I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each of the previous two entries in Stephen Graham Jones’s “Indian Lake” trilogy – My Heart is a Chainsaw and Don’t Fear the Reaper – but even so, I couldn’t help but worry a little bit about The Angel of Indian Lake. After all, sticking the landing of any series is always a tough balancing act, and when you throw into that the demands of the slasher formula, Angel had its work cut out for it – and that’s before the added difficulty of the way that Jones has always walked a careful line that allows him to be aware of the genre without turning into a meta-meditation on them. But I forgot about Jones’s secret weapon, and that’s Jade Daniels, the heroine of the series, whose first-person narration anchors Angel and gives it the heft I didn’t expect, as all of the events – the trauma, the sacrifices, the emotional damage, the exhaustion, the guilt – come home to roost, turning Jade from a kick-ass rebel who hates the world into an older, wiser, hardened woman whose development and growth broke my heart and made every single death count all the more. That’s good, because Jones’s typically loose plotting feels looser than usual in this entry, as Jade’s limited perspective meant trying to make sense of a lot of events that don’t inherently make sense; by the time we got to the nth reveal of what was going on, I kind of gave up and accepted the madness. And trust me, there’s madness and violence to spare here – the body count and the brutality are higher than ever here, and as you might expect from the final entry, basically no one is safe – to the point where any slasher fan is going to come out very pleased, even if some of the plotting remains fuzzy and unclear. But as much as that sometimes frustrated me, Angel works because it gives us a final entry with Jade Daniels, who has come so far since Chainsaw in ways that genuinely touched and moved me, and left me feeling like I was leaving behind someone I would genuinely miss by the end. I’m not sure Angel is as good as its predecessors – that fuzzy plotting is an issue, and some of the meta commentary gets a little more heavy-handed – but it’s a solid ending to the trilogy, and its depiction of an older, wiser, snarky but honest Jade is so good that the flaws fade away. Rating: ****
Dutch horror author Thomas Olde Heuvelt burst onto the international scene with HEX, a nightmarish tale about a small town that’s been dealing with the curse of a witch for so long that they have a government agency handling the issue. Heuvelt goes for a similar blend of horror and bureaucracy with Oracle, which opens with the appearance of an ancient ship in the middle of a field before all hell breaks loose, all while the government attempts to keep the whole thing under wraps. The result is a far less even book than Hex, with so much going on that I occasionally got frustrated with the way the book would undercut the ominous and unsettling story of the ship with a bizarre interlude about a power play by foreign powers, or as a series of dark events on an oil rig gave way to a pretty bland “kill all the witnesses” type of response. Add to that just how ambitious and weird Oracle is – I don’t want to get into spoilers, but by the end, you may have just forgotten about the nightmare ship into which people disappear – and the book often feels stretched thin, rushing from one beat to another and framing its compelling story through the oddest choice of lens possible. I still liked Oracle as a whole; it doesn’t all hold together, it feels a little overstuffed, and it sometimes struggles under the weight of its ambition. But Heuvelt knows his way around a scare (multiple setpieces absolutely gave me the creeps here, with the “all hell breaks loose” sequence being a standout), and I’d rather something ambitious than something boring. Still, some focus and pruning would turn Oracle into a story for the ages, and I wish I’d seen that version of things. Rating: *** ½
I’m now two books into Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s Long Earth series, and it feels like an issue that I’m still not sure what the “point” of this series is, even as I’m having an enjoyable enough time with the books. But if you want the issue in a nutshell, it’s the fact that when they announce that the titular war of The Long War has ended, I realized that I did not know that it had actually begun at any point, and even now I’m not quite sure who that war was between. The whole premise of the Long Earth is such a good one, and Pratchett and Baxter fill the books with wild ideas, from alternate intelligences to the tax ramifications of a world like this, but the books feel bizarrely unfocused, tossing out ideas constantly but never quite developing them before moving onto the next. The central characters – explorers Joshua Valente and Sally Linsay, Officer Monica Jannson, artificial intelligence and possibly reincarnated Tibetan mechanic Lobsang – are all interesting, and I’m invested in their lives, but so much keeps happening off-stage or between books, and the plotting feels so slack, that it’s hard to be motivated to keep going with the series. I’ll probably give the third book a shot at some point, but I can’t say that it’s a top priority at this point; I love Pratchett a lot, but 40% of the way through the series, this feels like a concept in search of a plot. Rating: *** ½
It’s been a bit since the apocalyptic events of A Book of Bones, and while John Connolly has released three books in the Parker series since then, one was a prequel, one was a side story, and one was a pair of novellas. And so, while all of those were great, The Instruments of Darkness feels like the first true novel in the series since Bones – but for all of that, Connolly hasn’t missed a beat, and the series is still every bit as good all these years in. Broadly, Instruments finds Parker being asked to help out a client of Moxie Castin’s: a woman who is suspected of murdering her child and getting rid of the body. But Moxie doesn’t buy it, and neither does Parker, and so the investigator starts doing what he does best – stirring up things that don’t want to be stirred. By the standards of the series, Instruments is on the tamer side; the horror here is still evident, but it’s more of a sense of eeriness and unease, of something profoundly wrong that stays just out of sight. More evident is the increasing presence of right-wing agitators and racists, whose presence Parker takes as pure affront, to say nothing of Louis and Angel’s even less charitable views. As ever, Connolly threads all of this together incredibly, weaving together all of these disparate pieces and communities into one large picture, infusing the pieces with dread and uncertainty while keeping the momentum driving and the story moving, all while telling the story in his rich prose that delivers both horror and humor with equal skill. I don’t think Connolly has written a bad book in his more than two decades of work, and he certainly hasn’t started here; Instruments only reinforced my belief that Connolly is one of the best and most underappreciated writers working today, delivering crime horror that feels unlike anything else out there and doing so with a humanity and morality that feels hard won and complex. A great read, and even a great place to try the series if the idea of reading through all twenty previous books is too intimidating. Rating: **** ½
While I love so much pulp fiction, I’ve never actually gotten around to one of the most iconic series there is until jumping in to Conan: The Definitive Edition, a (now unavailable) collection of all of the Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard (including the novel The Hour of the Dragon). And while I’ll tell you that I’m not sure that marathoning them all was the way to go – I could not definitively tell you what happened in which story without doing some digging, for one thing – what I can tell you is that they’re incredibly fun, as long as you can adjust for some dated views that are sometimes a little iffy (nowhere near as bad as the views of his colleague H.P. Lovecraft, but dated nonetheless). The stories are simple (and blessedly unconcerned with anything that looks like canon or continuity), but in all of them, you’re left delighted by just how weird and expansive Howard’s imagination was. I knew to expect the tales of a traveling barbarian (a la The Man With No Name films), but what I didn’t expect was just how much eldritch and inhuman horror Howard brought to the table, and just how much of a dangerous, unsettling, unnatural world he could evoke in his storytelling. Howard’s Conan might not have the wry sense of humor and self-deprecation that marks, say, Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories (which is why I prefer those on the whole, even if they are all very much of a piece); they can be earnest and even goofy in their commitment to the bit. But that’s also why they work; Howard never lets on how wild this all is, and instead commits on delivering great setpieces, surprisingly complicated worldbuilding, and compelling characters, all while knowing how to deliver a pace that keeps readers involved. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. Did I have a blast with pretty much all of them, warts and all? Yes indeed. Rating: ****
I feel like I’ve made this comment before, but it’s hard not to think about how much Stephen King is aging as you read his recent works, which are increasingly aware of King’s impending mortality and questions of what he will leave behind – and those questions are undeniably present throughout many of the stories (and, not coincidentally, the best stories) in You Like It Darker, a collection of short fiction and novellas. The most notable here is “Rattlesnakes,” which finds us revisiting Vic Trenton from Cujo in the present, many years removed from the events of that book, but nonetheless haunted by them as he moves into a Florida neighborhood and encounters an elderly woman who pushes around a stroller to carry what she claims to be her twin boys – boys who died decades ago. “Rattlesnakes” is undeniably a horror tale – perhaps the most effective in the book – but it’s also a fascinating reminder of that character and a thoughtful take on what might have happened to him in the many years since, to say nothing of being a portrait of parents left dealing with the scar tissue left behind when a child dies. It’s an affecting, unsettling tale, and single-handed justifies the collection, even though there are plenty of other solid entries here. “Two Talented Bastids,” for instance, takes a look at how “regular” people become geniuses, and while the tale itself is a good one, orbiting around a young man in the aftermath of the death of his famous author father, it’s the kicker that turns it into something special, giving us a rough ending that hurts in a wholly unexpected way. Meanwhile, “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is a great premise that fits perfectly into its novella length, delivering a supernatural premise that feels like a spiritual cousin to both King’s own The Outsider but also to Les Miserables‘s iconic Javert, pacing out some great suspense and strangeness along the way. You Like It Darker is full of solid tales, and if the others beyond this one are never quite “essential,” they’re also never bad at all – King is too capable of a writer for that, and his imagination is still as fresh and rich here as it ever has been, whether he’s delivering a tribute to Flannery O’Connor in “On Slide Inn Road” or digging into the questions of fate in “The Answer Man.” It’s the perfect literary equivalent of Selznick’s “three good scenes, no bad ones” approach to filmmaking; while it won’t make the top tier of King’s works, it’s still a great piece of entertainment, and gives us a few classics – especially “Bastids” and “Rattlesnakes” – to more than justify your time. Rating: **** ½
Umney's Alley 