I spent all four days of the U.S.-imperialist holiday weekend hunkered down in our bedroom with my wife where the air conditioner huffed and puffed and, with a fan added to the mix, kept the space bearable, in the low 80s or so. Yes at a certain point we did get cabin fever but the alternative, venturing out into the muggy smoggy high-90s air and walking somewhere, seemed worse so we stuck it out. Mostly we read. Teresa finished two books, shortish, serious. I finished one, longish, pure vacation nonsense: Red Moon by Benjamin Percy.
Red Moon is a
marketer's dream. It's a big fat horror story wholly in the Stephen King/Dean
Koontz mold. Yet it's also, supposedly, literary, a step above your standard
scary novel. The jacket features blurbs by writers from both sides of the mass-market-vs.-literary-fiction
divide, and Percy comes fully credentialed from the lit side, so you see, the
idea is to appeal to everyone. OK I bit.
OK describes the novel. It's not eye-rollingly insipid. The
writing is fine, yes a step above both King and Koontz who themselves are
better than most of their cohort. Honestly, though, I can't work up much
enthusiasm. The characters are competently wrought but no more than that. Ditto
the action. I never cared much about any of it. I felt no pain, no sorrow, no
fear, no tension. I did keep reading, and I'll tell you why.
There is a veneer of political relevance to Red Moon. I was
mildly intrigued as I read along, curious as to what direction the politics
would take. I had to read to the end to conclude that it's just a veneer. There
is no actual honest engagement with actual political issues. There is certainly
no side-taking. It's a glib middle-of-the-road petit-bourgeois ever-so-slight
glance at relevance, that's about it. Liberalism in literary-horror form.
The werewolves in this book, and the congruent alternate
history into which the werewolf plot is slotted, can be read as parallels to,
variously: September 11 and the preceding U.S. funding and creation of terror
groups, the Bush/Obama "war on terror" and civil liberties,
anti-Muslim racism, right-wing vigilantism, anti-immigrant racism, anti-U.S.-imperialist
"terrorism," left-radical activism, the 1960s anti-war movement, AIDS
and AIDS activism and discrimination against people with AIDS, and I forget
what-all else, forgive me, it's quite a mishmash. Pieces of the story echo
pieces of these various historic realities at various points. It would be an
inaccurate stretch, however, to say these pieces separately or together amount
to commentary on any of these political realities. No position is taken; we're
just teased along the way, with a sort of authorial wink; I guess we're just
supposed to note the clever similarities and leave it at that. No, I'm wrong,
there is one position taken: there are bad werewolves and good werewolves,
those who want to find a way to get along in society and those who want to
destroy non-werewolf society. Oh how very bold and courageous (not!). This is
the essence of liberalism, crying woe at the evils of the status quo but
clinging to it. This bad terrorist werewolf/good civil libertarian werewolf
dichotomy, in fact, reminded me of a book I've been meaning to read for some
time, and I've now begun it: Good Muslim,
Bad Muslim—America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood
Mamdani.
There's also an unfortunate though not uncommon problem regarding the national question that kept popping out as I read. With only one exception I recall, a brief scene in a cave where several minor characters are introduced with name and nationality, throughout the rest of the book whiteness is a given for every character. If a character is not white it is pointed out (in fact it's often the only thing that's pointed out); otherwise we're to assume the character is white. As in a description of several people in a crowd that goes something like: a tall man with deep laugh lines around his eyes, a stout woman with short brown hair in bright blue capri pants, and a Mexican in jeans and cowboy boots. Wow. That this is still the standard is so sad.
One other point of frustration with Red Moon. It's about the oddly faulty way the quest for a vaccine
for werewolfism informs the plot. A vaccine, as is accurately explained early
on, is basically a tiny dosage of a version of an infectious agent (virus,
bacteria, or, fictionally here, prion) that, once introduced into a person's
system, stimulates the immune system to resist it and thereby inoculates the
person against any future attack by the infectious agent. It's why I get a flu
shot every year (yeah I know you're agin' it, but my public-health
epidemiologist super-communist comrade argues for the flu shot and I find his
view convincing). OK. So a vaccine is a preventive measure. It's to prevent
infection. Perfectly understandable that a key plot strand involves the search
for a vaccine to prevent folks bitten by werewolves from themselves succumbing and
becoming werewolves. But. Not in the least understandable, in fact perfectly
nonsensical, that it seems also to be intended as a cure, which is an utterly
different thing than a vaccine. And that in the novel's final pages our hetero-coupled
heroes (nope, not a single same-sex-lover anywhere in sight in this
500-plus-page novel with a cast of thousands), having, against all odds,
managed to get a hold of the single extant vial of vaccine, are about to
administer a dose to themselves. They are already infected! It's a vaccine, not
a cure! Oy, I hate it when this kind of thing undermines my readerly willingness
to suspend disbelief.
Ah well. One week left till I start my vacation days. I have another fat new supposedly better-than-average horror-type book on my pile but I think I'll let it wait. Maybe it's great but probably it's not, and one non-thrill is enough for this summer.
