ECSTASY

Wealthy owners of a luxury hotel on a Greek island run afoul of a cult of wild women living on the beach.

Pochoda’s venture into dark horror is a clunky revision of The Bacchae revolving around four women and one uptight male jerk. Lena is the wealthy widow of a Greek hotel developer who died under suspicious circumstances on the site of his unfinished Agape Villas. Her son, Drew—as rigid, controlling, and misogynist as his father—has completed the project and now brings Lena; her best friend, Hedy; and his own pregnant wife, Jordan, to the island for a kind of soft opening where they will be the only guests. Already in situ is Luz, a former powerful drug dealer who did time in prison when her son turned her in to save his own hide; this backstory is the only remnant of the kind of book Pochoda has been so successful with in the past. Luz has become the leader of a group of women who live on the beach that adjoins the Agape property. Their nightly revels revolve around a DJ named BaXXus who has golden blood and takes the form of a mountain lion during sex, one of the various versions of “ecstasy” that may make this book off-putting to some readers. Also unpleasant are the constant expressions of revulsion for the aging female body. Drew on Lena: “Here’s his goddamn mess of a mother at last. Look at the state of her. That fucking caftan hiding fucking nothing. ‘Mom.’ To think that morning he’d thought of her as anything more than a saggy fifty-four-year-old ex-ballerina.” Lena feels about the same about her “worn,” “desiccated,” and “weathered” body, once so lithe and lovely (54 seems to be the new 94 here). At the heart of the story is the idea that “we grow the monsters that take us down”—both Lena and Luz have vile, treacherous sons, and pregnant Jordan is quickly picking up the vibe. You know those Greek myths—this won’t end well. Pochoda’s reliance on sentence fragments and single-sentence or single-word paragraphs add to an overall hasty feel, and probably not the kind of horror the author intended.

A hot mess.