Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (26 page)

The Knotted Cord

Alistair Kinnon

BeWrite, 316 pages, paperback, 2002

Almost a decade ago, cop Martin Nicols, working in a small Ontario town some tens of miles outside Toronto, failed to solve the murder of young S&M rent-boy Billy. He gave in to pressure from his superiors to let the "obvious culprit", Billy's regular client Frank Taylor – self-confessedly guilty of pedophile conduct but, Nicols believed, innocent of killing the prostitute he loved – plea-bargain manslaughter and take the rap. Now a string of similar murders bedevils Toronto, and Nicols realizes he might at last catch Billy's murderer.

But again people in high places obstruct him, trying once more to pin the crimes on Taylor, recently released. Nonetheless, Nicols presses on, uncovering once more the hideous details of a pedophile sexual-slavery network that spreads into all levels of Canadian society.

He also has to cope with his own guilt. If only he had persisted in the teeth of political pressure, he might have caught this sadistic killer ten years ago and thus saved the lives of several of society's most unfortunate. Now that he's based in a new force, with new superiors, it's a pusillanimity he'll not repeat.

In
The Knotted Cord
we follow both of Nicols's investigations, with the "flashback" occupying about two-thirds of the text – perhaps an artificial distinction, since the "flashback" is really part of the current case.

This book functions pretty well as a sort of double police procedural, despite some clumsy writing; a further distraction is that the text reads as if (although this may well not have been the case) the book was originally written as set in Britain and then revised to effect a relocation to Ontario. There's also an annoying frequency of typos, short pages (the typesetter's widows/orphans program needs adjustment), jumbled word-orders and errors of the "lead" for "led" variety.

All these criticisms seem oddly trivial – as, indeed, do the book's "mystery" aspects – when set beside the element that gives
The Knotted Cord
its explosive strength: its unflinching examination of the sexual exploitation of kids both for the profit of the slavers and the pleasure of the clients. The details of the criminal schemes and activities have all the authenticity of a documentary account. Hugh McCracken, using here the nom de plume Alistair Kinnon, has worked extensively with troubled teenagers in Canada, and this bolsters the sense that what we're reading is factually based. In this sense
The Knotted Cord
is a crusading book, and I would say an important one.

A further point. Although the author is as tough as any on pedophilia, and especially on pedophilic exploitation, he is also tough enough to take an unpopular stance and present convicted pedophile Taylor as a redeemable character. Having served his sentence and now living in a stable gay relationship, Taylor actively contributes to the hunt for the exploiters and the killer – in other words, has joined the forces of the good.

Despite the flaws noted, this very powerful novel is much recommended.

—Crescent Blues

The Moth Diaries

by Rachel Klein

Bantam, 256 pages, paperback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in 2002

This is one of the subtlest vampire stories you could ever hope to come – subtle to the point that at the book's end it is left up to the reader to decide whether
The Moth Diaries
is a vampire story at all. In other words, it is one of that delicious – and rare – breed of fictions that has been dubbed the "fantasy of perception": there is certainly fantastication here, but that is not to say the events described were themselves other than mundane; they may have been fantasticated by the observer, the protagonist.

The observer in
The Moth Diaries
is an adolescent girl who has been sent to an exclusive and very peculiar single-sex boarding school; except for a brief prologue and epilogue added by her in much later life, the text consists entirely of her schooldays diary. In it we learn of her various friendships and enmities – all seemingly transitory – with her fellow pupils, and in particular of her largely unrecognized crush on her room-mate Lucy and her hatred and fear of the new kid across the hall, Ernessa. Assuredly there's a lot that's weird and possibly detestable about Ernessa, but Ernessa's true – if again unrecognized – crime in the eyes of the narrator is that her company is significantly more alluring to Lucy than is the narrator's own.

The other girls sense Ernessa's strangeness, too, but also that allure. She could perhaps be regarded as a personification of the adult sexuality about which they're all so insatiably curious, which they are so tantalized and attracted by, which they are so eager to experiment with for themselves, and yet which they also fear because of its unknownness and its obvious dangers. Together they spy on Ernessa to see if they can solve the perceived mystery of who – or indeed what – she is, and no one is more assiduous in this than our narrator. Even when one of the girls falls off the school roof to her death during one of these spying expeditions the narrator is not long distracted from her partially successful quest.

For she has a specific reason to unpick the riddle of Ernessa. Lucy, the girl with whom she is in love – even if she cannot admit this is the case – but who has wearied of her and instead fallen under Ernessa's spell, is afflicted by an undiagnosable illness that seems to be sapping her very life away. The diarist's claims to the school authorities that Ernessa is a spiritual vampire who is sucking Lucy's life from her are of course ignored as the nonsensical ravings of a disturbed pubescent; yet it is true that when Lucy is away from school, and thus from Ernessa, her health recovers, but that when she returns she goes once more into decline ...

Klein deliberately uses an almost flat style of narrative, eschewing linguistic melodramatics in favor of something that's much more menacing – and much more engrossing, for this is a novel it soon becomes extremely hard to put down. Written with this beautiful restraint, and functioning at a number of allegorical levels,
The Moth Diaries
is a book you'll almost certainly want to read more than once.

—Crescent Blues

The Buzzing

by Jim Knipfel

Vintage, 260 pages, paperback, 2003

Here is a book that's potentially enormous fun but which, through flaccid, sloppy writing, poor characterization and a general lack of coherent focus offers a major disappointment.

Roscoe Baragon was once a prominent investigative journalist, but now he's old, alcoholic and complacent. His previous achievements having brought him to the prestigious (well, sort of) newsroom of the
New York Sentinel
, he has gravitated towards what's popularly called the Kook Beat because reporting on the conspiracy theorists doesn't require him to get off his (literally) fat butt to go out and do any real journalism. He's the ear of choice for all the crazies of New York, of whom there is no short supply; they fax, phone or e-mail him the wildest products of their own persecution complexes, and these he translates with minimal effort into "news" stories. The job is a matter of money for as near to nothing as Baragon can get it.

But then a cluster of conspiracy theories start making a sort of synergistic sense, especially when taken together with genuine news reports coming in from around the world of multiple earthquakes along a line associated with no known plate margin, of a Japanese fishing boat being struck by a US nuclear sub, and so on. His own best friend and not-quite-girlfriend, the seemingly equally alcoholic Emily, is something in forensics at the city morgue, and she leaks him the story of a drifter found strangled in a nearby park whose corpse, on arrival at the morgue, proved to be so radioactive, through and through, that he'd have died within hours had he not been strangled first.

All of this – plus the contents of
Godzilla vs Megalon
(1973), one of the lesser of Toho's offerings – Baragon weaves into the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories. It can be nothing more than lunatic ravings, of course, and so his editor spikes it and fires him; yet in
The Buzzing
's closing pages we find indications that Baragon is right ...

Not the most original of plots, but no one would care about that if the conspiracy theories themselves were sufficiently imaginative, if the one-liners came fast, furious and witty, if there were a bizarre cast of larger-than-life characters, if the writing were full of flair or sophistication, or ...

Instead the writing is clumsy and leaden. There
are
a few laugh-out-loud moments, but not many grins between them; one has the feeling of ploughing on through a prose wasteland hoping that someone will have dropped a rose by the path that hasn't had time to wither. Baragon is a reasonably drawn character, and possibly his hostile editor and one of the theorists, Nastacia, just about scrape the grade as well; but all the others, surprisingly including Emily, are mere names on the page. As for the conspiracy theories, surely a potentially rich lode for entertainment, these, save alone the one that Baragon himself painstaking constructs over the course of 200-plus pages, lack the fastidious complexity – the careful plaiting of different data strands to produce a perfectly self-consistent tapestry of delusion and misinformation – that is essential for the full fascination and delight of this quasi-literary form. One has the constant feeling that Knipfel hasn't bothered to do enough research to familiarize himself with the whole ethos of the conspiracy theory, and has assumed that just coming up with a few crazy notions will humour the reader.

Some of the descriptions of New York life are evocative; overall, though,
The Buzzing
is somewhat dull where it should sparkle.

—Infinity Plus

From the Corner of His Eye

by Dean Koontz

Bantam, 729 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 2001

Dean Koontz is probably, right now, the most underestimated writer at work in the field of fantastic literature. The reasons are not hard to fathom. Unlike most authors, who go through the learning process before they ever see print, Koontz had the misfortune – although of course it must have seemed far from that to him at the time – to find publishers for his early, clumsy attempts, which, again unfortunately for his status within the field, sold pretty well; one of them,
Demon Seed
(1973), an sf novel of risible implausibility, was successfully made into an even worse movie (1977). His movie novelization
The Funhouse
(1980; initially published as by Owen West) is another to be recalled with the wrong sort of shudder. Through these and other books he gained a dubious reputation – and good sales figures – as a sort of poor man's Stephen King, a reputation that ignored the fact that he was slowly carving out his own individual and quite distinctive niche: his novels, which got steadily better, grew less like horror novels and less even than like dark fantasies, instead becoming what might best be described as dark technofantasies. Horrors there might be aplenty, and they might seem to be rooted in the fantastic, but almost always there was a sub-sciencefictional rationalization somewhere. By the time of a book like
Mr. Murder
(1993) – which is not far short of a fine novel – he had more or less mastered his art. It can be read as a technofantasy response to Stephen King's
The Dark Half
(1989): in both books the central character is a writer being persecuted by a doppelgänger, but in Koontz's novel the doppelgänger has been
manufactured
rather than generated from the psyche.

Bestsellerdom greeted many of his novels of the later 1980s and especially the 1990s, but by that time many readers of fantastic literature had given up on him, having been more than once bitten by his earlier efforts. This was a great shame.

And it would be a great shame were such readers to miss
From the Corner of His Eye
, because, although not blemish-free, this is a good novel by anybody's standards. Although not as elegantly polished, it has the air of the novel that John Irving, perhaps, might write were he ever to stray into Dean Koontz territory.

Most of the book is set in the latter part of the 1960s. Harrison White, a black preacher, writes a long and powerful radio sermon based on the little-regarded disciple Saint Bartholomew. This sermon provides important motivation for much of the plot, as is slowly revealed. For example, a rehearsal of it is playing in the background as psychopath Junior Cain is brutally raping the younger of White's two virginal daughters, Seraphim; she dies bearing the resultant child, a girl who, christened Angel, is adopted by her elder sister Celestina. Although Cain barely listens to the tape, the name Bartholomew imprints itself upon his subconscious. Elsewhere, at about the time of Angel's birth, the broadcast sermon much affects Joe Lampion, whose wife Aggie is expecting their first-born; he dies in a car smash while taking her to hospital for the birth, his dying wish being that the baby, if a boy, be called Bartholomew.

Cain does not stop his psychopathic career at the rape of Seraphim. Less than a year later he moves on to murder, the victim being his fairly recent bride; he fakes her death as an accidental fall from a rickety tower and is awarded millions in an out-of-court settlement by the authorities whose task it should have been to keep the tower in a proper state of repair. Not all are entirely convinced by Cain's explanation, among them his lawyer, Simon Magusson – seemingly seedy but in fact with a moral core – and most particularly a maverick homicide detective, Thomas Vanadium, who can make coins (quarters) disappear in a seemingly sleight-of-hand trick that in fact is real: he has accidentally learned the knack of flicking the coins into parallel universes. (As an aside, this offers a wry counter-explanation of the celebrated Randi-Geller dispute: what if it's not Geller who's doing conjuring tricks but Randi who's performing paranormal feats?) Vanadium hears Cain talking in his sleep, and discovers that the murderer has a subliminal fixation on the name Bartholomew – a fixation that he begins to exploit after Cain has very nearly killed him. Cain, you see, believes that he
has
killed Vanadium, rather than, in actuality, putting him into a months-long coma; and it is because of this false assumption that Cain's psychopathic career begins to unravel; tormented by occasional, deliberately staged glimpses of Vanadium's "ghost", by incongruously "materializing" quarters and by snatches of a meaningful song "spectrally" broadcast into his luxury apartment, he becomes obsessed with the notion that the child born of his rape must have been a boy called Bartholomew, the murder of which infant will bring him release from all the "paranormal" persecution he is suffering.

As they grow through infancy, both Bartholomew – who proves to be a child prodigy – and Angel discover they have Vanadium's ability to interact with parallel universes, only much more so; in Bartholomew's case this becomes even more pronounced after, at the age of three, he must have his eyes surgically removed to halt the spread of retinal cancer. To help him move about without accident, he can let his mind briefly camp in closely similar realities where he was never stricken by the cancer and so still possesses his sight.

Cain is the star of the show. Koontz is obviously irritated by the fallacy perpetuated in almost all serial-killer chillers that serial killers are phenomenally intelligent – all Hannibal Lecters. In real life this is total nonsense: serial killers are almost always pretty dimwitted but their psychopathy leads them to
believe themselves to be
more intelligent by untold orders of magnitude than the "common herd"; this false belief is what leads them to getting caught, usually through repeated acts of thundering stupidity. Koontz, going against the literary trend but more accurately reflecting reality, portrays Junior Cain as an exceptionally stupid and gullible, if at the same time cunning and certainly lucky, psychopath, and he does so through often hilarious, laugh-out-loud satire. Cain has pretensions to Culture, and is completely hoodwinked by the stances of the bad modern-art cliques of the late 1960s: no painting is acceptable to him unless it is utterly hideous, preferably stomach-churningly so, and thus he squanders much of his ill gotten gains on the dire but fashionable artworks produced by idiot poseur Sklent. In his sexual life, Cain, physically handsome but affectingly vile, is convinced of his magnificence as a lover and that he is completely irresistible to women; he is perplexed by the fact that so few of his ex-lovers ever plead with him for a reconciliation and by the way so many of the women lusting after him play the game of pretending to resist, but chooses to dismiss these facts as just quirks of happenstance. And throughout everything he is guided by the ludicrous but bestselling self-help writings of the crackpot guru Cyrus Zedd, which have titles like
Act Now, Think Later
and which advise that one should live always in the future, never in the present or the past. As example, Zedd's prescription for the recovery of lost memories is to stand in a cold shower for as long as it takes, tightly pressing a fistful of ice cubes to the genitalia. Cain discovers that the technique does indeed eventually help him recover a specific lost memory, and thereafter, for some reason, he becomes generally much
better
at not forgetting things. There are other books in Cain's library – almost all purchased from the Book of the Month Club, of which he is inordinately proud to be a member – but somehow he has never quite had the time to read more than a page or two of any of them, obviously believing that, through their very possession, he has transformed himself into Literary Man through some sort of osmotic process.

But Cain is not the only character in this long and much-woven novel to leap out of the page and permanently imprint on the mind. Celestina White is another delightful discovery. A highly talented artist, she becomes successful creating paintings of the type that Cain has learnt to detest and despise: only morons could like paintings that uplift the heart and display brilliant technique, after all. More to the point, having initially, briefly hated the baby whose birth "killed her sister" – the newborn who, while half the offspring of the loved Seraphim must also be half the offspring of the deservedly loathed (but unidentified) rapist – takes her in and sacrifices much to be an ideal mother to her. It might sound as if Celestina could read as a nauseatingly good goodie (and the portrayal of Agnes Lampion does on occasion veer this way), but in fact she emerges as a charming and extremely intelligent woman, someone one wishes one had as a best friend. While it is hard to control a grin of derision, if not outright laughter, when Cain is at centre stage, in Celestina's case it is hard to control a warm grin of affection.

As noted parenthetically, the depiction of the one-woman charity movement Agnes Lampion is less successful, and, oddly, the same can be said for the unkillable cop and retired priest Thomas Vanadium, who really should be the tale's Immutable Force of Good. Perhaps part of it is to do with the name. As will be obvious, there's quite a lot of coding going on in terms of the book's names: Cain, the black Whites, Simon Magusson, Angel, Bartholomew, and so on, and this is by no means limited to the central characters. But Vanadium – harder, of course, than steel ...? It's a highly artificial surname, and the effect is a bit hokey, damagingly so in that it colours our perceptions of the rest of Vanadium's characterization, which would be just on the verge of clichéd caricature even without the name, which pulls it (only slightly) too far in that direction. It's possible, of course, that this was a deliberate gambit on Koontz's part – to set a caricatured Force of Good against his inspiredly caricatured Force of Evil – and certainly in the rest of the novel Koontz displays a sufficiently attuned intelligence that this may very well be the case, but in this instance, at least for this reader, it is a minor irritation rather than an effective literary stratagem.

Fantasy, technofantasy, science fiction, chiller thriller or comedy of manners?
From the Corner of His Eye
is all of these, to a greater or lesser extent. Although it has occasional clumsinesses (almost inevitable in such a very long novel) – the final, inevitable despatch of Junior by the kids is, for example, hurriedly and rather flatly done – these are just about irrelevant in the context of the whole, which is a splendid achievement. Do not be deceived by the book's trumpeted bestseller status, or by the bizarrely misleading blurb, or by any memories you might have (no need for cold showers and ice cubes here) of early experiences with Koontz's novels: give this one a try.

—Infinity Plus