We hear a lot about the artists and musicians of Humboldt County, but it turns out the redwoods are teeming with writers, too. This week we’ve compiled reviews and recommendations for local reads across ages and genres that explore imagined realms and familiar North Coast landscapes. Grab a cozy spot and read along with us.
Real Growth in the Realm of Fantasy
Zara Marielle’s The Café of Infinite Doors
By Erika Wright
For readers drawn to dark yet cozy fantasy with emotional depth, The Café of Infinite Doors by Zara Marielle offers both. It is an imaginative narrative rooted in the very real work of choosing a different life from the one expected of you.
Moving back and forth between contemporary San Francisco and a long-past mythical Scotland, the novel follows dual timelines that gradually converge. The structure is handled well, allowing each thread to deepen and inform the other, with the focus remaining on the internal lives of the characters. At the center of the modern storyline is Marceline, a woman isolated in a controlling marriage. Cut off from work, friends and family, she navigates a daily life shaped by her husband’s volatility. His behavior often shifts quickly from fragile to threatening, and Marielle captures both the instability of the relationship and Marceline’s complicated empathy for the wounded child she sees beneath his behavior.
A magical café is the central meeting point for the characters. It is a quiet, tucked-away place that offers a sense of community built on kindness and support. The café becomes a refuge where people are accepted as they are, providing a strong contrast to the instability Marceline has come to accept at home. Within this space, she begins to see her life and relationship more clearly and starts to imagine something different for herself.
What distinguishes The Café of Infinite Doors from other fantasies is its treatment of relationships. Where the genre sometimes normalizes jealousy or control as markers of intensity, Marielle instead frames those behaviors as harmful and situates Marceline’s journey around the gradual, painful process of recognizing that harm. Grief shapes many of the characters, each responding in distinct, personal ways.
Although the prose is adjective-heavy at first, and the stylized dialect in the Scotland sections took some getting used to, both settle as the narrative progresses and contribute to a strong sense of atmosphere and place. The pacing is steady and engaging throughout.
Marielle allows the story to sit with discomfort and resists easy romanticization. The result is a narrative that feels grounded and emotionally honest. It ultimately stands as an homage to found family and to the people who help make change possible.
Erika Wright (she/her) holds degrees in literature from Humboldt State University and the University of London and serves on the Humboldt Library Foundation’s board of directors. She reads voraciously across genres, especially books with windows into other cultures, places and lived experiences.
Missing in Familiar Places
Neil Tarpey’s Darkness in the Redwoods
By David Jervis
From unnervingly great scenic beauty and a wealth of winding two-lane roads to lots of notably weird liminal spaces, Humboldt County seems to call for the skilled among us to unspool literary scenarios. As a bonus, the weather changes a lot. As in very rapidly, cycling through all manner of conditions, often in ways that are easy to attach meaning, and you can’t beat that.
Among all sorts of jobs and adventures in his decades on the North Coast, Neil Tarpey knocked around in the local news business, overlapping a little with my own work in that trade. I recall his byline as a sportswriter and his experience in that subgenre of the sublime craft of reporting serves him well with his latest novel Darkness in the Redwoods. In sports reporting, you need to write well while also writing fast, and one finds that being sharp at one skill benefits the other. It also calls for conveying what makes someone interesting, and so not surprisingly the characters in Tarpey’s eminently enjoyable book, a police procedural alongside a compelling mystery, are well worth the visit.
Set in the small fictional Humboldt County city of North Valley, Kevin Valken and his partner Detective Naomi Marren are tasked with solving the case of a missing person, a college student back home visiting family during a break. However, while Valken and Marren are still doing their due diligence on that disappearance, in short order her retired judge grandfather turns up fatally shot in his own home. From there, the story takes off in a couple directions.
One of the smarter narrative choices Tarpey makes, and one that moves for the most part seamlessly, is for Darkness in the Redwoods to be told in the first person by both lead characters. The first several chapters are from Valken’s point of view, and after that it alternates more or less evenly between his and Marren’s perspective. (This also works out well in the final third of the book, when it shifts halfway through one of their interrogations of a suspect). Valken has the backstory of the loss of his wife and child at the hands of a drunk driver and his viewpoint allows us into the world of various coping mechanisms he’s used in dealing with life after tragedy.
Marren’s character is Native, and while she is not dealing with a recent loss like her partner, she faces the usual obstacles of ingrained misogyny, both from members of the public to a sexist coworker (who unfortunately is able to drift along/fail upward based on the need for as many local cops as possible work on a high-profile case). In her background, both personally and professionally, she’s familiar with the grim reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women, a real-world problem that also turns up tangentially as events unfold in the plot.
Tarpey also nails some internecine details that transpire in the course of real-life law enforcement work that frequently get short shrift. Namely, that sometimes investigations veer in promising new directions that turn out to be complete dead ends, that leaks happen from agencies to reporters (some real-life county media outlets get name-checked in Darkness in the Redwoods), often the result of dissatisfied parties speaking off the record more out of workplace disagreements rather than the egalitarian urge to help someone get an exclusive. Also in the pages of the novel are cops in rural areas relying on tips and info from their cohort out of the area, especially in big cities.
Creating the fictional burg of North Valley — which, as best as I can tell, would be located somewhere in a triangle within the points of Clam Beach, Moonstone Beach and Crannell — is wise. It doesn’t get much of a detailed description, but it does allow Tarpey to create a fictional police department as a very liberating device (read: not stepping on any real-life toes). The town existing alongside the rest of real Humboldt County also works well, and less ambitious than creating a fictional setting out of whole cloth. Tarpey’s writing is brisk and concise and the places his characters go and people they meet feel familiar, interesting and real, something other local fiction authors haven’t always been able to pull off as well as they may think.
David Jervis (he/him) is an Arcata-based freelance writer and editor.
Murder Comes to SoHum
Kelli Stanley’s The Reckoning
By Linda Stansberry
It’s 1985. Renata Drake steps off the Greyhound bus in Garberville, assumes a new identity and straps a combat knife to her hip. Her only goal is to evade the FBI agents she’s sure are just a few steps behind her, but within days she’s fully invested in solving the mystery of a murdered teenage girl. And how could she not be, with her own murdered sister’s ghost silently bearing witness as Renata turns over rock after rock in the small town, revealing big-time graft, intimate malice and a possible serial killer?
Drake is the latest hardboiled heroine dreamed up by Kelli Stanley, whose previous works include a historical mystery series set in 1940s San Francisco. That series centers around Miranda Corbie, a former Spanish Civil War nurse turned private investigator. With The Reckoning, Stanley launches a new series in a setting she knows intimately, having grown up in Piercy and attended South Fork High School. (Some key portions of the novel are set on campus, which should be entertaining for fellow alums.)
It was a treat to read a novel set in the Southern Humboldt of my childhood and occasionally be reminded of former landmarks and businesses. (The Waterwheel Restaurant and its Shirley Temples stand out in my memory in particular.) As one would expect, the underground economy and concurrent challenges of the cannabis industry provide a colorful backdrop to what could have otherwise been a boilerplate potboiler. I thought it was particularly clever to have the protagonist run into the irony of trying to escape the scrutiny of federal agents by fleeing to the most rural place she could think of, only to find out that due to Reagan-era drug policy, the woods are crawling with … federal agents.
The Reckoning includes a positively Agatha Christie-esque cast of potential suspects and several subplots that wrap with satisfying takedowns of various evildoers. As a reader, I often find it hard to immerse myself in novels that have so much going on at once. But as a writer, I can respect Stanley’s obvious love of story and character. I especially appreciate the dialogue she gives to the various teenagers who help propel Renata’s investigation forward, dialogue that does more than serve the story’s purpose but takes its time and stays true to the vagaries and vulnerabilities of adolescence. Equally touching are her descriptions of South Fork teachers who are obviously trying hard to support their students, a detail that no doubt mirrors Stanley’s own experience.
Southern Humboldt, and the Emerald Triangle writ large, are fertile ground for future noir novelists. Thanks to the occasionally gawping perspective of true crime enthusiasts, the wider world has been exposed to some iconography that we’re probably going to see appear and reappear as storytellers try to sell our story back to us — rugged hills, terse farmers, hoop houses and the ever-present whickety-whack of helicopters overhead. Some of it’s going to be entertaining and some of it’s going to be infuriating. The Reckoning is the former and a welcome addition to the genre. l
Linda Stansberry (she/her) is a freelance writer and journalist who lives in Eureka. More of her work can be found at lindastansberry.com, where you can also sign up for her weekly newsletter.
A Sky-View Mystery
Stilson Snow’s Wake Turbulence
By David Jervis
Humboldt County has turned up on the silver screen plenty of times but very rarely as itself (the eponymous 2008 film being an obvious exception). While it of course has always looked great even when playing somewhere similar, it’s often been portrayed as a mysterious, even menacing place hiding secrets.
Going off the screen to the page, it’s possible to have even more reign with fictionalizing a place, a town or a county you know well to take some literary license. Local author Stilson Snow knows this in his book Wake Turbulence, just as William Faulkner was onto something by creating Yoknapatawpha County. Snow may be no Faulkner, but few are (plus there’s no need for someone else to try to craft a sentence that runs longer than a page).
But what Snow can craft is an observant fictionalized Humboldt County, focused mostly on the town of Euphrates, done with an eye belonging to someone who long ago made the North Coast their adoptive home. Or, as in the case of the book’s protagonist Grif McNab, has returned back to his native home in the land of tall conifers, mists and (naturally) secrets after many years away out in the world at large. The setting can be a little distracting if you get hung up on that sort of thing: The city of Euphrates is a hybrid of Eureka and Arcata, taking a bit from each. For instance, it has a plaza with plenty of unhoused folks off their meds, but it is also the county seat and situated right on the bay, with a wharf, old canneries and all.
McNab, a middle-aged former aspiring astronaut and career Air Force vet, makes his living as a charter pilot and owner out of a small general aviation airport near the town of Euphrates, and from very early on in the book, that plane is a borrowed Cessna 185 Skywagon, offered up for his use by a friend. Throughout Wake Turbulence (the title itself is an aerodynamic term) there is occasional talk of altimeters, stabilizers, fuel pumps and such, but never does it pass into tedious jargon.
Snow has written a good, briskly paced, serpentine mystery in which to thrust the protagonist of McNab, who seems to know people from all walks of life at varying levels in this not-Humboldt County place. Fairly early in the story, he’s called upon by his attorney friend Pat (who’s more adept, as many women are, at seeing the bigger picture at hand) to investigate the death of Henry, a colorful and outspoken street person who recently pulled a spontaneous media stunt, embarrassing a local timber baron and then was found dead behind a Euphrates restaurant.
I’ve called Humboldt County my home for 36 straight years now. In Wake Turbulence, you don’t have to squint hard to see the fictionalized events of a recent era, the so-called Timber Wars that lasted from roughly the mid-1980s to the end of the century. The book’s malevolent timber baron is Bruce Hoffstader of one Mountain Lumber, and Hoffstader’s status as an out-of-the-area tycoon makes him a clear stand-in for Charles Hurwitz of Pacific Lumber Co., right down his reclusiveness and the small army of local shills.
The story even has the feeling of taking place 25 years ago or so at times — cell phones are nearly absent and McNab does a lot of investigation with microfilm at the Euphrates Library rather than online, but that doesn’t work against the story all. Snow is great with all kinds of other small details and a subplot involving a trio of monks who have come to the region from western China in search of a massive tree trunk begins to mesh with the story via an odd kind of logic. And among the many characters in McNab’s orbit is Jacque, one of Mountain Lumber’s public relations flacks, who ends up being one of those people whose every statement comes with a question mark after it, which passes for comic relief in a world of clear cutting, local mysteries and so many of cups of coffee.
Where the plot of Wake Turbulence ultimately leads is a confluence of intrigue and mysteries from McNab’s murky past (the latter part the reader begins to suspect from the second chapter), and it mostly feels like a natural progression to get there. Be it Humboldt County or the city of Euphrates, there’s world music on the local public radio station, you know that it’s wise not to ask what your neighbors up the hill are up to and you might just be a couple degrees away from more than you care to know about. l
David Jervis (he/him) is an Arcata-based freelance writer and editor.
Books for Young Readers
By Jennifer McFadden
Are there children in your life? Humboldt is rich in beautiful places to explore, and Hiking Humboldt Kids by Rees Hughes is a great resource for families. The book features 25 hikes, clear directions, maps and photos. There’s even a scavenger hunt activity for kids highlighting the various flora, fauna, historical or cultural aspects related to each hike!
Little Mouse & the Big Tree, written by Kate Juliana and illustrated by Holly Sweet, is the tale of an adventurous little mouse who leaves her nest and finds a whole world — and a dear friend — in a Douglas fir tree. The story and its sweet illustrations warmly invite young children into the lives of the plants and animals of the forest.
The Blacksmith Princess and The Castoff Princesses by Rowan Mallory (a pen name for local author and Booklegger staff member Martha Longshore) are fairy-tale adjacent historical fantasies that will take you on adventures that are inspired by friendship and forging your place in the world. Exciting, funny and filled with great characters, these first two volumes of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” series have teen and adult readers anxiously awaiting the next volume.
Brook Thompson grew up in the Yurok and Karuk tribes, loving the salmon and lampreys that lived in the Klamath River and nurtured her family. She became a scientist and activist who has honored her ancestors and helped to protect the environment with her work. I Love Salmon and Lampreys: A Native Story of Resilience by Thompson, illustrated by Anastasia Khmelevska, tells the story of how Native-led movements successfully led to the removal of dams and toxic conditions that were endangering salmon and lampreys. An inspiring story with wonderful, lively illustrations.
Jennifer McFadden (she/her) is the owner of the Booklegger used book shop in Eureka and an annual judge of the NCJ Flash Fiction contest.
Shameless Self-Promotion
Books by Journal contributors
Well, not self-promotion, exactly, since they’re not my books. But we’re taking a moment to share work by some of our favorite writers, whose work you’ve likely enjoyed in these pages over the years. It turns out a number of our columnists and contributors have (gasp) lives outside the Journal, and that includes writing.
When Simona Carini isn’t writing about marvelous ways to prepare your farmers market haul or new hiking trails, she writes poems. Her collection Survival Time brings the same reverence to a basilica as the Arcata Marsh or a sick bed. It’s beautiful, poignant work to read and reread.
Linda Stansberry’s unflinching reporting and sharp eye for humor are both in play in the personal essays in her newsletter, which you can find at lindastansberry.com. And if you can get your hands on a copy of her poetry chapbook Fiasco, count yourself lucky twice, for the deftly unfolding narratives and the proceeds that go to North Coast Rape Crisis Center.
Before my tenure as editor, Jason Marak, who’s also my husband, was the steady Art Beat columnist for the Journal. The Geometry of Departure, his book of poems, 100-word stories and artwork is rooted in the landscape of the North Coast, much like its protagonists, a couple at odds, a thicket and a redwood tree.
Book reviewer and faithful NCJ Flash Fiction Contest judge David Holper has had his recent poetry book Bord för En reviewed in these pages, but he’s also written a wild, COVID-era political satire meta-fantasy titled The Church of the Very Last Chance, in which a young woman is saddled with a Joan of Arc-like mission with way more questions.
Local historian Jerry Rohde has shared his essays, excerpts and stories in the Journal over the years and shows no signs of slowing his research. His new book Northern Humboldt Indians is the latest installment in his History of Humboldt County Peoples and Places series, filled with contemporary descriptions, maps, colored photos and the clear, unflinching writing we’ve come to expect from Rohde.
If you can’t get enough of Mike Kelly’s weird takes on the dead critters he finds on the beach in his Washed Up column, there’s more where that came from. His byline mentions Tigerfish, about his time in the Peace Corps in West Africa, but if you dig a little, you’ll find some funky sci-fi humor books under the name M. Sid Kelly with plots involving aliens and, naturally, bass fishing.
Field Notes columnist Barry Evans released his latest installment, The New Hum Book, a compilation of his columns and more with contributions from his wife Louisa Rogers and Jerry Rohde. But he’s also published Amazon to Zodiac: 101 Scientific Curiosities Across Time and Space, the sort of brainy thumb-through book you enjoyed as a kid on a rainy day. And hey, it looks like rain.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in Local Lit.