The Company Man

Publisher's Weekly described Bennett's fist novel, Mr. Shivers, as a cross between John Steinbeck and Stephen King. It won the Shirley Jackson award, and so the King elements must have won out for panel of experts. This new novel, The Company Man has been nominated for the 2011 Philip k> Dick award, but it has the same uneasy relation to genre as its predecessor.

Mr. Shivers was an engaging tale set in the Great Depression and among the hobo jungles and squalid, half-dead towns of the period. And then there was also the serial killer who turned out to be an evil from before the time of man.The Company Man is alternative history but not of the elaborate or tricky sort. The South has not won the Civil War, the Axis not has lost WW11, and there are no armor-plated dinosaurs fighting doughboys. One simple, history-changing event has happened. An industrialist, Mr. Mc Naughton, while on a hunting trip in the Pacific Northwest, has been rained-in in the wilderness. His host turns out to be an inventor of amazing propensity. Over the years. Mc.Naughton Industries controls world technology. The thought of their weapon power prevents WW1, and they build on the Pacific Northwest Coast of America the magnificent city of Evendsen. Problems arise.

Evendsen is city where the dichotomies between rich and poor are so extreme that some readers may be inclined to find it familiar, although contemporary correlations are never encouraged, All that is stressed is that something is going very wrong. Our protagonists are a hard-working police detective, a psychic private investigator, and a young, brainy female recruit. What they find moves the novel into the realm of SF, although Bennett's strong point remains, as in Mr. Shivers his ability to create accurately detailed period scenes that keep you entertained and slightly uneasy.