BLIND FALL
Christopher Rice
Scribner
Psychological Thriller
ISBN: 9780743293990

BLIND FALL by Christopher Rice begins with a flashback to the battlefields of Iraq. On the ground John Houck makes a mistake. He wasn’t paying attention when he approached a boy, a dog and the wreck of a car that was really a bomb that exploded into a fiery “jagged white flame. John ate dust and felt the weight of Mike Bowers come down on him… [even after] Bowers was pulled off him, John still found himself unable to move… the explosion shut out sound and thick black smoke blinded him.”

Despite his inability to think clearly, somewhere in his failing consciousness, John knew that something terrible had happened to Captain Mike Bowers, the man who took the hit for him. John’s wounds were not life threatening nor were they difficult to treat. Mike, on the other hand, was badly hurt: he lost an eye and had two broken legs and other injuries. They were both flown out of the desert, and that was the last time the two saw each other for years.

John was riddled with guilt for not having an opportunity to thank Mike for saving his life. He had written to him, called him and finally found the courage to visit him. This journey is the second pivotal event that changes the timbre of the book. He makes the trip only to find Mike dead in his bed. Stunned, he soon realizes that he hears someone sneaking through the house. After a chase through the neighboring woods, John catches the “intruder.” The fellow is terrified and keeps crying out asking where Mike is. In his rage and automatic snap into his special Marine training, John doesn’t listen to the man’s pleas. He drags his “prisoner” out of the trees to re-enter the house.

Still not really paying attention to the guy, John becomes transfixed when he sees the wall of pictures. The second photo that catches his attention shows “Mike [sitting] on a bar stool, beaming, as he received a big wet one on the cheek from the guy [John] had almost killed. As he gazed at the “moment caught in time” he is able to see the shirt the bartender was wearing: “[It] said The Catch Trap, a gay bar in San Diego that was the punch line to some of the fag jokes John heard while he was stationed at Camp Pendleton.”

Alex Martin is the man who shouts that he lives in the house with Mike. The sheriff is summoned; Alex tells him and John that someone came into the house and that he was frightened and hid in the woods. That’s where John accosted him with snarling, palpable rage and almost killed him. They all trudge upstairs to the bedroom and find nothing --- Mike is nowhere to be found! “Whoever committed the murder moved the body.” In a sort of interrogation Sheriff Duncan explains to John that he is free to go because the official story is: “…you came up here with the best of intentions, and you walked into…some kind of sex game. Let’s just say you misread the scene, which is understandable. But it’s not murder…” He insinuates that John “saw something that wasn’t there” because, like so many battle-weary vets, John is probably suffering from PTSD.

Mike had a secret life he felt he couldn’t tell John about, and at that moment John starts to understand that things he took for granted in their friendship were not as concrete as he thought. This is when John embarks on a crusade to find out what happened to his buddy; John feels he owes him at least that much. John and Alex become a team, and as they proceed, John encounters more emotional pain and becomes aware that Alex was the real target.

John decides that he is going to protect Alex from the demons that are hounding him, and this decision precipitates a rapprochement with his estranged sister. As John meets people from his past as well as the present, he is amazed that they know so much about him and his life. It’s almost as though a dark shadow stalked him for years, accumulating information for some kind of surreal file. As he slowly starts to allow himself to “hear” what is said to him, he begins to take stock of himself and his self-image.

The main plot is straightforward and chilling, but Christopher Rice has that special talent shared among extraordinary writers that allows them to string several sub-plots together throughout the narrative, which, at the end, emerge in a cogent whole. This deftly written story races from event to event and seduces the reader into following the clues as if they were breadcrumbs.

As the narrative is propelled by sharp prose, the characters emerge fully limned. And in his wisdom Rice has changed the way he presented homoeroticism in his earlier novels. Here he chooses to tell his tale from the characters’ points of view and how each event impacts their lives. This device saves BLIND FALL from being a military-straight-gay-macho treatise. He said in an interview: “I like to joke that John is my first truly straight character.” And the story is told mainly from John’s point of view, which brings readers into his thoughts.

Christopher Rice, the son of Anne Rice, grew up in New Orleans, and he does bring a sense of the surreal that has always been associated with that city. His previous titles, A DESTINY OF SOULS (2000) and THE SNOW GARDEN (2001), gave readers a glimpse of the depth of his talent. BLIND FALL shows how each book reflects his maturity as a writer and the way he keeps a steady equilibrium among the many twists this novel takes.

    --- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

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