Flight 182

Reading Bonnie ZoBell’s San Diego short story and novella collection, What Happened Here, is sort of like reading a book about the people you lost touch with after high school—so-and-so wants to start their own business; that one guy’s taking classes at a community college; everyone’s in a troubled relationship—but with a twist. In 1978, PSA Flight 182 collided mid-air with a privately operated Cessna over North Park, killing all passengers on both planes and several residents of the neighborhood below. ZoBell’s stories, set mostly in and around North Park, examine the scars, both physical and emotional, left by the crash, but the shadow of PSA Flight 182 isn’t the only specter to hang over the characters and settings of ZoBell’s short stories. In “A Black Sea,” a couple encounters what they believe to be a chupacabra during a business trip to Mexico. A married couple’s secret, the husband’s HIV-positive status, haunts them in “This Time of Night.” The collection’s final story, “Lucinda’s Song,” follows an old woman who struggles with dating years after the death of her abusive husband.

At times, ZoBell’s stories channel The Shining (1977), not in terms of terror, but in the idea that what happens in any given place—death, violence, trauma—leaves marks, wounds that people will feel for decades. ZoBell forces us to consider what draws us to certain places and what makes us stay. Sometimes it seems we have no choice, but often enough, we do. Take the narrator of “This Time of Night” and her husband, Willy. Despite near-constant unhappiness and disappointment after disappointment, they keep returning to North Park following short sojourns in the mountains (Willy’s career has hit a dead-end after multiple failed auditions for the San Diego symphony). Why do they return? For ZoBell’s characters, the ghosts of the past form a vortex, a kind of black hole that prevents her characters from moving on. For some however, it’s not too late. In “Lucinda’s Song,” protagonist Lucinda manages to effect change in her life, first through violence, then through self-assertion, and finally through love. The story’s closing image—two elderly lovers, free of a son’s judgment and an overbearing HOA, napping in recliners on their lawn—verges on saccharine, but it is nonetheless a welcome change-of-pace following story after story of dysfunctional suburban marriages and long-term relationships.

It doesn’t take long for the characters of What Happened Here to blur together before distinguishing one melancholy couple from another becomes difficult. While I appreciate the choice ZoBell made in linking these stories, in making connections between her characters, these connections read almost like afterthoughts—they don’t detract from the overall effect of the book, but they don’t really add to it either. Unfortunately, the included novella reads like a longer version of other stories in the collection. The subject matter is essentially the same, and the added length doesn’t result in increased scope; it’s mostly used to establish other characters in the neighborhood, characters who will attend (and make mention of in their own stories) the anniversary barbecue for the PSA crash.

While the ghost of the 1978 plane crash and other San Diego details provide a fantastic backdrop for her stories, ZoBell’s use of them stays at surface level, and she tends to get repetitive when mentioning local oddities. Take the story “This Time of Night” and its descriptions of the San Onofre nuclear plant, specifically its breast-like structure. It’s an interesting fixture of the local landscape, no doubt, but ZoBell doesn’t push this beyond the (admittedly humorous) descriptor, “radioactive boobs.” I counted seven instances of the “the boobs” or “the radioactive boobs” looming event occurs in the collection’s titular novella; ZoBell makes mention of the 1978 crash on nearly every page. We’re also treated to a rather repetitive inner thought process by the novella’s narrator, Lenora. Midway...