Nostromo 
2.0 Stars
4-20-2025
Yet another in the raft of prequel entries for this IP. To be honest I am not sure why they keep making these prequels, perhaps it is because of contractual obligations, like with Sony and the Spiderman franchise? In any case this book explains one more bit of a back story that never needed to be explained at all, and fills in one more bit of background in a painting that was already a complete and self-sufficient work of art. The content of this prequel is just as much of a dog's breakfast as it initial motivation; we are shown scenes and characters and different viewpoints, but it takes like 70% of the book before they ever resolve into anything approaching a story. I was left asking: who are the MC's? What is the plot supposed to be? Are we supposed to care about these characters, or be scornful of them? These seem like basic questions when writing a novel, but the author did not seem overly concerned with them. For much of the narration I had this feeling of "why are you telling me these things?" Which, again is a weird feeling to have when listening to a story. The audiobook narrator did not do the story any favors either; his reading was rapid, and seemingly irritable? irate? scornful? And again it had me questioning what is even going on here? If you dislike this activity so much, why not find a different occupation? Audiobook narration can't pay that well, can it? Because of the narration, passages that might be have been luxurious, or moving, or gently ironic, instead marched along this odd line of barely subdued hostility and judgement.
About 70% of the way through the book events finally started to cohere, and the novel reaches its climax of three men in a boat. The three men are each wildly different, and spend a perfectly dark and still night out on the water. This was ... ok, and reaching towards good. However the men were each very silly in their own way, and this kept the extended passage from being genuinely great. Which brings us to the isms. One of the men on the boat is Jewish, and oh boy does the author go to town on him. This is another theme through out the novel, with plenty of lines being tossed off about the quality of women's thought and the nature of the South American or of the Englishman. I looked up the author and it turns out he is Polish, so I feel like he is throwing a lot of shade for someone who is within slur distance.
Anyway, this was a novel. I'm not sure about the point of it, and I would not recommend it.
Robert E Lee and Me
4.0 Stars
4-20-2025
I went into this book with low expectations, since the basic idea of the book (The CSA was shitty) is a very easy historical and rhetorical target, and what more really needs to be said about it at this point? Also, the idea of being a Southerner/American/Blanco/Dude/Hominid and coming to terms with the layers and layers of bones that make up your history is again, something that we should all be pretty familiar with at this point. The author surprised me though. For one, he actually did have an early life that goes *right* down the line of white supremacy. E.g. going through one prep school/college/social group after another named after Lee, in a way that only a 100? 200? people a year ever do. So he really can speak from the experience of being raised right smack dab in the middle of white-supremacy culture. The book also had a number of interesting historical anecdotes (e.g. Lee accepting a promotion three weeks before quitting to join the CSA, boooo, even I have more honor than that), and roasts of the Southerners that various army bases were named after. It also supplied at least a few historical details about a phenomena that I've read about online, but had not actually read the details of, where politicians in the 1900's traded southern votes for progressive economic policies in exchange for bringing the Lost Cause culture back into the fold. E.g. stuff like FDR gaining some votes for social security or what not, in exchange for giving Southern Senators an army base name or allowing Confederate dead to be buried in Arlington.
Other modest factors that resulted in me liking this book: it is short (200 pages), and the author, a historian who I expected to be a David Brookish nebbish dough-ball, instead looks like a grizzled army ranger straight out of central casting. Maybe you don't need a continual supply of highly concentrated carbs in order to have a thinking mind? Curious. Anyway his head shot did make me like him better. So not a world-changing book, but still brief enough and interesting enough to be worth reading.
The Hollow Places, Kingfisher
3.0 Stars
4-15-2025
In this novel a non-union employee falls down and bangs her knee on concrete while working overtime at her job. Unable to take sick days or vacation days, and having neither health insurance nor worker's comp nor a living wage, her untreated and unrested bruise/sprain cascades into a crippling knee injury and leaves her to face a lifetime of pain, debilitation, and economic and gait precarity. A searing indictment of late-stage capitalism in America.
Kingfisher does Annihilation/Control/Stephen King. This is fine, the world building is fine+, but the MC's patter started to wear on me by about the half-way point in the book.
Long Live Evil
3.0 Stars
4-1-2025
This is an isekai novel (wait! wait! stay with me) about a lady who, on her deathbed, is transported into the grim fantasy world of the hit novel, Time of Iron. She is promised that if she can get the McGuffin from the Royal Arbor in 30 days she will be returned to her world and healed, otherwise ... ? The author immediately takes this in 4 or 5 interesting directions, e.g. our MC has been placed in the shoes of a character who is to be executed in ~24 hours for her villainy, she has only vague memories of the plot events of this fantasy novel, her own interventions in the plot immediately send any previously established plot wildly off the rails, characters that she thought she knew take on different aspects in light of new developments, and questions are raised about who exactly is a real person and who is a character and what is the nature of the reality shared between her world and the fantasy world.
In many ways I liked this. There was frequent, fun, patter, sort of the stuff you might find in a detective novel but more silly. I liked how the author communicated the general plot of the original Time of Iron, filling in the made-up fantasy world in small doses so that we could understand what is going on/who these people are as well as understand how the original novel is being subverted. I liked many of the characters, both in the original and modified form, and I liked the author's willingness to have things lurch wildly off the rails at regular intervals. It reminded me a bit of those BBC comedies, where a stage crew tries to soldier on with a production of A Christmas Carol while everything careens off the rails. And the plotting is not all comical, i.e. some of the schemes are crafty and turn out to be genuinely interesting reveals.
On the downside, the book never fully decides what it is going to be. Is it going to dive into the infinite depths of meta-ness, like Philip Palmer would do? Is it going to settle down with one interpretation of its world, and then use that as a foundation to build up characters that are fleshed out and that we really care about? Eh. It kind of picks some from both paths, and ends up not entirely succeeding at either. Or to put it another way, the book is a bit of a mess. A cheerful mess, but still. Sometimes characters are well written, other times they sink to stock roles and lines. Sometimes the author wants to make the point say that all of these characters matter, and that they each have their own lives and individuality and should be cherished as such, and then other times she will have several dozen people die for a minor joke. There's numerous speeches about the way "evil" or "criminal" is a social construct defined by those in power, but they don't really go anywhere. People make yet more speeches about actually being evil, but then do not do anything even slightly evil. There are numerous talks about how there are unfair and hypocritical double standards for men and women's sexual behavior, but I'm not sure how relevant these talks are outside of medieval/conservative circles. Anyway! As mentioned, a cheerful mess.
A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher
3.0 Stars
3-25-2025
This is fine. I've never been *entirely* in love with a Kingfisher book, and this entry continues the tradition. In this case I wasn't all that excited about the main MC (she lacks too much autonomy through too much of the book), I'm rarely a fan of the English class-system or this sort of middle-class American rendering of it, I never fully connected with the noblewoman/nobleman ensemble that formed, etc. etc. [Edit: reading some of the tags on this book later on, they have the tag "Found Family". But the MC isn't finding family with the servants of the story. And the happy ending is that the MC is promoted to full on gentry. Why her? Why not her chambermaid? Why doesn't the chambermaid get to become a real person? Why is it cute when the butler gets to pretend for a minute that he is a real human being and can talk to the other characters like real and equal human beings? etc. etc.] The book has OK bits; the magic and horror of the setting expands as the book goes on in a sort of Dracula-esque fashion, geese are always good, ditto with playing a game to sound someone out, and there's some perfectly workmanlike instances of wit or humor. Anyway. Go further Kingfisher! Don't just be a Robert Jordan who takes the Star Wars and the Dunes and the other common influences of the day and mashes them together to produce slurry. Make something that is more your own, something that could not be produced just as well by 100 other fan-fic writers.
Oh right, and if you wanted to you could read this as part of the Camilia Bruce extended universe? There's a weirdly large amount of shared concepts between the two of them; a witch, a witch-horse, the witch being hoisted by her own witch-horse, a botched early engagement leading to bad feelings and serial killings, additional marriages with an eye towards widowhood and monetary gain, and children with a somewhat antagonistic relationship towards their mother.
A Murder of Quality
5.0 Stars
3-20-2025
Another early, delightful, Le Carre book. This is sort of the Post Captain of the series, as it takes familiar characters and transposes them to a different genre. In this case you have your spy people, but they are sent off to a murder-mystery, as they try to figure out who killed the wife of a professor at a posh British school. Suspects abound, and they are all intensely horrible in the way that only the British could truly produce, a combination of intelligence and education that has been disfigured and compressed by class/social strictures/gray climate into a truly curdled and malignant but also subtle form. Great stuff.
A Call for the Dead
4.0 Stars
3-15-2025
Filling in some of the early Le Carre stories that I missed the first time through. I'd heard that his earlier stuff is not that great, but that was a misapprehension! Even his first stories are 1-2 tiers above the common author, filled with structural complexity and enjoyable psychological portraits. There's a few mis-steps, but even in his first book he has scenes of a quality that most authors never reach. I suppose my joy in these is a bit like the joy of staring at a face, they are these endlessly fascinating objects that have so much depth and detail to key off of.
Perilous Times
2.0 Stars
3-10-2025
DNF. I enjoyed the start well enough, but after that it devolves into something that has the affect of an extremely unproductive online discussion/argument, as the members of an eco-action group argue with each other about what to do next. *Vietnam flashbacks* I feel like if you're going to have a post-apocalyptic novel, it should be upbeat like Barn 8, or downbeat like The Road, but it shouldn't recreate the feel of a mid 2010's forum argument amongst D tier online people. Also has the signposts problem.
In the Garden of Spite, Camilla Bruce
3.0 Stars
2-25-2024
Big Trouble in Little Brunhilde /
America is meant for people like you /
Put this author on a watch list /
That's an RIR
This is Camilla Bruce's first novel, and it shows both for good and for ill. The story is more straight forward, and told in cruder and brighter colors, and lacks the ambiguity and structural complexity of her later novels. So it's not as intellectual as her other work, but it does have better pacing, less gray, and more vivid emotion. The story is another one of Camilla Bruce's dark and murderous tales, as she re-imagines the life of the notorious historical murderess, Belle Gunness. The lady in question rambles through all the various sins, from Pride and Wrath and Greed and Gluttony and Lust to the final sin of Insurance Fraud, while occasionally guided and advised by a devilish man with a mustache. It's an acceptable story, *very dark*, occasionally dismal, well written. The real lesson from this story though is don't let this author come to America! Her interests are waaaay too specific; keep her in Norway and away from us good, soft, god-fearing American men.
The Butcher of the Forest, Preeme Mohamed
4.0 Stars
2-15-2024
In some ways this is a perfect book for me; it's just the right size (150 pages, if an author says they need more pages than that they are lying), it's about the correct subject matter (a trackless, wondrous, deadly, horrifying, fae forest/Area X), and it's well written and creative and directly feeds into D&D adventure building. The book did not quite stick the landing, but otherwise a really great job. Mother Mohamed, provide more.
All the Blood We Share, Camilla Bruce
3.0 Stars
2-15-2024
I can fix her
Classic story of a plucky immigrant family that heads West to achieve the American Dream (cannibalizing society in order to fatten yourself and your wallet). This is the first Camilla Bruce novel that does not have a double narrative, and I like it! The pacing is much better when the author is not constantly trying to Rashomon everything. Instead we have a single narrative, told from multiple PoVs, as an It'sAlwaysSunny type family of varied fuck-ups try to settle into the cursed soil of Kansas. It's very dark, yet also ~30% less unpleasant than her other novels, as it has less of the charity-less griping that so marks her other stories. And as always she's a solid good writer.
1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated
2.0 Stars
2-10-2024
DNF, due to a combination of A) this book is more about the dry science of archeology than it is about providing a history lesson, and B) what history that is built up seems based on the thinnest of reeds, and the narrative assembled seems so fragmentary and speculative that it's difficult to really pull anything remotely actionable from it and C) archeology professors apparently have the same sense of humor that computer science professors have, i.e. bad. It's been months? years? since I've heard jokes as tepid as those in this book. On the one hand it is impressive that we can say anything at all about civilizations and politics from 3500 years ago, on the other hand what we can say is really only a few pages, not an entire book.
Red Rabbit
3.0 Stars
1-27-2024
A dark, gothic, western, weird, adventure story. The first ~50% of the book is propulsive and really enjoyable, as gamblers, gunslingers, bandits, ghouls, lycanthropes, witches, witch-hunters, ghosts, devils, and school teachers variously chase, flee, ally, and betray each other across the cursed land of Kansas. This first half is pleasingly morbid, with plenty of gory and inventive death, but without crossing over into Laird Barron or Ballingrud horror-depressiveness. It also does a good job of developing the characters both backwards and forwards in time, steadily revealing new bits of history that put current struggles in new lights. Unfortunately the book doesn't really nail the landing. What should be a climactic finish instead gets drawn out and over-explained, and the pacing slows down to a crawl. As a finale the author then re-tells the story in abbreviated form, not once but twice, reviewing and reflecting on the past actions from 2 additional viewpoints. It didn't work for me! Listening to this on audio-book, there was a solid one-hour period where I was in bewilderment and repeatedly asking myself "why hasn't this book ended yet?!". As a final quibble, the ending doesn't really have a supportable moral viewpoint with regard to the witches. The various witches are first portrayed as a threat, then as misunderstood but basically good and enlightened people who are unfairly persecuted by benighted yokels. The yokels were right though! Or at least they have the right idea, even if their particular grievances are kind of silly. The witches in the story were way too dangerous and way too careless with power to be around civilians, and this made it difficult to accept the pro-witch ending that was offered.
Oh! I almost forgot. The audiobook does have 2 genuinely nice renditions of Western trail songs. So that is one additional positive thing that the book did. Not enough to reach 4 stars though. Ad tres astra per aspera.
Green Bone Saga (Jade City, Jade War, Jade Legacy) by Fonda Lee
4.0 Stars
1-22-2024
The Joy Luck Knife Fight Club
Alt: Dishonorable warriors can't 'ear you
An unusual but interesting 1500 pages of alt-history urban-wuxia gangster-clan soap-opera. The first unusual thing is that the author decides to create an alt-history, but also to have the alt-history closely mirror the nations and trends of our own world. I.e. America and Britain get mushed together into a global capitalist Western entity called Hispania. All the Nordic countries become Steppenland. The Cold War becomes the Slow War. Japan becomes Shitar. Christianity becomes the Truth-Bearers. WWII becomes the Many Nations War. Cricket becomes Rucketts. Taiwan becomes Kekon. Etc. etc. etc. So you still have all the main ideas and events of the modern world, but everything has had the serial numbers filed off. Which raises the question of, why do that? Unclear! But unusual. The next big item on the list is Jade. Into this alt-history, the author introduces the idea of "bio-reactive jade" as the Hispanians(West) would have it, or a gift and a test from the Gods as the Kekonese(Taiwanese) would have it. Jade is only found in a single location (alternate universe Taiwan, aka Kekon), and is only usable by a portion of the natives of the island. These lucky people, the Kekonese, can use Jade to access Wuxia-type abilities. This requires a certain aptitude, and a lifetime of training starting in childhood, but at its full flower these Jade abilities include things like super-human lightness and speed, strength and resilience, the ability to sense and read auras, and the ability to heal or harm purely with energy. So that's what the lucky Kekonese get. For the other natives of the island Jade is an inert stone, while for the unlucky population of the rest of the world Jade acts as a sort of Dragon's Gold, driving the possessor to greed for more Jade, paranoia, madness, and finally to bloody self-destruction. So on most Western maps, for most of history, Kekon was a cursed island, guarded by fierce warriors and madness-inducing gemstones. It's only in the modern age that Jade has become more widely known and understood.
Whew, that is 90% of the setup done. Now we enter into the main story, ~1960's Kekon, where the heroic generation of Jade Warriors that drove out the Japanese occupiers is fading away, and the united resistance front formed in that war has fractured into multiple clans, each feuding for power and prestige. Our protagonists come from the main family of the No Peak Clan and ... I would say more but I don't want to spoil anything. Instead in general terms I would say that what you get is a buffet of story elements. Do you want Wuxia combat? Sure, that happens occasionally, though it is in no way the focus of the story like you would get in a Brandon Sanderson novel. Do you want some brief but surprisingly erotic sex scenes? Yep, that happens about as often as magical knife-fights. Do you want trade negotiations? Oh yes, we have trade negotiations. There is family drama, relationship drama, child rearing drama, plots and counter-plots, marriages and deaths, triumphs and tragedies, spies and snipers, bombs and bloodshed, and deep and varied introspection of people's place in the world and their culture. Really it's that last bit that surprised me, in that you have these deep dives into what it means to be Kekonese with a Hispanian parent, or to be a Kekonese that has gone to Hispania for college, or a Kekonese that grew up in Hispania, or Kekonese-Shitarian, or a Kekonese that has come back to Kekon after living abroad, etc etc etc. There's all the racial and cultural aspects that we have in the real world, but also an Honor-based aspect, as an 18 year old that comes from a dueling society takes Intro to Statistics with a bunch of no-magic MBAs and has to navigate and try to find their place in these disparate worlds. The world also gradually grows larger and larger as the story unfolds, and what starts off as bloody sword fights between island clans gradually widens out to include more and more aspects of the modern world. It reminded me of the Expanse in that way, in that the enormous and seemingly all important concerns of the first novels gradually become just threads in a much larger tapestry.
Is it good? Kind of. At various points I ranged between ranking it at 2-4 stars, between loving it and wanting to throw it away in disgust. Let me just say that one thing the novel does well is that it does not give characters too much plot armor. As it mentions at several points, there is nothing certain in a duel, and it is entirely possible for characters that you have spent ~500 pages with to either die or to be crippled in various ways. The series doesn't engage in Game of Thrones style grim-dark just for the sake of it, but it is cognizant that there is no completely safe way to engage in a magical gang-war. One other compliment I would give to the author is that she takes positions that I don't agree with, and does a wonderful job of selling them. I.e. not a fan of gangsterism or clannism, but she does an excellent job of making the protagonists sympathetic despite their flaws. Going back to Game of Thrones, I've never read George RR Martin or any other fantasy author and thought to myself "you know, I should really start a Great House". Here though the author does a good job of selling the benefits of extended family and exchanged favors, rather than atomized individuals living in a world of equally applied laws and rules and money. Not saying that she has changed my mind, just that she managed to strongly convey these character's viewpoints through the story. Another compliment; you really want someone to make a boardgame out of this world building, something like Mr President, that models the steadily expanding concerns of the Kekonese clans. I would do it myself, if not for that great Albatross of Copyright.
One more note: the book Jade City is about a war, while the book Jade War is about the city. Someone should let her know about this oversight.
You Let Me In, by Camilla "Baddy" Bruce
3.0 Stars
1-5-2024
Why can not two things be true at once?
Another dismal British tale of domestic abuse, dark magic, and dogging. As with the Witch in the Well, this story provides a twin narrative. There's one version in which the events are the result of fairy magic, and another version in which the events are the result of CSA. Both readings seem pretty valid. Actually, wait, there's a third reading, in which both of these things are true and the events are the result of both leeching fairies and childhood sexual abuse. :(
Overall I liked this one more than The Witch in the Well. The pacing is better, the main character is not as unpleasant to deal with, and the supernatural creatures, if they exist, have more life and vitality to them. Not like the sodden kelpie and her chained witch. Still, this is a pretty dark novel, and towards the end the narrator shades more and more towards the neurotic passive-aggressiveness that made the previous book so unpleasant. If you're going to impale someone's heart with a rune-carved spear, own it girl! Don't hide behind made up shadow children. And while the pacing in this is not terrible, it's still slower than it could be because of the author's desire (like in the Witch in the Well) to tell a twin narrative, where each event has two explanations associated with it. While I do often like art that contains its own critiques and counter-explanations (e.g. Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, e.g. much of Nabakov, e.g. Chappell Roan's Femininomenon), in this case the fullness of the critique does slow down the pacing. In the previous the examples, the critique is ~10% of the story, whereas here the critique is ~33% of the story.
Anyway. Bruce is a strong and inventive writer, good at coming up with both folk lore magic and interesting narrative structures. I'm looking forward to what she comes up with if she widens her scope and branch out to tell more varied tales.
Black Mountain, Bad Angles, Laird Barron
2.0 Stars
12-25-2024
"Genius Losi" - some idiot who narrates audio-books, a complete fool
On the plus side, I am here for modernish, Call of Cthulhu type adventure-mysteries as a former mob-hitter and current private detective gets drawn into brushes with the dangerous and esoteric. On the down side, it's difficult to keep a straight face when listening to much of MC's internal dialog, so you just have to ignore about 15% of his patter (especially the parts relating to his Dale Gribble type mentor). It's like if the Sandman Slim novels took themselves seriously, i.e. dire. Back on the positive side, I do sincerely like the MC's laconic, alcoholic, ex-marine, side-kick who gets the best comic lines and who is more of a real and reasonable person. Also a fan of when the investigation phase is over and the MC gets in a fist-fight with some eldritch herald. As I've noted before, where Lovecraft would just pass over the ineffable and horrible with a few lines and then fade to black, Laird Barron is much more likely to describe in precise physical detail what happens when a Mi-go or whatever removes your brain and puts it into a jar. Back to the negative! The mythological references and allusions don't work, and like the MC's deep-thoughts are pretty cringy. So, eh? I feel like the author basically had one story in him, and he was good at telling that story and it did well, and so he kept at it, and now over the course of ~10 novels he's gradually branching out, developing, widening, and trying to write new narratives that are not that one initial story. I am there for him in this journey! Even if the current phase of his journey is kind of rough.
The Sabres of Paradise
2.0 Stars
12-20-2024
You people need Tzeentch
This history book has been on my to-read book for 10 years? 15 years? since apparently it was one of the influences on Frank Herbert's Dune series. And you can see some of the inspirations that Dune took from the culture of the Caucus; the mountain tradition of personal and familial vendetta, the universal open carrying of daggers, the remote and highly defensible aouls/sieks, the messianic figure in the form of Shamyl (aka the Lion of Daghestan, aka the Third Imam, aka the Shadow of Allah), and the Daghestani supplying the inspo for the Atreides & Fremen, while the imperial Russians provide the inspo for the Houses Corino & Harkonnen. Still, I wouldn't read too much into this influence; the history provided some color and some general themes, but it was really just the slightest sliver of a seed for the Dune novels. It's mostly interesting in the parallels it raises between the modern world and the fictional world; e.g. the Atreides who are often read as the heroes of the fictional story would equate to ISIS in the real world, while in the real world the Paul Atreides figure ended up being first captured by the Russians, then feted and pampered by the Russians, then spending the last few decades of his life pensioned off and making social calls in a mid-sized Russian town. Sort of universal jidhad dissolving into Jane Austen.
For this book itself, it is only a history book in the loosest of terms. It's more the result of the author's personal passion project and idiosyncratic investigations, and it focuses on individual incident, character, and personality more than it does on the larger flow of history or laying out a clear timeline of events. It's also from the age where authors would talk a lot about the essential nature of the Oriental, or the Frenchman, or of the Russian. It's also super, super fucking depressing, or at least the first 75% of it is. On one side of the conflict you have Imperial Russia at its most conservative and corrupt and brutal; willing to throw away the lives of its slave-soldiers by the hundreds of thousands, and killing or imprisoning anyone showing slightest leanings towards liberty, fraternity, or equality. On the other side of the conflict you have the mountains-have-eyes religious hillbilly zealots, who would love to be dirt poor but in most cases can only afford barren rocks, and who split their free time between praying to God, knifing each other, and kidnapping and raping 13 year olds. At various times during this portion of the reading I thought of the Three Body Problem and its decision to signal the aliens so that they can come and wipe us out, of the God-as-Watchmaker metaphor where he created the universe and set it in motion in order to observe it play out precisely to his calculation and what a boring and awful experience that must have been for him, and of how none of what I am reading is disproving the RadFem hypothesis of "maybe we should kill off all the men?" So, not a great time or area of the world in which to be alive.
As mentioned though, the book takes an odd turn in the last 25%. The Russian Tzar gets replaced, and his successor decides to try ... not being evil? And then Shamyl, the leader of the resistance to the Russians, is finally cornered, defeated, and captured. Rather than being executed, instead he's taken to the big Russian cities, greeted with parades and cheers, becomes a minor friend of the Tzar, and is settled along with his family and retainers in a snowy but pleasant Russian town. During the decades of warfare very little was known about Shamyl with any surety, instead he was just this shadowy and legendary leader masterminding the Murid's attacks on/resistance to Russian encroachment. And then in the sunset of his life suddenly everything is known about him, and is recorded by the Russian aides who managed his estate as well as by the thousands of people he dined with in this last stage of life. He seems to have taken his removal from absolute power with grace. I think most of us would have difficulty with the transition, especially losing the ability to lift a finger and have who ever was bothering you instantly beheaded. From most accounts Shamyl seems to have been Kvothe-like figure; charismatic and tough and talented and lucky and smart, but also constantly scheming to put himself at best advantage and make himself appear larger than life. One of the later-life encounters that stood out was when Shamyl met a visiting illusionist, and he saw through most of the tricks pretty quickly, but then demanded, nearly at sword point, that the other tricks be explained to him. This was a guy who never stopped thinking about stage craft and presentation. Even at a far distance you wish Shamyl had been able to live a different life where he could have put his talents to less murderous use.
Ok, now the part where I recount the more minor bits and pieces I found interesting:
From Civ5 fame, we have the Krepost. This was a Russian/Cossack invention, and referred to basically the smallest fort/watch tower possible, manned by ~5 soldiers. These were the nannites of frontier warfare, and were placed in the thousands along the border, with each krepost only ~100 or so yards from the next. As a hinterland tribe these must have been terrifying, since they prevented infiltration, could reinforce their neighboring Kreposts, could slow down larger raids long enough for larger Russian forces to arrive, and steadily advanced across the frontier in a cordon that contained more and more land each year.
Quotes about People X are like this, People Y are like that:
"Like all Poles, Przhetzlavski was adept at turning everything to political account. After the
suppression of the Polish risings in 1863, he often spoke ..."
"French preceptors occupied a singular position in Russian households.
Whatever the barriers of geography, politics, or language which isolated Russia
from the rest of Europe, large numbers of French tutors found their way there
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and were followed by an invasion
of English nannies. Both occupied a remarkable place in the westernization of the
country. The tutors may be said to have had a profound effect on Russian
education and culture, sophisticating and Gallicizing their little charges just as
the nannies Anglicized them; superimposing discipline, plain foods and
punctuality on these basically tempestuous babies. Although neither tutors, nor
nannies, appear to have been able to achieve more than purely superficial effects
of logic and order. As soon as their charges grew up, numbers of them were to be
found blowing out their brains over some imagined slight; breakfasting at
midnight; sobbing away whole afternoons sustained by pickled herrings; gambling
or drinking for forty-eight hours on end; or galloping across the steppes in furious
charges against fate. Soudba! Toska! Fate! Spleen! French tutors, and even English nannies, were no match for the Slav soul."
Excuse making when you accidentally kill the Third Imam's cat while he is away on business:
"Early in 1853, when Shamyl was absent for some months fighting in the
mountains, poor Vaska-Nourman pined; refusing all food. In vain the choicest
morsels were prepared for him, the household hanging over him solicitously. In
vain Khazi Mahommed moved into his father’s rooms trying to feed the cat by
hand—it was inconsolable and at last died. The whole aôul was becalmed in grief.
Khazi Mahommed assembled all the available Murid dignitaries to honour his
father’s pet, giving it a special burial and a funeral ovation worthy of a Naib. But
no-one dared inform Shamyl of the tragedy. ‘Now it will go badly with me,’ he said,
hearing at last of his loss. To him, Vaska-Nourman must have been mascot and
companion, someone who shared the days of his glory and who returned his love
unquestioningly—and made even less demands than the gentle Shouanete"
Russia, never a great place to be:
"The Dekabristi—so named from the fact that their revolt took place in
December—were a group of cultivated and liberal young army officers devoted to
reform the liberation of the serfs and, above all, to the formation of a
constitutional government. Their very idealism, in its purity, made them incapable
of carrying out their revolt against the tyranny which Nicholas embodied. Their
abortive stand was a heroic madness, embodying the whole of nineteenth-century
Slav psychology. The time was not ripe. The people were not ready; the idealists
stood alone—and fell alone. Alexander Herzen was to write of them with love and
anguish, throughout his Memoirs:
Between 1812 and 1825 there appeared a perfect galaxy of brilliant
talent, independent character and chivalrous valour, a combination quite
new to Russia. These men had absorbed everything of Western culture, the
introduction of which had been forbidden… They were its latest blooms
and, in spite of the fatal scythe that mowed them down at once, their
influence can be traced, flowing far into the gloomy Russia of Nicholas, like
the Volga into the sea.
The merciless manner in which the new Tzar suppressed not only the
Dekabristi, but every personal freedom or liberal measure, kept the country cowed
throughout his reign, and made him the embodiment of that tyranny which the Dekabristi sought to destroy."
"It had been raining heavily, the children were coughing—those
who were left, that is, about a third, were already dead, en route.
‘Not half will reach their destination,’ said the officer in charge.
‘Have there been epidemics?’ I asked.
‘No… but they just die off like flies. A Jew boy, you know, is such a frail, weakly
creature… he is not used to tramping in the mud for ten hours a day and eating dry
bread—then, being among strangers, no father, or mother, nor petting; they just
cough and cough, until they cough themselves dead… And I ask you—what use is it
to the State? What can they do with such little boys? … Well, we must be off… Hey!
sergeant! Tell the small fry to form up.’
‘They brought out the children,’ continues Herzen, ‘It was one of the most awful
sights I have ever seen… Boys of twelve or thirteen might somehow have survived it,
but little fellows of eight and ten… Pale, exhausted, with frightened faces, they
stood in thick clumsy soldiers’ overcoats with stand-up collars, fixing helpless, pitiful
eyes on the garrison soldiers who were roughly getting them into ranks. The white
lips, the blue rings under their eyes looked like fever or chill. And these sick
children, without care or kindness, exposed to the icy wind that blows straight from
the Arctic Ocean, were going to their graves."
Blood Standard, Laird Barron
3.0 Stars
12-20-2024
Apparently I have no idea what I want. I thought a gritty and hard-bitten Laird Barron crime-detective-adventure story would be right up my alley, but in practice not so much. Part of the problem rests with me; I haven't really read many of these stories, and while in theory I thought I would like them, when the narrative actually starts unspooling I'm a bit put off by it. It's just not really a fantasy that I'm enamored with, in fact the opposite. Have none of these people heard of index funds? Why are you getting into fist fights and murdering people rather than checking out new board game designs on Table Top Simulator? It's just this entire way of life and mind set and fantasy that is not super-attractive, especially to me, with my bird-thin programmer bones. Part of the problem though rests with Laird, in that his criming narratives don't really make much sense. E.g. the book starts off with mobsters in Alaska, and I'm just not sure that Alaska can support that many mobsters. Like you have 4 small icy towns with a total population of ~5000, that is not enough territory to support a half-dozen Italians in suits. Some local families that maybe smuggle cigarettes or grow pot or whatever? Sure! But there's only so much organized crime that can really go on in a collection of scattered outposts. Similarly, when the narrative moves to the East Coast, the story is set in a sort of Miller's Crossing world of feuding Italian families and rules of honor, rather than in the actual present day of what, Serbians? Albanians? Russians? Cartels? It just doesn't come off as realistic. Laird Barron doesn't really have this issue with his Cosmic horror stories; if his tales of space leeches and dead worlds aren't accurate, there's no one there to gainsay him. Moving closer to the real world though, I think he could benefit from doing some research for his novels. Related quibbles: A) the NSA does not do field work, they do not have teams of assassins or networks of informants B) FBI partners or police partners do not disagree in front of interview subjects, except *maybe* as part of some ploy. (or at least that's what Rivers of London has told me, and that seems like something that would be true) C) you do generally get arrested if you kill a score of people over the course of 2 weeks, even if there is some corruption in the local PD. There's just no way this doesn't attract all sorts of attention.
So, what is good here? I like Laird's writing, even if the actual content doesn't always make sense. He's skilled at the basic profession. I liked the mild tie-ins to his horror universe, which enliven an otherwise kind of pointless tale. I like that he gifts the MC not necessarily with extreme smarts or deadly skill, but with ~350 lbs of mass and a quasi-supernatural ability to take a beating/stabbing/shooting and still recover from it. I like that the inflection point for the MC and other Laird characters isn't a murder or a bag of money or a dame in distress, but rather cruelty/murder of animals. Going back and mildly spoiling an earlier Laird short story, in the short story the MC is a big game hunter/poacher, and over his life he's shot countless hundreds of buffalo/elephants/etc. And he's with a group of gentleman hunters in the deep woods and they're all contending with a giant satanic moose. Trust me, it's scarier than it sounds. And the MC in this story is worried that the moose will get him, but eventually he gets reassured by the moose that really, there's nothing for the MC to worry about, since the MC has belonged to the moose and his buddies since way back, so there's no need to chomp on him now. With Blood Standard, Laird takes the opposite tack, and it's the MC's violent refusal to go along with a hunting expedition that's the trigger for his modest moral improvement, and causes the MC's path to diverge from the standard doomed/damned Laird Barron MC. So, an argument for Jainism? Or at least veganism. In any case, I liked that it predicates the story on deeper ideology? metaphysics? the basis elements of the Laird Barron universe? rather than on more standard mob/crime/detective concerns. It has a little of the flavor of Tim Powers in its Dashiell Hammett.
The Croning, Laird Barron
4.0 Stars
12-15-2024
What is a Croning but Laird persevering?
I was ambivalent about this book, and at different times during the reading I was placing it at anywhere from two to four stars. The main change in this book is a positive one, in that rather than writing a number of short stories here Laird crafted a longer running narrative. I thought this worked really well and allowed Laird to build and layer a narrative that had more power than his usual multiple disconnected stories. The larger story is still somewhat episodic, as you learn about different terrible episodes over the course of this one guy's life, but it is always building this larger over-arching story that grows gradually darker and more raddled. On the flip side, the crow meme. You know the one. Laird has already used this monster/mythos a couple of times before, and honestly once was enough, so I didn't really appreciate a whole book dealing with the same over-tuned creatures. You can only feed so many level-0 characters into the maw of a space-and-time-manipulating cosmic god and its billions of ultra-tech servitors before the exercise becomes boring and repetitive. I started to wander a bit there at the end; like has anyone tried a flame thrower on one of these guys? The confrontations always seem to happen when the MC only has their bare hands on hand, why not have even one character just have a try at pre-emptively burning their shit down? Or maybe some humor? They're going to torture you for eternity anyway, maybe make fun of them a bit first? Repeat what they say in a silly voice? Point out their tendency to Xanatos gambit any minor reverse?
But! On the flipped-flip side, this book was kind of genuinely depressing, so I feel like that deserves some sort of recognition? If nothing else Laird is a good writer; he might not be writing what I want him to write, and he is usually writing kind of the same thing, but his execution of both the moment-to-moment of the story and on his larger themes is always superb. So, good job?
And now a Laird re-cap and re-stock. For someone who isn't a Laird completionist, I feel like reading just one of his horror books, that is not Occultation, is probably enough. Occultation is the weakest of his collections, but all the others tend to cover the same themes, mythos, story beats, etc at about the same level of quality. So just read any one of them and you should be fine. I also think Laird would be really, really good if he branched out to write basically anything else but this? And great news, he actually has! It seems he's written a trilogy of noir-action-crime stories, and I think these should be a great fit for his style of writing. I'm excited to try them out next.
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, Laird Barron
4.0 Stars
12-15-2024
A surprising number of Satanists
Pretty Lairdish. The stories are similar to the early ones of his that I read, though the tone has lightened by about 20%. A prototypical early Laird Barron story has an unbalanced protagonist that is alcoholic/drugged/suicidal, and they are facing off against God, and God wants to eat them, and then God eats them in a horrible fashion. So there's not a lot of autonomy or chance to survive for the MCs, though in various cases their struggles could be pleasingly scary or memorably horrific or just really unpleasant and depressing. In these more recent stories, I feel like the protagonists have slightly more of a chance; in a few of them the MC even survives with part of their sanity intact. I kind of like this turn by Barron. I also found it gratifying/uplifting that in one of the stories, the monsters at least partly come to the attention of the security state and the NSA, which kind of edges these stories into Delta Green territory, which I generally like and which I think would be a some new and interesting territory for Laird to explore. It's fine to have horrible deaths and monsters and things that are vastly powerful and that we don't even slightly understand, but also it seems unfair to pit these monsters against random alcoholics. Put these entities up against the Mormons in the FBI, CIA, etc., and then evaluate how well they do.
Another change I noticed is that Barron is building up more of a mythology now; where the early stories were a bunch of horrific one-offs, here he is doing more to link his current and earlier stories into a larger web. I'm kind of ok with this, but it also feels a bit like selling out and McStandarizing his stories rather than having them each be their own wild and individual tale of some cosmic horror that we don't understand.
On the downside, there's not one but two different meta-stories in here that involve the author writing about authors. This is always a sure sign that a writer is running out of fresh ideas, and as a reader these sorts of stories become unbearably twee after the first few dozen that you've read.
And finally, a half dozen nice things in this collection:
- a description of a dire-antelope eating a guy's head
- a description of the stars, star-siphoning a guy
- a description of a melee with a bunch of Hills-have-Eyes peasants
- a short but quite likable story of Selma and Louise and skinshifting
- the crones, who start out extremely creepy and then continue becoming more creepy for every sentence of the next 5 pages
- the buzzing of fluorescent lights. For some reason most authors never mention the message being hummed out by fluorescent lights, even though this is the sort of lived detail that we all experience and which would do a lot to ground and enrich their novels