Zero Zone
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A literary thriller about an infamous desert art installation, the cult it inspired, and the search for a missing young woman that is “cinematic . . . readers will be compelled to start again at page one to discover how O’Connor pieces together his suspenseful, incredibly well–written narrative” (Library Journal, starred review).
Los Angeles, the late 1970s: Jess Shepard is an installation artist who creates environments that focus on light and space, often leading to intense sensory experiences for visitors to her work. A run of critically lauded projects peaks with Zero Zone, an installation at the once upon a time site of nuclear bomb testing in the New Mexico desert. But when a small group of travelers experience what they perceive as a religious awakening inside Zero Zone, they barricade themselves in the installation until authorities are forced to intervene. That violent showdown becomes a media sensation, and its aftermath follows Jess wherever she goes.
Devastated by the attack and the distortion of her art, Jess retreats from the world. Unable to work, Jess unravels mentally and emotionally, plagued by a nagging uncertainty as to her culpability for what happened.
Three years later, a survivor from Zero Zone comes looking for Jess, who must move past her self imposed isolation to face down her fears and recover her art and possibly her life from a violent cult intent of making it their own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Connor's harrowing, dexterous thriller (after the collection A Perfect Universe) delves into the impact of an art installation on a group of emotionally disturbed characters. In 1977, Los Angeles installation artist Jess Shepard processes the defining moments of her childhood a near drowning when she was 11 and the death of her parents in a car accident two years later by building "Zero Zone," a concrete building in the New Mexico desert, near a defunct nuclear testing site. Then a group of religious seekers converge and occupy the site, leading to a violent showdown with law enforcement. A month later, teenage Izzy, one of the seekers who was at the site, confronts Jess at a Los Angeles gallery opening and sprays her with a mysterious toxic gas. When Izzy is released two years later from juvenile detention, her life and Jess's intersect again. O'Connor moves nimbly among points of view and shuffles back and forth in time, allowing the reader to piece the story together, only to zoom out and reveal thatJess's relationship with the seekers is more complicated than it intially seemed. With a noir tone and a rich assortment of characters whose lives unfold in chapters pared down to their essentials, the novel transforms a would-be abstract meditation on the influence of art into a vital, deeply engaging work. Writing with verve and precision, O'Connor serves up a thoughtful, original thriller.
