Something is definitely not nice in Niceville. Ten-year-old Rainey
Teague disappeared while walking home from
school one day. It’s not the first missing persons case the town has known. In
fact, the town has a stranger-abduction rate more than five times
that of the rest of the country. Two per year since 1928, to be exact.
Rainey’s disappearance is only one of many, many ugly
occurrences in the pretty little town. The local bank gets robbed, and a sniper
picks off each of the cops chasing the escape car. Along with the bank’s $2.5 million, the
robbers swiped a top-secret piece of equipment previously stolen from a local
Raytheon subsidiary. A prominent citizen films his adolescent
daughters in the shower. And mirrors and windows reflect something
evil.
The sleepy southern town was built against Tallulah’s Wall,
a forbidding-looking cliff that serves as the northern border. Locals think
that the town’s problems might stem from Crater Sink, an ominous, bottomless
sinkhole at the top of the wall. Readers realize early on—far, far earlier than
the characters do, that the true source of the problem is time travel gone seriously
awry.
Carsten Stroud is an amazing talent. His writing is elegant, his setting
fabulously ominous, and his characters refreshingly unique. He describes one couple as being “as frigidly
unappealing as banana-flavored Popsicles.”
About Tin Town, Niceville’s slum, Stroud said,
“the main industry ruling the place was a lethal combination of grinding hard
times, blood-simple gunsels, pointless death, and blue ruin.” (I’m not sure
what “blue ruin” is, but I liked the phrase.) Despite his skill—or rather,
because of it—I ultimately found Niceville
infuriating. The problem? The plot is a
hot mess. There are too many story lines, and Stroud does not bother to weave
them together. Characters are thrown in
the mix in a way that implies they’ll somehow impact the plot; too often, they
have no effect at all. When one character takes action to destroy another, Stroud writes, “the fact that he was, in effect, about
to commit a kind of suicide was not clear to him at the time.” Set-ups of that sort deserve resolution equal
to the drama of the language; the fact that the character was alive and well at
the end of the book left me scratching my head. The supernatural aspect of the plot is not
compelling and the climax of that story line incomprehensible. Stroud is
careless and sloppy. In the mystery world, those are capital crimes.
I couldn’t put this book down, but when it was done, I
wanted to stomp it into dust. It’s a
great read with an outstandingly unsatisfying ending.
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