Literature / Spoonbenders

"I know people who can do magic. Real magic. And what does it get them? Nothing. If you can do a magic trick... you get paid."

— Teddy Telemachus

It's The '60s. The Amazing Telemachus Family were the talk of the town as a family of people with genuine Psychic Powers; telekinesis, telepathy, lie-detection, the works.

Or at least they were.

After a well-known skeptic debunks them on live-television, things have gone downhill for their once great psychic dynasty. People stop believing them, the family's matriarch (and most powerful psychic in the world) dies tragically. Thirty years later in the mid-1990's, the family is trying to get by as "normal" people.

Spoonbenders: A Novel is the seventh novel written by Daryl Gregory (Pandemonium), published in 2017 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

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Spoonbenders contains the following tropes:

• Age-Gap Romance: It's been stated that Teddy has a thing for younger women, everyone remarking on the age-gap between him and his wife before she died. Now a widower and a grandfather, Teddy spends his free-time picking up women young enough to be his daughter.
• Agent Scully: Destin Smalls is a government agent who believes that not only are psychic powers real, but he salivates at the thought of using them for military purposes. It also makes him very gullible to Teddy and Archibald's scams, convincing him that the micro-lepton gun can actually suppress psychic powers.
• Anti-Magic: On top of psychic research, Destin Small's team invented a micro-lepton gun, a device that can alter a person's torsion field and neutralizes a psychic's powers. Though it's later revealed that the gun doesn't do anything. Psychics just think it can take away their power, and therefore, it does.
• Been There, Shaped History: Teddy claims that he had met a young Johnny Carson who would later "steal [his] act" in the form of his iconic character Carnac the Magnificent. Whether or not this is true is rather vague.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Amazing Telemachus Family were a household name back in The '60s, showing off their Psychic Powers to the public. That is until they were humiliated on live-television by a well-known skeptic. Now they're living "normal" lives on Dysfunction Junction; their matriarch Maureen dies of uterine cancer, their patriarch Teddy using his abilities to con drunks out of pocket change and pick-up lonely single-moms, Frankie taking up Get-Rich-Quick Schemes with Mob Debt, Irene is a single mother to Matty who is forced to move back in with the rest of the family when she loses her job, and Buddy is somewhere on the spectrum and has to be looked after.
• Centipede's Dilemma: This is Buddy's life 24/7. He has visions of certain, dramatic events happening that can't be averted, but he can control the context of the vision and try to avert disaster, but he's so worried that every action/inaction he takes could lead to things spiraling to disaster that it has rendered him a passive observer of his own life. He tries communicating this to Frankie by giving him a book on Chaos theory, but Frankie just thinks he wants it read to him.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Having died of uterine cancer years before the book starts, Maureen was The Heart who held the family together, the Telemachus Family collapsing into dysfunction once she's dead and buried. She is also the only member of the family with multiple psychic abilities, as opposed to her children and grandchildren who only inherited one each.
• Devil's Advocate: While Archibald was instrumental in the Telemachus Family's fall from grace, that wasn't the intention. Archibald was an associate of Teddy, Maureen and Destin Smalls, and his appearance on the show to try and debunk them on live-TV was all a part of the act. The only reason why it didn't work was because Buddy freaked out (having a vision of his mother's death at that time), leading to Maureen taking him off-stage to calm him down, Archibald coming in without her there and ruining the set-up and payoff.
• Emotional Powers: Frankie's telekinesis is dependent on his state of mind and he has little control over it even in adulthood. It seems to rely on his emotional wellbeing and is utterly powerless when he lacks confidence in himself, his constant failures not doing him any favors.
• In Love with the Gangster's Girl: Through sheer coincidence, Teddy winds up in a relationship with Graciella, daughter-in-law to The Don Nick Senior, who had just separated herself from her husband after he's arrested on murder charges. Of his own volition, he enlists Irene's help so that she can become finally stable enough to leave for good and is forced to pay off Frankie's Mob Debt for him in the hopes that his family won't be further involved.
• Inadequate Inheritor: Frankie admires his father Teddy just as much as he resents him, wanting to be a charming showman just like him. Unfortunately, he lacks the same magnetic charisma and common sense his father has, getting himself stuck in a no-win situation with the mafia when he accepts a loan from them to try and save his failing business, every other idea he has being either getting involved in a Ponzi scheme or some other new business idea doomed to fail.
• Insane Troll Logic: On top of blaming professional skeptic Archibald on their family's fall from grace on live-television, Frankie also blames Maureen's death on him by way of chaos theory.
  Frankie: First, the act is wrecked. We're dead as her as the public is concerned. Gigs get cancelled, fucking Johnny Carson starts making fun of us. ...Once they isolated us, we were sitting ducks. Do the math kid. Nineteen seventy-three. Height of the Cold War. The world's most famous psychics are discredited on The Mike Douglas Show, and just a year later, a woman with your grandmother's immense power just dies? Oh yeah.
  Matty: But Mom— Mom said she died of cancer.
  Frankie: Sure. A healthy woman, a non-smoker, dies of uterine cancer at age thirty-one.
• Kids Raiding the Wine Cabinet: When Matty was only two-years old, Teddy (who was supposed to watch him) accidentally drank a glass of his gin. Twelve years later, Irene still uses this to guilt trip Teddy when she makes him look after him. All Teddy has as a retort is that if Matty would get into his gin stash again, it would be on purpose this time.
• Kissing Cousins: Matty has an uncomfortable sexual attraction towards his older cousin Mary Alice, having activated his psychic abilities — Astral Projection — accidentally while spying on her and her friend from the closet. They aren't related by blood, but it's still pretty euwy.
• Living Lie Detector: Irene's psychic ability is that she can tell whether someone is lying. While it's most effective on simple "yes/no" questions, she's able to fish out lies on other types of lying too.
• Mind over Matter: While she had other abilities too, Maureen Telemachus was a psychokinetic and would move objects during their demonstrations, an ability her son Frankie had inherited from her.
• Mob Debt: Frankie owes money to the Chicago mob after taking out a loan in an inevitably botched Get-Rich-Quick Scheme.
• Momma's Boy: Buddy thought of his mother Maureen as "the World's Most Powerful Psychic", so when she gives him a medal declaring him the World's Most Powerful Psychic, he treats it as Serious Business even into adulthood.
• Motifs: Each member of the Telemachus Family is associated with a Zener card, chapters focusing on a specific character beginning with one of the cards and each chapter's sections separated with their corresponding shapes: Teddy is a square, Irene is the star, Matty are the three wavy lines, Frankie is the circle and Buddy is the plus-sign.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: When Irene discovered that the financial investment firm she worked at was embezzling their clients, she took it up with her bosses who proceeded to lie to her face about it while also trying to gaslight her into thinking she's imagining it. She responds by slapping him in the face before she starts calling all of their robbed clients. By the end of it, Irene is fired, lawsuits are filed against her on "assault charges" and she's forced to represent herself, worried that word would get around about Ad Hominem attacks in association with her infamous family name. At the end, she ran out of money and was forced to move back in with her father.
• Parent with New Paramour: For all of his faults, Frankie wants to be the "dad who stuck around" for Mary Alice unlike her bio-dad, even though she seems to resent him in her life. Considering he's an incompetent confidence artist who gets the family in trouble due to his Mob Debt, her resentment isn't entirely unwarranted.
• Phony Psychic: While his wife Maureen was a genuine psychic, Teddy himself is an absolute fraud. He plays the part of being a clairvoyant, when really he's a Con Man who knows how to read people and perform slight-of-hand.
• Placebo Effect: The micro-lepton gun is no more effective against psychics than a child's toy. It only works on Buddy because everyone says the toy suppresses psychic powers and he believes them.
• Ponzi:
  • UltraLife is the "fastest-growing multilevel marketing company in the United States". Frankie, being the most miserly of the Telemachus family, gets a job there.
    Teddy: When you say multilevel marketing—
    Irene: He means pyramid scheme.
  • The investment firm Irene worked at was guilty of skimming money from client's accounts and keeping them and writing them off as bad investments. When Irene found out, she tried telling her boss about it under the assumption that it was nothing worse than a filing error. Being a Living Lie Detector, she quickly uncovers that they were doing it intentionally and that they were trying to gaslight her into leaving it alone. She punches him for it before calling her various clients and telling them to start looking for an attorney.
• Power Incontinence: Irene's lie-detecting ability makes it very hard for her to maintain a love-life.
• Prophecies Are Always Right: Buddy's ability to see the future allows him to see events that can't be averted. However, most of the time such visions lack proper context, and it's Buddy's job to ensure that the "context" renders the event benign, or at least less tragic than at face value.
  Say that he remembers a man in a bloodstained shirt. But does it have to be blood? Perhaps it's only a terrible ketchup stain! Armed with this gap in his knowledge, it's Buddy's duty to fill a bowl with ketchup and throw it at the man.
• The Scrooge: Having been born into poverty before finding success as a professional psychic (and the occasional scam), Teddy is a firm believer in making one's own fortune and has tried enforcing that idea onto his kids. Irene blames this for her brother Frankie's "crooked little heart".
  Teddy: Never lend chips to someone who can't buy their way into the pot.
• Seers: Buddy's special ability is to see certain future events, described as him "remembering" things that haven't happened yet. Him having to interpret these visions with incomplete information has left its mark on him though, giving him a lot of symptoms that would imply that he's somewhere on the Autism Spectrum and has to be looked after by other members of the family.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Frankie spends the whole book devising a way of paying off his Mob Debt by robbing Mitzi's safe. Wouldn't you know it, he manages to reach the safe and finds it empty, save for an empty kid's lunchbox.
• Shotgun Wedding: It's right before Teddy was planning on preposing to Maureen does she tell him that she's pregnant with their first child, having psychically sensed its presence beforehand.
• Spoon Bending: When he first met Maureen, Teddy demonstrated his abilities by bending a key to impress her.
• Team Mom: Irene was tasked with playing the part of "the responsible" member of the family, something was made so much worse once her mother died, making her the only responsible member of the family.
• Violin Scam: It's implied that the micro-lepton gun is one, Teddy and Archibald having made what is essentially a toy gun and convinces Destin Smalls to buy and manufacture it for psychic warfare. Considering it actually can suppress psychic powers using the power of suggestion, there is a nugget of authenticity to it.

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