The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

 

I read this last night but am only getting around to posting it this afternoon; I have no excuses or jokes to make about that, oops. This is a novel I've had around for a while, probably one of the first times I read a *bildungsroman* that I knew what it was (and the word for it). It's a decently creepy novel, honestly more what I thought Perotta's *Ghost Town* was going to be (but wasn't) though it's set in the mid-1960s, not the early-mid-1970s, and the POV is younger--there's less in the way of drug use, what's there is mostly alcohol (and mostly a parent being/getting drunk, and therefore secondhand, and the POV's mom is an alcoholic, which is portrayed as bad). There's also actual tension, though the novel does tend toward the episodic/picaresque; the bad thing/s happening in the suburb are real and bad. There's a strong whiff of the supernatural, a ghost experience, but the evil in the neighborhood is very definitely human, though that human does seem to have some preternatural stuff going on. The mundane stuff going on the POV's life in parallel--family and school and neighborhood kids--serves as a pretty effective counterpoint to the Boy Detective/ghost story threads; it never felt as though things weren't moving on multiple levels. The denouement is sorta bittersweet and wistful, laden with the idea that there are things we leave behind when we leave childhood, and maybe sometimes doing that makes us less than we were. I bought this about when it came out (published in 2008) and I'm sure I read it about then, I'm glad I reread it, it's really good.

The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel

 

I've had this book since some point in the 1990s, and I'm still a fan of the author and this series (yeah, I know I don't much like series fiction--I have what Fitzgerald would have called a "first-class mind"); I have a lot of books I kinda want to reread, and tonight was a weird night timing-wise, so I figured I might as well reread this. It's good, in the way Book One tends to be, it sets up most of the overarching tensions of the series, it establishes at least the two main characters and some of the ancillary ones (though I think there's some churn in the latter). Some of the backstory, I think, ends up getting dragged forward--I don't think the characters ever age all that much past where they start (though it seems probable the Jesuit priest's situation might evolve). The prose is solid, and Coel seems to enjoy and appreciate these characters, and the physical place they're in. Not deathless literature, but something the world is better for having in it.

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

 

This was a weird little book. The art is supposed to be a big thing but the pictures didn't really make any difference in my ability to follow the story; the story is really disjointed, very nonlinear and not entirely coherent, it loops and sworls and kinda trundles its way through to the end. The nonlinearity is handled in such a way that I found that much of the narrative tension was lost; the solution to at least one of the parts of the story turned out to be much less interesting than what the narrative seemed to be pointing toward, the story didn't much reward trying to think ahead. Clearly there's something cultural around it, but the novel itself seemed not all that--not bad, but not sensational, either. I have a sense there might be translation issues, here, the voice itself seemed almost stilted at times; I have a known tendency to struggle with translated books, though, this might be my priors speaking.

Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton

 

A really clever title for a moderately interesting book. Spends a lot of time talking about the building of the infrastructure of training and materiel that had to happen to make the sabateurs and guerillas the book's about, before paying that off with recountings of some of their greatest hits. Sabateurs can do stuff that matters. Because things are happening in an order, there's more structure here than in some other pop-history-type books, but there's still a lot in the way of not names and information that don't always have obvious connections; the "what became of these people after the war" epilogue might not have been the best choice, though it did allow for a couple of elegiac moments.

Mary by Nat Cassidy

 

This is not a particularly bad novel, but it's not really a very good one, either. There's a blurb on the back that compares the main to Delores Claiborne but the King female character that persistently came to mind was Annie Wilkes--and the novel is mostly (except for some vaguely epistolary stuff at the end that feels more like an homage to Carrie than anything else) told from the main's first-person POV. The first ... 250 pages or so of this 400-ish page novel are bordering on fricking tedious, even as it becomes clearer that the main is a nutter (probably a nutter with some supernatural stuff going on, but a nutter). Yes, the novel has lots to say about how women are seen--or often not--especially as they get to middle age and beyond, and it's practically shaking with (justified) feminist rage; as has often happened lately when I've read (especially horror) fiction that wanted to have a Point, the author has forgotten that the story has to carry the weight of the subtext, not the other way around. As with much more-current horror, there's some confusion and/or conflation between monster/villain and hero, which leaves the novel without much of a leg to stand on when it comes time to take a moral position (and horror especially must take a moral position). The prose is relatively solid, I guess, neither jarring or really anything to write home about--Cassidy might be aiming at "invisible prose," which is a reasonable enough thing, but in the absence of a good story it leaves the reader without a lot of pleasure to take from the book. But it was not so bad I couldn't bring myself to finish it, which is something for me and current horror, these days.

Forever and a Death by Donald E. Westlake

 

A suitably pulpy cover for a book by one of the grandmasters of pulp action/mystery/thriller novels. Apparently derived from a treatment Westlake wrote for a Bond movie--which is believable, though this is not a Bond story, the putative main kinda disappears through the middle then turns into one of an ensemble. There are side characters who die brutal, sudden, arguably undeserved deaths; there's a remarkably brave and competent young woman who almost dies like twice (and serves as a kinda understated love interest in her spare time); there are lots of characters who aren't straight white guys doing pretty impressive things, sometimes at least bordering on the heroic; there's a villain who's willing to cause millions of deaths (including some of his co-conspirators, because villain) in order to empty some bank vaults, who gets a marvelously apt death. The prose snaps, the dialogue is convincing, the plot is ... well, it maunders a little bit, but it gets where it needs to go and even some of its side journeys are more than reasonably pleasant (oh, the joys of free-writing). It's really hard to find Westlake's older books in hardcopy, but I'll keep trying.

Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

 

These days, Nick Harkaway is filling in blank spaces in his dad's ouevre, but dude's got some game of his own--I'm sure he finds what he's doing now much more remunerative, and that's not a thing I'm going to snark on, but I do wish he would chase his own muses still. This book is a really taut noirish SF novel that doesn't have even a whiff of cyberpunk about it (well, maybe the occasionally lethal corporate maneuvering ...) that basically treats the Sf aspects as facts of the world, there's no worldbuilding as such deployed; the blurb on the front cover from Gibson seems amazingly apt, in that and several other ways, now that I think about it. The prose has some terse dry British humor (shocking given the author is a Brit) but there's a distinct snarl deployed as needed; the characters are really pretty spot-on without any real caricature; the pacing and plot are practically taut enough for a highwire act. Really, really good, and I'll definitely be looking for more of his own novels.