A Book By Its Cover: Bad Island by Doug TenNapel
Tennille Moffat is the world’s foremost authority on Beatles’ collectibles – from tickets to their iconic performance at the Ed Sullivan show to a gold lapel pin from George Harrison’s Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Suit, she knows better than anyone both the sentimental and monetary value of items both common and rare. When a mysterious client, Mr. Blue, invites her to his island sanctuary in the Maldives claiming that he has the half of the hole given to Jeremy in Yellow Submarine , Tennille has no choice but to take him up on his offer. When she’s met at the docks by Captain Denaho, a swarthy Maldivian pilot with a mischievous glimmer in his eye, Tennille’s initial apprehension, about traveling alone to a secluded island in a country that she doesn’t know the language, is dispelled by his outstretched hand and a glass of fermented coconut milk. But when Tennille wakes with a throbbing head in a field of flowers surrounded by stone sentinels, she realizes perhaps that she didn’t understand anything about The Beatles at all. As a Beatles fan, I was instantly intrigued by the conceptual nature of this novel. It combines fantasy and science fiction into a cohesive, but occasionally difficult to follow, story full of rich characters and surreal circumstances. Doug TenNapel has successfully incorporated his fascination with history, pop-culture, and science that has previously only been hinted at in his earlier non-fiction, works like, The Theoretical Physics of Earthworm Jim and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: or How the Agriculture Industry is Trying to Kill You. Bad Island is obviously a labor of love and Beatles history and the subculture dedicated to it are the main focus of the novel. It isn’t often that a world is so richly drawn by a writer that you come up grasping for air and needing a dose of reality, but TenNapel does exactly that with his prose. If he fails at anything it is in revealing too little. When the main character, Tenille, realizes what is going on, the reader is still left completely in the dark and struggling for another 50 pages. However, with such intriguing characters – Tenille, Captain Denaho, and the enigmatic Mr. Blue – there to escort you through the dense puzzles, it is easy to forget that you’re suffocating on an overabundance of background information, while desperate for immediate clues. Books that force you to operate, metaphorically, with one hand tied behind your back, or one eye blindfolded, create an unnecessary handicap that can occasionally be frustrating. I will say that, by the end of the book, I felt as if I had just spent a semester in a pop-culture history course that revealed both a great deal of factual information, but also spent a lot of time speculating as to the motivations for and social ramifications of “The Beatles” culture. It was a fun romp which managed to be both sparse in prose and rich in detail and I would recommend it to anyone who likes their history with a dash of adventure. (A Book by its Cover is our weekly column in which we review a book based solely on the cover, without any other knowledge of what it is about. Any similarities in our review to the book are purely coincidental and proof that we are awesome)
A Book by its Cover: Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer
Back cover blurb: “By the author of “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” one of the great Midwestern marine horror novels of the 21st century, comes a novel so chilling that it comes with a wool blanket at the check out counter. Finnigan Mt. Belucci, estranged son of the famed Belucci Fishing Family, just wants to lead a normal, northern Wisconsin life with his wife, Margaret. He wants to get a few chickens, maybe a cow — lord knows enough of wild beasts roam the countryside — and a little shack on Bayfield’s idyllic coast. Everything is blue bonnet’s and walleye fish fries until a heavy fog rolls in February 14th. The Mt. Belucci’s, on a romantic ferry ride, get stopped half-way between Madeline Island and Bayfield. As strange noises begin to emanate from below deck, all semblance of humanity leaves the ferry goers. As the Belucci’s try desperately to escape the madness around them, one thing becomes immediately apparent: they’ll never look at candy hearts the same again.” Ann Packer made her name in Midwest Gothic, and this is a blissful return to form. Having taken a departure to study French Buddhism, Packer immediately began work on the fevered dreams that would become Swim Back to Me on her return to her native Green Bay. Six years and two dozen drafts later, this little masterpiece dropped on my desk. It’s a slim volume, and innocuous looking. The faded pastels of the cover betray the transgressive musings inside. Packer’s parallels between the color of prop churned seabed and human carnage are nauseating. The early decline of the Mt. Belucci’s relationship over a misinterpreted text message give Packer the opportunity to rebuild their relationship on the boat ride. However, even though [spoiler alert] Finnigan gets his hand cut off in the second act, forcing Margaret to protect and coddle him back to health through the incredibly rapid onset of infection (one gets the sense that time is distorted on the ferry), we never get the sense that love will retake a hold in their relationship. They rely on the familiar in unfamiliar, and terrifying, surroundings, but, as in King’s 1408, the relationship never re-materializes. This would be my main criticism of the book: the rekindled relationship Packer sets up never comes about. I may have been misinterpreting the foreshadowing, but it seemed as if it was inevitable, and inevitability is a main theme of the novel; from the sense of foreboding that Margaret gets when she sets foot on the ferry, to the mutated fish that claw their way up the hull and begin disemboweling anything with a heartbeat, to the ultimate sacrifice of Captain Helena using her own body as a replacement prop shaft. It seemed out of sorts to have the most inevitable outcome of the book to go by the wayside, but, again, this could be Packer putting us on edge once again. In the end, this is a great example of old school horror done with a deft hand. Recommended. (A Book by its Cover is our new weekly column in which we review a book based solely on the cover, without any other knowledge of what it is about. Any similarities in our review to the book are purely coincidental and proof that we are awesome)
