I wrote the review above a good time before Ronald Frobnitz was established (or, really, even conceptualized) as a submission to Amazon's reader reviews feature. When I started work on my own (then-)prospective Cat Who... site in earnest, the piece might have been about a year old, but since the bad aftertaste in my mouth Went Underground had left when I last read it still remained and I was feeling quite harried from the strain of having nineteen other reviews to write that, to be honest, to have any work at all already done and out of the way was a relief, I decided to retain it as my "official" take on the book. I remained secure in my disdain for Underground and never had a second thought about the decision - until I started to do Underground's Rules analysis (part of a "C-pad" series adapted from a project by X-Files maven Chris Williams); though the analyses are not intended as reviews, the respectable scores the book was, in an objective light, racking up pointed to a more competent Cat Who... installment that I had originally thought it to be. My discoveries made me a bit uneasy about my previous judgments and prompted me to reread the book - which, in turn, prompted me to experience a halfway change of heart.
The book has two qualities to recommend it, the first being the conversation between Qwilleran and the natives and Arch Riker. Above, I griped about the less-than-comforting atmosphere of Mooseville, but, I realize now that, in the long run, that's not really a factor, since the person-to-person interaction is the focus here. Braun's care in character introduction and establishment with the Moose County cast in Knew Shakespeare and Sniffed Glue has dispensed with the necessity of anxious extensive expository pleasantries and enabled our hero talk to these people with the comfortable rhythm of old friends. Our author ploughs ahead with confidence in her supporting characters (most of the time, warranted, save for the Three Tree Island saga, which is still just a overly dramatic gimmick), even allowing the story to delve a bit into their character development, particularly in the cases of the dependable Nick Bamba and Mildred Hanstable. Most of the scenes with Qwilleran and the country regulars (save for an obnoxious party scene near the start of the book) work well, and the banter between them is very realistic.
The second element of note is the pacing. For the first half of Went Underground, the story moves the events along at a good clip, feeding us enough plot twists and developments to keep our interest piqued, with appropriately-timed pauses for thought (such as a particularly involving chat between Roger and Qwill at the Hotel Booze) along the way. Most of the big discovery scenes and shocks work, and the narrative is well-constructed - up to a point.
That "point" comes when Braun flies off on Underground's paranormal sub-tangent in the second half of the book. Though my memory might have faltered on other matters, the UFO and psychic phenomena are as hokey and ill-handled as I remembered them to be: the gossipy, knowing Mooseville chitchat about the alien "visitors" (which, I gather, we are ultimately supposed to regard with the same reverence that the natives do) is laughably silly and fluffy; the pretentious supposedly-psychic medium with her phony-baloney methods of "divination" (writing initials on slips of paper, gimme a break), uttering self-important ominous portents of impending doom, whose vague, imperious predictions and credibility we're supposed to swallow with unquestioning disbelief is ridiculous; the character of Russell Patch is still a mystery shrouded in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma, and not in a good way - she's utterly superfluous to the plot, and if Braun intended to have her hang around to just add to the mood, she's too aimless for that. The pacing and (until now, fairly gripping) mystery plotline grind to a halt for these supernatural set pieces - the intent of which, I gather, is to establish that, like cats, country folk are more in tune with nature's unexplained and thus are superior to ordinary humans like us. Which I can't buy (especially considering the natives' behavior in other circumstances).
Much of the problem here - or, more precisely, with the second half of the book - is that Braun seems to be seeking to both venerate Moose County - to praise its residents for being a wiser, more transcendant people - and vilify it at the same time - to expose part of its sordid, dirty underbelly with the serial-killer angle and the past and motives of the murderer. The material Braun atempts to traverse here, though, is far more adroitly handled in the next book after Underground, The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts, as the jarring leaps of logic the UFO stuff entails in this volume interrupts the stronger central plotline and leaves a bad taste in one's mouth; in fact this probably would've been one of the better Cat Who... books out there, were it not for the paranormal drivel. As it stands, Underground rests as essentially solid, entertaining Cat Who... fare significantly flawed by its sporadic subtext.
Back to the Ronald Frobnitz and Family homepage.