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.

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

 

Known classic spy/thriller novel from the mid-1970s. Turns out it's really well-written. It seems to me to have a lot in common with Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, though there's a reasonable case the stakes are higher, here--losing WW2 instead of just having De Gaulle assassinated--but the dogged pursuit of the one very threatening expert is a real parallel, here. The characters are mostly believable, the pacing is deft (there's some skimming through time to get to spring of 1944, but I think the bits from earlier are necessary for the stories in the novel). The authorial voice is very British, which makes sense since the author is British; the dialogue seems at least not implausible (I don't know Brit slang of the era enough to say for certain). Interestingly, I think there might be some things that showed up either in Nonesuch or Atonement when things were happening in the same timeframe as this, makes me wonder whether those things are in the British collective memory as real things, or if they've just shown up in enough fiction set in the time that people use them; if the latter, I suspect Follett was probably earlier.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker

 This ends up being a decent enough horror novel, but I have to give it some demerits for being such a slog to get through the first half-plus; the main character is just overwhelmingly passive and uninteresting--though it's clear she's dealing with some sort of fractured, possibly divergent brain-thing, and being interesting and/or active isn't really something she's wired for. I don't know enough about the various kinds of Chinese folklore woven into this to comment on that, other than using stuff that's sovereign against one thing against something entirely else does not seem to be ... a thing likely to work. Toward the end, when the main character and the ghosts she's interacting with set out to do something about the serial killer (and some terrifying number of copycats) killing East Asian people in New York City, the book takes a turn that reminded me more than a little bit of Everett's The Trees, if perhaps a little less apocalyptic (this is not snark). The writing is ... OK, I guess, the Caucasian folks sound different from the Chinese people, but that's as far as the differentiation between/among them goes; there are occasional flashes of wit, but the prose mostly just kinda sits there. The pacing is really slack for a long time but does tighten up some late.

American Girl by Wendy Walker

 

This is a pretty decent crime/thriller novel, lots of people who aren't what (or who) they say they are, all kinds of small-town secrets (or maybe "secrets," given how open many of them seem to be) serving as foundation and as reveals. The novel has a lot to say about how small towns treat their girls and women, how little respect and trust they get from the boys and men around them; while some of that boils out of the subtext, it never really gets in the way of the story--and it's a pretty common theme, these days, especially as more women write in the genre/s. The main character is an autist, and that's handled relatively plausibly and readably--her narration is always comprehensible, if often at least a little askew--and all the characters here feel like people, flawed and struggling and barely making it as their small town dies around them. There are some very good people--the POV and some of her friends--and there are some pretty despicable ones--the murder victim and people associated with the crimes he was doing under cover of the businesses he owned; most of them, though are somewhere in the vast middle ground, including the killer. Lots of interesting things here, and I'll probably be looking for more of Ms. Walker's books.

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.