UNLESS one is an unusually astute and perceptive reader, one should read the first book in James Frey’s Endgame series, The Calling, before embarking on perusing this particular volume — Sky Key. Many bestseller sagas these days come in no less than planned trilogy form, and Frey’s is no exception, but while it is not difficult for one to pick up the key plot elements from perusing the second book in such grandiose schemes, in the case of the Endgame novels one generally finds oneself at sea unless privy to vital background information.

I will, therefore, provide salient aspects of the overarching plot for the readers’ benefit. The trilogy (of which the final volume is yet to be released) is quite literally about a game of apocalyptic proportions. The Calling commences with 12 meteors striking Earth, thereby activating a global summons that collects 12 chosen Players for the purpose of the game, which continues in Sky Key. Although the placement of the action is in the 21st century, apparently the plans for the game were laid down millennia ago by Masters who governed the human race (the implication is that they were alien beings). The Players are all in their own ways remarkable individuals and superb warriors: an Aboriginal woman of tremendous strength, a physically mutilated man who has links to the Ark of the Covenant, an amoral and ferocious young man with a deadly mechanical arm, and so on.

Once the game concludes, the prediction is that all of humanity will perish (hence the well-chosen term Endgame); this results in frenetic action on the part of the Players. They have two main aims: the first is to compete with each other for the purposes of survival, and the second is to end up being the ultimate winner who can either prevent the annihilation of humanity, or affect it. This intense and relentless action makes for compelling reading, especially for those who enjoy Tarantino-style violence as a mode of escapism, and the ancient nature of the mysteries involved gives the book a quasi-mystical flavour that is by no means displeasing. To be perfectly honest, however, appreciating Endgame to the fullest is a matter of acquired taste, and I would not be surprised were many readers to abandon the book before reaching midway through the novel.

Central to the action are artefacts and motifs, some of which possess strong links to our mythical history. The above-mentioned Ark of the Covenant (aptly underscored in popular culture by the Indiana Jones films) yields its various secrets to the Player affiliated with the Aksumite line, Hilal Ibn Isa Al-Salt. What emerges from that encounter is the caduceus of the god Hermes/Mercury, a symbol of two intertwined snakes forming a wand that incidentally is as mythically significant as the Holy Grail or the fabled Ark itself. Hilal is expected to slay a powerful, demonic individual named Ea with the help of the caduceus, and while I will refrain from giving away any more of the plot at this stage, such exciting subplots provide the action of Sky Key with much of its buttressing momentum.

In order to successfully construct a universe of the scale and scope necessitated by the Endgame novels one needs to be somewhat obsessive. Intriguingly enough, his obsessive focus on the game enables Frey to create some incredibly memorable characters. An Liu, of the Shang line (of Asian origin) is one of Frey’s best developed characters, even though one never really hears him speak over the course of the novel — his facial tics are more expressive than his voice! Expertly trained in warfare and the martial arts to the point where he comes across as more machine than man, the skill and precision with which Liu consistently evades capture and execution by competing Players is both deadly and beautiful to observe. Adding a touch of macabre to the already twisted aspects of Liu’s persona, Frey repeatedly notes how obsessed the Shang remains about his dead beloved, Chiyoko — to the extent of wearing a necklace made of her decaying facial features. Unhealthy though this may be, it is perfectly resonant with the grotesque atmosphere of much of Sky Key and I will not be able to forget characters like An Liu the Shang for a while to come.

All great imaginary heroes (and villains) have fatal flaws: Superman’s vulnerability to Kryptonite and inability to see through lead, Oedipus’ fatalistic parentage, Lord Voldemort’s susceptibility to the love with which Lily Potter marks her child, Fox Mulder’s obsession regarding who abducted his sister, to name but a few. None of Frey’s characters are flawless, and for this one should be truly thankful since their foibles make for relatively plausible, albeit chaotic, reading. However, the book itself contains a serious thematic mistake in that none of the 12 Players can plausibly come to grips with having to kill a particular two-year old child in order to save all of humanity. The more barbaric and psychopathic of them appear to have no ostensible problem with it, but their callousness stems from the amoral sadism underlying their nature, not from a true, analytical appreciation of the global necessity for such a murder. Some of them recoil in such horror from the very idea that one wonders why they were chosen as Players for such a game in the first place.

I’m not advocating that one should blithely execute children for the purpose of global salvation; however, this demurral seems somewhat out of place in the innately cruel world of Endgame. Perhaps one should not rush to judge the author, since even Quentin Tarantino used animation in order to ‘soften’ the deeply disturbing murder of O-Ren Ishii’s parents in Kill Bill 1. Moreover, given the Endgame phenomenon’s global mass-media appeal that is currently raking in millions, some might argue that Frey’s novelistic limitations are both explicable and understandably humane.

The American publishers of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange lopped off his softening last chapter when releasing the book in the United States, and Stanley Kubrick characteristically didn’t bat an eyelid when basing his memorable film version on the US edition of the novel. But those with more delicate imaginative sensibilities may gain some comfort from the mitigating final chapter of that book, now published at Burgess’s insistence. Fans of horror movies ranging from The Shining to Sinister may nevertheless chuckle at Frey’s qualms, since in the world of boundless entertainment no one is ever truly spared.

The reviewer is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the Institute of Business Administration.

Sky Key (THRILLER)

By James Frey

HarperCollins, USA

ISBN 978-0062332615

512pp.