Kill City Blues by Richard Kadrey

Published by Harper Voyager on July 30, 2013

Kill City Blues is the fifth novel in the Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series.  Half-angel James Stark (sometimes known as Sandman Slim) is no longer Lucifer, although he still occupies Lucifer's penthouse at Chateau Marmont. Something not quite human wants to buy the Qomrama Om Ya (a weapon that kills gods) from Stark, but Stark doesn't have it. Since the Qomrama can be used to release the Angra Orn Ya (or to keep the Angra imprisoned), Stark decides finding it will be his best chance to protect humanity from an Angra invasion. The last Stark knew, the Qomrama was in the possession of a rogue angel named Aelita. His search for its current location takes him to Hell (of course), to a whole bunch of bars (naturally), and to a shopping mall called Kill City. Oddly enough, the story turns out to be a search for God (with a capital G), or at least for one of His parts, now that He's been broken into five separate entities.

The story is relatively mindless -- Sandman Slim finds a variety of ways to kill a variety of supernatural entities before they kill him -- but the prose is intelligent, as are the jokes, the snide comments about LA, and the snappy dialog. Kill City Blues works well as a tongue-in-cheek quest/adventure story. Dark humor is mixed with enough light humor to keep the tone from becoming oppressive, while periodic action scenes keep the story moving at a good pace.

Even if you've read all the Sandman Slim novels, it's difficult to keep track of all the gods, demons, angels, werewolves, zombies, vampires, ghosts, sylphs, Dark Eternals, Hellions, and other supernatural characters, not to mention Stark's friends (including a sin eating priest, a girlfriend who needs drugs to control her urge to drink the life out of people, and a guy with a malfunctioning mechanical body). Reading a Sandman Slim novel is like reading a guidebook to all the Netherworlds and spirit realms of the Earth's collected mythologies. Fortunately, Stark is the only one who really matters. He is fully endowed with personality (mostly snarky) and has enough mental anguish and moral qualms to keep a team of therapists busy for decades. The other characters exist only to contribute sideshow amusement.

Readers who don't have a sense of humor about religious beliefs (those who think it is blasphemous to portray God in non-Biblical terms) should probably avoid Kill City Blues. My favorite sentence is uttered to God (or a fraction of God) by Father Traven: "I devoted my life to you and now I see you're nothing but a ridiculous, foulmouthed little man." Talk about a crisis of faith!

I wouldn't call the novel's ending anti-climactic because it never actually reaches a climax. Kill City Blues has the feel of a book that was written to set up the next book in the series. That doesn't mean Kill City Blues is uneventful or that it tells a bad story, but the fizzling out, "to be continued" nature of the final pages is frustrating. I suppose the remedy is to wait for the next Sandman Slim novel. Fortunately, that's something I don't mind doing.

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Graveland by Alan Glynn

Published by Picador on May 28, 2013

The CEO of a Wall Street investment bank is shot dead while jogging. That same bloody weekend, a hedge fund manager is killed. Despite the absence of supporting evidence, talking heads speculate that domestic terrorists are targeting Wall Street. The murders intrigue freelance reporter Ellen Dorsey who, after hours of research, surmises who the next victim is likely to be. Should she go to the police with her suspicion, or should she report the story?

Three parallel plot threads unfold as Dorsey continues her investigation. First, Connie Carillo's trial (she's accused of stabbing her investment banker husband to death) is a hot item on all the news networks. Second, Frank Bishop, downsized out of his career as an architect and recently divorced, loses his mediocre replacement job at a mall just as his daughter Lizzie goes missing. Third, James Vaughan's health problems convince him to step down as CEO of a private equity firm and Craig Howley is poised to become his successor, a position that gives him access to surprising secrets. A related development involves the experimental drug Vaughan is taking. Rather than weaving in naturally with the rest of the story, that thread initially feels like an outtake from a bad science fiction movie that was added to the novel as an afterthought. Although that storyline fizzles out, the relationship between Howley and Vaughn turns out to be the most intriguing aspect of the novel.

Slightly past its midpoint, it seems as if the novel should be nearly over. Most of the stories have come together, the reader has learned the identities of the shooters, and events appear to reach a surprising climax. Yet the story continues, and when the final plot thread connected with the rest of the story, I was even more surprised.

Alan Glynn writes fast-moving prose, often employing short sentences and brief paragraphs, but with a sense of literary style. I'm impressed by Glynn's ability to convey the world of finance both through the doublespeak jargon of money managers and from the angry perspective of the working stiffs who lose their jobs and pensions because of financial shenanigans. Graveland reflects justifiable anger at the greed that motivates financial managers who, playing with money, contribute nothing of value to the economy while diverting wealth (none of which they create) from the middle class to their own bulging pockets.

Glynn's characters are complex yet easy to understand. While the plot is overly ambitious, the characters hold the story together. The ending is an anticlimactic disappointment that dampens my enthusiasm for the novel as a whole, but most of Graveland is so absorbing that I'm willing to forgive its unrealized ambitions.

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TransAtlantic by Colum McCann

Published by Random House on June 4, 2013

Connections across the Atlantic and across time furnish TransAtlantic's theme. The first part of the novel reaches into history to tell three true stories. In 1919, Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown retrofit an airplane once used to make war and use it to make history: the first nonstop transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to Ireland. In 1845, Frederick Douglass travels from Boston to Dublin to seek Irish support in the fight against slavery. In 1998, Senator George Mitchell flies across the Atlantic to negotiate peace in Northern Ireland. Colum McCann is a loving biographer of these transatlantic voyagers, focusing more intently on their positive qualities than on the faults they may have had. Still, as much as I admired McCann's attempt to personalize the historic, the stories in part one failed to touch my emotional core.

McCann tells three smaller yet richer stories in the novel's second part. These are ordinary people, not the subjects of history texts. Lily Duggan, a maid who meets and admires Frederick Douglass in part one, flees the hardship and pain of Ireland and travels to the promise of America, where she marries an ice dealer and lives a common life of love and loss and modest success. Lily's daughter Emily (a journalist who wrote an article about Frederick Douglass' legacy) crosses the Atlantic so that she can interview Teddy Brown for the second time (having met him in part one) for a story about the tenth anniversary of his flight. Years later, Emily's daughter Lottie (who chats with Senator Mitchell in part one) is living in Belfast, as are her daughter and grandson. As is true of many people in that time and place (and in many other times and places), Lottie's story ends tragically.

Among the novel's many connections is a letter that Lottie gives Teddy Brown for transatlantic delivery. The letter brings together Frederick Douglass and every female in Lily's family, having been passed from daughter to daughter. It makes its final appearance in part three, more than ninety years after it crossed the ocean. Lottie's daughter Hannah wonders "what might have happened if the letter had made it to its proper destination in Cork, what random turn of events might have grown out of it, what chance, what accidents, what curiosities." TransAtlantic reminds us that life is often shaped by coincidence and chance, that "our lives are thrown into long migratory orbits" by random occurrences and by the things that might have happened but did not.

At some point McCann describes life as "an accumulation of small shelves of incident." TransAtlantic illustrates life as a collection of connected but ever-changing moments, each giving birth to something new as the old vanishes into memory. The world changes, and yet there are constants: war and violence, men and women striving to achieve. McCann's characters carry the weight of history as they battle "ancient hatreds." As one character explicitly states, our stories outlast us. Old stories are eventually retold with new names. Frederick Douglass brings the point home when he considers how people share the same responses to different forms of oppression and thinks about how people on roads in Dublin and Boston are traveling the same road, how they "meld into each other."

After a slow start, parts two and three bring TransAtlantic to life. McCann's prose, while vivid, did not strike me as forcefully here as it did in Let the Great World Spin, but his reliance on clipped, fragmentary sentences eventually grew on me. Both novels make a point about interconnected lives; both make clear that the world keeps turning, no matter how honorably or disgracefully its inhabitants behave. Each is compelling in its own way. If TransAtlantic did not blow me away as did Let the Great World Spin, it eventually worked its literary magic as the story danced from character to character. I'm a bit disappointed that in format and message it is so much like Let the Great World Spin, but TransAtlantic is a worthy novel in its own right.

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Light of the World by James Lee Burke

Published by Simon & Schuster on July 23, 2013

As the opening paragraphs of the twentieth Dave Robicheaux novel expressly state, Light of the World is an exploration of evil, a familiar theme in James Lee Burke's books. It is Robicheaux's tale of how "one of the most wicked creatures on earth made his way into" the lives of Robicheaux's family and friends. Initially, the reader wonders whether the "wicked creature" is a born-again rodeo clown named Wyatt Dixon, the serial killer Asa Surrette (who, according to the FBI, is dead), or some other character who might be channeling Keyser Söze, making the novel a sort of whodunit. In the end, Burke's point is that evil wears many faces. Some evil people enter and leave prison, some enter the worlds of business or politics, some carry a badge. And as the best thriller writers remind us, the boundary between good and evil is often indistinct.

Robicheaux meets Dixon after an arrow sails past the ear of his adopted daughter Alafair while she's jogging in Montana during a family vacation at Albert Hollister's ranch. Alafair soon realizes that someone is stalking her, and she thinks she recognizes Surrette, a psychopath she once interviewed in a maximum security prison for a book she was writing. The stalking coincides with the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl, the adopted granddaughter of a billionaire whose son is a scoundrel.

Burke adds another dimension to the story with the reappearance of Gretchen Horowitz (last seen in Creole Belle), the daughter of Dave's friend Clete Purcel. Sexually abused as a child, Gretchen became a contract killer before renouncing her criminal vocation. Child abuse is clearly evil; whether Gretchen is evil, given her past, Burke leaves for the reader to decide. She might be less evil than a member of the local police department who brutalizes a handcuffed suspect before focusing his unwelcome attention on her. Robicheaux is a cop, but he acknowledges the evil inherent in the "sick culture" that pervades law enforcement, the "smug moral superiority" that makes police officers feel entitled to violate the laws they are sworn to enforce. Of course, any book about evil is also about good, and rare is the person who is entirely one or the other. The fact that good and evil coexist assures that they will influence (or taint) each other by virtue of their proximity. Robicheaux has learned the lesson that we all "belong to the family of man, even if only on its outer edges."

Burke writes with such eloquence that his tendency to be verbose is easy to forgive. When he waxes poetic about human nature, I take it in stride, confident that he'll eventually pick up the plot thread. His soaring prose is a joy to read. Real people generally aren't as articulate as the characters in a Burke novel (I know I'm not), but if they were, the world would be a more interesting place.

There's as much family drama as thriller drama in Light of the World, but none of it is melodrama. Family isn't always easy but it's always family, a point Burke makes through several of his characters. Burke has a knack for creating characters I'd sometimes like to strangle, while at the same time making me understand why they behave as they do.

Thrillers that take evil as their theme often allude to the devil, and this one is no exception. When Burke asks whether evil has human origins or whether it comes from a darker place, he's walking on familiar ground. When his characters started smelling peculiar odors that they associate with malevolence and seeing prints made by two-legged goat-footed creatures and at least half believing that the killer is an emissary of the devil, I became worried about the novel's direction, but Burke offers an appealing contrast of explanations for those phenomena, grounded both in the rational world and in the supernatural. In any event, Light of the World is such a deft display of suspenseful storytelling that my qualms vanished well before the novel reached its climax.

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The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei

Published by Other Press on July 23, 2013

The Deep Whatsis is a familiar but funny sendup of the corporate environment. It's like Dilbert with sex, or Office Space merged with Fatal Attraction.

Eric Nye is 33, works in advertising ("advertising is how corporations outsource their lies") and is on page two of the screenplay he's been writing for three years. As the ad agency's Executive Creative Director, his primary job is to fire older workers, a task he handles with pleasure (for awhile, at least) despite his realization that he is the person most deserving of being fired. Like other writers who have lampooned the highly compensated denizens of corporate culture, Peter Mattei emphasizes Eric's shallow self-indulgence, his obsession with trendy consumerism, his emotional emptiness, and his dependence on mood-stabilizing drugs, none of which ward off his panic attacks.

Eric's one-night-stand with a client's young intern becomes problematic after she accepts an internship with Eric's employer and begins to stalk him. Naturally enough, Eric is obsessed with the one person who is devious enough to cause him professional harm. Yet Eric's mind seems to take occasional breaks from reality, leaving the reader to wonder whether the problems in his life are caused by the intern or are of his own design.

Mattei's characters are hilariously stereotyped, from the politically correct HR lady to the antisocial IT guy. Eric is a jerk but he's a self-aware jerk, so over the top in his jerkiness that he's almost likable. Eric experiences a transformation of sorts that gives the reader a reason to care about him, but how much he's actually changed is an open question by the time the novel reaches its abrupt ending. Eric's relationship with the intern is central to the story and to the development of Eric's character, but Eric's strong feelings about her are not entirely convincing.

Mattei's insights into advertising (the art of persuading consumers to buy junk they don't need) aren't new but his description of consumers buying shiny new things to increase their "game status" in the game of acquisition is amusing. His notion that technology is "taking away the fundamental truths about our humanity and making us pay to get them back" is, sadly enough, at least partially true. It is, in fact, Mattei's take on modern urban life -- more funny than profound -- that furnishes the novel's best moments.

Although The Deep Whatsis is built upon ideas that are recycled from other novels, Mattei has infused enough fresh humor to make it a breezy, entertaining read. The novel has an unfinished feel that might disturb some readers -- it's a slice of an unsatisfying life, with much remaining to be resolved -- but readers who don't mind writing their own endings are given ample opportunity to imagine where Eric's life will take him.

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