46 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
Review_FICTION Review_FICTIONis condemned to repeat certain histories
after a stranger attacks him. And in
“Summer Beam,” a novella split in two
that ends the book—which is perhaps the
strongest in the collection—a woman
retreats to her family’s vacation home to
escape her dissolving marriage, only to
find more pain waiting for her. While some
stories veer a bit too much into the didactic,
especially about the state of the world, Peck
is best when writing confidently about the
uncomfortable reality humans live in.
This is an evocative collection. (Nov.)The Dreamed Part
Rodrigo Fresán, trans. from the Spanish by
Will Vanderhyden. Open Letter, $18.95 trade
paper (552p) ISBN 978-1-948830-05-8
The sequel to The Invented Part continues
the adventures of Fresán’s unnamed writer
but cannot match its predecessor’s bril-
liance. After failing to throw himself into
the Large Hadron Collider (the plot of
The Invented Part), the 50-something
protagonist, a critic of social media, writes
a book on reading and language, and after
his star fades, he battles a severe case of
insomnia and writer’s block. Wide awake,
he concocts scenarios that place him in aworld where a phenomenon called the
White Plague has robbed everyone of
dreams and an organization known as
Onirium works to preserve the few
remaining dreams by extracting them from
users’ memories. The writer also remembers
and reimagines his own history, including
his parents’ disappearance, the strange
tales of his Beatles-loving uncle, and the
loss of his sister, Penelope, also a writer, who
obsessed over Wuthering Heights as a child
and went on to pen a series of popular books
placing versions of the Brontë sisters on the
moon. Less interested in traditional story
lines than the way thought patterns can
steer narrative, Fresán has plenty to say, yet
segments drag, and some tangents fail to
deliver. Some fans of The Invented Part will
perhaps find enough here to find it worth-
while, but most will be disappointed. (Nov.)Love and Hate: In Nazi Germany
Ryan Armstrong. LM Vintage, $11.99 trade
paper (218p) ISBN 978-0-692-10726-3
This WWII love story between a Nazi
guard and a Jewish prisoner from
Armstrong (Back to the Start) is a tense tale
about a soldier seeking to make amends.
Hans Beck is guarding a Jewish ghetto inRegensburg, Germany, when he is ordered
to kill Lilo, a young captive who witnessed
her father being bludgeoned to death. A
silent dissenter, Hans disobeys the kill
order and goes into hiding with Lilo in the
ghetto, until Hans is arrested and taken to
his brother, Erich, a sadistic Nazi general.
After being branded with a Jewish star,
Hans is allowed to take Lilo and leave, in
order to be “hunted” down. In love, the
two set out for Switzerland but quickly
separate—Hans returns to Regensburg to
save a nun that Erich has kidnapped, while
Lilo continues to Switzerland—and over
the course of the novel, they struggle to
reunite. The love story is a respite from
Hans’s heavy-handed soul-searching:
“When you’ve killed many men, your
soul bleeds, and the more you kill, the
more blood pours out of you, until you are
a pale, washed-out thing.” The brutal
scenes of beatings and rape might put off
some readers, but the plot twist at the
end will satisfy those who like a curveball.
Armstrong turns in a decent WWII
novel. (BookLife)Mystery/Thriller
Trace of Evil
Alice Blanchard. Minotaur, $26.99 (384p)
ISBN 978-1-250-22703-4
Set in Upstate New York, this gripping
series launch from Blanchard (The
Breathtaker) examines how violent secrets
from the past resurface in a rural commu-
nity. Det. Natalie Lockhart, a rookie cop,
still struggles with the beating death of
her older sister, Willow, 20 years earlier.
Another sister, Grace, who’s raising a
15-year-old daughter, Ellie, urges Natalie
to bury her memories and focus on the
recent murder of schoolteacher Daisy
Buckner. Meanwhile, Ellie is drawn to
dark rituals that renew Natalie’s suspicions
about Willow’s murder. The setting pro-
vides visual interest, and the resourceful,
sympathetic Natalie drives the action.
Blanchard occasionally undermines tension
by relying heavily on subplots, a large
number of extraneous characters, and
misdirection. However, she delivers the
goods in a sharp, if derivative, showdown
between Natalie and the serial killer who
crossed her path many years ago. Flush
with red herrings, Wiccan symbols, andSpace Invaders
Nona Fernández, trans. from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
Graywolf, $14 trade paper (96p) ISBN 978-1-64445-007-9T
his standout debut from Chilean author Fernández
dexterously tells the story of a group of Chilean
friends haunted by the absence of their old classmate
and friend, Estrella González, who left their school
as they grew up during the Pinochet dictatorship. Years
later, the friends all remember Estrella differently.
Fuenzalida remembers her voice; Maldonado dreams
about the letters Estrella sent to her (three of which are
in the text); Riquelme remembers going to Estrella’s
house to play Space Invaders and witnessing Estrella’s
father, a high-ranking officer for Pinochet, remove his
wooden prosthetic hand after he got home from work. The narrative eventually
winds its way to revealing what happened to Estrella. Fernández’s masterstroke
is her remarkable structure: the novella is related in fragments that drift and
remain unreliable, which evokes the pervasive fear and uncertainty of life under
Pinochet. “Time isn’t straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead,
merges them, separates them out again.... Whether we were there or not is no
longer clear.... we’re left with traces of the dream, like the vestiges of a doomed
naval battle.” Fernández’s outstanding novel explores the nature of memory and
dreams, and how after a certain point, they become indistinguishable. (Nov.)