Thursday Things Tuesday Edition #1
29 September 2020, Tuesday Book Report #1, by Dan McGirt
Welcome to a special Tuesday edition of Thursday Things! This won’t be a regularly scheduled feature, but I have a few ideas for special theme editions of Thursday Things that I may try out from time to time. This week I bring you the Thursday Things Tuesday Book Report!
We don’t cover politics on Thursday Things – it’s a happy zone! – but we all know it’s out there. So in recognition of the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, I want to highlight two election-themed novels that I enjoyed and that you may like too, if you prefer fictional politics to real politics (which often itself seems fictional). Let’s go!
The Hell Candidate by Thomas Luke aka Graham Masterson (1980)
Short version: Presidential candidate is possessed by Satan.
It’s 1980. Mushy moderate Republican senator Hunter Peale has no chance in hell of being elected president. Then, after a strange encounter at a creepy New England farmhouse, Peale becomes a changed man – suddenly confident, strong on national defense, eerily persuasive, and massively popular. He’s soon running away with the election. The story is told by Peale’s aide, Jack Russo, who watches these developments with growing concern. There is something diabolical about Hunter Peale’s rise. There are violent and gory, possibly (definitely!) supernatural, episodes that eliminate his rivals from the race one by one. It all leads to the horrifying realization that the next president of the United States may be possessed by Satan!
This book comes to you straight out of the schlocky horror craze of the late 70s and early 80s. But it’s no churned out potboiler. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a horror potboiler, but well written and wickedly entertaining. I dug my old paperback copy out of the book vault and thought I’d be sharing with you an obscure book you’d have little hope of finding. But I learned a few things about this 40-year-old book in prepping this report for you today.
For instance, I now know ‘Thomas Luke’ is a pseudonym for well-known 70s horror writer Graham Masterson, author of classic chiller The Manitou and its sequels, along with other horror tales like Tengu, Ritual, and many more. Masterson currently writes a mystery series featuring Irish Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire. I knew the name, but I’m not a big horror reader – I picked up The Hell Candidate many years ago for the politics angle.
Masterson is known for lots of graphic sex and gore and The Hell Candidate certainly delivers those – so be warned! It also does a great job of depicting the rising horror of narrator Russo as he realizes something is terribly, terribly wrong with his boss and that the fate of the entire world may is at stake. Remember — this book is set during the Cold War and giving the Devil access to the nuclear codes could make things very hot indeed.
The other thing I learned is that The Hell Candidate was re-released in 2017, with a new introduction by the author, and is available now in both paperback and ebook formats. So The Hell Candidate is ready when you are.
Interface by Stephen Bury aka Neal Stephenson and George F. Jewsbury (1995)
Short version: Presidential candidate who suffered a stroke is revived and remote-controlled through a brain implant.
I’ll go straight to the cover blurb: “There's no way William A. Cozzano can lose the upcoming presidential election. He's a likable midwestern governor with one insidious advantage - an advantage provided by a shadowy group of backers. A biochip implanted in his head hardwires him to a computerized polling system. The mood of the electorate is channeled directly into his brain. Forget issues. Forget policy. Cozzano is more than the perfect candidate. He's a special effect.”
Another book with a pseudonymous author – although this time I did learn a couple of years after reading the book that ‘Stephen Bury’ was really Neal Stephenson and his co-author and uncle, George Jewsbury. (See how they cleverly combined their names? Genius!)
When Interface was released in 1995, the World Wide Web was a new thing, “Dot com” was entering the vocabulary as a noun, The X-Files were at their paranoid peak, and Neal Stephenson was the author of Snow Crash, a novel about our technologically driven dystopian future. Interface perfectly fits that mood. It is set in a nearer near future than Stephenson’s other works – but that was 1995. That nearer near future is much nearer now.
As in The Hell Candidate, we begin with a likeable, moderate politician who undergoes a mysterious transformation. This time instead of demons, it’s brain implants. Midwestern governor William Cozzano suffers a stroke and is the subject of an experimental procedure to embed a chip in his brain that will enable him to regain speech and body control. Wild stuff in 1995! In 2020, it’s even more plausible.
Cozzano runs for president. As the blurb suggests, the chip in his head allows him to be controlled by a shadowy conspiracy. They can control his mood, his language, his rhetoric, by turning a dial. With the help of sophisticated polling and instant audience feedback, they can adjust what he says in real time so that he always perfectly appeals to any audience. Cozzano becomes a seemingly unbeatable candidate. But he is also the unwitting puppet of the behind-the-scenes cabal who plan to extend their control into the White House!
Because this is Neal Stephenson there is an overlarge cast of wordy characters and various meandering subplots. I was working in Washington, DC when this book was published. The authors do get some details of politics right – and others laughably wrong. But the selling point here is the technology and the premise of a remote-controlled candidate. Crazy stuff, right?
I wonder what would happen if the Hell Candidate ran against the Interface candidate? I guess we’ll never know.