So much for chronology. The Nameless Zine received two novels by Chris Dietz as submissions and, as he happens to be an Arizona author, resident in Bisbee, I was happy to give them a go. While the two books are unrelated standalones, I felt I should tackle 'Hinterland' first, given that it saw print first, and then continue on  on to 'Trilobites!' In reality, 'Trilobites!' is a far more accessible read and functions well as a door into his particular style of writing. If you like this, then you may love 'Hinterland' because it does many of the same things but bigger and more and with emphasis.

I don't know Dietz's background, beyond what the author blurb says in these books. He's a writer and a teacher and a birdwatcher and I can see all of those things in his writing. He writes not merely to tell his stories but to have fun with words. His characters are bright, sometimes precocious, sometimes modest kids, but believable ones who I'd loved to have known when I was their age. And those characters spend a lot of time outdoors doing the sort of things that kids used to do before technology took over. But he's more than those three things.

In particular, with two of his novels now behind me, I wouldn't be surprised to find that he's also a slam poet and/or a performance artist. His frequent wordplay isn't the traditional sort I'm used to being an Englishman, not just puns but spoonerisms and malapropisms and their ilk. He goes for jagged stream of consciousness rhyming, like he's a surrealist rapper or, as I said, a slam poet. He likes homonyms and rhythms and if he can turn them into something quirky and evocative, all the better. He also has a habit of creating characters who also create, the primary character here being a young writer and a group of important characters constituting a communal art collective.

That primary character is Ian Scanlan and he's a teenager who's moved to Gary, Indiana with his dad for his work and presumably as part of an ongoing separation. His dad, Ethan, is a teacher and, to be fair, a flaky and bitter pain in the ass. His mum, Taylor, on the other hand is far more stable and interesting, a geologist who's mapping aquifers in New Mexico for a mining company. And that's where the trilobites of the title come from. In the cover art, they're the long extinct fossils we know well. In this novel, they live, in a million-year-old underground lake that Taylor and her colleagues discover close to the border with Texas. And, considerate mum and corporate risk that she is, she gives Ian one of the trilobites.

I'd say that Ian's a normal kid, but he's a little brighter than the norm, especially in Gary, Indiana where he's also a fish out of water. For a start, his idiot dad's enrolled him in Catholic school, even though he's an atheist with a fondness for science that he's inherited from his mum. Let's just say that the nuns who run his classes do not appreciate his thoughts on evolution and his not putting God at the heart of each topic they cover. The only friend he makes is an odd one, because she's a nominally Godfearing girl who argues with him and apparently hates his guts. But, as is so often the case, that means that they hook up and make a wonderful couple.

Well, not quite. And it isn't just that Ethan arrives home to find his teenage son asleep on his bed with his head on the belly of a sleeping girl he's never seen before. Never mind that both and fully clothed and nothing untoward happened, you can imagine the shock. It's also that Taylor gradually comes to realise that Hessler, the trilobite she gave to her son, may well be the only male trilobite amongst a population of thousands; if not, tens of thousands. His little science project is now a crucial asset of her company, so she wants him back and Ian and Bridget have no intention of letting him get sliced and diced for science.

Being the leads, they naturally figure out a plan and put it into effect and I'm not going to spoil any of it but I should mention two other things. One is that Ian has another couple of friends who factor into this novel in various ways throughout. They're Dan and Tallulah, who pick on each other fondly and viciously, and I have to say that I would be honoured to call either of them friend. Tallulah in particular is a joyous little girl, believably under ten but also believably wise beyond her years. I felt the importance of every one of her decisions, whether they made sense or not. They certainly did to her.

The other is the other story that unfolds at the same time as the one above, and anyone who looked at the other Chris Dietz that I reviewed here at the Nameless Zine, 'Hinterland', will roll their eyes at the likelihood of confusion. Well, yeah, I got confused here for a while but only for a while and only because of a combination of factors that should probably have been addressed before publication. This story is a fictional story, one that Ian is writing throughout the book and which Bridget ends up helping out with.

The main problem is that I didn't realise that it was a fictional story until surprisingly far into the book, even though it's entirely told in italics and even though the fictional story and the real one don't meet in any way other than Ian is in both of them. Had it not been for a couple of crucial things, I would have been fine but whoever proofed the book didn't mention it. One is that the book begins in the fictional story, so we're introduced to Ian not as the character we expect but as a fictional character who simply happens to based on and invented by the character we expect. The other is that this section ends with an essay that the real Ian wrote for real class but then apparently included in his fictional story. Hey, it was in italics too, even if they were also bold.

So I didn't recognise the device as a device, even though every other character is different. Instead of a pair of kids that he befriends in Gary, there's a house full of kids that he befriends in Gary, who live over the street without any parental supervision, because they're a dystopian near future. Instead of going to Catholic school, they do much cooler things, like hack the AIs which run the freight train system so as to be able to sneak into the yards when they're stopped, sneak into specific containers and then sneak out again with stuff they've liberated. And these kids, who have cool names like Romper, Turd and Pop, not to mention the two young hacker girls, Fun and Moon, talk in a rhyming beat poetry, just as ADHD as Aurore's multi-language amalgam in 'Hinterland'.

My main problem with this story within a story is that I didn't realise that it was, which seems to fall at the feet of the awkwardly conceived and laid out chapter one. Otherwise, I had a blast with it, but I do still wonder why it got such a high page count. There are reasons for it to be there, as insight into what makes Ian tick and as a bonding agent between him and Bridget, for a start, but none of the reasons I conjured up seem to be important enough to warrant that much of it. Maybe I'm missing something. It isn't the hardest thing to do in a Chris Dietz novel.

And, just as I probably came off more positive than I really was in my review of 'Hinterland', I may come off more negative than I really am in my review of 'Trilobites!' I liked a lot of the last book but had a lot of problems with it too. I liked more of this one and had fewer problems with it. It's an easier read but a similar one in many ways. There's no way anyone who read the two would mistake them as being by two different authors. Dietz has a very recognisable voice.

The kids are the important characters in both books and they share a slew of attributes that the author obviously appreciates. The adults were utterly useless in 'Hinterland' and some in this book are utterly useless too, but they're given reasons beyond simply being adults, making this a far more mature work: Ethan is bitter about the collapse of his marriage and he's moving slowly into crazy town; and Bridget's mum is a religious nut. Other adults, though, are capable if flawed human beings, like Ian's mum, along with the dedicated Officer Mahoney and a talented PI, Hakeem Arafat. Both books are road movies and coming of age stories with the girls generally smarter than the boys.

Dietz only has one other novel in print, which I don't have, and that's Art Town, published later in 2021, after 'Trilobites!' What little I can see about it suggests that it's likely to unfold in a similar way to the two I've read, which bodes well, because I like Dietz's unique voice and, on the basis of only two books, is improving at getting it across. Maybe I'll track it down and give it a shot too. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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