FICTION: The author's 11th novel is an eerie exploration to uncover the origins of a 25-year-old mystery in the woods.
"Passersthrough" by Peter Rock; Soho Press (233 pages; $26)
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Like Peter Rock's 10 previous works of fiction, his new novel mixes characters who live on the margins of society with those in the mainstream. His best-known book, "My Abandonment" (later adapted into a film called "Leave No Trace"), followed a father and daughter whose choice to live outdoors caused them difficulties. And his recent "The Night Swimmers" mixed memoir with fiction into a meditative and provocative remembrance of a life. Each of these had moments of mystery but each had captivating narratives from start to end.
His newest novel, "Passersthrough," despite its promising beginning, evolves into a bizarre, otherworldly environment that never clearly seems resolved. "Passersthrough" starts with an audio capture transcription between Helen Hanson, a 36-year-old California woman, and her estranged 76-year-old father, Benjamin, who lives in Oregon. Helen's mother died a few months earlier and among her effects Helen found 11 birthday cards addressed to Helen from her father, opened but withheld by her mother.
This discovery led her to reestablish a relationship with her father that fell apart 25 years earlier after they went camping together near Mt. Rainier. To facilitate this she installed a recording device in her father's home so that he could respond to questions she sent him by fax. This need to communicate indirectly was because of Helen's emotional fragility caused, it's inferred, by something her father may have done during that fateful trip.
During that camping excursion, we learn that 11-year-old Helen went suddenly missing for almost a week before being discovered at a cabin more than 100 miles from where her father reported her missing. Although there was no evidence of foul play, Helen moved in with her mother as her parents had separated shortly before this incident, likely because of another family trauma: the death of Helen's younger brother a year earlier.
What follows could be an explanation of what happened between Benjamin and his daughter those many years ago but it's uncertain. By chance Benjamin is drawn into a small cast of characters who connect to the dead but are mostly unrelated to his son's death or his daughter's disappearance. Among other eerie encounters he visits a place known as the murder house and another locale called Sad Clown Lake, which moves around to different locations, a lake where the bones of children from the murder house surfaced to talk to Benjamin.
It's possible that "Passersthrough" is about memories linked to extrasensory perceptions not commonly experienced but present in some trauma victims. But then again it may not be. In the end the reader doesn't have any clearer idea than Benjamin did about what happened to his children more than two decades earlier. And perhaps that is what Peter Rock wants. Uncertainties and mysteries always surround death and disappearances. And while we may hope we find answers in stories, and in life, that's not always what happens.
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Jim Carmin is a writer in Portland, Oregon.
