Fiction
Body Surfing, by Dale Peck, $26
The virginal teenagers and swooning vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series wouldn’t last long in Dale Peck’s violent, overheated supernatural thriller, “Body Surfing.” The novel’s demonic antagonist, Leo, is one of an ancient race known as the Mogran, who survive through the millennia by flitting from one hapless mortal host to another, a passage that can be facilitated by having sex with a new, unwitting and often unwilling partner.
Occasionally, a discarded host survives with a permanent souvenir of his or her possession: lightning reflexes, accelerated healing, a memory that Brainiac 5 might envy. More often, he or she is just dead.
In a brief prologue, the Emperor Nero watches a young boy named Leo take on a rhinoceros in the Colosseum, a scene that makes one long for the elegant restraint of Bob Guccione’s “Caligula.” Two thousand years and 46,881 hosts later, Leo gets under the skin of a 17-year-old known as Q.
Under Leo’s influence, Q takes three friends, including his best pal, Jasper, and Jasper’s girlfriend, Michaela, on a joyride that ends in a fiery climax.
Given his past as a respected writer of literary fiction, and a possible future in the land of commercial blockbusters, whatever possessed Dale Peck to write this book?
Elizabeth Hand
Washington Post Writers Group
Fiction
The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James, $26.95
Marlon James’ powerful novel takes place on an early 19th-century Jamaican sugar plantation. Homer, a woman, is one of six hate-poisoned half sisters, all disfigured by whippings, who have been meeting at night for years to plan an apocalyptic slave rebellion among neighboring plantations.
They’re all house slaves and daughters of the former overseer, green-eyed Jack Wilkins.
All slavery was cruel, but none was as brutal and inhumane as in the West Indies, where whites were vastly outnumbered. Black life was cheap, especially since roving bands of armed runaways called Maroons captured new runaways for a fee.
Homer recruits a spirited, green-eyed teenager named Lilith who has killed a would-be rapist. She teaches Lilith to read and provides her a further education in killing and domestic terror. But in the midst of murder and arson, Lilith falls in love with Quinn, a humane, Irish overseer who has his own issues with the British.
Her feelings for Quinn give Lilith second thoughts about killing all whites on the plantation. Reading has made her wise, as well as romantic. She warns Homer that the rebellion is suicidal. But Homer must prove that she is in charge, and the bloody revolt erupts.
Gail Lumet Buckley is the author of “The Hornes: An American Family” and “American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm.”
