Mister Magic by Kiersten White

 

This novel at least seemed at first to have a lot in common thematically with last night's aborted read, but that eventually seemed not to be entirely the case. Sure, the POV character (and her circle of friends) were stuck in a reliving their past trauma/s thing, same as last night's book, but *Mister Magic* is Horror--really really noisy Horror, not at all subtle--so the traumas end up being more monstrous and somehow more believable for being less plausible. There's some real murk in the middle, really rough going, I almost stopped reading several times, but the novel pulls itself together around the ending (not enough to justify the slog, but somewhat) and then the acknowledgments make the subtext clear that this really is a novel about growing up in a religion that insists on strict conformity; this is not a shock, when I said it was a noisy novel, I meant it. The prose is at best nothing special, the characters other than the primary POV tend to blur into like a couple of tags each without much depth. Ms. White has written a number of YA novels before this, I have to wonder if the lack of subtlety is a carryover from that. Not a DNF, but barely; not a particularly good novel.

We Had a Hunch by Tom Ryan

 

I picked this up from the library in the hope--maybe something like the expectation, based on the cover copy--that it was going to be a light-hearted and witty inversion of Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books, in the vein of what *Meddling Kids* did with Scooby-Doo. As it turns out, this is not that kind of book. There's no sparkle here and hardly any wit, and practically nothing to care about after 180-ish of 330-ish pages, when I stopped reading. The main thing I was taking away was that none of the non-POV characters seemed remarkably trustworthy, and that none of the POV characters were particularly interesting or likeable.

The End of the World As We Know it edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

 

Spent the past few nights working my way through this--it's 700+ pages--and it's full of excellent stories. I tended to prefer the ones set during the plague to those set after, but that's probably a personal preference. Some of the authors took more liberties than others, but the entire range was mostly fine in that regard; the stories set after the events of the novel tended to be darker and more depressing, mainly because they tended to take very dark views of both humanity and the future of it in the setting. Of course, it's been ages since I've read the novel, and at this point I'm not doing anything like as much re-reading as I used to, so my memories of *The Stand* are probably kinda blurry and shouldn't be entirely trusted. My ambivalence about some of the very downbeat endings some of the stories bolted onto the novel notwithstanding, there are no bad stories in this anthology.

The Bang Devils by Patrick Foss

 

There is a kind of crime fiction that focuses on criminals who are out of their depth--sometimes my a lot, sometimes by enough to seem like idiots; this is very much a book like that, where the protagonists persistently make bad choices as the situation they've put themselves into spirals further and further out of control. While the main characters do not seem like the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, calling them idiots is probably in the direction of unfair--though there is not a single decision they make in the novel that a reasonably alert reader cannot tell is going to make things palpably worse. This is not exactly my favorite kind of crime fiction, mostly because the main characters could have walked away at almost any time and been OK--if there are going to be bad decisions, I very much prefer for the people making them to be under more pressure. The prose has some neat turns, and the story isn't badly told, for all it's not really to my preferences; the various POV characters do kinda blur together, and I'm not sure how I feel about some of the very extended bits of unattributed dialogue: It's not just that there aren't tags, it's literally just the words the characters are speaking and you have to work out one instance of who's talking and sorta propagate that out, the book isn't good enough to reward that amount of work.

Morbidly Curious by Coltan Scrivner

 

I read this little book in a coffee shop yesterday, after seeing a pretty strong recommendation online, and ... well, I was distinctly underwhelmed. It spends a fair amount of its relatively small space defending fans of dark fiction from various calumnies I personally haven't really encountered--though I also am not as a rule a fan of either slashers or torture porn. The author is apparently a real social scientist, or at least has done that kind of work, for real, but the book feels a lot more pop-psych to me, though without the readability and charm of someone like Mary Roach. Lots of recaps of various studies the author has worked on, or at least been associated with; lots of talk about purportedly haunted places in the real world (which I mostly don't buy, and the author says he doesn't but then seems to talk about experiences he's had in them). Not much is sticking a day later, which probably says something.

The Shadow Dancer by Margaret Coel

 

There are a small number of mystery series I'll read, and this is one. Coel's mysteries on teh Wind River Reservation are reasonably effective mysteries, and they're very effective dramas--not so much family drama in the way William Kent Krueger's are, but very much focused on the characters and the people they're attached to, and to the open and vast beauty of the place. This is pretty typical, and it's clear Coel spent some time having characters move back and forth between the Reservation and elsewhere (Denver, for instance) so she could have the same relationship dynamics available to her. This makes some sense, though it does make the various relevant timelines a little ... slippery. The fact the first murder victim here was tightly connected to one of Coel's mains is a bit of a vaguely nasty surprise, but a well-executed one. Coel clearly really likes her characters in these, and it's hard not to agree with her as a reader; I'll keep reading these as I keep finding ones I haven't read.

Crooks by Lou Berney

 

Saw this in the library and I remembered how much I enjoyed Dark Ride, so I checked it out. It's at least as enjoyable, though this is not anything like the "stoner noir" I described Dark Ride as. There's wit and sparkle in the prose, including the dialogue, and the stories here eventually add up to basically what's on the cover--a novel about crime and family. All the kids especially need to come to grips with both those things, and how in their particular instance they're intertwined. And those kids are well-distinguished from each other, both in their POVs and elsewise, Berney does a marvelous job of making it seem as though you're in seven different heads, here (not at once) and that's a real accomplishment. This isn't as intense as some other crime novels I've enjoyed, but I enjoyed it a lot.