The Returned by Jason Mott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Returned is Jason Mott’s debut novel and as a first novel it’s pretty decent. As a novel, period, I found it less effective, with a number of flaws and unrealized potential.

The premise is high concept and simple: without explanation, the dead return to life, unchanged from the time just before their deaths (ie. murder victims don’t show up with knives stuck in their backs). As the story progresses the number of ‘returned’ grows significantly and things take a turn for the ugly as governments grapple to deal with all of the freshly warm bodies.

The novel pays lip service to the wider effects of the dead coming back to life, mostly by having people observe news reports on TV or in brief interstitials between chapters that recount the return of various individuals across the globe. The bulk of the story focuses on the elderly couple of Harold and Lucille Hargrave, who have their eight year old son returned to them fifty years after he drowned in a local river, and how their small southern town of Arcadia handles the newly not-dead (hint: not very well at all).

The characters are broadly drawn–Lucille is deeply religious, her husband is a cantankerous atheist, there is the decent but powerless government man and the colonel in charge of the eventual operation in Arcadia is revealed to be all but psychotic. The latter, Colonel Willis (I couldn’t help but imagine Bruce Willis as the character, as it is essentially a copy of the character of Major General William Devereaux that Willis played in The Siege), is set up to be a major player but actually has a fairly small role.

I had two main problems with the story, the first being that the premise is never explored in any detail. The dead come back to life, their numbers create a problem for the “true living” and that’s it. There are a few vague hints about the why and the how of why they have returned, but these are nothing more than traces. It’s an interesting concept but in the end it feels like a plot device to hang the story on.

I was fine with the story focusing on the small scale of the Hargraves and their boy, along with some of the town’s neighbors and a few other sundry characters that get drawn in, but here again the story is curiously one-sided, with the author staying almost entirely out of the heads of the returned, and this was my other major problem with it. I often felt like half of the story was being withheld. The boy Jacob is little more than a polite cipher, a wind-up toy in the shape of an eight year old. While everyone frets and threatens and talks about the returned, the returned themselves are little more than wallpaper in the background.

The writing sometimes tries a little too hard to wax lyrical but I admit I may be the wrong audience for this style of writing. It comes off sounding corny to me. “It was bitterly cold, like a hard winter where the ground is frozen and cruel.” I just made that up, but it conveys Mott’s style of metaphor. There’s also a little too much of characters confessing how little they know about particular subjects “other than what I see on TV” that feels like the author trying to cover for his own lack of knowledge on various topics.

The Returned is not a bad book, though. The prose is clean and direct and the story never meanders. There are some amusing exchanges between characters. By the end, though, the whole thing felt a bit disjointed, with character arcs that play out to no real effect, action scenes that don’t quite ring true (there should be a moratorium on people shooting someone in an extremity) and a conclusion that wraps things up but left me thinking, “Well, okay. I guess the story’s done now.”

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Dead Sky Morning by Karina Halle

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the third book in Karina Halle’s “Experiments in Terror” series, though the story is self-contained and any needed background is provided along the way. I chose it because a) the cover looks neat (yes, I am still drawn to a good cover) and b) I liked that this particular ghost story was set on an actual local island here in BC.

The story follows webcasting ghost hunters Perry Palomino and Dex Foray as they set out to document the alleged haunting on a former Chinese leper colony on D’Arcy Island, located off the coast of Vancouver Island. Dex is a chain-smoking gruff thirty-something with a Dark and Mysterious Past while Perry is a 22 year old with serious confidence issues and also the ability to see ghosts.

The story is told from the first person perspective of Perry and Perry likes to go into great detail about what she is thinking, what she is doing, what she might be doing, what Dex should be doing (falling in love with her, it seems) and well, everything and anything. This is another story where much of the mystery and drama is leeched away by the protagonist basically not shutting up about every subject under the sun.

The romantic tension serves as the undercurrent to the story and consumes a surprisingly large chunk of it. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the will-they-won’t-they thing but it’s all fairly predictable.

The adventure on the island goes south quickly with all kinds of terrifying and horrifying sights and sounds. As with many horror stories it works best if you don’t step back and try to piece things together logically. The biggest issue here is probably how Perry can see ghosts but Dex can’t–until it’s needed story-wise for him to be able to.

On the one hand I admire the author for having a protagonist who isn’t some uber she-warrior able to handle everything with panache. Perry is neurotic, throws up, passes out, trips, falls and generally has a terrible time of it, yet she comes through it all a little stronger and a little surer. The arc for both characters growing is small but there.

In the end, though, the writing itself left me feeling ambivalent about the book. Halle does a fine job in capturing Perry’s voice but at times it’s detrimental to the story, with the tone veering all over the place, from melodramatic passages you’d expect from a bodice ripper to near-slapstick. Perry’s take on things often feels like an overheated teenager. It’s funny at times but the shifting tone and casual, almost sloppy style detract from the overall experience.

Still, this is a decent bit of terror and it moves at a brisk pace. It’s not likely to make you want to go camping on a remote island any time soon.

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