strange and random happenstance: Disappearances

Hokuloa Road by Elizabeth Hand
Published by: Mulholland Books
Publication Date: July 19th, 2022
Format: Hardcover, 400 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy

Grady Kendall's life imploded. But then so has so many others. The pandemic came and everything ground to a halt, including the construction on all the wealthy vacation homes in Maine where he worked as a carpenter. The first stimulus check went to back rent and two overdue truck payments. So he moved back in with his mother. Though the memories at home aren't the kind you want to dwell on, his father's suicide, his brother's addictions, and so much loss. Which is why he likes his Pabst. And then an opportunity lands in his lap he can't pass up. An eccentric billionaire is looking for a caretaker for his home in Hawai'i. Grady has always loved the wilderness and has felt that circumstances have limited his chances to see the world so he applies. Within days all the paperwork has been sorted and he is flying to his new home on Hokuloa Road. Another of Wes Minton's employee's, Dalita, picks him up from the airport and drives him out to the house. The compound appears wild but on closer inspection he sees it's just as meticulously designed as the empty beach resorts he saw from the plane, it's just in need of some care, and that's what Grady is here to give. His work isn't too onerous and he has his own cottage. His boss is often at the sight of his proposed hotel on the remote Hokuloa Peninsula, which he now uses for conservation work, particularly with rare birds. In fact the most important of Grady's tasks is tending an aviary of rare birds on the second floor of Wes's house. Some days it feels like these birds are his only companions. Which leads him to feel the loneliness and menace of his isolated surroundings. Sure, it's beautiful, but it's otherworldly too. And then he learns about the disappearances. There's a well-known surfer who's just gone, as well as a girl, Jessie, whom he met on the plane. Because of his personal connection to Jessie, Grady feels like he should ask questions. But Wes hired him because he's a stranger, an outsider, and will not ask questions. The island is filled with the absences left by the vanished. It's only when a tourist like Jessie arrives that anyone cares. But despite being the wrong guy for every possible reason, perhaps he is the tool at hand to break this mystery wide open?

I hated this book so much I don't know if I'll be able to coherently express my rage. I mean, just the cavalier attitude to Covid and declaring people "safe" without knowing where they've been or what they've been up to enraged me. And keep in mind this is set at the very beginning of the pandemic, so tests were impossible to find and there was no vaccine! But that was just the first of many many rage inducing incidences and I have many issues stemming from the new subgenre of pandemic literature which I won't go into here. So much of this book is rooted in the lore and people of Hawai'i. Dalita speaks Hawaiian Pidgin, alternately called Hawai'i Creole English. It's a very stilted language. I'm sure Hand did this to add to the authenticity of the book. She says she went to great effort to learn the dialect when she went to Hawai'i. But as much as I believe in her good intentions it comes across as a privileged white woman travelling to a foreign land and setting herself up to be the mouthpiece of these people. It doesn't sit right with me. I kept asking myself, is she the right person to tell this story? Well, given my next complaint, yes, but that then brings me to the fact that if this book wanted to be authentic maybe a native speaker or someone whose life this is should have been telling this story. And I am against censorship, anyone can write any story they want, but that doesn't make it feel right. Because this book exudes white privilege and Hand is nothing but a haole! Grady and his adventures are nothing but the biggest most nauseating example of white savior complex I have read in years. I mean, it's so horrid that if I had to summarize the book in one word it would be cringe. I physically recoiled from this book. At one point a character accosts Grady saying "You think you're the fucking chosen one." And that is the book, he IS the chosen one. A drunk, messed up chosen one, but it's the outsider status of a white man that's the problem. He comes in and Dalita is all, yeah, people disappear all the time, but no one's ever going to take the time to figure it out. Well their new white savior will! Because that's what he's here to do, make everything right for the natives. How could Hand, whose previous works I loved for their understanding and subtleties write this tone-deaf tome!?! That's the real mystery.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Authenticity, Caretaker, Chosen One, Covid, Disappearances, Elizabeth Hand, Grady Kendall, Hawai'i Creole English, Hawaii, Hawaiian Pidgin, Hokuloa Road, Maine, Murder Most Foul, Pandemic, White Savior Complex

Slade House by David Mitchell
Published by: Random House
Publication Date: October 27th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 238 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

There is a door. It's small and unassuming. Most people never see it because most of the time it isn't there. But every nine years on the last Saturday of October it's there for the chosen one. Near The Fox and Hounds Pub, Slade Alley is easy to miss. If you don't look carefully you could end up going out the other side wondering how you could have missed the entrance. But through that small door is a beautiful garden leading up to a house. A house that is far too nice for the working class neighborhood the alley is a part of. But then again, you'd never find the house in that neighborhood. It's in a little bubble all it's own, an orison. In 1979 Nathan Bishop is the chosen one. His mother, a pianist, has been asked to perform at Slade House for Lady Norah Grayer. Lady Grayer asked that Nathan be brought along. He spends the day in the garden playing with a boy his age, Jonah. But as they chase each other around the house things begin to shift and change. Nathan is worried that the Valium he snuck from his mother was bad. But it's not the Valium, it's the house. It has lured him in and Norah and Jonah won't let go. Nathan Bishop and his mother are never seen again. Nine years later in 1988 Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds is looking into the disappearance of Nathan Bishop and his mother because new evidence has surfaced. On the day they disappeared they asked directions from a Fred Pink. Immediately after stepping out of Slade Alley Fred Pink was hit by a car and has spent the intervening years in a coma. When he was catching up on the news that he missed he recognized the Bishops and immediately went to the police. Gordon Edmonds finds Slade House and the beautiful widow Chloe Chetwynd. She uses her feminine wiles to seduce Gordon Edmonds. He is never seen again. In 1997 a group of paranormal investigators made up of college students, one of whom is Fred Pink's nephew, goes missing never to be seen again. In 2006 the sister of one of the missing college student interviews Fred Pink. She to disappears. Like dominoes, each disappearance leads to another and another, stretching back and forward until someone is able to pop the bubble.

Years ago I bought Slade House giddy for a good haunted house story not knowing that it tied heavily into David Mitchell's other book, The Bone Clocks. But then again, all his books tie in. Yet I still thought I should probably do my homework and read The Bone Clocks first. So I put off reading Slade House, and I put off reading it. Then two things happened around the same time, a friend of mine said this book could easily be read as a standalone and I found a copy of The Bone Clocks on the sales table at Barnes and Noble. Thanks for sending me mixed messages universe! So I was basically back at square one. Looking for a good spooky read leading up to Halloween I said fuck it and picked up Slade House and I really wish that I had waited. Typical me would have read The Bone Clocks first. Typical me would have been right. This feels almost like it's the CliffsNotes version of the meticulous worldbuilding that Mitchell has done. There is a literal infodump in the forth chapter that while yes, it makes everything clear, feels too shoehorned in. This information about apertures and orisons and lacunas and psychovoltage feel like they belong to another story. And really, they do. And that is this book's fatal flaw. Yes, you may be given everything you need to know, but it feels shallow. The ending is a literal Deus ex machina where a character from his other books who is from the other feuding immortal faction shows up and puts an end to Norah and Jonah. How is that fair to the readers of this book? It feels not just like Mitchell is cheating the readers of a satisfying ending but is also admonishing them for not doing their homework. I should have known this wasn't likely a book for me because of the comparisons the The Turn of the Screw. My main problem with that story is there is no jeopardy. You know the governess survives. The same could be said here. There is no driving force because every narrator dies so your investment in the characters will never pay off so you quickly learn to disassociate from all of them. And this isn't even going into my issues about how Mitchell handles each decade and the derogatory language he uses. Sure, it's era appropriate, but much like everything to do with this book I could have done without.