THE PEOPLE OF THE BROKEN NECK

Fiction

Making certain we’re not certain

THE PEOPLE OF THE BROKEN NECK
By Silas Dent Zobal
352 pp. Unbridled Books

Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo

Shell shock. Battle fatigue. It’s had many names over the years. Now we know it as PTSD. Silas Dent Zobal peels back the layers of Dominick Sawyer, ex-Ranger, ex-husband, and father to two tweens whom he is afraid of losing. The People of the Broken Neck brings us into a desperate struggle of one person to protect his family. From whom or what remains uncertain until the last chapter.

Zobal builds strong characters and gives each enough instability to create doubt in our minds. We might see the distancing and sparring between son, Clarke, and father as a natural component of teen years. We might see the dreams and nightmares of the daughter, Kingsley, as part of the uncertainty she is facing. We might look at Dominick and see a scared, yet protective parent – or a deeply disturbed veteran steeped in paranoia. Charlie, the diligent FBI agent, pledges to save Clarke and Kingsley from their father—or is it to save his own family’s stability? Zobal makes certain we’re not certain.

[Charlie Basin] telephoned the SWAT team leader to get an update. They’d lost the trail in the woods but hounds were on the way. He put the phone back in the breast pocket of his coat. What had he once enjoyed about this job? 

The wheels hummed against the blacktop. He straightened a lock of the girl’s black hair. She smelled unwashed. Why hadn’t he just called an ambulance? Or he could have sent one of the uniformed police officers. Why take her to the hospital himself? The girl curled into a fetal position. What had he missed at his home while he’d been hunting men?

This novel is written in the new style. Points of view merge and shift according to the scene we are in, making for a disjointed tale. But Zobal does not stray so far from traditional style that we become lost, as seems to happen with many modern efforts. We are led down several paths, follow willingly, and then accept the twists and turns as natural elements of the characters’ stress instead of as prosthetic prose.

In a shallow pool Clarke had discovered a juvenile lobster hiding beneath a rock. He had only a single claw. Dominick’s kids poked at the lobster with a stick. They wanted it out in the open. They wanted to see how it would choose a path through the clear water. They wanted it to come out from under that stone shaped like a round of bread.

Finally, Clarke leaned back in the sand, resting on his elbows. He had been thinking things through. He watch King lean against their dad’s leg. “If they’re after us,” he said to his father, “you better show us some things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Like how to take care of ourselves.”

“I’ll take care of you, Clarke,” he said. 

“No, you won’t.”

Though the players feel a bit stereotyped, Zobal’s prose engages us. We care about both the foe and the hunter. We identify with the children even while unsure of their roles, their complicity, or their true feelings. We shift our allegiances with theirs, and with Charlie’s, and back. 

A nice piece of adventure reading, and not too difficult to take down in a couple of evenings.