Island Games

Rating:
Summary: A fast-paced and exciting thriller
Review: Island Games is Roger Helm's compelling debut novel, set in a secluded South Pacific tropical island paradise tainted with a murderous secret, and where a group of men hunt their victims relentlessly. A fast-paced and exciting thriller where an ordinary man on his honeymoon and a Tahiti-resident private eye become caught up in a deadly power struggle. Highly recommended reading, Island Games clearly documents Roger Helm as an author of considerable talent and narrative storytelling skill.

Rating:
Summary: Deadly Survivor: Island Games packs morbid, modern punch
Review: While plagued with clunky metaphors and an over-long set-up, Island Games is a worthy first novel. The premise - of a Survivor-type game where the stakes are deadly real - is a increasingly plausible concept in these times. My read-through was fraught with morbid fascination.

The plot: a quartet of bored rich men plan the perfect hunt, after the delights of elk trophies and putting greens pall. When stalking newlywed husbands marooned on a tropical paradise becomes too easy, a more complex game entices - why not see if regular people can be induced to kill a man? The older hunters have the grace to feel slighly abashed at playing God, a good foil to the young dotcomer's intoxication with his own amoral omnipotence. Helm's exploration on the corruption of morals in alpha-types with unlimited power is certainly plausable. The victims - normal people conned into playing contestants in a macabre reality show - engage in acts of increasing depravity, as the nature of the games escalate.

Hunting men as prey is hardly new territory - witness the cult following of Scharznegger's Predator. Helm lends the concept a sense of contemporary realism. In the wake of reality programs and shock-TV, one wonders whether the Ultimate Game is actually on the agenda, somewhere in Hollywood.

Helm slips into passive prose in expository passages, but does better with action sequences. The author's overburdened analogies distract at times from the plot, self-indulgently revealing the author's "cleverness." The tikki spirituality was also ill-handled; it's as if Helm was trying so hard for surrealism that he became merely incomprehensible.

The innocent contestants caught up in the demented games were well-drawn once they reached the island, after diddling in their home habitats for far too long.

In spite of Helm's new-author mistakes (nothing good editing couldn't cure), I was gripped, devouring the book in a single sitting. I even felt vaguely guilty for my own gruesome fascination in the deadly contests. With his adeptness at handling climactic plot threads, Helm should only mature as a writer. It will be interesting to see what other contemporary rabbits he can pull from his hat.