Book review: “Boca Raton” by Lauren Groff.
Lauren Groff has written a horror story filled with apocalyptic visions. What makes it so chilling is that the visions ring true. I believe we are living in the last days, not decreed by a wrathful god, but brought on by human greed and carelessness, by our relentless breeding and building.
screen shot of partial Google listings
Ange and her young daughter live close to the ocean in Boca Raton, in a cottage she could only afford because of its grisly past. The story opens with Ange cleaning trash out of a creek, and a vivid listing of the nastiness she finds, until the corpses of baby chicks rotting around the plastic that killed them make her vomit. For four days she cannot sleep or hold food down.
Pepper Mound Creek, Tampa image: abcactionnews.co
She has visions – of a family waiting to be taken up by the Rapture, and their bitter disappointment when the sun rises and they are still here. Of the ocean lapping across the floor of the library where she works. Of a huge, grimacing face approaching her, a looming darkness gathering, waiting outside her locked doors.Of her daughter in the future, haggard, in rags, trudging north to escape what there is no escaping. She grieves for her daughter, and children yet to be born, knowing she has no power to protect them from environmental devastation.
Groff’s work has always had a strong sense of place. She moved to North Florida about ten years ago. She has absorbed the wonder and absurdity of this place – the snakes and roaches, the hurricanes, the gentle winters and fierce summers, the ocean ceaselessly lapping at the shore.
Florida is just a narrow peninsula of sea-level land enclosed by two long coasts, and sea level rise is already upon us.
image: miamitodaynews
Florida after one meter sea level rise image:researchgate.net
Yet we keep building condo communities, retirement communities, McMansions for the rich and mini-mansions for the striving. We replace natural wonders with tourist ‘attractions,’ pave over still more land to add lanes to the crowded highways, fertilize the golf courses and destroy the springs.
expanding the highway image:planshillsborough
image: golfdigest.com
sewage, manure, and fertilizer runoff led to toxic algae in Santa Fe River image: earthjustice.org
“Boca Raton” is one of seven short stories about climate change commissioned by Amazon for Kindle in a collection they call Warming. Written with Groff’s fluent gift for language and unerring eye for the telling detail, it is a haunting horror story for our times.