this is a fascinating horror novel about adults who won't let go and kids who have to pay the price. the novel literalizes the idea of parents living this is a fascinating horror novel about adults who won't let go and kids who have to pay the price. the novel literalizes the idea of parents living their lives at the expense of their children: appalling thrill-seeker Renee may now be virtually braindead, but she still wants to live the wild life, even if that means inhabiting the mind of her daughter, bending that little body to her will and sucking her soul away, bit by bit. Renee was a student of the left-hand path and those lessons served her well; fortunately for her daughter, Renee's ex-husband is willing to literally give up everything to free their child of this puppeteer.
the book is grim, grimy, and unpleasant. and very well-written. the scenes of Renee's practice run mind controlling her sister were difficult for me to read, they were so full of the complete degradation of a person's body and spirit. Jeter makes this novel a compelling and fearful experience, full of night sweats and terrible dreams. he was clearly committed to maintaining a certain kind of narrative, one that doesn't spell things out for his readers, and to creating a certain kind of atmosphere, one of creeping dread and feelings of imminent doom. his vision of an unspoken fraternity of divorced fathers, only somewhat in their children's lives, moodily traveling the freeways on Fridays and Sundays, was a surprising concept. even more striking is the novel's central location: a failed suburban planning experiment now mainly empty, the funders out of money halfway through the project, leaving only the skeletons of homes that will never be lived in. and at the heart of that dead neighborhood, a body in a coma, hooked to feeding tubes, nearly dead itself but still desperately yearning for life. never have I read a will to survive depicted so repulsively. just die already, monster!
the strange and perfect collage art cover on my edition is by Dave McKean, whose covers for Sandman disturbed and enchanted me when much younger....more
Science fiction pulp or sweaty nightmare made real? A tense and often inexplicable fever dream? You be the judge! Seeklight is about the son of a so-cScience fiction pulp or sweaty nightmare made real? A tense and often inexplicable fever dream? You be the judge! Seeklight is about the son of a so-called traitor, his flight across a curiously lifeless colony full of curiously lifeless humans, his slow movement into understanding of his purpose and his powers. It has clones & fake angels & screamingly murderous robots; it also has a female character who in any other novel would be a romantic interest, but in this one is just as mindlessly, frustratingly, monomaniacally small-minded as every other character. It has a low-key, downbeat tone and a style that manages to be simultaneously sinuous, hypnotic, and blandly prosaic.
It has a kind of theme: HUMANS ARE FUCKING MISERABLE BUGS. They are not worth the effort of saving; downward is their natural trajectory.
Jeter is not interested in making you happy and he is not interested in letting you understand the nuances of the human condition. He wants you to know about entropy, about the inherent piggishness of human nature, about quests that go nowhere, and answers that deliver questions that have no answer. He wants you to understand there is actually no hope. I hate that message and I didn’t particularly like this book. But I also really respected it, its choices and its insularity and its bleak and rather pure logic. Color me impressed. Alienated and saddened, but impressed.
This is Jeter's first published novel. Apparently he arrived in the science fiction world fully-formed and already equipped with the cynicism and world weariness of several lifetimes. Kudos? Yes, kudos!
And hey, did you know that Jeter coined that term?
Remember when those fantastic adventure tales whose main goal was to tell a fast-paSteampunk, ahoy!
And hey, did you know that Jeter coined that term?
Remember when those fantastic adventure tales whose main goal was to tell a fast-paced story with some interesting ideas used to clock in under 250 pages and could be enjoyed in one long afternoon? Probably not and I'm probably dating myself. It is nice to be reminded that such things were once fairly common. Maybe authors these days are afraid of being seen as somehow disposable or too lightweight. And what's wrong with being lightweight?
Infernal Devices is a great example of swiftly-paced, lightweight entertainment. It is a retro-chic thriller full of tricky clockwork mechanisms, cobblestones and foggy nights, demented aristocrats and dodgy lower class types, inhuman creatures from the sea and their barely human half-breed spawn, creepy flights into darkness and sudden escapes, and two brassy mercenaries who are strangely familiar with 20th century slang. Best of all, there is also an automaton who comes equipped with all of the wit, intelligence, and sexual drive that his original human model - our strangely bland hero - appears to lack. Two peas in a pod, except one pea is infinitely more tasty.
The writing is luscious and rather gleefully sardonic. It winks at you while delivering its narrative thrills in a delightfully vivid, semi-archaic purple prose package. And it almost feels like Jeter is even sending up his own traditionally enigmatic heroes. The answers to many of the questions swirling around the oddly placid protagonist lie within his very stolidity; his unimaginative blankness and prim limitations are actually the key to Infernal Devices' central conundrums and contraptions. Clever. And the climax is a literal climax. Ha!
Also featuring... The End of the World! Maybe.
A version of this review is part of a larger article on Jeter posted onSHELF INFLICTED...more
this is a surprisingly effective, briskly paced, nicely tense, and occasionally interesting bit of horror-thriller.
poor Mike Tyler has a problematic past: once a part of a group of pretentious college kids devoted to a pretentious professor slash guru slash svengali, these kids and their prof decided to take it to the next level by regular ingestion of the highly illegal drug The Host - which apparently induces both hallucinatory effects and shared empathic group connection. sadly, The Host is similar to that Blue Sunshine drug from the movie called, er, Blue Sunshine, and so zany murderous Manson Family-style slaughter-hijinks ensued. but all that is behind him. after all he didn't take part in the murders - he was merely an accomplice. after some hard time in both prison and a mental institution, and medicated to the gills, he's managed to carve out a decent living with a nice live-in girlfriend and her son. unfortunately for Mike, not only does The Host stay in your system permanently (thus the constant meds) but a member of the group has come out of the woodwork and is trying to recruit Mike back in - by kidnapping his supposedly long-dead son from Mike's once-vanished ex-wife. uh oh!
K.W. Jeter is a genre maverick, having paved the way for both cyberpunk and steampunk with novels like Dr. Adder and Morlock Night. at some point he apparently decided to make some cash by churning out a series of lurid horror novels that probably looked great on the shelves of various B Daltons and Waldenbooks across the nation. such is Dark Seeker. i hope he made some money off of this one.
Jeter has an individualistic vision that encompasses the Los Angeles landscape of freeways and strip malls, a grim and sour misanthropy, the need for his characters to escape from various dark pasts, and a fairly expert use of parallel narratives that comment on each other in intriguing ways. he clearly has writing chops (except for the overuse of various cringe-worthy parentheticals denoting thoughts-within-thoughts) and he just as clearly has the ability to outwrite more popular horror hacks. such is Dark Seeker. i hope he didn't beat himself up too much when seeing his novels shelved next to Koontz and Saul.
i was impressed with Jeter's skill at portraying what it feels like to be on hallucinogens. the taste in the mouth, the subtle colored outlines, the thrilling expansion of sound and vision. although now the idea of taking acid sounds about as fun to me as taking bleach, back in my college days i did it more times than i can remember. i used to love it so much that the idea of being on acid 24/7, of never coming down, was awesome to me... shudder! The Host is 24/7 and it also features visions of a pointy-teethed lil' guy who wants you to kill kill kill. my own hallucinogenic escapades tended to feature pleasant colored wavy things and the need to be in water and dreamy visions of the brotherhood of mankind. The Host's hallucinogenic qualities make participants want to tear limbs from bodies, bathe in blood and laugh like hyenas. different strokes for different folks i guess.
Dr. Adder is a brilliant surgeon in the horrible wreck of future Los Angeles, a messianic figure who earns his keep by re-sculpting the various teenagDr. Adder is a brilliant surgeon in the horrible wreck of future Los Angeles, a messianic figure who earns his keep by re-sculpting the various teenage runaways of Orange County into the whores of Los Angeles - amputating and reconfiguring various body parts, wiping away their minds if necessary. This sickeningly sick character is an unrepentant woman-hater and homophobe; he is also the wildly popular and beloved symbol of freedom for both L.A. and the O.C. John Mox is a brillant corporate strategist and voice of moral authority in the drug-addled suburban sprawl of future Orange County, a messianic figure who keeps his power by out-maneuvering his fellow corporate shareholders and by addressing the denizens of Southern California during his daily televised hour of folksy, grandfatherly sermons. This sickeningly sick character is an unrepentant hater of all things associated with the body's desires; he is also the commander of a legion of bloodthirsty stormtroopers called The Moral Force. E Allen Limmit is a disaffected young man, fresh off the giant-mutated-chicken farm, once a soldier and later the manager of the farm's mutated-chicken-whore brothel. A somewhat bland and often irritable lad with vague ambitions to be somebody, do something, whatever, just getting the hell off of the farm. Limmit travels to The Interface - a terminally seedy street that functions as a meeting place for the degraded, drugged-up, fuck-happy denizens of L.A. & O.C. And he has brought a terrifyingly effective death-weapon with him - an instant-massacre machine. Woot! Guess who gets caught between a rock and a hard place.
The novel "Dr. Adder" is perhaps the first cyberpunk novel, being completed in 1972 (although not published until 1984). It certainly has that grim, tarnished, dirty urban feeling that is key to the subgenre. It has the nonchalant violence and misanthropy, the cynicism, the snark; its narrative includes violent corporate interests, casual murder & slaughter, bad-trip imagery, and a strange kind of psychic pre-internet that exists somewhere in between the mind and the electromagnetic static of radio waves & television transmissions. It is certainly a distinctive book: angrily snappy, grimly jokey, gleefully vindictive. An adventure and an excoriation.
I didn't particularly care for it. I do admire how forward-looking it turned out to be. As a person who lived for many years in So-Cal, I appreciated and shared the equal-opportunity contempt for both Los Angeles and Orange County. (Have there ever been such radically different neighbors?) The novel also has admirable chutzpah when it comes to the sheer imagintion on display - the seedy 'Rattown' of L.A., the sewers beneath it, the mind-numbing & hypocritical lifestyle of O.C., the casually bizarre chicken farm, various vividly characterized cast members, a tremendous dream-battle, gruesome & revolting sexuality, a bloodbath on the Interface, even an extraterrestrial Visitor... all quite strikingly stylized, all of these things practically popping off of the page. Jeter has a way with words. Although often lamentably sloppy (particularly in terms of plotline), the man is still a creative and often surprising wordsmith, with ideas that are well ahead of their time and are often fairly sophisticated. He knows how to write a great sentence and he knows how to create savage alternates to our reality. But the constant misanthropy - and, most obnoxiously, the constant misogyny - really began to annoy me. It seemed facile. Like an angry teenager from a cushy middle class background. All of the posturing felt shallow and unearned.
I am not a moral relativist. Sorry. I don't care what the fookin' era is all about or if this is just how a particular culture operates... if a specific demographic is demeaned over and over again, in a work of fiction or elsewhere, I am not going to make excuses for it. I may not completely dismiss the piece in question, but I'm not going to overlook bullshit or come up with reasons why it's not so bad. And so it is with the novel Dr. Adder: fearless, clever, boldly imaginative; the first cyberpunk novel; a sardonic encapsulation of the moral battles & culture wars between counties Orange & Los Angeles; concepts from Burroughs moving about in a world of Sadean cruelty; a deranged & violent sci fi farce; a gushing blood-fountain of excessive, crypto-techno-organic deviance... all that, yes, great... but also constantly WOMAN-HATING. Ugh. You may be ingenious... but still: Fuck Off, novel! Your attitude sucks....more
Loading...
