When These Mountains Burn by David Joy

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on August 18, 2020

When These Mountains Burn is a literary suspense novel that carefully balances plot and characterization. The novel offers a granular examination of Appalachian lives plagued by addiction and loss. The story focuses on a few key characters who are caught in a clash between cultural values that have long informed the region and the drug culture that swallows residents who see vanishing opportunities and have little hope for a better life.

There were good times in Ray Mathis’ life, but it hurts too much to remember them. His wife is dead and his adult son Ricky is a junkie. Ray retired from the Forest Service with an injury and a small settlement. He spends his last $10,000 to save his son from a drug dealer who is holding him hostage for an unpaid debt.

Ray is from a generation that “never had much use for the law.” People in the mountains took care of their own problems. In Ray’s opinion, if someone who deserved rough justice came up missing or got burned out of a house, it would be a mistake to call that lawlessness. “These mountains used to have their own kind of order,” Ray laments. He will eventually take justice into his own hands — a decision that irritates but doesn’t surprise the deputy sheriff who is like a daughter to him — but Ray won’t be pleased with the result of his actions.

Ray is a decent man who endures the changes that have vanquished the kind of self-sufficient life that men of his generation value. Ray feels emotions strongly but lacks the ability to express them. He knows that the strong silent man is actually a weak man, weakened by his inability to speak the truth in his heart.

A second character who gets a fair amount of attention is Rodriquez, an undercover agent who works with the DEA. Taking advantage of the assumption that “men who looked like Rodriguez were drug dealers and rapists,” the DEA uses Rodriguez to gather information about a high-level dealer who uses the Cherokee reservation as a refuge from surveillance.

The third key character, and in some respects the most important of the trio, is Denny Rattler. Denny is a heroin addict and small-time thief who steals enough to pay for his next fix. Denny finds himself in a motel room with a group of addicts, tries to save a man’s life, and is beaten for his trouble. Throughout the story, Denny has serious intentions of cleaning himself up. As is generally true of addicts, he always manages to find a reason to set his good intentions aside in favor of the needle. Even his love for his sister is less compelling than the need to chase the perfect high.

David Joy tells his story in an honest and straightforward prose style that suits the novel's atmosphere. His plot builds suspense as gritty characters circle each other in a dance that brings them closer to destruction. The story gains credibility from its relative simplicity. It is violent without becoming brutal or gratuitous. The ending is satisfying but not artificially happy.  Whether any character will internalize the novel’s traumatic events and emerge as a better person is unclear, although Joy doesn’t foreclose that possibility. Life is hard and the future is uncertain, but perseverance — the novel seems to suggest — carries the possibility of reward, even if it is not the reward we seek or expect.

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The Companions by Katie M. Flynn

Published by Gallery/Scout Press on March 3, 2020

The Companions would have benefitted from a more purposeful plot. The story recycles themes that are common in science fiction — storage of human memory in an artificial body, the exploitation of artificial constructs that have a connection to humanity, the faint line that separates what is human and what is machine — yet the exploration of those themes serves an unclear end. While characters occasionally have moral reservations about their conduct, the story never brings into focus the message, if any, that Katie Flynn wants to convey.

Companions are cheap robots that have been programmed with memories uploaded from people who are about to die. They are available for lease, not for ownership. They are said to have consciousness but no soul. Companions are useful for people who are quarantined or living in eldercare facilities. Plenty of people need them because of a virus that continues to do its deadly business. The quarantine is in the background so if you are looking for a story that provides insight into the world’s present plight, this isn’t it.

The story begins with a girl named Dahlia and her companion Lilac. Lilac retains the memory of her death as a teenager at the hands of another teen. She knows her friend Nikki was present when she died but doesn’t know what became of her. Her consciousness was uploaded shortly before her death. It then became the property of Metis, the company that manufactures companions. Flynn largely ignores the legal and ethical questions that surround private ownership of another person’s consciousness, except to suggest the obvious, that it might be a bad thing to own the equivalent of another person’s living brain.

Dahlia and her mother live in San Francisco. Dahlia’s mother resents paying for Lilac, despite purchasing a first-generation unit with an inexpensive processor that does not allow Lilac’s mind to mature. As Dahlia begins to outgrow her need for Lilac, and as it seems clear that Lilac will be recycled, Lilac lets loose the rage that she has kept contained.

From that opening chapter, the novel covers a period of years. For the most part, each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character. Novels that change narrators in each chapter must find a way to build a connection between the reader and at least some of the narrators. Flynn never made me care about any of them. Part of the problem is that few of the narrators felt like a unique individual. With the exception of Gabe, whose uneducated dialect is exaggerated, the characters speak in the same narrative voice. If the chapter headings did not announce the narrator, it would be difficult to understand whose voice the reader is hearing.

In any event, a damaged Lilac visits the person she believes to have killed her human body. She thereafter goes through various incarnations, hooks up with other renegade companions, and deals with an evolving world that eventually decides companions should be recalled and scrapped. A pivotal chapter in the novel’s middle tells of a woman approaching death whose plan to upload her consciousness to a companion is interrupted by an attempt to hijack the companion so that another consciousness will have a body. A later chapter introduces a farmer who takes on the recycling of defective companions as a side job and the daughter who eventually carries on that business. Those chapters also introduce a disturbed child named Andy who seems to prefer the company of companions, if only to have control over a consciousness other than his own.

Because it jumps from character to character, the story has a disjointed feel. Investing in or sympathizing with any character is difficult. That’s a drawback in a novel that is probably intended to make readers feel something for the plight of companions. Lilac turns out to be a disagreeable consciousness; her eventual reinterpretation of her own death made me shrug. A good deal of care went into the construction of a plot that is intermittently interesting, but if Flynn had a purpose in mind when telling this story, it eluded me.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Luster by Raven Leilani

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 4, 2020

There is an appealing randomness to Luster, yet every scene in this story of a 23-year-old woman is purposeful. After Edie loses her job as an editorial coordinator for the children’s division of a book publisher, she does food delivery on her bicycle as part of the on-demand economy, joining the other “delivery boys and girls who jet into traffic with fried rice and no reason to live.” She later fills her days with whatever comes along, culminating in a trip to a comic convention that she attends as a black Princess Leia. Along the way Edie observes her environment, frets about her intestines, and questions her choices. A plot that seems to be haphazard and whimsical evolves into a serious story about a black woman who is trying to find a path that will take her beyond condescension and judgment to a destination of her own design.

While still employed, Edie begins having an affair with a middle-aged man who impresses her because he can adequately navigate a wine list. Edie has had flings with pretty much everyone in her office, regardless of gender — she regards opportunities to have sex as the best part of her job — which accounts for her eventual separation from her employment. Edie is sure men lose interest in her when she talks and perhaps that is the way of men, but Edie is so stuffed with ideas that it is difficult to believe anyone would not be delighted to hear her thoughts.

The affair is with a married man named Eric. They meet through an app. Edie worries about their first meeting in broad daylight, the one “where you see him seeing you, deciding in this split second whether any future cunnilingus will be enthusiastic or perfunctory.” Edie is disappointed that Eric takes so long to take her to bed and is thereafter disappointed that he spends so much time traveling on business or doing whatever he does with his wife.

Edie drops into Eric’s home uninvited — in fact, she walks into the house to have a look around, thinking it is empty — and ends up attending Eric’s anniversary party with his wife Rebecca and adopted daughter Akila. Eric and Rebecca are white; Akila is black. Rebecca decides for reasons of her own that she should form a relationship of some sort with Edie, although not exactly a friendship. Rebecca expects Akila to bond with Edie and wants Edie to play the role of “Trusty Black Spirit Guide” in exactly the way Rebecca thinks it should be played, but Akila is thirteen and not about to bond with any adult, particularly not one who has seen her father’s penis.

When Edie loses her job and apartment, Rebecca improbably invites her to move into the guest room. For much of the novel, Edie is trying to figure out how to fit in with the man she sometimes shags, his wife, and the tweener who seems to despise her. At the same time, Edie is painting. Her works are undistinguished, but as she thinks about her life and the circumstances of those around her, she slowly develops a technique that brings an emotional honesty into her creations.

Perhaps Edie is a surrogate for Raven Leilani, at least in the sense that Leilani has certainly learned the importance of taking a hard and honest look at life and to let her critical observations inform her writing. When Edie says about her job, “if a person come to rote work with the expectation that she will be demeaned, she can bypass the pitfalls of hope and redirect all that energy into being a merciless drone” — she is speaking a truth that most people will recognize.

Racism is a central theme that Leilani tackles with subtlety. Before she is sacked, Edie works with a black woman who is enviably better than Edie at being “black and dogged and inoffensive.” Edie’s co-worker criticizes Edie for thinking that by being “slack” and expressing “no impulse control you’re like, black power. Sticking it to the white man or whatever. But you’re just exactly what they expect.” In the other woman’s view, Edie isn’t allowed to be herself, because in a white world, being herself isn’t good enough. Which is, in itself, a form of racism. Edie’s sharp observations of the role black women are expected to play in a business world dominated by white males — particularly white men who are trying to be politically correct and cluelessly botching it — would make Luster worthwhile even if the novel had nothing else to offer.

The behavior of men toward women is another theme. In the dark, “all the wholly unoriginal, too generous things men are prone to saying before they come sound startling and true.” Then they collect their pants and “there is a world beyond the door with its traffic and measles and no room for these heady, optimistic words.” Men are there and then they are not. “I have learned not to be surprised by a man’s sudden withdrawal,” Edie says.

Luster might be seen as a coming of age novel because, while Edie may seem aimless, she begins to understand what is important to her life by the novel’s end. The sentences quoted in this review provide a glimpse of how Leilani focuses so precisely on the world that Edie inhabits, how eloquently she conveys Edie’s thoughts. The novel is wickedly smart, sly, and engrossing. Leilani’s novel may be a debut, but it is written in the assured voice of a seasoned writer who knows exactly what she wants to say.

RECOMMENDED

A Private Cathedral by James Lee Burke

 

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 11, 2020

Like many Robicheaux novels, A Private Cathedral is a meditation on the nature of evil. Crime writers have a tendency to conceptualize evil as a force, sometimes one that has supernatural origins. James Lee Burke did that in Light of the World. He returns to the theme of evil as a force beyond human understanding in A Private Cathedral.

Dave Robicheaux tells the story as something that happened many years in the past. In the present, Robicheaux and his friend Clete Purcell contemplate the evil of white supremacists who stand guard over statues of Confederate generals and the oppression of freedom that they represent. In the past, the story opens with Robicheaux watching Johnny Shondell, Louisiana’s answer to Elvis, performing on a bandstand. Isolda Balangie, who appears to be seventeen, approaches Robicheaux because he was once a cop. She tells him that the Balangie family has hated the Shondell family for generations. Johnny Shondell is nevertheless delivering her to his Uncle Mark for reasons Robicheaux would prefer not to understand.

Robicheaux visits Marcel LaForchette in prison at LaForchette’s request. Robicheaux agrees to see him because he “wanted to believe that evil has an explainable origin, one that has nothing to do with unseen forces or even a cancerous flaw in the midst of Creation, and that even the worst of men could reclaim the light they had banished from their souls.” LaForchette, a former mob enforcer who claims to have information about the Kennedy assassination, would like Robicheaux to give him a job so he can be paroled to Louisiana. His promises of reform make Robicheaux wonder whether he might have reclaimed the light.

LaForchette used to work for the Balangie family (he claims to have been the driver on the whack of a child molester ordered by the Balangies) but when Robicheaux next hears about him, he is on parole and working for the Shondells. Two private investigators approach Robicheaux for information about the disappearance of Isolde and its possible connection to LaForchette’s release.

The investigators end up dead and dismembered, as do a good many others. Robicheaux would like to stay out of it, but he can’t abide the Balangies and Shondells using a teenage girl as currency for a deal. His friend Clete Purcell would also prefer to avoid the drama until he finds himself strung upside down as a fire is being set below his head. Purcell isn’t sure how this fits into the Balangie/Shondell situation, but he means to find out.

This sets up what seems like a typical crime story — typical for Burke, who sets his stories in the deepest depths of southern corruption and depravity — but the novel takes a twist with the introduction of a reptilian character named Gideon Richetti, who is either a time traveler or has lived through evil events in the distant past. Richetti represents enduring evil, the kind that brought us Auschwitz and Huey Long and prisoners who die from dehydration after being locked for days in a steel coffin in the Louisiana heat.

Against his better judgment (or perhaps in the absence of judgment), Robicheaux becomes involved with Isolda’s mother, Penelope Balangie, who may or may not be married to Adonis Balangie. He also becomes involved (he thinks, given that he attributes his involvement on both occasions to blackouts) with Leslie Rosenberg, a woman Adonis is keeping on the side. Other key characters include a priest who may or may not have given into his temptations and a bent cop named Carroll LeBlane.

The plot is harrowing. As was true in Light of the World, its supernatural elements might (but probably don’t) have earthly explanations. Robicheaux would like to find a rational explanation for the slave ship he keeps seeing, the one that is also in Purcell’s dreams. He would like to think there is a reason for Richetti’s knowledge of events in Robicheaux’s past that he has never shared, or for Richetti himself, who starts the novel as more snake than human but evolves the story progresses. Those explanations will be just as hard for the reader to conjure as they are for Robicheaux. Everything that troubles Robicheaux could be in his imagination because, as he acknowledges, “superstition has its origin in fear.” Robicheaux has plenty to fear, but Burke makes clear that he isn’t alone. All our problems are grounded in fear.

Burke’s point seems to be that evil has had such an ineradicable presence throughout history that it can only be explained as a force that influences good people to do bad things. The alternative, as Robicheaux ponders, is that humans are not good at all, that they are fundamentally flawed and will trip over themselves in their hurry to harm others to satisfy their own sense of superiority. “I believe that most human activity is not rational and is often aimed at self-destruction,” Robicheaux says. “I also believe that ordinary human beings will participate in horrific deeds if they are provided a ritual that will allow them to put their conscience in abeyance.” Hence the ability of humans not just to turn their back on obvious evil, but to encourage it.

One reason to read any Burke novel is to luxuriate in his prose. “Here’s the strange thing about death,” Robicheaux explains. “At a certain age it’s always with you, lurking in the shade, pulling at your ankles, whispering in your ear when you pass a crypt. But it doesn’t get your real attention until you find yourself home alone and the wind swells inside the rooms and stresses the joists and lets you know what silence and solitude are all about.”

The other reason to read Burke is that few crime writers manage to plumb the souls of their protagonists, the struggle between their flawed natures and their fundamental decency, with such depth while still telling a riveting story. A Private Cathedral is just the latest reminder of why Burke occupies a laminated position in my list of favorite crime novelists.

RECOMMENDED

The Last Emperox by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on April 14, 2020

The Last Emperox is the third book of the Interdependency trilogy that began with The Collapsing Empire and continued with The Consuming Fire. The first book sets up the detailed background that serves as a springboard for the next two. When I read it, I wondered whether all that background was really necessary. Perhaps the trilogy would produce a story that might better be told in a single volume without all the detail, however interesting it might be, that John Scalzi served up in The Collapsing Empire. With apologies to Scalzi, who knows more than I do about how to write John Scalzi books, I confess I was wrong. The final two volumes are each packed with storylines, way too much to cram into a single volume and all of it essential, or at least worthwhile. Anyway, trilogies give writers three advances and royalties on three books instead of one, and who am I to complain about Scalzi earning a living? Readers who invest in all three books will not find themselves cheated.

By the end of The Consuming Fire, we know that flow streams connecting various places that humans occupy in the Interdependency are collapsing. Marce Claremont has brought that news to the relatively new Emperox, whose formal name is Grayland II. Informally, she is still Cardenia of the House of Wu, a relatively young woman who is forced into the life of a ruler when she would rather have the freedom that comes with a less stressful existence. Like most of the female characters, Cardenia has a healthy sexual appetite, much to Marce’s benefit. Various political machinations have ensued, including attempted assassinations, but Cardenia is still holding power, although to what end is uncertain. When the flow streams finally collapse, the Interdependency will collapse with them, producing a period of anarchy and massive death brought about by insufficient and suddenly irreplaceable resources.

The Last Emperox continues the political plot that lies at the novel’s heart. The villainous Nadashe Nohamapetan, seemingly foiled in the second novel, is up to new tricks in this one. She is matched against Lady Kiva from the House of Lagos, a delightfully foul-mouthed woman whose sex drive might better be described as insatiable than healthy, and good for her. Kiva may be allied with Cardenia or working against her. Scalzi keeps the reader guessing.

The plot is lively. Scalzi uses it to make the always timely observation that power is short-sighted. People who hold it want to keep it. If their actions accelerate the destruction of whatever (the environment, the government, the Interdependency), they’ll let the next generation worry about it. Maintaining power and accumulating more of it trumps (pun intended) the harm they cause to everyone else. Naturally, rulers of the powerful houses hatch a plan to save themselves from the flow stream collapse because, if only a few people will be able to survive, they feel entitled to be the survivors.

I expected the protagonists to come up with a plan to save the human race (or that part of it that lives in the Interdependency, which or may not be all of it) and they do, sort of, but the plan surprised me. It’s both clever and a testament to the willingness of good people to set power aside and to sacrifice everything for the greater good. Maybe science fiction fans carry the idealism to believe that our better selves will ultimately triumph. Maybe the fond hope that there is something salvageable, something decent, in human nature is what makes me keep reading science fiction. That, and good storytelling that revitalizes the sense of wonder. Scalzi attains those objectives better than most science fiction writers. In The Last Emperox, he brings a well-conceived plot to a satisfying conclusion while leaving room for related stories to be told. I hope he gets around to telling them.

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