Book Review

  • Counterparts, Gonzalo Lira

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 1998, 384 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-12429-X

    Why do you read thrillers? To be thrilled, obviously. But as with fine cuisine, there is a palette of possible thrills any writer may wish to play with. While some may thirst for tightly wound-up suspense, others may prefer gore, psychological intensity or military hardware.

    But take a bunch of experienced thriller fans and they’ll tell you that originality is often the biggest thrill of all. There’s a limit to the number of average serial-killer novels you can read. Even such a powerful concept as a government-wide conspiracy can lose its luster after a hundred novels. Thriller fans depend on a degree of innovation, of hard-edged newness to maintain their increasingly demanding fix.

    Chances are that parts of Gonzalo Lira’s Counterparts will please them.

    Certainly, this novel starts out promisingly on realism and meanness, two other thriller staples. Our first protagonist, FBI agent Margaret Chisholm, is introduced with a crackerjack sequence in which she isn’t afraid to amputate a suspected terrorist in order to avert a disaster. Mean, smart, tough and unpredictable, she’s a type of protagonist we could enjoy. Our second hero is a charming, sophisticated intellectual named Nicholas Denton, who controls the CIA through his directorship of the records department. They’re brought together after a shadowy assassin destroys a convent of nuns, and soon have to cooperate in order to find the truth behind the assassination.

    It sounds promising, and is in fact quite intriguing for a while. Lira’s antagonist -“Sepsis”- is an assassin who masters an astonishing variety of skills, and initially seems to be no match even for the united law-enforcement agencies of America. He mulls over concepts such as meta-killing (destruction without assassination), enjoys good books, speaks half a dozen languages and remorselessly kills after sex. Ooooh…

    Furthermore, for a while everything seems to adhere fairly well to the real world, with an extra twist of enhanced originality. Denton’s take-over of the CIA is believable, as are the various descriptions of the inner working of federal agencies. Sepsis’ methods are intricately described, and even if the thought of Quebecker terrorists assassinating Canadian federalists is slightly amusing, everything seems to hang together quite nicely.

    There are even a few exhilarating action scenes. While most thriller writers seem content with a clinical description of bullets, explosions and fatal trauma, Lira does an excellent job at representing action scenes on a purely visceral level. The demolition derby/fire-fight in Chapter 5, for instance, is one of the book’s highlights.

    The problem is that Lira doesn’t do much with any of the tools at his disposition. As soon as the narrative moves to Italy, interest goes downhill. Meta-murder is scarcely brought up again. The motives behind his attacks seem increasingly dubious as more and more revelations are made. The novel even seems to turn in circle past the halfway point, as if certain revelations had been made too soon.

    After that, the novel becomes more and more ludicrous, with extra layers of conspiracy, evil plans and secret identities that don’t make retroactive sense. Chisholm’s sexual preferences are gratuitously brought up. Denton’s lack of knowledge of the “true plan” is similarly unlikely. Sepsis’s origins are sort-of-explained, but it’s really hard to suspend our disbelief in this case. You may be excused a giggle or two during the last chapter.

    Ultimately, the end result is a novel whose freshness wears off midway through, but a promising debut by a writer who can only improve with time. Hopefully, Lira’s next novels will build on his strengths while correcting his deficiencies. Certainly there’s enough raw potential in Counterparts for three other novels. Now let’s see if it’s a false promise.

  • War of the Rats, David L. Robbins

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1999, 474 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58135-X

    For all the horror and the suffering that came out of the period, World War Two is an inexhaustible source of great stories. Manhattan Project, Pearl Harbour, D-Day… The battle of Stalingrad, while less known in North America, stands as an equally fascinating event, a principal nexus of the Nazi’s Russian campaign and a turning point for, indeed, the whole war.

    Numbers can only tell you so much: Both armies lost 1,109,000 men in that battle. The city’s population was reduced from 500,000 to 1,500 civilians, “Of the million and a quarter invading soldiers who rode across the Russian steppe to the gates of Stalingrad in August of 1942, fewer than thirty thousand ever returned to their homeland.” [P. 470]

    But, as Stalin said, a million death is a statistic but a single death is a tragedy. In War of the Rats, David L. Robbins has found a way to humanize the conflict by focusing on that most personal of military killers, the sniper.

    While no soldier is alike, snipers are a special breed themselves. While they carry a powerful scope rifle, their most efficient weapons are stealth and patience. They will burrow in an innocuous spot, patiently wait -sometime for hours- for their target to make a mistake, and then they will take a shot. One bullet, one kill. While they might take a shot from more than half a kilometer away, there’s no real distance between them and their target. While soldiers often have the luxury of convincing themselves that it’s always the guy to their sides who fired the lethal shot, snipers have no such comfort; each killing is theirs.

    This sniper mystique is one of the many elements that come together successfully in War of the Rats. Based on real events, this novel is about the duel between a Russian and a German sniper in the ruins of Stalingrad during the fall of 1942. When the Germans become concerned about a Russian sniper hailed as a hero -Vasily Zaitsev-, they decide to take measures and send in their best shooter to track him down. It’s not the only story in the book, which uses this simple conflict as a springboard to describe the battle of Stalingrad, as well as a romantic affair between Zaitsev and an American-born (!) woman he trains as a sniper.

    The historical authenticity of War of the Rats is deeply impressive, convincingly representing the atrocious conditions of the battles and doing its best to put us in the soldiers’ frame of mind during it all. Robbins has conducted good research (there’s a complete bibliography at the end of the book), and the results are there for us to enjoy. Zaitsev and Thorvald’s duel comes to symbolize the test of will between the two nations fighting over Stalingrad.

    War of the Rats‘s principal flaws are its occasional lengths, which trade off energy for mood. The book is never snappy or flashy, but it does succeed admirably at building psychological suspense. It’s impressive to see what Robbins can do with a conflict in which both parties spend most of their time immobile, peering through a rifle scope.

    This is a docu-novel that should immensely please war buffs and thriller readers to no end. Historically accurate yet no less exciting for it, psychologically claustrophobic and filled with suspense, this is a novel unlike any you’ve read before. Worth a detour.

    (One last note: There is a recent film called ENEMY AT THE GATES, which also tells Zaitsev’s story though presumably not based explicitly on War of the Rats. Given the choice, see the film before reading the book. Not only will you be surprised at the differences between the film and the book -oh, those screenwriters!-, but the images of the film will help to ease you in the novel’s atmosphere. Though note that the German sniper Thorvalds looked nothing like Ed Harris.)

  • Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Norton, 1999, 297 pages, C$18.99 tpb, ISBN 0-393-31929-6

    The third novel of an author is in many ways the most revealing of his future career. Not only does no-one knows what to expect of your first, but you also have all the time in the world to polish it. If it’s successful, not only will everyone will expect something of your second, but you’ll also be expected it to deliver it in short notice. Most authors have enough material discarded from their first book to inspire a second one. But the third, ah, that’s when the author’s career takes off, with the expectation of a steady level of quality and the time restraints it implies.

    It’s also the novel that shows if the author is a one-note hack.

    Chuck Palahniuk certainly made an impression with his debut novel Fight Club, a blisteringly angry manifesto for the Gen-X generation. Beginning as the narrator has a gun in his mouth, it certainly established Palahniuk’s fascination for self-destruction. His second novel, Survivor, wasn’t much different, presented as the last recording of a man about to crash a plane in the Australian outback.

    So it’s no surprise to find ourselves in familiar territory again at the beginning of Invisible Monsters, as the narrator flashbacks from a scene involving a burning house and people getting shot with an automatic rifle. Rewind a few months, and the plight of the narrator becomes more apparent: An ex-fashion model, she’s been disfigured by a rifle shot across the jaw. Unable to speak, stuck in a relationship with a sexually conflicted vice cop, at the mercy of a clothes-stealing best friend, she quickly succumbs to the peculiar charms of a pre-op transsexual also looking for her true identity.

    If you think the above paragraph is weird, well, you really have no idea. The narrative hops in time like a mad rabbit, character all have multiple identities, self-destruction is pushed to new limits, twists and turns abound, and nothing is quite as it seems.

    The twists and turns of the novel are so extreme that they quickly acquire a quality of our own. Don’t be surprised to whoop and cheer at every outrageous revelation and ask for even more. Remember: No one is what it seems!

    All throughout, Palahniuk keeps up his usual verve and ironic narration. While our protagonist’s voice doesn’t quite fit with her personality, it’s not too much of an intrusion, as if it’s all-too-clear that this is Palahniuk’s narrating as a fashion model and not the fashion model herself. Give me irony. Flash. Give me quotable quotes. Flash. Give me a bookload of fun. Flash.

    As usual, there are several priceless moments scattered over the novel. One Christmas gift unwrapping turns into a nightmare for our narrator as her parents give her boxes after boxes of condoms, overcompensating for the plight of their AIDS-afflicted son. In another instance, we’re treated to a clinical description of the steps required in order to rebuild the narrator’s jaw —no small wonder our stomachs churn, as we understand why the narrator would rather stay that way.

    But what about Palahniuk’s future career, and all that good stuff mentioned in the introduction? It’s obvious that Palahniuk isn’t moving too far away from his usual themes of self-destruction and nick-of-time redemption. It’s also clear that stylistically, he’s sticking to what he knows best. While the shtick is still vastly entertaining, it’s also beginning to show its signs of excessive use. Only Palahniuk knows what his next book holds, but let’s just hope that it will allow him to stretch a few conceptual muscles.

  • Lagrange Five, Mack Reynolds

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1979, 227 pages, C$1.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-12806-X

    It might be an artifact of growing up, becoming more cynical or watching too much of the evening news, but as I grow older, it seems to me as if Science-Fiction is all too often becoming a nostalgic refuge for the simplistic techno-fantasies of a more naive time.

    Not all science-fiction, mind you, and almost none of the stuff I really want to read. Such luminaries as Bruce Sterling or Greg Egan have proven themselves to be aware of the complexities of our world, and the effects of changing society on our dreams for a better tomorrow.

    In fact, because we’re so close to “our” contemporary SF, it’s often difficult to say what’s being naive for lack of perspective. But take a look a SF twenty years after publication and, oh boy, do you get perspective vertigo. While Mack Reynolds’ Lagrange Five isn’t offensive in its retrograde social values as, say, Martin Caidin’s 1984 novel Killer Station (which comes to mind only because I recently read it and it’s truly atrociously falsely feminist), it’s a novel that is showing some substantial cracks.

    The most visible of those comes from the setting. As you may infer, Reynold’s novel takes place on an O’Neill-type space habitat located in Lagrange Five. That notion was most popular around 1980, but has now proved -with a few year’s worth of hindsight- to be highly problematical. The building costs are unimaginable, the ecosystematic challenges complex (thanks to a few year’s worth of experience in trying to build artificial environments since then)… and perhaps most unsettling, the human aspects are more worrisome than ever. Will humans accept being stuck in an artificial habitat? How do you protect such a fragile habitat against attack or accidents? How do you finance it?

    In Reynolds’ view, few of those are problems, and those that are (claustrophobia) are more like plot devices than real issues. At the heart of Lagrange Five is a thriller, but it’s a thriller of such simplicity that it almost seems a distraction from the habitat so lovingly described.

    As usual with potboiler SF, there is an assumption that smart people never do wrong. Lagrange Five is an idyllic place to live, where several communities provide cultural diversity and people can choose which type of urban setting attracts them the most. Oh, and everyone on Lagrange Five is hyper-intelligent, because they won’t allow anyone with a lower IQ to immigrate. (Even thinking of myself as an intellectual elitist, this notion disturbs me somewhat. At least Reynolds handwaves something about Emotional Quotients.)

    There is also a black superiority subplot, handled with maybe a touch more class than we’d expect from a hard-SF story. Lagrange Five‘s resolution is as unashamedly didactic as the rest of the novel, which spends as much time demonstrating how much of a cool idea it is than to advance the mechanics of the plot.

    And yet, I enjoyed it. The plot advances by fits and spurts, but the details are always interesting. Our averagely-intelligent protagonist easily gets the smart girl, and it’s all really sweet. Reading about a well-adjusted artificial community might be so déclassé, but it’s unarguably more fun than having to suffer through another angst-ridden post-cyberpunk novel.

    So should we conclude that nostalgia has its place? Maybe. After all, if SF can all things to all people, it probably allows some room for everything, including uncompromising optimism in the best retro fashion.

  • Gravity, Tess Gerritsen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999, 385 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-01677-6

    By now, you should know the rant: Some will argue that after decades of publishing fiction tightly segregated in marketing categories, enough is enough. Critics demand cross-fertilization! Authors are rebelling against the straightjackets of genres! Readers are picking books blindfolded! Everywhere, the crowd chants “Fusion! Down with genres! Mix’em up!”

    Uh-huh.

    I don’t think so, but that doesn’t preclude the odd good cross-over book from time to time. Tess Gerritsen’s Gravity is one such book, a medical thriller with one interesting twist… it’s set on the International Space Station.

    Interestingly enough, you’d expect this crossover between medical thriller and science-fiction to be penned by an author previously associated with SF—if only because authors in other genres are usually reluctant to do research on space technology and associated material. But not so with Gravity and Tess Gerritsen, whose best-known previous novels are unarguably medical thrillers. (She also has nine romantic thrillers to her credit, but is now exclusively “marketed” as a medical thriller writer) Gerritsen has obviously done her research, and the space station segments are lovingly detailed with exactitude to rival the best and most obsessive hard-SF writers. (And, though it’s considerably incorrect to dwell on such details, her photo on the back jacket shows that she’s a real hottie. Ahem.)

    The result of Gerritsen’s work is unusually invigorating, attacking a familiar SF premise with an abundance of hard-edged details that are real now.

    And what a lovely premise it is: After a slight accident with one of the ISS’s biological experiment, doctor Emma Watson—newly sent up as mission medical specialist after an accident that befalls her predecessor—is helpless to prevent the contamination of her colleagues with a mysterious and deadly disease. After NASA decides to quarantine the station rather than bring back the virulent plague to Earth, well, it’s up to her to find a solution…

    The real fun of Gravity isn’t in the premise, nor the overall story or conclusion: It’s in seeing the gradual tightening of the screws taking place in the first two-thirds of the book, where the claustrophobia of the ISS multiplies the creep factor of the disease tenfold, and all the possible options to save our protagonist are gradually stripped away.

    This tension culminates with a memorable shuttle landing halfway through, and the revelation of the nature of the sickness killing off the ISS astronauts. After that, well, things are somewhat obvious. Paradoxally, tension falls as possible paths for survival are reduced to exactly one. It’s a small letdown, but not one serious enough to sink the book… though it definitely strips it of any superlative mention.

    All the way through, Gerritsen manages to deliver an excellent mix of limpid writing and convincing details. It’s not easy to juggle both astronautic and medical jargon at the same time, but here she achieves both with an admirable deftness. (“Combines the tension of ER and APOLLO 13” raves the New York Post on the back cover. Amen.)

    Gerritsen even goes back to her romantic literary origins by including a strong “estrangered couple” relationship in the mix. Have I mentioned the expression “genre fusion” in my introduction?

    While it climaxes before impact and recycles elements that will be familiar to avid genre readers, Tess Gerritsen’s Gravity remains a wonderfully unusual thriller. Impressive research, good use of telling details and an exceptional initial heightening of tension should be enough to make you pick it up if you’re in the mood for this type of novel. I’m definitely curious about Gerritsen’s other novels now.

  • Apaches, Lorenzo Carvaterra

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1997, 368 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-42251-1

    What is a “structural problem” in the context of a book review? What is “structure”, anyway? Is it easily identifiable? Are you even interested? And why am I asking these questions at the beginning of my review of Lorenzo Carvaterra’s Apaches?

    Definitions first: I’d argue that “structure” is the way the story is put together. It’s neither the premise nor the writing. It’s akin to plotting, but not quite, as you can tell a same story in many ways. Structure is how the author makes a transition from the overall story he’s trying to tell to the mechanics of how to tell it. For instance, the premise might be “farmboy takes over as king”, structure might be “farmboy learns about the world, makes friends, raises an army, attacks the castle and kills the king” while plotting might be the various general events that fill in the structure: “he makes friends by paying them beers and triumphing at a snooker contest”.

    Structural problems arise when, for a reason or another, something prevents the story from being told in a satisfying fashion. This, obviously, is all in the reviewer’s mind. But consider: the movie PEARL HARBOUR puts its most impressive sequence -the attack on Pearl Harbour- right in the middle of the film, padding it on each side by an hour of miscellaneous stuff. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to put it at the very end of the film, during which all the conflicts are resolved at the highest moment of dramatic tension? Or, more interestingly, begin the film with the attack and end it after the battle of Midway, when Americans win a sizeable victory over Japanese forces? That is a structural problem.

    On a straight paragraph-to-paragraph level, Lorenzo Carvaterra’s Apaches is a pretty good read. Heck, even in chapter-to-chapter, it’s sufficiently interesting. He writes clear prose, adequate characters and isn’t afraid to be truly nasty when depicting evil characters. (Two stomach-turning words will suffice: Dead babies) In fact, rip out the first half of Apaches, and you have a fair thriller.

    The structural problem comes up when you consider the first half of the book. Not the first chapter, mind you, an effectively heart-wrenching depiction of a kidnapping. But right after, as “Book one” of Apaches (chapter 1-6, P.7-132) introduces, chapter after chapter, the six main protagonists of the novel. While the chapter-stories are interesting, they’re either too long or to concentrated at the start of the novel at a point where the reader is justifiably asking himself why he should read on.

    There are ways of handling the same material more carefully. In Icon, Frederick Forsyth introduces his main protagonist in the story only midway through. However, the first half of the book interleaves the main plot and the protagonist’s personal history in such a fashion that the protagonist’s backstory is completed just as he enters the stage. That’s good structure and that’s what should have been done here, introducing one character at a time along with their backstories.

    Okay, I’ll admit it; it’s not such a big problem. You can get past it and enjoy Apaches as what it is, a story of hurt ex-cops banding together to rid the world of an evil criminal, shoot’em-up style.

    A word of caution, though: Apaches is one mean book. Each of the protagonists has a violent tale to tell. The villains are truly completely evil. Even our heroes, once they get their mandate to get rid of the scums, are uncomfortably closer to vigilante justice than to law and order. Apaches does some mileage out of an examination of the line between good and bad, righteousness and revenge. Almost by definition it can’t be a pleasant tale. The high body count doesn’t really help.

    But in the end, chances are that you won’t be able to shake off the feeling that somehow, this could have been an easier, a more powerful tale. That’s when abstract notions such as “structural problems” suddenly become compelling.

  • Fortunes of War, Stephen Coonts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1998, 376 pages, C$33.99 hc, ISBN 0-312-18583-9

    Regular readers of these reviews know that I have said a lot of nasty things about the current works of those who used to write great techno-thrillers in the early nineties. Tom Clancy has killed his editors. Payne Harrison suffered brain damage and turned UFO-nut. Larry Bond took too much Prozac and now writes simplistic crap. Dale Brown re-writes the same boring book again and again. Harold Coyle got lost in the Civil War and never came back.

    Compared to all of his classmates, at least Coonts is making an effort. Granted, The Intruders had problems, and I can’t discuss the formulaic-sounding latest Cuba, Hong-Kong and America trilogy without reading them first, but at the very least he doesn’t actively try to repeat himself. Fortunes of War, despite some shortcomings, is a step in the right direction. One that should be attempted by a few of the afore-mentioned authors.

    The first great thing about it is how it does not take place in the author’s flagship universe. Whereas Clancy continues to play in Jack Ryan’s increasingly divergent parallel Earth and Dale Brown re-uses the same characters over and over again, Coonts temporarily abandons his Jake Grafton alter-ego here and branches off in a new world: In the first few pages of the novel, the Japanese emperor is murdered by hard-liners, and preparations are made by the new government to invade oil-rich Siberia. Oh, and both sides have nuclear weapons…

    Shortly after Japanese troops take over Siberian cities, American pilot Bob Cassidy is dispatched to the area with a squadron of F-22s. The United States want to stop the Japanese intervention, but political pressures force them to send only pilots who will fight for the Russian air force. Of course, things are more complex once the Americans have to face a new Japanese fighter jet, and Cassidy has to fight against a friend on the other side…

    Have I mentioned the coup that drives a rabid dictator to the top of the Russian government? There is a lot of material in here, and it’s Fortunes of War‘s chiefmost problem that it attempts to cover a lot of ground in relatively few pages. Describing a war takes time unless you severely constrain your scope (see Coyle’s Team Yankee), and while Coonts focuses on a few characters, the picture still seems fragmentary.

    It doesn’t help that several pages are spent on the wrong things. Most of Cassidy’s fellow pilots are discussed more intricately during their recruitment than after. A lot of time is spent in preparation rather than the actual war itself. There are only a few glances at the ground war. At the same time, the novel flies from the pilots to the politicians. While the beginning is laborious, the ending is rushed. In short, there seems to be a lack of focus.

    There’s also, in the middle of this realistic scenario, a bit too much of war-stories dramatics. The “elite corps of competent misfits that has to fight battles on their own” motif is, by now, so over-used that even careful rationalization can’t completely excuse it. The friendship between pilots on opposite sides is interesting, but seems artificial. The Russian dictator is straight out of Central Casting.

    Still, the novel is a good read, and not an entirely unsatisfying one. There are good action set-pieces, and a few interesting characters. More of them die than you might expect. Maybe best of all, this novel doesn’t slavishly imitate Coonts’ earlier works, which have concentrated more on the Vietnam War (Flight of the Intruder), limited theater engagements (Final Flight) or more espionage-driven plots (The Minotaur). It’s his first try at a brand-new war; give him some slack. At least he’s working harder at it than his colleagues.

  • Quicksilver, Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999, 728 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-02854-5

    Location, location, location. It’s not just a good idea for real-estate investment or the localization of a new business; it’s almost a prerequisite for a really good thriller. Look at that most meanly efficient thriller machine, the action film: DIE HARD wouldn’t be so great if it wasn’t for being set strictly in an office tower. EXECUTIVE DECISION did wonders inside an airliner. And what would SPEED be without a bus?

    The list of interesting locations in which to set a thriller has to include the Pentagon, the iconic and practical location of American military power. One of the biggest buildings in the world, the Pentagon’s myth invokes endless military secrets, fantastic security, international relevance and a primo terrorist target.

    This is where Quicksilver comes in. Ignore the great teaser about a novel super-weapon having far more destructive effects than predicted: it is, as you may expect, merely a pretext to the real meat of the book, which is a terrorist takeover of the Pentagon.

    As you may also expect, the solution to this problem will rest squarely on the shoulders of plucky underdogs; a marine-in-training, an electronic nerd and his aggressive ex-wife. Together they’ll… well, they’ll obviously triumph, but the fun is all in the pudding.

    The Reeves-Stevens husband-and-wife writing duo had, after years of undistinguished Star Trek novels, knocked out one solid book with Icefire, one of the best technothrillers of the late nineties. They’re back with Quicksilver, bringing the same creative imagination, limpid narration and uncomplicated characterization to their second technothriller. The result, as you may expect, is another steady fun read in the Clancy genre, with more invention and less useless fat than Clancy’s current work.

    The Pentagon is a fantastic setting for a thriller, if only through the discovery of the building. Relatively old (built in the 1950s) by office building standards, the Pentagon is currently being completely renovated (a “Slab-to-Ceiling” work) and the Reeve-Stevens have a lot of fun throwing random construction obstacles in the way of their protagonists. But more than that, it’s the labyrinthine layout, the security measures, the forgotten basement areas, the arcana of the building that engrosses the reader as much as the overall plot of the book. The authors make full use of their setting, as competent thriller writers very well should.

    Naturally, the various gadgets used by protagonists and antagonists alike are fun and interesting. The “Looking Glass” gadget in particular promised much, even though it’s taken out of action early on. The central MacGuffin of the book is credible, original and suitably powerful. And as for the identity of the terrorists… well, I haven’t seen anything like it in a long while. Good stuff, supported by plausible research. Hey, shouldn’t the opening diagrams be classified Top-Secret?

    Going beyond location and gadgets to the actual plot of the book, well, we can’t ask for much more, from a presidential escape to an impressive apocalyptic finale. Tension is gradually increased, and if you’re not careful you’ll end up reading much more of the book in a single sitting than you’d want to.

    In short, technothrillers fans have a lot to look forward to with Quicksilver. While a bit less original than Icefire with the standard building-taken-over-by-terrorist template, it’s a bit more mature (viz the dismissal of the UFO-nut character in Quicksilver versus the jarring references in Icefire) and focused. The edges are polished and the result is a solid, thick read that will amply satisfy countless beach readers.

    [September 2001: As with so many other novels, the September 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon suddenly takes out a lot of fun out of this thriller. “Well”, I blackly reflected in the heat of the events, “there goes the schedule for the slab-to-ceiling renovations.”]

  • The Shift, George Foy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1996, 515 pages, C$17.95 tpb, ISBN 0-553-37544-X

    The reviewer wakes up. For a single moment, his life is bliss, mostly because he doesn’t realize what a pathetic life he leads. Still smiling from his oniric tryst with Sarah Michelle Gellar, the reviewer managers to slide out of bed before waking up.

    Looking outside the grimy windows of his apartment, he sees that things are worse than ever. Microsoft has plastered another hideous billboard on the building across the street, extolling the new consumer-protection features of Windows TJ designed to disallow any potential illegal activity. The reviewer knows that will transform the computer in little more than a Microsoft-approved silicon brick; he’s spent the last week re-installing his own machine.

    He looks at the book on his reviewing slate and groans. George Foy’s The Shift, as undistinguished a piece of cyberpunk SF it’s possible to publish. The reviewer doesn’t have a clue what to say about the book that will sustain a full-length review. He decides to sidestep the issue and go take a shower.

    Things haven’t improved after the shower, nor the breakfast. On the streets outside, wild bands of illiterate barbarians are fighting pretentious pseudo-intellectuals. It’s a battle the reviewer wants everyone to lose. As the spicy smell of tear gas wafts through the broken air-conditioning unit, the reviewer sits down at the computer to make another stab at writing the review.

    His first approach is pure grade-school classic: Reword the back cover blurb, adding a few meaningless details that show he’s read the book. It’s not a satisfying experience: Not only does it offend his sense of creativity, but The Shift doesn’t offer anything compelling to write about. By this time, everyone has read a few dozen books in which a well-off character is brought down in the “real” world. Everyone’s had their fill of obsessive virtual reality creators who come to like their creation more than the real world. Everyone’s sickened of those oh-so-clever “virtual monster crossing in the real world” plots. Oh, and evil corporations aren’t anything new.

    He deletes most of the plot résumé and graduates to a higher level of hack work; maybe it’s possible to waste a few words on the place of The Shift is the overall literary pattern of the SF genre? As quickly as he seizes upon this notion like a drowning man, he realizes it’s not going to work. The Shift‘s historical legacy and significance is null and void. It simply regurgitates the clichés of the cyberpunk genre in a nearer future. It does attempts to do something more realistic and closer to mainstream fiction, but the net effect is soporific for any genre reader. Maybe someone coming in fresh from outside Science-fiction will like it. But that’s not the reviewer’s audience.

    The reviewer remembers his mother’s advice to find at least something nice to say about the book. But he can’t just write that the prison segment is quite good. Or that the conclusion ties up everything nicely. A good conclusion doesn’t expiate the busload of clichés that preceded it. Nor does a rather good prison novella redeems a 500+ page borefest.

    The reviewer knows he’s screwed up. By spending most of the month reading the massively enjoyable Night’s Dawn trilogy, he’s run out of time to fill up the usual wordage. So now he’s stuck dredging up what he would normally read and forget away. There is no way out.

    So he puts his fingers on the keyboard.

    But then, a team of corporate anti-terrorists operatives bursts in his room and kills him in a hailstorm of gunfire.

    It is, ironically, a happy ending.

  • The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Mark Leyner

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Vintage, 1997, 240 pages, C$16.95 tpb, ISBN 0-679-76349-X

    I initially thought about writing this review Mark Leyner-style, filled with madcap concepts, sophisticated language, memorable epigrams and a variety of formats. But, hey, I’m no Mark Leyner and that’s why he’s the one selling books by the thousands and I’m the one writing these review for an obscure web site that no one reads.

    I’m not saying that his style is inimitable; I’m just saying that you’ll end up crazy trying to do so. I’m trying to say that my brain will melt down before producing something every as remotely amusing as his stuff. Heck, I’m saying that if ever Leyner tracked me down as a pathetic imitator, he’d be quite capable of booting my pathetic butt single-footedly. And that would be humiliating.

    So allow me to be blandly conventional and try a traditional review. But not too much of a traditional review, otherwise it still won’t make sense and I’ll have wasted thirty minutes of my time.

    Look, even a plot resume won’t make sense: Our thirteen-year-old protagonist (Mark Leyner, in what’s presumably a non-autobiographical role but we can’t be sure) is bothered by the fact that he’s got to miss school in order to attend his father’s execution. He tries to pass time by writing a screenplay (which must be delivered the next day, given that it’s already won a prize) and hitting on the prison warden. Alas, the execution goes wrong, his father is put on New Jersey State Discretionary Execution (NJSDE) protocol, the warden responds to his advances and he still hasn’t come up with a title for his screenplay. I mean, who’d consider this an actual plot?

    Plus, what about the form? The Tetherballs of Bougainville is made up of narration, a brochure, newspaper articles, biographical sketches, a complete screenplay and a really long movie review. This scattershot approach to writing shouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone who’s read other material by Leyner, from the gloriously fluid form of Et Tu, Babe? to the loggorheatic wordblender of I Smell Esther Williams. But Leyner has learned a lot since his early days, and one of the most surprising things about The Tetherballs of Bougainville is how well it flows.

    Indeed, it flows at such a compelling pace that you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself whooping and barking through the whole book in a single sitting. It’s not a recommended way to read the book (you may find your landing back in the real world to be jarring), but it can be done with a disconcerting ease.

    Reviewers beware; it’s nearly impossible to review the book without re-reading lengthy portions of it when looking for specific details. It’s inevitable, so just accept it.

    And it’s a book worth re-reading; the weirdness and density of the humor is such that you’re bound to miss some on the first pass (or blow a mental fuse and have to stop). Highlights include a droll NJSDE brochure, the origin of most modern literature, the description of a three-hour oral sex scene, the artwork used by the young Leyner for auto-gratification and a small SkriptMentor software review. I’m not making any of those up; Leyner is.

    The result, as you may guess, is not only a memorably weird book, but also Leyner’s second-best book. (Hey, I loved Et tu, Babe?) Approachable but uncompromisingly weird, The Tetherballs of Bougainville is exactly the type of book you want to share with everyone around, not only to make them read something great, but most amusingly to see the reactions of those who just won’t get it.

  • The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, Peter F. Hamilton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Aspect, 1997-2000, ???? pages, C$??.?? mmpb, ISBN Various

    A Second Chance at Eden, 1997, 420 pages
    The Reality Dysfunction, Part 1: Emergence    , 1996, 586 pages
    The Reality Dysfunction, Part 2: Expansion    , 1996, 572 pages
    The Neutronium Alchemist, Part 1: Conflict    , 580 pages
    The Neutronium Alchemist, Part 2: Consolidation    , 596 pages
    The Naked God, Part 1: Flight    , 2000, 778 pages
    The Naked God, Part 2: Faith    , 2000, 778 pages

    Six books. 4000+ pages. A cast of hundreds. Techno-jargon. The Dead coming back to life. Oh no, the Night’s Dawn trilogy isn’t for sissies. Even reasonably fast readers such as myself basically have to plan ahead for a month’s worth of reading time in order to get through it all. Is it all worth it? Absolutely.

    I mean, let’s face it: In its quest for literary legitimacy and critical consideration, Science-Fiction has indeed become a more respectable literature with poignant characters, enjoyable prose and complex plotting. Unfortunately, along the way we seemed to lose the very thing that had initially attracted us to the genre: Big ideas, high adventure and stakes that made the galaxy look small. Sure, pulp SF space opera was fast, cheap and out of literary control, but at least it was a blast. Why wouldn’t it be possible to use the new facets of SF and stuff them with some of that old space-opera fun?

    I’m not sure if that’s what Peter F. Hamilton intended when he sat down to write the Night’s Dawn trilogy, but the woozy cozy feeling of grandiose fun is what I’m keeping in mind after completing the trilogy. The sheer bulk of the work makes it a reading experience unlike any other.

    It begins laboriously, of course. You can’t just rush into a brand-new interstellar universe in a hapzard fashion, and Hamilton is careful in establishing the various threads of the story. Be careful, however, in assuming that initially important characters will remain so. Indeed, one of the most enjoyable scenes in the whole trilogy is seeing one sympathetic but over-abused character simply say “That’s it! I did my job and now I quit!” then disappear from the rest of the story.

    In a relatively short time (that would only be 600 pages, mind you), the fascinating framework of Hamilton’s universe and the most important characters are established. That’s crucial, given that these very same characters form the bulk of the Night Dawn trilogy’s continued appeal. Whether we’re with our stalwart hero Joshua Calvert, our innocent rich girl Louise Kavanagh, our delightful Lord of Ruin, our detestable antagonist Quinn Dexter or most of the rest of the hundred-plus dramatis personae, Hamilton makes us care for most of them. (With exceptions; however hard I tried, I couldn’t get interested in any of the Hippie-Possessed characters or the Valisk habitat.) In any case, don’t be worried about the size of the cast; they’re introduced in a very organic fashion, sometime so smoothly that you only later realize how important some bit-players eventually become.

    Indeed, it’s hard not to be impressed by how smoothly Hamilton sets up his various players, whether he’s introducing characters or explaining the political complexities between the various empires that interact in his universe. Some of the best moments in the trilogy are in fact alliances shifts and other spectaculars that depend almost exclusively on the various forces that Hamilton himself sets up. We’re not talking chamber drama; we’re talking massive space battles, planets disappearing, the dead returning to life and stars exploding.

    Sounds juvenile? Don’t be so sure. While pulp space-opera often read like the scribblings of a bright overenthusiastic teenager, Hamilton comes to the genre with an approach that benefits from decades of increasing genre maturity. He brings to the story a sheen of complexity and sophistication, both technical and emotional: The systems he describes are all-too fallible and interdependent, the psychology of the characters is multi-layered and never quite predictable. (Though the caricatural pure evil of Quinn Dexter does get tiresome after a while) This is a space-opera from the nineties, and the easy simplistic solutions of earlier decades don’t work. (Well, shouldn’t work: The conclusion of the trilogy is deus ex machina, but not unsatisfying so. There is considerable progress made on all fronts by this point in the story, and the characters are allowed to resolve their conflicts by themselves.)

    You can’t expect a 4000+ pages story to be simple, and indeed the plotting can get hilariously convoluted at times, though never quite unbelievable. Such a large story-space allows Hamilton to cover a lot of thematic ground, so don’t be surprised to go from horror to romance to action to contemplation in a short time. Surprisingly enough, Hamilton is able to juggle all the balls at once and seldom strikes a false note.

    Best of all for a series of this size is the impression that it’s compulsively readable. Not only are characters compelling in themselves, but Hamilton has polished his prose until it can be read seamlessly, and with enough repeating information to keep everyone up-to-date even though they’re not paying enough attention. It’s bad enough to split a series in six thick books; it would be unbearable to make the reader fight his way through it.

    But no fighting here; once the initial volume is read, the rest is smooth sailing, with occasional pauses for whooping when the heroes make another nick-of-time escape. Indeed, Hamilton’s Confederation is like an onion whose layers a peeled away as we progress in the story. Human and alien historical conspiracies are revealed even as a full intergalactic war is in full progress and the very metaphysical nature of the universe is explained. It’s a heady trip, well worth the investment. (Though I’m still not sure that all the pieces -with a particular emphasis on the “ghosts”- fit together.)

    Two other books form a loose addition to the Night’s Dawn Trilogy. While I haven’t yet bought The Confederation Handbook, a “non-fiction” look at the universe created by Hamilton for the series (too expensive in British import), I can give a marginal recommendation to his related short story collection A Second Chance at Eden. Bringing together seven stories set before the start of the trilogy, A Second Chance at Eden helps to flesh out some events mentioned as background in the other six books. Most notable are the title novella, a murder mystery incidentally describing the events leading up to the foundation of Edenism, and “Escape Route”, which features Joshua Calvert’s father in an unrelated but enjoyable “empty alien ship” adventure. (That last novella is hilariously spoiled in The Naked God). I also liked “Sonnie’s Edge” and “The Lives and Loves of Tiarella Rosa”, but couldn’t muster any interest for the other three stories. Your mileage may vary. You may read the collection before starting the trilogy, though be warned that the trilogy is generally easier to read.

    Being someone who naturally avoids long series, I was unaware of how deeply you could invest yourself in a multi-volume
    story. How the various character threads cross each other in delightful coincidences. How you could really get to care about them through countless adventures. How deeply you could establish a universe. How just darn good it is to lose myself in a story for weeks at a time, rather than read in a day or two and throw back the book on my shelves. A great feeling, and I didn’t even have to pick up a fat fantasy trilogy.

    In short, the Night’s Dawn trilogy gets a strong seal of approval from the offices of this reviewer, through an unbeatable combination of readability, imagination, complexity, respect for the audience and some wonderful characters. Sure, it’ll take a while before you’re done reading, but trust me. It’s all worth it.

  • The Alienist, Caleb Carr

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1994, 599 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-57299-7

    These days, it seems that everyone loves a good serial killer thriller. A criminal type ideally suited to the needs of fiction (ie; “he has killed before… and will kill again until our heroes stop him!”), the rise in dramatic popularity of the serial killer can also find its roots in the rise of real-world cases of such criminals. While it would be foolish to maintain that the serial killer is a wholly modern creation, it does seems as if the late twentieth-century has been a breeding ground for them. You can most probably name half a dozen off the top of your head without breaking a sweat.

    You could blame many factors for this recrudescence (I’m arguing for easier transportation, media coverage, broken families and MTV myself) but the problem has become so relatively commonplace that modern police science now features a special area of expertise called “profiling”. You can read John Douglas’s Journey into Darkness for details, but profiling codifies all that’s been learned from past experience with criminal behavior and tries to fit this knowledge with known details from repeat offenders in the hope to learn about the criminal and predict his actions.

    Profiling as an accurate tool only took off in the 1970s, but criminals have been with us far longer. It only takes a little imagination to wonder when was the earliest time we could have conceived of profiling and applied it to a serial murderer. That’s essentially what Caleb Carr does in The Alienist, taking us to 1896 New York City.

    Our narrator is John Moore, a journalist dragged more or less willingly in the hunt for a child murderer. The main character, however, is someone else; Laszlo Kreizler, a gifted alienist (psychologist) who, well in advance of his time, is making headway on the science of profiling.

    The book is quick to hook us by an efficient introduction to the crimes and the team of investigators that will track down the perpetrator. (Including the requisite proto-feminist tough-girl character just so to acknowledge political correctness) New York City is a fascinating place, today or a hundred years ago, and Carr’s skill at representing the pre-skyscraper city without pedantry is one of his most laudable accomplishments.

    This is not a novel that will put you to sleep. Despite the historical setting, Carr is deliciously modern in his pacing, and compelling scenes flash by at a fast clip. One annoyance, though; Carr loves cliffhanger chapter endings, so don’t plan on reading “just another chapter”, because the changes are that you’ll just keep going. Which, depending on whether you have to wake up early the following morning, might not be a bad thing.

    I had the chance to curse my lack of knowledge of historical America once more while reading The Alienist, because even though the book is perfectly understandable without a history degree, there are a fair number of celebrity cameos (J.P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, etc…) that hint at a superior level of enjoyment for gaslight period buffs.

    But don’t worry; the only requirement to relish The Alienist is a love of good thrillers. Avid readers of crime fiction will get an extra kick of reading about the protagonists’ effort at developing proto-profiling decades before the actual event. There is an undeniable intellectual appeal to witness the investigators pieces together clues and obscure reference to eventually come at a correct answer, even if the “poor abused killer” shtick isn’t new, even a hundred years ago. It’s also a bit of a letdown when the resolution is enacted in a violent Hollywoodish manner, but that, of course, is hardly the point of the book.

    It’s hard to oversell Caleb Carr’s The Alienist. Not only does it succeed on a conceptual level, giving us an original premise and an ambitious scope, but it also gets the more mundane elements correctly; the scenes, characters and the writing keeps our interest. Perhaps more successful as the sum of its parts than a die-hard crime thriller or social history, but still: Grrreat book; don’t miss it.

  • Plum Island, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1997, 574 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60540-9

    Hey, guess what, constant reader? It’s summer. Uncovered sun, oppressive humidity, TV reruns… Like most winter-hardened Canadians, I suddenly feel the need to stop all activities, sit in the shade and work really hard at doing absolutely nothing. As there is a definite limit to the number of hours you can cat-nap -believe it or not- it’s always a good idea to keep a good seat-of-your-pants thriller to fill in the rest of the day.

    Chances are that you won’t be able to find much better than Nelson DeMille’s Plum Island in the summer-reading category. A big fat thriller mixing tension with smart-ass narration, this is one book that will keep you interested through it all without necessarily requiring excessive amounts of concentration. Just perfect for your summer-addled mind.

    Plum Island isn’t as much about a story as it’s about a character, our wisecracking narrator John Corey. Appropriately enough for a summer read, our novel begins with its hero in semi-vacation, actually on disability leave after a serious three-bullet incident in New York City. Temporarily relocated on the eastern edge of Long Island, Corey is, in theory, free to read as many fat thrillers as he’d want to.

    That is, if two people he knew didn’t have the misfortune to get killed in what initially seems to be a messy robbery. It’s not, of course, and as Corey digs deeper in the case, he discovers small-town scandals and suddenly has a lot to learn about pirate treasures and biological warfare. Limping and annoying his way to a solution, Corey even gets to sleep with two women and shoot a few people. All very satisfying. Or sign that you went from drowsy from dreaming in your lawn chair.

    At 550+ pages, Plum Island might have felt considerably longer if it wasn’t for Demille’s narration. John Corey is true-blue NYPD cop, with an extra dash of wittiness. His eye for detail and odd observation really help at giving life to the novel, and that’s not even mentioning the dialogue. Expect to laugh out loud a few times: Fortunately for us, Corey doesn’t like everyone he meets, and it’s invariably more fun to see the fireworks between our fearless protagonist and his least favorite characters.

    The thriller mechanics are as efficient as they can be from a writer with nearly a dozen other thrillers to his name. The slow accumulation of clues is steady, and even the red herring scenes are efficient, such as the memorable visit to a biological research center. A professional product from beginning to end.

    Still, there are lengths. They get worse as the sneering humor evaporates, more characters die and suddenly, we’re in straight no-joke thriller with man-against-man, man-against-nature and man-against-himself life-and-death conflicts. The last hundred pages stretch beyond reasonable length and even the most indulgent summer readers might feel a few faint touches of exasperation.

    But hey, guess what? Doesn’t matter. As you lie down, sweltering in thirty-degree heat, you’ll feel grateful for yet more time spent with John Corey in the cold, humid, windy shores of Long Island. There’s plenty in Plum Island to keep even the most demanding summer reader interested. Forget your bookmark and pick up your sun-tan lotion, because you’re going to be reading for a while.

  • Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA, Peter Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1994, 286 pages, C$27.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-51786-0

    I must confess that I have often thought about writing a book about my first (and so far only) university degree. Mostly while undergoing said degree, usually whenever I was stuck in my room studying for yet another mind-crushing exam. By the end of the program, I even had a dramatic arc of sort with an happy ending; the story of a young man bouncing back from a humiliating first year, going from academic probation to a cum laude B.Sc. The idea shelved itself a few months after graduation, as I was struggling with the wonderful work of steady employment; I suspected that my story wasn’t at all very compelling. Tales of love triangles, demonic teachers, transient friendships, Jolt-fuelled all-nighters, razor-thin academic close calls, cryogenic winter mornings and the discovery of the Internet must be nearly universal amongst Computer Science students; what else could I bring to the common mind pool? By showing me what a truly gifted writer could do with such things, Peter Robinson’s Snapshots from Hell took me back -screaming and shouting- to my university days of not-so-long ago and made me think again about my own experience there.

    Few other academic acronyms mean more than MBA. In theory, these three letters are associated with analytical skills, business acumen and financial success. Get an MBA, says common wisdom, and you can start your business, become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and conquer the world. But the actually process of getting an MBA isn’t quite as well known. Granted, we assume it must include some studying and some class time, but what else, exactly?

    Peter Robinson was the right person at the right time to take us inside an MBA program. Having quit his job as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, Robinson moved across the country to Stanford and began his business training. Unlike many of his classmates, Robinson was more familiar with words than numbers; as a “poet”, he’d have to mold his mind to the mathematical exactitude required of him after years of Washington double-answers.

    But that also put him in an ideal position to report on what he saw. Given his gift for clear writing, this is invaluable to us readers; Robinson can be wickedly funny, observant or analytical, and we can not only follow, but also understand his experience.

    Snapshots from Hell mostly covers Robinson’s first year at Stanford. Given my personal experience, I can agree with this choice; first year is tough on anyone and anyone not destroyed by the experience can only come out of it stronger. Robinson suffered -and his narrative describes his pain-, but he eventually won out. By the second year, he was used to it. Still, it’s a small stroke of genius to name the three sections of the book “Inferno,” “Pugatorio” and “Paradiso (sort of)”

    The writing style is simply wonderful, compulsively readable like a novel and yet filled with details that clearly bring out the lessons to learn from Robinson’s odyssey. Tales of friends dealing with the program are as illuminating as Robinson’s own efforts, allowing a glimpse of the program’s effect on various type of students.

    It’s hard to tell when Robinson’s skill ended and my own personal empathy kicked in, but in any case, I loved Snapshots from Hell. It accomplishes what it sets out to do -tell the world about the perils on an MBA degree- in such a wonderful way that it’s hard not to be enthusiastic about it. It definitely ranks as a must-read for anyone -like me, yes- who’s toying with the idea of getting an MBA some time in the future. Better warned than surprised, right?

  • Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, Mark Leyner

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harmony, 1995, 216 pages, C$26.50 tpb, ISBN 0-517-59384-X

    When reading anything by Mark Leyner, the tagline from the HIGHLANDER film series come to mind: There can only be one. You might try to find similar authors, but even a carefully-blended mix of Thompson, Adams and Stephenson won’t even come close to the pure undiluted Leyner. His mixture of wide-ranging knowledge, go-for-broke recklessness and carefully-honed absurdity easily places him in a special position in modern humor writing.

    Though as of this writing I haven’t yet been able to manage acquiring a copy of Leyner’s breakthrough book My Cousin, my Gastroenterologist, I was first hooked on his follow-up novel, Et Tu, Babe? a hilarious portrait of the writer-as-megalomaniac. Reading this book after so many intensely boring genre novels was like discovering MTV after a decade of Masterpiece Theater. Mainlining with pure caffeine. Adding nitrous oxyde to your morning commute.

    Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog is Leyner’s third book (well, fourth if you include I Smell Esther Williams, about which later.) and while it is in a few ways a let-down after Et Tu, Babe, there’s nothing wrong with an extra dose of pure Leyner.

    Part of the letdown is inevitable, going from the unified (if disjoint) narrative of Et Tu, Babe? to the straight-ahead collection of plays, short stories and gonzo journalism in this follow-up. It’s not that Leyner is best at novels (his longer pieces are really excuses to go from one hilarious vignette to another), but shorter pieces can’t depend on sustained jokes and long build-ups. Blah, whatever; there are still more jokes per square page here than anywhere else.

    The second issue here is that Leyner seemed to have grown up a little. Either that or I’ve become used to his style. Nah. If you take a look at Leyner’s first book, a 1983 collection of pieces entitled I Smell Esther Williams, you’ll find an unrecognizable -and nearly unreadable- Leyner. While each sentence has a kernel of comic effect, they don’t seem to relate to each other in any fashion, and the result is a hyperspeed mish-mash of quasi-epigrams that’s just impossible to read in any fashion. Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog serves to show how much Leyner’s been working on his craft. There are very few incoherent passages (and those who are pass quickly) and Leyner shows that he’s more than able to sustain our interest for longer pieces (the play “Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown” is 80 pages long, and fun from start to finish)

    One amusing note; there appears to be some nonfiction content in Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, if I believe a few interview made by Leyner after the publication of the book. The problem is that they’re not identified, and probably unidentifiable. What I took to be one of the zaniest pieces in the book (“The Good Seed”, about -no kidding- a sperm bank located in the Empire State Building) is in fact a nonfiction piece with some high-octane extrapolation thrown in. Good luck trying to find the rest of the nonfiction, if there’s any more.

    If I’ve succeeded in scaring some of you away from Leyner’s stuff, good; Not everyone can handle his books. It’s not enough to acknowledge that Leyner has no compunction about writing with his fantasy date with Princess Di, insert hard-core pornography in his pieces, recommend bringing your kids to practice extreme sports such as drag racing or committing crimes in order to become more attractive to the opposite sex. You’ve got to embrace his weirdness and make it your own. If the idea of loving, exemplary parents driving their kids to murder somehow strikes you as interesting in any way… well, welcome to the club. You’ll love the required reading material.