Jason Dias's Blog - Posts Tagged "mystery"
Matryoshka Blues goes too far - and I love it
Shawn Harper's debut novel is a real barn-burner. The key to comedy is going too far. Remember when Bill Maher called himself a house slave, but he didn’t say slave? He used another word, and had to apologize to the world. Remember when Kathy Griffin had to disappear for holding up a severed dummy head? They went too far. Comedians are supposed to. Unlike dancers, they’re supposed to tread on your toes.
This book does that from start to finish. Goes too far, that is. It doesn’t drop N bombs or threaten to assassinate the president. You know what, forget about all that for now. I mean, it goes too far in narrative asides to the reader. Like half the story is the narrator talking to the camera. That should be a ridiculous distraction and detractor but it isn't: everyone can find a way to relate to the narrative character, even if you might not end up liking him that much. He's just like us.
Imagine if Shawn Spencer from Psych merged with The Rock from any given movie in a freak transporter accident. Well, not The Scorpion king. Something else. Whatever. And imagine the resulting being had all of the worst traits of each: out of shape, no impulse control, forgetful, sarcastic. You’d basically get Matryoshka Blues.
I mean, it’s told in the vein of a basic hard-boiled-detective plot, only the detective isn’t that hard boiled. Kinda soft in the middle, on the downslope of his tough-guy years but gutting through it. He talks at the camera constantly, a never-ending stream of self-referential jokes. If you liked Psych or Deadpool or even Spiderman, this is for you.
The story includes some important diversity narratives. I like that in a novel. They don't cloud things up, they're just another natural part of life. Harper shows here you can write gritty detective fiction and not be a total ass about trans people, people of color, or women.
So you've got some great violence, some fast cars, belly-laughs, self-conscious masculinity.
Comedy is hard. I rarely if ever laugh reading a book (Calvin and Hobbes doesn't count; it's a comic). I laughed reading this one. Well done, Shawn Harper.
Video version:
https://www.facebook.com/JasonDiasaut...
My website: JasonDiasAuthor.com
This book does that from start to finish. Goes too far, that is. It doesn’t drop N bombs or threaten to assassinate the president. You know what, forget about all that for now. I mean, it goes too far in narrative asides to the reader. Like half the story is the narrator talking to the camera. That should be a ridiculous distraction and detractor but it isn't: everyone can find a way to relate to the narrative character, even if you might not end up liking him that much. He's just like us.
Imagine if Shawn Spencer from Psych merged with The Rock from any given movie in a freak transporter accident. Well, not The Scorpion king. Something else. Whatever. And imagine the resulting being had all of the worst traits of each: out of shape, no impulse control, forgetful, sarcastic. You’d basically get Matryoshka Blues.
I mean, it’s told in the vein of a basic hard-boiled-detective plot, only the detective isn’t that hard boiled. Kinda soft in the middle, on the downslope of his tough-guy years but gutting through it. He talks at the camera constantly, a never-ending stream of self-referential jokes. If you liked Psych or Deadpool or even Spiderman, this is for you.
The story includes some important diversity narratives. I like that in a novel. They don't cloud things up, they're just another natural part of life. Harper shows here you can write gritty detective fiction and not be a total ass about trans people, people of color, or women.
So you've got some great violence, some fast cars, belly-laughs, self-conscious masculinity.
Comedy is hard. I rarely if ever laugh reading a book (Calvin and Hobbes doesn't count; it's a comic). I laughed reading this one. Well done, Shawn Harper.
Video version:
https://www.facebook.com/JasonDiasaut...
My website: JasonDiasAuthor.com
Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless
I usually want to wait a day or two after reading something to meditate on it and let it settle. I was so at home in Bannerless, though, that this seems unnecessary.
Maybe the reason I love this book so much is that Vaughn manages to do what I’m trying to do in my own writing. This book is clearly genre-fiction, even if it lives in a newish genre (post-apocalyptic fic) and is a genre-bender (it definitively blends in murder mystery, edging up against cozy because there are no forensics and only the mildest of violence). While inhabiting these genres, though, the world is really a main character as much as the people in it; here is plot taking a backseat to story, and worldbuilding as much more than just setting.
And the novel rises above all of that into the sphere of literary writing. In some ways, it’s a coming-of-age story. The main struggles appear external – solve the mystery – but are really internal to the protagonist (a strong but relatably human woman).
All this is bound up together with a ribbon of wistfulness. A sadness over what has passed on, on the loss of an age. This wistful air is not present in all the zombie and cannibal movies set after the end of this age; those tales are rageful and cynical. This is something else, something past nostalgia, a yearning that people get over their selves to become good.
The story is nothing at all to do with Lord of the Rings. But how I feel reading it is how I feel reading about Arwyn electing to stay in the world as a mortal woman because love is worth it. It’s how I feel reading about the mirthful Tom Bombadil receding from the world because his age has ended. It’s a sadness contained in the prose so much more than in the events of the story; elegant writing that conveys a feeling without ever mentioning it. While the writing seems so clear and concise and unobtrusive, nevertheless this is poetry.
Of all the new books I’ve read this year, this one is my favorite, and likely to enter my annual reading rotation.
Here's an audio version:
https://youtu.be/cnAwPer3dbM
And visit me over at jasondiasauthor.com.
Maybe the reason I love this book so much is that Vaughn manages to do what I’m trying to do in my own writing. This book is clearly genre-fiction, even if it lives in a newish genre (post-apocalyptic fic) and is a genre-bender (it definitively blends in murder mystery, edging up against cozy because there are no forensics and only the mildest of violence). While inhabiting these genres, though, the world is really a main character as much as the people in it; here is plot taking a backseat to story, and worldbuilding as much more than just setting.
And the novel rises above all of that into the sphere of literary writing. In some ways, it’s a coming-of-age story. The main struggles appear external – solve the mystery – but are really internal to the protagonist (a strong but relatably human woman).
All this is bound up together with a ribbon of wistfulness. A sadness over what has passed on, on the loss of an age. This wistful air is not present in all the zombie and cannibal movies set after the end of this age; those tales are rageful and cynical. This is something else, something past nostalgia, a yearning that people get over their selves to become good.
The story is nothing at all to do with Lord of the Rings. But how I feel reading it is how I feel reading about Arwyn electing to stay in the world as a mortal woman because love is worth it. It’s how I feel reading about the mirthful Tom Bombadil receding from the world because his age has ended. It’s a sadness contained in the prose so much more than in the events of the story; elegant writing that conveys a feeling without ever mentioning it. While the writing seems so clear and concise and unobtrusive, nevertheless this is poetry.
Of all the new books I’ve read this year, this one is my favorite, and likely to enter my annual reading rotation.
Here's an audio version:
https://youtu.be/cnAwPer3dbM
And visit me over at jasondiasauthor.com.
Blood on the Tracks
Blood on the Tracks by Barbara NicklessMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I picked up this book because Barb Nickless came to my book signing. Authors support each other. And I'd heard great things about Blood On The Tracks.
They were all true.
This is hard-boiled-detective style thriller, except the lead character (Syndey Rose Parnell) has a heart - and a dog. She's come back from the war with a wounded spirit and an adopted military dog. Her and Clyde both lost the same man over there; she lost a little more. Clyde IS her heart, the mission that keeps her going when the despair threatens to overtop her levies.
She's taken work as a railroad cop. The story centers around people who ride the rails, vets back from Afghanistan, and a murder that might involve all of them. The vic is family. Sydney's lost so much already that she'll do anything to find out who the killer is and get justice for the victim.
Clyde really does a lot for the story. We could throw in dogs all day long as devices to garner sympathy from the reader. But this dog, as such dogs do, is a way to explicate the inner workings of Syndey Rose that would otherwise go unremarked and unnoticed. Minus Clyde, she's nearly a sociopath like Jack Reacher. Clyde keeps her human, both in the plot and the reading of it. Dog or no dog, Syndey's as tough as they came, hard-boiled all the way.
Some unique settings and twink knowledge dwell with expert, moody prose. If you're read my reviews here, you know what I like is prose that borders on purple, writing that has character and emotion, almost poetry but also so smooth that it doesn't distract from the story. That's what we have here: every word carefully chosen to de exactly the job it needs to do.
There are others in the series. I read so slowly that I almost never consider sequels written by friends - I want to read everything from all my local writers. But here I think I'll make an exception. Nickless makes me look like the amateur I am.
That's not to say the story is completely without faults. There are a couple of tiny little issues that I was relieved to find because otherwise this book would have been so perfect there was no point in me every writing anything. Barbara Nickless wrote the perfect book, the rest of us should just quit. Luckily, I can still strive to be 10% as good as her.
Read this book immediately.
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