James P. Blaylock, twice winner of the World Fantasy Award, is a southern California writer whose short stories, novels, and collections have been published around the world. He was one of the literary pioneers of the Steampunk movement along with Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter. His short story "Unidentified Objects" was nominated for an O. Henry Award in 1990. Despite his close association with Steampunk, most of his work is contemporary, realistic fantasy set in southern California. His novel The Rainy Season was chosen by Orange Coast Magazine as one of the ten quintessential Orange County novels.
Fifteen years ago, on a deserted California beach, Dave Quinn swam out into the winter ocean to save two drowning girls - identical twin sisters. He was only able to save one.
Now, years past, he meets Anne, a strugglng artist from Canada. He has no idea she is the child he saved so long ago. And he has no idea that Elinor, the long-dead sister he couldn't save, has come with her...
"Blaylock's evocative prose and studied pacing make him one of the most distinctive contributors to American Magical Realism."
– Library Journal"Blaylock is one of the most brilliant of that new generation of fabulist writers."
– Washington Post"A magical world, magically presented... having journeyed there, you will not wish to leave, nor ever to forget."
– Philip K. Dick1
THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY WINDS ALONG THE VERY edge of California, a narrow asphalt ribbon that marks the western rim of the continent, separating the isolated beach towns and the chaparral-covered hillsides of the Coast Range from eleven thousand miles of Pacific Ocean. Heading south from Crescent City, the Highway swings inland below Eureka, wandering thirty miles from the ocean through redwood groves and mill towns before angling west again above Mendocino and then more or less following the shoreline all the way down into southern California. There are still wild and rocky stretches of coast around San Luis Obispo, and empty coves and bluffs above Santa Barbara, but south of Ventura the Highway plunges into the overpopulated beach cities of Los Angeles and Orange and San Diego counties, past hundreds of thousands of wooden bungalows and stucco apartment houses, past fishing piers and rock jetties and boat harbors and ramshackle main streets lined with fish restaurants and bars and surfboard shops and used bookstores and parking meters. And on any sunny summer afternoon, countless people drive out of the suburbs and cross the Highway, drawn to the uttermost edge of the continent for reasons they can't always define.
In winter, cold north swells move down out of the Arctic in long lines, and the blues and greens of the late summer water turn gray beneath cloudy skies. The unsettled ocean shifts with the rolling swell and darkens with the shadows of moving clouds. Storms hammer the coast, washing precarious sections of the Highway into the ocean and veiling beach cities with curtains of misty rain the same steel-gray cast as the rising swell. The surging tides swamp oceanfront houses in Malibu and Surfside and Newport Beach, and rogue waves slam through wood and concrete piers, ripping pilings out of the ocean floor, shifting heavy rocks in harbor jetties, sweeping countless tons of beach sand away in the longshore currents, ceaselessly changing the contour of the sea bottom.
The beaches themselves are nearly empty of people in winter, especially on stormy days—perhaps only a couple of surfers watching waves break across outside sand bars, or a beachcomber with a metal detector, or someone gathering seashells along the high tide line where the ocean dumps its flotsam of kelp and driftwood and sand dollars and polished stones.
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY THERE WERE STILL TRAIN tracks along the ocean side of the Highway through Huntington Beach. A chain-link fence separated the tracks from the fifty yards of sandy shoreline, and onshore winds piled beach sand into ice plant-covered dunes that pressed against the rusty chain link and swept across the edge of the tracks and out onto the Highway, which was narrower back then, with a ragged dirt shoulder along the northern verge. Beyond the shoulder there was a grassy marsh, and beyond that stood, and still stand, the pink and gray cinderblock walls that shelter narrow suburban backyards. By the early 1970s passenger trains had long ago quit running along that part of the coast, and the tracks that followed the Highway had fallen into disrepair. Walking along the tracks at the edge of Huntington Beach State Park, a person could find old rail spikes and other iron debris in the sandy ice plant, or, on a lucky day, a heavy, broad-headed nail with a raised number on it, a thirty or a thirty-six or a forty, recalling the year a particular tie had been sunk in the road-bed.
In the winter there was something lonesome and desolate in the rusty chain link and the blowing sand, in the scattered bits of railroad iron and the deep green ice plant with its feathery pink flowers. There was a natural stillness in the air despite the sound of the cold north swell breaking along the beach and the cries of gulls circling in the sky. And beneath windswept skies it could seem that the ocean was a hundred miles removed from the suburban neighborhoods only a couple of blocks inland, as if the Highway, with its sand-softened verge and its distant vanishing points, was a borderland between the suburbs and the shifting sea. When there was a sizable swell running and the winter sun was low in the sky, a traveler gunning north or south along the Highway could glimpse over the crest of the beach the pale green transparency of a backlit wave as it surged upward over a sandbar and pitched forward with the sound of distant, hollow crashing….
