The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

 

The tone of this novel is ... really, really weird. It's set ... less than a century in the future, in a time when all sorts of environmental crises have gotten much worse, but when there are people who are clear on what needs to be done and determined to do it: The world is much worse, but people seem somehow better, at least the POV and (most of) the people he cares about. Of course, there are obvious bad people who for whatever reason/s would rather just see everything burn, at least so long as they and their stuff are still safe and there's still some rump of society for them to be the top echelon of. It took like half the novel for things to really kick, and there's really not much moral complexity in it, and the ending sort of looks like hope, except the world is on fire. It's moderately well-written on most levels--to riff on a line Doctorow riffs on, he wasn't typing with boxing gloves on--but the moral simplicity of it does in the end weigh against it. On the other hand, the novel's point is worth extracting and restating: If people would just do the fucking right thing/s now, we might end up with a world that's not on fire, and wouldn't that be nice?

What You Leave Behind by Wanda M. Morris

 

This is not a very good novel. I almost quit reading it a few times, because the prose just sort of lay there like a dead thing on the page, and the story was managing to be pretty obvious. On the one hand, I'm glad there weren't any stupid-rugpull-twists; on the other hand, seeing where the novel's going more than a hundred pages before it gets there at least means the novel isn't surprising me, which means it also probably isn't interesting me. It's pretty clear from the afterword that the author was at least as interested in drawing attention to an issue--a genuinely shitty thing that's impoverishing the poor and enriching the wealthy--but she seems to have kinda forgotten to make the story engaging. Oh comma well.

The Shadows We Hide by Allen Eskens

 

This is not a great novel, not a particularly great crime/thriller novel, but it's not horrible, either. Even though the structure is kinda looping and non-linear, it's not very complex or complicated--there are some twists that border on rugpulls, that'd probably play better in some visual medium than they do on the page, especially with a first-person narrator who's clearly making an explicit choice about what to tell, and clearly stringing on along the reader in a way that makes little to no diagetic sense; but the narrative does manage to carry on past those, and things to clear up, and those twists end up revealing about as much about the narrator as they do about the mystery he's found himself in the middle of. There are some thematic concerns floating along, mostly about people not being lost causes, but they very much mostly serve the story rather than the other way around. The first half or a little more is a bit of a haul, but the back end is a nice resolution. I might grab something else by this guy at some point, which I guess means it might be better than "not horrible."

Stiletto by Daniel O'Malley

 

This is another spies-in-a-magic-world novel, a sequel to *The Rook.* It's laden with startlingly funny turns of phrase, and the characters in it are well-differentiated and the story is well-structured. There are some moments that play like either wild absurdism or hard realism, could go either way. It's clear there's at least one more novel in this arc, and I know there's a prequel. I probably wouldn't pick those up on my own, but there's a pretty good chance someone else in my house will, and I'll probably read them, then. The first novel was pretty self-contained, but this one is much more clearly setting up a sequel, which seems to be a thing that happens: The first novel is a complete story, then the author has to keep setting up the next book. That's most of why I don't mostly bother with anything other than First Books, but the writing here is charming and entertaining enough that I'll keep biting.

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow

 

Ms. Harrow writes novels that are strong magic, and this might be the most powerful thing of hers I've read, heady and hefty--never more so than when it's at its most understated. There are obvious metaphors and echoes and reflections and connections of and with the real world, here; there will be those who see this as a strongly political novel (and I wouldn't be inclined to disagree with them). The language is persistently beautiful, and after a bit of a rough start things  come together then tighten into a spiral that leads to an ending with weight.

Alter Ego by Alex Segura

 

This not so much a sequel to Secret Identity as a follow-up: While there are come connections, there aren't a lot of major characters in common. The story focuses much less on the dying industry in the dying city (comics in NYC in 1975) and leans much more toward telling the story of people working out how to reconnect with a past self, for what are mostly good reasons. It's non-linear as hell, happening in mostly two timelines with smatterings of others, but everything is clear--even/especially as it becomes obvious there are tragedies in it that have approximately nothing to do with comic books. There's also a wide bold streak of art-vs-commerce stuff happening, here, complete with a strong statement about LLMs and suchlike and what they create and whom they screw. This is less of a mystery, structurally, but it might be a better novel than its precursor, for all-a-that.

Providence by Max Berry

 

After reading something by this author and thinking it was better than I would have expected, I saw this in the library and figured I'd give it a shot. There's some wonky science at work in this novel, but once you get past that, it plays out well enough as like a space-opera kinda turned inside-out. The human characters have all sorts of virtues, but most of what they do doesn't really matter; the AI does basically everything. I have to believe that's kinda Barry's point, here, that unnecessary--maybe even pointless--isn't the same as meaningless. The prose is pretty solid, the pacing and characters all good, a decently written--if kinda dark--novel.

Deadlock by James Byrne

 

This is a witty thriller, laden with sparking dialogue and hilarious, read out loud to your increasingly impatient spouse funny turns of phrase. There's probably at least one more novel coming, here--I'm reminded of David Gordon's Joe the Bouncer novels, where there were three to resolve the starting situations, then some more (and probably more coming, which is fine, I'll read them if/when I find out about them and find them); this has a similar feel, which is, again, fine: I'm not devoted to Byrne's novels, but they (and Dez) are great fun, and now there's some pending stuff. If I see another of these in the library, I'll check it out; it's not anything I'm deeply pressed about.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Even though this a vampire novel, it's really a primal scream of pain at what's been lost--the vampires in it are basically ways to bring the past to the present, though some of that does seem to be enacting well-earned vengeance. While the reason/s for the vengeance are pretty clear, pretty early on, the target isn't; there are quickly hints, however, that at least one of the first-person narrators in the novel (there are three nested ones) might not be as reliable as one might hope. The language here shifts to cover those three different voices with notable grace, many novelists wouldn't even try what Jones makes look effortless, here.

The Donut Legion by Joe R. Lansdale

 

Yeah, Landsale's a legend. This is him operating near the top of his game, with not only a ripping story (he always has ripping stories) but also some things to say. Those non-story things sit neatly mostly in the subtext, muttering about religions and cults and politics and grifts and the human frailties all those things prey upon. There's some sizzling dialogue, and some glorious phrase-turning outside the people talking, because Lansdale gotta Lansdale. After the hard ricochet off last night's novel, I wanted to read something I was confident I'd find pleasing; success!

Vermilion by Molly Tanzer

 

Got about halfway through this ~380 page book and just ... stopped. I didn't care enough about what was going on in the book, didn't care enough about the characters or the setting, to keep going. It's not that it's badly written; just too much "it's the real world but magic" alt-history shit for me.

The Cover Wife by Dan Fesperman

 

So this is a novel about at least one of the possible and plausible ways the intelligence agencies of the Western Allies (in this case, Germany and the US) could have dropped the ball in 1999 such that the attacks of September 11, 2001, happened. It's a pretty grim novel, for a lot of reasons--not mainly because of what happened after 1999, more because so many of the characters in the novel have as their primary interests something other than the jobs they're supposed to be doing. Long-standing bureaucracy and all-a-that, I guess; everyone playing the angles for their own personal betterment no matter the price of an operative, or some innocents, or thousands of civilians, or whatever. Not just grim, cynical: probably not entirely without justification. Competent and readable enough, a decent novel.

Blood Sisters by Graham Masterton

This guy wrote horror for decades, I saw that he was writing mysteries--that's what the library has of his books at this point--so I grabbed one out of curiosity. Turns out, he's in the middle of a series with this one, which is a bit of a bummer. He's still got some writing chops--especially an ear for dialogue--but this is laden with probably a superabundance of story threads, many of which are carried over from past novels, many of which are clearly going to resolve in future novels. There is a central case, here, and it does get worked out, but there are also lots of other things going on to make the main character's life worse. She's a likable character, being the main in a detective series is probably the worst thing that could have happened to her.

Ohio by Stephen Markley

 This is not a happy novel. I mean, you probably wouldn't expect a novel set in dying-small-town Ohio to be happy, but this novel conveys all the hopelessness of growing up in a small down where all the actual industries have shut down and all that's left for jobs is crap retail or the nursing home, and the people who live there conspire to keep people with dreams of escape tied down like Gulliver. There are a couple of long-term escapees, but even they find themselves returning to the gravity well occasionally. The brutality of small-town high school is etched in this novel deeply enough to draw blood (large suburban high school isn't all that much better, but I remember much more in the way of subcultures that overlapped, sometimes barely, sometimes not at all) and the scars from that formative time linger and accrue and wrinkle and choke and kill. The characters are neatly portrayed, complex and individual; the prose is solid and occasionally sparkles. The story arcs overlap and reinforce each other and tangle and tighten as the novel progresses. There are maybe some moments of muddle, but this is a very solid novel.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

 

Um. Wow. This is like an anarchist-Orwellian body horror novel, with undertones of like aging and/or other inevitable death, and how the aged and dying tend to be forgotten and disappear. It's easy to see the island in the novel as a metaphor for a nursing home or something--though that's plausibly just an unintended resonance or something. This novel is fucking grim, but in a kinda beautiful way, it's probably the first novel in translation I've actually enjoyed in a long time (though I've had enough bad experiences with books in translation that I mostly choose against them, these days). It's probably at least as literary as last night's book, but fucking worlds better.

The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

 

There were several times reading this that I gave serious thought to putting it down and getting on with my evening, but I figured I'd keep going in case the novel every managed (or maybe bothered) to pay of its premise. I should have stopped, and spared myself the unending digressions pointlessly spiraling into pomo inanity about the impossibility of facts; then an ending that's really more like a stop. In between, La Farge manages to mimic Lovecraft at his least readable and the sludgy prose of a shrinkologist who can't get out of her own head without ever managing to demonstrate that he can write prose that is actually pleasant to read.

Safe and Sound by Laura McHugh

 

So, I'm clearly well on my way to being a big fan of Ms. McHugh. She writes well, and her stories are intricate and dense without being laden with Shocking Twists and other assorted rugpulls. This novel is structurally a lot like The Weight of Blood in that it's in two timelines, but there's a lot less of the bildungsroman in this. I mean, all the protagonists are young--like, senior in high school young--but this is not so much a novel about growing up as it is about getting away. Ms. McHugh tends to set her novels in small towns (in a relatively narrow patch of America) and she seems to know them in her bones--and she at least at times does not seem to like them. Given the way the small town in this novel seems to gather itself to punish anyone with the nerve to want to leave, I'm strongly inclined to say she doesn't.

Every Cloak Rolled in Blood by James Lee Burke

 

This is a really, really good novel, even though it plays in that space around death and life and includes plainly supernatural doings. Meaning, it operates in a similar space as last night's novel, which I didn't like as much, at least in part because it did those things. On the one hand, it's easy to say it's that Burke's a better write--he really is. On the other, though, there's something about the handling of things, the way so many of the characters in this novel rage and fight against the ghosts and the demons; Connolly's characters are either blind to all-a-that or they're deeply a part of it and just treat it as like Tuesday. Connolly's makes the horrific bland, Burke's embraces the horror while still somehow making the mundane horrific. There are spiritualistic undertones in the Burke novel that border on the religious, and that's really not my jam, but there are reasons, and Burke can write, so I'm just going to say this is a beautifully painful novel that at points slants against my preferences.

A Game of Ghosts by John Connolly

 

Look, a novel written by someone who actually cares about the story! And the characters! It's not a great novel, by any means, there are some premises that choke my suspension of disbelief, here, that might not if this were a complete story instead of an episode (this is apparently part of a long-running series); I'd probably have an easier time if it were straight horror instead of trying to commingle that with a detective story--in the sense of trying to be a detective story, rather than that of using detective story tropes to frame a horror story, which works just fine. As it is, this feels like some of F. Paul Wilson's later Repairman Jack novels, where he's fighting supernatural forces almost all the time; the author got a little creepy in a detective thriller and it sold and he kept needing to use more creepy in his detective thrillers. This is--really--a nicely-written novel that just does some things that don't vibe right for me. Better than the last few, anyway.

A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens by Raul Palma

 

Yet another novel laden with blandness the author attempted to cover up with dazzling and daffy local color. Cluttered and crowded and massively disjunct, with the strong whiff of an inability to tell dreams from detritus. Dude, you should have let the short story be.