Utopia, Iowa by Brian Yansky (review)

To some people, Utopia, Iowa is just a particularly wholesome and healthy Iowa town; to others, it’s a place where residents possess various supernatural gifts (or curses, depending on your point of view) as a matter of daily fact. Film-loving, mildly troublemaking teenager Jack Bell is in the latter category: he sees dead people on the regular, which usually isn’t a big deal, but now beautiful young girls are being murdered and turning to him. The local cop, a nonbeliever, is suspicious of Jack’s entanglement, while other townspeople, including Jack’s witch grandmother, believe that the deaths are the result of a larger sinister force that’s trying to use the girls for a destructive end. Jack’s narration is deceptively low-key and laconic, his slightly slackerish disaffection bringing a wry, M. T. Anderson–esque note to this blend of noir and supernatural story. Yansky does a fine job of building the magical realism of Utopia and its combination of inhabitants who believe, those who don’t believe, and those who make money off of pretending to believe at the local Nirvana College; the Midwestern solidity adds both ironic and unironic charm. The picture of Jack’s family, mostly viewed through a subplot about his parents’ possibly strained marriage, is appealingly drawn, and the book cunningly pops some of the background domestic detail into the foreground in surprising ways as the story mounts. Readers building up their nerve for Andrew Smith will find this a pleasingly creepy and likably oddball outing.