Passersthrough

November 1, 2021

At age 11, Helen vanished in Mount Rainier National Park while camping with her father, Benjamin, and though she was found and reunited with her family after a week, she remains estranged from her father for 25 years. Finally, they are ready to reconnect, even as Benjamin meets a strange woman and child who push him to understand more about Helen's experience by leading him to the creepy, bone-laden Sad Clown Lake. From the author of My Abandonment, made into the film Leave No Trace, and PEN/Faulkner finalist The Night Swimmers.

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February 14, 2022
Rock (The Night Swimmers) offers an eerie account of the attempted reconciliation between an estranged father and daughter. Benjamin Hanson, 76, gets a visit from 36-year-old Helen, who wants to rebuild a relationship with him and begins by installing a recording device in his house. What follows is a mix of transcribed recordings of their conversations, which take place remotely while she stays in a motel, visiting him in Portland, Ore., from San Mateo, Calif. Benjamin chafes at the technology but acquiesces to use the fax machine, and she faxes him a message expressing a desire to understand a traumatic event from her childhood. When Helen was 11, she disappeared from the foot of Mt. Rainier. Gone for a week, her “misadventure” was never fully explained. Things get weird and complicated when a group who might be a family of ghosts shows up at Benjamin’s house. The family’s unnamed boy and girl suggest Benjamin hike to Sad Clown Lake. Rock draws on the mountain scenery to create a surreal atmosphere, culminating in a haunting scene of disaster. The result is an otherwise conventional family conflict that convincingly morphs into something genuinely bizarre. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic.

April 15, 2022
An estranged father and daughter try to reconnect 25 years after she mysteriously disappeared for a week while they were camping in Mount Rainier National Park. The heart of Rock's latest novel is the relationship between 76-year-old Benjamin Hanson and his 36-year-old daughter, Helen. When Helen was 11, she went missing for a week under mysterious circumstances while she and Benjamin were camping in the woods near Mount Rainier. Attempting to reconnect, Helen visits Benjamin at his Portland, Oregon, home. She either can't or won't talk to her father in person about her disappearance. Instead, she installs a machine with custom software that records him as he's speaking, transcribes his words, and delivers them for her to process at her own pace. She responds by fax or phone. The incident and subsequent time apart have left them both unable to articulate details or emotions to one another. While Helen can't even bring herself to speak of the camping trip, Benjamin suggests that they go camping again, and in his preparations for this ill-suggested outing, he encounters Melissa, a transient woman with questionable motivations. Something's off about Melissa, and her actions waver between altruistic and opportunistic, but as she learns of the history between Benjamin and Helen, she becomes a willing substitute in Benjamin's would-be plans to re-create whatever it was that happened to him and his daughter 25 years ago. As the novel progresses it becomes clear that it's never been about the reconciliation of Benjamin and Helen but rather the ongoing relationships both they and Melissa have with death, the deaths of loved ones closest to them, and the search for answers in trying to deal with their losses. Its best elements, like its supernatural overtures, are reminiscent of Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999). A captivating page-turner that raises more questions than it answers.

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