Book Review: THE CONSULTANT

I'm no Bentley Little completist, but I've been a fan of his books for a long time.

I read The Store when I was a teenager, and I recall understanding at least some of the novel's satire and social commentary, while also appreciating it as a very, very different sort of horror novel.

Since then, I've read several more of his books, including The Revelation and The Summoning; Dominion remains one of the few full-length novels I've read in a span of less than forty-eight hours. And recently, I've enjoyed The Policy and The Influence.

So I am very familiar with what Bentley Little does, and I'd say his books usually fall on a spectrum of "Just Okay" (The Academy) to "Excellent" (The Store). I don't think've read a bad one.

And I still haven't, though at times in the middle of this book I was starting to wonder.

The Consultant is built on a typical Bentley Little framework: a consultant is brought in to save a struggling corporation--CompWare--and instead puts its CEO and all its employees through a dozen layers of torment. It's sometimes memorable. Occasionally funny. And it's plenty weird in that trademark Bentley Little way.

But this is nowhere near Little's best work.

To start, the book feels formulaic. This is to be expected of a Bentley Little book--to an extent; Little does what he does, does it well, and that's about all he does. But his strongest works make you forget about the formula because you're so immersed in them: you care about the characters and wonder what obscene, totally random nightmare they're going to encounter next; you're perhaps thinking about some of Little's social commentary; and when you put the book down, it lingers with you for all the reasons a memorable book should.

I never felt immersed in The Consultant. The only piece of this novel that's going to stick around in my head for the long term is the antagonist himself, and even he feels like a lost opportunity. The settings in this book were generic and barely described. (Little seems to be at his best when he's writing about small desert communities, not high rises and suburbia.) Promising sub-plots (like the consultant stalking the protagonist's family) go absolutely nowhere. The characters here were not developed at all. Craig, the protagonist, is a thirty-something guy who goes to work, goes home, gripes about work, and promises to spend more time with his wife and kid. That's about all we ever get from him, and he's the best-developed character here aside from the memorably pathetic and evil title character. Everybody else is just a name on the page.

The action and horror in this book were definitely from the mind of Bentley Little--no chance of any ghost writers here. But with very few exceptions, the stuff in The Consultant was tame and, in this reviewer's opinion, flat-out uninspired compared to the "how in the heck did he think of that?" material I've read in almost everything else he's written.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this book--because I don't need out of this world imagery or literary-quality characters to at least enjoy a story and give it a good review--is that this is a fairly long novel (almost 500 pages), and in its current state, it doesn't need to be. Throughout the heart of the book, the middle 300 pages or so, Little bangs on the same chord over and over and over again: consultant thinks of a ludicrous new policy, calls a meeting, and Craig complains about it to his spouse and coworkers.

As I stated earlier, The Consultant's sub-plots go nowhere. I don't know of an issue in this book that matters beyond the chapter it arises in.

If the book were 500 pages because Craig and his family were being properly developed as sympathetic characters... or the horrors and motivations of the strange, bowtie-wearing antagonist were being explored... or maybe a sub-plot was followed that actually gets off the launch pad and goes somewhere... If any of this were the case, then 500 pages would be fine.

As it is, this shoulda-coulda been at least 200 pages shorter than it is.

And despite all this, I never doubted that I was going to finish The Consultant.

Little has been writing this stuff a long time, and even when he's phoning something in that was likely frustrating him, his stuff is very entertaining and readable.

So, points for the memorable bad guy. Points for the author being so talented that he can write 300+ pages of more or less the same darn thing without it being boring. And points for writing horror novels like nobody else.

3/5 stars.

FLYING SAUCER, the story behind a restless novel...

Flying Saucer is available here

What do you do when humanity decides to pump the brakes on the turning of the world?

Take care of some old business, I guess.

Ten years ago, I wrote a novel called Flying Saucer. It was about a struggling musician in Las Vegas who finds herself teaming up with a friend and a couple of strangers in a battle against dark forces from a certain military base near Groom Lake. I put the book through several drafts, sent it to a company who’d published two of my other early novels, and figured I was done with it.

A few years passed, and I kept thinking that Audrey Cole’s story was not done. Unlike any other story or novel I’ve ever written, this thing persisted in the back of my mind, insisting that I'd made a mistake in sending it off and assuming I was done with it. Rework me, rewrite me, write a sequel or a prequel—but you gotta do something, the book said, cause this ain’t over.

In 2017, I took the first step toward appeasing this restless story: I contacted Flying Saucer’s publisher and got the rights back. Feeling motivated, I started on the story again, approaching it from several different directions. None of them led anywhere, and I turned my attention to other projects. It’ll happen when it happens, I told myself. It always does.

It did.

At the end of 2019, a key plot point that had been totally missing from the original incarnation occurred to me (What if Audrey heard her song—“Flying Saucer”—on the radio, performed by her, but she’d never actually recorded it? Wouldn’t that be weird! And it could be explained by…!) With this in mind, I dove back into the story, taking it from the top. Start with the same headlines about missing persons that begin the first version. Move into that same first scene with Audrey as she's struggling with her singing and playing. Start there; see where it takes you. 

This time, the writing went smoothly. 

Flying Saucer is now a much different book. Portions of the first incarnation remain intact, especially in the first third or so of the story. Most of the key characters made the trek to their new home without difficulty…. But most of the book was rewritten entirely. Several plot threads were changed or removed. Most importantly, the theme of the book is totally different. 

And it’s all for the better.

That first version of Flying Saucer was a noble effort at an idea that I really liked but was incapable—at that point—of fully developing.

Despite its inspiration from my personal explorations of the desert north of Las Vegas, despite its title and the story's inclusion of creepy shadow figures from Area 51, Flying Saucer is not a book about aliens or alien vehicles.

It’s a book about a woman who made a poor choice in her life at a time when she should’ve never been asked about her priorities. Will she make things right, when forces she’s incapable of comprehending are working against her? Can she?

These are big questions about big ideas. They deserve proper exploration.

This time, it's all in there.