51 by Patrick O'Leary

Published by Tachyon Publications on February 8, 2022

Patrick O’Leary has a day job. At one point, he worked for Steve Jobs. Prior to 51, his most recent novel was published almost twenty years ago. His first two, Door Number Three and The Gift, are wildly imaginative, although The Gift is more fantasy than science fiction. O’Leary says it took him sixteen years to write 51 (and even longer to write The Gift). He’s produced some short fiction in the interim, but not all that much. O’Leary is deservedly proud that Harlan Ellison called him science fiction’s J.D. Salinger.

Speaking of imaginative. Remember the imaginary friend you had when you were a little kid? You probably can’t remember any details about your friend, but the friend was real. Every imaginary friend (IF) is real. We imagine them into existence. They make us forget them as we grow older, yet they exist for the sole purpose of having people believe in them. They exist because children need them. They provide comfort, inspiration, love. They help children fight their fears when they are most vulnerable. They disappear when we no longer need them. Or they did before things changed. For the last several decades, our IFs have continued to exist, invisibly, living in closets, long after we forget them. That’s a clever premise.

It’s not just IFs we forget. Forgetting is one of the novel’s themes. We forget the Native American tribes that were wiped out to expand white America. We forget the slave labor that built white America. We forget the bombs that have been dropped, the wild animals that have been caged, the democracies that have been toppled, the species we made extinct. Our IFs are invisible because so much is invisible that we can’t see what we’ve become — or so one of the IFs tells a character named Nuke.

Alcoholism is another prominent theme, related to the theme of memory and its loss. Alcoholics often drink to forget. To forget how to feel pain. To endure a personal tragedy that friends have barely noticed until “not one of your friends, colleagues, or drinking buddies can recognize the man you’ve become.”

The IFs aren’t in the closet during most of the novel’s time frame (mid-1950s to 2019). They’re in Area 51, where they’re washed and stored and become the subject of experiments. Winston Koop begins working at the base in 1972 and quickly spots an equation on a blackboard, an equation that accidentally made a door to a place called “the Anywhere.” Scientists don’t know how to close the door. Koop is one of the few who understands the equation. He’s also one of the few who can retain a memory of the IFs he sees at the base. To Koop they look like kids in nightgowns. To others they look like white cats. Their true form is something different. They are masters of camouflage.

The door and the atom bomb have something to do with why IFs no longer fade out of existence when the children who imagine them grow up. Now everyone sees them but nearly everyone instantly forgets seeing them. At Area 51, they help the defense establishment create advanced weaponry. In exchange, one of their number (nicknamed The Pope) is put in charge of the portal and allowed to set a certain number of IFs free each year.

Koop’s job eventually evolves. He learns how to make others forget. He’s responsible for security, for making sure that nobody with knowledge of Area 51 remembers. Sometimes they need to die to make that happen.

The narrator, Adam “Nuke” Pagnucco, was a college friend of Koop. Nuke was the best man at Koop’s wedding. Nuke has forgotten the wedding. He’s forgotten Koop. The forgetting was Koop’s doing. Nuke starts to remember him after a chance encounter in 2018. At that point they are both 73, “long past our denials and excuses.” Koop fills Nuke in on forgotten details before enlisting him in a mission — to close the door. And there’s your plot, although it makes multiple detours on a nonlinear path before it finally zeroes on its destination.

In addition to its creative exploration of intriguing themes, 51 is notable for its unpredictable moments. Some are funny (the Pope’s interactions with American presidents are priceless). Others are poignant. All are surprising and a few are downright weird. They give the plot an offbeat, unbalanced, ever-changing rhythm. The story is a bit more muddled and a bit less amazing than Door Number Three, but it is similar in its complex structure. Both novels probably merit a second reading to fully understand their meaning.

The appearance of 51 gives me hope that O’Leary will retire from his day job (if he hasn’t already) and pull other projects off the shelf, or create new ones, without making us wait another twenty years for a finished product. O’Leary has a story-telling perspective that is uniquely his own. I’m grateful that he shared that perspective again in 51.

RECOMMENDED

Dark Horse by Gregg Hurwitz

Published by Minotaur Books on February 8, 2022

The 7th Orphan X novel offers what fans of the series expect: action; spats between Evan Smoak and his teenage ward Joey; more action; introspective moments as Smoak tries to understand himself; more action; philosophical moments as Smoak tries to help others understand themselves; and, of course, a whole lot of action.

The plot is far-fetched. That isn’t unusual for Orphan X novels. In Dark Horse, Evan returns to his Nowhere Man gig, helping people who can’t help themselves.

A cartel leader in southern Texas named Aragón Urrea wants Evan to retrieve his daughter Anjelina, who was kidnapped by a rival cartel leader in Mexico. One might think that Urrea would be more than capable of helping himself and wouldn’t qualify for Evan’s services. Urrea has funding and manpower to attack his rival, although a frontal assault would probably not work out well for Anjelina. He decides he’d rather send one guy, apparently having heard through the grapevine that Evan is a superhero.

Evan agrees to take the job if, at least to some degree, Urrea will change his evil ways. Urrea reluctantly agrees because nothing is more important to him than his daughter, at least until later developments cause him to question his parental loyalty. At that point, Evan helps the cartel boss get back in touch with his root love of his daughter. Those scenes a bit hokey but they advance the plot so the hokeyness is forgivable. Because Urrea is only “sort of” a cartel leader, not like the evil cartel leader in Mexico who traffics in young women and feeds his enemies to a lion, the reader can “sort of” get behind Urrea, or at least not despise him.

The portrayal of Urrea as a gangster with a heart (at least when it comes to family) is forced, but it leads to an interesting discussion of the relative morality of drug dealing. Urrea profits from feeding addiction, but so do the Sacklers. Urrea’s mother points out that Urrea, as a good crime boss, at least uses some of his profits to support needy families who are loyal to him. I appreciate that point of view. Evan isn’t into moral relativism but he listens. In fact, he spends a good bit of the novel learning to listen, particularly when the petulant Joey demands that he respect her ability to make mature decisions. The continuing effort to develop Evan’s character helps the reader maintain an interst in Evan.

Evan’s ability to infiltrate the Mexican cartel and his immediate bonding with (and ability to manipulate) the cartel boss strained my willingness to suspend disbelief. I did so only because the novel works so well as an action story. Evan’s ability to wipe out a couple of dozen bad guys also strains credibility, but that’s the nature of the modern thriller. The story is entertaining and, in the end, that’s all that counts.

There is a Romeo and Juliet feel to the story (more than that I won’t say for fear of spoiling it). Apart from the main plot, the story advances Evan’s “sort of” relationship with his neighbor Mia and her son Peter while adding a bit of drama regarding Mia’s uncertain future. The story also advances Joey’s desire to be independent, a desire that clashes with Evan’s protective nature. All of that gives the book (and the series) enough substance to elevate it to the upper tier of thrillers that feature action heroes.

RECOMMENDED

String Follow by Simon Jacobs

Published by ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on February 1, 2022

String Follow is marketed as “a darkly comic suburban Gothic.” There’s no doubt that the novel is dark. School shootings are as dark as it gets, and the novel’s school shooting is only a small part of the violence that pervades the story. But school shootings aren’t the stuff of comedy. How String Follow can be marketed as “darkly comic” is bewildering.

The characters are teens in Adena, Ohio. The real Adena, a small village at least an hour’s drive from Pittsburg, is more rural than suburban, but a novelist is free to change the reality of locations. The fictional Adena appears to change its size and shape as characters drive through streets that are simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable.

The story is narrated by a lurking presence (marketing materials describe it as a “malevolent force”) that purportedly helps the teens understand their choices “and see their architecture, the brutal structure behind them, as dense and complex and orderly as a blood spray.” The plot culminates in a “Death Party” at the (supposedly empty) home of a character who is presumed to be dead but is inconveniently alive — a party orchestrated by the malevolent force. String Follow is more of a horror novel than a dark comedy. I suppose horror alone suffices to convince marketing departments to describe a novel as “Gothic.” The underlying premise seems to be that it’s pretty horrifying to be a teen.

The characters are lost in their teen angst. Beth “bottled and buried her rage within herself,” instinctively turning her back and retreating from conflict. Her older brother Greg is seeing a psychiatrist who has him on Risperdal. Greg doesn’t tell his shrink about the voice he hears, the voice that begins to dictate his behavior. Beth also hears a voice that tells her what to do, although its not as demanding as her brother’s voice. Beth feels like she’s trapped in a tower and believes she sees colors that she interprets as souls.

Not to be outdone, Sarah spends an inexplicable amount of time thinking about colored lights. Her colors are not necessarily souls, but she sometimes perceives them as bodies. Purple seems to be a guiding light. Sarah can’t have sex without entertaining colorful scattered thoughts: “On the bed, she separated from her body,” a perspective that allows her to notice “the yellow of David’s room to the filtered gray palette of the world beyond him” and the “furious white” sky, an “impossibly dense color of equal violence” creating an atmosphere “as thick as language.” Readers who can decipher that prose might find String Follow to be a real treat.

Sarah is Beth’s best friend until she’s not. Sarah is also David’s girlfriend until they break up, and then his lover when he’s nice to her until she decides he’s not being nice, after all. David is given to “pornographic cult fantasies” but otherwise seems to be living in oblivion. During their breakup, Sarah hangs out with Greg, whose attention she enjoys until she doesn’t. Sarah has a driving need to be popular and to solve other people’s problems, then feels her friends are using her when they allow her to impose her will upon them. It's not surprising that Sarah drives away her friend Claire, a minor character who is embarrassed by her family’s prosperity.

Tyler and Rhea are the other key characters, although Rhea is something of a nonentity unless she’s bleeding. For a time, Tyler and Rhea explore Adena and surrounding communities, avoiding their homes and parents. Tyler then discovers that David left the house unlocked while his parents were taking an out-of-town trip. Tyler takes over the teen cave that David made for himself in the basement, locking David out. David thinks it is odd that the basement door is suddenly locked but his teen ennui prevents him from doing anything about it. Tyler eventually invites Rhea to join him in David’s basement. Using David’s computer, Tyler invites a younger girl named Marcy to join him, promising to fuck her to death if she brings weed, to which Marcy (who calls herself Typhus) responds “when and where?” Inviting Marcy turns out to be a bad decision, one that adds to the flowing blood that eventually drowns the story.

Claire becomes a fan of a teen named Graham, a member of a punk band who is locally famous for self-inducing blinding migraines so that he can express his pain through his music until he passes out. Later, a kid named Adam who suffers the same affliction (did Graham relocate and change his name?) is present during a school shooting that occurs late in the novel. He does nothing after noticing the gun. Adam then obsessively replays videos, watching himself and blaming himself for the bullet that struck one of the victims after he collapsed in pain.

With all these characters, String Fellow produces enough teen angst to power a small country. The malevolent force (self-described only as “we”) might be responsible for the colors that plague Sarah and Beth and the voices in Greg’s head. It is explicitly responsible for the school shooting, for Adam’s migraines, and for the Death Party, among other acts of violence. Perhaps malevolence directed at the reader motivates the narrating force to explain the inner thoughts of insecure teen characters. Too many paragraphs are devoted to internal monologues as characters fret about each new source of anxiety.

The malevolent force might not be a reliable narrator, given that events near the novel’s end involving Tyler and Rhea and Sarah make no sense at all. Near the end, Tyler leaves the basement with his friends in tow, only to return to the house (where he picks up Sarah as she flees from David) without appearing to recognize it as the same house he just vacated. Deliberate ambiguity is built into the story’s conclusion, ambiguity that creates pointless confusion. The force appears to be clouding the minds of the characters. It certainly clouded my mind, giving me an Graham/Adam-like headache as I tried to follow the plot. A lengthy passage in all caps seems to suggest that all possible versions of the story are simultaneously true, while a passage that follows in normal type suggests that alternative versions of the story could just as easily be told. Those passages made me say out loud: “Just pick a story and stick to it.” Perhaps the novel is meant to be experimental. If so, the experiment left me frustrated.

String Follow envisions evil as an external and sentient presence. Many writers have made that suggestion. It might be comforting to attribute teen violence that has no obvious explanation — and there’s plenty of that in String Follow — to a malevolent force rather than mental illness or poor parenting. As a society, we only have ourselves to blame for society’s failure to recognize the symptoms of mental illness or violence-prone kids and to intervene before tragedy ensues. Attributing violence to an amorphous evil seems like copout, although Simon Jacobs does try to have it both ways by portraying Adena as a town where adult supervision of teens is entirely absent.

On a more positive note, Jacobs’ prose is creative and robust. When they aren’t whining about their lives or behaving as if they are characters in a slasher movie, the kids occasionally do something interesting (the idea of taking over a random basement and using it as a hangout is cool). Had the story tried to explore teen violence as the product of something other than an evil force, it might have been compelling. I shouldn’t criticize a writer for failing to write a different book — the kind of book I might have enjoyed more — but I think it’s fair to criticize a writer for making a choice that doesn’t work. The “malevolent forces make kids bad” theme is too banal to succeed, despite offering some stirring moments to fans of gore.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Deep Sleep by Steven Konkoly

Published by Thomas & Mercer on February 1, 2022

Deep Sleep is a “Russian sleeper network” story, a throwback to the days when spy thrillers focused on villains in Russia rather than China or the Middle East. The story does not end in the final chapter, so readers should be prepared to commit to reading at least one more book if they want to read a complete story.

The protagonist is Devin Gray. He’s a former FBI agent who now works in a private firm called MINERVA. (Other all-cap names of the kind that spy thriller writers love include DEVTEK and CONTROL). Gray’s mother Helen was a long-time operative of the CIA but she lost her job after she came to be seen as “psychotically paranoid.” And here I thought being psychotically paranoid was a job requirement.

Anyway, Helen kidnaps a man named Wilson and apparently kills a deputy sheriff before shooting herself. The reader will see that she didn’t kill the deputy but she definitely kidnaps Wilson and does some killing before she dies.

Gray’s mother had the foresight to send Gray messages that would be delivered in the event of her death. The messages take him to one of the few people who appeared at Helen’s funeral, a former CIA colleague named Karl Berg. From beyond the grave, Helen doles out clues to the location of a safehouse where, after a journey that occupies the first quarter of the novel, Gray and Berg find a room filled with files and surveillance photos.

The evidence that Gray’s mother assembled points to an ambitious Russian project. Not only did Russia place an unknown but large number of sleeper agents in the US back in the Soviet era, it made sure that the agents would breed, producing a second and possibly a third generation of loyal Russian spies. Now, everyone understands that American kids rebel against their parents. Instilling loyalty for Russia in kids who grow up as western materialists seems unlikely. Steven Konkoly tries to overcome that problem by sending the sleeper families to an annual summer camp near Branson, where loyalty to the motherland is reinforced. Kids who don’t get with the program (and parents who stray) end up at the bottom of a lake.

The story isn’t particularly credible but maybe it doesn’t need to be. This is an action story that hinges on surveillance drones and chases and shootouts and exploding helicopters. Credibility is an afterthought. At least Konkoly recognized the unlikely nature of his plot and tried to do something about it. Readers who enjoy the story can pretend he succeeded.

The other person who comes to Helen’s funeral is Marnie Young, a Marine helicopter pilot who is Gray’s good buddy and a potential love interest. Naturally, when it comes time to assemble a group to travel to Branson and check out the summer camp, Marnie tags along. Naturally, her ability to fly a helicopter turns out to be fortuitous.

Nothing much happens in this installment beyond setups and shootouts. We learn about some players in Russia. We meet the team of interchangeable mercenaries assembled by Berg. None of them, and for that matter none of the characters, including Gray, have any hint of a personality. After the action in Branson, the story fizzles out as Konkoly dumps another round of details that will presumably drive the next installment.

This installment is easy to read and the action is moderately entertaining, although there’s nothing in Deep Sleep that thriller fans will not have encountered many times before. Some of the book feels padded, likely because the premise doesn’t warrant multiple books. Maybe I will revise my thinking after (and if) I read the second installment. My guarded recommendation at this point is based on Konkoly's crisp writing style and his ability to hold my interest in a plot that would have been more timely during the Cold War.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

All Was Lost by Steven Maxwell

Published by ‎ Pushkin Vertigo on March 1, 2022

All Was Lost is an appropriate title for a story of desperate actions taken by people who are willing to risk losing everything. The plot is noir on steroids.

Orla McCabe, an Irish transplant to Liverpool, is photographing a crumbling abbey at night when a “lurching figure” leads her to a “shooting box,” a small enclosure used by hunters. She takes photos of a scene that resembles a small-scale death camp when someone shoots at her. Orla drops her camera and driver’s license as she flees. Outside the shooting box, she pauses to take a gun from the hand of a dead man. She also grabs a suitcase full of money that the dead man must have been guarding.

Orla’s impulsive decision raises questions about the morality of theft. In Orla’s judgment, she took money from bad people who would use it for bad purposes. Why should they have money when she struggles as a cleaner, when her husband has a month left on his work contract, when their home has been repossessed and when she has a baby to feed? In Orla’s view, the worst thing about not having money “isn’t that you don’t own things, it's that you don’t own yourself.” The money represents freedom.

News stories soon make clear that, seen in a different light, the money represents the fruits of human trafficking. Orla’s husband Liam doesn’t want anything to do with it. To him, it’s the devil’s money and Orla has cursed their family by taking it. To Orla, the harm caused by the traffickers has already been done. She believes the money will make them better people and will give their daughter the life she deserves. She clings to that belief long after it becomes apparent to the reader that Orla has no obvious way out of the predicament she made for herself.

While the philosophical struggle between Orla and Liam persists throughout the novel, Orla spends most of her time running. She runs from people who want the money and, when one of them finds it, she runs after the money. Her primary stalker is Dolan, who has been tasked by Cy Green with recovering his money. The pursuit leaves death in Orla’s wake and threatens the welfare of her husband and daughter.

As that story unfolds, Cy’s interest in human trafficking has become an embarrassment to the in-law who presides over their crime family. He assigns his son, Millar Sweet, the job of cleaning up Uncle Cy’s mess. The fast-moving action leaves the reader wondering whether Sweet or Dolan will find Orla before they settle scores with each other.

Two cops, Lynch and Carlin, are also on Orla’s trail. Carlin has his own money problems, thanks to loan sharks who are threatening his family. Lynch has a different problem, involving an affair with a married woman he hopes to rescue from a dangerous man. It does not seem that things will end well for anyone in this violent story of temptations and bad choices.

Apart from a couple of children, Liam is the novel’s only innocent character. His flaw is that he is too trusting. Lynch is not entirely innocent, but he at least feels the need to do something good with his life, something unselfish. Orla and Carlin have made their beds, but the reader will worry that they might suffer undue punishment for their sins. Orla might not be admirable, but she is determined and resourceful. That’s enough to make readers care about her.

Maxwell establishes a grim atmosphere with fading light, barking dogs, and abundant blood without slowing the pace of this tight novel. The plot is built on one surprise after another as the short chapters count down from 67 to 0. The penultimate chapter changes everything. Despite the shocks, the story never feels contrived. All Was Lost is a brutal crime novel, the kind of story that isn’t meant for weak stomachs, but it is also an intriguing character study of the choices people make when they feel lost, when temptation bumps against their sense of being crushed by life.

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