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Terror on the roller coaster-- thoughts on Greg Rucka's ALPHA

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Tasting copper in his mouth.


The vibration of his head hitting concrete again, the blurred flash of Pooch looming over him, human hand and dog's paw, the knife gone. His hair tearing. Kicking back, struggling, and then the world losing sound, vision splintering, as his skull was bashed into the floor.


And his last thought, bitter and angry, as he saw Pooch's insipid, eternal grin.


Mission failed.


From the prologue to Greg Rucka’s Alpha, which you can read on Facebook .


Whether it’s in novels or comic books, Greg Rucka’s storytelling is some of the leanest writing out there.  He lives and writes by the rule of “why use three words when you can use one.”  His latest novel has a simple high concept pitch which even Rucka has used jokingly but accurately to describe Alpha.  It’s Die Hard in Disney Land.  But it’s not: that’s just a surface read of Alpha.  Undercover Delta Force operative Jad Bell is not John McClean.  There’s no “yippy kay yay, mother fuckers” here.  Bell is a professional and so is Rucka.  

Rucka's previous novels, particularly the Atticus Kodiak books, were about people who make mistakes. I think it's his first novel Keeper that opens with Kodiak taking his girl friend to go get an abortion. Without a judgement call, that opening just implies that something the characters  did didn't go as planned and now they're forced to face the consequences. Atticus was not a major screw up or anything but Rucka's wrote him with these blind spots, both personal and professionnel, that showed a man who didn't always know the right thing to do.  

The last couple of Kodiak novels, where Kodiak learns the skills of a professional assassin, veer off into different kinds of trouble for the character that I'm still not too sure if I understand. Kodiak became almost superhuman at that point and too skilled to goof things up like he did in older books. Whether it's Tara Chase (Queen & Country,) Bridgett Logan (Shooting At Midnight,)  Kate Kane (Batwoman) or Dex Parios (Stumptown,) Rucka gives his characters plenty of room to make the wrong calls because he commits to following those mistakes no matter how ugly the consequences may be.

Jad isn't a character who makes mistakes. Assigned to work undercover at a Disney-like theme park, he and his team of special operatives are right where they need to be when they need to be there. It says a lot that the attack and take over of the park begins at only a third of the way into the story. Rucka only gives us 90 pages or so to meet and get to know these characters before he launches into the actual attack. Actually, like the original Die Hard movie, Rucka gives us all we need to know before the fireworks begin but he doesn't stop developing his characters. As the terrorist attacks begin, we start to really see Jad and to understand how he processes the world and the threats around him.

Professionally Jad doesn't make mistakes but personally?  That's another story.  As he plays up the high concept parts of the novel, it's easy to miss the characterization that Rucka slowly and deliberately builds.  He's divorced and he has a deaf teenage daughter. And while it's never explicitly said, he's divorced because work always came and still comes before his family. It's a character flaw of the character but it's also what really drives the book as his daughter is at the park the day the attacks happen.

He never has Jad's wife come out and yell "we got divorced because of your damn job" but he still makes that as explicit as possible shows.  Rucka builds his stories around what's not said as much as it is around what the characters do. That he lets his ex-wife and daughter come to the park when there's a possible threat and that he smartly realizes that others on his team may be better equipped to rescue his daughter speaks more about the character than any forced exposition could.

Rucka doesn't just tell us about his character's. He uses the story to show us who they are. The problem with a story like this and a character like Jad is that there may not be that much to tell. Maybe Jad is just a special ops workaholic but there doesn't seem to be that much more to him than that. Rucka is so specific in his research and his characterizations that Jad is the one of the least developed characters in the book.   

He gets us into he heads of his terrorists; Gabriel, a sleeper agent, and his handler the Uzbek. Rucka has always worked hard in his novels to make sure we understand the bad guys as much as we understand the protagonists but with Alpha, we understand the antagonists so much better. We understand their motivations and their fears. We understand the life Gabriel wants even as he holds on to the thin belief that he will get out of the amusement park alive. We never get into Jad's mine the way we get into the terrorist's minds.

At some point, Rucka made a decision on who Jad is and how he was going to reveal him to the reading audience. Like Rucka, Jad is a man who uses as few words as possible who is as professional and skilled as hey come. In that way, Jad and his writer are very similar. Rucka writes Alpha as if was the man on the mission, pounding away on the ground to create this amusement park, the terror and the man who will protect it. Jad is a soldier; hopefully in later books Rucka will show us more of Jad, the man.