On a chilly morning in January 1952, Alan Baldridge witnessed a murder. Sailing off the coast of California in pursuit of a pod of migrating whales, he heard screams in the distance. The pod abruptly vanished. Scanning the horizon, he spotted a large gray whale “spy-hopping,” swimming vertically and raising its head above the surface. Baldridge, a marine biologist at Stanford, decided to investigate; drawing closer, he saw seven orcas singing hunting cries, circling a small gray whale calf. As its mother watched nearby, the orcas began devouring the lips, tongue and throat of the dead baby.
Baldridge’s story inspired a controversial research agenda. Soon after his encounter, the Navy began using orca sounds in an attempt to control cetaceans. Their hypothesis: Whales could decode information from sound, a contrarian claim in an era when most researchers believed that animal noise was devoid of meaning. One of the Navy’s first experiments involved sailing a catamaran off the coast of San Diego, playing recorded orca screams to gray whales swimming south on their annual migration. The results were “spectacular”: The whales whirled around and fled north or hid deep in nearby kelp beds, slowly popping their heads above the surface to search for predators. When they finally resumed swimming south, the whales were in stealth mode: sneaking past, with little of their bodies showing above the surface, their breathing scarcely audible.
Some people are drawn to beautiful birds. Others are enamoured with orchids. There are those who are mesmerised by the kaleidoscopic swish and sway of tropical fish. But mention you’re interested in fungi, and you’re likely to be met with a raised eyebrow, a sideways glance, or perhaps even a choked-back guffaw. You may even watch faces warp from expressions of interest to ones of disgust. Fortunately, however, things are changing, and fungi are finally being looked at anew by homo sapiens.
A slasher sequel has the unenviable task of one-upping the original: more blood, more bodies, more terror, more killers (or more of the same killer vanquished in the original). This is the challenge confronted—and overcome—by Stephen Graham Jones in Don’t Fear the Reaper (2023), the second novel in his planned Indian Lake trilogy. If the first novel of the trilogy, My Heart Is a Chainsaw (2021), thrives on navigating the ins and outs of slasher films, then Reaper doubles down on the genre, leaning into the tenets of the sequels: monsters come back, body counts double, and the “final girl” returns home.
What emerges is something special — a polyvocal novel, an essay on inherited trauma and a quiet metafiction about telling stories we don’t own. At times, it’s unclear exactly where Pin is going — for instance, there’s a superfluous thread about American soldiers serving in Vietnam — but we follow because Pin’s novel is less about the story and more about how the story is made. Reading it is like watching a writer at work as she tries to give loss a plot and make meaning out of details. This proves to be more fascinating than the story of three siblings acclimating to their new home.
There’s a great deal of love in this book — often complicated, always genuinely depicted, never with a hint of sentimentality. Readers will come away with full and aching hearts, the best thing that can be said about any novel. The “lookout” of the title may refer to the fire lookouts that appear periodically through the text, but the larger meaning returns to Cody’s lesson about paying attention and, perhaps, caring for beloved places and the people who belong to them.