I’ll be honest and say that, despite the fact that I haven’t yet not loved a Joe Abercrombie book, I was a little wary of A Little Hatred, the first book in the “Age of Madness” trilogy. Oh, I expected that it would be good…but something about the idea of returning to the world of the First Law series, but following a new generation – many of whom were literally the children of characters from the first series…well, look, how many “the next generation” series like that have been worth the time? But I should have trusted Abercrombie, who delivers a story that’s every bit worthy of continuing the First Law series, justifying its use of children and descendants while also telling a story that exists wholly on its own terms. As with The Blade Itself, A Little Hatred is undeniably the first part of a trilogy, and as such, it’s hard to entirely evaluate without knowing Abercrombie’s endgame, but even here it’s evident that his conception of a new generation isn’t merely the literal idea of children dealing with the legacies and shadows of their parents (legacies that are complicated by our own knowledge of those figures), but also in terms of the changes in a world that is increasingly moving into something like the Industrial age – both in terms of technology and in terms of a ruling class that sees it as a chance to make a buck. Into this, Abercrombie throws in international tensions, power struggles, old soldiers who have tried to stay on the sidelines, cutthroat businesswomen…and beneath it all, a simmering tension that feels like we’re on the verge of an explosion. Abercrombie delivers a book that feels satisfying on its own, ending with a couple of serious whammies, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was eager to see what came next and how this series earns the title “The Age of Madness.” Rating: **** ½
I’ve enjoyed a lot of F. Paul Wilson’s books over the years, but one oddity about the man is that, despite being a doctor, his straight-up medical thrillers are among his least interesting books. Still, at the time he released The Proteus Cure, which he cowrote with Tracy L. Carbone (who is, admittedly, unknown to me, and given that I wasn’t a huge fan of the book, I’ll keep my blame on Wilson and not her), I was pretty much willing to take a chance on anything he wrote. And for a bit, Wilson’s normal pacing and craft keeps The Proteus Cure afloat; even as he’s leaning into a few tropes that he’s done too many times by this point, it’s engaging enough to keep you drawn in, if never quite rich and satisfying. But it becomes evident that there’s just not much there there to Proteus; even before you get to the reveal of what’s going on, which is thin and not that interesting, the characters have long since revealed themselves to be pretty functional cardboard cutouts with a couple of characteristics each to keep them moving along. The result is never really “bad,” per se, but it’s rarely more than functional as a book, and despite a pretty interesting ending reveal, it never comes to life – and given that the book just sort of expects us to follow these uninteresting characters because we care about them, that becomes a problem. Add to that some weird undercurrents that never quite set right with me – a character who feels a hair’s breadth from being a stereotype, another character whose ex-wife becomes just a caricature of an evil woman – and the whole thing is just sort of a bland fizzle. It’ll pass the time, but not much more. Rating: ** ½
The Maxx, by Sam Keith – I had too much to say about my revisiting of this 90s comic to fit into this capsule format, so you’ll find my review here.
When I read the original First Law trilogy, it took until the final volume, Last Argument of Kings, for the overall shape and structure of the trilogy to click into place, revealing the arc that Abercrombie had been shaping all along. That’s not the case with the “Age of Madness” series, however, because The Trouble with Peace lets us see (I think, anyways) where we’re going in all of its bloody horror by the end, giving us a sense of what this series is really all about. Before we get there, though, we have a major power struggle to survive, as a newly crowned king tries to find a way to handle challenges to his authority from within his own government – to say nothing of a newly anointed hero who’s being embraced by the rebels. Add to that the simmering tensions and connections of the first novel, and what you have is a taut, tense novel that never really loses a moment of pacing over the course of its 500 pages, whether it’s giving us a fraught plea for clemency or a sprawling military battle. More than that, though, The Trouble with Peace lets us dig even deeper into our characters, seeing beyond our initial impressions of them all and seeing even more who they are – seeing Clover as more than the wry old warrior, and Savine as more than the ruthless businesswoman, and Orso as more than the debonair fop, and Leo as more than the glory-hungry hero…and so on. Indeed, part of the joy of Abercrombie’s taking his time to spread this story across three volumes is the way that he finds more and more depth and complexity into his characters, to where the story’s brutal turns – and oh, are there some nasty ones coming – are simultaneously shocking and yet also feel wholly in keeping with the characters as we know them. The scope here is massive, with much of the book being given over to all out warfare, but Abercrombie never loses focus on the grounding of his story in human figures – those with power and those without, as the series always reminds us what happens to those ground between the gears of history. I suspect that, much as with the First Law, the final volume will snap everything into place in some way I haven’t seen yet, but that hasn’t kept me from loving the books and being unable to put them down. With his dark sense of humor, rich dialogue, compelling characters, and plotting that feels both intimate and epic, Abercrombie reminds me what a master he is, and why I fell so instantly in love with his world within moments of starting The Blade Itself. Rating: *****
One thing you have to admit about Tracy Sierra’s debut novel Nightwatching: it doesn’t waste any time. By the end of the first page, our protagonist – a nameless mother whose narration is undeniably filtered through her own perceptions – awakens to realize that there is a man in her house, standing and looking at her, motionless. What happens from there happens with the speed of a rocket, essentially unfolding across the span of two relentless sequences with a bridge in the middle that makes everything more complicated. Sierra makes a few odd stylistic choices – none of the characters are ever given “real” names, for instance – but by and large, Nightwatching works by committing to its narrator and her perspective – her fear as she and her children are threatened, her slow piecing together of what’s going on, her terror and inability to know what’s happening outside of her field of vision…and also, the fact that she’s not quite as put together as she seems at first glance. Indeed, Sierra starts playing a complicated game early on, threading a needle between “society has a tendency to not believe women or minimize their trauma” and “but our narrator here really might be unstable,” somehow doing both ideas justice without weakening either. There are a couple of small issues here and there with Nightwatching – I think it sometimes leans so far into its subjective narration that it feels unfocused, one supporting character feels like a trope that never becomes more than that, and I think the ending is less interesting than what came before it – but those are small knocks when the thriller aspects of this are so tense, move so fast, and have so much to rip the reader along in their path. That it’s a first novel only makes them all the more impressive. It’s a great, taut little thriller, one that has interesting ideas but also moves like a rocket – once you start, it’s a hard one to slow down with. Rating: ****
I remember hitting Last Argument of Kings, the final volume of the First Law series, and having the breath all but knocked out of me as I realized just what Abercrombie had been working towards this whole time, clicking everything into place brutally but magnificently. And so I was a little prepared for the same experience with The Wisdom of Crowds, which finds the Age of Madness sliding into full French Revolution territory, all while the North ends up moving towards its own change of leadership. At least, I thought I was prepared – but once again, somehow Abercrombie sidestepped my assumptions beautifully, hitting me with a couple of reveals that made complete sense and yet caught me entirely unawares, putting everything into a sharp relief that revealed just how careful he is as an author – but also once again reminded me why the man was the origin of the term “grimdark.” None of that keeps Crowds from maybe being one of the most propulsive, intense reads Abercrombie has ever written; between the anarchy of the streets and the damage done to our characters across the board, I found myself absolutely unable to put down the book, particularly whenever we were building towards a climax (and the major battle climax here is a doozy that I recommend you just set aside some time for when you get to it, because you won’t want to stop). For all of the writing and the tension and the reveals and the plotting, though, what makes Abercrombie truly work is his grip on characters, and none of that fails him here, as all of his major players complete their arcs in ways that are both satisfying and tragic across the board. Fallen hero Leo, surprisingly compassionate royalty Orso, ruthless but traumatized Savine, cynical survivor Vick, semi-reluctant warrior Broad, practical and unsentimental Clover, underestimated Rikke – all of them find an endpoint here that draws the trilogy into a nice shape, feeling like their logical endpoint while also feeling like you could never have called it. It is, in short, one of Abercrombie’s best books, and I’m mainly just sad that it’s over – but my god, what an accomplishment it (and the trilogy) is. Rating: *****
I was quite impressed with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut short story collection Friday Black, which I felt showed a huge amount of promise in its concepts and trenchant social commentary, while also feeling like Adjei-Brenyah hadn’t quite stuck the landing in connecting those concepts to a larger story perfectly. In some ways, I have similar complaints about his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars; that being said, I also couldn’t really put this one down, and it’s undeniably a stronger work than that collection across the board, all without losing those fascinating ideas and vicious satirical bent. Chain-Gang All-Stars gives us an America where convicts can opt out of their life sentences to participate in brutal combat to the death, all with the promise of freedom if they last long enough – and that combat has become the most-watched sport in the country, inspiring cult-like fandom, fetishization of the athletes, rampant sponsoring opportunities, and not a small amount of protest movements. What you get, then, is something like a fusion of the film version of The Running Man if it were also a savage critique of the prison-industrial complex, and it’s undeniably a compelling and wild read. Adjei-Brenyah builds his world through its details, most notably footnotes that are pretty evenly split between world-building (particularly some dryly funny sponsorship notes), character backgrounds, and sobering (real-world) statistics about the prison system; add that to a story that’s willing to look beyond its primary characters to dive into the larger world a few times, and you get a dark and trenchant satire whose confidence in its points about the system are undeniably effective, using a high concept to explore these ideas in the guise of a story about one convicts final weeks before potentially earning her freedom. That being said, Adjei-Brenyah also still struggles a bit with some of the “turning this into a good story” here and there, even before an ending that I’m not sure worked in the way that he wants it to; there are some odd details and dead-ends along the way, some plot beats that never quite mesh into the larger picture, and just some shagginess that feels like it could have been trimmed for greater impact. But I’d always prefer something shaggy but ambitious and interesting to something that plays it safe and takes no risks, and All-Stars delivers on that and then some; it’s a book that has a point to make and does it well, all while also displaying Adjei-Brenyah’s incredible imagination and gift for finding fascinating ways to explore our society. Rating: **** ½
I enjoyed Tana French’s The Searcher, a stand-alone tale of Cal, a former Chicago cop who moves to a small Irish town, only to find himself helping a local teen named Trey in her search for her missing brother. But as much as I enjoyed it, now that I’ve read The Hunter, French’s followup, I can’t help but feel like The Searcher was merely the prelude for the book she really wanted to write – and oh, did she succeed, delivering what might be my favorite book of any she’s written. Opening not long after the events of The Searcher drew to a close, The Hunter has a simple inciting incident: the return to town of Trey’s long absent father – a return that almost everyone agrees probably isn’t due to parental love. What exactly he wants is best left to French’s slow unrolling of details; suffice to say, The Hunter is a book that’s willing to take its time, evolving again and again as new events unfold, characters reveal new depths, and the ground under everyone’s feet changes. But what starts as a simple tale of a pariah’s return becomes something far more complex – a story of revenge, of spite, of loyalty and outsiders, of community and belonging, of what people will do in their own name and in the name of those they love, and the actions we take sometimes without fully understanding why. By the time you get to the complex, dense final act – which delivers too many tense scenes to put down, so you better budget time when you get there – I was pretty sure that I was reading French’s best novel, and the conclusion didn’t detract from that at all. And if all the plotting and thematic/emotional complexity isn’t enough for you, there’s French’s beautiful ear for dialogue, which is deployed here in ways both comic and unnerving throughout, with a knack for capturing the banter between friends as well as it nails the way that often, the words of a conversation have nothing to do with what’s actually being said. I liked The Searcher quite a bit, but The Hunter feels like the story that this series was started in order to be told; while you really need to read The Searcher to fully love this one (for…reasons), rest assured, it’s worth it for the best book by one of the best living crime writers working today. Rating: *****
Donald Bain is an incredibly prolific author – well over 100 published novels – and yet one who almost never publishes under his own name, instead working as a ghost writer for everything from the Murder She Wrote series to the autobiography of Veronica Lake. I saw him give a talk about a decade back, which I enjoyed it enough to pick up a copy of his memoirs, entitled Murder He Wrote. And now that I’m finally getting around to it, I’m remembering why I enjoyed his talk so much: because Bain was a great old storyteller and pro – an author who viewed writing as a job, who approached it simultaneously with pride in his work and yet no ego at all, and one whose life had so many odd little detours and side paths – life as a military pilot, a PR coordinator, an advocate for aviation reform, a regular talk show guest, a frothy romance author, and so much more – that he’s filled with great tales and knows how to tell them. You’ll get everything from government conspiracies to dwarf auditions here, all told with the rhythms of a man who knows how to keep his audience entertained. More than that, Bain takes a working man’s approach to writing, with little use for excuses or fussiness, and it makes for a fascinating take on the writing process – especially given that he’s a man who almost never has it go out under his own name. It’s an enjoyable series of stories from a compelling, oddball life, but more than that, it’s a reminder of an era where writing gigs like that were a way to make a life, and you can’t help but read a lot of it and think, to paraphrase Bain, of a time where a lot of things were more fun than they are now. Rating: ****
I’ve long enjoyed Anthony Oliveira’s presence on social media, simply by virtue of the fascinating but narrow Venn diagram he represents – how often do you find a queer theologian and classics academic who also loves camp cinema and the X-Men (well, comics in general, but you know the way to my heart), all while also just being entertaining, deeply human/e, and just a fascinating, unique person? Oh, and he’s also a phenomenal writer, as his essay “A Year in Apocalypses” will testify. So it didn’t take me much to be sold on Dayspring, Oliveira’s debut work of fiction, basically sight unseen. Closer to prose poetry than it is a traditional novel (I am always a little wary to ascribe formatting choices to an advanced ebook copy, but everything I’ve seen makes this seem accurately laid out), Dayspring is remarkably hard to summarize or even convey in my capsule reviews; in its broadest sense, it is the story of John, the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” and his relationship with Christ, one anchored both by emotional and sexual love and desire. Now, is that relationship a retelling of the Gospels, or is it a modern allegorical telling? Well…yes – and it’s also a post-modern telling, in which Christ (whose dialogue is written in red font) points out the historical origins of some of the tales around him, remarks that some of these stories have been revised over time, rolls his eyes over Peter’s inability to understand metaphors, and in general, reminds us that if Christ came to earth as a man, then he must have lived as a man – which means that he might have farted on his boyfriend, or yelled at the sea when he was frustrated with it, and so forth. And if all of this sounds like a conventionally religious book, well, it should not (and if you know me, you know that my own feelings on Christianity are…complicated) – did you miss that Christ has a boyfriend, whichever time period we are in, or that this is a book that is both about queer love but also divinity, about the way society weaponizes faith against queer people but also denies Christ’s messages of acceptance, about how the gospels and so much of the Bible are revised and edited over the years into “canon” while also being something more for so many people? And it’s also a book about what we do with all of this in the modern era – an era where Christianity has become toxic and corrupted for so many of us past the point of repair, where “religion” too often has come to mean “hateful and vile,” where queer people are still judged for actions that can be found even in religious texts. Somehow, Oliveira turns all of this into a beautiful, sprawling, meditative work that feels deeply personal to his interests – side tracks into medieval art, allusions to comics, musings on historical writings, astonishingly beautiful writing – and yet hits home even for this straight agnostic (at best) English teacher in the American south. (Mind you, this is a book so dense with allusions – religious, historical, literary, and more – that it certainly will appeal more to those with a knowledge of those fields, especially Christianity.) It is a dense book whose short length belies its complexity, density, and nuance, but it’s also a beautiful book about hope, about shaping the world with the goal of moving forward, about reminding us that change is a process and not an end, about the fallibility and beauty of humanity, and about the fundamental belief that things cannot always be like this, but that it is up to us to fight for this and move on. I found it a truly moving book, one that I annotated and marked up to high heaven for its beauty but also for its humanity and its hope – at a time where the world can feel overwhelming and faith can feel like a fool’s errand, Dayspring is a meditation on what humanity means, on what it meant to have a fully human God on earth, and what it can teach us about our own lives – and in doing so, I was left deeply moved and inspired by its impact. Rating: *****
Preston Fassel’s Our Lady of the Inferno may be a 21st century novel, but it so perfectly evokes the grimy, sleazy spirit of its 1980s Times Square environment, and so nicely conjures up the spirit of grindhouse cinema and the like, that you could almost forget that it’s a modern book and instead make yourself think that it’s the latest Paperbacks from Hell release or a great thrift shop find. A nasty, pulpy horror novel set in the shadows of the Deuce, Our Lady of the Inferno is the story of Ginny, a prostitute who essentially serves as the den mother for her girls, working as the liason between them and their pimp, sheltering them from his rages but also encouraging them to do better – helping them with reading, encouraging them to learn new languages, and more. That could so easily become treacly fare, but even without the horror elements, Fassel never lets that happen; Ginny is too hardened, the realities of the area and the life too grim, the consequences – the psychological and emotional as well as the physical – too evident to make her actions more than a kind action in a rough world. That same attitude goes for a lot of the book’s characters, all of whom are flawed people, eking out an existence along the edges of society, making things work for themselves, reaching their own compromises, and doing what they think is right – and that includes the serial killer who is preying on the prostitutes around the square, kidnapping them and hunting them in a nightmarish labyrinth that only gradually reveals the depths of the delusion here. The result is a mix of 80s grindhouse horror and Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, and wholly effective; Ginny is a character who’s easy to become invested in, even with (and maybe because of) her flaws and mistakes, and Fassel’s evocation of the time and place here is so well done that I found myself picturing it all through the filters of Frank Henenlotter movies of the era. There are some small nits to pick, most notably in the verbal tics of some of its characters (Ginny’s speech could be an affectation, but other characters stops and starts get a bit more wearying and jarring), but none of it really detracts from the atmosphere of it all, which thrusts you back into the era so effortlessly and cleanly that you’re not even thinking about when the horror hits. Rating: **** ½
Last year, I read Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers, a Vietnam novel that served as the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. That book was part of a planned “Vietnam Trilogy” about Joker and his experiences during and after the war; however, the third book wasn’t written before Hasford’s death. The second book, The Phantom Blooper, was, however, and it gives you a sense of how the series was changing – and let me tell you, the direction was “darker, angrier, more cynical, and more unsettling.” By the time we catch up with Joker at the beginning of Blooper, any glimpse of innocence is gone; this is a man who mutilates a fellow soldier who questions his methods and who’s willing to sacrifice a “new guy” in the name of luring out the titular “phantom blooper,” a possibly mythical soldier who has become the terror of the men. It’s then, though, that The Phantom Blooper shifts in a wholly unexpected direction, following Joker as he becomes a prisoner (in the loosest possible sense of the word) and begins to forcefully reckon with his own feelings on the war, the things he’s done, and his own feelings about his country. If The Short-Timers was a scathing look at the military machine and what it does to people, The Phantom Blooper is more directly a book about Vietnam, with anger, disillusionment, and guilt to spare; it looks directly at the disconnect between the goals of the war and the reality, and that’s before it ends up grappling with the nature of homecoming from the war and what happens when you’re no longer the boy who left. The Phantom Blooper is an angry, angry book, to the point where it can be hard to take; by the time you’re in the final stretch of the book, Joker feels so far gone – so broken by his time in the war and his experiences – that being around him feels scary at best, and heartbreaking more often. I can’t help but wish we had a third volume, just to see if Hasford had any plans to give him peace by the end of things, but it feels unlikely; The Phantom Blooper feels like a raw nerve written by a soldier who felt betrayed by his country, his family, and himself. It’s a harrowing read in a lot of ways, and while it hits hard, emotionally, it’s also not a book that’s for everyone as a result of all of that. Rating: **** ½
If Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life ended one chapter earlier, I think I’d be able to recommend it, even with its flaws. What starts as the story of four friends becomes an exploration of the bond between two of them specifically – a famous actor and an attorney whose childhood was filled with abuse and trauma – and as the book evolves, that trauma becomes the foreground, turning the book into an exploration of living with pain and struggling to overcome the challenges that formed him. At its best, A Little Life can be incredibly moving; its portrait of grief along the way is devastating, and while the book is undeniably got some flaws – it’s too long, especially given how two of its major characters just drop out of the book after us spending a lot of time with them; the trauma goes from realistic to excessive to cartoonish along the way; there’s little sense of time or place ever, even as years and years go by – it works as an operatic melodrama, where everything is cranked to extremes, including the emotional appeals. And I’ll fully concede that I was on board for a lot of it; it didn’t all work, but it got its reactions out of me, and I enjoyed how it grappled with questions about how we handle moving on from trauma, what a relationship looks like in cases like that, and so forth. But it’s that final chapter – combined with reading more about Yanagihara’s intentions in writing the book – that really turned me on the book, so much so that since finishing it, I’ve slowly moved from a “that was quite good” to “well, I’m not really sure about it” to “that was actually kind of offensive in its cynicism and self-righteousness”? Because, without getting into spoilers, it turns out that Yanagihara’s message is “sometimes people aren’t fixable, and some traumas are just going to ruin your life” (a message that she literally spells out in an interview), and let me tell you, that’s not a message I can really get behind…and that goes doubly when you run with it to the degree that Yanagihara does. Without its final chapter, I might be still on board with A Little Life as an effective, if overwrought, piece of melodrama, but its ending – and learning more about the author’s intentions – changes it into something that’s legitimately offensive and horrific to me, glamorizing suffering and pain in a way that can’t help but send messages that I think will make the world a worse place. No Rating
PS: This is completely unrelated to the book itself, but man, I hate that cover – and I hated it more once I learned that it’s titled “Orgasmic Man,” which only underlines my unease with the way the book seems to link suffering and ecstasy.
Umney's Alley 