Famous for his Repairman Jack and The Adversary series of horror/adventure novels, Wilson morphs his keyboard into a Ouija to write this New Age quest romance.
The Set-Up
Physician Wilbur Cecil Burleigh learns he has an aggressive cancerous tumor in his throat. By chance he meets a former patient whom he did not expect to survive her cancer. She claims a New Age healer named Maya cured her. Although extremely prejudiced against alternative medicine, Burleigh visits the mysterious healer Maya and seeks a cure through her on her terms. She requires him to give away his money and travel with her to Central America to seek healing “tines” hidden by an unknown ancient civilization. The tines are necessary for a cure. He goes, but not without a “Kevorkian kit” to end his life if Maya’s cure doesn’t work.
My Take
Granted, the plot is an old one: guided by a magical or divine being, a hero goes on a quest to learn about the spiritual nature of death and mortality. You’ve seen this story before in Book VI of Virgil’s “Aeneid” or in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” or, more trivially, in Captain Jack Sparrow’s quest for the Fountain of Youth in “Pirates of the Caribbean 4.” I admire Wilson’s sense of invention for mashing up this old plot with “physician heal thyself” and a romance between middle-aged adults. Wilson also gets plus marks from me for writing a New Age story without extraterrestrials, monsters, or ghosts.
Amazon reviewers rate this book across the full range of possible ratings. Half the eighteen reviewers gave the book five stars, but the other half assigned ratings of one, two, three, or four stars. This book with a monstrous but real antagonist--cancer--didn’t appeal to some fans of Wilson’s horror/adventure novels.
I suggest that Wilson’s fans who are disappointed with this book don’t recognize its genre. Looking over the negative reviews on Amazon, I see readers of horror/adventure novels who are hungry for more. They buy this book expecting it to be like his other novels, but it’s not. This novel is a romance with man and woman who can’t stand each other at first ending up as a happy couple. Thus, it’s a romance/adventure and more like a Louis L’Amour novel than a Michael Crichton book. I have to confess that the romance element of the novel sneaked up on me.
Observations
- The romance, especially the sexual element of the romance, runs counter to popular notions of the attractiveness of terminal cancer patients (or of middle-aged people).
- Having a healer named Maya take the hero to the country of the Maya people of Central America causes some confusion with names.
- F. Paul Wilson still practiced medicine when he wrote this book. Even though this work is fiction, Wilson’s obvious interest in mind-over-matter medicine astonished me.
- Wilson did some small amount of research into Maya civilization for this book. His references to the Maya people are respectful. Some of Wilson’s Maya characters are suspicious of the healer, showing that you don’t have to be a scientist to distrust her.
- In my favorite scene in the novel, Burleigh shelters himself from rain and flooding alone in an ancient temple. Many animals from the jungle--even some very large ones--also shelter themselves there.
- The novel does not attribute the mystical tines to the ancient Maya civilization, but to a mysterious pre-Maya people of Central America.
- No discussion of the end of the world in 2012 occurs in this book.
Recommendation
Readers who don’t mind some adventure thrown into tales of spiritual quests or romances will enjoy this book. If every book you like has an alien or a serial killer, stay away.
This review originally appeared on Triond's Bookstove site here.
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