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Critic's Corner
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SO COLD THE RIVER When Eric Shaw’s career in Hollywood filming movies hits a dead end, he and his wife return home to Chicago in hopes of starting over. However due to Eric’s procrastination as to exactly what he wants to do with his life, his wife Claire leaves him. Left on his own Eric begins making wedding and funeral videos just to get by. After one funeral video he did for a young woman killed in a car crash, the woman’s sister approaches Eric with an offer he can’t refuse. Alyssa Bradford asks Eric to make a video of her very sick father-in-law’s home town in Indiana. She tells him that her father-in-law, Campbell Bradford is ninety-five years old and near death. As a surprise to her husband she wants a bio of the elder Bradford’s life before he left his Indiana home. She offers Eric twenty thousand dollars to complete the project. He’s to travel to West Baden Springs, Indiana, stay in the hotel there for two weeks while he makes the film. According to Alyssa, the old man has quite a story but that he left there many years ago when he was a teenager. No one seems to know why he left, Eric is to discover his story as well as the history of the place. West Baden and French Lick, Indiana are two very small towns situated side by side. Each once had famous spas in their hotels and sold a special mineral water taken from the local springs. Alyssa gives Eric an eighty-year-old bottle of the water that Campbell seemed to value a great deal and had kept with him unsealed all these years. The small green bottle holds a cloudy liquid. Printed on the label is the name “Pluto Water – America’s Physic.” Each time Eric picks up the bottle it feels colder. What Eric can’t realize is that his life has just taken a turn into the “Twilight Zone.” The hotel in West Baden Springs looks like a fairy tale castle. Even before Eric gets settled into the beautiful hotel his troubles begin. First he begins to have migraine headaches that appear associated to the liquid he tasted from the bottle of Pluto water. Then he meets a young graduate student who is doing a thesis on the history of the place back in the roaring twenties. Kellen Cage turns out to be a true friend in the coming days of horror and mayhem. Then there is Anne McKinney, 86 years old, a weather watcher with barometers and thermometers, and surrounded by weather vanes and wind chimes in her hill top home. She comes to the hotel every afternoon for one gin and tonic which she slowly sips while watching the comings and goings in the hotel lobby. Anne, too, befriends Eric, but in the end can’t help herself. This is a story filled with paranormal visions and one most horrific ghost who is intent on regaining in death all he lost in life. Revealing more of the story would be a spoiler, and that would not do, not at all. Michael Koryta is the author of five previous novels, including “Envy the Night,” which won the LA Times Book Prize for best mystery/thriller. He is a former private investigator and newspaper reporter. Koryta lives in Indiana and Florida. One thing I can tell readers is that West Baden Springs and French Lick, Indiana are real life places. I have been to that area and can testify to the eerie ambiance of the whole place. Just something strange in the air you can’t quite put your finger on, not that you’d really want to. Koryta’s brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real story is not to be missed. Yes, it’s fiction, but reads like something that just might happen . . . in the twilight zone. If suspense is your cup of tea, take a long drink of “So Cold the River.” Buy So Cold the River Patricia Ann Jones is a published writer and has recently retired from her position of 18 years as a reviewer for the Tulsa World newspaper. To comment on this review you may email pattij777@aol.com. |
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from Amazon.com
