Heathern (Hardcover)

Womack has a strong, passionate literary intelligence. He is a crank and a bookworm, a polymath and a blowhard, he strives for the comedy gauntlet in every paragraph. His characters lock horns and break heads in the now-familiar backalleys of dystopian urban burlesque, and if his punchlines often seem forced and artificial, we feel honor-bound (given the massive potential of his two previous novels) to let the artist experiment with this new, plastic genre. He tries his darnedest to suspend our disbelief, to make this surreal ï¿picnic in a graveyardï¿ something worth caring about, something human. We know him as a invert -- yet one striving for the more conventional pleasures of readerly transport.

But *Heathern* (clearly written under deadline to fulfill a publishing contract) disappoints on too many levels. The liberties we were willing to grant him have gone stale in the interim. As a prequel to the Dryco Chronicles, Womack has seen fit to ease the throttle of his abounding, gutter-mouthed blarney (Ambientspeak has yet to dominate the Dryco universe), and the resulting text, cleansed of all overflow, is a cold naked testament to his limitations as a novelist, his faltering ability to make the surreal *real*.

You could say that Womack overloads the dice. His characters are no more or less plastic than those in early DeLillo, in Pynchon at his worst, in most award-winning science-fiction for that matter. But once the pyrotechnic distraction of his top-heavy prose-style is snuffed out, we realize that the bookï¿s foundations are wormy, its characters hollow at the core, its engine of suspense unable to inject fuel, and what was once an opulent Style becomes a cloying distraction.

The readerï¿s syntactic eye is strained by the torsional buckling of his modifiers, the bulwarks, breakwaters, and stumbling blocks of his flexural, haphazard style. Womack strives to be ï¿lapidary,ï¿ to push the linguistic envelope, to make his surreal narrative believable in the throes of gushing, mellifluent overabundance. But in *Heathern*, his key does not open the door. His characters are exposed for the tactless straw-effigies they are.

And it sucks. Oh how it sucks.

By concentrating the odium of capitalist villainy into one massive, megalithic metaphor (the Dryco Corporation), Womack simplifies the *real* terrors of our world into a seedy Japanimation serial about the Big Bad Megacorp and the network of mystic underworlders who nibble at its heels. The terrorist subplot seems thrown in as an afterthought, a conversation-piece for the authorï¿s trash-talking finger-puppets. The relationships are as stodgy and wooden as a Punch and Judy spectacle trying to be deep and literary, while the villain of the piece (CEO Thatcher Dryden) is a B-movie troglodyte, a failed attempt to satirize the monopolist mindset, whose crimes and immoralities are far more subtle and convoluted than the cyberpunk excesses showcased herein.

And jeez, if youï¿re going to put a Messiah into your novel (yawn), his dialogue must rise above the usual string of crypto-theological sidebars and faux-Biblical irony -- presented in the form of wisecracks and prophetic conundrums, straight out of the ï¿riddle-me-this-Batmanï¿ tradition. Womack doesnï¿t do quite as bad as some, Iï¿ll admit. His street preacher Lester Macaffrey has something approaching a ï¿realï¿ personality, and the author may be attempting to show how Macaffreyï¿s stoical eccentricity, his suavely detached musings on theological issues make him the beacon of posthumanity in a world of protohuman cartoons. But the effect is fleeting, and Macaffreyï¿s sudden, epiphanic relationship with the narrator is hollow, contrived, asinine, as is nearly everything else in this novel. When one of the characters expounds his familyï¿s relation to the Jewish Holocaust, the reader finds himself whistling in despair at this vinegary attempt to charge an insipid burlesque with humanistic ï¿depthï¿.

I give this one two stars out of sympathy with the authorï¿s boredom with conventional SF tropes and motifs, and his rigorous (if rushed and miscalculated) attempt to break onto the genre-scene with all guns blazing. But *Heathern* is Womack taking two steps back after the intriguing forward-tramp of *Ambient* and (parts of) *Terraplane*. Check out those books for Womack working more-or-less successfully in his essence. Leave this one in the remaindered bin.

Heathern sees Womack showing a bit of restraint. While his story is brutal in its own right, its much more tame compared with Ambient (or Random Acts of Senseless Violence which might be seen as the predecessor to Ambient). Because of his focus on the story, the reader is left guessing about certain developments in this futuristic New York City.

All in all, a good story but its not as strong as the beginning of the series.