The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 8, 2020

Chuck Palahniuk is known for transgressive fiction, but being transgressive for the sake of being transgressive gets old. Shock value only has value if it wakes readers up or makes them think. The Invention of Sound isn’t particularly shocking — I don’t know if it is still possible to shock readers with violence — but more to the point, the novel has nothing new to say. It’s simply Palahniuk being Palahniuk.

The story centers on the production of sound effects — particularly screams — for movies. Palahniuk gives the reader interesting tidbits about screams, yodels, and other vocalizations that moviegoers have heard, probably without realizing that they’ve heard the identical scream in other movies. The Wilheim scream, for example, is a stock sound effect that has been used in over four hundred movies. Who knew?

Mitzi Ives has followed in her father’s footsteps as a Foley artist by making a lucrative living recording screams. They seem more realistic than the screams produced by actors because they are actual screams produced by fear, torture, and fear of torture. After tying down her victims in a sound studio, Ives sedates herself with Ambien and alcohol so she won’t remember what she did. The reader will find that odd and will likely not be surprised to learn the truth about the torture sessions.

The surrounding plot involves a long-missing girl named Lucinda (her face has been on every milk carton in the country, presumably terrorizing children who wonder when they too will go missing) and her father, Gates Foster, who spends his time tracking down pedophiles in the apparent belief that one of them must be to blame for his daughter’s absence. An aging actress named Blush Gentry adds her perspective, both as a character and as the author of an autobiography, excepts of which pepper the plot. A caricature of a producer and a supernatural element are additional ingredients in a stew of clashing flavors.

Foster can’t come to terms with his loss, as he makes clear when he disrupts Lucinda’s funeral. He even pays actresses to play her part based on computer-generated likenesses of what she would look like at the age of 24. So okay, that might be a shocking, although I’d probably categorize it as creepy.

The novel’s key concept seems to be that the blending together of screams can create a sound that is greater than the sum of its parts, a sound that can wreak havoc. That’s likely intended to be disturbing but Palahnuik didn’t make me feel anything for the theater patrons who find themselves buried in rubble after the collective scream is unleashed. If the novel is intended as a work of horror, it is less than horrifying. Perhaps it is intended instead as dark humor, but if so, it doesn’t generate enough grins to be satisfying.

Palahnuik can always be counted on to craft interesting if twisted characters. His in-your-face prose style always creates a sense of immediacy that always keeps me reading to the end. Perhaps true fans of transgressive fiction will love The Invention of Sound. Readers who wonder, as I did, if Palahnuik had a point other than showing off how transgressive he can be will probably agree that this is not his best book.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Hooligans by P.T. Deutermann

Published by St. Martin's Press on July 28, 2020

War novels are not a staple of my reading list. Unless, that is, they are written by P.T. Deutermann. While Deutermann is a skilled author of thrillers, he uses his suspense-building skills and his experience as a naval officer to good effect when he writes about World War II naval conflicts.

War novels often follow the path of earlier war novels, telling familiar stories of valor and bravery and self-sacrifice. All of that is present in The Hooligans, but Deutermann gives the story a fresh spin by making the main character a doctor. Lincoln Andersen had finished the third year of a seven-year surgical residence at Duke Medical School when he decided to enlist. His flat feet kept him out of the Army but, after Pearl Harbor, the Navy needed warm bodies.

The Navy teaches Andersen to salute and sends him to a base on the Solomon Islands, where he’s assigned to a field hospital to help with casualties the Navy suffered at Guadalcanal. Thanks to Andersen’s failure to complete his surgical residency, the “real” surgeons view him as a wannabe surgeon. Anderson is promptly reassigned as the squadron doctor for a group of P.T. boats. The squadron is known as the Hooligan Navy because the “real” Navy doesn’t have much use for P.T. boats. His commanding officer doubtless saw the assignment as a way to keep Andersen away from “real” field hospitals, but Andersen sees it as a chance to save lives.

Over the course of the novel, as soldiers and sailors battle the Japanese, Andersen teaches himself to be a trauma surgeon. He draws on his three years of residency and, when he doesn’t know what to do, has someone read him a field manual that explains the procedure as he’s performing it. He doesn’t save every life but he saves enough that he comes to be known, with a good bit of affection, as Superman.

Andersen tags along with the Hooligans for a couple of years as they make their way closer to Japan, eventually serving his last duty in the Philippines. He survives bombings and torpedo attacks while working himself beyond exhaustion as he strives to patch the wounded so they can be transported to a field hospital for more complete care. He also survives a military bureaucracy that threatens his career when “real” surgeons learn that he has been performing life-saving procedures for which, by their standards, he is unqualified. The sailors whose lives he stayed no doubt disagree.

Battle scenes are harrowing and all the more realistic because Andersen isn’t a combatant who strides bravely into battle. He’s a guy who steps up his game when he’s in over his head because nobody else is in a position to perform battlefield surgery. He overcomes a bit of self-doubt and an enormous amount of professional envy while doing his best to stay alive and help others. Andersen is a likable character because, while not needlessly humble, he isn’t full of himself.

Deutermann creates a detailed view of the various island locations in which Andersen finds himself. He explains the hardships faced by the forgotten Hooligans who have to raid other naval vessels to get the supplies they need. He introduces interesting and offbeat secondary characters, not all of them in the military. Some are fated to die, not always in battle. Beyond his ability to create atmosphere and convincing characters, Deutermann brings home the horrors of war and its impact on the soldiers, sailors, nurses, and doctors as they are wounded and watch others die, always knowing that death in war is a game of chance.

I can’t fault Deutermann for a feel-good ending because Andersen endures so much pain that he deserves a happy ending. Yet even the ending brings a reminder that nobody escapes war unscathed. While The Hooligans is a quick read because of its adrenalin-pumping nature, the novel’s attention to atmosphere and characterization raise it to a higher level than a typical war novel.

RECOMMENDED

Dark Hollows by Steve Frech

Published in Great Britain in 2019; published by HarperCollins/HQ on September 1, 2020

Dark Hollows straddles the border between thriller and horror. Much of the story occurs around the Halloween season. Elements of horror spring out of the text on occasion, including spooky woods and a graveyard, the appearance of a woman who might be a ghost, and a cockroach infestation. The novel also depends on the underlying fear that something evil might be done to a dog, which for dog lovers is pretty horrific.

Jacob Reese lives in a Vermont town called The Hollows. He owns a coffee shop that he hopes to franchise. He also rents out a cottage on his property as sort of a bed-and-breakfast without the breakfast. Everyone seems to like Jacob well enough and they adore his dog Murphy.

Jacob has a dark secret in his past. He was once a low-level drug courier (not so much a dealer as a go-between, although there’s no legal distinction between the two roles). Jacob was dating a woman named Laura until his unlawful employment got in the way of their relationship. Laura ended up dead and Jacob blamed himself, although he didn’t actually kill her.

The Hollows gives Jacob a place to hide from his past until a woman shows up who seems to be the reincarnation of Laura. Bad things (did I mention cockroaches?) begin to happen after the woman appears. It eventually becomes clear that this version of Laura places even more blame on Jacob than Jacob places on himself for Laura’s fate.

The story follows Jacob as he tries to figure out who this woman is and why she is sabotaging his life. The plot is tense at times, particularly after Murphy disappears, but lacks a “wow factor.” The story is about as credible as most modern thrillers, meaning it’s a bit far-fetched, but it never becomes so preposterous that I lost my will to suspend my disbelief. The narrative travels through its peaks and valleys at a good pace. Steve Frech pushes all the buttons that thriller writers need to push to make a reader invest in the plot, but the story is sufficiently contrived that I never lost awareness of my buttons being pushed.

Jacob is the novel’s only real character; everyone else is supporting cast. Jacob is presented as a conflicted young man, torn between past and present, striving to assuage his guilty conscience by making his current life worthwhile. The last scene requires Jacob to make a choice between accepting responsibility and the consequences of his choices or continuing on his current path. What choice he will make is deliberately ambiguous — this is a novel that allows the reader to write the ending — but Frech seems to suggest that living with a guilty conscience is a worse fate than living with the consequences of bad decisions. Personally, I think Jacob should lawyer up before he does anything, but readers can make their own judgments.

RECOMMENDED

In the Shadows of Men by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Subterranean on August 31, 2020

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror all tend to be shelved together in bookstores, although they are distinct genres. Robert Bennett Jackson is one of the best at blending the genres together. His recent novels have been fantasies with elements of science fiction, but In the Shadows of Men is best categorized as a horror novella.

The story is of two brothers, one of whom becomes obsessed and perhaps possessed by evil. Narrating the tale is the younger Pugh brother. He calls his older brother Bear. If the narrator’s first name is revealed, I missed it.

Bear and his brother had an abusive father. Bear took the larger share of the abuse. The narrator was living in Houston when Bear asked him to come to Coahora, a dried-up Texas town that is seeing a new life due to fracking. The narrator’s wife left him, he feels trapped, so Coahora seems as good as any other place in which to disappear.

Bear bought a motel from a cousin who inherited it from Corbin Pugh, an uncle of Bear’s father. Bear thinks he can fix up the motel and cash in on transient workers until the fracking moves elsewhere. The narrator agrees to help because he has nothing else to do. Before much time passes, the sheriff pays a visit and tells them that Corbin operated the motel as a house of ill repute, importing Mexican girls to serve the local men.

In the tradition of horror novels, spooky things begin to happen. They find a hatch in one of the motel rooms but they can’t unlock it. They hear voices and an old Merle Haggard song. The narrator sees apparitions and hears girls crying. Bear begins to behave irresponsibly and then gets a bit whacky. The narrator is eventually drawn into the good-versus-evil conflict that is so often central to Bennett’s work. The story’s suspense comes from the fear that evil will overtake the narrator before he can save an innocent victim and — perhaps — save his brother.

Since these are all standard horror elements, I can’t say that there is anything surprising about the story, although it delivers some chilling moments. Bennett’s strength is his characterization. While there aren’t many characters, he does a sufficiently deep dive into the narrator’s psyche that it’s easy to feel sympathetic when the brother-against-brother theme reaches its denouement.

At this point, Subterranean has made In the Shadows of Men available as a fairly pricey deluxe edition hardcover. I don’t take price into account when I make recommendations, but buyers might want to take it into account when deciding how much they want to pay for a novella. The price point is appropriate for collectors and affluent Bennett fans. Other readers might hope that it eventually becomes available in a more affordable format. In any event, the story is one that horror fans and Bennett fans will likely appreciate, even if it lacks the substance of Bennett’s longer work.

RECOMMENDED

The Rabbit Hunter by Lars Kepler

Published in Sweden in 2016. First published in translation in the UK in 2018. Published in a slightly different translation by Knopf on January 14, 2020.

The serial killer who baffles the police in The Rabbit Hunter wears long leather straps around his head that are strung with rabbit ears. So yeah, he’s weird, but serial killers are weird by nature. That’s probably why thriller writers love to imagine them, even though actual serial killers are relatively rare. If we must have another serial killer novel, at least we can have one in which the killer really ramps up the weirdness.

Sweden’s foreign minister was murdered while he was consorting with prostitutes. Saga Bauer, an officer who specializes in counterterrorism with the Security Police, investigates the killing. One of the prostitutes heard the killer say something that suggests other murders are on the horizon. Bauer thinks a suspected terrorist named Salim Ratjen might have relevant information about an apparent assassination plot, but Ratjen is in prison and unlikely to be cooperative.

Enter Joona Linda, who has starred in five earlier novels by the writing team that calls itself Lars Kepler. Linda begins this one in prison where he’s serving a sentence for assisting an escape and assaulting a guard. He’s looking forward to spending the rest of his life not being a police officer until the prime minister shows up with Bauer and asks Linda to get into Ratjen’s head.

The scene shifts frequently after the premise is established, although it shifts away from prison relatively quickly. Other murders occur as promised, but they don’t seem political. What ties them together is unclear, thus setting up the classic serial killer plot as the police try to figure out who will die next.

Linda is released from prison to continue the terrorism investigation despite his growing sense that the foreign minister’s slaying wasn’t an act of terrorism. Bodies drop and clues pile up until the real reason for the killings — the fact that links them and that explains the rabbit ears — is revealed.

The Rabbit Hunter is a longish book with a complex plot that delves deeply into the lives of privileged people who will likely die before the story ends. Some readers might think they deserve to die. Other readers might think that some of the characters, at least, are fairly sympathetic individuals who have atoned for their past. Either way, their fate shouldn’t be in the hands of a killer who wears rabbit ears, or even one who dresses more conventionally. Interestingly, the killer receives less character development than the victims, in part because his identity is concealed for most of the novel. We do, however, get a good sense of the kind of the shattered childhood that might produce a serial killer.

Kepler manufactures tension in the manner of a good film director. Kepler describes a crucial element of a scene, then describes something that might or might not be important — a shadow, a loud noise, tree branches moving without wind. Suspense builds but the reader is never quite sure whether something eventful is about to happen. Until the end, at least, when the action erupts. The ending doesn’t seem forced but it might be faulted for being a bit too karmic to be realistic. Still, with all the violence and death that ensues throughout the story, it would be hard to classify the finish as an entirely happy ending. It also comes with the touch of bitter irony. The ending might best be characterized as a respite from bleakness which, in Scandinavian thrillers, is the best for which a reader can hope. And in the tradition of Scandinavian thrillers, the respite is worth waiting for even if it’s a long time coming.

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