String Follow by Simon Jacobs

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on February 1, 2022

String Follow is marketed as “a darkly comic suburban Gothic.” There’s no doubt that the novel is dark. School shootings are as dark as it gets, and the novel’s school shooting is only a small part of the violence that pervades the story. But school shootings aren’t the stuff of comedy. How String Follow can be marketed as “darkly comic” is bewildering.

The characters are teens in Adena, Ohio. The real Adena, a small village at least an hour’s drive from Pittsburg, is more rural than suburban, but a novelist is free to change the reality of locations. The fictional Adena appears to change its size and shape as characters drive through streets that are simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable.

The story is narrated by a lurking presence (marketing materials describe it as a “malevolent force”) that purportedly helps the teens understand their choices “and see their architecture, the brutal structure behind them, as dense and complex and orderly as a blood spray.” The plot culminates in a “Death Party” at the (supposedly empty) home of a character who is presumed to be dead but is inconveniently alive — a party orchestrated by the malevolent force. String Follow is more of a horror novel than a dark comedy. I suppose horror alone suffices to convince marketing departments to describe a novel as “Gothic.” The underlying premise seems to be that it’s pretty horrifying to be a teen.

The characters are lost in their teen angst. Beth “bottled and buried her rage within herself,” instinctively turning her back and retreating from conflict. Her older brother Greg is seeing a psychiatrist who has him on Risperdal. Greg doesn’t tell his shrink about the voice he hears, the voice that begins to dictate his behavior. Beth also hears a voice that tells her what to do, although its not as demanding as her brother’s voice. Beth feels like she’s trapped in a tower and believes she sees colors that she interprets as souls.

Not to be outdone, Sarah spends an inexplicable amount of time thinking about colored lights. Her colors are not necessarily souls, but she sometimes perceives them as bodies. Purple seems to be a guiding light. Sarah can’t have sex without entertaining colorful scattered thoughts: “On the bed, she separated from her body,” a perspective that allows her to notice “the yellow of David’s room to the filtered gray palette of the world beyond him” and the “furious white” sky, an “impossibly dense color of equal violence” creating an atmosphere “as thick as language.” Readers who can decipher that prose might find String Follow to be a real treat.

Sarah is Beth’s best friend until she’s not. Sarah is also David’s girlfriend until they break up, and then his lover when he’s nice to her until she decides he’s not being nice, after all. David is given to “pornographic cult fantasies” but otherwise seems to be living in oblivion. During their breakup, Sarah hangs out with Greg, whose attention she enjoys until she doesn’t. Sarah has a driving need to be popular and to solve other people’s problems, then feels her friends are using her when they allow her to impose her will upon them. It's not surprising that Sarah drives away her friend Claire, a minor character who is embarrassed by her family’s prosperity.

Tyler and Rhea are the other key characters, although Rhea is something of a nonentity unless she’s bleeding. For a time, Tyler and Rhea explore Adena and surrounding communities, avoiding their homes and parents. Tyler then discovers that David left the house unlocked while his parents were taking an out-of-town trip. Tyler takes over the teen cave that David made for himself in the basement, locking David out. David thinks it is odd that the basement door is suddenly locked but his teen ennui prevents him from doing anything about it. Tyler eventually invites Rhea to join him in David’s basement. Using David’s computer, Tyler invites a younger girl named Marcy to join him, promising to fuck her to death if she brings weed, to which Marcy (who calls herself Typhus) responds “when and where?” Inviting Marcy turns out to be a bad decision, one that adds to the flowing blood that eventually drowns the story.

Claire becomes a fan of a teen named Graham, a member of a punk band who is locally famous for self-inducing blinding migraines so that he can express his pain through his music until he passes out. Later, a kid named Adam who suffers the same affliction (did Graham relocate and change his name?) is present during a school shooting that occurs late in the novel. He does nothing after noticing the gun. Adam then obsessively replays videos, watching himself and blaming himself for the bullet that struck one of the victims after he collapsed in pain.

With all these characters, String Fellow produces enough teen angst to power a small country. The malevolent force (self-described only as “we”) might be responsible for the colors that plague Sarah and Beth and the voices in Greg’s head. It is explicitly responsible for the school shooting, for Adam’s migraines, and for the Death Party, among other acts of violence. Perhaps malevolence directed at the reader motivates the narrating force to explain the inner thoughts of insecure teen characters. Too many paragraphs are devoted to internal monologues as characters fret about each new source of anxiety.

The malevolent force might not be a reliable narrator, given that events near the novel’s end involving Tyler and Rhea and Sarah make no sense at all. Near the end, Tyler leaves the basement with his friends in tow, only to return to the house (where he picks up Sarah as she flees from David) without appearing to recognize it as the same house he just vacated. Deliberate ambiguity is built into the story’s conclusion, ambiguity that creates pointless confusion. The force appears to be clouding the minds of the characters. It certainly clouded my mind, giving me an Graham/Adam-like headache as I tried to follow the plot. A lengthy passage in all caps seems to suggest that all possible versions of the story are simultaneously true, while a passage that follows in normal type suggests that alternative versions of the story could just as easily be told. Those passages made me say out loud: “Just pick a story and stick to it.” Perhaps the novel is meant to be experimental. If so, the experiment left me frustrated.

String Follow envisions evil as an external and sentient presence. Many writers have made that suggestion. It might be comforting to attribute teen violence that has no obvious explanation — and there’s plenty of that in String Follow — to a malevolent force rather than mental illness or poor parenting. As a society, we only have ourselves to blame for society’s failure to recognize the symptoms of mental illness or violence-prone kids and to intervene before tragedy ensues. Attributing violence to an amorphous evil seems like copout, although Simon Jacobs does try to have it both ways by portraying Adena as a town where adult supervision of teens is entirely absent.

On a more positive note, Jacobs’ prose is creative and robust. When they aren’t whining about their lives or behaving as if they are characters in a slasher movie, the kids occasionally do something interesting (the idea of taking over a random basement and using it as a hangout is cool). Had the story tried to explore teen violence as the product of something other than an evil force, it might have been compelling. I shouldn’t criticize a writer for failing to write a different book — the kind of book I might have enjoyed more — but I think it’s fair to criticize a writer for making a choice that doesn’t work. The “malevolent forces make kids bad” theme is too banal to succeed, despite offering some stirring moments to fans of gore.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Deep Sleep by Steven Konkoly

Published by Thomas & Mercer on February 1, 2022

Deep Sleep is a “Russian sleeper network” story, a throwback to the days when spy thrillers focused on villains in Russia rather than China or the Middle East. The story does not end in the final chapter, so readers should be prepared to commit to reading at least one more book if they want to read a complete story.

The protagonist is Devin Gray. He’s a former FBI agent who now works in a private firm called MINERVA. (Other all-cap names of the kind that spy thriller writers love include DEVTEK and CONTROL). Gray’s mother Helen was a long-time operative of the CIA but she lost her job after she came to be seen as “psychotically paranoid.” And here I thought being psychotically paranoid was a job requirement.

Anyway, Helen kidnaps a man named Wilson and apparently kills a deputy sheriff before shooting herself. The reader will see that she didn’t kill the deputy but she definitely kidnaps Wilson and does some killing before she dies.

Gray’s mother had the foresight to send Gray messages that would be delivered in the event of her death. The messages take him to one of the few people who appeared at Helen’s funeral, a former CIA colleague named Karl Berg. From beyond the grave, Helen doles out clues to the location of a safehouse where, after a journey that occupies the first quarter of the novel, Gray and Berg find a room filled with files and surveillance photos.

The evidence that Gray’s mother assembled points to an ambitious Russian project. Not only did Russia place an unknown but large number of sleeper agents in the US back in the Soviet era, it made sure that the agents would breed, producing a second and possibly a third generation of loyal Russian spies. Now, everyone understands that American kids rebel against their parents. Instilling loyalty for Russia in kids who grow up as western materialists seems unlikely. Steven Konkoly tries to overcome that problem by sending the sleeper families to an annual summer camp near Branson, where loyalty to the motherland is reinforced. Kids who don’t get with the program (and parents who stray) end up at the bottom of a lake.

The story isn’t particularly credible but maybe it doesn’t need to be. This is an action story that hinges on surveillance drones and chases and shootouts and exploding helicopters. Credibility is an afterthought. At least Konkoly recognized the unlikely nature of his plot and tried to do something about it. Readers who enjoy the story can pretend he succeeded.

The other person who comes to Helen’s funeral is Marnie Young, a Marine helicopter pilot who is Gray’s good buddy and a potential love interest. Naturally, when it comes time to assemble a group to travel to Branson and check out the summer camp, Marnie tags along. Naturally, her ability to fly a helicopter turns out to be fortuitous.

Nothing much happens in this installment beyond setups and shootouts. We learn about some players in Russia. We meet the team of interchangeable mercenaries assembled by Berg. None of them, and for that matter none of the characters, including Gray, have any hint of a personality. After the action in Branson, the story fizzles out as Konkoly dumps another round of details that will presumably drive the next installment.

This installment is easy to read and the action is moderately entertaining, although there’s nothing in Deep Sleep that thriller fans will not have encountered many times before. Some of the book feels padded, likely because the premise doesn’t warrant multiple books. Maybe I will revise my thinking after (and if) I read the second installment. My guarded recommendation at this point is based on Konkoly's crisp writing style and his ability to hold my interest in a plot that would have been more timely during the Cold War.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

All Was Lost by Steven Maxwell

Published by ‎ Pushkin Vertigo on March 1, 2022

All Was Lost is an appropriate title for a story of desperate actions taken by people who are willing to risk losing everything. The plot is noir on steroids.

Orla McCabe, an Irish transplant to Liverpool, is photographing a crumbling abbey at night when a “lurching figure” leads her to a “shooting box,” a small enclosure used by hunters. She takes photos of a scene that resembles a small-scale death camp when someone shoots at her. Orla drops her camera and driver’s license as she flees. Outside the shooting box, she pauses to take a gun from the hand of a dead man. She also grabs a suitcase full of money that the dead man must have been guarding.

Orla’s impulsive decision raises questions about the morality of theft. In Orla’s judgment, she took money from bad people who would use it for bad purposes. Why should they have money when she struggles as a cleaner, when her husband has a month left on his work contract, when their home has been repossessed and when she has a baby to feed? In Orla’s view, the worst thing about not having money “isn’t that you don’t own things, it's that you don’t own yourself.” The money represents freedom.

News stories soon make clear that, seen in a different light, the money represents the fruits of human trafficking. Orla’s husband Liam doesn’t want anything to do with it. To him, it’s the devil’s money and Orla has cursed their family by taking it. To Orla, the harm caused by the traffickers has already been done. She believes the money will make them better people and will give their daughter the life she deserves. She clings to that belief long after it becomes apparent to the reader that Orla has no obvious way out of the predicament she made for herself.

While the philosophical struggle between Orla and Liam persists throughout the novel, Orla spends most of her time running. She runs from people who want the money and, when one of them finds it, she runs after the money. Her primary stalker is Dolan, who has been tasked by Cy Green with recovering his money. The pursuit leaves death in Orla’s wake and threatens the welfare of her husband and daughter.

As that story unfolds, Cy’s interest in human trafficking has become an embarrassment to the in-law who presides over their crime family. He assigns his son, Millar Sweet, the job of cleaning up Uncle Cy’s mess. The fast-moving action leaves the reader wondering whether Sweet or Dolan will find Orla before they settle scores with each other.

Two cops, Lynch and Carlin, are also on Orla’s trail. Carlin has his own money problems, thanks to loan sharks who are threatening his family. Lynch has a different problem, involving an affair with a married woman he hopes to rescue from a dangerous man. It does not seem that things will end well for anyone in this violent story of temptations and bad choices.

Apart from a couple of children, Liam is the novel’s only innocent character. His flaw is that he is too trusting. Lynch is not entirely innocent, but he at least feels the need to do something good with his life, something unselfish. Orla and Carlin have made their beds, but the reader will worry that they might suffer undue punishment for their sins. Orla might not be admirable, but she is determined and resourceful. That’s enough to make readers care about her.

Maxwell establishes a grim atmosphere with fading light, barking dogs, and abundant blood without slowing the pace of this tight novel. The plot is built on one surprise after another as the short chapters count down from 67 to 0. The penultimate chapter changes everything. Despite the shocks, the story never feels contrived. All Was Lost is a brutal crime novel, the kind of story that isn’t meant for weak stomachs, but it is also an intriguing character study of the choices people make when they feel lost, when temptation bumps against their sense of being crushed by life.

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Defenestrate by Renée Branum

Published by ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing on January 25, 2022

A family superstition underlies Marta’s obsession with falling. She thinks about people who have fallen from great heights and survived. She thinks about Buster Keaton, the undisputed master of falling. She ponders statistics about falls. She might see falling as a metaphor for her own life.

Marta and Nick are twins. Marta’s mother tells Marta that she has always had trouble being close to anyone other than Nick but cautions Marta that she cannot always be her brother’s keeper. Marta and Nick have much in common, including depression and possibly a suicidal ideation. Their mother is steeped in religion, the kind of religion that forces her to disown Nick when he comes out as gay. Their nonconfrontational father devoted most of his time to constructing a village for his model trains. Marta always wondered how that hobby was meant to keep them safe, but Marta is a bit obsessed with safety.

The family superstition — they avoid calling it a curse — began with Jiří, who in 1895 pushed a stonemason out a window in a cathedral tower that was under renovation in Prague. The stonemason may have seduced Jiří’s daughter, although the truth of the story might be quite different. Since Jiří defenestrated the stonemason, family members have fallen from railings or ladders or roofs, as if they cannot resist falling, their “bodies magnetized to the pavement.” Perhaps the family is being held accountable for the stonemason’s death, or perhaps the family curse has more to do with mental illness.

Marta and Nick visit Prague, a city that is famous for throwing men from windows, as if returning to the scene of their ancestor’s crime will help them “make sense of the shape our lives had taken.” Inevitably, Nick falls from a balcony in Prague, saved by the branches of a tree but nevertheless hospitalized. Whether his fall was accidental is ambiguous, although it gives Marta a chance to discuss a famous photograph with a man she meets in a bar. The photo, later made into art by Andy Warhol, is of a woman who landed on a car after jumping to her death from the Empire State Building. As conversations of seduction go, Marta’s needs some work.

The plot concerns Marta’s journey toward health and forgiveness. She drinks too much. She behaves carelessly. She blames (with a certain amount of good cause) her mother for poor parenting. After Nick promises her that he will try to be careful so that he doesn’t fall again, she comes to realize that trying to be careful might be the only promise she can make to anyone, including herself. Careful with herself, careful with her family, careful with her relationships.

The elegant voice that narrates Defenestrate is well suited to the story. The voice is calm and quiet, never reaching toward melodrama, always keeping the story grounded in Marta’s introspective melancholy. Sometimes Renée Branum reaches for descriptions that fail to resonate, but her prose is usually an appealing blend of the evocative and the precise. The falling metaphor is a bit overused; the examples of fall survivalists become redundant. The tales of Buster Keaton are interesting but ultimately add little of substance to the narrative. Small flaws aside, Branum’s confident and controlled narrative offers an intriguing view of a family learning to manage, and perhaps overcome, a perpetual state of self-inflicted crisis.

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Devil House by John Darnielle

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD) on January 25, 2022

Like all writers, true crime writers must make choices about the stories they tell. Maybe they make the wrong choices. Maybe they tell the wrong stories. Maybe they shade truth with fiction. Those thoughts underlie Devil House, a novel about a true crime writer who comes to question his craft.

The novel imagines that two significant crimes occurred in Milpitas. A teen strangled his girlfriend in 1981. Some of his friends were aware of the crime, saw the girl’s body, but said nothing about it. A movie called River’s Edge publicized the crime, raising predictable questions about the apathy of youth and suggesting the decline of civilization. Five years later, a realtor and a potential property buyer were slashed to death with a sword inside an abandoned porn shop. Teens who used the porn shop as a clubhouse may been involved. The people of Milpitas refused to talk about the crime, having suffered enough reputational damage from River’s Edge.

An editor finds the story of the porn shop murders and sends it to true crime writer Gage Chandler, whose first book — The White Witch of Morro Bay — recounted the story of two unarmed students, Jesse and Gene, who broke into the home of a female teacher with the intent to steal her property. The teacher was in the kitchen. She happened to be holding a knife when the boys entered her home. When Gene touched her breast while trying to ease the knife out of her hand, she snapped. After she finished stabbing both kids to death — while they are retreating from the home — she dismembered them in an effort to conceal the crime. The media portrayed the teacher as having groomed the kids with the intent to turn them into a human sacrifice. Chandler’s version of the truth was less sensational.

Chandler is reluctant to take on another book about teens, but he admits that the story of the porn shop murders is intriguing. He moves to Milpitas in 2001, buys the building, and recreates the murder scene because that’s the immersive method that he uses to write his books. Chandler decides to call the murder scene the Devil House. The killer was never charged; his identity remains the subject of conjecture. Or so Chandler tells the reader from time to time. The truth is obscure because, at the end of the first chapter, Chandler reveals that he has decided not to tell the story that he came to Milpitas to tell. In fact, Chandler starts the book by telling the reader that Devil House is not the true crime book he had contracted to write. It is instead “about restoring ancient temples to their proper estates.”

Chandler's reconstruction of the crime follows the owner of the porn shop, a man who is trying to remake his life in the small town, having failed in San Jose. After repeated rent increases, the owner decides to walk away from the store, leaving everything behind, knowing he’ll never get his cleaning deposit back from the landlord he despises.

Chandler then follows the teen who works in the porn shop, a seemingly ordinary kid named Derek who is finding a late high school balance between slacking and planning for an adult life. Derek keeps a key when the owner walks away from the shop. Chandler follows Derek’s friend Seth, an artistic loner who begins the project of remaking the porn shop, repurposing magazine and video covers as the tools of an art project that transforms the store into a haunted house. Chandler follows a homeless kid named Alex who begins to live in the shop, a kid who has some mental health issues and, like so many homeless people, has fallen through the cracks. Derek lets Alex stay in the shop because Derek is a decent kid.

After building a picture of the abandoned porn shop's occupants, Chandler follows his own efforts to turn his new dwelling into a crime scene. He tells of his investigation, his interviews, the documents and pictures he finds on eBay. Eventually he sorts the details into the story of two deaths. But is the story accurate? Can the truth ever be known? Do readers even want to know the truth?

The narrative pulls together several themes. More than once, we see how society throws away people who are homeless or mentally ill or poor or obviously troubled, creating a recipe for violence or despair that could be avoided by recognizing people who need help and helping them.

One chapter consists of Chandler reading a letter from Jesse’s mother, a letter that takes him to task for not telling her story, for leaving the impression that Jesse was a bad kid of her creation. That chapter could be read as an indictment of true crime writing. Even when true crime avoids sensationalism — a rare feat — even when it tunnels down to true causes of crime, it will only tell part of the story, perhaps the least important part. The mother’s lengthy letter is a controlled howl of pain from a parent who did her best and whose worthiness as a mother Chandler chose to ignore.

The final chapter, as Chandler meets up with a childhood friend who briefly lived in Milpitas, explores the malleability of memory and the dubious process of recreating the past. In that chapter, we learn that the story Chandler appears to be telling (we never see the final version) omits important facts about the crime and the killer and changes names while inventing at least one character who never existed. It seems that Chandler took liberties with the “true” part of “true crime” in the service of protecting the innocent. In any event, truth in the modern world is simply what someone chooses to believe. Truth has become the story that best fits our belief system, not the story that is best supported by verifiable facts.

The final chapter also invites discussion of “stand your ground” laws and whether they apply to squatters (they don’t, but some “stand your ground” advocates believe it’s appropriate to use violence against anyone in any location who is perceived as an intruder). The Devil House killer may have seen himself as protecting his castle from intruders. The teacher had a stronger “stand your ground” defense until she went after Jesse, who was trying to get out of the home when she killed him. If she hadn’t hacked him into pieces, she might have been acquitted.

An odd chapter called The Song of Gorbonian is the novel’s only misstep. Retelling a medieval Welsh legend, the fantasy about avenging a father’s death might have been intended to speak to issues raised by the larger narrative, but its attempt to capture an early version of English is a stylistic fail.

Fortunately, the rest of the novel is riveting and unpredictable. Its attention to detail, its focus on characters at the margin, and its philosophical exploration of truth make Devil House an impressive work.

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