Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt

 

Sigh. The best thing about this book is the title, really. It promises wordplay and fun and this novel doesn't really have much of either of those, past the occasional well-turned humorous phrase. I guess there's something kinda like progression, the main character working out that if he doesn't want to be bored he needs to be interesting; but he never really makes it there in the text, and much of what happens in the story comes off mostly as incident, and it's too localized with too many fixed characters to really be picaresque even if it's at least arguably kaleidoscopic. It's plausible there's some gesturing at social inequality intended here, but the weird vagueness of the setting--something not quite like the real world, but nothing remotely like magic--just means any intention comes off as muddled and maybe misdirected. Not bad enough to put down, not good enough to really enjoy.

The Border by Robert McCammon

 I've read some McCammon, back when I was younger and reading more Horror, and that was good--sometimes only pretty good, sometimes very good; this sits somewhere near the top of that range. It's hard to imagine a truly post-apocalyptic novel that's truly hopeful, but this at least mostly manages it: The novel has powerful, utterly alien things in it, but it's at its heart a novel about human perseverance and human faith winning the day. The victory is ... not about destruction, though it's simultaneously very destructive, thought about differently--though that destruction is something like a cauterization. There are clearly things in this novel that work the way they do because McCammon wants them to, there's no reason to believe physics bends those particular ways, but this is much more a novel of Fantasy or Horror than SF, alien invaders from beyond the stars notwithstanding. The story itself is pretty well-told, there are some POV choices I'm not really fond of--some head-hopping, a POV characters who changes but in ways that don't always convey well in narration--but McCammon does seem to grasp at least most of his human characters well, and his prose is solid enough.

A Chain Across the Dawn by Drew Williams

 

Yeah, it's a sequel that's plausibly going to turn into a trilogy (or even worse, an indefinite ongoing series) and while that's not ideal, the writing here is good enough--both in the turns of phrase (which are frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious) and in the story (which centers on the young woman rescued in the previous book)--that I'm at least willing to forgive the sequel thing, and I'm provisionally interested in whatever book might come next. There are clearly things planted here for at least one more book in ways they weren't in The Stars Now Unclaimed.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence

 

The title, and to an extent the cover copy, make this seem as though it's going to be about various weirdness; it's not. I wouldn't say this novel isn't weird, but it's entirely real-world stuff--some of it pretty depressing schoolboy stuff, some of it stark more adult real-world stuff. Structurally, it's mostly one long flashback inside a frame story; definitely a bildungsroman, focused on the right to die. It's pretty well-written, though there are some things--some of the events, some of the people--that kinda rattled my suspension of disbelief, but they didn't do so badly enough to kick me out of the novel.

A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block

 

If I've ever read a complete novel by Block, I've forgotten it. I feel as though that's probably either an ongoing big mistake or a series of slightly smaller ones. This is not one of his funny novels, but there are moments of wit and sharp turns of phrase; the characters and setting feel well lived-in--there's some neat retro charm about the POV walking around with a pocket full of quarters so he can make phone calls wherever/whenever. The fact the novel centers around alcoholism makes the title resonant; the fact the novel ties specifically to the difficult work of staying sober, and the specifically challenging nature of AA's Ninth Step, makes the title layered. (I have a weakness for clever titles.)

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

 A thriller, kinda a pursuit novel--if one told from enough points of view that the chase ends up being kinda kaleidoscopic--set in the forests and mountains around the Montana-Wyoming border. There are some twists, and at least one kinda rugpull, but nothing whacked out or overcomplicated or stupid. Koryta is a writer I've read before, under his Scott Carson *nom de plume*, but this is the first book of his under his own name that I remember reading. The chops are all there, the dude can write, the differences between writing supernatural Horror and like criminal Thrillers are ... not much to worry about, if the writer's brain generates both sorts of stories. Koryta gets story and character, and writes prose ranges well into good (if not magical or heightened or anything).

Descent by Tim Johnston

 

This is a novel about a family that suddenly find themselves living a nightmare, and it conveys really well just how violently it disrupts them as a family and as individuals. The characters are all strongly drawn and clearly recognizable as human--except for one, who's an inhuman monster. The actual story is a little disjointed, all kinds of time skips that often aren't entirely clear, and I can see someone being put off to a greater or lesser extent by the pages that are all in italics. It's clear reading it--especially noting the copyright date of 2015--to pick up on at least some of the real-world inspirations for this novel, but it's very much its own thing, pure fiction, characters under a magnifying glass.

Paradise Sky by Joe R. Landsdale

 

It's mostly a Western, yeah; and it's definitely a picaresque with a first-person narrator who's pretty upfront about not being completely reliable; but it's Landsdale, and he can really write--both in the sense of story and in the sense of phrase-turning--and it's really worth reading. Lots of racist shit in here, since the POV's a Black man, but it's handled reasonably well. It's set in the Old West (part of it even happens in fucking Deadwood) but it's a very modern take, takes the piss out of some of the dime novel mythmaking that's ossified into how people tend to think it really was. Given where the end goes, arguably a bit of a bildungsroman, too, though that might be oversimplifying the novel. Very, very good.

The Second Girl by David Swinson

 

I picked this up not knowing it was Book One of a series--but as Book One, it does a good job of introducing the major characters and putting them into position for a few follow-on stories, and it's set in a big enough city (DC) for future things to be reasonably plausible. The main is interesting--he has his lines, things he will not do, but they are probably not the lines you might want to expect from a retired cop; his secrets are probably even more not what you might want to expect. The story here has a strong whiff of *Taken* to it, but is otherwise reasonably OK, and the authorial voice is reasonably good and occasionally well-turned.

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

 

On the one hand, there's no really good reason a novel about a librarian going to some extraordinary lengths to protect a gay kid from his parents should still feel as relevant--no, as necessary--as it does, thirteen years after it was published; on the other hand, it's as fucking relevant now as it was then, maybe more so. There are parts of the novel that are a little disjointed, especially once the away-running gets started, but it's a narrative disjunction not a thematic one. The librarian and the kid are really well-drawn characters, especially the librarian--who comes across as a really mild person whose buttons just got mashed hard this one time, and whose reactions to that carry on some way past the kid making it back to his parents. Maybe thirteen years ago the kid's parents--especially his mom--might have been easier to take as played for laughs, but anyone who's lived through the 2020s so far knows there's no real long-term laughs there, that shit's serious and real.

All Things Bright and Strange by James Markert

 

This book is a mash up of a handful--maybe a large or even double handful--of influences, everything from *Needful Things* to *This Present Darkness* (though without some of the ... problematic stuff of the latter). The people of a town teaming up with angels to cast the devil back out of said town permanently (or at least very long-term) but the angels are themselves ... at least mostly human, and the forces of evil are sensitive to fire as well as apparently every human religion the people of the town can throw at them (every Western Christianity, including at least two specifically American variants, plus Islam and Judaism ... so more like every Abrahamic religion). This was published by a Christian publisher, or at least a Christian publishing division of a publisher, but it's more syncretic or heterodox or something than I would have expected. Also, the town was diverse but unified before the evil thing started driving wedges in it, and one of the wedges was religion; it's hard not to see some sort of subtext there. I was kinda hoping it was going to turn out to be anti-religion (or at least anti-organized religion) but that was probably at least one bridge too far. Oh, well. This isn't a great book, but it's not a horrible one either. Markert has some sense of story structure, and some sense of people.

The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh

 

This is a very good novel--mostly a rural crime novel, but also a passable bildungsroman (maybe something of a a double-barreled one, given the twinned timelines) with perhaps part of the growing up in this case being a realization that unearned loyalty is a mistake and/or worthless; maybe something about staying where you are needing to be an active choice and not just the result of a lack of options. There's pain and grief here, but what they fuel is less in the way of vengeance than it is a burning need to know. The parallels between past and present play neat thematic chords, as well. I do kinda wish Ms. McHugh had been able to tell the whole novel in just the two first-person POVs, but I get why she needed to start introducing other POVs (and I get why those other POVs are all tight third).

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

 

A neat little Horror novel (big shock on the genre, there, I'm sure) that plays some interesting games with PTSD and identity, with maybe an interesting echo of Barker's "Dread," where someone brings about their own destruction by turning someone else into a monster. There are large stretches told in something like screenplay format (and might in fact be formatted correctly) but it's not a transcript, all the observations about what the people in the script are thinking or feeling are at least plausible as a written--as opposed to a transcribed--thing. Also, what's going on outside the movie is ... plenty realistic/plausible, there's nothing really supernatural happening in this novel, I think, just some damaged people making some dubious decisions.

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

 

This is a really ... stolid novel, really. There are hints of Rashomon in it, with all the various first-person characters flashing in for their own chapters, interrupting the main narration, but all of that first person stuff is remarkably reliable, really, and other than some notion of honesty or fair play I see no real reason for it. And I figured out the big dramatic reveal--who the bad guy was--something like two hundred pages beforehand. Ms. Shepherd has written a novel about some putative conflict between technology and magic, while skittering into "the map is not the territory" territory (heh). The former is a pretty common theme in modern (non secondary world) Fantasy, and the latter at least seems to be, as well--The Book of Doors and The Starless Sea both were playing with very similar ideas with books instead of maps. Given that my reaction to all those books, and this one, was very "meh," it's possible there's something in that that just doesn't work for me.

Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen

 

I am obviously in a place right now where Hiaasen's novels hit buttons I like having hit, and this one does just that. There's a nefarious scheme that involves continuing to destroy the Everglades unhindered, and it gets at least partially foiled, and the schemers come to bad ends; kinda oddly, approximately no one else does (mainly because none of the other characters in the novel are involved in that scheme--even the people knowingly committing adultery are not behaving that sort of badly). There's typical Hiaasen wit and mild raunch along side the crime and corruption and environmental destruction. Very laugh-out-loud in parts.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

 

A bunch of rich drunks have drunken adventures in France and Spain between the Wars. There is fishing, and there are bullfights. Decadence and dissolution more or less without reprieve. Lots of conversations, occasionally not super-clear who's talking; I guess it's plausible the characters are talking about things they don't ever (much) mention, but the book really wasn't interesting enough for me to try to read that deeply, or for me to reread it.

The Last One at the Wedding by Jason Rekulak

 

This came out like right after I read Hidden Pictures, which I liked a lot, so I put a hold on it at the library. Uh ... This is not a very good novel--nowhere near as good as Hidden Pictures, for sure. There aren't any really likeable characters, or really even believable ones, and the big twist--who the sociopath the narrator needs to deal with--is pretty obvious from about halfway in (maybe more). I'm sure Rekulak is trying to say important things, mostly about stuff like wealth and power disparities, and I'm sure that to an extent the slightly dulled and thickened narrative voice is intentional; but the overwhelming experience here is authorial clumsiness.

Book of Night by Holly Black

 

This is a novel that sets itself some easy goals, and then reaches them. It's very much in the same vein as Laurell Hamilton or Kim Harrison, complete with "it's the real world but there's been magic for a while," but it's in third person (better to show you things the main can't possibly know) and the main clearly knows herself better than at least those two authors' mains ever did, that I saw. Also, she's only just on the path to becoming a monster--I presume there will be other novels, and I presume she will become more a monster in them, though I suppose it's possible she'll do so about as intentionally and knowingly as Dresden did; I won't be reading those novels, this book was not good enough to interest me in them.