Nate > Recent Status Updates

Guessed this one early on. Mystery writers...please don't present a suspect pool of three people and have one of them remain mysterious and removed from the action. That said, this will probably be a four-starter because Bosch is the man and Connelly write real gud.

Why are all the characters from Galle (Cameron's France parallel) either cowards, perverts, connivers, or murderers and usurpers? Sounds like someone's still mad we won the Hundred Years War...

This shit has so much more to do with real people and events than Power of the Dog that I'm getting that thing in historical fiction where you know how certain characters end up/how certain stories play out, which usually sucks...but it also lessens the constant emotional nut-kicking this book delivers. The story about the dead Mexican Marine and his family...FUUUUUUUCK.

Guys...this book. This FUCKING book.

The burning shirt scene...fuck you, Winslow. I will never be able to enjoy carnitas again.

Oh man...when Bosch pulled out the file on his new mystery case I was like YEAHHHHH.

I can't stop obsessing over how much this book feels like one of those many stories from history or even fantasy where the Great Man creates an empire, then dies and it falls apart into chaos and conflict with new states springing forth in the tumult. Just gonna go ahead and say it: The Cartel is a modern-day version of the Diadochi wars, but with drugs and an obsessive foreign official adding to the melee.

Wooooooow....I just realized the word "quixotic" actually comes from Don Quixote. I'm dumb.

It doesn't really effect the actual content of the book, but whoever did the designs for this and the Power of the Dog's new paperback edition should win some kinda fancy award. This shit just screams "read me or I'll fuck you up!"

Babcock

At least Vegas is more or less the same...

It's easy to see why Stephen King shot so much rope over this book...it's like if Salem's Lot and The Stand fucked and had a cool kid.

D:

There's nothing really original about this book, but the way Cronin fuses a bunch of awesome genres together combined with his smooth-ass writing style really makes the pages turn. We got some horror, some post-apocalypse, some thriller, plus a decent degree of worldbuilding...it's a pleasant stew. Man...now I want stew.

Read almost half of this in one sitting last night, so I think I'm enjoying it.

This whole book is like a much gorier version of the end of that one Lone Wolf and Cub movie where Ogami Itto kills like 400 dudes. If you guys haven't seen those movies, all I gotta say is ronin-for-hire travels medieval Japan with his son Daigoro who rides in a baby cart with built in knives and machine guns.

Okay, the scene with all the Mafia dudes in track jackets grubbing down on "cheeseburgers and hot dogs piled high with peppers and onions and relish chunks the size of bricks" made me hungry as FUCK.

Ah, the "stab someone with a shit-covered knife" trick. Truly a classic move. Also, the more this book goes on the more it turns into Tannhauser and Grymonde's personal Anti-Hero Olympics. Moral ambiguity! Disdain for social mores and laws! Endless capacity for violence! Ludovici from The Religion was almost literally a mustache-twirling silent film bad guy compared to The Infant.

This is like a fairy tale for people that like weird shit. Perfect!

And here we have the most gross and over-the-top bodily fluid fireworks from Willocks yet, in the form of a scene in which Grymonde passes a cemetery filled with mass graves that yield a "fatty potage" with bones floating in it. Fatty. Potage. Like a rice pudding of gelatinous melted dead human. BLECCCCCHHHH

Leave it to Willocks to conjure up a truly painful and gross birth scene. My whole lower body is radiating with sympathy pain, thank Fortuna I never have to go through this shit!

Augustus refers to the poet Horace as "the very cleanest of pricks" in a loving, endearing way. Gotta remember that one...

The idea of Antony irritating everyone with antics like drunkenly hitting on Athena (yes, the goddess herself, not a woman named Athena) is hilarious. Also, the stuff about crocodile dung diaphragms was nauseating.

Gotta get ahold of some Cicero...dude was constantly laying down pithy, scathing disses! Some of the lines quoted in this book are just undeniably funny, like the one where he offhandedly refers to another (male) Roman politician as "somebody's daughter."

These fuckers Pompey and Caesar keep showing me up at the conquest game...hey, Parthia looks like an easy win!

*dies*

-Crassus, 53 BC

Mithridates VI has the most ridiculously dramatic and awesome story...exiled prince descended from Greco-Persian legends like Darius and Antigonus One-Eye hides in the woods for seven fucking years drinking poison to become immune to it, then claims his throne and slays his scheming mom, brother and sister, ultimately rising to anti-Roman heights alongside lofty names like Hannibal or Spartacus.

Digging this very hard so far; some very gooey novelistic narrative prose and a quick pace...plus the inherently melodramatic, soapy, and violent nature of late Republican Rome is just an easy target for writers who like to retell history like this.

Carla studies Grymonde, the gigantic odd-smelling gang boss and antagonist of the novel:

His features were not deformed in design, yet his nose, his lips, the heavy ridges of his cheekbones and brows were so huge, so overgrown, that the effect was grotesque. His eyes were deep-set and dark. Strangest of all, he gave off the air of a monstrous boy. The Infant of Cockaigne.

Grand guignol doesn't even begin to describe how sustainedly violent this book is...now that Amparo's no longer around to bone down on constantly all Tannhauser's getting up to is killing the living FUCK out of Parisian street gangs of the Protestant and Papist varieties.

I thought we promised we weren't gonna use any Bronte/Austen references that go over my head, Dennis.