Firestarter by Stephen King

Bad things happen to kids in Stephen King land

Firestarter (1980) is a fairly early King novel -- the eighth counting ones he wrote under the Bachman pseudonym. I'm not a fanatical Stephen King fan, but after finishing Firestarter I wondered just how many of his books I've read. I found an online checklist, and it turns out I've now read 29 of them, which is probably more books than I've read by any other single author. Still, he's written 80 and is at work on more, so I've got a long way to go if I want to catch up.

I've never seen either of the two movie adaptations of this novel, so I went into it not knowing anything other than the fact that it's about a little girl who can start fires with her mind. In the book, this power is call "pyrokinesis." The critic S.T. Joshi claims the correct coinage should be "telepyrosis," but I believe that Joshi's version would mean heartburn from a distance. Pyrokinesis sounds just fine to me anyway since it sounds like you're throwing fire.

Review

Stephen King starts this one with the tried-and-true technique of dropping the reader into the middle of the action. Seven-year-old Charlene (better known as Charlie) McGee and her father, Andy, are on the run from government agents who have killed her mother, Vicky. A pair of agents had already taken Charlie captive by the time the narrative starts, but Andy managed to catch up with them and use his own mental powers to neutralize them. The secretive agency known only as "The Shop" has plenty more agents, though, and they will keep coming until they have Charlie in their clutches.

In flashbacks we learn that Andy and Vicky met in college. The psychology department was running an experiment where a dozen student volunteers would be paid $200 each to take a mild hallucinogenic drug called Lot Six while being monitored. They both could use the money and ended up doing it together to provide each other a little moral support. As it turned out, the experiment was a sketchy operation being run by The Shop, and some of the students who took part died or were mentally impaired afterward. Vicky and Andy experienced what seemed to be telepathy with each other. As a result of the experience, they grew closer, eventually marrying and having a child. Vicky and Andy also each retained weak psychic abilities. Vicky could use telekinesis to move objects, while Andy's ability allowed him to "push" other people into doing what he asked them to do, like a very strong case of post-hypnotic suggestion.

This is where I have to say that I had expected that this would be a story about an adolescent girl slowly discovering her awakening psychic powers and having to learn to control them. While the latter does come into play, the surprise for me was that Charlie had her pyrokinetic ability from infancy. This brought to mind the Superman comics of the 1960s that I read when I was growing up, where Ma and Pa Kent were always amusingly having to deal with and/or hide the fact that their baby could lift the farmhouse off its foundation if he was looking for a lost toy. Raising a baby who could cause random spontaneous combustion events didn't come across nearly as funny as Superbaby's antics, though.

To sum it up, without going into much more detail, I will note that Firestarter falls into three well-defined acts. In the first, Andy and Charlie are desperate and on the run until they are finally captured by The Shop's implacable Native American superagent, Rainbird. In the second act, the two are prisoners of The Shop, where they are drugged into submission. Psychological techniques are used to gain their trust. The Shop wants to understand the extent of Charlie's powers (which she refuses to show them at first) with the idea of perhaps developing a eugenics program using parents who have been doped with Lot Six to produce superpowered mutants. All of this is being done in name of national security, of course. In the third act, Charlie and Andy finally gain some agency of their own and manage turn the tables on their captors. The climax is unputdownably exciting and cathartic. The denouement that follows provides a satisfying sense of closure.

I never read at the beach. I don't even understand why anyone would. But this is a great book to read on an airplane or anywhere else that you want the hours to fly by unnoticed.

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

Her House is haunted by ghosts and monsters

Published in 2021 when she was 32 years old, Build Your House Around My Body is Violet Kupersmith's first novel. Her mother fled Vietnam in 1975 following the fall of Saigon. Violet, who is half white and grew up in Pennsylvania, spent a year teaching English in Vietnam on a Fulbright scholarship in 2011. All of those experiences feed into this astoundingly well-written debut novel. 

Review

Having just finished the book, I feel as if I would probably only fully appreciate it if I were to go back and read it again -- though it isn't at all hard to follow on first reading. The story stretches across several decades (from the days of French Indochina until 2011) and is told in a non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth across the years and recounting events in the lives of characters whose relationships to each other aren't clear at first. (The author says she was inspired by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.)

The way Kupersmith structured the novel is impressive as narrative revelations always seem to come at just the right time no matter how out of temporal sequence they may be. My one small criticism of this novel is that, in her assiduous determination to weave together every character's relationship to the others, it gets a little tedious in the final third. The conclusion is quite satisfying, though.

The first character we meet is Winnie, who arrives at the airport in Saigon from the U.S. planning to stay with a great aunt and teach English at a small language school. Even though the novel features an ensemble cast of characters, Winnie will remain central because every chapter is situated, not just in its geographical location, but also in relation to the day she disappeared. So, as you are reading the book, you are constantly reminded that something (presumably bad) is going to happen to Winnie. She is, however, not a sympathetic character. She's lazy and doesn't even try to be a good teacher. She'll do whatever she must to get by with the least amount of effort. She's dishonest and slovenly -- kind of a rat.

Winnie's brother, Thien, pesters her to meet up with an old friend of his from medical school who is living in Vietnam now. "He'd be more than happy to show you the ropes." Winnie finally accedes to her brother's request and meets Dr. Sang. It turns out that Sang set up his practice in Saigon because it's a place where he can pursue his "other interests," besides being a doctor. Drug dealing is one of those interests. Human trafficking is another. During their brief time together, Sang takes Winnie to the snake house at the zoo where he shows her a two-headed cobra that he himself donated to the zoo. That cobra and many others will play a crucial role in later developments.

Winnie will eventually visit the Café Max, which is the headquarters of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co. We're told that Vietnam is rife with ghosts, so chasing them away is a sought-after service. The company is headed by the Fortune Teller, who is helped by his (possibly clairvoyant) First Assistant and (bumbling) Second Assistant. The Fortune Teller is good at fortune telling and removing ghosts, but he is somewhat embarrassed by his affliction, which is that he is possessed by a monster. The Fortune Teller once encountered a young girl named Binh and two boys (Tan and Long) who were her accomplices in a graveyard extortion scheme, but he scared them off by unhinging his jaw and opening his mouth wide enough to swallow them all. Binh, Tan, and Long will all become involved with Winnie in different ways.

Kupersmith writes beautifully, and her fecund imagination weaves complex and convincing backstories for her characters. She also departs from mimesis and imbues the novel with supernatural elements. A copper-colored smoke monster roams throughout this novel, inevitably bringing to mind the smoke monster in the TV show Lost. We're told it has no memory because it is itself a memory. Once it takes possession of you, it gives you the ability to move from one body to another. 

Maybe that's a metaphor for the way that reading a well-written novel lets you move from one life to another. Kupersmith certainly accomplishes that here, and I can only imagine the heights to which she'll ascend in future works. 

The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith

Not sure why but this is my favorite picture of Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith's 1962 novel The Cry of the Owl provokes anxiety in the reader from the outset, and that feeling doesn't let up until the very end. You may find that it doesn't even let up for a while after the end.

Review

Robert Forester has moved from New York to a small town in Pennsylvania where he has taken a job as a draftsman for an aeronautical engineering company. Robert is getting divorced from Nikki. It was a short, unhappy marriage, and he feels depressed, lonely, and at loose ends living in a strange town. One night he happens to drive past a house where he glimpses a pretty young woman in her kitchen. For reasons he doesn't quite understand, he's so taken with the scene that he turns his car around, parks down the block, and walks over to stand in the shadows and watch her through the window. 

As time goes by, Robert becomes addicted to watching the woman (and her boyfriend) through the front windows of her house. The young woman's name is Jenny; her boyfriend is Greg. They've been together for a while and seem to be moving toward a formal engagement. Robert has no intentions toward Jenny. He doesn't want to hurt her or have sex with her or even meet her. Just watching her gives him a sense of calm and well-being. More than once, however, when he's moving around in the shadows he accidentally makes noises that lead her to think there may be a prowler outside. Sometimes she sends her boyfriend out to search the property; but Robert always manages to avoid getting caught.

After a while, Robert realizes he has to stop peeking into Jenny's house. If he gets caught, he would likely be arrested. He could lose his job. His soon-to-be-ex-wife would ridicule him. One evening he goes over to Jenny's house for what he tells himself will be the last time. As he watches, Jenny comes out of the house with some trash that she dumps into a container and sets on fire. As she stands there contemplating the blaze, Robert falls into a reverie watching her... until he realizes Jenny is looking right at him. He awkwardly spreads his hands and says hello. She asks him if he is the prowler she keeps hearing. He admits he is but promises he'll leave and not come back. A conversation ensues, and Jenny eventually invites him into her house. They talk for a long time and lay the first foundations of a friendship.

As time goes by, Jenny confesses that she's not sure she loves Greg enough to marry her. Robert understands but impresses on her that he is not interested in a romantic relationship; nevertheless, she begins to fall in love with him. Greg doesn't take well to being dumped. When Jenny can't explain how she met Robert, Greg becomes convinced that Robert was the prowler and that he's some kind of dangerous kook. As he goes through various machinations trying to scare Robert away, Greg eventually gets in touch with Nikki to try to learn more about him. Nikki, not to put too fine a point on it, is a perverse narcissist who takes pleasure in destroying other people's lives. So, of course, she gleefully feeds Greg everything he wants to hear. 

One night Greg runs Robert off the road in a lonely stretch of highway that goes by the river. They get into a fight, and, although Greg is the bigger of the two, Robert has had military training and holds his own. At one point they tumble down the bank into the river, where Greg apparently hits his head on some rocks and becomes groggy. Robert pulls him out of the water and leaves him sitting on the river bank. He drives away to meet Jenny, and he tells her what happened.

This is the point at which the story makes a big turn. Greg's abandoned car is found by the river the next day, but Greg never shows up. Robert goes to the police and tells them what happened. But days and weeks go by, and Greg is never seen again. Suspicion falls harder and harder on Robert that the version of the story he told isn't true, that Greg ended up in the river drowned. Maybe it was manslaughter; maybe it was deliberate murder. In his efforts to break up Jenny and Robert, Greg had told the prowler story to anyone and everyone who would listen. People begin to wonder about Robert's character. Even Jenny begins to wonder. Weeks later a badly decomposed body washes up downriver. Robert's life spirals more and more into a hell of uncertainty and suspicion, and even attempts on his life. 

Throughout the book, Robert remains a decent person. He isn't a good man turned bad, like, say, Guy Haines in Strangers on a Train. Instead, he's an innocent who keeps unintentionally causing bad things to happen to innocent people, who has enemies who want to destroy him for no good reason, and who almost everyone comes to regard with hostility and distrust. Because Highsmith has done a brilliant job of putting you in Robert's shoes, you squirm anxiously with every twist and turn of the narrative.

Paradoxically, you race from chapter to chapter just to find out how much worse things can get. Robert comes off as a two-dimensional character, but I believe Highsmith made him that way to emphasize the idea that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to our moral character. 

As for how it all works out, I will only say that the book does finally climax in a glorious Grand Guignol blood fest that is quite satisfying. 

Parts of this book are a bit mystifying. You may feel some sympathy toward Robert even as he becomes a Peeping Tom because you understand his loneliness and pain. But when he inadvertently gains Jenny's love, inexplicably he doesn't want it. He just wanted to admire her from a distance, nothing more. He seems almost asexual. He's coming off of a bad marriage, but his ex-wife Nikki wasn't just a bad match for him. She is actually one of the most hateful characters in literature. Her vindictiveness and cruelty exceed all limits of rationality, making Medea seem placid in comparison. 

Unlike Roland Barthes, I think knowing a few details about the author's life can sometimes help you appreciate a book. Here are a few tidbits via biographer Joan Schenkar. 

Highsmith was once smitten by a pretty young blonde and spied on her voyeuristically. As her misanthropy increased, Highsmith eventually found that she enjoyed looking at pictures of attractive women but had no interest in actual relationships with them, just as Robert enjoyed admiring Jenny in the window but wanted nothing else from her.  

Highsmith had a two-year affair with another author, the lesbian pulp fiction writer Marijane Meaker, who wrote under the pen name Vin Packer. Highsmith was extremely bitter over their breakup, and the hideous Nikki is probably a projection of Highsmith's feelings about Meaker. 

Mine by Robert McCammon

McCammon turns the suspense up to 11

The author dedicates this book "to the survivors of an era when the whole world was watching." He is, of course, echoing the chant of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in 1968, and some aspects of the book probably resonate best with those of us who remember the unrest of that era. Nevertheless, it's a gripping thriller, lacking in any of McCammon's usual supernatural elements, and the core story could easily happen today.

Review

Mine is the story of two women. The first, Mary Terrell, is a former left-wing, violent radical who has been wanted by the FBI since 1969. Back then she was called "Mary Terror" because she was an effective soldier in the war to take down the system, an enthusiastic participant in bombings and shootings. She was also in love with a charismatic radical leader they called Lord Jack. She even became pregnant with Jack's child but miscarried during a violent shootout with the feds. 

Twenty years later, Mary is living a marginal life under an assumed name, one in a series of false identities. She's good at disguises, good at acting, having taken drama classes in college, though she can never hide the fact that she's six feet tall. Mary has become more and more divorced from reality, however, as time has gone on. She's paranoid and schizophrenic. She has a closet full of mutilated baby dolls that she "raises" as she fantasizes of returning to Jack with their baby and living out the idyllic hippie marriage to him she had always imagined. They're mutilated because her violent temper always overcomes her, and she ultimately "murders" each of the dolls.

Laura Clayborne, the other woman in this story, is 36 years old and pregnant for the first time. Laura had been a bit of a hippie herself back in the day, but now she's a senior reporter and book reviewer for the Atlanta Constitution's lifestyle section. Her husband Doug is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. She drives a BMW; he drives a Mercedes. From the outside they have a good life. They don't really love each other any more, but they have a baby boy on the way and maybe that will make things better. (Doug is having a secret affair, though.)

After an evening of dropping acid and having sordid sex, Mary comes across a cryptic message in the back of Rolling Stone she'd bought earlier that day. "Mr. Mojo has risen. The lady is still weeping. Does anybody remember? Meet me there. 2/18, 1400." Mary instantly recognizes these as coded terms used by her group, Storm Front (a hyper-violent offshoot of the Weather Underground). The author of the message is proposing that the old team get back together on February 18 at 2PM. Twenty-six days from now! Mary knows where the "weeping lady" is. And she is doubly sure the writer is Lord Jack himself. Mary is going to reunite with the love of her life, the man she still thinks about every day, after twenty years. And, she decides, she's going to bring their baby back to him. Mary is happy and begins to lay plans.

Doug is with his girlfriend the night Laura's water breaks. She knows because she followed him. But now she has to get herself to the hospital fast. It is a difficult delivery. When it is over, Laura leaves a message for her husband on the home answering machine, knowing it is over between them. Her baby, David, is only two days old and resting on Laura in the hospital bed when a tall nurse enters the room and tells her she needs to take him to be weighed. Mary has used her skill in deception to case the hospital, modify a nurses' uniform to match theirs, and take the baby out a back door with a disabled alarm. She wasn't after Laura's baby in particular, but stealing a boy baby is a real bonus. She knows Lord Jack will be pleased to have a son!

Mary begins her cross-country trek to find Lord Jack. Laura is at first hysterical with fear, rage, and grief, but she pulls herself together and develops a steely resolve to get her baby back. And thus begins the chase. The cops are useless and her husband is out of the picture, so Laura takes matters into her own hands, chasing down the clues to Mary's past, ferreting out the surviving members of her terrorist group, and following her trail. Mary Terror is no easy target, however; she's already left several people dead in the wake of her journey, and more will die before it's over. All the while, the newborn baby in her possession pushes the levers of her violent temper with his crying, raising the specter of those mutilated dolls even as Mary tries to remember that she's doing it all for Jack. 

Mine consists of 400 pages of nerve-wracking suspense interspersed with nail-biting scenes of violent conflict and gore, parallels, reversals, and twists. If that sounds good to you, I'd suggest starting it on an evening when you don't have to get up early the next day.

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson

F. Paul Wilson was a practicing doctor throughout most of his writing career

The Keep by F. Paul Wilson was published in 1981 and became an immediate bestseller. A movie based on the book was released two years later. (We'll come back to that.) It's easy to see why the book hit the bestseller lists. It has all the right elements, including an intriguing premise, spooky supernatural happenings, a passionate romance, and a fast-paced, easy-to-absorb narrative style. Wilson says his inspirations for the novel were the works of Robert Ludlum, Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft. As unlikely a mixture as that may sound, all of those influences are clear in the text.

Review

As the story begins, the young Sturmbannführer (Major) Erich Kaempffer, of the SS, has been chosen for an important post in Romania. He'll be in charge of opening a death camp in Ploiești -- a real feather in his cap! But before he can take up his post, the German High Command wants Major Kaempffer to look into (and resolve) a small issue of some concern. Captain Klaus Woermann, of the regular German army, has been posted to a small castle-like structure in the Carpathian Mountains, where he and his men are to guard a strategic pass from the Russians. Woermann's men, however, are being killed, one by one, each night, and he can find no answer to what's causing those deaths. The Captain has, therefore, asked permission to move his men out of the keep. This is unacceptable to High Command, and, therefore, Major Kaempffer has been tasked with investigating the matter and putting an end to the killings.

Kaempffer finds this annoying for two reasons. First, it delays him from taking up his real work, which will advance his position in the party. Second, he has a history with Captain Woermann, whom he dislikes. The two men's distaste for each other adds an extra level of conflict throughout the book.

Back when Woermann arrived at the tiny village in the Dinu Pass, he discovered that the keep was maintained by a caretaker named Alexandru and his two sons. Alexandru warned the Captain that he and his men would not be able to stay in the keep. When asked why, the caretaker told him that bad dreams drive people out. Woermann, of course, found this amusing, dismissed the warnings, and had his men begin setting up electrical lights and generators, weapons emplacements, and barracks in the keep. As for who owns the keep and pays for its maintenance, Woermann could find no answers.

It is at first assumed that some kind of resistance movement must be behind the deaths of the German soldiers in the keep. When Kaempffer arrives, he uses brutal SS tactics to terrorize the villagers into giving up the rebels. But it becomes obvious that something else is in play when Kaempffer is confronted one night by the animated corpses of two of his own men.

Woermann and Kaempffer learn from the local innkeeper Iuliu that a Jewish scholar from the University of Bucharest, Professor Theodor Cuza, is an expert on the history of the region and may be able to help them figure out what's behind the killings. Although Kaempffer is unhappy with relying on a Jew, the dying Professor Cuza and his daughter Magda, who takes of him, are quickly brought to the keep against their will.

Cuza is highly resistant to the idea that he can help the Nazis in any way, but he becomes intrigued despite himself when he is brought a cache of books that had been found hidden in a small chamber in one of the walls. This is one of my favorite parts of the book, though it may pass right by non-fans of H.P. Lovecraft. As an in-joke on the author's part, all of the books and manuscripts that are brought to professor Cuza are directly taken from Lovecraft's work or other writers who participated in the Mythos-related writings. For those who are interested, here's the list:

• The Book of Eibon "du Nord translation" (from Clark Ashton Smith)
• De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn (from Robert Bloch as Mysteries of the Worm)
• Cultes des Goules by the Comte d'Erlette (from Bloch)
• The Pnakotic Manuscripts "in scroll form" (from H.P. Lovecraft)
• The Seven Cryptical Books of Hasan (from Lovecraft)
• Unaussprechlichen Kulten "by von Juntz" (from Robert E. Howard as Nameless Cults)
• Al Azif (from Lovecraft, original Arabic name for the Necronomicon)

The Ludlum influence becomes obvious at this point in the narrative. When Molasar, the evil presence trapped in the keep, reveals himself to Cuza, he asks questions about the Nazis who have invaded his domain and soon proclaims his desire to drive them from Romania and to kill their leader, Hitler, in Germany. Of course, Cuza becomes eager to ally himself with Molasar and to help him escape the keep. F. Paul Wilson does a masterful job of compounding lies with deceits with trickery and then slowly opening the reader's eyes to what's really going on.

Meanwhile, as these events transpire, in Portugal a red-haired man called Glenn has undertaken an arduous journey over land and sea to the Carpathian Mountains. In the course of his journey, it becomes clear that Glenn has not only an implacable will but superhuman strength. When he arrives at the keep, his mission is clouded in secrecy. He forms an uneasy alliance with Magda (who is a scholar in her own right), and eventually the two of them fall in love with each other. Together they will stand against Molasar (and Magda's father) in a battle with the highest stakes possible.

Wilson isn't afraid to make use of some horror movie tropes that may make you shake your head at their cheesiness, but nobody said this was high literature. If you're in the mood for a good thriller with a side helping of the supernatural, this is a fun read. And, spoiler, don't worry, the Nazis in the keep all come to a hideous end. 

-----

After reading the book, I decided to rent the movie on Amazon Prime because I was curious to see how it made the transition from page to screen. As I watched, I kept thinking F. Paul Wilson must have felt like he'd been stabbed in the heart. Michael Mann, who wrote and directed the film, threw out almost everything that was good about the book and turned it into a disjointed, incomprehensible mess. Avoid it at all costs. 

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

 

African-American noir in a fast-moving car

Blacktop Wasteland is a heist novel that centers on the wheel man, the getaway driver, like a more realistic version of Edgar Wright's Baby Driver but just as exciting. I don't know anything about S.A. Cosby, but I assume he must be a car enthusiast because his descriptions of engine mechanics and driving seem to come from a place of personal knowledge rather than just research. 

Review

Cosby builds the novel on the classic crime noir setup. Beauregard "Bug" Montage, got off to a bad start in life doing petty crimes as a teenager until a job gone wrong ended him up in juvenile detention. By the time Bug got out, his father, Anthony (aka "Ant), had disappeared, never to be seen again. The only thing Ant left Bug was the souped-up Plymouth Duster they both loved. Bug turned it into a legendary street-racing machine and had the chops to drive it like no one else could. 

After the stint in juvie, Bug went straight. He bought an old garage and turned it into an auto repair shop. He remarried. (The first marriage had long since dissolved; they were both teens at the time.) And he had a successful business until a rival shop run by a franchise called Precision moved into town and undercut his prices. 

Because he couldn't beat Precision's prices, he lost customers and fell behind on his mortgage payments. Meanwhile, his son Darren needs glasses. His other son Javon had to get braces. His daughter Ariel, from the first marriage, is smart enough she could go to college and make something of herself if only she could afford the tuition. To top it all off, his mother is in a convalescent home, and he's just learned that there's a discrepancy with her Medicaid policy for which he now owes the government $48,360.

Bug is in desperate straights financially when Ronnie Sessions shows back up in his life. Ronnie is a redneck drug addict and career criminal who's always looking for the next score. He's also the screw-up who masterminded the job-gone-wrong that put Bug in juvenile detention way back when. But this time he's got a foolproof scheme. Ronnie's girlfriend Jenny is working at a jewelry store that is going to be temporarily holding $500,000-worth of uncut diamonds, and with her help they are going to take advantage of that window of opportunity to steal the diamonds. Reggie knows a guy who can fence the goods, giving them a clean $250,000 which Ronnie, Bug, and the gunman on the team, Quan, can split three ways. Eighty thousand dollars would go a long way toward solving Bug's problems.

But he quit the life. He has a wife and two sons he loves, a daughter he rarely sees but cares about, a difficult mother to take care of, an employee (and childhood friend) named Kelvin... he can't blow it all by getting caught or killed in a holdup. Bug's wife Kia tries to convince him, instead, to sell the beloved Duster, which is legendary in the county and would bring a very high price. Bug can't let go of that link to his father, though. So he tells himself that if he fully takes charge of the job, checks out everything personally, makes sure absolutely nothing can go wrong, then it's just one last job, and he'll be out of the life for good. 

You know this story, right? The "one last job and then I'm out" story? It's a good one. A classic, in fact. 

Ronnie and Quan both promised Bug they would stay away from coke for the duration of the job, but they lied. Ronnie also lied about the value of the diamonds, which was really more like $3,000,000. (If you were smarter than Ronnie, it would make you wonder why jewels that valuable would be passing through a rinky-dink, small-town jewelry store and who would be behind it.) In fairness to Ronnie, though, there's no way he could have known the fat lady who was Jenny's boss at the store was also a stone-cold killer. I won't tell you anything about what happens next except for the one thing you already know -- once the robbery starts, everything goes to hell big time, real fast. 

S.A. Cosby is a terrific writer. With this novel, he's already in the realm of the likes of Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. The story is peopled with a fully realized cast of characters, the small-town Georgia settings feel lived in, the action sequences and tense encounters are white-knuckle stuff. If you like hard-boiled noir fiction, this one's for you. 

The Lost Continent by C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne

Once a best-selling author, now largely forgotten

The Lost Continent was first published in serialized form in 1899 and in book form the following year. Hyne was a successful writer of scientific romances and adventure tales whose career spanned the late Victorian era into the l930s. His work is almost entirely forgotten today except for The Lost Continent, a yarn about Atlantis, which has been reprinted several times over the intervening years. It is currently in print from the University of Nebraska and some on-demand publishers.

Review

The Lost Continent opens with that staple of the Victorian fantasy novel, the framing device. You are, after all, about to read a story that stretches credulity to the breaking point, and the author wants to assure you that he didn't just make it up. So he makes up a provenance for the story. In this case, the frame tale is told by an adventurer who accompanied an archeologist named Coppinger on an expedition to the Grand Canary Island off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. There they searched through caves, looking for artifacts of the ancient inhabitants. On the last day of their expedition, the unnamed narrator discovers, in a nearly inaccessible cave, a collection of talc tablets covered with a waxy substance that has Egyptian-looking characters incised into it. Eventually, Coppinger manages to translate the writing and provides a copy to our narrator who, as discover, is authorized to publish it. The tale that follows constitutes the rest of the book. 

The narrative written on the tablets is the first-person account of Deucalion, who had been Viceroy of the Atlantean colony of Yucatan for twenty years. At the beginning of the story, however, he is stepping down to be replaced by his successor, Tatho, because Deucalion has been summoned by the new Empress to return to Atlantis proper. Reports about the Empress Phorenice are mixed. She is said to be beautiful and extremely intelligent, having created marvelous new inventions (including, apparently, firearms). But she is also said have come to power by force (rather than as a member of the duly appointed priestly caste), that she claims to be the daughter of a God, and that she is a cruel tyrant.

Deucalion, who is himself a priest and a loyal subject of Atlantis, goes back, not knowing if he has somehow aroused Phorenice's displeasure and may be returning to his own imprisonment or execution. What he discovers instead is that in his twenty years of service his name has become known far and wide. He is renowned throughout Atlantis as an unparalleled military leader and as an administrator of unimpeachable wisdom, humility, and fairness. Phorenice has chosen him to become her husband because she is convinced no other man in the empire is worthy of her. 

She is as beautiful as he has been told, and though Deucalion has never had much need of women, he's not displeased with the prospect of becoming her husband and co-ruler of Atlantis. He soon finds, however, that the city-state is rent by unrest and that rebels protest violently at the gates. It is a far cry from the peaceful Atlantis that he knew before. Phorenice intends that Deucalion use his military prowess to crush the rebellions and enforce her iron-fisted rule. He also learns that she has no truck with the old Gods, for whom Deucalion is a pious believer and high-ranking priest and that she intends to declare herself Goddess as well as Empress. The old High Priest Zaemon, whom Deucalion served in the long-ago past, still lives, in exile, and opposes the blasphemous rule that Phorenice has brought to Atlantis. 

Zaemon's wife had adopted Phorenice as a child and raised her. Zaemon also has two biological daughters, Ylga and Nais. Though Ylga serves as fanbearer and courtier to Phorenice, she is the first person to warn Deucalion that he should be wary. Nais, meanwhile, is an active member of the opposition. In the course of events, Deucalion falls in love with Nais. 

Here come spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you care about that sort of thing.

Deucalion eventually ends up in open opposition to Phorenice and, because she is too powerful to be easily defeated, spends several years hiding out and trying to survive in the dangerous outlands of the continent of Atlantis where flesh-eating dinosaurs still roam. Zaemon and his fellow priests plot the destruction of Atlantis by means of magical help from the Gods. (Or is it Atlantean technology?) Out of spite and jealousy, Phorenice forces Deucalion to kill Nais (though Deucalion finds a way to merely put her into suspended animation). And in the end... well, you already know what happens to Atlantis. The priests arrange for Deucalion and Nais to escape the sinking of Atlantis in an ark that contains the accumulated history and knowledge of Atlantis written on wax-covered tablets. Deucalion's mission is to carry this knowledge to another part of the world and establish a new Atlantis. But once they have come ashore on what will one day be Grand Canary Island, Deucalion decides that Atlantis' time has come and gone and, in defiance of the priests, wipes out the information on the tablets and writes down his own story instead. 

I enjoyed this story a great deal, but then I have a high tolerance for Victorian adventure novels. If 19th century adventure novelists like Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Edwin Arnold, and Eden Phillpotts, or early 20th century fantasy writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, appeal to you, then I'm pretty sure you'll like The Lost Continent. For those less inclined to enjoy such things, this won't be for you at all. Hyne gives Deucalion a somewhat stiff, archaic voice, but that is clearly intentional; he is, after all, an aristocrat belonging to a lost race. Deucalion, while a sympathetic protagonist, has out-of-date attitudes that feel appropriate for an ancient era -- owning slaves, for instance, is perfectly acceptable. It's difficult to place Hyne's Atlantis in time because, while he mentions places like Yucatan, Egypt, and Europe by name, the lost continent harbors mammoths, plesiosaurs, and dinosaurs among its fauna. Like Conan Doyle's Amazonian plateau in The Lost World, it is truly a region that exists outside of time. 

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa bought a how-to book to write her first novel 

Eileen (2015) was Ottessa Moshfegh's first published novel. She followed it up three years later with the NYT best-seller My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I haven't read; but having read the reviews I know that it is about an alienated young woman who decides to try to sleep for a year after losing her job at an art gallery. Moshfegh is an excellent writer whose fiction explores the inner lives of misanthropic, unlikeable characters. 

Review

Eileen takes place over the course of the week leading up to Christmas 1962. The story is told retrospectively in the first person by the title character, Eileen Dunlop, from some fifty years in the future, when she is apparently living a better life under a different name. At the time of the story, Eileen is 24 years old, living at home with her father (an abusive, alcoholic ex-cop), and working as an assistant office administrator in a correctional institution for boys. Eileen had been taken out of her first year of college to come home and help out when her mother was dying. She never returned to college and now provides a modicum of care for her father, whom she hates. The "care" consists mostly of keeping him supplied with copious amounts of gin and making sure he doesn't wander around the neighborhood causing problems and eliciting visits from the police. (The old man, suffering from senile dementia and paranoid delusions, has a tendency, among other things, to point his service revolver threateningly at school children.) The approaching holiday plays little part in the events of the novel other than, perhaps, to emphasize the disaffection and squalid lives of the characters and provide a marker for Eileen's breakaway. 

If you're looking for a story with a plot, you'll be shit-out-of-luck with this one. The book consists entirely of Eileen's observations, obsessions, regrets, recriminations, delusions, and half-hearted future plans for about 220 pages. Then, a bit of a plot develops around 40 pages from the conclusion. It's this shift to a consequential sequence of events near the end of the novel that seems to have inspired some reviewers to compare the work to those of Hitchcock, Highsmith, and Jim Thompson, but nothing could be further from the truth. Eileen isn't a schemer or a psychopath; she's a lonely young woman looking for a way out of her desperate circumstances who ultimately seizes an opportunity with no idea what the next step will be. We gather from breadcrumbs dropped throughout the text that she will struggle for years and eventually find a comfortable place for herself in the world. (Earlier in the novel, in a bit of foreshadowing, she had noted the slogan "Per aspera ad astra" written on a pack of Pall Malls.) We don't learn anything about her later experiences, other than the fact that she eventually eliminates men from her life, but we gather that finding a peaceful, fulfilling existence is indeed possible even for someone like Eileen.

The narrative is almost unremittingly bleak, although punctuated here and there with bits of black humor. (I wonder if Moshfegh read Louis-Ferdinand Céline.) Having never had sex, Eileen fantasizes about it often in ways that are not at all constrained to the politically correct. It's an interesting journey if you're up for the challenge of spending a few days inside the head of a character who will often disgust you. The ending, however, doesn't quite live up to the promise offered by the final turn of events; so the novel ultimately feels unfulfilling.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

Doris had some ambivalent feelings about motherhood

The Fifth Child is a very short novel, consisting of 132 pages in the Vintage edition, told in a continuous, limited-third-person narrative that has neither chapter breaks nor line breaks. This lack of any sort of pause has the effect of compelling the reader to keep turning pages and to make short work of the book. Nevertheless, Lessing packs a tremendous amount of resonance into the story, leaving you with as much to ponder as you would find in many a longer work. 

Review

The novel opens at a large office party in London during the swinging '60s. Two of the people attending that party -- David Lovatt and Harriet Walker -- stand apart from the festivities because they don't feel particularly at home in this milieu. The wallflowers spot each other across the room. Recognizing that they are two of a kind, they meet, find a quiet place to talk, and eventually go back to David's apartment. They find that they have the same attitudes toward many things, including an old-fashioned desire to have a large family.

In short order, they begin living together in David's flat and then get married. Both want to find a big house in which to raise children. The search takes them outside of London, where they eventually find a three-story home that captures their hearts. Living there will mean a long commute to work for David, however, and it's more expensive than he can afford on his salary. David's father, James, has remarried to a wealthy woman, though, and they have more than enough money to help the young couple with the mortgage, which they willingly do.

Children then come in quick order, as well. Luke, Helen, Jane, and Paul are born in the course of six years. The large house becomes the center of the extended family as David's two sets of parents and his sister and Harriet's widowed mother and her three sisters' families all come to spend Easter and summer and Christmas holidays around the enormous dining table, eating and drinking, partying and playing together, sometimes for weeks at a time. Harriet and David's wild, impractical dream has come true. David's father James helps with the finances, while Harriet's mother Dorothy comes to live with them for months at a time to help out with the children and the household chores. The children are each and every one lovely and smart and happy.

But David and Harriet aren't content with just four children. It's all so wonderful that they want the happiness to keep growing. Why not have six children? Why not eight? Their parents and siblings constantly warn them not to overdo it, but the young couple will hear nothing of it. Harriet does want to take a pause after Paul's birth; but one night, far too soon, David makes love to her again, and, again, she's pregnant.

This time the pregnancy does not go well. The fetus inside her seems to grow too fast, moving about, delivering powerful kicks, making her sick all the time. She thinks the unborn baby is poisoning her. She's sure it is going to rip its way out of her. The fifth child, Ben, is born after only eight months; but he weighs eleven pounds. The infant is enormously strong, and he has a forehead that slopes "from his eyebrows to his crown," where a thatch of yellow hair grows. Harriet thinks he looks like a troll, or a goblin. 

Within only a few weeks, Harriet begins feeding Ben from a bottle; his hunger is too great and his powerful gnawing too painful for her to breastfeed him. He seems to have no need of maternal affection. Even as an infant his eyes are cold and malevolent. While still a baby, he kills a terrier that someone in the family had brought over. Shortly afterward he kills the family cat and nearly succeeds in breaking the next-youngest child Paul's arm. The other children come to fear him, as do the other adults in the extended family. Ben had already begun the strain the happy family before he was born by keeping Harriet always in pain and unable to tend to her other children. Now, as a baby, he is so frightening and destructive that Harriet has to watch him all the time, essentially abandoning David and her other children. 

There comes a time when David and the other adults prevail on Harriet that Ben must be institutionalized. When she finally agrees to this, they bundle him up and ship him off to an unnamed place in Northern England. Things then begin to normalize in the Lovatt family, though Paul remains traumatized because his fear of Ben had known no limits. Eventually Harriet insists on going to see Ben, to find out how he is being treated at the institution. It turns out to be a nightmarish place that makes the place Frances Farmer was put into look like a spa, a place where unwanted children with physical and mental maladies are dumped, never to be visited by their kin again, and where most die after a short time. Harriet finds Ben drugged into unconsciousness, covered in piss and shit, and naked except for a straightjacket. She insists on taking him home, even though the attendants at the institution warn her that she has no idea what she's getting into.

David and the other children feel utterly betrayed by Ben's return. And, indeed, Ben is filled with an uncontrollable rage that begins to destroy the family again. The older children, Luke and Helen, go off to boarding schools and spend their breaks with the grandparents. Jane soon follows suit, moving in with Harriet's sister during the breaks. Only Paul remains at home, terrified and becoming more and more socially maladapted himself. While Harriet hates Ben, she can't bring herself to abandon him to be killed in an uncaring institution, even if it ruins everything else in her life. 

As the novel goes on from this point, we see Ben grow older and form relationships outside the family. By the age of eleven he is already the leader of a gang of older boys while he remains cold and unknowable. Harriet and David believe he is a throwback to some earlier level of evolution, a genetic anomaly that may be closer to the Neanderthal than the human. In any event, the dream of the big happy family is long dead. As the couple muse over what life might be like someday when Ben is gone, Harriet expresses her belief that they were cursed because they wanted too much and were struck down for their hubris. David rejects this, seeing it only as bad luck, an unfortunate roll of the dice.

This summary really doesn't convey anything of the rich complexity and strangeness of the novel. For such a short book, it has a large cast of characters, most of whom I have either not at all or else barely touched on. And what exactly was Doris Lessing getting at here? Certainly every parent understands what a fearful thing the throw of the genetic dice can be, as well as the sometimes ambivalent feelings we have about our children. Then, too, there's the anxiety we all feel about the fact that forces in the world we can't control can destroy everything we've tried to build for ourselves.

 
Lessing once said she didn't understand why critics were always trying to explain what a novel is "really about." She's right to leave you pondering. I understand there's a sequel to The Fifth Child, called Ben, in the World. I'll probably read it. 

Nightfall by David Goodis

You can't escape the fickle finger of fate?

You may remember a bestselling nonfiction book that came out back in 1981 called When Bad Things Happen to Good People in which a rabbi gives advice on dealing with grief. Separated from its context, I've always felt that title sums up what a lot of noir fiction is all about. As for why bad things happen to good people, noir's answer is: there is no why, shit just happens.

Review

Cornell Woolrich, whom some credit with inventing noir, was the master of plots built around the random, meaningless accident that changes a life -- a brick falls off a building and robs a man of his memory, a whiskey bottle thrown from a plane kills another man's fiancé, and so on. And to be honest, some of those people bad things happen to weren't so good to begin with. Just unlucky.

David Goodis, the author of Nightfall, was also an accomplished master of stories about the noir twist of fate. In this novel, the protagonist, Jim Vanning, pulls off the highway to help the survivors of an automobile accident. But the men in that roadside accident just stole $300,000 from a bank, and it turns out they are going to be needing a little more help from Vanning than he had bargained for -- and they'll get it at gunpoint. That's what being a Good Samaritan gets you in the noir universe.

Jim expects to die before his involvement in the getaway is over. But then he's confronted with an opportunity to escape that seems too good to be true. It is, of course, a setup. But the setup goes wrong, Jim shoots and kills one of the criminals in self-defense, and he really does escape -- with the satchel full of thousand-dollar bills.

While there are violent scenes and some bareknuckle fights, Nightfall can't be called a hardboiled action novel. Goodis injects too much existential handwringing and philosophical pondering for this to be anyone's idea of fast-paced. That said, though, it's a twisty little tale that keeps your attention for the two or three hours it takes to read. My only complaint is that the story relies on my least favorite plot device, amnesia, and, to make it worse, I really believe Goodis could have made the story work without that crutch.

Nightfall was published in 1947 but feels surprisingly modern for a crime novel of the era. Sure, Jim is a war vet, everybody smokes cigarettes like there's no such thing as cancer, and traditional gender roles are taken for granted. But there's little in the way of macho posturing or misogyny. The wife of the detective who's after Jim is the detective's greatest ally and confidant, and Jim longs for nothing but marriage and a family. Even the villain, "John," is clearly a man who's been wounded by life; he doesn't want to kill anyone, he just wants the money so he can sail away from all this grief with his girlfriend, and never come back.

John won't get that break. But here's where Goodis breaks with the true noir tradition: in the end Jim has a glimmer of hope.