Book Review | Reviver by Seth Patrick

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Jonah Miller is a Reviver, able to temporarily revive the dead so they can say goodbye to their loved ones — or tell the police who killed them.

Jonah works in a department of forensics created specifically for Revivers, and he’s one of the best in the business. For every high-profile corpse pushing daisies, it’s Jonah’s job to find justice for them. But while reviving the victim of a brutal murder, he encounters a terrifying presence. Something is on the other side watching. Waiting. His superiors tell him it's only in his mind, a product of stress. Jonah isn't so certain.

Then Daniel Harker, the first journalist to bring revival to public attention, is murdered. Jonah finds himself getting dragged into the hunt for answers. Working with Harker's daughter Annabel, he becomes determined to find those responsible and bring them to justice. Soon they uncover long-hidden truths that call into doubt everything Jonah stands for, and reveal a sinister force that threatens us all.

***

If, for a time, we could talk to the dead, what would we say to said?

Jonah Miller, duty reviver for the Forensic Revival Service, asks the dearly departed how they died, in an effort to find out why, and by whose hands. Understand that his subjects have all met a hellish end, mostly through means cruel and unusual, and their posthumous testimony, however hard to extract, could make all the difference if and when their killers are caught.

Though Jonah and his co-workers are out for justice, in the better-paid private sector, other revivers act as mediums between the living and the lost... albeit for the right price. Mercenary as this practice often is, at the end of the day, what wouldn't we give for the opportunity to whisper sweet nothings or simply say goodbye to our much-missed loved ones?

On the other hand, what would we be taking away?

The truth is, even now, no-one knows. Though people have come to accept the practice of this dark art—largely thanks to the sensitive way the journalist Jonathan Harker dealt with its initial discovery—much about the process remains mysterious. And with no easy answers forthcoming in the years since the landmark first revival, funding for further study has all but dried up. Yet there are a few still looking into the possible consequences, such as Dr. Stephanie Graves, who specialises in remnants.

From the get-go we know that "hearing the dead bear witness to their own demise was never pleasant." (p.1) Headaches and nausea are to be expected, but poor overworked Jonah soon starts suffering from more serious side-effects. In short order he's hearing voices that are not there, seeing things that simply cannot be, and experiencing the leftover memories of people he has revived.

But being a reviver is all that Jonah has—in fact it's all he has had since the horrendous death of his mother—so he plays down the various complications. He makes a token trip to see an in-house shrink, then gets back to work as if nothing untoward had happened. However, he can't keep up the act after he's called in to revive the bloated, blackened corpse of the aforementioned Jonathan Harker, who in his last days had been investigating a group of particularly militant Afterlifers.

As you can imagine, there has been some resistance to the idea of ghost whispering, and the Afterlifers represent this perspective:

"What hostility remained gradually coalesced into a protest group called the Afterlifers, well-funded from an easy collaboration of disparate religious interests who saw revival as desecration, an unacceptable disturbance of the dead. But loud as they were, they found their calls for moratorium ignored. Direct action from more extreme members brought public disapproval. Their message of outright objection to revival took a back seat, replaced by more successful calls for greater control, rights for the dead, and a system insuring revivers were licensed." (p.15)

Still, there are those who disapprove of the process. Those who are prepared to use violence on revivers, never mind all the good they indubitably do. Jonathan Harker's killing is just the first suggestion of their elaborate plans, and given his involvement—not to mention the remnants of the murdered journalist with him still—Jonah is quickly drawn into this conspiracy. Soon, he and Harker's daughter Annabel find themselves racing against time to expose a chilling plot before the Afterlifers are able to realise the rest of their threats.

In the main, Reviver is a legitimately gripping conspiracy thriller, but the author—a Northern Ireland man who develops video games for Sega in his day job—also incorporates elements of horror into his first novel, as well as a healthy helping of crime fiction. Individually, neither of these aspects are especially impressive—though both have their moments near the beginning of the book—but presented together, like slight yet satisfying starters before a main meal, they complement the core story cannily, helping to make Seth Patrick's debut distinct.

Just as well, I warrant, because parts of Reviver would be by-the-numbers otherwise. Its elevator pitch is interesting, but not dissimilar to a number of others made in recent memory, and though Patrick's execution of his premise is perfectly acceptable, it is too pedestrian to pull one through the occasional doldrums. The narrative unfolds much as you might expect, with scant few surprises that have not been telegraphed earlier.

Additionally, there's quite a bit about Reviver which seems... not clumsy, but indecently convenient. Various relationships simply don't feel real, particularly as regards the one-dimensional women who pretty much flit in and out of existence relative to Jonah's indiscriminate interests. The only character to really come off is our anxious protagonist's pal Never Geary, who plays a charmingly maternal role and offers light relief in the interim.

Last but not least—before this becomes a laundry list of drawbacks, which Reviver definitely doesn’t deserve—expect a whole lot of explaining, including one mad scientist who elaborates, at alarming length, on his dastardly masterplan. On the whole, Patrick tells substantially more than he shows over the course of the story... but I’d argue that this is equally suggestive of his debut's strengths.

You see, it really is very direct; refreshingly so if you're in the right frame of mind for a few evenings of fast-paced fun. Reviver is a no-nonsense novel which values thrills over chills and holds banter in higher regard than character, but credit where it's due: the reading experience is resolutely thrilling, and the chatter, especially where Never’s concerned, is certainly snappy.

The high and mighty might be inclined to describe this as a dearth of depth—and it is, there's no getting away from that—but what Reviver lacks in terms of texture and density the author makes up for with an excellent sense of immediacy and quantities of unbridled excitement. In sum, though Seth Patrick has next to no use for poetry in his prose—an issue emblematic of many of his debut’s minor missteps—Reviver is a timely reminder that stories need not be beautiful to be good. This first novel has small problems aplenty, then, but these don’t detract from the fact that I really enjoyed reading it... and there's value in that, I think.

***

Reviver
by Seth Patrick

UK Publication: June 2013, Tor
US Publication: June 2013, Thomas Dunne

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Book Review | The Lowest Heaven, ed. by Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin

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The Lowest Heaven is a new anthology of contemporary science fiction published in partnership to coincide with "Visions of the Universe," a major exhibition of space imagery at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

Each story in The Lowest Heaven is themed around a body in the Solar System, from the Sun to Halley's Comet. The stories are illustrated with photographs and artwork selected from the archives of the Royal Observatory, while the book's cover and overall design are the work of award-winning South African illustrator Joey Hi-Fi.

***

Space.

The final frontier?

For now, that searching question stands an unfortunate fact. We want to know more, of course, but there is no clear need for the revelations we may or may not gain from our desired endeavours, or none that we can easily see.

And so we wait, painfully aware that — even if the Powers That Be see reason — we are lamentably unlikely to see a man on Mars in our lifetimes.

Maybe our children will. I want that for them.

But neither you nor I nor they, in their day, will find out what awaits on the other side of the interstellar space NASA's Voyager probe is on track to chart; the odds are simply not in our favour, I'm afraid. But we can wonder, can't we? We can imagine. We can read and write and damn it, we can dream.

So for the foreseeable, space may indeed be the final frontier in fact, but fiction, by its very definition, need not be held back by what is. Instead, its pioneers ask: what if? And occasionally, incredibly, what if is what is.

Come to that, science fiction and science fact go way back. Speaking of space, here's Dr. Marek Kukula, public astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, introducing The Lowest Heaven, a truly awesome anthology published in conjunction with the opening of the aforementioned Observatory's "Visions of the Universe" exhibition:

"By setting human stories within that immense canvas writers can help us to see ourselves as part of the wider cosmos, and perhaps give us an inkling of what that might actually mean. No wonder that many of today’s professional astronomers can trace their interest, at least in part, to an early encounter with science fiction. 

"The connection between science fact and science fiction has never been more pervasive than it is today. The visual language of astronomy is everywhere in contemporary science fiction, from book covers to the backdrops of films and television shows. Vistas from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Cassini probe have inspired the scenery for Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, and with their enormous popularity these shows and movies bring astronomical imagery to a much wider audience. Artistic license even allows them to ignore the fact that that the original images have been enhanced and manipulated, and rarely show the Universe as it would appear to human eyes. 

"The connection works both ways. As yesterday's science fiction becomes today’s science fact it can sometimes seem as though we live in a science fictional universe. Above our heads, Arthur C. Clarke's geostationary satellites encircle the equator, while the imprints of human boots still mark the surface of the moon."

This back and forth between the actual and the fantastic underpins The Lowest Heaven's exploration of space, both as we know it and as we can only imagine it. To wit, each of the seventeen stories presented by Pandemonium's Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin over the course of this extraordinary ensemble is illustrated by a fitting image from the historical collection of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Take the first fiction, for instance. 'Golden Apples' by Sophia McDougall — an alt-history author most known for revising the Roman Empire of yesteryear into a present-day dystopia — is a bittersweet, surreal story about a couple who feed their dying daughter with solid sunlight stolen from a local laboratory. Like the hand-painted magic lantern slide of sunspots dating from the late 1800s which accompanies it, 'Golden Apples' incorporates slivers of science into a fantastical canvas to tremendous effect.

The second short, 'A Map of Mercury' by Alastair Reynolds, comes complete with a photograph of a ghostly glove puppet: a surprising image, initially, but its unsettling elements speak to the stark art at the heart of this disconcerting dialogue between man and machine. Similarly, an equatorial cross-section of the earth and its atmosphere appends 'The Krakatoan' by Maria Dahvana Headley — a strange tale about a boy who visits a volcano in defiance of his absent father — while Archie Black's unspeakably bleak 'Ashen Light' is illustrated by an early negative of the Transit of Venus, which exposes the night as one of life's white lies.

Short of systematically showing how each of The Lowest Heaven's various visions relates to the accompanying artwork, suffice it to say that the plates are excellently selected, striking and suggestive. Most of the subsequent stories are equally inspiring, and though others are hard to parse — especially Adam Roberts' chronicle of a voyage 'From World to World Again, By Way of the Moon, 1726' — even these reveal feeling, and accumulate meaning.

"They came at last, after the dust had settled; and in truth it sifted but slowly to the ground; for weight on the Moon is less than on our world. For it is the efficacy of the various worlds to cast their charm upon men in divers ways; such that to stand upon 1 planet is to be made from stone, and upon another into cork. It is accordingly a different matter entire to stand upon the Moon as it is upon the Earth; in the former place the substance of that world causeth the body to become buoyant almost to the current of floating into the ayr; yet to return again to Earth is to become heavy again, with a sense of sinkage of body and spirit both."

Indeed, it is Roberts' long short which brings the core focus of The Lowest Heaven home. Whilst wondering what may have happened if humanity had tomorrow's technology at a point in the past, specifically during the golden age of exploration, the author of last year's fantastic Jack Glass hits on an idea that this anthology features frequently: the tragedy of the "boldness, and purpose, and hunger to travel to places that are new to [us having] departed out of the breasts of humankind."

The thought is voiced again in the next narrative, 'WWBD' — which is to say 'What Would Bradbury Do?' — by The Curve of the Earth's Simon Morden, who reminds readers that though "we can send all the robots we like, it takes humanity to put the soul into exploration." Later, in 'Only Human,' World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar wonders about "what could have been, and of what didn't," before concluding that "to do that is, after all, only human" too.

Truth be told, I'm loathe to talk about very many more of these stories. To touch on the sparkling Saturn Trees of Kaaron Warren's addiction allegory, the misunderstood beauty of 'The Grand Tour' James Smythe gives us, or the inhuman horror of Kameron Hurley's self-replicating spaceship. These are a few of The Lowest Heaven's finest fictions, but better, certainly, that I let you mine its many treasures in your own time.

There can be no questioning the value of this artful anthology: it's as inspiring as it is inspired. But The Lowest Heaven is also a timely and ultimately touching reminder of what we stand to lose by turning inwards as opposed to venturing again into the unknown. Granted, the universe is vast — and vastly dangerous, I dare say — but consider the wonders we stand to discover; the places, the races!

We cannot grasp what awaits us out there, but it behoves us, surely, to find out. So let us go once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our dead dreams.

***

The Lowest Heaven
edited by Anne C. Perry & Jared Shurin

UK Publication: June 2013, Jurassic London

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In Tribute | Goodbye, Iain Banks

According to his former widow-in-waiting, Iain Banks passed away “without pain” in the early hours of Sunday morning, just two months after publicly announcing his own impending death in early April. At that time, he admitted it was extremely unlikely he’d live beyond a year, but we all hoped he’d have that long at least.

I still can’t get my head around how sudden it seemed. We knew what was coming, of course, but as I write, I’m realising that hasn’t made his passing any easier to deal with.

What has softened the blow, if only a little, is knowing that I’m not alone in feeling sick to my stomach with sorrow. Touching tributes have been rolling in ever since Adele’s message. They’ve come from a truly huge range of folks, all of whom profess to have been affected by the irreplaceable author and his thirty-odd awesome novels.

So today, rather than documenting the details of his untimely death, I want to take this opportunity to highlight a few of these outpourings of emotion. Who knows... maybe, just maybe, they’ll help you feel a bit better too.

Let’s begin with Neil Gaiman:

I should be blogging about The Ocean at the End of the Lane, because it comes out in 9 days and the reviews and articles are starting, and right this minute I should be doing the writing I have to finish before I hit the road. 

But I just learned that Iain Banks is dead, and I’m alone in this house, and I cope with things by writing about them. 

I met Iain in late 1983 or early 1984. It was a Macmillan/Futura Books presentation to their sales force, and to a handful of journalists. I was one of the journalists. Editor Richard Evans told me that he was proud that they had found The Wasp Factory on the slush pile—it was an unsolicited manuscript. Iain was almost 30, and he got up and told stories about writing books, and sending them in to publishers, and how they came back, and how this one didn’t come back. “You ask me what’s The Wasp Factory about?” he said. “It’s about 180 pages.” He was brilliant and funny and smart. 

He fitted right in. He was one of us, whatever that meant. He wrote really good books: The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass and The Bridge all existed on the uneasy intersection of SF, fantasy and mainstream literature (after those three he started drawing clearer distinctions between his SF and his mainstream work, not least by becoming Iain M. Banks in his SF). His work was mordant, surreal, and fiercely intelligent. In person, he was funny and cheerful and always easy to talk to. He became a convention bar friend, because we saw each other at conventions, and we would settle down in the bar and catch up. 

(A true story: In 1987 I was at a small party at the Brighton WorldCon in the wee hours, at which it was discovered that some jewellery belonging to the sleeping owner of the suite had been stolen. The police were called. A few minutes after the police arrived, so did Iain, on the balcony of the Metropole hotel: he’d been climbing the building from the outside. The police had to be persuaded that this was a respectable author who liked climbing things from the outside and not an inept cat burglar returning to the scene of his crime.)

We all deal with death differently, I guess. Me? I like to remember the lives of those we’ve lost, and Gaiman’s story managed to make me smile, which I haven’t done in a while.

Charles Stross was next in line to pay tribute to the great Scot:

One of the giants of 20th and 21st century Scottish literature has left the building. 

I can’t really claim to be a friend; my relationship with Iain was somewhere between one of the faceless hordes seen at SF conventions, and “guy I run into at the pub occasionally.” However, I’ve known Iain and chatted with him at times since, I think, 1989 or 1990 or thereabouts. And, after getting over my initial awe of the giant of letters, subsequently discovered that he was a giant in other ways: big-hearted, kind, affable, humorous, angry at injustice. 

There is probably no point in my writing an obituary. The newspapers are all over the generalities [...] and if I had anything more intimate to add I wouldn’t care to do so in public, out of respect for his family and friends. 

However, I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on my personal sense of loss. Iain’s more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. But in his science fiction he achieved something more: something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do. He was intensely political, and he infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better—he brought to the task an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that sane human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed).

In my admittedly limited experience with The Culture, which I’ve been reading on and off (but mostly on) ever since the late author first fessed up to feeling Very Poorly, Stross is spot on in his conception of the series as something singular. I’ve read a silly amount of science fiction, and there’s just not a whole lot like Consider Phlebas and its exemplary successors.

And The Culture isn’t just unique, it’s also incredible. Masterfully imagined and simply brilliantly written. I can hardly wait to start reading Use of Weapons. But the awful knowledge that there will come a point where the sequence simply stops has hit me like a tonne of bricks.

Beginning with the first lines of a fan letter he was in the process of writing, Nick Harkaway reflected on that very thought on his blog:

Dear Mr. Banks, 

I would like to say, very simply, that I could not have contemplated writing the books I have written and the ones I am writing in my head if I did not have you out there in front of me. I just wouldn’t have thought anyone would pay attention. 

Because that is true. He made a revolving door between genre and non-genre before ever I left school. In the 80s, for God’s sake, when that ridiculous essay about how all science fiction was essentially for sweaty-palmed teenage boys was doing the rounds. 

And from what I hear, pretty much everyone who met him liked him, too.

The author of Angelmaker went on to talk about some of what we’ve lost in light of Banks’ passing:

No more Culture stories. No more Affront, no more smug, infuriating, misguided, altruistic, brilliant Minds engaged in slyly funny banter. No more hair’s breadth escapes. No more savage, disturbing images. No more ethical conundrums or brain-stretching sociological what-ifs. No more guy behind Crow Road, behind the appalling Wasp Factory. God knows how many other writers owe Banks a tip of the cap, how many TV shows and movies and books would simply not exist, or would never have been published, without his gravity acting on the rubber sheet of narrative space. 

There are a couple of his books I never got to. They’re upstairs. But now I somehow feel I should pace myself. 

Well. Sod it. Farewell, Mr. Banks. And I wish it wasn’t.

So say we all, sir.

In addition to these reminiscent missives, there was no shortage of shorter tributes from a small army of fellow Scots authors. Despite the early hour, Irvine Welsh tweeted that he was "off out to the pub to toast one of [his] all-time literary heroes with a malt,” a most excellent sentiment shared by Val McDermid:

Iain Banks, RIP. Grateful for what he left us, angry for what he’ll miss and we’ll miss. And now I’m going to pour the best dram in the house and raise a toast to Iain Banks for all the hours of delight and provoked thought.

Talking to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme a little later, Ian Rankin of Rebus renown considered the magnificent man’s character:

He didn’t take things too seriously, and in a way I’m happy that he refused to take death too seriously—he could still joke about it. I think we all thought he would have a bit longer than he got. 

What made him a great writer was that he was childlike; he had a curiosity about the world. He was restless, he wanted to transmit that in his work, and he treated cancer with a certain amount of levity, the same that made him a great writer. You never knew what you were going to get, every book was different.

But the last tribute I want to take in before saying goodbye to Iain Banks one final time comes from his British publisher, oddly enough. Pay attention to the last sentence of Little, Brown’s statement especially:

It is with enormous sadness that Little, Brown announces the death of Iain Banks. Banks has been one of the country’s best loved novelists for both his mainstream and science fiction books since the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. After his own recent announcement of his cancer Iain Banks was hugely moved by the public support for him via his website. Just three weeks ago he was presented with finished copies of his last novel, The Quarry, and enjoyed celebration parties with old friends and fans across the publishing world.

That, I think, touches on what we have to take heart in during this terrible time. How Iain Banks lived—and he did live—rather than how he died.

Not to mention how his life and his life’s work touched the lives of others. Others including the writers whose reflections we’ve heard today, but not just them. Not by any stretch of the imagination that was so characteristic of Iain Banks. Indeed, more than ten thousand of his readers have left messages on his guestbook, and I would urge you to do so too. As Adele says, “he absolutely loved them,” and honestly, I’d rather think about love than loss today.

On the other hand, we have to say goodbye. We might not want to—I know I don’t—but we have to. So.

Goodbye, Iain Banks. There’s no one like you now, and there never was. Nor, I warrant, will there ever be.

You’ll be missed, mister.

You already are.

Status Update | On Belgium and Banks

Home again, home again... but I'm afraid I didn't bring my jiggedy-jig.

Don't get me wrong, I have a bloody lovely time on holiday — Antwerp was brilliant, the beer was as well, and sometimes I forget what a wonderful thing it is to read for pleasure — but the bad news about Iain Banks' passing broke the day after I got back, almost immediately after I'd finished The Player of Games, and it pretty much knocked me for six.

Kept me busy yesterday as well. In the afternoon, I wrote a long tribute to the dearly departed author for Tor.com — you can read it here right now, but I'm hoping to share it with you all on The Speculative Scotsman tomorrow — then in the evening I had a couple of classes to teach, during which I discussed a particularly fantastic chapter from The Wasp Factory with couple of the older kids I tutor.

For what it's worth, they seemed to enjoy it. And if just one of them went home and ordered a copy, my work here is done.

Or has it just begun?

In any event, I'm going to hold off on publishing the special something I mentioned before I went back to Belgium. Dragons are awesome, obviously, but I need to be happy to introduce this thing with the unbridled delight it deserves, and I'm just not now.

Completely missed E3 as well, which is complete unlike me. I'm still hoping to stay unspoiled, the better to watch a press conference or four later today or tomorrow, but let's face it: this is the internet.

Actually, now that I mention it, this is the internet — fancy that! — so you tell me: what should I watch? Any events I can afford to ignore? Or were they all a wash?

Book Review | Joyland by Stephen King

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College student Devin Jones took the summer job at Joyland hoping to forget the girl who broke his heart. But he wound up facing something far more terrible: the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and dark truths about life — and what comes after — that would change his world forever.

A riveting story about love and loss, about growing up and growing old — and about those who don’t get to do either because death comes for them before their time — Joyland is Stephen King at the peak of his storytelling powers. With all the emotional impact of King masterpieces such as The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, Joyland is at once a mystery, a horror story, and a bittersweet coming-of-age novel, one that will leave even the most hard-boiled reader profoundly moved.

***

After a lamentably uneventful 2012, Stephen King kicks off what looks to be an unusually huge year for fans of the master of modern pop horror with a small but perfectly formed mystery novel. Joyland is the second story King has written for Hard Case Crime, and like The Colorado Kid — which SyFy has since adapted into a reasonably successful TV series that deals with the weird and the wonderful on a weekly basis — it comes complete with throwback cover art by Hard Case mainstay Glen Orbik and a fantastic, nostalgic narrative.

Joyland takes the form of a tale told by an old man looking back on the last year of his youth:

1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died. It was Devin Jones's lost year. I was a twenty-one year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart. 

Sweet, huh? (pp.12-13)

Devin — or Dev to his friends, who flit in and out of the fiction like memories lost and found again — Dev, then, is in the process of the processing the loss of his first love, a heartbreaker called Wendy Keegan who leaves our young man hanging when she sashays on down to a job in Boston. At first, Dev doesn't know what to do without her, so when the prospect of employment at a nearby amusement park quite literally lands on his lap, he takes the opportunity by the horns, looking to lose himself in something all-consuming.

Joyland is absolutely that. But Dev's star turn as a Happy Hound will eat up much more than all the time and energy he suddenly has on his hands: to tell the truth, it will consume his youth.

King's many admirers will be pleased to hear Joyland showcases the author of The Shining and this year's never-mind-how-needful sequel, Doctor Sleep, at the top of his game. It's rather more reminiscent of Duma Key and Different Seasons than the aforementioned classic, and more interested, in the main, in natural characters than supernatural factors, but be that as it may, Joyland bears its fair share of thrills and chills.

So sit back. Relax. Make yourself a plate of something, perhaps.

"And I'll tell you the sad story of the Joyland ghost while you eat, if you want to hear it." 

"Is it really a ghost story?" 

"I've never been in that damn funhouse, so I don't know for sure. But it's a murder story. That much I am sure of." (p.35)

Dev hasn't been at Joyland for long when he first hears tell of this spectre. Supposedly, she's the ghost of a girl who was murdered by her as-yet-unidentified boyfriend halfway through the Horror House.

That this homicide happened years back is a tragic fact; that something remains of poor Linda Gray to this day is probably just local legend. Dev becomes taken with the tale in any case. He begins by looking into the circumstances of the slaying — one of a number done by a serial killer with an apparent fondness for fairs. Then, when a friend of Dev's says he sees her, and another makes a dangerous breakthrough, his investigation steps up a gear.

This aspect of the narrative unfolds slowly — in fact, it's only towards the end that said thread takes front and centre — but there's more than enough going on in the interim to retain the reader's interest. Early on, Dev meets Annie and Mike, a single mother and her sickly son, who suffers from Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy, and I dare say this pair play a more meaningful role in Joyland's story than the so-called ghost of Linda Gray. In what is far and away the novel's most emotional moment, Dev takes it upon himself to show Mike the time of his life. And when he finally rises into the sky, "up where the air is rare," (p.229) I had myself a bit of a cry.

A murderer is unmasked come the climax, and there is, admittedly, a slight speculative edge to the entire affair, but Joyland is no horror novel, nor is the "hard-boiled crime fiction" this imprint traffics in a particularly fitting description. What we have here is a coming of age tale, primarily; a beautiful book, warm and honest, about a boy becoming a man, and his tempered transformation really does pack a punch.

In the exceedingly unlikely event that Stephen King is only remembered for one thing, I warrant it will be his talent for crafting characters, which I'd assert is especially evident in this text. In Mike and Annie, not to mention Tom and Erin, Lane and Fred and Eddie — and it wouldn't do to forget dear Dev himself — King conjures living, breathing people out of thin air, often in the space of a few paltry pages.

Here, however, his sense of setting is also on top form. Joyland is a magnificent place to spend a weekend immersed in, and the surrounding area is nearly as well realised. Here's how the old-timer who owns the amusement park puts its purpose:

"This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. Those of you who don't already know that will come to know it. Give such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun. In exchange for the hard-earned dollars of your customers, you will parcel out happiness. Children will go home and dream of what they saw here and what they did here." (p.59)

Know that King's business, at least in this instance, is not dissimilar.

In short, Joyland is a joy. A gem whatever its genre. And I would be remiss not to note that it bodes very well indeed for Doctor Sleep, which must be the most significant novel the stalwart wordsmith has written since the finale of The Dark Tower saga. If the further adventures of Danny Torrance measure up against the high standard set by this more modest effort, King's constant readers can look forward to another real treat this year.

***

Joyland
by Stephen King

UK & US Publication: July 2013, Hard Case Crime

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Book Review | The Oathbreaker's Shadow by Amy McCulloch

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Fifteen-year-old Raim lives in a world where you tie a knot for every promise that you make. Break that promise and you are scarred for life, and cast out into the desert.

Raim has worn a simple knot around his wrist for as long as he can remember. No one knows where it came from, and which promise of his it symbolises, but he barely thinks about it at all—not since becoming the most promising young fighter ever to train for the elite Yun guard. But on the most important day of his life, when he binds his life to his best friend (and future king) Khareh, the string bursts into flames and sears a dark mark into his skin.

Scarred now as an oath-breaker, Raim has two options: run, or be killed.

***

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: promises are made to be broken. In truth, trust exists to be tested.

We're often called upon to give our word, for what it's worth, but keeping it is never so simple. Of course it can be done, and indeed, we should endeavour to honour as many of the bonds we form as possible. But sometimes, circumstances arise; unavoidable, inescapable circumstances that require us to behave badly in service of the greater good. To do something we have sworn not to, or say what someone else would rather we wouldn't.

I'm sure I sound like someone with a guilty conscience, and perhaps I am. I'd argue that we all are, to a  greater or lesser extent. Thankfully, the consequences of betraying a vow in our world are in nothing compared to what we'd face if we came from Kharein, the capital city of Darhan.

"Kharein itself was shaped like a pentagon and surrounded by a long, low wall. The wall served more as a way to section off the inner city from the masses of yurts that surrounded it than as any means of defence, as Kharein needed little defending. The flat, isolated land that surrounded the city meant that any attacking army could be seen from miles away, and would be met well before it reached the city. On every point of the pentagon stood a tall watchtower, guards keeping a vigilant eye for suspicious plumes of dust. During Festival season, the yurts were scattered around the outside of the city walls, clustered together by clan like white petals around a flower. This was the only time Kharein truly looked alive. Without the visiting population it was simply a dried up bud—the centre of royal activity, perhaps, but not the home of people's hearts. The people of Darhan could not be settled. They moved constantly, shifting with the days of the year, the seasons, the animals. By the end of the month-long Festival even the merriest Darhan grew restless. They dispersed, seeds on the wind, and yet remained unified. It was the life of the Darhan, and had been for centuries." (pp.53-54)

Here, in the authentic desert dynasty Amy McCulloch has dreamed up for her debut, oaths are expressed in physical form. So-called "promise knots" are tied in thread or rope or gold, then worn by both parties. These don't mean a great deal until people reach their Honour Age—when they should be old enough to know better, basically—but beyond that point, forsaking one's faith represents the road to ruin:

"A true promise has serious consequences. Breaking a knotted promise meant excommunication to the desert to live in Lazar, with the community of exiled oathbreakers known as the Chauk. 

"There was no escaping this fate. If it was just a scar you could hide it [...] but it was the shadow that you could not escape. It was the shadow that others saw, judged and sentenced the oathbreaker to exile. It was the shadow that followed you all the way to Lazar and made sure you stayed there. Just the thought of it made Raim shudder." (pp.8-9)

At the outset of The Oathbreaker's Shadow, Raim is an adolescent on the cusp of adulthood, with characteristically grand plans for the future and friends in high places. Friends like Khareh, who is in line to lead Darhan one day as Khan—and on that day, Raim sees himself as Khareh's right hand man, safeguarding the future ruler from any potential threat. In their innocence, the boys simply agree that this will be, thus they tie a promise knot to stress their fidelity.

Fate, however, has other plans for the pair. Raim must become Yun before he can be sworn in as his best friend's Protector, and it will not be easy, even for such a natural talent as he. To make matters worse, Khareh has taken an unhealthy interest in an old man who says he can teach the would-be Khan magic:

"The old stories, passed down by the elders, told of a time when the strongest Khans were the ones with a sage at their right hand, performing magic that gave them the edge on the battlefield. But that was long before even the oldest elder had been born, and for as long as any memory could reach, ever trace of sage magic had disappeared, lost for ever—or so it had seemed." (p.32)

It takes a fair while for the titular oath to be broken, and again for the subsequent shadow to show itself, but I wouldn't describe this debut as slow going. On the contrary, McCulloch makes good use of her first novel's opening act, establishing character and developing setting like an old hand, all while aligning the pieces on the board just so. To wit, when the central premise of the text finally takes centre stage, it presence is very much felt.

The Oathbreaker's Shadow doesn't stop there. McCulloch whisks us around the desert lands of Darhan—to Lazar and back again—like a bona fide tour guide, at such a breakneck pace that if anything I'd have been grateful for a break. But there are sights to be seen, wonders of this world as well, and I'm pleased to have experienced them... though only a few have time to truly take flight.

Similarly, later reversals largely lack the impact of the breakdown of the relationship between Raim and Khareh. Draikh is pretty great, but Wadi—a forgiving Alashan our protagonist takes up with after his inevitable exile—is too transparent a character for her fortunes to mean much.

The Oathbreaker's Shadow is a bunch of fun otherwise. From the germ of an absolutely fascinating idea—our right to wrong; to do ill by others as well as well—Amy McCulloch shapes an undeniably entertaining debut that put me in mind of The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett. And there's every chance The Oathbreaker's Shadow will be just such a success. Sometimes the oldest stories are the ones which take hold of one's imagination most, and the plight of Raim set against the rich tapestry of Darhan is entirely alive in my mind's eye.

In short, bring on book two of this endearing duology. And the sooner the better, especially in light of the absence of an actual ending. The Oathbreaker's Shadow simply pauses at a point—an emerging trend (or am I just noticing it now?) that never fails to frustrate. By design, I dare say, because of course authors want us to want more.

And it's true: I do.

***

The Oathbreaker's Shadow
by Amy McCulloch

UK Publication: June 2013, Doubleday

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