Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

Published by ‎ Grand Central Publishing on January 10, 2023

Katrina Kim is a Korean-American. She lives in a city not far from her hometown, works for a temp service, and shares a small one-bedroom apartment with Leoni, who was seeking a co-tenant to split the rent. Katrina dropped out of college when her parents were unable to continue paying her tuition. Her parents were victims of a financial fraud scheme that wiped them out. Katrina believes her parents abandoned her after their financial disaster because they never visit or answer her letters.

Katrina is stalking a co-worker at her temp job. Kurt is all she thinks or talks about. She follows him around the office. Oddly, Katrina didn’t pay any attention to Kurt until Leoni saw him in a photograph and questioned Katrina about him.

Leoni is almost mothering in her concern for Katrina’s well-being. Leoni thinks Katrina might need to see a therapist. For multiple reasons, Leoni is probably right. Katrina has longstanding mental health issues, including her obsession with the number eleven and certain geometric shapes, particularly endekagram stellations. She believes an eleven-point sigil keeps her safe, so she obsessively traces one on her door. She occasionally slips into a “kitchen-door world” that she associates with Mi-Hee and the Mirror Man, a Korean book from her childhood. Standing on a bridge helps her maintain control when all her other rituals fail.

By snooping through his desk, Katrina knows that Kurt reads books about Masons and ancient magic. Seems like a guy who is perfect for a crazy woman. Kurt might or might not know that she’s snooping through his desk and might or might not have left a message in his desk for her. The line between reality and Katrina’s imagination is difficult to discern.

Kurt disappears from work. Katrina later sees him crash his car and then jump from a bridge. The police don’t believe her because they can’t find a body or a wrecked car. Katrina isn’t sure that what she saw was real.

All of that sets up Katrina as a neurotic detective. I think I’ve had enough of mentally ill detectives. Writers have used mental illness (particularly autism) in characterizations for some time, but writers who rely on trends inevitably try to top each other until they go over the top. David Baldacci claimed the prize for making mental illness ridiculous in Memory Man, leaving other writers with nowhere else to go. I give Maria Dong credit for taking mental illness more seriously than Baldacci, but Katrina’s affliction comes across as a gimmick, not as a genuine mental health issue afflicting a real person.

The book starts slowly but it grew on me as I continued reading, in part because I had no clue where it was going. A co-worker named Yocelyn also goes through Kurt’s desk, but why? Is that why Yocelyn was fired? Perhaps Kurt is a popular guy to stalk, but why? Katrina has the sense that someone is watching her. That might be true, but why? The Voynich Manuscript makes an appearance, but why? The plot piles question upon question. It does eventually move in the direction of clarity, but I’m not sure that all the questions are answered. Maybe I just lost track.

The solution to the book’s many puzzles is heavily dependent upon coincidence. The various plot threads are nevertheless woven together in a way that explains (sort of) Kurt’s disappearance, Katrina’s estrangement from her parents, Yocelyn’s firing, Leoni’s helpfulness, and Katrina’s inability to find any school yearbooks with Kurt’s picture. The story is a bit convoluted. Its attempt to generate suspense by placing Katrina in danger at the novel’s end fall flat. Katrina’s conflict between life in a Korean household and life in white corporate America seems forced.

While my reaction to Liar, Dreamer, Thief is negative in many respects, I gained an appreciation of the story as it developed. I wavered when deciding whether to recommend the book with or without reservations. Wavering might imply that I have reservations. I do, but not to the extent that I’m on the fence about recommending it. In the end, my interest in the plot overcame the novel’s weaknesses.

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The Hopkins Manuscript by R.W. Sherriff

First published in Great Britain in 1939; published by Scribner on January 17, 2023

Apart from its outdated science and technology, The Hopkins Manuscript is a book that could have been written this year. Set in the mid-1940s, this post-apocalyptic novel is based on the kind of European nationalism that was festering when it was first published in 1939. The novel even imagines a nationalistic British prime minister who might be mistaken for Boris Johnson. But the novel is not overtly political. At least initially, the apocalypse has a natural rather than a human cause.

The story purports to be a manuscript found in the ruins of Notting Hill. The Royal Society of Abyssinia has been investigating the dead societies of Western Europe. Historians found the manuscript to be of little value, although it does supply the only firsthand account of a Western European who survived the Cataclysm that occurred 700 years earlier.

The Hopkins Manuscript is as much pre-apocalyptic as post-apocalyptic. This is the story of an ordinary man who, despite being flawed by conceit and an inflated sense of self-importance, tells a gradually darkening story about muddling his way through catastrophic times.

Edgar Hopkins is a 53-year-old bachelor and a retired schoolmaster in a small English village. He has given up grammar school arithmetic and now devotes his days to hobbies: raising and showing chickens, gardening, and studying the moon. Hopkins is a prideful man who, thanks to his prize bantam’s accumulation of blue ribbons, regards himself as a minor celebrity. He easily feels slighted. Hopkins is quick to judge people he regards as self-impressed, often believing them to be jealous of his own accomplishments. Like many people, Hopkins wants to be the star of his own story and resents anyone who receives attention that he believes to be his due.

Hopkins attends quarterly meetings of the British Lunar Society in London. Scientists and philosophers deliver lectures about the moon to its members. At one eventful meeting, Hopkins learns that the moon is moving closer to the Earth. The members are sworn to secrecy, as the government does not want the public to panic. Hopkins is unbearably proud that he is among the chosen few who are entrusted with the secret but can barely refrain from boasting of his own importance.

To keep people well-mannered as the apocalypse approaches, the government convinces newspaper editors to report the possibility that the moon will only strike a “glancing blow,” perhaps causing a survivable atmospheric disturbance that will merely cause hurricanes and floods. The government orders the construction of dugouts in each city and village to maximize the chance of survival in the event that the moon does not obliterate the Earth when the bodies collide. It supplies watertight steel doors and oxygen cylinders so that village residents can sit out the apocalypse in comfort before cleaning up the mess. The villagers are happy to have a project to distract them from the end of the world and are even happier to believe that the apocalypse is nothing to worry about.

The reader knows from the start that Hopkins will survive. More than half the manuscript is devoted to events that lead to the cataclysmic event. The wry humor with which Hopkins describes his life is a welcome change from typical apocalyptic fiction. The zombie apocalypse novels that were popular as the end of the twentieth century neared were often amusing (not always intentionally), but the eco-catastrophe novels that have dominated the current century and the “war of annihilation” novels that followed the Second World War were not meant to tickle the funny bone. R.C. Sherriff imagines an unlikely apocalypse that does not depend on war or pandemic or global warming or even a zombie attack. I wish apocalyptic writers of today were as creative, even if modern readers might think it unlikely that the Earth would survive the apocalyptic event (or that the event could happen in the way the novel describes).

The last third of The Hopkins Manuscript reveals its broad lesson. Devastating events can pull us together. Eventually, however, the worst aspects of human nature will pull us apart again. Greed, tribalism, and appeals to fear are so much easier to sustain than compassion and cooperation. R.W. Sherriff certainly had the rise of Nazi Germany in mind as he wrote the story.

Hopkins takes note of political conflicts that weaken western European nations and make it vulnerable to attack from the East, but he sticks to his goal of telling “the story of these days as I saw them with my own eyes.” The days become increasingly depressing, turning an amusing story into a sad one.

Hopkins is true to himself through the entire novel. He’s lonely, apart from the post-apocalyptic attachment he forms with a young man and his sister for a couple of years after the catastrophe. He’s content with his loneliness because he prefers breeding chickens to the company of those who do not appreciate his courage, fortitude, and wisdom. Although those attributes might actually be in short supply, he is appealing because of his ordinariness. He lacks insight into his faults (as do most people), but he is a decent human and the perfect observer to record an eyewitness account of the end of western civilization, albeit from a narrow perspective.

Fans of post-apocalyptic fiction might want to seek out The Hopkins Manuscript as an early example of the genre. It isn’t as emotionally affecting as the best post-apocalyptic novels of the 1950s, but like those novels, it works because of its focus on the life of one person rather than the death (and possible rebirth) of the planet as a whole.

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Better the Blood by Michael Bennett

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 10, 2023

The pattern of British colonialism is ugly. White colonists pronounce themselves superior to “uncivilized” natives. Using their superior firepower, they supplant indigenous people in the territories they colonize. In New Zealand, the Māori were a peaceful people who saw themselves as caretakers of land that belonged to all Māori collectively. The British took their land and punished Māori who resisted, sometimes by hanging them. Efforts to restore stolen land through the legal system, if successful at all, result in the restoration of about 2% of the stolen land to the Māori.

Set in Aukland, Better than Blood is a police thriller that tells a story grounded in cultural identity. Hana Westerman is a Māori. When she was a new police officer, her white superiors thought it would be smart to send her to the front line of a police effort to suppress a Māori protest. Hana knew the Māori had legitimate grievances and felt conflicted when she carted off an older woman as the Māori derided her for siding with the whites.

Years later, when she is in her thirties, Hana has the rank of Detective Senior with the Aukland CIB. Someone sends her a video from an anonymous proxy. When she investigates the abandoned house in the video, she discovers a dead body in a hidden room. The death is the first of a series. Each time, Hana receives a video that tells her where a body will be found.

This isn’t a whodunit. The reader knows that the killer is a Māori lawyer named Raki. Hana’s daughter Addison took a class that Raki was teaching. Raki avoids killing innocent people, but he has his own definition of innocence. Hana’s task is to find the thread that connects the victims. That task requires Hana to work harder than the reader. The opening scene provides at least a rough idea of how the victims might be related.

Better than Blood fails to develop sufficient tension to stand as a successful thriller, despite scenes that place Hana and her daughter at risk. An early subplot about an entitled young white guy who decides to mess up Hana’s life disappears soon after it surfaces. I could have lived without Raki’s revealing dreams of his mother (and his encounter with her in the afterlife), just as I can always live without descriptions of dreams (and the afterlife).

Still, any novel that calls attention to social injustice has value. Hana’s conflict between her ethnic identity and her service to a government that has long oppressed her people adds interest to her character, as does her ex-husband’s position as her boss. I appreciated the way the novel ends. And I like the message that injustice cannot be a tool that is wielded against injustice. While the novel lacks suspense, it tells an interesting story through a character whose personal journey is more compelling than the underlying plot.

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Happy New Year!

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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