Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling

Published by Atria Books on April 4, 2023

Camp Zero is a novel of climate change, sisterhood, survival, and the privilege that accompanies wealth. In the relatively near future, southern climates have become unbearable, forcing migration to the north. The true impact of global warming in the United States is only hinted at in a story that primarily focuses on northern Canada. We nevertheless learn that one American city — a new one, constructed to house wealthy Americans offshore to avoid the threat of rising sea levels — has prospered despite (or because of) climate change.

Damien Mitchell lives in the Floating City. He invented the Flick, a device that is wired into the brain to provide internet connectivity. Damien has not told the public of a long-term downside to using the Flick. Camp Zero might be sending a message about the downside of staring at smartphone screens all day long, but the damage caused by the Flick is measurable. Unfortunately, after Michelle Min Sterling introduces that story element, she does nothing with it. Doing nothing with story elements is a recurring issue in Camp Zero.

Rose is Damien’s client in the Floating City. Rose is a half-Korean sex worker whose true name is revealed in an anticlimactic moment late in the novel. Using the promise of a decent life for Rose’s mother as an inducement, Damien convinces Rose to travel to Dominion Lake in Canada, where a camp employs Diggers to dig holes in the frozen ground. Rose is instructed to use her talents as a working girl to spy on Meyer, the architect who believes he is building a new settlement for Americans who are fleeing from the climate crisis.

Rose joins five other sex workers who are collectively known as the Blooms. They are supervised by a woman named Judith who extracts their Flicks, a seemingly pointless exercise since Dominion Lake has no wireless connection. Whether the Blooms feel exploited or happy to have a job (or both) is unclear, as neither the sex workers nor Judith are developed in depth. Only two Blooms are of consequence to the plot. Rose’s background is presented as a sketch while Willow’s underdeveloped character ties into another part of the story. Since the Blooms eventually seize an opportunity to make a better life, a reader can infer that they are unhappy with their present lives, but the women are so insubstantial that I found it difficult to connect with their plight.

Dominion Lake was once an oil drilling town but jobs became scarce after the US finally banned oil. Life in Dominion Lake is primitive. The Blooms operate from an abandoned mall. Why the stores left so many goods behind when they closed is never explained.

Grant Grimley came from money. With the help of his parents, he survived a hurricane that devastated Manhattan, but his girlfriend was less fortunate, perhaps because Grant’s parents regarded her as unworthy. Grant went north, accepting an invitation to teach English at a newly built campus in Canada. The campus at Dominion Lake turns out to be something less than he expected. His students are Diggers who, with Meyer, are supposedly awaiting an influx of funding so they can build a bigger community. Why it was deemed wise to give Grant a useless job is never made clear.

The story of Dominion Lake is woven into the separate story of White Alice. White Alice is a research station within snowmobiling distance from Dominion Lake. Because it was once used as a military radar base, it supposedly establishes American sovereignty, giving the US a foothold in an area that has an untapped supply of rare earth elements. The White Alice story, compressed in time, begins before the Dominion Lake story but eventually catches up.

The all-female team at White Alice has replaced a team that either went mad or starved to death when its home base stopped resupplying the scientists. This was apparently an attempt to see how well scientists survive without food and fuel in the frozen wilderness. The result was predictable, leaving the reader to wonder why the experiment was carried out. That’s yet another question the story neglects to answer.

To assure that the experiment is not replicated, some of the new scientists visit Dominion Lake in a search for supplies. One of them comes back pregnant. They decide to make their own little colony at White Alice, collectively raising a baby who grows up to be a proficient raider as they steal oil and supplies from other towns. Sustaining the colony will require an influx of new blood — that is, new breeding stock. The men who might be suitable for the task meet varying fates.

Had the characters been given more depth, had the story addressed unanswered questions, Camp Zero might have been a strong entry in the growing subgenre of climate change science fiction. Sterling imagined interesting scenarios but did too little with them. While the story confronts the conflict between idealism and survival, its revelatory moment instructs us that “it’s a shit world, but it’s the only world we have.” As inspiration goes, that lesson is wanting. The novel did enough to hold my interest but not enough to realize its potential.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Insatiable Volt Sisters by Rachel Eve Moulton

Published by MCD x FSG Originals on April 4, 2023

The Insatiable Volt Sisters is a literary horror story. Unless the author is Mary Shelley, I’m not sure that “literary” and “horror” belong in the same sentence. Stephen King (to whom Rachel Eve Moulton seems to pay homage by naming a character Carrie) once argued that writers either create genre fiction or literature but not both. In later years, after sharpening his writing talent, King backed away from that position, but there is some truth to the suggestion that plot-focused genre fiction isn’t easily blended with literary fiction’s focus on character and setting and deep themes. Some writers perform that trick, but Moulton sacrifices the storytelling that horror fiction demands by focusing on her literary aspirations. In the end, Moulton uses the trappings of horror fiction to dress up a domestic drama that explores feminist themes. She never manages to create the buildup of dread that is essential to a good horror story.

The plot cycles between 2000 and 1989, although the reader learns much (maybe too much) about the early history of Fowler Island in Lake Erie. We are told at least twice that Eileen and Elizabeth Fowler, sisters who developed the power to communicate with each other without speaking, built the island’s downtown and roads, as well as the Island Museum. Elizabeth married Seth Volt, who dug a quarry and built a Victorian house that islanders call Quarry Hollow. Legend has it that Seth imprisoned Elizabeth in the house, separating her from her sister. They learned to communicate by telepathy to overcome their separation.

The half-sisters Henrietta (Henri) and Beatrice (B.B.) are descendants of Seth Volt. They were born two years apart to different mothers but were often mistaken for twins, perhaps because their mothers looked so much alike. Their father James, a reclusive poet who somehow made a living, apparently had a type. After Olivia Rose vanished, James knocked up Carrie and brought her to the island as his new wife. The sisters grew up in Quarry Hollow and know it to be haunted, perhaps by Oliva Rose, but not by her alone.

Fowler Island is where depressed women go to die. “The island feasts on female sadness. It licks it up like ice cream.” Women visit the island and disappear, perhaps by jumping (voluntarily or otherwise) into the quarry, which is now filled with water. The quarry is known to the Volt sisters as the Killing Pond. Nobody seems to care about the missing women. Their bodies are never recovered so they are quickly forgotten. Moulton seems to be making a heavy-handed argument that society in general doesn’t care about women, although in most places, when someone comes across a female foot that has been detached from its body, the police at least investigate. Not on Fowler Island.

The island devil, a “great big and dripping thing with leathery fins,” lives in the Killing Pond. Perhaps bodies never surface because they are consumed by the monster, apart from the stray foot. When, on occasion, “the essential part” of the monster walks on land, it can change its shape to suit its whims. The monster’s true identity is a barely concealed secret until Moulton decides to state the obvious.

The other key character is Sonia, the curator of the island museum who helps mop up the blood and feet when women disappear. Sonia helped James raise B.B. after Olivia Rose disappeared.

For reasons that are revealed near the novel’s end, Carrie separated from James without warning, leaving the girls to fear that she had disappeared like Olivia Rose. After she returned, the girls sensed that Carrie would leave James and made drama because they feared she would only take her biological daughter with her. Their scheme to remain inseparable ends with a transformative experience for Henri. The island is indifferent to the scheme because it has plans for the Volt sisters.

Early in the novel, in a chapter that takes place in 2000, B.B. finds her father’s body, minus a part he seems to have shed. B.B. calls Henri to deliver the news. When Henri tells her mother that she will return for the funeral because B.B. needs her, Carrie reminds Henri that the island is “a magnet for trouble” and a “lighthouse for disaster.” Carrie eventually agrees to join Henri although she vows not to enter Quarry Hollow. Really, she should have known better. In any event, the Volt sisters are together once more.

The plot is all over the place. It combines a haunted house story with one of demonic possession while exploring sisterly relationships under extreme circumstances, failed marriages under extreme circumstances, and the disappearances of women who fled extreme circumstances. Themes of female despair and empowerment drive the novel. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to note that the ghosts who haunt the house are the residue of the women who died on the island. In death as in life, they are enslaved by toxic masculinity. Exactly why that is true is never addressed. It seems to be assumed that male demons feed on women because that's what men do.

The eventual show of strength displayed by the Volt sisters is a stretch, if only because their acquisition of girl power is unconvincing, even in a horror novel that demands suspension of disbelief. A late scene in which Carrie and Sonia overcome adversity by battling a devil while they’re underwater is just silly. So is the thought that ghosts of dead women urge a living woman who allies with them to “be strong” and “not to quit” until they transform the woman into “a lightning bolt of a girl.” You go, sisters! This is the kind of plot I might expect from a comic book. I just couldn’t take it seriously.

Because the novel is literary, Moulton devotes great attention to character development. Carrie and Sonia are collateral characters but they relate their thoughts in detail — Carrie’s thoughts of how it feels to be a disappearing mother, her changing feelings about James and the plan she made to escape from the island, her fear of the house and of James’ potential responsibility for the vanishing women; Sonia’s thoughts of being a maternal stand-in and the custodian of island lore. The detail slows the pace, inhibiting the fear that the novel never conjures.

Descriptions of the island monster crawling out of the goop are a bit chilling, until we realize that it’s a standard lizard monster with changeling powers. Moulton’s failure to enliven a horror story with original ideas leaves a shell that she fills with striking sentences and an ode to sisterhood that, while well-intentioned, falls short of being compelling.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dark Angel by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 11, 2023

Letty Davenport saved the war for Ukraine. Who knew?

The Letty Davenport series is similar to the Prey series that stars her father. The books tend to be gritty, unlike John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers novels, which mix in a larger amount of humor. Still, even Sandford’s darker novels are lightly seasoned with humor. Most of the humor in Dark Angel comes from snarky asides as characters rib each other, although Sandford also milks a team of hackers who devour microwave burritos for laughs. Burritos aside, the story’s focus is on good guys killing bad guys. The action becomes more intense as the story builds to a high-energy climax.

Letty works for a senator who loans her to Homeland Security in an odd disregard for the separation of powers. Letty is working on a stakeout involving the theft of government property when she meets a CIA agent who introduces herself as Cartwright. After the mission is completed, Cartwright invites Letty to join a social group consisting of women who are good with guns.

Letty is next assigned to infiltrate a West Coast group of computer geeks who reputedly hacked into the software that runs Russia’s train systems. While Letty is told that the group plans a ransomware attack on a natural gas provider in the Midwest, her handlers seem to have a greater interest in Russia’s trains. That interest coincides with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The American government wants to maintain deniability, but having rogue hackers rerouting trains that carry Russian military supplies would be a nice way to stick it to Putin.

Letty doesn’t need to know anything about hacking because her job is to protect someone who does. She is sufficiently young and hot to pass as a successful hacker’s girlfriend. The hacker is an overweight guy who helps out the NSA with his specialized knowledge of machine control software. He isn’t Letty’s type but they learn how to work together by establishing a cover as they drive from Florida to California. After arriving at their destination, they make a couple of contacts, engage in a bit of blackmail, and gain credibility by helping hackers who plan to take down a right-wing hate site. Their efforts lead them to the hacker they need to meet.

When they're not stealing the latest Intel chips, Russian assets are also looking for the train hackers, leading to the novel’s first significant bit of violence. Guns are drawn or fired repeatedly as the story progresses, culminating in attacks on the hacker group because it is trying to make life better for Ukraine. Since the government doesn’t want to involve its own actors (and wants to conceal its involvement from the FBI and local police), Letty recruits members of the women’s shooter group to help protect the hackers. Mayhem ensues.

Sandford never fails to entertain. He tells dark stories in a breezy style, crafts plots that move quickly and in surprising directions without causing confusion, and creates likable characters who are fundamentally decent without becoming saccharine. Some of his stories are enlivened by current events, but this is the first I’ve seen that allows a character to stick it to a foreign leader. Given the mess that the Russian Army made of Putin's invasion, Sandford's take on how American intelligence operatives might have contributed to the disaster comes across as plausible. That makes Dark Angel even more enjoyable.

RECOMMENDED

City Walls by Loren D. Estleman

Published by ‎ Forge Books on April 4, 2023

Amos Walker novels are a throwback to the days when detective stories were tight, plots were smart, and snappy dialog made readers think “wish I’d said that.” Loren D. Estleman turns them out at a steady rate and never misses.

Emmett Yale made himself rich by building electric self-driving cars, although he’s still working the bugs out of the self-driving part. His stepson, Lloyd Lipton, was shot by a sniper from a highway overpass while driving a classic Stingray. The shooter, Melvin Weatherall, was arrested. Disagreeing with the theory of the judge who granted bail to Weatherall, Yale believes his son wasn’t the random victim of a disgruntled gun owner who was taking out his animosity toward wealthy people by shooting sports car enthusiasts.

Lipton knew that Yale added to his fortune by using his inside knowledge of his own financial shenanigans to make a killing in the stock market. Yale believes that Lipton sold his knowledge of Yale’s unlawful behavior to Clare Strickling. Yale’s head of security, Gabe Parrish, caught Strickling stealing trade secrets while Strickling was still employed by Yale’s car company. Yale wants Amos to prove that Strickling hired Weatherall to kill Lipton.

As is common in novels of noir, the first murder is not the last. The most dramatic killing occurs after Walker tails Strickland to a private airfield. Walker assumes that a portfolio Strickland is carrying is stuffed with cash that Strickland intends to take on a clandestine flight to Canada. Before Strickland can leave the ground, however, someone points a prop plane at him and lets it taxi. Walker watches the prop tear Strickland to shreds.

Walker’s investigation should probably end at that point, but Walker lets no mystery go unsolved. Why did Weatherall kill Lipton? Who killed Strickland and why? Walker’s investigation includes an interview with the beautiful Palm Volker, a pilot and partner in the private airfield where Strickland died. Palm is making an investment in a historic biplane that will play a key role in the story.

Other murders ensue before Walker gets his answers, including a sniper shot into Walker’s office from a roof on the other side of his street. One mystery gives birth to another as Yale’s theory about Lipton’s killing becomes secondary to the events that follow. The final action scene had me wondering “Didn’t Walker realize he was putting himself in danger?” but the scene is so much fun that I forgave Walker for being a bonehead.

Estleman describes cars on a freeway, viewed from the vantage point of an overpass, as “aerodynamically approved cough drops on wheels.” He describes “a chain-link fence topped by coils of razor wire” as “Detroit’s official flower.” That’s the kind of writing that made detective fiction great in its golden age. Kudos to Estleman for keeping the tradition alive with classic stories about an old-school gumshoe.

RECOMMENDED

Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen

Published by Minotaur Books on April 4, 2023

Most of us depend on vision more than any other sense to perceive the world. As a character in Blind Spots explains, visual perceptions are often faulty. Eyewitness evidence in criminal prosecutions is among the least reliable forms of evidence because perceptions and memory are subject to error and bias. Blind Spots builds on that knowledge to imagine a world in which the questionable data we receive from our eyes gives way to a new form of “seeing” that is subject to manipulation.

Blind Spots imagines a near future in which everyone in the world lost their vision for a reason that scientists have not discovered. The disability spread like a pandemic. During a period known as The Blinding, chaos ensued. Scientists who had been working on a form of artificial vision developed an implant that allows a form of vision. How the implant works is a bit blurry (it purports to combine radar and GPS to transmit images to the brain) but the device (known as a vidder) also gives companies a chance to beam advertisements directly to the user’s consciousness. Naturally, the company that developed and markets vidders is making a fortune.

I’d rather be blind than forced to watch ads, and that’s a choice some people have made. Some of those people have joined a religion or cult called Inner Sight based on their rejection of vidders. Inner Sight encourages people to accept blindness as a means of stepping back from the “deceitful, materialist, immoral world.” A nefarious company is building on vidder technology to create an improved experience that allows users to change how their appearance is perceived. Okay, I might put up with advertising if a gadget can make women mistake me for George Clooney.

Before The Blinding, while he was a teen, Mark Owens visited a monastery for a couple of days. He was impressed by the stress relief associated with silence. When Owens removes his vidder and spends time with Inner Sight, he experiences a similar epiphany. Eyesight is wonderful but it might also cause the sighted to miss perceptions that come from other senses; the whistles of birds, the gentle caress of a breeze. Not to mention the ability to fight with sticks like the old blind guy on the television show Kung Fu. Thomas Mullen borrows the blind stick fighting for an action scene near the novel’s conclusion.

Owens is a cop. He was married to Jeannie. He’s been a mess since she killed herself. He blames himself for her death because he was less than a supportive husband. Some of his colleagues, including the one he’s sleeping with, wonder whether he might have killed Jeannie. Owens’ partner, Jimmy Peterson, seems to be the only person who will stand up for him. Owens is under investigation by the Truth Commission for wild and violent actions by people in positions of authority during The Blinding, but the investigation seems to be a pretext to cover up something more sinister. The plot involves a conspiracy that will be furthered by an assassination, presumably shielding conspirators from the light that the Truth Commission hopes to shine on their misdeeds.

Nobody believes Owens when he claims that crimes are being committed by people he only perceives as black blurs. Is a glitch in his vidder preventing him from identifying suspects or is he lying? Owens has little help as he works to answer the question and solve the novel’s several connected murders.

Futuristic cop fiction is a subgenre at the intersection of science fiction and crime fiction. Blind Spots is a bit weak on the science (The Blinding is never explained and the attempt to explain vidders is unconvincing, particularly when they start making holograms) but science aside, the story works as a crime novel. While the many-branched plot is a bit convoluted, it all comes together in the end. Owens is sympathetic in the traditional role of troubled cop under suspicion. Action scenes give the plot some pep. Despite a determined effort, Mullen falls a bit short of making a meaningful statement with the blindness theme, but Blind Spots does manage to tell an entertaining story.

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