Few would deny that the Vietnam War indelibly imprinted itself on the psyches of those who came of age in the 1960s, both those who traveled to that far-off land and those who stayed home. Author Jack Ketchum once wrote, “There’s nobody in my generation of U.S. citizens who doesn’t know somebody—or for that matter hasn’t lost somebody—in that god-damn war. And I doubt there’s a writer of my generation who hasn’t wanted to address the subject in one way or another.”

  Peter Straub addresses that subject head-on in the meticulously researched Koko, along with one other theme that preoccupied him over the years: the majestic power of stories, their effect on their tellers and listeners, their ability to define and redefine individual realities and histories, and their effectiveness in probing the truth of any situation. As one of his characters notes, “Deep down, the things that happened to you never stop happening.” Straub’s basic underlying point seems simple but is actually very complex: we are all the sum of our experiences, bad and good. When the bad dramatically outweigh the good, our essence can be perverted. We all try to cope, but some of us are pushed too far, as is the case with Straub’s title character in Koko. Then, nightmare becomes reality.

  For the author,Koko represented a rigorous, arduous experiment with style, transparency, and precision. It also represented an exploration of horror through the vehicle of realism, rather than through the fantastic, as he had done in previous works. For readers, it’s a vivid, disquieting sojourn, a visceral, engaging, painstakingly crafted thriller that disturbs and excites.

  In Koko, the immediate journey begins in 1982 at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., as several veterans gather at the monument ostensibly to pay tribute to their fallen comrades. But they are actually assembling for another reason. A string of brutal murders committed by a killer who leaves a playing card signed “Koko” on his victims leads them to conclude that one of their fellows is responsible. As only they have put the clues together, only they can stop him. For this reason, and personal reasons of their own, comrades Michael Poole, Conor Linklater, and Harry Beevers embark on a trip to the Far East in search of writer Tim Underhill. Their mission takes them from Bangkok to Singapore to New York, and finally to Milwaukee, where they finally uncover the real narrative thread that has been driving events, a story so bleak and sordid it makes the battle-hardened veterans shiver in fear and sympathy.

  The shared story of their experiences in Vietnam binds these men together, a story whose end only they are capable of writing, one only they are capable of completely understanding. It’s a story about staring into the abyss, about exploring the dark recesses of the human mind and behavior (Straub is constantly leading his characters into and out of caves and cave-like structures, playing on the reader’s instinctive fear of the dark and closed, tight spaces). It’s a story about monsters, the human kind who lose their way. It’s a story about ghosts, in the sense that memories haunt all the participants. It’s a horror story, not in the supernatural sense (although there are supernatural elements to be found), but in the sense that it chronicles man’s irrational excesses, his often inhuman behavior toward his fellow man. And, most importantly, from the thriller point of view, it’s a desperate race against time, as Koko has embarked on a killing spree that will not cease anytime soon unless his former comrades intervene.

  Koko was a big hit, joining (significantly in hindsight) The Silence of the Lambs on the New York Times best-seller list, for Koko, like Thomas Harris’s smash hit, signaled the beginning of a new era in thriller fiction, that of the serial killer as enigmatic antihero. Like Hannibal Lecter, Koko is frightening because he often seems superhuman, blessed with almost supernatural gifts that enable him to stalk and dispatch his prey, all the while eluding discovery. It was the dawning of the age of a new bogeyman, one who might be standing next to you in line at the supermarket, or sitting across the table from you at dinner.

  As was the case with Harris, Straub had not yet finished wringing the last ounce of story value from his situations and characters, but unlike Harris, Straub’s subsequent forays into this strange landscape proved just as intriguing as their predecessor. Like the classic jazz artists he favors, Straub, a remarkably deft and versatile writer, found numerous and creative ways to riff on the situations he set up in Koko, penning two additional novels (Mystery and The Throat) in what came to be known as his Blue Rose trilogy, and writing several striking short stories that gave insight into the characters featured therein (including “Blue Rose,” “The Juniper Tree,” “The Ghost Village,” and “Bunny Makes Good Bread”). Tim Underhill became a sort of doppelgänger/colleague of Straub, appearing in two of the author’s non-Blue Rose works,lost boy lost girl and In the Night Room. As did Koko, each successive work, in its own way, continued to probe what Joseph Conrad labeled “the heart of darkness” or, as his character Kurtz said, “The horror.”

  Hank Wagner lives in northwestern New Jersey with his wife and four daughters. Hank’s reviews and interviews have appeared in Jazz Improv, Mystery Scene, Cemetery Dance, Hellnotes, Dead Reckonings, Nova Express, and The New York Review of Science Fiction. Besides being coeditor of Thrillers: 100 Must-Read s, Wagner is a coauthor of The Complete Stephen King Universe and Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman. He is currently at work on The Repairman Jack Companion, a book about F. Paul Wilson’s popular series character.

  90

  John Grisham’s

  THE FIRM (1991)

  M. Diane Vogt

  In 1991, an explosive new talent conquered the best-seller lists, reinventing the legal thriller.The Firm was Mississippi small-town lawyer John Grisham’s (1955–) second novel. In its wake, Grisham’s books, including legal thrillers, nonfiction, and other novels, have sold more than 235 million copies worldwide. Prior to The Firm, Grisham spent ten years in his first career as a small-town lawyer and Mississippi legislator. The passion to write his first novel,A Time to Kill, was ignited by an incident he witnessed while waiting his turn in court. The disturbing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim made him imagine the consequences if the victim’s father had killed her assailants. That first novel was published by a small press and had a printing of five thousand copies. Grisham then began writing The Firm, combining Faust’s mythical devil deal with high-octane David vs. Goliath, an unrivaled combination that became his forte. Grisham’s other thrillers include The Pelican Brief and The Client, two of his many books that were adapted into movies.

  Ten years after the unlikely anthropology professor Indiana Jones defeated the Nazis with a lot of help from God (and considerable suspension of disbelief), rookie tax lawyer cum action hero Mitch McDeere spectacularly defeated modern-day Mafia and government manipulators, using only his wits and his Harvard law degree.

  Certainly lawyers had been inspirational literary heroes, triumphant in mythic David and Goliath battles before The Firm was published in 1991. But this was no courtroom drama and McDeere was not our father’s Perry Mason or even Scott Turow’s worthy but flawed Presumed Innocent (1987) prosecutor, Rusty Sabich. Rather,The Firm dramatizes a minimum of lawyering and instead emphasizes McDeere’s race to save himself before his government or his employer terminate his life.

  The Firm captures the despair of gray-fiannel-suited lawyers who felt shackled by golden handcuffs to their lavish lifestyles. Its emblematic cover depicted an attorney clutching a briefcase while being manipulated by the strings of a puppeteer. The book energized the legal thriller, which heretofore every working lawyer knew was an oxymoron on steroids. Grisham’s ability to make the genre exciting and suspenseful by featuring larger-than-life lawyer heroes propelled The Firm and Grisham to the top of the charts where he has remained for almost two decades.

  At the end of the 1980s, a decade of conspicuous consumption and excessive spending, workaholism reigned in all sectors of the economy. Lawyers were commanding salaries beyond their wildest dreams. Megafirms launched, the number of lawyers skyrocketed, and the competition to hire the best and the brightest intensified. What was once a genteel, collegiate, underpaid profession became a cold, profit-driven business supported by billable time.

  Against this backdrop,The Firm opens with the hazing ritual all law students must endure: the first law job interview. The uninitiated reader might assume job interviews lack even quiet drama, let alone thrills. Yet, a typical law student feels more nausea during the process than panicked passengers escaping the half-submerged Titanic. Following years of hefty debt accumulation and daily Socratic inquisitions during which students consume thousand-page casebooks digested and regurgitated into a three-hour essay exam upon which the entire grade for the course and subsequent employment depend, exhausted students compete for work. Making the best choice is yet another angst-producing hurdle. The tension of the interview process lasts most of the fall and into the spring of the final year.

  More determined, better credentialed, desperately motivated by personal struggles, and closer to the brink of financial ruin is Grisham’s Mitch McDeere. Third in his class at Harvard, Mitch receives offers from prestigious firms in New York and Chicago. But when he’s seduced by an elite Memphis law firm’s extravagant offer, he proves his mettle by interrogating the hiring partner. He’s assured that no lawyer has ever voluntarily resigned from the firm.

  Wanting to believe the firm is that good, Mitch decides he has no choice; he must take the lavish offer. After all, like all law students on the brink of licensure, he is confident that he can handle whatever comes his way. But his bravado soon evaporates—the coming challenges far exceed his practical risk analysis. Early on, every reader knows the job is not what it seems, but like Mitch, they’re already hooked.

  Before The Firm, lawyer readers had already made the same bargain Mitch did. They knew that despite the astronomical salary, new BMW, low-interest home mortgage, repaid student loans, and beyond-the-call support in passing the dreaded bar exam, the job would be hell on earth. And so it is with Mitch.

  What follows is a brief period of calm before he realizes that the limitless job he’s accepted with the Mafia-controlled firm can have only one possible outcome. Like his colleagues, he is literally tethered to the firm. He will work until death.

  Grisham crafts his story expertly. Readers fear that Goliath will win and that Mitch will either conform to the firm’s policies or die. But despite the forces opposing him, Mitch McDeere is not your average David, as we’ve suspected from the outset. The Mafia and the FBI are no match for him.

  Lawyers can be heroes, too, Grisham reminds us, not just in The Firm, but in each of his many books about the legal profession that followed. In Grisham’s world, attorneys are a force to be reckoned with. They lead lives not of quiet desperation, but of noisy, active, responsible accomplishment in the face of powerful opposition. The practice of law, at least on the page, has never been the same since Grisham’s debut.

  M. Diane Vogt was an associate and a partner in a large Detroit law firm where she and her colleagues were living Mitch McDeere’s Faustian bargain themselves when Presumed Innocent ignited and later The Firm inflamed her passion to write lawyer-hero stories of her own. One of the country’s top attorneys for more than twenty-nine years, Diane is the author of several novels featuring Judge Wilhelmina Carson (Silicone Solution, Justice Denied, Gasparilla Gold, and Six Bills) as well as two nonfiction titles, a book of crime puzzles, short stories, book reviews, and countless nonfiction articles. Her short story, “Surviving Toronto,” appeared in ITW’s Thriller anthology.

  91

  R.L. Stine’s

  SILENT NIGHT (1991)

  Jon Land

  “My job,” says R.L. Stine (1943–), “is to make kids laugh and give them the CREEPS!” Toward that end, Stine has become one of the best selling authors of all time. Never a great student, he found an old typewriter in his attic at the age of nine, and his career began, literally, the next day with the penning of stories and joke books. But it wasn’t until 1989, when he created the Fear Street series, that the world discovered Stine’s work.Fear Street went on to become the best-selling young adult book series in history and was followed by the Goosebumps series in 1992. Recently, he developed two new series,Rotten School and Goosebumps Horrorland. In 2007, the International Thriller Writers organization gave him its Silver Bullet award.

  “The burgeoning interest in literature for teenagers took a giant leap forward when government money became available to libraries in the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson’s presidency,” writes K.L. Going in Writing and Selling the YA Novel.

  If that era didn’t mark the official beginning of young adult literature, it came close enough, giving birth to works by S. E. Hinton, Paul Zindel, and, in the 1970s, Judy Blume. Going credits these and other authors, “who consistently wrote amazing, literary novels through these decades,” with introducing scores of young readers to fiction. But it took a bit more time for the thriller form to make its way into young adult literature. Christopher Pike and Robert Cormier started that ball rolling, but in 1989, it was R.L. Stine, who turned the ball into a steamroller, defining the YA thriller for generations while introducing millions of teenagers to the genre.

  What’s next? Riva wondered with a cold shudder. What’s next? That question forms the heart of Silent Night and pretty much all one hundred-plus thrillers by R.L. Stine that between them have sold over 350 million copies. And wanting to know the answer to it is what has kept young adults turning the pages for decades. For millions of them, R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series represents their first exposure to a genre with which they ultimately fell in love.

  Silent Night is typical of the structure found in all of them, distinguished by its consistency of theme across the gamut of Stine’s prolific bibliography. A young protagonist, in this case seventeen-year-old Reva Dalby, finds herself embroiled in a web of her own deception and deceit after she lands jobs for a number of her friends at her father’s Macy’s-like department store for the Christimas rush. Reva is self-centered and bitingly cruel, the residue of her mother’s death and her mostly absent father. The book opens with her disinterestedly working behind a cosmetics counter. She’s smoothing her own lipstick into place when a sharp pain strikes her and she tastes blood. Reva realizes in horror that someone has stuck part of a razor blade into her lipstick and she’s just sliced her own lip.

  Sounds like something more suitable for Robert Bloch’s Psycho or a scene from an early Brian De Palma movie.Silent Night, like virtually all of the entries in the voluminous Fear Street series, succeeds by confronting its young protagonists with adult problems they must solve for themselves. The journey is never direct and obstacles are everywhere along the way. But the journey is also one steeped in self-discovery, the protagonists becoming different people than when he or she began.

  In Silent Night, Reva’s various mechanizations and manipulations have tragic consequences for her friends and estranged cousin Pam. The ending, though, provides hope that she has at last learned her lesson.

  I feel so warm, Reva thought, so light, as if a layer of ice had melted away from me. If I hadn’t been so cold, so bottled up, so hateful, maybe none of this would have happened. What a shame such horrors had to take place before I could feel again.

  A shame for her, perhaps, but not for the readers. Because the moral dilemma Reva must confront in her evolution as a character forms the heart of Silent Night. Stine rotates his chapters among varying points of view, mostly Reva’s and her cousin Pam’s. This has the effect of giving us not just Reva’s conniving, twisted actions, but also the ultimate upshot of those actions, leading to both death and incarceration. The answers aren’t easy. Redemption comes with a price.

  Contemporary adult thrillers are no different. The heroes that keep us reading late into the night are often tortured figures haunted by pasts that define their quests for redemption. And for many the road to understanding these heroes was paved by R.L. Stine. It’s not hard to make the argument that the most successful thriller writers of today have survived, even thrived, by reverting to or reinventing, a structure to which their current audience was introduced by Stine.

  Silent Night builds to a climax inside a cavernous department store on Christmas Eve. The store is closed and deserted, leaving Reva to confront her nemesis and her own moral failings. This comes in the aftermath of a botched robbery of the store by some friends for whom she secured jobs, with tragic consequences.

  “You can’t do this to people, Reva!” a boy she scorned accuses at one point.

  In point of fact, she already has, but it’s doubtful she’ll do so again. She has succeeded in saving, at least salvaging, her own world. And, ultimately, that is what all thrillers are about.

  “How do teenagers today view books?” Going asks in Writing and Selling the YA Novel. “And are we doing all we can to keep them reading?”

  Well, R.L. Stine certainly is. Between the time I write this essay and when it’s published, another ten million or so of his books will be sold to young people who will eventually turn to adult thrillers to keep them reading into the dark hours of the morning when the child in us all is free to run wild.