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Any J.S. fan will come to expect a certain kind of style and content of his many earlier works. The M.H.C. is a pleasurable surprise.
A thrilling and suspense filled adventure follows our main character Jeff Converse who finds himself caught up in events way beyond his control.
Charged with a crime he didn't commit Jeff is thrown into a deadly game of survival. His death is staged (unbeknown to him) and he is led under the streets of New York into a world of the homeless and the crazies.
The crazies turn out to be the sane, wealthy, respected men of New York City (Chief of Police, a Judge etc.) who run a hunt-club, ridding N.Y. of the scum the prisons have accumulated.
As usual J.S. draws you into a story where you have to wrestle with your conscience not to flick to the end of the book to see if Jeff makes it out or not.
The reality of the storyline makes you wonder is J.S. knows more about what really goes on under the streets of N.Y. than he lets on. This, is the true frightening aspect of the book, could the truth be stranger than fiction.
There are some surprises in these pages, and a feeling of justice that sometimes does not find its way into Saul's fiction. The makeup of the Manhattan Hunt Club and the ideas behind its formation are disturbing yet frighteningly plausible. Saul does an admirably fine job of humanizing the homeless in all of their guises; the characters we meet underneath the subway tunnels are not all bad or shiftless, yet even some of the best of them, through their mute cooperation with "the game," cause one to face some troubling propositions and wonder if, in their shoes, he might do the same thing. The most enlightening character here is Jinx, a young girl who found a home beneath the city after running away from her mother's abusive boyfriend; despite the bad luck life has sent her way, she retains her dignity and bravely seeks to do the right thing when she does not have to get involved at all.
One is struck by the fact that much of this story could in fact be true to life. There are people living the kind of life described herein, but John Saul would seem to have done such unfortunate folks a great service. He brings out the humanity of these people, making the point that they are not all druggies and addicts but are all too often very human characters forced to live as best they can. Perhaps the motivation fueling some of the true villains here, the members of "the club," is not strongly enough developed, and the character of Jeff's deeply religious mother is somehow forgotten along the way, but The Manhattan Hunt Club is an increasingly compelling read that will take you into the filthy subterranean tunnels alongside its characters and very likely change you in some way by the time you finally manage to find the light at the end of the tunnel.
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