Blue Moon by Lori Handeland

This is another heterosexual paranormal romance. It is set in the fictional town of Miniwa Wisconsin. I'm not exactly sure where it's supposed to be--it seems like it's set in the northern forests, but on the other hand she mentions being sort of near Stevens Point, and La Crosse being to the west, which would mean it's not in northern Wisconsin.

Anyway, the main character is a 26-year-old police officer named Jessie McQuade. She is on the full-time police staff; they also bring in a lot of seasonal deputies for the summer, when vacationers cause the population to temporarily swell. She is good friends with the third-shift dispatcher, Vee, and the sheriff, Clyde. She doesn't appear to like anyone else in town. Otherwise she's a loner with apparently no friends or family she's willing to talk to, nor does she really seem to know the townsfolk all that well, which is surprising for a cop in a small town she grew up in.

Jessie goes to the scene of an accident where a woman has hit a wolf (now missing) and was bitten by it. She is obviously in shock, and Jessie sends her with another deputy for medical treatment, then pulls out a flashlight and decides to track the wolf's blood trail through the woods in the middle of the night to try to find it and make sure it isn't rabid. The blood trail leads her to a cabin where she encounters a naked man behind a bush with extensive bruises on his hip. He's Native American and attractive, and Jessie acts like a hormonally-charged 16 year old who can barely string two sentences together. He turns out to be the love interest.

The victim of the car crash goes crazy the next day and starts attacking people, and the sheriff shoots her in the head. Then her body, and that of her victim, disappear from the morgue. Jessie finds a carved wolf head at the scene of the crash and thinks it might be Native American, so she goes to the local liberal arts college to look for an expert, and is directed the the naked hottie from the night before. It's insta-love, and they begin a relationship despite the sheriff warning her to stay away from the guy.

The DNR brings in an elderly German wolf-hunter to find the wolf, she speaks to someone at the CDC who advises her that using silver bullets works best, the professor suggests that someone may be using Native magic to raise an army of werewolves, and Jessie refuses to believe anything all that odd is happening and believes that everyone else must be losing their minds. She is really, amazingly closed-minded. And irritating. Did I mention thick-headed and annoying?

The boyfriend shows stalkerish behavior that she doesn't find as creepy as a real woman would. Everything goes to hell in a handbasket, and it turns out-- SPOILERS AHEAD!!-- that the werewolves are mutants created by the Nazis, and that hundreds of local people are werewolves already, and someone is going to use a Native American ritual to become a werewolf god. Jessie flips back and forth on whether to believe the weird boyfriend is in on it, makes several wrong decisions, and only barely manages to save herself at the end. She and the boyfriend hire on at the end as werewolf hunters. His odd behaviors were not adequately explained, but perhaps will be in a later volume of the series. I won't find out, because it was all too mind-numbingly stupid to read another. Which is a shame, because the writing was competent. It was just the characters and plot that totally sucked.

The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross

The Fuller Memorandum is the third in Stross's series about The Laundry, a branch of the British government that deals with supernatural events and creatures. They are spy novels, but our protagonist isn't a typical spy story hero, he's a computer geek named Bob.

Bob's wife, Mo, is also a Laundry agent, and much more dangerous than he is. So when a monster posing as a Russian shows up at their home and tries to shoot Bob, he assumes that Mo was the intended target. Bob is focusing on other troubles, including a civilian who was killed when an exorcism Bob was performing went wrong. Also his boss, Angleton, who sent him to perform the exorcism without a proper briefing, has disappeared. And it seems that a bunch of dark cultists are performing sacrifices in the hope of rousing dark creatures from other dimensions.

I finished this book a few days ago, and should have written the review then, while it was still fresh in my mind. I have already forgotten some of the details. What I can say is that I enjoyed it a lot more than the previous entry in the series, The Jennifer Morgue. This one was quite fun.

The Sorcerer's House by Gene Wolfe

The Sorcerer's House is an epistolary novel, the story told through a series of letters, most of the written by our main character, Bax. Bax was recently released from prison, having served time for committing fraud and stealing from his brother and his friends. Bax is unable to find a job, and so is delighted to discover that he has inherited a creepy old house that is reputed to be haunted. He relates his experiences in a series of letters to his brother, his sister-in-law, and his ex-cell mate.

Bax has all sorts of strange adventures, and he seems to accept an awful lot of oddness without much question. For instance, he returns home one night to find an attractive naked lady is his bed, and he does not wonder who she is or why she is there, he just thinks, oh boy, I'm getting laid. Likewise, one evening he is driving somewhere that he has gone before, but somehow ends up driving through a strange forest and being attacked by werewolves, and yet it takes him a long time to realize that anything odd is going on. And he has no idea how many rooms there are in his house, and the number of rooms seems to be increasing, but he doesn't seem to be particularly curious about it at first.

This being a Gene Wolfe novel, not everything is explained in the end, or perhaps it was subtle enough that I just didn't pick up all the clues. That happens when I read Wolfe novels. It is also a very entertaining and readable story, and the sort of book that I couldn't wait to pick up again to find out what happens next. We never find out exactly what happens to Bax at the end of the story, and it wasn't entirely clear if he had a happy ending. But I really enjoyed The Sorcerer's House.

Kraken by China Mieville

I abandoned this one about 2/3 of the way through. It's a big story about a missing giant squid that may lead to the end of the world. The protagonist is a museum curator who specializes in molluscs. When his museum acquired a giant squid, he helped prepare the display, and later he is the one who discovers it has been stolen. Many people think this can't be a coincidence, and he gets sucked out of his ordinary life and into the secret magical underworld of London. I was interested in his story. Unfortunately this is one of those books that jumps around all over the place to a large cast, and the descriptions are just tedious and over the top.

There is a lot of stuff like this:

A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth, or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.

Which may sort of set the mood, but does fuck-all to advance the plot. And 509 pages of that? Hard going. Somewhere in that novel is a 250 page story screaming to be let free. It's like Perdido Street Station for me, which was a tedious slog because he kept throwing too much irrelevant stuff out there. Same here. Which is too bad, because I started out really liking it, but in the end couldn't force myself to continue.

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

Sandman Slim is a revenge story. Our protaonist, James (who prefers to be called Stark), is a magician who was betrayed by his little circle of magical friends and sent to Hell. Eleven years later he has escaped Hell and returned to L.A. to kill them. Not so much for sending him to Hell, though he is understandably angry about that, but in revenge for the death of his girlfriend, Alice.

James is sort of a stereotypical badass anti-hero. He spent his eleven years in Hell fighting and killing, and has grown into a nearly invincible killing machine. He also chain smokes, drinks too much, and is a pain in the ass. He was nineteen when he was banished to Hell, and after a while it becomes clear that he didn't really mature while he was there. He's impulsive and kind of stupid and keeps springing traps. He does dumb things. For instance, early on he gets shot several times. Throughout the book people keep telling him that he ought to get the bullets removed, and a magic-wielding physician offers to do it for him. He keeps refusing to deal with it, saying he'll worry about it once his enemies are dead. He pisses off his friends and develops an ever-increasing list of enemies, and at a certain point I was very frustrated with the character and the story and considered giving up.

Fortunately things take an interesting turn and the story gets better. James learns that his enemy, Mason, tapped into darker and stronger powers than James had realized, and that even after eleven years in Hell there are things he doesn't know about Heaven and Hell and the places in between. And people start calling him Sandman Slim, the monster who kills monsters. He resists, of course, because he is far more interested in his personal motivations than in saving the world, but it wouldn't be much of a novel if he didn't step in and do what was necessary by the end.

In the end, I liked Sandman Slim, despite the main character. It is written in a good voice, it's compelling, the text sucks you in and pulls you along. Before this book, I read a couple of e-books that were painfully amateur stuff, and after those it was so wonderful to immerse myself in a work by a writer who can actually write. Very enjoyable.

Half Year Reading Roundup

We're halfway through 2010, so I thought I'd have a look at what I've been reading this year. I've been keeping track of my reading (of new works completed--re-reads don't count, nor do works I don't finish) since 2000. This year I see I've been reading more than ever.

This is mostly because I've just been on a total reading binge, and was even before I bought my Nook. The Nook made it quicker and more convenient to acquire and read works. I used to have to wait a week and a half for a box of books to arrive from Amazon or Book Depository, or I could hope that the local Borders had what I wanted to read, but often they didn't. With ebooks, buying and loading books just takes a few minutes. Thus, I spend a good deal less time waiting than I used to, which is certainly more efficient.

My total of works for the first six months of 2010 is 160, which is well above my total for any previous year. This is partly because I'm reading more than ever, and partly because I'm reading more short works. Scripts and novellas take less time to complete than novels. I still don't count short fiction--I haven't been counting anything less than 90 pages. But I've been reading a lot of works in the 90-150 page range, which is certainly shorter and quicker than a 450 page science fiction novel.

Here are a few of my favorites so far this year:

Science Fiction & Fantasy:
The Stranger by Max Frei
Child of Fire by Harry Connolly
Yellow Blue Tibia and Stone by Adam Roberts
Shadow Prowler by Alexei Pehov

Scripts:
Marvin's Room
Dearly Beloved

Gay Fiction:
Marked by Joely Skye
Psycop: Property & Camp Hell by Jordan Castillo Price
The Heaven Sent stories by Jet Mykles
The Adrien English mysteries by Josh Lanyon
Oleander House by Ally Blue
Hellcop & Hellcop 2 by Astrid Amara, Nicole Kimberling, and Ginn Hale
The Long Way Home & ePistols at Dawn & Physical Therapy by ZA Maxfield
Blind Desire by ID Locke