Book Review: Earthquake Weather

Tim Powers
1996
Awards: Locus (Fantasy) 
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

Earthquake Weather is the third novel in Tim Powers’ somewhat roughly connected Fault Lines trilogy. It is not really a sequel, but it continues some of the story lines from both of the previous two novels, Last Call and Expiration Date. And it pulls in several of the same characters, although the main characters in this one are new.  

It also takes place in the same world of magic as the other two books. Which is most definitely not the light, floaty, Disney variety; the magic of Powers’ trilogy is a hard-boiled, real-world, practical magic conducted using everyday objects. It is an impressive amalgamation of ancient gods, ghosts, spirits, religions, superstitions, rituals, faiths, totems, and traditions—old and new and east and west.

And it, too, is set against a backdrop of the grittiest parts of America: diners, bars, mental institutions, curanderías, big city streets. The cars are always big, old, beaten-up American models. The characters are people from the edges of society—the poor, insane, criminal, fugitive, orphaned, lost. They tend to drink a lot—mostly Coors, vodka, and cheap red wine. (It can tend to get a little gross.)

At the beginning of Earthquake Weather, Janis Plumtree, a woman with multiple personality disorder, has killed Scott Crane (the man who was crowned as the Fisher King in Last Call). She killed him on a lonely road near Los Angeles by jamming a trident into his throat.

A faction of Crane’s supporters and believers—the Fisher King’s army, if you will—found his body before the police did and are hauling it around with them, trident included, preparing for the day when they can perform the necessary rituals to resurrect him. They are also protecting a pre-teen boy, Koot Hoomie "Kootie" Parganas, who appears to have been spiritually designated as Crane’s successor to the Fisher King’s throne in the event of Crane’s permanent death, as evidenced by the constantly bleeding wound in Kootie’s side, and the fact that he needs to tie his belt in a Mobius strip and drink lots of alcohol to keep himself from being found and possessed by ghosts. 

Into this picture comes Sid Cochran, a man who checked himself into a mental institution because he keeps seeing random people turning into bull-headed gods, and hearing people speak in the voice of his dead wife. Except that he’s not insane; those things actually are happening to him, because he’s been chosen to be one of the vessels of the god Dionysus, after an accident he once had in a vineyard where he almost got his hand cut off trying to protect an old vine stump from being cut down. In the institution Cochran meets Plumtree, who was put there by the police when she came to them claiming to have killed Scott Crane (whose body they can’t find). 

Cochran and Plumtree strike up a friendship (she with him and him with most of her personalities), and eventually they break out of the institution, narrowly escaping the clutches of the evil chief psychiatrist Dr. Armentrout, who “cures” his patients by eating the parts of their souls that are misbehaving. Eating soul parts gives Dr. Armentrout lots of spiritual power, and the fact that it sometimes kills his patients doesn’t really bother him at all. 

Plumtree’s good personalities want to atone for the bad one that killed the Fisher King, so she drags Cochran with her to track down the band of people preparing for the Crane’s resurrection. It isn’t hard, given all the portents pointing to their house in Long Beach, and the people drumming and dancing in front of it twenty-four hours a day. 

Kootie and his adopted parents-cum-spiritual shields, Angelica and Pete Sullivan, and Crane’s old friend Arky Mavranos, take in Cochran and Plumtree as wary allies. They then go on a chaotic journey up to San Francisco filled with pretty random-seeming diversions and plot twists, to perform the king-restoring ritual. 

The whole time they are pursued by Armentrout, who has hooked up with some anti-Fisher-King zealot thugs. Armentrout’s aim is to capture Crane’s body and to keep it alive but in a perpetual coma, so he can feed eternally on the spirit of the Fisher King, making him super powerful in the magical world. He doesn’t mind the idea of kidnaping Kootie as well, holding him coma-hostage in the event Crane dies for good. And if Cochran and Plumtree die along the way as well, so much the better for him. 

The Cochran/Plumtree/Kootie allies race around San Francisco gathering the necessary materials to prepare for the awakening ritual. All kinds of things go wrong to cause them setbacks, not least of which is the fact that one of Plumtree’s personalities is the not-quite-dead ghost of her evil father--the personality that killed Scott Crane--who keeps telling Armentrout where they are. There is also a genuinely exciting car chase scene when a ghost steals the car that has Crane’s body in it, and Angelica and Pete and Arky have to race it down and leap on to it while hurtling down the highway to regain control (over the car and the body). 

It all eventually comes to a climax in a giant turbulent scene at the Sutro Baths, where the final battle for Crane’s life (or death) is fought out with both temporal and fearsomely magical weapons. 

One of the best things about this book is that Powers has a stupefying amount of knowledge of a hugely broad range of spirit world arcana. He brings in ghosts, spells, portents, charms, remedies, and rites from a wide variety of traditions from around the world. This is no American Gods lightweight gimmicky hack job. 

And the magic is cleverly done using practical, real-world objects; for a knowledgeable person in the world of Powers’ books, almost anything can have a magical use. His characters use wind chimes made of chicken bones and radio parts as alarms to warn of incoming malevolent entities. They hook up old television sets and record players to talk to spirits. They use ashtrays as substitutes for fireplaces to send ghosts, literally, up in smoke. They use clove and regular tobacco cigarettes as masking tools, but actual rubber masks (of clowns, in this case) can serve the same purpose, in a pinch. Wine is used for all kinds of purification, masking, and sacramental purposes—although Coors can work, too, sometimes. 

The main problems with this book (which was also true of Last Call) are that it is dense, complex, and seemingly, for the most part, unplanned. Although there was generally an anticipatory build-up, a climactic confrontation, and a resolution (of a sort), the plot trucks along largely haphazardly towards those ends. 

I rarely understood why any of the specific incidents over the course of the book happened; most of them seemed to come out of left field. It felt like the characters were dropped into situation after situation with little or no lead-up or connection to the next. They went from Chinatown to a maze-house to a car chase to a hotel with no apparent logic. 

I also didn’t understand why voices spoke to Cochran when they did, or why he saw the signs he did, or what the bull-headed god meant in any particular situation; it seemed like the god was just saying, “hi, I’m here, be afraid.” I didn’t understand why Plumtree changed personalities when she did, or how they knew to use this or that piece of equipment. 

I tried to go with the flow and let it all just soak into my head naturally. And that worked to some extent, but generally it was so hard to make connections and follow the characters’ non-logic—especially when so much of it was somewhat repellently fueled by Coors and vodka—that I ended up skipping a lot of text. 

And, at the end, it didn’t feel like everything finally connected together and made sense; it felt like it all fell together by accident, in spite of itself, and in spite of the chaotic actions of the characters. All in all, it was just too much reading whiplash.