Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman

Published by Soho Press on January 8, 2013 

Creepy and atmospheric, Little Wolves mixes two kinds of horror -- awful reality and fear of the supernatural -- while building suspense with the steadiness of precision machinery. The emphasis, as it should be in a truly frightening novel, is on the horror that lurks in human behavior.

Lone Mountain is a sleepy, mostly empty town in Minnesota that balances liquid and holy spirits. It is also a town in the grip of wickedness. A boy named Seth shoots Will Gunderson, Lone Mountain's sheriff, before killing himself, leaving his father, Grizz Fallon, distraught and overwhelmed by guilt. It is Pastor Logan Warren's first test and he can't find the words to offer succor. His pregnant wife, Clara, feels responsible for Seth's death because she had been teaching his class about doom, the end of life tale told in Ragnarok. She also feels her own brand of guilt because Seth came to her door before he shot Gunderson, but she left his knock unanswered. Is that why she sees Seth in the corn field after his death, or is she witnessing the return of a spectral Seth?

According to town gossip, the Fallon family has long been cursed. Was Seth possessed by evil spirits or did he have a good reason for killing Gunderson? Grizz doesn't want to know yet he's haunted by a need to learn the truth. He gets a clue from Leah, a girl Seth was dating before her father forced them to break up. It isn't a story the town wants to hear.

In addition to being a fan of Beowulf and its concept of wergild (blood debt), Seth had an affinity for coyotes (the titular little wolves), having raised some from infancy. After Seth dies, the coyotes in Lone Mountain behave strangely. Clara also has an affinity for coyotes, perhaps due to the stories her father told her about a girl who was part wolf. Clara always suspected that the stories had something to do with her own life, and she feels drawn to Lone Mountain because she is certain her mother died there. According to Clara's father, her mother died in a car accident, but he buried part of the truth and Clara is determined to unearth it.

All of these (pardon the expression) haunting questions give the reader an incentive to keep turning pages, as does Thomas Maltman's vibrant prose. The story borrows from legends and mythology while remaining grounded in the desperation of rural life. Little Wolves often straddles a line between supernatural and worldly horrors, creating unrelenting suspense from the uncertain perils Clara and the other characters must face. I wasn't entirely convinced by the penultimate scene and its blast of terror, but it is at least consistent with the story Maltman tells.

The portrait of Clara as the teacher who can make the kids appreciate Beowulf where others could not is a bit contrived, but the fullness of her character is convincing. She has an interesting way of analyzing word origins that informs her understanding of the world. She married a religious man but is filled with religious doubt, a conflict that serves the story well. Clara's search for her past leads to a truly creepy backstory that begins to unfold about midway through the novel.

Although Little Wolves includes a pastor in its cast of characters and explores a theme -- forgiveness -- that should resonate with religious readers, this isn't an overtly religious book. According to Grizz, the whole town craves forgiveness for the sins it visited upon Native Americans a hundred years earlier. While Seth and Grizz and the sheriff and Clara's father are of more immediate concern to the reader, perhaps the entire town should seek forgiveness for its judgmental treatment of residents it views as outsiders. Maltman asks the reader to decide which central characters deserve to be forgiven. Writing with penetrating insight, he makes it possible to forgive them all.

RECOMMENDED

Rage Is Back by Adam Mansbach

Published by Viking on January 10, 2013 

About a third of Rage Is Back is an excruciatingly irritating mix of ultra-hip cultural references and D-list celebrity name dropping. I was indifferent to another third. The remaining third approaches brilliance. Stray sentences, random thoughts, sometimes entire pages shine like polished platinum.

Kilroy Dondi Vance is a nineteen-year-old mixed race drug dealer. His mother's family is from Trinidad and his father is half-Jewish. Having attended Manhattan's third-most-prestigious prep school on a scholarship, he's now an Angry Young Man whose mother, Karen, has kicked him out of her apartment. Dondi's also something of a graffiti historian. Karen is worried that Dondi is turning into Billy, Dondi's absent father. Back in the day, Billy (a/k/a Rage) and Karen (a/k/a Wren 209) tagged trains together. Before he fled to Mexico, Billy got himself into a mess with a transit cop-turned-demon named Bracken, the man who killed Billy's friend and fellow graffiti writer. When Billy returns to Manhattan sixteen years later, Bracken is running for mayor and Dondi ... well, as you'd expect from an Angry Young Man, Dondi is none too pleased with Billy.

Still, after Dondi gets together with Billy and his old crew of graffiti writers, a plan to take revenge against Bracken takes shape, and therein lies the plot. The writers embark on an Ocean's Eleven scheme, complete with ensemble cast, designed to thwart Bracken's ambition. When the novel stays focused on that scheme, it's fun and lively and supremely entertaining. To the extent that the novel serves as a fictional history of (and tribute to) graffiti writers, it is fascinating. To the extent that it relies on time travel portals and other supernatural weirdness, it derails.

When a novel screams "Look how modern and literary and determinedly ironic I am," it generally isn't a novel I enjoy reading. Some writers, Adam Mansbach tells us, can't rely on a straightforward narrative because they're too "busy trying to prove how smart they are." Exactly. Mansbach is one of those annoyingly intrusive writers who talks to you about what he's writing while he's writing it ("You recall a few chapters back when I ..."). Being up-to-the-second cool means Mansbach can rag on Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe because their psychedelic prose is passé in an age where up-to-the-second fiction is inspired by designer drugs that Timothy Leary could only dream about. And Mansbach can smugly dis Bob Dylan because, you know, dude is old and Mansbach isn't (yet).

Most of the novel is written in the first person from Dondi's perspective. For reasons I can't fathom, a character named Cloud 9 takes over the narration in chapter 10. His voice is a bit more "street" than Dondi's, but not much. In another literary affectation (Mansbach seems determined to try them all), Cloud 9 doesn't bother to set off dialog with quotation marks. Chapter 11 returns to Dondi's perspective ("hey, it's me, Dondi again"). Ugh.

In addition to being artistic, the characters are impossibly erudite. Dengue Fever, for instance, places the three-dimensional letters he builds in the context of hieroglyphics and illuminated manuscripts and the mystery vowels of ancient Hebrew. My eyes glazed over when Dondi started talking about Theseus and Pirithous and "my man Odysseus." That's just a little too precious for me. On quite a few occasions, I was less than convinced by Dondi's voice, particularly when he's nattering on about the uncoolness of white boys. The voice just didn't seem authentic, you feel me?

Despite my griping, I enjoyed much of Rage Is Back. Mansbach incorporates a short story into the plot that was supposedly written by a drug dealer. It contains the best sustained writing in the book. The story forsakes the literary trickiness that mars the surrounding novel, opting instead to tell a straightforward, powerful tale. When Mansbach turns his talent to descriptive writing, he paints expressive pictures of dank subway tunnels and captures the mixture of artistry and audacity required to tag trains. And underlying all the nonsense is a good story, almost a great story, that for significant stretches is well told and nonsense-free. It also delivers an important but well-buried message about the nature of fame. Patience is rewarded as the initial struggle to connect with the narrative pays off in the final chapters.

RECOMMENDED

Driver's Education by Grant Ginder

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 8, 2013 

Driver's Education is a multigenerational story in the sense that the primary characters are a young man, his father, and his (mostly unseen) grandfather. As is common in modern novels, both time and point of view shift frequently.

In sections of the novel labeled "What I Remember," Colin McPhee talks about his life. He starts in 1956, at the grand opening of a theater called the Avalon. Movies and the Avalon play a large role in his young life, particularly after his mother dies. Colin's love of movies apparently motivates his desire to write screenplays and in 1974, after he moves to Hollywood and sells one, he rather improbably reunites with Clare, a former Avalon co-worker who is now an aspiring actress. When Finn is born, Clare comes to resent Colin's love for his son (she actually tells him that he should love Finn less). At this point, believing not a word of Colin's story, I was asking "Who are these people?" They certainly aren't people I recognize.

The screenplay, Colin's only successful writing venture, is followed by twenty years of writers' block. At some point Colin begins taking care of his father (largely absent from his life after Colin's mother died) who had a stroke and apparently suffers from a form of dementia. Nearing the end of his life, Colin's father feels the need to drive his car (Lucy) again, so he calls Finn and asks him to bring the car from New York to San Francisco.

Finn is an assistant story editor on a reality TV show that resembles The Real World.  His job is to "guide" the reality. Finn and his friend Randall recover Lucy and begin a road trip. Along the way Finn tells Randall some tedious stories that his grandfather used to tell. Finn wants to document those stories and brings along a video camera for that purpose. They go to Pittsburgh because Finn's granddad has a story about saving a man from a collapsing building in Pittsburgh. They crash a medical supply sales convention in Columbus because Finn's granddad fell in love with a female pilot in Columbus. They track down a baseball in Chicago because Finn's grandad told a story about nudging a ball hit by Ernie Banks from foul into fair territory. The road trip eventually turns into a movie. Toward the end of the novel, Finn interviews Randall (again on film) so that Randall can complain about how Finn edited reality when he made his movie. We also learn from Randall that Finn has been an unreliable narrator.

The novel's theme, as expressed by Randall, is this: Colin values realism (or at least he values cinéma vérité) and hates Finn for choreographing reality while Finn wants Colin to be a better liar. That conflict is apparently meant to supply dramatic tension while saying something weighty about the way people create their own realities. Neither goal is realized. Driver's Education creates an emotional distance between the reader and the characters simply because the reader doesn't care one way or another about contrived experiences that we aren't meant to believe. It's ironic that a novel about the fabrication of reality fabricates reality so poorly.

The description of the trip through Ohio -- "Everything is extremely pretty in a very un-pretty way; interesting because there's a phenomenal lack of interest" -- could stand as a summary of the book. Grant Ginder's prose is pretty while the novel's content is uninteresting. Taking a road trip to document an old man's stories might be an intriguing premise for a book, but not this book. Grandpa's stories are dull, there are only a few of them (it's surprising that a cross-country trip would hightlight only three cities), and the discovery that Finn's versions of his grandfather's stories aren't entirely truthful is hardly a world-shattering revelation.

It's a shame that Ginder didn't tell a better story because he has a nice sense of literary style. Unfortunately, he's fond of writing inane sentences like "Half of loving someone is being okay with hating her" in the apparent belief that readers will mistake nonsense for deep thought. His characters are constantly engaged in profoundly witty conversations that are neither profound nor witty. Did I believe that Clare rented a private booth in a porn arcade so that she could have "a private place to cry"? I did not. Did I believe that Finn and Randall brought a fifty-year-old cat along on their trip? No. The novel is littered with nonsense like this in a failed attempt to add heft or interest to an empty story. While some sections of Driver's Education provide momentary entertainment and would probably work well as short stories, the novel fails to come together as a convincing, meaningful whole.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

First published in the UK in 2012; published by Bloomsbury USA on January 8, 2013 

Around the world, reports are surfacing of children killing their relatives for no apparent reason.  When a seven-year-old girl makes the news by shooting family members with a nail gun, Hesketh Lock views the story through the lens of an anthropologist, as “a parable of dysfunctional times.”  Perhaps that is the best way to read The Uninvited.

Many dystopian novels begin with the world in a dystopian state.  They may or may not explain how the world’s condition came about, but when they do, the explanation tends to be cursory.  The Uninvited takes a different approach.  The story begins in a normal world.  The reader watches as that world collapses.  The cause of the crisis, when it is finally revealed, is more imaginative than the zombie plague that has become the hallmark of apocalyptic fiction.

Hesketh is an isolated man, a sufferer of Asperger’s Syndrome.  He is a compulsively honest, concrete thinker who lacks people skills.  He managed to live with a woman for awhile but Kaitlin had an affair so his isolation is again complete, despite his desire to maintain a relationship with Freddy, Kaitlin’s seven-year-old son.  Hesketh works as a corporate troubleshooter, targeting anomalies in behavioral patterns in the workplace.  He undertakes a series of assignments involving corporate saboteurs in Taiwan, Sweden, and Dubai who, after contending that they were controlled by spirits or trolls or djinns, kill themselves.  Hesketh believes there has been a global outbreak of hysteria fed by indigenous superstitions, although he has trouble explaining why all the dead guys had developed cravings for salt.  Nor can he explain why, just before he watched a man plummet from the top of a building, he saw a little girl urging the man to jump.

I expected The Uninvited to be a conventional horror story.  It isn’t.  The Uninvited is a hybrid of the science fiction, horror, and mystery genres, but it is also a commentary on how society addresses disaffected children.  What is the real horror:  kids who kill or the tendency to forget that they are kids, to treat them as inhuman creatures?  Particularly unsettling, because it’s so close to reality, is the public’s willingness (as the crisis intensifies) to label children as terrorists, to concentrate them in camps and drug them, because a desire for safety trumps compassion and understanding.  The public will always prefer to act in ignorance rather than wait for knowledge if action instills an artificial sense of security.

Still, it isn’t necessary to read The Uninvited as a parable.  Taken at face value, it is an absorbing, nightmarish story.  I was pleasantly surprised by the elegance of Liz Jensen’s prose and by the depth of her characters.  Jensen exercises admirable restraint in her depiction of Hesketh.  Some writers would exaggerate his mental disorder to manufacture sympathy for the character.  Jensen is more subtle.  Hesketh is functional but a little off.  He’s keenly aware of numbers and time and colors and patterns.  He mentally constructs origami when he’s stressed.  Sometimes he rocks back and forth.  Jensen makes it clear that Hesketh is wired in an unusual way, but Hesketh likes the way he’s wired, enjoys the advantages that derive from his disorder (particularly his skill at pattern recognition), and scoffs when others pity him or assume he wants to be as “normal” as they are.  That’s an unusually insightful characterization of someone who would widely be pitied for his mental illness.

The Uninvited delivers a thought-provoking message but the message never overshadows the storytelling.  This is the way to write dystopian horror (and without a single vampire or zombie!). 

RECOMMENDED

Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates

Published by Mysterious Press on January 8, 2013 

Joyce Carol Oates writes about horrors that none of us want to imagine, and does it with such seductive prose we can't stop reading. Yet Oates' great talent is to find the horrific in both the commonplace and in the unthinkable. Daddy Love begins with a momentarily misplaced car that leads to a child's barely contained panic and a mother's sense of failure, a small horror that evolves into the larger horror of child abduction.

Part one takes place in 2007. Dinah Whitcomb has invested "all of her volcanic Mommy love" in her only child, Robbie. She strives to make every moment a learning experience for her five-year-old son. She faults herself when she feels tired, because a happy mother should always feel strong. Later she will blame herself for letting go of Robbie's hand when Robbie is snatched from her. Although she is faultless -- the abductor strikes her, first with a fist and then, when she runs after him, with a van -- Dinah feels "the defeat of her life as a mother."

The first four chapters tell the same brief story, each from a slightly different perspective, adding or subtracting facts, revealing more of Dinah's life, her sense of connection with her husband and son. In chapter five, time again begins to move forward. But can life really move forward for someone who has been as badly damaged, both physically and emotionally, as Dinah?

In the chapters that follow, Oates changes the perspective, allowing the reader to follow Robbie and his kidnapper. Oates reveals the demented mind of Daddy Love with the same skill that makes her portrayal of Dinah's tormented mind so convincing. It is nonetheless disappointing that Oates chose to make the character so purely evil, when a more nuanced approach -- a sex offender who struggles against urges he can't control, as is usually the case -- would have been less obvious.

Part two takes the reader to 2013. Robbie, now known as Gideon Cash, is in sixth grade. His true history, unknown to the teachers who believe he is Daddy Love's autistic son, is reflected only in his macabre drawings. Perspective changes again as the reader sees the world through Robbie's eyes. And as she does with Dinah, Oates enters Robbie's mind with uncommon insight. She presents a more subtle view of Robbie than is typical in fictional portrayals of abuse victims. Robbie's personality and behavior provide some of the novel's most thought-provoking moments.

Although Oates' prose is always first-rate, it doesn't soar to the same height in Daddy Love as it does in her best work. The story isn't particularly innovative. It is, in fact, too predictable to have the impact Oates probably intended. After the strong opening chapters, I felt let down by the pedestrian path that the plot follows.

The characters, as a reader expects from Oates, are fully developed and completely convincing. On the other hand, while Oates often paints portraits of victims, the characters in Daddy Love are not as memorable as those some of her other fiction: they evoke sympathy in ways that are just too easy, too predictable. To her credit, however, Oates avoids coating her characters in sugar. She understands that people rarely respond to tragedy in ways that make them noble and likable, as so many writers would have us believe. Dinah wouldn't be the ideal spokeswoman for mothers of abducted children; her connection with reality is tenuous, her fragility is unnerving. Dinah's husband realizes that he's lost perspective, that he's defined his entire life by a single catastrophic event, but he's powerless to change. Although these aren't Oates' best creations, it is for the characters rather than the plot that I recommend Daddy Love.

Be warned: Some scenes involving Daddy Love and Robbie are disturbing, and while none of them are described in graphic detail, sensitive readers should be cautioned that child abuse is very much a part of the book's content. There are also a couple of chapters that will make dog lovers cringe. Oates has never been a writer who shelters her readers from the darkest realities of life.  She does not do so here.

RECOMMENDED