I knew as I was typing yesterday that other things had come to mind that I wanted to include in my review of The Totem, but which escaped me at that moment. They’ve since come back.

Morrell begins almost every chapter with a style I like, call it a “B-A-C” style. If you take the normal order of three events, some past event that lead to what is happening right now and one that happens next, and represent it by letters, it would be A-B-C. That is, A happened, now B is happening, and C happens next. In the B-A-C style, you say B is happening, a follow-up to A which just happened, and C happens next. Morrell does this constantly throughout the book.

I hesitate to say every chapter, but for sure in many chapters. I also used this method when I wrote Doctor Luke’s Assistant. I had never seen this described in any book on writing techniques. In fact, DLA was complete before I began reading those books. I just liked that style: begin the chapter with immediate action; then say what happened between chapters; then return to the action moving forward. As I began to pay more attention to the writing style in other novel, and to read those books on writing, I never saw this technique used or even discussed. So I edited some of those out of DLA, and haven’t been using that style in In Front Of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. After reading Morrell, I’m reconsidering.

Another thing Morrell did exceedingly well was the working in of back story. All the major characters had a past that impacted something on the event in the book. Slaughter had killed someone while on duty as a cop in Detroit, and was himself another shot with a shot gun and almost killed. The reporter was an alcoholic, fallen to a low position on the newspaper staff. The medical examiner had been in a fast-paced similar position in Philadelphia and ruined his career by becoming obsessed with his work. The younger veterinarian, Owens, had a past. Morrell is in no hurry to tell us all this. For the first third of the book he concentrates on developing the horror that is to come, letting the reader know enough to conclude the truth without giving it fully away. The last third of the book is devoted to the fast-paced actions that lead to the penultimate battle. The middle third of the book consists of long-ish chapters that give the back story of the major characters. It is done well. Even when telling us the back story, Morrell tells just enough to help us understand the characters, not so much as to overwhelm us.

A few more observations.

• I mentioned that the denouement left me unsatisfied. One of the reasons is we don’t find out what happened to several characters who contracted the virus. We see them in their fully affected states, or even in their developing states, but with a couple of exceptions we don’t find out about them. We don’t see any consequences for the mayor, who botched things so badly.
• The hippy colony was established in 1970; the book takes place around 1993. Yet during all this time, the town of Potters Field apparently had no contact with them, didn’t know they had changed locations, didn’t know how many were there or if they even existed. While the town “decided” in 1970 they wouldn’t have anything to do with the hipppies, it seems unlikely that for 23 years the two existed so close together (at most 60 miles apart), and no one from the colony came to the town to buy or sell, seek medical treatment, whatever. That is somewhat improbable, it seems to me. If they couldn’t come to town because of the virus, why did it take 23 years for this outbreak to occur? While this is a weakness in the plot (in my opinion, of course), it doesn’t really detract from the enjoyment of the tale.
• The reappearance of Lucas Wheeler, the boy from the town who joined the colony, at the very time when he was needed to identify the one person from the colony who made his way into town during the crisis, was a coincidence too much.
• Editing: I remembered another thing I wanted to say. The tie of the title to the story was not as strong as I would like. Morrell defines totem on the front end pages: “1. among primitive peoples, an animal or natural object considered as being related by blood to a given family or can and taken as its symbol. 2. an image of this.” I suppose the tie-in is based on what Dunlap, the reporter, found in the throne room. However, I would have liked the tie to be stronger.

That’s all I can think of for now. Plus I feel like I have written too much negative. Each of these seems to be magnified in my words, whereas they were really a series of minor problems, none of which individually, nor all together, made the book any less enjoyable.