‘Salt Bones’ review: A haunting novel set near the Salton Sea

An early line from “Salt Bones,” the latest novel from talented poet and novelist Jennifer Givhan, reads, “Daughters disappear here.”

It is a line that haunts the Salton Sea region, where Givhan has set her latest novel and infuses the toxic air upon which her characters must survive. In other words, this warning to keep your daughters close clings to everything. It is in the air, but also — in this thriller that employs elements of magical realism and mystery — it is in the water, buffeting each of these characters with the cadence of windblown waves crashing against the shore.

The Salton Sea is just as much a character here as Givhan’s main protagonists: Mal, a mother of two daughters, and the two daughters themselves — Amaranta, in high school, and Griselda, a science major in college. Through them, we get a sense of this place, what it was, what it is and what it is becoming. A sea that evaporates and pulls back year after year, exposing a lake bed contaminated with agricultural runoff and revealing not just the bones of fish but also a painful history that many would rather remains beneath the water’s surface.

“Salt Bones” by Jennifer Givhan

(Mulholland Books)

El Valle, the fictional town that serves as the primary setting for “Salt Bones,” is haunted by what surrounds it. By the memories of the missing. Daughters like Mal’s own sister, Elena, who disappeared more than 20 years before.

Now with two daughters of her own, Mal is a butcher at the local carnicería. But when one of the workers at the shop, Renata, a young woman the same age as Mal’s eldest daughter, doesn’t show up for work one day, Mal begins to spiral into the past, questioning what she could have done differently, and then what she could do now. And, most of all, why does all of this seem to keep happening here in El Valle?

For Mal and her family, there is no escape. They are followed not just by memories, but also by Mal’s mother’s spite-fueled dementia, which returns all of them again and again to the fissures in time just before and just after the disappearance of Mal’s sister. And now, with Renata gone missing, there is nowhere to hide from the tragedy of this place, not at work, not at home and not even at the edges of the Salton Sea where Mal can sometimes find a tenuous peace.

But it is not just Mal who roams these shores, but La Siguanaba, a shape-shifter often associated with Central American and Mexican folklore, wearing “whatever a man lusts after most. Sequins. Spandex. Fishnet. Nothing at all.” And then after enticing these men to approach, this being — often described as a woman — turns and reveals the “white-boned skull of a horse” beneath her long dark hair.

“By the time they scream,” Givhan writes, “it’s too late.”

La Siguanaba is a cautionary tale and a myth to some in El Valle. She is a ghost story to keep the kids safe and away from danger, but to Mal, she is very real. La Siguanaba comes to her in dreams; in her waking hours, she lurks just beyond the light. Her smell — something like urine and unmucked stables — floats on the wind, acting like a warning, a memory, a message.

But all this — the monster in the shadows, the missing daughters and even a rising tension in El Valle over a lithium plant and a looming ecological disaster — is only part of the story. Mal can only know so much, and it is through the details revealed by Mal’s daughters, Amaranta and Griselda, that we begin to comprehend the depth of this story.

Like all good mysteries, there is a whole world just out of reach: secret lives, secrets kept, secrets used like currency. For us — the readers — the clues are there. Givhan does a wonderful job infusing the early pages with hints and observations from each of the three perspectives, Mal, Amaranta and Griselda, all of whom are hiding things from each other.

To the reader, who benefits from the combined knowledge of these characters, each perspective adds a different lens. Mal, with her mother’s intuition and almost otherworldly connection to La Siguanaba, Amaranta, who is the youngest and still very much a child and who sees what others don’t expect her to, and then Griselda, home from college, who looks on all of this with a fresh, almost outside perspective. All of them come to the same conclusion very early on: Something is very off in this small community.

“Salt Bones” is a worthy read. It’s a book infused with the language and culture of a strong Mexican American and Indigenous community. In some way, like La Siguanaba, it’s a conduit into another world. A complicated, real and very much welcome, if a bit scary, world.

And though the layering of information — of what we know, what remains hidden from us and what has been foreshadowed — does add up (delaying what becomes a propulsive search for the missing in the second half of the novel), Givhan’s talents as a writer of blunt, strong sentences and remarkable poetic passages regarding the landscape and the sea more than make up for any delay.

“Salt Bones” is a triumph. One of the most masterful marriages of horror, mystery, thriller and literary writing that I’ve read in some time. And it is certainly a book that will haunt you (in a good way!) for a very long time after you’ve turned the final page.

Waite is the author of four novels and a book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.