Hunter's Moon by David Devereux
Reviewed by Richard Larson
29 May 2007
The world of Hunter's Moon, David Devereux's debut novel, is one of magic, demons, and covert operations, a world in which a group of witches called the Enlightened Sisterhood are planning to assassinate Britain's Prime Minister. The novel's hero, Jack, is a gun-wielding sorcerer secret agent—"a magician by profession and a bastard by disposition" (p. 14)—and is expected to save the day and get the girl, so to speak, in this supernatural thriller. Action, adventure, murder, sex, and torture abound as Jack brazenly navigates the mystery of the Sisterhood's plot, and through all the twists and turns, we see the world through the eyes of the hero as he carries out his mission.
But Jack is not your typical hero. Usually, the hero in this sort of genre fiction has a deep understanding of good and evil and works to make things right in the world; they serve as our moral compass. Jack, however, is more or less along for the ride, defeating people he is told to defeat, and killing, torturing, or otherwise manipulating most of the other characters in the book. While he is obviously very good at his job, he's missing any sense of social responsibility; he just wants a drink and a pretty lady at the end of the day, like any self-respecting wage slave, and doesn't care who he has to hurt to reach this objective.
This all changes with the arrival of Annie, Jack's partner for his current mission, a rookie in the secret government organization they work for who has gone undercover and infiltrated the ranks of the Enlightened Sisterhood to provide Jack with much-needed information about the Sisterhood's current endeavors. Jack feels protective of her at first, and as their relationship deepens he even ends up in bed with her, and so he is pained—against his better wishes, of course—when she becomes brainwashed by the leader of the Sisterhood, a dangerous ex-CIA agent with a penchant for mind control named Candace Alder. Subsequently Annie disappears, presumably to help the Sisterhood with their mission to kill the Prime Minister. Even her attempt to murder Jack (when he has arrived to rescue her) does not dissuade him from continuing to try to save her while he simultaneously stops the Sisterhood from carrying out their mission.
It is Jack's desire to save Annie that drives the action in the latter half of Hunter's Moon, which would otherwise be a simple procedural of a highly competent agent systematically overpowering the group of women he has been assigned to eliminate. "Getting Annie out would be the challenge, though," Jack notes (p. 90), thus raising the stakes and preparing the reader for a quest that even our infallible hero has no precedent for. And infallible he is: Devereux does little to show that Jack is human, choosing instead to impress us with Jack's power and his astounding ability to get out of every situation without even a scratch while those around him fail miserably, and suffer for it. Even during a climactic face-to-face with Candace Alder, Jack only appears to become victim to her mind control tactics which have proven all-powerful for everyone else that she has unleashed them on. He suddenly breaks free and turns the tables of this confrontation, which should have been his major trial—during which we would see him suffer and then dramatically overcome his circumstances. His escape here is almost miraculous, earning our respect but maybe not our interest.
The fact that Jack's objective is to eliminate a group of women is no accident. Hunter's Moon ultimately presents an imbalanced conflict between men and women, introducing us to a hyper-masculine hero who demonizes women, manipulating them and torturing them and killing them. At one point Jack is even aroused after torturing one of the members of the Sisterhood, as though violence is his most intimate form of communication with women, an expression of sexual desire through a process of forceful domination. And when torturing another member of the Sisterhood, Jack notices "tears in her eyes as panic started to grip her. The combination of helplessness and suggestions was starting to play on basic fears from childhood: being alone, getting hurt and monsters in the dark—in this case the classic fairy-tale wolf" (p. 157). Even Jack sees himself as a monster, bent on extracting the very souls (sometimes literally) of his female victims.
Hunter's Moon explores the suppression of female will by masculine forces. Jack is at his best with women when simply engaging in consensual sex, but even then the relationship is strictly physical, one of giving and receiving, just the utilization and casting aside of the female body without concern for the individual. Jack's boss gives him a simple command early in the novel: "Find these women, and stop them" (p. 104). This establishes the game as one of men against women, rightful power against rebellious dissent, a game of masculinity versus femininity in its crudest form: a male hero fighting a seemingly helpless cast of female villains, none of whom ever pose much of a threat to him. Only in his relationship with Annie do we see Jack show any real respect toward women, but it is fleeting and he is constantly justifying it, as though he is embarrassed and annoyed about caring for her. Jack is ultimately motivated by a fear of women, a desire to keep them submissive to him so as to retain his position of power, so when he is ultimately captured by the Sisterhood and his fate is in question, it seems as though female vengeance will finally be enacted—and this shift in power, more than any physical threat, nearly ruins him. But because he has been tested and nearly dominated by female forces, Devereux rewards his masculine hero with a "fantasy payback" (p. 179), even as Jack is haunted by Candace in his dreams.
In his investigations, Jack finds that the Sisterhood is really just a group of women brainwashed by Candace in order for her to carry out her personal political agenda. We begin to see Jack under a similar influence in the organization that he works for. The opening of the novel explains how he got involved with the group: "They said I had a talent, that I was smart enough and fit enough and enough of a shit that I could serve my country in a way most people never even get to hear about. And I did want to serve my country, didn't I?" (p. 14). He has convinced himself that it was always his choice, when really he has been following orders all along, completing missions because someone else wanted them completed. Throughout the novel he invents names for himself, assuming new identities and lying about where he came from; "not that far from the truth, which is always the best kind of lie" (p. 161) is an effective description of Jack's ongoing process of self-invention. In the end we are left with a character who has spent so much time trying to conceal his identity that we begin to wonder if he ever really had one at all.
Comments
Having recently read this, mainly out of curiosity due to a vague and indirect connection with the author, I don't think this review is quite fair. I'm not suggesting that the book is any good; rather that it's far, far worse in every respect than the review implies.
For starters, the book opens with a ludicrously ham-fisted prologue in which the "hero" casually conjures up a poorly-described generic demon to defeat some anonymous baddies which not implies high-octane action of a kind we don't get at all, but in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the book. Also, it's clearly meant to evoke the prologues to the James Bond movies. The difference being that James Bond may be a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur", but he's not a psychopathic pervert who is sexually aroused by torturing and murdering women. And that's quite a big difference.
The rabid misogyny of this book is such that anybody who enjoys it probably ought to seek professional help. One major plot-point, which, given the crude and careless nature of the writing throughout, is probably straight from the author's subconscious rather than a lumpen stab at irony, involves the "hero" being delighted - and indeed aroused - to be witness the sex-and-drugs-based torture by the agency he works for of a female captive. Yet when at the end of the book exactly the same thing happens to him, it's presented as the ultimate evil because a woman is doing it to a man rather than the other way round.
Even his relationship with a female agent on the same side as himself, which is presumably a clumsy attempt to give him at least one redeeming feature, is extremely unpleasantly portrayed. They end up in bed not because he likes her, but because she has succumbed to the mind-control tricks of the evil female characters (which of course he, as a man, is ultimately able to resist), and uses her special female spy tantric sex training to seduce even him. Thus his feelings for her and his inability to forget her after she inevitably pays for her feminine weakness with her life come across as the consequences of a cunning plot by women to worm their way into his ultra-macho soul and thus undermine him, rather than evidence of any actual spark of humanity.
By the way, the scene in which a British government agency torture their captive is lifted directly from the TV movie "Callan" starring Edward Woodward. The difference is that in the film, the agency subjects a male character to horrible but non-sexual procedures because they aren't willing to casually murder a prisoner but need to erase his memory somehow; and the protagonist who is responsible for the victim's plight is disgusted by what he has been forced to do.
In contrast, "Jack" (would his second name, if he had one, by any chance be "Ripper"?) revels in his license to do anything he wishes to anyone the British government doesn't like. At one point, having brutalised a female captive, he hesitates over whether he should kill her, but spares her life not through pity, but because it's entirely up to him whether she lives or dies, and this time his godlike whim is to let her live. She is then taken off in a van to be subjected to some hideous reprogramming method (also lifted from that scene in Callan) which will almost certainly either kill her or condemn her to living death as a drooling vegetable.
The worst of it is that Devereux clearly thinks that his awful anti-hero really is the good guy. Painfully clumsy perfunctory attempts are made to supply him with redeeming features. He plays blues guitar at pub gigs - hey, the man's got music in his soul so he must be OK! And, in that laziest of action movie clichés, he's got a best buddy who's black. I've never been quite sure why not being a racist somehow excuses all other character defects, but Hollywood and David Devereux both think so.
By the way, this buddy - clearly DD's idea of the ideal male friend - is a CIA man (the Felix Leiter to Jack's Bond) who has killed even more people than he has - hundreds, in fact - and owns a nightclub in which gorgeous, utterly compliant and therefore non-threatening women lie about in scantily clad heaps and are casually offered to favoured guests.
Quite apart from the nastiness, there's a great deal of writing that's just plain inept. Jack visits a crappy little junk shop, explaining to the reader that every object in the place is deliberately worthless in order to deter casual customers, because it's just a front for something completely different and totally illegal. He then tries to make the owner talk by the time-honoured method of smashing the valuable antiques which the author has forgotten didn't exist one paragraph ago, because that's what tough guys always do to intimidate shopkeepers. And then he beats and seriously injures him anyway, presumably because he's not getting sufficiently turned on by damaging inanimate objects.
Also, Jack is supposed to be both a super-tough conventional master-spy and special forces soldier, and a kick-ass magician. This means that we get a lengthy description of how he uses SAS surveillance techniques to spy on his intended targets which serves no real purpose except to allow the author to talk about manly things like SAS operational procedures in boring detail. Then later in the book it is suddenly revealed that he can casually make himself invisible for purposes as banal as climbing over a cemetery wall in the middle of the night when there's nobody about anyway. And the mastery of lethal magic implied in the forward is completely dumped in favour of loving descriptions of Jack killing his female victims with knives, his bare hands, or by poisoning their sex-toys (I'm not making this up!) because he and the author both think that's a whole lot more fun.
By the way, it should be noted that the main villains thoroughly deserve to be mercilessly slaughtered because they're not just witches, they're commie lesbian witches. Seriously. This is not intended as a joke. By the way, they're also in league with Al-Qaeda. It is never explained why a bunch of fanatical Islamists would ally themselves with people whose politics are severely at odds with theirs, and whose sexuality and religion are morally unacceptable to Islam, but anyway, for the thinnest and most barely-explained of reasons, they do, just so that our hero can slaughter deadly Arab terrorists as well as scary women (though the terrorists feature very briefly and are dispatched very quickly compared to the loving descriptions of the women's deaths).
It should also be noted that DD is so clearly in love with his hero that until the very end of the book, he constantly forgets that the hero of a thriller ought to encounter numerous difficulties, instead of just breezing along effortlessly wiping out his enemies because he's so wonderful.
The McGuffin - a supposed plot to use the combined forces of terrorism and Wicca to assassinate the Prime MInister - never comes to fruition and is casually raised and then brushed aside in a few sentences because generating real tension by having the hero race against time to save the target at the last moment - or perhaps fail - is both far more difficult and much less fun for the author than describing helpless women being stabbed and tortured because that's what they deserve for being lesbians.
Oh, and there's one section that would have made me laugh if it had been in a different book. Our hero, who is a super-well-trained spy and has already shown considerable expertise in the use of drugs and torture to interrogate and re-program prisoners in very sophisticated ways, encounters the word "brainwashing" and, like many hypothetical readers stupid enough to be enjoying a book like this, has absolutely no idea what it can possibly mean.
So he phones up his HQ, and a man who isn't called Basil Exposition but should have been comes round to his flat and delivers an extremely long lecture on the exact definition of brainwashing and the entire history of its development which goes on for an entire chapter, and is clearly lifted straight from wikipedia, He then walks out, never to to be mentioned again.
I kept reading out of horrified fascination as to whether any book could possibly keep up this level of dreadfulness all the way through, and because it's a rather short book. I am delighted to report that it stays equally dreadful until just before the end, and then it gets much, much worse.
Avoid this book and presumably anything else written by this very sick man like a plague of lesbian commie witches.
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