The Empathy Effect by Bob Lock, reviewed by Stephen Theaker

In The Empathy Effect (Screaming Dreams, pb, 144pp), Bob Lock introduces Cooper Jones. Named for his father’s profession, he’s a slightly psychic traffic warden. He can sense feelings, which comes in handy on the mean streets of Swansea: it may not stop him getting punched in the stomach, but on a good day it’ll give him time to clench. In this short comic novel he teams up with Albrecht von Wallenstein the Fourteenth (Alby for short), a testicular retriever who seems to share his special gift, to investigate the case of a missing girl.

The Empathy Effect, Bob Lock

Time was, novelists would invoke the threat of bank robberies, assassination or treason, and this would be sufficient for the reader to prick up their ears and steam with indignation that such crimes should be endured. Surely something should be done… at which stage, enter the protagonist. Nowadays most fictional criminals attract more adulation than opprobrium, which is why, when casting about for a suitably unpleasant villain, so many writers plump for the universally reviled paedophile. With a child molester, you can’t really fail to invoke a churning sense of unease and revulsion in your reader.

Bob Lock attempts a similar move in this light-hearted and vaguely supernatural crime thriller, giving his hit-man Simon not only a fondness for dishing out pain, but also for underage schoolgirls. Unfortunately for Lock, like so many others before him, once he’s wrested that big sack of emotional distress into his shopping trolley, he really doesn’t know what to do with it. He’s certainly not interested in dealing with the psychology of child abusers in a considered way. It’s only a thriller after all, and the chained up schoolgirl is merely what’s at stake: unless the protagonist gets his act together, then the evil Simon will have his depraved way with seven year-old Kim Siong.

As a reader I’m uncomfortable with this easy use of paedophilia to punch-up the emotional tension. I got the feeling that the author was a little shaky about it too: we see very little of the kidnapped girl beyond a few downcast looks from the depths of her warehouse prison. Sympathy for the potential victim is rather muted, and quickly overshadowed by loud expressions of indignation about some vicious dog-fighting enthusiasts who appear around the middle of the novel. One can feel the author’s relief that he can now express some uncomplicated pity and outrage about these abused innocents. And perhaps in animal cruelty the book has stumbled upon one of the few other remaining unforgivable crimes of fiction. Nobody, to my knowledge, has yet tried to write a book about a gang of cool dog-fighting enthusiasts. Clooney and Pitt will never appear on screen as a pair of glamorous donkey neglecters. The British can be relied upon to hate the perpetrators of animal cruelty almost as predictably as we foam at the mouth at the suggestion of child abuse.

It’s an animal-human relationship that receives probably more attention than anything else in the story. Relentlessly chipper alcoholic Welsh traffic warden Cooper Jones has the ability to feel the emotional states of others without the usual sensory clues the rest of us rely on. After he becomes subject to a mysterious vendetta, he eventually teams up with Alby, a Jack Russell who’s a ‘bit of a character’, and like a Welsh Turner and Hooch team up to track down the villains.

There’s a couple of technical problems: we begin the story with Cooper strapped to the end of a pier with industrial cling-film. He describes his predicament in the present tense, and proceeds to explain just how he got himself into this mess. But then, on page 83, while waiting for a taxi, he switches back to the present tense as though he is telling the whole story from this point in time. The same thing happens a couple of times on page 99.

Details aside, my main gripe with The Empathy Effect was with Jones’s endless wisecracking and humorous asides. At one point he feels compelled to tell the reader that he has big feet – cue a gag about how ducks are jealous of him. Whatever situation he finds himself in, whether he is being tortured by psychopaths, running away from the police, finding a severed finger in his bag of chips, Cooper Jones can always be relied upon to attempt some light-hearted banter. I was relieved when the narrative left him behind for a few chapters to concentrate on the baddies, who cracked less lame jokes, even if they were rather too fond of ramming home their depravity with Dr. Evil-style arch comments and raised eyebrows. Cooper reminded me at times of an adolescent blogger at pains to convince his putative readership that every incident in their humdrum lives is actually fraught with absurd humour and noteworthy weirdness. But there are some things that, however many leaden quips one attempts, remain resolutely unfunny, and I’m afraid I have to count this book among them.

"The Empathy Effect" by Bob Lock, Screaming Dreams 2010, ISBN 978-1-906652-07-4, paperback, 135pp, £6.99. Publishing date: TBA. Available soon from www.screamingdreams.com

Different Skins, by Gary McMahon

Different Skins collects two novellas, “Even the Dead Die” and the shorter “In the Skin”, both by Gary McMahon. They share certain themes – death, identity, skin, gender relations – but are otherwise separate. The marvellous cover is by Vincent Chong.

In “Even the Dead Die” Mike Angelo (his parents must have had a sense of humour) moves through a London that he despises, soon discovering that there’s a worse London beneath. It’s a story of death, rape, murder, prostitution and sexual slavery. Structurally, there are similarities with things like Neverwhere or The Matrix, but in tone it’s closer to the movies of Clive Barker. I won’t say anything more about Mike’s discoveries; I don’t want to spoil the novella for anyone; but as you might expect they are shocking, horrifying and gruesomely entertaining.

This novella was bit of a tough read, even allowing for the gruelling subject matter, because it was marred by mistakes and patches of clunky, awkward writing. Some sentences looked good on the surface but didn’t stand up to scrutiny, while other sentences were overloaded with redundant words. For example see p. 40: “This was becoming repetitive, but despite all the information (he) was imparting, he was going nowhere near the answer to the only question that really mattered.” It’s not exactly wrong, but it’s not exactly elegant either.

Some sentences don’t quite slot together. For example, there was “a lengthy silence on the line, which was soon filled by the sound of Aunt Hilda crying” (p. 21) (was the silence lengthy or soon filled?), and “I needed air, even if it was the polluted miasma that hangs above London like a cloud of radioactive leakage” (p. 24) (if it’s a cloud above London will he be breathing it?). After a revelatory chat, his “mind was drowning in all this sensory information” (p. 52) – presumably the chat was accompanied by a laser show!

The opening line is already infamous: “London is an open wound … through which oozes the rancid puss of society.” And no, this isn’t a story about zombie cats. I’d guess the old lady with the hot body is supposed to be disconcertingly erotic rather than “discerningly erotic” (p. 54), though both could well apply, and when a baddie gets his just desserts I think the process probably involves being pulled apart rather than telling lies (“quickly dissembling him” (p. 67). There’s also a pile of smaller errors and the impression is unfortunately of a story that didn’t go through a proper editorial process.

Still, despite its flaws, it has many strong moments, lots of good ideas, and (as Tim Lebbon notes in his introduction) is written with exceptional passion. If the production is poor, the story being told is more than good enough to compensate and make this a very worthwhile and memorable read.

“In the Skin”, though, was better in every way. Dan goes on a business trip to New York, leaving behind his wife Adi and young son Max. Upon his return, his wife seems jumpy and his son seems unusually bulky. What has happened to them in his absence? And who’s that crawling around in the garden?

As with “Even the Dead Die”, the story is powerful and frightening. There is still the occasional mistake (how could he have watched both planes crash live on 9/11, and how does his laptop’s operating system run once the entire hard drive has been wiped?) but the language is leaner, direct and much less wordy – and hence more impactful. The writing is just plain better.

The author’s notes at the back of the book suggest “In the Skin” was written much more recently than the story that shares its covers (circa 2008, compared to 2002 for at least the first two parts of “Even the Dead Die”), so maybe that explains the differences between them. Either way, this was a very enjoyable book, and if my experience of the same author’s Rain Dogs is anything to go by, within a month or two I’ll have forgotten the mistakes and be rhapsodizing about the bits I loved.

Different Skins, by Gary McMahon, Screaming Dreams, pb, 120pp.

The Postmodern Mariner, by Rhys Hughes

I went from The Smell of Telescopes, one of Rhys Hughes’ earliest books, to this, one of his most recent. The decade or so that separates them is immediately obvious (or at least it seems to be – perhaps these stories date from the same period and I’m just imagining a difference!): the lines are cleaner, the twists less superfluous, the jokes funnier. There are three distinct sections. (I rather wish The Smell of Telescopes had been divided up in the same way to save me a bit of brainache!)

Part One features seven amazing adventures of Castor Jenkins, the Baron Munchausen of Porthcawl, of which more below. Part Two is “The Lip Service”, a tale of a man who posts himself to his girlfriend and ends up in a far-off magical lost parcels depot. It’s funny, silly and rather sadder than the other stories, being all about the steady disappearance of love from the world.

Part Three is a novella about the Postmodern Mariner in person, “Rommel Cobra’s Swimming Carnival”, in which the Mariner (a blogger) goes in search of adventure with pirates in a gigantic cup of tea – adventure on the high teas, one might say! Astonishingly, in a novella filled to the brim with groan-worthy puns, Hughes neglects to make that one, the most obvious of all. I can only guess it’s a deliberately open goal, left by way of invitation to the reader to join the game!

[In this, as in so many things, I was wrong. The author, reading the original draft of this review on Goodreads, noted that such a pun could be found on page 118, about halfway down. Said Rhys: “I was mildly shocked at the thought that I might have missed a pun! I went mildly pale, began mildly shaking, nearly collapsed with a mild heart attack!”]

Two marvellous opening paragraphs from the Castor Jenkins stories should serve to give a taste of the pleasures of this book. “The Plucked Plant” begins thus: “Castor Jenkins has a bad habit of advocating outlandish ideas and even his mildest beliefs are routinely uncommon. If you ask him about the Primeval Soup he’ll insist it was leek and potato. He denies the existence of the colour purple, the number seven and the note G#.”

And “Interstellar Domestic” opens with: “Nobody outside Porthcawl, and hardly anyone inside it, can remember that Wales once had a space program that enjoyed greater success than the combined efforts of the Americans, Russians and Chinese. … What’s more, it was done on the cheap, without even the need to build a spaceship.”

If you like those extracts, you’ll enjoy this book immensely. The book reviews itself! But I should try to contribute; what I like about these stories is that they are all about extrapolation. I like stories where one thing follows on from another, where premises are built upon, notions are followed through. For example the way the apocalyptic ending of Joe Hill’s Gunpowder follows logically from its small beginnings, or Racine’s protagonists are propelled to their doom, or Superman shaves his beard with his heat vision.

The speciality of the stories in this book is taking a silly (and sometimes not-so-silly) premise and following it through to an apparently logical but ludicrous conclusion – and that’s why I loved them so much. A review of the same author’s The Crystal Cosmos dismissed it briefly: “It begins, beautifully. Alas, from here on out it descends into a nonsensical mess.” Not having read that book of course I can’t argue with the conclusion, but it’s worth noting that not all nonsense is a mess, and nonsense isn’t necessarily something into which a story descends: sometimes it’s something to which a story carefully builds, and that’s certainly the case in this collection.

The book’s one flaw for me is that it groups together three chunks of storytelling that have little in common. Each section is individually quite fantastic, but they don’t quite add up to a pleasing whole. A complete collection of Castor Jenkins stories would have been even better, or a set of three novellas, but as it stands the novella feels like an unnecessary adjunct to the Jenkins stories, or vice versa. Certainly, the unique and very admirable Castor Jenkins stories deserve to be in a book with his name on the cover.

And while we’re talking of covers, a note of praise for Steve Upham’s marvellous giant octopus! Certainly, the design of this book does it proud, as does the quality of its production.

The Postmodern Mariner, by Rhys Hughes, Screaming Dreams, pb, 160pp.