Book Review: The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French
One of my favorite maxims in popular fiction writing is the one that reads: Always start with a killer first sentence. As the opening in her latest book proves, Elizabeth Stuckey-French is one author who not only takes this rule to heart, she wields it like a blunt cleaver: "By the time Marylou Ahearn finally moved into the little ranch house in Tallahassee, she'd spent countless hours trying to come up with the best way to kill Wilson Spriggs."
While the book's intriguing title may suggest metaphor or hyperbole, as the first sentence indicates, "The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady" is a somewhat disappointingly literal description of the story that follows. In the '50s Marylou Ahearn finds herself caught up in a secret government medical experiment. As part of this experiment she is administered a deadly radioactive cocktail while pregnant with her daughter Helen. Fast-forward to today, and we learn that not only did Marylou become gravely ill from the effects of the experiment, the radiation also caused Helen to contract cancer as a child and die a horrible death. Now, as an old woman, Marylou has only one burning ambition left: revenge. "After Helen's death she'd had to focus her anger somewhere, and since the government of the United States as a thing to hate was too unwieldy, and all the idiots who got caught up in the Cold War paranoia -- the morons who devised and funded and carried out the radiation experiments -- were too numerous and anonymous to collectively despise, she focused her hatred on Wilson Spriggs."
While it would seem Marylou's desire for revenge should be a simple matter, it becomes complicated because Spriggs, now old and retired himself, lives with his daughter's family. Thus, in order to get access to her intended victim, Marylou must befriend Caroline and Vic Witherspoon and their three children: Otis, Ava and Suzi. Ahearn's original plan for revenge soon mutates into a vague plan to wreak havoc on Spriggs' entire family, a plot that is made even more complicated by the inconvenient fact that as she ingratiates herself into their lives, she realizes she actually likes them.
Stuckey-French is a young author with several titles to her credit. In the acknowledgements she admits to being inspired to begin the book after reading an account of actual radiation experiments conducted on unsuspecting American citizens during the Cold War. With literary exuberance, Stuckey-French takes these actual events and uses them as a departure point to create a work of fiction that is lively and entertaining, if a tad uneven in places.
"Revenge" is most definitely a character-driven book. The novel is presented "Rashomon" style, with each chapter telling the unfolding story through the eyes of a different character. While this convention allows the author the freedom to flesh out the individuals, the flesh she chooses often seems somewhat contrived. Otis and Ava both have Asperger's syndrome, Vic suffers middle-aged angst and struggles not to have an affair, while Caroline is a bored, neurotic housewife. Caroline also carries emotional scars because her mother left home when she was an infant, and Wilson Spriggs seems to spend much of the book in a dementia-tinged fog. The weighted focus on the book's characters results in a plot that is somewhat choppy and uncoordinated. Reading the book, I felt as though I'd been watching a child playing with dolls in a dollhouse, acting out each scene -- complete with dialogue -- all the while knowing that at any moment the author would be called away to dinner.
The book does contain more than a few flashes of subtle humor. For example, the alias Marylou selects to hide her identity is "Nancy Archer," the name of the character in the B movie "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman." In addition, "Revenge" has moments of poignancy as well, such as Marylou's realization of the unintended pain she has caused the Witherspoons: "Because this whole thing was her fault. It was her fault. ... Could she ever stop ruining the lives of innocent people? First her own daughter and now Suzi. The Radioactive Lady, it seemed, was just as destructive as the nasty shit she'd swallowed."
As a writing instructor at Florida State University, it is not surprising that Stuckey-French should be good at coming up with opening lines that really grab the reader. (My personal favorite is: "Everything that used to work didn't.") And to give her credit, the author has an admirable feel for realistic teenage dialogue -- no doubt the result of living with two daughters.
Yet, despite a credible effort, "Revenge" falls short of being a work for the ages. As you lie on the beach this summer saut