Haunted by Secrecy

A review of Robin Riopelle’s Deadroads: A Novel of Supernatural Suspense (Night Shade Books, 2014).

The Acadian Grand Derangement or Great Expulsion was a time of loss and displacement when people were uprooted and disconnected from their origins. Robin Riopelle brings these themes forward into the present in her novel Deadroads: A Novel of Supernatural Suspense, exploring an Acadian-Cajun family struggling with this continual state of disconnectedness, loss, and identity crisis. Like the ghosts they hunt, the Sarazzins are defined by their displacement, by their uprootedness and the confusion resulting from it. They are cut off from their past, isolated by secrecy about their own history.

When their mother left with their sister, Lutie, Baz and Sol had to be raised by their father, a man who wanted to erase the memory of their mother to ease his own pain and to feel stable. Sol had followed his father’s erasure of the past despite his constant defiance of the man, but Baz seeks to bind his family back together, to recover his own roots by finding the rest of his family. After their father dies, Baz seeks out Lutie, who has been living with a foster family since their mother died. Lutie has lost knowledge of her family’s ability to lay ghosts, to send them onto the deadroads to the afterlife. Her foster family saw her affinity with ghosts as a sign of mental illness, medicating her to suppress her ability, but Lutie has maintained a belief that she could control the ghosts, that she could turn them into her pets… the same issue that caused their mother to leave in the first place when she decided to keep a ghost despite their father’s insistence that ghosts should be sent on to their place of rest.

Suppressed by medication and a culture of disbelief, Lutie’s family knowledge was rendered mythic and lost. But when Baz makes a deal with a demon to find his lost sister, these siblings are reunited and a process of recovery can begin. Baz and Sol, both wanderers, perpetually drawn to the road by the desire to escape from overwhelming responsibility, are brought back to their sister, reunited as a family seeking to discover secrets about a past that was obscured by time and by a history of hiding information “for their own good.”

Deadroads is a novel about the interconnection between family responsibility and secrets, and the ability for secrets to pull a family apart and continue to haunt the lives of all of them with the absence of memory. Ghost hunting pulled the Sarazzins apart, but also brought their family back together, allowing them to begin the process of recovery through a shared notion of protection and discovery.

Angels and demons, the dead and the living, everything is a potential threat in this novel, inscribed with danger and needing to both be kept secret and to keep secrets from. Deadroads is a novel marked by uncertainty and characters coping with a deficit of knowledge and the danger that knowledge can bring to them.

To find out more about Robin Riopelle, visit her website at http://robinriopelle.com/