Perdido: A Fragment from a Work in Progress

Imagine a vacation spot within everyone’s reach, but that only a few are invited to. A place where anything is possible and fantasies you didn’t even realize you harbored can be realized. This is Perdido, and it will change one family forever. When unhappily wedded couple Margie and Carver visit Perdido, they return transformed, each wreaking havoc on the life of their troubled son.

I would love to summarize more, but unfortunately Perdido is a snippet, a fragment that Straub abandoned in place to work on other things. It’s exceedingly rare to see an uncompleted work by a living author, especially one as tantalizing as Perdido. I genuinely didn’t know where it was heading next, or whether it intended to be more of a psychological thriller or a musing on mid-life and quarter-life crises with a mystical twist. But that very potential made for a curious reading experience, because half the time I was imagining what might have been cut in a later version. Letting us know the work is a fragment makes it almost amorphous, allowing him to guide us with a narrative while letting us write it.

Perdido, like its namesake, is possibility and tease all at once.