China Mieville Going Downhill (in my opinion)

So, I just finished China Mieville’s much hyped Iron Council.  Ehhh.  He has such good ideas, such rich and vivid visuals and generally an intriguing setting – New Crobuzon has its ups and downs.  But, dammit, I just didn’t care two hoots for ANY of the characters in Iron Council.  The story flipped around too much and none of the characters were anything more that two dimensional, I felt.  Just when you would start to get a feel for a character, he would switch to the other setting he was writing about.  Just when you felt like a character was developing some depth, he would stop talking about them. It was a big tease, really.  I found myself in the last thirty pages or so feeling like I really couldn’t care less if I finished it or not.  I did, because I respect the craft, but I didn’t care about it.  Just so damn disappointing.  He’s suppossed to be good, but I haven’t loved any of his books.  Perdido Street Station was great until the cheap deus-ex-machina ending.  The Scar would have been a great idea, if Neal Stephenson hadn’t already written the same book with Snow Crash.  And Iron Council, well, is he getting lazy, riding the coattails of his own success?  I really want to care about the characters I read, but Cutter, Judah Low, Ann-Hari, Ori, Toro?  They were all just…ehhhh.

The one line of the book that stuck with me was this, and I did think this was a powerful observation:

“You don’t get to chose what you remember.”

Did that make the book worth reading?  No.

And now, I am on to Light by M. Scott Harrison.  Another highly touted book and so far, 167 pages into it, I already care about the characters more than I did in Iron Council.  The story hasn’t developed quite yet, but its coming.

The First Law Trilogy – Amazing

I blew through this fantasy trilogy.  Absolutely blew through it.  It consumed me, rather than me devouring it.  I loved it.  Even the end of the third book, which has garnered some negative attention, I enjoyed in retrospect.  At the time I felt some of the same disappointment that others felt at the fact that not all the loose ends were successfuly tied up (and were not meant to be), but looking back on it, well done.  The evolution of Bayaz’s character was one that grabbed my attention, particularly in the last book.  He went from being a powerful wizard, wise adviser, and meddling old man to a power hungry demigogue.  That was unexpected and fascinating.  I loved how he simply made Jezal king, then point blank told Jezal he would do as he was told.  That left me feeling slimy.  I liked it.

Abercrombie has written a fourth book now too, that takes place in the same world, so I’m looking forward to that.  Everyone that has read it says it is the best, but I’ll believe it when I see it.  It’s going to be hard to beat characters like Glokta and Logen Nine-Fingers, my two favorites.  (The scenes when he “turns into” the Bloody Nine….wow…amazing!)

This definitely renewed my faith in fantasy authors that has been dashed to pieces by Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin.  The Wheel of Time was great for the first four books, but then sucked and now will never be fniished.  The Song of Ice and Fire was wonderful too, but he suffers from Robert ordan like success.  Now, instead of finishing his fucking story, he’s working on an HBO screenplay for the first book.  It pisses me off.  Abercrombie, by contrast, wrote an excellent and engaging story that had a start, a middle, and an end.  And he was satisfied with that.  And so was I.  I like that he’s sticking around in the world he created because its too rich to leave the rest of it unexplored, but I’m glad the first group of books actually ended.  I’m glad he didn’t stop after Book 2 to write an encyclopedia and I’m glad he didn’t make excuses when it came to writing, but actually wrote.  Joe Abercrombie – THANK YOU!

Now I am on to Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas – about half way through it and enjoying it, but it’s not fantastic.  It seems like a series in interconnected short stories rather than a novel, but it’s holding my attention.  I understand it is one of the weakest Culture novels, but needs to be read to set things up, so I’m reading it.  Actually, just this morning, it took a turn for the better in terms of overarching plot development, so that’s encouraging.

But Horza is no Logen.

Chapter Titles

I really like how Abercrombie titles his chapters. I have to admit, when I first saw that he employed chapter titles, it felt a bit juvenile, but when I read how he used them, I loved it. Each chapter title seems to say one thing and then as the chapter progresses takes on an entirely different meaning than what appears at face value. For example, one chapter title was “How to Train a Dog” – and it dealt with an inquisitor torturing a prisoner so that the prisoner would testify “correctly” at the trial. Over and over and over again. He asks the prisoner if he knows how a dog is trained. The answer? Repetition. And the torture begins afresh.

Or another example, the chapter title “Means of Escape” – wherein you know the guards are coming for the criminal and the title leads you to believe the criminal will escape. But then the criminal hangs himself. An altogether different kind of escape.

Anyway, they’re very clever and this book is very dark, and that works well together.

The First Law: The Strong Will Take from the Weak

I raced to the finish of Duma Key at the end of last week and I have to say that while I loved the book, I found the ending to be a bit weak, unusual for a King book.  I think he fell to much into the trap of showing too much of the “horrible thing” and thereby robbing it of some of its power to terrify through being unknown.  Take, for example, the scene where the two drowned twin sisters appear at the bottom of the stairs in Big Pink, where they do and say nothing just stand there, but only for a moment in which the main character questions his sanity.  That’s terrifying.  Now compare that to the scene where the drowned man is in the kitchen with the main character, grabs him and begins to drag him away, trying to put him in manacles.  To me, that scene was just silly and not scary at all.  The monster became too real, and by becoming real it became weak, vulnerable, and easily beatable.  The last scenes in the original Heron’s Roost house were not as scary as they could of been and I felt they were a bit rushed.  Was a deadline approaching, Mr. King?  But, overall, this was a great story and one of my favorite King books.  It was engaging, interesting, a (sort-of) fresh idea, and fast paced.  A more than excellent beach read – for at least two reasons.

Now, I’ve moved on to my next book.  It was with grave amounts of hesitancy that I picked this book from the bookstore’s shelves.  I had a gift certificate and was ready to use it.  The first book I bought with it was the first book in the Prince of Nothing trilogy by R. Scott Baker, a novel that comes with a strong recommendation from a trusted friend.  Then my eye was caught by this other fantasy trilogy by new author Joe Abercrombie.  Two things attracted my immediate attention: one, as a trilogy, it was completed, and two, the binding and cover art were unusual.  On the first point, I cannot stand reading serial books if the series is not completed.  I waited until Book 7  was out before picking up Harry Potter, for example.  I will bear a grudge to the grave with me against Robert Jordan, and George R.R. Martin is is serious danger of falling into that abyss as well.  But this trilogy was completed.  The second point goes again the adage of never judge  a book by its cover, but I do that often.  The truth is, you can do that, if you’re careful.  This cover was unusual, and interesting.  Interesting enough to make me read the back.  The back was interesting enough to make me read the first chapter there in the store to get a feel for the writer’s style and and sense of diction and syntax.  The danger: it’s a fantasy book – you can pick up ten fantasy books you’ve never heard of and they all will very likely be terrible.  The good fantasy book is a gem and difficult to find.  So, that was my hesitancy.  But I liked the first chapter and I liked the description from the back of the book, so I jumped. 

About 150 pages into the story now, I am glad I bought it.  It is excellent, engrossing, with wonderful, flawed, human, and ambitious characters.  So far, it is the best fantasy story I have read since A Game of Thrones (finish the damned series, please, Martin!) though it lacks all the political intrigue.  This book is definitely character driven so far, with political intrigue as the backdrop.  I appreciate the complexity of the characters themselves and look forward to a growing complexity of political relationships, some of which is slowly manifesting.  One of the interesting things about the story so far, and the characters who propel it, is the sense of over-ripeness.  This is an empire past its prime with characters who are either also past their prime or who are in danger of never realizing their potential.  Among certain minor character there is a sense not of over-ripeness, but of rottenness.  And I like that.  Nobody here is innocent.  Nobody is clean.  And the place is going to rot from the top down.

The other thing I really appreciate is Abercrombie’s facility to imbue his world with a tremendous sense of history without droning on in a lecturer’s voice.  “Ok, and then the 4th king after the reign of ….  in the year of…. following the great drought of….before the battle of…”  No, that’s boring.  What he does is inject the history of the world into his descriptions of the contemporary setting or into the mouth’s of the characters.  It’s well done.  You don’t feel like you have to learn an encyclopedic amount of information to appreciate the story; it is not a novel requiring a guidebook.

The final thing I want to comment on is how I appreciate his sense of boundary breaking and cliche avoiding.  No where was this more apparent (though it certainly is throughout the story so far) that in the part when Logen approaches the old, wizened man with the long flowing white beard and the voluminous robes and comments to himself that “…the First of the Magi, Bayaz, certainly looked the part,” only to quickly discover that that man was not Bayaz at all, but a librarian.  Bayaz was the powerfully built bald man who was currently engaged in butchering a cow.  The Butcher draws near and introduces himself as the First of the Magi.  I darn near applauded!

This is a good book so far and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it as it goes on.  I’m glad I got it and if the only complaint I saw in other reviews is that the book ends in a cliffhanger (duh…trilogy) why then I will look with eager longing to a new, well executed, high fantasy trilogy.  They are so good, and so, so far and few between.

Duma Key Keeps on Rolling

Duma Key is quickly becoming my favorite King book. Maybe it’s the fact that it takes place near where I live, but I just cannot put it down!

Why Do I Like Horror Stories?

It’s been easy to see the trends in my own reading of late.  I finished The Terror and moved right to H.P. Lovecraft (which had more to do with my recent fascination with Arkham Horror: The Boardgame than anything else), but once I read a few Lovecraft stories – I find you can’t read too many in a row, so The Hound, The Unnamable, Dagon, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth did just fine for me – I immediately picked up Duma Key by Stephen King.  Sometimes it is a hard decision to pick what I’ll read next but this was easy.  So, the obvious trend is horror stories.  The less immediately obvious connection between the Lovecraft and Duma Key is that they are both written in the first person.  I find that this perspective lends itself particularly well to horror stories – it lends a crucial air of credibility to the story; it is much easier to discount something from a third person perspective.

Like most King books, Duma Key is a fast paced story.  I began it only two days ago and am close to 200 pages into the story.  Part of the reason is in unburdened, uncomplicated language (by which I do not mean to suggest simple), part of it is in the gripping nature of the tales, and part of it is in the fact that he breaks up his narrative into manageable chunks: chapters divided into shorter sub-chapters.  And they all advance the plot line somehow.  That is something King is big on, and all good writers are big on.  It’s funny to me somehow, King is so marketable, so popular, and such a household name that it seems contradictory to say he is also a great writer.  Most authors that fit into the first several categories are decent writers and some are just bad.  But King is one of the most prolific Great Writers of our time.  The man really knows what he is doing.  When I was younger, I did not read King because he was forbidden for one reason or another, whether by my parents when I was really young or by my own snobbishness when I was older. (I used to say I never read books where the author’s name appears in a larger font on the cover than the title of the book, but I’ve relaxed on that – relaxed, not given up entirely!)

So, why the fascination with horror?  It’s interesting, a couple of years ago I decided to celebrate Halloween by watching a few classic horror films – TBS and TNT and SCI-FI all run marathons that time of year anyway and I DVR’d them and watched them at my leisure.  It was fun!  Now, I’ve made that a regular practice each year but find myself checking out other horror films throughout the course of the year much more regularly than I ever did before.  Last year I watched all the “originals” – the ones that I saw in the video stores as a kid and was never allowed to check out, the ones that became franchises.  I watched the original Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc.  It was awesome!  Then I watched a documentary on those film’s directors and others like them called The American Nightmare and got into their thinking a little bit.  It was interesting to suddenly think of zombie flicks as social commentary (something most people probably picked up on their own) and slasher flicks as being reactions to the violence of the Vietnam War (something most people probably did not pick up on).  I tended not to stray into the realms of horror films that focused on sexual violence (The Last House on the Left) or more modern “torture-porn” (Hostel) because that is not entertaining to me.  I want to be entertained, surprised, scared, and thrilled.  Grossed out has it’s place in those films, but when grossing out becomes the motivating factor, I lose my interest, as I did after watching only three of the Masters of Horror series.  When it serves as a foil, I’m all ears (and eyes), as I was for Halloween, and The Ring.

For me, good horror touches those sensitive parts of my imagination where I do not regularly allow myself to go.  I like the suspense of it, the sense of being on the edge of something horrible.  It frees me to think about things I don’t normally think about and in a weird way, it reminds me of how fragile I am.  Part of it is probably a juvenile sense fo rebellion against my parents’ rules: thou shalt not watch horror films.  And part of it is some odd need to go beyond the normal pale of experience, and then to safely return all without having to leave my couch.  I’m sure that a neurologist could tell us all about those areas of our brains that get excited by this stuff and while that is interesting, it isn’t as important to me as knowing that I want/need to excite those areas, wherever they are.
To that end, I’m eating it up right now, spending time in Lovecraft, King, and others.  I found a website for horror short story podcasts, Pseudopod, that I’m enjoying during my morning constitutional right now.  Some are better than others, I’m sure, but to find the gems you sometimes have to sift through the trash.  And in horror writing, there is a lot of trash.  If I can smell it before I get to far in, I’ll avoid it and get to the good stuff.  But sometimes, there’s nothing better than a banal tale of horrible man-eating bugs that crawl beneath your skin, lay eggs, and burst out of filthy pustules.  It gets you going in the morning.  And, and, it provides me with that silly, inane, laughable, but altogether exciting extra sense of immediacy when next a mosquito or fly lands on my arm.

Because I know that if I want, there’s plenty of mind-warping Lovecraft, still the unequivocal King of the horror story.  Ia! Ia!

From the Terror to the Horror

I finally finished reading The Terror and the rumors are true: it bogs down a wee bit in the middle to the late-middle then ramps up for a surprising and rousing conclusion.  (Mr. Simmons, will you please teach Mr. Stephenson how to do that?)  Once I got the characters straight in my head, I really rather liked this book.  It wasn’t fantastic but it was very good.  I espcially enjoyed how the scary snow/ice demon wasn’t ever totally explained in a realistic way, leaving plenty to the imagination and the realms of folklore.  I also enjoyed how everything for the poor souls aboard Terror and Erebus would have been absolutely awful enough without the ice demon!  That’s what really threw it over the edge in terms of feelings of hopelessness.  I also really liked the description of the slow descent into insanity of the Hickey character and particularly the description of how he froze to death: it was so well done that Simmons never once out and out said, Hickey is freezing to death.  You just got it. After the ending, I feel like the book could have been improved by being about 100 pages (to be perfectly arbitrary) shorter.  There was a lot of character backstory that didn’t have to be told in as great of depth as it was (always my complaint with Patrick O’Brien) and could have better been accomplished with shorter anecdotes.  When reading those sections I found myself saying, “I don’t care. Can we get back to the ship part of the story please?”  Fans of horror may or may not enjoy this book, depending on what other genres they enjoy.  Fans of horror who are only fans of horror will probably find this book to be too long and not horrific enough.  Fans that enjoy reading adventure stories, historical novels, and/or horror as well will be right at home.  I look forward to reading Simmons’ latest, Drood, but will have to wait a while; it is large as well and I want to forget for a time that Simmons’ bogs down in the middle.

Victor, Griffin, and I have discovered and have been playing the board game Arkham Horror recently.

Arkham Horror – the Board Game

It’s a game based off the stories of Lovercraft and let me just say, it is amazing.  5 hours long sometimes, but amazing.

That has led me to pick up some Lovecraft and start reading again, some stories I’ve read before but mostly some ones I haven’t.  When I first read Lovecraft, I knew at some level that he was awesome, but didn’t fully understand him or appreciate his writing style.  Now that I am older, or at least some time has passed, I think I get Lovecraft on a whole new level.  And that is fun, cause he is incredible.  No other writer has the power to induce such terrifyingly vivid dreams as he does.  Think the Shoggoth pit is bad in the stories?  Wait til you dream about it and how your mind makes it up.  <Shudder>  Right now I’m on a great little tale called The Whisperer in Darkness: it follows the typical Lovecraftain formula of science minded fellow encountering a tale of horror that cannot possibly be true and then slowly discovering it is.  But it is fun to read how that happens each time.  And, when combined with the game, it is especially fun to see where the inspiration for the game pieces arise from.

Terror

I’m about 428 pages into Dan Simmons’ The Terror and I am enjoying it still.  Many folks who’ve commented on it have said that it bogs down somewhere in the middle and I don’t know if I’ve gotten there yet or not (the book is almost 800 pages) but so far I haven’t felt it get sluggish too much.  There have been some ten or fifteen page sections that were a little numbing, but nothing prolonged.

I really enjoy his descriptions of the ice and all the challenges associated with that.  Sometimes while reading it, I actually feel cold.  It’s incredible.  I like how the ice monster beast thing is also only one of their myriad potentially catastrophic problems.  It would have been easy as an author to focus on the monster alone and ignore the other potent challenges that are certainly present: disease, malnutrition, -100 degree weather, ice smashing the ships apart, mutiny, and the like.  But Simmons pays full attention to all of those things, in fact, he gives them precedence I think.  That makes it all the more awful when the beast shows up and kills two or three sailors.  It makes one despair and cry aloud, as if it already weren’t enough!

If anything, the story features too many characters; I felt this was a difficulty also with Patrick O’Brien’s stories.  When writing about a ship and its crew, it is hard to characterize well a few characters while still including all the other necessary people.  Simmons does a fair job at this, but I still find myself getting confused sometimes.  Who was that again?  Wait, was this the alcoholic captain or the other one?  Who’s the first mate?   I thought that was the bosun’s mate.  Hmmm? That sort of thing.  As far into it as I am now, I’m getting a feel for the principles but to me, that should have happened about 300 pages ago.

In the intervening time, I’ve found myself in a distinctly Lovecraftian mood.  Sometimes this happens and the only thing to do is feed the beast.  I grabbed one of my collections off the shelf and tore through “Azathoth,” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.”

“Azathoth” was like reading someone’s dream journal – a terrifying and head scrathching one, but a dream journal.  I actually read it out loud to myself and found that that worked great.  It’s short and the language has an even more powerful effect when heard.  “The Thing on the Doorstep” was incredible.  I had not read that one before and chose it because I wanted to read an Arkham story.  It was the tale of a man whose body was being stolen by his wife who through dark magic exchanged her soul and his into their respective bodies. This story had everything that makes Lovecraft the horror master: intrigue, mystery, terror, gross things, unnameable unspeakable horrors from somewhere Beyond, death, insanity, and passion.  I highly recommend it to anyone as a good place to start with Lovecraft if you haven’t delved into his mad pages before.

We have an accord

Which is another way of saying, “I agree.”

I agree, after some reflection, with a Goodreads commentor who said of Marisha Pessl’s novel that at times the characters said things which were just not believable for high school students, no matter how erudite, to say.

I think they also did things at times which were less than believable, but mostly it was their speech.  The smartest kids I knew in high school, when out of school and among friends, talked more or less like high school students.  Maybe an SAT word or two crept into our sentences, but mostly, we were, like, you know, average kids.

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I’ve really gotten into Simmon’s novel, The Terror.  I’m about 160 pages into it already, which is pretty far for me in this short amount of time.  So far I find it fast paced (despite warnings from goodreads commentors that it slows down, I haven’t seen that yet) and exciting.  The dialogue and adventure part reminds me of the best parts of Patrick O’Brien’s work – though I eventually gave up on that series because I wanted to read sea-adventure, not victorian love triangles that take place while on shore leave.  Give me more cannon fire and booty, more storms and reefs, man!  Anyway, The Terror, surprisingly, does that.  Even though they’re ice-locked in the Arctic.  The descriptions are awesome and the characters, so far, are genuine and believable.  The total atmosphere altering effect the presence of the native american woman has on the men is great!  The ice demon thing, so far, is great.  Now, here’s to hoping he doesn’t reveal too much about it.  Ever.  I hate monster stories that tell you everything about the monster.  Leave some mystery in it.  Please.  My imagination will run wild, I promise.  And it’ll be scarier.  Here’s to hoping.

Calamity of an Ending

Well, Pessl’s first novel didn’t quite end the way I anticipated, and I don’t know if that disappoints me or not.  Hannah Schneider turned out to be some sort of agent for a rebel pseudo-political group called the Nightwatchmen, and so did, apparently, Blue’s father.  The second is harder for me to swallow than the first.  Actually, I think I just decided, I didn’t like the ending. The story was so sinister, so believably dark up until she brought in this Nightwatchmen thing.  Hannah, the strange teacher, hugely popular and overly interested in minors (even sleeping with one of them), who happens to have the unfortunate experience of having someone die in a drunk drowning accident at her party.  Later, she is murdered/committed suicide in the woods – I like the suicide angle better, it fits her character better.  On the surface, cool as a cucumber, but underneath, solar flare.  Depressed.  Anxious.  Unsatisfied.  Gets her jollies by contributing to the deliquency of minors, overcoming that horrid feeling of never quite being popular enough when she was in school.  I think that’s a character more people could identify with.  As far as Blue’s father goes – well he was a weird one from the beginning, but a secret agent for a revolutionary group?  I have to stretch just a bit too much on that one.

All that aside, this was a great book.  4 stars.  It was fun to read, a surprising page turner, with colorful characters in which I think a lot of us could see a part of ourselves (usually parts we don’t like, too), and so it worked as a social mirror.  I liked the way it was written – as I noted, several fantastic observations and turns of phrase.  I just wished the ending was a bit more on the believable side.  But, it won’t deter me from her next book whenever it comes out, whatever it is.

I have turned now back to the realm of speculative fiction.  This time I chose Dan Simmons’ The Terror: A Novel.  I’ve read a lot of Simmons before and I like him.  I like how he’s almost perversely allusive to other works of literature and poetry.  The man is in love with Keats, for example.  But this book seems wholly unlike anything I’ve read by him before (both Hyperions, Ilium, Olympos).  I’ve heard really good things about it too – and so far, it has lived up to the hype.  I’m reading this book in in the beginning of summer in Florida, while running on the treadmill, and it made me feel cold.  (It takes place on a frozen ship in the Arctic, exploring unexplored regions in about 1847.)  His descriptions run chill all through your body.  “To touch iron was to lose flesh.”  The power of the ice as he describes it is incredible.  I’m looking forward to the sort of retro-adventure style combined with some good ole fashioned monster horror.  And if I know Simmons, his characters will be fun and empathetic.