A sixteen-year-old girl dives off the end of a pier and lets herself sink. She lies on the sandy bottom among the weeds, eyes closed, and thinks how easy it would be to stay down there, weightless and unbothered, until her lungs insist otherwise. When she surfaces, her older brother is waiting in a dented aluminium boat, threatening to leave without her. It is the first week of the summer of 1999, and it is the last summer this family will spend together. Savage Lake by Nick Medina opens its past in that cold water, and the image of a girl who would rather not come up for air turns out to be the key to everything that follows.
The Summer the Marins Stopped Talking
The girl is Nell Marin, and the novel moves between her at sixteen and her in middle age, when she drives back to the same Wisconsin cabin with her son Oscar to sell it after her father’s death. The earlier strand is the stronger, and it is built from small domestic disasters rather than scares. Her brother Benny is eighteen, funny and impossible, already in trouble at home for something he did in Chicago that winter. Their father, George, is a proud tradesman who has decided that this holiday is the place to bring his son to heel. Their mother, Ava, fills bird feeders and keeps a glass of wine close by.
Medina is wonderful on the texture of being a sibling. In one scene Benny drifts round a drugstore slipping embarrassing purchases into strangers’ shopping baskets while Nell tries not to laugh, and the joke curdles a page later when his larger theft lands her in trouble instead. In another, he wakes her on the porch at night to apologise, and makes her bed badly by way of penance. Ava, watching hummingbirds fight over a feeder, observes that beautiful things can be savage about what they think is theirs, and the remark sits over the rest of the book like weather.
The family is also Latino in a place that lets them know it. A beach brawl turns on a slur; a waiter’s friendliness becomes something Nell cannot quite trust. The Marins have spent generations trying not to be noticed, and Savage Lake by Nick Medina is precise about how little that protects them.
What Savage Lake Inherits
The present-day strand belongs to Oscar, and its real subject is not the shapes he glimpses on the pier but his mother. Nell stops cooking, then stops dressing, then sits for hours at the end of the dock staring at something only she can see coming across the water. Oscar remembers standing in her bedroom doorway as a small boy, too frightened to go in and hug her, and the novel treats that memory with more care than any ghost.
The dead grandfather hangs over this strand too. Oscar met him only a handful of times, and in a hospital room shortly before the end the old man told his daughter, with the last of his strength, that he had not been the one responsible, then apologised to his grandson for never bringing him to the lake. Neither Oscar nor the reader knows yet what either remark means. Savage Lake by Nick Medina turns those two deathbed sentences into the engine of its present-day mystery, and the payoff, when it comes, lands with the weight of twenty-seven years of silence between a father and his daughter.
Oscar copes the only way he knows, through the horror films he has watched all his life, and at his most frightened he plays an entire one in his head, starring five teenagers renting the cabin across the lake. The device is clever in principle: the rules of the genre become his armour against a sadness he half suspects he has inherited. In practice, these interludes are long and gleefully gory, and each one stalls a story that has more urgent business.
There is a second problem in the middle chapters, where Oscar bikes to the roadblocks, does odd jobs for an unpleasant neighbour and returns to an increasingly flooded cabin more times than the plot requires. The tension that the 1999 chapters build so patiently leaks away while he waits.
A Monster With a Long Record
When the answer to the old mystery arrives, it is fairly clued and genuinely sad. Yet the figure responsible tips into caricature in the last act, explaining his contempt as if reading from notes, and Savage Lake by Nick Medina asks its reader to accept a run of convenient connections between 1999 and the present that the earlier chapters had seemed too careful to need. The closing pages then stack several endings on top of one another, some moving, some merely busy.
What survives that wobble is the book’s moral clarity. The local girl Tess gives the story its gentlest thread. She roams the woods with her elkhound looking for signs of Sabe, the Bigfoot of Anishinaabe teaching, because she has seen his face on shop signs and bakery buns all her life and thinks of him as a friend she has not met yet. She is also, disconcertingly, an expert on real serial killers, having secretly watched her mother’s true-crime documentaries since the age of eight. Her conversations with Oscar, who trusts fiction and fears reality, are the funniest in Savage Lake by Nick Medina, and they quietly set out the novel’s argument about which kind of horror deserves our fear. The creature the book finally shows is kinder than many of its human beings. Readers should be prepared for violence, cruelty within a family, bigotry, depression and drinking, all handled seriously and some at length.
The Real Lake Behind Savage Lake
Nick Medina, who grew up in Chicago and is enrolled with Louisiana’s Tunica-Biloxi people, explains in his afterword that much of the book is lifted from life. He spent summers at his grandfather’s cabin up the highway from northern Illinois; the boat christened after spilled beer was real, and so, it seems, was a childhood wagon of doomed crayfish. He also admits to once mistaking a wind sock for a lurking killer just after watching The Strangers, and traces his love of horror to seeing, and later reading, Misery at six years old.
The roadblock is real too. Medina based it on the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s decision to close reservation roads over long-expired easement payments, and he notes that non-Native households sit on the reservation at all because of the Dawes Act of 1887 and the allotment that followed. That history gives Savage Lake by Nick Medina a sting no monster could supply.
What It Leaves Behind
Savage Lake by Nick Medina, out now from Berkley, is an affecting family novel wrapped in a horror novel that sometimes forgets which of the two it is. The grief is real, the bigotry is unsettling because it is so ordinary, and the slasher fantasies are best skimmed. Readers who loved the self-aware teenage horror fan of My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones will see an obvious kinship, while those drawn to a crime that a reservation community carries for years should try The Round House by Louise Erdrich. Medina’s own Indian Burial Ground is the natural next step for anyone who wants more of his voice.
The girl on the lakebed comes up for air in the end. The novel’s quiet hope is that her son will not have to learn to stay down.