Maul

Tricia Sullivan, Maul (Night Shade, 2006) Maul is everything I don't like about a book wrapped up in one package. So why is it that this thing works so very, very well? I don't have an answer to that, and I probably never will. And I'm not the only one that thought this, given some of the negative reviews I've read of the book. Sometimes, though-- it happens far more often in music-- you throw together all the stuff that makes a song pure crap and come out with absolute genius. Look at Better than Ezra's "A Lifetime" or Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want". It's rare that it happens in book form, but it does every once in a while. Maul is one of those books. It tosses together a vocabulary that makes next to no sense half the time (and weighs itself down with dialect all too often), uses a painful cliché as its turning point, is way too in love with its own postmodern flair, stops the action on a fairly regular basis to inject social commentary, and is desperately predictable. And yet, somehow, you put it all into the meatgrinder and what comes out the other end is delicious. The book is divided into two parallel storylines. One deals with Sun, a Korean-American who, with two of her friends, is forced to go to the mall one Saturday morning (who's doing the forcing you find out later; too complicated to get into in a thousand words), where, thanks to one of her friends, she finds herself in a shootout with the city's toughest girl gang. The other, set in a world where a virus has wiped out most of the men, centers on Meniscus, a male clone who is a lab rat for designer genetic weaponry. He's autistic and noncommunicative, and Madeline, his handler, keeps him docile with a VR program called Mall. (You see where this is going already, I take it.) Meniscus' world is shaken up when a rogue male, whom Meniscus calls Starry Eyes, is brought into his bubble, an attempt to assassinate Starry Eyes with the plague that Meniscus is currently incubating. The whys and wherefores of the assassination attempt for the main mystery in this part of the book. What makes this all work is Sullivan's crackling prose and flair for the B-grade dramatic; she knows exactly how to balance a cliffhanger to keep the reader pushing for just one more chapter. Despite the book's flaws (detailed above), I devoured it in a few sittings; Sullivan invents a near-future world of post-armageddon pop culture where an armageddon hasn't actually taken place, and it's fascinating to watch. Then, once you're hooked, she goes way over the top, and the fun is just hanging on to see how nuts this thing is going to get. Meanwhile, she's stealthily developing her characters, certainly more than I expected once I clued in to the B-grade nature of the book; by the end, it almost seemed as if Sullivan were crafting a parody of cyberpunk rather than the real thing. But not quite. And this is another aspect of the genius of Maul; having reflected on it as long as I have, I still can't quite t

Neal Stephenson faces off with John Shirley and Pat Cadigan in this intriguing, often fascinating, feminist cyberpunk thriller from Tricia Sullivan. Imagine if you will, the nonchalant, often hilarious prose from Stephenson's "Snow Crash", mixed vigorously with vivid, descriptive, and often lyrical, prose from Shirley's "Eclipse" trilogy, and Pat Cadigan's memorable female anti-heroes from her short fiction and novels, adding up to a memorable, if not perfect, novel from this young Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author. Tricia Sullivan has conjured a bizarre, near future world of suburban malls inhabited by homicidal teenage girls running amok, armed with semiautomatic pistols and rifles, and acting as if they are inhabiting a cyberpunk computer game, without realizing the deadly consequences of their real-life actions. She deftly weaves this memorable saga featuring 16 year-old Sun Katz and her friend Suk Hee Kim, with another, equally compelling, tale of down-and-out loser Snake Carrera, who is imprisoned with Meniscus, the experimental "Typhoid Mary" of a deadly male plague, as part of a deadly medical experiment that will have unforseen consequences for both men, and the female team of researchers overseeing their welfare. Although both tales do not mingle, they do set the stage for a memorable conclusion about individuality and the future of humanity. Without question, with the publication of this novel, Tricia Sullivan has emerged, as one of our most interesting young writers of science fiction, and especially, as one of its most intriguing literary stylists.

Maul is not just a sharply-written book, it's an experience. From the shocking opener to the shattering finish, it's a thrill ride -- for some of the characters, literally. Sullivan tells two stories here, which never quite converge but influence each other in ways that become apparent. First, the story of Sun and her friends, who head to the "maul" to face off with a rival girl gang at Lord & Taylor's. What starts out as a game of insults escalates when Sun's friend Suk-Hee jumps onto the cosmetics counter and opens fire (all the girls, it seems, are packing.) Sun spends the rest of her story alternately trying to talk and terrorize her way out of increasing danger. The other storyline involves clone/lab experiment Meniscus, a man in a world where most men die of a gene-linked disease, and scientist Maddy, who is running the experiment. When a disreputable tough named Snake Carerra gets stuck with Meniscus in hopes that he will catch the disease and die, the experiment and the women running it spin out of control. There's a lot going on here, and not all of it makes sense, even by the story's own crazy logic. And for all that this book is not excessively long, it still drags a bit in the middle. But by the time you get to the men's contest to see who gets to breed, you're off and running. If you're looking for something different and just a little twisted (not to mention well-written) Maul might just be your thing.