A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Published by Little, Brown and Company on May 5, 2020

The stories in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth explore the multitude of ways in which lives are and have been lived, across time and geography, lives that resemble each other only in the experience of  emotions that define human existence. The nine stories cover an astonishing array of subjects, joined only by being set in the past.

Jacob Burke, a brawler known as Muscular, takes on his greatest challenge in “Death of the Pugilist, or The Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw.” Burke and Blindman Ben McGraw fight an epic battle in 1824 that attracts thousands. The story is less about fighting than the reason for fighting: “the reason he hit is that there was joy in hitting, real joy in the simplicity and the freedom and the astounding number of answers in a single movement of his arms.” The story’s attraction, apart from its depiction of grit and determination, is its exploration of good and evil. There is good in all of the story’s pugilists (although Burke wonders “how a hitter could be a good man, and whether he was good only because in the Great Scheme he was on the bottom and he couldn’t be anything else, that if conditions were different, he wouldn’t be so”) because they have open hearts, but there is evil in the men who exploit their pain for profit. This is my favorite story in the collection and it might become one of my all-time favorite short stories.

“The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace” follows a “bug collector, species man” who travels the world observing life. Wallace works out a theory of natural selection that he immediately sends to Darwin, a better known scientist who might be a bit reluctant to acknowledge Wallace’s contribution to the field. Not that recognition matters to Wallace; he is moved by his epiphany, his understanding that when he “looked upon the world,” what he saw “was not life, but life transforming.” In a very different story of a self-sustaining traveler, “The Line Agent Pascal” tells of a man who operates a telegraph station in a remote South American location, joined to humanity only by the daily signals sent by other line agents, a connection that sustains him despite the knowledge that isolated men might die unexpectedly in a multitude of horrible ways.

“For the Union Dead” is narrated by the grandson of immigrants. His American-born father served as a Navy physician in Vietnam while his foreign-born uncle, longed for a connection of his own to America. He found it by playing dead in Civil War reenactments, making a figurative sacrifice that made him feel truly American.

The most playful story adds to an account by Herodotus of an ancient’s Greek’s experiments in child development. A story about raising an asthmatic child in smoke-filled London, when leaches were the preferred cure for most maladies, examines a mother’s devotion to her son.

The last two stories have quasi-religious themes. One is about a female balloonist who, despite being shunned by the male natural scientists of her time, discovers and gives herself up to a rift in the sky. The title story tells of a man in an asylum who is making a registry of his life to share with God, a man who perceives angels and finds hidden connections in the objects he collects.

Some of the stories collected in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth appeal to the intellect more than the heart, but they are all heartfelt in the depth with which the explore the evolving human condition throughout history. The stories are stunningly fresh. Each delivers a nutritious serving of insight and hope. I’ve never read anything quite like them. This is Daniel Mason’s first story collection and the world is richer for it.

RECOMMENDED

You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 3, 2020

Initially, You Are Not Alone seems to be the story of a revenge club, a group of women who are dedicated to avenging atrocities — or, at least, events that in their overwrought imaginations they define as atrocities. We are introduced to two sisters, Cassandra and Jane Moore, and four other women who are apparently dedicated to inflicted harm on the men who have done them a perceived injustice. But three of the six women quickly drop out of the story, leaving the Moore sisters and a woman named Valerie as the primary agents of vengeance. The story is not actually about their efforts to obtain what they view as justice, but to cover their rears when they think they are about to be caught.

The novel’s protagonist is Shay Miller, a woman with no job, no boyfriend, and no self-esteem. Shay is keeping a notebook filled with depressing facts that she calls her Data Book. Every chapter she narrates opens with a (usually depressing) fact from the Data Book. Maybe if she abandoned her gloomy book, she would feel better about life.

Early in the novel, Shay watches a woman named Amanda jump in front of a subway train. Shay spots and keeps Amanda’s necklace, the first in a string of improbable occurrences. For reasons apparently related to her general battiness, Shay leaves some flowers at Amanda’s apartment and then attends her funeral, where she meets the Moore sisters. For no obvious reason, Shay invents a story about how she knew Amanda.

The Moore sisters pretend to befriend Shay because they are worried that Shay might have learned something incriminating about Amanda that might link to the sisters. They only believe this because Shay is bizarrely behaving as if she had a connection to Amanda. All of that seems like a contrivance to set a plot in motion.

Shay is so needy that she gleefully accepts the sisters' friendship. The Moores are PR specialists who know artists and celebrities. They might be clones of Samantha Jones on Sex and the City. Since they are glamorous and Shay is not, Shay feels unworthy of their attention.

The sisters soon hatch a wildly improbable scheme to set up Shay for a crime committed by another revenge club member. The scheme depends on the happy coincidence that when Shay cleans herself up, she bears a strong resemblance to Amanda.

What is it in the psychological makeup of Cassandra, Jane, Valerie, and the other revenge-obsessed women that allows them to feel justified when they do awful things to the men who wronged them? The authors do little to make them credible characters. Cassandra and Jane are portrayed as having a sense of entitlement which, combined with their evil natures, might be a plausible reason to believe that they would seek revenge for wrongs that affect them personally. People with that psychological makeup don’t tend to care about wrongs done to others, so their motivation to encourage others to seek revenge struck me as thin.

You Are Not Alone lacks the energy that should flow through an engaging thriller.  The story generates little suspense because, for all the rushing around and looking over her shoulder that Shay does, there is never a sense that she is in real danger. The novel’s other problem is that Shay isn’t terribly bright. When, near the novel’s end, it appears that someone is about to murder her, the reader will be wondering why she doesn’t understand what is about to happen and move away from the danger. Or the reader might not care because, as thriller characters go, Shay is screamingly dull. In any event, the reader will understand that Shay is in no danger at all, as the outcome of that scene is entirely predictable.

The plot encourages the reader to guess why and how Shay is being set up. The story was sufficiently effective to hold my interest. The novel earns a weak recommendation on that basis. Unfortunately, the novel’s merits are largely offset by its implausibility, its one-dimensional and unexciting characters, and its predictable climax.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Corporate Gunslinger by Doug Engstrom

Published by Harper Voyager on June 16, 2020

Notwithstanding its unfortunate title, Corporate Gunslinger offers a smart, offbeat, and entertaining allegory of the ways in which corporations enslave workers and screw over consumers. The story mixes corporate greed with the gun culture, imagining an environment in which contract disputes can be settled in duels.

The story imagines that corporations in the near future will take the sanctity of their contracts seriously, largely because contracts always favor the corporation. “Life service contracts” bind a debtor to the service of a corporation for life. Life service contracts are a condition of loans. Default on the loan and the lender takes everything the debtor owns and then indentures the debtor. The corporation controls the debtor’s life, dictates where the debtor will live and work, what the debtor will eat, and whether the debtor will have children. A life service contract ends when the debt is repaid, but since the corporation charges fees for the housing and meals it provides, as well as interest and various service fees, repaying the debt is usually impossible. Bankruptcy does not exist and neither, apparently, does the Thirteenth Amendment.

Kira Clark lost her parents to disease while she was in college. Medical debt wiped out her inheritance. She took out student loans to pursue a career as an actress, believing that her talent would allow her to repay the debt. It didn’t work out. If she defaults on her payments, she’s facing a life of servitude. Her one hope is to take a job fighting duels as a corporate gunslinger.

Gunfighters work for insurance companies. The companies force contract disputes into arbitration, which consumers always lose. When insurance companies refuse to pay out and consumers lose their arbitration, they have the option to challenge the company to a duel. The company hires professional gunfighters to represent their interests while dueling consumers do the best they can.

Kira’s intense training and determination make her a good gunfighter. She wins match after match for the insurance company that employs her, but she still isn’t making enough to retire her debt. If she quits, she will default on her payments and face the demands of a life service contract. If she keeps fighting matches, she’s likely to lose her life to a lucky shot. Kira finally decides to risk it all by fighting a high stakes professional match that pits one corporate gunfighter against another. The bloodthirsty public loves duels — they love Kira and have dubbed her “Death’s Angel” — but they really love watching professionals duel. The best outcomes occur when both fighters are wounded. The first to fall (or bleed to death) loses.

The novel is billed as a satire but, like Gulliver’s Travels, the story is told in a straightforward manner that asks the reader to accept the impossible as true. Doug Engstrom doesn’t openly condemn America’s gun culture or its corporate culture, but the story’s suggestion that a fair number of gun-loving Americans would allow their enjoyment of dueling to offset their opposition to corporate slavery rings true.

Kira is a likable character, but Engstrom doesn’t let the reader — or Kira — forget that she kills people for a living. Is the remorse she feels an adequate reason to forgive the choices she has made? Engstrom doesn’t dictate an answer. In fact, the ambiguous ending makes it possible for the reader to write the final chapter. The opportunity to write it in a way that the reader finds morally or empathically correct is one of the joys of this provocative novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on October 16, 2018

The Consuming Fire is the second novel in John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy. The Collapsing Empire introduces key characters and sets up the trilogy’s framework. The habitats of the Interdependency are facing a crisis as the Flow streams that link them begin to disappear. The habitats truly are interdependent, with the possible exception of the planet End, resulting in the likely death of their inhabitants when they are cut off from their trade partners.

The Consuming Fire is more satisfying than the first installment because, having established the premise, Scalzi is free to do something with it. In addition to developing a solid plot based on political conspiracies, Scalzi uses the book to teach an allegorical lesson. The collapsing flow streams pose an existential threat, but the members of the power structure — industrialists, religious leaders, and politicians — refuse to consider the long-term implications of that threat because they are only concerned about their short-term goals: acquiring and maintaining wealth and power. They are more interested in propping up the stock market than in acknowledging a threat that will make their stocks meaningless in a few years. They are happy to let the next generation worry about the consequences of their greed. Does that remind anyone of, for example, global warming?

The story fills in more background about how the Interdependency came into being. It’s a clever story involving the manipulation of the superstitious with religious visions and prophesies that were faked by the first emperox. The visions were “meant as parables to help a divided humanity understand the need for a new ethical system that focused on cooperation and interdependency.” The current emperox, Grayland II (f/k/a Cardenia), uses the same trick to control the empire’s citizens in a time of crisis.

The plot follows a grand scheme to overthrow Cardenia that brings together the House of Nohamapetan (which tried to assassinate Cardenia in the first novel) and disloyal elements of her own house (the House of Wu). The few people who are on Cardenia’s side include Kiva, whose house is at odds with Nohamapetan, and Cardenia's lover, the mathematician Marce Claremont, who remains focused on the imminent collapse of the flow streams and the deaths that will follow if humans cannot make their way to End, a planet that is now under the inconvenient control of the House of Nohamapetan.

In a critical subplot, Marce discovers that older flow streams are temporarily reopening, including one that leads to a lost system. Marce travels there with a small team to learn what they can about survival strategies, only to discover that a few plucky humans are still alive, 800 years after their orbital habitats were cut off from supplies. More importantly, he finds a ship from a forgotten system of planets that is operated by a captain whose consciousness was downloaded into the ship’s operating system.

Scalzi combines action with intrigue in a fast-moving novel that suggests important lessons without becoming preachy. Cardenia continues to develop as a character, growing into a role as emperox that she didn’t want, using her wits and marshalling her toughness to take on political opponents who view her as weak and naïve. I look forward to seeing how Cardenia gets the empire out of the mess its short-sighted industrialists and politicians have created.

RECOMMENDED

Die Next by Jonathan Stone

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 14, 2020

The first part of Die Next reads like a mediocre short story. So mediocre, in fact, that I considered giving up on the rest of the novel. The good news is that the novel gets better. The unfortunate news is that, by the end, it descends back into mediocrity.

Zack Yellin is at the counter of a coffee shop when he notices that the guy next to him has the same iPhone. He happens to see the guy unlocking the phone by punching numbers in a simple pattern. The guy, Joey Richter, mistakenly takes Zack’s phone, leaving his own on the counter when he departs. Zack unlocks it using the password that he conveniently knows and calls his own phone to arrange for a swap. But when curiosity or nosiness causes him to look at the phone’s contents while waiting for Joey to return, Zack discovers that Joey is a hired killer. Joey took photos of his victims as proof of death and didn’t bother to delete them.

Zack’s dilemma is that Joey now knows that Zack may have seen incriminating evidence. Zack decides that fleeing is the better part of valor, but Joey now has Zack’s phone, giving him contact information for Zack’s girlfriend Emily and his best friend Steve, who both become targets Joey can use to get his phone back.

Why doesn’t Zack just go to the police? Because that would bring the story to an abrupt end. He actually does go the police but leaves because he doesn’t think the police will believe him, photographic evidence notwithstanding. The improbable decision not to report murder evidence to the police sets up an improbable resolution of the novel’s first act.

The novel becomes more interesting when Zack agrees to do a solid for Joey after Joey is improbably acquitted of murder. Yes, the story is based on a good many improbabilities, too many to overlook, which is the novel’s chief weakness.

Zack’s good nature leads to tension with Steve and Emily, both of whom Joey tried to kill before he was captured. Jonathan Stone kept me reading by bringing characters together and driving them apart. Steve and Emily both endure credible conflicts between their feelings about Zack and their failure to understand why he’s trying to help the man who tried to kill them all. I particularly like the portrayal of Joey, who prefers prison life to the real world, where he has no need to think for himself. Joey only works as a killer on the outside because he doesn’t know what else to do. I wouldn’t want to be Joey’s neighbor, but as sociopathic characters go, Joey seems realistic. He doesn’t have any particular desire to kill anyone, he just isn’t bothered by doing it.

While interesting characters and Stone’s straightforward prose style kept me engaged, I was put off by the contrivances that keep the story going. Stone doesn’t seem to understand much about the justice system. After Zack beats the first murder rap, he’s set free while prosecutors wait weeks to have him arrested on new charges. That’s not how prosecutors behave when they know they can bring new charges against a murderer. While Joey is waiting for the inevitable return to jail, a murder victim files a wrongful death suit against him that proceeds to trial within weeks after it is filed. Joey is the defendant but he only learns about the trial when he gets a subpoena to come to court for the first day of trial. That isn’t how the system works. It isn’t even how subpoenas work. But the plot needs to bring Joey to court to further a ridiculous scheme orchestrated by the guy who paid Joey to be a killer. That scheme again involves Zack and a confusion of phones. Nice try, but I just didn’t buy it.

Die Next is a novel that almost works, but not quite. While it doesn’t make for a disagreeable reading experience, the plot has too many flaws to earn an unqualified recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS