The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018)

The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018): CAST AND CREDITS: The first adaptation of the post-Stieg Larsson Lisbeth Salander novels is a competent, surprisingly bland thriller. Salander, played with competence but little spark by Claire Foy, is now basically Batman or The Equalizer, but with more hacking skills and lesbian sex. Would I have cast Stephen Merchant as a computer whiz? Mmm. No. He's fine, but I kept expecting Ricky Gervais to wander in at any minute. Which would probably have spiced things up! Lightly recommended as a time-filler.

Searching (2018)

Searching (2018): written and directed by Aneesh Changanty with Sev Ohanian; starring John Cho (David Kim), Michelle La (Margot Kim), and Debra Messing (Detective Vick): Tight, innovative thriller plays out entirely on the computer screen through various applications and feeds. It works on a TV screen without causing eyestrain because the camera does zoom in on relevant material, unlike the Unfriended movies, which are best watched on a computer screen from 18 inches away.

John Cho plays a widower who discovers one day that he doesn't know what his teen-aged daughter has been doing in the months since her mother died. Cho's quest to find his daughter will play out on Facebook and in chat rooms, vlog posts and email and texts. Debra Messing plays the police detective assigned to the case, already more than 24 hours old by the time Cho realizes his daughter is missing.

Searching works in part because it remains intimately focused on Cho's grief and anger. It's also extremely clever in displaying all the ways we are watched in our day-to-day life, voluntarily and involuntarily. The film-makers also do a nice job of creating a twisty plot that plays fair with the audience with its investigative plot. All the evidence of what happened is there -- you just have to watch carefully. All this and several distinctively Hitchcockian tropes deployed in a thoroughly modern manner. Recommended.

Gun Machine (2013) by Warren Ellis

Gun Machine (2013) by Warren Ellis: Warren Ellis, a long-time comic-book writer (Transmetropolitan, The Authority, and Planetary, among many others) and acerbic futurist, creates one hell of a smart Pop detective thriller here. 

Lonely, burned-out, never-was NYPD detective John Tallow starts Gun Machine with a bad day that quickly gets worse. The violent events of the first few pages open a door into a secret Manhattan world of murder and weird maps. And guns. Lots of guns. Hundreds of guns from flintlocks to modern, near-metal-less handguns. An otherwise empty apartment filled with guns arranged into a mysterious, incomplete pattern. And every gun attached to either an unsolved murder or a murder now known to be incorrectly solved.

Tallow's detective instincts get jump-started by this room of mystery, especially after the case is dumped on him  because the NYPD not-so-secretly wants Tallow to fail and the cases to vanish as quickly as possible. A bad detective gets born again, though that rebirth may be short-lived. Conspiracies of power don't want the secret of the guns solved.

Ellis' prose is as pungent and cynical as ever, densely packed with information. The plot rockets along. Tallow and the other characters are sharply drawn. Sharply drawn, too, is our attention to the secret maps of Manhattan which Tallow discovers. A financial map based on the time it takes for financial offices to communicate with Wall Street. A map of gun crimes in Manhattan and the other boroughs. And the map the killer carries in his head, of Manhattan before Europeans came, a map that still surfaces in surprising places in the postmodern landscape.

It's a dark romp that engages with social and technological questions as it zips along, dialogue crackling and sparking, the narrative casting a cold eye on the modes of NYPD evidence collection, the surveillance state, the technical specifications of guns used in famous murders, the difficulty of parking in New York, the meaning of Occupy Wall Street, the malign rise of private policing, the dangers of too much exercise, an assortment of Native American tribes and rituals, and the politics of the police bureaucracy. 

Gun Machine is too densely packed to make a great movie, but it would make one hell of an HBO miniseries. Highly recommended.

Gorky Park (1983)

Gorky Park (1983): adapted from the Martin Cruz Smith novel by Dennis Potter; directed by Michael Apted; starring William Hurt (Arkady Renko), Lee Marvin (Jack Osborne), Brian Dennehy (William Kirwill), Joanna Pacula (Irina Asanova), Richard Griffiths (Anton), and Ian Bannen (Iamskoy):

A perfectly respectable, big-budget adaptation of Martin Cruz Smith's first novel featuring morose Soviet detective Arkady Renko. William Hurt is physically miscast as Renko, but he does a good job with the pensive, morose part of the character. 

The real problem is that as able a writer as adapter Michael Potter is (he of BBC standouts The Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven, both made into problematic Hollywood adaptations themselves), he has to either jettison the lengthy descriptions of life in the late-Soviet-era Russia of the novel or use a voice-over. And the film-makers clearly decided against a voice-over. And Gorky Park really needed one. Without it, we're either shown stuff that requires context or told stuff in awkward expository sections. 

Stripped of Cruz's detailed, pungent descriptions of life in late-1970's Moscow, Gorky Park becomes a generic detective thriller with an underwhelming MacGuffin. That MacGuffin was interesting in the novel; here it seems almost perfunctory, as does the identity of the killer. Yes, you will guess the identity of the killer quite easily because he's the most obvious suspect and because there really aren't any other suspects. Oh, well.

This certainly isn't a bad movie. And you do get to see a young Joanna Pacula's boobies and William Hurt's naked ass, depending on what sort of nudity spins your dial. And Brian Dennehy is so much fun as an American cop that he seems to have wandered in accidentally from the set of another, juicier movie. Lightly recommended.

Now I'm All Outta Elvis and Pike

Stalking the Angel (1989) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #2) by Robert Crais: The theft of a priceless Japanese book from the Los Angeles home of an American businessman sends PI Elvis Cole and kick-ass pal Joe Pike up against dark family secrets and Japanese organized crime. Pike's character begins to come into focus in this, the second Cole/Pike novel, though the blurb on the back still refers to him as a sociopath (he isn't). 

The mystery is a bit thin. The climax is an inspired, epic shoot-em-up that seems to have been written with the movie screen in mind. And for foodies and lovers of brand names, Cole's obsessive recounting of the foods he eats and the brands of clothing people wear is at full-throttle. Recommended.

Lullaby Town (1992) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #3) by Robert Crais: Elvis Cole and Joe Pike head to Connecticut in search of the son a famous Hollywood director abandoned years ago before he was famous. Well, his ex-wife took the son with her and disappeared, and the director didn't care then. Now, he wants to reconnect. 

The detective work leads Cole to the missing woman quite quickly... and into yet another big mess quickly after that. There's a certain amount of stereotypical fuzzy-mindedness about the Mafia along the way, along with another massive action climax. Crais, who's worked in TV and movies, seems to enjoy skewering Hollywood pretensions and pretenses here without turning the director into a completely unlikable cliche. Recommended.

Free Fall (1993) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #4) by Robert Crais: The estranged fiancee of an LA cop comes to PI Elvis Cole in search of answers as to why her high-school sweetheart has become furtive and distant. And of course it's not simply another woman. Soon, Cole and best friend Joe Pike are fighting both the police and LA gangs as they search for answers. Things lead to a tightly choreographed, bloody climax. Recommended.

Voodoo River (1995) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #5) by Robert Crais: A Hollywood celebrity hires Elvis Cole to track down her birth mother back in Louisiana. Nothing is ever simple in an Elvis Cole adventure. 

Along the way to an explanation, Cole runs up against small-town crooks, the world's worst PI, a 200-pound napping turtle, a Lurch-like enforcer, and a whole lot of Louisiana cooking. This novel also introduces the series' one major drag, love-interest Lucy Chenier, who will spend the next few Cole novels boring the bejesus out of the reader even as she entrances Cole. Recommended.

Indigo Slam (1997) (Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike #7) by Robert Crais: Three kids aged 8 to 16 hire Elvis Cole to find their father, who's gone missing from their LA home. As Cole feels sorry for them, he takes on the case rather than calling Child Protective Services. But what seems simple isn't, leading Cole and hyper-competent partner Joe Pike into a Battle Royale between Viet Namese and Russian organized criminals. Recommended.

Great Detectives with Unfortunate Names

The Snowman (Inspector Harry Hole#7) (2007) by Jo Nesbo (translated into English from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett): Say what you will about the Scandinavians, but people sure love their mysteries and thrillers. Especially publishers looking for the next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or Smilla's Sense of Snow, going back a few years). That's why The Snowman is the first Jo Nesbo-penned Harry Hole (!!!) police procedural translated into English but the seventh overall: this Norwegian thriller is the most marketable of the Hole books.

Why? It's got a nigh-omniscient serial killer, the sort of serial killer who's nigh-omnipresent in movies, television, and novels but nigh-non-existent in the real world. Especially serial killers who actively seek out the cop hunting them for a showdown. So far as I know, this has never happened in real life, ever, anywhere on the planet. In fiction, though, it's such a common occurrence that one is surprised that there are any homicide detectives left alive on planet Earth.

But enough of my kvetching. The Snowman is a tensely plotted, satisfying twisty fun-machine that involves the horrible murders of several women over a 15-year period. Harry Hole, Oslo detective and possessor of a name that I personally would have changed for English-language publication, is an alcoholic trainwreck who is also the Best Damn Detective in Norway. He must stop a serial killer dubbed The Snowman, in part because The Snowman seems to have taken a personal interest in him.

One of the reasons The Snowman was selected as the first English-language appearance of Hole is, I believe, its cinematic touches. There are several set-pieces that seem to have been written expressly for film. And hey, Michael Fassbender has apparently been cast in the long-gestating Snowman film adaptation! He looks nothing much like the character described in the novel other than their shared attribute of Tallness, but so it goes.

Anyway, this is an enjoyable thriller. And Hole is an engaging character. The serial killer is ludicrous on a number of levels once revealed, but less so than a lot of serial killers (including every incarnation of Hannibal Lecter). And Nesbo makes Norway seem interesting in an odd way, like a small town masquerading as a country. The translation by Don Barrett seems solid to me. Recommended.

End of Watch (2016) by Stephen King

End of Watch (Bill Hodges #3) (2016) by Stephen King: Intrepid but decidedly unhealthy retired police detective Bill Hodges returns in this conclusion to a trilogy that began in Mr. Mercedes and continued in Finders Keepers. Still set in a never-named U.S. Rust Belt city somewhere on one of the Eastern Great Lakes, End of Watch pits Hodges against the seemingly brain-damaged spree killer of Mr. Mercedes.

King manages to pull off something that looked a bit dodgy when it first became manifest in Finders Keepers -- namely, the introduction of the paranormal into the world of Bill Hodges. Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes Killer of the first Hodges novel, was left with a brain made of mush at the climax of Mr. Mercedes. Hodges' soon-to-be-partner-in-private-detection, Holly Gibney, bonked Hartsfield on the head just before he could blow up an auditorium filled with thousands of boy-band-loving teenagers.

However, experimental drugs and the vagaries of the brain have slowly granted Hartsfield mental powers. He fakes being non compos mentis to avoid prosecution for his crimes while he gains strength and lethality. 

Hartsfield is a return to one of King's favourite types, the Outsider with Wild Talents. Unfortunately, this psychic wants to kill people -- as many of them as possible. King combines a quasi-scientific mind-control premise that stretches back to at least Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Parasite" with an antagonist who's one of Thomas Harris' serial-killing grotesques writ larger and with super-powers. 

Brady Hartsfield doesn't just want to kill people -- he wants to find ways to trick them into killing themselves. And with his powers, he now can. King's heroes have to engage Hartsfield on multiple fronts to stop him, from the Internet to the real world to the nebulous world of the mind. 

Somehow, it all works. Even the bit where a character survives a gunshot because of something in her pocket. Well, OK, that doesn't quite work. 

Otherwise, End of Watch works in part because Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney are carefully drawn characters. Hartsfield is a terrible, pitiful antagonist. There's also an immensely clever plot device involving video games and hypnotism. And there's a snowstormy climax that recalls the closing chapters of The Shining. In terms of tension and pleasure of reading,  Mr. Mercedes remains the best of the Hodges trilogy, but End of Watch runs a close second. Highly recommended.

Demons and Ghost-dogs

The Deceased (1999) by Tom Piccirilli:  The late and much-lamented Tom Piccirilli's early horror novels were uniquely strange. Strange events, strange creatures, strange protagonists. The simplest of plot-lines could suddenly stop dead for disturbingly violent and/or sexual set-pieces. Characters might spend pages immersed in their own poetic maladjustment. The prose would push the limits of the purple and the florid, sometimes going way, way beyond the red-line. And it all worked as the expression of someone who wanted more out of the horror novel than simply plain prose and A-Z plotting.

The Deceased embodies Piccirilli's approach to horror. Indeed, there's almost no point describing it in all its pulpy, poetic, weird glory. It's about a young horror writer wrestling with the demons of his terrible past. Some of those demons are deceased members of his own family. There's pathetic fallacy and incest and tips on writing (seriously). There are strange things in the forest surrounding the ancestral home. There's that ancestral home with its weird construction and hideous facade. There are ghosts and monsters and voices from the past.

To borrow a phrase from somebody, it's all a bravura frenzy. It's also the sort of writing that seems to drive a certain type of reader, one looking for the straightforward and the plain style, completely nuts. You're watching a gifted writer assemble and disassemble himself simultaneously. It may not always be pretty, coherent, or even 'good' in a traditional sense, but it's compelling and very human. Recommended.

The Midnight Road (2007) by Tom Piccirilli:  40ish Flynn is a case-worker for New York City's Child Protective Services.  He's a broken soul due to childhood tragedy. But he's also dogged and committed to child welfare. And a huge fan of film noir. So of course he gets involved in a noirish case with hints of (possible) supernatural horror.

The late Tom Piccirilli wrote a string of noirish thrillers beginning in the early oughts. This is one of them. It lacks the exuberant stylistic flourishes of some of his earlier horror works, but it's plotted beautifully, with twists that are difficult to see coming.

Flynn is very much the damaged would-be knight of noir and hard-boiled detective stories, emotionally stunted but heroically struggling against demons inside and outside. The character's own investment in noir makes for a sort of running meta-commentary on the action, as Flynn notes ways in which his own story does or does not resemble the noir films he loves so much.

Piccirilli tamps down his stylistic flourishes for, I assume, reasons of commercial viability: a person has to eat. But they also suit the noir and hard-boiled genres he's working with. Stylistic outliers like James Ellroy exist, but for the most part the hard-boiled heroes and anti-heroes and straight-out villains of Piccirilli's genre antecedents work within a world of flavourful but not wildly experimental or impressionistic prose. 

The result is that old chestnut, a page-turner, one which doesn't end until Flynn has dealt with his internal demons. The identities of the antagonists come as a shock, but a fair one. Flynn, sympathetic and self-lacerating, makes for a fine protagonist. And touches of the absurd -- Flynn finds himself haunted by the talking ghost of a French bulldog, probably the result of slight brain damage incurred early in the novel. In all, a very satisfying ride on The Midnight Road. Recommended.

The Past Isn't Even Past

Poppet (2013) by Mo Hayder: Mo Hayder's troubled, brilliant DCI Jack Caffery continues his Major Crimes work in Bristol in this satisfying horror-procedural. Caffery again and again finds himself investigating cases that seem to be just this side of the supernatural, and Poppet keeps that going. Caffery also has a couple of problems to deal with from previous novels, but these are explained well enough that one doesn't need to have read a previous Caffery novel to understand everything that goes on.

Hayder gives us multiple third-person limited narrative focuses for Poppet. The narrative is handled deftly (though Boy, are some of the chapters short!), with Caffery and mental-institution worker AJ being the main protagonists. AJ calls Caffery in when events at his privately funded institution seem to get dangerously weird. And they are dangerously weird, and have been intermittently for years.

Poppet does a number of things tremendously well. Foremost is its sensitive treatment of catastrophic mental-health issues both through the sympathetic, haunted AJ's interactions with his patients, and partially through Poppet's plot, which does not go where it seems to be going. Hayder should get some sort of prize for not giving us the same old mentally ill boogeymen and women, or for not simply dressing up yet another impossible Joker and unleashing him on her novel.

Terrible things do happen, and marvelous things, some of the latter verging on the supernatural without necessarily getting there. Throughout it all, Caffery -- isolated, alcoholic, workaholic -- holds himself together as he also strives to follow the labyrinthine thread to the truth. Highly recommended.

Hey Nostradamus! (2004) by Douglas Coupland:  So we have four narrators for the four sections of Hey Nostradamus!: Cheryl, Jason, Heather, and Reg.  They narrate their parts of the story in 1988, 1999, 2003, and 2004 respectively. Cheryl and Jason were high-school lovers in 1988. Heather is Jason's girlfriend in 2003. Reg is Jason's religious fanatic father. A horrific 1988 Vancouver high-school shooting which vaguely anticipates Columbine sets the narratives in motion.

Coupland's characterization of the four narrators is deft and sympathetic, or at least empathetic. The 1988 school shooting is portrayed with a mixture of horror, black comedy, and crazed heroism on the parts of some individuals, including Jason. The media frenzy afterwards, the desire to canonize some individuals, the problems of recovering from such things -- these are all marvelously conveyed.

Douglas Coupland doesn't always get his due as a major novelist because, like Kurt Vonnegut, his novels are so easy and natural to read that the whole thing can seem effortless. Perhaps even too entertaining. Perhaps, given the often bleak but also often laugh-out-loud comic touch Vonnegut and Coupland share, the novels can seem glib.

Hey Nostradamus! isn't glib. But it goes down so smoothly that one can perhaps be forgiven for finding it too entertaining to be taken as a serious novel. But it is serious. If there's closure, it's faint and conditional and human and humane. The plot takes turns at several points that are genuinely shocking in their unexpectedness, though they always remain this side of plausible. 

Morally, the novel suggests that moral or religious certainty, the certainty of absolutism, can be horrifyingly toxic. It also suggests that people can change, but not always, and not always in time for that change to be meaningful to those for whom one changed. All this comes in that compulsively readable Coupland manner, funny and witty and floating on a vast ocean of sadness. Highly recommended.

When Bad Titles Happen To Good Books

Frankenstorm by Ray Garton, also including the novella "The Guy Down the Street" (2014): Great, fun, pulpy horror-thriller with a terrible title. An unlikely West Coast hurricane and a sinister government bio-weapon project team up to cause major problems for the citizens of Eureka, California, north of San Francisco. Ray Garton handles the multiple viewpoint third-person narration smoothly, cranking up the tension as the disparate plot threads begin to dovetail towards the conclusion. 

As pretty much always, Garton manages to work a social consciousness into the horrors and thrills. The bio-weapon team has been abducting homeless people from the Eureka area and experimenting on them in order to develop a viral weapon. 

Both the first chapter and various sections throughout generate sympathy for these unwilling test subjects, as well as for a working-class woman who also gets pulled into the terrible events of the novel simply because she needs money for her son's medical care. It's rare that a thriller can end with a solemn contemplation of mortality, but Frankenstorm does, and effectively. This is the sort of thrilling agit-prop we could use more of.

Nonetheless, thrills and surprises are paramount. Frankenstorm stirs a bunch of things that have often served as the plot-engine for a thriller -- a crazy cop, a conspiracy-busting reporter, a well-armed private army, a mad scientist, a hurricane, a child custody battle -- into the same pot. And it's delicious! This paperback edition also includes an X-rated version of the sort of American-suburban contes cruel that Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont created in the 1950's, "The Guy Down the Street." In all, recommended.

Strangers on a Train (1951)

Strangers on a Train: adapted by Ben Hecht, Whitfield Cook, Czenzi Ormonde, and Raymond Chandler from the novel by Patricia Highsmith; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Farley Granger (Guy Haines), Robert Walker (Bruno Antony), Ruth Roman (Anne Morton) and Patricia Hitchcock (Barbara Morton) (1951): At the very least, Strangers on a Train is one of Alfred Hitchcock's ten greatest films. And maybe it's top five. It's a terrific thriller that holds up beautifully and which contains an absolutely terrific performance from the tragic Robert Walker, who would die at the age of 32 the same year Strangers on a Train came to theatres.

Farley Granger's Guy Haines is a tennis player with a marital problem. His wife's been unfaithful. He wants to get a divorce so he can marry the daughter of the United States Senator for whom he'll be working full time once his tennis career ends. But his wife, now carrying someone else's child, no longer wants a divorce.

A seemingly random conversation with a stranger Guy meets in the club car of a train rapidly becomes sinister: Robert Walker's Bruno Antony is a superficially charming psychopath who seems to know an awful lot about Guy's marital problems, and indeed his entire personal life.

While spit-balling various theories on how to murder someone and get away with it, Bruno suggests that potential murderers should swap victims so as to eliminate motive. Guy thinks the creepy guy on the train is just indulging in a lurid fantasy (or mentally goofing around the way that the father and the Hume Cronyn character spin out perfect murder theories in Hitchcock's earlier Shadow of a Doubt).  But then Mrs. Haines ends up murdered at an amusement park. And now Bruno wants Guy to hold up his side of a bargain Guy didn't realize he'd made.

Funny, thrilling, and creepy, Strangers on a Train contains a number of shots and sequences that have been discussed in film schools and film criticism for decades. I'll let you experience them for yourself. Farley Granger does solid work as the slightly dense Mr. Haines, as does Hitchcock's daughter Patricia as the smart-aleck sister of Guy's new love interest. But it's Walker who steals the movie with his insinuating, creepy, hyper-intelligent psychopath. It's an absolutely marvelous performance made tragic by the reality of his death. Highly recommended.

Too Many Vampires

The Passage by Justin Cronin (2010): The Passage caused a bidding war among publishers that topped out at $3.75 million for the publishing rights and an unknown (and probably greater) amount for Ridley Scott's purchase of the film rights. Pretty good for a third novel from a writer whose first two novels were acclaimed and awarded for their literary merit but, insofar as I know, lacked vampire apocalypses.

There are a lot of good things in The Passage, especially in the first 500 pages or so (it checks in at about 760 pages in trade paperback, with two more volumes of the trilogy on the way). Cronin has a flair for description and characterization that elevates this above the run-of-the-mill thriller, with passages of occasional lyric beauty and some keenly drawn sympathetic characters. The plot is suspenseful, the apocalypse nicely imagined. He's not so good at imagining the inside of unsympathetic characters, but that seems to be part of the ethos of the novel -- there's really only one truly despicable person in The Passage, and he isn't a vampire. Everyone else has his or her reasons.

We begin in 2016. A U.S. military-funded expedition to South America yields what appears to be the source of all vampire legends: a bat-carried virus that turns people into, well, vampires. They're super-strong, nearly invulnerable, extremely photo-sensitive, tear people to pieces and eat them an awful lot, and can transmit their affliction to others. They also lose all body hair and run around naked -- essentially, they're a cross between the vampire in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu and Will Ferrell's character in Old School.

The military sees this a golden opportunity to "weaponize the human body", and begins experimenting with the virus in a secret Colorado laboratory. Things go well. And then they don't. They really, really don't. Boy, do they not go well at all.

We leave the major characters of the 2016-2018 portion of the novel behind at about the 250-page mark with the complete collapse of civilization well underway. A couple of vignettes take us through the next 93 years until we arrive at a small California mountain-top settlement that's survived the ongoing apocalypse, and we are introduced to our next cast of characters. Here, the novel shifts into a post-apocalyptic mode that recalls novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz, only with vampires and a lot of late teen-aged angst. Lots of stuff happens. And 500 pages later, we end on a cliffhanger.

There's a major logical flaw very early in the novel that may derail some of your appreciation for the work if you figure it out. I'm not telling you. Like Ontario, it's yours to discover. The first 500 pages really do zip by, with solid world- and character-building yoked to a rollercoaster of a plot. And what a rollercoaster!

No, seriously, what a rollercoaster! After 500 pages of reversals, apparent deaths, shocking developments, shocking returns from the dead, more shocking deaths, and a casino that explodes because of a 93-year-long build-up of sewer gases, I started to feel less like I was on a rollercoaster and more like I was being punched in the head repeatedly.

Cronin never runs out of ideas (though they're often other people's ideas synthesized into new combinations), but after awhile you may wish he would. Or save some for the sequel. As The Passage has often been compared to the first volume in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'll illustrate the problem with the climax using The Fellowship of the Ring: imagine if Gandalf and company fought a Balrog, then fought two Balrogs, then fought an army of Balrogs, and then found out that there were 500 more Balrogs between them and Mordor. Somewhere in the middle of all that, both Boromir and Gandalf die and then come back to life, only to die again. Or maybe not. Now imagine that scenario on speed. That's what the novel accelerates into, out of the blue and into the black.

By the end, there's too much of everything. So too much of everything. Two loveable animals killed for no discernible plot reason except to jerk some tears; two 'good' characters with what amount to superpowers; two Magical Negros (seriously -- it's as if Stephen King decided to have both Mother Abigail and John Coffey dispensing magical blackness in The Stand); two action set-pieces involving a train pursued by a horde of vampires; 12 vampire lords (actually, 13. Or maybe 14. Maybe it's an homage to the replicant-number problem in the original version of Blade Runner); so many teary farewells and subsequent teary hellos that I lost track; bioluminiscent vampires (which are I assume a satiric commentary on the sparkly vampires of Twilight); multiple nicknames for vampires, none of them being the obvious 'vampire' or 'vamps' (instead we get 'smokes' or 'jumps' or 'flyers'); one super-magical little girl; two dead characters who return from the dead and really, really shouldn't have; one fairly major character we know is doomed because he alone never gets an internal monologue; a seemingly haunted house; and repeated references to an academic conference more than a millennium after the outbreak of the vampire plague that recall Margaret Atwood's frame narrative for A Handmaid's Tale but which don't help at all with generating suspense.

This last one is quite interesting, as it's similar to what Max Brooks did in World War Z -- that is, contain the apocalypse within a shell narrative demonstrating that the end of the world did not, in fact, entirely arrive. It defangs the menace of the apocalypse (and the vampires), and I can't say as I think it's a good idea. Essentially, it puts a guardrail up for the weak of heart. Someone will survive! But one of the points of an apocalyptic narrative in the contemporary world is that someone may NOT survive, and you're supposed to read to the end to find out.

The dual trains-outracing-vampires sequences illustrate one of the problems with Narrative Overkill. The first sequence is startling, in part because the character describing the events can't actually see what's happening -- she can hear what's happening, she can respond to the reactions of the people around her who actually know what's happening, and she can describe what she learned later about what she was hearing. It's quite unnerving and evocative, and leaves a lot to the imagination, which is where a lot of great horror ultimately resides.

The second train sequence plays like a storyboard for a Mummy movie, with rivers of fast-moving vampires pursuing a train in what really reads like a description of a CGI scene from a big-budget film. It isn't evocative at all, or particularly scary, and the conclusion of this sequence also operates as a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card that immediately solves what might have actually been something of a messy plot problem. It's dull, it's manipulative, and it's completely inorganic. Remember when Spielberg couldn't restrain himself and had to give us a second 'bike flying through the air' sequence in E.T., only with more kids and far less impact? That's Cronin's problem here. He's too schematic in his attempts to top himself.

Overall, though, I enjoyed The Passage more than I was annoyed by it. The first 500 pages really are solid and sometimes spectacular; the last 260 pages are increasingly wearying and manipulative. I will be interested to read the middle book of the trilogy. Right now, Cronin could go either way as a thriller writer, and I'm interested to see which way that will be. Recommended.