A House at the Bottom of a Lake by Josh Malerman

Published in the UK (small press) in 2016; published by Del Rey on January 19, 2021

The title encapsulates the plot. Two 17-year-old virgins go canoeing on a date. They paddle from one lake to a second lake, where they find a tunnel that leads to a third, swampier lake. There they find a perfectly preserved house at the bottom of the lake. Its roof is visible from the lake’s surface but the house is apparently a secret. They decide that the underwater house would be a great place to lose their virginity.

James and Amelia feel drawn to the house, as if by a supernatural force. They eventually get some scuba gear so they can spend time exploring the house and each other. They even build a raft so they can sleep on the lake. They don’t want to know how or why the house exists, how or why its furniture and teacups remain perfectly in place rather than floating away, how or why rugs stay flat on the floor and show no sign of damage, how and why dresses are moving through the water as if worn by an invisible woman.  Apparently, they are worried that rational thought would destroy the magic. Eventually the magic is destroyed by the onset of creepiness. There’s a monster or a presence or a something in the house because how could there not be?

The House at the Bottom of a Lake isn’t marketed as YA fiction but I would only recommend it to young adults. The plot is unsophisticated. The young lovers are the only characters of any importance and almost the only characters to appear. The sex is far from graphic. Josh Malerman’s prose is simple (almost juvenile). All of which is fine if you’re fifteen and wondering what it would be like to lose your cherry underwater, although the absence of pain and blood won’t give kids a realistic view of virginity’s loss.

Is The House a horror novel? Probably, but it’s too dull to be frightening. Is The House a love story? Too much of it is — and a sappy love story, at that — but the idea of seventeen-year-olds bonding over a house at the bottom of a lake is so unconvincing that I was unmoved by their puppy love. The ending attempts to make a dramatic statement about the ephemeral nature of young love but the story is so lacking in drama that adult readers are likely to shrug their shoulders and hope that the next book they read will be better.

The novel’s first climax suggests what the house is made from but doesn’t explain its existence because no explanation is possible. The novel’s final climax is silly and anticlimactic. The story is too simplistic to hold the interest of most adult readers.

Horror novels are based on fear, not rationality, although the best horror novels are based on rational fears. I don’t necessarily expect a horror novel to make sense (apart from the internal logic that the author constructs) but I do expect a horror novel to be frightening. This one isn’t. We’re often told that James is “more scared than he’s ever been” but we don’t feel the fear. Nor did I ever get the sense that James and Amelia were particularly imperiled. Maybe a YA audience would react differently, but since the book isn’t marketed as YA fiction, I can’t recommend it.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit by Mark Leyner

Published by Little, Brown and Company on January 19, 2021

The terms absurdist and surrealistic came to mind as I read Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit. The story is narrated by a patient as she reads the content of an eye chart during a visit to the optometrist. Neither the patient nor the doctor seems to think it strange that the eye chart — “the world’s greatest encrypted text” — spells out a hidden narrative. And a strange narrative it is that the eye chart tells.

The book is written like a play. Occasional stage directions appear in italics (“The PATIENT suddenly stops, flushed with curiosity about how the Professor’s Introduction could possibly include a reference to the OPTOMETRIST.”). Dialog follows the name or title of the speaking character.

The patient reads aloud the introduction to an ethnography titled Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit. The professor who wrote the introduction claims to be one of the few academics who has visited Chalazia. In the professor’s opinion, the ethnography was not written by the anthropologist to whom it is attributed but by his beautiful daughter Gaby, with whom the professor is in love. The professor deems the book to be a masterwork, “one of the great anthropological adventures in modern literature” and the “standard reference work on the Chalazian Mafia Faction” (CMF).

CMF street soldiers are former performers at the Chalazian Children’s Theater. Their weapons of choice are semiautomatic pistols and melon ballers. When they’re interviewed, they quote lines from musicals. Chalazia parallels but distorts American culture. Mark Leyner tosses in references to movies and actors and books and authors, sometimes altering them to suit his whims.  There’s quite a bit of creative nonsense in the novel, all of it amusing.

The professor explains that the ethnography explores an enduring and evolving folktale about a dying father who wants to spare his daughter the pain of knowing that he will soon die. The second half of the book is an “epilog” that takes place in the Bar Pulpo as the CMF commits mayhem outside, splattering the bar’s window with the eyeballs of murder victims. Inside, getting drunk on gravy, the anthropologist and Gaby bond while surrounded by the text displayed on the bar’s spoken word karaoke screens. The anthropologist and his daughter are playing out their part in the folktale.

The story reminds the reader about the illusory distinction between perception and reality and how language affects the way we perceive. The words on the eye chart (or the patient’s perception of them) change as the optometrist tries a different lens, as if an entirely new story emerges when looking at the text with a different focus. In the novel’s second half, we learn that the same word in the Chalazian language can have different meanings depending on context. A particular two-word phrase in Chalazian means “a little,” but it can also mean “injection-site redness” and “YA fiction.”

We also learn that Bar Pulpo is filled with cosplaying fathers and daughters. The book could be read as a celebration of “a father’s exquisite love of his daughter” (it includes a long list of celebrity fathers of celebrity daughters). The novel is a little too goofy to be touching, despite its homage to father-daughter relationships. A reader might want to plumb its depths for hidden meaning, but I would need to give it a second reading to get past the silliness. Fans of offbeat humor won’t require more than one reading to be satisfied with Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit.

RECOMMENDED

The Breaker by Nick Petrie

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on January 12, 2021

Nick Petrie is among the handful of Thrillerworld action novelists who have managed to combine interesting, multi-faceted characters with smart plots that generate palpable excitement. The Breaker is the sixth installment in the always dependable Peter Ash series.

The story isn’t quite as down-to-Earth as Petrie’s best work, but it never travels beyond the bounds of plausibility. Petrie imagines that a reclusive tech genius named Holloway has developed a new robotic weapon called HYENAS. The semi-autonomous robots move like animals on multiple legs, have a claw instead of a head, and are equipped with an electronic gun that accelerates bullets toward targets with impressive accuracy. While Holloway could be a legitimate defense contractor who would be despicable for all the usual reasons, his greed compels him to steal the design for the power supply that powers his HYENAS. The power supply inventor gets even by hacking Holloway’s weapon design and threatening to publish it on the internet, potentially allowing anyone with a machine shop to produce an army of killer robots.

Peter Ash, his girlfriend June Cassidy, and his buddy Lewis are minding their own business when they see an armed troublemaker enter a mall in Milwaukee. Naturally, Peter and Lewis intervene. The troublemaker only seems to be interested in stealing someone’s cellphone, but shots are fired. After both the troublemaker and the cellphone owner flee, Peter realizes that the incident has been captured on something like a webcam, placing Peter’s anonymity is at risk. Lewis also enjoys his anonymity, having spent most of his life as a criminal. Hence the need to find the troublemaker and retrieve the recording, a quest that has Peter and Lewis interviewing bicycle machinists and quirky inventors.

June is a reporter who senses a story. She thinks she recognizes the cellphone theft victim from a story she covered many years earlier. Her journalistic inquiries place her at risk when the owner of the pilfered cellphone sends a hitman to kill her. Peter, on the other hand, is given an opportunity to wipe his slate clean if he helps an old frenemy who maintains an “off-books team of special operators.” All of this eventually leads to close encounters with the killer robots.

Collateral characters are the highlights of The Breaker. A young woman named Spark rises above the stereotype of gifted hacker, thanks to a backstory that creates some sympathy for a character who would otherwise be too ruthless and self-centered to be likable. A simple-minded but determined assassin named Edgar loves his work (particularly the part involving knives and torture). Edgar seems to have a hypnotic power over his victims but, unlike those victims, Edgar is quite difficult to kill.

The main characters also have full personalities. Series readers know that Peter is having trouble adjusting to the “static” that fills his head whenever he’s not outdoors. He’s also having trouble adjusting to Judy, who has no interest in being bossed around by an action hero. Lewis is the less complex wingman who, in the tradition of the action hero wingman role, likes to break things while dispensing encouraging advice to Peter.

While action gives the novel its pace, Petrie takes time to create atmosphere. He paints the novel with the local color of Milwaukee, a blue-collar city that has transcended its industrial roots, avoiding the urban decay that plagues less fortunate rust belt cities. A fun plot, troubled but likable characters, and a heartland setting combine to make The Breaker another strong entry in the Nick Petrie series.

RECOMMENDED

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on January 12, 2021

Summerwater follows a day in the lives of people staying in log cabins at a holiday park on a loch in Scotland. It has been raining for days, a biblical rain that creates an apocalyptic dread. The worries that occupy characters approach the apocalyptic: global warming, Brexit, family discord. Forced to stay inside, family members judge each other. Peering out windows, they judge their neighbors.

Justine is up at dawn, running and thinking about her husband Steve, who complains that she’s obsessed with fitness. Later in the novel, Steve complains (mostly to himself) about the Bulgarians (or maybe they’re Romanians) who keep them awake at night with their parties and loud music. Steve also complains (only to himself) that Justine is on the couch watching porn on her company laptop, at the risk of getting fired and depriving the family of her income.

David is retired, visiting the holiday park with his wife Mary as they did when the kids were young. Taking Mary to a café, David drives too fast in the rain, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to frighten her. David seems to resent the success that his children achieved. He recalls with bitterness his daughter’s youthful lectures about “how everyone ought to behave,” unappreciative of all his generation has done to make life better for her generation (as if a new generation should be grateful that their parents did the things they ought to have done).

Josh and Milly are trying to have simultaneous orgasms because Josh read that their marriage will last longer if they master the technique. Milly thinks about another man to help her along because she’s cold in the cabin and would rather have a cup of tea. They’re planning to move, leaving all their friends behind. Milly sees the unceasing rain as a warning of bad times to come.

The only people who seem to be happy are the Bulgarians/ Romanians with their loud parties. Their daughter Violetta is less happy when she’s told to go back to her own country by Steve’s daughter Lola. Lola's brother Jack worries that the music will bother his mother, who is always tired, but there is something about the carefree manner of the Bulgarians that he finds intriguing.

One of the best chapters involves Alex, a disenchanted 16-year-old who takes his kayak onto the loch during the pouring rain. His parents seem unconcerned about the danger he will face.

Between the chapters that narrate the story are brief chapters that describe the atmosphere or setting. One imagines the impact of soundwaves from the Bulgarians’ music on fox cubs and anthills. The first such chapter reminds us of all the sounds we barely register, the sounds we only notice when they stop. Sarah Moss revisits the theme at the novel’s end, when a boy hears a sound he can never unhear.

Moss writes intense scenes that drip with tension. As Alex maneuvers his kayak across the loch, his hands are so cold he can’t free his grip from the paddle. As Violetta hangs over the loch on a rope, Lola throws stones at her rather than helping her swing back to shore. A little girl named Izzie gazes out her bedroom window at night, certain that something evil is creeping between the cabins. With so much foreshadowing of doom, it isn’t a surprise that the ending is not happy.

The story is powerful but gloomy. It risks becoming oppressive as each chapter generates a new sense of foreboding. Even without the risk of imminent harm that characters often face, the harm caused by the daily grind of life — judgments and nationalism and unkindness within families — is enough to wear the reader down. Some readers might dislike the social commentary.

Yet by the end, the novel suggests that gloom is not the only response to dreary days. Maybe dancing with the Bulgarians is the best approach to creating a community. Still, the ending matches the story’s apocalyptic tone; disaster awaits, dancing only forestalls the inevitable. Readers who want an upbeat novel should look elsewhere. Summerwater nevertheless captures that angst that so many people feel — that perhaps more people should feel — as the world continues its relentless march toward chaos.

RECOMMENDED

The Scorpion's Tail by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Published by Grand Central Publishing on January 12, 2021

The Scorpion’s Tail is billed as the second Nora Kelly novel (following Old Bones), although it’s actually a Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson novel. Swanson is an FBI agent and a young protégé of Pendergast, who has a long-running series of his own. Kelly is an archeologist who, for the second time, has been called upon to join an FBI investigation that has need of her skills.

Old Bones involved the Donner Party. The Scorpion’s Tail takes a look at the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Co-author Douglas Preston has an interest in archeology that will apparently drive this series, as it drives some of the writing team’s other books.

Swanson is still viewed as a rookie and, despite her success in Old Bones, isn’t necessarily viewed with favor. When a body is discovered on federal property in a ghost town called High Lonesome, Swanson is sent to investigate. The body has been buried for decades. It shows no obvious evidence of homicide but the corpse’s face suggests that death was accompanied by terror or extreme pain. Corrie doesn’t want to mess up the evidence by digging it up herself. Nor does she want to waste the time of an evidence team if there was no murder. She instead decides to waste Kelly’s time.

Swanson also finds the remains of a mule that was shot through the head, but murdering a mule isn’t a federal crime. With the help of a glory-hogging medical examiner, Swanson decides that the corpse probably wasn't murdered. To identify the deceased, Swanson puts her forensic anthropology skills to use. Legwork reveals the corpse's identity and eventually his cause of death. Subsequent investigation takes Swanson and Kelly to an army base, to rumors of treasure hidden in the mountains, and to a descendent of Geronimo. Swanson also visits some bars because the best investigations are accomplished with a beer in hand.

Old Bones is formulaic and predictable. The Scorpion’s Tale is a more challenging whodunit. The story generates more suspense than Old Bones by placing the characters in more plausible danger. The plot is reasonably credible in comparison to modern thrillers, most of which have little concern with plausible storytelling. I’m not in love with either of the protagonists in this series (although Pendergast makes a brief but welcome cameo) but the authors gave me no reason to dislike them. Perhaps in the future they will develop personalities. I would still prefer to spend time with a Pendergast novel than a Nora Kelly novel, but The Scorpion’s Tail isn’t a bad way to pass the time until the authors get around to writing another Pendergast.

RECOMMENDED