Steven Boyett

I don’t push books very often. This is one of those rare cases when I do.

Sometimes you come across a book and it makes you painfully, sharply envious.  Steven Boyett’s books head the pack in that category for me.

A while ago Ace sent me ELEGY BEACH.  It’s a sequel to ARIEL, which is being rereleased August 25, 2009.

I read the first two chapters and I had to stop.  I couldn’t do it.

I was revising Kate 4 at the time, it wasn’t going well, and ELEGY BEACH just drove home the point: I was falling short.  I had to finish the draft and only after I turned it, I went back to ELEGY BEACH and devoured the book.  To say that I admire his work, would be an understatement.

The writing in this series is magic.  It makes you wish you were a character in the book.  Here, let me show you:

The northern boundary of my childhood forays was delimited by the canted and rusting wreck of a supertanker careened on South Carlsbad Beach decades ago.  Drowned corpse of some foundered god.  When I was ten a group of us kids had gone exploring in it, despite being strictly forbidden to.  Or maybe because of that.  The inside was a cramped dark slanting metal maze above a manmade grotto slick with algae, dank with water, rank with oil.  And inhabited.  Squatters lived in its tilted upper decks, fishing off the sides and for all I know eating kids too stupid to keep out.  When we saw them, skinny Asians in ragged clothes, we fled screaming and laughing.  They cursed us in some catlike language, throwing things as we splashed into the water and slogged ashore.  Yan claimed they were the tanker’s original crew, or descended from them.  I never went back there, but the iron corpse of it loomed throughout my childhood like a haunted house, the way the concrete vastness of the Del Mar racetrack dominated it like a storybook castle.

Our lives were dominated by the ocean, by the shore.

Strange things washed ashore sometimes.  Giant nets, thick cables, endless plastic bottles, salt-polished wood, bottle glass, old metal drums of industrial chemicals, carcasses of sea serpents, airline seat cushions, one time a rotting mansized mass some people claimed was a mermaid, though I never saw it and can’t say either way.

Summers were social, soft, easy.  In June families would load picnic backpacks and head for the cliffs at Seagrove Park to watch the sea serpents mating.  Huge as railroad tunnels and equally improbable there in the crumpled bright water, scales gleaming candy-apple red tinged with vibrant yellow, they fanned their parasol gills, dead-man’s eyes and built-in leers giving them permanent expressions of goofy fanged delight.  A quarter-mile offshore the males would rear and hiss and bite each other, churning the water and getting knotted as a drawer full of rubber bands and then sorting themselves out and starting all over again.

This is what I would like to achieve as a writer.  Mundane magic.

Steven’s website is here: http://www.steveboy.com/index.html.

I’ve linked the images to Amazon.  Check them out if you get a chance.