The Firefly Collective: A Review

NC native and Brownsville, Texas denizen, Ryan McGinnis has just graced us with his newest novel, The Firefly Collective. It was published just last week and out of his four novels, it’s certainly the best of the bunch. I’m told his next is hot on its heels. In the past two years, since McGinnis’s debut as a novelist (Tears of the Dragon), he has been honing his craft and developing stronger and stronger material all the while. This newest novel evinces those newfound powers and leaves readers, myself included, begging for more (and hopefully even longer) installments in the future. To stay updated on his process and get first dibs on chapter excerpts from those upcoming projects as they appear, follow his website and be sure to join his email list.

In The Firefly Collective, McGinnis turns his focus back to the cast of characters we’ve come to know quite well through the first three novels and one novella of his Xavier Greene series. After the events of The Osiris Initiative, when Xavier, Stacy Martinez, and Bill Logan-members of different governmental and secret organizations-were forced to join forces to take down the mysterious Axion corporation; and The Delicate Art of Death where Stacy’s attempt at a peaceful return home is foiled as she investigates a series of suspicious murders in her hometown before becoming unwittingly ensnared in the web of a cryptic hunter of men; a new terrorist cell in Europe is targeting major tech companies and the crew once again cross paths to uncover what’s happening.

The Firefly Collective deepens the layers of complexity, conspiracy, and intrigue of the previous novels, drawing as much from imagination as from the stuff of life. Tech headquarters fall one after another, with no rhyme nor reason, seemingly being engulfed in flames by a series of detonations with no physical trace. that is, people know the buildings are being sabotaged, but cannot locate the bombs or bomb debris. And this despite the fact that the bombings are always presaged by warnings to media outlets and the corporations themselves with specific locations and times in each correspondence. This firefly bombing is ultimately revealed to be the product of a malignant force everyone in the Arab Gulf has come to dread in the 21st century: drone strikes. However, instead of the US targeting innocent civilians (or single individuals near civilians retroactively labeled collateral damage), terrorist organizations are targeting big business. Yet, their m.o., unlike that of the total warfare of the eco-terrorists in Tears of the Dragon, is commendable. They alert businesses ahead of time to the destruction, allowing employees and personnel to be evacuated, and destroy facilities (hitting the capitalists where it hurts them most: in the means of production alone) without collateral damage or loss of life of any kind. Nonetheless, Xavier takes an interest in the bombings and makes it a point to identify who is responsible and to prevent them from continuing.

If left there, the novel would unravel into little more than a pro-business, corporatist apology (The old non sequitur that only evil people use force to fight back against hegemonic forces). Instead, Xavier learns that the terrorist cell, the titular Firefly Collective, were once freedom fighters and progressive activists pushing back against the statist absolutism of British government. The head of the organization, Francisco Ortega, was once an idealistic young man working to change things and improve the lot of working class people. When his brother became terminally ill, requiring a costly life-saving procedure that the NHS would not provide him, Francisco found himself-through economic privation in a sick society-victim to what was left of Axion. The corporation offered the collective a huge payout to stage and enact a series of bombings, strategically placed near different targets than the tech companies themselves, and Francisco obliged. The novel is another strong indictment of how power corrupts, but McGinnis complicates the portrait with the context of structural inequalities and indictments of UK attempts to privatize healthcare and defund the NHS. The story calls readers to think more deeply about many associated issues such as organizational belonging and responsibility, the ineptitude and inefficiency of bureaucracy and bureaucratic compartmentalization, global economics, and homesteading and off-the-grid militancy (an attractive alternative to surveillance capitalism). At the end of the day, the novel is also a good spy thriller, a perfect airport read, and a work that engages one intellectually only as far as they wish to take it.

The Firefly Collective maintains its focus on the working of international cabals, secret syndicates, spycraft, assassinations, and gripping fight sequences that have held our intrigue thus far as readers. However, in the new novel, McGinnis displays an ever increasing deftness in his plotting and character development that had me riveted to my laptop the whole time I was reading. This is proficient work peppered with ruminations on power (both how it is gained and how its capture co-opts those who hold it by illicit means), manipulation, and the Realpolitik always operating beneath the surface ideals of state and corporate actors. And as always, the novel is just long enough to captivate the reader before dangling a wonderful bauble, a hint about what comes next. Think big, think ostentatious, think Japan!

The Delicate Art of Death: A Review

Carolee Schneeman, “Eye Body #11”

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t qualify this essay with an apology. Rocker, novelist, and Brownsville denizen Ryan McGinnis released his third novel The Delicate Art of Death about 9 weeks–March 1st to be precise–and its popularity has since rocketed the first novel of his Xavier Greene series (Tears of the Dragon) into the top selling spot, I’m told, for five different categories on Amazon’s best seller lists! It’s a killer turn of events for a writer working so hard at his craft to finally see some financial return on time investment and a growing readership, as well as the dozens of reviews the new novel has received in writing and video format. So, with the semester’s grading behind me, I thought it about damn time I offer my thoughts on this newest installment of McGinnis’s work, surely his finest and most tightly scripted and executed novel to date.

The newest volume of the Xavier Greene series is an engrossing vignette in the life of Stacy Martinez, set in the wake of events from the previous novels. As Stacy returns back home and tries to re-integrate, to some degree, back into everyday life and to re-establish a rapport with her friends and family, an odd series of murders, a black car whose tail she can’t seem to shake, and an unnerving sense that things are awry increasingly awake her to the reality of her situation: that her experiences of political cabals and power’s underground operations have changed her, marked her, and made her unfit for civilian life. After Stacy’s sister’s friend Jenn dies under mysterious circumstances, Stacy begins to notice a black sedan all over town and another outsider, a woman named Natalie, who keeps appearing everywhere that Stacy does. She begins to suspect that the murders are connected, wondering naturally whether they have something to do with the downfall of Axion or the Citadel’s restructuring post-Osiris Initiative.

Everything seems to point, at least at first, toward a paranoid reading of more governmental rackets and international cabals. However, the twist comes out of left field and makes for a compelling and unexpected read reminding us that assassins and government agents are not the only arbiters of death, not the art of death’s sole practitioners.

I originally read this novel alongside other paranoid political thrillers like Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander and Cormac McCarthy’s newest novels The Passenger and Stella Maris. While McGinnis’s work is more standard political action thriller fare that has less to say about ecology and ontology, it is nonetheless a production that mirrors concerns of major authors in our contemporary moment: principally in how the pursuit of truth queers our own positionality in regards to world. Like Jane Doe and Alicia Western in the aforementioned works, respectively, Stacy Martinez’s pursuit of the truth paints a target on her back and attunes her to the traces of violence and disorder that abound, even in a rural Kansas town like her sister’s.

While Stacy’s methods of evading the cabal whose money she has stolen mirror those of Llewelyn Moss in McCarthy’s earlier crime thriller cum border novel No Country for Old Men (Both are compromised by stealing from organizations more powerful than themselves, and both notably hide their duffel bags of cash in air vents), I detect shades of John Fowles’s The Collector, as well as a feminist undercurrent whereby the damsel in distress is replaced with powerful female figures who resist male attempts at capture or control.

A novelist’s first work often tends to be semi-autobiographical to some degree, and for male novelists this registers in coming of age stories where the protagonist undergoes a demystifiying operation or an existential quest to better comprehend their relation to the world and to their ideal and actual selves. For McGinnis, his outsider assassin Xavier is instead an older character who has already undergone these kinds of narrative shifts and is instead learning to reckon with his past. Stacy Martinez, too, is haunted by the loss of an old partner and suffering from the effects of PTSD. That McGinnis can write compelling, realistic characters like this is a testament to the maturation of his work. And if I’m really honest, the occasional wordiness or typos of that first novel are rapidly disappearing as well (as he’s transitioned to self-editing: a surprisingly great improvement). For a independent author without the institutional structure of editors and copy editors, this is no minor feat.

I hear also that his fourth novel is in the works and developing quite rapidly, so if you’ve enjoyed the Xavier Greene works so far, you can expect more very soon. I know I’m champing at the bit to find out how some of the plot lines McGinnis has laid down will resolve.

I’d like to end on a note on the photo I’ve chosen to place at the beginning of this short review essay: Caroline Schneeman’s “Eye Body #11.” Rather than re-purposing the female body as a destructive canvas ala our male Dada artists, McGinnis has headed off what amounts to a fait accompli in the works of many male writers. Hell, even McCarthy’s serial killer novel Child of God trades in female objectification and mutilation to attain its narrative kicks or sense of transgression. Furthermore, whereas Stacy has hitherto been pitted against the occasional female mastermind or feminine force of evil–even this newest novel sets up that possibility–and has typically been allied to male protagonists, The Delicate Art of Death‘s denoument charts new territory for McGinnis in the development of a homosocial bond that is enticing narratively just as it is progressive in that political domain we call the interpersonal.

Schneeman once advised that we “Be stubborn and persist, and trust yourself on what you love. You have to trust what you love.” As long as us readers continue to state our support and McGinnis continues to trust the development of his craft, I expect we’ll continue to be privy to the unfolding of his talent for years to come.

The Osiris Initiative: A Review

Osiris with Retainers Hieroglyph

Here at The Boron Heist, we have previously reviewed quite a few works by indie author Ryan McGinnis including his last novel Tears of the Dragon and his newest short story “The Musician’s Daughter.” Now, McGinnis has penned the second major installment of his Xavier Greene spy-assassin series: the upcoming novel The Osiris Initiative! At The Boron Heist, we’ve been chewing the fat for a couple days, reading through and ruminating on McGinnis’s newest effort. The novel is an improvement upon Tears and shows McGinnis constantly developing his ability to interweave complex plot threads from multiple narrators while hedging his subtext more deeply into the plot and spinning an electrifying yarn for his readers.

In The Osiris Initiative, the first five chapters are each told from a different perspective. While a few of these–Xavier, Logan, the mechanic from Tears–drive the plot, one is an innocent bystander, of sorts, caught in the crossfire of a mysterious organization’s war on the Citadel: Xavier’s employer. The shifting perspectives, each packed with their own action sequences and resultant carnage, engage the reader from the very beginning and make it difficult to put the book down for quite some time. We learn that Martinez has gone rogue since the events of Tears some months prior, that Logan has retired to a ranch in Montana, and that Xavier is almost fully healed from the havoc the Silver Wraith, Liliya Orloff, wreaked upon his body during the last mission. Now, Xavier has been tasked with killing the would-be assassin of a United Arab Emirates royal and Logan is being wooed by executives from the cryptic Axion corporation.

When Xavier’s mission goes south, an obvious double-cross by an outside party, Logan begins to question the motives of Axion, and Martinez finds a bounty on Xavier’s head advertised on the Dark Web, the three professionals’ destinies become intertwined once again in this rousing new political-action thriller.

Unlike Tears of the Dragon, the full nature and implications of the the Osiris Initiative at the core the novel’s plot are only traced in part. The group that put out the kill order on Xavier’s life and that is also targeting Citadel safehouses and stations has likewise created a code to link together all cameras on the planet, which are connected to the internet. Together with facial recognition software, they hope to be able to track any individual, anywhere, at nearly any time and to develop the world’s most sophisticated network against anyone they perceive as threatening their interests. While we live in a police state in America now, in the real world, and the NSA collects all our metadata into personnel files, the fear of a panopticon, of a universalized surveillance system, seems to be waning. However, The Osiris Initiative may serve to remind readers of the horrors of this system, as well as the fact that our political institutions are not run by idealistic, humanitarian sovereigns, but instead by power-hungry persons controlled by corporate powers. When every move you make is tracked, is it possible to truly act freely? Xavier’s foiled attempts to avoid the panoptic surveillance system aimed directly at registering his face and sending assassins his way foregrounds our own inability to operate from the shadows. And sometimes, operating from the shadows is the only way to combat dehumanizing bureaucratic forces.

Like those much-maligned (by me and Scorsese at least) superzero films whose preponderance signifies a lack of faith in our institutions and in our public defenders to provide our defense, Xavier Greene’s, Logan, and Martinez’s efforts in The Osiris Initiative provide readers with much-needed catharsis. The danger of marvel narratives is that only those endowed with superhuman power or grotesque economic advantage have the power to counter corrupt institutions. However, Logan and Martinez provide a counternarrative of the average person’s ability to do likewise and therefore, the novel avoids some of the major pitfalls of hero and action texts.

For all this talk of deeper meanings and implications, The Osiris Initiative is really anything but heady. The ideas are couched deeply enough into the text so as not to burden the plot, and instead function as interesting background to the modern world that makes up the foundation of McGinnis’s plot: our world. The relevance of that world to readers renders it real for them while the fight sequences, chase sequences, and bureaucratic intrigue drive the plot forward in this nail-biter of a novel. The Osiris Initiative is a thrilling read with plot twists and turns that keep the reader on the edge of their seat with a cliffhanger climax that promises many morsels of cinematic excess and enjoyable reading ahead.

The Osiris Initiative will be released on March 21st through Amazon books, so pre-order your copy today!

“The Musician’s Daughter”: The Emerging Mythos of an Assassin

Bucharest, Romania Skyline by Michael Tompsett

In one week (March 21st, 2022), Brownsville, Texas based Indie author Ryan McGinnis is releasing a new novel, The Osiris Initiative, in the Xavier Greene assassin-spy series. In the interim, he has made available a short work in the same universe entitled “The Musician’s Daughter: A Xavier Greene Thriller.” which delves deeper into the history of its titular character and ought to increase excitement for the new novel as well. The Boron Heist has previously reviewed a few of McGinnis’s short works (“Sketch” and “A Good Night’s Sleep”) as well as his first novel Tears of the Dragon, so you know we’re fans. His new story can be accessed for free by joining McGinnis’s email list here and if you read it to end, you’ll even find a nice blurb on Tears from yours truly.

In “The Musician’s Daughter,” the setting is Bucharest, Romania where Xavier Greene has been stationed to bring a politician, Andrei Luca, to justice for his backroom dealings with the Romanian Humanist Party, a political organization described as a thinly-veiled front for the proliferation of specialized radios called Music-Boxes. The purpose of the device is not discussed in full and one is compelled to call it a MacGuffin, or physical object that propels the narrative forward and provides it a visual center. While the place, and indeed the purpose of Xavier’s mission, are explained, the time is left open and the reader is therefore uncertain whether the events of the narrative unfold before or after those of Tears of the Dragon. What we do know is that Xavier mentions his rise to top-level assassin status in the Citadel, a secret organization that hires out spies and other professionals for high profile missions, possibly with nefarious intentions. By the end of McGinnis’s first novel, however, Xavier’s relationship to the Citadel is anything, if not tenuous, and therefore the reader might assume that this story is a prequel.

As in most good prequels and shorter works in a larger corpus or universe, this tale introduces more backstory to the protagonist. Namely, we learn that Xavier’s line of work is an attempt–perhaps unconsciously–to follow in the footsteps of his deceased father. Further, the reader learns that if Xavier is to follow his father’s example, that his work may inevitably lead to his death as well. The sins of the father… even the absent and long-dead father, eh?

Xavier’s mission to bring the politician to justice and to claim the Music-Box device for his employers starts off smoothly and in a way that demonstrates Xavier’s professional ethics. When the second half of the mission involves extracting the device from a nonchalant, professional spy, Mihail Vulpe, Xavier exceeds the boundaries of the job, rendering it a kill-order operation. As Mihail’s organization closes in on Xavier, will he be able to escape with his life, with the device in tow, and without killing an innocent bystander–Mihail’s orphaned daughter Ana? In “The Musician’s Daughter,” McGinnis has produced a kinetic piece of short, action writing with moments of deeper reflection on fate and the ways in which history recurs, in which our lives play out eternal conflicts that might, or might not, preclude our ability to choose our direction in this world.

Tears of the Dragon: A Review

Xavier Greene is a high-level assassin for a worldwide secret organization–The Citadel–that operates the levers of the power behind the scenes. Known as ‘The Silencer’ he is known for his ability to go undetected through even the biggest jobs: political coups, counterterrorism, assassinations. His face is in no personnel system, no facial recognition can place him: He’s a ghost drifting through the floating world of modern political play where transnational political actors create destructive encounters, Realpolitik games, with little regard for loss of life. Xavier has tired of his work, retired to a remote monastery, and takes jobs intermittently as he contemplates enlightenment alongside complete retirement.

Then, a new job appears. A terrorist organization known as The Brotherhood has recently received a strong, financial backer. With their help, The Brotherhood have developed a contagion called “Tears of the Dragon.” They plan to release it at a large event within the week and to wipe out most human life on the planet in the process to prompt a hard reset of the unjust systems of power of the world: to fight political injustice with apocalypse. The allure of The Brotherhood is immediately apparent to all dissidents who read Ryan McGinnis’s debut novel. You can’t fight power within the system because it has always already co-opted its members and will rapidly absorb destabilizing tendencies to prevent the system from toppling. The only option left is economic or real violence. Despite The Brotherhood’s subversive appeal, Xavier’s actions and the narrator’s handling of The Brotherhood seem to respond no to both options: working within the system and working to destroy the system. Rather than engaging in political angst, in Nietzschean ressentiment, Xavier remains a counterterrorist and thwarts a factional uprising within The Citadel to restore this latter organization to its proper institutional spirit and to save the world.

“Tears of the Dragon,” the contagion, is derived from the venom of the vampire bat: a substance touted for the past few years for its medicinal properties and potential usage in the development of drugs to combat diseases. However, with each new development there are negative externalities, downsides that the developers of the tech could not have foreseen. In Tears of the Dragon, The Brotherhood has developed a kind of blood coagulant that can be spread quickly and effectively worldwide with just one vial. Writing often mirrors life in unexpected ways and the parallel between the development of an apocalyptic pathogen with the apparently accidental mutation of a world-upsetting virus that led to our own pandemic is not lost on this reader.

Finally, as in all of McGinnis’s writing hitherto, dreams play an important role throughout the novel. At many crucial points in the text, Xavier dreams, day dreams, or hallucinates visions of the dragon. At times he tries to contain its power and it burns him, at others he seems to have a strong emotional connection and is warming up to the dragon. It is both his nemesis and a very attractive mystical object, which could bring him untold riches or power if he chose to keep it. All told, the novel is reflective but mostly active. The reader gets good doses of spy intrigue, political machinations, helicopter chases, firefights, and even a very compelling duel to the death between two of The Citadel’s most legendary assassins. Tears of the Dragon is a fun, riveting, on the edge of your seat kind of novel and a good first novel that bodes well for McGinnis’s future work.

To learn more about Tears of the Dragon or to purchase a copy follow the link here. To read about McGinnis’s short fiction follow these rabbit holes: Sketch and A Good Night’s Sleep.

“A Good Night’s Sleep” is Hard to Find

(See my previous review of Ryan McGinnis’s fiction here)

Sam and Kevin Woodworth are a well-adjusted, suburban couple in the final stages of the adoption process. Their domestic life includes an altruistic relationship with an elderly widower, Agnes, in their neighborhood; a good work-life balance; and a loving-lovable terrier Max who keeps them company. Domestic bliss seems inevitable with the arrival of their new daughter Lily. However, Max seems afraid of the little girl no matter how long she chases him around and vies for his affection. And in a small case, she keeps a set of dolls–one male, one female–whose appearance echoes her biological parents that disappeared under mysterious circumstances. When Sam and Kevin begin having night terrors, sleep paralysis, and experiencing other unsettling nighttime events, they begin to suspect that something is amiss in their would-be domestic tableau.

As with much good horror fiction, the fears and anxieties at the core of “A Good Night’s Sleep” (eBook available for free by joining the Ryan McGinnis mailing list here) are contemporary while simultaneously hearkening back to older, more primal notions of the self. There is first, the classic fear of the adopted child whose genes and past history are alien to the foster parents: the child who appears with a kind of psychic baggage it is the perceived job of the foster parents to absolve, to correct, to fix, or to come to terms with. What happened to the child’s parents? What trauma did the child experience through their loss? Can we really help the child? These kinds of anxieties can lead to self-doubt and fears of failure in parenting that are amplified for foster parents. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” Sam and Kevin’s fears are internalized and received subconsciously through dream visions of a man who stands at the edge of the room or right outside the window: a man who beckons to follow. Or they are externalized by visions of Lily’s midnight wandering through the house or constricting nightmares of suffocation.

The Self is at its most peaceful when its surface, the conscious person, hides or abjects those things that pull at and create tension within the self. The dream of a domestic space of peace and tranquility and simplicity is aided by a self-formation that is limited, that does not reflect openly on the darker aspects of the self. Here, the fears of failure and of the dark past of the orphaned child bring to surface the multiplicity of the self with its abyssal, fragmentary, and self-destructive capabilities. A large change in life calls for a requisite and equal change of Self, which is self-dislocating, anxiety-producing, and terrifying, though necessary. In “A Good Night’s Sleep,” McGinnis reflects these fears in a narrative where the worst of them is actualized and the self is destroyed in the process of change and the foster parent becomes little more than a doll in a child’s scheme for their own self-formation: essentialized, always present, and nothing more than an object of the child’s will. In horror, our deepest fears are made real and that is definitely the case in McGinnis’s short story.

Read my review of McGinnis’s novel Tears of the Dragon next.

Ruminations on a “Sketch”

In “Sketch” (published online at Mandatory Midnight), North Carolina native and Brownsville, Texas denizen Ryan McGinnis crafts a sinister, Lovecraftian vision of cerebral horror befitting a New Weird moniker. In an introductory blurb we learn that Sarah, an aspiring sketch artist of landscapes and gothic architecture, has recently suffered from a hard breakup. Her friend Tracy attempts to help her by managing and staging an art exhibit of Sarah’s work on gothic castles from her travels in Europe. Sarah takes to the work well, at first, as she drafts image after image with her expressionist style of deep shadows and chiaroscuro contrast with attendant surrealist motifs and unsettling smudge-work. However, when an image of a man appears and then disappears of its own volition within her frames, Sarah experiences abject fear and her friends believe she is going insane. Half-horror, half-edge-of-your-seat-fugue-state, this tale draws parallels to the texts of Junji Ito. It’s gothic fixations remind one of the imaginative power of Mervyn Peake or Jorge Luis Borges.

As a sketch, “Sketch” is the beginnings of a larger body of work: One in development and one I will be reviewing for the next few weeks here. The narrative style is simple and unadorned third-person narration from a relatively invisible narrator with direct access to the interiority of Sarah’s mind. The writing is straightforward, which aids the reader in clipping along quickly and building the sense of tension. Its central idea of note is the question of how our creative works can absorb us as artists? In Sarah’s case, she is offered the vertiginous possibility of her creative work bringing new life into the world and through her fears and anxieties she is unable to do so. Instead, Sarah stifles her greatest creative achievement (freeing the spectre of the gothic castle) and is, in a sense, consumed by her inaction.

The idea here is that creative endeavor is voidal, abyssal, aporetic by its very nature. That in the process of writing, the writer changes, evolves, and becomes a more complex entity. The attendant fear of psychological disintegration is so strong that it may block the writer from ever truly engaging a project or putting it out into the world through submission or private publishing. Yet, by not letting the creative work live and emerge into the real world, the writer risks a far more pernicious spectre’s birth: Regret, a beast much more able to consume the artist totally in the final analysis. In “Sketch,” the anxieties of a beginning writer are veiled through an engaging piece of horror short fiction that is harrowing, both metaphysically and on the gut level.

For more information about Ryan McGinnis and to receive a free ebook and access to his writings, please peruse his personal website here. (Check out my review of “A Good Night’s Sleep” next)