Atonement by Ian McEwan

 

I find myself deeply ambivalent about this novel. Most of the first part was tedious. The bits on the way to Dunkirk and in a homefront hospital were gritty and intense and really good. To the extent the second part made the first part worth the slog, McEwan undercuts it with a metatextual rugpull at the end and into the epilogue. The novel isn't about an atonement that happens, it's about one that doesn't, one that can't--this is fine, there are things that cannot be undone, severings that cannot be mended; and the ending hits kinda hard, the rugpull stings. But it's still a rugpull, and it drags most of the novel (I'm unclear on the extent to which that sloggy first part is supposed to have been written by a character in the novel) from the realm of fiction to the realm of lies. I hate being lied to.

The Good Killer by Harry Dolan

 

This wasn't as persistently funny a novel as last night's read, but I think it was probably better--it certainly was very much more in the inner ring of my personal tastes, anyway; Dolan's a writer I really like a lot, and this is him at or very near his peak (at least that I've read). It's a pretty realistic thriller, as thrillers go, the mains (and most of the rest of the characters, for that matter) are all the best at what they do, by any means, though some of them are very good, or at least have the right skills and knowledge for the situations they find themselves in. It's violent, especially at the end it's really fricking violent, but it never revels in that. There's all kinds of tension in the novel, from really early on if you read the cover copy and know the novel's basic premise/s. That tension never lets up until the end, as action and consequence and cause and effect impel things toward that bloody end. It's a pretty moral novel, though--the good characters get at least mostly the good endings, the bad ones get the bad ones. Though one does suspect that some of the characters might have suffered some career setbacks after the events. Dolan writes crisp prose that stretches taut like a high wire, and his characters all feel human, even the ones you find yourself rooting against.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

 

This was a fun read, crackling with energy and anger and humor. It's an inverted supers story, where the "supervillains" are at least less dangerous and damaging than (most) "superheroes," but doesn't read to me as any sort of takedown of the genre or anything so much as riffing on some (or a lot) of the tropes, looking at things from a different angle. It *might* be leveling at least some snark on a certain category of supers movie that features all sort of collateral damage. Also at America's "health care system" and possibly at corporate life in general. The characters here are mostly believable, the dialogue tends to sparkle and zing, the prose snaps and dances. There are some minor weirdnesses in the story--at least one bit of "skip ahead and backfill the gaps" that doesn't work as well as it could have--but there aren't really any dead spots pacing-wise.

You Know What You Did by K. T. Nguyen

 

This is not a particularly good book. The POV character--there's really just the one until the very end--is struggling so hard with mental illness that it's impossible to take any of her reported perceptions exactly literally, she's not primarily delusional but her perceptions are violently skewed. The novel takes like 170 of like 350 pages to get to what's arguably the inciting event, though there's a plausible reading it's not. It jumps around in time between at least three timelines, with some of those juddering and skipping between present and past. The characters aren't all that interesting or likeable, most of them seem really shallow and one-note. The prose is pretty solid; that and the fact that it's not endless twists (there's just the one and it mainly works because the POV is so limited) are the extent of the good I can muster, here. The author is clearly coming from a place of pain and writing about things very important to her, but much of this is just a jumbled scream.

Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner

 

This is a weird and witty novel, clearly has a lot of Noir in its ancestry but has a really dry sense of humor about it, and draws amply (and does well to do so) on Spiner's experiences making Star Trek: The Next Generation. There's a co-writer on the title page who probably deserves a good bit of the credit--and Spiner is generous in his acknowledgments. There are some moments that don't work as well as others, but that's not wildly unusual. There are hints that something like at least some of this happened for real, and it's clear Spiner appreciates fans while at least occasionally wishing they'd leave him alone, but this is not any kind of fandom takedown novel (if that's your jam, I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas is a good novel that does some downtaking of at least Lovecraftian fandom). Many of the  secondary characters are fictional versions of real people, which makes it hard to talk about characterization in the novel, but the dialogue feels at least mostly plausible; the moments where Spiner kinda captures the relationships between cast members are often wonderful. I'm not sure how much appeal this novel would have for people with no fond memories of the show, but I enjoyed it plenty.

The Gomorrah Gambit by Tom Chatfield

 

This was a pretty good book, really--not deathless, but good enough to spend and evening with. If I'm reading the signs correctly and it's book one of a series ... well, it's not good enough for me to chase down the rest of the series, but I'm a tough sell on that at best. The prose sparkles and shines, dances and sings; the characters all seem reasonably plausible considering that some of them are clearly larger than life. The implausibilities of the book don't matter all that much in the context of the book, things start almost normal and things build gradually to kinda bizarre, but the next thing is always pretty easy to swallow if your disbelief is still hanging overhead. There are some occasional moments of insight, here, and probably some vague thematic threads related to trust and power and suchlike, but this is not a very complex novel as far as all-a-that.

Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore

 

This was not a very good book, and also it was stoopid. At least the prose was readable, though. There was never any suspension of disbelief or particular concern about the characters or the setting or the story. I probably should have stopped reading like eighty pages in; as often happens when I push on, I regret the choice.