A History of Fear by Luke Dumas

Published by Atria Books on December 6, 2022

Grayson Hale has a history of fear. Perhaps he is afflicted with satanophobia, a condition describing an abnormal fear of the devil, but Grayson might have legitimate reasons to fear the Adversary. Whether the devil is real or in Grayson’s head — and whether the distinction makes a difference — is the question that propels the novel.

We learn in the opening pagesl that Grayson died after he was convicted of murder. He left behind a manuscript, the story of his life. An editor has annotated the manuscript with documents and interviews that shed light on what might or might be true in Grayson’s memoir.

As a child, Grayson’s fear was triggered by Dirt Devil commercials, deviled eggs, or a chance encounter with the number 666. The fear escalated after Grayson began to be plagued by winged creatures with needle-like teeth. Grayson eventually decided that the fiends weren’t real, a conclusion that followed from the inability of anyone else to see them. Grayson believed that one of the fiends scratched its mark into his arm when he was a baby — he still has the scars — but that was Grayson’s only physical encounter with demonic beasts before they vanished from his life.

Grayson’s father was a divinity scholar who doubled as a cult leader, although Grayson did not recognize the fellowship as a cult. Grayson’s father warned him to be wary of the Adversary. His mother threatened to show him the wrath of the Lord if he misbehaved. His brother, with his mother’s tacit approval, tried to beat the sin out of him. His father gifted Grayson with a book about a boy who had an insatiable hunger that was implanted by the devil. The book occasionally returns to haunt Grayson, providing a metaphor for his life that he doesn’t understand.

Grayson angered his father by following him in a park when he should have kept his distance, but he apparently repressed the full memory of what he saw. Grayson’s father either died in an accidental fall or jumped to his death, leaving behind a cryptic note that might provide insight into the true demons that torment Grayson.

The story begins when Grayson travels to Scotland to pursue his studies. Grayson needs to maintain enrollment and find some income to remain in the country. His need for cash seems to be met by D.B., who hires him to write a book about the history of the devil in Scotland. D.B. wants Scotland to remember the devil. The true nature of the book D.B. wants Grayson to write is not revealed until the final pages.

The winged creatures come back into Grayson’s life when D.B. enters it. Grayson comes to believe that D.B. is Satan. The reader might wonder whether Grayson, who blacks out from time to time, blames demons for his own actions. But if the fiends aren’t real, is D.B.? Grayson devotes the last part of his “book” to his search for the truth. He finds answers that tie together many of the novel’s loose ends while contributing to the story’s ambiguity.

Perhaps the supernatural exists, but the narrative offers clues to an alternative explanation of Grayson’s history of fear: his abandonment by a friend in childhood who didn’t like the way Grayson played; his lack of sexual attraction to his girlfriend; his obsessive desire (noticed by others but not by Grayson) to be close to Liam Stewart, a popular schoolmate who denied having a friendship with Grayson. Luke Dumas apparently did not trust readers to piece the clues together. He eventually (and unnecessarily) spells out the truth, a decision that dumbs down the novel. Yet the question of the devil’s reality always lurks.

Dumas emphasizes Grayson’s unreliable narrative and the mechanisms of self-protection that shield him from the truth. Whether Grayson’s perceptions are accurate or delusional, Grayson’s voice is clear even when his thoughts are not. Dumas’ characterization of Grayson as a troubled young man who lacks self-awareness is convincing.

Familiar themes include a son who is desperate for a father’s approval, a mother who is more concerned with appearances than reality, the way abusive behavior is passed from generation to generation, the bigoted condemnation of “deviant” sexual behavior, and the lasting harm that religious intolerance inflicts on children. The novel’s premise — maybe the supernatural is real, maybe it is imagined by ill minds, maybe the supernatural preys on ill minds — is also familiar, but Dumas executes the balance between competing explanations for Grayson’s experiences — supernatural forces and mental illness — with skill.

I’m not a big fan of the supernatural in fiction, but I appreciate stories that build upon the ambiguity that is inherent in unanswerable questions. The final section, reflecting the views of the editor who annotates Grayson’s memoir, purports to clarify the ambiguity but adds to it by making the reader wonder about the editor’s true identity. While A History of Fear might have a greater impact on true believers in Satan, it tells an intriguing story for readers who appreciate how little we understand about the nature of reality and the complexity of the human mind.

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The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams

Published by William Morrow on January 3, 2023

This strange story is filled with the low-key humor that comes from transplanting characters who might be at home in The Office or Severance to an arctic research station. The station has been closed but not abandoned. Only four people haunt the empty building. Gilroy is the only remaining researcher. Without lab equipment, he conducts his research by staring into space and making notes. He wants to “get in touch with the cold,” which he envisions as a malicious entity whose “end goal” is “a full-blown castration of the soul.” The other three are maintenance workers who perform such important tasks as opening and closing doors to determine whether they make noise and, if so, to record the volume and source of the noise so that repairs can be scheduled.

As the supervisor of the three maintenance workers, Hart completes the paperwork associated with their assignments (filling in the blank that follows such questions as “How many chairs need replacement?” after they sit on each chair and shift from side to side). Hart places the completed forms in a drop box on the roof. Pat, his boss, dispatches a weekly helicopter to collect the forms and drop off new assignments.

Hart is convinced that their work is of the utmost importance. Researchers might die if they fail to identify work surfaces that are not perfectly flat (the tragic accidents and ensuing chaos he envisions are imaginative but implausible). Hart is sometimes paralyzed by the fear of making an error. His coworkers do not seem to share that fear; they’re simply unmotivated.

Hart believes he is locked in a power struggle with Gibbs, who clearly (and perhaps correctly) thinks she can lead the team more capably than Hart. Cline regards himself as an artist, but he doesn’t ask for art supplies to be delivered on the weekly supply run because he’s not sure he wants to paint a landscape of snow.

The tasks assigned to Hart’s team are so pointless that Hart has lost track of whether the team has done them before. They often need to start over because they become distracted and can’t recall, for example, whether they rolled all the window shades in a particular room up and down. Hart wonders whether the nature of monotonous work might “propel it straight past a casual memory into the arena of trauma, where it would likely be repressed?”

The concept of inept workers struggling to perform tedious make-work chores is funny, but the nature of the workplace adds to the novel’s humor. After a windy night, the workers see something in the snow. They can’t identify it. They aren’t sure whether it moves when they aren’t watching it. When they stare at it, hours elapse. In fact, lost hours are common in the facility, at least for Hart, who can never remember how he spent his weekends. In fact, Hart has lost track of how long the team has been working at the facility.

When Hart sends Pat a Post-It note asking if she knows about the thing in the snow, she asks for more information. The three workers quarrel about who should prepare a description. Rather than collaborating, they decide to resolve their differences with a writing contest, then argue about who wrote the best description of a lamp. Their dysfunction as members of a team is hilarious, although instantly recognizable to anyone who has been part of a dysfunctional team. Pat’s eventual response to the question about the thing in the snow produces something approaching panic, followed by another series of failed experiments.

In addition to mocking make-work jobs and teams that can’t master the art of collaboration, The Thing in the Snow questions the concept of leadership. Hart is ridiculously impressed with himself because he supervises two subordinates in a pointless job. He reads a series of novels that are meant to provide instruction or inspiration for leaders, but they fail to transform Hart into something he is not. A reader might suspect that the endless supply of “How to Be a Leader” books are equally useless. Still, the plots of the leadership novels that Hart reads are so outlandish that I would probably read them.

A contracted wellness provider whose basic care only measures body temperature within a range of 3 degrees (premium care offers whole numbers; with platinum care you get decimals) offers some of the novel's funniest moments. A story that draws humor from absurdity doesn’t need to make sense, but Sean Adams impressed me with an ending that explains why the three maintenance people and the lone researcher are really working at the facility. The novel deliberately leaves lingering questions that add to the fun. In the end, I think The Thing in the Snow is about the need to find purpose, or at least to feel a purpose, in work or in life. When a goofy story turns out to make a meaningful point, I have to recommend it.

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Happy Holidays!

An Impossible Return by Caroline Laurent

First published in France in 2020; published in translation by Amazon Crossing on December 1, 2022

An Impossible Return takes place during one of the historical tragedies that most of us never hear about because it happened to someone else, to some other people in some other land. Mauritius is an island nation in the Indian Ocean. It was under French control for a hundred years before it became a British colony. The people of Mauritius gained their independence in 1968, but the British, the US, and the new political leader of Mauritius cut a secret deal to split off the Chagos Archipelago, which became a British territory. The island of Diego Garcia was leased to the US for a naval base, a land grab justified by the “war on terror.” The lease required all Chagossians to be expelled before the base was constructed.

In an afterword, Caroline Laurent explains that she learned about the ordeal endured by Chagossians from her Mauritian mother. Laurent’s novel tells the story by creating a protagonist who, despite poverty and the absence of a formal education, fights back against injustice. The protagonist’s son brings the story forward, into the recent past, with intermittent commentary on a legal proceeding before the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

The protagonist, Marie-Pierre Ladouceur, lives on Diego Garcia. She shares herself with two lovers as the mood strikes her. She has a daughter named Suzanne and doesn’t know which lover is the father. When a handsome young man named Gabriel Neymorin arrives on the island, Marie aggressively takes his virginity. Gabriel is enthused to discover the new sport of sex, although his petulant refusal to dance with Marie at a wedding motivates her to shag one of her former lovers. Marie greets her pregnancy with the hope that Gabriel is the father, but the baby does not have his fair skin or European features. Gabriel nevertheless assumes that Joséphin is his son and loves him as a father should.

Gabriel grew up in Mauritius with a brother and sister. His father sent him to the Chagos to work as the secretary for Marcel Mollinart, the colonial administrator. The assignment shattered Gabriel’s hope of studying in London, a dream that his more favored brother was allowed to pursue. Some of the story involves a family drama as the siblings become distant from each other and from their racist father. Another family drama occurs when Gabriel comes to suspect that he is not the biological father of Joséphin.

History begins to take center stage when Gabriel learns of the plan to evacuate Diego Garcia. The plan calls for volunteers to leave first (without telling them that they can’t return), followed by cutting off supply shipments to the Chagos, with the eventual forced evacuation of diehards who remain. Gabriel is sworn to secrecy by the British government and blackmailed by Mollinart to hide the truth from Marie. Gabriel’s dilemma leads to an even deeper schism in his relationship with Marie and Joséphin, particularly after Marie learns that Gabriel lied about the fate of her sister, who took a trip to Mauritius to buy supplies and failed to return as Marie expected.

The novel’s most moving scenes follow the upended lives of Chagossians who are cut off from supplies and later evacuated at gunpoint. The evacuation scene is horrifying, particularly for dog lovers. Marie and Gabriel are separated in the confusion, just as other families are torn apart. Travel to Mauritius in the hold of a ship (reminiscent of slave ships) is harrowing, as is life for Chagossians in a Mauritian slum that is torn apart by a cyclone with no support from the governments of the UK or Mauritius.

Racism explains why the British and Americans felt entitled to force black island residents to abandon their land, property, and culture, to endanger their lives, to separate family members, and to provide them with no support on Mauritius. Laurent illustrates racist attitudes in other ways: Mollinart’s wife can’t believe that he feels sympathy for black people; Gabriel’s father berates his sister for befriending an Indian girl on Mauritius.

Some plot elements could be the stuff of melodrama (the uncertainty of Joséphin’s paternity, the abusive relationship to which Marie’s sister clings, Gabriel's awareness of his father's abuse of a servant, an unexpected death), but even the most dramatic moments in the story of Marie and Gabriel are understated. Their story primarily exists as a frame for the larger story of Chagossians who were uprooted and forced to wait decades for the opportunity to return to their homeland. Marie becomes an unlikely spokeswoman, something of a media celebrity, in her efforts to force the UK to acknowledge its wrongdoing. The British try to take advantage of the Chagossians with an illusory settlement before they are forced to answer for their colonial sins. The larger historical context produces a stirring story that resonates with the kind of truth that refuses to be silenced.

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Three-Edged Sword by Jeff Lindsay

Published by ‎ Dutton on December 6, 2022

Three-Edged Sword is the third Riley Wolfe novel. I started reading the first one but I was so turned off by Wolfe’s boastfulness that I set the book aside and never got back to it. The second book evaded my radar. By the time I saw this one, I had forgotten about the first one, so I gave it a try. I am pleased to report that Wolfe, while occasionally reminding the reader that he is the best criminal in the history of crime, has toned down his arrogance.

Wolfe’s real name is Wiener. He uses aliases because that’s what thieves do and besides, Wolfe is so much cooler than Wiener. As a successful thief, Wolfe has plenty of money. He needs it to maintain security and to keep his mother’s body breathing, despite her brain death.

As the novel begins, Wolfe’s companion (not quite a girlfriend despite one blissful night together) Monique is in a coma. She was working for Wolfe when she took a blow to the head and Wolfe feels responsible for her welfare. Wolfe knows she will recover because he dictates outcomes. Well, apart from his mother. As much as Wolfe believes he can will it to happen, nobody wakes up from brain death.

While he’s waiting for Monique to awaken, Wolfe attempts to pull a complicated heist involving diamonds in Botswana. The target turns out to be a setup. A CIA agent named Prescott recruits Wolfe to steal a flash drive from a safe at the bottom of a missile silo on a heavily guarded private island. In exchange, Wolfe can keep the Ushakov icons that are stored in the vault. Also, Prescott will release Wolfe’s mother and Monique, who are being held hostage to assure Wolfe’s cooperation.

The plot follows Wolfe as he creates and executes a plan to steal the drive and icons from a fellow who once ran an espionage circuit for the Soviet Union. Wolfe’s plan is reasonably clever and more believable than your typical Mission Impossible plot. Once Wolfe discovers the contents of the drive, he turns his attention to Prescott and to his imprisoned mother and friend.

Three-Edged Sword moves quickly, fueled less by the fights that are typical of thrillers than by the con artistry and parkour that are common to heist stories. Notwithstanding his conceit, Wolfe is a welcome break from the tough guys who dominate crime novels. As he proved in his Dexter novels, Jeff Lindsay can make dark personalities appealing, even if you might not want to befriend his characters. I wasn’t convinced to give Just Watch Me another try, but I’ll look for future entries in the series with the hope that they match the energy of this one.

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