Coco Butternut by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on January 31, 2017

Coco Butternut is a novella-length story. It isn’t the funniest Hap & Leonard story I’ve read but it has its moments. More than enough moments, in fact, to earn a recommendation, at least for readers who are familiar with the characters.

Hap and Leonard are called upon to deliver money to a blackmailer in exchange for the disinterred body of a mummified dachshund named Coco Butternut. The job seems simple, but nothing is ever simple for Hap and Leonard.

As usual when Hap and Leonard get involved in a case, dead bodies appear. Human bodies, not just the mummified dog. And as usual, getting paid doesn’t work out quite as they planned.

Hap’s daughter Chance plays a supporting role in the story, as well as his partner/lover Brett. Adding to the banter is their primary role, but it’s hard to top the banter that Hap and (especially) Leonard provide as they point out each other’s faults.

Coco Butternut doesn’t advance the characters, but it tells an amusing story that fans will appreciate. I suspect that newcomers will benefit from reading earlier installments in the series before turning their attention to this one.

Joe Lansdale has written excellent novels and stories across a variety of genres. I enjoy Hap and Leonard and I’m glad Lansdale is achieving financial success with those characters, but I hope he finds time to diversify his current output. Not that it matters much, because I enjoy everything he writes. He’s a fine storyteller and his irreverent sense of humor matches my own, but I'm an even bigger fan of his not so funny but exceptionally chilling horror novels.

RECOMMENDED

Grave Predictions by Drew Ford (ed.)

Published by Dover Publications on September 21, 2016

Grave Predictions is a collection of stories about the world’s end. The first several stories are classics. If you haven’t read them, you’ll find it worthwhile to have them collected in one place. I have a mixed reaction to the entries from the current century. I suppose it’s hard to find current writers who match up to Bradbury and Ellison and Vonnegut and the others who penned the majority of the volume’s stories.

The collection begins with an introduction by Harlan Ellison. It rambles a bit, but it makes a good point. Humans are tenacious survivors, but can the human race survive its own capacity for self-destruction?

Here are the stories:

Eugene Mouton, “The End of the World” (1872). More an essay than a story, Mouton predicts that the world will spontaneously combust, making it an early prediction of global warming. He attributes the combustion to man’s obsessive consumption of resources (relentlessly pumping oil from the ground, deforestation, expanding cities to house excess population, etc.). All quite prophetic, even if current science might call some of the details into question.

W.E.B. DuBois, “Grave Predictions” (1920). Gasses from a comet’s tail wipe out the residents of New York and perhaps the entire world. A black messenger who was trapped in a vault and a white woman from a prosperous family are the city’s last survivors. Their disparities of wealth and race become foolish distinctions as they realize they have only each other — at least until reality intrudes. This is probably the kind of classic story that’s taught in high school, although I haven’t read it before.

Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian” (1951). In this classic Bradbury story, a man who wanders empty streets at night, choosing to view the world with his own eyes rather than watching television, is picked up by the one remaining police car and taken to the Psychiatric Center. The repressive state against the open-minded individual: an eternal theme of science fiction, and of Bradbury in particular.

Arthur C. Clarke, “No Morning After” (1954). Aliens make telepathic contact with a human to warn him of an impending danger to the planet, but the drunken scientist thinks he’s hallucinating. Bad luck for the human race, but whether humans are worth saving is a question that soon occurs to the benevolent aliens.

Philip K. Dick, “Upon the Grave Earth” (1954). A girl who believes she is a saint attracts blood-drinking creatures (Valkyries, perhaps) from another place. But when she goes to the other side, she realizes it isn’t where she belongs. Eventually it isn’t clear where anyone belongs, as the nature of reality -- a favorite PKD theme -- becomes difficult to separate from illusion.

Kurt Vonnegut, “2 B R 0 2 B” (1962) - The title is the phone number people call when they’re tired of living. After aging was cured, people began to live too damn long. But no new child can be allowed to live unless the parents find someone who is willing to die. A man whose wife gives birth to triplets finds an ironic solution to the problem. Classic Vonnegut.

Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967) - One of the most celebrated stories in science fiction. A raw, powerful tale about the last five humans and the machine that tortures them.

Ursula LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) - A utopian society is made possible only by the misery and suffering of a child who lives beneath the city. The ones who walk away are those who have a conscience, who will not condition their own pleasure upon the suffering of others. This is apparently another story that is popular with teachers for the lessons it imparts, but I suspect it only resonates with bright and selfless students who would be willing to walk away from pleasures they didn’t earn. Those have become a rare breed.

Brian M. Stableford, “The Engineer and the Executioner” (1976) - An engineer who created a self-contained evolutionary ecosystem within an asteroid confronts the robot who was sent to destroy it. The theme here, one that tracks the history of science, is that anything new and different must be feared and destroyed. The ending is a dark lesson in irony.

Stephen King, “The End of the Whole Mess” (1986) - The narrator’s brother finds a cure for war (it’s in the water), but the cure is worse than the disease. This is an interesting story although not as chilling some of King’s bleak views of the future.

Joe R. Lansdale, “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” (1992) - The people who designed the weapons that ended the world come up from their shelters 20 years later, only to find man-eating roses waiting for them. This is an unsettling story about the consequences of self-inflicted madness, but the worst consequence is the way we punish ourselves for our sins.

Greg Bear, “Judgment Engine” (1995). At the end of the universe, a hive mind restores the consciousness of a human from our time to provide an “objective judgment engine” that will help them decide upon the future at the end of the present. A mathematical proof has established that more complex civilizations will always wipe out those that are less complex, so is it ethical for the various hive minds to avoid death by moving to a different universe? An interesting idea, but as a story it’s a little too contrived.

Erica L. Satifka, “Automatic” (2007). Ganymedeans saved the few surviving humans from the plague … although their generosity comes at a price. I’d rate this story: mildly interesting.

Mark Samuels, “The Black Mould” (2011). Sentient black mold takes over the universe. The story is amateurish. In his introduction, Ellison says he thought one of the stories was silly. I’m betting it was this one.

Ramsey Campbell, “The Pretense” (2013). Predictions of the world’s end are coming true, as the protagonist discovers when he leads his family on a (presumably) fruitless journey away from the disintegration of reality. This is a novella that probably should have been a short story, but it’s worth reading for the unsettling mood that it creates.

Carmen Maria Machado, “Inventory” (2013). A bisexual woman makes an inventory of her sexual experiences before and after the virus that works its way across the country. She finally hunkers down in Maine, but sex partners keep coming. As, eventually, does the virus. The story is touching and surprisingly powerful, sort of like On the Beach with a lot more sex.

RECOMMENDED

The Last Mandarin by Stephen Becker

First published in 1979; published digitally by Open Road Media on January 12, 2016

Stephen Becker combined the elegant prose of a literary author with the storytelling of a genre master. Nowhere are those gifts more evident than in the novels that comprise the Far East Trilogy. The Last Mandarin is the second novel in that series. It is a wonderful collision of east and west, showcasing cultural differences and universal verities. An adventure story told with literary flair, The Last Mandarin mixes humor and drama, romance and war, honorable rogues and disreputable heroes.

In 1949, the Nationalists are fighting the Communists and the poor are dying on the streets of Peking. Burnham, retired from the American military, is hired to bring death to a Japanese war criminal named Kanamori Shoichi. But the true nature of his mission is concealed, even from him.

Burnham encountered Kanamori during the Rape of Nanking in 1937. His memories give him a personal stake in his mission. His quest takes him all around Peking, to beggars and bars, to the police and gangsters, to prostitutes and pillars of Chinese society. Given a choice, Burnham prefers prostitutes and ricksha drivers to the more hypocritical members of society. A thread of decency runs through all of Becker’s novels, and Burnham, while far from perfect, is a decent man.

Mixed in with Burnham’s pursuit are flashback chapters that explain Kanamori’s role in the Japanese military, both as a warrior and then as Japan’s emissary to the Chinese drug trade. I can’t say that Kanamori is a sympathetic character (at least initially), but Becker makes it possible to understand how Kanamori perceived his life and the lives of those who surrounded him. Enjoying the benefits of corruption while the war is going tolerably well for the Japanese, Kanamori fancies himself the last mandarin, but we know that the war did not end well for his side. Kanamori is a complex figure, torn between two countries and a betrayer of both, soulless yet plagued by demons.

The dialog in The Last Mandarin is rich with metaphor and misdirection. “Probably there are more ways not to answer a question in Chinese than in any other tongue” and Burnham employs them all. The dialog is also rich with humor (“I am always thirsty after being beaten about the head”). Becker pays tribute to the elegance of Chinese language and to China’s remarkable history, culture, and artistic achievements, but never turns a blind eye to the corruption and political unrest that has for so long troubled the nation. The novel’s atmosphere is utterly convincing.

Some images in The Last Mandarin, particularly Becker’s description of the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking, are disturbing, although the images are less disturbing than the reality they describe. Some erotic images, particularly Becker’s description of a night that Burnham spends with a prostitute, will only be offensive to those who are offended by joy and love.

All good novels pose a moral dilemma. Burnham’s is what to do with Kanamori if he finds him. The choice is not as easy or obvious as it first appears. Letting go of a painful past is never easy but sometimes necessary, and justice can take many forms. The great lesson of The Last Mandarin is this: You never know what benefit might come from making a new friend of an old enemy.

Like many fine novels, The Last Mandarin includes a love story. It is romantic because it eschews all pretense of romance. In Burnham’s world, love is what we salvage from horror. In the end, the best we can hope for is to “find our lovers, bake our bread and watch the sunset in peace.” And the best thing we can do for the world is to help make love possible.

The Last Mandarin is a masterful mix of adventure, humor, drama, tragedy, philosophy, history, romance, and atmosphere. Stephen Becker is one of America’s great uncelebrated novelists and The Last Mandarin is a prime example of how much fun readers can have if they take the time to find his work.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Golden Gate by Robert Buettner

Published by Baen Books on January 3, 2017

The Golden Gate imagines a near future in which Homeland Security is not an ineffective bureaucratic nightmare. Obviously, this is a work of fiction.

The early chapters of The Golden Gate follow Ben Shepard’s underwater search for an experimental car that was blown off the Golden Gate Bridge by an explosion that may or may not have been the work of terrorists. The rich car owner, Manny Colibri, was financing life extension technologies and some people think the explosion might be linked to those efforts. Subsequent chapters have reporter Kate Boyle investigating the attack upon the rich guy, with occasional encouragement from her politically incorrect father, Jack Boyle.

The novel intermittently flashes back to 1588, to the early nineteenth century, and to World War II. Historical artifacts (a helmet used by the conquistadors, a whaling harpoon, a child’s necklace) enter the story in the present after appearing in stories from the past.

The main plot has Kate and Jack and Ben Shepard trying to figure out who would benefit from Colibri’s death. Shepard and the Boyles and the reader are challenged to figure out who is behind the apparent conspiracy and how it ties into the artifacts. Only late in the book — too late, I think — does Robert Buettner make it clear why this is a science fiction novel. Until that point, the story seems like a Dan Brown novel. Still, the reader will puzzle out the carefully concealed sf element long before it is revealed. It’s just a bit too obvious, making the effort to conceal it a waste of words.

Occasional scenes, particularly one that takes place in Iraq to develop Shepard’s backstory and another that’s set in a concentration camp, are intense and dramatic. Other scenes, including one that details the technology involved in an underwater search, come across as attempts to pad the story. Buettner is at his best when he writes about the horrors of war, but much of the story is slow and does little to advance the plot or to develop the characters.

There’s some political nonsense in this novel I could have lived without. Buettner’s central characters seem to believe that an honest insult is always preferable to “politically correct” respectful behavior. At some point, adults should outgrow the need to be obnoxious or disrespectful in their honesty. When writers (via their characters) feel the need to ridicule people who hold political beliefs that differ from their own, their lack of intellectual tolerance degrades the story. That’s particularly true in science fiction, a genre that teaches the importance of diverse and unorthodox opinions (although tolerance seems to be a vanishing commodity in sf fandom in recent years).

So Buettner loses some points for celebrating narrow-mindedness and for assuming that all Latinos in California know how to get a fake social security number. He loses more points for setting a novel in the future where people complain about hippies. I think the last confirmed sighting of a hippie was in 1973. People who write sf should really try to be more creative.

Pieces of The Golden Gate are good. There are some intense action scenes, but they are few and far between. Too much of the novel drags and the characters are unidimensional. The ending is anticlimactic and a little sappy. For all those reasons, I can only give The Golden Gate a guarded recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Fatal by John Lescroart

Published by Atria Books on January 24, 2017

The characters in Fatal, regardless of gender, have trouble keeping their pants on, at least when they are with someone else’s spouse. Fatal isn’t quite Fatal Attraction, although there are overtones of obsessive desire leading to dangerous consequences.

Geoff and Bina Cooke bring their friends Peter and Jill Ash together with their friends Ron and Kate Jameson. Kate comes home with the overpowering desire to shag Peter. One seduction later, Kate has satisfied herself but has transferred the obsession to Peter, who can’t stop thinking about her. This apparently transforms Peter’s life in ways that I didn’t understand or believe.

Frank Rinaldi is the murder victim in an apparent murder-suicide. Beth Tully, investigating the case, thinks his wife killed herself after she killed Frank, probably after learning that he was having an affair with Laurie Shaw. Beth, who starts dating Laurie’s brother Alan, happens to be a good friend of Kate. You might need a spreadsheet to keep track of the intersecting relationships in Fatal.

All of this seems more like a soap opera than a thriller until a group of terrorists start shooting people and blowing things up near the coffee shop where Beth and Kate are chatting about Kate’s infidelity. Hello, terrorists? That comes out of nowhere, and it’s followed by Peter’s murder. So now we’ve got a thriller. But then we’re back to a soap opera as Beth helps Laurie deal with her anorexia while adding her friend Kate to the lengthening list of women who might have wanted Peter dead. That’s a little too much soap for me.

John Lescroart should stick to writing about lawyers. This is a novel about cops, and his cops are tedious and annoying. Beth is more interested in her intuition than evidence and her partner is more interested in being a bully than in doing legitimate police work. When they finally settle on one of a few different competing theories, the partner isn’t the least bit troubled that no evidence establishes the purported killer’s motive. That reflects the sad reality of law enforcement — everyone they meet is a suspect, the presumption of innocence doesn’t exist, and clearing a case is more important than arresting the right person — but as realistic as Beth and her partner might be, I wouldn’t want to know them.

And unfortunately, by the end of Fatal, I didn’t care who shot Peter. The investigating cops are so unlikable and self-righteous that I would have been just as happy to see the crime unsolved — maybe happier, since I didn’t think they deserved to solve it. My favorite character was a CSI guy who kept telling them to stop bothering him until they had some actual evidence that merited investigation.

The solution to the mystery isn’t terribly surprising and the ending is silly, but I don’t have a problem with the plot so much as the disagreeable characters. I hope Lescroart returns to writing about Dismas Hardy. That’s a character I can enjoy.

NOT RECOMMENDED