Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz

 

Another interesting book about old places, some more forgotten than others, less interested in frontiers and fringes than The Far Edges of the Known World, much more interested in cities and how they grow and shrink, live and die, and what lessons we can take from history as the cities more of us live in than ever are threatened by climate and other natural disasters. The clearest throughgoing point is that leaving a city--and mass abandonment is in the end how most cities that die, die--is a political choice, especially at a population level. It's not exactly a fix-up, but the four cities were clearly four different experiences for the author, and probably not in the same order they're in the book. Not so scales-from-the-eyes enlightening as the Rees, but very readable and worth reading, especially if you live in or near a city (and probabilistically, you do).

A Small Town by Thomas Perry

 

After a couple of mediocre-ish novels, I was grateful to past me for picking this up last time I was at the library, Perry is usually a fun thrillerish read. This is pretty typical for Perry, dry and almost clinical, with a main character who manages to be both methodical and opportunistic as she pursues her well-justified mission of revenge. This isn't the most-satisfying Perry I've read, there's less in doubt almost from the start than there is in some of his others--the primary question is what it's going to cost the main to kill all the bad men she's after, her success seems inevitable pretty quickly. Still a good read, but it is interesting to me how "watch the person pursue inevitable revenge" is so much more satisfying to me than "watch the sociopath kill people pointlessly," even when the relevant body counts are about the same.

Listen to Your Sister by Neena Viel

 

This looked like a horror novel when I saw it in the library, and after last night's sub-awesome book by a horror author I figured I'd give it a shot. It's not a very good novel. It's disjointed and kinda tips more surreal than the author really has chops to pull off, and even for supernatural horror it has some ... plausibility issues--though they're mostly around how people behave more than the supernatural-ish stuff. The prose is occasionally a little awkward and flat, but the dialogue mostly rings true (though there's not a lot of distinction between the three main characters). The story seems to want to say things I'm inclined to agree with about family and its value, especially Black family, but there's a lot of clutter and cruft that gets in the way of saying it. Oh, well.

The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay

 

Found this in a book store a few months ago, and I'd read some Tremblay and enjoyed it--and the thought of a riff on Chandler kinda appealed, too. Alas, it turns out that Tremblay is much better when he's writing horror, which this is not. The choice to have a narcoleptic narrator is, er, tiresome; he never really seems to figure anything out, solutions just seem to land on him. Maybe that's not far from Chandler, but this is at best a pale shadow of that. The prose seemed almost lifeless, and the characters all seemed blurry and vague. If I didn't like Tremblay's more recent horror so well, this would just about put me off him.

Last Exit by Max Gladstone

 

This is a fantasy novel that has, that I can see, bits of stuff like Zelazny's Amber books and King and Straub's The Talisman (and of course King's Dark Tower) in it. Multiple worlds that share what one might call architecture, or landmarks, all of them under some sort of threat. Apparently. At least, the nature of the threat is not what it seems--which is fundamentally fine, it allows a happier ending than seems possible for most of the novel's length, without seeming cheap or as though the author is wimping out or something. There are elements of Horror (unsurprising, really) and some interesting textual and subtextual commentary on society and tech--the latter, refreshingly, not in a "magic-versus-tech" way--and the implication that the main characters find the other worlds they find is because their imaginations are so limited is ... interesting. There are also hat-tips and allusions (and probably Easter eggs) to other Fantasy, much of which I probably didn't entirely get. Probably the best novel I've read in a while, huzzah.

All Hallows by Christopher Golden

 

I am a genuine oddity among Horror fans, in that I really don't much like Hallowe'en. I am also an oddity in general in that I have approximately zero nostalgia for my teenage years, and I'm furthermore an oddity among Gen Xers in that I have like no nostalgia for the 1980s. So this novel about Hallowe'en, 1984, was always going to have an uphill battle. The fact it's not all that well-written--especially its weirdly gauzy anachronistic nostalgia for 1984, and its awkwardly miraculous knack for interrupting any narrative momentum to jump to a different POV (there were like six or seven, in the 97 pages I finished, and the chapters tended to be little three-to-five-page things)--eventually ground me to a halt. DNF, and probably just as well.

Somebody's Daughter by David Bell

 

This is one of those modern thrillers that confuses interminable twists and a surfeit of variously unreliable narrators for cleverness. Somewhere in the back half I was finally able to turn off the part/s of my brain that were trying to figure out what was going on and just read; the book didn't necessarily get better, but it got less unpleasant. It's a little harder to pull off unreliable narrator/s when you stick to third, but the tight third here enables the decision--there's one narrator who's a little more reliable, and they're also the character acting less stupidly than just about all the others. So many people with so little in the way of redeeming characteristics, it's vaguely amazing I finished the novel. I picked this up at the library because I remembered reading another book by the author, I remember being ambivalent about it, but liking it more than this. Oh well.