The Preserve, by Patrick Lestewka
Written: Dec 14 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: The characters, the writing, the plot.
Cons: I didn't think of it first.
The Bottom Line: It's not often I reach the end of a book this long and wish there were more to it, but that's what happened with THE PRESERVE.
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| cdm72's Full Review: The Preserve Books |
In 1967, the Magnificent Seven--Slash, Gunner, Oddy, Tripwire, Crosshairs, Zippo, and Answer--faced a monster in the jungles of Vietnam. Two of them didn't come out of that battle. When the war was over, the remaining five returned home and built lives for themselves. Tripwire makes porn. Zippo is a hitman. Oddy has become a bank robber. Crosshairs is barely surviving on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Answer is a problem-solver. One day each member of the squad receives an envelope in the mail with an unsigned check for $50,000 and an invitation to meet at a bar in Canada to hear a proposition made by Anton Grosevoir, whom none of them know.
Patrick Lestewka is becoming a familiar name to me. His story "B*tchfight" appeared in the Necro chapbook MotherB*itchfight and his novella "The Coliseum" opened the Necro anthology The Damned. Both were exceptional stories written by an exceptional talent. I wondered how he would be able to handle the more involved work necessary in a novel. The answer is: like a pro.
Anton Grosevoir's proposal is this: he would like the 5-member team to go into the wilds of Canada in search of an escaped convict, the man responsible for killing Grosevoir's family. In return, he'll pay them one million dollars each. The squad, 20 years out of the war, takes the challenge. But when Grosevoir's chopper drops them off, they discover nothing is what they thought. The forest they thought was the refuge of the escapee is really a nature preserve for the creatures Grosevoir has been collecting. As he tells them, animals in captivity, even when well-fed, don't live as long as wild animals. They grow complacent. Their survival skills stagnate. So he lets them hunt for their food.
This on its own would be enough for a really good novel. But when the A-303 Blackjack team faces the beasts on Grosevoir's preserve, the rules change entirely. Their first face-off is with a horde of lurching, living-dead zombies. Then it's vampires. Then werewolves. The creatures they run into at the end of the book defy all description--although Lestewka does a great job of filling in what details he can.
When you stop and think about it, you're hit with the obviousness of it. OF COURSE, you say, slapping your head, WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT? WHAT A GREAT IDEA.
And it is. Luckily, however, someone with Lestewka's talents was the one to bring it to fruition. This idea would have failed miserably in the hands of a lesser writer, but Lestewka gives it that balance of serious graphic horror, laugh-worthy humor, and insightful prose that only a real Writer could bring.
I like to read while I eat, and the last time--before The Preserve--that I had to stop eating until I'd finished a paragraph was an Ed Lee novel 5 years ago.
The Horror:
"Unnoticed amidst the carnage, a single deadhead slipped under the radar: an infant, or something that had once been one. Its skin was glistening and slick with a coating of mucous-like slime. A shred of placenta, rotting black, was perched atop its bulbous skull in a travesty of a baby's bonnet. A great deal of undeveloped intestine drooled out of its anus in soupy loops, riddled with holes pecked by hungry ravens. The infant deadhead pulled itself along by its hands, as its feet had been hacked or eaten away."
The Humor:
"Tripwire was bemused: Canada, a country populated by infuriatingly polite bumpkins, required a Super-Max? He couldn't quite grasp the concept of a Canadian serial killer. How would he approach a potential victim: 'Pardon me, eh, but I was thinking a-boot cutting your head off and skewering it on a pike. Okay by you?' Perhaps the victims were unusually accommodating" 'Alright, eh. Just don't go making lampshades out of my skin, you hoser.'"
The Serious Prose:
"But, after a few Tours in 'Nam, I came to see war as the Great Lie: your country wanted something and their country wanted something and everyone was feeding lies and misinformation to get what they wanted. And all the memorials and the monuments and the medals and the American flags waving outside shopfronts on Veteran's Day--that was all part of the lie. Those things only shrouded the one stone-cold fact, which was this: some soldier, some f**king kid, dying alone in the middle of a rice paddy or a shallow trench, this kid who was playing high school ball and chasing tail six months earlier now dying with parts from the inside of his body strewn about the outside of it . . . All he knew was he was cold, and in pain, and that once, at some far-off time, he was deathly afraid of being thought a coward, a boy who'd refused to do what was best for his country."
My only complaint here was 1) the characterization. With all these different nicknames, it was sometimes hard to keep them straight. Oddy was the squad leader, I got that one. But sometimes I couldn't if Crosshairs was the one with the prosthetic face, or was that Tripwire? Zippo is the hitman, right? Other than Oddy, the only one I really kept a good read on was Answer. During the war, he was the one they used to get information from their prisoners. And back home, that's still what he does, gets answers from people who don't want to talk.
Another problem I had was . . . I don't know, when I found out Grosevoir's preserve was for monsters, I was excited, but then he starts talking about finding vampires and werewolves in small town motels and barrooms and the zombies and all and it just rang a little too false for a minute. I'd already known, from earlier passages, that if Lestewka wanted to create a monster, he could do it better than most others. Clive Barker is probably the only one I've read to write a better beast. So with this incredible talent, Lestewka uses it on Hollywood standards? I was disappointed.
But these are small problems. Even with the uninteresting monsters, Lestewka infuses great energy and life into his novel, giving us one of those books you just don't want to put down. There are way too few of those anymore, and I love it when I come across one, especially from a writer just getting started because with any luck, they'll offer more and more "un-put-down-able" reads and I look forward to all of them.
Recommended:
Yes
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cdm72
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Location: St. Joseph, MO, USA
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That's me in front of Trent Reznor's house in NOLA several years ago.
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