So Cold the River

Southern Indiana is not the first place one thinks of as a setting for a supernatural thriller, but just as Stephen King made Maine a prime location for spookiness, so has Michael Koryta in his novel So Cold the River, which turns the town of French Lick, heretofore known only as the hometown of Larry Bird, into a hot spot for mystery and murder.

The story is told from the point of view of Eric Shaw, a failed cinematographer, whose Hollywood career ended when he punched a director in the nose. He headed back to Chicago with his tail between his legs, and ended up as a videographer for events like weddings and funerals. He's hired by a woman to make a documentary about her father-in-law as a birthday surprise for her husband. That father-in-law, Campbell Bradford, Shaw is told, grew up in the environs of French Lick, which was once a tourist site because of the springs there. A grand hotel still exists.

All of this is real, but the story gets weird when Shaw takes a sip of the bottled spring water, called Pluto Water. He ends up having visions of what appear to be Bradford as a young man, when he ruled over the area in the 1920s, the personification of evil. Along with a graduate student and a local elderly woman, who happens to have a passion for meteorology, Shaw tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, while the last descendant of Bradford suddenly seems to be possessed by the spirit of his ancestor.

Koryta spins his tale in breathless prose, but it never edges into the silly. I found his descriptions of Shaw's visions, when Bradford, always wearing a bowler hat, commits some heinous crimes, to be crisply and frighteningly told, and does remind me of the best of King. The sections that seem most over the top are those involving Shaw's ex-wife, who runs to his side when he needs her. That the book climaxes with everything taking place while the countryside is swarming with tornadoes doesn't sound like it could possibly work, but it does.

So Cold the River works as both a mystery and a ghost story, and is probably best read during a fierce thunderstorm.