Welcome to Steve’s Novella Corner, where I dive into the less conventional depths of the indie ocean and return with strange treasures that you can read in a day or two. Here we’ll feature the stuff that we love, but that is too short to feature in one of our boxes.
This month, it’s Beneath the Salton Sea, by Michael Paul Gonzalez.
“Everything in the world is a personal recording device.”
That’s the thesis statement, I think, of my new favourite book of this year; the idea that everything we interact with holds on to a part of us. If that’s true, then books are personal recording devices too, and this one feels like finding a stack of old photos and diaries that reveal some very dark truths.
Beneath The Salton Sea is hard to pin down. It has DNA from House of Leaves, Turn of the Screw, and has a very strong scent of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation. Time and flesh and love are moulded and shaped into a deeply emotional narrative that’s equally terrifying, uplifting, and heartbreaking. It’s like going ten rounds with a professional boxer who cooks you dinner afterwards.
It’s also three stories, each of them about lost love and the attempts to reconnect. Two lovers who stumble into a Nomadland-esque hippie camp and wind up finding a crack in the sky. A sister desperately searching for what remains of her sibling. A mother, an artist, trying to glue herself back together after her life is shattered.
It’s also steeped in metaphor. In a story about things existing atop one another, we find three stories that exist atop one another, about three characters who are separated by inconceivable forces. The stories, and the very methods through which they are told, come off as both analogue and digital. Camera crews and documentaries, graffiti layered over itself, tapes and phone videos, letters and photographs. And everywhere that the story takes place, there is art. That’s what humans tend to leave behind, after all.
Odd how grief traps us in one place, even when we have moved on, we inhabit both the present and the awful memories of that time. It’s haunting, literally, and it’s definitely horror. Cosmic dread leaks out of the page, unexplained until the final chapters where it all begins to make awful sense, and the reader realises that our perceptions themselves are in question. The horror comes from a horrible sense of wrongness that’s captured beautifully, that plays on our inability to completely trust our minds, our senses. Strange constellations, voices on the radio.
“How much of ourselves can we lose before we become something else?”
It’s horror of the heart, the body, of grief – and at times, it feels like throwing these women into a Lovecraftian Saw trap.
The relationships are all beautifully real, written with a deeply human touch. I know how you look when you’re nervous. Little unspoken ticks, fights, glances and looks. And just when I thought I couldn’t love it any more, we come to the journal pages, and go full House of Leaves. Previously insane ramblings make sense, and you’ll wish they didn’t. I dare not say any more for fear of spoiling an incredible story for you.
As Leonard Cohen said: there’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.
I can’t recommend this enough.
You can find the book here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beneath-Salton-Michael-Paul-Gonzalez-ebook/dp/B09LTBL1D8/ref=sr_1_1?sr=8-1
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