After keeping up my blogging for a nice streak (I went more than 40 days without missing a one!), going on a vacation with my family gave me a nice excuse to take a break from my reviews. But, of course, it’s vacation, which meant I read…a lot. So over the past few days, I’ve be doing some shorter reviews to catch back up to date on everything I read over vacation (and a couple since then as well.)
This will be the last of my short capsule review round-ups; after this I plan on returning to my typical-length reviews, including one of Laura Lippman’s new novel and hopefully a couple of others.
John Katzenbach has long been one of those great thriller writers that not enough people know about, and even though his latest, The Dead Student, isn’t among his best works, it’s still a gripping and fun enough read that I feel safe telling people looking for a beach read that they could do a lot worse. A story that alternates between a long-simmering plot of revenge, a recovering alcoholic trying to uncover the truth of his uncle’s purported suicide, and a young woman recovering from a recent trauma, Katzenbach deliver his usual thrills, all while giving some of his typically engaging and interesting characters.
Admittedly, the plot of The Dead Student is functional, at best (with some detours into silliness toward the end, especially as revolves around a support group’s involvement in things), and that’s a little less typical for Katzenbach, who has given us some fantastic thrillers in recent years (check out his previous nailbiter, Red 1-2-3). The Dead Student works as a nice little piece of noir, with our protagonists crossing line after line as they attempt to pursue the truth, to say nothing of a compelling villain whose methodology and casual demeanor towards it all makes him a great narrator. And if some of the plot details don’t always work as well as you’d hope – the killer’s motivation ends up feeling like we’re missing some key details, the aforementioned support group involvement – somehow, the book manages to keep you reading and enjoying it, even while part of your brain notes the flaws.
No, The Dead Student isn’t among Katzenbach’s best, but it’s still a great, fun little thriller, with twists and turns aplenty and three great main characters, each of whom brings a lot more to the table than the typical generic crime hero or heroine. If you’re looking for a fun beach thriller read, you could do a lot worse, trust me – you’ll have a lot of fun here. But you’d probably have more if you were reading, say, Red 1-2-3 or The Analyst instead. Rating: *** ½
Last year, The Adventure Zone – an RPG podcast hosted by the McElroy brothers and their dad, and my favorite podcast in the world – made the jump from the audio medium into the world of graphic novels, adapting the first arc of the Balance campaign into the bestselling Here There Be Gerblins. Against all odds, Gerblins was a blast, capturing the goofy spirit of the show while also truly adapting an audio-only, collaborative project into something more streamlined and even coherent. And if there were some little bumps along the way in that adaptation, well, Gerblins was the first arc of the show, and had its own issues, so that was to be expected a bit.
Now comes the second volume of the adaptation, Murder on the Rockport Limited, which finds our brave adventurers infiltrating a train under false pretenses and attempting to not only find a missing artifact, but also solve a murder – or should that be murders, plural? – along the way. It was the first arc of the show that was all truly the McElroys, as Griffin (the DM) made his own story and the rest of the crew started to truly get into their characters, resulting in one of the funniest arcs of the show, as well as introducing some iconic characters for the whole series.
The graphic novel adaptation of Rockport is every bit as good, embracing both the podcast’s jump in quality and the larger sense of the Balance Arc, and finding a great balance between both. While Gerblins occasionally felt like great bits were cut out of the adaptation (understandably, given how tangential they often felt), Rockport feels like it’s much more able to retain a lot of the anarchy of the original series, from the ruthless mocking of a wizardly train attendant to the unexpected appearance of a beloved hotel spokesman to the odd dynamic that arises when three grown men bully an adorable young boy. Having just re-listened to Rockport recently, I can say that this adaptation absolutely captures the spirit of the original story, bringing out the humor of the characters and the McElroy sensibility, all while still making it fit more into the larger shape of the Balance campaign saga. (This last component is in some ways the most interesting thing about the book from the perspective of a TAZ fan, as it allows the story to start bringing out the emotional beats that make all the goofs so special, but they’re hard to talk about in a spoiler-free review.)
I can’t tell you how you’ll feel about Rockport if you’re not already a TAZ fan. Is it accessible to non-fans? Will it make sense if you don’t already love this story? Will you appreciate the cavalcade of in-jokes from MBMBaM and TAZ tossed into the background by artist Carey Pietsch? (Okay, definitely not the last one, but trust me, they’re there, and only add to the evidence of how great of a choice Pietsch is for this project.) But as a long-time fan of the series, Rockport is a ton of fun to read, bringing the arc to life, but more importantly, capturing the spirit of it all wonderfully, and conveying the fun and silliness – and the stakes! – of what the McElroys created. Rating: **** ½
Neil Gaiman has made a career out of stories – not just telling them, although of course he’s done that too. No, Gaiman has always been fascinated by the power of stories – how they can shape our day to day lives, how they guide us and determine our character, and so much more. So it’s no surprise that his Marvel mini-series Marvel 1602 (with gorgeous illustrations by Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove) deals with stories as well, all arising from a simple “what if?” idea: what if the Marvel universe started not in the mid-twentieth century, but at the beginning of the 1600s?
A fun idea, and for a lot of the length of Marvel 1602, the comic is a treat just to see how Gaiman and company have brought these characters to life in recognizable ways while still making them utterly defined by the time period. We recognize the X-Men, even if they are labeled as creatures of witchcraft and hunted by the Inquisition. We know Nick Fury, even if he’s working as a spymaster of sorts for Queen Elizabeth and the idea of “S.H.I.E.L.D.” doesn’t even exist. The blind bard who’s more than capable of handling himself without vision? We know him, too, even if the comic never explicitly calls him Daredevil. Again and again, Gaiman illustrates our knowledge and familiarity with these characters by seeing how much he can change them and yet leave them the same on a fundamental level. (I haven’t spoiled all the appearances in here; suffice to say, Gaiman packs the frames with quite the array of Marvel icons, including one whose name in the series, once I finally realized who it was, made me laugh quite a bit.)
But if all Marvel 1602 gave us was a glorified What If? comic, that wouldn’t really make it as engaging as it is. Instead, Gaiman focuses in very specifically on this time and place – a change in the English monarchy, and a lot of fear of the supernatural – but more than that, makes the question of “why this time?” not just speculative, but part of the story itself. And indeed, as it unfolds, and we realize what’s led to this, it allows Gaiman to play with richer ideas about the notion of heroism, the role of heroes in our own lives, and what it means to be…well, that would be a spoiler. (But it’s such a neat idea!) No, Marvel 1602 isn’t the kind of comic book that transcends the typical Marvel audience. This is a superhero story, even if it is one that takes place in the 1600s. But what it is is a wonderful reminder of just how many ways there are to tell a familiar story, and a fantastic exploration of archetypes, tropes, and ideas that have become larger than the characters that gave birth to them. (It is, in many ways, to Marvel as a whole what Into the Spider-Verse was to Spider-Man – a reminder that stories are about so much more than just the one person they seem to be about.) Rating: ****
It’s somewhat unusual to find Philip K. Dick being as overtly political as he is in The Crack in Space; after all, Dick is mainly known for his more philosophical and cosmological ideas, and less for his direct commentaries on the world around him (even though the influence of the times is fairly evident in his work). And yet, The Crack in Space is about the first African-American candidate for president, and just what it would take for America to overcome racial prejudice in order to consider electing a non-white man to the highest office of the land.
It’s taken me a few books to get into the rhythms of Ursula K. Le Guin and to understand how she approaches her stories. In many ways, my issues with The Left Hand of Darkness are the same issues I had with 
Set in the world of his First Law trilogy, Joe Abercrombie takes on the fantasy war novel in the standalone novel The Heroes, which tells the story of a three-day battle between the forces of the North and the Union, all over an unimportant hill in the middle of nowhere significant. With a scope that includes more than a dozen different perspectives throughout the book – on both sides of the battle – Abercrombie plunges you into the conflict, depicting every aspect of it, from the large-scale planning to the brutality of the front lines, from the feints and bluffs to the incompetent commanders, from the individual acts of heroism to the pathetic acts of cowardice.
One of the perils of reading fantasy is the “wait for the next book” problem. Any fan of the genre knows the sort of thing I’m talking about – that feeling when you’ve read a book that feels entirely like it’s setting up the great story to come, but not quite satisfying on its own terms. V.E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic doesn’t quite evade this trap – there’s a real sense that the bigger story is still to come in this series – but it does give you a self-contained story and a world that you’re more than willing to keep exploring, even if it feels ultimately more abrupt and short than you might hope it would.
Terry Pratchett’s A Slip of the Keyboard is probably a book more for fans than anyone else, but that makes sense – after all, this is a collection of non-fiction pieces by the author that span multiple decades, and cover things that are largely his own opinions and perspectives. The art of writing, the origins of stories, the questions of genre – all of those are dealt with, but so are more serious issues, including wildlife preservation, but most notable, the right to die, as the final section of the collection moves into Pratchett’s desire to have the right to end his own life as his suffering from Alzheimer’s moved into its final stages.
If you were to ask me what the best period for American film was, I’d be hard pressed to argue that it wasn’t the 1970s, a period where a slew of factors gave us some of the most personal – and most interesting – films of all time. From big-budget pictures like The Godfather to personal stories like Mean Streets, from the revolutionary Easy Rider to the predecessor of the modern blockbuster Jaws, the 1970s was a time of incredible growth and change for the film industry, and there are no shortage of films from the decade that can be held up among the greatest films of all time.
Let’s go on and get some grumbles out of the way first: no, Spider-Man: Far From Home isn’t as good as its predecessor, 
There were all kinds of reasons I picked up Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching. An intriguing title; a striking cover; a lot of blurbs emphasizing the Gothic qualities of the book and comparing it to something by Shirley Jackson; a vague sense of Oyeyemi’s growing reputation as a writer; an unrefusable price at the bookstore – all of these and more went into my decision to grab it. All of which means that I went into White is for Witching feeling like this was definitely a book that was up my alley – which means that my disappointment with it might well be a case of expectations more than the book itself.
If all The Murders of Molly Southbourne had was its conceit, it would still be an intense, surreal read. That conceit? Every time Molly Southbourne bleeds – for whatever reason – a new version of her is borne. And every one of these new mollies goes bad soon, trying to kill her and everyone else they see – which means that Molly, from an early age, has to learn to murder all of these versions of herself and dispose of the bodies.
Like a lot of people, I first became aware of the writing of Ted Chiang when I saw the movie Arrival, a gripping, complex piece of science fiction based on his story “Story of Your Life.” That led me to pick up 
In the Stacks is the earliest (I believe) of the three, but there’s everything you’ve come to love about Lynch here already – fantastic group dynamics and banter, propulsive pacing, and a sense of fun that’s hard to escape. It doesn’t hurt that In the Stacks has such a great premise, though, revolving around the fifth year exam at the High University of Hazur, a school for students of magic. That exam? To return a book to the university’s living library. Oh, and that word “living”? That’s not a metaphor – the library, thanks to storing all of those magical tomes, has come to life. And it’s not all that friendly, or safe.
Next up comes The Effigy Engine, whose dedication to Glen Cook should tell you what’s obvious as you read – that this is Lynch’s tribute to 
But the novella that I originally came to pick up, A Year and a Day in Old Theradane, is by far the standout of the trio – a fact that says as much about Theradane as the other two, given how great each entry really is. But Theradane is such a treat on so many levels that it’s hard not to just spend this whole entry talking about just it. Even if all it was was the premise, that would be enough. Because here’s that premise: a crew of retired criminals gets given a job that they can’t refuse or fail. And that job is to steal something quite valuable…an entire street of the city.
Declan Hughes’s debut novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, comes complete with a pair of endorsements by both crime icon Michael Connelly but also John Connolly, who’s one of my favorite writers working today. That’s no small feat for a book I hadn’t heard of, and all but guaranteed I’d pick up the book. Having read it, it’s not hard to see what drew both men to Hughes’s richly-detailed and well-written world, even if there’s more of a sense of promise here than a fully realized crime story.
Umney's Alley 