by John Grant
Being fortunately childless – for shame! – one day she ups and flees her comfortable Long Island home for the anonymity of New York, taking neither car nor credit cards. She's untraceable. Or is she? Tony, slowly realizing the error of his ways, is eager to find her, not necessarily to bring her back but at least to talk to her so that he may have some sense of closure. Leo wants to track her too, ostensibly to bring back his son's wife but in fact to destroy her.
A small-time semi-crook called Mortimer is in serious hock to Leo. Mortimer has just been told he has only three months to live, so were all other things equal he'd be unmoved by Leo's death threats. However, he understands these would extend to his widow. He therefore complies when told to bring into the game the services of Stark, an enigmatic figure whose expertise is finding lost people – whether or not they wish to stay lost. (Stark? Donald E. Westlake fans, see below.)
Other involved characters include the barman Abe, the sole person whom Mortimer entrusts with the secret of his impending demise and also – by very stretched coincidence – the guy whom Sara approaches in Manhattan seeking a job as a singer; and Caruso, a hood forever seeking to turn hitman. Caruso has a fanatical loyalty to Leo, to whom he believes he owes everything.
Peril is made up the interlocking tales of these various people, constructed rather in the way of a typical Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, although there the resemblance ends. (The style is more reminiscent of Donald E. Westlake in his "Richard Stark" mode.) As we are given the pieces of the plot to jigsaw together, a sort of inexorable momentum builds up; the tension is very real. Everyone wants to locate Sara except Sara herself, who wants to lose Sara and rediscover the woman she once was. Who will find her first? Her life depends on it.
A couple of the main characters are quite brilliantly depicted: Mortimer and especially Tony, who goes through a gradual attitudinal sea-change that's masterfully handled. But Leo's vileness seems sketched rather than painted in, and Sara's vapidity, although wonderfully captured in a lovely, lovely piece of characterization, makes it hard to care as much about her fate as you perhaps should.
You'll certainly enjoy Peril, and almost certainly you'll become snared in the working out of its various converging strands, but even just a few days after you've finished it you may find you have difficulty remembering its resolution. This is a top-quality piece of journeyman craftsmanship – nothing at all wrong with that, but it's not Cook at his best. Cook at his best, though, is equalled by few, so who's complaining?
—Crescent Blues
Fault Lines
by Natasha Cooper
Simon & Schuster, 346 pages, hardback, 1999
A few years ago, Kingsford – somewhere in the Home Counties – was terrorized by the so-called Kingsford Rapist, whose assaults culminated in murder and who thereafter desisted. Now there has been another grisly sex murder, clearly a copycat crime, and the cops, under plodding family-man cliché Chief Inspector William Femur (a name for which, one can't help feeling, he must have often had his leg pulled), set off in lumbering pursuit of the perpetrator. Also in pursuit is pluckily-beautiful-but-intelligent-with-it cliché feminist barrister Trish Maguire, who, unlike most series amateur detectives, here does little more than some rather aimless snooping around.
There are other feminist stereotypes here as well: the males are almost without exception caricatured as malign, inadequate, sexist or just plain stupid – or all of these – whereas the women are almost equally universally intelligent, industrious, civilized and in all ways superior to mere masculine scum, right down to their dress sense and not forgetting the fine cut of their faces and figures. The sole exception is the deceased, who is permitted to have been dowdy; indeed, she is by far the most interesting character in the book, and it's a pity Cooper was unable to develop her, through flashback or other means, to the extent she merits.
Despite the nature of the crime and the serial-killer aspects, frissons of horror are not so much few and far between as nonexistent. To be sure, we have lengthy descriptions of the initial murder and of (no cigars for guessing this one) the attempt by the psychopath on Trish herself – a scene that seems to be the sole justification for the designated heroine's inclusion in the book, just as if she were the bimbo romantic appeal in a B-movie who's been told not to wander off but does. Neither of these scenes, however, generates the remotest tingle: cardboard characterization and a lack of atmosphere doom them. Matters are not helped by the plotting, which takes the form of a whodunnit. It is a convention of the whodunnit that, early on, there's presented a thunderingly obvious solution which the reader knows is not the correct one. In this book, to our escalating disbelief, we are tediously led through knots of false deduction so stupid that it cannot be credited real people would ever think this way to reach, not some surprise denouement, but ... that thunderingly obvious solution!
A mystery that doesn't mystify, a thriller that doesn't thrill, and packed with the kind of stereotyped, dumbed-down feminism that makes any real feminist see red – as if all the other failings are somehow okay just because the author's heart is in the right place ... Added irritations are a type-size so large as seemingly to be designed for the visually impaired and the proliferation of blank pages at chapter heads, presumably both measures to make the text look more substantial than it is.
—Samhain
The Feminists
by Parley J. Cooper
Pinnacle, 188 pages, paperback, 1971
I should stress right at the outset that this paperback original was published in 1971. Why a review in 2003 of a relic from sf's hoary past? Well, I think the reason is to be found in the front-cover blurbage:
1992: TO BE A MAN IS A SIN
TO TAKE A WOMAN IS A CRIME
The Feminists
... They rule the world, and top dog is a bitch! A small band of men and their women go underground to fight the final battle of the sexes!
Yes: The Feminists is clearly what sf publishers are constantly telling us is "a forgotten classic" – a cutting-edge dystopian work to rank alongside Nineteen Eighty-four, a dire-warning if-this-goes-on tale about a horrific future in which the weaker sex have usurped the laws of Nature and taken over the reins of political power.
Tremble in your locker-rooms, oh heedless males.
The future is distant 1992, and everything's gone to hell in a handbasket since the female coup (often for reasons that are not immediately apparent: for example, I cannot understand why a drop in industrial production to virtually zero should have caused devastating global pollution). Men are a subjugate species; they have their uses, but not many of them, and are expected to be self-effacing and subservient at all times. Jackbooted butch dyke security troops are everywhere. Heterosexual sex is prohibited except by special permit.
Husky hetero Keith Montalvo has sex with a like-minded colleague, and their crime is discovered. She's in hot water, but he's in serious trouble. He goes on the run, hides in the New York subway, encounters and joins the underground (literally) resistance (which is composed of both men and women seeking not a return to male dominance but the establishment of equality of the sexes) is recruited, engages in guerrilla warfare, is captured, tortured and sentenced to execution, and is unofficially reprieved at the last moment when the Mayor of New York realizes he is her long-abandoned son and goes to the guillotine in his place.
Oops, I forgot the obligatory bit: he falls in love with a sultry rebel temptress.
One can imagine how this book came into existence. The scene is a smoke-filled editorial office at Pinnacle. Shirtsleeved males of varying degrees of obesity and baldness sweat amid the white-hot heat of creativity. They've had the USA conquered by bugs, commies, aliens, prehistoric monsters, werewolves ... you name it. What the hell is there left? And then it slowly dawns: even more terrifying than Godzilla is ... women!*
[* 2011 note: Cooper got in touch with me after this review appeared and told me that the book's genesis was nothing like the one I'd imagined.
He wrote it off his own bat ... and in a weekend! Under these circumstances, it's quite an achievement.]
I did wonder for a while if Cooper's purpose was satirical – if he might be using his female-dominated USA to make caustic comment about our own male-dominated USA (and of course it was far, far more so in 1971). But I don't think, on reflection, his aspirations went that high: there are too many stupid jibes about the supposed failings of womanhood, such as:
... he doubted that any woman, even a Feminist soldier, would brave following them into the sewage system. Their [women's] inherited fear of rats was evident even in Angela, who was, he thought, braver than most.
Of course, with the more recent mapping of the human genome we can identify exactly the chromosome responsible.
A thought that kept hammering at me as I read was this: Whatever we might say, and indeed whatever we might think, we have in our culture elevated the terrorist to the status of folk hero – for terrorists is what the heroes of The Feminists are, merrily planting bombs that blow up the innocent alongside the guilty. Although the official stance of Western civilization is staunch opposition to terrorism, in fact popular culture has glorified the terrorist, who in consequence has always had firm public support – so long as s/he is our terrorist, the underdog fighting back pluckily against oppression using whatever means are to hand, most notably their own courage and ingenuity. We admire their quickwittedness, their tricksterism. In other words, terrorists are evil murderous bastards unless they're on our side, in which case they're heroic freedom fighters, and the civilians they kill with their bombs and their bullets are just collateral damage. This is an enormous example of double standards, and of course it's not confined to Western cultures. The dichotomy is perfectly understandable, of course; what is destructive is the pretence that it doesn't exist.
Hardly an original thought – I've even had it myself several times before – but it was reinforced by my reading of this book.
But what of The Feminists as a novel? I must confess that when I handed over my 5¢ for it at a yard sale I hoped it'd be so astonishingly bad I'd be rocking with mirth as I read it – that there'd be a flood of juicy morsels for Thog's Masterclass. Alas, the novel is not a "classic" for that reason; the writing is somewhat drab and uninspiring, and the adventures lack any verve or originality. Yet it's an intriguing curio nonetheless, and will remain on my shelves: there may well be writers somewhere in the West today who're self-publishing equally doom-laden futuristic novels about the dreaded ascendancy of women, but I can't imagine any front-line commercial publisher wishing to take such a thing on. So The Feminists is a "classic" of sorts in that it is a literary item whose like we shall not see again, at least in the immediately envisageable future.
Fortunately.
—Infinity Plus
Kunma
by Frank Corsaro
Forge, 336 pages, hardback, 2003
Unorthodox psychotherapist David Sussman has a new client, Laurel Hunt. From the descriptions, you might be forgiven if you occasionally leafed back to check that David is indeed a psychotherapist, not a Black Mask-style P.I., because this babe has the legs, the curves and the wherewithal. She also has a problem: her semi-estranged husband's in hospital with an undiagnosed condition; his business partner (and her recent amorous partner) has been discovered murdered in London with his tongue ripped out; and she thinks everything's the fault of a malevolent supernatural entity.
David thinks she's disturbed.
He also thinks she's hot.
She thinks he's hot, too.
It doesn't take long before P.I. (sorry, psychotherapist) and client are clapping more than lustful eyes on each other. However, as David soon has to admit, Laurel has a point, because David's charlatan-psychic pal Ara, to whom David sent her for a consultation, turns up with his tongue ripped out. Guided by his other pal Peter – all three of David, Ara and Peter went off a while back to study at an Indian ashram – David soon discovers that the root of Laurel's problems is himself.
In a previous incarnation he was a Tibetan abbot who schemed to instal a protege in place of the Dalai Lama. The scheme was exposed and the abbot horribly executed. The protege was sexually abused and had his tongue ripped out. He promised to avenge the abbot's death, but was unsuccessful during that lifetime. Taunted as "Kunma" – soul-stealer – the protege has come back in this new reincarnatory cycle as a supernatural monster, capable of possessing people (Laurel's husband) and still intent on exacting vengeance against the reincarnated versions of the punishers.
Oh, and Laurel's young son Chris is the new Dalai Lama but nobody knows it yet.
There's quite a lot more like this, all culminating in an incredibly confusing face-off with a pack (it says here) of vultures at the top of a mesa in New Mexico. I say it's incredibly confusing, because at least one of the characters, if I was following things aright, is in two places at once. The vultures certainly find it all zoologically confusing; we're told that "the abbot watched dazedly as they rushed like lemurs toward destruction."
Frank Corsaro is Artistic Director of the Juilliard Opera Center, and is in general a pretty prestigious sort of a fellow – possibly famous, although, er, I'm not the best judge of that. The writing is atrocious, which makes for occasional giggles but is more often just outright tedious – I would have given up had I not been reading this book for review. The editorial standards emulate those of iUniverse or xLibris. The research manages to be both superficial and heavy-handed. The plotting is risible.
This is shoddy publishing. Of course, plenty of bad books are published for commercial reasons. But, when they hand over their $24.95, readers have a certain right to expect the publisher has made at least some effort with the "product" they're paying for. Otherwise the $24.95 is being taken under false pretenses.
—Crescent Blues
Terror Tales of the City: Prince of the Perverse
by Joseph Covino Jr
New Humanity Press, 319 pages, paperback, 2002
In San Francisco, around now, mad hypnotist Dr Valdemar is obsessed with the tidal wave of "Abnormals" (i.e., homosexuals) that seems to be engulfing and irremediably corrupting the city and, indeed, Civilization As We Know It. He hits on the cunning plan of ensnaring drifting wannabe writer Peter Lyon and conditioning him into being a sadistic serial slayer of overtly homosexual men. However, Peter's plucky girlfriend Jonna Park, allied with scholarly gay liberationist Kerwin Usher, does the appropriate thwarting.
Those names – "Usher", "Valdemar" – may stir some recognition, and this is no coincidence. For Prince of the Perverse, the first in a series of like novels, is an extended homage to and pastiche of the prose writings of Edgar Allan Poe. As such, it serves its purpose well.
Unfortunately, precisely because it is so lovingly and faithfully done, it has problems in terms of actual readability. Poe himself was of course a pioneer of both the macabre mystery and the horror tale, but he succeeded best at short – really quite short – length. Further, he was no great plotter and certainly no great stylist; he compensated for both by his brilliance at the sudden effect, at intense, almost visual imagery, and at what is in terms of the modern horror story called the gross-out. Prince of the Perverse reproduces all those virtues but, alas, all of Poe's shortcomings – and it does so at novel length.
A longish novel, at that.
Thus we're treated to acres of overwriting and to unbelievably long didactic passages, many rendered in the form of Platonic dialogues. One of the philosophical extravaganzas is really quite interesting – it compares the hypnotic state with romantic love – but most are expositions on the theme of hypnosis that seem to go round and round in circles without ever showing much sign of getting anywhere. Two are dialogues between Peter and Jonna debating whether or not he is right to be terminally peeved that she still enjoys the company (and no more than that) of her ex-lover; after about two paragraphs of Peter's spoilt-brat whinings on the subject one's incredulous that Jonna hasn't lon
g ago hurled him off the Golden Gate Bridge ... indeed, one's eager to volunteer to do it for her.
All of this extra Poe-esque material means there's not very much room left for plot, and indeed the summary in the first paragraph above just about covers it, less a couple of not-so-startling twists. Covino enjoys his Grand Guignol effects, again reminiscent of Poe, but these fall late in the book; for many readers perhaps too late, because by then they'll have picked up a different book.
Prince of the Perverse is, then, by no means a literary exercise without merit; Covino is to be admired for having sustained his homage so well and for so long. The most dedicated of Poe devotees will surely wallow happily in this book; to the rest of us, however, it must remain as little more than that: a worthy exercise to be respected rather than actually read.
—Infinity Plus
Fountain Society
by Wes Craven
Simon & Schuster, 350 pages, hardback, 1999
Despite the pseudo-holographic jacket – it's always a warning when vast extra sums have been spent on the covers of "celebrity" novels – the notion of a first novel by movie director Wes Craven holds a certain appeal to the curiosity.
As always with "celebrity" novels, the first question in the reader's mind is: "Who actually wrote this?" Well, there are just enough examples of writing amateurishness – nothing too offensive in this regard (you'll find more in a David Baldacci thriller) – to persuade us that, unusually in such cases, Craven did indeed write this book himself.