Empties by George Zebrowski
Reviewed by Maggie Jamison
It had to be a prank. That’s the only explanation the coroner can come up with when Detective William Benek brings in the brainless corpse of a derelict found by the East River in New York City. There are no incisions, no proof of tampering: the skull is full of blood, but the brain is gone. Yet unlike the rest of his precinct, Benek finds himself drawn to the case, certain that there is more than an elaborate, motiveless joke behind the empty-headed corpse. After all, a man can’t just lose his mind like that, can he?
George Zebrowski’s Empties (a very long novella bordering on novel length) is a dark, thoughtfully wicked tale that combines elements of noir mystery, romance, thriller, sf/fantasy, and horror. The story itself follows Detective Benek as he quickly unravels the mystery surrounding a brief series of bizarre deaths, only to find himself locked in psychological combat with a real-world, one-trick witch. But every second that Benek vacillates between trying to accept what his eyes have seen and doubting what simply can’t be real, he draws ever closer to losing his own mind. Literally.
It’s clear from the very beginning of the story that George Zebrowski knows exactly what he’s doing. Using plot and careful narration, he pulls and pushes at the reader’s sense of reality, asking the tough questions about perception, identity, logic, and power. When faced with a real-life monster, how would you honestly react? Zebrowski has taken great care to explore the realistic possibilities of what would happen if someone like Dierdre Matera truly existed and walked the streets of New York City unchecked. The realism of this story is one of its strongest suits. There are certainly portions in which the reader may experience the familiar desire to shout back at Benek, to warn him not to doubt himself, not to open that door, not to go down that road, but every decision is firmly mired in absolute possibility. Mixing this gritty realism with streaks of surrealistic horror, Zebrowski has created something that will linger in the mind long after Benek’s story is told.
Empties truly shines because of its believable, sympathetic characters. Even the minor side personalities—the coroner, the police chief, the annoyed neighbor—bring the story to life and enhance the reality Zebrowski has crafted. Benek’s struggles are the reader’s struggles, and his descent into self-doubt while desperately clinging to logic and rationality is wholly believable. His frustration and helplessness in his attempts to convince others of the truth are particularly poignant, because the reader is his only ally, and the only other person who really knows. Empties is a book you experience as you read.
Even Dierdre, with her gruesome talent, is someone the reader can identify with, to a degree. The way Zebrowski shows the reader her anger, her isolation, her fears, her desires, and her drive to learn more about herself and what this talent means makes her a fascinating villain. Her relationship with Benek and the cat-and-mouse game she plays with him make her at once almost pitiable, and at the next, detestable and horrifying.
Some readers may find the story a bit hard to get their heads around initially, as Zebrowski elects to begin by introducing Benek with a good deal of internal self-examination as he debates and rationalizes his experience of the world, his relationship with his parents, and the reasons for his almost non-involvement with women up to this point in his life. This seemed to me the weakest portion of the story, lacking the emotional involvement it develops later, but it does serve a purpose. Benek’s exhaustive self-examination emphasizes the walls a person constructs to hold his life together, to bring meaning and order to the lucky chaos that brought him into existence. This theme of trying to quantify and explain that which is outside the realms of normalcy is one of the main threads that ties the story together. And while the first few chapters take a while to pick up the pace, once your brain clicks onto the track Zebrowski has laid for it, the story—and perhaps your mind?—flies to its inevitable, but satisfying, end.
In the epilogue, Zebrowski ends Empties with a heartfelt homage to Fritz Leiber, his mentor during the Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop in 1968. His descriptions of Leiber’s generous attention to his students—or “apprentices” as Zebrowski thinks of himself and his fellow writers under Leiber’s instruction—and his gentle encouragement will make the reader smile and long for that same inspiring relationship with such a master of fiction. Zebrowski’s debt to Fritz Leiber is in part responsible for his writing Empties, and he discusses in detail the impact Leiber’s Conjure Wife had on him. Near the end of the memorial, Zebrowski’s writing catches fire on the spark of Leiber’s inspiration, and he declares: “Writers should kick ass, or try to, because even when they don’t, they are the alarm canaries in the mineshaft—except that they don’t choke on the gas right away to warn the miners; they go on choking, slowly, word by word, with every household dollar, asking themselves what they think they’re doing.” Zebrowski and Leiber both kick considerable ass, and any reader will be glad that they had led the way, word by word, without ever succumbing to self-doubt.
Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press (2009)
Price: $24.95 US
Hardcover: 165 pages
ISBN: 978-1-930846-59-3