by John Grant
And that's more or less the whole plot of Jack Ketchum's short novel Right to Life, which seems to have been inspired in some part by the ghastly case of the UK husband-and-wife sexual psychopaths Fred and Rosemary West. The tale is really quite well told, but one's left with the uneasy feeling that its subtext is a bit of a mess – perhaps intentionally so. Yes, there are Right to Lifers whose life-sanctifying principles don't stop them from maiming, shooting and lethally bombing, and on the face of it the tale might seem allegorical of this miserable illogicality; yet the allegory soon falls apart as it becomes evident Stephen has no real interest at all in the baby – indeed, he at one point wonders if the baby might be disposed of along with its mother – but is driven solely by the urge to gratify his sado-sexual urges, while Kath is looking forward gleefully to the goriness of performing an unnecessary and fatal Caesarian for the delivery.
So, sans subtext, all we're really left with is a tale of crazed inhumanity – the pro- and anti-abortion debate being just a Maguffin – yet it's a gripping enough narrative to brush off such misgivings until after the reading is done.
Of the two stories appended in this edition, "Brave Girl" is beautifully told and sucks the reader in with enviable skill, only to suffer from the lack of a real ending – it just stops – and "Returns" is a very pleasing bit of whimsy, a very short ghost story of immense appeal to cat-lovers everywhere.
This elegantly produced volume will serve as an introduction to those unfamiliar with Ketchum's work and as a gap-filler for Ketchum completists. For the rest of us, it's a pleasant enough way of passing a train journey.
—Infinity Plus
Bag of Bones
by Stephen King
Hodder & Stoughton, 516 pages, hardback, 1998
Jo, the wife of successful thriller writer Mike Noonan, dies suddenly and still quite young from a brain aneurysm. In grief, he suffers a dramatic case of writer's block, but is able to get by for a few years by covertly publishing novels he'd written earlier but never told his publisher about. But then the "spares" run out, and he must, somehow, get his act together to write something new. In desperation, he decides to go to the summer home he and Jo had in a remote part of Maine, a house he hasn't found the courage to visit since Jo's death. On arrival he finds that the house, called Sara Laughs in honour of a local turn-of-the-century blues singer called Sara Tidwell, is haunted. Also he meets and falls in love with widowed Mattie Devore and her three-year-old daughter Kyra; Mattie's vastly wealthy father-in-law Max is determined to get custody of the child, and so Mike steps in to help Mattie fight him through the courts. In so doing, Mike begins to unearth a truly ghastly tale of what happened one summer's day ninety years ago to Sara Tidwell, and the terrible revenge her spirit has been exacting from the descendants of her murderers.
King has always been a masterful page-turner – even his weakest books are usually immensely readable. But through most of his long career he has rarely aspired to be more than that – which is an observation rather than a criticism, because there's many a respected literary novelist who could improve his or her art by learning a little of King's craft. At the same time there has been the feeling that, in books like Rose Madder and Insomnia, King himself has become a little impatient with the self-imposed shackles of "mere" craftsmanship.
With Bag of Bones he's finally made the breakthrough, and it is as a serious literary novel that this book should be judged. That's not to say that he has lost any of his ability to tell a spellbinding tale – and this is one of his very best, a stunningly good and often very frightening ghost story that owes much to the tradition of M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and, to name a modern example, the excellent Jonathan Aycliffe. But what makes this book so intensely gripping is something more than that – and more, too, than the fine, perceptive and often disturbingly funny writing: it is the superb depiction of character and situation. We care about these people; we share with Mike Noonan his slow discovery that his loss of Jo is at an even more profound depth than he or we could have imagined, that she was a finer person than even he had realized; and lordie do we come to share his growing love for Mattie and the child Kyra. And all this is achieved through the use of a very difficult narrational gambit: although Mike is our narrator, our storyspinner, and thus is present on every page and is the eye through which we see, he is not in fact the central character – that role is shared by Kyra and Mattie and by the dead Jo and Sara, for this is in part also a novel about women and the male perception of them.
There are various undercurrents in this novel. Inevitably there are aspects of metafiction about it – for King is like his creation a successful novelist (more successful and more prolific than Mike Noonan) and the very title is drawn from a remark by Thomas Hardy to the effect that even the finest fictional character is but a bag of bones when compared to a real person. If King falters anywhere, it is in the handling of these metafictional aspects – a slight failure, seemingly born of timidity. But the most important underlyer is the sense of and deep appreciation of human loss: Jo is lost to Mike and the world, as even more profoundly is Sara, whose songs are available only through interpretations at the hands of others, for no recordings of her survive. Mike's ability to write is lost – ask any writer and you'll be told that this is a true nightmare of the soul. The only loss that can be averted is that of the child Kyra, who is sought by both the living and the dead.
This is a very powerful book, and a fine example of what the late-twentieth-century novel can do. And should be doing more often.
—Samhain
The Knotted Cord
Alistair Kinnon
BeWrite, 316 pages, paperback, 2002
Almost a decade ago, cop Martin Nicols, working in a small Ontario town some tens of miles outside Toronto, failed to solve the murder of young S&M rent-boy Billy. He gave in to pressure from his superiors to let the "obvious culprit", Billy's regular client Frank Taylor – self-confessedly guilty of pedophile conduct but, Nicols believed, innocent of killing the prostitute he loved – plea-bargain manslaughter and take the rap. Now a string of similar murders bedevils Toronto, and Nicols realizes he might at last catch Billy's murderer.
But again people in high places obstruct him, trying once more to pin the crimes on Taylor, recently released. Nonetheless, Nicols presses on, uncovering once more the hideous details of a pedophile sexual-slavery network that spreads into all levels of Canadian society.
He also has to cope with his own guilt. If only he had persisted in the teeth of political pressure, he might have caught this sadistic killer ten years ago and thus saved the lives of several of society's most unfortunate. Now that he's based in a new force, with new superiors, it's a pusillanimity he'll not repeat.
In The Knotted Cord we follow both of Nicols's investigations, with the "flashback" occupying about two-thirds of the text – perhaps an artificial distinction, since the "flashback" is really part of the current case.
This book functions pretty well as a sort of double police procedural, despite some clumsy writing; a further distraction is that the text reads as if (although this may well not have been the case) the book was originally written as set in Britain and then revised to effect a relocation to Ontario. There's also an annoying frequency of typos, short pages (the typesetter's widows/orphans program needs adjustment), jumbled word-orders and errors of the "lead" for "led" variety.
All these criticisms seem oddly trivial – as, indeed, do the book's "mystery" aspects – when set beside the element that gives The Knotted Cord its explosive strength: its unflinching examination of the sexual exploitation of kids both for the profit of the slavers and the pleasure of the clients. The details of the criminal schemes and activities have all the authenticity of a documentary account. Hugh McCracken, using here the nom de plume Alistair Kinnon, has worked extensively with troubled teenagers in Canada, and this bolsters the sense that what we're reading is factually based. In this sense The Knotted Cord is a crusading book, and I would sa
y an important one.
A further point. Although the author is as tough as any on pedophilia, and especially on pedophilic exploitation, he is also tough enough to take an unpopular stance and present convicted pedophile Taylor as a redeemable character. Having served his sentence and now living in a stable gay relationship, Taylor actively contributes to the hunt for the exploiters and the killer – in other words, has joined the forces of the good.
Despite the flaws noted, this very powerful novel is much recommended.
—Crescent Blues
The Moth Diaries
by Rachel Klein
Bantam, 256 pages, paperback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in 2002
This is one of the subtlest vampire stories you could ever hope to come – subtle to the point that at the book's end it is left up to the reader to decide whether The Moth Diaries is a vampire story at all. In other words, it is one of that delicious – and rare – breed of fictions that has been dubbed the "fantasy of perception": there is certainly fantastication here, but that is not to say the events described were themselves other than mundane; they may have been fantasticated by the observer, the protagonist.
The observer in The Moth Diaries is an adolescent girl who has been sent to an exclusive and very peculiar single-sex boarding school; except for a brief prologue and epilogue added by her in much later life, the text consists entirely of her schooldays diary. In it we learn of her various friendships and enmities – all seemingly transitory – with her fellow pupils, and in particular of her largely unrecognized crush on her room-mate Lucy and her hatred and fear of the new kid across the hall, Ernessa. Assuredly there's a lot that's weird and possibly detestable about Ernessa, but Ernessa's true – if again unrecognized – crime in the eyes of the narrator is that her company is significantly more alluring to Lucy than is the narrator's own.
The other girls sense Ernessa's strangeness, too, but also that allure. She could perhaps be regarded as a personification of the adult sexuality about which they're all so insatiably curious, which they are so tantalized and attracted by, which they are so eager to experiment with for themselves, and yet which they also fear because of its unknownness and its obvious dangers. Together they spy on Ernessa to see if they can solve the perceived mystery of who – or indeed what – she is, and no one is more assiduous in this than our narrator. Even when one of the girls falls off the school roof to her death during one of these spying expeditions the narrator is not long distracted from her partially successful quest.
For she has a specific reason to unpick the riddle of Ernessa. Lucy, the girl with whom she is in love – even if she cannot admit this is the case – but who has wearied of her and instead fallen under Ernessa's spell, is afflicted by an undiagnosable illness that seems to be sapping her very life away. The diarist's claims to the school authorities that Ernessa is a spiritual vampire who is sucking Lucy's life from her are of course ignored as the nonsensical ravings of a disturbed pubescent; yet it is true that when Lucy is away from school, and thus from Ernessa, her health recovers, but that when she returns she goes once more into decline ...
Klein deliberately uses an almost flat style of narrative, eschewing linguistic melodramatics in favor of something that's much more menacing – and much more engrossing, for this is a novel it soon becomes extremely hard to put down. Written with this beautiful restraint, and functioning at a number of allegorical levels, The Moth Diaries is a book you'll almost certainly want to read more than once.
—Crescent Blues
The Buzzing
by Jim Knipfel
Vintage, 260 pages, paperback, 2003
Here is a book that's potentially enormous fun but which, through flaccid, sloppy writing, poor characterization and a general lack of coherent focus offers a major disappointment.
Roscoe Baragon was once a prominent investigative journalist, but now he's old, alcoholic and complacent. His previous achievements having brought him to the prestigious (well, sort of) newsroom of the New York Sentinel, he has gravitated towards what's popularly called the Kook Beat because reporting on the conspiracy theorists doesn't require him to get off his (literally) fat butt to go out and do any real journalism. He's the ear of choice for all the crazies of New York, of whom there is no short supply; they fax, phone or e-mail him the wildest products of their own persecution complexes, and these he translates with minimal effort into "news" stories. The job is a matter of money for as near to nothing as Baragon can get it.
But then a cluster of conspiracy theories start making a sort of synergistic sense, especially when taken together with genuine news reports coming in from around the world of multiple earthquakes along a line associated with no known plate margin, of a Japanese fishing boat being struck by a US nuclear sub, and so on. His own best friend and not-quite-girlfriend, the seemingly equally alcoholic Emily, is something in forensics at the city morgue, and she leaks him the story of a drifter found strangled in a nearby park whose corpse, on arrival at the morgue, proved to be so radioactive, through and through, that he'd have died within hours had he not been strangled first.
All of this – plus the contents of Godzilla vs Megalon (1973), one of the lesser of Toho's offerings – Baragon weaves into the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories. It can be nothing more than lunatic ravings, of course, and so his editor spikes it and fires him; yet in The Buzzing's closing pages we find indications that Baragon is right ...
Not the most original of plots, but no one would care about that if the conspiracy theories themselves were sufficiently imaginative, if the one-liners came fast, furious and witty, if there were a bizarre cast of larger-than-life characters, if the writing were full of flair or sophistication, or ...
Instead the writing is clumsy and leaden. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments, but not many grins between them; one has the feeling of ploughing on through a prose wasteland hoping that someone will have dropped a rose by the path that hasn't had time to wither. Baragon is a reasonably drawn character, and possibly his hostile editor and one of the theorists, Nastacia, just about scrape the grade as well; but all the others, surprisingly including Emily, are mere names on the page. As for the conspiracy theories, surely a potentially rich lode for entertainment, these, save alone the one that Baragon himself painstaking constructs over the course of 200-plus pages, lack the fastidious complexity – the careful plaiting of different data strands to produce a perfectly self-consistent tapestry of delusion and misinformation – that is essential for the full fascination and delight of this quasi-literary form. One has the constant feeling that Knipfel hasn't bothered to do enough research to familiarize himself with the whole ethos of the conspiracy theory, and has assumed that just coming up with a few crazy notions will humour the reader.
Some of the descriptions of New York life are evocative; overall, though, The Buzzing is somewhat dull where it should sparkle.
—Infinity Plus
From the Corner of His Eye
by Dean Koontz
Bantam, 729 pages, paperback, 2001; reissue of a book originally published in 2001
Dean Koontz is probably, right now, the most underestimated writer at work in the field of fantastic literature. The reasons are not hard to fathom. Unlike most authors, who go through the learning process before they ever see print, Koontz had the misfortune – although of course it must have seemed far from that to him at the time – to find publishers for his early, clumsy attempts, which, again unfortunately for his status within the field, sold pretty well; one of them, Demon Seed (1973), an sf novel of risible implausibility, was successfully made into an even worse movie (1977). His movie novelization The Funhouse (1980; initially published as by Owen West) is another to be recalled with the wrong sort of shudder. Through these and other books he gained a dubious reputation – and good sales figures – as a sort of poor man's Stephen King, a reputation that ignored the fact that he was slowly carving out his own individual and quite distinctive niche: his no
vels, which got steadily better, grew less like horror novels and less even than like dark fantasies, instead becoming what might best be described as dark technofantasies. Horrors there might be aplenty, and they might seem to be rooted in the fantastic, but almost always there was a sub-sciencefictional rationalization somewhere. By the time of a book like Mr. Murder (1993) – which is not far short of a fine novel – he had more or less mastered his art. It can be read as a technofantasy response to Stephen King's The Dark Half (1989): in both books the central character is a writer being persecuted by a doppelgänger, but in Koontz's novel the doppelgänger has been manufactured rather than generated from the psyche.
Bestsellerdom greeted many of his novels of the later 1980s and especially the 1990s, but by that time many readers of fantastic literature had given up on him, having been more than once bitten by his earlier efforts. This was a great shame.
And it would be a great shame were such readers to miss From the Corner of His Eye, because, although not blemish-free, this is a good novel by anybody's standards. Although not as elegantly polished, it has the air of the novel that John Irving, perhaps, might write were he ever to stray into Dean Koontz territory.
Most of the book is set in the latter part of the 1960s. Harrison White, a black preacher, writes a long and powerful radio sermon based on the little-regarded disciple Saint Bartholomew. This sermon provides important motivation for much of the plot, as is slowly revealed. For example, a rehearsal of it is playing in the background as psychopath Junior Cain is brutally raping the younger of White's two virginal daughters, Seraphim; she dies bearing the resultant child, a girl who, christened Angel, is adopted by her elder sister Celestina. Although Cain barely listens to the tape, the name Bartholomew imprints itself upon his subconscious. Elsewhere, at about the time of Angel's birth, the broadcast sermon much affects Joe Lampion, whose wife Aggie is expecting their first-born; he dies in a car smash while taking her to hospital for the birth, his dying wish being that the baby, if a boy, be called Bartholomew.