When she pistol-whips a very large man, we feel both her competence and the weight of the act.
This strong yet flawed woman drives the novel’s success. Among its many virtues, Bennett’s convincing portrayal of Mona may be his greatest accomplishment. “American Elsewhere” conjures up echoes of the best works of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. The ultimate showdown between various factions is truly titanic and unique it lacks the personal, lived-in quality of the rest of the novel but makes up for it in scale. Once past these scenes, however, the novel rights itself and regains some of its former power.
AMERICA ELSEWHERE MOVIE
First, appears to Mona via a movie screen to explain a few things, there’s not just a static quality to reading about Mona sitting there - we also already know part of what we’re being told. So when one of Wink’s inhuman residents, Mr. By the time Mona comes close to unraveling Wink’s secrets, the reader has already put together large pieces of the puzzle. But to its credit, when “American Elsewhere” falters a bit toward the end it’s not really about the quality of the revelations so much as the method of their presentation. Worse, they might not be skulls at all but instead presage the arrival of an intruder who could devastate Wink.įew novels about uncanny forces manage to sustain their initial intensity or to offer satisfying answers because it’s hard for readers to suspend their disbelief of patently impossible things for so long. In the novel’s most frightening scenes, Bolan’s underlings also must retrieve “fleshless, bleached” rabbit skulls housed in little boxes so heavy that even strong men stagger from the weight. He works for a blood-chilling invisible client who communicates, creepily, via a broken stock ticker and forces him to murder a supposedly immortal member of the community. Accelerating these changes are missions run by a bordello owner and drug runner named Bolan. But Mona’s appearance in Wink signals that things are changing, possibly forever. The slow discovery of the truth about Wink and the peculiar yet compelling portraits of the strange townsfolk are fascinating enough. As he roves between character viewpoints, Bennett’s genius is in recognizing how such small yet startling moments add real pathos while also advancing the plot. These kinds of grotesque parodies of ordinary middle-class life provide a major clue about the forces that have taken over the town. The husband works on his back under the car for so long that he develops bedsores - all the while mindlessly attaching toasters and other useless things to the engine. In a chilling scene, a housewife’s high heels fill with blood as she stands for hours repetitively asking her husband, who is tinkering with the family car, if he wants lemonade. You should also look askance at the veneer of normalcy. Because in Wink, you most definitely should mistrust old ladies, whether covered in mud or not. Benjamin, other strange inhabitants and Wink’s forbidden zones, a somewhat wry Bennett line like “It is hard to mistrust an old lady covered in mud” seems less funny than sinister. Benjamin, the host shows her a “weird magic trick” with two mirrors that seems to create impossible duplicates of real objects.Īs the reader learns more about Mrs. At a luncheon thrown by the town’s court officer, the elderly Mrs. The hotel clerk Parson appears to be playing checkers against an invisible opponent and has an odd contraption in his basement. It doesn’t take long for Mona to realize Wink is no ordinary place. She also learns to her surprise that Alvarez might have worked at the nearby Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory - abandoned after a terrifying lightning storm in the late 1970s that changed Wink forever. The existence of the house, which belonged to her mother, Laura Alvarez, a long-ago suicide, makes Mona reevaluate everything she thought she knew about her past. When Latina ex-cop Mona Bright inherits a house in Wink after the death of her estranged father, she embarks on an exploration of the town. The exact nature of those lurking things, human and otherwise, is chronicled by Shirley Jackson Award winner Robert Jackson Bennett in his at times horrifying and yet strangely beautiful new novel “American Elsewhere.” The book remains ambiguous about whether we’re reading supernatural fiction, science fiction, or fantasy for a long time but then delivers mind-blowing answers. The town of Wink, N.M., doesn’t appear on any official map, the moon as seen from its streets has a pinkish hue, and very odd things lurk beneath the charm of its old-fashioned façade.
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