Invasion of the Daffodils by Dino Enrique Piacentini begins with a child’s discovery of a corpse while beachcombing. The blending of whimsy and horrifying acts that characterize the novel begins here. As the corpse is judged and debated among the townsfolk of the island, it disappears as quickly as it was found. This initial mystery sets up the strangeness of this Island off the coast of California, supposedly fashioned after Piacentini’s familial ties to Catalina Island. Ten years pass from the initial discovery of a dead body to a crate of daffodil bulbs discovered at the same beachhead.

Dino Enrique Piacentini

The bulk of the narrative begins with Chico Flores, younger brother of the original beachcomber, Raul, now off fighting in the Korean War. Chico introduces the crate of daffodil bulbs onto the Island, wanting to make some money for his cash-strapped family.

The isolation of the Island presents a difficult barrier to accessing the mainland, and ultimately makes it seem real. The otherworldliness of the daffodils wreak havoc over the Island, and never threaten to expose the reader to any sense of normalcy. Even the ferry boat and the pier become settings of trauma, mystery and fatality.

The entire Island population shows up at the pier to celebrate the eldest Flores brother, Raul, returning from the Korean War. But a grieving Italian mother cannot celebrate; her own son came home in a coffin. She is literally clutching at her pearls—a mother-of-pearl cameo her son gave her before shipping out to Korea. This woman turns out to be the mother of Chico’s friend, Louie. She’s a blatant racist who holds a grudge that Louie’s older brother died in the war while Chico’s older brother returned from the war early.

Buey-Buey, the grandmotherly matriarch of the story, describes her son’s asthma returning after receiving a traumatic letter from Korea: “He wheezes. He gasps. It is as if the black ink scrawled across the flimsy pages of Raul’s letter had trickled down her son’s throat and saturated his lungs.” This imagery mimics frequent point-of-view jumps in the minds of the characters, and omniscience that leaps from paragraph to paragraph. Head hopping ultimately benefits this story, so beautifully imbued with disorienting wonder.

The imagery of the farmer on the daffodil crate whispering in Chico’s ear enough to give him a nocturnal emission becomes a vivid portrayal of this shameful rite of coming of age. And his grandmother walking in on Chico and trying to understand what has happened comprises a priceless scene. This theme expands with the invasive spiky shoots emerging around the Island. Piacentini cruelly gives young Chico a proclivity for homosexuality and then strips away his ability to follow through, ratcheting up the intolerance of the Islanders. Chico grows more curious about the nature of his budding homosexuality and the town’s homophobia and racism blossom in response.

The daffodils, meanwhile, choke the growth of other plants in the area.

An endearing scene of class struggle takes place while the family is bringing home its war hero on the ferry to the Island. A well-to-do, upper-class woman is retching in the toilet on the ferry. She comes out and finds Rita Flores, Raul’s young sister with a missing finger, at the sink. The tourist woman asks after Rita’s brother in the wheelchair, wondering what happened to his legs, as the woman clumsily applies lipstick in the mirror. She casually boasts that both of her sons came back from the war in Europe in one piece. Rita decides to underhandedly get superficial revenge: “She reapplies her lipstick, hot pink. Turns to Rita. Bestows a smile. ‘How do I look?’ Lipstick mars her front teeth. Rita nods, ‘Fine. Real fine.’”

Piacentino’s power of description is demonstrated in this image, seen from Rita’s point of view, of her father: “It is her father dressed up for Raul’s homecoming, but still looking bedraggled. His shoulders slope like the tail of a beaten dog and the tongues of his shoes pant with exhaustion, brown leather punished to beige. Three jobs and he still can’t afford a decent pair of shoes.” Class and race struggles play out along economic lines. Some Island businesses will not allow entrance to Italians or Mexicans. Even the church on the island, once a Catholic Mexican church, gets swallowed up while undergoing a makeover. The daffodils spare no religion in their onslaught against the island, and the church becomes yet another victim.

Here’s the kind of metaphor, confusing and whimsical, sprinkled throughout the book, this one of freckles transforming into hallucinatory starlings: “Then, in a burst of flapping wings and lost feathers, they lift off the schoolteacher’s face. Gathering into an iridescent flock and circling above the ferry dock, chittering out judgment. Like God, they beat their wings furiously, pressing down the heavy air. It congeals into glass, a bell jar. It crushes down on the crowd, crushes down on her—her skull, shoulders, breasts—mashing, thickening, saddling, swelling. It fractures the world—the entire world.”

This vision defines the strange meltdown Louie’s mother has during Raul’s homecoming on the dock, her perception of “the Island’s Mexicans, cooing excitement over the safe return of one of their own.” Despite her racism, or maybe because of it, the portrayal of this grief-stricken mother hallucinating showcases Piancentini’s gift with lyrical imagery. The scene transcends the page and gives the reader the briefest glimpse of the gut wrenchingly awful emotions evoked when a parent loses a child.

About mid-way through the book, Chico begins to feel the unspoken hatred of those who blame him for introducing the bulbs to the Island, “Heads crane in his direction like weathervanes in a windstorm. Pink lips murmur and glisten. Spittle ripples in the corners of down-turned mouths. Rough tongues shine wet with whispers.” These lines come after a shift in the behavior of the daffodils, sometimes emitting loud sounds and eventually starting to glow eerily. The glowing affects the Islanders differently, causing a reverse of the social order. Suddenly the lower class, who have been looked down upon, can still harvest the shoots in an attempt to earn money, while those in the upper class run around in post-apocalyptic-like rags to protect themselves from supposed radiation that emanates from the daffodils’ blooms.

The isolation of the Island intensifies when one of the only transports to and from the mainland becomes increasingly dangerous for tourists and Islanders alike. “The ferry is like a toy boat being knocked about in a galaxy-sized bathtub by some titanic, unruly child. The brat slaps the water with its flat palm; the displaced water kicks like a schoolyard bully alongside the boat’s starboard face; and the boat flops sideways, its smokestack almost horizontal. Slap, kick, flop.” This is a good example of some of the trips Piacentini gives readers. One character can be looking at an advertisement for daffodil bulbs and then suddenly feel transported to the location in the ad with powerful imagery and imaginative transitions involving all the senses.

I’ve never encountered racism reduced to such dehydrated terms as when Raul Flores attempts to get a job as a bank teller on the Island. “Bardi pushes back into his chair. He wants to help Raul. He really does. But he knows. He knows. Even though Raul’s beige uniform softens the hue of his skin (em dashes instead of hyphens, sorry no time!) – somewhat – Bardi knows that this uniform, this dusting of respectability, is subject to any stray breeze, like dry sand sprinkled over dark, silty earth.” This scene is followed by one of the clumsiest and most heartbreaking attempts of defiance I’ve ever read.

Invasion of the Daffodils ultimately tells a terrible tale of what happens to an island with so little tolerance it is even written on the faces of people who disappear halfway through the story, like ghosts with the temerity to look down upon the living.

Dino Enrique Piacentini is a third generation Californian who grew up in Los Angeles and lived in San Francisco for 23 years. His stories and essays have been published in Pembroke, Gulf Coast, Confrontation and the Massachusetts Review among other places. He has taught creative writing at both the University of Illinois and the University of Houston. He currently lives in Denver, where he teaches creative writing at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop and the University of Denver’s University College. Invasion of the Daffodils is his fine, daring, perplexing, fantastical and challenging debut novel.