No less harm in God is apparent in Brian Payton’s Hail Mary Corner (Beach Holme), set in a Vancouver Island seminary school in the 1980s. Bill, his best friend Jon and the rest of their pack run the school, promoting disorder, breaking the rules and waging a campaign against the food. These concerns may be petty but the struggle is not: Payton captures perfectly the way teenaged boys terrorize each other and the adults in their lives. At first the seminary setting had me conjuring a mental image of a quaint institution, but Saint John the Divine Seminary School is shabby and depressing. God is often on Bill’s mind, but his religious education and his own crisis of faith do nothing to inspire charity, chastity or brotherly love. The story is engaging, but it spirals into a series of melodramatic clichés that are unworthy of the rest of the book.