Crooked

by Austin Grossman
355 pgs

"What if there are worse things in the world than nuclear weapons?" This is a statement made by President Eisenhower to his young Vice President, Richard Milhous Nixon, near the beginning of Crooked.

What if The United States was built on a foundation of dark magic centuries earlier? And what if ever since World War II, the country had been involved in a secret arms race, one far more dangerous than the one the rest of the world knew about with the Soviet Union, but with forces far more dangerous than any possible human threat? Austin Grossman's latest book is a fascinating alternative history story in which Nixon, the country's most disparaged president, is not the man the country, and the rest of the world believed him to be. Rather, the decisions that he made, that eventually resulted in him quitting the presidency in disgrace, were motivated by his responsibility to protect the nation from dark forces from another dimension.

It's an outlandish premise, and one that could have easily resulted in a nonsensical and silly book. But that's not the direction Grossman went with his story. Instead, it's obvious that he conducted an amazing amount of research into both the lives of key historical figures of the era as well as the key events. And the result is a story that expertly overlays an alternative history over one of the most significant periods of the country's history

While Grossman's pacing in the book leaves a little to be desired on numerous occasions, it's still a highly-unique story and Grossman's creativity and imagination are in high gear. He manages to bring H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu into America's political backstory, and transform Henry Kissinger into a 1000-year-old sorcerer.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

YOU

by Austin Grossman
383 pgs

Russell has recently left the fast-paced lifestyle of an up-and-coming attorney for the all-night-subsisting-on-skittles-and-mountain-dew lifestyle of a computer game programmer. Back when he was a teenager, Russell and three of his closest friends had been some of the first people in the world to see the potential of computer gaming when their teacher gave each of them 15 minutes alone to play around on a new Apple II computer the school had bought and didn't know what to do with. Each of them finally found something in the world that they could relate to and that they could interact with naturally. And from those few minutes alone, the future of online computer gaming was born.

Russell eventually parted from his friends and went off to pursue the type of career his parents would be proud of, while the other three created their own company and launched the highly-successful Realms of Gold game series. Now, in an attempt to fill the void in his life created when he left the world of computer-generated magicians, thieves, princesses, and dragons, he has quit the law firm, swallowed his pride, and come back to the company he wishes he'd never left.

The company is at the early stages of creating the next game in the series and Russell has to quickly get back up to speed and prove to everyone there that he can contribute and help the company return to the levels of success it once enjoyed.

YOU is the second book by Grossman. His first book Soon I will be Invincible was a highly imaginative tale of superheroes which I enjoyed a lot. This one is just as imaginative, but unfortunately it fell flat for me. I don't write computer programs, I don't know HTML or C++ and I moved on from playing video games when I was 18 years old or so, right around the time Super Nintendo came out, so much of the story was uninteresting to me. I wish that Grossman had made YOU more accessible to a broader audience. He's such an intelligent writer and I wanted to like the book more than I did. But it read more like a memoir than it did a thriller. I kept waiting for some dramatic climax which unfortunately never materialized. I'm sure a geekier person than me would enjoy this book much more, unfortunately for both Grossman and myself, I was just a little too cool for this one.

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆