Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (25 page)

The Anatomy Lesson

by Robert I. Katz

Willowgate Press, 228 pages, paperback, 2004

This is the third novel by Robert I. Katz. The first,
Edward Maret
, was a good science-fiction novel, albeit one that was somewhat rough around the edges. His second novel,
Surgical Risk
, marked a shift into the mystery genre, introducing the characters Richard Kurtz (surgeon with a penchant for getting into trouble) and Lew Barent (grizzled, hard-bitten NYPD homicide detective). Again it was a good novel, and again it had minor problems. With
The Anatomy Lesson
, however, Katz finally hits the nail on the head.

The second in the Kurtz and Barent series, this starts off with a grisly practical joke being played at a teaching-hospital Halloween party: some of the props are replaced by genuine body parts, purloined from the cadavers on which the students learn dissection techniques. Soon after, a colleague and friend of Kurtz's, Rod Mahoney, is found murdered, the corpse hideously dismembered in a manner reminiscent of what was done to the hospital cadavers. Can the prank and the murder be related? And what is the connection between them and the growing evidence of a turf war between the drug barons who operate in New York? Once again forced to be reluctant partners in detection, Kurtz and Barent swing into action, assisted on occasion by Kurtz's alluring mistress Lenore.

The novel performs well on the "soap-opera" front – the backdrop of the major characters' ongoing lives. Barent has to learn to like his son-in-law as the pair acclimatize themselves to the pregnancy of Barent's daughter. Kurtz and Lenore move marriageward, despite the disapproval of Lenore's mother. And so on.

It also performs well as a detection – really, as two detections (I'd be giving the game away if I expanded on this). What works particularly well is the way the earlier life of Mahoney, the focal victim, is slowly unraveled: the character whom one assumed to be a stock mystery victim – rather staid, rather boring – becomes progressively more three-dimensional, and is shown to have been, behind the facade, something close to a dashing romantic hero. It's a beautifully handled worked example of the inherent fallacy in our all-too-common assumption that the folks who're today superficially dull old sticks have always been thus.

Of considerable further interest is the way in which Katz manages to blend two fiction traditions in a single novel. As mentioned enigmatically above, in
The Anatomy Lesson
the reader is in effect offered two detections for the price of one. The first of these accords to the traditions of the classic mystery; the second belongs more in the line of the modern crime novel. In theory this should lead to a stylistic clash; in practice, Katz weaves the two skillfully together, so you're rarely conscious of any dichotomy.

If Kurtz and Barent are new to you,
The Anatomy Lesson
offers an ideal introduction, although you may want to pick up
Surgical Risk
first. If you've already read
Surgical Risk
, you'll be delighted by the characters' flowering in this new novel.

—Crescent Blues

Edward Maret

by Robert I. Katz

Willowgate Press, 260 pages, paperback, 2001

Although it's an unorthodox procedure, I'd like to start this review by quoting
Edward Maret
's blurb
in extenso
. I hope my reasons for having done so will become plain a little later on.

Edward Maret was a happy man. He was young, carefree, rich and engaged to be married, but Edward Maret had enemies. His cousin Philip envied him his money, Vincent FitzMichael envied him his fiancee, and Jason Deseret, a man with a dangerous secret, feared that Edward Maret could destroy him.

Six years later, the cyborg corps is humanity's first line of defence against the alien Kliya, and cyborg AX-17 is one of the best – swift, skilled and deadly. His memories stolen from him, his face and body mutilated beyond recognition, cyborg AX-17 has no choice but to obey the orders of his human masters, until AX-17 is unexpectedly set free, and Edward Maret returns, to seek revenge.

This blurb, unlike so many blurbs, offers what is actually a pretty accurate summary of the novel's plot.

But ...

The "but" is that, reading the blurb, you'd probably expect the novel to be a space action-adventure yarn, something a bit like
RoboCop
, perhaps, except with space-opera trimmings. In fact,
Edward Maret
is not really that at all, which may come as a disappointment to
Battlestar Galactica
-gawpers but should be a delightful surprise to most other readers. It is not flawless – a secondary element of the final plot resolution seems somewhat contrived for melodramatic effect (it involves Devil-worshipping aliens), and the novel's structure as a whole has an aura of slight precariousness without ever quite falling apart – but it is certainly absorbing reading.

Why? Because Katz has filled it with interesting
ideas
. Again, that's a statement that might mislead, so let me immediately qualify it. Many of the ideas are not especially sciencefictional. Some of them are: for example, Katz's snapshot portrayals of differing alien and far-future-human cultures as his protagonist wanders the spaceways in the book's central section hold a good deal of interest (although the culture with which he populates Sparta, the planet on which much of the tale unfolds, is somewhat pedestrian, as if intended only as dutiful backdrop). But many of the novel's passages – either integral or digressionary – are concerned with the working out of
philosophical
ideas: ethical, moral and religious.

This is not to say that the text is any way stuffily didactic – indeed, it's refreshingly well written and flows along with scarce a moment of turgidity. Instead, what Katz has done is to take some basic formulae from science fiction and use them to construct a skeleton upon which he can drape a rather unexpected flesh, with the result that the book has superficially the affect of light reading yet is constantly titillating the intellect. That, of course, is what
all
science fiction is supposed to do, but in fact is what very much of it does not.

It's a difficult task that Katz has taken on, and as noted he doesn't do it with complete, 100% success. (There are also a few irritating flaws that should have been picked up by his copy-editor.) Yet he comes very close – certainly close enough that
Edward Maret
, even though it won't keep you up into the small hours feverishly turning the pages, is an extremely rewarding piece of work.

If you want stark shoot-em-up entertainment then this is not the book for you – there is surprisingly little dramatic action of that sort, despite the blurb, and Maret's time as cyborg AX-17 occupies only a small portion of the narrative. If you prefer your sf thoughtful and more deeply involving, however,
Edward Maret
can be recommended ... and Katz, whose first novel this is, is certainly an author to watch.

—Infinity Plus

Surgical Risk

by Robert I. Katz

Willowgate Press, 240 pages, paperback, 2002

One night in a Manhattan hospital obstetrician Sharon Lee is murdered. Found wandering nearby is a psychiatric patient who bears scratch-marks; traces of his tissues are found under the dead woman's fingernails. It seems an open and shut case, yet NYPD Detective Barent isn't so sure – and neither is surgeon Richard Kurtz, dragged into the case initially because he once had a passionate affair with Lee but kept on as unofficial hospital snoop because of past connections with law enforcement.

Soon after, Lee's apartment is burgled, and the burglar is later found murdered. There's a gangster connection, and Barent sets out to probe it, aware it may be just a red herring. At first he gets nowhere: potential informants either know nothing,
say
they know nothing, have disappeared or are inconveniently dead. But at last cracks begin to open and shenanigans ensue.

Willy-nilly, Kurtz and his love life become embroiled in those shenanigans, and he it is who spots the vital clue that leads to the busting of a criminal conspiracy and the solution to the murder.

This is a very smoothly written mystery, with likable central characters. The elegance of the writing and the frequently extremely funny but always entertaining conversations of the surgeons around the operating table pull the reader along very satisfactorily. The final unveiling of the murderer comes only after a couple of very effective twists. The private lives of Barent and Kurtz are involving too; the cop's daughter is getting married, and mother and daughter are conspiring to create a
Father of the Bride
-style extravaganza of a wedding; the surgeon is deeply fond of girlfriend Kathy, but not so deeply that he is not tempted by the allure of svelte blonde Lenore, encountered on a solo Mexican holiday and then later back in New York – Kurtz's vacillation between the two women is especially well done.

The novel's only problem is the plethora of minor characters: it's hard to keep track of who they all are. This does dilute the effectiveness of those plot twists a little; hard to be startled by the revelation that it was Smith who did
this
and Jones who did
that
when you can't remember who either Smith or Jones actually
is
.

That reservation aside, however,
Surgical Risk
is a thoroughly enjoyable read, with exactly the right blend of suspense, bamboozlement and humor. It is also substantially tougher-nosed than many a mystery novel: the gangster villains are very convincing in their nastiness, and overall there is no sense of coziness about the novel's worldview. Uncomfortable topics such as anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry are addressed directly. And the surgical descriptions are satisfyingly revolting; this reviewer will never be able to look a rectum in the eye again without a shudder.

Surgical Risk
is billed as "A Kurtz and Barent Mystery", implying that it is the start of a series. Further volumes are awaited eagerly.

—Crescent Blues

Right to Life: A Novella and Two Stories

by Jack Ketchum

Gauntlet/Edge, 158 pages, paperback, 2002; the novella
Right to Life
first published 1998

Sara Foster, who years ago lost her six-year-old son in a tragic accident, and who lost her husband too, inadvertently becomes pregnant during her affair with the married Greg Glover; as Greg declines to destroy his family, they decide on an abortion. As they make their way to a Manhattan abortion clinic Sara is abducted into a car by Stephen and Kath Teach, two declared Right to Lifers, and drugged into unconsciousness.

When she awakes she is in the New Jersey basement cum torture chamber of the Teaches. Kath is barren. The couple intend to secrete Sara until she comes to term, then keep the baby as their own; Sara herself will not be permitted to survive the delivery. In the meantime she is repeatedly tortured – physically, mentally and in due course sexually – primarily by Stephen, who is a sadistic psychopath with less interest in the baby than in the sexual sadism, but also to a lesser extent by Kath, who despite a sympathetic exterior is in fact little better. Of course, in the end Sara turns on her tormentors and bloodily exacts her revenge ...

And that's more or less the whole plot of Jack Ketchum's short novel
Right to Life
, which seems to have been inspired in some part by the ghastly case of the UK husband-and-wife sexual psychopaths Fred and Rosemary West. The tale is really quite well told, but one's left with the uneasy feeling that its subtext is a bit of a mess – perhaps intentionally so. Yes, there are Right to Lifers whose life-sanctifying principles don't stop them from maiming, shooting and lethally bombing, and on the face of it the tale might seem allegorical of this miserable illogicality; yet the allegory soon falls apart as it becomes evident Stephen has no real interest at all in the baby – indeed, he at one point wonders if the baby might be disposed of along with its mother – but is driven solely by the urge to gratify his sado-sexual urges, while Kath is looking forward gleefully to the goriness of performing an unnecessary and fatal Caesarian for the delivery.

So, sans subtext, all we're really left with is a tale of crazed inhumanity – the pro- and anti-abortion debate being just a Maguffin – yet it's a gripping enough narrative to brush off such misgivings until after the reading is done.

Of the two stories appended in this edition, "Brave Girl" is beautifully told and sucks the reader in with enviable skill, only to suffer from the lack of a real ending – it just stops – and "Returns" is a very pleasing bit of whimsy, a very short ghost story of immense appeal to cat-lovers everywhere.

This elegantly produced volume will serve as an introduction to those unfamiliar with Ketchum's work and as a gap-filler for Ketchum completists. For the rest of us, it's a pleasant enough way of passing a train journey.

—Infinity Plus

Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

Hodder & Stoughton, 516 pages, hardback, 1998

Jo, the wife of successful thriller writer Mike Noonan, dies suddenly and still quite young from a brain aneurysm. In grief, he suffers a dramatic case of writer's block, but is able to get by for a few years by covertly publishing novels he'd written earlier but never told his publisher about. But then the "spares" run out, and he must, somehow, get his act together to write something new. In desperation, he decides to go to the summer home he and Jo had in a remote part of Maine, a house he hasn't found the courage to visit since Jo's death. On arrival he finds that the house, called Sara Laughs in honour of a local turn-of-the-century blues singer called Sara Tidwell, is haunted. Also he meets and falls in love with widowed Mattie Devore and her three-year-old daughter Kyra; Mattie's vastly wealthy father-in-law Max is determined to get custody of the child, and so Mike steps in to help Mattie fight him through the courts. In so doing, Mike begins to unearth a truly ghastly tale of what happened one summer's day ninety years ago to Sara Tidwell, and the terrible revenge her spirit has been exacting from the descendants of her murderers.

King has always been a masterful page-turner – even his weakest books are usually immensely readable. But through most of his long career he has rarely aspired to be more than that – which is an observation rather than a criticism, because there's many a respected literary novelist who could improve his or her art by learning a little of King's craft. At the same time there has been the feeling that, in books like
Rose Madder
and
Insomnia
, King himself has become a little impatient with the self-imposed shackles of "mere" craftsmanship.

With
Bag of Bones
he's finally made the breakthrough, and it is as a serious literary novel that this book should be judged. That's not to say that he has lost any of his ability to tell a spellbinding tale – and this is one of his very best, a stunningly good and often very frightening ghost story that owes much to the tradition of M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and, to name a modern example, the excellent Jonathan Aycliffe. But what makes this book so intensely gripping is something more than that – and more, too, than the fine, perceptive and often disturbingly funny writing: it is the superb depiction of character and situation. We
care
about these people; we share with Mike Noonan his slow discovery that his loss of Jo is at an even more profound depth than he or we could have imagined, that she was a finer person than even he had realized; and lordie do we come to share his growing love for Mattie and the child Kyra. And all this is achieved through the use of a very difficult narrational gambit: although Mike is our narrator, our storyspinner, and thus is present on every page and is the eye through which we see, he is not in fact the central character – that role is shared by Kyra and Mattie and by the dead Jo and Sara, for this is in part also a novel about women and the male perception of them.

There are various undercurrents in this novel. Inevitably there are aspects of metafiction about it – for King is like his creation a successful novelist (more successful and more prolific than Mike Noonan) and the very title is drawn from a remark by Thomas Hardy to the effect that even the finest fictional character is but a bag of bones when compared to a real person. If King falters anywhere, it is in the handling of these metafictional aspects – a slight failure, seemingly born of timidity. But the most important underlyer is the sense of and deep appreciation of human loss: Jo is lost to Mike and the world, as even more profoundly is Sara, whose songs are available only through interpretations at the hands of others, for no recordings of her survive. Mike's ability to write is lost – ask any writer and you'll be told that this is a true nightmare of the soul. The only loss that can be averted is that of the child Kyra, who is sought by both the living and the dead.

This is a very powerful book, and a fine example of what the late-twentieth-century novel can do. And should be doing more often.

—Samhain