Cycler ended so abruptly and with so little resolution that I expected (Re)cycler to be basically the second half of a novel too long for one volume. I thought it was going to include an “origin story” for Jill (who turns, physically, into her male alter-ego Jack for 4 days a month). I thought, for example, that it might be revealed that Jill’s mom, who has a more-or-less normal relationship with her daughter but real trouble dealing with her “son,” had conducted some sort of awful gene-splicing experiment on Jill/Jack.

Jill and Jack both self-identify as heterosexual but (slight spoiler here for the first novel) they both wind up involved in relationships where their partner’s bisexuality is either stated explicitly or strongly hinted at. Along with a twist on lycanthropy and/or the Jekyll/Hyde paradigm, one potential reading for Jill/Jack’s hermaphroditic nature would be an attempt to resolve feelings of attraction to both sexes by compartmentalizing them, and I thought one, or even both, of Jill/Jack’s love triangles might resolve themselves with a partner who has a relationship with both Jill and Jack.

But (Re)cycler avoids concretely realizing any of those speculations (although it leaves the door open for some of them to be explored in the future). Instead it introduces several new characters, opens up a lot of other possibilities, and leaves many of them unresolved, too. Maybe it’s book two in a projected long-running series, but maybe McLaughlin is just not that big on closure.

Not wanting to wrap everything up neatly is certainly a valid artistic choice, and part of me likes this book a lot for defying my expectations so thoroughly. McLaughlin certainly had me flipping pages at a breakneck pace. But it still leaves me a bit unsatisfied, partly because I still crave answers to all the questions Cycler and (Re)cycler leave unanswered, but mostly because this book is in many respects much tamer, lacking the dark undercurrent that made the first volume so striking.

needs more demons? maybe.

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.

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.

I found The Affinity Bridge not un-entertaining, and although the reveal in the epilogue wasn’t too much of a surprise, it suggests a multi-novel story arc that I’m curious to see how Mann evolves. So I may read more. (The Affinity Bridge resolves as a stand-alone novel, but it is unambiguously the first of a series.)

On the minus side, Mann’s characters are flat and cartoonish. I had suspension-of-disbelief problems several times, most notably with iron as a structural element in lighter-than-air vessels and Mann’s depiction of the physics of railway carriages. Mann seems to struggle both with the rhythm of the prose and the blocking of action sequences (I assumed it was his first novel, but it’s not, so perhaps he is still seeking the right balance of faux-Victoriana and modern prose construction). I was less bothered by this when I started envisioning the fisticuffs shot in the clunky and often unintentionally humorous style of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who. A typical sample:

[The other man] got to his feet, careful to keep his pilot’s chair safely between the two of them. He smiled slyly. “Indeed we do.” He lashed out as he spoke, sending his fist flying toward Newbury’s face. Newbury ducked quickly out of the way, feeling the fist brush his cheek, ever-so-narrowly missing its target. He thrashed back at the other man, connecting hard with his sternum and causing him to stagger backwards, banging against the control panel. It wasn’t a graceful move, but it was certainly functional.

needs more demons? not as such, but a little more care in the writing would not have been amiss.

• I read every word within a 24-hour span
• I’ve already purchased some Merge recordings I hadn’t previously heard
• The palpable enthusiasm of Ryan Adam’s (slightly incoherent) intro almost makes me want to hear what he’s been up to lately

The structure of Our Noise is pretty genius: there’s a little bit of connective text to provide context and occasional fact-correction, but mostly the story is told in interview snippets. Mac and Laura’s voices are augmented by those of other Merge recording artists, associates (like Touch & Go’s Cory Rusk), friends, and peers. Alternating chapters switch between advancing the overall Merge (and Superchunk) timeline and highlighting some of Merge’s more prominent bands, like Spoon, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Arcade Fire. Sometimes this is slightly confusing, as when the money The Magnetic Field’s Sixty-Nine Love Songs eventually makes discussed much earlier than its place in the overall chronology. It perhaps shortchanges the bands not selected for the individual chapter profiles, with Archers of Loaf arguably the most significant. But it effectively breaks up the potential monotony of “then we did another tour. then we put out some more records,” and enlivens the book by letting different voices ascend and recede in prominence.

Our Noise is richly illustrated, not only with photos of band members on- and off-stage, but also with flyers, album art, set lists and correspondence, and no less than 4 pictures of “The Magnetic Fields” misspelled in various ways on marquees and such.

Quibbles: A complete list of Merge releases through April 2009 is the sole appendix. It’s handy, but a short bio of each interviewee would have been very useful, as would an index. (Interviewees are often described in a parenthetical note the first time they appear: “Aaron Stauffer (Seaweed).” But if you forget which band Stauffer was in and he has another comment a few chapters later, it can take some flipping around to find the first reference.) I noticed a handful of copy-editing errors, but none that were confusing and not enough to detract from my enjoyment.

Our Noise is much more narrowly focused than Azerrad’s Our Band Could be Your Life, Option magazine’s (terribly titled) We Rock So You Don’t Have To or Punk Planet’s We Owe You Nothing (what is it with the third-person plural, anyway?). Andersen and Jenkin’s Dance of Days is largely, but not entirely the story of DisChord, Minor Threat and Fugazi; it’s also the story of Positive Force. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare Our Noise to those books, but I think it may be the most satisfying of them to read cover-to-cover uninterrupted. It makes me want to stand up and cheer. And read a similarly structured book about DisChord, Simple Machines, SST, or TeenBeat, for a start. And go back in time and get serious about playing music much earlier.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

The prose of Gloriana is frequently gorgeous — it’s rich and evocative and pays homage to its obvious influences without being derivative. The book has many fans, all I must assume, with stomachs made of sterner stuff than mine. But if you start reading it and find yourself disturbed the first time you encounter a female character subjected to non-consensual, sexually-infused terror, my advice? Quit while you’re ahead. It’s not exactly a pervasive theme, but worse lurks in later pages.

Also: considering this is the author for whom I was willing to endure hours of junior/highschool ridicule to be enthralled by the sorecerous adventures of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, et al, Gloriana is really kinda slow-moving, and very sparing of actual fantastic elements.

needs more demons? scale really, really doesn’t apply here. I think Gloriana is very successful at being the novel it is — it’s just fundamentally not to my taste. I’m not even sure I should write about it, except for the theoretical “if your taste is like mine steer clear/if your taste is not like mine jump right in” value.

I thought Twilight was genuinely suspenseful in places, but the action/tension scenes in New Moon seemed more cartoonish and less compelling. Your mileage may vary. But I feel like I can wait a while before embarking on the third book.

needs more demons? I’m going to go with “yes.”

Matlock’s musical contributions to the band also fascinate me. I’m convinced that the strange alchemy between Matlock and Steve Jones is at least as important to the band’s enduring success as Lydon’s characteristic sonic sneers and McLaren’s image-mongering. Matlock wrote lovely pop songs and Jones stripped away the fiddly bits and reduced them to their elemental essence. (The fantastic EMI documentary Never Mind the Bollocks has many examples of this process in action).

Matlock (with help from co-author Pete Silverton) proves a breezy and entertaining narrator unburdened by false modesty. He’s got about as little patience for the myth that the Pistols couldn’t play as I do. He portrays McLaren as more of an opportunist than a master manipulator, and since he worked in McLaren’s shop even before it was renamed Sex, his is presumably a well-informed opinion. His account of the infamous Anarchy tour is markedly different than the others I’ve read; he was insulated from the press furor and mostly remembers being dead bored in hotel rooms.

A brief quote will give you a feel for the book’s flavor, and also show why Matlock didn’t ultimately fit well with the band:

…What they were interested in was prostitutes. It was all, let’s go and get Glen a tart. It may sound like I was a party-pooper but I wasn’t interested. One, I had my eye on a girl at the Paridiso [the club where the band was booked]. Two, I had a couple of songs to work on and one of the songs I wrote there turned out to be “Rich Kids” which sold 100,000 copies, thank you very much. So sod going off after a tart.

I read the original 1990 edition, but glenmatlock.com indicates that Matlock has revised the book with new material covering the recent reunion tours. Dang. I might have to read it again.

Needs More Demons? Not really.

• Nothing with swords or dragons in the title or the cover
• Nothing with a map of imaginary places at the front

There are many counter-examples to prove the rules, and even more bad books not filtered by them, but they do eliminate a lot of books I’m pretty sure I don’t need to read (I’ve had my lifetime quota of lame Tolkien knockoffs, thanks). I usually think twice before picking up a sword-y or dragon-y book, and the presence of a map is not likely to sway me toward an impulse purchase. Fire Logic has a big sword on the cover and a map in the front. I’d also be inclined to add a rule about titles that define the context of a series: Fire Logic, especially once you learn a little about the set up, implies that Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic will follow. Poor Fire Logic had three strikes against it before I’d read even a word.

So why did I read it? The third volume in the series is published by Small Beer Press. I have great faith and trust in their editorial judgment; their track record of publishing the kind of books I like is virtually flawless. In their promotional material, clearly aware that their audience might be leery of a mainstream fantasy tetralogy, they went to some pains to assure potential readers that this was not a standard issue heroic fantasy.

And indeed it’s not. What struck me most about this novel was its sense of place. Shaftal, despite a name that still strikes me as silly, feels like a nation where people could really live, not a sketchy setting for events of import to befall heroes and villains. There’s no incarnation of evil bent on utter subjugation of the world; there are invaders and a resistance, and the readers sympathies — and many of the characters’ — are tugged back and forth by the choices that people make. There is magic, but it’s not of the gaudy, lightning-bolts-from-the-fingers variety. Marks doesn’t belabor the principles by which magic operates, but they nonetheless feel internally consistent (a neat trick).

Marks’ society is very thoroughly egalitarian, few of the central characters are heterosexual, and nobody in the novel makes a big deal over anyone’s gender or sexual preference. It makes many of the standard fantasy genre tropes look very reactionary. I’m no expert, but I certainly can’t think of any fantasy set in a pre-industrial society as gender-neutral as Fire Logic. (In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ day, heroes could of course stumble upon cities, islands, or planets ruled by women — but ultimately that seems just as non-feminist: “Oh look, Dr. Jameson! The women are in charge! How very queer indeed!”)

On the down side, much of the plot was a little too military-oriented for my personal taste, and while Marks’ characters usually emerge as well-rounded, I could wish they were fundamentally a little farther from standard-issue fantasy types in aspects other than sexual orientation. Marks’ dialog has a realistic flow and is blessedly free of faux archaisms, but that makes her prose look a little dense and early 20th-century by comparison. But the bottom line is that I liked Fire Logic quite a bit, and I look forward to reading the next volume.

Needs More Demons? Nope.

I picked up John Mortimer’s Charade thanks to a case of mistaken identity: I confused Mortimer (for reasons I can’t satisfactorily explain) with Michael Innes (also a British novelist with a capital “M” in his name, I suppose). I didn’t much care for Charade. It didn’t seem to know whether it wanted to be gentle satire, a comic romp, or a serious coming-of-age novel. I’ve often find this sort of confusion charming, but Charade didn’t muster sufficient conviction in any one dimension. It struck me, though, that Charade, published in 1947, could well have been an influence on several things I liked much better, most notably Monty Python’s singular vision of the British Army, and the crazed film director Eli Cross, brought to such memorable life by Peter O’Toole in The Stunt Man.

After that rousing endorsement, I’m sure you’ll all be delighted to learn that Charade is currently in my Bookmooch inventory.

Needs More Demons? Couldn’t hurt.