“The Octopus Murders”
By Naomi Klouda; Cardamom Press, 2026; 124 pages; $12.99.
In under two years, Homer’s Naomi Klouda has quietly emerged as one of Alaska’s finer authors, finding several places to locate herself in the state’s literary landscape. Prolific and unusually diverse, Klouda has thus far penned no two books alike.
Among them are “The Alaska Glacier Dictionary,” a nonfiction history and popular science volume about how the state’s glaciers were formed and why they bear their present names.
She also updated Ann Chandonnet’s classic work, “On the Trail of Eklutna,” returning to print that memorable history of the tiny Native village resting just to the north of metropolitan Anchorage.
And then there’s her delightful young adult novel “Anna’s Whale.” This book explored the environmental questions raised by a whale beaching itself on a coastal Alaskan village through an array of well-developed and thoroughly believable characters. All of them, with their varied approaches to the situation, are painted as complex individuals with differing but understandable motivations, and never as stereotypes to be knocked down in service of an agenda.
Now Klouda has turned her attention to the mystery genre. Or at least sort of. In her brief novella “The Octopus Murders,” the standard trope of a dead body is merely the impetus for a story about small towns and well-kept secrets, and the ways our pasts remain inescapable. And as she did with “Anna’s Whale,” Klouda does so with an array of flawed but sympathetic characters whose quiet lives are upended by an unexpected event.
In two ways, “The Octopus Murders” does echo “Anna’s Whale.” Both are set in fictional coastal Alaska villages, and both begin with bodies washed up on the shore. From there the resemblances pretty much cease. The body discovered in the tiny fishing hamlet of Grayling Cove is human, not cetacean. And while the whale that lands in Anna’s imagined community of Sunavik yet lives, the man found pushed by the tide onto the sand is very much dead.
The man is named Yuri Polinski, a fairly recent arrival in the isolated settlement accessible only by boat or seaplane, the sort of place where everyone knows everyone and, as the book’s narrator George Vanderhoff tells us, there dwells “a collection of loners, voicelessly bound by social contract to leave one another be.”
Of course, the villagers can’t let the deceased Yuri be. Not much happens there after all. Yuri is dead in the first sentence, the state troopers are on their way, and George is sitting around drinking whiskey-spiked coffee with his fellow members of the Social Security Club. Along with our main protagonist, these include his good friend Tom, a woman named Lill responsible for the swill in their mugs, and Lill’s husband Sam, who’s well into the latter stages of dementia.
The arriving troopers are puzzled by the death, but the one certainty is murder. Yuri was broadly disliked in the town owing to his occupation. He went out into Boulder Bay, upon which Grayling Cove sits, to harvest ink from resident octopuses with a hypodermic needle before returning them to the sea. The ink he sold to cooks and artists in the Lower 48, drawing a more than tidy income.
For residents of Grayling Cove, this was unconscionable behavior, and it isn’t a stretch to think that one of them might have considered it enough to take the life of the local offender of community mores.
Seeking his own answers, which he believes involve the octopuses, George boats out to the rocks where Yuri engaged in his unscrupulous business. There he finds a knife, prompting him to call the troopers. While awaiting their arrival, he notices nearby octopuses engaged in unusual behavior. The normally solitary animals are clustered together, carefully watching him and the quickly arriving authorities.
As the knife is given the usual treatment for evidence, George, stuck on the tiny island due to his finding it, goes wandering about and finds an object the creatures are guarding: Yuri’s watch. Then he stumbles on something even more alarming. A second body, a man in a wetsuit who appears to have been killed by the nearby blade.
The case is expanding. And since he’s the one who located the second corpse and two crucial pieces of evidence, the result of returning to the scene of the crime perhaps, George becomes a person of interest.
Readers could be forgiven for thinking this is going to develop into a standard detective potboiler, and that George will heroically uncover the culprit behind the slayings. They would be wrong, but that’s OK.
Klouda is instead gently pushing the story into a novel direction. George, recognizing that octopuses are fairly intelligent animals capable of remembering faces and learning to use tools, concludes that the ones Yuri had been snatching from the sea for ink had banded together to kill him in revenge. And that they might have used the knife to commit the second murder, a man named Rick Dewar, a seasonal fisherman and part-time diver known to explore Boulder Bay from the city of Jonesville, located across the water.
Everyone in Grayling Bay thinks George is a kindly man, but they wonder if he’s gone mad. Meanwhile he’s haunted by his own secrets, ones not revealed until midway through the story, and which compel him to find an answer. These secrets drive the book’s true theme of how our pasts remain inescapable no matter how far we run, and how decades-gone incidents can continue to influence present day actions.
To reveal more is to give it away, and I don’t want to do this. Suffice to say that Klouda, who has yet to err as an author, has, with “The Octopus Murders,” produced her best work yet. Original, captivating, and peopled with lovable characters. Where she goes from here remains to be seen, but if her recent past gives any indication, it will be in yet another direction. And given her track record, she’ll do it well.
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