Dash in the Blue Pacific - Softcover

Cole Alpaugh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1603812520 ISBN 13: 9781603812528

Publisher: Coffeetown Press, 2015

Synopsis

2015 International Book Awards Finalist

Dash does not feel lucky. When his plane crashes in the South Pacific on a honeymoon flight to Sydney, Australia, he is already a broken man, having left his cheating fiancee at home in Vermont. Dash is the crash's only survivor, and the natives who find his battered body blame him for poisoning their fish with spilled jet fuel. Once he has sufficiently recovered, they plan to offer him as a human sacrifice to their Volcano God, who they believe downed his plane and cursed them with drought and hardship. While Dash awaits his fate, he abandons all hope of rescue. But his new life has its moments. He meets ten-year-old Tiki, daughter of the chief and an innocent who dreams of being chosen by the soldiers who occasionally visit their island. He also conjures up an imaginary friend, Weeleekonawahulahoopa Willy, for short. Willy is half-man, half-fish, a sometime god who resigned his lofty status after failing to save his people from drowning. As Dash comes to understand the natives who hold him captive and confront his own unhappy past, he suspects that he might not be so unlucky after all.

About this title

About the Author

Cole Alpaugh is a former journalist, having worked at daily newspapers along the East Coast, as well as spending several years as a war correspondent in numerous hot-spots around the world for Manhattan-based news agencies. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines, as well as most newspapers in America. He was nominated by Gannett News Service for a 1991 Pulitzer Prize. Cole is currently a freelance photographer and writer living in Northeast Pennsylvania, where he spends his afternoons watching his daughter hit fuzzy yellow balls and ski through slalom gates. You can find Cole online at ColeAlpaugh.com.

Review

Surely Dash's run of bad luck must be winding down. He's lost his job and fiancée and finds himself alone on what should have been his honeymoon flight from Vermont to Australia. What else could possibly go wrong? Lots of things, as it turns out. In Cole Alpaugh's darkly comic and richly layered Dash in the Blue Pacific, the defeated Dash never makes it to Sydney but instead crashes in the South Pacific. What seems like a near-death experience at first is actually the beginning of a mind-bending, life-changing journey for a man at the end of his rope.

Dash's adventures begin with a familiar trope: a man washes up on a remote island's beach, worries that the natives will eat him, and plots his escape. In Alpaugh's hands, however, the story is anything but stale. Instead of building signal fires and rafts (though these will come), Dash is preoccupied with a tribal chief who wants to feed him to a volcano, women who want his help to make the island s first white baby, and a young girl who hopes to escape the island with the "soldiers" who sometimes come to her shores looking for the prettiest among them. And then there's the former god Dash spends many hours consulting with, a half-fish, half-man mind reader named Weeleekonawahulahoopa Willy for short who has resigned his godly role after failing to save his people from drowning. It gets weirder after that.

The weird parts work because Alpaugh integrates them into a story that is physically raw and wickedly funny. Dash is as incredulous about all that is happening as anyone, and his self-conscious skepticism keeps the magical elements from seeming off-the-wall. Little by little, Dash's conversations with Willy reveal Dash's deeper emotional wounds, and offer another interpretation for his dreamlike visions.

Taken simply as a comic adventure story, Dash in the Blue Pacific is thoroughly entertaining. When you consider the other elements--racial tensions, human grief, and spiritual redemption--it takes on new levels of meaning. Book clubs will be talking about this one.

--Sheila M. Trask, Foreword Review

"Cole Alpaugh is a grand comedian, and the conflicts and themes which exist in uncharted territory for traditional novels work well with his droll craft. The novel is full of magical wonders, melancholic gods, invasive spiders, and hilarious blunders from both Dash and the natives. 'Boring' and 'predictable' would be the last two words you'd use to describe Alpaugh's novel."

--D. A. Wetherell, Necessary Fiction

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffeetown Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1603812520
• ISBN 13: 9781603812528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256