I really didn’t know much about V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue before I picked it up, which allowed to me to take on Schwab’s sprawling tale of a woman granted immortality with the price that no one would ever remember here without any sense of where the story would go. Schwab digs into Addie’s point of view wonderfully, unraveling her tale along two parallel timelines – one that starts at the beginning of her tale, and one that starts in the “present” – slowly helping us see how Addie’s life has been one both full of wonders but also desperately lonely, with only one relationship that’s been consistent over the years – and given that it’s with the power that gave her this blessing/curse, that’s a fraught relationship, to put it mildly. Look, I loved this book; it reminded me of books like The Time Traveler’s Wife and even Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, mixing magical and fantastical elements with deeply human stories, and using those elements to underline larger human needs and emotions – in this case, the need to leave an impact behind us when we’re going, and the way that Addie pushes against her curse to find a way to do that, all while also demonstrating the way that people can lose their moral compass when sometimes consequences don’t matter. It’s a wonderful little book, made even better by the closing section, which finds a way to connect Addie’s desires with the ongoing story of her life and the people she’s “met” along the way. It’s a wonderful little gem of a book, one that just works on pretty much every level (with the one possible caveat that one reveal is a little obvious, but it’s handled so well and makes so much thematic sense that I don’t mind at all) and just feels human and warm and imaginative, immersing you in Addie’s unusual life and her unique perspective. Rating: *****
Somehow I had gotten into my head that Anathem was a bit of a return to tighter, more adventure-driven storytelling for Neal Stephenson, who had started to embrace massive book lengths and endless (if fascinating!) digressions and discursions by this point in his career. But it didn’t take me long to realize that, if anything, this was Stephenson going further than he’d ever gone before, tossing us into an alien world (quite similar to Earth, but definitively not) with 4000 years of history, a slew of new words, religious orders dedicated to the relationship between humanity and Platonic ideals, contemplation about the relationship between quantum physics and alternate realities – and none of that is even the plot of the book. Anathem is about as far from a casual read as you can get; a huge chunk of the book is dedicated to Socratic seminar-style discussions of these complex philosophical ideas about perceptions, where ideas come from, the nature of language, and so forth, and in no way is Stephenson interested in dumbing down these debates for a general audience; these are heady, difficult questions, and they’re depicted in complex dialogues that find him making an effort to making them understandable while also doing them justice. That’s not to say that those ideas don’t tie into the main story of the book, which revolves around a member of a religious order (not in a Christian sense of “religious,” mind you; almost more of a world where math and science have become a religion, in some ways) who starts to suspect that intrigue in his order might tie into larger happenings around the world. But Stephenson takes his time unspooling that thread, letting his characters talk and debate for massive lengths of time, counting on the reader to be fascinated by listening to characters speak intelligently about complex fare. By and large, it works; I would never consider Anathem a page-turner, and I definitely can’t help but feel that there’s a very different book in here where a lot of the philosophical digressions are trimmed and cut, allowing the compelling story to work on its own terms. And yet, I found myself pretty compelled by it all, immersed in its debates about how we see the world and where information comes from, and as I started to see how it connected to Stephenson’s larger story, I could see the shape of the book as a whole. The result isn’t exactly an easy read, nor is it one for all audiences; it’s intensely heady stuff, to the point where some of the wild events of the story (including martial arts-wielding monks, nuclear weapons, court intrigue, parallel universes, and the possibility that there’s something in the sky that no one wants anyone to know about) almost takes a backseat to debates about whether ideas come from our brains or if there are universal forces we tie into. I can’t say that I loved Anathem, but it’s a wholly remarkable book, and one that’s not really like anything else I’ve ever read; I found myself drawn into it, and while I can’t help but wish it was cut back a bit, I also found its love of complex ideas and concepts intoxicating and wonderful in an era where we almost always favor the most bland and easy ideas possible. Rating: ****
There are so many things that I loved about Mike Mignola’s comic epic Hellboy (and its epilogue series, Hellboy in Hell) that it’s hard to know where to start. Do I start with the glorious array of little cases that find Mignola embracing weird folklore from all over the world, only to have the deadpan, gruff Hellboy react with nonchalance and dry wit, no-selling the horror in front of him and instead just treating it all like another day at the office, no matter how weird it gets? (And, oh, does it get weird.) Do we talk about how laugh-out-loud funny the comic often is, from Hellboy’s dry recitations of the insanity around him to Mignola’s love of killer monkeys to his willingness to find the comedy in the disconnect between the insanity of his world and the mundanity of his characters? Do we talk about the incredible arc of the series, which shifts effortlessly between standalone cases and a tragic tale of a creature who never chose his origins nor his destiny, ultimately creating a series that’s like some wild blend of The X-Files and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman? Or do we just talk about Hellboy himself, who may be one of the great characters of all time – whose wry commentary, glee at punching Nazis, amusement at the weirdness of his world, and omnipresent cigarette all just make him both amazingly cool and wonderfully at ease with his own weirdness? It’s really all of these things and more that makes it – or, more accurately, it’s all of these things put together that work, anchored by Mignola’s shadowy, unusual work (the other artists who come in are also great, make no mistake, but it feels like Mignola’s work is what people think of with this series – and rightfully so) and the fusion of folklore, pulp storytelling, religious iconography, and apocalyptic vision. I loved it all – from weird Nazi monkeys to the nightmarish Crooked Man, from the vistas of Hell to the underwater realms of the mermaids, from gambling vampires to flying heads – it all just put me in an amazing world that felt like little else out there, and I’m glad that I still have a bunch of one-shots and side stories awaiting me now that this main tale is completed. Rating: *****
Seven Shades of Evil is the penultimate entry in the Robert McCammon’s Matthew Corbett books; more notably, it’s the first book of the series made up of short stories, a choice that both allows McCammon to experiment with all sorts of stories and genres, but also a choice that lets him mix up the narration of the series, allowing some of Matthew’s supporting cast to take the spotlight for a change. All of that makes Seven Shades one of the most engaging and purely fun books of the series, really, so much so that you quickly forget the odd pacing choice of interrupting your series with one book to go to fill in some unconnected stories that don’t quite tie into the final arc (with one minor – and cryptic – exception). But when you have Matthew in the middle of a supernatural war between some very dangerous predators, or Berry trying to uncover the truth behind a missing passenger on a ship, or Minx Cutter tracking a serial killer, or Katherine Harrald going to bat for a former slave whose property makes her a target, or Hudson Greathouse himself dealing with a community under siege by what might be a cyclops…well, all of those are so lean, entertaining, and propulsive as to make the pause in Matthew’s larger story less of an issue. McCammon’s storytelling skills are on fine display here, and the short story format gives him the freedom to take chances and expand away from Matthew’s normally “real” world and into the shadows that lurk around the edges, and when combined with the chance to get to know some of the supporting characters better, I really just had a blast here. Pulpy stuff – and I mean that in the best way – that tosses some wild stories, engaging mysteries, and fun surprises your way. It’s an easy starting point for anyone curious about the series as a whole, which is a rarity for the 9th book in a saga, but fits the standalone tales of adventure, investigation, and weirdness that you’re getting here. Lots of fun to be had, and a nice chance to see McCammon try his hand at short fiction again. Rating: **** ½
It’s genuinely hard to know what to say about Titus Alone, the third entry in the Gormenghast series. Do you take it as a book that was changed by its author’s declining health, resulting in us only seeing the shadow of the book that was? Is it an entirely intended gearshift for the series, one that cuts Peake’s normally rich descriptions and leaves the shadowy world of Gormenghast behind for a “modern” world with no knowledge of the castle? Or is it a book that was never intended to be published, the work of an author whose health – both physical and mental – kept him from writing the book he wanted? I honestly don’t know, and I’m not versed enough in the story of Peake and the series to have a firm opinion; what I can say is that Titus Alone really is a bewildering book even when you take it away from the preceding two books, with which it has almost nothing in common except for Titus, and even he doesn’t feel quite like the same person. There’s a neat idea in the heart of Titus Alone – that of Titus leaving the safe embrace of Gormenghast to make a name for himself and figure out who he is – and in its best moments, there are glimpses of the way that Peake seemed to be able to encourage vivid, unusual, wryly comic scenes through dialogue or exaggerated caricatures or just moments of beauty. But for every scene like that, there’s Titus vacillating between ego (bragging about a station in life that he’s also running from) and need (being desperately glad to see the very same “friends” he was just sneering at), or characters whose behavior comes out of nowhere and feels driven by their plot need rather than the rich personalities of the first two books (I’m thinking here especially of Cheeta, who is…something, I guess). There are moments where you can see the brilliance of the first two books here – a party scene that feels of a piece with the bizarre and wonderful world of the Professors, a hallucinatory finale that (despite making little sense) absolutely comes to vivid, nightmarish life – but I mainly finished it a little bewildered, a little let down (maybe more than a little), and a little saddened at the fact that the magic of the first two books is let down so much by a third book that almost feels like it was never meant to be seen in this form. Rating: ***
One of my favorite things about The X-Files was the way that the show mixed supernatural phenomena with “plausible” scientific explanations; it was always a blast how the show managed to have its cake (supernatural horrors and surreal moments) and eat it too (come up with an explanation that could make it all happen, even if there was just that small possibility along the outskirts that it wasn’t natural at all). That’s also something that authors Lincoln Child and Preston Douglas have managed over the years, and Child keeps that tradition alive in his solo work if The Forgotten Room is any indication. Part of his series about “enigmalogist” Jeremy Logan (a series unread by me, but pretty clearly designed as standalones, based off of this one), The Forgotten Room finds Logan being called to investigate a nightmarish suicide that happened in a secretive research firm. Why was the death so violent? And what prompted it, given that the man had no issues or signs of despair? That’s what Logan gets brought in to determine, but it doesn’t take long before it starts to feel like there’s a deeply malevolent presence that might have been uncovered when that titular room was revealed. The Forgotten Room is a pure beach read, but one handled by an author who knows how to craft such fare; it moves quickly, tosses out plot revelations at a perfect rate, gives you just enough characterization to make the book work, and cuts pretty much all fat in favor of a lean, exciting little book. It’s the book equivalent of a summer B-movie – perfectly enjoyable, keeps you entertained, won’t stick on your ribs for more than a few hours. But sometimes, that’s what you want, and The Forgotten Room delivers as a popcorn read that reminded me of the fun of watching The X-Files thread that needle. Rating: *** ½
Let’s get the elephant in the room addressed first: yes, Karen Thompson Walker’s novel The Dreamers is the tale of an epidemic, and I think it’s going to be a long time before reading scenes of panicked grocery shopping, uncertain people looking out from behind masks, paranoia over how germs spread, and the like is ever going to be something that’s without at least a twinge of trauma and unpleasant memories. But if you can set that aside, The Dreamers is a beautiful little tale, one that captures a lot of the magical and yet uncertain mood that anchored Thompson’s breakout novel The Age of Miracles, albeit doing so without quite the thematic tightness of that novel. The Dreamers unfolds in a small California college town, where a sleeping epidemic has started – that is, people have started to fall asleep, but don’t seem to be able to wake up. Into this scenario, Walker gives us a wide cast of characters – a shy college freshman who doesn’t know anyone; a strong-willed moral absolutist; a pair of new parents terrified of what all this means for their newborn; two sisters raised under the control of a prepper father; a gestating child – and uses the uncertainty and unease of the moment to explore all sorts of ideas about how we connect to the people around us, how morality can lead us to have to confront our own ideals in the face of reality, how the future and the past can shape our present, and the roles of dreams in all of this. It’s all wonderfully told, and the mood of the whole thing is magical – it’s undeniably a book that reminds me of how powerful it was as Thompson used that same mix of promise and fear as a metaphor for growing up in Miracles. The thing is, The Dreamers doesn’t feel as tight or cohesive as that book did; it’s impeccably crafted and wonderfully immerses you in its characters and its story, but it never feels like it quite comes together around any one idea – or even a few ideas – as much as it needs to in order to have an impact. I still liked it a lot, but ultimately it feels like a lovely slice of life without much “there” there. Rating: ****
I haven’t read Cujo in probably nearly three decades; I had a few scattered memories here and there, but mainly remembered it as “that book about a rabid dog that King doesn’t really remember writing.” So it’s a bit of a treat to pick it up and remember just how surprisingly propulsive and intense it is, especially given how much less of the book than you remember actually revolves around the mother and child trapped in the car by a rabid Saint Bernard. Instead, much as Christine uses a possessed car as a way of exploring what happens as friends grow apart, Cujo is really a book about a marriage on the verge of collapse, as a young couple deals with the aftermath of an infidelity and the pressures of an income that might be falling apart. Just as I’ve always said that King is one of the few authors who seems to remember what it was really like to be a kid, I think he’s largely unappreciated in his ability to capture the life of the working class and the working poor, and that pays off beautifully in Cujo, as you can feel the financial sharks circling the family in the aftermath of a PR disaster. Somehow, though, King brings those threads together with the aforementioned rabid dog (who’s portrayed in a surprisingly heartfelt and heartbreaking manner) and the possible lingering malevolence of the killer who stalked the pages of The Dead Zone – and even though it should feel like a mess, it somehow doesn’t. Indeed, somehow it all threads together effortlessly, turning the situation at the car into a pressure cooker that somehow just gets worse and worse, all without ever feeling contrived. More than that, reading Cujo as an adult has a way of making you see how well King uses the story of the marriage to anchor the book, giving it stakes that it might not otherwise achieve. It’s not the “how did I overlook the greatness of this?” experience that I had with Christine, but it’s also a book that I was delighted to revisit, remembering just how untouchable King was at the peak of his powers (and still quite often!). Rating: **** ½
I’ve never had an experience like that of reading Kiersten White’s Mister Magic, a book in which my entire opinion of the book changed not because of the book itself, but because of something the author said in the acknowledgments. Until that point, I was enjoying Mister Magic pretty well – it’s a creepypasta-influenced piece of horror about a children’s show that feels more akin to an urban legend (it’s mentioned at one point that you could only find it “between” the channels); somehow, though, a podcast has managed to find the original children from the show and is reuniting them to reignite the magic of the show. What follows from there is deeply unsettling and weird, if a little shaggy; some of the “lore” behind the show was odd, and while the themes of the book became more interesting – about the way that so much children’s entertainment is about teaching children to obey and not about celebrating their childlike spirits – the book felt just…odd, in some way that I struggled to articulate. And then came White’s acknowledgments, which open with her discussion of the origins of the book (and it’s here that I have to intrude and mention that, absurdly, I feel like I’m spoiling something here, despite it literally being just the context of the book – I think it’s just because of the whammy impact of this coming after the story, maybe?) – that it’s a metaphor for her upbringing in the Mormon church and the impact it had on her as a child. That window into White’s intentions absolutely changed my impressions of the book, helping a lot of the odder elements click into place, making clear how the themes connected to her own religious trauma, and turning the book from an unsettling odd little tale into a story that uses horror to get at something far deeper and more complex. I’m loathe to let my opinion of a book be entirely shaped by something outside of the text, but I can’t deny that understanding White’s background changed my feelings on Mister Magic, almost to the point where I feel like a second read of the book would be an entirely different experience; regardless, what I can say is that seeing that thread made me appreciate Mister Magic so much, giving it an emotional heft and power that I didn’t understand until that moment. Is that fair to say for a book that I liked but didn’t love until that moment? Hard to say – but once I knew it, I couldn’t not know it. Rating: **** ½
Umney's Alley 