The Age of Terror

Terror indeed looms over this beautifully crafted and disturbing novel from Plante (Annunciation), who continues to explore themes of religious faith and the cruelties large and small possible in human relationships. Joe, a disillusioned 23-year-old American, finds himself in Leningrad as the Soviet Union crumbles. He is driven by a need ""to imagine something he didn't yet know,"" for his mind generates brutal fantasies involving a vague genocidal underworld, which he suffers as if he somehow had already lived them. He meets the beautiful, mysterious Zoya (named after a famed WWII Soviet martyr) and is quickly drawn into her world, a morally nebulous zone ruled by Gerald, a drunken, sinister American bent on making a profit from the U.S.S.R.'s collapse. Joe is a catalyst for Zoya; she tries to free herself from her ""joint venture"" with Gerald, a money-making scheme in which desperate young Russian women and girls and boys, are sold into prostitution in the West. The three become entangled in a life-altering game of emotional espionage, where alliances suspensefully shift and motives are necessarily selfish. Joe tells Gerald he ""would like to be a bad man,"" and in his surprisingly casual betrayal of Zoya he succeeds. With unsettling dialogue and sharp detail, Plante depicts a society on the cusp of spiritual despair and economic disintegration, and his careful buildup of menace is all the more chilling for its skilled understatement. (Jan.)