Prodigal Son by Gregg Hurwitz

Published by Minotaur Books on January 26, 2021

Prodigal Son is the sixth Orphan X novel. Gregg Hurwitz seems to have gained confidence in his material as the series has progressed. The early novels were a bit gimmicky, placing a routine, indestructible thriller hero in two overlapping roles: protector of the weak (along the lines of the Equalizer) and victim of a government plan to turn kids into deadly assassins (along the lines of Jason Bourne). The novels have steadily drifted away from those clichéd themes while developing the hero’s personality in greater depth. Prodigal Son is the best in the series so far and will probably be hard to top.

A man named Andre, working a dead-end security job at an impound lot, watches a man die in a way he can’t explain. The death is caused by an advanced military weapon. Andre doesn’t know that, but he knows enough to flee. Having been the only witness to a killing on U.S. soil committed with secret technology, Andre becomes a high value target of the weapon developer.

None of this should concern Evan Smoak, who has removed himself from the savior business he started while operating as the Nowhere Man. But Andre happens to know Evan’s mother, and Evan’s mother wants Evan to help Andre.

Wait, Orphan X has a mother? Yes, we learned that at the end of Into the Fire. Fans of the series will understand why Evan has some issues regarding his mother, but they reunite in Argentina and Even agrees to help Andre until he decides not to help him until he decides to help him again. Andre and Evan knew each other as orphaned children but Evan, who has an understandable coldness in his soul and an unfortunate superiority complex, views Andre as a loser until Evan’s ward Joey reminds him that compassion has greater value than smugness.

Other series characters return in Prodigal Son, including the formidable Orphan V, the dog who helps Joey embrace her soft side, and the neighbor who would like to be Evan’s girlfriend if he weren’t always running around the world and killing people. All of the collateral characters are growing into their individualized personalities (except fo the dog, who displays the constancy of a dog). I particularly enjoy Joey’s teenage snark. Andre promises to be a good addition to the cast.

It is Evan’s character development that sets Prodigal Son apart from most action novels. There’s plenty of action in a plot that has Evan infiltrating a military base (twice), dodging advanced weaponry, and using controlled violence to teach bullies that their actions have consequences. But the story is enhanced by Evan’s struggles to understand why his mother abandoned him, his recognition of the impact that abandonment had on his controlling and obsessive personality, and his realization that he needs to make some changes if he wants to live his best life.

Not all of Prodigal Son is credible, but that’s a charge that can be lodged against most modern thrillers. I was particularly unwilling to believe that the developer of secret technology for the military so easily consented to meet with Smoak (posing as a tech writer) and gave him a tour of classified projects. On the other hand, various technologies that appear in the story reflect impressive research by Hurwitz. They help the plot seem plausible.

The story ends with a cliff-hanger and with another link to Evan’s past that might be explored in a future novel. This is a series that I will continue reading regardless of cliff-hangers in the hope that Hurwitz can continue writing with the depth he has shown in recent Orphan X novels, and particularly in Prodigal Son.

RECOMMENDED

That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

First published in the UK in 2020; publsished by Doubleday on January 12, 2021

Most of the nine stories collected in That Old Country Music are set in western Ireland. They are sweet and sad, funny and tragic. Many are stories are of people in transition surrounded by an unchanging landscape. When a Roma child who speaks no English runs away from Dublin, she loses her fear after meeting an aging hermit in the Ox Mountains and adopts his contemplative life of books and solitude.

Many of the characters are ungrounded. One narrator tells us: “Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere and in other times.” Others, like the hermit, know exactly where they belong.

One story tells of a song that the narrator hears an old man sing in a nursing home — a song of heartbreak and meanness that tells a story of “erotic wickedness and greed.” Another offers a bartender’s perspective on an overheard conversation between an elderly woman and her aging son — the latest iteration of the same conversation that they have been having for years, until it comes to a bad end.

It is difficult to pick a favorite from this variety of gems, but here are a few that are memorable:

A girl of seventeen (“She was almost eighteen and aching to have a fuck before it”) seduces an English junkie who has gone “astray in the head.” Despite the fierceness of her father’s judgment when word of the scandal leaks, she feels empowered by the knowledge that the man was made to leave the town and will think of her when he “seeks again the needle’s tip and solace.”

A garda, three weeks from retirement, fears that a young nemesis who has been spreading babies across the Ox mountains, not always with the consent of the women he impregnated, will feel no constraints after being diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. The garda senses that a killing is imminent, but who will the victim be?

A man in Limerick is a “connoisseur of death,” reporting the news of every local who dies, lamenting them all as his city disappears around him. He chats about celebrity deaths, points out potentially fatal hazards, causes people who do not want to confront the inevitable to cross the street when they see him. He is “impressed by death” and by the knowledge that the only death he will be unable to report to others is his own.

The most darkly amusing story is “Roethke in the Bughouse,” set in 1960 when the American poet Theodore Roethke was committed to a psychiatric hospital in western Ireland. Roethke was troubled by the “bits of sheep everywhere” on the island where he stayed, a “mutton necropolis.” The poet was tormented by long nights filled with occult music, but perhaps he was tormented most of all by the words that demanded escape from his body.

As is often true of Irish writers, Kevin Barry has a gift for language. His sentences are those of a skilled artisan. “He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feelings.” “To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only a specter of losing it.” “He had the hunted look of rural poverty.” “Anxiety folds away its arbitrary music.” A wandering man tells his life story to an unkempt dog, “a dog that has seen some weather.”

I loved Barry’s novel Night Boat to Tangier. I suspect he labors long over each sentence he creates. He may not be the most prolific Irish writer, but he’s among the most exquisite prose stylists.

RECOMMENDED

Turning Point by Jeffery Deaver

Published digitally by Amazon Original Stories on January 19, 2021

Coming in at more than 60 pages, “Turning Point” is a longish short story in Amazon’s series of original stories. The story is a standalone that features none of Jeffery Deaver’s popular series characters.

A serial killer has murdered three women. After he tortures his victims, he leaves a Russian nesting doll at the scene of his crimes. Capturing the killer requires a creative plan that I won’t spoil.

The most interesting of the story’s characters is a fellow named Michael Stendhal. Michael is a jerk and a bully. Even apart from his criminal tendencies, he’s just mean. He goes on a date and belittles the woman who meets him for leaving her daughter home alone. In a dispute over who got to a taxi first, he asks a woman why she dresses her daughter like a slut, a strategy that gets him the cab when the daughter flees in tears. Michael is not a people person but he likes himself just fine.

A police detective named Ernest Neville seems to be playing a collateral role in the story as he searches for the killer, even after he finds a nesting doll on his property. Yet roles played by characters evolve as the story evolves. Multiple characters are not what they seem to be.

The character with whom the reader spends the most time is unlikable, but that doesn't detract from the story's pleasure. With a tongue-in-cheek attitude, the story asks whether assholes play a useful role in society. Deaver knows that the answer is either “no” or “rarely,” although assholes will likely have a different answer. Given the prevalence of self-satisfied jerks in America, the question is timely. Jerks do seem to think they’re serving a useful purpose by annoying the crap out of everyone they meet.

The story takes multiple twists, using misdirection that makes it difficult for the reader to guess what will happen next. Crime fiction fans have grown accustomed to Deaver’s ability to create intriguing characters and surprising plots. “Turning Point,” while not as weighty as Deaver’s longer work, accomplishes those ends.

RECOMMENDED

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