Caught Between Forces of Good and Evil

Novelist Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose chronicles of the mania and delusions of the American West, underlined by a sense of pervasive evil, have been compared to the works of a latter-day Flannery O’Connor.

With his new novel, “The Dogs of Winter” (Scribner), he delves even deeper into the primordial pulls of good and evil. Set in Northern California, the plot centers on a has-been photographer named Jack Fletcher who gets a last chance: an assignment to shoot a surfer in the feared, mystical reef known as Heart Attacks, located amid rocks and fog banks, where waves in excess of 30 feet break a mile from shore.

Fletcher hooks up with a bizarre entourage including a hot-dog surfer named Robbie Jones andthey set forth. It’s not until he is heading through the shark-in-fested swells in an outboard Zodiac piloted by a boy that Fletcher begins to understand the terrifying extent of his assignment.

Nunn writes:

“The wave face was dark with the amount of water it contained but with the sunlight splitting the last thin bands of cloud, lighting up the yellow rails of the Brewer gun and the red stripes of the wetsuit in such a way that, as Fletcher brought the scene into focus, he could actually see the colors reflected on the face of the wave, and suddenly he was drawing a bead on Robbie Jones. Even as the boy jerked on the starter line. Even as the wave bore down upon them, because in some dark corner of his head, Fletcher knew very clearly what he was looking at. The only shot ever taken from the water at Heart Attacks. In epic conditions. A rider up. The thing he had come for. He saw his shot and he pulled the trigger.

“It was really quite perfectly done. Robbie Jones was on his feet, crouched slightly with the board bucking beneath him but driving cleanly down the face of the wave. Fletcher held him in frame, leading him slightly, firing away, aware now too of yet one more sound--something apart from the thunder of the wave, the clicking of the camera. He was aware of the absurd sputtering of the Zodiac’s outboard as it kicked to life and yet even as he put out his hand in anticipation of its acceleration, the foolish thing leaped beneath him.

“Fletcher’s hand, extended backward, caught at the craft’s rail. The rail in question, however, was wide and fat, made of synthetic rubber, slick and spray and it afforded no purchase. Nor was there time for a second grab. Just like that and Fletcher was going over, still clutching the old orange housing he’d once risked his life to save, ass first into the icy Pacific.”

* Kem Nunn is among the more than 200 authors scheduled to appear at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday and Sunday at UCLA. For information, call (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 7BOOK.