The Riverman, by master storyteller Aaron Starmer, will leave you questioning the responsibilities of friendship, the boundaries of imagination, and the true origin –and ownership– of the stories we tell. ~inside front cover blurb for The Riverman

The book did leave me questioning, but my questions are not so philosophical. My first question is: what in blue blazes is this story about? Alistair Cleary keeps secrets. When his not-so-typical neighbor, Fiona Loomis, tells him her secrets about a land called Aquavania where everything she imagines becomes real, Alistair keeps her secret, too. But he’s not sure whether Fiona is telling the literal truth about Aquavania and about The Riverman who is stealing the souls of the children there, or whether Fiona’s stories are a way for her to tell him about what’s going on in the Real World. Are children being kidnapped or abused or even murdered? Or is Fiona just crazy? Or is Aquavania real?

I never got answers to any of Alistair’s and my questions. Here are some review quotes lifted from Amazon:

“This blend of magical realism and mystery blurs the line between reality and fantasy, setting up a creepy unease that both disturbs and propels the reader forward.” ~BCCB

“The novel’s strength is in the pervasive aura of unknowing that Starmer creates and sustains.” ~Publisher’s Weekly

The problem I have is that I’m not sure that the ambiguity and creepiness and darkness are strengths. The lack of even semi-definitive answers frustrated me, and the final twist of revelation about who The Riverman really was made no sense at all to me. The violence at the end of the story was also unexpected and unwelcome and rather mystifying. In fact, the ending was not so much ambiguous as it was baffling.

It’s not that I am completely opposed to ambiguous endings. Sometimes I have enjoyed making up my own ending to a novel or deciding for myself how the story continues. But The Riverman is too incomprehensible. I don’t even have a working theory about what was going on with Fiona and Alistair and especially Alistair’s friends, Charlie and Kyle.

Yet another odd book. At least I think I understood Nightingale’s Nest by Nikki Loftin and some of the other oddities I’ve read lately. This one has me stumped. Maybe I skimmed something I should have read more carefully. Maybe the book itself is at fault. If you’ve read this particular book, would you please, please enlighten me?

QOTD: Do you like stories with ambiguous endings? Can you name a novel or story that you have read that ends ambiguously? Did you make up a happy ending or a sad one in your mind?