Mike Finn > Recent Status Updates

So far, each of the stories has been told from the point of view of beings we should be wary of on Halloween but, apart from the first story of a hunted demon the tone has been mostly playful with a tonight-we-get-to-let-our-hair-down feel.

I love the tone of the storytelling: unrushed, deeply observant, aware of things left unsaid. I like Ofelia. It's great to see a science fiction protagonist who is realistically old but far from helpless.

The fear in this is made much more powerful by how grounded the people and places are in the everyday reality of life in England.

I like Hazel. She feels real. I like how the police investigation is presented. That feels real too.

Serial killer novels often seem voyeuristic to me, elevating the killings into something that distracts from the offence that they are, placing the emphasis on the killer and makeing the killed seem like a plot device. This avoids most but not all of that.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoy the way Ropa talks and thinks.

This is fresh and energetic. It's also violent, bloody.
This isn't a civilised paranormal romance with strong decent men trying to control their wolf taint.
These werewolves aren't and don't want to be human. They want to be all the wolf they can be. Humans are meat. But smart meat that needs to be stalked, not battled.
They're not lead by a wise but ruthless alpha male but by a bitch they all fight to mate with.

As always, Nancy Collins' storytelling is vivid, violent, original and strangely believable. It turns out that she can twist the werewolf tropes just as vigoursly as she did the vampire ones.

I don't have the patience for this at the moment. I'm not connecting with the main character. She's too whiny for me and the daddy issues stuff, however ironically delivered isn't landing with me. I'm going to set it aside and maybe come back to it when I'm in a better mood.

I love the narrative voice in this. It's rich and human. The emotional impact of the killing that opens the book caught me by surprise. This killing feels real, rather than being something necessary to trigger a murder mystery. I'm eager to read more.

I?m struggling with this. Mostly it's the language. Jim Butcher reaches for a mashup of the kind of language I'd normally hear in a Restoration Comedy by Congreve or Vanbrugh. This isn't a problem when has a character exclain "La!" from time to time but when a fight scene gets loaded with phrases like '"shor forth" everything gets clunky and distractingly faux.

So far, my favourite part is the cats.

à almost set this aside at the 65% mark because the journey across the spacestation, while grpahic and filled with threat, was becoming repetative. Then the story moved in an unexpected direction and now I have to know how it ends.