Andrew Klavan’s After That, The Dark: The Best Cameron Winter Book Yet

After That, The Dark is the fifth novel in Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter series, and it is the best one so far. Cameron Winter is a very interesting character who has shown more and more depth to his personality as the series has progressed. He is a former “black ops” agent who is still intensely loyal to his former commander, the Recruiter. However, the Recruiter has had to go underground, due to political pressure that has been fomented by the ultra-wealthy tech mogul, Thaddeus Blatt. For the first time, there are cracks in Winter’s unquestioning trust in the one person who gave his life meaning.

Winter is currently employed as a professor of English Romantic poetry at a small college outside of Washington, D.C., but he manages to get embroiled in various murders that seem open and shut cases until he starts asking uncomfortable questions. In After That, The Dark, the murder in question is brought up by Gwendolyn Lord, a therapist he met in the third book, The House of Love and Death. He was immediately attracted to her, but it took him quite a while to screw up the courage to ask her out. While they are on their first date, she mentions an “impossible murder” that her friend in Tulsa, OK told her about. 

Owen McKay was a loving and devoted husband who suddenly snapped and went crazy, killing his wife and year-old son. When he is arrested, he is put in a holding cell and before the jail psychiatrist can evaluate him, he is found dead, shot through the heart. No one is on video as having visited him in the cell. 

Winter’s curiosity is piqued, and he decides to fly out to Tulsa and investigate. Everyone he talks to who were involved in the case have been terrorized into silence, and he can’t get anywhere with them. Finally, the doctor who performed the autopsy agrees to meet Cameron, and he tells him that he found some kind of device with wires embedded in McKay’s brain. However, the final report has scrubbed all of his notes about it. 

When Winter returns, a very creepy tattooed man is waiting for him in his apartment and nearly kills him. He is obviously getting close to something big. Then, he reads about another murder that happened in Connecticut that has eerie similarities to murders McKay committed. When he goes up there to investigate, it’s clear the murders are connected. 

And so, Cameron Winter finds himself neck-deep in a conspiracy involving the highest levels of the federal government, an unscrupulous tech company, and an amoral venture capitalist. He’s also under constant threat from the mysterious Tat Man.

To leaven the darkness, Klavan develops the relationship between Gwendolyn and Cameron. She is a devout Christian, and he is, at best, an agnostic. And yet, he has respect for her faith, and a small gift she gives him ends up saving his life. They fall in love with each other while feeling as if they were destined to do so from the beginning of time. 

I also enjoyed Klavan’s lampooning of faculty politics. Lori Lesser is the woke administrator who has it in for Winter, because he insists on teaching only classic poetry and not including subpar literature produced by minority authors. Besides, how many people of color have written English Romantic poetry? There is a very funny scene where Cameron and Lori are meeting with the dean in his office, and Cameron has trouble focusing on Lori’s jargon-laden arguments:

What was she saying? Winter sometimes wondered as the meeting dragged on. But too late: He had lost track of it and was too distracted to catch up. It had something to do with racialism and historic injustices and the systemic metaphorical violence of favoring the poetry of John Keats over whatever blithering doggerel had been scrawled by lesser and justly forgotten versifiers of some oppressed minority or other. So he assumed, anyway, because Lori was always talking about such things, and because some of her catchphrases seemed to leap out at him as if made momentarily visible in the office air.

Klavan, Andrew. After That, the Dark (Cameron Winter Mysteries Book 5) (p. 238). Penzler Publishers. Kindle Edition.

After That, The Dark is a turning point in Winter’s development. His long-time therapist (who has a bit of a crush on him, despite being much older) realizes that his crisis is behind him, and he is becoming comfortable in his own skin. Comfortable enough to risk being vulnerable with Gwendolyn. His relationship with the Recruiter has also matured, to the point where Winter no longer carries out his directives unquestioningly. It will be fascinating to see how an fully integrated and confident Cameron Winter handles his next case!

John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids: A Story of Post-Apocalyptic Humanity

The Chrysalids is John Wyndham’s seventh novel, following two of his best, The Day Of The Triffids, and The Kraken Wakes. From the opening pages, he creates an atmosphere of an oddly disturbing future: the narrator, David Strorm, says that as a young boy, he dreamed of cities with carts that moved without horses, “and sometimes there were things in the sky, shiny fish-shaped things that certainly were not birds.”

While walking outside his village, he comes across another child, a girl named Sophie, and they play together. She falls and gets her foot caught in a rock. He tells her he needs to unlace her shoe so she can pull her foot out, and she panics. Eventually, she gives in, and when he is able to extricate her foot, he notices that she has six toes.

When he helps her get back home, her mother is there and, while she genuinely appreciates David’s help, it’s clear she is very apprehensive. She sits him down and asks him to promise he will never tell anyone about Sophie’s extra toes. And then Wyndham includes this intriguing little bit:

I could feel her anxiety strongly; though quite why she should be so worried was not, at first, clear to me. I was surprised by her, for there had been no sign before that she could think in that way. I thought back to her, trying to reassure her and show her that she need not be anxious about me, but the thought didn’t reach her.

“I thought back to her…” Is David telepathic? Yes, he is, and he is able to communicate with a few other children over some distance. Unfortunately, David’s father, Joseph, is a prominent farmer in the area and an ardent “fundamentalist” when it comes to “Offences”, or mutants.

I learnt quite early to know what Offences were. They were things which did not look right — that is to say, did not look like their parents, or parent-plants. Usually there was only some small thing wrong, but however much or little was wrong it was an Offence, and if it happened among people it was a Blasphemy — at least, that was the technical term, though commonly both kinds were called Deviations.

Joseph Strorm rails against tolerating any kind of Offence, to the point of killing a neighbor’s tailless cat, even though the local government Inspector has ruled that there is a naturally occurring species of such felines. If a field of corn or other grain is found to contain any Deviation, it is burned.

Wyndham drops little clues about the society and culture David is living in: centuries ago, there was a Tribulation, which was most likely a nuclear war. His father’s farm is on the edge of civilization in an area called Waknuk, part of what has been called Labrador for time immemorial. The most advanced technology they have is a primitive steam engine. Outside of Waknuk are the Fringes, where uncivilized and mutant humans and animals live. They sometimes raid the farms of normal humans for food, tools, and guns. Beyond the Fringes are the Badlands, from which no one returns alive.

Sophie and her parents live just outside Waknuk. She and David become close friends, and he realizes all of the preaching his father makes against Blasphemies is false. Besides her extra toes, Sophie is a sweet, normal girl. Another boy comes across David and Sophie wading in a creek, and he reports her deviancy to the local Inspector. Sophie’s parents realize she’s in danger, and pack up and leave for the Fringes.

David is brutally punished by his father for hiding Sophie from the authorities, and the Inspector tries to explain how serious David’s offense is:

‘ ”… and each foot shall have five toes,”  ’ he quoted. ‘You remember that?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted, unhappily.

‘Well, every part of the definition is as important as any other; and if a child doesn’t come within it, then it isn’t human, and that means it doesn’t have a soul. It is not in the image of God, it is an imitation, and in the imitations there is always some mistake. Only God produces perfection, so although deviations may look like us in many ways, they cannot be really human. They are something quite different.’

I thought that over. ‘But Sophie isn’t really different — not in any other way,’ I told him.

We eventually learn that David has eight friends in the vicinity who can also send and receive “thought-shapes”. Inevitably, incidents occur that cause normal people to suspect that something is different about David and his friends which include Rosalind, a young woman he loves. It becomes exhausting to keep pretending that they are normal, and after a crisis occurs David and Rosalind have to flee for the Fringes.

One the first and finest post-nuclear apocalyptic novels is Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which was published in 1959, four years after The Chrysalids. Miller’s novel is better, if harder to understand, than Wyndham’s, but The Chrysalids is one of the best dystopian novels I’ve read. In it, Wyndham illustrates the damage done to innocent people by unthinking bigotry and inflexible religious fundamentalism. He uses subtle details to paint a picture of a largely devastated world and how isolated communities attempt to pick up the pieces. I highly recommend this one if you are looking for a thought-provoking read that was written in the throes of the Cold War of the twentieth century.

Jack Gatland’s Silver and the Sunday Cypher

After slogging my way through the enjoyable but lengthy Bleak House, I decided to pick up a new book that Amazon’s algorithm recommended to me: Jack Gatland’s Silver and the Sunday Cypher. It turned out to be the perfect follow-up to a relatively dark Victorian masterpiece.

Silver and the Sunday Cypher is a fun and fast-paced thriller that features 64-year-old widow, Laura Carlyle, who is thrust into a cloak and dagger world of secret societies, murder, espionage, and international diplomacy. It begins with the assassination by poisoning of Harry Farrell in broad daylight in front of a London church. Farrell has been compiling a dossier on a shadowy group that is called The Calendar. Its members go by days of the week (shades of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday), with a mysterious “Mr. Sunday” at the top of The Calendar’s hierarchy.

Laura is visited by Farrell’s widow, Rebecca, who tells her her late husband left instructions to contact Laura is he died under mysterious circumstances. The official explanation for Farrell’s death is natural causes, but Rebecca has her doubts. Laura has no idea why Farrell would be connected to her, but he reluctantly agrees to look into the case, and before she knows it, she is a target herself.

Fortunately, she has the assistance of her elderly yet active Aunt Celia – whose acerbic wit is a highlight of the novel – as well as her college-age grandson, Kyle. She is also being shadowed by a silver-haired man who, according to Laura’s neighbor, looks like “Pierce Brosnan”. This man turns out to be Sebastian Silver, agent extraordinaire. He always wears a trilby hat and carries a walking stick that is sometimes a taser, sometimes sheathing a sword, and sometimes just a stick. Whenever Laura gets into a tricky situation, Sebastian is there to rescue her.

However, he is a slippery character who never reveals too much about himself. Is he a retired member of The Calendar, trying to atone for past misdeeds? Is he an MI5 agent, or a lone wolf? As the story progresses, Laura learns to not trust anyone, even what she thought was true about her late husband.

Gatland does a great job keeping the reader on the edge of his or her seat, and even when very surprising details about Silver are revealed, it’s not the end of the story. Silver and the Sunday Cypher was just published in September, and there are already plans to publish another adventure in December. It looks like this is the start of a very entertaining adventure/mystery series!

Dickens’ Bleak House: Portraits of Hypocrisy

Almost thirty years ago, I picked up Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, more out of curiosity than anything, and immediately fell in love with it. I went ahead and spent the better part of a year reading all of his novels in the order of publication. Since then, I’ve reread Pickwick and his final complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, but not any others. I know that Bleak House often tops people’s lists of The Best Dickens Novels, and when I first read it, I thought it was very good, but not one of his best. I decided to give it another chance, and, once again, I find that I have a much greater appreciation for a book now that I am older.

Bleak House begins with a dark and dismal description of a muddy and befogged London in general, and its Chancery Court in particular. Chancery Court is where cases drag on interminably and suitors literally go mad trying get justice. The one case that is the epitome of endless and pointless legal maneuvers is Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, which concerns a disputed will.

We are also introduced to the Dedlocks, a childless couple who move in the most fashionable segment of English society. Dickens describes Sir Leicester Dedlock in his inimitable style as

 only a baronet, but there is no mightier baronet than he. His family is as old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable. He has a general opinion that the world might get on without hills but would be done up without Dedlocks. …
He is a gentleman of strict conscience, disdainful of all littleness and meanness and ready on the shortest notice to die any death you may please to mention rather than give occasion for the least impeachment of his integrity.    He is an honourable, obstinate, truthful, high-spirited, intensely prejudiced, perfectly unreasonable man.

We also meet Esther Summerson, who takes over the narration of the story. She is a young, orphaned girl who lives with her devout yet joyless godmother. No one will tell her any details of her mother or father. Life is pretty miserable, with her godmother even declaring on one of Esther’s birthdays,

“It would have been far better, little Esther, that you had had no birthday, that you had never been born!”

When her godmother unexpectedly passes away, a lawyer, Mr. Kenge, shows up and offers Esther an education and possibly a job as a governess, if she’ll take. He does this on behalf on anonymous benefactor. Esther jumps at the chance to receive an education, and she is soon a beloved member of the small class she’s a part of. After a few years, her mysterious benefactor informs her, via a letter, that he has a position for her, as the companion of another young woman, Ada Clare. They will live at Bleak House with a Mr. John Jarndyce. She meets with the Chancery Judge, who approves of the arrangement. While there, Esther also meets Ada and her cousin, Richard Carstone. They also are orphans who have received support from an anonymous person, and none of them know what is going on.

On their way to Bleak House, they spend the night at the home of one of Dickens’ finest satirical characters, a Mrs. Jellyby. She spends all of her time and energy soliciting donations to help the African community of Borrioboola-Gha, to the criminal neglect of her own family.

Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She also held a discussion with Mr.   Quale, of which the subject seemed to be— if I understood it— the brotherhood of humanity, and gave utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and told them in whispers Puss in Boots and I don’t know what else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed. As Peepy cried for me to take him to bed, I carried him upstairs, where the young woman with the flannel bandage charged into the midst of the little family like a dragon and overturned them into cribs.

And so the stage is set for one of Dickens’ longest and most involved novels. There is a very large cast of characters who seem to have no connection at all to each other, but gradually they are dragged into the same web of hypocrisy, greed, and lies. Sir Leceister Dedlock, Baronet, is consumed with making sure everyone around him treats him with the respect he feels he deserves; he is the epitome of status anxiety. His wife, Lady Honoria Dedlock, is a beautiful yet haughty woman who is constantly moving from their estate in Lincolnshire, Chesney Wold, to their place in London, because she is utterly bored with life. Sir Dedlock’s confidant and advisor, Mr. Tulkinghorn, is a prominent lawyer who collects information on high society figures and uses it to his advantage. In other words, he’s a blackmailer. Joshua Smallweed is a bitter old man and usurer who works in league with Tulkinghorn. Mr. Vholes is a Chancery lawyer who sinks his hooks into Richard Carstone by convincing him he has a potential stake in the Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce suit. A Mr. Chadband is a greasy and gluttonous preacher who speaks in hackneyed phrases while always on the lookout for an easy meal or shilling.

Against these unsavory characters are the ones who strive to live honorable and charitable lives: the heroine, Esther Summerson, her benefactor and guardian, John Jarndyce, the young doctor, Allan Woodcourt, the legal stationer Mr. Snagsby who gives half-crowns to the desperate people he runs into, Mr. George, a veteran who runs a shooting gallery and owes Mr. Smallweed money, his friends the Bagnets, and the police detective Inspector Bucket.

Tulkinghorn discovers a terrible secret about Lady Dedlock’s past, and he threatens to reveal it, destroying her reputation. It involves Esther and an unknown man who lives in a tenement apartment and dies of an opium overdose. Esther is oblivious to this involvement, as she assumes the position of housekeeper of Bleak House, John Jarndyce’s home. As Inspector Bucket gathers data on everyone involved, he develops from a threatening character into a man who wishes to make sure justice is done.

As always with Dickens, there is a multitude of subplots which can get confusing. Many of them are very funny, like Mrs. Jellyby’s crusade to help the people of Borrioboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger. Her oldest daughter, Caddy, becomes friends with Esther, who helps her escape her crazy household and marry Prince Turveydrop. Prince makes a living teaching dancing lessons and his father, Mr. Turveydrop occupies himself with “deportment”, or standing around, looking important.

Dickens’ description of the unscrupulous Smallweed family is hilarious:

Mrs.  Smallweed instantly begins to shake her head and pipe up, “Seventy-six pound seven and sevenpence! Seventy-six thousand bags of money! Seventy-six hundred thousand million of parcels of banknotes!”

“Will somebody give me a quart pot?” exclaims her exasperated husband, looking helplessly about him and finding no missile within his reach. “Will somebody obleege me with a spittoon? Will somebody hand me anything hard and bruising to pelt at her? You hag, you cat, you dog, you brimstone barker!” Here Mr.  Smallweed, wrought up to the highest pitch by his own eloquence, actually throws Judy at her grandmother in default of anything else, by butting that young virgin at the old lady with such force as he can muster and then dropping into his chair in a heap.

“Shake me up, somebody, if you’ll be so good,” says the voice from within the faintly struggling bundle into which he has collapsed.

Another subplot involves Mr. Guppy, a law clerk, who is besotted with Esther. He’s a buffoon, but a goodhearted one. He follows Esther around, always looking at her with a mournful face, because she refuses his offer of marriage. After Esther contracts smallpox and her complexion is ruined, he withdraws his offer, but he eventually realizes he still loves her. Needless to say, she continues to reject him.

Jo is a homeless boy who makes a living begging at a street crosswalk in London. He is cursed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he is a most pathetic figure as he tries to simply exist.

Over all of these sublots looms the years-long Chancery Court case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce. John Jarndyce has washed his hands of it, and he advises Rick Carstone to do the same. Unfortunately, Rick becomes obsessed with the suit, and he devotes all of his time and energy into trying to bring it to a successful conclusion.

There’s a death by spontaneous combustion, a murder, madness, an illicit affair that results in an illegitimate child, and all kinds of other hijinks. As far as Dickens’ novels go, Bleak House plenty of drama and action. An interesting feature of it is Dickens’ use of two narrators: one is a third-person omniscient narrator who speaks in the present tense, and the other is Esther Summerson, who speaks in the past tense.

However, Bleak House as a novel is marred by a couple of things. First, Esther Summerson, as a character, is so cloyingly sweet and perfect that I found her very unsympathetic. She is modest to the point of absurdity, as this typical passage illustrates:

And I looked up at the stars, and thought about travellers in distant countries and the stars they saw, and hoped I might always be so blest and happy as to be useful to someone in my small way.

They were so glad to see me when I got home, as they always were, that I could have sat down and cried for joy if that had not been a method of making myself disagreeable. Everybody in the house, from the lowest to the highest, showed me such a bright face of welcome, and spoke so cheerily, and was so happy to do anything for me, that I suppose there never was such a fortunate little creature in the world.

Yuck.

The other annoying character is Harold Skimpole, supposedly based on the writer Leigh Hunt. He refers to himself as “a simple child”, and as a result absolves himself of any responsibility. He has a wife and three daughters, but he refuses to do anything to earn a living. It was extremely irritating to read how John Jarndyce found Skimpole amusing, when it’s clear he’s a con artist. His affected childishness leads him to be an very offensive person:

“Enterprise and effort,” he would say to us (on his back), “are delightful to me. I believe I am truly cosmopolitan. I have the deepest sympathy with them. I lie in a shady place like this and think of adventurous spirits going to the North Pole or penetrating to the heart of the Torrid Zone with admiration. Mercenary creatures ask, ‘What is the use of a man’s going to the North Pole? What good does it do?’ I can’t say; but, for anything I can say, he may go for the purpose— though he don’t know it— of employing my thoughts as I lie here. Take an extreme case. Take the case of the slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard, I dare say they don’t altogether like it. I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were!”

He insists he doesn’t have the slightest idea how money works, but he always manages to get his friends to bail him out. As Inspector Bucket remarks,

Now, Miss Summerson, I’ll give you a piece of advice that your husband will find useful when you are happily married and have got a family about you. Whenever a person says to you that they are as innocent as can be in all concerning money, look well after your own money, for they are dead certain to collar it if they can. Whenever a person proclaims to you ‘In worldly matters I’m a child,’ you consider that that person is only a-crying off from being held accountable and that you have got that person’s number, and it’s Number One. Now, I am not a poetical man myself, except in a vocal way when it goes round a company, but I’m a practical one, and that’s my experience. So’s this rule. Fast and loose in one thing, fast and loose in everything. I never knew it fail.

Despite these drawbacks, I do believe Bleak House is one of Dickens’ best novels. It’s a mature work, and his use of satire to skewer various kinds of hypocrisy is wickedly funny. If I had to rank his novels, I’d put Bleak House in third place, behind The Pickwick Papers and Our Mutual Friend. If you’ve never read any of his works, I suggest you start with Great Expectations. That is a tighter tale, with more focus to the plot. If you enjoy that one, then you will definitely find Bleak House a very entertaining read.