This week’s book

‘The Houseboat’ by Dane Bahr

Counterpoint – 256 pp – $26

Dane Bahr has spent many years in the Pacific Northwest, running the Seattle based Dock Street Press before leaving the city for Bellingham, Washington. But Bahr hails originally from the Upper Midwest, and he returns to the heartland for the setting of his psychological thriller and debut novel, “The Houseboat.”

The novel is set in 1960. Edward Ness works for the U.S. Marshals Service in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when a call comes in from Oscar, Iowa. The local sheriff there needs help with a case, and Ness is sent to investigate. Seven years earlier, tragedy befell Ness, and he has since self-medicated with liquor. He is a functional alcoholic, but still a pretty sharp detective after the haze of his nightly binge clears away. Ness’ boss thinks a change of scenery may do him some good.

Oscar is a small town located along the Mississippi River, where Sheriff Amos Fielding has a tough case on his hands. A couple was driving home from a church social one night when they came upon a girl, trembling, traumatized and naked by the side of a country road. The girl said her boyfriend had  been murdered, although there was no sign of a body.

The area is pretty remote, Fielding tells Ness. The only person who lives nearby is Rigby Sellers, “a feller who lives up (the) slough.” Sellers is the local misfit. He drifted into town a few years back, picked up a job and soon lost it due to some behavior his boss called “deviant.” Sellers lives in a derelict houseboat moored in a marshy spot along the river and stays mostly out of sight and mind of the townsfolk.

But readers will find it impossible to get him out of their heads, as the author spends a long stretch in the middle of this novel to focus on Sellers and the events of the previous year that have led to his decaying grip on reality. The bogeyman on the edge of town is not a new trope, but Rigby Sellers is an unnerving new addition. If it seems to the reader that Sellers is capable of the sordid acts of rape and murder, they’d be in good company. Most of the townsfolk in the novel are inclined to believe it, too.

As a town barber tells, “you hear about men like Rigby in the world. There just ain’t no place for them. Better gone, if you ask me.” A group of men even form a posse to carry out frontier style justice. But as different as Fielding and Ness are from one another, the small town cop and the big city detective both stand for due process, even if they don’t believe that it always works.

Readers might find it so easy to get lost in Sellers’ freak show that they won’t take a pause to consider the disturbing creep of subversion elsewhere in the novel. “The Houseboat” is masterfully atmospheric and deeply haunting.