Book review by Zinta Aistars
Paperback:
194 pages
Publisher:
Vagabondage Press, 2012
Price:
$13.95
ISBN-10:
0615683894
ISBN-13:
978-0615683898
In reading as in life, it’s always a good idea to push
one’s comfort zone, break routine from time to time, and try something new or
different for the purpose of discovery. Reading within the horror genre is that
for me, although I’m not sure I would classify Kristi Petersen Schoonover’s
novel, Bad Apple, in that category.
It certainly does send the occasional shiver of delightful creepiness up and
down the spine, but it’s not the sort of story that gives one nightmares.
Bad
Apple is the story of teenage Scree, growing up in a Maine
apple orchard among an intriguingly dysfunctional and broken family. She is
burdened with household chores that never seem to end, among them the raising
of her brother’s baby, Beckitt. Fascinated with patterns, Scree allows dishes
to pile up because she enjoys the patterns food and mold make on dirty dishes,
and household debris accumulates as a kind of funky art form. Her obsessive
behavior seems to indicate unhealed psychological wounds, and rightly so. Deep
in Scree’s psyche is a childhood memory of pushing her mother down a well, and
the memory surfaces in her life and her choices in surreal ways throughout the
story.
Rather than allow the baby she grows to love to follow in
her life path, Scree escapes the orchard to a colorful resort. It seems to hold
within its walls all that Scree has dreamed for her own life, but facades begin
to melt and tapestries of story lines unravel to increasingly reveal the odd,
the freaky, the inexplicable, the haunting in her surroundings as well as Scree’s
inner landscape. Reality becomes ever more meshed with dreamlike scenarios, and
the baffled reader must hang on until the ending for a stunning revelation.
Schoonover is a writer who loves her art and is practiced
at it. Bad Apple is not her first novel,
and her dedication to excellence in the written word shines here. Descriptions
are vivid and tense, reeling the reader into her character’s ever more twisted
world:
“My
fingers went numb, my toes stiff, my teeth chattered, and my breath came in
white puffs: I was instantly freezing. I sat up, and for some reason, I was
embarrassed as Adam and Eve in the Garden the second they’d discovered they
were naked. I marathoned across the icy broken cabana cement to the door that—strangely—was
stuck and took three yanks to open. The wallpaper glared, each stripe a crowbar
threatening to bash in my skull. I ran up the stairs, down the hall, tripped
over something—what, I didn’t know—and crumpled against a wall mural depicting
gnarled, shadow-dark trees under an igniting sky. It made me miss the orchard.
“The
orchard that was no longer my home. The mural’s tree limbs swayed and called to
me, cursing me for leaving behind the bobbing Gingergolds, the incinerating
summers, the raw spring, the moon-indigo winters, the November afternoons when
the gray sun was an omniscient eye.” (pg. 150-151)
Kristi Petersen Schoonover is the author of the short
story collection Skeletons in the
Swimmin’ Hole—Tales from Haunted Disney, and her short fiction has appeared
in Carpe Articulum Literary Review, Full
of Crow, Eclectic Flash, The Adirondack Review, Barbaric Yawp, The Illuminata,
Macabre Cadaver, Morpheus Tales, Citizen Culture, MudRock: Stories & Tales,
New Witch Magazine, Spilt Milk, Toasted Cheese, and a host of others,
including several anthologies. She hosts the paranormal fiction segment on The
Ghostman & Demon Hunter Show broadcast and serves as an editor for Read Short Fiction. An interview with
the author is featured in The Smoking Poet’s Summer 2014 Issue #26.
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