The Mars Run by Chris Gerrib

When I got some distance into The Mars Run, I realised I was reading something that belonged to that rare sub-genre known as “mundane science fiction.” If you think that’s me putting it down, you would be wrong. Let me educate you. Mundane SF is a tricky beast to write, and something that I, as an author, have not attempted. Mundane SF is all about what’s really likely. You are not allowed to feature time-travel, interstellar space travel, teleportation; even aliens are frowned upon. Mundane SF takes what technology we already have and theorises realistically about what seems genuinely possible in the future. Doesn’t that make for rather dull sci-fi? Depends on what you’re looking for in a story. For me, I like to sink my teeth into a good human drama. That’s what The Mars Run is. If anything, I found the mundane SF aspects of the novel fascinating. When Gerrib tells me about a spacecraft that has a spinning central section creating an area of the ship with artificial gravity, it excites the scientist in me, in a way that the phrase “Kirk to transporter room” won’t.

The novel is set in the 2070s, told in the first person by Janet Pilgrim, a young astronaut in her late teens. In order to raise money for college, Janet agrees to become a crew member on a cargo haul from Earth to Mars, a vocation no more exciting than a present-day truck driver. A mining colony has been established on Mars, and there is regular traffic between the red and blue planets. There is also the danger of pirates; outer space is the new ocean. Janet’s ship gets attacked and the whole crew murdered - except her. Janet is given the opportunity to join the pirate crew. It’s that, or death. From there on, the trip to Mars turns out to be much more dangerous and difficult that she ever expected.

On the author’s website, Gerrib writes, “Warning - explicit sex and language!” I’m a Christian, so you know right off the bat that I’m going to be tolerating rather than appreciating those two things. In actuality, the sex is not very explicit at all. It’s almost written as summary. Which is no bad thing, considering that there’s a lot of raping going on - or at least something very close to rape, as Janet spends a good portion of the novel forced to play the role of sex slave, and using her feminine wiles to get the upper hand. The exception is a consensual and rather pointless lesbian relationship. I can imagine what a movie of the novel would be like (Kleenex to the ready) but as a book, with Gerrib holding back on the eroticism, the lesbian relationship seems superfluous and is ultimately swallowed up by the larger story.

The Mars Run is a self-published novel. Gerrib’s writing style is clear and streamlined, respecting the reader’s intelligence. When Gerrib writes about an astronaut placing his helmet against a closed door in a vaccuum, he expects the reader to figure out on his own that this is a little trick you can play to hear what’s going on inside the room. Too many author write timidly and slow their work down with pointless qualifications. Not Gerrib. I spotted some grammar and punctuation errors, but not a lot. It wouldn’t take a great deal of work to lick this into truly professional shape.

The novel is a character drama, and on the characters it succeeds. Everyone was well defined, their actions believable, and the reader really feels for Janet’s plight. The only part of the story that I disliked was an overly long section near the end where Janet seems to be carried along by events over which she has no control, and everyone around her is merely talking politics. Thankfully, this section is not characteristic of the story as a whole.

This was an enjoyable read, and one I’ll remember. Reminded me of Robert Holdstock’s space trader novella Elite: The Dark Wheel. I had qualms about some of Janet Pilgrim’s moral decisions in the story, but the ending was surprisingly refreshing on that score.

Brother Odd by Dean Koontz

This is the third book in the Odd Thomas series. To recap, Odd is a young man with the ability to see the spirits of the dead who have declined, for one reason or another, to move on. He also sees shadow-like creatures called “bodachs.” Their arrival is always the sign that a major calamity is about to befall the area - something that will result in numerous deaths. In the past, the presence of the bodachs has given Odd enough of a heads-up to prevent major tragedy unfolding. Odd’s third ability is what he calls “psychic magnetism,” the ability to intuitively track down a person just by thinking about them.

At the close of the previous book, Forever Odd, the responsibility that Odd’s unique talents demand of him has become too much to bear, and he seeks solace away from civilisation (and the needy dead) in a monastery, not as a monk but as a long-term visitor. The place is St. Batholomew’s, located in remote mountains. At the beginning of Brother Odd, Odd has been there for quite some time, and has already built up good relationships with most of the brothers and sisters. It’s winter and Odd is watching the snow fall outside the window. It’s not something he ever sees in the hot and humid town of Pico Mundo, where he has always lived. As he watches, a lone bodach slinks towards the building - a harbinger of doom. The snow soon becomes a blizzard, and the monastery is sealed off from the world.

One of the brothers goes missing, but that’s not enough to justify the presence of bodachs. Odd plays detective for a while, trying to find out what possible calamities might unfold in a place like this. One suspect is a scientist with a strange laboratory deep underground, accessible only by an electronic palm scanner. The recent suicide of one of the brothers also needs investigating. But before Odd gets very far, something truly bizarre attacks him in the snow. He doesn’t get a good look at it, but from what he does see, it’s the strangest assailant this reviewer has heard described. Strange enough that I had to keep reading.

I liked the characters in this novel, particularly the brothers and sisters. The dullness of their clothing was certainly not reflected in their personalities. It’s clear also that Koontz has a great respect for Christianity and Christian ideals, so much so that I find myself wondering if he is one himself. Occasionally, Koontz comes out with insightful comments about life that are gems to read. I wish I had bookmarked a few of them for you. They’re hard to find now, unfortunately, because they don’t characterise the book; they’re just tidbits. It’s on this issue that I have problems with Koontz. Occasionally, Koontz will say something that reveals him to be a writer of great depth, but he never seems to choose to write a story with genuine worth. Instead, he writes typical supernatural thrillers that meander down common plot-lines, injecting into them the occasional nugget of brilliance. Koontz is super-productive, writing one or two novels per year. He’s bound to be so rich now that he doesn’t need to write so often. Sometimes I wish he would just stop and carefully examine the merit of every idea he gets, because I think he often chooses to write sub-standard ones simply because they’re there in his head.

Still, I enjoyed Brother Odd. I think it’s better than Forever Odd, but not quite as good as Odd Thomas. I was in the library last weekend and I spotted a fresh new copy of his latest novel, The Darkest Evening of the Year, but I just couldn’t bring myself to borrow it. I may read the new novel one day, but not right now. To be fair, it’s more the feeling you get when you’ve eaten too much cake (and I have read four Koontz novels in the past year), rather than the feeling you might get if someone put a plate full of doggy-doo in front of you. To draw the analogy out further, cake might taste sweet, but there’s not much nutritional value; I’d like to see Koontz cook me a proper meal, and I’m confident he could, if he put his mind to it.

The Walking Dead #2: Miles Behind Us by Robert Kirkman

Another enjoyable volume in The Walking Dead saga, although not quite on par with the first one. For me, there was far too much dialogue. Some frames had speech bubbles that were overloaded, the characters constantly pausing to express their feelings about life in the wake of the apocalypse. I get that the author wants to tell a story with emotion as well as action, but there’s such a thing as overkill. And frankly, we’ve heard it all before, and more succinctly, in George Romero’s movies.

Although The Walking Dead was first published in serialized comic form, there are definite story arcs that fit tidily into the graphic novel format. Volume 2 tells the tale of the survivors in their camper van hooking up with a small farming family, only to discover that the father has gone a bit batty. Chaos ensues. The thrust of the story covers similar ground to themes already expressed in Night of the Living Dead (being unwilling to kill your zombified loved ones) and Dawn of the Dead (storing the undead instead of killing theme). Although entertaining, it all felt a bit like filler material between volumes 1 and 3. Although I’ve never read 3, I think I can say this because 2 ends on a note of promise that leaves you wanting more.

Anne Droyd and Century Lodge by Will Hadcroft

Three children, Gezz, Luke and Malcolm, are playing on some waste ground close to where they live, when they bear witness to the arrival of an old man and a startling young girl. The man is Professor Wolfgang Droyd and the girl is Anne Droyd - not his daughter, but his android creation, capable of great feats of agility, speed and ingenuity. The two are on the run from the facility where Anne Droyd was developed: The Ministry. The children are initially frightened by the duo, but it soon becomes clear that the two escapees need their help. Soon, the professor is recaptured, and it falls to the three children to take care of Anne in his absense. Whilst Anne is in many ways superhuman, she is sub-human in terms of her emotions and experience. Gezz, Luke and Malcolm arrange for Anne to attend their school, to help her learn how to be human.

On the surface, the novel is a fairly straightforward children’s story, in a similar vein to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five adventures. But there’s also something going on underneath: a look at the human race from the quirky perspective of a non-human. For instance, if someone said to Anne, “Go back,” she might start walking backwards. Misunderstandings are part of the fun of the story, but this is also a theme close to the author’s heart. Will Hadcroft has felt a bit like an alien all his life, suffering a mild form of Asperger Syndrome. I’ve already read Will’s autobiography, The Feeling’s Unmutual (I thoroughly recommend it), and I recognised immediately that some scenes in Anne Droyd were straight out of his past experiences, for instance, his childhood fascination with smokers and a particularly bad bullying incident. The novel is currently marketed as an “Asperger Adventure,” designed to give affected readers a protagonist that they can really empathise with. Note: the novel’s first publication was not aimed at such a restricted target audience; I don’t want to convey the idea that it’s not aimed at all children, when it is.

I sense a three-act structure to the novel. First, the story charts Gezz, Luke and Malcolm’s experiences of getting to know Anne, followed by Anne’s impact on life at school, and finally a showdown with the bad guys from The Ministry. When reading, I couldn’t help thinking about those multi-part dramas that I used to see on Children’s BBC when I was a kid - often adaptations of novels. Anne Droyd and Century Lodge would make a pretty good one.

The novel is not without a few problems. I felt the pacing was rather slow; some of the more mundane and domestic scenes in the novel were over-developed and took up too much reading time. Sometimes, characters made incredulous decisions, like the police apprehending Professor Droyd at Gezz’s house, then failing to search the property for Anne just because the professor told them she wasn’t there. Kids won’t care about that, of course, but this kind of faux pas does hinder the novel from being appreciated beyond its target audience. Quibbles aside, the author demonstrates a good writing ability that shows a lot of promise. I have to confess, also, that I’m reading well outside my preferred genres on this one. Any children’s literature I do read tends to be the more gritty “young adult” stuff. I think kids will enjoy Anne Droyd.

A sequel, Anne Droyd and the House of Shadows, is due to be published in 2008. Keep up to date with news on the author’s blog.

North of Sunset by Henry Baum

There’s a new serial killer with an unusual MO stalking Hollywood: no one with a personalised number plate on his car is safe. The psychopath’s name is Curt Knudsen and he’s known to the public as the Vanity Plate Killer. His name is no secret to the reader, because this is no mystery story. Author Henry Baum likes to take you right inside the head of your killer, putting his life and his motivations in full view. But this is not only the tale of a serial killer. It’s a shifting-perspective novel that lets you see the thoughts and feelings of several very different and flawed individuals: a detective, a paparazzi photographer, a producer, and principally, top Hollywood actor Michael Sennet. Michael and the killer become inextricably linked, due to an unfortunate incident. A paparazzi photographer captures Michael’s infidelity on camera and tries to bribe the actor. Michael, in a fit of rage, clobbers the photographer to death. To cover his tracks, he dresses the scene to make it look as if the Vanity Plate Killer commited the crime. But Curt Knudsen isn’t too happy about having his image tarnished by a copycat. However, if you think the rest of the novel is about Curt out for Michael’s blood, think again. There are far more complex issues going on in the killer’s head. The story also has an amusing and insightful satirical side, poking fun at our tendency to become starstruck when encountering celebrities - celebrities who may well be immoral behind all the glitz and glam.

North of Sunset is very well written. The style is snappy and polished, a rare find in a self-published novel. The author also pulls off two very tricky things of note. The first is his decision to write a story about bad people. When you learn about how to tell a story effectively, they tell you to make the reader sympathise with the protagonist(s). Well, there’s not much to sympathise with here. Even the characters who aren’t killers are still wrapped up in their materialism, greed and adultery. And yet the novel remains a page-turner. Secondly, the author indulges in talking us through a lot of each character’s backstory. It’s usually better to reveal a character’s nature through his present actions in the story rather than communicating it through lengthy passages of exposition about the character’s past. And yet there’s no denying that Henry Baum is able to do just that and make it all very interesting. The author is involved in the Hollywood movie industry and rubs shoulders with the sort of people he’s writing about. The writing definitely carries an air of realism. As an author myself, but with a different background, I know I couldn’t handle the same material as Baum.

The only disappointment I found in the novel (and this is purely personal) is that I rather liked old Detective Harry Stein. He was the one character with a bit of moral backbone, and he seemed a little underused in the story. I would have liked to have seen him get a bigger slice of the action.

Nevertheless, North of Sunset is a very good thiller, both insightful and inventive. A worthy read for those who like crime fiction.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

A man called Moss is out hunting deer in the outback when, through his binoculars, he spots of two parked SUVs and what looks like several bodies scattered on the ground. Further investigation yields a trunkload of heroin and over two million dollars in cash. With everyone dead, Moss decides to take the money and run. But before he can get away properly, his own truck is spotted by some bad men who have arrived - clearly to see what went wrong with the trade. Moss’s licence plate is now known to them, and he’s smart enough to realise that come Monday morning, when the court house opens, it’ll be a small step for these men to find out all about him. He’s already taken the money, so there’s no going back … and it has cost him his identity. Moss now has to go on the run, with two different sets of bad guys and the police trying to track him town. But the worst threat comes from one other man, Chigurh, a psychopath with an agenda all his own.

No Country for Old Men starts strong and has all the makings of a fantastic thriller. In fact, it is a fantastic thriller, for about two thirds of its length. It’s fast-paced, engaging, and inventive. McCarthy demonstrates a particular skill at dialogue; I was riveted by many of the conversations that took place in the novel. But something goes wrong in the latter part of the novel. It starts when the reader begins a chapter to find that one of the principal characters has been murdered off-stage. The effect is so jarring that I had to flip back to make sure I hadn’t skipped a chapter. Other characters are simply talking about the death, and the reader is left to put two and two together. I understand that a writer is free to pull a stunt like this for “special effect” purposes, but here it simply broke the flow of the story; what had been, up to this point, linear and straightforward, became like a jumping record. Towards the end, the novel is written almost in a flash fiction style. In one paragraph, the sheriff asks the location of someone, and in the next, he’s addressing the person he was looking for, suddenly transported, as if by teleport, without so much as a scene division. In the latter part of the novel, McCarthy seems preoccupied with making a point about American culture and is prepared to put the “thriller” side of the story firmly in second place, to the detriment of the novel as a whole.

The message that McCarthy injects into the novel is that the moral fibre of America has gotten progressively worse and worse and is now beyond the point of recovery. Depressing stuff. I don’t live in the USA, but I have a much more positive outlook on humanity than that. Since I couldn’t appreciate McCarthy’s subtext, there was nothing I could do but judge the novel on its entertainment value. And I just wish McCarthy had plotted the final stretch of the story better, instead of leaving us high and dry, because the novel had so much going for it.

When I read McCarthy’s The Road (one of my favourite reads of 2007), I thought that his oddball punctuation wouldn’t work in a novel that had lots of characters and varied situations. But it turns out that No Country for Old Men is written in just the same style. And it still works, up to a point. The same problems arise that are present in The Road.

To sum up: No Country for Old Men is an excellent read, with some disappointing flaws.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road charts the journey of a nameless man and a nameless boy south through a post-apocalyptic America. They have nothing but each other and a cart of supplies. There is little food available. Nothing grows any more. The trees are leafless and ash covers the ground. The story is set years after some devastating event that turned the country into a charred ruin, presumably a nuclear war. The two protagonists are journeying south to escape the cold of the approaching winter, doing their best to avoid encounters with any “bad guys” (as the man calls them when speaking to the boy). In a world with nothing but canned food in ever diminishing supply, it’s not surprising that some might turn to cannibalism. The names of characters are never mentioned, I would guess, because in a world with so few people, names become meaningless. Likewise the names of the roads on which they travel have ceased to have meaning; there is only The Road.

You could be forgiven for skipping this novel on account of the bleak storyline. But nothing could be further from the truth. The novel shows the reader a world where on the surface of things there is nothing to live for - where you would either kill yourself or long for death. But the man’s entire life is transformed by the simple fact that he must take care of the boy. This is a story about where true meaning in life resides, when you strip away all the comforts and distractions of our lives: in the love one person has for another human being. It’s such a simple story: a long journey interspersed with occasional dramatic encounters. But it’s an absolute page-turner, because it’s meaningful, realistic, uncompromising.

The fact that it’s hard to put down may also have something to do with the strange style in which the book is written. There are no chapter divisions at all, but a great many scene divisions throughout the book. Many scenes consists of only two or three paragraphs. Rarely do they exceed two pages. This brevity, oddly enough, works quite well, and has the effect of making the reader think “Just a bit more before a put it down.” Then, before you know it, you’ve read another twenty pages.

The author has decided to rewrite the rules of English grammar and punctuation for himself. If McCarthy were a self-published author, I would be balking at such arrogance. But since he’s an accomplished author, and since I enjoyed the novel so much, I’m forced to pause and examine the matter closely. I always read with a critical eye, so here’s a list of all the things I saw McCarthy doing a little differently:

• There are no quotation marks. Speech is rendered indistinguishable from narration, like this: Let’s go, he said. All things considered, it was fairly easy to distinguish the two.
• Commas are in short supply. This decision did cause me a bit of grief. Occasionally I got mixed up in the meaning of a sentence and had to re-read it.
• Several clauses in a sentence are often joined with multiple “and”s, in a manner that seems quite childlike, which is bizarre because McCarthy demonstrates a rich vocabulary that puts me to shame.
• There are no italics. Fair enough; not exactly a necessity.
• Apostrophes are removed from words like “can’t,” but are retained for words like “he’d.” McCarthy seems to have decided that when two words are joined together (”he had”), you keep the apostrophe, but when one one (”not”) is concatenated (”nt), you remove it. Struck me as an unnecessary amendment to the English language.
• Hyphenated words are usually rendered without the hyphen.
• “He” does not usually refer to the last mentioned subject, but to the man, as opposed to the boy, regardless of whether the boy was last mentioned.

Taking all of the above into consideration, I get the feeling that perhaps the author is attempting to convey a style similar to oral storytelling; you can’t speak a quotation mark, so why write one? The idea has some merit, and I’m actually curious about attempting to write something in a similar style. I appreciated some of McCarthy’s changes, but others irritated me and made the prose awkward to read. There was also a limited degree of sloppy inconsistency going on. More than once, I spotted a sentence like Come on he said, where McCarthy left out a comma in a circumstance where he always used one. Also, about halfway through the story, in a the middle of a paragraph, I encountered a nonsensical sentence that began with a small letter. It was as if someone had accidentally highlighted the first half of a sentence and deleted it by accident. Don’t publishers proof-read their books before publication? Shame on you, Picador.

Enough criticism. I’m overlooking McCarthy’s oddball English, because this is an excellent novel. Thoroughly recommended.

Antarktos Rising by Jeremy Robinson

I’ve had my eye on Jeremy Robinson for a while. He’s a self-published author running his own publishing imprint (Breakneck Books), and he’s one who seems to be going places. After spotting a couple of glowing reviews on some blogs, I had to get hold of this.

I love the concept Robinson came up with. America inexplicably freezes, while Russia boils, and Antarctica thaws. The earth’s crust has tilted forty degrees on its axis. All the earth’s nations are now in ruins, with billions dead. As humanity picks itself up from the apocalypse, the remaining governments seek to claim Antarctica (later named Antarktos) as their new home. Rather than descending into war, all the nations agree to a participate in a race. The first three to reach the centre of Antarktos will divide the continent into three equal sections. The losing nations will have to make do with the harsh conditons of their present homeland.

After only two months of mild weather conditions, Antarktos has mysteriously transformed into a lush paradise. Trees and plants have grown at an alarming rate. The thaw also reveals Antarktos to have been inhabited in the distant past, eons ago when it wasn’t covered in ice. Worse still, the thaw has released Antarktos’s wildlife from a state of cryonic suspension. The race teams not only have to outwit and outrun each other (with talented assassins and Arab terrorists in the mix), but they must also face dangerous dinosaurs and do battle with a more intelligent enemy - mentioned briefly in the Bible: giants, known as the Nephilim, recorded in Genesis chapter 6.

From the beginning, the story is divided up into several sub-plots. We follow Dr. Merrill Clark, Antarctic explorer, as he experiences the changes on the continent first-hand. We follow Mira Whitney, in the USA, who must escape an incoming tsunami followed by a rapid freeze. We see right inside the lives of Arab terrorists, intent on sabotaging the American race team. And there are Russians and Chinese sub-plots, too. All the jumping around from place to place does unfortunately have a negative affect on the story’s pacing, but it did help maintain the sense of epic promised in the story’s premise. Occasionally, I got impatent, eager for the race to get moving and the real adventure to start.

The first point where the story faltered a little for me was when Dr. Clark emerged from a naturally dry valley in Antarctica and discovered that all the ice had gone, leaving only soil and rock. The temperature had risen, then the ice had melted and presumably flowed out to sea. But I had to ask myself: why didn’t the water flow into the valley and drown Dr. Clark? A valley, by definition, is lower than the surrounding land. No matter how I tried to think about it, I couldn’t conceive of how one man could survive the “birth pains” of the new continent. I put this plot-hole aside, hoping it would be the only one. Sadly, a little later we see Whitney in the USA hiding from men with guns by pretending to be dead. However, she’s in sub-zero temperatures. The author seemed to forget that the very act of breathing would betray her, as her warm breaths hit the frigid air. Maybe I’m nit-picking, but it bugged me, because I thought it should have been so obvious. To be fair, though, the novel wasn’t littered with these inconsistencies.

The author makes a reasonable attempt to add a more intimate and personal side to the story. The lives of the principle characters are fleshed out. We even see the terrorists’ motives from inside their own heads. But none of it rings true enough for me. The characters were just too straightforward and uncomplicated, their actions occasionally spoiled by melodrama. The novel just lacks a necessary richness in the area of characterisation. And that’s a great pity, because that’s one of the main things I’m after, as a reader. If the characters don’t come alive in my imagination, even the most original and action-packed story will fail for me.

Antarktos Rising is essentially a cross-genre novel. Nothing wrong with that, in principal; genre definitions are merely labels to determine where a book should be placed in a store. Antarktos Rising starts out as a thriller with sci-fi leanings, but by the end it’s in full-fledged fantasy territory. Robinson starts off by appealing to those who like their fiction grounded in something close to reality; he goes to great pains to inject some science into his theory of the earth’s crust shifting. But at the end, we have winged beasts and magical healing powers. Those who where expecting a scientific explanation for the accelerated growth of Antarktos will be disappointed to discover that it boils down to an explanation more at home in a Tolkien-esque fantasy. All I’m saying is, you have to like both genres. You have to be able to handle the massive suspension of disbelief that is part-and-parcel of any fantasy novel right alongside scientific thrillers, which typically thrive on rationality. This strikes me as a hard sell, and it didn’t quite work for me.

It’s more than just thriller plus fantasy. There’s a religious side to the story. I have no problem with that, in principle, and I think it’s good that a writer injects his own beliefs into his fiction. That’s writing from the heart, after all. However, there was something strange about reading two characters debate about the historicity of the Biblical Flood inside a novel that was already steeped in so much fantasy. If you want to convince a reader that the events of the Bible really happened, you’re going to need to place your argument in a more reliable context. As a Christian myself, I felt Robinson went a little too far when he suggested that the Flood was not God punishing mankind for its wickedness (as stated in the Bible), but God wiping out a race of demon-human hybrids that had mixed with man’s bloodline. The Flood, he suggests, was a means of restoring humanity back to a pure bloodline. I’m shocked that a Christian author would dare to mix fantasy with reality and be so bold as to misrepresent the will of God.

I hate having to voice all these criticisms, because I really wanted to love this book. In fairness, there were some really atmospheric scenes. The short chapters, many of which ended in cliff-hangers, kept the pages turning. Robinson, as a self-published author, is one of the minority who are doing self-publishing the right way - taking time to shine their prose up so that it sparkles. Robinsons’s grammar, punctuation and style are almost indistinguishable from a professional novelist’s. I think, however, that the story could have benefitted greatly by being submitted to some hardcore critiques prior to publication. The plot-holes alone make me suspect that Robinson is running a one-man show. Every writer needs his advisers.

Overall, this is a story that attempts to be great and succeeds in being good. It’s clear that the author is working to the best of his ability and aiming for the top, which is something I can respect. And I hope that Jeremy Robinson continues to hone his craft with future novels. It struck me that fans of Jules Verne in particular may appreciate this novel.

Ultraviolet by Lesley Howarth

Any story that’s classed as post-apocalyptic will be get me interested. But if you really want to fascinate me, show me a post-apocalyptic world that is bizarre. And that’s just what attracted me to this young adult novel. Ultraviolet (not to be confused with the movie starring Milla Jovovich) is set in a near-future world where something has happened to the earth’s atmosphere causing the sun’s rays to be super-harmful for several months of the year. People are no longer permitted to go outdoors. Those who sneak out at their own risk are called “Leakers.” Homes are all connected by above-ground tunnels made of a protective plastic called BluScreen. BluScreen is more than just a covering; it allows the sun to penetrate in a non-harmful way, allowing gardens and such to grow underneath. BluScreen, unfortunately, is an extremely expensive material to purchase. Aside from the tunnels, only the rich can purchase the material for their own use.

The protagonist of the novel is Violet Niles, a gutsy teenager with attitude, daughter of a famous scientist responsible for the invention of BluScreen. When Violet learns that the lives of everyone could be transformed, if not for the greed of the powerful BluShield corportation, she decides to do something about it. It was hard to see where this novel was going until about halfway through, as the author indulged in a lot of world-building, rather than plot advancement. Normally, that would bore me, but I found Howarth’s world to be different and fascinating enough to sustain my interest until the real meat of the story came into play. As for characters, Violet Niles was wonderfully drawn - quite different from typical protagonists.

A note on the author’s style. One of the most common mistakes I find authors making is “the timid writer syndrome.” That’s where the author is afraid that the reader won’t understand him, so he throws in unnecessary extra words just to make sure. Oddly, this is the first book I’ve read where the author errs in the opposite direction. Howarth is a snappy writer, using an economy of words that is often skilful, but occasionally a bit irritating. Let’s say eighty percent of the time I admired the style of the book.

The novel also has a bit of a subtext. Howarth highlights the lack of freedom that young people today enjoy, as opposed to the author’s own childhood. Enforced indoor life and the inevitable obsession with videogames comes under the spotlight.

The ending was somewhat anticlimactic. Whilst I didn’t see it coming, it turned out to be a bit of a cliche. Nevertheless, as a whole, I had a good time with this novel and I consider it a worthwhile read.

L.A. Stalker by David Kilpatrick

The protagonist of the novel is Los Angeles police detective Jerry Leger, and he’s working on the case of Pandora Collins, sexy superstar actress. Pandora’s problem is that she has a stalker. It has been going on a long time, but lately the stalker’s advances have been getting more dangeous and sick. Worse still, not long ago, another actress who was the target of a stalker turned up dead. When the police fail to apprehend Pandora’s stalker, she decides to take matters into her own hands. She hires a contract killer. Everything goes smoothly until a misunderstanding about payment turns the assassin against Pandora. And, as the novel’s blurb puts it so well: “Pandora soon learns that the cure she called upon is worse than the disease.”

This novel grabs your attention even before page one, with a striking and touching dedication:

This book is dedicated to that small army of underpaid, overworked and forgotten people who wage a near-silent war against sexual predators. Your dedication and humanity may not always be recognized, and the good you do cannot be measured. Your success is measured in the things that never happen; the things you prevent from happening. Your reward can be seen in the joyous faces of those would-be victims who never have to face the horror and heartache of sexual predation, and in the normal lives of those victims you’ve led to recovery.

It comes as no surprise to me that the novel is very well written, as I’ve already read and enjoyed the author’s Undercover White Trash. David Kilpatrick belongs to that tiny group of self-published authors who care deeply about the quality of their work. Usually, in self-published books, grammar and punctuation errors are leaping out at me on every page. They were pretty hard to find in L.A. Stalker.

The novel contains material that some readers may find offensive: scenes of violence and sexuality (and both of those together). But the book was written in such a way that I never once felt the author was being gratuitous - just bravely honest - even when writing about rape and child molestation. One very daring scene for the author was a flashback of Pandora being molested by her father when she was about twelve. What Kilpatrick drew attention to was the idea of a child’s tolerance and acceptance of a father’s long-term abuse - something that is as true and tragic as the more horrific forms of abuse that tend to claim the spotlight. The violence of the story is complemented by an undercurrent of tenderness, brought about by detective Jerry Leger falling in love with Pandora.

I wasn’t offended at all by the sex and violence, but there was something else that bugged me - something you only detect if you read between the lines: the morality of ending. It’s difficult to talk about that without spoilers. Suffice it to say, taking into account eveything that was at stake coming up to the end, I didn’t like the author’s resolution to the story. It had the bitterness of a fall from grace, only it was written as the opposite.

Regardless, I think L.A. Stalker is a great thriller, populated by believable characters about whom the author skilfully makes you care.

The Dawkins Delusion? by Alister McGrath

This is a small book, merely 100 pages, written as a thiestic response to Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. Alister McGrath, the primary author, studied chemistry and molecular biophysics at Oxford, and moved on to study Christian theology, specialising in issues of science and religion.

Naturally, I had already read Dawkins’s book (also reviewed in this blog) before coming to this one. To summarise, I was dissatisfied with his arguments against God, disappointed by the ranting, arrogant tone of the book, and unnerved by the deceptive tactic of bombarding the reader with vague negativity about theism (and by that I mean the way Dawkins constantly provides poor quotes from thiests, with the design of infusing the notion that we’re all idiots; persuasion by pressure of numbers rather than by rational argument).

The Dawkins Delusion?, however, was a joy to read. It offered clarification of many objections I had already formulated in my mind, highlighted others I hadn’t seen, and it presented everything in a respectful tone. Reading it was like having poison drawn out of my body.

My only objection is in the title of the volume. Okay, it’s perhaps the perfect title for eye-catchability, but it’s kind of cheeky - something that Dawkins has no problem being, but something the Christian opposition should rise above. The title will instantly raise the heckles of Dawkins’s supporters, when the real aim should be to win them over to a more rational point of view.

Other than that, superb. I happen to think Dawkins’s book is crafty and dangerous (again, consult my review for justification), so I recommend reading The Dawkins Delusion? as an essential companian. Read both and make up your own mind.

Survival Op: The Fear in the Wilderness by Scott Allen

Author Scott Allen asked me to review his book and even went to the trouble of mailing it to me from the USA at his own expense. I usually say no to review requests, but the cover art and theme of the story appealed to me. My confidence that I was in for a good read was further bolstered by the many positive reviews of the book I found online and by the fact that Allen is an English teacher. Sadly, the novel didn’t live up to expectations. My problems with it began in the very first sentence:

It was the same type of dark, dreary night as when I was delivered here in this dreadful prison of the wilderness.

For authors, the opening line is your crucial moment to hook a reader’s attention. The last thing you want to do is blow it on a comment about the weather. In fact, starting a book with a line about the weather is generally regarded as a cardinal sin of writing fiction. However, I could forgive it here, if not for the dreadful grammatical error that made me read the sentence several times, to make sure I understood it before I moved on. It should read “I was delivered here to this dreadful prison,” not “in this dreadful prison.” To say that you were delivered in a wilderness really means that someone gave birth to you there!

Unfortunately, this grammatical misstep was not an exception, but the shape of things to come. However, I thought, “Okay, the book is far from polished, but let’s ignore that fact and hope the story is good.”

The protagonist is Marcus, a homeless thirteen-year-old boy who is kidnapped by a criminal organisation called Survival Op. Marcus is part of a scientific experiment to enchance the human body’s survival ability. As part of the research, the organisation implants a microchip in Marcus designed to monitor the chemical changes in the body during stress. Then they release him onto an island wilderness and begin to hunt him. Marcus is soon joined by a girl called Lynn, and together they learn to survive.

That all sounds okay as the basis for a story. But big problems arise in its execution. For instance, Marcus and Lynn start a fire just inside the entrance to a cave in order to burn out all the snakes that live there so that they can make it their home. The plans works. However, a couple of chapters later, the duo enters the cave, only to discover an S-bend leading to an expansive cavern at the back of which are several holes. So why didn’t the snakes simply move further into the cave? Okay, it could be argued they died from oxygen depletion, that is, until our heroes decide to build a fire at the back of the cave, under one of the holes. Lo and behold, the smoke escapes up this convenient air-hole (or should that be plot-hole?).

Marcus and Lynn’s relationship isn’t believable. One minute they’ll be sharing a joke, and the next minute Marcus is inexplicably angry. Furthermore, the dialogue is written as if two robots are communicating:

“I cannot believe they would die to rescue us,” Lynn said as she leaned her head back on the cave wall. “Who would die for someone they do not even know?”

“Ms. Wayne told me that it does not matter how special or awesome something is that a person does, it is the reason why that person does that thing,” I said.

The author sometimes uses inappropriate words. Marcus constantly calls Lynn “punk” (a term I’ve only ever heard referring to males). Fish swimming through the water are referred to as “figures” (a term I’ve only ever heard reffering to humans).

The story meanders through fairly predictable territory. The main surprises were those of incredulity. The reader is literally slapped across the face with Marcus’s instant transformation from ordinary boy into experienced survivalist and killing machine. He does survival tricks that no young teenager would know, instantly knows how to handle captured weapons, kills without mercy or conscience.

On a descriptive level, one of the most disappointing moments was when Marcus finally comes face-to-face with a fearsome beast that has been skulking in the wilderness. It is described as ten-feet-tall, black, with bright yellow eyes. That’s all the reader is given. We never know whether it’s hairy, scaly, whether it moves on two legs or four.

As a result of this review experience, I’ve actually changed my submission guidelines on the blog. I read for pleasure, and I would rather avoid having to read bad books altogether. But right now, my personal commitment to review everything I consume compels me to write this painful one.

Survival Op is just another title in a sea of poorly conceived, sloppily written, non-edited, novels that gives self-publishing a bad name. Sorry, Scott, I wanted it to be different, but I have to tell it like it is.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

I spotted this book on a friend’s bookshelf and decided that I was up to the challenge of having my belief in the existence of God put to the test. Having lived a significant portion of my life as an agnostic, and having jumped between agnosticism (i.e. God may or may not exist) and theism (i.e. God does exist) more times than I can remember, I think I’m more qualified than most to claim that I’m capable of having an open mind.

The hardcover edition of The God Delusion is about 400 pages long. Should it really take 400 pages to prove or disprove the idea of God? I personally don’t think so. The book is this length because Dawkins includes many related topics, some of which I found useful; others were a waste of space. For instance, Dawkins spends a whole chapter talking about how many of the scientists who appear to be theists on paper are actually athiests. Scientists sometimes use the term “God” in a loose, poetic sense. Dawkins’s argument may have some validity, but it’s hardly scientific for a reader to believe or disbelieve in a theory by counting how many scientists’ heads are on each side. We want a rational case for athiesm presented!

Sadly, before we can get to hear the crux of the argument, Dawkins has a lot of stuff to get off his chest. A lot of it comes across as quite emotional and dripping with arrogance. In introducing a quote by C.S. Lewis, on the matter of whether Jesus could have been truly “good” if he wasn’t really “God”, Dawkins can’t help himself from stating it thus: “C.S. Lewis (who should have known better) said …” Dawkins’s disagrement with Lewis was simply on the grounds that each author came at the issue with a difference set of presuppositions: Lewis with the view that the Gospel accounts are reliable historical documents, and Dawkins that they are not. And so, there was no need for such mockery.

When I came to Dawkins’s central argument, I was surprised by its simplicity. It turns out he has a big problem with the idea of “infinite regression” (i.e. if God made the universe, who made God, then who made the thing that made God, ad infinitum). Well, on that we are agreed. Infinite regression answers nothing. But Dawkins refuses to accept that the idea of a creator is a valid means of terminating an infinite regession. Long ago, I heard it argued to my complete satisfaction, something like this: Logic tells us that for every effect we need a cause. The universe began with a Big Bang. That’s not a proper explanation, because we need to explain how the material for such a bang originated. A creative agent of some kind. And, of course, we face the obvious question of who created the creator? The most logical idea that our brains can comprehend is that there should be nothing at all: no universe, no laws of physics, no anything. That would make perfect sense. Except here we are. We exist. And so, whether we like it or not, we are forced to consider, in the absense of any rational alternative, the notion that there indeed was a “first cause,” something that exists outside of time itself and is responsible for all that we see.

Dawkins denies this argument, in a chapter entitled “Why there almost certainly is no God.” He believes in evolution, as a lot of people do. In my mind, whether you do or don’t has little bearing on whether God exists. Evolution is related to biology alone. And when we’re talking about the origin of the universe, that’s cosmology. Where Dawkins errs is that he insists on cosmological evolution: the universe arrived at the form it is in today by a process of evolutionary changes. Dawkins acknowledges that this is not something that can be proven, but he stands by the principle that the simplest answer is almost always the right one (the theory of evolution claims to show how the simple gives rise to the complex without the need for an intelligent designer). God, he says, is infinitely complex, therefore he almost certainly does not exist. Did you spot the flaw in Dawkins’s reasoning? He assumes cosmological evolution to be true in order to lay his ground for disproving God (i.e. the answer to the origin of the universe must be simple, therefore it ain’t God). In other words, he assumes cosmological evolution to be true in order to prove cosmological evolution to be true: circular reasoning.

And that’s it. That is Dawkins’s single thread on which he clings to. And it’s over and done with about halfway through. The book continues for another two hundred pages, because it’s not just theism that Dawkins is attacking. It’s the idea of a personal God who hears prayer. And so, religion is under scrutiny for much of the remainder of the book. He attempts to explain the predominance of religion by theorising about us having a “God centre” in our brains - a left-over item from man’s evolutionary progress that once helped us survive, but now we’re better off without it in our more enlightened times. Pure speculation.

Dawkins talks about religion’s association with violence. He wastes a page or two quoting some hot-headed anti-athiest remarks posted online by a blogger. Why include this stuff? It’s just the remarks of an idiot blowing off steam. Oh, but I think I know why Dawkins put it in the book. The book is littered with poor examples of quotes by theists, both from antiquity and modern day. The author appears to indulge every whim to sling mud at a believer in God over some poorly thought-out comment the believer made. These quotes cannot form the basis of a rational argument against God, so why are they included? All they do is create a vague buzz of negativity in the reader’s mind about the idea of God. But perhaps that’s the idea. And if true, that makes Dawkins a fairly sinister author.

On the matter of religion and acts of violence, there is no doubt a connection. But it’s the same connect that exists between, say, soccer and violence; just look at England’s reputation for football hooliganism. The governing principle that Dawkins misses is that violence is easily associated with anything that people feel passionately about. If we rid the world of religion, we don’t cure the problem. We relieve one symptom of a problem that lies in the nature of man.

Dawkins is totally out of his depth when talking about the Bible. He sees the God of the Old Testament as a big bully, replaced by a more favourable deity in the New Testament. I, however, see a perfect unity of the two, because I’ve given them more than a cursory glance over the years. The idea of a holy God who demands absolute perfection, who cannot stand sin, who must punish sin - a God who rescued man at great cost to himself - these concepts don’t register with Dawkins. I get the feeling that he has led a fairly moral life, and if it were possible for him to believe in heaven, he would consider it his right to end up there - as a decent law-abiding citizen of earth. Even when he examines the God that he doesn’t believe in, he can’t help but shape God in his own image.

More rational athiests than Dawkins will feel disappointed by his ranting. Some athiests will of course be cheering him on (in the same way that some people think Michael Moore makes honest documentaries). Worst of all, some who are on the fence about Christianity may use the book as a form of escape. From experience, I know that we are not often as rational as we think we are at times; we can claim to seek the truth, but unconsciously we’re trying to escape from something that we desperately hope isn’t true: a God who demands our attention; not everyone has a mind that is sharpened like a razor against self-deception and crafty arguments.

I left this book feeling like I had been poisoned, but relieved that my rational belief in God remained intact. I would never say to anyone not to read something; that’s an attitude that smacks of brainwashing. But I would caution that this is a dangerous book for an impressionable person. In a spirit of fairness, I recommend also reading The Dawkins Delusion? by Alister McGrath for a well presented opposing argument.

Forever Odd by Dean Koontz

Forever Odd is the second in a series of novels centred around the character Odd Thomas, a young man with the ability to see what he calls “the lingering dead” - spirits of dead people who, for one reason or another, have unfinished business before moving on. It’s far from an original notion, of course, but that didn’t stop me devouring the first and second novels quickly, and anticipating the third.

I’m probably repeating what I said in my review of the first book, but Forever Odd is a great read because of its titular character, a sensitive, eccentric, deep thinking young man, dealing with a supernatural gift that has the habit of doubling as a curse.

Forever Odd begins several months after the traumatic climax of the first novel. We see Odd voluntarily unemployed, living alone in an apartment, trying to put the pieces of his psyche back together. Suddenly he is visited by a new ghost, the father of one of his friends - a man who should be vey much alive. Odd quickly visits the man’s house, only to discover that his friend has been kidnapped, and his friend’s father murdered. And so, Odd sets off in hot pursuit, his gift giving him an edge over anything the police might do.

In one sense, the novel is typical formulaic Koontz, and just when I’m inclined to view the author as a bit of a hack, he goes and surprises me with a nugget of wisdom among the pages, elevating the book to more than just the literary equivalent of a dumb action movie. Koontz, in his podcast, said the novel is about “the redemptive nature of unearned suffering.” That’s a tad pretentious, but credit where credit’s due: Koontz does inject a few good insights about life into the prose.

All things considered, the Forever Odd makes a pretty good thriller, and it has a tendency to surprise the reader (as did the first novel).

A worthy sequel. Looking forward to getting my teeth stuck into Brother Odd sometime. And I’ve heard Koontz is intending to write yet more Odd Thomas books.

Rising Stars: Voices of the Dead; Bright by Fiona Avery

The artwork in this graphic novel was so beautiful that it called to me from the library shelf. I had never heard of the Rising Stars, mythology but it seems that each tale works in a standalone fashion. The two in this volume are concerned with two different characters. The common thread that unites the whole series is that each protagonist is a “Special.” Here’s what that means (from the back cover):

In the sixties, a fireball struck Pederson, Illinois granting all the children who were in utero at the time fantastic powers - 113 in all. Dubbed “Specials,” these children grew into adulthood cloistered together, forming rivalries, friendships and enmities. Some became heroes, some criminals, and others simply lived out an ordinary existence. After years of petty fights, squabbles and grabs for power, a new unifying mission became clear, a purpose for their existence that they had all been unable to see before … to change the world.

Somebody’s been watching The 4400 methinks. Well, I decided to disgregard the unoriginal concept, since the superhero genre offers plenty of scope for diversity of superpowers. Unfortunately, the two stories aren’t terribly original in that regard, either.

Voices of the Dead is about a man called Lionel Zerb whose power is an ability to see ghosts. Lionel’s obsession is to discover whether there really is an afterlife. You’d think that fact would be obvious to someone like Lionel, but unfortunately it’s not strictly true that he sees actual ghosts. He sees “afterimages” of a person. So, he goes from ghost hunt to ghost hunt, hoping one day to find “the real thing.” It all gets ultra weird after a while, and I found myself a bit confused by the end of it all.

Bright is the shorter (and better) of the two stories in the volume. This one is about a Special, Matthew Bright, who takes on a false identity in order to pursue his dream of being a police officer (a position of responsibility that a Special would not be permitted to fulfill; think X-Men and all the fear of “mutants”). Right in the middle of an important case, his identity is compromised, and things get sticky. The ending of the story involves Bright getting a “costume” as a gift. This is the only point where the story got a little silly.

It’s an above average read, but there are certainly better graphic novels out there. I’ll heap plenty of praise on the artwork, but not so much on the writing.