You Won't Believe It's Not Stephen King

Demon Night by J. Michael Straczynski (1988): Babylon 5 creator  and long-time Spider-man writer J. Michael Straczynski has also written three horror novels over the years, with this being the first. It almost seems parodically like a Stephen King novel at points. It's laced with portentous and generally pretentious quotes at the beginning and at each section break, which is very much a King trademark (lest we miss the point,  Straczynski quotes King on the novel's main epigraph page). It's set in small-town Maine, it involves a former resident of that town as a child returning as an adult, and it involves an ancient evil awakening and transforming townspeople into monsters. Yes, it bears more than a passing resemblance to King's Salem's Lot, only with possession-crazy demons rather than vampirism as the culprit. 

The cast of characters who battle the evil includes a struggling writer, a Roman Catholic priest, and a medical doctor. OK, that's also quite a bit like the good guys in Salem's Lot. But wait, the protagonist has a wide array of psychic and telekinetic powers with which to battle the evil. So it's like Salem's Lot mashed up with Firestarter, The Shining, and The Dead Zone. There's also quite a bit of It. And there are Native American tribes mixed in because you can't have an American horror novel without a mysterious location tied into Native American spirituality.

Basically, if you haven't gotten enough Stephen King, Maine-based horror over the years, this novel may be for you. Straczynski offers generally well-drawn, sympathetic characters. The antagonist leaves a bit to be desired -- its speechifying, when it comes, is something of a disappointment. There's also a description of the Thing in its final form that really, really seems to anticipate South Park's ManBearPig. Snakes, cockroaches, and what appear to be malevolent, wall-crawling lobsters (well, it is Maine) show up in such a cursory fashion as obstacles to our heroes at the end that they seem to have accidentally wandered in from an Indiana Jones movie. 

And it's interesting to see a Wild Talent novel collided with a horror novel in this way, at least at the end when a full array of telepathic and telekinetic powers are needed to combat the antagonist. There's maybe a bit too much superhero in the main protagonist, but he's a relatively likable fellow for all that he's a Chosen One in the long tradition of genre Chosen Ones (though the Chosen One tends more to the epic fantasy and science fiction areas of genre).

The gem of characterization is the Roman Catholic priest, however, who takes a beating without ever losing his stubborn dignity. Why do atheists write the best characters of faith? In any case, I enjoyed the novel, though there's nothing that really stands out about it. Lightly recommended.

Gateway to the Stars

The Gateway Saga 2: Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl (1980): Frederik Pohl's first Gateway novel won pretty much every major SF award after it came out in 1977. This second book didn't, though it's still a fine piece of work, especially for those who want psychological depth in their Space Opera. 

We pick up the story 20 years after Gateway, with that novel's protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, now a comfortable millionaire on an increasingly resource-starved future Earth. He now funds space expeditions to find more of the technology of the Heechee. The Heechee were an extremely advanced alien race that left technology lying around the solar system (and the galaxy) after they disappeared half-a-million years ago.

Humanity started exploiting that technology after the first Heechee artifacts were found in artificial tunnels on Venus about 50 years before this novel. But humanity doesn't know how much of the technology works, especially the faster-than-light stardrives on the remaining Heechee spacecraft. 

These spacecraft, mostly housed at the carved-out asteroid dubbed Gateway, can be programmed with unknown destinations and sent out into the galaxy. Desperate 'prospectors' pay into the Gateway Corporation for a chance to ride on these ships. Sometimes they come back with new artifacts or useful locations; sometimes they come back with nothing; sometimes they don't come back, or come back dead.

Robinette's fortune was made by the disastrous but lucrative discovery of a non-rotating black hole, a discovery that dropped everyone but Robinette into said black hole. Now, he's sent an expedition to a newly discovered Heechee vessel in our Oort cloud. It seems to be a Heechee food factory, using carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and trace elements found in the cometary halo around our solar system to make a nearly inexhaustible supply of food. It could solve Earth's food problems. But where is the factory periodically shipping its food?

Well, there's the question. The Gateway books are the much smarter father to such SF series as Stargate SG-1 and Babylon 5 in which humans seek out ancient alien technology, often using it without any idea how it works. Broadhead and the other sympathetic characters of this novel, including Wan, the most lost of all Lost Boys, and an ancient machine consciousness that was once a living, non-human (is it a Heechee?) being, are skilfully drawn. 

There's less sense of the unknown in this second book, as Pohl begins to answer more questions than he asks. But the big questions, Where Did the Heechee Go and Why Did They Go There?, only begin to be answered here. The answer is a big one, but it awaits the sequel. Recommended.

The Gateway Saga 3: Heechee Rendezvous by Frederik Pohl (1984): The original Gateway Trilogy wraps up here as the mysterious Heechee finally put in an appearance 500,000 years after they seemingly vanished from the universe. The action of the third book picks up about 20 years after the second, with trilogy protagonist Robinette Broadhead beginning to show the effects of old age despite having a really terrific health plan.

Among Pohl's achievements here is a prediction of our current Cloud-based computer world, though in Pohl's world processing comes from a gigantic global pool upon which all computers can draw. That's some network! This future Earth's health care, though, hasn't been so predictively accurate, perhaps because Broadhead's health problems are such a key part of the narrative.

Many of the mysteries first posited in Gateway back in 1977 are solved here, most notably the reason for the Heechee's long disappearance. Unfortunately, the narrative bogs down again and again with Robinette Broadhead and his improbably beautiful, hyper-intelligent, and financially successful wife. She's part wish fulfillment and part comic relief, the latter because of her Boris-and-Natasha manner of speaking English. What larks, Pip!

Indeed, the trials of Broadhead and Wife seem to fascinate Pohl a lot more than the science fictional mysteries he himself created. The ending, when it comes, is rushed, somewhat perfunctory, and clearly left open-ended for yet another sequel. There would be three more Gateway novels, if you're counting.

The novel really is a must-read if one has read the first two Gateway books, despite its immense and multitudinous flaws. The tendency of the narrative to spin off into interpersonal whoopsy-cutesiness reminds me of similar problems in Robert Heinlein's later-career novels; Pohl composed the Gateway Trilogy between the ages of 57 and 64, along with a boatload of other novels. 

The going never gets as bad as it does in Heinlein's worst moments (see: The Number of the Beast), but the going, she is rough at times. Pohl's decision to transform a character from the previous novel into an annoying sociopath doesn't much help things, though it does pose an interesting question as to why he did so. My guess would be that he had a conversation with a psychologist who suggested that the character's upbringing, as constructed by Pohl, would almost certainly create a near-monstrous sociopath. But it's too bad -- and the scenes with that character are almost unreadable.

Oh, and there are black holes, weird black holes, artificial black holes, and various space fleets and space whales and thingamajigs. Despite all the lavish praise heaped by the novel on Broadhead's wife, the novel also posits two alien species with major downsides for females: Heechee women go into heat and, if they don't have sex while in heat, have a pronounced tendency to die; a second race not only has non-sentient females, but non-sentient females who are a food source for the (sentient) males as well as breeding stock. Well, alrighty, then! Lightly recommended.

Spoilery Lost Speculation post-"Sundown"

A long time ago, the producers of LOST talked about how Stephen King's THE STAND had influenced some elements of the show, most notably the character of fallen rock star Charlie, who they compared to King's Larry Underwood character in the behemoth-sized post-apocalyptic novel about a tussle between good and evil.

Such comparisons now look a lot more workable. In THE STAND, the 'leader' of the forces of good, Mother Abigail, dies with a fair bit of the book to go, leaving our merry band of good guys to figure out how to battle Satan-surrogate Randall Flagg by themselves. In LOST, Jacob is now dead (though remarkably loquacious, at least to Hurley), and the battle lines seem to be being drawn being a small band of good guys and a larger band of bad guys congregated around Not-Locke.

Like the stereotypical Devil, Not-Locke offers bargains that seem too good to be true, while Jacob's offers always involve some sort of sacrifice (as Dogen's monologue about his son highlights). Oh, that Devil!

Will this all turn out to be a battle between Good and Evil, or will some clever destabilizing of such a bipolarity occur a la BABYLON 5's undermining of the Vorlon/Shadow dichotomy during the climax of the Shadow War? I'm thinking a bit of both.

I'm also thinking that the Jacob/Not-Locke argument comes down to Parent/Child relations, if only because Parent/Child relations drive about 75% of the angst of all major LOST characters. Though it's entirely possible that Not-Locke is the parent and Jacob the child -- Not-Locke does bear more than a passing resemblance to the Old Testament Yahweh in that he's something of a murderous, manipulative jerk.

Poor Sayid! Though I assume he, like a few others, will have a chance at redemption before the story's through, a path the always annoying Benjamin Linus already seems to be walking. Though if I were to bet on someone running a long con on Not-Locke, it would be Sawyer.

Did Jacob know all this would happen once Sayid was raised from the dead? Destroying the Temple inhabitants changes the power dynamic on the Island, but that dynamic didn't seem all that healthy anyway -- Jack may be a jerk sometimes, but Dogen's manipulations and plots make Jack look like a saint.

Which may be the point.

Or not.