by Kelly Pickerill
I started reading Citrus County this weekend, John Brandon’s new book and our First Editions Club pick for August. The novel is set in Florida in, you guessed it, Citrus County (visitcitrus.com). The county is on the Gulf coast in central Florida, north of Tampa but south of the panhandle, and it’s home to such natural wonders as the Homosassa Springs, the lazy Crystal River full of gentle manatees, and, in Brandon’s rather dark, quietly violent tale, dangerously disillusioned children and apathetic adults.
Toby is a junior high delinquent with a Holden Caulfield complex who spends more time in detention than at home. Shelby is a bright-eyed and -minded good girl who one day decides to pursue Toby. Mr. Hibma is their geography teacher who, when not thinking of ways to avoid actually teaching, fantasizes about killing his colleague but is unable to come up with the right method — no cutting of throats or gun violence, no poison (too easy to track) — before he finally settles on smothering.
I’m not too far in, but the event that has put Citrus County on the news in the big cities has just occurred — Shelby’s little sister has been kidnapped — and Toby is more than involved. His intent, or one of many, is to take the swagger out of Shelby’s step, so to speak, to steal her confidence, incongruous as it is with his own worldview. But more than that, Toby hopes that “when the manatees give up the ghost or a hurricane finally gets a bead on Citrus County, trucks of guys would come down from Tallahassee and dynamite the place and slide it off into the Gulf of Mexico to sink.”
Being from Florida, I enjoy reading books set there. Florida has a big personality; it can’t help but butt its way to the front of the stage in parts of the narrative. There’s kitsch in every corner and, while that may be true for most states, Florida’s different, because the kitsch is so often juxtaposed against tremendous natural beauty. That eyesore tourist shop on a white sand beach, the easter egg-colored condos that mar your view of the ocean, the sheds with signs that boast 20-Foot Gator! off the interstate, surrounded by thousands of them in their swampy natural habitat. In Weeki Wachee, not too far from Citrus County, there’s a spring where an underwater theatre was constructed back in 1947, and to this day tourists can get a glimpse of life under the sea as “mermaids” perform shows with the aid of air hoses.
“Natives” of Florida have a tendency not to claim it, though they continue to stay, aware that their inertia is conscious; their parents or grandparents moved to Florida from somewhere, some years ago, yet no matter how long they live there they will always consider it to be outside themselves, a place that should be mocked and degraded but that they are loath to leave. What John Brandon has done in Citrus County is to create a culture around this quiet dissatisfaction, where sometimes something really bad has to happen in order to relieve the everyday, mundane misery. Toby thinks he knows just what that is — it’s the only thing he’s ever been meant to do.
John Brandon will sign and read at Lemuria starting at 5pm on Tuesday, July 13th.
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