During our month of wandering around the United Kingdom we intended to have fun and failed. Finding our flat was an ordeal and I won’t bore you with our tales of misadventure. I can’t help but remember the bedsit we found in Brighton as an act of desperation to end our wanderings. Electricity in the bedsit was coin operated. You ran out of coins, you ran out of light. I had always heard of such things in the old world,but in all my travels this was my first coin-op bedsit. I was feeling robust enough to be amused. Warren, on the other hand, sat on the edge of the bed catatonic, staring at the wood chip wallpaper.

needs more demons? James Clerk Maxwell is mentioned several times, but his famed little critters never come up. But I can’t really say that’s a flaw.

The novel portrays Farmer’s world through the eyes of Matt, the young clone — almost a sort of pet — of one of the nastiest and most powerful drug lords. Matt is an impressive fictional creation; at times he will probably push the boundaries of many readers’ sympathies, because he’s not raised in an environment that encourages many positive traits. His struggles to carve out his own identity make for compelling reading. (And there are other vivid characters for him to interact with.)

The House of the Scorpion has some structural issues, which I think largely result from Farmer’s attempt to address a moderately serious plot problem: the alert reader will figure out several important things before Matt does, so there are more surprises in store for Matt than for the reader. The last third of the book mixes things up significantly and probably offers more novelty to the reader. But while it continues the thematic arc of Matt’s life, it’s less well defined and leans harder on familiar fictional tropes than the rest of the novel. It also introduced some political commentary which at best seems irrelevant and at worst contrary to the main thrust of the book (the novel’s embrace of moral ambiguity notwithstanding). And the last few chapters felt distinctly rushed. If it were published today, I suspect there would have been editorial pressure to expand it into two novels. One of those hypothetical books would have ended with a godawful cliffhanger, but the second chunk of Matt’s story might have benefited from a richer, more thorough treatment.

needs more demons? despite my quibbles, I thought most of this was very well done, and I will read more from Farmer for sure.

What’s really impressive is that How I Became a Famous Novelist itself clearly follows a best-seller template, although pitched to a snarkier, more cynical audience segment and (thankfully) without The Tornado Ashes Club’s overwrought prose.

Including multiple pages of deliberately bad parody prose and pulling the-joke-is-that-it’s-not-a-joke are risky moves. What makes it work for me is that Hely, bless him, fully commits to his satire: he insults the three most significant audiences for his book: the editors and publishers who decided to buy it, journalists who discuss it, and ordinary people who read it. (A fourth audience, people who make film option decisions, gets a virtual pass, which would seem suspicious if I could envision How I Became a Famous Novelist filmed as anything other than a shoestring-budget indie quirkfest.) Tarslaw’s a bit of a skeeze, but he’s aware of his skeeziness and possibly trending toward future reduced skeeziness, which I thought kept him adequately sympathetic. And when Hely’s authorial point of view shines through Tarslaw’s voice, it just might, y’know, tug at your heartstrings, because, like all good satire, How I Became a Famous Novelist has a hot, angry core.

* You know, “I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison.”

needs more demons? no.

Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill — wet-eyed and weak –that he didn’t think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry.
But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept.

I love this setup — how it establishes the narrative perspective is at least somewhat unreliable — Ig only clearly recalls those “terrible things” as the novel approaches its dénouement — without making it clear exactly how unreliable it is. And I love how the story unfolds. Ig soon discovers that other people react oddly to his horns as well. The reader soon discovers a lot of backstory — like that a year ago Ig’s girlfriend dumped him, then turned up dead after he spent the night in a blackout drunk.

I didn’t think it was perfect — there are multiple plot revelations in the “now you have to re-evaluate what you thought you knew” category; and I had a credibility gap with at least one: I can kinda maybe almost sorta see how that course of action would’ve made sense to that character in that situation? Well, no, not really. I’m also a little iffy on the shifts of tone. Horns is unsettling throughout, but mostly I’d classify it as “dark fantasy” more than “horror.” A few notably grisly sequences are thematically appropriate and clearly required by the plot, but I might have preferred to have them described with a touch more subtlety.

But these are really minor quibbles. Mostly I thought this was terrific — strong characters, vivid and flavorful prose, and startling and fresh takes on some classic horror/fantasy thematic elements.

This novel and the first of Hill’s Locke and Key graphic novels have converted me into a Hill completist.

needs more demons? negatory.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe seems to operate in at least three dimensions:

On one hand, it has (as you might expect from the title) some science fictional trappings: the narrator travels around in a time & space navigation machine that perhaps-not-coincidentally seems to be about the same external size as Dr. Who’s TARDIS; the story includes robots, and alien creatures, and other planets.

On another hand, the narrator’s name is “Charles Yu” and characters in the novel encounter a manual titled “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” excerpts from which are included in the text. So there’s some amount of meta-text/break-the-fourth-wall shenanigans going. But neither author-Yu nor narrator-Yu address this head-on; narrator-Yu seems to implicitly acknowledge that his life operates according to “science fictional” rules, but he doesn’t confront this awareness directly the way the characters of, say, Flann O’ Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds do — narrator-Yu seems to more-or-less accept his science fictional lot. The set up might seem designed to suggest that author-Yu might be exploring autobiographical material through the vehicle of rendering it in science fictional form. Author-Yu explicitly rejects some aspects of this in his acknowledgements, although, given all the fourth-wall perforation, it may be fair to wonder if Author-Yu is necessarily any less given to self-delusion and/or dissembling than narrator-Yu (who is clearly practiced at both).

On the third hand (since this is science fictionish, if not science fiction per se) what the novel is really about is narrator-Yu’s struggle toward emotional maturation, largely expressed through the plot device of searching for his (literally, physically) absent father. This plainly represents searching to understand his father a little better, more specifically understanding why his father was fundamentally unhappy, with the goal of avoiding (if possible) choices that led to that sort of unhappiness. As the son (like narrator-Yu) of an emotionally distant scientist who probably would have preferred much more bench-work than his career held, I found much of this heartbreakingly on point.

What I’m not quite sure of is whether the science fictional aspects are just a clever device to enliven a (finely observed, but not fundamentally surprising) coming-of-age story or if it all scare quotes means something end scare quotes. The “minor universe” in which the story is set has the same designation as the Andromeda galaxy in the Messier catalog, for instance, and if that’s not coincidental, you might claim it says something about the science fictionality of our reality . . . but then again, maybe “31″ is just “31.”

Dept. of “huh.”: Just about a year ago I read (and also really liked) another book in which the physical book I was reading was described in its own text. So far, I’m down with this meme.

needs more demons? nuh uh.

Lots of meta-textual hijinks ensue, with Carley’s story paralleled or reflected in various ways by Bree’s own backstory, The Arion Annals (Carley’s favorite TV show, an amalgam of Buffy, Veronica Mars, Lost, among other sources) and Dark Ages, Bree’s novel-in-progress. The Great Gatsby is something of a touchstone for several of the novel’s characters, but that’s only the tip of the literary reference iceberg: a Salinger/Pynchonesque writer-recluse makes an appearance, and the descriptions of McEnroy’s first novel Between Scylla and Alta Vista bear a distinct, if superficial, resemblance to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

As Carley helps Bree shape Dark Ages, she learns about some of the contents of the writers’ trick-bags, and begins to form her own preferences; meanwhile Gibson has the opportunity to show off many of those self-same tricks.

I liked it overall, although I don’t think it quite lived up to its ambitions. At the surface plot level one of the characters undergoes an important change that didn’t seem adequately supported to me. At the meta level, some of the resonances between characters seemed oversold. (I suppose you could argue that could be part of the point; still I would have preferred a slightly more subtle touch). But I certainly remained engaged, not to mention emotionally involved enough to want to see some sense knocked into all of the protagonists.
And I really liked some of Gibson’s writing, not least the opening sentence:

The idea came to Carley’s father amid the whir of a hundred handheld sanders at Bunny Gardner’s Sweet sixteen, an event that had burst into life with the birthday girl’s parents whipping a satin drape off their pedestaled daughter at the center of the Glen Club ballroom, where she held a pose she would later tell her classmates was “Winged Victory, except not headless” through applause people would say she milked a bit too long before stepping down.

One minor note: maybe it’s just me, but I had to mentally increase the younger protagonists ages by a couple years, both to sustain credibility and to not get icked out by some of what they get up to.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no.”

Her Fearful Symmetry has many symmetrical sets in it, and a goodly quantity of things that are fearful. The most prominent symmetries concern two sets of twins: Edie and Elspeth (one of whom has just died at the outset of the novel) have long been estranged, with an ocean between them. By contrast, Edie’s daughters Julia and Valentina are so close that their attachment might arguably be described as “unhealthy” — certainly, their mutual dependency makes it hard for them to function as individuals in the world. (In one of several instances of Niffenegger perhaps taking things too far, Valentina suffers from situs inversus, a medical condition that makes her literally the mirror image of her sister, even internally.)

Like Nieffenegger’s first novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, Her Fearful Symmetry has a certain formalism to it, but it’s expressed very differently. Where The Time Traveler’s Wife tagged each scene with the date and age of the principals, Her Fearful Symmetry explores its titular conceit in a balletic area of resonances and inversions among its twinned twins and those close to them: chiefly Robert, a guide at Highgate Cemetary and author of an enormous unfinished thesis on its many occupants, and Martin, a writer sharply constrained by obsessive compulsive behavior.

Niffenegger also continues to display the same extrapolative rigor that marked The Time Traveler’s Wife. When, at a certain point it becomes clear that Her Fearful symmetry partakes of a specific English literary tradition, its characters actually read some of the works to which reviewers might be tempted to compare it.

The Time Traveler’s Wife used its nonlinear construction to examine the trajectory of a relationship. Her Fearful Symmetry uses its devices to explore the consequences of unresolved grief. As such, it’s a much darker book. I enjoyed it more before the tone of it became clear, but found it compelling almost to the end. (The actual dénouement left me a little unsatisfied, even if it was required by the novel’s structure.)

Dept. of Meaningless Coincidence: I finished Her Fearful Symmetry on an airplane. The in-flight movie? The adaptation of Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.

needs more demons? no.

It’s certainly not perfect — two chapters of dialect monograph seemed particularly weak and, the tone is inconsistent (some satirical material about beautiful-people-wannabes is funny, but doesn’t completely mesh with the rest of the novel).

But it’s substantially more ambitious and thematically complex than Wener’s previous books, and mostly she pulls it off. The 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger both literally triggers and figuratively overshadows some of the dysfunction of Claire’s family; when her brother Daniel disappears, she’s convinced she’ll find him in Miami.

What ensues isn’t always strictly credible, but it has a consistent core of emotional truth. It’s also more tightly structured than Wener’s prior books. I thought the chapter heads were especially adroit, starting with the very first, “Obviously a major malfunction.” The eerily flat words spoken by a stunned announcer moments after the explosion are a perfect metaphor for Claire’s family’s inability to directly confront its unhappiness.

Maybe I found The Half Life of Stars particularly affecting because my own less-than-fully-functional family past includes a trip to witness a rocket launch (although my trip to the Cape was actually low on emotional trauma; it’s my favorite nuclear-family vacation memory).

needs more demons? nope.

The tone is much lighter, and it’s less realistic — both plot-wise and in the emotional life of its characters — than Larbalestier’s “Magic” series. I basically enjoyed it, but, frankly, it felt like a bit of a rush-job, and I can’t help but think it would have been more effective as a novella or short story.

needs more demons? kinda sorta.