needs more demons?

While I was reading it, The Neddiad reminded forcefully of two other authors’ works in a specific, if somewhat slanted way. The obvious one was Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, because Neddie Wentworthstein’s narrative voice struck me as similarly authentic and adolescent. The other eluded me for a while, but I finally [...]

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I usually prefer not to read a single-author short story collection straight through, but to intersperse it with other reading. Even with very good authors, I find that reading too many short stories back-to-back emphasizes repeating themes and devices. I find it often blunts the impact of individual stories.
Puchner’s Music Through the Floor is a [...]

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Dexter Palmer’s The Dream of Perpetual Motion initially sounds like a steam-punk science fiction novel: it’s set in an alternate twentieth century peopled with clockwork men and flying cars, brooded over by a vast obsidian tower, a sinister airship, and the master of both, the undeniably brilliant and almost certainly mad scientist-cum-magician, Prospero Taligent.
But despite [...]

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Rites of Spring Break is another frothy cocktail in Peterfreund’s Ivy League series, following Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose, and mixed up according to the same recipe which is roughly:

1 part coming-of-age novel (protracted)
1 part feminist subtext
1 part formalized presentation (every chapter has an “I Confess…” header; text incorporates ordered lists and the [...]

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Rampant is a unicorn novel for people who hate unicorns — or at least the fluffy depiction of unicorns in current popular culture. Peterfreund sets out to reclaim the dignity of the unicorn by returning to the legendary roots of one-horned critters, and weaves multi-cultural variants on the theme into a unicorn hierarchy.
Since Peterfreund’s unicorns [...]

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If you take its core plot at face-value, John Dies at the End is at least superficially a xenophobic horror story in the Cthulhu mythos mode. Wong gives his Big Nasties different names from Cthulhu and his crowd, but he specifically borrows a key concept from Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” — if you do something special [...]

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The phrase that kept coming to my mind to describe Boneshaker while I was reading it was “purely awesome.” The back cover copy gives away a little too much of the setup for my taste, but I will say that it shifts between being a steampunk adventure story and a gritty, claustrophobic zombie novel so [...]

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Benjamin Parzybok’s Couch delivers exactly the experience I expect from a first novel. It’s rough in spots (particularly the end; I thought Parzybok wrote himself into a little bit of a corner), but it shows considerable promise and leaves me eager to see what Parzybok writes next.
Couch is the story of three roommates who have [...]

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Translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear
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 [...]

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I was a little hard on Secret Society Girl, so I’m happy to report that Under the Rose addresses both major defects I complained of in the first novel: less heavy-handed telegraphing of evolving plot points, no deus ex machina.
Amy Haskel’s breezy narrative voice is if anything even more assured, and the novel was [...]

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