Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor — there had been no time for any fine polishing — but the book was animated by a fury that no reader could help but notice.

…words which could easily be applied to the novel itself. Like the protagonist Blomkvist’s book, which is mostly fact-dump appendices, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is angry, and its twin plots are intricately detailed, very much in favor of other niceties.

One of the issues Larsson is angry about is sexual violence perpetrated on women. Another thing I found problematic about this book is how Larsson deals with this theme. Like the old saw about anti-war films inadvertently glorifying war, this can be tricky territory to write about. It took a long time for Larsson to convince me that he was wasn’t just being lurid, sensational, exploitive, and playing to exactly the wrong audience; some readers might lose patience (or their lunch) waiting for the authorial viewpont to become clear.

Finally, what with the author and the male protagonist both being magazine editors, it’s tempting to suspect that Blomvkist might be an idealized version of Larsson himself. Given that, the proportion of the novel’s female characters who throw themselves at Blomvkist sexually seemed more than a little icky, not to mention a bit juvenile.

needs more demons? I realize there’s a lot of hubris involved in making value judgments about a book as popular as this, but if your taste is similar to mine, you might prefer to invest your time in a slightly more literary thriller.

On the bright side, although it’s the first of three volumes, it delivers closure on its plot and character arcs, so there’s no lingering hunger for resolution to impel me to read further.

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

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

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.

Liar is darker than the other books. Micah is a compulsive liar, and the novel fundamentally revolves around the question of just how unreliable a narrator she is. The text clearly supports different interpretations of what “really” happened, and which — or if any — of Micah’s sometimes contradictory accounts are “true.” The novel’s structure is complex — it consists of short chapters, most simply headed “before” and “after” to identify their chronological relationship to a significant event.

There are two traps a book like this needs to avoid — one is when peeling back a layer of lies reveals something that strains the reader’s credibility or violates the book’s internal logic. The other is when the narrator’s unreliability passes a threshold beyond which the reader loses interest in what is “true” or “not true.”

For me, Liar danced right up to these lines — repeatedly — but never quite crossed either one. Micah remained a sympathetic (if damaged) character, and I stayed involved in the book. I could scarcely put it down, in fact.

needs more demons? adding demons would absolutely ruin this book.

I’ve always suspected I would find Lawrence an annoying writer, and I do. He’s fiercely judgmental, and many of his judgments are precisely the sort that raise my dander: like ugly generalizations about gender relations, professing admiration for simple rustic lifestyles while presuming that a lack of social or technological sophistication is synonymous with a lack of intelligence, and broad-stroke condemnations of contemporaneous art. Worse, he gripes about the frustration he feels when he is swept up in the same sort of generalizations he so freely dispenses. I believe I would have found Lawrence even more annoying as a travel companion: complaining about the price of accommodation and transport, the quality of the food, insisting we trudge through late afternoon rain to another town because he can’t bear the thought of passing the night where he is.

Lawrence’s prose breaks many of the rules I learned about good writing. He will seize on a word, often a prosaic adjective like “flat,” “grey,” or “naked,” and worry it to death in several consecutive sentences. I think he may have meant his work to be read aloud, or at least voiced within the head, rather than read, so his many repetitions falling into a sort of sing-song rhythm. In the earliest of these works, “Twilight in Italy,” and in the last, “Etruscan Places,” (which, to be fair to Lawrence, was published posthumously, and might have been edited further if the author had the opportunity to prepare it for publication) Lawrence launches from time to time into wide-ranging pontifications in which many nouns must be capitalized: “I am consummate when my Self, the resistant solid, is reduced into all that which is Not-Me: my neighbor, my enemy, the great Otherness.” I was uncomfortably reminded of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or, more generally, being young and drunk and terribly certain of my own profundity.

But I found this book almost as delightful as it was infuriating. If Lawrence’s prose sometimes seems self-conscious and overwrought, it also sometimes is simultaneously beautiful and lucid. When Lawrence griped about an inn where the room is not to his liking, the memory of the first night I spent in Buenos Aires came flooding back to me with uncommon vividness (I swear, if I described that room accurately, you would be sure I was exaggerating for comic effect). And if often made me want to read — or write — fiction that uses some of its memorable elements, like the village where the high steeple is visible throughout, but impossible to find in the twisty streets.

needs more demons? not exactly.

The tone is much lighter, and it’s less realistic — both plot-wise and in the emotional life of its characters — than Larbalestier’s “Magic” series. I basically enjoyed it, but, frankly, it felt like a bit of a rush-job, and I can’t help but think it would have been more effective as a novella or short story.

needs more demons? kinda sorta.

But these innocuous openings give little away. In what era is the story set? Does it take place in world like ours, or somewhere quite other? Are the protagonists human? Alive or dead? Answers to questions like these differ between these ten tales.

Lanagan isn’t one for big dumps of exposition. She demands a willingness to read a few pages before you’re quite sure what’s going on, and perhaps to re-read as your understanding grows. Her prose and structure are fiercely economical. I’ve enjoyed several of William Sleator’s books, but it struck me that if Sleator had written the opening “Baby Jane,” (which employs some of Sleator’s frequent tropes) it probably would’ve been a short novel, rather than a short story.

“Winkie” and “Under Hell, Over Heaven” by themselves would be enough to ensure that I’ll read more from Lanagan.

needs more demons? no.

It has a good first sentence:

Somewhere in the middle of my rant it occurred to me that I’d killed whoever it was I’d been yelling at, so arguing was no longer important.

I mostly like the setup, which melds elements of Memento (one of the viewpoint characters has strange blackouts and is not an entirely reliable narrator) and The Sopranos (he runs a strip club and power-jockeying in the underworld is the prime plot driver) with the now-standard Buffy/Laurell Hamilton-style modern world overrun by vampires, werewolves, and other things that go stab in the night.

My biggest complaint is lack of disclosure: the book is free of the usual “first in an exciting new series” cover blurb and the teaser for the next volume tacked after the last pages; it looks like a standalone novel, but it’s not. It resolves some of its conflicts, but structurally, it’s more like an episode of a dramatic TV series than a book that can stand on its own. I don’t necessarily mind that, but I prefer to know when I start a book if I can reasonably expect it to end.

The victory for Lewis is that I do want some what-happens-next satisfaction, so I will probably read at least one inevitable sequel despite the book’s other faults. The lack of internal consistency in the social environment bugged me (to be fair, this also bugs me about plenty of other books in the supernatural romance/thriller genre). Either killing people has consequences in a society or it doesn’t. For the presence or absence of those consequences to be determined by what’s expedient for the plot seems lazy. Staked also pushed my tolerance levels for cartoonish macho posturing and gratuitous violence.

But I do still want to know what happens next. Go figure.

needs more demons? not so much “more” as better use of the ones it has

This, the concluding volume of a more-or-less self-contained trilogy, introduces fewer new elements than the previous books; mostly it lets the characters and situations set up in the previous volumes run toward their resolutions. Magic’s Child wraps up the major plot elements in a thematically appropriate fashion (but leaves plenty of unresolved threads from which to weave possilbe sequels). It continues to effectively exploit tension between the realistically depicted emotional life of its principals and the use of magic powers to actualize adolescent alienation and the growing dread of mortality. I found it satisfying and enjoyable, but markedly less surprising than the previous books.

needs more demons? mmmmaybe.