needs more demons?

In The Third Lynx, Zahn again puts agent Frank Compton (from Night Train to Rigel) through some of the classic noir detective paces in his unusual near-future setting, which prominently features interstellar trains. (One of several tropes Zahn explores this time around is the detective who finds himself unexpectedly a murder suspect; there are also some elements with a distinctly Maltese Falcon-ish air.)

Zahn’s rail-connected universe is by no means hard sf, but as in the previous book, Zahn delivers some solid science fictional twists to the mystery. One of them is so obvious that I got a little impatient waiting for the penny to finally drop, but I think that may have been in part a diversionary tactic on Zahn’s part.

Somewhere in the build-up to the climax I got a little confused about which planetary system everyone was off to and why, but my favorite plot twist snapped me back to full alertness.

I’m wrestling with myself over whether I want to read the final book now! of wait another month to prolong my enjoyment of the series. Now! may win.

needs more demons? nope.

The nine stories in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned are full of vivid, acute descriptions, like:

I had a studio apartment in the West Village, which people were impressed by until they came up for a look. The place was the architectural equivalent of a biscuit dough remnant, a two-hundred-square-foot waste shape of crannies and recesses left over when the rest of the building had been sectioned into proper places to live.

Tower’s people are generally broken in one way or another. The streak of dark humour in many of these stories reminded me to varying degrees of Gates, Saunders, and Antrim, but Tower’s characters are often unusually clear-headed about where they went wrong:

Bob had not been close with his father, so it was puzzling for him and also for his wife, Vicky, when his father’s death touched off in him an angry lassitude that curdled his enthusiasm for work and married life. He had fallen into a bad condition and,in addition to several minor miscalculations, he’d perpetrated three major fuckups that would be a long time in smoothing over.

Tower’s approach to plot generally eschews obvious conflict/resolution narrative arcs. Things happen in the corners of these stories as well as in their foregrounds. These aren’t stories for the squeamish. The bone-chilling nightmare logic of “Down Through The Valley” snapped into sharp focus for me days after I finished it.

The title story is a startling departure from the more-or-less contemporary naturalism of the others: a compelling account of world-weary Vikings whose pillaging arises from a sort of dreadful inertia. It’s probably my favorite.

needs more demons? no. recommended.

In his introduction, Jacobs lays asserts that his participatory journalism draws on the tradition of writers like Nellie Bly and John Howard Griffin (the author of Black Like Me). But I would assert that he also belongs somewhere along the continuum of writers like Dave Barry and Mark Leyner, who blur the lines between the humorous essay and autobiographically inspired fiction. Jacobs and his (presumably) long-suffering wife Julie are very much characters in The Guinea Pig Diaries. I was also reminded of Julie Powell (Julie & Julia) and Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, 30 Days) , both of whom also participate in time-bounded projects and explicitly incorporate their partners’ reactions into the work documenting the project.

Jacobs’ blend of ingredients is not dissimilar to Spurlock’s: a lot of subjective experience, a dab of underlying science, a few gags, a bit of analysis, a few insights. (Probably my favorite aspect of The Guinea Pig Diaries, much of which was originally published as articles for Esquire, are the codas to each essay, in which Jacobs discussed how each project did (or didn’t) continue to affect his life after its conclusion.) But I think it’s fair to say that the emphasis is on entertainment, with educational value as a secondary focus.

Jacobs’ nine “experiments” and the resulting chapters all follow the same basic template. Some seemed goofier than others. I thought “What Would George Washington Do?” was the weakest, but it demonstrates the general form. In it, Jacobs follows Washington’s personal code of conduct for a month (sort of an abbreviated, watered-down version of Jacobs’ own The Year of Living Biblically) with a side-order of biographical tidbits; in the process he comes to realize how uncivil our society is, and how much he dislikes shaking hands.

The fascinating meta-lesson of Jacobs’ experiments, though, is that he consistently finds that adopting a given behavior — even very artificially and deliberately — winds up changing his attitudes about the behavior he’s adopted. Funnily enough, I recently arrived at the same realization (perhaps sparked by some of the things I read in Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open) and so I’m currently engaged in a few different Jacobs-style experiments with the goal of altering my mindset through behavioral changes. (For instance, I’m trying to defuse my anger at unsafe and law-breaking bicyclists. So far, it seems to be helping.)

needs more demons? the essays do get a bit samey if you read them all back-to-back (which is awfully easy to do). The incursion of an extra-dimensional evil entity would have broken up the pace a bit, for sure.

Revamped is, like its predecessor Staked, a fantasy thriller very much in the mode of Hamilton’s Anita Blake series: jockeying for dominance between various supernatural entities is the prime mover of the plot, which features a lot of sex and violence, the latter even more copious and explicit than the former.

Lewis continues to exploit the devices that distinguished his first novel: twin first-person vampire anti-hero narrators: Eric and his sometime-girlfriend Tabitha. Eric is a reluctantly unreliable narrator to boot; he has a capricious memory. (I like this notion; it seems very logical that storing centuries of memories in a human-like brain would get problematic — although Eric isn’t actually particularly old.)

On the plus side, Lewis (and Eric) don’t seem to take themselves as seriously as Hamilton (and Blake) do. Eric introduces himself by explaining that

In ice cream terms, vampires come in three flavors: chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. I’m grape sherbet — hard to come by and much more likely to give you brain freeze.

and utters lines like:

“My magic ice sword! I left it in the closet. If some damn fireman stole my magic sword, I’m going to be so fucking pissed off!”

And those aren’t the silliest things in Revamped.

If I’m comparing Revamped to Hamilton’s Blake novels, it’s only fair to specify that it resembles the earlier books, where the plot is more substantial than thin connective tissue between fight and/or sex scenes.

On the minus side, the the entrenched sexism of Revamped was hard for me to overlook. Somehow it’s a little easier for me to swallow female characters who act like players in a stereotypical male fantasy when the author is female. I suppose it also might help to envision most of the characters in the book as participants on a VH1 reality show.

needs more demons? just not my cup of tea

Rites of Spring Break is another frothy cocktail in Peterfreund’s Ivy League series, following Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose, and mixed up according to the same recipe which is roughly:

• 1 part coming-of-age novel (protracted)
• 1 part feminist subtext
• 1 part formalized presentation (every chapter has an “I Confess…” header; text incorporates ordered lists and the occasional chart)
• 1/2 part not utterly reliable narrator
• 1 1/2 parts pseudo-credible gossip/speculation about Skull & Bones
• 1 1/2 parts mystery/suspense
• 5 parts college-age soap opera

I don’t mean the breakdown to be dismissive; if it were straight college soap I wouldn’t be along for the ride, and, as with any cocktail, the trick is in blending the various flavors of the constituents into a cohesive, pleasing whole.

I was way ahead of “confessor” Amy Haskell on most of the plot reveals this time around, but I’m not at all sure that’s not Peterfreund’s intent. It didn’t interfere much with my enjoyment of the novel and I’m looking forward to the concluding volume.

needs more demons? no

Karen Novak’s creepy suspense novel Innocence impressed me on several levels. It has some vividly drawn characters, and a twisty plot that managed to surprise me more than once. It has an unusual structure, employing shifts of narrative perspective and chronology to build dramatic tension. And Novak’s prose evinces both an eye for interesting detail and some flavorful descriptions:

…a car horn rendition of “La Cucaracha” sounded outside. I looked out the sidelights of the front door to see a white van with foot-long wrought-iron ants welded along the roof, making it look like a giant motorized sugar cube at a picnic. The termite guy.

His name was William Watson, and he was carrying a black vinyl binder at least six inches thick. “Call me Bill,” he said twice, once as he shook Greg’s hand, once as he shook mine. Bill was a short, skinny man of about sixty with a well-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and ears that were as gnarled and meaty as tree fungus. He listened to our tale of the previous night’s insect horror with his eyes turned toward the floor, his head cocked as though he were an oncologist and our complaints might hold the first subtle signs of a malignancy larger than we were prepared to face.

I liked Novak’s debut novel Five Mile House, which shares protagonist Leslie Stone, a troubled ex-cop with a lot of baggage. Innocence demonstrates exactly the sort of progress I’d hope for from an author continuing to improve her craft: it’s more nuanced and subtle, more solidly structured, told in a more authoritative set of voices.

The end was a tiny letdown, with most of the plot threads gathered up just a little too neatly and too quickly. The one significant stray thread is likewise a hair too expected, like the question mark floating into a film’s “The End” title card.

In general, though, if I enjoyed every suspense novel as much, I’d read more suspense novels.

needs more demons? no.

Cycler has an inventive premise: for most of every month Jill McTeague is a more-or-less normal teenage girl, but for four days she physically turns into a male. (The novel doesn’t explicitly deal with how this came about, although it drops some clues. I suspect McLaughlin will address it directly in a future volume*.) Jill manages to induce a sort of split personality disorder with a meditation technique; as a result her boy-self develops a distinct persona, who inevitably christens himself “Jack.”

The novel unspools in dual, snappy, first-person, present-tense narratives. Jill’s story initially seems like it’s going to follow a standard “who do I go to the prom with?” teen romance line, but gradually veers off the rails. Jack’s story starts pretty far off the rails and only gets weirder. It gradually dawns on the reader that the situation is even more messed up than it at first seems. Jill’s mother, despite being in a nominally heterosexual marriage, seems to think she’s in a Joanna Russ novel. She’s completely unwilling to engage with Jack as a human being, but comfortable purchasing pornography to help him purge his male desires.

I was intrigued by Cycler not only because of the unusual central plot device, but also because discussion of it was so polarized. Some folks whose recommendations I take account of, like author Scott Westerfeld, praised it, but I also saw criticism of it for reinforcing sex role stereotypes.

One possible reading of Jill-Jack’s serial hermaphroditism would be as a metaphor for Jill’s discomfort with her feelings of homosexual desire. If you start from this interpretation, the book is implicitly homophobic: Jill’s gay desires are “normalized” by the fact that she’s physically male when she’s (consciously) experiencing them. I think this interpretation is incorrect (or perhaps partly correct, but insufficient). Jill struggles a bit with non-heterosexual feelings in the book, but the novel affords other opportunities for that struggle besides her own duality; the novel itself doesn’t strike me as homophobic.

Another question is whether Jack is too extreme a characterization of adolescent male desire; I didn’t think so. Jack has four days to undergo a month’s worth of teen hormonal churn and he’s effectively isolated from normal society — it’s not surprising that he’s somewhat unbalanced.

I love that the second part of this novel is titled (Re)Cycler, and definitely look forward to reading it when I get through my current library stack.

* insert the same tired rant about how this really is not a complete standalone novel, and doesn’t adequately label itself as an incomplete work. I realize that this is a sad reality of modern publishing, but it still sucks.

needs more demons? no.

Krakauer’s creepy, gripping book uses a brutal double murder committed by Mormon fundamentalists as a vehicle for exploring the convoluted history of Mormonism, with a special emphasis on the Mormon church’s ambivalent relationship over time with polygamy and with direct personal revelation. (I never knew, for instance, that although Joseph Smith practiced polygamy himself, he was initially hesitant to formally incorporate his revelation of the “Principle” into the nascent faith.) Krakauer also devotes considerable attention — as did the trials of the Lafferty brothers, the defendants in the murder case — to the uneasy boundaries between faith that is considered sane and faith that is not considered sane.

I learned many things, not least of which is that HBO’s polygamous-Mormon-centered soap Big Love, the third season of which we lately finished watching, isn’t nearly as far-fetched as I might have thought. As a proponent of gay marriage, before reading this book I had thought a good place to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable partnerships might be to allow any combination of adult consenting humans, so a marriage of, say, three women and four men might be fine. But after reading Under the Banner of Heaven I’m forced to conclude that raising children in a polygamous culture — particularly one that prioritizes procreation, devalues external education, and requires unquestioning obedience — creates a situation in which “consent” may be a practical impossibility.

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict is the flip side of Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict: the earlier novel cast 21st-century Courtney Stone’s mind into the body of a young woman in early 19th-century England. This (much better) novel brings the unfortunately (if significantly) named Jane Mansfield’s persona forward to modern Los Angeles and confronts her with dead-end jobs, suitors of uncertain reliability and trustworthiness, and the conundrum of how to answer the vast volumes of mail — physical, voice, and electronic — that a young lady might receive in a 3-day period.

Suspending my disbelief in Mansfield’s reactions to the modern world took some effort. I think, for instance, that an LED display reading “808″ would first be interpreted as an abstract geometric pattern rather than as numbers. I’m inclined to think (although this may be partly my own prejudice) that when confronted with technology such as cars, iPods, cell phones, etc., that a 19th-century person might not be easily convinced that the technology is natural and human, rather than unnatural and infernal. But of course, if Mansfield were completely unable to engage with the modern world, Rigler wouldn’t have much of a book. So I’m willing to make allowances, and Rigler certainly establishes that Mansfield is strong-willed, intelligent, and unconventional — like most of Austen’s heroines; like Austen herself.

Rigler makes a more-or-less credible attempt to describe the modern world as a Regency-era person might see it. Even at its silliest, the novel often displays Rigler’s 19th-century knowledge, as when Mansfield explores Stone’s refrigerator:

…At last I have discovered a larder, bare though it may be.

Ah. There is an upper door as well. Frigid air issues from the interior, refreshing upon my skin. A giant, frosty bottle of something called Absolut. A jar, pliable as paper, of something called Cherry Garcia. I open it, dip in a finger and taste. It is a delightful variety of ices, sweet with chewy cherries and bits of what tastes like chocolate except that it is solid and much sweeter. Must find a spoon.

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict is none too deep a book, so perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but it could perhaps be considered an extended metaphor bridging the gap between Austen and her present-day readers.

I’ve spent enough time reading Austen’s fiction and biographies of the authoress to have formed a one-way emotional connection. But I’m keenly aware that if some time anomaly afforded me an opportunity to meet her, that she would find me dreadfully uncouth and unfit for conversation. Despite all the pleasure her words have afforded me, I’m certain she would find my paltry scribblings deeply appalling.

To a limited degree we can put ourselves in Austen’s shoes: reading her work, histories, even watching PBS’s Regency House Party. Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, with a character who shares many characteristics with Austen and her protagonists, and whose name blends Austen’s given name with the title of one of her novels, attempts the reverse. It suggests that, among other allowances, Austen could conceivably conclude that, at least in the climate of southern California, it might be appropriate for ladies to be seen bare-limbed.

I thought it was charming, and although mostly fluffy, not without a few insightful moments. I’d recommend it to anyone who finds the basic premise intriguing and isn’t completely allergic to anything that could be filed under “romance.”

Mostly I thought City of Ashes was a vast improvement on City of Bones. It had a few nifty surprises. The plot continues to echo elements from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Harry Potter series, and Star Wars, among other sources, but generally doesn’t draw enough from any one of those wells to feel overly derivative. City of Ashes also more explicitly incorporates mythic traditions (mostly from the British isles) and some nods to primary sources. A few times I stumbled over an awkward phrase, and at least once I thought the banter between Clary and her pals was a little too specifically modeled on the dialogue of Buffy Summers and crew. But primarily my experience of this book was that I would look up and discover that an hour and/or so another fifty pages had blown in what seemed like an eye blink.

An extended battle scene near the end, however, forcibly recalled my issues with the first novel — the descriptions of the participants seemed a little lazy and formulaic, and the confusing, somewhat contradictory, descriptions of the environs interfered with my suspension of disbelief. But if the finale was a little disappointing, it certainly wasn’t enough so to blunt my interest in the concluding volume.

needs more demons? mmmmmmaybe.