State of Paradise

Out running, a jogger sees a biker approach a van by the roadside and plunge a knife into its tire. That’s the start of this novel: no context or follow-up, just one quick violent incident. Van den Berg (I Hold a Wolf by the Ears) is known for writing about weird places and happenings, the very weirdness of her narratives forcing readers to rethink present-day reality. Here, a writer moves home to Florida to ghostwrite for a famous novelist whom she later discovers is long dead. His acolytes have placed him in cryostorage while they oversee the continued churning out of books under his name; there’s no him anymore. That’s one of the less-creepy occurrences in van den Berg’s continually unsettling novel. For instance, the writer’s sister becomes addicted to a virtual reality device called MIND’S EYE, supplied free to the town’s citizens to provide solace during the pandemic. The sister vanishes, and when she is recovered, she claims to have been living in an alternate reality. Meanwhile, the writer’s mother leads a cult of locals campaigning for No More Babies. All the time, the weather becomes steadily more unpredictable and dangerous, and missing-persons signs dot the town.