Axiom's End by Lindsay Ellis

 This turned out to be a surprisingly good SF novel, sort of an alternative-universe first-contact story laden with conspiracy-theory talk, more reasonable in the context of the story than it ever really was in reality. Lots of interesting things about family and commitment to Truth, and some serious thoughts expressed about humanity's reaction/s to more-powerful ETs (thoughts I've seen elsewhere, but that's not a dig). The prose sticks most every landing, occasionally mustering grace and/or wit above and/or beyond the call of duty, the characters all make sense and stand apart from each other (though there's a bit of head-hopping) and the story resolves well with some interesting implications in the denouement. I'm pleased for the entire story to fit into one book, that's less and less the way in SF and Fantasy these days.

If You Were Here by Alafair Burke

 

I picked this up because it sounded at least vaguely interesting from the cover library when I was at the library. It was ... at least vaguely interesting. Not particularly plausible or believable, and not like gripping; but vaguely interesting. There's some misdirection that starts spiraling in around the end of the novel, as lies pile up to an almost fissionable critical mass--some of that is at least skittering around the edges of stupid twists, but the vast majority of it's building on things in ways that at least sort of make sense. The roughness in the late-beginning through the early-end, as the novel tries be all multi-threaded, does clear up as things come back together through the end. There's probably more autobiography in this novel than is absolutely ideal, but Ms. Burke has taken good care to file the serial numbers off, no one's gonna get sued over this. I'm not over-impressed, here, but it wasn't a horrible evening's read; I never seriously considered DNFing.

The Man in the Crooked Hat by Harry Dolan

 

I grabbed this because I'd liked something else by the author a few weeks ago, and this novel ... turned out to be a well-written and complex--without being stupidly overcomplicated, without deploying pointless "twists"--novel. It switches out POV some on a chapter-by-chapter basis, but the two mains are the protagonist and the antagonist: This turns out to be a solid narrative choice, the antagonist is warped but at least mostly trying to do and be the best he can, and in some ways the former-police protagonist is probably a greater social disruptor than the serial killer. At least, he's arguably about as warped in extent if not in direction. Well-written, very believable characters, tons of like dramatic suspense, including the possibility the protagonist will die, or maybe turn out not to be as good a person as he wants. And a denouement that is kinda beautiful in its ambiguity.

Eyes Wide Open by Andrew Gross

 

I wouldn't call this a complete dumpster fire, but it's not a very good book. Not that one should expect a good book from an author who apprenticed under James Patterson--if I'd seen that I'd have probably skipped this book. The author here is working out a great deal of pain pretty, shaping the text to pretty explicitly mimic at least some things from his reality; I'm not sure he really needed to drag in the Manson knock-off, or try to write about said Manson Knock-off having any particular reach outside of prison: Manson was a pretty skilled manipulator, but he aged out of any relevance really quickly, in spite of what the Geraldo Riveras of the world would like people to believe. There's not much here to justify suspending disbelief, the characters never really make much sense, even the ones who are relatively sympathetic make some persistently bad choices, the prose is at best nothing special (I didn't note any gratuitous garbage writing); the ending is clearly as much about the author's pain as the story, which is fine, but the epilogue is kinda a steaming pile. Not bad enough to DNF but not a novel that really added to my life experience.

The Maltese Iguana by Tim Dorsey

 

This is another of this author's weird, completely gonzo novels, and it's got the standard toolkit: oddball violence; complicated, tangled storylines; lots of recreational drugs. The story here sort of pulls itself together, but it does so at best loosely. There are some gloriously hilarious turns of phrase, and some very satisfying bad ends for bad people; what pass for good people in this novel (it's a reasonable questions if any of the people in it are actually good) tend to survive and maybe thrive. These are decent as an occasional palate-cleanser, but I don't know that I want to try to keep track of which I've read, at least not for much longer.

How It Happened by Michael Koryta

 

This is partly a thriller--layered conspiracies, government agencies, blackmail, drugs--and partly a mystery--murder, conspiracy, blackmail, drugs; the genres are closely connected and play together well, especially at the hands of an author who understands them both, or at least understands what he's trying to do, as Koryta clearly does, here. There are some reveals that I saw coming, at least one "howdunnit" thing I twigged to pretty early, though the solution in the book wasn't exactly what I was thinking (but it was close). Part of why I think this mixes thriller and mystery, instead of just being a mystery, is that it's almost always clear who the main badguy is--though there's a secondary who's perhaps not so obvious--the primary questions are on the lines of whether the main will manage to survive, put a stop to things, put the badguys away, that sort of thing. The fact the main has studied how interrogations go bad, in the form of leading to bad confessions (it's the Reid technique) and has strong thoughts about law enforcement and criminal justice that probably aren't consistent with what most people would expect of an FBI agent ... that's the author being particularly clear-eyed, I think. Also, the thread in the novel about opiates wreaking havoc in rural/coastal Maine (and elsewhere) in like 2016 is definitely resonant. Koryta understand story and character and the setting he's working in here, almost flawlessly; there are some rough spots near the beginning, but things smooth out rapidly.

I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

 

This was a remarkably fun novel to read, more fun than I would have guess if I'd known it was such a paean to slasher movies and hair metal--two things I don't care all that much for. I mean, I love some aggro in my rock music (when I listen to it) but hair metal is bland; and I adore Horror as a genre but slasher fiction isn't about worming under your skin and eating your mind from the inside so much as it is about cheap gore and crappy jump scares. That said, there's a lot of love here for those two misbegotten genres, and the novel works well even from a nonfan's POV, I think. There's a really unexpected amount of humanity in the slasher, here, and his ability to make one final choice for himself makes the ending hit pretty hard. What's funny is that it's clear Grady Hendrix loves slasher movies and metal--he wrote a book about each trying to prove it--and Jones, here, manages a novel with more humor and wit than anything Hendrix has done, an actual pleasure to read, that doesn't make you feel the author's making fun of anyone, there's no archness here, though there's plenty of self-awareness.

The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza by Lawrence Block

 

I've read some Lawrence Block recently, and he's fun and funny, and I'd heard his Bernie Rhodenbarr books were about the most fun and funniest, so I grabbed one. It's great fun, for sure--interestingly both ahead of and of its time (1980) and there's lots of humor in it. Not like Hiaasen-grade humor, but humor. The characters are all just a little askew, but they all fit the story and its setting just fine; the story's a little wacky but it holds together and wraps up satisfyingly. It's a very New York City novel, which might appeal to some and turn others off. I've seen others at the library, and I'll probably grab them from time to time.

Arrowood by Laura McHugh

 Tonight's book was about as good as this afternoon's, it's been a very good reading day for me today. I read and really enjoyed The Weight of Blood a while ago, and when I saw this in the library I yanked it off the shelves with some vigor. This novel is possibly better than that one, though it doesn't have the neat doubled timeline; it unfurls like a flower blossoming in time-lapse, layered revelations in roughly every scale the novel's operating in. There's stuff on the cover calling it a "mystery," and while there is a crime at the center of it, the solution of the crime is only as important as it is relevant to the main character's life and her ability to live it. All the traps nostalgia lays lie in the story, and they all have their piece of the characters' flesh, but the denouement at least implies there is some moving past the past happening.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

 

I read this in a coffee shop this afternoon. Like so many other people I owe bigolas dickolas wolfwood a deep debt of gratitude, this book is if anything better than he says. The alternating POVs, with alternating authorial voices, work shockingly well, and the interweaving of the stories bears some thematic weight come the finale. The idea of the eternal time war (or maybe Time War) probably owes something of a debt to Fritz Leiber's Change War (Snakes and Spiders) stories but that's not wildly important, this novel balances the vast scale of the war with the personal scale of the characters and is its own thing of beauty.

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

 

So this story takes a while to get going, but when it eventually does, it goes some interesting and mostly cheerful places. There's more than a little authorial insertion, because it's hard to write something so knowingly about fiction without going at least a little meta (I'm pretty sure the book's more about secondary-world fantasy than it is about fairy tales, no matter what it says, but that's probably not important). The characters are reasonably well-drawn, and it's probably a sort of comment on the heteronormativity of genre that the Important Couple here are queer (if possibly bi, and poly, though neither of those is anything like explicit in the text). The ghost city in the middle of the fantasy setting honestly reminded me a lot of the "hell" in What Dreams May Come, but maybe a little less interesting (if not so lame in the end) but I'm sure ideas like that are floating around in the collective subconscious there for the taking. It's a pretty good novel, not anything deathless or earthshaking, I'm glad I grabbed it out of the books my wife was going to take back to the library.

The Comedy Is Finished by Donald E. Westlake

 

This novel is set around the same time-frame as last night's read--sometime in the late 1970s--but it does a much better job capturing the hopelessness and existential hangover lots of people were feeling in the reeking wake of the 1960s; the sense that all the protest and violence had been pointless, that all that was left was damage without chance of rebirth. It's also about a crime, like last night's novel--a kidnapping instead of a murder or three, carried out as part of the last gasp of the putatively revolutionary movements instead of as some culmination of criminality. It's a pretty serious novel--there aren't much in the way of laughs, here, in spite of a literal comedian being one of the main characters, but it manages not to be a slog even though it's not much shorter than last night's novel. Unlike last night's novel, this novel is actually good: Westlake had reasons not to publish it in his lifetime, including possibly forgetting it existed (after not wanting to publish it because it was too much like another famous piece of fiction) but I don't think he needed to be ashamed of it.

All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage

 

I almost stopped reading his novel before finishing the prologue, a drippingly sentimental and pretentious thing in first person plural talking about a former farmhouse. I didn't, and I ended up in a novel that says it's about a murder and you might think that means it's about solving the murder but no, it's about how the murder--and a couple-three others--came to happen, the sad mental state of the broken humanoid doing them, how he's emotionally cowed his wife and his lover, how he's conned and grifted his way into a tenure-track position (the novel is set in 1978-1979, when I guess just about anyone could find a tenure-track position, as opposed to now when all the gigs are as adjuncts) in some grubby little college. The novel has all the tics of a 2010s novel written with "literary" aspirations, the one most people will notice is the absence of quotation marks around dialogue; the college professor having the affair thing is, of course, such a cliche in a kind of "literary" fiction that all I could really do is laugh. The best thing about this novel is the cover; I should have stopped with the prologue.

Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

 

Something about the cover copy here grabbed me when I was in the library, and then over the past week and change as I'd sift through the books I'd checked out I'd wonder if I'd erred. I, uh, didn't really err: This is a really good novel, if one not in my usual range, genre-wise. It's probably a bit "literary"--there's at least some blurring toward the end of the novel about what has actually happened away from the narrative spotlight, there are hints from before, in the POV of a character who dies, that roughly nothing he says about himself is what most people would think of as literally true, though he might be less dishonest than that; and there are knock-on effects that make what happened seem as though it might matter, then it turns out not to. The noel has a lot to say, both in text and subtext, about how the US treats "sexual offenders," especially about how there is context and nuance to many of their situations and the system/s they're caught up in don't care at all about any of it; turns out, I mostly agree with those things; there's not really a sense of authorial axe-grinding, though, the characters have reason enough to care. It's a pretty grim novel, any hope is vague and distant, though its seeds are planted.

Salvation Day by Kali Wallace

 

This seemed like an interesting premise, from reading the cover copy, and the novel mostly delivered; I guess there's at least one very loaded word in the cover copy that gives a lot more away than Ms. Wallace probably would have preferred, but it's not as though she can really claim the novel is particularly subtle on that point (or at all subtle on that point, really). It becomes obvious really early on that the two POV characters are both coming from very sheltered backgrounds and are going to have to come to grips that things in the setting are not as either of them has been led to believe. That process adds a neat sheen of bildungsroman. On some level, I'm not sure I believe all the SF-ish tech, I don't know how important that is, SF often has wildly implausible tech (and sometimes wildly implausible "science") in it, it mostly comes down to how the song is sung--and the song here is song pretty well.

The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero

 

I came across this in the library and figured that since Meddling Kids was so much fun this was worth a look. It was in fact worth a look, though it's not the pure giddy fun that Meddling Kids is. It's a bit grimmer and a bit grimier and it's clearly playing at Lovecraftiana with some of the names of people and things (though I can't claim to have caught every instance of that) though there's a neat dawning love story percolating and a weird borderline pointless reveal of sorts in the epilogue, and it's nowhere near as funny as Meddling Kids, it's not so much taking the piss out of anything; it is a very good book in spite of those niggles, however.

The Fervor by Alma Katsu

 

This is a weird little quasi-horror novel. It kinda looks as though there's something supernatural going on, but it turns out to be ... mostly not, apparently. There's all sort of barely-subtext going on about racism and anger and hatred and mobism, because it was written in 2022 and I guess it looked, then, as though there might be some hope a novel could do something about the way society was headed; that barely-subtext does tend to take on a grinding-axe timbre, eventually. The story's pretty decent, though, multi-POV, with some characters being more deeply flawed than others. Having excerpts from a journal a character kept in the main timeline's past as text, rather than as like revelations in the main timeline, is probably the most-graceful way to handle it, especially since the journal and someone who can read it aren't in the same place until late in the novel, so there aren't any sudden stupid reveals.

Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy

 

Holy crap. This might be the most brutal, beautiful novel I've read in a long, long time. Bad things accrete and escalate, to an ending that feels like a punch in the belly. Sparkling prose and deeply human, flawed. believable characters. To the extent there's any hope in the novel, it's not for the main character, there's one person who might escape the story's gravity, her story doesn't feel as though it's ending so much as beginning. If memory serves, this is the novel that made David Joy's reputation; I emphatically see why. It's still ringing in my ears, and I read it yesterday.