It doesn’t go deep. It mentions typeface classifications like “Didone” and “Garalde” without exploring the distinctions. The authors frequently discuss the mood or tone of a group of typefaces but rarely discuss the elements of the font that establish the tone; when listing similar fonts they seldom explicitly discuss the differences between them.

Although I read the second edition, updated in 2002, the section on web typography is, perhaps inevitably, dangerously out of date.

Overall this was substantially more useful than Never Use More Than Two Different Typefaces. It should help an amateur do a less amateurish job of laying out type; and it should enable a design professional without a solid typography background to talk with one who does.

(I owe Joe Hill’s short story “Best New Horror” for obliquely introducing me to Gallagher by mentioning him in the same sentence as Kelly Link.)

needs more demons? no.

There’s a present day plot thread that introduced dramatic tension but never quite felt adequately supported, and I found the diction of the oldest of the quoted texts a little unconvincing, even allowing for the unconventional education of its author. I also thought the novel’s concluding handful of paragraphs were unworthy of what went before, with a touch neater resolution than I would have preferred. But these foibles don’t stop me from enthusiastically recommending the book.

needs more demons? no.

The set up for Dark Cities Underground reads like something from the manual of how to write a novel that appeals to me: Ruthie Berry is writing a book about the author of a beloved series of children’s stories a la Barrie, Milne, Lewis, Grahame, et al. She manages to get an interview with the reclusive author’s son, Jerry, the template for the books’ hero Jeremy. Strange things start to happen, and Jerry starts to remember things he’s forgotten since childhood . . . and I’m hooked.

Goldstein does two things extremely well in this book. She reworks mythic tropes into a modern day setting (reminding me a bit of Neil Gaiman, particularly Gaiman’s Neverwhere, with which Dark Cities Underground shares some superficial plot points). And she cunningly weaves real historical data and figures into her fantastic plot, recalling Tim Powers’ magnificent fantastic alternate histories. She pulls off some other neat tricks, not least of which is to use plot devices that might threaten a reader’s suspension of disbelief, and then making them absolutely integral to the plot and thematic development.

This novel completely sidestepped my critical detachment. I had the sense that some of the concluding chapters felt a tad rushed, but that’s probably mostly a reflection of my desire for the book to have more pages in it. I’ m really a little surprised Dark Cities Underground didn’t win any of the major fantasy awards (it was a nominee for the British Fantasy Society Best Novel, but lost to Stephen King’s Bag of Bones).

needs more demons? nuh uh.

Presumably the draw for most fans of Project Runway’s congenial but incisive mentor figure Tim Gunn (certainly for me) is the promise of some juicy insider chat, which Gunn delivers a good bit of. You might hope for Gunn to dish about fashion world figures like Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley (yes), assorted Project Runway contestants (yes), Parsons (oh my, yes, that bridge is burnt), and Heidi, Micheal, and Nina (not a chance).

But Gunn is, I think, too sincerely principled to want to produce a gossip-centric volume, and what results is a peculiar mish-mash of gossip, memoir, and Gunn’s (as the subtitle puts it) “[Life's] Little Lessons for Making It Work.” Gunn’s guidelines are reasonable, pithily expressed and ably supported (his suggestions for giving design critiques are particularly useful). There’s nothing holier-than-thou about it, either; Gunn is not all reticent about criticizing himself. But the general tone of the volume is distinctly anti-snark, so there’s a slight tension between the book’s message and its contents. At times I almost felt like there was an implicit quid pro quo: eat your healthy precepts, then you can have your catty gossip.

My vague unease with the book was exacerbated by the absence (largely) of Gunn’s distinctive voice. Project Runway’s editors leave in many instances of Gunn’s vivid and precise vocabulary (he’s a use-exactly-the-right-word kind of guy), and my ideal of a Tim Gunn book would send the less erudite portion of the readership scurrying for a dictionary at least a few times. But Calhoun (I suspect) has largely excised Gunn’s most flavorful language. On page 74 I found a glimmer of what I felt was lacking (”Every corpuscle of every society in the history of this globe has religion at its core!” I brayed at him.), but moments like those are thin on the ground throughout.

Warning: from time to time you may be overcome by a strong desire to give Tim Gunn a hug and say, “there, there.”

needs more demons? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe needs a less assertive editorial/co-authorial hand.

I feel like this book wants to be a social climbing satire, but it isn’t barbed enough to qualify. Its critiques of modern life in Los Angeles seem a bit familiar and comfortable (although maybe as a non-Angelino there are subtleties that elude me).

needs more demons kinda sorta

Lots of meta-textual hijinks ensue, with Carley’s story paralleled or reflected in various ways by Bree’s own backstory, The Arion Annals (Carley’s favorite TV show, an amalgam of Buffy, Veronica Mars, Lost, among other sources) and Dark Ages, Bree’s novel-in-progress. The Great Gatsby is something of a touchstone for several of the novel’s characters, but that’s only the tip of the literary reference iceberg: a Salinger/Pynchonesque writer-recluse makes an appearance, and the descriptions of McEnroy’s first novel Between Scylla and Alta Vista bear a distinct, if superficial, resemblance to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

As Carley helps Bree shape Dark Ages, she learns about some of the contents of the writers’ trick-bags, and begins to form her own preferences; meanwhile Gibson has the opportunity to show off many of those self-same tricks.

I liked it overall, although I don’t think it quite lived up to its ambitions. At the surface plot level one of the characters undergoes an important change that didn’t seem adequately supported to me. At the meta level, some of the resonances between characters seemed oversold. (I suppose you could argue that could be part of the point; still I would have preferred a slightly more subtle touch). But I certainly remained engaged, not to mention emotionally involved enough to want to see some sense knocked into all of the protagonists.
And I really liked some of Gibson’s writing, not least the opening sentence:

The idea came to Carley’s father amid the whir of a hundred handheld sanders at Bunny Gardner’s Sweet sixteen, an event that had burst into life with the birthday girl’s parents whipping a satin drape off their pedestaled daughter at the center of the Glen Club ballroom, where she held a pose she would later tell her classmates was “Winged Victory, except not headless” through applause people would say she milked a bit too long before stepping down.

One minor note: maybe it’s just me, but I had to mentally increase the younger protagonists ages by a couple years, both to sustain credibility and to not get icked out by some of what they get up to.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no.”

It opens with a sequence that seems like a textbook example of magical realism; in his afterward Gold claims it has a historical basis, although, perhaps suspiciously, the only references I can find on the Internet to the event are in descriptions of Sunnyside itself. The event binds the destinies of aspiring actor Lee Duncan and Hugo Black to Charlie Chaplin’s career in some obscure fashion.

Roughly half the novel follows Chaplin from late 1916 through mid-1919, when he was creating films for Mutual with an unprecedented degree of creative control. He pals around with Douglas Fairbanks, squabbles with Mary Pickford, raises money for the war effort, and struggles toward a creative breakthrough that seems always just beyond his grasp. The rest of the book follows Duncan (a real figure) and Black (an invented one, seemingly unrelated to the Supreme Court justice who shares his name) through the war years.

Sunnyside entertained me in the main, but the logic that makes these three stories combine into a cohesive novel eluded me. I found the resolution of Hugo Black’s story particularly problematic; it departs significantly from the level of naturalism in the novel elsewhere to evoke mythic and religious tropes like the temptation of Christ and encounters with faerie. Charlie Chaplin meanwhile is throwing seemingly random plot elements into his film Sunnyside in a desperate attempt to make it all stick together. I found myself tempted to think that Gold is similarly striving for some apotheosis, shifting the tone and narrative structure of Sunnyside the novel in an attempt to make its whole somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

I don’t think it completely succeeds, but it’s brave and interesting in its attempt. I loved Carter Beats the Devil for what it was, but most of what I loved was the intricate construction of its plot, and to a lesser degree the emotional resonances Gold achieved. But Carter Beats the Devil didn’t operate on any particularly deep thematic level.

Sunnyside is a completely different beast, and it mostly leaves me impatient to see what Gold tries next.

needs more demons? no.

The key difference is that the film has one additional character. I was surprised at the controversy, because the additional character’s presence makes good dramatic sense to me: the character provides a foil for Coraline; a way to see what she’s thinking without resorting to voiceover narration or the like. But the additional character is male, and it’s been suggested that his presence is a sexist marketing ploy, an attempt to appeal to young males who would otherwise not be interested in a story about a plucky girl hero.

Reading Coraline didn’t challenge my preconception that Gaiman shines best when working with a strong visual partner. I’m not sure, though, what the causal relationship might be: is that because I first encountered Gaiman as a comics writer paired with some amazingly sympatico illustrators, or is Gaiman’s prose fiction impacted by his familiarity with leaving space for the illustrator?

needs more demons? nope.

The urge of speculative fiction authors to escape their marketing categories is driven, it seems to me, by sour grapes on both sides. Genre authors who aspire to more than simple escapist tale-telling resent the prestigious awards and publication venues available to “serious” or “literary” authors (most famously The New Yorker). On the other hand, “serious” authors resent the megabucks available to the upper sales echelon of the genre authors.

The debate may seem silly to anyone outside it. Works of “serious” literature have frequently incorporated fantastic elements since the very dawn of literature, no matter when you choose to place the dawn (Homer, Beowulf, Milton, Rabelais…). And many of the canonical great authors wrote their books in an era where the novel was considered an intrinsically frivolous and unworthy work; the idea that critical acclaim should come during an author’s own lifetime is a comparatively new one. But SF writers take their genre-name wrangling very, very seriously. And it’s true that the likes of Dickens didn’t invalidate their work by publishing in markets geared toward the cheap seats. And it’s also true that the prestige markets nowadays are publishing work from writers like Chabon, Lethem, Saunders, and Wallace that are much like the best of the work in the best of the genre publications.

Of course, the advocates for the best of the genre authors tend to downplay the fact that there is also an awful lot of purely escapist genre work published, and a great deal of that, bluntly, is badly written and unworthy of more serious consideration. You know — all those books with dragons, bare-chested strong-thewed warriors, and/or battling spaceships (let’s ignore for the moment the confusing irrelevancy that a tiny fraction of books with those illustrations are actually not crap).

Many smarter minds than mine have considered the problem of how to distinguish the good stuff. I’ve come up with my own test, the Is-it-bigger-than-a-breadbox? test. Here’s how it works: You could describe Hamlet as a ghost story in which a vengeful spirit convinces a young man to murder his uncle, ultimately leading to his own doom. But if you describe Hamlet strictly in genre terms, you fail to capture the essence of the play. It doesn’t fit in the ghost-story breadbox. In the same way, if you describe Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat” as a ghost story in which a vengeful spirit claims the life of two children, you fail to capture its essence; it doesn’t fit in the ghost-story breadbox either. In fact, that description isn’t necessarily even accurate, and part of the story’s essence (I’d argue) is that it doesn’t fit in the breadbox; it defies the narrative expectations of the conventional ghost story.

The breadbox test has a catch, which is this: If the story fits into different genre breadboxes — ghost-story and hardboiled detective fiction, say — it’s still breadboxable. To escape the conventions of genre, a work has to fail to fit in any genre breadbox.

This is the great failing of Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers’ theme anthology Slipstreams, one of several recent books released to capitalize on interest in this movement. In Helfers’ introduction, he confesses that he doesn’t quite get what this slipstream stuff is supposed to be (I have the distinct impression he hasn’t read any of it), so he asked his authors to submit stories which combined two genres. Unfortunately, few of the results are impressive; most have a paint-by-numbers predictability to them.

Far and away the best story was Jane Liskold’s “Menu for Life…and Death.” Despite a title which telegraphs more of the plot than it needs to, this combination of cookbook and fatal love triangle was striking and unusual. Other than that, I liked the stories where one of the other genres was detective fiction best, although that may be because I generally prefer detective fiction to westerns or war stories. Robert Sawyer’s “Biding Time” actually suggested a new (to me, at least) motive for murder that arises from its science fictional conceit. Michael M. Jones’ hardboiled Santa “Claus of Death” is about as predictable as the lame title, and not even internally consistent, but I thought the St. Nick à la Chandler was still kinda fun; ditto the vamp sleuth of Tanya Huff’s “Critical Analysis.” Two stories demonstrate Summervillain’s First Corollary of Crap Historical Fiction: If you’re in late 19th-century London, you can scarcely take a step without tripping over Jack the Ripper. (Summervillain’s First Law of Crap Historical Fiction: No matter where or when you are, you can scarcely take a step without tripping over a famous historical personage.)

The primary reason I picked the book up was the inclusion of a story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, a writer of whom I’m a big fan. “Marrow Wood” doesn’t give her an opportunity to showcase her strengths; it’s too short to allow the compelling character development that marks her novels, and her take on faery magic is more standard and less distinctive than I usually expect from her.

When I was younger, I devoured Alan Dean Foster’s novels by the dozen, but his entry here — a tall tale/deal-with-devil hybrid — is particularly awful. Sentences like, “The result was a climatological confusion that often left him squinting to see through the resultant heavy fog,” cry out for a stern editorial hand. Russell Davis’s “The End of Spring” is perhaps the most ambitious story here, and the closest to slipstream as I define it. But it’s also one of the weakest; it punishes the reader with flat, repetitive present tense; the sentence, “The man sitting in his pickup truck is staring at the ridgeline and thinking about patterns,” appears multiple times; one of its genre components is perhaps apotheosis (if that can be considered a genre), but another is armchair psychiatrist babble.

Needs More Demons?
No, but needs more good writing.