New Spring, by Robert Jordan / ****

I have a lot of love for Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, warts and all. It is a series that I read for nearly twenty years, starting not long after the publication of the third book and going right up until the release of the final book in the series, completed by author Brandon Sanderson after the literal death of the author of the saga. It’s a series with some incredible peaks and some dire valleys, with plotting both rich and byzantine, with characters I loved and was compelled by, and plotting that sometimes lost me entirely. It is, taken in its totality, something wholly remarkable, and even with its shortcomings it’s still one of the defining works of fantasy to me.

And yet, somehow I never read New Spring, Jordan’s prequel novel telling the story of the meeting of Moiraine Damodred and her future Warder Lan Mandragoran, unfolding neatly two decades before The Eye of the World began. I had read Jordan’s original novella back when it was first released, but the expanded novel somehow never became something I picked up until a couple of months ago. And while New Spring is undeniably an inessential volume in the series, I can’t deny how great it was to dip my toes back in Jordan’s world again, even if only for a little while.

As I mentioned above, New Spring is a prequel, one that unfolds as, many miles away, a young boy named Rand al’Thor is born to a dying mother, setting in motion a chain of events that will drive the entire series and shape –  and break – the world. But Rand isn’t a part of this story – well, not directly. Because this is the story of two Accepted, Moiraine Damodred and Siuan Sanche, both of whom are raised to the shawl of full Aes Sedai sisterhood not long after overhearing a prophecy that the Dragon has been reborn. Making matters worse? The fact that the long-rumored Black Ajah may not only be real, but also hunting the Dragon.

If all of that sounds bewildering, well, let’s be honest: New Spring is not a good starting point to begin The Wheel of Time. It’s a prequel in the true sense of the word, designed to be read by those who are already familiar with the series and the characters and know the dramatic irony that Jordan is using. While The Eye of the World introduced us to Jordan’s vision slowly, New Spring wastes little time, throwing us into events that we’ve heard referenced and not offering much in the way guidance or guideposts. Which is welcome as a longtime fan, but undeniably makes this a bad place to start reading the series, as I can’t imagine coming away as anything less than hopelessly lost if you don’t know the basics.

But, for those who know these characters, New Spring is a welcome window into their pasts. It’s fun seeing Moiraine and Siuan before they became the formidable and hardened women of the later series, back when they were young and full of mischief – to say nothing of far more inexperienced and naive than the women we would later meet. As for Lan, there’s something compelling about seeing him in his Aragorn mode, for lack of a better term – king of a land that no longer exists and wrestling with a certain death to come. All of it feels of a piece with the iconic figures we would meet later, and gives us a chance to see behind the carefully constructed faces they present to the world.

Even so, New Spring doesn’t feel all that substantial as a story to itself, apart from showing us how these characters met. While it thankfully dodges the worst of prequel problems (that is, the shrinking of the world where every single character is a reference to later events),  it never quite has enough story to quite make it an essential read. (That this may be the one time I’ve ever said “I wish this Wheel of Time book was longer” says something.) Even the inevitable Bonding of Lan as Warder feels a bit…well, inevitable; it feels almost like something that happens because Jordan set it up as the end point of the novel, and not quite as much because either character was ready for it to happen, and you can’t help but feel like there were more events that set them up for that link.

Still, New Spring reminded me just why I loved these books in the first place, giving me rich characterization, an astonishingly constructed world, imagination to spare, and a story both epic and complex, all while still being grounded in these characters and their own struggles. And if it’s not essential, well, it’s also something that as a fan, I enjoyed reading, giving me the itch to dive back into this mammoth series all over again just to live in that world for a bit longer.

Amazon

The Adventure Zone: Amnesty / **** ½

Most of my reviews on here are either for books or movies, so it’s somewhat striking to me that one of my off-brand reviews of a podcast remains one of the most-read pieces on my site. (Second-most read of all time, I think, if I’m remembering right.) But really, that’s not too surprising given the fandom and love for The Adventure Zone, a podcast in which three brothers and their dad play Dungeons and Dragons, and ended up slowly turning a ridiculous goof-fest into something deeply rich, moving, and beautiful. That project comprised The Adventure Zone‘s first campaign, entitled Balance, and it’s that review that seems to stay popular over the years as people catch up on that amazing story.

Now, a few years later, the McElroys have finished the second big campaign of the podcast, this one entitled Amnesty. Following up Balance was a hard task by any standard, given the amount of investment people had in it, and one made even more complicated by the way that campaign only gradually became what it did as everyone figured out what the show was capable of being. So when it came time for Amnesty, expectations were high – after all, this time we would be starting a campaign knowing what everyone wanted the show to be, and knowing that the audience wanted not just silliness and absurdity, but also humanity and genuine pathos. All of which meant the show could just skip that part where it figured itself out and jump right in, right?

In many ways, Amnesty is defined by that ambition – the same ambition that hurt it a bit and held it back at times, but also that ambition which kept the character work as strong as ever on the show. Working with a new game system – the Powered By the Apocalypse-derived Monster of the Week, which focuses less on dice rolls and stats and more on collaborative story building – Amnesty unfolded the story of Kepler, West Virginia, a small town with a mysterious gate that opens into another world, one populated with werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and more creatures whose outwardly unsettling aspects hid their basic decency. But with that gate also comes the Abominations – monstrosities unleashed on a regular basis whose purpose and origins are unclear, but whose destruction and evil is undeniable.

Which brings us to our main characters: Justin’s park ranger “Duck” Newton, Travis’s spell slinger Aubrey Little, and Clint’s huckster/reformed con man Ned Chicane collectively become the “Pine Guard” a group working covertly to defeat the abominations and keep the gate – and the citizens of that world – from being discovered. Doing their best to set up the richer, more complex characters that their Balance characters became by the end of the series, the crew worked  hard to sketch out those characters in advance, creating deeper backstories and even setting up connections between them to be paid off later, all in the name of giving us more than simple caricatures in the early going.

An understandable choice, but it’s also one that both helped and hurt Amnesty as it went along. It helped by allowing the series to jump in with a stronger start than Balance could do, investing us in Duck, Aubrey, and Ned quickly, and giving the boys more room to play around in this world because they knew who these people were. As Aubrey developed a relationship with a woman named Dani, or Duck made his peace with his own destiny, or as Ned struggled to keep some of his past from affecting his present, it could develop more quickly and more smoothly than in the previous campaign, because the story knew those beats were coming and could bring them in more organically.

But that same development of characters held Amnesty back from being quite as surprising as Balance could be, because there wasn’t quite as much room for the characters to develop in unexpected ways. We knew early on the connection between Ned and Aubrey, for instance, and while the slow build towards their own realization was a good one, it wasn’t as shocking as the moments when Balance could upend our expectations or one of the boys found something true in their character to develop. It brought out emotional depth, and it made the role-playing great, but it hemmed in the story in some ways, holding Amnesty back from those great shocker moments that Balance could hit you with.

Not necessarily helping that was the choice to go with the more loosey-goosey system of Monster of the Week. Once again, the rationale was obvious – the more story-driven mechanics allowed everyone to have a hand on the ball and drive the story, reducing the load on Griffin as game master and allowing the final product to reflect everyone’s contributions. And sometimes that could lead to amazing moments – I’m thinking here of something like the choice to save rather than kill one of the abominations, or Justin’s re-writing of a pair of background joke characters into something absolutely wild and wonderful. But what that also meant is that consequences didn’t always feel natural or enforced, and the stakes felt lower – even if the threats were larger and the risks seemingly worse, Amnesty rarely felt as though our characters were in danger, and the dice rolls rarely led to those moments of pure disaster that are so often the most fun parts of RPGs. Even more to the point, it kept Griffin from being able to drive the story in directions he clearly had planned out, which led to some plot threads feeling abruptly abandoned, or revelations forced into the story in awkward places where they didn’t fit.

So, yes, Amnesty sometimes suffered, especially in comparison to Balance. But we always knew that would be an issue – what could live up to something so beloved, especially given how that series slowly became what it was almost by chance? But what made it work was the same thing that made Balance ultimately the thing it was: the McElroys.

It’s hard to explain not just the McElroys’ senses of humor, but also their sensibilities. The family has a love for absurdity and silliness, one that provided Amnesty with so many wonderful moments that it’s hard to name them all – a wonderful passing conversation about waffles among roommates and the escalating silliness of a group brainstorming of water park names are two of the best that come to mind. But even among that silliness, what stands out is their empathy and kindness. The McElroys are firm believers that comedy can be silly, ridiculous, and funny, all while still being open and warm and generally optimistic, and Amnesty reflected that every bit as much as Balance did, ultimately becoming a series about choosing forgiveness and tolerance over fear and violence, and why that matters so much as the world pits us against each other.

And in every way, the show reflects that sensibility, most notably in the deeply humane characters all of them created. From Griffin’s NPCs (most notability a creature of evil who finds himself reconsidering his position) to Justin’s weary but outgoing Duck, from Aubrey’s relentlessly cheery Aubrey to Clint’s cynical Ned, all of the characters had a fundamental decency to their core, and that drove the story in surprising ways, allowing the characters to choose acceptance at every turn and work to genuinely make moral choices (something the gleefully anarchic trio of Balance didn’t do quite as often). That could lead to glorious silliness, yes, but it also led to devastating moments of sacrifice and kindness that touched me every bit as deeply as some of Balance‘s peaks.

And really, that’s what made Amnesty work, even as I got frustrated with some of the meandering story aspects and the shaggy mechanics. What I cared about really wasn’t the plot (though I did care about it), and it wasn’t the stakes. It was these characters and their efforts, and in the end, the fact that those characters came so vibrantly to life made up for a lot of my issues with Amnesty. Add into that so many other small touches – great character beats, Griffin’s ever-more ambitious music and editing choices, a willingness to upend the story on a passing whim – and what you got was sometimes shaggy, sometimes unfocused, sometimes even frustrating. But it was also always entertaining, always character-driven, and always something that I looked forward to every two weeks. Does it match Balance? No, it doesn’t…but it’s still wonderful in so many of its own ways, and it proves that the show was more than just that one campaign. It’s moving and it’s funny and it’s exciting and it’s wild, and it means that this family has a lot more stories to tell in them – and that’s good enough for me.

MaxFun Adventure Zone Page

 

 

A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, by Mackenzi Lee / **** ½

It’s hard to explain just how much fun Mackenzi Lee’s The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue is, and that’s saying something, because it’s far from my typical genre. Romantic historical adventures aren’t really my standard fare, and when you make that the trope of the spoiled upper class boy who realizes that his problems pale in comparison to those of women and other minorities, well, there’s all kinds of reasons why that book shouldn’t work.

But against all odds, Lee turns all of those elements into a blast of a read, giving all of it just enough of a unique spin and different feel to make it all come together. Why go with a bland 18th century tour of Europe when you could throw alchemists into the mix? Why play at making your protagonist unlikable when you can really emphasize how selfish and cruel he can truly be, all while making him super fun to watch?

Oh, and why do a typical star-crossed 18th-century romance when you can make it a love story between two lifelong male best friends?

Gentlemen’s Guide does all of that and more, and in so fully committing to every aspect of its story, it makes it all feel so much fresher and more exciting than it has any right to. Yes, it could be easy to roll your eyes at Henry Montague, upper class heir to an estate whose life mainly consists of being kicked out of schools and disappointing his father, as he claims to be the real victim here, all while ignoring the racial animus his mixed race  best friend (and love interest) Percy suffers, or while being oblivious to the way that his sister is being forced into a finishing school when she wanted so much more from life. But Lee makes two choices with Henry, and together, they make the character work. First, Henry’s bisexuality is a critical aspect of his character, and one that informs not only his insecurities and worries, but also his fraught relationship with his father. Secondly, Henry himself may be a narcissistic rake, but that doesn’t make him less fun to live through vicariously, and Lee steers into the chaos and fun of it all before making the stakes clear to not only the reader, but also to Henry. It’s the perfect way to handle this kind of story, one that gives the character more stakes than “I was a selfish pampered rich kid who had a good life” and instead turns him into someone more fragile and complicated than he first appears.

But more than that, there’s just the sheer energy of Gentleman’s Guide, which packs its chapters with quick wits, fast dialogue, and a wonderfully propulsive plot jammed full of pirates, robbers, misunderstandings, fights, escapes, and so much more – and then fills its quiet moments with a thoughtful take on a first romance made even more awkward and nervous by the fear of not knowing if you’ll be scorned for your same-sex desires. And if that’s not enough, there’s the slowly developing relationship between Henry and his sister, each of whom manages to understand the other more and more while still maintaining that glorious sibling banter.

Oh, and did I mention the alchemists who are working to cure death? Because that’s a thing too!

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue isn’t interesting in being photorealistic fiction of the time period (although, as the afterword shows, it’s undeniably well-researched throughout). No, this is an undeniably modern sensibility put onto a classic story, all while trying to evoke the time period and have some fun with it. And if that makes it all a crowd-pleaser, well, there are far worse things to say about a book, because this really is a fun read from beginning to end.

Amazon

The Institute, by Stephen King / ****

I’ve been accused of being predisposed to like everything that Stephen King wrote, and while I don’t think that’s entirely true, I think it is true that it’s hard for me to think of many King books that I didn’t enjoy reading. That’s not the same as saying they’re all good books (not when you have a Dreamcatcher, a Tommyknockers, or a Gerald’s Game in the mix), but what it is saying is that King is too accomplished an author, too good of a storyteller to not have something appealing about the way he’s spinning his stories. And even when the story is a bad one, immersing yourself in King’s conversational prose, expert pacing, and gift for unease and horror is all but guaranteed to lead to a fun read, even if it ends up being unsatisfying.

None of which is to say that King’s newest, The Institute, is a bad book. Indeed, The Institute is a perfectly fun, entertaining read – not on a par with King’s best work by a long shot, but far from his worst. It’s a solid, engaging story, well-told as usual and paced with King’s usual intensity and gift for buildup. It’s just that, by the time you finish, you realize there’s not much meat on these bones, and more frustratingly, you can see the chances where there could have been that substance…but instead we got a solid little B-movie thriller with head nods towards something more.

After a (surprisingly lengthy) prologue involving a small-town cop, The Institute settles into its main story: the titular organization, which has been abducting children who show signs of telepathic and telekinetic abilities, no matter how weak they might be. So when genius teenager Luke Ellis winds up here, it’s not his intellect they want him for; it’s more about those odd times that doors move without him ever touching him. But Luke’s intelligence leads him to start poking holes in the stories about the Institute and result in him trying to figure out exactly what’s going on in the Back Half of the building, into which kids disappear and don’t come back.

The reason for all of this remains unsaid for quite some time, and ultimately, that explanation is one of the more compelling and unexpected aspects of The Institute – it’s not the exact reasons King leads us to assume, and it’s one that could have led to some thoughtful moral calculations. Instead, The Institute is more about trying to rebel in the face of unfathomable moral cruelty, in which children are mistreated and abused in the name of some greater good and without ever being acknowledged as human beings. (Luckily, there are no modern-day or contemporary parallels here at all. Nope.) Essentially, it’s a prison break book – The Great Escape with psychic children, if you wanted to be reductive about it.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing! Few authors handle pacing as well as King, and there are some great setpieces here, from the slow unfolding of an escape plan to a showdown in a small town to the unveiling of the true power of some of these kids. And those treatments? They’re intense and horrifying, raising the specter of “enhanced interrogation” methods committed in the name of a greater good without ever making that connection explicitly clear. All of that leads to some deeply despicable villains whose comeuppance becomes something I truly needed by the end of it all, and some characters who I genuinely wanted to see get through all of this okay.

Still, I’m a few days out from finishing The Institute now, and my main thought is “Yeah, that was pretty good.” There aren’t many chances taken here, and little new ground broken. There’s nothing here like the ambition and power of 11/22/63 or the horrors of the end of Revival; instead, you’re getting a solid little thriller, one that’s well-told and incredibly engaging, but won’t really leave you much to chew on. But when the book is still as compulsively readable as this one is, I don’t think that’s the worst thing in the world.

Amazon

Growing Things and Other Stories, by Paul Tremblay / **** ½

Over the course of three books, Paul Tremblay has risen to one of the most compelling and unique modern horror writers, reveling in the ambiguity of unanswered questions and using it to increase the unease of his horrors. More than that, though, is the way that Tremblay uses his horrors as the anchor to get into so many larger issues, from reality television to parenting, from fandom to political zealotry. But while Tremblay has made a name writing great horror novels, short stories are an entirely different medium, and I was curious to see how much Tremblay’s talents could transition into that form. The answer, at least based off Growing Things and Other Stories? Quite well on the whole.

Of course, ambiguity can often play better in the short form anyways, which allows Tremblay to continue his theme of pairing tales of uncertain horror with more personal, intimate experiences. Take “Swim Wants to Know If It Is as Bad as Swim Thinks,” which parallels the spiraling drug addiction of a young woman with the approach of a monstrous, otherworldly creature, using each against the other to underline the metaphor all the more plainly while never making clear which is the “real” subject of the story. “The Society of the Monsterhood,” on the other hand, manages to both be a story about an insular group of children and an exploration of what it’s like to not fit in with your ostensible community, all anchored by a horror which only becomes clear at the end of the story in an unexpected way.

But what makes Growing Things so rewarding isn’t the typical Tremblay fare; it’s that the medium allows him to play and explore in different styles. “The Teacher” follows a class of high school seniors as they attend a series of “special” lessons which expose them to more and more real-world horrors, resulting in a moody, sickening atmosphere without escape. “A Haunted House Is a Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken” finds Tremblay using a haunted house as a representation of past traumas, which in of itself isn’t a new idea…but structuring it as a “choose your own adventure” story which emphasizes the cyclical nature of such trauma and makes clear the only way to escape from it? That’s something else entirely. Or take “Notes for the Barn in the Wild,” which begins as a pastiche of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and becomes a tribute to Laird Barron’s Lovecraftian nightmares, all without losing that Krakauer feel.

And that doesn’t even get into some of the truly meta and experimental stories, with the standout being “Notes from the Dog Walkers,” an increasingly deranged story that takes the form of, well, notes from the people walking Paul Tremblay’s dogs. And trust me, I do mean Paul Tremblay (or, at least, “Paul Tremblay”), as “Notes” is the most metafictional of any of the stories, as the dog walkers begin critiquing Tremblay’s other novels, referencing his own writing, his reputation as a writer of “ambiguous horror,” insecurities, and so much more. It’s a weirdly playful story that gets more and more uncomfortable as the notes get longer and more demanding, peeling back layers not only of Tremblay’s own worries but of the boundary between stories and readers perfectly. It’s an idea that runs throughout the collection; even the bookends, “Growing Things” and “The Thirteenth Temple,” are stories about storytellers, and each has their connections to Tremblay’s other work (namely, A Head Full of Ghosts).

Growing Things and Other Stories isn’t a conventional collection by any means, but then again, Tremblay isn’t really a conventional author. And in his collection, he continues the playing with the form that we’ve seen in his novels, giving us stories that are undeniably horror tales while also not being easily pigeonholed or characterized. To some, that’s going to lead to a feeling that this is simply a batch of “weirdness for its own sake” or strange vignettes without conclusions, and those aren’t entirely unfair if you’re not on the wavelength of the stories. (Heck, I was on their wavelength, and there are still a few that left me cold.) But it’s a compellingly odd, ambitious, and unusual collection, and one that throws in plenty of unease and terror to spare.

Amazon

The Dark Monk, by Oliver Pötzsch / ****

Oliver Pötzsch’s The Hangman’s Daughter was a pleasant little surprise – a piece of historical fiction that wore its research smoothly, using it all in service of a solid thriller that could easily appeal to a modern audience. Add into that Pötzsch’s own connections to the characters – the titular hangman, Jacob Kuisl, is Pötzsch’s ancestor – and what seemed like a pretty relentless Amazon marketing campaign and you’ve got all the ingredients for the sort of book that could easily be a runaway hit. As it was, The Hangman’s Daughter‘s pleasures were  smaller in scale, and held back a little bit by some of the very modern characterizations that crept into the book, but none of it kept the book from being a lot of fun to read.

The Dark Monk, the second book in the Hangman’s Daughter series (despite the much smaller role of the daughter in the series compared to her father and the young town doctor), does a lot of what made the first book so much fun to read. Pötzsch’s evocation of 17th-century Bavaria is wonderful, immersing you in a world that feels immaculately researched and realistic without ever grinding the story to a halt to show off the details that he’s learned in his diggings. And the plot is undeniably a blast, taking the form of a treasure hunt through the religious sites of the era in pursuit of the lost treasure of the Knights Templar, all while being pursued by members of a mysterious religious order. Oh, it’s all a bit into the realm of the ridiculous, but Pötzsch makes it work by committing so wholly to it and adding in his own humor and sensibility to the mix, reminding us all that this is a fun series, not a grimy historical re-enactment.

And, of course, there’s the compelling character of Jacob Kuisl, the town executioner and surprisingly well-read and learned man. Kuisl is Pötzsch’s ancestor, so it’s no surprise that he has some Mary Sue tendencies – he’s always head of his time, wiser than the superstitious townfolk, ready to give mercy when he deems fit, and so forth. But by marrying all of those qualities to someone who also tortures and executes people for a living, Pötzsch undercuts some of those worries, letting Kuisl be both the brilliant Sherlock Holmes analog and a bit of an antihero. Does he sometimes get to be a bit too smart for the book and for my taste, feeling so much like the hero that you wish he had some more flaws? Sure, a bit, and I think this book doesn’t quite steer into his executioner job as well as the first book did. But Kuisl remains an intriguing character, and by separating him from his protege and letting the two characters have their own threads – the young doctor hunting the treasure, while Kuisl deals with some wandering bandits who seem to have too much information about secret trading routes – Pötzsch is able to cover more ground and develop each a bit on their own terms.

None of which is to say that The Dark Monk is flawless. The treasure plot gets a bit more absurd as it goes along, and whether it goes into the point of silliness will vary by the reader – for me, it felt like a fun B-movie at times, and I say that as a fan of B-movies. More annoying is Pötzsch’s constant trick of omitting key conversations with narration that simply tells us that a character was shocked to hear something, or knew that it confirmed their theory, and delaying that revelation until later; it always feels like a cheap stall or an easy tease, and while it works once or twice, after a while, it feels like a crutch.

But for all of that, I enjoyed The Dark Monk enough to keep me enjoying it and excited to see how it unfolded. There are better thriller writers, undeniably, but the combination of historical time period, interesting characters, and lurid plot all work together to give you a historical fiction beach read of a sort – and sometimes that’s all you want.

Amazon

Three by Adam Bertocci / **** ½

I first came across Adam Bertocci’s writing with his fantastic Shakespearean take on The Big Lebowski, entitled Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, which was the rare Shakespeare mash-up that did right by both parts of its inspiration. But since then, I’ve come to appreciate Bertocci more for his short fiction, many of which are ostensibly teenage/college-age stories done right, with a nice mix of elements that makes them both satisfying and nicely unpredictable. And while a lot of his stories have dabbled in supernatural elements both for creeps and for laughs, my latest trio of his works all focus more on the mundane, everyday worries of relationships and high school anxieties.

Take Ex Marks the Spot, the story of a teenage girl who’s been ghosting her ex-boyfriend for quite a while, only to spend a lot of the run-up to Halloween subconsciously figuring out how to “accidentally” run into him again. Simple enough fare, but Bertocci brings a nice life and plausibility to it that makes it work – and trust me, as a high school teacher, I know all too well what teenage romance can sound like in the real world. Bertocci nails both the rhythms of teenage patter but also the way that relationships can loom so large over the world when you’re that age, coloring all of your interactions and decisions in ways you don’t always understand. Add into that some great family dynamics – after all, what’s Halloween without taking your little brother trick-or-treating? – and Ex is a simple little treat, giving you a sweet teenage relationship story that feels less like a dramatic saga of love and more like a moment of connection in the middle of all the other drama that comes along with being a teenager.

For a lot of people, that drama can build to a head with the pressures of life beyond school – getting into the right school, for example. That’s the catalyst for Laura and Maura, in which we meet Maura, who’s spending the night before the SAT cramming vocabulary frantically…only to have her night of studying upended by the arrival of her outgoing, flighty Canadian cousin Laura. And while the evening starts off simply enough, with Maura finally being convinced to take a break and catch up with her cousin, things escalate from there, leading to everything from police-crashed parties to a bit of car theft. Again, pure classic broad comedy fare, but Bertocci grounds his antics in his characters nicely, making the absurdity and chaos always serve the character development and the larger themes of the story as a whole. Laura and Maura gets a little big for my taste, and the antics sometimes feel a little forced, but none of that keeps the story from coming together nicely, giving us a pair of well-realized female characters defined not by relationships or love interests, but by their own concerns, fears, and desires for life.

Finally, there’s Confessions of an Off-Brand Princess, which is probably the highest concept of this trio, even if it doesn’t seem that way at first. Leaving behind high school for the college life, Bertocci gives us the life of the title character, who plays various Disney princesses – well, their off-brand generic versions, anyway – while stuck waiting for her adult life to really begin. Confessions captures perfectly the awkwardness of those college years, where you’re not quite an adult but not quite a kid, and the frustration that comes as you’re trying to both make your own independent life and be loyal to your family as well. How all of this ends up making use of the fairy tale theme is best experienced rather than told; suffice to say, the English major part of me quite enjoyed watching how Bertocci pulled together what seemed like a lot of disparate ideas into one cohesive whole. But what makes Confessions really work is how well it captures that moment in time, one that’s all too familiar to anyone who remembers those years well. It’s typical of why I enjoy Bertocci’s work in general – for all of the fun and silliness, it’s all about his ability to capture life at an age a lot of us would rather forget, and do it with honesty and wry humor.

Amazon: Ex Marks the Spot | Laura and Maura | Confessions of an Off-Brand Princess

Perfidia, by James Ellroy / *****

It’s incredibly hard to convey what it’s like to plunge into a James Ellroy novel. The closest thing I can give you is that opening Perfidia is like taking a stout shot of whiskey – it burns all the way down, and it’s a bracing, even off-putting experience if you’re not ready for it. But for those open to what Ellroy has to offer, what you’ll get in return is something incredible – a hard-boiled, brutal world that lives and breathes, one immerses you in Los Angeles in December of 1941 and refuses to let you up for air until it’s finished its tale.

As with any Ellroy, at its core, Perfidia is a crime story, although one whose plot (in the tradition of writers like Chandler and Hammett) is so complicated and labyrinthine that you’ll be forgiven for losing track of it all as you go. The basics, though, are simple: on the morning of December 7, 1941, a Japanese family is found ritualistically killed in their home, and a note on the scene hints that they may have had advance warning of what was to come to Pearl Harbor that day. But just as the murder investigation begins, so does America’s involvement in World War II – to say nothing of a violent upsurge of anti-Japanese sentiment and virulent nationalism, one which would lead to the country’s shameful use of internment camps. And beyond all of that, just as there always are, there are those who see in tragedy only a chance to line their own pockets.

That’s the basic gist of Perfidia, but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the novel to come. Unfolding over the course of that fateful December, Perfidia juggles dozens of primary characters, almost all of whom are already known to faithful Ellroy readers from appearances in the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) or the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover). While knowing those series isn’t essential for understanding Perfidia – I’ve read six of the seven, but it’s been more than a decade and my recollections are hazy at best  – there’s little denying that Ellroy is playing games with dramatic irony, giving us stories that both flesh out characters to come in books to come and tell us stories that have only been hinted at before. More than that, this is James Ellroy, which means the characters we get aren’t just flawed – they’re dangerous, conniving, scheming, amoral, violent, corrupt, selfish, and so much more.

And undeniably, the juggernaut among all of them is Dudley Smith, given his chance to shine and narrate the story in a way that he’s never been given before. Longtime Ellroy fans know Smith as his equivalent of Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden – a swaggering, cocky, terrifying force of nature with a moral code all his own, a propensity to violence that nauseates, and a charisma and power that’s undeniable. The chance to explore Dudley feels like a natural reason for Ellroy to have written Perfidia, but the book justifies that, giving us a sense of Dudley while never explaining him away or reducing his power. It’s an immersion in an entirely amoral, disturbing figure, and one done without easy distance from the monster.

Which brings us to just how ugly Perfidia can be to read. Ellroy throws us into a jingoistic, xenophobic period, one that wasn’t good for minorities and immigrants under the best of circumstances, and a period that only worsened as war with Japan came into focus. Ellroy’s staccato, stripped-down, bullet-speed dialogue and narration is peppered and punctuated with racial slurs and hateful stereotypes, and the book never gets easier to take on that front. But there’s never a sense that Ellroy is reveling in his hate; instead, it feels like an unblinking mirror at the period, at the attitudes of powerful white men  who were either virulently racist or more than willing to use the prejudices of others as a way to gather their own power or make money. It’s ugly, dark fare, but one that fits both the period and the genre effortlessly. And while it doesn’t make the book less bracing and unpleasant, Ellroy never lets us forget the toll these words took on the people who had to suffer from them.

All of these elements – the hateful characters, the icy plunge into a racist time and place, the sprawling crime narrative, the sense of fictional history – come together to create something utterly immersive and riveting. I absolutely couldn’t put down Perfidia, even as the characters went to darker and darker places, as the plot revealed more and more portraits of human awfulness and cruelty behind it, as the racism became thicker – no matter what Ellroy threw at me, I was hooked, drug along in the way of Ellroy’s vicious, rapid-fire prose and relentless pacing. Effortlessly mixing real-world figures with his fictional murderer’s row and evoking every aspect of 1940s Los Angeles, Ellroy gives you an atmosphere so rich you could smell it coming out of the pages. And while in theory Ellroy is writing a crime story, what he’s truly making is something more ambitious and compelling – a portrait of a time and place in American history that we don’t like to remember, and one where Ellroy’s monstrous crew fits in distressingly well.

Ellroy’s not a taste for everyone. The plot is labyrinthine to the point of madness; the characters are almost universally horrifying, and even the few good ones aren’t immune to corruption and degradation; the relentless racism and hatred and darkness can be oppressive at best. Those are all legitimate critiques, and ones that I would imagine Ellroy himself would agree with. But they’re also in service of what the novel accomplishes, which is an unblinking look at what the country was willing to do in the name of a “good war” and the ugliness that didn’t even hide its face at the time. That it’s done with such style, thrills, characterization, plot twists, and that amazing prose…well, put it this way: Perfidia the kind of book that makes you wish it wasn’t only 700 pages. To read it is to put yourself in the hands of a master – a vicious, unflinching, cruel master, but a master nonetheless.

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A Brief Programming Note

Just wanted to apologize for being sporadic about reviews in the month since summer vacation ended for me. I’ve read quite a bit since then, but this new school year has involved a lot more planning for me than years past, and as such is chewing through more of my free time than usual, leaving me not much time where I’ve felt like sitting down to write. My hope is that I’ll start back into a blogging/reviewing routine tomorrow (hence me posting this, to hold myself publicly accountable and force myself into writing again) and get back into the swing of things. But, again, apologies for the delays and gap in posting much of anything for a few weeks now.

Books by Friends #1: City of Windows, by Robert Pobi

I’m resurrecting this review as a reminder that Rob Pobi’s City of Windows is now out, and extremely worth your time – don’t sleep on this one if you love thrillers.

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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 – the enthusiasm you’re reading here is genuine.

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I got to know Rob Pobi before I read his debut novel Bloodman, and, as a result, I remember being so worried about picking up that book. Rob was a great guy – interesting, darkly funny, intelligent, and just a fascinating dude – and what if I didn’t like his book? Instead, Bloodman blew me away on almost every level – plotting, prose, themes, ideas, characters – and each successive book hit just as hard. Rob’s not just capable of riveting plots and wild characters; he’s got an amazing craft to his writing, one that takes his already great ideas and kicks them up to an even higher level.

So when I got a chance to read an advance copy of Rob’s next book, City of Windows (due out in August), I was sold, sight unseen. And all that was before I found out the following things:

1. That Rob – a wonderfully, fiercely independent and strong-willed author – had been talked into doing a series.
2. That this was a conscious effort by Rob (a noble Canadian) to write a deeply American thriller
3. That the book comes with a slew of jaw-dropping blurbs, including ones from David Morrell and Lee Child

Was I excited? You know it.

And City of Windows lived up to my hopes, giving me a tight, intense thriller with a compelling lead character, a riveting plot, and serious tension throughout, all anchored in Rob’s great prose and with a keen eye at America as only an outsider can sometimes see us.

The hook here is simple: there’s a sniper that’s killing people in New York City. The shots are impossibly tough. The weather is frigid and forbidding. And the targets are unconnected, as far as anyone can tell. There are no demands, no threats, no terrorist claims that seem legitimate. But the fear in New York City is growing. And that brings us to Lucas Page, a former federal agent who left after an incident left his body in ruins. Page is a hard man to like – he’s viciously cynical, hates anyone he feels is incompetent (which is almost everyone), and doesn’t trust the service that left him so damaged – but his analytical mind is second to none, and lets him view the crimes and clues through a cold, uncluttered view.

As he did with Bloodman, Rob takes familiar tropes – the reluctant, damaged cop; the disconnected but obviously linked crimes; the viciously critical hero – and somehow gives them a life and freshness you would have thought impossible, making them feel not like worn-out cliches but vibrant, intriguing characters. Rob knows how to control his plot, doling out revelations carefully but perfectly, giving me the biggest case of “just one more chapter” that I’ve had in a long time. And in Lucas Page, he’s made a pretty fascinating hero, one that feels like some bizarre mix of Will Graham and Dr. House, and yet one who feels like his own character.

Moreover, he does all of this while delivering a book that’s wholly and completely his own. Rob has made a book that’s undeniably an American thriller – but in doing so, he casts an unblinking, critical eye on things that so many of us have become blind to, from racial tensions to right-wing terrorism. And yes, he’s given us a series, but one that doesn’t always do what you expect, withholding information and events that a lesser series would give us, and giving us a read that feels like it was an end to itself, not the launch of a franchise.

City of Windows won’t be out for a long time – about six months – and while I’m going to try to bump this post back up when the book comes out, there’s a chance I forget. But I’m telling you, don’t miss this when it’s officially published – if you’re a fan of thrillers, you’re going to love this book. I know I did.

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