Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (23 page)

Supping with Panthers

by Tom Holland

Little, Brown, 432 pages, hardback, 1996

Recursive fantasy-horror is a dangerous game to play: it can either be lots of fun – as in Mark Frost's
The List of 7
, which mixes Arthur Conan Doyle, Helena Blavatsky, Adolf Hitler and the model for Sherlock Holmes with a hideous occult conspiracy – or it can seem like a routine exercise, an act of literary cleverness.
Supping with Panthers
, which inhabits very much the same territory as Frost's book, is exceptionally well written and contains passages of stunningly vivid imagery, but eventually the confection of Byron, Oscar Wilde, Jack the Ripper, Bram Stoker and others with bloodthirsty vampirism begins to – it is hard to resist the word – coagulate. There are Holmesian echoes here as well – the central character studied at Edinburgh under the same tutor as did Doyle. In fact, after reading about two-thirds of this long book I felt I was eating a stew into which too many ingredients had been put.

To summarize the plot in its most basic form, Dr John Eliot, a specialist in haematology, discovers the truth about vampirism while serving with the British Army in a remote province of India. Once he is back in London, his acquaintances become the victims of vampiristic killings, and he is persuaded to investigate the case. This he does, and in the course of doing so discovers the ghastly truth about himself.

Holland is an extremely good writer, and his depiction of some of the characters – especially Stoker – is fine, but his revelling in the joys of recursiveness stops his tale from being properly told. In the end, I tired of the book even while continuing to admire its many good qualities.

—Samhain

Sense of Evil

by Kay Hooper

Bantam, 352 pages, hardback, 2003

This is the latest offering in Kay Hooper's
Bishop
series based on the premise that the FBI has an underpublicized division of psychic crimefighters, headed by the eponymous psychic and his wife Miranda. The early entries in the series more directly involved these two, and were in their way very engaging; this most recent volume, the sixth, focuses instead on the exploits of more junior agents of the division.

In the small South Carolina town of Hastings there is a serial killer on the loose, taking as his victims beautiful blonde women who are successful in their chosen professions. Hunky Police Chief Rafe Sullivan is at a loss as to how to stop the murders, and is grateful when the FBI sends in one of its top profilers, Isabel Adams. The only trouble is that of course she's beautiful, blonde and successful in her own profession. The pair being almost instantly smitten by each other's charms, Rafe's instincts are to protect the woman he is swiftly coming to love, but all the indications are that she is better able to protect herself than he is. Further, she's not the only member of the FBI's psychic team in town.

Their investigation reveals that not all of the victims have been as pure as the driven snow. They unearth a sordid pattern of sadomasochistic prostitution and probable blackmail – looking at tranquil Hastings, whodathunkit? It soon becomes evident that the killer, who in exhibitionist fashion seems to delight in committing further murders despite the spotlights having been switched on, is fully aware of the danger Isabel represents, and has added her to the list of future targets. But she is of stern stuff, and will not relinquish the pursuit ...

It's obvious from the first pages that Hooper knows her craft – but knows it too well. There's a Prologue that could have come from just about any psychic-serial-killer thriller, and most of the rest of the novel follows much the same pattern: we keep reading because there's no good reason to stop rather than because of any surprises, fresh ideas or thrills. The resolution of the mystery – the revelation of the serial killer's identity – involves such prime hokum that one doesn't know whether to giggle or throw the book at the wall. It's no wonder Hooper embellished the main plot with all the subplotting about kinkiness beneath the town's innocuous surface; these embellishments she handles pretty well, thereby lifting the book from the rut in which it might otherwise have gotten itself irremediably stuck.

Sense of Evil
is not by any means an out-and-out bad book, and in many ways it succeeds in its intention to pass the reader's time. But it seems to be a book entirely without ambition, the literary analog of a completed paint-by-numbers picture hanging on a friend's wall: you can compliment the friend on the skill, patience and care used to apply the colours, but as to the artwork's originality ...

—Crescent Blues

The Program

by Greg Hurwitz

Morrow, 368 pages, hardback, 2004

Your local bookstore is piled high with novels that, however sleekly and professionally they may serve their purpose as nail-bitingly suspenseful thrillers, are essentially no more than empty-headed entertainment. This is no criticism of them: they achieve superbly what it is they set out to do, which is to make you read far later into the night than you should. Thereafter, of course, you forget all about them ... with the eventual result, after you've read a bunch of such entertainments in a row, that you have the embarrassment of picking one of them up and being unable to remember whether or not you've read it.

Nothing could be further from the case with the suspense novels of Greg Hurwitz. What truly distinguishes them from the herd is that not only are they first-rate thrillers, brilliantly eliciting all the requisite pulse-pounding, but that they have subtexts – agendas, even – in which the profounder implications of an ethical or other premise are rigorously thought through. In Hurwitz's previous novel,
The Kill Clause
, protagonist Tim Rackley, unjustly ousted from the US Marshals Service, falls into the hands of a clique dedicated to inflicting capital punishment upon perceived scum who have escaped justice through the exploitation of a flawed and/or corrupt judicial system, which the clique regards as over-liberal. So, too, does an embittered Rackley, and he carries out a few "executions" on the clique's behalf. But then doubts set in, especially when he becomes convinced of one of the targets' innocence; and he discovers he has been manipulated into murder by clique members with a reprehensible secret scheme of their own. The novel's net effect is to offer a critique of popular attitudes toward capital punishment: Rackley is educated into the realization that the death penalty is as vile as the crimes it purports to avenge.

In
The Program
the focus of the subtext seems to be on our preconception that people's religious or quasi-religious beliefs, however asinine, should be respected – should be sacrosanct as a personal matter, and thus immune from criticism. The flaw in such apparently laudable tolerance is that those beliefs may
in themselves
be damaging or indeed dangerous to others. In course of exploring this territory through the medium of Rackley's penetration of a viciously grasping cult, The Program, in order to try to rescue from it the daughter of a wealthy Hollywood producer, Hurwitz provides us with an astonishing amount of fascinating information on the techniques used by such cults first to snare and indoctrinate their victims, then – psychologically, physically, or both – to ensure that it's virtually impossible for said victims ever to escape.

Rackley is lured back into the Marshals Service at the behest of fantastically rich movie producer Will Henning, whose daughter Leah has vanished into The Program. At first Rackley resists, resenting (as he should) the fact that Henning's wealth alone gives the man extra-legal influence; but soon he is caught up in the attempt to counter the devastation the cult is causing to numerous human lives as it uses indoctrinative techniques to separate the gullible from their worldly goods. At the heart of The Program is its leader, the carefully self-recreated Messiah figure T.D. Betters who, surrounded by "handmaidens" and thuggish, vicious bodyguards, is seemingly unassailable by US law; those who lose everything they own to the cult, including most of all their souls, are, after all, supposedly adults of sound mind acting of their own free will. Leah, the initial reason for Rackley's infiltration of the cult, becomes instead – even while he becomes emotionally bonded with the young woman – the tool he might be able to use to bring about the cult's downfall.

Perhaps the most chilling and memorable sections of this always absorbing novel – it constantly runs through one's mind that
The Program
is as effective at snaring people as is the eponymous cult! – are those in which Rackley subjects himself to the cult's induction sessions, secure in the knowledge that he will be able to come through mentally unaffected because of the strength of his own will and the tuition given to him by a broken man who has succeeded in making his escape, albeit at the cost of nearly destroying himself. Rackley's confidence in his own resilience, he finds, may well have been misplaced ...

Of course, the cult turns out to have far more lethal methods at its disposal to keep its adherents in line than merely indoctrination, as Rackley eventually discovers. Even then, because of the inhibiting nature of the laws pertaining to claimed religions, however phony, morally obscene and exploitative these may be, it is difficult to find a way of pinning the murders to the actual perpetrators, the cult's leaders.

As with
The Kill Clause
before it,
The Program
delivers the full-scale edge-of-the-seat-emotional-rollercoaster experience one demands from the very best suspense thrillers, but it's the gritty fibre of its ethico-philosophical underpinning that makes it an unforgettable novel, one that merits rereading. This is
la crème de la crème
indeed.

—Crescent Blues

Timeshift

by Phillip Ellis Jackson

AmErica House, 211 pages, paperback, 2001

"The year is 2416. Mankind is slowly coming to terms with the terrifying reality that, as a race, it is moving toward extinction. Three hundred and fifty years earlier the country divided into two cooperative, but separate nations – the East and West United States. A brief nuclear exchange involving remnants of the old Soviet empire gave rise to a deadly new lifeform – a toxic, self-replicating, indestructible ash."

In the grand tradition of R. Lionel Fanthorpe comes Phillip Ellis Jackson's first novel, heralding what is promised to be a trilogy.

Our descendants live underground, hoping to reclaim their world (which is coextensive with today's USA) through eliminating the ash, a task they hope to accomplish by exploiting the properties of Beta Light. "Beta Light?" you ask with a quizzical crossing of the eyes. Well:

Scientists discovered that after leaving the sun,
Alpha Light
– the spectrum ranging from infrared to ultraviolet – split off and continued on into space while a new, hitherto unknown companion particle,
Beta Light
, was trapped in a sediment-like swirl by the earth's magnetic field. Because of its unique properties, Beta Light acted like a recording film capturing the images of the past exactly as they happened – sights, sounds, everything just as it was. Man could view the past, but not interact with it. Still, it was enough to replay the 3-D holographic images they retrieved, allowing the people of the present to share in a life that once was, and might never again be.

As a wacky-physics sf premise, this is only about one order of magnitude wackier than Bob Shaw's "slow glass", a concept with which, in terms of potential for story development, it can be directly compared. Thanks to advanced technology, people can be sent on "jumps" into the layers of Beta Light that surround the earth rather like the rings of a tree; there they can record the past. The hope is that, by dint of detailed historical research, they can pinpoint the moment in time when either the precursor of that ash was invented as an item in the biological-warfare arsenal or the "cure" for it was invented by the long-dead scientist Audrey York. Or something like that: this is a novel in which it is easy to lose track.

There's not a lot of crime in the 25th century for the obvious reason that "jumps" can be made back to the moment of perpetration and the criminals thereby readily identified.

Paul Thorndyke is the up-and-comer in B.E.T.A., one of the three all-American corporations that control access to Beta Light. A member of the company for only a couple of weeks, he is visibly such a leader and genius that he is asked to stand in for B.E.T.A. boss Scott Hollock as witness of the most important "jump" yet, back to the moment when past US President Peter Haley authorized the development of York's work; if the establishment where that further research was done can only be pinpointed, the reasoning goes, then future "jumpers" can be sent to spy on what went on and thereby discover how to neutralize the killer ash.

Oh, yes, B.E.T.A. stands for Betalight Electromagnetic Technology Applications. The other two companies are P.A.S.T. – "Particle Accelerator Shuttle Transmission" – and T.I.M.E. – "Transitional Insertion Management Enterprise". Each of these three handles a different aspect of the effort to exploit Beta Light. Clearly it'd be a good idea if the three corporations could be unified; and this is the aim of various criminals in high places who realize that the person at the helm of the unified corporation could also be (cackle, cackle, cackle, Mr Bond) the ruler of the world. The high-echelon nasties are assisted in their wheeze by the fact that the brilliant mathematician Harman Bright, who has devised a way of altering Beta Light images (so folk can be framed for crimes they didn't commit, and thus be got out of the way), is not only a brilliant mathematician but a cheery little psychopath: anyone looks as if they're cottoning on to the nefariousness all around and Harman Bright can either snuff them or/and fake up the scene of a snuffing so that the threatening individual is instantly convicted of murder, on Beta Light evidence, and condemned to death.

Here's an odd thing. Throughout the civilized world at the start of the 21st century the US fascination with the death penalty is widely regarded as a noxious practice, a barbaric hangover from earlier ages; and there's much debate even within the country as to its effectiveness and morality. Yet in Jackson's future, a full five hundred years hence, not only is capital punishment still practised, it's inflicted so frequently that it's just taken for granted, despite its complete pointlessness in the society he paints.

Anyway, Jim Robenalt, a pal of Thorndyke's who has cottoned on to the conspiracy, is framed for the murder of Ben Mitchell, a pal of both of them who likewise sniffed out the conspiracy. As a result Robenalt is condemned to die by being irreversibly "jumped" into the past of an hour ago, where he will eventually dissipate, as folk do. This galvanizes Thorndyke, his boss Hollock, Hollock's number one squeeze (who happens to be Secretary of State Lillian "Call Me Lillian" Dorr), Thorndyke's own squeeze Sharla Russell, Thorndyke's mathematician pal Quentin Cottle, Cottle's squeeze Ruth – those women are all first-class citizens with admirable minds, you understand, but for some reason not remotely connected with the fact that they're merely women and sexy as hell fall short of the geniushood displayed by their respective menfolk.

And so the novel rambles on until the conspirators are defeated in a maze of spelling errors, further wacky science and poor proofreading.

There's a good bit, too, marred only by Jackson's ignorance of the fact that nouns ending in "a" are likely to be plurals rather than singulars (throughout the book we're told that "jumpers" must seek out an individual strata of Beta Light, the word "stratum" clearly being, um,
terra incognita
). This good bit occurs when Thorndyke and Russell go to have a meal in a restaurant where customers can call up authentic scenes from the past as ambience (they choose the court of Henry VIII), and it occurs at the top of page 82 where the waiter tells them:

If you have need of any other services, please throw a resin-polymer rib bone at the candelabra in front of the King. You'll strike a sensor pad behind that spot that will signal someone from customer services. Enjoy.

Those four lines are something of an oasis for the reader, alas; if you want to get the best out of this book, rush to page 82 and read that top paragraph again and again and again. Elsewhere we discover how infernally difficult it is for characters actually to
say
their dialogue; by way of compensation they have the ability to chuckle, smile, smirk or laugh not just single words but whole sentences: "'If you don't mind my asking,' Quentin frowned", the words presumably appearing on his wrinkled forehead in Braille.

There are other good bits, but only for the unpardonably vindictive reader. Here's an example of the New Botany:

... A genetically engineered virus-sized organism that can be introduced into the stem cells of plants to migrate to their leaves, then bind with the plant's own genetic material to fundamentally alter its indigenous respiratory process. Instead of simply scrubbing carbon dioxide from the air, the altered plants will take in even the most virulent form of airborne pollution, break it down chemically into harmless components, and then excrete it into the soil where it will remain a harmless constituent of the earth.

"Shitting plants!" shuddered my wife, nervously skirting a potted geranium in our back yard. The New Ecology is not far behind:

What was it they called it? Political correctness? Can you
imagine
actually working under conditions where basic research was so heavily influenced by the personal prejudices of petty politicians who were bound and determined to make science conform to their own preconceived notions? The ozone layer wasn't affected by sunspots and other natural climatic processes ... just aerosol spray cans and old air cooling technology. Well, we stopped the spray cans and changed cooling systems, but the ozone layer kept getting thinner. So we curtailed fossil fuel emissions and other byproducts of technological advancement, but still the problem worsened. It was only when the solutions became more and more perverse, and their anticipated beneficial effects farther and farther away, that the public finally began to see the pronouncements for what they were – tools to advance a private, social agenda.

Sort of makes you wonder why the commie bastards in authority are so keen to curtail your fundamental American freedom to light cigarettes in gas stations, doesn't it? And it makes you wonder about the ignorance of a mindset that has failed to notice the action taken on "aerosol spray cans and old air cooling technology" was a brilliant success, reversing the dangerous depletion of the ozone layer. Or that thinks the need to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions has anything to do with the ozone layer. And, as for "tools to advance a private, social agenda", I have yet to find of these frightwing antiscientific conspiracy theorists able to identify plausibly exactly what that agenda might be.

Now, apart from the candelabrum/candelabra and stratum/strata problems, and the problem of the characters mystically smirking and grinning all those words, there are a number of others. For example, things emerge from the "bowls" of the earth, someone "pours" over a manuscript, "jumpers" are shot into the "breech of history" – I promise I'm not pulling your leg here – and all in all one begins to think that perhaps the publisher didn't bother putting a copy-editor through the text; at a level even below that, quite often there are double letter-spaces between words. Of course, it would be unjustifiably sceptical to suggest that the web-based publisher AmErica (www.publishamerica.com) was merely a vanity press economizing on the editing in order to make itself more effectively profitable.

Rummaging through the more cobwebbed recesses of his memory, your reviewer recalled the time about a year ago when AmErica was actively soliciting freelance editors and copy-editors to work with their authors; offered in lieu of a fee was a royalty share and so your reviewer, reckoning that each author could have only so many moms, abruptly lost interest. It may be that he was not alone in this or there may have been some other, completely unrelated reason, but AmErica no longer boasts to the authors it recruits about the advantages of having copy-editors. Quite the contrary, the press has new strengths:

Furthermore, you are always
the intellectual owner of the book
. No one is allowed to tamper with the text after you have made it final. Digital printing makes it technically possible to make changes to texts at any time, therefore your contract protects you against such outside tampering. You are your book's creator, writer, and owner.

Then, last but not least, you are entitled to having fun! It is important that you enjoy being a published writer. To have your book out and have other people buy and read it, is pure joy. It makes you feel proud and fulfilled. Your name and face are in the newspaper, people discuss your work and are impacted by what you wrote: all that is sheer pleasure. Enjoy it!

In other words, a great advantage of publishing your book with AmErica is that you won't have some clown correcting the spelling without your permission – or, in fact, at all. But at least it's obvious from the rest of the site that potential authors are not expected to pay for publication; one suspects it may be rather easy to gain acceptance of your book at AmErica, but at least there's none of the nonsense other, similar organizations promulgate about it being "fair" that authors "contribute to production costs".

Over the decades, this reviewer has sometimes wondered about the advantages of publishers having copy-editors. To be sure, having a paradigm of the trade like Nancy Webber or Katrina Whone or Lydia Darbyshire going through your text is a great boon; my bacon has been often saved. At the same time, not all copy-editors meet those same standards.

All such doubts about the advisability of using copy-editors were banished on reading
Timeshift
. This is a fairly short novel (211 pages, big print), yet it took me a long time to read because it is – to doff my aura of demure charity for just a moment – a mess. Struggling through the last forty pages or so was an ever-slowing task made possible only by the thought that the alternative was helping my wife re-wallpaper the landing. If you ignore the bad science and the bad grammar and the bad spelling and the bad characterization and ... But you can't.

This reviewer has no wish to be unnecessarily cruel, but here is a book that should never have been published. That it has been – and that there is a sequel on the way – is a cause for great depression.

Or is it?

Like it or not – and most of the big publishers don't – there's a justified air of excitement at the moment about the "new publishing". Thanks to advances in printing technology, small presses are proliferating: it now costs only a fraction of what it did a mere decade ago to set oneself up as a publisher. At the same time, the big commercial houses have been forming themselves into ever-larger conglomerates with a redefined editorial brief: where once there was the faith that a good book would bring in the pennies, now there is the belief that only a strong media-related hook will make a genre-sf novel sell. The folly of this notion is symptomatized not just by the fact that, six months after publication, these sf novels are crowding out the remainder tables at Barnes & Noble but by the difficulty InfinityPlus's US Reviews Editor has in finding reviewers to take them off his hands – in other words, the difficulty he has even giving them away.

By contrast, what the new small presses are releasing is often very exciting.
Timeshift
is at the bottom end of the garbage pile, to be true, but it's not actually much worse – if for quite different reasons – than much of the stuff coming out of the commercial houses at the moment. Perhaps the price we have to pay for seeing good, un-commercially-adulterated novels from the small presses is the occasional
Timeshift
. If that's the case it's a price worth paying.