A Small Town by Thomas Perry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on December 17, 2019

A Small Town is a vigilante story. To make vigilantism seem justified, thriller writers concoct dastardly crimes committed by evil villains so that readers will root for the vigilantes. In the logic of thrillerworld, if bad guys are bad enough, it’s okay for good guys to murder them. It isn’t surprising that Thomas Perry made one of the killers a psychotic racist cult leader because even liberals would agree that it is morally correct to murder a racist, right? Wrong. The protagonist’s stunning hypocrisy might make her an interesting character if her character flaws were recognized and explored, but Perry wants the reader to cheer on a serial killer who never pauses to consider whether being a serial killer might be morally blameworthy. I just can't root for shallow protagonists.

The bad guys in this story are federal prisoners who commit an improbable escape, killing a bunch of corrections officers and arming themselves in the process. Mind you, this is a minimum-to-medium security prison, the kind that houses tax evaders and people who commit credit card fraud, but we’re told that hardcore criminals were transferred there because more secure prisons were overcrowded. It isn’t clear that the hardcore criminals even committed federal crimes (murder is usually a state crime), but put that aside. Violent criminals with years left to serve don’t get sent to a federal prison with a low security level, even at the request of a blackmailed Bureau of Prisons bureaucrat, making the premise hard to swallow. But the setup isn’t nearly as difficult to buy into as the plot that follows.

In the two years since the prison break, the FBI hasn’t managed to find any of the twelve worst bad guys (perhaps not surprising since that duty would primarily fall upon the U.S. Marshals). Our hero, a detective named Kate, decides to resign from her small-town cop job so she can track down the twelve escapees and go full vigilante on them. Can this plucky small-town cop succeed where federal agents cannot? You know that answer to that question. In fact, she manages to find them rather easily and dispatches them without working up a sweat. The feds were apparently too dim to consider some of the obvious steps she takes to find the killers.

Kate takes the crime spree personally because her lover (married to a woman with MS so we’re supposed to forgive him for having an affair) was a casualty of the bad guys. That’s one of many contrivances designed to manipulate the reader into cheering for Kate despite her decision to betray everything a law enforcement officer should believe in by becoming a serial killer. I didn’t find either her cause or her character to be noble.

Apart from being a serial killer, Kate carries an illegal “numberless Glock” with an illegal “silencer screwed on.” Where does she get her illegal weaponry? More importantly, why does a police officer who should be dedicated to arresting people who violate firearms laws feel no qualms about violating them herself? The moral seems to be that if you think you have a good justification to break the law, it’s just fine to do so. The prisoners probably felt justified in escaping, but Kate believes her justification is superior to theirs. The prisoners and Kate are both wrong. We are a country of laws precisely to prevent people like Kate from becoming their own law.

Even less believable is that Kate’s quest is funded by the mayor and city council members who redirect a crime fighting grant to her personal use. I found it hard to swallow that so many people, even in a small town where leaders tend to be like-minded, would willingly conspire to commit federal and state felonies by misusing a federal grant to fund a contract killer. The mind simply boggles.

A vigilante novel needs to do something special to earn my recommendation. Perry has never been a gifted wordsmith, although he sometimes tells a good story. A Small Town does nothing to overcome its shallow premise. The narrative suffers from redundancy, as the reader is frequently reminded just how awful the criminals are, how much they deserve to die, and how the small town suffered in the aftermath of the violent prison break. The sentences devoted to those topics are an exercise in tedium. A good bit of the novel reads like padding, as Perry supplies mundane details that do nothing to create atmosphere or advance the plot.

I was amused by some of the novel’s observations, including a character’s realization after dedicating eight years to a religious cult that all he had to show for it was “a marginal life in the woods.” But the novel’s few moments of entertainment fail to offset a dull and predictable story about a remarkably hypocritical character.

NOT RECOMMENDED

An Orc on the Wild Side by Tom Holt

Published by Orbit on September 10, 2019

An Orc on the Wild Side is a sequel to, or at least set in the same multiverse as, Doughnut and When It’s a Jar. Utilizing the pathway to the multiverse that was discovered in Doughnut, an entrepreneur sells real estate in the Hidden Realms to snooty Brits who can no longer afford to buy vacation properties in the south of France. The Hidden Realms have a primitive human population, but the more interesting residents are goblins, Elves, dwarves, halflings, trolls, and wraiths. Not to mention the Eye.

King Mordak is the new ruler of the goblins. His New Evil platform of reform has met with resistance, but liberal change is always resisted by traditionalists. Mordak understands that Evil always loses and, in fact, that is Evil’s fate in the long run, so maybe a new game plan is in order. Mordak’s latest problem is his successful attempt to create a female goblin. There has never been one before, and since females are stronger and better problem solvers than males, the goblins aren’t sure they are ready for one.

The strongest of the seven dwarf-lords is King Drain. He is preoccupied, however, by the discovery of eggbeaters and can openers, contraptions (he is told) that are made in a place called China. The gadgets speak to a sophisticated level of machining that dwarves have never managed. While Drain is worried that cheap Chinese goods will put dwarves out of work (at least if this place called China decides to market its wares in the Hidden Realms), a human who calls herself Snow White sees the opportunity to make some cash — the very reason she traveled to the Hidden Realms.

Other complications arise when the humans back in our universe vote in favor of Rexit, a reality exit referendum to seal off our universe from the rest of the multiverse for fear that immigrants from other universes will come to ours and take our jobs. That’s the kind of priceless humor that Tom Holt serves in abundance. I also appreciated the Eye’s definition of authority as “there’s more of us and we have all the weapons, so we can do what we like to you.”

Even with the reforms inspired by the New Evil, goblins are pretty awful, as are the other dwellers in the Hidden Realms, especially wraiths. ‘The wraith who’s tired of killing is tired of life.” But are humans really any better? Goblins and dwarves are at least honest about their nature. “Humans, alone of the Races, have a unique ability to believe things that are patently untrue, even when the facts are pulling their heads back by the hair and yelling in their faces.”

The humans in the story include Snow White, a lawyer (but not a very good one) who tires of serving Elves, the property owners who are having buyer’s regret, and Theo Bernstein, the fellow in an earlier novel who blew up the Very Very Large Hadron Collider. They all illustrate the folly of being human.

I’m not usually a big fan of fantasy, but the multiverse theory holds that everything is happening somewhere, blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality-based fiction. I am a big fan of Tom Holt. I grin my way through his novels and frequently laugh out loud. I love the way he mixes imagined absurdity with the absurdity of the world we inhabit. An Orc on the Wild Side is perfect for readers who don’t take fantasy, or for that matter humanity, too seriously. "It's better to laugh than to cry" is the message I take from Holt's inventive books.

RECOMMENDED

Merry Christmas!

The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan

First published in India in 2018; published in translation by Grove Press/Black Cat on December 10, 2019

An anthropomorphized goat named Poonachi thinks human thoughts, or perhaps her goat thoughts happen to coincide with those that are common to humans. Her simple life as a goat opens a window on human behavior and attitudes. Poonachi experiences love and desire, loss and depression, jealousy and bitterness. She relishes freedom and resents limits that are placed on her behavior. As do many people who have little control over their simple lives, she bemoans her fate.

The story is set in an arid stretch of land called Odakkan Hill, presumably in or near the state of Tamil Nadu in India. An old man receives a black newborn goat as a gift from a tall stranger in a loincloth who predicts that the goat, as the last kid from a litter of seven, will give birth to seven kids of her own. The stranger is looking for a kind heart to raise the goat, knowing that “men of fortune are as plentiful as fruit worms, but a kind heart is rare.”

The old man’s wife names the malnourished kid Poonachi and raises her as if she were a daughter. The couple’s own daughter lives in another village. They see her only once a year when they travel to the daughter’s village for a festival.

The old man and his wife graze goats and grow a few crops, barely surviving from year to year but living serene lives. Poonachi’s life is equally difficult. Soon after the old man brings her home, Poonachi is nearly carried away by an eagle and is later threatened by a wildcat. She suffers a fever after her ear is pierced by a vindictive bureaucrat. When she is older, Poonachi becomes lost in the forest. Exhilarated by the richness of her new environment, however, she isn’t sure she wants to be found.

Poonachi earns a reputation as a miracle goat, particularly when she fulfills her destiny by giving birth to seven kids. But later, in a year of no rain when the couple faces starvation, they wonder whether she is a curse.

While the story creates sympathy for the kindly old man and his wife, the reader’s most tender feelings will be devoted to Poonachi. Mixing with other goats, Poonachi is bullied by an old buck and feels like an outsider. Still, she slowly makes friends and develops a sense of security, a knowledge of her place in the world. That changes when she is taken to visit the old couple’s daughter. The trip is frightening but it opens Poonachi to new experiences and gives her the opportunity to meet Poovan, a buck who kisses her gently and makes her tremble “at the slightest touch of his horn on her body.”

Poonachi feels despair when she must leave Poovan and again when she must leave the forest. Being bred against her will makes her hate the world. She cries when her kids are taken from her and sold. She sees other members of her herd killed for their meat or as a sacrifice to the gods. Eventually she wonders whether life is worth living if everything that matters is sure to be lost. Only her memories of her second encounter with Poovan, who “helped her learn the secrets of her own body,” sustain her.

The novel’s lessons about the joys and hardships of life come from Poonachi and the old couple, but the novel offers some collateral lessons, as well. Farmers and goatherders impart their wisdom in bromides like “only the egg-laying hen knows the pain of an inflamed asshole.” The novel imagines a ruling regime that is a bureaucratic nightmare, one in which government officials carefully regulate the purchase, sale, and registration of goats. People are encouraged to inform on their neighbors if they do not report the birth of a goat. “The regime had the power to turn its own people, at any moment, into adversaries, enemies and traitors.” In the presence of officials, people have “mouths only to keep shut, hands only to make obeisance, knees only to bend and kneel, backs only to bend, and bodies only to shrink before the authorities.”

I don’t recall when I last read a novel that was quite so charming. The story is sad but enriching. Writers often anthropomorphize animals to illuminate the human condition. I wonder if Perumal Murugan anthropomorphized goats to give them a voice. He may be inviting the reader to consider whether animals are like humans in fundamental ways. Why do we assume that goats do not love each other, do not suffer when we separate them from their lovers or offspring, do not feel abused by owners who dictate their limitations?

I live near some goats who, when I pass them, stare at me with utter malevolence — or so it seems to me. Perhaps this story explains their animosity. It certainly reminds us how simple people, and simple goats who think like people, experience love and pleasure while enduring pain and loss in the course of lives that, in the end, are never simple.

RECOMMENDED

The Weddings by Alexander Chee

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“The Weddings” is a story of romance and changing times, focusing on a gay character who considers for the first time the possibility of marriage after the Supreme Court prohibits states from banning same-sex weddings. Jack met Scott in college and they became good friends. Jack came out and Scott had sex with him, but Scott otherwise confines himself to dating Asian women. Jack is a Korean-American.

They go their separate ways after college but Jack carries a torch for Scott. The advent of Google makes it possible for Jack to find Scott and renew their friendship, prompting Scott to declare both his love for Jack and the disclosure that Jack is still his only male sex partner. They live on different coasts and their friendship continues, but not in the way Jack would like. Still, he feels special because Scott did not experiment with any other man.

Now in his forties, Jack explains that backstory to Caleb after they attend the wedding of two gay men who have lived together for years and can finally marry. The wedding makes Jack think about Caleb as a potential husband. Jack asks Caleb to another wedding when he learns that Scott is marrying a Korean woman. The wedding gives Jack the opportunity to fret about his inability to speak Korean, about the wedding gossip he hears about Scott’s past, and about his confused mashup of feelings toward Scott and Caleb.

As I read “The Weddings,” I kept wondering whether it was going anywhere. It went to a predictable destination. That isn’t necessarily a complaint — not all stories need to surprise, and predictable endings are often the endings that readers want. The ending is nevertheless anticlimactic, given the drama that Jack builds as he frets about Scott and straight weddings.

The story is nevertheless admirably observant. Jack takes note of wedding customs that he’s never understood and comments on the changing nature of society, both in terms of gay acceptance and in the willingness of Korean-American women to pursue their own lives, rather than the lives their mothers want them to have. On occasion, the story smacks of a Harlequin romance. Sentences like “How long he had wanted to hear something like this” make me cringe. Still, the story is heartfelt and honest, two qualities that largely offset its faults.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS