Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (34 page)

Phoenix Fire

by Tim O'Laughlin

BodhiDharma, 343 pages, paperback, 1999

Between the covers of this book there lurks a very good novel trying to get out.

A group of friends in California adds to its number retired psychiatrist Larry, who has had a long interest in past-life hypnotic regression. He tries this out on first one and then all the individuals of the group, and they discover it is not accident that has brought them together in this lifetime: they have been friends, spouses, etc., in previous incarnations, notably in Nazi Germany and, before that, as members of a massacred Sioux tribe. They are older companions than they have known. A dramatic manifestation occurs when Larry realizes that in countless previous lifetimes Audrey, who is not part of the group, has been the spouse of Ryan, who is; when the two are introduced they instantly "recognize" and are in love with each other.

In each of their prior lifetimes the group members have been threatened and generally killed by the vindictively hate-filled man called
The One without a Soul
, who has manifested in this lifetime as tycoon Raymond Baker, boss of Amalgamated Insurance, which not only has an atrocious record of failing to settle claims but also functions as an asset-stripping company. For reasons he himself does not fully understand, Baker has just seized the traditional family firm Miller Lumber – renowned for its sensitivity to the environment – in a hostile takeover, and is intent on felling a preserve of old-growth redwoods that the lumber company owns.

Audrey is a stalwart of Project HOPE, a small, volunteer-run conservation organization. It and the other group members set themselves against Baker to save the redwoods and the trees' associated population of rare birds. In this they are aided by group member Gayle's psychic talents and her and Larry's rediscovery, through revisiting their Sioux incarnations, of the ability to spirit walk. Of further assistance is the avatar called Ariel, currently a purely spiritual being but soon to be incarnated – unless Baker is victorious – as the female expression of the Divinity, set to reverse the long dominance of the world by the male principle and thereby to attain a harmonic balance.

Got that?

But Baker has his own supernatural weapons, and these increase in both number and strength as he begins to recall his own previous incarnations, right back to when, sometime in the Golden Age where generic fantasy stories happen, he was apprentice to an unwilling sorcerer, whom he murdered for the last word of a Spell Too Terrible To Use. One such weapon is the ability to wrest a person's soul from their body and cast it into a limbo from which it can be recovered only by the power of Love and through Larry's spirit-walking facility. More often Baker relies on orthodox methods – such as hired assassins – to get rid of his foes. But, for the ones he has come to recognize as his enemies through many lifetimes, he sadistically anticipates using his full gamut of magical nastiness, including the Spell Too Terrible To Use – which has the additional advantage that it will throw the entire universe out of kilter and create misery on a correspondingly enormous scale.

What seems at first like merely yet another skirmish between voracious Big Business and the conservationists thus evolves, unknown to anyone but the participants, into a truly cosmic struggle ...

Phoenix Fire
reads rather as if it were the (hypothetical) unpublished first novel by Charles de Lint, an impression reinforced by a de Lint strapline ("A Promising Debut From A New Author Worth Watching!") on the back cover and a hefty plug for him in the text. Comparison of an author's work with early de Lint is, however, something of a double-edged compliment, because
Phoenix Fire
shares not just the virtues but also the flaws of that writer's early work.

There is the attitude towards folk and derived-from-folk music, which is regarded as a lifeblood by some of our heroes and at the very least adored by all the rest; the notion that some perfectly good and reasonable, law-abiding people of great musical sensitivity might have tried folk music and not liked it much is obviously not one that has crossed the author's mind. The text is liberally sprinkled with his own (I assume) and other songwriters' lyrics; here O'Laughlin deserves great credit because – whatever their merits – the original-to-the-book song lyrics actually read like
song lyrics
rather than, as in most fantasy novels, mere written verses. Nevertheless, because of O'Laughlin's hammering away at the theme of how utterly marvellous music of the folk tradition is, by the time one's halfway through the novel one has begun to regard attendance at one of our heroes' regular jam sessions as something approaching purgatory.

Far more irritating than this is that, as in early de Lint but taken to the
n
th degree, our heroes are so thoroughly and unbearably
nice
. You
itch
for one of them to have a temper tantrum, light up a joint, kick an old lady, fart at a funeral ... anything
at all
by way of a bad habit or human weakness (unless you count the obsession with folk music). In any real-life group of people mounting a campaign that demands huge effort and sacrifice there would be constant arguments and quarrels, but not among this bunch; whenever one of them does anything that with hindsight proves to have been unwise, instead of the usual bitchy recriminations that characterize real life enterprises there's an instant rallying round of all the rest to tell the individual concerned that it wasn't her/his fault. Any mild differences of opinion that might occur are immediately resolved through use of the kind of cutesy dialogue that has one reflexively reaching for a brown paper bag.

By contrast, all the bad guys are irremediably nasty, which is lazy characterization but more acceptable because it's pretty conventional. Still, one balks a bit to discover that two symptoms of Baker's vileness are that he – ooooo – smokes and – ahhhhh – drinks spirits. The only one of our heroes who smokes is able to give it up Just Like That in an early chapter, after her first hypnotic regression. The only one who ever hit the bottle a bit did so only in the bad old days and has now successfully reformed. Nowadays they're all clean-living, right-thinking, health-loving folk with hobbies like mountain-bike riding (and, of course, folk music).

Their company becomes suffocating after a while – one can take only so much piety. The same goes for the expository passages that herald Love as the cure for all the world's – indeed, the universe's – ills. It is obviously terribly hard for O'Laughlin to restrain himself from descending into preachiness on the issues that are important to him. Here is Larry in philosophical mode:

Take physical appearance for example. What's the
real
value of good looks in one lifetime? Good looks, especially the kind of "good looks" that television and magazines tell us are so important, last for only a few short years. Compared to an eternity, what's the value of having unwrinkled skin for a few additional years? [...] You and the others at Project HOPE, on the other hand, are working toward things that are really important. Personally, I believe that the people who devote their time or money to organizations like Project HOPE, or who are otherwise concerned about ecology and environmentalism have more advanced souls.

Fortunately
Phoenix Fire
is a strong enough novel that it manages to survive the heroes' unbearable niceness of being and the preachiness and the Lurve and all the rest (including the folk music). None of these are fatal flaws, although they are serious enough that any competent editor would have guided O'Laughlin in their avoidance. This book, however, screams at the reader that it hasn't been edited.

Or copy-edited. In the short passage cited above at least two obligatory commas are missing, while the quasi-repetition of other/others/otherwise grates. Throughout the book there are probably on average at least four or five instances
per page
where a copy-editor's pencil would have dipped – not to make major changes, but merely to correct trivial grammatical (and some spelling) errors, inconsistencies of usage and minor stylistic carelessnesses. For example:

Larry took the turn-off for Highway 128 at the north end of town, where The Hamburger Ranch, site of Adam's and Michael's clandestine meetings with John Smith had taken place [...]

There are countless other instances. In the same category – stuff that should have been picked up by an editor or copy-editor – there's the fact that a very minor character is called Doug. Nothing exceptionable in that, you might think, except that one of the
central
characters is also called Doug. The page or two where Minor Doug is on-stage is a time of great confusion for the reader: "Hang on a minute! I thought Doug was still in hospital or something ..."

A slightly more major difficulty, but again one that could have been cured by elementary editing, is that, in order for the powerful spirit Ariel not simply to grab the plot by its lapels and swiftly make Good triumph, she can act only within certain rules. That these rules are never comprehensively stated lends a sense of arbitrariness to all of Ariel's interventions in the plot; more seriously, the only explanation Ariel can give for these rules' very existence involves painting the Divinity as a callous, heartless gamester – which is certainly not the author's intention but, rather, something he has trapped himself into.

I have spent a lot of time focusing on
Phoenix Fire
's defects, but, as noted, it
is
a strong piece of writing, and O'Laughlin is certainly one to watch out for in the future. For all its legion minor imperfections and several somewhat more major irritations, this long novel is better than many you'll find on the lists of much larger and more prominent houses than BodhiDharma – for the very simple reason that it is
about
something, rather than being a slickly written piece of floss. O'Laughlin sets out to affect the way the reader thinks, and – whether you end up agreeing with his promoted values or not – achieves his aim in a very readable way. We can hope for great things from him in the future.

—Infinity Plus

The Burden of Indigo

by Gene O'Neill

Prime, 184 pages, paperback, 2002

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, after the Collapse of Everything, California is a waste of rusting autos and semi-barbarous tribes. Across this landscape trudges the Indigo Man – indigo because the punishment for serious criminals, in this future, is that they're given a treatment that colours their skin a hue appropriate to the crime, a renewing stigma that can never be erased. Indigo is the colour that identifies a child molester, and sometime years ago our protagonist did indeed commit such a crime – or probably did, he can't quite be sure any more, but it was an accident, he's sure it must have been an accident ...

From this brief summary you might expect the novel is going to be an allegory on the theme of colour prejudice. Not so. It's much more interesting than that.

The Burden of Indigo
is not a novel overly burdened with event – although there's a good sufficiency of plot to fill its 181 pages – but where O'Neill triumphs is in his evocation of atmosphere and the total involvement of the reader. In this latter respect he is, of course, creating an additional plot element: one rooted not directly in the text but rather in the reader's
experience
of the text. Because eventually one does, however reluctantly, come to identify with the Indigo Man; and this identification does constitute an important theme of the novel – not that one should sympathize with child molesters but that, however heinous the crime a human being has committed, eventually there must come a time when forgiveness is not just possible but the only humane option.

In other words, the dyeing of the skin (and the inevitable resultant ostracism) for the rest of the criminal's lifetime is
too permanent a punishment
; without the possibility that the stain will one day be removed – and the Indigo Man is fully prey to quacks promising cures – there can be no palatable outcome to the whole sorry series of events. The various other coloured individuals whom the Indigo Man meets on his travels display a sort of uneasy camaraderie not unlike the occupants of Death Row, drawn together by their shared knowledge that their fate is sealed and their eternal hope that tomorrow may nonetheless bring news of a reprieve. Although they're tagged to ensure that (hopefully) they can never repeat their crime, it cannot be thought the judicial authorities have in any sense deployed the instruments of justice usefully.

Looking back on what I've just typed I realize that what makes
The Burden of Indigo
so powerful is that, in a way, it's not about the future at all: it's about
today
. And it's about
us
.

—Crescent Blues

Decadence

edited by Monica J. O'Rourke

Prime Books, 169 pages, paperback, 2002

In any anthology of short stories one expects a bit of variation in standard, from Sublimely Good right through to the merely Pretty Good, but this new collection of (mainly original) erotic-horror shorts shows a far wider spread than most: from Pretty Damn' Fine to Absolutely Bloody Awful What The Hell Can The Editor Have Been Thinking? The latter category contains not just one isolated turkey but several.

The authors involved are Nancy Kilpatrick, Charlee Jacob, Jack Fisher, E.C. McMullen Jr, Brian Knight, Rain Graves, Adam Pepper, Sephera Giron, Nicholas Kaufmann, Gene O'Neill, Teri A. Jacobs, Thomas Deja, d.g.k. goldberg, John Urbancik and Edo van Belkom.

Nancy Kilpatrick's "Metal Fatigue" is an interesting piece that could perhaps be sf except that it's so engagingly hallucinatory that it might be something else entirely but dressed up in sf imagery. You may hate it – which is praise of the highest!

E.C. McMullen Jr's "Some People" is likewise sf, assuming you accept cryptozoology as a science; although it's not in the slightest erotic, despite being focused almost entirely on sex, this may be the standout story in the book. Its conceit is that the krakens exist, and that their reproductive cycle involves the parasitic use of host bodies, which are devoured while still alive and functioning. The details of the sex scenes in the story are as emetic in affect as you can imagine, yet McMullen manages to convey that, while nauseating
to us
, these events are nevertheless pretty all-fired erotic to their participants.

Nicholas Kaufmann's "V.I.P. Room" is, unlike the previous two discussed, genuinely erotic in aspiration and result. A married man adores his wife and they have an excellent sex life together, yet he yearns for variety while remaining faithful to her. Such a dilemma seems solvable through taking his wife to a high-priced orgy club, yet he makes the mistake of becoming sexually obsessed with the woman who runs the club ... with doom as the end of the road.

Gene O'Neill's "When Legends Die" handles nicely the fact that the incubus narrator initially doesn't know who – what – he is, and only slowly, along with the reader, finds out. The ending of the story is a little predictable, but the unusual and unusually well depicted setting makes up for that.

Teri A. Jacobs's "The False Face" overcomes slightly sloppy writing to be interesting in its use of unfamiliar elements from oriental mythology (they may, such is my ignorance, be in fact Jacobs's original inventions). It's also a cat story, which adds to the appeal for felinophiles – especially, as it happens, lesbian felinophiles!

d.g.k. goldberg's "Last Exit to Darlington" is a deliberately anti-erotic story, like so much of the noir fiction which it very successfully emulates. A good-time girl gets picked up by a fairly overt sexually psychopathic serial killer and, while she is prepared, even eager, in a way to add herself to his list of victims in that she will submit to all the sexual humiliations he demands of her, she is not prepared to let the evening end in his desired climax of her slaughter. This is quite a powerful tale, and would belong creditably in any collection of modern noir.

John Urbancik's "The Painted Woman" is an oddity which well merits reading, while Edo van Belkom's "The Uninvited" is, despite a troubling and I'm sure unintentional slight aura of racism, a joke which is both nicely executed and worth the execution; its mockery of the male obsession with penis size is also amusing.

Don't let it be thought that all of the rest of the stories are dire: some are perfectly adequate entertainments. But enough of them are so worthless in both concept and realization that it's impossible to deduce what process of editorial thought went into their selection; in general it is these stories that are most riddled with the proofreading and copy-editing gaffes that are commoner than they should be in the book as a whole, suggesting that O'Rourke herself had little patience with them.

Of course, the problem with any such collection is that horror is almost by definition detumescent if it's to be good horror, while erotica aspires to exactly the opposite criterion. Most of the stories in
Decadence
substitute masses of sex and, often, locker-room language for any attempt at the genuinely erotic (when will practitioners of supposed erotica learn that this discipline requires a more sensitive use of language than virtually any other form of writing, rather than a coarsening?); some resort to being
about
sex, substituting intellectual interest for the attempt to kindle a hormonal blaze; and just one or two succeed in uniting the two disparate literary forms. This is not overall a criticism; it's what you expect when you pick up a book like this, even though the marketing gurus of the publishing industry seem to think we're all naive enough to buy such books hoping to get our rocks off and puke simultaneously. However, it would have been nice if O'Rourke had selected a higher proportion of stories that fueled both the imagination and the intellect at the expense of those whose authors seem to think their brief is satisfied by mere, terminally dull, obscenity.

Still and all, the good stories in this anthology make up a sufficient proportion of the whole.

—Infinity Plus