Morris and Chastain!

Our books today are Black Magic Woman (Solaris, 2008) and Evil Ways (Solaris, 2009), the first two installments in the ongoing adventures of Quincey Morris and Libby Chastain, two paranormal investigators who face off against ‘black magic’ and the supernatural in all its myriad forms. This will sound like a well-worn premise – fans of The Dresden Files, for instance, will recognize it immediately (they’ll also recognize the book’s covers, which are done by Dresden Files vet Chris McGrath – not to begrudge McGrath any of the five dozen commissions he’s got going at any one point, but if sci-fi/fantasy publishers were occasionally to not use him, their authors might have less of an ‘interchangeable’ factor to fight against). TV shows like The X-Files and Supernatural and True Blood (and their venerable ancestors, including the great Night Stalker and the underrated Kindred) have worked their own magic in creating a genre where more or less ordinary people work side-by-side with the occult world.

In these books, Quincey Morris would be the ordinary person – although he’s anything but ordinary in the ordinary sense of the word, being tough as nails and very cool under pressure (in the wonderful set piece that opens Evil Ways, he takes on an entire clutch of vampires that have infested a small Texas hotel, and you get a visceral sense of how good Morris is in a tight corner – and a sly tip of the hat from Gustainis, whose conceit is that his Morris is a direct descendant of Bram Stoker’s ill-fated Dracula-hunting Quincey Morris). He’s joined by ‘white witch’ Libby Chastain, another distinctly idiosyncratic fictional creation who spends a good deal of her time explaining the difference between her kind of witch and the bad kind (for all the world like nobody in these books had ever seen The Wizard of Oz)(or Bewitched, for that matter):

“White magic derives its power from nature,” Libby told him. “From the four essential elements of earth, air, fire, and water, as well as from the sun and moon.”

“Is all that a fancy way of saying ‘from God?’” LaRue asked.

Libby thought for a moment. “Well, it can be – although some of us might use other terms, including ‘Goddess.’”

“And if you want to posit God as the source of white magic,” Morris said, “it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where the other side comes from.”

“No, I suppose not,” LaRue said. He looked at Libby Chastain and asked, “Which is the stronger?”

There’s no easy answer to that question, of course (or these would be mighty short books), but you can see the snap and pace of Gustainis’ prose – that prose is the real secret behind these books; most supernatural thrillers (hell, most sci-fi and fantasy just in general) are flatly, horribly written and don’t care if you know it – they figure if they deliver their requisite cargo of blood, guts, and demons, they’ve done their job and should be allowed to collect their paycheck. In this they take their cue from mainstream thriller writers like James Patterson and his ilk, whose books are mere plot-skeletons, delivery devices for climaxes and cheesy one-liners, not really books at all.

Gustainis doesn’t got that route, and as a result, even his book’s throwaway scene-settings are often memorably good:

Not unlike Caesar’s Gaul, all American college towns are divided into three parts. There’s the campus itself, usually a sprawling mass of concrete and brick (except in New England, where its usually wood, ivy, and rot), the jungle (where the students tend to reside and recreate), and the town (where the permanent residents live – usually as far away from the campus and the jungle as they can get).

Another refreshing aspect of these books – let’s hope it stays strong as the series continues – is the depth and complexity given to the non-supernatural side of every investigation, specifically the efforts of the FBI’s behavioral sciences teams out of Quantico, usually headed by recurring character Agent Fenton (whose persistent, completely uncontrolled potty mouth is just about the only false note the author strikes in any of this – you simply won’t find an FBI field agent who talks that way around the general public, but it’s a small point). Gustainis signals at every turn that wants this side of his mostly-paranormal investigations to be both realistic and tautly gripping in its own right, and at one point he does this signaling in the manner most likely to grab the attention of police procedural buffs: he invokes God – i.e. Thomas Harris. Quincey Morris asks if Jack Crawford is still in charge of behavioral sciences for the FBI at Quantico.

He’s told Crawford died of a heart attack a while back. But the fight against crime – natural or otherwise – goes on, and if Will Graham and Clarice Starling aren’t available, Quincey Morris and Libby Chastain will do in a pinch.

Books! a small selection from the pile!

We here at Stevereads are aware that some of you think we spend all our time either arbitrating lovers' spats between Hippolyta and Sebastian, or slapping down Kevin's comic book snobbery, or asking Jeff to explain something. or making smart-aleck remarks about the colossal failure of Beepy's one-woman Broadway play (a musical revue of the novel of Fanny Burney? Oh Beepy! This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you ...).

But such is not entirely the case. As hinted at in the title of our little community here, we do a fair amount of reading.

A suggestion was recently made that we at least mention - and preferrably review - every single book we read. We viewed the suggestion with a certain amount of doubt, since it seems pretty damn masochistic on the part of the suggester.

Our young friend and comrade in intoxication, TS Bacon, has already made himself merry by jibing at the obscurity we sometimes sink into here at Stevereads ('What obscure 16th century guy are you writing about now?' he's been known to waggishly call across the quad). If we were to annotate every book we read, this site would be SWAMPED with obscurity, and we surely don't want THAT.

Just the other day, for instance, we read a wonderful examination of the processes of the plebian voting assemblies of the Roman Republic. Days earlier, we read and very much enjoyed a long, annotated analysis of currency debasement in the reign of Queen Mary. Now we ask you: aside from provoking another sarcastic volley from TS Bacon, what good would it do for such books to be reviewed at length here?

Tedium is not our aim, but let's be honest: we here at Stevereads read deep in history and biography and the classics, just as many of our readers read deep in their own domains. Into what hinterlands of specificity could John lead us all on twentysomething poets, after all? Or Beepy on the complex societies of Guineau Pigs ***? Or Kevin on subatomic birds and beasts and their antics? Or Sebastian on ... well, on Sebastian. And so on.

We here at Stevereads read, for instance, every Star Trek novel that's written. We read every one of the burgeoning (and nauseatingly consistently crappy) line of DC Comics novels, though there's absolutely no reason to. We read at an enormous ground-clearing speed, and this tempts us into byways of both scintillating erudition and pure crapola so often that it wouldn't serve anybody's purpose if we were to dissect every single thing we read.

But that leaves plenty we CAN discuss! SO many books worthy of your consideration! Here are a few:

The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton - this wonderful book is all about recent advances in technology, but the catch is that 'recent technology' handily includes a great many things that feel like they've been around forever.

Edgerton's tone is wonderful - knowing yet wondering, smart without any condescension. It reminded us here at Stevereads of the calm, funny, wonderful voice of James Burke as he narrated the long-lost mini-series 'Connections' (we'd go on at great, detailed length about 'Connections' ... but alas, this isn't 'Stevesees' so it falls outside our jurisdiction)(on a side note, several of you have urged the CREATION of just such a site as 'Stevesees' .... partly because not all of you read nearly as much as you watch stuff, and partly, one assumes, because you just CAN'T GET ENOUGH of my sweet self - so what say the rest of you? That most awesome of all questions is upon you: do you want EVEN MORE Steveblogging in your future, for 2007? We abide by the will of the people)

Likewise there's an unexpected brio in Simon Baker's 'Ancient Rome,' the companion volume to the upcoming BBC documentary. Oh, don't get me wrong: these series are always (almost! almost always! We think, of course, of Ken Burns' magnificent 'The Civil War') imbecilic. They freeze-dry the past and then carve it up into pre-digestible packets and serve it up with hammy music and untrustworthy graphics. They're least-common-denominator history, and usually their book-companions are equally dumb.

But not in this case! Baker's book is smart and fast-paced and might prove very useful to the general reader who wants a good accessible introduction to ancient Rome.

Of course such an introduction will feature the Second Punic War and its epic confrontation between the Romans and Hannibal, and if that name doesn't sound right without 'Lector' added to it, you're probably the target audience for Thomas Harris' latest book, "Hannibal Rising."

Maybe you'll approach the book with the excitement, remembering how you enjoyed the good doctor's three previous appearances. We here at Stevereads thought 'Red Dragon' was an extremely well-done thriller. We liked 'Silence of the Lambs' even more, found it a broader and more beautiful work. And we thought 'Hannibal' was in almost all ways superior to both, a masterfully ambitious book of true wisdom and steep art (except for the wretched, awful, illogical, treacherous conclusion, for which Harris ought to feel ashamed for the rest of his life).

There's virtually nothing of those books in this one. A well-etched scene here, a sharp turn of phrase there, but that's quite all. Everything else in it is thin gruel indeed and often inadvertently funny.

Harris here gives us the origin story of Hannibal Lecter, a noble childhood blighted by the barbarity of the Second World War.

Rich stuff, in potential - but the potential is entirely squandered. Hannibal the child is creepy and homicidal. Hannibal the teenager is creepy and homicidal. No attempt is made to probe what makes young people turn into the older men they become. Indeed, the strangest thing about this book might very well be the utter indifference it shows toward human psychology, the very bread and butter of all the previous books.

No, this just a tale of young Hannibal exacting revenge on the men who, during the war, killed and ate his sister. The revenges take all manner of baroque forms, and then the book ends. There's no life in it at all, and that's not even its biggest mystery.

No, the biggest mystery of this book is why we're still hearing about Hannibal Lecter at all. Oh yes, yes, there's the money being offered to Harris - but dammit, the man WRITES like somebody who values writing over money. Why aren't we reading about NEW characters from him, perhaps characters even more compelling than Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter? Why are we still reading about this one guy?

The book gives no hint of an answer, and for that reason and many others, it's the very first Thomas Harris book that's not worth reading. Let's hope it's the last such. We need all the good writers we can get.

Never, never would we have thought we'd ever have cause to segue to Norman Mailer - of all people - upon mention of 'good writers,' but facts must be faced.

And the fact confronting us here is this: at the end of his life, in his 80th year, after having mis-fired more often than black market Canadian fireworks, Norman Mailer has written a great book.

It's achievement enough to write one - all who write yearn to do so, and ninety-nine percent fail. The tiny fraction who succeed almost always succeed only once.

Mailer succeeded twice - first with 'The Naked and the Dead,' and then with 'The Executioner's Song' - and the law of diminishing returns demands that's enough. The same law certainly says no writer is going to hit the top of his game after the age of 60, much less 70. 80 is beyond the pale, and yet here is 'The Castle in the Forest.'

This is a mighty work, quietly so. It's a garrulous (this was unavoidable), wise, questioning, extremely detailed, historically acute, and dauntingly eloquent book, exactly the KIND of book so often written by a striving 23-year-old.

It's nothing short of miraculous that it's written by our Norman Mailer, in the 8th decade of his life.

But perhaps it's understandable, that fire should be struck from such an old flint. Not only is Mailer old enough to feel the ultimate motivating force of any writer (my voice is to be heard no more? MY voice? No! It must not be!), but in 'The Castle in the Forest' he's writing to his singular strength.

Mailer has always been a writer of ultimates. He's sought for them, for some clear and clean vindication of writing at all - the unspoken yearning of the so-called 'greatest generation' for .... well, for validation, though they (nor their subsequent advocates) would adamantly deny it.

Here Mailer takes on not God (he's tried that, disasterously) nor Jesus (he's tried that too, with results even more embarrassing than those achieved by his erstwhile sparring-partner Gore Vidal) nor even Hitler (though he's the heart and soul of the book) but Satan himself, Satan and the whole problem of evil in the world.

These are questions best fit for old men of fierce intellect, but I'd have been the last person on Earth to nominate Mailer - vain, posturing, misfiring Mailer - to that cast, until this book. Until this book, I'd have said there's no more reason for reading Mailer.

And lots of reason for reading Pynchon, but there's the rub: After a similar period of silence, both our lions have whelped betimes, and their offsprings will groan the bookstore tables side by side.

But Pynchon's huge book is a false-born monstrosity compared to this thing from Mailer, fierce and long and endlessly, angrily justifying its own length and complexity.

This is a book of an extremely young man. And so, the least likely words in the whole world: God bless you, Norman Mailer. This book took long, long brutal hours to write (at an age when most other men seek only rest), and it instructs and often scintillates. So we here at Stevereads undertake a re-consideration of Mailer's entire corpus, which is a mighty burden this late in the year.

And we can continue on an equally positive note: Philippa Gregory's sequel to her bestselling and intensely enthralling 'The Other Boleyn Girl,' 'The Boleyn Inheritance' is every bit as good as the original, a stunning, wonderful reading experience.

As some of you may know, we here at Stevereads have not only read widely in Tudor fiction but also dipped our own oar into those turbulent waters. We can say with some authority: it's monstrous horrible hard, to write historical fiction in that particular time period. Everybody knew everybody, everybody intermarried with everybody, and everybody with a little money had three or four titles, and used any one of those titles as NAMES, on a randomly-rotating basis. Keeping it all straight was a burden even while LIVING through it. For the historical novelist, it's a minefield almost impossible to traverse.

Gregory pulls it off luminously. 'The Boleyn Inheritance,' the story of the largely unfortunate women who succeeded Anne Boleyn as Henry's queen, is a damn fine job. It will please the most exacting Tudor scholar, and like its predecessor, it will equally please someone completely ignorant of the period. One of the delights of 'The Other Boleyn Girl' was watching it WIN OVER people who never saw themselves reading 500-page historical novels. It's our pleasure to report that the sequel also has this magic about it.

So there you have it! A small nosegay of new, accessible books about non-obscure subjects! I'd go on longer, but I think I hear a ruckus in the comments field - I must go and see who's pulling whose pigtails ...