The Medusa Effect by: Justin Richards

 

Is there a name for the trope where characters become possessed by people from the past and are forced to reenact the circumstances of their death?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer employed this one in “I Only Have Eyes for You” in its second season and I’m fairly certain Supernatural probably did it at some point.  Yet before Buffy the Vampire Slayer attempted it Justin Richards wrote The Medusa Effect, one of the New Adventures novels featuring Bernice Summerfield, predating “I Only Have Eyes for You” by nearly a month complete with its own science fiction trappings.  Now, I don’t believe Richards is originating the trope, nor was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Stephen King’s The Shining, both the book and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation, could be considered an adaptation of the trope to a degree and demonic possession stories dot human history in general, though William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist features the idea specifically.  The variation on the trope on effect here in The Medusa Effect, is a melancholic affair when all is said and done.  It concerns the reappearance of the experimental ship Medusa, a ship missing for twenty years after its maiden voyage, appearing back on Dellah empty as St. Oscar’s Advanced Research Department puts together a team to investigate the ship and discover what exactly happened twenty years ago.

 

The Medusa Effect is a novel where Richards is intentional in writing a novel where Benny is meant to feel out of place.  Much of the preamble of the novel to the point where the Medusa reappears is from Benny’s perspective and is used to really bring out how the Advanced Research Department is an organization that would clearly be under the thumb of Irving Braxiatel, except it isn’t.  Braxiatel is in the novel, Richards being the character’s creator means that he is characterized at his best, especially in the final pages of the novel where he and Benny have this utterly devastating conversation.  Brax is a character who clearly has his own agenda, but his care for Benny is genuine, in its own way and he doesn’t actually seem to like the ordeal she has gone through.  Benny herself is intentionally portrayed as the odd woman out on the expedition, is the one added last to the crew and the one outside of the ARD which is several red flags all at once.  There’s already a sense of things going wrong because of Benny’s position in the novel as on the back foot.  Richards doesn’t actually waste time by paralleling the two crews before the possessions start.  The possession trope is one of those things that really finds their way into the novel quite slowly.  Benny being a suitable replacement is one aspect of the novel that doesn’t work. Richards makes Benny being a match for original crewmate too close that the suspension of disability is just off.  The other characters work because they were hand selected and it’s implied moulded at points into their roles, but Benny as an outsider really needed Richards to show how different she actually was.

 

Despite the possession narrative driving the plot down the route of a murder mystery with Benny as detective, Richards also has the novel end with a stand-off with a villain.  The shift towards the more science fiction, genetic engineering elements of the novel that leads to Benny dancing with a skeleton as depicted on the cover.  The identity of the villain is fairly obvious, again Richards as a novelist has never been one for his great twists, but the motivation for the villain is a bit underwritten.  The villain is one motivated by a lost love and a knowledge of genetic engineering essentially trying to create artificial lifeforms out of the identities of those on the Medusa.  There is one particularly effective twist as to why there is an extra member of the new expedition in regards to the original crew of the Medusa, though again in hindsight it’s a fairly obvious twist that keeps in line with a lot of the book.

 

Overall, The Medusa Effect is a surprisingly effective novel.  Justin Richards actually manages to make a memorable read out of a science fiction murder mystery where the twists have a tendency towards the obvious.  What really works is the characterization that allows the main trope that’s the conceit of the novel to really work, the first third is devoted to characterization and it’s clear that Richards not having to just write Doctor Who, but a spin-off leads to some very solid work in this second Benny novel.  8/10.