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.

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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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Bobby March Will Live Forever by Alan Parks

Published by Canongate Books on March 5, 2020

Most police detectives in Alan Parks’ Glasgow are members of the Masonic Lodge. They look out for each other, not for justice. They are “ignorant arseholes, chucking their weight about, lining their own pockets, bending the law whichever way it suited them.” In the third Harry McCoy novel, McCoy is thinking he no longer wants to be a part of it. That’s not surprising, given the number of times he is beaten and nearly killed.

While most of the Glasgow police are searching for a missing girl named Alice Kelly, McCoy is called to a hotel to deal with a suspicious death. The victim turns out to be Bobby March, dead of an overdose, the needle still in his arm. The evidence suggests he might have been murdered.

Bobby March was an immensely talented guitar player from Glasgow who impressed Keith Richards while auditioning for the Rolling Stones. He quickly became a has-been thanks to a heroin habit, although he still had a loyal following of Glaswegians.

McCoy isn’t looking for Alice because his former partner and current boss, Bernie Raeburn, is trying to force him out of his job. Raeburn eventually assigns McCoy to investigate unsolved burglaries while Raeburn hopes to get the glory of finding Alice’s abductor.

McCoy’s other task is to look for the chief inspector’s niece, Laura Murray, who ran away from home. That task brings McCoy into a family drama he’d rather avoid, although it also brings him into the Glasgow music scene, where he encounters his former girlfriend Angela, who currently works as a band manager and drug dealer. He also encounters his childhood friend, Stevie Cooper, who is now a heroin addict and a key player in the Glasgow underworld. Cooper is distressed to learn that someone is trying to blackmail him.

Much of the plot concerns Raeburn’s effort to fit up a young man named Ronnie Elder for Alice’s murder. Suffice it to say that McCoy is less than pleased with Raeburn’s desire to get the glory of an arrest even if he doesn’t arrest the right person. As police in all countries have learned, it’s easier to beat a confession out of an innocent person than to find the guilty party. That plot thread ends with a violent confrontation between McCoy and Raeburn.

Along the way, Parks ties up the plot threads involving March’s death, Laura’s disappearance, and Cooper’s blackmail problem. The resolutions are refreshingly credible. The story is tightly woven despite its many threads. Parks gives ample attention to characterization and paints a vibrant picture of the Glasgow music scene. As is often true of crime novels from the UK, Parks doesn’t glorify the police. In fact, Parks makes it clear that Glasgow’s cops and criminals all come from the same roots and that they’re very much alike, despite the paths they’ve chosen. McCoy has faults of his own, but a lack of decency or compassion isn’t one of them. He’s a likable protagonist.

Parks balances mystery, suspense and action in a story has a little something for everyone — except, perhaps, for fans of quilting mysteries, for whom the novel is probably too dark. Bobby March Will Live Forever is the third McCoy novel but the first I’ve read. It makes me think that crime novel fans might want to start at the beginning and read all three.

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City Under the Stars by Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick

Published by Tor.com on August 25, 2020

Gardner Dozois, one of the most respected editors and anthologists in the history of science fiction, died in 2018. Although primarily celebrated for his editorial talent, he wrote and co-authored some noteworthy fiction of his own, including two Nebula-winning short stories. At Dozois’ request and under his direction, his slightly younger friend, Michael Swanwick, took an unfinished manuscript that had languished for years and helped Dozois turn it into a novella called “The City of God.” The novella was published in 1995. Over the ensuing years, they talked about turning the deliberately open-ended story into a series of three novellas that would work as a novel, but the press of other business and Dozois’ eventual death intervened. As something of a tribute to Dozois, Swanwick skipped the other two novellas and transformed the original novella and some work that Dozois did on a second one into a short novel.

The theme of City Under the Stars is the corruptive nature of power. The story is set in a dystopian future. A formidable wall separates laborers who toil at production from a city they cannot enter. Nobody knows who lives in the city. Rumors tell of Utopians who built the devices that the laborers still use to mine coal. Pre-Utopian technology has broken down, leaving men like Hanson to do the back-breaking work of shoveling the coal into a hopper. Hanson once took pride in his ability to outwork everyone, but he knows he can no longer keep up the pace. If he cannot work, his future is bleak.

Hanson commits a crime and flees from the factory, only to be abandoned before he reaches his destination. He joins a group of outlaws and flees again from a law enforcement raid. Hanson is with a dying and seemingly insane man known as the Preacher when a mysterious event allows Hanson to enter the city while carrying the Preacher’s lifeless body. The Preacher is restored to life but hubris is his ruin.

Hanson, wanting nothing to do with this dangerous city and its forgotten tools of destruction, returns to the factory after taking down a section of the wall. He is taken into custody and tortured before political rulers take him back to the city, hoping he will unlock its secrets and help them attain sovereignty over all others.

The nature of the Utopians and the fate of the post-Utopians is deliberately ambiguous, but the novel’s message is not. When Hanson was a worker, perfectly decent co-workers who were elevated to positions of authority quickly became abusive and self-involved. “Kill all the bosses and the quiet guy who’d worked alongside you all his life and never once did anybody dirt would step forward to fill the vacancy and become a boss himself, and next thing you knew you were eating dust at his feet, right back where you’d always been.” Hansen knows that if political leaders master the power that the city offers, they will use it only for their own ends and everyone else will continue to suffer. Power risks authoritarian rule, a lesson Hanson has internalized and that guides the decisions he makes at the novel’s end.

Dozois' sense of prose style served him well as an editor. Swanwick captures that style throughout the novel. The prose is graceful without becoming untrue to the story’s working-class sensibility. In a time when authoritarianism seems to be a rising threat both worldwide and domestically, the novel’s message is timely. Despite its word count, City Under the Stars feels more like an extra-long novella than a novel — it has only one significant character and the story’s significant events occur in a compressed timeline — but City Under the Stars is both a must-read for Dozois fans and an entertaining selection for science fiction fans in general.

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The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 4, 2020

What defines a murder mystery? The Eighth Detective explores that question, and even provides examples of the definition’s permutations, in a plot that seems to be one thing and turns out to be something quite different.

Before his retirement, Grant McAllister was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. A fan of murder mysteries, McAllister authored a paper in 1937 that purports to define the mathematical structure of murder mysteries in all their variations. To illustrate some of the key principles of his definition, McAllister wrote seven stories. In the 1940s, he collected the stories and the paper in a self-published volume called The White Murders.

The reader is told that the long-forgotten volume came into the hands of a small press publisher who thought it deserved an audience. He dispatches an editor, Julie Hart, to track down McAllister, who seems to have isolated himself on a Mediterranean island. Hart discusses the stories and the mathematical paper with McAllister in a series of interviews.

The Eighth Detective opens with the first short story that appears in The White Murders. The next chapter relates Hart’s discussion of the story with McAllister. The book then alternates short stories with discussions until it reaches the final discussion, in which Hart reveals the solution to a separate mystery that she has uncovered.

Alex Pavesi scores points for inventing such a clever concept. The stories are ordinary murder mysteries, some better than others. None are particularly impressive but none are unworthy of publication. As Hart reads them to McAllister, she spotlights inconsistencies in the text and wonders whether they are deliberate. McAllister’s answers are vague. At the novel’s end, we learn that we have been deceived about the stories in a way that I won’t spoil. The deception is critical to the plot and to a full understanding of the stories themselves.

The math in the research paper that Hart finds so complex consists of nothing more than Venn diagrams. McAllister defines every murder mystery in terms of four ingredients. With one exception, a story that lacks any of those ingredients is not a true murder mystery. Unsurprisingly, a murder mystery requires at least one murder victim, at least one killer, at least two suspects, and typically (but not inevitably) someone who solves the crime. The categories overlap, so that (for example) the detective or the victim might also be the murderer. McAllister also believes that the main structural variations of mystery stories can be broken down into archetypes. The stories are meant to illustrate seven of those.

Murder mysteries often depend on surprise endings (in many, the killer is the person we least suspect), a convention that, Hart opines, has carried over into the broader crime novel genre, even as traditional murder mysteries have diminished in popularity. The Eighth Detective follows that convention by serving up a couple of surprise endings. One changes the reader’s understanding of Hart (just as Hart changes the reader’s understanding of McAllister), while the other wraps up some dangling clues to an unsolved crime that Hart discovers in The White Murders.

Cleverness is its own reward in crime fiction. If The Eighth Detective didn’t blow me away, and if the “mathematical” analysis of murder mysteries seems a bit simplistic, those faults are easily overshadowed by Pavesi’s careful attention to storytelling details that create, in the end, an inventive novel that is both a murder mystery and a different kind of mystery — the story of two protagonists who each endeavor to keep secrets from the other for reasons of their own.

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