Eugenie Lund did not have a conventional childhood. Her mother dies after being buzz-bombed by a swarm of killer bees: Eugenia and her sister Camille are taken into the care of sinister Dr Vargas, who installs the children in a remote Maine forest house. Vargas keeps the girls under this rigid and isolated circumstance until they turn sixteen: the quack scientist drumbeats his own dogmas into the children, then shocks them with electric collars if they fail to repeat his syllogisms correctly. (The Doctor’s weak point is poker: the girls regularly beat him at the card game, earning library books as a grudging reward.) As Eugenie and Camille grow older, they develop a mystical kinship and powers, and plot to escape Vargas forever. The Doctor is a keen beekeeper, and the sisters manage to set another haze of killer bees upon him so that Vargas too dies.
I’m not giving anything away: this is just the first chapter, a mad prelude to the main story, which has Eugenia and her husband – an ex serviceman who calls himself ‘Venus Acid Boy’ – on the run out of Vegas from both sides of the law. Eugenie also wants to find Camille, who vanished into nothingness at the moment Vargas was killed. The couple take a hectic road trip across the continental US – and also across different realities.
Dodge and Burn is saturated with myths and legends. Buddhism, Jainism, Norse and Olmec mythology, stone circles, the Mothman, the Hypogeum of Hal-Saflieni – as Eugenie and Venus tour the free party and survivalist scenes, these legendary shadows accompany them and weave into the story. There’s no sense that these are New Age accoutrements or affectations: Eugenie and Camille use mythology as a comfort and refuge during their childhood, and to define themselves against the hack rationalist Dr Vargas – ‘this dark master imposed upon us a viciously circumscribed, authoritarian, dogmatic and anti-magical system – the mortal enemy of anyone committed to a magical universe in which all is spontaneous, unpredictable and alive.’
Maybe it’s significant that the prologue is narrated in the plural pronoun and we only get a straight first person narrative once Eugenie is an adult. Arguably, that’s what growing up is – a journey from the happy careless we to the lone and embattled I. Eugenie uses mythology to make sense of the world: she regards it as she regards the real-world characters and scenarios she comes across, with honest inquiry but no credulity and no sense that she’s trying to fill a void. Eugenie is a maenad who worships no god exclusively or at any cost. The references are On the Road but Madsen’s novel reminds me of a later classic work. The economy, the reliance on found texts made me think of Alan Warner’s These Demented Lands. Life may be death or a dream, but no less worth living for all that.
There is a marvellous passage where Eugenie discusses lucid dreaming – the state where you are asleep and dreaming but know it. ‘This act breaks the membrane between everyday reality and the dream world, enabling one to step into the dream territory completely aware that one is dreaming and embark on the next steps to gaining more understanding, power and knowledge of that world.’ That’s what Dodge and Burn feels like… a dangerously lucid dream, from which waking is difficult.
Max Dunbar 