Review of Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

I haven’t dreamed of flying for a while.

A young woman’s life, in the grip of a dangerous obsession. Sleeping in airports. Riding planes for the thrill of the ascent. Anti-social behavior. Her workplace endeavor is appropriate. She scrubs the toxic waste from virtual platforms, while she pollutes the airways with her lust in her off-time. When she gets off work, she gets on a plane and then she gets off on the plane and then gets off the plane… And then back on and so on.
I hope the author writes about a woman who loves roller coasters next. That book needs to be written. I was drawn to this novel due to its spiritual affinity with Ballard’s masterpiece, Crash. The propulsive force of human desire is the centerpiece here. While this isn’t as twisted as that novel, it is convulsive in its depiction of a tortured soul coping through a modern landscape of social facade and stifled desperation. Its darkness is mingled with a fine texture of humorous romance. Linda stumbles through life and relationships, unable to loosen her grip on her passionate pass time.
Just don’t look at other people on airplanes. You will rarely be rewarded with pleasant revelations. The unspoken rule is that you are supposed to overwrite the unpleasantness in your mind of being thrust through airless atmosphere at 800 mph for hours on a stretch while perched upon a stained, juddering deflated cushion like a rag doll on an unstable shelf, while gasping the exhalations of perspiring passengers, one of whom is oozing over your armrest.
Dancing with fate in the sky, Linda searches for meaning outside her addiction. And in plane terms she fails in finding herself time after time, always hearkening back to her sky daddy, who is a knowing vehicle, idling on the runway of her mind. Amid the quiet trauma of her life, she was swept up and never let down, suspended in that ozone of despair.
And in her cramped, unclean apartment, to the soundtrack of screams and prayers, she relives her adrenaline fixes through visual stimuli and rabbit-hole research. When funds permit, she cherishes each tussle with turbulence like a heart-jostling embrace. Her frolics are profoundly unsettling, because the author bolsters her character’s unenviable mentality with an astounding knowledge of aircraft history, the aerial tragedies she dreams of, and their concurrent mental reenactments. These sequences, where the fateful failures of technology force upon unwilling passengers a conspiracy of fiery doom, are truly startling, especially for the aerophobic. Linda aspires toward a cleansing inferno. And not unlike Alyssa Nutting’s unswerving protagonist from Tampa, is powerless in the grip of her vice.

Her insistence that the universe is acting through her visualization boards is an intriguing device. This undeveloped spirituality is prevalent now, where people call upon “the universe” as if that were a deity or a divine agent, as if to paint over old, time-hardened cultural beliefs with fresh superstitions. Reliance on this voodoo assuages her guilt and sparks the reckless actions she revels in until, hopeless without consummation of her death-drive, she repeats the patterns of one who seeks and cannot find, groping through the diminished returns of her fixation, striving for a more perfect expression of her longing, which is the only way to perfect the flawed self for unification with her soulmate, in the Platonic sense of “other half,” through a coupling, mechanical, spiritual, and physical.