Reviews of Other Books |

THE GENIUS PLAGUE by David Walton

October 19, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

David Walton’s THE GENIUS PLAGUE is about a fungal infection that grants its victims superior intelligence but also an overwhelming desire to protect and advance its parasite’s survival. This is a fantastic read that delivers on almost every level, including technical excellence, a sweeping scale that always feels local, and big ideas.

The story focuses on two men, Paul and Neil Johns. Paul, a mycologist, becomes infected while studying fungi in the Amazon. Neil, his brother, has just started a job at the National Security Agency. Neil, our protagonist, is brilliant but a screw-up, hired by a manager at the NSA who sees plenty of use for his out-of-the-box way of thinking. When he stumbles upon a strange new form of communication among people living along the Amazon, a vast conspiracy is uncovered, one that threatens South America, then the United States, and ultimately the world.

Are the infected in control of themselves and benefiting from their symbiotic relationship with the fungus, or are gradually evolving into creatures without individuality? Is the ecologically sustainable, utopian world they offer worth the price? And can they be stopped?

THE GENIUS PLAGUE is a meaty read packed with good characterization, snappy dialogue, excellent pacing, and plenty of surprises. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.

THE DEMONOLOGIST by Andrew Pyper

October 18, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

THE DEMONOLOGIST by Andrew Pyper tells the story of a professor of demonic mythology who is confronted by a very real demon that wants him to help bring demons out of the realm of story and into the real world. I liked it. Though I didn’t find it particularly frightening, it’s a very well written story. I’m on a bit of a literary horror bender right now, and I’d consider THE DEMONOLOGIST a gold standard for that subgenre.

The book reads like Michael Chabot wrote a horror novel. A witty, erudite professor lives in Manhattan, has a precocious daughter, exchanges witty banter with a professional colleague who functions as his story “ally,” and his marriage is on the rocks. When he’s hired to go to Venice to examine a phenomenon, resulting in his daughter being taken from him by a demon, he is forced to use his knowledge of demonic lore (specifically, John Milton’s PARADISE LOST) to find her. His pursuit becomes a game between him and the demon. He wants his daughter back. The demon wants something from him.

I loved the writing, enjoyed the characters, and found a number of scenes satisfyingly creepy. But I never really engaged with the story on an emotional level. The protagonist is, well, just too darn witty. He regards most of the situations he finds himself in at a safe emotional distance, such as the breakup of his marriage, and when he talks about the demon and what’s happening to him, he resorts to banter when real conversation is called for. My biggest disappointment was a failed expectation. I was hoping the novel would be about a man using his knowledge of demonology to crack a mystery. Instead, we find the character very, very loosely relating passages in PARADISE LOST to city names, that kind of thing, and pursuing the demon accordingly. This left a real opportunity on the table, which was for the reader to gain a deeper understanding of the broad spectrum of demonic lore and see the protagonist use it to solve a mystery, the way we’d see in a Dan Brown or Michael Crichton novel and what makes those books so darn entertaining.

But okay, for what I did get, I liked it. It’s an entertaining story told with a sophisticated voice, well-developed characterization, and some creepy scenes. I liked the author enough I picked up THE ONLY CHILD, his next novel.

CLADE by James Bradley

October 13, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

James Bradley’s literary dystopian novel CLADE tells the story of three generations of a family living in a world dealing with climate change caused by global warming. A clade is a group of life forms consisting of an original form and its descendants. Similarly, we get the story of Adam Leith, a climate scientist living in the near future, and his offspring. Their stories are filled with typical human joys and pain while the world slowly changes and becomes increasingly hostile to life and civilization.

As a cautionary tale, CLADE works very well, making climate change and its effects the backdrop of each of the book’s interconnected stories. Fish die-offs, bird die-offs, rising sea levels, mass extinctions, super storms and resulting flooding, killer heat waves, disease, and social unrest plague the planet as things keep getting worse. By focusing on a single family, Bradley makes it all personal, and by showing three generations, he’s able to flash forward so we see the impact of climate change occurring rapidly. The author’s literary style is engaging.

The book’s advantages, however, may also challenge some readers. By switching point of view and jumping forward in time in a short book, it’s hard to get invested in any one character and care about them. For me, the biggest problem is aside from Adam and his daughter Summer escaping massive flooding in a depressed England, they don’t really suffer from the effects of climate change. There are millions of climate refugees, economies are staggering, and the food chain is collapsing, but they all seem to live out their lives in relative comfort, able to focus on the mundane and relatively trivial goings on in their lives. While the world is getting worse, there is no real sense it is getting worse for them, which keeps the reader a safe distance from the impending misery the author is trying to communicate. In contrast, THE FOUNTAIN AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD takes a similar approach by telling the human story of globalization, but in a much more coherent, personal, visceral way; you feel as well as see its effects, and you become deeply invested in the characters.

When I think about climate change, I seriously worry for my children, my species, and myself. As in this book, because we lack the political will to buck the elites and do something about climate change, we and our descendants will suffer for it, and I doubt we’ll make out as well as the people in this novel.

INTO THE GUNS by William C. Dietz

October 5, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

In INTO THE GUNS by William C. Dietz (author of LEGION OF THE DAMNED), meteors strike the earth and wipe out the U.S. government. In the ensuing chaos, military units find themselves cut off from the chain of command, and the Southern states plan secession. The result is a setup for a second American civil war.

I read the synopsis and thought, wow, count me in. Here’s what I liked and didn’t. First, I’d heard Dietz is a master of military sci-fi, and his skills are on full display here. The guy writes supremely well, carries a story, gives you likeable characters, and delivers detailed action. I also enjoyed the ideas behind the North and South getting ready to fight. What’s at stake is the strategic petroleum reserve, which in the South. The South wants to keep it for itself, the North says it belongs to the whole country and wants it shared. The South wants to reconstitute as a confederacy incorporated like a business, with a CEO, board of directors, and voters become shareholders–in short, a version of libertarian government where corporations and the rich can buy votes and dominate decision-making. The North wants to spend money on a massive reconstruction program to repair the damage and rebuild the country.

Dietz portrays the North in a more favorable light, but I was just grateful for once not to read a second civil war novel in which dirty liberals try to steal everything under the direction of Black socialists who want to disarm patriotic citizens and create a Marxist one-world government. Seriously, I’ve read one or two of those, and they’re basic right wing wish fulfillment. They don’t require willing suspension of disbelief from the reader so much as an unquestioning ideology, one in which the world is divided between evil liberals and plucky patriots.

Despite what I liked about it, I had some reservations. Within days of the attack, gangs attack and begin to overrun major military bases. One military unit, run by one of the book’s protagonists, finds itself under attack by a nearby town that wants its fuel for itself. While this created opportunities for Dietz to show off his excellent skills as a military fiction author, I found it hard to believe that within days of disaster, gangs or even small towns would find the wherewithal and strength to take on U.S. Army units in their bases, much less win. Civilians don’t come across as very nice people in this novel. Most of them are selfish looters. The President is a civilian but for one odd reason or another ends up going into combat with the troops much of the time.

A final issue for me was the timeline and pacing. The country falls apart, everybody starts attacking everybody else, military units go rogue and turn mercenary (strangely resisting the chain of command when it begins to reassert itself), and the South plans secession in a timeline that seems to be highly compressed for the most part but then suggests time is jumping ahead quite a bit. This is apparently a series; I would have hoped the first book would deal with the meteor strikes and their aftermath, leading up up to the civil war, and the second book get into it. That being said, the quick pacing keeps things moving.

In the end, you just have to regard it as pulpy military adventure fiction and run with it. If you’re good with how some of the events bump fast forward, and the dubious realism of how the country responds to the crisis in its first months, you’re in for a fast-paced, action-packed read.

WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL by David Williams

September 5, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

David Williams’ WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL is an apocalyptic story about an Amish community struggling to survive after a solar storm fries the world’s electronics. I liked it for its freshness and fair degree of realism, but with some big reservations.

Being a fan of apocalyptic fiction, I always thought the Amish would be ideal survivors after a world-changing disaster. They live largely without technology right down to getting around using horse and buggy. They’re farmers and live close to the land. WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL convinced me they’d have all the skills to survive but would be ultimately doomed to die.

First, the story. We’re introduced to Jacob and his wife Hannah, son Jacob, and daughter Sadie. They’re farmers and craftsmen living in an Amish community outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They call themselves “plain folk,” speak a mixture of English and Dutch, and call the rest of America “the English.” Epileptic seizures and strange visions plague Sadie, who keeps saying the angels will come and the English will fall. When a solar storm fries the world’s electronics, billions of people must now survive without electricity.

The Amish are well positioned both to help and survive, but too many people live in the cities, there’s too little food, and the recovery efforts are too slow. The military imposes martial law, but even the military starts to break down. It isn’t long before starving refugees begin to raid the farms looking for food.

Enter the strong Amish faith and pacifism. This faith permeates every paragraph and chapter of the book, which is presented as Jacob’s journal (and had me skimming at times due to repetition). While his Christian faith is a great source of relief and strength in times of trouble, it also demands pacifism even in the face of certain murder. The family faces difficulties but overall very little hardship. By the end of WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL, and that ending comes a little abruptly, only one bad thing has happened to them, from which they are promptly rescued by a non-Amish. But it’s obvious at the end they’re all going to die because they can’t defend themselves nor can they even allow others to defend them.

But enter religion again. From what I could tell from Jacob’s narrative, the Amish believe in divine providence, which includes God answering prayers by intervening in the physical world. This is reinforced by Sadie’s visions being not mental illness but possibly communication from God. (I found her a cloying character with little to do in the book other than be patronizingly mysterious and prophetic. In fact, all of Jacob’s family are poorly developed characters who come across as two-dimensional.) So as the reader, for you to believe the book has a happy ending, you have to accept that God is okay with billions dying but that he’s looking out for a select few. Well, most of these people, anyway, as many Amish in America are already killed by the end of the book.

So I ended the read feeling a bit torn about it. I liked it. Actually, I liked it a lot. It’s well written. The way surrounding cities react to the crisis sounded realistic and worked for me. Jacob is an interesting and sympathetic narrator. I particularly enjoyed the look inside a typical Amish community and how they lived, which is laid out in the novel’s slow-burn setup. I loved the connection between a solar storm/EMP-like event and how the Amish would be ideally positioned to survive it. But for me the book just couldn’t connect the dots and make it work toward an ultimately satisfying conclusion.

THIRST by Benjamin Warner

August 24, 2017 by Craig DiLouie Leave a Comment

THIRST by Benjamin Warner imagines life in a suburban community after a strange event destroys all water in nearby rivers and reservoirs. Uncleared traffic accidents and the power going out create an immediate sense of isolation and hardship. Eddie Gardner and his wife bunker down and negotiate how much they need to help themselves versus others in the community, believing help is on the way. Any day now, the power will return and they will have water again.

What follows is an interesting apocalyptic story whose idea meshes originally into the genre, though the story overall didn’t stand out for me. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t make a heavy emotional impression like the best apocalyptic books do. Warner captures the steadily mounting isolation, tension, and hardship of thirst well. In his book, he provides an interesting meditation on what people will do to survive. However, the characters often grate with their decisions until at times they seem to be actively working against their best self interest, and they don’t consider many sources of water such as car radiators. While a nice meditation on survival, nothing really struck me as poignant or original in a genre packed with such meditations (note I’ve read so much of this genre I’m a bit jaded). The narrative becomes increasingly unreliable due to Eddie steadily going mad with thirst, which effectively portrays his suffering, though at times it was confusing for this reader. The ending concludes well but may leave some readers unsatisfied, as the source of the water being eliminated isn’t explained (nor the power going out or all the accidents).

I liked the novel and recommend it to apocalyptic fiction fans looking for an original premise as well as newcomers to the genre. Warner writes well and I hope to read more of him in the future. While I enjoyed THIRST, however, it didn’t deliver the gut punches (nor the action) I like to see in apocalyptic fiction.