PASSERSTHROUGH :: Peter Rock

Not since Iain Reed's I'm Thinking of Ending Things have I finished a book and thought "I have little to no clue what I just read, but I loved every damn minute." Peter Rock's Passersthrough is all kinds of crazypants, and I am far from understanding everything that happened, but in the words of Trip in Meatballs, "It just doesn't matter!"

The basics of what I DO know are this--Helen and her father Benjamin have been estranged for more than two decades, since something mysterious happened when she was eleven and they were camping together in Mt. Rainier National Park. Helen disappeared and wasn't found until a week later and 100 miles from their camp.

After her mother's death, Helen begins reaching out to Benjamin, although tentatively. She gives her father a machine that he can speak into (and vice versa) and his words will be transcribed and sent to her machine. Helen is not yet to the point where she trusts him enough to spend time him or speak directly about what happened. 

Through their communications, we learn snippets of what that camping trip involved, including a blue tarp and a lake they called Sad Clown Lake, a body of water filled with bones that never seems to be in the same place twice. They also had a notebook they left in their tent while they were out, leaving it for "passersthrough" to write in. 

As Helen and Benjamin talk remotely, Benjamin has a semi-catastrophic encounter with a woman and her dog in the market parking lot. Melissa helps Benjamin home and tends to him, but also reads some of the transcriptions on Benjamin's machine. As Melissa and her "brother," who are squatting in a "murder house," try to help Benjamin figure out what happened on that ill-fated camping trip, things start to get really cuckoo. 

To share more would be both too much information and me providing a perception that might not be anywhere near correct. Although the story seemed to remain outside my grasp, it was so beautifully written and intriguing that I didn't want to put it down for a minute. It's haunting, eerie, bizarre, lovely, and tragic. Rock is a beautiful writer (his heartbreaking My Abandonment was a gift of a novel and also made into a fantastic film, Leave No Trace) and even though much of Passersthrough escaped me, I enjoyed the hell out of it and will pick up Rock's next work without hesitation.