We Sold our Souls by Grady Hendrix

I am vaguely disappoint. I was kinda hoping for a more Horror-inflected take on This Is Spinal Tap (add your own fucking umlaut, there) but instead it's as though Hendrix has read Martin's The Armageddon Rag and decided that if Martin can write a novel about mediocre hippie music saving the world, he can write a novel about mediocre metal saving the world. The novel is not improved by Hendrix's attempts to write lyrics, nor by his decision to repeat them. Maybe someone who liked crappy metal more than I do would dig this novel more than I do, but it never really feels witty or self-aware--or even arch--the way Hendrix's better novels do.
 

Honky Tonk Samurai by Joe R. Lansdale.

 

So, Lansdale's a fricking legend, and novels like this demonstrate why. On some level it's your basic small-town/rural crime novel, with POV characters who are kinda sorta at least vaguely connected to people with some amount of authority--somewhere between undeputized cops and unlicensed PIs--with grit and crime and vague twists and (because it's a novel in a series) callbacks to previous adventures and new characters arriving. Lansdale's writing though, his turns of phrase and his ear for dialogue, as well as his sense of place and people, elevate what is arguably a pretty formulaic story. Witty and serious in turns, as needed, well-paced, gritty and bloody and sorta hopeful-ish, as much about the tight connections between the major characters as about any other elements.

Mister Lullaby by J. H. Markert

 

This was a jumbled mess of a novel, a poorly organized pile of timelines, points of view, and global folklore (making a mistake I've seen before, of pulling myth and folklore from as many sources as possible, ending up with a muddle). There are some elements of worthwhile character, here, and hints of understanding the people of the novel; and the overall premise isn't horrible, though dreamland being a threat to waking reality will have antecedents ranging from Barker to Lovecraft to possibly Poe. Those upsides, though, are buried in the murk.

Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan

 

This is a surprisingly good thrillerish crime novel--there are elements of twisty whodunit mystery at play, and interesting layers of innocence and guilt. Dolan has a knack for turning a phrase, and an ear for dialogue, and a solid feel for character and story. While the situations in the novel are very much at the far edge of plausible, the characters' motivations are always clear and believable. The novel's opening being in present tense and at least most of the rest being in past is an interesting choice, I don't have much problem with it, there aren't any glaring tense shifts in any given section, but I can see the possibility of someone being bothered. I honestly grabbed it because the title struck my fancy, but it turned out to be very worth reading; I'll have to keep an eye out for more from the author.

This Is the Voice by John Colapinto

 

There's a lot that's interesting in this book, and the fact Chomsky's "theories" about language and speech come out looking distinctly garbagelike is a distinct positive for me (my problems are with Chomsky's science, not his politics). There are some things that seem kinda dubious, but I'm not inclined to say they're exactly wrong--just that they seem distinctly counter to my understanding of my own experiences. If a book about how speech and language work and interact seems interesting to you, this book will probably be interesting; if not, then probably not.

The Fixer by Joseph Finder

 

This is an author whose name I see around among thriller novelists, and I figured I'd pull a novel and check it out, and ... it's not entirely garbage, there are moments when the story sticks and grabs and maybe pulls a little, generates some momentum. Most of the novel, though, is like someone fingerpainting parts of a life and/or lifestyle he can't really imagine; there aren't really any genius characters, here, but much of the writing reminds me of someone who's kinda average-ish intelligence trying to write a supergenius: it's just off, and you can tell. Of course, I haven't lived any of the lives that are in this novel, either, so it's possible I'm wrong about that, but the prose is mostly thick and smeary and the main character spends the first half-ish of the novel as smug and shallow and self-centered and almost as annoying as the main character in last night's novel (though fortunately there's just the one of him, that probably makes a big difference). At least now I know I can go back to ignoring his books on the library shelves.

Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell

 

This is a weird little time-travel story that manages not to be particularly SF, the time-travel is just a thing, and it's mostly a way to get a distressingly lot of copies of one of the most annoying characters I've encountered in fiction in the same place and time. There are hints of post-apocalyptic shit here--New York City in 2071 is not a nice place in this novel--and I kinda gotta think Ferrell is trying to say things about identity and free will and the sorts of things you'd expect a story with the elements this one has to have as thematic inclusions. It's not super-well-written, though: The story is jumbled even by the standards of mediocre time-travel fiction, and there are a couple of weird transitions where it goes from all the multiples getting drunk in an abandoned hotel to life in the decaying metropolis and back, and the resolution is all kinda of wildly implausible. It wasn't a total waste of my evening, but I do kinda wish this novel had somehow gotten misdirected between 2013 and now.