Introduction

Riptide, Oregon, 1983. A sleepy coastal town, where crime usually consists of underage drinking down at a Wolf Point bonfire. But then strange things start happening—a human skeleton is unearthed in a local park and mutilated animals begin appearing, seemingly sacrificed, on the town’s beaches. The Mercy of the Tide follows four people drawn irrevocably together by a recent tragedy as they do their best to reclaim their lives—leading them all to a discovery that will change them and their town forever.

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Excerpt

RIPTIDE, OREGON, 1983

TRINA FINSTER

Trina learned to fear the bomb two weeks after her mother died, and she fell into that fear like someone slipping into bed after a hard day’s work. Fell into it with a relief that bordered on gratitude. When she thought of the bomb, she felt like someone who was gravely ill witnessing a terrible and violent event: a merciless distraction, but at least one outside of her own body.

When thoughts of her mother came now, thoughts that made her ache and curl up in bed like a plant without sunlight, she read The Looming Error. She read about Mutual Assured Destruction—M.A.D.—and at night those three letters ran the plainsong of their zippered teeth along her heart as she stared at the ceiling wishing for sleep. It was a lullaby that made her heart fearful and clumsy, those three letters, that idea, but—and this was the important part—it took up too much room to worry about anything else. To feel sad for herself. To miss her mom. The world, Trina knew, was doomed, and it was terrible, but there was some part of her that felt glad that at least this part of it would be over. The world wouldn’t survive, and there was something freeing about that, like finally throwing up after you’ve felt sick for a long, long time.

Those three letters, M.A.D., and how they spelled the end of everything. The book lay under her bed and sometimes it felt like she slept above a bomb for all the power it had.

The thing she hated most about the Soviets and the United States both was their babyishness. How much they seemed like grumpy, spoiled kids playing with toys they didn’t want to give up. There was a lot about the negotiations in the book, and she could picture it all too well, the two countries discussing things in a big room somewhere, everyone with their own glass of water by their hands, old white men in suits trying to work out trades in practically the same way that she and Sam had bartered the gross parts of their school lunches when she was a baby back in first grade:

United States: We want you to reduce the number of your SS-20 missile launchers in Europe, okay? You have 243 of them and we want you to only have 75.

Russia: Hmm. Okay. If you also only have 75 launchers for your Tomahawk cruise missiles there as well.

United States: Fine by us.

Russia: Ha! Except we both know that your Tomahawks carry four warheads compared to the one warhead of the SS-20, so you would have like 300 warheads to our 75! Cheater!

Trina knew they did not actually talk like this, but still. Practically.

It went on and on. And this, she knew, was just one type of nuclear missile, when both sides had so many different kinds, thousands of missiles of all different kinds, and all of them capable of doing their little part for M.A.D. One Tomahawk, The Looming Error said, carried a nuclear yield up to ten times the one at Hiroshima! And still they argued about it like little babies over their toys. Their tens of thousands of toys.

ICBMs. NCBMs. SLBMs. IRBMs.

B-1s. MXs. Poseidons.

These characters at night became like glyphs to her, these names a hidden language that battled the shadows skirting her wall, battled the shapes of the trees outside her window, the yawning realization that her mother was never, ever coming back, that Trina would never see her again, that she was dead in the ground right now even—

Trident IIs. Pershing IIs. Tomahawks.

Soviet SS-4s. SS-5s. SS-18s. SS-19s. SS-20s.

She read them in the book and repeated them; it was a cadence that had become familiar, intimate. The Looming Error was overdue but she couldn’t imagine turning it back in to the library. She carried it in her backpack to school; she could practically feel it under the bed at night, whispering like a bad friend. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Do you think Sam and Toad would have gone on their road trip? Was Sam ready to leave his sister and father?

2. Would events in Riptide have transpired the same way if the skeleton had not been discovered in Tumquala Park?

3. Who should have received the Tumquala girl’s bones?

4. Were the Brief Asides necessary to the novel? Did they add or subtract from the overall story?

5. Were the Finsters good parents?

6. Had these events taken place in present day, in what ways would the characters have reacted differently? In what ways was the era and locale important to the story?

7. The Tumquala tribe of Native Americans was an invention of the author. Was it appropriate to include an invented Native American myth in the story?

8. The ending of the novel is vague but seems imminent. What do you think happens? Will there be a sequel, or is this the end of the story?

9. Were this story to take place today, would Nick Haylsip have reacted the same following the trauma he experienced during combat?

10. Did Hayslip redeem himself at the end of the novel?

11. Do you agree with the statement in The Looming Error that it’s in our nature to seek our own destruction?

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