Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
What a fantastic find this is! Written against the backdrop of inner city poverty, this is a short story about deeply imperfect people trying to cope with extraordinarily crappy circumstances. Drugs are a major part of this story, as is the supernatural. I found myself reminded of The House by Edward Lee - a miasma from years of psychic pain builds up and takes on a life of it's own, which is the sort of Jungian inspired supernatural shenanigans I like the best.
Speaking as someone with six years of sobriety after a lifetime of chemical addiction, I found the portrayal of addiction in this story to be among the best I've ever read. According to the bios on the usual sites the author's day job is drug counseling. This experience shows through. The horror and depravity of addiction feels gut-wrenchingly visceral. I found parts of this short story difficult to read - they're that powerful. And I'm the guy that can read Edward Lee while eating dinner.
To be frank, I didn't have very high expectations for the book; Wicked Run Press is Mr. Mathew's own label. I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the writing - he uses an economy of words that flows very well, the characters were all developed well and voicing was especially well done. I do not recall any typos or grammatical errors. This is a well produced book gloriously free of the problems that beset too many self-published books.
I've since purchased several other books from Mark Mathews. They are not going to sit on my TBR list for years; knowing that I have some more stories that could be this good is like having a stash of the good stuff tucked away for later.
Brainycat's 5 "B"s: blood: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] boobs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bombs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bondage: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] blasphemy:Brainycat's 5 "B"s: blood: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] boobs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bombs: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] bondage: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] blasphemy: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] Stars: 2 Bechdel Test: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] Deggan's Rule: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%] Gay Bechdel Test: [UNSCORED, DNF AT 10%]
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I DNF'd this book at 10%. I found the protagonist unbelievable - I felt no depth to the character, I felt he was just a collection of attributes and a repository of Things That Happened To Him. It was as if he had no agency in his story, but just existed to move the plot along. Not a good place for the main character to live.
The pacing didn't make sense to me at all. In the first couple of pages, we watch as the protagonist's daughter gets abducted by some sort of dimension hopping demon. Describing this (visually, because other senses and the interior life of the character don't exist in this world) takes only a few more words than driving through the french countryside between plot advancements. I felt a complete lack of economy WRT the wordsmithing. I expect authors of books I'm reading for fun to be able to write better than I can :)
The few pages I read showed me that this book isn't lacking for ideas, but isn't cut of the cloth that I like to read. I didn't see any glaring typos or grammatical errors; this is not from the bottom of the self-published barrel. Unfortunately, I think the author needs to keep working on his craft (characterization, pacing, visualization) before I will feel comfortable investing the time and energy into an entire book. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
Imagine Herman Hesse and Theodore Sturgeon eating acid with Philip K. Dick then spending the whole day reading classic comics while watching Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell. That's the impression I got from this book; it's a self-confessed pop culture mashup with a thin veneer of Jungian psychobabble plastered over the top. This could have gone either way; in the hands of a less confident or skilled author this story would quickly become a parody of itself and lose respect from any decently read reader.
Fortunately this was not the case. Nobody tried to reach too far nor did the story try to pretend it's more than just a contemporary adult fantasy novel. It's crafted well, the editing/proofreading are all of the standard you'd exepct from Del Rey, the characters have enough life to be interesting and stand on their own while the setting just sort of drifts by and occaisonally interjects itself to complicate the plot on cue. There's not a lot of action in this book, which makes this the sort of book I don't normally read. I felt the pacing was brisk but too tightly managed. There were very few surprises and I never felt compelled to try to prognosticate what was going to happen next. I'm not even sure I ever got emotionally invested in the protagonist, actually. I felt like I was reading an inventory of a lot of conversations that some guy was having with a number of different people with the purpose of deciding if I like the guy or not. And I'm still not sure I like the guy.
That being said, the story has a new twist on a premise that's been touched on in any number of books and movies (some of them mentioned by name, thank you dear author) and faith in the premise is what kept me going despite the occasional plot hole or the contemporary setting full of characters who can travel back and forth across the US at will but don't have cell phones.
There's nothing technically wrong with this book; it's certainly better than most of the swill getting published under the contemporary fantasy banner. It's a great premise that's executed well, the author clearly respects me as a reader and I feel a kinship since we clearly count some of the same writers among our favorites, but ultimately this story lacks a certain frisson and failed to grab me. I think this is a great book for someone else, and could easily be five stars for a different reader. I found myself skimming the last third hoping there would be a surprise that would engage me (there wasn't), but I liked it just a little too much to give up on it. I'm giving this a very solid 3.5 stars....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is an odd little addition to the Laundry Files canon. It clocks in at 74 ereader screens; it's hardly long enough to get a story going, let alone developed and resolved. There's a very long setup and then a super quick resolution which left me just a little puzzled - I won't give anything away but I feel the solution to the problem isn't consistent with the "rules" of the Laundry Files world. We did learn some more arcane trivia about the history of the Laundry, but we didn't learn very much about Bob Howard and the "mystery" aspect of the story leaves some huge gaps that aren't adequately explained. That being said, the writing is crisp and elegant which I appreciate after the clumsiness of The Rhesus Chart.
A weak 3.5; it was enjoyable enough for fans of the Laundry Files but doesn't offer very much for people just coming into the series....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
The latest installment of the Laundry Files series is the best plot yet, has some brilliant moments but is tempered by whole chapters that feel phoned in. There's whole chunks of backstory and supporting cast member development that feel like they're just there to pad the wordcount. I was reading these chapters and imagined a dialogue between Mr. Stross and his editor:
"Hey Charles, I went over the latest revision with the publisher, they want to up the word count to justify the premium price." "Well, the story is finished as it is..." "Sure, and it's great, but maybe you could, you know, do that writing thing you do and make up some more stuff?" "Where would I put more story? This is already the most complicated plot in the series." "Maybe you could throw in some long expositions about the supporting cast? And do lots of recaps, a'la 'The story so far' - the publisher thinks kids today with their short attention spans won't be able to follow along with all the doublecrossing doubleagents." "Well, I suppose I could add a few paragraphs here and there. How much bigger is the book supposed to be?" "Charles, we need to ask for another ten thousand words." "ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?!?" "No, I'm afraid not. Say, how's that advance treating you anyways?"
And thus we see the author playing around with different expositionary styles in a "let's break the fourth wall" kind way. We see the author spend a lot of time developing characters that are going to be dead by the end of the book. We get an inordinate amount of exposition with some ancillary plot twists, to the point where I think this book marks a sea change in Bob Howard's career at the Laundry. Previous books had Bob getting thrown around by bureaucratic forces outside of his comprehension or control, forcing him to battle Lovecraftian horrors on one hand while trying to find his way through Gilliam-esque horrors (see [1] and [2]) on the other hand, and this was part of the charm. This book sees Bob take control of major operations, manipulate the bureaucratic to his needs, play office politics with the best of them and generally act like a middle-management, PDA wielding Indiana Jones.
I'm glad to see Bob's arc progressing so well, and the level of danger and plot complication get amped up to match. This is no Monty Haul campaign: the conflict in this story is something the likes of which the Laundry has never had to deal with before. Mr. Stross has clearly done his homework with regards to contemporary vampire mythology, and has worked very hard to put his own unique spin on it. I shan't spoil it for other readers but I'll say he stays true to the core concepts and ideals of vampirism while adding his specific spin on it and brilliantly lampoons the glut of popular vampire stories that have come out in the last few years. He's read everything from Stoker through Hamilton (at one point Bob is tasked with reading this same canon, and we clearly hear Charles whining about it through Bob's mouth) and he uses this knowledge to drop more than a few shoutouts to some of the better vampire stories. Let The Right One In and Near Dark get major nods, while the rest of the stories get their barbs here and there.
When the story is moving along, this is probably the best Laundry Files book yet. It's brilliantly plotted, the conflict is refreshing and interesting and the cast of characters is the best yet. But it felt like every time I was really into the pace, really absorbed by the story and the plot - oomph! - I ran headlong into pages of exposition that felt like trying to walk through knee deep mud. There's a lot of ancillary info thrown around that didn't directly affect the plot. This was necessary to provide the emotional backdrop of some of the characters to explain their motivations in subsequent chapters, and I have a very strong suspicion a lot of what we learned about these character's interior lives will be relevant in subsequent installments of the series. Which is great in the context of the whole series, but within the scope of this book it felt like clumsy writing. In the scope of this book alone, I would've appreciated some reworking of certain sections to make them more elegant and fit into the overall pace of the book better.
Charles's scathing treatment of the curses of modern life - particularly agile project management - should be studied by anyone who ever works with technology engineers. While parts of the plot drag, the insightful snarkiness of Bob's observations are hardly tempered at all. Technology plays less of a role in this book however; there's not as much here for the programming nerds to sink their teeth into. Overall, this book felt less like "Joe Programmer vs. The Eldritch Horrors, hilarity ensues" and more like "Bob the Middle Manager plays Van Helsing, hilarity ensues". At this rate of progression, however, there can't be many books left in the series.
Unless CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN comes about, and the publisher tries to pad the word count into a second series...
Two memorable quotes from this book: "It suddenly dawns on me that I know about as much about looking after a pet cat as I know about flying a jet fighter: it’s all MEOW DAKKA-DAKKA ZOOM to me."
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
A serviceable but not especially engaging story that takes full advantage of the most popular cryptozoological tropes. Red shining eyes in the night, strange teeth, domestic animals acting strangely - they're all packed in here. The featured domestic animals are cats, and since I'm a certified crazy cat guy, this endeared me to the story even though the character building of both the cats and humans vacillated between inadequate and forced. The plot developed steadily enough, but is left entirely unresolved and the human protagonist is left in an untenable position. This is the first installment of loosely related stories in his Wicked Neighborhood series, of which I also picked up #2 and #3. I doubt I'm going to read them. I'm probably being generous with 3.5 stars, but I really like cats so that's worth a star and a half to me. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is a very quick read, too short and simple to be marketed as a novella. It doesn't really add anything to the "crazed chainsaw wielding psychopath slaughtering kids trapped in a locked house" genre, but it is mercifully well edited. Mr. Shaffer is no Ed Lee, nor is he trying to be - this is a middle of the road bog standard not-especially-gruesome slasher. Comforting in it's predictability, to be honest. The writing is competent if not expansive; the pacing, arc and resolution all worked well but I felt the sentence structures to be repetitive and the vocabulary to be a bit limited. I'm feeling generous because I got this free through Kindle Unlimited; I'dve paid up £0.50 before feeling ripped off. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I don't recall exactly why it seemed like a good idea to buy this and read it again; I believe I heard a mention that the BBC4 dramatisation will be available for sale soon. In an inexplicable fit of nostalgia I bought a copy and for reasons I can't quite fathom I actually reread the whole thing. I first read this book right as it came out in paperback - about the time I graduated high school. It must be understood that the young Mr. Brainycat was drunk nearly every night and stoned more often that not. Way back in the day, I thought it was brilliant satire that was sticking it right to the man where it'd hurt him the most. Neil Gaiman was the new Ambrose Bierce!
Growing up in middle America made any story set in England seem vastly important; it was the land of Monty Python, Benny Hill and Proper Tradition. England was a wonderland of glorious villages and endearing people with a brilliant sense of humor, and an affinity for anything English gave me a feeling of being cultured (superior) to the rednecks surrounding me. A quarter of a century later, six years sober and living in England has wiped the gloss right off of that fantasy in no uncertain terms.
I think being more familiar with the English culture is the biggest factor in my disappointment with this rereading. It doesn't seem cute and quaint; the difficulties of trying to do things in England (like drive around the M25) are cute when you're reading about them from 10 000km away; when you're living there it's maddeningly frustrating[1]. I didn't realize how much of this book is taking the piss out of the British way of doing things until now, but this time around I didn't find it LOL funny. It's cute, it's funny, and it's totally forgettable.
I had a notion to reread American Gods, which I liked when I was really high, but I think I'm going to let that one lie. Some things are best left as (scattered) memories and vague impressions. I believe the fact of the matter is that except for Sandman, I'm not a Neil Gaiman fan and as I grow older and more cynical I'm diverging further and further away from his canon. By the same token I've never disliked Terry Pratchet, but I've never been a huge fan either - I found the couple of Discworld books I read to be cute, funny and totally forgettable. This is a great pairing of authors but I don't think they worked out a whole that's any greater than the sum of their parts.
[1] Example: restaurants run and staffed by English people cannot get a meal delivered to a table in less than 45 minutes. This is an example of the attitude that lost them their empire.
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
A list of shorts with the likes of Swanwick, Stross, and Bear? Yes Please! This was one of those "you might also like..." suggestions from That Monolithic Online Retailer. It showed up while I was filling in my Laundry Files collection, and on a whim and without even looking at any reviews I bought it. Say what you like about the way Mr. Bezos runs his business, but the boffins who write the code that glues purchasing patterns to the inventory are doing some good work - I really liked this collection. All of the stories are strong enough that I feel no ambiguity; the stories I like I like a lot, the stories I don't like I really don't like.
Unfortunately, demands on my time dictate that I can only reliably allocate the time between getting in bed and falling asleep for reading every day. The stories in this collection were exactly the right length for this interval. I doubt this was intentional on Tor's part but it was nice for once to be able to pick up my reader and start at the beginning of a new story for a few nights in a row. The volume appears to be an amalgamation of complete ebook files from each story; there's an overall cover and title page, then each story has it's own cover and title page. This is no doubt the result of some laziness on Tor's part, as combining small standalone files into a single compendium only takes a few keystrokes, but I didn't mind at all. As we'd expect from a large publisher like Tor, all the mechanics of a proper book like formatting, spelling and grammar were spot on.
Dormanna, by Gene Wolfe, is yet another reinterpretation of the childhood imaginary friend. I'm not sure it really added much to the genre to be honest. As I was reading the story, I kept hoping something horrible and twisted was going to happen. The ending is ambiguous enough to let each to let the reader decide the fate of humanity but I never got the dark twist I was hoping for. This is a story I didn't like. The whole tone was all sweetness and bubbles, and the dark forces that were hinted at never materialized enough to provide a meaningful (or entertaining) counterpoint.
The second story in the collection is Portrait of Lisane de Patagnia by Rachel Swirsky. This is the only story I didn't finish. I just couldn't get into the first person POV; I feel like the characterization didn't put enough hooks into the protagonist to make learning about the world (and therefore deciphering what's happening) worthwhile. I think a more dedicated reader, who is more appreciative of intensely allegorical introspective relationship studies would do much better with this than I did. I have nothing bad to say about the quality of Ms. Swirsky's writing, but unfortunately the POV and conflict push all my DNF buttons.
Michael Swanwick has created some of the most engaging worlds I've ever had the pleasure of visiting. I remember reading Vacuum Flowers in highschool; his use of dialogue to bring the world to life still sticks in my brain today[1]. The Mongolian Wizard, like all of his works I've read since, does the same and breathes some sophistication into what would otherwise be a straightforward steampunks and wizards jaunt through a quasi Hapsburgian Europe. This would be an example of story that didn't rely on depth, sex, violence or gimmicks to keep me involved, but instead was so expertly crafted it was just a pleasure to take it in.
A Tall Tail by Charles Stross would be a great introduction to Stross for the uninitiated. Mr. Stross knows engineers; he gets us folk with an affectionate sarcasm that can only come from being and accomplished engineer himself. This little story has accurate science, caricatures of people you know, a bit of cloak and dagger conspiracy and more than a few good jokes. Again, not a story that's going to echo through your worldview and knock the cobwebs down, but a great way to spend a few minutes and learn a little about rocket propulsion.
Time travel is very difficult to do well; all too often we see it used as a gimmick to artificially create resonance between elements on different arcs. The Ghosts of Christmas by Paul Cornell neatly avoids this trap by making the entire arc of the story a fractal exploration of itself. It's elegant, it's engaging and it kept me interested with a believable protagonist and multi-dimensional supporting characters. Kudos to Mr. Cornell, and I'm looking forward to read more of his work.
Brit Mandelo's The Finite Canvas follows a well worn path to redemption through all our favorite cyberpunk tropes, but it did keep me engaged up until the end - the protagonist has a choice to make, and her character is layered deep enough it's not clear what she'll do until the end of the story. After that, the inevitable gracefully concludes itself with a minimum of chatter which I appreciate. Ms. Mandelo is also on my "authors to look for" list.
Am I Free To Go? is Kathryn Cramer's dystopia about the police state encroaching on american liberal-centrist middle class sensibilities. It feels quite preachy; Kathryn has a Point to make so she Wrote A Story to illustrate her Point. I think it didn't cover enough nuance to justify the word count, and the plot was too disjointed and the characterization too thin to feel engaged with the protagonist. Everything Kathryn is warning us about has been covered at nymag, hufpo, theatlantic, etc ad nauseum. I'm not at all opposed to politics in my scifi - it's what scifi is supposed to be about IMHO - but this attempt feels like a miss for me.
Every collection of shorts always has that one story that surprises me with how much it sticks with me. I liked Pat Murphy's About Fairies for it's imagination and it's dark undertone that rose up in unexpected places. I didn't like the pace at all; it veered dangerously close to some allegorical, introspective soliliquies in a couple of places but managed to pull itself back from the brink. It seems a lot of words were spent in the interstitial places between realms, and I think I would have liked to see a more intricate plot that wove the different realms together in a more symbolic manner. Despite this, it is a story that has stayed with me and I appreciate that.
Our Human by Adam-Troy Castro wasn't poorly written, but it did bore me. I had the "surprise" worked out about seven paragraphs into the story. This is NOT to say I'm a sophisticated reader; instead, I'm a voracious reader of the sorts of stories that use all these tropes so I knew what to expect right away. That being said, I played Jane's Addiction in my head and it was an easy enough way to spend a few minutes before drifting off to sleep. Not a story brimming with originality, but the author showed skill and confidence and I felt it worthwhile to finish it.
Elizabeth Bear's contribution Faster Gun ticks all the boxes to squeeze my DNF gland dry: alternate history, the wild west, steampunky time travel and little green men who come in peace. On paper, this looks like a story I'd avoid at any cost. Quite to the contrary, I enjoyed the heck out of it. The whole story had a self-deprecating, tongue in cheek quality that gave a dimension to the tropes I hadn't seen before. Because of the way it was handled, what could have been a vile dud is actually one of the three best stories in the collection.
I paid about two quid for this, and I feel like I got my money's worth. I don't know if I'll ever come back to reread any of it, but it satisfies my criteria for a good collection: the majority of the stories were good and I found some new authors to look for. This would be a good survey of contemporary scifi; there's a variety of settings, plots and tropes to select from that illustrate where the "mainstream" is at these days.
[1] "I saw a brontosaurus by the Thames this morning." "Oh, lovely! It's been a warm winter, I suspect that's why they've come out so early" ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I finished the first two stories in this collection (21% of the book) and moved on. I really like a lot of what Necro has published, so when I saw the blurb explaining this is the guy who runs the publishing house I was excited to see what he's writing. Unfortunately, the writing didn't excite me.
The first story is written from the POV of a psychopathic killer, and is in the vein of the "I'm normal but everyone else is weird" device. This works best when the author draws out sympathy from the reader, so we are left wondering if we're harboring some sort of psychopathology. While I wanted to relate to the protagonist - a nerdy kid who got picked on in school, rather like myself - I just never felt like I related to him enough, nor did I feel engaged in what he was doing. Failing to connect to this kid meant that I never had to question my own delicate sensibilities, and thus the whole story fell flat.
The second story could have been interesting except I saw the ending from a mile away. I think the explanation for the relationships between the parents and their adopted son was explained too early which completely gave away the conclusion in the first few pages of the story. Finishing the story was just an exercise in moving my eyes across the page while the inevitable concluded itself.
Overall, I found the writing felt expository with a very even cadence. I like writing that mixes it up a little (ie, of a much higher caliber than my own writing) and the vocabulary was conversational but not especially evocative. Reading these stories hasn't dampened my enthusiasm for the Necro label, but it has reinforced my opinion that writers can be good authors or good editors, but not both....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is a very, very short addition to the Laundry Files series. It pokes a bit of fun at the English traditions, a lot of fun at corporate bureaucratic culture, and then wraps itself up in a tidy conclusion. As I was reading this, I thought my file was corrupted - I was 20 pages into a 38 page story and I still wasn't sure where the conflict was and had only one clumsily inserted clue about the nature of the antagonist.
To be honest, I don't think this is a very good example of Mr. Stross's abilities as a writer. If it were longer he could have added more subtlety and mystery, but the very short length meant he had to pare the story down to it's absolute bare essentials. For me, the long setup and short conclusion threw the balance and cadence way off. A crucial read for fans of the Laundry Files series, but not recommended for people who aren't already familiar with the series....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I'm going to share an uncomfortable truth with you here. This is not the best book in the series, and in fact it's not even a very good final episode. One of the things I've always liked about this series is the frenetic pace; "no rest for the wicked" and all that. This book, however, doesn't really start to take off until around the 50% mark. Once it picks up a lot of long lingering plot lines are resurrected and thrown into the mix, the tension builds until the last 20% of the book, and then SPLAT! The apocalypse blows it's load into a climax that's - we're friends, I'll be honest - is disappointing.
The casual cynicism, saucy word play and nonstop pop culture references are still in abundance, and once the violence gets started it's a good as any of the other books. All the things we love about Sandman Slim aka Jim Stark are here, and the weird little circle of friends he's accumulated are just as weird and fun as ever. Reading this book felt a lot like getting in touch with some old friends.
This book shows a deeper interior life for Stark, and I think Kadrey worked very hard to develop the character and round him out. Unfortunately, this happens at the expense of a lot of action and intrigue. I don't believe in an either/or dichotomy between actioning and adventuring OR feeling and relating. I think what happened was the author tried too hard to grow the character and lost track of his cadence, and let the interior development drive too much of the plot.
We're told many times that the apocalypse is upon creation, and several details are repeated to this effect: nonstop rain and flooding in LA and Hell for example. But I never felt any impending doom. Maybe because Stark and Candy are too busy lovingly quipping at each other? Maybe because there's not enough time spent with the supporting cast to get a feel of how the world is falling apart, because are protagonists are too wrapped up in themselves and their relationship with each other? All I know for sure is that any sense of impending doom was told rather than shown and this really didn't help me to get to the final conflict.
The final conflict was... I've already used the word "disappointing" once in this review, so let's say it was "unsatisfying". Unlike the final conflicts in the other books, I knew what he was working on ahead of time. I love to see a plan come together in unexpected ways. But I wasn't surprised. In fact, the whole battle felt like it was phoned in. The oldest of the old gods is invading creation to take it back from god, and the best we can do is tear up a few blocks of LA across a couple of pages? It just felt like it was too little too late and didn't engage me. I didn't feel afraid, I didn't feel cosmic forces wreaking havoc on all the physics I've ever known, I didn't feel like these characters that I've known for 5 or more books were ever in any real danger. It just felt like I needed to consume the words to get through the pages to reach the conclusion.
A whole host of lingering plot lines were brought up in this book, but most of them did not end satisfactorily - see "phoning it in", above. I suppose the ends are loose enough to squeeze a few more novels out of some of them, but at some point I think epic characters in long series' need to find a new set of Major Antagonists to up the stakes and move the whole arc of the world into new territories. I feel an opportunity to do just that was lost here.
If this had been the first book in the series, I don't think I would have read any of the others. I feel really bad writing such damning words. Maybe this book is just mediocre, but the rest of the series is so much fun and so well written that it feels like The Getaway God is worse than it really is. I do know that I hope this review doesn't put anyone off of starting the series; up until this installment, they've been top notch rollicking good times and a total hoot to read. It's entirely possible I brought too much expectation into this book, and my disappointment has nothing to do with Kadrey and everything to do with what I wish I had read.
Is this the last Sandman Slim novel? My halfhearted attempts at googlefu don't turn up any interviews saying so, but the book ends on a note that's suitable to end the series. On the other hand, it also ends on a note that leaves room for a nearly infinite stream of sequels. I guess it's a matter of what Kadrey wants to do with the series. Personally, I'd like to see him baby the thing into a Netflix miniseries a'la GRRM and GoT....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I left my "5Bs" blank because I didn't read enough of the book to make a valid score.
I made it about 12% into this book before I gave up. Not because it was too "extreme" or "graphic", but because it just wasn't written very well. I'm all about the splatterpunk - I don't even blink an eye at Edward Lee - and I took a chance on this at amazon when I saw the 3.6 average review at GR. I'm glad I didn't pay very much for it.
The content wasn't the problem. The problem is the writing. All of the sentences looked the same. All of the dialogue sounded the same. The author didn't show me anything. The author only told me things. The main character was boring. And she was predictable. I knew what was going to happen to her after her first "test".
There's just too many good books that are crafted by wordsmiths rather than written by content producers and lovingly edited by professionals that are advocating on the reader's behalf to spend time on books that are substandard. I do hope this author continues to refine his craft, the world needs more splatterpunk and I'm sure he has important stories to tell, but until he's better at telling them I'm going to spend my scant reading time on books that are produced to a higher caliber....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I finished this book a few weeks ago, and to be completely honest I'm having a hard time recalling any details of it. I remember the first book in the series, and I remember reading this book and thinking, "Where did the awesome go?" My recollection of this book is of some ridiculous plot twists and a Mary Sue revenant coming to save the day too often. Where the first book was gloriously dark and dystopic and our intrepid hero was properly cynical and jaded, this book just felt like it was full of whiny characters who were being shuffled from one plot twist to another. I just didn't like it nearly as much as the first.
I hope this is just the "second book slump", and the series continues to a third edition to wrap up the Big Boss Fight that's been lurking on the horizon. I'll definitely buy the next book in the series, but I'll be reading it with a healthy dose of trepidation rather than the unbridled optimism I had when I started this book....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
This is a short story tucked into the Sandman Slim series. I read it out of order (I'd already finished Kill City Blues) but that didn't change my enjoyment of the story. As a huge fan of Sandman Slim, my only problem with this book is that it was too short. It had everything we like about this guy - violence, wry self deprecating humor, a wicked (pun intended) sense of sarcasm and tidy little story line that wraps itself up at the end.
The story takes shortly after Sandman takes over hell and revolves around him taking a couple of legions of hellspawn out to the far reaches to take care of some business left over by the last Lucifer. Naturally, chaos, violence, horror, death and destruction ensue.
I'm not sure this would be a good way for people who haven't read the earlier books to dip into the series. It might be a little difficult to follow along; Mr. Kadrey expects the reader to have a firm grasp of the mythology he's created and the history of his major characters. On the other hand, as a quick little horro/action-adventure/romp it's a fun little diversion and for readers don't mind being a little behind on the backstory and motivations, this would be good introduction to the style and tone of the Sandman Slim series....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
If more erotica was written with as much insight, creativity and commmand of the language as Vanessa has, I'd read a lot more erotica. This collection of ten stories (all of them new to me; I don't believe any of them are in any of her other collections) is another set of knockout stories. Even the weakest amongst them are worth reading. The real standouts for me are Trebarthen Cottage, which blends the fantastical into the real seamlessly as Vanessa does in so many of her stories. The Shower Game by far the longest story in the collection, watches 2 relationships evolve around a mutual appreciation for voyeurism, and the story is handled quite deftly.
This collection doesn't really go into any of the taboo kinks that some of Vanessa's stories do, so this would be an excellent collection for the discerning reader looking for some top shelf, witty and well written vanilla erotica. ...more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
If you like the Laundry series, you'll like this short. It's a very quick read and treads well worn ground, but all the things I like about the Laundry are in abundance: sly digs at English culture, comically overdrawn computer science and good ol' fashioned whatdunnit in the vein of classic Dr. Who.The references to the eldritch gods and Crowley are like a fractal tesseract and provide the real meat of the story.
For people not familiar with The Laundry, this would work as a standalone. There's enough context provided to explain who the players and are and what they're doing, and the voicing, cadence etc are all exemplary of the series. For people familiar with the series, reading this out of order (like I have) didn't detract my enjoyment....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
One thing about Peter Watts - he has one of the most distinctive voices in scifi since Theodore Sturgeon. Despite the depth and breadth of topic, setting and POV this collection of shorts reads like a cohesive whole. All of these stories are worthwhile, which is unfortunately more than I expect from an anthology, though naturally I felt a few were stronger than most and the weakest are easy to pick out.
First of all, there are two shorts from the Rifters world: "Home" and "A Niche". These are among my favorites if only because I like the Rifters world so much. Other stories that stood out for me are "A Word for Heathens", a morality play in a world where Jerry Falwell and Farenheit 451 intersect. It took a few pages for me to warm up to "The Island", but by the end I was completely hooked and it's message of humility and the limitations of the human scope stick deeply with me.
I wasn't such a big fan of "Repeating the Past"; I felt like I've read that story a number of times before and I'm not sure it adds anything to the canon. I felt much the same for "Flesh Made Word", actually. The first story "The Things" only makes sense when you realize it's a first person account of the alien's perspective from the movie "The Thing". A cynical part of me feels that a story that needs an introduction like that has fundamentally failed to set it's scene properly; but it would be hard to know if it's possible to set the scene in-story without plaigerising the movie. Perhaps I'm asking too much?
This is a great set of short stories. None of them are long enough to need more than a single sitting to read, but nearly all of them contain ideas and emotions with subtle barbs that have sat with me long after I finished the book.
The outro - wherein Mr. Watts talks about his infamous detention at the hands of the US Border Patrol and his feelings about his canon being labeled "unrelentingly dark, "misanthropic" or "savage" is some of the best discourse on the nature of horror and how "bad things" is an entirely relative term that's entirely dependant on scope. Worth the price of admission just for that essay, actually....more
Please note: I don't review to provide synopses, I review to share a purely visceral reaction to books and perhaps answer some of the questions I ask when I'm contemplating investing time and money into a book.
I read this in the "wrong order". I finished Firefall before I started this, so reading this wasn't as much about whetting my appetite for a new book as much filling in a couple of gaps in the epic I just finished.
Protip: The correct order to read the Firefall series is:
Blindsight
The Colonel
Echopraxia
You can also read The Colonel first, but it'll very slightly spoil Blindsight. Please note that Blindsight does not have a surprise ending; but reading The Colonel first may slightly change your viewpoint while you read Blindsight.
That being said, it's a nice little short. I think I would have liked it more if I'd read it before I finished the series, because there is some intense (eloquent) characterization and the post/transhuman future he details is deeply thought provoking. But I already knew the characters and had gotten my thoughts provoked by Firefall, so all this did was fill in some details about a time and place that hadn't had much attention in Firefall.
Absolutely worth more than the £0.39 I paid for it....more
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