The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper

Published by Simon & Schuster on March 5, 2013

Does the world really need another novel about demons and the Vatican? I'm not a big fan of books in which Satan is a character. I am, however, a fan of Andrew Pyper. I loved The Wildfire Season, a thriller with sharply drawn characters that has nothing to do with the supernatural. Based on my admiration of that book, I decided to give The Demonologist a try. It turned out to be a good decision. Yes, the plot involves a demon, but this is fundamentally a book about flawed mortals.

In the novel's first thirty pages, Pyper gives more life to his protagonist than most authors can manage in three hundred. David Ullman is a faculty member in the English Department at Columbia, specializing in mythology and religious narrative with a particular expertise in Milton's Paradise Lost. Ullman suffers from depression, which may be why his wife is openly having an affair with a physics professor. Ullman wants his floundering marriage to work and does his best to be a good husband to Diane, although, like many men, he can't remedy her complaint that he is rarely "present in the moment." His platonic friend, Elaine O'Brien, is Ullman's "clear-thinking inner self" but she has been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer. His eleven-year-old daughter, Tess, alienated from both her parents, seems to share his melancholy. David is alone in the world. But does he need to be?

A mysterious woman appears in Ullman's office on behalf of an employer that wants a demonologist to investigate a phenomenon she refuses to describe. The next day David and Tess are off to Venice. What he encounters there rocks the foundations of his belief system. As much as he would like to ignore it, he can't. He is given a task -- to "find and retrieve the dead ... from darkest limbo" -- that his life, and his daughter's, will hinge upon. Whether David will survive may depend upon whether he is "vulnerable to becoming convinced of impossibilities."

Throughout the novel, David is manipulated by unseen forces. He's being chased, but is his pursuer working for the Devil or the church? Or, as O'Brien sees it, has David created his own mythology, a delusional reaction to grief? While The Demonologist has the action and the pace of a thriller, this is also the story of a man reinventing himself. David takes a road trip to North Dakota ("a version of hell in itself") and then south and back north, a journey that advances the plot while giving David time for introspection. It is a journey of self-discovery that forces David to confront the part of himself that refuses to engage with the world. To battle the Devil, David must open his mind to horror. He must remember the past while learning how to think and feel at the same time. He must understand the death of his brother and confront his feelings about his father. The Demonologist is ultimately the story of a very personal hell.

Pyper has mastered the art of building fully shaped characters into plot-driven stories. Not just in its horrific subject matter, but in the intensity of its prose, the realism of its supernatural elements, and the intelligence of the story, Pyper has crafted a chilling tale of good and evil. The Demonologist reminded me of Joe Lansdale at his best. It is a book that will appeal not just to fans of horror, but to all readers who appreciate a thought-provoking story told with literary style.

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The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2013 

The Boyfriend opens with the murder of a beautiful young escort in Los Angeles. Her parents hire Jack Till to find the killer. The reader learns in chapter one that this isn't the only escort the killer has murdered, and it doesn't take Till long to search for similar crimes. Till's pursuit of the killer takes him to Phoenix and Boston and San Antonio before the action returns to California.

To carry out his scheme (there's more to it than murdering prostitutes), the killer becomes an escort's boyfriend so he can stay with her in her residence. He manages to do this over and over in city after city. That's a trick that even Lothario would have trouble pulling off, and it struck me as implausible at best, despite the graduate level course in seduction that Thomas Perry provides. The true motivation for seducing and then killing the temporary girlfriends is even less plausible but I give Perry credit for coming up with an original and clever plot twist.

Till tracks the killer by scouring websites and finding photographs of escorts wearing a distinctive piece of jewelry that the killer has given them. That each soon-to-be-dead escort decided to have a new photograph taken as soon as her boyfriend gave her a necklace struck me as highly unlikely. It's even more unlikely that the killer would allow the photographs to be published on the net, given how carefully he covers his tracks in all other respects.

Perry devotes roughly equal attention to Till and to the killer. Some chapters focus on Till's methodical investigation and some describe the killer's methodical planning. All of that is moderately interesting (if not particularly exciting) and the story moves quickly.  The plot follows the formula of slasher movies:  naughty girls die while the audience wonders what's in store for the not-so-naughty girl who is with the killer in the end.  That's just too predictable to be enthralling.

Although a portion of the novel is devoted to the killer's backstory, he doesn't have much personality. Till's own backstory seems pieced together, bits carved out of other thriller protagonists and transplanted into Till so that he seems to have a life. There is nothing about Till that makes him stand out in the universe of thriller heroes.

The Boyfriend didn't grab me and hold me in a tight grip, nor did it give me much to think about, as do my favorite thrillers. The plot is surprisingly simple. I formed no connection to the characters and had little reason to care about them. Till is busy being stalwart, the killer is busy killing, and the hookers are busy dying. Still, I kept wondering what would happen next. In that sense the novel is more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.  In short, The Boyfriend is an easy read, but it isn't Perry's best effort. Nothing about this thriller is unlikable, but nothing makes it stand out.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy

First published in 1938; published digitally by Open Road Media on January 15, 2013

Like many transplants to Hollywood, Ralph Carston craves fame and fortune and is just waiting for the miracle that will make it happen. His only friend in town is a sparkplug named Mona who starts out the novel by getting sent to jail for mouthing off to a judge. The momentary notoriety she earns from that episode leads to an invitation to a benefit for the Scottsboro boys hosted by a wealthy socialite. Although the hostess is a cougar with designs on Carston's chiseled body, she also has connections that could help him. Should Carston become her boy toy if that's his only chance at finding the break he needs?

At least by modern standards, Carston is an unusual protagonist. He's naïve, innocent, and polite. He's from Georgia, not well educated, and holds firm to racist beliefs. With his thick southern accent, he has no chance to become a movie star, despite his good looks, but he's ashamed to return to his home town without succeeding in his chosen profession -- particularly after the letters he wrote to his mother, bragging about his success, appeared in the local newspaper.

As he demonstrated in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Horace McCoy had a realistic (perhaps realistically jaded) view of Hollywood as the land of opportunity. As Mona points out in the novel's most dramatic moment, for every girl who leaves her job as a waitress to become a star, there are hundreds who ruin their lives chasing an impossible dream. Carston's attempt to bridge the enormous divide between the haves and the have-nots teaches him the difference between dreams and reality. Mona's participation in an effort to organize extras who are seeking better working conditions adds another dimension to the class division that supplies the novel's framework.

McCoy's hapless characters exemplify the mix of futility and misplaced optimism that prevailed during the era in which he wrote. All they want is a break, a chance to live the glamorous lives they read about in magazines. Yet for all but a few, the easy life is an illusion, well beyond their reach. Using stark, economical prose, McCoy captured those for whom luck is always bad, those who, desperate to climb the social or economic ladder, are exploited by the fortunate few they seek to emulate. He wrote about people who took chances with their lives, who didn't want to join their small town peers who "were doing the same old thing in the same old way and would go on doing it forever," but he avoided the fairytale endings that cheer people in hard times. His novels are grounded in harsh realism. I Should Have Stayed Home isn't his best work, but as an honest portrait of disappointed lives, it is true to the model he followed.

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The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

Published by Del Rey on February 12, 2013 

Although the other three human civilizations regard them as judgmental and aloof, the Sadiri have long been "the backbone of galactic law, diplomacy, and scientific discovery." They seem to be a lot like Vulcans: wicked bright with some telepathic ability but obsessively in control of their emotions. Their arrival on Cygnus Beta, a planet that has become a homeland for pioneers and refugees, seems out of character. Yet the Sadiri homeworld has been destroyed and they are desperate to perpetuate their ethnic existence. Cygnus Beta gives them a chance to do just that, in part because factional groups of Sadiri long ago settled on the planet. The Sadiri are also curious about the planet's legendary Caretakers, the "guardians of humanity" who (according to the legend) transported a chosen few from Terra to Cygnus Beta.

Against this imaginative background, The Best of All Possible Worlds becomes a road trip novel set on an alien planet. A Cygnian civil servant and biotechnician named Grace Delarua is assigned to help a Sadiri named Dllenahkh search for genetic cousins of the Sadiri in Cygnus Beta's remote homesteads. To find genetically appropriate mates for the Sadiri, Delarua and Dilenahkh (with some helpers) begin a tour of the Cygnus Beta hinterlands. The odyssey gives characters a chance to bond, to form love interests, and to have some low-key adventures.

Karen Lord's worldbuilding includes a couple of hidden cities, a place called Faerie ruled by the Faerie Queen, and a place where mischief is afoot that changes Delarua's life as a consequence of confronting it. All of that is interesting but not so remarkable as to engage my sense of wonder. The book has surprisingly little atmosphere, given that it's set on an alien planet. There is little about the surroundings that creates a feeling of "alienness." Fortunately, the cultural and political differences among the various cities or settlements on Cygnus Beta are more carefully detailed and therefore more convincing.

Although a love story is at the novel's heart (sort of like logical Spock and romantic Uhura), The Best of All Possible Worlds is more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging. To some extent, the novel is an exploration of ethics. Delarua confronts a dilemma and must decide what response is morally correct. The novel tells a slow-moving, cerebral story, light on action, heavy on relationships. For the most part, the story suffers from a lack of dramatic tension. The love story offers little drama since the outcome is all but preordained, while Delarua's moral crisis is so easily resolved the reader has little opportunity to become emotionally invested in her plight.

While I have reservations about The Best of All Possible Worlds, in the end I liked the characters and enjoyed the road trip setting. I also liked the way Lord played with creation myths. While the story is better in concept than in execution, the ending is satisfying. Fans of romance fiction, however, will probably be more enthused about the novel than I am.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker

Published in the Netherlands in 2010; published in translation by Penguin Books on February 26, 2013 

A Dutch woman who introduces herself to people as Emilie rents an isolated house near Caernarfon, Wales, where she ponders Emily Dickinson. She looks out the window at night, recalling a former lover. She thinks about the uncle who once wandered off into a pond and just stood there, half submerged. She wonders about the geese in the field next to the house; some have gone missing. She fears meeting the owner of the black sheep that have wandered onto her property. Every now and then she is overcome by tears. Why is she in Wales? Perhaps, as Dickinson might have done by writing poetry, Emilie is trying "to hold back time, to make it bearable." Something has clearly gone wrong in Emilie's life, something from which she is fleeing. Soon enough, the story shifts to Holland and we begin to learn what might have prompted her reclusive behavior. It takes some time, however, for an explanation to come into focus, as Gerbrand Bakker teases the reader with bits of the truth, never quite revealing Emilie's story in its entirety.

Although the scenes of Emilie in isolation are somber, those in which characters interact with one another -- Emilie and an inquisitive couple who own a bakery; Emilie and a doctor who doesn't believe her (no one does) when she explains that a badger bit her foot; Emilie's husband, Rutger, and her bickering parents; Rutger and the enigmatic police officer who befriends him -- are almost whimsical. As the novel unfolds, the reader wonders whether Emile will begin to let people into her life. She meets the sheep farmer as well as a student who is mapping a hiking path that runs through her property. Whether she will make a meaningful connection with either of them is a question that contributes much of the novel's dramatic tension.

Ten White Geese is not a plot-heavy story, but it does have some surprises. Although the story is realistic, it has a surrealistic quality. As is true of Dickinson's poetry, Ten White Geese is ambiguous, open to diverse interpretations. How much of the novel is unvarnished truth, how much is perspective (truth told slant, as Dickinson would say), is unclear. A reader who is so inclined will probably be able to discern symbolism in the vulnerable geese, in the foot injuries that two characters suffer, in the black sheep and in a stone circle that occupies Emilie's attention.

Although Emilie, before coming to Wales, was writing about the "all-too-eager canonization" of Dickinson, Bakker is clearly a fan. Ten White Geese quotes lines from Dickinson's poetry, quarrels with Dickinson's biographer, and makes references to the poems that assume the reader's familiarity with at least her best known work. Bees and roses show up in Dickinson's poetry and in Emilie's life. Some of Dickinson's recurring themes (death, pain, separation) are echoed in the story. There are obvious parallels between Emilie and Dickinson. Emilie describes Dickinson as a "puling woman who hid herself away in her house and garden, wordlessly insisting with everything she did or did not do that people should just ignore her, yet fishing for validation like a whimpering child, scared to death that the affection she showed others ... would remain unanswered." She could be describing herself.

While I wouldn't necessarily characterize Bakker's prose as lyrical, there is a poetic sensibility in his careful word choices, in the rhythm of his sentences, and in the novel's hidden meanings. This melancholy novel invites rereading (alongside an anthology of Dickinson's poetry), with each new investigation of the text yielding a new way of understanding the story.

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