The body count mounts as the dead drift to shore. In Jeffrey Perso’s novel Water Bodies, the Mississippi River is a highway of doom and the city identified only as “L” is a charnel house. The landscape is fetid with greasy bridges, carrion birds feeding on roadkill and decay. The people are as squalid as the town they inhabit. The darkness is so unrelenting that one expects to find ghouls—maybe even the tentacles of Cthulhu rising from the rank waters. But in the end, the monsters are man-made.
“It’s genre bending,” Perso says. “My publisher”—Texas small press Black Rose Writing—“decided to put it in the mystery-thriller genre. I think of it as literary fiction embedded in satire and mystery.”
The Milwaukee author set Water Bodies in a reimagined version of his birthplace, La Crosse, Wis. “I’m more interested in the emotional and psychological landscape. But the locality gives it specificity as a springboard into larger themes of human folly and hubris,” he says.
Some of Water Bodies is directly drawn from real life. The idiot Sheriff Bubbow is based on Milwaukee’s David Clarke and the string of deaths along the river is inspired by rumors swirling around real events in Wisconsin a few years ago. “People have always been drowning in rivers,” Perso says. “But the response [in old media and social media] got me thinking that today, nothing can be what it is. Everything’s got to be nefarious—there has to be a criminal conspiracy, stalkers behind everything. It was ripe for satire.”
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The people of L are fearful and alone, clutching at guns for security and conspiracy theories for answers. The satire is folded into an almost gothic sequence of images conjuring an unhealthy terrain of human misdeeds. One expects the streets of L to converge on the House of Usher. “We’re living in a real horror show with humanity’s mistreatment of the Earth,” Perso says.
Perso will discuss Water Bodies at 7 p.m. Friday, June 14, at Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St.; and 6 p.m. Friday, June 21, at Voyageur Book Shop, 2212 S. Kinnickinnic Ave.
