Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (4 page)

Atom

by Steve Aylett

Phoenix House, 137 pages, hardback, 2000

Set in the city of Beerlight, this short novel (almost a novella) represents an attempted hybridization of surrealism with the Hammett/Chandler hardboiled detective tale. Whether there is actually any
point
in trying to marry two such antithetical modes – surrealism deconstructs Story, the detective tale relies on Story – is a question for another arena; the book, which is replete with conscious references to the Fathers of Surrealism (notably Magritte), must be taken on its own terms or not at all.

There's an explosion at the Brain Facility, and the preserved brain of Tony Curtis is stolen. Various characters are eager to get it or get it back, for reasons that are not much clarified when it proves the brain is not that of Tony Curtis at all, but that of Franz Kafka. Stirred into the mix is the eponymous private defective (not a typo) Taffy Atom, seemingly possessed of transnormal powers (although this may be illusion), along with his sidekicks Madison (a sexy spitfire) and Jed (a giant talking goldfish). That is about as much of the plot as it's sensible to recount, because in many ways, like any good surrealist tale, this book doesn't actually have a plot, just the
appearance
of one, an appearance fostered by the use of the motifs of the hardboiled PI story. The effect is rather like that of some of Jerome Charyn's wilder Secret Isaac novels (of which I was constantly reminded while reading
Atom
), only divorced yet one further step, or indeed several, from reality – and from Story.

Well, if the quest in search of a plot is designedly futile, what of that quest itself, regardless of its lack of destination? In other words, while this novel may be a ride to nowhere, what's the ride like?

One of the motifs of the hardboiled PI story is the deployment of firecracker one-liners, and here Aylett scores reasonably highly, with only a few of his squibs being damp. The opening phrase of the book gives a brilliant (and just about the only required) description of Beerlight, "The city sprawled like roadkill", although this is unfortunately burdened by the rest of the sentence: "spreading more with each new pressure." Other one-liners that leap from the page: "Smoking a cigar which seemed to have been carved from an expensive chair ..."; "Modesty's kinda useless if everyone agrees with you ..." There are plenty more, but their incandescence tends to be dimmed by the admixture of the occasional misfire: "Well you're a regular suppository o' wisdom ...", "Maddy was so deep he needed a U-boat to visit her" and so forth. Still, even Raymond Chandler produced plenty of dud one-liners among the jewels, so we can't be too critical.

But there was another extremely important component of the old PI story: characterization. No matter how much even the best of these writers and the venues in which they published may have been despised by most of the lit crew of their time, and to a great extent by some of that crew's successors, they displayed a mastery of characterization that has been rarely if at all matched in any other field of written storytelling – indeed, that's what many of the one-liners were
for
. By the nature of surrealism, in contrast, characterization is not really possible – indeed, it could bring the whole surrealistic edifice tumbling down – and this fact severely restricts
Atom
's function as an entertainment. While one or two of the individuals peopling his pages have singular speech patterns, which is characterization of a primitive sort, most are fairly indistinguishable from each other, to the extent that not only did I constantly have to remind myself who they were when their names appeared but also, on occasion, I even had to think twice about whether they were male or female! This again is an interesting surrealistic effect – especially since, paradoxically, about the only character who's instantly identifiable on reappearance is Kitty Stickler, a nightclub singer of such extreme standardized beauty that she becomes effectively invisible – but it sure as hell truncated
Atom
's ability to entertain me except on the most superficial level.

One of the book's two cover-quotes from Michael Moorcock states: "This is toon-noir ... as on the button as tomorrow's news." "Toon-noir" is a very apt description, especially with reference to Gary Wolf's
Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
(1981), but the remainder of Moorcock's comment serves, presumably unintentionally, as a pointer to
Atom
's problem as a novel: tomorrow's news hasn't happened yet, although much of it is beginning to coalesce. Similarly,
Atom
offers us, presumably
not
unintentionally, what can be interpreted as a cameo view of the coalescing process – a soup of motifs swirling towards an integration that has not yet been and may never be, for inherent reasons, attained. To both extend and mix the metaphor, it is consequently hard to establish whether what's being served up is a hearty nutritious broth or a thin consommé.

—Infinity Plus

Black Projects, White Knights

by Kage Baker

Golden Gryphon, 297 pages, hardback, 2002

Before I talk about the book, a few words about the publisher. If I had to vote for which is the best
publisher
currently operating within the genres, I'd almost certainly opt for Golden Gryphon. Their books are produced with such care and love – not just for the subject matter but for production standards – that it gives a genuine thrill just to hold a Golden Gryphon book in one's hands. And, almost always, the contents live up to the rest, so I had high hopes of this collection by Kage Baker, an author with whose work I am (to my shame) otherwise unfamiliar.

Most of the stories are in her series about Dr Zeus Inc., otherwise known as The Company – a shadowy super-technology organization that could be thought of as lying at the heart of most of the relevant conspiracy theories. There are also some stories in another, slightly linked series, concerning a prodigy known as Alec Checkerfield.

The newly penned opener to this volume, introducing Dr Zeus Inc. to the unacquainted reader, is a firecracker piece of writing; surely no appetite could be left unwhetted by this piece. But thereafter, while each of the stories is a highly competent piece of magazine fiction, none of them seems outstanding; always I was left with that exasperated "nicely done, but so what?" feeling.

But it's a lovely, lovely book, from its splendid J.K. Potter cover all the way on through.

—Crescent Blues

Coldheart Canyon

by Clive Barker

HarperCollins, 676 pages, hardback, 2001

Since the industry of Hollywood is dreams, it's hard to understand why there have been so very few good stories of the fantastic centred on, or based in, the movie business. Even Thomas Tryon, the ex-movie star turned fantasy novelist, stayed strictly within the bounds of the real in his one movie novel/fixup,
Crowned Heads
(1976). The single novel that this reviewer has come across that mixes the movies with fantasy with any real measure of success is Theodore Roszak's exquisite 1991 novel
Flicker
, and even it is likely to offend genre fans in the delicious subtlety, rather than the wham-bam foregrounding, of its fantasticated underpinning. Within the movies themselves there have been a few successful attempts at this marriage, the most notable probably being
Last Action Hero
(1993), much maligned on release but now generally well regarded, and Woody Allen's 1984 excursion
The Purple Rose of Cairo
. One could add Maurizio Nichetti's delirious 1989 piece
The Icicle Thief
, although there the movie-within-a-movie is being screened on television, and it is the fantasies created by tv that are the real subject.

So the strapline on the cover of
Coldheart Canyon
is enough to set the pulse a-tingling and the jaws a-salivating: "A Hollywood Ghost Story." Barker is one of the most elegant writers and exciting imaginers in the horror business: almost as good a writer as Peter Straub, almost as good an imaginer as Ramsey Campbell "A pity he should waste that writing ability and those powers of imagination on such garbage" is a common enough reaction, and perhaps an unfair one, although it does tend to be the ugly schlock moments rather than the wonderful flights of fancy that stick in one's mind after reading a Barker novel. But give him a ghost story and the results should be pretty stupendous – after all, remember what a fine novel Stephen King crafted from the form of the traditional ghost story with his
Bag of Bones
(1998).

And for the first couple of hundred pages or so it seems that Barker has pulled it off. There is a beautiful sense of claustrophobia about the tale and its telling, not to mention that same delightful feeling as in Robert Holdstock's
Mythago Wood
(1984) that strange and spectral archetypal figures are just on the limits of tangibility – although here of course the archetypes are born of the movie industry rather than of legend. One settles down for what looks to be another five hundred or so pages of sheer bliss, to wallowing euphorically in a new addition to that rarest of beasts, the truly successful fantastication about the movies. There's ozone in the nostrils, the eyes are flared, the real world is forgotten ...

But then ...

But then Barker the horror writer takes over. After another couple of hundred pages occupied largely by increasingly kinky sex between mortals and bits of ectoplasm, described with all the erotic passion of a coroner's post mortem report (although much more nicely written, of course), the rest of the book is a fairly straightforward horror novel. Quite a good horror novel, as horror novels go, but not exceptional even in that arena.

It's a crushing disappointment. What a complete waste of those first two hundred pages! "A pity he should waste that writing ability and those powers of imagination on such garbage," in short.

The story starts back in the 1920s. Hollywood star Katya Lupi – lovely, ruthless, promiscuous, worried about the advent of sound to the movies – returns to her native Romania with her manager, worshipper and would-be spouse Zeffer to visit her folks. Zeffer has a blanket instruction to buy anything he thinks might amuse her for the new home she is building in one of the canyons near Hollywood. Visiting a rundown monastery, he buys from the monks the four walls of a room completely covered in hand-painted tiles depicting scenes from a Wild Hunt of sorts – often in bestially cruel and/or pornographically explicit detail. The tiles are exported to Hollywood, where a room is constructed to hold them and the mural is painstakingly reassembled.

There is a legend behind those tiles. They were created at the behest of Lilith, Adam's first wife and also the Devil's wife – and, too, the wife for a short while of ex-Crusader Duke Goga, after he and his huntsmen had accidentally killed Lilith's goatboy son, who was fathered by the Devil. The child does not die; instead, the Duke and his party are condemned forever to hunt the territory, the Devil's Country, that is both depicted in and
is
the tiles, in an attempt to recapture him.

Once the room has been reconstructed in LA, Lupi discovers that entering it can gain a person one entrance also to the
real
Devil's Country, a seemingly endless tract of landscape through which Goga and his gang still ride in search of the goatboy. Time spent there has a curiously rejuvenating effect – the place is, in effect, a fountain of youth.

Flip forward to the present day. Heart-throb movie star Todd Pickett's career has started to slide. In desperation he opts for a face-lift. It's a disaster. To keep him out of the limelight, his agent Maxine stows him away in a long-deserted mansion in one of the canyons near LA ... which proves, of course, to be still secretly inhabited by a youthful and sex-crazy Katya Lupi. And in the grounds Zeffer still lives, although he's not as youthful and not noticeably sex-crazy at all because decades ago Katya got mean about rationing visits to the Devil's Country when it occurred to her its supply of rejuvenation might be finite. Also lurking in the grounds, almost always unseen, are the ghosts of hundreds and possibly thousands of old movie stars who were Katya's friends before she cut them off from their regular visits to the Devil's Country; these spectres, barred from the house by wards Katya has nailed into the doorsteps, can take on physical form when they want to, and they're all sex-crazy too.

Todd, who was pretty sex-crazy to begin with but has been looking forward to a lean time of it because his face is such a mess, becomes a sort of walking sex-craze on encountering Katya. He plays with her the games sex-crazy people play (or, at least, the games sex-crazy adolescents wish like hell they could play), then joins in one of the ectoplasmic orgies, then he boffs Katya in the Devil's Country – an ecstasy enhanced by the fact that they get caught mid-boff by Goga and his pals – and then he ... well, actually, I sort of lost count around here.

Goga isn't sex-crazy. Presumably having been married to Lilith for the few years during which she entered this world to commission the tiles cured him of any sex-craziness he may once have had, or maybe it's just that he's spent several centuries on horseback. Not sex-crazy either is Tammy, the president of Todd's fan club, either because she's fat (the novel displays a certain amount of stereotyping in the characterization) or because she sublimates it all in her obsessive collecting of knick-knacks relating to her idol. Either way, she gets concerned when Todd drops out of public view and heads to LA to investigate, following the trail to a certain old mansion in a canyon ...

And that's when the viscera begin to erupt.

To use the movie terminology, there are some curious continuity errors in the text, as if the book went through a lot of rewrites. On page 77, for example, Todd has to cancel his facelift appointment because his dog is ill; but it's not until page 101, after the dog has died, that he makes the appointment in the first place. On page 249 it's mentioned that it's twilight, yet a little beforehand Todd and Katya have been viewing their surrounding by moonlight and starlight. On page 408 Tammy says to Todd that "We're going to do this together" (not sex, I hasten to add), yet on pages 411-12 it becomes evident that they didn't. There may be some other examples I didn't spot.

Because Barker is such a fine prose artist,
Coldheart Canyon
is in general very readable – aside from the two hundred or so sex-crazy pages, which become very tedious after a while – but this quality doesn't make it a good novel, or even a particularly good entertainment. It's certainly not one of Barker's own better efforts. Yet that first couple of hundred pages, when he seems to be setting up for a top-notch ghost story, are a remarkable achievement. Why he didn't just keep going, why he apparently suffered a crisis of nerve and reverted to the bizness-as-usual – there's a mystery for you.

—Infinity Plus