ZERO ZONE

The aftermath of an uncanny art installation entangles the artist and her audience with unintended consequences.

Jess Shepard creates art out of experiences. First, she created The Way Out, a room for young women to smash objects in anger, as a response to a college hazing ritual called the weigh-in. Then she assembled the Rainbow Rooms, a sequence of adjacent chambers flooded with singular hues of light so intense that lines of return visitors formed around the block. But these interactive exhibits pale in comparison to Jess’ masterpiece, Zero Zone, a concrete cube constructed in the New Mexico desert at a site formerly used for nuclear bomb tests. Due to lingering radiation in the air, “you see things sometimes,” as the owner of the land puts it. The novel revolves around a group of haphazard travelers who wind up inside Zero Zone together: Martha, a cocktail waitress at a Las Vegas casino; Tanner, a mailroom clerk with disfiguring neurofibromatosis; Danny, a “muscle-bound, baby-faced Latino kid” fresh out of county jail; and Izzy, a wayward teen nicknamed Señorita Shake by mean-spirited kids at school after suffering a seizure. The four share an otherworldly experience in the room, and they decide to barricade themselves inside. When sheriff’s deputies arrive, the standoff turns into a shootout, ending with one unfortunate fatality. Shortly thereafter, Izzy attacks Jess at a gallery show, leading to her incarceration. Upon Izzy’s early release, her mother, Madeline, contacts Jess to solicit her help in locating her daughter, which reopens the wound. While each character’s narrative should compel readers to invest in the backstory and tragedy of the lethal intersection between life and art, the novel never finds its footing, succeeding only in revealing a completed puzzle and asking readers to pick apart the pieces.

A novel about experiential art based in light and space loses focus along the way.