Review by John Austin
About a hundred pages into Craig Brockman’s recent thriller Dead Silence, the reader and the complicated “hero” of the story meet the book’s most splendidly rendered character: Ma’ii, the trickster coyote spirit who eventually resolves the plot, albeit in confounding fashion, and not necessarily to everyone’s satisfaction. Our hero, Ron Jarvin (a former priest and psychologist on a byzantine journey to connect with his long-lost daughter) and Ma’ii convene by the fire in a grand abandoned inn, where Ma’ii lays bare the true nature of human life and its relationship to the realms beyond the veil. The scene beautifully synthesizes the primary threads in the fabric of this careening story: the slippery outlines of reality, the sources of existential pain, the mutability of time, and the plain fact that the Upper Peninsula is one of the world’s thin places, where the seen and the unseen perform an intimate, thrilling, sometimes terrifying dance.
Jarvin is compelled by mysterious forces to reconcile with his daughter Gracie, who was conceived in the tryst that ended her father’s career in the priesthood. Gracie turns out to be White Doe, a possessor of significant inherited powers and cosmic stature. The two of them and their comrades are closely connected to the Lake Superior Council, who are waging a bitter battle with the Dark Council over—among other things—numerous unexplained disappearances of Native women. Unspinning the intricate web of identities and motives in this battle is the narrative essence of this book, which culminates in a scene of spectacular carnage.
Besides Ma’ii and the outmanned human characters, there are Yetis and Puckwudgies, and people who are dead but not dead. The settings include slime-slathered chambers in the underworld, remote beaches, torture chambers, and the depths of Lake Superior. Nearly every setting and character shapeshifts at some point, and the pivots in the narrative that result from these shifts are hard to predict. Surprise twists are essential to the genre, of course, and on the whole they work when one gets used to them. The only aspect of this tale that this reader struggled with was the seemingly infinite plasticity of time as the characters passed through it. Hours, weeks and millennia morph into one another from one sentence to the next, with no apparent mechanism or rule. That time and time-sense are contingent is absolutely fair game, not just in suspense tales, but in the unraveling of philosophical, theological, and psychological mysteries. That granted, as well as the constant layer of bewilderment which is essential to the world Brockman depicts, some order to the chronological chaos would have helped this reader.
And yet, the feeling that all times are now is an inescapable byproduct of living in, and appreciating, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, not just in its physical mysteries, but in its cultural complexities and its shaping of an individual human soul. For anyone who feels that feeling, Craig Brockman’s Dead Silence will take them on a pleasantly exhausting and rewarding journey.
