Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

Beautifully written, four people descend into their own personal Hells, and eventually find redemption as a family.

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Quotes:

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

He got this aura of expectancy about him that confused me. It wasn’t dread, not exactly, but you could not call it hope.

Something lunged in me then, receded. A giggle or a sob. A noise. I thought: You look very stupid, Dad.

“Really, it’s unproductive to ruminate on that particular problem of our sister’s,” he’d told Ava on the night before he left home, by which he’d meant “It hurts.”

This is not forever, Kiwi would think as he held his breath and plunged one of the World of Darkness latrines with the clown-nose suction cup. You are still a genius. You are just a temporary worker

I think it’s hard to ever hear your own happiness as an alarm bell.

“Nobody can get to hell without assistance, kid.”

“Hell’s real, all right. We can be there tomorrow, or Wednesday at the latest. So long as you want to go.”

Few mainlanders know that the Seminole Wars lasted longer than any other U.S. conflict, longer than the Vietnam War and the American Revolution.

Faith was a power that arose from inside you, I thought, and doubt was exogenous, a speck in your eye. A black mote from the sad world of adults.

From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the “official, historical” Florida records we found in books. “Prejudice,” as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic—a “damn fool math”—in which some people counted and others did not.

At ten, I couldn’t articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.

“You were lying to me,” I said dully. “There isn’t any such thing as the underworld, is there? This is just the ordinary swamp.” “Aw, kid, don’t say that.”

I believe I met my mother there, in the final instant. Not her ghost but some vaster portion of her, her self boundlessly recharged beneath the water. Her courage.

We were a family again, a love that made the roomiest privacy that I have ever occupied.

I’d told the Chief about a dream I’d had on Swamplandia!—a great tree had swallowed him, his knuckles sunk into the tree bark—and he listened with such a frightened, pained expression that I stopped talking. So I didn’t tell my dad about the Bird Man, or Louis Thanksgiving, or the red Seth, or Mama Weeds.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she told me that night. But until we are old ladies—a cypress age, a Sawtooth age—I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, either. Not the kind from Ossie’s book. I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulable than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in The Spiritist’s Telegraph. Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.

Like me, I think that eventually Ossie simply figured out how to occult her own deep weirdness, to shuffle quietly down the chutes of our school hallways.