A sneak peak at the latest novel from the acclaimed author of So Sad Today and Milk Fed.
Her latest, though, is another kind of enterprise.
Below, the cover reveal and an exclusive excerpt forDeath Valley, due in bookstores Oct. 24.
Luke Fontana
Many feet have been here.
But when I really think about it, I’m probably not okay with either.
It’s only April, but the weather app on my phone says ninety-six degrees.
Scribner
Then I head out to find food.
I don’t know why I lie like this.
I guess I want to seem like a woman who “does things.”
“Mojave or Death Valley?”
Since I’m not actually going hiking, I don’t know how to respond.
“Dunno,” I say.
“Just gonna see where the morning takes me!”
It’s two p.m.
“Let me show you nice, easy trail close by,” says Jethra.
“Go east on highway, then north,” she says, using her nail as a vector.
“Will take you ten minutes.”
“Twenty,” says Zip, looking up from his phone for the first time.
I ignore Zip and thank Jethra directly, then head out to the car.
When I step outside, the desert heat hits me like a weighted blanket.
The sun is white and blazing.
There’s no breeze.
My car is a furnace, but at least it starts.
Switching on the AC, I eat and drink.
Then I pull out of the parking lot.
Quickly, I turn the radio off.
This is my father’s music, and it hurts too much.
I don’t always avoid oldies.
My love for my father isn’t romantic.
But the longing has the same bereft quality.
Euphoric dreams leave a question hanging in the air the question of:Is that all we get?
Puffs of dry brush, like fuzzy clown wigs, grow miraculously out of cracks in the cement.
They must really want to live.
Or maybe I’m projecting that.
When I venture to strip away my projections, I’m not left with much.
It’s hard to describe what is.
How many times can you use the wordarid?
But as I continue east, the landscape grows more lush.
Craggy Joshua trees come howling out of the earth.
There’s a bounty of palm-looking things (yucca, maybe?
), and brightly living shrubs in all shades of green: sea, sage, moss, chartreuse.
I wish that I could drink the beauty.
The emptiness is still inside me.
I search my phone for a distracting audiobook anything butSweet Thursdayby John Steinbeck.
Since the accident, I read all my father’s favorite writers.
I can’t handle a melancholicohhhhright now.
I put on a new book, written by a psychic about communicating with the dead.
It’s called anticipatory grief and it’s normal.
LEAN IN!!!
I kicked off my literary grief tour with a memoir by a Buddhist psychologist about his father’s passing.
The Buddhist psychologist mostly described how angry he felt and how surprised he was to feel angry.
I found it strange that the Buddhist psychologist was surprised.
Anger seems like a grief basic.
But even more strange was the realization that I didn’t feel angry.
Maybe I don’t have the self-esteem to feel angry.
All I could think was,Who unravels this neatly?There was no mention of fear.
Zero messes or catharses.
If a feeling did surface, it was an elegant dribble, pristine, assonant.
Was this really the inside of a person’s head?
I’ve been more unraveled by a yeast infection.
It was clear that the author had never, herself, unraveled.
If I saw no humor in my unraveling, I’d have been dead long ago.
The audiobook about communicating with the dead is already better than the novel was.
“Listen,” she says.
“Your dead loved ones are waiting to talk to you.
So what’s the holdup?
You don’t need me or any other clairvoyant.
you might talk to them right now!
All you have to do is change your dial.
Tune in to their frequency.
And by ‘tune in,’ I mean believe!”
I like this self-starter attitude: Occult DIY.
Teach a girl to fish, Carmela.
“Start asking for signs,” says Carmela.
“Say, ‘Send me a sign to let me know you’re with me.’
Some of the more common signs that people report are butterflies, pennies, feathers.
But don’t be afraid to be specific, to ask for a specific sign.
Cultivate a spirit language.
Let them impress you.”
I turn off the highway and head north, wondering what my father’s spirit language will be.
My father’s brand.
Atop the billboard, a lone bird is perched: something shiny and black, with a butter-yellow underbelly.
But my father isn’t dead.
It’s not him.
“I had a client whose daughter passed in childhood,” says Carmela.
“During our first session, she asked her daughter to send her a green apple.
An hour later I get a phone call.
‘You’re never going to believe this,’ says my client.
‘I’m at Ikea, in the kitchen section, and what do I see?
A bowl of green apples!
The apples are plastic, but I know it’s her!
She’s here!'”
I can’t believe this is supposed to be an encouraging story.
A bowl of fake apples.
That’s all the woman has left of her daughter: a bowl of fake apples at Ikea?
“Now my client asks her daughter for apples every day,” says Carmela.
“She sees them everywhere!
I want you to do this.
Start asking for signs every day!
You should be in constant communication!”
My father, living or dead, does not want to be in constant communication with anyone.
There’s no way I could ask him for a sign every day.
What, he’s trying to rest in peace, and I’m nagging him for fruit?
Fruit and eternal connection?
I’ll definitely annoy his spirit.
I’m too insecure to ask anything of the dead.
