Breakout by Paul Herron

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 6, 2021

Breakout is a strange novel. It imagines the mother of all hurricanes hitting Florida, essentially wiping out Miami. Yet the focus is not on the hurricane’s impact on Florida, but on its impact on a prison. That could have been an interesting story, but it has too many credibility problems to merit a recommendation.

The protagonist, Jack Constantine, is a typical thriller character who is motivated by vengeance. He was a cop with familiar thriller hero experience in Afghanistan, living a happy cop life until three criminals broke into his home to commit a burglary. Burglars don’t usually work in threes and they don’t usually murder home occupants, but these stumbled upon Jack’s pregnant wife and bashed in her head with a baseball bat. Of course, it’s not enough in a thriller like this to kill the protagonist’s wife. The wife has to be pregnant because in a thriller like this, everything is completely over the top, including Jack’s need for vengeance.

Jack slept through the murder but eventually realized his wife wasn’t in bed and wandered through the house until he found her dead body. Like all predictable thriller cops, he decides to abandon the oath he swore to uphold the law. He finds and murders one of the killers, for which he gets a measly ten years in prison. I guess it pays to be an ex-cop veteran, at least in Florida.

Jack goes to prison where, by happy coincidence, the other two killers are serving time. Jack can’t reach them until the hurricane comes along. This being Florida, the state hasn’t prepared for a prison emergency and leaves it to the warden to make a seat-of-the-pants plan. That, at least, is credible. The warden's plan is to abandon the prison, locking the outer doors on the way out (can’t have prisoners running loose in a hurricane), but unlocking all the cell doors so the prisoners will have the opportunity to kill each other before they drown. And kill each other they do, because in this over-the-top conception of prison life, the only goal of prison gangs is to kill members of other prison gangs while the prison walls are being blown down by the hurricane.

There’s an abandoned building nearby which authorities somehow think will withstand the hurricane, so some prisoners are moved there before the warden and his correctional officers run away. The two men who killed Jack’s wife are in that building, so Jack’s genius plan is to wait for the eye of the hurricane to arrive, allowing him to sprint across the prison yard, enter the old prison, and kill the two men before they die in the hurricane.

Jack can only carry out the plan because he has a key to the prison doors, provided by the only correctional officer who stayed behind, a rookie female who was late for work late and didn’t get the memo that all the staff were supposed to look out for themselves. The officer, Kiera Sawyer, is a kind-hearted woman (so why did she decide to be a prison guard?) who has deep discussions with Jack about morality when they aren’t busy fighting their way through hordes of marauding prisoners.

Kiera provides the novel’s only interesting moment when she plays dueling Bible verses with a crazed prisoner called the Preacher. The Preacher thinks it is God’s will to kill everyone who doesn’t meet the Preacher’s standards, while Kiera thinks it is God’s will for everyone to lighten up and be nice. The argument illustrates the point that the Bible can be interpreted to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.

In all other respects, the story is predictable and not very smart. With Kiera’s help, Constantine does his soul searching and becomes a better person, sort of, by the novel’s end. A few decent prisoners who are on their side meet predictable ends. Another has an unlikely “come to Jesus” moment. I didn’t buy any of it.

Like many novels based on vengeance, the story is mostly about violence and mayhem. The setup doesn’t make a lot of sense but that’s fine because neither does the plot. The ending relies on a previously unknown connection between two characters that had me rolling my eyes. We then learn that Jack’s loss was not as Jack imagined it for reasons that, again, are intended to give the novel a late kicker but fail to do so in a credible way. Jack’s unexplained survival is impossible to believe. His overwrought self-flagellation for sleeping through Amy’s murder is boring and, unless you get off on scenes of prison riots, so is the story.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

Published by Library of America on April 20, 2021

Richard Wright (1908-60) was not a particularly prolific writer, but he wrote two of the most important books of the last century. Black Boy (1945), a largely autobiographical account of racism in Wright’s younger years that he blended with fiction, and Native Son (1940), a fictional account of the racism and poverty that underlies the crimes committed by the protagonist, are among the most powerful books of their time.

Wright published “The Man Who Lived Underground” as a short story in 1942. The story was condensed from a short novel that Library of America has, for the first time, published in full. Accompanying the novel is an essay, “Memories of My Grandmother,” that Wright hoped would be published with the novel.

The protagonist is Fred Daniels, a young black man who lives with his wife, attends White Rock Baptist Church, and works for the Wootens, a prominent white family. When the police stop him as he is leaving work, he assumes that those credentials, mixed with the deference and respect he has learned to give white people (and particularly police officers) whether they have earned it or not, will convince the police to let him go about his business. He’s not so lucky.

A neighbor of the Wootens was murdered. Since Fred is black and in the area when the police begin to investigate, they decide he must be guilty. They isolate him, beat him, confuse him, and do everything they can to convince him of his guilt before having him sign a confession that he doesn’t read.

Fred eventually seizes an opportunity to flee. Hearing police sirens, Fred escapes down a partially open manhole. He then lives for a period of time underground. Fred discovers a series of connecting tunnels and breaks into a basement with a deteriorating foundation by loosening some bricks. He steals  tools that he uses to break into other basements.

While living underground, Fred observes the outside world. He contemplates the services at a black church. He sees a man stealing money from a safe and decides to do the same. He breaks through the basement of a jewelry store where a night watchman is sleeping and steals watches and diamonds. Later, Fred sees that the same cops who framed him are blaming others, including the night watchman, for crimes that he committed. He feels overwhelming guilt, one of the themes Wright explored in Native Son.

Fred quickly loses touch with the world and with himself as he lives in the dark. He feels nothing when he sees a dead baby that someone abandoned in the sewer. When he gets his hands on cash and jewels, none of it seems real. He can’t spend the money; he wants to keep it around so he can look at it. He starts to think of aboveground as “something less than reality, less than sight and sound, less even than memory.”

As the story nears its resolution, Fred decides to emerge from the underground and to atone for his crimes, as his religion taught him to do. Unsurprisingly to all except Fred, the story does not end well for him.

Racism in law enforcement is an important theme, but the novel also explores the impact of religion on Fred’s life. Living underground gives him a new perspective. “When he had sung and prayed with his brothers and sisters in church, he always felt what they felt; but here in the underground, distantly sundered from them, he saw a defenseless nakedness in their lives that made him disown them.” Living underground empowers Fred to reject all that he has been taught.

Wright’s essay about his grandmother expands upon the role of religion in black American life. Wright explains that religion was the dominant force in his grandmother’s life (she was a Seventh Day Adventist) and that he wrote The Man Who Lived Underground to depict “the religious impulses” among black people. Wright did not understand how his grandmother could embrace humanity as a whole while having such callous disregard for individual humans. That is a question that puzzles many about people who are not true to the religious values that they espouse.

The novel and the essay are just as timely today as they were when Wright wrote them. Readers who are interested in the history of black fiction and those who just want to read a powerful story should be happy that The Man Who Lived Underground has been published in its full length.

RECOMMENDED

The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on April 20, 2021

Frank Tussock is a farmer in rural England. He is holding captive an undocumented Vietnamese immigrant named Thanh Dao. Frank broke Thanh’s ankle to keep her hobbled. Whenever Thanh tries to escape, Frank burns one of her possessions, stealing everything from Thanh that helps her remember her identity. Among Thanh’s last possessions are letters from her sister, another undocumented immigrant who took up residence elsewhere in England. Frank uses Thanh’s sister against her, promising that the sister will be deported if Thanh kills him or escapes.

Frank uses Thanh as a servant and as a sexual slave. He expects Thanh to prepare meals as is mother did, to wear his mother’s bra, to use his mother’s rags in lieu of sanitary napkins. Frank has serious mommy issues. When Thanh becomes pregnant seven years into her captivity, Frank seems moderately happy, perhaps envisioning a future servant. But he doesn’t want to have sex with Thanh while she’s leaking milk (he was equally fastidious about her period before she got pregnant), so he takes another woman captive. Cynthia Townsend dropped by on a couple of occasions to inquire about buying some of Frank’s land before he captured her. Frank holds Cynthia in the basement and presumably uses her as a sexual substitute for Thanh, although none of those scenes are explicit.

The Last Thing to Burn tells a simple story, perhaps a bit too simple given that it has only three characters until a fourth makes a brief appearance near the end. I didn’t entirely buy Frank’s decision to risk kidnapping Cynthia, particularly after learning late in the novel that Thanh wasn’t Frank’s only sexual option. Nor did I entirely buy Thanh’s decision not to tell Cynthia that she was being held captive when she first had the chance, before Cynthia also became a prisoner. Finally, I didn’t regard Cynthia’s strength at the novel’s end to be plausible after behind held in a dank basement and subsisting on scraps.

Still, the story is chilling. Will Dean uses Thanh’s first-person narration to place the reader inside her head. Her fear and hopelessness, eventually replaced by fear and determination, seem perfectly authentic.

Frank’s accent, speech pattern, and ill-educated vocabulary add to the illusion that the story is real. Frank is one of the creepiest characters I’ve recently encountered, but his creepiness seems perfectly consistent with his upbringing and rural isolation. Dean’s prose develops the plot with understated power. An epilog is perhaps too optimistic — the promise of quick healing is a bit hard to swallow — but as a horror story of evil endured and defeated, The Last Thing to Burn is largely a success.

RECOMMENDED

We Are Watching Eliza Bright by A.E. Osworth

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 13, 2021

It’s early, but We Are Watching Eliza Bright might be the most inventive novel I will read this year. From its prose (“Suzanne twitches and wonders how a room without a door can smell so Strongly of anything let alone the ephemeral subtle stench of depression”) to its structure to its surprising plot, A.E. Osworth has crafted a timely American original.

The novel’s point of view might be its best feature. For the most part, the POV is collective. As the title implies, the novel is narrated by the “we” who are watching Eliza Bright. The narrators “watch” Eliza with their eyes when she is in their line of sight, by hacking her computer or phone, by tracking her online presence, by monitoring the location of devices belonging to people who have contact with her, and through crowdsourced surveillance. Some of the watchers are Eliza’s co-workers, including Leaky Joe, who feeds information to the collective that he gleans by watching Eliza from a distance with his “mad lipreading skills.” Others are members of the gaming community.

Members of the collective often draw different conclusions about the facts they are narrating, usually because they are speculating about events that occur outside of their physical or virtual presence. Sometimes the collective narrates alternative versions of things that they imagine might have happened. In one version of a visit to Eliza’s apartment by her boss, they have sex; in another, the boss doesn’t even take his coat off. Either version makes for a good story.

The “we” who read about Eliza on Reddit have a perspective that they believe to be more civilized than that of the “we” who read about her on 4chan. While the collective shares diverse opinions, we know that it is unified in its disdain for Eliza. Most of its members view her friend and co-worker Suzanne as a “social justice warrior,” the idea of social justice being particularly abhorrent to those who benefit from its absence.

The collective is dominated by males; few women remain “who have not been driven away.” The males in the collective generally view themselves as victimized by females. They believe “the world isn’t safe for normal white men anymore.” They presumably hang out on Reddit for affirmation. Suzanne belongs to a female collective counterpart, allies of Eliza who call themselves “the Sixsterhood.” They interact in person and presumably stay far away from Reddit.

The story initially centers on a relatively mild instance of sexual harassment that quickly escalates when Eliza complains about it. Eliza works for Fancy Dog Games. Her boss is Preston Waters. Preston co-created a popular game called Guilds of the Protectorate. Eliza is a gamer whose avatar is called Circuit Breaker. Eliza is not a coder but she gets promoted to a position that requires her to develop coding skills. Other (mostly male) coders resent her presence and mark her lines of code with 80085, which looks like the word boobs if you squint just right. Eliza complains to Preston, which makes the coders, led by Lewis Fleishman and Jean-Pascale Desfrappes, go ballistic. How dare she? Doesn’t she have a sense of humor? Preston, who portrays himself as woke and open and is very into deep and meaningful Conversations with employees, pretends to be concerned while he — with the utmost display of sensitivity — encourages Eliza to drop the whole thing so everyone can return their focus to helping Fancy Dog make money. Meanwhile, the coders who watch through the office windows assume that Eliza is shagging Preston because why else wouldn’t he have fired her for complaining about them?

Eliza wants Fancy Dog to change the male-centric culture that characterizes the tech industry and gaming. When she doesn’t back down as a good “team player” should — when she in fact shares her concerns with the media — the coders decide to punish her. Soon the entire word of gaming joins in the fun, which isn’t fun for Eliza. In fact, they want to instill fear in Eliza, from which they derive the equivalent of sexual pleasure that they probably can’t get in any other way. The worst of them, a sadist who calls himself The Inspectre, sets out to terrorize her. The Inspectre is much admired in the collective for having the courage to do things in the real world that others only fantasize about. More timid members of the collective content themselves with raping Circuit Breaker inside Guilds.

The novel’s form is occasionally experimental, but not drastically so. Periods are sometimes omitted from sentences. (I imagine that’s a statement about a generation that grew up writing periodless texts.)  Important words are capitalized; words in phrases are capitalized as if they are titles. Many chapters consist of text message chains.

The novel explores physical and psychological threats to women in the workplace, the use of NDAs to silence wronged employees, and the team-building style of business management that pretends to be more humanistic than traditional heirarchical companies. On a more philosophical level, We Are Watching Eliza Bright asks whether there is any longer a difference between the virtual world and the physical world. Eliza argues that online encounters, in gaming environments or other virtual settings, are just as important as encounters in meatspace. We convince ourselves that “things that happen in games and online aren’t important” when they might be just as psychologically consequential as in-person interactions. Eliza contends that it is dangerous to “fragment our society even further” by living in a virtual world without human interaction, a world that breeds incels and white nationalists in the absence of the civilizing influence of community.

It could be argued that online communities are not much different from physical communities and that people who think alike will seek each other out, in physical space or in online communities. That certainly seems to be true of white nationalists. Perhaps online life is different for nerdish guys (and I say this as someone who was once a nerdish kid), who might develop a resentment of women who dismiss them as undesirable. Perhaps their resentments are reinforced in online communications that encourage hostility to women in the workplace. Whether or not the reader is persuaded by Eliza’s argument, the story makes clear that the discussion is worth having. In any event, the story is worth reading for its literary and entertainment value apart from the book club discussions it might inspire.

RECOMMENDED

In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 13, 2021

Tom Klay investigates crimes against endangered species for an organization called The Sovereign. Similar in some ways to National Geographic, The Sovereign is a nonprofit institution that includes publications and a news channel focusing on nature and its threats. Among other stories, Klay investigates poachers in Kenya, where rhinos are killed for their horns. One of Klay’s sources is a friend who dies early in the novel. Klay suspects that Ras Botha, a former South African cop, is behind a poaching operation that is responsible for his friend’s death.

One of The Sovereign’s apparent supporters is Krieger, who owns Perseus Group, a security company that provides international paramilitary support to governments and private organizations. Klay doubts that Krieger cares much about endangered species, given his conflicting interest in a Chinese plan to run a railroad down the middle of Kenya. Part of the story’s drama involves the sale of The Sovereign to the media branch of the Perseus Group, much to the chagrin of The Sovereign’s president and Klay’s editor, Vance Eady. The sale may drastically change the nature of Klay’s job.

Klay’s backstory as the son of an imprisoned undertaker includes a failed relationship with a South African prosecutor named Hungry Khoza. It also includes a drunk driving accident that caused a child’s death in Jakarta and destroyed his relationship with Erin Dougherty. At a low point, thinking of himself as “a bad person who does good things to hide the truth,” Klay agreed to work under contract for the CIA.

The plot extends well beyond poaching and the ivory trade. Following the plot requires a bit of concentration and a keen memory. Scenes flash by that the reader will later need to connect with new events. People Klay trusts turn out to be untrustworthy. People Klay despises may actually be his allies. The CIA is up to its usual meddlesome tricks, sometimes forming relationships with the wrong people. Unsavory characters of note include a pedophile priest, an Admiral who betrays the American military, and someone who shoots a child to save himself from a charging buffalo.

The least satisfying part of the story concerns the area in the South China Sea that both China and the Philippines claim as their territory. Krieger makes a sales pitch to give China a technological advantage against the American Navy, which regularly cruises international waters to prevent Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. The Chinese intrigue seems out of place. It advances into territory that is too familiar to thriller readers. The novel works best when it avoids conventional thriller plots and concentrates on the kind of story that other thriller writers haven't told.

Bryan Christy uses elephants as a metaphor for power and delayed vengeance (elephants, after all, never forget). The story’s African setting allows Christy to create an atmosphere that sets In the Company of Killers Apart from its competition. Klay isn’t an action hero, making him more credible than most thriller protagonists. The story nevertheless moves with deliberate speed, never bogging down despite its complexity. Christy’s prose is smooth and he doesn’t waste words.

Life changes people. Good fiction reflects that with changes in characters. Klay evolves as the story progresses. He becomes more likeable as he gains more insight into his past. If Christy is inclined to use In the Company of Killers as a springboard for a series — and why wouldn’t be? — it will likely be a series worth following.

RECOMMENDED