Dog on Fire

Svoboda (Great American Desert) delivers a lyrical Midwestern gothic. The novel opens when a woman sees her brother’s ghost (both are unnamed) in a dust storm holding a shovel, a totem from his time working as a trim digger. The brother has been dead a month now, and since then his sister has been investigating what led to him being felled by a mysterious seizure. She begins with his lover, Aphra, the last one to see him alive, and listens to Aphra’s painful life story involving a sexually abusive father. The siblings’ father, meanwhile, chalks up his son’s death to the work of aliens or the mob, or his son’s handling of depleted uranium during his time in the military. More important than the sister’s search for the truth are the many zany episodes: a séance, the auctioning of a hot tub, an attempt to douse a dog that’s caught fire. The prose is challenging, shifting without punctuation or paragraph breaks from dialogue to internal monologues, but it can also be breathtaking, particularly from the sister’s point of view: “I read from the kind of book that doesn’t require staring-out-the-window thinking but replaces all thought with Olympic swimming pools of savage love and intrigue.” For readers who like to put in the work, there are plenty of rewards. (Mar.)