{"id":5003,"date":"2023-08-10T09:19:18","date_gmt":"2023-08-10T16:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5003"},"modified":"2023-08-10T17:46:25","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T00:46:25","slug":"review-ipoltergeist-ask-the-dust-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5003","title":{"rendered":"Review: Poltergeist: Ask the Dust"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AskTheDustCover\"<\/a>As an indie author, I don\u2019t pay much attention to genre anymore. I write the story I want to write, and let the genres fall where they may. I wrote \u201cDrumlin Boiler\u201d long before I knew what a \u201cspace western\u201d was, but that\u2019s what it turned out to be. Bending genres has become a thing, and I\u2019m seeing the guldurndest categories. You may not have heard of the steampunk zombies weird western genre, and if you haven\u2019t, I encourage you to read James R. Strickland\u2019s Brass and Steel: Inferno<\/a><\/em>. It\u2019s a helluva good book, and you\u2019ll never see zombies quite<\/em> the same way after you\u2019ve read it.<\/p>\n

Well, Jim\u2019s put his genre-bender in gear once again, and he\u2019s given us a genre that I\u2019ve not encountered before: the paranormal noir murder mystery. Chew on that for a moment while I caution that there is another James R. Strickland who writes children\u2019s books like Does God have a Favorite Pet Dog?<\/em> Emphatically not<\/em> the same guy.<\/p>\n

Enter Jim\u2019s latest book: Poltergeist: Ask the Dust<\/a><\/em>. 14-year-old Nina Cohen goes down with the Titanic<\/em> in 1912. Her higher (mind) spirit, or ruach<\/em>, flees for parts unknown. Her lower (body) spirit, the nephesh<\/em>, wanders the seas, possessing sharks and other fish, eventually finds the land and arranges to be born into a feral kitten. The kitten is taken in by a young Romanian woman in Las Vegas, and becomes Viviana\u2019s constant, affectionate companion. Viviana, however, is deeply depressed, and after a few more years puts a pistol in her mouth and commits suicide. Nina\u2019s nephesh cannot abide the thought of losing her human, so she leaves her cat body and enters Viviana\u2019s. Nina is a body spirit, and in a living human being the nephesh handles much of the task of healing injuries. Nina furiously works to repair Viviana\u2019s damaged brainstem, which is complicated by still having a .22 slug in it. She does her best, but the struggle to keep the body\u2019s heart beating and lungs breathing is ongoing. After considerable work, Nina inhabits a (mostly) functional body. Viviana is gone, leaving Nina  without a partnered mind spirit. Nina is thus a dybbuk<\/em>; i.e., a poltergeist. Most dybbuks get bored, make noise, and throw things around. Nina has a body to maintain and lacks time for mischief. But she needs a job to keep body and nephesh together.<\/p>\n

Enter Tom Fletcher, a former cop and current chain-smoking private investigator in the Raymond Chandler mode. Except\u2026he is also a powerful occultist, and when he spots Nina at a bus station, he looks at her in the lumina<\/em> (the realm of spirit and life force) and immediately knows what she is. Fletcher takes her in, moves her back to Minnesota with him, and begins teaching her how to be a private eye. Nina gets her license, and learns from Fletcher that there are some powerful advantages to being a poltergeist gumshoe who can see the lumina and the numa life force that glows within it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a lot<\/em> of backstory, and peculiar backstory at that. Jim has a fairly rare talent: He can build a backstory and major universe details in bits and pieces dropped into the primary narrative, without an infodump anywhere. The story proper begins two months after Fletcher dies of throat cancer, leaving her the private investigator business and the building he owned plus all his goods inside it. A man calls her and asks her to find his son, who has been missing for ten years. Nina takes the cold case with an eagerness bordering on naivete. In searching for Mike Berg, she runs afoul of the local drug-running gang, hitmen, conniving relatives, various lowlifes in the bad part of Lakeport, and the limitations of her poltergeist talents. Poltergeist tricks like psychokinesis cost her in numa, which accumulates slowly but can be spent very quickly. She can leave her body and travel through walls to look around, but her body doesn\u2019t breathe while she\u2019s not in it and so the clock is ticking. Although a local Lakeport cop befriends her, Nina soon finds that there is more than mere friendship involved\u2014and that the spirit world is a great deal more complex and treacherous than even she knew.<\/p>\n

The background has a startling richness. Its internal consistency is one of those things you don\u2019t always see in fantasy yarns. It isn\u2019t abracadabra magic so much as spirit physics, with limitations implicit in its laws. The idea content is dazzling, granting that I\u2019m an ideas guy and I love that sort of thing in fiction. Jim has a new take on physical invisibility based on the workings of the human eye and brain. Numa energy can be transferred between humans by a mechanism that sounds a lot like electrical circuitry. And a poltergeist inhabiting a body generates a lot of static electricity. Anything Nina touches that has transistors in it croaks as the junctions die. She thus uses antique dial phones and radios with tubes, and wears limeman gloves while working on her snotty AI-driven computer.<\/p>\n

Nina\u2019s POV has a wry if sometimes naive voice, with lots of low-key humor and affectionate flashbacks to the late Tom Fletcher\u2019s kindness and his quirks. She is devoted to her cat Djinn as she in cat form was devoted to Viviana. In fact, there is a great deal here for cat lovers. We see the lumina universe through her inner eyes, whether the view is of great beauty or molten terror. The terror is real, and at the climax she must face and fight it at the possible cost of her very existence.<\/p>\n

Jim has indicated that Poltergeist<\/em> is a series, and he\u2019s working hard on the second book. I\u2019ll let you know when it appears.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a wild ride. Take it. Poltergeist: Ask the Dust<\/em> is the best new fiction I\u2019ve read in a long time.<\/p>\n

Highly<\/em> recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As an indie author, I don\u2019t pay much attention to genre anymore. I write the story I want to write, and let the genres fall where they may. I wrote \u201cDrumlin Boiler\u201d long before I knew what a \u201cspace western\u201d was, but that\u2019s what it turned out to be. Bending genres has become a thing, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5003"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5011,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5003\/revisions\/5011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}