BLACK BLADE

By Eric Lustbader

Fawcett Columbine (1993)

Reviewed by Robert Thompson 2/14/93

BLACK BLADE is somewhat of a departure from the norm for Lustbader. While his last couple of books have been kind of weird, this one was even more so. Don't get me wrong, it was in some ways more interesting than some of his others, it just requires the reader to suspend any disbelief in metaphysical matters.

While most of his books have dealt with metaphysics, they have mostly been limited to martial arts disciplines and Zen philosophy, this one gets heavily into other areas such as E.S.P, psychokinetics, life extension, shamanism and other areas. And, in fact it is these topics that make the book somewhat more interesting to me. Not that I am a great believer in this sort of stuff, but I am somewhat a student of it nevertheless.

BLACK BLADE has Lustbader's usual mix of Japanese culture, martial arts, sex and political, economical and scientific conspiracies, but they sort of play a back seat to the metaphysical conflicts. This story is not quite as gripping as Lustbader's usual: it is easy to put down and go to sleep, or go to work.

In it, we are introduced to a new hero; Wolf Matheson, a New York Police Detective, the son of an ex-Texas Ranger, and grandson of a Native American (Indian for those of you who aren't into political correctness) Shaman. He gets involved in a hornets nest of activity. The plot is so complicated, I won't even try to explain it, but everyone is screwing everyone, often figuratively and literally at the same time.

The story jumpped around even more than usual in a Lustbader novel, which probably is the reason that the book was less engrossing than it could have been. At first, I thought that the author was loosing his skill at captivating his readers, but in the end, I decided that he was just trying to keep us off balance so that it wasn't easy to figure out who was really one of the good guys, one of the bad guys, and who was just being manipulated.

Probably my biggest criticism of the book, and a relatively minor point is a small section of dialog between two New York Police Officers who happened to be Black (African-American for the P.C.). The dialog sounded like it was taken from a reject script for an early 1970's SHAFT or SUPERFLY movie sequel.

Other than that, the book was pretty good, if not Lustbader's best.
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