After reading the book about snakes, a work of fiction caught my eye - Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. I was intrigued and repulsed at the same time. Set in Florida, Swamplandia! is the story of the Bigtree family and their alligator wrestling theme park. It is a tragedy with a happy ending.
Ava, the main character basically sums up the plot with this quote in the exposition:
"I didn't realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another -- bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave." (7)While reading it, I seemed to find a Dante-esque theme of traveling deeper and deeper into Hell. One of the characters finds a job working in another theme park called "the world of darkness" which is supposed to be hell inspired. Then Ava sets out on a journey to the underworld to find her sister who has eloped with a ghost. Each of the characters has a climax of horror in the book.
And also like Dante, they come out of hell at the end and find heaven - or at least reality, happiness, and family - "When my father stepped forward it didn't matter that we were nowhere near our island. All of us, the four of us--the five if you counted Mom inside us--we were home. We were a family again, a love that made the roomiest privacy that I have ever occupied" (312).
While this was one of the strangest books I have read, (have you ever read a book with alligators, alligator wrestling, ouija boards, theme parks, casinos, and swamp legends?) it is also strangely satisfying. The writer has a gift for prose and story telling, I was pleasantly surprised with the whole thing.
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