To her, his job began and ended with supplying rich, empty people with poor, desperate victims. She only looked at the negative side of his job--never saw the good side, the kindness and help it let him give....the dust addicts who wanted and needed another chance; the working people who had sunk all their earnings into paying for the memory crystals; the victims of disease whose bodies were no more than mockeries of the human form; none of them would have had any hope of reconstruction if it weren't for procurers.Someone's collection of 1970s and 1980s SF paperbacks ended up at the Goodwill in Middletown, MD, and I recently came upon it. Lots of Fred Pohl and Poul Anderson, as well as other authors you've heard of, solid representatives of the respectable mainstream of SF, both the pinko end of the spectrum and the libertarian end, people who care about science, history, economics, politics, and actually know about that stuff. Not to take anything away from Pohl or Anderson, I found more intriguing, more strange and mysterious, a bunch of books by people I'd never heard of (or forgotten--I have a bad memory), books that looked like they were novels about future dystopias that are full of sex, or maybe novels full of sex that are about future dystopias. Either way, I got five of those for one dollar each. One dollar! A bargain, even if the covers are marred by those $0.99 stickers.
My copy doesn't smell too bad, so I'm going to read this book the way people read books in 1980, turning the pages with my own hands. You can read like a 21st-century person by clicking the links to a scan of Crystal Phoenix at the internet archive here or here.
From Chapter 1, we know we're reading a book that is totally insane when we meet olive-skinned, 213-centimeter-tall Oleo. Oleo tortures people to death for fun, either jerking off with one hand while he flays them alive with the other or fucking them while keeping a hand free to hold a pistol with which to shooting them in the head just as he is about to achieve orgasm. Equipping himself with a glove that has needles in its palm, he sets out from his home, which is furnished with coffins and electric chairs, for a bit of fun. But first he takes a minute to record his mind in his crystal--if he gets killed tonight, his mind will be uploaded in a new body and he'll still, sort of, be alive, only having lost a few hours.
Over the next few chapters we meet a bunch more unsavory characters and learn how this insane future world operates. We've got Dennis the "procurer," who operates out of Bentwell's. We've got the disgustingly obese Bentwell, who runs a night club where people meet to drink, drug, have sex and hire the services of procurers like Dennis. Dennis has a wife, Kira, who thinks Dennis' job is a disgrace, and whom Bentwell is always pursuing, groping her when she gets drunk and high. Dennis also has to deal with rival procurers, the married couple Frank and Mara, inferior operators who blame Dennis for stealing their clients and angels. In these early chapters of Crystal Phoenix Mara tries to steal a potential angel, Warren, from Dennis.
"Angels" are people who enjoy abusing and killing people--Oleo is an angel, and Warren, an office clerk who lives in a slum apartment with his fat wife, aspires to become one. A procurer's clients are people who are, for whatever reason, tired of their current bodies and want to have their minds uploaded to a new body created in a lab that looks just like them at a healthy 25. This whole "reconstruction" process is expensive, so many people contact a procurer who hooks them up with an angel--the angel pays to rape or torture or whatever the client and ultimately kill him or her, and the client gets enough money from the deal to have his or her most recent save state uploaded from his or her crystal to a new body. Obviously, the procurer gets a percentage. Wealthy people like Oleo kill again and again and again, become addicted to the thrill, while less affluent types like Warren save up and only kill somebody once in their lifetimes. Another such wealthy angel is Mary, a sixteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a rich and powerful couple of businesspeople who are also angels who work with Dennis--each member of this prominent family regularly pays Dennis to connect her or him to somebody they can legally torture and kill, but keeps this habit a secret from the other two. When Mom and Dad cut off Mary's allowance, Mary comes to Dennis as a client so she can make the money she wants by being killed.
This society is obsessed with untimely, violent death. People pay to watch the angels torture and slay the clients. In Chapter 4 we see how Dennis relaxes--by strapping on a dream helmet and living out a scenario in which he rides a roller coaster which malfunctions and kills the riders, including him. Dennis believes he loves Kira, but when he is angry at her, when they have an argument, he has elaborate fantasies of murdering her. While all moat of our characters are upper middle-class, there are apparently lots of slums full of impoverished people who murder each other.
Adding to the stress of this future world in which everybody is obsessed with death is the fact that jobs are hard to find and so businesses can dock your pay for the smallest inefficiencies and fire you at will. Warren's job offers as one of its perks a crystal for him and one for his fat spouse who hates him, making it imperative he not lose his job. Another source of stress is class distinctions reflected in fashion choices. Fashions change in intervals as short as a month, and wealthy people have to keep up with the fashions or lose face. Warren, who is just a clerk, wears his latest suit to Bentwell's and almost everyone ignores him because his clothes indicate he is a nobody. (Warren has a cousin in show biz who leant him his membership card to Bentwell's.) Berlyn does a little satire of fashions at the time he was writing, having the disgusting Frank wear a polo shirt with a little crocodile on it even though he doesn't really know what a crocodile is, a reference to preppies and Izod/Lacoste shirts.
OK, the plot. Oleo is a stockbroker and makes lots of dough. He hires Frank's services and rapes and kills a teenaged girl; Frank, being essentially incompetent, screws up the paperwork and can't pay his fee at Bentwell's, so Dennis pays it for him, which Frank, who is already brainstorming ways to put Dennis out of business so he can pick up Dennis' angels and enjoy less competition for clients, takes as an insult. Meanwhile, Oleo has a problem. He killed a girl like five years ago, absolutely legally, but the girl's father has come out of the woodwork and wants revenge. Worried this guy might murder him, Oleo contacts Frank to see if Frank will preemptively murder the bitter father.
Halfway through the novel, somewhat abruptly, Kira and Dennis's troubled marriage seems to be revived when Kira convinces Dennis to quit being a procurer by insisting they go to a shopping mall and look down at the glassed-in bit of nature where he proposed to her--overcome by nostalgia about the happy days before Dennis took on the job of procurer, they have the best sex in years and he agrees to quit. But first he has to settle Mary's case, hook her up with an angel with lots of money so she can score a profit from being raped and killed. He settles on Oleo, an angel with whom he has worked before.
Mara and Frank win Warren as an angel, stealing him away from Dennis, largely because Kira, the procurer-hater, interfered with the deal Dennis was trying to make with Warren. Then comes our big horror/fetishistic sex scene--Frank tricks Dennis into watching as Oleo and Warren torture, rape and murder Kira, burning her alive as the finale. In return for Oleo's help in torturing Kira (Oleo is the best torturer in town, it appears), they provide that embittered and vengeful father to Oleo. Mara plotted out this whole thing, and Frank realizes how clever, how dangerous, she is, and begins to think he has to kill her, and probably torture expert Oleo and torture neophyte Warren as well.
The depths of Mara's diabolical plot become apparent to us readers as the final third of the novel begins. She kidnapped Kira but set things up so that Kira Number 2, after Kira's most recently saved consciousness was uploaded into a fresh 25-year old clone of her body, would believe she had volunteered to be raped and killed while Dennis watched as a way to spice up their sex life. This is the lie the doctors tell her, the lie they think is fact because of forged legal documents Mara got from an ex-husband from an earlier incarnation who now is a government administrator. (The Mara in this novel is like Mara Number 4.) Luckily for Dennis, Kira doesn't believe this lie, even though her last crystal save was before the shopping mall, before Dennis promised to quit being a procurer, before their marriage was rejuvenated. Unfortunately, he has to try to rejuvenate their marriage again, even though it was she who rejuvenated it the first time, and it isn't easy, and it doesn't help that he keeps remembering watching her burned to death by Oleo--in this future world people use drugs all the time, and when Dennis drinks "mescanol" and looks at Kira he has hallucinations that she is burning even as she is sitting there talking to him.
Dennis again promises to quit procuring, and again says he has to finish up some business. But this time that business includes getting revenge on the people who murdered Kira! First, he gets Warren fired from his job; Warren blames Frank and goes to confront Frank and is gunned down by a trigger-happy associate of Frank's. (Just a couple of weeks after driving Dennis out of the business, Mara and Frank, on the brink of bankruptcy at the start of the novel, are now big wigs with a big entourage, having gotten all of Dennis' former angels, apparently due to Mara's skillful operating, not that of dullard Frank--Mara didn't hire the trigger happy goofball, Frank did without consulting her.)
Next comes Oleo. Berlyn wraps up Mary's fate off screen, telling us that, in Dennis' absence, she ended up getting Oleo as an angel--uh oh, Oleo hates Mary's family for business reasons. Oleo the sadist tortured Mary with a knife while updating her crystal so that she, in her new body, will remember the pain and terror of being carved up. How Oleo got a hold of Mary's crystal, when she lives with her rich parents, is left unexplained. Dennis breaks into Oleo's house and sabotages Oleo's crystal so it kills him and erases itself when Oleo tries to use it, killing him permanently. In a world whose culture revolves around killing people you'd think wealthy people like Mary's parents and Oleo would have better security, but breaking and entering and kidnapping are childishly easy in this novel.
Dennis has an elaborate plan to drug Mara and Frank and toss them in a swimming pool of sulfuric acid; he even has an old book about fighting techniques, weapons, drugs and acids that he consults, and Berlyn includes passages from this book in the text, for some reason. But then Dennis just junks the plan after finding it difficult to locate a suitable pool and acquire the drugs and acid. I find it annoying when fiction includes these kinds of abortive plans--I spent page after page reading about this plan and it was for nothing? Maybe Berlyn had to pad out the length of the book here. A similar frustrating thing Berlyn does a few times in the novel is lead us to believe that Kira is going to leave Dennis and then perfunctorily reveal that no, that is not what Kira is thinking at all. Maybe that is supposed to make us readers realize Dennis is bad at reading other people, or at least reading his wife.
Anyway, Dennis captures Frank and Mara and takes them out to the country. Mara tries to seduce him and Dennis grabs her by the ankles, spins in place so Mara is whipping around in a circle above the ground, and hits her head against a tree so her blood and brains splatter all over. Maybe this was supposed to be funny? Dennis tricks Frank into thinking he and Frank can be friends now that the evil Mara is out of the way. Frank helps Dennis dig a grave and toss Mara in, and then Dennis breaks Frank's legs and buries him alive with Mara's body.
In the final chapter it seems like Kira and Dennis will stay together, but uneasily--Dennis still sees and smells Kira burning when he looks at her, and while he is no longer going to be a procurer, he will still be in that evil world, working as Bentwell's partner, still indirectly profiting from the whole angel business. Dennis has killed a bunch of people, and Kira has died and been reborn, physically better but psychologically worse than before, but their relationship is right back where it was when we met them in Chapter 2, he doing a job she will, presumably, find degrading and immoral, in proximity to the fat disgusting Bentwell and all kinds of desperate wretches and noxious killer perverts.
"Crystal Phoenix" isn't terrible. It is an easy read, as the sentences are short and straightforward and the chapters are similarly brief and direct. The setting is sort of interesting, the plot more or less works, and the crazy stuff that goes on is a little shocking, which keeps you reading as you wonder what crazy thing will happen next. Unfortunately, the most shocking bit is in the first chapter, on the second page; all the killing and torture after that is a little bit of a let down.
One of the good things Berlyn does in Crystal Phoenix is describe this world in its own terms--he doesn't tell you that all the stuff going on is revolting and evil, he lets it speak for itself. The business with the angels and killing and torturing people so they can finance their rebirth in cloned bodies of themselves is treated by the characters in the novel the way people in our own world treat issues like abortion, sex change drugs and surgery for minors, and affirmative action: lots of people just casually accept this stuff as a normal part of the landscape, plenty of people passionately fight for these things as essential to a just society, and plenty of people find these things revolting and monstrous injustices that must be ended, and these three types of people try to coexist.
The characters and their relationships in Crystal Phoenix are not great. Dennis' character feels all over the place--is he a normal guy of this world who loves his wife and wants to make his marriage work, or is he some kind of criminal genius who knows how to manipulate the system and outwit dangerous criminals and who is always on the verge of beating up his annoying wife? In the start of the novel I just thought he was one of many procurers, a regular joe procurer, but as things go on I guess we are supposed to see him as the best procurer, one of very few at Bentwell's, a top dog whose success dominates the market and makes things hard for people like Mara and Frank. Or maybe that is just in dim-witted and envious Frank's head? The way Dennis skillfully kills off all his enemies in the last quarter of the book comes as sort of a surprise, because earlier in the book he doesn't run any complicated operations or anything--in fact, he is screwing up his relationships with everybody. (One of the smarter things Berlyn does with Dennis' character is hint that he and Frank are really the same kind of person--we see Frank consider killing Mara, Oleo and Warren, and then we see Dennis actually do it.)
Another character issue is how so many minor characters pop into view to fulfill some plot requirement and then are dropped--examples include the rich girl Mary, the bitter and vengeful father of one of Oleo's victims, Mara's ex-husband, and the trigger happy guy who shoots Warren down.
Crystal Phoenix is tolerable. It is more like a crime novel in a bizarre setting than a traditional science-fiction novel. In a classic-style SF novel the protagonist would start out ignorant of some astounding fact, learn that fact, and then lead or at least witness a paradigm shift--Kira would convince Dennis that the whole angel and reconstruction business was evil and he would launch or join a revolution leading to a liberal democratic or socialist dictatorship regime that would end the angels and make crystals and cloning available to all or to none. As it is, the novel describes a circle--Dennis and Kira are firmly enmeshed in a wacky society and have a troubled marriage and at the end after an adventure full of trauma and death they are still enmeshed in the same wacky society and still in their troubled marriage. Maybe we should see this book, published in 1980, as a product of 1970s pessimism and as a representative of the elite intellectual class's hostility to American prosperity and consumerism, signaled by the satire of shopping malls, Izod/Lacoste polo shirts, and quick changing fashions. (Michael Berlyn, contributor to Accolade's Snoopy's Game Club and Bend Studio's Columbo's Mystery Capers, doesn't have to be a member of the intellectual elite to ape their pronouncements.)
Will I read any more of the five novels I bought at Goodwill this recent weekend? The three novels by Mark Adlard appear to be a series, and I don't know if I want to embark on a series, even if this series looks to be more popular and respectable than my other two Goodwill finds (Crystal Phoenix has never been reprinted.) So probably of this Goodwill haul we'll next experience Rick DeMarinis' Scimitar. Is there any chance Scimitar is about Islam? We may soon know.
