Bliss (review)

Prim Atlanta and posh Crestview Academy are far from the hippie communes and university basement labs where Bliss has lived or squatted with her parents until now, when her parents flee to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War draft and leave Bliss to the attentions of her fussy grandmother. Bliss is excited, though, by the possibility of having friends her own age, and she does love hot showers and commercially made soap, after all. The friends she falls in with are nice enough B-listers, but her social conscience leads her to befriend the school pariah, Sandy. Sandy has plans of her own, however, as she is trying to channel the malevolent spirit of a suicide, Liliana, who turns out to be seeking someone to inhabit so that her evil has a body through which to do its work. Interstitial quotations from period songs, television (especially The Andy Griffith Show), and the Charles Manson trial transcripts, appearing in white on black before each chapter, link events happening at the school with the pop culture of the day. Bliss, however, slips into anachronistic speech patterns on occasion, and Myracle uses a mixed-race couple in a barely credible situation as a catalyst for her climax, making the early 1970s setting seem more a device than an authentically realized ethos. The quote technique does succeed at mirroring the juxtaposition of Bliss’s wide-eyed innocence with Sandy’s malignant designs, but the sought-after creepiness fades in a relatively tame showdown with anticlimactic consequences. Sure, a nice girl dies, but other than committing heinous experiments on her cat, Sandy’s crimes remain mostly in potential, and Bliss’ protests are inconsequential, making both villain and hero ultimately disappointing. Still, horror fans who can fill in the book’s gaps may find this a spooky source for period creepiness.