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My review of Tom King’s A Once Crowded Sky

Since the introduction of Superman in 1938, superhero comic books have undergone a slow maturation from cartoonish to naturalistic. Despite the fantastic central idea of a superhero, for the last twenty-five years, a realistic approach to storytelling has finally brought the art form legitimacy.

Recently superhero novels set in their own universes have begun to proliferate. Most of them are dark superhero noir, cultivating realism,   like the modern comic books they are based on.

Following tonally in the footsteps of Those who Walk in Darkness, and thematically in the footsteps of Soon I Will Be Invincible, Tom King’s A Once Crowded Sky tells the final story in an age of super heroes.

The characters are drawn from common comic book tropes. Soldier is wolverine crossed with captain America, a cryogenically preserved grandson   of George Washington. PenUltimate is Robin to Superman instead of Batman, Strength is something like Wonder Woman with issues, Doctor Speed is the Flash with a medical practice.

The books secondary characters are a combination of familiar characters with the serial numbers rubbed off and original creations.

The first thing you should know about a Once Crowded sky is that its good. The style is more literary than the comic book illustrations at the beginning of each chapter indicate. The second thing you should know is that the novel is depressing. Its the comic book novel equivalent of All Quiet on the Western front.

The plot. An energy force known as the Blue threatens to destroy the universe. The Ultimate, (a robotic superman,) understands the only way to stop it. All super heroes must sacrifice their powers and this combined energy will seal the rift through which the energy is pouring into our world.

All make the sacrifice accept one, PenUltimate, robin, who has decided being a superhero is too much sacrifice and is retired.  Then the book begins.

If your sold, the novels good,  stop here. Miner spoilers follow.

Calling a once crowded sky a superhero novel is not completely accurate. Because when the book opens there is only one superpowered individual left in the world.

The others have all been depowered. So its more accurate to call a Once Crowded Sky a post superhero novel.

How depowered individuals deal with the loss of so much power is one of the  novels major themes. The answer, for the most part is they deal very badly.

The absurd nature of comic books is lampshaded on almost every page. Former superheroes talk to one another about villains they defeated, and how the villains come back again and again. They call their conflicts the game, a game they all loved to play. And now its gone.

for All but PenUltimate, who got sick of being a superhero and quit, so when everyone    agreed to sacrifice their abilities, he wasn’t there and is thus left the worlds last superhero.

He begins the novel using his powers only to continuously save the depowered Wonder Woman, who despite now being only human keeps trying to fight  three or four armed thugs at a time.

But when an unknown force begins attacking the city, PenUltimate teams up with Soldier, Captain America/Wolverine/the Punisher, to figure out who is responsible and starts trying to be a superhero again.

A Once Crowded Sky toys with your expectations. Given that it is a novel about superheroes with only one superhero in it this was bound to happen. The types of city spanning battles where people punch their enemies through buildings are mostly absent,  happening primarily in flashback.

Through the snappy comic book dialogue,  King evokes a pitch perfect shared history for his characters. We don’t get to see a lot of it because we’re coming in at the end, but that makes the bits of backstory we do get more interesting.

Soldier, the Captain America stand inn, runs into all the normal people who used to be superheroes. Most of them talk over old times, trade stories of playing the game.

The novel at its best looks at the idea of saving the world every day and what that would do to people. Some are happy to be human again, others are devastated. Doctor Speed, the Flash, drinks now that he is no longer spending  his time saving civilians.

All the major comic book tropes  are examined, from characters being killed off and later coming back to supervillains always escaping from jail, to the question present in every comic book, who wants to dress up in a costume and save the world?

King handles his ex-superheroes with a surprisingly deft touch for a first novelist. If handled poorly the genre conventions of superhero stories can make a superhero novel into shit far more easily than can the same elements in a comic book. But MR. King handles the idea of masked men in tights flying around well.  He draws his characters in such a way that going from superhero to ordinary person is made relatable.

The flashbacks that are found often throughout the novel provide just enough superheroics that a reader will not feel slighted by there lack. The contrast these flashbacks raise between who these people used to be and who they are now is one of the novels major strengths.

Many of the former heroes are shown in an unfavorable light, unable to cope without their game. This is not a heavy handed rebuke, its an outgrowth of the plot.

The plot of the novel isn’t why you should read it. Naturally its ripped straight from a comic book. A dark comic book. Its well done, but A Once Crowded sky is more a meditation on power,  the obligations of having it, the consequences of losing it, and what people will do to get it back.

Although the superheroes are realistic, the world they live in is in all ways  the world of comic books. King knows the laws of such a world  and created the world of the novel to follow them with a fanboys fidelity. this constant contradiction between the world of stories the superheroes inhabit and the humanity  of the same heroes is one of the novels biggest strengths.

As A Once Crowded Sky continues, the facts of comic book life intrude further into the characters thoughts and actions, and the general absurdity inherent in living in such a world becomes apparent.

But it is not apparent to most of the superheroes. They wander around like ghosts now that they cannot play the game, and when a slim chance arises which might allow them to regain their abilities, they jump at it without looking back.

It is  only soldier, who has served in every war since the first world war with twenty years of superheroism after desert storm who begins to question the meaning of all the superhero lifestyle. What’s the point of beating a bad guy when he’s going to come back in three months?

At no point does a once crowded sky disappoint. It  does  become overly meta towards the end when King is making his final points about comic books, but never so meta  that the story is ruined.

If you are looking for a straight up homage to superhero comics, look elsewhere. But if your in the mood for something kind of bleak, and you would  like to read a well written and engaging deconstruction of that Genre, pick up a Once Crowded Sky.

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2012
08/17
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Character Drama in Washington, my review of Gore Vidal’s Washington D.C

I’ve fallen into the habit of reading authors who have recently died. I don’t know why this is. Gore Vidal, for example, I’d put off as too literary until he died last week. Then  I read Washington D.C., his fifth in a series of six novels chronicling American Political history.

The novel is billed as a political novel, and this is where I find issue.

Washington D.C. introduces us to an elderly senator, concerned with philosophy, morality, and, incongruously, winning his next election. We are also introduced to the senators morally bankrupt aid, who will do whatever it takes to win a congressional seat, the senator’s daughter, who is in love with the aid, a rich aimless sun of a newspaper publisher, and his sister, who opens the novel by fucking the aid in a pool house.

The novel begins in 1937 and ends in 1950.

The plot, such as it is, involves a lobbiest offering the senator a bribe, the senators aid spurning the senators daughter in favor of the newspapers suns sister, and the looming world war.

Vidal’s prose is for the most part flawless, or at least whatever flaws exist are beyond my ability to detect them. The exceptions are several shockingly lazy sentences which stand out for there ability to jar you right out of the book through ham-handed exposition which Vidal usually handles in a more subtle way. ”

Blaise was bewildered; he was also angry that Clay chose not to confide in him. But Clay had no intention of confiding in anyone.”

. Its as though Vidal’s editor skipped every fiftieth page, allowing awful sentences to sneak into the final draft which is mostly composed of the type of writing that makes me jealous. This is a miner gripe, and doesn’t detract from the work.

We run into trouble, however, when calling Washington D.C. a political novel.

Historical figures hide from us between the lines. Both presidents of the time period, Truman and FDR, plus their respective cabinets are right on the sidelines and Vidal spends the novel tantalizing us with glimpses of them.

They are characters off page, shown only in how the main characters react to what they choose to do.

This, unfortunately, characterizes the novel as a hole.

There are many scenes in the senate cloakroom, and many scenes in the Senator’s office, and many scenes where grand political theater has just happened, or is about to happen, but whenever we get close to witnessing one of these historical or political events, our focus is whisked away, back to domestic or personal drama.

The senator, the rich kid, and the senators aid are so captivated by there own personal drama’s that they rarely look up to view the city around them.

Similarly, the great events which take place from 37 to 50 are shown only in how they effect the characters involved.

This does not hurt the narrative itself, but considering Vidal wrote the novel to illustrate politics, the severe lack of it left me cold.

Certainly this may be an issue of values dissidents.

I hate spoiling books, which makes them difficult to review. But what I’m about to describe happens in the first fifty pages.

The senator is offered a big bribe. He wants to run for president. His struggle over the money provides the first few steps of the plot.

Politics is discussed mostly from a perspective of amorality, the senator admits to himself that among his colleagues bribery is as common as grass. The senators aid is lacking utterly in political principal, but, considering the events of the novel are cast at such a remove from the history taking place at the same time no one gets much of an opportunity to comment on them. This may have been the point.

We are nonetheless confronted with the fact that although allegedly about politics, the novel is really a slice of life kind of thing which uses politics to tell a story which is not primarily a political one.

There is evidence of social change, in one scene where women begin to do the factory jobs that men once did, and in a subplot where a Jew struggles for entry to a social circle whose members hate her on reflex, but towards the end of the novel, when the senator is speaking to an old friend and the friend mentions how different the city is, all I thought as a reader was, “it’d have been nice to see that.”

The aforementioned values dissonance comes from our conception of politicians verses how they may have been perceived in 1967, when Washington D.C. was published.

Post Watergate, post Vietnam, post political action comities, the American people take sleaze and moral bankruptcy for granted. Political history could easily be titled a history of moral lapse with a few laudable and conditional exceptions.

But back in the day politicians, so I hear, were venerated and thought to be morally upright despite reality.

This change in our implicit assumptions of, to name one example,  what is the average senator like,  may have sapped some of the novels punch, because Vidal makes the point that most of them are up to their ears in corruption which is something I already knew.

The character of the newspaper publishers sun gives us the closest thing we have to political commentary. He fights against the Washington culture, hates the legislative aid, first for a variety of personal reasons,  who, spoilers, wins his election to congress. Secondarily the newspaper publishers sun hates the congressman because he’s a calculated politician, using poles to take the most popular positions, going along to get along, as so many do, and Vidal uses the suns hate of the congressman to speak against the increasing roll of good looks and babble which substitute for real discussion of policy.

Because Washington, D.C. was written before the rise of Ragon and our modern campaigns made up of quick televised sound bites and political advertising, this part of the novel is amazingly prescient, its almost too prescient because its complaints have been subsumed by a much harsher reality.

However, if you approach Washington as another literary novel, a family chronicle, a character study, a slice of life, mad men from the forties with all the scenes having to do with Madison avenue cut down to eight seconds, then you will enjoy it. The novel deals with the upper classes, and those parts of Washington they frequent, ballrooms, garden parties and that kind of thing. These period settings are rendered vividly,  and the way the characters speak to one another and maneuver for social eminence and discuss the political figures of the day with a jaded perspective are all things in the novels favor.

While not a political novel, political events Vidal lets us glimpse briefly do move the plot forward. That plot, while not what you were expecting is gripping because Vidal has a firm conception of his characters, an ear for dialogue, and engaging prose.

You will go into Washington DC with a certain amount of knowledge about the period 1939 to 1950, and you will finish the novel with the same amount of knowledge because it is only set in that time, not so much about the central events of that time. But once this is understood, and your expectations are altered, Washington, D.C. is the kind of literary fiction you’ve come to expect. There are affairs, witty writing, a little bit of melodrama substance abuse, and discussions of the human condition. Enjoy.

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2012
08/13
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The Hunger Games is Pretty Good

The Hunger Games is pretty good. I know that description is inelegant for a book review, but its been a while since I’ve written a book review and I’m trying to get back into the swing of it.

In case you’ve been living under a rock and have no idea what the Hunger Games is about, the plot introduction follows.

Katniss Everdene, a girl living in a nation formed after ours was destroyed in an unnamed cataclysm watches as her sister is selected to participate in an annual blood sport tournament in which twelve boys and twelve girls are forced to battle to the death and because her sister is twelve and has no chance whatsoever of winning Katniss volunteers to take her place.

The premise is neither new or complicated but Suzanne Collins fidelity to it serves the novel well. The novels biggest strength is its plot, by chapter three Katniss is already on the train to the capital City of Panem, the nation that replaced the United States. Also by chapter three, all of the major characters have been introduced.

There are two love interests, the first is Katniss’s hunting partner who gets little screen time as he is not selected as part of the hunger games, and the second is the boy from her town who is selected, and whom Katniss may have to kill. These love interests benefit from the strong characterization which is found throughout the novel so that even though they are stereotypical bad and good boys respectively they both are three dimensional. It also helps the dark atmosphere of the novel that she’s going to have to try and kill one of them. There is also a drunken mentor who spends his first few appearences wasted and indifferent to whether or not the people he’s mentoring survive.

The novel isn’t exactly a character study as its more focused on story, but Collins does a good job with the first person narrator of Katniss. She’s been raised in the poorest of the twelve districts that make up the nation of Panem and thus is hard bitten and used to violence and struggle, but has managed to hang onto her humanity enough to be horrified at many aspects of her society which allows her to tell the reader what he needs to know, while also freaking out when she sees people die in front of her. This allows her to kill people and remain sympathetic.

The story moves at a fast clip, only slowing down every once in a while for flashbacks to earlier times in Katniss’s childhood which serve to flesh out a few of the characters by showing them in a context which doesn’t involve a bloody battle to the death.

For a book about twenty-four teenagers trying to kill each other, its not as violent as it could be, and the bleakest aspects of the dystopian society Collins has created are handled with discretion so that the book is appropriate for younger teenagers. The glossing over of sex and gratuitous violence is handled perfectly, however, so at no point does it feel like Collins was afraid of the subject matter she decided to write about, she implies with a few details what some authors would spend pages belaboring, and in that one way the censorship imposed upon her by the demographic she’s writing for benefits the novel. OK, that made up for pretty good, right?

The book can be roughly divided into three parts, before the hunger games, which is the name of the blood sport, the hunger games themselves, and the aftermath. The first part works at ramping up the tension so that even though I was pretty sure Katniss lives because there are two more books after the first I was nervous that she might die at any time once the hunger games started, and Collins does a good job of never letting the reader forget that death’s always right around the corner.

The Hunger Games are a reminder to the citizens of Panem that rebellion will not be tolerated, they are supposed to be punishment for an earlier rebellion. They are broadcast on TV like a reality show, and the book satirizes how our reality shows work. Katniss has a stylist who makes her look pretty for pre hunger games interviews, and the members of the capital see nothing wrong with watching people brutally kill each other.

The interviews themselves resemble the fluff pieces on good morning America, and the early part of the novel keeps showing us almost banal preparations for the contest to come. The contrast between getting makeup done and trying to shine on TV as compared to what’s coming is unreal. Because the novel is first person we stick with Katniss all the time she’s being prepped to die, and Collins does a great job of showing the stress that would result from being in such a situation.

Once the hunger games start, there’s a nice implied contrast between how bloody and violent the contest is for those involved in it and the idea that its entertainment for other people is made to be properly discomforting.  Teenagers die left and right and some of the deaths resonate. Given how short the book is, making miner characters vivid enough  that the reader cares about them when they die is a mark in the books favor.

The world building is balanced perfectly with plot. Katniss will mention facts that are important in passing several chapters before we need to know them, but at no time does the book get bogged down in tons of stuff that is irrelevant to the story. When the facts later come into play they’ve been introduced recently enough in the book that you remember them and its always nice to see how careful bits of exposition are important later on.

As more contestants die, Collins shows how awful it would be to have to participate in such a contest and she gets extra points for making the authoritarian and bloodthirsty society of Panem believable, everyone in the capital endorses the Hunger Games and enjoys watching them, but few of these characters strike the reader as evil, instead they are all misguided and ill informed.

Whoever decided this book would make a great movie has a wonderful eye for this type of thing as one of the books strengths is the way in which Collins draws you in through the settings she conjures up. The capital is decetant and foreign and very flash bang science fiction, while all the characters that populate it are believably human. The arena that the games take place in is dangerous and without comfort and the hunger games themselves which take up the largest part of the novel are well written. The battle fatigue and stress and fear that’s inherent in the concept of having to try and shoot someone in the face with a bow and arrow never abate or grow stale or repetitive.

The best illustration of Collins’s skill as a novelist work is that Katniss is a product of her society. While she’s against the Hunger Games, especially once she’s in them, she isn’t one of those unbelievable characters who lives in a dystopia and has an instinctual sense that everything about it is wrong. She reacts to the cruelty inflicted on her and her family, not on the cruelty inflicted upon the society as a hole. As the book continues and Katniss sees people dying all around her for no reason, the stirrings of a political conchisness begin to show themselves, but this evolution is naturalistic, and isn’t ever ham handedly done through pages of preachy monologue.

If you like science fiction or adventure, or books that keep you turning pages, give this a try. You won’t be disappointed.

One final thing. Some people have noted rightly that the Hunger Games is quite similar to a novel called Battle Royale. The only thing both novels share is that they are both about a reality show where kids try and kill each other. Battle Royale, however is a novel consumed with blood, whereas the Hunger Games works so well because it starts days before the first drop of blood is ever spilled and the comparison between the two is like comparing Dracula and Salem’s Lot. Simmilar but by no means the same book.

2012
03/31
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I finally review something. My review of Something Happened

Something happened is not a book that’ll leave you feeling good, or ok, or average, or below average. Something happened is a book that will leave you feeling that everyone in the world is a bad person. Its the type of book that will leave you feeling like people are worse than they appear to be when you first meet them, and it will make you feel bad about every interaction for the next month or so. Nonetheless, read it.
Written by Joseph Heller, mainly known for writing Catch Twenty-two, this book was his follow up to that novel.
The books a satire of corporate America in the mid sixties and it also happens to be the most depressing piece of fiction I’ve ever read.
Something happens is an odd title, because for most of the book, positively nothing happens.
Robert Slocum, the books narrator, sits in his office or in his house and tells the reader about his life.
He has a wife who he cheats on often, a daughter he picks on because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, a son he loves, and a retarded son who he wishes would die.
Slocum isn’t a happy person. He finds the half empty side to every single activity in his life.
He’s the type of person whose glad he snores so that his wife can’t sleep, who won’t wake that same wife while she has nightmares, and he is glad when she tells him the nightmares are worse than usual. He is upset that his female sexual partners derive pleasure from intercourse because he wants all of the pleasure to be his.
He hates people who have physical malformities, he’s a little racist, and yet after all this, he’s still sympathetic.
I spent half the book hating him, half of it feeling sympathy for him and most of it laughing.
Because the book, while depressing, is also a sterling example of black humor. Slocum is depressed but extremely funny, and his mordent whistling passed the graveyard voice had me laughing out loud.
Everyone describes this book as a satire but I’d argue that its not really a satire. Satire, to me, means that you don’t care about the characters, they exist to prove a point just as characters in ancient morality plays did. But in Something Happened, I cared a lot about everyone except for the retarded son.
Slocum is an ass hole, but he knows it and wishes he were a better person, is in fact slightly better than he gives himself credit for being. I spent most of the book feeling bad for almost everyone Slocum knows because he berates everyone who isn’t berating him, demeans everyone who isn’t demeaning him, and has harsh words to say about absolutely every other character in the novel.
This book is so dark that when I first tried to read it, when I was a senior in high school, I had to put it down because it was making me too depressed to function. I’m really not kidding. Poverty is boring these days, we’ve heard about slums, foreign and domestic, so often that they’ve become hardly worth an eye blink, but Heller, through his narrator its painted a bleak picture of suburbia, corporate culture, and America itself.
Something happened is almost plotless. The narrator deals with his son’s inability to do well in gym class, his wife’s suspicions he’s cheating on her, (which are justified a thousand times,) and mulls over whether or not to take a promotion by replacing a colleague who he hates and feels sorry for. excepting one development which happens towards the end of the novel, that’s its entire plot.
But Heller is one of the few authors I’ve found who can make such a meager soup into something fine, as he delicately interweaves scenes that make you want to cry with scenes that have you snorting. Then he blends the two together. The perfect balance between sadness and humor is one of the two reasons this book is worth reading.
The other is the way Heller can make this douche seem to not be a douche. You root for his marriage, which is bad, you empathize with him, although he’s a huge ass, you even start to feel for his children. This is because the book is taking place mainly in the narrators head and very few bad people think of themselves in that way, and Slocum is no exception.
The most heartrending section of the book is when Slocum recounts, through a series of anichronicly arranged flashbacks, a sort of trist he had when he was working his first job. He thought he was in love with a girl, but was too immature to per sue the relationship properly, so he never dated the girl. He was in love with her and it is hinted that she was in love with him but because of his nervousness and his inability to recognize the daily hints this girl constantly threw around that she wanted him to take her to a hotel for a night, they never ended up together.
He keeps coming back to this event in his life over and over again because the missed opportunity haunts him, looking at it from different angles and thinking about random what ifs.
Slocum mentions early on that he has a knack for telling whose going to have a nervous breakdown at the company, a typist in the office is slowly going crazy.
Other characters in the book, such as Slocums first girlfriend, were crazy, and mental health is one of the books main themes. This has a particularly sinister and ironic undertone, at least for me, which I won’t go into here as it might spoil things
Something happened is a character study. Its about Bob Slocum , but that isn’t the best thing about it. Something happened is a novel where the author has locked you into someone’s brain and won’t let you look away from any thoughts experienced, whether they be noble or awful, and there in lies its brilliance.
Five out of five stars.

2011
03/09
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My review of the Everworld Series by Katherine Applegate

So I want to talk about a different kind of book. This isn’t the type of thing I usually review. Its a series written for young adults called Everworld. The author is K.A. Applegate. Almost no ones heard of it, and if they have heard of Everworld, they probably have dismissed it as some awful dreck for kids. This can’t be further from the truth. 

The books are about four teenagers living in Chicago who all know a fifth teenager, a witch. The witch is pulled into another world, called Everworld, and the four, for reasons they can’t quite understand, are sucked into this world with the witch. 

Everworld is a world populated by creatures of myth and legend, Xoose and Odin, Athena and Amman Ra. If it was a god in human myth, its now living in Everworld. The gods have human worshippers, usually about a town or city full, turning Everworld into a mosaic of different cultures and times. 

This might sound both corny and stupid. The way in which these kids get pulled into this world might seem overly coincidental. 

But I’m here to tell you that if the plot is stupid, it doesn’t matter, because Katherine Applegate has to be commended for making it feel absolutely real, perfectly truthful. 

The four teenagers are as stereotypical as the plot. David, the wannabe hero with something to prove, Christopher, the sarcastic joker, April, the girl next door, and Jalel, the rationalist intelligent sceptic of the group, the kid who is always saying, “This shouldn’t be able to happen.” 

If your even more dissuaded now that you’ve heard about the cast of characters, again I must stop you to point out that Applegate has once again taken a stereotype, and while respecting it has transcended it utterly. Every main character is taken from common obvious stock and every one, while still being exactly what the little descriptions above indicate they are, feels three dimensional, entirely lifelike, as well developed as any character I’ve ever seen in a novel. 

Applegate has a couple of things going for her. These books are short. The series was published on a monthly or by monthly basis from 1999 until 2001 and thus no space is wasted. 

A lot of small early details come into play later on, and these callbacks feel organic. 

Applegate’s a pro at tightly plotted story, and this story zings along at a rapid clip while never descending into action movie insipidness. 

The prose runs the gammit from serviceable to good. The narration is in the first person, and while the prose is nothing special, Applegate has an ear for the internal monologue and also for the teenaged dialogue which makes up a lot of the book. 

Her characters make the impossible feel grounded in the concrete details of reality, just because when they speak, what they say sounds like what you and I would say if confronted with an insane Norse god or a dragon. 

The series is further grounded in reality because while the setting and plot is fantastical, Applegate never forgets that she’s dealing with teenagers. The group of four isn’t happy go lucky. They aren’t friends when the series starts, and they often fight about what to do, and they sometimes fight because they don’t much like each other to begin with. The series spends some time focused on real life issues, such as racism, religion, gender politics. But it never turns preachy. These issues arise naturally so that when the series deals with race, it does so to further the plot or to show characters change. 

These books are hard to get people to read, because when I try to talk about them, I make them sound worse than they are. Even glowing reviews don’t do them justice because summarizing parts of the plot make the thing feel campy when it isn’t. 

Everything you’ll read about these books, in fact, makes them sound worse than they really are. 

I’m not saying they are anything like world literature, but as far as urban fantasy goes, I’m saying they are hands down the best. 

The books are short individually, and when thinking about them each one is like an episode in a serialized television show. A story is concluded in each book, but the novels should be read in order, one after another because the Everworld series is just one long novel divided up into twelve short novellas. When taken as a hole, this novel, in my opinion, is the best piece of American adventure fiction published in the last fifteen years. Its hands down the best series for young adults I’ve ever read. 

It can be enjoyed from anyone from about age twelve on. 

Young adult novels are usually constrained by all sorts of sensorship guidelines imposed by publishers, and, being written for teens, Everworld is under many of these restrictions. 

But the author slides so much stuff under the radar that it doesn’t matter. The books never feel stilted or watered down. Even though they’re for kids, Everworld deals with the fallout of battle uncompromisingly. 

Back when it was not ok to write “fuck” in a novel, I mean when people like Hammet and Chandler were in their prime, authors used to have to describe someone saying fuck without them actually saying it. A sharp guttural word, was how Hammet put it. This one quote should explain what kind of writer Applegate is. “The deep moral authority that comes to a man who has just stood by while someone screamed that particular word and then launched himself into the cleavage of said small man’s wife as though determined to make that word a prophecy, well, a man in that position carries more than his natural height and weight.” 

I think the series suffers from two or three problems. One character in book Eleven never came alive for me, book ten is a comparative slog, but these problems are the type of quibble that only exist because the series is so good. Its similar to a man looking at his favorite comic book, lamenting how one panel isn’t as good as all the others, or how superman’s right eyebrow was drawn at a slant that you notice after reading the comic for the tenth time. 

I cannot push these books hard enough for people who like adventure novels. I really can’t. Nothing I say will easily convey what a fun time I had reading them. 

Applegate has such a gift for drawing characters in quick sure strokes, for telling a wonderfully paced story that grabs you and pulls you along, faster and faster. 

Its funny its glib its dark. Its well done. It goes from fast paced to faster paced. It ramps up the tension. Its always exciting. Despite its action packed plot, it makes you think. I really cannot recommend it enough. If you like fantasy at all, if you like adventure novels, you need to get your hands on this series right now. 

Five out of five stars. 

The author does not have a website. 

If you are looking for these books, you will most likely have to buy them on amazon. 

2010
08/10
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my review of Sean Stewart’s Mockingbird

So I started this blog in late March, mainly for the purpose of reviewing books. I read a lot of books, so the logical thing to do is to review them when I’m done, instead of letting the opinions I have for what I read molder away, forgotten, in some back closet of my brain. 

I thought it a slightly negative omen, then, that since I’ve started this blog I haven’t read one book that I was eminently blown away by. The makers came close, but as I discussed in my review, a certain… Weirdness about doctoros world stopped that from being completely five star. Or maybe it didn’t, I’m too lazy to check. 

But anyway, without further adue, I present my review of Mockingbird, by Sean Stewart, the best book I’ve read since march. 

This book is absolutely fucking brilliant. Go read it. That should be all I need to say, but I’ll elaborate. 

Before reading Mockingbird, I’d heard of Sean Stewart. The people at the New York Times book review love him, so I avoided him. I’m sorry, but any work of fiction the New York times deems good I approach with a lot of caution unless I can get a backup recommendation from a newspaper or magazine which doesn’t force its reviewers to review with something shoved firmly up there ass.. 

This one time, however, the Times was dead on. Everything about this book was amazing. 

A brief plot summary. Toni’s mother dies. Toney’s sister, candy, acting on instructions given from her mother’s deathbed, tricks Toni into drinking spiked wine which results in Toni becoming a conduit for little gods, or spirits. There are six spirits that take Toni over from time to time, against her will and with no warning. 

Each spirit represents a different aspect of life. The preacher is about austerity, Copper is about money and winning, Sugar is about sex and flirting. 

Now, if this sounds trite, or stupid, I’ve described it poorly. It is neither of these things. 

The fact that life can be magical at times is calmly excepted by most main characters. The major characters of the novel except that life has a little magic in it with no real complaint. Candy’s boyfriend is a sorcerer, and at only a few places in the text is this mentioned as atypical. The spirits which possessed Toni’s mother, and then possess Toni, are treated by the family as normal events to be dealt with, the same way you might treat a family member with epilepsy. I hesitate to use the term magical realism to describe this attitude, because I feel people who say magical realism are saying it because they’d prefer not to say fantasy. 

But the fact that the main character is possessed by spirits is known by everyone in the book, and no one, outside of characters that are mentioned but do not appear, disbelieves this or expresses confusion about it. 

The book is written in such wonderful language even if my description has done nothing for you you need to pick this book up for the prose alone. Every sentence is polished, there isn’t a word out of place. And if there is, its just that, a word. No sloppy constructions or bland paragraphs which neither the writer and the reader have much interest in. Stewart’s prose sings with life. most of the Metaphors come across as refreshing and unique without sounding forced. The dialogue is realistic, the descriptions of Texas in the summer are so vivid I felt like I was there. The book is written in the first person. Unlike many books written in this style, however, I never felt that the narator was a standin for the author, or a slightly alttered version of him. Every paragraph and thought Toni has feels like her own. The voice the novel is written in is spot on and never wavers. Stewart might have flaws as a writer, but his prose is not at all, in any way, one of these flaws. 

Stewart blends the fantasy elements and normal concerns of an every day life together easily and naturally, one day Toni is in the mall when she gets possessed by Sugar, the spirit representing sex. She comes home wearing a skirt that’s cut off at the thighs, and she may or may not have fooled around with a Victoria’s Secret salesclerk. Toni’s embarrassed, Candy is amused and concerned, life goes on. The next day, she’s trying to scrape together money to help a neighbor get her roof fixed and no spirits appear at all. 

This is beautifully done, and that’s one of the strengths of Mockingbirds many strengths. Stewart takes a situation which in a bad author’s hands would feel fake and he makes it real, real in a pedestrian but still marvelous way. 

The book has a plot, but its weak. Nothing much happens, Toni’s life isn’t extraordinary in any way but having spirits possess her from time to time. The world is not in danger, nor is anyone she loves. But that doesn’t matter. The things that do happen kept me hooked, I finished this in a day. 

One last commendation for this book and for Stewart as an author. He’s gutsy in what he chooses to do. Of course men write women protagonists and women write male protagonists. A lot of authors do this well, I wrongly assumed Robin Hobb was male, but I’ve never seen anyone do this as well as Stewart has! He writes a female who sounds so female, not in an overstated way, but just in a really authentic way, I would believe it if he’d spent a year in drag to teach himself how to write a female protagonist. This seems like a miner issue, but its just one more thing I loved about this book. 

I’m not easy to please. I loved this book. Go buy it, right now. If you can’t buy it, steal it. But get a copy. 

Five out of five stars! 

Sean Stewart’s web site. 

http://seanstewart.org 

2010
06/29
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Too much Talent, my review of The Talented MR. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

Patricia highsmith is best known for her Ripliad, a series of novels about a sociopath named Thom Ripley. 

Still having a bad taste in my mouth from Hyperian, I decided to check it out as she’s mentioned alongside people like Chandler and Christy, the big’s of the mystery genre. 

I can’t say I was blown away. There was no problem with the writing, and the book went along at a fast clip, although it was never hugely suspenseful. 

Meet Thom Ripley. Unemployed, possessed of a reckless need to risk jail time and a certain low cunning. At the beginning of the book he’s committing miner check fraud just to see if he can get away with it. Turns out he can. 

One night, a man approaches Tom in a bar. He recognizes Tom as a friend of his son. The son has run off to Europe to paint, and the father can’t convince him to return home. Tom admits he was more of an acquaintance than a friend, but even so, by the end of the conversation the father has offered to pay for Tom to go to Europe and try and convince the Son to come back. 

The first third of the book shows this attempt. Lots of time is spent describing the Italian countryside, the Son is staying in Italy. Some time is spent describing the people Tom meets, the wine he drinks, his attempts to learn Italian. This is slow but enjoyable writing. 

If you’ve been following my blog and trust my taste in literature, (unlikely,) and all you want to know is if I liked the book, the answer is it was all right. If you’re planning on reading it, stop here, as my reasons for not liking it are linked to the second half of the novel in such a way that I’m about to spoil most major plot points. 

Tom is sort of a gadfly. People find him amusing, he mooches off of them for a while and when they get tired of him, they kick him out and he moves on. Tom has been living with the Son in Europe. The son gets tired of him, Tom, enamored with the lifestyle he’s been allowed to share, kills the son, steals his passport and impersonates him. 

I really hesitate to spoil the rest of this novel, but it is the reason it is ok instead of good, so I will. The problem is that Tom, for all intents and purposes, gets away clean. Only one person suspects anything, and he never proves it. No one, not the police, not a private dick brought over from the states,, not any of the Son’s friends realize anything’s wrong. And that is the entire second half of the book. Tom worrying for no reason. I am not exaggerating. 

It reminded me of what crime and punishment would have been if the main character of that novel had been less of a complete idiot. Tom worries, takes measures to avoid capture, but none of those measures are truly necessary. 

I’m not upset that Tom doesn’t get caught, I mean, hello, there are four more books in the series and they aren’t called Ripley in jail. But no one comes close to catching him. No one says, “I think your involved in this guys death.” No one says that… Except for one person. But that is dealt with before any suspense can be built up at all. So the second half of the book, while not a slog is a disappointment. The real climax is the murder of the son. 

Now I’m not saying the book isn’t worth reading, because Ripley is an interesting character, a more dandified and less supernatural version of Hannibal Lecter and, assuming the later books in the series are more action packed, they’ll be worth reading. This one just had issues. 

Two and a half stars. 

　 

2010
06/15
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Not worth the Hype, my review of Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

Dan Simmons is an author I wish I liked. He presents interesting concepts, creates characters that should be three dimensional, tells long well thought out stories, and all that happens when I read them is that I wish I liked them more than I end up liking them. 

Hyperion is no exception. Modeled after the Canterbury tails, only with a more extensive framing story, Hyperion takes place in a far future. People have faster than life travel, artificial inteligence has been created and succeeded from humanities control, humanity has colonized hundreds of worlds… 

Against this backdrop exists the world of Hyperion. On this world lives a being called the Shrike. 

Somehow, when groups of people make a “shrike pilgrimage,” the shrike kills everyone in the group but one. The survivor gets anything he or she wants, one request. 

The main human empire is at war with a tribe of space barbarians. Against this backdrop the story begins. 

A detective, a poet, a scholar, a ship captain, a diplomat, a soldier and a priest are the seven chosen for the last pilgrimage. As they each tell there story, the reader realizes that each is somehow connected to the shrike. 

If you’ve read any Dan Simmons before and liked him stop reading this review right now and go read Hyperion. If not, read on. 

Simmons has written a book which I really wish I appreciated more. I can’t find anything wrong with it but it took me weeks and weeks to get through. If I like a book I read it in days. 

I was never uninterested, but I was never truly interested either. Each story, there are seven plus the framing tail, works well. 

They are told in the first person and while Simmons characters sound awfully alike his first person voice is confident and polished. So individually I liked the tails and if Hyperion had been published without the framing device, which admittedly is a third of the book, I would have probably liked it more although it would have made much less sense. 

But the framing sections, narrated in third person limited omniscient drag hard. Bla bla bla. 

They are important as far as the plot is concerned, but I just never got into them. 

The only problem I found with the book was that there wasn’t enough exposition. Its strange because I hardly got through the book, but I think it should have been longer. A key concept of the novel is that the shrike will kill everyone in a group but one to whom it will grant a wish. But no character ever comes out and says this, it has to be gleaned. I got it on its first mention, of course, but even so, I feel many things like this should have been explained more thoroughly as they are major plot points. 

In conclusion, Hyperion is not a bad book. It just wasn’t to my taste, but I can’t say others won’t like it. 

Can’t rate this one, because I feel I’m in a small minority without being able to explain why, but my personal rating is like two stars. 

2010
06/15
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I’m Back and the nytimes Book Review

So I haven’t blogged in a while. I guess that’s why its been raining so much lately, god was crying. Sorry about the hiatus but I’m back now so the sun shall soon shine. Anyway…

   

is good, thoughtful books about interesting historical events or current political issues, but finding interesting novels in the times book review is like finding needles in haystacks. selection there nonfiction. Who the hell gets there book recommendations from the New-York times book review section? I mean, I admit about two-thirds of have a questionI

  

The times just throws out these books that no one wants to read. From pompous author so and so, or from foreign author so and so, this book, about absolutely nothing, has sixteen creative metaphors , a nonlinear plot structure, characters who are more symbol than reality and a wonderful scene where the narrator drinks while looking out to sea. We love it.  

And I have middlebrow tastes. I hate James Patterson, and authors like him, but the times seems to purposefully review fiction that only ass holes want to read.  

2010
05/23
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my reviews of March Upcountry and March to the Sea, by David Weber and John Ringo.

March upcountry and march to the Sea 

I rarely read novels with more than one author. I think collaborating is cheating a little bit, and I always wonder why the hell authors are so lazy that they need to write a novel with someone else. It strikes me as odiously commercial, if you have two authors working on a novel, you can write it for half the work and in half the time and the publisher can make a couple bucks even if the novel sucks. 

Nonetheless, having nothing else to read, I read the two books March Upcountry and March to the Sea by both John Ringo and David Weber. If two authors work on a book, I figure its ok to review the first two books in the series at the same time. 

The series, which has four books to date is an homage to the Edgar Rice Burros style of adventure novels. A spoiled prince, on his way to perform routine diplomatic service crash lands on a planet full of primitive aliens. Luckily, he’s not alone. His royal bodyguard, consisting of somewhere between fifty and seventy marines, is with him. There’s a spaceport across the planet from where the crash landing occurred, and the marines are trying to get the prince to the port so that they can try and steal a ship and get back to Earth. 

I’m divided as hell about these books. They suffer from a lot of problems, and work more as novels of idea’s then they do as fast paced adventure novels, which is ironic, because they are supposed to be fast paced adventure novels, but rapid pacing is the exact opisit of what they actually are. 

These novels drag with a capital D. 

The main plot device, repeated over and over again is that, while trying to get to this spaceport, the marines and the prince influence the primitive alien societies around them. Sometimes they overthrow governments, sometimes they trade technology for safe passage, and all of this is explained in thorough detail. 

A battle that lasts a day in the world of the book can drag on for a hundred pages, and instead of being described in snapshots of blood and gore, its more commonly shown by long conversations of the commanding officers. The series is really more of a hypothetical argument than a novel. “If futuristic marines were dropped on a primitive planet, what would happen.” 

And that question is answered exhaustively. Each society encountered is altered in some way, and discussions of the alterations and the implications, ethical, economic and political, are also discussed at length. 

The other problem is that characters are never really developed well. They aren’t exactly one dimensional, but the character development that does happen is not exactly subtle. The spoiled prince is gossiped about by other characters, with several theories tossed around for why he is why he is, which doesn’t matter for long because he doesn’t stay a spoiled prince for long. This is the type of book where people get better under stress, not worse. So soon the prince is self sacrificing and friendly, a war leader. Now, this isn’t the main problem, because while its not subtle, its not ham handed enough to be too awkward or unbelievable. The real problem is the marines. There are between seventy or fifty or something, an din the first book all of them it seems have several pages of narration which doesn’t matter because most are interchangeable. 

primitive aliens pop up like breeding rabbits, and also get there own viewpoint chapters. One alien tribal leader is much like another, just like most of the marines are interchangeable, so while the perspective is valuable, the actual character background really isn’t. 

Out of the maybe fifteen main characters of each book, three or four are unique enough to be interesting, the others only serve to fill out the exposition. 

I’m the type of guy who is moderately interested in this type of thing, and I finished these two books in about a week. They don’t grab your attention, but they can keep it, because despite the slow pacing, the idea’s the book examines are solidly dealt with, and as I say, are dealt with thoroughly. 

So whether you want to read these books really depends on why you want to pick up a novel. If you want a great story, don’t bother. The plot is an obvious set up to examine idea’s, and is mostly predictable. Example. Does the prince get with the cute female marine? Yes, obviously. If you want truly compelling characters, don’t bother. The characters with the most screen time are developed adequately, but the others are card bored cutouts of the worst kind. But if you want to read a novel that concerns itself with ideas, and not literary ideas but practical ideas, or really, not practical idea’s taken seriously, then read this. discussion of military tactics abound and the solutions to problems are dealt with realistically, even though the situation is obviously fantastic. If your into military history, or emerging technology, or kind of overblown adventure novels, give this series a try. If not, definitely don’t. 

　 

The main strength of this series is how it goes about showing the practical problems of most adventure novels. The main theme is that humanity as a species kicks ass, because we have the technology and morality to uplift lesser species, which I suppose could be read as an allegory for America verses the third world, but I didn’t bother to take the books that seriously. 

can’t give this one a rating, its too subjective. 

2010
04/27
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