Pursuit by Joyce Carol Oates

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on October 1, 2019

Joyce Carol Oates writes horror stories with a literary sensibility, at least when she’s not writing literary stories that are informed by horror. Her horror stories do not depend on zombies or slasher-killers. Her characters suffer from the horrors of abuse and neglect and the awful things that people do to each other, particularly spouses and parents. A horrifying childhood and its impact on a young woman are at the heart of Pursuit.

Abby Hayman (her real name is Miriam, but she prefers Gabriela, the name she invented for herself) has been married to Willem Zengler for less than a day. She was a virgin when they married because Willem is very religious. Willem “identifies strongly as a Christian but not the kind of somber-faced Christians who take themselves too seriously.” Yet taking himself too seriously is the exact definition of Willem, even if his face might not always be somber.

Early in the novel, Abby steps in front of a bus and is in a coma for a few weeks before she is treated, rehabilitated, and sent home with Willem. Why did newlywed Abby step in front of the bus? The answer is not immediately clear.

Abby’s father, Lew, was an angry veteran, blaming the world for his misfortune. Like many angry vets, it is not obvious whether he was scarred by war or whether he went to war because it suited his scarred personality. In any event, Abby’s mother, Nicola, eventually kicked Lew out of the house. A section of the novel tells us that story from Lew’s self-interested perspective. Another section tells the same story from Nicola’s very different perspective. Oates paints Nicola as a vulnerable woman, easily manipulated by a manipulative man, who gains strength from her experience. Lew is considerably less sympathetic. By the end of Nicola’s story, after Lew has left and returned, her life has become tragic and grotesque.

Abby’s perspective, on the other hand, is that of a child who does not understand her parents and who blames herself for everything that happens, including her apparent abandonment by them both. One big event occurs when Abby is only six, an event for which both of her parents are to blame, neither having given much of a thought about how their conduct will affect their child. A later event, while Abby is spending a summer with her aunt, leads to a life-shaping discovery that Abby does not fully understand and that she tries to block from her mind.

Back in the present, Abby is haunted by nightmares and memories of skeletons, making Pursuit a good Halloween read. Once out of the hospital, Abby decides to visit her aunt, an aunt she feels guilty for abandoning, who does not know of her marriage to Willem. The trip with Willem is necessary to complete Abby’s journey, to exorcise at least some of her demons, to help her overcome fears — not just fears of horrifying events, but the ordinary fear of being alone, even in marriage.

Pursuit ends on a more hopeful note than some of Oates’ work. Nicola’s story is more powerful than Abby’s, but the two stories work together to explain Abby’s timidity, a characteristic that makes her an unremarkable ghost of a character, devoid of personality. Willem turns out to be a surprising character, in that he is capable of growth and is not shaped entirely by his crabbed religious upbringing.

Oates’ signature style is less dependent on quotation marks and parentheticals than some of her other work, which is fine with me — I think she’s been there and done that. Otherwise, she displays her characteristic economy of language, shading scenes with just the right amount of detail while leaving room for readers to fill in the color. Pursuit isn’t Oates’ best work, but it is recognizable as the kind of horror story that only Oates can tell.

RECOMMENDED

Knight by Timothy Zahn

Published by Tor Books on April 16, 2019

Knight is subtitled A Chronicle of the Sybil’s War. It is the second book of a trilogy, following Pawn and preceding Queen. The ending isn’t quite a cliffhanger, but it doesn’t resolve much of anything.

Timothy Zahn’s premise is that several humans and various aliens are enslaved on a two-mile long ship. Sometimes the Shipmasters have different species fight each othe using relatively harmless weapons (like paintballl guns) in different kinds of arenas. When aliens fight well, the Shipmasters sell the location of their planet to other aliens, who can capture slaves from that planet for use as fodder in combat.

The ship is having problems, probably because enslaving people wasn't its original mission, although what that mission might have been has yet to be revealed. A human named Nicole Lee is tasked with watching over the ship. She was promoted from Sybil to Protector, a position that requires the ship (but not the Shipmasters) to give her commands some deference. To maximize her communication with the ship, she has to ingest chemicals through an inhaler that will shorten her lifespan.

The ship is divided into quadrants. The Shipmasters seem to be in control of one quadrant but less in control of the others. Nicole’s assigned task is to maintain and protect the ship, but her self-assigned task is to convince the Shipmasters that humans are lousy fighters and therefore not worth kidnapping as warrior-slaves. That plan doesn’t work out quite the way Nicole intends.

Aliens enslaving humans is standard space opera fare. The story is moderately interesting but probably not worthy of a trilogy. Some of Nicole’s adventures as she wanders through the ship, trying to figure out what’s what and intervening in arena battles, come across as filler. The alien races she encounters are not particularly imaginative, but the humans don’t have much personality beyond the pluckiness that we expect from sf human as they outsmart their alien captors, so it all evens out.

As an action-adventure story, Knight has modest entertainment value. Zahn keeps the action moving even when it seems to be moving in circles, biding time until the story gets around to advancing. The middle novels of trilogies often come across as bridges between two better novels, and that is probably the case with Knight. It might be more fair to review the trilogy as a whole, but the third novel isn’t out yet, so I have to give the second one, standing on its own, a thumbs sideways.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Warehouse by Rob Hart

Published by Crown on August 20, 2019

Many books, both fiction and nonfiction, have condemned the corporatization of America, the loss of worker’s rights, or the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a shrinking few. Presidential candidates who have a chance to get elected are even talking about those issues (only to be condemned as radical by those who depend on the shrinking few for financial support). The Warehouse is an entertaining, near-future look at the consequences of allowing the top 1% to make policies that govern the rest of us.

The Warehouse is based on a company called Cloud, because Rob Hart would have been sued if he called it Amazon. It was founded by Gibson Wells, who might be even wealthier than Jeff Bezos, and is certainly older and (I assume) more devious. In an era of budget–tightening in industry and government, the unemployed are flocking to Cloud for monotonous, tiring, underpaid jobs (the kind of jobs that Amazon warehouse workers perform). Some of them worked for companies that were put out of business by Cloud’s predatory practices. In fact, Cloud is pretty much the only retail store that matters, the box stores having been run out of town by the convenience of online ordering and drone shipping.

The Warehouse is set a few years in the future, when global warming is having its predicted impact on the planet. Cloud is a throwback to corporate towns; employees live in dorm rooms provided by Cloud so they can focus on working rather than commuting. In exchange for discounted housing and healthcare, they earn less than minimum wage thanks to a business–friendly Congress. Deductions from meager wages are made for a variety of reasons, including the failure to make quotas. Workers wear watches that track their location and production. In fact, they can’t leave their dorm rooms without wearing the watch, even on their own time.

Gibson is an old-fashioned robber baron who relies on bromides to mask his self-interest. “Regulations are bad” because they keep him from doing all the awful things he wants to do. “Hard work is good” if the hard workers are filling his pockets with profits. “Privatization is efficient” because his control of newly privatized services efficiently increases his wealth. He views himself as “exceptional” so customary standards of human behavior, not to mention laws, cannot be expected to stand in the way of his achievements.

Gibson is dying of cancer and is blogging his final year of life, during which he intends to visit all 100 MotherClouds (fulfillment centers) so he can say hello to all his employees before he dies. He also blogs his self-aggrandizing ideas. He pats himself on the back for creating jobs when the jobs are crappy and employees are treated like slaves. He is virulently opposed to unions and thinks his “rating” system to overwork his underpaid employees is brilliant. Ebenezer Scrooge might agree.

The two key characters, Zinnia and Paxton, both make the hiring cut. They both have ulterior motives for taking the job. Zinnia is a corporate spy. Cloud claims to be energy independent but its wind farms and solar panels seem incapable of generating the necessary power. Zinnia has been hired to find the source of the power that Cloud doesn’t want to disclose for fear of losing its green tax breaks. What she actually finds, on several different fronts, casts Cloud in an even less favorable light.

Paxton tried to patent his own idea but was screwed over by Cloud. After working as a prison guard, he views a job at Cloud as temporary but essential to his survival. He hated being a prison guard so he is, of course, assigned to security. Naturally, his life intersects with Zinnia’s. He is smitten, while she is happy to develop an unwitting source for information about Cloud security. A reader will see where that plotline is going and will be either pleased or disappointed to learn that it does not deviate from expectations. The predictability didn’t bother me because I enjoyed the novel less for its plot than for its detailed imagining of the future of retail that Amazon might soon inspire.

The Warehouse argues that free people don’t have to accept the lives that are assigned to them by corporate masters. “At least I have a job” doesn’t justify being treated like garbage. Free people can fight for something better. Whether Zinnia’s way of fighting is the best way might be a question that readers debate, but she at least opens minds to the possibility of change. The novel’s underlying lesson is that compassion and fairness are more important than security and comfort. As important as security and comfort might be, they should not be achieved by sacrificing the security and comfort of others.

The Warehouse is also an indictment of:  big businesses that use their economic might to drive small businesses out of the marketplace; big businesses that use their economic might to patent and control ideas developed by small businesses; and big businesses that use their economic might to convince people that big businesses act in the best interests of their employees and customers when they are only acting to further the interests of controlling shareholders. The story targets Amazon but it could just as easily target Purdue Pharma or Wal Mart or Johnson & Johnson or Wells Fargo or Ford Motors.

Readers who disagree with those propositions won’t like the book. Most other readers should enjoy it. Despite its predictable moments, the plot is lively and Paxton is a sympathetic protagonist who confronts a personal crisis in a way that readers can admire. It is the future that Hart builds, however, that makes The Warehouse memorable.

RECOMMENDED

The Deserter by Nelson DeMille and Alex DeMille

Published in the UK in 2019; published by Simon & Schuster on October 22, 2019

I love the John Corey series and I’ve enjoyed most of Nelson DeMille’s other work. I can’t tell how much of The Deserter, co-authored with his son Alex, is Nelson’s and how much is Alex’s. That’s a good thing because the collaboration has not produced an obvious drop-off in quality. On the other hand, the protagonist is sort of a Corey clone and the atmosphere is similar to Nelson’s last novel, The Cuban Affair, complete with relentless bashing of what our president would call a shithole country. At the same time, the novel’s political takes (as expressed by its characters) are a bit less astute than those in The Cuban Affair. Still, I easily ignored the politics and raced through the novel because DeMille & Son know their craft. The story produces thrills and that’s what a successful thriller should do.

Broadly following the premise of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its movie counterpart, Apocalypse Now, The Deserter imagines that a Delta Force captain abandoned his command in Afghanistan, was captured by the Taliban, escaped, beheaded his captors, and made his way to Venezuela, where he took command of local mercenaries so he could help them resist America’s undeclared military interests. The captain is more similar to Coppola’s Kurtz than to Conrad’s, in that he has been driven mad not just by the jungle he inhabits but by the military service that shaped his sense of destiny.  

Scott Brodie is a chief warrant officer. He and his partner, Maggie Taylor, have been tasked with finding the Delta Force officer, Kyle Mercer. Someone who knows Mercer spotted him in Venezuela. Brodie’s orders are to bring him back without worrying about legal niceties like extradition. Given that Mercer is formidable, the assignment seems like it might be more than a couple of warrant officers can handle, but Brodie is up for it because, well, this is a thriller.

The Venezuela setting gives the characters a chance to blame Venezuela’s woes on socialism, a simplistic analysis of a complex country that readers with more nuanced views can safely ignore. The atmosphere, both in Caracas and in the jungle, is dangerous. Why Caracas is dangerous is irrelevant to the plot, despite all the pontificating about socialism. Fortunately, the father-and-son writing team eventually stop dwelling on the why and start focusing on the action, which is all that matters in an action-driven thriller. Chases and fights, in a brothel where Mercer was hanging out and in a jungle camp where Mercer is training mercenaries, are credible and exciting.

The plot benefits from a layer of intrigue as Brodie and Taylor struggle to understand why a Delta Force hero would desert his post. The explanation is based on a conspiracy that, given the American government’s conspiratorial history, isn’t hard to swallow.

Brodie is snarky, although he’s Corey-lite when it comes to snark. He isn’t big on planning. He has a tendency to ignore orders and charge ahead to complete the mission as he defines it, a fairly common attribute of military thriller heroes. He’s selectively moralistic (another common feature of military thriller heroes), coming down on Taylor for an arguable betrayal of her position while Brodie deserves to be dishonorably discharged for repeatedly disobeying orders.

Taylor is tough but doesn’t have much personality, beyond playing the humanizing role to which tough women in thrillers are often relegated (they keep the testosterone driven males from killing everyone in sight). The sexual tension between Brodie and Taylor is predictable but it doesn’t interfere with the story. Readers don’t expect deep characterization in a book like this so its absence shouldn’t be disappointing. Instead, readers of The Deserter will get what they are paying for when they buy a thriller. Predictable or not, flawed or not, the thriller delivers its thrills.

RECOMMENDED

Starship Repo by Patrick S. Tomlinson

Published by Tor Books on May 21, 2019

As the title implies, Starship Repo falls into the category of science fiction stories that are intended to amuse the reader. It succeeds in that task by combining a basic science fiction action novel with some running jokes and imaginative aliens.

Firstname Lastname got her name from a mistaken data entry at a refugee center, but she goes by First during the novel. First has traveled far from home and is the only human most of the aliens she encounters have ever seen. Unfortunately for them, if they don’t keep a hand or tentacle on their wallet, she’ll probably take it.

First is in the process of stealing a car when the car steals her, depositing her in the penthouse of its owner. Since she has a knack for stealing cars, he blackmails her into joining his repo business. As the title suggests, he repossesses starships.

The plot follows First as the repo crew she joins uses a variety of schemes to take possession of various crafts, including a band’s spacefaring tour bus, a racer, a cruise ship, and a casino. Since First is the protagonist and since humans in sf novels are traditionally more clever than aliens, First devises most of the ploys to gain access to the ships and (in the case of the cruise ship and the casino) to evacuate passengers before seizing the vessel.

First’s exploits involve a fair amount of action, but since this is a comedy, there is little worry that any likeable characters will be irreparably injured. The plot is really just a mechanism for introducing imaginative aliens, including First’s best friend (who is something like a giant sloth that moves too slowly for any motion to be obvious) and the boss of the repo outfit, whose race assembles a variety of independently sentient components into an organic individual.

I appreciated the imagination that went into the development of the aliens and I chucked occasionally at the plot. First is a likeable if familiar protagonist, a plucky young woman who relies on her wits to get herself into and out of dangerous situations. I can’t rave about Starship Repo (there aren’t any ROFL moments and character development is minimal), but it works well enough as a diverting science fiction comedy to earn a recommendation.

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