Review: Your Own Fate by Amos Keppler

   This came to my attention ten years ago, through a review at Amazon. I had read a few of Amos Keppler’s novels, like The Defenseless and Dreams Belong to the Night before that. It was an easy sell. I feared my expectations were too high, that I was bound to be disappointed, but I wasn’t.

  It starts off with a bang, and works itself up from there.

  Jeremy Zahn, a hunter of men and former British policeman, arrives in Los Angeles after a long, exhausting hunt of Timothy Joyce, an international fugitive that has become his archenemy. Zahn is a driven man, obsessive in his zeal, frustrated by his incomprehension of what’s going on, unable to understand the motivation and often baffling actions of his enemy.

  The story begins in Los Angeles, but also in London years before, successfully moving back and forth between the present and the past. Zahn is pretty much a typical, dull lawman during that time in London, one that hasn’t really pondered the hidden depths of the world. He’s forced to do that repeatedly during the three years of the hunt. Joyce seems to be his superior in all important ways, but Zahn refuses to be give up, following the other like a bloodhound never letting go of the scent.

  Who is really the prey and who is the hunter is open to interpretation, though.

  This is Amos Keppler’s shortest novel, but it feels much longer because it’s packed with details. You need to catch every one of them, or you might miss an important clue to what is actually happening. I didn’t realize what that was until the last few pages. It was still a great payoff, or perhaps a great payoff because I didn’t know. But when I read the book for the second time, and knew the basic story, I still loved it.

  It’s a complex story to end all complex stories, a tales of the unexpected to end everything unexpected. I predict you will be as stunned as I was when you’re done reading it.

 

I would rather be dead than come out of the closet, some gays say, but I don’t

   I and my sister heard that a lot in the Christian group and the small community in western Norway we grew up. We also witnessed how several people acted on it. We suffered under the yoke, until we practically ran away to the nearest big city in our late teens, and could finally be ourselves.

  Bergen, the big city measured by Norwegian standards was, is more open, but we keep facing the same prejudice we did in the small community. It’s more concealed, but very much present.

  We were told by our father, the priest that there were two inferior people in the eyes of God. One was women. The other was people performing «beastly acts». We didn’t know what he meant during most of our childhood, but, as stated we found out. He was talking about homosexuals.

  We discovered that the prejudice wasn’t limited to Christians either. We encountered many other seemingly free-spirited people with the same hateful, practically pathological bias. When looking at the current western society, it’s not really strange, I guess, since we still live in a basically patriarchal society, where some both males and females insist that victims of rape share the blame. And don’t even mention transgenders that are really getting trashed lately, also by professed feminists. JK Rowling has led on in that crusade, and she is a hero to many, people not questioning her warped views at all.

  There is something profoundly sick about modern human society. Some of it is remains from less enlightened times and oppressive communities, but there is something more that isn’t necessarily a result of that, but of a general, ongoing, persistent intolerance. People insist, for instance that women and men are equal, now, that there is no more need of feminism, and they’re not kind about it.

  What they’re really saying when they say that is that there was never a need for feminism. Feminism is even blamed for many of the wrongs. We meet such people on the Web often. It’s hilarious every time the perpetrators of rape and prejudice and vicious misogynist acts play the victim, but also very sinister, since many people keep supporting that twisted opinion.

  And there’s something even deeper and twisted, a message repeating itself endlessly in almost all communities: Don’t stand out. If you do, prepare to be taken to the court of public opinion or worse.

  Every time you encounter a male supremacist, a lover of rape, you look incredulous at him, because such crappy human beings exist. But they do. There are loads of them.