Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

 

Another instance--like the Spufford--where it's interesting to see such a Serious Writer write something so thoroughly genre: In this case, Chabon is riffing on pretty classic sword-and-sorcery fiction by authors such as Lieber and Howard and Moorcock (but completely without anything more magical than some amazingly effective knockout rags); he does so rather well, it's clear he knows the genre and even though there's some vaguely contrarian impulse (based on his afterword) to choosing Jewish main characters and a Jewish empire (that really existed around the end of the first millennium) as well as some more real-world points to make, after a brief time that all ceases to matter, the story just kinda goes. It's a very picaresque story, in a more old-fashioned way than just "episodic," these "Gentlemen of the Road" are occasionally altruistic scoundrels, the story focuses on a stretch of such occasions. It's witty and funny, and Chabon uses indirect dialogue to some devastatingly humorous effect; the characters are all more or less believable, there's even differences among them visible in the dialogue, which isn't as common as it could be. While the narrative doesn't follow much of a traditional arc, there is a sense of the stakes gradually being raised before Chabon wraps up the arc of the novel. A fun and relatively light read.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones

 

I am the weird horror fan who doesn't like slasher movies; Stephen Graham Jones fucking adores them, and this novel is book one of a three-part paean to slasher movies. It's written just fine, the characters are believable and the prose works pretty well--he even handles nicely a stark register change between the mainline narration and the main character's journals (or whatever). The story's pacing kinda drags, though, and that's not helped by the fact Jones is basically the whole time mining slasher movies for the tropes he's going to deploy (and his POV is as huge a fan as he is, so she knows them) but slasher movies--including the various precursors Jones references--are movies (kinda stupid movies, but movies) and movies have different strengths and weaknesses and needs than novels, and I'm not convinced that novels are the right medium to try to tell slasher stories. Basically this book felt kinda like something of a category error to me. I'll see how book two goes, I might not bother with book three.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

 

It's interesting to see a writer as serious (and as Serious) as Spufford write something so like Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, not so much in the shape of the story (as I remember Clarke's novel) but more in the weird specifics of the premise--magic is real in ways with the historic practices and writings, and England is under threat. The magic is less explicitly Fey than in the Clarke, and the threat is Nazi Germany, but the larger pictures are very similar. The POV character is a woman, and sexism is a large part of her experience: she plays against it as something of a "bad girl" and then working to make her life better as much as she can with in the constraints she lives under. There is a sense of the magic of the world revealing itself to the POV character, but there's a misunderstanding of the nature of that magic, and at the end the main character seems to have fixed something important from her youth at the price of losing much of who she is. There's another novel coming, which will probably solve (or resolve) that. The writing here is of course very good, on just about all levels, and I'll read whatever that other novel is once Spufford publishes it; I'll probably reread this shortly before that, which is fine, I won't mind.

The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub

 

Took a couple of nights to read this, for the first time in decades; the book is new to me but is physically about the same age as the mass-market paperback I read to tatters in high school and a bit later, and I am please that it shows at least some of its age. I figured out before I started this reread that part of my latching onto it when I did was about the twelve-year-old main character saving his mom (when thirteen-year-old me wasn't able to--what with reality being kinda a bitch like that) and that was certainly a part of it, but this is a really solid novel. The  Early-Eighties America in it is shockingly grim, almost as scary as any of the monsters and badguys in it; the badguys and monsters in it are all deeply twisted and evil and scary in their ways, but this is really more a fantasy novel than a horror one, whatever it says on the cover, wherever you find it on the shelves. The characters in it all feel observed, the places all feel as though the authors have been to them, no one does anything outside of their own character (and the gradual unveiling of Morgan Sloat/Morgan of Orris is really well-handled, in some ways he never really knows himself). Both Straub and King were funnier writers than anyone really wanted to give them credit for, at least in the 1980s, and there are moments of scintillating wit in here, as well as all kinds of other tonal variation. I'm not sure the novel really cried out for a sequel, never mind a second one, but the choice to end with a quotation of the last words of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does leave open the possibility. I hope Richard comes off better in Other Worlds Than These than he did in Black House.

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

 

Even before he tried to get any novels published, Scalzi wrote very much like Scalzi. This is probably more like *The Android's Dream* (though I wonder at least a little if the aliens in that book that communicated at least somewhat olfactorily were maybe repurposing at least some of the thought that went into the aliens in this book--no snark if so) in tone than his more recent novels, it's less breezy and there's probably more going on below the surface here than there is in, say, *Starter Villain*, but the story still moves quickly and the authorial voice is immensely readable. There are a few things that are somewhere in the range between well-foreshadowed and bleeding-obvious (and even at least one thing that seemed kinda obvious, it was still interesting to see how it worked out). The characters are mostly believable., the dialogue feels like people speaking, the prose is occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Glad I grabbed this from the library when I saw it.

The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

 

I read this last night but am only getting around to posting it this afternoon; I have no excuses or jokes to make about that, oops. This is a novel I've had around for a while, probably one of the first times I read a bildungsroman that I knew what it was (and the word for it). It's a decently creepy novel, honestly more what I thought Perotta's Ghost Town was going to be (but wasn't) though it's set in the mid-1960s, not the early-mid-1970s, and the POV is younger--there's less in the way of drug use, what's there is mostly alcohol (and mostly a parent being/getting drunk, and therefore secondhand, and the POV's mom is an alcoholic, which is portrayed as bad). There's also actual tension, though the novel does tend toward the episodic/picaresque; the bad thing/s happening in the suburb are real and bad. There's a strong whiff of the supernatural, a ghost experience, but the evil in the neighborhood is very definitely human, though that human does seem to have some preternatural stuff going on. The mundane stuff going on the POV's life in parallel--family and school and neighborhood kids--serves as a pretty effective counterpoint to the Boy Detective/ghost story threads; it never felt as though things weren't moving on multiple levels. The denouement is sorta bittersweet and wistful, laden with the idea that there are things we leave behind when we leave childhood, and maybe sometimes doing that makes us less than we were. I bought this about when it came out (published in 2008) and I'm sure I read it about then, I'm glad I reread it, it's really good.

The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel

 

I've had this book since some point in the 1990s, and I'm still a fan of the author and this series (yeah, I know I don't much like series fiction--I have what Fitzgerald would have called a "first-class mind"); I have a lot of books I kinda want to reread, and tonight was a weird night timing-wise, so I figured I might as well reread this. It's good, in the way Book One tends to be, it sets up most of the overarching tensions of the series, it establishes at least the two main characters and some of the ancillary ones (though I think there's some churn in the latter). Some of the backstory, I think, ends up getting dragged forward--I don't think the characters ever age all that much past where they start (though it seems probable the Jesuit priest's situation might evolve). The prose is solid, and Coel seems to enjoy and appreciate these characters, and the physical place they're in. Not deathless literature, but something the world is better for having in it.