Eric Shaw, a talented cinematographer who has more potential than he does discipline to realize it, is unhappy with his life. He feels he deserved and continues to deserve More. The great break could be any day.
Once in demand by Hollywood directors, Eric now makes his living doing memorial videos from photographs, scrap books and other memorabilia collections when someone has died. He takes a pile of memories the deceased left behind and turns them into something that will become a distilled memory of the deceased for the survivors. When he just has a feeling about including a photo of an isolated cottage in one of the memorial videos, he sets off a chain of events that leads him to West Baden, and an encounter with a side of the universe most of us never see.
The place setting that infuses the story, sustains and makes it possible is a real piece of American life and history, the mineral bath spas of French Lick and West Baden Indiana. The resort at West Baden has been restored in real life as well as in the fictional world of So Cold the River. Koryta does an excellent job of conveying the impressive structure’s beauty, as well as the feel of the surrounding countryside. The dome above the lobby area was the largest in the world until 1913, and in the US until 1955 when a larger (but far less beautiful) domed coliseum was built in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Equally real is the Lost River, and the unique mineral springs that can be found throughout the area.
So Cold the River is not a travelogue or a local history, but without the unique geography and the local history anyone would have been hard pressed to imagine such a place, and Koryta brings it to life.
Besides creating a living, breathing setting in which the story takes place, this book brings vivid characters that are human, and some who used to be. Which begs the question, do we cease being human just because we’ve left the body behind?
Josiah Bradford, a young man who is the last descendant of the infamous Campbell Bradford, now works as a lawn maintenance technician at the restored West Baden resort, not so quietly smouldering with rage over his lowly position in a valley his ancestor Campbell once mostly owned and definitely ran. Josiah has in common with Eric the sense of something owed him, of having been defrauded somehow, of the unspecified glories that should rightfully have been his and unfairly are not. Where Eric has several factors in his life to keep him grounded (including people who both believe and understand his vulnerability to dreams and visions), Josiah does not, and when Campbell himself arises from the dead with colorful determination to use them both, Josiah and Eric are put on a collision course. Campbell Bradford, you see, had been an extremely evil man, and he enjoyed it.
He still does.
Another great character is Anne Bradshaw, a slight elderly woman who brings the story a port of stability in a very strange storm. Anne is a brilliantly written woman, full of years and happy to have lived a full life as ordinary as she herself is aware of the non-ordinary side of the place she lives, occupied now with watching her life wind down, and happy to be of extremely practical use. She’s a voice of reason as well as belief, a quiet kind of hero, a sweet, generous old woman with nerves of steel.
The only characters who are immediately vulnerable to Campbell are Eric and Josiah, because of terms Campbell himself laid out. They also have in common the chip on their shoulder, the resentment, the ego – the Pride, if you will, that makes them vulnerable to Campbell’s manipulation. In Josiah’s case that vulnerability turns him into a tool of revenge in the hands of his ancestor. Standing almost off the page, Campbell Bradford is a palpable presence, looming behind and thrumming through the narrative like the vibrations of the train he rides.
As genre fiction, So Cold the River will not disappoint any reader who just wants a decent, well-written shiver down the spine, or a well-planned and precisely-executed mystery. As literature, it provides interesting peeks into the depths of the human experience, and teaches us about our ties to each other, including how binding those ties can be, even beyond the grave.
Enjoy.
