Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

 

It turns out this was published less than a hundred years after what (best I can tell) are considered to be the earliest English-language novels, and the fact that "novel" wasn't entirely an established form, yet (outside of length) shows. What kept kicking me out, though wasn't the two-hundred-year-old novel-quirks; it was the two-hundred-year-old science. Shelley at least has the ... presence of mind, I guess, to keep the actual mechanics of Victor's work obscured--and his determination that his secrets should die with him is a reasonable enough plot point. The structure, with at least three layers of nested narrative, is one that occasionally surfaces today, in novels as different from each other as *Cloud Atlas* and *The Buffalo Hunter Hunter*, though Shelley doesn't seem to even try (or feel expected to) muster the shifts in narrative register Stephen Graham Jones handles so gracefully in the latter. Some of the ... contrivances in the story are wacky and almost laughable; there's often not a lot of difference in prosody between narration and dialogue, let alone difference in character voice; the epistolary nature kinda clunks along, as it tends to, managing little more than to frame the first-person narratives. It still has some kick, though, and the thematics of it pack some punch; it's clear why it lingers in the cultural subconscious (though most of that's probably due at least as much to James Whale and Boris Karloff as it is to Mary Shelley).

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

 

This is a really good crime thriller-type novel, set in a big city with all sorts of big city problems, with all sorts of changing demographics plausibly at the root of some of them. There's a long and tangled thread of family stuff, and a narrator who might be somewhere on the spectrum, and some widespread venal corruption. The voice is really, really engaging--especially considering the narrator's mental state and/or wiring--and the dialogue seems really spot-on. The characters all feel plausible, and the various tensions in the main character's life all come home to roost in various ways. Many (possibly all) of the personal situations are changed by the end of the novel; virtually none of the societal situations are changed like at all. It's a grim novel on many levels, with the only little wisps of hope coming from the possibility of personal redemption. Very impressive, I'll have to see if I can find more by the author.

Truth to Power by S. A. Cosby

 

It's probably not any kind of secret that I'm a big fan of Cosby, and while this book isn't anything as much to my taste as the novels set in his own Virginia (as opposed to Marvel's) it's a fine novel and a blast to read. I don't know Luke Cage as well as some other Marvel characters, I have no sense how far outside the lines Cosby is coloring, here. The dialogue manages a fine and fun admixture of comics-talk and something more ... earthy, but stays very much on the side of teen-friendly (and the idea of some teen somewhere being introduced to Cosby by this book--or to Segura by Enemy of My Enemy makes me smile). The story has some Very Marvel elements but isn't wildly inconsistent with Cosby's own take on industry and small towns, and there's a lot of grit in the prose. It's not quite like chewing on a live wire the way Razorblade Tears or King of Ashes is, but that's setting the bar really really high.

The Black Orb by Ewhan Kim

 

So, in the library this looked like a weird novel skittering on boundary between horror and SF, with maybe some things to say about society and people and stuff. Yeah, it's that, though it's weirder (in many uses of that word) than could be put on the dust jacket. That's not a complaint: It tilts more than a little bit gonzo but I don't see how a novel about black orbs that pass through walls and absorb people then spit them back out more or less where they were nearly three months later couldn't be. While there's some social commentary (or at least observations) during the first half-ish of the novel, as society (at least that portion of it in South Korea) unravels then implodes, I think the strongest things the novel has to say about people and society and how they react to tragedy and/or overpowering strangeness come after people have come back, as they look for scapegoats. The translation here is at least decent English-language prose, I presume it's at least not better than the original Korean; the characters feel remarkably plausible even looking at them from within a very different culture, and the dialogue and descriptions all seem well nailed down. The ending might be something of a Moebius thing, it's a little hard to tell exactly what the author intends, there; outside of that, this is a really good read.

Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

 

This is a novel a lot like the Black Sun trilogy on the surface, though it's a fantasy Russia with what feel like fake-Russian place (and plausibly character) names, where the bodies of angels have been falling from the skies for a few centuries, all of them (apparently) falling in not-Russia's territory. Maybe some of what's going on here is at least derived from actual Russian folklore, but I'm not deeply familiar with Russian folklore so I cannot say. Totalitarian government with internal conflicts and tensions is not going to stand long, and the figurehead in fact dies during the novel. It feels as though there might be (or might at least have been) plans/expectations for other novels to come after this--the ending leaves several threads dangling--and in fact there's a Book Two and a Book Three, but this is not a good enough novel for me to feel as though I need to read more of this: It's kinda muddled and emotionally flat; there's some tension in the pacing but it skips POVs enough that it ends up feeling kinda scattershot. None of the characters are anything like as interesting as Higgins seems to think they are, and the world is decidedly unclear as a setting. Not a waste of the evening, but not very good, either.

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

 

Known classic spy/thriller novel from the mid-1970s. Turns out it's really well-written. It seems to me to have a lot in common with Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal, though there's a reasonable case the stakes are higher, here--losing WW2 instead of just having De Gaulle assassinated--but the dogged pursuit of the one very threatening expert is a real parallel, here. The characters are mostly believable, the pacing is deft (there's some skimming through time to get to spring of 1944, but I think the bits from earlier are necessary for the stories in the novel). The authorial voice is very British, which makes sense since the author is British; the dialogue seems at least not implausible (I don't know Brit slang of the era enough to say for certain). Interestingly, I think there might be some things that showed up either in Nonesuch or Atonement when things were happening in the same timeframe as this, makes me wonder whether those things are in the British collective memory as real things, or if they've just shown up in enough fiction set in the time that people use them; if the latter, I suspect Follett was probably earlier.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker

 This ends up being a decent enough horror novel, but I have to give it some demerits for being such a slog to get through the first half-plus; the main character is just overwhelmingly passive and uninteresting--though it's clear she's dealing with some sort of fractured, possibly divergent brain-thing, and being interesting and/or active isn't really something she's wired for. I don't know enough about the various kinds of Chinese folklore woven into this to comment on that, other than using stuff that's sovereign against one thing against something entirely else does not seem to be ... a thing likely to work. Toward the end, when the main character and the ghosts she's interacting with set out to do something about the serial killer (and some terrifying number of copycats) killing East Asian people in New York City, the book takes a turn that reminded me more than a little bit of Everett's The Trees, if perhaps a little less apocalyptic (this is not snark). The writing is ... OK, I guess, the Caucasian folks sound different from the Chinese people, but that's as far as the differentiation between/among them goes; there are occasional flashes of wit, but the prose mostly just kinda sits there. The pacing is really slack for a long time but does tighten up some late.

American Girl by Wendy Walker

 

This is a pretty decent crime/thriller novel, lots of people who aren't what (or who) they say they are, all kinds of small-town secrets (or maybe "secrets," given how open many of them seem to be) serving as foundation and as reveals. The novel has a lot to say about how small towns treat their girls and women, how little respect and trust they get from the boys and men around them; while some of that boils out of the subtext, it never really gets in the way of the story--and it's a pretty common theme, these days, especially as more women write in the genre/s. The main character is an autist, and that's handled relatively plausibly and readably--her narration is always comprehensible, if often at least a little askew--and all the characters here feel like people, flawed and struggling and barely making it as their small town dies around them. There are some very good people--the POV and some of her friends--and there are some pretty despicable ones--the murder victim and people associated with the crimes he was doing under cover of the businesses he owned; most of them, though are somewhere in the vast middle ground, including the killer. Lots of interesting things here, and I'll probably be looking for more of Ms. Walker's books.

Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Stephen Graham Jones knows the horror genre, it's not any kind of surprise that he's done a werewolf novel, or that it's very good. The big surprise, really is that his werewolves aren't explicitly Native Americans (though there's a strong case they're very much in an underclass, the closest thing I can think of in real-world America would be like the Roma) but that's probably at least a little bit of a bad expectation being justly rewarded. The telling is very nonlinear, which makes the novel seem either less episodic than it is, or more episodic than it is; it does make the arc of the novel hard to discern and harder to predict--the latter probably being more the intent. Some of the chapters are in first-person and some in third, but that's not any kind of distraction or other problem. The narrative voice is pretty believably a young person waiting to "grow up" and become a werewolf. The underworld the novel describes is believably desperate; the people in it almost distressing in their plausibility. The dialogue is sharp, at times coming close to drawing blood. Really, really good stuff, here.

The Big Time by Fritz Leiber

 

I read this in a coffee shop yesterday. It's a really good novella, lots going on, very early 1960s. Probably some commentary on the Cold War going on in the subtext--by the early 1960s, it was already possible to see the pointlessness of that (the fact there's East-West/Europe-Asia happening in the war between the Spiders and the Snakes cannot be entirely accidental). It's interesting to note the first-person POV is a woman, an "entertainer," not a soldier, though it's pretty clear there are women soldiers, and there are several male entertainers. Interestingly, the novel is barely about the war between the Spiders and the Snakes, it's more about loyalty to the side, then something like a lifeboat story (there's at least the threat they're all cut off from the titular Big Time). At the end there are hints at least some of the characters are more cynical than they started the novel; some were of course very cynical. In keeping with the Cold War-type pointlessness, the overall situations don't seem much changed at the end. A very solid novella, not even 200 pages.

A Very Simple Crime by Grant Jerkins

 

This was not a very good novel. One of the narrators is ... not so much an unreliable narrator as just an utter scumball, the other is so desperate for a shot at redemption that he'll do anything; at least the second narrator isn't first-person.  There's a strong whiff of sociopath doing sociopath things without consequence, and a distinct sense the author hasn't paid as much attention to his favorite true-crime shows as he might have and really doesn't know too well how the criminal justice system in America works (there's a really glaring misuse of "acquittal" that almost had me putting the book down). Most of the characters are very one-note, if that, there's no real complexity here, just some plot twists that aren't all that twisty. The main voice seemed juddery and herky-jerky. Not much to like, here. Oh, well.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

 

Michael Chabon wrote a Sherlock Holmes novella. It's set in 1944 and Holmes is nearly ninety. It's a reasonably OK Holmes story (though I'm not a big fan of Holmes) though there's some intentionally unstated stuff that's effectively text, not subtext: Holmes is never named; there's a parrot who keeps uttering strings of numbers in German that are plainly the ID numbers tattooed onto concentration camp inmates, though no one in the novella seems to know the camps even exist. The snippet toward the end from the parrot's POV is probably the most enjoyable portion of the thing. While Chabon can pitch his authorial voice to nearly any register he wants, I'm not sure he really tried to write like Doyle, here; the voice feels more modern than that to me. It's a short thing that's easy enough to read, though I don't think there is (or is supposed to be) like any great heft, here.

A Dance at the Slaughterhouse by Lawrence Block

 

A somewhat different take on combining "funny" and "crime." Probably more successful than the Hiaasen I read last night--which was not Best Hiaasen, this was Very Good Block--though they weren't really going for the same things: Scudder is a Very New York character, and his stories are Very New York stories, which are both very different (even if they're occasionally laugh-out-loud funny) than Hiaasen's Very Florida novels. This book is very late-1980s/early-1990s (copyright 1992, but that's not absolutely dispositive) and there are things that are occasionally jarring, like the AIDS crisis still being a crisis and Donald Trump being thought of as a successful developer, but those are just like artifacts. The story itself is really hardboiled/noir, all twisty and corrupt, there's even a porn film at the center of it--a snuff porn film, but hey--which really kinda feels like a throwback to Chandler. This is a novel after Scudder stopped drinking, so his recovery (lots and lots of AA meetings, apparently in New York, then, you could find one just about any time of day or night) is kinda a central motif, though many of the other recurring characters are present. The novel turns on Scudder being more morally gray than I think he really thought he was capable of, it'd be interesting to read these in order and see whether and how that came to matter; alas, I'm reading these as I find them and thanking the Great Perhaps for the opportunities.

Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen

 

This might not be the best of Hiaasen's novels, but it's still a pretty good read. It has most of the elements that go into most of his novels--scummy politicians and developers, sexy women, ordinary people who've had enough, scattered only-in-Florida crazies--but this feels a lot as though there's a lot of madcap stuff going on, but there's neither the joy necessary for comedy nor the rage necessary for satire; at times it just seems a little jaded and/or cynical, which isn't really an attitude Hiaasen carries well. The writing is strong, the characters come across as human and different from each other and remarkably plausible given their environment; the story feels a little overbusy, but it does hold together reasonably well.

Prayer by Philip Kerr

 This is one of those awkward novels that attempts to throw supernatural events in with a detective-mystery-thriller story, a trick that rarely goes as gracefully as the authors hope/think/expect--the fact the genres are appear to overlap as much as they do makes it seem more natural than it is, I think. In this case the first-person narration could help, since their belief system changing is kinda the crux of the novel; but neither the supernatural layer nor the narrator's changing beliefs really worked all that well for me. The writing is pretty decent, and most of the characters come across pretty clearly; but the pacing gets a bit jammed-up toward the end, especially as it becomes clear that the narrator-detective is going to have to get religion to survive. The novel is copyright 2014 and some of the goings-on in it are very of its time; while the narrative could reflect many possible authorial attitudes, there's an afterword that makes Kerr's position clear. Not a terrible novel, but not all that good, either.

Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

 

I hadn't read this since it came out, I didn't remember the writing in it was so fricking beautiful, even as the events spiral deeper and darker and the Tower, like a gnomon, leans its shadow around. It doesn't have the immediately obvious hook for me that The Talisman does, but I've been reading some crime novels lately and this feels like a kinda twisted one of those for a while, though King and Straub take their time to allow layers to accrete: There's real depth to things, here, in ways there often wasn't in The Talisman. There's a triumph, then a bit of a downbeat ending, one the authors warn the reader about. Jack Sawyer in this is a truly amazing character, as are Harry the blind DJ and the Thunder 5. the southern Wisconsin of the novel feels like a real place, or at least the memory of one., not idealized the way Bradbury did the rural Midwest of his childhood but no contempt--bred from familiarity or otherwise. The pacing starts out arguably a little slow, though it comes across as a thoughtful deliberation, not clumsiness or anything; it turns a corner about four hundred pages in and fricking screams through the finish. A really good and beautiful book.

We Will See You Bleed by Ron Currie

 

This novel has approximately the same strengths as The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, though it is a prequel, and prequels face a pretty specific set of challenges. Good news: Currie handles those challenges brilliantly, in a way similar to in his previous novel--in the earlier novel, there was never any doubt Babs Dionne was going to die (it was right there in the title) so the questions had to be about moral challenges and whether the death was going to be worth it, in this novel, there's never any questions Babs Dionne is going to live (and take over the criminal underworld in her corrupt small town, arguably for her community's well-being) so the questions have to be what the price for that is going to be and whether it's worth it. Currie's prose is a complete fricking blast to read, even as the people in the novel are in some cases kinda collapsing morally. That said, as with the earlier novel, the people who are less outright greedy tend to get better endings. Grim and beautiful, bloody and at times hilarious.

Copper River by William Kent Kreuger

 

This is a pretty early Cork O'Connor novel--copyright 2006--and while it has Krueger's typical humanity and grace, it does not have anything like as much of the Ojibwe ... mysticism in it as the more recent entries. Cork's life is always full of tragedies and sorrows, though there are often joys as counterpoint, that remains constant. The writing is as solid, pacing and character and setting all just about pitch-perfect. It's an interesting novel in that what feels like the primary thread at the beginning mostly disappears until right near the end, just because there's a local situation that seems more urgent (and probably is). Also, the killing of an injured and arguably out-of-place cougar that's in the process of attacking a helpless (bound and gagged) teenager ends up feeling just about as tragic as any of the homicides in the novel, which ... I thought was probably pretty good, but I can see how someone might find it kinda offputting.

The Perfect Plan by Bryan Reardon

 

This is a pretty mediocre novel, really, but it's better than it seems it's going to be for the first hundred-ish pages, which are deeply muddled and kinda circular, and completely redolent with unreliable narration: specifically, the sort of unreliable narration where you know it's just that the narrator isn't telling you a thing that will make things make sense. Eventually the story stop spinning its wheels and kinda goes somewhere, but that somewhere is at best barely worth the opening slog. The prose here is kinda stolid and inert, there's not a lot of sense of who the characters are (which is a glaring weakness in a novel that aims at the sort/s of psychological conflicts and resolutions this one does) and the story makes remarkably little sense. The pacing tends toward a lot of pointless orbiting and repetition. I don't exactly resent my decision to finish the novel, but I wouldn't have regretted DNFing it, either.

Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks

 

This has been sitting n my shelf for a while, I figured I'd read it. The author is a professor at Georgetown Law, and she went through a program the Washington DC Metro Police (hereafter MPD) have that allows people who are probably (at least arguably) old enough to know better to become unpaid part-time police officers. The author eventually ends up being certified to operate alone, which apparently is kinda a big deal. She brings, well, not exactly a gimlet eye to things, but she has a background (professional and as it happens personal) that gives her a distinctly outsider POV on what goes on in the MPD, both during training and on the job. She has a clear sense of the broader structural flaws and of how the individual police officers think about--and rationalize--what they do, what their jobs are. There are some officers who come off not entirely well, here, they'd plausibly recognize themselves, though the author has anonymized them, but the book portrays the larger problems as systemic, a combination of mixed and perverse incentives alongside (maybe, at least in the now) unintended consequences. There's a thread about the author's family, especially her mom, being skeptical about the police thing, but that at least seems to have worked out more or less all right for everyone. Interesting and pretty informative.