Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Published by Tom Doherty Associates/Tor.com on January 21, 2020

When nine African Americans who gathered for Bible study in a Charleston church were gunned down by a white supremacist, the shooting solidified a long-standing understanding that black lives only matter to some. That massacre, the Rodney King beating, and police shootings of unarmed African Americans around the nation are recurring images in Riot Baby. Black Lives Matter is a dominant theme, but the story indicts not just white violence against blacks but institutional racism that Tochi Onyebuchi imagines will soon be embedded in supposedly race-neutral algorithms. In the novel’s near future society, algorithms determine who gets out on parole, who gets shot or arrested by mechanized police. The algorithms are just a way to mask the race-conscious desire to control blacks, to assure their subjugation.

Ella Jackson has a Thing. She can balance a ball of light in her palm. She can make a rat’s head explode. She can make toilet paper fly off a bodega’s shelf. She can wrap a blanket around her Mama’s neck and lift her until her legs dangle in the air, all without touching the blanket or her Mama. Something is eating Ella from the inside, something that makes her leave home. Only years later does she realize the good that her Mama does, working in a hospital, standing next to trauma surgeons and wiping up the stomach acid that spills from open wounds.

Ella hates South Central, hates that Rodney King can be beaten like all her neighbors are beaten and nothing ever happens to the cops who beat them. Until she moves to New Haven, she protects her brother Kevin, but when Kev goes to prison, he protects Ella by telling her to visit in person, not as a ghost. He doesn’t want anyone to see what she can do. On bad days, though, he wishes she would burn Rikers to the ground.

Kev was born in South Central during the 1992 riots. He decides to live in Watts when he is paroled from his sentence. The parole board sets him up in a community that it controls, puts a monitoring chip in his thumb, and assigns him to a job. Kev chose Watts because it is as far from the East Coast and the trouble that sent him to prison as he can get. Ella is less sanguine about his choice.

After listening to the news in prison — more riots, rising hate crimes, “Nazis in the street killing black folk” — Kev expects to find a post-apocalyptic world. Instead he finds “refugee-type kids walking barefoot with pieces of glass in the bottoms of their feet, not even flinching because living through the End of the World enough times does that to you.” Through Ella, he soon learns that he is seeing change at its advent.

Riot Baby is largely Kev’s story, but the central moral question belongs to Ella, who wonders whether she should use her Thing to punish. A pastor tells her, “We don’t get where we’re going by matching hate for hate,” but Ella considers the reality that slaves were freed at gunpoint. Civil rights legislation followed protest that wasn’t always nonviolent. If she has a chance to be “the locust and the frogs and the rivers of blood,” what should she do? The pastor’s take is appealing, but anger motivates. From that perspective, the Rodney King riots were useful, maybe even a necessary cleansing. If people aren’t angry about living in a society that devalues them, and if they don’t show that anger, their value might never be recognized.

Riot Baby is not a comforting novel. Onyebuchi nevertheless tells a powerful story that invites serious thought about racial oppression and violence. It is possible that a future utopia might follow a dystopia founded on anger. Readers can differ as to whether a utopian outcome of revolution is either likely or worth the pain, but readers who are both rational and compassionate cannot argue with the need for change that Riot Baby dramatizes.

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The Rock Blaster by Henning Mankell

Published in Sweden in 1973; published in translation by Vintage on February 18, 2020

At some point during The Rock Blaster, the protagonist comments that there should be more books like those by Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg, whose “characters were not in any way remarkable. They were like all the others. But you get to see how much happened in their lives.” The Rock Blaster is Henning Mankell’s contribution to the literature of the Everyman.

Oskar Johannes Johansson identifies himself as a worker, what would now be called a manual laborer. Construction work, rock blasting, whatever comes along. “He belongs to a group that he sees as clearly defined and also clearly segregated.” His father and grandfather were workers. He has had “the same life as everyone else. Brutal swings between having work and being laid off.” Much has changed during his life but he feels he has had no part in shaping those changes. “The worker is a member of his community, but the forces driving and changing society are wielded by others.”

The narrator tells Oskar’s story in snippets, focusing on events between 1910 and 1969, with diversions that examine Oskar’s roots and the contemporaries who influenced his life. A defining moment comes in 1910, when Oskar proclaims himself a socialist and is no longer allowed to live at home. Another occurs in 1911, when he miraculously survives an explosion in a rock blasting accident. He loses an eye and has his eyelids sewn together rather than opting for a glass replacement. He loses a hand and prefers a stump to a hook. Near the end of his life he has three teeth but can’t be bothered to buy dentures because what’s the point? Oskar lives with deterioration and loss, accepts it and even embraces it as life taking its natural course.

Oskar is dating Elly before the accident, but she gets pregnant while he is in the hospital. By coincidence, he ends up marrying Elvira, her sister. They have children. He goes back to work as a rock blaster. He loses his job in the depression, gets a new one after unemployment peaks. He becomes a widower. He tries to comfort a friend who is losing his faculties to a degenerative disease. He loves the location of his inner-city apartment but the building gives way to a new housing project, forcing his relocation to a suburb. Later in life he spends summers on an island, in an old sauna that he has converted to a single room dwelling. He spends his last years recalling what it was like to be young and vigorous.

Like a Moberg novel, The Rock Blaster is the story of an ordinary life. Ordinary but not uneventful, in the way that all ordinary lives are assembled from a series of chance events. Oskar struggles and perseveres. He feels stupid and lonely, but he manages those feelings. Like a hundred billion others in human history, he’s here and then he’s not.

The Rock Blaster explores the role of ordinary people in Swedish society, people who have “only been allowed to speak in murmurs, yet they were the ones doing all the fighting and being beaten.” They are the ones who build society and keep it running, yet they are at the bottom of the pyramid, holding it up so that the rich and powerful can reap a disproportionate share of the benefits. Oskar becomes disenchanted with the Social Democrats because they focus on civil servants, creating unnecessary jobs that are given to people who develop a sense of entitlement, leaving workers behind. Oskar remains convinced that a worker’s revolution will one day come, although he is sad to have missed it. At the same time, he always says hello to his neighbors because he knows he is part of something bigger than himself. “Whether you like it or not, you’re part of it. Just spit in the ocean once. Then you have all the eternity you need.”

The Rock Blaster is Mankell’s first novel, the latest to be translated into English. It shows the ambition and unevenness of a first novel. The Everyman theme is too heavy-handed, as if Mankell didn’t trust the reader to understand the point of creating an ordinary character. He makes his points with needless redundancy. Still, the story is an effective reminder that, while we become spellbound by the lives of extraordinary people, ordinary people are the foundation of society. And in a sense, most people are extraordinary. To persevere after losing a hand and an eye is remarkable, but people do it all the time. To care about others, to be curious about the world and to wonder how it can be improved, are qualities of people who are gifted with compassion. The Rock Blaster reminds us that to be ordinary makes us a part of something extraordinary, something that we change and shape in our small way, even if we feel insignificant and powerless.

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The Boatman's Daughter by Andy Davidson

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on February 11, 2020

The Boatman’s Daughter is marketed as a supernatural thriller. While supernatural forces contribute to the thrills, horror novels like this one remind us that humans at their worst are more horrific than the imagined entities that haunt human lives. The supernatural entity who lurks in The Boatman’s Daughter might be less evil than a couple of the human characters.

The boatman is Hiram Crabtree. His daughter is Miranda. The novel opens with the boatman’s disappearance in the bayou when Miranda is eleven. Accompanied by a witch, Hiram embarks on a mission after telling Miranda to wait in the boat. In the horror story tradition, Miranda ignores sensible advice and plunges into the darkness when she hears disturbing sounds. Instead of finding her father that night, she finds a baby, or perhaps an abomination, that she calls Littlefish. She raises Littlefish as an orphaned younger brother.

The witch is an old woman named Iskra who was once scolded by the leshii for having a loveless heart. She is too selfish, the leshii told her, to have children of her own. The leshii, according to various wikis, is a mischievous deity that inhabits forests in Slavic mythology. Apparently one of them made it to Arkansas.

Most of the novel’s action occurs a few years after Miranda finds Littlefish. Miranda has been bedeviled by a one-eyed constable named Charlie Riddle who paid a price for trying to have his way with her. At Riddle’s direction, Miranda uses her boat to deliver drugs through the bayou. A “mad, lost preacher” named Billy Cotton, widower of a woman named Lena who had a gift for perceiving the supernatural, is also involved in the distribution scheme. Cotton was present at Littlefish’s birth, a seriously warped scene that the novel revisits more than once, each time imparting new revelations that tie the past to the present.

Miranda eventually learns the truth about her father’s disappearance and the mysterious origin of Littlefish. The other key character who contributes to the story is the dwarf John Avery, a dissatisfied employee in Riddle’s drug dealing enterprise. And then there’s the girl in the forest who haunts Cotton’s dreams, much as Littlefish does and for a similar reason.

The Boatman’s Daughter tells a creepy story that delivers a regular dose of chills. That’s what horror novels should do, so I rate this one as a success. The supernatural elements are a bit muddled. As they deliver murder and gory mayhem, Riddle and Cotton are sufficiently evil to supply a full quotient of horror, even in the absence of the leshii and mysterious monsters lurking in the depths of the earth. Littlefish and the girl in the forest nevertheless add to the story’s eerie atmosphere.

Andy Davidson’s vivid prose gives the story a cinematic quality. His explanation of characters’ motivations, good or evil, makes it possible to believe in their existence. Miranda’s ability to cope and to redefine herself at the novel’s end is appealing. The novel does not depend on gore, despite the occasional severed head, to instill fear. The story might not persuade the reader to believe in the supernatural, but it will reinforce the belief that horror is a force personified in the lives of horrible people, and that darkness is never so dark that it cannot be overcome by light.

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Eden Mine by S.M. Hulse

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 11, 2020

Eden Mine is the story of two siblings, troubled in their separate ways, who are bound by a traumatic childhood event and the secrets they keep. Samuel planned to leave Prospect, his childhood home in Montana, to join the military with his friend Kev, and then to pursue a career as a veterinarian. After the traumatic event left Jo in a wheelchair, he abandoned his dreams so he could drive her to school and keep her safe. Apart from Jo, his only real attachment is to their inherited land, but the government is about to take their house so a highway can run through the property.

Samuel is seduced by militia groups that preach the sovereignty of haters rather than the unity of all, and by fringe websites that spew senseless conspiracy theories. He hates the government. He hates Jews. He believes people are better off “keeping to their own kind.” Jo reminds him that all the people responsible for their losses are, in fact, “their own kind.” Clouded by hatred and helplessness, Samuel plants an explosive in a courthouse, hoping to make a political statement but critically injuring a little girl in a storefront church across the street.

Jo never wanted to leave Prospect because she loves “the way the mountains cleave the sky, and the valley cradles its people.” She knows the land is poisoned and businesses are failing, but the beauty keeps her rooted. The losing fight against eminent domain is the force that threatens to uproot her. Jo blames herself for loving Prospect so much that she gave Samuel a reason to destroy the courthouse, and for loving Samuel so much that she didn’t realize he was “the kind of man who would.”

After the bomb explodes, Samuel hides in the mountains, not realizing that that a video camera had captured his image. Sheriff Hawkins has known Samuel and Jo forever. He knows that Jo knows where Samuel is hiding. It would be easier for Jo to tell him, particularly after the FBI comes calling, but her loyalty to Samuel compels her silence.

Ambiguous relationships dominate Eden Mine. The father of the injured girl is a preacher named Asa Truth who seems drawn to Jo, torn between his Christian desire to forgive and his fatherly hope that Jo will reveal Samuel’s location so that he can be punished. Hawkins has long been Jo’s friend, but he may need to exploit that friendship to find Samuel. A gallery owner admires Jo’s use of mud from the landscapes she paints as a pigment, incorporating the place into her image of the place, but in truth, the owner wants to market Jo’s status as the sister of the bomber to improve sales.

And then there are Jo and Samuel. Is the bond between them stronger than Jo’s belief that justice must be done? Is it stronger than Samuel’s instinct for self-preservation? Can Jo live with what Samuel did? Would it be a betrayal if she tells Hawkins where to find him? Would Samuel forgive his sister for betraying him? Can anyone forgive Samuel for what he did? Would Asa, a pastor, think the man who killed his daughter deserve forgiveness?

The struggle with faith is another key theme. Asa ponders familiar questions about believing in a god who brings so much suffering to his worshippers. Asa believes that, as a child, he healed a bicyclist who was struck by his father’s car, but he has never advertised himself as a faith healer. Asa is tormented because his daughter remains in a coma despite his faith, or perhaps because his shaken faith is insufficiently strong. He doesn’t understand why he had been given the ability to heal when he cannot use it to heal the person he loves.

Brief sections of the novel are told from Samuel’s point of view, but the narrative primarily belongs to Jo. Neither Jo nor Asa understand why they are drawn to each other, but the reader understands that they each need something that only the other can provide. S.M. Hulse makes it easy to empathize with both characters. Perhaps Samuel deserves no empathy, but Hulse makes it easy to understand why he became the kind of person he never intended to be. Too many people, the novel suggests, have been shaped by forces they do not understand; websites that preach division and paranoid hatred, militias that offer violence as a solution to nonexistent problems.

Eden Mine builds to a dramatic conclusion. The ending is guardedly hopeful, suggesting that it is never too late to find the will to change. The novel illustrates a growing disconnect between reality-based Americans and those whose fringe beliefs are a danger to themselves and to society, but it does so in a story that is personal and moving.

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The Wife and the Widow by Christian White

First published in Australia in 2019; published by St. Martin’s Publishing/Minotaur Books on January 21, 2020

The wife in the novel’s title is Abby Gilpin; her husband is Ray. The widow is Kate Keddie, who was married to John before he disappeared. Their stories are told in alternating chapters. Christian White invites the reader to fit the two stories together in an effort to understand how they relate to each other, both temporally and in the overlap of their characters.

John Keddie was a doctor. He disagreed with Kate about the need to activate parental controls on the internet. In John’s view, if parents don’t talk about the monsters in the world, their children won’t be ready to handle them when they appear.

John has monsters of his own, as Kate eventually discovers. Her mission of discovery begins when John doesn’t come home from a two-week research colloquium. She learns that he didn’t show up at the colloquium. She is even more perplexed when she learns that John stopped working at the Center for Palliative Care three months earlier, after the death of an elderly patient to whom he seemed drawn.

Kate believes John appreciates the fact that she is “passive to the point of invisible,” but passivity won’t serve her well if she is to learn what happened to John. She gets her first clue when an alarm is triggered at their holiday house on Belport Island, a place Kate would never expect John to go. According to John’s father, John spent his teen years on the island in a state of spiritual distress. Kate and her father-in-law travel to the island to look for John. His fate is telegraphed in the novel’s title.

Belport Island is the home of Abby, Ray, and their son Ed. Abby is troubled because Ray has been acting strangely. He seems to have lied to Abby about the places where he claims to have been when he was supposedly working. The pile of gay porn magazines hidden in the basement fuels her suspicion that Ray is concealing more than the magazines.

The reader is asked to consider how John’s disappearance relates to the Gilpin family. Like Kate, the reader will ask why John kept an obituary of a murdered man named David Stemple in the holiday home’s attic. Who killed Stemple and why? As in any good mystery, the obvious answers to the questions that the novel poses turn out to be false.

Kate is a sympathetic character. She must overcome her passivity to survive the story. a transition that enhances her likability. Abby is less sympathetic, although her desire to protect her family might cause some readers to empathize with her. John and Ray are developed in enough detail to explain their actions, but the novel’s focus is on Kate and Abby. Neither husband is likely to earn the reader’s sympathy or empathy.

White tells a plausible, well-paced story. Its clever structure helps conceal the relationship between the wife’s story and the widow’s until the reader has an “ah-ha” epiphany. The ending brings the titular characters together for a satisfying conclusion, making The Wife and the Widow a good bet for mystery fans.

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