Book Review: Gridlocked by Cody Goodfellow

 

Gridlocked

Paperback, 132 pages
Published October 2020 by King Shot Press

This is a short book so I going to plan on writing a short review and probably say more than I need to. Gridlocked is a short and small booklet sized slider of horror literature. Just like eating an overpacked slider, it helps to have a napkin ready because this book is overstuffed and dripping tidbits all over the place.  You might be finding stains and debris long after your last bite. That is a Cody Goodfellow special.

I like the idea of the commuter special, and that is how I read this. The first novella taking the bus, the second on the way home. It is also inspired that the cover design (it looks Revert did it) was themed like a hardcore show flyer…

All ages/ $7.95 cover/ B.Y.O.B./ No jocks

These two stories have a beer-soaked musty basement show edge to them. I thought about a basement show I went to around 1999 and saw Burnt by the Sun. The only spot I could find was behind the drumset and for 40 minutes I watched Dave Witte just beat the shit out of the drums. He was too good to be playing in the basement but I was goddamn thankful he was.

2020 was an amazing year for mainstream big NY based horror publishing. The Only Good Indian by Stephen Graham Jones, The Loop by Jeremy Robert Johnson, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia. Big sales, mainstream attention. One-year earlier Goodfellow’s Unamerica was released and while it got a deserving Wonderland award, I could not help thinking that book is as brilliant as any of the others I just mentioned. The difference is a big-time established publisher.

I am not slagging on King Shot Press they are making beautiful and quality books but I am sure Michael would agree with me there is a crime here. I get that before Cody shaved he was side hustling with regular gigs playing the homeless drifter or the occasional wizard in an Anthrax video. He doesn’t look like a boy scout or he might not seem like the traditional NPR books podcast guest, but Cody is actually one of the most wickedly intelligent people I know, so forget that noise.

Gridlocked is like a gritty single recorded over a weekend by a band tuning up for a long tour. You are better off just trusting Cody and going in blind but if you are cool with my thoughts and wild spoilers keep reading.

The title story is a unique piece that takes advantage of the San Diego setting the same way King uses Maine. What is a more Southern California tale than to be trapped in traffic? One of the problems with modern horror is how do people end up trapped despite having cellphones, well being trapped on a California freeway after an accident. So that set-up for a werewolf story that includes weird cult biker dude bro werewolves would be enough to make a story interesting.

That said Goodfellow built the novella a very crafty time reversal in the narrative. This works because Aaron the main character and his frustration are relatable. What did he get himself into? It didn’t hurt that it took place here in San Diego and I understood the geography of the story. None the less the stage is so well set when the insanity comes it gives the reader the feels it is supposed to with such skill.

Gridlocked is an effective tale that feels like a story out of EC comics jazzed up by elevated prose. That is the Goodfellow vibe in nutshell insane ideas written intelligence and skill that separate good from the boring Spaltterpunks. Anybody can write a story about a nail going through an eyeball, but not every writer gross you out and make you feel smarter at the same time. That to me is the difference.

As for the second novella, I am not going to say too much as this is a story Breaking the Chainletter that I asked Cody to write for an anthology. This was the doomed Vault of Punk Horror. It is a great anthology that I  would be proud of if I had known what I was doing when We made it. As result, there are only about 30 of them in the world.  So I am glad that authors like John Shirley, Jeremy Robert Johnson, and now Cody have republished the stories.

This story is complete chaos and has a fever dream pace to it. Of course, I love it.

Yeah, for 8 bucks you can’t go wrong with this title. He keeps winning the Wonderland award for a reason. He is one of the best weird fiction writers we got.

   

Book Review: The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey

 

The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey

Paperback, 416 pages (375 + preview of book 2)

Published April 2020 by Orbit

I want you to keep in mind while you read this review a few facts. First off I want to state as a fact that Mike Carey, writing here under the super-secretive pen name M.R. Carey is a writer I really like and respect.  Second, consider that I have read almost every release he has in prose. I almost loved his run on Hellblazer. The final fact I want you to consider is I would go so far as to say that his novel The Girl With All the Gifts is a masterpiece.  I do not say that lightly.

I was rooting for this book that just got nominated for the PKD award and I am not going to argue that it is bad. In fact, it is probably a good book but if I am being honest and that is my purpose when writing a book review, I really didn’t like this book. I considered not finishing it which is almost unthinkable for me and my reading relationship with this author.

This book was built on writing tricks that are pet peeves of mine, so you might not mind it as much as I did. There is actually a neat story here, and I like the concept but the delivery just killed me. That was the stumbling block for me and The Book of Koli.

 It is first-person which is already my least favorite way to tell a story in the novel form. I think it locks the storyteller into breaking their own rules the way a found footage movie does.  We know the storyteller lives at the end of the tale, and we have to hear it in that character, not the author’s voice. That being said a well-composed first person narrative like King’s Delores Claiborne for example will slip out of my mind as I get carried away with the story. First-person can work for me but I prefer to work in the author’s voice.  

The problem with The Book of Koli is the first person was so odd and so different than I was constantly paying attention to it and not the story. Set hundreds of years-in-the-future after the fall of civilization in Ingland of the former Yewkay the prose was “written” by someone who doesn’t knowns’ stuff like us as educated folks. I mean this is the whole book, at least early on was so dialect heavy that I just couldn’t flow with the story.

That sounds insanely difficult to write, like signing your signature with your left hand after a lifetime of using your right. I was at the same moment annoyed and impressed with this. I think what Carey is doing here is very difficult and an interesting choice to say the least. It just didn’t work for this reader at all. As the story progresses Koli gets a solar-powered AI-driven “dreamsleeve” which is basically a conversational iPod that teaches him. The prose gets somewhat better and easier to flow with.  

(Note: I understand why Carey felt the need when Koli was explaining how he got into heavy metal that to note that he was listening to classic sabbath, and I aware this is a push up my glasses nitpick but it took me out of the story and seemed a little too cute that this young man a few centuries after the collapse of society would understand classic era Black Sabbath vs any other era. Besides Dio Sabbath is great.)

TBOK is the first part of a trilogy and one thing it does really well is ending with a compelling hook that has me interested in where the story will go even though I didn’t enjoy the book along the way. It is the story of Koli who lives in Mythen Rood - a village after the fall of civilization, there are little bits of tech here and there but life is midevil and contained mostly. One of my problems with the novel is it promises killer trees, which are the monsters at the gate.

That is a huge problem for me as the monsters at the gate remain the most interesting element to me after I closed the book the last time. The first act takes too long to develop and by the time the stakes are set, I was checked out wishing I was reading another book.

I have made clear that I write with outlines and I prefer reading novels that feel well-plotted. It seems to me that Carey started this journey going in a different direction and vibe. There is nothing wrong with the story here. I think that this novel will work for some people. I don’t think this is a bad novel. It is probably a good one. It just didn’t work for me, too many personal dislikes involved and that is not on Carey or this novel. He had a mission in mind when he started this book and I suspect he knew he would lose some people. That is a choice artists sometimes make. Not everything is for everyone. Also, Carey just set a very high bar for himself by writing a masterpiece with his first M.R. Carey novel.

The funny thing is that the hook is good enough at the end I do want to know what happens in the rest of the trilogy.   

Graphic Novel Review: Blade Runner 2019, Vol. 1: Los Angeles by Michael Green, Mike Johnson, Andres Guinaldo (Illustrator)

 

Blade Runner 2019, Vol. 1: Los Angeles by Michael Green, Mike Johnson, Andres Guinaldo (Illustrator)

Paperback, 114 pages

Published November 19th 2019 by Titan Comics

 

 As I sat down to read this, I was kinda hoping that the story would unfold and I would hear the Vangelis soundtrack in my head. That I would see the outdated yet still amazing Special effects and I would feel like I was watching a Blade Runner movie. It is hard to talk about this book without spoilers so let’s start by saying I think fans of the movie who like comics will enjoy this side story that happens in the same city and year as Rick Deckard’s story.

Co-written by DC comics veteran Michael Green who has written long runs with Superman, Supergirl, and Batman, and Mike Johnson who is the most prolific Star Trek comics writer ever. The art is handled by Andres Guinaldo who also has tons of DC experience. First things first DC and Alcon did well with the hiring. The team did amazing.

The art itself looks and feels like Blade Runner even feeling like Syd Mead concept art at times. Hat it is One of the things that makes the movie what it is the lived-in feeling. Sure this book benefits from building off the movie but that is the point of a media tie-in. Expanding the existing world, we know and are dying to get more of. Mission accomplished.   

I am going to spoil things while talking about this, but I am having fun. There were clear and important decisions made here. This follows the film in vibe tone and world-building completely. This is THE 2019 of Blade Runner. There is little to nothing of the PKD novel, except a few minutes that inherit moments of the film.

As a Dickhead there is not much here to pick- apart, Blade Runner doesn’t have much of the source material and this has even less. That is OK, as a fan of the movie there is plenty of fan service done tastefully.

The story follows Aahna ‘Ash’ Ashina who is a Blade Runner in the same LAPD adjacent office as Deckard. If you read the script you can assume Deckard is up north hunting Alaskan skin-jobs during these events.  Her side hustle is a little darker but she has a secret she is dealing with. You see Ash has a secret, she is paralyzed and she is able to fake it by using illegal tech. She has to plug into her wheelchair and recharge every so often or she will lose control of her legs. She is working to save money to get off-world, and she does this by stealing and selling body parts of the Replicants she retires.

She is the perfect morally corrupt member of the Blade Runner team to be hired for the under the table and off the books investigation into a missing mother and daughter. The father is tied to this world by way of a friendship with Tyrell Corp and the company founder.

Ash is a great flawed character; she is beaten-up and had a rough go of things. She is tough and you could imagine being very good at her work. As she investigates we get a great reversal on the Blade Runner storyline as Ash discovers the mother she is looking for is a replicant meant to copy and replace Tycoon Alexander Selwyn’s wife who died of cancer. This is a neat storyline as you could imagine a rich man in this situation paying the money to replace his wife so his young daughter can delay the loss of her mother.  The ethics of this kind of Replicant replacement becomes the ethical question at the heart of this story. Smartly this takes us to the south of the border Replicant sanctuary.

This is media-tie in done right, I enjoyed the story and it made me wish we had a movie of this. Excited for volume 2 and 3 for sure now.  

Anthony did a spoiler-free review for the Dickheads YouTube channel...

Click here for Anthony's take.

Book Review: Signalz (The Adversary Cycle) by F.Paul Wilson

 

Signalz (The Adversary Cycle) by F.Paul Wilson 

paperback, 190 pages
Crossroad Press Published July 2020

Despite this novel being a thin 190 pages (a novella by modern publishing standards) it would be easy for me to overwrite this review. The subtitle of the book is the Adversary Cycle – A prelude to Nightworld. The Adversary Cycle is a series of books (that I will refer to here as the AC) that had been six books long until this new novella and now we can say is seven books long. This story is set right before or from a certain point of view as the events of Nightworld unfold. In this series that means the end of the world.

This six, uh yeah seven-book series starts with an all-time classic of horror The Keep which is the ultimate misdirection novel. That novel manages to kick off a saga that encompasses all history and most of this prolific author’s entire canon. The only comparison that comes close is King’s Dark Tower that bleeds out into an author’s entire body of work. Unlike Dark Tower Wilson has plotted this in the open with novels, short stories, novellas that are on a set timeline he calls the secret history. No alternate reality wheel of Ka-tet hoo-ha here.  You can find elements of the secret history in stand-alone novels like Black Wind, and three different series The AC, The Ice Trilogy, The two dozen Repairman Jack novels that include a prequel trilogy, and a YA trilogy about Jack as a kid.

None of this should work. As an exercise in plotting it is insane. Keep in mind he ended the AC in 1992 with Nightworld and circled back to book two of AC and launched the Repairman Jack series. That makes The Tomb AC #2 but Repairman Jack #1. Are you following? In this way, Nightworld was book six, now seven of the AC, and book 15 of the Repairman Jack and ended both series. So, with the publishing of Signalz FPW has moved the goalposts again.

If my math is correct and it probably is not.

Nightworld is not only AC book 7, and Repairman Jack number 24 and ends both series. Imagine a whole bunch of train tracks that come back together.  37 books total? That is fucking crazy. I understand why that would be daunting to a new reader. Like not wanting to start watching Doctor Who because of fifty-plus years to catch up on. Keep in mind you can read the AC or the Jack books on their own. That said these books are infinitely readable and I recommend them, but not starting with this book.

F.Paul Wilson is a genius and he is a bestseller with a legion of fans for a reason. These books as complicated as they are plot-wise are written with a reader in mind. They are page-turners with characters you will grow to care about. Signalz however is a tough sell in some ways. This book is for Secret history super fans. There are 36 books I think you SHOULD read first.

Don’t get me wrong I am stoked I bought this. That’s right not a library book or a review copy I wanted a complete AC on the shelf. This Lovecraftian tale really doesn’t stand alone, it works for those of us who love the Secret History.  

It is the story of Ellie who is a sixteen-year-old visiting the big city when she hears a series of signals that no one else seems to hear. This begins a transformation in which Ellie becomes a monster more ready for the big change coming.

The most interesting aspect of signalz involves P.Frank Winslow the writer stand-in for the author who was slowly drawn into the prophecy of the events by writing Meta-novels. The most interesting moments of this novel involve Frank and his book, which challenges the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order that is working with the Adversary thought-out the 37 books. Their conclusion is a spoiler but it was this storyline that I felt was the most added value Wilson gave to the overall storyline.  

So here is your SPOILER WARNING…

When the order reads Winslow’s book it is revealed to them that they are suckers and will die for the big change. What I think is telling considering that we are reading this in 2020 is how against their own interests, even in light of the overwhelming evidence they walk into their demise. I know Wilson is a libertarian, but you can see parallels to the far right in this country here.
 
In Meta-moment Frank tucks what we assume is the very novella we are reading under his arm and intends to deliver it to the publisher. Then this happens.

“A rough-hewn, squarish tunnel, maybe eight feet on a side, carved through dark stone, stretched ahead of him curving off to the left. Smokeless flames flickered in sconces spaced along the walls.
Okay, first question: Who lit the sconces? And second what were the flames feeding on?
What did it matter? In sharp contrast to the blah, semi-modern characterless buildings on the surface, this tunnel looked ancient. And that gave Frankie hope. Because it might lead somewhere else.

Was it unreasonable to hope it led back to Manhatten-his Manhatten? Most certainly. Did he have a better route to follow? No.
With the manuscript of the Great American Novella clutched to his chest, P.Frank Winslow started walking.”

Winslow disappears. My reading of this and I may be totally off is this is the moment where the secret history in meta sense travels through to our world. This is the gap that FPW is filling with this novel. This is the purpose of this novella. As a secret history fan, it is a little but important thing. Also makes me want to read Nightworld again. Ha-ha.

I was skeptical that this would add to the saga but I don't know why. 37 books in and Wilson brings it again. For serious fans of Secret History, this is a must-read, for others start at the beginning. No rush but you have quite a saga to get to this point.

Book Review: The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller

 

The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller  

Hardcover, 384 pages 

Published December 2020 by Ecco

Podcast interview recording soon. I will post it here.

I was looking forward to this book since it was being written. One of the cool things about interviewing authors for the various podcasts I do is getting to know them a little better. A few years back I interviewed Sam J. Miller in one of the early interviews I did for our Philip K Dick podcast when I selected Miller’s amazing Cli-fi novel Blackfish City as a Dick-like suggestion on our show. In that interview, he hinted that he was deep into work on a novel about his hometown and whale ghosts.

He didn’t know but I was working on a novel about the ghosts of my small town at the same time. This is a sub-genre of novel that I adore, and since I was in the same headspace it really had my attention.  The most famous example of this sub-genre is Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. In many ways, The Blade Between evokes the same small-town ghosts and horror as Something Wicked but with the modern diversity and progress inherit of an author who is a gay man and a social justice activist.

Yeah, the Blade Between hits some sweet spots for me. I talked with a friend of mine recently who read the same book. He said that he understood that it was a well-written book but the story didn’t do much for him. As I finished and loved the book, I thought a little bit about why we had such a different experience. I realized that he was from a big city, but more importantly, he was still in his home town that he had only briefly left.

Much of the strength of this novel takes place in the weird mental space where a person returns to their home town after a few years to find an alien place. It is a unique feeling, you know how to navigate the streets, but the buildings have changed. Beloved shops and restaurants have changed hands. Townies who never left look aged and different. All the ghosts of your childhood both positive and negative resurface in your mind, something you would never think about in the new city you call home. I am not sure this book will work as well for life long townies.

The Blade Between is a great novel about that common haunting but what was so charming for me was Sam Miller’s unique experience with his hometown translated through his imagination. Fictional versions of people that could have lived in Hudson New York and tortured spirits inspired by the blood of whales from the real-life industry that the upstate river town was built around in real-life. I love how Miller uses the history and setting of Hudson to evoke that home-town haunting feeling I KNOW from returning to Bloomington Indiana, my hometown with different but relatable issues.

Our main point of view character is Ronan a successful photographer, who has been living in the city that might be connected by train but might as well be a million miles apart from the town that raised him. He is going through drama in the city and after taking the train out he finds a different Hudson. While he grew up struggled with homophobia, Hudson is becoming almost a gay getaway. Even the candidate running for Mayor is openly gay. The problem with the rich man running for office is that he is buying up the town trying to remake it.

The parallels at the heart of this novel are really well set up. The hipster city folks taking over and wanting to destroy the town as it was are like living monsters. At the same time the ghosts of the town’s tragic history are woven into the story, and after decades of haunting the town now wants to protect it. Well sorta. At the end of the first act, there is clarity to the purpose of this novel.

 “The City was built on their blood, Katch said “It’s in the foundations of the buildings. The sap of the trees. The oxygen that mosses excrete.”

The battle lines are drawn. Ronan joins the activist resistance, whole at the same time dealing with hauntings of coming home. The boy he always crushed on who likes to experiment with him is now a cop and is married to one of his oldest friends. He also is dealing with his dying father whose wishes he is not sure how to value or make happen.  The freedom the town offers him as an adult he never felt growing up. The tension between comfort and misery is on almost every page.

Part of the activist storyline provides some of the novel’s most effective moments of horror that are what I consider minor spoilers. The novel is at its best when it is personal and heartfelt. The horrors of the hipster invasion of the hometown balanced with the ghosts both positive and negative are the beating heart of this story.

“They made this town theirs. And their magic is powerful. Their wards have held for almost two centuries.”
 
Those are the macro themes but Miller also nails some micro themes as well. This aspect comes from the various aspects of Sam Miller that make this novel a one of a kind thing that could only be the product of this one singular writer. It is concerned with issues like eviction and housing issues, corporate invasions, historical racism, LGBT+ discrimination, class warfare, and most interesting to this long time married old dude how modern technology and social media is used and sometimes weaponize in the Queer community.  Also, the idea of Grindr online fantasies becoming solid and real threats provides one of the best horror suspense beats of 2020.

“I found my old phone. Opened it up, logged into my own Grindr account. And then I clicked on Browse Nearby.

Sure enough, the nearest man to me was Tom Minniq >25 less than Twenty-feet away.”

I don’t say that lightly as 2020 is a year of fantastic horror novels. I also admit as a straight old married dude I wouldn’t have understood how great this moment was if without a co-worker who had explained to me how youngins date these days. Ha-ha.  Glad he did because this moment was incredible.

I am sorry I didn’t get to read The Blade Between in 2020 but it stands up there with all the great horror novels of this last year, Your Mexican Gothic, or The Only Indian. Diverse and powerful horror had a great year and this book is on the list for sure.

Podcast Episode/Review: Ubik by Philip K. Dick

 

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Published by Doubleday May 1969

Dickheads episode coming  featuring guest Dickheads Stephen Graham Jones author of The Only Good Indian and Mongrels. 

Soundcloud for the episode... 

YouTube video still on the way...

Book Review: Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

 

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

Hardcover, 247 pages

Published January 1980 by Doubleday Books

 

I’ll admit it I got sucked in by Queen’s Gambit like everyone else. When we watched the first episode I was surprised to see that it was based on a novel by Walter Tevis. This is an author I knew and had read before. It had been decades since I read The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler and in the last decade I had read his last Sci-fi Novel Steps of the Sun but I had not heard of Queen’s Gambit. I decided I wanted to look and see what other Tevis gems I had missed. When I went to Good Reads I saw that I had already marked this book as want to read. With further online encouragement from Professor D.Harlan Wilson, I bumped this novel up in my TBR.

Mockingbird is an interesting work of Science Fiction for an author primarily known for his mainstream work. It would be reductive to make simple comparisons but the most obvious is Brave New World but that is unavoidable as this dystopia has similar elements like the lack of monogamy and the plethora of drugs. That is really yet, very surface level. Brave New World is a dystopia wearing a Utopia Halloween costume. Mockingbird is a pure Dystopia that explores Humanity’s downfall via the mind of Walter Tevis.

By modern standards, this is a short novel, but Mockingbird is jam packed with ideas, questions, and an intense dialogue with history and culture that is only possible when a story reaches beyond history and character into speculation. This is what Science Fiction at its best can do that mainstream novel can’t. Surrealism, fantasy, and magic realism can do many of the same tricks but Tevis a master of mainstream novels like The Hustler doesn’t take the genre lightly.

Like a battering ram tearing through the castle gates, major themes and important ideas are dead on this battlefield. Mockingbird is one you enjoy as your reading, but long after you close the book you will be considering its ideas.

When the book starts it would be easy for a modern reader to dismiss this rather pulpy and simplistic look at a robot – a member of the 9th class of robots designed to serve the human race. The sad robot trope is most famous in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that book did exist. Our sad robot here is Bob, he is wary of running human affairs we don’t know why but when he climbs to the top of the Empire state building which he says is the tallest building left in this future. He wants to die but can’t.

He is one of our three POV characters the other two Paul and Mary Lou are humans who challenge societal standards by learning to read. There are laws against reading, it is just the way things are. Reading is for robots, who run the show.

“Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Age. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”

Of course, with reading comes questions and answers and threatens the control the robots have slowly been handed. Keep in mind it is clear that in this story we handed the control to the robots. Just as we basically log into big brother in the form of social meeting in a way that would probably stunned mister Orwell. Tevis on the other hand imagined it pretty clearly.

  Reading is more than an information transfer for Paul and Mary Lou. The freedom leads the two characters to fall in love. Paul is punished with Prison as monogamy and his desire to learn will upset the balance they have developed in society. Paul and Mary Lou’s love affair is one thing and in a sense the more important rebellion in the eyes of this society. Bob the Robot is more concerned about humans coupling again than it is that they are learning. That is ultimately a mistake by the robot and in the final pages, we understand why.

A science fiction novel that reverses the dystopic destruction of books like Fahrenheit 451 with a story about the power of reading in action is refreshing.  The San Francisco Chronicle went as far as calling it a sequel to Bradbury but I think response is a better description. It is a response in the same war Haldeman’s Forever War is responding to Starship Troopers. Tevis pointed out more than once that he was inspired by the fall of literacy he was watching teaching high school English for more decades.

“I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”

So if we ignore the sexism at the end there, the message is important. Touching another person’s mind in the way an author and reader mind meld is something this future world doesn’t know. Once Paul and Mary Lou learn, it changes them forever.

They learn valuable things like history and also unimportant things. Tevis doesn’t ignore the pluses and minus of the canon of human writing. Even in Sci-fi for every Mockingbird, there is Dean Koontz's 40th generation copy of Frankenstein with a dog hero novels.   

One of the most important and powerful books that Paul reads as he learns the power of reading is titled The Causes of Population Decline. This happened in the world of Mockingbird in the twenty-first century but it is unclear what year exactly. We know humans were still reading and writing in the last date on any of his books is 2135. This is an excellent world-building detail.

The Causes of Overpopulation are boiled down to six reasons.

1. Fears of overpopulation
2. The perfection of sterilization techniques
3. The disappearance of the family.
4. The widespread concern with “inner” experiences
5. A loss of interest in children
6. A widespread desire to avoid responsibilities


The mission statement of the novel really comes on pages 158 and 59 of the first edition hardcover I read. This happens when Bob Android-splains the decline of the human race and blames cars.

“It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies—sexual and economic and narcotic—upon the automobile. And the automobile paved the way for more profound – more inward- inner dependencies upon Television and then robots, and finally the ultimate and predictable conclusion of it all: the perfection of the chemistry of the mind…It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.”

Mockingbird is a deeply misanthropic novel, and you should know that coming from me that is not a knock against it. In fact, you can feel the frustrated intellectual living in small-town Midwest for decades dripping off every page of this novel. I loved that and related to it pretty hardcore.

But the fact is Tevis did tell us in a Radio interview in 1981 his intentions. “…what I am convinced of is that it is very bad for people to find substitutes for living their lives, and that’s what I hope I do say, and say well, from time to time in the book.”

Well Mister Tevis I would say you pulled that off. This novel is super close to being a masterpiece if he didn’t blink at the end miss the chance to end this book with the strength of the earlier pages. I have to spoil that to explain my feelings on that.

Overall Mockingbird is a must-read for fans of highly literate Sci-fi. I think of the three genre novels Tevis wrote this one was my favorite. At times this book is profound and at other times it is funny in a sly way. Tevis is such a talented storyteller and I love that he is coming to the book with a point of view.

I have just one problem…

Major spoilers ahead…

The Final Twist of the knife comes on page 210. Mary Lou is about ready to give birth and Bob the robot is not happy. He is helping her because he is programmed to. The thing is he will live on the serve humanity as long as it exists. So you see the big reveal is that Bob sabotaged and sterilized the human race just so he could die. Mary Lou actually calls him out “You fed the world birth control because YOU felt suicidal. You’re erasing mankind…”

The debate is an interesting one. Bob reminds her that mankind was plenty suicidal on its own and she blames Bob for drugging the entire species through social control.

This ending was a cool reveal and story-wise I loved it. As far as what it is saying about the theme that is totally different. I don’t like how this information ethically dodges some of humanity’s responsibility. To me it is similar to the ending of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds a movie I liked for its unrelenting brutality, the problem was The Berg blinked and undid all the amazing build-up by having Tom Cruise’s son alive against all story logic.

Here I think Tevis had a neat story twist that subverts the overall message of the book. That’s fine because at least there was a message.