It mixes critical discussion of the albums music and lyrics with an exploration of “dangerous” music as a tool for coping with adolescence.

I’d never actually listened to Master of Reality before — the only song I knew from it was “Sweet Leaf,” not my favorite Sabbath tune by a long shot. Turns out it’s a pretty fantastically weird record. It delivers a lot of what you might expect from Black Sabbath — some of this record is so proto-Metallica it’s almost spooky. But it also contains some positively pastoral moments (flute? flute!) and, the opening love song to Mary Jane aside, you could more-or-less label it Christian Rock.

Darnielle is a perfectly suited writer to delve into these seeming contradictions, and he’s found a wonderfully authentic voice to use. Very, very, cool.

(I’m hardly the first person to draw a line between Master of Reality and “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” but John Darnielle says I’m wrong, in a very nice, but spoileriffic, piece at Nerve.)

needs more demons? nuh uh.

I also found it less insulting to the reader’s intelligence than many paranormal romance books. Davidson doesn’t really explain why Betsy’s corpse wasn’t embalmed, for instance, but at least the issue is raised within the novel.

Toward the end, the Undead and Unwed takes a turn in the power struggle between rival vampire clans direction, a theme I find tiresome. But, on the bright side, Betsy finds it tiresome too, so maybe, just maybe, it won’t dominate future entries in the franchise.

needs more demons? nah.

It opens with a rather laborious description of personal combat ending with a gag death. The humor relies on the reader’s visualization, and I think it would have worked much better as a handful of pages in the other medium David writes in (comics).

After the fight scene, there’s 200-plus pages of flashback, with Apropos narrating his family/life history to date (he starts his story even before his conception). This is sadly pedestrian and predictable stuff — it’s only real hallmark is Apropos’ refusal to conform to the expectations of the fantasy hero — but I waded through enough of Stephen Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever” to know that’s really not so genre-defying after all. If I had been the editor, I would have suggested lopping out this third of the book entirely, and replacing it with a few dialogue asides to fill in the gaps: “Funny, my mother saw that omen the day I was born,” “Now I remember where I’ve seen you before!” and such.

Once the reader makes it back to the present day, there’s some mildly diverting Apropos-has-to-escort-the-princess-through-dangerous-lands-and-they-think-they-hate-each-other-but-are-inevitably-falling-in-love stuff. The mood is a bit like when the Dread Pirate Roberts has kidnapped Buttercup in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (or, really, about a zillion other books of all genres). But David is much bawdier than Goldman (often in a nasty, not fun way, as when Apropos recounts his mother’s gang rape in excessive detail) and perpetrates a few puns that even Piers Anthony might have passed up.

Why did I bother to finish reading it? For a while I was on an airplane, and my other books were wedged deep under the seat in front of me. Then I kinda sorta wanted to see how David resolved his conflicting plot threads (answer: with a little more ick than I bargained on). The worst thing? Because I expected (based, as it turns out, on false information) to enjoy this novel, I already bought a copy of the sequel. Oops.

needs more demons? mostly just needs abridgment.

I’m no literary critic; I’m read The Three Musketeers primarily because I recently saw Slumdog Millionare, and I’ve been making a conscious effort to read books a little farther afield from my usual choices.

But for whatever it’s worth, here are my impressions.

Initially I found The Three Musketeers an uphill climb, mostly because I didn’t pay enough attention during European History class. Pevears’s copious notes are very helpful, but he assumes more knowledge of 17th-century French (and even English) politics than I brought to bear. In particular, the balance of power between King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, and Queen Anne (of France, but who is not French) was a little hard to puzzle out.

After I more-or-less internalized the dramatis personae I enjoyed the novel quite a bit — for a while. Dumas weaves his genre-defining derring-do skillfully through the threads of actual history. It reminded me a bit of how fantasist Tim Powers spins tales of high and improbable action around real events and people (only without the fantastic elements). A good portion of my pleasure in the book derived from flipping to an end-note and experiencing the jaw-drop of “that part really happened!” And, thanks in no small part to Pevear’s lucid translation, some of my pleasure derived from moments of genuine laugh-out-loud humor.

As the novel goes on, however, its tone darkens considerably and I found it increasingly unpleasant. I know it’s unfair to chastise a 19-century novel for sexism, but the portrayal of the novel’s femme fatale, Lady de Winter, seems to go beyond that and into misogyny. (Richelieu is guileful, a figure to be feared, but ultimately not ignoble; Lady de Winter, whose ambitions, cunning, and vengefulness roughly equal those of the male protagonists, is unsupportable.) It might be interesting to see a modern recasting of Lady de Winter as the novel’s heroine.

needs more demons? (too a silly yardstick to apply to a literary classic)

needs more demons? no, but Dorst needs to write more books.

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The basic ingredients are the same: historical fiction, hardboiled whodunnit, comedy of manners, political intrigue, and romance. But the proportions are quite different this time around. In particular, the prominence of whodunnit elements is so reduced that the book barely qualifies as a “mystery novel” in the traditional sense, although the mystery sub-plot is too well integrated to be gratuitous. (And although Falco spends comparatively few calories trying to build links between corpses and killers, The Iron Hand of Mars gives him puzzles of other sorts to wrangle.)

The Iron Hand of Mars even features some armed-parties-tramping-through-the-woods-looking-for-things action which almost gives it a fantasy novel vibe — except that a clash over who wins the contract to supply an army base with tableware is the sort of nuts-and-bolts conflict which Davis excels at depicting, and which few fantasists would deem worthy of consideration.

Finally, Falco’s distinctive narrative presence holds everything together. He’s a wise-cracking private investigator (informer, in Roman parlance) in the classic mode — wry, self-deprecating, observant, and incisive (apart from the requisite blind spots). He’s also a Roman citizen who dwells in a richly detailed, complex, and credible social environment. The seamlessness with which Davis melds these disparate elements continues to astound me.

Needs More Demons? Nope.

Everything I said about Silver Pigs applies to Venus in Copper, and then some (I enjoyed Shadows in Bronze, too, although it didn’t impress me quite as strongly). The characters are wonderfully realized. Falco’s narrative voice is assured and incisive, and his helpmeet [trying to skirt spoilers...] is more than a match for him. The setting is so vividly drawn that I’ve had fanciful thoughts about a time machine in Davis’s closet with its coordinates set to Imperial Rome. Heck, I almost feel as if I’ve visited Imperial Rome. The plot elements are quite satisfyingly twisty (although once again, a Big Clue in the open seemed far more obvious to me than to the protagonist).

Moreover, while the tone isn’t broadly comic, it made me laugh out loud several times, and the mouth-watering descriptions of certain Roman sweetmeats instilled a craving that I’m still trying to figure out how best to satisfy. Finally, it’s more satisfying on a literary level than a great many mysteries, what with the foreshadowing, the symbolism, the external conflict mirroring internal conflict, and so forth.

Needs More Demons? No.

Lately I’ve been writing quite a bit about fantasy novels marketed to young adult audiences (probably to the dismay of many readers, but that’s beside the point for now). I was on the Amazon website perusing lists of people’s favorite young adult novels, and in a list with a bunch of genre authors, I found The Seventh Raven described like this: “Too bizarre to actually describe here. Let’s just say you’ll never read anything quite like it again.” I have the impression that I looked it up somewhere else and read a comment along the lines of “This is a book about . . . no, actually, it’s better if you just find out for yourself.” (I can’t find that comment now, though, so I could be wrong about that.) Anyway, the information I had was enough for me to request it from the library. It sure looked like a fantasy novel when I picked it up; the cover features a grim-looking kid wearing an elaborate raven headdress.

If I had read an accurate description of what the The Seventh Raven is “about” (plot-wise, and to some extent thematically) I never would have read it. And that would have been a shame, because I liked it a lot. It seemed quintessentially British, in a good way: precisely and insightfully written, rather dry-humored, and somewhat reserved even when depicting loud and raucous events.

The list I found it on described it as “little-known.” If that’s true (I’d certainly never heard of it, which proves nothing) I suspect it’s in part because it doesn’t fit neatly into a single genre at all. It’s a good book, I’d say, in at least two genres. Where do you file it? How do you market it?

And I agree with the source I can’t find and may have manufactured — better not to know anything at all of what genres the novel might or might not fit in. I will tell you that you’ll have a first-person 17-year-old female narrator as your guide, and mention that I recommend it doubly if you’re a musician of any stripe, and that’s all you’ll get from me. If you wind up with the same edition I read, maybe you could put some sort of slipcover on it. That way you won’t embarrass yourself showing the front cover in any public place, and you’ll reduce the risk of reading the back cover ’til after you’ve finished.

Needs More Demons? Nope.

I’ve frequently enjoyed historical mysteries, but they rarely succeed for me on both levels — either the period detail is compelling and the mystery is a bit slight, or the other way around. I appreciate the sly humor of transposing the tropes of modern crime fiction to a historical setting — the good centurion/bad centurion interview, say — but that sort of injoke can’t sustain whole a novel. Silver Pigs balances its two aspects remarkably well. We recently watched (and for the most part liked) the HBO series Rome. Silver Pigs offers similar ambiance and takes a similar tack: it looks at court intrigue and large-scale historical events from the vantage of Rome’s merchant class. The mystery at the heart of the novel is credible for the time period, and consistent with some archeological detail; the who-betrayed-whom? plot twists get positively Chandler-esque. The first-person narrator, one Marcus Didius Falco, a retired soldier turned “informer” (in Davis’s hands, the Roman equivalent of the modern detective) owes a clear stylistic debt to Chandler and Hammett’s iconic Philip Marlowe and Continental Op. But I was also reminded of Georgette Heyer’s hybrid romance/mysteries. Falco isn’t quite as cynical and embittered as he’d like to think he is, which suited me just fine, and the female characters don’t have to submit to Chandler’s bubble head/black widow dichotomy.

Up until the last 40 pages or so of Silver Pigs, I was having trouble remembering the last time I’d enjoyed a mystery novel as much. I tried to read more slowly to make it last longer. Perhaps partly because I was lingering, I felt Davis tipped her hand too much at the end; Falco almost literally stumbled over a major clue before he recognized it for what it was. There was also some significant inconsistency — Falco withholds information from the reader to increase the suspense. I don’t have any trouble with that per se, but his internal monologue doesn’t jibe with what he knows, but the reader doesn’t (yet). Even though I found the dénouement less than completely satisfying, it was certainly forgivably so (particularly for a beginning novelist). I’ve already submitted a library request for the next volume (Shadows in Bronze) in the series that Silver Pigs kicks off. There seem to be approximately 8 zillion more volumes, and I fear I may be entering into the sort of brief, torrid affair I had with Lawrence Block’s Scudder novels a few years ago.

Needs More Demons? No.