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Shashi Warrier

King of Horror

Stephen King writes of evil with surprising deliberation. He writes in Desperation of the fate of a small mining town -- named Desperation, hence the name of the book -- where a defunct mine is revived. Out of the ground comes evil, consuming first the local lawman and, through him, killing almost the entire population of the town. All this passes unnoticed, for no one cares about a small town in the middle of the desert. Until passers-by, including a famous novelist on his way down are caught in the net.

A family of four are caught, one of whom, a young boy, is deeply religious, and out of his prayer comes the power that saves him and a few others, though the others in his family all fall victim to the evil. King's detail work is, as usual, excellent, but, in the last few years, he has tended to become repetitive. It's a good read, though, for horror fans. The irritating thing about his work is the ways in which his publishers market him. First there was The Green Mile which they brought out as chapbooks -- a series of six small books -- rather than as a single novel. And now they've raked up the same old confusing things about Stephen King and Richard Bachman. From some of King's quotes it seems as if he is Bachman, and from others that he isn't. Finally, one of the characters in Desperation, is carrying on from where she left off in one of his earlier books, Rose Madder, though her presence is not used to push the earlier book.

Here, as in all his writing, there is an acceptance of evil as part of life and a rarer quality in that, here, he talks of God. Not all good writers delineate evil the way King does. In most of Isaac Asimov's science fiction, even in the Foundation series, there isn't a real villain to be found. There is, of course, the bad guy, but on closer inspection the bad guy has his own reasons for doing whatever he's doing and the reader sometimes can't help agreeing with him. A classic instance is perhaps The End of Eternity, which, to my mind, contains one of the best SF plots ever.

Several centuries into the future, time travel has been made possible and there is a select group of humans, called Eternals, who from time to time organise changes in reality, guiding mankind towards their vision of a desirable future. One of the more successful Eternals discovers that tinkering with the future leads to far more damage then leaving humankind to go its way. The only way to undo this is to go back into the past and turn the attention of scientists away from time travel. The trouble with this scheme is that whoever does it will be stuck in the past, at the point where mankind's attention is diverted. But the rebel Eternal and his girlfriend are willing to risk dislocation in time to achieve this, and they travel back to the first half of the twentieth century to turn a young scientist called Fermi towards nuclear energy…

The point is that the Eternals were trying to do their best but their fault was that they were so set in their ways that they refused to accept that what they were doing could have disastrous consequences. This is one of the most enduring qualities of Asimov's work, and he himself speaks of the absence of the villain in his writings.

David Mason's Shadow Over Babylon is a good thriller with a credible, if twisted, plot. A successful and unscrupulous British businessman is contacted by a minister who wants Saddam Hussein eliminated. This businessman turns to another British entrepreneur running a multination construction business with interests in the Middle East and an extensive security network, but does not tell him who the principal is. The builder's fee is a guarantee on two of the major contracts he's bidding for, two contracts that will see his company safely into the next century. The builder's security chief, a former special forces officer, Ed Howard, takes on the job for a fee of ten millions pounds. After the deal is set up, the businessmen who made the deal with the minister is killed on his yacht. Now the builder has no idea who he's really working for, though he is contacted when necessary.

Howard bring in some former colleagues, and works out an ingenious plan to get into Iraq through Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein has several doubles who stand in for him on public occasions, and no one but his own securitymen, headed by his son, knows where he is all the time. But there is one appointment he will keep: a public meeting, under heavy security, at his hometown, Tikrit.

Howard needs a sniper to finish Saddam off with a rifle at a range of 120 yards, well over a kilometre. He finds one, a deer-stalker in Scotland whose brother was one of the victims of the violence during Iraq's takeover of Kuwait. Howard and his bunch of men go into Iraq, do the job, and get back minus two of their number who have been killed on the way out.

One thing a good story has in common with a scorpion is a sting in the tail. I won't spoil the surprise by letting out what the surprise is, but it's a good one, and one that adds some depth to the plot.

Mason's research is fantastic. There's a wealth of technical detail about firearms, about satellite surveillance, shipping, the structure of intelligence agencies and so on, that leaves me, as a writer of thrillers, feeling distinctly inadequate. There's also a degree of authenticity that perhaps comes from Mason's experience as a soldier.

The weakness is the editing. It's sloppy in parts, causing the book to be a wee bit flabby. If it had been just five per cent shorter it would have been an even better read than it is.

Collage: Dominic Xavier