War-weary world takes bizarre turn
The reasons we read are as diverse as the people who do so.
If bestsellers’ lists are any indication, most read to escape, delving into a book for a brief reprieve from daily lives into stories that are not our own but could be, in another time, another place.
Susan Perly’s Death Valley is not that kind of book.
An absurdist odyssey that would make Thomas Pynchon proud, the novel centres around Vivienne Pink, a veteran war photographer who has seen too much. Pink is ostensibly on an assignment to photograph soldiers about to deploy to Iraq, accompanied by her writer husband and her best friend, a CIA operative.
It has a mind-bending array of extras who encounter the trio on a hallucinogenic anti-buddy road trip through the titular landscape: the man dressed as a chicken and the woman with a hare’s head. Consider yourself warned.
Death Valley is not an easy read. The novel defies genre, mashing up generous helpings of pulp fiction and spaghetti westerns with an abridged history lesson on America’s nuclear heritage.
This fantastical fable gets curiouser and curiouser until Alice actually shows up in Perly’s warped Wonderland in her pinafore, alongside a talking rabbit in a waistcoat and a very high caterpillar.
“The green caterpillar called from his toadstool, ‘Anybody got a doobie for the Dude? I hear there’s some fierce Purple Haze coming out of Bogota.’ ”
And that’s not the strangest scene in the book. Not even close.
Toronto-based Perly is the author of the novel Love Street. She is also a former journalist and war correspondent for the CBC.
Knowing that, Death Valley takes on a confessional quality, her absurd dissertation on an absurd world. Dene Moore is a freelance journalist and writer in British Columbia.