needs more demons?

I think the combination of the current young adult publishing climate and the packaging of Generation Dead do Daniel Waters’ novel a disservice.

For better or worse, in the wake of Twilight’s success (not to mention Harry Potter’s, Buffy’s and the more explicit books of Hamilton’s, Harris’s, et al) there’s a lot of supernaturally-themed young adult fiction being published these days that shares many common attributes. These books generally use supernatural abilities as a metaphor for ordinary adolescent alienation. Many of them employ themes of humans consorting with the not-quite-human to deliver mildly illicit thrills (whether or not the characters actual consort). The overall vibe is generally escapist, with plot more prominent than theme or character development. (In fact, I think some of these books — although not the best of them — deliberately skimp on development of the viewpoint characters to increase the degree to which the intended audience can identify with the protagonists).

If you judge Generation Dead by its cover, I think you could be excused for thinking it’s one of these books:

However, despite some common plot elements Generation Dead is a completely different sort of novel — more serious and more ambitious — and it’s hard to imagine someone looking for a Twilight-esque experience is going to be very satisfied. In fact, it’s a little hard for me to imagine many readers being completely satisfied by Generation Dead — its symbolism seems muddled, although that’s arguably deliberate, and the abrupt ending leaves many elements unresolved. The dénouement makes thematic sense, but it also feels a little as if it was chosen as an alternative to answering or addressing some of the questions the narrative raises.

But I definitely give Waters credit for trying something different, and I found his book interesting, if not completely successful. In Generation Dead some deceased teens rise again as zombies unlike virtually any other treatment of the undead I can think of. They shamble around, but they don’t rot or eat brains, and one of them even goes out for the football team. Waters plays a little with zombieness as metaphor for alienation, but he’s more interested in contrasting the zombies’ externally imposed alienation with the internally imposed alienation of teens in the goth/punk subculture. The social treatment of the undead (or in the novel’s politically correct phrase, “the differently biotic”) is also an extended metaphor for real world bigotry (and one perhaps best not too closely examined). Waters’ third-person omniscient voice delves deeply into the motivations of his human characters, including the nastiest, a memorably self-aware bully, while leaving the zombies oblique and mysterious.

Quibble: I think writing about counter-culture music credibly is something that writers from outside the culture can often best deal with by making up band names. Waters mostly acquits himself well, but the number of times Michale Graves (a.k.a. the singer for The Misfits who was neither Glenn Danzig nor Jerry Only) is mentioned suggests that Waters’ source on Graves’ prominence in the goth/horrorpunk/metal scene might have been an interview with Graves himself.

needs more demons? just a few.

Night Train to Rigel’s unusual premise sounds a little jokey, but Zahn plays it (mostly) straight: interstellar travel is accomplished with trains that travel along a sort of hyperspace railway. Frank Compton is an ex-intelligence agent who finds himself embroiled in one of those mysteries that’s bigger than it first appears, and which ultimately affords Zahn opportunities to play with a number of story-set-on-train devices, both of the whodunnit/whydunnit flavor and the derring-do/action flavor.

Zahn is clearly aware of the sources he’s riffing on — at one point Compton and his maybe ally/maybe femme fatale actually watch Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes — but two attributes of the novel save it from sinking into parody. The first is Compton’s narrative voice, which seems to be modeled on Hammett’s Continental Op. He’s quietly competent, eschewing the misogyny and personal demons of Chandler’s Marlowe, and Compton always takes his own situation seriously, even when Zahn’s tongue slips into his cheek. The second is that the unraveling mystery works fairly well in science fiction terms. (There’s a point where the seasoned SF reader may find a conclusion obvious well before light dawns on Compton, but on the other hand Zahn finds more-or-less credible explanations for some of the flimsier tropes of detective/espionage fiction that he borrows.)

Night Train to Rigel wraps up with a lump of exposition before a pair of predictable (if emotionally satisfying) set-pieces, a minor flaw in a novel that seems tailor-made for the description “ripping yarn.” There are two more novels in the series (although this one is complete in itself) and I look forward to reading them once I dig out of my soon-to-be-overdue library book pile.

needs more demons? no.

Rampant is a unicorn novel for people who hate unicorns — or at least the fluffy depiction of unicorns in current popular culture. Peterfreund sets out to reclaim the dignity of the unicorn by returning to the legendary roots of one-horned critters, and weaves multi-cultural variants on the theme into a unicorn hierarchy.

Since Peterfreund’s unicorns are fierce predators inclined to maim and/or devour any but a maiden pure, she posits a secret society of unicorn slayers. For a little while it seemed like Rampant was going to be more-or-less a rip off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Seasons 7 and 8* in particular, with narrator Astrid as the Buffy-figure helping to train a cadre of young warrior women to combat unicorns instead of vampires ). I would have been fine with that; the sheer novelty of fierce and deadly unicorns was sweeping me along.

But ultimately, Rampant, to its credit, has a lot more going on. It deals with feminist issues a little more explicitly than Buffy, and it’s angrier. I can imagine that if some teenage boys could bring themselves to read a (dark, gory) book about (fighting) unicorns they could possibly have their consciousnesses raised in ways that might prevent some real-world damage to human beings.

I was a little worried as the remaining page-count dwindled that Rampant was going to be one of those “novels” that turned out to be first-in-series and not a complete story. I was pleasantly surprised that while Rampant doesn’t exactly preclude a sequel, it certainly doesn’t require one. I thought the dénouement was a little rushed, but that may have been partly because I was turning the pages so fast.

Peeve: “hissed” as the verb describing the utterance of several sibilant-free bits of dialogue. Multiple times, yet.

*yes, Season 8. It’s currently unspooling in comic book form.

needs more demons? nope.

I liked Harwood’s previous novel The Ghost Writer very much. The Séance shares several of The Ghost Writer’s hallmarks: reserved, chilly, almost 19th-century flavored prose*; dark, complex and secret-spiked family histories; an elaborate, almost meta-textual, structure with multiple layers of nested stories; a brooding, slow-growing aura of menace; and lingering questions about which — if any — of the recounted events are supernatural.

Initially I found The Séance a bit too similar to its predecessor, but it eventually reveals itself to be significantly different. Without wanting to spoil it too much, it pays homage to a different set of earlier works than The Ghost Writer, and it introduces a handful of genuinely surprising notions into the maybe-ghost trope. One particular device seems so appropriate — and so creepy — I can’t believe dozens of other writers haven’t exploited it. Maybe they have, but I’ve never read a work using quite the same trick.

Unfortunately, although the climax proper is appropriately hair-raising, the novel finishes rather weakly, with a hard-to-digest expository lump.

Despite my reservations, I recommend the book unhesitatingly to fans of a good old-fashioned spook show.

* Séance is actually set in the latter part of the Victorian era, and Harwood evokes the milieu far more successfully and convincingly than a great many writers who set fiction in the time period.

needs more demons? no.

The good: As supernaturally-themed young adult novels go, the premise of this one is strikingly original: no vampires, werewolves, nor zombies (at least in this first volume of the series…). Instead, Janie finds herself involuntarily drawn into the dreams of anyone dreaming near her. A few SF authors have worked with similar concepts — and there’s that Cheap Trick song — but, on the whole it’s refreshingly different.

The not-so-good: Wake’s prose takes fast-paced to new extremes. Short declarative sentences with a lot of sentence fragments. Like that one. And this one. It seems susceptible to parody, and I found it a tad wearying. But it sure made for a quick read.

The even-less-good: Wake feels more like a prequel than a main event. It’s one of those novels where not a whole lot actually happens, and much of the plot conflict is driven by characters’ lack of clear communication (admittedly, so is Pride and Prejudice, I suppose). It picks up more of its dramatic tension by starting in medias res with a boatload of “how we got here” flashback — which is fine, but I think I might have preferred the res the series is in medias of to be set after the events of this book.

needs more demons? kinda.

Even if I count them as guilty pleasures, I’ve enjoyed several of Zahn’s Star Wars novels enough that it’s a bit odd I never got around to trying one of his non-tie-in novels until now. (Many of them seem to be packaged/marketed as “military science fiction” as opposed to “space opera,” which probably partially explains it.)

I went through Dragon and Thief like it was a tub of movie popcorn. It reminded me pleasantly of the uncomplicated space action yarns I devoured as an adolescent from the likes of Bischoff, Chalker, and Foster, although it was more kid-friendly than several of them. (Heinlein’s juvenile novels also came to mind, although Zahn’s milieu is more cosmopolitan than I think of as characteristically Heinlein.)

Dragon and Thief struck a fair balance between wrapping up some narrative threads and setting up future novels in the series. I will read more.

needs more demons? no.

Bad Monkeys opens with Jane Charlotte in custody, apparently being interviewed by a police psychologist. She admits she’s in jail because, “I killed someone I wasn’t supposed to.” She claims to work for a secret (but extensively resourced) organization that combats evil; her division terminates “irredeemable” people, like serial killers and child molesters. She tells the doctor her story is too long to relate (but there’s clearly a couple hundred pages available to it) and won’t be believed anyway (but readers can judge for themselves). In between their sessions, the doctor attempts to corroborate Jane’s account. Some things match up, but there are inconsistencies, which Jane readily acknowledges, but dismisses as irrelevant.

Bad Monkeys is much too fast-paced to accommodate chunks of philosophical speculation, but nonetheless it raises some serious issues, not least that killing without compunction or remorse — which Jane claims to do in the service of “good” — is itself a frequent operant description of “evil.” The question of evil’s subjectivity — how much you can manipulate the perception of an individual by selecting events and isolating them from their contexts — also comes into play. The jail scenes from which Bad Monkeys flashes back are explicitly set after September 2001; perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest one aspect of the novel may be Ruff’s own exploration of questions like what the mix of good and evil would have been in killing the hijackers before they seized the planes.

Jane ’s narrative voice is crucial to this sort of story: she must be engaging enough to retain some measure of the reader’s sympathy despite making some questionable (or outright bad) decisions. Ruff does a tremendous job of this. Jane Charlotte isn’t always congenial, but she’s memorable and vividly drawn, and her actions are credible in their contexts.

Bad Monkeys isn’t really very similar to Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. They share sardonic and troubled narrators whose reliability is seriously questioned. They’re dark books with flashes of grim humor. Both had me flipping pages at breakneck speed and literally kept me up late — beyond that the novels have little in common. But that’s enough that I’d be inclined to recommend each to fans of the other.

needs more demons? negatory.

Prospero Lost is one of the most original contemporary fantasies I’ve read in years from outside the slipstream camp. Its central conceit is that Shakespeare’s The Tempest was loosely based on fact. Prospero, Miranda (and later additions to the clan) are near-immortal beings secretly responsible for imposing order on elemental magical forces, thus making modern technology possible. The family is estranged, with shifting alliances that evoke both Zelazny’s “Amber” books and Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics without being too overt about it. At the novel’s outset Prospero has gone missing and his chief lieutenant Miranda is order to track down and warn her siblings of a threat from the “Three Shadowed Ones.”

There are several nice touches. Miranda is given to flashbacks from her 500-year lifetime, but freely admits the faultiness of her memory. In particular, she’s seen The Tempest so many times that she’s a little vague about the differences between her own early life and Shakespeare’s portrayal of her. Lamplighter weaves elements from many different mythologies together, successfully on the whole. The menaces Miranda and her companions encounter make a nice change from the color-by-numbers vampires, werewolves, zombies, et al that crowd so much recent urban fantasy and paranormal romance. I appreciate her portrayal of elves: low on cutesy, high on unpredictability, even menace. It takes a while for the primary characters to define themselves, but they eventually do, and they don’t remain stagnant. At the end of this volume, Miranda is clearly on the cusp of a major epiphany.

This brings up my first problem with Prospero Lost: Tor’s (classy) cover nowhere communicates that this is not, in fact, a standalone novel. It doesn’t resolve any of the plot conflicts it establishes; it just comes to a screeching halt after introducing a new one.

Lamplighter’s tone is a little inconsistent; mostly Prospero Lost takes itself seriously, but occasionally it veers toward comic fantasy. The inclusion of one mythic figure in particular may stress some readers’ willing suspension of disbelief.

I also thought the prose was both a little flat and a little heavy. Adjective choices are rarely surprising: “The dark walnut frame held an embroidery of an elegant unicorn rampant upon a field of royal blue.” Happily, the writing seems to improve somewhat toward the end of the book, suggesting that Lamplighter has the potential to write a more thoroughly satisfying novel.

needs more demons? just a smidge.

The Reformed Vampire Support Group is maybe the most original vampire novel I’ve ever read that actually uses the word “vampire.” With a few deft twists to the rules of the legend, Jinks inverts the dynamic of the modern sexy, super-strong bloodsucker. Her vamps don’t have super strength or magically accelerated healing. They can’t fly, transform into animals, and they are to all appearances stone dead — and defenseless — when the sun’s up. They’re also prone to episodes of gastric distress. Jinks manages the neat trick of having believable human characters who are much more genuinely scary than the vampires.

The first-person narrator is herself a vampire, and Jinks exploits this to build intrigue and suspense: when Nina wakes up at sundown, she has to figure out what happened during the daylight hours. It was an effective plot device and I’m surprised more authors don’t take advantage of it. Nina’s sardonic narrative voice is also terrific and her wry outlook provided several laugh aloud moments.

On the minus side, the major plot arc plays with some of my less favorite tropes of the modern vampire novels, and it felt just a bit mechanical. For the most part characters act believably as situations evolve, and react as you might expect, so the novel is relatively low on big surprises.

But mostly I found The Reformed Vampire Support Group fresh, funny, and engaging. Also unusual and commendable: it’s a real honest-to-goodness standalone novel that doesn’t demand a sequel. I’ll read more by Jinks for sure.

needs more demons? no.

If the title didn’t already clue you in, the final sentence of the back cover blurb perfectly telegraphs You Are So Undead to Me’s tone: “Her life — and more importantly, the homecoming dance — depends on it.”

In the first volume of Jay’s post-Buffy zombie franchise, reluctant zombie “Settler” Megan Berry is at least as concerned with boys and cheerleader tryouts as she is with figuring out who’s sending murderous zombies after her. It’s more lighthearted than most recent publishing successes with superficial similarities. This isn’t a bad thing at all — in fact, Jay has crafted a novel that might not only appeal to some fans of Meyer’s Twilight books, but also to some readers who find Bella’s level of angst a little wearing, if not unintentionally silly.

Berry is obtuse about some of what’s going on around her in a way that may make some readers’ eyes roll (although it’s partly a specie of obtuseness that certainly honors longstanding tradition) and alert readers will see through the red herrings easily. But like Berry’s selective blindnesses, a flimsy mystery seems less a fault of this novel than an attribute of the genre that You Are So Undead to Me embodies. It’s very much a color-inside-the-lines exercise, but it delivers exactly what it promises.

needs more demons? has just about the requisite amount.