Andrew Klavan’s The Last Thing I Remember is his first young adult thriller. That doesn’t mean a grizzled old man like me can’t enjoy it, though, and I did.

Nobody sets up a grabber opening like Klavan, and it would have been hard to better this one. As the story begins, we find our hero, high school junior Charlie West, waking up strapped to a heavy metal chair, in a room full of torture instruments. He has wounds and burns that he can’t remember getting. In fact, the last thing he remembers is a fairly ordinary day of school (which turns out, on closer examination, to have been not so ordinary at all). Outside the door, he hears men talking, and the one in charge says, “Kill him.”

Now we both know they won’t succeed at that, because otherwise there’d be no book. What follows is a two-stranded story—Charlie describes his desperate escape and his attempts to get back home and avoid the police (who are hunting him), alternating with his memories of that “ordinary” last day—the karate demonstration he did for a school assembly (he has a black belt, and it’s a good thing, too), working up the nerve to talk to a pretty girl and getting her phone number, a session at the dojo and a talk with an estranged friend, work on a history paper, and bed.

The formula for a good thriller is to put your hero in an impossible situation and find ways for him to survive and reach his goals, even though the impossible situation gets even worse. Klavan hits every stop, and the story just speeds along. It seemed too short, and now I’ll have to wait a whole year to find out what comes next.

Charlie is a Christian and a patriot, and just the kind of hero you want your kids to have.

I have some minor quibbles. Charlie frequently draws strength from a quotation from Winston Churchill that he got from his karate master—“Never give in, never give in… never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense….” It gets a little didactic, but of course this is a young adult novel, and you almost have to do that if you want to teach the reader anything. Nuance doesn’t go very far with younger readers.

I found that lesson a little painful, personally. The principle’s a good one, but there are a lot of people out there—especially young people—who aren’t in a position to act as Charlie does. These people are in situations where they literally have no power, and trying to “never give in” will only make their situations worse. I know, because I was one of those kids once.

But that’s something that’s probably more significant to me than to most people. This is a book you’ll want your son or daughter to read (mild violence, no sex or bad language), and you’ll enjoy reading it too. A lot.

(And another Klavan review recycled tonight. Have a good weekend. I’ll be playing Viking for a Sons of Norway youth event at Danebo Hall in Minneapolis on Saturday. I’ll let you know how it goes, if I live.)

Hunting Down Amanda is a masterful book. It’s fascinating in its own right, as a brilliantly crafted, smart, moving thriller.

It’s also fascinating to the Christian reader as an artifact of the conversion process. Because Klavan, who was not a Christian when he wrote it, was clearly on the way, and his growing interest in matters eternal informs the whole product.

The Amanda of the title is Amanda Dodson, a five-year-old girl who, when the story begins, witnesses a terrible air crash. She wanders to the crash site, and is carried out by a man. Her mother, who has been searching for her, sees this and says, “Oh God. Oh God. Now they’ll come after her.” Continue reading Repost: Hunting Down Amanda, by Andrew Klavan →

(Tonight, another reposted Klavan review.)

One-line review of Andrew Klavan’s Damnation Street: “Woo-hoo!”

I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for Christmas, and Damnation Street was one of the books I chose to get with it. I don’t generally buy hardbacks, but I felt this was a special case.

It was, in fact, a more special case than I knew. Because it appears that Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop books (the previous ones are Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley) are not going to be an ongoing series, but a trilogy (unless I read the ending wrong). Continue reading Repost: Damnation Street, by Andrew Klavan →

(Mark this down as a good day. I got an e-mail from somebody I’d been waiting to hear from, who’s sending me a FREE BOOK ABOUT VIKINGS [more information on that later]. I got going on a project I’ve been putting off in the library, and actually found it engrossing. Time flew. Also my doctor told me I could go off the iron supplement she’s had me on, which means I ought to have a lot less heartburn in my life. Below is another Klavan review, this one from October, 2006.)



Hard-boiled detective stories are one of my favorite genres. So it was good news for me when I learned that Andrew Klavan, my favorite contemporary author, had begun a detective series (I love series! It’s almost like having real friends!).

And I wasn’t disappointed. If Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop series isn’t moving Hard-boiled into fertile new territory, it’s at least discovering new treasures in the old fields.

You gotcher tough-guy protagonist. You gotcher smart-guy protagonist. You gotcher psycho killers and your dangerous dames. You gotcher dead bodies and threats and violence. You gotcher subtextual deconstruction of postmodern philosophy. What’s not to like? Continue reading Repost: Shotgun Alley, by Andrew Klavan →

An Israeli newspaper somehow obtained the slip of paper that Barack Obama slipped into a crack in the Wailing Wall during his recent visit, according to this report. It’s traditional for visitors to leave such slips with prayers written on them. The newspaper printed the text of the prayer today.

I have very little time for the Democratic candidate, but that’s just beyond the pale. Shame on them.

Yesterday I panned Andrew Klavan’s The Animal Hour. Today I shall soften the blow to his ego (since I’m sure he follows this blog) by praising his horror novel, The Uncanny.

I kept thinking as I read The Uncanny, “This book is almost perfect. I wish I’d written it.”

I’d like to see it done as a movie, but only if they respected the text. Obsequiously. Because this book is like a fine Swiss watch, all its parts rotating and ratcheting together, making a small, regular “tick-tick” sound (which, by the way, is a recurring theme in the book).

The book begins with a short story called “Black Annie,” a note-perfect pastiche of a Gothic horror tale. The reader then discovers that it is being read aloud by Richard Storm, a Hollywood producer who has made a pile of money with a series of horror flicks, but has moved to England due to a personal setback.

He reads it at a London party, and when he finishes it a woman drops a glass. That brings about Storm’s first sight of Sophia Endering, a lovely, lonely, emotionally damaged heiress and art-gallery owner, with whom he falls immediately in love.

But Sophia has other things on her mind. A man spoke to her one night in the street, imploring her to watch to see who will buy a certain obscure painting at an auction. The man who buys it, he says, is the devil. He can’t do it himself, he says, because he’s going to be murdered. Which prediction comes true.

And Sophia is deeply troubled, because her own father has instructed her to buy the painting for him. “At any price.”

Richard is advised in his assault on Sophia’s romantic defenses by Harper Albright, the proprietress of a magazine devoted to supernatural phenomena. Harper is an interesting character, a resolute skeptic whose life is centered on a kind of affirmation of faith.

As he gets embroiled in Sophia’s perils, Richard finds that his own dreams—even his movies—seem to be entwined with the diabolical plot he uncovers, bit by bit. Other old stories, a ballad, and a memoir punctuate the story, and it all comes together in a climax worthy of Hollywood (as Richard can’t help noticing).

It’s a thriller and it’s a parable (a Christian book, I think, though there are no Christian characters). Women will enjoy the love story; guys will enjoy the adventure and thrills. I loved it.