Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie

 

This is labeled as an epistolary novel, but that's not entirely right. There are entries that could not possibly have been written, from the narrative; and most of the "entries" are in fact more like transcripts of audio (with weirdly knowing descriptions of what body language and expression mean, insight into what people are literally thinking). Honestly, this reads more like a script, for the most part, than a novel--and I think the format makes what I've seen called the "fictive dream" more elusive than actual straight prose. The fact none of the characters are particularly likeable, or come across as anything like as intelligent (or brave, or driven, or ...) as they seem to think they are doesn't help much, either--though there's a hint that one of the characters might have survived in a more meaningful manner than the one who was subsumed into the Bad Place.

The Dancing Girls by M. M. Chouinard

 

I am honestly puzzled as to how or why this is Book One of a series--it makes no sense from an author's, publisher's, or reader's perspective. The characters who would presumably be the recurring characters--the Series Name Detective and the others in her office--accomplish approximately nothing: The serial killer they're chasing gets himself killed by a-fucking-nother serial killer, in a moment that bizarrely reminds me of some Roger Zelazny short stories from like the 1980s or early 1990s ("Itself Surprised," about one of Saberhagen's Berserkers encountering a remnant from the war of their origin, something built to kill Berserkers; and a story I do not remember the title of, about something that preys on vampires interacting with vampire hunters). I guess the serial killer meeting victims through the chat function of World of Warcraft (and communicating further via Skype) would have been a thing in the early 2010s when this novel was written, but even now feels almost as dated as Francis Dolarhyde in *Red Dragon* finding the families he killed when he processed the film from their movie cameras.

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

 

Um. Well, the book starts--more or less--with a prophecy, that it tells you will come true. Then it spends somewhere over three hundred pages unwinding how the prophecy came true. On the one hand, that's kinda a trope in Fantasy; on the other hand, it's usually weak sauce Fantasy that does it. What it does is it puts a lot of burden on how the author tells the story of the prophecy coming true, and in this case especially the decision to tell something like two hundred fifty years in just over three hundred pages makes it feel like a surface-level skim while sucking most of the narrative tension out. There are moments of charm, of beauty, of ... well, if not moments of truth, then moments where Rushdie's messages ring loud and clear; those moments are scarce and scattered, though, and subsumed in the rapid flow.

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

 

This started off ... more than a little rough, to be honest: There are a lot of POVs and the novel hops around between them a lot (though that calms down eventually); and the voice is distinctly Brit, which is distinctly off for young American women living in New York, New York (I checked to make sure neither of them was supposed to be Brit, more than once); and there's some weird threat stuff that remains mostly nascent or latent or something for a while. But it gets better--maybe I got used to the voice, but it gradually stopped lighting up all by Brit Prose Sensors; and the threats came together (and tied together kinda nicely in a kinda unintended consequences kind of way at the end); and the characters started to come together as something like people; and the story started to build up momentum about the time it started getting all nonlinear and time-travelly; and there's a grace note at the end that will hit people with different degrees of force but which landed on me kinda like a ton of well-aimed bricks. Very much in the vein/s of Morgenstern's The Starless Sea or maybe Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January, though less meta than the former and less monster-laden than the latter; probably somewhere between them as far as "good" goes, somewhere past the middle in the direction of Morgenstern, I think.

Uprade by Blake Crouch

 

On the one hand, this reads a lot like a techno-thriller--and my experience is that any time one of those ventures into any area I know anything about, they manage to get it badly wrong; on the other hand, the setting, all plausible and recognizable near-future, isn't any worse, really, than Dick or most cyberpunk when they were written: I guess it's more in the SF direction than a lot of techno-thrillers tend to be, and it seems as though Crouch has done his research--at least enough so his characters don't come across as total idiots--so I can't snark more than a little on most of the choices, really. I can say, though, that marketing it as near-future SF would be more honest than anything else, really; I grabbed this book off the library shelves because the cover copy made it seem to me as though it was set in more or less the now, not some twenty-ish years in the future (maybe more like fifty). In some ways, the world of the author's setting contains too much that is recognizable, given the amount of mostly-destructive change it's gone through. I'm pleased that Crouch moved away from pure intelligence being the solution to the problems of the novel, though I'm not sure I entire buy the solutions he posited, either. At least he seemed to be committed to the novel being what it was.

The Hush by John Hart

 

This is a weird novel--not Weird, as like a literary or genre descriptor, just weird. It's clearly a kind of Horror novel, with a patch of somewhere in the South that's haunted by a really old and really angry (kinda) ghost, and debts that convey along bloodlines; but it reads like a novel written by an author who isn't super comfortable or experienced with writing Horror, as though Horror is like a sideline or something: Thinking about it, this novel hits a lot of the same notes as The Chill by "Scott Carson," which is another Horror novel by a writer of mostly crime/thriller novels; maybe it's the kind of Horror those kinds of writers reach for, or maybe ancestral debts and hauntings are Horror trappings writers newish to the genre reach for. This is not as good a novel as that one, but it's not bad; the supernatural stuff sits kinda sideways to the more real-world-plausible elements, here, almost as though Hart wasn't fully committed to writing a Horror novel.

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman

 

A very engaging novel, maybe less of a mystery than a broader thriller--while there is a murder mystery and it is solved, the road there takes many turns and detours. Delicious phrases fall out of Osman's writing like prizes from a kid's cereal box, and he has a feel for all the characters in the novel. The story is just a bit over-the-top, and the characters kinda tend that way, too, sometimes, though they do manage to remain recognizable as people. If I were looking for another writer of series fiction to read, reading Osman wouldn't be any kind of hardship.

Light Years From Home by Mike Chen

 

This cover text on this book promises much more of a novel of pursuit than the covers actually contain, but this is otherwise a reasonably interesting book. There's like a hundred pages--maybe more--of the sort of intra-family drama that ends with you not really liking anyone, but that's just setup for the things that happen toward the end of the novel. The climax is not some chase resolution, or even really external/violent action, but the members of the family getting their shit sorted out and being able to move on with their lives as they should be. Well, two of them, anyway: One has her dementia relapse after a temporary magic-tech reprieve, and the other is off-planet fighting a desperate war. There was a stretch where I was seriously thinking the character just back from the extraterrestrial war might turn out to be entirely delusional, but this is in fact a SF novel, so that didn't turn out to be the case.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

 

This is a beautifully novel about the pain of war, and the conflicts between duty and desire--at least, that's the surface story. Under that, there's a stream of self-justification--mostly on the part of people other than the POV, though he comes to believe it--based on reincarnation and fate; there's a scene near the end of the novel, in one of the brief stretches in 1995, where the character who triggers the extensive flashbacks that make up the vast majority of the novel makes it clear that predestination in Western (or at least Christian) thought is the same thing. What the novel's really about, though is the need to tell, and the potential healing power of telling; the difference in the POV/narrator's attitude in the epilogue/last chapter is the key, here--telling his story did more for his peace of mind than anything that might have anything to do with any putative past lives, or any putative fate.

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

It's kinda funny, considering that I was thinking about how Hendrix's writing is typically so arch and knowing, and here there's barely any humor. Wit, yeah, clever turns of phrase, and a palpable sense of self-aware Fandom (it's clear Hendrix loves slasher movies, maybe in spite of his better judgment); the strongest takeaway I get here, though, is sincerity. He sincerely loves slasher movies; his main here is never less than 75% sincere (there's some caginess, she gives off strong unreliable narrator energy for much of the novel); the novel's subtext is a thick stream just below the surface, friendship and trust and protecting your loved ones and the future, and it's sincere. Hendrix isn't arch, he's self-aware.

All the Blood We Share by Camilla Bruce

This is a very heavy book. Oh, it's not that it deals with serious things seriously or anything like that, it's just a weight like being thrown into the sea tied to a millstone, a darkness unrelieved by anything more than a mildly clever turn of phrase. Some putatively charming sociopaths who think they're master criminals, except the only way they can think of to take what they want is to kill the people who have it. It's based on real people and events, because there are and have always been people like that, and I guess there's some value in telling some version of that story, but this is most of 375 pages in the first-person mind of one or another of the family of sociopaths at the novel's center, and after a while you just want it to end, you end up hoping they all die. (They don't, because there's no documentation.) Not a fun read, not a great novel.

Night Shift by Alex Finlay

 

Well, this is a crime novel that plays in the current idiom of "stupidly overplotted thriller," with a dash of "omnicompetent sociopath"--though there's a reasonable chance the omnicompetent sociopath is not the killer. (I'm not entirely sure I buy every single part of the "resolution" of this novel ...) The fact that in a novel full of unpleasant manipulative asshats the only real "onscreen" death is one of the really good characters does not improve my disposition, here. The story could plausibly not have been *horrible*, but the author couldn't resist throwing stupid twist after stupid twist: It's clear he didn't trust his story to go out into the world less adorned.