Books: Daemon By Daniel Suarez (2006)

"Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can't always be said for the people who design them. Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer—the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company's stock price. But Sobol's fans aren't the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol's secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it's up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy—or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control."

To be honest, I almost gave up on Daniel Suarez debut novel Daemon after about 40 pages, when the character of Gragg goes to a rave. There he separates a young women from her friends, drug her, then is able to get her to undress and give blowjobs to him and about forty other men all lined up behind him. Oh, and while this is going on, he’s streams it. While the purpose of this was to establish Gragg as scumbag, which I guess is the point, but this could’ve been done in a less sleazy and offensive way.

I do think the book does have some potentially interesting ideas, however Suarez squanders it multiple times (it sometimes comes off as an updated version of The Lawnmower Man). While the book is entirely plot driven, he does introduces a huge cast of mostly bad guys (and not some sort of modern anti-hero, let’s be honest here) who appear to be based on late 1980s action thriller villains in films made by Golan-Globus company The Cannon Group. These guys are all just stock characters, baddies of little imagination and no particular interest. What good guys that do appear, seem completely idiotic and are killed off in rather gruesome sorts of ways. But you end up not caring in the end, as they’re all paper thin creations, and ultimately boring.

And when Suarez tries to impress the readers with his tech-savvy knowledge, it comes off more pretentious than intriguing and he just assumes everyone will understand what he's writing. The book seems destined for people who are gamers and fans of MMORPG. He really explains nothing, which also can make a non-gamer fan feel really stupid. And even though he’s trying to keep the novel grounded in reality –less he gets stuck in the sci-fi genre that is more cult-ish than broad based audience he wants- the book becomes less and less a speculative futuristic novel, and more a tale that seems cobbled together by writers of 1970’s Doctor Who who think this is what "kids want" in their entertainment.

In the end, narrative runs wildly out of control and it never recovers any sense of logic or reason. It ends on a cliffhanger, which leads into 2010's Freedom™. But for me, Daemon is such an awful book, and despite having the second book here, I really don’t think I’ll be reading it anytime soon.

Books: Social Intercourse By Greg Howard (2018)

“When Beck’s emotionally fragile dad starts dating the recently single (and supposedly lesbian) mom of former bully, Jaxon Parker, Beck is not having it. Jax isn’t happy about the situation either, holding out hope that his moms will reunite and restore the only stable home he’s ever known. Putting aside past differences, the boys plot to derail the budding romance between their parents at their conservative hometown’s first-ever Rainbow Prom. Hearts will be broken, new romance will bloom, but nothing will go down the way Beck and Jax have planned.”

Much like Julian Winters Running with Lions, Greg Howard’s debut novel, Social Intercourse, features an out and proud gay teen Beckett Gaines and a supposedly straight jock named Jaxon Parker who suddenly realizes that he might not be so straight. This jock also is having problems with his girlfriend, who is very homophobic, so she hates Beckett and is a bit miffed that super-popular quarterback Jaxon is spending too much time not paying attention to her.

While the book has merits (even if the story is not original), it does feel a bit…seedy, I guess. Howard paints Beckett Gaines a little too shallow and bit insufferable. I wanted to like him, but found he was written a bit holier than thou and seemed really only to care about himself. Sure he loves his dad and tries hard to make him happy, but ultimately he comes up short, being too much a gay stereotype to be liked by anyone except other narcissistic twats. Jaxon, for all his questioning of whether he likes girls, boy, or both, comes off more grounded, if not too perfect. And I'm not sure it exactly paints bisexuals in a good light as well. It seems to, more or less, say that bi-guys are only bi until the right gay guy comes around.

As for the whole theme of growing up different in a Southern State, again the author takes the easy way out by making all people who dislike gays horrible human beings. They’re cartoon villains and beyond redemption, so you know the Pastor (who leads his band of hateful Christians) will get caught being hypocritical (and that happens) and thus you can't see them anything less than cardboard figures. 

I’m not sure what could’ve made this book work for me, because underneath the flash there is some social commentary substance. But you have to dig deep for that. And while I like the idea of a YA book being unfiltered with talk of sexuality, I guess I was surprised on how much everyone got away with things. I don’t want to be a prude, but no parent would allow their child, gay or straight, to spend the night alone in their bedroom. 

That’s TV fantasy world, not reality.

Books: The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (1966)

"Mrs. Pollifax is an elderly widow who has come to find life dull and is almost ready to end it all out of sheer boredom. Inspired by a newspaper profile of an actress who began her career in later life, she decides to fulfill a childhood ambition and apply for a job as a spy at the CIA. Meanwhile, Carstairs at the CIA is looking for an agent who can pass as a tourist in order to pick up an important microchip in Mexico City. Due to a slight confusion, he thinks Mrs. Pollifax is one of the candidates and decides that Mrs. Pollifax is ideal; Carstairs decided this assignment carries so little danger that even one who is relatively untrained may be sent. So with minimum explanation, Pollifax is ushered off to Mexico City in Mexico to meet a bookstore owner/secret agent, exchange code phrases, leave with a book containing the microfilm. Of course, the courier mission does not go as planned, and Mrs. Pollifax finds herself in a prison in Iron Curtain-era Albania, facing harsh questioning and possible torture"

While I admit I have always been familiar with Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax novels (she wrote 14 of them, spanning the 1960’s through 2000), I never thought of them as spy novels, just your everyday murder mysteries featuring an aging widow in the vein of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. But as I was doing research on Donald E. Westlakes Forever and a Death (which led me to A Spy in the Ointment), I stumbled upon a site that is dedicated to Westlake written by many of his long-time fans. The blogger talked about spy novels and referenced Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax, which was released in the mid-1960s at the height of spy genre era. So I got a used copy, just to see if it was anything I might like. I found the book okay and but it’s completely unbelievable (but that was the magic of early to mid-1960s), as there is no way any agency CIA or FBI, would send such untrained octogenarian into such an unstable element that was returning micro film (a McGuffin straight out a Hitchcock film) from Mexico.

Still, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax has some charm to it. Mrs. Pollifax is just the kind of grandmother anyone would love to have –very resourceful, intelligent, somewhat sly, and, who just happens to a secret CIA operative.  If taken as a complete fantasy, the book works (even as Gilman inserted a lot of real-life historical anecdotes about the country of Albania, Russia, and China), but over fifty years later, the magical aspect of how the book gets going made me roll my eyes.

Books: Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory (2017)

"The Telemachus family is known for performing inexplicable feats on talk shows and late-night television. Teddy, a master conman, heads up a clan who possess gifts he only fakes: there's Maureen, who can astral project; Irene, the human lie detector; Frankie, gifted with telekinesis; and Buddy, the clairvoyant. But when, one night, the magic fails to materialize, the family withdraws to Chicago where they live in shame for years. Until: As they find themselves facing a troika of threats (CIA, mafia, unrelenting skeptic), Matty, grandson of the family patriarch, discovers a bit of the old Telemachus magic in himself. Now, they must put past obstacles behind them and unite like never before. But will it be enough to bring The Amazing Telemachus Family back to its amazing life?”

Spoonbenders was an amazing book, a delightful eccentric family saga that is often times out-right hilarious, but it's also odd and heartbreaking as well. There’s a lot to unpack here, and the story zooms back in forth in time (though the “current” part is set in 1995), but author Daryl Gregory is able to create an assortment of screwball family members who each are blessed with physic powers, but none have gotten over the death of the mother, Maureen (which maybe the weak link here, as her story seemed more interesting at times).

And Gregory, who was born and raised in Chicagoland, uses the geography well (I knew all the towns and roads he mentions, including those classic local grocery stores), and is also able to tap into the Midwest love of 1970s talk shows like Mike Douglas and others. It was acts like Uri Geller and others, who appeared on these talk shows and claimed to have psychic powers that inspired the authors’ book; the title also comes from Geller's stage trick of bending spoons.

The first quarter is a bit rough, as much like the Gallagher Family of Showtime’s Shameless, the author expects the reader to be empathetic with some of the questionable things these men do here (including 14 year-old Matty). It comes off a bit seedy at times, but as the story goes on, you sort of start to forget those earlier passages as the book begins to pick up speed towards its chaotic conclusion.

Still, much like the character of Maureen, the women (including child and adult Irene) get short-shifted in the developmental part -they're at times more two-dimensional.

But in the end, this is still a charming and very entertaining fantasy.