Books by Friends #2: The Voodoo Rumors Series, by D. Alan Lewis

Over the years, thanks to my podcast The Library Police, I’ve gotten to know quite a few authors both as professionals and as friends. And while I know they trust that my reviews are pretty honest – and they are! – I know that being friends with the author automatically puts an asterisk next to any review. So be aware that this review (and tomorrow’s) operates under the disclaimer that I know the author and like him a lot; nevertheless, the review is honest, evenhanded, and true – hey, in this case, there’s even an entry in the series that I didn’t like very much!

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From his first book, The Blood in Snowflake Garden – a noir story about murder at the North Pole, set against the backdrop of the Red Scare – Alan Lewis’s love of pulp, noir, and genre fiction has been pretty evident. And as such, it’s honestly kind of a surprise that it’s taken him this long to write a private eye series, albeit one with supernatural elements a-plenty. But in writing his Voodoo Rumors series, Lewis has found a pretty perfect Venn diagram of his interests and talents, building up a wild world full of femme fatales, double-crossing villains, supernatural horrors, and hardened dialogue to spare – to say nothing of all the demons, vampires, ghosts, and more.

Take The Last Encore, the second entry in the series. Encore follows Nashville private investigator Thomas Dietrich, who specializes in cases that the police can’t handle because of their supernatural trappings, gets called in to deal with  a stack of blood-drained corpses left in a dumpster. But even with the obvious clues pointing towards vampire attacks, there’s more to the story than the easy explanation, and soon Dietrich is dealing with a Nashville record label that’s a front for something much worse, putting his right-hand woman at risk, and having to deal with his literally demonic sister as he dives into the supernatural fight below the surface.

It’s all pure noir storytelling, from beginning to end – the hard-boiled prose, the complicated storyline, the moral conflicts between brutal justice and humanity – but Lewis never looks down his nose at the genre or the story, instead embracing it unironically and enthusiastically. And all of that means you’re pulled along for the ride, enjoying as Lewis keeps revealing more layers to his unusual underworld, twisting the plot a few more times, or just delivering some fun action sequences.

Or how about the third entry in the series, A Penny for Luck, which is even stronger than the second (despite a pretty lurid opening that doesn’t quite fit the 1950’s setting). Dietrich’s got a ticking clock scenario, and he’s being asked to track down a single penny – oh, and he has all of Memphis to look through to find it. And if that doesn’t make the case hard enough, turns out, he’s not the only one looking for it.

A Penny for Luck is more ambitious than Encore – more plates kept spinning, more main characters to handle, a less easy throughline than a murder mystery provides. But Alan makes it work nicely, all while never losing the novella length that makes the Voodoo Rumors series such easy reads – they’re in, they’re out, and they get the job done, all less than 150 pages. Moreover, by giving us some additional figures that have lived in this world, Alan gets to keep adding to his mythology, giving us some windows into Dietrich’s background and the events that are always circling in Nashville.

Now, you may notice that I’ve talked a lot about the second and third entries in the series, but not the first, entitled The Blood Red Ruby. And the honest reason for that is this: The Blood Red Ruby didn’t work for me almost at all, bouncing me off the series from the get-go in a way that almost led to me not going on with the next book. There’s a few reasons for that, but maybe the chief one is that, as the first book in the series, it doesn’t do a great job of actually introducing us to Dietrich or making us care about him – and that’s a problem.

Almost entirely told in flashback – but not an origin story – The Blood Red Ruby finds Dietrich telling the story of a bank robbery he and some friends pulled that ended up with them attracting some supernatural vengeance for their larceny. The flashback structure is a problem in of itself – it’s hard to care about a story in the past of a character we don’t know, especially since we don’t yet have much sense of this world, the character, or his rules. But more than that, Ruby just doesn’t really have enough story to justify even its brief novella length. There’s a good short story here about a bank robbery gone wrong and a most peculiar type of vengeance, but when taken to novella length, the story gets repetitive quickly, with each incident feeling less like an escalation and more like a repetition. And while the actual explanation of what’s going on is interesting, it doesn’t really do much to make the rest of the story that engaging, nor to really tell us anything about Dietrich.

But here’s the good news: you really don’t need to read that first book to enjoy what Alan is doing in the next two – and more to come, per his website. It’s pulpy, grimy, hard-boiled, twisty, and a lot of fun, and the kind of series that invites people to play in its world for a long time to come.

Amazon: The Blood Red Ruby | The Last Encore | A Penny for Luck

The Favourite / **** ½

It warms my heart a bit that a movie as idiosyncratic – honestly, as weird – as The Favourite has earned itself Academy Award attention. Sure, at first glance, The Favourite seems like typical Oscar bait: a period piece, based on actual events and historical conjecture, about two women competing for the favor of Queen Anne and exerting their influence not only over the monarch, but over the country – that sounds like the kind of movie that Oscar voters would eat up. But that’s not really what you’re getting with The Favourite, which subverts its costume drama trappings in favor of delivering a sly, vicious look at the devious machinations and twisted relationships that unfold during struggles for control. It may have the outward trappings of “just another movie about queens and royalty,” but what you’re getting nastier, funnier, and more darkly entertaining than you’d ever expect from a superficial look.

The plot of The Favourite is deceptively simple; as mentioned above, it’s about two women – a longtime court presence played by Rachel Weisz and an ambitious lower class woman played by Emma Stone – who find themselves both playing for the affections, favor, and attentions of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), whose fickle moods and seemingly capricious whims make her an easy target for people in pursuit of power. And this is not a competition without consequence: while the women push and pull, England is in the midst of a bloody conflict with France, and the minority leader of Parliament (a gloriously catty Nicolas Hoult) is trying to both end the way and claim a share of power for himself.

So, yes, that’s the plot, and in the abstract, that sounds like typical costume drama fodder. But director Yorgos Lanthimos is almost perversely uninterested in the politics of the time, or even in keeping things from being anachronistic. From fashion choices to dance moves, from dialogue to sexual mores, Lanthimos creates a historical costume drama that also feels incredibly contemporary, blurring the lines between past and present without interest or concern for “realism”. Instead, he focuses on the interpersonal dynamics as play, giving us a view of a court where everyone is playing their own games, where everyone’s smiles hide daggers, and where power is the name of the game, and to hell with morality.

Lanthimos’s style only underlines the strangeness and unease of this environment, with ominous framing, disorienting fisheye lenses, long corridors full of watchers, and a discordant score that gives every scene an uncomfortable sensation that keeps us off kilter. That’s emphasized all the more by the sharp-tongued, venom-dripping script, which keeps us focused on the acidic dialogue, all while deliberately obfuscating the motives and internal monologues of the characters, leaving us trying to see the traps being laid before they arrive.

All of this creates a wonderfully unexpected, unique film, one that gleefully defies convention in so many ways, all while never failing to be darkly entertaining. More than that, it becomes something more compelling than your typical costume drama, turning a sharp eye on power: how people (women, especially) compete for it; how it affects and corrupts people; and how politics, gender, charisma, deception, and sex appeal all factor into it, no matter what we like to think.

But most importantly, The Favourite is gloriously entertaining, if you’ve got the dark sense of humor the movie demands. It’s funny, smart, magnificently crafted, superbly acted, and just a welcome poison pill that feels vibrant, sharp, and engaging at every turn. It’s a great treat, and the fact that it’s somehow gotten traction at the Academy Awards is like a wonderfully sick prank that I love.

IMDb

The Good Place (Season 3) / **** ½

Slowly but surely, The Good Place has become maybe my favorite show on television – high praise, considering that my annual airwaves also contain Better Call Saul. But The Good Place is so laugh out loud funny, in so many ways – silliness, surreal comedy, food puns, visual tricks, comic powerhouses – but also somehow manages to be a show about what it’s like to try to be a good person in a horrible world. It’s a show that can spend twenty minutes making fun of Jacksonville, but also grapple with moral philosophy, and the questions of determinism in the universe, and how motivations can shape whether or not we are good people, regardless of our actions. In other words, it’s not just the funniest show on television; it’s also one that makes you want to be a better person, and to attempt to do that even in face of the awfulness of the world.

I say all this to say: when I say that season three of The Good Place was a bit of a letdown, take into account the remarkable standard set by the show, and the fact that even this “weak” season is still better than almost anything else you could be watching right now.

Nonetheless, The Good Place undeniably had a few stumble points along the way this year. Any show that reboots itself as often and as gleefully as The Good Place does always runs the risk of a premise that doesn’t quite work, and while the show’s sojourn to Earth paid off in some ways, it definitely felt like an idea that somewhat overstayed its welcome. That’s not to say that it didn’t have plenty of joys along the way, including a Florida-centric episode that may be one of the funniest episode of the series; it’s just that, by the end of it all, the show was dragging a bit, no doubt partially because setting things on the mundane reality of Earth ended up tying one of the show’s hands behind its back, keeping it from some of the wild touches and weird asides that make its afterlives so memorable.

And then there’s the show’s focus on a romantic coupling to drive its story that…well, just doesn’t work for me. Whether the tension between Eleanor and Chidi works for you is a matter of taste, one that seems to pretty evenly split fans of the show; suffice to say, if you’re not on board with the pairing as anything less than true romance against all the odds of the universe, it’s hard for the show’s more emotional gambits to ring true, and it feels like the show telling me what to feel instead of making me feel that.

So, sure, season three had its issues. But it also had Michael McKean as a saint on Earth, living a tormented life of perfection in which he tried valiantly to not hurt a living creature or even impact their life negatively. It had Stephen Merchant as an cheerfully oblivious afterlife accountant, and Maya Rudolph as the charmingly stubborn Judge of Humanity. It had the episode “Janet(s),” which didn’t just give the amazing D’Arcy Carden a showcase worthy of her talents; it delivered maybe the best episode of the series ever, mixing a high concept with outlanding comedy with character drama. It had jokes about American restaurants, obnoxious nice guys (Adam Scott, of course), jabs at Florida a-plenty, an accomplished but insecure Hemsworth brother – oh, and an episode called “Chidi Sees the Time-Knife.” It had Jason giving tear-filled complex handshakes with his bros, Ted Danson doing any number of dances, the best summary of Chik-Fil-A ever (“Did you know that on Earth they have this chicken sandwich, and if you eat it, you hate gay people? But it’s delicious!“), and so much more.

So The Good Place stumbled a bit this season, trying a new environment that didn’t quite work and counting too much on its emotional storytelling. Fine. It also remained a show about being a good person in challenging times, which is a lesson we all need and a welcome encouragement these days. It set itself up perfectly for the next season, finding a way to both reboot the show from scratch again while giving itself something familiar on which to build, all while adding some fun complications. It found showcases for every single cast member of its ridiculously talented ensemble, and it did it all while making me laugh until I cried just about every week. And in the end, those are the things I’ll remember more than a brief thin stretch and an iffy emotional beat that didn’t really work.

IMDb

On Lackluster Disney Sequels

Writing a review of something you love is easy. So is writing a review of something you hated. You know what’s not? Writing a review of something that left you feeling pretty much indifferent. But here I am, attempting to write reviews of Mary Poppins Returns and Ralph Breaks the Internet, two Disney sequels that aren’t ever bad, but never really do anything of note on their own, nor ever really justify their own existence.

Take Mary Poppins Returns, which has arguably the higher bar to clear. The original Mary Poppins is a much-beloved film, even before you factor in the nostalgia that no doubt has only increased its perception over time. The songs are iconic ones that almost anyone can still sing, even if they haven’t seen the movie; Julie Andrews is all but cemented in the role; and even though Dick Van Dyke’s accent is much mocked, there’s always a tone of affection for it all. So how do you do a sequel to that without Andrews, with Van Dyke, and with the original characters all grown up? More importantly, is there really any good reason to?

Let’s answer the second question first: no, not really. Sure, Mary Poppins Returns follows up with Michael and Jane, now grown and with a new set of children, all set on the same street still populated by some of the same characters – the admiral whose cannon marks the hour, etc. But Mary Poppins Returns feels less like an original story and more like a retread of the original, down to the required mix of animation and live action that mainly makes you miss the days when Disney did hand-drawn animation. The cast is all fun and gives their all, most notably Emily Blunt, who’s an absolute treat as Mary Poppins – her mix of snark, superiority, and magic is genuinely wonderful, and brings so much to the movie. Lin-Manuel Miranda is charismatic as ever, although the choice to have him do his own bad cockney accent never quite works, but it’s important because…I don’t know, the first movie did it?

Look, there’s nothing at all wrong with Mary Poppins Returns – it’s fun, the songs are fine, the performances are fun. But it’s all utterly forgettable, giving you the epitome of disposable moviegoing. Do you have fond memories of the original Mary Poppins? Then you’ll like this one. But don’t expect to remember a thing about it 24 hours after you finish.

So what about Ralph Breaks the Internet? The original Wreck-it Ralph was an unexpected treat – a terrible-looking movie about video game characters that turned out to be funny, charming, and big-hearted, telling a story of characters who feel hemmed in by their reputations and their roles in life and wanting something more. So, on paper, the idea of a Wreck-It Ralph sequel isn’t terrible; what’s more, the premise of exploring the Internet and how it affects our daily lives is a good one. So why does Ralph Breaks the Internet leave me so cold?

It probably doesn’t help things that Ralph Breaks the Internet doesn’t bring much new to the table in terms of how it views the web; indeed, almost every sharp idea or clever notion was done nearly fifteen years ago by Dave Chappelle when he made an episode imagining the Internet as a place. That Chappelle is funnier than Ralph is no crime – Dave Chappelle is funnier than a lot of people – but that the ideas of the movie aren’t all that much richer than the original show despite having fifteen years more material to deal with…well, that’s more damning.

Of course, Ralph feels also like it’s forced into corporate synergy too often, with long sections of nods at Disney properties that feel a) like they’re forced into the film and b) as though they’re hamstringing the movie’s jabs to be “safe” jokes at the corporate powers. Yes, the jokes about Disney Princesses are somewhat self-aware, but they’re also massively broad and don’t say much beyond offering a little bit of snark. That’s kind of the movie in a nutshell, too often – every time you think Ralph might come out with some interesting insight about the way the Internet has changed our interactions with people, the movie falls back into broad insights or platitudes. (I’ve seen arguments made that the movie is engaging with how toxic masculinity so often runs rampant on the internet, but I just feel like people are stretching to make that point work.)

That’s not to say that there aren’t moments – the climax of Ralph is genuinely bizarre looking and surreal, and feels as though it’s doing what the first film did a bit – that is, taking a generic conflict and investing it in the characters. But by that point, the conflict feels forced, and while the way it’s staged is interesting, there’s just no reason for it to be happening other than that the movie needs an ending. In other words, the same reason we have a Ralph sequel in the first place – because someone decided we need it. And that’s just not enough for an engaging movie experience.

Rating: *** (both films)

IMDb: Mary Poppins Returns | Ralph Breaks the Internet

Book Review Round-Up: Consumer Zombies, Love in Movies, and Demonic Politicians

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut short story collection Friday Black bears an endorsement on its cover from George Saunders, and it’s not hard to see the connection there; like Saunders, Adjei-Brenyah’s stories often deal with the world through satirical metaphors and hyperbole, watching as we distance ourselves from social issues by viewing everything through the lens of media and entertainment. That’s maybe most evident in “Zimmer Land,” a story depicting a business that allows white homeowners to live out the fantasy of “standing their ground” and deploying physical force and violence against “intruders” – in other words, black men. Or the series of stories, including the titular “Friday Black,” which finds Adjei-Brenyah using the horrors of zombie hordes to rip into mindless, violent consumerism at its worse.

These are great hooks for stories, but so far, Adjei-Brenyah hasn’t quite made it beyond “concepts” into full stories. The ideas are great ones, and Adjei-Brenyah’s worlds and protagonists are well-created – shaded around the edges, full of lived-in detail and satirical bite to spare. But the stories often feel like premises in search of a plot, no matter how well-written or brutally incisive they can. That’s not always true – try walking away from the opening story, “The Finkelstein Five,” without feeling the visceral anger of a broken system and what it does to those who feel its wrath – but it’s true often enough that Friday Black doesn’t quite live up to the strong ideas at the book’s core. That being said, there’s a lot to chew on here, and no small amount of talent and trenchant commentary on society, with moments here that are unforgettable – the casual violence of “Through the Flash,” the cruel dystopia of “The Era.” Friday Black can be effective and painful and nightmarish, and it marks its author as a talent to watch, flaws and all; on its own, though, it’s a collection of fascinating ideas, and not quite a satisfying read. Rating: ****

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It’s hard for me to talk objectively about People Only Die of Love in Movies, an anthology of film writing by the late Jim Ridley. Ridley was a Nashville institution – the editor of the city’s leading independent newspaper, but more than that, someone who loved the city, its culture, and every other aspect of it. Anyone who met Jim knew him as a larger-than-life figure with a kindness that’s hard to capture; I met him a few times, but even after only a single meeting, he never forgot my name, the things we had talked about, the things we had in common, or the movies we both loved.

Yes, Jim was a remarkable person, but long before I knew Jim the man, I knew Jim Ridley the film writer – a critic whose writing and thoughts are part of the reason I started writing about film in the first place. Jim had a way of writing about film that was both hilarious and insightful, placing every movie within its historical context perfectly while also judging it on its own merits. More than that, Jim was a cinematic omnivore. I can’t picture him at a theater without his faded Battle Royale t-shirt, but he was just as likely to sing the praises of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (whose Criterion release boasts an essay by Jim that also closes this anthology) or independent Chinese cinema as he was violent Tarantino fare or exploitation horror.

I say all of this to give you a sense of what you’ll get in People Only Die of Love in Movies, a collection of Jim’s writing that spans genres, subjects, tones, length, and even media (thanks to a mid-book “intermission” featuring a write-up of a Bruce Springsteen concert that contains a passage that brought tears to my eyes). It’s a book that lets you view movies through the eyes of an insightful mind, understanding not just how he saw the movie but finding yourself caught up in his enthusiasm and glee, or laughing at the film’s absurdity right alongside him. It’s well-written, its insights are remarkable, its jabs perfectly worded, its excitement infectious – it’s everything that made me fall in love with film criticism in the first place – not as someone who hates movies, but as someone who loves them. It’s a wonderful read, and a perfect tribute to a much-missed man. Rating: *****

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I’ve raved on this blog before about Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour series, a seven-novella story focused on a professional kitchen that caters events for supernatural entities – demons, goblins, etc. It’s a gloriously gonzo series, one that’s equal parts black comedy, splatter horror, social commentary, and Kitchen Confidential-inspired fiction. In other words, it’s genre-bending in all the best ways, and just plain fun to boot.

Greedy Pigs, the fifth entry in the series, finds Wallace in the back half of the story, and kicking things back up into high gear after the “relative” quiet of Idle Ingredients (if “quiet” is the term for supernatural elections, succubus-inspired gender wars, and more). Following the immediate aftermath of the election in Ingredients, Greedy Pigs finds the Sin du Jour crew being asked to cater the inauguration of the new President of the supernatural orders of the world (and really, most of humanity, no matter how who we think really runs things). But it doesn’t take things long to get out of hand, and before you can even start taking it all in, Wallace is giving you secret witch hideouts, Nazi war criminal pandas, demonic alien politicians, and more – and all that is background to the actual story.

Greedy Pigs is a delight – maybe the best book since the series’ initial volume, Envy of Angels, delivering a slew of wild moments that defy easy categorization, giving you a tight plot with an obvious ticking clock whose motivations are unclear, and giving you a climax that raises as many questions as it settles. It’s clear that the series is beginning to move into the endgame, with Wallace creating a big bad in the form of the government agency that supervises the kitchen, but the exact form and nature of that finale is yet to be determined.

But honestly, part of what I love about this series is how unpredictable it is. Wallace may be writing only novellas, but there are whole fantasy series that don’t have a tenth of the imagination, style, and fun that Wallace packs into less than 200 pages. These books are gross, gruesome, twisted, funny, absurd, satirical, and just plain fun – a perfect mixture of ingredients that has me eager to move on to the next book in the set.

Amazon: Friday Black | People Only Die of Love in Movies | Greedy Pigs

The Winter of the Witch, by Katherine Arden / **** ½

It’s hard to think of a recent release that I’ve been as excited for as The Winter of the Witch, the final entry in Katherine Arden’s beautiful, magical Winternight trilogy. From the first few pages of her incredible debut novel, The Bear and the Nightingale, I was hooked; by the time I turned the last pages of The Girl in the Tower, I was almost angry that I had to wait for the third book. But as any fan knows, those same expectations can work against a book, especially when it’s the final part of a series; sometimes, you get so excited that no ending can ever live up to your hopes.

Luckily, that’s not the case with The Winter of the Witch, which wraps up Arden’s sprawling saga in a way that draws everything into focus, revealing that all this time, she’s been telling two stories simultaneously: one about a young girl who straddles the line between humanity and magical creatures, and one about the formation of Russia itself during the medieval period. And if Winter feels just a tiny bit overstuffed, well, the book’s ambition and successful fulfillment of those goals more than justifies it.

At its core, The Winter of the Witch has three things to accomplish, leading the book to feel like it’s three stories that all interweave together:

1. Arden has to wrap up the lingering threads left hanging at the end of The Girl in the Tower, where cataclysmic events ran all the way to the end of the novel, leaving the aftermath to be explored.
2. We need to watch as Vasilisa comes to terms with her destiny, finding a way to unify Russia’s pagan folklore with the rapidly approaching wave of Christianity that’s washing across the nation.
3. And finally, we need to deal with the imminent threat of the Khans as they work to destroy the loose federation of Russian tribes that are unifying in opposition.

That’s a lot to take on, and at times, Winter of the Witch feels like it breaks a bit into three separate stories that don’t always connect into each other. Arden fixes that by the end, giving us a stunning climax that weaves together every disparate piece of the series into one astonishing sequence that clarifies the series’ focus in a way that genuinely both shocked me and completely unifies the books into a continuous saga.

But even before that ending, Arden makes each of these segments work beautifully on their own merits. The novel’s opening is harrowing, bringing a nightmarish intensity and horror to the book that brings home the impact of the characters’ choices to this point. More than that, though, it gives the final book of the series stakes in a way that I didn’t expect, reminding us of how many forces Arden has working in opposition to Vasilisa, and just how dangerous these ideas truly are.

And then, just when we’re at the bottom point of the book, Arden twists reality around us all over again, immersing us in a magical world that we’ve never seen before, and plunging even more deeply into Russian folklore and mythology, and slowly revealing more and more of the backstory of Vasya’s family that have, to this point, only been hinted at. It’s all satisfying and engaging, but more than that, it gives Arden the chance to breathe and live in her wondrous world, conveying the unreality of her planes through her carefully written prose – and that’s before she springs some major, major surprises on us.

It’s hard to talk much about the end of The Winter of the Witch without giving away some of what Arden has planned (although I would point out that anyone who has knowledge of Russian history, or who glances too much into the helpful glossary at the end of the book, might find the story spoiled by historical facts). That’s not just in terms of the rich storytelling she’s got going, which finds the lines between villains and heroes blurring, questions of faith raised, and familial relationships complicating around them. No, The Winter of the Witch also delivers on an emotional level, bringing us closure not just in on the big picture and in our story, but on the level of relationships – most importantly, the relationship between Vasya and Morozko, the incarnation of Frost and Death.

The Winter of the Witch, in other words, does everything you want a finale of a series to do. It provides us closure on all of its plot threads and disparate stories. It concludes all of our characters’ arcs, allowing them to develop and grow, and giving us an end to their story that’s satisfying while not being excessively wrapped up. It clarifies and coheres the series’ thematic complexities, unifying its questions of faith, folklore, historical movement, national pride, and destiny into one powerful message and idea. It rewards us for our emotional investment in these characters, making us both hurt and rejoice with them as they reach their ends. And in the end, it leaves us wanting more time in this world, even as it gives us an ending. Does it have a lot to do? Yes. Does it feel like it could use maybe a bit more time? Sure…but it’s also magical, beautiful, and moving, and lives up to my hopes for the other books in the series – and given how much I loved them, that’s a big deal indeed.

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