A lot of people know that the city of Seattle burned down in 1889. And it's common knowledge that when it was rebuilt, much of the old city remained, buried beneath the modern streets. But nobody really knows what's down there any more... Now a suspected psycho and the eight-year-old girl he's taken hostage during a bungled heist are about to find out, when they crash through the floor of an abandoned warehouse into a street no one has walked down for a hundred years.Pursued by an ex-Vietnam Tunnel Rat brought in by the Seattle PD - a man with one or two mental problems of his own - Hilton Badcock has no choice but to drag young Ali further into the underground maze in search of a way out. But the deeper they go into this strange, secret world, the weirder and more dangerous things get...
Rob Ryan's debut novel
Underdogs, an ambitious and convoluted thriller, sports a jacket blurb describing it as a cross between John Carpenter's film
Assault on Precinct 13 and
Alice in Wonderland. Athough one might disagree with the points of reference there is something wildly hybrid about this book. The novels of Charles Dickens with their huge casts drawn together in an inexorable web of connections would serve as a good analogue for Ryan's plotting style. Brief chapters flitting from character to character as well as back in time to the Vietnam war are initially fragmenting and disorienting, but the pull of the narrative interweaves them all tightly and in unexpected ways. Dickens' sense of the underbelly of urban life is also manifest and actualised here--the book takes place in Seattle, known to most as the home of TV's
Frasier, the band Nirvana, and good coffee. In the city a real yet surreal underworld is revealed: a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers created after the city was ravaged by fire in the 1890s and had to be rebuilt one layer higher than before.
More contemporary reference points would be books on Vietnam, gun manuals, and police procedurals, and Ryan's heterogeneous approach to the genre makes for an original and cleverly written piece of fiction (if a little heavy on police and army acronyms). One of the central characters, Lewis, served as a "tunnel-rat" in Vietnam (the "underdogs" of the title) flushing out Vietcong lying in ambush in networks of underground passages. Like Seattle itself Lewis has a deep, dark and unfathomed aspect--both are bound to and marked by the past. Being sent into the city's underworld in pursuit of a fleeing gunman and his eight-year-old girl hostage Lewis is made to confront a traumatic wartime experience: a denouement which like in all good detective fiction is subtly signalled throughout but is nevertheless resolutely surprising. Ryan's book comes to life in the underground passages with their freakish denizens and fetid environs and ultimately provokes a real frisson of strangeness and terror. Watching Frasier will never be the same again. --Burhan Turfail
