Keith Scaife’s cover for the 1988 edition
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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I so loved The City, Not Long After, that I’m adding this one now. TYVM Dr. B.
It’s great to hear from you! I plan on reading the story that later became The City, Not Long After soon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this one!
I tried reading The City, Not Long After and found the beginning too slow. Never finished it. I struggle with finishing a fair degree of novels if the plot doesn’t grab me quickly.
I did like the short story collection Points of Departure, especially the short story “Orange Blossom Time”, which I found to be one of the most poignant tales of time travel out there.
I have some of her earliest short stories on my radar.
The City, Not Long After is the only Pat Murphy book I’ve read. I remember enjoying it, but not much about the plot. (The only part that stayed with me is the artists painting the Golden Gate Bridge all different shades of blue, because someone uses that as a metaphor for collective action and the artists take it literally. I’ve always loved that.)
I just finished rereading Emma Bull’s Bone Dance, which strikes me as somewhat similar, and was published within a couple of years of City. They’re both set in post-apocalyptic rebuilding times, both fending off authoritarianism. I loved in when I first read it, and even though it strikes me as a little more jumbled and unfocused than I remember, I can still see what I liked about it.
I don’t think I’ve run across a copy of Shadow Hunter (would probably have picked it up)…but I think I have a copy of Murphy’s Nadya, a werewolf story.
I’m currently reading Lisa Goldstein’s A Mask for a General (1987) (I know, a few years past my self-imposed cutt-off date, muaha), another one of those “fending off authoritarianism” type novels. I’ll withhold my general thoughts until I think through them for a review. I’m compiling an interesting list of unique forms of resistance — sounds like I should put Murphy’s The City, Not Long After (1989) on it as well.
I suspect that copies of The Shadow Hunter aren’t the easiest to find in the wild (vs. online) due to the lesser-known SF presses that published the first two editions — Popular Library and Headline.
Hey, Joachin,
Thanks so much for reviewing The Shadow Hunter! I just wanted to let folks know that the best place to find physical copies of the book is Tachyon Publications , which published a slightly updated version back in 2002. It’s also available as an ebook at Open Road Media. This info (and lots more) will soon be available on my new website, which will be up by the end of March.
I didn’t write much for the last couple of decades — overwhelmed by a combination of day job and eldercare for my parents. But I’m back at last! My newest novel, The Adventures of Mary Darling, will be coming out from Tachyon in May.
Anyway, it’s great to see my older work getting some attention. Many thanks!
Pat Murphy
Dear Pat,
Thank you so much for stopping by! I’d love to know what you “slightly updated” in the 2002 edition. I look forward to exploring more of your early work, especially your pre-1985 short fiction! Thank you for the links.
Sincerely,
Joachim Boaz
Ooh, good to know.
In France, The City is not translated. Too bad, it looks interesting.
The Falling Woman (1986), which won her the Nebula Award for best novel, was translated into French at least!
And her best known short fiction is translated as well — “Rachel in Love” (1987), which won a Nebula and placed second for the Hugo. https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1373949
Very hard to find. Thanks for the information, I may look at The Falling Woman.
No problem. Yeah, I didn’t see a copy of Univers 1989 on French ebay when I quickly took a look.
This author is new to me, may have to check out The City given the setting is of personal interest.
Let me know your thoughts if you get to it soon. I haven’t read it. I plan on reading the short story — “Art in the War Zone” (1984) — that she expanded into The City, Not Long After soon (but, you know me and plans).
I have never heard of this author or the books you mentioned. This one sounds excellent really. Going to have to track down a copy. Thanks for the great review.
Thanks for stopping by. What type of SF do you enjoy? While outside of the date range of my current project, her later novel The City, Not Long After (1989) is probably her best known work. And The Falling Woman (1986), while more overtly fantasy and thus also outside my general area of research, won the Nebula Award for best novel. This is definitely a lesser known work of hers. And I imagine the other two are superior.
Really depends on my mood. Last couple of years I’ve been really into work from the 40s – 60s. PKD. Eric Frank Russell. Philip K. High. Love stumbling onto posts like yours that showcase authors I’ve never heard of and exploring their body of work.
Thank you. If you haven’t found them already, my year in review posts are the best place to get a sense of what I’ve been covering lately. I read a lot of short fiction and those posts help organize them into the various series I’m simultaneously conducting over the years.
2023: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2024/01/01/my-2023-in-review-best-sf-novels-best-sf-short-fiction-and-bonus-categories/
2022: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2023/01/01/updates-my-2022-in-review-best-sf-novels-best-sf-short-fiction-and-bonus-categories/
Oh man thanks! I just clicked over and instantly saw several I’d love to read. Your blog could be dangerous for my bank account and TBR pile.
If you tackle anything, let me know!
I’ve not read this one but I have read various other books & stories she’s written.
I agree with everyone else who rates The City Not Long After and also the Falling Woman. Between that title, The Jaguar Hunters by Shepard & Deserted Cities of the Heart by Shiner it felt like the Mexican/Central American jungle was the place to be in f&sf round about then!
Hello Mike, I hope you’re doing well. Sounds like all the parts–Shiner, Murphy, and Shepard–for a good article!
Tired after a busy summer! I think you’d be stretching your nominal publishing boundary to fit them all in, I’m afraid!
Haha, yeah. I still haven’t been able to share my main project from the summer — my Simak article on organized labor for Journey Planet. The issue has been delayed a bit.
The author revised The Shadow Hunter in 2002. In the introduction she writes, “The future postulated in the first edition of The Shadow Hunter has become severely dated. Before I could let the book be republished, I felt that I had to update the future it describes.”
Thank you for the update! That said, as a historian focused on SF written between 1945-1985, I can’t say I’m personally interested in rewrites that fall outside that range. I’m interested in what SF says about the time it was written. All SF is inexorably connected to the time it was written, and that’s fine with me! haha.