Hunter Cell
By Joshua Dyer
(Cover art and design
by Christopher Stroud)
March 15, 2013
182 pages
Sold by Amazon Digital
Services, Inc.
ASIN: B00BRWG1XK
Mash-ups can be fun to read,
though probably a good deal less to write. To blend more than one type of story
effectively -- for example, steam punk, which splices historical fiction with
fantasy or science fiction -- takes confidence and a certain degree of
fearlessness; How else can you be sure that what you have written while
pursuing one genre doesn't violate the rules of one of the others you are
following? It can be difficult enough just to keep the elements of your
fictional universe sorted out as your tale progresses, let alone color within
the lines of each type of story you are jamming together.
In short, there is a hell of a
lot that can go wrong in a mash-up, which is probably why exceptional examples
don't readily come to mind.
Characters can be less than
compelling, description inadequate, dialog unbelievable or hackneyed. Sometimes
the universe a writer constructs doesn't differ enough from the one we all
normally live in to drive the story. Sometimes the details of the comingled
genres don't really mesh. Occasionally the plot is too dense and complicated to
easily follow; at other times it is too thin to engage readers and draw them in.
Sometimes all these things go
wrong at once. When that happens, Katie bar the door.
Hunter Cell, Joshua
Dyer's new novel, is a good example. Dyer has grafted a mystery story onto a
science fiction yarn set in the not too distant future in which the sheer
volume of crime has caused a breakdown in the traditional justice system. The
guilt of suspects is considered a given and their traditional right to
challenge their accusers is non-existent. Normal trials have been abandoned for
the most serious types of crimes, and suspects are simply killed by a
hand-picked team of government assassins that works in anonymity -- the hunter
cells of the title.
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Joshua Dyer: This Cell Won't Hunt! |
The system begins to fall apart
when members of a mysterious underground begin to interfere with these
executions. One man in particular who is slated for assassination engages in a
series of hairsbreadth escapes while the members of the hunter cell that is
supposed to eliminate him find themselves among the hunted.
The concept seems a bit like Judge
Dredd Meets The Watchmen; I couldn't help but think of these comics as
I was reading it, and not in a complimentary way: The idea has promise, although it seems much too
derivative for my comfort.
The problem is not the basic
concept or even the particulars of the plot; in my opinion, the reason the book
stumbles is because Dyer handles all his elements in such a clumsy fashion.
For one thing, he can't seem to
work out how he feels about the hunter cells themselves. He gives its members a
sort of twisted camaraderie-in-arms, setting them up in situations where they
chat and joke together in a diner, complain about bureaucracy and mutter about
the boss, just like cubicle jockeys at a Silicon Valley startup.
With one exception --the suspect
whose flight triggers the conflict in the book -- their victims are painted as cold-blooded
monsters, bereft of a shred of decency. At the same time, it is clear that at
least a couple of the government killers are psychopaths themselves, literally capable
of killing without remorse at the drop of a hat.
This raises the question: who are
we supposed to be rooting for in this story? The good guys or the bad guys? Do
we support the hunter cell assassins who represent the forces of law and order
or are we appalled at their violence, brutality and extra-judicial executions?
Dyer gives us little guidance in Hunter
Cell, which is billed as the first in a series of novels. Perhaps after
he has published several more, we will be able to figure out how we feel about contract
killers who operate under an official government aegis, but we are given no
hint in this first installment. For the most part, they seem to be at least as
brutal and bloodthirsty as the bad guys they are assigned to exterminate.
Perhaps it would be easier to
accept the moral ambiguity of the hunter cells if Dyer had created a more
interesting world for them to inhabit, but that is not the case. His world of
at least a half century in the future seems very similar to our own: everybody in
the novel seems to smoke, either synthetic cigarettes or the real thing. In
addition, they costume themselves like a futuristic version of the Village People
-- one is an outlaw biker, one a film noir style private eye, one a female
ninja who seems to have been drafted from Mortal Kombat or some other video
game.
There is even a bionic man in the mix, who powers himself around on a set
of mechanical legs as if the upper body of Frank Castle, the Punisher, had been
Superglued to the lower half of the Tin Man of Oz.
Did I mention that the boss who
runs the Hunter Cells seems to do so by piping directly into his agents' brains
through some sort of electronic mental telepathy? I guess that's one way to
save taxpayer dollars: get rid of cellular telephones.
These minor high tech details --
coupled with a repressive legal system -- seem to be the only things that
differentiate the present from the future, however. We still drive around in
single-occupant vehicles, no doubt burning fossil fuels. The freeway is still one
of the primary modes of transportation.
Despite this retrograde travel
technology, there is no mention of climate change or rising oceans. Everything
seems to be pretty much the way it already is -- only more so.
The one thing that Dyer seems to
have done to get readers to follow his story is to end the first installment with
a cliff-hanger. The question is, will readers be willing to accept the
inadequacies of Dyer's future world simply in order to find out what happens
next?
This one will not; The new John
LeCarre is waiting for me on my bookshelf, and I would rather spend my spare
time in the most unconvincing world LeCarre has created than the best one
summoned up by Joshua Dyer.
One noose.
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