Old Scores by Will Thomas

Published by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on October 3, 2017

After showing his garden to the Japanese ambassador, Cyrus Barker disappears for a few hours. Thomas Llewellyn searches for him and is promptly arrested. He discovers that Barker was arrested earlier for shooting the ambassador through an open window at the embassy. Llewellyn, having committed no provable crime, is released, but Special Branch thinks it has a case against Barker. It turns out that Barker does, in fact, have a motive, if he were the type to settle old scores with a pistol.

Barker’s ward, a young Chinese woman who has married a man with questionable business enterprises, is also peripherally involved with the ambassador’s death. There is no shortage of other suspects, including the Ambassador’s bodyguards (who were selected by the Japanese military), local Chinese criminals, and officials of the British Foreign Office. Identifying the true killer becomes the reader’s mission.

Old Scores delves into Barker’s past, revealing secrets about the time he spent in Japan (hint: there is a reason Barker knows so much about traditions of the samurai). The novel starts as a mystery but by the end, it is Barker’s story. The philosophical question Will Thomas poses is whether it is better to settle old scores or to promote the healing of old wounds by understanding the motivations of those who have wronged us.

The story has some poignant moments. As usual, Will Thomas mixes action and humor into the plot (the humor primarily stems from Llewellyn’s ongoing frustration with Barker), but the glimpse into Barker’s past gives Old Scores more depth than some other entries in a series that has always been surprisingly entertaining. I’m not generally a fan of Sherlock Holmes clones, but Will Thomas tells his stories in a distinctive voice that I have grown to appreciate.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

The Whispering Room by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on November 21, 2017

Anything that Dean Koontz writes is entertaining by definition, but the Jane Hawk series is far from his best work. The mind-control conspiracy premise is overdone and not particularly convincing.

The Whispering Room gives shape to the “maniacal conspiracy of utopian totalitarians” that Jane Hawk began to uncover in The Silent Corner. As we learned in that novel, the masters of the universe are using nanotechnology to infiltrate brains and force people to kill themselves for the betterment of society (at least as the totalitarian conspirators see it). In this novel, sweet elderly teachers are committing terrorist acts for the same reason. Why sweet elderly teachers are seen as a threat to world supremacy is explained only by the assurance that they were selected by a computer. Presumably the computer had its reasons. Again, I'm not convinced.

The bad guys are “elitists” with Ivy League educations who belittle individuals with “third tier” college educations, which may give the story some populist appeal. Koontz more than once writes about the “foolishness of the elites,” using the kind of divisive political buzzword that stokes fury in certain societal groups but doesn’t really mean anything. That’s unusual and surprising coming from Koontz, who typically embraces unity.

A new addition to the cast is a local law enforcement officer, Luther Tillman, who investigates the murder of a governor, a crime the feds seem surprisingly unmotivated to investigate. Luther stumbles across some journals that refer to a spider building a web in the killer’s brain, and uncovers evidence pointing him to a conference that the sweet killer attended — a conference that seems to have changed her, and perhaps others who were invited so that their brains could be captured.

Another new addition is a kid named Harley who knows that all the adults in his town have taken the Stepford treatment. Luther is a good character but Harley is a bit corny, the kind of brave and adorable kid that has become a stock Hollywood character. I expect more than that from Koontz. I appreciate, however, the minor characters who commit random acts of decency, the sort of people Koontz often scatters through novels to suggest that the human race is not universally awful.

Meanwhile, Jane roars through the novel like a force of nature, moving forward in her investigation from bad guy to bad guy while staying a step ahead of all the bad guys who want to kill her. And since this is a mind-control conspiracy, pretty much everyone wants to kill her. That gives the novel energy and motivates the reader to continue turning pages. And there’s a bizarre fight scene near the end involving nonhuman foes that I enjoyed simply because it is outside the norm of thriller fare. Not entirely believable, but fun.

That is, in fact, my reaction to both novels. I’m just not buying much of what happens, but I’ve enjoyed reading both books. Despite characters who aren’t as meaty as Koontz’s best, an unoriginal premise, and too many unconvincing scenes, Koontz’s ability to hold a reader’s attention makes the novels an easy read. Just don’t expect the books to go where no author has gone before.

The story does not end in The Whispering Room (I'm not sure how many novels in this series Koontz intends to write) but the ending is not a cliffhanger, which I appreciate. The first two novels have enough merit that I'll read the next one without being manipulated by a cliffhanger, but they don't have enough merit to earn wild praise.

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Ultraluminous by Katherine Faw

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux/MCD on December 5, 2017

Ultraluminous is narrated by a prostitute who buys heroin with designer labels. She describes her life and thoughts in snippets. She comments upon bars and sex and getting high and her memories of the Sheikh who paid her for sex in Dubai, starting her on the road of upscale prostitution.

The narrator comments upon the five regular men in her life, designated by descriptions (the junk-bond guy, the calf’s brain guy, the art guy, the ex-Ranger, the guy who buys her things) rather than names, presumably because their names aren’t worth remembering. She comments upon the art of prostitution (holding a man’s attention requires a prostitute to be sad but not too sad, unlike strippers who must appear to be happy). And she comments upon her sparse nonsexual interactions with the world, which primarily involve women at her nail salon, a Polish diner, Duane Reade, and her yoga class. Women judge her and she judges them for different reasons.

The snippets slowly build a picture of a bright, observant woman who is living a pointless and unsatisfying life. The title refers to an astronomical X-ray that shows the universe being ripped apart, which the narrator sees as a metaphor for her life. When asked how she can have sex with men for money, she answers “Heroin. Cocaine is for stripping.” Given the sexual tastes of the guys she describes, heroin does seem like a job requirement. But she thinks it’s blindness, the inability to see what’s coming, that keeps us alive. That might not be enough.

For much of the novel, I was wondering whether the snippets would add up to a story. It does reach a climax (pardon the pun), but before that point, the snippets add up to a life. The protagonist is unabashedly crude, but she has valuable insights into the men who either abuse or reject her (or both). Her life isn’t safe and she doesn’t seem to care. Accepting abuse is a choice she has made, a tradeoff that’s preferable to perils she might otherwise face. As she tells the junk-bond guy, “terrible things happen every day, not just to you.” Refreshingly, she doesn’t paint herself as a victim (she’s moved beyond wallowing) and spends little time telling the reader how she came to live the life she inhabits. She is who she is.

Ultraluminous might be seen as a commentary on the masters of the universe who act as if the ordinary rules of behavior don’t apply to them, who treat beautiful young men as fantasies and abuse them because they can afford to pay for the women’s acquiescence, who leave the women “on the floor of a hotel room when they got bored like anything else they once had to possess.” But more illuminating is the narrator’s ability to understand and manipulate the men, to let them control her as a way of controlling them, to take advantage of their self-delusions, to allow her body to be rented while refusing to be owned.

Ultraluminous is a powerful novel, not just in its ending (which is foreshadowed and not entirely unexpected), but in the way the snippets gain a cumulative force. What seems like a frivolous story about a frivolous person morphs into a convincing account of a damaged woman whose attempts to cope with pain — brief and infrequent moments of pure joy (not counting the heroin) — cannot undo the life into which she has fallen. There’s something exquisite about the way this story is told, and something horrifying about what it reveals.

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Bubba and the Cosmic Blood Suckers by Joe Lansdale

Published by Subterranean on October 31, 2017

Joe Lansdale is a versatile writer. He’s churned out westerns, horror novels, science fiction, and a ton of crime novels. Some of his books approach the subject matter seriously, many are written as comedy, and some are a blend. He never fails to entertain, but occasional efforts, including this one, seem dashed off. Lansdale wrote the story as a prequel to Bubba Ho-Tep, a novella that was made into a movie several years ago, so maybe he was kicking the idea around for a while and felt the need to jot it down.

One of my favorite horror novels is Lansdale’s The Bottoms, a truly frightening story. As you might guess from the title, Bubba and the Cosmic Blood Suckers plays with the horror genre but the story’s tongue-in-cheek nature makes it more funny than scary. Still, the creatures Lansdale describes in the opening chapter (written as a straight horror story) demonstrate how capably Lansdale can scare the pants off his readers. Had he written this as a straight horror story, I might have wet the bed.

So perhaps it's fortunate that Lansdale quickly introduces Elvis and his team of monster fighters, led by his manager, Colonel Parker. Already, I’m sure, you can see the potential for humor. This is a jaded Elvis, at the peak of his career and starting to lose control of his weight. He still has his charisma (and still has a lot of sex), but the charisma is attracting a dark force from another dimension. The “cosmic blood suckers” in the novel’s title actually feed on charisma more than blood, which makes Elvis a prime target.

Johnny Smack, who tells some of the story in the form of journal entries, is one of Elvis’ bodyguards. He is also part of the Hidden Agenda, a group that for centuries has battled monsters. After bodies are discovered of unidentified people who have had their innards sucked out, Richard Nixon sends Hidden Agenda on a mission to tame the responsible monsters. The Colonel, Johnny Smack, John Henry, a charismatic singer named Jenny, a wizard named Jack, and a fellow called the Blind Man join Elvis on the Hidden Agenda team.

The concept is goofy enough to be funny, and Lansdale adds characteristic bits of humor in nearly every paragraph. One of my favorites is a barrier to keep ghouls away that is made from ashes from incinerated corpses mixed with nun pee, but there are too many examples to count. One of the funniest passages involves Elvis’ sexual encounter with a ghost. Well, it’s Elvis, so he really can’t refuse.

I can’t say I laughed out loud at much of the goofiness, but I was consistently amused and entertained. Lansdale can do that without even trying, but the story does give the impression that he didn’t try very hard. I look forward to Lansdale returning to meatier work, but in the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with being amused.

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