One slight drawback: experiencing the work of any of the interview subjects is left as a homework exercise for the reader; Brand Thinking is strictly text-only. It’s an interesting counterpart to more visually oriented books like Sean Adam’s Masters of Design (Sean Adams is himself one of Millman’s interview subjects).

needs more demons? No. I thought this book was terrific. Recommended for anyone interested in branding and identity design.

needs more demons? perhaps, but not as many as before.

In the weakest stories, Maliszewksi’s formalism verges on gimmickry: almost none of his people have given names; most are referred to only as “the man,” “the wife,” “the husband,” “the boy,” and so on. Maliszewki’s titles almost all take the form of “Parable of . . .” or “Prayer for . . .”; the reader is initially perhaps led to believe that the “prayers” are more naturalistic and the “parables” are more symbolic/fabulist or, well, parable-y, but Maliszewksi quickly subverts that convention.

Although I thought Prayer and Parable was uneven, its high points were more than enough to keep Maliszewski on the list of writers I’m eager to see more from.

Moriarty delivers a plot compelling enough that I was able to read this book on the subway without getting motion sick (a rarity). Some plot points are a tad predictable — it is immediately clear that Sacha’s pride must lead to a comeuppance — but I found the ways even the requisite elements unfolded satisfying; and there were plenty of unexpected thrills (and chills; there is a dash of horror in Moriarty’s mix). Sacha is both engaging and a little off-putting, a neat trick. Moriarty does an excellent job of portraying the world through his eyes, so we see how he comes to decisions most readers would probably disagree with to some extent.

I loved the complexity of Moriarty’s milieu. Sacha’s life is impacted by economic disparity and prejudice, but the novel isn’t preachy in the least. The role of magic in society has some obvious metaphorical parallels (Prohibition and intellectual property issues both came to my mind) but it also works on a straightforward literal level. I also loved the integration of some folkloric elements that haven’t been done to death in recent years.

It is clear that Sacha’s gradual-coming-of-age will occupy more than one book; he does some significant growing up in this one, but he’s got a way to go. Moriarty ties up Sacha’s first major case with Wolf and company well enough, but leaves some things decidedly unresolved. Often this annoys me a bit, but in the present case it just leaves me very impatient for the continuation of Sacha’s story.

needs more demons? nohow.

needs more demons? for my taste, yes, a bit.

I don’t know how any nerd could not love the knuckleball, or, as I prefer to call it, the “chaos pitch.” It’s thrown — at the velocity of a cheetah, mind you — with almost no rotation. Its path to, and hopefully over, the plate is determined, as much as anything else, by the eddies formed by the ball’s stitches* as it shoves its way through the air.

And to me, the knuckleball is emblematic of baseball’s appeal. As much as fans love to describe the game with statistics, the game is interesting because statistics can’t accurately predict what happens next. And nothing embodies that like the knuckleball. As the pitch leaves Wake’s hand** he has scarcely a better idea of its trajectory than anyone else.

No one personifies the knuckleball for me like Tim Wakefield, perhaps the last of baseball’s greats to throw the pitch. As I’ve learned about the game over the past 8 years or so, he’s been the constant inconstant: sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible — often both in the same game, or even the same frame. I dearly love to see him win, but I admire him most in the grim losses where he grinds through out after painful out, sabotaging his stats and saving the bullpen’s arms. There’s an equanimity to him in these innings, a grace and lack of ego that seems very rare in professional sports. Then again, it’s awe-inspiring to see a guy pitch one of the best games of his career in his forties.

Massarotti’s book*** opens with some historical context on the knuckleball, outlining the careers of pitchers whose careers ended before I became a fan of the game, and describing the pitch in relation to the rest of baseball’s arsenal. Then he dives into Wake’s career, wich mirrors many of his games: improbable comebacks against long odds, devastating setbacks. Longtime Boston Herald writer Massarotti offers some interesting insights throughout. His analysis of what it costs a team for a pitcher to record each out uses some suspect math, but still makes a convincing case that Wake has been quite a bargain for the Sox. It’s also fascinating to see well-documented history through Wake-colored-glasses; Schilling’s bloody sock performance in game 6 of the 2004 ALCS is a mere aside, primarily relevant to the state of the rotation and how many days of rest Wakefield has going into the World Series.

The book is marred by some copy editing gaffes, with a score going from 5-0 to 4-1 to 5-2 in the 2003 ALCS perhaps the worst. And it’s written as if Wake’s career was effectively over in 2010, with no opportunity to contribute significantly to the 2011 season. That’s not quite how it worked out, but of course, most folks had written him off in 1994, too.

needs more demons? Despite some flaws I found it both entertaining and illuminating.

* or, in baseball parlance, “the stitches of the ball.”
** i.e., “the hand of Wake”
*** Massarotti and Wakefield confusing refer to themselves as author and writer, a fallacy I won’t perpetuate. The book is written in the third person; Wake’s voice is present as an interview subject.

Proof by Seduction did eventually win me over. The tension in romance novels is never about who gets paired off, it’s about how the emotionally correct pairing is legitimized in the eyes of society. In the Austen model that (I would argue) is the ur-template from which these novels derive, the economically appropriate pairing must be proven unsuitable, and vice versa, generally by a literal reversal of fortune. Milan injects some novelty into the tried & true structure; Proof by Seduction actually surprised me more than once. And it’s pretty overtly feminist for a novel in which heterosexual pairings are the expected “happy ending.”

Milan’s novel is set in London at the very dawn of the Victorian Era. Her portrayal has a bit more grit to it than Heyer’s Regency (or Austen’s), although I still found it hard to credit a description of the smells of London that omitted the obvious in favor of more pleasant and genteel odors. But in general it felt pretty well researched, at least enough to fool me. I thought the word “shag” might be anachronistic, but I looked it up, and Milan’s well within her rights to have her characters use it.

I also thought Milan did a nice job of balancing accessibility to modern readers with a little old-fashioned flavor in dialogue. I liked, for instance, Jenny’s description of the limits of her education: “I was drilled in my accent and taught just enough conversational French to start a good argument, but not so much that I would be able to do anything so gauche as to win it.”

There’s a sequel, and I’m looking forward to it.

needs more demons? no.

The original prospector had extensively surveyed it. The stroid was primarily metal ore. It was a big one: about three by three by ten kilometers in size, roughly barbell-shaped. Its albedo was high — typical for nickel-iron rocks. Its mean density had been 5.8 grams per cubic centimeter — nearly three times Phocaea’s. One end of the barbell consisted of a big lump of crumbly silicates; the result of a collision with a silica rock sometime in the distant past. But the bulk of the stroid was high-grade ore.

Thankfully, this is an extreme example, but the prose does tend to bog down a little when Locke wants to make sure the reader knows how well researched the novel is. The pacing of some of the “action” sequences also suffers from a little more laborious blocking than is strictly necessary. The resolution of some of the plot elements leans on coincidence almost to the point of deus ex machina and one dangling plot thread clearly leads to a potential sequel. The cast of of characters is large and some of the names invite confusion (Ian/Ivan; Harbough/Harman/Harper); I had a little trouble keeping all the relationships and roles straight.
Despite these minor quibbles, I definitely enjoyed Up Against It.

needs more demons? not really.

A sextet of short stories by D. Harlan Wilson opens the collection. Wilson is big on present tense, and characters with attributes instead of names: “the man in the silver handlebar mustache”, “the little boy”, “a bodybuilder in a purple spandex G-string.” He favors dream-like illogic over anything resembling coherent plot. His prose is often very concrete and mechanical: “[He] sniggered, then began moving his tongue around the insides of his mouth so that his cheeks poked out.” Wilson claims Kafka as in influence to the extent that he titled a short story collection The Kafka Effect, but nothing drives these stories the way Kafka’s paranoia and the tension between the individual and society/The State drove his. None of them really grabbed me.

Bizarro first came to my attention via the impressively lurid titles of Carlton Mellick III’s novellas, here represented by The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. It’s probably not a bad litmus test: the titular object is not a molded toy-in-the-shape-of, it’s an actual clone of the Savior, and if this seems simply too offensive or too mechanically improbable, then Mellick is probably not for you. The shock-for-its-own-sake aspect leaves me cold, but beyond that the obvious metaphor of (ahem) internalizing belief systems and its consequences on a couple whose beliefs become disparate is explored with something approaching emotional resonance. Meanwhile the nightmarish milieu doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems to make sense to Mellick’s narrator; there’s something approaching internal consistency. I might cautiously experiment further with Mellick.

I didn’t enjoy Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals while I was reading it, but its grotesque imagery has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. And I have to admit that while marrying the hoary last-man-and-woman-in-post-apocalyptic-wasteland cliché with the popular notion that cockroaches are the critters most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust struck me as a tad obvious (not to mention really gross), I had never read anything quite like it.

Kevin L. Donihe’s The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports was for me the anthology’s first clear win. It has some weak spots — the back and forth between a pair of news commentators seemed trite, but on the whole it was surprising and held my interest. I may have a soft spot for it in part because the “sport” is cycling (and not, as the title might have led you to expect, copulation).

Gina Rinalli’s Suicide Girls in the Afterlife seemed a bit too familiar — a bit of Neil Gaiman, a dash of Kelly Link, a dollop of Beetlejuice — but if it’s maybe too indebted to obvious sources, I like those sources. Promising.

Andre Duza’s Don’t F(beep) with the Coloureds goes in quite a different direction than its inflammatory title might suggest. It reminded me a lot of a 1988 film, only (naturally) darker, and grosser. I liked the story-in-story structure (although I would have liked to see it pushed a little further) and thought some of the expository chunks could have been more smoothly integrated, but give it a qualified thumbs up overall.

Vincent Sakowski offers up one two short-shorts, one of which feels a bit like a Robyn Hitchcock song rendered in prose, and one which is tired and vile, and the pretty nifty long short story “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok.” Its embittered modern couple, Vogue and GQ, have just enough depth to be more than tropes, and the intrusion of mythic elements offered a few interesting twists. The mood reminded me a bit of Leslie What’s “The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City,” only (naturally) darker and grosser. I may seek out more from Sakowski, although the story I really disliked leaves me somewhat distrustful.

I was a little annoyed by a persistent tic of Steve Beard’s Survivor’s Dream: it uses a boatload of definitive articles, maybe to evoke a childlike narrative voice: “She was hiding in this ship”, “It had a domed roof held up by these thick white pillars,” et cetera. It seemed excessive, but afterward it occurred to me that plenty of writers from the lit’ry side of the street play with not dissimilar tactics, e.g., Kathy Acker or even Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” (Of course I’m sometimes annoyed by those, too). Other than that, Beard manages a kind of impressive balancing act between multiple, contradictory narrative threads tied together by a pervasive mood and Beard’s flat, unmusical prose. I would have liked it better if it had been shorter.

John Edward Lawson’s Truth in Ruins is one of the most hyperbolic entries in the entire anthology. In Lawson’s grim future humanity is divided into serial killers and profilers, with genetically engineered “Humanzees” poised to take over after humanity’s failure. It’s self-consciously, cartoonishly, uber-violent, and narrative chunks are jammed together in ways that emphasize their incongruities, like a movie made of nothing but jump cuts. I sort of liked it, although I had to skim over some stomach-turning bits.

Three of Bruce Taylor’s short stories, “The Breath Amidst the Stones” and “A Little Spider Shop Talk,” and “Of Tunafish and Galaxies” are perhaps the most conventional entries in the collection: weird, for sure, but coherent, reminiscent of Leiber and Lafferty. I liked them. I thought the last, “City Streets” was less successful.

needs more demons? maybe kinda sorta

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.