The Management Style of the Supreme Beings by Tom Holt

 

Sara enjoyed this and her description of it sounded kinda up my alley, so I decided to read it before it ended up being returned to the library. I'm really glad I did, it's a very English funny novel, strong whiffs of Adams and Pratchett (and probably Osman, though that's maybe less an influence than a contemporary) but also some of Moore, a wacked-out premise followed through to its illogical conclusion. What if being a deity was something like a business, and what if YHWH decided to sell Earth to the most corporate deities imaginable? What if Santa Claus saved the day? Moments of laugh-out-loud funny wrapped around an actually interesting story, characters that feel distinct even if they're completely impossible (though strangely not implausible on the page). Remarkably warm for a novel that has such satirical angles--though I dunno if it's exactly satire, or aimed at it.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne by Ron Currie

 

In the library, this probably seemed to me like an interesting crime novel; it's much more than that. Currie's authorial voice sparkles and dances and laughs, even as the people in the novel are fighting and suffering and breaking and dying. It's a remarkably grim novel--Babs Dionne dies hard, even if the narrative of it ends before the event, and the setting is remarkably grimy in a badly-governed small-town way (probably because it's a badly governed small town). The characters are mostly doing the best they can, the ones that aren't tend to die less well--less easily, less meaningfully--than the rest, and all of them seem like themselves. There's a touch of magic realism around the edges, one of the POV characters can apparently see and communicate with the spirits of the departed, but much of the novel reads as depressingly plausible. The novel begins with almost a recitation of an ancestry, it ends with something like hope. It's a starkly beautiful novel.

Mister Magic by Kiersten White

 

This novel at least seemed at first to have a lot in common thematically with last night's aborted read, but that eventually seemed not to be entirely the case. Sure, the POV character (and her circle of friends) were stuck in a reliving their past trauma/s thing, same as last night's book, but Mister Magic is Horror--really really noisy Horror, not at all subtle--so the traumas end up being more monstrous and somehow more believable for being less plausible. There's some real murk in the middle, really rough going, I almost stopped reading several times, but the novel pulls itself together around the ending (not enough to justify the slog, but somewhat) and then the acknowledgments make the subtext clear that this really is a novel about growing up in a religion that insists on strict conformity; this is not a shock, when I said it was a noisy novel, I meant it. The prose is at best nothing special, the characters other than the primary POV tend to blur into like a couple of tags each without much depth. Ms. White has written a number of YA novels before this, I have to wonder if the lack of subtlety is a carryover from that. Not a DNF, but barely; not a particularly good novel.

We Had a Hunch by Tom Ryan

 

I picked this up from the library in the hope--maybe something like the expectation, based on the cover copy--that it was going to be a light-hearted and witty inversion of Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys books, in the vein of what Meddling Kids did with Scooby-Doo. As it turns out, this is not that kind of book. There's no sparkle here and hardly any wit, and practically nothing to care about after 180-ish of 330-ish pages, when I stopped reading. The main thing I was taking away was that none of the non-POV characters seemed remarkably trustworthy, and that none of the POV characters were particularly interesting or likeable.

The End of the World As We Know it edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene

 

Spent the past few nights working my way through this--it's 700+ pages--and it's full of excellent stories. I tended to prefer the ones set during the plague to those set after, but that's probably a personal preference. Some of the authors took more liberties than others, but the entire range was mostly fine in that regard; the stories set after the events of the novel tended to be darker and more depressing, mainly because they tended to take very dark views of both humanity and the future of it in the setting. Of course, it's been ages since I've read the novel, and at this point I'm not doing anything like as much re-reading as I used to, so my memories of The Stand are probably kinda blurry and shouldn't be entirely trusted. My ambivalence about some of the very downbeat endings some of the stories bolted onto the novel notwithstanding, there are no bad stories in this anthology.

The Bang Devils by Patrick Foss

 

There is a kind of crime fiction that focuses on criminals who are out of their depth--sometimes by a lot, sometimes by enough to seem like idiots; this is very much a book like that, where the protagonists persistently make bad choices as the situation they've put themselves into spirals further and further out of control. While the main characters do not seem like the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, calling them idiots is probably in the direction of unfair--though there is not a single decision they make in the novel that a reasonably alert reader cannot tell is going to make things palpably worse. This is not exactly my favorite kind of crime fiction, mostly because the main characters could have walked away at almost any time and been OK--if there are going to be bad decisions, I very much prefer for the people making them to be under more pressure. The prose has some neat turns, and the story isn't badly told, for all it's not really to my preferences; the various POV characters do kinda blur together, and I'm not sure how I feel about some of the very extended bits of unattributed dialogue: It's not just that there aren't tags, it's literally just the words the characters are speaking and you have to work out one instance of who's talking and sorta propagate that out, the book isn't good enough to reward that amount of work.

Morbidly Curious by Coltan Scrivner

 

I read this little book in a coffee shop yesterday, after seeing a pretty strong recommendation online, and ... well, I was distinctly underwhelmed. It spends a fair amount of its relatively small space defending fans of dark fiction from various calumnies I personally haven't really encountered--though I also am not as a rule a fan of either slashers or torture porn. The author is apparently a real social scientist, or at least has done that kind of work, for real, but the book feels a lot more pop-psych to me, though without the readability and charm of someone like Mary Roach. Lots of recaps of various studies the author has worked on, or at least been associated with; lots of talk about purportedly haunted places in the real world (which I mostly don't buy, and the author says he doesn't but then seems to talk about experiences he's had in them). Not much is sticking a day later, which probably says something.

The Shadow Dancer by Margaret Coel

 

There are a small number of mystery series I'll read, and this is one. Coel's mysteries on the Wind River Reservation are reasonably effective mysteries, and they're very effective dramas--not so much family drama in the way William Kent Krueger's are, but very much focused on the characters and the people they're attached to, and to the open and vast beauty of the place. This is pretty typical, and it's clear Coel spent some time having characters move back and forth between the Reservation and elsewhere (Denver, for instance) so she could have the same relationship dynamics available to her. This makes some sense, though it does make the various relevant timelines a little ... slippery. The fact the first murder victim here was tightly connected to one of Coel's mains is a bit of a vaguely nasty surprise, but a well-executed one. Coel clearly really likes her characters in these, and it's hard not to agree with her as a reader; I'll keep reading these as I keep finding ones I haven't read.

Crooks by Lou Berney

 

Saw this in the library and I remembered how much I enjoyed Dark Ride, so I checked it out. It's at least as enjoyable, though this is not anything like the "stoner noir" I described Dark Ride as. There's wit and sparkle in the prose, including the dialogue, and the stories here eventually add up to basically what's on the cover--a novel about crime and family. All the kids especially need to come to grips with both those things, and how in their particular instance they're intertwined. And those kids are well-distinguished from each other, both in their POVs and elsewise, Berney does a marvelous job of making it seem as though you're in seven different heads, here (not at once) and that's a real accomplishment. This isn't as intense as some other crime novels I've enjoyed, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Another Kind of Eden by James Lee Burke

 

I kinda figured this was at least in with a chance of bringing the kissing-the-light-socket feeling I like so much, and it brings that aplenty. While this probably isn't exactly a crime novel, there's definitely crime at its core, and probably something darker--especially toward the end as the novel veers explicitly toward the supernatural. It's the early 1960s and all the things that boiled over later in the decade are there just starting to simmer, and there's kinda casual bigotry of all sorts around, as well as drugs and violence (the worst violence seems to erupt from people who can't get the war/s they fought in out of their heads). There is beauty in the mountains of Colorado, but there is also rot. It's a love story that ends when one of the lovers disappears, and the other one kinda runs away. It's brutal and harsh, but it's Burke and it's laden with juicy turns of phrase and hard (in many senses) characters and incident. Beautiful and gripping.

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

 

Well, this was at least vaguely disappointing. The prose was (I presume intentionally) very much in the style and voice of mid-eighteenth-century writing, which I avoid more or less whenever possible, and while I think I at least got most of the incident, I didn't really see much point to it all. I guess the strong whiff of picaresque here explains some of the difficulty in discerning any point, though that's not strictly speaking inherent in picaresque. Whatever distinctions there might be among the characters is to my eye and ear buried under the willfully antiquated authorial voice. I'm sure Spufford more or less hit the target he was aiming for, but the target wasn't one I turned out to be all that interested in.

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

 

I couldn't tell you when exactly I fell out of love with Greek Myth, but it happened somewhere along the way. This is a book that does a wonderful job of reminding me of at least part of the why: The deities (and in many cases, the heroes) of Greek Myth rarely behave much differently than spoiled toddlers. In this book that is absolutely true. The monsters aren't monsters, the heroes aren't heroes (Perseus especially comes off as an annoying twit--but so do Hermes and Athena); the gods are privilege personified, and the kings are better than the gods only for having less actual power. There's enough wit and anger here to qualify this as satire, I think; unfortunately the wit fades over the course of the novel, and by the end there's just the bitter taste of anger, before the story kinda fritters away. There is some sparkle to the prose, here, especially in the first quarter or so, but the characters have a tendency to kinda blur around the edges. While I started the novel with spirits and hopes high, by the end I mostly came away with the sense this novel had One Weird Trick, and I just got tired of it.

The High Window by Raymond Chandler

 

It's always a pleasure to read a Chandler that's new to me, and this was new to me. It has all of Chandler's typical strengths--atmosphere, dialogue, crystal prose--and is the first one of his novels I've read that didn't seem obviously like two stories pasted together. There's still some murk in the plotting, of course; and the amount of alcohol some of the characters consume seems to make it implausible for them to function anything like as well as they do. Some of the casual racism (and other cruelties) in here will be upsetting to modern readers, but it does go a long way in the direction of showing the crassness of some of the characters (arguably including Marlowe). I'm still wanting to read more Chandler.

The World Made Straight by Ron Rash

 This book seemed as though it might be some sort of Appalachian Noir type stuff, something on the lines of what David Joy's been doing, all criminals in the mountains of the American Old South. And it is, though it's really not as ... taut, mostly, as Joy's novels. There are historical elements, things from the US Civil War, floating to the surface between the chapters, as well as elements of the various characters' backstories--threads that seem to imply there are family connections at least some of the characters don't know about. Most of the slack in the novel probably comes from the time skips, as the novel slides past weeks or months. The characters are reasonably well-differentiated, and the dialogue works, but the narrative prose kinda lies inert. Not an entirely engaging read, though it does have things it wants to say about getting out of poverty, and violence.

Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen

 

So I knew this was probably an older Hiaasen, but I didn't realize until I sat down with it this evening that it was from the early 1990s (copyright 1991)--so this is from Hiaasen's early wacky-gonzo phase, before his somewhat more serious one, which has given way to his current more satirical one. I mean, there are elements of this novel that are Florida (at least, Florida of the time) writ large and exaggerated to absurdity, but here the point is mostly humor, there isn't any larger point being made, there are no real-world personages being specifically targeted. That said, the pacing of the novel is mercury-quick and slippery and the dialogue and characterizations are spot-on. There are some things that are at least a little but implausible, but they work in the novel, mostly by dint of sheer authorial will in some cases. A very good novel to sort of pluck out of the past and read, to start my reading year.