Agent J works for a shadowy government agency that investigates matters of extreme secrecy. His primary antagonist: Capaletsio, head of the equally shadowy and nefarious Syndicate. But both sides in this struggle are flummoxed by the appearance of huge Roman numerals floating in the sky—apparently a harbinger of further supernatural phenomena to come.
Told with a maximalist style, a pulpy sense of adventure, and a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, Daniel Lowell Placiszewski-Plazek’s AGENT J AND THE SHADOWS OF EREBUS has plenty of personality. Although the action takes place across nearly a century, the overall narrative sensibility is a kind of ‘50s spy noir: J is the archetype of a G-man, perpetually dressed in a black suit and hat with his gun and his Lucky Strikes. This ‘50s voice often comes through in period-appropriate slang (“coffin nails” for cigarettes), but most memorably in absurd language drawing on mid-century ad copy. For instance, J’s panegyric in praise of Lucky Strike cigarettes, with their unparalleled “quality, consistency, flavor, drawability, convenience, availability, cost, package, repurposing, and other factors.” The very archetype upon which Agent J draws also comes in for a ribbing: his anomalous occupation is wryly described as “agenting.” This humor gives AGENT J AND THE SHADOWS OF EREBUS most of its appeal.
Unfortunately, the text struggles with execution. The maximalist prose, for instance, can be fun and absurd, but it can also be grating when the jokes are repeated ad nauseam. Agent J’s gun is always referred to as his “Colt 1911 .45 ACP semiautomatic handgun” (in full), and for several chapters characters always respond to queries with “Does a dog have fleas?”—which feels more annoying than funny after a few repetitions. Sometimes the prose loses track of itself, leading to descriptive redundancies: “the chill of the cold January wind,” a “palatial palace,” and “a red cylindrical red glass jar” all appear in the text.
The characters, meanwhile, ride the line between archetype and stereotype. Agent J is a sufficiently fun take on the dour G-man, but an Irish priest and a Japanese scientist are written as embarrassing ethnic stereotypes; and exhaustive descriptions of a female agent’s beauty aren’t funny enough to be interesting. This might be more acceptable if the simplistic characters allowed the plot to clip along more briskly, but the plot itself is hard to parse and still takes nearly three hundred pages to unfold. A series of linked episodes occur in different decades of the 20th and 21st centuries, but they’re broken up over multiple chapters so that the narrative is non-sequential. It’s not clear that this really adds interest or complexity to the storytelling, but it does cause confusion. The ultimate problem is that very little seems to happen, and nothing is resolved. A few characters die, but since the characters are so flat, there isn’t enough of an emotional arc to carry the book.
Overall, the title itself evinces this lack of a focused structure: whatever “Erebus” is, the word doesn’t even appear in the text until page 275; and, though the reader can guess what its shadows are, THE SHADOWS OF EREBUS makes no attempt to explain.
This novel has plenty of energy and a clear sense of style, but it needs more thorough editing for both sentence-level cleanup and overall structural reworking for its strengths to shine.
Daniel Lowell Placiszewski-Plazek’s AGENT J AND THE SHADOWS OF EREBUS has a quirky sense of humor and keen attention to scenic detail, but flat characters and a meandering plot make it an ultimately unsatisfying read.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader
