Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
What a fantastic find this is! Written against the backdrop of inner city poverty, this is a short story about deeply imperfect people trying to cope with extraordinarily crappy circumstances. Drugs are a major part of this story, as is the supernatural. I found myself reminded of The House by Edward Lee - a miasma from years of psychic pain builds up and takes on a life of it's own, which is the sort of Jungian inspired supernatural shenanigans I like the best.
Speaking as someone with six years of sobriety after a lifetime of chemical addiction, I found the portrayal of addiction in this story to be among the best I've ever read. According to the bios on the usual sites the author's day job is drug counseling. This experience shows through. The horror and depravity of addiction feels gut-wrenchingly visceral. I found parts of this short story difficult to read - they're that powerful. And I'm the guy that can read Edward Lee while eating dinner.
To be frank, I didn't have very high expectations for the book; Wicked Run Press is Mr. Mathew's own label. I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the writing - he uses an economy of words that flows very well, the characters were all developed well and voicing was especially well done. I do not recall any typos or grammatical errors. This is a well produced book gloriously free of the problems that beset too many self-published books.
I've since purchased several other books from Mark Mathews. They are not going to sit on my TBR list for years; knowing that I have some more stories that could be this good is like having a stash of the good stuff tucked away for later.
Brainycat's 5 "B"s: blood: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] boobs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bombs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bondage: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] blasphemyBrainycat's 5 "B"s: blood: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] boobs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bombs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bondage: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] blasphemy: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] Stars: 2 Bechdel Test: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] Deggan's Rule: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] Gay Bechdel Test: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I DNF'd this book at 10%. I found the protagonist unbelievable - I felt no depth to the character, I felt he was just a collection of attributes and a repository of Things That Happened To Him. It was as if he had no agency in his story, but just existed to move the plot along. Not a good place for the main character to live.
The pacing didn't make sense to me at all. In the first couple of pages, we watch as the protagonist's daughter gets abducted by some sort of dimension hopping demon. Describing this (visually, because other senses and the interior life of the character don't exist in this world) takes only a few more words than driving through the french countryside between plot advancements. I felt a complete lack of economy WRT the wordsmithing. I expect authors of books I'm reading for fun to be able to write better than I can :)
The few pages I read showed me that this book isn't lacking for ideas, but isn't cut of the cloth that I like to read. I didn't see any glaring typos or grammatical errors; this is not from the bottom of the self-published barrel. Unfortunately, I think the author needs to keep working on his craft (characterization, pacing, visualization) before I will feel comfortable investing the time and energy into an entire book. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
Imagine Herman Hesse and Theodore Sturgeon eating acid with Philip K. Dick then spending the whole day reading classic comics while watching Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell. That's the impression I got from this book; it's a self-confessed pop culture mashup with a thin veneer of Jungian psychobabble plastered over the top. This could have gone either way; in the hands of a less confident or skilled author this story would quickly become a parody of itself and lose respect from any decently read reader.
Fortunately this was not the case. Nobody tried to reach too far nor did the story try to pretend it's more than just a contemporary adult fantasy novel. It's crafted well, the editing/proofreading are all of the standard you'd exepct from Del Rey, the characters have enough life to be interesting and stand on their own while the setting just sort of drifts by and occaisonally interjects itself to complicate the plot on cue. There's not a lot of action in this book, which makes this the sort of book I don't normally read. I felt the pacing was brisk but too tightly managed. There were very few surprises and I never felt compelled to try to prognosticate what was going to happen next. I'm not even sure I ever got emotionally invested in the protagonist, actually. I felt like I was reading an inventory of a lot of conversations that some guy was having with a number of different people with the purpose of deciding if I like the guy or not. And I'm still not sure I like the guy.
That being said, the story has a new twist on a premise that's been touched on in any number of books and movies (some of them mentioned by name, thank you dear author) and faith in the premise is what kept me going despite the occasional plot hole or the contemporary setting full of characters who can travel back and forth across the US at will but don't have cell phones.
There's nothing technically wrong with this book; it's certainly better than most of the swill getting published under the contemporary fantasy banner. It's a great premise that's executed well, the author clearly respects me as a reader and I feel a kinship since we clearly count some of the same writers among our favorites, but ultimately this story lacks a certain frisson and failed to grab me. I think this is a great book for someone else, and could easily be five stars for a different reader. I found myself skimming the last third hoping there would be a surprise that would engage me (there wasn't), but I liked it just a little too much to give up on it. I'm giving this a very solid 3.5 stars....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is an odd little addition to the Laundry Files canon. It clocks in at 74 ereader screens; it's hardly long enough to get a story going, let alone developed and resolved. There's a very long setup and then a super quick resolution which left me just a little puzzled - I won't give anything away but I feel the solution to the problem isn't consistent with the "rules" of the Laundry Files world. We did learn some more arcane trivia about the history of the Laundry, but we didn't learn very much about Bob Howard and the "mystery" aspect of the story leaves some huge gaps that aren't adequately explained. That being said, the writing is crisp and elegant which I appreciate after the clumsiness of The Rhesus Chart.
A weak 3.5; it was enjoyable enough for fans of the Laundry Files but doesn't offer very much for people just coming into the series....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
The latest installment of the Laundry Files series is the best plot yet, has some brilliant moments but is tempered by whole chapters that feel phoned in. There's whole chunks of backstory and supporting cast member development that feel like they're just there to pad the wordcount. I was reading these chapters and imagined a dialogue between Mr. Stross and his editor:
"Hey Charles, I went over the latest revision with the publisher, they want to up the word count to justify the premium price." "Well, the story is finished as it is..." "Sure, and it's great, but maybe you could, you know, do that writing thing you do and make up some more stuff?" "Where would I put more story? This is already the most complicated plot in the series." "Maybe you could throw in some long expositions about the supporting cast? And do lots of recaps, a'la 'The story so far' - the publisher thinks kids today with their short attention spans won't be able to follow along with all the doublecrossing doubleagents." "Well, I suppose I could add a few paragraphs here and there. How much bigger is the book supposed to be?" "Charles, we need to ask for another ten thousand words." "ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?!?" "No, I'm afraid not. Say, how's that advance treating you anyways?"
And thus we see the author playing around with different expositionary styles in a "let's break the fourth wall" kind way. We see the author spend a lot of time developing characters that are going to be dead by the end of the book. We get an inordinate amount of exposition with some ancillary plot twists, to the point where I think this book marks a sea change in Bob Howard's career at the Laundry. Previous books had Bob getting thrown around by bureaucratic forces outside of his comprehension or control, forcing him to battle Lovecraftian horrors on one hand while trying to find his way through Gilliam-esque horrors (see [1] and [2]) on the other hand, and this was part of the charm. This book sees Bob take control of major operations, manipulate the bureaucratic to his needs, play office politics with the best of them and generally act like a middle-management, PDA wielding Indiana Jones.
I'm glad to see Bob's arc progressing so well, and the level of danger and plot complication get amped up to match. This is no Monty Haul campaign: the conflict in this story is something the likes of which the Laundry has never had to deal with before. Mr. Stross has clearly done his homework with regards to contemporary vampire mythology, and has worked very hard to put his own unique spin on it. I shan't spoil it for other readers but I'll say he stays true to the core concepts and ideals of vampirism while adding his specific spin on it and brilliantly lampoons the glut of popular vampire stories that have come out in the last few years. He's read everything from Stoker through Hamilton (at one point Bob is tasked with reading this same canon, and we clearly hear Charles whining about it through Bob's mouth) and he uses this knowledge to drop more than a few shoutouts to some of the better vampire stories. Let The Right One In and Near Dark get major nods, while the rest of the stories get their barbs here and there.
When the story is moving along, this is probably the best Laundry Files book yet. It's brilliantly plotted, the conflict is refreshing and interesting and the cast of characters is the best yet. But it felt like every time I was really into the pace, really absorbed by the story and the plot - oomph! - I ran headlong into pages of exposition that felt like trying to walk through knee deep mud. There's a lot of ancillary info thrown around that didn't directly affect the plot. This was necessary to provide the emotional backdrop of some of the characters to explain their motivations in subsequent chapters, and I have a very strong suspicion a lot of what we learned about these character's interior lives will be relevant in subsequent installments of the series. Which is great in the context of the whole series, but within the scope of this book it felt like clumsy writing. In the scope of this book alone, I would've appreciated some reworking of certain sections to make them more elegant and fit into the overall pace of the book better.
Charles's scathing treatment of the curses of modern life - particularly agile project management - should be studied by anyone who ever works with technology engineers. While parts of the plot drag, the insightful snarkiness of Bob's observations are hardly tempered at all. Technology plays less of a role in this book however; there's not as much here for the programming nerds to sink their teeth into. Overall, this book felt less like "Joe Programmer vs. The Eldritch Horrors, hilarity ensues" and more like "Bob the Middle Manager plays Van Helsing, hilarity ensues". At this rate of progression, however, there can't be many books left in the series.
Unless CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN comes about, and the publisher tries to pad the word count into a second series...
Two memorable quotes from this book: "It suddenly dawns on me that I know about as much about looking after a pet cat as I know about flying a jet fighter: it’s all MEOW DAKKA-DAKKA ZOOM to me."
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
A serviceable but not especially engaging story that takes full advantage of the most popular cryptozoological tropes. Red shining eyes in the night, strange teeth, domestic animals acting strangely - they're all packed in here. The featured domestic animals are cats, and since I'm a certified crazy cat guy, this endeared me to the story even though the character building of both the cats and humans vacillated between inadequate and forced. The plot developed steadily enough, but is left entirely unresolved and the human protagonist is left in an untenable position. This is the first installment of loosely related stories in his Wicked Neighborhood series, of which I also picked up #2 and #3. I doubt I'm going to read them. I'm probably being generous with 3.5 stars, but I really like cats so that's worth a star and a half to me. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is a very quick read, too short and simple to be marketed as a novella. It doesn't really add anything to the "crazed chainsaw wielding psychopath slaughtering kids trapped in a locked house" genre, but it is mercifully well edited. Mr. Shaffer is no Ed Lee, nor is he trying to be - this is a middle of the road bog standard not-especially-gruesome slasher. Comforting in it's predictability, to be honest. The writing is competent if not expansive; the pacing, arc and resolution all worked well but I felt the sentence structures to be repetitive and the vocabulary to be a bit limited. I'm feeling generous because I got this free through Kindle Unlimited; I'dve paid up £0.50 before feeling ripped off. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I don't recall exactly why it seemed like a good idea to buy this and read it again; I believe I heard a mention that the BBC4 dramatisation will be available for sale soon. In an inexplicable fit of nostalgia I bought a copy and for reasons I can't quite fathom I actually reread the whole thing. I first read this book right as it came out in paperback - about the time I graduated high school. It must be understood that the young Mr. Brainycat was drunk nearly every night and stoned more often that not. Way back in the day, I thought it was brilliant satire that was sticking it right to the man where it'd hurt him the most. Neil Gaiman was the new Ambrose Bierce!
Growing up in middle America made any story set in England seem vastly important; it was the land of Monty Python, Benny Hill and Proper Tradition. England was a wonderland of glorious villages and endearing people with a brilliant sense of humor, and an affinity for anything English gave me a feeling of being cultured (superior) to the rednecks surrounding me. A quarter of a century later, six years sober and living in England has wiped the gloss right off of that fantasy in no uncertain terms.
I think being more familiar with the English culture is the biggest factor in my disappointment with this rereading. It doesn't seem cute and quaint; the difficulties of trying to do things in England (like drive around the M25) are cute when you're reading about them from 10 000km away; when you're living there it's maddeningly frustrating[1]. I didn't realize how much of this book is taking the piss out of the British way of doing things until now, but this time around I didn't find it LOL funny. It's cute, it's funny, and it's totally forgettable.
I had a notion to reread American Gods, which I liked when I was really high, but I think I'm going to let that one lie. Some things are best left as (scattered) memories and vague impressions. I believe the fact of the matter is that except for Sandman, I'm not a Neil Gaiman fan and as I grow older and more cynical I'm diverging further and further away from his canon. By the same token I've never disliked Terry Pratchet, but I've never been a huge fan either - I found the couple of Discworld books I read to be cute, funny and totally forgettable. This is a great pairing of authors but I don't think they worked out a whole that's any greater than the sum of their parts.
[1] Example: restaurants run and staffed by English people cannot get a meal delivered to a table in less than 45 minutes. This is an example of the attitude that lost them their empire.
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
A list of shorts with the likes of Swanwick, Stross, and Bear? Yes Please! This was one of those "you might also like..." suggestions from That Monolithic Online Retailer. It showed up while I was filling in my Laundry Files collection, and on a whim and without even looking at any reviews I bought it. Say what you like about the way Mr. Bezos runs his business, but the boffins who write the code that glues purchasing patterns to the inventory are doing some good work - I really liked this collection. All of the stories are strong enough that I feel no ambiguity; the stories I like I like a lot, the stories I don't like I really don't like.
Unfortunately, demands on my time dictate that I can only reliably allocate the time between getting in bed and falling asleep for reading every day. The stories in this collection were exactly the right length for this interval. I doubt this was intentional on Tor's part but it was nice for once to be able to pick up my reader and start at the beginning of a new story for a few nights in a row. The volume appears to be an amalgamation of complete ebook files from each story; there's an overall cover and title page, then each story has it's own cover and title page. This is no doubt the result of some laziness on Tor's part, as combining small standalone files into a single compendium only takes a few keystrokes, but I didn't mind at all. As we'd expect from a large publisher like Tor, all the mechanics of a proper book like formatting, spelling and grammar were spot on.
Dormanna, by Gene Wolfe, is yet another reinterpretation of the childhood imaginary friend. I'm not sure it really added much to the genre to be honest. As I was reading the story, I kept hoping something horrible and twisted was going to happen. The ending is ambiguous enough to let each to let the reader decide the fate of humanity but I never got the dark twist I was hoping for. This is a story I didn't like. The whole tone was all sweetness and bubbles, and the dark forces that were hinted at never materialized enough to provide a meaningful (or entertaining) counterpoint.
The second story in the collection is Portrait of Lisane de Patagnia by Rachel Swirsky. This is the only story I didn't finish. I just couldn't get into the first person POV; I feel like the characterization didn't put enough hooks into the protagonist to make learning about the world (and therefore deciphering what's happening) worthwhile. I think a more dedicated reader, who is more appreciative of intensely allegorical introspective relationship studies would do much better with this than I did. I have nothing bad to say about the quality of Ms. Swirsky's writing, but unfortunately the POV and conflict push all my DNF buttons.
Michael Swanwick has created some of the most engaging worlds I've ever had the pleasure of visiting. I remember reading Vacuum Flowers in highschool; his use of dialogue to bring the world to life still sticks in my brain today[1]. The Mongolian Wizard, like all of his works I've read since, does the same and breathes some sophistication into what would otherwise be a straightforward steampunks and wizards jaunt through a quasi Hapsburgian Europe. This would be an example of story that didn't rely on depth, sex, violence or gimmicks to keep me involved, but instead was so expertly crafted it was just a pleasure to take it in.
A Tall Tail by Charles Stross would be a great introduction to Stross for the uninitiated. Mr. Stross knows engineers; he gets us folk with an affectionate sarcasm that can only come from being and accomplished engineer himself. This little story has accurate science, caricatures of people you know, a bit of cloak and dagger conspiracy and more than a few good jokes. Again, not a story that's going to echo through your worldview and knock the cobwebs down, but a great way to spend a few minutes and learn a little about rocket propulsion.
Time travel is very difficult to do well; all too often we see it used as a gimmick to artificially create resonance between elements on different arcs. The Ghosts of Christmas by Paul Cornell neatly avoids this trap by making the entire arc of the story a fractal exploration of itself. It's elegant, it's engaging and it kept me interested with a believable protagonist and multi-dimensional supporting characters. Kudos to Mr. Cornell, and I'm looking forward to read more of his work.
Brit Mandelo's The Finite Canvas follows a well worn path to redemption through all our favorite cyberpunk tropes, but it did keep me engaged up until the end - the protagonist has a choice to make, and her character is layered deep enough it's not clear what she'll do until the end of the story. After that, the inevitable gracefully concludes itself with a minimum of chatter which I appreciate. Ms. Mandelo is also on my "authors to look for" list.
Am I Free To Go? is Kathryn Cramer's dystopia about the police state encroaching on american liberal-centrist middle class sensibilities. It feels quite preachy; Kathryn has a Point to make so she Wrote A Story to illustrate her Point. I think it didn't cover enough nuance to justify the word count, and the plot was too disjointed and the characterization too thin to feel engaged with the protagonist. Everything Kathryn is warning us about has been covered at nymag, hufpo, theatlantic, etc ad nauseum. I'm not at all opposed to politics in my scifi - it's what scifi is supposed to be about IMHO - but this attempt feels like a miss for me.
Every collection of shorts always has that one story that surprises me with how much it sticks with me. I liked Pat Murphy's About Fairies for it's imagination and it's dark undertone that rose up in unexpected places. I didn't like the pace at all; it veered dangerously close to some allegorical, introspective soliliquies in a couple of places but managed to pull itself back from the brink. It seems a lot of words were spent in the interstitial places between realms, and I think I would have liked to see a more intricate plot that wove the different realms together in a more symbolic manner. Despite this, it is a story that has stayed with me and I appreciate that.
Our Human by Adam-Troy Castro wasn't poorly written, but it did bore me. I had the "surprise" worked out about seven paragraphs into the story. This is NOT to say I'm a sophisticated reader; instead, I'm a voracious reader of the sorts of stories that use all these tropes so I knew what to expect right away. That being said, I played Jane's Addiction in my head and it was an easy enough way to spend a few minutes before drifting off to sleep. Not a story brimming with originality, but the author showed skill and confidence and I felt it worthwhile to finish it.
Elizabeth Bear's contribution Faster Gun ticks all the boxes to squeeze my DNF gland dry: alternate history, the wild west, steampunky time travel and little green men who come in peace. On paper, this looks like a story I'd avoid at any cost. Quite to the contrary, I enjoyed the heck out of it. The whole story had a self-deprecating, tongue in cheek quality that gave a dimension to the tropes I hadn't seen before. Because of the way it was handled, what could have been a vile dud is actually one of the three best stories in the collection.
I paid about two quid for this, and I feel like I got my money's worth. I don't know if I'll ever come back to reread any of it, but it satisfies my criteria for a good collection: the majority of the stories were good and I found some new authors to look for. This would be a good survey of contemporary scifi; there's a variety of settings, plots and tropes to select from that illustrate where the "mainstream" is at these days.
[1] "I saw a brontosaurus by the Thames this morning." "Oh, lovely! It's been a warm winter, I suspect that's why they've come out so early" ...more
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