A couple of years ago I dove headfirst into the urban fantasy genre in order to determine if I really didn't like it, or if I just hadn't found the good stuff. The answer, as it turned out, was a bit of both. I do like a few writers and series, but most of it doesn't work for me. Somehow I missed Ilona Andrews as I was sampling everything I could find. I have since picked up Magic Bites twice, read the first chapter, and set it down because it didn't really grab me. However lately I have seen a couple of people online say that she was one of their favorite writers, so I decided to give this one another try.
Magic Bites is set in the future. The background isn't all explained, so I don't fully understand it, but apparently magic is creeping back into the world, but it fluctuates, so sometimes technology works better and sometimes magic works better. At any rate, a lot of things apparently went very wrong between our now and her present. Kate Daniels is a mercenary who goes around kicking monster butt. She is, further, apparently 24 years old, good looking but not girly (thank god she isn't attacking monsters in miniskirts and heels, unlike some of the women in books like this), and pushy and angry. Urban fantasy is full of angry young good-looking women who kick ass, so I was quite wary of her for the first half of the book. By that time she calmed down and began to gain my respect.
Her friend and protector, Greg, who was the knight-diviner of the Atlanta branch of the Order of Knights of Merciful Aid, an organization of powerful mages, has been killed. Kate is determined to track down his killer, and the Order agrees to hire her to assist them and draw attention while they send in a specialist to come in quietly and clean up the mess. Kate antagonizes both the shapechangers and the vampires in the process, but they tolerate her because they want her help with a number of murders of their kind. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that their murders and Greg's are related.
The book grew on me as I read it. It's hard to read a story like this on its own, without comparing it to all the others of its type that I've read. Overall, Magic Bites comes off pretty well in the comparison, actually. Kate isn't a whiny, immature, self-absorbed little idiot like so many of the heroines of these stories. It seems unlikely that she would be as strong and deadly as she is, except that clearly she's keeping secrets from us. Kate has hidden depths that I assume would explain why she's so powerful, but not only is she hiding her secret from all the other characters in the book, she is also hiding it from the reader. I assume that eventually her secret will be revealed, but I am kind of enjoying the mystery.
So this one was a pleasant surprise, and I will definitely be reading the next one.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
The Snatch by Bill Pronzini
This is the first in Pronzini's long-running series about the Nameless Detective. I decided to try them, and to read in order, so this is the first one I've read. The novel came out in 1971, and I suppose is basically a hard-boiled detective story. The protagonist is a private investigator, after spending fifteen years in the police and a few years before that in the military. He is a World War II vet, and still occasionally has to be careful not to remember the things he saw in the Pacific.
Nameless apparently has a good reputation, but doesn't have a lot of clients. He has a bachelor pad that his girlfriend thinks is a dump, an office where he goes every day and waits for business, an extensive collection of pulp fiction (also to his girlfriend's disdain), and the girlfriend he calls when he wants sex, who is attractive and ten years younger than he. He'd love to marry her, but she isn't willing to commit to him.
Nameless is hired at the beginning of the novel to deliver ransom money after the son of a wealthy man is kidnapped from school. Pronzini describes the father and his associate as "speculators, angle boys, long-shot and sure-shot gamblers, wheelers-and-dealers." Nameless agrees to make the drop, despite his reservations, and things go very wrong. He then sets out to find the missing boy and the murderer who was lurking in the dark that night. He has some success, and much to my relief, he worked with the police when he had important information, and didn't try to be a lone wolf. In this, it was much better than a lot of hardboiled detective fiction I've read.
It says on the cover copy of the book that the author was 27 when the book came out. I find it quite interesting that a 27 year old man would create a main character who was 47, smoked too much, and had a bad cough he feared was cancer but was too afraid to get checked out. Young authors don't usually seem to handle age and fear of mortality that well, but I thought it was a surprisingly mature choice. I also enjoyed a character who, when upset and feeling lost and unsure what to do with himself, goes to a bookstore instead of a bar. His relationship with his girlfriend was a little more annoying, but hardboiled detectives can't find happiness too easily, can they? It wouldn't fit in with the genre.
This was a good, solid, and entertaining mystery. It wasn't very long, but it was solid, believable, and entertaining all at once. The solution wasn't a great surprise to me, but it was satisfyingly wrapped up. I really enjoyed the book, and plan to read more in the series.
Nameless apparently has a good reputation, but doesn't have a lot of clients. He has a bachelor pad that his girlfriend thinks is a dump, an office where he goes every day and waits for business, an extensive collection of pulp fiction (also to his girlfriend's disdain), and the girlfriend he calls when he wants sex, who is attractive and ten years younger than he. He'd love to marry her, but she isn't willing to commit to him.
Nameless is hired at the beginning of the novel to deliver ransom money after the son of a wealthy man is kidnapped from school. Pronzini describes the father and his associate as "speculators, angle boys, long-shot and sure-shot gamblers, wheelers-and-dealers." Nameless agrees to make the drop, despite his reservations, and things go very wrong. He then sets out to find the missing boy and the murderer who was lurking in the dark that night. He has some success, and much to my relief, he worked with the police when he had important information, and didn't try to be a lone wolf. In this, it was much better than a lot of hardboiled detective fiction I've read.
It says on the cover copy of the book that the author was 27 when the book came out. I find it quite interesting that a 27 year old man would create a main character who was 47, smoked too much, and had a bad cough he feared was cancer but was too afraid to get checked out. Young authors don't usually seem to handle age and fear of mortality that well, but I thought it was a surprisingly mature choice. I also enjoyed a character who, when upset and feeling lost and unsure what to do with himself, goes to a bookstore instead of a bar. His relationship with his girlfriend was a little more annoying, but hardboiled detectives can't find happiness too easily, can they? It wouldn't fit in with the genre.
This was a good, solid, and entertaining mystery. It wasn't very long, but it was solid, believable, and entertaining all at once. The solution wasn't a great surprise to me, but it was satisfyingly wrapped up. I really enjoyed the book, and plan to read more in the series.
Monday, July 23, 2012
The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
At North American Discworld Convention last year the authors were talking about this book, and it didn't sound very interesting to me. But when it came out, I thought what the heck and decided to try it.
The Long Earth is based on the idea that there are infinite Earths, side by side, and in the beginning of the book people learn how to step across from one to another to another. You cross to another Earth, and you're in the same place, geographically, but it's another version of Earth that's slightly different. There aren't humans, for one thing, so what you get is wilderness and all the wildlife that would have lived if humans hadn't killed them. You step again, and get to another, similar but slightly different version of Earth. And so on. This sets off a frontier impulse in a lot of people, with new worlds to explore and settle, and new natural resources to exploit. People set up their own communities and communes a few steps away from our modern Earth, and in the meantime the old Earth is emptying out. Not of everyone -- some people choose to stay or cannot leave. But it causes enormous changes in the main world as well as all the others surrounding it.
The story is told through multiple viewpoint characters as the authors explore all the possibilities and the implications of how this change would affect everything else. In that, it is very traditional science fiction. Though there are many storylines, the main one is about Joshua Valiente, who is unusual in that he finds the stepping process much easier than most people, and prefers to spend most of his time alone in uninhabited Earths. He is persuaded to accompany a powerful AI on a journey to explore farther than anyone else has ever gone.
The problem with this book, and I am currently two-thirds of the way through and unlikely to continue, is that this is a Big Dumb Object story. The whole point of the book (so far) appears to be exploring this amazing and mysterious new thing they've found. (For those unfamiliar with this story type, it's less common than it used to be. Well-known examples are Rendezvous with Rama and Ringworld.) And the thing is, it's boring. I am neither interested in a straight SFnal "let's extrapolate how this will change society" exercise, nor am I interested in pioneer fiction, having been fed more than a lifetime's supply of that in my childhood. And I never enjoy science fiction that tries to show me the scope of a setting or situation by hopping to lots of point of view characters.
So I have lost the will to keep reading this book. I have been avoiding it, and forcing myself to pick it up and read a bit more, but I have a big pile of other things I'll probably like better in the To Be Read pile, so I am not going to further waste my time. It's probably a fine example of old-fashioned "let's extrapolate the consequences of this change" science fiction, but it's not for me.
The Long Earth is based on the idea that there are infinite Earths, side by side, and in the beginning of the book people learn how to step across from one to another to another. You cross to another Earth, and you're in the same place, geographically, but it's another version of Earth that's slightly different. There aren't humans, for one thing, so what you get is wilderness and all the wildlife that would have lived if humans hadn't killed them. You step again, and get to another, similar but slightly different version of Earth. And so on. This sets off a frontier impulse in a lot of people, with new worlds to explore and settle, and new natural resources to exploit. People set up their own communities and communes a few steps away from our modern Earth, and in the meantime the old Earth is emptying out. Not of everyone -- some people choose to stay or cannot leave. But it causes enormous changes in the main world as well as all the others surrounding it.
The story is told through multiple viewpoint characters as the authors explore all the possibilities and the implications of how this change would affect everything else. In that, it is very traditional science fiction. Though there are many storylines, the main one is about Joshua Valiente, who is unusual in that he finds the stepping process much easier than most people, and prefers to spend most of his time alone in uninhabited Earths. He is persuaded to accompany a powerful AI on a journey to explore farther than anyone else has ever gone.
The problem with this book, and I am currently two-thirds of the way through and unlikely to continue, is that this is a Big Dumb Object story. The whole point of the book (so far) appears to be exploring this amazing and mysterious new thing they've found. (For those unfamiliar with this story type, it's less common than it used to be. Well-known examples are Rendezvous with Rama and Ringworld.) And the thing is, it's boring. I am neither interested in a straight SFnal "let's extrapolate how this will change society" exercise, nor am I interested in pioneer fiction, having been fed more than a lifetime's supply of that in my childhood. And I never enjoy science fiction that tries to show me the scope of a setting or situation by hopping to lots of point of view characters.
So I have lost the will to keep reading this book. I have been avoiding it, and forcing myself to pick it up and read a bit more, but I have a big pile of other things I'll probably like better in the To Be Read pile, so I am not going to further waste my time. It's probably a fine example of old-fashioned "let's extrapolate the consequences of this change" science fiction, but it's not for me.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow
This is another book group selection.
A Cold Day for Murder is a mystery set in and around a remote national park in Alaska. I'm not clear on whether this park is a real place or an invention of the author's. The fact she rarely or never names it makes me think it might be fictional. Such as:
And so on--pages of description about the park without ever naming it. A park ranger and someone from the Anchorage district attorney's office are both missing, and so the Anchorage DA turns to a former employee of theirs, Kate Shugak, to find out what happened to them.
I found this book to be very heavy on description and very light on investigating. Like many series mysteries of the period (early 1990s), this book is both short and slight. It goes down quickly and easily, because there's not a lot there. Stabenow describes everything way too much for me, because I am not a visual reader, so I tend to bounce off descriptions. In the midst of a pages-long dump about what Kate's cabin looks like and a listing of her possessions, I managed to miss that she was Native American, obliquely referred to ("she had the burnished bronze skin and high, flat cheekbones of her race") in amongst her faded Levis and pondering the unlikelihood of a woman as tiny as she actually having square shoulders. (I didn't fail to understand that reference, it's just that my eye skipped over most that sentence in the midst of a long, boring paragraph) Now, long descriptive passages never, ever work for me. Some people like them. I suppose that Stabenow imagined that by describing Kate's home in unnecessary detail that the audience would come to understand her character, but the necessary parts (her race, which matters in this story, and the fact that she's emotionally damaged) were buried under lots of meaningless filler.
Kate grew up in the area where the two men disappeared, and so she returns to the town of Niniltna where her family live, and gets involved in various family dramas. Her manipulative, imperious grandmother, her pathetic and unsavory cousins, two random drunk guys who show up at the bar demanding alcohol--all are illustrative lessons to lecture us about the social problems of Alaska. It isn't until 80 pages into the 200 page novel that Kate even begins trying to learn about the missing guys. She asks some questions and then starts accusing people who might have had motive to kill the ranger. She gets shot at twice by people who don't mean to hurt her, and the men around her try to protect her because they all care about her.
No one appears to care at all about the dead men, including Kate, though she was romantically involved for a while with the second victim. They're not real, there aren't any particular consequences or ripples from their deaths, and it felt a bit like old English country house mysteries in which murders are committed but the audience is safely insulated away from any of the realistic nastiness of murder--and in so doing, Stabenow portrays her characters in a very unflattering light. They more or less say, "Yeah, they're probably dead. So what?" No one cares that two young men were probably murdered.
So overall, I found this mystery quite unsatisfying. I read mysteries because I am interested in the mystery and solving the mystery. I am not interested in being lectured about the social problems of the place the mystery is set in, nor am I all that interested in long insertions about the personal lives of characters I don't care about. And I really didn't care about Kate Shugak and her friends and family, any more than they cared about the dead men. It was too slight and too shallow for me.
Oh, and I wanted to share one of my favorite sentences: "The Jeep was a Toyota Land Cruiser."
A Cold Day for Murder is a mystery set in and around a remote national park in Alaska. I'm not clear on whether this park is a real place or an invention of the author's. The fact she rarely or never names it makes me think it might be fictional. Such as:
The Park occupied twenty million acres, almost four times the size of Denali National Park but with less than one percent of the tourists .... The Park's coast was almost impenetrable from the sea, choked with coastal rain forest made of Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder, and devil's club .... The major difference between tourist mecca Denali National Park and this one was a road. Denali had one.
And so on--pages of description about the park without ever naming it. A park ranger and someone from the Anchorage district attorney's office are both missing, and so the Anchorage DA turns to a former employee of theirs, Kate Shugak, to find out what happened to them.
I found this book to be very heavy on description and very light on investigating. Like many series mysteries of the period (early 1990s), this book is both short and slight. It goes down quickly and easily, because there's not a lot there. Stabenow describes everything way too much for me, because I am not a visual reader, so I tend to bounce off descriptions. In the midst of a pages-long dump about what Kate's cabin looks like and a listing of her possessions, I managed to miss that she was Native American, obliquely referred to ("she had the burnished bronze skin and high, flat cheekbones of her race") in amongst her faded Levis and pondering the unlikelihood of a woman as tiny as she actually having square shoulders. (I didn't fail to understand that reference, it's just that my eye skipped over most that sentence in the midst of a long, boring paragraph) Now, long descriptive passages never, ever work for me. Some people like them. I suppose that Stabenow imagined that by describing Kate's home in unnecessary detail that the audience would come to understand her character, but the necessary parts (her race, which matters in this story, and the fact that she's emotionally damaged) were buried under lots of meaningless filler.
Kate grew up in the area where the two men disappeared, and so she returns to the town of Niniltna where her family live, and gets involved in various family dramas. Her manipulative, imperious grandmother, her pathetic and unsavory cousins, two random drunk guys who show up at the bar demanding alcohol--all are illustrative lessons to lecture us about the social problems of Alaska. It isn't until 80 pages into the 200 page novel that Kate even begins trying to learn about the missing guys. She asks some questions and then starts accusing people who might have had motive to kill the ranger. She gets shot at twice by people who don't mean to hurt her, and the men around her try to protect her because they all care about her.
No one appears to care at all about the dead men, including Kate, though she was romantically involved for a while with the second victim. They're not real, there aren't any particular consequences or ripples from their deaths, and it felt a bit like old English country house mysteries in which murders are committed but the audience is safely insulated away from any of the realistic nastiness of murder--and in so doing, Stabenow portrays her characters in a very unflattering light. They more or less say, "Yeah, they're probably dead. So what?" No one cares that two young men were probably murdered.
So overall, I found this mystery quite unsatisfying. I read mysteries because I am interested in the mystery and solving the mystery. I am not interested in being lectured about the social problems of the place the mystery is set in, nor am I all that interested in long insertions about the personal lives of characters I don't care about. And I really didn't care about Kate Shugak and her friends and family, any more than they cared about the dead men. It was too slight and too shallow for me.
Oh, and I wanted to share one of my favorite sentences: "The Jeep was a Toyota Land Cruiser."
Saturday, July 14, 2012
The Void by Brett J. Talley
The Void is set 150 years in the future and takes place in space. That makes me inclined to want to read it as a science fiction novel, as that is a genre I am well-read in and comfortable with. That would be a mistake, however, as The Void isn't a work of science fiction, it is a horror novel that happens to be set in space. This is an important distinction, as the goals of a science fiction writer and a horror writer are not the same. It is not very successful as science fiction, but I think it may be successful as horror. It is a little hard for me to judge it on that basis, however, as I don't read a lot of horror, so I am less familiar with the genre conventions and have less knowledge of the canon to compare it to.
There will be spoilers in this review.
It takes place in 2169. Humans are traveling through warp space and have colonies and trading outposts scattered around. Because warping space and traveling through it is too weird and horrific for the human mind to experience and remain intact, people are rendered unconscious for that part of their trip. The problem is that they have horrible, frightening, incredibly real dreams, and have the same dream every time they warp. Occasionally someone will go insane or die in the warp process. Our protagonist is Aidan Connor, a ship's navigator, who is the sole survivor of his ship's destruction. He is found, injured and drugged unconscious, floating in space in an escape pod weeks after his ship was destroyed. He has no memory of what happened or what caused the ship to destruct.
He is able to get hired on for the maiden voyage of a cargo ship called the Chronos. They are bound for one of the more outlying colonies, and along the way they stumble upon a derelict ship that is about to be swallowed by a black hole. They investigate, at first concerned for the crew, and then with the thought of salvaging the ship. But creepy, malevolent creatures are lurking on the ship, in the darkness, and the crew of the Chronos are going to have to face their dreams in real life and try to save humanity while they're at it.
As I said, as a science fiction novel this book just doesn't work. There are way too many things that we are just told, that if you think about it don't make much sense, or seem too arbitrary and contrived. For instance, the computers and engine of the derelict ship were destroyed by one of its crew before her death, and Aiden and his very capable lady sidekick conclude that they can't be repaired, but then someone else manages to get everything operational again very quickly with no explanation of how this was done. There are lots of things like that that don't make a lot of sense if you give them much thought.
Further, the crew aren't very convincing as residents of the future. Some of what we are told of their lives and experiences sound very much set in the here and now (one crew member is a fan of the New England Patriots, who have recently won the Super Bowl--it would be more believable if football were different then, if the team had moved cities, if the game were different--I really doubt that it will remain unchanged for 150 years) or even kind of old-fashioned, even in our current time (the character whose mother went crazy after bleeding a lot during childbirth, for instance). Plus they are listening to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The characters read like Baby Boomers, not people having adventures in space in the future.
But as a work of horror? I kind of bought it (keeping in mind I don't read a lot of horror). The story did a fairly effective job of showing characters who are feeling overwhelming dread and fear throughout. Most importantly, it hooked me and kept me reading. I would have gulped it down in one sitting except that I ran out of time and had to set it down just a couple of chapters shy of finishing it. However, when I went back to the beginning and re-read, I found a lot of problems catching my attention.
For one thing, there is head-hopping. We switch from one person's point of view, over to someone else, and back again in the span of a few sentences. That was really distracting to me. There is some weird punctuation that caught my eye, too, especially not putting in a quote mark at the beginning of a paragraph of dialogue if the same person is speaking as in the previous paragraph. But there were also bigger problems of continuity. For instance, the captain of the Chronos calls everybody to a meeting, which should have been five people, and yet two people were never mentioned and didn't say anything (and I don't believe they would have been silent had they been in attendance), making me wonder if they were even there, or if "everyone" wasn't actually everyone.
Worse, there was the matter of sleeping quarters. At the beginning of their voyage, a crewman says to a passenger: "Sorry about the accommodations but this is a freighter, not a passenger ship. Only the captain and the navigator get their own cabins. Even the ship's doctor is stuck back here with the rest of us." And yet later one of the passengers apparently has her own cabin, and later yet the captain tries to get the passengers to return to the passenger quarters, even though we have been told there are no passenger quarters, only a crew compartment. Though the author is ultimately responsible for what they wrote, still I think the publisher may have failed Talley a bit, as this sort of thing could have been caught and fixed in editing.
I realize that in horror it is sometimes better not to describe things too much, so that the reader can fill in the details from their own imagination. But sometimes I needed more detail. Such as this part: "At first he thought he was imagining it, the thing, dragging a body behind it. Pulling it along by one leg, as the arms hung limply behind." We never get any description (that I could find) of what "the thing" was. A robot? A living creature? A ghost? I have no idea, as we aren't told. I don't need detailed descriptions, but I need some clue what I'm supposed to be visualizing.
So The Void is a little rough, but it's actually a pretty entertaining read. It's got characters whose safety you care about, creepy creatures talking to them in the dark, people dying gruesomely, and the safety of humanity hanging in the balance. I would read another novel by Talley without hesitation.
There will be spoilers in this review.
It takes place in 2169. Humans are traveling through warp space and have colonies and trading outposts scattered around. Because warping space and traveling through it is too weird and horrific for the human mind to experience and remain intact, people are rendered unconscious for that part of their trip. The problem is that they have horrible, frightening, incredibly real dreams, and have the same dream every time they warp. Occasionally someone will go insane or die in the warp process. Our protagonist is Aidan Connor, a ship's navigator, who is the sole survivor of his ship's destruction. He is found, injured and drugged unconscious, floating in space in an escape pod weeks after his ship was destroyed. He has no memory of what happened or what caused the ship to destruct.
He is able to get hired on for the maiden voyage of a cargo ship called the Chronos. They are bound for one of the more outlying colonies, and along the way they stumble upon a derelict ship that is about to be swallowed by a black hole. They investigate, at first concerned for the crew, and then with the thought of salvaging the ship. But creepy, malevolent creatures are lurking on the ship, in the darkness, and the crew of the Chronos are going to have to face their dreams in real life and try to save humanity while they're at it.
As I said, as a science fiction novel this book just doesn't work. There are way too many things that we are just told, that if you think about it don't make much sense, or seem too arbitrary and contrived. For instance, the computers and engine of the derelict ship were destroyed by one of its crew before her death, and Aiden and his very capable lady sidekick conclude that they can't be repaired, but then someone else manages to get everything operational again very quickly with no explanation of how this was done. There are lots of things like that that don't make a lot of sense if you give them much thought.
Further, the crew aren't very convincing as residents of the future. Some of what we are told of their lives and experiences sound very much set in the here and now (one crew member is a fan of the New England Patriots, who have recently won the Super Bowl--it would be more believable if football were different then, if the team had moved cities, if the game were different--I really doubt that it will remain unchanged for 150 years) or even kind of old-fashioned, even in our current time (the character whose mother went crazy after bleeding a lot during childbirth, for instance). Plus they are listening to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The characters read like Baby Boomers, not people having adventures in space in the future.
But as a work of horror? I kind of bought it (keeping in mind I don't read a lot of horror). The story did a fairly effective job of showing characters who are feeling overwhelming dread and fear throughout. Most importantly, it hooked me and kept me reading. I would have gulped it down in one sitting except that I ran out of time and had to set it down just a couple of chapters shy of finishing it. However, when I went back to the beginning and re-read, I found a lot of problems catching my attention.
For one thing, there is head-hopping. We switch from one person's point of view, over to someone else, and back again in the span of a few sentences. That was really distracting to me. There is some weird punctuation that caught my eye, too, especially not putting in a quote mark at the beginning of a paragraph of dialogue if the same person is speaking as in the previous paragraph. But there were also bigger problems of continuity. For instance, the captain of the Chronos calls everybody to a meeting, which should have been five people, and yet two people were never mentioned and didn't say anything (and I don't believe they would have been silent had they been in attendance), making me wonder if they were even there, or if "everyone" wasn't actually everyone.
Worse, there was the matter of sleeping quarters. At the beginning of their voyage, a crewman says to a passenger: "Sorry about the accommodations but this is a freighter, not a passenger ship. Only the captain and the navigator get their own cabins. Even the ship's doctor is stuck back here with the rest of us." And yet later one of the passengers apparently has her own cabin, and later yet the captain tries to get the passengers to return to the passenger quarters, even though we have been told there are no passenger quarters, only a crew compartment. Though the author is ultimately responsible for what they wrote, still I think the publisher may have failed Talley a bit, as this sort of thing could have been caught and fixed in editing.
I realize that in horror it is sometimes better not to describe things too much, so that the reader can fill in the details from their own imagination. But sometimes I needed more detail. Such as this part: "At first he thought he was imagining it, the thing, dragging a body behind it. Pulling it along by one leg, as the arms hung limply behind." We never get any description (that I could find) of what "the thing" was. A robot? A living creature? A ghost? I have no idea, as we aren't told. I don't need detailed descriptions, but I need some clue what I'm supposed to be visualizing.
So The Void is a little rough, but it's actually a pretty entertaining read. It's got characters whose safety you care about, creepy creatures talking to them in the dark, people dying gruesomely, and the safety of humanity hanging in the balance. I would read another novel by Talley without hesitation.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
The Third Rail by John Harvey
This was my book group's selection this month. It's a high-action thriller/mystery set in Chicago. The main character is Michael Kelly, an Irish-American ex-cop who is now a private eye. It's the third in the series, and I haven't read the two previous ones.
It begins with a couple of women being murdered while using mass transit. One was shot while standing on an L platform waiting for a train, the other shot by a sniper while riding a train. Kelly is a witness to the first crime, and chases after the shooter. They have a confrontation in an alley, and Kelly is knocked unconscious and the bad guy gets away. This is the sort of story where our hero gets knocked out with the butt of a gun, and suffers no ill effects. He never mentions a lump on his head or a headache, he just gets on with chasing after the bad guy as if it never even happened. Which is not entirely realistic, but at least we know up front that it's going to be that kind of story.
There will be spoilers from this point on. You have been warned.
What follows is a quite entertaining but not at all realistic story with lots of layers and lots of violence. Kelly thinks that there are actually a team of bad guys, but the FBI brushes him off, quite certain it's a lone criminal. He gets peripherally sucked into the official taskforce, his contribution nonetheless being marginalized by them. At the same time, he's getting phone calls and messages from the killer, and the second attack happened on the anniversary of and location of a train derailment he was in as a child, so for Kelly this is all very personal and he does a bunch of investigating on his own. The mayor calls him in and hands him a gun and tells him to hunt down and kill the shooter, legal process be damned. Though he isn't a policeman any more, he has no trouble getting access to crime scenes and evidence, and really can pretty much go where he likes and do what he likes.
It's also the sort of story with too many reveals. They shoot the shooter. Wait, he's not the only one, there's a partner! They find out who that is. Wait, but he isn't the one who killed the sidekick! And so on. One of the people in my book group, who I expected would like this one, actually disliked it because it was too (unbelievably) twisty. We all agreed that it's better if you don't think about it too much, because then things start to unravel. Also, the author is not at all subtle. Really, not subtle at all. For instance, his girlfriend tells him that his job is too dangerous and will affect her negatively and destroy their relationship. Guess what happens later in the book? His computer genius sidekick was also obviously doomed, since he had been badly beaten up before the book even starts, and we keep getting the sense that he's vulnerable. Then the killer threatens his safety, and next thing you know the poor guy has been killed. It was very unfortunate, but also very predictable.
I also found the handling of the female characters deeply problematic. We basically have two huge refrigerator women (females who are killed, kidnapped, raped, or have other terrible things happen to them, not to develop their own stories, but to provide motivation or characterization for the men); a dead hooker; a competent but bitter and unhappy woman who turns out to be a villain; and a reporter who shows up just long enough to give the police some useful information, and then isn't seen again, though one of the cops gets a date with her at the end, as if she's a prize instead of a human being. And the kidnapped/injured refrigerator woman girlfriend? The almost-rape that left her so traumatized that she broke up with him was completely unnecessary to the story. It was weird and tacked-on and didn't need to be there, except to cast negative stereotypes on two of the few black characters, which was also problematic. Seriously, why was that part even there? She had ample reason to be traumatized without that part, and it was completely unnecessary. Not that her trauma was about her at all, it was about showing the male protagonist suffering, which is why she's a refrigerator woman. I suppose the greater question is whether the author was deliberately writing this way to conform to the norms of his subgenre, or if this just came out of his subconscious without him really even giving it much thought.
That said, it was a quick and breezy read, not even slightly plausible, and fairly entertaining. That much violence without having to follow the rules? It can be kind of fun, especially if you don't think about it too much. I might be curious enough to try the earlier ones.
It begins with a couple of women being murdered while using mass transit. One was shot while standing on an L platform waiting for a train, the other shot by a sniper while riding a train. Kelly is a witness to the first crime, and chases after the shooter. They have a confrontation in an alley, and Kelly is knocked unconscious and the bad guy gets away. This is the sort of story where our hero gets knocked out with the butt of a gun, and suffers no ill effects. He never mentions a lump on his head or a headache, he just gets on with chasing after the bad guy as if it never even happened. Which is not entirely realistic, but at least we know up front that it's going to be that kind of story.
There will be spoilers from this point on. You have been warned.
What follows is a quite entertaining but not at all realistic story with lots of layers and lots of violence. Kelly thinks that there are actually a team of bad guys, but the FBI brushes him off, quite certain it's a lone criminal. He gets peripherally sucked into the official taskforce, his contribution nonetheless being marginalized by them. At the same time, he's getting phone calls and messages from the killer, and the second attack happened on the anniversary of and location of a train derailment he was in as a child, so for Kelly this is all very personal and he does a bunch of investigating on his own. The mayor calls him in and hands him a gun and tells him to hunt down and kill the shooter, legal process be damned. Though he isn't a policeman any more, he has no trouble getting access to crime scenes and evidence, and really can pretty much go where he likes and do what he likes.
It's also the sort of story with too many reveals. They shoot the shooter. Wait, he's not the only one, there's a partner! They find out who that is. Wait, but he isn't the one who killed the sidekick! And so on. One of the people in my book group, who I expected would like this one, actually disliked it because it was too (unbelievably) twisty. We all agreed that it's better if you don't think about it too much, because then things start to unravel. Also, the author is not at all subtle. Really, not subtle at all. For instance, his girlfriend tells him that his job is too dangerous and will affect her negatively and destroy their relationship. Guess what happens later in the book? His computer genius sidekick was also obviously doomed, since he had been badly beaten up before the book even starts, and we keep getting the sense that he's vulnerable. Then the killer threatens his safety, and next thing you know the poor guy has been killed. It was very unfortunate, but also very predictable.
I also found the handling of the female characters deeply problematic. We basically have two huge refrigerator women (females who are killed, kidnapped, raped, or have other terrible things happen to them, not to develop their own stories, but to provide motivation or characterization for the men); a dead hooker; a competent but bitter and unhappy woman who turns out to be a villain; and a reporter who shows up just long enough to give the police some useful information, and then isn't seen again, though one of the cops gets a date with her at the end, as if she's a prize instead of a human being. And the kidnapped/injured refrigerator woman girlfriend? The almost-rape that left her so traumatized that she broke up with him was completely unnecessary to the story. It was weird and tacked-on and didn't need to be there, except to cast negative stereotypes on two of the few black characters, which was also problematic. Seriously, why was that part even there? She had ample reason to be traumatized without that part, and it was completely unnecessary. Not that her trauma was about her at all, it was about showing the male protagonist suffering, which is why she's a refrigerator woman. I suppose the greater question is whether the author was deliberately writing this way to conform to the norms of his subgenre, or if this just came out of his subconscious without him really even giving it much thought.
That said, it was a quick and breezy read, not even slightly plausible, and fairly entertaining. That much violence without having to follow the rules? It can be kind of fun, especially if you don't think about it too much. I might be curious enough to try the earlier ones.
Monday, July 2, 2012
Shadow Blizzard by Alexey Pehov
Shadow Blizzard is the final volume of the Chronicles of Siala trilogy. It's translated from Russian, and Tor has been releasing them a year apart. I'll spare you my rant about the timing of the releases, suffice to say it's stupid to space them out that much when they're all already written. A year is a long time for readers to wait, and possibly lose interest or lose track of the series.
There's nothing tremendously original about the trilogy, in many ways it's a bog standard epic quest fantasy with the fate of the world riding on the shoulders of our thief, Harold, and the motley crew of people who are accompanying him on his very important and dangerous mission. That said, I enjoyed the series. I very rarely read this sort of fantasy any more, and I am sure I wouldn't have given it a try if the writer weren't Russian. But I've had some good luck with Russian fantasy (Lukyanenko's Watch novels and Max Frei's Stranger series) so I was willing to take a chance on it.
I loved the first, Shadow Prowler, even though it was such a clear pastiche of the video game Thief that even I recognized the source, and I didn't play Thief very much. But Pehov worked past that, and Harold is made an offer he literally can't refuse, as the king forces him to go to a Moria-like underground catacomb that was abandoned to the evil forces long ago in order to sneak his way past countless traps and monsters in order to retrieve an important magical artifact that will allow them to nullify the magic of the Nameless One, who is stirring up the orcs toward war against the humans again. That was rather a run-on sentence, wasn't it? Two expeditions have already failed, and in this last-ditch effort Harold is sent with a band of soldiers, plus a dwarf, a gnome, a goblin, and three scary dark elves to protect him and ensure that he reaches his destination safely.
It's obvious, of course, because Pehov isn't very original, that they will die off one by one along the way, until only Harold and maybe a select few others make it back safely -- and that's exactly what happens. The first book, Shadow Prowler, was concerned mostly with preparations for their trip. The second, Shadow Chaser, is spent entirely upon traveling to their goal, and they have rather a hard time of it. This is gloomy and not nearly as fun as the first book, as is usual with the middle book of an epic trilogy. In Shadow Blizzard, they finally reach Hrad Spein, and Harold goes in alone to try to reach the Rainbow Horn and bring it back out. Of course, the enemy has arrived before them and in waiting in the catacombs for him. His journey is very harrowing, and what happens after he makes it out is just as much so.
But there is another, deeper story going along mostly under the surface until we reach Shadow Blizzard. Harold isn't just an amazingly good thief, the reason he is able to accomplish what he does is that he has hidden abilities he didn't know about, and he has the power to make decisions that will literally change the future of the world. He is basically a good guy and wants to do the right thing, but the tricky part is figuring out what the right thing is. The novel is also less black and white about the races than Tolkien was, though Pehov seems quite influenced by Tolkien, possibly at a second or third generation remove. He has all of these races, but clearly there really isn't that much difference between the elves and the orcs. And the orcs aren't mindlessly evil, they are fighting against the encroachment of the neighboring kingdoms. They're tired of humans cutting down the trees they depend upon, and elves raiding and killing in their territory. All of the races struggle to find balance between dominating and being dominated, and Harold has to consider that certain actions that throw things out of balance could lead to genocide. It isn't so obvious and simplistic as a lot of epic fantasy, and that was somewhat refreshing.
As always, sometimes the translation was a little weird. I have read enough translated Russian works now that I suspect it's a fairly literal translation, and what works in Russian seems a little odd to an English speaker's ear. For instance, the powerful and ancient Rainbow Horn, forged by the ogres thousands of years ago, is repeatedly referred to by Harold and some of his companions as a tin whistle. That's just ... incongruous.
There were a few other things that annoyed me, for instance Pehov has Harold having true and detailed dreams. This way he can write more battle scenes. I am so very, very uninterested in battle scenes that most of these were an annoyance rather than an addition to the narrative. It's also kind of a cheat for Pehov to be able to tell us what Harold would have no way of knowing, otherwise. I didn't like it, and tended to skim or skip those parts. I also found the timing of the release of the books a problem. I love the first novel enough that I re-read it every so often when I'm in a reading funk, but the second one was grim enough that I only read it twice. Picking up the third book, I don't remember all the little details because it's been a very long time since the last one came out. So, for instance, when one of his surviving companions gives Harold his swords at the end and Harold knows what he's supposed to do with them -- I have no freaking idea what Harold is supposed to do with them, because it's been too long and I don't understand the significance of the gesture, and it isn't explained.
Nevertheless, I really liked this trilogy. It isn't all that original--most work of this type isn't, let's be honest--but it's solidly entertaining and well worth the time. I have no doubt I will be re-reading the whole thing again before the end of the year.
There's nothing tremendously original about the trilogy, in many ways it's a bog standard epic quest fantasy with the fate of the world riding on the shoulders of our thief, Harold, and the motley crew of people who are accompanying him on his very important and dangerous mission. That said, I enjoyed the series. I very rarely read this sort of fantasy any more, and I am sure I wouldn't have given it a try if the writer weren't Russian. But I've had some good luck with Russian fantasy (Lukyanenko's Watch novels and Max Frei's Stranger series) so I was willing to take a chance on it.
I loved the first, Shadow Prowler, even though it was such a clear pastiche of the video game Thief that even I recognized the source, and I didn't play Thief very much. But Pehov worked past that, and Harold is made an offer he literally can't refuse, as the king forces him to go to a Moria-like underground catacomb that was abandoned to the evil forces long ago in order to sneak his way past countless traps and monsters in order to retrieve an important magical artifact that will allow them to nullify the magic of the Nameless One, who is stirring up the orcs toward war against the humans again. That was rather a run-on sentence, wasn't it? Two expeditions have already failed, and in this last-ditch effort Harold is sent with a band of soldiers, plus a dwarf, a gnome, a goblin, and three scary dark elves to protect him and ensure that he reaches his destination safely.
It's obvious, of course, because Pehov isn't very original, that they will die off one by one along the way, until only Harold and maybe a select few others make it back safely -- and that's exactly what happens. The first book, Shadow Prowler, was concerned mostly with preparations for their trip. The second, Shadow Chaser, is spent entirely upon traveling to their goal, and they have rather a hard time of it. This is gloomy and not nearly as fun as the first book, as is usual with the middle book of an epic trilogy. In Shadow Blizzard, they finally reach Hrad Spein, and Harold goes in alone to try to reach the Rainbow Horn and bring it back out. Of course, the enemy has arrived before them and in waiting in the catacombs for him. His journey is very harrowing, and what happens after he makes it out is just as much so.
But there is another, deeper story going along mostly under the surface until we reach Shadow Blizzard. Harold isn't just an amazingly good thief, the reason he is able to accomplish what he does is that he has hidden abilities he didn't know about, and he has the power to make decisions that will literally change the future of the world. He is basically a good guy and wants to do the right thing, but the tricky part is figuring out what the right thing is. The novel is also less black and white about the races than Tolkien was, though Pehov seems quite influenced by Tolkien, possibly at a second or third generation remove. He has all of these races, but clearly there really isn't that much difference between the elves and the orcs. And the orcs aren't mindlessly evil, they are fighting against the encroachment of the neighboring kingdoms. They're tired of humans cutting down the trees they depend upon, and elves raiding and killing in their territory. All of the races struggle to find balance between dominating and being dominated, and Harold has to consider that certain actions that throw things out of balance could lead to genocide. It isn't so obvious and simplistic as a lot of epic fantasy, and that was somewhat refreshing.
As always, sometimes the translation was a little weird. I have read enough translated Russian works now that I suspect it's a fairly literal translation, and what works in Russian seems a little odd to an English speaker's ear. For instance, the powerful and ancient Rainbow Horn, forged by the ogres thousands of years ago, is repeatedly referred to by Harold and some of his companions as a tin whistle. That's just ... incongruous.
There were a few other things that annoyed me, for instance Pehov has Harold having true and detailed dreams. This way he can write more battle scenes. I am so very, very uninterested in battle scenes that most of these were an annoyance rather than an addition to the narrative. It's also kind of a cheat for Pehov to be able to tell us what Harold would have no way of knowing, otherwise. I didn't like it, and tended to skim or skip those parts. I also found the timing of the release of the books a problem. I love the first novel enough that I re-read it every so often when I'm in a reading funk, but the second one was grim enough that I only read it twice. Picking up the third book, I don't remember all the little details because it's been a very long time since the last one came out. So, for instance, when one of his surviving companions gives Harold his swords at the end and Harold knows what he's supposed to do with them -- I have no freaking idea what Harold is supposed to do with them, because it's been too long and I don't understand the significance of the gesture, and it isn't explained.
Nevertheless, I really liked this trilogy. It isn't all that original--most work of this type isn't, let's be honest--but it's solidly entertaining and well worth the time. I have no doubt I will be re-reading the whole thing again before the end of the year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)