Being [Library Binding]

This is not a book for people who like neat and tidy happy endings and all their questions answered - it's a gritty and often scary read, raising existential questions in a context very approachable by adolescents. Who or what is this boy? Who is hunting him and why? Is there anywhere left to hide in the world now? Make up your own mind - just as every human has to make up their own mind on who and what they will be (not that most of us have plastic insides to confuse things!).

Definitely worth reading, and stayed with me long afterwards.

After reading "Road Of The Dead" I immediately picked up his next novel "Being". The best advertisement for an author's books is quality. Write a good book, and people will want to go and pick up your next one.

While I like a good hardboiled crime novel, and while "The Road Of The Dead" was a very good one, the whole astral projection thing was way overdone. Here, in "Being", the "super"natural element is the whole point, and is so much more organic to the plot, and it works. Yeah, it really does.

Sixteen-year-old foster kid Robert Smith goes to the hospital for some routine tests for a possible ulcer. He's put under for the tests by the anesthesiologist, only to be constantly woke up by a "something" inside of him. As he wakes, he hears snatches of conversations in which he learns that there is someTHING inside of him, and someone (David Ryan) wants it cut out of him regardless of the cost to Smith. He breaks out, taking anesthesiologist Kamel Ramachandran as a hostage. Robert decides to go to Sainsbury's railway station, where he lets Kamel go and takes a train to anywhere, and uses a credit card he had lifted from Ryan to book a hotel room. It's here that he watches a videotape that he had also lifted from Ryan, which shows exactly what's inside of him, and it ain't pretty. And it ain't human either, and as Robert has found out, it can communicate with him, and it can heal him with remarkable speed. Robert is also becoming SOMETHING else, and Robert's current circumstances are making him violent and dishonest, and he doesn't like that either.

Then Ryan tracks him down, and in escaping he realizes that he has to find a place to hide after finding out that Ryan has had Kamel and the surgeon killed. Robert remembers that an old mate, now dead, of his used to know a woman (Eddi) who specialized in making false IDs. He goes there and things get messy, and in the end he takes her hostage. One thing leads to another, and don't they always, and Robert tells Eddi what's happening, and slowly Eddi realizes that Robert is telling the truth, and that she and Robert are going to have to go on the run together to survive.

They also realize that they are going to have to leave the country to survive. Like "The Road Of The Dead" this is hardboiled crime novel with something extra, but that something extra truly works here and gives this novel a reason to exist.

Ryan is unrelenting, Robert and Eddi are hunted, even while they are building a new life together. Again, Brooks truly understands the rules of NOIR and the hardboiled story method. Stories like "Being" may not always have a clear or a happy ending. We may or may not ever know exactly what is inside of Robert, but, we don't need to, that's all part of the rules of the hardboiled school of writing.

Like "The Road Of The Dead", Brooks doesn't talk down or patronize his audience, he doesn't preach any great moral lessons, he doesn't shy away from the violence, nor does he dwell on it; there are sexual situations, governmental menace, paranoia, and nobody ever gets punished for the crimes they do. This is a crime novel with superscientific elements that just gets darker and darker. This is a top-flight, hardboiled, dark crime and science-fiction novel that may not be for the very young, but those that are looking to upgrade from the common juvenile should love it.

I was very disappointed. What you know when you read the first few pages is what you will know at the end of the book. Literally no more than that.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 15 reviews  3.3 out of 5 stars