Bad Apple by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

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. 

The Whiteness of the Whale by David Poyer

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

Print Length: 333 pages

ISBN: 1250020565

Publisher: St. Martin's Press (April 2, 2013)

Yet again, I watched another news story on the evening news that matched almost exactly the story David Poyer tells in The Whiteness of the Whale. This may be a novel, but it is based on factual scenarios, happening all too often on the oceans. As in real life, the novel tells a story of activists in pursuit of a Japanese whaling fleet they’ve observed killing whales and processing the whales for meat. That has long been illegal for all but scientific research purposes, yet the Japanese still hunt and kill whale in the Antarctic waters, hiding behind the banner of “research.”

The activists in pursuit are a motley crew. A primate behaviorist, a Hollywood movie star, a double-amputee Afghanistan war veteran, and others, each adding their own storyline and colorful personality as they sail together on the Black Anemone.  

They are not the only ones in pursuit. After an altercation with the Japanese whaling fleet, described with unnerving detail that makes the suffering of the whales uncomfortably memorable, the Black Anemone picks up a castaway. More, they pick up a tail. At this point, the story takes on echoes of Moby Dick, as a whale turns on the boat and goes out of its way to destroy the ship and the crew.

Poyer writes from a base of experience. He has a 30-year sea career on which to base his many sea novels. That kind of first-hand knowledge adds all kinds of subtle layers of nuance that bring scene after scene alive, some terrifyingly so. There are sections of the book that, when read, leave what feels like an uncanny splash of seawater on the reader’s face.

The activists don’t always come off as heroes. They appear human. Characters show their weaknesses as well as their heroic moments. The whale recognizes none, in dogged pursuit, seemingly enraged by the slaughter those very activists tried to prevent.

Poyer’s strongest characterizations are, in fact, the whale and the primate behaviorist, Dr. Sara Pollard. It’s not often one reads such accurate and effective cross-gender writing, but Poyer captures her female voice precisely.

I enjoyed the book enough to want to know more, and asked the author to do an author interview in the Summer/Fall 2013 Issue of TheSmoking Poet. My hope is that such novels take on a life outside of the fiction world and enter into the movement to save whales from the kind of barbarous scenes of slaughter Poyer describes and evening news show all too often.

David Poyer’s naval career included service in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, Caribbean, and Pacific.  His thirty-plus books, including twenty sea novels, have been translated into Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and other languages. He’s also written sailing, diving, and nautical history articles for Chesapeake Bay, Southern Boating, Shipmate, Tidewater Virginian, and other periodicals. His work has been required reading in the Literature of the Sea course at the U.S. Naval Academy, along with that of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville.  He lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia with his wife and daughter, with whom he explores the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic coast in their sloop, Water Spirit.

The Psychiatrist, poetry by Mariela Griffor

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

Publisher: Eyewear Publishing (October 23, 2013)

Price: $24.00

ISBN-10: 1908998113

ISBN-13: 978-1908998118

I’ve had the privilege to read the galleys for Mariela Griffor’s third poetry collection, The Psychiatrist, which will be published in late October 2013. The experience is mesmerizing, even healing.

My introduction to Griffor’s work came through Exiliana, her first collection. Thirteen poems from that collection are included in this one, only two from her second, House, and twenty-one poems are new. In them all, Griffor allows us windows into her remarkable life.

Born in Chile, Griffor was a Chilean opponent to the military regimen of General Pinochet  in love with another such opponent. Their love story is a tragic one; he was assassinated, and Griffor, expecting their child, was exiled to Sweden. Eventually, she married an American and moved to the Detroit area in Michigan. Much of this life story appears in her work, in the tender ache of a lost love, in the fierce love of a mother for her child, in the love for her ancestral home left behind.

In these poems, we step into Chile, Sweden and, finally, the streets of Detroit. We visit Griffor’s broken and patched-again heart. We step into her life. Griffor exposes her vulnerability with courage, but then also lets us see her resilience, her street smarts, her determined survival.

“I should have died but the devil/did not want me,” she writes in the poem, “Code Names.”

Griffor does not write dense poetry. I say this as a compliment. To call her an accessible poet, too, is meant as a compliment. Her images are clear, in almost plain wrapping, and nothing stands between the poet, the poem, the reader.  It is as if the poet has unzipped her skin and put her core self on the page, the experience of her life, and allowed us entry. And not just us, but also a kind of alter ego, an invented friend: “I invent a friend to pour out/remembrances of the old country” (from “Prologue I”). She finishes that poem so: “As I invent you, I invent myself.” With that, Griffor states plainly and clearly the truth of all writers, that literature is an unveiling of self, and in so doing, a kind of therapy, an easing of loneliness, a word-balmed healing, an invitation to the reader to come inside and connect, if even for just an instant in time.

And we connect. Griffor holds up no barriers. There is a disarming sincerity to her poetry. She asks the questions we have all at some time in our well-lived lives asked. “What do we do with the love if you die?” (from “Love for a subversive”). She births grief like she births new life, and in that birthing of a grief, its slow laboring, it’s painful entry into the light, one realizes just how alike these two processes are, and the prizes for enduring both: new life.

“Maybe just poets can understand each other, /even bad poets have another language. It is like/the words are invented only for those who love them,” Griffor writes in the new poem, “Death in Argentina.” To some degree, that may be, but no one is left standing outside Griffor’s gate. If not all of us have experienced exile, most all of us have known rootlessness, being lost in the sea of life, and to that part of us that we keep hidden, protected, denied, unloved, shamed, wrapped in secrets and lies, to that part Griffor reaches out and gives a healing touch. Much like a psychiatrist.

Mariela Griffor is the author of Exiliana (Luna Publications) and House (Mayapple Press). She was born in the city of Concepcion in southern Chile. She is co-founder of The Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and Publisher of Marick Press. Her work has appeared in periodicals across Latin America and the United States. Griffor is Honorary Consul of Chile in Detroit, Michigan.