The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte translated by Sonio Soto (Harcourt, Brace) is a dark, literary thriller about a man hired to find a rare occult book that can summon the devil. An exuberant mystery brimming with erudite antiquarian booklore, the complex story includes tantalizing bits about a missing chapter of The Three Musketeers. Accessible and entertaining, The Club Dumas deserves the attention and success of The Name of the Rose. Highly recommended. It was, unfortunately, made into a terrible movie by Roman Polanski called The Ninth Gate.
Spares by Michael Marshall Smith (Bantam) expands upon an sf/horror story published a few years ago. Although Smith, a several time award-winner for his superb short horror is still not quite in tune with novel structure—shifts in time and place occasionally jar—the writing is crisp, with rich detail, the voice is interesting, and the author isn't afraid to throw in a few grisly bits when necessary. A burnt out former soldier/cop is assigned caretaker to a farm where "spares," i.e. clones, are kept for use as spare parts by their rich counterparts. The story slides back and forth between the present and the past as the protagonist recalls the Gap, a place that feels somewhat like Vietnam but is far stranger. Highly recommended.
Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Tor/Forge) is the page-turning sequel to Relic. Two mysterious skeletons are found in the Hudson River. One is that of a missing socialite, the other unknown and unclaimed and possessing grotesque physical abnormalities. Are they related to the genetic monster that wreaked havoc on the Museum only eighteen months before? The authors are at their best with the authenticity they bring to their depiction of a particular area of Manhattan. In Relic it was the Museum of Natural History. This time it's the NYC underground. Preston and Child also draw an exceptionally sympathetic portrait of the mole people—homeless people purported to live in and around deserted subway stations. My only quibble is that I didn't believe in the villain for a minute.
Sacrifice by Mitchell Smith (Dutton), is the fifth novel by the author (under his own name) of the classic prison thriller, Stone City. A tough ex-con tries to settle into the calm of normality but is unable to resist one last score. After a successful but deadly bank robbery he learns from his ex-wife that their daughter has been murdered by a serial killer in Florida. The rest of this gritty novel follows Pierce as he tracks down the killer and tries to elude the Feds after him for the robbery. Smith is expert at creating likable, believable characters that you want to have happy lives (although you know some won't). Look for Mitchell's first novel, the unusual police procedural Daydreams, the aforementioned Stone City, and his dark mainstream novel, Due North.
Cimarron Rose by James Lee Burke (Hyperion) is not part of the Robicheaux series but is as richly detailed and textured nonetheless. In Deaf Smith, Texas, lawyer and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland defends a teenager accused of the rape and murder of a girl he picked up in a bar. Holland's guilt over the death of his best friend (who appears to him as a ghost), and his unacknowledged fathering of the accused make for moral complications and ambiguities—the keynotes to Burke's best work.
Signs of Life by M. John Harrison (Victor Gollancz/ St. Martin's Press) is a beautifully told story of a man, who drifting through life, falls desperately in love with a woman much younger than he; she will do anything to fulfill her wish to fly. The novel is about the complications that ensue from following her yearnings, and although it has the feel of a mainstream novel, it contains elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Throughout, there is a sense of imminent disaster as the five principals meet, clash, mix, and come apart. Highly recommended.
Lives of the Monster Dogs, a lovely first novel by Kirsten Bakis (Farrar, Straus), also has a mainstream feel to it (indeed, the publisher only sent it out to sf venues as an afterthought) although its Frankensteinien elements bring it solidly into the realms of sf, fantasy, and horror.
In the late nineteen century, a psychopathic young German boy is taken in hand by a renowned surgeon and develops into the quintessential mad scientist, dreaming of creating an army of 'monster dogs' with artificial voice boxes and hands and boosted intelligence. Although he dies before his dream comes to fruition his followers continue his work. Told in bits and pieces from diaries, notebooks, and journals of the scientist, one of the dogs, and their human chronicler, this is a weird, wonderful, and terribly sad book. Winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Achievement in First Novel.
The Church of Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns (Metropolitan Books) is one of the best horror novels of the year. Dobyns's last excursion into the realm of darkness was The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (released as a movie with Sonia Braga a couple of years ago). The Church of Dead Girls is an absorbing study of a small town in upstate New York several years after the grisly murder of a woman widely thought to be a whore. Now young girls are disappearing and suspicion is rampant. The confrontation between a small-minded bully and a smug, self-absorbed Marxist professor trigger a series of events that destroy the town. Dobyns terrifyingly depicts a town being eaten from within.
The Magician's Tale by David Hunt (Putnam) is a fine pseudonymously written mystery told by a woman who is a black & white photographer-because she is totally color-blind. She becomes friends with one of the young male hustlers she is photographing on the streets of San Francisco,. His brutal murder echoes a series of gay murders twelve years earlier that the photographer's policeman father investigated. The personal resonances force her to take action, and by becoming immersed in life on the strip, she treads dangerous ground. Magic, twins, and kink.
Asylum by Patrick McGrath (Random House) is about a dangerous sexual obsession seen through the eyes (as usual) of an unreliable narrator with his own agenda. I had hoped McGrath would break out of this stylistic dead end but he hasn't quite. Although there are a few surprising twists and turns that's not enough. Few of the characters come alive because of the flatness created by the veil through which we see the story.
In the Palm of Darkness by Mayra Montero (HarperCollins) could, I suppose, be called magic realism. Although based on certain facts—the inexplicable worldwide disappearance of frogs and toads leading to what seems to be mass extinctions of entire species—the story itself, about a professor searching Haiti for a supposedly extinct frog, veers into magic and horror. Montero's Haiti is a country filled with political violence and supernatural fears—a place where the living dead walk and must be hunted down by men specially trained to do so.
The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce (Signet/Tor) is a frightening, beautifully rendered coming-of- age-story about three boys growing to maturity in a small English town during the '60s. Joyce immediately hooks his readers from the very first page with a small sharp shock and holds the attention with engaging characters and an air of menace. This tooth fairy is not the kindly creature who leaves money in exchange for unwanted baby teeth but is mischievous and destructive, representing our own worst aspects.
Fog Heart by Thomas Tessier (Gollancz-UK/St. Martin's Press) does something unusual for the genre. Tessier takes a common horror trope and creates something fresh and beautiful merely in the writing of it. Tessier's eighth novel, the story centers around two sisters, one a genuine psychic, and the two couples that elicit their help. The woman in each couple is haunted. The man in each couple is a real creep— jarring the balance of the novel a bit. Tessier's writing forces the reader's suspension of disbelief in the supernatural not only by his crisp language but with a reasonable (if tenuous) plausibility. Good show.
Nightmare Syndrome by William Marshall (Mysterious Press) gives me an excuse to mention a mystery series that I've been avidly reading since its inception in 1975. The series follows the travails of a group of policemen in Hong Kong's imaginary Yellowthread Street precinct. The books have a wicked sense of humor and there is often a dark, even horrific element to the various mysteries.
In NS, people are dying grisly, seemingly natural deaths—the deceased have all scratched out their own eyes and have a look of unspeakable terror on their faces. Is the murderer supernatural? Is he related to the death years before of Detective Chief Inspector Harry Feiffer's father? Frantic, funny, and frightening. Start with this one and then find the earlier novels in the series.
The Universal Donor by Craig Nova (Houghton Mifflin) magicks a beautiful and terrifying love story out of an unlikely premise. In the middle of the L.A. riots, an emergency doctor is faced with a race against time to save the woman he loves (married to an old friend). The woman has been bitten by one of the venomous snakes with which she works and the only person in the hemisphere with her rare blood type is an escaped criminal. Interesting structure swings the story to the past and back again.
Glimmering by Elizabeth Hand (HarperPrism) is an exquisitely told story of the coming of the end of the world. As a result of the confluence of man-made and natural circumstances, a vast hole is ripped in the ozone layer causing flashes of spectral color to stream across the skies, not to mention the disruption of life as we know it. As humanity faces the apocalypse, the publisher of an obsolete literary magazine faces his own tragic circumstances—he is dying of AIDS and has watched his personal world crumbling over time. A memorable cast of characters populate this frightening scenario that combines sf and horror.
Dispossession by Chaz Brenchley (NEL,UK) is a fine, neatly constructed dark mystery about a man who awakens from a car crash with amnesia of the past three months of his life during which time he has acquired a new wife, a new lifestyle, and a new boss—a crime lord. As he tries to unravel the various strands of strangeness, he discovers that his life may be in danger. Much of the action is realistic and down to earth—except for the existence and participation of Luke, a fallen angel, who plays a very important part in the protagonist's fortunes.
True Crime by Andrew Klavan (Dell) is a page turner about an absolute prick of a newspaperman who drinks too much and compulsively cheats on his wife with all the wrong people—one boss's daughter, another boss's wife. But he is a crack reporter and having, at the last minute, taken over the coverage of a scheduled execution by lethal injection he comes to believe that the prisoner is innocent, and has less than 24 hours to save the man's life. Thrilling and terrifying to read as one realizes just how easy it is to send the wrong person to their death. Made into a movie with Clint Eastwood.
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