I actually finished a Beach Book today which is almost the Platonic Ideal of Beach Bookdom, a hilariously overwrought potboiler called Starik. Rest assured, I do not expect you to have heard of this book. I certainly had never heard of it, and simply stumbled across it in a used bookstore at the beginning of June and bought it on a whim. When I went to add the book to my personal cyber-shelfspace on the GoodReads site, I discovered that they did not have an image of the book’s cover on file, nor had anyone else on the site ever given the book a 1-to-5 star rating. I’ve put 400 books on my GoodReads shelves over the past three years and those data lapses on the site’s part were a couple of firsts for me. They simply underscore the utter obscurity of this particular piece of pulp.
But it has so many awesome things to recommend it! A quick sampling:
- On the cover, the “R” in “STARIK” is backwards (of course it is) because it is a thriller written in the 80’s about the Russian Menace. That’s actually what initially caught my attention in the bookstore, because I am a sucker for weird jingoistic Cold War relics. Feel free to blame that on all the comic books I read as a youngun.
- The rest of the cover has the most generic art you could possibly imagine – a large American flag where the blue field has no stars in it, showing instead a silhouetted skyline of the Kremlin and multiple ICBMs flying hither and yon above the onion domes. It’s so characteristic of the cheap spy knockoff genre that it practically oozes déjà vu (or more accurately déjà lire?)
- The blurb on the back explains that the premise of the book is basically a heist story, with the loot in question being Lenin’s corpse, as in the terrifying near-future of the novel the USSR is led by a saber-rattling madman who reveres the old man. So basically a few loose cannon Americans who think outside the box are going to steal Lenin out of his tomb, which will cause the Russian leader to have a nervous breakdown, which will actually prevent World War III since the Russian leader will be too distraught to actively start the nuclear hostilities. I KNOW.
- Not contained in the blurb, but should have been: “This novel contains a passage in which a German spy, working with the CIA, has his legs strafed with a machinegun by a KGB operative on the streets of Moscow, and is then tackled by the KGB man, which leads to a brief wrestling match that ends when the German decides he has no desire to be captured, tortured, and used to undermine the CIA’s non-officially sanctioned graverobbing schene, so the German grabs the KGB operative’s machine AND SHOOTS HIMSELF IN THE FACE.” Because in 1988 that is how far the USA and our allies would go to stop those godless commie bastards.
Really, the best thing I can say about the book was that it was so bad it was good. And, as I say about everything I read on the commute, it passed the time.
Now I find myself looking ahead to August and three more weeks of commuting before I can actually read Beach Books on a Freaking Beach. I may in fact need to start pacing myself and setting aside a few books for the Outer Banks vacation itself, which of course begs the question: do I save the good (or at least wildly self-indulgent) books for the beach, even though with a two-year-old in the mix I might not have that much down time to read them? Or do I use the most highly entertaining books to get me through the interminable wait between now and a week of freedom, and content myself with any old thing I can find when I’m footloose and fancy free with sand between my toes? I will let you know how that dilemma ends up shaking out.
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