It's another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother's home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she's contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button. Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother's lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself.
Discomfiting and surreal ... Van den Berg rejects the very concept of narrative cohesion, plunging the reader instead into a series of dreamscapes. Moody and hallucinatory ... Reflect[s] our selves back at us and into the world, in all their wildness and weirdness.
The supernatural, or the suggestion of it, coats her tales like so much humidity ... A macabre tale in which the living interact with the dead and yet the eeriest souls are those with a pulse.
