“If somehow the naïve, uneducated overconfident species known as humans should all come to know about this phenomenon at once, well, I have every confidence that nature would respond, react, retaliate. It always has, son. It always will. You think you know a secret, do you? You think what you and I are discussing right in news? Shit, this wouldn’t make the back page of the Universal Newsletter.”
So just what is it that Ed Caine and Darien have been discussing in John Podgursky’s novel? Their place in the world. The fact that they are THE ONE PERCENTERS: nature’s cleanup crew, whose mission it is to eliminate “the sick, the weak-gened, the ill-minded.”
Caine’s wife has died at the hands of a serial killer and, like Dad in the movie FRAILTY, of which this short novel is in some ways reminiscent, Ed has now come to believe that there are too many people on Earth dragging down the rest of us. (Note which side I put myself on.) What better way to even things out again than to remove as many of them as possible from the gene pool? He is an agent of the planet itself. The only cure is radical surgery.
Podgursky does a nice job of keeping us guessing about Ed. My description of him makes him sound like a nut job, but is he really? Or is he right on target? Does his friend Darien really exist, or is she a visitor from Planet Psycho? And, of course, use of the name “Caine” and the fact that the serial killer leaves a copy of the Bible behind with every corpse make one wonder …
Podgursky is also sly in the way he slips motivation to you. We’re told blatantly — as if we needed to be — that the beginning of Ed’s hatred of his fellow man was tied to his wife’s murder, but notice this simple throw-away line as Ed thinks about the killer: “The late-night talk show hosts had a feast joking about this guy.” In its own way, isn’t that as horrible as the crime itself?
This is a quick read, a one-nighter even for a medium-speed reader like me, but it’s a good way to spend the evening. —Doug Bentin
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Well, I loved the movie Frailty, so any allusion to that can’t hurt. A nice review, as I have a review copy of this myself and plan on getting to it in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully I enjoy it as much as you.