Nick W.

The Chimeras of the Scientific Mind

Revisado: 03-03-20

This is not a book for everybody. And it is not science fiction do much as a farcical observation anout scientific endeavor and the human beings who engage in it.

Billy is a sort of innocent straight- man /voice of reason, and the novel leads him through absurd encounters with the antic and sometimes almost frightening denizens of the strange isolated environment of the novel, a multi-nationally funded research center engaged in a variety of ridiculous almost post-modern fields of study, primarily the interpretation of a message received by radio telescopes from a distant star.

I wouldn’t duscourage anyone from reading this, but I suspect many readers will not connect with it.

It is dense, beautiful, silly and profound, overflowing with beautiful language and pregnant with endless ideas, and written on the kind of beautiful indulgent prose DeLillo more sparingky employed in his later novels. It is bubbling with information and I sight, and reading it is a lavish treat for readers who have a fairly broad experience of scientific language and a live for the sheer beauty of words and concepts.

It has little plot, it is mostly a series of quirky characters, weird encounters, and descriptive language so wonderfully crafted that it reminds us of what the written word can do at its best.

I love this book, and the right people will, also. It has no action, to speak of, no real story arc, no predictable outcome or single resolution. It’s beautiful, dense, challenging, hilarious, thought-provoking, profound, absurd, and oddly sad.

It’s like Monty Python, in that you will like it, or you will not like it. There will be little middle ground.

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Quirky, Well-written, Fun

Revisado: 06-22-19

You know how there’s certain movies that you just like, even though you know they aren’t great films? My example, which is actually relevant to “Shoot the Dead”, is the movie “Army of Darkness”, a movie with little to recommend it, except that I just LIKE it, in all its campy idiotic glory.

I feel similarly about “Shoot the Dead”. On the one hand, I don’t really believe the world needs or will ever need another book, movie, tv show or anything featuring vampires or zombies. Talk about done-to-death played out themes... But I still let the occasional exception through my defenses, and in this case, I’m glad I did.

WARNING: POSSIBLE SMALL SPOILERS AHEAD. I am a sucker for the beginning sequence where some horrible thing is discovered at an archeological dig decades before the story starts. The film “The Fifth Element” and Gregory Benford’s wonderful novel “Artifact” come to mind. There are countless other examples.

And then author Wetherell flashes to present-day London, where we arrive inside the head of a gangster named Jack, who is preparing to make an extremely risky and patently immoral life-changing career move. What distinguishes this book from the noise of the genre is how incredibly well the internal monologue of this character is written. In spite of Jack’s criminally insane murderous amorality, we come very quickly, if a bit reluctantly, to like him, and his anti-social brother, Billie. To some degree, the cast of almost universally unsavory characters who populate the story also become people we care somewhat about.

Granted, these anti-heroes are set up as a lesser evil against unambiguously, unapologetically, classically evil antagonists, so we have little choice, but the whole premise of the way the vampires and zombies and other baddies, which in almost every fiction in which they appear, are always easily able to overpower solitary mere mortals when they come upon them alone in the night, or set their minds to besieging the house in which they are hiding, meet their match when trying to deal with a couple of mobbed-up low-level thugs who simply are used to fighting back and not giving in.

It’s a bit of a novelty that vampires and zombified reanimated thralls are depicted as vulnerable to mortals who are simply tenacious fighters. It is satisfying to see Jack and Billie hold their own against supernatural terrors by simply fighting back, reluctantly at first, and then with an almost gleeful violence. They are either too unimaginative and dim to appreciate the full horror of their situation, or just too practical and experienced with a way of life where showing any sign of weakness or fear is equivalent to a death sentence. Whatever it is, it makes for a very entertaining read, interspersed with internal monologues from Jack, and revolving first-person perspectives of other characters, including stoned slackers, a tough lady detective and her partner, the perspective of an archeologist in a couple of flashbacks, and a few of the evil antagonists of various types.

So, while I’m not going to call this great literature, it’s not trying to be, and if you’re looking for a fun, fairly scary, very quirky and imaginatively and convincingly written action/horror tale, this is it. Wetherell is a strong writer with a real knack for adopting convincing inner voices for a variety of characters, and an ability to write sympathetic and believable anti-heroes. These are not easy things to do, and even though the story centers on some fairly insignificant main characters, the underlying theme hinting at potentially world-shattering consequences is also present.

The narrator is also very good, from the convincing menacing inner monologues to the action and dialogue sequences.

So, if you like this sort of zombie/undead genre novel, or if you want to try one and are looking for one that is a cut above, or, in fact, if you liked the movie “Army of Darkness” better than say, “Schindler’s List” or “The English Patient”, you’ll probably like “Shoot the Dead.”

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