The Island by Kerri King
Have you ever read a book that you wished would never end? That’s the kind of book The Island is, and it’s a rare find.
Written by Amazon bestselling author and filmmaker Kerri King, this speculative fiction novel follows the emotional journey of Mack, a novelist-turned-fisherman, whose sailing trip with his wife, Lily, takes an unexpected and troubling turn toward the “rich and strange.”
Mack first encounters Lily on the docks near his employer’s fishing boat and is immediately smitten. Lily finds his life as a sailor so intriguing that he decides not to tell her about the fact that he had found success not long ago as a novelist.
As their relationship blossoms, they marry and quickly settle into domestic life. But Mack doesn’t know that Lily harbors a bigger secret than his own — one that will soon change the trajectory of his life.
A Sanctuary Turned Nightmare
It starts with odd behavior: Lily walking naked on the shore, seemingly unaware of her surroundings. Things soon escalate from there.
Lily’s “blackouts” become more frequent and much more disturbing. She destroys valuable paintings in the art gallery she runs. She kills a betta fish that was gifted to her only hours previously. Each time, when she comes to, she remembers nothing of what happened and is horrified by what she’s done.
Mack is desperate for answers, but even the doctors he consults with can’t figure out what is causing Lily’s episodes, much less treat them. At last, he faces the only option left — to put her into the care of an institution for her own safety.
Mack balks at the idea and instead proposes to Lily that they get away for a while on his sailboat. Perhaps, on the open sea and other shores, her condition will improve.
The trip is a welcome change, and the pair reconnects in ways they haven’t been able to in months. But when a storm knocks them off course, they land on an island populated only by a handful of inhabitants — Rúnsearc, an art colony of sorts.
Mack and Lily decide to stay a night or two before they reset their course. But the island has other plans for them.
An Island Full of Secrets
After Lily vanishes during a morning swim in one of the coves, Mack tirelessly searches for her for days without success. A strong swimmer, surely she would have been just fine in the tranquil waters surrounding the island. And, as it turns out, it’s an island filled with many coves and beautiful forested areas. Did she go off to explore and simply get lost?
As the days and weeks wear on without his wife, Mack slowly comes to realize that the island holds a secret so shocking and strange that it changes all who come to its shores, and most never return to the mainland again.
Mack is so desperate to find Lily that he fails to note the significance of the oddities of the island, which remain just below the surface of his awareness: the sap pooling from the flowers in the garden by moonlight, the amber liquid ubiquitously on offer as a beverage and cure-all, a rogue wave he never witnesses that swamps his sailboat in seaweed, the fact that the inhabitants remain stubbornly optimistic about Lily’s whereabouts.
King handles his unreliability as a narrator so skillfully that we remain only one step ahead of Mack, unable to see around the corner of his limited viewpoint.
Poetic and Spellbinding Read
As he gets to know the island’s inhabitants one by one, Mack discovers that many of them are successful artists who have “plateaued” in their careers. Among them, a musician, an actress, a sculptor, an architect, a poet, an artist and his muse. And a photographer, gone missing.
Mack also begins to understand the connections between several of them — romances that have in some way faltered or failed altogether. It is as if they are a curated collection of what happens when art and love collide. But who, or what, is the curator? And how does Mack figure into the ensemble?
Soon Mack uncovers what the inhabitants already know about the island — something so morally ambiguous, darkly erotic and culturally foreign that he is both drawn to and repulsed by what he finds. And it is in this uncomfortable place that the narrative holds the reader captive.
Mack’s description of being in the throes of writing is also an apt description of what it’s like to read The Island: “My mind became an endless portal that lived in the precious space between dreaming and waking.” We are suspended between worlds, and the result is haunting and beautiful and foreboding, all at the same time.
King writes with a poetic economy and a spellbinding flow; it’s as if the writing itself is a siren song, luring us to the boundaries between fantasy and reality, elation and dread.
It’s a feeling that lingers long after the final page is turned. And in that way, King fulfills our wish: a tale that never truly ends.
About Kerri King:
Kerri King was a writer at Netflix before moving into the literary world of speculative fiction; her novels take place between the lines of reality and the rest. Her film Maidens of the Sea premiered at the Indie Film Corner at Cannes and is now streaming on Apple TV.
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