Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines

First published in 2010; republished by Broadway Books on February 26, 2013

Ex-Heroes was originally published in 2010 by Permuted Press, an independent publisher specializing in zombie apocalypse fiction. The novel developed something of a cult following, leading to its republication by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, which is a subsidiary of the world's largest publisher, Random House. That's quite a step up the literary ladder.

In the crowded house of zombie apocalypse novels, Ex-Heroes adds a twist. The apocalypse is set in a universe where superheroes live (with a demon thrown in for good measure). George Bailey was the first superhero, and he's conventional: super strength, bulletproof skin, the ability to fly (or, more accurately, to glide), coughs fire. He called himself the Mighty Dragon, a bit weenie as heroic names go. After the Mighty Dragon appeared, superheroes started to pop up regularly. Gorgon transfixes people with his gaze and steals their strength. Zzzap enters an energy state that makes him sizzle like a sparkler. Cerberus is your basic armored warrior, a female Iron Man. Beauty pageant winner Stealth is a heavily armed version of The Batman. Cairax is a demon with questionable judgment. Banzai is a female Jackie Chan. Midknight does something with an EMP field. I never quite figured out what Lady Bee is all about.

The zombies (known as exes, for ex-humans, because it isn't politically correct to call them zombies) control Los Angeles. The superheroes protect the apocalypse survivors, who take refuge in a Hollywood movie studio. Some superheroes die fighting zombies. Some become zombies. Josh Garcetti, once known as the Regenerator, lost his ability to heal others at the start of the apocalypse. This forces him to do his doctoring the old fashioned way, but he's nonetheless integral to the story.

When the superheroes aren't fighting zombies, they're battling the Seventeens (a gang of bad guys) and the Boss of Los Angeles. Things go from bad to worse when zombies appear who seem to have retained their intelligence, allied (of course) with the Seventeens. As one of the heroes observes, "just when you thought the walking dead couldn't get any creepier," they do.

Peter Clines writes in a breezy style that lends itself to a fast pace and nonstop action. Yet Clines mixes action with emotion, never forgetting that stories are about characters, not just the things characters do. For a zombie apocalypse novel, the writing is impressively intelligent. Clines even supplies an explanation for the zombie apocalypse, and it's credible ... at least, it's credible if you accept the premise of superheroes. And zombies. And demons.

Clines' sense of humor assures that the story doesn't take itself too seriously. The way the studio's guards brag about the celebrity zombies they've killed, and compete for the biggest celebrity, is hilarious (they consider zombie Alex Trebek to be a huge score). It's necessary to overlook some gaps in logic and the absence of explanation for certain things that happen during the course of the story, but that's acceptable in a novel that isn't logic-based.

As you'd expect in a superhero story, there are superhero clichés, including George's moral reservations about killing evil people (the ones who aren't already dead) because that's what separates the good guys from the bad. In a story that depends on action and humor, however, clichés aren't terribly disturbing. In fact, George's idealism -- a throwback to the early versions of DC's heroes, before they became dark and gloomy and self-loathing -- is refreshing. It is without irony that George comes to be known as St. George. The return to idealism was one reason I enjoyed Ex-Heroes, despite my general befuddlement about the ever-expanding zombie apocalypse phenomenon.

RECOMMENDED

The Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian

Published by Viking on February 21, 2013 

Although the protagonist of The Office of Mercy is twenty-four, the writing style, themes, and plot are characteristic of Young Adult fiction. That's neither good nor bad, in my view, but it surprised me since the novel doesn't seem to be marketed as YA. (In that regard, the promotional comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro are unwarranted, although Suzanne Collins is more apt.)

Natasha Wiley works for the Office of Mercy, stationed in a wing attached to the Dome atop the underground settlement known as America-Five. The settlement is dedicated to "World Peace, Eternal Life, and All Suffering Ended," at least for those residing within its walls. Outside the utopian settlement live the (supposedly) starving and disease-ridden Tribespeople. Natasha's job is to monitor the nomadic Tribespeople who come within fifty miles of America-Five, using an array of cameras and sensors. Killing them (preferably with missile strikes) is the work of her colleagues in the Office of Mercy.

The Alphas, the generation that orchestrated the Storm (a genocidal extermination of nearly everyone not living underground), have the status of gods within the settlement. Why and how the Storm happened, and how the Alphas managed to convert underground bunkers into settlements, are largely unanswered questions, despite a cursory discussion of a failed past that seems to have been based on Marxism. In any event, Natasha is part of generation Epsilon; Jeffrey, her immediate supervisor (and romantic interest), is a Gamma. For reasons that are never adequately explained, new generations are grown on a schedule created by the Office of Reproduction. Cell replacement has all but conquered death while other technological advances assure an ample food supply for the settlement's inhabitants.

Like the other underground settlements, America-Five is governed by the Ethical Code, a book that has supplanted the Bible. Over the course of the novel, without the expository information dump that is prevalent in dystopian fiction, we learn how people like Natasha have been trained to think: their disdain for nature's beauty, their need to guard against empathy, their belief that those who live outside the Dome are not people but animals enduring hollow lives of suffering. As is common in dystopian novels, those who stray from correct thoughts are subjected to coercive "reeducation."

The novel's initial phases seem to set it on a predictable path, as Natasha struggles to cope with her hidden and forbidden doubts about the Ethical Code, particularly its insistence that, for the Tribespeople, death is better than pain. Like the plot, Natasha's immaturity, her insecurity about her abilities and her anxiety about whether Jeffrey reciprocates her romantic feelings, reminded me of YA fiction. Natasha's starry-eyed approach to Jeffrey is more indicative of a fourteen-year-old girl than a twenty-four-year old woman.

Midway through the book, a contrived plot twist that forces Natasha to redefine herself while forcing the reader to sympathize with Jeffrey left me rolling my eyes. Natasha's naiveté when dealing with the Tribespeople is flabbergasting. When the story reached a climactic moment that inexplicably shocks Natasha, I was muttering, "Well, what did you think was going to happen?"

Only the final chapter saves The Office of Mercy from mediocrity and predictability. For much of the novel, I thought the story would be about Natasha's moral growth, the story of a young woman in an insular society learning to think for herself. She seemed to be learning simplistic lessons like "killing the innocent is bad" and "empathy is good." In an unexpected twist, the story turns out to be something quite different. If The Office of Mercy is meant to teach a lesson -- and I think it is -- the teacher isn't Natasha at all, and the lesson is refreshingly ambiguous. I'm not sure every reader will appreciate the bleakness and uncertainty of the novel's last chapter, but I admired Ariel Djanikian's courage in telling a dystopian tale that has a dystopian ending. Perhaps that's why the novel isn't classified as YA when everything else about it, from the unchallenging writing style to the relatively unsophisticated characters, screams YA. In the end, I would recommend this to young adults (and, with some reservations, to older readers as well) just for its unconventional take on dystopian fiction.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed

Published by Bloomsbury USA on February 12, 2013 

Little Known Facts is a character-driven novel, of interest primarily for its structure. The focus is on past and present members of a family, one of whom is a famous actor named Renn Ivins. He has a son named Will and a daughter named Anna. Their mother, Lucy, is a pediatrician and Renn's first ex-wife. His second ex-wife, Melinda, has the novel's most distinctive voice. The chapters (some written in the first person, others in third person) provide differing perspectives of the family members.

Renn's son sets the stage. The less photogenic Will has always been a bit aimless, lost in his father's shadow. He might go to law school, might not. He doesn't need to work and shows little ambition to do so, but he doesn't want people to think of him as living off his father's wealth -- which he is. He worries (with good reason) that his girlfriend is with him only because his father is a celebrity.

We then hear from Lucy, who met Renn in college and, fifteen years after their divorce, can't get past her lingering bitterness about Will's infidelity. Fortunately, her resentment does not make her unlikable. Her honesty serves to humanize her, to gain the reader's empathy, as does her disappointment with, and concern for, Will.  Melinda resolves her own issues with Renn by writing a tell-all book, some of which turns up in the novel. At least superficially, Anna is the most well-adjusted character -- she's succeeding in medical school -- notwithstanding her interest in a married doctor.

We learn about Renn not just from his ex-wives and children but from an autobiography he's writing. Christine Sneed adds additional perspectives on Renn in a fairly inconsequential chapter written from a propmaster's point of view, a man who comes across as a harmless stalker, and in a chapter devoted to Elise, the young actress who the latest object of Renn's affections. Elise's perspective also encourages the reader to see Will in a different light.

The depth of the characters and the quality of Sneed's prose kept me reading Little Known Facts, but I can't say that the story is engrossing or even particularly noteworthy. The first third of the novel is interesting but uneventful. A moment of family drama is revealed near the midway point, another about two-thirds of the way in, and another near the end, but this isn't a plot-driven novel. It's a novel about people's lives, how they perceive themselves, and how they are perceived by others. Little Known Facts could have gone in the direction of Hollywood soap opera and melodrama -- it certainly has the plot elements that are associated with a cheesy soap -- but whenever it leans in that direction, Sneed uses the conflict to present perceptive views of troubled personalities.

With so many different characters commenting upon each other, the reader has the opportunity to sift through the perspectives, to draw conclusions about where the truth lies when opinions differ. Is Renn shallow and vain or is he worldly and caring? Some of the characters have a more flattering view of themselves than is held by those who know them, while other characters judge themselves more harshly than they are judged. Most of the characters suffer from at least a degree of hypocrisy. Little Known Facts reminds us that we rarely see ourselves in the way others see us, and that no two people see us in the same way.

RECOMMENDED

Ghostman by Roger Hobbs

Published by Knopf on February 12, 2013 

A ghostman is an imposter, someone who can make himself (or other criminals) disappear by changing appearance or identity. The titular ghostman lives by a motto he found in The Aaeneid: "If you can't reach heaven, raise hell." That pretty much sums up what you need to know about Ghostman: the protagonist is an intellectual who raises a lot of hell.

Ghostman starts with the theft of more than a million dollars from an armored car. The robbery turns into a bloodbath that leaves one of the two thieves dead at the scene. This concerns Marcus Hayes, who planned the robbery, because he's in a fatal predicament if he doesn't recover the loot. Hayes turns to Jack Delton -- the ghostman -- for help because Delton (not his real name, but it's the alias we're given) owes Hayes a debt for reasons that are explained in a series of flashbacks. It's the kind of debt Delton may have to repay with his life. Delton has to beat a very short clock if he's to save Hayes' life -- and his own.

Delton is soon jetting from Seattle to Atlantic City in search of Jerome Ribbons, the robber who seems to have disappeared with the stolen money. His search brings him into contact with a dangerous man known as the Wolf -- even more dangerous than Marcus. To keep the tension high, Roger Hobbs ends most chapters set in the present with "X hours to go."

The flashback chapters describe an audacious bank robbery in Kuala Lumpur. It's the sort of Ocean's Eleven scheme that pushes the boundary between improbable and ridiculous, but without the fancy gadgetry.

The primary plot -- the battle of wits between Marcus Hayes and the Wolf, with Delton stuck in the middle -- is clever. Apart from an overdone Russian roulette scene (there must be a more original way to show us that the protagonist isn't afraid to die), the story is, for the most part, convincing. I'm a bit skeptical of Delton's ability to take on and defeat thug after thug, usually while armed only with his wits, but the invincible protagonist is commonplace in the world of modern thrillers.

Readers who need to admire the sterling character of a thriller hero should give Ghostman a pass. Delton has only a few redeeming qualities (he doesn't kill people unless he feels it's necessary and he tries to avoid harming women and children) but he is nevertheless an interesting, if not particularly likable, character. He's certainly more likable than Hayes, the Wolf, or the other robbers, making it easy to root for him as the least of many evils.

Hobbs writes lively prose and moves the story forward at a pace that is well suited to a thriller. He fills Ghostman with interesting crime trivia (the safeguards against stealing money that's en route from the U.S. Treasury, the origin of the term "wheelman") without bogging down the story. Other than Delton, however, there isn't much here in the way of character development. This is a plot-and-action novel; it isn't character driven. Fortunately, the plot and action are sufficient to hold a reader's interest. The climax is a bit anti-climactic but the novel as a whole is enjoyable.

RECOMMENDED

Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 5, 2013 

Wash is an examination of slavery -- more specifically, the breeding of slaves as if they were horses -- from a variety of perspectives. Although some of the novel is narrated in the third person, the text is frequently divided into sections that tell the story from an individual character's point of view. Wash (more formally known as Washington) is a slave whose service as a stud is made available to other slave owners. James Richardson owns Wash, having purchased his mother, Mena, when she was pregnant. Mena's story is told by Wash and by Thompson, who leased her from Richardson. Thompson's son, Eli, fleshes out the story of Wash's youth. Pallas, a midwife who works on a neighboring farm, is Wash's lover of choice.

Wash is both a riveting portrait of inhumanity and a life-affirming story about healing. From its vivid description of manacled captives aboard ships to the art of branding the face of a runaway slave, from Pallas' administration of herbs to cure Wash's fever to the mixture of love and spiritualism that restores Pallas after three years of sexual abuse, the novel captures all points along the spectrum of good and evil. The nature of freedom -- freedom of the mind versus freedom of the body -- is one of the book's driving themes. Another is the difficulty of understanding, and the risk of error in judging, a person whose life you have not lived. For Pallas and Wash, and even for Richardson, the novel is a story of survival and growth.

The novel begins near Nashille in 1823, moves back in time to North Carolina, then returns to Tennessee and again moves forward. Richardson, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and a failed general in the War of 1812, is now a farmer, a land developer (he's building a new town called Memphis), and a breeder of slaves. Although he has doubts about the morality of the latter business, Richardson's business partner, Quinn, has convinced him that breeding slaves is a surer way to eliminate his debt than hoping for profitable cotton harvests. Quinn, however, disagrees with Richardson's strategy to breed for intelligence. Quinn thinks slaves should have strong backs and weak minds, the better to foster obedience and discourage insurrection.

Richardson is a multi-dimensional character, a product of his time and upbringing who, nagged by self-doubt, broken by the war, torn by his dependence on slavery, and detached from his family, confides only in Wash. In his senior years, he comes to question all the assumptions upon which he has built his life. Wash is also a deep-grained character, a man locked in a constant struggle to suppress his rage. Pallas comes into focus in the novel's second half. She provides the novel with its moral center. She is both forgiving and understanding: "people didn't mean half the things they did and sometimes, slack was all we had to give each other."

The story is dramatic but the drama is never overdone. Margaret Wrinkle's sentences are like velvet ribbons uncoiling and connecting, textured and luxurious. If her prose has a flaw it is that the voices of her characters are equally eloquent and, for that reason, not particularly distinctive. Wrinkle draws wonderful parallels between horses and slaves: the fierce ones need to be broken, the strongest serve as profitable studs, and some, especially the ones who have been abused, will never be tamed. The horse imagery, Wash's connection and identification with horses, gives the novel some of its best moments, including a memorable ending.

The downside to telling a story from different perspectives is the redundancy it creates. Seeing the same scene from different pairs of eyes gives the reader fresh insights, but a few of the scenes don't alter the perspective enough to warrant the repetition. That's a minor quibble and certainly not one that diminishes my enthusiasm for this fine novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED