Category Archives: Reviews

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘What’s Wrong With the World,’ by G.K. Chesterton

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If one could see the whole universe suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored toy, just as the South American hornbill looks like a bright-colored toy. And so they are—both of them, I mean.

Reading G.K. Chesterton is (at least for me), most of the time an intellectual romp. Though I frequently agree with many of the author’s points, I certainly never agree with all of them. But I enjoy the caperings of his mind, as one enjoys watching an acrobat. Chesterton looks at the world every which-way, often from upside down. He had the body of a sedentary beast, but an acrobatic imagination.

What’s Wrong With the World is different from most of his books because (as he declares) he leaves religion mostly out of it, except in reference to other things. Though I’m a damned heretic in his view, I find that I like his religious writing better than his political writing. He was devoted to a political movement called Distributism, a sort of a mild socialism. It retained private property, but wanted to parcel that property out more fairly, so that every free man would have a piece of land of his own, holding the dignity of a property owner. The aristocracy would be eliminated as a vestigial organ (gently, if I understand it correctly). Chesterton regards everything around him in comparison with an imagined medieval Catholic world, populated by free, contented peasants.

What’s Wrong With the World is a systematic explanation of why he considers the present system of capitalism and moneyed oligarchy unjust. Along the way, he exercises his trademark imagination, peppering his pages with paradox.

For the modern reader, though, it makes for some hard going. I think I understood many of Chesterton’s references (to prime ministers, poets, and current political controversies) better than the average American reader, but a lot of it was still opaque to me.

If you’re a Chesterton fan, you’ll probably want to read What’s Wrong With the World for the sake of completeness. If you’re new to GKC, I’d recommend starting with some other book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Cypress House,’ by Michael Koryta

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She was that kind of beautiful. The crippling kind.

Probably later than any other fan, I’ve figured out that most (maybe all, for all I know) of Michael Koryta’s supernatural thrillers involve the same family. Arlen Wagner, hero of The Cypress House, seems to be the grandfather of Mark Novak, hero of the two books I previously reviewed.

Arlen grew up in West Virginia, and still carries the shame of having a crazy father who thought he could converse with the dead. Now he’s a veteran of World War I, and working for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He’s on a train with a group of other CCC men, headed to Florida to help construct a bridge to the Keys.

That’s when he has a vision of all his fellow passengers turning into skeletons. Arlen has had this experience before, during the war, and he knows it means they’ll die soon. He tries to persuade the men to leave the train, but they laugh at him. The only one who gets off with him is a young man named Paul Brickhill, a mechanical genius for whom Paul has conceived paternal sentiments. Left at loose ends, the two men get a ride to the Gulf Coast, so Paul can look at the ocean. There they find the Cypress House, a lonely boarding house near a dying town, overseen by a beautiful woman. They don’t plan on staying long, but a hurricane blows in (fulfilling, down in the Keys, Arlen’s grim prophecy about the CCC workers), and by the time it’s blown over, Paul has fallen in love with the landlady. Also, Arlen has noticed that something shady is going on at the Cypress House. He stays on to protect the boy.

A lot of protection will be called for, and Arlen will have to make peace with his father’s legacy before he can save the lives of the people he cares about.

The Cypress House is a compelling thriller. The tension ratchets up steadily, and the final showdown is as exciting and surprising as you’d expect from Koryta. In the tradition of Dean Koontz, Koryta’s story dabbles in the supernatural, but not in a way to greatly bother Christians.

My only quibble was that the Florida nights in this story seemed to be remarkably mosquito-free (though the mosquitoes finally showed up when they were needed to contribute to the dramatic tension).

The Cypress House was a superior thriller, verging on the epic. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Rise the Dark,’ by Michael Koryta

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The Billings airport was built on a plateau above the city, and while the mountains were far off in the hazy distance, the big sky was right there on top of you. The Montana sky felt older than time and endless as space itself.

It was a humbling sky.

Pushing on through the second book in Michael Koryta’s Mark Novak series. I was a little disappointed in the previous book, Last Words. Rise the Dark made up for that, and more. The claustrophobia of the first book contrasted with the open heights of the second (Rise the Dark is about mountains and power line towers), lending epic scope to the narrative as a whole.

Markus Novak now knows the name of the man who murdered his wife Lauren. His investigation takes him to the one place he needs to see, but always feared to visit – Cassadaga, Florida, a community founded on spiritualism. Raised by a fraudulent psychic mother, Marcus has always had a horror of psychic claims. But when he goes there, and nearly gets murdered in a burning house, he comes away with the last notation in Lauren’s notebook – the words, “rise the dark,” as well as  a clue as to where the murderer is headed – to a town in Montana where he lived a while as a boy, with his mother and his two outlaw uncles. On the way, he joins forces with a beautiful private detective.

Meanwhile, in Montana, a young wife is kidnapped by the leader of a doomsday cult. Her husband, a power line worker, is informed that if he wants his wife to live, he’ll have to help the cult carry out a major act of sabotage. What no one knows is that he’s lost his nerve. If he is to do this thing he does not want to do, he’ll have to go far beyond his personal limits.

Rise the Dark was an epic story, full of Michael Koryta’s trademark plot twists and surprises. It strays further into the occult than I like, but there’s an ambivalence about the topic that comforted me. It looks like more books are coming, and I look forward to reading them.

I found Rise the Dark highly compelling. Recommended, with the usual cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Houseboat Detective,’ by Jay Allan Storey

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I am, as you’ve doubtless noticed, a sucker for mysteries about detectives who live on boats. This is due to a (fruitless) yearning for some second coming of Travis McGee. The Houseboat Detective by Jay Allan Storey was available for free, so I gave it a shot.

It wasn’t bad, but it was (perhaps intentionally) about the polar opposite of a Travis McGee story.

Jake Sommers does not live on a luxurious seagoing barge yacht like McGee, but on a quaint little houseboat, never intended to sail anywhere. And it’s docked more than a nation away from Fort Lauderdale – in Victoria, British Columbia. Jake inherited the boat from his hippie aunt. He ekes out a marginal living playing piano in a bar (he’s a talented musician, but lacks ambition), and he’s working on a serious drinking problem.

One of his neighbors, just to send him a wake-up call, puts up an online ad, advertising Jake’s services as a private investigator. (Jake has a little intelligence training, from the military, but has neither experience nor interest in the work.) But when Evangeline, a beautiful young woman, shows up at his houseboat, offering him money to locate her missing sister, he can’t resist. The woman tells him she never knew she had a sister, and the woman’s profile has now been pulled from the DNA testing site where she found it. Purely by trial and error, Jake begins to turn up leads, though the sister has left suspiciously few traces behind. Meanwhile, the mercurial Evangeline is fascinating him more and more. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that she’s been lying to him from the start.

I get the impression that author Storey is still learning his craft, but he shows some promise. Jake Sommers is an intriguing, wry character (though his bravery when the action starts is a bit surprising to the reader), but he could have been more effective if he’d been written in the first person (there was no plot reason not to). The prose could have used some cutting. It’s not awful, but meanders.

Still, not bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Last Words,’ by Michael Koryta

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…He had called on every resource for survival and found that your resources didn’t matter much when you were lost in the dark. You needed help from outside the blackness then. That had been the most unsettling realization of his life. I cannot save myself.

A while back I picked up a novella by Michael Koryta, my latest author enthusiasm. It was called The Last Honest Horse Thief, and told a story about Marcus Novak, a young boy living an itinerant life in the American mountain west. His mother, whom he loved but was ashamed of, was a fraudulent psychic and con woman. The story told how he got a chance at a different life, but chose to go back to her, honoring what he felt to be his responsibility. Like all Koryta stories, it didn’t go where I expected it to, but was satisfying in its own way.

On picking up Last Words, the first book in a series, I discovered that the novella had been a prequel, and that Marcus Novak is the hero here. He’s grown up now, having happily fled the mountains that carried so many bad memories. Now he lives the good life in Florida, as an investigator for a nonprofit foundation that investigates wrongful death penalty convictions. Or rather, it was the good life, until his wife was murdered. Since then he’s been obsessed with discovering her killer – so that he’s close to losing his job.

To get him out of the board of directors’ sight, Marcus’ boss sends him to Indiana, to investigate a case that doesn’t even match their organizational criteria. Ten years ago, a teenaged girl was lost in a cave. An eccentric local spelunker brought her dead body out, claiming he’d lost any memory of finding her. Public opinion agrees that this man must have murdered her, but there’s no evidence, and he’s never been charged or convicted. He is, in fact, the one who asked the foundation to send an investigator, to settle the truth once and for all.

Marcus has no interest in going to Indiana, and doesn’t care about the case. The secret lies in the cave, and he doesn’t like caves. The secret also involves a hypnotist, and he doesn’t trust hypnotists. Still, he will get drawn into it, and dark truths will be revealed.

I’m afraid I was a little disappointed in Last Words. The writing, as always with Koryta, was good. But I found the hero kind of passive. He got drawn into things against his will, and although he was tested in a major way, I wasn’t sure what he learned from it. But the big thing was that I wasn’t greatly surprised by the solution. I expect more surprises from Michael Koryta.

Also, there’s a lot of hypnotism in the story. I’m skeptical of hypnotism myself (someone tried to put me under once, but I’m a bad subject), and I thought the claims here were implausible.

But I’ll stay with the series. Last Words was all right, just not the author’s best work. In my opinion.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Ridge,’ by Michael Koryta

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At this point I’ll just cop to it – I’ve become a Michael Koryta junkie. I’m plowing through his books, one after the other, and when I run out I’ll probably have to check myself into a rehab center somewhere.

The Ridge is not my favorite of his books, but it kept me biting my nails. And Koryta’s great trademark – the head-fake, the illusionist’s trick of diverting the audience’s attention so they can be astonished when the rabbit (or, in this case, the cougar) emerges from the hat – is there in abundance. The wonderful thing about this artistic technique is that it increases verisimilitude (life is full of surprises like that) and offers plenty of opportunities for deeper, more complex characterization.

In the hills of eastern Kentucky an idealistic young couple has established a sanctuary for exotic cats. They are full of hopes and love for the animals, but they dislike their closest neighbor, a crazy old man who has built an actual lighthouse nearby, and keeps telling them this is a bad place for them to set up.

The same old man has been warning Deputy Sheriff Kevin Kimble about some weird danger that he can’t define. Kimble pays the old drunk little attention, but when the old hermit suddenly kills himself, Kimble finds a number of mysterious newspaper articles and photographs tacked up in his house. They all relate to accidents and murders that happened at , or to people who’d been at, the ridge. As he investigates, Kimble grows increasingly convinced that there is evil at work up there, and it’s his job to figure out how to fight forces not of this world.

The Ridge was a pretty complex story – perhaps a little too complex. It must have been a challenge to plot. But all the thrills were earned, and the the ending was dramatically satisfying. Think Dean Koontz, if you’re looking for a comparison.

Recommended. Cautions for grownup stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mean Business On North Ganson Street,’ by S. Craig Zahler

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Someone suggested I read an S. Craig Zahler novel, just to see what I thought of it.

So I went and bought Mean Business On North Ganson Street.

There are many good things I could say about this book. First of all, it’s well written. Author Zahler is a very good stylist. He turns out punchy, neo-hardboiled prose, with a razor edge: “The silver luxury car rolled past a street that was blocked off by an overturned pickup truck, which had been torn open like a zebra on the plain.” “The windshield wipers shoved powder across the glass, and through the opening, Bettinger saw Victory. Covered with snow and viewed from a distance, the city resembled a mildewed autopsy.”

Also, the characters are vivid and the plotting propulsive. This is very good writing.

But the reading experience provided? That’s a whole other thing.

Jules Bettinger is a police detective in Arizona. His record is good, but his customer service attitude isn’t, and he gets himself fired. His only option to stay on the job is a transfer to the city of Victory, Missouri, notorious for having the worst crime rate in the country.

When he gets there, he finds his fellow detectives brutal and probably corrupt. He observes clear violations of suspects’ rights. Then he learns more, and discovers why the cops are acting the way they are – in Victory, the situation has gone far beyond law enforcement. It’s now total war. When his own family gets pulled into the violence, Jules takes the gloves off and enters fully into the battle.

And that battle will lead from the better parts of Victory, which are merely blighted, to the worst parts, which are post-apocalyptic.

It’s a descent into Hell.

Reading Mean Business On North Ganson Street was an uncomfortable experience. Shocking, offensive, full of disillusionment. This is Nietzche’s world; the cops are just patrolling it.

I can’t really recommend the book, unless you have a taste for scenarios out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

I also thought the sex scenes were unnecessarily explicit.

I fear I am not going to be a S. Craig Zahler fan.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Prophet,’ by Michael Koryta

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There is no God.

You walk alone in the darkness.

To prove this, to imprint it in the mind so deeply that no alternative can so much as flicker, is the goal. This is power, pure as it comes….

The prophet’s goal is simple. When the final scream in the night comes, whoever issues it will be certain of one thing.

No one hears.

Reading fiction is an activity entailing many pleasures; among them is the constant possibility of discovering a truly wonderful book. I had that pleasure – in a big way – in reading Michael Koryta’s The Prophet. It’s a book that has a lot to do with football, and it hit me with the impact of a linebacker.

In 1989, brothers Adam and Kent Austin of Chalmers, Ohio were both on a winning high school football team in that football-obsessed part of the country. But Adam made a mistake on the night of their greatest victory, a mistake that destroyed their family. Today, Adam is a bail bondsman, still living in Chalmers, in the old family house. His brother Kent is the local football coach, a much-respected figure. He’s a devout Christian, and regularly leads Bible studies in a nearby prison.

The brothers almost never speak to one another.

When Adam now makes a second mistake, resulting in a young girl’s death, he is overwhelmed with guilt. He makes a promise to the girl’s mother – he will find the murderer, and he will not turn him over to the police. He will kill him.

Adam has no intention of letting this ugly business slop over into his brother’s life – but it does. It turns out that Kent was part of the plan from the beginning – innocently and unintentionally, but he and his family will be drawn inexorably into a drama scripted by the killer.

In a separate plot thread, we follow the progress of Kent’s high school football team, as they surmount one obstacle after another (not least survivor’s grief) to pursue a championship they’ve never won before. This theme provides a sort of harmonic counterpoint to the main plot, revealing character and illuminating the narrative.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that impressed me as The Prophet did. (And I’m not even interested in football). In addition, the book surprised me though describing the struggles of a sincere, decent Christian – not in an evangelistic way, but honestly and with sympathy. This is something you don’t see often in mainstream literature.

I could go on and on. Drop whatever you’re doing and buy The Prophet. You’ll thank me.

Cautions for adult stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Hard Count,’ by David Chill

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I’ve read and reviewed a few of David Chill’s Burnside (he’s one of those fictional detectives who apparently has no first name) novels in the past. I liked them okay, but had a few quibbles. Hard Count comes several volumes along in the series from the ones I’ve read before, and I thought the writing was better this time, so kudos to the author for learning his craft.

Burnside, our hero, is a former pro football prospect and a former cop, now a Los Angeles private eye. His private life has improved to the point where he has a live-in partner, who has a young son on whom he dotes. Gail, his partner, works in the City Attorney’s office and is running for the top job. Burnside’s not-entirely-shining past is not helping her campaign, so he’s trying to be on his best behavior.

But it’s difficult. An insurance company hires him to check out a murder attempt on one of their high-end clients, a former pro football star, now a restaurateur. Somebody took some potshots at the man in his back yard, while he was in his hot tub with his trophy wife. But the investigation gets pulled inevitably toward the insured guy’s son, a college football player who’s a hot prospect for the NFL draft, and who’s already living the celebrity life.

I found Hard Count a competently written PI story, mostly in the classical tradition. The modern shamus, of course, is more feminist and sensitive than Philip Marlowe was. Though politics were involved in this book, and we’re told that Burnside’s partner is a Democrat, there’s no real political slant here (indeed, it seemed as if they were living in another decade, when prosecutors in LA still believed in arresting people).

In the past I noted certain stylistic and grammar weaknesses in the Burnside books, but I do not see them now. Hard Count didn’t stand out from the crowd of competing detective series, but it made the cut.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Winter After This Summer,’ by Stanley Ellin

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I’ve become fond of the mid-20th Century mystery writer Stanley Ellin. I already recognized that he was an essentially good writer, not just a clever creator of smart mysteries. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what I found in his novel The Winter After This Summer, which qualifies as a mystery, I guess, but is more of a literary novel.

We first meet our hero, Dan Egan, as he is being expelled from his college. The fraternity house where he lived burned down the previous night, killing his best friend and roommate, the football hero Ben Genarro. Everyone blames Dan for failing to save Ben – and Dan himself is not entirely sure what happened.

Dan is the child of a somewhat tense marriage alliance between new money and old money, uniting two wealthy families in awkward coexistence. Refusing relatives’ offers of easy jobs, Dan instead goes to work in a shipyard, learning the mysteries of that dying craft. He tells us about his life, especially his disappointed love for Mia, Ben Genarro’s sister, who rejected him to marry into the American elite.

We also meet Barbara Jean Avery, a stunningly beautiful young woman who has escaped poverty in the Florida Keys, dreaming of James Dean and Hollywood. Mentally, she is an entirely ordinary girl, but Dan seizes on her beauty, dreaming of making her into a better version of Mia. Unfortunately, Barbara Jean has a husband, who is older and a religious madman. Their inevitable collision will bring the story to its climax

The Winter After This Summer qualifies technically as a mystery, I suppose, because it begins with an unexplained death – but that death is never actually explained. It’s more about Dan struggling with his personal background and trying to find his authentic self. The book could almost be described as Christian (Ellin in fact converted to Quakerism later in life), though the best Christian character in the book has fairly iffy theology. Readers should be cautioned about rough, realistic language and fairly frank sexual scenes.

I think my final take on The Winter After This Summer is that it’s one of those works that’s too smart for me. In the end, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to take away from it. But it was a rewarding reading experience.