#12
The Medusa Effect
By Justin Richards
Something, something, snappy opening line.
Hey, it can be difficult knowing where to start, or what to even say about books that aren’t trying to do anything world-breaking and are pretty much fine at that. The Medusa Effect is the latest from Justin Richards, certified Safe Pair Of Hands, and it is (reassuringly?) unlikely to frighten the horses.
It quickly settles down into a familiar pattern: a bunch of characters investigate a spooky old ship that has unexpectedly reappeared after its doomed maiden voyage. Before long they start to see things – the old crew and passengers, times past – and they find themselves remembering those other people’s experiences, then reliving them. Will they escape the calamity that befell the ship the first time?
Richards has a lot of fun in the ghost story portion of the book (which is most of it), sliding Bernice and her co-investigators in and out of a gleaming past and the dusty present. The prose can be sharp: “The furniture looked like it had arrived in the cobwebs and had not yet been unpacked.” “The cry echoed down the passageway, muffled as it went by the layers of dust that ate the sound.” There’s a whole scene, so I can’t write it out, where a character picks up a shiny apple from a banquet only to find it dedicated after a bite. That one will stick in my memory.
It’s good, evocative stuff, but – I’m still thinking about that apple – maybe it’s low hanging fruit of a sort? There’s not a lot to unpack as, inevitably, the characters on a spooky old cruise ship begin creepily adopting the hairstyles and bad habits of the dead. For plot reasons, everyone is a bit too out of it to really register the horror, which lends the whole thing a sort of unreal quality that perhaps takes some of the edge off. It is for instance suggested that Bernice will share the fate of a truly unfortunate passenger and be sealed in a coffin alive, and sure enough we get there, but too soon for it to feel all that climactic, and then we move on. It’s all a bit like, well yeah, you get on a spooky old boat, what did you expect? Similarly when almost all of them – spoilers I guess? – relive their deaths down to the last detail, it is difficult to be upset so much as just mildly disappointed for them.
It might be easier to dig in and care if the characters were stronger, but right out of the gate The Medusa Effect seems (deliberately?) to make that a challenge. There are far too many names thrown around too soon (just as we also set foot on the Medusa quicker than I expected – was it a boring ride over?), and while I’m failing to tell apart Chomsky and Hoyt and Gyles I’m also having to contend with the names of the dead crew and passengers. This pretty much tells you that’ll you’ll be making their acquaintance somehow, so the whole “re-live the past” bit does not come as a shock. But then, for plot reasons, it turns out all these names who-are-now-behaving-like-some-other-names have specifically been picked because they are “archetypal”. And that was the point where I wondered if I wasn’t even meant to grab hold of anyone here. Which I mean, if so, clever and all that, but to quote another voice from the past… do you think that’s wise?
I’m just theorising here, but I suspect the “spooky space mystery” part of The Medusa Effect came to Richards very independently from the explanation for it. (Indeed, he was inspired by – and I am not making this up – a book called Ghost Boat.) He really does have a ball in the dusty old fun house he’s created, extending the otherworldly weirdness to some kooky imagery such as life forms growing in and then bursting out of wooden pillars. (Which makes me think, on some level, he was inspired by Earthshock.) But you do have to explain stuff eventually, and hoo boy, does he make me reconsider asking.
It turns out the (already not to be trusted) Advanced Research Department on Dellah wanted to create easily controlled soldier clones, but it was for some reason difficult to do this in a lab (?), so they used the launch of a remote control space cruiser as cover and filled it with people that have archetypal personalities (?) so some psychic clone matter could absorb just the right mental mix to aid… being controlled, I guess? But then it all went wrong because an escaped convict got aboard and made them all murder each other. When the same shadowy forces engineer it so the same thing can happen again on the Medusa’s return, and it does, including the bits that went wrong, you’ve got to wonder if Big Mad Science could use the occasional boring normal person in the room to say “nope, next.”
I didn’t dislike this just because it’s bonkers: more so that it means unmasking the villain, and they do that “drop any pretence of not being a cartoonish megalomaniac” thing about as bluntly as I’ve ever seen it. I’m amazed Richards kept them from smoking one of those long cigarettes and laughing maniacally – they seem less real than the ghosts. Things culminate in a literal countdown to an explosion and it all begins feeling like he’s trying to wrap this thing up before the car pulls up outside. But I must admit it was a bit exciting. Again, though, with the low hanging fruit.
Bernice is well served here, at least insofar as Richards seems keenly aware of the facets that make up Bernice Summerfield, and puts them to work. This is surprisingly not the first time that her fondness for booze has kept her out of trouble; her fixation with keeping a diary causes lines to blur between herself and one of the ship’s passengers; and Richards even revisits the idea of her higgledy-piggledy bicycle from Mean Streets. (As well as making the plot of Mean Streets, of all things, crucial to this one. Hey, man, you are what you eat.) As often seems to happen, Bernice isn’t quite herself for a chunk of this, but when she is there’s a good amount of wit and intelligence, albeit not nearly enough freaking out for me to get seriously unnerved by the story. She develops a close bond with someone on board and, as also often seems to happen, events conspire so that they’re unlikely to bump into each other again. (Well, it’s not The Bernice And Her New Best Mate Adventures, is it?) She leaves the story disappointed and perhaps a bit heartbroken, but as – apparently – Richards wrote the final post-explosion chapter rather late in the process, any examination of that will fall to later authors. (Or quite possibly him again, having glanced at my bookshelf.)
You have, in all likelihood, heard better versions of this ghost story, but The Medusa Effect knows the ropes well enough not to send you away completely disappointed. The prose comes to its rescue quite often, but then again things happen suddenly and unexpectedly so often that it feels like it’s not just that ill-fated voyage being recreated in vain, but its inspirations too.
6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment