Past Tense by Lee Child (2018, Delacorte Press)

Passing through

Past Tense by Lee Child (2018) is a splendid thriller with diabolical New Hampshire villains interested in making money by offering wealthy men the opportunity to hunt humans. 

Sadly for them, they pick on a young working class Canadian couple passing through on their way to what they hope is a new life in Florida. Patty worked in a sawmill, and Shorty was a potato farmer. They have a heavy suitcase with them, the contents of which they hope will purchase a downpayment on their future.

All of which gives the start of Past Tense a Psycho vibe: are Patty and Shorty thieves like Marion Crane, waylaid by chance at the wrong rural motel?

Child handles the rising tension in the first half of the novel very well, as Patty and Shorty come to realize they are caught in the filaments of a very fine web. 

The payoff for the reader, of course, comes in the second half, when Patty and Shorty find a way to turn to tables. Turns out hosting human hunts is more complicated than the villains thought.

....Shorty ran for the woods first, as agreed. He made it. Patty waited. No sound. No shouted warning. She went after him, squeezing between the same two trees, aiming to head around the same quarter circle, back toward the track. She could hear him up ahead. She was close enough to help. She glanced behind her. She was far enough to get away. Would she? She thought, a mile in my shoes, baby. Who knew what anyone would do?

     She walked on.

     Then two things happened so fast and sudden her mind went blank. They came out of nowhere. Too fast to see. Two things happened. That was all she knew. And then nothing. Except Shorty was suddenly standing in front of her, and a guy was lying on the ground. Then came a painful slow motion replay, like a mental reaction. Maybe a therapeutic purpose. Post traumatic. In her mind she saw a guy looming up. Literally a nightmare vision. All in black, tight nylon, a bow, an arrow, a hideous mechanical one-eyed face. The bow jerking right, tilting down, at her legs, aiming low. They'll shoot to wound. Then the string drawing back, the arrowhead winking in the moonlight, then out of nowhere Shorty was behind the guy, swinging his long metal flashlight like the riot police, hitting the guy full on behind the ear, every ounce of his potato farmer bulk and muscle behind it, plus every ounce of his anger and fury and fear and humiliation. The guy went straight down. Dead, she was sure. The sound alone told her. The flashlight against his skull. She was a country girl. She had heard enough cows killed to know what it took.

     Close enough to help.

     It had worked.

     "Thank you," she said.

     "I busted my flashlight," he said. "It doesn't turn on anymore."

     "You can have mine," she said. "It's the least I can do."

     "Thank you."

     "You're welcome."

     "Keep mine for a weapon," he said.

     They traded flashlights. An absurd little ceremony.

     "Thank you," she said again.

     "You're welcome."

     She looked away.

     "But," she said.

     "But what?"

     "They know there are two of us. They must have known we would play it like that."

     "I guess."

     "Which is a risk for them."

     "I guess."

     "They must have known that upfront."

     "OK."

     "I think their obvious solution would be to hunt in pairs."

     A voice said, "Damn right about that, little girl."

     They turned around.

     Another nightmare vision. Glistening black nylon tight to the skin, a complicated bow lurid with composite layers, a steel arrowhead as big as a serving spoon, a Cyclops stare through an expressionless glass circle.

     The nightmare vision shot Shorty in the leg.

     The bowstring thumped, the arrow hissed, and Shorty screamed and went down like he had fallen through a trapdoor. The arrow was stuck in his thigh. He was hauling on it, and jerking his head side to side, and clamping his jaw up and down, which bit his scream into separate rapid-fire gasps of agony, much faster than breathing, ah ah ah, like a racing heartbeat.

     Patty was calm. Like Shorty had been before. When her mind was blank. Now his was. Suddenly she thought, this is how life is supposed to feel. She heard herself in her head, as if she was her own teammate, at her own shoulder, saying sure, Shorty's bad, but he won't get any worse in the next three seconds. Not medically possible. So feel free to take care of the other thing first.

     Which was the guy with the bow. Who was old, she saw. Suddenly a second teammate was at her other shoulder, saying sure, you're going to notice more now, much more detail, because now you're operating at a higher level, or maybe a more primitive level, where senses are more acute, so that although the guy is dressed head to toe in shiny black, and has a machine on his face, you can tell from his posture and his movements he's about our grandfather's age, and he's stooped, and he's sparrow-chested, and if we think back to all the older guys we've known, uncles and great-uncles and so on, and the lousy shape they were in, and we adjust for height and weight, then maybe we don't have too much to worry about with this guy.

     He was slow with his reload. His right elbow was slow to bend. Kind of awkward. Arthritis, maybe. He tried to compensate by scrabbling for the arrow early. He fumbled it. Patty breathed in. She felt she was at the head of a tight V-shaped formation, somehow now in motion, loud music playing, her loyal teammates marching at her shoulder, willing her on, bearing her forward, buoying her up, making her weightless.

     The first teammate whispered, I think the thing to remember, when all is said and done, apart from anything else, is that this guy shot Shorty with an arrow. Which by any standards is completely out of order.

     The second teammate said, the night vision device will protect his face. Better to aim for his throat.

     Keep mine for a weapon, Shorty had said.

     She did it beautifully. Despite very little prior experience. She felt it all happen, at a molecular level. She sensed every compound flooding her brain. Some were complex emotions. Mostly about Shorty. Primeval feelings. Much stronger than she expected. Some were simple software downloads. Dusty old how-to manuals, left behind from savage eras deep in prehistory. She absorbed them all, and they gave her animal grace, and strength, and speed, and cunning, and ferocity, plus some kind of serene human abandon over the top of it all, that made her surrender to instinct completely. She danced across the space, trailing the flashlight behind her, shuffling her stride to perfection, swinging the flashlight ahead of her, accelerating it hard, keeping it low, the Cyclops eye coming down to track it, then whipping it up in a savage U-shaped curve, into the narrowing angle between the dropping chin and the arching neck.

     It hit with a crunch she felt all the way to her elbow. The guy went down like he ran into a clothes rope. He landed on his back. She grabbed his bow and threw it away. His night vision was bound to his head with thick rubber straps. She tore it off. He was a thin, pale, sour man, about seventy years old.

     His mouth was opening and closing like a goldfish.

     Panic in his eyes.

     He couldn't breathe.

     He pointed to his throat, both hands, desperate urgent gestures.

     Can't breathe, he mouthed.

     Tough shit, she thought.

     Then she heard Shorty whimper.

     Later she knew she would have no defense, if a lawyer accused her of flying into a murderous rage. Damn right she did. Or if he asked her, sternly, did you in fact beat the victim to death with the flashlight? Damn right she did. With blows to the head, exclusively. A lot to his face. With every ounce of her strength. Until his skull looked like a bag of nails.

     Then she crawled back to Shorty.

     Who was quiet.

     He had seen.

Crossing the line of this rural drama is Jack Reacher. On a whim he has come to nearby Laconia, New Hampshire while hitchhiking south for the winter. Lacondia is supposedly his dad's birthplace. 

As you can imagine, Child has a field day getting Reacher, Patty and Shorty, and the human hunters, on intersecting courses.

Considering the plot and the level of carnage detailed, it's a mellow and comfortable novel, free of the high levels of Affect Horror foregrounded in the sublime Make Me.

Changes are neatly rung on the ever-reliable Reacher story-kit. Two rich Laconia bullies, eighty years apart, receive useful "life lessons." A female detective becomes an ally. A small town clerk and the town's counsel find true love. As ever, Reacher mends all the destinies he touches.

Jay

14 April 2020

What goes around comes around: Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (2009).

….There were photographs in the middle of the book. All except one were bland snapshots tracing Sansom's life from the age of three months to the present day. They were the kind of things that I imagine most guys could dig out of a shoebox in the back of a closet. Parents, childhood, schooldays, his service years, his bride-to-be, their kids, business portraits. Normal stuff, probably interchangeable with the pictures in all the other candidate biographies.

But the photograph that was different was bizarre.

The photograph that was different was a news picture I had seen before. It was of an American politician called Donald Rumsfeld, in Baghdad, shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, back in 1983. Donald Rumsfeld had twice been Secretary of Defense, but at the time of the picture had been a special presidential envoy for Ronald Reagan. He had gone to Baghdad to kiss Saddam's ass and pat him on the back and give him a pair of solid gold spurs as a gift and a symbol of America's everlasting gratitude. Eight years later we had been kicking Saddam's ass, not kissing it. Fifteen years after that, we killed him. Sansom had captioned the picture Sometimes our friends become our enemies, and sometimes our enemies become our friends. Political commentary; I supposed. Or a business homily, although I could find no mention of the actual episode in the text itself….

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (2009).

Gone Tomorrow is one of the best detective puzzles Lee Child has given us in his Jack Reacher series of thrillers. It is filled with misdirecting clues and red herrings. In the end, they all add up. Reverse-engineering the plot, the mystery reader is staggered by the sheer inventiveness Child has employed for our bafflement.

The usual Reacher novel elements are here. A young, determined female NYPD detective named Theresa Lee. An old hand named Winchester who starts out looking like a foe and ends up as a careful ally.

This is not a modestly scaled rural tale like Make Me or The Midnight Line. It is a big, urban wallop of action with multiple cop and national security agencies, all waiving the Patriot Act and asking questions later. In fact, one goon squad agency shoots Reacher with gorilla tranquilizer not once, but twice.

Reacher's nemesis at first seems to be a North Carolina senatorial candidate, but once the true enemy reveals itself, the effect is stunning. It is Child's greatest piece of misdirection, and deserves a slow, professional round of applause.



Jay
21 April 2018

Great Plains Carnage: The Midnight Line by Lee Child (2017).

Here is the political context for Lee Child's 2017 thriller The Midnight Line:

....Opioid overdoses have reached crisis proportions nationwide, in urban centers and even more so in rural areas. Over 28,000 people died from these drugs in 2014, reported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than double the total from a decade earlier. Many who become addicted to doctor-prescribed pain killers such as Oxycontin or Demerol then turn to heroin or synthetic opioid drugs such as fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin. Heroin-related overdoses have nearly quadrupled over the past decade, and last year outnumbered gun deaths.

In 2015 more than 12,000 people died of overdoses in just 10 states — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio — according to the Wall Street Journal. Fentanyl-related deaths across those states soared 128 percent from the previous year to nearly 4,000. Nationwide it rose to 9,580 last year.

In Huntington, West Virginia, with a population of 49,000, local health officials say some 12,000 people are hooked on heroin or another opioid. In a state devastated by the layoff of tens of thousands of coal miners, drug overdose deaths are the highest in the nation.

Pharmaceutical companies promoting opioid pain killer drugs as well as small-scale illicit drug labs producing fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics are reaping big profits while addicted workers pay, in growing numbers with their lives.

The spread of these drugs is tied to the fact that eight years into an official economic "recovery," millions of workers face declining median family income and lack of decent-paying full-time jobs. Today more than 11 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not part of the workforce, compared to less than 4 percent in the 1950s....

From:

"Capitalism's toll on workers: Life expectancy falls, opiate use grows"

The Midnight Line finds Jack Reacher wandering around the Great Plains. Lee Child seems to find his best stories here among the banal and modest criminal elements, as well as the banal and modest good people. His 2015 thriller Make Me is probably the best example.

The Midnight Line is about illegal trade in opioids along the I-90 corridor in South Dakota and rural Wyoming. The dramatic spine of the story is Reacher's hunt for the owner of the West Point class ring (Class of 2005.) He buys in it a pawnshop and starts his detective work. 

Along the way he meets Rapid City, SD police detective Gloria Nakamura. She is one of Child's proficient, Hawksian women, and she and her department are hunting a local crook with the grandiose name of Arthur Scorpio. 

Reacher also meets private investigator and retired FBI agent Terry Brammal. Brammal is snooping briefly on Scorpio, but then heads West, as does Reacher after an "interview" with the crook at his lair of evil, a local laundromat.

….Reacher sat down in the lawn chair next to Scorpio's. He stretched out and got comfortable and stared straight ahead at an inert Maytag. Scorpio was silent beside him. They looked like two old men at a ball game. The sentries stayed on the floor, breathing, but not easily.

Reacher took the West Point ring from his pocket. He balanced it on his palm. He said, "I need to know who you got this from."

"I never saw that before," Scorpio said. "I run a laundromat."

"What have you got in your pockets?"

"Why?"

"You need to take it all out. I'm going to put you in the tumble dryer. Keys or coins might damage the mechanism."

Scorpio glanced at a tumble dryer.

Couldn't help himself.

He said, "I wouldn't fit."

"You would," Reacher said.

"I never saw that ring before."

"You sold it to Jimmy Rat."

"Never heard of him."

"Where I set the temperature dial is up to you. We'll start on delicates. Then we'll turn it up. Someone told me it goes all the way to where it can kill a bedbug."

Scorpio said nothing.

"I understand," Reacher said. "You're Mr. Rapid City. You're the man. You got a bunch of networks running. Which is your problem. Maybe they're all interconnected. In which case, one question might lead to another. The whole thing might unravel. You can't afford for that to happen. Hence the stone wall. I get it. Perfectly understandable. Except you need to remember two very important things. Firstly, I don't care. I'm not a cop. I don't have another question. And secondly, I'll put you in the tumble dryer. So you're between a rock and a hard place here. You need to get creative. You ever read a book?"

"Sure."

"What kind?"

"About the moon landings."

"That's called non-fiction. There's another kind, called fiction. You make stuff up, perhaps to illuminate a greater central truth. In your case, maybe you could tell me a story about a poor homeless man, maybe from out of town, who came in to launder his clothes, except he had no money, nothing at all except a ring, which you reluctantly traded for a couple of hot-wash cycles and a couple of dryer loads, plus enough left over for a square meal and a bed for the night. All out of the kindness of your generous heart. Detective Nakamura couldn't argue with that. It would be a fine story."

"I would have to admit selling the ring to Jimmy Rat."

"Which was perfectly legal. You run a laundromat. You carry quarters to the bank. You don't know what to do with a ring. Fortunately a guy passing by on his motorcycle offered to buy it from you. Not your fault he turned out to be a bad guy. You're not your brother's keeper."

"You think that's a good enough story?"

"I think it's a fine story," Reacher said again. "Just as long as you happen to remember the out-of-towner's name."

"Out of state," Scorpio said. "That's exactly what happened. More or less. Some broke guy came in from Wyoming. I helped him out."

"When?"

"Six weeks ago, maybe."

"From where in Wyoming?"

"I believe a small town called Mule Crossing."

"What was his name?"

"I believe it was Seymour Porterfield. I believe he told me people call him Sy."

The utter poignancy of what Reacher finds in Mule Crossing, WY, and the wrongs he sets out to understand and put right, make for an ambitious tale. 

Child never lets us lose our geographical and narrative bearings.

Jay

21 April 2018

Heartland horror: Make Me by Lee Child

In his book The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, John Clute defines Affect Horror this way:

AFFECT HORROR 

....Since the 1820s, terror has been defined as an apprehension that something not yet experienced, but deeply to be feared - something horrific, or inhumanly sublime, or vast beyond our frail human capacity to survive the experience of its arrival, or a temblor announcing some deep shift in the grammar of the world - is nigh. Horror, on the other hand, is usually described as exactly not a matter of anticipation; horror is the experience of the atrocity of the thing itself, which can be seen whole. Terror may lie too deep for tears, though FUSTIAN may veil our reluctance to admit that the unsayable is precisely unsayable; horror, which is compounded out of the visceral responses of the appalled protagonist, can be put in words: what you see is what is said. Distinctions of this sort between the two terms have been very erratically applied since Ann Radcliffe first separated them in "On the Supernatural in Poetry" (1826 New Monthly Magazine ); but Radcliffe was as inconsistent in applying her arguments to her own work as any of her fellow Gothic writers, and an ongoing fuzziness over how terror and horror differ may be diagnostic of a general uneasiness about the nature of HORROR (the shorthand use of this one term is very generally accepted) as a genre. But the distinction between the two terms remains suggestive. Horror as Radcliffe defines it is Affect Horror in modern parlance. Terror can still usefully refer to tectonic shifts in the nature of the world too fundamental for our senses to apprehend directly; and, so defined, clearly furthers the declared purpose of this lexicon: which is to understand Horror as a pattern of stories bound to the wheel of fire of the world entire. Something similar to this breakdown is of course adduced by H P Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature ( 1945 ) when he distinguishes between "the literature of cosmic fear" and "the weird tale", but his readers have tended to understand these promising divisions as varying descriptions of affect. Terror as understood above has not been a major focus of critical attention for some time.

....In 1982, introducing his anthology Prime Evil ( 1982 ), Douglas E Winter, in a passage which has also become famous, effectively translates King's lengthy and personalized explanatory narrative into a generalization: "Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto … Horror is an emotion." Winter later amplified his argument, suggesting that this emotion of horror was experienced by protagonists, and hence readers, through a powerful need "to confront the unknown": the protagonist of a horror story was himself or herself, therefore, the motor at the heart of the story, whose thrust into the unknown recruited the identification of readers eager for affect. That this can lead to an unhinging of story, and to the kind of escalation of effects almost fatally experienced by the field in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is obvious enough.

....it could be argued that the greatest challenge non-supernatural Affect Horror novels in particular must surmount is the risk of becoming stymied in THICKENING , with no storyable exit into REVEL....

❖

Let's make no mistake. Make Me is a horror novel. Non-supernatural, but horror for all that. This is rural, empty, weird North America horror. Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, Robert Bloch horror, mean and bloody and black as night.

Reacher asked her, “Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?”

She said, “I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“Why?” 

“The farmers don’t like it. They’ve done their best to bury it.” 

“I won’t tell them you told me.” 

“It’s a corruption of the old Arapaho Indian name. One word, but it sounds like two. It means the place where bad things grow.”

❖

Lee Child's thriller Make Me locates horror on the Great Plains.  

Mother's Rest is the name of a small town where a two lane road and a railroad intersect. It is in the middle of hundreds of miles of wheat.  There is no highway and no cell service. There are a few businesses and houses, a diner, and a motel. Mostly there are railway silos.

The locals don't like outsiders. And they really take a disliking to Child's series protagonist, Jack Reacher.

Many novels in this series find the source of crime and evil-doing in the "fly-over states." Child loves a big sky and paints with deft and telling strokes. He loves rail lines and roads heading straight as a ruler to the horizon.

Make Me is a horror novel, as well as a crime novel. The monsters are human. Two hundred people have arrived in Mother's Rest, and have never been seen again.

The two hundred have been conned by a site on the Deep Web. The site promises a humane form of assisted suicide using veterinary tranquilizers and pre catalytic converter carbon monoxide fumes. The site is run by the leading businessmen of Mother's Rest, such as they are. "Not the A team," as Reacher tells his comrade in arms Michelle Chang.

A farm twenty miles south of Mother's Rest, where assisted suicides are supposedly conducted, is actually used to record snuff films and torture porn for internet download. (It beats farming, I guess.)

Those who paid for assisted suicide are murdered.

The business mastermind behind the Mother's Rest scam explains it like this to Reacher and Chang:

“Their lives were forfeit. Surely you see that. They had given their lives away. Their decision was made. They were already gone. They were mine to use. And they got what they wanted anyway. In the end."

This guy gets ten rounds in the neck as a response to his thesis.

Jay

May 6, 2017