Riptide, Oregon, 1983. A sleepy coastal town, where crime usually consists of underage drinking down at a Wolf Point bonfire. But then strange things start happening--a human skeleton is unearthed in a local park and mutilated animals begin appearing, seemingly sacrificed, on the town's beaches. The Mercy of the Tide follows four people drawn irrevocably together by a recent tragedy as they do their best to reclaim their lives--leading them all to a discovery that will change them and their town forever. At the heart of the story are Sam Finster, a senior in high school mourning the death of his mother, and his sister Trina, a nine-year-old deaf girl who denies her grief by dreaming of a nuclear apocalypse as Cold War tensions rise. Meanwhile, Sheriff Dave Dobbs and Deputy Nick Hayslip must try to put their own sorrows aside to figure out who, or what, is wreaking havoc on their once-idyllic town. Keith Rosson paints outside the typical genre lines with his brilliant debut novel. It is a gorgeously written book that merges the sly wonder of magical realism and alternate history with the depth and characterization of literary fiction. This book will appeal to fans of genre-bending authors such as Dean Koontz, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and Kevin Barry.
David Glover is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton, where he teaches courses on cultural theory, Irish literature, and Victorian and Edwardian literature and culture. He is the author of Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (1996) and Genders (2000 and 2009) and has recently co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction.
