Jeff Mariotte may not have lived in Arizona when he wrote 'The Slab', residing in San Diego at the time as a co-owner of the Mysterious Galaxy bookshop, but he lives here now and he's a mainstay of the local author community. I've read a few of Jeff's dark thrillers before, like “Cold Black Hearts” and “River Runs Red,” though none recently enough to have reviewed them at the Nameless Zine, so it's about time I tackled another one and I've long admired the cover of this, at least the IDW first edition from 2003.

It's an interesting one because of how it goes about its business. It's a novel but it doesn't play like one. As a broad story, the big picture behind everything is surprisingly simple, unfocused until late and wrapped up pretty quickly without a firm explanation of the how behind the much clearer why. However, as negative as that sounds, none of it matters, because that grand sweep is timeless and omnipresent, the eternal battle between good and evil, and this uses it more as the backdrop to a set of smaller stories than as the be-all and end-all.

As the back cover blurb tells us, there are three separate characters with initially separate stories which gradually interweave as the book runs on until they find that they're really a trio of threads to a bigger story. All of that's true, but mostly just a tease. It doesn't tell us which three characters, for a start, so we're kept on the hop trying to figure out which they are, while Mariotte introduces us to a massive ensemble cast. Also, it doesn't translate to three stories that take up a third of the book each; it's more like a couple of novellas and a host of short stories that make up a third.

The first of the three primary characters is obvious, because the opening part of the book is given his name, even though it's far from all about him. He's Kenneth Butler and he's a sheriff out in the wilds of eastern California, a good man but a troubled one. He lost his wife in a tragic accident and crawled into a bottle, but he eventually crawled out again and found himself a job with jurisdiction over the Slab, a collection of misfits and ne'er-do-wells who have opted out of society for reasons of their own and come together in a ramshackle RV community in between the Chocolate Mountains and the Salton Sea. However, the Slab is as much a character as anyone else here, Ken included.

We know the Slab is important because it's the title of the book and a frequent location for events; but we don't know why and we won't for most of the novel. It's a fantastic backdrop for a novel, an utterly unique community that really exists. The Slab City website is down right now and Jeff's own photos of it have vanished after his recent website revamp, but a quick search on Google Images is enough to tell me that I've seen pictures and video of this place before, especially of its abundant art. Mariotte introduces us to a host of residents and I wonder how many of them were inspired by real people. Surely not all, given how troubled some of them get. At least I hope so.

We don't know why Sheriff Butler is important but we know he is, because he feels the magic. It's a strange feeling, one that pops up now and again in his life at odd moments, always heralded by the taste of copper in his mouth. The first time for him was during the Vietnam War, when he was down inside an enemy tunnel system and he was kept safe and guided out by a talking snake, and it's not left him ever since, not really. I appreciated this take on magic. It's not something that Butler can conjure up at will to do his bidding. It comes when it comes and it always manifests in some new strange way and then leaves again. It's elusive and indefinable and, while it seems to be a positive thing, that's up for debate.

We recognise the second of the three primary characters because she feels the magic too. She's a veteran too, but a younger one who served in Iraq, coming home wounded but alive after a magic incident in which she was able to mysteriously keep a convoy safe in a minefield. She's Penny Rice and the third part is named for her. While Sheriff Butler is upholding the law, she's breaking it but for what she believes is a very important reason. We first meet her as she sneaks onto the military test site not far from the Slab to make rock art messages like "No More Bombs".

I'm not going to name the third character, because it doesn't really become clear until very late in the book, even though the second part carries that character's name. Initially I thought it was the real estate mogul, Carter Haynes, who's bought the Slab and the land around it to develop into the exact opposite of Slab City: a community of luxury residences. He's the first character we meet and he does prove important to the wider story, but he's not the third of the primaries any more than Lucy Alvarez is and she feels as close to a lead as anyone.

That's because the most obviously developing story in the book is the Dove Hunt, an annual event for a group of men, gathered together by a special forces veteran named Kerry, and a woman, who tends to be brown-skinned and dark-haired and is kidnapped off the streets to be the Dove in their take on the Most Dangerous Game. There are thirteen graves in the desert and we can't help but wonder if the human skull found in the firepit at the Slab and handed over to Sheriff Butler is from one of them. Lucy proves to be a tougher Dove than they've hunted before and she doesn't merely survive. As the Sheriff is investigating the skull and searching for Lucy, we wonder if she's just part of his story, but the weaving of threads runs far deeper than that.

Eventually, all these stories, and a host of others too, start to converge and transform into parts of something more. There's also another note that runs through this novel, which is 9/11. It isn't part of the story, having happened a week or two before anything we read, but it flavours many stories here, because Mariotte wrote this in the aftermath of that terrorist act and it weighs on the minds not only of the various military veterans in the story, or indeed those still active, but plenty of the other characters too, because they're Americans as well. After all, the attacks weren't just against buildings but the American way of life and it was hard for Americans not to take that personally.

I liked this novel a lot, probably more than the other Mariottes that I've read, even though each of them were more traditional novels that I enjoyed in a more traditional way. This one feels less like a novel and more like an energizing, fascinating and traumatic trip away from everything. It plays like immersion in an escape, the result of which is partly freedom and partly responsibility. There are a lot of reasons to opt out of everything and live on the Slab and it's a fantastic sanctuary from some angles, but freedom comes with a price and the Slab isn't a cure all. It's a tough life living in the middle of a blazing desert without electricity and running water or most of the other comforts of life that the rest of us take for granted.

And that's what this book becomes. It's a rumination on 9/11, knowing that it's going to change the country in fundamental ways but wondering about how that'll play out. It's also a look at society, a look at what it means and how it works, but done by looking at people who have opted out of all of it—some the responsibilities, some the rules, some the grind, some the morality, some the reality—only to create their own rules and morality and responsibilities.

There are a lot of points where characters in this book come to realisations, not the overt lightbulb moments that chapters are designed around but more subtle ones where characters realise that their vision of the world wasn't quite right. There's a lot of growth here and we can't help but read The Slab, with all its death and madness and immorality, as being fundamentally about hope. This was a notably dark time and Mariotte both acknowledges that and suggests that we could, if only we can come together, defeat the darkness. I should have read this sooner. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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