THE LOST COAST

In Robinson’s horror novel, the massacre of a Native American tribe in California prompts its sole survivor to embark on a 100-year campaign of revenge.

The story opens with the murder of 250 Wiyot people by knife-, hatchet-, and axe-wielding white settlers on Feb. 26, 1860, in California’s Humboldt County during the tribe’s annual World Renewal Ceremony. Kinetitah, the lone Wiyot survivor, comes up short in his brief quest for justice at the local sheriff’s department. No matter, though, because Kinetitah, known as “Mad River Billy” to locals, has an ace up his sleeve that the massacre’s ringleader, Timothy Hurley, can never hope to play. Kinetitah happens to be a superpowered shaman who’s attuned to the brightest and darkest forces of nature. He wastes no time summoning their energies, which enable him to transform at will into a horrible, 15-foot beast and embark on a grim murder spree of his own. Only then do Hurley and his murderous accomplices grasp the effect of their horrific deeds, but it’s too late to undo what they’ve done, and they—and, years afterward, their descendants—begin to vanish at a dizzying rate. About a century later, it’s up to troubled University of California, Berkeley professor Wes Cravenfish to connect the relevant dots as people in his orbit meet terrible fates, which throws dark shadows on his own past. A grudge that never relents, a curse that won’t die until every last condition is fulfilled—these provide the spark of Robinson’s latest offering, which burns with intensity from the opening page. Over the course of this novel, Robinson has fashioned a suitably dark, Gothic cocktail, driven along by a heightened tone (“The earth remembers. The spirits remember”) as well as unyielding action, once Mad River Billy goes about his monstrous business. Kinetitah’s monster form is armed with tentacles and mandibles that seem straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story, and he has vows to match: “I will feed on your souls as the next payment for your atrocities.” Revenge tales have rarely felt so vicariously thrilling as they do here.

A fiery tale of vengeance that keeps the tension high.