Friday, Dec. 10, 1999 | 10:01 a.m.
Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at [email protected] or 990-2446.
About 8:30 one recent evening, I settled onto the tattered couch here in the Shelf Life scriptorium with Bill Branon's new thriller, "Spider Snatch" (Huntington Press, $24.95). The TV was squawking, the kids were blaring, the cat was clawing at things.
I looked up a few minutes later. The TV was off, the kids were in bed, the cat was curled on the floor. It was 12:30 a.m. I'd finished the book.
This sucker moves.
A Las Vegan, Branon still has his Marine Corps hair, a burly presence, a conversational style that still carries a hint of naval corridors, and a military resume that contains the words "weapons expert." He probably splashes testosterone instead of gin into his martinis. And yet the big lug wrote a violent thriller -- his third, following "Let Us Prey" and "Devils Hole" -- from a woman's point of view.
"Spider Snatch" concerns Evvie North, who, along with her husband, Ted, is sailing off the coast of Panama in hopes of getting over the death of their young daughter. Ted is a Drug Enforcement Agency officer recently forced into retirement, bitter because he never hauled in a major drug kingpin.
Now, this wouldn't be a thriller if all they did was sail. Things on this trip aren't what they seem. Ted is acting weird, and so are the pair's new acquaintances. The atmosphere is heavy with foreboding. Their sailing adventure ends with the boat crushed against a reef, Evvie and Ted stranded on an island inhabited by a small band of Cuna Indians held hostage by violent drug thugs (the Spider of the title is a drug lord). With the bad guys keeping Ted in chains, it's up to shy, wavering Evvie to stiffen her spine and save the day.
As with Branon's previous novels (as with most novels, no doubt), "Spider Snatch" proceeds from a matrix of intensely personal agendas ("Let Us Prey," for instance, in which bands of rebels blow up IRS buildings, was born in Branon's anger at the way taxmen treated his son). For one, he wanted to make use of a bit of colorful autobiography: Like his heroine, he says, he's wrecked a boat off Panama and spent time among the Cuna.
"I still have a few pieces of the boat lying around the house," he says. While on the island, he partook of the Cuna diet of live ants and prechewed fish. "When you're hungry, it's good," he says. "All that stuff (in the book about the Cuna) is very authentic."
More importantly, Branon wanted to write a female protagonist. "I've known some strong females in my life," he says. Three in particular: One, a real-life Evvie he met in Panama's canal zone; two, his wife, Lolly; three, his mother. Each faced cancer with a courage and fighting spirit that stirred a military man like Branon. "She was just a champ," he says of the real Evvie. "I often wondered what she'd do in traumatic circumstances."
He also wanted Evvie to carry some baggage, and to that end he equipped her with a rough childhood and an unusual genetic mutation, a third breast. Even her husband publicly ridicules it. "I love working with people who have flaws," Branon says. Because life -- TV and People magazine and the rest of pop culture to the contrary -- isn't all about beautiful people. "Some of the nicest people I've ever met have been stone cold ugly suckers," he says, in what sounds suspiciously like a reference to the Shelf Life crew. "To me, that's humanity."
Also, he says, a defect will force you into becoming "either a (male-genital-based euphemism for unpleasant person) or a fighter." "Spider Snatch" makes this split manifest in the characters of three-breasted Evvie and El Codo, Spider's shrivel-armed lieutenant and the book's embodiment of pure evil.
At the same time, Branon -- a former medical man -- wanted to explore "disassociative disorder," which he describes as a clinical condition "somewhere between post-traumatic stress disorder and sleepwalking." He's seen it in soldiers; in his telling, it's a kind of functional schizophrenia that occurs under extreme stress, in which the subject's personality splits, compartmentalizing the person you are and the the person who does the dirty work that has to be done.
It's what allows Evvie to survive the brutal experiences -- impalings and shootings and beheadings and rapes and tortures -- the drug gang inflicts on the resilient Cuna. "I wanted her to be put through the wringer," he says, to see how she handles that balancing act between personalities. That's why he set the book's significant action on a small island. "I wanted the person to be caged," he says. "I didn't want running to be an option."
Toward the book's end, Evvie has a mystical experience: a vision of her dead daughter. Was it the head wound she's just suffered, or is she in a different part of the world, with different rules? "In the relatively few times I've been in life-or-death situations, I've always had two or more interpretations of what happened," Branon says. "I wanted the reader to come away with that same feeling. I wanted to create unease in the reader, that 5 or 6 or 7 percent of doubt. The hardest challenge in writing the book was creating that nebulous, cross-cultural doubt you feel in a traumatic episode."
As I noted, the book is a speedy read. Branon's writing tends toward a kind of driving pulp lyricism, with moments of macho flexing and touches of florid romance -- which is to say, he's committed to keeping you entertained. He does. "Spider Snatch" may not be for everyone -- all that grisly death and so on -- but for those with steely nerves and fighting spirit, it gets a hearty Shelf Life vote.
Reading list
Take time to read the two-page "battle royale" for the title of Dubious Person/Achievement of the Millennium. It comes down to a square-off between the black plague (which "resulted in unfair scapeboating of fleas and rats, given that scientists have since proved the true cause of plague was the wrath of God") and Steven Spielberg ("His movies too cold and cerebral; why won't he let us feel?"). The winner, of course, is no surprise: Richard Nixon, in that famous picture of him laughing hysterically.
There's no better way to end the century. After all, as Bill Branon might agree, we're caged here, running is not an option, so we may as well laugh. Maybe Nixon was on to something.
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