Big Names, Short Stories, Mixed Results

Stephen King & Stewart O’Nan/Richard Chizmar, A Face in the Crowd/The Longest December

Dean Evers, an old New England widower in Florida, has become a reluctant Tampa Bay baseball fan. He whiles away lonely hours, largely estranged from his only son and with few surviving friends, by watching the Rays and reading. One hot afternoon, watching a low-stakes game, he sees a familiar face in the stands. A face from his personal past, which shouldn’t be possible, as its human is long deceased.

I can’t tell how much of “A Face in the Crowd” Stephen King wrote, and how much Stewart O’Nan contributed. King’s short fiction, unlike his novels, follows a reliable trajectory, building not toward some jump scare or twist, but toward a sense of inevitability. Characters see themselves as participants in events, until discovering that they’re mere passengers. Who knows if King wrote this story, or if O’Nan borrowed King’s vibe.

However, King and O’Nan aren’t this book’s star performers. Not only is their page count barely sixty percent of Richard Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” but their story is much more widely spaced and set in a larger font. Cemetery Dance Publications, Chizmar’s indie imprint, presumably put King and O’Nan on the cover to sell Chizmar’s “The Longest December,” which is more thematically ambitious but, ultimately, disappointing.

Bob Howard’s comfortable suburban Maryland life gets upended one snowy morning when local detectives appear at his neighbor’s door. A just-the-facts investigator informs him that his sweet, avuncular neighbor, James Wilkinson, has bodies under the floorboards. Bob finds himself beset on all sides, by suspicious neighbors, greedy reporters, and fair-weather friends. Everybody wonders what Bob knew, when. Then the midnight hang-up calls start.

This story differs from the other by rejecting a reliable beat sheet. Sadly, without a comfortable outline, Chizmar seems uncertain what story he wants to tell. Is this an amateur sleuth mystery in which a neighborhood family man must uncover deep secrets? A satire of the media circus following lurid crimes? A lone man’s descent into madness as the pressures of maintaining middle-class respectability crumble around him?

Yes, all this and more. Chizmar has selected an ambitious slate of themes he wants to address, backed by his admitted fondness for Twilight Zone-inspired narrative, but he seemingly doesn’t know how to keep all the balls in play. He gets just enough of one theme going to wet his readers’ whistle, then caroms onto another. It almost feels like he doesn’t know how to carry the themes forward once he’s introduced them.

As an author, I enjoy writing short stories because they let writers do something novels never permit: they let authors focus on character and plot, and politely ignore backstory. In full-length novels, the physical mass simply demands the author explain everything, or nearly everything, because there’s room enough. But short stories make no such demand. The brevity permits that, sometimes, things simply happen because they happen.

For instance, Dean Evers doesn’t need to ruminate on deeper themes of his buried past suddenly appearing on the Jumbotron. It simply happens because it happens. Evers tries to fight the inevitable but, like Oedipus Rex, his resistance becomes part of his breakdown. Yes, observant readers already know where his story is headed, and everyone except Dean realizes he can’t fight the tide. What tide? Doesn’t matter, the story’s over.

But Bob’s story, simply because it’s longer, has room to address the questions it raises. It just doesn’t, and one wonders whether Chizmar has started something he doesn’t know how to finish. The swarming, shark-like media frenzy gets introduced, then gets forgotten. Similarly, the pressures which the investigation puts on Bob’s ability to do his job, which is high in pressure but low in prestige. And the psychological toll on his family.

Indeed, in the final resolution, I find myself wondering why it stops there? Bob’s story not only isn’t done, but the “conclusion” actually opens more cans of proverbial worms about his family, his past, and his mental health. One wishes Chizmar took some guidance from King, whose notoriously long, family-oriented conclusions at least give readers some sense of where our protagonist now stands in a world forever changed.

These stories are arranged back-to-back, with two front covers, in the style of the old Ace Doubles that kept pulp classics in print during the 1960s. They feature two stories that go in different directions and ask different questions, but appeal to the same thriller audience. Both feel like good narrative introductions. Sadly, both also feel like something the authors intended to finish writing later.

The First and Last Days of Scottish Witchcraft

C.J. Cooke, The Book of Witching

A calamity has occurred on an uninhabited island in the Orkneys, in Scotland’s sparsely populated far north. Three teenagers reenacted a pre-Christian ceremony, with all the cocksure enthusiasm of teenagers; but it’s ended with one teen dead, another maimed, and the third missing. Now the adults around them must reconstruct what happened, because a malevolent force nobody’s yet seen may have something to profit from the catastrophe.

C.J. Cooke, a sometime university professor, has gained renown for her intensively researched, historically themed dark fantasy novels. This is no exception; not many horror novels include a works-cited page. For this volume, she delves into one of Scotland’s darker episodes. Even by witch trial standards, Scottish trials were notoriously brutal, a revolting mix of Christian piety and state-sanctioned torture which extracted confessions through truly appalling means.

In 2024, Clementine Woodbury struggles to understand the events that stranded her daughter in a Glasgow burns unit. Once lively and free-spirited, Clem’s daughter Erin has grown moody and secretive since becoming a teen mother. With Erin under sedation in a sterile room, Clem can’t ask direct questions about her mysterious injuries, so she takes her granddaughter and commences a freelance investigation. She isn’t prepared for the secrets she uncovers.

Parallel to Clem’s investigation, Alison Balfour stands accused of witchcraft in 1594 Kirkwall. Though the accusation carries whiffs of religious paranoia, Alison quickly realizes the truth: she’s a pawn in a powerful dynastic struggle for control of the Orkneys. Her confession, or lack thereof, will determine which rapacious aristocrat will control Orcadian government—though either outcome will be disastrous for ordinary smallholders like her family.

Cooke’s balance between these two narratives asks important questions. What debts do we moderns owe for injustices performed centuries ago? And what obligations do we bear to future generations? Alison Balfour realizes quickly that she can’t prevent her own unjust death; she can only determine what consequences her death brings upon others. Clem can’t pinpoint what caused her family’s sufferings, but clearly something dark lingers in her heritage.

C.J. Cooke

Though marketed as a “thriller,” this novel’s contemporary portion more resembles an amateur sleuth mystery. While the police struggle to fit Erin’s grievous injuries into their pre-written crime narrative, Clem assumes responsibility for uncovering what happened to her daughter. If this means scrambling into Scotland’s enigmatic, impoverished north to confront a secretive cabal, she clearly considers this an acceptable price for a truth she might not like.

The historical portion, meanwhile, is explicitly political. Orkney suffers under a government that rules by stoking fear among the population, retaining power by convincing the population of an even worse enemy. Alison knows she can’t win this battle. Therefore she’s forced to redefine victory according to what keeps her family and her people alive. Cooke reconstructs a poorly documented time of paranoia, recorded only through state and religious propaganda.

Therein, Cooke tacitly acknowledges something often forgotten in histories of witch hunts: they weren’t the flexings of invincible empires, eager to demonstrate their power. Witch hunts happened after the church-state hybrid began losing unquestioned authority. Alison Balfour’s execution happened a generation after the Scottish Reformation, as the Stuart monarchy clung to dwindling authority. Witch hunts are the superannuated flailings of a broken empire already in retreat.

In this, Cooke shows an aristocracy terrified of its people. Patrick Stewart, Second (and last) Earl of Orkney, sought the church’s benediction because he knew the people already organized against him, that the trade guilds that built his palaces were also hotbeds of insurrectionist intrigue. The Earl and his retinue yearn for unquestioned power, but the very fact they must resort to such extremes proves they’ve already lost the people’s devotion.

Alison Balfour works as a peasant healer among people who survive in nature’s bounty; but palace intrigues and state paranoia drag her into early modernism. Clem Woodbury trusts medicine, modernism, and police technocracy; but she’s forced to delve into her lost heritage and forgotten bloodline when modernity can’t answer her questions. Both women discover truth hiding in secretive corners, that nothing’s ever as simple as the official narrative would claim.

Cooke creates a story of nuance and complexity that rewards multiple levels of reading. She uses the markers of paperback thrillers, and on that level, one could read this book casually, like any other beach novel. But Cooke also asks questions about heritage, responsibility, and power, which don’t yield themselves to easy answers. Especially in Europe, where aristocratic paranoia still casts a long shadow, is the past ever really gone?

Teenage Torture and Softcore Self-Indulgence

Harleigh Beck, Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: an Erotic Horror Story

It’s been nearly a year since Skyler and Evelyn killed their high school’s star quarterback, Nate, in a totally avoidable hit-and-run accident. They’ve kept their culpability secret for an entire year, despite the rumor-mongering common in small towns. But as the anniversary approaches, Skyler begins seeing Nate everywhere. She fears his spirit hungers for revenge, until he astounds her by showing up, alive and unmarked, in the high school hallway.

To review this novel, I must first acknowledge: I’m not Harleigh Beck’s intended audience. Before page one, Beck dedicates this novel “For all of my erotic horror girlies.” Not women, girlies. Beck has selected a mostly young, primarily female audience, presumably one whose ability to appreciate literature is uncluttered by excessive prior reading. Perhaps that’s why Beck pinches liberally from Tobe Hooper, Ambrose Bierce, Kevin Williamson, and more.

The seemingly resurrected Nate wants revenge on Skyler specifically. And the revenge he wants is specifically sexual in nature. Though Skyler, who narrates most of this novel in first person, repeatedly emphasizes her plainness and lack of desirability, she has constant attention from several boys—a staple of young adult fiction. But while Dustin and Max want to date Skyler, Nate wants to humiliate, degrade, and dominate her.

And Skyler loves it.

Although these characters are high school students, and several important scenes happen inside their school, Skyler and Nate occupy a world substantially devoid of adults, surnames, and other indicators. Only in the epilogue do any adults (besides Skyler’s mostly absent, milquetoast dad) appear, or any characters receive surnames. Group dynamics mimic teen movies from the 1990s and 2000s. Characters, individually or together, are beholden to Hollywood boilerplates.

Only in Nate’s tortures of Skyler do events vary from cinematic standards. By day, Nate finds ways to isolate and gaslight Skyler. By night, he seeks increasingly embarrassing ways to sexually torment her, promising to eventually deflower and assassinate her. His conflation of sex and death would trigger Sigmund Freud’s alarm bells, not only for his dominant power trip, but also the increasing gratification Skyler feels at her forced submission.

Beck divides the novel into two parts. (Three actually, but the third is a brief codicil.) Part One mimics conventional teen horror. Nate tortures Skyler in broad daylight, blackmailing her into complicity by threatening to reveal what happened that fateful night. Nate’s malevolent predations exist amid a context of teenage ennui: high school, where everybody fits pre-written social roles, and Skyler’s home life, where Dad has become a phantom.

Harleigh Beck

Part Two occurs in a single frenetic night. Teenagers gather at an abandoned vacation cabin for a Halloween party, where Nate decides to finally enact his revenge. Somehow, while Nate cleaves a body count, Agatha Christie style, through the amassed teens, nobody pauses the party. The atmosphere of adolescent banality that permeates Part One becomes oppressive in Part Two, as Skyler increasingly realizes why she’s trapped inside with her tormentor.

Previous reviewers have raved about Beck’s “twist ending,” which has become an obligatory component of genre fiction today. This further demonstrates that Beck writes for an audience unclouded by excessive genre familiarity, because without spoilers, she signposts the twist from around page 20. Besides, it’ll take serious gumption to write twists exceeding Catriona Ward, so maybe authors should pause that boilerplate for now.

And the erotic component? Beck highlights that component in her promotional material, and considers herself so transgressive that she requires a full-page trigger warning in the front matter. So does the content stir my loins? No, but I’m not seventeen, like these characters. They seemingly find eros in describing body parts and saying dirty words. They’re clearly finding their sexuality, and as students, reduce the experience to limbs and anatomy.

I find myself neither frightened, nor aroused, nor invested in character development, as characters develop according to their designated Hollywood roles. But again, I’m not Beck’s preferred audience: I’m a middle-aged male who’s watched horror movies for thirty years. Beck writes for a more naive audience unjaded by either sex or death. Perhaps it matters that Skyler repeatedly protests her Laurie Strode-like innocence.

Perhaps Beck would rather write big-ticket film treatments. Perhaps this story might make stirring, acceptably dangerous late-night Netflix viewing. But just reading it, where I set my own pace, I’m too conscious of Beck’s cinematic sources and shopworn cliches. Beck has an earnest, skillful voice and handles English well, so I finished the novel easily. But without either eros or thanos, I close the book and think: “Meh.”

The Shallow State, Part Two

Keri Russell (left) and Rufus Sewell as Kate and Hal Wyler, in The Diplomat Season Two

This essay follows the prior review The Shallow State.

The first season of Netflix’s series The Diplomat turned heavily on its relationship with then-current events. A career American foreign service officer gets appointed to manage the relationship between an aged American President, who is terrified of appearing old, and an oafish British Prime Minister who opportunistically seizes a catastrophe to improve his public image. In the eighteen months since Season One dropped, global politics have shifted violently.

First, Rishi Sunak’s Tory administration imploded, culminating a decade-long train wreck that included such questionable luminaries as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Almost simultaneously, Joe Biden removed himself from consideration for reelection as U.S. President. This set American politics up for a contest between a highly competent but anodyne Democrat, and a charismatic Republican spouting talking points plagiarized from Weimar Germany. Politics stands idle for nobody.

The Diplomat foregrounds the unelected professionals who make American and British government offices run. On the American side, this mainly includes career foreign service officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who didn’t want the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom, but accepted it because it’s right. Wyler has built her career preventing impending wars and violence. The State Department thinks this makes her a good potential political candidate; she disagrees.

Season One ended with Wyler and her chief ally, British Home Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), believing they’ve discovered a conspiracy running through Britain’s government. Anybody who reads or watches thrillers regularly knows that, the more fervently characters believe something in Act One, the more thoroughly Act Three will dash their beliefs. Our only questions are: how will their expectations be upended? And, what will replace them?

This matters because the British Prime Minister isn’t elected by British voters. Though the PM traditionally must be a member of Parliament, this isn’t legally mandatory, just expected. The PM is elected by Parliament itself, and therefore is almost always the leader of the majority party. This gives the PM extraordinary power and, as Boris Johnson proved, tragically little oversight. Government conspiracies have liberty to travel quickly with little impediment.

Season Two runs two episodes shorter than Season One, primarily because it dispenses with character-building. Creator Deborah Cahn assumes you remember the characters and their relationships; she introduces few new characters this season, and no new core ensemble members. This lets her dive straight into the action, a movement made possible because Season One ended with an explosion, and lingering questions about who survived.

Allison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn

Therefore, for a show driven substantially by dialog, the pacing never feels slow and talky. Every conversation carries weight, and nobody speaks flippantly. The terse, telegraphic language packs every interaction with weight, as characters talk bullets at one another. The show bespeaks the influence of Aaron Sorkin’s similarly dialog-driven The West Wing. Probably not coincidentally, this season introduces West Wing alum Allison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn.

But this creates a difficult dynamic with the show’s real-world inspiration. Two season’s worth of events have happened in just weeks, while Anglo-American politics has whipsawed drastically over eighteen months. The aspersions cast on President Biden’s age, which Season One name-checked without mimicking, seem dated now. As Kamala Harris tries to sustain Biden’s legacy, the character of Grace Penn seems unexpectedly pointed, and potentially dangerous.

This series emphasizes an important Platonic principle: the people who most fervently desire power over others, deserve it least. One achieves political power in modern democracies by showing the people an amiable public face, but by engaging in backroom negotiations and cutting deals which push the boundaries of legality. Prime Minister Nichol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) is an effective leader, if he is, to the degree that he’s a terrible person.

Same goes for Grace Penn. Season One established that the American government wanted to remove Penn behind a scandal. This season establishes that Penn knows this, and seems willing to cultivate Kate as her replacement. However, Kate quickly learns that Penn faces consequences only for the scandal where she’s been caught. Like Trowbridge, Penn scaled the heights of American politics by sacrificing her morals.

Anyone who follows politics, American or international, learns quickly that purity of heart is for fools. Situations necessary for the common good, often are deeply unfair to selected individuals. Life in politics requires candidates to question which of their principles they’ll willingly abandon under pressure. This series forces Kate Wyler, a career civil servant driven by high morals, to ask these questions of herself.

And by extension, it asks us, the audience, what price we’d willingly place on our souls.

The Island of Faith and Lies

Catriona Ward, Little Eve

On a tiny Scottish island forgotten in the backwash of World War I, a strange prophecy has come to fruition. Five people and a horse lie dead, and a 5000-year-old megalith has fallen over. This was the final act needed to purge the world and bring The Adder into the world, purging corrupt humanity. So what exactly happened here? How did one teenage girl cause so much death and destruction? And where, exactly, is The Adder?

This, Catriona Ward’s second novel, debuted in Britain in 2018, but didn’t receive an American release for years. Only after some of Ward’s latter novels, particularly The Last House on Needless Street, garnered American acclaim did anyone think readers across the pond would appreciate this novel. Having read it, I understand why publishers would’ve assumed a limited Yankee Doodle audience: it’s almost aggressively British. Yet I think that only increases this book’s American appeal.

The laird of Altnaharra, one John Bearings—identified throughout almost exclusively as “Uncle”—believes himself a messiah. He receives visions from his snake, Hercules. He has formed a doomsday redoubt inside his ancestral castle, comprised of two common-law wives and four foundling children. He forces everyone else to live austere vegetarian lives (while he indulges in beef and gravy), and performs periodic tests to determine which of his children will become the harbinger of his snake cult.

If this sounds like a frenetic mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Wicker Man, I won’t disagree. Ward channels a specific kind of apocalyptic fear, not of the world ending, but of unhinged people awaiting that end. The castle teems with caverns, hidden rooms, and labyrinthine hallways, the lifeblood of gothic horror. As in the best gothics, supernatural occurrences have become seemingly common, but we must wonder how supernatural they really are.

Trapped inside the Altnaharra castle, Uncle enforces capricious discipline, while his children adapt themselves to appease his moods. The war-ravaged outside world is too busy to interfere, so Uncle’s religion becomes ingrown, consuming the children. Teenaged Evelyn particularly struggles with Uncle. She wants his approval, and campaigns to be named his successor; but she also can’t help seeing how manifestly corrupt Uncle has become. Her attempts to escape only make her situation worse.

Catriona Ward

Ward starts her narrative at its conclusion, as the rural villagers living in Altnaharra’s shadow discover the bloodbath. What actually happened unfolds only in flashback, as the massacre’s only survivor dribbles out information sparingly. While the villagers seek pat answers and want to close the coroner’s inquest quickly, the few facts we receive only make things muddier. This is only made worse when it becomes clear that Evelyn has buried key facts, and Dinah, the only survivor, is lying.

It probably comes as no surprise to readers of horror literature that, the more thoroughly we believe something on Page One, the more surely we’ll see that belief shattered. Ward’s other novels have shown her ability to cantilever multiple twists. We attempt to predict what surprises Ward will throw our way, because horror literature since the late 1990s has trained us to watch for rug-pulls in Act III. Ward knows this, and her twists are truly surprising to today’s jaded audiences.

What, Ward asks us, makes a family? Uncle chose his two wives and four children because he needs adulation. He maintains their loyalty, not through love and devotion, but through caprice and Crowleyist woo-woo. Uncle’s wives have differing reactions to his ministrations, and their responses reflect traditions of Jungian psychology. But Uncle’s children choose not to escape, even when opportunities arise, because Uncle’s violent whimsy is all they know. They have no survival skills without him.

This novel also uses themes of religion as a shared activity. Uncle leads his apocalyptic cult unilaterally; he alone receives revelations from The Adder, and dispenses justice that might be god-given, or might be arbitrary. Religion holds Uncle’s ramshackle family together, but it also creates divisions, as cult members try to determine who’s blessed or damned. Capital-T Truth comes from Uncle alone, and his motivations are hardly beyond question.

Ward cultivates fear, not through monsters and blood—despite kicking off the story with a crime scene, Ward uses violence so sparingly that, when it does happen, it’s even more shocking—but through misdirection and claustrophobia. Our narrators lie because lying is the only language they know. The outside world of objective truth and information only confuses them. We see the world through their eyes, and what we see is truly terrifying.

The Other Side of the California Dream

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 52
Carl Franklin (writer/director), Devil in a Blue Dress

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins only wanted to earn an honest dollar and pay his mounting Los Angeles mortgage bills. Not many Black men own their own houses in his city and time, after all. So when a hulking White man in a flashy suit offers Easy straight cash to find a missing White girl who enjoys visiting Black jazz clubs, it feels like a welcome payday. That us, until leads Easy questions start turning up dead.

We generally don’t associate the Left Coast with the pervasive “color line” that divided many Twentieth Century American cities. But in the years surrounding World War II, California had every bit the segregated culture and bigoted tendencies. Black Americans from Texas and Louisiana came to La-La Land for the same reasons they settled in Chicago and New York, because the big cities offered work. But as elsewhere, what one hand offered, the other took away.

Easy finds himself managing the tension between two communities while seeking his target, Daphne Monet. White people need information from the Black community, and having aggressively built segregated institutions, they cannot cross the borders they’ve created. Black people need White money, and also White tolerance, both of which they can purchase if they’re willing to sell their integrity. But once the two start mingling, the implicit violence that keeps the communities divided starts becoming explicit.

This slow, thoughtful neo-noir already appeared like an artifact from another era when it appeared in 1995. Director Carl Franklin overexposed several key shots to create California’s sun-streaked postwar fatigue. In Franklin’s distinctively dated cinematography, Easy is proud of owning his single-family home with lawn and picket fence, but that house looks slightly singed, with dust permeating every crevice. L.A. is a city of promise, but to Franklin, that promise has already started wearing thin.

As crimes start accumulating, people on both sides of the color barrier consider Easy a trustworthy source. Though hired to find Daphne Monet, she quickly finds him, begging his help negotiating her return to her fiancé. But that fiancé, in whose name Easy has been seeking Daphne, appears never to have heard of Easy. Who, then, sent flashy DeWitt Albright into central L.A. to find Daphne? And how does this affect the L.A. mayoral race?

Franklin’s storytelling deliberately channels previous Southern California noir thrillers, like Double Idemnity and Chinatown. Unlike the French movies that originated the smog-shrouded noir genre, L.A. noir is notable for its unrelenting sunlight, making warmth and visibility feel as oppressive as European mist. This movie appeared around the same time as other neo-noirs, like L.A. Confidential and Mulholland Drive. But its specifically Black sensibilities set it apart, emphasizing those neglected by California’s booming postwar bonanza economy.

Jennifer Beals and Denzel Washington in Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress

Cinematography emphasizes this movie’s oppressive ethos. Franklin shoots many scenes from a low angle that places the horizon above the midpoint, placing the viewer below the characters’ eye level, making us feel low to the ground. Although Franklin has few scenes of out-and-out violence, those he does have distinctly lack glamour and grace. Fighting, for him, is a clumsy enterprise; none of that “gun fu” that would start infecting Hollywood soon after, with The Matrix.

Against this visual austerity, Franklin contrasts a lush Elmer Bernstein score. The sound reflects a changing attitude in jazz: though the musician favor traditional instruments and rhythms, their compositions are altered by electronic amplification and a harder, more aggressive backbeat. Bernstein judiciously mingles his own compositions with period icons like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and in the noir style, he leaves several key scenes silent, letting character, dialog, and action convey the thoughtful story.

Like the Walter Mosley novel upon which it’s based, this movie was an experiment, to determine whether the market would support a franchise. The novel launched the Easy Rawlins franchise, and helped elevate Mosley to the first tier of commercial success. Despite a star cast and critical praise, the movie failed to recreate that success, barely breaking even at the box office. Denzel Washington’s performance was iconic, but only to those few who saw it.

Too bad audiences missed it, though. It provides a view into the institutions that enforced the color barrier during a time that California tried to romanticize itself, selling the “California dream” to anyone who could afford it. Easy shows us the unromantic side, the side that didn’t profit from postwar excess. He shows a man, dragged into the institutions of power, who grows into his role, becoming the defender his people never knew they needed.

The Power Politics of Fairyland

Sarah J. Sover, Faed to Black (Fractured Fae Book Two)

Gwendolyn Evenshine is settling uncomfortably into her role as the fairy kingdom’s first and only licensed private investigator. But a mysterious stranger appears in her office with the magical world’s equivalent of chloroform, and Gwen wakes up trapped inside a box. A little tense log-rolling reveals that Gwen’s been kidnapped by her own family. Because Gwen’s secretly no mere PI; she’s a runaway member of fairyland’s ancient aristocracy.

It’s hard to imagine a second series novel which departs more abruptly from the first. Sarah J. Sover’s first Fractured Fae novel followed the time-honored pattern set by Jim Butcher or Laurel K. Hamilton, a crime novel set against a background of creatures from myth and folktale. But just as protagonists Harry Dresden and Anita Blake have secret birthrights, so does Gwen Evenshine. Sover just skips the several-book buildup.

Exactly who kidnapped Gwen, the mystery that dominates the first few (very short) chapters, gets resolved quickly. The more important question becomes why. Gwen abandoned her aristocratic birthright years ago, and resents getting dragged back. Meanwhile her friend and business partner Chessa, having determined who nabbed Gwen, taps some old allies to mount a rescue mission. She apparently thinks it’ll be easy to spring a prisoner from Avalon.

Yes, that Avalon. Gwen and Chessa’s fairy lineage descends from the enigmatic kingdom that brought King Arthur and Morgan le Fay to power. The first novel occurred in the fairyland corresponding with Boston, and the Revolutionary heritage that city contains, but this second goes back even farther, to the English-speaking world’s pre-Christian heritage. Fae can survive for centuries of nothing kills them, so their grudges can last equally long, apparently.

Sarah J. Sover

Sover’s prior novel was a conventional PI story, like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler wrote. A protagonist with internal scars chases a deeply personal definition of justice, although “justice” doesn’t necessarily correspond with “law.” This novel swerves into Ian Fleming or John le Carré territory. It continues the notion that justice and right are ad hoc creations without conventional morality. But rather than crime, it focuses on politics and world affairs.

Or anyway, the first half does. Sover initially focuses on the enemies of free society, and the lies and backroom deals that society conducts to preserve freedom. How free are we, she asks, if our leaders must engage in skullduggery to conserve that freedom? Then, somewhere around the halfway mark, Sover swerves again. She abandons the pretense of James Bond-ish subterfuge, and pushes her characters into a full-on insurgency.

The parallels with current affairs are inescapable. In the war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of fairy, Sover presents the Unseelie as amoral, reveling in cruelty and sacrificing innocent civilians to their power schemes. Yet the Seelie, supposedly just and liberated, are obsessed with forms of order, unaware that the world has changed without them. The Unseelie are evil, but successful; the Seelie are benevolent, but aloof.

On some level, mass-market fiction is always about its audience. Sover shows how the twin idols of power or morality blind authorities to the common suffering outside their doors. Gwen and Chessa serve the Seelie Court, each in their own way, and therefore the forms of order, and they’re shocked by the Unseelie’s casual cruelty. Yet the streets of Avalon teem with fae whose lives are neither cruel nor orderly.

Gwen abandoned the Seelie Court, with their hoity-toity ways and cold politesse, years earlier. Her one regret was that her abandonment forced her to leave her brother, a bright-eyed and optimistic kid. The intervening years have seen Gwen become independent, but poor and plagued with second thoughts. When politics reunites her with her baby brother, she sees that Liam’s gone the opposite direction, becoming a creature of order and bureaucracy.

Any readers who fail to anticipate that Gwen’s reunion with Liam will ultimately result in disappointment, are probably new to paperback fantasy. The only question is what form that disappointment will take. As the stakes continue to increase, and Gwen must relearn the methods of power politics she once rejected, she finds herself willing to countenance many kinds of disappointment.

If anything, this second novel in Sover’s Fractured Fae novel is better than the first. In the prior volume, Sover experimented playfully with the conventions of the urban fantasy genre. Here, Sover throws the conventions into a blender and spreads them around ecstatically, more in love with her characters and story than her marketing niche. The result is fast-paced, breathtaking, and feels much, much shorter than it actually is.

Cat & Mouse, and 90s Movie Cheese

L.R. Jones, You Look Beautiful Tonight: a Thriller

Meek Nashville librarian Mia Anderson has the life she wants, with a decent job, comfy apartment, and narrow network of good friends. It isn’t glamorous, but it works. But her BFF, who really is glamorous, pushes Mia to join a dating app. Online, a charming civil engineer named Adam makes it his personal project to uplift Mia and unlock her hidden potential. Too bad Mia doesn’t want unlocked, because Adam is willing to kill.

L.R. Jones has purportedly written several bestselling “dark” novels, but I can’t find them; this is apparently her first under this byline. This novel feels like the big-screen thrillers Joe Eszterhas wrote in the 1980s and 1990s, with hard-bitten characters pushed into corners and forced to reveal their secrets. Jones is less libidinous than the notoriously salacious Eszterhas, but she recaptures his texture. This is both good and bad.

Someone starts tucking anonymous notes for Mia under her morning latte, and in other places that show her secret admirer is close. This gives her conflicting impulses. She knows she ought to feel “stranger danger,” but the unanticipated attention also makes her feel validated, assured that her actions matter to somebody. She starts adjusting her behavior to receive her secret admirer’s approval. Her admirer, unfortunately, misreads Mia’s intentions.

Here’s where experienced thriller readers start compiling a suspect list, and testing it against the growing weight of evidence. But Jones offers us a cornucopia of possible suspects. Mia’s two best friends have begun acting squirrely, for instance, each in their own way. Mia also has two bosses who each conform to different stereotypes of why you can’t trust management. An enigmatic stranger has begun watching Mia at work.

Then there’s Adam. Mia hasn’t actually met him yet, only interacted with him online through the dating app and social media. He begins the relationship with the pickup artist’s trick of negging her. Mia initially sees through that. But Adam responds with an eloquent spiel about how he, too, was once chronically overlooked in today’s fast-paced and deeply inauthentic society. He only wants to help her escape her self-imposed shackles.

L.R. Jones

If this seems like a confusing cast of thousands, I won’t argue. Introducing all the moving parts in Mia’s life takes forever, giving this book an extremely long first act. Only somewhere around the halfway mark does Jones quit clearing her throat and begin the thrilling part of this supposed thriller. Though in fairness, once Jones begins moving, she begins moving hard. Her villain, once introduced, plays Mia like a fiddle.

Jones provides Mia with a remarkable antagonist. The enemy claims to value Mia’s well-being, and targets villainy at whatever prevents Mia living to the fullest. But the enemy also gives conflicting cues. “I want you to assert control in your own life,” the villain tells Mia, while simultaneously literally picking Mia’s wardrobe and scripting Mia’s interactions with the various people controlling her life.

We readers with our suspect lists start getting confused. The antagonist is intimately aware of Mia’s daily activities, and provides running commentary, while remaining strangely invisible. How, we wonder, can somebody be seemingly as close as Mia’s elbow in her workplace, social activities, and home, while remaining wholly unnoticed? Don’t worry, Mia notices this too, and her trajectory moves from horror to determination to paranoia.

Remember the Joe Eszterhas comparison? I don’t make that lightly. Jones creates a multi-layered story of distrust so complete that, like Eszterhas’ most famous movies, the resolution is almost certainly disappointing. It relies on characters keeping secrets, but not the ones they’ve let us believe they’re keeping. And, I cringe to write this. It relies on conflating mental illness and trauma with moral weakness.

I’m trying not to reveal too much because, when Jones’ narrative works, it works well. Audiences who love character-driven thrillers will appreciate plenty herein. But in the final resolution (and extremely talky denouement), Jones reveals an Eszterhas-like belief that humans will inevitably repeat the mistakes of their past, unless compelled to change through violence. Jones hints at that in earlier chapters, but her resolution makes it explicit.

Again, the right audience will appreciate Jones’ story. It’s character-driven rather than shocking, and nearly all the violence occurs offscreen. The appeal isn’t violent horror, but the paranoia and self-doubt Mia experiences as she, like her audience, struggles to reconcile the conflicting evidence. But the culmination is so thoroughly unmoored from anything that came before, that I fear experienced readers will sit in disbelief and, like me, throw the book.

At War in the Kingdom of Foodies

Beth Cato, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge

Ada Garland has lived as a fugitive on the kingdom’s periphery for years, surviving by her wits and her cooking skills. She’s a Chef, a form of supernatural guardian whose capabilities combine the roles of cook, general, and priest. Officially, every Chef in the kingdom of Verdania belongs to King Caristo, but Ada’s wits have kept her free for decades—free, but alienated from her lost husband and child. Then an assassin appears in her lodgings.

Author Beth Cato is as famous on the genre convention circuit for her cooking as for her fiction and poetry. This, Cato’s sixth novel, combines her two loves. She creates a world where love of food is a gods-given gift and terrible responsibility. Cato’s writing also shows the influence of George R.R. Martin, particularly his fondness for the impersonal, violent politics of medieval Europe. And nothing provides a richer political target than a wedding.

Princess Solenn knows she doesn’t look or think like other royalty of Braiz. Only when she’s shipped to Verdania for a politically useful marriage does she discover why: she’s a Chef, an ability that supposedly only travels in one’s bloodline. Though lacking training, her innate Chef abilities uncover a plot to assassinate her callow young betrothed. Solenn doesn’t love him, but she definitely loves the peace which Prince Rupert’s assassination would disrupt.

Despite alternating between these two viewpoint characters, Cato hasn’t created a conventional character-driven novel. Both Ada and Solenn are beholden to political forces and old vendettas they might stem, but never completely prevent. Poisonings and regicides are simply extensions of the political horse-trades that make royal court life possible. Cato’s characters want simple, honest lives, but late-medieval politics refuses to let them sleep easily.

Please understand, I don’t make the GRRM comparison lightly. Like Martin, Cato creates a kingdom where magic exists, but isn’t central. Political logrolling matters more than the Chefs’ food-based wizardry. Our characters desire simple, honest lives, but court intrigues keep intruding. This doesn’t stop our viewpoint characters from describing their sensory circumstances in rich detail; Cato’s prose includes multiple lush descriptions of ingredients and the cooking process.

Beth Cato

Though a Chef’s responsibility manifests primarily through food, political exigencies define what that actually means. Ada previously commanded troops in battle, though she lost faith in the corrupt king she served, and deserted to save her soul. (Exactly how food magic translates into strategic command is left implicit.) Now somebody is clearing the ranks of Ada’s fellow disillusioned generals. Ada must apprehend her assassin’s employer before it’s too late.

It spoils nothing to say, since Cato reveals it early, that Solenn is Ada’s long-lost daughter. Though her politically expedient marriage would cement peace between Verdania and Braiz, if her actual parentage ever comes out, the political consequences will be severe. Until then, though, somebody wants to not just assassinate Prince Rupert, but frame Solenn for the crime. Solenn must survive the intrigue in order to prevent the war.

Besides the focus on politics, Cato also shares GRRM’s casual attitude toward historicity. She describes Verdania’s Bronze-age religious rituals and downright Roman attitude toward antiquities, while musketeers with rapiers and flintlock pistols struggle to keep peace within the palace. Like GRRM, Cato cares more about creating the feel of her setting’s historical parallels, than about remaining scrupulously realistic. It’s casual, but it works.

Cato’s two heroines reflect two different approaches to conspiracy and intrigue. Ada, the wanted fugitive, must actively pursue justice through Verdania’s byways, knowing that if she ever lapses in vigilance, her enemies will destroy her and her family. Solenn, by contrast, is trapped by her royal circumstances. Her greatest aspiration is to survive, which isn’t always guaranteed. She occupies a hall of enemies, and must remain forever vigilant.

This novel does require a certain dedication. Though Cato’s characters both act and are acted upon, the forces acting upon them aren’t always clear. Therefore, her storytelling involves occasional breaks where characters explain circumstances to one another, which sometimes slows the momentum. Pushing through these occasional dry breaks, however, rewards audiences with the suspense and drama they expect from similar political novels.

Ultimately, Cato shares GRRM’s interest in politics, but lacks his cynical fatalism. Her characters frequently lack control, but not agency; they aren’t prisoners to circumstance. They want what we all want: liberty and simplicity. But like us, they can’t have it, because they live in a world of humans and their dependencies. Therefore, Cato offers us the ultimate resolution: just stay alive until you find answers.

The Shallow State

Rufus Sewell (left) and Keri Russell as Hal and Kate Wyler, in The Diplomat

Previews for Netflix’s The Diplomat are edited in a rapid hip-hop style, implying a series anchored on explosions and sex, like a Tom Clancy thriller. Both of these are in relatively short supply. Instead, we get a series anchored on the machinations of the unelected bureaucrats whose presence always lingers beneath normal politics. These are the members of the “deep state” we’ve been coached to fear in recent years.

Kate Wyler, a longtime member of America’s professional diplomatic corps, has packed her bags for Afghanistan. She’s spent her career identifying and exploiting weaknesses in other nations’ political organizations; this skill has rewarded her richly, while also serving American interests. So she’s baffled when, on the eve of the departure, President Rayburn calls her into his office. The President has an alternate offer: the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom.

Start with how showrunner Debora Cahn casts Keri “Felicity” Russell as Kate Wyler. Early in her career, Russell was so thoroughly pigeonholed by her beauty that an over-hasty haircut nearly derailed her first starring role. But she’s now forty-seven, an age when Hollywood puts most women out to pasture. Cahn casts Rufus Sewell, an equally famously attractive showcase, as Kate’s husband Hal, but he’s a man. His greys are “distinguished.”

The show’s characters comment that the U.K. ambassadorship isn’t usually considered a serious diplomatic posting. Embassies in America’s NATO allies are usually plum appointments for prestigious political donors—a fact considered shocking when George H.W. Bush dispensed ambassadorships that way in 1989, but banal now. Skilled diplomats historically run things in America’s friendly embassies, but wealthy, semi-retired palm greasers get the prestigious chair.

Except things have changed. Business executives face steeply reduced pressures to retire at a certain age; Charles Koch, Sheldon Adelson, and Donald Sussman continue running their corporations well into their seventies and eighties. A two- or three-year hitch in some plush London mansion, shaking hands with King Charles, hardly seems like an appropriate career capstone anymore. Especially when, as now, international tensions remain permanently peaked.

This series contains numerous pointed references to current events. Kate Wyler is appointed ambassador by a rough-hewn but semi-progressive American President who’s terrified of being perceived as old. President Rayburn wants Kate to stage-manage America's relationship with Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge, whose folksy, off-the-cuff manner makes him popular with British voters. However, events hint that both Rayburn and Trowbridge are craftier than they appear.

David Gyasi as U.K Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison, with Keri Russell, in The Diplomat

Everything described occurs under the constant shadow of war. President Rayburn picks Kate for the British ambassadorship because somebody’s just hit a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, killing forty-one sailors. The British public is braying for blood, and PM Trowbridge’s off-the-cuff comments only make that more likely. Except that professional diplomats like Kate know the evidence doesn’t add up. The obvious suspects are, in this case, hardly obvious.

It’s impossible to overlook the direct real-world parallels. Streaming TV, with its relatively short lead times, can comment in ways that legacy scripted media can’t. While the next presidential election promises to feature two very old and broadly unpopular White men, the British public has watched three consecutive Tory PMs disintegrate rapidly, and possibly a fourth. Meanwhile, the Ukraine war drags interminably, and Putin has been indicted for war crimes.

PM Trowbridge is played by Rory Kinnear, who last appeared on Netflix in the Black Mirror premier episode. If you missed that, he played a Prime Minister who, to appease a terrorist, is compelled to fuck a pig on live national television. Though Trowbridge is a darker, angrier figure than PM Callow, surely showrunner Cahn recognized this parallel. Because Trowbridge specifically, and elected officials generally, come across as crazed pig-fuckers.

Again, online trailers spotlight explosions and sex. But after the opening scenes of episode one, the explosions are largely limited to verbal sparring and personal conflicts. This is a series about the backroom log-rolling sessions that voters never see, but which make politics happen. The characters quarrel, swap favors, and submarine one another regularly. Elected officials like Trowbridge and Rayburn are there to be managed, not to call the shots.

But if this is the feared “deep state,” it really isn’t that deep. Far from a finely tuned engine of political know-how, this show features a complex nexus of wounded egos and resentment. Other than a brief on-screen appearance by an Iranian ambassador, this entire show features American and British characters, nominally allies, who constantly play one-upmanship games and personal horse trades. The deep state is, apparently, really quite shallow.

The Search for a Modern British Messiah

Tom Moran, The Devil’s Hour

Peter Capaldi and Jessica Raine in The Devil’s Hour

Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, receives second billing in The Devil’s Hour, behind Jessica “Call the Midwife” Raine. Yet he’s remarkably absent from the first half of the series, commenting on things he’s seen, but unseen by others. We don’t even learn his character’s name for several episodes. When we do, it confuses more than it resolves: who, exactly, is Gideon Shepherd? Needless to say, the following involves spoilers.

For practical purposes, we know Gideon (he’s generally addressed by his first name, once it’s uncovered) combines aspects of Capaldi’s two most influential roles, the Doctor and Malcolm Tucker. When the show’s other male lead, DI Ravi Dhillon (Nikesh Patel), asks whether Gideon is perhaps a time traveler or a soothsayer, given his foreknowledge of events, he hedges. Because the show knows its audience already recognizes Capaldi’s face and voice.

Perhaps the solution comes in Gideon’s name. In the book of Judges, Gideon arises from the disorganized tribes of Israel when the nation has lost its collective respect for God. When the neighboring Midianites invade, Gideon alone recognizes this as God’s judgment upon the people. He musters an army and, after winning the unworthy from its ranks, challenges and defeats an overwhelming Midianite force in a Thermopylae-like underdog performance.

The specifically Biblical implications of Gideon’s name, contrasts with his superficially violent approach. As both a Judge of Israel and a shepherd, a title used by Jesus Christ, he’s implicitly declared a Judeo-Christian messiah. But like Malcolm Tucker, Gideon is violent and vulgar, turning an almost operatic language of vindictiveness on anyone who crosses him. If he’s a messiah, he certainly isn’t anybody’s Prince of Peace.

Not that he lets that stop him, protected by the certainty of deterministic destiny. The universe seems to provide him favor; cornered by DI Dhillon in Gideon’s first substantial appearance, a literal lightning bolt from above provides the protection he requires. Once he finally becomes an active participant in the story, we see him appearing to target children for psychological conditioning and torture, which he justifies with self-righteous rationales.

Peter Capaldi as Gideon Shepherd
in The Devil’s Hour

Gideon displays his Christian implications through the interstitial narration that unifies the series. As the story unfolds out of sequence, we see two tracks throughout the story. Lucy Chambers (Raine) and DI Dhillon watch their story unfold, as Dhillon tracks Gideon’s trail of destruction, and Lucy struggles with her son’s flat affect and her own seemingly psychic premonitions. In the moment, little makes sense, for them or us.

In the second track, Gideon explains the truth about everything the characters previously experienced. What seemed meaningless as it happened, turns out to possess explicit purpose. But that purpose isn’t frivolous, and it happens in the person of Gideon himself. For the religiously inclined, it’s impossible to avoid comparisons to the Gospel of Luke, wherein the resurrected Jesus, at Emmaus, explains how the whole Tanakh points ultimately to himself.

If Gideon is a messiah, though, he’s an unquestionably brutal one. What gospel does Gideon preach? He certainly follows the apocalyptic facet of Christ, who on the final day, looks into every person’s heart and judges accordingly. Unlike DI Dhillon and the police, who can only respond to crimes that have already occurred, Gideon judges people according to their hearts, and metes out responses accordingly. These responses are frequently violent.

Unlike the Doctor, Gideon has only one approach, to crush humanity’s worst inclinations. The Twelfth Doctor’s anti-war speech in the episode “The Zygon Inversion” urges Kate Stewart, as representative of humanity’s power structure, to uphold humanity’s best tendencies, to avoid war, and to resolve conflicts through our better nature. Gideon, by contrast, can only hope to stop people by hurting others, usually by hurting them first.

Only in the sixth and final episode do we discover Gideon’s motivation. His worldview is bleak and deterministic because he, uniquely among humanity, understands time’s nature as a flat circle. Gideon’s messianism directly counters his father’s Presbyterian religiosity, but it isn’t nearly as counter as he believes. Both are judgmental and believe in corrective violence. Gideon just doesn’t justify his brutality through appeals to an invisible God.

Like the Biblical Judge, Gideon Shepherd’s mission begins when the people have lost their communal faith: Gideon’s mission of retributive justice begins in approximately the middle 1960s, when British religious observance plunged dramatically. Both Gideons want to restore justice to the land. But this Gideon brings a truth that Britain’s power structures don’t want to hear, and work to quell. We know his crucifixion must be imminent.

Darkness’s Little Brother

Ania Ahlborn, Brother

Michael Morrow tries to keep his morals intact, despite the violence around him. It’s been no easy task: he grew up in a family of serial killers. But a chance encounter introduces him to Alice, a beautiful, free-spirited artist who reawakens the spark in Michael’s soul. For the first time in his short adult life, Alice gives Michael permission to dream. But are his dreams ultimately doomed, given the number of deaths in which Michael has been complicit?

Ania Ahlborn pinches a storyline familiar from slasher movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes: the rusticated hillbilly clan that torments pretty people who wander into their territory. But Ahlborn subverts the genre by telling the story from the killers’ perspective. She unpacks the morals driving some of literature’s most seemingly amoral characters. And she suggests that the monsters may not torment outsiders half as much as they torture one another.

Michael’s brother's real name is Ray, but he wants everyone to call him Rebel. Only Michael is cowed enough to do so. Rebel, along with Momma and daddy Wade, does the actual killing, but they make Michael clean the messes left behind. Even worse, they make Michael’s sister Misty Dawn watch. Through the slow torture of complicity, the Morrows leave Michael with one driving motivation: don’t let the family sickness rub off on Misty Dawn.

Rebel finds constant ways to torture Michael. For one, he ensures Michael never learns to drive, or holds an adult job, keeping him dependent on Rebel to experience the outside world. He forces Michael to shoplift the liquor Rebel uses to quiet his inner torment. Michael has adapted to Rebel’s constant petty torments to survive. Considering how the alternative is collapse, keeping his head down works pretty well.

In flashbacks, we catch glimpses of the Morrows’ life before Michael was old enough to remember. They reveal Ray’s sensitive, emotional childhood, and his devotion to another sister, Lauralynn. What happened, we’re left to wonder, that Lauralynn isn’t in the present? These flashbacks demonstrate the moral complexity beneath the family’s violence. Rebel is sadistic, but deeply lonely. Michael is sweet-hearted, but complicit.

Ania Ahlborn

Alice, the pretty bohemian record-store clerk, gives Michael his first glimpse of a world not circumscribed by murder. She’s beautiful and artistic, but bored by small-town life. Music liberates her soul, and when she loans Michael a treasured 45, he experiences the same liberty. But it comes with a price. Leaving the Morrow farm means leaving Misty Dawn, another musical spirit, at the mercy of a family that murders pure-hearted young women.

Ahlborn plays with genre convention throughout this book. Her inspiration is clearly slasher movies, so reviewing this book in movie terms is justified. Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters tells us that every character introduced by name and/or dialog serves a narrative purpose. Our role as audience is only to ascertain what that purpose is. Briefly, the answer is, more than I, an admittedly jaded reader and cinephile, anticipated.

The characters make occasional reference to God and religion; Rebel in particular compares himself to a vengeful deity. But this book is completely secular. Notwithstanding that, Ahlborn teases out themes of free will and determinism that even the characters themselves glimpse fleetingly. At what point, Ahlborn asks, does Michael stop being a victim of the Morrows’ evil, and become part of it?

This novel is packed with nuance and shadows. No moment of character or dialog is wasted. If Ahlborn's characters glimpse a daisy in passing, we’ll ultimately see someone important pushing it up. The cascade of moments accelerates until we reach a climax so fraught that, while reading it, my hands literally shook. I don’t rattle easily at mere prose, folks. The fact that this book exhausted my emotions testifies to its dense, well-constructed impact.

It’s hard not to feel for Michael. Presumably, few of us came from hillbilly murderer clans, but we all have ways we feel our families are weird. We’ve all experienced that moment we believed the right person could deliver us from that weirdness… and that moment when we absolutely believed we squandered our chance.

That’s what makes the tortures Michael faces so gut-wrenching. Because he is us, with the choices we all whiffed, and the trail of loved ones we’ve left hurting behind us. Michael’s pain is our pain. And, like Michael, we’re left with the consequences of the choices we could’ve made, but we never knew we had the choice until just too late.

Spiraling Toward Armageddon

J. Todd Scott, The Flock: A Thriller

One snowy late-fall morning in rural Colorado, three armed intruders invade Sarah Brannen’s home, shoot her husband, and kidnap her daughter. But Sarah Brannen isn’t Sarah Brannen; she’s really Sybilla “Billie” Laure, the only survivor of a Branch Davidian-style cult mass suicide. And the intruders are True Believers, convinced Billie and her daughter are the Messiah. Now Billie must travel across the country before desperate cultists literally crucify her daughter.

Former federal agent J. Todd Scott’s fifth novel reminds me of Neal Stephenson, particularly his star-making novel, Snow Crash. Like Stephenson, Scott brings together an unusual number of threads in a baroque symphony of near-future paranoia. Like Stephenson, Scott’s book runs over 400 pages of tightly paced twists and revelations. And like Stephenson, Scott cannot possibly resolve every thread he’s introduced, ensuring readers are both thrilled and ultimately confused.

Born amid an atmosphere of cultist paranoia, Billie has spent her life preparing for Apocalyptic confrontations; now her preparation pays off. She collects old debts to get the tools and weapons she needs to chase her daughter’s kidnappers. Meanwhile, small-town police chief Elise Blue, unprepared for multiple murders on her patch, draws the wrong conclusions and begins chasing Billie herself, walking straight into a trap ten years in the making.

In flashbacks, we reconstruct Billie’s childhood at the Ark of Lazarus, a cult that channels the worst of the Branch Davidians, NXIVM, and Heaven’s Gate. These similarities aren’t incidental, as Scott name-checks most of them. But a decade after the Ark died in a literal firestorm of True Belief and bureaucratic incompetence, it’s been resurrected online, accumulating new followers on Chan boards. Like QAnon, the New Lazarians are willing to die for their beliefs.

Scott’s many expository flashbacks might make this novel somewhat tough sledding for casual readers. We rediscover the Ark’s history not in sequence, but in the nonlinear form that matters most to Scott’s increasingly large ensemble. More important, the “facts” we discover in retrospect aren’t always reliable, because then and now, these characters lie. Even with a child’s life in jeopardy, they continue lying to protect their fragile self-images.

J. Todd Scott

While Billie’s front-burner narrative boils, subplots simmer in the background. Scott’s story unfolds against a background of economic stagnation, public health crisis, and environmental devastation. No wonder, Scott implies, that paranoid netizens look to the resurrection prophecies of a disgraced doomsday cult for guidance. Because it’s difficult for rational people to face a literally burning, storm-ravaged physical world that increasingly appears to have no future.

But all religion is both global and local. The New Lazarians prophesy a literal resurrection impending when Billie and her daughter are sacrificed. Believers seek a world cleansed of unrighteousness, but they also want meaning in their own lives. They seek escape from modernity irredeemably tainted by environmental rot and human sin. Peeling the onion layers of Billie’s lies, we discover, sometimes painfully, that these prophecies aren’t necessarily wrong.

Again, that’s a lot. Scott’s book, like Stephenson’s, runs over 400 pages, features a cast of thousands, and progresses out of sequence. Casual readers dipping in and out before bedtime might find Scott’s narrative impenetrable. Scott also does something many thriller novelists find distasteful: he spends time ruminating over how his massively convoluted plot traumatizes his characters. Even if his protagonists win, they can’t return to their old lives.

It bears repeating that Scott introduces so many plot elements that he cannot possibly resolve every one. Some plot elements, like a massive invasive plague, get briefly mentioned before they’re forgotten. I understand why Scott introduces so many threads, reflecting his audience’s persistent awareness of economic injustice, constant wildfires and end-of-days hurricanes, and Covid. Because today’s reality is a constant barrage of things that plan to kill you.

Perhaps, in that regard, Scott’s novel is a “thriller” because it reflects the roller coaster we’re all trapped on. Where Tom Clancy or John le Carré wrote thrillers about worst-case scenarios for the Cold War, Scott writes about the directionless world Americans find themselves trapped within today. We aren’t speeding toward nuclear conflagration anymore; like Billie, our world is just spiraling, and nobody appears to be at the controls.

Scott writes with a relentless pace that doesn’t let readers pause for breath. His chapters are short, several under one page, and nearly all end with cliffhangers or revelations so shocking, you can practically hear the soap-opera organ music. But even that feels remarkably familiar. Because under his law enforcement bluster and pacing, Scott is ultimately writing about us.

“Once Upon a Time” Could Be Right Now

Sarah J. Sover, Fairy Godmurder (Fractured Fae Book 1)

Gwendoline Evenshine worked hard to become a fairy godmother, and blew it; her very first charge was murdered on hallowed ground, in broad daylight. So she hardened her heart and rededicated her life to bringing down the killer, a serial monster nicknamed The Brain Scraper. This mysterious beast stalks the soot-streaked streets of fairyland, murdering magical beings for mysterious purposes. But the case has taken a dark turn, and Gwen suddenly finds herself the target.

Sarah Sover’s second novel isn’t groundbreaking, but don’t consider that a knock against it. Sover follows a beat-sheet beloved by popular cross-genre novelists like Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, a hybrid of traditional paperback fantasy and midcentury noir mystery. The product is a darkly playful overlap that, to Sover’s benefit, comes with a built-in audience. Veteran readers will recognize when the next plot twist or brutal betrayal is coming, without truly spoiling the surprise.

The story proceeds along two tracks. In the present, Gwen haunts the midnight streets of Korranthia, a fairy kingdom roughly corresponding with New England. Haunted by her greatest failure, Gwen paused her personal and professional life, dedicating everything to chasing that one phantom. She works as a police consultant, but only on the Brain Scraper case, using her fairy godmother skills to examine bodies for evidence that ordinary forensics can’t find. It hasn’t helped much.

In flashbacks, we get Gwen’s backstory. Fresh from the Academy, Gwen is assigned fairy godmother status over Princess Francesca (that’s “Frankie” to you), heir of Korranthia’s royal house. Frankie expects to inherit authority over the precarious balance between her fairy kingdom and the increasingly volatile United States. But she lives with a dark foreboding that she’ll never actually live to receive her inheritance. Despite her power and skill, Gwen is powerless to prevent Frankie’s doom.

This dualism gives readers a jarring view of Gwen at different life stages. The present Gwen is hard-bitten, desperate to avoid building relationships or having feelings. Because she dared to care about Princess Frankie, and her big-sisterly guidance ended horrifically. We know from Chapter One that Frankie is doomed, and watch helplessly as, like Amanda Palmer, her story plays to its inevitable conclusion. Gwen is desperate never to fail, or be that heartbroken ever again.

Sarah J. Sover

However, boring old reality persistently intrudes. Gwen can only pursue the case by remaining in the Korranthia PD’s good graces, and the fuzz cares more about maintaining order than pursuing justice. And Gwen never formally completed her magical training, meaning she still needs her old Academy connections to decipher the scanty evidence she’s collected. Thus, despite her desire for independence, she keeps falling back on the two institutions dominating young people’s lives: law and school.

Not that Gwen’s truly alone. Two allies, a griffin homicide detective and a pixie true-crime blogger, continue supporting Gwen, despite her cynical façade. And her old Academy mentor makes frequent overtures to tempt Gwen back, promising the largess of power and old-girl-network connections. Gwen, like Harry Dresden, is extremely powerful, but needs guidance to channel that power. But Gwen finds the temptations of friendship, insidership, and power threatening. Especially in fairyland, there’s farther to fall.

Sover mixes contemporary and folkloric influences in different measures at different times. The flashbacks presaging Princess Frankie’s murder, and Gwen’s fall from grace, read like a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, salted with allusions to contemporary politics and culture war issues. Sover’s “present” chapters read more like a conventional hard-boiled procedural. This duality hits harder because this is the first novel I’ve read which effectively uses the COVID-19 pandemic in its setting. Sover’s fairyland feels very real.

As an aside, Korranthia’s mythic beings come from European myth: fairies, gnomes, ogres. The characters swear by Danu, an Irish goddess. Nowhere do Native American mythic beings appear, despite the New England setting. It’s entirely the mythology of the colonizers, not the colonized. This feels like a real missed opportunity, especially in light of Sover’s use of contemporary politics in her mythological milieu. I hope she corrects this understandable but large oversight in future books.

This novel feels like the slipstream genre I read extensively ten years ago, but haven’t seen much recently. Sover uses the imagery of myth and folklore, but brings the stakes into a contemporary scope. She addresses issues that seem timely to modern readers, especially women, but narrates those issues in ways that seem sometimes almost whimsical. She doesn’t lecture or scold her readers, but like in the best literature, ultimately, the story is about us.

Miss Marple for a Darker Time

Brianna Labuskes, A Familiar Sight (Dr. Gretchen White, Book 1)

Whenever the Boston PD can’t solve a mystery, they contact Dr. Gretchen White, behavioral psychologist and amateur sleuth. Like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Dr. White, who mostly goes by “Gretchen,” asks the questions the fuzz isn’t allowed to ask. Unlike Miss Marple, Gretchen is a clinical psychopath, and may have killed someone twenty-five years ago. This means the Boston PD needs Gretchen, but they don’t trust her.

Brianna Labuskes’ sixth novel, and first series title, ties me in knots as a reviewer. It’s fast-paced, cinematic, and establishes a mind puzzle so intricate, I felt myself swept along. But Labuskes also trafficks in genre and regional clichés that drive me bananas. Repeatedly, I found myself so enrapt by Labuskes’ writing that I forgot myself and vanished into the book, then she dropped some banality so glaring, I jolted back to reality with whiplash.

Attorney Lena Booker left Gretchen an enigmatic voicemail before dying, in an apparent accidental overdose. But Gretchen refuses to believe her tightly wound friend (one of Gretchen’s few real friends) did something so careless as die accidentally. She persuades her PD handler, Detective Patrick Shaughnessy, to postpone a final ruling until she gathers every loose end. Shaughnessy agrees, provided Gretchen lets his partner, Det. Lauren Marconi, ride along.

Start right there. Labuskes names her police characters “Patrick Shaughnessy” and “Lauren Marconi,” about the most formulaically ethnic names you could give Boston characters. Shaughnessy is fat, ugly, and ill-tempered, a vintage Irish Policeman burnout character. Marconi is described as attractive, but makes herself as sexless as possible for professionalism’s sake. She reads like a Law & Order casting call notification. Major low-hanging fruit.

Gretchen zips through Boston with Marconi in tow, in her shiny, sleek Porsche, a metaphor for Gretchen’s hastily mobile mind. The late Lena Booker’s final case involved Reed Kent, a bereaved husband whose clinically psychopathic tweenage daughter stands accused of stabbing her mother, Reed’s wife, to death. But Gretchen discovers the case goes deeper. Lena, Reed, and Tess Murphy were thick as thieves twenty years ago… until Tess mysteriously vanished overnight.

Thus, Gretchen and Marconi vanish down a rabbit hole of overlapping mysteries. Solving Lena’s death means solving Claire Kent’s murder, which requires solving Tess Murphy’s disappearance. These difficult cases get compounded when Tess’s brother, a Congressman running for reelection, and Reed’s sister, a nurse specializing in troubled youth, both stonewall the investigation. Seems everyone has something to hide, including Lena, whose secrets remain locked even in death.

Brianna Labuskes

If this sounds Byzantine, don’t feel intimidated. Labuskes spins these cantilevered mysteries out through short, mostly dialog-driven scenes, where characters lie or disclose, slinging accusations at others or defending themselves. Labuskes, and her viewpoint characters, don’t indulge in philosophical maundering or long soliloquies. Gretchen, holder of multiple advanced degrees, sometimes pauses to explain complex concepts, but she always keeps it short.

Sometimes in reviews, I contrast “fully realized characters” with “authorial sock puppets.” By this I mean characters who have complex, nuanced motivations, versus those who do what the author’s outline requires. Reading Labuskes, I realize this is false. All characters, no matter how refined, exist entirely in the author’s head. Labuskes lets her characters feel as realized as she requires, while signposting that this is a story, a human-made contrivance, written by a person.

This comes across most directly in alternating chapters. In odd-numbered chapters, we see the present investigation unfold through Gretchen’s detached, analytical eyes. As both a psychologist and a psychopath, two groups famous for reading people, Gretchen spots lies and small details. Indeed, she sometimes comes across as a mind-reader. Because she is, indeed, the author’s narrative device, and someone needs to explain her finer points in plain English.

In even-numbered chapters, Reed Kent’s backstory unfolds in reverse. We watch him gradually realize he’s an unreliable narrator in his own life, possibly even a villain, whose stunted emotions drive people away. Thing is, as two mysteries unravel in Gretchen’s chapters, they become more constrictive in Reed’s. He knows the truth about Claire’s murder, and Tess Murphy’s disappearance, but he can’t tell us, because he can’t admit it to himself.

How you receive Labuskes’ story depends on the expectations you bring into the reading. Like a Hollywood thriller, she presents a tightly constructed, fast-moving narrative, where every character and action proves ultimately relevant. Like an Agatha Christie mystery, this story is remarkably bloodless and sexless (occasional vulgarity). Yet it’s also complex, even if the psychology is underdeveloped. It’s a new take on the time-honored thriller form.

David Tennant in: Cash-and-Carry Justice!

Dean Devlin (director), Bad Samaritan

Feckless young stoner Sean Falco (Robert Sheehan) parks cars outside an upscale Portland, Oregon, restaurant. But that’s a side gig: once customers trust them with their keys, he burglarizes their homes while they’re dining. He’s gotten good, too, at selecting subtle loot that nobody misses. Until the day slick, upscale Cale Erendreich (David Tennant) gives Sean his keys, and Sean discovers a battered girl chained in Cale’s home office.

Only Dean Devlin’s second directorial outing, Bad Samaritan opened to lukewarm reviews and dismal receipts. Those who saw it, gave it somewhat warm, but not overwhelming, reviews; but not many people saw it. This isn’t entirely unfair, given its straight-to-DVD characteristics: much action is squarely centered and unsubtle, like the director expected audiences to watch with one eye, while cooking dinner. This isn’t cinema as high literature.

But within that limit, it nevertheless makes an interesting commentary on American justice and unequal economics. Cale Erendreich has everything Americans have learned to expect from prosperity, including a glamorous house, numerous girlfriends, and virtual impunity. He also tortures and kills women. Sean Falco is poor, strung-out, and a petty criminal, but as the only witness to Cale’s depravity, he’s desperate to be perceived as honest.

Sean attempts to report Cale’s crimes to Portland PD, twice. And twice, the fuzz disbelieves him. One detective even sits at Cale’s kitchen island, drinking coffee and chatting amiably, while Cale lies like a rug. Worse, returning to the station, the detective threatens Sean, based on his prior history for broken-windows offenses. Apparently, Sean’s vandalism arrests and other petty convictions rank worse than Cale’s disdain for humanity.

Women everywhere can probably sympathize.

Once Cale recognizes Sean’s intrusion into his carefully controlled world, he organizes ways to control and dominate Sean. He gets Sean’s parents fired from their honest, blue-collar jobs, demolishes Sean’s relationship with his out-of-his-league girlfriend, and destroys Sean’s half-restored vintage car. Piece by piece, he dismantles Sean’s life, leaving him alone and defenseless against a city that doesn’t care.

Here’s where this movie earns some of its harsh criticism. Cale’s deconstruction of Sean’s life follows, almost note-for-note, the pattern described in Blake Snyder’s screenwriting guide, Save the Cat!. Though Sheehan, Tennant, and a sterling supporting cast of inordinately good-looking performers give their all, and Tennant maintains a remarkably good American accent, we quickly realize, the story is beholden to a beat sheet. The characters are simply carried along.

David Tennant sadistically enjoys toying with his prey in Bad Samaritan

However, in parallel to this beat-sheet story format, one character stands out. Character actor Tracey Heggins, as a young FBI agent eager to break her first case, chooses to ignore her superior officers’ advice and take Sean’s accusations seriously. She admits his story doesn’t sound altogether plausible, but it at least remains consistent, which sets him above the run-of-the-mill crank. She doesn’t necessarily believe Sean, but takes him seriously.

Desperate to protect his loved ones, Sean pursues Cale using any tools available. He believes the entire law-enforcement establishment opposes him, and knows both the law, and criminals far more skillful than him, will demolish him should he falter. That doesn’t matter; he only knows there’s a helpless girl, a family who doesn’t understand, and somebody who takes pleasure in others’ suffering. He only wants to put things right.

Cale openly boasts that his money makes him immune to consequences. Throughout most of this movie, that’s true. I cannot help comparing this movie to another socially motivated horror thriller, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, in that it foregrounds a White villain whose wealth distorts the value of justice. Where Peele makes his story about race, Devlin makes his about wealth. The difference probably doesn’t matter much to the desperate protagonists.

Audiences can probably perceive this movie one of two ways. The cat-and-mouse suspense narrative definitely leaves something to be desired. As stated, it follows the beat sheet included in a mass-market screenwriting guide. Tennant, as Cale, comes across as a poor man’s Hannibal Lecter. Sean is no Clarice. It’s not boring, but it does play by the numbers, reaching through standard confrontations, toward a conclusion we feel is probably inevitable.

Simultaneously, the movie makes clear comments on whom the law actually serves. At multiple points, it reminds us how police obey when rich people call, yet reflexively consider the poor untrustworthy. We watch Sean desperately telling the truth, while the “justice system” sweeps real, substantive crimes under the rug. As a thriller, this movie is okay, but not groundbreaking. As social commentary, it has something to say about cash-and-carry justice.