REVIEW: THE PROPHECY MACHINE

By Neal Barrett Jr.

Neal Barrett Jr. deserves to be in a special category of fantasist among writers like Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance. Like them, Barrett is a master of absurdist Sword & Sorcery. The protagonist of The Prophecy Machine, Finn, is s lizard maker, that is he crafts exquisite mechanical life-forms. Finn, along with his beloved is Leticia Louise (a Newbie, as humanized animals are called in Finn’s world) and Julia Jessica Slagg, the lizard to end all lizards, get stranded in Mahasar where everyone is more-or-less insane. Finn regards himself as eminently sane, and is increasingly (and comically) frustrated by the shenanigans of Mahasar.

Soon Finn is drawn into a bizarre mystery involving rival sects of madmen, his deranged host, bad food, and a machine of awesome, yet obscure power. The Prophecy Machine is rather like Skinny Annie Blues, a way of torturing the protagonist in a delightfully amusing way while putting a fresh twist on old genre standards like fantasy and mystery.

-Dave Hardy

INTERSTATE DREAMS

By Neal Barrett, Jr.

At Armadillo Con 2005 in Austin, Texas, I listened to a panel on “The Weird Tale”. Someone defined that type of story as something Neal Barrett, Jr. wrote. Well, fair enough.

Interstate Dreams follows Dreamer, a slacker war-vet who lives in Austin. He sells tropical fish and is a professional thief (thanks to a bullet stuck in his head that gives him surreal, prophetic dreams and allows him to circumvent locks and alarms). Alas, people from Houston intrude, the slimy scientist/white-collar crook Halloran Horn, millionaire Gus Brauweiler, and gangster Mako Binder.

They prove less of a strain on Dreamer than the mysterious, angelic, infinitely desirable hitchhiker he just saw. It’s not so much the girl as the way Dreamer’s lust is all too apparent to his ambitious lawyer-girlfriend, Eileen.

This is really the tip of the iceberg. There is enough stuff here to make about six novels. Any sane, sensible, NY Times bestseller author would have filled out a 627 pager and have gotten an advance on the sequel. Barrett fits it all into 225 pages, and you know what, it never feels forced. Much of this surreal Austin-Houston landscape zips by like scenery on the interstate, glimpsed but impossible to get at, but it doesn’t get dull or sluggish. Maybe that’s why Barrett gets published by MoJo Press and is widely respected by other writers, rather than being a bestseller wallowing in bloated self-indulgence. Just a theory.
 

-Dave Hardy

 

ALDAIR IN ALBION
By Neal Barrett Jr.

While Neal Barrett is well known for works that verge on the surreal (e.g. Interstate Dreams) or the grimmest of grim futures (Through Darkest America), he can put together a rousing tale of swashbuckling adventure.

Aldair is a student at the University in Silium. Like many a youth, he runs afoul of the Pigs. But Aldair is something of a boar himself. In this version of Europe, different species of animals form the rival kingdoms. Aldair is a boar from the Venici, a tough border tribe used to acting independently. Rhemia is an empire of pigs, who face the wolfish Stygianns to the north and the sophisticated and snaky Nicieans to the south.

Unfortunately for Aldair, his comfortable life is disrupted when he is accused of heresy. In an off-kilter version of The Defiant Ones (or is it The Three Little Pigs?) Aldair joins up with Rhief, who is literally the big, bad wolf. They are looking for Albion, a mystic land of wonder and terror. But first they travel through a good bit of the known world on picaresque adventures that see them as pirates, slaves, mercenaries, scholars, and child-care specialists.

Aldair in Albion is real rousing fun, but not at the expense of well-drawn characters and a humanistic (or is animalistic appropriate here?) belief in the value of truth. It forms part of a larger body of quality writing given to us by Mr. Barrett, and one that has surely earned him some kind of recognition for a lifetime of achievement as a writer.

-Dave Hardy

DAWN’S UNCERTAIN LIGHT
By Neal Barrett, Jr.

****NOTE: If you haven't read Through Darkest America yet, you may want ot skip this review as it does neccessarily reveal a plot point or two.****

The sequel to Through Darkest America completes the saga of Howie Ryder and his search for his lost sister. He is a bitter young man, savagely mutilated by an enemy. In the last novel Howie escaped the chaos of the war in the west between Lathan and the American government. However he discovered the truth about the soulless “stock”, the creatures that look and walk upright like humans, but do not talk and are considered to be meat.

Yes, I said meat. Howie lives in a future America devastated by nuclear war. Life goes on, farmers raise crops and families, warlords make war, and people eat stock. Only Howie has learned a thing or two about stock and he is determined to rescue his sister from a fate that is worse than death, but probably includes death anyway.

Barrett’s vision of the future is bleak. There isn’t even the comfort of total destruction, rather mankind has been stripped down to his essentials: hypocrisy, bloodlust, and murder for food. The reader may not find Dawn’s Uncertain Light to be as nightmarish as its predecessor. It is hard to top the repeated shocks Barrett administers in that particular work. Rather Dawn toys with the notion of Howie as a mythic figure who is unaware of his status. Just as Darkest America was a cannibalistic trail-drive western, Dawn is the vengeance trail of a legendary gunfighter, told in Barrett’s own unique style.

-Dave Hardy

THROUGH DARKEST AMERICA
By Neal Barrett, Jr.

It’s not very often that a fiction writer can make me cringe. Very little of what makes its way into print is even a tithe of the awfulness that is splashed across headlines and that is usually watered down to meet the demands of a public that has no tolerance for news that might be upsetting.

But Neal Barrett, Jr. pulled it off here. There are lots of apocalypse tales that make the Apocalypse seem like not such a bad place. Sure, all that radiation killed off the weaklings, but a new race of übermenschen will arise and liquidate those pesky mutants. What’s to worry about? Mr. Barrett has a few suggestions of what you should worry about.

At first glance Through Darkest America might seem to be one of those cozy Apocalypse tales. America functions at a lower level, but not much lower than our pre-industrial past. Rape, murder, and torture inflicted by soldiers, outlaws, and warlord militias are pretty common, but that’s true of 21st century DR Congo. There are some unusually disturbing details to this new world, but Barrett’s protagonist, Howie, is such an earnest and engaging lad that one can’t help but identify with his world view.

In many ways Through Darkest America is much like a Western. Howie avenges a savage attack on his family and lights out for the Territories. He encounters outlaws, Johnny Rebs, and dance hall girls with hearts of gold in this off-kilter version of Huckleberry Finn. But Barrett only lets his readers go so far on that path before bringing them around to a very nasty elephant in the corner.

This is science fiction with guts. Barrett doesn’t mind launching brutal attacks on our deepest taboos about food and sex. Definitely not for the squeamish, if you want a cozy Apocalypse, look elsewhere.

-Dave Hardy