There are strange “goings-ons” lurking about in Gary Pak’s novel, Children of a Fireland. Ghosts, evil curses and premonitions of doom haunt the sleepy town of Kanewai in this contemporary tale set entirely in Hawaii. With a quirky cast of mostly multiracial characters, Pak offers humorous slices of local Hawaiian life, mixed in with descriptions of traditional Hawaiian culture and myth.

The story begins on a promising note: An old abandoned movie theater in Kanewai owned by the Ching family is slated for demolition to make way for a new fast food chain. However, graffiti mysteriously begins to appear on the walls of the theater. At first the town’s inhabitants are amused by the messages, but become increasingly disturbed as the scrawlings begin to reveal shocking — and true — details of their personal lives: “Harry and Ella have not done it in eight and a half years.” “PAul Navarro and Cassie Chun used to meet every Thursday in

ROW FORTY-FOUR.” “MATILDA NUNES GOT PREGNANT IN ROW 37.”
Indeed, most of the messages have to do with the sexual indiscretions of the locals, causing many to wonder if the town is under a curse. The graffiti continues to appear despite the formation of an all-night watch group to catch the culprit and despite repeated attempts to paint over the remarks. When the messages become more ominous and threatening, rumors begin to swirl that the ghost of the Kanewai theater’s former owner has come back to haunt them. Even Father Fonseca, the local priest who is called upon to perform an exorcism, comes to face the demons in his own past.

Children of a Fireland by Gary Pak (University of Hawaii Press, 249 pages).

The theme here in Fireland seems to be a literal and figurative concealing of the truth. Pak subtly hints that the “evil happenings” are linked to the colonization and loss of land of native Hawaiians, but everything is couched in terms of contemporary gossip, rumor and innuendo. Thus, the mystical and supernatural are disguised and blurred into everyday events, as when historical newspaper articles mysteriously float up during a torrential flood, concocting “a strange sense of time past and time lost.”

Haunting and mourning over some kind of cultural loss is not an uncommon trope in Korean American novels — other writers have incorporated Korean shamanistic traditions and the “ghostly selves” of lost cultural identity into their narratives. Yet, Pak seems more immersed in the traditional ghost story. By chapter five, after teasing the reader with hints that the bizarre occurrences may be nothing more than the product of overactive, superstitious minds, Pak explicitly, and delightfully, enters the realm of the supernatural by taking on the voice of the theater owner.

Pak, an award-winning creative writing instructor at the University of Hawaii, has a highly skillful, humorous writing style and does a fine job of mixing local myths and legends with what I can only assume is an accurate rendering of the local culture and Hawaiian dialect. His prowess at creating a fictional world and the natural rhythm of his prose is engaging and entices the reader to turn the page.
But the book has some drawbacks. First, the sheer number of characters — from
Clarissa Ching to George Hayashida to Claudio Yoon (I lost count after 12) — presents a labyrinth of story lines. While Pak’s strong point is in painting wonderfully descriptive portraits of the characters as individuals, on a larger scale, they come off as too disconnected. Halfway through the novel, I lost track of who was who. Pak fails to maintain interest in the characters and drops some of their stories altogether. By the end of the novel, Kalani Humphrey’s Cosmogonic, Christ-figure apotheosis is treated more like an afterthought, leaving me with an artificial and ineffective sense of closure.