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| Ghost Ocean |
I finished this book last week and actually wrote a post about it, but WordPress ate it. So, here I go again.
S.M. Peters’ Ghost Ocean is a contemporary fantasy that’s closer to the fantasy end of the genre than the contemporary part. It’s set in a city named St. Ives that could be anywhere in America, but might not be either. There are three plots that weave in and out of each other, but by the final third of the book, things get a little abstract. They could be taking place in St. Ives, the underworld, or in the main characters’ heads and it gets really hard to tell what’s real and what’s just a metaphor.
The first plot centers on Te Evangeline, a young girl who comes to discover that she’s at the center of a massive conspiracy. What most people don’t know about St. Ives is that it’s a prison for supernatural creatures. Te might be the key needed to let them loose again, and there are a number of characters who want her to do just that. Towards the end of the book, she has to decide if it’s really humane to keep those creatures locked up or whether its’ worth the price of letting them all free.
The second plot follows Evangeline’s erstwhile boss, Babu Cherian. Cherian used to be a cop before he ran into something that couldn’t be explained by rational science. After that, he becomes a part of a group of people who have the ability to capture and lock up supernatural things. Because of what happened to his brother, Cherian has a deep hatred of supernatural creatures–which causes a rift when Evangeline starts to manifest abilities that aren’t strictly human.
The third plot was a little hard to nail down at first, because it’s narrated by an ‘I.’ After a chapter or two, it becomes clear that I is Angreal, a fortune teller who turns out to be a lot more than human by the end of the novel. She’s in on the conspiracy, which makes her sections interesting reading. Most of the time, in any book that involves a mystery, the reader doesn’t get to see what’s happening on the criminal’s end of things. You get the investigator’s side and you get the pleasure of figuring out what happened along with them.
Ghost Ocean is a very interesting read, but I’m not sure I’m entirely satisfied with it. I really enjoyed the first two thirds, when the plots were pretty grounded in reality and folklore. But when things start to go abstract, it gets hard to determine what’s really happening and what’s just a vague metaphor for something really, really weird. It’s been a week and I still haven’t made up my mind. I have another book by Peters, so we’ll see if I can make up my mind after that one.