review of
Greg Bear's Psychlone
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 27, 2017

You'd think this guy is one of my favorite writers or something. This is the 17th bk I've read by him & I always pick up any titles of his that I don't already have. It helps that they're cheap. He always has a grandiose idea that he develops fully. This wasn't one of my favorites but then I read ANOTHER ONE that I liked so much that he was instantly 'redeemed'.

The PROLOGUE:

"Final message from the U.S.S. Matheson, received 1630 hours May 24, 1964:

""Mayday, repeat, Mayday. Situation is getting worse. They are all over the decks now. Blue fire crawling over my radio and the ports.["]"

[..]

"From The Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1977:

"PAPEETE, Tahiti (AP)—Police are investigating the death at sea of five members of an English family whose boast was found drifting erratically near Anaa island in the Tuamotu group, 240 miles east of Tahiti. The yacht Enchanted, rented from owners in Tahiti["]" - p 1

If these are true stories I can understand why they might've inspired Bear to provide a fictional explanation, in this case a highly imaginative & dramatic one. However, I didn't find either online in an extremely cursory search. Searching for "USS Matheson" did yield a link to Psychlone so I conclude that they're fictional but may be based on other stories of the same ilk. After I did the search a strange vehicle did appear outside my bedrm window & a pink light was beamed in but I was too busy writing this review to pay it no mind.

""Stay the night at least. You'll know as much as I do, which right now is nothing. He's not senile, Larry. I know him pretty well—we've gotten reacquainted in the last few years. He's just as skeptical as you and I."

""But these books—"

""I know, some are ridiculous. Not all, however. There's genuine scholarship on that shelf."

""Mixed with a healthy dose of bullshit. All this Frank Edwards crap, Jeane Dixon, strictly National Perspirer stuff. Are you two trying to set me up for a night in a haunted cabin?"" - p 10

I'd never heard of Frank Edwards but, yeah, he apparently really was a writer of popular bks on UFOs & paranormal subjects. Jeane Dixon's a little more familiar to me, she was an astrologer & claimed to be a psychic. The National Perspirer is probably an obvious joke to most readers of this review but since historians will be reading my reviews a thousand yrs or more in the future it's my duty to explain even this: The National Inquirer is a celebrity gossip magazine that's sensationalist & lurid. What's a "celebrity" you ask? Be glad you're in the future.

"Officer Lawrence Perez Preston—nicknamed "Sergeant Preston of the Mexies" (p 34) - presumably a take-off of "Sergeant Preston of The Yukon", a 1950s American TV show about a Canadian Mountie. Get yr yuk on.

We get our BIG CLUE fairly early on:

"The door to the hardware store was open. The light had gone out or been moved, however, and now the store was dark. He waved the beam of his flashlight back and forth in slow arcs. Everything seemed to be in order. Then the light fell on the floor and he saw paperback books scattered all over. The wire display rack was resting across the yellow wood magazine stand, a few books still leaning in the wire bins. There were bits of paper scattered, but not a whole lot of them—as if one book had been picked out and torn to shreds. He retrieved a corner of a mangled cover. "Hiro—" he read. "By John—" - p 36

After that I went to take a break to eat a Hershey bar but all I found was its shadow. The clues just keep coming:

"Tim knew he had problems to solve—personal problems. His nightmares were bad. Sometimes he would dream he was back in the house when everything happened. Other times he would dream his mother and father and somebody else were coming to visit him. They were very unhappy. The third person was a man in uniform. Tim was pretty good at recognizing uniforms, but this fellow's was a puzzle." - p 56

"He wrote a name down on the cardboard model box, using the citrus-smelling glue tube. The glue made the name shiny and transparent, just like his night visitors. Dream visitors, he corrected himself. he was asleep—must have been asleep—when he saw them. The name was Corporal S.K. Percher." - p 57

Percher being another fictional character, doncha know. &, yeah, a bunch people die violent deaths & nobody knows what the heck's going on:

"Most of the news stories concerned Lorobu. There were conjectures about "killer" satellites, hidden caches of nerve gas, germ warfare and even UFO attacks. Several religious groups used the story to further their own ends. One evangelist in North Carolina announced that Lorobu was merely the beginning of God's wrath, brought down on the United States because of loosening laws against homosexuality." (p 58)

Weren't they surprised when they went to heaven & found out that, yes, God & Allah were both old men w/ long white beards who just happened to be screwing the shit out of each other when they arrived. Oopsie! The plot thickens!:

"Now he was the last one. Beverly Winegrade—the blond clerk he had had a crush on several months ago—had killed Cynthia. Next she would try to get him, and if she didn't succeed, she would kill herself. That was the way it had been before.

"He was the last one to hold out against the insistent voices behind the smiling images of his parents and the man in the uniform.

"Maybe Cynthia would join them.

"Welcome

"And Beverly, eventually. Then they would all come for him. And behind them, controlling them like puppets, would be the voices, screaming in a language he didn't understand." - p 64

Of course, the reader is mystified, even w/ these clues & plot-thickeners.. but a few glimmers of light peep thru those dark, dark clouds of death:

""It may take those it kills along with it. Perhaps that's how so many names are connected with it."

""A giant string of spiritual flypaper, winding across the land," Jacobs said." - p 91

It's that word "with" that gave it away for me. Note that it appears TWICE in 2 sentences. I wonder what it means?! Poor Tim.. & you think YOU have problems:

"He scrunched his eyes shut. The faces of people from Lorobu flashed in his head like images on a pack of shuffled cards. He twisted his head back and forth, trying to drive out the vision.

"He couldn't. Behind the faces, rapidly fading, there arose redness, then a purple smoke, something like water . . . and for the first time, he saw them. . . .

"Eyeless, mouths open.

"He screamed." - p 100

Wdn't you?!

""It killed my best friend and his father. We haven't done anything to it, but it wants to kill us, now. Why?"

""Maybe we're thorns in its side." Prohaska seemed to struggle for the proper phrasing, his lips working. "Have you ever been in a room with a very dull person, and watched the hate grow when he met a smart person?["]" - p 114

I'll bet you think I'm going to go off on a tangent inspired by that last part. You. Are. Wrong. (Although I admit it's tempting.)

"Taylor, unlike many people in his business, genuinely believed in his merchandise. He had put tiny pyramids in his bathroom and bedroom, and in them he kept his razor blades, bars of soap, even bottles of vitamin C, to preserve them. When he swore an oath about his merchandise's efficacy in concentrating the pyramidic energy of the cosmos, he was honest and devoted." - p 146

When I was too young to have hair on my face to shave off, probably around 15, I read somewhere about pyramids aligned in a certain way to compass points kept razor blades sharp that were kept in them. It seemed unlikely, after all razor blades got dull b/c of the friction they were subjected to. I mean wd you get a manicure if you kept your finger tips in a pyramid overnight? Anyway, I decided to try it anyway so I made a cardboard pyramid, aligned it properly & asked my stepfather to keep his razor in it. Much to my astonishment my stepdad reported it as working. Since then, I've read that keeping one's penis inside a vagina has remarkable health benefits & I've tried to test that out too.. but that's a different story.

""Is it unprecedented? You're an expert on folklore. Has anything like this ever happened before>"

""We say this and it so often—haven't we any names? Of course—but they are swear words to the scientists and the liberals, as much as sexual language is to the conservatives. We are talking about a possession of some sort, but no, I know of nothing like it—except perhaps the invasions of nunneries and monasteries, or incidents of mass hysteria."

""Like The Devils of Loudon."" - p 175

Damn! There I go, spoiling the whole plot, thanks to my sexual frustration the whole world becomes violently hysterical & everyone goes crazy & kills everyone off. There's a paradox in there somewhere. Anyway, I really just quoted the above to give me an excuse to plug one of my favorite movies, The Devils by Ken Russell.

"Fowler pulled change out of his pocket and counted the quarters to see if he had enough to complete the call. He fit the stack of coins into the telephone slot and waited for the switching-equipment sounds to give way to strong ringing." - p 186

Ok, so I lied, I didn't give away the plot, it has nothing to do w/ my sexual frustration; it has everything to do w/ how maddening pay phones used to be. Pay toilets were even worse. Do they still exist anymore? After the revolution whoever invented pay toilets will have to PAY. ( )

An old man enlists the help of his son and his son's friend to monitor strange phenomena around his secluded cabin. Both young men are skeptical, but are willing to humor the old man and spend a few days with him. Two days later one would rush from the cabin with the utmost urgency, shaken and in denial about the incomprehensible events that had taken place the night before.

Meanwhile a whirlwind of genocidal psychic energy wipes out nearly an entire town of people in New Mexico, leaving only 2 women and a small boy. It was meant to be a big mystery as to why this was happening, but the big reveal was completely spoiled in big bold letters in the summary on the back of my edition. If it happens on page 230 out of 280, it probably shouldn't be mentioned in the summary. Seriously...

There is a lot of great tension early on but the ending fell apart for me. A wave of characters is introduced in the second half of the book, which was hard to keep track of considering that is the time when you are using blitzing through the pages in this kind of book. Some events seemed to be skipped over too, and occasionally I wondered if I had accidentally skipped a page when flipping. The overall concept is interesting, but as I said, it was spoiled by the publisher.

The author had a cool idea, but the book feels like it needed a bit more work before publishing. As it is, it's just okay, I didn't hate it or anything, but it's just a little too sloppy for me. ( )

I read it probably 15 years ago, and imagery and the horror of the novel have stuck with me to this day. Either that says something (complimentary) about this book, or I don't read enough horror. ( )

Fans of Greg Bear or fast-paced horror novels with an SF tinge, who aren't fussy about plausibility, will find this a fast read. Probably the most SF-ish thing about this book is when one of the main characters, during a dramatic psychic phenomena freezing spell, stops to calculate how much energy is being drained from the local region. Shades of 1940's SF and those engineers with their slipsticks! ( )