The Nature of Balance (Hardcover)

It may seem like just another end-of-the-world story (or is it a beginning?) at first but Lebbon looks at the situations on a deeply personal level and takes them in surprising directions. It is very much a character driven story. You will care about these people -- even the bad ones.

It's interesting that horror has made a comeback in the American bookselling business these days, the same way it did in the eighties. (And the same way it will again twenty years from now.) Often, cycles of something being popular and unpopular are blamed on a fickle public. Those of us in the business of media manipulation through the creation of art know better. Without going into the details, let's just say that the more popular something guess, the more the quality is likely to decline. The business itself brings about the downfall of the genre, whatever that genre may be. (Look at the long, painful death of industrial music in the mid-nineties.)

It's pretty easy to see that the new horror revival will soon be headed that way, as well. The stalwarts who weather the last death of horror as popular art form are still around, of course. King, Koontz, Ed Lee, etc. will never go anywhere while they live. And, as always, the newer crop of horror writers contains some brilliant writers who are destined to topple and replace the stalwarts (Kiernan, Brite, etc.), some who have been around for years and just never got the recognition they deserved (Koja, Laymon, et al.), and, well, the rest.

To call Tim Lebbon one of the rest is not to imply that Lebbon's work lacks quality. It doesn't. The Nature of Balance is a good, solidly-written novel that keeps the pages turning and is likely to appeal to any horror fan (it may be a bit laid back for fans of extreme horror novelists like Laymon and Lee). But it's not more than that. When you pick up something by Cait Kiernan or Kathe Koja (when Koja's writing horror, anyway), you're not only getting horror, you're getting your socks knocked off. They transcend simple horror novels and become something else. The Nature of Balance never achieves that transcendence.

Anyone remember Rick Hautala? Ken Eulo? John R. Holt? William Valtos? Doug Hawk? Leslie Whitten? I could keep going for a very long time here, and at a guess, you'll get maybe ten percent of the names unless you were an obsessive horror fan like was an obsessive horror fan back during its last popular heyday. If it hit the Atlantic Books shelves in the horror section, I was there waiting with $3.99. (Depressing, isn't it?) And all of the above authors were writers of good, solid horror novels (okay, we'll make an exception for Whitten). I can (and have) go back and pick up John Holt's When We Dead Awaken or Edward Levy's The Beast Within and come up with a fantastic read. It's not a new Kathe Koja novel, but it's a great way to kill a few hours on a rainy day. And, ultimately, that's what The Nature of Balance is; good for what it is, but at a guess, not destined for immortality. ***