Aaron Gwyn’s novel describes a world in which people can fall through the surface of the earth and be snatched by a mythological creature, never to be heard from again.
Two of the main characters in Aaron Gwyn’s first novel, The World Beneath, work at a golf course. A fitting setting, for in Gwyn’s world every place, every thing, everyone is full of holes. Literal holes, figurative holes, holes in memory and consciousness, holes in one, tiny holes, big giant gaping holes, holes into which people disappear forever.
The novel begins as fifteen-year-old J.T. goes missing. J.T. is an outcast, half-Native American, half-Mexican, obsessed with the Chickasaw legend of the subterranean creature Shampe: “It is said of Shampe he makes his way beneath. At all times a miner, he comes topside in greatest night or need. He slips through weeds and windows, carries off the wayward child.”
When J.T. disappears, something is triggered in Sheriff Martin, the man assigned to his case. As a boy, Martin’s younger brother Pete disappeared mysteriously while the two were walking the river: “Pete… smiled, edged forward, and then vanished as if through a trapdoor.” Martin tries to fill the hole of his loss by uncovering the details of J.T.’s disappearance. All the while, the author builds a case for the unexplained, the unexpected. He creates a world in which people can fall through the surface of the earth, be snatched by a mythological creature, never to be heard from again.
It is thus perfectly reasonable when Hickson Crider, a war veteran and J.T.’s boss at the golf course, discovers a perfectly formed, seemingly bottomless hole in his backyard. He tries to determine its depth: he throws pebbles down in hopes of a thud, a splash; he ties a larger rock to a two-hundred-foot rope. Nothing reaches the bottom.
The theme of cause and effect runs throughout The World Beneath. Sherriff Martin pursues J.T.’s case doggedly, clinging to the idea that events trail evidence “like the arrowed ripples that accompany fishing lures across a pond. Track the wave and you discover the thing itself.” Hickson, too, is convinced that an answer exists wherever there is a question:
Everything has a bottom…
At a certain
point, boundaries. Things separate and divide.
So everything has a conclusion.
Things don’t just appear.
They have an origin.
Cause.
It is this shared belief that anchors the story, that holds a promise to the reader that an explanation exists for everything, even as circumstances become more and more unlikely.
Researching probable causes for his mysterious hole, Hickson finds reports of underground cities: “You walk on earth that is only a brittle shell. Miners have come from other lands to make it brittle. To make their way beneath you. Because of them, your life could collapse.” J.T., Martin, and Hickson are linked by the hollowed territory, by the world beneath that waits to claim the people above. Though at times this metaphor feels overwrought, too omnipresent, Gwyn successfully imbues the imagery with meaning and uses it to transport us to another place.
The triumph of The World Beneath is its structure, which initially takes some adjusting to but which pays off tremendously. Gwyn unfolds the story through a series of dated flashbacks and flash forwards that make it possible for him to reveal details and motives that would otherwise have lacked suspense presented chronologically.
Gwyn’s language does not always serve the story as best it could—it can be staccato to the point of distraction—but still the author manages to accomplish something extraordinary: to create a narrative that mirrors its greatest metaphor. Reading this novel feels like descending into a hole. It takes at least fifty pages to get going; in the beginning, we are still close to the surface, looking up at the sky, taking in the light. As the story progresses, we lose the light, and with it our sense of what is or isn’t real, taking on the desperate need of Martin and Hickson to get to the bottom.
The World Beneath is in many ways a timely work, coming during a period of great global uncertainty and mirroring our fear that we might slip through the cracks, never to be heard from again. Some of his characters fall too far to be saved; but Gwyn also shows that it is sometimes possible to climb out from the deepest hole before discovering where it leads, before sinking to the bottom.
