Onyx reviews: Where they Wait by Scott Carson

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 8/22/2021

Writing a puff piece for his alumni magazine isn't what Nick Bishop, whose work was once nominated for a Pulitzer and who spent time as an embedded journalist covering troop draw-downs in Afghanistan, would like to be doing, but his options are limited. He was recently laid off and the job pays five grand, so he packs up and relocates from Florida to his hometown of Hammel in coastal Maine. It will give him a chance, too, to visit his mother, a scientist who specialized in memory research who now, ironically, is suffering from dementia. He also gets to rekindle a high-school era friendship with former crush Renee Holland.

The article he's been commissioned to write is a profile of Bryce Lermond and his new app, Clarity, which has been designed to shape dreams. Nick is an odd match for this piece, since he claims he has never dreamed in his life. When Nick agrees to beta test the app, against Renee's strong recommendation, he finds it to be surprisingly effective. It consists of guided meditations, breathing exercises and sleep songs. The latter component is the most impressive: the woman's voice and the oddly ominous song she sings send Nick immediately into a deep sleep.

The app has some intriguing features. Once played, a song vanishes, forcing Nick to wait for the next one to appear. Also, the app will only play the song through earbuds and not speakers, preventing Nick from recording the music, although he uses an old military contact to figure out a way to defeat this limitation. The fact that Renee asks him several time to delete the app, which she claims is not ready for public use, only makes him more determined to dig into its capabilities.

Nick moves into his family's seasonal camp on Rosewater Pond, which is where he and Renee, who is two years older, became friends the summer he was sixteen. This was shortly after his father was killed in a car accident. His only neighbor is nosy caretaker Bobby Beauchamp, who has been a fixture in the community all Nick's life.

As Nick falls deeper into the grips of the app, he has his first dream—a nightmare in which a mystery woman offers cryptic instructions. It's not the only inscrutable advice he receives: his mother speaks of grackles and squirrels and traps beneath their cabin. Then Renee reveals something that shakes his world to the core and challenges everything he believed about his past.

The novel explores Maine legends and folklore—including the many shipwrecks that have occurred off its rugged coast—and the power of song and story. Carson (a pen name for Michael Koryta) draws inspiration from the implanted memory experiments of Elizabeth Loftus, as well as drawing from such topical subjects as "sonic bullets" and the mysterious afflictions suffered by some consular employees that may have been caused by sound.

Ultimately, though, the book focuses on Bryce Lermond's obsessive interest in aspects of reality best left unexplored. In that sense, Lermond is reminiscent of Rev. Charles Jacobs in King's Revival. Carson ramps up the tension as the truth about certain recent deaths is revealed and Lermond's master plan is exposed.