Chris F. Holm's CHILD ZERO

Dirty faces peered at Jake and Amy around flimsy doors and dangling tent flaps as they passed. Some looked stricken. Others, suspicious. One woman appeared to Jake as if she were wearing war paint until he realized the lines of white from cheek to jaw were made by falling tears.

William Gibson has contributed a lot to contemporary discourse over the years -- he coined the term "cyberspace" for one -- but the term that serves as our most valuable rhetorical currency these days is The Jackpot, or The Jackpot Years, his vividly descriptive term for humanity's collective experience of multiple existential threats simultaneously, like when a slot machine's wheels (or, nowadays, algorithm- driven simulation of wheels) all come up with the display for the really big prize and an avalanche of coins pours out of the bottom. I guess that's probably virtual now, too? I've never gotten the appeal of gambling so I might be way out of date.

Gibson, anyway, used it as a slang term in dialogue, what characters say to each other as shorthand for a period in their past that Gibson wasn't interested in actually depicting for us. 

In Child Zero, Chris "The Collector" Holm has depicted a version of The Jackpot Years for us, one skewed toward biomedical catastrophe but hey, we still know that things like antibiotic resistance and whatnot are not unrelated to threats that aren't directly biomedical, like anthropogenic climate change and peak oil and good old fashioned pollution. 

In the world of Child Zero, the relationship between drug-resistant disease organisms and climate change gets a direct link in the form of a bacteriophage (basically a virus that attacks bacteria, but also tends to transfer genetic material from other bacteria to its targets, occasionally allowing the rapid spread of, say, a mutation that has allowed one bacterial cell to survive a medical treatment) that was dormant in Siberian permafrost until -- doh! -- we took the "perma" out of the frost and let the phage go on a global gene-swapping spree. This means that suddenly long-ago-defeated diseases like gonorrhea are back with a vengeance, and even a papercut can turn into a septic mess that ends in amputation. We're not quite in the world of The Sheep Look Up, here, but we're definitely Sheep-adjacent. Just, imagine if Austin Train was Elon Musk, greedy egotistical billionaire-on-paper, instead of the gentle scholar who wilfully went into obscurity. 

Also there's a bit of Children of Men mixed in here for good measure, the film more than the novel. In that there is a MacGuffin that is also a person.

Anyway. Making matters much worse for everybody was a bioterror attack in which a madman rigged two major New York City subway stations homemade aerosol devices loaded with the bacteria that causes bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic plague, Aum Shinrikyu style, infecting hundreds with the deadly disease and sending New York into lockdown. The scene described in the pulled quote above takes place in Central Park's Sheep Meadow, renamed "Park City" after it has become a semi-permanent field hospital-cum-internment camp, originally set up as temporary shelter for people who found themselves stranded in NYC without places to sleep, now a grim third world shantytown.

The aformentioned Jake is one of our point of view characters, an NYPD detective whose wife died of the plague and whose daughter, Zoe, is gravely ill and in danger of being swept up by the United States Department of Biological Security, a new bureaucracy straight out of conspiracist fever dreams that purportedly monitors even the most seemingly private communications for any hint of "unreported" illness. Since the death of his wife, Jake has had and broken up with an amazing girlfriend, whom he dumped because she wouldn't succumb to his emotional blackmail and chuck her career as a brilliant surgeon "for the little girl's sake" so he's not the greatest guy ever, but who is in this dirty old world these days (ours or the novel's)? Anyway, lickety split, he and his amazing partner Ameera (aka Amy, the same Amy mentioned in the pulled quote) quickly catch a big bloody massacre of a case and Jake has no choice but to call his ex, Hannah, who's just had the Worst Day Ever at her job trying to Save Lives and Do Surgery without antibiotics, to come babysit and maybe keep Zoe from dying? Pretty please?

For what it's worth, Jake knows he's the asshole here.

While Hannah takes on the task of trying to save Zoe, Jake and Amy have to go to the Sheep Meadow where a massacre has taken place! Over 100 people have been murdered and their bodies burnt, not so much to prevent their being identified because Who Cares but to conceal the fact that all of them were in perfect health. Before long we get a hazy idea of how this came to be -- a hundred internees in a camp full of incurable infection and disease and not so much as a head cold -- and that it relates to a 12 year old El Salvadoran immigrant named Mateo, our human MacGuffin.

From here on out it becomes mostly an escort mission, with Jake's progress hijacked by the need to keep this invaluable kid from falling into the wrong hands; he, Amy, Hannah and by extension Zoe, are now responsible for the safety of the Most Important Person in the World and need to get him to the Good Guys Who Can Help while keeping him safe from, well, everybody else in New York City. This could get hackneyed as hell but Chris Holm is no hack; there are surprises and twists around every corner and everything is expertly handled except...

Well, there's this one thing. Probably just for texture, episodes of the story are intercut with news clippings giving us glimpses of the story of a small band of Above the Law-type desperados who have decided to outfit a fishing boat for deep sea travel (badly) and attempt to sail from Australia to New Zealand to demand "biological asylum." It's a premise that would make a fine whole 'nother novel but its presence in Child Zero didn't quite work for me, because it has nothing to do with Child Zero's story. I kept expecting it to tie in to the larger narrative somehow but nope, it's just there for color. This may irritate other readers less than it did me, but I think most of my readers (who have made my still-incomplete Suns Suns Suns series the most read pages on this blog by a very significant margin; i.e., Gene Wolfe fans or wannabe fans or almost-fans) are the sort who will be annoyed by this at least as much as I, if not more so.

But really, just as Jake's mistake with Hannah makes him as a character and their relationship as it evolves much more interesting, this flaw in Child Zero must stand as a minor one. After all, it does point to the larger world and the plight of everybody else who isn't a New Yorker. And that's not nothing.

Chris F. Holm's THE BIG REAP

Stop me if you've heard this one. Boy gets job. Boy hates job but is totally, totally trapped in it so he does the best he can at it according to his lights. Boy's boss gives him an important new project that's finally going to put his talents to use. Boy finds out that this only makes his job suck more. Once again, there is no girl, nor is there a spoon. Well, there is a woman (we do like being called women when we reach adulthood)* but she's pretty much off limits, because she's the boss.

I'm pretty sure we can all relate to this one.

The Big Reap is the latest in Chris F. Holm's Collector series, and a book I've been eagerly anticipating. I enjoyed the first two so very, very much. But since one of the big questions I had going into it was, could it possibly be as awesome as was The Wrong Goodbye?** That's always a dangerous question to be asking as one begins a book, and I dislike having such questions on my mind as it's a strong indicator that I'm not going to be enjoying the book solely on its own merits (see also my experience with Doctor Who: Harvest of Time, the other book I was dying to get my hands on this summer).

But really, The Wrong Goodbye was one of my favorite things I read last year. And here we are, returning to the weird, sad, funny, outrageous world of Sam Thornton once again, so how can I not compare? How can my expectations not be high?

This is not to say that they weren't met, or more precisely not met at all. But there was something missing this time around, for me, and I'm not just talking about hospital/morgue hijinks as Sam steals his next body to inhabit.*** I've been having trouble putting my finger what it is that's felt missing, though.

Partly, I suppose, it's that each successive novel has almost felt like it was playing for more modest stakes than the last. In Dead Harvest, Sam was only focusing on saving one girl, but in saving that girl he was also saving the world from an all-out war between Heaven and Hell; in The Wrong Goodbye he was trying to collect a particularly nasty soul, the possession of which might give one side an undue advantage over the other; in The Big Reap he's really just kind of acting as a janitor or errand boy. He's taking on, in the process, some seriously grotesque and powerful monsters, monsters that turn out to have had an undue influence over human history, but even after Holm brings back a few much-loved characters from the prior two books to help out (and be put in danger), Sam's jeopardy now feels like Doctor Who jeopardy, except for one thing that I can't talk about without spoiling everything.

The book is still, though, a fine, fine addition to a series that I enjoy a lot -- it made me want to re-read its predecessors, the better to admire how he's constructed the story arc (and believe me, it's worth admiring) -- but I'm not sure, if I hadn't read those books, if this book would have made me want to. As part of the series, it's still pretty satisfying, but as a stand-alone work, less so.

I still, make no mistake, read the whole thing in as few sittings as I could manage, with no flitting to other books like I do. And doubtless this will always be my way, with Mr. Holm.

For Holm has carefully left room for more Collector books to happen, and I'll be along the ride if/when he does -- I'm especially interested to see what Sam's stories are like without [REDACTED] -- but I hope he starts thinking a little bigger for them again.

Or more intimate. Because on the whole, I prefer smaller and more intimate stories. If your theme is eternal cosmic conflict, though....? Holm balanced this beautifully in the first two books. Here, he just went for a video game-style quest narrative with flashbacks. But you know what? Holy crap, do I want to play this as a video game now.

Which probably says more about me than about the book.

I still very strongly suspect that Mr. Holm is only going to get better, though.

*Well, except when "woman" is used in place of our proper names. That's a bit crass.

**Yes, his titles are all riffs on famous crime novel titles. I love this about Holm.

***For those of you who haven't read my prior reviews or the books, Sam is a sort of ghost, whose job is to collect the souls of the damned, and he has to borrow bodies from the living or the freshly dead to do it. In the first two novels, he stuck to newly dead ones for ethical reasons -- crowding a living mind and soul out of the driver's seat of its own body is kind of a dick move, yo -- but in this novel, for a variety of perfectly justifiable reasons, he's mostly piloting living bodies. A bit of tasty conscience wrestling thus occurs, but not that much, because its one of this world's conceits that every time Sam possesses a body, he leaves a little of his humanity behind when he leaves the vessel, and he's been doing this for something like 60 years as most of this story takes place.

100 Books #95 - Chris F. Holm's THE WRONG GOODBYE

Stop me if you've heard this one. Boy meets corpse. Boy tries to harvest soul from corpse. Boy finds out that someone else already took it. Boy is in big, big trouble. There is no girl. Nor is there a spoon.

It's not even been two months since I read and enjoyed the first book in Chris F. Holm's Collector series, Dead Harvest, so the fact that I was eager to return to it says something, either about what else I've been reading (*cough* too much Dark Tower) or about how much I liked that first book, or both.

Let's say "both."

The Wrong Goodbye is not merely another adventure for our beleaguered soul-collector, Sam, though it would seem like such at first as he slogs through rain-washed jungles of Columbia to gather up the mean, mean soul of one Varela, drug kingpin, power broker and all around bad guy. But then the problem kicks in, and it's a doozy: someone else got there first. Someone who left behind the nastiest crime scene, maybe ever (especially if you don't like insects*). Someone who absconded with Varela's soul and carved a "hey buddy, we have to talk" message to Sam into Varela's corpse.

Before we know it, Sam, victim of a bait-and-switch, is traipsing all over the U.S. in the company of a dead low-level mobster who has been shoehorned into the fat old body of "the sausage king of Chicago" (wink wink) hunting down the guy who stole the soul and left the message. Along the way, we learn a bit more of Sam's incredible backstory, but where in Dead Harvest it was all about how he got to be a Collector, in The Wrong Goodbye the backstory focus is on his early Collecting days, during which he broke a lot of really important rules. Which is to say that even before the near-apocalyptic events of the first book, Sam has been on a lot of supernatural radars, none of them friendly.

Sam and his mobster-cum-sausage king** encounter quite a lot of genuine horror in this book, all of it dealt with extremely effectively. An extended scene exploring a decrepit sanitarium in the New Mexico desert evokes shades of every nightmare you've ever had, and every horror game you've ever had to play with the lights on (Fatal Frame, I'm looking at you) -- while, get this, simultaneously making the reader feel sorry for the demons hanging out there. It's all very complicated and I don't want to spoil it but man, it's a bravura performance Holm has done, there, and worth the price of the book alone.

But wait, there's more! Like two dead guys who are animating two other dead guys' bodies having an argument over whether one is to be allowed to smoke indoors. Giant evil mega-demons quoting The Big Lebowski. A weird carjacking of a vehicle so beautiful even a non gearhead like me can appreciate it. An action-packed final third that riffs on and builds from the action-packed final third of Dead Harvest and turns it all up to eleven -- until comes a twist ending that, even if you did see it coming, is a pretty satisfying payoff.

And through it all, we have Sam, still trying, despite his damned and undead status, to be a decent guy, to do the right thing, to keep the world from being completely destroyed. Again. Because he's Sam, a guy who went into perdition out of pure and selfless love, and who, yes, is bitter about it, but has not given up the struggle to stay good even so. I heart Sam, I really do.

All of this makes for very good, page-turning fiction. One might think she knows where all of this is heading, but one might be wrong. Or not. Either way, very enjoyable.

And yes, there is obviously going to be at least one more Collector book, to which part of me says, jeeze, how many times can one guy save the world, but to which the rest of me says, hey, Sam's a lot more likeable than Buffy...

*And speaking of insects, if you have a phobia about them, this book is going to scare you silly. There are swarms of giant, angry insects -- The Deliverants, who accept and pass collected souls along to Hell -- dogging Sam's every step through this one. They want their two dollars, you guys. A lot.

**Coo, that sounds a bit naughty, doesn't it?

100 Books #80 - Chris F. Holm's DEAD HARVEST

Stop me if you've heard this one. Boy meets girl. Boy tries to collect girl's soul for the Devil. Boy can't collect girl's soul because girl is blindingly pure (and a hottie). Boy chucks his assignment and steals girl away to try to protect her from all the Hell (and Heaven) that's about to break loose.

Yeah, I didn't think so. And I haven't even gotten to the really novel pleasures this book has to offer. Like the slapstick horror potential of a reanimated cadaver trying to escape Bellvue hospital with an unconscious teenager who all but made the Most Wanted list before blacking out. Like pieces of an ubiquitous lucky money cat being wielded as a powerful supernatural weapon. Like a hero who can possess any body he chooses but tends to choose newly dead ones because fighting off the soul of a living body is a huge hassle.

Some of these elements are used to better effect than others, but even if underexploited, they come together into a seamlessly enjoyable whole due to a strong crime noir-flavored plot and a weirdly engaging hero, our man Sam, who was originally an unemployed nebbish on Staten Island in 1944 but who made the wrong deal with the wrong people. His past, alluded to in carefully placed vignettes throughout the story, strongly colors his reactions to his present, as is strikingly reflected in the book's amazing cover art (even if you have your AdBlockers turned on and don't usually see my Amazon Affiliate links that I place at the beginning of these posts, shut 'em off for a second and make with the clicky and bask in the perfection of yet another amazing Angry Robot Books cover design. The book looks just like a mass market paperback did back in Sam's original day, when mass market paperbacks were the new and terrible Thing That Was Going To Destroy Publishing. It's brilliant!), as his mission brings him back to his old original haunts over 60 years since he himself was Collected.

The plot itself is interesting enough, but what I really found fascinating was the way Holm depicts Sam's experiences. A first person narrator, Sam loads his account of himself with sensations as experienced through his varied host bodies, relying on the superb physical fitness and muscle memory of one, on the suave good looks and body language of another. It makes the storytelling quite visceral and alive. I go back and forth on one niggling point, though: how often Sam should have been allowed to get away with calling it his own heartbeat, pulse, breath, blush response, versus calling it that of his host body. Sometimes he does one, sometimes another, and I'm not sure if this is meant to be taken as a way of tracking how deeply he is immersed in the experiences of a body, or if it's just something the narrator-writer slips to out of habit and narrative convention. This distracted me sometimes and yanked me out of that happy reading trance you guys know I like, but at least this time I was being yanked out by something interesting rather than a lot of verbal tics and typos (though I think Sam released a breath he didn't know he was holding a few too many times; ditto with setting fire to a cigarette instead of smoking one...).

At any rate, it was infinitely preferable than, say, Stephen King's version of possession as depicted quite a lot in The Drawing of the Three, in which a host body is pretty much just treated as a robot-cum-walking database after a token brief struggle.

And but so, here's the thing. I was not originally prepared to like this book very much, because it's pretty obvious from the early blurbs that Sam's decision to run away with the girl is likely to trigger all out war between Heaven and Hell, which really hasn't ever been my thing. For example, I only went to see that damned movie Legion because I love Paul Bettany, and boy was that a waste of my ticket money and his talent. Dogma is my least favorite Kevin Smith film. Et cetera. Plus I couldn't figure out the relationship of that neato vintage cover to what was pretty obviously a modern urban fantasy. So yeah, I fully intended to read it at some point, because Angry Robot has yet to truly let me down, but it never, you know, leaped out at me and said Read Me, Read Me Now... until my friend EssJay (yes, I know, we're like brainlocked or something. Hush) got her hands on it and devoured it and flagged down Angry Robot for an advance review copy of its sequel, The Wrong Goodbye, and gushed about that even more. And finally Dead Harvest started doing the Read Me Now Hula.

I'm very glad it did. It's a perfect example of what Angry Robot seems to be better than anybody at finding: a genre fusion that will please fans of any/all of the genres it's mashing up. There's a nice heroic protection/rescue plot (though sometimes it's a real question of who is rescuing/protecting whom; the young girl, Kate, is plenty resourceful and feisty all on her own), with plenty of exciting action scenes*; there are plenty of crime/noir elements; there is the much-mentioned War Between Heaven and Hell. There are shades of what I still consider Piers Anthony's finest book, On a Pale Horse -- but only of the good elements thereof.

It could all have gotten very, very corny, but it didn't. Though sometimes it came close:

He was a mountain of a cop, with dark deep-set eyes peering outward from a fleshy face, the features of which were twisted into an angry frown around a mustache the size of a small woodland creature. His barrel chest strained the button of his uniform blues as he approached, nightstick in hand... When he gave my bum leg a good thwack, I made my move. And by made my move, I mean fell down.

Hee hee. So you can kind of see this is also often a very funny book. But not long after one laughs, one cringes. Sam is as attuned to the moral crises as the physical sensations he and his fellows experience while possessing unwilling "vessels", and Holm makes sure that we feel them, too. Yikes.

At bottom, Dead Harvest is a perfectly fine whodunnit in the classic mode. It's just the howdunnit and whydunnit that are so very, very strange. And I like that.

I'm looking forward to the sequel.

*Especially an OMG sequence on board a hijacked helicopter, which, OMG.