Miracle Creek

by Angie Kim

Pak had planned to call the business “Miracle Creek Wellness Center,” but seeing the chamber, the way it resembled a miniature submarine, she’d said, “Miracle Submarine.” She’d turned to Pak and said it again. “Miracle Submarine—that’s what we should call it.” He’d smiled and said that was a good name, a better name,

I did HBOT in real life with one of my kids for his ulcerative colitis. The first time he saw the chamber (he was 4 yrs old), he pointed to it and said, “Look, it’s a submarine.” We’d just watched the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine for family movie night, and the HBOT chamber looked just like that, except it was blue. So we called it our “Blue Submarine” for the rest of that summer. When I wrote this novel years later, I titled it Miracle Submarine, and that’s how thousands of ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) were printed. We got feedback from some early readers that the “submarine” in the title made them think it might be a military thriller, or perhaps a children’s book (like the Yellow Submarine), so we changed it to Miracle Creek, which is ironic given this highlighted passage. I named the town (and the creek) Miracle Creek as an homage to Dennis Lehane’s MYSTIC RIVER, which is one of my favorite books of all time. I outlined that book to learn from its great structure and plot points when I decided that I wanted to write a novel, so I wanted to pay tribute to it somehow.