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Recommended Books

September 2003

"He Who Maps It Owns It"

Part III

"The Dead Zone"

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The Burning of her Sin, a Brenda Strange Mystery by Patty G. Henderson, Barclay Books 2002

The TV series Dead Zone has an odd story behind it. At first they knew they had a hot property because it was a Stephen King property. But their first attempts to bring it to life on the small screen didn’t do well. They analyzed what the fans of the show loved about it, and focused on the relationship story, the background and characters without the horror treatment of the original novel.

They made the hero more dimensional so his relationships would seem realistic. In the process, they found an emphasis on a particular theme that grabbed the audience and ratings began to take off.

That theme? Power.

We have discussed the use and abuse of Power here many times in many contexts. It is a primary concern of the student of the occult, of the ceremonial magician, and of the adept ready to teach these skills.

"The Dead Zone" is titled for a phrase that refers to an anatomical structure in the human brain. Our Hero is a man who wakes from a coma to discover that when he touches people or their possessions, he gets flashes of their pasts, or of their possible futures.

These flashes are accurate, but not conclusive. Apparently, the theory of precognition being used in this television show is the one used by Marion Zimmer Bradley in her Darkover Series, particularly in the novel Hawk Mistress. The precognitive sees an array of futures. The mature precog can discern which is the most probable future.

These stray glimpses of futures show tight close-ups on points of intense emotion. The precog can only guess how the situation came to be, and what it might yet lead to.

"Mapping" these futures onto a personal "visualization of the macrocosmic All" (to borrow a phrase coined by Edward E. Smith Ph.D for his Lensman Series) does give one power to alter probabilities a little bit.

That is, the precog with maturity and skill may sometimes be able to "own" the future, to control it.

Which brings us to the question, "What are the rights and obligations of an owner?"

If you own something, can you do anything you want with it, just because you want to? Does ownership confer a sovereignty that is not even accountable to the Creator of the Universe? Or do your rights depend on what you own?

A number of authors have been using the occult-fantasy genres to discuss these issues of "ownership" (in the sense of having "mapped" a subject as discussed in Part I).

Wysard and its sequel Lord Brother both by Carolyn Kephart (trade paperback, no e-book) are set in a richly constructed fantasy world where the adepts at magic are swept away to live in citadels apart from the world. There is rivalry among the citadels, and hostile magic afoot.

Ryel Mirai, The Lord of Markul has been alone in the citadel where he has trained as his colleagues have been dying off rapidly. His mentor lies "dead" though there’s a chance that ancient magic can rejoin body and soul. Ryel, accepting responsibility for the events that killed his mentor, sets out to find a way to bring him back to life.

These novels are about finding and retrieving lost knowledge and using it for a current purpose. As in many fantasy universes, original research doesn’t seem to be an option, however Ryel Mirai is the kind of scholar who could and would do it himself from scratch. I think that’s why I like him.

This is a smoothly written, well constructed tale decorated with much original detail. It seems to me the two volumes should have been published as one with a combined price of about what it costs for one. You’ll find used copies on amazon.com – and the books are sturdily constructed enough that I expect the used ones will be readable.

Now we come to an odd item that some of you may feel is the best book you’ve read all year, and others will find unreadable only because the main character is in a lesbian relationship. But the interesting thing about this novel is that it is an occult murder mystery, and the murder involves a lesbian relationship, but the whole novel has little if anything to do with the problems specific to living as a lesbian today.

This is an occult murder mystery, and as such it is one terrific mystery. It is cleanly and solidly constructed, easy reading, interesting and gripping.

The main character, Brenda Strange has undergone a near-death experience and emerged (as in The Dead Zone) with a psychic ability that forces an adjustment in her life. She goes from being a successful lawyer in New Jersey to being a private eye in Florida. This is the novel that takes us through that transition in her life.

Brenda buys a house in Florida that is a fixer-upper. During renovations the carpenters break through a wall and find a skeleton from long ago. A ghost walks. Brenda listens, refuses to be deterred by the resistance of descendants of the previous owners of the house, and digs up the whole story of that death.

Then she has to make some hard decisions. She’s mapped the territory, she has the power of ownership, and now she must decide what to do with it. She wrestles through ethical and moral concerns. In the days when this murder happened, women were regarded as possessions by some husbands. At that time slave ownership was within living memory. But today, in the 21^st century, owning people is considered either evil or just plain wrong.

What should she do? How much truth should come out? Is it up to her alone to judge? Who can she talk to? Where do you get advice on such a matter – and does it make a difference that the key information on where to find concrete proof of the perpetrator’s guilt came to her psychically? Does the ghost’s wish count?

I highly recommend this novel. If you’ve never read a novel with a lesbian couple as the main characters, you should start with this one. If you have a deep seated aversion to reading novels with gay characters, well then this one just won’t be worth its price to you. But you’ll have missed a good book about an occult-detective muddling through with no formal occult training.

I hope the series continues so we can watch this woman become a trained magician perhaps like Taverner.

You will notice that over these last three columns I’ve reviewed a few very obscure publishers’ books beside those of the biggest publishers. And the obscure publishers’ books are withstanding the test of comparison.

That is a relatively new development in publishing, and is the result of Plutonian like forces operating below the surface of the business world. Sketched in brief, the publishing industry in America was destroyed when the tax laws were changed to treat books in warehouses the same as toasters – i.e. that each year a book sits in a warehouse, the publisher must pay taxes on that book.

So it became necessary to print only as many copies as could be sold in a year. This doomed most novels to such a short shelf-life that those who would have become fans never found the book.

With U. S. publishing in disarray, Europe and the rest of the world went on a buying binge, buying up U. S. publishers. In retaliation, U. S. publishers bought each other and conglomerated, while some non-publishers bought book publishers too. Manhattan publishing cut out their less profitable mid-list books (the non-bestsellers you love).

The entire mid-list readership went hungry until new small publishers appeared all over the country.

In spring 2003, I’ve been watching changes at a startup e-book publisher where an editor left and the publisher decided to eliminate the contemporary romance line because Manhattan was publishing those and the e-book publisher couldn’t compete.

The e-book publisher decided to concentrate on the kinds of books Manhattan could not publish because the market is too small – but the e-book/print-on-demand publication could be profitable.

Today, with the new print-on-demand technology, new publishers are springing up everywhere trying to serve this very hungry market. Unfortunately, many of the smallest publishers don’t get the best books submitted, and rarely have the editing ability to make up the difference.

I’ve tried to point you to the best new publishers here. Come discuss the publishing industry on rereadable-l the discussion list for this column. www.simegen.com/archives/