Word: weirdness
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...oddest of the season's worthwhile offerings, or at least the hardest to explain, are William Marshall's War Machine (Mysterious Press; 220 pages; $15.95) and Reginald Hill's Underworld (Scribner's; 280 pages; $14.95). Marshall's 15 weird suspense novels are all set in either the Philippines or, as in this case, Hong Kong and feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure, the culture clashes of East and West and the intrusive effects of each place's multinational colonial history. In War Machine, someone...
...clairvoyants, faith healers and spoon benders, and Walter Stewart, a free-lance fraud sleuth at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Their report was merciless: "The hypothesis that water can be imprinted with a memory of past solutes is as unnecessary as it is fanciful." The behavior of the weird water was only a delusion, they concluded, based on flawed experimentation. But the matter did not end there. Nature was still smarting from the criticism that it lent credence to the whole messy business by publishing the report in the first place...
Spain has the Catalan sculptor Susana Solano, 42, whose constructions of sheet iron, mesh and rods are based on the image of baths and attain a weird intensity in balancing the plain, structurally explicit means of minimalism against an atmosphere of secrecy and menace: they could be prison cells or metaphorical labyrinths...
There's also some weird Christian symbolism. Th' identities of th' son n' th' father merge. Dad's name is Weston (Western?); Junior's is Wesley. In th' third n' final act, Dad talks about feelin' "reborn," like it was "Christmas," n' he baptizes himself in a tub of cold water. Junior does th' same, puts on Dad's clothes, n' Mom confuses him for his father. Junior also goes out n' slaughters a lamb n' practically washes himself in lamb's blood. Beats me what all this Christian symbolism is doin' in a play whose characters are as poor...
...Walker Evans or told by a New England Tennessee Williams. Morris often seems more absorbed by the manipulation of language, cadence and humor than by the dreadful case at hand. Like a backwoods balladeer, she moves quickly to the final playing out of a tragedy about people whose weird lives have been pushed to the limit by genes, cultural circumstance and a witch's spell cast by the devastating author...