FIRST FICTION

ORDINARY HORROR By David Searcy; Viking: 230 pp., $24.95

So this retiree has a rose garden like the ones you read about. The only problem is gophers, so he sends away for these gopher-repellent plants from South America. They arrive in the mail, he plants them and, wouldn’t you know it, the gophers disappear. But then some really weird things start happening. . . . The setup of David Searcy’s disquieting novella about a sweet-natured widower, Frank Delabano, and his rose garden reads like an urban legend. But what follows is no tidy fable designed for retelling around the office water cooler. Instead, what emerges is an open-ended quasi-allegory of tract-home quietude gone awry. Almost immediately upon their arrival in the mail, Mr. Delabano’s mysterious Amazonian plants have a curious effect on the neighborhood. It’s as if the dark, otherworldly blooms--with their carrion-like odor and menacing root system--had the power to break the closed system of Mr. Delabano’s mellow, if lonely, existence, the kind that leans heavily upon frozen Salisbury steak and lawn care. Soon enough, crows are descending upon Mr. Delabano’s residence with Hitchcockian fury, his sleep is troubled by bizarre mewlings filtering in from next door, and the comforting hum of suburban life threatens to splinter: “He can still hear the mouth harp music confused with the wind outside--a thin, twangy sound like weather stripping, unpleasant children’s programming blowing like leaves; the sound of wind through TV antennas.” Like Mr. Delabano, Searcy’s prose is discomfitingly hyper-aware, a razor-like tool for dissecting the surreal mundanity of suburbia and the weird waking dreams of a guy suddenly besieged behind his picture window.

MONKEY BEACH By Eden Robinson; Houghton Mifflin: 378 pp., $24

What you can learn from Eden Robinson’s first novel: One of the words for “blueberry” in the Native American Haisla tongue is mimayus, which translates literally as “pain in the ass.” Bigfoot, known to the Haisla people as B’gwus, has his own Web site at https://www.sasquatch.com. Native Americans, at least the Haislas who live in the remote British Columbian village of Kitamaat, eat a lot of Kraft products. A rich grease can be extracted from the oolichan--a kind of Pacific smelt--to make a tasty condiment and ideal skin moisturizer. Ghostly visitors from the beyond can, like living people, be foolish and untrustworthy, and at least one of them--the one who regularly appears to Lisa Hill, Robinson’s 22-year-old Haisla heroine--looks like a troll doll with flaming red hair. A rickety old speedboat might not be the best way to track a person lost at sea--in this case, Lisa’s younger brother, Jimmy--but it does provide ample opportunities for mesmerizing flashbacks: Lisa watching Dynasty with her grandmother, or Ma-ma-oo; befriending her wicked wayward Uncle Mick; getting mixed up with a trio of village ne’er-do-wells named Frank, Cheese and Pooch; and growing up alongside Jimmy, a potential Olympic swimmer. Although death hangs like a Pacific mist over these pages, Robinson, herself a Haisla, fills this edifying book with the stuff of the living, from the tiniest details of Haisla life to the mightiest universals of tradition, desire and family love. *

ROBBERS By Christopher Cook; Carroll & Graf/Otto Penzler: 372 pp., $24.95

After an opening blast of overwrought, finger-snapping prose, Christopher Cook’s debut--an adrenaline bomb of a crime novel that also happens to be a wry Texas travelogue--settles into a rhythm that is strictly four on the floor, as Cook’s cops and robbers steadily groove toward their respective fates. And if there’s something about Cook’s enterprise that suggests a James Ellroy-meets-James Lee Burke-by-the-numbers approach (Burke, in fact, is invoked like a genial spirit throughout the book), there are some good surprises in store for those souls who like their heroes and villains to gobble up western-style ranch beans by the canful, sleep with their friends’ wives and kill innocent people for no damn reason. Cook’s hero is veteran Texas Ranger Rule Hooks, a lone wolf with a keen snout for a perp. He’s on the trail of two redneck sociopaths: Ray Bob, clearly the alpha male here; and Eddie, who wonders how he got mixed up in this reckless spree of convenience store and gas station holdups. But no one is really as he seems: Ray Bob is actually a tormented dude named Johnny Ray; Eddie, who just wants to play guitar, is either somebody named Wade or DeReese; Rule might not survive to bring these bad boys to justice; and Della, a single mom who gets picked up for the ride by Ray Bob and Eddie, might not, in fact, be a Sears catalog model. With these compromises of identity, Cook manages to make these cartoons of good and evil engaging as he offers the twisted lesson that you can, in fact, get away with it.