Review: What Lies Beneath
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 25, 2014
Scott Zavoda has figured out an effective formula for literary horror in his novelette length short story, "Beneath the Sand." Combine a basic human fear, common everyday occurrences that can play into that fear with the right suggestion, and an unreliable narrator who may or may not be off his rocker, and you get a genuinely creepy tale."Sand" plays into our fear of suffocation... not being able to breathe. The story is set in the early 1980s, carefully chosen so that the narrator, a one-legged Vietnam vet still dealing with PTSD, can be a reasonably young, fit man. The bulk of the story is told in the form of excerpts from the narrator's journal, which is found on a California beach and turned over to a local police officer. The anonymous narrator lives in a nearby condo and makes his living selling his paintings to tourists along the beach. As the narrative unfolds, we gradually learn that, in the narrator's mind at least, there's something in the sand that periodically drags swimmers and even passersby under and kills them. He himself has suffered the drowning loss of a wife and the disappearance of a girlfriend, and he's convinced that whatever it is in the sand is after him as well.For much of the story, Zavoda engages in a bit of mind games with the reader, in leaving open the possibility that the narrator may just be paranoid instead of a witness to some hidden being or creature in the sand. Most of the occurrences he reports consist of a handful of drownings and accidents that would be likely on any popular public beach over the years, exacerbated by the fact that two women he knew well were victims. The other "evidence" is largely unexplained accumulations of sand in a beachfront condo. The possibility of a disturbed narrator, along with the realization that he still has issues from his Vietnam days, gives the story an added dimension of creepiness.Zavoda's clever framing device helps resolve the issue of whether the narrator is correct or delusional, and the result is a powerful ending. The last few pages of the story follow the policeman who finds the journal and describes what happens when he tries to find out what happened to the narrator. Let's just say that the issue is definitively resolved, once and for all.My only real quibble with the book has to do with the format. Although Zavoda uses the narrative journal format, he doesn't always play fair in describing what's gone on. The sequence of events that the narrator lays out are well organized in terms of building suspense and tension but not organized in the manner someone would do if he were recounting events, some of them having happened years before, on a day-to-day basis. Having the feeling that I wasn't reacting to a real person, but, instead, a clever author constructing a story, broke the mood of the story a little bit.Overall, however, "Sand" is a highly effective and genuinely creepy story. Both the narrator and the reader can feel what it must be like to be dragged under sand or water and be unable to breathe, and Zavoda brings us back to that several times in the story without it really feeling repetitive (as it might have in a longer work). I received the story for free as a promotion, and I'm often leery of recommending a shorter story such as this that usually costs money to read, but, frankly, the story would not have been as effective had it been dragged over 200 or more pages. Fortunately, I live well away from the ocean, but we sometimes vacation there. I have a feeling that the next time I walk along a beach, I'll think of Scott Zavoda and this chilling little tale.