Vanish 3: Weak points and conclusion

The weak points of Tom Pawlik’s Vanish are annoyingly hard to explain. And I'll break precedent by taking issue with something that almost certainly isn't Pawlik's fault.

Design. I was tempted to write "unintelligent design," but the designer is likely a wonderful person who for some reason likes goofing up books. I don't usually complain about such matters--others cavil at covers; I don't--but here the "design" creeps into the book as such. Covers, I ignore; pages, I can't. And here the upper part of the right page is smudged (something I can do for myself, thank you) and the first page of each chapter is presented in an odd, narrow-column format that I found distracting. But again, I doubt that's Pawlik's fault, and I generally concentrate on the text.

Double, double... Things are not as they seem, and sometimes a character turns out to be an impostor--that is, it's really one of the gray things impersonating the other person. But there is a character that simply is two different entities, a human being and a spirit being--and the spirit, though mostly malevolent, sometimes seems to be pointing Godward. (For those who've read the story, this is the character who has the final line.)

Clever, not deep. The ending is clever--it's funny, in a macabre fashion--but a deep ending might involve someone, perhaps a boy, entering the room and saying, "One of your friends asked me to visit you. We need to talk."

A life-and-death issue. This is the major drawback for me, and I'd bet that hardly anyone will notice it because it's more assumed than stated. It's the idea that near-death is death, that God can't truly reach beyond normal consciousness.

(Someone will cry foul here, based on a rescue scene near the end. But that is more a physical than a spiritual rescue, postponing matters until a normal decision in normal circumstances can be made.)

If someone is fatally injured and lingers briefly in a coma, apparently cut off from the world around him, is he as good as dead? Or can God reach him in those last moments? If God can't reach him, then perhaps we may as well pull the plug on anyone in a coma. There are two arguments against this.

First, there are numerous cases where God dealt with people in their sleep through dreams. If he can do that, he can reach someone vegetative or in a coma.

Second, there are biblical references to our inability to prolong life. In Matt. 6:7, Jesus says we can't add an hour to our lives by worrying; in Eccl. 8:8, we read that since we can't retain our spirit, we can't control death--in context, we can't prolong our lives. So if someone is on life support, we can't prolong his life with all the gadgets; when his time comes, he'll die, no matter what anyone tries. But we can hasten death, and that's what happens when we pull someone's plug. As long as someone is alive, he can be reached; ending his life prematurely is wrong. The writer seems ignorant of this, as many Christians are. Is it any wonder abortion is still legal when even Christians can't understand the nature of such actions?

Conclusion. However, I doubt most people will notice this line of thinking, and otherwise it is a good story well told. So while I think it could easily have been better, it is still well above average and definitely worth a look.

Again, for anyone interested, my novella Galatea is available for download in PDF form.

Let's have a last look at this month's tour...
Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Alex Field
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Ryan Heart
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Margaret
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Donita K. Paul
Epic Rat
Crista Richey
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

Vanish 2: Good points

Note: For reasons I don't understand, this post was not published this morning according to schedule. I apologize for the delay.

So on to the good points of Tom Pawlik’s Vanish.

A positive negative. The main strength, to my mind, is a negative, like congratulating someone for not throwing up on your carpet. And to explain, I'll have to digress a bit.

Vanish is listed as "suspense," which can mean anything from "a page-turner" to "something so nauseating the writer should be put away for life." (For the curious: Vanish is the first, not the second. Resume breathing.) But it's an annoyingly vague, catch-all genre. So to end some of the suspense, I'll note that a story with faceless humanoids that lurk whispering in the shadows and only evince mouths by a process like tearing skin--such a story is horror.

That's not inherently bad. Properly done, horror can be deeply theological, and Vanish does a good job. (I'll get to a theological complaint tomorrow, but this works far better than I might have feared.) And that gives the back-handed compliment that matters most to me: Pawlik doesn't do anything obnoxious or stupid. This is no small feat. Most horror and thriller writers seem entranced with the sheer ickiness of their subject, but while Vanish is certainly suspenseful, it isn't gross and doesn't glorify violence or evil. I can actually recommend it to friends, which is uncommon these days.

Suspense as such. A page-turner, that is. I've already said it, but it bears repeating. This is not the sort of book you'll put down easily, and it isn't a good choice if you have other things to do. If you have time to sit and read--if you want a beach book or have a long plane ride--it's an excellent choice.

Characters. These are generally strong and well developed, and I at least cared whether they lived or died. There's a little unevenness in the development: Conner, Helen, and Mitch all have the same kind of Dark Secret in their past, and how they deal with it influences their destiny, with a little more distance granted those with less-happy outcomes. But the outcomes matter, just as the characters do.

Tomorrow we'll look at some weak points.

In the meantime, for anyone interested, my novella Galatea is available for download in PDF form.

Time for another look into the netherworld of the CSFF blog tour...
Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Alex Field
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Ryan Heart
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Margaret
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Donita K. Paul
Epic Rat
Crista Richey
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

Vanish 1: Intro

This month the CSFF Blog Tour is doing Tom Pawlik’s Vanish. Curiously, it's not a cleanser as I expected, at least not a good one; I strongly advise against using it to clean a toilet, especially before reading it. On the other hand, it's quite good as a book, much better than the other stuff and not nearly as irritating. (Watch this blog for my upcoming analysis of whether product placement pays off.)

Anyway--what's the book about? (Hands up, everyone who expects a page count!) Well, according to the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, it's about lawyers, models (persons), mechanics (persons again), and storms. Note that apparently neither storms nor lawyers are persons; this seems correct.

Specifically, the lawyer is Conner Hayden, biologically male, though the species may make it hard to tell. As the story opens, he is impersonating a rat, to the consternation of all true rodents, encouraging some nice people to sue a nice doctor and gain a small settlement while losing their own souls. And on the topic of losing one's soul, today he keeps seeing people without faces. As a lawyer, this shouldn't be a new experience, but somehow it troubles him. Maybe he likes the look of fear.

He heads home to his splendid solitude, marred only by a side-trip to his past: an ex-wife, an ex-daughter, and a personal tragedy to be named later. By contractual obligation he brings his daughter home, and as a matter of paternal indulgence doesn't sue her for anything. Yet.

Following an argument in which his daughter claims to be doing the religious thing willingly, not under coercion, he steps out to see whether there's a mysterious, plot-launching cloud around, as the Weather Channel claimed. There is. Curses. He can't sue them this time.

Meanwhile, sometime model Helen Krause is being told that she's too old to act her age. She heads home to find her son, Kyle, and a birthday/farewell party: he's leaving town (and her) for better things. Distraught, she decides to step outside to look for unearthly storm clouds. She's in luck--or not...

Meanwhile again, Mitch Kent, a mechanic (person), is finalizing plans to buy a garage and get engaged to his girlfriend. He's too well organized to buy his girlfriend and get engaged to a garage, which is just as well. However, he too develops a kind of familial crisis: his long-despised and -ignored father calls up to say that he (the father) has cancer and wants to patch things up. Annoyed that his father would call him just to die at him, Mitch hops on his motorcycle and heads off to propose to his girl, completely ignoring a storm warning on the Foreshadowing Channel. Sure enough, he soon sees a strange cloud in the mirror, right above the note that "Objects in mirror may be uncannier than they appear."

The next thing the three know, they come to roughly where they saw the storm. There's no sign of anyone else, but instead of assuming that they've missed the Rapture (not really on their personal radar anyway) they decide to go looking for everyone and bump into one another and a few other leftovers. Along the way they also have disturbing visions from their past--well, Conner and Mitch do; Helen doesn't so much for some reason. And Conner keeps having these searing chest pains.

But the real creep factor is that they occasionally spot people-like objects in the shadows. These creatures have no faces, but they still whisper a lot. They also turn out to be immune to gunfire, which is a bit annoying. Worse yet, from Conner's standpoint, they have no respect for subpoenas. Oh, and from time to time they grab someone and drag him off screaming to his doom. (I hate when that happens!)

Is it an alien invasion? Are they victims of Rod Serling's posthumous powers? What happens when you say "Langoliers" backwards? For answers to completely different questions--mostly "What are the strengths of Vanish, at least as compared to Comet?"--tune in again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, check these links to see whether a mysterious storm has waylaid the rest of the CSFF Blog Tour:
Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Alex Field
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Ryan Heart
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Margaret
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
John Ottinger
Donita K. Paul
Epic Rat
Crista Richey
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler