Press 53
192 pages, $17.95

Review by David S. Atkinson

Some people believe each of us is ultimately alone in life, alone with our dreams, fears, and the ghosts that haunt us. However, others insist our individual problems are just variations on what others experience and we are more connected to each other than we can possibly imagine. I found myself thinking about these two positions while reading What Happened Here by Bonnie ZoBell.

This book is a linked collection of stories and a novella centering around a neighborhood in North Park, San Diego where PSA Flight 182 crashed horribly in 1978. The crash was long ago, but the characters in the various pieces reflect upon the tragedy, mysteriously affected in some way, while going about their own lives, lives filled with their individual problems and hopes:

The accident was posed to me as a ghoulish fringe benefit by the previous owner of my house. I’d be able to say I resided in a place where the tragedy had occurred….I worried about how the annihilation of these bodies that landed on my property would affect me. Would I feel engulfed by doom simply living on this patch of earth? I’d had bouts of depression. I didn’t need to think about dead families sprawled on my back patio, even if it had been decades. But while I’d never be cured of this incessant disease, my own particular strain had been restrained after too many years of therapy and a lifetime of commitment to antidepressants. My husband’s had not. Continue reading →