Combating fleas and tyrants

I think I've got Laurence Dahners figured out, the sly hombre. His modus operandi goes like this: Even as he submits a parade of compelling characters, even as he ramps up the suspense and stages these bold action beats, he's also sneaking in these science lessons. Nice try, Laurence Dahners, but I ain't learned a lick.

My favorite series of his are the books that track the Hyllis Family. It's a post-apoc septology (so far) that's set hundreds - maybe thousands - of years from now. In this future era, technology has regressed to that of pre-Industrial Age circa the 1700s, courtesy of a global cataclysm. Tech devices and technical or science or medical books that date back to our present day are unearthed, occasionally, but are widely considered taboo. No one wants a repeat of the end of the world.

Eva Hyllis has a collection of these forbidden books that she keeps stowed away. That's not even the family's biggest secret.

If you're new to the series, I envy you and kind of resent you. You're in for some dope reading. Unless you'd rather go into this series blind - and here's a **spoiler alert** for those folks - you should know that the Hyllises are a family of gifted healers. That their success rate is thru the roof isn't only because Eva and her medical students are knowledgeable in their field. The Hyllises are various categories of psychics. And how the author details, with such vivid imagination, the application of their extraordinary talents to diagnose and heal the sick is one of the biggest draws for me. It's wild sci-fi speculation "grounded" by hard science.

Dahners' heroes and heroines are crazy versatile. Case in point, the Hyllises are healers, yes, but they're also embedded in the hospitality business, and I love that diversity. The Hyllises are still fairly new to the town of Clancy Vail, and yet their tavern - where their patients are also treated - has already garnered a rep as the very best of the lot, with regards to quality of grub and brew. Come to the tavern to get your booboo remedied; stay for the incredibly yummy pizza. Or vice versa.

There are two major story arcs - again, spoilers. Me, I love the turns Dahners' storytelling takes. Book 7 picks up moments after how Book 6 ended as the plague descends on Clancy Vail, and there go the Hyllises scrambling to stem the unbridled spread of the disease. Heck, even that ornery teleporter, old Ms. Rainey, pauses her perpetual testiness to help out in the crisis. One of the preventative methods Eva resorts to is shaving away all body hair so as to not provide camping grounds for fleas (as you know, fleas are notorious carriers of the bubonic plague). I had this recurring image that cracked me up of the Hyllis men and women going around looking like Shaolin monks and having honor and stuff.

But that plot isn't why this book is titled HOOD. Our badass boy Tarc is dispatched to their old hometown of Farleysville to recover the family's savings from the bank, as well as the money owed them for selling their old tavern. But what kind of page turner would HOOD be if Tarc ended up with a nice straight drive up the 405? Observe Tarc as he gets pulled into these side excursions in which he has to use his talents to problem solve or to get himself out of sticky situations. Along the way, he inadvertently revives an old legend from English folklore.

In a way, think of Tarc's adventures as a reverse travelogue of the Hyllises' journey from the first book to now as Tarc makes his way back to his old home, hitting familiar spots and bumping into familiar faces along the way. One interesting stop was Realth, the city where Eva got arrested because it was unlawful for healers to ply their craft (in HEALERS, Book 3). It dawns on an appalled Tarc that, sometimes, deposing a vile monarch means that an even worse successor seizes the throne.

What else? I appreciate that the author doesn't neglect dangling threads. We catch a sighting of Jadyn's vengeful ex, Argun, and, oboy, can this guy hold a grudge! And it's gratifying that the Hyllises' hiring a guard to watch over the tavern finally pays off.

I'm still squeamish about the notion of telepaths' messing with people's minds and correcting their behavior, even if it's for a good cause.

One minor bone to pick is how abruptly Nylin and Tarc's romantic relationship ended in the last book. It's almost as if Dahners suddenly came up with a better character to pair up with Tarc, and there's Nylin suddenly swept under the rug. There's my investment in them as a couple, gone poof.

I have a favorite new character, and it's the Blacksmiths' daughter. I can't wait for the eighth book to see how she folds into the our cast of regulars.

We get less Daussie in this one. I'm not okay with that.

And, lastly, huh, no cliffhanger ending. That's actually worrying.


H. Bala
TOP 500 REVIEWER
5.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes, like a Hyllis, I try to unerringly locate the sun at night
Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2019
Verified Purchase
The other day Laurence Dahners was in the grocery store and dropped his shopping list. I picked it up and read it, and what a superbly written list! It flowed organically and kept me in suspense. There were exciting bits about veggies and Cheetos and tv dinners. I wanted a sequel. My point being, Laurence Dahners can sure spin a yarn.

Telepath is the fourth volume in Dahners' Hyllis family series, and I tell you, if someone were to press something sharp to my carotid artery and make me pick a favorite of all the series Dahners had written, I'd take so long waffling between the Hyllis books and the Bonesetter books, I'd get my throat cut. Mind you, I got mad love for the man's other works, although his long-running Ell Donsaii stuff may now require a character glossary. It's just that I get really, really stoked whenever I can catch up with Pell, the teenaged inventor from the Stone Age, or with Tarc and Daussie and the rest of the psychic Hyllis clan.

If you're new to the Hyllis series, it's worth it to know that it's set hundreds (thousands?) of years in the future in a post-apocalyptic world that was made thus, courtesy of a global superflu pandemic that wiped out most of humanity and regressed civilization and society to circa pre-industrial revolution. Scattered here and there are plastic and metal remnants of man's ancient technology.

But not all knowledge is lost or forgotten. Generations of the Hyllis family have been healers, equipped with psychic abilities that allow them to mysteriously probe and assess their patients' bodies, and sometimes remedy their ills. Thru three books, we'd followed this batch of Hyllises - healers AND tavern keepers - as this next generation of teenagers learns that their psychic abilities are more potent than their parents. And that's the fun of this series. Being along for the ride as Eva and Daum's children, Tarc and Daussie - and now their 13-year-old cousin Kazy - discover practical new methods of applying their respective talents. And they're applied not only for healing purposes. There are no lack of outlaws and other nogoodniks in this world of might makes right. But there really is no threat the Hyllises can't handle. The tricky thing is to not ever broadcast their freaky powers.

As Telepath opens, the Hyllis kids had just sprung their mother, Eva, from detention in a kingdom where practicing the arts of healing is forbidden and harshly punished, and Eva had been arrested for her inability to turn away suffering people. Now, the Hyllis family is on the trail trying to catch up to the caravan they'd been traveling with. It's passage not devoid of misadventure.

It's a premise I'm sure some other author's touched on before... Come to think of it, I'm reminded a bit of Anne McCaffrey's classic Dragonriders of Pern series. There's similarity in that both series have characters harboring a vague notion of what shiny human civilization was once like, even if nowadays knowledge of it comes mostly as rumors and myths.

Laurence Dahners is one of my favorite present-day storytellers. He's up there with Glenn Bullion and Marion G. Harmon in that each of his new stuff is an automatic buy for me. As for Dahners' latest, I won't spoiler much. I'll say that the tale is fraught with perils and discovery and science and a sense of wide-eyed wonder and high adventure. There are obstacles to overcome, including more assshats and outlaws to take to task, more medical challenges, and the predicament of just exactly how long will the Hyllises roll with the caravan? There are wonderful new characters waiting in the wing and a new Hyllis in Kazy - introduced in the last book - to get to know better. We may find out who is possibly the most deadly Hyllis. And, okay, here's one mild spoiler. One of Eva Hyllis' continuing lament is how so much of the past's medical knowledge has been lost. Maybe, by the end of this book, she'll have felt a bit better.