Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin

 

So I read another novel by Ms. Heaberlin and it was pretty good, so I grabbed this one while I was at the library, and it's also pretty good. There's a little more of the overcomplication that at least sometimes passes for intelligent plotting than in the other one, more reliance on a narrator with a secret (which borders on unreliable narration, but it's pretty clear up-front that Tessa/Tessie isn't willing to talk about some things, and she's pretty straightforward about everything else). The prose and dialog have occasional nifty turns of phrase, and there's some wit and sparkle around the edges; the story is mostly clear if complex, and the characters manage to establish some decent individuality. The choice to put the story in two timelines is familiar to me, I dunno if it's a thing common in some portions of the Suspense Novel Kingdom, I've seen it in some mediocre-at-best novels but it's also a core feature of all the Laura McHugh novels I've enjoyed. This novel at least seems less inclined to describe the small town at its core as a trap, the way way McHugh's tend to.

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlisch

 

This is a kinda Weird--as well as weird--SF novel, layers of time travel and alternate futures wrapped in and around a vaguely Lovecraftian inevitable End. There's some serious implausibility around the premises, but it's distinctly baked-in, if you have those sorts of problems this probably isn't a great novel for you. I didn't exactly have novel-breaking problems with it, but continuing suspension of disbelief was a conscious choice. The prose is probably a notch or three on the plus side of functional, the characters manage to remain consistently themselves even when they are different iterations of themselves, the story is complex and convoluted but manages to be reasonably clear for all-a-that. A reasonably good read, if not a great one.

Unthinkable by Brad Parks

 

Read this this evening after dinner. It's a deeply implausible novel--at least, it has a deeply implausible premise at its core--but Parks has put in a lot of effort to make it plausible, at least on the surface, and he's kinda succeeded. I mean, I'm really not going to buy precognition as a real thing, but the novel makes it clear how dangerous it would be, even if one were trying to be maximally altruistic (and "maximally altruistic" is itself deeply problematic). I'm not sure it'd be possible even for someone so gifted to so easily evade the public eye, but conspiracies have been a big part of thrillers since at least Ludlum, so that's in-genre and not really grounds for snark. The POV characters here are pretty believable, as they get yanked around by the antagonistic conspiracy (or agents thereof) and as they start to get their own back. There were some reveals I saw coming well before they arrived, but I'm also not going to snark on that--they were reasonable directions for things to go, and they were at least reasonably well foreshadowed, Parks was playing reasonably fair, here. The prose and dialogue have more than a little charm, though I wouldn't call them exactly scintillating. After some flailing around in the first half or so, this turned out to be a pretty worthwhile book.

Alexandra Petri's US History by Alexandra Petri

 

Read the first halfish of this in a coffeeshop yesterday morning, finished it this evening while dinner was cooking. It's a collection of humorous things based on US history (shocking, I'm sure!) and even aside from the obvious comparison to Dave Barry Slept Here, Ms. Petri has the thing Barry has, where the more you know about whatever he's mocking, the funnier the writing gets. Now, obviously different people will have different knowledge levels about different things, so different people will find different things hilarious, here; some of the things that connected to things I know passing well were so funny I could barely breathe. I am not a historian, and I am not reliably capable of intentionally writing funny, but people who appreciate history and funny writing will probably greatly enjoy this book.

Burned by Edward Humes

 

Last trip to the library, I grabbed a handful of nonfiction. This is reported narrative nonfiction about an arson case that at least would be in with a chance of not being prosecuted today--the science of arson investigation has clarified some in the decades since, at least around what can't be proven, though different jurisdictions and different investigators will understand the meaning of that differently--and it serves as something of an indictment (heh) of the entire system and process of forensic criminal investigation: Too many of the methods haven't ever really been tested scientifically. Even fingerprint analysis has room for errors (some where between 1 in 306 cases and one in eighteen cases); other pattern-matching analysis, such as fibers or shoeprints or took impressions is worse, and don't even get me started on bite-marks. The fact that prosecutors tend to flat refuse to admit when some past prosecutor fucked up just makes me so angry I can barely see. Well-written and deeply reported, and very worth reading if it's the kind of thing you want to read about (you should probably read at least a little about this sort of thing, it's kinda important).

One of Us by Craig DiLouie

 

Made it about 250 out of about 400 pages, tapped out. Kinda dull and dreary and mostly lifeless, two murders felt boring, and and oncoming revolution felt tedious; and the tension between wildly implausible "science" and grittily realistic social fiction led to a Total Disbelief Collapse. Also the sound of axes on stones was the loudest thing in the book.

The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry

 

Barry is a pretty decent writer, working in the interstices between more conventional thrillers (a la Ludlum, though this doesn't have much specifically Ludlumesque in it) and various iterations of Fantasy/SF. This is kinda a crime thriller crossed with Multiverse stuff, doesn't seem to take itself all that seriously: Barry isn't a particularly funny writer, but there's plenty of wit and sparkle in his prose, here. Has some interesting things to say about identity and the subtle ways we change the world around us, and how every person might be important even if there are approximately infinite variations of them. Gets a little sloggy through the middle, but otherwise good and worth reading.

This Body's Not Big Enough for Both of Us by Edgar Cantero

 

I dunno. On the one hand there are some interesting ideas in this novel, and Cantero's prose sparkles with wit and joy. On the other hand, there are probably enough parodies of hard-boiled detective stories (Jean Kerr wrote one in the 1950s, you can find it in Please Don't Eat the Daisies) and I don't think the Kimreans are interesting enough characters, or the story here an interesting enough story, to really be the kind of witty inversion/subversion Cantero seems to intend--the kind that also serves as an example of the kind of story it's parodying. Nothing in the novel really holds together, and it persistently seemed to be fighting my ability to suspend disbelief. I had the thought that maybe this would have been better served by some sort of visual medium--movie or comic/graphic novel--since I know Cantero works in at least comics, and much of the novel seems to want to carry the story on the strength of imagery; that might just be a stray thought, though.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

 

I read this in a coffeeshop this morning. I was not entirely overwhelmed by it, but it was not horrible or anything. Things of note that caught my attention: Interesting for an instructor in creative writing to persist in dropping backhanded mockery of "proper novels"; Haddon did a reasonable job of humanizing his protagonist--Chris isn't much less of a hypocrite than many of the neurotypical folks he encounters, his insistence that he doesn't lie notwithstanding--but he still mostly failed to write a narrator I found particularly engaging. Somewhere around the midpoint of this short novel, the story became simultaneously more obvious and less interesting, probably when it stopped even putting on airs of being a mystery. No regrets, here, just a novel that didn't do much for me.

The Bomb Maker by Thomas Perry

Grabbed this because I've enjoyed all of Perry's novels I've read; this is no exception. It's less a novel of pursuit than some of the others have been, it plays out more like a crime-oriented Thriller bordering on Mystery, but Perry can do that, too. I was wondering, after reading that Forsyth novel a couple nights ago how much of that I'd see in Perry: Turns out, this is a highly technical novel, it has detailed (probably not entirely correct) steps for how to make explosives and bombs, and Perry seems to know his stuff, there. Perry has an interesting approach to writing burgeoning romantic relationships that is always kinda fun, usually surprising. The characters in the novel are clear, even the bomber--whom Perry made the decision not to name--and the story manages more than adequate narrative tension. Another solid novel, lf course I'll keep grabbing them as I see them.
 

Passing Through a Prairie Country by Dennis E. Staples

 

Somehow when I pulled this novel out of my TBR stack, I missed that it was kinda a Horror novel: Nothing wrong with that, just not really what I was looking for. Well, this was a shortish novel, around 250 pages, and it's pretty good. There are a lot of sequences that seem as though they might be muddled, but I think the characters' experiences are supposed to be muddled (or maybe reality itself) so I can't really call those passages mistakes. There are moments when knowing more about Ojibwe lore than I do (I know practically nothing, here) would clearly have been helpful, but the author really isn't duty-bound to relieve the reader's ignorance, and it's clear from text and context that these are Big Things--I have no complaints on this score. The characters are pretty clear, and the monstrous supernatural horror of the novel can plausibly be understood as a metaphor for the grim social horror of the rez (from what I can tell, just about any rez). The story kinda judders some, but nothing unforgiveable.

The Fox by Frederick Forsyth

 

I've read a handful of Forsyth's novels, some from the 1960s, and it's nice to find some of his later work. This feels a bit sketchier than I remember some of his older novels being, but there's still some neat exploration here of what a veteran spymaster would do with someone who could get into any computer system, and how he might use his skills from a lifetime of playing that particular game to keep that asset safe and secure. There are some interestingly developed characters, here but there's not as much tension in the narrative as I at least would have hoped for--though the old man still managed some neat and striking turns of phrase. Forsyth always based his speculation on research and fact, which makes some of the things he says here ... interesting to see, seven years after he wrote them.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

 

This starts out vibing like some sort of relatively safe Portal Fantasy, but Wendig writes Horror: What's past the staircase isn't some twinkly Fairyland but a hungry and hateful nexus of badplaces, scarred by pain and death, all the things houses see and all the things they keep secret within their walls. It's like a haunted house novel that's all quantum-entangled. The writing is good, Wendig clearly has a sense of these characters and the pain they live with--and the sorts of pain the houses know--as well as at least some of the places. It's interesting to me, for reasons, that his ur-suburb is clearly a riff on Levittown, but he didn't seem to be trying to hide that (just using fictional names). There's some gore, here, and some mashing on other Bug Buttons, but it's Horror, I'm not complaining. Seemed to me to be a little sludge and mud through the middle, but nothing that really slowed me down or put me off.

Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

 

This book starts out as a pretty witty take on Classic Horror Monsters in an SFnal setting (well, aboard an interstellar ship) and in some ways it never really gets away from that. The wit, however seemed to mostly fade over the last couple hundred pages--which is reasonable, the primary joke had staled for me by that point. The prose still had some sparkle, and the romantic arcs were clearly the primary focus in the back half of the book. It's always interesting seeing someone try to have multiple plague-analog monsters in the same place and time; I'm not sure there's anything in classical vampire (or werewolf) lore pointing the way the author leans here, but I suspect story needs were more important to her. There are all sorts of Easter eggs for people who know the stories of the various Universal monsters, both on film and in print; Lovecraft's Deep Ones are arguably a bit of a clash with the rest of it. The novel as a whole barely holds together, it only avoids being a jumble by a hair's breadth. Truelove seems to have a better handle both on Horror and SF (and science) than Barnes did, but there's still more than a little mushiness around the edges here. Readable and fun, not deathless; honestly, probably fifty or a hundred pages too long.