The Secret Hills
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University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations May 2015 The ecrS et Hills David Bowen University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Fine Arts Commons Recommended Citation Bowen, David, "The eS cret Hills" (2015). Theses and Dissertations. 861. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/861 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SECRET HILLS by David Bowen A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2015 ABSTRACT THE SECRET HILLS by David Bowen The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015 Under the Supervision of Professor George Clark The Secret Hills is a literary thriller. Kelly Murdoch is crestfallen when her sister Mara fails to attend her documentary premiere. Kelly visits Mara’s apartment and finds evidence that no one has been there for weeks. A random shooting occurs across town at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Seven people die. The zoo shooter, Ibrahim Rohani, had participated in one of Mara’s PTSD studies. Kelly tracks down Rohani’s friend Nick Miner, a fellow veteran who also participated in Mara’s study. With Nick, Kelly drives to Colorado to confront Lorenzo Hills, an independently wealthy rancher who funded Mara’s PTSD research. Despite (or perhaps because of) her suspicion that Mara had been romantically involved with Nick, Kelly sleeps with him. While on the road, Nick and Kelly evade an ambiguous agent they call The Patriot. Kelly and Nick search for Mara and Hills in Colorado. The Patriot reappears and abducts Kelly. Nick rescues Kelly and they flee into the mountains. While in pursuit, The Patriot’s wheels are shot out and his truck goes over a cliff. Mara Murdoch appears. ii Mara takes Nick and Kelly to an abandoned mining settlement called High Fork. The inhabitants—including the secretive Hills—are misfits, but unusually bright, inventive, and observant. With Nick’s help, Kelly learns that Mara’s work with a genetically-modified parasite has activated the “nirvana centers” in the brains of the High Fork residents—but the parasite sometimes activates other parts of the brain, areas associated with rage, aggression, and violence. The first symptom is insomnia, and Nick hasn’t slept for the past three nights… It’s up to Kelly to save Nick, prevent Mara from distributing her genetically-modified parasite to every grocery store and municipal water supply in America, and heal the family that shattered when Kelly and Mara’s father committed suicide more than twenty years ago. iii © Copyright by David Bowen, 2015 All Rights Reserved iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to my friends who have read and commented on portions of this book during its initial drafting and revisions—Okla Elliott, Raul Clement, Adam and Jamie Pacton—and thanks in advance to those who have agreed to read future drafts: Matthew Armstrong, Paul Crenshaw. I hope to have opportunity someday to thank you all on another acknowledgments page. Many thanks to the graduate faculty at UW-Milwaukee who challenged and guided me during the doctoral work that culminated in this dissertation. I’m especially grateful for the attention and assistance of those professors who served on my dissertation committee: George Clark, Liam Callanan, Tasha Oren, Ted Martin, and Anthony Greene. I look forward to applying your questions, ideas, and recommendations as I begin the next round of revision efforts. Thanks to my family: Mom and Dad, Nick and Jenna. And to Liana: my thanks will never be enough. v 1 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 1. GETTING STARTED: MOUNTAINS, GHOST TOWNS, GYPSIES, BUGS After our wedding, my wife and I drove across Colorado to reach our honeymoon destination, a former mining settlement called Ouray that had used the local hot springs to reinvent itself as a resort town. The trip took seven or eight hours, and we listened to one of my wife’s audio books while I drove. I don’t remember the prose and the characters (including a former orphan turned police lieutenant named “Eve Dallas” and a hunky Irish Bruce Wayne of unlimited resources named only “Roarke”) embraced type if not caricature, but the function of each scene in the plot’s sequence seemed to me particularly clear, and cast into relief the conventions of the mystery genre. There is an unknown— whether a missing person or artifact or an unidentified murderer at large—and each scene finds the detective and the reader one step closer to its revelation, often through confrontations constructed as interviews. Without yet having tried to write a novel, I remember thinking: I could probably write something like this. I would later encounter a book by Peter Brooks called Enigmas of Identity, where he suggests that detective fiction may be popular in part because it so clearly depicts “the very process of narrative plotting” (131). I’d read some Chandler and Hammett (and Graham Greene and Elliot Perlman and Donna Tartt), but didn’t count myself a devoted fan of the mystery genre, nor had I watched many of the popular police procedural shows like C.S.I. or Law and 2 Order. My childhood and adolescent reading leaned toward science fiction and fantasy—Heinlein and Saberhagen, Douglas Adams and Roger Zelazny, with dollops of Twain and Dickens and Shakespeare—but my reading tastes since college veered toward the contemporary literary fiction. From Conrad and Hemingway, I found my way to Kerouac and the Beats. There was the summer of John Gardner, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass that turned into a strange winter reading John Hawkes. Undergraduate workshops introduced me to Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Stone, Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, and the rest of the workshop canon. As my wife and I traversed the Rocky Mountains on our way to Ouray, my bedside reading probably consisted of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, or manuscripts that I was considering for publication with the independent literary press where I continue to serve as publisher and senior editor. My favorite writer at the time—the voice I most tried to imitate in my own writing—was probably Jonathan Franzen. When my wife and I reached Ouray, our hotel’s night manager told us that we had arrived before the start of the summer season. Aside from a pack of wealthy Germans touring the United States on identical Harley-Davidsons, we were the only visitors. After the motorcycles roared to life the next morning and disappeared on the road to Durango, we had the little alpine village to ourselves. The notion of celebrating one’s honeymoon in near seclusion beneath snow- capped peaks sounds romantic in the abstract, but we learned quickly how 3 conspicuous it feels to be the only two people eating in any restaurant, drinking coffee in any café, or walking down any street. As the waiters, servers, and bartenders watched silently from their posts, it was perhaps partly out of self- consciousness that we began filling a little notebook with playful descriptions of our own mystery-solving sleuth: a girl named Kelly Murdoch who would never give up, no matter what. She would dislike coffee and love tea. She would be innocent and trusting compared to her closest friends. She would admire the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age, in particular the films of Mae West and Cary Grant. And when she decided to do something, she would not stop until it was done. After hiking some trails, exploring an old mine, and soaking in a hot spring, my wife and I left Ouray a day earlier than we had planned, and without having concocted the problem that would launch the relentless Kelly Murdoch into action. By the time we’d arrived home in Fort Collins, the notebook that contained all of our ideas had disappeared. Almost two years later, I prepared to begin my second semester of doctoral coursework at UW-Milwaukee. While driving home one night, I listened to an NPR interview with Karen Abbott, who’d just written a biography of Gypsy Rose Lee. I only half-listened as Abbott described the burlesque performer and captivating wit who’d been the inspiration for the musical Gypsy and once received a telegram from Eleanor Roosevelt reading “May your bare ass always be shining.” From humble beginnings, Lee’s notoriously monstrous stage mother 4 took Lee and her sister on the road, pitted them against each other, taught them to trust no one but her. Lee’s sister became the actress June Havoc, and was the first to achieve fame. Lee’s own fame later eclipsed her sister’s, and their fierce sibling rivalry intensified. And it would never be resolved. When Abbott asked June Havoc (who died in 2010 at the age of 97) what kind of sister she’d been to Gypsy, Havoc responded: “I was never any kind of sister to her.” My ears perked up. That sounded like the most horrible thing imaginable—to be in one’s nineties, so near the end of life, and to confess such an irrevocable loss. Since Gypsy died in 1970, I imagined the terrible burden of guilt June may have been carrying for forty years. Crushing. And so I remembered Kelly Murdoch, and imagined that she had an estranged sister.