Fruit of the Dead
by Rachel Lyon
Scribner
This stunningly seductive tale is based on the ancient Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter. In Rachel Lyon’s modern take on the tale, eighteen-year-old Cory Ansel was drifting through life after losing interest in her studies in the final year at high school.
Working at River Rock Summer Camp was not what she thought she would be doing after Senior Year. But at least she was spending time outdoors and away from New York and her highly strung single mother Emer who was bombarding her with options.
Cory’s mother was the head of an agricultural NGO and Cory had been brought up to make healthy choices about what she ate. When one of the parents asks her to come to a diner with him and his two children he has collected from the camp, her mother’s warnings about food are surpassed by the dopamine rush of sugar, salt and animal fat.
With his kids Fern and Spenser clinging to her, their middle-aged, divorced father offers her a child-minding job for the rest of the summer. As the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, Rolo Picazo is obscenely wealthy and lives on a private island off the coast of Maine.
In the Greek myth, Hades kidnaps Persephone and secretly gives her pomegranate seeds (a symbol of marriage) in order to keep her in the Underworld. Rolo offers Cory some of his supply of opiates that are manufactured by his company, and Cory indulges in everything the island has to offer.
Unable to communicate to the mainland, Cory explores this fascinating new life of excess but, as Lyon reminds the reader, “the membrane between fun and danger is flimsy and easily torn”.
Meanwhile Emer is increasingly distraught and, like Demeter, she searches for her daughter. The mesmerising tale comes to life through the voices of the girl who doesn’t realise she has been abducted and her increasingly frantic mother.
Rachel Lyon began writing this haunting story early in her sobriety, and her examination of the power of addiction in a modern underworld is compulsive reading.
Lezly Herbert
