A "review" of Michael Warren Lucas - Immortal Clay

Michael W. Lucas writes very good technical books. They hit that rare sweet spot between dry, abstract classroom theory and rote copy-and-paste that gives you practical examples as well as enough background on the subject to inform you as to why you would want to do it his way. His guides are invaluable, especially with complex subjects like ZFS, which is no mere file system but rather an amorphous stack of cooperating storage technologies and principals. It's a godsend to have a concise explanation handed to you that foregoes much of the academics and gives you usable, real-world guidance.

What I'm trying to say that Michael W. Lucas can write tech books. But what about fiction?

Lucas writes his fiction under the name Michael Warren Lucas, presumably to separate it from his fact. He ran a sale on some of his titles earlier this year and encouraged me to try his ostensibly horror-ish title Immortal Clay. So I did.

Admittedly, I approached this story with a fair amount of trepidation. A good writer cannot necessarily write everything equally well and I've suffered a number of authors who felt brave enough to try to genre hop before they were ready. Nonetheless, a low e-book price was encouraging and if I didn't like the book, I wouldn't be out too much. Immortal Clay describes itself as what would happen if The Thing from John Carpenter's The Thing had won. This was a good sign.

You know The Thing. Researchers in Antarctica find a dog that is really a shapeshifting alien that eats living organisms and creates perfect clones of them. Kurt Russell fights it with a flamethrower. But that's where The Thing's story ends, and that is more or less where Immortal Clay picks up.

I was ambivalent about this because it's very easy to conjure up a "what if" concept and very difficult to deliver a complex story based on it. There is a wonderful short story about the events of The Thing told from The Thing's perspective. It would be hard to top that.

Fortunately, any concerns I may have had about Lucas's ability to deliver on the promise of his premise were allayed by the end of the first chapter. This is a book that starts with the end of the world and just keeps going from there. When a space alien that perfectly clones life forms finally conquers the planet, you wouldn't think there would be much more of a story to tell. You'd be wrong.

Our protagonist dies in the prologue. Or rather, the alien duplicate that is our protagonist is copied from a person who dies in the prologue. It possesses all of his physical characteristics and behaviors, and retains all of his memories. He was a police detective before he was eaten and the alien copy keeps his inherent desire for justice, even if he now lives in a bizarre realm where there really is no longer any specific system of law anymore. How do you solve crimes, even murders, when you aren't completely sure if alien-copied things can be killed?

Immortal Clay is not pure horror, per se. It is a post-apocalyptic suburban mystery novel. It certainly draws inspiration from The Thing, and James Gunn's Slither, but it has as much in common with Jean-Paul Sartre and Tim Burton as it does to Raymond Chandler. Our hero is just as confused as Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are at the start of Beetlejuice, stuck in their home and unsure of their fates until they find their guidebook for the afterlife. You remember it: it reads like stereo instructions. Our hero doesn't get the benefit of a book or a grizzled social worker to spell it out for him, so he asks himself some compelling philosophical questions without always getting answers. Turns out if an alien eats your homeworld and spits out perfect copies of everything, those copies will have a lot of psychological problems and, oh by the way, all the old rules of what constitutes "alive" and "dead" are right out the window.

Immortal Clay is a fun romp through a community of quote-unquote "survivors" with quirky personalities blended with real survival problems trying to make the best they can after the most absurd of unnatural disasters has ruined their planet. They are left to pick up the pieces and try to put them back together, even if there's no instruction manual. It has some genuinely horrific imagery and some genuinely emotionally harrowing moments, especially around our not-really "survivors" having very real survivors' guilt.

The mystery portions of the story are well-paced and Lucas avoids the contrivance of an oh-I'm-so-clever Agatha Christie denouement. It's a good old-fashioned whodunnit, with the added complications of "mass extinction" and "civilization was eaten by a space monster" thrown in to keep things interesting. I found myself unable to put this story down once I'd picked it up. Lucas's fiction style leans towards short, brutally plot-propelling chapters that break the action up into even, fitting scenes, and he clearly pays very strict deference to his outline. Even at 51 chapters, it's a quick read. The plot never lags and there is no unnecessarily flowery "let me prove to you I have a thesaurus" prose. Our protagonist never spends, for no discernible reason, scores of pages describing in agonizing detail how he eats a bowl of cereal. He's got a crime to solve, dammit, and he's going to solve it or die trying.

If he can die, that is. He isn't certain he can be killed.

But someone is trying to figure it out for him for sure. Or rather, some Thing.