The Deep by Nick Cutter

Published by Gallery Books on January 13, 2015

If this is the apocalypse, Luke Nelson thinks, at least it is orderly. People get the Spots, then they get the `Gets, then they wander away with blank minds. Luke's brother Clay, eight miles deep in the ocean near Guam, might have the answer to the phenomenon.

The Deep falls into the "strange entity discovered at the bottom of the ocean" subgenre of horror novels. The entity, nicknamed "ambrosia," has properties unlike any substance known to science. Ambrosia appears to have the curative powers that humanity needs in a time of crisis. Of course, this is a horror novel so the reader knows better, thanks in part to clues that Nick Cutter plants about its true nature. One of those clues is delivered in mysterious messages written in a submarine that returns from Clay's base in the Mariana Trench.

Cutter does a reasonable amount of character building although he sometimes slows the story's pace with flashbacks to Luke's past. Luke carries the scars of a difficult childhood and the guilt of allowing his son to go missing under his care, events that make him wish he would become afflicted with `Gets and forget everything that haunts him. I understand the technique of prolonging tension by cutting away from the present to talk about the past, but Cutter's frequent resort to that device is sometimes frustrating. For the most part, however, Cutter steadily builds a sense of dread, conjuring primal fears and encouraging the reader to share them with Luke.

A few too many scenes tell us about the characters' dreams. That often strikes me as something writers toss into a book to fill pages when they can't think of a creative way to advance the plot. The dreams are relevant here because they are presumably influenced by sinister forces at the bottom of the ocean, but horror-filled dreams seem like a cheap way to fill the pages of a horror novel. The characters' waking fantasies ("did I see/feel/hear that or am I hallucinating?") do a better job of provoking shivers.

But what about the bottom line? Parts of the book (particularly a diary written by one of the scientists on the ocean floor) are decidedly creepy. Parts of the book are at least borderline scary. The plot threads connect in a way that might be difficult to accept, but horror novels demand that disbelief be suspended before opening the book so that did not bother me. The nemesis that threatens Luke and the rest of humankind is formulaic -- in fact, it echoes the nemesis in Cutter's last novel, The Troop -- but Cutter wields the formula deftly.

A passage that describes Luke's work with stray dogs is quite moving. Other parts of the book that attempt to explain characters and their motivations are founded on clichés. But still, the ending -- the explanation for all the horror -- is clever. I like the way it plays with the meaning of evil. This isn't a deep book but, as horror novels go, it is at least slightly better than average.

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A Vision of Fire by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin

Published by Simon & Schuster on October 7, 2014

Like many other geekish guys, I had a thing for Gillian Anderson during her X-Files days -- or more precisely, for Scully, a woman of intellect and understated sexiness who easily made it onto my laminated list of Favorite Fantasies. I feared that her attempt to write fiction might produce another awful clone of Twilight, but as a committed Gillian groupie, I set aside my anxiety and took the literary plunge into A Vision of Fire.

After witnessing an assassination attempt on India’s ambassador to the UN, the ambassador’s daughter, Maanik Pawar, enters a disturbed mental state that includes periodic trancelike states, speaking what seems to be gibberish, and moving her arms in peculiar ways. Dr. Caitlin O’Hara is asked to assist. O’Hara is an adolescent psychiatrist who specializes in solving the problems of children around the world.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, a boy sets fire to himself. In Haiti, a girl is drowning without going near the water. Badly behaving birds and swarming rats also figure into the story. O’Hara’s task is to find the connection between the various events. Her willingness to fly off to Iran and Haiti to do so struck me as unlikely and foolish, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of Gillian Anderson.

The novel’s backdrop is an escalating military conflict between India and Pakistan. O’Hara’s hypersensitive friend, Benjamin Moss, not only persuades O’Hara to intervene with Maanik but is the first person contacted by a UN peacekeeper when hostilities break out. Those both seem like improbable roles for a UN translator to play -- he’s really in the novel to give O’Hara the opportunity for love or lust -- but again, I suspended by disbelief. (Oh, Gillian, the things you make me do ….)

The novel’s final element concerns the Group, which collects (or steals) artifacts from the southern polar seas. The artifacts come from the distant past, a time of crisis, and as one expects from artifacts in a novel like this, they hold power that endangers the present. That plot thread fizzles out until the end, when it returns to set up the sequel.

The plot of A Vision of Fire is reasonably smart. It has the feel of an average X-Files episode (I attribute that to Gillian). The writing style is smooth (I attribute that to Jeff Rovin). The love interest subplot seems forced but the political background gives the novel some heft. Unfortunately, the story is less suspenseful, less creepy, than I want from this kind of novel. Doing my best to remain uninfluenced by my swoony feelings for Gillian/Scully, I’m giving A Vision of Fire a modest recommendation. I don’t know if I would read the next book in the series without the Scully connection, but as a besotted fan, I’m sure I will.

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The City by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on July 1, 2014

All great cities have a soul. At the age of eight, Jonah Kirk meets a woman who tells him she is the soul of the city made flesh. Jonah calls her Pearl. He introduces the reader to Pearl when, at 57, he starts dictating the book we are reading. Jonah attributes the appearance of new piano in the community center (and thus the beginning of his career in music) to Pearl, whose connection to the supernatural is immediately apparent to the reader, if not to young Jonah.

Despite the supernatural elements that you would expect in a Dean Koontz novel, The City is not the kind of story that Koontz typically tells (a fact that may disappoint Koontz fans). The City is a tale of crime and conspiracy, but I liked it less for its moderately engaging plot than for its cast of fully developed characters. Among other topics, the early chapters of The City recount Jonah's love of his mother and grandparents and his difficult relationship with his (mostly) absentee father. The occasional appearances of Jonah's father build a sense of dread, as do the dreams that sometimes trouble Jonah's sleep. One is about a dead girl named Fiona Cassidy. Another is about Lucas Drackman, who murdered his parents. Not unexpectedly, both figures make threatening appearances in Jonah's life. Perhaps the dreams are prophetic, but prophecies are easily misinterpreted. Still, this is a novel that builds characters more than it builds suspense.

Courage and heroism are among the novel's driving themes. The City reminds us that those qualities are exhibited by ordinary people every day. "And one form of heroism," Koontz writes, "is having the courage to live without bitterness when bitterness seems justified, having the strength to persevere when perseverance seems unlikely to be rewarded, having the resolution to find profound meaning in life when it seems the most meaningless." Courage is, in part, the ability to overcome adversity and fear, but it is also the ability to overcome anger and guilt -- a wise lesson the novel teaches repeatedly.

To an even larger extent, The City is about the power of friendship. When Jonah needs help understanding the evil that has entered his life, he turns to the Japanese-American tailor in his building who has become his friend. The tailor enlists the help of his own friends, who seek help from their friends, and so on, each acting solely from the desire to help a friend. Another key character is Malcolm Pomerantz, a child prodigy with the saxophone who becomes Jonah's lifelong friend at the age of ten. Malcolm is a misfit but his beautiful older sister is the personification of grace and sweetness. She is white, Jonah is black, but (like Malcolm and the tailor and Jonah's grandfather) she does not view race as a barrier to friendship.

A related theme of The City is the power of kindness. Many of Koontz' characters (from neighbors to cab drivers to victims of Japanese internment camps) are exceptionally (perhaps unbelievably) kind. It is a way of life for them to do good and unselfish deeds for others, friends and strangers alike. Kindness, Koontz seems to be saying, is the antidote to evil, even if it cannot shield us from evil acts or tragic events. And if the goodness and generosity of the characters makes them difficult to believe, I think Koontz intended them as archetypes, as models of the people we should all aspire to be.

Koontz establishes the time (mid-1960s) and place with great clarity. The focus, of course, is on historical events that increase the novel's atmosphere of dread: race riots, serial murders, bombings, and other violent episodes contribute to the reader's sense of unease. Balanced against that chaotic environment is chaos of a different sort, expressed by Jonah's love of music, from the jazz standards that his mother and grandparents extoll to the Beatles, Dylan, Motown, and the explosion of artists and musical forms that characterize the time. The City might not appeal to readers searching for a strong, plot-driven narrative, but even if The City told no story at all, it would be a joy to read for its evocation of a tumultuous and musical decade. It is made all the better by the moving moments in the story it tells and by its memorable characters.

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The Troop by Nick Cutter

Published by Gallery Books on February 25, 2014

This is the second tapeworm novel I’ve read in the last few months. As trends go, I doubt that tapeworms are likely to replace zombies, but they are sufficiently creepy and disgusting to lend themselves to thriller/horror novels. The Troop gives the tapeworm theme an interesting spin. The story involves a bunch of boys stranded on an island. It’s sort of like Lord of the Flies … with tapeworms.

Scoutmaster Tim Riggs had taken his troop of 14-year-olds to Falstaff Island for a camping trip. They believe they are the only humans on the island until Tim encounters Tom Padgett: a seriously thin man who is driven to eat, constantly and insatiably. And he’ll eat anything. Tim, a doctor, is disturbed to notice that something seems to be moving under the man’s skin. He doesn’t know that Padgett (known in the press as The Hungry Man or Typhoid Tom) is “a runaway biological weapon,” the product of an experiment gone wrong. Or maybe it hasn’t.

Fortunately, Boy Scouts know they need to Be Prepared, even for monster tapeworms. The Scouts are a diverse bunch. Three of the five are nice enough, one is a typical alpha pack bully, and the fifth is almost as monstrous as the killer tapeworms. Teachers expect to see Shelley’s “slack and pallid moon-face staring up at them from an oil-change pit at Mr. Lube” but Shelley seems destined for a crueler life.

True horror lies not in external threats but in the darkness that lives within us. True horror is reflected in the way people behave under extreme circumstances and in the extreme behavior of people who have been entrusted with leadership. Nick Cutter occasionally moves away from events on the island to reveal the cause of Padgett’s tapeworm infection and the government’s response to it through a series of journal entries, hearing transcripts, and magazine articles. Those passages remind us that not all monsters are artificially created.

Cutter has a flair for the truly vile, which is what readers generally want in horror fiction. His description of an unorthodox surgical procedure and its aftermath is vivid and intense. Death permeates the novel but the story is ultimately about the tenacity of life. Cutter uses the plot to address difficult moral questions but, in the end, a depressing story is enjoyable because those questions are presented through well drawn characters.

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Lucretia and the Kroons by Victor LaValle

Published by Spiegel & Grau on July 23, 2012

Consider, if you will, Lucretia Gardner. (I begin with these words because I was hearing Rod Serling's narrative voice while I read this novella.) Lucretia lives in Queens. She just turned twelve. She wants to spend time with her best (and only) friend, Sunny, a girl who is dying of cancer. Apartment 6D (according to Lucretia's older brother) is occupied by the remnants of a deformed and rotting family of crack-addicted child snatchers called the Kroons. Are the Kroons the invention of an older brother who wants to scare his sister, or do they exist? Lucretia learns the answer to that question when her mother and brother leave her alone to spend some time with Sunny.

Victor LaValle writes twisted, nontraditional versions of horror stories. His monsters often behave in surprisingly human ways. Despite the monstrous appearance of the Kroons, there's a sweetness to the story and a large dose of gentle humor (including the suggestion that Shea Stadium is actually Heaven). This might be the only story you'll read in which children smoking cigarettes is a good thing.

As LaValle demonstrated in The Devil in Silver, true horror lies not in the supernatural but in the tangible world. In Lucretia and the Kroons -- sort of a longish short story -- it is the horror of childhood cancer, of saying goodbye to a friend who will never grow up. While LaValle achieved a greater degree of poignancy in The Devil in Silver, this story offers another fine balance of creepiness and honest emotion, showcased by characters who are original and sympathetic.

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