Joe Kessler > Recent Status Updates

May 4th, the eve of St. George's Day. "Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?" Interesting how rulebound Dracula is in this original story -- yet with very different rules than the usual vampires today.

Some of Jonathan Harker's oldtimey racism in the first Dracula excerpt. Ooh, eastern Europe is so ~mysterious and its peoples so ~exotic and ~fiercelooking but actually ~meek. I ate a dish seasoned with ~paprika for dinner and had to drink ~all the water in the inn.

(I have no idea how to easily map the email digests onto page or % for Goodreads. I'm just going to use page = day for my updates, I think.)

I'm (re)reading this as part of the Dracula Daily this year, which turns the epistolary novel into daily email digests, corresponding to the dates the letters were originally posted. More details and sign up here! https://draculadaily.substack.com/about

"What is fascism but colonialism in the heart of a traditionally colonialist country?" -- Frantz Fanon

Explicitly autistic main character!

Oh wow, I really hate how this book just... ends, with no real resolution to any of its plot or character threads. I was so into it, too, convinced I was going to give this five stars when I was done. So much great material, but that ending is just unforgivable.

"[German women back home] had cut Hitler Youth squad leaders down to size and done their best to drive from their sons' heads any fancy ideas they might have had of being members of a master race."

Don't know how I feel about this implication that no women were Nazis themselves.

You mean the reclusive CEO William who never appears in public is actually the dad's old friend Wally who hasn't been seen or heard from in years? *shocked Pikachu face*

I hate when books bury the (obvious) premise so deep. Of course you can only get to these places by using the magical maps that they're drawn on! That should have been revealed in the early chapters, not when we're almost halfway through.

Two or three other upcoming twists seem ridiculously telegraphed too, although I'm still waiting for them to be sprung.

Yay, the twist I saw coming literally hundreds of pages ago 🙄

Feels like this is a bit late for the disconnected plot to suddenly snap into place as (spoilers?) a time-travel story, but the book is short enough overall that I don't feel as exasperated as I normally would by that.

Finally starting to get some actual plot here, seven chapters into the book.

Jackson called after him, "You know, you're the most paranoid guy I know."

Bosch narrowed his eyes in mock suspicion. "Who told you that?"

I think this author just really likes saying Volga Bulgars -- and I like hearing it in the audiobook, where the narrator makes it sound like those words rhyme.

We've now added the George Floyd murder to this fictional narrative, and I'm *really* not sure I trust this author to do right by it.

So long as I'm complaining: I can't stand all the namedropping of books this character / author has read and liked. It's so poorly motivated each time, so it feels like a weird brag, and there's almost never any further detail about why they're supposedly good. I probably recognize more of them than average, and I still hate it.

I'm not opposed to setting stories during the pandemic. A few TV shows already have. I suspect the best stuff set now will be made later, looking back, but whatever. By all means, include Covid in your contemporary fiction.

But springing it halfway through a novel? Weird choice.

We're writing Covid into this novel? Really? Sigh.

Fingers crossed on this one... It's been getting good reviews, but I really didn't like the author's earlier book Future Home of the Living God. So we'll see.

This is such a warm hug of a book. I wish I had more time to read it.

‪"You have allowed harsh times and cruel circumstances to bar the doors of your hearts. I will not cite your reasons for doing so, lest you deem yourselves thereby excused. Rather I say to you plainly that you have diminished yourselves until I am loath to acknowledge you as my people."‬

"That I no longer walk into the walls of my cell is not because I have forgotten they exist."

Crate and Barrel!!!

Wow, I would not have expected it to take this far into the book series for those guys to show up, based on their presence all throughout the show.

Staying up late to finish this... I've got two hours left in the audiobook and it's due back to the library in two-and-a-half.

How is this book only half done? (That's not a complaint, or at least, not much of one. But it feels like things are approaching the climax here, so I'm surprised I'm only halfway through.)

I appreciate that they keep calling Jacomo Tess's brother-in-law. He's not, really -- he's her sister's husband's brother -- but it's a nice subtle reassurance that he's not being positioned as a love interest for her.

Finally some personal stakes.

I wish I was liking this better. =/

It might still end up as a 4-star rating from me -- maybe -- but it's definitely not the instant 5 of its predecessor.

It's never mentioned but.... these animals acquiring humans? First the buffalo morphing Chapman and then the ant morphing Cassie?

They're, uh. They're naked, right? It's hard to see how they wouldn't be, but the book scrupulously avoids going there.

CASSIE: Is it right to kill that buffalo, now that it's accidentally gained the power to morph and acquired human DNA, or would that be murder?

CASSIE A FEW PAGES LATER: Let's take down a helicopter filled with Yeerks and their involuntary host bodies, rather than fighting our way inside it.