Posted by johnshirley
on 11/3/2009, 3:44 pm
The title of John Shirley’s new novel may bring Dickens to mind, but this entertaining supernatural thriller has more in common with Lovecraft and The X-Files. In its depiction of ancient entities driven by an implacable hatred for humankind, it draws on Lovecraft’s brand of chilly, cerebral horror, while Scully and Mulder would be right at home in its paranoid political atmosphere, featuring shadowy government programs and arcane secret histories.
The Bleak of the title is Gabriel Bleak, a former army ranger who now works as a skip tracer in and around New York City. In both these occupations, he has been assisted by inborn eldritch abilities that grant him access to the Hidden, a “consciousness-inflected energy field connecting all life on Earth . . . the medium that provides a living environment for a spiritual ecology.” In other words, it’s home to ghosties, ghoulies, and other things that go bump in the night. It’s the closest to us of a number of supernatural planes of existence and as such must be traversed by earthly spirits moving on to higher or lower planes, and by entities resident in those planes who may wish, for benign or sinister reasons, to influence or even invade our own. It can also be a tangible medium, made of “stuff” that can be molded into forms and given functions that have physical effects in our world. Bleak, for example, can use his powers to fashion energy bullets that he throws with preternatural accuracy and deadly explosive effect. His connection to the Hidden has also given him the ability to talk and otherwise interact with ghosts, and has conferred as well a kind of sixth sense, an ability to tell when he is being watched, and to see himself through the eyes of the watcher—a handy skill for a soldier and bounty hunter. As described by Shirley, this supernatural system is more superhero-y than spooky.
Bleak is a loner, a semi-burned-out case bearing scars from childhood—his twin brother, Sean, was abducted when he was only three, and he’s been haunted ever since, Mulder-like, by the tragedy of that disappearance—and from his time in the army, fighting down and dirty in Afghanistan.
Bleak is not the only one with a connection to the Hidden. There is a loose group of misfits and outlaws in the New York area that calls itself the Shadow Community, led by a beautiful black woman named Shoella. Other communities and gifted individuals presumably exist around the world. Some of these people have an inherent ability to access the Hidden, while others seem open to contact from entities within or beyond the Hidden, who act through them.
Troy Gulcher, an inmate in a New Jersey maximum security prison, falls into the latter category. Gulcher is a man ruled by violent emotions, but he is not entirely without intelligence or a rudimentary moral sense, debased and twisted though they are. An entity from beyond the Hidden imbues Gulcher with the power necessary to escape from jail—which Gulcher does in bloody fashion. Outside, as he pursues the agenda of the entity that soon identifies itself as Moloch—yes, that Moloch—he begins to feel a certain . . . frustration, as if he has simply exchanged one prison for another. Gulcher may be a sociopath, but his yearning for freedom makes him vaguely sympathetic; he’s like a vicious beast caught in a trap and willing to gnaw its own leg off to get loose.
The U.S. government is aware of the Hidden. A secret arm of Homeland Security—9/11 took place in this reality, as in our own—called the Central Containment Authority, or CCA, is devoted to monitoring the Hidden and those who manifest a connection to it. They are especially interested in Bleak, whose connection is among the strongest known. The head of the CCA, General Forsythe, wants Bleak for reasons that are not entirely clear at first: perhaps his powers are seen to be threats to national security, or perhaps, on the contrary, they may be used in the service of the country. In any case, Forsythe has dispatched an attractive young CCA agent, Loraine Sarikosca, to track Bleak down and bring him in.
This is complicated not only by Bleak’s ranger skills and “magical” abilities, but by the romantic sparks that fly when the hunter and hunted come face to face. As time goes on, and her feelings for Bleak grow stronger and more confusing, Sarikosca will come to question her allegiance to the CCA, whose methods become increasingly brutal and arbitrary, in what is a clear allusion to the decay of moral and legal standards in the CIA during the presidency of George W. Bush.
Bleak, too, is troubled by the attraction he feels toward his pursuer, yet is equally unable to deny it. But as a kind of barbed romance blooms between these characters, Shirley is deftly weaving together darker threads of plot that will draw in Gulcher, a mysterious artifact buried in the Arctic tundra, and even Bleak’s missing brother. At stake is—what else?—the fate of humanity itself.
As in many such thrillers, the end of Bleak History feels rather perfunctory and by-the-numbers, but getting there is a fun and sometimes surprising ride. This is, after all, a John Shirley novel: anarchic in spirit, politically engaged with the real world, and shot through with gonzo weirdness. Yet not too weird: Shirley is in mainstream mode here, writing for the widest possible audience, with the clear intent of launching a series. And with its likeable characters, an occult system that manages to be both fresh and familiar, and a fast-moving plot whose action is spiced with romance, the prospects for that would seem to be anything but bleak.
paul witcover
http://www.darkecho.com/johnshirley
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