Camp Out with These Books

Conveniently for my daughter, she's rarely home when I want to throttle her. I'm getting ready for a camping trip with friends, so I pulled out our five-person tent. Except it's not our five-person tent. I've never seen this tent before in my life. The last time I saw our tent is when I handed it to my daughter, who took it to a weekend music festival, the kind where there are thousands of tents being taken down on the last day, and your daughter brings back a tent that's not nearly as large or as nice as the one she and her friends originally set off with in her car.

That particular tent may be jinxed. On the way home after purchasing it, I asked my two then-small kids not to tell their dad how expensive it was. It was erected in the living room, and the three of us were looking at it proudly when Hubby/Daddy got home. "Wow, that's a really nice tent. I bet it was pricey, like a hundred bucks," he said. "Yeah, something like that," I smiled. "No, Mommy, it was $xxx.xx," advised our daughter, the overly truthful, little Miss Know-It-All. "Hey, Mommy told us not to tell Daddy how much it cost," scolded her big brother, who liked nothing more than correcting her. Luckily, Hubby/Daddy has a sense of humor, and he just laughed.

Thinking about our jinxed tent today, I hope the people now camping with it are not plagued by blizzards or high winds, since the tent's bad-weather cover remains in our garage. The instructions are there, too. Let me know if you're the (un)lucky person in possession of the tent that formerly belonged to us, and I'll tell you how to set it up. For everyone else, I'll stick to suggesting books you'd be lucky to have for reading in your tent.

After you've doused yourself with mosquito repellent, pitched camp away from the poison oak, and secured your food out of the bears' reach, take refuge in the mean streets of Los Angeles with black homicide detective Elouise ("Lou") Norton in Rachel Howzell Hall's Land of Shadows (Forge, June 2014). Lou's current case involves the death of 17-year-old Monique Darson in a gentrifying development, but Lou sees similarities to her own older sister Tori's unsolved disappearance 25 years earlier. As her investigation proceeds and grows more dangerous, Lou becomes convinced that solving Monique's murder will also close Tori's cold case. Her superiors aren't so sure.

Rachel Howzell Hall
(Getty Images)

Most of the book is narrated by Lou. It's a pleasure to follow Lou as she recalls days leading up to Tori's vanishing and its aftermath, and she deals with her new partner from Colorado, Colin Taggert, who dresses like he's "going to a bar mitzvah at the Ponderosa" and does a bites-his-lip-and-smiles thing when he surveys the attractive Lou. Lou rolls her eyes, although her marriage to Greg, in Japan on business, is wilting. How many "Sorry, Baby" Porsche Cayenne SUVs does a woman want from her cheating husband? Lou is sassy, smart, and tough; writer Hall knows Los Angeles inside out, and she has keen insight into human nature and complex family relationships. This is a great start to a new series. Don't worry about the looming "Z" for Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone: meet the LAPD's Lou Norton.

Okay, I love Lou, and I look forward to seeing more of her in the future, but one should spend only so much time with law enforcement while camping. After all, isn't the point of spending a few nights hanging out with wild animals in the forest to escape civilization? Let's plot a murder (ineptly, it's the funnest way) with Buddy Sandifer, a used-car dealer in the Midwest and father of a teenage son heavily into sex manuals, who wants his wife dead so he can marry his buxom blonde mistress, Laverne, in Sneaky People. This terrific black comic noir, set in the '30s, is written by Thomas Berger, who also wrote the picaresque novel, Little Big Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman when it was adapted for the screen.

When you've had your fill of gazing at the stars and eating s'mores around the fire, light the tent lantern and crawl into your sleeping bag with a book. Now, the book must be absolutely riveting to keep your mind off how incredibly claustrophobic it all is. Think about it: you are lying not only inside a small tent, you are encased in a narrow bag. But don't think about it too much. If the enclosed space is getting to you, and you're in danger of bursting into shrieks and running amok through the camp, you might find it helpful to stuff cotton between each of your toes so they don't touch each other while you're in your sleeping bag. (I have no idea if this actually works because it just occurred to me; however, doesn't the theory behind this suggestion seem sound to you?)

My specific book recommendation depends on the phase of the moon. If there's a full moon, don't just howl at it––read Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Please don't tell me you don't like science fiction. There are certain books even non-sci fi lovers should enjoy, and this is one of them. In it, indentured lunar colony members produce wheat for consumption on Earth. It's 2075 when some of them, aided by a computer named Mike, decide to stage a revolution.

The word "revolution" reminds me of the French (Happy Bastille Day!), which reminds me of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. (Trust me, I am working my way toward a point.) If there's not a full moon, but an inky sky glittering with constellations, I suggest you read Alfred Bester's darkly comic oddball tale, The Stars My Destination. You'll see the parallels to Dumas' 1844 adventure masterpiece as Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class and only man alive on the wrecked and marooned spaceship Nomad, vows revenge against the owners and crew of the Vorga, a passing space vessel that ignores his distress signals. It's a furious, obsessional murderous pursuit through time and space that should distract you from the confinement of your tent and sleeping bag.

I would be grossly irresponsible if I didn't close with a post-apocalyptic horror thriller for your nighttime read. M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts (Orbit/Hachette, June 2014) is that––and an on-the-road (à la Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and coming-of-age novel, too. Its heroine is a 10-year-old named Melanie, whom Dr. Caldwell calls "our little genius." Melanie lives alone in her cell in a cellblock full of other children. There are no windows, and the children have no memories of any other existence. Five days a week, Sgt. Parks trains a gun on them while they seat themselves in wheelchairs, are strapped in, and are wheeled into a classroom for lessons. Melanie loves her teacher, Miss Justineau, and hopes when she grows up, she can move to Beacon, the closest city in that part of England. Soon thereafter, events take a turn that puts Melanie, Miss Justineau, Sgt. Parks, Pvt. Gallagher, and Dr. Caldwell on the road to Beacon. That's all I want to divulge about the plot and characters.

M. R. Carey

Despite its flaws (clichéd characters and plot elements and an over-long 403 pages), I enjoyed this book for its creepy atmosphere, intricate plotting, examination of our world and a dystopian future, the relationships between the characters, and the chance to see Melanie come into her own. Pandora, who opened a box and gave her gifts to the world, would have enjoyed it, too. When the owls start hooting, pull out Carey's novel, and dig in.

Happy camping and reading, everybody.

Espionage and Horror to Go

I'm on the train, traveling to northern California. This morning, I casually glanced at my watch and was horrified to discover I had 20 minutes to shower, iron my clothes, pack, fill the hummingbird feeder and bird bath, and water houseplants before I absolutely had to leave for the train station. (I'd say the birds and plants came out better than I did.) The book I grabbed as I burned rubber out the door is Fear: A Novel of World War I (trans. from the French by Malcolm Imrie; New York Review Books, May 2014). It's based on author Gabriel Chevalier's experiences on the front lines in The Great War and was originally published in 1930. Already in my handbag were Neely Tucker's The Ways of the Dead (Viking, June 2014), featuring Washington, DC investigative reporter Sully Carter, who digs into the killing of a judge's daughter and wonders if cold-case murders are related to it; and Rachel Howzell Hall's Land of Shadows (Forge, June 2014), with hard-as-nails Los Angeles homicide detective Elouise Norton looking into the death of a Jane Doe.

If you're traveling this Fourth of July weekend, I hope your preparations are less frenzied than mine this morning. You need to get a move on if you don't yet have a book to pack.

On Monday, I told you about Terry Hayes's thriller, I Am Pilgrim, and Lenny Kleinfeld's R-rated hardboiled black comedy, Some Dead Genius. While those two books make great reading anywhere, Josh Malerman's Bird Box (Ecco/HarperCollins, May 2014), is ideally read at night under the covers with a flashlight. It's an unsettling horror thriller set in a decimated dystopian world where people barricade their houses, cover their windows with heavy blankets, and wear blindfolds when venturing outside because seeing something––nobody knows exactly what––inexplicably drives people to deadly violence against themselves and others. Needless to say, this doesn't make anyone eager to answer a knock on the front door.

When the book opens, single mother Malorie has spent the four years since the birth of her two children, Boy and Girl, training them to use their ears and to obey her without question. She decides it's time to leave their Detroit house near the river and row a boat 20 miles downstream to what might be greater safety. Of course, they must do this blindfolded. As they feel their way to the river and make their perilous journey, we intermittently learn Malorie's backstory. The incessant high tension makes the ending somewhat anticlimactic, but holy Toledo, by the time I got there, I was so wrung out, I barely cared! This book about trust and adaptability was written by the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band The High Strung. (Is this fitting or what?) I wouldn't recommend it to someone who feels let down if ultimately all questions aren't fully answered.

Last year about this time, I enjoyed a terrific spy novel, Red Sparrow (Scribner, 2013), written by ex-CIA agent Jason Matthews (see Sister Mary Murderous's review here). Now, former BBC correspondent Adam Brookes gives us the benefit of his familiarity with China in a stellar book of espionage, Night Heron (Redhook/Hachette, May 27, 2014).

After a 20-year incarceration, Li Huasheng, also known as Peanut, escapes a high-security Chinese labor camp and makes his way to Beijing. There, Li approaches freelance British journalist Philip Mangan with an offer of top-secret information and the admonishment to tell his superiors that the night heron is hunting. Mangan passes this message on to a friend in the British embassy, and it rings a bell at the UK's Secret Intelligence Service headquarters. A plot is thus set in motion to steal Chinese missile secrets. We alternate between Li, Mangan, and British operatives in China and the SIS in London, with a few stops in the United States thrown in. The atmosphere is full of foreboding. When one assesses the interests and resources of the global espionage-industrial complex, various factions in the British SIS, and Chinese state security, the odds don't look good for the inexperienced Mangan and the decades-out-of-touch Li. I was struck by the role personal motives and frailties play in state affairs and grew to care so much about Brookes's characters, I had to fight off my impulse to peek at the ending. I wasn't as successful resisting the appetite for Chinese food this book inspired. Now I must wait for Brookes's next, Midnight Blind, due out in the UK on March 12, 2015.

Have a good weekend.

Review of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

No, this isn't my husband, our dog and me.

My rating scale for books is based on the lengths to which I'll go in order to avoid putting the book down. The other night I was reading Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 4, 2014) when the dog needed to go out. My husband took him out after negotiating a steep price because I rate Annihilation very high.

You can see why I was riveted from the very first paragraph:

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

Before I talk about VanderMeer's skillful manipulation of the threat, let me tell you about the expedition, the twelfth sent by the Southern Reach, a clandestine government agency. The mission is simple: to continue the government’s investigation into the mysteries of Area X. While Area X is mysterious, so are the motives behind the Southern Reach's treatment of the expedition sent to explore it. Expedition members are not only forbidden to take cell phones and computers, they don't even have watches or compasses. On their belts hangs an odd measuring device that will glow red to indicate they have 30 minutes to find "a safe place," although they are not told what the device measures. They also carry guns and journals they're to write in without sharing entries with each other.

Members of previous expeditions did not fare well and it's not clear why. Area X exerts a strange influence over people who enter, and they kill themselves or each other or return, like the eleventh expedition, husks of themselves. The current team consists of four unnamed women: the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist and the biologist, who narrates. The psychologist is the team leader. She puts her team under hypnosis to keep their minds from tricking them as they cross the border, which is invisible to the naked eye. If the psychologist becomes incapacitated, the others are to return to the entry point and wait for an "extraction" whose methodology they don't know.

winter in Area X

Everyone on the team assumes the enigmatic psychologist knows more than the others. From very early on, we see that the biologist narrator isn't divulging everything she knows to the group. She tells us she's not sure what they've been told is the truth. We're unsure how credible and objective a witness she is, although it's impossible not to root for her. It's strange that she insists on calling the uncharted structure that disappears into the ground (mentioned in the first paragraph) a tower, while the others say that of course it's a tunnel. Whatever it is, it's a masterpiece at unnerving the reader.

As unsettling events in Area X mount and take their toll, the biologist becomes even more determined to understand what's going on. I rode a roller coaster of dread and paranoia as she continues her investigations and attempts to account for strange, surrealistic animal behavior and to reconcile physical evidence with what she thinks she knows. As she becomes aware that everything is not what it seems and Area X may not be her only source of danger, she begins interrupting the action to recount her childhood, marriage and career as "the queen of tide pools." These suspensions in the plot serve to heighten tension when action is resumed, but her portrait is as fascinating as her heart-stopping Area X exploration. An only child, she became an expert in the uses of solitude and an observer who melts into her surroundings. Her nature is critical to VanderMeer's brilliant plot.

I was engrossed watching the biologist, whose work is her life, tackle the secrets of the intriguing and dangerous Area X. While we learn her secrets, she discovers truths about herself. This uncommon book, with its strange images and courageous heroine, is so suspenseful in so many different ways, I confess I sneaked peeks ahead. What can I say? I was under the spell of Area X.

Luckily, I don't need to wait long to continue VanderMeer's thriller mash-up of horror, sci fi, and fantasy examining reality and perception. Authority, second in the Southern Reach Trilogy, will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 6, 2014. The third book, Acceptance, will be out on September 2, 2014.

Map of Area X by Jeremy Zerfoss

Note: Images are from Jeff VanderMeer's page on weirdfictionreview.com.

Not With a Bang But a Whimper

Apocalyptic and dystopian novels have the same fascination for me as those geologic mega-disaster shows, and I have finally realized why: they portray global disasters for which I am in no way responsible and about which I can do absolutely nothing. I can't send money to stop sunspots or sign petitions to plug volcanoes or demonstrate against the inexorable slow advance of continents smashing into each other. Nonetheless, all of these events will occur sooner or later, and it is interesting to speculate how society as a whole and individuals within that society will deal with them.

Countdown City is the second in a pre-apocalyptic trilogy by Ben H. Winters. His Edgar-winning first book in the series, The Last Policeman, was set six months before the huge asteroid called Maia will impact the earth, wiping out most of civilization. About half of that time has passed at the opening of Countdown City, and Concord Detective Hank Palace, along with the rest of the force, is out of work. Police forces have been nationalized; electricity and communication services are mostly nonexistent, and water services in the city have finally failed. Law enforcement efforts have shifted from investigation to simply maintaining order.

When his old babysitter, Martha, asks for his help finding her husband, Brett, a former State Trooper who has left after promising that he would stay with her to the end, the likelihood of finding one man in a world where millions have abandoned their previous lives seems hopeless.

"This may seem like an obvious question," I say, when I'm done writing down her answers. "But what do you think he might be doing?"

"I've thought about it so much, believe me. I mean, it sounds silly, but something good. He wouldn't be off bungee jumping or shooting heroin or whatever. He'd be doing something, like, noble," Martha concludes. "Something he thought was noble."

Palace's sole tenuous lead is to a student activist at the University of New Hampshire whom Brett had arrested, then refused to testify against, even though the refusal had cost him his job. Hank rides his bike 40 miles to the Durham campus in search of Julia Stone, only to be nearly killed by an anarchist group calling itself the Free Republic of New Hampshire occupying the University. He is eventually shot, and is only rescued from death by his sister Nico, a member of a well-organized and -equipped group of paramilitary conspiracy theorists. Her group is attempting to rescue the only scientist who may be able to prevent the impact, who they believe has been kidnapped by a power-hungry cabal prepared to sacrifice most of humanity so they can control the world after.

This series should be terribly bleak but somehow is not; a surprising number of people retain elements of human decency and purpose in the face of impending universal destruction. And, of course, a great many do not. As in the first book, the mystery takes second place to the slow devolution of society into groups; from anarchists to predatory bandits to religious zealots, each organized according to the beliefs and values of its members. In a world slowly going mad, laconic, lonely Henry Palace remains a likable if very unlikely paladin. I look forward to the third installment in this unusual trilogy.

In Michael Farris Smith's Rivers: A Novel, the federal government, after many years of increasingly destructive hurricanes, has given up on the Southern Gulf Coast and drawn the Line. Lowland regions of seven states, including all of Florida, are to be entirely abandoned to the elements. Residents who disobeyed the mandatory evacuation orders are on their own; no services of any kind would be provided below the Line. Power, water, police, mail, and medical services are no longer available. Soldiers are stationed at the Line to prevent marauding bands from entering the diminished United States, although small unarmed groups and individual refugees are still welcome.

Cohen had opted to stay in his home on the Mississippi coast after his wife and unborn daughter were killed, and he buried them in his old family plot. Despite the endless rain, he was managing well enough with his dog and his horse and his ghosts. The house was sturdy––he had built it himself––and Charlie, an itinerant tinker dealing in all kinds of foodstuffs and supplies, makes irregular rounds to nearby towns, providing food, fuel, and ammunition to Cohen and his few die-hard neighbors.

Coming home from a buying trip one day, Cohen picks up a pair of teenagers and agrees to give them a lift. They mug and rob him and take his jeep, leaving him to die in a swamp. When he arrives home, his house has been stripped of all of his survival gear, food, and money. Even the few precious mementos of his wife are gone. The generator is still there, so Cohen knows they will be back. He disables the generator and leaves with his dog and horse, leaving a note for the thieves, "To whom it may concern, he is not dead, he is risen."

Without any means to survive, Cohen will have to make a run for the Line. But he is determined to find the thieves and recover his cherished box of memorabilia first. When one of the thieving band is attacked by a mountain lion after leaving Cohen's jeep unattended outside a church where Cohen has taken shelter, he learns the location of the band from the dying man.

While this story moved well and the writing was lyrical and at times quite intense, this is more a "slice of life in interesting times" novel than one with an overarching plot. Rivers is a dark story with a claustrophobic Southern Gothic feeling. In light of the weather anomalies in recent years, the premise is both remotely plausible and quite depressing. No wonder Cohen chooses to live so much of the time in his head, revisiting happier days! Below the Line is not a place I can ever imagine choosing to live.

Note: I received free review copies of these books. Countdown City was published on July 16, 2013 by Quirk Books. Rivers: A Novel will be released by Simon and Schuster on September 10, 2013.