Word: daemonically
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...world of The Associate is subtly distinct from our own reality. Take a look at a thriller like Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, a software consultant who actually understands how cutting-edge networks work. This is a book that's got the shock of the new, that's so fresh and well-informed that it's still covered in metal shavings and PVC dust. Reality is everywhere in Daemon, and it's exciting and scary. But who wants to be excited and scared all the time? The Associate is high-calorie comfort food, a thriller that doesn't actually thrill...
Daniel Suarez, a software consultant in Los Angeles, sent his techno-thriller Daemon to 48 literary agents. No go. So he self-published instead. Bit by bit, bloggers got behind Daemon. Eventually Penguin noticed and bought it and a sequel for a sum in the high six figures. "I really see a future in doing that," Suarez says, "where agencies would monitor the performance of self-published books, in a sort of Darwinian selection process, and see what bubbles to the surface. I think of it as crowd-sourcing the manuscript-submission process...
...Pullman's brief, exquisite novel ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE NORTH (Knopf; 104 pages) is fan service at its best. North is set in the same quasi-Victorian alternative universe as Pullman's Golden Compass, where every human is accompanied by a talking-animal soul mate called a daemon. It's a prequel, the story of how a young and not-yet-grizzled Lee Scoresby, gunslinging aeronaut extraordinaire, and his rabbit daemon, Hester, first met up with armored polar bear Iorek Byrnison. Nobody writes dialogue for gunslingers like a Brit: "Damn, Hester," Scoresby says...
...slinks through the mansion where Lyra is her guest and captive. The lady wears her gold or white ensembles so perfectly, you can almost hear the frocks whisper thank-you as they cling to her. But the bloodshot eyes are the giveaway to the character's venality. Her daemon is another: it's an ill-tempered monkey, with whom she has an abusive parent relationship. In one of the film's sharpest, most surprising scenes, Mrs. C. slaps it in anger, then promptly caresses and coos to it. Mummy hits you, Mummy loves you. Since that the daemon...
...made, even in its current gelded form. But there's something missing, beyond the iconoclastic theology, in this perfectly OK, blandly underwhelming superproduction. The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon...