Laura Van Den Berg’s sixth book, her third novel, is a dazzling, enigmatic venture through a surreal, interlocking narrative evoking the bizarrely heightened nature of the pandemic, family history, mental illness, storytelling, and Florida life in general. The narrator has returned to her mother’s home in Florida to ride out the pandemic. As these “return home” books often go, this automatically prompts memories, family dynamics and secrets, and memories of her own struggles with alcohol and mental illness.
Ghosts of one kind or another are one recurring theme. The narrator is a ghostwriter for a bestselling thriller author, haunted by her past and her inability to write her own stories. Her sister uses a virtual reality headset to talk to their father’s ghost. People disappear or die in different versions of reality around them, including her sister, who sees her own face on a billboard memorializing pandemic victims. Everything and everyone here is haunted in some way, tenuous, and grappling with the everchanging, unstable world around them, as well as the unreal world of the MIND’S EYE virtual reality headsets that were ominously distributed during the pandemic by a local corporation, ELECTRA, with the slogan “Go where you need to be.” People, including the narrator and her sister, become overly dependent on that form of escapism, disappearing for days, even weeks. Part of the novel centers on the narrator donning a headset to search for her sister, who disappears during a violent storm.
Further complicating things and lending to the magical realism winding throughout, the narrator’s bellybutton becomes a deepening pocket, the bestselling thriller author becomes one of the more surreal parts of the story, and a nascent cult bent on human extinction is forming in her mother’s living room.
There are also some amusingly meta bits where she struggles with professional writing advice and rules about outlining and plotting—then proceeds to deftly defy most of it.
All in all, it’s a hypnotic, engaging, bewildering ride, over and over echoing—sometimes even deriding— the thriller author’s trademark phrase: “everything is not as it seems.” But storytelling, memory, and family may be our best ways to live and thrive in it all anyway. –L.J. Gouveia
Author website: https://lauravandenberg.com/
I write about the knife I find sticking out of an anthill. I write about states of suffering and states of paradise and try to understand how a person can travel from one to the other. With these fragments I slowly begin to build a world. I go where I need to be.