By Nick Fuller Googins
Jamaica Plain, Boston
Sept. 6, 2017
KL Pereira’s collection, A Dream Between Two Rivers, had its launch party at Boston’s Papercuts bookstore on Sept. 6, and it was a night of firsts: the first story collection put out by the independent bookstore’s publishing arm, Cutlass Press; the first stop for Pereira on her 12-city tour; and the first book launch I've been to that offered a preposterously large bottle of Tanqueray for the audience's refreshment.
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| Pereira at Papercuts (photo by Katie Eelman) |
There was also prosecco on ice, and most went for this chilled option after a brutally humid day and on an evening that wasn’t doing much to cut it. Plastic cups sweated in our hands as we waited for Pereira.
She appeared decked out a Ouija board-themed dress, appropriate given that the September moon was nearly full and that Pereira’s stories run the gamut from dark to darker to darkest. She read a “darker” one, her collection’s opening, “The Dark Valley of Your Lungs,” in which a girl with a killer voice (literally) finds a mentor of sorts in a woman with silver hands and feet. The story, creepy on its own, ends in a cemetery, and if that isn’t enough creep, know that it was written in one too: Pereira revealed during the Q&A that she’d penned the first draft one evening in nearby Forest Hills Cemetery. If there had been anybody in the audience wondering how one gets away with rocking a Ouija board dress, nobody was wondering it anymore.
Literary horror has long been in Pereira’s wheelhouse. She told the audience of an archeological dig through the mounds of school-work that her mother had saved. She’d recently excavated her earliest stories, composed at age nine:
- “The Haunted School”
- “The Secret of the Old Piano” (“pilfered from Nancy Drew,” Pereira confessed)
- “The Fishing Trip” (spoiler alert: a shark devours the young narrator and her father)
In response to a question regarding the generative process, Pereira explained that she’s “always been interested in the weird” and hails from a “family of storytellers.” Her ancestry stretches back to Cape Verde, Colombia, Italy, and the Azores, providing her with a rich library of folktales and legends to draw upon.
It was fitting that A Dream Between Two Rivers launched in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood because Pereira wrote most of the collection there in 2009. She lives now with the witches and the spirits up in Salem, but the audience greeted her as if she’d never left. When she admitted that she was pretty nervous, and a friend had advised her to picture the audience as cats to help, the crowd erupted in reassuring meows.
After the Q&A, I asked Pereira what she’d done earlier that day. She’d been selected for the MBTA’s “Books on the T” program, so she and her publishing team had been guerrilla-dropping copies of A Dream Between Two Rivers in subway stations around the city, she explained. What this means for the rest of us is that Pereira’s unique brand of literary horror is right now making its way through the underground arteries of greater Boston. Innocent commuting souls: beware.
It was fitting that A Dream Between Two Rivers launched in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood because Pereira wrote most of the collection there in 2009. She lives now with the witches and the spirits up in Salem, but the audience greeted her as if she’d never left. When she admitted that she was pretty nervous, and a friend had advised her to picture the audience as cats to help, the crowd erupted in reassuring meows.
After the Q&A, I asked Pereira what she’d done earlier that day. She’d been selected for the MBTA’s “Books on the T” program, so she and her publishing team had been guerrilla-dropping copies of A Dream Between Two Rivers in subway stations around the city, she explained. What this means for the rest of us is that Pereira’s unique brand of literary horror is right now making its way through the underground arteries of greater Boston. Innocent commuting souls: beware.
