Cortex and 'Spark'

In a dark future that may be too close for comfort, John Twelve Hawks exposes the seven most effective habits of killers who are dead.

Spark

by John Twelve Hawks

Doubleday, 320pp., $25.95

The thriller genre thrills most effectively when a protagonist is both running away from something that's hard to escape and running toward something else that's hard to track down. Harlan Ellison noted this with vituperative accuracy in one of his Glass Teat essays decades ago, and here we see that truth borne out yet again – but in a novel that works its material in the manner of a dark cautionary tale, and with a protagonist unlike any other.

In John Twelve Hawks' Spark, set in a dystopian future just a few years down the temporal block, our hero is a man named, ostensibly, Jacob Underwood, and he's suffering Cotard's Syndrome. That mean he believes himself to be dead. A motorcycle accident has compromised if not fully destroyed part of his brain, and now he, although sentient and ambulatory and in fact able to function as a highly efficient assassin-for-hire, honestly thinks he is other than "alive" as it pertains to most humans. He feels no emotions other than curiosity, boredom, and disgust. He kills, under contract, to sustain what he calls his Shell – the body in which resides his Spark.

And what he's caught up in now, in this book – which is surely just the first in a series from the secretive author of The Traveler – he's caught up in a vast conspiracy, naturally, that helped lead to the police-state level of hi-tech surveillance gripping the world. And what he's up against are a few of the key people in power, whose control is now threatened by a MacGuffin that Underwood knows the approximate whereabouts of. But what he's learning, in this narrative, is that maybe the people he's up against are also some subset of the same organization that hired him.

We've seen this sort of thing before, of course, in any number of spy movies, in any of a seemingly infinite number of ludlums on our parents' shelves. But author Twelve Hawks isn't just goosing rigmarole here: It's the contrasts between (and resonances among) Underwood's mostly emotionless killer and the other, supposedly alive and human but demonstrably uncaring people – not to mention a few non-conscious-but-seemingly-intelligent robots – that gives this tale a depth beyond the usual. It's what Underwood is learning about himself, as he becomes deeper involved in the treachery and its possible solutions, as his brain struggles to repair itself, that makes the reading worthwhile.

(Well, the cautionary tale part, too. For those of us who would rather die fighting, to paraphrase Trent Reznor, than give Them control.)

And there's the gist for you: This Spark is a darkly futuristic thriller; it's also a bit of worthwhile reading for when you've got the time. Before the terrorists win. Before the machines take over. Before you're dead.