Revenge by Stephen Fry.
Random House, 2000. $16.95 — 320 pp.

A new book by Richard Matheson should be cause for rejoicing among Matheson fans. He is, after all, the author of such suspense and sci-fi classics as The Incredible Shrinking Man, Hell House, I Am Legend, and Somewhere In Time.

Unfortunately, Matheson fans needn’t break open the champagne over the publication of Hunted Past Reason. The aging author’s latest book is so silly in its plotting and so gross in the portrayal of both its hero and villain that Matheson devotees will be appalled. Reading this book is like finding out that your deceased, venerable grandmother was in reality the gin-slopping, foul-mouthed, alley-cat mean madam of a local brothel.

Bob Hansen, writer and family man, is the wimp who serves as the protagonist of Hunted Past Reason. Wishing to write a novel set around backpacking, Bob asks an actor friend, Doug, to take him on a trip through the forests of Northern California. After making plans to meet Marian, Bob’s wife, the two men set out into the woods, with Doug obnoxiously lecturing on the art of backpacking and Bob already beginning to wonder if the trip isn’t a mistake.

In the middle of this book Bob realizes that his travels with Doug are indeed a mistake just about the same time that the reader realizes that reading this book was a mistake. In a scene that makes the rape in James Dickey’s Deliverance look tame by comparison, Doug allows his sense of personal failure and his envy of Bob to explode from verbal attacks to a physical beating, a confrontation which ends with Bob tied to a tree and with Doug having his way with Bob (giving a twisted nuance to the phrase backpacking). Doug then releases Bob, gives him a head start through the forest, and soon pursues the writer with the idea of murdering Bob and marrying his wife.

After much heavy breathing — the panting of fear and exhaustion, not of sexual athleticism — and scratching through bushes and brambles, Bob finally reaches Marian only to find Doug has arrived first and is waiting for him. After another protracted struggle in which Doug attempts to rape Marian, Bob and Marian finally prevail, and a groggy, naked Doug is strapped to the top of the Bronco for delivery to the police station.

(I am relating the ending here in order to further discourage you from reading the book).

This book is awful, awful, awful. Bob Hansen is such a whiner that the reader begins early on in the book to feel embarrassed for him. Moreover, his frequent metaphysical ruminations, so Californian, so up-to-date, and so ultimately bogus, will annoy even the hardiest adherent of New Age theosophy. Doug the actor is painted in such dark, dirty colors that he ceases to be a villain and is instead a sort of blob of moral repugnance. Only Marian seems to have sense and courage, and at the end of the book, when she finally puts Doug off his feet by burning him with a flare from the Bronco, I kept wishing that she would take the frying pan with which Bob had tried to whack Doug and give her husband a few whacks upside the head as well.

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Readers looking for a better suspense novel will do well to turn to Stephen Fry’s Revenge. Here is the story of Ned Maddstone, a privileged English teenager who has just fallen madly in love when he falls victim to the twin plots of jealous classmates and of the Irish Republican Army. Secretly arrested, left to rot in a psychiatric hospital on a small island off Sweden, Ned eventually falls under the sway of Babe, a brilliant man who is also unjustly imprisoned. Shortly before his death, Babe gives Ned the numbers to his Swiss bank account and a plan for escaping the island. Ned does escape, finds the money, and tracks down those who helped set him up for his twenty years in the hospital.

The plot of this novel may sound familiar, for Fry lifted it, right down to the escape by the coffin, from The Count Of Monte Cristo. Why Fry, who is not only a talented writer but also an actor and a director of motion pictures, should have felt compelled to replay that classic story is not clear. Readers who enjoy crisp writing and solid plotting, however, will take some pleasure from Revenge. Ned Maddstone as well as Ashley Barson-Garland, one of the wicked boys who grows in political power until he has a shot at becoming prime minister, are particularly well-drawn characters.

In a choice between Fry’s remake and Matheson’s trash, Fry wins hands down.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville and can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)