A recent high school grad runs off with 30-something teacher to a rickety lighthouse that could be a set of a horror film. A slightly chubby clerk at a magician shop searches for his insane but genius twin brother, who had reoccurring nightmares as a child of a pirate slitting his throat and tossing him into the ocean depths. A college student fakes his own death after he discovers he was adopted by his Wonder bread, “Leave It To Beaver” parents, and goes off to instigate identity theft schemes via the Internet. All these stories are connected, in Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply.
The book starts out with three different story lines, which intertwine, a little too late and almost suddenly. Still, each character has an interesting background and the situations they face, especially high school student, Lucy, and her mysterious former teacher and current lover, George. The book brings a hint of supernatural, with Miles recalling images of his twin brother, Hayden, recounting him how he remembers how he died in past lives and dabbles in all things ghosts. Though the book is not a horror, Chaon’s inspirations have been Lovecraft and King.
Here is an exert from my favorite part of the book (does not give anything away):
But now, standing in the dried-out basin of the lake, on the steps of the old church where the body of a carp had mummified among a clump of cobwebbed moss–now she could easily magine the United States was gone; the cities were burnt and the highways glutted with rusting cars that never made it out of town. “It’s funny,” George Orson was saying. “My mother used to tell us you could see the steeple underneath the water when it was clear–which was a myth, naturally, but my brother and I used to come out here on the pontoon and dive down, looking for it. We’re probably about–what would you say?–pretty close to the middle of the lake, and you have to imagine it was fairly deep at the time….”She could see it. She could imagine being at the bottom of the lake–the membrane of the water hovering above them like the surface of the sky, and the rippled shadow of the pontoon boat, and figures of the boys in the diffuse blue-green light, their silhouettes like birds skimming the air.
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