If She Wakes by Michael Koryta

 

After last night's damp fart, it seemed worthwhile to grab a book I was confident I was going to enjoy, and I chose exceedingly well. Yeah, Koryta's really good at thriller stuff, and here he has a witness with locked-in syndrome which makes for some interesting complications (Koryta seems to have done a little research on that). He also I guess got a lot of positive feedback on the sociopathic brothers from 

Those Who Wish Me Dead because one of them left a son behind and he shows up. He's scary, but in a lot of ways less scary than his dad and uncle. There's some car focus here, since one of the mains is a professional aggressive driver type, and she gets some resolution. There's a character here whose motivations are not as they present them, and this isn't the first time Koryta's done this; it's third-person narration so it's not total hack shit, but it's just a bit of a rugpull (I kinda twigged that something was up from the beginning, but still.) The prose is solid, the characters are mostly clear and clearly themselves, the pacing is spot-on. Koryta knows his shit.

Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

 

Tapped out after 125 pages in which absolutely nothing of any interest happened. There are whiffs on the air like sewage of tensions between moneyed and not, plausibly between school and townies. Some sense that the main character is--for whatever reason/s--not up for graduate school, now or maybe ever. Definitely people acting of their own free will against their better interests. This is the second very bad novel I've seen Harrow blurb, it's time to start ignoring her on that score.

Apostle's Cove by William Kent Krueger

 

Yeah, I'm a sucker for Krueger's novels, the way he manages to tell such complex stories about a place he loves and the people he loves who live there; the remarkable honesty about the bad and about how it doesn't outweigh the good. This is one of those, with less family stuff than many of his more recent novels that I've read. There's a prologue of framing, then two parts; the first part is set like twenty-five years ago and lots of the changes wrought over the course of the novels haven't happened yet, which is bittersweet as hell; the second part is the pay off as at least some things that have plausibly been floating around for at least most of the series come home to roost like angry hens, or maybe harpies, or perhaps Furies. Krueger gets these people; they all act and speak as themselves, without notable artifice. The story feels a little rushed toward the end, perhaps, but it is a decent resolution. The spiritual stuff feels likewise unforced, though Henry is going to die eventually (possibly when Krueger does). I figure that if Krueger is your jam, you're probably already reading him, this fits in well with what he's been doing lately.

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

 

The cover copy seems kinda reluctant to admit this, but this novel is basically a cyberpunk novel--AI and hacking and science past the recognizable bleeding edge that manages to feel plausible; also literally murderous corporate maneuvering--though this novel has the advantage of being (or feeling) at least a couple decades closer to its future than, say, Neuromancer. There's more biology, specifically marine biology, on several levels of premise; the results of decades of chronic overfishing are part of the background, and very foregrounded in several of the arcs. The setting is at least as dark as one might guess: in addition to the murderous corporate maneuverings, there's human trafficking as one of the narrative engines. There's a thread that doesn't meet up with the rest of the novel until the epilogue, but that thread is playing a neat counterpoint, and I don't think I would want it excised. The prose is solid, occasionally sparkling and witty; the dialogue fits the characters well; the characters are mostly plausible. There are things floating around about what it means to be human (a classic SF theme) as well as some thoughtful takes on the problems of alien intelligences--and how shockingly alien other intelligences could be here on Earth. Really, really good.

Only Way Out by Tod Goldberg

 

This looked like a novel I'd enjoy yeading, and it most definitely was. The blurb by Stephen Graham Jones was a mixed thing--I dig Jones, but Leonard devolved into self-parody his last decade or more. Fortunately, this is a good novel, and while it's clear Goldberg has consumed rather a lot of Elmore Leonard's prose, the voice here feels natural. It also sparkles and dances and sings and growls and screams, as needed; Goldberg has some chops. The dialogue feels distinctive from the narrative voice, and the characters--some of them, at least--actually talk differently from each other. The story feels at first as though it's going to be a heist-gone-wrong thing, but it turns out to be more than that, with layers of blackmail and revenge and something like a love story burbling to the surface the last few chapters. I'll have to remember the name and look for some of his other novels, I'd even consider reading something in a series, which probably says enough about my feelings for this book.

The Devil Is a Southpaw by Brandon Hobson

 

This seemed, in the library, as though it might be an interesting novel about surviving childhood on the Rez, with all the ways the larger American culture tries to destroy the people/s struggling to do so. It was barely about that, and it wasn't really all that interesting. The various sentences, many of them most of a page, were often beautiful as prose, but they mostly said nothing and went nowhere. Also lots of tendencies to drop really obscure words, some of which might have been correct--I only recognized a few, and not all those usages seemed to be so. The novel played various games with unreliable narration and what might have been going on that the narrator didn't want to tell us; I was never interested enough to really care, though some of the lies the narrator was telling were really obvious. The envy at the core of the novel seemed really weak to me, and blown out of any reasonable proportion in the telling. Not a super-awesome novel, in spite of occasionally magnificent sentences.

The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale

 

Yeah, Lansdale. This Lansdale writing about historic Texas, sometimes around the 1910s or thereabouts, it's not booming like the 1920s, and electric light and telephones and automobiles are around the edges of the small towns the novel is set in and around. Laden with delicious turns of phrase, well-paced, with characters that feel not just plausible but real. Gritty and violent--sometimes shockingly so--but with some real beauty showing through. I'm always happy to come across something by Lansdale I haven't read, this was really good.