He May Be a Horrormeister, but Wes Craven’s Novel Is No ‘Scream’

The dust jacket for Hollywood director Wes Craven’s first novel has to be one of the year’s spiffiest. In front is a holographic representation of a man’s face that switches, depending on how the book is held, from youth to age. And in back is a photo of Craven, the horrormeister behind “Scream” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” looking suitably Mephistophelean.

In between, though, are the 350 pages of the novel itself, which isn’t so spiffy. Not that Craven does a particularly bad job. He knows how to string scenes together and supply the technical detail that lends a patina of plausibility to outlandish events. But “Fountain Society,” with its chases, explosions and moral and emotional muddle, reads even more than most books of this kind like a film script out of its true element.

The title refers to a top-secret U.S. program to prolong the lives of weapons researchers by transplanting their brains into the younger bodies of clones who have been prepared for them--a high-tech fountain of youth. Peter Jance, for example, is about to perfect a particle-beam device, the Hammer, that could ensure U.S. military dominance for decades. But Jance, at 76, is dying of pancreatic cancer. It’s time to kidnap his clone, Hans Brinkman, a Swiss investment banker who has lived to 35 under the illusion that his life is his own.

Jance’s colleague, the megalomaniac Dr. Frederick Wolfe, performs the transplant. His ally is Jance’s wife, Beatrice, who has developed a DNA “glue” to rejoin severed nerve fibers and who helps persuade Jance--terror of extinction does the rest--to overcome his scruples.

Sure enough, the rejuvenated Jance pushes ahead with designing the Hammer. But his new, young body carries in its “cellular memory” some distracting baggage. Hans Brinkman was a skilled pilot, skier and boxer, but a worse swimmer than Jance; moreover, the scruples about his work have come back, stronger this time, and Jance finds himself dreaming of making love to a beautiful woman he never knew.

She is Brinkman’s mistress, Elizabeth Parker, an American-born fashion model who isn’t satisfied with the official explanation that Brinkman died in a car crash. A mysterious e-mail leads her to the island of Vieques, off Puerto Rico, site of a complex of U.S. bases where Wolfe has his headquarters.

Parker’s aptitude as a sleuth would be surprising, except that this is the kind of novel in which Brinkman can twice beat a Navy SEAL in hand-to-hand combat, and the aircraft the good guys fly in happens to be (a) the only kind of jetliner with a below-decks galley where they can hide and (b) a plane so old that its engine heat doesn’t attract Sidewinder missiles.

Meanwhile, Beatrice Jance, whom Wolfe has long coveted, feels estranged from the new edition of her husband. Jance himself isn’t sure whom he loves: his aged wife or the Parker his body desires. Parker is delighted by Brinkman’s newfound maturity but puzzled by his lapses of memory. It’s tempting but futile to wonder what a Kafka or a Nabokov would have done with all this, seriously or comically, because “Fountain Society” leaves little time, between outbreaks of mayhem, for emotions to develop or philosophical conundrums to be explored.

Indeed, at no point does this novel tell us: “Wes Craven, and no other person, wrote me.” With its glamorous characters, its slam-bang pace, its easy and unearned cynicism, it seems written instead by that Generic Thriller Writer--human “ghost” or computer program--who writes all too many of our thrillers.