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.

I went through Dragon and Thief like it was a tub of movie popcorn. It reminded me pleasantly of the uncomplicated space action yarns I devoured as an adolescent from the likes of Bischoff, Chalker, and Foster, although it was more kid-friendly than several of them. (Heinlein’s juvenile novels also came to mind, although Zahn’s milieu is more cosmopolitan than I think of as characteristically Heinlein.)

Dragon and Thief struck a fair balance between wrapping up some narrative threads and setting up future novels in the series. I will read more.

needs more demons? no.

This was almost completely wrong. Huston is not a writer who chooses the easy, predictable path. He does revisit aspects of the previous books: some of the survivors of the previous novels make appearances, Hank’s ambivalent passion for baseball reasserts itself, and the central macguffin of the series continues to haunt Hank in surprising ways.

As I’ve come to expect from Huston, it’s hard to say whether funny or grim dominates; it’s both, not just alternately but sometimes simultaneously. It made me laugh out loud at least once, and probably made me cringe, too.

I still think Six Bad Things is the weakest of the three books, but this novel places it squarely in its context as a middle act. A Dangerous Man is pretty much a non-stop adrenaline surge.

needs more demons? noway.

I’ve always suspected I would find Lawrence an annoying writer, and I do. He’s fiercely judgmental, and many of his judgments are precisely the sort that raise my dander: like ugly generalizations about gender relations, professing admiration for simple rustic lifestyles while presuming that a lack of social or technological sophistication is synonymous with a lack of intelligence, and broad-stroke condemnations of contemporaneous art. Worse, he gripes about the frustration he feels when he is swept up in the same sort of generalizations he so freely dispenses. I believe I would have found Lawrence even more annoying as a travel companion: complaining about the price of accommodation and transport, the quality of the food, insisting we trudge through late afternoon rain to another town because he can’t bear the thought of passing the night where he is.

Lawrence’s prose breaks many of the rules I learned about good writing. He will seize on a word, often a prosaic adjective like “flat,” “grey,” or “naked,” and worry it to death in several consecutive sentences. I think he may have meant his work to be read aloud, or at least voiced within the head, rather than read, so his many repetitions falling into a sort of sing-song rhythm. In the earliest of these works, “Twilight in Italy,” and in the last, “Etruscan Places,” (which, to be fair to Lawrence, was published posthumously, and might have been edited further if the author had the opportunity to prepare it for publication) Lawrence launches from time to time into wide-ranging pontifications in which many nouns must be capitalized: “I am consummate when my Self, the resistant solid, is reduced into all that which is Not-Me: my neighbor, my enemy, the great Otherness.” I was uncomfortably reminded of Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or, more generally, being young and drunk and terribly certain of my own profundity.

But I found this book almost as delightful as it was infuriating. If Lawrence’s prose sometimes seems self-conscious and overwrought, it also sometimes is simultaneously beautiful and lucid. When Lawrence griped about an inn where the room is not to his liking, the memory of the first night I spent in Buenos Aires came flooding back to me with uncommon vividness (I swear, if I described that room accurately, you would be sure I was exaggerating for comic effect). And if often made me want to read — or write — fiction that uses some of its memorable elements, like the village where the high steeple is visible throughout, but impossible to find in the twisty streets.

needs more demons? not exactly.

Since I keep reading the darned things, I can’t claim they don’t work for me as escapist entertainment at some level. But that doesn’t mean their weaknesses don’t irk me, and it doesn’t mean I don’t wish they were a little better.

Harris’s Dead Until Dark has many of the genre hallmarks, but it avoids some of the pitfalls.

First and foremost, the writing is markedly less clunky.

Paranormal romances often seem comic book-y to me (in a negative sense). Protagonists in the Anita Blake mold are generally some sort of short-fused bounty hunter with unusual (psychic/magical) abilitites. This leads to dreadfully clichéd set-pieces in which a character reacts to something innocent (a thrown snowball, a tap on the shoulder) with deadly force and only just manages to avoid skewering/shooting a lover/friend/girl-scout-selling-cookies because her reflexes are so supernally fast. Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse bucks the trend — she does have a superpower of sorts, but she’s a waitress and the novel is thankfully free of “don’t-sneak-up-on-me-I-almost-killed-you” bits.

Another way in which paranormal romances remind me of bad comic books is that events only have consequences when the consequences usefully advance the plot. In particular, Blake and her many imitators have trouble with murder. The vampires/werewovles/etc. kill people — that’s part of their nature. There’s usually a sort of what-happens-in-vampire-town-stays-in-town meme, with human authorities mostly staying out of monster business. But the vampire/werewolf/etc. societies don’t feel internally consistent in their attitude toward death; their mores are too essentially human. They usually come off a bit like squabbling drug gangs — that is, as if devauling (the taking of) life is a deliberate rebellion against the dominant social order, which is reinforced by the high value of life (when it is taken from your group, necessitating revenge).

Harris does a very nice job of side-stepping this mess; rather than warring drug gangs, her template seems to be the early days of civil rights, when cops are legally bound to uphold the rights of black folks, but aren’t necessarily happy about it. It’s much more satisfying in science fiction/consistent worldbuilding terms.

The whodunnit aspects of the plot weren’t completely successful for me, but no less satisfying than many mysteries without supernatural elements (of which Harris has written a goodly number).

My main gripe is with the tone — the novel mostly takes itself seriously (there’s some humor, but it arises from the characters and their interactions, not from outlandish plot elements — assuming you grant the fundamental vampires-walk-among-us proposition). But toward the end, there are a couple of twists that push it in a more overtly comic direction, which undercut the suspense for me a little.

Still, I liked it, and I look forward to reading more Harris.

needs more demons? nah.

It was this sequence that sent me wandering around the ‘net to see what other folks have been making of the novel (since it’s far too new for Cliff’s Notes to have tackled). It seemed likely that this text was supposed to function on a symbolic level at least as much as literal, but I couldn’t quite grasp the key. I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that Darkmans deliberately evokes several old British Isles myths and archetypes, like Arthur and the Wild Hunt, but that didn’t seem quite sufficient.

Darkmans repeatedly feints toward several more-or-less conventional narratives: at various times it seems like it might be a magical realist novel in which the sadistic spirit of John Scoggins, jester to Edward IV, infests modern British citizens; or the story of absurd and drawn-out revenge schemes between embittered Chunnel contractors; or about reconciliation among estranged families; or the tale of a love quadrilateral in which father and son vie for the affection of the same married woman. It’s all of these and none of these. The connections between characters are so tightly interwoven, and the grounding physical detail of Barker’s prose is so precise, that it’s easy to miss (for a while) that the fragments of this book are very precisely machined to fail to mesh with one another.

needs more demons? Nah.

Diana Wynne Jones is no run-of-the-mill comic fantasist, however, and while Dark Lord of Derkholm pokes some gentle fun at Lord of the Rings and its endless imitators, there’s much more going on here than parodying the standard episodic heroic fantasy. Jones’ characters are emotionally complex and we meet them in medias res with a lifetime’s worth of experiencing — notably including assorted rivalries and resentments — under their belts. Rather than let the reader sketch in the backdrop of his or her favorite fantasy novel, Jones provides a complex milieu that has its own unique personality, despite nods to some of the familiar genre tropes.

I enjoyed it quite a bit, but arguably there’s a little too much going on for a single volume. Post-Tolkein fantasies are often criticized for being padded with excess verbiage (after all, the gods of marketing decreed that they must all be trilogies at minimum). In contrast, Dark Lord of Derkholm often feels compressed, with perhaps a little too much elided. The book might have been stronger if Jones had juggled fewer balls — dragons & elves & dwarves & demons & griffins & horse-lords, oh my! And that’s just the mise en scène, the actual story involves court intrigue & rebellious adolescents with image issues & derring-do & temple intrigue & longtime married couples growing apart & parallel universes & … well, you get the idea.

I can’t decide whether Dark Lord of Derkholm would have been strongest cut to a single shorter volume, or expanded into two (I’m not sure there’s a natural breaking point, for one thing). Either way, I think it’s ill served by its title, which makes it sound much sillier than it is. I’d recommend it without hesitation to those who are already fans of Jones, but I think I’d still steer newcomers to Hexwood, or perhaps Howl’s Moving Castle.

Needs More Demons? Absolutely not.

I found several little things to like a lot, like Johnson’s favoring of elegant, witty descriptions of things like clothes and sports cars instead of the more common brand-name dropping. I also appreciated protagonist Jane Jarvis’s refreshingly pragmatic response to purportedly supernatural goings-on. I’m definitely interested in reading more from Johnson.

This is apparently Johnson’s first foray into fantasy genre fiction, though, and it shows a bit. The novel opens with a prologue that suggests a combination of Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree and McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, but it doesn’t quite live up to that promise, partly because the prologue gives away too many of the book’s best surprises to an attentive reader. And one of the main drivers of Devilish’s plot is fundamentally a deal-with-the-Devil story, and that’s very well-worn territory for any fantasy/horror reader. Johnson strives for an original take on the trope, but some readers may find her gimmick (because there’s always a gimmick in deal-with-the-Devil stories) a little hard to swallow. Fortunately, it’s also a story about the parameters and limits of friendship, and it works much better on that level.

Needs More Demons? Yes. Or it needs the demons it already has to be a little more convincingly, you know, demonic.