Locus Looks at Books: Faren Miller
Crosstalk, Connie Willis (Gollancz 978-1-473-
20093-7, £14.99, 512pp, tp) September 2016.
(Del Rey 978-0-345-54067-6, $28.00, 498pp,
hc) October 2016
The Motion of Puppets, Keith Donohue
(Picador 978-1-250-05718-1, $26.00, 332pp, hc)
October 2016.
The Family Plot, Cherie Priest (Tor 978-0-7653-
7824-8, $25.99, 366pp, hc) September 2016.
Wicked Weeds: A Zombie Novel, Pedro Cabiya
(Mandel Vilar 978-1-942134-17-6, $16.95,
166pp, tp) October 2016. [Order from Mandel
Vilar Press, 19 Oxford Court, Simsbury CT
06070; <www.MVPress.org>.]
I
n Crosstalk, Connie Willis gives a modern
subject – the continuing changes in com-
munications – elements of both SF and
fantasy, when a new medical procedure that’s in
vogue with celebrities and other wealthy types
has unexpected results for a young woman who
doesn’t feel at home among the glitterati. And
meanwhile, a new smartphone is in the works....
Despite its substantial length and interwoven
plots, Crosstalk moves at the brisk pace of
screwball romantic comedy with an added kick
of suspense, as it follows Briddey Flannigan
through a rapidly escalating series of encounters
and events that starts with the instant flurry of
gossip (office and web) before the shared minor
surgeries intended to amp up the intimacy of her
relationship with sleek boyfriend Trent Worth,
a Porsche-driving executive at their workplace
Commspan. The other man who’s crucial here
is chief nerd/ techno-wizard C.B. Schwartz, de-
veloper of the ‘‘TalkPlus’’ phone – a project still
mysterious even to him – and a polar opposite to
Trent: unkempt whatever the occasion, lacking
the easy eloquence of privilege.
Introduced as the weirdo in the basement
lab, C.B. comes to the fore in Chapter Three
with his startling intrusion into Briddey’s mind
while she’s still at the hospital after the opera-
tion. Though any mental contact should have
come from Trent, who urged her into getting the
procedure known as EED, what she gets is tele-
pathic remarks from the nerd, saying he warned
her about ‘‘unintended consequences’’ of EED.
The nature of telepathy soon becomes crucial,
as Briddey’s initial fears (that C.B. found an
insidious technoid way to bug her) are swamped
by a multitude of other people’s private thoughts:
she exposed as if she’d gained another sense,
some form of ESP that that feels more like a
curse. In crowded public places, minds raise a
clamor where each voice is distinct and none
can be entirely ignored. Since C.B. shows no
surprise at this, it’s not much of a spoiler to
reveal that they grow closer when he helps her
counteract the worst effects of the new sense,
while together they investigate its cause – some
rare genetic fragment that survived from ages
past, or outright deviltry?
The family that intrudes on Briddey’s life, with
drop-in visits and messaging more persistent
than her new mentor’s ESP, runs the gamut of
attitudes: from an older woman’s obstinate in-
sistence on their Irish heritage, rooted in mythic
days of yore, to a precocious kid who’d rather
blame anything weird on zombies, the subject of
her favorite films (and she’s smart enough to get
around her mother’s blocks on Netflix).
In the course of further discoveries, rescues,
escapes and encounters with the strange, horror
always lurks, but romance finds ways to blossom.
Crosstalk is a virtuoso performance that isn’t
just for show: both daffy and deep.
Keith Donahue’s The Motion of Puppets
opens with a bold statement from the heroine’s
perspective: ‘‘She fell in love with a puppet.’’
Kay Harper loves the ancient thing – body
‘‘hewn from a single piece of poplar,’’ simple
limbs designed for lost connections, ‘‘pierced
at the hands and feet’’ – not just for its beauty
and rarity but ‘‘because he could not be hers.’’
Note those dueling pronouns: what would be it
to most observers is he for both the woman and
(less ardently) for the author of this novel where
some objects are very much alive. Keith Dono-
hue’s modern take on old myths and fairy tales
brings sentient puppets closer than Kay could
ever imagine, when she becomes one herself.
Though the metamorphosis was unintended,
and doesn’t lead to Ovidian antics, it’s still a kind
of betrayal, since she leaves a bewildered hu-
man husband, Theo. Their viewpoints alternate
throughout the braided plotlines. The marriage
is still new enough that there should be a lin-
gering sense of honeymoon for these American
visitors to Québec City, Canada, where twenty-
something acrobat Kay has come to take a small
part in a local cirque’s performances while her
husband (an academic in his thirties) works on
a book translation. If the supernatural had not
moved her beyond easy recovery – first in an
Old Town toy shop that never seems to be open,
then on the road and elsewhere – love might
persist. Without melodrama, Donohue hints at
a continuing commitment on both sides while
they’re apart.
Her disappearance prompts an investigation
by a pair of Canadian detectives, with Theo as
the object of suspicion and sympathy, but there’s
no hope of finding Kay just through stubborn
searching. So he returns to his teaching job,
uncertain of her fate and further troubled by
the work he’s been translating: a biography of
the early photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Unusual in many ways beyond the name, this
was a genuine historic figure whose studies of
movement in animals and humans give The
Motion of Puppets its title and (as Donohue
extends them to fantasy) some compelling im-
ages. But the episode in Muybridge’s life that
torments Theo most deeply involves passion,
betrayal and revenge: when his wife ran off with
her lover, the photographer went after them...
and killed the guy.
Puppets here range from humans transformed
as Kay was, to iconic figures from myth and folk-
tale, yet all have a human essence that persists
even while the world seems to change. (Their
reactions to a sudden drastic shift in size vividly
show what it’s like to be one of them.) When
two friends, a French-Canadian dwarf who
worked for the cirque and a professor of myth
and ancient cultures at Theo’s university, go with
him on a belated quest to track her down, it’s a
fascinating process that leads to a compelling
conclusion. Touched by the ancient tragedy cited
in lines from a poem that precedes the narrative,
‘‘Euridyce’’ by H.D., the book ends with words
that might (unlike Pandora’s Box) offer us hope.
In The Family Plot Cherie Priest dismantles
two forms of horror, Southern Gothic and the
 p. 61
THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
October 1, 2108. T-Day salute? Thought to
be celebrating the bicentennial of the first
(1908) Model T Ford, an estimated 11.6
million DL (handzfrei) autos honked their
horns at noon Detroit time.
LOCUS October 2016 / 21
 Faren Miller
 p. 21
haunted house story, reducing them to their con-
stituent parts as the heroine and her salvage crew
take apart an old mansion (whose dark spell persists
while its parts – furnishings, forgotten heirlooms,
choice architectural details – get assessed and
packed away).
Dahlia Dutton, the recently divorced thirty-
something woman whose father created Nashville-
based company Music City Salvage and chose her
to lead this project, calls it ‘‘disassembling.’’ In
reviewer’s lingo, the novel itself might be called a
work of ‘‘deconstruction,’’ but Priest brings it off
without avant-garde shenanigans, through a grip-
ping, unbroken narrative and one main viewpoint
character.
Although she’s tough, efficient, and far from
genteel, a hard drinker who doesn’t mince words,
Dahlia’s not all business. At the beautifully crafted
but run-down Victorian house her father bought
from the sole survivor of the Withrow family, we
see another side: ‘‘Truth was, she wanted a moment
alone with the house, with nobody watching or
listening. ... Sometimes she had to whisper [such
hopes] from the backyard, while forklifts pulled
windows from their casings.’’ Her only personal
attempt to rescue a fine old home ended with a
divorce, still recent enough to give an extra pang
to what she senses here: a mixture of sadness, loss
and anger.
Dahlia leads a crew consisting of crass boozer
cousin Bobby, his teenage son Gabe (hulking
yet rather shy), and Brad (a college student avid
about the past but new to the game of salvage).
Long-dead Withrows haunt this place so deeply,
everyone feels their presence. Starting as fleeting
scraps of vision, wisps of mood, soon the ghosts
become more troubling. One encounter sets cool
Brad to a spate of frenzied grave-digging (where
he emerges looking like ‘‘a fugitive from a hill-
billy zombie flick’’), and Dahlia is harassed so
badly she has good reason to fear the house is
out to get her.
They’ve got to see this project through, since
the company’s financial survival depends on
what they make from it. To save their own lives
and sanity, they need to learn as much as possible
about the family tragedy that spawned the ghosts.
Since these are modern times (even in countryside
miles from Chattanooga), smartphones and web
links give the team a chance. But the danger grows
more acute, over the course of what proves to be
a remarkable new take on old darkness – both
living and dead.

Pedro Cabiya emphasizes the horror in Wicked

Weeds with the subtitle ‘‘A Zombie Novel’’, and
with a central plotline (set in the Dominican Re-
public) told from the viewpoint of a pharmaceutical
executive who’s seeking an herbal antidote to his
own undeath. Since Cabiya is a Latin-American
poet, screenwriter and novelist also known for
essays and short stories, the book turns out to be
more devious than most dark fantasy, shattering
its plotlines into a scrapbook or quirky collage
(assembled by one character as a kind of tribute to
another), whose components are grouped by type
in the table of contents, as Records, Laboratory,
Vacuus, and Field Journal.
Even before this list, an authorial ‘‘warning’’
tells the reader that neither strict movement through
the pages as numbered nor zig-zagging to read
each section separately will lead to anything but
‘‘chaos.’’ They differ wildly, yet have hidden con-
nections: Records is a series of police interviews
after a murder; Laboratory the zombie’s story,
central to the contents and much longer than any-
thing else; the last two were written by the same
woman (who works, along with two close female
friends, in the lab where the gentleman zombie
has been investigating ‘‘weeds’’) yet are distinct
otherwise – Vacuus as occasional reflective essays
on topics like ‘‘Alchemy and Photosynthesis’’, Field
Journal the memoirs of a childhood where this city
girl spent months on Haitian tree farms owned and
worked by her rural kin.
What seems like mad miscellany can change
drastically with another look, as significance
and connections change in a process that seems
less like paging through a scrapbook, more like
the motion of a kaleidoscope: striking the senses
differently with each turn. In a crucial evening
visit to a noisy club, one of the female co-workers
achieves a ‘‘fleeting miracle,’’ with unexpected
consequences. The grotesquerie of undeath changes
radically, depending on perspective, yet never gets
entirely dismissed. Even the violence that prompts
those police reports can’t change the zombie’s tale
to bitter tragedy, or strip away its dark wonder.
Rereading Wicked Weeds changed my view of
this month’s other novels, as Cabiya’s interplay of
‘‘voices’’ in his sections made me consider all four
books together as if they were a dialog about the
workings of the body, mind, and heart. I’ll offer
one quirky comment to indicate the nature of my
thoughts. While style and tone differ enormously
between Crosstalk and The Motion of Puppets,
both feature romance with a love triangle – the
same one, under all the trappings? Check it out
for yourself!
–Faren Miller 

LOCUS October 2016 / 61