Disposable Lit Reviews

Northwest Publishing, Inc., 1996
216 pp.
ISBN 0-7610-0032-1
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Even before I did my homework and confirmed it, I was pretty sure that now-defunct Salt Lake City publisher Northwest Publishing, Inc. was a vanity press. The first clue was the diverse/eclectic subject matter of the books they’d put out: Political thrillers, science fiction and fantasy novels, collections of short’n'pointed essays, religious commentaries, and lots of others. Small publishers that pay their authors can’t afford the shotgun approach; they have to occupy a niche by region or subject matter in order to survive.

The second clue was that so many of their books sucked mightily.

Not that that’s unusual in the books I review around here. But the suckitude of NPI books is different than the suckitude of a bored, uncommitted, in-it-for-the-money hack. No, these are works of sincere suckitude. The suspense-thrillers are all written to dramatize a deeply-held personal belief as to what’s wrong in the world. The political and religious commentaries are meant to wake up the reader to something that the author feels is vitally important. (In fact, the title of one such political essay collection is I Hold These Truths: Wake Up America! [sic].) The wholehearted devotion that these writers bear for their subject matter is so consuming, so paradigm-informing, that it completely blinds them to the fact that they can’t write well enough to satisfy the tastes of even the most undemanding reader (who isn’t related to them, of course). Thus, when no reputable publisher (wisely) will consent to take on their manuscript, they forge ahead and shell out a few thousand bucks to make their voices heard.

(How do I know so much about the books NPI put out? A few years ago, the NPI owners had gotten shut down by a criminal investigation for taking their authors’ money, up to $10,000 per book, and using it as their personal pizza fund. I got to know their books when their entire inventory showed up by the crateload at Desert Industries thrift stores, going for ten cents apiece.)

The novel specifically under discussion today, Rogue Planet, is the story of one Phil Deveroux, a firefighter/paramedic (an occupation coincidentally shared by the author), on the Michigan/Canada border for a scuba-diving vacation (a hobby coincidentally shared by the author), in the far-flung future of 1998. He and his wife start getting bothered by UFOs, a subject he knows quite a bit about (a knowledge coincidentally shared by the author), and he begins to realize that it’s all a part of the Earth Changes predicted by Edgar Cayce, with whose writings he’s very familiar (a familiarity coincidentally… ah, skip it).

As far as I’m concerned, most New Age belief systems are hopeless mishmashes of disparate beliefs and philosophies, held together by a cultivated anti-rationalism and hinging on nonsensical buzzwords like “vibrational attunement”. Having these same beliefs given flesh in a fictional narrative (which, thanks to the idea of dramatic structure, is supposed to make more sense than real life) would probably be a better antidote to New Age leanings than any rationalist diatribe. The book certainly makes the current spate of vicious fundamentalist Christian end-time fantasies seem almost competent by comparison.

All of which might be swallowable if, in contrast to the risible Earth Changes predictions being portrayed, Jodouin had any talent for characterization, dialogue, or even simple English sentences. Alas, we instead have a book in which Phil and his wife are constantly having earth-shattering experiences (literally, by the end) which leave them stunned and apoplectic for about five minutes before they shrug them off and go back to scuba-diving or making dinner. Just as well, I suppose; had they concentrated their minds on the sequence of events around them, they would have realized that nothing makes a lick of sense. The characters are all cardboard cutouts with the unprinted backside turned to face the front, nonreactive stand-ins to whom all of this stuff can happen, and their dialogue is fully as stiff and corrugated as their cardboard selves.

In fact, when the Space Brothers showed up halfway through the book to tell Phil that he’s been chosen to “evolve one step higher on the earth plane” so that he can be a teacher for those who survive the “major shifting of [the Earth's] axis” to “realign itself into proper vibrational harmony with the other planets” and correct “the polarization of your planet” because “human consciousness is out of synchronization with the life energies of Earth,” I was ready realign my own harmonic disunity by throwing the book across the room. (Never have so many latinate words been used to say so little.)

If there’s a conclusion to be reached (heaven knows, the novel never reached any), it’s this:

This is not a sign of quality. And sincerity just isn’t an adequate substitute.

Nathan Shumate