THE SNAKE PIT by Mary Jane Ward

redemption, inform just about every action and interaction between and among the myriad characters Van Booy sets loose on the slowly revolving stage of rural, karmic destiny.

This well-crafted and often serendipitous saga recognizes that family cannot be escaped but can be expanded.

BATH HAUS

Vernon, P.J. Doubleday (320 pp.) $26.95 | Jun. 15, 2021 978-0-385-54673-7

One night of infidelity sets this thriller in motion. While his partner, Nathan, is away at a medical conference, Oliver goes in search of some commitment-free sex. His fantasy takes a terrifying turn when the stranger he hooks up with tries to murder him. Oliver escapes with his life, but the repercussions of this encounter follow him home. When he tries to explain away the bruises encircling his neck by telling Nathan he was mugged, he’s telling lies that will necessitate more lies. What makes the book compelling is the way author Vernon uses a deranged killer as a catalyst for revealing the hidden dimensions of the main characters’ inner lives. Oliver was in Indiana, where Nathan was doing his residency, when they met at the trauma center of the South Bend hospital. The fact that Nathan is older, more accomplished, and exponentially wealthier means that Oliver has access to a lifestyle he’d never imagined. It also means there is a huge power imbalance in their relationship, and it’s ultimately this dynamic that drives the plot—and it’s the plot that makes the schlocky style endurable. “My stomach twists like a wet rag, wringing damp fear from itself” is unfortunate, but at least it makes a kind of sense. “The voices grow sharper, like bedazzled kitchen knives,” however, is more baffling than revealing, and it’s hard to know what to make of “martinis screaming for help through olive eyes” even in context. But it’s Vernon’s penchant for piling metaphor on top of metaphor that is most trying: “I center myself and clear my mind because the game is about to change. A snap of my fingers, and the stage will tilt in a new direction. Listing like the deck of a foundering ship, and I will not drown.” It’s also noteworthy that, while chapters alternate between Oliver’s and Nathan’s perspectives, they have indistinguishable voices.

A gripping story rendered in overwrought prose.

THE SNAKE PIT

Ward, Mary Jane Library of America (360 pp.) $15.95 paper | Jun. 1, 2021 978-1-59853-680-5

One of the first novels about the American mental health system turns out to be among the freshest, and most darkly funny, examples of a genre that is often grimly earnest if well-meaning. Published by the Library of America to honor its 75th anniversary, Ward’s novel was a bestseller, the basis of a popular movie, and the impetus behind change to state mental institutions. The semiautobiographical novel is told from the constantly changing and unreliable point of view of sardonic novelist Virginia Cunningham, who, as the story opens, is puzzled to discover herself in what seems at first to be a public park but which she gradually identifies as a mental institution, in which she has been confined for an indeterminate amount of time. Virginia, whose primary tie to the outside world is her faithful husband, Robert, and who is beset by lapses in her memory, bounces around through the wards of Juniper Hill, a severely understaffed state institution whose motto, she believes, is “Keep Them Quiet.” For a while, she makes it up to Ward One, the closest to release. Other times, she comes to consciousness in wards where she is being drugged, treated with ice baths, or given shock treatment. She alludes to sessions with a psychoanalyst, but her main focus is on the nurses and patients with whom she interacts and on her own desperate attempts to make sense of her situation, or to fake her way out of it. Virginia, deeply confused and occasionally violent, is also sharply observant, noting that the medication given to the patients makes them smell like “badly tended lions” and observing that the eyes of one fearsome nurse “had a look you do not mind seeing in the eyes of your cat.” The novel, admirably, doesn’t oversimplify Virginia’s mental state or provide an explanation for it but reveals it in all its complexity.

An uncompromising look inside a troubled mind and a troubled institution.

THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS

Wendig, Chuck Del Rey (544 pp.) $28.99 | Jul. 20, 2021 978-0-399-18213-6

A family that’s banished itself to the woods of rural Pennsylvania finds more than they bargained for when supernatural forces decide they would make quite a snack. Prolific and delightfully profane, Wendig pulled off a good trick last time with his sprawling, inventive, and prescient apocalypse chronicle, Wanderers (2019). This is another doorstopper, but here he returns to macabre horror