Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye

Published by Penguin Books on September 25, 2012 

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone has the flavor of a horror story, complete with the spectral creatures and gruesome events that fuel legends of the supernatural.  Yet the most compelling horror is grounded in truth rather than legend.  Stefan Kiesbye’s novel addresses the horror of spite and malice, of mob violence, of child abuse and incest, of missing children, of kids being cruel for the sake of cruelty, of friends who betray each other for selfish ends, of homeless children who die in the cold for lack of charity.  Who needs witches and werewolves when the world is filled with terrors like these?

The novel consists of a series of connected stories.  It begins with the sparsely attended funeral of Anke, the final occupant of the von Kamphoff manor in the Village of Hemmersmoor.  A widower named Christian Bobinski sets the stage with his description of Anke’s funeral.  The stories that follow are told from the perspectives of individuals who, like Christian and Anke, lived in Hemmersmoor during their childhood and adolescence.  Their stories are set in a time when concentration camps had only recently closed, when Germany was newly divided by a wall.

Ghost stories and tales of the supernatural abound in Hemmersmoor.  Horrible events have plagued the superstitious village residents -- or so the stories go -- from the heir to the von Kamphoff manor who mysteriously vanished (and is said to be wandering the manor’s hedge maze) to the miller who sold his soul to the devil after Swedish troops tortured and killed his family during the Thirty Years’ War.  Do spirits and witches really roam the village?  Is the village cursed?  Or are the gossipy, mean-spirited villagers reaping exactly what they have sown? 

Some of Hemmersmoor’s young residents are clearly disturbed, including the boy who kills his sister and the kids who dare another to jump into a hole they have cut in the frozen river.  Some are simply bewildered by the demands of dawning adulthood or by their parents’ repulsive behavior.  No matter how gruesome the stories become, it is easy to understand why these kids commit the awful acts that they confess:  they are the products of their warped environment, of people who are determined to forget their nation’s sins and to conceal their own.  Just like their parents, their lives will be dedicated to forgetting and denying.

Kiesbye’s sentences are crafted with elegant care; his prose lends power to the stories.  The characters are lively.  The story falters when it comes too close to the supernatural -- the horror of reality gives the novel a strength that is sapped by ghost stories.  Many of the living characters are virtual ghouls, the walking dead; nothing is gained by adding (for instance) the man who haunts the hedge maze.  Fortunately, those moments are infrequent.  While some are better than others, the tales of Hemmersmoor’s children are both horrendous and touching.  Given the fractured nature of the narrative, the stories cohere into a whole surprisingly well, bookended by Christian’s memories as he returns to the Hemmersmoor of his youth.  They add up to a masterful work of psychological horror.

RECOMMENDED

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

First published in 1953

With good reason, The Space Merchants is one of the classic science fiction novels of the 1950s: it is fun and prophetic, and it conveys a message that remains timely. What Gordon Gekko did with "Greed is good," Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth did with "Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely." In a story that is at once witty and scathing, Pohl and Kornbluth smack down the aristocratic pretensions of the business elite, the leaders of industry who comprise the de facto ruling class.

The protagonist, Mitchell Courtenay, an advertising executive with Fowler Schocken, is proud of his ability to redirect talent, turning poets into copywriters, musicians into jingle writers, all to further humanity's highest ideal: increased sales. He's even more proud of his ability to convince consumers that they need products they don't really want. Courtenay sits near the top of the economic ladder, marketing questionable products to those at the bottom who produce and consume them.

As the novel opens, Courtenay is surprised to learn that he has been placed in charge of the Venus Section. The government has given Fowler Schocken an exclusive contract to develop and exploit Venus, a task that requires the planet to be colonized. Before Courtenay has a chance to learn whether his newfound power is ennobling, someone takes it away. Courtenay is compelled by unexpected circumstances to work alongside the consumers.

Courtenay's fall brings him into contact with a group he has always despised: consumer activists, referred to derisively as "Consies." Given the novel's time frame, the similarities between the words "Consies" and "Commies" -- the favored demon of the 1950s -- can hardly be coincidental. The similarity does not end with the name: Consies, like communists, believe that workers should have a greater share of the wealth that their labor creates. Forced to share their pain, will Courtenay gain empathy for their plight, or will he imagine new strategies for marketing products to them?

In the political context of the early Eisenhower years, The Space Merchants' depiction of capitalism run amuck almost seems subversive. The exploitation of labor by capital and the strife inherent in class division is a central theme. Yet the story is more satire than polemic. Much of the novel has a tongue-in-cheek quality, as is evident when Courtenay must tunnel through a vast growth of chicken meat to attend a Consie meeting. Outright humor ranges from hilarious advertising jingles to lines like "I dreamed I was ice-fishing in my Maidenform bra" (the latter appears in a museum exhibit).

One reason to read science fiction of the 1950s is that writers were committed to the craft of storytelling. While modern sf authors too often indulge in lengthy explanations of every idea they can concoct, Pohl and Kornbluth toss off two or three ideas on a page, letting the accumulation of ideas build the story's context. The Space Merchants is filled with nifty ideas: government sanctioned "industrial feuds" that occasionally include assassinations; congressmen elected by businesses rather than individuals; religion as an advertising account; individual steps in stairwells rented to the homeless. Pohl and Kornbluth accurately predicted the clash between industrial development and conservationist philosophy (including environmental activism), the economic difficulties brought on by diminishing oil supplies, and reliance on subliminal advertising and addictive chemicals to increase demand for products.

An engaging plot and believable characters are the twin ingredients of successful sf storytelling. The Space Merchants delivers on both fronts. The story is full of surprises. There are so many clever twists that the reader, never sure where the story is headed, knows only that he is taking a joyful journey. The characters tend to be stereotypes, but they're fun stereotypes. In fact, I've used the word "fun" repeatedly in this review because it's the word that best summarizes my reaction to The Space Merchants. It's the kind of romp that is too rare in modern science fiction.

RECOMMENDED

Relentless by Simon Kernick

First published in the UK in 2006; published digitally by Atria Books on September 18, 2012 

Software salesman Tom Meron describes himself as a dull guy with a dull job. He gets a call from an old friend, a successful attorney named Jack Calley. On the telephone, Meron hears Calley being murdered; with his dying breath, Calley gives the killer Meron's address. After discovering that his wife is missing from work, Meron is attacked by a man with a knife. Meron makes a harrowing escape before being arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife's university colleague, a woman named Vanessa Blake. Meron's wife, Kathy, is also a suspect in Blake's killing, given that her fingerprints are on the murder weapon.

After this setup, the story shifts to Detective Inspector Mike Bolt, who is investigating the apparent suicide of a judge who was also Calley's client. Point of view then alternates between Meron's first person account of his odyssey and third person narratives that follow Bolt or the bad guys.

Simon Kernick peppers the plot with mundane marital drama but fails to flesh out Kathy's character -- a serious omission in a novel that depends so much upon the reader's belief that she would act as she does. Supporting characters are mostly cops and former cops, including Tina Boyd, whose boyfriend died under mysterious circumstances after receiving a tip that revealed the motive for the high level murders. None of the characters have much personality; this is a novel that depends on plot rather than astute characterization. Unfortunately, the plot is problematic.

The entire storyline struck me as improbable -- not an uncommon impression when reading a thriller, but this one requires the reader to accept a motivation for murder that is both contrived and unimaginative. The plot advances only because Meron makes some inexplicably stupid decisions: he doesn't call the police when he hears Calley being murdered, and he later runs from the police for no apparent reason. For a software salesman, Meron is also a remarkably adept fighter. The killer tries to make his murders look like suicides but he leaves identical suicide notes at the scenes of the crimes -- making him one of the stupidest murderers to grace the pages of a crime novel. A lawyer's shockingly unprofessional behavior makes little sense but the plot hinges upon it. Kathy's behavior is preposterous (for reasons I can't reveal without spoiling the novel's biggest surprise). The likelihood that her fingerprints would have been found on the murder weapon is virtually nil.

While Kernick is a capable storyteller, his prose style is undistinguished.  On a more positive note, the story moves at a relentless pace, making the novel a quick and easy read, and Kernick earns points for cleverness by giving the plot a couple of unexpected twists as the story nears its end. Still, Relentless lacks the pizzazz that the title promises and that the best thrillers deliver. Relentless isn't by any means an awful book, it just isn't a particularly memorable one.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

San Miguel by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Published by Viking on September 18, 2012

The most distant of the Channel Islands from the coast of California is rain-soaked, wind-swept, and populated by sheep. In San Miguel, T. Coraghessan Boyle tells the stories of three women who made the island their home. While fans of character-driven historical fiction featuring strong women should be pleased with San Miguel, readers who gravitate to plot-driven fiction will probably find this novel less satisfying than some of Boyle's earlier, more captivating work.

Part one tells Marantha's story. It is a masterful portrayal of a woman struggling to control the dark side of her personality, to adapt gracefully to miserable circumstances while coping with failing health. In the late nineteenth century, Marantha joins her second husband (Will Waters) and adopted daughter (Edith) on San Miguel where, with Marantha's money, Will has purchased a half interest in a sheep farm. Marantha hopes to recuperate from consumption but soon realizes that a rainy, windy island is the wrong setting in which to salvage her health ... or, for that matter, her marriage. To paraphrase The Clash: Will she stay or will she go?

With Marantha, Boyle is at his best, creating a carefully nuanced character and describing her life in powerful terms. Marantha knows she has become "a crabbed miserable thing who said no to everything, to every pleasure and delight no matter how small or meaningless," but that is not the person she wants to be. As only a gifted writer can do, Boyle generates sympathy and understanding for a character whose thoughts and behavior are often spiteful.

Part two shifts the focus to Edith and her frustrated desire to be independent, free from her stepfather's tyranny. Hers is a story of isolation and desperation, of a blossoming woman longing for the company of intellect and social grace ("On a ranch, there are no gentlemen or ladies -- there was just life lived at the level of dressed-up apes tumbled down from the trees"). Boyle encourages the same empathy for Edith as he does for Marantha, although Edith is less complex and, for that reason, less interesting.

Part three begins in 1930. It introduces a woman named Elise who, at 38, is newly married to Herbie Lester. Having never been west of the Hudson, Elise moves to San Miguel with Lester. Unlike her predecessors, Elise manages to make a life that, if not quite normal, is generally satisfying despite Lester's growing detachment from reality.  Unlike the first two sections, some chapters in part three drag, adding little to character development while recounting events that are of no significant interest. The story perks up with the encroachment of World War II and a series of dramatic events that foreshadow an inevitable conclusion.

Edith resurfaces in part three as a memory, a tale told by Jimmie, the island's constant resident and the only character to appear in all three sections.  While the information Jimmie provides adds welcome continuity, the story of Edith's adult life is disappointingly abbreviated. Elise, on the other hand, is a character in full, but not a particularly vibrant one.

Boyle’s surgical prose slices into his characters, exposing their inner workings.  Boyle introduces the setting and characters in short chapters that bear descriptive titles:  “The Kitchen,” “The Flock,” “The Wind,” “Jimmie,” and so on.  Occasionally they are repeated, creating the sense of characters living parallel lives:  “The House” on San Miguel in which Marantha dwells, for instance, is less inviting that “The House” that will become Elise’s home.  Jimmie also rates more than one chapter heading, but he is hardly worth the space.  The novel belongs to the female characters, not the men.

The novel is aptly named.  The island of San Miguel is virtually a character in the novel, fickle and treacherous, beautiful and harsh, challenging its inhabitants with relentless wind and sand.  The sense of isolation Boyle creates is vivid.

That the characters are based on real people is perhaps San Miguel's greatest weakness. At its best, the novel creates tension as the characters struggle to survive the perils of nature and the numbness of seclusion. In part three, however, the story falls flat. Boyle's fidelity to the real-world characters, his failure to make Elise and all of the male characters more interesting than they actually were, causes the novel to lose momentum after a strong start. For its sense of history and place, and for Marantha's compelling story, San Miguel is worth reading, but this is far from Boyle's best work. 

RECOMMENDED

The Janus Reprisal by Jamie Freveletti

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 11, 2012 

More than ten years after Robert Ludlum's death, the Ludlum Industrial Complex continues to churn out novels featuring his name on the cover, often in a larger font than that given to the actual author. In this case, the largest font is reserved for Jason Bourne's name, although this isn't a Jason Bourne novel. The Janus Reprisal (excuse me, Robert Ludlum's^TM The Janus Reprisal) is part of the Covert One series, allegedly based on Ludlum's ideas (and possibly his notes), although Ludlum himself never authored a Covert One novel. As the ninth Covert One novel, The Janus Reprisal presumably has only a tangential connection to any notion that originated with Ludlum.

The Janus Reprisal is better than many factory-produced novels. Although it makes use of a well-worn plot (terrorists want to acquire a mutated virus so they can become bioterrorists and kill Americans), Jamie Freveletti adds some modest twists to the standard formula.

The story begins with a group of terrorists staging an improbably successful attack on a hotel in The Hague, moving from room to room and shooting the occupants. Coincidentally, Lt. Col. Jon Smith is a hotel guest. Smith is both a physician and an operative of the super-secret spy organization called Covert One. He's attending a meeting of the World Health Organization. Other attendees have stored biological agents in the hotel's safe. The terrorists make off with the biomaterials, and it is up to Smith to track them down.

Meanwhile, an old nemesis of Smith's -- Oman Dattar, a Pakistani unimaginatively nicknamed The Butcher -- escapes from a prison in The Hague, only to find that he's having financial woes. He needs money to pay his assassins, one of whom targets Smith at the hotel during the terrorist attack. The assassin stupidly carries Smith's picture with him, as well as the photos two other people, giving Smith a trail to follow.

Smith is a pleasant departure from other thriller/action heroes in that he doesn't possess superhuman strength or inexhaustible stamina (although he functions surprisingly well after being exposed to mustard gas). Smith is smart but specialized; he doesn't have the encyclopedic knowledge that diminishes the credibility of some thriller heroes. Beyond that, however, Smith is devoid of personality. The Janus Reprisal is all plot; characterization is absent.

Some aspects of the novel are all too familiar: Smith disarming a bomb by following instructions he receives over the telephone; Smith's reliance on a genius computer hacker who is a social misfit; multiple shootouts in which professional killers never manage to disable or kill the hero; a mole in the CIA; a plan to kill everyone in Manhattan; using a woman as bait to flush out the terrorist (which always results in the woman being captured ... don't thriller heroes ever read thrillers?). The action sequence at the end becomes difficult to believe but it's not as outrageous as some other thrillers I've read.

Notwithstanding the story's familiarity, The Janus Reprisal is enjoyable. The workmanlike prose is clean; the pace is quick. Despite being used as bait, the woman who has been targeted by Dakkar is strong and resilient, not the typically helpless female character of old-school thrillers. The plan to wipe out Manhattan has some original elements. The plan is far-fetched, but no more so than is common in modern action-based thrillers. The Janus Reprisal isn't by any reasonable standard a first-rate thriller, but it's a fun time-killer, significantly above the norm for a factory-produced novel.

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