“State of Paradise” describes a place defined not by residents’ propensity for mayhem and absurdity, but by the perilous proximity of humans and nature.
Weirdos don’t know they’re strange. Anyone who claims to be weird isn’t, at least not inherently. Sure, a person can devise an infinite number of ways to separate themselves from everyone else, and they can engage in any number of methods of making sure everyone knows they’ve done so. But a true weirdo never tries to be different. A weirdo justLaura van den Berg gets all that.
Where things get weird in van den Berg’s Florida is where they would get weird in stories set anyplace. The supernatural, or the suggestion of it, coats her tales like so much humidity. Sometimes, her characters encounter actual ghosts. Other times, as she told the magazine, she comes “at the haunting from an unexpected angle,” with a “sideways ghost story” where “the haunting is more a state of being, both in the self and in the surrounding world.
Horrors pile up: The narrator’s outie belly button becomes an innie that grows deep enough to hold a bar of soap. Her sister experiences changes in eye color she insists are not happening. Their mother becomes a leader in the “voluntary human extinction movement.” Relatives believed to be dead may be coming back.
“State of Paradise” is the second novel van den Berg has set during a pandemic. Her first, 2015’s “Find Me,” concerns a grisly, brain-eating virus that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans in a matter of weeks. Given its pre-covid creation, the pandemic in “Find Me” seems more shocking and less inevitable than the one in “State of Paradise.
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