efore we witness, as prologue, the seemingly accidental death of a black teen named Tanesha Evans, we get to learn some tantalizing facts about her life, the central one of which is her involvement in a scandal some seven years earlier. In Claremont, Ore., Tanesha and several peers were involved in a daycare-center child-abuse trial. Surprisingly, all the preschoolers emerged from the experience without any lingering mental scars. In fact, they all still look on their nursery school experience as providing the foundation of their subsequent lives. Under the subverted instructors, they were imprinted with a unique set of values that have since given them a mental and even physical edge over their peers. As we shall discover in bits and pieces over the course of this book, these kids and others around the nation were the subjects of an illicit experiment in honing their innate abilities. But once the secret program was shut down, the kids were set adrift. And now someone is trying to kill them all—singly, or en masse if necessary.
On the periphery, at first, of this unfolding plot is a reporter named Renny Sand. Renny, who is black, works for a huge media conglomerate founded by Alexander Marcus, himself a nationally famous black man. Marcus died in a plane crash several years back, causing Renny some real grief, for Renny had admired the man. But now, at loose ends in his professional life, Renny begins to do some digging into Marcus' past. He starts to uncover some troubling facts about his idol's sexual and personal life. Always surrounded by a squad of bullyboys called the Praetorian Guard, Marcus seems to have left a legacy of evil. Renny's investigative work eventually draws threads between Marcus' empire and the experiment to raise superkids.
Meanwhile, back in Claremont, five children, now teens, enjoy the mutual support afforded by a club persisting since their twisted daycare experience. The focus for our narrative is one boy, Patrick Emory. Despite the rough home life occasioned by stresses between his mother, Vivian, and father, Otis, Patrick and his buddies are well on their way to becoming junior entrepreneurs. Seemingly well adjusted, they lead wholesome, average lives, despite their superior intelligence. But all this changes when they fall afoul of a local motorcycle gang busy manufacturing and selling drugs. Patrick's eventual revenge on these thugs for trouble they've caused his family propels him and his mother to hide out at a summer camp, Lake Charisma, in Arizona. But the seeming refuge is a trap. This camp is the very place that the inheritors of Marcus' schemes—six ex-Praetorians—have selected as the site of a massacre that will eliminate all 50 surviving superkids.
With Renny present as well, the summer camp becomes a battleground, climactically pitting 50 ingenious children against six armed men.
Heinlein's influence hangs heavy
Steven Barnes' new novel is the wildest hodgepodge of genres I've seen in a while. It's a young adult book when it focuses on Patrick and his friends, almost in a Beverly Cleary manner, with bicycle races and campfire get-togethers. When the spotlight is on the bikers and their meth lab (featuring a brutal, over-the-top fistfight between the cyclists and the pumped-up leather boys of a queer bar), it's some kind of Elmore Leonard/Carl Hiaasen/Donald Westlake/James Ellroy noir story. (We get a serial killer thread, too.) When Barnes' attention turns to Tristan D'Angelo, sheriff of Diablo, Ariz., head Praetorian and instigator of the superkid-murder plot, we move into Jim Thompson territory. All the gun talk and rugged-individual material carries us into the libertarian sphere, a la L. Neil Smith. There's Buppie romance in the plotline about Renny Sands falling for Vivian Emory. A Harold-Robbins-type saga about the rise of a corporate giant is lurking in here somewhere. Finally, we get shades of technothriller in the fashion of Ira Levin's The Boys from Brazil (1976).
What the book is not, by any stretch of the imagination, is simon-pure science fiction. Despite SF's long history of dealing with exceptional children (from actual mutants on down to the merely odd), Barnes seems detached from the riffs and frissons traditionally associated with his Midwich cuckoos. And since the book is relentlessly and vigorously mimetic, with a present-day setting, and no technology, it seems in the end a mainstream novel. And that's weird, considering I detect the dead hand of Robert Heinlein at the controls.
Heinlein's influence on the field, 14 years after his death, is stronger than ever. A flock of writers still emulate, for better or worse, his savvy, wisecracking, man-of-the-world tone and approach. (Curiously enough, another Barnes, John, is also in this camp.) And one of Heinlein's most influential stories—or so I believe—is "Gulf." The tale of a secret cabal of supermen bent on saving humanity from itself, "Gulf" seems to me the unacknowledged subtext of Barnes' novel. The children are analogues of the recruits of Heinlein's Kettle Belly Baldwin, but prematurely cut off from their mentor's guidance.
For the most part, Barnes successfully engages the reader with his storytelling, keeping the puzzle suspenseful (although there's an awkward patch in Chapter 69, where he has to clunkily insert information Renny cannot know to complete our understanding of the machinations). His characters are all vivid and feisty, his dialogue true to life, and any preaching is kept to a minimum. A passage in Chapter 9, about Marcus being the white conservative's worst nightmare, strikes me as retro and politically out of date. Nowadays the GOP likes nothing better than to co-opt someone of Marcus' stature, and has historically done so recently. But otherwise, Barnes deserves immense credit for populating his novel with so many strong characters of color.
