Northwest Angle by William Kent Krueger

 

Yeah, it's another of these novels. They work--they're stunningly effective amalgamations of crime novels, thrillers, and family dramas; and while they happen in a sequence, and there's some additional something to reading them in that order, it's not necessary for any given single novel. Krueger knows the real-world version of the setting and its people, and the versions of those in his novels reflect that. I might not be super-happy with the implications--stronger in some novels than in others--that the magic/religion of the local tribes works and is real, but what usually seems to matter more is that the people in the novels believe it works.

White Noise by Don DeLillo

 

Well, here it is, a classic of postmodern fiction, in a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition, complete with an over-enthusiastic (if not overwritten) introduction. Well, it's an interesting read--more coherent than I was really expecting, if I'm honest--but the sharp wit and turns of phrase kinda disappear about a third of the way through, when something like a plot, or a story, or at least things happening, start to emerge: at that point it turns out that there's not much substance beneath that surface wit. It's pretty clear there are things the novel really wants to say, about consumerism, about fear of death, about media, about government and industry and pollution; and it's clear why some people think it's prescient, but especially toward the end of the novel there doesn't seem to be much signal in the noise.

A Secret About a Secret by Peter Spiegelman

 

This was an altogether more satisfying book than last night's--not flawless, but better. The setting is ... strange: It's like some Nordic or Euro state (supported by the names of people and places) with some strange politics and a deeply structured and internally competitive security apparatus that's almost Soviet, with its competing security services and its service that the mere mention of the name turns people into pliable citizens (it's not fair to call them cowards when they're acting in the face of that kind of power discrepancy). The story is a relatively straightforward murder mystery at its heart--there's a lot of set-dressing about a biolab in an old boarding school, and corporate espionage and headhunting, and some things that could be interesting, or at least thought-provoking, about marriages and other intimate relationships. The characters are mostly interesting, the POV wearily determined. The prose manages to come across as like an authorial version of the old Transatlantic accent, managing to be neither Brit nor American but still readable and kinda interesting--if still kinda weird.

Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie

 

This is labeled as an epistolary novel, but that's not entirely right. There are entries that could not possibly have been written, from the narrative; and most of the "entries" are in fact more like transcripts of audio (with weirdly knowing descriptions of what body language and expression mean, insight into what people are literally thinking). Honestly, this reads more like a script, for the most part, than a novel--and I think the format makes what I've seen called the "fictive dream" more elusive than actual straight prose. The fact none of the characters are particularly likeable, or come across as anything like as intelligent (or brave, or driven, or ...) as they seem to think they are doesn't help much, either--though there's a hint that one of the characters might have survived in a more meaningful manner than the one who was subsumed into the Bad Place.

The Dancing Girls by M. M. Chouinard

 

I am honestly puzzled as to how or why this is Book One of a series--it makes no sense from an author's, publisher's, or reader's perspective. The characters who would presumably be the recurring characters--the Series Name Detective and the others in her office--accomplish approximately nothing: The serial killer they're chasing gets himself killed by a-fucking-nother serial killer, in a moment that bizarrely reminds me of some Roger Zelazny short stories from like the 1980s or early 1990s ("Itself Surprised," about one of Saberhagen's Berserkers encountering a remnant from the war of their origin, something built to kill Berserkers; and a story I do not remember the title of, about something that preys on vampires interacting with vampire hunters). I guess the serial killer meeting victims through the chat function of World of Warcraft (and communicating further via Skype) would have been a thing in the early 2010s when this novel was written, but even now feels almost as dated as Francis Dolarhyde in *Red Dragon* finding the families he killed when he processed the film from their movie cameras.

Victory City by Salman Rushdie

 

Um. Well, the book starts--more or less--with a prophecy, that it tells you will come true. Then it spends somewhere over three hundred pages unwinding how the prophecy came true. On the one hand, that's kinda a trope in Fantasy; on the other hand, it's usually weak sauce Fantasy that does it. What it does is it puts a lot of burden on how the author tells the story of the prophecy coming true, and in this case especially the decision to tell something like two hundred fifty years in just over three hundred pages makes it feel like a surface-level skim while sucking most of the narrative tension out. There are moments of charm, of beauty, of ... well, if not moments of truth, then moments where Rushdie's messages ring loud and clear; those moments are scarce and scattered, though, and subsumed in the rapid flow.

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

 

This started off ... more than a little rough, to be honest: There are a lot of POVs and the novel hops around between them a lot (though that calms down eventually); and the voice is distinctly Brit, which is distinctly off for young American women living in New York, New York (I checked to make sure neither of them was supposed to be Brit, more than once); and there's some weird threat stuff that remains mostly nascent or latent or something for a while. But it gets better--maybe I got used to the voice, but it gradually stopped lighting up all by Brit Prose Sensors; and the threats came together (and tied together kinda nicely in a kinda unintended consequences kind of way at the end); and the characters started to come together as something like people; and the story started to build up momentum about the time it started getting all nonlinear and time-travelly; and there's a grace note at the end that will hit people with different degrees of force but which landed on me kinda like a ton of well-aimed bricks. Very much in the vein/s of Morgenstern's The Starless Sea or maybe Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January, though less meta than the former and less monster-laden than the latter; probably somewhere between them as far as "good" goes, somewhere past the middle in the direction of Morgenstern, I think.