Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews Read online

  But there was another extremely important component of the old PI story: characterization. No matter how much even the best of these writers and the venues in which they published may have been despised by most of the lit crew of their time, and to a great extent by some of that crew's successors, they displayed a mastery of characterization that has been rarely if at all matched in any other field of written storytelling – indeed, that's what many of the one-liners were for. By the nature of surrealism, in contrast, characterization is not really possible – indeed, it could bring the whole surrealistic edifice tumbling down – and this fact severely restricts Atom's function as an entertainment. While one or two of the individuals peopling his pages have singular speech patterns, which is characterization of a primitive sort, most are fairly indistinguishable from each other, to the extent that not only did I constantly have to remind myself who they were when their names appeared but also, on occasion, I even had to think twice about whether they were male or female! This again is an interesting surrealistic effect – especially since, paradoxically, about the only character who's instantly identifiable on reappearance is Kitty Stickler, a nightclub singer of such extreme standardized beauty that she becomes effectively invisible – but it sure as hell truncated Atom's ability to entertain me except on the most superficial level.

  One of the book's two cover-quotes from Michael Moorcock states: "This is toon-noir ... as on the button as tomorrow's news." "Toon-noir" is a very apt description, especially with reference to Gary Wolf's Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981), but the remainder of Moorcock's comment serves, presumably unintentionally, as a pointer to Atom's problem as a novel: tomorrow's news hasn't happened yet, although much of it is beginning to coalesce. Similarly, Atom offers us, presumably not unintentionally, what can be interpreted as a cameo view of the coalescing process – a soup of motifs swirling towards an integration that has not yet been and may never be, for inherent reasons, attained. To both extend and mix the metaphor, it is consequently hard to establish whether what's being served up is a hearty nutritious broth or a thin consommé.

  —Infinity Plus

  Black Projects, White Knights

  by Kage Baker

  Golden Gryphon, 297 pages, hardback, 2002

  Before I talk about the book, a few words about the publisher. If I had to vote for which is the best publisher currently operating within the genres, I'd almost certainly opt for Golden Gryphon. Their books are produced with such care and love – not just for the subject matter but for production standards – that it gives a genuine thrill just to hold a Golden Gryphon book in one's hands. And, almost always, the contents live up to the rest, so I had high hopes of this collection by Kage Baker, an author with whose work I am (to my shame) otherwise unfamiliar.

  Most of the stories are in her series about Dr Zeus Inc., otherwise known as The Company – a shadowy super-technology organization that could be thought of as lying at the heart of most of the relevant conspiracy theories. There are also some stories in another, slightly linked series, concerning a prodigy known as Alec Checkerfield.

  The newly penned opener to this volume, introducing Dr Zeus Inc. to the unacquainted reader, is a firecracker piece of writing; surely no appetite could be left unwhetted by this piece. But thereafter, while each of the stories is a highly competent piece of magazine fiction, none of them seems outstanding; always I was left with that exasperated "nicely done, but so what?" feeling.

  But it's a lovely, lovely book, from its splendid J.K. Potter cover all the way on through.

  —Crescent Blues

  Coldheart Canyon

  by Clive Barker

  HarperCollins, 676 pages, hardback, 2001

  Since the industry of Hollywood is dreams, it's hard to understand why there have been so very few good stories of the fantastic centred on, or based in, the movie business. Even Thomas Tryon, the ex-movie star turned fantasy novelist, stayed strictly within the bounds of the real in his one movie novel/fixup, Crowned Heads (1976). The single novel that this reviewer has come across that mixes the movies with fantasy with any real measure of success is Theodore Roszak's exquisite 1991 novel Flicker, and even it is likely to offend genre fans in the delicious subtlety, rather than the wham-bam foregrounding, of its fantasticated underpinning. Within the movies themselves there have been a few successful attempts at this marriage, the most notable probably being Last Action Hero (1993), much maligned on release but now generally well regarded, and Woody Allen's 1984 excursion The Purple Rose of Cairo. One could add Maurizio Nichetti's delirious 1989 piece The Icicle Thief, although there the movie-within-a-movie is being screened on television, and it is the fantasies created by tv that are the real subject.

  So the strapline on the cover of Coldheart Canyon is enough to set the pulse a-tingling and the jaws a-salivating: "A Hollywood Ghost Story." Barker is one of the most elegant writers and exciting imaginers in the horror business: almost as good a writer as Peter Straub, almost as good an imaginer as Ramsey Campbell "A pity he should waste that writing ability and those powers of imagination on such garbage" is a common enough reaction, and perhaps an unfair one, although it does tend to be the ugly schlock moments rather than the wonderful flights of fancy that stick in one's mind after reading a Barker novel. But give him a ghost story and the results should be pretty stupendous – after all, remember what a fine novel Stephen King crafted from the form of the traditional ghost story with his Bag of Bones (1998).

  And for the first couple of hundred pages or so it seems that Barker has pulled it off. There is a beautiful sense of claustrophobia about the tale and its telling, not to mention that same delightful feeling as in Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood (1984) that strange and spectral archetypal figures are just on the limits of tangibility – although here of course the archetypes are born of the movie industry rather than of legend. One settles down for what looks to be another five hundred or so pages of sheer bliss, to wallowing euphorically in a new addition to that rarest of beasts, the truly successful fantastication about the movies. There's ozone in the nostrils, the eyes are flared, the real world is forgotten ...

  But then ...

  But then Barker the horror writer takes over. After another couple of hundred pages occupied largely by increasingly kinky sex between mortals and bits of ectoplasm, described with all the erotic passion of a coroner's post mortem report (although much more nicely written, of course), the rest of the book is a fairly straightforward horror novel. Quite a good horror novel, as horror novels go, but not exceptional even in that arena.

  It's a crushing disappointment. What a complete waste of those first two hundred pages! "A pity he should waste that writing ability and those powers of imagination on such garbage," in short.

  The story starts back in the 1920s. Hollywood star Katya Lupi – lovely, ruthless, promiscuous, worried about the advent of sound to the movies – returns to her native Romania with her manager, worshipper and would-be spouse Zeffer to visit her folks. Zeffer has a blanket instruction to buy anything he thinks might amuse her for the new home she is building in one of the canyons near Hollywood. Visiting a rundown monastery, he buys from the monks the four walls of a room completely covered in hand-painted tiles depicting scenes from a Wild Hunt of sorts – often in bestially cruel and/or pornographically explicit detail. The tiles are exported to Hollywood, where a room is constructed to hold them and the mural is painstakingly reassembled.

  There is a legend behind those tiles. They were created at the behest of Lilith, Adam's first wife and also the Devil's wife – and, too, the wife for a short while of ex-Crusader Duke Goga, after he and his huntsmen had accidentally killed Lilith's goatboy son, who was fathered by the Devil. The child does not die; instead, the Duke and his party are condemned forever to hunt the territory, the Devil's Country, that is both depicted in and is the tiles, in an attempt to recapture him.

  Once the room has been reconstructed in LA, Lupi discovers that entering it can gain a person one
entrance also to the real Devil's Country, a seemingly endless tract of landscape through which Goga and his gang still ride in search of the goatboy. Time spent there has a curiously rejuvenating effect – the place is, in effect, a fountain of youth.

  Flip forward to the present day. Heart-throb movie star Todd Pickett's career has started to slide. In desperation he opts for a face-lift. It's a disaster. To keep him out of the limelight, his agent Maxine stows him away in a long-deserted mansion in one of the canyons near LA ... which proves, of course, to be still secretly inhabited by a youthful and sex-crazy Katya Lupi. And in the grounds Zeffer still lives, although he's not as youthful and not noticeably sex-crazy at all because decades ago Katya got mean about rationing visits to the Devil's Country when it occurred to her its supply of rejuvenation might be finite. Also lurking in the grounds, almost always unseen, are the ghosts of hundreds and possibly thousands of old movie stars who were Katya's friends before she cut them off from their regular visits to the Devil's Country; these spectres, barred from the house by wards Katya has nailed into the doorsteps, can take on physical form when they want to, and they're all sex-crazy too.

  Todd, who was pretty sex-crazy to begin with but has been looking forward to a lean time of it because his face is such a mess, becomes a sort of walking sex-craze on encountering Katya. He plays with her the games sex-crazy people play (or, at least, the games sex-crazy adolescents wish like hell they could play), then joins in one of the ectoplasmic orgies, then he boffs Katya in the Devil's Country – an ecstasy enhanced by the fact that they get caught mid-boff by Goga and his pals – and then he ... well, actually, I sort of lost count around here.

  Goga isn't sex-crazy. Presumably having been married to Lilith for the few years during which she entered this world to commission the tiles cured him of any sex-craziness he may once have had, or maybe it's just that he's spent several centuries on horseback. Not sex-crazy either is Tammy, the president of Todd's fan club, either because she's fat (the novel displays a certain amount of stereotyping in the characterization) or because she sublimates it all in her obsessive collecting of knick-knacks relating to her idol. Either way, she gets concerned when Todd drops out of public view and heads to LA to investigate, following the trail to a certain old mansion in a canyon ...

  And that's when the viscera begin to erupt.

  To use the movie terminology, there are some curious continuity errors in the text, as if the book went through a lot of rewrites. On page 77, for example, Todd has to cancel his facelift appointment because his dog is ill; but it's not until page 101, after the dog has died, that he makes the appointment in the first place. On page 249 it's mentioned that it's twilight, yet a little beforehand Todd and Katya have been viewing their surrounding by moonlight and starlight. On page 408 Tammy says to Todd that "We're going to do this together" (not sex, I hasten to add), yet on pages 411-12 it becomes evident that they didn't. There may be some other examples I didn't spot.

  Because Barker is such a fine prose artist, Coldheart Canyon is in general very readable – aside from the two hundred or so sex-crazy pages, which become very tedious after a while – but this quality doesn't make it a good novel, or even a particularly good entertainment. It's certainly not one of Barker's own better efforts. Yet that first couple of hundred pages, when he seems to be setting up for a top-notch ghost story, are a remarkable achievement. Why he didn't just keep going, why he apparently suffered a crisis of nerve and reverted to the bizness-as-usual – there's a mystery for you.

  —Infinity Plus

  The Fifth Victim

  by Beverly Barton

  Zebra, 352 pages, paperback, 2008

  Oh dear.

  A small Tennessee town: Cherokee Pointe. A killer starts sacrificially murdering young women. Maverick FBI agent Dallas Sloan (rippling thews, unruly shock of blond hair, never found a woman who could tame him; get the idea?) recognizes the m.o. and arrives seeking vengeance for the killing of his niece by this same murderer the previous year in a different state. He's the only person in the FBI who's noticed there's a killer on the loose whose m.o. is to sacrificially murder four women in a row and then do the same to a fifth but with the extra feature of ripping her heart out for later cannibalistic consumption.

  Here in Cherokee Pointe, though, the local law forces have what would seem to be, were it not that the local Chief of Police is a sinecured halfwit, a considerable advantage: local psychic Genny Madoc (petite, pert breasts, never found a man worth letting inside her pants; get the idea again?) can intermittently tap into the killer's mind and witness his vile deeds. Now, if only she could get a street address ...

  Although Dallas thinks "psychics" are all phonies or crazies, from the moment they first clap eyes on each other the electricity sparks between him and Genny with such intensity Van de Graaff would have trashed his own generator in jealous disgust. It's obvious that, unless one or other actually bursts into flames first, they're going to have a monumental sex scene about three-quarters of the way through the book, and, golly gosh, so they do.

  Alas, just about everything else is equally predictable except quite how much direr, at any particular point, the book can get from here on.

  The Fifth Victim is by intention a serial-killer chiller, a mystery and a semi-erotic romance novel – all three. To take these aspects in turn: The serial-killer aspect is so hokey (oh, lumme: satanist cults) it'd have seemed a trifle passé in, say, 1953. The mystery's flaccid: the murderer's the guy you thought, then thought might be the Red Herring because he's so bloody obvious.

  And the erotica? Oh, geez. The Genny/Dallas megaromp is surprisingly OK, but elsewhere the liberal sexual references, plus the fairly frequent lesser sex scenes, are so clumsy and dumb it's hard to know whether to burst out laughing or into tears. And the main characters have astonishingly high Allure Quotients. Perhaps people have stronger sex urges in Tennessee: not one but several of the characters possess such a powerful aura of sexuality that they leave members of the opposite gender in a state of high arousal merely by walking by or speaking on the phone.

  This is a book that leaves you begging for less.

  Oh dear.

  —Crescent Blues

  A Matter of Profit

  by Hilari Bell

  HarperCollins Children's Books, 281 pages, hardback, 2001

  Usually, by the end of reading a book, one has a fairly clear idea – possibly a misguided one, but still an idea – of whether the book is good, bad or somewhere in between, but in the instance of Hilari Bell's young-adult sf novel A Matter of Profit this particular reader has found it infernally, and bizarrely, hard to decide.

  The protagonist is a young man, Ahvren, of the human species known as the Vivitare. Generations ago, the Vivitare were conquered on their home world by militaristic alien invaders, the Karg. They fought a protracted rebellion, eventually driving out and exterminating the invaders. Now they in turn, using Karg technology, conquer other worlds. Latest on the list is the 40-world, 40-species alliance known as the T'Chin. But the diverse T'Chin species (many of which have names tiresomely full of apostrophes and triple esses) have confused the Vivitare Empire by offering up no resistance to the invasion: they have let the Vivitare simply walk in and take over, a reaction interpreted by the Vivitare as being just a matter of cowardice.

  The Vivitare have a pretty savage code. In place of a religion they have what can most swiftly be described as a faith in the survival of the fittest. At the top of their social order, therefore, are the most skilled fighters – the soldiers, who are exclusively male. Other men are, through sterilization, eliminated from contributing to the gene pool. Women, who are generally regarded as incompetent at just about everything, do not suffer such a triage; it's assumed the most survival-equipped men will wish to mate with only the most beautiful and survival-equipped women.

  Young Ahvren, although a fully qualified member of the soldier caste, has been sickened by the ruthless Vivitare suppression of a recent rebel
lion on the planet Mirmanidan. He wants to get out of the war game, something very difficult for a member of his caste. When he expresses this to his father, who is a high member of the aristocracy, his father makes a wager with him: he can quit soldiery if he can use his wits to run to earth the widely rumoured plot to assassinate the Emperor.

  So Ahvren goes out and about among the diverse species of the planet T'Chin, main centre of the T'Chin alliance and the original home of the T'chin species. Note that lower-case "c"; it's not a typo. Although there is no hierarchy among the 40 species of the T'Chin alliance, the species that started it all was the insectile T'chin, the differentiation being marked by the upper-case/lower-case "c".

  And it is with this sort of thing that Bell starts getting into all sorts of difficulties, because an alien language wouldn't have a letter "c" in it in the first place – and doubly so since the T'chin communicate via smells (pheromonal exudations) rather than sounds. Indeed, Bell has gone to great and highly creditable effort to create a whole gamut of alien species that are not just different from us but different from each other, yet at the same time she seems to keep forgetting the very aspects of their alienness that she has been at such pains to establish. As example, we often discover members of physiologically quite distinct, non-humanoid species grinning at each other. Item A: What does an alien grin look like? Item B: Would a truly alien species experience the emotion that would produce a grin?