Growing Pains

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

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In Jillian Weise's The Colony (Soft Skull, March 1), researchers gather subjects for radical gene therapy. They can mend Alzheimer's, they say, and delete a predisposition toward fat.

Anne Hatley, even as she participates in the study, remains unconvinced. With the cellular ability to regenerate new tissue three times faster than other people, she has the most promising genetic profile of the five subjects. The 25-year-old walks with a prosthetic leg; the researchers dangle the promise that she will be able to grow herself an entirely new limb.

But Anne doesn't feel damaged. "I sat on the bed of the X-ray machine and waited. He would take my shadow and put it to the light. He would point with the end of his Montblanc to various regions of black, gray and white. Without the light, he couldn't see the X-ray. It's easy to forget this. The inadequacy of the human eye. No one calls it a failure; it's just the way we're made."

This is the crisis at the heart of The Colony: Born without a leg, Anne is comfortable as she is; but born without a leg, her body is always marked out as different. She doesn't need a new leg. Her prosthesis, with a computerized knee and a cord that plugs into the wall nightly, works better and repairs more easily than a fragile human limb. Despite all of that, it's the trait that defines her, the first thing anyone sees or mentions.

This dilemma works so well because of Anne. A biology teacher from Durham, she likes sweet tea and cigarettes, lacy slips and peep-toe pumps. She's a bundle of conflicting impulses, happy to take the three-month paid retreat to the Colony but resistant to treatment, quick to fall for a fellow patient (Nick, a suicide-prone Jewish cowboy) but still hung up over an affair with a married man.

The novel is likewise appealingly scattered and contradictory, able to use a grounded realism to analyze clinical treatment or emotional entanglements but just as happy to provide grace notes of absurdity (weightlessness as a side effect of fat-gene treatment) or flashiness (medical charts, sex surveys). Weise's magpie excitability sustains the heavy lifting of the ethical debate, and Anne's decision to grow a leg may not surprise anyone, her debate as plausible as the tissue of near-factual science enabling it.

Plausible isn't Joe Hill's concern. His Horns (William Morrow, Feb. 16) opens with Ig Perrish growing entirely different appendages, sharp and bony, from his temples. But Hill quickly makes Ig's situation believable: Waking up with a pounding hangover, he finds the horns just as inexplicable as we do, and as Hill barrels on it becomes clear that they just are.

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As Ig tries to understand what's happened to him, he discovers that the horns don't really frighten people, but instead encourage them to spill their darkest secrets and act out their worst impulses. In scenes that move from simply funny, with Ig's heavyset girlfriend giving in to a box of doughnuts, to the more disturbing confessions of his doctor (prescription drugs, candy-striper lust), Hill sketches out how ostracized Ig is, culminating with his mother confessing her belief that he killed his childhood sweetheart.

If Ig resembles the devil, his surroundings play their part, too. His small New Hampshire town's bar is called The Pit. He drives a Gremlin (His brother? A Viper). The sheer range in wisecracks is less surprising than gradually discovering how a book so overstuffed with clever ideas about morality and sin and femininity and loss winds up so very sad and sweet.

Ig works well as a poor devil, given the striking difference between his appearance and his wounded soul, and the gap between the suspicions of the town and the torch he carries for his dead love. Horns pulls as much from Frankenstein as from Faust: Ig, transformed into a monster (first by rumor and suspicion, then literally and physically), retains his innate gentleness and humanity. His movement — from realizing his monstrousness, to accepting it, to using it to repair his life — turns a high-concept horror story toward delicate, ironic resolution.

And it's this same Frankenstein resolution — the plot that hinges on the monster's realization of his monstrousness — that The Colony strikingly inverts. Anne starts where Ig ends up, comfortable in the body she has; but the promises science makes for eugenic normality chip away at that self-assurance. Anne becomes estranged from herself; looking into a microscope at the outset of her therapy, she sees "a black background with red oblong cells. ... I thought the cells rather than my cells, and it felt like looking at a textbook rather than an image of my inner workings." By giving in to normality, she's already started to become a monster.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)