All the Dark Places by Terry Parlato

Another day, another mediocre novel. Cluttered story, stolid prose. For a novel arguably about a serial killer it didn't really seem to have much in the way of stakes: Other than the murder that was the instigating event, there was some not super-competent violence, but no one actually died; and the people who got hurt seemed to recover on all levels really rapidly. There's the "first person narrator who's not telling you something" thing going on for a long time, which doesn't make me like the book. Some of the characters almost threatened to be interesting, but they were hammered down and muffled. At least it wasn't repeated pointless twists.
 

Tinfoil Butterfly by Rachel Eve Moulton

 

This is not a very good novel. It seems to have emerged from something like writing exercises while the author was in college or maybe grad school, and while clearly some part of it stuck in her head and she kept working on it, she really probably should have left it as the exercise. The first-person POV is something of a knot of pain, self-loathing, and addiction--and also self-harm; she's not a pleasant character to share one's head with. The other characters are I guess supposed to be grimy-gritty sorts you might find on the road in the middle of nowhere (whether the Black Hills counts as the middle of nowhere is probably a matter of opinion) except I guess for the pre-pubescent trans boy. There's a lot of not-real-competent violence in the novel, people seem unable to actually kill each other, though they do from time to time hurt each other good. The novel's biggest problem, though, is that it seems unable to make up its mind about some things in the novel that arguably seem supernatural, but the POV is just too screwed up in multiple ways to just accept their narration in point. "Unreliable narrator of possibly supernatural story" is basically the Henry James approach to horror, and it's not a great approach. The novel is probably trying to say things about women on present-day American society, and I'd probably agree with those things, but the novel doesn't work on the level of story, let alone on the level of subtext.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

 

It turns out this was published less than a hundred years after what (best I can tell) are considered to be the earliest English-language novels, and the fact that "novel" wasn't entirely an established form, yet (outside of length) shows. What kept kicking me out, though wasn't the two-hundred-year-old novel-quirks; it was the two-hundred-year-old science. Shelley at least has the ... presence of mind, I guess, to keep the actual mechanics of Victor's work obscured--and his determination that his secrets should die with him is a reasonable enough plot point. The structure, with at least three layers of nested narrative, is one that occasionally surfaces today, in novels as different from each other as *Cloud Atlas* and *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*, though Shelley doesn't seem to even try (or feel expected to) muster the shifts in narrative register Stephen Graham Jones handles so gracefully in the latter. Some of the ... contrivances in the story are wacky and almost laughable; there's often not a lot of difference in prosody between narration and dialogue, let alone difference in character voice; the epistolary nature kinda clunks along, as it tends to, managing little more than to frame the first-person narratives. It still has some kick, though, and the thematics of it pack some punch; it's clear why it lingers in the cultural subconscious (though most of that's probably due at least as much to James Whale and Boris Karloff as it is to Mary Shelley).

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

 

This is a really good crime thriller-type novel, set in a big city with all sorts of big city problems, with all sorts of changing demographics plausibly at the root of some of them. There's a long and tangled thread of family stuff, and a narrator who might be somewhere on the spectrum, and some widespread venal corruption. The voice is really, really engaging--especially considering the narrator's mental state and/or wiring--and the dialogue seems really spot-on. The characters all feel plausible, and the various tensions in the main character's life all come home to roost in various ways. Many (possibly all) of the personal situations are changed by the end of the novel; virtually none of the societal situations are changed like at all. It's a grim novel on many levels, with the only little wisps of hope coming from the possibility of personal redemption. Very impressive, I'll have to see if I can find more by the author.

Truth to Power by S. A. Cosby

 

It's probably not any kind of secret that I'm a big fan of Cosby, and while this book isn't anything as much to my taste as the novels set in his own Virginia (as opposed to Marvel's) it's a fine novel and a blast to read. I don't know Luke Cage as well as some other Marvel characters, I have no sense how far outside the lines Cosby is coloring, here. The dialogue manages a fine and fun admixture of comics-talk and something more ... earthy, but stays very much on the side of teen-friendly (and the idea of some teen somewhere being introduced to Cosby by this book--or to Segura by Enemy of My Enemy makes me smile). The story has some Very Marvel elements but isn't wildly inconsistent with Cosby's own take on industry and small towns, and there's a lot of grit in the prose. It's not quite like chewing on a live wire the way Razorblade Tears or King of Ashes is, but that's setting the bar really really high.

The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim

 

So, in the library this looked like a weird novel skittering on boundary between horror and SF, with maybe some things to say about society and people and stuff. Yeah, it's that, though it's weirder (in many uses of that word) than could be put on the dust jacket. That's not a complaint: It tilts more than a little bit gonzo but I don't see how a novel about black orbs that pass through walls and absorb people then spit them back out more or less where they were nearly three months later couldn't be. While there's some social commentary (or at least observations) during the first half-ish of the novel, as society (at least that portion of it in South Korea) unravels then implodes, I think the strongest things the novel has to say about people and society and how they react to tragedy and/or overpowering strangeness come after people have come back, as they look for scapegoats. The translation here is at least decent English-language prose, I presume it's at least not better than the original Korean; the characters feel remarkably plausible even looking at them from within a very different culture, and the dialogue and descriptions all seem well nailed down. The ending might be something of a Moebius thing, it's a little hard to tell exactly what the author intends, there; outside of that, this is a really good read.

Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

 

This is a novel a lot like the Black Sun trilogy on the surface, though it's a fantasy Russia with what feel like fake-Russian place (and plausibly character) names, where the bodies of angels have been falling from the skies for a few centuries, all of them (apparently) falling in not-Russia's territory. Maybe some of what's going on here is at least derived from actual Russian folklore, but I'm not deeply familiar with Russian folklore so I cannot say. Totalitarian government with internal conflicts and tensions is not going to stand long, and the figurehead in fact dies during the novel. It feels as though there might be (or might at least have been) plans/expectations for other novels to come after this--the ending leaves several threads dangling--and in fact there's a Book Two and a Book Three, but this is not a good enough novel for me to feel as though I need to read more of this: It's kinda muddled and emotionally flat; there's some tension in the pacing but it skips POVs enough that it ends up feeling kinda scattershot. None of the characters are anything like as interesting as Higgins seems to think they are, and the world is decidedly unclear as a setting. Not a waste of the evening, but not very good, either.