The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey

 

I really wanted to like this novel--I've heard lots of good things about the Sandman Slim books--but this was not very good. It took like forever to get itself set up, then took its sweet time getting moving; and the putative protagonist took until the last quarter of the book, and maybe well into that, before he did anything for himself, for his own reasons, as something other than a reaction to someone else doing or saying a thing. Also, the weird fictional German dieselpunk city never really coalesced for me as a setting, and the attempts to convey Weimar Germany likewise failed to land. I'm sure Kadrey had things he was trying to say, parallels he wanted to make between the rise of Nazi Germany and current politics, but honestly read something recent by Lebuskes and get the same subtext, mostly, in a better novel.

We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White

 

I wish I could say this is a good book, it's sincere and it has big thing (Big Things!) to say, about poverty and how it's a trap, and how you do it to yourself and how other people do it to you and how you help each other, and how people work with each other to help each other survive poverty, and about how grief stickies up the threads of the spiderweb. Alas, it's not a very good novel; all the timelines and POVs kinda muddle, the characters and the events all kinda run together, and though there is lots of incident it never really feels as though there's a lot of story movement, and if there's some actual story point to the novel I wasn't able to see it.

The Marauders by Tom Cooper

 

This is the first book I've read in a while that aimed for "kaleidoscopic" and didn't hit "muddled" or worse. It's not a great novel, but all--OK, most--of the story-threads do kinda come together to make a something like a broad story. It's a novel full of rage, and given what the bayous and the people in them have been through--some of which was more like scabs than scars when this book was written--that anger is honestly come by. Most of the people in the novel aren't really pleasant, they're too busy scrambling for their next meal, or their next joint, or their next paycheck, or whatever, to bother with pleasantry, but one gets the sense the people in the novel would be recognizable to people from the novel's setting as people like themselves, or people like people they knew. The novel kinda promises a humorous caper-gone-wrong novel in the Louisiana bayous, but there's not much humor and there's not much in the way of caper-stuff, either; it's not horrible for what it is, but it's not what it says it is, I'm inclined to blame that mostly on the publisher.

Hokuloa Road by Elizabeth Hand

 

Ms. Hand has won all sorts of awards in all sorts of genres, but this novel, at least, isn't really all that good. It wants to be a crime novel about a serial killer (whose reasoning is left boringly blank) and it wants to be a novel about the beliefs of the native Hawai'ians having real magical power, and it's not exactly a bildungsroman--the main is too old for that--but there's a thread six lanes wide of someone figuring himself out, finding himself, complete with a very complicated moral decision at the end (which is left boringly unexplored). The novel begins by moving from there the main starts to the actual situation of the novel with a speed that batters the ability to sustain disbelief, which does not serve the complicated cross-genre nature of the novel well; and the rest of the situation accrues narrative clutter at speed and in amounts that likewise do not serve it well. It's plausible Ms. Hand has written good novels, this is not one, it does not give me reason or confidence to dig much further.

The Burglar by Thomas Perry

 

This novel's title is a bit of a red herring: While there are parts of this novel that are about as mundane as the title might lead one to expect, it's a subtle, twisted, complicated sort of mundanity. There's some dry wit turning some phrases, here, and a pacing that kinda ticks, then tick ticks, then tickticktickticks. The main is deeply criminal but still has something like morals, and the sequences where she goes through things making her career path possible are ... a neat way to make her character clear, her tendency to plan carefully and move quickly. I gather much of Perry's work is novels in a series, I might give something a try in spite of that; this was a good read.

The Drift by C. J. Tudor

 This is a mostly mediocre little post-apocalyptic novel, where all the bad that happens is due to people being shits, where there's precious good to be seen. That it happens in three timelines is "cleverly" hidden by the author most of the way through the novel; what seems like three plotlines that will converge is in fact one timeline told out of order for what I'm sure are reasons. Probably so that when the three POV characters die we get all of their experiences of crossing the veil. Because that's awesome. And what happens at the beginning of the novel's text happens after the end of it, because Ms. Tudor thinks that's clever--and it might be, if any of what happened in the novel mattered in the world of the novel; it doesn't, it isn't

At the City's Edge by Marcus Sakey

 

Looking at the blurbs and cover text, it occurred to me that this novel might have a bit of Ludlum in it--something about a former soldier and a conspiracy--and it does! Of course, it all takes place in Chicago, and mostly not any of the really happy parts, but aside from the geographical constraints, it really has many of the right elements. There's even a romantic interest--if it's one that remains unconsummated, at least within the text of the novel. (It's pretty clear that's not a condition that's going to last long past the novel's end.)  Sakey has a sense of story and a feel for people and a knack for turning phrases, this is a remarkably strong novel.

Lexicon by Max Barry

 

I remembered seeing parts of this novel back when I was recording audiobooks (we who operated the equipment didn't usually get to read whole books) and it looked interesting then, so when I stumbled across it in the library I figured I'd check it out. It is, in fact interesting, a reasonable thriller that has a vague sense of magic about it--which might just be connected to some specific woo, or which might be connected to something more "scientific," like Chomsky--though as a callback to my Ludlum thing, isn't mostly a pursuit novel, and is remarkably nonlinear (though it's much clearer about when you are than the last few heavily nonlinear books I've read have been). It's even got some vaguely interesting thematic concerns--free will, identity, the power of love (cue Huey Lewis ...). I mean, the core premise is implausible, but that aside the novel is really good; I'm seriously pleasantly surprised by that.

Night Film by Marisha Pessl

 

After not a lot happens but for people making stupid bad decisions over and over, persistently, the novel takes a turn toward the gratuitously postmodern, trying to shoehorn as many different ideas of what the diagetic objective truths of the novel are or might be; all of that in the service of some very particular ideas of what "genius" is, overlaid with a sort of Internet epistolary element that in 2013 was probably bleeding edge literature complete with Web elements you could scan with your phone to experience more completely (not an idea that seems at all good in 2025). There's a lot of authorial noise here, but not much worth bothering with other than some widely scattered turns of phrase. Thank you for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts for you, who's the next contestant?

Redemption Road by John Hart

 This novel has nothing I noticed in the way of supernatural about it, and I have the sense that's probably something Hart's more comfortable with than having ghosts and stuff running around. I mean, I saw the Big Twist coming something like 200 pages before it landed, but Hart doesn't seem to be an overly subtle novelist, even among prize-winning crime novelists. There's a lot that happens in this novel, and it's kinda jumbled at times, but the various relationships ring at least mostly true, and the ending is--suitably, given the title--distinctly hopeful, if not exactly redemptive; maybe Hart gets that earning redemption isn't so easy, maybe he just wanted to leave the ending a bit more open-ended. It's not a great novel, but I don't feel as though I've wasted my evening; I might not jump at more by the author, however.

Spirit Crossing by William Kent Krueger

 

After the DNF last night, I wanted something that felt ... reliable. William Kent Krueger's books are exactly that. This probably wouldn't be my favorite of his books--it's too focused on the Native spiritualism for my tastes, I don't believe a word of it outside the context of these novels (and honestly, barely there)--but his strengths as a novelist are all on display: His feel for the characters and their culture/s, his care for the physical and social environment, his faith in humanity, his belief in ... something. Has things to say about death and faith and forgiveness and grief, and it says them powerfully.

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

 

It turns out there's only so much nothing happening I can stand, and tonight--in the company of uniformly annoying characters, in the shape of overly nonlinear fragments--it's about 175 pages (out of about 400).

A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons

 

There is some real overlap between crime fiction and horror fiction, certainly crimes--especially some gone wrong--can be pretty horrific; but I wouldn't have expected someone to try to bolt supernatural horror bordering on the Lovecraftian (as that's understood, this isn't literally Yog-Sotthothery) onto a heist-gone-bad/no-honor-among-thieves crime story. After reading this, I'm not sure it entirely worked: The incessant recurrences of the other criminals reminded me of some of Koontz's novels, where he has supernatural badness happening and conscienceless or deranged or sociopathic human killers as a way to at least imply that humans are the worst monsters possible. In the case of this novel, the humans are patently not the worst monsters, even if the supernatural badness is arguably present because of human actions (there's an actual cult ...). I'm pretty sure the authorial intent here is something like instigation and increasing tension. Also, I'm not sure I buy the ability of the supernatural badness to faultlessly track the Main, here, given it should have been important at some point in the intervening couple twenty-plus years. Probably not horrible, but really not all that great. Probably better than the last couple of horror novels I've read, but that's setting the bar kinda low.

Lock In by John Scalzi

 

If I tell you this is basically a mystery in near-future-SF dress, that might surprise you (if you know who John Scalzi is) until/unless I also mention that when he started writing fiction he basically coinflipped between Mystery and SF; at that point it might make perfect sense. This is a really good novel, with some interesting thematic resonances mostly centering on free-will and the intersections of wealth and power, with various subthreads on regulatory capture and the way the Diné have been misused and abused and ignored by the US government over history. It's ten-year-old Scalzi (wow!) at this point, and it's not so breezy as some of his more recent stuff, and I know he's said before that hearing the audiobook of a novel has led him to at least mostly drop dialogue tags ("he said") and I gotta say the dialogue tags jumped off the page at me as I was reading this, so this might have been that novel/audiobook; but it's very readable and a blast.

We Sold our Souls by Grady Hendrix

I am vaguely disappoint. I was kinda hoping for a more Horror-inflected take on This Is Spinal Tap (add your own fucking umlaut, there) but instead it's as though Hendrix has read Martin's The Armageddon Rag and decided that if Martin can write a novel about mediocre hippie music saving the world, he can write a novel about mediocre metal saving the world. The novel is not improved by Hendrix's attempts to write lyrics, nor by his decision to repeat them. Maybe someone who liked crappy metal more than I do would dig this novel more than I do, but it never really feels witty or self-aware--or even arch--the way Hendrix's better novels do.
 

Honky Tonk Samurai by Joe R. Lansdale.

 

So, Lansdale's a fricking legend, and novels like this demonstrate why. On some level it's your basic small-town/rural crime novel, with POV characters who are kinda sorta at least vaguely connected to people with some amount of authority--somewhere between undeputized cops and unlicensed PIs--with grit and crime and vague twists and (because it's a novel in a series) callbacks to previous adventures and new characters arriving. Lansdale's writing though, his turns of phrase and his ear for dialogue, as well as his sense of place and people, elevate what is arguably a pretty formulaic story. Witty and serious in turns, as needed, well-paced, gritty and bloody and sorta hopeful-ish, as much about the tight connections between the major characters as about any other elements.

Mister Lullaby by J. H. Markert

 

This was a jumbled mess of a novel, a poorly organized pile of timelines, points of view, and global folklore (making a mistake I've seen before, of pulling myth and folklore from as many sources as possible, ending up with a muddle). There are some elements of worthwhile character, here, and hints of understanding the people of the novel; and the overall premise isn't horrible, though dreamland being a threat to waking reality will have antecedents ranging from Barker to Lovecraft to possibly Poe. Those upsides, though, are buried in the murk.

Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan

 

This is a surprisingly good thrillerish crime novel--there are elements of twisty whodunit mystery at play, and interesting layers of innocence and guilt. Dolan has a knack for turning a phrase, and an ear for dialogue, and a solid feel for character and story. While the situations in the novel are very much at the far edge of plausible, the characters' motivations are always clear and believable. The novel's opening being in present tense and at least most of the rest being in past is an interesting choice, I don't have much problem with it, there aren't any glaring tense shifts in any given section, but I can see the possibility of someone being bothered. I honestly grabbed it because the title struck my fancy, but it turned out to be very worth reading; I'll have to keep an eye out for more from the author.

This Is the Voice by John Colapinto

 

There's a lot that's interesting in this book, and the fact Chomsky's "theories" about language and speech come out looking distinctly garbagelike is a distinct positive for me (my problems are with Chomsky's science, not his politics). There are some things that seem kinda dubious, but I'm not inclined to say they're exactly wrong--just that they seem distinctly counter to my understanding of my own experiences. If a book about how speech and language work and interact seems interesting to you, this book will probably be interesting; if not, then probably not.

The Fixer by Joseph Finder

 

This is an author whose name I see around among thriller novelists, and I figured I'd pull a novel and check it out, and ... it's not entirely garbage, there are moments when the story sticks and grabs and maybe pulls a little, generates some momentum. Most of the novel, though, is like someone fingerpainting parts of a life and/or lifestyle he can't really imagine; there aren't really any genius characters, here, but much of the writing reminds me of someone who's kinda average-ish intelligence trying to write a supergenius: it's just off, and you can tell. Of course, I haven't lived any of the lives that are in this novel, either, so it's possible I'm wrong about that, but the prose is mostly thick and smeary and the main character spends the first half-ish of the novel as smug and shallow and self-centered and almost as annoying as the main character in last night's novel (though fortunately there's just the one of him, that probably makes a big difference). At least now I know I can go back to ignoring his books on the library shelves.

Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell

 

This is a weird little time-travel story that manages not to be particularly SF, the time-travel is just a thing, and it's mostly a way to get a distressingly lot of copies of one of the most annoying characters I've encountered in fiction in the same place and time. There are hints of post-apocalyptic shit here--New York City in 2071 is not a nice place in this novel--and I kinda gotta think Ferrell is trying to say things about identity and free will and the sorts of things you'd expect a story with the elements this one has to have as thematic inclusions. It's not super-well-written, though: The story is jumbled even by the standards of mediocre time-travel fiction, and there are a couple of weird transitions where it goes from all the multiples getting drunk in an abandoned hotel to life in the decaying metropolis and back, and the resolution is all kinda of wildly implausible. It wasn't a total waste of my evening, but I do kinda wish this novel had somehow gotten misdirected between 2013 and now.