The Sinful Ones

(I read an earlier incarnation of this novel called You're All Alone.)

Leiber's short novel has a wonderfully creepy opening. Carr Mackay works in a large Chicago employment agency. One afternoon he has a kind of spell.

You've all had the experience. Suddenly the life drains out of everything. Familiar faces become pink patterns. Commonplace objects look weird. All sounds are loud and unnatural. Of course it lasts only a few moments, but it can be pretty disturbing.

Then a "frightened girl " enters the large office. She is terrified and closely followed by "a big blonde handsome woman," a woman she studiously avoids acknowledging. No one else notices the pair. The frightened girl comes into Carr's office and when he speaks to her she is even more terrified. Carr coworkers can clearly not see either of the women. One fellow employee casually interrupts Carr's conversation with the frightened girl to ntroduce him to an invisible companion. The frightened girl drops Carr a quickly scribbled message and leaves, but in the outer office her way is blocked by the big blonde. The big blonde slaps her hard across the face. The frightened girl leaves. The big blonde follows.

I was hooked. This was weirdness of the highest order, amplified as Carr comes to realize that he himself has become invisible, although he can still talk on the telephone. He reads the note left by the frightened girl.

Watch out for the wall-eyed blonde, the young man with one hand, and the affable seeming older gentleman. But the small dark man with glasses may be your friend.

I was primed to settle into 100 pages of entertaining perplexity, but Leiber kills the story by excessive episodes of strangeness that succeed only in making Carr Mackey come off as a clueless idiot. Leiber establishes early on that Mackey has been "awakened." He knows that Chicago and for all he knows the entire world is a machine with people moving about as automatons playing out their roles. Only he, the frightened girl, and the ghoulish triumvirate of evil characters live outside this mechanized world. Actually there are others, like the six men in black hats. But they are even deadlier than the first three we meet. (Remember this is all written 50 years pre-Matrix.)

Readers will catch onto all this pretty quickly, but the story, for all its brevity, is then padded with episodes and interminable blocks of conversation that attempt to explain what we have already figured out. After the knockout opening scene, the only good piece of writing is an outrageous car chase through downtown Chicago that with the right special effects could be inserted into a Batman movie. The plot slogs it way to a uninspired ending. Mr. Leiber disappoints big time with this one.