Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Stephen Graham Jones knows the horror genre, it's not any kind of surprise that he's done a werewolf novel, or that it's very good. The big surprise, really is that his werewolves aren't explicitly Native Americans (though there's a strong case they're very much in an underclass, the closest thing I can think of in real-world America would be like the Roma) but that's probably at least a little bit of a bad expectation being justly rewarded. The telling is very nonlinear, which makes the novel seem either less episodic than it is, or more episodic than it is; it does make the arc of the novel hard to discern and harder to predict--the latter probably being more the intent. Some of the chapters are in first-person and some in third, but that's not any kind of distraction or other problem. The narrative voice is pretty believably a young person waiting to "grow up" and become a werewolf. The underworld the novel describes is believably desperate; the people in it almost distressing in their plausibility. The dialogue is sharp, at times coming close to drawing blood. Really, really good stuff, here.

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

 

I read this in a coffee shop yesterday. It's a really good novella, lots going on, very early 1960s. Probably some commentary on the Cold War going on in the subtext--by the early 1960s, it was already possible to see the pointlessness of that (the fact there's East-West/Europe-Asia happening in the war between the Spiders and the Snakes cannot be entirely accidental). It's interesting to note the first-person POV is a woman, an "entertainer," not a soldier, though it's pretty clear there are women soldiers, and there are several male entertainers. Interestingly, the novel is barely about the war between the Spiders and the Snakes, it's more about loyalty to the side, then something like a lifeboat story (there's at least the threat they're all cut off from the titular Big Time). At the end there are hints at least some of the characters are more cynical than they started the novel; some were of course very cynical. In keeping with the Cold War-type pointlessness, the overall situations don't seem much changed at the end. A very solid novella, not even 200 pages.

A Very Simple Crime by Grant Jerkins

 

This was not a very good novel. One of the narrators is ... not so much an unreliable narrator as just an utter scumball, the other is so desperate for a shot at redemption that he'll do anything; at least the second narrator isn't first-person.  There's a strong whiff of sociopath doing sociopath things without consequence, and a distinct sense the author hasn't paid as much attention to his favorite true-crime shows as he might have and really doesn't know too well how the criminal justice system in America works (there's a really glaring misuse of "acquittal" that almost had me putting the book down). Most of the characters are very one-note, if that, there's no real complexity here, just some plot twists that aren't all that twisty. The main voice seemed juddery and herky-jerky. Not much to like, here. Oh, well.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

 

Michael Chabon wrote a Sherlock Holmes novella. It's set in 1944 and Holmes is nearly ninety. It's a reasonably OK Holmes story (though I'm not a big fan of Holmes) though there's some intentionally unstated stuff that's effectively text, not subtext: Holmes is never named; there's a parrot who keeps uttering strings of numbers in German that are plainly the ID numbers tattooed onto concentration camp inmates, though no one in the novella seems to know the camps even exist. The snippet toward the end from the parrot's POV is probably the most enjoyable portion of the thing. While Chabon can pitch his authorial voice to nearly any register he wants, I'm not sure he really tried to write like Doyle, here; the voice feels more modern than that to me. It's a short thing that's easy enough to read, though I don't think there is (or is supposed to be) like any great heft, here.

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block

 

A somewhat different take on combining "funny" and "crime." Probably more successful than the Hiaasen I read last night--which was not Best Hiaasen, this was Very Good Block--though they weren't really going for the same things: Scudder is a Very New York character, and his stories are Very New York stories, which are both very different (even if they're occasionally laugh-out-loud funny) than Hiaasen's Very Florida novels. This book is very late-1980s/early-1990s (copyright 1992, but that's not absolutely dispositive) and there are things that are occasionally jarring, like the AIDS crisis still being a crisis and Donald Trump being thought of as a successful developer, but those are just like artifacts. The story itself is really hardboiled/noir, all twisty and corrupt, there's even a porn film at the center of it--a snuff porn film, but hey--which really kinda feels like a throwback to Chandler. This is a novel after Scudder stopped drinking, so his recovery (lots and lots of AA meetings, apparently in New York, then, you could find one just about any time of day or night) is kinda a central motif, though many of the other recurring characters are present. The novel turns on Scudder being more morally gray than I think he really thought he was capable of, it'd be interesting to read these in order and see whether and how that came to matter; alas, I'm reading these as I find them and thanking the Great Perhaps for the opportunities.

Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen

 

This might not be the best of Hiaasen's novels, but it's still a pretty good read. It has most of the elements that go into most of his novels--scummy politicians and developers, sexy women, ordinary people who've had enough, scattered only-in-Florida crazies--but this feels a lot as though there's a lot of madcap stuff going on, but there's neither the joy necessary for comedy nor the rage necessary for satire; at times it just seems a little jaded and/or cynical, which isn't really an attitude Hiaasen carries well. The writing is strong, the characters come across as human and different from each other and remarkably plausible given their environment; the story feels a little overbusy, but it does hold together reasonably well.

Prayer by Philip Kerr

 This is one of those awkward novels that attempts to throw supernatural events in with a detective-mystery-thriller story, a trick that rarely goes as gracefully as the authors hope/think/expect--the fact the genres are appear to overlap as much as they do makes it seem more natural than it is, I think. In this case the first-person narration could help, since their belief system changing is kinda the crux of the novel; but neither the supernatural layer nor the narrator's changing beliefs really worked all that well for me. The writing is pretty decent, and most of the characters come across pretty clearly; but the pacing gets a bit jammed-up toward the end, especially as it becomes clear that the narrator-detective is going to have to get religion to survive. The novel is copyright 2014 and some of the goings-on in it are very of its time; while the narrative could reflect many possible authorial attitudes, there's an afterword that makes Kerr's position clear. Not a terrible novel, but not all that good, either.