State of Paradise

Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MINDS EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But its not just the ominous cats, her mothers burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern - something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets. During a violent rainstorm, the writers sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mothers lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author, and reality itself. A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Bergs State of Paradise is an interlocking and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.