Marshall My Thoughts

Finally getting round to replying to Steven K's comments on Michael Marshall [Smith]'s The Lonely Dead -- SPOILERS for which, and for its prequel[*] The Straw Men, will shortly follow.

I actually finished the book a week or so ago, but have, as advertised, been busy.

I do agree that The Lonely Dead was ultimately unsatisfying, and that it fails to live up to the promise of The Straw Men. This is partly because the big revelation towards the end appears relevant only on a local scale, and (despite some vaguely mystical hints) is unlikely to affect the characters in the same way.  Which when compared with "Human society has always been run from behind the scenes by a secret cabal of serial killers", is bound to come as something of a disappointment.

I actually quite like the grounding of the fantastic in reality in both these novels -- to start off small-scale and ordinary and then build up to that revelation in TSM was a pretty bold move, and one that I did feel worked for me. Given the usual expectations of a crime thriller, it's an interesting experiment with generic slipstreaming -- TSM can just about be accommodated within the crime genre, but TLD's frankly SF revelation definitely slips the moorings, like an X-Files episode smuggled into a series of an ordinary cop show.

I think another part of the problem is that, after the discoveries they make in TSM, the characters in TLD are less grounded in reality. Instead they're grounded in a paranoid fantasy based loosely on reality, and the sideways slip into a world where Neanderthals live on and are responsible for all of humanity's "hidden people" legends (just as the Straw Men themselves are responsible for all the conspiracy theories) is less shocking and effective than it would have been if it had come in the first novel, or in a non-series novel with new characters.

That said, there's a lot that's effective in TLD -- quite apart from the prose, which is to die for. The meditations on addiction, whether that comes in the form of cigarettes or serial murder, were very chilling indeed. The tracing of the serial-killing impulse to ancient sacrificial ritual was also very fine, and put me closely in mind of Neil Gaiman's excellent American Gods, another novel by a British US resident about how ancient elements of European culture infuse that of the modern-day United States. And the returning characters from TSM, apart from Zandt who's hardly in it, were still as compelling.

As, say, the second book in a trilogy (and I'd hope that would be what it turns out to be, rather than an open-ended series) I think it's very good. Hopefully it forms a brief diversion from the main action, and a prelude to the character development and (again, hopefully) genuinely shocking revelations of the third volume. Perhaps that's the only context in which it can really be judged -- as an individual novel, it suffers from its evident series status.

Generally, though, it's pretty damn good, but -- because of its position in the series -- precisely how good depends on where the story's going next.

[*] OK, so strictly speaking "prequel" was coined to refer to a story which is written and published later than a story which came out before, but which is set earlier -- effectively, a book- (or whatever) length flashback. Thus Prelude to Foundation, The Phantom Menace, The Merry Wives of Windsor etc. So... what is the word which just means "story to which the story currently under discussion is a sequel"?