The Ferryman by Justin Cronin

In terms of reader enjoyment and elegant prose, I'd give The Ferryman my highest rating. I congratulate the author on producing another fine novel that's somewhere between science fiction, fantasy and psychological thriller. 

So why is my Goodreads rating only three out of five stars? My one reservation is that Cronin's story contains a couple of wrenching plot twists. They're intriguing, but I'm still trying to reconcile some of the details. This is partly my fault, as I had to set the book aside for a couple of weeks while I attended to other priorities. To atone, I spent considerable time re-reading certain critical sections. Thank God for Kindle, which makes it easy to search for words like "Oranios" and "The Designer." Now I need a book discussion group to help me finish the task.

The theme of a "Designer"is key to this book. Readers with gnostic tendencies (a worthy lot) will recognize the concept of an artisan god separate from and subordinate to the original creator. But this book is not about theology. The Ferryman poses the question: what is real, and what is illusion? This brings to mind a favorite Moody Blues lyric, but let's not get bogged down in "Nights in White Satin." Instead, here are some of my favorite passages from The Ferryman: 

• "...it was and always would be impossible to know what was dream and what was not... all creation was boxes within boxes within boxes, each the dream of a different god."  
• "There is the thing... and then there is the echo of the thing, the shadow of the thing." Echoes and dreams play a large part in this book. Dreaming is almost deviant behavior in the world Cronin creates, but some people do it anyway. They can't help it.
• "So none of this is real, is what you're saying." "Oh, I wouldn't say that. More like a reality of a certain kind. A shadow kind, if you will." Cronin provides a nice synopsis of Plato's cave parable here.

This is heady stuff. Cronin also has a point of view on current events, including climate change and the increasing disparity between the rich and everyone else. Those who seek further analysis and commentary may want to follow the links below. 

External Links

• New York Times Book Review.  An Island Utopia Where Nobody Dies and the Living Is Easy." May 1, 2023.
• Kirkus Reviews. Twisty, Thrilling and Beautifully Written. April 11, 2023.
• Esquire. "How Justin Cronin Wrote the Ultimate Holy Sh*t Moment in The Ferryman." May 2, 2023.
• Washington Post.  Justin Cronin Returns with "The Ferryman", an Apocalyptic Thriller. April 25, 2023.

World War II Fiction: A Partial List

My father, born in 1930, was an avid reader of fiction about World War II. Too young to participate in the war himself, I suppose this was his way of experiencing it vicariously. 

Many of the titles listed below were stored in boxes in our attic during my childhood. The rest are books I picked up here and there as an adult.  They provided me with many hours of exciting reading. 

• The Caine Mutiny (Wouk) - one of my all-time favorites of any genre
• Once An Eagle (Myrer)
• Battle Cry (Uris) - I've lost track of how many times I've read it
  
• The Winds of War (Wouk; a trilogy)
• Catch-22 (Heller)
• The Young Lions (Shaw) 
  
• From Here to Eternity (Jones)
• The Naked and the Dead (Mailer)
• Von Ryan's Express (Westheimer)
• King Rat (Clavell)
• The Cruel Sea (Monserrat)
• Landfall (Shute)
• The Chequer Board (Shute)
• The Good Shepherd (Forrester)
• Tales of the South Pacific (Michener)
• The Big War (Myrer) - I may re-read this one; I scarcely recall anything about it.
• Don't Go Near the Water (Brinkley) - a humorous treatment
• Where Eagles Dare (Maclean) 
• Eye of the Needle (Follett)
• Jackdaws (Follett)

In several cases (Wouk, Uris, Shaw, Follett) the books listed above set me on a longer-term effort to read the author's other work that has been quite rewarding. Many of these novels became films. But don't judge these books by the movies.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

 

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Every so often, I read a book simply because it has been on The New York Times bestseller list for a long time. The presumption is that if a book has been highly successful, and the capsule description doesn't put me off, there'a a better-than-average chance I'll enjoy it. This book is the exception to that rule. For reasons I can't quite put my finger on, it didn't appeal to me. It struck me as artificial, the situations and characters as contrived. I did read it to the end, though. I don't like to abandon a book partway through.

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Borderline by Lawrence Block

249 pp. Hard Case Crime/Titan Books. London. 2014. ISBN 978-1-78116-777-9

This is a reprint of a novel originally published in 1961 under the pseudonym Don Holliday. The original title was "Border Lust." But I didn't discover that until I was halfway through it. 

 The Hard Case Crime publishing house markets it as "scorching pulp fiction." But I soon realized that this is material from Block's earliest period. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he supported himself by writing what is referred to on his web site as "midcentury erotica." This sort of thing has been characterized elsewhere as soft porn for the mass market. I'm at a loss to explain what we'd call it today. 

"Soft porn" seems too harsh.  It's pretty tame by contemporary standards. This makes it something of a curiosity for readers such as myself, who were children back in 1961 and grew up reading Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming and Playboy magazine. It's racier than Spillane and Fleming, but not "dirty" per se, at least to my way of thinking. So what do we call it? Smut? Filth?  

About halfway through I lost interest in the sex scenes, skimming or bypassing them entirely to see where all this was leading. Setting aside the spicier bits, it's entertaining, pretty well-written for popular fiction, and the plot moves along briskly. The book is only 166 pages in length, so I found it well worth finishing. The "beatnik" slang used by some of the characters sounds, of course, terribly outdated today. But it's interesting too, a relic of a bygone time.

Back in those days, Block wrote 12 to 15 novels a year like this under various pen names just to support himself. Kudos to him for sticking it out until he'd reached the point where he could publish better work under his own name.

N.B. The Hard Case Crime volume includes three of Block's short stories from the same era, one of which is the memorably titled "Stag Party Girl" from the February 1963 issue of "Man's Magazine." More information about the 1961 version, and background about the original publisher, Greenleaf Classics Nightstand Books, can be found at Vintage Greenleaf Classics Books. 

The Pagan God by Javier Teixidor

The Pagan God: Popular Religion in the Greco-Roman Near East 

by Javier Teixidor

The idea of a pagan god has a certain creepy attraction. As everyone knows, pagan gods were not bound by modern standards of polite behavior. One remembers Greek myths featuring randy Zeus, bawdy satyrs chasing shrieking nymphs, Arthur Machen’s story The Great God Pan, and so on. A few pagan gods are even mentioned sparingly in The Bible. I’ve long been curious about them. So I made it my business to read this book.

It’s not written for a general audience. This book is, according to the preface, “an essay on religion in antiquity... an attempt to study the religious elements which late north-western Semitic inscriptions had in common." The time period under discussion encompasses the Persian Empire through the first Christian centuries, or to be precise, the second half of the first millennium B.C. and the first centuries A.D. The book draws heavily on archaeological finds made in the Near East during the one hundred years or so before the book was written in 1977. These include the discovery in 1928 of the ancient city of Ugarit in what is now Syria. Among the ruins, archaeologists found clay tablets written in a then-unknown language. These included a series of stories about the Canaanite god Baal, a "weather god" associated with fertility.

Teixidor maintains that it is not enough to focus on the mystery cults of Orpheus, Dionysis, Isis or Mithras, as these "tell us little about the feelings of the broad masses." He holds that "the common man never rose above his daily prayers, and we may wonder whether the mystery religions were ever the actual creed of the unenlightened faithful...It is in the copious inscriptions produced by the Semites in their own homeland that paramount interest lies" for this author.

Therefore, Teixodor focuses his book on the cult of Baal Shamin (“Lord of Heaven”), the chief god of the Phoenicians, and pagan gods such as El, Bel, and Dagon (or Dagan) worshipped by the Phoenicians, Aramaeans and Arabs. The author holds that the pagan cults were not really religions in the sense we know today, in part because they had no "theological creed such as appears in Judaism or Christianity." Personally, I wonder if that is simply because of the limited source material scholars have to study. The pagan religions were truly old. We may not fully understand them simply because scholars have little to go on except clay tablets, inscriptions on monuments and images on coins. Putting a book like this together must have been a challenge.

Readers will search in vain for an account of how the pagan gods faded away as monotheism took hold. But it's interesting to note that the Baal cult was still prevalent as late as the year 130 AD. One would have thought Christianity was sweeping the globe by then, but apparently that was not yet the case.

N.B. Fans of horror fiction will probably share my view that H.P. Lovecraft borrowed the name of the pagan god Dagon for his short story of the same name, and for his novella “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”

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Revelator by Daryl Gregory

 

Revelator by Daryl Gregory
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How much did I like this book? So much that I began it on Wednesday night and finished it (with breaks to sleep) on Friday morning. Except for meals, all other activities were set aside. It's on the horror/fantasy spectrum. If that's to your taste, and/or your family seems dysfunctional, I strongly recommend Revelator.

N.B. This book was one of the Washington Post's best science fiction, horror and fantasy books of 2021. 

Message from Malaga

 

Message from Malaga by Helen MacInnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Originally published in 1971, this espionage novel is indeed a "good read." Set in Malaga and Granada on the Costa del Sol, it involves a flamenco dancer (the fiery Tavita), a retired bullfighter (the brooding Esteban) and two American expatriates with connections to the U.S. intelligence service. They work together to help refugees from Castro's Cuba escape to freedom. A high-ranking defector with KGB connections shows up and arrogantly insists on receiving special treatment, endangering everyone.

I gave this one three stars because the dialogue is a bit unnatural at times (the main complaint of The New York Times' reviewer back in 1971). But the descriptions of the exotic setting and brisk pacing of the plot more than compensate for that. I'll definitely read more of MacInnes' work. 

N.B. The book was a commercial success, ranking as one of the top ten U.S. fiction bestsellers in the year of publication.

Fair Warning

Fair Warning by Michael Connelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying this book. I didn't particularly like my first experience with Connelly's writing, which was one of the early Harry Bosch novels. That one seemed formulaic to me. It didn't compare well with the work of authors such as Hammett, Chandler, or John D. MacDonald, or more contemporary practitioners such as Ruth Rendell, Denise Mina and Tana French. Procedurals don't really interest me any more. 

But in Fair Warning, Connelly chose a journalist as his subject, not a policeman. Perhaps that's why I found this book so satisfying. It has the ring of truth to it. It's an area where Connelly has deep real-world experience, having been a journalist before he became a novelist. The characters were interesting and believable, and the story moves along briskly. An out-of-work newspaper reporter is forced by circumstances to work for a consumer watchdog publication. He stumbles onto an unscrupulous genetic testing firm whose data is being sold on the dark web to creepy involuntary celibate men seeking women who are genetically predisposed to risky behavior such as one-night stands and addiction. And one of the "incels" is a killer.  

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An American Tragedy

by Theodore Dreiser

Library of America, New York 

972 pages. ISBN 978-1-931082-310.

This outstanding novel is based on the true story of the Gillette murder case of 1906. But it's much more than a crime story. 

Clyde Griffiths is a young man from a poor family who seeks to rise in society by attaching himself to people of wealth and power, including his rich uncle. In sharp contrast to his wealthy friends, his impoverished parents are itinerant street preachers who are "wrapped up in evangelizing the world." Yet he has no sense of right and wrong to guide him. 

Published in 1925, certain aspects of the story will seem dated to contemporary readers. But for me that was more than balanced by Dreiser's occasional powerful messages about religion, class, wealth, capitalism (he was a committed socialist) and, most importantly, personal responsibility. 

Dreiser on the religious beliefs of Clyde's parents: "...in some blind, dualistic way she and Asa insisted, as do all religionists, in disassociating God from harm and error and misery, while granting Him nevertheless supreme control."  

Dreiser on capitalism: "There had to be higher and higher social orders to which the lower social classes could aspire. One had to have castes....It was necessary when dealing with the classes and intelligences below one, commercially or financially, to handle them according to the standards to which they were accustomed. And the best of these standards were those which held these lower individuals to a clear realization of how  difficult it was to come by money... It informed and strengthened the minds and spirits of those who were destined to rise. And those who were not should be kept right where they were."

The latter part of the novel seems to shift gears into more straightforward storytelling, with courtroom scenes as compelling as any I've read. Yet here again, Dreiser manages to insert some pointed observations about how law enforcement can be swayed by political considerations.  After all, district attorneys are elected officials.

Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden

A Girl's Life in the Incredible String Band
By Rose Simpson. Strange Attractor Press. 2020.
264 pages. ISBN 978-1-90-7222672.

I liked the Incredible String Band in the late 1960s. I read this book because I was particularly interested in what part Scientology played in Rose Simpson's departure, and the women's role in the band. Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden has all that and more. Even if you're not that into the ISB, it's interesting to read of her encounters with The Rolling Stones (minimal), Joan Baez (less than gracious), The Doors, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell -- and especially Crosby, Stills and Nash, an encounter which she claims changed her life.

The book is well written. It doesn't follow the approach a journalist or a historian would use. It's more like a series of memories or stories, not strictly arranged in chronological order but well enough organized that you get a sense of how things unfolded. She's quite candid about certain things. For example, she tells us that although she was "part of" the band, and appeared on stage with them, she never felt like a musician. And she describes the elite groupies in the U.S., those that pursued the biggest bands, as "beautiful and intelligent", based on encounters in hotel elevators.

Personally, I found Simpson's account of commune life sad. Clearly she was in love with Mike Heron, but when it came to couples, monogamy was neither expected or followed, and "cottage doors remained open long after we ceased to be exclusively together." It's a life I could never lead. But then, this isn't my memoir. 

A passage I keep coming back to about her commune years: she tells us that in those days they wished for "peace, an end to war and the outrageous exploitations of capitalism." In those days (the late 1960s) capitalism wasn't exactly unbridled in the UK. I wonder what she thinks of British politics today.

I salute Simpson for her honesty, and for having the courage to walk away when her "freedom had been overruled by Scientology" and she decided "I wanted someone who would stay with me, a life to share." 

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

Published in 1923, this British detective novel has an ingenious story line and well-drawn characters. For me, however, it was spoiled by unkind references to Jews that some would call offensive at the least. 

The murdered man, Sir Reuben Levy, is Jewish. Nobody else in the book is described as Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, or of any religion at all. Only Levy is singled out for his faith, and almost always in negative terms. Levy is described as "a little Jewish nobody, " a "sheeny" and one of those "self-made men of low origin" who don't take care of their teeth and are terrified of dentists. When discussing an investment, Levy "shrugged up his shoulders and looked like a pawnbroker." Other examples:

"I don't hold with Hebrews as a rule."

"I remember so well the dreadful trouble about her marrying a Jew."

"I'm sure some Jews are very good people, and personally I'd much rather they believed something."

Given the context in which these things are said, perhaps the author is merely pointing out the casual anti-Semitism of the British upper class. It's hard to tell. But for me, there's too much of this distasteful material in "Whose Body?" I understand the same sentiments crop up in her other books. I'm not sure I want to read any of them for that reason alone.
 

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you liked Megan Abbott's "Dare Me" and Tana French's "The Secret Place," you'll love "The Burning Girl." I certainly did. You can tell by the length of this  review.

This is a coming-of-age story (or "bildungsroman," as the Library of Congress' classification system would have it). Two sixth-grade girls spend a summer exploring an abandoned mental asylum in the woods near their town:

"We ventured daily up the grand staircase to long corridors of almost identical rooms, in which torn blinds still dangled at the cracked and smeary windows, or in which sinks encrusted with dessicated black slime hung askew from the walls, their taps useless."

With that delightfully gothic scene as prelude, it's no surprise when one of the girls, Cassie Burnes,  has one problem after another when her mother's strange lover moves into their single-parent household. When that's combined with puberty and adolescent social anxiety, the tension level in the house gets cranked up to unbearable levels.

Messud is a pleasure to read because she has a sure hand in crafting beautifully phrased descriptions of ordinary things without overwriting: 

"The kittens were sisters from the same litter, two tortoiseshells, small enough then to hold in your hand, with tiny white teeth and opalescent claws that dug pulsingly but painlessly into your jeans when you set the creatures on your lap."

 I was also struck by this, early in the book, as the narrator describes her best friend:

"All you had to do was to look into her eyes - still blue eyes that turned gray in dark weather, like the water in the quarry -- and you could see that she was tough. Strong, I guess is a better word. Although in the end, she wasn't strong enough."

As I read that for the first time, I thought: well, what about that quarry? What's going to happen there? And what wasn't she strong enough to handle? I had to find out, and that kept me reading. (Just as a teaser, the quarry is right behind the old mental asylum.)

Don't let those quotes fool you into thinking this is a cozy mystery. Messud takes on some deep issues, but is skilled enough to do so in a way that fits naturally with the plot. Even though the protagonists are mainly adolescents, this is dark, adult stuff, such as: it's hard to know what is true, because we shape our own reality so it makes sense of who we think we are. Whatever choices we think we make, whatever we think we can control, has a life and destiny we cannot fully see.  And finally, referring to a dream in which Cassie puts on a black cloak:

"Now I know, for what little it's worth, what it means to be a girl growing up. Maybe you can choose not to put on the cloak, but then you'll never be free, you'll never soar. Or you can take on the mantle that is given you; but what the consequences may be, what the mantle might do, what wearing it may entail, you can't know beforehand. Others may see better, but they can't save you."

It seems to me that the cloak represents the choices we make and the identity we create for ourselves. And Messud gave Cassie the last name Burnes for a reason: she is the burning girl.

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The Outsider by Stephen King

The Outsider by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Outsider is excellent work by Stephen King - his best in quite a while. I read  this son of a bitch until my eyes dropped out of their sockets and plopped into my lap, and my brain was fried. Of course my brain was already fried, and has been for years, but that's not the point here.

My only complaint is that two of the characters have names which are too similar: Frank Peterson and Ralph Anderson. I kept getting them confused, requiring the creation, yet again, of a table of characters. It would have been better to give one of them a more ethnic name, like Wicznoski.

Come to think of it, I have another complaint. King uses the peculiar term "lookie-loos" to describe gawkers, as he did in at least one previous book.

In his afterword, King reveals that he has an "able research assistant" named Russ Dorr. How do I get into that line of work, and get paid for it? I could also position myself as a "name consultant,"  helping authors avoid problems like that noted above. I could do it all from home, without any coronavirus risk.

N.B. And another thing: as long as I'm complaining, I want to mention a new and distressing physical ailment that's plaguing me. I am suffering from what I believe to be "MacBook Thumb," a repetitive stress injury brought on by intensive use of the touchpad on my new MacBook. Of course there's nothing more boring than people whinging on about their maladies, so I'll stifle myself now.

Yarrow by Charles de Lint

Yarrow by Charles de Lint

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this enjoyable work of speculative fiction, Cat Midhir has a foot in two worlds. In ours, she's an award-winning author of fantasy novels. But in her dreams she visits The Otherworld, which is the source of her best story ideas. When the dreams stop coming, Cat becomes untethered and strange things happen.

Set in Ottawa, Yarrow is a fine feat of imagination by de Lint. My only mild complaint is that he introduces so many characters in the first 20% of the book that I had to make a list of them to keep their relationships straight. But I have this problem regularly with other authors, so let's not blame de Lint for my own failings (which are no doubt due to my advancing age and my habit of reading late at night and falling asleep in the process). His characters are well drawn - interesting and very human. Fans of this genre will appreciate the name-checks he dishes out to other fantasy authors, including Ursula LeGuin, Jack Vance, Patricia McKillip and Christopher Stasheff. He even makes his heroine a winner of the World Fantasy Award, just like de Lint himself.

Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman

Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This novel has all the merits of Bouman's "The Bramble and the Rose" (Henry Farrell, #3). Farrell is a police officer -- in fact, the only police officer in his rural Pennsylvania town. Among other things, I like the way Farrell solves problems and resolves conflicts without shooting, beating, kicking or humiliating the backwoods ruffians and corrupt rich men that cross his path with alarming regularity.



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The Bramble and the Rose by Tom Bouman

The Bramble and the Rose by Tom Bouman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Quarantined at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I read this in about two days. It was a fine way to pass the time. As soon as I finished it, I started reading the first book in the series, which will give you an idea of how much I liked this one.

When it comes to crime and detective fiction, having run through the classic crime writers (Hammett, Chandler) and plenty of mediocre ones, I've become picky about what I'll read. I'm not particularly interested in procedurals or trying to figure out who committed the crime. I'm looking for realistic (and flawed) characters, and local color on areas that interest me. I like the Henry Farrell character because he's an underdog, the only police officer in a tiny township in rural Pennsylvania. Farrell has to act alone against vicious backwoods characters when help is far away. When help does arrive, in the form of the Pennsylvania State Police and an investigator from the Attorney General's office, suspicion falls on Farrell himself and things get very sticky.

N.B.  I am not sure why the title is "The Bramble and the Rose." Fortunately, I bought this book in digital format. I'll use the awesome power of the Kindle to search for "bramble" and "rose" to untangle this mystery.

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Conviction by Denise Mina

Conviction by Denise Mina

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've read most of Denise Mina's novels. For some reason I can't quite recall, I read the first 50 pages or so of this one, then set it aside and picked it up again a couple of weeks later. I rarely do that, and in this case it was a mistake because this novel has a complex plot. One key character has a secret identity and a backstory that the others don't know about. Another is mentioned throughout the book but never actually appears in person until page 355. All of this made it necessary to re-read and mark up the early chapters to figure out who was who and how they were related.

The fact that I felt motivated to do that tells you how good this novel is once the action gets started. Once I picked it up again, it became one of those situations where everything was put on hold to read the hell out of this one until there was no more to read and the story was over.

Apart from the fact that I admire Mina as a writer, I also like the fact that she's active on Twitter and has even responded to my own tweets a few times. if I was a literary agent I'd urge my clients to do that. It builds the author's brand loyalty.

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Walk The Wild With Me

Walk the Wild With Me by Rachel Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a nice read for fantasy fans, followers of folklore and Anglophiles (all of which include me, for what it's worth). Mortals, aided by Robin Goodfellow, The Green Man and Father Tuck, try to defeat cruel faerie Queen Mab. In this telling, certain characters are magical creatures who can take the form of humans. For example, Robin Hood is the human form of the gnomish Robin Goodfellow, Little John is The Green Man (and also a tree) and so on. Herne the Huntsman makes a few brief appearances as well, although that character is curiously underdeveloped.

I thoroughly enjoyed Walk the Wild With Me and was sorry to see it end. A sequel is planned. Rachel Atwood is one of the pen names of prolific author Phyllis Irene Radford. 


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Chances Are... by Richard Russo

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2019
ISBN 9781101947753 (ebook)

In this splendid novel by one of my favorite writers, three men in their mid-60s - longtime friends Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey - spend a weekend on Martha's Vineyard mulling over the disappearance of Jacy, their mutual fantasy girlfriend from college days.

I've read most of Russo's novels. This one has all the things I love about his writing. It's highly readable, with a compelling story and believable characters. But then there are passages such as this one, which appears after Lincoln wonders: "If there was such a thing as do-overs, if we all had a bunch of chances at life, would they all be different? .... Or would they play out exactly the same?"

"To Teddy's way of thinking - and he'd thought about it a lot - this depended on which end of the telescope you were looking through. The older you got, the more likely you'd be looking at your life through the wrong end, because it stripped away life's clutter, providing a sharper image, as well as the impression of inevitability. Character was destiny. ...Why? Because... well, that's just how the story went. Nor, as the ancient Greeks understood, was it possible to interrupt or meaningfully alter this chain of events once the story was underway."

Russo doesn't bludgeon us with his insights. He has the knack of blending them together with plot, character development and believable dialogue.  Chances Are... will appeal to readers of my generation who remember the Vietnam war, the draft and the late 1960s in general. Russo fans will also notice that poignant sense of regret that runs through much of his work.

NB - I could hardly believe it when I read it, but this book contains the following passage: "Staring out to sea, she said, 'How come everything has to be so fucked up?' "  This is quite a coincidence, because in jest I have often asked my wife that same question, in almost exactly the same words. I have yet to find the answer.

Further Reading
New York Times Book Review. The Old Men and the Sea (or Richard Russo's New Novel). Alida Baker. July 30, 2019.

The Anomaly by Michael Rutger

This book ably works through a theme near and dear to me: that of hidden mysteries. 

The lead character is a jaded former screenwriter, now reduced to hosting a YouTube series on unexplained phenomena. He and his second-rate production team set forth to locate a cavern in a remote part of the Grand Canyon. Discovered by a 1909 expedition but long since forgotten, it's rumored to contain "wonders". 

The author, Michael Rutger, is a screenwriter by trade. Perhaps that's why he chooses to tell this tale using clever characters who constantly trade snappy dialogue. It's an odd choice given the subject matter of this tale. But the wry banter falls away whenever the action kicks in, which happens frequently. Rutger knows how to keep the pace moving along briskly. The Anomaly is a page-turner. I just kept reading it and reading it until there was nothing left to read. 

These virtues more than balance a couple of shortcomings. A couple of incidents are a bit too similar to certain popular movies (I won't name them, to avoid spoilers). And the author makes an effort to end most chapters with a cliffhanger phrased as a short, punchy sentence, which feels just a bit too manipulative. 

Don't be put off by the negative Kirkus review. The Anomaly is much better executed than Dan Brown's books. It's not as finely crafted as Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation or John Langan's The Fisherman. But it's still a rattling good read for lovers of weird fiction and conspiracy theories.