Joe Herrington, Tekoa (PublishAmerica, 2003)
I would like very much to be able to consider this book without taking into consideration its publisher. Mr. Herrington deserves no less for his efforts.
However, it is impossible to consider Tekoa without considering PublishAmerica. When I saw the blurb for this book, it intrigued me, but when I held the book in my hands and saw the publisher, most of that curiosity turned to trepidation.
PublishAmerica is infamous for a variety of reasons. The majority of them have no relevance to Mr. Herrington's novel, so for those who are curious, I invite them to read this article. What is immediately relevant is that PublishAmerica does not read or evaluate manuscripts that cross its door very well at all. They have famously offered to publish a book made up of the same thirty pages over and over, and a book deliberately written to be as bad as possible.
PublishAmerica has published some excellent stories as well, which their detractors have said is all the worse, as those stories are liable to be passed over by anyone burned by the experience of reading one of their poorer offerings.
In addition, they do not make a significant effort to edit. Their editors are asked to edit so many manuscripts at a time that they rarely do more than run a spell check and a grammar check. Sometimes, a lucky person will get a bit more than that, but never even as much as an adequate copyedit, which would fix their sentence level issues, much less a full edit, which would look at matters of plot and character and pace.
This means that even the best books released by PublishAmerica include more typos and read more roughly than books published by a genuine small press publisher.
So I had a legitimate fear that this book, Tekoa, would follow that pattern. I was partly right.
Shelby and David are friends and would-be scientists, using their pre- college summer to explore the Marfa ghost light phenomenon out in the Texas prairie. Instead, they end up in another world, among a people who seem related to the Native Americans of our world, but with a decidedly different technology. Shelby and David promptly end up involved in a war between the oppressed Tekoans and their enemies, the Cartokians. The two Texans do their best to teach the Tekoans to stand and fight for themselves. In spite of this, it's Shelby who steals the best scenes in the book, and David who tries to steal the romance with the local.
The story is filled with white buffaloes, human sacrifice, geysers, and a Nikola Tesla-inspired energy system. Science and fantasy both thread through the story, with the scientific method the clear winner. Mr. Herrington also very clearly loves to share his knowledge of scientific play, and survival skills. Tekoa is fast-paced, and intelligent. Mr. Herrington describes himself as a longtime storyteller, and it shows. His sense of what makes a thrilling campfire story is his best trait.
The one substantial problem I noted with the plot is the closing chapter, which includes a gratuitous moment of "And they forget all the adventure they just lived through" -- one of the cardinal sins of closing chapters, and one that has ruined some otherwise superb books. The conclusion is also retracted a few pages later, with one last and tiresome hammering home of the 'scientific method is great' meme, making it that much more pointless, and turning a slightly overdone theme into a compelte and utter soapbox.
The characters have the potential to be a great bunch -- the groundwork has been laid for Shelby, the romantically inept David, the Tekoan boy Bon, and Vishti, the girl who makes David's tongue trip, among others. The problem is, the clunky prose gets in the way of the characters far more than it interferes with the underlying story. Prose style is where the biggest gap lies between storytelling and novel, and here's where Mr. Herrington stumbles.
All the prose tends to be clunky, with facts and details interrupting the story instead of being smoothly integrated. The themes of science and American patriotism are laid on with a trowel instead of a fine brush. Things that should be implied are baldly stated time and again. The impression I got was that Mr. Herrington wanted to tell his story in the writerly equivalent of straight talk, not realising how very easily the prose version of straight talk becomes excessive bluntness. In storytelling, the voice and presentation can overcome awkward phrasings much more easily; in prose, there's no such backup.
The dialogue is the place where character should shine the most, and instead, it's where the prose problems show up. For all Shelby and David speak in a drawled slang that's meant to sound natural, their dialogue has a stilted feel. Part of the awkwarness is in the phrasing, whihch uses few standard contractions and employes over-formal sentence structure.
Another part of the awkwardness lies in what they say. David and Shelby, in spite of being longtime friends, each take some time to tell the other their background and their relationships with their families, their preferences in school, in one of the most blatant "As you know Bob" conversations I've ever seen. While few of the other conversations include quite as obvious a sin, the awkwardness remains, with the same characters sometimes talking in long formal sentences, sometimes with an excess of jargon, and sometimes with a sudden burst of slang.
There are also definite structural issues. Chapters one and two, and the closing chapter, are in first person from Shelby's point of view, and the rest of the book in third person, though the most of it is from Shelby's point of view. There is no good reason for this switch. On the contrary, it makes the opening of chapter three unusually jarring, considering the action continues with the same people, less than five minutes after the close of chapter two.
The pity is that with a good editing from a publisher who cared, Tekoa stood a chance of being a damn good adventure.
I don't lay the blame on Mr. Herrington, whose only crime was in submitting a rougher draft of his novel than he could produce -- and anyone who knows the publishing world knows that's a universal flaw in writers.
I blame the publisher, who should have either rejected this as an early draft of a potentially better story, or committed genuine time and effort to editing and working with the author.
Joe Herrington has a Web Site.
