'Darkroom:' Mary Maddox's Best Thriller Yet

By Dan Hagen

Mary Maddox writes in the margins of 21^st century America.

The central Illinois novelist’s thrillers often feature females economically and emotionally on the fraying edges of society, marginal people whose meager access to resources heightens their peril when something wicked their way goes. They haven’t got much with which to fight back, except wits.

In Darkroom, Kelly Durrell’s friend, Day, is benighted, a fact we can hear and smell even before we see her. Maddox’s deft description clues us in even as Kelly returns to her home with groceries. “Manic whoops and a whiff of cannabis seeped into the garage. Daffy Duck was getting high… A teenaged girl lived inside the body of a thirty-eight-year-old woman.”

Maddox sketches character in clear, economical lines: “He raised the empty mug and wiggled it; ‘Hannah.’ The server gave Alan a brisk nod and went on taking the order of a couple nearby. ‘Hannah likes girls.’ His tone insinuated that straight women fetched him beers at once.”

With one friend drugged-up and bipolar, and another who is cheating on her powerful and vengeful husband, Kelly is dropped into tension on page one of the novel, and Maddox weaves those threads around her swiftly. With several novels’ worth of experience, her sense of suspense is sure-footed.

Day is trouble, but she also has potential — specifically, the discernment of the professional photographer. “She studied (the photos), so caught up in Day’s experiments with contrast and nuance that she forgot she was looking at herself. It came as a shock when she remembered. The faces weren’t the familiar one in her bathroom mirror, the woman who dabbed her smudged mascara with a tissue and dreaded going to work. The photographs showed a woman with amazement shadowing her eye, a woman caught in the world’s strangeness.”

Caught indeed.

Tracing her vanished friend Day, Kelly finds evidence of another disappearance, and knows she’s getting too close to somebody who makes people go away for good.

But Kelly, who is credibly heroic without bravado, keeps searching as the shadows around her grow longer, until she finds herself on the radar of a Blackwater-like corporate police force that doesn’t mind murdering people for a client’s convenience.

Maddox sets aside the supernatural elements featured in her earlier suspense novels, and they are not missed here. She’s written a page-turner with realistic perils and motivations and palpable tension, one that builds momentum like a rockslide. It’s her best suspense novel to date.

Maddox’s novels are available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Booksellers on line.

Maddox Provides Perils Unnerving and Uncanny

By Dan Hagen

In her new thriller Daemon Seer, Charleston, IL, author Mary Maddox gets just the kind of running start that I like, engaging the reader in an intriguing situation on page one.

Lu Darlington’s boss confronts her with a true-crime book, “Professor of Death,” having figured out that she was the girl stalked by this serial killer a decade before. Those are the events of Maddox’s previous thriller, Talion, but she has structured this sequel as a stand-alone suspense novel, and having Lu’s nightmarish past catch up with her makes a perfect jumping-on point.

No longer an impoverished and endangered young girl, Lu now works for a company that cyber-spies on corporate employees in a shadowy manner, even as she herself is spied upon by shadowy supernatural forces she thought she’d left behind a decade before. It’s subtle nod to the predatory nature of the universe in which Lu lives.

Tempered by her horrific childhood, Lu has grown up practical and alert, capable of facing simultaneous threats.

And like Dick Francis, Maddox is clever enough to weave her protagonist’s background skills into the plot in useful ways. Learning that her friend Lisa is being stalked by a psycho cop, Lu is able to wield her cyber-spying as a counter-measure.

I was never quite sure, in the first novel, whether the entities that haunt Lu are supernatural or manifestations of some multiple personality disorder. But now, it’s pretty clear that these daemons are independent beings. “Daemon” is a term for semi-divine beings in Greek and Roman mythology. In Lu’s world, involvement with them puts human beings in a position roughly akin to that of a small animal dashing back and forth on an interstate highway.

The beautiful Talion tells her that she must breed for him, subjecting her to pain and passion to show her he holds the whip hand. But Lu — realizing that the entity need not have told her his plans at all, but could merely have manipulated her in to doing what he wants — reasons that he therefore must need something from her, some kind of assent that she might be able to deny him if she can deduce what it is.

Behind Maddox’s narrative, but never impeding it, is a recognizable 21^st century America of economically marginalized people — forced to take lousy, morally suspect employment, vulnerable to trumped-up charges. Their quiet desperation is as familiar to them as dried sweat on a Walmart t-shirt, and it’s another factor that heightens the odds against them in their struggle to survive. The very tired ordinariness of their world makes its fantastic elements seem more real.

Adding zest to the recipe is Maddox’s gift for a lyrical phrase: “Golden light stretched my shadow across the patchy grass;” “Her fear skittered through my body and became my fear.”

As Lu faces threats from adversaries both human and inhuman, both unnerving and uncanny, Maddox keeps ratcheting up the suspense. When Lu finds herself in a bidding war between daemons, it turns out that being pursued and trapped by a sadistic sex killer cop isn’t even the most serious of her troubles…

Both Maddox’s Lu Darlington supernatural thrillers are available at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Booksellers on line.

Fun with Thunder

Chris Hemsworth as Earth's defender, the mighty Thor

Brad Kupiec, Mary Maddox and I just attended “Thor: The Dark World,” running into Sean Copeland and Bryce Ricketts there. Marvel movies draw my friends like iron filings to an Asgardian lodestone.

And this latest is great fun, dancing to the same snappy blend of action, melodrama, heart and humor that made “The Avengers” a winner, although it doesn't share the latter's perfect pace.

The metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is considerable, but never gets in the way of the audience’s enjoyment for long. And when you have to talk about metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, you're better off to get Sir Anthony Hopkins to do it for you in his redoubtable, undoubtable voice.

A dimension-hopping climactic superhero battle is just about everything a comic book fan could want, but it’s the humanity of the superhumans that carries the day, thanks to actors well-rehearsed in these roles after three films.

Particularly to be relished is Anthony Hopkins’ effortless gravitas as Odin the All-Father and Tom Hiddleston’s wonderful, seductive, layered performance as Loki, the trickster god. Watch how Hiddleston’s face shifts and shades from grinning evil to a flicker of lost-boy vulnerability, his eyes hinting at a child who has angrily pushed away the arms he longs to have hold and protect him.

Often unsung but perhaps best of all is Chris Hemsworth as mighty Thor, saddled with the thankless task of portraying an utterly noble champion. If his hammer strikes sparks of humor from the situation, that’s only because of the deft juxaposition of gods and bemused 21^st century mortals, and never at the character’s expense. Think how easily such a role can slip into thundering self-parody, and you’ll savor how well Hemsworth, with his matter-of-fact valor, pulls it off and pulls the film together.

Zack Snyder's Meh of Steel

By Dan Hagen

I know, I know, it sounds ludicrous to charge a Superman film with implausibility, but my problem with Man of Steel is psychological implausibility.

Art by Kevin Eslinger

As my friend Mary Maddox said, if a film is physically impossible, it’s doubly important that it be psychologically plausible. And here, at certain points, characters act out of character in ways that shatter the mood.

The other things that break here are buildings. Lots of them. Maybe half of them on Earth for all I know. No shortage of action, boy, and people seem to shrug off the deaths of what must be hundreds of thousands without a backward glance. In "Superman II," the direct inspiration for this film, Superman feigns cowardice in order specifically to AVOID wrecking Metropolis in his battle with Zod. Here, Superman and Zod display a video gamer's indifference to the thousands of people they crush.
I'm afraid the world would never trust Superman after the events in this film. He and his race have just caused the destruction of about half the planet, something the crowd shrugs off to give the obligatory Superman cheer. Like much in the film, it is remarkably perfunctory and unconvincing. 
Weirdly for a Superman movie, the film is even short on effective rescue fantasy. Compare it to the first Iron Man movie, where the villager has been torn away from his son and is about to be shot on the spot by terrorists. Iron Man plummets from the sky, and the audience cheers. Where is that scene?

The movie has a somewhat jarring, worshipful level of military hardware in it. The vibe is creepy. Also, as my friend Jerry Sheehan pointed out, all the decisions about the Earth's fate are made by generals. Not even a nod to civilian control of the military in a democratic society. So much for "the American way." The National Guard got good product placement value for its money.
And I hate the washed-out gray-blue color palette. You keep expecting Batman to show up instead of Superman. Composer Hans Zimmer decided to do the soundtrack without trumpets — a bold choice, and a sadly ho-hum one. John Williams cannot be equaled.

The idea of telling Superman’s story in a series of flashbacks was a mistake. We need a linear storyline here so we can develop full empathy for the frightened boy who is Clark Kent. His vulnerability then emotionally justifies his power later for the audience. We absolutely must have that human connection before we get to the superhuman mayhem. I should not be checking my watch in a Superman film.
The film’s story is similar to Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel “Gladiator” about Hugo Danner, a young alienated superhuman who travels the world trying to figure out his purpose in life. Jerry Siegel was heavily influenced by that book when he created Superman.

Superman’s alien nature is underlined six times in red in this movie, putting him up against the 21^st century American military-industrial complex — a point that makes the movie ring true in a dark contemporary way. 

But the film lost me, finally and forever, early on. Clark Kent would NEVER have let his beloved foster father die in a tornado just to preserve his secret. That's the phoniest bit of plot-driven characterization I've seen in a long while. 
You see, the essence of Superman's character is to be a compassionate rescuer of people in dire circumstances. His empathy and ethics do not permit him to leave even strangers in fatal peril if he can help it. So a Superman who refuses to save someone he loves from certain death in order to protect himself is no Superman.
Granted, fictional characters have no fixed biographical identities. But they do have an aesthetic essence that can be violated, as Superman's was  here. And by the way, Martha Kent, having had the family home she's lived in for decades smashed to pieces by space criminals, would not merely shrug and say, "It's just stuff." I admire stoicism, but let's try to keep it within the bounds of human nature. Donner's Superman won us at the moment that young Clark cried out, "All those things I can do. All those powers, and I couldn't even save him." This film's answer is, "I could have saved him, but I chose not to."
And, no, Superman DID NOT kill Zod at the end of "Superman II," and supporters of inferior "Man of Steel" movie need to stop saying that. This deleted scene from “Superman II” reveals that the villains were all arrested by the "arctic police." 

Jerry added, "And let's not forget that this Superman appears at times incapable of independent thought ... that is he basically defaults to whatever the closest 'old man' tells him to do. I would have loved the tornado scene if he had rescued his father which would have been the plot moment at which he had to 'disappear' from people who knew him." Jerry's idea is a good one, and it would have worked perfectly in the linear plot line that his film so badly needed. As it is, his poignant decision to wander the world was a completely lost dramatic opportunity. 
The best performances are by Kevin Costner as Pa Kent and Russell Crowe as Jor-El, two actors strong enough to lift any kind of material. Henry Cavill absolutely looks the part of Superman, and I have no particular problem with Amy Adams as Lois Lane. But Richard Donner spoiled us there with the romance he built into the 1978 film. We keep expecting a spark of charm and longing to fly between them, and it doesn’t.

One advantage this Superman film has over all others is that for the first time, Kryptonians move the way we have always expected them to move, the way they logically should move — with breathtaking speed and frightening power. But the writing is sometimes remarkably amateurish. Lois tells her editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) "I'm a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist." I guess he didn't know. Maybe I'd better tell my faculty colleagues, "Look here, I'm an journalism professor at a midwestern public university!" Jimmy Olsen has apparently been turned into "Jenny" Olsen, a meaningless change that substitutes or originality. A character for whom you can't find a use doesn't become useful with a sex change.

There's nothing very original about the overall plot, either. It echoes not only "Superman II," but even an unproduced, Jackson-Gillis penned 1957 movie "Superman and the Secret Planet" in which surviving Kryptonian criminals attack Earth and are opposed by Superman George Reeves. "Krypton" means "secret," of course.
Finally, Superman should not have been pushed into the nasty situation of being forced to brutally kill the villain. In other words, the movie went out of its way to make Superman a character who kills and/or lets people die. A neck-snapping, militarized Superman the National Guard ad people can love. Disgusting. As Andrew Wheeler writes in his excellent essay, “That is a revealing choice. It tells us that director Zack Snyder and writer David Goyer wanted to establish that there are times when killing is necessary, even for Superman. They believed that this bleak message is the right one to convey using one of the most moral characters in modern fiction.

“Can Superman kill? You can contrive a situation in which he has to; it has been done before. Yet I think most people would place the character at the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to the preservation of life. The moment he absolutely has to end one life to save another should carry so much weight that the story contorts to serve it. I don't think Goyer and Snyder earned that moment in Man of Steel. You may disagree.

“Either way, the choice is troubling, as the movie neglects to send any other moral message. This is not a movie about truth, or justice, or heroism, or sacrifice, or hope.” Can't we have one hero who doesn't break people's necks in this ugly 21st century society of ours? Killing is not the solution to everything, and it should not be suggested to children that it is. Killing is not the solution to much at all, something that an advanced being from Krypton would already know. But you'd never know it from all the promiscuous, gleeful and/or casually indifferent "heroic" killing in 21st century Hollywood movies. I always get the feeling that we are being softened up by 21^st century popular culture, in a dozen ways simultaneously, to regard human life as cheap, if not valueless.

The pieces of the familiar Superman mythology don’t all fall into place until the very end of this film, along with the film's best line ("Welcome to the Planet.") That means that the next film is the one I really want to see. As I told Matt Mattingly, I’m hoping this situation will parallel that of the first two Star Trek films, which didn’t really soar until the sequel.
In the meantime, as someone once sagely observed, Superman is invulnerable. He can survive anything, even bad writing.

 

Kevin Costner as Jonathan Kent and Dylan Sprayberry as young Clark Kent: "Just let me die, kid."

Surfing the Synchronicity Wave

An art piece I have always liked, by an unknown and, I believe, late artist. This, at least, will live.

By Dan Hagen

Is the universe connected on some dimensional level of which we’re ordinarily unaware?

The psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung thought so, and termed the phenomenon “synchronicity.” By that he meant an acausal principle that somehow links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially — “meaningful coincidences,” in other words.

I have experienced enough of them in my life to wonder if Jung might have just been on to something, bizarre as it seems to rationalists.

Consider the way a two-dimensional being on a flat plane would perceive a three-dimensional cone being pushed through its dimension. As an expanding circle, right? What if the intrusion of higher-dimensional phenomena were to produce analogous effects for three-dimensional beings like us? What would we perceive?

Synchronicity?

Years ago, I began keeping a list of synchronistic experiences I’ve had. I offer some of them now as food for thought.

•••

Some students of synchronicity have claimed that instances are experienced more frequently when you travel. One of the most striking examples in my experience happened while I was making a rare visit to Washington, D.C., to attend a journalism seminar in January 1998.

As soon as I got into my hotel room, I called one of my oldest and best friends, First Amendment attorney Bob Corn-Revere, and told him that he’d find me in Room 326.

“That should be easy to remember,” Bob said. “Section 326 is the part of the Communications Act that deals with media freedom.”

“That’s interesting, Bob,” I said, thinking it wasn’t.

We made plans and said goodbye, and I switched on the hotel TV as I unpacked. James Bond fan that I am, I stopped channel-surfing when I spotted the 1983 film “Never Say Never Again” starring the original 007, Sean Connery.

At that moment, Bond was introducing CIA agent Felix Leiter to a beautiful female companion whom he called, “Agent 326.”

Okay, okay, I thought. Clearly the universe was shouting the number “326” at me.

The only trouble was, of course, that I had no idea what it meant.

I was later amused to learn that Secret Agent 326 is the hero of Fritz Lang’s famous silent film “Spies.”

By the way, another strange coincidence on that trip concerned the fact that while I was in D.C., President Bill Clinton was not 40 miles from my home in central Illinois. Air Force One literally became stuck in the mud there, in Champaign, IL, just as the “mud” of the Monica Lewinsky scandal was breaking.

•••

On the afternoon of Wednesday, March 27, 2006, I went to Midgard Comics in Charleston and checked my subscription bag. I noticed that next to mine was a bag for someone named “Adam Hall” — the famous pen name for my great friend and mentor, novelist Elleston Trevor.

•••

At about 1:30 p.m. Aug. 9, 2004, I was at the Elizabeth Titus Memorial Library in Sullivan, reading an article in a national news magazine about dreaming. I started to nod off for a moment, and while half-dreaming, thought about Dr. Glen Gabbard, a psychoanalyst I know. Reading on in the article, I came across a quote from Gabbard himself.

•••

At 7:20 a.m. Feb. 15, 2005, I bought a light jazz tape at Wal-Mart and listened to the first song, ‘Let’s Fall in Love,’ wondering what the lyrics were. As I switched off the tape, I heard the radio playing a feature profile of Harold Arlen on NPR’s Morning Edition. The story detailed how he came to write ‘Let’s Fall in Love,’ and included a singer performing the lyrics.

•••

At 5:40 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005, I was walking my Dalmatian in the winter dark and thinking about my just-published synchronicity column and the trickster motif. At that moment, a streetlight directly over our heads went off. I stopped and was reminded of the Jack Lemmon character in “Bell, Book and Candle,” a warlock who did that trick. We continued down the street and, a minute later, the light came back on.

At 9:30 a.m. that same morning, I was pulling into the McDonald’s drive-up in Sullivan and still thinking about the trickster motif. I had to wait on a Honda Accord that had pulled in just ahead of me, and noted that, staring at me from the back of the car, were decals of Felix the Cat and the Joker — both trickster characters.

•••

At 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2006, I pulled into the BP service station in Charleston intending to buy exactly $8.25 worth of regular gasoline so that, with my three newspapers, the bill would come to exactly $10. I filled the tank, but could only get $8.24 worth of gas — the last penny wouldn’t go in. Inside, the attendant told me that I had gotten the last ounce of regular gas in the place. A tanker truck was just pulling in to refill them.

•••

On the evening of Feb. 22, 2003, I bought and read “The Hero Within” by Carol S. Pearson, a book which discusses psychological archetypes, synchronicity and the necessary confrontation of the conscious self with the Jungian Shadow, or repressed negative self. I napped briefly, and awoke just as an old Ed Sullivan rerun was beginning a performance of “Me and My Shadow” featuring a white soft-shoe dancer and his black “shadow.”

•••

On July 15-17, 2004, I read about the Thunderbird, Indian mythological shapeshifter who grants power in dreams, in a Sullivan High library book during school board meeting. Next day at the film “I, Robot,” I saw a trailer for the film “The Thunderbirds.” My friend Karen Binder highly recommended Neil Gaiman’s novel “American Gods” to me that day, so I bought the book and discovered that the Thunderbird is a character in it.

•••

On Wednesday, March 28, 2007, at 7:25 a.m., while walking our Dalmatian, I was thinking about "Marlowe," a private eye movie I had just seen and the cult of the

tough guy, which I admire. I was also wondering to what extent it's all bullshit. Just then, I glanced at a white pickup truck owned by a guy with whom I'd had

a run-in (after our Dalmatian had left him a small present). The brand of the tool box in the back of his pickup was "Tough Guy II."

•••

On Sunday, Jan. 8, 2006, at 3:50 p.m., I was attending the film “Munich” with Mary Maddox when I spotted, in the row in front of me, a young man I recognized from somewhere, After thinking about it a few minutes, I realized that I had seen him in a graduation poster at my friend Paul Beals’ Big Picture office. One of the photos in the poster showed him wearing a cheese hat on his head. I didn’t mention the incident to anyone.

The next morning, I told Paul that I had seen someone I recognized at the movies. Before I could tell him anything else, Paul told me confidently that it was the boy with the cheese on his head, wasn’t it? He said he had seen the picture quite clearly in my mind.

•••

What does it all mean? Anything? Nothing? I don’t know, but it does seem that you can sometimes hear the faint laughter of a cosmic trickster somewhere in the background.

Here’s what I’ve gathered of the apparent “rules” of synchronicity — and sometimes serendipity — from research.

1. Pay close attention to people you run into by accident. Listen to what they tell you, or say what pops into your mind. You may have a message for them, or they for you, or both.

2. The more you notice meaningful coincidences, the more they multiply.

3. If you are having a particular problem, decide to turn it over to synchronicity. That means letting it go completely.

4. Always trust even when outward appearances seem bleak. That's when something is happening behind the scenes.

5. Anger and frustration stops synchronicity.

6. Travel increases instances of synchronicity.

Celebrating the Value of Intelligence

By Dan Hagen

I'd say the reviewers have it wrong on Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows. Mary Maddox and I had a rollicking good time at this action-comedy. 
Robert Downey Jr. does for Sherlock Holmes what Johnny Depp did for Captain Blood. 
The best scenes are again between Holmes and Watson (as the Ambiguously Gay Duo of the 1890s) and Holmes and Moriarty (played with icy conviviality by Jared Harris — Lane Pryce of "Mad Men" — and an inspired choice). 
Nice to see at least one 21st century eye-candy film franchise that actually celebrates the value of intelligence, even if it's only comic-book super-intelligence. 
That's an increasingly rare thing, and the world is much the worse for it.

About Books: Talion by Mary Maddox

By Dan Hagen

Lu Jakes doesn’t have a chance.

She never had one. She’s a teenager trapped in a Utah trailer with a drunk for a dad and a sadistic slattern for a stepmom. Her only friends are phantoms in her head. And now she’s attracted the attention of a sexual torturer and serial killer…

Lu is the protagonist of Eastern Illinois University English professor Mary Maddox’s thriller “Talion” (now available from Amazon), a dark gem she has polished to a purple luster.

Peer inside. You’ll see a crime novel, and something else lurking there in the shadows. “Silence of the Lambs” meets “The Turn of the Screw.”

Like other unhappy people, Lu has escaped into her head, where supernatural figures dwell — avian Black Claw and shape-shifting Delator and, chief among them, silver-eyed Talion, a shining, translucent hero-image off the cover of a romance paperback. A child refused love, she has seemingly reinvented it for herself.

Are they multiple personalities? But these fantasy figures seem to know things that Lu doesn’t know, couldn’t possibly know. How? And, as their whispered guidance takes a sinister turn, whose side are they really on?

So doom is coming at Lu from at least two directions, because someone else is also warming his tortured psyche with romantic delusions.

Outwardly the ineffectual, mocked college professor Conrad, inwardly he’s an implacable villain who has dubbed himself “Rad.” A highly intelligent, self-described “hunter of a thousand faces,” he exults in the exquisite excruciation of his victims. He thinks that harming people is proof of power, not seeing that it’s really a ringing declaration of weakness.

Fatuously but nevertheless fatally, Rad imagines himself a hawk that rends pretty songbirds in his talons. Maddox manages to make him both ludicrous and frightening, a neat and yet convincing trick.

The story is propelled by suspense, and made delicious by Maddox’s Ray Bradbury-like gift for deft, deep-shadowed description. “The ticking of the grandfather clock made her think of bored skeletons tapping their fingers.” Gamblers “stick like iron filings to magnets around the craps and blackjack and roulette tables.” And Rad has eyes “as blue and transparent as the swimming pool, only there’s nothing at the bottom.”

Despite her fantastic friends, Lu displays a matter-of-fact, worm’s-eye view of the world that not even she appreciates, but that might just manage to save her life… Those last hundred pages just about turn themselves.