Matt Ruff

Fool on the Hill — (1988) Publisher: A young writer-in-residence at Cornell University is caught up in an epic of love and death, good and evil...and magic.

Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy — (1993) Publisher: High above Manhattan android and human steelworkers are constructing a new Tower of Babel for billionaire Harry Gant, as a monument to humanity's power to dream. In the festering sewers below a darker game is afoot: a Wall Street takeover artist has been murdered, and Gant's crusading ex-wife, Joan Fine, has been hired to find out why. The year is 2023, and Ayn Rand has been resurrected and bottled in a hurricane lamp to serve as Joan's assistant; an eco-terrorist named Philo Dufrense travels in a pink-and-green submarine designed by Howard Hughes; a Volkswagen Beetle is possessed by the spirit of Abbie Hoffman; Meisterbrau, a mutant great white shark, is running loose in the sewers beneath Times Square; and a one-armed 181-year-old Civil War veteran joins Joan and Ayn in their quest for the truth. All of whom, and many more besides, are caught up in a vast conspiracy involving Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, and a mob of homicidal robots.

Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls — (2003) Publisher: Andy Gage was born in 1965 and murdered not long after by his stepfather... It was no ordinary murder. Though the torture and abuse that killed him were real, Andy Gage's death wasn't. Only his soul actually died, and when it died, it broke in pieces. Then the pieces became souls in their own right, coinheritors of Andy Gage's life... While Andy deals with the outside world, more than a hundred other souls share an imaginary house inside Andy's head, struggling to maintain an orderly coexistence: Aaron, the father figure; Adam, the mischievous teenager; Jake, the frightened little boy; Aunt Sam, the artist; Seferis, the defender; and Gideon, who wants to get rid of Andy and the others and run things on his own. Andy's new coworker, Penny Driver, is also a multiple personality, a fact that Penny is only partially aware of. When several of Penny's other souls ask Andy for help, Andy reluctantly agrees, setting in motion a chain of events that threatens to destroy the stability of the house. Now Andy and Penny must work together to uncover a terrible secret that Andy has been keeping... from himself.

Bad Monkeys — (2007) Publisher: Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons — "Bad Monkeys" for short. This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail's psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy — or playing a different game altogether. What follows is one of the most clever and gripping novels you'll ever read.

Bad Monkeys

Bad Monkeys, by Matt Ruff, is a funny, dark and twisty thriller. I was hooked on Page Five, when a woman who is being held in the nut-job wing of a Nevada jail says to the doctor evaluating her, “I think it all started when I figured out my high school janitor was the Angel of Death…”

Jane Charlotte, the woman in question, says she works for a secret organization called, well, the organization. This organization has a unit called “The Division for the Final Disposal of Irredeemable Persons” — nicknamed Bad Monkeys. (All of the organization’s divisions have nicknames.) Jane, a Bad Monkeys operative, has been captured because one of her assignments went bad, but as she starts telling the doctor her story, it’s clear that things started going wrong in Jane’s life much earlier.

Jane’s story unspools like a true spy thriller or the oh-so-logical delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic. Young Jane fights constantly with her single-parent mother and resents her younger brother. She ends up getting sent to live with her aunt and uncle in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Through a fluke, Jane identifies the school janitor as a serial killer who has been labeled “the Angel of Death,” but she is unable to prove it. Suddenly, someone begins communicating with her in secretive ways, through clues in crossword puzzles and voices on phones that didn’t ring. Someone gives Jane a gun that does not fire bullets, but kills the janitor when he breaks into her house and attacks her. It is years later, though, before Jane is actively recruited by the organization, and her real work begins.

Bad Monkeys is told mostly in the first person, interspersed with third-person interludes as the doctor gently debunks pieces of Jane’s narrative. The tale spirals and loops, turning back on itself as Jane meets characters, like Carlotta Juanita, who are variations of herself or what she could have been. The book is decorated with word-play like a cupcake with sprinkles; Jane Charlotte evokes both a famous Bronte character and the best-known Bronte author. Case handlers in the organization are all named Robert, but they have last names like Wise, True and Love. Nestled into the inner curve of this wild story of action adventure, drugs, lies, and family dynamics is a serious question about the nature of evil. Is evil an absolute? Can you commit only a small evil? And is the organization, which is not interested in justice but merely the elimination of evil, any better? Jane tells her interviewer that John Wayne Gacy, an infamous serial killer, belonged to a part of the organization called The Scary Clowns, until he went bad.

Part of the book takes place in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, but the rocket-fuelled climax is set in Las Vegas, Nevada, and that’s no accident. Five-star casinos are the perfect backdrop for wild drug trips, lethal clowns, car chases, double and triple crosses, and martial arts sequences.

The book is short, coming in at just over 200 pages, and Jane’s voice is vital and fresh. She is not necessarily a likeable character, but she is a compelling one. I thought I had figured out the story, and then I thought I had figured it out again, and then the final pages upended my theories completely. Bad Monkeys is a dark, convoluted, entertaining puzzle of a book. —Marion Deeds

The Mirage — (2012) Publisher: A mind-bending novel in which an alternate history of 9/11 and its aftermath uncovers startling truths about America and the Middle East. 11/9/2001: Christian fundamentalists hijack four jetliners. They fly two into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh. The fourth plane, believed to be bound for Mecca, is brought down by its passengers. The United Arab States declares a War on Terror. Arabian and Persian troops invade the Eastern Seaboard and establish a Green Zone in Washington, D.C... Summer, 2009: Arab Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi interrogates a captured suicide bomber. The prisoner claims that the world they are living in is a mirage — in the real world, America is a superpower, and the Arab states are just a collection of "backward third-world countries." A search of the bomber's apartment turns up a copy of The New York Times, dated September 12, 2001, that appears to support his claim. Other captured terrorists have been telling the same story. The president wants answers, but Mustafa soon discovers he's not the only interested party. The gangster Saddam Hussein is conducting his own investigation. And the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee — a war hero named Osama bin Laden — will stop at nothing to hide the truth. As Mustafa and his colleagues venture deeper into the unsettling world of terrorism, politics, and espionage, they are confronted with questions without any rational answers, and the terrifying possibility that their world is not what it seems. Acclaimed novelist Matt Ruff has created a shadow world that is eerily recognizable but, at the same time, almost unimaginable. Gripping, subversive, and unexpectedly moving, The Mirage probes our deepest convictions and most arresting fears.