INA winner: Shooting an Albatross by Steven R. Lundin

It was a tough call. Both Threshold and Shooting an Albatross were strong books populated by good characters. Threshold is more artistic, literary and offbeat. But Steven’s book had a stronger story.

From the opening pages, Shooting an Albatross sets up a powerful question in the reader’s mind. As you may have surmised from the previous award winning book, Chion, here at the New Podler we like strong stories. Cinematic stories. Muscular stories with good, clear lines of action are what we think make great books. Shooting an Albatross is such a book. But it is more than just a story that crackles with tension. It is a story of the inability to forgive and let go, a story that leaves you with a chill down your spine. Lundin manages not only to create a strong plot but also a human story of love and loss and revenge in his book.

2009 INA Finalists

From the list of books eligible for the 2009 INA award I have picked two finalists. Bonnie Kozek’s Threshold, the hardboiled tale of skid-row life and Shooting an Albatross by Steven R. Lundin, the story of revenge that takes a lifetime to come to pass. Both are very strong books. But which will walk away with the award?

Independent Novel Award for 2009

The self-published books that have been reviewed at the New Podler blog in 2009 are as follows,

Winter Games by John Lancombe

Threshold by Bonnie Kozek

Deadly Exchange by Geoffrey Gluckman

Ether by Kristine Williams

The Curse of the Red Dragon by Vinny Do

Shooting an Albatross by Steven R.  Lundin

 

The winner shall be announced shortly.

Shooting an Albatross

Revenge takes a generation to come to fruition in Shooting an Albatross, Lundin's above average first horror thriller. One day the lonely life of a ninety-something Floyd Akerly is interrupted when he receives a stranger into his home, thinking that the man is there to keep him company and listen to his stories. But the uninvited visitor with an unusual interest in events that took place over six decades in the past has a different agenda. Only Floyd's careful recollection of the past prevents the stranger from carrying out his plan right away.

As Floyd begins tell of the events that transpired during the late summer of 1943 in Hollywood, what emerges is a story of Floyd's jealousy and humiliation that eventually leads to a murder. In 1943, the PGA Golf tour is suspended because of the War, but that does not stop an admiral and an Army general from descending on Hollywood's' El Rancho Golf Course to settle a bet through a game of golf. Because neither man can play, each partners up with a serviceman who can play golf. Evan Wilkins is chosen by the Army general and taken out of the normal Army chain of command, a move that annoys his commanding officer, Major Floyd Akerly. He becomes upset by Even's unexpected entry into the world of Hollywood's power elite and his relationship with a mogul's beautiful daughter, Amanda. The relationship between the young Amanda and the serviceman deepens into true love. The two end up kissing, an act witnessed by Floyd. In a fit of madness, jealous Akerly decides to sabotage Evan's chances of winning the game in hopes of destroying the private. But Floyd's plan backfires and he loses everything. Demoted to private, Akerly decides on taking the life of a man he blames for everything.

Shooting an Albatross is a smart horror novel that excavates the darkness that dwells in the hearts of men with assured sophistication. Floyd is not portrayed as a caricature, as evil characters often are in fiction; rather, Floyd Akerly is shown to be a man who does not seem to be able to feel or love. He is attracted to external manifestations and pursues them with external means, and in his path he leaves destruction and maimed lives. In a way, he is a tragic character because he unknowingly creates evil as he tries to fulfill his desires, for if he were able to perceive the inner lives of others, he would probably not act as he had. But we all must face the fruits of what we sow, and so Floyd Akerly comes to face in his latter years the man that he created. Lundin's plot in Albatross is of literary quality, and Albatross is a study in the nature of evil, deliberating on its origin and tracking its progress through human lives as it leaves a trail of destruction and suffering, moving from one generation to another, from one life into another, like a terrible infestation poisoning all that it touches.

Available on Amazon.

Winter Games

Winter Games
John Lacombe
336 pages
AuthorHouse (2008)

When bookish, twentysomething Tim Sutton goes to collect his kid brother, Eric, from the airport one cold New Hampshire evening, things don't go quite as planned. Three FBI agents are there to meet Eric, too. Within minutes, two are dead – throats slashed – and Eric has vanished into the snow. Three years later, Tim receives a coded message at the small-town comic book store he runs: a North Korean propaganda comic cleverly amended to include instructions on how Eric can be found. With the assistance of a disgraced former agent from the FBI's Financial Crimes Department, a millionaire Chicago drug lord, and a gifted female super-soldier-turned-rogue, Tim sets out to find his brother…

Many self-published thrillers fail because they're boring. The author has a topic they find interesting, or a great premise, but no idea how to turn that into a novel. Winter Games is certainly not one of those books. Clearly informed by the rhythms of Hollywood and high-concept episodic television such as "Prison Break" and "24", John Lacombe's novel grabs you from the outset. It was page 91 before I looked up.

The scenario is outrageous, but that's just what the genre demands. Suspension of disbelief is required – and rewarded. It's an opportunity for readers to project themselves into an imaginary world, and this is one of hi-tech espionage, global drug networks, black ops, comic books, and ninja-like operatives who pick fights with grizzly bears for kicks. It has the kind of fun, page-turning intensity you need in this genre. Lacombe has clearly read plenty of these kind of novels and he knows how they work. It's all action and anticipation – begin in medea res, reveal just enough for the reader to understand what's going on, but hold back enough that they want to keep reading. As James Cameron once said of writing movies: "Every scene should answer a question, and raise a new one you want answered, too..." On that score, Lacombe really delivers.

The writing style is clear and efficient, but Lacombe also understands the music of language. He knows how the rhythm of it can propel you across the page. Exposition is kept to a minimum. Where it is eventually required, it's mostly delivered through dialogue and in scenes that also advance the action, so Lacombe has clearly thought about how to deploy it. Some of these scenes are long and the exposition a little too wordy, but they often segue into action-packed flashbacks which "show" more than they "tell", which is satisfying. It's mercifully free of the awkward phrasing and endless typos that plague so many self-published novels. My virtual editor's pencil was hovering, but was rarely put to use. There's the odd overuse of adjectives, but on the whole this is the clean, workmanlike language you expect in an action-thriller and it really is a pleasure to read.

I was pleased, too, to discover there's quite a bit going on here thematically. Without wanting to spoil the story, it involves the global drug trade, super-soldier training programs, the ethics of US and North Korean government agencies, and one very smart American kid. At one point that kid, Eric Sutton, utters, "Screw freedom. I have power." At different times, this may well have been the battle cry of both the US and North Korea. While the novel never aims to be an incisive political analysis of the two nations, it does draw some comparisons between their global ambitions, motives and methods. There's also a really nice subtext about people being unable to overcome the life for which they were either born or made. I think a little more could have been made of Eric's character and family background, in this regard. His achievements are quite incredible, but I had an easier time buying those achievements than his rather cold motives. I wanted more. It would've made the novel a richer experience. But you can't judge a novel against an objective it didn't set out to achieve, and Lacombe has mostly exceeded the ones he obviously lined up here.

There are a few aspects that might benefit from a professional edit. First, two characters are named "Jeff" and they share many scenes together, so it's not always clear which one is speaking. This is compounded by an odd formatting error: where a character's speech runs over more than one paragraph, the closing quotation marks should be left off the end of all but the final paragraph. Here, the quotation marks are closed at the end of every paragraph of speech, so it often seems as if a second character has started speaking when it's actually a continuation of the first. This can be confusing. Secondly, things occasionally get a bit muddy in terms of structure. There are multiple flashbacks, and two scenes from the past are virtually identical though they happened three years apart. It's possible to get a little confused and this slows the pace. Finally, I mentioned earlier that suspension of disbelief is required. But sometimes things go too far. The ease and accuracy with which characters infer major parts of the backstory – inferences which are vitally necessary for the action to continue – is sometimes implausible.

In the final analysis, though, these aren't serious problems. Overall, this is a slick and solid action-thriller from an emerging writer of considerable strength. It shows a confident grasp of storytelling technique, genre requirements (including the tickler for a sequel!) and superb imagination. It's polished and professional work, and I imagine it was only knocked back by mainstream publishers because the thriller is such an incredibly competitive field.

Oh well, their loss is our gain. Winter Games is a mighty fine read. And John Lacombe is a talent to watch.

Note: This has been a free review. Due to a change in site policy requiring self-published authors to pay for reviews from now on, this is the last one I'll be contributing to The New Podler Review of Books.

This policy change was cancelled by Podler before it ever happened. The only "price" that we ask authors to "pay" is that they send us a copy of the book they wish to be reviewed. - The Podler Staff

Author Interview: Bonnie Kozek

Bonnie Kozek is author of Threshold. Her work has been recognized by major arts and letters organizations, and she has taught writing at a major American university.

Q: When did you first catch the writing bug?

A: I came to “art” very early on in my life – while still in my single digits. It manifested in all sorts of disciplines. Drawing, painting, filmmaking, writing. But for the past fifteen years I’ve been writing – to the exclusion of everything except an occasional collaboration with other artists.

Q: What artists have you collaborated with?

A: The Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Over the years, and until his death, we worked together on numerous projects. The Dutch artist Jan Frank and I collaborated on “Mania” – a book of my poetry for which he created a series of original drawings. I’ve also performed in pieces by Jeffrey Perkins, the American fluxus artist. But, like I said, this isn’t my primary focus.

Q: Okay. So, what impelled you towards art at such an early age?

A: I think people become artists for differing reasons. Some are born with immense talent, others make art to survive. I am of the latter category. It’s a less intellectual approach – at least in the beginning. And it involves a lot of catch-up and tremendous risk-taking. But, there you have it.

Q: So writing began as a means of survival. Has that changed?

A: Oh yes, that has changed. Survival isn’t my issue anymore. That ended long, long ago.

Q: So, why do you write?

A: I write for two reasons. The first reason is Words. I am wildly attracted to words. They are powerful and mysterious. I mean, in the extreme, words have the potentiality to Create or Annihilate. Although this is a dogma I’d love to discuss, I think it best left for another forum. So I’ll leave that there. In the less extreme, but no less compelling, words are awesome – thrilling – miraculous! I mean, there seems to be a code – an answer to great mysteries – that lies just beneath the surface of the words. So, I write in order to get my hands dirty – to dig down – to unravel the enigmas. Secondly, writing grounds me to the earth – to time and space – which fulfills an intense hunger I have for terrestrial connection. It’s funny because, theoretically, fiction writing doesn’t really seem a natural conduit to “reality” – yet somehow it works for me. Beyond these two things, I write because that’s what I’ve chosen to do. But then again, I’m not so sure if I chose writing or it chose me.

Q: What do you want to express in your writing?

A: I like the idea of taking deep, profound, weighty philosophical concepts and questions and stripping them of all adornment – wrapping them in “ordinariness,” if you will.  I want to express how extraordinary the ordinary is.  I want to suggest to the reader that human beings are perfectly flawed, and that even though permanently stained, we are worthy of redemption – redemption as imperfect as the flesh.  And, I want to convey these concepts in unconventional, unexpected ways.  With the Honey McGuinness series, of which “Threshold” is the first, I employed the “hardboiled noir crime thriller” genre, with its monosyllabic style and tough-guy vernacular.

Q: Let’s talk about Honey McGuinness.  She’s a complex character.  How did you go about creating her?

A: I have a fairly large reservoir of idiosyncratic characters in my head.  I pulled her from that reservoir.

Q: Why did you choose Honey McGuinness as a character to write about?

A: Well, in order to answer that I have to first talk about how the story developed.  The nascent philosophical questions I wanted to examine in the story were these: What happens when the life of a “non-believer” intersects with the life of a “believer”?  And what circumstances might bring such two disparate lives together?  I was interested in the vertex – the exact point of intersection.  Now, as I indicated above, I didn’t want to write about such a lofty subject in a conventional way – long sentences composed of multi-syllabic words wrapped in a reflective and problematic story rooted in the compound complexities of the human condition.  Nope.  I wanted to unburden the reader of the traditional pulling of heartstrings.  So, I turned to the classic noir genre – very unorthodox. Enter Honey McGuinness.  Honey is sacrilegious, off-kilter, haunted, and severely damaged – a most unlikely heroine for whom no depth is too low to sink, and for whom no line is too sacred to cross.  In short, the perfect protagonist for my purpose.

Q: In “Threshold” your description of Skid Row life seems very real.  How did you go about researching that world?

A: I enlisted the left hemisphere of my brain, and hit the streets.  I talked to and observed the itinerant and the drug addicted; DEA and regular beat cops.  I spent time in homeless shelters.  I’m crazy about doing research.  It’s the perfect counter-balance and repose to the glorious and torturous years I spend in the right hemisphere of my brain once I start writing.  And no, my research did not include smoking crack!

Q: What adventures do you have in store for Honey McGuinness?

A: In the next book she searches for “love and sex” in all the wrong places and gets caught in a terrifying xxx-rated nightmare of biblical proportions.  Now, when I say “love and sex,” I mean it’s a Honey McGuinness story, and in that context “love and sex” reads ultra-ultra-unorthodox.

Q: What is the title of the book and when will it be published?

A: “Just Before the Dawn.”  It is scheduled for publication this year.

Q: Speaking of publishing . . .  how was your experience with self-publishing . . . with iUniverse in particular?

A: Very trying.

Q: Will you use iUniverse for “Just Before the Dawn”?

A: I think everything that could have gone wrong in terms of working with iUniverse on “Threshold” did go wrong, so I learned a lot.  Now I know what I have to do to make the process run more smoothly.  Plus I developed a good relationship with an editor there, who has agreed to work with me on the next book.  So, I would say probably – I will probably use iUniverse for the next book.

Q: Do you have any advice for writers who might be considering self-publishing with iUniverse?

A: Absolutely.  Have your manuscript finalized – proof-read, edited – before you submit it.  Have your back-copy written and finalized before you submit it.  Know your audience.  Consider having your cover designed by a professional outside of iUniverse, which will lower the cost of the package that you purchase.  Basically, the more you can do yourself the better.

Q: Okay.  Who are your favorite authors and influences?

A: For a long time I only related to really tortured writers, poets, artists: Baudelaire, Rimbaud – the usual suspects.  I remember reading an interview from 1919 with the writer Djuna Barnes.  The interviewer asked her why she was so morbid and she answered, “Look at my life.” I mean, that’s what I related to.  Not anymore.  Now I like rhyming poems … and Artaud!  In the noir crime fiction genre of the Honey McGuinness books, I’d say my favorite writers are Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler.  Outside of this genre?  Oh, there are so many.  Among contemporary writers I’m crazy for Jeanette Winterson, Jonathan Lethem.  I read Alice Munro, Carl Hiaasen, Walter Mosely, David Foster Wallace.  Then there’s Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, Henry Miller – that crowd.  There’s Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck.  And of course, Gabriel García Márquez.  I’m sure I’ve missed some but as you can see, my stock is eclectic.  Once you clean house, there’s room for everything.  I like that.

Q: How did you change over the years as a writer?

A: I used to write for myself.  Now I write for others.  And I feel a tremendous responsibility to the reader.  I mean, it’s an issue of trust, and I don’t want to break that trust.

Q:  What would you like to tell struggling writers out there?

A: I would tell them that writing is a discipline that requires immense self-control.  It is difficult and terribly lonely – so be prepared.  Set a schedule and stick to it.  Don’t deviate.  If it’s not flowing, write one word after the other.  Don’t give up.  Be ruthless in your editing.  Don’t cling to words, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, that aren’t working – no matter how long you’ve worked on them or how precious you think they may be.  Try to advance an authentic open-mindedness.  And, most importantly, never never censor yourself!

Author Interview: Geoffrey Gluckman

Geoffrey Gluckman is the author of Deadly Exchange. You can visit him at geoffreygluckman.com


NP: When did you first discover the writing bug?

GG: I was eight years old.

NP: How long have you been writing before you wrote Deadly Exchange?

GG: Most of my life, but more non-fiction, poetry, then short story.

NP: What is your next writing project about?

GG: The second novel is more a literary mystery dealing with women/men/sex. Also working on the sequel for Deadly Exchange.

NP: Does it also deal with questions of identity?

GG: Not really

NP: Do you plan to write more espionage thrillers?

GG: Yes, working on sequel to Deadly Exchange.

NP: How do you go about researching topics for your books?

GG: Lots of research, both talking to people in specific areas of interest, reading, visiting locales, and real-life experience, etc.

NP: Do you have any pointers about research and fiction writing?

GG: Well, that's a big topic. I presented to some writing groups on the topic of authenticity—facts in fiction. But I guess, write what you know is nice to follow.

NP: What writers do you admire?

GG: Camus, F.S. Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, E.A. Poe, Kafka (I have them listed on my Goodreads page because whenever someone asks me that my mind goes blank)

NP: What are your favorite books?

GG: The Stranger (Camus), The Castle (Kafka), Our Man in Havana (Greene), The Great Gatsby.

NP: Have you tried to interest mainstream publishing in Deadly Exchange?

GG: Yes, numerous rejections, then with TOR books they really liked it and had it for 18 months and we were in discussion about it. Then they decided they didn't want it and I had lost all that time, so I went the self route.

NP: How did you feel about that experience?

GG: Rejections are to be expected (especially being a nobody), but the experience with TOR was annoying. I've heard others had similar experiences with bigger houses. So it goes!

NP: How was your experience wish self-publishing?

GG: With iUniverse, it was horrible. I had to hire my own cover designer and they made errors (perhaps through the digital publising process) in the final draft that went to print. Typos appeared in that version that weren't in the final draft I sent to them.

NP: Why did you choose iUniverse rather than Lulu.com or even Amazon's Create Space?

GG: It seemed better than Lulu (from research), the latter wasn't available then.

NP: Are you planning on using the Amazon Kindle digital publishing option for Deadly Exchange?

GG: I'm looking into it. I'd like to see numbers on Kindle sales to see what the market is.

NP: What would you like to tell those writers out there who want to self-publish?

GG: Hmmm—buyer beware. Don't do it, if you can avoid it.

NP: Did you use any editing services?

GG: I had a private line editor.

NP: How did you promote your book, and what tips would you have for other writers?

GG: Social sites, book signing tour, speaking engagements, web promo. Tip: plan to stick with marketing for at least 2 years because there are so many books out there.

NP: You write in your bio that you were trained as an undercover agent. What about that experience, if anything, prompted you to write Deadly Exchange?

GG: I drew a lot from those years to write the authentic aspects about espionage/undercover work in the story.

NP: How close is Deadly Exchange to reality? Could a sinister corporation or some other shadowy group be using a device similar to the one you created in your book without anyone knowing it?

GG: If you read the ending note, the technology was perfected by the CIA in the 80s and used by them and other countries since. The extent of which is still classified.

NP: How would anyone know?

GG: It would be hard to discern. Invisible weaponry is very hard to detect. Google invisible weaponry—look for Katherine A. Fitz's work.

NP: Are there good guys in the secret recesses of the clandestine world, ready to step in and put an end to plots by bad actors?

GG: I don't think so. That is the responsibility of the citizenry, as in 'government by the people, for the people.' (At least, in the US) We, the people, need to take that responsibility back. But people tend to be very apathetic.

NP: In other words, who watches the watchers?

GG: The Watchmen (ha-ha). Originally it was Congress and the citizens.

NP: Why did you turn down the CIA?

GG: I had studied what they did and some things I just couldn't agree with and hence did not want to be a part of.

NP: Did it have to do with how it would change your identity?

GG: Unfortunately, that happened anyway, which I worked hard to alter. It took many years to reverse.

NP: How did you become immersed in the world of clandestine ops?

GG: I actually chose it.

NP: It seems that today, the general public is less suspicious of government than it was a decade ago. Do you think that the current cultural climate makes people less receptive to books like Deadly Exchange?

GG: Actually, they should be more wary because things are worse now then 10 or 20 years ago. The daily distraction provided to the general public is like the entertainment provided to the Romans as the empire was collapsing.

NP: Do you think that people today are more willing to overlook any potential problems, to relinquish choice and privacy for the sake of promises of security and prosperity?

Yes, and both are illusions. To paraphrase, a founding father's quote: one who gives up freedom for security, deserves neither.

NP: Your books poses some interesting questions about freedom and identity. How do we know that we are truly free and how do we know that the identity that we do have is really us?

GG: It takes quite a bit of listening to the inner voice that speaks within. Practice, practice. Begin by looking at all the conditioning of society, parents, religions, etc in your life and ask yourself is this really true for me?

NP: Can we ever become emancipated or is freedom simply a trade one ideology for another?

GG: Tough question. I suppose only you will find that answer for you. Like Bob Marley sang: "Emanicipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds."

NP: Do you mean to say that, as in Kabbalistic teaching, we create the world by how we chose to use the energy that we do have for good or evil?

GG: Yes, I guess that could be a summary. The ancients knew lots of information, much of which has been distorted by those who placed themselves in charge.

NP: And is freedom then the realization of this simple fact?

GG: Perhaps.

Romance Thrives Amid Economic Gloom

According to NYT article, romance novels are the strongest selling category of fiction, surpassing other fantasy genres such as Sci-Fi. The reason--readers want a happy ending and a story in which fantasies come true.

Romance buyers are not only the most loyal, they are willing to sacrifice other things in order to buy their fix of happiness. And Romance also does well in nontraditional formats.

Romance novels have also captured a larger proportion of the electronic book market than other categories. Whereas most publishers say that about 1 percent of sales come from e-books, Harlequin says that digital editions make up about 3.4 percent of its sales.

At Fictionwise, the e-book seller recently acquired by Barnes & Noble, about 50 percent of sales are romance books, said Steve Pendergrast, chief technology officer. “Romance readers tend to be voracious readers,” Mr. Pendergrast said. “The ability to instantly download and start reading is potentially more important to that audience than any other audience.”

The growing market for digital romance novels has attracted several newcomers, including tiny independent publishers like Ellora’s Cave, Samhain Publishing and Ravenous Romance.

The Book Thief

The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
584 pages
Picador (2005)

"Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the children I carried in my arms."

This is a novel narrated by Death. It’s January 1939, and nine year-old Liesel Meminger and her young brother, Werner, are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family in Molching, a small town outside Munich. Liesel’s father was arrested as a Kommunist, and Liesel’s mother fears a similar fate. During the train journey, Death takes six year-old Werner, but not without noticing Liesel, too. It will be the first of many such encounters. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she finds a mysterious object, partially hidden in the snow: it’s a book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left there by accident. It’s the first of many she will steal.

So begins a fascination with books and words as Liesel, with the help of her foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi pyres. With the help of her new friend Rudy Steiner, she liberates several from the personal library of the mayor’s wife. As years pass, Death watches. Life with the Hubermann’s on Himmel Street is punctuated by the terror of the Allied bombings, but is otherwise as tolerable as a wartime childhood can be. Then her foster father repays an old debt by allowing a Jewish fist-fighter to hide out in their cellar, and Liesel’s life is changed in more ways than she could’ve imagined.

Does the world really need another Holocaust novel? Yes, if it's as good as this one. No, it’s not some German inversion of The Diary of a Young Girl despite what the synopsis might suggest. Nor is it Harry Potter and The Holocaust as more than one critic has quipped. Young Australian writer Markus Zusak is a prize-winning writer of children’s fiction, but The Book Thief is his daring adult debut.

And what a debut it is. The Book Thief is one of those extremely rare novels: an absolute page-turner as well as a serious work of art. It’s unsettling, provocative, triumphant and tragic, at times fanciful and at others relentlessly grim. It’s beautiful and harrowing in almost equal measure. More than anything, it’s emotionally gripping in a way that few novels are. I stayed up one night, determined to finish it, and brushed away tears for the last fifty pages.

Zusak says he was inspired by two real-life events related to him by his German parents: the bombing of Munich, and a teenage boy offering bread to an emaciated Jew being marched through the streets, ending with both boy and Jewish prisoner being whipped by a soldier. As Philip Ardagh in The Guardian noted, it’s the way in which Zusak combines such terrible events with such believable characters and the minutiae of everyday life in Nazi Germany that makes this book so special.

The genius, too, is in the voice. Death is arch, wry, and given to bad jokes about his profession, but he’s also moved by the plight of humans and amused by our attitudes to him. "By the way – I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me." Death is closely involved with what’s happening in wartime Europe – and obviously very busy – but he’s also, for the most part, emotionally detached from it. This allows him to comment on man’s inhumanity to man without ever being ponderous or moralistic, and without taking sides. This is important. The novel could be painfully sappy or irritatingly didactic without such a detached perspective driving it.

Zusak uses a plain style, punctuated only occasionally by vivid images. The moments of joy and violence, when they come, are all the more striking for the economy with which they’re depicted. It’s an object lesson to writers who want to deal with complex moral issues or powerful themes. And the lesson is this: just get the hell out of the way. Your language doesn’t need to be dazzling and ornate; your plotting doesn’t need to trick and surprise; you don't need to lecture or berate. Carefully choose your narrative point of view. Then put the right characters in the right situation and describe what happens as clearly as you can. The rest will take care of itself.

This is an important indirect lesson in a book that takes as its subtext the power of reading and writing. As Janet Maslin in The New York Times commented: "It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures. And because there's no arguing with a sentiment like that."

A Death on Skid Row

THRESHOLD
by Bonnie Kozek

Available from Amazon.com

Only in her mid-twenties, Honey McGuiness is already an old soul who seems to have lived a life twice as long. A self-described loner and outsider with no connections and no meaningful relationships, she hides from life in a self-imposed exile from society in Los Angeles' Skid Row, wallowing in the gutter along with the rest of the damaged persons. Of course, Honey is not like them; she could be somebody, as one of the other characters insists, but Honey neither believes that, nor does she want to hear it from anyone. There is something dark in Honey's past, something that she's not yet ready to accept and deal with, and that something is killing her chances at life and living.

Honey is not completely isolated, however. There is one person in the world of the homeless that she has a thing for. Not that this thing could ever be anything other than it is, a simple a connection that's pretty special to Honey's jaded self. Billy himself isn't much. For one thing, he is blissfully unaware of the world around him, including Honey's attention. And he communicates in seemingly random rhymes out of the words that he hears around him, like a parrot. But there seems to be something innocent about Billy, something genuine, something that draws Honey. Billy is the only person she cares about.

Working at the urban mission, living in a building targeted by developers, and Billy seem to be the building blocks of Honey's new life in hiding. But Honey's skid row honeymoon from reality is shattered when Billy is shot by unknown assassins. Dying in her arms, he whispers “mother.”

Shattered by the death of her simple friend and thirsting for vengence, Honey launches on an all out, one-woman investigation into Billy's death. That a recording device was strapped to Billy leads Honey to suspect that Billy was being used by the police, a turn of events that she finds particularly upsetting for how the system had used Billy's innocence.

In her quest to get even with the slimy players responsible, Honey encounters the last boyscout, an idealistic cop who still lives by long-gone values of right and wrong, joining the force in order to do some good. The two become close, ersatz partners, each on an idiosynchratic quest for justice. In order to turn up some leads into Billy's death, Honey herself must descend into the local drug scene. The first real contact she meets is Abel, the street boss and drug dealer with an unlikely conscience. But is this the same man whose name is mentioned on the tape she recovered from the recorder on Billy's body? Through Abel she meets another player in the drug scene, Mr. V. But Honey is treading in dangerous waters, for Mr. V knows far more than Honey suspects, and before she knows it her world erupts with violence.

Threshold is stellar writing, a work populated with complex characters, and a story with a hypnotic narrative pull. And Bonnie Kozek is a talent to watch.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Briefing for a Descent into Hell
Doris Lessing
228 pages
Vintage (1981)
First published, 1971

"Sometimes when you read a book or story, the words are dead, you struggle to end it or put it down, your attention is distracted. Another time, with exactly the same book or story, it is full of meaning, every sentence or phrase or even word seems to vibrate with messages and ideas, reading is like being pumped full of adrenalin." (p.155)

You don't say, Doris. The title alone should be enough to tell you that Nobel-winner Lessing's 1971 novel isn't going to be an easy read, and the first 100 pages are a very hard slog indeed. This is one of the few books I have almost turned away from in frustration (I normally finish everything I start). But it's worth the effort.

This self-declared "inner-space fiction" narrates the gradual "recovery" of amnesiac Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics Professor who is hospitalized after being found wandering along the London Embankment. The narrative alternates between Watkins' inner world and the efforts of his doctors and friends to revive him.

Lessing has been accused of trivializing mental illness here, but the charge carries no weight. She isn't attempting to articulate the experience of amnesia, nor of delusional psychosis. Her aim is philosophical. The further we go into the novel, the more we come to realize that Watkins may not, in fact, be ill at all - rather, the human condition may be his "illness" and his breakdown is actually a kind of waking up. What emerges is a view of the world in which identity is conditional, all matter is a unified system, and "time is the whole point". The "Hell" of the title may not be mental illness - it may be life as it is lived in the supposedly real world.

Of course, Lessing can give no definitive answer to such philosophical questions, but her exploration is powerful and increasingly sharp. Once we leave Watkins' inner world and he is asked to write about his experiences, Lessing's narrative elevates to a level of startling lucidity. The stories Watkins writes about his apparent wartime experience in Yugoslavia, and what he can see from the window of his Cambridge study, are both beautiful and profound. They make the philosophical point far better than any academic essay ever could.

And what is the point? It's a particular understanding of reality. As Lessing's epigraphs - one from a fourteenth-century Sufi mystic, the other from a twentieth-century marine biologist - neatly show, we tend to think of spirituality and science as heading in opposite directions, but they may in fact be inching ever closer together. No, the conclusion is not that God actually exists as some old man sitting up there in heaven, but rather that the ancients' intuitive understanding of the nature of reality, and their poetic expression of such, is startlingly similar to a lot of what quantum physics is telling us about space-time today. Much of human suffering may stem from an inability to see our world and ourselves in the right way. Readers engaged by this kind of thinking might also enjoy "Valis" by Philip K. Dick.

Have you made the deadly exchange?

DEADLY EXCHANGE
by Geoffrey Gluckman
Published by iUniverse 2007
Available on Amazon.com

Jennifer Chance is not the person she thinks she is. Apparently an über successful motivational speaker, Chance is more than a corporate drone without a life outside her job. She is a person whose past has been erased five years ago through a combination of drugs and mysterious electronic frequencies by a sinister cabal in control of a nefarious technology, a technology that they plan to use on the public at large under the guise of a workplace enhancement technology. Their goals are simple—to hold America hostage, and the world. If you like the FOX Dollhouse series, you'll probably enjoy the ideas behind Geoffrey Gluckman's Deadly Exchange, a rather frightening entry in the mind control genre of thriller. But Deadly Exchange is more than just a thriller. It is also a warning.

Despite the drugs and the transmitter she wears constantly on her person, Chance's artificial persona begins to crack after she reads a mysterious line in an obscure book. This seems to trigger a personal crisis for Chance, one she decides to deal with by requesting a break from her work.  This request does not go over well with her handlers, but they reluctantly accommodate her, setting in motion a chain of events that makes them wish they hadn't been so understanding, for it brings her in contact with someone from her past, a man the cabal spent a great deal of effort making her forget.

Frank Revere is still blaming himself five years after the loss of his beloved Sarah in an apparent hit-and-run. One of the more troubling aspects of the event was the mysterious disappearance of her body, a fact that Frank could never resolve. The need to take care of some last unfinished business brings him to San Diego, where he meets Jeniffer Chance and the two begin a relationship, both unaware that they have a common past that had been taken from them by a malignant cabal.

People as playthings of sinister, shadowy powers manipulated into doing things that they would not otherwise contemplate doing, stolen memories, and frequencies that kill make for a fascinating and scary scenario underlying Deadly Exchange. One question that always suggests itself in those types of books is whether or not the characters ever free themselves from these sinister manipulations. They do face very clever and resourceful foes that seem to be way ahead of them at the start. Can Jennifer Chance regain her past? And will she be able to live a life of freedom, once she does? Eventually, she and Frank will have to take on the unsavory characters at the heart of the murderous conspiracy whose aim is to hold the world hostage with a mind-altering electronic frequency weapon if they hope to ever be free. Good thing they have help from men like Peter Wellington and others with the skills and knowledge to go up against the Director's cabal.

Fast moving, filled with realistic action and dialog, based on careful research and clever extrapolation, Deadly Exchange is a riveting spectacle of thrills and chills that comes with a heart and soul, filled with hope that true love is never lost and that there are greater powers at work in the universe than the plots of men who dwell in the houses of clay. More than just some thriller you put away after a reading, it is also a warning about making bargains with personal freedoms, deadly exchanges that in the end produce a bitter harvest.

The Faber Book of Utopias

The Faber Book of Utopias
Edited by John Carey
528 pages
Faber and Faber (1999)

Anthologies are a wonderful way of exploring a genre or theme; not as a substitute for wide reading but as pointers to make your reading more rewarding. I’ve discovered some of my favourite books and authors through anthologies such as The Art of the Story edited by Daniel Halpern, and Alberto Manguel's Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature, which is a wonderful collection of fantastic/speculative tales.

Given a fair number of this site's readers declare an interest in post-apocalypse and alternate history titles, I suspect they might also be interested in an anthology such as this. The Faber Book of Utopias edited by John Carey is a fascinating survey of writing dealing with one of the most recurrent concerns in speculative literature and philosophy.

As Carey explains in his introduction, utopia actually means nowhere or no-place. It has often been taken to mean good place, through confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy. As a result of this mix-up, another word dystopia has been invented, to mean bad place. But, strictly speaking, imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias, or nowheres. Both are represented in this book and Carey uses the word dystopia for the bad places simply because it now has currency.

Not every imaginary nowhere counts as a utopia, however. To qualify as a utopia, an imaginary place must be an expression of desire. To count as a dystopia, it must be an expression of fear. This book, then, is a collection of humanity’s desires and fears over several millennia. The instant we recognise that everything inside our heads, and much outside, consists of human constructs that can be changed, we want to change them. This belief in the perfectibility of human life and society encourages many noble and selfless schemes but it's also inspired a trail of folly, tyranny and attempts at social control. They tend to centre around genetic engineering, education, crime and punishment, the prevention of ageing and the avoidance of death (or painless ways of inducing it).

Carey’s scope is vast, in terms of both period and genre. The first extract, “Holy Snakes”, comes from an Egyptian manuscript written 2000 years before the birth of Christ. The last comes from Lee M. Silver’s 1998 book Remaking Eden and concerns the fate of humankind in a post-cloning America of the year 2350. In between there are fiction and non-fiction selections from Plato, Tacitus, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Milton, Hobbes, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, the Marquis de Sade, Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Italo Calvino, Julian Barnes and many more. As other reviewers have noted, while many of the selections are predictable, some are surprising: Carey has defined utopian writing widely enough to include an extract from Hitler's Mein Kampf and Abraham Lincoln's “Gettysburg Address” as examples. (Sidenote: Did you know there is actually a photograph of Lincoln delivering that speech?)

Each has a brief introduction which provides enough context for you to appreciate an unfamiliar piece without ruining it for you (a lesson the editors of many anthologies should learn, including the aforementioned Manguel). Carey’s impressions are sometimes radical: on Plato’s Republic he argues that, however benevolent its goals, the imagined world is maintained by a mixture of force and lies and depends on squashing the aspirations of ordinary people. This points to a theme that emerges consistently here. Utopias obviously offer warnings, promises and social critiques by encouraging us to compare imagined realms with our own. But the meaning we make of the comparison will differ depending on the nature of where, and when, we live. In the mid-twentieth century, Karl Popper criticized Plato’s Republic because he saw in such a seemingly benign utopian model the beginning of, and justification for, totalitarian states. The force of a utopia seems to rely on how readily it thrusts us into a re-evaluation of our own world and its current trends. This can change over time.

Overall this is a vast and rewarding work that should appeal to anyone interested in the idea of utopia/dystopia. Ultimately, utopias seem to be attempts to address the insoluble problems of human life, but utopians tend to falsify these problems by regarding them as simple. They build their utopias on universal human longings. But what they build usually carries within it its own potential for crushing or limiting human life. As this anthology shows, how that particular contradiction plays out can be endlessly fascinating.

Syfy is the New Sci Fi

Looks like the Sci Fi Channel is taking a Hooked on Phonics approach and is changing its name to Syfy. Yeah, I don’t know what it means either. It just looks like “Siffy”. Supposedly the idea is to distance the network from its hapless, bespectacled, pocket-protector-wielding image:

“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.

True, the text messaging generation is going to love this. Unlike “Sci Fi”, “Siffy” doesn’t have that extra space in the middle. It types faster. And, much like substituting “kool” for “cool”, “bai” for “bye”, it’s more social network friendly. But Tim Brooks’ dysfunction comments are a bit “meh” if you ask me. Geeks and nerds are equated with dysfunction and antisocial behavior because we’re more obvious, it’s presumably easier to point us out in a crowd, we don’t have the broad shoulders, perfect postures, or blatant sex appeal of your typical jocks / jockettes, etc. Realistically, it’s more about appearances than it is actual social quirks. “Cool people” are just as dysfunctional as “not-cool people”. How many rock stars, movie stars, or Olympic athletes have used drugs, alcohol, self-imposed starvation, over-training, or acute promiscuity to prove this point? Could it be that we’re all not quite right in the head (to a certain degree), and that we’re all in denial?

I’m not worried. Sci-fi is cool with or without Siffy. I’m cool. My mother told me so. ;)

Real People

Real People
Alison Lurie
146 pages
Random House (1969)

I’m a big fan of the ‘diary novel’ as a genre – i.e. those novels which purport to be the actual journals of fictional characters. I enjoy the unreliability of the narrator, the blend of interiority and external action, and the freedom it gives the narrative to slip into analysis, reflection and anecdote.

Some of the most engaging and enjoyable books I’ve ever read fall into this genre: Saul Bellow’s early novel Dangling Man, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s 1975 Booker-winning Heat and Dust, Evan S. Connell’s Diary of a Rapist (don’t let the title deter you, it’s actually an insider’s vision of the classic disintegration of a schizoid personality) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea which is part-parody of the form and one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

In Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (1984), H. Porter Abbott gives an amusing outline of the genre’s key elements. Though remarkably consistent across the genre, within these apparent "rules" there can be almost infinite variety of stories. In the male version, the diarist is intelligent, sensitive, introverted and self-conscious. He is reasonably alienated with no gift for social life. He is young, in his twenties or early thirties. He is poor and powerless. He is alone. He lives in a room that contains at least two things: a window with a view and a mirror. It is a shabby room in a shabby house. The house is in a city. He walks the city streets. He writes. He paces the room. He gazes out of the window and meditates upon those passing below. At least once in the course of his entries, he looks in the mirror and describes what he sees there. He is either in love or obsessed with that fact that he is not. He is prone to melodrama. He is doomed. There is a good chance he will die. If he dies, there is a good chance he will die by his own hand.

In the female version, the major differences are that the writer is usually married; she is oppressed by the indifference, the insensitivity, or the love of her husband (or lover); she is a victim of the stereotyping imposed on her by virtue of her gender; her powerlessness is a function of her social condition as a woman; her sense of identity is more tenuous; she is less melodramatic.

That all sounds pretty grim, but the diary novel can also be the occasion for great hilarity, as demonstrated by John Updike's A Month of Sundays, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones novels and Sue Townsend's classic series on the adolescent and adult adventures of Adrian Mole.

One of the most enjoyable examples of the "female version" is Pulitzer-winner Alison Lurie’s 1969 novel, Real People. It was reprinted several times right through to the 1990s, so most good second-hand bookstores will have it – which is precisely where I stumbled across it.

When writers write about writing, the results are usually very interesting. Think of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. To my mind, Real People is right up there with them. It’s only 146 pages long, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in elegance and sophistication.

Janet ‘Belle’ Smith - married, early forties, and the author of a well-received collection of short stories - is taking her annual sojourn at Illyria, a New England mansion which has been converted into an invitation-only retreat for artists of all kinds. Craving escape from a deadening home life, Janet is delighted to find her friend Kenneth is on the guest list, but the appearance of the witless waif Anna May and the husky sculptor Nick Donato threaten to disrupt everything. As Janet struggles to construct new stories she is forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about herself, her companions, and the potential fraudulence of her art.

Lurie chooses Janet’s diary as the narrative device, and it’s an excellent choice for the kind of novel this is: one which deals with the difference between appearance and reality, between social roles and one’s own sense of identity, and in which the protagonist’s reflection on these differences is vital. Apart from constructing a neat snapshot of American art in the 1960s, Lurie deftly explores the familiar crisis of female artistry: the competing claims of being a wife/mother and having a creative career which family members more or less refuse to take seriously.

But this isn’t just about women. It’s about the relationship between art and reality. What starts out as a comedy of manners escalates in profundity until it becomes, in the final pages, a concise manifesto on the nature and purpose of art – which turns out to be truth: “If nothing survives of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.”

Ether

Ether
by Kristine Williams

Daniel's uncle Frank was a man with a penchant for the fantastic. He was certainly a source of great stories that Daniel fondly recalls from his childhood. But there were also props, toys and objects that his uncle claimed were proof that his fantastical stories were true after all.

When Daniel inherits his uncle's house, he does not expect to receive a key that opens a doorway into an alternate reality and adventure. But when Daniel uses the strange key on the key ring to the house, he falls out of his reality and right into the path of oncoming traffic. The traffic altercation brings Daniel and Ian Foster to the attention of Sheriff Murphy, who interprets Daniel's disoriented behavior as proof of his otherworldly status. He's had plenty of experience, for there were others, visitors from Daniel's world, who had come passing by on their travels through Ether. Daniel has a problem, however; in order to get back home, he must use the key, but his key is left back in his reality, still stuck in the door lock. His only hope now is to find another key, hidden somewhere in Ether.

Soon, Daniel faces his new reality and a quest for the second key, traveling through Ether courtesy of Ian Foster and his balloon ship, which is not completely unfamiliar to Daniel—he had seen it before, a model of it in his uncle's house. Their journey takes them to a giant forest, where people dwell inside trees hollowed out by enormous worms. Daniel takes part in a worm hunt and earns a tooth keepsake from the beast.

Each environment they pass through offers some sort of danger. In the swamp there is the Tree of Lives, a particularly nasty things that uses the sense of the victims for its own. And in the maze there is the mold that can make you forget your name, then more, until you forget to live. Then there are the zombified, who have lost their memories due to the spores, roaming the maze aimlessly until they die.

Ether is an imaginative adventure story that's worth checking out if you love Dr. Who or watched Sliders or the Stargate series. Though smaller in scope, Ether still manages to be entertaining for those who love the idea of traveling between different worlds.

Serial Novels Online -- Some Thoughts

There is a quiet revolution happening on the Internet; serialized ficiton seems to have exploded in the last few years. You can explore the phenomenon at Webfiction Guide and Muse's Success. There you will find some intersting stuff. And a few gems.

Here are some serials that have caught my interest.

Mr. Abernathy (Now Defunct): I love the presentation. The only unfortunate thing is the .pdf format—not everyone has a high speed connection.

Tying them together is the elusive “Mr. Abernathy”, a man known only through enigmatic references in scattered documents and journals spanning more than 100 years. His identity and secrets are of intense interest to the CIA, Russian thugs, and a mysterious band of men known only as The Joneses.

Determined to know who his father really was, Parker realizes he must first try to solve a larger and far more dangerous puzzle: who was Mr. Abernathy?

The Legion of Nothing is superhero serial ficiton. Sounds interesting.

The Legion of Nothing is the story of Nick Klein and what happens when he takes on the identity (and powered armor) of “The Rocket.”

Originally his grandfather’s superhero identity, the powered armor comes with a lot of baggage. Ranging from his grandfather’s service in World War II to connections with other heroes (and villains), the past has a way of intruding on Nick’s present.

Ether (Now Defunct) is another lovely site. Lovely premise, too.

The day Daniel Harper inherited his uncle’s old farm, he also inherited a strange key. When he used that key on the cellar door, he found himself not on the rotting wooden steps, but in the path of an oncoming car on a dark city street.

He’s just stepped into Ether, a world of steam powered cars and wooden ships that sail the skies. The key to going home is the key that brought him there, but he’s left it in the cellar door. Now his best chance of finding the way back is to go along with Ether’s most wanted criminal and former bodyguard to the murdered King in the hopes of finding another key.

Steal Tomorrow grabs right away.

Cassie stood in the devastation of the ransacked kitchen. Others had been here before her—young people who were just as hungry, just as desperate. Even the spice rack was empty, a bad sign, since it meant someone was hungry enough to consider cloves and dill weed food.

Children of the Apocalypse also looks great. I love the way that the author has created a community portal rather than just presented the writing.

There are a few things that you can learn from browsing through these sites. They can be summarized in three terms: good design, staying power, and community.

First, design of the site itself is very important. If you're thinking about creating a serial novel online, you should keep in mind that ease of access to the chapters should be one of the paramount concerns. There is nothing worse than having to search for chapters on a site. A good idea is to have a simple list of the chapters in a sidebar, easily seen by a first time visitor. What is also really effective is an arresting visual such as you find at Mr. Abernathy and Ether. Think of this aspect of the site as you would about a book cover--the visual must grab attention, but not in a cheap way. Going deeper into the presentation, you want to create the feeling of turning a page with easy navigation. Think left to right rather than up and down. Finally, you don't want to overload the site with stuff and bury the writing itself.

Should you use Blogger or pay for a hosting service? You want to think staying power here. With Blogger and WordPress, you are unlikely to encounter a bandwidth problem or see your site shut down for whatever reason; both providers are rather stable and can be expected to be around for a while. And if you put your serial on blogger or WordPress, it is likely that your work will not vanish in a few years. But if you decide to pay for hosting, you have to realize that your work will only be around as long as you keep paying the hosting fee. With hosting, you not only have to be prepared to pay for a few years, but you must be willing to cover any possible increases in hosting costs that may come down the line.

It takes more than just the story to make an online serial work. You want to be able to interact with your readers (community) and create ancillary content. These days, you want more than just the ability for the readers to comment. The best practice here is Children of the Apocalypse with tons of stuff that relates to the story line (ancillary content) and community sections: a gallery, a forum section, and extensive polls.

If you look at sites like Children of the Apocalypse, you are reminded of a portal into another world. And that's what a site featuring a serial should be like--it should be a window into another world.

The Reader

The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
224 pages
Vintage (1999)

Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from school in post-World War II Germany when he falls ill and is befriended by the 36-year-old Hanna who takes him home. When he recovers many weeks later, he dutifully brings her flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in Michael’s education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. Soon, their meetings take on a more meaningful routine in which after lovemaking Michael reads aloud from the classics. There are hints of Hanna's darker side: one inexplicable moment of violence over a minor misunderstanding, and the fact that Michael knows nothing of her life other than that she collects tickets on the streetcar. Hanna leaves the city abruptly and mysteriously, and Michael does not see her again until years later, as a law student, he sits in on her case when she is being tried as a Nazi criminal.

The Reader explores Germany's guilt-ridden relationship with its own past by objectifying it in the sexual and emotional coupling of a 15-year-old boy and a 36-year-old woman. On the face of it, that doesn't sound like the premise for one of the most engaging pieces of Holocaust fiction available, but it is. Far from eroticizing Nazism or trivializing the Holocaust, using the metaphor of a human relationship makes them both more accessible. Schlink provides a way into the unique postwar experience of the German people by relating it to things we have all experienced: guilt and romantic love. Issues and events which usually repel or dismay us with their enormity are taken out of the zones of History and Philosophy and reconfigured on a human, interpersonal scale - the scale on which they actually happened, and on which they must be confronted if we are ever to understand them fully.

I was surprised and moved to find a novel that treats the Holocaust in this way; a novel that risks being misunderstood in order to foster understanding. The erotic aspect of the novel is, in the end, a minor one and hardly the point: it's about so much more than that. Through careful characterization and plot development, Schlink manages not only to make plain the ease with which German civilians were drawn into unspeakable roles, but also to explore the difference between a legal conviction and real justice, between retribution and recompense, and, most importantly, the almost insoluble situation in which Germans born postwar find themselves - laden with guilt for things they did not do and for which they cannot possibly atone.

Interestingly, Schlink's book also becomes a sustained yet subtle commentary on the function of literature and literacy as ways of recording and recovering the past. Those interested in this subtext might like to read next W. G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction which explores the historical unwillingness, and therefore the contemporary inability, of German literature to deal with the terrorist victimization of German civilians at the hands of the Allies, e.g. the bombing of Dresden. Anyone unfamiliar with W. G. Sebald’s work should read all of it. Immediately.

For all its high intent, and equally high achievement, The Reader is almost an easy read. Schlink's language (or Carol Brown Janeway's translation, at least) is smooth, spare and precise. Schlink's subject is dignified by such straightforwardness.

The Killer Inside Me

The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson
256 pages
Vintage (1991)
First published, 1952

Lou Ford, 29, is the Deputy Sheriff of Central City, Texas. He's a local boy, son of the town doctor, and a sure thing to marry the girl next door. He's also a secret sufferer of what he terms "the sickness": textbook sociopathy, most likely, the dramatic upshot of which is a penchant for committing nasty murders, preferably of women. It first emerged in adolescence and resurfaces when Lou is drawn into a plot to silence a prostitute with the potential to embarrass the town's first family. Things rapidly escalate when suspicion falls on Lou and he needs to eliminate an ever-growing number of human loose ends, including several people he claims to love.

The genius of Thompson's dark classic is that he manages to horrify us with Lou’s truly vicious murders and all the calm premeditation that goes into them – every monstrous step narrated in Lou's wonderfully deadpan voice – and yet still have us feeling for him. Lou’s flat, affectless delivery is anything but unaffecting. He’s intelligent, cynical, self-aware and chillingly rational in his irrationality until he detours into obvious delusion towards the end. But by that point you understand him. You can't forgive him, but by witnessing his villainy from the inside you might just be able to accept that, for Lou, things couldn't have been any other way.

Technically, there's a lot to like here, and potentially a lot to learn for those interested in writing their own thrillers: an engaging voice, beautiful plotting, some agonizingly suspenseful scenes (Lou’s visit to Johnnie Papas in the lockup, in particular), masterful use of laconic speech rhythms and Texan dialect, and a whole raft of wonderfully realized minor characters who, while still identifiably small-town types, are never caricatures. But the construction of Lou Ford is Thompson’s real achievement. Numerous scholarly articles available online explore Lou’s “sickness” and find consistency with clinical diagnoses – some of which post-date the novel’s publication, suggesting Thompson had remarkable native insight into this kind of character (including their tendency to misdiagnose themselves). While I don’t think we should psychoanalyze characters as if they were real people, authors constructing fictional killers can obviously benefit from a good working knowledge of the symptoms, behaviours, inner life and childhood origins of the pathologies they want their villains to express. Thompson’s novel demonstrates how engaging and enduring such veracity can be.

It’s endured, too, because this novel is actually about something, and not just mental illness: there are several passages in which Thompson touches on the tenuousness of civilized morality; on the phoniness of social interaction and the grim reality it masks. The recognition of this commonplace inversion of values – the difference between the way the world actually is, and the way we say it is or think it should be – is a staple of the noir genre, of course. But Thompson gives it a highly effective workout here, making this a superior novel. Running chills up and down your spine is one thing. Making you think is something else.

Sidenote: Those who enjoyed Casey Affleck’s performance as Patrick Kenzie in big brother Ben’s 2007 adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone might be interested to know he’s playing Lou Ford in a new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me directed by Michael Winterbottom. Currently filming, it’s slated for release in 2010. Stacey Keach played Ford to good effect in the otherwise undistinguished 1976 version, but the unassuming young Affleck should bring some rather chilling, baby-faced menace to the role.

HATER by David Moody

David Moody's zombie novel Autumn was reviewed in this blog some time ago. It was a compelling story and a well written novel and I thought that Mood had talent. I wasn't too far off the mark. Like a number of self-publishing graduates, Moody has been picked up by a major publisher and seems on his way to mainstream recognition.  On the 17th of this month David's new novel HATER is coming out from Macmillan/Thomas Dunne. Not only that,  but it's also been optioned for a movie.

THURSDAY

i

Simmons, regional manager for a chain of main street discount stores, slipped his change into his pocket then neatly folded his newspaper in half and tucked it under his arm. He quickly glanced at his watch before leaving the shop and rejoining the faceless mass of shoppers and office workers crowding the city center sidewalks outside. He checked through his date book in his head as he walked. Weekly sales meeting at ten, business review with Jack Staynes at eleven, lunch with a supplier at one-thirty...

He stopped walking when he saw her. At first she was just another face on the street, nondescript and unimposing and as irrelevant to him as the rest of them were. But there was something different about this particular woman, something which made him feel uneasy. In a split second she was gone again, swallowed up by the crowds. He looked around for her anxiously, desperate to find her among the constantly weaving mass of figures which scurried busily around him. There she was. Through a momentary gap in the bodies he could see her coming toward him. No more than five feet tall, hunched forward and wearing a faded red raincoat. Her wiry gray-white hair was held in place under a clear plastic rain hood and she stared ahead through the thick lenses of her wide-rimmed glasses. She had to be eighty if she was a day, he thought as he looked into her wrinkled, liver-spotted face, so why was she such a threat? He had to act quickly before she disappeared again. He couldn’t risk losing her. For the first time he made direct eye contact with her and he knew immediately that he had to do it. He had no choice. He had to do it and he had to do it right now.

Dropping his newspaper, briefcase, and umbrella Simmons pushed his way through the crowd then reached out and grabbed hold of her by the wide lapels of her raincoat. Before she could react to what was happening he spun her around through almost a complete turn and threw her back toward the building he’d just left. Her frail body was light and she virtually flew across the footpath, her feet barely touching the ground before she smashed up against the thick safety-glass shop window and bounced back into the street. Stunned with pain and surprise she lay face down on the cold, rain-soaked pavement, too shocked to move. Simmons pushed his way back toward her, barging through a small crowd of concerned shoppers who had stopped to help. Ignoring their angry protests he dragged her to her feet and shoved her toward the shop window again, her head whipping back on her shoulders as she clattered against the glass for the second time.

“What the hell are you doing, you idiot?!” an appalled bystander yelled, grabbing hold of Simmons’s coat sleeve and pulling him back. Simmons twisted and squirmed free from the man’s grip. He tripped and landed on his hands and knees in the gutter. She was still on her feet just ahead of him. He could see her through the legs of the other people crowding around her.

Oblivious to the howls and screams of protest ringing in his ears, Simmons quickly stood up, pausing only to pick up his umbrella from the edge of the footpath and to push his wire-framed glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Holding the umbrella out in front of him like a bayonet rifle he ran at the woman again.

“Please...” she begged as he sunk the sharp metal tip of the umbrella deep into her gut and then yanked it out again. She slumped back against the window, clutching the wound as the stunned and disbelieving crowd quickly engulfed Simmons. Through the confusion he watched as her legs gave way and she collapsed heavily to the ground, blood oozing out of the deep hole in her side.

“Maniac,” someone spat in his ear. Simmons spun around and stared at the owner of the voice. Jesus Christ, another one! This one was just like the old woman. And there’s another, and another...and they were all around him now. He stared helplessly into the sea of angry faces which surrounded him. They were all the same. Every last one of them had suddenly become a threat to him. He knew there were too many of them but he had to fight. In desperation he screwed his hand into a fist and swung it into the nearest face. As a teenage boy recoiled from the sudden impact and dropped to the ground a horde of uniformed figures weaved through the crowd and wrestled Simmons to the ground.