Guest post by Shell Games author Bonnie Kistler
Bonnie Kistler is the author of The Cage and Her, Too. A former Philadelphia trial lawyer, she was born in Pennsylvania and educated at Bryn Mawr College and the University of the Pennsylvania Law School. She and her husband now divide their time between southwest Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.
About Shell Games: A dazzling thriller about a young woman whose fabulously wealthy mother might be the victim of an elaborate con or might be losing her mind––and the daughter can’t tell where the truth lies.
It’s hurricane season in Florida, and, as we now know, most of southeastern United States. I was in Florida when Helene struck, and I weathered that, only to learn that it had unleashed its worst on Western North Carolina. For 48 hours I couldn’t reach my husband at our house there or get a flight back. I finally rented a car and made a white-knuckle drive into the flood- and wind-ravaged terrain. After 14 hours, I arrived to find him safe and our house mostly intact, though without power, water, internet, or cell service.
For the next 10 days we lived like nomads in a succession of shabby hotels in South Carolina, wherever we could find electricity, water, and WiFi. Only to then watch as Hurricane Milton took direct aim at our other home in Sarasota. Two hurricanes targeting both our adopted cities? It was hard not to take it personally.
Obviously our troubles were trivial in the face of the devastating loss of life and property suffered by so many others. Nonetheless, the double whammy of Helene and Milton made a huge impact on me. My usually well-ordered life went spinning out of control. I felt helpless before the terrible power of these storms.
In the aftermath, I started to reflect on how and why hurricanes appear in fiction, including in my latest novel, Shell Games. A violent storm adds heightened drama to the plot and vivid images to the text, and that sense of helplessness can make the story even more compelling. After all, people might be able to outsmart or overcome a human killer, but there’s no way they’ll triumph over a Category 4 hurricane. The best they can do is survive, and survival in the face of overwhelming odds makes for powerful storytelling.
Here’s a sampling of novels, both classic and contemporary, that have deployed hurricanes to such effect.
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richards Hughes
First published in 1929 and still in print today, it follows a group of British colonial children whose Jamaican plantation home is leveled by a “high wind,” i.e., a hurricane. No longer safe there, their parents put them on a ship back to England. Along the way, they’re kidnapped by pirates. Here the hurricane not only starts the book off with a bang, it serves as the instigating event of the plot.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
A classic novel that traces a young Black woman’s coming of age. The actual Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 is central to the story. It killed thousands of people, most of them African American workers in the Everglades. The author uses the hurricane to show the power of nature, its disregard for human life, and its disproportionate impact on vulnerable people.
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn West
Similar themes can be found in Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn West, which depicts a Black family in Mississippi bracing themselves for Hurricane Katrina and later struggling through its aftermath. The novel shows the both the destructive force of the storm and the trauma suffered by its victims. It also shows the role climate change plays in causing such devastation.
Camino Winds by John Grisham
The hurricane in Camino Winds, by John Grisham, serves as both an instigating event and a red herring. As the novel opens, a devastating hurricane levels homes and takes lives, apparently including a thriller writer named Nelson Kerr. But he has some suspicious injuries that suggest something––or someone––may have actually caused his death.
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
A hurricane is employed to its full thrilling effect in Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. On a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, a murderer has escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane, and federal marshals are searching for him as a hurricane bears down upon them. Nothing is quite what it seems, but the approach of the hurricane clearly conveys an eerie sense of foreboding. And when it strikes, its violence reflects all the rage and malevolence unleashed in the story.
My latest novel, Shell Games, features a Florida Gulf Coast hurricane as a set piece in the middle of the story. A wealthy, 70-year-old woman convinces herself that her brand-new husband is gaslighting her to get control of her fortune. Her daughter is torn between fearing that her brilliant mother is sinking into dementia and fearing that her beloved stepfather is a con man. When the hurricane approaches, the mother refuses to leave her mansion, so mother and daughter hunker down together as the storm rages around them.
I included the hurricane in Shell Games to serve both character and plot. First, as the women ride out the storm, we see that the mother is still as sharp-witted and steely-determined as she ever was. Second, the aftermath brings about a joyous reconciliation between the newlyweds––or so it seems. The hurricane’s aftermath also shows the stark difference between the haves and the have-notes: the mansions survive the onslaught while low-income housing is ripped to shreds.
But my larger purpose was to advance the book’s underlying theme of the perils of climate change. Scientists have predicted that overheated waters, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, will lead to earlier and more ferocious hurricanes. That was the case with the hurricane I invented for Shell Games. I wrote it more than a year before the awful wrath of Helene and Milton descended on my cities. Now I’m wishing I hadn’t been so prescient.
