Michael Koryta’s latest novel* starts out innocently enough. Eric Shaw, in his recent former life an LA cinematographer before that career crashed and burned and now in his early thirties, has for the past two years lived in Chicago, trying to make a living filming memorial videos for presentation at funerals. He is approached by a beautiful young woman who asks him to prepare such a video in honor of her father-in-law, a famously reclusive billionaire, ninety-five years old and near death in a hospital. She offers Eric a very generous amount of money to travel to Southern Indiana to trace his early years in furtherance of the project. The only artifact of her father-in-law which she can provide is a small flask of water which derived from underground mineral springs, now apparently defunct, and known as Pluto Water, which had been touted as having nearly miraculous healing powers.
Before leaving, Eric visits the old man in the hospital. Initially unresponsive, the first intimations of what is to come occur when what Eric sees through the viewfinder of his camera are not what his eyes had just seen, but instead the essence of that on which, or who, they focused. Enigmatically, the old man says to Eric, “so cold the river.” Or does he?
Eric goes to the town in question, West Baden Springs, and finds himself unable to resist tasting the water from the strange little bottle he has been given. The results are immediate, chaotic, and nearly addictive, and his life, and the book, goes off in strange, surreal directions. In the aftermath Eric, who has a history of psychic tendencies, has visions, encounters dead people, and sees scenes from the past apparently reenacted before his eyes.
Throughout, there are ominous signs of an impending storm of perhaps historical proportions.
Somewhat daunted by the book’s sizeable heft, and by my usual aversion to most things Gothic or which invoke the supernatural, I nonetheless found the pages turning rapidly, completely swept up in the tale the author has spun, so masterful is the writing, and I recommend it highly as another terrific book by Michael Koryta.
*Actually, his next novel, “The Cypress House,” will be released on January 24, 2011
