Skye Dancer
Lila L. Pinord
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2002 PublishAmerica
ISBN: 1591297451

Life around a beautiful Pacific Northwest lake is never the same after The Prospector showed up.

Charlie Crane had a difficult time in the city -- couldn't hold a job, hated paying taxes, couldn't handle the depression of a life without hope, nor could he hold onto his adored Indian wife's affection. When he found her seeking love from another man, he went berserk & became the dealer of Death. Then he fled in his camper with a stash of money he'd been saving in his mattress -- fled deeper & deeper into the forest.

Safe at last in an abandoned shack, not far from an idyllic lake around which generations of Indians have made a good if frugal life, he taught himself how to live off the land. The years passed, with only an occasional episode of death-dealing rage. Until the day he spied his wife walking along the path around the lake.

Skye Dancer is a daughter who doesn't remember her mother. She's a young woman now, working at the little lakeside cafe & occasionally serving The Prospector, a white-haired old fellow who suddenly appears & as suddenly vanishes. In the scattered community, the children are amused by him, no one can remember exactly when they first saw him & no one knows where he lives back in the far, dense reaches of the surrounding forest.

Over the years people have simply disappeared, even though rumors abound about abductions -- visitors like the married couple who had come for a hiking holiday, or the amiable fisherman who stayed out after dark. Others have met untimely, inexplicable deaths like the kindly teacher sitting on his porch, or the Pig Woman in her sty. No one quite knows if it is murder. No one, until now, has dared to follow The Prospector home.

Lately Skye has been having visions. As a child she would have them often, she had thought she'd grown out of them. Now, images of gasping faces, reaching hands & incomprehensible danger haunt her dreams. Why is she being drawn along the path by the lake? Why does the lake seem to be calling her, further & further into the forest? Who is watching her? Who will she find?

One of the watchers is young, silent Billy Shake who can slither through the underbrush like a snake. When he was young everyone thought his father had killed his mother in a fit of drunken rage. When Snake got the news that his dad had been killed in prison he ceased to speak. Now he's seeing things in the shadows menacing those he has grown to love.

Time & reality become elastic & porous in Lila Pinord's Skye Dancer. Who will Skye & her two friends, Snake & Ryder, find when they finally follow The Prospector to his lair? How will they survive?

The Boogey-Man abounds in every culture, & Lila L. Pinord, born & raised in the Quinault Indian Reservation at Queets in Western Washington, has taken the legends of wild woodsman & Tsiatco (Sasquatch) & woven a taut, terrifying, lyrical & redemptive tale that will make going into your neck of the woods that much more hair-raising!

Very well done!
(11/09/03)

Rebecca