by John Grant
Small wonder that now, in adulthood, Clara has become an alcoholic. When her condition threatens her ability to cope with the stresses of the New York battered-women refuge she's in charge of, she's sent to rehab, where she encounters the gentle, sensitive Mark. Love springs between them, and they rush into marriage. Yet the psychopath Niko, who all these years has been conducting his murders and other crimes on the West Coast, has never forgotten the one woman who ever succeeded in sloughing him, and the idea of recapturing or at least punishing Clara has become an obsession to him. And now he has returned to New York with the express aim of seeking her out ...
Clearly a main storyline of this novel follows in the footsteps of classic noir, but it's only a main storyline. Equally in the foreground is the tale of Clara's struggle to accept herself as a product of her past and thereby escape its clutches, something she must needs do if ever she's to become a whole person – and, not incidentally, if she's ever going to be able fully to fulfil her role as Mark's wife. It can by no means be taken for granted by the reader that she will in fact achieve these aims.
As Jones juggles the various strands of this many-layered novel with a skill one can only gasp at, it becomes steadily more moving, fascinating, absorbing, and even white-knuckle – all these at the same time. This is a monumentally impressive piece of work, and should certainly be on anybody's shortlist of the best thriller novels published in 2005.
—Crescent Blues
Dark Terrors 4
by Stephen Jones and David Sutton (editors)
Gollancz, 352 pages, hardback, 1998
There's a rather defensive introduction to this book by its editors, saying that many reviewers will disagree with their choice of one story or another but, dammit, they stand by what they've picked. This is a perfectly fair stance for the editors to have adopted; it is also a clear indication that what we can expect from this, the 4th Gollancz Book of Horror, is a bit of a mixed bag; and on top of that it is an invitation to the reviewer – well, this reviewer, anyway – to go through the book story by story rather than simply discuss the book as a whole.
So, here goes.
It is indeed a mixed bag. Very few of the stories are horror stories (none of the good ones are); rather, most are fantasies of varying degrees of darkness, generally not very dark.
19 stories.
Deep breath now.
"The Great Fall" by Richard Christian Matheson is a mercifully short squib which has resonances of the work of the author's father, Richard Matheson. "Normal Life" by Christopher Fowler seems to be based on the career of Dennis Nilsen, albeit generally hetero rather than homo; it's neatly enough written but the ending is a bit predictable. "The Wedding Present" by Neil Gaiman is a creepy psychological number that's the best thing I've read by him. "Never to be Heard" by Ramsey Campbell is again good, but seems to be crying out to be turned into a novel. "Tumbleweeds" by Donald R. Burleson has as its central idea the notion that, if you get up a dark alley with a tumbleweed, it's going to rip your throat out; this is not a worry that has hitherto had me lying awake at nights. "Family History" by Stephen Baxter is a contemporary Minotaur fantasy; his science fiction is better. "The Incredible True Facts in the Case" by David J. Schow presents a Jack the Ripper theory, but very clumsily; some of Schow's other work is very fine, so this was particularly disappointing. "Mr Guidry's Head" by Roberta Lannes is a very moving study of parenthood: highly recommended. "Inside the Cackle Factory" by Dennis Etchison is a professional piece: it reads well enough, but a half-hour later you've forgotten what it was about. "Entertaining Mr Orton" by Poppy Z. Brite is an exercise in gay (male) pornography; as either a horror or a fantasy story it has little to say. "The Country of Glass" by Joel Lane is about alcoholism and is very good indeed, except for its last paragraph. "My Pathology" by Lisa Tuttle is the first story by Tuttle I've read that I've not liked: she is one of our best writers. This one, though, just doesn't work – for me, at least. "Curing Hitler" by Thomas Tessier is a genuine chiller. "Weak End" by James Miller is a confused and confusing attempt to explain ... well, that's the trouble: at the end of it you're pretty certain there was something goddam profound going on here, but, er ... On the other hand, "Sullivan's Travails" by Jay Russell is superbly lucid: good fantasies about the movie industry are few and far between, but this is one of them (even though it's unkind about Veronica Lake, which in my book is akin to blasphemy). "The Suicide Pit" by Conrad Williams is just dull; a pity, because Williams can obviously write well. "Making Monsters" by Geoff Nicholson is a fascinating little piece about the inability of men to understand women. "A Place to Stay" by Michael Marshall Smith shows someone trying to write a fresh New Orleans vampire story; it is a colossal pity that horror and fantasy authors don't talk more to each other, because here Smith, whose ambitions for the story are admirably high, reinvents the wheel. And, last, "Suburban Blight" by Terry Lamsley is not only extremely long but so very bad that one can't really understand why Jones and Sutton thought to include it.
All in all, that predicted mixed bag, but a worthwhile anthology.
19 stories.
Phew!
Hope you took that deep breath.
—Samhain
The Tooth Fairy
by Graham Joyce
Signet, 342 pages, paperback, 1996
Once upon a time, back when the Beatles were God, there were three schoolboys who were all each other's best buddies. Then one of them, Sam, was visited by the Tooth Fairy – who proved to be not a cute androgyne with gauzy wings but, at least initially, a vast-cocked male with razor-sharp fangs and an interest in messing up every relationship Sam tried to form. Then the Tooth Fairy became – as he grew through adolescence and discovered great love for the horse-riding Alice – a female, ready to take on the form of either Alice or his buddy's beauty-queen sister Linda in his bed at nights. The Tooth Fairy is his nightmare, as he is the Tooth Fairy's; in many ways she deteriorates as he grows out of the age of nightmares.
Graham Joyce is adept at making one turn the pages, and he supplies plenty of chills as he tells his tales. This book is no exception to the rule, but there is a certain half-heartedness about it, as if he started out with a great idea but could never quite work out a proper resolution. The depiction of characters is highly variable – Alice lives on in the mind whereas the central figure, Sam, is never much more than a cypher, the main distinguishing feature of whose personality is his compulsive masturbation: he's a sort of Everyadolescent. A murder turns out not to have been a murder, although a quite different murdered body is discovered and never explained. There is some remarkably sloppy writing: "And with every minute urging the evening on to midnight, the leather football of anxiety inflating in Sam's stomach was pumped still further"; "The shocking stillness of the room wanted to blister and peel back like a layer of skin"; etc.
But make no mistake about Joyce's page-turning capacity: if you want a good fast and enjoyable read, this is certainly for you, and there are enough good ideas along the road to make you think about the book, and its ambience, long after you've finished reading it.
—Samhain
The Anatomy Lesson
by Robert I. Katz
Willowgate Press, 228 pages, paperback, 2004
This is the third novel by Robert I. Katz. The first, Edward Maret, was a good science-fiction novel, albeit one that was somewhat rough around the edges. His second novel, Surgical Risk, marked a shift into the mystery genre, introducing the characters Richard Kurtz (surgeon with a penchant for getting into trouble) and Lew Barent (grizzled, hard-bitten NYPD homicide detective). Again it was a good novel, and again it had minor problems. With The Anatomy Lesson, however, Katz finally hits the nail on the head.
The second in the Kurtz and Barent series, this starts off with a grisly practical joke being played at a teaching-hospital Halloween party: some of the props are replaced by genuine body parts, purloined from the cadavers on which the students learn dissection techniques. Soon after, a c
olleague and friend of Kurtz's, Rod Mahoney, is found murdered, the corpse hideously dismembered in a manner reminiscent of what was done to the hospital cadavers. Can the prank and the murder be related? And what is the connection between them and the growing evidence of a turf war between the drug barons who operate in New York? Once again forced to be reluctant partners in detection, Kurtz and Barent swing into action, assisted on occasion by Kurtz's alluring mistress Lenore.
The novel performs well on the "soap-opera" front – the backdrop of the major characters' ongoing lives. Barent has to learn to like his son-in-law as the pair acclimatize themselves to the pregnancy of Barent's daughter. Kurtz and Lenore move marriageward, despite the disapproval of Lenore's mother. And so on.
It also performs well as a detection – really, as two detections (I'd be giving the game away if I expanded on this). What works particularly well is the way the earlier life of Mahoney, the focal victim, is slowly unraveled: the character whom one assumed to be a stock mystery victim – rather staid, rather boring – becomes progressively more three-dimensional, and is shown to have been, behind the facade, something close to a dashing romantic hero. It's a beautifully handled worked example of the inherent fallacy in our all-too-common assumption that the folks who're today superficially dull old sticks have always been thus.
Of considerable further interest is the way in which Katz manages to blend two fiction traditions in a single novel. As mentioned enigmatically above, in The Anatomy Lesson the reader is in effect offered two detections for the price of one. The first of these accords to the traditions of the classic mystery; the second belongs more in the line of the modern crime novel. In theory this should lead to a stylistic clash; in practice, Katz weaves the two skillfully together, so you're rarely conscious of any dichotomy.
If Kurtz and Barent are new to you, The Anatomy Lesson offers an ideal introduction, although you may want to pick up Surgical Risk first. If you've already read Surgical Risk, you'll be delighted by the characters' flowering in this new novel.
—Crescent Blues
Edward Maret
by Robert I. Katz
Willowgate Press, 260 pages, paperback, 2001
Although it's an unorthodox procedure, I'd like to start this review by quoting Edward Maret's blurb in extenso. I hope my reasons for having done so will become plain a little later on.
Edward Maret was a happy man. He was young, carefree, rich and engaged to be married, but Edward Maret had enemies. His cousin Philip envied him his money, Vincent FitzMichael envied him his fiancee, and Jason Deseret, a man with a dangerous secret, feared that Edward Maret could destroy him.
Six years later, the cyborg corps is humanity's first line of defence against the alien Kliya, and cyborg AX-17 is one of the best – swift, skilled and deadly. His memories stolen from him, his face and body mutilated beyond recognition, cyborg AX-17 has no choice but to obey the orders of his human masters, until AX-17 is unexpectedly set free, and Edward Maret returns, to seek revenge.
This blurb, unlike so many blurbs, offers what is actually a pretty accurate summary of the novel's plot.
But ...
The "but" is that, reading the blurb, you'd probably expect the novel to be a space action-adventure yarn, something a bit like RoboCop, perhaps, except with space-opera trimmings. In fact, Edward Maret is not really that at all, which may come as a disappointment to Battlestar Galactica-gawpers but should be a delightful surprise to most other readers. It is not flawless – a secondary element of the final plot resolution seems somewhat contrived for melodramatic effect (it involves Devil-worshipping aliens), and the novel's structure as a whole has an aura of slight precariousness without ever quite falling apart – but it is certainly absorbing reading.
Why? Because Katz has filled it with interesting ideas. Again, that's a statement that might mislead, so let me immediately qualify it. Many of the ideas are not especially sciencefictional. Some of them are: for example, Katz's snapshot portrayals of differing alien and far-future-human cultures as his protagonist wanders the spaceways in the book's central section hold a good deal of interest (although the culture with which he populates Sparta, the planet on which much of the tale unfolds, is somewhat pedestrian, as if intended only as dutiful backdrop). But many of the novel's passages – either integral or digressionary – are concerned with the working out of philosophical ideas: ethical, moral and religious.
This is not to say that the text is any way stuffily didactic – indeed, it's refreshingly well written and flows along with scarce a moment of turgidity. Instead, what Katz has done is to take some basic formulae from science fiction and use them to construct a skeleton upon which he can drape a rather unexpected flesh, with the result that the book has superficially the affect of light reading yet is constantly titillating the intellect. That, of course, is what all science fiction is supposed to do, but in fact is what very much of it does not.
It's a difficult task that Katz has taken on, and as noted he doesn't do it with complete, 100% success. (There are also a few irritating flaws that should have been picked up by his copy-editor.) Yet he comes very close – certainly close enough that Edward Maret, even though it won't keep you up into the small hours feverishly turning the pages, is an extremely rewarding piece of work.
If you want stark shoot-em-up entertainment then this is not the book for you – there is surprisingly little dramatic action of that sort, despite the blurb, and Maret's time as cyborg AX-17 occupies only a small portion of the narrative. If you prefer your sf thoughtful and more deeply involving, however, Edward Maret can be recommended ... and Katz, whose first novel this is, is certainly an author to watch.
—Infinity Plus
Surgical Risk
by Robert I. Katz
Willowgate Press, 240 pages, paperback, 2002
One night in a Manhattan hospital obstetrician Sharon Lee is murdered. Found wandering nearby is a psychiatric patient who bears scratch-marks; traces of his tissues are found under the dead woman's fingernails. It seems an open and shut case, yet NYPD Detective Barent isn't so sure – and neither is surgeon Richard Kurtz, dragged into the case initially because he once had a passionate affair with Lee but kept on as unofficial hospital snoop because of past connections with law enforcement.
Soon after, Lee's apartment is burgled, and the burglar is later found murdered. There's a gangster connection, and Barent sets out to probe it, aware it may be just a red herring. At first he gets nowhere: potential informants either know nothing, say they know nothing, have disappeared or are inconveniently dead. But at last cracks begin to open and shenanigans ensue.
Willy-nilly, Kurtz and his love life become embroiled in those shenanigans, and he it is who spots the vital clue that leads to the busting of a criminal conspiracy and the solution to the murder.
This is a very smoothly written mystery, with likable central characters. The elegance of the writing and the frequently extremely funny but always entertaining conversations of the surgeons around the operating table pull the reader along very satisfactorily. The final unveiling of the murderer comes only after a couple of very effective twists. The private lives of Barent and Kurtz are involving too; the cop's daughter is getting married, and mother and daughter are conspiring to create a Father of the Bride-style extravaganza of a wedding; the surgeon is deeply fond of girlfriend Kathy, but not so deeply that he is not tempted by the allure of svelte blonde Lenore, encountered on a solo Mexican holiday and then later back in New York – Kurtz's vacillation between the two women is especially well done.
The novel's only problem is the plethora of minor characters: it's hard to keep track of who they all are. This does dilute the effectiveness of those plot twists a little; hard to be startled by the revelation that it was Smith who did this and Jones who did that when you can't remember who either Smith or Jones actually is.
That reservation aside, however, Surgical Risk is a thoroughly enjoyable read, with exactly the right blend of susp
ense, bamboozlement and humor. It is also substantially tougher-nosed than many a mystery novel: the gangster villains are very convincing in their nastiness, and overall there is no sense of coziness about the novel's worldview. Uncomfortable topics such as anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry are addressed directly. And the surgical descriptions are satisfyingly revolting; this reviewer will never be able to look a rectum in the eye again without a shudder.
Surgical Risk is billed as "A Kurtz and Barent Mystery", implying that it is the start of a series. Further volumes are awaited eagerly.
—Crescent Blues
Right to Life: A Novella and Two Stories
by Jack Ketchum
Gauntlet/Edge, 158 pages, paperback, 2002; the novella Right to Life first published 1998
Sara Foster, who years ago lost her six-year-old son in a tragic accident, and who lost her husband too, inadvertently becomes pregnant during her affair with the married Greg Glover; as Greg declines to destroy his family, they decide on an abortion. As they make their way to a Manhattan abortion clinic Sara is abducted into a car by Stephen and Kath Teach, two declared Right to Lifers, and drugged into unconsciousness.
When she awakes she is in the New Jersey basement cum torture chamber of the Teaches. Kath is barren. The couple intend to secrete Sara until she comes to term, then keep the baby as their own; Sara herself will not be permitted to survive the delivery. In the meantime she is repeatedly tortured – physically, mentally and in due course sexually – primarily by Stephen, who is a sadistic psychopath with less interest in the baby than in the sexual sadism, but also to a lesser extent by Kath, who despite a sympathetic exterior is in fact little better. Of course, in the end Sara turns on her tormentors and bloodily exacts her revenge ...