Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lost On a Page,’ by David E. Sharp

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[In case you’ve been wondering how my left eye is doing, post-surgery (cataract), I woke up this morning with clearer vision that I’d had when I went to bed. I believe it’s now better than it was then – but such things are hard to judge when the progress is slow. My retina surgeon led me to believe I’ll have permanent diminished sight, but the cataract guy thought he could restore it substantially. I await the final resolution of this contest of expertise.]

I knew this one was going to be strange, but it looked like it could be fun. And I guess it was, more or less. David E. Sharp’s Lost on a Page is a literary fantasy, in which characters from different genres interact, fighting and making alliances in a struggle against their own authors.

We meet Joe Slade as a hardboiled private eye in a typical urban nighttime setting, when he gets lured into chasing a strange group of people. They lead him into a library (or bookstore, I forget which), and somewhere in a maze of shelves they pass through a portal into a library in another world. There his new acquaintances reveal themselves to be an elf, a dwarf, and a wizardess. They reveal their discovery that they are characters in fictional fantasy stories, and they have decided to invade the World Where Books Are Made, to get revenge on their author for all the awful things he’s put them through. They’ve read Joe’s stories, and consider him just the ally they need for this violent job.

As they jump from fictional universe to fictional universe, they’ll find themselves in a Regency romance, a space travel story, and a zombie apocalypse novel. They’ll learn that there are things that the rules of fiction won’t permit them to do, and that different powers work differently in different worlds. And, of course, love with blossom.

Lost On a Page was a creative and original book, and amusing in places. I enjoyed the author’s self-mockery as the characters complained about their working conditions. However, I think the author also bit off more than he could chew. The book was awfully complicated, with settings and rules changing from scenario to scenario. And the author’s vocabulary wasn’t up to his challenges. For instance, when they jumped into the Regency romance, he tried to adopt the literary style of such books, with unhappy results: “Any afficionado would lecture this was a wine to be savored slowly and to which one should pay great homage.”

I finished the book, but it annoyed me. You might like it, though, especially if you’re a Jasper Fforde fan.

Fiction, Reviews

‘An Honest Man,’ by Michael Koryta

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“The past wasn’t all a lie, and the future isn’t all hopeless,” he went on. “That’s the way people on that island feel now, like they’re in one camp or the other. Either everything was bad or everything will be bad, right?”

It’s pretty rare for me to embrace a book whose message I’m not sure I like. But such is the power of Michael Koryta’s An Honest Man. (I reviewed another book called An Honest Man the other day. This was the result of a confusion on my part, when I was attempting to buy this one.) It’s a beautiful book that will linger with the reader.

Israel Pike went to prison some years back for killing his own father in a fit of rage. Now he’s paroled and back in his home, the moribund community of Salvation Point Island off the Maine coast. He has almost no friends there, not even his uncle, the assistant sheriff, who in fact hates him and is trying to find an excuse to send him back to prison.

One morning Israel sees a yacht drifting offshore, and rows out to check on it. Inside he finds the bodies of seven men, all shot to death. Naturally, Israel’s uncle points to him as the most likely suspect, but he can’t pin it on him.

But there are things Israel isn’t telling the police. He has secrets, and he knows more than he’s telling. But then, the whole community is hiding its own wicked secrets.

Meanwhile, a young boy named Lyman Rankin is living on a smaller, nearby island with his alcoholic, abusive father. When Lyman discovers a wounded young woman hiding in an abandoned house nearby, he puts himself at risk to help her and keep her secret. A bond develops between the two, even as his father grows increasingly suspicious and brutal.

An Honest Man is not only an exciting and well-constructed thriller. It’s also a heartbreakingly beautiful story about truth and beauty. It moved me deeply.

It also troubled me. One theme of this story seemed to be that lying is not only permissible, but admirable, in the right situation. (I’d like to hear the author debate Jordan Peterson, who says lies invariably come back to bite you.)

On the other hand, another theme seems to be that big, widespread, agreed-upon lies are wicked and must be brought to light.

In any case, An Honest Man was an amazing book to read. I give it the highest recommendation. Cautions for all you’d expect.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Choice of Evils,’ by Morley Swingle

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Can a former district attorney find love with a woman he once sent to prison for manslaughter?

That slightly implausible puzzle is one of several in Morley Swingle’s Choice of Evils, first in a series of legal thrillers featuring attorney Wyatt Blake.

Wyatt Blake, of Panorama Springs, Colorado, lost his way after the death of his wife in a skiing accident, an accident for which he still blames himself. His concentration slipped, and an ambitious rival managed to beat him in his race for reelection. Now he’s set up as a defense attorney, but the word is out that Wyatt has lost a step.

So it’s a surprise when a friend refers a heavyweight client to him – Ryker Brando, a tech and legal-marijuana multimillionaire. Ryker doesn’t deny that he cut the rope tying him to his business partner while rock climbing, sending him plunging to his death. But he argues that he had no choice – if he hadn’t, they’d have both been killed.

Ryker’s claims are weakened by the fact that the man was having an affair with his wife.

Ryker is kind of an Elon Musk caricature – he’s autistic, arrogant, demanding, and unlikeable. Wyatt will have a job to do, convincing any jury to buy his arguments. He’ll need to bring his A game – and these days he’s not the lawyer he used to be.

He doesn’t know if it’s a good thing or bad when he runs into Harper Easton, a female former police officer, now a private eye, whom he sent to prison for shooting an unarmed suspect. She hates his guts, and he feels guilty about it. But there’s a spark there, and he could use an investigator…

First of all, I need to say that I enjoyed Choice of Evils. The prose was good. I liked the characters. I was caught up in the mystery.

However, I thought there was a certain… lack of self-confidence in the writing.

Years ago, I read an interview with a TV comedy writer who’d written for Milton Berle. He recalled how Berle had always asked him to make the jokes “lappier.”

What does “lappier” mean? the writer wanted to know.

Berle explained that he wanted the jokes to fall into the audience’s laps. Nothing subtle. Push the joke in their faces like a cream pie.

I felt that way reading Choice of Evils. It seemed the author didn’t trust his own powers. He was telling me how to feel about everybody and every situation – even, to some extent, the big plot twist that was coming further along

Take, for instance, this passage:

Aside from a cordial hello, Harper hasn’t said a thing to me. No reason she should, though. I had a hand, obviously, in causing a great deal of unpleasantness in her life. The help I’m giving her regarding her mother is small compensation.

There’s nothing wrong with those lines in themselves – except that they tell us nothing we don’t already know. We’ve been told numerous times that Wyatt caused Harper “unpleasantness.” We’ve seen how he’s helping her mother out. The last two sentences are thus entirely superfluous, and could have been cut, moving the scene along.

Well, it may be author Swingle is learning his craft, and will do better in time. Taken all together, Choice of Evils is a commendable and highly readable effort.

In spite of being written in the present tense.

Recommended, with cautions for language and some steamy sex stuff.

Fiction, Publishing, Reading

‘Troll Valley’: recording done

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Tonight, BIG NEWS!

Deeply… underwhelming… big news.

(By the way, do kids today realize that “underwhelming” wasn’t always a word? I first saw it used in the Pogo comic strip, back in the 1960s, I think. It was funny because “overwhelming” had never (that I know of) been paired with “underwhelming” before. “Overwhelming” was one of those words that had no commonly used obverse form, just as we still never talk about anyone being “gruntled.”)

What I mean to say is, I finished recording my novel, Troll Valley, this morning. To mark the occasion, I decided to film myself “in studio,” for the benefit of future literary historians.

I apologize for the quality of the video. The old HP laptop I use for recording doesn’t have much of a camera.

But you’ll note that the sound is good. That’s the quality of sound you’ll be getting with my fully artisanal audiobook.

I need to give the whole thing a listen-through again, though, just to be sure it’s right. I should be able to do at least two chapters of that a day, so it ought to take a couple weeks.

Then, it will take as long as it takes for me to jump through the hoops of converting files for Audible, and uploading. (Phil has already modified the book cover for me, for which I’m most grateful.)

But it’s coming. It can’t be too long now.

You may now return to your scheduled weekend.

Fiction, Reviews

‘An Honest Man,’ by Simon Michael

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There are plenty of legal thrillers out there. Simon Michael’s An Honest Man recommended itself to me through being set in London in the 1960s, and through authenticity (as far as I could tell) and general good writing.

Charles Holborne was, not long ago, a rising criminal defense barrister. In spite of prejudice – both class prejudice and antisemitism (he changed his name from Horowitz, to his mother’s annoyance), Charles’ legal and persuasive skills brought him success. Until he was accused of the murder of his wife. The story of how he cleared himself of that charge was the subject of the first book in the series, and An Honest Man is the second.

Charles has come down in the world. It doesn’t matter that he was innocent of the murder – the London bar is a small, parochial community, and Charles lives under a cloud now. He’s struggling for money, and contemplating taking a job with a large legal firm, losing forever the courtroom work he loves.

Then, to his surprise, he gets a request for representation from a very wealthy and prominent client – Harry Robeson, a criminal solicitor who’s helped defend some high-level organized crime figures. Charles is leery at first, unsure why a man with so many options would choose him. But Harry is charming and thoughtful, and Charles is soon convinced of his innocence. It doesn’t hurt that a corrupt policeman with whom he’s tangled before seems to have been playing some shady tricks.

Many surprises and twists lay ahead. An Honest Man is a cynical enough book to be realistic about the world, but just positive enough to satisfy the reader’s inner idealist. I liked it a lot.

Cautions for violence and a little more sexual detail than I considered necessary.

But overall I was very pleased.

[I note, once again, to my minor annoyance, that this book was written in the present tense. I seem to be hitting a string of those lately. I suppose it’s what the cool kids are doing these days.]

Fiction, Reviews

‘No Turning Back,’ by Steve Frech

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I have announced that I’m cutting back on my reading of thrillers, just because I’m getting too old for the stress. But that doesn’t mean I’ve given up on thrillers altogether. When I do read one, I prefer the smaller, more intimate kind, where the focus is as much on character as on bangs and kabooms.

Which is precisely what I found in Steve Frech’s No Turning Back. I got it through an online deal, knowing nothing about the author or the story. But I had a treat in store.

Our hero and narrator (the book, I regret to say, is written in the present tense) is Lucas Walker, a young man who moved with his wife Julia to Los Angeles from their small home town in Pennsylvania not long ago. They found the streets meaner than they expected, but they were getting by when they learned that Julia was pregnant. They agreed they wanted the baby, and somehow they’d figure out a way to pay for it. Then Lucas lost his job. Concerned about stressing Julia, he did not tell her about this. Instead, when he’s not job-hunting, he now drives for a ride share service. It doesn’t help to pay their debts, but it allows him to maintain insurance coverage.

Lucas thinks he’s in a bad spot.

But he has no idea how bad a spot can be.

When he picks up a man named Damon, on a dark road in the Hollywood Hills, he figures he can squeeze one more ride into his night. Maybe he’ll get a decent tip.

Instead, Damon – who is spattered in blood – pulls a gun on him and tells him to drive to a certain address. There he will kill someone, and then they will drive to another address where he’ll kill someone else. He has a whole night of homicide planned out, and Lucas will be his chauffeur.

If Lucas does not cooperate, Damon says, he will kill him. Then he will go to his apartment and kill Julia.

Over the course of the night, Lucas will learn what fear and desperation really are. But he will also discover courage and resource within himself that he never knew he had.

And he will learn a few things about Damon – who is not exactly what he seems, and somehow grows increasingly sympathetic, in spite of the blood on his hands.

No Turning Back is fast, intense, and compelling. It grabbed me like the best work of Andrew Klavan or Gregg Hurwitz. It also had a very satisfying twist at the end. This is an expertly plotted and written story. It would make a great movie. Like all thrillers, it contains a few implausibilities, but they’re well handled.

I happily recommend No Turning Back. Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘All Hallows Eve,’ by Charles Williams

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(Sorry for the late post tonight. I had an eye exam, preparatory to cataract surgery [to which I very much look forward], today. They dilated my eyes, and I’m only now regaining the ability to see my computer screen clearly.)

What had looked at Lester from Evelyn’s eyes, what now showed in her own, was pure immortality. This was the seal of the City, its first gift to the dead who entered it. They had what they were and they had it (as it seemed) forever.

Lester Furnival (Lester, in this case, a woman’s name) is a ghost. As All Hallows Eve begins, the war is over, but she fell victim to a freak accident, a commercial plane dropping from the sky near Westminster Bridge. She has now entered a parallel but different City – the City of God. But she’s still disoriented.

With her is her “friend” Evelyn, a petty-minded and voluble woman who happened to be with her when they died. But as they wander the familiar streets, now strange and strangely unpeopled, Lester finds herself drawn into the troubles of another friend – Betty. Betty is the daughter of Simon Leclerc, a charismatic healer and preacher of peace who is now attracting a world-wide following. No one guesses that Simon is in fact the Antichrist, a magician. He has a plan to make contact with the eternal through killing his daughter and using her spirit as a messenger, to bring him news of the future. He’s already been sending her on such journeys in trances, and it’s in that state that she encounters Lester, who feels a divine compulsion to help her before she can move on into higher Heaven.

Meanwhile, Lester’s husband, Richard, is mourning her and lamenting his failures as a spouse. Lester’s friend Jonathan, a renowned painter, wants to marry Betty – unaware of her father’s plans for her. To please Betty’s mother, he paints a picture of Simon – one which infuriates the mother, but – surprisingly – pleases Simon himself.

That’s the setup for All Hallows Eve, Charles Williams final novel. Like all his books, it’s eccentric and challenging. I’ve always enjoyed it, and I quite enjoyed re-reading it.

Williams was a writer utterly at odds with modern literary fashions. Where we all (I include myself) struggle to be terse and precise in our prose nowadays, Williams unleashes a flood of words on the reader. But he does it the right way. He is not – like so many bad writers – just throwing words at his ideas, hoping a few will stick. Rather, he revels in an abundance of words, saying the same thing over and over in different ways, faceting his (often surprising) spiritual insights.

I would say, in fact, that Charles Williams’ fiction was just another stream of his poetry. Almost literally a stream – more like a torrent. One launches one’s boat into it and drives with the current.

Some people like Williams; some can’t stand him. I like him a lot (as a writer, not necessarily as a man). If you haven’t tried this strangest member of the Inklings, All Hallows Eve is a good place to start. But be prepared to wrestle with it.

Fiction, Reading, Religion

Thoughts on ‘All Hallows Eve’

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I’m reading (again) Charles Williams’ final novel, All Hallows Eve. I’m not quite half way through it. Williams is not the easiest read, but I keep coming back to his books. Just a few thoughts tonight about my ongoing impressions.

A recurring theme in Williams’ novels is the city – properly spelled with a capital “C” when he deals with it. J. R. R. Tolkien was always a little leery of Williams, and I’d imagine attitudes towards cities had something to do with it. Tolkien was a countryman, reveling in woods and meadows, trees and flowers and butterflies. Williams was London-born, and felt best at home there, amid the noise, the crowds, the bustle.

I’ve never (yet) read St. Augustine’s City of God, but I understand it to be a meditation on the societal catastrophe of the fall of Rome. Augustine told Christians that they mustn’t identify the City of God with any city of man, however great its pretensions. Christianity could do without Rome – we look to the City with foundations, eternal in the Heavens.

Nevertheless, Williams saw something of eternity in London, and in any great metropolis. A city has a being of its own; a body, a pulse, and a spirit. Many members work together to support a common life. The man of God can find an image of Heaven in the city, if he looks for it. London is itself an active character in All Hallows’ Eve.

Another thing that always strikes me – bothers me, really – in this book is that the villain is a Jew, and his Jewishness is an important element. There is no hint here of Jewish inferiority – rather the opposite. The villain here, Father Simon, is, we are made to understand, the Antichrist. And as the true Antichrist, he has to correspond to Jesus Christ, but in an inverted way. The Jewish capacities that in part made Jesus Messiah are aped and parodied in Father Simon.

This is my personal opinion – we need to be careful, when reading, to understand that people didn’t view antisemitism the same way back then (Williams died in 1945, as the war was ending, but before most people knew the true extent of Hitler’s Holocaust). The old antisemitism was bad enough, but Hitler improvised a new kind. The persecutors of Jews before that time – Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox – had never considered annihilating the Jews. They wanted to convert them. Hitler cared nothing for the Jews’ souls. He was all about “pure” blood, and regarded the Jews as an infection to be removed.

I don’t think we can ever treat Jews the same way in literature again. And that’s a good thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death Trap,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Realization was a long time in coming, and when it came in all its intensity, I knew that the world seldom saw as great a fool as I. She had magic, integrity, passion and a rare loveliness. And I had gone at her the way you go at one of those coin machines where you try to pick up the prize with a toy crane. I could have had the whole machine, with all the prizes and all the candy. But I had settled for gilt and glass.

Hugh MacReedy, hero-narrator of John D. MacDonald’s Death Trap, has never gotten over the mistake he made two years ago, when he was working as an engineer on a highway project near the town of Dalton (no state given). He had met the lovely Victoria Landry, and dated her. He then treated her as a score on a card and cast her off, hurting her deeply. Now he knows he blew the best thing that ever happened to him. But he also knows he’ll never get another chance with her. Until, back in Chicago from a job in Spain, he happens to pick up a newspaper and read that Vicky’s brother Alister, an awkward and arrogant genius, is scheduled to be executed for murder in a few days.

On impulse, Hugh cancels a vacation he’d planned and drives to Dalton instead. He finds Vicky, a shadow of her old self, devastated by her brother’s tragedy. At first she refuses Hugh’s help, still hurting from his rejection, but at last she offers him a deal. If her brother is executed, she says, she knows she’ll never be able to be any man’s wife. But if Hugh can find evidence to prove him innocent, she’ll give him another chance.

Hugh is strong and healthy, bright enough, and not shy. He can afford to spend money on an investigation. He’s in.

I call that a pretty good set-up for a mystery thriller. Death Trap was written in 1957, when author MacDonald was hitting his stride as a novelist, and Death Trap, it seems to me, is right up there with the very best. The town of Dalton is realistically portrayed, a town that’s experienced tragedy and corporately settled on a unanimous narrative, in which the truth is secondary. The girl Alister is supposed to have killed is remembered as a sweet, lovely child. In fact she was prematurely promiscuous, openly defiant of authority, and casually manipulative. Anyone questioning the accepted narrative, though, has to expect pushback – and Hugh gets it in spades, though he gives as good as he gets.

The book involves several vicious fights, but – interestingly – it’s psychology and a smart trap that nail the real murderer down in the end. Few things in literature age as poorly as old psychology – and the analysis does creak a little here – but all in all it works.

Death Trap is a top-notch, old-school pulp action mystery with added class. Recommended, with cautions, as you’d expect, for violence and non-explicit sexual situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Foundational Laminate,’ by Jay Maynard

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This book was promoted on Instapundit. I suppose it must have qualified because of certain libertarian elements in the story. Personally, although I finished Jay Maynard’s Foundational Laminate, I’m a little ashamed of myself for doing so.

We begin with Alex Sullivan, a young man who’s been arrested and convicted of punching out a cop during a street demonstration. He got a pretty good deal – a couple weeks of jail time, plus probation – on the condition that he undergo therapy at the Laminatrix Mental hospital in rural Missouri. This hospital’s novel approach is to encase the patient (as well as the therapist) in a latex suit, which is then encased in a crystal sphere. The two, each in their suit and sphere, then engage in intense conversation over a period of weeks – through telepathy – as the patient is helped to re-process their old traumas, gaining perspective and clarity.

How is this possible? Through magic. The hospital is run by a sorceress whose legal name is “The Laminatrix.” She invented the latex suits, which fully support all physical needs and remove waste. Full-time employees at the hospital are permanently sealed in their suits, voluntarily becoming fully committed, lifetime caregivers.

The story then continues, telling how Alex himself decides to become a caregiver, surrendering his face (all suit-wearers are masked) and his name (he becomes Red 24, after the color his suit and his hiring sequence). We follow as he eventually encounters a patient who, unwittingly, will round out his personal story. And we also follow as the state of Missouri discovers, to its horror, that there’s an institution here they haven’t figured out a way to regulate, so they diligently try to find a way to get it on a legal leash.

First, in fairness, I should state that Foundational Laminate is pretty well written. The prose was professional, the grammar and punctuation good – something fairly rare these days. Characterization was all right – though Maynard is one of those annoying authors who avoids almost all description of characters.

What I did not like was, first of all, that we’re dealing with a false gospel here. It’s the Freudian belief that all our problems come from unconscious traumas, and that if those are solved, we’ll become fully virtuous. I believe our faults go much deeper than that, and that a man without neuroses may still be a wicked man. Therapy has its place, but we have deeper problems.

Secondly, the suits creeped me out. We’re talking about a latex suit with a masked helmet. A life without faces and names is presented here as in some way superior. I like seeing people’s faces. I like names better than numbers, too. (Call me old-fashioned.) Also, the suit-wearers cannot procreate.

What’s more, we’re told that these suits are genuinely skin-tight – so tight as to show all details of the body. More like body paint than a wet suit. The suit wearers, even as they lose their faces, shed all sense of bodily shame. Not only that, but much is made of the tubes that the suits magically insert into all the body’s orifices. This struck me as a little perverse.

In other words, Foundational Laminate reads a lot like a sex fantasy in which a latex fetishist imagines saving the world through his kink.

That may be unfair. But it looked that way to me.

I can’t recommend Foundational Laminate.