The Intruders is being marketed as a thriller, but as with the other Michael Marshall novels there are outré elements that should make it of interest to readers of horror and science fiction, the suggestion of more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Marshall is a writer who likes to push at the boundaries and my own take is that, with this book and its predecessors, he is reinventing the ‘secret race’ fiction of novels like Williamson's Darker Than You Think and Farmer's Wold Newton series (the governing council of the Intruders are called simply the Nine, as are the group of immortals who secretly rule the world in Farmer's work), has brought it kicking and screaming into the twenty first century, and imbued the form with a hitherto unseen level of sophistication and subtlety.
Marshall is canny in how he handles these fantastical elements, with the narrative entirely realistic at the outset, but gradually setting up plot strands, such as the exploits of nine year old runaway Madison, which can only make sense given one explanation. The reader, like Whalen, is forced to reach conclusions at odds with all we think we know of science. Making Whalen a former cop is another smart move, in that he has the technical abilities and mindset to uncover the evidence, but none of the constraints that go with still wearing a badge, while the conspiracy theories that run through the book further reinforce the reader's willingness to accept the conclusion Whalen reaches, tying in as they do to our basic human need to believe that things make sense, that there is some guiding intelligence at back of all the madness.
On the personal level, Whalen is a fully rounded character, with flaws to sit alongside his virtues. He takes the law into his own hands and is too quick to reach for the bottle when things are not going his way, and in parenthesis one could understand if his wife was seeing another man, but he is also compassionate, an honest man, a good friend, a husband who loves his wife deeply and is undone completely by the changes she appears to be going through. Also undergoing changes is nine year old Madison, one of the book's other viewpoint characters, a child who runs away from her family, the internal conflict between the girl's essential goodness and the evil that is trying to possess her externalised in acts of shocking violence and abuse that, in many ways, are the most unsettling element of the novel, and the Intruder response to Madison suggests that they are not all bad, that there is more going on here than can be rendered in black and white terms.
The Intruders has an open ending, with Jack Whalen's life and world view turned upside down, and Jack not knowing what to do with the knowledge that has fallen into his lap. I suspect (and hope) that Michael Marshall knows exactly what he's going to do with it.
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A MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH BIBLIOGRAPHY
Published as Michael Marshall Smith:
Only Forward (1994)
Spares (1996)
One of Us (1998)
The Vaccinator (1999)
What You Make It (1999)
Cat Stories (2001)
More Tomorrow and Other Stories (2003)
This is Now (2007)
The Servants (2007)
Published as Michael Marshall:
The Straw Men (2002)
The Lonely Dead (UK)/The Upright Man (US) (2004)
Blood of Angels (2005)
The Intruders (2007)
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Are you conscious of any difference in how you approach a writing project with your Michael Marshall hat on as opposed to when you're writing under the Smith byline, or is it simply a marketing convenience?
It started off not so much as a marketing convenience, as an expedience. I'd written The Straw Men as a Michael Marshall Smith novel—not seeing it as any different to what I'd done before, but rather being a next step in a hopefully interesting direction. It was quickly pointed out that Michael Marshall Smith had written three SF novels, and a bunch of horror short stories, and that this novel was neither. So to avoid confusion, I agreed to change my name. I wasn't that keen on the process at the time—and would still, if I'm honest, prefer to have everything out under the same byline, as so far as I'm concerned, it's all just my stuff—but being able to make the distinction does occasionally make it easier for me to step outside my current publishing box. With The Servants it certainly helped that I had no need to make it even slightly like a Michael Marshall project, but could just write what I wanted to write ... Michael Marshall Smith has basically generally had the freedom to write whatever the hell comes into his head, which is a wonderful (if not always very profitable) situation to be in. Luckily, for the time being, he has Michael Marshall as a patron ... And MM's novels do represent where a lot of my head is at now, anyway.
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Conspiracy theories are central to The Intruders and the other Michael Marshall books. Are these just a plot device for you, or do such things have a wider appeal, tying in to some basic human need to have things make sense?
I believe conspiracy theories are absolutely key to our understanding of the universe. I suspect the very first times our species started to weave fictions, they were intimately concerned with the process of trying to bring shape and order to the inexplicable: what is thunder? Why do the crops fail sometimes? Why did Thog, who's always been great at killing bison, get gored to death this afternoon? We're still doing the same things now. I don't go looking for the conspiracies in my novels—they just seem to come as part and parcel of the stories and the characters within them. We are a pattern-making and dot-connecting animal—it's part of what's put us where we are.
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There are some tell-tale details in The Intruders which suggest it's taking place in the same world as The Straw Men etc. Do you have any plans to bring these two story strands together at some point?
Well spotted! I don't know, is the honest answer. I certainly don't think that those two worlds are inconsistent, so it might happen at some point ... Though the novel I'm writing at the moment goes in a different direction altogether. You don't want to be in my head. It's like trying to herd cats.
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As far as I know, The Servants is the first book length story that you've written entirely from the perspective of a child. How challenging was that?
To be honest, I didn't think much about it. I've always tried to tell a story from the point of view of the people inside it—which is why The Straw Men books have at times ended up very multi-perspective, including the points of view of characters who don't actually survive very long. The Servants is Mark's story, and so that was always going to be the only way into it. And ultimately I suspect that a large proportion of our adult reactions and responses to the world differ only slightly from the way we'd react as a child. Certainly one has recourse to experience, as you get older, and a little more patience, and a few other adult glosses—but when you're angry, you're angry, and when you're scared and sad, you're scared and sad. Distress, anxiety and confusion are great levellers.
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One of the things I enjoyed most about The Servants was the sense of place, Brighton in the off season, so I'm wondering if you have any personal connection to the town?
I do, yes. We're lucky enough to own a flat down there on the seafront, and though it's rented out most of the time, we do manage to spend a few weeks a year there. My wife always wants that to be when it's sunny, but I love Brighton most when the weather's grim and you really feel like you're on the edge of the land, and the town's true nature starts to peek out from behind the tourist front ... Keith Waterhouse apparently once said that Brighton was ‘a town that was helping the police with its enquiries'—and that's a brilliant way of capturing the place's cheery but implacable dodginess. It's a town you'll always have a great evening in a pub with, but you wouldn't exactly trust it with your house keys. And there's something about the presence of the ocean that puts humankind in its place, and in context.
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Both you and John Connolly, a writer with whom you're often compared, are producing thrillers with o
utré elements. Can reader receptivity to such work be taken as a sign that genre boundaries are blurring?
I'd love to hope so, but if so, it's not a new thing but a return to the way things once were. Rigid genre boundaries are relatively new, and not something that some writers enjoy dealing with very much. In the past, people like Guy de Maupassant or D.H. Lawrence could write off-beat and spooky tales (The Rocking Horse Winner, for example) and nobody batted an eyelid. More ‘literary’ writers have been allowed to get away with this throughout, too, under the guise of ‘magic realism’ or ‘metaphor’ or ‘artifice'. Given that crime and thriller novels deal intimately with the basic verities of life—love, death, greed—it's absolutely right that they should deal with good and evil too. And that way lies the boundaries between what's real, and what's not.
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SOME FACTS ABOUT MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
Michael Marshall Smith's first short story, ‘The Man Who Drew Cats', appeared in Dark Voices 2: The Pan Book of Horror edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton in 1990, and won the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Short Story. x Michael's first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. His second, Spares, was optioned for film by DreamWorks and translated into seventeen languages. x His story ‘Everybody Goes’ appeared in issue 19 of Black Static's predecessor The Third Alternative and was later picked up for Best New Horror 1999, edited by Stephen Jones. x The first Michael Marshall novel, The Straw Men, was promoted with the slogan ‘as good as John Connolly or your money back'. We have no information as to whether anyone asked for their money back. x Michael is currently co-producing and writing a feature film based on his short story ‘Hell Hath Enlarged Herself', and will be adapting a Stephen King story for television later in the year, while The Intruders has been optioned by the BBC and is currently under series development.
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PLANTING FLAGS IN NO-MAN'S LAND
The novella, that no-man's land between the trenches of short story and novel, seems to be enjoying more than its fair share of popularity in genre circles of late, and Steve Vernon's Hard Roads (Gray Friar Press paperback, 150pp, 8 pounds) presents us with two for the price of one.
Hillman, the protagonist of ‘Trolling Lures', is a man with issues, a former cop who made a bad decision, going off into the woods to die, something he hardly dares admit to himself. Instead, with a little help from the trickster god Coyote and some handy spirits, he saves a young boy from the Troll, a magical being stranded there by Odin, though as a prerequisite of this Hillman needs to come to terms with his own past. Simply put, this is a tall tale, one that conflates various mythologies, the Amerindian and Scandinavian, and would probably give the comparative mythology academics apoplexy, but Vernon's touch is light enough to make you swallow the improbabilities and put credibility on hold. There are dashes of scabrous humour and moments of gore to flavour the pot, while Hillman's quest to recover his memories injects the story with a personal dimension, the end result an enjoyable tale with rather more depth than the length and backdrop might allow.
At half the length ‘Hammurabi Road’ is more of a mixed bag. Three men escort a fourth into the woods with the express purpose of killing him, payback for a crime of which he is accused, burning down a hotel, but along the way they have an encounter with a bear that puts an entirely different spin on the night's events, as the three argue with each other and doubts are raised as to the fourth man's guilt. There's something of the Jacobean tragedy about this tale, with things fated to end badly and a veritable feast of recrimination and guilt, regarding all of which I have mixed feelings. Vernon has the voice of a born raconteur and his prose is never less than compelling, with a homespun slang feel to it that brings to mind the work of Joe Lansdale. Scatological humour informs the work and the characters of the men are all well drawn, but all the same the scenes in which one of them talks to the spirit of the bear and where they eat the flesh of their victim don't quite ring true to character for these men as presented here, and thus doubts are raised about the validity of the whole, so what we're left with is something that engages the reader but doesn't quite convince, an entertaining story but with the outré elements slightly undermining the rest.
Conversely, in Rain by Conrad Williams (Gray Friar Press paperback, 100pp, 8 pounds), the supernatural thread that runs through the narrative remains ambivalent, a backdrop to the central tale of a disintegrating relationship. After a break-in at their UK residence, Ben and Grace move to an old farmhouse in France with their son Noah, but they seem just as incapable of papering over the cracks in their marriage as they are of renovating the building in which they live. The story is told from the perspective of Ben, whose self-image as husband and breadwinner has been undermined, while now even his role as father to Noah is built on shifting sand, giving Ben something else to feel guilty about. Williams weaves seamlessly into the narrative a panoply of special effects—strange sounds in the night, spectral visions, constant rain and hostile neighbours—so that the world itself seems to reflect and acerbate the troubled marriage, as if their unspoken conflict is being externalised. When Noah is hurt in an accident, it's the catalyst that brings everything to a head.
'Rain’ is a disturbing snapshot of a failing marriage, looking back at happier times and trying to figure out where it all went so badly wrong. The characterisation is spot on, and the outré elements enhance the growing sense of unease as the story progresses, the feeling that otherworldly forces are involved. The writing is moody, evocative, involving, packed with incidental detail and chillingly perfect metaphors, Williams equally adept at describing the almost sublime eroticism of happier times and the gut wrenching horror of the finale. If I have a complaint, it's that I didn't feel the ending was sufficiently foreshadowed, with the first hint of the true state of affairs appearing only four pages from the end, but it's a quibble, and Williams's skill at creating atmosphere, delineating damaged characters and simply shocking the reader to the core is as evident here as in any of his longer works.
Double Act (Nyx Books paperback, 91pp, $14.99) is old style supernatural horror from L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims, two masters of the form. Walter Coker, half of the vaudeville double act Cocker and Hass, has his life and career thrown into turmoil when his partner Charlie Hass dies suddenly of a heart attack. Charlie's widow June, with whom Coker had a brief fling years before, finds evidence that somebody else may have been writing Charlie's scripts for their act. June's house and Coker's rented room are broken into and ransacked, the cryptic message mine left behind on the wall, and then Coker's agent suffers a stroke and dies. When Coker is contacted by Joanne, Charlie's illegitimate daughter, he realises how very little he knew about his old partner, and a fatal chain of events is set in motion.
There's little that is innovative here, just solid storytelling in the Jamesian tradition. Maynard and Sims have an assured grasp of the material, building the story one brick at a time and taking the reader with them, so that you can never quite pin down the moment when the natural order fell by the wayside. The atmosphere of vaudeville is captured perfectly, even though we never set foot in an actual theatre, a world of second rate boarding houses, grasping agents, headliners and also rans, with the dividing line ever so thin, and name dropping to add verisimilitude. At the heart of the story is the dichotomy of the funny man and the straight man, each dependent on but also resentful of the other, the old adage of a sad man inside the clown given a concrete form, only the creation here is not exactly sad, but an unsettling monster, its genesis rooted in an act of betrayal and its acts dictated by madness, unreasoning anger. And having brought us this far, Maynard and Sims pull the rug out from under the reader's feet with a twist at the end as unexpected as it is shocking.
It's a nicely produced book too, with a striking cover from Peter Mihaichuck, easy on the eye print and miniature posters/handbills from the age of vaudeville used for interior illustration, adding a nice touch
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SMALL TOWN USA VS. THE VAMPIRES
Five towns that have had more than their fair share of bloodsuckers:
Sunnydale—epicentre of the Buffyverse and, with an average kill rate of three vampires per episode, probably not the best place to be out on your own at night. x ‘Salem's Lot—eponymous setting for Stephen King's 1975 novel. x Santa Carla—a quiet seaside town invaded by a pack of vampires led by Keifer Sutherland in the 1987 film The Lost Boys. x Grandville—visited by The Travelling Vampire Show in Richard Laymon's 2000 novel. x Junction—transformed by S.P. Somtow into Vampire Junction (1984).
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NAME DROPPING
A few novels, other than the obvious, with Dracula in the title:
Anno Dracula—Kim Newman x Dracula Unbound—Brian W. Aldiss x The Dracula Tape— Fred Saberhagen x The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula—Roderick Anscombe x The Revenge of Dracula—Peter Tremayne x Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula—Loren D. Estleman x Dracula Returns— Robert Loring x The Dracula Archives—Raymond Radorff
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THE BRIDESMAIDS
Female serial offenders in the vampire stakes:
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