Nightmare Ballad

Ethridge compiles a phantasmagoria of incoherence in this overwrought and bizarre quasi-horror story. Luke Rhodes wakes from a half-remembered dream of a mysterious ballad, and encounters frogmen and devastation in his Southern California neighborhood. His two wives, Dara and Maribel, and his friend Johnny also struggle to recall a song. Teen Petunia Stedding gives Luke a peculiar warning about the Nightmare Ballad, but the song remains elusive as tribesmen, corpses, and drunks swap identities in a bar and fist-sized violet insects signal a bad start to Dara’s job interview. The surreal increasingly supplants the normal, but the characters take it in stride. (“I’ve never survived an alien attack,” a police detective says, “so I have no idea what you’ve gone through, but I would suggest you go home and get some rest.”) The bewildered reader may decide that the real nightmare is Ethridge’s evasive and freewheeling nonlinear plot. (June)