Cast of Shadows
By Kevin Guilfoile
Knopf
$24.95 hard cover, 320 pages; ISBN 1-4000-4308-5 (2005).
First time novelist Kevin Guilfoile has come up with an unusual twist for a new book: a fertility doctor specializing in reproductive cloning loses his daughter to a brutal rape and murder. The crime is never solved – the killer never found. Months later, Dr. Davis Moore retrieves his daughter’s possessions and is erroneously given a vial containing the murderer’s DNA. Grief stricken, Dr. Moore doesn’t do what most folks would assume – make a clone of his daughter. That would be too predictable. Instead, Dr. Moore clones the killer. The cover of the book explains why: “How far would you go to look into the face of your daughter’s killer?”
This novel asks serious questions. Where does evil come from? Can you clone a soul? Does duplicating a life also duplicate criminal behavior? Can a perfect genetic replica of a cold-blooded killer become a law-abiding citizen?
This clever plot twist presents many possibilities, and the future of reproductive cloning painted by Guilfoile is frighteningly plausible. Yet the novel at times seems to lose its focus, perhaps because there always seems to be so much going on at once. In addition to reproductive cloning, the book contains suicide, murder, a serial killer known as the Wicker Man, a fantasy on-line world, and the systematic elimination of doctors. The religious anti-cloning group, The Soldiers for Christ, supports its ideology through a cold-blooded killer, Mickey the Gerund. Mickey’s full time profession is traveling around the country murdering doctors who work in fertility clinics. Mickey appears at various times throughout the novel, but his role in the novel should be even more prominent.
The book develops a futuristic on-line world called Shadow World that plays a big part in the novel. Shadow World is, in essence, Sims on steroids. In a speech, Dr. Moore describes it this way:
“Shadow World is the exact world we live in, every building, park, bus stop, and store in the thirty-five hundred cities around the world – and counting – that the TyroSoft programmers have drawn in the game to date. Within any city, you can walk or drive down most any street or alley, enter any building if the door’s open or you have a key. You can even travel from city to city through working airports and train stations and a skeletal interstate system. Every player begins the game with a character representing himself. You start with your real-world job, you real-world family, you real-world education. But in Shadow World, the player can do all the things they are afraid to do in real life. You can choose new destinies or take outrageous chances. You can ask models out on dates or tell off your boss. The price of failure is nothing worse than the forced start of a new game, beginning again as the real you, with another shot at deciding what choices will make you happy.”
Players use the game in different ways: to fulfill their dreams of being something they can’t in real life – say a famous actor or writer, or to try out things in a game before doing them in real life, like asking for a raise or changing professions. Others live out their dark desires by committing on-line crimes, including murder. Still others, called “True-to-Lifers,” simply mirror their life by doing the exact same things in the game that they do in real life. Millions of people become so hooked on the game that they spend half their waking hours playing it. As one character described it “nine hours in the world, nine hours in the game, six hours sleeping.”
While I love the concept of this on-line world – so much so that an entire novel could be developed based upon life in Shadow World, I found that, on a whole, it detracted from the main story in the book. I would have preferred that the novel keep its focus on Dr. Moore and the clone he created of his daughter’s killer. But make no mistake; this novel is a finely crafted futuristic work of fiction. Its view of the future is both thought provoking and disturbing. You won’t soon forget it.
