But I found myself unexpectedly involved with and satisfied by the concluding handful of chapters. I was expecting a twist, but not quite the twist that was delivered, and Riordan resolved at least one conflict I expected to be dragged out through at least another novel. I was at first thinking I’d part company with Jackson after finishing this volume, but I’ve been persuaded to go a little farther.

needs more demons? kinda, but (weak start + strong finish) > (strong start + weak finish)

Of course there are exceptions that prove the rule, and happily, Predator’s Gold is one of them. Surviving characters from the first novel continue to grow and evolve (I’ll eschew specific spoilers, but if Reeve is perhaps not as cruel to his protagonists as, say, Joss Whedon, he’s assuredly not the sort of novelist from whom all sympathetic characters escape unscathed), and Reeve introduces new characters who also go through significant changes — there’s none of the stagnant quality to character dynamics that sometimes afflicts sequels. Some of Reeve’s people make appallingly bad choices in this novel, but that didn’t lessen my emotional involvement.

Reeve introduces a few nifty wrinkles to his world-building, and more importantly, deepens the moral complexity of the story; what was shaping up to be a a mostly-good versus mostly-evil conflict in the first novel becomes substantially more nuanced, nicely mirroring the good-people-doing-bad-things aspect of the plot. Speaking of the plot, it’s satisfyingly twisty and suspenseful. And once again I found Reeve’s language, coinages, and nomenclature delightful. I laughed aloud several times, and inflicted read-aloud passages on my patient wife.

needs more demons? no, no, and again, no.

Dept. of neither-here-nor-there: Mortal Engines is a decade old (and due for a round of reprints early next year, it looks like) — my encountering it only now indicates a clear failure of the Internets to reliably surface to me the books I want to read most.

needs more demons? no.

It introduces a hefty dose of moral ambiguity into the story. In the original film, no one on the Death Star was portrayed as anything other than evil. But in Reaves and Perry’s revisionist take, the Death Star is home to conscripted doctors, conscience-stricken pilots, kindly prison guards, and other beings who are clearly not evil. Even the cold and cruel Governor Tarkin is humanized to the extent that he’s given a girlfriend.

Reaves and Perry do a good job of engaging the reader’s sympathies for the non-evil Death Star denizens without making them so well-rounded that they violate the general mood of the Star Wars uiverse. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension arises from the fact that the reader knows what happens to the Death Star, and the characters don’t. I found myself hoping that Reaves and Perry’s motley collection of misfits would somehow find a way to escape the Death Star’s fate.

I thought the first section was a little slow, but I read the second almost in a single sitting. I generally feel like it’s a mistake to try to science up Star Wars; even a Star Trek level of pseudoscience seems a bit jarring. There’s a little bit of that here, but not so much that I found it really obtrusive.

needs more demons? not so much

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

Narrator Hanna Järvinen is more than a little crazy (literally; she prefers “manic depressive” to “bipolar disorder”), and when she runs away in search of her absent mother she finds that Portero, TX is arguably even crazier than she is. I don’t want to spoil any of the plot surprises (and there were a few that blindsided me) but I will mention a few of the things I really appreciated about this novel:

• Hanna has to figure out a lot of things about what’s going on in Portero, and instead of beating the reader over the head with her revelations Reeves usually assumes that the reader comes to realizations at the same time Hanna does.
• For once, most of the interpersonal conflict, particularly between the romantic principals, doesn’t stem from misunderstandings that could be cleared up if people would just talk to each other.
• Hanna makes some very poor choices in the course of the book, but not only does Reeves do a good job of keeping her sympathetic, it’s easy to see how Hanna’s bad decisions look reasonable to her at the time.
• It’s an honest-to-goodness self-contained novel, instead of one book padded out and published in separate volumes. (Reeves forthcoming novel Slice of Cherry, which I’m impatient to read, is apparently also set in Portero, but doesn’t sound like a direct sequel.)
• No vampires!

I didn’t think it was perfect — I thought there were a few issues of internal consistency; the “rules” of Portero didn’t feel rigorous. And some of the characters’ actions strained my credulity. But on the whole, I liked it quite a bit.

Whiny quibble. I read the “nook” edition of the novel, and every ellipsis in the text was rendered as a question mark. Distracting. Hopefully it’s been fixed by now.

needs more demons? more than adequately supplied on the demon front.

There’s a lot of metatextual goings-on, but I don’t mean to suggest that the book is thorny or hard to digest. On the contrary, it’s fast-moving and sharply observed. I suspect anyone who’s ever been bullied will find it both easy and a little disquieting to identify with Doug and his revenge fantasies.

Side note: this novel features a reclusive, sardonic, hard-drinking gay vampire named Stephin. With an “i.” Hmmmm…..

needs more demons? no.

Packing for Mars devotes a chapter apiece to several aspects of the ticklish business of getting human beings off of Earth and back to it relatively undamaged. Topics range from earthbound research, like psychological evaluations of crew dynamics and people paid to lie in bed all day while their muscles and bones waste away, to discussion of just how gross it is to wear a spacesuit (answer: very) and pondering the question of whether anyone has yet joined the 286-Mile-High Club.

As in previous Roach’s previous books, particularly the cadaveriffic Stiff, she doesn’t shy away from gruesome or unsavory topics. (The chapter on crash survivability research was actually the most wince-inducing for me.) She approaches her topics with a lively, mordant humor, which often pops up in gleefully grim footnotes. And she’s clearly a gifted interviewer — she gets actual astronauts and researchers to say things you wouldn’t necessarily expect in an on-record interview.

But some of Roach’s footnotes deploy more-or-less random factoids, not at all related to space research. After a while I got a “hey,here’s another weird crazy thing!” vibe from these — entertaining, but not elucidating. And Roach devotes — maybe even wastes — several pages to debunking the claims of an adult DVD producer that one of its videos featured the world’s first zero-gravity, er, “money shot.” (The video was allegedly shot in an airplane flying a parabolic pattern to induce brief weightlessness, not actually in orbit.) There’s no science involved; it seems to be more about Roach establishing herself as an “edgy” journalist. Which, after Stiff, Spook, Bonk and the rest of Packing for Mars, seems to be something already well established.

needs more demons? Despite a few misgivings, no.

Unfortunately, there’s not much life in the book. Raye’s vampire social structure is a little improbable to say the least. She starts with the not-unreasonable hypothesis that vampires prize fertility, with “born” vamps trumping “made” vamps in social status, but then adds the bizarre notion that female vampires’ fertility is correlated to how multi-orgasmic they are. (This leads to lots of clunky dialogue, since vampires are apparently deficient in tact, and many verbings of the word “orgasm.” Also, should you care, although the characters talk about orgasms a lot, Dead End Dating’s strain of paranormal romance is much less racy than, say, Hamilton, Harris or Harrison’s.)

Narrator Lil’s voice is very Candace Bushnell, with fashion product placement on practically every page — which I found a little unsatisfying given that Lil is supposedly centuries old. (I don’t expect a novel like this to be rigorously researched, but at least Bill in Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels has a few 19th-century mannerisms.)

Dead End Dating is further dragged down by the introduction of an action/mystery sub-plot involving a serial kidnapper and a mysterious bounty hunter who the narrator finds inexplicably yummy (at tiresome length) despite his hair-metal wardrobe.

needs more demons? I was just barely interested enough to finish it, and might not have bothered if a heat wave hadn’t been generally sapping my brainpower/will to live.

Ryan’s zombies — which come in both the old-school slow shambling and the newer fast-moving varieties — are certainly horrific, but Ryan treats them almost as an elemental force. The antagonists in the story are predominantly human, and despite some gore and emotional trauma, the central horror of both novels is what happens to humanity as a consequence of the zombie plague. Perhaps it’s reading into it too much to suppose that the zombies and the repressive, fear-ruled societies they engender could metaphorically represent terrorists and reduced civil liberties in response to terrorism — but perhaps not.

Despite my general fondness for Ryan’s world-building (or un-building, if you prefer), it took me a while to warm to The Dead-Tossed Waves. Narrator Gabry spends a lot of energy second-guessing her every move. I’m not so old that I can’t remember how, as a teenager, just about everything seemed like a matter of life and death, and of course, a lot of Gabry’s decisions are literally matters of life and death. But I still found some of Gabry’s “I must! But I can’t! But I must!” vacillations a bit wearying, if not melodramatic nearly to the point of parody. That, coupled with a triangular love situation, reminded me not-in-a-good-way of Meyer’s Twilight books. And even after The Dead-Tossed Waves won me over, there was still some heavy-handed life-lesson-larnin’ to plow through. On the whole, I think The Dead-Tossed Waves would be stronger if it were leaner and a bit more subtle.

But I’m glad I stuck with the book, because it does eventually veer in directions it doesn’t initially telegraph. It’s frequently vivid and consistently creepy. And if it revisits some of the territory of the first novel, it does so with a bit of a spin and some interesting twists.

The Dead-Tossed Waves doesn’t — quite — end with a literal cliffhanger, but it does leave a lot of plot elements unresolved. I’d be disappointed if the story skipped another generation before the third act (or screeched to a halt) and my impatience for the next volume might be the best measure of this novel’s success.

needs more demons? Needs just a smidge less of Gabry’s personal demons, actually.