Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  The Wooden Sea

  by Jonathan Carroll

  Tor, 302 pages, hardback, 2001

  Jonathan Carroll is one of the best and most intelligent novelists at work today, and yet, although they sell healthily, his books have never achieved the sales figures his manifold virtues so richly deserve. This has puzzled many – the jacket of this new novel is covered in quotes from the famous expressing exactly this bewilderment – yet the reason Carroll's work has never really conquered the commercial market seems obvious enough, a conclusion reinforced by reading The Wooden Sea: his novels cannot easily be summarized in a sentence or two.

  This is precisely the reason they're so very rewarding, of course, but not helpful when you're trying to recommend them to friends. If you were wanting to recommend a Stephen King or a John Grisham novel, for example, you could say "it's about vampires in a small American town" or "it's about this guy on the jury of a cigarette-company lawsuit who's secretly an anti-smoking campaigner" and you'd have adequately conveyed the gist of the book. Each novel of Carroll's, by contrast, is "about" a whole lot of things, so you're reduced to saying: "Just read it. You'll love it." (This is almost verbatim the way UK editor Peter Lavery introduced me to Carroll's work, way back when.) To repeat, this is why people who do read them do love them, but of course it makes it hard to induce people to do the reading bit in the first place.

  So my apologies in advance – and to Carroll as well – if the following resumé seems a bit vaguer and more chaotic than it could be.

  Frannie McCabe is Chief of Police in the small town of Crane's View, somewhere in the sleepier reaches of New York State. One day a dying three-legged dog is brought into his office, and takes over his heart. A few days later it dies, and he buries it. At about the same time a couple of the rowdier townsfolk disappear, seemingly into thin air. The dog refuses to stay buried, reappearing in his car boot accompanied by a beautiful perfume – not the stench of decay that one might expect. Other enigmatic symbols associated with the dead dog recur in McCabe's life, notably a coloured feather which only later will he realize is actually artificial. A teenager dies, and it is discovered that the drawings in her schoolbook relate to the dog, the feather and McCabe himself. An old artbook reveals an 18th-century painting of what appears to be the three-legged dog – and called by the same name, Old Vertue.

  These and other strange occurrences could almost lie within the province of the real, and for a while McCabe desperately tries to rationalize them as such. However, his attempts soon founder as his life lurches into the outrageously surreal. Aided by allies that include himself as a teenager (his junior self promptly gets the hots for McCabe's own stepdaughter), he struggles to make sense of all the weirdness, before realizing the counterproductiveness of trying to make sense of something that has no straightforward sense, no rationality.

  An individual called Astopel, whom for some time both McCabe and the reader assume to be a demon of a sort, tells McCabe that he has only seven days of life to solve the enigma of what is going on if he is to save the world. However, those days need not all be spent in the same part of his life; cast into the future, for example, he spends some hours as an old man and learns the dreadful truth as to how his wife has died/will die young – an event which he obviously yearns to avert once back in an earlier portion of his life ...

  Where this novel succeeds most brilliantly is in its portrayal of constantly shifting realities. Let me enlarge upon this. The fantasy concept of alternate realities is similar to but distinct from the sf idea of alternate universes or parallel worlds; the two concepts can be overlapped, of course, and often are, but they need not be. Good alternate-realities stories are extremely difficult to write, which is why there are so few of them: many writers either do not take up the challenge or (which is really much the same thing) lapse into the easier-to-handle sciencefictional mode of the alternate-universes story. The Wooden Sea – although it is in part actually an sf novel – is a paradigmatic example of what the fantasy alternate-realities story can be made to do, while also, though it is eminently easy to read, demonstrating the difficulty of handling the mode. McCabe's (and hence the reader's) realities are in a constant state of flux, always likely to be temporary and never to be trusted, but somehow our perception of those realities remains fixed: because of this, although the sequence of events, if related baldly as a list, might seem to be random, there is at no point any sense while sharing McCabe's adventures that they have just been arbitrarily thrown together – it is always in our mind that they do have a purpose and an order, although that purpose and that order may transcend our understanding.

  Even when finally an explanation is forthcoming, there is the delightful feeling that this explanation itself may be as transient as the realities through which McCabe has, and we have, journeyed. In that sense, the plot's explanation almost doesn't matter.

  All this is infernally difficult to achieve, as I've said: as readers we usually want to have a book's rationale (or rationales) firmly foregrounded, and become impatient otherwise. It requires great skill for an author to shake us loose from this dependence on the rational, this desire to duck the challenge that full-blooded fantasy should be issuing to its readers. Michael Moorcock does it sometimes. More specifically, Gene Wolfe succeeded brilliantly in There Are Doors (1988) and, in a rather different way, Mark Helprin managed it in the later parts of Winter's Tale (1983) – while, of course, Lewis Carroll managed it in his proto-surrealist Alice novels. There are other examples, but they're few and far between. It was in particular the Wolfe book that kept coming to mind while I was reading The Wooden Sea. Although the two novels are very different, both succeed in letting us – or making us – cut ourselves free from the logic of the everyday world.

  It would be perfectly possible to read The Wooden Sea with great pleasure as just an entertainment, and doubtless many people will, perhaps pondering from time to time about its seeming quirkiness. But it would be a waste to do so when the book offers us so many other rewards.

  —Infinity Plus

  Nemesis

  by Vincent Cobb

  M-Y Books, 304 pages, paperback, 2007

  Several years ago in the English Midlands, trainee police recruit Angela Crossley, still not quite out of her teens, was in on the culmination of a pedophile case. Some unknown had been abducting, raping and savagely murdering young girls. The killing might have gone on indefinitely had it not been that the mother of a pre-adolescent girl called Connie came to the police with the astonishing claim that her daughter was psychic and could help them. Angela, deputed to go through the motions with this obvious nutcase, was convinced despite herself, and sure enough Connie was able to guide the cops to the derelict site where the murderer had been dumping all the pathetic little corpses. Although the murderer was not apprehended, the discovery had the effect of getting him – at least so everyone hoped – to clear off into another part of the country. However, police insensitivity to Connie at the time of the gruesome discovery drove the girl into mental collapse ... and ever since she has been under psychiatric care. Her psychic abilities seem to have been scoured out of her by the experience.

  Because of guilt or perhaps something more than that, Angela has been a regular visitor to Connie in the psychiatric hospital, and the two young women have become friends. Now it seems that Connie, her exploitative mother dead, may soon be well enough to attempt a return to the outside world, and of course Angela is keen to help her. Yet what neither of them could have predicted is that the pedophile psychopath has chosen this moment to return to the Midlands, here to renew his campaign of rape and slaughter ...

  The writing style of Nemesis could hardly be more out of tune with the 21st-century American mode. This is not simply because it's a (first) novel by a British writer, set in Britain. Even in that country the style is an anachronism: ponderous, somewhat wandering, definitely amateurish. I was reminded of nothing more than the many hardback mystery novels issued by the leading Br
itish mystery publisher Gollancz in uniform yellow covers during the 1960s and 1970s. (Gollancz's books were also habitually packed with typos and questionable grammar, not to mention even misspellings. Presumably inadvertently, Cobb and his publisher have managed this further level of verisimilitude.) Many of the Gollancz mysteries were as slickly written as anything you'd find elsewhere, but a good many were not. That's not to say they were in any way bad: they simply harked back to a yet earlier age, the 1940s or so.

  The amateurishness of the telling of Nemesis thus works for me in a way it may not work for others. First, the clumsiness of the writing reinforces the impression that we're reading not a novelist's artifice but the genuine record written by Angela, a bright but not especially bookish cop. And second, of course, the whole time I was reading Nemesis I was, as a Brit of A Certain Age, bathing in a warm pool of nostalgia.

  In short, Nemesis has a very good tale to tell, but you may be significantly offput by the telling. It's very much a case of caveat lector. Me, I think you'd find this book worth the gamble.

  —Crescent Blues

  Tempter

  by Nancy A. Collins

  Gauntlet, 222 pages, hardback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 1990

  Nancy Collins made her name – and added a phrase to dark fantasy's vocabulary – with her first novel, Sunglasses After Dark (1989), a tale of chic, urbanized vampires. Her second novel followed in short order: Tempter (1990). This book received much less attention, being generally regarded as more of the same, but with voodoo added somewhat discordantly to the vampiric mix. What was unknown to readers back in 1990 was that the vampires in the tale had been added only at the behest of Collins's publishers, who were eager to groom their newly discovered author as "the next Anne Rice". For this new edition Collins has not only taken the vampires back out again but also rewritten almost every sentence in the novel in some way, great or small.

  Although it was not rated very highly at the time, Tempter was in its initial form a pretty fair novel. (I know this, because it's among the small percentage of novels I chose to bring with me when I emigrated from the UK to the US.) It is now better than that. A mark of how much better is that this reviewer read it in the form of an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) so littered with typographical errors that in the ordinary way he would have found it impossible to continue for more than a couple of dozen pages because of the constant distraction, yet he not only finished the book but found it gripping.*

  [* 2011 note: The text was apparently very thoroughly proofread preparatory to final publication.]

  The tale is set in New Orleans. Alex Rossiter is a has-been rock star making efforts to restart his career, although hampered in this by the urgings of his testosterone. He experiments with voodoo (or, as we're told, more correctly "voudou") in the hope that the voudou gods will aid his career. Penis-guided as always, he ends up in bed with the beautiful mambo, Ti, who danced at his initiation ceremony. From her he borrows and then purloins a grimoire called The Aegrosomnia, a collection of blood-sacrifice-requiring spells which, we later discover, were those used by a vicious plantation-owner, Donatien Legendre, in a bid to bring himself physical immortality. Luckily Legendre was thwarted by a slave-girl/voudou mamalewe whom he'd raped, Jazrel, but his evil soul, now known as Il-Qui-Tente ("Tempter"), lingers on in the remains of his mansion, Seraphine, aching for a route back into the world of mortals ...

  Which route it discovers through Alex Rossiter.

  Other characters involved in what becomes a fairly complex plot include Charlie, a beautiful yuppie with a propensity for falling in love with ghastly men; Jere, the not-very-successful artist who for years has loved Charlie but whom she regards only platonically; Arsine, a member of Rossiter's new band; and Mad Aggie, an ancient who peddles voudou paraphernalia that everyone believes, wrongly, to be just tourist-fleecers. The strongest and best depicted of all these characters are quite noticeably the black ones – Ti, Arsine and Aggie.

  A further complication of the plot arises – indeed, several, interrelated further complications – because none of these characters can be guaranteed to be the normal human beings they seem to be; they may instead be the physical incarnations of immortal souls that can emerge on occasion to dominate the temporal spirit of the individual concerned. On occasion this causes Collins some difficulties in presenting her material; most of the time she copes very well with the challenge, but there are scenes involving two separate entities, one called Alex and the other Rossiter, where one has to pay close attention to be absolutely certain of who is whom.

  The pace of the telling in general rarely flags, the only real exception being during a central section when we are treated to extensive extracts from the 19th-century journals of Donatien Legendre's lawyer and then of the wife whom Legendre grievously abused. Collins makes these extracts, which are vital to any understanding of the rest of the action, as interesting as she can – and it is to her credit that she succeeds so well – but even so they do stand out in stark contrast to the breakneck pace of the rest.

  Such minor carps aside, it is excellent news that at last a definitive version of Tempter has been released. Whether or not you've read the previous version, this is a publication that merits your attention.

  —Infinity Plus

  Into the Web

  by Thomas H. Cook

  Bantam, 272 pages, paperback, 2004

  One of the great pleasures of opening each new Thomas H. Cook novel is that he eschews the standard rentathriller style employed by most of the other writers on the relevant shelves. Further, Cook is quite prepared to tailor his writing style to the mood of the subject matter, so that, in effect, if you follow Cook's novels you get several thriller writers for the price of one. (That is, if his books are even thrillers. They tend to transcend the category's guidelines.) Thus the last Cook novel I reviewed for Crescent Blues, Peril (see below), had a wonderfully spare dispassionate style that perfectly offset its in actuality very romantic tale of love trying to flower and of people trying to be people in brutally adverse circumstances. Into the Web again has brutality at its heart, but here the brutality is of the kind that communities accept almost as if not realizing it's there, the brutality perpetrated by their authority figures; the central brute is the ex-sheriff of a small, remote West Virginia town, Kingdom City. The style is almost that of the bucolic novel, which matches the way Kingdom City would like to see itself and us to see it; the events depict the true corruption and violence at Kingdom City's heart.

  Roy Slater left Kingdom City for college in California weeks after his simple-minded brother Archie, in custody for viciously murdering the hostile parents of his girlfriend, hanged himself in his cell. Now, two or three decades later (the text is a little unclear on this), Roy is back to be at the side of his dying father. Old Sheriff Porterfield has retired, but his son Lonnie, a chip off a pretty revolting block, is running things in his place. Roy, escaping for a while from the curmudgeonly company of his father, stumbles into conversation with Lonnie, and hence almost immediately into the investigation of a suspicious death.

  That death proves to be no mystery at all – in a delightful tease of our preconceptions, Cook soon lets us know this was merely a matter of a poor elderly man dying of chronic illness. But the death occurred on property owned by Roy's youthful sweetheart, Lila Cutler, whom he planned to return from college to marry and take away from Kingdom County, but who wrote and told him not to bother – she would never, after all, be his.

  The reopening of this old wound draws Roy into prodding at another: he has always been convinced, despite Archie's confession, that his gentle-souled brother could not have been guilty of the decades-ago double homicide. If it wasn't Archie, who was it? Digging into the old crime, Roy discovers atrocities hidden for decades by Kingdom City's acceptance of central evils, and must constantly reappraise the people around him (notably his own father) and his interpretations of their motives for their past acts. What appears to be profou
nd vileness can prove to be philanthropy, but the philanthropy in turn may conceal an even worse vileness. What seems mystery may be no mystery at all; the mystery may lie within what appears to be clear-cut ...

  The dissection of the present to reveal the truth that gave rise to it is engrossing, and Cook succeeds also in making his tale extremely moving. Old Sheriff Porterfield emerges as one of the more terrifying brutes of modern fiction, even though his sense of duty can lead him to perform on occasion the kindest of deeds. But what really stirs the emotions, as Roy unearths the truth about not only the old homicides but also Lila Cutler, his father, and ultimately himself, is the sheer quantity of human happiness that has, over the decades, been obviated – the waste of human lives – through the failure of a community to face up to the monster it has placed in the position of master.

  There is an obvious political allegory here, but Cook skilfully declines to take it too far, leaving it to the reader to connect the relevant dots. Besides, this is only one aspect of a novel whose shortness conceals the multiplicity of its layers. It's quite astonishing, in fact, that Bantam should have chosen to release this little masterpiece, reminiscent of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, as a mass-market paperback original, since Into the Web is a novel you'll want to keep on your shelves for repeated reading. Hopefully there'll be a hardcover of it in due course.

  —Crescent Blues

  Peril

  by Thomas H. Cook

  Bantam Dell, 320 pages, hardback, 2004

  Sara Labriola is, in a rather small way, married to the Mob: her husband Tony runs a legitimate enough business, but her father-in-law Leo is a vicious operator in the lower Mob echelons. Although Tony hasn't inherited Dad's vileness, he has been indoctrinated into believing some of Dad's rather more reprehensible attitudes concerning the roles of husbands and wives. Constrained from pursuing any activity that might interest her, condemned to spend her time picking up dirty underwear after Tony, realizing that she's hit middle-age and the future is going to be only endlessly more of the same, she yearns even for the somewhat grim days before she met Tony. Then she was a torch singer of occasionally purchasable morals, but at least she wasn't stifled.