Dark Debts
By Karen Hall
Random House, 560 pages, $25
Harvest
By Tess Gerritsen
Pocket Books, 259 pages, $22
Once again, this is the summer you won’t be reading Dostoevsky or Jane Austen during your vacation. What you might well be reading is one of these intelligent new thrillers by writers who have come roaring into the territories of Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Robin Cook and Patricia Cornwell as though they owned them.
Karen Hall is one of that small band of television writers who get noticed for their efforts: in her case for programs such as “M*A*S*H,” “Hill Street Blues” and “I’ll Fly Away.” For the last five years, she has been working on “Dark Debts,” a brooding, intensely readable novel about a family infected with evil. Once you meet the Landrys of Georgia, you’ll never again use the words “a family from hell” lightly.
“Dark Debts” focuses on two very different couples–a Jesuit priest and reluctant demonologist named Michael Kinney, whose growing doubts about his calling are energized by an affair with Tess McLaren, an editor at The New Yorker; and Randa Phillips, a columnist for an alternative newspaper in Los Angeles who was the longtime lover of Cam–seemingly the sanest of the Landrys until he killed himself–and is now involved with his only surviving brother, Jack.
Both couples get equal time in the book’s sprawling arena, but I think you’ll find that Randa and Jack are more interesting and original than Michael and Tess, who occasionally seem to have wandered in from an Anne Rice novel. Because one of the novel’s major themes is faith and how to sustain it, Michael gets many (perhaps too many) moments of interior dialogue on the subject.
Randa has the advantage of being the main mouthpiece for what must be Hall’s own sprightly and mordant wit. Driving down a road in rural Georgia to visit the house where so many Landrys had such a hard and haunted time, “she was sure that any minute she’d wake up . . . and be working on a story about where to find the best soft tacos in the San Fernando Valley.” Randa winds up needing every drop of zest in her body to keep up with the ever-darkening debts to the devil carried by Jack Landry. (The book’s title comes from a poem by executed murderer Gary Gilmore–and his brother, Mikal Gilmore, is credited by Hall as one of the people “who taught me most of what I know about writing.”)
Both halves of the story eventually join up, in a way that is both inevitable and truly frightening. Antecedents like “The Exorcist” might flash through your mind, but in the end it will be Karen Hall’s vision of evil that will color your nightmares.
“Harvest” generates its own very high level of fear and excitement by using another kind of “demon”–medical science. When Robin Cook’s “Coma” appeared in 1977, the idea of hospital patients being incubated for their vital organs sounded like implausible science fiction. Some 20 years later, in more cynical times, a thriving international black market in hearts, livers and kidneys doesn’t sound quite so far-fetched.
It was a conversation with a former Russian police officer about missing children that first planted the book’s idea in the imagination of Tess Gerritsen–an internist who turned out a series of successful romance novels and a couple of screenplays while still practicing medicine, then retired to raise her children and produce polished, riveting prose like “Harvest.”
Gerritsen’s experience as a doctor and her skills as a writer combine to give the book a strong narrative engine and many moments of startling verisimilitude. When young surgical resident Abby DiMatteo assists at her first “harvest”–the removal of living organs from a patient declared legally brain dead–“she felt vaguely nauseated by the whine of the blade, the smell of bone dust,” neither of which seem to bother the veterans. It’s obviously a personal memory being mined for fictional purposes.
DiMatteo could easily have become a stock figure from romance fiction–the poor but honest young woman tempted by love and riches to betray her calling. Gerritsen is canny enough to dust her with that kind of glitter, and artistic enough to make her a tough and believable person underneath. She has also built into the novel a formidable gallery of important supporting characters, from a worthy mentor named Vivian Chao to a heartbreakingly real Russian boy called Yakov. The ending has a heroine-in-danger aura that might flash you all the way back to “The Perils of Pauline”–until you realize that the scalpel in the surgeon’s hand has already pierced the skin. . . .
