I said I’d review William Brinkman’s new book – Revenge of the Phantom Press – before it comes out and missed that goal, so here we are on release day the day after release day two days after release!  You can buy that thang, even as you read this!  William Brinkman is the Bolingbrook Babbler man in the sidebar, with his long running tabloid universe.  How does an old school movement skeptic end up writing a series where aliens and lake monsters are real?  Maybe reading all his babblerverse novels will provide a hint.  The first one, The Rift, was torn from the atheoskeptic headlines Law&Order style, recreating Elevatorgate with fictional characters, plus weredeer and time travel.

Increasingly, especially in the self-publishing sphere, you find that the language of storytelling has been broken.  Everyone from Mary Shelley to Dan Brown learned to write in a continuum with Shakespeare.  They knew how to weave a tale that works.  Exposition, conflict, escalating stakes, payoff.  Too many kids these days came up in fanfic spaces where all of these things are optional.  This isn’t to say that a sufficiently advanced author couldn’t break with convention for artistic ends, but the lack of fundamental skills on display nowadays is appalling.  William Brinkman learned to write before the turn of the millennium and it shows.  I don’t want to damn with faint praise, just to express my satisfaction with reading a complete story.  It’s the difference between eating breath mints and eating food.  RotPP is food.

I’m going to just throw out some general observations and wrap with my opinion of the book’s merits.  I’m not going to discuss the plot to avoid spoilers, and because the summary on the jacket is good enough.

I know that Brinkman took pains to make the story stand alone, so that a person can read it without having read the previous Babbler stories.  It’s hard for me to tell objectively how well that worked, having read The Rift and a few others, but my guess is that some elements of these characters and this setting are not going to work for some readers, because they do call for an amount of outside familiarity.  On the other hand, I do think most readers can just deal with those bits enough to keep going, because he does very successfully minimize the sense of being interrupted for info dumps – even more than in the previous book.

At the outset of the book and a few times throughout, the hero is humbled in the presence of women in a way that might feel off, to people with only a little of the backstory.  Even having read The Rift, I kinda felt like he was excessively kicked around.  Our hero Tom is a reformed villain, so alright, makes sense, but if I was friends or coworkers with someone who had recovered from heel status, I wouldn’t want to trigger the sense of shame that had driven him to villainy in the first place, right?  I’d be at least a bit nicer to him.  This is a quibble though, and doesn’t detract overly from the story.

The way the story was constructed ended up having a lot of back and forth travel.  I’m sure there are lots of good stories that do, but it’s kinda funny how much it’s like, go there, no get out, no go back, no get out again.  Still, different enough things happen on each foray that it doesn’t feel repetitive.

I have low-key problems with memorizing white people names, worsened by characters with minimal description, but this wasn’t as difficult for me this time around as it was in The Rift.  Two hundred pages in I had to wonder who “Jenna” was, but I gathered her role in the story from context, so I didn’t have to page back to be fully reminded.

Science fiction and fantasy have some overlap – hence the term SFF – and Revenge of the Phantom Press lives in that overlap.  There’s another term that gets bandied around for fantasy with a contemporary milieu: “magical realism.”  That’s where things are moving in the direction of the literary or surreal.  As a writer I’ve spent a lot of time trying to feel out these lines, and to me at least, it’s largely about explanation.  Does this setting have rules – or does it strongly communicate the feeling there are rules – behind the supernatural events taking place?

RotPP does, and so there’s no question that it’s straightforwardly genre fiction – not literary.  But as a reader who is drawn to the literary, my eye is open for it, and there were a few moments that got surprisingly close.  If you ignore the explanatory elements, just dig the scenery, the first scene in “Little Bolingbrook” can hit like that.

As a contemporary SFF story that emphasizes action and adventure, RotPP is very well-executed.  People love writing these kinds of stories, but there are a lot of pitfalls, and Brinkman deftly maneuvers around the lot of them.  I didn’t get hung up on exposition, I didn’t see any plot holes, no dangling plotlines, no pointless cul-de-sacs.  Set-ups had payoffs, plot devices worked as intended.  Pacing was tight.  You’re never far from an exciting scene, but you’re not overwhelmed by too many without breathing space between.  You could see the movie of this on the pages, but it also doesn’t feel like a failed screenwriter’s consolation project.  The medium of prose is used well.

The most important part of all this is emotional core.  Did the emotional scenes hit the way they were supposed to?  The climax of action coincides with a climax of emotion in the story – which is more than I can say for my own entrant to the genre – and while it definitely had the potential to feel pat and obvious, it actually worked for me.  Later, when the relationship arc of the main characters was complete, I was again able to feel what Brinkman wanted me to feel.

I don’t know why I’m in such a creative writing teacher mode on this review, just completely patronizing, so it’s time to get down to brass tacks.  Worth it or not?  Worth it.  Good stuff, surely the cream of self-publishing.  I recently read a Dean Koontz novel – Midnight – which had a similar action-adventure feel, and gives a good metric for comparison.  Koontz was better with the kind of description that makes a vivid impression (sorry William) but Brinkman’s plot construction was superior, and his story didn’t end with the hero smashing his son’s record collection, so also superior values.

This isn’t the kind of story I’d normally go out of my way for, favoring horror and surrealism.  I ended up reading it because William is my bloggy compatriot on Freethoughtblogs.com.  Even so, I feel he did great work.  I give it four out of five stars.  Check it out if you like action-adventure scifi-fantasy in a contemporary setting, no bullshit.

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