Literary Paranormal Fiction – 5 Stars!

Caveat: If you begin reading A Twist of Karma at bedtime, you risk losing a night’s sleep.     

Novels containing paranormal scenes or experiences achieve the appellation of literary fiction when the main theme or themes are well established and solidly grounded before any paranormal events occur.  When considered, this seems obvious.  The reader has accepted and been drawn into the fictive world: Disbelief has been suspended when the apparitions appear.  And when they do, the reader is likely to welcome them, as he or she continues reading within what John Gardner termed the fictive dream in his classic, The Art of Fiction.

An excellent example of this technique can be found in Toni Morrison’s most admired novel, Beloved.  The story begins in an actual city at an actual time in a home that houses what is perhaps not a typical family, but a family comprised of real people doing real things.  The reader is several chapters into the novel before coming to a scene where furniture begins to fly around, angry furniture.  But soon these paranormal events subside, and the reader is back in recognizable reality with interesting characters with whom, by this time, the reader has formed an emotional connection.  Beloved is unmistakably a ghost story indisputably in the canon of literary fiction.

There is more. Beloved is based upon an unimaginably horrible but true story: A woman kills her baby daughter rather than allow her to be taken into and raised as a slave in 19^th-Century America. And Beloved recalls other true horrors of slavery as well: beatings with a bullwhip that turns the flesh of slaves’ backs into a mass of scar tissue and other horrid tortures.  Considering these beyond-darkness-dark scenes, flying angry furniture isn’t difficult to accept, can be more easily seen as metaphor.  

A Twist of Karma, by Wendy Wanner, a story that is fascinating from the first paragraph, is also literary paranormal fiction of the highest quality. It faithfully begins in an exciting, exotic locale—a jungle in Sri Lanka—with a main character—Jennifer Stephens—in the vise of crushing morbid depression and guilt brought on by the recent drowning death of her eight-year-old daughter—Suzie—at their home on the beach in Santa Monica.  Jennifer was poolside absorbed in a novel when Suzie called out to her, “Mommy look.  Watch me dive.”  Jennifer didn’t lift her eyes from the pages she was reading until she sensed an unsettling silence.  By then, it was too late to save Suzie: she’d drowned. The death of a child is each parent’s worst nightmare, and so for a novelist, this is a subject not to be lightly undertaken as only a novelist with superior skills can make this work. 

But undertaking this freight-ladened burden, like Toni Morrison before her, is exactly what Wendy Wanner has done superbly in A Twist of Karma. The excellence of this novel stems from its realism, its believable characters credibly developed without melodrama, characters that make the reader feel as if they stepped off the page, some characters the reader comes to fear, other characters the reader comes to care deeply for, some characters the reader would be delighted to come over for tea.

A Twist of Karma takes the reader into worlds not readily familiar to many westerners: Buddhism, yoga, and fine art painting, fables from an ancient Far-East civilization.  The reader is also drawn into experiences familiar to denizens of western civilization in addition to parental grief such as budding romantic love together with the stress of forging of a new relationship during a homicide investigation.  Back in Santa Monica, Jennifer falls for a homicide detective, Mason, whom she meets in a yoga class.  Affectionately, she calls him “Ace.”

Soon after Jennifer returns from Sri Lanka to Santa Monica, unexplained, mysterious murders of young mothers, women whom Jennifer knows, begin.  Horrific but believable: Serial killers do abound. This makes the question of Jennifer’s vulnerability or perhaps culpability increasingly tense.

From the opening paragraph, the reader knows that she or he will be treated to superb writing, writing that’s often lyrical, writing that’s evocative, writing that propels the story with an urgency that makes the book one that you will not want to put down.  Who will be killed next? Will it be Jennifer, punished for parental neglect?  Is Jennifer the killer?  The story is so well written, it unfolds as naturally as if the events were real or real in Jennifer’s grief-impaired imagination.

And what of the angry apparitions that Jennifer first encounters back in Santa Monica?  What of Suzie’s voice that Jennifer begins to hear?  At this juncture in the story, the reader is still within the realm of real possibility: Afterall, it’s very possible that these subjective experiences of Jennifer are hallucinations caused by her profound grief, by Suzie’s tragic death, and the serial deaths of the young mothers in Santa Monica that follow.  But then what is the explanation for Suzie’s young friend, a boy two years younger than she, also hearing Suzie’s voice?  

The settings are so realistically drawn, that the reader will believe that she or he has experienced a Buddhist enclave in a Sri Lankan jungle, Buddhism, the practice of yoga, the beaches of Santa Monica. Stated alternatively, I fully believe that author Wendy Wanner is a convert to Buddhism, a practitioner of yoga, had been a visitor to a Buddhist-led yoga retreat in Sri Lanka. That she had lived in Santa Monica, that she was married to a homicide detective. Did I mention that the environments are beautifully described?

This is a novel that women and men will find compelling, well deserving of five stars.

Read James Victor Jordan’s review of Wendy Wanner’s THE COLOR OF FEAR here