Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Published by Margaret K. McElderry (a division of Simon & Schuster) on June 7, 2011

Blood Red Road is a young adult novel and, as an old adult, I’m not part of its target demographic.  I thought I might like it anyway; I still enjoy the Heinlein juveniles I was reading as a kid and I’m generally a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction.  Blood Red Road is apparently a post-apocalyptic story (we’re told that reading and writing have largely become lost skills) but the nature of the apocalyptic event is never revealed.  Although the characters seem human enough, it’s not even clear to me that this story takes place on Earth; I can’t imagine any sort of apocalypse that would produce giant carnivorous Dune-style sandworms (recast as “hellwurms,” these have legs and claws).  Too much in this novel is left unexplained, perhaps because no credible explanation could be concocted (e.g., what kind of weapon is a “bolt shooter” and how does it work in the absence of a power source?).  The gaps in narrative logic are one of many reasons the novel just didn’t work for me.

Eighteen-year-old Saba has always blamed her nine-year-old sister Emmi for their mother’s death during childbirth.  When their father dies while trying to prevent five horsemen from stealing her twin brother Lugh, Saba suddenly finds herself in charge of Emmi’s welfare.  She twice tries to dump Emmi on the only responsible adults she can find so that she can rescue Lugh, but she can’t rid herself of Emmi that easily (after all, the conventions to which the novel adheres require Saba to learn to love her kid sister).  Saba undergoes a couple of ordeals that test her mettle as she tracks down her brother’s captors.  She also falls in love with the guy she keeps pretending to hate.

My most significant gripe about this novel is its utter predictability.  Saba’s adventures are predictable, the love story is predictable, and Saba learns predictable lessons like “nobody asks to be born into this world” and “never give up.”  The story is too shallow to generate interest, much less dramatic tension.  Although Saba lives in a violent world, the violence she experiences is so far from graphic that it’s difficult to take seriously.  That’s probably a plus for impressionable young adults but the muted tone robs the story of its potential power.

Another complaint:  there are elements in the story that border on fantasy, from a “heartstone” that grows warm when Saba is “near her heart’s desire” to a pet crow that might be the smartest character in the book.  So is this a realistic story of a post-apocalyptic future or a fantasy romance?  I think it tries to be both and doesn’t succeed very well at either one.

I give Moira Young credit for having her characters speak in a consistent voice, but I found the voice troubling.  It resembles the language spoken by the less educated characters in a TV western crossed with the language spoken by TV hillbillies.  (In fact, Young’s characters sound like they’re imitating the characters on Firefly -- a wonderfully funny show that exploits that style of speaking for comedic effect.)  Language would change after an apocalyptic event but it would evolve into something new; words like “britches” that have all but disappeared from our vocabulary would not make a sudden reappearance.

In short, I thought the novel was predictable, unoriginal and unconvincing.  On a positive note, the story moves along at a quick pace and Young’s writing style is lively.  For those reasons, young readers might enjoy it -- particularly those who haven’t been exposed to truly well-written examples of post-apocalyptic fiction and who might not realize that Blood Red Road suffers from comparison.  To be fair, the marketing materials claim the book is appropriate for readers who are 14 or older.  To a 14-year-old looking for a post-apocalyptic love story, I might recommend the novel; to other readers, not so much.  As an adult who reviews novels for other adults, I have to rate this one:

NOT RECOMMENDED

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 2, 2011

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is very different from the other two Sara Gran novels I've read -- Come Closer and Dope -- but like those novels it is quirky and engaging. This novel is playful where the other two were serious. If you're looking for a straightforward detective story, keep looking: this isn't it. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead resides somewhere between strange and bizarre. That's what I liked about it: I enjoyed its offbeat nature.

Claire DeWitt is the world's greatest private detective -- just ask her -- although her failure to find a friend who went missing when they were both teenagers has been a lifelong frustration. Claire is hired to find Vic Willing, a New Orleans prosecutor with some inherited wealth who disappeared after Katrina. He's been declared dead but his nephew wants Claire to find out what happened to him. Her first "clue" is a business card she finds on a restaurant floor that has no apparent connection to anything. This turns out to be consistent with Claire's unconventional detection methods, which include consulting the I Ching, divining personalities from fingerprints, and denting her rented truck so it will fit in with her surroundings. She rivals Sherlock Holmes in her deductive ability although she seems to pull clues from the ether as much as from close observation.

As Claire endeavors to solve the case, she gets involved with a drive-by shooting, wonders about people messing with electrical transformers atop utility poles who aren't wearing utility company uniforms, ponders the obscure advice about detecting proffered in a French tome on the subject, gets high (because drugs take you to places where you can find clues), is shot at (repeatedly), and reminisces about her mentor, Constance, who taught her most of what she knows about sleuthing while trying (unsuccessfully) to get Claire "to see something better in people, something that would lead us up a little higher."

Claire repeatedly says that we all have mysteries but we rarely want to solve them. Fear of the truth is one of the novel's themes. Clues are central to the novel but not in the usual sense. Clues in this novel aren't only the fruit of detection; they're the key to understanding life. We're told, for instance, that you can't change a person's life, you can only "leave clues ... and hope that they understand, and choose to follow."

The titular "city of the dead" is New Orleans -- a city in which it's "easy to die." Post-Katrina New Orleans plays a key role in the story. One of the characters says that there's "a lot to love" about New Orleans but "it ain't no place for happy endings." That's exactly how Gran portrays it. The novel takes a hard, honest look at the violence that endures in the spirited but tragic city. Gran realistically portrays what passes for a criminal justice system there: a dysfunctional alliance of police and prosecutors that was broken even before Katrina's devastation. Maybe the picture she paints of New Orleans is too bleak -- Gran hammers at the city's abysmal murder rate again and again, almost approaching literary overkill -- but I think the city deserves the spotlight she shines on it and I'm pleased to see the attention she focuses on a vibrant city that continues its struggle to recapture its glory. Gran clearly loves the city (a place where, Claire observes, "magic is real") and feels for the impoverished residents who were most affected by Katrina. There's a poignant moment in which a drug dealer talks about the anger that swelled within him in the aftermath of Katrina, anger that (as Claire points out) would be recognized as a symptom of PTSD under other circumstances or in a different place.

Claire does manage to solve the mystery of Willing's disappearance (she's the world's greatest detective, after all) although she fails to solve all the mysteries in her own life. The solution to the Willing mystery is a little sad, but remember: there are no happy endings in New Orleans. Within the context of this unconventional novel, it's nearly perfect.

I love the way the story is structured, I love the dialog, and I love the message. I hope Gran writes more Claire DeWitt novels.

RECOMMENDED

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

Published by Riverhead on May 12, 2011

The Psychopath Test is fundamentally about the mental health community's obsession with labeling people -- an obsession that feeds into the nation's intolerance of nonconformity. Although The Psychopath Test is a very funny book, it touches on serious issues, including the increasingly common misdiagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder, the over-diagnosis of autism, and the delight that pharmaceutical companies take in the explosion of newly-discovered disorders.

Jon Ronson's entertaining romp through the mental health industry starts with an expensively produced book called Being or Nothingness (half the pages are blank) that puzzled recipients around the world. Investigating that mystery (and questioning the mental health of its author) led Ronson to wonder whether "madness was everywhere," which motivated him to page through the formidable Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (finding, as every honest person would, a few categories into which he might fall). Further investigation brought him to the Scientologists (a group that takes a dim view of psychology), who pointed him to an institutionalized individual who had been labeled (inappropriately, according to the Scientologists) a psychopath.

I think it's telling that when Ronson asked to interview Bob Hare, whose psychopathy checklist (the PCL-R) is widely used to "identify" psychopaths, Hare told him he could have an interview if he paid £600 to attend his seminar. The link between money and "the madness industry" (to quote the book's subtitle) is one of Ronson's stronger points, one that merits a book of its own.

It's ironic that Hare's initial research into psychopathy involved giving painful electric shocks to test subjects and that Hare feels he did nothing wrong (notably, a lack of empathy and lack of remorse are two of the criteria the PCL-R uses to label individuals as psychopaths). Hare also thinks that his research results are "a really big story" that could "forever change the way people see the world" (a grandiose sense of self-worth is another of the criteria). Interestingly, Hare would score himself only a 4 or 5 of 40 on the PCL-R while one of his critics would score him 29 or 30. Admittedly, both of the scorers are biased (the critic is a Scientologist) but that's the point: scores depend largely upon the subjective impressions of the scorers rather than scientifically measurable facts, rendering the PCL-R (like many rating instruments) of dubious value.

Seduced by the illusory clarity of the PCL-R, Ronson begins to pin the psychopath label on people he meets after momentary interactions. To be fair, Hare does the same. Hare tells Ronson that a hotel concierge who objected to Ronson's uninvited use of his telephone was a psychopath when it seems to me the concierge had a right to be upset.

The most important sentence in Ronson's book, I think, is this: "I now felt that the checklist was a powerful and intoxicating weapon that was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands." True enough, although I wonder whether anyone has the right hands. Hare does have the good grace to acknowledge that the PCL-R can be misused, pointing to the role it plays in the United States as a justification for labeling individuals as sexually violent persons. (It's actually the least important rating instrument used for that purpose; the others, supposedly more specific to sexual violence, are flawed and none have any predictive value in determining who will and who won't commit sex offenses in the future.) Of course, Hare's stated concern about the misuse of the PCL-R to label individuals as sexual predators doesn't stop him from coming to the United States to make money teaching psychologists how to use it for that very purpose.

The Psychopath Test does meander a bit. There's an amusing chapter on David Shayler's loony conspiracy theories and another that discusses a criminal profiler whose profile matched an innocent person more closely than the actual killer, leading to the innocent's arrest and prolonged incarceration while the criminal was left free to kill again. Exposing the goofiness of conspiracy theories and the myth that profilers can identify the guilty on the basis of glib assumptions about criminal behavior is useful but not on point with the rest of the book. Still, the tone of Ronson's book is light and chatty -- it isn't a polemic -- and he can be forgiven for straying off point for the sake of telling a good story. Those who are wedded to the efficacy of labeling individuals with mental disorders might be put off by this book, but I thought it was great fun.

RECOMMENDED

The Rock Hole by Reavis Z. Wortham

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on June 7, 2011

This deftly plotted, fast moving novel is Reavis Wortham's second. His first (a comedy) was published in 1999. I hope he doesn't wait a dozen years to write another thriller. I don't want to wait that long to read it, and read it I will.

The Rock Hole is set in 1964. About half the chapters are written in the third person. The rest are written from the first person perspective of Top, a ten-year-old boy who lives with his grandparents on the Texas side of the Red River, where they have a cotton farm. Top has nightly nightmares about drowning in the river's Rock Hole.

In addition to farming, Top's grandfather, Ned Parker, is a part-time constable, a job that usually involves busting up stills and arresting disorderly drunks. When he's called to a farmer's field where a dog has been tortured and killed (one of a series of similar crimes), he finds an advertisement torn from the local newspaper that makes him wonder whether the animal predator is about to move on to human prey. Ned's investigation becomes muddled when several members of a family are killed and a baby goes missing. Later murders make it apparent that the animal killer's appetite for gruesome death has progressed to human victims, most of whom are related to Ned. Of course, it's inevitable that the killer's path and Top's will eventually cross.

Top spends much of his time with his cousin, an amusingly foul-mouthed girl named Pepper. The chapters that tell the story from Top's point of view capture the horror that a child would experience when encountering the sort of violence that would disturb even the most jaded adult. While all of the characters are well-developed, the reader forms an empathic bond with Top, whose innocence erodes as the story progresses. Wortham balances the growing tension surrounding the killings with atmospheric scenes of rural life (farming and hunting and community gatherings) and the routine of Ned's law enforcement duties as well as a subplot involving Ned's nephew, who takes up with a woman after she separates from her mean-spirited husband, much to the husband's consternation. Comic moments are carefully placed to create respites from the increasing sense of dread (my favorite involves Ned's response to a fire-and-brimstone preacher who accuses Ned's devoutly Christian wife of living a sinful life).

In many respects, The Rock Hole reminded me of another well-conceived thriller: The Bottoms. Like Joe Lansdale's novel, The Rock Hole takes place in Texas, sets up a story involving mutilated bodies, places a child at the story's center, and features a white protagonist who doesn't share the racist tendencies of his neighbors. Ned, a white man married to a Native American, depends on nonwhite labor to pick his cotton but treats every law-abiding member of the community with respect regardless of race. The town is literally divided by railroad tracks, whites living on one side and blacks on the other. Ned's black deputy enforces his own version of the law in the black community as an alternative to the vicious "justice" dispensed by the racist Sheriff, a man Ned despises. The differing attitudes of the characters on questions of race add realism to the story without becoming sanctimonious (even Ned, who pays low wages to the laborers who pick his cotton while worrying that civil rights protests will spread to their community, has a ways to go).

The Rock Hole isn't quite as chilling as The Bottoms, but the quality of the writing is nearly as good. I loved the way it ended.  This is a novel I can entusiastically recommend to thriller fans.

RECOMMENDED

Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on May 25, 2011

Mickey Spillane was a master of the noir title:  My Gun is Quick remains my favorite, but almost equally high on my list of stellar titles are I, the Jury; The Big Kill; and Kiss Me, Deadly.  Kiss Her Goodbye just doesn’t have the same danger-laden pizzazz.  Its subdued title notwithstanding, the novel feels very much like a Mike Hammer story:  edgy, violent, fast-paced and action-filled. 

Hammer was always a bit too self-righteous for my taste, too given to seeing himself as an avenging instrument of justice and too frequently indulging in rants against the many categories of people he believes the world would be better off without.  Although it’s been years since I last read a Hammer novel, the latest installment depicts a somewhat more introspective Mike Hammer than the one I remember.  I wouldn’t say he’s mellowed; he doesn’t kill anyone until about two-thirds of the way through the novel but the body count rises dramatically as the novel nears its end (particularly when Hammer tells us he “passed the grease gun across a sea of faces and turned them scarlet and screaming”).  Still, Hammer engages in less moralizing as he did in some of the earlier novels and his misogynistic opinions are a bit more muted (both of those changes are improvements, in my view).  Plots in a few Hammer novels seem like an excuse for Hammer to go on a rampage, dispensing street justice with his .44.  Kiss Her Goodbye gives the reader a taste of the rampaging Hammer but also delivers a relatively nuanced plot that is both coherent and engaging.

After a year of retirement in Florida while recovering from a wound he received in a shootout with the Bonetti family, Hammer returns to New York to attend the funeral of his mentor, Bill Doolan.  Hammer can’t believe Doolan would commit suicide, despite the terminal cancer that promised him only three more months of pain-filled life.  After leaving the funeral, while riding with the captain of the homicide division, Hammer spots a murder victim, Virginia Mathes, lying dead on a city sidewalk.  Hammer improbably intuits that Mathes was not killed in a random mugging and that her murder is somehow related to Doolan’s death.  Adding to the mystery are a dead hooker, an uncut diamond that was smuggled out of Russia before the Second World War, a stunning Brazilian singer named Chrome, and Doolan’s unlikely membership in a trendy NYC disco called Club 52.  It all adds up to an entertaining, plausibly-plotted story that leads to a satisfying (although not entirely surprising) resolution.

Despite being an enormously popular writer in his day, Spillane was never in the same league as the best writers of crime fiction who preceded him:  Chandler, Cain, and Hammett.  Compared to most other pulp fiction authors, however, Spillane stood out.  Spillane nourished the reading public’s desire for sex and violence using a spare, undemanding prose style that was perfect for the gritty stories he wrote.  We don’t know how much of the writing in Kiss Her Goodbye is Spillane’s and how much is Allan Collins’ -- the introduction tells us only that Collins was working from Spillane’s plot notes, character sketches, and a “false start” -- but it doesn’t really matter.  Kiss Her Goodbye is unmistakably a Mike Hammer novel:  a little trashy, sometimes childish, but always entertaining.

Although set in the 1970’s, the novel is written in the less-than-PC language of the 1950’s:  women are either dolls or broads and nearly every description of a female includes a commentary on her breasts.  Offensive though that might be, ‘twere it otherwise it wouldn’t be a Mike Hammer novel.  It is what it is.  Kiss Her Goodbye is the kind of throwback novel that most fans of old-school, hard-boiled detective fiction should enjoy.  I thought it was well done.

RECOMMENDED