"Bonnie ZoBell's linked novella and story collection, What Happened Here, made me feel as if I'd lived all my life in San Diego's North Park, whose inhabitants live and work in the long shadow of the 1978 airline crash that decimated the neighborhood. What is most extraordinary is the ease with which ZoBell at once accumulates the layers of a novelistic narrative and offers us beautifully written, compact stories with lives of their own. Like Krzysztof Kieślowski's Red or Haruki Murakami's After the Quake, ZoBell allows us a complete picture only through a nimble narrative triangulation between the many characters and stories. The hard-fought and bounded truth we see here is, I think, the truest kind of truth." -Jerry Gabriel, author of Drowned Boy, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
The Story Behind This Book
WHAT HAPPENED HERE is set on the site of the PSA Flight 182 crash into the North Park area of San Diego in 1978, and I live right next to the site, so that was one of my inspirations. In the opening novella, a man's depression falls deeper and deeper in parallel to the 30th anniversary of the crash and the crash itself. Neighbors who are introduced here have their own stories in the book and grapple with, including chupacabras, free air, wedding jitters, and the like.