Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

 

This is a short novel, and a pretty straightforward one--its message is barely in the subtext. The people of Africa were not perfect, and neither were their cultures; the arrival of Europeans did nothing to improve the lot of the people or the shape of their cultures. The fact the primary POV character in this novel is someone it's hard to call a particularly good person arguably makes that message all the clearer. It's a beautifully-written novel, does a good job of conveying the experience of living in that culture to a reader who has no points of reference. I can see why it regularly gets assigned in schools.

Dirt Creek by Hayley Scrivenor

 

This is a remarkably mundane mystery novel, the events in it could happen just about anywhere, just about any time--it's set in 2001, but I think that's more about giving some of the POVs in it the ability to look back with some distance and perspective than it is about trying to constrain the kind/s of technology available to the characters--and what actually happens is tragic but not unusual. The creativity here isn't in the events of the story but in how it's told, a kaleidoscope of POVs, some plausibly less reliable than others (though there's less of that particular game than that might imply, and the book isn't playing at Fair Play in any event). The characters are crystalline and purely distinct, and it's clear the author has empathy for more of them than many (most?) readers likely will. The ending manages to wrap and resolve most of the pending stories, and feel like a bit of a punch in the face, and leave some interesting questions open for the reader to consider. It's kinda relentlessly grim, but it's a wonderful novel.

Murder at Haven's Rock by Kelley Armstrong

 

While I finished the book, it's probably one for the "nothing special" file. It's tied to (if not exactly a part of) a pretty extensive series of novels, and there's a lot of stuff that's clearly behind what's happening, most of which just hangs there in the background like a theater scrim. There are severe plausibility problems at the premise level. And while there is at least one actual murder that happens in the novel, the stakes of the investigation keep getting lowered as the novel goes on, not heightened--at least, until the very end--which goes some length to give the whole thing a bit of a cozy feel, and I kinda loathe cozy. That said, the characters are mostly reasonably well-written and well-distinguished from each other (and the ones who remain murky mostly do so by author intent, I think) and the prose is reasonably competent, there's even some occasional wit and sparkle. The story ends up being kinda needlessly overcomplicated, which does not play well with the diminishing stakes. There's a lot more to this author's work and I probably won't read any of it.

A Killing on the Hill by Robert Dugoni

 

DNF. I got like 120 pages in and the complete bland obviousness of it put me to sleep. The prose itself is bland, and the noirish corruption of just about everyone in the city is obvious. Nothing really had happened (in the way of anything with actual suspense) by the time I put the book down and decided not to pick it back up: I'm pretty generous about pacing but that's kinda ridiculous.

The Ridge by Michael Koryta

 This is an older Koryta--copyright 2011--and it's obvious reading it why he decided to start using a pen name for his more Horror-oriented novels, this is more Horror than it is anything else, really. It's not overly inventive Horror: It has a strong whiff of Folk Horror (at least, it's set in Appalachia, which is kinda where Folk Horror always seems to want to be) but it's not wildly unlike something Manly Wade Wellman would have written in the 1950s (seriously, a strong whiff of "Vandy, Vandy") which isn't really snark. Koryta's strengths are here, character and plot arcs and stuff, but there's some dragging through the early-middle, as the novel seems to be wavering between supernatural and not--which doesn't seem plausible given the overall shape of the novel, but it is as it is. The main being a bit self-sacrificing is also kinda a Koryta thing, or at least a thing in his range if not exactly a tendency. A good novel overall, though I was expecting less like Horror (which is fine.)

Ghost Station by S. A. Barnes

 

I read this book last night, but things and reasons conspired to keep me from posting about it until now. It's not a horrible book--the prose and the pacing are reasonably good--but it's not a very good one, either: Ms. Barnes spends like the first half of the book writing around things in her main character's past, and in the setting, rather than writing about them; she's holding them back for reveals, which ... well, isn't a thing I'm very fond of, at best, and seems kinda clumsy, here. There are some characterizations that stick and work pretty well, there are others that don't, some of those are for the same characters. The science in the book ... well, let's just say it has (or seems to have) some severe plausibility problems. There are some politics floating around in the book, both in the text and the subtext, that I tend to agree with, but some of the handling ends up feeling a little graceless. There are some interesting ideas, but the execution is not what it probably should have been. Oh, well.

Replaceable You by Mary Roach

 

Mary Roach has been writing oddly specific pop-science books for more than two decades, now, and while the books are about different things, and they're individually written with some care and passion, she does have ... if not exactly a formula, then at least an established approach. It works. Here, she writes about attempts to replace parts of the human body, not so much what we might think of as more conventional transplants (organ and other) from other people as mechanical replacements or transplants from other species; turns out that the other species is probably porcine. The prose has the typical Mary Roach sparkle and wit and breezy flow, and this is a fine read. I'm not sure it's as revelatory as some of her others--especially *Stiff*, most people really don't like to think about what happens to corpses--but there's plenty of information in here, she did her research and she spoke to a lot of people, as usual. Worth reading if you're interested, or if you like Mary Roach's other books.

Memorials by Richard Chizmar

 

I grabbed this from the library because Chizmar's one of the people King's done some cowriting with recently, though I haven't read those books it's still enough to make me curious. Also, he's associated with a small press specialized in horror fiction that also publishes a much-awarded and otherwise respected horror fiction magazine, so he in principle should have some sense of the genre at least. Well, he does. This is a reasonably solid novel, it builds slowly, has decent characters, zigs and zags in some interesting and unpredictable directions without seeming overly complicated. It does take a disappointing Lovecraftian turn at the end, but that's disappointing to me, I might just be in a place where I don't need to see any of that crap for a while. It's set in 1983, and though Chizmar says in his afterword/acknowledgments that's because he graduated from high school in 1983 and had memories he wanted to reference, I'm sure it's at least as much because he wanted to isolate his characters and make their research more difficult. The novel didn't entirely work for me, but it's competently written and it seems to be more or less what Chizmar wanted it to be; take that for whatever it's worth.

James by Percival Everett

 

This got a lot of buzz in the past year-ish, and I can see why. It's a "reimagining" of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the POV of a much more erudite Jim, and it has a lot of inversions of Twain's novel that definitely at least play-act as subversions, and the people who give awards to books love subversions. There's a lot of humor extracted from the slaves' code-switching, and that feels good at first but gradually starts to wear thin as it starts to feel like the only joke the novel has in it. Then it starts to drift from Twain, and it actually gets more interesting, if still vaguely picaresque; James certainly seems to be a more reliable narrator--he's at least not the naïf Huck is. It's interesting to me that a novel so clearly in conversation with an earlier novel is at its strongest (and its strongest is very strong, to be clear) when there is less Huckleberry Finn (and less Huckleberry Finn) in it.

Dark Ride by Lou Berney

 

This turned out to be a remarkably impressive piece of stoner noir. The POV/narrator is kinda baked for a lot of it, even as he's changing into someone who probably won't be smoking anything like as much weed in the foreseeable future. There's a strong whiff of bildungsroman in this, in addition to heavy dollops of noir classics (there's a strong whiff of Hammet and/or Chandler, here) but it comes across as very much its own thing. The POV character is neat and well-drawn, and the other characters are reasonably distinct--the POV is strong enough he might be misreading elements of them, but that's a thing that sometimes happens with first-person. The ending is a bit of a gut-punch, always a possibility with noir of any kind, but it's earned, and appropriate, and the story threads in the novel do mostly resolve. I don't think I've read anything by Berney before this, I'll be looking for more.

Mask of the Deer Woman by Laurie L. Dove

This looked like an interesting book when I grabbed it at the library--big-city detective fallen hard, lands in the Reservation where her father grew up, where the cases of missing young women resonate with the death of her own daughter; Indigenous myth bleeds over into a more materialist surface existence. All those things are there, but the novel itself is not strong enough to carry that much weight. There are two sociopaths working on and around this particular rez, and they have overlapping if opposed motivations, and the baseline reality is never well-enough-established for the incursions of magic or myth or spirit or whatever to actually register as wrong or at least other, and the investigator is badly troubled and way out of her cultural depth--both of those serve to make the events of the story even more muddled; the muddling is not helped by the investigator being the only character that feels at all realized--the charitable reading is that she can't bridge the cultural gap to connect with them.. The Deer Woman here bears a strong resemblance to the "monster" in Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Dead Indians, which means only that Ms. Dove might have pulled from a similar pocket of myth. The prose here is best described as 'functional," there weren't any glaring infelicities.
 

Basil's War by Stephen Hunter

 

This was a reasonably well-written novel of derring-do during World War 2. It's not the deepest read ever, but it's interestingly structured, told on at least two timelines (and across a couple-five POVs). Of course the Good Guys win, though there are shades of Good and Bad. For someone with something of a reputation as a gun-lovin' author, Hunter has remarkably few guns at play in this. I suppose I'll have to take a look inside one or more of his other novels to see how justified that reputation is.

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

 

This was a pretty interesting novel, pretty enjoyable. In the same way that Lock In and Head On are Scalzi dressing up pretty straightforward Noirish mystery in SF dress, Magic for Liars is a pretty straightforward mystery in Modern Fantasy dress. There are a few premise-level things about the novel that don't hold up to a lot of close scrutiny, but it's possible to just accept them and enjoy the story Gailey has to tell. The prose is appropriately snappish, the characters are nicely drawn (especially the POV). The motivation, which is played up as though it's a big twist, I saw coming like fifty or a hundred pages ahead, but that's not really snark--it's more likely to be a combination of authorial fair play and how my brain works. Not deathless, but a real step up from last night's book.

The Thing in the Snow by Sean Adams

 

This is clearly supposed to be a satire--both the shape of the text and the stuff on the cover support this. I fell asleep about halfway through, woke up, finished the thing for no real reason I could put my finger on, vaguely regret finishing it. There are occasional glimmers of absurdity in the novel, but there is practically nothing actually funny about it. Some of that might be the intentional choice to have as a first-person narrator an incompetent manager-type who cannot get out of his own head. Nothing in the novel matters to the world or characters in it, there is nothing here worth paying attention to.

The Oracle Year by Charles Soule

 

I came upon this when I was poking around the library, and the title and cover copy piqued my interest. Turns out, it's a really good book, a thriller with maybe a stronger whiff of SF than most technothrillers do--there's absolutely some premise to accept before the rest of the novel can work--but the writing is mostly strong, and the pacing does crank the pressure with chapters in the POV of people variously opposed to the main character. There might be some sludge around the middle of the book, but it never feels bloated or like a grind. The prose has life and style, and the characters all manage to feel differently like themselves. The novel clearly has things to say, or at least things it wants the reader to look at and/or think about, about free will and fate/destiny, and the extent to which it's possible to shape the future; also, whether at least one thing in the novel (though it's really more like a negative space in the novel than anything else) is good (if maybe a bit pragmatic) or evil (if maybe a bit altruistic).

Don't Forget Me, Little Bessie by James Lee Burke

 

After the quick DNF last night, I went with something that seemed really unlikely to repeat that experience. This is James Lee Burke at his typically excellent. He's been writing stories about the Holland family for years, all kinds of out of chronological order, I think; this one falls during the 1910s, and has all kinds of interesting things to say about the, uh, "shrinking" of the American West, and the various long-lasting aftereffects of the Civil War even as they bleed into the aftereffects of World War I (and to a lesser extent the Great Flu). Unlike many of Burke's novels, the POV is a woman--and a youngish woman, fourteen at the novel's beginning; like many of Burke's novels, there is some intense and brutal violence, some masterful turns of phrase, and some untrustworthy people in authority. Burke's novels are practically always worth reading, and this is no exception.

The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal

 

Based on my experience, including this novel, the odds of a podcaster writing a novel I'll enjoy reading are about zero. When the instigating event, clearly intended to be zany, sucked my interest right out of me, I stopped. I didn't even make it fifty pages.