Book Review: The Shadow Hunter, Pat Murphy (1982)

3.75/5 (Good)

Pat Murphy’s first novel The Shadow Hunter (1982) is an achingly beautiful tale of displacement. In the distant past, a young Neanderthal boy embarks on a hunt to claim his name and to learn the nature of the world. In the near future, a mogul named Roy Morgan wants to create a Pleistocene oasis (The Project) ensconced in a valley in an increasingly urban world. Morgan employs two damaged souls, Amanda and Cynthia, to aim his machines–that reach backward and forward into time.

And Amanda, aiming to capture the bear, pulls the Neanderthal child, named Sam by his captors, into the subterranean bowels of The Project. He awakens in a world that “is all edges. Flatness meets flatness in stiff lines” (11). He must learn the nature of the shadows that inhabit his new world: his own loneliness, the damaged souls that inhabit the streets and perpetuate Roy Morgan’s schemes, the men and women lost in the shadows of their parents, the fragments of his old world that still inhabit his new world, and the pattern that seems to tie everyone together across the eons.

The Nature of the Shadows

The Shadow Hunter, despite its fantastic Jurassic Park but with time travel and without dinosaurs locale, maintains a human (or rather, Neanderthal) focus to everything that transpires. Told entirely from Sam’s perspective, the novel’s circumscribed perspective keeps the details of the world, the nature of the technology of time travel, humanity’s exploration outwards, the nature of urban malaise, as intriguing hints rather than fully formed exposition. The story relies entirely on Sam. He’s a deeply empathetic character. He cannot discard his beliefs. While those around him might dismiss him as the last of a dead race, he uses his unique insight to provide a glimpse of truth in a world of malaise and aimlessness. He does not lay blame for his own predicament, but, like us all, tries to live life as best as he can considering his situation.

Sam gathers to him a fascinating range of characters. First, there’s Amanda, the young, and similarly lonely, African-American woman with the talent to aim Roy Morgan’s machines. She cares for him when he awakes in The Project, and sneaks him into The Valley where he can live and hunt. There’s Marshall, the child of an absentee tycoon father, who grows deeply attached to Sam and periodically returns to the Valley. And Merle, a driven documentarian who seeks to make a film about Sam… And Tim, a descendant of Native Americans, who walks like a hunter. Sam must confront the spirit of the bear, whom he blames for pulling him into the world, a malevolent trickster force that also inhabits the valley and threatens those whom he loves.

For a first novel, The Shadow Hunter demonstrates incredible promise. Murphy’s crispy, icy, and poignant prose likewise elevates the premise (that admittedly prevented me from picking up the book for many a month). I’ll be reading more Pat Murphy, that’s for sure. I have my eyes on “Art in the War Zone” (1984), later expanded into her best known novel, The City, Not Long After (1989).

Recommended.

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