There was something strange, mysterious even, about the White Horse tonight. Normally, it was merely an Indian Bar. My Indian bar. But there was a milky, dreamy quality to the red lights swinging over the pool tables, like the wind from the open doors was bringing them something new, something I’d pushed away for as long as I could remember.
-first paragraph
Kari describes herself as an urban Indian, living near Denver. She leads a simple life, moving between her apartment, her father’s house and the White Horse, her favorite bar. She spends time with her cousin Debby and sometimes with Debby’s family, though there’s friction between Kari and Debby’s husband, Jack, who thinks Kari is trouble. There’s no one else consistently in her life, except Nick, the bartender, who is thinking of retiring.
Stuck, Kari is unsure what direction to take. She’s unmarried and unattached, which seems to bother Jack, also Debby to a degree. Nick wants to sell White Horse, and Kari wants to buy it, but is hesitant to start the process.
One night Debby meets Kari at the bar and gives her a piece of jewelry that belonged to Cecelia, Kari’s mother, a bracelet that brings with it insistent visions. Cecelia disappeared when Kari was two days old. Her father, desperately in love with Cecelia, was never the same, leading to a drunken car accident that Kari blames on her mother; now sometimes he seems to recognize Kari and sometimes he doesn’t and he spends most of his days staring at the TV set. Then there was Jaime, her friend, who o.d.-ed.
In a sense, Kari was already haunted by memories of Jaime and her guilt for not being able to save her friend, as well as by her mother. But now her haunting is literal, and visions of Cecelia’s ghost screaming, albeit soundlessly, are powerful motivation, as is dread of being forever haunted by Cecelia. But Kari doesn’t know what the ghost is trying to tell her or what to do about it, and she’s not even sure she wants to help the woman who abandoned them, but what else can she do? Is there something in Cecelia’s past that makes her spirit restless? How can she be laid to rest?
Kari’s first-person narration drew me in immediately. Her voice and attitude are relatable and Wurth’s writing flows, especially after the first couple of chapters. (A couple of phrasings caused me to pause and consider the wording, but that passed early on as either her prose or my reading smoothed out.) Like many ghost stories, this one becomes a mystery, and Kari’s search for answers has the stops and starts you would expect from someone forced to play amateur detective without the resources to do so easily. Deftly mixed in with her investigation is an interrogation of her occasionally contentious relationship with Debby, and especially with Jack, her estrangement from her maternal grandparents, and the trauma and grief from witnessing Jaime’s death.
To solve the mystery of her mother’s haunting, Kari has to get out of her own head and engage all of these people, and several others.
Reading White Horse, Wurth’s third novel, I was reminded of Joe Hill’s debut Heart-Shaped Box, mainly because both are initiated by the appearance of a haunted object which drives the owner to action, and because the storytelling is crisp and straight-forward in prose that is accessible while also capturing its character’s personality, place and time. Regardless of where Wurth goes from here, whether toward supernatural or mystery stories, or toward more mainstream work, White Horse establishes her as a writer to watch.
WHITE HORSE by Erika T. Wurth (2022; Flatiron Books)
Review by Randy Money
