Shadows in the Sun, Preliminaries

Wow! I am floored with how good my newest read is!

I zipped through ten pages Sunday and got hooked - but circumstances kept me from getting further involved. Yesterday, I snuck out of work for a brief lunch break and put away three chapters before I regrettably had to go back in. I stopped right at a point where some Great Reveals were about to be ... uh ... revealed.

The book is Shadows in the Sun and it's by Chad Oliver, an anthropologist-slash-SF writer who I never heard of before. It starts out with an anthropologist (imagine that!), studying a small Texas town, who realizes that all is not what it seems to be. More specifically, the people act strange. Bland, generic, xeroxy strange. Our hero gasps as his research uncovers an entire townsfolk replaced over a period of fifteen years.

At first I thought it would be an Invasion of the Body Snatchers retread. (Well, since the book was published in 1954, it might have been the source material for the famous movie.) Not so. A flying saucer quickly makes an appearance - but what a creepy appearance it is! Aliens logically follow. But none of it follows my preprogrammed anticipatory guesses! I love when I'm surprised, and this book surprises.

The writing is quite good, too. Check this out:

The blazing white sun hung in the sky, almost motionless, as though it too were too hot to move. No cloud braved that furnace, and the heat beat down like boiled, invisible rain. Heat waves shimmered like glass in the still air and the parched earth took on the consistency of forgotten pottery.


Jefferson Springs, from the coolest corner in the thick, square icehouse to the baked metal of the top of the water tower, held its breath and waited for evening.

That's awesome writing, no two ways about it.

And a few paragraphs down, Oliver throws away an observation that floored me with its simplistic brilliance:

If you wish to devise a problem that cannot be solved, the simplest way is to make it appear that there is no problem.

Heavvvvvvvvvy! There's a blog post somewhere in them thar words.

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Full book review to follow in a few short days ...