But the aspects that annoyed me outweighed those that intrigued me. Even as worry for a character quickened my pulse, I felt manipulated by the specifics of the threat. The main protagonist, Nicholas Close, repeatedly makes choices of such tooth-gnashing stupidity that it was difficult to maintain sympathy for him. The reader learns early on that Close sees ghosts. People-who-see-the-dead is such a well-explored device that there are “I see dead pixels” t-shirts parodying it; Irwin approaches it with a heavy-handed thoroughness, as if it were so fresh that it demanded a great deal of exposition.

The recurring motif of large quantities of large spiders at first just seemed lazy — an automatic gross-out for many people, with no subtlety — but eventually I got desensitized to it. Meanwhile, the repeated juxtaposition of arachnoid imagery with aged female sexuality suggests that they’re intended to be viewed as parallel scopes of horror, which I find unpleasantly close to misogyny.

needs more demons? well, not literally

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

Drive strikes me as a perfectly designed business book. It’s a slim, fast read (it’s substantially padded by a section which essentially recapitulates the book’s content, with some putting-into-practice tips sprinkled in). It invents some new jargon — Motivation 2.0 and 3.0 (Motivation 1.0, if you’re curious, is subsistence-level gotta-survive type stuff) and Type I(ntrinsic) and Type X(trinsic) — in which to frame ideas that have been floating around for a while. Of course there’s a gotcha here as well: implementing many of these concepts requires people in positions of control to give up a lot of it, and they will be threatened by much of what this book proposes. (It does get a little hippy-dippy in places for a biz book, at one point Pink hints that management itself could become an outdated concept.)

You’ll find those traits if you search them out, but in the end it didn’t bother me, because if Cohn and Levithan are perhaps feeling their way through the book a little bit, Dash and Lily are decidedly feeling their way through what kind of relationship they will (or won’t have). Lily and Dash pass coy autobiographical tidbits and a series of “dares” back and forth through the medium of a Moleskine notebook deposited in New York’s storied bookstore The Strand, so their descriptions of things important to them arises very organically. And while it’s not a particularly deep book, it doesn’t shy away from the issue of the difference between how Dash and Lily “really” are and how they present themselves to each other, which alleviates the sense that Cohn and Levithan are flirting with each other through the medium of the novel. Also, if plot wanders a bit, that doesn’t mean some of the prose isn’t sharply focused. I particularly liked this description:

She led me into a room that could only be called a parlor. The drapery was so thick and the furniture so cloaked that I half expected to find Sherlock Holmes thumb-wrestling with Jane Austen in the corner. It wasn’t as dusty or smoky as one expects a parlor to be, but all the wood had the weight of card catalogs and the furniture seemed soaked in wine.

Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares also pushed a lot of my personal buttons. I met my wife through a long meandering correspondence, and any courtship scenario with a pen-pal-ish element has extra emotional heft for me. Meanwhile, The Strand has enjoyed a legendary status in my head since those days before the Internet, when hard-to-find books and records scarcely seemed to exist outside the shelves on which you found them. But even without those elements necessarily being present, I enjoyed this enough to seek out Cohn and Levithan’s other collaborations.

needs more demons? no. And a special thanks to my excellent friend Janet for alerting me to this book.

The set up for Dark Cities Underground reads like something from the manual of how to write a novel that appeals to me: Ruthie Berry is writing a book about the author of a beloved series of children’s stories a la Barrie, Milne, Lewis, Grahame, et al. She manages to get an interview with the reclusive author’s son, Jerry, the template for the books’ hero Jeremy. Strange things start to happen, and Jerry starts to remember things he’s forgotten since childhood . . . and I’m hooked.

Goldstein does two things extremely well in this book. She reworks mythic tropes into a modern day setting (reminding me a bit of Neil Gaiman, particularly Gaiman’s Neverwhere, with which Dark Cities Underground shares some superficial plot points). And she cunningly weaves real historical data and figures into her fantastic plot, recalling Tim Powers’ magnificent fantastic alternate histories. She pulls off some other neat tricks, not least of which is to use plot devices that might threaten a reader’s suspension of disbelief, and then making them absolutely integral to the plot and thematic development.

This novel completely sidestepped my critical detachment. I had the sense that some of the concluding chapters felt a tad rushed, but that’s probably mostly a reflection of my desire for the book to have more pages in it. I’ m really a little surprised Dark Cities Underground didn’t win any of the major fantasy awards (it was a nominee for the British Fantasy Society Best Novel, but lost to Stephen King’s Bag of Bones).

needs more demons? nuh uh.

I’ve read a lot of books that covered similar topics, but if you don’t read new ones (this one was published in 2008), things tend to change. For instance, we used to think that our sun was in the class of stars that could go nova, inexplicably increasing in brightness for a period of hours or days — possibly long enough to fry the Earth to a crisp. In the current understanding, stars like ours don’t go nova; only hydrogen-gorging white dwarfs do (whew!). On the other hand, I’m a little more scared of big meteors than I used to be; turns out blowing them up with nukes probably doesn’t work at all, and even deflecting them is likely to be much harder than I thought. So while Plait’s book covered a lot of ground familiar to me, there were usually new wrinkles; I learned plenty.

One reasonable quibble I have is that Plait is a little glib about scale. Only in the chapter on the death of the universe does he rely on exponential notation, and then only because the numbers are so unimaginably huge. Throughout most of the book he uses million and billion in adjoining sentences. Even these numbers are so beyond human scale that I think they’re difficult to keep hold of; I think our brains tend to render them as “really big” and “really big (but bigger)” — it’s hard (for me anyway) to keep in mind that a billion is a thousand million and that a trillion is a thousand thousand million. It’s geeky, but I kind of wish he’d used exponential notation throughout.

My unreasonable quibble with the book illustrates why I’d make a spectacularly lousy scientist, particularly in the chapter on “Deep Time” and the end of the universe. I can accept that we can make assertions about the age of the universe and what happened to bring us to the current point — if we look at an object that’s 6 billion light years away, we’re seeing it as it was 6 billion years ago unless pretty much everything we think we know about physics is wrong. So we can learn about state of the universe 6 billion years ago by direct observation, and extrapolate backward.

But foretelling the end of the universe involves quantities of time that literally, I think, beggar the imagination. As Plait acknowledges, you can’t use metaphors — you can’t say, for instance, that the 14-ish billion years age of the universe to date is an eyeblink compared to Deep Time, because an eyeblink is way, way, way, too long. It’s certainly scientifically reasonable to extrapolate from our observations of the universe now. But for us to presume we really know what’s going to happen on those scales strikes my unscientific, intuitive mind as enormous hubris. Suppose for a second that there’s some big change in the universe that happens once every 20 billion years. It hasn’t happened once yet, but in the Deep Time scale, it would happen billions upon billions upon billions of times. That’s not a scientific notion — I certainly can’t propose a mechanism for some fundamental shift in the universe, or draw up equations to describe whatever it might be.

But what I can observe is that throughout recorded history, when we think we have things pretty much figured out, something upsets the apple cart and we discover it’s way more complicated than we thought. And, from the oldest historical records to just last week (with news story about experimental results failing to match the predictions of string theory), the strangification of the universe is happening faster and faster.

So while I don’t know when, how, or why (although pseudo-scientifically, dark matter still seems to be a bit of a wild card), I’d (intuitively, unscientifically) bet that long before the universe gets to the Deep Time that Plait describes, our understanding of it will significantly change. Probably before the sun swells to a red giant, or within my lifetime, or possibly even next week. And that’s what I love — the notion that despite our best efforts, the universe will always reveal complexities that transcend our understanding. We need something even weirder than string theory? Bring it on!

My irrationality aside, I liked Plait’s book a lot. Certainly found it thought-provoking.

Needs more demons? Nope.

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.

But despite all the sci-fi trappings and a plot which superficially resembles an adventure story, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is a serious, ambitious novel of ideas. It’s primarily concerned with the inherent subjectivity of all human experience, and specifically with the fundamental inadequacy of language as a tool to establish objective understanding.

It’s by turns darkly funny and grotesque, sometimes even disturbing. It decidedly establishes Palmer as an author from whom I would like to see more. It’s dense and allusive, with abundant references to The Tempest, but also to The Wizard of Oz and many other works as well. Just as I’m thinking how utterly impossible it is to read about an eccentric industrialist offering a tour of his secret facilities to a select group of under-privileged children without thinking of Willy Wonka, for instance, Palmer’s protagonist Harold Winslow remarks that he is “not like that other kid in the class who still carries disfiguring scars across his face, earned during some misadventure in forbidden culs-de-sac of a local chocolate factory.” The Dream of Perpetual Motion features some strong descriptive writing. I particularly liked this bit:

This night we punish ourselves, making a bad thing worse by drinking coffee of a brand that Prospero imports from a tropical nation with a perpetually unstable government and a boundary that confounds cartographers. He bombards the beans with high-intensity Röntgen rays and brews them hot enough to scald the tongue. The result is a cup of coffe whose first sip will make you grind your teeth into a fine white powder.

That’s the good news.

Palmer uses the surreal and outright fantastic to construct metaphorical externalizations of his characters’ mental states in a way that recalls Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, and Colson Whitehead. Unfortunately, although it’s interesting and promising, I think it’s ultimately a failure. (I reject out-of-hand as meaningless sophistry the notion that a novel about the inadequacy of communication must fail in order to succeed.)

Palmer is more interested in archetype than character, which I can accept, and the cursory attention devoted to the “plot” is certainly forgivable; the plot is not the point. My biggest problem is the novel’s lack of subtlety. I didn’t mind

Tiny lead blocks with inverted letters carved on them in relief are dropped into the bath one at a time, and the letters twist out of shape and disappear amidst bubbles that slowly rise to the surface and explode, each one releasing the whiff of a lost word.

But with passages like

…no matter how he tries he can’t make the ink marks on the page represent the things he’s seen with enough fidelity to be certain that someone else might read the words and be certain of the things he saw. Even worse than this is that he can feel his mind actively making up events from whole cloth to fill the blank spaces of his story that lie between those few things he does remember, and that as soon as it does this, he can’t distinguish between the truths of his memory and the fictions of his necessary fantasies.

and

I can hear what you have to say: it’s not clear whom I think I’m fooling with this business about “searching for Miranda.” Perhaps you think this is some kind of dumb fable, a means to evoke the rhetorical question, “Ah, but can one person every really know another? Are we not all mysterious to each other? Is not Woman an enternal mystery to Man?” It’s all very profound, and at the end of the story we discover that Miranda (Woman) was just an objectified fragment of Harold’s (Man’s) imagination, just like the voices from his past. All very academic.

I sometimes had the impression Palmer was writing the Cliffs Notes to the novel, rather than the novel itself.

I was annoyed when, after Winslow encounters a sort of incarnation of Vulcan, Winslow (and the reader) get a quick primer on some of the mortals who ran afoul of Jupiter, Juno, et all — just in case we might not have recognized the misshapen, musclebound figure in his fiery element. And this, in a novel featuring not only a Prospero, but a Caliban and a Miranda, seemed, well, gratuitous:

“Students, believe me when I tell you this: everything in the twentieth century is dead. Everything has already been said… all we have left to us are possible permutations of the building blocks of fossilized ideas and dead sentences.”
…
Each of the twelve students in the classroom has on his or her desk a twenty-cent paperbound copy of The Tempest, a bottle of glue, and a pair of scissors. Their assignment is to dismantle and reconstruct…they must rearrange the words into another work that is to “reflect the spirit of the twentieth century,” according to the professor.

needs more demons? The role of the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys is played by tin demons, actually, so there are a good few. But, yeah, kinda.