Steven Krane

This is something unusual from Swiniarski (the author behind the pen name) and something of an experiment. It’s a novel about troubled youths, comic books, a secret CIA mission, and spontaneous human combustion.

Told through four viewpoint characters, we start out with Jimmy Somerset, a troubled youth. He’s been placed in several foster families and plenty of schools. He’s learned to fight for himself from his time in several juvenile detention facilities. But Jimmy has some anger issues, so, when the star quarterback starts something with him, Jimmy ends it. Or, as Jimmy thinks of it, the Jimmything takes care of it.

But a straightforward case of self defense – at least that’s what Jimmy remembers – is not supported by witnesses or video, and Jimmy finds himself railroaded into a new government program, TRACE, for troubled youth. Part of the evidence against him is the violent comic book he draws featuring Cain (yes, it seems to be Cain from the Bible), trying to get in good with God after several thousands of years and frequently battling the demon Baphomet.

Then there’s Nate Adriano, an independent computer forensic consultant who has become obsessed with the mystery of nineteen teenagers who spontaneously combusted. To pursue his investigation, he uses his law enforcement contacts and impersonates CDC officials, doctors, and even FBI agents.

The last draws the attention of then FBI agent Boyd who almost caught Adriano in one such impersonation. Boyd’s now with the CIA, and his project concerns those burning teenagers. Except, they aren’t the product of some covert government project. The CIA is genuinely baffled and regards the matter as a national security threat.

And they are alarmed by a leak. A government contractor dying of brain cancer turned over a secret database on the children to an independent reporter, Abby Springfield, who has contacted Adriano. And Springfield may have ties to Chinese intelligence.

We get quite a bit, with Adriano, of how you go about getting information out of a cryptic and corrupted database drawn, no doubt, from Swiniarski’s own work as a database manager.

Examining Jimmy in the TRACE facility Dr. Husam. He notes some odd things in the metabolism of Jimmy and his surprisingly good health. He and Adriano also learn that Jimmy made a miraculous recovery from his extensive burns in a fire that killed his parents.

Nate independently arrives at some of the same conclusions about the timing of the combustions as the CIA, but its developed a disturbing theory about their causes.

And when a troubled resident of TRACE spontaneously combusts after biting Jimmy, they fear the burnings may be infectious.

Krane propels his story along quite quickly. Jimmy’s comic book creations are an integral part of the puzzle. And the whole thing comes, of course, to a fiery and somewhat enigmatic conclusion on a rooftop in Cleveland. This was another winning novel from Swiniarski despite the questions raised – and the broad, untapped potential for a sequel – at its end.… (meer)

Quaid Loman wakes up in a room in a tropical resort. He has no memory how he got there and no idea where he is. Did he spectacularly fall off the wagon?

Then he finds out there’s 19 other people in the resort too. None of them know how they got there either though the gaps between now and their last memories vary. There’s no resort staff about and no clue where they are.

And they all receive letters with their own dated signatures on them. The letters state each of the nineteen is:

1) [character name] is a player in the Game.
2) The players must participate in the Game.
3) The players may agree to change the rules.
4)The players must obey the rules or forfeit.
5)The winner of the game is the last player who has not forfeited.

Being good Americans, a leader is nominated, and things are put to a vote when they all meet in the resort’s ballroom. And the process and decisions decided on are written up and distributed the next day to the players as rule addendums implying that the players are under surveillance by the forces running the Game.

There are questions. Can everyone be declared a winner and the game ended or must the Game be played out whatever the prize is or whatever is considered forfeiting?

Then the first body shows up.

The novel is Krane’s rumination on power dynamics – who leads and who follows and why – as the group divides into teams.

And what about those lights scene in the sky at night? And who’s running the Game? The CIA? The Chinese? Aliens? The Mafia?

Quaid is our main viewpoint character, but there’s also Berenice Greenblatt, a widow; Connie, a paranoid schizophrenic who has been institutionalized in the past and whose speculations begin to same increasingly reasonable; Carlos DeVay, an auto mechanic; and Abe Yanowitz, a doctor (convenient for autopsies).

When a team is sent to explore the rest of the island the social dynamics change when another dead person shows up, and Quaid finds himself imprisoned.

But he begins to sense that not all the players in the Game know its full rules and some of the players aren’t whom they claim. And some of the players start having shadowy memories about how they got to the island.

All the mysteries are resolved though Swiniarski again denies the reader what may have been a satisfying epilogue.

I’ve never read another book quite like this. The Game isn’t a version of Survivor, and it isn’t a version of Richard Connell’s classic “The Most Dangerous Game”. It may be Swiniarski’s shortest novel and pulls the reader along to the end.

In an introductory note, Krane tells us the Game is a “nefarious” version of a game called Nomic, introduced in Peter Suber’s The Paradox of Self-Amendment and popularized in Douglas Hofstader’s Metamagical Themas.… (meer)

This book is longer and more casually paced than any other Swiniarski I’ve read. I suspect that’s because it’s operating in Steven King territory specifically King’s Firestarter and Carrie which are explicitly alluded to as well as the movies Scanners and Akira. (Perhaps the name Steven Krane was chosen as a pseudonym so the book, merely marked as “Fiction”, could show up in the same section of the bookstore as Steven King and Dean R. Koontz.)

Our heroine, 17-year old Allison Boyle, is being stalked by creepy high school dropout Chuck Wilson, and it is through his escalating series of unwanted advances to Allison that her increasing telekinetic powers are manifested at the same time she is having lots of crippling migraines, a sign of her developing telekinetic powers and which her mother Carol is in denial about as a sign of Allison’s inherited ability.

Meanwhile, adding to the mysteries and chaos and stress of Allison’s life, are a serious of very late-night calls she overhears between her mother and a man named John who is worried about Allison’s headaches and the attention it may bring from them. We know John is Allison’s father, who Carol always claimed was dead, from the opening chapter which showed John and Carol as employees of the sinister PRI organization. Theykept their relationship and resulting child secret, but, after discovering some disturbing PRI archives and information about John, Carol took four year old Allison and fled.

PRI is interested in Chuck who is a telepath on their watch list. But, when Allison kills him during an attempted rape, she comes to the notice of PRI and their creepy kid telepath Elroy.

Orders are given to the PRI field team to bring Allison and her mother in. But Allison, figuring out form some papers in her mother’s possession, that she’s telekinetic, has been systematically testing out her powers. After a series of violent confrontations, Allison and her friend Macy flee Cleveland on a road trip to Washington DC to meet John. Along the way, there will be plenty of action and some spectacular scenes with her PRI pursuers.

But the professionals at PRI aren’t so easily thwarted and, eventually, Allison finds herself at PRI headquarters. It’s a creepy place, a jail and lab trying to appear as something else. Looking over the introduction packet she’s handed, Allison’s

eyes kept misting over at the details, but the text felt like a collage cut from brochures advertising resort hotels, Ivy League universities, and high-class drug treatment programs.

This part of the story allows Krane to develop his fascination with political and social dynamics, who obeys whom and why. Most of the students are daily drugged to quell their psychic powers, but not all, and that includes PRI’s favorite and most powerful psychic, the telepyrokinetic Jessica Mason. She’s is not happy she may be supplanted by Allison.

Most of the students accept PRI as their new parents, but there are also rebels.

I enjoyed this book which moved along quite fast despite its length. The most novel part of the story was PRI and its school though Krane also does an excellent job depicting Allison’s exploration of her powers.

However, the story’s end brought to mind a remark by the late Ed Bryant, author and one-time Locus book reviewer: sometimes the most interesting part of a story is what happened after a novel ends and how this is all going to be explained to the authorities.… (meer)