The Sacraments of Blackgum Lake

Smith (The Skeleton Melodies) delivers an ambitious southern gothic that braids folklore, faulty memory, and family trauma. The plot toggles between the present day and a troubled summer that Cecil Mears spent at his family’s lakeside cabin in the 1990s. Interspersed throughout are stories and visions of the Great Depression, when notorious gangster John Dillinger used the same location to dump the bodies of his victims. To Cecil, this gory history lingers in the air, and his sinister father adds his own layer, telling tall tales of lagoon creatures rising from the watery depths. Cecil’s perception of the world is scarred by a concussion sustained a few years prior and his slippery grasp on time is reflected in the novel’s structure. The story plays out as a collection of fragments, with layered memories, hallucinations, and nested, Russian-doll-like recollections. At one point, Cecil experiences a flashback of Dillinger experiencing his own memories, producing a dizzying vision-within-a-vision effect. The setting itself is the novel’s most arresting element, thick with muck, dead fish, and submerged histories. As events unfold, the reader begins to sense that the lake’s true horror may be the emotional rot passed between generations. Readers seeking atmospheric horror are sure to be sucked in. (May)