Happy to review THE FOLD today by Peter Clines. Proud of the disclaimer for this review, which is Peter is a friend of mine and somebody I admire a great deal.

THE FOLD is a sidequel to Peter’s runaway hit 14, a sidequel being a standalone story that follows in the footsteps of another. In 14, the tenants of an apartment building discover strange clues that leads to an astonishing discovery and possibly the end of the world. It’s like Scooby Doo meets LOST, though without LOST’s more annoying aspects.

In THE FOLD, Mike is a genius with a photographic memory. An old classmate and bigwig in the government, Reggie, has been trying to recruit him for years to work on secret government projects, but Mike has found happiness and peace being a schoolteacher, and wants nothing to do with it. Then Reggie presents him with an irresistible mystery–a project in which a small group of scientists have invented an inter-dimensional portal that allows teleportation. It works, the scientists insist, and it’s safe. But something’s wrong. Something feels wrong.

As Mike investigates, he realizes the machine isn’t what it seems. That it may, in fact, destroy the world.

In some respects, Peter reprises 14, but with new characters, additional lore and some new surprising twists. So if you’re already familiar with 14, this standalone novel still offers great twists and surprises, and made for very quick and satisfying reading. Otherwise, it contains the same basic elements that made 14 so successful–endearing characters, humor, an intense mystery that is slowly revealed, easygoing writing style and good pacing. The pages flew by, something hard to accomplish with this jaded reader with limited time.

The sky’s the limit for Peter Clines. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.
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THE LEFTOVERS by Tom Perrotta, the book on which the HBO series is based, tells the story of the Garvey family and other survivors of October 14–the day in which 2% of the world’s population simply vanished.

The book is less concerned with why this happened, though this mystery is central to the book’s emotional resonance, and more concerned with its aftershocks among those either lucky enough to have survived or unfortunate enough to have been left behind. The event is like the Rapture, but people of all religions are taken, including sinful people who might not have deserved it, and on planet Earth, life goes on. As science and religion don’t have answers, cults spring up. Everybody else loses their sense of purpose.

The book is very well written, but I was kind of ruined by watching the show first. In my view, the show captured the true pathos of such an event. The real loss, the disruption, the nagging spiritual malaise that comes with the sense that somehow everybody left behind had been rejected. The insult of being confronted with an impossible event that can’t be explained and probably never will. The incredible loss of so many people. In the series, we are confronted by a world gone haywire, a world just like ours but in which everybody is living with something they are trying to forget but can’t. Everybody is trying to move on, but they don’t have a clue where they want to go. They only know they want to stop feeling bad.

In contrast, the book is kind of sleepy, and I frequently lost interest. While in the show the Sudden Departure is a terrific plot premise and informs everything that happens, I often forgot the event happened as I read the book. While one character lost people directly, the rest didn’t. The event isn’t critical to the character who lost her entire family–she could have simply have been somebody who’d lost her loved ones in a car crash. Their motivations aren’t clear. For page after page, nothing really happens, and most of the plot lines come to relatively weak conclusions. The plot dissolves in sprawling character development, making it read more like a literary novel. That’s fine, that’s great, in fact–Perrotta is a great writer–but I found myself wishing it had reached above a rich portrayal of the mundane toward something higher and more thrilling, considering the concept–and especially again after I’d seen the show, which did exactly that.

On the other hand, while reading the book, you can see where the show’s creator, one of the co-creators of LOST, seeded it with annoying LOST-like elements. Fortunately, he appears to have been motivated to do that out of belief that’s what viewers want, but not from what he wanted to do, as those elements aren’t laid on as thick as in LOST, and aren’t nearly as annoyingly inconclusive.

In short, the novel is well written and pretty good, but the show is a masterpiece.
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ASSAULT ON SUNRISE is a dystopian novel about an impoverished America that finds entertainment in watching movies in which people, called “extras,” are literally killed by animatronic monsters on live sets. The desperate extras get a big payout if they survive. It’s a great idea.

The novel is set in Sunrise, a California town populated by hardened survivors of various films. When several police officers are shot while pressing a trumped-up charge instigated by a Hollywood director, the entire town is sentenced to death. Their only hope of survival in the new town they built and love is to survive another monster film.

The story takes us through the cat and mouse game between the director and the townspeople, and ultimately the three-day battle between these people and the monsters. Being united, veteran extras and having the contacts to get heavy weaponry, they’re ready. But are they strong enough to withstand the onslaught?

The great idea and promise of action reeled me in, and while the novel delivers, I just couldn’t connect with the characters enough to care what happened to them. While reading it, I did some homework and found out the novel is a sequel, and maybe all the character development happened in the first novel, THE EXTRA. The dust jacket for ASSAULT made no reference that it’s a sequel, so I assume it was intended to be able to be read as a standalone, so I have no choice but to judge it that way as a reader.

Unfortunately, the townspeople are all basically the same. Small town, earnest, loving, shy but formidable. There are many of them, and I found it hard to keep track of who was who. Making things worse is that some passages are written in first person, and I lost track of who that first person was. (I’m now guessing this might be the first-person narrator of THE EXTRA, which I haven’t read.)

In all, ASSAULT ON SUNRISE was fun, particularly once the action got rolling, but I can’t say I’d recommend it. Michael Shea knows how to write, but like the Hollywood the book satirizes, I found ASSAULT entertaining without being moving or affecting. But again, that could be because I’d read a sequel, so check out THE EXTRA for yourself if you like the basic concept, and then be sure to read ASSAULT if you enjoyed it.
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I had the pleasure to meet John Dixon at the World Horror Convention in New Orleans in 2013. I’d already connected with him on Facebook, exchanging tips and views, and when I met him, I wasn’t surprised to find out we’d become instant friends. Dixon is a cool dude.

I’d read one of his books written for Permuted Press under a pseudonym and enjoyed it, but not his big debut, PHOENIX ISLAND, the novel on which the CBS show INTELLIGENCE was based. I finally did read it, and I’m glad I did.

Carl Freeman is an orphan who’s gotten bounced around to various foster homes because he’s violent. He has a pathological hatred of bullies, and when he sees bullying, he can’t stop himself from getting involved. Very strong and highly skilled at boxing, he dishes out harsh punishments that always land him in trouble and a new foster home. Then he goes one fight too far, landing him in so much trouble he may be sent to juvenile penitentiary. The judge offers him a choice. Jail or Phoenix Island, a boot camp-style rehabilitation camp for troubled youths. Stay there until he’s 18, stay out of trouble, and he’s out with a clean record.

But Phoenix Island isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Carl and the other kids are systematically brutalized by sadistic drill sergeants. Soon, they realize they’re not only outside the United States but also any laws protecting them. There’s a purpose to it all, in which Carl will find his destiny. Phoenix Island, it turns out, is ground zero for the future of combat intelligence.

PHOENIX ISLAND may feature a teen as its main character, and you might find it in the YA section at many bookstores, but it’s a brutal, hard-hitting book with huge appeal for adults as well as teens. F. Paul Wilson, creator of the REPAIRMAN JACK series, called it “LORD OF THE FLIES meets WOLVERINE and COOL HAND LUKE.” Like the novel’s protagonist, Dixon was a Golden Gloves boxer, and it shows in his writing. (He also plays chess like a boxer.) Jab, jab, jab–always keeping the initiative–and then POW. The pacing and crisp style of the book moves things forward, and the protagonist, while flawed, is almost immediately likeable so that you care what happens to him. Dixon keeps things simple, keeps them moving, puts his protagonist in almost impossible situations, and makes you care.

Recommended. The sequel, DEVIL’S POCKET, is coming August 2015.
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