STEPHEN FOREST
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS 1999
Simultaneously another meeting is taking place in an Irish Abbey, where Father Shanahan, an IRA priest, is enlisting the aid of the world’s deadliest assassin, the Gorgon, in a confessional booth. The Abbey is filled with milling tourists, all positioned as protective surrogates of the two, who never meet face to face, but agree over concealed microphones to a fee of two million dollars for a completed job.
This being a biographical thriller, we are soon apprised of the past of these characters and quickly learn of the influences that brought each of them to their respective positions of power. As he is leaving, the Father suspects he has made a deal with a woman doing a man’s work. And so he has, since the Gorgons were three monstrous sisters of Greek mythology who would slay any man who looked into their eyes. Their present reincarnations are three gorgeous globe trotting sisters who already have completed a dozen assassinations by unique poisons affording themselves ample time to escape. The sister that he has hired is one Kristian Somberg, a Swede, whose first victim was her husband. By losing his body at sea and assuming his male identity, she collected over a million in insurance money on herself to begin to establish her super race of Amazonian women who could conquer any men that they encountered. But Kristian witnessed her first murder as a teenager, when her mother found her being ravaged by a priest and cut his body into little pieces. The mother was placed in a sanitarium and the sisters were bound together for life.
From this point on we are engaged in a pervasive subplot of gender-bending fantasy. Kristian, whose striking purple eyes and long curly blond hair make you think of Medusa, has created her dozen acolytes called “femmes”. Her most recent seduction is a Hawaiian Harvard Grad student called Kim Lee. Using unlimited money, gifts and sex she has lured him to her Chateau on Lake Geneva, where using mind games, sex and Estrogens disguised as Vitamins, she is slowly transforming the mental and physical attributes of Kim into his nubile girlfriend Melissa. Everyone in this group believes that beneath all males lies a femininity just waiting to surface. (Don’t you?) In every paragraph amid the lurid sex, we are invited to watch Kim’s mental wrestling with his new figure and identity. Gender confusion is ever present.
“That’s right, Somberg said watching them in the mirror as she turned his head to take his lips with her lips tight against his open mouth, caressing his nipples which went erect together with his penis. She could feel his craving and it gave the pleasure of generosity to change him at her touch, the estrogen pills returning him to his true nature, that of God Herself. Softly, softly, she stroked the pretty baby, with infinite soothing and assurance, and as they kissed she rocked the beauty being born within, teaching hips to roll to her rocking, and he grew soft inside and hard all over, while she turned hard inside and remained soft all over.”
Oh, he loves it of course, and in due time relinquishes his male identity to wear Donna Karen clothes and Valentino gowns in the service of his new Goddess. After this transformation is complete, Les Femmes begin to use their “Femchismo” and intelligence to rule by killing as instructed by Medusa. She has successfully created two dozen Femme "Manchurian Candidates" and only one has committed suicide. Now back to the original story.
Kristian is now formulating her precise strategy to eliminate Mrs. Thatcher with an oral poison which must be slipped past the toxicologist who samples everything she eats. She decides that she will use a child to bring the poison past the guards in the form of icing for Mrs. T's favorite cake to be ingested when she revisits her first grade alma mater in Grantham. Through meticulous research she selects a blond, blue-eyed boy in Chicago named Danny Moore, the son of fashion photographer, Jessica Moore. Using the alias of Jessica Sterling, a Sony Advertising Executive, Kristian entices the stage mother to let her borrow her son for a few audition shots. At this point she brain-washes the child into pretending he has a new name Eric Anderson and that he is playing with a toy six-shooter. Upon returning to his mother’s studio, he is instructed to shoot his mother and does so thinking it all play. He is then kidnapped by Sterling/Somberg.
Jessica Moore survives the shooting because of a costume she was wearing and spends the next year searching for her son with her live-in companion Pit. She only has a composite of Sterling but feels that she is European and through various contacts she meets Trent Stanford, who puts her to work looking through Interpol faces on the computer. Finally she makes an ID of Peter Nordstrom, who looks like Sterling, but was a suspect in the murder of his wife, Kristian Somberg. Now the first real break comes as an American tourist connects a picture of Danny taken in Shanahan’s church in Killarney, Ireland with a milk carton in Chicago. Could the Brighton IRA case and the child kidnapping be connected? Could Father Shanahan be the central contractor for all IRA murders of English luminaries?
Well it’s off to the Emerald Isle, where Jessica meets the Father, the IRA and her own mortality in a bizarre murder attempt by Somberg’s sister. And then to England to save Mrs. Thatcher and confront Mrs. Anderson/Somberg, who has painstakingly established herself as the perfect Grantham PTA mother.
It appears that I have over-simplified the plot of a very complex novel, where pages are devoted to dissecting the psyches of each character. The themes of loyalty, pain, torture, aggression, female dominance, maternal and paternal influences, and gender confusion are all carried to extremes of verbosity, which make you want to skim the print, but you can’t. Stephen Forest’s writing is reminiscent of James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” with sentences that continue forever. There is a also a definite "flight of fantasy", which you will somehow find believable. So you continue to the very end which culminates in a fiery climax with everybody in the same room with the IRA explosives meant for Mrs. Thatcher. With a vivid description of the storied Chateau library and all the protagonists in a Mexican standoff, you know this just had to be written for that upcoming movie. Can't wait to see it.
Luv Ya, Cerise