The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S. Durbin

 

This is a weirdly gentle and eventually moving novel of an Old West where Lovecraftian entities roam the plains and deserts--though it's possible the stains of human evil are more dangerous, more painful, and more lasting. It's a very episodic novel, some of the chapters read like pretty self-contained short stories, though they do happen in a specific order for clear and good reasons; it's maybe not quite stream-of-events enough to be a picaresque--there are big time skips between the chapters. The authorial voice is consistent and well-handled and seems to owe something to Lansdale, there are nifty turns of phrase lurking all over; the characters and story (or stories) are all well-handled, everything shines clear on the page. I'm very impressed, this is a nicely handled interstitial take.

Murderland by Caroline Fraser

 

This book is part memoir, part researched examination of the cluster (in epidemiological terms) of serial killers in the Seattle area, starting in the late 1960s. Her thesis--that it's the damage lead and other metals do to human neurology, writ large really close to big smelters operating in the days before there were real pollution laws--takes her to Kansas and Texas as well, and eventually Ciudad Juarez. The memoir stuff, about growing up in the Seattle area, about the floating bridge on I-90, about growing up Christian Scientist and eventually rejecting that, is interesting and well-written; as is the stuff about the serial killers (the focus is on Bundy, but there are others represented). The narrative style here is digressive almost to (or maybe just past) the point of being scattershot. It's an interesting read, and kinda informative--even if like me you have more brainspace dedicated to the Classic Serial Killers than you want to admit to anyone, probably even yourself--though it's a grim and kinda depressing read, as much for the pollution/environmental stuff as anything else.

Head On by John Scalzi

 

So this is the sequel to Lock In, and it's a lot like that novel, both in tone and in story content. It's not Scalzi at his most witty-breezy, but it's plenty quippy; the science and tech in it have had some thought applied to them, however implausible at least some aspects of the novel might be. The characters are very much mostly themselves, even his villains have personalities that in some cases are laden with surface charm. There's a strong political angle to the novel, suitable for a noirish detective novel (which this is, under the near-future-SF skin) all kinds of text and subtext about government turning its back on its neediest citizens, the cruelty being the point. It feels as though Scalzi thought there'd be more novels about Chris and the rest of the Hadens when he finished this; it's been a while, he might have been wrong.

Good Girls Don't Die by Christina Henry

 

This is a surprisingly effective novel, somewhere in the border of thriller and nonsupernatural horror, deeply concerned with misogyny both in the broader culture and in like three genres of fiction (or, at least, in regard to the fiction, concerned with misogyny in interpretations of those genres). Plausibly also has something to be said about techbros and all their works, but that seems a little peripheral to this particular novel. Immensely violent and probably triggering in many ways (though if you're reading a Horror novelist, you should probably expect that). There's a little slowness, I thought, some stumbling, in the early goings (that plural is intentional) but it does pick up, especially once the novel's threads finally come together. Ms. Henry writes strongly, with passion that in this novel borders on rage; I am very impressed.

In the Blood by Jack Carr

 

This is one of those Special Forces Operator Novels, and it's ... not exactly horrible, but it's not really very good, either. The prose is reasonably competent--there are even flashes of dry wit and gallows humor--but there are things that are either authorial tics or genre expectations (or like author-perceived genre expectations) that wear thin very quickly. Dropping the name brands for fucking everything is one, dropping the name brands and the specs and modifications for every single firearm is another. It's as though Tom Clancy set out to write a Mack Bolan novel.

Big Chief by Jon Hickey

 

Another really good novel--and this one by an author entirely new to me. I think this is his debut, so probably new to just about everyone. It's kinda interesting to read a novel about indigenous folk that's not really any kind of genre novel, but this was a pleasant read. Clearly has lots to say about family and culture and relationships and politics and power, and there are some obvious overlaps with current broader American politics; the stories of the novel always take precedence, though. I kept getting flashes of Bright Light, Big City, which seemed kinda out of place for a novel set in a far-from-the-big-cities reservation ... then there was a chapter in a slightly surreal second-person-present-tense voice. So, yeah, there's that going on. Differentiated and believable characters, solid prose. I wouldn't say the story is exactly fun, but there's real tension and release, though the main is definitely left in a position I'd describe as pending. That's fine, though.

The Last Dead Girl by Harry Dolan

 

After the DNF last night, I grabbed a book by an author I've enjoyed in the past, and ... oh, boy, this is a really good thriller/crime novel. It's set in 1998, so there's less in the way of ubiquitous communication, and computers are mostly desktops, but everything else mostly works the way you'd expect and the time allows Dolan to write this as a novel about a character he's written two other novels about, before those other two novels happen. There's never any real doubt the main's going to survive, but there's plenty of other tension--and the novel does kinda answer some questions about how the character in those other novels got that way. The story unfurls kinda slowly, but that just makes some of the later twists a little tighter., The characters are all well-defined, even (especially) the ones with secrets that unravel during the novel, and the first murder victim to appear in the novel (there's a bit of nonlinearity) turns out to have been an impressive young woman, her murder turns out to be more tragic, the long-tail result of someone else's bad choices (in addition, of course, to the murderer's needs). As mentioned, it's a prequel, but it's remarkably self-contained: You don't need to know the other novels to understand this one.

Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton

 

DNF. Bland prose, uninteresting and implausible characters, and a story that hadn't gotten interesting 100 pages into a 260 page novel. I'm patient, but that's ridiculous. Also, it's a vampire story, and Sinners and The Vampire Hunter Hunter are both fresh enough in my head that mediocrity just won't do.

Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age by Raphael Cormack

 

Started this little book in a coffee shop this morning, finished it this evening. It's a weird book, there's a veneer of scholarship to it but it's so uncritical, bordering on credulous, about the putatively magical things the guys it's about are purported to have done that it's almost like reading a "lives of the saints" book. It's not literally a hagiography: At least, the guys it's about weren't particularly good guys, and they were pulling scams that even the author doesn't see the point in denying. I was hoping for a book that was weird, and the credulity here actually makes the subject matter less weird in a lot of ways, definitely not what I wanted or expected. Reasonably well-written, and has extensive sources, but still not particularly credible.

Say Nothing by Brad Parks

 

This was a reasonably decent thriller, nothing mind-melting. Started kinda slowish, with some kinda not smart, not proactive behavior on the part of the POV, but things do get better, he does start showing wit and spine and he does do some thing to turn his blackmailers' demands into unexpected results. The ending is probably a little too-happy for just about everyone concerned, but there's some bittersweet going on, I'll give that a pass. Decent, believeable, distinguishable characters, competent-enough prose that seemed a little ill-served by the editors (some obvious wrong words). There are some twists, and some red herrings, but the path is pretty easy to walk, I started to see where things were going relatively quickly--it's always a good idea to expect the big investors, especially hedge fund types, to be the villains.

Farewell, my Lovely by Raymond Chandler

 

It's always refreshing to read a classic that actually deserves the designation. This does. The story gets a little ... something (cluttered or jumbled or disjointed) in middle-end, but eventually comes together reasonably well, and Chandler's prose is a pure joy to read, laden with nifty unexpected turns of phrase. It's not perfect: The characters--other than Marlowe--often don't have much to distinguish them, and there are often attitudes bandied about that grate harshly on modern nerves. It's a grimly cynical book, pretty much everyone is some shade of corrupt, but that's kinda table stakes, here. I'm happy to have come across this in the local library of our choice.

White Fox by Owen Matthews

 

This is another book in a series, but it's labeled as Book Three in a Trilogy, so I believe the stories the author has told all the stories he had to tell in Soviet Russia. At least, his main has escaped, more or less. Which is about as good an ending as he was going to have, really: I was wagering on his being murdered by his colleagues in the Committee for State Security. The characters in the three books are progressively more scarred (and more scared) by their time in the machinery of the Soviet state, and by the end, here, many of them have entirely given up hope. These are progressively less happy novels, though they do all read pretty well on their own--while the characters do continue to evolve, and their past/s do continue to accrue and to matter, there aren't big overarching stories. Matthews writes well, knows his characters and their milieu, and knows the broader history these stories are in (and in this last novel, where things really do veer off). All good stuff, all very worth reading.

Chain Reaction by James Byrne

 

And with this I'm caught up on this series. Still witty and quippy-breezy, engaging prose and characters. There were some weird, offputting editing errors in this book--instances of mixed-up homophones, mostly, I think, and something that jumped out at me as like a continuity glitch--but Byrne's prose does sparkle and pop. I'm probably not going to stress on trying to keep up with the series, it looks as though it might be settling to something like a status quo, or at least a holding pattern. If I see a new book and I remember the author, I'll plausibly grab it, but I don't really try to keep up with series. Still, these are entertaining reads.

Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney

 

Unlike last night's novel, tonight's comes from a very genre place, very Horror, complete with barely explained snow monster and other oddments, but it ends up having a lot to say about real world things--the snow monster is basically a side effect of a cracking (but not broken) relationship, and it reflects in many ways the feeling of being in a relationship that's threatening to unravel after a shared traumatic experience, all trapped and frozen and brittle. There is some healing, at least for the couple at the center of the novel, though it takes another traumatic experience with a much more human monster to make the healing happen and work. There are some other characters who just get hosed, but that's kinda a thing in Horror. Well-written, nicely paced, the trauma at the heart of the monster-couple turns out to be achingly real. I get the feeling the author has recently shifted to Horror, can't say how long he'll stay, can't say whether anything else will be worth reading; this very definitely is.

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

 

So, on the one hand, I don't have a lot of patience for the distinction between "literary" and "genre" fiction; on the other hand, you can usually tell which direction a given author working in this particular hinterland is coming from, and Michel is clearly coming from "literary"; on the gripping hand, this is something like 330 pages of punching down at fandom in many of its scruffy forms, and I ran out of patience about 200 pages in and switched to power-skimming. Michel demonstrates an impressive ability to shift his authorial voice into several different registers, but he never shakes the sense that he's mocking his characters, laughing at them (not with them). Really good on the prose level, but kinda an insulting nothingburger on every other.

Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen

 

I figured while I was reading reliably good authors, I should read this. Turns out it's really good--maybe a little less wacky in some ways than some of Hiaasen's more recent novels, and one of the mains feels like maybe a little bit of a lift from Tim Dorsey, but none of those keep this from being a blistering blowtorch of satire. Hiaasen's typical interests are here: Florida's environment and the corrupt politicians who seem intent on destroying it, mostly, though tourists and national politics come in for some snark. The ending isn't exactly happy, there's some sense of hopelessness about the larger-scale systemic problems, but the outcomes are about as good as the less corrupt characters could have asked for--given that satire comes from a place of anger and hope, an unrelieved grim ending might not be entirely apt. There might be a character or three from Hiaasen's other novels appearing here, but you don't really need to know them for the novel to work.

Buffalo Bill's Dead Now by Margaret Coel

 

One of a small handful of mystery series I'll read books from, in any order I find them. Ms. Coel's empathy for the Arapahoes of Wind River is deep and occasionally borders on heartbreaking. This has an interesting structural fillip, in that the instigating event is a theft, not a murder--though there is eventually a murder to solve. There's an ongoing tension here that I remember being strong enough in a later novel to strongly imply that one of her mains is going to find himself unable to continue being a Roman Catholic priest, though here it's much less overt. The characters are different and believable, and the story is distressingly plausible, though Ms. Coel does unpack in her afterword/acknowledgments where her fiction departs from reality. I'll keep reading more of these novels as I keep finding them, probably.

Mood Machine by Liz Pelly

 

Started this at a coffee shop this morning, finished it this evening at home. Well-written, -sourced, -researched; immensely informative--especially for someone like me, who never engaged with downloaded music, let alone streamed. I stopped bothering when finding media became a real pain in the ass. The recording industry has always been scum; streaming just makes that worse--it flattens markets and (sub)cultures while funneling money the artists earn into corporate coffers. Very worth reading, if eventually more angry-making and depressing than anything else.