Beneath the Salton Sea by Michael Paul Gonzalez

Beneath the Salton Sea Reviews

• 
  Ian Welke

  Excellent and eerie. In a way this reminds me of some of Laird Barron's work, the way in which the unsettling feeling of getting a glimpse into some other world that at most meshes with our own. I once saw Tim Powers say that "Los Angeles is a strange place because I know when I get on the freeway what it's like where I've been, and I have an idea about what it will be like where I'm going, but there's the sense that anything can happen if I get off at the wrong offramp." This book is a bit like that, further removed from that freeway offramp, it has the unsettling feeling that anything can happen out by the Salton Sea.
  
  I highly recommend this story.
• 
  Thomas Joyce

  A beautifully written exploration of interpersonal relationships through the lens of a cosmic horror story. Set against the backdrop of a mystery decades in the making, stretching from sinister military experiments to almost present-day, Gonzalez explores the detailed and complex relationships between a married couple, two sisters, and a mother and daughter. He never goes too far into the nature of the cosmic incident, using ambiguity and the reader's own imagination to hint at a horror on a grand scale. The character studies take centre stage, using love and loss, grief and guilt, to drive the story forward. The characters are intricate, the mystery compelling, and there are many beautifully written passages; some touching and elegant, others gripping and terrifying. This is a wonderful and rewarding read.
• 
  Eric Guignard

  Reading and thoroughly enjoying BENEATH THE SALTON SEA by Michael Paul Gonzalez, published by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing.
  
  = “A cosmic horror technological nightmare transcribing the raw honesty of what makes a family, what breaks them, the difficulties of communication, and the painful joy of memories.”
  
  I’m a lover of a books’ setting and atmosphere, which Michael Paul Gonzalez nailed. Eerie conspiracy of cosmic horror and military experiments set in the backdrop of the wild meth-living abandoned community of the Salton Sea (which I can personally vouch from several visits is as weird and terrifying as Michael Paul Gonzalez depicts).
  
• 
  Darren Lipman

  This book is hard to put down—every word is gripping from the beginning, and the characters have genuine depth and interest. I can’t say much about the story for fear of spoiling it, but it’s incredibly rich and vivid. The ending could have tied up a few more loose ends than it did and I would’ve been happy, but even so, this is a book I’m going to hold onto.
• 
  Aaron McQuiston

  I have been fascinated with the Salton Sea since I watched a documentary from 2004, narrated by John Waters, called Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea. In the documentary, they explain how the Salton Sea was a vacation destination in the 50s, a southern California desert Lake Tahoe, and the hot place to be. Due to ecological disaster, the place was abandoned by all tourists, and the only people left are outsiders. The documentary also has footage of Leonard Knight constructing Salvation Mountain, a guy who lives naked in the desert, and several people who say that the lake is just as good as it has always been even though it smelled like rotten eggs and the beach was made of fish bones. Despite seeing the Salton Sea pop up a few more times in the years since I watched this documentary, most notably during the movie Into the Wild, when Emile Hirsh playing Chris McCandless visits Salvation Mountain and the chapter in William T Vollmann’s huge California book Imperial, I have not really thought about the Salton Sea much more until now.
  
  Fast forward almost fifteen years, Michael Paul Gonzalez is on the Goulish podcast talking about his new book, Beneath the Salton Sea. He talks about a Salton Sea that is still inhabited by outsiders, but there are more of them gathered to create art and a community of people who live away from society. He talks about Slab City, a place where a makeshift society has formed on an old military base, and about how outsider art has taken over everything around the Salton Sea. He sets his new novel in this area, and as soon as he starts talking about it, I am drawn back into the mystique of the area. It is also a perfect place to set a horror story.
  
  The novella is split into three parts, each one happening years apart, but all of them involving the same characters. The first section is from 2008, when Dee and her wife Sharon go to the Salton Sea to explore. They are told that there is a crack in the sky above the Salton Sea. When they go to the old Yacht Club, weird things happen and they barely make it out alive. The second and third parts are family members of these two going to the Salton Sea to find out what happened to them. All three of the sections turn into confusion and chaos, and there is a real disconnect between reality and the things the characters are experiencing.
  
  This could have really turned out to be a poorly told story, but Michael Paul Gonzalez does a great job leading us through the confusion that his characters are experiencing. He uses technology as a bridge between the dimensions. The writing must be strong and very clear in several sections, and this is what makes his writing feel masterful. He expresses huge ideas and some scenes make no sense whatsoever, but it also allows you to feel the confusion that the characters are feeling. The strength of the writing is the only thing that could pull off this story, and many writers can not do it as well as Michael Paul Gonzalez.
  
  When I was reading this book, I kept thinking that there was a reason why so many people are drawn to the Salton Sea. This draw is in the location itself. The characters are drawn there because they are looking for someone or something they have lost, but this happens to people in real life as well. The Salton Sea seems to attract people, and I think that this is a good way to explain why so many people choose to live in a dead and decaying area. There is something that the sea holds that they have lost.
  
  This book can be a challenge to some people because it is deliberately confusing and chaotic. There are gaps in time and dimension and logic, but these are things that make the book compelling. I hope that many people stick through it and read it because it will also make you fall in love with the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea demands it.
• 
  Michael Louis Dixon

  Beneath the Salton Sea is not my first experience with this story. I originally read elements of this story in How the Light Gets In, a short story originally published in the anthology Lost Signals, also by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing. This story is the seed for the novel, and I was all on board for that, because I really loved the story. It’s an excellent Cosmic Horror story.
  
  While this is truly a Horror story with a capital H, it’s not a viscerally gruesome tale, and yet there are some moments that made me cringe a bit from its graphic and grisly details. But for me, where this story really sinks its teeth in is its deep exploration of loss and abandonment. Keep in mind that not everyone who is abandoned is done so willingly, or through neglect. But again, this story explores more than one avenue of abandonment.
  
  This is a Cosmic Horror story, AND it’s a Ghost story. Cosmic Horror relates to something so vastly beyond our limited ability to comprehend, and yet by our own very nature, our inquisitiveness sets us exploring the extreme edges of our known world and invariably puts us into conflict with the vast unknown. Here, at the Salton Sea, a possible past military experiment seems to have ripped a hole in the fabric of space and time. Unlike many Science Fiction stories, this is not a setup for an action/adventure, but instead it creates an alluring phenomenon which in turn becomes like some kind of cosmic trap.
  
  Ghost stories are generally about a disembodied spirit haunting the living, and while that’s often depicted as the dead communicating, or as in Horror, tormenting the living, in Beneath the Salton Sea we have a different kind of haunting going on. Mysterious signals from the past, voices delivering cryptic messages, and communications from the missing and presumed dead. Those who’ve come in contact with the “crack in the sky”, or may even simply be close to someone who has, are forever haunted by these strange messages.
  
  Even the location is conundrum of loss, abandonment, and haunting.
  
  Michael Paul Gonzalez has written a truly poignant novel that is well worth reading. I highly recommend it. I will certainly be looking for more of his work to read.
  
• 
  John Cramer

  The exposition is taut in this examination of family, paranoia, communication, and the value of living spaces. Gonzalez delivers an engaging story set in a location that functions as a fundamental character—this one mysterious, eerie, and uncanny. At times the prose veers hard into the poetic, and does so without unraveling or losing strength. The weirdness feeds this book from cover to cover.
• 
  Lloyd

  This book is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Cosmic weirdness at its finest. Thought-provoking and heart-breaking. I loved it.
• 
  Denise Cimpko-Beller

  …”amazing and sad, and horrifying, and breathtakingly beautiful all at once…” evocative and otherworldly