Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye

Published by Penguin Books on September 25, 2012 

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone has the flavor of a horror story, complete with the spectral creatures and gruesome events that fuel legends of the supernatural.  Yet the most compelling horror is grounded in truth rather than legend.  Stefan Kiesbye’s novel addresses the horror of spite and malice, of mob violence, of child abuse and incest, of missing children, of kids being cruel for the sake of cruelty, of friends who betray each other for selfish ends, of homeless children who die in the cold for lack of charity.  Who needs witches and werewolves when the world is filled with terrors like these?

The novel consists of a series of connected stories.  It begins with the sparsely attended funeral of Anke, the final occupant of the von Kamphoff manor in the Village of Hemmersmoor.  A widower named Christian Bobinski sets the stage with his description of Anke’s funeral.  The stories that follow are told from the perspectives of individuals who, like Christian and Anke, lived in Hemmersmoor during their childhood and adolescence.  Their stories are set in a time when concentration camps had only recently closed, when Germany was newly divided by a wall.

Ghost stories and tales of the supernatural abound in Hemmersmoor.  Horrible events have plagued the superstitious village residents -- or so the stories go -- from the heir to the von Kamphoff manor who mysteriously vanished (and is said to be wandering the manor’s hedge maze) to the miller who sold his soul to the devil after Swedish troops tortured and killed his family during the Thirty Years’ War.  Do spirits and witches really roam the village?  Is the village cursed?  Or are the gossipy, mean-spirited villagers reaping exactly what they have sown? 

Some of Hemmersmoor’s young residents are clearly disturbed, including the boy who kills his sister and the kids who dare another to jump into a hole they have cut in the frozen river.  Some are simply bewildered by the demands of dawning adulthood or by their parents’ repulsive behavior.  No matter how gruesome the stories become, it is easy to understand why these kids commit the awful acts that they confess:  they are the products of their warped environment, of people who are determined to forget their nation’s sins and to conceal their own.  Just like their parents, their lives will be dedicated to forgetting and denying.

Kiesbye’s sentences are crafted with elegant care; his prose lends power to the stories.  The characters are lively.  The story falters when it comes too close to the supernatural -- the horror of reality gives the novel a strength that is sapped by ghost stories.  Many of the living characters are virtual ghouls, the walking dead; nothing is gained by adding (for instance) the man who haunts the hedge maze.  Fortunately, those moments are infrequent.  While some are better than others, the tales of Hemmersmoor’s children are both horrendous and touching.  Given the fractured nature of the narrative, the stories cohere into a whole surprisingly well, bookended by Christian’s memories as he returns to the Hemmersmoor of his youth.  They add up to a masterful work of psychological horror.

RECOMMENDED

San Miguel by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Published by Viking on September 18, 2012

The most distant of the Channel Islands from the coast of California is rain-soaked, wind-swept, and populated by sheep. In San Miguel, T. Coraghessan Boyle tells the stories of three women who made the island their home. While fans of character-driven historical fiction featuring strong women should be pleased with San Miguel, readers who gravitate to plot-driven fiction will probably find this novel less satisfying than some of Boyle's earlier, more captivating work.

Part one tells Marantha's story. It is a masterful portrayal of a woman struggling to control the dark side of her personality, to adapt gracefully to miserable circumstances while coping with failing health. In the late nineteenth century, Marantha joins her second husband (Will Waters) and adopted daughter (Edith) on San Miguel where, with Marantha's money, Will has purchased a half interest in a sheep farm. Marantha hopes to recuperate from consumption but soon realizes that a rainy, windy island is the wrong setting in which to salvage her health ... or, for that matter, her marriage. To paraphrase The Clash: Will she stay or will she go?

With Marantha, Boyle is at his best, creating a carefully nuanced character and describing her life in powerful terms. Marantha knows she has become "a crabbed miserable thing who said no to everything, to every pleasure and delight no matter how small or meaningless," but that is not the person she wants to be. As only a gifted writer can do, Boyle generates sympathy and understanding for a character whose thoughts and behavior are often spiteful.

Part two shifts the focus to Edith and her frustrated desire to be independent, free from her stepfather's tyranny. Hers is a story of isolation and desperation, of a blossoming woman longing for the company of intellect and social grace ("On a ranch, there are no gentlemen or ladies -- there was just life lived at the level of dressed-up apes tumbled down from the trees"). Boyle encourages the same empathy for Edith as he does for Marantha, although Edith is less complex and, for that reason, less interesting.

Part three begins in 1930. It introduces a woman named Elise who, at 38, is newly married to Herbie Lester. Having never been west of the Hudson, Elise moves to San Miguel with Lester. Unlike her predecessors, Elise manages to make a life that, if not quite normal, is generally satisfying despite Lester's growing detachment from reality.  Unlike the first two sections, some chapters in part three drag, adding little to character development while recounting events that are of no significant interest. The story perks up with the encroachment of World War II and a series of dramatic events that foreshadow an inevitable conclusion.

Edith resurfaces in part three as a memory, a tale told by Jimmie, the island's constant resident and the only character to appear in all three sections.  While the information Jimmie provides adds welcome continuity, the story of Edith's adult life is disappointingly abbreviated. Elise, on the other hand, is a character in full, but not a particularly vibrant one.

Boyle’s surgical prose slices into his characters, exposing their inner workings.  Boyle introduces the setting and characters in short chapters that bear descriptive titles:  “The Kitchen,” “The Flock,” “The Wind,” “Jimmie,” and so on.  Occasionally they are repeated, creating the sense of characters living parallel lives:  “The House” on San Miguel in which Marantha dwells, for instance, is less inviting that “The House” that will become Elise’s home.  Jimmie also rates more than one chapter heading, but he is hardly worth the space.  The novel belongs to the female characters, not the men.

The novel is aptly named.  The island of San Miguel is virtually a character in the novel, fickle and treacherous, beautiful and harsh, challenging its inhabitants with relentless wind and sand.  The sense of isolation Boyle creates is vivid.

That the characters are based on real people is perhaps San Miguel's greatest weakness. At its best, the novel creates tension as the characters struggle to survive the perils of nature and the numbness of seclusion. In part three, however, the story falls flat. Boyle's fidelity to the real-world characters, his failure to make Elise and all of the male characters more interesting than they actually were, causes the novel to lose momentum after a strong start. For its sense of history and place, and for Marantha's compelling story, San Miguel is worth reading, but this is far from Boyle's best work. 

RECOMMENDED

The Janus Reprisal by Jamie Freveletti

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 11, 2012 

More than ten years after Robert Ludlum's death, the Ludlum Industrial Complex continues to churn out novels featuring his name on the cover, often in a larger font than that given to the actual author. In this case, the largest font is reserved for Jason Bourne's name, although this isn't a Jason Bourne novel. The Janus Reprisal (excuse me, Robert Ludlum's^TM The Janus Reprisal) is part of the Covert One series, allegedly based on Ludlum's ideas (and possibly his notes), although Ludlum himself never authored a Covert One novel. As the ninth Covert One novel, The Janus Reprisal presumably has only a tangential connection to any notion that originated with Ludlum.

The Janus Reprisal is better than many factory-produced novels. Although it makes use of a well-worn plot (terrorists want to acquire a mutated virus so they can become bioterrorists and kill Americans), Jamie Freveletti adds some modest twists to the standard formula.

The story begins with a group of terrorists staging an improbably successful attack on a hotel in The Hague, moving from room to room and shooting the occupants. Coincidentally, Lt. Col. Jon Smith is a hotel guest. Smith is both a physician and an operative of the super-secret spy organization called Covert One. He's attending a meeting of the World Health Organization. Other attendees have stored biological agents in the hotel's safe. The terrorists make off with the biomaterials, and it is up to Smith to track them down.

Meanwhile, an old nemesis of Smith's -- Oman Dattar, a Pakistani unimaginatively nicknamed The Butcher -- escapes from a prison in The Hague, only to find that he's having financial woes. He needs money to pay his assassins, one of whom targets Smith at the hotel during the terrorist attack. The assassin stupidly carries Smith's picture with him, as well as the photos two other people, giving Smith a trail to follow.

Smith is a pleasant departure from other thriller/action heroes in that he doesn't possess superhuman strength or inexhaustible stamina (although he functions surprisingly well after being exposed to mustard gas). Smith is smart but specialized; he doesn't have the encyclopedic knowledge that diminishes the credibility of some thriller heroes. Beyond that, however, Smith is devoid of personality. The Janus Reprisal is all plot; characterization is absent.

Some aspects of the novel are all too familiar: Smith disarming a bomb by following instructions he receives over the telephone; Smith's reliance on a genius computer hacker who is a social misfit; multiple shootouts in which professional killers never manage to disable or kill the hero; a mole in the CIA; a plan to kill everyone in Manhattan; using a woman as bait to flush out the terrorist (which always results in the woman being captured ... don't thriller heroes ever read thrillers?). The action sequence at the end becomes difficult to believe but it's not as outrageous as some other thrillers I've read.

Notwithstanding the story's familiarity, The Janus Reprisal is enjoyable. The workmanlike prose is clean; the pace is quick. Despite being used as bait, the woman who has been targeted by Dakkar is strong and resilient, not the typically helpless female character of old-school thrillers. The plan to wipe out Manhattan has some original elements. The plan is far-fetched, but no more so than is common in modern action-based thrillers. The Janus Reprisal isn't by any reasonable standard a first-rate thriller, but it's a fun time-killer, significantly above the norm for a factory-produced novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott

Published by Other Press on September 11, 2012

Jackson and James are brothers. Jackson is only a year older but he seems determined to be middle-aged well before he enters his teens. A freakishly obsessive kid, Jackson memorizes all the bones in the human body "in order to understand and own how they carried him." Ida is Jackson's inseparable friend from infancy and his lover from adolescence. Jackson and James virtually become part of Ida's family; Ida's father treats them as if they were his own children. As they get older, Jackson starts having nightmares that lead to nocturnal violence; sometimes his somnambulism produces art, other times mayhem. Meanwhile James becomes a mentally ill, suicidal drug addict.

Ida and Jackson are no longer together when the novel begins. Their paths depart about halfway through Ida's recollection of her life. As she tells her story, seemingly random incidents loom large in Ida's young life: her exploration of Jackson's body when she is seven and he is eight; Ida's shameful response to the kidnapping of a neighborhood child; the meanness Ida directs to a preacher's daughter who wants to befriend her. During too much of this short novel, as Ida reflects upon her life, I found myself asking "Why is she telling me this?" Kathleen Alcott provides no clear answer. On other occasions, Ida recalls seminal occurrences from her adolescence that are just too contrived to resonate as formative events in a young life.

None of the events in this short novel are eventful; none of the drama is dramatic. The motivation for Jackson's decision to leave Ida is ludicrous. The characters are tedious, as are Ida's mutating relationships with Jackson and James and her father and an art gallery owner named Paul. Ida's lifelong obsession with Jackson is inexplicable, particularly given that she spurned him before he spurned her. Ida writes: "Since childhood I've spent my heart and words and a catalog of tiny, insignificant moments trying to merge with a bloodstream not mine." I wanted to yell, "Get over yourself!"

Ida's actions and reactions are too often unexplained. I don't need authors to spell things out for me but I do like things to make sense. Ida's thoughts and deeds rarely do. When a character is as pathetic as Ida, I want to know how she came to be that way, but Alcott offers no insight into Ida's psyche. At bottom, I didn't believe the characters were real and I didn't believe the story that Ida narrates.

Alcott's writing is strong but it often amounts to flash without substance. She strives for (and sometimes achieves) an eloquence that overshadows the story she's trying to tell. At other times (as in the title), she's just pretentious. Clever phrasing and surprising word choices do not a novel make. How does a reader evaluate a novel that has nothing to say when the nothing is said beautifully? If I could rate them separately, I would recommend the prose but not the content.  Since they are inseparable, however, I have to say ...

NOT RECOMMENDED

A Fistful of Collars by Spencer Quinn

Published by Atria Books on September 11, 2012 

If you’re looking for a light, amusing detective story, it’s hard to beat Chester Quinn’s novels about the two partners in the Little Detective Agency:  Bernie Little and his loyal dog Chet.  Even when the plot is weak, Chet is always good for a laugh.  Fortunately for fans of the series, this is one of Quinn’s better books.

A movie is shooting on location in the Valley.  The mayor (prompted by the city’s insurance company) hires Bernie to keep an eye on the star.  Thad Perry has a taste for drugs and a knack for getting into trouble.  If the three weeks of filming pass without incident, the town will attract more filmmakers -- or so the mayor believes -- and the city’s insurer won’t have to pay any claims. Yet once filming begins, trouble of an unexpected nature ensues:  murder.  In the end, three murders come to light (albeit considerably separated in time) and it’s up to Bernie and Chet to determine how they are related. Bernie is in charge of deduction; Chet (as he frequently reminds the reader) brings other things to the table.

The mystery is a good one, much better than the plot that drove the previous novel in the series.  Still, the story exists largely as an excuse to give Chet something to talk about.  Chet is the narrator and, as you might expect of a dog, he has trouble staying focused.  Chet’s thoughts tend to meander (often in the direction of his next meal) but they always end up in a happy place.  Chet might ponder a profound question for a few moments -- If Bernie has a word on the tip his tongue, why can’t Chet see it? How can Bernie’s bark be worse than his bite when Bernie doesn’t bark? -- but Chet doesn’t sweat the small stuff.  His running commentary on life (“a fluffy white towel can be fun to drag around”) is hilarious.

Like all dogs, Chet enjoys eating (ribs are a favorite), napping, and riding in cars.  He has some impulse control issues, particularly when cats are around, but the beauty of Quinn’s writing lies in his illumination of the canine mind.  Bernie might think Chet is misbehaving, but Chet’s behavior is perfectly natural ... to Chet.  Whether he’s shredding the leather seats in Bernie’s new Porsche or making an uninvited leap into someone’s swimming pool, Chet’s actions always make perfect sense … to Chet.

A Fistful of Collars moves at a steady pace and features enough action and detection to satisfy mystery and light thriller fans, but the story is clearly geared to dog lovers.  This is neither a hardcore thriller nor a complex mystery.  The writing is breezy, the language is clean, and humor (invariably generated by Chet’s antics and commentary) is the animating force.  New readers can enjoy the story even if they haven’t read the earlier installments, but series fans will appreciate the mild intrigue surrounding Bernie’s changing relationship with his girlfriend.  Chet doesn't quite understand what that's all about, while readers will have to wait for the next book to learn how Bernie's romantic life will unfold.  Until then, Bernie at least has Chet at his side.

RECOMMENDED