2023-06-24
Teens working on a building project come under the malign influence of an Oklahoma moonshiner in Sadi’s suspense thriller.
The narrative unfolds over a summer in the late 1950s at a campground near the town of Council, Oklahoma, where 10 teenage boys and girls from a church group, chaperoned by a married couple, gather to build a meetinghouse for the Indigenous Kickapoo tribe. The kids have a surprisingly good time digging foundations and mortaring cement blocks, their tasks punctuated by hearty meals, games of dodgeball, and furtive moments listening to forbidden rock ’n’ roll on the radio. A love triangle takes shape that finds North Carolina spitfire Lulumae Johnson taking a liking to brooding New Yorker Ranen Sarensen and cooling toward her boyfriend, Lee Ray, who bombs around in his mufflerless black car, smoking and defiantly blaring rocking tunes from the radio. Lee gravitates toward John MacGrath, a wizened, bowlegged old man who operates a still at his farm, where he plies Lee with corn whisky. A World War I vet who did a stint in a mental hospital, MacGrath has an air of eerie religiosity that is heightened by the burning bush visible in the depths of his blue-gray eyes. Looking on anxiously is Barron Henderson, a local Kickapoo man who suspects that MacGrath means to rope Lee into his cultlike craziness. This yarn features sharply etched characters, punchy dialogue (“Why, ain’t he the cutest, littlest ole man you ever did see” sasses Lulumae), and evocative, Midwestern-gothic atmospherics (“She looked at the childlike figure of John MacGrath moving the rocking chair back and forth on the porch floor in a slow, even way…and suddenly saw the thin, grimy looking hand striking and snatching out at the fly buzzing in front of his sunken, toothless mouth”). Unfortunately, MacGrath feels more eccentric than scary, and the listless, haphazard plot never satisfyingly pays off the sense of occult menace that Sadi conjures around him.
A feckless narrative only partially redeemed by richly textured writing.
