Tag Archives: Thriller

March 8, 2024 · 12:01 am

The Future by Naomi Alderman

book cover

The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.

Love is the mind killer.

So what would you do if your super-secret software gave you the alert? End times are afoot. Time to scoot! If you are like most of us, you might seek our your nearest and dearest to see the world out together. But what if you are one of the richest people on the planet? Well, in that case, you would have prepared a plan, an escape, a plane, supplies, a bunker somewhere safe. Buh-bye, and off they go. The they in this case includes three billionaires, the heads of humongous tech companies, some years in the not-too-distant future, Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik, and Ellen Bywater.

They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it…They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies. – from the LitHub interview

What if you were the number one assistant to one of these folks, or the less-than-thrilled wife of another, or the ousted former CEO and founder of a third one, maybe the gifted child of one? You might have been spending your time trying to see what you could do to mitigate the vast harm these mega-corporations have done to the planet. These are Martha Einkorn, Lenk’s #2, Selah Nommik, Zimri’s Black British wife, Alex Dabrowski, founder and former CEO of the company now headed by Ellen, and Badger, Ellen’s son.

“Margaret [Atwood] has very much covered how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer doing that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better, and what are the avenues we can pursue.” – from the AP interview

BTW, Atwood mentored Alderman.

What if you were attending a conference in Singapore, having recently met one of group B above for an interview, and gotten entangled in an unexpected way, but now find yourself in the vast mall in which the conference is being held, being chased and shot at by some psycho, probably a religious nut? Lai Zhen is a 33yo refugee from Hong Kong, an archaeologist and well-known survivalist influencer. She had met someone she thinks may be The One, but her immediate survival is taking up all available mental space. Thankfully, she has help, but will it be enough?

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Naomi Alderman – image from The Guardian

The action-adventure-sci-fi shell encasing The Future is a dystopian near-future that takes an if-this-goes-on perspective re the road we are currently traveling toward planetary devastation, global warming, the increasing greedification of the world economy, and concentration of wealth, at the expense of sustainability and human decency. But Alderman has done so much more with it.

The Future has a brain and a heart, to go along with the coursing hormones, and some serious mysteries as well. Did I mention there is a romance in here also? Good luck shelving this thing. You probably will not have much luck putting it down once you start reading. Well, take that advisedly. I did find that it took a while to settle in, as there is a fair bit to get through with introducing all the characters, but once you get going, day-um, you will want to keep on.

While offering a look at survival post everything, Alderman tosses in some fun high tech and BP-raising sequences. And she gives readers’ brains a workout, providing considerable fodder for book club discussions. To bolster the thematic elements, Aldermen provides plenty of connections to classic tales, biblical and other, that offer excellent starting points for lively discussions.

Martha was raised in an apocalypse-concerned cult, led by her father. As an adult she gets involved in on-line exchanges about questions like what might be learned from the experience of a biblical apocalypse survivor, Lot. Alderman was raised as an Orthodox Jew, studying the Torah in the original, so knows her material well. (God was about to firebomb Sodom when Lot’s kindness to a couple of god’s emissaries earned him and his family a get-out-of-hell-free pass.) In addition, she finds relevance in Ayn Rand, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and more.

She brings in a discussion of the enclosure act in the UK, how the stealing of public land by the wealthy has a mirror in the theft of public space of different sorts in the 20th and 21st centuries. But the biggest issue at work here is trust. In fact, Alderman had intended to title the book Trust. But when Herman Diaz’s novel, Trust, won a Pulitzer Prize, she had to find an alternative. Can Zhen trust her new love interest. Can she trust the AI that is supposedly helping her? Can she trust any of the oligarchs? Can she trust people she has known for years on line, but never met in person? This is a core concept, not just on a personal, but on a societal level. Civilizations are built on trust. It is an issue that touches everyone.

The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk. – from the Electric Literature interview

Consider a concern that is immediate in early 2024. Can American allies, whose alliances have kept the world out of World War III since the end of World War II, trust the US intelligence services with their secrets, when our next president might give, trade, or sell it to our enemies? Can you trust that the person you are communicating with on-line is being honest with you. (As someone who has met people through Match.com, I am particularly aware of that one.) If you are stuck on a survival island, can you trust that the other people there will not do you in, in order to improve their chances of gaining power once things begin to return to some semblance of global livability?

In today’s culture, technology, particularly social media, “encourages us not to really trust each other,” Alderman explains. “The ways that we use to communicate with each other have been monetized in order to make us as angry at and afraid [of one another] as possible.” And while the internet can all too often amplify “absolute hateful stupidity” to feed our distrust of one another, the author continues, “It can also demonstrably, again and again, multiply our knowledge and capacity to understand.” – from the Shondaland interview

Zhen’s is our primary POV through this, although we spend a lot of time with Martha. She is an appealing lead, a person of good intentions, and reasonably pure heart. She is wicked smart, able, and adaptive. It is easy to root for her to make it through. But, noting the second quote at the top of this review, if Love is the mind killer, might it impair her clarity of thought, her maintenance of necessary defenses? Of might it impair that of the person she is love with?

The concern with dark forces is a bit boilerplate. Two of the oligarchs are cardboard villains; another has some edges.
But it is the conceptual bits that give The Future its heft. Oh, and one more thing. Woven throughout the 432 pages of this book is minor crime, Grand Theft Planet. It should come as no surprise that an author who has had great success with her previous novels, and who has spent some years writing video games, would produce a fast-paced, engaging read, replete with dangers, anxieties, fun toys, and wonderful, substantive philosophical sparks. I cannot predict the future any better than 2016 presidential pollsters, but my personal AI suggests that should The Future will find its way to you, you will be glad it did.

Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.

Review posted – 3/8/24

Publication date – 11/7/23

I received an ARE of The Future from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and the password to my super-secret software. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, GR, and Twitter pages

Profile – from Simon & Schuster

Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.

Interviews
—–Professional Book Nerds – Dystopian Futures with Naomi Alderman – video, well, mostly audio, with no real video – 41:59
—–Toronto Public Library – Naomi Alderman | The Future | Nov 13, 2023 with Vass Bednar – 45:05 – there is a nice bit in here on tech as neither bad nor good, but a tool which can be used for good or evil.
—–Literary Hub – Naomi Alderman on Creating a Fictional Tech Dystopia by Jane Ciabattari
—–Shondaland – Naomi Alderman Is Still Finding Hope in Humankind by Rachel Simon
—–AP- Naomi Alderman novel ‘The Future’ scheduled for next fall by Hillel Italic
—–Electric Literature – Dystopian Future Controlled by Technology by Jacqueline Alnes
—–Independent – How We Met: Naomi Alderman & Margaret Atwood – by Adam Jacques – Atwood mentored Alderman in 2012 – a fun read

Item of Interest from the author
—–BBC Sounds – audio excerpt – 1.0 – The End of Days – 15:47

Items of Interest
—–Tristia by Ovid – Zhen reads this prior to a trip to Canada
—–The Admiralty Islands
—–inert submunition dispenser – a kind of cluster bomb
—–Wiki on the enclosure act

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Filed under Action-Adventure, AI, Cli-Fi, computers, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Mystery, Reviews, Science Fiction, Thriller, Thriller

Tagged as Adventure, apocalypse, book-review, book-reviews, books, brain-candy, computers-ai, crime, Fiction, literary-fiction, Science Fiction, science-fiction, Thriller

January 26, 2024 · 12:01 am

West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman

book cover

A scream suddenly pierces the air. Startled glances are exchanged on the porch, a drink is spilled, a baby begins to cry, and your muscles tense; you sense this is one of those plot leaps that writers use to punctuate and propel the narrative, like those bursts of biological creativity that scientists claim shock evolution into action. But you are unsettled; just pages into the book, is it too early? Should a mystery unfold in a more demure fashion? Aren’t the suspense and anticipation the real secret thrill of the book, rather than (let us be honest) the all-too-often disappointing dénouement, the magician turning over his cards for an audience that realizes, bitterly leaving the theater, that they’ve been had?

Other people’s secrets are easy. It’s our own that are hard

I am not particularly a fan of video games, the large immersive, role-playing ones. Nothing against them. They are simply outside my experience for the most part. But I do know that a lot of the experience, the joy of these games, lies in figuring things out. If I do this, what happens? What if I do that? Where might secret intel reside? How can I get to it? It strikes me that for many readers, particularly for readers of detective stories, the experience is comparable, however different the physical approaches might appear. The internal processes are quite similar. Reading West Heart Kill is a bit like having a game designer walking you through the construction of the game as you play it, reminding you of the usual rules, and teasing you a bit about whether you will actually figure things out or not, suggesting tricks and traps that writers (or game designers) employ to keep you off base, while remaining entertained.

I am a bit obsessive when I read mysteries, keeping lists of characters with their attributes, keeping track of timelines, locations, motives, et al, so am primed for such things. The game here is an overt one. The author is challenging you to figure out whodunit. If you accept the challenge you need to figure things out before the final reveal, otherwise it is game over for you. It is not that you finish the book with no points. Figuring out the mystery, the how, why, when and where, may be the top prize, but a skillful writer will offer plenty of rewards along the way, whether you succeed or fail. I did not figure out ahead of time the large murder questions, but I did suss out some of the lesser puzzles, and there was at least some whoo-hoo!-figured-it-out satisfaction to be had in that. There are further benefits to be had.

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Dann McDorman – image from the NY Times – shot by Maansi Srivastava

The West Heart of the title is a private club (membership fees are exorbitant), high on wealth (well, presumed wealth, at least), and low on morals. Secrets abound, as one might expect. The residents, many of whom spent their summers there as children, have considerable difficulty with marital vows, in particular, and then, of course, with that whole thou shalt not kill thing.

Adam McAnnis is a thirty-something private investigator who has been hired to hang about, keep his eyes open, and see if he spots anything off. His connection is with an erstwhile classmate, from whom he manages to wheedle an invitation. The place is isolated, and will become more so as an expected storm seems likely to close off roads and cut off communications. Sound familiar?

Many of the elements that make up this very meta novel will, particularly as McDorman lays them out for us, addressing readers directly. The weary detective is one:

How often is he both lonely and alone, suspicious of everyone, accepting betrayal as the rule, not the exception? The deceits that begin to unfold the moment the client walks through his office door. Nights spent in parked cars watching illicit silhouettes behind shaded windows, receipts pulled from dripping trash bags, a five-dollar bill waved between two fingers before a junkie’s fixed gaze . . . the debased work of hundreds of cases, a file cabinet full of tragedies and comedies and tales too ambiguous to categorize.

Or one particular character type:

As a general rule, in murder mysteries, the least likable character is the most likely to die. But devious writers can anticipate your knowledge of this cliché and thrust a character like Warren Burr into early prominence to surprise you, later, with an entirely different victim. Or, perhaps, more devious still, circle back and kill him off in a double bluff—destined to die all along, exploiting and perverting your expectations from the start. Of course, some writers, among them not the least skilled, use much the same trick to mask and unmask their murderers . . .

These permeate the story, as McDorman pokes you to figure things out. He even provides lists of characters and clues to help you along.

It does not take too long for first mortality to occur. McAnnis takes on the role of investigator, publicly this time. We tag along as he interviews each of the suspects in turn. McDorman has a bit of fun, even concocting one interview with a dead person.

We are treated to small essays on this and that, methods of killing people, for example, or an etymology of the word Murder, or on Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance, or on well-known writers using pseudonyms, or on the rules for mysteries, or on unresolved literary murders, and more. These are small, delightful diversions.

Voice is handled differently from the norm here.

The novel takes place over a long July 4th holiday weekend —Thursday to Sunday — and so I had the idea of writing each day from an additional different perspective: “he”… “I”… “we”… etc. Thus, each section is stamped with its own particular identity. And of course, the “you” voice explores why the perspective suddenly shifts, and how that plays into the intrigue of the plot… – from the Bloomsbury interview

In fact, this works to keep one off-balance a bit. But there was some ambiguity even within the voice, at times, that I found off-putting. For example, there are sections in which the resident population is represented by a sort-of “we” voice. Then it mixed with an omniscient narrator. While there was certainly a purpose to it, it came across as jumbled to me.

Asked what drew him to the 1970s as a time in which to set his novel, McDormand said,

The superficial reason is that it was fun! The hairstyles alone defy belief. Some of the most entertaining hours I spent “working” on the novel involved paging through mid-70s clothing catalogs; that led directly to an entire paragraph early in the book that is just a listing of the trademarked (and fabulously named) artificial fabrics worn by the characters: Acrilan®, Fortrel®, PERMA-PREST®, Sansabelt®, Ban-Lon®…  More substantively, the zeitgeist of the 1970s felt intensely familiar to me. We’d lost trust in institutions and in each other; the old solutions didn’t work; the new ones seemed inadequate; a creeping disillusionment had overtaken the best of us, while the worst seemed full of passionate intensity. As an era, the 1970s seems extraordinarily relevant to writers and readers today. – from the Bloomsbury interview

There are plenty of suggestive atmospherics, like a part of the considerable property that is used for hunting (hunting what, exactly?), or a traditional bonfire that might be used for the destruction of evidence, (or maybe eliminating a pesky witness?) primitive maps, hidden paths, mysterious people seen at a distance on ill-lit trails, a dark and stormy night. All great fun.

Of course, there is another traditional element in the mystery novel. Be sure to bring along your fishing pole. There are red herrings aplenty to land.

I found this to be an entertaining read, but there were bits that did not sit well. There is an event that happens near the end, which I will not spoil, that created a bit of a vacuum, that space being filled in a way that, while very creative, still felt forced and unnatural. Certain scenes are written as plays, which seemed cutesy. Not saying these were not entertaining, but why?

Many of us who read Stephen King continue to do so because there is pleasure to be had in the reading, the engagement, the flow, the scares, even though many readers often find his final reveals to be unsatisfying. In a similar vein here. There is much in West Heart Kill that is great fun, that engages us and prods our brains to kick into gear when a less meta approach might just leave us to cruise through the read in a straight line. It encourages us to play, rather than just watch. That is worth a lot. The elements that bugged me made it less than a five-star read, but it will certainly stand out from the pack for seasoned readers of crime novels for its interactive approach. Game on.

Review posted – 01/26/24

Publication date – 10/24/23

I received an ARE of West Heart Kill from Knopf in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on my site, Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Author links – well, McDorman’s social media links definitely remind one of the time in which he located his novel. He did have a Twitter account at some point, but has not posted anything for years. Nada on FB. Here is his GR profile page.

Interviews
—–NY Times – When a Book Deal Feels Like ‘Winning the Middle-Age Lottery’ by Elizabeth A. Harris – nothing on the book itself, solely on his unlikely situation of getting a first novel published.
—–Bloomsbury – “In the end, both the detective and the killer must make a choice, whether to act from hate, or from love”
—–Crimereads – DANN MCDORMAN ON EXPLORING LITERARY HIJINKS AND META MYSTERY by Jenny Bartoy
—–BookBrunch – Q&A: debut novelist Dann McDorman by Lucy Nathan

Items of Interest
—–Publishers Weekly – Knopf Bets on ‘West Heart Kill’
—–Wiki on Angela Atwood – referenced in Chapter 1

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Filed under Fiction, Mystery, Reviews, Suspense, Thriller, Thriller

Tagged as book-review, books, Fiction, Meta, Mystery, Thriller

October 13, 2023 · 12:01 am

Holly by Stephen King

book cover

I had to write this book to write one scene, which I saw clearly in my mind. Holly attending her mother’s zoom funeral. I didn’t have a story to go with it, which was unfortunate, but I kept my feelers out because I loved Holly from the first and wanted to be with her again. Then one day I read a newspaper story about an honor killing. I didn’t think that could be my story, but I loved the headline, which was something like this: everyone thought they were a sweet old couple until the bodies began turning up in the backyard. Killer old folks, I thought. That’s my story. – from Author’s Note

Holly Gibney, partner in the Finders Keepers Detective Agency she inherited from Bill Hodges, (of the Bill Hodges trilogy, in which Holly first appeared) is called in by a distraught mother, Penny Dahl. Her daughter, Bonnie, has been missing for three weeks, and the police are at the point of washing their hands of the case. A peculiar, ambiguous note had been found on her bicycle. But there was no helmet found. Curious, no?

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Stephen King – image from New Hampshire Magazine – illustrated by John R. Goodwin

Holly is on her own, as her partner is laid up with COVID. She has just attended her mother’s funeral. So Holly is emotionally laid low. People close to her have urged her to take some time to grieve. Still, a case might be a way to keep moving, so the game is afoot. It is not long before another missing person case shows up in her research, and another. Tough to prove, but Holly suspects there is a serial killer at work. The book opens with

It’s an old city, and no longer in very good shape, nor is the lake beside which it has been built, but there are parts of it that are still pretty nice. Longtime residents would probably agree that the nicest section is Sugar Heights, and the nicest street running through it is Ridge Road, which makes a gentle downhill curve from Bell College of Arts and Sciences to Deerfield Park, two miles below. On its way, Ridge Road passes many fine houses, some of which belong to college faculty and some to the city’s more successful businesspeople—doctors, lawyers, bankers, and top-of-the-pyramid business executives. Most of these homes are Victorians, with impeccable paintjobs, bow windows, and lots of gingerbread trim.

Hmmm, maybe King was not quite done with thought processes from his novel, Fairy Tale. One of those Victorians is home to a couple of octogenarians, mostly-retired professors at the nearby Bell University. They seem ok to a brief glance, but spend time with either one and you might feel the urge to pop up and say, “check please.” Both are considered, at the very least, odd, by those who know them. Some find them creepy. They are far worse.

Holly is assisted in her investigation by two associates from prior cases. Jerome and Barbara Robinson are both game to help, but both have other things going on, so are not entirely available. This is a crucial element in sustaining tension, (along with hoping Holly can figure out what is going on in time to save Bonnie) as their disconnection from Holly keeps her from figuring everything out much sooner. What happens if you have, among the team, all the pieces to the puzzle but simply cannot get them all on the table at the same time?

The story proceeds as, um, a procedural. Discover this clue, follow it, find another clue, follow that, and so on. Keep the unconnected breadcrumbs floating about in one’s consciousness until it becomes clear where they lead. There is nothing paranormal going on in this one, although abnormal would certainly fit.

Two time-lines swap back and forth. In the present, July 2021, Holly pursues her investigation. In the other we flash back to each of the victims, who they were, how they were taken, and how they were treated once captured.

King wrote this book during the height of the COVID pandemic, and wanted to make that a major part of the novel. We encounter Holly when she is disconnecting from her mother’s funeral. She, and others, had attended via Zoom. Mom was a diehard, literally, anti-vaxer. Buh-bye. And from what Holly expresses about the dearly departed, she is not all that sad to see her go. Throughout the story, Holly has to decide, mask-or-no-mask, for every interview. Shake hands or bump elbows? She is maybe OCD, or even somewhere on the autism spectrum, but she certainly has an enhanced intuition that some think might be a form of the shining made famous in the book by that name. Maybe she is just a really gifted detective? There is no overt diagnosing of Holly’s abilities or limitations in the book.

In addition to the presence of COVID, King offers looks at a range of people and their political attitudes. A bowling alley manager is a full-on conspiracy theorist. Emily Harris’s diverse bigotries are baked in. Speaking of bigotries, one that 76-year-old King addresses is ageism. It usually manifests in presuming the elderly to be incapable of or disinterested in this or that based simply on their age. This is a bit of bias that Holly shares, to her own peril.

I know that there are a lot of people out there on X, or whatever you want to call it, that are convinced that Covid is over and it’s not a going concern anymore. What do you think of that idea?
Well, Holly’s mother is a Covid denier, and she dies in the hospital of Covid. And to the very end, she’s saying, “I’ve just got the flu. The flu is what I have.” And I think that it goes back to this is not a new thing. There have been people for years who have just been vaccination deniers who say that if you get a vaccination for a certain kind of thing, you’re going to cause birth defects in your children, this and that. Or if you vaccinate your children, they could have strokes. And you see the same things about the Covid vaccinations. There’s this constant story that thousands of people are dying of heart disease because of the vaccinations. It’s not true, but it’s gained a lot of credence. So there’s a lot of that. And I tried to put that in the book. There are characters in the book who just say, “I don’t believe in this bullshit. It’s all crap.” And that’s the life that we live. And I always try to reflect the time that I’m writing in. – from the Rollingstone interview

It is easy to root for Holly Gibney as she struggles to learn the truth. This keeps us interested in the book. King is right to keep going back to her. (this is the sixth time) She is sooooo engaging. But there is another course in this meal. King points out how holding false beliefs can lead to mayhem, even death. It certainly did for Holly’s mom, and there is at least one criminal motivation in here that is based on a non-COVID-related disproven theory.

This may not be to everyone’s taste. “I’ve had enough” was the note left on Bonnie Dahl’s bicycle. But I bet that by the time you finish reading Holly you will be hungry for a second helping.

The outsider masquerading as Terri Maitland was evil. So was the one masquerading as Chet Ondowsky. The same was true of Brady Hartsfield, who found a way to go on doing dirt (Bill’s phrase) even after he should have been rendered harmless. Rendered that way by Holly herself. But Roddy and Emily Harris were worse.

Review posted – 10/13/23

Publication date – 9/5/23

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

SK’s personal and FB pages

my reviews of some other books by this King
—–2022 – Fairy Tale
—–2020 – If It Bleeds
—–2019 – The Institute
—–2014 – Revival
—–2014 – Mr. Mercedes
—–2013 – Doctor Sleep
—–2009 – Under the Dome
—–2008 – Duma Key
—–2006 – Lisey’s Story
—–1977 – The Shining

Other King Family (Joe Hill) books I have reviewed:
—–2019 – Full Throttle
—–2017 – Strange Weather
—–2016 – The Fireman
—–2013 – NOS4A2
—–2007 – Heart-Shaped Box
—–2005 – 20th Century Ghosts

Interviews
—–Rollingstone – Stephen King Knows Anti-Vaxxers Are Going to Hate His Latest Book: ‘Knock Yourself Out’ by Brenna Ehrlich
—–GMA – Stephen King talks new book, ‘Holly’ – lightweight, but with some nice personal details re SK
—–Talking Scared – Episode #155 – Stephen King & Writing From the Nerve Endings with Neil McRobert – audio – 1:08:56

Songs/Music
—–Pretty Little Angel Eyes – chapter 9 – Roddy sings this to Emily while serving her supper

Items of Interest from the author
—–Entertainment Weekly – excerpt from Chapter 2
—–SK reads – excerpt – video- 8:00
—–Entertainment Weekly – excerpt – print

Items of Interest
—–League of Gentlemen – Special Stuff
—–Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou – A Little Priest – original cast recording

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Filed under Fiction, Horror, Mystery, psycho killer, Suspense, Thriller, Thriller

Tagged as Fiction, horror, Mystery, procedural, Suspense, Thriller

September 29, 2023 · 12:01 am

Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge by Spencer Quinn

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Maybe sex made more sense than marriage—or even dating—in old age. Wasn’t courtship for the young?

Meet me at Café des Artistes, eighteen hundred.”
“Is that the address?”
He blew out an irritated-sounding breath. “Six,” he said. “Six o’clock this evening. Your hotel—the Royale, I assume—can give you directions.”
“How will I know you?”
“I’ll wear a billboard with a question mark.”
Click.

Loretta Plansky, widowed, retired, pretty fair tennis player, (particularly considering her new hip, only nine-months in) 71, Florida resident, financially comfortable, wakes one morning to discover that she has been pretty much cleaned out. Bank account, retirement fund, investments, the whole kit and caboodle, well, mostly. It seems that the ten grand she had given to her grandson, Will, overnight went instead to cybercriminals. The real Will had not asked her for anything. (Of course, I am totally in favor of folks sending cash to people named Will, but that’s just me. Any amount gratefully accepted.). The FBI special agent in charge holds out virtually no hope of her ever seeing her lost funds restored, but her number two, about to leave the bureau for a private gig, gives Mrs P one intriguing bit of intel. Unwilling to let this crime stand, she heads out to darkest Romania hoping to do…what? who knows? something.

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Spencer Quinn (pen name for Peter Abrahams) – image from Macmillan – photo by Diana Gray

Mrs P is an intrepid investigator, with an unusual skill set. She manages to talk to a relevant person at the US embassy in Bucharest, and persists in following up the few clues that float down her way.

The story is told in parallel lanes. Mrs P is the primary of course, but we are also let in on the doings on the other side. Dinu is a teenager with a gift for and enthusiastic interest in American English. He collects colloquialisms and contemporary American slang the way a video-game player collects tokens to gain power. Of course, the power Dinu is amassing causes real harm. His scary uncle has paid to train him, and is now employing Dinu in making calls to American grandparents, pretending to be their stressed-out grandson, in need of emergency cash in order to get out of jail, or whatever. He has a computer whiz bff, Romeo, another teen, who is also employed by the scary uncle. Generally, they do not seem all that morally concerned about what they are doing, and the pay is good.

So, Mrs P makes her way to the relevant town, and stumbles her way through to the sort of cozy resolution one might expect. Along the way there are mysterious passageways, dark deeds, life-threatening adventures, a car chase, a valuable jewel, and some very unpleasant characters. So, I guess this is less of a cozy mystery and more of a cozy adventure tale.

It is a very good-natured story, and Mrs P is a fun lead, a very engaging sort, a good egg, who has been done dirt, but who would prefer to take matters into her own hands rather than leave her fate to the dubious efforts of others. She displays considerable courage, the creativity of an experienced field agent, and a wily serenity in stressful circumstances. One lovely element was her continued connection to her late husband, Norm. No magical realism here, just a pining for the person to whom she had been the closest for most of her life, as she shares thoughts and concerns with his memory, wondering at his theoretical advice. She is also a very kind person, amenable to applying the resources she has…well, had…to helping out her kids, despite that not necessarily being the wisest choice.

You will get a taste of Romania, a very small taste. Most entertaining among these is a hotel festooned with portraits of Bela Lugosi.

There is enough humor in here to generate several actual LOLs, which is always welcome

BUT, as things were winding up to the big finish, there were multiple eye-roller events that took me out of the book. Like running a marathon then tripping over a stick in the road, then another, then another. I did finish the book, and it was a fun read, for the most part. But I found myself saying “Really?” more than once or twice. And that damaged my overall feeling. Bottom line is that you have to be willing to overlook some egregious reliance on coincidence and deus-ex-machina trickery to make the story work out. I expect I am a bit towards the higher end in my sensitivity to such things. But if you are more forgiving, netter at leaping past roadway impediments, then do it, jump in. You will be rewarded with a fun, light read, featuring a very engaging lead. Mrs P will be glad of the company, and so will you.

Review posted – 09/29/23

Publication date – 7/25/23

I received an ARE of Mrs Plansky’s Revenge from Tor Publishing in return for a fair review and the password to my bank account. Hey, now wait a goldarned minute! Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Profile

Spencer Quinn is the pen name for Peter Abrahams, the Edgar-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Chet and Bernie mystery series, as well as the #1 New York Times bestselling Bowser and Birdie series for middle-grade readers. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife Diana and dog Pearl.

Interviews
—–The Big Thrill – Up Close: Spencer Quinn by Karen Hugg – all on dog books
—–Famous Writing Routines – Interview with Peter Abrahams: “I love what I do. Love seems to clear a lot of paths.” – nothing particular to this book. More on his methodology.

Songs/Music
—–The Byrds – Eight Miles High – appears in Chapter 13
—–The Chimes – I’m in the Mood for Love – Chapter 20

Items of Interest
—–Excerpt – Chapter One
—–Federal Trade Commission – Consumer AdvicePhone Scams
—–Tor/Forge Blog – Inspiration and Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge by Spencer Quinn! by Ariana Carpenter

Five or six years ago, my dad got a phone call. At the time he was in his early nineties. He died two weeks short of his 97th birthday and was in excellent mental shape and very good physical shape until the end. I want to emphasize that mental part. He was a very smart guy: quick, sharp, clear-headed. Back to the call.
Caller: Hey, Grandpa!
My dad: Jake?
Caller: Yeah, Grandpa, it’s me, Jake.
Cut To: My dad’s wife, noticing he’s putting on his jacket.
Wife: Ed? Where are you going?
My dad: To the bank. Jake’s in trouble and he needs some money.
At that point it was decided to call Jake (living in another city), and he had not called my dad and wasn’t in any trouble. “Jake” never got a penny. But I was amazed that someone like my dad could have been fooled.
And then I got back to writing the Chet and Bernie novel I was working on and thought no more about the two Jakes. Then one day on a bike ride the idea for Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge—indeed the whole set-up, including the Romanian part—came to me in one fell swoop.

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Filed under Comedy, Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Tagged as Cozy, Fiction, humor, Mystery, Thriller

July 7, 2023 · 12:01 am

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson – introduction by Jeffrey Keeten

book cover

The power of this tale is the fact that nearly everyone on the planet knows the story, even though few have actually read the book. For the Victorian reader, Stevenson hides the twist of the book until near the end. For those readers, Hyde and Jekyll were two men until Jekyll’s confessional letter sets them straight. – from the intro

He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.

There is much to be gained by re-reading the classics. Great works of literature are considered great for a reason, mostly because the truth of their excellence persists over time, as each generation discovers them anew. In a parallel vein many become embedded in our culture, and suffer, in popular application, the erosion of original purpose, of nuance. A 2012 study of memory found that:

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. – from the Northwestern article linked in EXTRA STUFF

I expect this can be applied on a grander scale, to society and culture at large. Our recollection of the stories produced by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century, for example, bears little resemblance to the truly grim tales they actually told, thanks in considerable measure to Disney. On becoming popularized, stories can become simplified, stripped down. Alice might recognize the great peculiarity of reducing complicated things to their elements to the extreme of absurdity.

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” – Alice in Alice in Wonderland

What we have achieved in our collective recollection of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is just that, a grin without a cat. Jekyll has been reduced to a well-meaning physician, and Hyde a monstrous container for human evil. Black and white. Jekyll good, Hyde bad. Not so fast.

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Stevenson in Samoa – image from Britannica

Jeff Keeten, long-time Goodreads superstar reviewer, offers his take on the book in a thoughtful introduction. He points to the existence of an earlier, possibly more lurid version, of the novella, a 19th century Go Set a Watchman. Good or bad, it would have made a fascinating counterpoint to the final. Keeten provides some wonderful details about the writing of the story, and shows a thematic continuation from Stevenson’s prior work.

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Jeffrey D. Keeten – image from Gravelight Press – it is remarkable what vast amounts of makeup and digital touching up can accomplish

For a quick refresher, there has been a series of dastardly deeds committed in a London neighborhood. We learn of these through Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer, and friend of Jekyll. A culprit has been identified. Mr. Hyde, a known associate of Doctor Jekyll. Utterson is asked by Jekyll to treat Hyde as his heir. But as knowledge of Hyde’s activities becomes more widespread, Hyde must go into hyding (sorry). Exposition is handled via direct observation, but also via documents from another professional peer, and Jekyll’s final message to Utterson.

I read the original version of this novella (thirty-something thousand words) a lifetime ago. Can’t say that I remember it from that reading all that clearly. But I do recall the sense I have acquired from seeing multiple productions of the story on screens, and in print, both tellings of Stevenson’s story and interpretations of the work that extracted, or tried to extract, the substance of the allegory and apply it in a modern context. In its simplest understanding, the story highlights the conflict between good and evil in human nature.

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John Barrymore in Hyde mode – 1920 – image from Public Domain Movies

There are many tales that address what the natural state of humanity is, i.e., how might we behave without the benefit of civilization. Lord of the Flies pops to mind as a premier example of the genre. Keeten, in his excellent introduction, points out that Stevenson had shown in his other work an interest in internal moral divisions within people. Britannica describes Treasure Island as at once a gripping adventure tale and a wry comment on the ambiguity of human motives. But divisions are not necessarily slashed in straight lines down the core of our moral being. More than all else, one thing stood out for me in this latest reading. It is not a battle between good and evil. It is much more an attempt at accommodation. There is plenty of cat to go with that conflictual grin. Jekyll is no paragon. (BTW, according to Daniel Evers, of the University of Bristol, the proper Scottish pronunciation of Jekyll is ‘Jee-kul.’ – article on this is linked below.)

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Spencer Tracy in the dual role, really, really wants you to pay your share of the bar bill – 1941 – image from Fiction Fan Blog

He does not so much conduct objective research into where in people is drawn the line between good and evil. On the contrary, Jekyll knows he has urges and desires that are not considered socially acceptable. He is not so much looking to suppress those by some form of internal bifurcation. No, no no. He is looking to give his dark side free reign, while sparing his Jekyll side the inconvenience of conscience. So, what was Stevenson writing about? What was his intent? To show the hypocrisy of the Victorian upper class? I have not seen any specific report that he was a political writer in the way of Dickens, who used his work to highlight the class horrors of an age. Stevenson’s aim seemed more tilted toward demonstrating the internal conflict between good and evil that permeates us all.

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Frederic March’s 1932 version ignored Stevenson’s subtle distinction between the two – image from Fiction Fan Blog

And what is the relevance to today? How might we use the lens of this tale to gain a focus on our present? As noted above, classic tales are often reinterpreted to offer us a new take on modern themes. My favorite among these is the 1990s staging of Richard III, with Ian McKellan. I was blessed in being able to see it in person in Brooklyn, and later as a film. It was breathtaking, using a 16th century drama as a vehicle for portraying 20th century fascism. I get chills still, just thinking about it. It became clear to me that RLS’s scenario could be applied, as well, to the contemporary political realm.

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Richard III as a fascist dictator … Ian McKellen in the 1996 film image from The Guardian – photo by Ronald Grant

In this take, the good doctor might be seen as the Republican Party of the mid-to-late 20th century. No longer the party of Lincoln, the GOP largely abandoned the good work their predecessors might have been proud of. Instead, particularly after the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon, it became a party that was not only willing to tolerate its excesses, the racism

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(In 1971 – Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde offered an interesting twist – image from British Horror Films

that opposed civil rights legislation, the classist hostility that opposed the New Deal and Great Society, and any allegiance to sustaining a fair voting system. They understood that they had these urges and constructed potions meant to separate the worst behavior from the respectable core. This is where we get the Tea Party, Q, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and other on-the-ground kinetic actors, spurred on by demagogues spreading disgraceful lies, the Rush Limbaughs of the world, the Alex Joneses, the demagogues-du-jour on Fox News. The party wanted to let their fascist freak flag fly, but deniably. So, Jekyll wanted to give his dark urges a way to be sated, while maintaining a clear conscience, or, at the very least, deniability. Doctor Jekyll is not a good guy. And, as with the GOP, once you breathe life into your darker side, that darker side will not be satisfied with partial residence for long, no matter how many lies he tells, or how much orange hair dye he might use. As with Jekyll, over time, the GOP feels less and less constrained by decency, as they boldly attack voting rights, civil rights, even the law itself, with a decreasing need for an external beard. What might Jekyll v. Hyde stand for in your understanding of the 21st century? There may be other elements that jump out for you, aspects that shift your take on the dumbed-down vision most of us have of the J/H conflict.

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In a 1990 production, Michael Caine is really tired of the other actors calling him Alfie. – image from TV Worth Watching

There is a short story added on at the end, Markheim. It is rich with familiar elements and it is clear that, published only a year before J/H, it was a primary source from which the longer tale grew. It would be easy, though, to see it as an alternate ending to the later novella.

Eddie Izzard has signed on to play a trans Dr Jekyll in an upcoming production

And, of course, it would be perfectly natural if, at the end of reading, or re-reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you are of two minds about it all.

in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size; it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

Review posted – 7/07/23

Publication date – 4/3/23 – of this volume – J/H was first published in 1886

I received an ARE of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from Gravelight Press in return for a fair review, and a printout of my special formula. Thanks, folks,

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=============================EXTRA STUFF

It was definitely a fun experience for me to trot down memory lane for a re-look, and a better look at J/H. Keeten’s smart intro definitely helps. You might also check out some of the links below for more. Gravelight promises a slew of horror classics, one new one every six months or so. Upcoming are The Picture of Dorian Gray and Frankenstein, complete with Keeten’s insightful introductions. Nifty collection material for horror afficionados, and ideal gifts for Halloween. No, I do not get a commission!

Links to Keeten’s personal, FB, and Instagram pages

I have written one prior review for a book intro’d by Jeffrey Keeten
—– Exhumed: 13 Tales Too Terrifying to Stay Dead – edited by David Yurkovich

Songs/Music
—–The Who – Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
—–Bear McCreary – The Skye Boat Song or Sing Me a Song of a Lad That is Gone – the theme song of the TV series Outlander sets a Stevenson poem to music

Items of Interest
—–British Library – ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two’: duality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Greg Buzzwell
—–Wiki – Adaptations of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – There is a wonderful catalog here of J/H productions from 1887 to the present
—–Northwestern Now – Your Memory is like the Telephone Game by Maria Paul
—–Britannica – Robert Louis Stevenson
—–Interesting Literature – The Surprising Truth behind Jekyll and Hyde by Daniel Evers
—–Dark Worlds Quarterly – Classic Monsters in Comics: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde offers a fun look at comic treatments over the ages
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What me worry? – from above article

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Tagged as Fiction, horror, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

June 30, 2023 · 12:01 am

The Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado

book cover

The weight on her chest lightens, her breathing slows. The ‘monkeys inside her head screech a little less loudly. That’s what is so brilliant about certainties, even fleeting ones. They offer us respite.

Police Inspector Jon Guttierez of the Bilbao PD, 43, is a large person, a weightlifter who lives with his mother. He ran into a spot of trouble recently when he attempted to plant evidence on a well-known drug dealer, only to be filmed in the act, said film going viral. Oopsy. He stands to lose a lot more than just his badge. When what to his wondering eyes should appear but a get-out-of-jail-free card, in the form of a mysterious personage known as Mentor. But Mentor has a tough, if unusual ask. He wants Jon to persuade someone to return to work. Someone who really, really does not want back in.

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Juan Gómez-Jurado – image from Zenda

Antonia Scott (her father the British ambassador, her mother a Spaniard) spends three minutes of every day contemplating suicide. (Whatever works for ya, dear.) Her comatose beloved husband has been in a hospital bed for three years. She has been by his side throughout, clearly feeling some responsibility for his condition. (Antonia’s struggle is reminiscent of how JGJ felt when his father was dying during the writing of the book.) Antonia has regular chats with her English grandmother, who encourages her to put her particular set of skills to good use, instead of letting them go to waste. She has some superpowers, but also some limitations, one being a need for a certain medication when she is overwhelmed.

The inspiration for Antonia and Jon inevitably stems from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Antonia is that idealistic being, she does not hesitate to face the windmills, because she believes in a better world. Jon, on the other hand, is that pragmatist who has a dreamer hidden inside of him. – from the Hindustani interview

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Vicky Luengo plays Antonia Scott in the Prime series – image from InStyle

Jon clearly succeeds in drawing Antonia out, or we wouldn’t have a book. And he becomes her partner. Not spoilers. It appears that Antonia is quite special indeed, with a mental capacity well beyond the norm. She had been a member of an elite international police organization, Red Queen, a network across Europe, one unit per country, each led by a Mentor. They exist outside the usual police structures, relying on the local constabulary for on-scene access and intel. Each unit uses a person with special gifts to help solve major crimes. Red Queens are selected for having a set of particular characteristics, which Antonia has. Uber-smart, amazing memory, analytical capacity just this side of a super-computer. (very Lisbeth Salander) But will she be smart enough to foil a criminal mastermind who has already murdered one child of the uber-rich, and has kidnapped another?

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Hovik Keuchkerian plays Jon Guttierez in the Prime series – image from his Twitter profile

Alvaro Trueba, a teenager, has been dead several days, drained of blood, and laid out with bizarre religious iconography that is clear to the particularly perceptive. The kidnapper calls himself Ezekiel. The house in which his body was found, in a gated community, was one of several owned by his one-percenter parents.

Antonia and Jon must contend with the Abduction and Extortion Unit. (AEU), led by Captain Jose Luis Parra. Far too often, police stories have a dickish supervisor, tacking to political winds at every breeze, and getting in the way of actual investigators. Parra serves that role here, although as someone in a parallel, instead of superior role. He is not a totally incompetent team leader. Still, very dickish.

Just because we’re a unit created to avoid competition and secrets being kept between different police forces doesn’t mean we don’t repeat the same old mistakes.

Carlos Ortiz is the wealthiest man in the world. When his daughter, Carla, is kidnapped, he receives a call. His next call is to Red Queen, and Jon and Antonia are brought in, seeing the obvious connections between the cases.

The story is told in the 3rd person, primarily following Antonia and Jon as they track down leads in pursuit of the baddie. Once Carla is taken hostage, we flip back and forth between the investigation and her experience. There are occasional sidebar chapters in which we get a closer look at some of the supporting characters.

Red Queen is a particularly fun thriller to read. JGJ has a wonderfully droll (snotty?) sense of humor which permeates. Do not expect rolling on the floor hysterics, but you will smile and titter a lot. Jon gets all he knows about children from Modern Family reruns or When his sandwich arrives, Jon confirms that the hospital follows tradition: the grill they use must never be cleaned. Because she is fluent in many languages, Antonia often brings in obscure words or expressions from diverse cultures (aboriginal, South Ghanaian, and others) when that word is particularly descriptive of a situation. This is a wonderful bit, speaking to the limits of communication in a single language. There is also some intel on the ancient, unseen, infrastructure of Madrid, a nifty Dan-Brownish touch.

The supporting cast is also a plus. Corrupt security guards, a feisty nonagenarian granny, a tattoo artist who delights in disrespecting tourist customers, the testosterone-poisoned Captain Parra, an oily reporter, a mad scientist (I am not crazy; my reality is just different from yours.), and an evil baddie. The portrayal of criminal motivation and history was thin, but hopefully later volumes will flesh those out a bit more.

I was hesitant at first to read this one, as it is the opener of a trilogy. Would there be resolution at the end or a cliffhanger? The answer is yes. There are some things that remain to be resolved, but there is enough of an ending here to make it a viable stand-alone read. Every adventure requires a first step.

There are twists and turns aplenty, which always helps. And questions to be answered. Will Carla escape? Will Antonia and Jon uncover who is behind these crimes? Will the usual competitive misery from other forces interfere with the investigation? What is it the kidnappers want and why are those demands not being met? Will Antonia completely fall apart before they can complete their mission? (We’re all mad here)

You will want to know as you flip-flip-flip-flip through these pages. Red Queen is a good beginning at which to begin. I would urge you to go on till you come to the end, then stop. But of course, that will not be possible for most of us. We only received an English-language translation of Reisa Rosa in 2023. It was originally released in Spain in 2018. There are three books in the series. For those fluent in Spanish there will be no waiting, but for those of us who do not speak Spanish, let the panting begin for volumes two (Loba Negra or Black Wolf, due 3/12/24 from Minotaur) and three (Rey Blanco or White King, presumably a year later) in English translation. The trilogy has been a huge international hit. Prime has optioned the series for a Spanish-language production. In the video interview linked below, we learn that primary shooting has completed for at least five episodes. I would guess a probable release in late 2023 or in 2024. I wouldn’t wait, though. Red Queen is a perfect summer read, whatever color roses you might prefer.

A spasm of pure fear convulses Antonia’s body. Fear and loathing. Because she finally understands—with piercing, icy clarity—what has been going on from the very start.

Review posted – June 30, 2023

Publication date – March 14, 2023 – (English translation)
It was first published in Spanish on November 8, 2018

I received an ARE of Red Queen from Minotaur Books in return for a fair review, and releasing my hostage. Thanks, folks.

This review is cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Gomez-Jurado’s personal, FB, and Twitter pages

Profile– from EAE Business School

Juan Gómez-Jurado was born in Madrid in 1977. His interest in literature led him to pursue a career in Information Science. No one at TVE, Canal Plus, La Voz de Galicia or COPE Radio Station —where he has worked— could have imagined what he would become in time. It wasn’t until 2006, when he published his novel, God’s Spy, that his talent became known, not only in Spain, but all across the globe.
Since then, he hasn’t stopped writing. Contract with God, The Traitor’s Emblem, The Legend of the Thief, The Patient, Scar… Year after year, his books keep on coming out. No time to rest. And his success keeps on rising and he keeps on breaking records. The trilogy made up of Red Queen, Black Wolf and White King, was the first to have all three books among the best-selling books in Spain simultaneously. In fact, Red Queen has been the most read book in Spain for two years in a row now, which translates into more than two million copies sold.

Interviews
—–Murder by the Book – Live from Madrid: Juan Gomez-Jurado Presents, “The Red Queen” Hosted by Sara DiVello – video – 35:08 – almost all of this is about his writing process, with bits about this book here and there
—–Hindustan Times – Interview: Juan Gomez-Jurado, author, Red Queen by Arunima Mazumdar

Item of Interest from the author
—–Crime Reads – Excerpt – Jon trying to persuade Antonia to return to work

Items of Interest
—–Gutenberg – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
—–Gutenberg – Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
—–Gutenberg – Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
—–Bookroo – quotes from Alice in Wonderland

The epigraph of the novel is a quote from Through the Looking Glass, the book title having been taken from that. So, it seemed fitting to sprinkle throughout the review quotes from that and from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I used the Bookroo site above for that.

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Filed under Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Thriller

Tagged as crime, Fiction, Mystery, police, spain, Suspense, Thriller

June 9, 2023 · 12:01 am

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

book cover

…all the great tragedies are stories ultimately of betrayal. They’re stories where people betrayed the people closest to them but they’re also stories where people betray themselves. They kind of betrayed the better person that they could have become. – B&N interview

Third Apparition –
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsiname hill
Shall come against him.

Macbeth –
That will never be.
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root? – The Scottish
Play

Wanna bet?

Birnam Wood is a serious, literary novel, a tragedy, cleverly disguised as an eco-thriller. Mira Bunting, 29, a horticulturist, heads an activist collective called Birnam Wood. They grow food in found plots of land, sometimes with permission, sometimes not. What they grow they consume themselves and give away to any in need. She discovered in childhood an interest in horticulture. It drowns out the relentless patter of self-critique that drives her.

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Eleanor Catton – image from The Guardian

Shelley Noakes is number two, the sort of efficient workhorse that most organizations need in order to survive. Though she is Mira’s roomie and bff, Shelley has grown tired of being taken for granted, always relegated to second fiddle, and is determined to leave. She struggles, however, with the knowledge that if she leaves, Birnam Wood will not survive Mira’s laughable incapacity for meat and potatoes organizational management.

Tony Gallo has been away for several years, backpacking, teaching English in Mexico, trying to find himself. He wants to become a freelance journalist, despite a thin volume of actual experience. He is idealistic and insufferable, his ideological lines are not only clear, but electrified. He is carrying a torch for Mira and has returned home to see if there are any sparks left. Eager for a journalistic break, he stumbles across a biggie.

Robert Lemoine is an American billionaire, disgustingly rich from his drone business. He is looking for a bug-out retreat in case of global meltdown, and had found just the place. Is Lemoine a well-meaning rich guy, or a Bond villain?

Owen Darvish, recently knighted, is the owner of that place, a considerable swath, cheek by jowl with a national park. Unfortunately, there was a major landslide there recently, which has cut off the town of Thorndike. Will the sale actually go through now?

The landslide has caught Mira’s attention. What if Birnam Wood could set up shop in a place that was effectively cut off from most ongoing enterprise? Might be a great chance to grow her non-profit into a much larger player, and maybe do a fair bit of good? She decides to make the considerable drive and check it out. While there, she encounters Lemoine. This is where the story really gets going.

The novel flows in two parallel streams, often merging, then separating, then merging again. The first is the eco-thriller. What is Lemoine on about? He can certainly come across as charming, and sincere, but is he really? Is the money he offers Mira for Birnam Wood’s work being given sincerely, or is he up to something? Does the devil speak true? That he has a studly appeal adds to the confusion. The other is a deep dive into personality and motivation, with rich literary technique and a host of thematic concerns.

Privacy, or lack thereof, is a frequent focus in the book. Lemoine, for example, is a developer of drone technology, and is a one-percenter as well in terms of knowledge of and facility with surveillance. (…he took his phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen, then turned it around to show her. Under the list of detectable devices nearby was listed ‘mira’s iPhone’.) It permeates down to the ninety-nine-percenters as well. This, for instance, is our introduction to Shelley:

…the yellow circle labelled ‘Mira’ pulled out into the street and began traversing slowly north. Shelley Noakes reduced the scale of the map until her own circle, a gently pulsing blue, appeared at the edge of the screen, and watched the yellow disc advance imperceptibly upon the blue for almost thirty seconds before turning off the phone and throwing it, suddenly and childishly, into the pile of laundry at the end of her bed.

Mira has a tracker app on Shelley’s phone as well. Mrs Darvish keeps up on where her husband is by tracking his phone. Tony’s research is of the investigative reporter sort, on line and in-the-field which, of course, entails some significant snooping. And, of course, he is snooped on while he investigates.

Catton uses interior dialogue to let us in on the main characters’ struggles with who they are and what they want. Well, not so much Lemoine, who struggles less with a values dialectic than with figuring out how to get what he wants from the world. Tony sees himself as a progressive, but wrestles with his feminist credentials, and sincerely wonders if he is inauthentic in his desire to make a meaningful career for himself, in presenting himself as someone who has to struggle to get by, who criticizes the very system that makes his life possible. Mira struggles to hide (…a vanity, an appetite, a capacity for manipulation that she would rather other people did not see; she knew, and was ashamed to know). Shelly has to reconcile her seemingly permanent peace-maker role in life with her need to be her own person.

Shelley wanted out. Out of the group; out of the suffocating moral censure, the pretended fellow feeling, the constant obligatory thrift; out of financial peril; out of the flat; out of her relationship with Mira, which was not romantic in any physical sense, but which had somehow come to feel both exclusive and proprietary; and above all, out of her role as the sensible, dependable, predictable sidekick, never quite as rebellious as Mira, never quite as free-thinking, never – even when they acted together – quite as brave.

This being a tale not told by an idiot, inspired by a tragedy, there will be familiar tragic elements on display. Tragic flaws for everyone. Come one, come all. But can the mere hoi-polloi really be tragic characters? Isn’t that reserved for the high and mighty? Owen Darvish certainly counts for that, as does Lemoine. But Mira? Shelley? Tony? Or is grandiosity alone sufficient to elevate one to a height sufficient to mark a character as potentially tragic? Catton does make us wonder as we read just who are the tragic characters, and who the schlubs who are guilty of, maybe, a bit of overreach, or garden variety foolishness.

Of course, there is more to them than merely wanting beyond their capacities. There is another element from tragedy to consider. Note the quote that opens this review. Betrayal figures large. There is enough deception in the air here that one might be well advised to don a bee-keeper outfit to fend off the tangled webs that permeate the landscape. Secrets will be kept, some minor, some world-class. Our intro to Mira, for example, shows her using a false identity to research the landslide area. More importantly, is she selling out the collective if she comes to a deal with Lemoine? Shelley tries her best to seduce Tony as a passive-aggressive way of getting Mira to separate from her. Others have their own secrets and betrayals nicely tucked away.

Another tragedic element is that outcomes are the result of actions, not fate or chance. If you look back down the path from end to beginning you will see all the characters’ yesterdays lighting the way to an inescapable end. Although it is not the only influence on the book, Macbeth is clearly the primary one.

[Catton] drew up another intricate masterplan in which each of the main characters could be seen as Macbeth, with a corresponding Lady Macbeth, witches and so on. It sounds tricksier than it is: as the narrative perspective shifts, everybody could be the villain. She wanted to stop readers playing “the polarised blame game we are all used to in contemporary politics,” she explains. “You wouldn’t be able to say: ‘These are my people so they are obviously the good guys. These are the people that I despise so they are obviously the bad guys.’” – from The Guardian interview

You will have to find out for yourself how much of this structure made it into the final draft.

Other significant sources of inspiration were 20th century crime fiction, Jane Austen’s Emma, (the structure and taut language) and even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The character Shelley was named for the author, leaving us to wonder whether this Shelley is creature or creator.

While this is a novel in which actions matter, and have consequences, it is also one in which the omniscient narrator will tell you everything you need to know about each of the characters. This ability to look into (monitor remotely? surveil?) everyone’s deepest inner thoughts and feelings resonates with the surveillance elements in the story. One of the precipitating ideas for the book, the Big-Brother-is-watching element certainly, sprung from a 2015 protest in which New Zealand police were taking photos of protesters as they walked past.

Catton is also interested in inter-generational dealings.

It’s something I have thought about a lot…how my generational placement or position has conditioned me. The book is designed generationally. There are three generations represented in terms of the points of view. And I wanted to really explore the generational differences in terms of how they deal with certain contemporary problems that we’re all kind of facing globally. – from The Toronto Public Library interview

But it is no boomer-bashing party.

“Millennials are quite willing to cosy up to the tech gen Xers,” she says. “We are all personally enriching billionaires like Elon Musk by freely giving away our data…These minerals are in the phones that are around us all the time. I want my iPhone. I want to be able to have the freedoms that it brings. We are all complicit.” – from The Guardian interview

In addition to its literary and thriller aspects, Birnam Wood is a satire, a caricature of diverse sorts. Most glaring is the Birnam Wood members, whose motivations and desires are often less idealistic than what they show to the world. Darvish comes in for an uncomplimentary look, too, as does Lemoine. It is a tale, also, about expectations.

Macbeth is a play that’s all about prophecy. It’s animated by prophecy. So I …re-read it with everything that was happening in terms of world events resounding in my head and suddenly saw it in a really different way, as a play that contains very interesting and loud warnings about what happens when you regard the future with too much certainty if you’re too convinced about what lies just down the road. Because of course Macbeth makes the ending of Macbeth happen. None of that was written on the wall before before he received those prophecies and I and so I kind of wanted to achieve a similar effect in a novel by writing a book about incremental political actions and moral actions that end up kind of having these enormous effects that were avoidable. – from the Barnes & Noble interview

In short (too late, I know), Birnam Wood is a multi-layered triumph, building on classic structures and themes to tell a very contemporary story, offering consideration of how people make very human choices, as they contain battles between morality and desire. The tale does not at all creep in a petty pace, but rolls along at a good clip, shifting into turbo as it nears the end, generating an abundance of sound and fury which certainly signifies something.

Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo.

Review posted – 6/9/23

Publication date – 3/7/23

I received an ARE of Birnam Wood from FSG in return for a fair review. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating, but ever since writing the review, I acquired, and can’t seem to wash off, these bloody spots.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Catton’s Good Reads and Wikipedia pages

Profile – from Wiki

Eleanor Catton MNZM (born 1985) is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch. She completed a master’s degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master’s thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize (at age 28) and only the second New Zealander. It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.

For those looking ahead

…her next work, “a queasy immersion thriller” that will be called Doubtful Sound, after the remote fjord in the south-west of New Zealand where it is set. She has had the title for a long time – “I just think it is so beautiful” – but it was only in the final months of completing Birnam Wood that the story came to her. – from The Guardian interview

Interviews
—–Poured Over: A Barnes & Noble Podcast – Eleanor Catton on Birnam Wood with Miwa Messer
—–Toronto Public Library – Eleanor Catton – Birnam Wood – Mar 6, 2023 – video – 44:50
—–The Guardian – Eleanor Catton: ‘I felt so much doubt after winning the Booker’ by Lisa Allardice
—–NY Times – Eleanor Catton on ‘Birnam Wood’ with Gilbert Cruz – audio – 35:11
—–Stuff – Eleanor Catton on guilty pleasures, being a slow writer, and whether NZ is still home

Songs/Music
—–Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me
—–The Police – Every Breath You Take

Item of Interest from the author
—–Waterstones – Eleanor Catton on Birnam Wood and its influences – video – 6:29 – on Emma as inspiration. There is a lot in here.

Item of Interest
—–The New Yorker – March 13, 2023 – Eleanor Catton Wants Plot to Matter Again by B.D. McCloy

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Tagged as Cli-Fi, eco-fiction, Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

May 5, 2023 · 12:01 am

What Have We Done by Alex Finlay

book cover

As the bus disappears in a trail of black exhaust, Jenna notices a woman across the street who seems to be staring at her. She’s not one of the usual bus-stop parents. She has a pretty heart-shaped face, high cheekbones. Someone new in the neighborhood maybe. Too young to be a mom. An au pair? Jenna raises her hand to wave, but the woman turns away. Not even fellow outcasts want to be friends. Jenna watches a long moment as the woman crosses the street to avoid the other parents chatting on the sidewalk.

No matter how bad the person, we all cling to the days of innocence we remember from our youth.

Of course, not everyone was innocent. Savior House was less of a group home and more a ring of hell for Jenna, Donnie, and Nico. When they were teens, their female peers were disappearing at an alarming rate. This on top of unhealthy quantities of brutality to endure or evade, not to mention a strange rich person who stopped by occasionally with mysterious purpose. Twenty-five years ago, the three, together with two other friends, committed a homicide. (It’s in the prologue) Today, one of their group is already dead, and the rest are in mortal peril. Can any of them be saved? What goes around…

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Alex Finlay – image from AnthonyFranzenBooks.com

We follow the three as they try to survive. The action is mostly contemporary, with looks back at their teen experience, which was not pretty, and the events that led up to that fateful day. They did not escape Savior House unscathed.

I love exploring how people deal with, and overcome, trauma. I’d read somewhere about how many people with childhood trauma somehow later channel that into highly successful careers. That was the spark for the idea of a group of teenagers in an abusive foster home growing up and having accomplished lives, but also a secret that will come back to haunt them 25 years later. – from 2023 The Big Thrill interview

Jenna is a DC-suburb stay-at-home stepmom, with a particularly dark past, which she believed she had left behind. Donnie was in a popular band twenty years ago, and is now playing the oldies circuit, currently working a cruise ship. He has issues with substances. Nico is an executive producer for a successful reality TV show, set in a mine. He has issues with gambling. Maybe their troubles are a form of penance. Attempts are made on all their lives.

Asked in the above interview how he came up with the unusual characters in this book, Finlay said,

For Donnie, I’ve long wanted to create an aging rocker as a character. In fact, seven years ago I interviewed the members of a popular 80s band knowing that someday I’d use it for a character. That day came when I wrote my first Donnie chapter for WHAT HAVE WE DONE.
For Nico, I have a friend who’s an executive producer of hit reality TV shows, so I had access to someone with a unique job. And the great fictional characters of others—Jason Bourne, Nikita, and Orphan X to name a few—inspired Jenna.

The book is divided into three parts. In The Targets, we meet and spend some time with each of the three, get to know them, their situations in life, their strengths and their issues. The Reunion brings at least some of the group back together, and The Truth is self-explanatory.

It is a wild ride, as Finlay keeps the action moving, and the pages flipping, as the three do their best to remain alive in a hostile world. There are plenty of white-knuckle passages, and chapter-ending questions left to be answered. Finlay knows how to end his chapters with a hook, to keep you from switching off that bedside lamp (or e-reader). He keeps you wondering who can be trusted.

The chapters are short, averaging a little over four pages per, and many, eighty-six, so you can pop into the book for a few minutes at a time, and still scarf down a chapter or five.

Some moral questions are raised. You will pick up some unexpected bits of intel. A killer uses an unusual weapon for their dark purpose. And there is some useful info on mining safety. You are hardly likely to fall in love with any of the characters, particularly any with a psycho-killer persuasion, but you will like them enough, particularly Jenna, (who, BTW, gets 36 of the 86 total chapters; Donnie and Nico get 22 and 16 respectively) to care about how things go for them, to hope that they can find some redemption, in addition to surviving. But this is pretty much a pure entertainment. Don’t worry about underlying content, themes, or larger issues. Just see what happens next, and then, and then, and then. It is a wonderful beach read. You won’t wonder what you have done once you finish reading. You’ll know. You will have had a good time.

he’s startled by a memory: the four of them at the bank of the river, on their knees, the gun barrel put to the back of Donnie’s head.
Ben’s voice echoes in his head. You don’t have to be scared anymore, Donnie.
A tear rolls down Donnie’s cheek.
I’m not so sure about that, Benny. I’m not so sure.

Review posted – 5/5/23

Publication date – 3/7/23

I received AREs of What Have We Done from Minotaur Books in return for a fair review. Now, would you please tell that person who keeps following me to go away. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to Finlay’s personal,
FB, and Instagram, and pages

Profile – From the author’s real-name website

Anthony Franze is a critically acclaimed novelist with St. Martin’s Press, and a lawyer in the Appellate & Supreme Court practice of a prominent Washington, D.C. law firm.
For more than a decade, Anthony was an adjunct professor of law teaching courses in Federal Courts, Legal Rhetoric, and Appellate Practice, and he currently participates in a European faculty exchange program where he teaches at law schools abroad.
He writes legal thrillers under his own name, including THE LAST JUSTICE (2012), THE ADVOCATE’S DAUGHTER (2016), and THE OUTSIDER (2017He writes commercial fiction under a pen name, [Alex Haley] and his 2021 novel was an Indie Next pick, a LibraryReads selection, an Amazon Editor’s Best Thriller, as well as a CNN, Newsweek, E!, BuzzFeed, Business Week, Goodreads, Parade, PopSugar, and Reader’s Digest best or most anticipated thriller of the year. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and optioned for television and film.

Interviews
—–The Big Thrill – Up Close: Alex Finlay – A CHILDHOOD DEED TO DIE FOR by K.L. Romo
—–The Big Thrill – 2022 – The Ties That Bind by Dawn Ius
—– Annie’s Book Stop of Worcester – Alex Finlay Interview – on The Night Shift

Item of Interest from the author
—–Criminal element – Excerpt – Chapter 2

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Tagged as Mystery, Thriller

March 31, 2023 · 12:01 am

The Angel Maker by Alex North

book cover

Our experiences and fears collect in the backs of our minds like dry kindling…

…there is really no such thing as long ago

After writing eleven stand-alone mystery/thriller novels, author Steve Mosby shifted course to horror, birthing his nom de doom, Alex North. The Angel Maker is his third under that name. The first, The Whisper Man, was a spine-tingler of the highest order. His second, 2020 – The Shadows, took on lucid-dreaming, bound to garish murders. The Angel Maker returns us to a contemporary setting brought into being by crimes committed a generation ago. It revolves around a spooky book, around one seriously messed-up family, around a young woman, and around a central philosophical theory that fuels a psycho-serial killer.

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Alex North – image from Hull Noir

Thirty-something Katie Shaw is a caring teacher with a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and a shaky marriage to her childhood sweetheart. Her brother, Chris, a couple years younger, has been out of touch for quite a while. Katie had finally reported him to the police after he’d stolen money from her bag during a family event. Drug addiction can do that to a person. But then, if you were 15 when some seemingly random psycho tries to kill you on your own street and literally tear your face off, it can have lifelong repercussions. So, Chris has issues. But he is out now, of jail, of rehab, has been for a while, even has a partner and a life. Which is why Katie is confused when her mother tells her that Chris has gone missing. And the hunt is on, as Katie goes all Miss Marple, trying to track down her little brother.

Professor Alan Hobbes, seventy-something, is getting his affairs in order as he expects to die on October 4, 2017, the present of the novel. He lives, or rather lived in a very large house, one with some decidedly spooky elements.

…at the far end of the room, an archway.
He stared at that for a moment. It clearly led away into some deeper chamber of the house, but the blackness there was impenetrable. [Detective] Laurence [Page] could hear the faintest rush of air emerging from it, and the sound reminded him of something breathing.

This in addition to a section of the upstairs floor that burned decades back, but was never repaired. (The UK title of the book is The Half Burnt House.)

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Tartini’s Dream by Louis Leopold Boilly – image from Wikipedia – this appears in a lecture Hobbes is giving

Why did Chris disappear? How did Hobbes foresee his own end? And what does all this have to do with notorious child-killer (and possible seer) Jack Lock, who died in prison in 1956? What was Lock writing in his book all those years ago, and why is some rich guy looking to get it? Edward Leland is clearly a nogoodnik, rich, angry, sociopathic, employer of bad people. And he wants that book, whatever it takes.

So, we have our hero, Katie, who is the primary page-getter here. (19 chapters of 50) We follow along as she tries to track down her brother as the threat levels against both her and Chris keep ratcheting up. Oh, and the guy who had tried to kill Chris all those years ago? Out of jail.

When I first started planning and writing The Angel Maker, all I really knew was that I wanted… the characters [to] be searching for a rare and forbidden text. Some of them would end up doing so for innocent reasons, of course, but there would be others who genuinely coveted the dark knowledge they imagined it contained…I settled on the journal of a fictional serial killer called Jack Lock, an item that would be valuable in and of itself to certain damaged people. But I also wanted it to contain some kind of secret knowledge, which raised further questions. What else might drive people to seek this book out?…in the end, I went with an idea that has haunted me more than a little for many years now, and which engages with a number of the themes that have always interested me. Nature versus nurture. The influence of the past on the present. How much control any of us really have. – from the Crimereads interview

North flogs this theme throughout, which is a strength, giving the book more heft than relying solely on a scary story. Here we have a scary philosophical theory. Leads one to wonder, with a shudder, just how many people might hew to this perspective.

Detectives Laurence Page and Caroline Pettifer offer some entertaining banter, but serve mostly as a way of connecting parts of the story. Laurence offers some echoing of parental issues as well.

The story is definitely engaging. Katie is a good egg, and is easy to root for. North provides her with the handicap of an unsupportive, disbelieving husband, which was cause for a bit of eye-rolling. It is such a trope these days. Maybe always has been.

Dangling fantasy items are tossed in, but seem gratuitous. Katie’s daughter reporting that the moon comes to talk to her, for example. There are a few more otherworldly gewgaws added here and there, but they serve, mostly, as window-dressing.

There are elements that permeate. The first is, obviously, the quest for the magical book. Second is Katie’s quest to find her brother. Parent/child relationships are important, particularly when parents display a clear preference for one child over another. Siblings have issues with each other as well. (Don’t we all?) Thematically, the book is about free choice. Are we really free, or is everything laid out, reducing us to actors reading lines? Do events in our past define our options moving forward? And if the future is set, where lies personal responsibility? North has some fun counterpointing characters named Lock and Hobbes, standing in for the immutability of determined events vs the ability of people to effect change via personal decision-making, reflecting their well-known namesakes from Western philosophical history.

The story dips back from the present (2017), with scenes set in the 1950s, ‘70s, 80s, and 90s, offering explanations for what is going on today. Some might find it a bit tough to follow. I did not have a problem. There are fifty chapters in this 336-page book. So, it is easy to read this one in small chunks if that is your style.

There probably are no books that can foretell the future. But, the odds are that by the time you finish reading The Angel Maker, I predict, you will be quivery and exhausted. You are free to read this book, or to pass, a matter of personal choice. But if one believes in God, a god who knows all that has happened, all that is happening, and all that is to come, then the decision was made long before you were ever offered the choice. Are you still responsible for that decision? And if you veer from what is written in God’s plan, are you not defying the Almighty? Read it or not. The choice is up to you?

“If you could see the future,” Sam asked her, “would you want to?”

Review posted – March 31, 2023

Publication date – February 28, 2023

I received an ARE of The Angel Maker from Celadon in return for a fair review and agreeing not to dig up those things in my yard. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on Goodreads. Stop by and say Hi!

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

My reviews of other books by North
—–20219 – The Whisper Man
—–2020 – The Shadows

Songs/Music
—–Cher – If I Could Turn Back Time
—–Jim Croce – Time in a Bottle
—–La Stravaganza – Violin Sonata in G Minor—the Devil’s Trill

Item of Interest from the author
—–Crimereads – Alex North on the Pleasure of Fictional Forbidden Texts

It’s a familiar and recurring motif in fiction: the search for a work of art that may or may not exist. One that is difficult to find. One that is rare because it’s awful, and which is sought after for both reasons. The idea speaks to a human desire to face the forbidden simply because it is forbidden. To be a member of the select few that have gone through an ordeal that others have not. To be let in on a secret even if learning it will ultimately destroy you.

Item of Interest
—–Wiki – Laplace’s Demon
—–CRAM – Hard Determinism and John Locke’s Theory of Human Philosophy

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Tagged as horror, Suspense, Thriller

February 10, 2023 · 12:01 pm

All Hallows by Christopher Golden

book cover

…the static seemed to claw at the music, tear it up. Another voice broke in, like the ghost of one radio station overlapping with Kiss 108. But this wasn’t the voice of Sunny Joe White. The voice sounded like someone amused, caught in the middle of telling a joke, but then it changed, as if the man had something caught in his throat. The sound was awful, almost hateful, like an animal . . . and then it was just static again. Barb twisted the dial, trying to tune back in to Kiss, but all that came out was static and squealing, so she jabbed the power knob and the inside of the car went silent.

Nothing in these woods could be more dreadful, more terrifying, than the selfish cruelty of ordinary people.

Coventry, MA may be an appealing looking place, and there are some good things happening there, involving some good people, but below the mask of 1984 suburban bliss there lie some darker realities. And over the course of a single Halloween night there will be a cornucopia of revelation. (A Masque of the Orange Death?) As in Poe’s story, there is no refuge from what is coming, and there will be a hefty body count.

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Christopher Golden – image from eggplante.com

Tony Barbosa is a decent guy. Not hugely successful in the world. Just found a job after a long spell out of work. About to sell the family house, the damage from that prolonged unemployment. He puts on a Halloween tradition on his property every year, The Haunted Woods, with all the things one might expect. Sadly, this will be his last time. Daughter, Chloe, 17, loves helping out. His wife, Alice, puts up with it, and his son, Rick, 13, is simply uninterested. He will hang with his friend, Billie, a rare black girl in this area. Tony and Alice are just emerging from a rough patch. The future of their marriage is shaky. On this Halloween night, there will be a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.

Attorney Donnie Sweeney is a drunken, philandering pathetic excuse of a husband, reliably unreliable, a chronic liar. His wife, Barb, is reaching her limit with him. (Everyone loved Donnie Sweeney, but nobody more than Donnie himself, and for the first time, Charlie wondered if that wasn’t his dad’s defining characteristic. He loved his wife and his kids right up to the moment it threatened his ability to have a good time.) Their kids are a surprisingly decent lot, 18yo Julia, 13yo Brian, and Charlie, 11. Really, dude, you cannot simply put your scattered crap back in the garage and shut the garage door, on a weekend, but take off to do whatever, sticking your kids with the task?

In addition to these two families we follow Vanessa Montez, 17, and her bff, Steve Koenig, 16 Both are crushing on the same girl.

Trick-or-treaters are making the rounds, but there are some unfamiliar faces among the crowd tonight. A young-looking (nine, maybe) girl in a rough, old-time Raggedy Ann outfit. A teenaged scarecrow, his costume also seeming to be from another era, and a very pale boy named Leonard. Definitely not a trick-or-treater is the man they say they are fleeing, Mr. Cunning. They beg the local kids to stay with them, to protect them, until midnight, when the coast should be clear. Um, ok, sure, whatever. It is clear, though, that there is something strange in the neighborhood. A giant blackthorn tree appears, and a new (popup?) clearing in the woods. There is hunting going on.

There are two levels to this one, the presenting horror, which is pretty bloody horrifying, and the underlying horrors, also pretty bloody horrifying, but in a different way. In a 2014 interview with Nightmare Magazine, Golden said, I’m not just fascinated with monsters, but with monstrosity, both human and—in the way it reflects back the human—supernatural. There is a considerable volume of monstrosity in Coventry, hidden, or at least not publicly professed by the residents. A relatively-recently-arrived couple are suspected of dark doings. Are those suspicions accurate or just speculative hyperbole? Donnie’s low character is not exactly a state secret, but his charming mask will not hide him tonight. Bigotries will be exposed. But there is mask-dropping that will be benign, as some folks allow their true selves be seen, to positive effect.

The strength of the novel for me was its portrayal of middle-class duress. Tony Barbosa’s situation wandered queasily close to home. Everybody seems on the cusp of change. Troubled marriages abound. The adult women are given prime roles, their life goals, and marital experiences portrayed evenly with their mates’. Ditto the interactions among the teens and kids, wrestling with changes in their lives, moving from kid to adolescent, from adolescent to something more, discovering and molding who they are or want to be. The strength of Golden’s kid portrayals reminded me very much of Stephen King. There is an element of nostalgia for the 1980s here, but a much larger perspective on a place and time that is portrayed as far from appealing.

There were some aspects that I thought did not work quite so well. While it was possible to follow the many characters tracked here, there seemed rather a lot of them for a book of modest length. Chapters are short and offer alternating viewpoints. There are sixty two chapters in a book of three-hundred-thirty-six pages, so if you are inclined, you can read this one in small bits. Four characters get the most ink. Barb Sweeney gets ten chapters, Tony Barbosa and Vanessa get nine each, and Rick Barbosa gets eight. One character gets four chapters, two get three chapters, one gets two and five other characters get one chapter apiece. The character voices are distinct and Golden goes into sufficient depth with the majors to gain our interest.

Also, I found the layering of the supernatural evil excessive. And the back-and-forth struggle of one character to gain control inside a terrible space just seemed, even within the confines of a fantasy, a bit much. The gruesomeness worked well, offering shocking turns and some surprise demises.

There is persistent creepiness, ramping up from shadows, noises, and fleeting images to more direct darkness and considerable bloodshed.

By the end of the night, many truths will be revealed, facades of all sorts will be ripped off or tossed aside, many lives will have ended and many others will have been permanently changed. The line between a good scare and good, people-centered storytelling has never been thinner. All Hallows is a scary good read.

Something moved in the forest. A deeper shadow, back in among the trees. Vanessa narrowed her eyes, trying to focus, but someone said something funny and everyone laughed and she pretended to have heard the joke and laughed along with them, and the moment passed.
Still, something in the air had changed. The night seemed darker, as if the moonlight sifting through the branches had dimmed. The shadows had turned weird, the clearing a bit smaller, closer. This time when her skin prickled, it wasn’t from the flush that Julia made her feel, but from the way the night seemed to hold its breath.

Review posted – 02/10/23

Publication date – 01/24/23

I received a digital ARE of All Hallows from St. Martin’s Press in return for a fair review, and the offering of a few Druid prayers. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.

This review has been cross-posted on GoodReads

A three-and-a-half, really, but I rounded up.

=======================================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages

Golden is a monster of an author who got started, and found success, very early. He has a gazillion publications to his credit and an army-size host of teleplay credits from his years writing for Buffy with Joss Whedon, and plenty more. And then there are the comics. You may have heard of Hell Boy, among those. Here is a list of what he has published, from Fiction DB. I personally think he has elves, or more likely, goblins, chained to computers in his basement helping him crank out such volume.

My review of his prior book, Road of Bones

Interviews
—–Interview: Christopher Golden by Lisa Morton – January 2014
—–Atomic Geekdom – Book Review Interview / All Hallows by Christopher Golden – with Jenny Robinson-Nagy – video – 51:20

Items of Interest
—–Folk Customs – Tree Lore – Blackthorn
—–Britannica – Halloween
—–Britannica – Hallowe’en – a 1926 entry on this
—–Wiki on Samhain, the ritual from which Halloween was derived

Songs/Music
—–Air Supply – The Ones That You Love – chapter 3
—–Michael Jackson – Thriller – chapter 6
—–Bobby Picket and the Cryptkicker Five – The Monster Mash – chapter 6

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Tagged as Fiction, Halloween, horror, Thriller