Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on December 3, 2019

Dead Astronauts is told, in part, from the perspective of a fox who merged with a biomechanical version of itself and was sent on missions of exploration, apparently to other times or universes. The fox plotted revenge against the humans who, in its view, were torturers. After all, humans hunt foxes for sport because foxes can’t hunt humans. When it is the fox’s turn to kill, it muses: “Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.”

One theme of Dead Astronauts is that after centuries of being hunted or used as test subjects, animals might have the last laugh. Scientists who try to un-fox a fox might find themselves outfoxed. In that regard, Dead Astronauts might be viewed as an animal rights story, a reminder that our fear of alien abduction is no different than a bird’s fear of being caged by humans, that gathering data by harming an animal is no different than an animal tearing apart a human to satisfy its curiosity. It’s all just a matter of perspective.

The story might also be viewed as a cautionary tale of the consequences that follow from the human capacity to block unhappy thoughts. The fox imagines what humans might ask if they were honest: “Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?”

While this is in part the story of a fox, it is also the story of all foxes, because the fox as a species knows how to burrow down, to hide, to survive, perhaps to outlast humanity. Sometimes it is the story of birds and fish, both specific creatures and a species in general. We’re all part of the same world, the novel suggests, one that humans are insufficiently meek to inherit.

Yet the story is also told, in part, from the perspective of Charlie X, a human who was still just Charlie when, as a boy, his father worked for the Company. Charlie’s gift was the creation of new creatures, biomechanical life forms with altered genes, some of which he created without the Company’s knowledge. Charlie, like the blue fox he created, viewed his own creator — his father — as a torturer.

Charlie and the Company made something of a mess. The scientists who made the mess, likened to magicians, left destruction in their wake, at least in one universe. A homeless woman from the past named Sarah, contemplating an apparent journal from the future, seems to suggest that there might be something worth living for, even if that thing is unknowable. Just ask the fox.

Maybe those few facts are spoilers (although I would have found a user’s guide to be helpful) because the first three quarters of the novel leave the reader clueless about what’s going on. Those chapters introduce three characters: Grayson, Chen, and Moss. One of them might be a dead astronaut, or perhaps they all are. Shape-shifting Moss might literally be moss, but perhaps none of them are human, at least not now. They seem to be living different versions of the same history over and over, repeatedly encountering a blue fox and a duck with a broken wing, not knowing from one encounter to the next whether those creatures will be allies or enemies. They seem to be looking for Charlie X, although what they hope to accomplish by finding him is unclear. I assume they want to change the past or damage the Company through a strategy yet to be invented.

Does such a baffling story merit a recommendation? At times the narrative approaches incomprehensibility. I suppose the same might be said about Ulysses, a highly regarded classic by those who made it the end, so perhaps hard sledding isn’t a reason to condemn a novel. I can say that the fox has more characterization than is given to the typical fictional fox, and that the broad outlines of biogenetic engineering that form the novel’s background, while common in science fiction, are intriguing. I can say that the prose is sometimes poetic, although Jeff VanderMeer sometimes abandons poetry to repeat the same cluster of sentences dozens of times over the course of several pages. I can say that I would probably get more out of the novel after a second reading, but I don’t know if I will ever find the energy to struggle through it again (I’m still awaiting the strength to take another stab at Ulysses). Since struggle can be its own reward, I’ll recommend Dead Astronauts guardedly with the caveat that the novel isn’t for readers who want the clarity offered by a writer who spells everything out.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Girl on the Porch by Richard Chizmar

Published by Subterranean Press on August 31, 2019

Repeated rings of a doorbell go unanswered until Frank Urban rolls out of bed and finds nobody at the door. In the morning, his wife Angela texts their neighbor. Sarah Tucker remembers hearing their dog barking during the night, so after reading the text she checks the footage on their home’s security camera. The camera shows a young girl on the porch, obviously scared, who appears to have escaped captivity. The police are baffled.

The video goes viral and the town panics. About half of The Girl on the Porch — the good half — is taken up by the police investigation and gossipy neighbors who are looking to cast blame for the mysterious girl’s fate, whatever it might have been.  Intermittently, we learn of events that might either be threatening or misperceived, some focused on the Tuckers: a footprint outside a window, a man who seems to be paying undue attention to the Tuckers’ daughter.

The second half reveals the fate of the girl in the video. The story then focuses on the wife of a main character who, along with the police, begins to suspect that her husband may have been responsible for what happened to the girl.

While The Girl on the Porch sets up an intriguing mystery, the mystery’s abrupt resolution leaves too many threads untied. The resolution gives the impression of a story that was written on the fly by a writer who eventually realized he had no idea how to end it. Fortunately, this is a novella, so I didn’t feel that my relatively brief investment of time in the story was entirely wasted. I haven’t read anything else by Richard Chizmar, but given the novella’s first half, I’m sure he’s capable to stronger work.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Impossible Causes by Julie Mayhew

Published by Bloomsbury on November 19, 2019

Impossible Causes is a Me Too novel, telling a story that demonstrates the collective power of women who finally reveal their stories of abuse. It is also a novel about the corruption of power, a story of men who seek or hold power so that they can abuse it. The framework of the story, involving a remote British island whose religious inhabitants fear witchcraft, is so farfetched that it robs the story of its drama, and the story is so contrived that the title might more accurately have been Impossible Plot. There is much to like about Impossible Causes but the novel’s flaws nearly outweigh its merits.

Leah Cedars is a virgin when Impossible Causes begins. She has a teaching post on the forgotten British island of Lark, an island populated by a religious community that does not welcome the outside world. People not born on the island are known by the derisive term coycrock. Women with black hair, like Leah, are revered as bearers of good luck, but Leah —known to all as “Miss Cedars” after taking a teaching position — feels she has no luck at all. Her brother has fled the island as have many others. Some have chosen to run from evil rather than confront it.

In addition to Leah, the islanders who are most significant to the story are Viola Kendrick and three girls who are approaching adulthood, known collectively as the Eldest Girls of St. Rita, the name their school shares with the patron saint of impossible causes (as well as abused wives and heartbroken women). We learn in the first pages that Viola has found a body, but it is only in the last pages that we learn the body’s identity. The novel jumps around in time to build a backstory of events in 2017 and 2018 that lead to Viola’s discovery.

Viola is a coycrock who craves the acceptance of the Eldest Girls. She is also a drama queen and an attention-seeking liar with a history of making false accusations. She would have been a more interesting character if her lies had not been so obvious.

Other significant characters are Saul Cooper and Ben Hailey. Saul is the island’s Customs Officer, not quite twice Leah’s age but nevertheless smitten with Leah, an attraction that Viola encourages and that Leah does not shun. Saul’s competition is Ben, a young teacher (the first male in that role, apart from the headmaster) who is newly arrived from the mainland. Leah feels destined to fall in love with Ben thanks to a reading of Tarot cards.

Ben also befriends the Eldest Girls, who seem to be monkeying around with witchcraft or summoning the dead while prancing about in the nude at one of those a mystical circles of stones that seem to be everywhere in British fiction. Ben is suspected of playing a role in the slaying of a goat and in the Eldest Girl’s suspected use of the goat’s heart as an effigy to cause a death. Whether Ben has monkeyed around with the girls and/or the goat, whether he is a good or bad guy, is one of the novel’s suspense-building questions.

All of this is background to a plot that leads up to the Me Too moment. While the story attempts to illustrate how women (and men) might remain silent when confronted with sexual harassment and other forms of sexual abuse, the odd setting robs the story of its power. The women on Lark apparently remain silent because they are on Lark and thus unaware that women are no longer putting up with subjugation by men. The fact that women in the real world remain silent is a more compelling story than the one told in Impossible Causes. The behavior of women on a male-dominated religious community doesn’t tell the reader much about the behavior of women in a less artificial and more modern setting.

When the Me Too moment finally arrives, it feels too contrived to be meaningful. The novel’s other key dramatic moment, involving the body Viola discovers, also comes across as a contrivance, an unlikely event involving mistaken identity that exists solely to create drama without regard to its improbability.

While the events of the novel take place in the very recent past, the story seems like an attempt to engraft modern themes (including Me Too) onto a time when people still believed in witchcraft. I suppose an isolated religious community (its leaders refuse to allow the construction of a cellphone tower) might be reality challenged, but I wasn’t convinced

I admired the novel’s character development (apart from the Elder Girls, who have no obvious motivation to monkey about with witchcraft) and I enjoyed Julie Mayhew’s prose. Some of her provocative passages (“Women are the true masters of deception, have always had to be. They don’t get to decide which of their behaviours are virtues.”) might spark interesting book club discussions. The story’s suggestion that religious intolerance and power are destructive forces, while not an original thought, gives the novel some weight. Balancing the positives against the negatives, I can only say that readers who are drawn to the message or the prose without concern for the story’s plausibility will probably like the book more than I did.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

When Old Midnight Comes Along by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Macmillan/Forge Books on December 3, 2019

When Old Midnight Comes Along is the kind of detective novel that should be a model for the genre. Loren D. Estleman’s plot is tight and credible. He conveys the depth of his characters without exploring their backgrounds in unnecessary detail. His prose style is clear and uncluttered while retaining a literary flair. Estelman has distilled, in this 28th Amos Walker mystery, the essence of what a detective novel should be.

Francis Xavier Lawes, a prominent Detroit businessman, hires Amos to find his wife. That could be tricky since Paula Lawes has been missing for more than six years and in less than a year will be presumed dead. Lawes tells Amos he wants to know his wife’s fate because he plans to remarry and would like to get the declaration of death out of the way without delay. Lawes’ intended is Holly Pride, who began working for him as a receptionist before (in my uncharitable interpretation of her intent) she decided to become a gold digger.

Amos starts by charming Deborah Stonesmith at the Detroit Police Department to let him review the file regarding Paula’s disappearance (in other words, she wants Amos to get out of her hair). He learns that Lawes and his wife were overextended on vacation home mortgages and credit card debt. That brings Amos to the police detective who ran the investigation. John Alderdyce has moved on to private security, but he's convinced Lawes murdered Paula and regrets his inability to prove it.

A complicating fact involves Paula’s car, found abandoned near the site where a cop named Marcus Root was killed. A retired police commander, Albert White, tells Amos that Root was shot while he was following Paula’s car. Root’s notebook was missing from his patrol car, suggesting that Root was killed because he had information about Paula that his notebook (or Root) would have revealed.

Other key characters include Oakes Steadman, a former gang member who now works for the police as a gang consultant, George Hoyle, who was having an affair with Paula, and Andrea Dawson, a publicist who was working with Paula when she dropped off the grid. As Amos wears down his shoe leather, the information he gathers about Paula from each character becomes even more confusing. The confusion is compounded when he discovers that a ring — probably but not certainly Paula’s engagement ring — might be connected to a crime.

The various characters provide conflicting clues that Amos and the reader will need to sort out to discover Paula’s fate. The characters have the fullness of unique individuals, unlike the stock characters that so many genre writers recycle. Estleman creates atmosphere without dwelling on needless lessons in Detroit's architecture or political history. The solution to the mystery is clever and not easily guessed (at least not by me). Unlike many modern crime novelists, Estleman finds a plausible way to bring all the characters and clues together and leaves no loose ends dangling. When Old Midnight Comes Along is exactly what an old-school detective novel should be: entertaining, challenging, and satisfying.

RECOMMENDED

Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel

First published in 1965; published by Vintage on November 20, 2018

Night of Camp David is a prescient novel; its foreshadowing of today’s political landscape is eerie. It is easy to understand why Vintage decided last year that it was time to rerelease this 1965 book to a new audience. Its author, Fletcher Knebel, was a journalist turned novelist who is best known for the political thriller Seven Days in May.

President Mark Hollenbach invites Senator Jim MacVeagh to Camp David in the middle of the night. The president wants to discuss his plan to wiretap every phone in the nation. Now this is 1965, back when the notion that the government would invade our privacy and use computers to store millions of telephone calls was still shocking. The novel also imagines that people are shocked to learn that the vice president steered a construction contract to his friends. What would the public in 1965 have thought about a president who profits when foreign officials book rooms in his hotels? Nothing shocks any more.

At any rate, Hollenbach sees his vice president as an enemy (the mild corruption scandal in any event means the veep has to go) and is considering MacVeagh as his candidate for vice president in his second term. Hollenbach doesn’t know that MacVeagh is having an affair with a woman named Rita. MacVeagh knows he should break it off (again, the novel was written in an era when having an affair might have been a liability for a politician) while Rita knows that MacVeagh is a lovable, good-natured, lazy bum who has no business being VP.

The novel recalls a simpler time when affairs by politicians were not often publicized because voters would have held them against the candidate. Today a president can brag about grabbing women by the pussy and be accused of multiple sexual assaults without losing the loyalty of his base. The times they have a-changed.

Hollenbach turns out to be creepily authoritarian. He wants to cut off White House access to a journalist who portrays him in an unfavorable light. Why does that sound familiar? He views himself as the victim of vast conspiracies, complaining of “an obvious conspiracy afoot to sully and demean me, even to destroy me.” He doesn’t use the phrase “witch hunt,” but the president’s paranoia is otherwise familiar to current consumers of the news. The Secretary of Defense, justly worried about the man who has his finger on the button, notes that Hollenbach “thinks he’s the victim of conspiracies who are plotting to destroy him, and he has obvious delusions of grandeur.” Yet Hollenbach is, for the most part, a competent president, unlike the “very stable genius” who currently occupies the office.

Hollenbach wants the United States to add Canada and the Scandinavian countries to its territory (presumably adding to the nation’s whiteness). He doesn’t mention buying Greenland, but again the similarity between fiction and fact is uncanny.

Relatively early in the novel, MacVeagh begins to fear that the president is insane. The president’s supporters, on the other hand, make it seem that MacVeagh is the crazy one. Perhaps they have alternative facts at hand. In any event, treating bearers of unwelcome news as the enemy is another way in which the novel foreshadows the current political landscape.

Leaders of the president’s party (he happens to be a Democrat) are reluctant to interfere with the presidency, but to their credit, they eventually realize that something needs to be done. Knebel probably would never have imagined a political party acting as a cheerleader for a corrupt, morally bankrupt president who suffers from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. He did, however, understand that “millions of ordinary people like to imagine there’s a conspiracy behind everything.” That problem, exacerbated by the ability of conspiracy theories to go viral on the internet, has only grown worse.

Hollenbach at least is capable of recognizing when he goes over the top and apologizing for his paranoid attacks on loyal citizens. He apparently hasn’t learned that never admitting error and doubling down on obnoxious behavior is the best way to excite a bloodthirsty base.

If not for its remarkable parallel of a president who came to power more than 50 years after the novel was published, Night of Camp David would be too dated to recommend. Women are treated as silly creatures whose job is to serve men. As a political thriller, the novel is tame by modern standards. The crisis resolves too easily and the resolution isn’t particularly believable. But given Knebel’s ability to imagine a future that has come to pass, the novel is of more than historical interest.

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