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
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 mutiple 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 charityless 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
Rivers of London, books 8-9
3.0 Stars
12-05-2024
The same, but slightly improved, but also starting to wear slightly thin. The main improvement is that the stories are finally free from the long-running antagonist (FM2) that they were fencing with in the first 7 books. This antagonist was OKish as an antagonist, but he also introduced a lot of narrative dissonance. On the one hand the author wants to have a somewhat genteel police procedural series that sure, has some murders, but also generally has satisfactory endings. On the other hand, the main antagonist has over his life accumulated a ~three figure body count, with the potential to increase that to 8 figures, so this sort of polite policing didn't really match the situation at hand. Like, if you even think you know where the antagonist is you should have the RAF drop a 2000lb bomb on the location, rather than going in and having yet another magical pillow fight with him.
Anyway! These later books tell more one-off stories, and they benefit from having a strong foundation of world building and characters that they can create these new stories on. As with the first 7 books, each new book accretes moderately more magical theory, cosmology, magical beings, and British people. It's fine stuff, though not extra-ordinary and rather leisurely paced. I would also praise the author for being someone who is A) obviously a giant geek and part of geek culture, while B) being able to write, affectionately, about this culture without making you want to jump off a bridge. Oh! And I consistently loved the talking foxes in every scene they are in.
The Peloponnesian War, Kagan
3.0 Stars
11-20-2024
happiness requires freedom, freedom requires courage, courage requires setting fire to a cop car
This book covers the Peloponnesian War, i.e. ~4 decades of internecine war between the city states of ancient Greece. These wars were utterly ruinous for Greece's power and culture and civilization, and it's basically the last time you hear about them influencing world history, but the wars *did* at least generate a lot of interesting vignettes and international relations case studies, and so they were not a complete waste. One of the reasons this time period is still interesting 2500 years later is that A) the city states of Greece had a sort of PreCambrian Explosion of different models of governance, with each city having its own bespoke combination of kings, consuls, senates, direct democracy, republic, elected generals, oligarchs, navarchs, etc. etc. So you had all sorts of wild political setups, as people started the various political experiments that would, over the millennia, gradually refine themselves into our own perfected form of governance. These states were then pitted against each other by B), the fact that none of them really had a good way of subduing any of the other states. Occasionally one of the cities would defeat another city-state, but they had no effective way of making these victories stick, either by incorporating the defeated into their own polity, or by doing an Israel and murdering/driving off the previous inhabitants. The city states did occasionally place down their own settler-colonies in claimed lands, but these colonies mostly did not grow to significance in a reasonable time, and if they did become significant they would "bud" off from their mother-city and become their own independent entity, and so there was no real and solid empire building going on. So instead you have this more or less constant froth between the states, as they did their best Machiavellian plotting against each other, and the wheel of fate brought first one city and then another high, and then low, and then high again. Again, not great for the Greeks, but interesting if you want to see every possible configuration of ancient state craft and diplomatic relations.
Whew. Ok, one quick caveat, there wasn't really any "good guys" during these wars. Other people on the internet have written plenty about this, but the quick summary: The Athenians are the easiest to identify with, since they practiced direct democracy among their citizens, but even they were more akin to a group of verbose cartel members, who did invent the discipline of History in the West, but also ran a mini-empire on the basis of "you give us your money and we will not kill you and torture your family". Their main opponents, the Spartans, were kind of like the Old South, except way, way, way, way, way, way worse. The other city states were similar; e.g. the Argives and everyone else were slave states, the Corinthians were messy and always starting drama, the Argives and Sicilian colonies and the etc. etc.
One of the more interesting bits of this time period is how well these conflicts model later world conflicts, but on a micro-scale. E.g.
- cold war in miniature, reminds me of CStross story about Cthulju copy and pasting various cold war states onto an infinite plane in order to observe human societies and their interlay in the same way we would examine a petri dish or an ant mound
- distributed intelligence, rather than having all the decision making concentrated at the center of a polity
- many incidents of humor
- relation to us civil war and distribution of loyalties
Rivers of London, books 1-7
3.0 Stars
11-20-2024
A slower, more genteel, more English, urban fantasy. In this case the MC is a green police officer, who stumbles into the supernatural while on a case and is gradually inducted into more and more of the mysteries of English magic. These stories are odd? One of the minor themes of the stories is jazz, e.g. the MC's dad is an almost famous jazz musician, and the second book is about a series of cases in and around the London jazz scene. And the books are a little like the jazz, they sort of noodle along, doot-dootling, taking their time, in no particular hurry to get anywhere. The moment to moment experience of reading them is nice, and they can develop a pleasant patter once they get going, but this slow and unhurried pacing means that the books are never really page turners or thrillers. In particular, when starting a new book, there's definitely a hump of a few hours that you have to get over before settling in to the new story. Usually with an audio book series I'll just listen to all the stories straight through, but with these, in between each book, I definitely needed a few hours of light comedy podcasts before being ready to hunker down and start the next Rivers of London book.
I think part of the issue with the pacing/urgency is that these books lean more on the British police-procedural aspect than they do on the urban-fantasy aspect. So there's (almost) never a case where it is the protagonists against Cthulu or where they are badly out-matched; rather the MCs can always draw on a police force that numbers in the tens of thousands, a dense grid of CCTV cameras, small armies of analysts, tactical teams, etc. etc. The MCs do occasionally face threats to their lives, but for the most part these threats can be defeated/routed/contained if the MCs can just get back to their literally thousands of comrades. Or to put it another way, the MCs (almost) always have a monopoly on violence, and they only need to worry about local and temporary disturbances to that monopoly. So MCs go out on most investigations armed with a baton, or maybe a taser if there's a particularly dire situation, while in the Dresden universe the characters will not walk to the bathroom with less than a .45 and a shotgun. In the Rivers of London series really the struggle is not to defeat a big bad, but rather to solve the case, and to figure out and resolve whatever is happening before more people are injured. There were some parts of these police procedurals that I liked; for one the stories take a thoroughly modern and rational approach to major crimes, with all relevant info being entered into a centralized database for the case, while dozens of investigators methodically and exhaustively trace through every branch and leaf of relevant inquiry. So everyone who might possibly be involved in the case gets interviewed, and everyone and everything they reveal gets interviewed/investigated, and so on in an endless produce/consume loop until the case is solved or there is no more information to process. It's very much a breadth-first, almost organic-AI type of investigation, rather than an investigation that follows the single thread of the whims of a solo genius detective. This leads to a lot of dead ends, and occasional partial successes, and is kind of boring? But it is at least intelligent and sensible, and I'm fine with boring, as again these books do have a nice patter once they get going. I could however see a solid 60% of the urban-fantasy audience just wandering off from these repeated dead-ends. Other notes on the subject of boredom: the MC talks about real estate like some authors talk about weather or scenery or the sky, basically any new scene will involve a discussion of the area's architecture or the history of the real estate in the area. I feel like this is a very middle-age, middle-class area of concern, i.e. it's something that me and my Mom would talk about, and is perhaps not the most exciting thing that the author could be writing. I also need to mention the Fae; there are dozens of river Gods and Goddesses, the eponymous Rivers of London, and they do basically nothing for like ~5 books? Again, a very weird authorial decision to introduce a Fae court, spend countless pages hyping them up, and then have them basically be uninvolved in the plot except for in the most modest of ways. These characters gradually start to play a more active role in the books, but oh wow does it take a long time.
Ok, so after 2 paragraphs of complaining, let me mention some of the positives. The writing is good writing; it's never less than competent and intelligent, there's constant small bits of humor and progress and spectacle, there's long running, low-key character duets between the various members of the police, the British magicians, the moderately magical underground, small time criminals, and the more elevated varieties of Fae and river-deities. I enjoyed the magic system, with its description of magic as being something like a musical note, a series of N dimensional shapes or sounds in the mind that practitioners gradually learn to hear and then to recreate during their training. I liked the ill-definedness and openness of the magical world, and the slow accretion of different magical traditions that the MC is gradually exposed to. Basically no one has a full picture of the magic-elephant; and different groups each have their own slice or perspective in how they interact with magic. I liked that the MC's family were immigrants, and his Mom is a house cleaner, and he spent swathes of his childhood helping her out at her job, and so he's constantly gathering impressions/clues of crime scenes and people's lives by how well they have dusted/cleaned/maintained their domicile. I also liked the solid Londonness of the stories; I think I finally might be beginning to develop the faintest understanding of the various English accents and their implications. I liked the MC's moderate naivete and idealism, and I liked the general upbeat and positive nature of these stories. I liked the author's take on urban-goblins and their combination of low-key criminality, bone-deep shiftiness and absolute inability to give a straight answer, while also being sort of charming and likable and ever so slightly helpful in a roguish and scuzzy way. Like they will steal your food from the break room fridge, but they also at a fundamental level want everyone to get along and not murder each other over ideologies and desires that seem absurd and incomprehensible to them.
The Familiar, by Leigh Bardugo
3.0 Stars
10-10-2024
Please clap
The library practically forced this on me, by placing it prominently on the "New Reads" shelf and me being bored. It was ... not bad? I've been burned by Bardugo in the past, but this was a slightly more quiet and self contained tale and I appreciated it for that. It reminded me of something that Naomi Novik would write more than anything, along the lines of her Spinning Silver. I think the story also benefits from being set several hundred years in the past, and avoiding some the political/cultural minefields of the present day. So: competently written, a fine historical fairy tale, but also somewhat marred by the standard Bardugo flaws of a pacing that is a bit too slow, situations that seem ~35% too unnecessarily grim, and a magic system that is too loosey-goosey for stats focused scientists like me.
The Library of the Dead, books 2 and 3 (Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, The Mystery of Dunvegan Castle)
4.0 Stars
10-05-2024
More of the same! Wide ranging language and accents, Scottish history, magical physics and magical system building, warm friends and family, and post-apocalyptic wizard politics. The main difference from the first book is that the plots have become considerably more complex. Oh and has a neat thermal/magical explanation for the second book's primary mystery. The MC continues to be energetic and precocious, but also deliriously rash and foolish at times. I'm convinced that she's employed by her Dumbledore mostly to stir up the waters and force other actors to reveal themselves, rather than to actually solve any conspiracies. The author also has a real talent for writing posh, condescending, manipulative, and aristocratic antagonists, which I consistently enjoyed. Actually wait I also enjoyed his diplomatic and persuasive peace keepers too. He's just really good at writing people, which I suppose is a useful talent for a novelist.
The Library of the Dead
4.0 Stars
9-20-2024
Bam! You've been Bardo'd!
Another entry in the sub-genre of YA books where magisterial wizards use their young charges to prosecute old grudges against other established wizards. This time the urban fantasy is set in a post-disaster Scotland, where the British Isles have been blighted by some (magical?) catastrophe. The rest of the world isn't doing so hot either, but Britain has been particularly hard hit and things have regressed a great deal, and so it's Edinburgh by way of Lagos. And now we are edging up to the main feature of the book and the main reason I liked it, this book is completely packed with *stuff*. There's a whole post-cataclysm Edinburgh to learn about, with its shanty towns and mix of low tech and modern tech and magic, and urban foraging and gangs and districts and strata, and various Edinburgh landmarks that have been transformed along with the world. And there's post-cataclysm politics and political history, and of course there's magic, and magic-systems, and cosmology, and the politics between various mages and their various organizations and histories, and general Scottish history, and the MC's family and friends and their various relations, and then there's the cultures and peoples that have been stranded in Scotland as the world system collapsed, so that the primary characters are a mix of Zimbabwaen, Scottish, and Indian, and then there's all of their various accents and slang on display. I listened to this via audio book, and I think this is really how the story is meant to be enjoyed, and the author even nods to this as the MC talks about how she listens to pirated audio books as she walks around Edinburgh for her job. With the audio version you get to savor/struggle with the various accents and they have an immediacy to them that you would not get on the printed page. So while this is a YA book, in many ways it's one of the more complex and dense books I've listened to recently. In a few sentences you might get words from 5 different languages (I know I know, this is just English), Scottish slang or rhyming slang, one of a half-dozen different accents, and one of a half-dozen different types of world building. The one simple thing about the book is the primary plot; most narratively aware readers will get the basic outline of what is going on ~15% of the way through the book. Really though the book is all about the side quests, and the plotting is like the rest of the texture of the book, it darts in a half dozen different directions and escapades and really finds its richness in these alleyways of narrative and communication than in the main plot of the story.
Hmm, what else to say. The MC is 15 years old, and has led a busy life of public schooling, copper wire stealing, being part of a Fagan-esque underage-breaking-and-entering-ring, and most recently being a ghost-talker (an accredited but relatively low-status profession, of talking to the dead and delivering their messages to paying customers). The MC is quite poor, and is the bread-winner for her grandmother and little sister (both *great* characters, tons of warmth here), so money is a huge concern through out the novel. This novel isn't quite as proficient as The Name of the Wind in using money to outline the contours of their fantasy world, but money concerns do keep things moving along and gives you an idea of the various stakes and proportions at play. Oh, and I liked that the world is appropriately grim. The characters are warm and likable, but the novel is true to its world and realistic about the events going on, and is perfectly content to say "oh yeah, because of events these X kids died horribly and these other Y people were crippled to greater or lesser degrees. Could have been worse!".
Ok, one final note, I liked the book's explanation of magic specialization, that mages were like Olympic athletes. I.e. they excel in their field, but the mental muscles they develop for, say, marathon running aren't really the same ones they would need for shotput or for dressage. So while a mage might excel in one field (pyromancy, spirit-talking, or healing), it's very rare for a mage to excel in multiple fields to the extent that they would be comparable with an actual specialist in that field.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
2.0 Stars
9-20-2024
Moderately amusing, but ultimately not very enlightening. This book covers the funerary chants of those OG furries, the Egyptian priesthood. A person is supposed to learn these chants and rules in order to do well in the Egyptian afterlife. A few brief issues; it seems like a great deal was lost in translation over the last 4000 years, it seemed like the person going into the afterlife (Ani) was the worst sort of preening asshole (sorry to speak ill of someone who died several millennia ago, but I have to speak my truth Ani), and most of the chants are repetitions and variations on simple and boring themes (I'm noble and great, give me stuff in the afterlife, smite my enemies).
Now the moderately amusing parts:
- The complex elements of a human being. There is:
the physical body (khat),
the physical heart (ib, they considered it the home of the mind/intellect),
the name (ren, a person's individuality),
the shadow (shut, almost Jungian, it is related to the individuality but can act and move separately),
the life-force or spirit (ka, stays on with the corpse and can be nourished by offerings),
the soul (ba, takes the form of a small bird and can return to the realm of the living during the day).
Mummification was supposed to be a way of transforming these elements so that they could continue to live on and partially function after death. This more enduring hybrid form was called a
"sah".
- "I fly as a hawk, I cackle as a goose; I ever slay, even as the serpent goddess Nehebka". Inspiring!
-"I behold Ra who was born yesterday from the buttocks of the cow Meh-urt; his strength is my strength, and my strength is his strength." Seems like a backhanded compliment.
- "The third pylon, which is guarded by a man headed deity..." (you know it's gotten bad as a furry and you've explored too many possibilities when you have to describe something as a man with the head of a man)
- Ammit the Devourer, answering the question of whether a dog would wear pants like this or like this .
- "Grant thou to me a place in the underworld near unto the lords of right and truth. May my homestead be abiding Sekhet-hetep, and may a I receive cakes in thy presence." (they were very focused on making sure they had tiny treats in the after life).
- As an example of the lost-in-translation aspect, here's a representative passage: "Behold, thou gatherest together the charm from every place where it is and from every man with whom it is, swifter than greyhounds and fleeter than light, [the charm] which createth the forms of existence from the mother's thigh and createth the gods from (or in) silence, and which giveth the heat of life unto the gods. Behold, the charm is given unto me from wheresoever it is [and from him with whom it is], switfter than greyhounds and fleeter than light." This reads like one of my high school Latin translations, i.e. it's not really understanding something essential to the original text. Whether that's because of cultural drift or a failure of translation, either way as a reader today and I'm not really getting the full meaning of what the Egyptians were trying to communicate.
Iron Druid series, books 1-3
1.0 Stars
8-30-2024
If Alex Verus is the Dresden Files from a better universe, this is the Dresden Files from a crummier universe. It has way too much basic m'lady energy, and when the author noted at the end of book 2 that he wrote that story in 5 months, I was like "yep, checks out". So, I've read worse things than this, but I also can't think of any situation in which I'd recommend this series to anyone. I'm giving this 2 stars rather than 1 star since at least a few of its many attempted jokes did land and gave me a sensible chuckle.
Edit: wait, wait, I listened to some more (don't blame me! I already had the files queued up on my mp3 player). Based on that experience I'm removing the previous charity star. The author is simply a bad writer and should find a different profession.