American Book Review

In 2019 the United Nations issued a report estimating around one million species are in danger of extinction, largely due to human activity. The scale of this mass death is beyond reckoning, which is perhaps why one finds it easier to think about an individual animal, the last of its kind, passing into history. Consider the fictional Beebop, the last remaining African blue rhinoceros and the nominal focus of Jesse Salvo's Blue Rhinoceros, or Pedestrian Verses. The rhino has long been dead when the novel's story begins, but the question of why exactly he had to die—or what his death meant—draws together a compelling cast of characters in a world simultaneously strange and painfully familiar.

The novel is often narrated by Thomas Entrecarceles, a former reporter disgraced after he fabricated stories from a war zone, who is hired by the mysterious Sairy Wellcome, a zoologist trying to figure out why she, at the [End Page 85] age of twelve, murdered the last blue rhinoceros on the planet. Wellcome explains that she was orphaned during the Littoral County Maple Syrup Disaster, which directly preceded the rhino's murder, and she has no clear memory of why she, an animal lover, would have done such a thing. She's worried that information about what happened seventeen years earlier could now be used to blackmail her, and she considers Entrecarceles an ideal detective because, should he find something incriminating, no one is likely to believe him.

The world-weary Entrecarceles, flanked by his loyal canine, Goober, sets out to investigate the events culminating in the factory explosion that sent waves of scalding maple syrup and molasses through the streets of Littoral, New York (which is neither on the water, as it name would suggest, nor a literal place in New York). Salvo manages to repeatedly invoke the horror of scalded, drowning townsfolk with descriptions as poetic as they are gruesome. Entrecarceles must not only uncover the history of the syrup disaster—a deadly day no one wants to remember—but must also explain why, in the aftermath, the townspeople help Sairy kill Beebop.

The story unfolds in multiple narrative modes, most often through what are presumably Entrecarceles's reconstructions of events described to him by interview subjects. The disgraced reporter's ennui surfaces in bits of editorial musing amid his reportage, and he doubts even why he'd hazard to write his story. "I am writing this down," he says of his account; "do not ask me what it is for." Nevertheless, we learn of powerful forces, including the ex-journalist's ex-wife, trailing his every move and threatening to end his investigation.

Along the way, a menagerie of characters plays their roles in the lead-up to the syrup disaster and rhino slaughter. Leanne Swinburne is blinded by the explosion while watching from the window of her jail cell; Sairy frees her in exchange for helping in her quest to destroy the blue rhinoceros. After the disaster, the town is visited by a mutual aid group known as the Rude Mechanics, the brainchild of a man named Robert Vicaray who inherited a fortune under mysterious circumstances and, attempting to fight climate change, accidentally multiplied that fortune by investing in renewable energy. Vicary is among "the more-than-100-million who suffer from Climate Depression," convinced the planet is doomed to inhabitability, and having given up on trying to prevent cataclysmic climate change, he runs the Rude Mechanics to [End Page 86] alleviate the human suffering in its wake. Vicary has recruited a former insurance adjuster, Oscar Louder, who specializes in assessing flood damage and becomes suspicious of the syrup disaster's origins. They group has been infiltrated by a corporate spy sent to monitor and, if necessary, put an end to Vicaray's do-gooder agenda.

Blue Rhinoceros fits comfortably in the genre of postmodern detective novels—the fact that Entrecarceles is a journalist and not a cop makes clear that his fact...