Sodom Road Exit

April 2, 2018
Following Sub Rosa, winner of the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian debut fiction, Dawn attempts to graft a ghostly possession story onto a family melodrama, with mixed results. Starla Martin is a disillusioned young woman, unable to choose a life path when “there are so many gosh darn prospects for me to gradually fail at.” Fleeing creditors, she moves in with her mother in Crystal Beach, Ont.. Finding work as night manager for an RV park, Starla quickly discovers an innate strangeness to the area: “Like Weekly World News, UFOs, two-headed squirrels, haunted barns weird.” As she tentatively begins a relationship with Tamara, a stripper, the ghost of a professional “scream queen” from a torn-down amusement park also takes a sexual interest in her, making for a complicated love triangle. Starla is an intriguing character, terribly flawed yet smart enough to realize that “torment is recognizing exactly what is wrong with you, but not knowing how to right those wrongs.” Her relationships with Tamara and her mother are the most accomplished elements of the story, but Dawn never fully reconciles the supernatural elements with the realism. There is much to commend in the narrative, but the novel as a whole has an oddly unfinished quality.