Tag Archives: Florida

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

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I’ve missed a few posts lately because I’ve been creating an index for my family history. How detailed? What’s most helpful? These are questions I don’t have the answers to. Having studied family histories other people have assembled, I know an index is invaluable, and the best I can do may be to strike a middle ground between obsession and gloss. Future users will have to rate my success, though I probably won’t hear about it.

But I do want to tell you about a book I really enjoyed, Lori Roy’s The Final Episode. It’s one of a string of books that enter meta-territory, in a way, in that they’re about television, its coverage of true-crime and the impact of that on people involved in the original tragedy. Others in this string that I’ve reviewed are The Murder Show by Matt Goldman, Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker, and one of the best, The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave. Each interesting in its own way and each highlighting significant downsides to the genre.

I can’t always pinpoint why one story totally captures my attention and another doesn’t. It’s some ineffable yet powerful characteristic that goes beyond plot, character, and setting. For whatever reason (reasons?), The Final Episode, kept me spellbound.

Roy provides a great set-up—a true crime television series is reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance of Francie Farrow, taken from her Florida bedroom some twenty years earlier. It happened during a sleepover with twelve-year-old Nora Banks. Feigning sleep, Nora saw and heard the man who took Francie and threaten to take her to the nearby Florida swamp.

Three families’ futures and fates are entangled in this devastating crime. For Francie’s parents, the slow-moving investigation and not knowing what happened to their daughter, where she is, whether she’s alive is, in the long run, more corrosive than the worst possible news.

The neighborhood becomes a pressure-cooker, and Nora and her parents escape to her mother’s childhood home on the fringe of the Big Cypress Swamp, with its venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, bears, bobcats, and cougars.

There, Nora’s family find the protagonist of the story, almost-eleven-year-old Jennifer Jones. Jenny and her two best friends are simultaneously lured by the swamp and obsessed by its terrors. Every girl in South Florida knows about Francie Farrow—the posters and news coverage are unavoidable—and learning that Nora has an intimate knowledge of the event makes her friendship all the more alluring and destabilizing. The disastrous season trudges on—hot, humid, reeking of swamp smells, and plagued by insects. Worse is the maelstrom of accusations, revelations, and manipulations that the families endure. At the end of the summer, another kidnapping occurs, and everything is changed for them all.

The story of the girls’ explorations and their evolving relationships is backdrop to the story of the grown-up Jenny, trying to make a living, out of touch with her childhood friends. But now that the television series is airing, the heartbreaks of that summer are uppermost in the minds of everyone, including Francie Farrow’s poor mother Beverley, increasingly unhinged. With the television series lurching toward a conclusion, no one knows how it will end. Will it reveal what really happened to Francie, and who will be blamed for it?

Author Roy keeps the girls well plugged into the plot. As they go about conditioning their hair and painting their nails, their actions are not only realistic, but to a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious. The male characters are well developed too, including the police officers and FBI agents, the fathers of Francie, Jenny, and Nora, and the adult Jenny’s sometime-boyfriend, Arlen (who has his secrets too). I particularly enjoyed Jenny’s aging grandmother, Dehlia, who never loses faith in her family, her history, and her portents. A real page-turner!

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Meet Author Laura van den Berg

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The interviews the late lamented Glimmer Train magazine published are a fine source of information on authors beyond, say, John Grisham and Lucy Foley. The mag’s interview with Laura van den Berg was published in 2012—a dozen years ago. Accomplished as she was at that time, she’s done even more now! Then, she was “working on” a novel (isn’t everyone?), but now she’s published three: State of Paradise, The Third Hotel, and Find Me, plus four collections of short stories, including the one with my favorite title, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. All the while, she’s been racking up the prizes. (Van den Berg’s website here.)

Her newest novel, State of Paradise, was published only two months ago and deemed a “most anticipated book” by a great many review publications. NPR said it was “at once an adventure and a treat, a deep study of Florida’s psychogeography,” and if you know very much about Florida, van den Berg’s home state, you’ll know what a deep and complex subject that can be. “So many worlds,” she says.

In the interview, she talks about the attraction of Gatorland, where people wrestle alligators, which reminded me of Karen Russell’s 2011 Swamplandia!, a Pulitzer Prize finalist about an entire family of Florida alligator wrestlers. Not recommended bedtime reading. “And many other parts of the state are just as strange,” van den Berg says.

Unlike so many authors, van den Berg didn’t start out to be a writer. She wanted to be a psychology major but ran into a major stumbling block: math. As a person who used to sleep with her statistics book under her pillow in case some insight would crawl out of it and into my head during the night, I can relate. What turned her attention to the possibilities of writing was discovering contemporary literature—not the classics.

Part of her learning to write fiction was to learn how not to be “willfully strange.” When her stories have strangeness in them, as they often do, it must “have roots in the characters’ lives” and not feel as if she is “imposing strangeness on them.” Certainly in writing mystery and suspense stories, events, however untoward, should not feel arbitrary or conceived merely to move the plot along. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking a particular character wouldn’t act as the story describes, you may have encountered something “willfully strange.”

Twelve years ago, van den Berg explained her attraction to magical realism themes, “monsters and myths,” as due in part to Florida’s influence. In addition, she says, “there’s so much about the world, so much mystery, that I would never understand,” that may be better described or appreciated through a totally different perspective. Her view was prescient, given the popularity of paranormal themes in fiction today. Recent crime novels with neurodivergent protagonists—Nita Prose’s The Maid, Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond, or Tim Sullivan’s Detective George Cross come to mind—may be another manifestation of shifted perspective.

Part of the pleasure of reading van den Berg’s work or that of the other authors I mentioned is sorting out what’s real and what isn’t. These alternative realities, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster or the power of wishes, are both “beautiful and terrifying,” she says, because in a way, “it’s easier to not believe in things.” And, “There’s a beauty to people who do live in the world with imagination, and who embrace the mystery of the world at large.”

Take it from me, it’s possible to love such flights of imagination and the cut-and-dried world of “just the facts, ma’am” police procedurals at the same time.More Recommended Florida Reading:
Swamplandia!by Karen RussellNaked Came the Florida Manby Tim Dorsey – irrepressible craziness

****Naked Came the Florida Man

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By Tim Dorsey – “ʻDon’t shoot guns into the hurricane.’ Elsewhere this would go without saying, but Floridians need to be told,” this antic crime novel begins, as Dorsey takes the familiar Florida man premise to absurd heights (or is it depths?). His hero, the aptly named Serge A. Storms, who has no discernible occupation, has plotted a picaresque adventure for himself and his dim friend, Coleman. Serge will drive them around Florida in his 50-year-old gold Plymouth Satellite, visiting the graves of past Florida luminaries.

Enlightening Coleman along their route, Dorsey/Serge painlessly and idiosyncratically covers Florida’s history, sociology, meteorology, and biology. Before long, you know quite a bit more about this quirky state than you did on page one. Florida with its extreme weather, its swarms of insects, its snakes and gators, its cultural hodgepodge, its tony suburbs and ramshackle sugar cane towns lend themselves perfectly to Serge’s non-stop snarky commentary

Several other plot threads, past and present, weave throughout. First is the story of the deadly 1928 hurricane that created a massive storm surge—not in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, where you’d expect, but in Lake Okeechobee—that killed some 2500 people. Pertinent to Dorsey’s tale, a rich sugar baron’s fortune in gold coins was lost in the calamity. The fate of the gold is one of the riches of this tall tale.

Most of the novel is devoted to Serge and Coleman’s adventures and clearly channels Serge’s manic psyche. His mind is like a rambunctious puppy, dashing here and there, nibbling this and that. At times the two men launch into a jag of childishness, racing and chasing each other, finger-painting murals for their motel walls, dressing as clowns, and generally acting up.

It’s hard to reconcile that light-hearted Serge with the man who plans (elaborately, of course) and carries out four diabolical murders. His victims aren’t blameless, but the gruesome methods by which they die almost put me off the book. But I hung in there, and I’m glad. Dorsey was a reporter and editor for the Tampa Tribune for twelve years and has twenty-two previous novels. The Boston Globe calls him “compulsively irreverent and shockingly funny.” A trip with his man Serge is most definitely a wild ride.

Order from Amazon here.