ROAD SEVEN

An anthropologist and his sidekick investigate a mysterious video that may show a unicorn in this novel that blends an Icelandic adventure with magical realism.

Mark Sandoval’s alien abduction memoir was made into a Hollywood blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, and he plans to study otherworldly beings further on a site visit to Iceland. Without revealing all of his aims, the self-described “renowned cultural anthropologist” and “famed cryptozoologist” enlists as his research assistant Brian Schutt, a headache-prone academic with a doctoral dissertation that's stuck in creative limbo back in Portland, Oregon. Schutt is mystified by the geometric scarring that covers his boss’s body—a “cosmic roadmap” or perhaps “warning or prophecy,” Sandoval’s memoir had suggested. Once both men trek to the Icelandic town of Hvíldarland, they bond over their shared fascination with mythical entities, cryptic creatures, and historical lore. Sandoval soon reveals the expedition’s true purpose: to investigate a grainy video sent to Sandoval of what looks like a unicorn on a pumpkin farm. Though Schutt is more skeptical, the trip provides a timely escape from his messy family melodrama and a dire health diagnosis. As they dig deeper into the area’s mystical folklore and haunted forest, all of it becomes a terrific thrill for Schutt, a man “still doggy-paddling through his academic career,” and Sandoval, hoping to lay claim to discovering the elusive creature with droppings that consist of “a gleaming coruscation of granulated glitter.” As in his Smoke City (2017), Rosson offers crisp characterization and surprising twists. Here he maps a magical journey through the wilds of rural Iceland and into a kaleidoscopic terrain filled with secretly active military bases and muddied body parts that sully what began as an innocent expedition into the supernatural. While the conclusion is disappointingly hokey and doesn’t quite measure up to the narrative mysticism and preternatural wonder preceding it, Rosson’s clever, swiftly paced story has more than enough to keep readers turning the pages and wanting to believe.

An engrossing and creative story of the wonders of the unknown with an Icelandic accent.