Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Published digitally by Open Road Media on July 14, 2015

Wylding Hall is sort of a gentle horror story, if that’s possible. What kind of horror? Demons? Ghosts? Witches? Monsters? All I will say is that this is neither a zombie novel nor a “space aliens who look like lizards” novel. Which is fine because the world has too many of those already.

Wylding Hall combines a supernatural/horror novel with a band story. The band (Windhollow Faire) became famous after their Wylding Hall album but it was once a bunch of kids playing folk songs in London pubs for fun. We learn early on from Lesley, the American singer who joined the band as Arianna’s replacement, that Arianna, after being replaced, fell to her death from guitar player Julian’s window. The producer decided the band should recover from her death by spending the summer in the country recording their second album at Wylding Hall, an old Tudor full of strange rooms, surrounded by spooky woods. In retrospect, it is one of the most influential albums in the history of progressive folk, or so the producer claims.

The novel is told in the form of a documentary. Band members, the producer, and occasional outsiders talk to a documentarian about the summer that the Wylding Hall album was made (and, to a lesser extent, about the backgrounds of the band members).

During the first half of Wylding Hall, characters mention, without actually describing, an event that occurred during the band’s stay. They also make references to dead birds, the disembodied voice of a child singing, an occasional apparition, warnings from a local farmer to stay out of the woods, and other foreshadowing of a horror to come. But most of the time, the characters are talking about themselves, their relationships, and the process of making music. It is in the second half that something unexpected and unexplained occurs.

I called this a gentle horror novel because no people are torn to shreds, or turned inside out, or have their blood sucked out. If violence is what you want, Wylding Hall will probably bore you. If you’re looking for a good band story, the kind of story that allows relationships to develop among people who are forced by circumstances to spend a lot of time together, you’ll probably like Wylding Hall. I don’t know that the supernatural element adds much -- it isn’t particularly frightening -- but it does provide the glue that holds the story together.

RECOMMENDED

Graveyard by William C. Dietz

Published by Ace on January 26, 2016

Graveyard is the third novel in the Mutant Files series.

When the body of a mutant who died from a botched face transplant is dumped near a church, Det. Cassandra Lee gets the call. She investigates that case while continuing her efforts (detailed in the first two novels) to track down the serial killer called Bonebreaker, who may be hiding in a mutant graveyard (hence the title). But first she has to rescue the mayor, who has taken shelter from shells that the Aztec navy is firing into Los Angeles as long-delayed payback for the Mexican-American War. The Aztecs have also landed mutant troops in California and Texas. Between the criminal gangs, the heavily armed civilian population, and the Aztecs, Lee doesn’t know who will be shooting at her next.

Lee is in a relationship with a psychologist named Kane, although the relationship is threatened when, after unlikely murder charges are brought against Kane (a street shooting in self-defense), Lee learns that Kane was accused of murder once before. The victim was Kane’s wife, prompting Lee to ask, “What wife?”

The bones of a good novel are present in Graveyard, but they are never given flesh. None of the plot threads have any emotional heft. The Aztecs exist as a backdrop to create action scenes but they do little to advance the novel. The Bonebreaker is a stock serial killer. He lacks depth and, as serial killers go, he isn’t very interesting. Neither the improbable political scandal that drives the plot nor Lee’s domestic drama are well-developed. They both just fizzle out.

If you’re a fan of dialog like “We need to get the killer off the street, pronto!” you might like William Dietz’ prose style. The novel has the feel of having been rushed to completion.

Dietz is a competent writer. The story is coherent and some aspects of the background are interesting. Unfortunately, the novel as a whole is not sufficiently interesting to earn my recommendation.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The God's Eye View by Barry Eisler

Published by Thomas & Mercer on February 2, 2016

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, The God’s Eye View serves up a timely story about an NSA director with a god complex who uses a vast and secret network of surveillance technology to spy on anyone he deems a security threat -- including Americans and particularly reporters and bloggers who pose a threat to his own job security. The NSA surveillance systems are so compartmentalized that, as was his intent, only the director understands the big picture. He looks forward to the day when parents can be manipulated into implanting microchips in their children as an anti-kidnapping device, enabling the NSA to track everyone who receives the chip. And like all government officials who want to spy on Americans, he justifies his actions with the belief that the only people who want privacy are those who are up to no good.

The title refers to an NSA intelligence gathering program that is even more extensive (and illegal) than Snowden’s revelations. When a leak of information concerning that program leads to an extreme response, an NSA analyst becomes concerned that the agency is taking it upon itself to dispose of inconvenient Americans.

Barry Eisler has fun describing how unelected government officials make decisions that are not theirs to make, then sell the public on those decisions by manipulating the media. He understands how easy it is for government officials to seduce the media and how buzz words like “national security” can be used to conceal nefarious intentions.

A couple of strong characters are the key to the novel’s success. Eisler creates a ruthless killer who happens to be deaf, gives him a detailed background, and humanizes him in a way that makes him sympathetic (if you ignore the fact that he’s a ruthless killer). Of course, Eisler honed the craft of humanizing assassins in his John Rain novels, and he puts that talent to good use here. The NSA director and his second assassin are so vile as to be cartoonish, but the female analyst and her deaf son are, if not deep, at least recognizable as real people. The conflicts that the analyst and the deaf killer both feel between loyalty to an employer and loyalty to the truth give the novel its heart.

The story follows an unsurprising course leading to a resolution that is largely predictable. Still, the story would probably have been disappointing if it had not resolved as expected. There are times when Eisler’s prose feels a bit rushed, but most of the time his writing style is fine.

Eisler appends a number of sources for those who want more information about the government's abuses of surveillance as well as its abuses of people who make internal complaints about illegal surveillance. It’s a little late in the day for a book like this to be lauded as a cautionary tale, but it is always good to read novels that stand as a counterpoint to simplistic novels that view privacy as a quaint notion that just gets in the way of slaughtering terrorists.

RECOMMENDED

The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino

Published by Simon & Schuster on February 9, 2016

The Fugitives is a difficult novel to classify (I regard that as a plus). It falls under the broad category of literary fiction, but it fits within (and elevates) the genre of crime fiction. It isn’t a comedy, exactly, but the story is light and filled with amusing moments when it isn’t a contemplation of death or failure or betrayal.

Some of The Fugitives is narrated by a writer with a talent for wasting time. Having been booted out of his New York home after a disastrous affair, Alexander “Sandy” Mulligan is now wasting time in Upper Michigan. The sojourn gives him a chance to ponder storytelling, which isn’t so different from living -- breaking time into discrete chunks of “anecdote and memory; association and reminiscence; conjecture, desire, and regret; the bones of the lunchtime saga over a glass of wine.” Unfortunately, he isn’t getting his new book written and is about to be sued for breach of contract.

Christopher Sorrentino advances the storytelling theme with a character named Salteau, a Native American (or not) who tells traditional stories to children twice a week at a public library. Meanwhile, a reporter from Chicago named Kat Danhoff, following a story about money stolen from a tribal casino, is taking an interest in Salteau for reasons unrelated to his role as a repository of folk tales. She thinks Salteau might be hiding something, or hiding from something … but is he part of a story that a journalist has any reason to pursue? And what should her editor do if the casino might pull its advertising if the story runs?

Mulligan’s description of his unfaithful past is the familiar stuff of literary fiction but Sorrentino finds ways to describe it that make his insights seem fresh. An extended paragraph about Mulligan’s lover’s underwear, in fact, is nearly enough to make the novel worthwhile. Sorrentino brings the same astute observational power to his third person account of Kat’s failed relationship with her first husband and her troubled relationship with the current one. My favorite line, though, is about an independent bookstore clerk who “shoved the books in a plastic bag as if they were socks or pork chops and sent her on her way, corroding a little more the romance that survived, God only knew why, in Kat’s heart.”

Sorrentino has fun with his offbeat plot and characters. That makes the book a fun read, even if it’s not particularly deep. Mulligan enjoys telling a good lie, particularly when he’s talking to a reporter, so his interaction with Kat is amusing. Identity confusion drives the plot and furthers one of the book’s themes: “Nearly everything is unknowable.” The future is “immune to prediction,” as is the novel’s ending.

The story bounces around in time and sometimes we see the same scene from the perspective of different characters, which might frustrate readers who are wedded to linear storytelling. Yet Sorrentino enhances the story by altering time and perspective and voice, techniques that not many writers can pull off quite so successfully. The techniques cause the reader to question just how reliable Mulligan might be in his first-person narrative. In a book about storytelling, that might be the most important question of all.

RECOMMENDED

City by Clifford D. Simak

First published in novel form in 1952 and revised in 1980; published by Open Road Media on July 21, 2015

In City, Clifford Simak imagined a future in which cities are dying. In early parts of the novel, cities are being abandoned as people flee to the country, where they can live like kings on large lots, commuting to work in the family plane. Later in the novel, Earth has all but been abandoned by humans, the population having fled to Jupiter and other planets, leaving behind a small settlement in Geneva and a bunch of forgotten cities, robots, and dogs.

Like many other sf novels of its era, City is a fix-up. Simak strung together stories he had written that occupy the same future history, most of which involve members of the Webster family over a number of generations, served always by Jenkins, their nearly ageless robot. Simak bridges the stories with new material that provides continuity. The transitional entries consist of the writings of a canine academic examining the old and beloved stories of Earth’s past. Dogs have inherited the Earth, as they should.

In the first story, squatters occupy homes abandoned by families that have moved to the country, making the cities havens for members of an underclass who have nowhere else to go. The few remaining farmers who grow crops in soil can’t compete with the hydroponic farms and, lacking jobs, are forced to join the squatters. The government has decided that the squatters and land farmers and other malcontents need to be “adjusted,” a notion that is resisted by people who prefer to think for themselves.

In the second installment, a man whose family (the Websters) has occupied an estate for generations discovers that he (like his father before him) has developed an irrational fear of leaving his land -- yet the future may depend on his ability to overcome that fear by helping a Martian who holds the key to humanity’s future. The grandson of the man in the second story is responsible for the talking dogs that appear in the third story. Apart from establishing the legacy of dogs, the story explores the future of human evolution.

The fourth tale also involves a dog, although this one hasn’t learned to talk, at least in the conventional way. The dog and his fleas accompany the dog’s human companion on a mission to learn why people have been unable to adapt to life on Jupiter. I get the sense that the story wasn’t written as part of the same future history but the one that follows continues the fourth story and ties in with the rest of the volume. The fourth and fifth stories both feature the same characters, a man who becomes something other than a man and a dog who becomes something other than a dog (although still a best friend). The stories discuss the wonderful futures that might lay within mankind’s grasp, and whether mankind would, or should, move in those directions.

By the sixth tale, the planet is pretty much empty unless you count the dogs and robots and mutants. One of the last humans on the planet, living with the rest of the humans in Geneva (the last city in the world), is a Webster. He returns to his ancestral home where he meets the family robot, talks to dogs, wonders what the dogs hear that men can’t, and asks himself what went wrong. This is a quiet, surprising story about hope and rebirth. It is one of the book’s highlights.

Jenkins returns in the next-to-last story, which takes place about 7,000 years after the first one. Dogs (and a bunch of other talking animals) have inherited the Earth. This is where we find out whether they’ve made it a better world than humans did.

The final story in the original volume takes place about 12,000 years beyond the first story and, wouldn’t you know it, people are gone but ants are still troublesome. The story is pure Simak: a quiet, thoughtful story about the virtue of doing the right thing even when the result will be sad, because it is better to be sad (or dead) than to betray your values.

City was published in 1952. It was reissued in 1980 with an additional story, written twenty years after the others and appropriately titled “Epilog.” The story was Simak’s contribution to a volume that commemorated John W. Campbell after his death. The epilog is a perfect fit, showing no sign of a two decade lag since the original stories were concluded.

City touches upon themes that are common in Simak’s fiction: individualism that resists “mob psychology”; the inevitable continuation of evolution; the human drive for social approval; the virtue of a simple agrarian lifestyle; how wonderful it would be to use our brains in full, instead of using just a tiny part; the importance of work and sacrifice to humanity’s future; the benefits of conflict and competition and tenacity; the curse of memory; and the belief that as time goes on and on, things will get better, although not in ways that we can possibly anticipate. Adding those themes together creates the sense that Simak believed in a human destiny that we are still far from achieving -- and maybe a canine destiny, and a robot destiny, as well.

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