Harbinger, by Jack Skillingstead, $16.99. Ellis Herrick is the only immortal man in the world. He can regenerate his damaged organs and heal quickly from illnesses. For some, it’s a cause to vilify him. For others it is something to exploit.
Ellis learns of his remarkable talent during his recovery from an auto accident soon after graduating high school. Langby Ulin has been searching for someone like Ellis for his anti-aging research. Ellis becomes a set of living replacement parts for Ulin because he has no idea what to do with his life.
He tries to live a peaceful life, but there are fanatics who think he is a sign of evil and want to end his unnatural life with violence. After 100 years or so, he leaves Earth on a starship built by Ulin’s great grandson. Memories from Ellis become the basis of the virtual-reality world on the ship.
When his former girlfriend’s mother said he was a harbinger of consciousness evolution, she was describing a New-Age world of Cosmic Consciousness. Centuries later, it is a story of quantum entanglement that sounds a lot like the older explanation.
“Harbinger” is a successfully ambitious novel covering topics from teenage awkwardness to the meaning of the universe. Ellis is always seeking to recapture something lost when he was young, and he needs a deep understanding of the world before he can do it.
No Doors, No Windows, by Joe Schreiber, $14. Scott Mast returns to New Hampshire for his father’s funeral. He finds his drunken brother unable to care for his 5-year-old son. His high-school girlfriend, Sonia, gave up law school and has returned to the small town to care for her father. The town and everyone in it suffer from dashed ambitions and broken dreams.
When Scott finds an unfinished manuscript left by his father, he feels a compulsion to attempt to finish it.
Scott had literary ambitions, but settled for a career writing greeting cards. He finds a remote old house to rent. It matches the house described in his father’s manuscript. It’s the Round House, where everything is joined in curves and there are no sharp corners. There are also hidden parts that contain horrible secrets.
When he gets past his writer’s block, Scott writes with a hallucinatory intensity. He is also following a path of madness and creation that has been in his family for generations.
“No Doors, No Windows” is a haunted-house story that works because of Schreiber’s fine characterization of the connected lives in a small town. They are all haunted, but also are clinging to some hopes.
Isis, by Donald Clegg, $14.95. This small volume is a Halloween treat of a book. When Iris is 7, she leaves America for her father’s family estate in England. The dour mansion has an ancient crypt the old gardener warns against: “Ye must nev’r sleep there, for the dead enter yer dreams.”
Tragedy strikes when Iris is 16. The crypt becomes the place for her to reach for the unnatural as a way to cheat death. The result is grotesque and fascinating.
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder, $14.95. A large volume of classic stories celebrates the 60th anniversary of “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.” The 23 stories span almost the full six decades, from Alfred Bester in 1951 to Ted Chiang in 2007. The names range from legends (Ray Bradbury) to the hottest contemporary authors (Neil Gaiman).
Picking it up, I thought my favorite story would be by one of the classic names, such as Philip K. Dick. In the end, it was “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,” by Shirley Jackson, from 1955. It’s a nice story of good deeds with a sharp turn-the-world-upside-down ending. The magazine is still going strong under Gordon Van Gelder’s editorship, and the only thing that might be better than this anthology is a subscription for the next 60 years.
Fred Cleaver is a freelancer who writes regularly about new science fiction.
