Subject: STRANGE INVASION by Michael Kandel

From: [email-masked] (Evelyn C. Leeper)
Date: 12 Apr 90 02:53:35 GMT

STRANGE INVASION by Michael Kandel
	       Bantam Spectra, 1989, ISBN 0-553-28146-1, $3.95.
		      A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		       Copyright 199 Evelyn C. Leeper

     This short novel (very short--152 pages, and by my estimate just over
the 40,00-word minimum in the Hugo definition for novel) is just the sort of
thing one would hope a line such as the Bantam Spectra Special Editions
would publish.  A Dicksian (*not* Dickensian!) slide through the story of
how one schizophrenic saves the world from invaders, STRANGE INVASION
whiplashes its "hero" all over the world to fight off invaders who try to
conquer the world through hedonism, ennui, and any other psychological tool
they can muster.  Only the fact that our hero is a psychological mess to
begin with (he has a difficult time separating the invaders from his
ordinary visions of monsters crawling up his wall) protects him.  Kandel
takes the standard plot of "Earth threatened by invaders and saved by
Everyman" and twists it fifteen degrees to "Earth threatened by invaders and
saved by total wacko."  One gets the impression that the hero was (and
perhaps still is) only a step away from being one of the ranters on the
street corners or people who talk to trash cans.  In fact, he does spend a
fair amount of time talking to inanimate objects in STRANGE INVADERS--but
then sometimes the aliens do disguise themselves as trash cans.

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 201-957-2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or [email-masked]