Geek Rage!

11/22/63

2012-01-31T08:37:00.001-05:00

"You're disgusting!"

True. And sometimes it's such a pleasure.

- Jake Epping

I have to be honest with you all, Dear Readers, I thought my first Stephen King post on this blog would be a different post entirely. That post would be The Talisman, which I still haven't gotten around to yet. But I should at least let on that Mr. King and I...we go way back.

The first time I encountered Stephen King's writing, I was in middle school. A lot of the girls in my grade (who, surprisingly, I had no interest in...that'd come later when they got better at backbiting) were reading It and Cujo. For me, King was just some trashy horror writer with a lot of work to his name...I'd tried It and been shocked and weirded out by the bathtub suicide in the early chapters but that was all I knew, really. But one afternoon I sat in the town's bookstore shelving copies of books while I waited for a carpool and I hit upon the books that would make me a lifetime fan: The Dark Tower.

These weren't the trashy-looking novels people carried to the beach. They weren't the horror novels meant to terrify and to give other people the author's nightmares. They sounded like very, very dark fantasy novels about a cowboy (oh, all right, a gunslinger) trying to find the titular tower. So I decided, being all of ten years old and sure I could handle reading such an adult book, that I was going to read the Dark Tower series. Sadly, I couldn't find the first book, so I had to start with book two, The Drawing of the Three.
My parents didn't agree with me.

Mostly my mother, who played the role of moral veto far more strongly than my father ever did. But either way, within moments of my bringing the book home, it was analyzed, flipped open to a random page, and taken out of reach indefinitely due to a major character abusing heroin. So my dad reached a compromise and said that if he could find a book that was more appropriate, he'd let me read that. The book he found was The Talisman. I instantly fell in love with it, and it's had a place on my bookcase ever since. And eventually Talisman led into more King, and I was a fan. I am a fan. I read my way through his work with a fervor I'd not experienced since my love of conspiracy theories. Which, of course, leads me to11/22/63.

11/22/63 is the story of one Jake Epping, a divorced English teacher who spends his time marking up the essays of GED candidates in a small high school. It is here he reads the essay of one Harry Dunning about the time that changed his life the most: when Harry's father murdered his family with a hammer, almost killing Harry but instead giving him severe brain damage. It is an essay that moves Jake, rocking him to his very core. While he ponders this (as he calls it) "watershed moment", something else happens that turns his life forever on a dime.
And then things get weird.

Jake frequents Al's diner; a trailer where the burgers are cheap, there's still a smoking section, and Al holds sway over an almost-empty establishment he runs practically at cost. One night, Al decides to show Jake a secret of his: In his pantry are a set of stairs that lead to a September day in 1958. Every time you enter, it's like someone hit a reset switch. Every time you leave, only two minutes have elapsed in the real world. And Al very much wants Jake to use it.

Al, you see, has a specific purpose: He's got his own watershed moment to fix. He wants to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting John F. Kennedy. But Al's not as young as Jake, and cancer's starting to take its toll on him, especially after his first attempt-- after his forays into the past, he's now terminally ill. So Jake is enlisted to go back in time and severely change history (he assumes) for the better. Between his need to try and fix Harry Dunning's life and Al's meddling to make sure he quits dragging his heels, Jake embarks off on his quest to make the world a better place.

  But of course, it isn't that easy, and Jake will have to tangle with several major players as well as fighting the past itself if he ever hopes to succeed.

---...---

The first thing you should know about the book is that it isn't quite Stephen King's usual thing*. It's mainly historical fiction. Yes, Jake is a time traveler and uses this to his advantage, but the book isn't preoccupied with that. It's as much about exploring the past and the social climate as much as it is about Jake and his mission. Make no mistake, all of King's touches are there...the sense that the world is really a lot stranger than anyone gives it credit for, the strange nonsense words with ominous significance...even the call backs to earlier works**.

But Jake spends a lot of time working out how the past, well, works and less time agonizing over how his part of things are supposed to work. King put a lot of research and time into the novel, and it really shows-- from the first page to the last, you can get immersed in the world, and it helps get you involved in the story. This is a book that needs its immersion, and the amount of detail King manages to cram into every page-- authentic detail, I might add-- really helps out. The pace never seems to drag, and the ideas never really lose their sense of wonder.

Another reason to read this book is the tension. You're never sure Jake is going to make it, and that constant sense of tension is kept up through the whole book. As each new plot detail unfolds, it just adds to the suspense like a group of ball-bearings on a wet paper towel. You're sure something is going to give, and each time Jake scrapes by, there's a sense of relief for a few seconds until you remember the book is still going on. And then the tension starts to build again, slowly but surely...

And finally, the characters are all very well-realized. But this is Stephen King. If there's one thing the man knows how to do other than give people nightmares and make them paranoid about their bathrooms, it's characters and dialogue. This, combined with a sense of pacing not seen since his earliest novels, makes for one hell of a good ride. Jake is snarky and jaded, but somehow maintains a good sense of wonder. His lover from the past is someone very real and very human, which shows when she gets upset over Jake's having to lie to her about being "George Amberson". Each of the characters has very clear motivations, even Lee Harvey Oswald (who of course has to make an appearance)

However, the book does have its flaws. Well...one or two big ones. Chief among those is the entire section that takes place in Derry***. Yes; Derry, Maine: Home setting for IT, Insomnia, and a great many other books makes an appearance here for an entire section. It's where Harry Dunning grew up, and where his father murdered his family. So Jake spends several chapters trying to clean up the mess in Derry. During 1958, which is a significant year in King's timeline****. Cue the avalanche of references to previous books and the peculiar nature of King Country's second-creepiest town (the first of course being Jerusalem's Lot), including cameos from Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh from IT, as kids. And, unlike previous nods and mentions, this one keeps going, pointing itself out with neon signs.

  Second big flaw is a rather personal one. Just once, I'd like to see time travel succeed. It doesn't have to be an all the time thing, or even a constant thing. But I want to see time travel actually work for once, instead of everyone going "But you can't kill (Hitler/Oswald/John Wilkes Booth)! Otherwise history will be all lopsidedy!" Really, I don't care. It's fiction. It moves by its own internal logic. I want to see history dramatically changed in a story and I want to see it stick. While this isn't the point with King's book, it's still something that I think has remained a certain way for a long time, and it's time to shake up the status quo. Lord only knows, I ain't gonna do it, but someone should.

And finally, after writing what some might argue is the same essay on John F. Kennedy's assassination for a few years now, I have to say that the idea of Lee Harvey Oswald acting entirely of his own accord is ridiculous. Even if he shot the president, the political climate was too lopsided for him to have done it all on his own. And yes, I know, people have tried to hammer this point home. But people are schmucks. Considering the number of enemies Kennedy had, and the number of those enemies who had ties to Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, it's almost simpler for a conspiracy than it is for him to be a lone man.
  But both of those points are minutiae. This is a fantastic book. If you aren't a Stephen King fan, you should read this and give him a go. If you are a Stephen King fan, you should definitely read this, as it's him at arguably his best since he stopped writing The Dark Tower*****. I'm glad I took the time to read this book, and even more glad I actually wound up with my own copy, thanks to my Uncle Dan and the recent holiday season (And since I know you read this...thank you. Thank you very, very much). So...yeah. Find this. Read this. You won't regret it if you do.

Next time: Retro-futurism begins as Caius tackles Adam Christopher's Empire State. And sometime in the near future: The Pilo Family Circus.

Notes:
* Which, honestly, is pretty cool. The guy's writing what he wants to, and he's not afraid to experiment. I'm glad he's at this point in his life. The only thing as good as a hungry writer is a writer who's having fun.
**And we'll get to those in a moment.
***See? I told you!
****The basics: It's where the first section of IT takes place, when a group of kids take on a gigantic spider-monster that feeds on fear and force it into hibernation. Yeah. I know. Just...just look up the book if you're curious, yeah?
*****His magnum opus. A divisive series, but a) I like it, and b) It's freaking amazing. So there.

American Gods: 10th Anniversary Edition

2011-09-06T18:22:00.001-04:00

The lights went out, and Shadow saw the Gods

And, while it took me almost three weeks to savor and get the taste of The Magicians out of my mouth, here we are now, with a book that is the exact opposite: Sweet, genuinely heartbreaking, and filled with plotlines that actually make sense.

I first ran into American Gods in the throes of my Neil Gaiman fanboy period. It was kind of nice, finding out one of my favorite authors and the one I liked the most at the time had a new book out for me, and naturally I reserved the one copy the library had (it wasn't like he had the rock star levels of fame he has now, so it was easy to get) and got around to reading it.

I didn't finish it, sadly, because it was long and my attention span was too short, and I got the non-specific feeling that everything was going to crash and burn. I usually get the feeling whenever I'm watching a movie, so maybe there are certain emotional cues involved, but I can always tell when things are about to go belly-up. About a year later, I went back, read it all the way through, and finished it. And surprisingly, the first time around, I hated it.

I think it has something to do with the time and place. At the time, I'd wanted something optimistic, much like Gaiman's other works, and American Gods just didn't strike me as such. It's very bleak in places and overwhelmingly dark: In the most infamous scene (two chapters in, despite what anyone would care to tell you otherwise), a man is eaten alive in an unsettling manner by a goddess, telling her all the while that he worships her. So I decried the book to those who'd listen and put it down for a while, hating that it ended on such a down note.

Ten years later, at Book Expo America, I happened upon the book again. This time, the copy was touted as "The Author's Preferred Text" and "Tenth Anniversary Edition". Given that this was getting an anniversary edition and not the (in my opinion) highly-superior Neverwhere or his other books, my interest was piqued. So, a few months later, when I had the money, I bought my own personal copy of it. And this time, unlike last time, I was blown away.

American Gods is the story of Shadow, a man released from prison after an assault charge, who finds himself pressed into service by Mr. Wednesday, a one-eyed con man who needs a driver and extra pair of hands for a journey across the country. Shadow, whose wife and employer died in a hideous (and strangely convenient) car wreck, readily accepts and finds himself drawn into a fight he cannot possibly comprehend between the old gods drawn to America by the immigrants, and the new gods of media, technology, and other such powers. But there's something else going on, something sinister beneath every surface, and Shadow will have to figure out what it is before it consumes everything.

Honestly, I'm not sure if the extra twelve thousand words made a difference, or if it's just that I've mellowed out considerably since high school. In either case, the book's plot actually managed to stump me the first time I read it. The clues are all there, of course, but the twist at the end is honestly kind of surprising. The plotting is slow at first, but picks up quickly as the chapters go on, setting the scene for a rather bizarre and unexpected yet completely original ending. While there are places that stop dead, they seem more like needed background and side-stories, detailing Shadow's downtime in between Wednesday's jobs.

The characters are bright and colorful, with cameos from at least one or two of Gaiman's other works. Shadow is believable as a hero because he loses almost constantly and is completely out of his depth until the very end of the story. Most of Wednesday's mystery isn't revealed all at once, leaving him just as unsettling at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. Most of all, though, it's that these characters seem to inhabit the world. They're real. They have their motivations and wants, needs and hidden agendas, all of it colliding quite well. Mr. Wednesday is an especially well-drawn character, as he seems perfectly affable, but every step of the way, one can question his motives and wonder what he's really about. Finally, Laura, the character whose description I can't mention much (because just calling her by name is a minor spoiler) is almost heartbreaking in her arc, from the moment she's introduced to her final lines in the novel. It's someone you sympathize with, and also someone who you want to see more of.

And finally, the setting is very well plotted out. In his introduction, Gaiman said he tried hard not to write about anywhere he hadn't been, and it shows in spades. The setting is very vivid, and while not quite truly American, it is true enough to the version of America we all tell ourselves exists, the Ray Bradbury America. The America where things hurt and there is sadness, but there's also a lot of good, everything is beautiful in its own way, and there's a strange kind of magic to the proceedings. In other words, the fun America.
In fact, this seems to be doing what Grossman tried and failed so catastrophically to do. American Gods takes the stories of magic and strangeness, those oh-so-quintessentially American stories from the likes of Ray Bradbury or Matt Ruff, or even Michael Chabon's Summerland, and shows us what happens when the gods and their champions grow up and realize that while the world's magic, it's got a dark side as well as a light-- some of those talking animals tell you to fuck yourself and people do die. Sometimes, they don't even come back to life. Sometimes, it's even better that they don't. American Gods presents a bleaker (but still beautiful, still magical) America than the thousand magical realism books that have come before it, and in the end, while it's still pretty dark, there's a lot of hope.

However, in the interest of objectivity, I have to throw out some points that the book is weak on, and really only one segment comes to mind: "My Ainsel". In this segment, Shadow stays in a small town somewhere in the Northern Midwest, and the story switches tone from a road story to a small-town fantasy somewhere along the lines of Stephen King. And starts that small-town dark fantasy from the beginning. While the stories tie together in interesting ways and eventually leads to a nice neat ending for everything (well, except for Shadow, but he's not too bad off either), the energy of the book and indeed the tone change completely, and one begins to wonder when the hell Mr. Gaiman is going to get back to the plot in progress and on with the show.

But this is a minor quibble. American Gods is a beautiful book, beautiful in that it's all the things one could want at once-- humorous, sad, heartbreaking, frightening, and wonderful. You should own this book. You want to own this book. It's the one book to have won all kinds of literary prizes and still actually be good. That alone means you are obligated to read it. So please, buy the new edition of this book. You will enjoy it. I promise.

Next time: 20th Century Ghosts
And after that: The Sheriff of Yrnameer

The Magicians

2011-09-06T18:20:00.000-04:00

"He's trying to use the Neitherlands to get to Middle Earth. I think he wants to be the first man to have sex with an elf."

- Janice

I should immediately point out that I am a fan of classic children's fantasy literature. I've read Harry Potter more times than I can count, once read my sisterThe Hobbit because my dad was working and she needed a bedtime story, hell, I still have a soft spot in my heart for E. Nesbitt, she of The Enchanted Castle andFive Children and It. All of these are lovely books, though a little stilted and of course weathered by time. They've aged well, but even something that's aged well will still show its age in spots. The reason that I point this out is mainly becauseThe Magicians by Lev Grossman appears to hate me. Which is fine by me, because I hate it right back.

Oh yes, dear reader, it's another one of those kinds of reviews.

I found this book through rather interesting channels. When it came out not two years ago, it was well-lauded by the press and poised to become a classic in its own right. As it had been called one of the best fantasy novels of a rather strange and twisted year in my life, naturally, I had to read it. That first time, the book defeated me utterly. I simply couldn't finish it. I found it boring, the characters apathetic, and the plot in general mostly a pointless framework for the author's sneering disdain. However, at BEA, I was "delighted" to find out (in an event I later blocked from memory because of how this book affected me) that Mr. Grossman wrote a sequel, to be published in august, called The Magician King. When I finally remembered the book months later, I remembered only how bad I thought it was, and wondered why it (much like Mr. Mann's efforts are getting a sequel) would have ever made it past the first book.

With a renewed sense of purpose, I set out to my local library in search of a copy of The Magicians, determined to get through it and look at it from a less-biased viewpoint for the purposes of review. I sat down and read, and read, and read some more, taking two weeks to finish the book and finally come to some kind of conclusion. And my conclusion is thus:
This is the most intelligently-written pile of twaddle masquerading as a book that this site will ever have to review. Possibly until the sequel.

The problem, of course, is not the quality, but the content therein. For the most part, it's a viciously stupid book, one which has decided upon a campaign of deconstruction and pursues it so doggedly that at times it rivaled its fellows in the deconstructionist fantasy movement for sheer unsubtlety and lack of taste. It does show brief signs of brilliance and potential-- the idea of post-college mages living out a Bret Easton Ellis-style drugs-partying-drinking-sex "I love this oh god I'm empty inside and destroy everything good I know" existence is an idea whose time, I believe, has come, especially now with the final rose being laid on the bier of the Harry Potter series-- but most often, it falls flat. The point it appears to be trying to make (and it's possible I missed the point, but given the quality and tone of the book, I don't care) is that the reality of all these fantasy worlds is a lot darker and nastier than the children's books we grew up with would allow us to believe. That it tries to get this done with loathsome characterization, sequences of events so far apart in their establishment that it almost seems like everything comes out of nowhere, and other, equally glaring faults.

The Magicians starts with Quentin Coldwater vanishing a nickel in a sleight of hand trick. He and his two friends, James and Julia, are going to an interviewer to see about a spot at Princeton. When he and James finally arrive at the interview, the interviewer is dead, Quentin grabs a mysterious folder with a book by one of his favorite authors in it, and receives an invitation to Brakebills College. Following the invitation, he finds himself in a summer garden. From there, the story follows Quentin from school to that time after school, and finally into the land of Fillory, a land from his favorite book series, though one that has not remained static with the passage of time. Quentin will lose friends, grow as a person, and finally realize who he is before the end, and all of it will take a lot out of him.

Well, in theory, anyway. Quentin is the kind of privileged, overachieving shit you always hated to be around in high school, the kid to whom Ivy League status was a foregone conclusion, who passed every test and couldn't afford to be friends with many people because he had his future to think about. He doesn't grow through the book so much as he just sort of shuffles from one scene to the next, often with bitter comments and empty displays of emotion. The book is set up so in places he succeeds almost in spite of himself-- to get into Brakebills, he has to pass the AP exam from Hell, all the magic is based on studying and repeating over and over again, he passes easily through the grades within a few months instead of a few years...the only time he's really challenged is in the last third of the book, and even then, that's only because the author stops writing challenges tailored to him and puts him in the frame of a traditional fantasy.

A problem that goes hand in hand with this one is that the main conflict is internal. Now, I've had no problems with internal conflicts in the past, Richard Kadrey's work is rife with them and one of my favorite books, The Neverending Story has this as the very central conflict. But here, it's Quentin wrestling with questions everyone else, up to and including the reader, already know the answers to. And when he engages in self-sabotage, it doesn't feel like there's anything attached. Some pretentious idiots have attempted to say "but you're feeling what he's feeling!" And the answer to that is no. In fact, utilising my law of precision F strike for reviews,fuck no. If I were feeling what Mr. Grossman insists I feel, I'd put a bullet right through my own eye, like the hero in a (not much) better Harlan Ellison story. Not a single thing Quentin does applies to any particular identifiable logic, save for maybe the denouement, which I'll get to.

Moving to another track, however, we come to the fact that the book openly insults any lover of fantasy fiction who decides to read it. At first it's merely the mocking tone and the overly-technical nature of magic, saying something to the effect of "What, you thought it was going to be easier than this?" as its academically-focused heroes go through complex hand gestures.
But then comes Welters. And the mocking and sneering Mr. Grossman decides he is done with the earlier, subtle mummery and decides to drop it entirely.

And oh, dear reader, you will wish he hadn't. Welters, you see, is a deconstruction of many magical games, most notably Quidditch*. Unlike those games, however, you never get to know the rules (except that they're stupid and they involve capturing squares on a board, and that there's a ball), everyone openly declares that the game is "stupid and pointless", and they play multiple games of it. In a further deconstruction of the trope, the Physical Kids (the book's heroes, named such because they study the physical discipline of mag-- y'know what? Screw it. Not important) lose several matches. However, in one particular scene, a drugged-out student makes derisive comments about "gotta get in my Quidditch robes" and something about "I don't suppose you have a time turner?" which caused me to put a dent in my wall across the room from where I read. Thankfully, the book was spared from further abuse due to my enduring love of the Metuchen Public Library, whom I would have to pay. That Mr. Grossman stooped to openly attacking his targets is lazy, and in fact not even amusingly unsubtle. There are ways to attack one's subjects, and then there are rudimentary methods loved by only the most zealous and pretentious. Such as Mr. Grossman, who places his literary significance above authors of a higher quality and skill.
And this tone doesn't change at all. In fact, the character of Josh seems to be there simply as a mouthpiece for how much every classic fantasy novel sucks, where the character of Quentin is supposed to herald some kind of new deconstructionist hero and a third character, and obligatory love interest named Alice is meant to hew to how the books traditionally work, which of course means she gets killed in a final confrontation with the slightly newer kind of villain. Spoilers be damned, if you made it this far through the review, you're probably only reading the book out of morbid curiosity anyway.

And as a final point, a final capstone, plot elements are called back to in a random fashion. I paid attention to the book, reading it over the course of a week (I could only do it in small doses. You will forgive my failings or at least understand that they come with great intestinal fortitude), and I still couldn't tell where some of the elements that everyone seemed to know about came from until I recalled earlier portions of the book, then went back and read through them. If Chekhov's Gun is the rule that if you have a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it will be fired in the third; Grossman's Gun** is the gun that is unloaded, uncocked, and left in a locked drawer offstage during the first act, only to suddenly go off and blow someone's head off in the third after all and sundry have forgotten it. It makes no narrative sense, and the callbacks are annoying, not informative to the plot.

However, despite this, there is some light. The book is astonishingly well-written, the characters do tend to have their own voices, and the descriptions are top-notch. This would actually be a good book if the characterization and indeed the plot weren't such steaming piles of absolute and complete garbage. As for the denouement (I told you I'd get back to it...might be my own little Grossman's Gun there, but it's there), it's the one part of the book I liked. It's sweet, even if it recalls characters who have had no bearing on the plot whatsoever, and it's a nice few passages where things are almost put back into balance for the horrid book that came before it. Almost. In it, Quentin almost appears human, and while Josh gets another moment about how lame all fantasy novels are, it does end things on a little beautiful note.

And then you realize the book has a sequel, which destroys the impact of the ending a little.
So in conclusion, I cannot recommend this book. Ever. To anyone. I do know there are people out there, literary hipsters, let's call them, who will read this and enjoy it. Good for them. For anyone who actually enjoys reading, however, give this book a pass.

Next time:
- American Gods
- Please, God, anything but this again

* A word which still has not appeared in my spellcheck menu, which both gives me hope and a bit of sadness.
** Which is TOTALLY A THING NOW.

I am...who?

2011-07-12T17:10:00.001-04:00

Isaac Dian, the character I played.

I look over the tables again and frown. I'm probably running out of time, and I need to figure out who the hell I am. Taped to each table is a typed sheet listing available characters for the AnimeNEXT Live-Action Roleplay, and I still don't know what I'm going to do. Part of this is due to my not knowing very many anime to begin with. Part of it is also due to about half of the anime and manga I do have a familiarity with being outside the PG-13 guidelines of the roleplay. Finally, I take a step back and think about this, then decide on a thief character, Isaac Dian. I register my decision to the moderators, find a room full of people, and wait nervously for everything to start.

Perhaps I should back up and explain. This actually starts on a humid Thursday evening when I decided to write for a while. There was a thunderstorm coming in, and I love the feel of humid air, so I went out to fill up my lighter and maybe bang out a few passages in the meantime. My friend Dave, who for five years has been pretty much the other half of a rather awesome duo, messages me and asks if he can hang out at my house. Since Dave lives in Philadelphia, I am more than okay with him dropping by. I would, however, like to know what he would be doing in my neck of the woods. As it turns out, he wants to go to AnimeNEXT, a convention for the tri-state area held just fifteen minutes away from my house by car. I figure I can bang a nice article out about my experiences, and also, it's a con (which I've never done before), so I tell him sure. After a small caveat that he's going to do certain things in particular, he starts trying to sell me on the LARP. I manage to wave him off for the time being and get things ready for the next day, making sure the Hawaiian shirt I wear for covering events is out and that I have enough money to actually do this.

We head to the convention mere minutes after I pick him up from the train station, and he continues his hard sell once we're all registered and looking around for stuff. I'm a mixture of surprised and annoyed at all of this. I don't do live-action games. Live-Action Roleplay, or LARP, is considered in tabletop gaming circles as “that thing geekier than us” for the most part. While there is overlap, there's also a certain sense of, “No, of course we don't run around in the forest pretending to be elves. But sitting around a table pretending to be elves, rolling oddly-shaped bits of plastic, and constantly doing addition are perfectly okay.” Yeah, I'm well aware of the hypocrisy in that statement. So Dave keeps his hard sell up for a while, alternating between telling me how much I should do this and telling me everything his character did from an earlier roleplay at Zenkaikon, another event. Finally, I can't take it any more and decide he's worn me down. I'll go see what this is all about.

“All right, already. I'll at least give it a look. It can't hurt to look.”

And apparently this seemed to pacify him for about ten seconds. Since I didn't know what else was around, and I said I'd take a look, I followed him into the LARP room and took a seat near the back for the opening presentation. And just like that, I'm already curious enough to play. The whole vibe of the room is very welcoming, and these people seem less like complete strangers (which, let's face it, at this point they are), and more just like people I hadn't met yet but really should. It's like walking into a room entirely filled with ten percenters^¹. The opening demonstration has the same tones of any opening, but at the same time, it's really, really informal, which I'm not used to. Rules discussions usually aren't this low-key, or this nice. Furthermore, it appears my fear of having to wear a costume or some such thing is completely unfounded and the LARP is very low-key, which I enjoy. All of this just convinces me that I should really, really stick around, so I do. I have a few ideas on who to play, anyway, thinking that I can just pick anybody. These picks may or may not have been influenced by Dave leaning over to me and muttering, “At Zenkaikon LARP, we had the largest number of kills on record.”, and the moderator leading the discussion saying “And if you get killed, remember, it's no big deal.”
While I understand death is part of it, I don't want to make it easy for anyone to kill off whoever I play. Which brings me back to where we started-- me looking at the list of playable characters and deciding on Isaac. Once I get the sheet, it seems like very little time passes before we get started and the opening narration happens. I try to pay attention to everything, but there's a little too much to take in. I try to focus by asking myself what my character would do. That does me no good, because Isaac would probably steal everything not nailed down, and start working on a plan to steal the massive TVs giving the player characters the opening narration. So for the moment, I wait patiently. The moderators finish their narration, and we're free to go interact with each other and work out our various plots and counterplots.
The LARP is contained in four rooms-- one for the moderators, and three for the players and the various scenes. For a while, I hang around, awkwardly interacting in character with the various other people who I was sure I would click with but now am having trouble approaching.

After a sheepish look to Dave, he leans over.
“Sam, you're playing a thief. Steal something!”
“What?”
“Go to the moderators. Tell them you're going to steal something.”

After a moment's thought, I walk into the moderator's room. “I'm stealing a booth from the merchant's guild.” I tell them. “I'm dressing up as the Grim Reaper and stealing a merchant's purpose.”
There is a brief rules discussion over how this would work, and after a few moments of talk including the phrase “You're Isaac, of course you would do this.”, they reach a decision.

“Congratulations, you now own a booth in the Merchant's Guild.”
“Really?”
“Really. Are you just stuffing it in a bag?”
“Sure, why not?”

This would, unbeknownst to me, set the tone for more than a few of my interactions throughout the game session.

After thanking them, I leave and go back to the other game rooms. I'm new, so in my fervor to interact, I accidentally barge into a few scenes. Eventually, I figure out that if I hang out in certain “open” areas, then most of my interactions are okay. Somehow, despite my shyness and weirdness around strangers, I start to get the hang of this. It's only helped by my finding a woman named Jess playing a character from the same universe as Isaac, an alchemist named Maiza. Instantly, I latch on to her like a remora on to a shark, she brings me into the group she's a part of, and just like that, I'm off and running, acting as a member of the group she's a part of. Things move in a blur after that, from one scene to the next, me trying to hold on as best I can while events are set in motion around me.
By the time I have to leave at nine that evening, I'm hooked, possibly for life. I'm figuring out my next moves, tossing out lines, doing a voice (I kind of think of him as bombastic and sounding like a suave hero with no indoor voice, so I do that), participating in dungeon crawls, and every so often going back into the moderator room to steal more things. Just before I leave, I have Isaac steal “energy from the gods” (okay, so he cuts power to the in-universe news service the mods are using for exposition...while wearing a bucket on his head...) and then run off cackling maniacally. I'm already working out plans for the next day, things like Isaac stealing “The future” (all the technology he doesn't understand), and a few other strange ideas here and there. Dave and I make it back home, watch a few episodes of Baccano!, the anime Isaac comes from (me for research, him because he'd never seen it before), and crash into bed, all ready to have at it bright and early the next morning.
Saturday sees me off to a slow start. My brother, Ben, is with us for the day, and I'm not nearly the hard-sell Dave is. Because I can't figure out what we can do together, Ben wanders off and I'm thrown off for a little bit at first. I'm torn. I desperately want to go back to those four rooms, back to playing Isaac and the people I met...somehow, while I don't know many of their names, and we only met when we were in character for the most part, I felt like I connected on some level with them, and they with me. I spend most of the day with Ben. At his urging, I buy a T-shirt and wear it under the Hawaiian shirt that serves as my journalism shirt. When I get back to the rooms, I notice everyone's in a session. This makes me a little nervous, but I carry it off well. As it turns out, everyone is currently in a scene, leaving me in the hallway.
I am alone. However, I am not out of things. While I'm milling around, one of the moderators comes by to tell me that due to the current crisis in game, Isaac is currently very, very unwell and losing health and energy at a steady rate. It is here where I unintentionally put a very complex and improvised plan into order, one that would echo throughout the rest of my time in game. When Dave comes by, sees me in the hallway, and once again tells me to steal something, I decide to move my timetable up a little and make my epic theft of the night a little earlier than usual. I stride into the GM's office, head held high, and announce,

“I'm dressing up in a black cloak and pumpkin mask, going to the merchant's guild and I'm STEALING THE FUTURE! Anything more technologically advanced than the 1930s, and it goes into the bag.”

There's a moment of silence from the moderator in the office, and then he checks my sheet and nods. Isaac gets a bag full of future tech, and I go out to the hallway again to await my impending doom. I start up a conversation with another player who's been in and out during the day, though for different reasons. As we sit in the hallway and bullshit, I can hear what sounds like a two-group PVP going on as moderators go from one room to the other, working things out. Briefly, I try to dynamic-entry my way in with a teleport pad, but there's no way. After a quick chat with my newfound hallway buddy, it turns out his fiancee is playing a healer, something which gives me some amount of hope that Isaac can beat the condition slowly killing him.
After a quick question to the moderator about healing (as it turns out, Isaac can't heal the way he normally would due to immortality, but he can be healed), it dawns on me that I probably have some medical items, items I quickly put into use, thus beating the GM crisis condition all on my own. While my character is being healed, the game takes a quick break for dinner and GM resting. In between, I have apparently gained a reputation as a magnificent bastard in this little subculture for my stunt. While this appears normal for people playing my character, it is still pretty darn cool.
Once dinner has finished, the big moments wind down more. There are a few duels I don't take part in, two people have their characters sort of ascend to a higher plane of existence, and I'm involved in a plot to help the woman playing Maiza bring back yet another person from the Baccano! Universe. It doesn't work, but enough headway is made to both satisfy the player, and at the same time, keep the scene from dragging out. Most of the time is spent in a sort of temporary autonomous zone, where a bunch of people sit around talking out of character. This is a common occurrence whenever enough people are out of a scene, though it seemed to happen most on Friday and least on Sunday, the reverse of how I expected it might.
The night closes with me having stolen a decent-sized drill robot (which dances!) and a sonic screwdriver, which Isaac points at everything and activates, causing both consternation and amusement when he does so. The moderators shoo us out of the LARP rooms with a cry of “You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here any more.” Dave and I leave and get a cab. Outside the hotel where the convention is, things are still lively and the first hints of stragglers are leaving. Two fellow LARPers chat for a little outside about the game, and conventions, and a few other things before they go back to their room to pass out. We get into the cab with a couple bound for New York for their train, when they're informed they can't get there in time. The whole ride home, I wonder if they made out okay. I hope they did. Dave and I spend until three in the morning doing very little but taking a lot of time to do it.

Sunday comes and the convention hall feels strangely empty when we arrive. There's a sort of quiet air to it...no longer are people hawking things at the front entrance, costumed characters mill around still, but there are less of them now that people no longer need their elaborate cosplays. The hotel's lobby is slowly filling up with baggage, all of it in neat, orderly lines near the entrance. No desperation or nervousness, just...acceptance. The feeling of “Yes, this is all ending. We all knew it was coming, now let's all go.” Even where there are loads of people milling around, somehow it still feels empty. Like the magic is leaving, if it hasn't left completely.
In the LARP rooms, things are off to a slow start. People gently trickle in, all of us out of play for the time being. There are donuts and other snacks brought in, and the tone, while informal as usual, carries some other kind of weight to it. In one of the rooms, I confess my fears to another player I've had no in-character interactions with. I'm afraid that on today, the grand finale day, the all-or-nothing in game day, I will run out of awesome things to think up. The young lady reassures me that I'll think of something, I respond with self-deprecating humor, and that's the end of that until game time.
When game time rolls around, people split off into groups and prepare for the final battle. My team is put into a police car, an item whose stats include a durability rating of “one scene”. We're to be part of the “ground team”, the group bringing about the end game. However, as audacious as I can possibly be, my mind is currently blank. While there isn't much I can do, other than wait for the scene to start, it's still worrying. Finally, my part of things begins, and I get very, very nervous, wondering what it is I'm going to do.
As it turns out, drive the car and not much else is what I'm going to do. I do pull off a wonderful job as wheelman for our four-man crew, getting us down a long stretch, followed by Isaac successfully pulling off a windshield cannon (in a pirate outfit, no less). The four of us successfully drop the defenses and allow the other group to run rampant through the base, and I use a (single-use) jetpack from the bag of future to drop us into that scene. From there, both the ground team and the people left outside during the attack launch a final assault on the machine driving the plot, hoping to take it down and end the scenario cold.
I wind up in the group taking the machine down in what seems like a race between the varied groups-- everyone is trying to reach the end of the hallway, destroy the machine, and rescue whoever we can. Sadly, my bag of tricks is used up (though I did think of trying to ride explosive decompression down the hallway to the machine using a massive sack as a sail...sadly, an aborted attempt), though I feel I do what I can to help out. Whatever mojo I had, though, appears to be lost the same way the tight, magical energy of the convention has started to go. Finally, the machine is destroyed, and after several people (my own fumbling and feeble attempt included) make our way through the epilogue, the game ends with a curtain call for the moderators, an award for the best roleplayer (a young lady who managed to pull of a high-energy character for the entire LARP and remain in character just about every time I saw her, so well-deserved) and a few plugs for upcoming LARPS, all of which I consider. Then, after that, it's time for the Long Farewell.
If you've ever been in a big group, you know what the Long Farewell is. The process of saying goodbye is never a simple one, and when it's a big group of people and a lot of them want to say goodbye and thank you individually, well, you get the Long Farewell. When done at its most egregious, it can sometimes take an hour or more. I say my goodbyes with a series of handshakes and the occasional hug (and one rather cool jig/dance/thing), get Dave and remind him he has a train to catch, and reluctantly say goodbye to this world. A feeling of loss comes over me as I realize that I know none of these people outside of their characters and brief moments in the temporary autonomous zones, but I want to so badly. There's a brief discussion of future cons as I leave, and I hem and haw a little over them. After all, what if this was a one-time thing? What if all the mojo's gone for good?
The suitcases are all piled outside in the front lobby, our ride is on the way, and the magic is fully gone when we exit the hotel. We've still got the high, though, and can't stop talking about it, even if all we're saying is “If I only did this” or “I could have handled this better.” Somehow, a chance thing that I was partly dragged to has become one of the best experiences I've had. As we drive away from the hotel, now an echo of the high-energy, high-pressure gathering it once held, I turn that question over and over in my head...what if it was a one-time thing? Immediately, the thought is dismissed. Despite not really wanting to be one when I came in, and despite not quite knowing what I was doing, I am a LARPer. There will be other conventions, and I will be at them. I will most likely LARP at them, too. Though the time was short and we were all pretending to be someone else, I feel like I connected with a group of people I'd never connected with before. I'd do it again in an instant.

1 Referring to the theory (expounded most notably in the book Happy Hour is for Amateurs) that there are only ten percent of people in any given situation who are worth knowing, and that they're naturally drawn together by whatever forces exist in any social situation.

I hope you enjoyed the diversion from the normal program.

Next up: Lev Grossman's The Magicians

The Thief of Always

2011-07-11T05:20:00.001-04:00

“I’ve heard a little good magic is always useful. Isn’t that right?"

- Mr. Swick

When I was twelve, my taste in books was driven by what I wasn’t allowed to read. It was a long list, as no one wants to be the parent who let their twelve year old kid read A Clockwork Orange, or even more unsettling work. But there were loopholes in the parental rulebook. Fun loopholes. Loopholes like authors they didn’t really know outside of maybe a few books here and there, or stuff I’d already read. At the time, R-rated movies and I were no stranger, so the rule felt a little weird, but there it was. And one of these loopholes was Clive Barker. This is, actually, the book that made me a Barker fanboy for a little while. I’ll get to the book that made me stop another day.

I discovered The Thief of Always on a spring day in the library at my middle school, a place where I was treated warily by the head librarian*. I was bored and wanted to find a new book, and somehow the name “Clive Barker” called to me. It may have been that I’d heard it before connected to horror movies of the decidedly weird kind. Or it may have been the Marvel Comics line in the early 90s, Clive Barker’s Razorline, which I always enjoyed. But no matter what it was, the author’s name and the blurb “a fairy tale for adults” on the back cover meant I walked out with the book and didn’t look back.

That was honestly one of the best decisions I made. The book took me a day and a half to read, and I was rapt all the way. When I was done, I took it back and then later took it out and read it again. The author illustrated it as well as writing it, and his creepy pen-and-ink drawings added something to the text, though it also outlined a glaring flaw I’ll get to later. The book is beautifully written, moves at a pace that seems leisurely yet almost too fast, and the emotions are genuine and evocative. This is a book that should be treasured somewhere, and it makes me sad when I realize I’ve only ever found three copies of it.

The Thief of Always is the story of young Harvey Swick, a boy who finds himself rather bored during the humdrum midwinter months and wishes for adventure and something interesting to happen. His prayers are answered by a small grinning man named Rictus who takes him to the magical Mr. Hood’s Holiday House, a place where he can have whatever he wishes and the weather is always pleasant and perfect for the season. Winter mornings, summer afternoons, halloween nights, and Christmas evenings happen almost every day but fail to get boring, and no one children ever leave because it’s far too perfect.

Except.

Except as you may have guessed, all is not perfect at the Holiday House, at least, not as much as it seems. There are horrors as well as delights (I’m not about to spoil them, but come on, you saw the “all is not perfect” thing coming a mile away because you are classy and intelligent people), and to survive them and escape the House intact, Harvey will have to call on all the power and cunning he can muster to confront Mr. Hood once and for all.

What really makes the book succeed is the mood Barker sets for the piece. The tone is bright and cheery when it has to be, with notable touches of melancholy when it calls for it. Harvey is exposed to the idea of loss again and again as the book progresses, and each time, the world he inhabits grows noticeably darker and sadder. That isn’t to say it’s completely without its beauty, as even at its darkest, the Holiday House has a strange, alluring quality to it. But it’s the growing feeling of melancholy throughout the book that drives home the tone and the message in the story. This progression makes it easy to feel what Harvey feels, creating an easily identifiable hero— we know why he does what he does because we experience everything he experiences and understand why we’d do the same.

Another way the book shines is in its images. Not just the pen and ink drawings, but the descriptions. This book is description porn in the best way possible. Everything is described in detail, from the food in the kitchen to the heavily-wooded lake to the roof where the house’s more eccentric residents make their home. The drawings accompanying each chapter (and occasionally the text) further aid one to imagine the various sights and sounds, giving a better picture of the house and its inhabitants. Barker has a certain way with evoking images, and he puts it to work especially well here, showing us both the good and evil of what goes on.

The book should also be applauded for its sense of loss. This is a book, after all, about growing up and losing innocence, of losing friends and loved ones, of seeing them move on. Every death, loss, and sad event serves to turn Harvey into the more mature, more capable boy we see at the end from the perpetually bored and slightly-surly youth we see at the beginning. The Thief of Always is a book about taking back what someone steals from you and dealing with the losses you cannot fix. In the end, while the specter of adulthood and Harvey’s future loom uncertain on the horizon, he seems to have dealt with his misgivings and become a stronger, more confident person.

And finally, there is the characterization. In a remarkable change for a “fable” or “fairy tale”, particularly one that seems to find its way into collections for young readers, the motivations of the characters are actually just as important as the actual characters. In the end, it’s not so much that Harvey fights as why he fights— he’s fighting to save his friends, the people he loves, and even himself. He’s fighting to keep from losing everything he’s ever had, and that makes what he does, be it the final duel that closes the book or his storming the House in the final third of the novel, right. It’s odd to see this sort of thing in a fable where usually the character lines are clearly drawn, but that Harvey fully adopts his role as a “thief” or a “vampire” makes his choice to do good that much more meaningful.

However, there is a major flaw that must be discussed. Barker has very little sense of pacing. While the book moves quickly anyway, instead of the slow build and the eventual shocking revelations and the horror of things, he starts building the creepy right from the moment Harvey enters the house and just keeps building from there. For the most part, this is mainly my reaction to reading the book multiple times and knowing what lies in store, but I felt after rereading it for this review, that things got a little sinister too fast, with the obvious hints a little too obvious and the occasionally unfortunate events a little too constant. The illustrations were no help here, either, the most obvious being the Christmas tree with the monstrous grin about six or seven chapters in, and the cover of the hardcover edition, which features a nightmarish face grinning below a picture of the titular house.

In the end, though, the book should be forgiven for its pacing and spoiling of rhythm. Why? Because it’s a fantastic book. It moves quickly, creates an interesting atmosphere, and its visuals continue to haunt and tug at one long after the book is closed. The final struggle is a question of if, not why, and is much better because of it— the chance that Harvey won’t succeed makes the battle all that more important. This is a beautiful book you should know about already, and if you don’t, you have no excuse now not to go out and find your own copy. Read it once. Read it twice. Pass it on to anyone you think would like it. I love this book, I cannot say that enough, and everyone else should, too.

Next time:

- my LARPing article

- Stephen King

- The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker, as well as others by him.

- The Magicians and The Magician King by Lev Grossman

* But less warily than my high school’s head librarians, who talked to my parents about me because they thought I was reading too much. No lie. Thankfully, they weren’t long for the school come Junior or Senior year.

On Stranger Tides

2011-06-21T14:50:00.001-04:00

"You used it up too fast."

- Benjamin Hurwood

Due to it being just as easy to post up here, I will be updating both the Tumblr and this simultaneously when I have a post. It's just neater for me.

Sweet Hell. That is all.

Okay, maybe not all. As long-time readers of this blog may know, I am a Tim Powers fanboy for life. I've read his worst (the stable time looperiffic The Anubis Gates takes top prize, in my opinion), I've read his best, and I've read everything in between. And none of them-- that's right, a grand total of none of them knocked me on my ass the way On Stranger Tides did. I once said that a writer's job is done when he or she makes the reader feel anything at all, even revulsion. Not only has Tim Powers done that, he did it so well and so frequently that even at the book's most manipulative, I have nothing but the utmost respect for him. The man is a genius, and more importantly, a genius who continues to write to this very day. And this is easily one of his greatest works, one of the two best things I've ever read by him. The ripples it has made in pop-culture further cement it as a classic, and if I didn't own it myself, I would be kicking myself again and again.

On Stranger Tides is the story of John Chandagnac, re-christened Jack Shandy after he was captured by a rather liberally-minded (and possibly anarcho-syndaclist) group of pirates crewed by a man named Phil Davies. Shandy is on the trail of his uncle, the nefarious Sebastian, who ruined both his life and his father's. Soon, he finds himself embroiled in sorcerer's duels, reincarnating pirates, zombies, voodoo curses, and the Fountain of Youth. To survive and rescue the woman he loves from her vile personal physician and other evil forces, Shandy must survive all these things, win a duel with Blackbeard, and contend with powers beyond human control or understanding. And all of it is fantastic.

Part of what makes it so fantastic is Powers' copious research into his topics. From very early on, he makes it clear that he's done all the research he can on large sailing ships, voodoo, and the politics of the Caribbean area. None of it feels rushed or handwaved, and all of it is very, very authentic-feeling, even when it's fictitious or the details are fudged. Powers also handily sidesteps the problem of having historical characters interact in his universe by way of the copious research. I never had time to think "But Blackbeard never acted like that..." because between the realism of the setting and the way the characters act, there's really very little room for doubt.

Another area with very little room for doubt is the characterization. All the characters are very three-dimensional, partly because Powers understands that it's not enough to have one's characters do things because they're good, or evil, but important to understand the why of their reasonings. Shandy may be one of the heroes, but he is forced, both by Davies and by his love for the book's romantic interest to occasionally do terrible things, to the point that he no longer recognizes himself. Davies may be a dashing pirate, but he's also a brutal murderer, because that's what he has to do to survive. One of the book's major villains performs actions that border on mind rape and are definitely unconscionable, but by understanding his motivation and the point that he's reached, you understand a little more of why he felt it was necessary, making him a more effective villain by showing that he'd reached that point (trying to resurrect his dead wife).

The magic in On Stranger Tides is also handled fairly well. Instead of "this is power over everything", it's a more practical approach-- eternal life means magical postponement/reincarnation (a common theme in Powers' work), rituals handle things instead of incantations and handwaving (though the minor spells are that), and everything is geared towards asking the loas, or gods politely "Could I please bend the rules of reality?" While there are a few exceptions (Blackbeard being a big one, the sorcerer's duel with Friend being another), most of the magic is very low-key...people gesturing a little, or tossing a ball of dirt into the air, or saying the proper rhyme. Because it isn't a high-magic setting, this also helps keep it believable and all the characters nicely grounded.

And lastly, the book has a remarkable sense of humor about itself. Most of this humor is delivered through the character of Philip Davies, who snarks his way through the book while both embodying and deconstructing the lovable dashing rogue stereotype. Some of it comes from Jack figuring out how to interact with the strange world he's been dropped in. All of it is as dark as one would expect for a setting this creepy, but it makes sense that the humor should match the tone of the book and not run counter to it.

On Stranger Tides is not without its flaws, though. Well, flaw. The book leads its readers on a merry chase through the Caribbean, but falls short in the last three chapters with the final confrontation. After watching Shandy pursue his goals tirelessly through the book, sometimes doing absolutely grotesque things in the name of love and justice, to have the book resolve Shandy's revenge and his rescue of the damsel in distress in such a way is a bit of a let-down. While Powers recovers nicely, the flaw is too glaring not to at least bring up. Also, calling the final chapter an epilogue when it doesn't really tie up any loose ends but just ends the book is a bit of a strange move.

But this flaw is negligible. This book is a classic, one that should be read and remembered for decades to come. Read it. Buy it. Request it for your libraries. Do whatever you have to so you can read this book. It is important that you read this book. It is equally important that this book survives. It has made it easily to the top of my list of things to read, managing to surprise me and engage me, usually at the same time. Read this book. This is too good a book to be remembered by thePirates of the Caribbean movie based on it. You will like this book. You must read this book.That is all.

Next up:

- I try an anime Live Action Roleplay

- Either Electric Barracuda or Nuclear Jellyfish by Tim Dorsey

- Other things as they arise

- Hopefully, the tenth-anniversary edition of American Gods.

Moving Blues

2011-05-26T19:37:00.000-04:00

As of today, this blog is moving over to its address at srmbc.tumblr.com. Some of you may notice that all the comments and at least one of the reviews may not survive the move, but all of the content should be intact. This site will stop updating, and I hope I could join you all over at the Tumblr one.

As always, thanks for reading'

Caius

Enigmatic Pilot

2011-05-21T19:11:00.000-04:00

Everything truly dangerous is afraid of itself, and cannot resist a mirror

- The Narrator

Constant readers of this blog doubtless know that I am a big fan of the works of Kris Saknussemm. My very first review was nothing short of glowing, and Zanesville, while flawed, was a fantastic debut novel. That this is the case makes it hurt even more that he has managed to disappoint me in such a manner with his current book. When I heard it was coming out in March, I was nothing less than overjoyed. That joy only grew when I found out he was doing it as a prequel to Zanesville, which meant in all likelihood that the same irreverent, gonzo tone that I'd found so endearing the first time around. When I finally interlibrary loaned the book and brought it home, I settled down to read it and was promptly so disappointed that I threw the damn book across the room.

I don't know what I was expecting, but a limp, quasi-historical steampunk book was just about the last thing on my mind. The book starts off in the middle of a civil war reconnaissance mission, which ends with a strange figure bearing the familiar wheelbarrow-and-fire symbol of the good guys throwing a blanket across the sky and performing other strange, unsettling tricks. Then we jump to Zanesville, Ohio in the mid-1800s, and the events of the prologue (while they hint at the strange figure on the battlefield being Lloyd) are never mentioned again. The book follows the strange messianic figure from Zanesville, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd, a mechanical and scientific genius even at age six, during his youth. Lloyd and his family get a message from an uncle in Texas, telling them that they're needed. Because a free black family in Antebellum Ohio doesn't go over too well, they jump at the offer and set off on a riverboat towards the town of Freedom. On the way, Lloyd meets an unsettling cast of characters, all of whom want to use his gifts for their own ends, and many of whom are more dangerous than they first appear. It plays out as a coming of age story with one final twist that I have to admit, was kind of surprising and cool. But overall, I couldn't stand this book.

I suppose my problem with it is multi-part. The first of these would be that it just doesn't match the same out-there tone of his other work. Where Zanesville was a black comedy in fun-house colors and Private Midnight was James Ellroy on bad acid, both very much insane and yet entirely acceptable in their own way, Enigmatic Pilot felt like Saknussemm trying and failing to restrain himself...to write something fairly conventional and still having odd elements here and there. Were this anyone else, or were it a first novel, then I'd praise it. But once again, as with Richard Kadrey, I know Saknussemm can do so much better and he just doesn't. This feels like someone trying to emulate Saknussemm, or even Tim Powers, and not really getting it. In fact, this feels like someone going on a steampunk binge, then an American history binge, and then trying to write a novel combining it all together. While there are some cool ideas, including the music-box people and the character of St. Ives (a gambler with the steampunk equivalent of a bionic hand), there just isn't enough to hold my attention for three hundred pages.

Which leads me right to my next problem. In a book about people travelling across the country, things tend to stop with almost astonishing regularity. Each section of the book spends a significant amount of time in one of the cities that the Sitturds stop in, most of the time because it's significant to Lloyd's development, and occasionally because there's something important to the plot that goes on there. What's supposed to happen is a frantic chase from city to city as they get driven to the next location and must contend with the dangers and whatnot there. What happens instead is a halting narrative where the cool ideas collapse under the groaning and lethargic nature of the plot. Despite the occasional threat of two ancient conspiracies (both who want Lloyd because of his massive intellect and abilities), the plot and indeed Lloyd's development as a result are in no hurry to get anywhere. For all the time it took, you would think the book would get to Texas by the end, at least to set up the next book (this having been billed as a series, after all)

But no. While by the end, there are some interesting dream sequences (or are they?) and one of the best final lines I've had in a book, they never get to Texas. In fact, there isn't even a real ending to the book. It just stops short of answering any questions. Now, while before I'd be willing to forgive Saknussemm for such a thing, that a book like this ambles along without giving us any idea of what's going on and doesn't even include a payoff is just unacceptable. Books can have no ending, but the non-ending has to occur organically. If your plot just stops and shrugs and goes "that's it, that's the end of that", then I can't condone it.

Finally, the book explains mysteries that never needed to be explained to begin with. I think this is the most egregious of its sins. Part of the fun of Zanesville was the mystery surrounding the protagonist and his origins. Now that the mysterious benefactor/god figure of the last book has been laid out in perfect, pretty detail in front of us, it's kind of pointless. If you know everything about the story, if all the mysteries are solved and very few new ones introduced, it's just kind of sad. For example, knowing that Vitessa (from Zanesville) is not only an evil corporation, but has existed since the eighteen hundreds and is run by an ancient conspiracy that might be from another dimension only serves to further distance this book from its predecessor. Part of this is the curse of the prequel...that any prequel to a work will only raise questions and explain things that don't need to be explained. And part of this is just the annoying nature of the book.

So while there are bright spots, give this one a miss. It's a sad misstep from the previous nuts books. While I still look forward to anything Kris Saknussemm does, this is just disappointing and definitely not worth your time.

Still to come:

- Tim Dorsey's Electric Barracuda

- Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy

- Tim Powers's On Stranger Tides

- And when I can fit it in, a new "doorstopper" series with Thomas Pynchon's classic novel Gravity's Rainbow

The Player of Games

2011-05-02T04:41:00.000-04:00

"This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player named 'Gurgeh'. The story starts with a battle that is not a battle and ends with a game that is not a game.

Me? I'll tell you about me later.

This is how the story begins."

- The Narrator

It's so wonderful when something I've been recommended to read by someone else works out well. A lot of the places I frequent have listed the Culture series by Iain M. Banks as either essential reading, or at least a really, really cool series. Usually, when something like this comes along, I'm skeptical of it. People give me many recommendations, some of which have shone out, but most of which (like most things in my life) end in what could be called some degree of disaster. But after hearing about the Culture Novels endlessly, I finally broke down and sought them out. Since everyone suggested I read Consider Phlebas (the first book in the series and an introduction to The Culture as a whole), or The Player of Games (the most accessible of the series) first, I put them both on interlibrary loan and let them race it out*. Whichever one got into my possession first, I would read and put up here. As you saw with the review and the little book-cover graphic, The Player of Games beat Phlebas (arguably the hardest book to bring up in conversation without sounding ridiculous) by about a day.
It is, by far, one of the best space opera books I've ever read, barring maybe Dune. And I'm not making that boast lightly. Player of Games should be a classic if it isn't already. Iain M. Banks takes the kind of plots that already exist in science fiction, and he screws with them to the point that they're much less recognizable. He deconstructs, plays things for laughs, reveals certain key details that only have meaning much later, and in general does everything he can to tell these stories in a new and interesting way. By the time the book finally drops to a close in its final downbeat moments, the plot will have twisted and turned every which way possible, from the games and counter-games played on the planet of Azad to the possible interference by the shadowy group known only by the "oh crap it's innocuous"** name of "Special Circumstances". And I loved it every step of the way.
The Player of Games is the story of Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the most famous board game player and theorist in a futuristic Utopian society called the Culture. The Culture is a true utopia-- there are methods of immortality for those who wish it, people rapidly evolve to adapt to any new environment, anything about a person can be changed, there is an all-encompassing tolerance, and pretty much everything that can go right does. There's a shadowy side to it all, but we'll get back to that in a moment. For now, all anyone needs to know is that the Culture is a splendid place to live and Gurgeh is an unbeatable games master. But Gurgeh's life is getting dull. The games are all too easy, his friends are more concerned with reveling in small pursuits than progress and accomplishment, and the delights of the Culture are starting to bore him more and more. One of Gurgeh's companions, an AI-controlled robotic drone named Chamlis, cajoles him into talking to Contact, the Culture's diplomatic division, in the hopes that they might have an assignment for him. Gurgeh is eventually reached by a drone who claims to be from Contact (but might actually be from Special Circumstances) with an assignment: go to the Empire of Azad, an entity the Culture has had limited diplomatic relations with, and play their national board game, the game that governs their entire society and way of life, where the ultimate prize is the rank of emperor and side bets frequently include body parts and imprisonment. While Gurgeh declines, a blackmail plot by a drone "friend" of his forces him to accept the deal and go to the far-off Empire to play the game. As Gurgeh advances through the tournament, though, the bodies and enemies begin to pile up, leading to a showdown on a fire planet that seems both completely predictable (in that it's a climactic showdown) and completely unexpected (in that holy crap does nothing go as planned).
What makes the book great is its fully-formed world and the people in it. The Culture and Azad have their own languages, names, ideas, and various traditions. No planet seems generic, nor do any of the characters or concepts seem anything less than fully fleshed out. While Gurgeh's friends (both human and organic) don't feature often, they do seem like they have their own lives and pursuits, all congruent with the portrait we're given of the Culture. Even the ship names, such as Conflict of Evidence and Lack of Subtlety are unique to the Culture, though a bit of a running gag. While the villains of the work are monsters, to be sure, there's a certain twisted rationale behind their motives and methods. None of it seems manufactured or rushed-- you get a really good sense of who these people are and what their motives are, as well as where they fit into their cultures. Even more impressive than this is that the book is only three hundred and nine pages and manages to pack all the setting in without creating a ton of info-dumps. That every page can tell you both information and plot and still keep one interested is no mean feat, and Banks does it here effortlessly.
Furthermore, for a book about playing a board game over and over, the games are written more as fight or battle scenes than straight games. This is established early on with the board games played in the Culture, and carries on through the action of the book. Banks handles his action sequences with much more intensity and grace than most people would. In fact, most other authors would probably have either made the game a lot more hands-on, or played the sequences out with more internal stakes, so they could drive up the intensity but keep the game placid. What Banks does is that he actually goes out of his way to keep the turns interesting and yet still keep the game on its course. While I would most definitely lose, I find myself wanting to play Azad more and more from his descriptions of the game. Also, Gurgeh even loses games. Not enough to kick him out of the tournament, but where someone else would make their hero win every game, that Banks allows his to lose, sometimes to be utterly crushed, is a good touch. This further cements one in the events of the book.
However, in the interest of some objectivity, I must point out a few things. One, that in certain places, the book slows down and does not regain its pace until much later. The pacing is normally great, but in a few moments here and there (usually between games), it kills the rhythm dead. The other major flaw involves the blackmail plot. It makes sense that Gurgeh is blackmailed for cheating in a crucial game before he leaves for Azad, as that drives the plot and makes it more sympathetic-- he can't leave or refuse the offer, because the blackmail is hanging over his head. But there is no real reason why he would cheat. He's not seeking glory, or playing simply for the accolades of his accomplishments, and he himself even says he could easily win the game without cheating. Add to this that the drone character who forces him into things is incessantly annoying, and the whole thing is just wrong. But these are small flaws, and best left forgotten.
In the end, I am kicking myself because I don't own this book. I should own this book. I should not have to take it out of the library, though I do admit the sense of urgency and danger of late fees add to how quickly I finishd it. The Player of Games is a brilliant adventure story filled with dastardly villains, multilayered intrigue, narrow escapes, and some very interesting world-building skills. Pick this book up. Read it. Love it. I'm sure you will, as there's  precious little to hate about The Player of Games. I fully recommend this to anyone who likes a good space opera, and a good read in general.


*Which was arguably the most amusing way of acquiring books for review that I've featured here. I kind of want to do it again. Any suggestions, put 'em in the comments thread.

**The general rule of weird fiction, when not going completely out there, is this: The more innocuous a department or organization name, the more you should run away from it at top speed. If there's ever something called the "Department of Assessment", it usually means they're responsible for destroying the world if a crisis gets too large and their influence borders on the omnipotent.

Next Time: Enigmatic Pilot by Kris Saknussemm, the prequel to his whacked-out classic Zanesville.
Then:
- The Physiognomy by Jeffrey Ford
- Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey
And just in time for the movie and a comparison review:
- On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

Accomplice: Conclusions

2011-04-25T02:16:00.000-04:00

I'm breaking the usual format here and just plunging in from the first review on Accomplice

     For the most part, my impressions on Accomplice remain unchanged. In the final two books, it's still as barely-coherent, insane, and darkly hilarious as the first two. The characters, while they become more aware of the situation going on, still remain just as odd and yet somehow compelling, Barny still remains almost as much out of his depth (the final book has him willingly going into something called a "blood shed" and giving his blood willingly for a levy) and accepting of his circumstances, and overall not much changes. Though that might actually be the point.
   You see, I'm beginning to get the sense that Accomplice is actually a version of The Divine Comedy where no one notices what's going on, or even cares. The secret underground cadre of demons would suggest that Accomplice is some level of hell, as well as things like the Blood Clock in the center of the city, the rather gruesome levy (and there's the chance that some people with that levy might be giving too much, as seen in the final chapters of book four), and the massive barbed-wire sculpture the incumbent mayor's challenger (the mayor being someone who not only acquiesces to the demons, but also serves their wishes) has to give his speeches in. But despite all the insanity and the nightmarish visuals (the Church of Automata in particular fills me with nonspecific dread), you will still find the heroes dining at the Ultimatum Restaurant or preparing for a picnic in the Infernal Realms.
   Adding to this mess is the list of questions in the back that reference angels, demons, and "people outside Accomplice" that seem to place it as either a hell similar to Jacob's Ladder, or some kind of purgatory. Barny's apparent ascension to a higher state at the end of book four merely adds credence to this assumption. Of course, then the reasoning would lead us to believe that all of these people haven't been particularly good but need to be redeemed somehow. The mechanic, Mike, and Barny would be the prime examples of this-- both of them wind up being redeemed...Mike turns into an angel, sort of , and Barny ascends to the point that even after he implodes due to an over-levy, he is still seen and interacts with the other characters, even providing references for jobs they get (meaning that he can still influence Accomplice). Still, the idea that humans set up their own society regardless of the purgatory brewing beneath is a great one, and Accomplice still ranks highly in terms of original ideas
   The other thing of note is that the book gets more sinister as it goes along, adhering more to Saknussemm's Progression. For those of you who follow me regularly, Saknussemm's Progression is the process that Kris Saknussemm perfected in which ideas get progressively weirder and the reader gets bombarded by them to the point that they become commonplace, and then weirder, more menacing ideas are introduced so the reader gets even more freaked out. Accomplice is actually doing this, though it doesn't start ramping up until the last two books. While initially it hadn't done this and seemed to be avoiding this kind of thing, it does it simply to change the mood-- yes, everything is still satirical and laughable, but with an increasingly sinister edge. That sinister edge is what changes it. While it's comic fantasy, it makes it more and more difficult to laugh at it, and the environment becomes more and more alien.
   While the world of Accomplice wasn't really that much like ours to begin with, as the demons begin to meddle more and more, it becomes a stranger place, a less hospitable sort of crazy and a more dangerous kind. While before Sweeney still dragged people to hell, it seemed to be played for laughs. Things like the Levy, the Church of Automata, and the like are frightening and sinister, but don't seem to be particularly threatening. As it comes together, it becomes funny much in the way of a darkly comic funhouse-- frightening, but somehow so absurd that you continue laughing at it. I have to admit, this is a manner of dark comedy that actually seems to work, neither light enough to be mistaken for straight comedy, nor so dark that it could actually pass for a horror novel.
   So in conclusion, Accomplice is still everything I thought it would be. Dark, hilarious, freaky, unsettling, weird, and all together enjoyable. While I can't ever recommend it to anyone, if you liked this, if you liked what I put forward in these reviews, if you like something cerebral, but that allows you to switch your brain off, then Accomplice is the book series for you. Buy it, download it, request it from your library, just don't let this one languish in obscurity. It deserves better.

Next up:
- Another strange book, but much more conventionally so with The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, one of the two "starting" books of the Culture Novels.
- Then, after that, a return to the insanity of Kurt Saknussemm with Enigmatic Pilot, the second book in the Lodemania Testament and the prequel to Zanesville
- Jeffrey Ford's Physiognomy
- And, in time for the new Pirates film, I finally get around to reviewing On Stranger Tides.

See you next time!

State of the Blog: April, 2011

2011-04-16T22:00:00.000-04:00

   As some of you may have noticed, I've been falling off a lot here. The first few entries are really my strongest work, and as I've gone on, the reviews have seesawed in quality. Some have been good, some have been bad. The truth is, the longer it's gone on, the more it's felt like I'm essentially smashing my head into a wall. Keeping this schedule has meant I don't finish books as much as I used to, all my reading is going to this instead of the occasional book or two for pleasure, I sometimes have to scramble or half-ass things, and every time I put up a note like this about how my personal life is getting in the way or apologizing for missing the deadline or whatnot, I feel like crap. First because I'm letting you guys down, and second because I'm essentially coming up short.

   BUT! I am not going to stop this. I like the blog, I like interacting with you-- all the people I've commented with or talked with have turned out to be really cool people-- and most importantly, I like doing this. It's a nice way to turn people on to stuff that I don't think many have read. Even better, it's a way for me to figure out what I like and don't like, what works and doesn't work for me in writing, so that when I write my own stuff, I have things I can fall back on. Book reviews may be done once every two weeks, or sometimes once a month, but they will be done. As many and as fast as I can get them out. I'll also hold up my promise to you: Every book on this site will be one I read all the way through. I won't stop halfway, I won't give any more impressions on a series I've only finished a little of...I'll just be taking things a little slower until I figure out a schedule that definitely works.

   I hate saying this, because I've tried to keep things on an even and regular schedule, and I'm usually the first person to say that people like me-- that is, people who do this sort of thing with an audience-- are in some way entitled to their readers and fans, but once a week isn't working. Longer books get rushed, my focus tends to be on shorter books that I'm able to read within the time period, and I don't feel like that's fair to anyone. So I hope you'll all keep with me as I welcome in a more relaxed but still just as edgy, quirky, and weird version of Geek Rage!

Caius.

Steve Aylett's Accomplice (Part One)

2011-04-10T04:24:00.000-04:00

   I should know better than to do a whole omnibus at once. So I'm doing general impressions for the books based on what I've read, and I'll either continue this next week, or some other time. On another note...should I space these out? Perhaps I've bitten off more than I can chew with this one book a week schedule? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

"Walking out with the awkwardness of a rod-puppet, he felt like a man leaving a bank with a bar of gold in his pants."

   It's already well-documented that I'm a fan of Steve Aylett. Slaughtermatic is a fun deconstruction of the cyberpunk genre where the crime actually undoes the plot instead of the reaction to the crime, Lint is one of my favorite books of all time, and the other works of his I've read range from merely okay to mind-blowingly fantastic. And then there's Accomplice. Oh, god, there's Accomplice. I actually found this when looking for an image to put up for the Lint review and ordered it with some birthday money from Amazon. So far, about halfway through, I am not quite disappointed, but I am sure that I won't be able to recommend this to anyone. Also, I'm positive that Lint was Aylett's response to critics of Accomplice, a sort of twisted self-parody with an expy of himself as the lead.
   Accomplice is not a sane book. It does not work in sane circles, nor should it. Accomplice is, in fact, so gibberingly mad that it pretty much guarantees its own hilarity, provided that you're accepting enough of its madness. I understand this will not be for everyone. I understand that many may not find this book humorous, or assume it's just being (*shudder*) "weird for weirdness's sake" or something equally as shrill and odious. However! This is a brilliant book, an almost completely successful attempt to write something new. Whether it succeeds or not is up for grabs, but hell, at least it tries to go all the way, instead of sticking in "safe" waters like every other book of its type. While that can be said of most bizarro, Aylett's manner of making everything so commonplace and non-threatening even in the most grotesque of circumstances gives him an edge that many of the others in his field don't have.And it works, in its own unsettling, twisted way.
   Only an Alligator tells the story of Barny Juno, a mild-mannered animal collector who is of no threat to anyone. One day, while going through a "creepchannel", a sort of shortcut that heads through the kingdom of demons beneath the island city of Accomplice, Barny finds an alligator. Completely ignorant to the fact that picking up reptiles from ethereal channels to netherworldly areas is a bad thing, Barny names the alligator "Mr. Newton" and takes it to his house, which doubles as an animal sanctuary containing mascara-wearing dogs and a fluctuating number of eels. What he doesn't know is that his "rescue" of the alligator has deprived the king of the demons, a large white cockroach named Sweeney, of a very important meal-- the alligator has picked up all kinds of information, and was destined to be Sweeney's dinner until it was stolen. Sweeney launches a campaign of blackmail and assassination (both character and otherwise) to bring Barny down and recover the alligator before anyone can learn anything from it, utilizing the Mayor's office, and both the incumbent and challenging mayoral candidates. Barny is suddenly the target of a great deal of demonic attention, smear campaigns, and other equally ludicrous events, all of which he is completely oblivious to and tries tirelessly to ignore when he can notice them.
   That I was able to type the last paragraph with a straight face and absolutely no hint of irony or "what the hell did I just write?" is a testament to Accomplice's power, but it's more than just insane set pieces and crazy names. The last sentence is completely accurate-- Barny has no idea he's been targeted by demons until the last third of the book, and proceeds mainly to ignore most of the attention directed his way. The machinations fail completely without his input one way or the other. This makes it unique in another way-- usually, the hero would be either directly responsible, or there would be a team of people around him, fighting to keep things ordinary. Instead, the only one who realizes anything is going on is Barny's best friend, Edgy. And when he reveals that demons are after Barny for his alligator (shortly after punching out all of King Sweeney's teeth in a vicious beatdown that comes almost out of nowhere), no one really cares. They go back to arguing about dinner and the alligator is eventually dealt with in the most innocuous way possible.
   Which is not to say that any of it is boring. Aylett's vivid imagination keeps it far from that, be it the odd traditions of Accomplice, or the massive and expensive smear campaign against a complete nobody who has no idea what's going on. The book is also gruesomely violent, from the opening that talks of Sweeney dragging a philosopher down to the netherworld and eating his brains while he continues to spout nonsense, to Edgy's backalley brawl, to Barny's unsettling habit of eating baby trolls when he gets nervous. The characters all feel like real people and real friends, too-- they have their own nicknames for each other, help each other with ridiculous schemes, and have long, protracted dinners and conversations with each other. You could know these people, if their circumstances weren't so ridiculously twisted by the place they live in.
   At the same time, though, they're just as insane as their circumstances. GI Bill, one of the characters, spends his time engaged in a blood feud with Barny's sidekick Gregor over Gregor being stuck in a dinosaur during a ball game. Sweeney uses all his influence to smack around a person who doesn't even care if he exists. The challenger to the incumbent mayor is referred to as "doomed Eddie Gallo" and has to give speeches in a torture device. That Aylett makes this relatable and amusing just helps push the book over the edge for me. You come to accept what Accomplice throws at you, and unlike Private Midnight, it doesn't do it to shock you all the more, it does it so you can understand the motivations of the characters and the plots that wind up in play. It does it so you can get Accomplice and all its myriad nuttiness.
   The book, as you may have noticed, is a dense thing, though, filled with bizarre turns of phrase, irrational characters, and plots that end up going somewhere, though that isn't usually the intended consequence. It's not without its bad points...the plot is heavily involved and dense, but completely inconsequential in places. Everything is handled with the same nonchalance. And overall, the book is barely comprehensible at best.
   But in the end, it's fascinating, though inaccessible. The set pieces are hilarious, and the strange syntax makes even the smallest and most inconsequential sentence suddenly very descriptive. While I can't recommend it to anyone in particular (okay, if you liked Lint, you can probably attempt Accomplice with a degree of ease), it's an essential book to me, one that should be read and, in an era of imitations, possibly be followed to help make something new, something more interesting. Read this book. It'll twist your head into all kinds of interesting shapes and hopefully make you laugh at the same time.

Next Week: Either more impressions of Accomplice, or The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway.

Nonfiction: Zombie Spaceship Wasteland

2011-04-03T17:52:00.000-04:00

"She cries black tears!"

- Cindy Brady

   I don't normally do essay collections on here, or even nonfiction in general. I figure you lot come here to read reviews of books with amputee bikers, zombies, alien cults, and the like, and part of me feels like I should just stick to that. But this one...this one sorta struck a nerve. You see, the past year, I've had to essentially pack up my past into a variety of cardboard boxes and move it not just out of my childhood home, but to two separate houses in parts of a state I swore I wasn't coming back to. This means that I have had to relive a lot of old memories, picking up parts of my past and remembering everything. And it's painful. So very, very painful. Because it's the past, and it's stuck behind that big iron curtain that separates it from the present. And on one level, it can't hurt you any, but on another, knowing that it's always there and you can't go back, can't address the problems with it...that hurts. So an essay collection about essentially a nerdy guy growing up, sprinkled with caustic anecdotes about the emptiness of an MTV gifting suite and nigh-unprintable "hobo songs" seems to hit the spot...it's what I read recently, it involves weird fiction in a very tangential way, and looking back on the past is most of what I'm doing right now.
   I came across this book, however, because I'm a Patton Oswalt fanboy. A roommate of mine wound up playing Werewolves and Lollipops in our dorm room during my second year in New Mexico, and about halfway through, it finally took. I got into his other albums, because his cynical way of looking at the world and the constant references gave me something I could identify with. Also, it wasn't that he was cynical...more like a constantly-disappointed and sort of pessimistic optimist. Yes, he was saying, we're all fucked, but there's hope. We're stupid, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And, at the time, I could get behind that. So when he announced his book recently, I had to pick it up. And while it wasn't the greatest thing in the world, it's still a fantastic collection.
   Zombie Spaceship Wasteland bounces back and forth between Oswalt's memoirs and humorous pieces he writes, alternating between bittersweet and really, really strange. The pieces range in quality-- one particular piece about his late uncle seems to drag on forever, and the essay on the gifting suite just seems like an exercise in cynicism, but overall, there are more hits than misses and the book carries through.
   The title comes from a piece where Oswalt talks about his view on the three types of people in the world, based on the movies they watch when they're younger. Zombies tend to be into zombie movies, more interested in the destruction of things than saving anyone or working with society. They're nihilists, and cynical, and usually believe nothing's really going to get better. The movies they watch deal with having to kill and destroy things, and they're a much angrier group of people. Spaceships are more self-contained. They have their own little unit, and they take care of it. Anything they do, they do their own way. They're not cut off from everyone else, but they have their own path. They have an urge to explore and make their own way. Usually they eventually settle down with families. Spaceships always have the best families. The captain has to take care of the crew, after all. Finally, there are the Wastelands. Wastelands are more about rebuilding than destroying, about taking as many people with them instead of walking alone. The Zombies may scream "We're fucked", but the Wastelands add "but there's hope". There's a certain core goodness in all of it that shines through, a sense that while everything is lawless and destroyed, it can be rebuilt. It can change. It can be made better. Oswalt's theory is that each person has a work of art in them about one of these three topics, and depending on what kind of person they are, they'll produce a work along one of these lines. His was wastelands.
   The other essays in the book are equally as well-written, including a history of topics through the routines of three bad stand-up comedians at a comedy club, the running of a corrupt three-screen movie theater (all jobs you get in high school are corrupt to a certain degree. There are no exceptions.), a crazy uncle who talks about the house down the street having inspired The Exorcist, and other subjects that strike the balance between emotion and cynical observations about the way things are, exploring what made him the way he is and why he thinks the things he does, but never tipping over into frothing depressive vitriol.
   The more fictional parts of the book are severely twisted in content, like a greeting card company whose card descriptions devolve into eldritch cosmic horror and insanity, or hobo songs that tend to be about prostitution with other hoboes. These are equally as well-written, though they kind of tend to unsettle as much as amuse. In particular, the greeting card piece gets dark very quick and very early.
   But in the end, it's a fantastic collection. Oswalt hits much, much more than he misses, and you can tell the care that went into the pieces. There's a great deal of genuine emotion in the book, and the essays are very accessible and quick-moving. Even the unsettling bits are worth reading for the sheer audacity and the fact that while it doesn't make you laugh, an artist's first two duties are 1) Tell a good story, and 2) make the audience feel something. Something, even if it's anger and outrage at the events. Oswalt makes the reader feel a lot of things, some of them not pleasant but all of them very real. This book is definitely worth a read, and it's going to remain part of my permanent collection.

Next Week: I will finally get around to the hilarious, barely-coherent, and utterly terrifying Accomplice by Steve Aylett. It's good to be back.

Official announcement of de-hiatusing

2011-03-30T13:32:00.000-04:00

This Friday, Geek Rage is back after its recent hiatus. I apologize for the disturbance. However, instead of the advertised review of The Complete Accomplice, I will be reviewing my first nonfiction work, one that fits with the themes of this blog: Patton Oswalt's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. I look forward to seeing you all then, and possibly to doing another vlog-type thing.

Caius

News of the Blog

2011-03-19T02:05:00.000-04:00

So I'm moving this weekend. Since I have been handling that this week, I sadly do not have a post for you guys. I may Sunday, but check back next week.

Original Fiction: Let's Try Something

2011-03-12T22:08:00.001-05:00

This is a story I wrote. Some of you have already read it. Those of you who haven't, this is what I do when I can find the spare time and motivation other than working on this blog. Since I didn't quite have a book planned, I figured I might post some of it up for you guys to look at.

Let's Try Something

Okay, let's try something. It'll be fun, I promise:

So let's say person A goes to sleep in world A. When they finally drift off, they awake to find themselves in world B. Something tells them world B is a little more real than world A, so they spend all eight hours of time stuck in world B. When they wake up, they resume normal behavior and go about their day as if world B never even existed, and even then, most memories of world B vanish automatically upon their waking up again in world A. B is false, and they'll probably never see it again. Probably.

Nah, that's boring. Let's try something:

So let's say Person A goes to sleep in world A. When they finally drift off, they awake to find themselves in world B. World B is just as vivid and realistic as world A, and everyone seems to recognize Person A a lot better. In fact, to Person A, world B feels a lot more natural than world A. What's really strange is that the dream ends with Person A going to sleep in world B and waking up in world A. What Person A notices but doesn't remember is that it's exactly the same as when he went to sleep and woke up in world B down to the last detail. After this, world A feels a hell of a lot less real to Person A, but they can't explain why. But they won't ever see world B again. Probably.

Nah, too ambiguous. Let's try something:

So let's say person A goes to sleep in world A. When they finally drift off, they awake to find themselves in world B. However, when they go to sleep again, they keep waking up in world B. It's not a bad place to be, world B. Kinda seems a little better sometimes. But all along, person A believes they should be back in world A. They're left with a sense that they should be somewhere else, but no idea where that somewhere else is. In the end, person A dies in world B.

Nah, that's depressing. Let's try something:

So let's say person A goes to sleep in world A. When they finally drift off, they awake to find themselves in world A, but everything is moved one half-inch to the left. Eventually, they find that every time they go to sleep, everything is moved one half-inch to the left, but it was so un- noticeable that once everything is irrevocably changed and they wake up one morning in world B, it's entirely indistinguishable from world A. Person A remains in world B, thinking it's world A, and meanwhile their friends finally go into their room in world A, and it's empty. And someone moved around all the damn furniture.

Nah, that's too silly. Let's try something:

So let's say person A goes to sleep in world A. There are subtle changes in the world and themselves, sort of like someone moving everything one half-inch to the left. Before they know it, nothing of them or who they were exists any more. They've been replaced by new information. And the worst part is, it will keep happening every time person A goes to sleep and they won't have any idea. It could be happening to you as we speak, and you would have no idea save for some occasional wonderings: was that here before? Where did that book get to? They live all their lives in world B, or world C, or any number of world this or thats, and eventually die far away from home, with people they think are their families and friends, but who aren't the people they used to know.

Nah, that's terrible. Let's try something:

So let's say person A goes to sleep in world A. When they finally drift off, they awake to find themselves in world B, which is a vivid nightmare. Almost too vivid. Thankfully, time and again, they wake up in world A safe and sound, but the nightmare keeps going night after night. Eventually, they begin to think world B might be the real world. But it can't be. So they keep dreaming it, and eventually try to push the Lovecraftian images and chaotic thoughts from their head. World B isn't real, of course, but to them it is. Even if to everyone else, world B is simply not there. And it probably won't ever be. Probably.

Nah, that's too freaky, and I think it's time for the truth:

So person A goes to sleep in world A, but they don't like world A. They've been traumatized by world A. They've found world A unsatisfying. So they imagine themselves to be person B in world B, and the imagination is so vivid and they want it so much that suddenly they wake up and they are person B in world B. But soon, being person B in world B is too much for them, so they become person B in world C, or person A in world C. Eventually, after one, or two, or even eleventy billion jumps just like this, a million transits to a million worlds, they figure something out: They wanted to be in world A as person A all along. That's if they even remember they were person A in world A at all. But they don't know how to get back, so all they can continue doing is going to sleep and hoping they can dream their way back to world A. And eventually, they start lining up the possibilities and realize that maybe, just maybe, their world is built on lies and unrealities. But they can't really go backward, can they? They have to keep living in world C, or world Blue, or world Shrimpless, or disappearing further into nested realities, and why? Because they didn't love world A enough, because they had complaints about it. Hell, they probably didn't even realize they were creating it until they woke up somewhere else, and it's not like they'd recognize that they were someone different. They've essentially condemned themselves to a fate worse than death, bouncing from body to body and from world to world, each death and sleep cycle a new destination. And the worst part is? They probably didn't even know they were doing it. That's right. Their own minds betrayed them and sent them spinning across the cosmos. They will never know home, or what it feels like for everything to go their way, and it's indirectly their fault. Someday, they'll wake up in the middle of the night, crying their eyes out until they dry heave, and they'll never know why.

But that won't happen to you.

None of this will happen to you.

Probably.

Next week: A look at the unsettling world of Steve Aylett's Accomplice, a book that reads like Naked Lunch, but subtly more coherent.

City of Saints and Madmen

2011-03-06T23:28:00.000-05:00

   I don't have a whole ton of respect for Jeff VanDerMeer. I like his books, yes, but it's nowhere near the top of my lists, or people like Gaiman, Powers, and Ende. The writing and the imagery is fantastic, but some of the plots tend to fall flat, and the work isn't as strong as it could be. Still, he's likeable, and better than Jacqueline Carey, so at least there's something there. I suppose my main problem (and indeed my bias) is that I am tired of looking through every one of my favorite genres and finding an anthology edited by him in there. If I look through the "new weird", I find an anthology of his. If I look for steampunk, I find an anthology of his, and a guide to the genre as well. I'm happy he likes the genres, and I'm interested in an author that is that prolific. But this just strikes me , for whatever reason, as trying too hard.
   City of Saints and Madmen, however, is a fantastic book, apart from how I feel about its author. It's about very human things-- love, art, insanity...but the way it tackles them is especially interesting. The book, you see, is actually about the city more than any plot or characters in it. Ambergris is the character, and a fascinating one at that...the city's waterways are patrolled by "freshwater squid" that communicate through bioluminescence, there are people dwelling in the rather frequent fungus covering the city's walls, and it has all its own festivals, districts, and its own personality. The book takes an interesting approach to the city, starting off with the outsider's approach in Dradin, In Love. Dradin is the story of a missionary from the city who has recently returned from the jungles and falls in love with a secretary...and then things get complicated from there, as a dwarf named Dvorak continues to torment him.
   From there, it takes the dry tone of a nonfiction piece with a history of the city from when Captain Manzikert landed on the island and promptly named it after "the most secret and valued part of the whale". This is actually the driest section, as it's written in such a way that it's easy to disregard it. After all, you wouldn't want to read the history of places you've actually been to sometimes, so why read this? Granted, it does give the early history and introduce the reader to the "gray caps", little bald fungus-people who are technically the indigenous life in Ambergris, but have since been driven underground to form another society. This is, of course, after they all but slaughter the initial colonists, as well as the night where suddenly everyone in the city vanishes without a trace, leaving it empty. While these are all interesting events and provide valuable setting information, the story loses focus and doesn't really tell us anything we couldn't figure out from the other pieces in the book, or the numerous supplimental information
   Finally, the book returns to narrative with The Strange Case of X and The Transformation of Martin Lake, two books that explore the effects of Ambergris on its own citizens-- in one case, a man claims constantly that he is the author of the book City of Saints and Madmen, and that Ambergris is his creation. Martin Lake follows an artist who is invited to a murder, something that makes him even more celebrated and adds to his artistic prowess. I have a severe problem with authors being the main characters of their work, which means that I find The Strange Case of X to be the weakest story in the initial four. Even if their qualities are downplayed, it's still essentially a god character. You shouldn't do that, or if you should, you shouldn't acknowledge it. Van Der Meer says that it's a pastiche of Borges somewhere. Borges never used himself directly, Jeff.
   Overall, though, the presentation is very good. Ambergris seems like a fully-realized city, the imagery is nice and borders on Bradbury at his most poetic in Martin Lake, and the appendices defintiely flesh out the information that got left to the side or kept in the second section of the book, where it's buried under dry anecdotes. The book concludes with several "hidden" stories, such as the habits of the Freshwater Squid, touching on the reason the festival is so dangerous. The city is a fantastic place, and would that Van Der Meer had written a guidebook or a series of anecdotes, guidebooks, and the like about it instead of trying to stick to narrative structure and short stories.
   Instead, his characters are either naive and bourgeois (Martin), stupid (Dradin), or insane (Himself). They are ridiculously unsympathetic to anyone or anything, and come off more as windowdressing than anyone you would actually want to spend time with. However, this is really the only failing-- that such unsympathetic people are your protagonists-- and the book is fantastic overall. While not worth a buy, it's at least worth checking out, even if the literary references seem a little shameless and the book could stand to do better plotting.

Next Week: Is a surprise! Though it might be The Land of Laughs, The Eternal Champion series, or any number of things.

The Neverending Story

2011-02-26T04:11:00.001-05:00

"If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger-
If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early-
If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless-
If such things have not been a part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next."

   Out of all the books I've read, there are very few that stay with me as long as this one has. And the story of how I wound up finding this one is about as long as that. When I was a lot younger and my mother was working late, my dad used to go above and beyond for us. This usually meant we'd go to the library, or do fake-fighting on the front lawn, or any number of things, always something special...something different from the usual nightly routine. But there were two things that always stood out to me: One would be that he'd read aloud to us to get us to settle down, and the other would be that we'd all watch a video together. We had a video store up the street from us, one with a seemingly endless collection of B movies, films from the eighties, and an astonishingly large horror/science fiction/fantasy section. We would pick out a film, go home for dinner, and then after bathtime, we'd all sit down-- me, my brother, and my father-- and watch it together. And one of those early films was The Neverending Story. It's actually one of my happier memories-- watching an effects-heavy movie on the futon in the den with my dad and my younger brother.
   About three or four years later, I'd gotten bored with the books in the kids' section of the local library, and stumbled upon a copy of the book The Neverending Story in the well-hidden science fiction section. I barely remembered the movie, but I remembered it as a favorite, so I immediately clutched the book to my chest and took it home, where I started reading almost the moment I got in the door. It took me about two weeks to read, and I read it constantly: In bed by the light of my sister's tropical fishtank, in the middle of math class...whenever I could find a moment to read it and launch myself back into this world, this strange, beautiful world. And something like that, the joy and amusement I felt, it sticks with you. I immediately insisted my dad read it aloud at night because I wanted to share, to have him find the same things I did in all of it. And those memories just add to what it means to me.
   The Neverending Story is about a young boy named Bastian Balthasar Bux. Bastian is having serious problems at home because his father has walled himself off emotionally, and he's getting picked on at school by all of his fellow students, so when he's being chased, he runs into a used bookstore where the curmudgeonly owner promptly insults him and leaves to take a phone call. In the meantime, Bastian is drawn to a large book with a copper-colored cover-- a book called The Neverending Story. The plot splits between the epic quest of a warrior named Atreyu trying to save a world called Fantastica, and Bastian reading the book in the loft of his school. And as the quest continues, past some really freaky creatures and odd situations (such as a giant turtle that talks to itself as if it's two separate people, and the fearsome Ygramul The Many, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like only poisonous), the line between Bastian's world and Fantastica begins to blur. And then things get weird.
   Bastian, because he's a boy with an imagination, is summoned to Fantastica to help heal the Childlike Empress (the world's goddess figure) and remake the world anew. To help with the task, he's given the amulet AURYN, which grants his every wish...but with a price, as the longer he stays and plays with the world he's been given control of, the more corrupted, power-mad, and divorced from himself he becomes. Bastian faces outer conflicts, like the evil sorceress Xayide (who accellerates and plays into his corruption), and internal ones as he comes more and more to believe he is a god. In the end, Bastian must rediscover who he is and return home if he is to protect himself and the world he fell in love with.
   The Neverending Story is, at its core, a book about trying to find one's self in the midst of distraction and all kinds of outside obstacles. It's a universal theme, which just makes the framework easier to understand and relate to. But it's not just about that, either. It's also about getting lost in a good book, reconnecting with those close to us, and in the end, it's about realizing that, much as we need that world to (in the words of Barry Hughart) curl up into on those cold, dark nights, we need this one as a counterbalance, and if we lose our anchor to reality, we lose part of what makes us us. But the central theme isn't what makes this a great book. What makes this a great book is that it tells a good story first, and lets all of this stuff shake out second. It never attempts to lecture its audience, but instead lets them discover what it is for themselves.
   To add to this, Michael Ende did a wonderful job with sketching out his world. Fantastica is a very well-realized place, to the point that even the small details can be visualized. Ende describes his world as boundless and beautiful, but to craft something like this without even much illustration-- though there is that, too. The twenty-six illustrations (one for each chapter, and also one for each letter of the alphabet) are done in the style of illuminated manuscripts, or stylized tapestries, lending to the overall feel of the book. The archaic feel gives it the atmosphere of old legends, which, with the actual integration of some old and legendary concepts (djinn, werewolves and the like) creates something rather interesting to read and behold.
   And finally, along with the wonderful descriptions and the relatable themes, the characters are much more than two-dimensional. Most authors would make the fantasy world a deliberately "lesser" place, something for their character to add to. Ende instead creates a fully realized world that doesn't completely need Bastian, but that Bastian can still add to and make his mark on. Bastian and all the characters save the Childlike Empress herself have motives and means, desires, and underlying motivations. Instead of simply being constructs, they're all very real and very three-dimensional within the story. Bastian, in particular, despite being an everyman, is quite well put-together, and his transformation from cowardly little boy hiding underneath blankets to hero to power-hungry tyrant and then back towards a more beneficial medium.
   The book isn't without its fault, though. And there is one major one. Despite all his development, despite all his trials and tribulations, Bastian comes off as the biggest Mary-Sue ever in a credible work of fiction. He immediately goes about setting things up so he's the fastest, strongest, smartest person in all of Fantastica, and then lets all his fabricated power go to his head as he humiliates his enemies and raises up his friends. Sometimes, this gets really wearing, almost as much as the rather heavy setup of Bastian as a sad sack. But where the book is heavy handed, it more than makes up for it when it isn't. It balances out wonderfully, and works out all its kinks as it goes. Though sometimes the whole setup feels contrived, it's brief and in short fits.
   But overall, this is far and away one of my favorite books. Ende is moving, touching, and uses some wonderfully vivid imagery throughout, the characters stay with me and are easy to identify with, and the underlying themes are strong as ever. This is also one of those books you can return to again and again, finding something different each time. Every time I've read it, and at different times in my life, I've found a new way to look at it and a new way to enjoy the book. There's always something new to draw me back in. So between the constantly-changing nature of the work, the vivid imagery, memorable characters, and interesting events and plotline. Never does it really approach the frivolous or the contrived, and when it appears to, it at least takes it in new directions. You should read this book. You should own this book. The Neverending Story is one of the five or ten books I will always own a copy of, and would never dream of giving up even to borrow. If that doesn't tell you something about how good this book is, then I really don't know what else to say.

There are only two books that have ever affected me in the same way aside from The Neverending Story. Sadly, like the book says:

But that is another story and will be told another time.

Next Week: We drop back into metafiction with the very strange mushroom and squid-infested City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanDerMeer.

Expiration Date

2011-02-19T13:54:00.001-05:00

"Madam, I've just run over your cat and I'd like to replace it."

"I don't know...how good are you at catching mice?"

- Elizalde, to herself

   As previously stated, I freaking love Tim Powers. And this is one of the books that did that to me. At the time I found it, I'd just finished Last Call and found this one on the "Leave a book, take a book" rack at one of the public places in town. The story sounded so engaging and the ideas were definitely ones I hadn't heard before, and it was Tim Powers to boot, so I started it, hoping it would grip me the way Last Call did and give me just as many reasons to love it. Annnnd...I was wrong. It wasn't completely the book's fault as much as it was the format. For some reason, I am completely incapable of reading mass-market paperbacks these days. I still do from time to time...you can't really avoid it these days, particularly in genre writing, but my preferred format is a nice-sized hardcover or trade paperback copy. It's the way the pages tend to slip while I'm reading and the spine bends too easy, I think.
   But when I got a copy I could actually read, and got through the parts where I'd kept putting it down, I loved it. Maybe not as much as Last Call, but definitely more than Deviant's Palace. Powers has managed to take his own weird, somewhat gritty style and reliance on historical fact, meld it with a modern-day crime novel sensibility (I'll get to what kind later), and then let it run amok all over Los Angeles. Expiration Date is our world, more or less, but one with pragmatic supernatural rules, a certain sensibility to it. Ghosts are commonplace and can be bought and sold fairly easily. The more famous and the "purer" the ghost, the more in demand they are. And why are ghosts so in demand? So they can be inhaled. Yes, Expiration Date is a drug novel about people snorting ghosts. And I can't believe I just typed that with a straight face.
   Expiration Date begins, though, with Koot Hoomie Parganas, whose parents are part of a rather strict Buddhist sect. Kootie, as he will be known for the rest of the book, is a young man who wants to run away from home. His parents treat him like a reincarnation of a dead religious leader, which means no meat, no real friends, and Kootie is tired of it. But in running away from home, he destroys a precious bust of Dante Aligheri, a bust with a rather important artifact that Kootie's parents were keeping from some very unsavory characters who want it for themselves. With his parents brutally (and I do mean brutally) murdered, Kootie sets off with this artifact (okay, it's the last breath of Thomas Alva Edison) into the world, trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on. He is pursued by a one-armed amnesiac ghost trapper named Sherman Oaks, and at various times aided by a cast of other characters. The other three main leads are Pete, an electrician with certain latent psychic abilities (and a psychic mask of Harry Houdini), Shadroe, a ghost haunting his body to evade the main antagonist, and Doctor Elizalde a former psychologist whose brush with the supernatural destroyed her career. Together, they're afloat in plots they can never quite understand, trying to keep between their pursuers and their next fix.
   The one major problem with the book is its focus. In having these protagonists and stories running around, you easily find that you like some better than others, and the worst of them is the stupid double-act that makes up the "Kootie and Edison" arc. Edison gets absorbed by the young man, you see, but not enough to be assimilated. So he shares Kootie's body as the two evade the violent and irrational Sherman Oaks. And it's dull. Pete's arc has the traditional "man on the run" story, Elizalde is trying to piece together what happened to her despite her being an avowed atheist, Shadroe is possessing his own body, and we get stuck with the kid for the brunt of the book. They have some good moments, of course, but overall, it feels like it should be leading somewhere, and it doesn't until two-thirds through.
   Which isn't to say the book is bad at all. Powers exercises amazing control despite the "large sprawling cast" form being out of his usual purview, and each of the characters (including the villains) have their own motivations and reasons. It's all handled wonderfully, and comes to a climax that's well worth it and where more than a few plot twists are answered (Tim Powers never met a loose end he didn't want tied in a neat little bow), too, which is nice. Elements found at the beginning of the book come into play near the end, improbable escapes are had by all, and the story and theme fit almost as if they'd been designed for each other.
   And the themes are death, the apocalypse, and addiction. I know, it's hard to have a happy ending with those things in there, but somehow, they manage to pull it off. Pete, Elizalde, and Kootie start to form a family structure somewhere near the end, there's a nice ironic fate for the villain, and things go swimmingly from there. Though...I really do have to wonder why there are all the apocalyptic overtones in the work, like the gigantic "lobster-quadrille" that beaches itself on the shore, or the fact that dead people are walking the earth to get inhaled by the living, another sign of the apocalypse. The dead walking around, not the inhaling thing.
   Powers does a wonderful job with the spiritualist parts, too, as Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini actually were interested in the spirit world (which was the very reason Houdini went around debunking mediums-- he wasn't skeptical about the existence of spirits, he just wanted people to stop with all the fake claims and making money off of spirits), and they're used to fantastic effect. As usual, Powers has definitely done his research, and it shows in every last bit-- be it the constantly referencing the Queen Mary's history, or the flashbacks to Edison's past. There's definitely a command of the language and ideas here that makes the book well worthwhile.
   But with all of these things, I can't recommend it completely. The first time I read it was in the prime of my Tim Powers infatuation, and looking upon it now, I see that may have clouded my judgement. Expiration Date is a fine book, yes, but not as original as it might seem. The plot is loose, but follows many of the conventions of a regular crime novel, where all the characters eventually come together and the ending has at least one gunfight. It hardly seems as tightly-woven as many of his other books, in particular Last Call, the companion piece and preceding volume to this one. Kootie is too annoying a main character to stick with for two-thirds of the book, and the other characters aren't featured enough to pick up the slack, leaving me with a feeling that this should really have been a different kind of book.
   So in the end, yes, you should read Expiration Date, but please don't buy it. Pick it up from the library, read it over a weekend, and you'll find it enjoyable enough that it will leave a good impression. But please, instead, save your money for one of Powers' much better books, such as Three Days to Never, Last Call, or his other equally brilliant works (except for The Anubis Gates, but I'll get to that later). This is a good book, but not a great one.

Next week: We get even more conventional with The Neverending Story, a children's fantasy novel that is a lot darker and more German than one would think

Lint

2011-02-12T03:28:00.001-05:00

"Your mischievous remedies have smashed us all!"

- Alger Lattimore

   Oh, god, where do I begin? Way back in my first review, I mentioned a conversation I had with my friend Greg. Greg and I had a gym class together about once a day, and in this class, we talked books with each other a lot (as well as other things, but this blog isn't about those, so screw 'em). He got me into Terry Goodkind, I got him into Dune, and so on and so forth. At the time, I had just discovered the "bizarro" literary movement and was making my way through a couple of severely strange books I couldn't get through interlibrary loan. The one title I could get my hands on was Steve Aylett's Lint. For back then, I couldn't believe that a book so audacious could ever make it to print, though I figured it being small press had something to do with that. And within about two or three days of laughing uncontrollably and trying to quote passages to my friends and loved ones, it was love.
   So naturally, I handed my ILL copy to Greg. He finished it by that Friday and we had the conversation I mentioned earlier, where he asked me "How the hell can you recommend this to someone? How can you hand someone a book going 'I know you're going to want to punch me for making me read this, but...'" Still, he liked the book, so it wasn't all bad. And now I finally know how I can possibly recommend it to someone: It's freaking brilliant for what it is. Steve Aylett has crafted in Lint an insane book with an equally-insane title character, an absurdist satire of biographies, cult authors, and indeed most science fiction. If you don't find something even amusing about the book, I am shocked and surprised by this. The book is absurd but never forcibly so, and the quotes I have wrung from it stay with me to this day, in the form of things like the "Great crowd tonight, release the tigers" mantra, the phrase "That's not a scarecrow, it's a crucifix in a hat!", or other choice bits. It's memorable, light, relentlessly funny, and most of all, it's fun.
   Lint is the biography of Jeff (possibly Jack) Lint, a science fiction author who started with the pulps in the 1940s under the pen name "Isaac Asimov". He would continue to inflict his quite nuts and absolutely unpublishable work on the general populace through a series of books, short stories, TV and film scripts, and a failed children's series, all while mingling with the elite and the lowest alike. The book (written, as it says on the cover, by Steve Aylett) follows this luminary from the moment of birth to his eventual death of a cerebral hemorrhage in the mid-90s, giving us an insight into how this tall, gangly whack job captivated the hearts and minds of thousands. But there's something not quite right. Occasionally, the absurdity gives way, showing something darker waiting just outside of the capering, brightly-colored satire. A world of freakish details and possible parallel worlds, where a man "pushed his face so far into the book that it was unable to be removed", until someone has to cut away most of his face and skull. A world where a children's cartoon that didn't last more than four episodes invaded the minds and dreams of the people who watched it. Where the impressive figure in the book might not be all he appears to be, nor the world he inhabits all that stable.
   First and foremost, I love this book for the sheer balls-out way it commits to its premise. On the back cover, you won't find quotes talking about the fictitious nature of the work, but instead praising Steve Aylett and talking about how they discovered Jeff Lint's work-- most notably from Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock, two acclaimed British authors. Lint is laid out in chapters, an index, and even quotes from Lint's work and interviews, all sourced to books. The tone never once winks at the audience, but lays its absurd premise out in the most serious way it can. If its stated premise was to get us to laugh, we'd be on guard for it every second we spent reading it, but it doesn't, so we're caught off guard by the naturally funny syntax.
   The syntax, too, is especially funny. While silly, it resembles actual quotes from cult figures. It's merely the frantic mumblings of a Burroughs or a Thompson, or even Philip K. Dick, but taken to their logical extremes. Aylett is exceptionally vivid, but in a fairly restrained way. He's not above going for a vivid and surrealistic scene or six, but keeps it framed within the work-- this is, after all, a biography, not a run-of-the-mill novel. He has to keep some level of seriousness in presentation and tone. This also makes for a nice contrast when Lint utters such phrases as "When the abyss gazes into you, bill it.", or submits his manuscripts in drag. Or when his agent enters a "catatonic insectile state" and spends the rest of the book decomposing.
   Which brings me to the world. Lint purports to set itself in modern day, but a ridiculously bent version, mostly due to the influence of the Lint character. Lint is the center of things, after all, and gives the book a very skewed focal point. He is given friends both historical and real, a pretentious nemesis in the form of literary critic Cameo Herzog (who inadverdently sets the mob on our protagonist), fans, and disciples. It's very clear from the scenes involved and the way everything from decomposing literary agents to taxi-driver suicides (due to Lint's theory of space) is treated as commonplace that this is definitely not our world. Either way, Aylett has the utmost control over his setting, and draws us in quickly by making it seem like it's our own before yanking the rug (and indeed the house) out from under our feet and plunging headlong into the account of a madman writing fiction.
   And this brings us to that dark side. No, the book isn't outright a horror novel. It presents itself as a very pleasant satire. It's only when you read passages such as the recording of The Energy Draining Church Bazaar, or the fact that Lint used a cipher based on a torture manual to write a chapter of his magnum opus, or the account of Lint's failed TV series Catty and the Major that you get the sense that something is wrong. And not just sort of wrong, either-- very, very wrong. This feeling won't engage you directly, of course. It lets you think about what you've read, and then in some quiet moment springs upon you and makes you go "Oh, god". I haven't ever had a book do this to me before...they either wear their horror on their sleeve, or reveal it quickly and decide to leave the horror obvious, or continue on their merry way after pouncing on you with it. This, among the other things, makes Lint very, very unique.
   But it isn't for everyone. More than one person will find it trying or stupid. The gimmick of the book is welcome but not quite needed, and the sections on Lint's religious experiences and philosophy tend to wane. The bit about "shallow vanishing" is interesting, but doesn't completely fit in with some of the other work. But overall, the book should carry through, and it's more a matter of what one thinks of the book than how the book is.
   In the end, it's a book I finally had to break down and buy this summer so it could be put into the private collection. It's hilarious, a little frightening, and hits all the targets it wants to hit. While passages may drag, and the bit about the progressive rock group stands out as mildly incoherent, it's a fun read, will take you less than a week to get through, and multiple readings might allow one better insight into the dark mysteries surrounding Jeff Lint and the "Lint is dead" rumors, which persisted long after his actual death. If you can find it, give it a read. It's worth a look-through, and the low price should be enticing enough. It'll give you a few good laughs, maybe an uneasy feeling or two, and more than that, it'll stay with you long after you've closed it up.

Next week: In an attempt to get back to coherent works, we return to Tim Powers with Expiration Date, a novel about people snorting ghosts. It's more coherent and less crazy. I swear.

And as an added bonus...Poe!

2011-02-05T03:31:00.000-05:00

This is a track off of the album that sort of serves as a companion piece to House of Leaves. It's also one of the more theme-connected songs. So here. Without further ado, "Haunted" by Poe, off of the album of the same name.

House of Leaves

2011-02-05T03:20:00.001-05:00

In an effort to retain the feel of the novel and keep things true to the form of the review, I have preserved all differently-colored words and font choices of the author, just to capture that extra bit of weirdness.

This is not for you

- Johnny Truant

"...and choose, however, to dismiss this enterprise out of hand, then may I suggest you drink plenty of wine and dance in the sheets of your wedding night, because whether you know it or not, now you are truly prosperous..."

-Zampano, warning both Johnny and the reader

Way back ~~in the dawn of time~~ about a decade ago, I spent every afternoon after school at the Maplewood Memorial Library. To the point that the librarians all knew me by name and asked me how I was doing. In fact, they still do. Though circumstances mean that I pop up there a hell of a lot less. And in all that time, it took me a while to realize that right up front where I came in, they had seasonal displays. The first time I realized this was in October during my high school career, where I discovered, "Hey! There are horror novels stacked up here! Oh-- they're for Halloween. That makes sense." Yes. I was that dense. But less pretentious. Anyway, in amongst the usual trashy ghost stories and a copy of Harvest Home that had probably been there before the book actually went into publication, there was an oddly-shaped paperback that caught my eye. The cover had a fold-over leaf, and inside was a color plate that showed seemingly random clutter. And this book-- which might have found me as much as I found it, judging from my interactions with it, was House of Leaves. When I picked it up, I thought it was just a quirky book using different colored words and playing around with text. And it is. Sort of. It's also not quite-- oh, fuck it. Let me try to explain:

House of Leaves is about a young man named Johnny Truant who finds a manuscript in the apartment of a dead old man named Zampano. Near the body are four large, unexplained gouges that look like an animal put them there. Being a young, foolhardy man in the prime of his youth, and not too concerned about the ethical matters of stealing from a dead man, Johnny takes the manuscript with him. Following the man's instructions with the loosely-bundled heap of papers, he begins to edit the work into something coherent, leaving his own footnotes along with it to tell his story. The book itself is mostly comprised of Zampano's critical analysis on a film that has not and does not exist, a film called The Navidson Record, thus also being about the film. And the third part of the plot is the actual film of The Navidson Record, about a photojournalist who tries to make a film about his house in the suburbs...a house that has a small architectural discrepancy of three quarters of an inch at first, but then the small closet that seems to be entirely painted black grows, each shift bringing more insane dimensions and impossible rooms upon impossible rooms, creating a ~~labyrinth~~ that threatens to swallow more than one of the characters who decide to do everything but leave it alone or move.

The three plots tend to intertwine with each other, elements from one appearing in another, and feeding on each other all at once. Johnny in particular is an unrepentantly unreliable narrator, at one point even going "Hey, not fair, you say. Hey, fuck you, I say." in response to changing a few words in one passage. Later on, he invents entire sequences and openly tells us that he wanted to end a sequence by having two characters murdered, but doesn't. Johnny is openly mocking, even as he's slowly losing his mind, and the book helps him come to terms with his rather checkered life and several incidents. Oh, and it's also driving him slowly insane. Finally, he gets the book published to give himself some peace of mind, though it never stops being more than a book for him.

Oh, and did I mention that this exact same book is the one that's been in your hands the whole time? The book you've probably been trusting to remain truthful to itself on at least some level? I probably should have. Oh well.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, House of Leaves is a mindfuck with a pneumatic drill, a book that plays fast and loose with its own ideas and logic to gain some unknown benefit, or maybe just because it can. Text is put in different colors. A chase scene is spread out over several pages to keep you turning the pages just to reach the end of it. One particular sequence creates an air of claustrophobia by clustering the words together smaller and smaller on the pages. As the secret space (yeah, that's the best name for it) builds and builds, the sentences begin to fragment, words fly all over the page, and footnotes circle in on themselves. The protagonists (all three of them...I think) quickly lose control of their lives as the book loses control of what was once a tight, organized format. As things go on, large passages of the book are excised by Zampano for seemingly no reason, Johnny's footnotes become more and more about his experiences which have nothing to do with the book, and Will Navidson becomes trapped in the house that originally intrigued him. And it is brilliant.

It's a very hard thing to get a book to lie to its reader on this scale. Eventually, an unreliable narrator gets found out, the tricks dissolve into gimmicks, or the narrative thread has to come to a conclusion. It's a rare feat when a book manages to make the reader doubt their own faculties when reading it, to get inside their head and under their skin the way House of Leaves does. And it does a truly amazing job. The individual voices and texts do a lot to immerse and unnerve the reader, be they calm and academic (Zampano), neurotic and frightened (Truant), or weirdly passionate and cold (Navidson. Yes, both at once). Throughout, the sense of immersion is nailed down by footnotes and references to actual things, as well as narration from voices who, in their own way, are easy to listen to. They're trustworthy in their own bizarre fashion.

Between these voices and the immersive quality of the book, the response it evokes makes it all the more fascinating. This is a book that pretty much commits to its premise fully and wholeheartedly, a book that never backs away, never flinches, and never goes "hey, I'm just kidding, it's all a joke." That it does this makes it somehow all the better, be it the exploration of the spaces, or indeed the unhinging of various minds. In total, that it never once winks or lets on is admirable. It's like a magic show where everyone's forced to believe the illusions are real, because there is no other logical explanation for them. That a book has such an immersive tone and manages to be so fascinating that I can read it over and over again and find new things should be commended.

But this is far from a flawless classic. Many people will have problems with the different colored words, the text that sometimes will appear upside down and backwards on the middle of a page, and the constant revisions of the truth by Truant and Zampano. There are parts where the actual critical parts are dry and all you want to do is get back to Johnny's story, and parts where Johnny's rambling on and on and you want nothing more than to read Zampano's account of Will's film. Many people don't like to be conned or played with by a book, and will dismiss it on the grounds that it's "too gimmicky", or stupid. But it's a personal choice. Give it a go. If you don't like it, then you don't have to read it.

In the end, though, I recommend House of Leaves to read. It's something that seems new every time I read it, and it's stuck in my memory since the first time I did. It's a fantastically-written book that moves beyond its gimmicks, and it's easily one of my all-time favorites, a list of which I'll have to get to writing up one of these days, just for posterity. The book also has an awesome soundtrack in the form of the album Haunted by Poe. Maybe find a copy and give it a listen with the book if you like. It may enhance the experience and help with the immersion. My final point is, it's a good book, and well worth reading over and over again. Just watch out for the ~~minotaur.~~

Next Week: The pile of weird almost boils over with the bizarro satire/biography book Lint by Steve Aylett.

Rumo: His Miraculous Adventures

2011-01-29T03:38:00.001-05:00

"...because some miracles can only happen in the dark."

- final page

   So after two weeks of severely twisted books, I decided to scale it back a little and go with something a little more benign.

   I first found out about Walter Moers by picking up his book The 13 and 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, about a blue bear (naturally) whose adventures take him on a whirlwind tour of the mystical land of Zamonia, a massive lost continent existing simply "elsewhere", complete with illustrations. It hooked me from the first few pages and refused to let go...Zamonia is a land of much magic, and much danger, as half the things that aren't benign are lethal to a ludicrous degree. But between the odd yet pleasant prose and the heavily detailed illustrations, I was a fan. A year later, I'd wandered into a bookstore on St. Mark's Place and found Rumo by the same author sitting in the science fiction section. Within moments of flipping through it, I'd found out it was the sequel to Captain Bluebear, and that there were two other works besides. This filled me with much joy, and then disappointment as I realized I was short on cash. That summer, on a trip to a quirky indie bookstore in Tucson called Antigone Books, I found a copy of Rumo and immediately snapped it up, not wanting to lose the opportunity more than once.
   Rumo tells the story of Rumo of Zamonia, a Wolpertinger (they're like bipedal sentient dogs with horns. Yes, I know it's odd, but stay with me) who eventually becomes the greatest warrior in the land. The book follows his adventures, from the time he escapes from carnivorous cyclopses as a pup to his eventual settlilng down in the city of Wolperting. Along the way, he meets a large Shark Grub with a devious tactical mind and a penchant for gambling, is educated by two "Nocturnomaths" (highly intelligent creatures with multiple external brains for storing extra information), contends with murderous yeti, fights a walking carnivorous forest, and must finally rescue an entire city (and his true love, naturally) from the bowels of the Netherworld. All of it illustrated to an almost dizzying degree.
   What I like most about Rumo is the grip it has on its own world. Zamonia is a vibrant place, where everything from the tiniest forest creature to the massively tall Ygg Drasil tree could have its own book written about it. Moers' strong grip on Zamonia is what allows him to drop his readers into the plot, confident that he won't have to explain every little thing-- just the most important ones. What his occasional bits of exposition don't do, the illustrations more than make up for. Zamonia, despite its ludicrously lethal flora and fauna, is a place you feel like you live in. Through this, Moers is able to draw the reader into the plot and get one invested in the plot quite easily. After all, if one feels like they live somewhere, they're more likely to be interested in what goes on in their world. And this is the book's main strength. It hooks you in because it constructs such a feeling of immersion, and doesn't let go until the final pages, when a series of narrow escapes lead to a climax that is ultimately that much more relieving.
   Another major strength of the book is its ability to laugh at itself. It knows it's kind of silly, and while not winking at the audience, it plays that to the hilt. Be it the Non-Existent Teenies, who argue about their name and go on and on about how "we've gotten over (insert human emotion here)"; Dandelion/Krindle, Rumo's dual-bladed knife with a split personality (one part houses the spirit of a homicidal demon, the other's a got the spirit of a pathologically-lying but ultimately pacifist troll); or the self-deprecating "Dead Yeti Army"; Rumo is a book that knows it's flat out insane and just runs with it. It tackles this in the sense that it doesn't stop piling on the absurdities, and in the sense that it slyly pokes fun at itself with a surprisingly matter-of-fact tone. It's a fantasy satire that could very well be a regular fantasy novel-- the magic sword talks, the hero has to contend with all manner of monsters and demons, the fate of the world is at stake, and people ride large, mythical creatures. But with its unique sense of humor and take on its world, it becomes unique.
   However, there are a few wrinkles. The book is gratuitously violent, beginning with the Siege of Lindworm Castle (a group of mercenaries attempt to siege a city of dinosaurs, only to be gruesomely repelled time and again), and carrying on like that. Blood is spilt, Rumo rips a cyclops' tongue out with his teeth, people get turned into pincushions and chunky salsa, and in one particularly squirm-inducing sequence, Rumo's love interest is put into an iron maiden whose spikes have been replaced with intravenous needles and tortured with poisons and viruses by one of the main villains. While I was prepared for the book to have its dark touches (Captain Bluebear wasn't without those, either), many of the sequences bordered on wanton violence. Though this might also fit with the darker tone of the heroic quest as it goes along.
   Second, for a while the book stops dead just as Rumo reaches the walled city of Wolperting. While it picks up again, watching Rumo at school and working as a cabinetmaker-- while important to the plot later on-- becomes a bit of a slog. After all, the book had enticed me with points of epic adventure and duels to the death, so turning into a coming-of-age romance about growing up and finding one's place kind of seems out of place. But in the end, it pulls together nicely and gives a reason for Rumo to rescue his damsel, rather than just rescuing her and being done with it after that.
   So in the end, this is a book well worth reading. It's a satire, a coming-of-age novel, a brutal heroic saga, and a fantastic adventure novel, all in one and with the length and girth to give all of that the time it deserves. The illustrations, while not beautiful, are fantastic, and the story hits all the right notes. It's a fantasy children's book for grownups, it's the book everyone always wanted as a kid but which grew up so it'd meet them on their level. Also, there's a fight scene that takes place in a giant robot. I forgot to mention that. In short, it's a fantastically good read and well worth tracking down and reading from cover to cover.

Next week: After this brief respite, we go back into the pile o' crazy with Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. And yes, the different coloring is manditory.

Crooked Little Vein

2011-01-22T00:56:00.000-05:00

"Let me be the Virgil to your Dante"

-Repeated line

"If you think I'm telling you about having sex with Trix, you're insane"

- Entire text of Chapter 17

   I first came across Warren Ellis through his work on comic books. He had a blackly comic style that I felt really suited where comic books should be, instead of the Saturday morning four-color morality jamboree they seemed to be at the time. Yeah. I was that kind of pretentious. Years later, I'd forgotten about him for the most part when I found Crooked Little Vein on the "Mystery" shelves of a Barnes and Noble in LA (We'll talk about what I was doing in LA another time. Suffice it to say, I haven't been back). The little black book piqued my interest somewhat, but at the time I didn't want to buy anything. I left the store with the book on my mind. When I got to Santa Fe, where I was going to school at the time (at a lovely institution called the College of Santa Fe, which has sadly been corrupted and blighted in recent years), I put in a request for an interlibrary loan and immediately read it cover-to-cover in the space of about a week. And I loved it so much I read it again. The first time I read it, I was laughing like a maniac at the early chapters, up until chapter ten or eleven. You'll know which ones I mean. (Hint: Saline) The book had everything...adventure, suspense, romance...To me, it was perfect. When I went back and read it later, it wasn't as great as the first time, but it's still a book that I'm proud to own.
   Crooked Little Vein is a story centered-- much like last week's offering of Naked Lunch, around control, sex, and violence. Private investigator Michael McGill is a "shit magnet"-- a man who attracts bizarre and often frighteningly grotesque events. Because of this "gift", he is hired by the most decidedly psychotic Chief of Staff of the United States to find the country's secret second constitution. The book was traded from Richard Nixon to a prostitute, and from there descended somewhere into the seamy underbelly of society, from one group of "perverts" to the next. The Chief of Staff wants this book back because inside it are the clues to somehow "reset the country" and save everyone. Mike hooks up with a heavily made-up, tattooed girl by the name of Trix and the two of them set off across the country to find the book. On their path they encounter a bunch of old money Texans who would fit right in with people like the Bushes and the Sawyers, a frightening Las Vegas pimp, and many others.But when they find the book, is it even worth using to reset the country?
   Crooked Little Vein is insane. There is no real way to describe its insanity. What makes it work, though, as opposed to other "gonzo" or "bizarre" mystery stories, is that every element is treated with respect, and with the straight-facedness it deserves. Each time I've read it, I've discovered another story, each one fitting into the first but somehow completely unnoticed. The first time, it was just a comic road novel about encounters with perverts and shadowy Men In Black. The second time, it was a sendup of the private detective genre. Most recently, I found all of that to kind of be secondary, because it's a love story about Mike and Trix and how these crazy events push them apart and eventually back together. But each element fits together as part of the piece. It's all of these things, and more. That I can keep coming back to the book and read the same words over and over again but find something new about them every time I do is a major component of the book's charm.
   Another element that makes the book work is how it goes about parody. Many people think parody is an easy genre to work in. I certainly used to. But as I got older, I began to realize the secret of parody-- No matter how outrageous it is, you have to commit to the premise and go at it with a straight face. You can't giggle, and you can't wink at the audience. That's what makes it funny-- everyone acting like what they're doing is normal even though it's the height of absurdity. With Crooked Little Vein, it takes things one step further. Instead of simply parodying the genre, we have a parody acted by straight-faced people who talk about Godzilla fetishism and "roulette parties" while we inhabit the head of the only sane, innocent person in the entire cast. Mike, while not a complete audience surrogate, is enough of one to draw us in. By reacting as any sane, vanilla person would, he gives us someone in a mass of mildly unsympathetic characters (even one of the heroes isn't exempt, given her stances on bestiality) to anchor ourselves to. Also, his reactions to slowly being driven insane by the things he's forced to uncover offers a nice comic counterpoint to the characters who treat most of this stuff as normal.
   Yes, it is Mike who guides us through this, whether it be his casual observations at the start of the book that a super-rat has peed in his coffee, or his horrified reaction to Junior Roanoke's "womb thing" in the Texas section. Mike is a much more noble hero than past private eyes that have been featured here, mainly because he has to be an innocent for the book to work the way it's supposed to. Because he's mostly an innocent and a nice guy, his eventual stand at the end of the book has that much more meaning to it-- he's sick of being pushed around and told he's out of his element or that he's too nice. For the last few chapters, he takes control of his situation, and we believe it and root for him because for the whole book, he's been floundering around out of his depth. We empathize and sympathize with Mike because in the same situation, we'd be Mike...scared and offended and freaked out by half the things we'd be seeing. So having him as the main character works wonders.
   There are rough patches, though. Some of the foreshadowing goes absolutely nowhere, as if there were plotlines that were discarded straight off instead of kept, or things to keep the ending from its initial outcome. Mike and Trix have a series of arguments in the final sections of the book that are pretty much just there to drive a wedge between them, and while part of me can see Mike arguing about it, it just seems like a way to get him out of the apartment. The book recovers wonderfully by the next two chapters or so, though, and keeps clicking right along.
   In the end, this is a book that should be read and enjoyed. People may find it "offensive" or "crude", or "shocking for shocking's sake", and while I acknowledge that this is not a book for children, it is the duty of mature human beings to face this sort of thing diplomatically, not with outrage, and accept that filth exists. And as for the people who say "shocking for shocking's sake" or other such things, and think they're being profound, nothing-- nothing in the written word that didn't have "by Howard Stern" written on it has been written purely to shock. No, not even bizarro or the works of Garth Ennis. You ought to be ashamed of yourselv-- I'm drifitng. Point being, this is a fantastic book, less dirty and more coherent than Naked Lunch and still completely enjoyable. The main character is someone whom you can really identify with, and the cast plays their roles masterfully well, be it the tiny, freaky Chief of Staff or the massive bodybuilder from Cleveland whose friends want Mike to "party" with them. This is a book that should have a much bigger audience than it does, and it annoys me that barely anyone has heard of it. Read this, if you feel the same way I do then buy it, otherwise take it out of the library. No matter how you feel, it'll be a trip you won't soon forget, and one that will elicit some kind of emotional response. It is a part of my private collection, and I am proud to keep it there for as long as I live.

Next Week: A direct one-eighty from this perversion, insanity, sex, and violence with Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures by Walter Moers.

Naked Lunch

2011-01-14T16:35:00.001-05:00

"Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole how to talk?"

- Doctor Benway

Long ago (okay, only about eight years ago), when I lived in a much more repressed set of circumstances, Naked Lunch came on the Sci-Fi channel. To me, it was that film that kept getting referenced on Farscape and had all the cool makeup effects. To my parents, it was an R-rated movie about a ton of disgusting sex, spousal homicide, psychotic episodes, and drug use. Yeah. We had those sort of cultural differences a lot. But my dad, after the umpteenth time I asked him if I could watch it, made a deal with me. If I read the book, I would be allowed to see the movie. He thought that would stop me. Instead, I exhausted every possible resource I had to find the book and read it. And boy, was I happy with what I read. While this wasn't the first book I'd ever read with nonlinearity and surrealism, it was the first book that felt like an experience. It was nasty, hilarious, dark, and scary all at once. It was dirty, sure, but the dirty nature of the book felt justified. It had its own style; a mix of tough-guy junkie slang, science-fiction dystopia, sex scenes by and for people completely detached from reality, and monsters that shouldn't even exist in the darkest corners of the mind. William S. Burroughs is quite literally H.P. Lovecraft on acid.

Naked Lunch tells the story of Bill Lee...sort of. Bill is a junkie who is about to get pinched in New York City. The cops have put an undercover officer in a white trench coat on him, as well as tracking him with a man named The Disk who sniffs out the junk in peoples' systems and pounces on them. So Bill flees, first to Mexico and then to countries that may be imaginary-- such as Interzone, Annexia, and Upper Baboonasshole. Throughout the book, though, the story becomes a guide to these rather nightmarish places through Bill's eyes (as there is really only one narrative voice, and it never tends to change), with such characters as psychotic cowboy A.J. (one of the few heroes in a sense), the memorable and incurably insane Doctor Benway, and the disgustingly hedonistic Hassan sometimes taking center stage. The various characters vie for control through a series of violent, shocking, and sometimes even explicitly sexual maneuvers that eventually (literally) rip the world apart to make sure they're the ones who're able to feed their addiction to power, while Lee seeks only to feed his own habits for drugs and company.

While seemingly easy to explain like this, the plot is all mostly implied and inferences from the book's structure. Things move in weird, rambling sketches from place to place, the ellipses in the text being the main way of telling when a scene's shifted mid-chapter. Despite this, the book is incredibly descriptive, each scene playing out in vivid, vivid detail. The details actually help immerse one in the book, and at the same time, help the book work its way inside your head. Naked Lunch is an experience, and that experience is mutual. Every time I read the book, I find different things, things I've missed, or things I hadn't thought of the same way as when I last read it. The thing unspools in insane, almost non-Euclidian ways, moving towards a cataclysm that, while not quite changing everything, does change quite a bit.

But despite all of this, the book is fantastic. It creates an atmosphere with a twisted sense of humor and a satirical look at what humanity will do if their addiction to control goes too far. It's crude and vile in certain aspects, but brilliant in others. While it's offensive, it's necessary, and when viewed with a sense of humor and a certain detachment, it's hilarious. Lee's tough-guy film noir tones give an interesting view of the vicious world he inhabits, and each of the characters lends their voice, creating a nasty but altogether amusing and interesting world. It's a book that's about the atmosphere as much as the plot or any characters, and overall it's brilliant. There's literally a whole world in there to explore, and every bit of it is actually worth spending time with.

While the insanity and grotesquerie aren't for everyone, and the hanging/sex scenes (supposedly an indictment of capital punishment) are a particular example of this, it's a book I'd wholly recommend. While many people who will take the book seriously may have difficulty seeing the humor, and while it would be very easy to get offended by this book, I'm proud to make it part of my personal collection, and one I'd read over and over again. Also, you'll learn what the words "Steely Dan" actually refer to, among a great many other quotes and references that have permeated the world's cultures. Every time I read it I discover something new, and it's meant different things at different times in my life. It's easily a classic in my book, and I am more than happy to recommend it to my audience and my friends alike. Read this book. You may not like it, but it's something everyone should at least try.

Next Week: Yet another dose of perversion and insanity (though in a more linear form) with Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein. It's good to see you all again, by the way.

The Steampunk Trilogy

2011-01-07T16:34:00.001-05:00

"And they never did have any children after that."

- Hottentots

   If there is anyone keeping the 50s mad scientist aesthetic alive, that man is probably Paul DiFilippo. From the beginning of The Steampunk Trilogy, we have Jacob's Ladders crackling and experiments that destroy large parts of the populace by accident. This is nothing new for DiFilippo, whose excellent short story collections, Ribofunk and Fractal Paisleys, were less Science Fiction and more SCIENCE!!! Fiction. And yes, the three exclamation points are necessary. While not quite a pioneer in the steampunk field (I swear, I will shoot the next person who uses famed Industrial Revolution engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a plot point or minor character. I will shoot them execution style.), Paul DiFilippo is an important author for bringing another movement into play in the steampunk genre: Biopunk. Biopunk was first started by Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein, and can be defined as mixing biological themes into science fiction in the established "punk" style-- no one has to explain it, etc. By mixing a myriad number of biological elements into his stories (Two in this book, at least), DiFilippo took the genre where up to that point it had concerned itself with either hard-science stories taking place a steampunk atmosphere, or odd historical fantasies. While my history may be off, based on what I've read, I think this was the first book to really push the limits of what steampunk could do.
   The Steampunk Trilogy falls over three novellas. In the first, Victoria, a mad scientist has replaced the actual Queen Victoria with a rather lifelike and deceptive clone made from the DNA of a Hellbender Newt, which they use while the real Victoria has disappeared to god knows where. Cosmo Cowperthwait, the mad scientist and protagonist of the story, must find a way to maintain the clone while tracking down the real Victoria, matching wits with an evil silver-nosed nobleman (the nose is purported to cause swoons in women), and his large associate, who exudes such an air of danger that our hero carries around a .50 caliber shell inside a gun-cane for the sole purpose of ending him. This is a great little novelette, with mystery and suspense abound as Cowperthwait and his Texan manservant Nails McGroaty track Victoria through the underbelly of Victorian society in the hopes that they can restore the monarch before the clone gives herself away by eating more bugs in public or something like that. It sets the tone quite well with the freaky lab of Cowperthwait and the one man satire of Americans that is Nails McGroaty. While at times it gets muddled as to who exactly we're supposed to be rooting for, and occasionally what's going on, but by the time it gets to that point, you'll probably be having just enough fun that it won't matter nearly as much as it should. Overall, it's a strong beginning and a good pulp story.
   Which brings us to the second novella, or more of a really short novel, given the page length: Hottentots. In this, a champion of the creationist theory battles dinosaurs, Dagon the lord of the deep, and the titular figures to stop the apocalypse before it happens and save the world. To do so, he must obtain an artifact so mysterious that-- okay, I'm going to stop right there. After all, revealing what it is isn't any great loss or anything. They're fighting over a pickled vagina. With a caul over it. Said organ has mystical abilities and significance, but that still doesn't excuse or deny the fact that it is a fight, no, a battle over a pickled vagina with a caul over it. Between a creationist and dinosaurs. Honestly, it's stories like this that are the reason I love the book. It's linear, it moves at a decent pace, and the ending involves a sea battle against savages and dinosaurs. The whole business is so macabrely funny that I wish I could be making it up. I honestly wish I could write a book this insane, but sadly, it's already been written. The postlude that mentions "But little did he know, Charles Darwin was writing a book that would blow his theories out of the water..." in strangely ominous tones, and a final line that is the absurd capstone on a well of absurdity just take the cake. While it is slow to start off, Hottentots is a fantastic read.
   And that it is a fantastic read gives me pause and a little bit of sadness, because the last entry doesn't live up to the first two. Walt and Emily is about Walt Whitman and Emily Dickenson, casting them in a romantic story where they time travel and experience all kinds of emotion for each other, but it doesn't really get beyond the premise. There are wonderful moments, but they have nothing to do with the two characters involved, who are kinda the point. I mean, the book should turn on these two characters specifically, but instead it spends so much more time doing other things. Thankfully, this is the shortest of the three pieces, and the sense of play from earlier is still very much intact. So it definitely isn't all bad, just weak and kind of disappointing.
   To finish, though, there is a reason this book is part of my personal collection, rubbing space on the shelves with The Talisman, Pretty Monsters, and of course the all-time top five (or six, depending). It's because it's fun, involves ideas that no one would really broach until later (possibly because of Mr. DiFilippo), and overall is just so freaking cool that it would be a travesty to pass up. Hopefully, you'll enjoy this one as much as I did, and it's a fitting end to steampunk month.

Next Week: Now that normal service has resumed, I will pick up with the insane rantings of Mr. William S. Burroughs. That's right, friends and neighbors. We're doing Naked Lunch.

Maintenance for the site

2011-01-03T14:55:00.000-05:00

Due to some mishaps, a snowstorm, and the recent holiday season (where I was trying to match Howard "I never take a break ever" Tayler and power right the hell through), I have recently undergone severe schedule deviation and wound up behind in many things. This kind of happens occasionally, and I would like it to stop, but I'm not omnipotent. Normal service will resume either this Friday or next, with the review of The Steampunk Trilogy and then Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs after that. See you then!

Perdido Street Station

2010-12-29T01:28:00.001-05:00

I thoroughly apologize for the delay. I was snowed in this holiday season and left without my usual set of tools at my disposal. Now, without further ado...

"I remember when The Weaver changed its tastes, it took us three deaths before we worked out what it wanted."

- Mayor Rudgutter

Hello and I hope you all had a wonderful gift-giving winter festival type thing. I had an eventful one, possibly even an interesting one myself. But before I get too far off track here, let's away into the review and have at it, shall we?

In every author's body of work, there is always one work that stands as a "breakout". Neal Stephenson had two books published before it, but Snow Crash is the one that seems to stick in everyone's head like a bad pop song. Anthony Burgess is (and he is probably viciously angry about it in his chosen afterlife) best known for A Clockwork Orange despite writing literally hundreds of other books. Neil Gaiman very quietly inched himself along as a journalist, television writer, and short story writer before The Sandman blew him on to the world literary stage. And China Mieville has Perdido Street Station.

The book is a dense, grotesque work, choosing to show not just how one character or a set of characters are affected by the malevolent forces at work, but how the entire city of New Crobuzon is affected-- from the criminals and barflies on the low end of the rung all the way up to the corrupt political offices of Parliament The idea that the problem affects the whole city, as well as the ability to show it, is rare in works, and really marks Mieville's ability, as well as the scope of the novel. It's ambitious, particularly considering this was his second novel. And this book does have it all-- horror, insanity, a well-described environment, tight scenes, and a complex but entirely manageable political structure. So naturally, it has everything that would attract me to it.

Perdido Street Station begins with an injured birdman named Yagarhek approaching a rogue scientist named Isaac. Isaac does his work in the nebulous field known as "Crisis Physics", a field that seems to involve doing random mad sciencey things to inanimate objects to put them into danger, in the hope that they will release "crisis energy", a force that bends reality itself. Yagarhek has been wounded, you see, and his wings have been severed from his body for a crime he speaks of but that makes no sense, a crime called "Second-degree choice-theft". He commissions Isaac for quite a bit of money to produce new wings or a new flight engine for him to use. Isaac sets about working on the idea of flight, dissecting birds and insects, putting out a general call for anything that he can study, be it larval, pupal, or fully formed. An informant gets some criminals to do the legwork, and one of them brings Isaac a rather large caterpillar that only eats hallucinogenic drugs known as "dreamshit". A caterpillar with a strange and checkered history with certain secret departments inside the Parliament. And when it decides it's time to metamorphose, the city quickly spirals towards disaster, ensuring that no one fully escapes the chaos Isaac's little pet leaves in its wake.

What makes this book great is all the care and detail that goes into it. You're dropped into New Crobuzon not as the author feels it out, but as a fully-formed city. Things unfold gradually, but they have the feeling of being established since the word "go". The protagonists don't initiate things so much as simply speed them along with the monkey wrench of the escaped moth and their subsequent quest to figure out exactly what it is and what it's doing in the city. A city that's explored in more detail than necessary, even-- every corner of New Crobuzon is given almost a page of description, such as the disgusting Remade, a class of criminal whose crimes were so heinous that through a mixture of thaumaturgy and sorcery they have been turned into grotesque walking art exhibits, the tamest of which would be the child-murdering mother who had her infant's limbs grafted on to her face, or maybe the informant who had his mouth sealed over. The moths (yes, plural) and their completely alien design are another example of too much information, but all of it makes a complex and almost independently intelligent setting-- malevolent, given that pretty much everyone is corrupt, but complex and independent nonetheless.

In terms of morality, Perdido falls slightly towards the "Richard Kadrey" side of the sliding scale, though this is by no means a failing. The characters are flawed, but since we spend time with each of them (save for the freakish moths), we get to understand why they do the things they do. The heroes are a particularly good example of this, as while Isaac is a moral and ethical void that rivals other mad scientists of the genre, he realizes when things have gone too far and tries to halt the vicious mechanism he gave birth to in the first place. Isaac serves as a hero who slowly realizes what is going on around him is wrong, leading to several moments of genuine emotion and growth. The other characters, as well, start out in their initial stiff archetypes, as one would find in such books as Ghosts of Manhattan, but soon they grow and twist out of their initial roles and come into their own. By the end, you know who they are and why they do what they do, because their setting and their personal growth all inform what they have become. The final scenes show Isaac having grown but at the same time realizing that he, despite all his imaginings otherwise, is still human and still gets his share of bad fortune at the very end of things. While he triumphs, there is sacrifice.

I suppose if I had any bones to pick with the book, it would be that there are points where the book definitely drags. Yes, the politics are all important, yes we need to see everything because it's really about the city, but they should be quicker. Hit-and-run and get back to the plot at hand. The way they are now, they provide valuable and (here's that overused word again) detailed insight, but it's too much at times. Also, once again, Mieville lets his setting run away with the book, allowing the city to at times overwhelm its inhabitants. In the end, though, these small quibbles actually work in the book's favor for the most part.

Yes, in the end, this is a fantastic book, much better than Kraken, his later outing, which tried to do the same thing but in a modern-day setting. Mieville's world-building skills are unmatched and unrivaled, and his instincts are fantastic. With New Crobuzon, Mieville creates a disgusting but beautiful and intriguing world, and with his story full of creepy, arcane systems and mechanisms, he creates the perfect play for its stage. This is one worth buying and reading over and over again, a thoroughly enjoyable work that marks a fantastic creation from a fantastic author.

Next week: Steampunk Month comes to a close with a review of The Steampunk Trilogy by the remarkably strange Paul DiFilippo, and I do the best books (new and old) that I've read this year, possibly on video. Have a great New Year's!

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

2010-12-18T17:17:00.000-05:00

"Burton! This is all your fault! Do what you're supposed to!"

- Spring Heeled Jack

   When Barry Hughart was writing his classic novel Bridge of Birds, he says that he had "A lot of cool ideas, but when I took a look at it, the book wasn't really about anything. So I put it in a drawer...and then it dawned on me-- this book should be about love. So it was, and the rest of them were, too." And that's the sense I get from Mark Hodder's book The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack-- it should have been about something. Oh, granted, the plot is fun, and there are a lot of great ideas, but it doesn't seem to have any grounding, which is kind of important to any plot. And it's a shame. A quick glance at the other reviews on this site would tell you I really should have liked this book a lot more than I did. The author is well-read and knows what he's doing, the steampunk ideas he integrates are really original, with eugenics and magic being mixed in with all the rest, but the way he presented things fell short and definitely didn't do justice to any of the concepts he was introducing.
   I'll explain: The plot takes place in a Victorian England, but not the Victorian age we know so well. No, due to something happening, it has veered wildly off course. Eugenicists breed talking dogs and parakeets who relay messages, there are subway and elevated rail systems running throughout the country, and various other morally and ethically removed elements are becoming commonplace. Into this strange world walks our hero, Sir Richard Francis Burton, a man who has spent much time exploring abroad and has returned to debate his onetime friend, John Hanning Speke, over the source of the Nile, or at least is supposed to until Speke shoots himself in the face. Shortly after that, Burton is accosted by a man wearing springlike stilts on his feet, and shortly after that is offered the chance to become the King's Agent and figure out why London is being plagued by red-robed, spontaneously combusting werewolves. With him are poet and masochist Algernon Swinburne, the corpulent DI Trounce, and a rather bizarre cast of characters, almost all of whom are taken from British history. For some reason, the strange figure who assaulted Burton, a man nicknamed "Spring Heeled Jack", keeps talking about how the natural order of history is upset, and Burton must get to the bottom of all these mysteries to protect the crown and country.
   The problems with the book come in when the setting overwhelms the plot and characters. Mark Hodder has done himself a great disservice here, as in setting up his world as an alternate history to ours (the ultimate culprit is a time traveler who made one fatal mistake and is trying to reintegrate himself into existence) he has cast fictional versions of real people (with one major exception) to carry out his plots. Had this been an adventure story with characters completely separate from history, elements of it would not have been quite the same, but the setting would have been served better. Hodder obviously has a great deal of potential as a writer, but at the same time, his sense of play and his need to treat historical figures like his own personal action figures drags everything down. Burton is a fantastic protagonist, sharing his bloodline with such great fictional detectives as Sexton Blake and Sherlock Holmes with his mastery of disguise, mesmerism, and the sword; the problem lies in his being an actual person and thus being dwarfed by the setting at hand. Hodder wants to explore the future of this timeline and the people in it (Oscar Wilde shows up as a nine year old newsboy for almost no reason but to be there.), but seems to have less commitment to the plot. The book suffers for this in gross quantities, eventually toppling under the weight of its own cool ideas by the end (though the character of Isambard Kingdom Brunel as a massive steampunk robot octopus is actually kind of funny).
   That isn't to say that the plot isn't interesting. While the first few chapters start off slowly, the first and third sections of the book are intriguing and gripping. Watching Burton and Swinburne run down leads in a succession of pub crawls and fights is a lot of fun to watch, and while the action flags, they are brief moments between a lot of truly fantastic seqences. The Battle of Old Ford (which makes up all of the climax) is handled not from the overhead perspective Stephen Hunt favors, but from a more personal level as Burton and Trounce smash and slice their way through the ground troops of the villainous Mr. Belljar (an orangutan with a brain in a jar on his head in a nice nod to Murders of the Rue Morgue and simultaneously '50s horror) and his army of sinister Libertines. The titular Spring-Heeled Jack is handled with just the right amount of pathos in his sections, and they would be interesting on their own, but in the end they serve mainly to slow the story to a crawl right before the big climactic airship (you knew that was coming) battle with Mr. Belljar and the bloated, two-brained grotesquerie that is Charles Darwin. The ending pathos and moral choice made by Burton are emotionally tugging, and the book even shines through in some moments with some pitch black humor.
   I suppose the problem with the book is that Mark Hodder tried to write two books and smoosh them together...in one, Burton and Swinburne must stop an evil and insane cabal in an adventure reminiscient of Mark Frost's The List of 7. In another, a time traveler must stop his ancestor from assassinating Queen Victoria, or alternately find some way to reintegrate himself into the timeline. While the interesting central idea is what makes the book turn and gives it focus, the problem is that the two halves don't really fit together. One should be separate from the other entirely. Put together, both elements which would have been strong on their own are weaker until the final scene, where Burton (after being told he has to make a choice) decides "I like the world I live in now.", a moment both touching and intriguing in its own way. Better yet, perhaps he should have tried to find an illustrator and do a half-guidebook, half-story novel about the way his Victorian society is different from now, a la James Gurney's excellent (so excellent George Lucas repeatedly poached from it) Dinotopia. Instead, what we get is a work chock-full of ideas, but none of which connect.
   In the end, the book is definitely worth a read if you enjoy steampunk, or even just strange science fiction or fantasy literature. The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack isn't as good as, say, The Court of the Air or The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (which handled a similar story much better, though it had its own set of problems), but while I would caution one not to buy it, I do give it a mild recommendation. It's an okay book, though not good or great, and it makes me want to see more of Mark Hodder's work, though hopefully separating his writing from his history.

Next Week: In what seems to have become Steampunk Month (despite that slight sidestep for the Richard Kadrey novel), the more grotesque and insane side of the genre is shown with one of China Mieville's New Crobuzon novels, Perdido Street Station, or perhaps The Scar. See you then.

Kill The Dead

2010-12-10T22:53:00.001-05:00

"Imagine shoving a cattle prod up a rhino's ass, shouting "April Fool!", and hoping the rhino thinks it's funny. That's about how much fun it is hunting a vampire."

- James Stark

   Over the past two years, I've had a ton of respect for Richard Kadrey. He's worked with bizarro authors, crafted noir stories that really feel like they're borne out of the mean, gritty streets they take place on, wrote some pretty cool cyberpunk, done "fetishistic photography" (his words) on the side, and he dragged the urban fantasy genre kicking and screaming back to its initial roots in shades-of-grey morality and a world where everything isn't romantic and fraught with relationship drama. Sandman Slim, as some may remember, is a favorite book of mine, for the reason that it moves quickly, slams into its intended climax with the grace and energy of a freight train helmed by John Woo himself. Butcher Bird is an equally awesome novel, one that takes the "one last heist" concept and sets it in a grotesque mishmash of worlds and ends in a literal trip through Hell. Kill The Dead tries to be a worthy successor to that legacy and...isn't.
   Kadrey still blows the other mooks out of the water when it comes to urban fantasy detective fiction, but Kill The Dead finds James Stark much in the same straits one finds the novel: Without a purpose, drifting from familiar haunt to familiar haunt, playing at working for the Golden Vigil, a bunch of overarmed and underinformed Homeland Security dicks whose sole purpose seems to be to play right-wing strawmen. Things get off to a cracking start with Stark taking down a pod of teenage vampires, including a blond schoolgirl with a flamethrower. This gives him a small amount of comfort, because Homeland Security decides to take taxes and Social Security out of his paycheck, and he goes back home, where his former friend and onetime enemy Kasabian tells him that Lucifer has a job for him. Stark accepts, and becomes Lucifer's bodyguard while the Prince of Darkness tries to get his biopic made. But with the streets filling with zombies, the vengeful angel Aelita after him, and members of the magical underground vanishing left and right, Stark will have a lot to contend with if he ever wants to collect his next paycheck.
   I suppose the problem with the novel is simply that it picks up almost directly where the last one left off. Mason is still down but not out, Aelita is still calling Stark a freak of nature, Ghost-Alice is still haunting Stark, and the whole thing has a downbeat tone. This isn't a sequel, this is someone writing the buildup to a sequel. Stark's renewed sense of purpose doesn't kick in until the last third or so, and the whole book ends on a cliffhanger, so not even that went anywhere. While there are some cool fight scenes, including Stark and a Czech porn star ripping zombies limb for limb, the book's momentum is choppy. No longer do we have the smooth (if formulaic) transitions between fight scenes and Stark adjusting to the world that moved on while he was stuck in Hell...no, now we have a bunch of uptight magic Angelenos hanging around Lucifer while Stark tries and fails to make sense of an electronic cigarette. Allegra, the uninitiated alchemist from the first book, is easily the best thing about it, and a book about her, written in sort of a "this is House with magic and with absolutely none of the slimy residue Olivia Wilde leaves on everything she touches" way probably would have worked better for this transitional material, leaving the writer with only the problem of transitioning back to Stark for the big nasty fight scenes.
   The characters are still strong, though...Lucifer comes through as some kind of pretty-boy, but one that's well able to handle himself, especially as seen when he takes down a hit squad with two massive, flaming swords. That's right, he's so special he gets two gladii instead of one. Allegra has matured nicely, as have Kinski and Carlos the bartender. And so has Stark. Which makes me pause. Yes, of course Stark should mature. That's the whole point. But Stark is an anachronism, a leather jacket-wearing bastard in a century of touchy-feely types who know they need him, they must trust him, because he's the man separating them from the dark. And I understand that his scars have to heal up because there needs to be that element of risk to the whole thing, but the direction Stark is going...it doesn't feel like Stark. This isn't the man who told the head of the Sub Rosa to fuck themselves, this is that man plus thirty years.
   And finally, why invalidate plot points as soon as they're brought up? If Stark is part angel, and that's why he heals from whenever someone tries to kill him, why, exactly, does that stop happening now? If the Vigil has a supernatural terrorist list, why haven't they acted on it until now? All of these questions pop up suddenly to create false and inflated tension in the work. While the fight scenes are still crisp, they no longer function as well. While the descriptions and the tough talking are cool, they all seem rather hollow. In the end, Stark walks off to Donut Universe once again, but it doesn't seem as right or as okay.
   In the end, I hope Mr. Kadrey writes another Sandman Slim book, one that helps tie this one up. It's a good transitional sequel, but it's nowhere near the end the series deserves, or even a complete book. It's a mess, a strange half a book that runs on too long, and nowhere near as up to par as the first one. It's still head and shoulders above the other fantasy crime novels of the genre, but for a man who writes as god damn flawless as Richard Kadrey has in the past, it's a step down and a definite disappointment.

Next Week, we return to steampunk with The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack by Mark Hodder.

The Automated Alice

2010-12-10T02:42:00.001-05:00

"And until the end of her days, Alice was never sure whether she was the real Alice..."

- Jeff Noon

   The first time I read a Jeff Noon book, it was how it should have been-- out of the blue. He writes in a trippy, stream of consciousness style that seems to discard both conventions and even the narrative tricks of his predecessors. What he writes are books of style and very strange substance that occurs out of that. He "remixes" his short stories as odd poems, writes in a made-up language peppered with infodumps disguised as press releases, and once wrote a novel where one of the main plot points boiled down to "Numbers have sex for the benefit of rogue mathematicians". In short, where there is weird, Jeff Noon only makes his first port of call.

This is the man who wrote a "trequel" (his own name for the third book in a series) to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I'll just let that sink in for a moment.

Okay, back to live action.

   The story begins with Alice trying to finish her jigsaw of the London Zoo as her Great Aunt Ermintrude calls for her so the two of them can start a lesson on the usage of the ellipse. Due to Alice's naturally odd nature and impulsiveness, she gives in to an urge to let her aunt and uncle's parrot, Whippoorwill out of his cage. Whippoorwill then flies around the room, despite Alice's best efforts to get him back in, and into the grandfather clock, where he vanishes out of sight. Alice, desperate to recapture him before her Great Aunt can find out, follows him through the workings of the clock, emerging in a "computermite mound" in far-future Manchester. From there, she embarks on a rather odd journey to get home by two o'clock in her own time, find all the missing pieces of her London Zoo jigsaw puzzle, and capture the troublesome parrot. But future Manchester is a terrible place, filled with creatures like the "Civil Serpents", snakes who believe in absolute order and bureaucracy, and a race of people affected by a disease known as "Newmonia" that scrambles their genetic code and makes them anthropomorphic. Plaguing the city is someone known as the "Jigsaw Murderer", who is killing people by reorganizing their parts in the wrong ways. Before her journey is over, Alice will have been swallowed by a snake, solved the murder, and met a robot exactly like her, as well as finding out the true use for an ellipsis.
   I can't really apply my usual method to this one. While I could talk about the characters, they're little more than concepts used-- the two main characters are Alice and a robot statue of Alice named Celia. The rest is a landscape of puns, both visual and textual, and the feel of the book is right along with the original source material. Noon definitely knows what he's doing, and his faithfulness towards Lewis Carroll and his work-- both historically and in a literary sense. Overall, there is a sense of fun that permeates the novel. Noon had fun writing this and playing with the various aspects of modern society: Bureaucracy, entertainment, and even modern art and music are poked fun of in a manner of ways, from director "Quentin Tarantula" to the overly-saccharine nature of the kiddie "lantern shows".
   What really makes the book what it is, though, is the sense that you're reading another Alice book. The illustrations look like they've been cribbed from John Tenniel, the illustrator for the actual Alice In Wonderland books, and even the writing, when Noon decides to leave the fourth wall intact, follows the stilted but very pleasant prose. And what really pushes things over the edge is when it starts to slip. You see, Automated Alice plays fast and loose with even its own reality. At times, despite the pleasant prose, things happen oddly. For example, why is it Alice knows who Charles Dodgson, the mathematician and creator of her books, is? And furthermore, is she dead, trapped in unreality, or some odd combination of those things? When Noon really starts to explore all the aspects of Alice and Alice's reality, he really proves he's definitely done the research into the character. After all, this is a book about Alice, in all her various forms (yes, even automated), and as much about how the character is and came to be as it is about what goes on in the story.
   The only problem is that Noon has too much fun. As in way too much. Be it his ponderings on his place as the author (he shows up as a character), his "or is it?" ending, the metafictional way he goes about things, or the oh aren't I so clever jabs at quantum physics and the like. Eventually, it just gets kind of annoying, though never terribly so. The action also seems beside the point given the metafictional nature of the work, though given last week's entry, the fact that it occurs organically from the story, rather than occurring in spite of the story is a massive plus. Personally, I think the metafiction doesn't distract too much, but the whole business is a little too silly, a little too tongue-in-cheek. It's like an essay couched in the terms of a narrative story or something. Furthermore, the connections to other books are a little too obvious and silly at some points, referencing things from other books he wrote. They kind of get in the way.
   But without these touches, or even if you manage to look at the work as a fiction story instead of an exploration of reality, the book is fantastic. It's a fun little story that manages to stay true to its own roots, and at the same time bring Jeff Noon's own psychotic touches and weirdness overload to the forefront. It's well worth a read, and I recommend it wholeheartedly, even if I'm not quite able to discuss the plot elements without getting into the whole "fourth-wall" nature of the book. It's worth reading, especially if you enjoy surrealism and the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. Definitely give this one a look.

Tomorrow: The return of the Monster Who Hunts Monsters, James Stark, in Richard Kadrey's Kill The Dead.

Ghosts of Manhattan

2010-12-08T23:12:00.003-05:00

So, due to two back-to-back spontaneous vacations, this blog wound up on hiatus for too damn long. I will be posting three reviews in the next few days. Hope you enjoy and sorry I kept things in suspense.

"He was going for a gun. Today...today we do it your way."

- Detective Donovan

   I hate it when a reviewer starts out a dissenting review with "I tried to like this book, I really did." It's been used sincerely, and I respect people who can, but it's also one of those things people use on Amazon (which has a level of intelligent discourse like the infinitely more infamous XBOX Live only with people reviewing books instead of playing Halo and Battlefield) when they want to say "Hey, I'm on your side, so take this bad review of a book seriously!" along with "I've been a fan of (Insert genre/author here), but this is..." and trashing the book.
   The problem being, I really should like Ghosts of Manhattan. It's a superhero story set in a steampunk version of the pulp era. There really isn't another alley that one could say was mine...I'm a huge fan of steampunk, Boardwalk Empire, The Shadow, and detective stories. On top of that, George Mann is a widely acclaimed author whose book The Affinity Bridge is considered a classic of the genre. But Ghosts of Manhattan, to put it mildly, is ridiculous crap. And with a declaration like that, I'm prepared to back it up. So, without any further ado, let's get to it.
   Ghosts of Manhattan is the story of a steam-powered version of Manhattan-- Cars have funnels on them, airships dot the skies, and holographic advertisements are common. Think a futuristic city, but done completely with retro overtones. In this city, the main antagonist is a crimeboss known only as The Roman, a man who inexplicably seems to do a decent share of his own dirty work and leaves a pair of denarii on the victims' eyes as a calling card. His right hand man, Gideon, holds sway over New York City with a supercharged (we know this because it has three funnels on it. Three!) car, an army of moss golems, and a custom-made pistol. Opposing him are the one honest cop in the city, a lounge singer with a secret (of course), and the hero known as "The Ghost", a technological genius and former war vet. Also embroiled in the mess is Gabriel Cross, a wealthy playboy and you can see where this is going from there. The Roman turns out to be a threat to all existence with some unsettling ties to otherworldly powers (of course), and The Ghost, the lounge singer, and the Honest Cop(tm) must band together against the forces of darkness to save the city and perhaps the world (of course).
   I suppose the first problem with this Lovecraftian abomination of a book is that it insults the reader's intelligence. To give an example, let's start with the character of The Ghost. Here we have someone like Bruce Wayne, with one difference: Everyone knows Bruce Wayne is Batman. People who haven't even seen or heard much about Batman know that Bruce Wayne is Batman. It goes without saying. That's part of writing about superheroes-- you let the reader in on the game early and then you let them tag along to interesting places after that.
   So why the hell would George Mann, in creating a Batman-style character, want to try and mislead everyone into thinking that the billionaire playboy war vet isn't the masked superhero raising hell and shooting lethal explosive darts into mobsters' heads? I mean, he could be trying to be original, but come on-- when there's a superhero and there's a billionaire playboy with some questionable nighttime activities, everyone knows the score. No, I believe that George Mann just thinks his entire readership is dumber than primordial syrup and is willing to believe that they're different people until the big reveal comes up to shock and surprise them. In this regard, Mann is like a magician who very obviously palms a coin and then tries to explain it as magic when he pretends (with an equally obvious motion) to pull it out of someone's ear.
   Constant readers (few of you that there are) might remember in this review, I stated that steampunk was

"...a pretty easy job: Just throw around some robots with boilers and some higher technology, and suddenly, boom. Instant steampunk book. Bonus points if you use the word "airship" twice in the same chapter."

No one should have any problem with this, normally. After all, it's kind of how the genre works. Nothing wrong with the genre working, right? Well, it's a little harder than I originally outlined. You see, the setpieces and props have to actually connect to the story, not exist in spite of it. It's insulting to write a story with a cool setting and then barely use the setting in places here and there. Yes, the Ghost uses a flechette gun, jet boots, and some pretty cool goggles, and the "holotubes" are a nice touch, but everyone else uses a regular ol' gun, and even the cars are fairly par for everything, save Gideon's. In other words, Mann takes my earlier description of steampunk writing and absuses it like a redheaded stepchild to such a degree that once again, it's like he's insulting the audience. That sort of lazy, dishonest behaviour simply won't cut it. No author should ever treat his readers like this.
   The characterization is terrible, too. Those archetypes I mentioned earlier? Yeah, that's the whole character for each of those. It's like the writer went through a list of every possible trope they could and took the basest possible meaning for each. (The links, in order, are the hero of the piece, the lounge singer girlfriend (or at least her secret), the honest cop (tm), Gideon, and The Roman) What makes it worse is that the hero is named Gabriel Cross, and one of the villains is Gideon Reece, which leads to some confusion, given the biblical names that begin with G and the fact that their first names are mentioned far more than their last names. These are not interesting people, or even fully-formed characters. They are stand-up carboard cutouts that move and talk vaguely like people. They are fucking pod people. This is not what an author does. This is what a lazy mouth-breather with a book to write does.
   Without any characterization, the plot can boil down to "people run around a city, doing random crap and hoping it makes sense to anyone". There's even a biplane chase scene in the final third of the novel. The idiot screwed up a biplane chase. When it happened, I had to stop and wonder "Huh. What the hell is this doing in here? It's screwing up the book." I then went on to wonder exactly why a biplane chase had materialized out of thin air, instead of occurring organically in the novel itself. I never wonder what an action sequence is doing in a book. That's part of what I like about books-- the action sequences. Those nervous moments between characters and how they react to things.
   And speaking of missed action sequences, the climax is, pardon my language, shit. It is the syphilis-infected needles on a junk heap of disgusting offal that I refuse to get into the specifics of in such a classy and respectable establishment as this blog. The massive doomsday portal had a gigantic "OFF" switch all the heroes seem to miss until after the big world-destroying creature was summoned, the love interest is sacrificed for no reason other than she said so earlier and the plot wants to make her carry through with it, and the villain who has been set up for the better part of two hundred pages is offed from behind. By a single bullet to the head. After previously wiping the floor with Our Hero. That shouldn't happen. Once again, it's the mark of a lazy author when the villain's henchman is given a much bigger (by an exponential magnitude) sendoff than anyone in the book and the head villain is given a bullet in the head in the basement. That there was a massive and horrifying event before it does not clear this of an anticlimax.
   I suppose there are good things here and there...the ideas presented are interesting, and this had the potential to be a really cool steampunk superhero pulp kinda story. If it wasn't lazy, insulting, and not worth the paper that it was printed on. And some day I will find George Mann, and after I quiet the urge to smash in his face and sensitive private areas for writing such offal, I will buy him a drink and explain to him exactly how offended I am by his travesty of a novel, and how he, long considered an author of note and merit in the field, has let me down. Then I will probably storm off.
   For those of you who decided to skip the large reams of scathing invective and insight, I did not like this book. In fact, I do not even I do not recommend it to anyone, nor would I ever. Avoid it at all costs. That this even was published by a decent fantasy book outlet makes me weep for the publishing industry and apprehensive about what quality books we are getting in the age of ebooks, self publishing, and the like. It's boring, insulting, forced, and none of it makes the slightest bit of sense. There's a plot in there, but not one anyone would feel particularly obligated to follow. Please, please avoid this book. For my sake if not for yours.

Tomorrow: We continue in the vein of strange worlds and stranger technology with Jeff Noon's The Automated Alice, which is better than this, I promise you.
Friday: A return to Richard Kadrey's L.A. Antihero Stark with Kill The Dead
Next Week: We return to normal schedule with The Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack.

Happy Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T13:56:00.000-05:00

I am visiting friends this weekend, so the update may not come exactly this weekend. Go enjoy time with your families and whatnot. I'll probably have it up when you're back.

Caius.

Life's Lottery

2010-11-19T16:45:00.001-05:00

"Go to 0"

"And So On"

- The Narrator

I have no idea how I found this book. Seriously. I mean, I've always been a fan of Kim Newman, as he seems to be one of the few (very few) people to criticize horror movies and not have his head wedged firmly in a rather unpleasant orifice. He also did vampires in a very chilling, blackly comic style with his Anno Dracula novels, which essentially tell of a world where vampires rule everything and humans (both sides being a mixture of fictional, historical, and classic characters) either live as the oppressed masses, or are put into prison camps. I've also been a huge fan of Choose Your Own Adventure books, having played them throughout my childhood and even into high school. So I suppose it was only a matter of time, but somehow, this one just fell into my lap and I immediately ordered it off of Amazon. It took me a little while to find it, because I don't think it was released over here (could be wrong about that one) and it's definitely out of print. What pisses me off about that is that there's an incredible market for adult Choose Your Own Adventures in the US, where we kind of look on that sort of thing with rose-colored nostalgia, and a bunch of publishers said "mmmnope, this'll never sell."

So yes. Life's Lottery is a Choose Your Own Adventure book for adults, divided into three hundred separate sections. In it, you drop into the head of one Keith Marion. Keith is a fairly average person. He does have a love of pirates and gets better grades in school, but other than that, he's fairly normal. You play through his life several times, making choices each time, always the same way-- in The Man From UNCLE, a classic spy series, does he prefer Ilya Kuryakin, or Napoleon Solo? It's this choice that spins off wildly, from kidnapping schemes to becoming a punk rock record producer, to fighting a large variety of enemies, from body snatchers to things that are better left unsaid and discovered.

Except...except there are things that keep popping up. Little, offhand things. Who is Derek Leech, for instance, and why does it seem like he owns everything? What's with section number eight and why is it so ominous? And what's with all the spiders? And then there are the sections you can't get to when "playing" the book "properly". Like the section where two doctors talk about Keith having some kind of syndrome (Note: This isn't a spoiler, this is something you can discover fairly early on...in fact, the book tells you the section is there).

Life's Lottery is exactly as it appears to be, but on another level, it's not. What it is and what you discover will be entirely up to you...if you decide to read the book beginning to end, you'll have just as interesting time, though the narrator seems to chide you for taking that path...he chides you for a lot of things, actually, as if he has a vested interest in keeping you playing the book a certain way. And, since the narrator is the one relaying all the events to you, everything kind of takes on a nice, chummy flavor. After all, it's in the narrator's best interest to keep you playing. He's got his own reasons and means for doing so, and occasionally will direct you away from areas he'd rather you not be. The narrative voice is really what carries the piece, as it kind of has to. Keith doesn't say very much, aside from those times where you have to choose something for him to say, and the other characters, while well fleshed out (after all, they stay with you from childhood to adulthood), tend to be shadowy-- they're merely other people in Keith's life. Some of them will stay, others will not.

The other thing that makes the novel really good is the sense that there is always something more to discover. I've "played" through it several times, once reading the alternate sections, and it's the sense of discovery. You play through it once, you get one possible set of paths. That's fine. You play through again, you get different paths, and different branches. After all, there are three hundred sections, each with their own endings. Only two, however, let you "win". The others say things like "And So On", or my favorite, the one that signals every death you may encounter: "Go to 0." On the way to any number of these paths, the realities of Derek Leech, the mysterious spiders, and even the possibility that you may be playing these lives out simultaneously, with different names taking the place of different versions of you.

I will say this book is not for everyone. Some sequences drag just a little, and others tend to leave you in weird places. You may find the book's secrets distracting, or stupid, and wonder "why did I get through all those pages just to have a reveal like that?" It's experimental to a certain degree, in that every story in it is part of a larger story that you can either take or leave, depending on your view, so if you don't enjoy experimental books, or books that don't have a purely narrative thread, I wouldn't completely recommend it. It's also not very substantial at first glance. Keith isn't exactly a main character that pops off the page, as you're supposed to fill in the blanks. The stories are nice, but feel a little on the light side sometimes, too.

But in the end, the book is a whole load of fun. Unlike many books of its kind, it is one you can come back to again and again...maybe you'll discover something different as you read and re-read it, maybe you'll just enjoy it for being a Choose Your Own Adventure book that takes a decidedly odd direction with its concept. Either way, you should find a way to get it and read it, because I guarantee you will never find any other book like it on earth. It's imaginative, inventive, and yes, a little twisted and macabre, and the ride is well worth it.

And So On.

Next Week: A return to the wild world of Steampunk with George Mann's Ghosts of Manhattan.

As an added bonus: Tom Waits!

2010-11-13T00:20:00.000-05:00

This is the song that acts as a sort of leitmotif in Sandman Slim, and works as a good tone-setter for the book's film-noir tone. So I thought I'd put it up as a nice addition to the review. The video isn't mine, but I like it.

Sandman Slim

2010-11-13T00:13:00.002-05:00

"L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crack off of Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and the illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you, then the Japanese tentacle porn will. New York has short con cannibals and sewer gators. Chicago is all snowbound yetis and the ghosts of a million angry steers with horns like jackhammers. Texas is criscrossed with ghost railroads that kidnap demon-possessed Lolitas to play strip Russian roulette with six shells in the chamber. L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy. There are more surveillance cameras and razor wire here than around the Pope. L.A. is one traffic jam away from going completely Hiroshima."

- James Stark

   I have a secret. Or maybe it isn't. Either way, I always wanted to grow up to be Philip Marlowe. Or not even Marlowe, but just someone with that same hard-boiled attitude and dedication to what is right at any costs. Spade, you see, would get the job done. Marlowe would do the right thing, even if it meant the job went to crap. He rarely ever got the girl, the money, or anything more than beat senseless. But things were done right. He survived, he fought, and he always wound up doing the right thing. It was someone I could look up to when I was younger. So when something has that distinct, gritty film-noir flavor, it's already got me hooked. This has led me from good things, like Garrett and Nightside to bad things, like some of the more moronic cyberpunk novels, to weird things, like Crooked Little Vein.
   At the same time, I've always had a love of urban fantasy, starting with the book Dark Cities Underground. Urban fantasy seemed darker, somehow, and nastier...more concrete. Interestingly, I seem to have sidestepped most of the modern connotations of urban fantasy, and gone more for the weird ones. And believe me, or maybe just believe the quote above the text of this review, this is a weird one indeed.
   Sandman Slim begins with James Stark, the antihero and our protagonist, being spat out of Hell and into a garbage pile. He immediately punches out a man described as a "Brad Pitt lookalike" and grabs his clothes and stun gun. After being stuck in Hell for almost a decade, he's managed to escape and is looking very hard for the people who sent him there in the first place. Within short order, he clears out a bar full of skinheads, finds one of the mages who got him dragged off to Hell, endures several gunshots to the chest, and slices his head off (It's okay, he survives). Stark wastes no time telling everyone he's back home with large, explodey signals, drawing the attention of more than just the mages he's come to kill. Enemies and friends begin charging out of the woodwork as it turns out that Stark's vengeance may not just satisfy his urge for blood, but success may mean saving the world itself. But to finish things off, Stark will have to contend with a Homeland Security-funded angel, satanist skinheads, a sadistic race of dead celestials known as the Kissi, and his archnemesis, the charismatic Mason.
   What I like most about the book is the feel. It's a good read, but it's a very uncompromising one. Stark is very much on the darker side of the heroic scale: a brutal, caustic man who will finish his quest at any cost, and damn the implications and results. In one of two large, explosive setpieces, Stark destroys a block of Los Angeles fighting with his adversary, Parker. He does not apologize for this act, nor does he seem to feel any regret or remorse, other than letting Parker get away more or less intact. Where most books would be engulfed by their secondary elements (such as romance or fantasy lore subplots) or try to make their hero seem good despite it all, Slim goes the opposite route. Stark isn't any better than the denizens of LA, but his motives are a little more pure. He's a monster, but he's needed because the monsters he fights and kills are ten times worse. In short, Kadrey has taken the crime fiction idea of an antihero back to its roots-- a criminal who does the right thing to further his own motives, rather than to further the greater good.
   Another element I like is the way Kadrey sets up his scenes and characters. He has a good grasp of the dialogue, from the tough-guy phrases snarled by the hardened Stark to the down-home platitudes of the Homeland Security chief. He also has a good grasp of set pieces. The climactic battle in a rather twisted specialty nightclub feels like it could have been ripped straight from John Woo, with its gunplay and theatrics. The broad-daylight battle with Parker could have easily fit in a Michael Bay film, if Michael Bay had any sense of taste whatsoever.
   If you look at Kadrey's influences and references, you find anime, B movies, the music of Tom Waits, film noir, and gritty crime fiction-- none of which really adapts to a literary style (save the latter), but it all fits together. The images it evokes keep the book moving and keep hitting the right emotional and energetic notes. The references also add a certain amount of cinematic quality to it-- films are more likely to reference topics as vast as anime, Richard Stark's Parker novels, the memoirs of Vidocq, and a great many others, but Kadrey does them effortlessly, without even drawing attention to them.
   Another strength the book has is the supporting cast. Stark interacts with a staggering variety of characters, from an enigmatic antiques dealer named Mr. Muninn who seems to know everything about everyone to a hipster girl who works in Stark's video store and wants to learn how to do magic. Each one has their own voice and their own personality, and aside from some of the "holy warriors", none of them blend together. Add to this the meticulous descriptions, and the book takes on an interesting cast-- you can actually see things happening, rather than simply reading and imagining. It's the cinematic quality that makes the characters "pop out" from the page, and what keeps the book moving along at a breakneck pace.
   If there are any weaknesses to the book, they would be Stark's personality. He is definitely a tortured man, and you definitely get a sense of that, but it gets to be a bit much when he's a prick even to his friends and those who help him. Sometimes, with people like the angel Alita, this results in amusing exchanges, but one begins to wonder exactly why he's telling his good friend Vidocq to fuck right off? It makes the book as a whole turn away from Stark as a hero and wonder if he didn't deserve to be dragged into Hell, even if he was a good person before he was yanked off and his girlfriend died.
   But in the end, despite the flaws of its main character, it is a fantastic book. It takes urban fantasy back to what it was originally-- taking the fairytales, myths, and legends of our time and melding them with the dark, modern setting. It involves a chase scene through Hell, womanizing alchemists, gruesome villains, and a cameo from Satan in which he rifles through a collection of movies on "the Devil", searching for something to steal and watch at home for entertainment. I recommend this book because it's a fantastic read from start to finish (the fact that it pushes all my buttons aside), because it's fun, and because Richard Kadrey takes the genre where everyone else holds back, flinches, and goes "No, no, that's not right." It's an action movie, a payback thriller, and a dark fantasy all rolled into one, it's original, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Next Week: Life's Lottery by Kim Newman, or, if either of my interlibrary loans come through, Kill The Dead  by Richard Kadrey (the sequel to this week's book), or Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat.

State of the Blog

2010-11-09T03:57:00.001-05:00

    Don't worry, this isn't another leave of absence thing. I think I should just be as open with all of you as I should be, as you're the regular readers of this thing, you've stuck with me for almost four months now, and I figure when I make a change, you deserve an explanation and have the right to comment directly to the changes I make with things.
   That said: I'm going to be switching the schedule, though. I will not be reading Eight Skilled Gentlemen. I promised you guys I would finish the books I review, and let's face it, I just can't finish this one. The other thing is that Master Li is beginning to feel done to death for me, just a little, and what we'd be headed for if I continued is something that a) I wouldn't want to write, and more importantly, b) you wouldn't want to read.
   So instead, our schedule will pick up this week with something a little different. I'm debating whether to go with the urban fantasy noir novel Sandman Slim, or several of the other things I have clustered around the room with bookmarks in them. Rest assured, there will be a review this week. I just can't bring myself to batter through a third Barry Hughart book.

-Caius

The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox Part Two: The Story of the Stone

2010-11-05T15:30:00.000-04:00

"Now let's take a look at reality. Little Hong Wong is indeed taken in hand by the educational establishment and force-fed languages, calligraphy, poetry...following which he's ready to start learning something--mathematics, for example...He passes his examinations and is ready for his first official appointment, and then what happens?"

"A superior who inherited the job from his uncle rams a barge pole up his ass."

"Good boy...Ox, at an early age, a Chinese genius gazes at the path that lies ahead and reaches for the wine jar. Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccupped their way into history?"

- Master Li and Number Ten Ox, respectively

     I have a mild problem with sequels to books like this. I suppose the problem started with Harry Potter, weirdly enough, a series I have a mild amount of respect for. The first book set things up with such a sense of wonder and exploration that it was like stepping into a new world and viewing everything for the first time. It felt, honestly, like a vacation. You know, how you go somewhere and stay in a nice hotel, and you absolutely love every moment of being in the city or the small town or whatever, and you think you could stay there forever. To continue the comparison, though, the sequels are the moment you start trying to live somewhere and realize that this has become where you live, and all the things you found so fascinating are now terribly, terribly commonplace. So you have to find new things to do and experience, while all the while the things you used to find so cool become routine.
   Master Li and Number Ten Ox is no exception to the rule. Li's slight flaw is still the same, though Ox is less innocent. It appears that in between Bridge of Birds and The Story of the Stone, Number Ten Ox has become more streetwise and mature in his ways, and less innocent. He's writing his memoirs, which Master Li complains about for making him look "violent and unscrupulous, which is only true when there's a need for it." The story proper opens as Ox casually observes an assassination attempt in our heroes' favorite drinking establishment, the Worst Wineshop in China (yes, the one from Bridge of Birds), located in the Alley of Flies (guess what the wine's secret ingredient is?). From there, they are called to investigate a curious forgery and murder case that quickly turns into an insane quest involving a divine inkstone, a long-dead prince, several folk and fairy tales, and a mushroom-fueled trip to Hell. On their quest, they are accompanied by a concubine and a sound manipulator somehow interlinked with each other in a way that's best left unexplained, who have their own part to play in the mess.
   But it doesn't feel as natural or tight as in Bridge of Birds. Ox is less the innocent fool, which is a bit of a relief, but at the same time, Li feels scaled back from the man who would easily slice off a thug's ear in a bar dispute. There's better by-play, but Ox sometimes feels relegated to a position of observer where in Bridge he observed, but he had just as many insights that helped move the plot along. The plot seems like it's starting to become formulaic, which is bound to happen, but shouldn't in such a way that your readers can guess a few of the minor plot twists because you used them in previous books. The locations have been scaled down from the country-spanning plot of the first book, but some elements seem scattershot. It's as if Hughart felt like writing another book, but didn't have his heart and soul invested in it the way he did the first one. It's actually kinda sad in a sense. The whole thing ends in an anticlimax that barely reaches the highs of the first book, and the big reveals aren't so much reveals as casual observations, as if one trips over gods, monsters, and long-dead handmaidens several times a day.
   Which is not to say that there aren't lovely points in the book. The trip to hell is a high point, as is Master Li petitioning the Celestials to appoint a new goddess of prostitutes, and the bit on the eating habits of monks (for self-mortification). The darker tone of story and the air of desperation as the Neo-Confucianists (a group much like conservatives, but with classical philosophy degrees) have taken power and appointed an Imperial Censor. Master Li's class of people, it would appear, are on their way out where before they were a fixture in the opulent place that is the Middle Kingdom. And the dialogue flies fast and furious as ever, though Master Li and Ox seem a little more cynical than in their previous outing.
   I suppose my reaction might be mainly to the tone, but it just didn't seem as right to me as Bridge of Birds was. That the villain built up for most of the book was defeated (and that's not a spoiler...there's a third book here, so the heroes have to win in some capacity) in such a handwaved manner that it almost felt rushed. and then the archvillain was presented in too affable a manner for the final confrontation to have any heft. When the loose ends started to get tied up, I was more glad that things were coming to any kind of conclusion. That shouldn't happen, particularly in a book written by someone like Barry Hughart.
   In the end, I'm not as incensed or angry with the book as I am disappointed. It started out rather strong, sort of like a Chinoiserie version of The Name of the Rose, or a fantasy-historical murder mystery. It ended like a B movie where they ran out of budget halfway through. The whole thing was a solid book, and I admit, if I'd written Bridge of Birds, I'd have an almost impossible act to follow. But solid doesn't cut it when the narrative shows so many flaws, and I can't forgive or give this a pass for so many. It's worth a read if you want to revisit the world of Li Kao and Lu "Number Ten Ox" Yu, but not worthy of a solid place in the series. I have hopes for the third one, though. With certain notable exceptions like Star Wars (Empire, not Attack of the Clones) and Nightside, second volumes usually suck.

Next Week: The series concludes with The Eight Skilled Gentlemen.

The Geek Rage Halloween Special!

2010-11-01T14:47:00.001-04:00

So it's finally here. I read, with dubious quality, three of my favorite freaky stories aloud for you, the readers of this blog, with criticism and comments on each one. I have tried to keep the comments to a minimum, but I kind of have a low fast speaking style and love to talk. In any case, hope you enjoy the readings, if not the presentation. I'm still new to the seamy underworld of video, and hopefully I'll catch up with it someday. These were uploaded in single takes (except for one instance where I was interrupted by a phone, and also one instance where I invited someone in to listen to the story and that's an obvious one) In any case:

Part One: "Cool Air" by HP Lovecraft (from Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of HP Lovecraft)

Part Two: "The Specialist's Hat" by Kelly Link (from Pretty Monsters)

Part Three (and our grand finale): "20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill (from 20th Century Ghosts)

In which there is a postponement

2010-10-27T03:31:00.000-04:00

In a move many who know me will find startling, I have decided not to take my laptop to Philadelphia in the interest of trying to interact with the people I'm there to see a bit more. This means that there will be a slight postponement with the review, and possibly a single-day delay to the Halloween readings. Or I might put them up early. Either way, the schedule's a little shaky right now, as it always seems to be when real life tends to intervene. I will be thinking of my readers and friends fondly, though.

Also, as a note on the videos: To aid with the process of putting them up and having them here, I have decided to use the Blip hosting service, as the terms of service and length requirements seemed a little lighter. I apologize for any problems with the videos and also if there are any things like ads or popups that result from them.

-- Caius.

The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox Part One: Bridge of Birds

2010-10-22T19:27:00.000-04:00

"My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao and I have a slight flaw in my character. This is my esteemed client, Number Ten Ox, who is about to hit you over the head with a blunt object."

- Master Li

Once every so often in your life, you come across a book that instantly makes it into your all-time favorites. A book where you can get lost in it, that makes you feel for the characters in it, and that you can hold up as unforgettable and instantly recognizable. In short, once every so often in your life, you come across what can only be described as a favorite book. Bridge of Birds is that for me, and I'll gladly put it in the pantheon along with all the rest. It worked overtime to make me feel good, to give me that world that easily sucked me in and didn't let go until the last lines. This is, for me, now one of my favorite books.

I don't even know how I came across this one. I think I was looking on Wikipedia for Kaja Foglio (Wife of Phil Foglio and co-creator of Girl Genius) to explain something for my then-girlfriend. In any case, through a random series of link dives, I stumbled upon The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox. Instantly I was intrigued, and after a bit of digging, came up with an Amazon link to a n omnibus edition of the books that cost far more than I would ever be willing to pay ($125)*. Luckily, my local library and the interlibrary loan program (which everyone should know how to use, and not just for academic research) came to the rescue and at long last I sat down to read it.

And it blew me away. The book begins in the small village of Ku Fu, where the annual Silkworm Festival, an event that usually brings the local merchants tons of money, is sabotaged. Due to the sabotage, the children of the town are exposed to poisonous fumes and all fall into a coma. Lu Yu, known as Number Ten Ox because he is the tenth person in his family and possesses great strength, is sent with the village's money to find a detective. After much searching and little luck, he finds a hundred year old man sleeping off a bad drunk. Upon coming back to consciousness, the man introduces himself as Li Kao, or as Ox begins to call him, Master Li. A former con man who decided solving crimes was much more challenging and interesting than committing them, Li turns out to be the greatest scholar in the Empire, despite his occasionally unscrupulous means. Li heads back to the village with Ox and immediately figures out who poisoned the slikworms and how. How to bring the children back, though, eludes him. And so, Master Li and Ox embark on a quest to find the medicine they need, or die in the attempt.

I could list everything I like about this book, but it would be a long list. Master Li is, despite the "slight flaw in (his) character" he's quick to remind everyone about, a thoroughly engaging character, be it his con jobs to make sure he and Ox aren't hurting for money, or his lightning-fast intellect. Li is what Sherlock Holmes would be if he were more personable and less aloof-- a ribald, snarky, hard-drinking, loveable, ingenious bastard. His "Watson" is our narrator, Number Ten Ox. Ox is an audience surrogate. Seeing Master Li through his eyes, what would probably be obnoxious to behold otherwise, or even flat-out illegal, is seen as ingenious and amusing. Ox gives us an interesting way of looking at the world, one in which we get a sense of wonder and interest in this world and how it works. The narrative voice and the strength of our main characters and even the minor ones like Miser Shen and Henpecked Ho helps to drag you into the story at the start and carry you through.

The dialogue helps back things up, being deft and very, very funny. The sequence in the "worst wineshop in China" where Master Li has the shortest recorded bar fight in existence and then, using a severed ear, successfully bargains for several extravagant items with which to pull off a con with is particularly funny, but each bit of dialogue does its part, be it the duke's vizier's wife who calls her paramours (including Ox) things like "Boopsie" or "Woofie" or the almost too calm and nice Henpecked Ho, who is personable until Master Li suggests that an axe might fix the problem he's having with his monstrous wife and seven obese sisters-in-law. While these characters may have more informal speech patterns than their station and time period would usually allow, it helps draw us in. They talk like real people, therefore we can treat them like real people.

The descriptions and the plot finally ram things home, though. Barry Hughart, the author of this book and its sequels, knows the importance of individual pieces building together to a whole. In particular are the sequences in the Duke's Labyrinths, where there is a definite sense of urgency as our heroes try to escape before the death that awaits them catches up. Many of the setpieces and the sense of emotion is shown, not told, something a lot of people who write fantasy and science fiction forget almost entirely. Hughart moves quickly from one setpiece to the next in a style that far outstrips Stephen Hunt's action sequences and doesn't stop to quit while it's got a minor lead. A good example of this is the "sword dance", where Ox must complete a series of increasingly complex maneuvers with a pair of swords so he can appease a ghost. The scene is lit at dusk and instantly, an image of the scene and what was going on popped up in my head.

If there's anything at fault, though, it's that the mood doesn't work for the whole book. While the story has a light tone, there's one sequence in particular where a revenge murder is half-disguised as physical comedy. Granted, the subject of the cruel prank definitely deserved it, but when you start to think on it, it was really a nasty thing to do. Other points where the mood doesn't completely work include a palace stampede culminating in a gruesome axe murder and several other, more minor moments. But these are but specks on the large, intriguing work that is Bridge of Birds.

In closing, the book is a fantastic read, and will go up on my top five along with Fool on the Hill, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and The Neverending Story (The original book, which I'll get to at some point). This book is worth a read, and not just that, but maybe a re-read, as there are probably things I've missed. It's funny, sad, exciting, and the ending had me half-crying, half-laughing. It's got all the components of the best of books, and it's infuriating that almost no one knows it exists. (Or at least, all the people I've mentioned it to have gone "What? Who?" So, once more for the cheap seats, READ BRIDGE OF BIRDS!

*Individually, the books are quite reasonably priced. It's just the omnibus editions, and the "limited" one in particular where they get kinda pricey.

Next Week: The Master Li series continues with The Story of the Stone, and I do a live reading of Joe Hill on Halloween. See you then!

Halloween Special

2010-10-20T20:40:00.000-04:00

For Halloween, I will be in Philadelphia seeing a friend or two. Depends on who's up there.

Sometime around Halloween week or weekend, though, I will be uploading a "Live" reading of a short story or two, including one of my favorite ghost stories of all time. I apologize for doing it most likely on my crappy webcam, but we work with what we've got.

Dinner at Deviant's Palace

2010-10-15T16:47:00.000-04:00

"They can't stand the bitter rain, so they run underneath one of the two awnings--religion or dissipation-- and guess who's waiting for them, under both awnings at once..." - Sevatividam

I freaking love Tim Powers. I'd like to just get that out of the way. The man flings ideas into the air and then makes them collide at high speeds, he helped invent the steampunk genre, and more than that, he tends to write books that unfold at equally high speeds with a lot of substance. Whether it's the Las Vegas sleaze hiding a soul-trading game in Last Call or the drug addiction novel centered around ghost-huffing that is Expiration Date, he manages to deliver. And while his book On Stranger Tides is getting made into a movie in the most terrible and sad way possible, it's still getting made into a movie, and that's kinda cool. Also, due to Tides, every time you see pirates and voodoo together in a movie (or a video game *coughcough* Monkey Island*coughcough*), it's officially Tim Powers' fault.

I first uncovered Dinner at Deviant's Palace in a Bookman's. It had no cover and no plot synopsis, just a simple yellow book in the sci-fi section. Granted, this didn't exactly endear me to it, as I kinda need some kind of synopsis to get an idea of what I'm getting into. Too many books titled things like The Vampires of Venice or things like that only to be about a bunch of war atrocities when I'm not in the mood for them. However, on a train last week, I found a copy of the paperback and dove right in. By three AM the next morning, I was done with the book. I finished it within a day, almost, and I have to say: It's one of the best freaking books I've read. And entirely unexpected as to the central ideas.

The book begins in post-nuke California with Gregorio Rivas, a musician, or "gunner", getting an odd request. One of the richest people in LA, Barrows, has lost a loved one to a religious cult called the Jaybirds. He pays Rivas five thousand "fifths" (playing cards used to represent brandy, the currency of this new world) to infiltrate the cult and bring her back home. You see, Rivas used to be a member of the cult who found out how sinister it actually was and ran away. He's also got a shady past as a "redemptionist", a combination of a cult deprogrammer and bounty hunter who tries to rescue wayward cultists and bring them back to their families by pretending to be cultists. And all of this has to do with his target: Barrows' daughter, Urania-- the former love of Rivas' life and what set him off on such a strange path on the first place. After much internal conflict, Rivas takes the job, infiltrates the Jaybirds to kidnap her back, and battles threats both external and internal in his quest, leading him to the titular event.

And to top it all off, it's a western about a man doing what has to be done, to save himself and to save others.

What I liked most about the book is the setting. While it becomes obvious that it's a post-apocalyptic setting where they use Brandy as currency and drive horse-drawn carriages made out of classic cars, it's very well-realized. Venice is presented as a sleazy den of sin with Deviant's Palace rising over it like some insane, nightmarish castle. The Holy City of Irvine is bright and clean from the outside, but filled with poverty and trash on the inside, with everyone being welded into leg-irons and forced to work. It's a world with its own slang, mannerisms, and rules of reality. Powers spent a lot of time on this for a book clocking in at under three hundred pages, and every bit of it shows. Despite the book being a slim, quick read, every page has a new facet of the world, be it the playing card-obsessed "Aces" who ruled the wasteland until an explosion went off and killed the Sixth, the alien intelligence known as Sevatividam, the history of Jaybird leader Norton Jaybush, and so on.

The problem, though, with Deviant's Palace is that it vanishes too far inside its character's own head. WAY too far sometimes. It's fine that we have a great sense of internal conflict, of Rivas fighting that impulse inside of him to join back up with the Jaybirds and let it consume him, but to have him living in his own head breaks immersion a little, like the scenes where he has flashbacks and can't tell past from present. While this sort of thing was merely disorienting and added to hallucinatory qualities in a book such as Private Midnight, it sometimes stops the book dead here, as the action is suddenly interrupted.

In fact, Private Midnight has a lot of similarities with Deviant's Palace. Both are books involving a rather driven man with a curious and dark past encountering a charismatic person who hints at being an otherworldly intelligence. But where one is a hallucinatory and strange tale of identity and how people can change, Deviant's is a book about being unable to run from who you are and knowing that icky, repugnant thing may not be pleasant to look at, but it's a part of you.

The other problem, and it's not really a problem, is the fantasy elements. It starts out as a post-apocalyptic western about a man fighting a cult, sort of like The Searchers if it was just John Wayne and he had to pretend to be an Apache for half the movie. But then you get the floating thing known as a Hemogoblin that claims to be a part of Rivas, the weirdness behind the "Sacrament", the restorative powers of "Peter and the Wolf" (which just makes me think of Peter Lorre in M), and a climax involving an alien psychic vampire. Or perhaps just some kind of mutant. And while the book should have ended there, you get a strange two-chapter epilogue just to tie up loose ends that didn't really need to be tied up. While the fantasy elements were still cool, and led to a fantastic setpiece, they didn't tie correctly into the book as well as they should have. Also, there's that stupid epilogue.

But you must read this book. It's a fast, brilliant ride, and while it's ugly and insane in places, it's all part of the charm. Besides, it rips a few satirical targets a good one, and is possibly the best post-apocalyptic and single-character book I've ever read. Rivas, despite starting out as a money-grubbing bastard, turns into a stone-cold badass by the end of the first section, and by the end he's a completely changed man, willing to throw himself in the way if it gets the job done, because his sanity-- and the sanity of his world-- are riding on the consequences. You feel every twist, every turn, and every triumph, and while the epilogue shoehorns a vague romance and tries to end things on a more ambiguous note, it's more than worth a read.

Next week: My three-parter on The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox begins with my review of Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart.

A change to the program

2010-10-14T21:32:00.000-04:00

Three things will be occurring in the next month. These are things that I feel should be done, mainly because it's a way for me to keep all the cool things I want to put up here and still run this blog on a weekly schedule (something highly important to me).

1) First, tomorrow's review will be Dinner at Deviant's Palace, in order to keep things rolling. I know it wasn't scheduled, but it's been begging me for the last few days for a write-up, and it bloody well deserves one. Also:

2) The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox is seven or eight hundred pages and spans three books. While I am going to review it, I'm gonna break it up into three weeks, one per book, in my first-ever serial review to make it easier on myself and keep the content my constant readers have come to expect. It's looking to be a pretty good, pretty big review, too. This blog is still in its first awkward steps, and I appreciate those willing to stick around through them while we figure this out.

3) Still thinking of what to do for Halloween. Given I seem to have worked into a "weird/quirky fiction" sort of niche, it would be very out of sorts if I completely let it pass and escape my notice. Any ideas or thoughts would be welcome, and in any case, I think it'll be fun.

So...yeah. There we go. See you all tomorrow for the review.

-- Caius

Leave of Absence

2010-10-06T01:23:00.000-04:00

The review is going to be late this week if it comes up at all. Kind of dealing with something that'd seem stupid to most people. I'm going to be taking a brief leave during this week to calm down and take care of some of my stress, and the reviews will return to normal schedule next week

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I'd rather you have awesome reviews than simply good or even crap reviews because I want to meet a deadline and am just not feeling it.

Sorry again

-- Caius

An Apology

2010-10-02T12:24:00.000-04:00

I apologize for one thing with the review of Valente's In The Night Garden. Regrettably, I broke one of my own rules and did not read the full book before publishing a review of it. This was partly due to it just not being a good book, but...yeah. I did read the book, I gave it a spirited try, but ultimately came up short. Sorry I didn't read the full thing...I had some stuff going on in my life, but next week, I'll be back to business as usual with what's shaping up to be a really fantastic read.

Once again, sorry for breaking my own rule, and hope you're still enjoying things here at Geek Rage. I know I am.

- Caius.

The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente

2010-10-01T16:37:00.000-04:00

"Now, why do you want to kill Beast? He's not borrowed your sword and refused to return it..."

- The Marsh King

   When I was younger, one of the first books my father ever read to me at night was The Arabian Nights. I loved it. I fell in love with the stories of Solomon's Bottle, and Aladdin, and all of that. There was a certain element of discovery to the whole thing, a vivid world where pretty much anything could and did happen, all in a far off land. I've always liked fairy tales, and even "grown-up" versions of fairy tales, like the excellent Fables, and One for the Morning Glory. So it would stand to reason that a book advertised with the line "A book of wonders for grown-up readers" would capture my attention. And it didn't.
   In the Night Garden is a book of stories within stories, each one feeding into the next. The framing device is that there is a little girl with black marks around her eyes who many think to be a demon in the Sultan's garden. At night, a little boy, a prince of the Sultanate, sneaks out to her and finds that the marks are actually densely-written words piled one upon the other until there is nothing but black. And the little girl can read these strange marks aloud. She begins to tell him the stories and he begins to listen, spinning vivid stories of battles at sea, talking herons, and sentient stars. Each one leading into and out of the next, weaving together into one work.
   Oh, the visuals are vivid, to be sure. And the characters all seem to be taken from the classic fairy-tale types. But this is not a particularly well-done book, in my opinion. Where most books of they type would begin one story, then maybe have a story inside that story, both those stories would be finished fairly early in. Catherynne M. Valente, on the other hand, barely finishes anything. The first story within the overall framing device, "The Tale of the Prince and the Goose", goes on for almost a quarter of the book. Now, granted, all of these stories tie into each other and into the overarching storyline, but none of them seem to have any cohesion. The link between the varying stories is tenuous at best, though they do call back to the previous ones, and overall, it's an interesting way to set up a book. It just takes quite a while to conclude each story, as each nested tale becomes more and more regressive. It seems like every individual character has their own story, and while I agree all of them should be told, the varying quality and the inability of the main story to go anywhere while the other stories are unfolding gives one a sense of frustration. The best sequences are when the stories are quick and self-contained, such as the bits with the Marsh King. Otherwise, none of it really goes anywhere and it just gets frustrating.
   The other main problem I have with the book is sexism. Men are not portrayed sympathetically. Those who are are either inhuman, in the case of the bear, the Beast, and the Marsh King, or in the thrall of a woman, as in the case of the young boy in the framing device, the prince in the prince story, and others. But the majority of the men are portrayed as decadent asshats who wouldn't know the proper way to do things if it bit them in the arse. And it's to this I object. Look, I know there's been a load of bad mojo over the centuries between the sexes, but we should acknowledge that we're all human. No, we don't always have the same thought patterns, but that really shouldn't matter. I know men who think in a so-called feminine manner, and I know women who are repulsive, closed-minded asshats. People, in the immortal words of Depeche Mode, are people. Not necessarily men or women, but people. And should be treated with the respect that human beings deserve, not turned into flighty nothings or violent idiots.
   I honestly do wish I could have recommended the book to you. It's got lovely illustrations, and a very vivid sense of itself. But the flaws in characterization and the annoying plotting bring me down for the most part, and I can't really recommend it because of those things. Chances are, you may like this more than me. I don't know. But I can't recommend it.

Next week: The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox by Barry Hughart.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

2010-09-24T14:13:00.000-04:00

"I'll grant the Lamora part is easy to spot, the truth is, I didn't know about the apt translation when I borrowed it...I just liked the way it sounded. But what the fuck ever gave you the idea that Locke was the name I was born with?"

- Locke Lamora

Just a little bit of business before the review proper:

And for this week, thank God I have a Kindle. I recently moved to some (gladly) temporary lodgings, and so most of my books are over at my other temporary lodgings. Eventually I'll settle down somewhere permanent and get a real job and all of that. Hopefully sometime soon, too. But since I don't have access to all of my nefarious resources, I am forever glad that I have a little electronic book that I can carry around with access to some of my temporary collection on it.

Enough advertising, though. I've been a fan of the heist novel, TV show, movie, and the like for quite a bit now. It all started with the film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, which gave me a set of sympathetic though down-on-their-luck criminals, as well as various others who were inadvertently caught in the same twisted situation. And it was fun to watch. From there, I started watching other crime-comedies, including such staples of the genre as Snatch, Ocean's Eleven, and the TV series Leverage, among countless others. So when I found a book on the shelf at the LaFarge Library in Santa Fe that purported to combine the heist and con premise with a fantasticized (and yes, that's a word now) Venice, wild horses couldn't keep me from getting my hands on it and reading it.

The story begins with the Thieftaker, a sort of Fagin-like character who takes in orphans and uses them to steal from the middle-class, selling a particularly troublesome orphan to a blind priest named Chains. In short order, we find out that 1) the kid has done something baaaad. And not just heinously audacious, but something worth murdering him over, and 2) that Chains is not blind, not a priest, and nor particularly interested in upholding the laws of reason and order that govern the city. To this end, he trains the young boy, who calls himself Locke, to take over a diverse band of thieves known as the Gentlemen Bastards, whose entire point is to scam the rich (something kind of unspeakable in this society). The book bounces back and forth between Locke's training, in which he learns to fight, con, and otherwise swindle people out of every cent they have, and how he uses these talents in the "present day" setting. A shadowy figure, however, emerges from the underbelly of the city to offer a job that Locke and his crew can't refuse, though, and soon it's down to the Gentlemen Bastards to save the city (and themselves) by pulling every last trick they know.

It's nice to finally have a book in this blog that trades on dialogue. A lot of how Locke gets through situations can be attributed to his gift for speech and his quick wit. While the cons do have physical elements, mainly down to Locke's best friend Jean who serves as the group's "hitter", it's mainly about the speech. And there is a lot of it. Scott Lynch, the author of this book and its (as-yet unread) sequel, seems to have watched a ton of crime movies and knows his genre inside and out. Locke is made a sympathetic protagonist, despite being a bit of a monster on some level for manipulating everyone he meets, and he and his crew are much more sympathetic than the nobles they dupe, which is a large distinction. While the descriptions of the city are fantastic (Gladiators fight giant sharks! Brandy-infused oranges! Big crystal spire-castle!), it's really the characters that are the meat of the story. And meaty they are. There's one villain, introduced somewhere in the second "act" of the story, who you spend every page wishing a cruel and unusual punishment on. When it finally comes, it makes it that much sweeter. Despite the nature of it, it still brings a smile to my face every time I read it. Likewise, Jean, Locke, and their assistant Bug are people who despite their larcenous and sometimes nefarious nature are people I find myself wanting to spend more time with. They're fun.

Furthermore, the thriller aspects of the book handle their load with all the tension and suspense that they need. I've revealed one or two spoilers here, but overall, there's a certain sense of surprise when things happen the way they do. The escapes really feel narrow, the rewards really that great, and the plans remarkably intricate and well thought-out. By the end, when everything seems resolved, it all makes sense for the time, and when you get there, you will be pleasantly surprised by the outcome, given everything that has come before.

Sadly, the mood whiplash is the problem. The book cannot decide sometimes whether it's a grim and gritty crime story, or a lighthearted caper, leading to a constant tug-of-war in some sections of the book. While it can be argued that the sudden plunge into seriousness signals a change in the book's setting-- that the Bastards are playing with people who are much better at the game than they are, it still keeps the lighthearted trappings a little bit. Also, if you have a problem with swearing and harsh language, probably give this one a miss. These people are criminals, and they act and talk like it. If you could get through a British crime film, or maybe In The Loop without much trouble or offense, it's a little tamer than the language in that. But since from page three, Chains starts an obscenity-laden diatribe on why he won't buy Locke and the language doesn't improve from there, I'd suggest those of an easily-offended temperament go elsewhere.

But is the book good? Oh, fuck yes. It's hard to find an original book on the concept of "One last job", but this is it. You will constantly be kept guessing as alliances and reasons change. Some motives are played with multiple times before being revealed to be something else entirely. And overall, it's a wild, sometimes shocking, always enjoyable ride through a criminal underworld, meant to interest both fantasy fans and crime-thriller fans alike. While it may never be part of my personal collection, it's something I've already picked up and read several times, each time noticing a new and different twist I hadn't before. And hopefully, you'll pick it up and find just as much to like as I do.

Next Week: The Orphan's Tales: In The Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

2010-09-17T13:41:00.001-04:00

"Bad luck is one fruit you will always find growing in the jungles of Liongeli"

I found a copy of The Kingdom Beyond the Waves tucked in a back corner of The Strand's science fiction section, on one of the low bookshelves close to the floor, where they keep all the good books. Strangely enough, I picked this up not half a foot away from where I found Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. Why they keep all their best books low to the ground is a mystery, but since they've taken slightly less money from my pocket than Steam and more money than the average GDP of small countries, I suppose it's kind of irrelevant. I'd heard of Stephen Hunt in passing before finding his book on the shelf in The Strand, but that evening, I figured that several coincidences lining up during my day was less random chance and more some kind of serendipity, and so I immediately snapped it up and made my way to the checkout. And I have not regretted the decision since.

Granted, I'm immensely biased. You see, I'm a big fan of both steampunk and the old pulp-novel aesthetic, so give me a book which combines both those things together, and I'll pretty much be begging to read it. But Kingdom combines them and uses their ideas with such style and grace that it goes beyond the mere eye-candy of an alternate-technology world. A book like this doing its job is a given. It's a pretty easy job: Just throw around some robots with boilers and some higher technology, and suddenly, boom. Instant steampunk book. Bonus points if you use the word "airship" twice in the same chapter. Kingdom, and it's companion book/preceding book The Court of the Air do the job well. Stephen Hunt spent time on his world, and it shows in the care that goes into crafting it. The characters have traditions, obscene gestures...all those little touches that make us know they're part of a bigger world, that they actually have something beyond their own characters.

Kingdom begins in a way that will be familiar to anyone who's ever seen the Indiana Jones movies, or pretty much any adventure film: Professor Amelia Harsh, a tomb-raiding rebel archaeologist, is climbing up a mountain with her companions (and aided by her massive, gorilla-like arms) to reach a cache of artifacts from the Black Oil Tribe. The opening sets up the whole tone for the book, from the guns to the crystal grenades, to the feeling that you've stepped into one of the old pulp novels, but, you know, less dry. The professor is raiding archaeological sites to try and find any evidence of the lost city of Camlantis, long since disappeared in an odd form of meteorological phenomena, essentially a "skyquake". Amelia is undertaking the quest to restore some honor to the memory of her father, a suicide after he lost his fortune in stock manipulation. Due to some double-crosses and bad luck with the Caliph, the ruler of the desert she's currently excavating in, Amelia is left crawling through the desert alone, on the verge of death.

It would be a very short book if she died in the first chapter, though, and once she gets back, the university she works for promptly throws her out despite her evidence of the lost city. Soon, her sworn enemy makes her an offer to fund an expedition, and Amelia has assembled a crack team of pirates, slavers, a professional scoundrel, and former commandos to head downriver, into the dangerous jungles of Liongeli and find Camlantis-- or die in the attempt. Her hellish cruise through the jungle makes for a good read, and even plays out in a cinematic way. Hunt is excellent with handling fight scenes, focusing first on the energy of the scene and then carrying that through the moments, keeping you invested in the action and reminding you that it isn't just an obligatory scene in his work-- it is vital to survival that these characters win.

The story that alternates with Amelia's story of lost cities, adventure, and tomb-raiding prowess involves a character by the name of Furnace-Breath Nick, a masked vigilante who takes on a job to rescue a rather prominent scientist from the Stalin-ish country of Quatershift. Nick slowly untangles further espionage webs in the style of an old pulp novel like Fantomas or Raffles, a gentleman criminal with a dark side and a mask, fighting evil from the shadows. Eventually, the two stories intertwine quite nicely, but sadly Furnace-Breath's story is the weaker of the two. It's no fun reading a detective adventure when the villain is clearly put right out there, adorned with a neon sign reading "Villain of the book", and accompanying himself on accordion. What little interest there is in Furnace-Breath Nick/Maximilian is quickly quashed when he is revealed to be the brooding, fearful of himself type of hero, like Batman with a homicidal anarcho-psychotic alternate personality. Yes, we get it, the mask is a necessity you'd rather not have. Considering how much you have to use it, though, we'd like it if you, oh, just shut up about your personal troubles and went back to figuring out what the evil industrialist was really doing.

I suppose what I like best about the book is the cinematic quality. I can see every action scene, every fight and flight, laid out in detail. Hunt's book(s) would actually make a good movie, given that pretty much every scene is given such detail that it feels less like you're being dragged through and more like you're a silent and intangible observer. There's a series of fights and action sequences in the middle of the book which really highlight this point, a group of fights, captures, narrow escapes, and betrayals that would seem complex to explain, but simple to go through. Hunt has a good grasp of his setting and what makes sense in it, and all of that comes out on the page, much to my delight. This, and I hate to use such simple words for it, is a good book.

Another thing I like, which I mentioned previously, is the attention to detail. There are at least three political systems introduced in the book-- the Free Catosian States, a proper anarchy with loosely-formed Free Companies and gender equality, the parliamentary country of Jackals, where the main characters all come from, and which rules under a somewhat totalitarian form of parliament. Think Cromwell if he went a step or two further with his ideas of governance. And finally, there is the hive-mind of the Liongeli, a complex network encompassing every living thing within it, from the plants to the creatures, all under control of the biological automatons known as the Daggish. In an amazing display of wordsmanship, none of these are dropped in favor of another, though each have their place.

The problems come in with the pacing, though. It is impossible for any writer to continue to keep such an energy level, and while Hunt almost manages to, his lulls are made all the more obvious when they appear. In particular offense is one section at the end. Once the villains' plots have been revealed, the surviving heroes have reached their destinations, and the final desperate battle is obviously in the cards and ready to go on the rails, the book stops cold. Not only is the villain's plan pretty nebulous and a little hard to follow, but the story refuses to go anywhere. This may be a byproduct of a strong story and a weak story meeting together and the elements combining to a mix that makes one go "Well, that's rather plain", but nonetheless, the story runs out of steam. When it gets back up to speed, it doesn't even manage to drag itself back to previous heights. You would think an aerial battle would have much more pep to it, but sadly it doesn't, and the book suffers for it. The saving grace is that the ending brings everything to a nice close, but with just enough plot points to revisit the characters if one wanted to.

The other major problem involves one specific incident with the death of a character. For someone who we have spent the whole book with-- and believe me, you'll know when it comes up, it's pretty obvious-- being randomly killed without even a last stand or any real reason other than "someone needed to die in this section" is a little less than the character deserved. It soured some of the sections, though the book recovers nicely from the event and gives us decent storylines for the surviving main characters.
Finally, Hunt's obsession with his own grotesque world tends to wear on one after a while. Yes, on one hand we have a kingdom where the hereditary ruler has their arms amputated and spends their life being humiliated by his public, but we don't need to hear about it all the time. Same with the fact that Amelia's arms are "gorilla-like" or "massive" or "oversized". Yes, her arms are huge. Similarly, the constant descriptions of the Greenmesh and its indoctrination process get repetitive after a while. The details are nice, but we don't need to hear about it over and over again. That's just crass.

In the end, I suppose that while it isn't always a strong book, it's a highly commendable one. It makes a very good attempt at being a classic adventure story, but less dry than, say the works of H. Rider Haggard or such. Hunt clearly knows what he's doing with his characters and his world. He shows a great deal of love and care to them, gives them interesting things to do, and gives them ends fitting of them. The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is a book worth reading, and worth reading more than once. I am proud to have it on my bookshelf, and am looking forward to any other books Hunt may write.

Next Week: Either Vurt by Jeff Noon, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, or the start of that Twilight series of reviews I might want to do, depending on what I feel like and what people would rather see me do.