Erin Singer, Dangerland! (Summit Books), 352 pp. Hardback, $29.00.
Characters in Erin Singer’s Dangerland! order vodka Red Bulls at Dotty’s and hot wings at PT’s. They drink cocktails at Herbs & Rye and at The Golden Tiki. They spot Carrot Top and O.J. Simpson out in public. And they go on dates at Jerry’s Nugget and at KISS World Mini Golf. This is clearly a Las Vegas novel about locals, not tourists. The casino hotels on the Strip—praised for their exceptionally clean public restrooms—appear only marginally.
Singer herself, a Saskatchewan native, has lived in Vegas for the past nineteen years. She knows the city well, and this familiarity constitutes one of the major strengths of Dangerland!. Set in 2024, the novel was inspired by Singer’s own experience living in the Queensridge gated community, which erupted in drawn-out country club drama several years ago when a developer purchased the Badlands golf course with the intent to build new properties in the sightlines of current homes.
Singer’s characters live in Alluvian, a similar golf course community located near Summerlin, and they feel pretty spot on for Vegas: a washed-out wannabe actor from LA, a full-time nanny moonlighting as a multi-level marketing scammer, an aspiring professional poker player living with his mom. They work out at the gym, they complain about the traffic cones, and they continually find themselves in oddly arranged shopping plazas (“a Greek restaurant tucked between a pet grooming shop and a pool supply store”). They reflect upon their neighbors’ compulsion “to participate in the modern American art form that was the personalized license plate.”
This local aesthetic might be epitomized by Singer’s brief focus on the airport. Whereas nearly every writer who visits Southern Nevada comments on the curiosity of slot machines waiting for you at your gate, Singer ignores them. Her characters are instead disturbed by the signs at the airport warning about human trafficking. The novel thus offers a refreshing alternative to the many accounts of Vegas chiefly inspired by parachute journalism. But it also establishes its own form of attention; Singer typically looks away from the splashy or sensational and concentrates instead upon the smaller dramas unfolding under Spanish tile roofs.
The other major strength of Dangerland! is its main character, 60-year-old Vegas native Eugenie Zepp. Eugenie, a successful real estate agent living in Alluvian, loves people and loves her hometown. Her face can be seen on billboards across the valley, and she works to keep that face youthful and presentable. (When it comes to plastic surgery, “she never overdid it, she was merely on the cusp of overdoing it.”) Her positive attitude and her “reputation for giving fantastic and wide-ranging advice” endear her to her clients. She always seems to have a compliment ready to fire. (“That’s the nicest neck tattoo I’ve seen!”)
Eugenie’s problem is 52-year-old Kurt Richter, the CEO of the management company that developed Alluvian. Kurt has been in love with Eugenie since 1979, when, an 8-year-old boy at the time, the 16-year-old Eugenie once babysat him. Kurt fell hard and has never recovered. Eugenie has always kept the younger man at bay, but, if pressed, she might admit that the attraction is mutual. At first, Kurt was far too young for her; later they would each get married to other people but try to maintain a platonic friendship—a friendship that gradually destroyed their marriages and led to a decision to cease all communication.
But the novel begins when they start speaking again. Will Eugenie finally realize that Kurt is the only man for her and bring to fruition a union decades in the making? Or is their love fated to be a tragic, ongoing missed connection?
Kurt, who inherited his company from his father, is something of a born-wealthy asshole, but his appreciation for Eugenie is his saving quality. His own house lies across the golf course from hers—exactly “234 steps away.” This proximity could occasion some creepy spying, but in Singer’s novel it primarily functions like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock. (Kurt would probably like to think of himself as Gatsby, but he’s more the type of guy who would buy a casino cocktail lounge and name it “Gatsby’s.”)
Will Eugenie finally realize that Kurt is the only man for her and bring to fruition a union decades in the making? Or is their love fated to be a tragic, ongoing missed connection?
The action in the novel gets going when 46-year-old Chad Sherrill comes to Alluvian and crashes with his cousin Mitch, Eugenie’s next-door neighbor. Chad—@chaddtothabone on social media—had tried for years to make it as an actor in LA without success, and now finds himself nearly penniless. But his outlook is surprisingly optimistic. His personal bible, a book titled You’re F*cking Killing It Bro: Bullet Points to Cash In on Your Passion, gives him invaluable advice about protein-maxxing and socializing, and within weeks he’s slept with both Richter’s live-in nanny, Janelle, and Eugenie, who allows him temporarily to move in with her. Chad becomes an unlikely father figure to Eugenie’s son, 25-year-old Austin, who has also just moved in with her (after having spent a couple of years in Taiwan teaching English) and hopes to begin a career as a professional poker player. Chad teaches Austin to cut carbs; Austin tries to get Chad to stop referring to women as “females.”
Several other minor figures round out the drama, and the narration skips back and forth between the present day and earlier moments in characters’ lives, slowly disclosing sources of strain in some relationships and occasionally revealing buried secrets that explain otherwise obscure motives.
The novel is not perfect. The ending is a little too wacky and a little too neat. The jostling between different characters’ perspectives and different moments in time is often unnecessary to the movement of the plot. And a chapter taking place at a seven-card stud table is almost comically reliant on poker lingo: “hole cards,” “the muck,” “third street,” “the five seat,” etc. (In an interview for KNPR’s State of Nevada, Singer noted that her husband, a professional poker player, “fact-checked” this chapter to capture how gamblers really speak.)
But the sincerity with which Eugenie and Kurt believe in Las Vegas is quite compelling. It’s the one great quality that these otherwise very different characters share, and it’s essential. “To love Vegas was to constantly be defending it to outsiders, to tourists, even to one’s own husband,” thinks Eugenie. (This is a quality she also shares with Ellory, a main character in Krista Diamond’s Close Relationships with Strangers.) Many see the city as crass, as an inelegant temple to Mammon, but Eugenie understands her home’s many charms, and she operates with grace, even sophistication. It’s an impressive performance.
