The January Dancer is fundamentally a space opera, with nods to sources as wide-ranging as Smith’s Lensmen (for sure) and Whedon’s Firefly (I suspect). The plot unfolds in a formal structure patterned after Celtic music forms (which I found off-putting at first, but only at first). The story incorporates a number of revelations, some of which have more payoff for the reader than others (when has a mysterious alien artifact ever not had unexpected significance or qualities), but some of which Flynn clearly expects the reader to work out at about the same time the characters do.

Two side notes: if you are considering reading this novel and daunted by the star map, list of characters, and/or the time-measurement conversion chart at the front of the book , don’t let them dissuade you. None are necessary (although the map is helpful) and the time chart can safely be ignored.
Also I was surprised that The January Dancer was not shorlisted for the Hugo and/or Nebula awards. The word “jilted” comes to mind.

needs more demons? Nope.

In the role of those who stand between us and the crawling horrors of other-dimensional space, Wong casts a pair of potty-mouthed chronic underachievers who could almost have slouched over from the nearest (good) Kevin Smith movie.

Wong has excellent control of narrative tone, and the book is often really funny in a slightly sophomoric way. The protagonist encounters an unusual monster in the prologue, and his response was the first thing in this book that made me chuckle, snort, or laugh outright:

The man-shaped arrangement of meat rose up, as if functioning as one body. It pushed itself up on two arms made of game hens and country bacon, planting two hands with sausage-link fingers on the floor. The phrase “sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist suddenly flew through my mind.”

I also like how Wong makes no bones about his musical taste:

I turned on the radio, looking for something to blast the thoughts out of my head, hoping the moist nighttime air would blow in a rare non-country station. I ground through static and static and static, then recoiled at the shrill, choking sound of a man apparently squealing through a crushed larynx. After a moment I realized it was simply Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit – [an acquaintance's] favorite band. They’re the ones who invented the musical technique of feeding a list of generic rap phrases to a goat, then reading its turds into a microphone over heavy-metal guitar.

Another of John Dies at the End’s substantial pleasures is that it’s clearly not meant to be taken at face value. The novel is narrated in the first person by David Wong, the pseudonym employed by author Jason Pargin — but even in the context of the novel, “David Wong” is not the character’s “real” name; he adopted “Wong,” simply because it is the world’s most common surname. Likewise the titular “John” is not really named John but is referred to by it because it’s (allegedly) the world’s most common first name. Much of John Dies at the End uses a framing device of David telling his story to a reporter, who wonders, logically enough, how much of what David says is true, and whether David is really a serial killer with an involved paranoid delusional system. David’s narrative reliability is further called into question by David himself — he glibly glosses over inconsistencies in his story with comments like ” I can’t remember exactly how [she] pulled that off.” When David recounts John’s experiences, he is even more explicit about the integrity of the narrative, liberally sprinkling asides like, “according to John, of course” into the story.

The novel’s “what’s real and what’s not” games go both ways: the jacket copy starts out, “Stop. You should not have touched this book with your bare hands. NO, don’t put it down. It’s too late. They’re watching you.” And on Wong’s website JohnDiesAtTheEnd.com, commenters join in by contributing alleged mysterious happenings resulting from exposure to the book.

It all adds up to a very interestingly multi-layered reading experience.

In the mildly minus column for me, the book consistently employs gross-out imagery. (Skimming an early sequence made me decide this was a library book not a purchase book; it seemed a little cheap and easy. If Wong had led with the bratwurst poltergeist I might have made a different call.) This is not a novel for anyone with a serious objection to authors slopping assorted bodily fluids around by the bucketful.

I also thought it flagged a tiny bit in the last quarter. Wong has to make some choices about how much he wants to tie his wild ride into a coherent narrative, and he also has to choose between emotionally satisfying and thematically appropriate outcomes. I don’t think he always picks the option that would make for the strongest possible book. But this is a teensy quibble — it still makes for a very enjoyable book, and I’m delighted to learn that a sequel is likely to materialize at some point, and intrigued by the one-third complete novella on the author’s website. Basically I’m afraid that I’ll stay up half the night reading it, and then really, really, really want to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!?

So, uh, so much for critical distance and reserve.

* as Warren Zevon once sang

needs more demons? not at all.

Although the novel is named for its narrator, John Stocking, Charyn is principally interested in exploring George Washington in the Revolutionary War through a fictional device (although Stocking is literally missing an eye, perhaps the title is also meant to suggest that he views the war from a vantage that does not afford depth perception). Charyn attempts to humanize Washington by inventing peccadillos like an ongoing dalliance with a notorious Manhattan madam, but Washington is already in the process of being mythologized. Stocking, who believes he may be Washington’s illegitimate son, is in almost religious awe of him, whereas the British mockingly refer to him as the “farmer in chief.”

My main problem is just that I didn’t find Stocking a very congenial character with whom to spend a book. Charyn plays fair by historical rules, so fictional Stocking can’t really do anything that would leave an indelible mark on real history. He spends much of the book vacillating between sympathy with the British and with the colonists. This is rather novel in my experience, and probably not at all unrealistic, but it doesn’t stop it from becoming somewhat tiresome. Aside from his efforts to be executed by neither army, Stocking spends most of his time yearning for a beautiful prostitute, and in this venue he is similarly indecisive.

Charyn’s portrayal of war-torn Manhattan has an impressive authenticity, and that was my favorite aspect of this book.

needs more demons? I suspect people who spend more time reading American military history than I do might find this more intriguing than I did.

The Jennifer Morgue isn’t perfect. The plot explicitly requires protagonist Bob Howard to be in the dark for most of the novel, but the alert reader will piece things together well before he does, and his whinging about being kept in the dark gets a little tiresome. Stross puts so much effort into making The Jennifer Morgue work on a humorous level that it’s seldom genuinely suspenseful — it’s interesting, cool, and more surprising than it could be given the set up, but not an edge-of-the-seat read.

Like its predecessor, The Atrocity Archive, The Jennifer Morgue is rounded out by a short story that pumps up the jokiness factor to a level that doesn’t work for me. It also features an essay, “The Golden Age of Spying,” with some intriguing ruminations of Ian Fleming’s famous super spy.

needs more demons? one or two more might not have hurt

Positives first: This is a fantasy novel that owes virtually no debt to Tolkien (or for that matter, to Harry Potter). Clarke portrays faeries as quite inhuman entities. As a reader of a smattering of the darker and less-Disneyfied legends and folk-tales of such things, her rendition of them struck a very pleasing note with me. Also happily, her early 19th-century men and women will also be somewhat alien to modern readers; Clarke makes no effort to sugarcoat the English class system. Clarke’s prose demonstrates careful attention to detail throughout, and displays flashes of wit and occasional melancholy beauty.

Throughout Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke has adopted some conventions of 19th-century prose, chief of them outmoded spellings (”sopha” for “sofa,” “shew” for “show”), and a reserved narrative presence with a fondness for the passive voice. This blends jarringly with much more modern literary devices, like fragmentary sentences and frequent, dramatic shifts of setting (including some of the “here’s what the villains are up to” variety, which also undermine the narrative tension).
There are also several unmistakable allusions to Jane Austen (although it’s her contemporary Anne Radcliffe who draws namechecks). It’s an unfelicitous comparison to invoke. Clarke fails to create a rich inner life for characters; most are at best two-dimensional. Clarke’s antiquated stylistic choices result in prose that’s often flat and sometimes repetitive. Clarke may not be interested in fully realizing her people or in constructing graceful and elaborate sentences — but if not, Austen is a bad name to conjure. At worst it makes Clarke’s authorial voice seem a little less like style and a little more like gimmickry.

I also have serious quibbles with the structure of the book. Essentially, it braids several stories of ensorcellment which follow the classic template. Although the novel stands on its own, not all of its conflicts are resolved, and the finale distinctly implies a continuation of the story. The conflicts that are resolved find their resolution through a sort of deus ex machina. It’s a well-supported and amply telegraphed deus ex machina, but a deus ex machina nonetheless. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell also teases quite a bit (and flouts a Chekovian rule of drama): if a fantasy novel repeatedly mentions “a strange country on the far side of Hell,” I damned well want it to take me there! But that will have to wait, I suspect, for a later volume.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell failed to satisfy me on a thematic level as well. Its alternate history of the Napoleonic wars doesn’t appear to comment on our own. The magic performed by the titular characters is sometimes impacted by their internal states, but Clarke seems uninterested in exploring the metaphorical opportunities this could provide. I have nothing against purely escapist fiction, but when a novel arrives with such high praise, and demanding so much of the readers time, I expect to get a little more back in return. I enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but it didn’t deliver as much as it seemed to promise.

Needs More Demons? Kinda sorta, I’m afraid

But it’s also a book about a crazy challenge — specifically, cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s massive Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of a year. And it’s a book that derives in part from an online journal and explores the metatextual ground where autobiography turns into fiction. As Powell confesses in the Author’s Note, “sometimes I just made stuff up.” These are much more interesting aspects to me. Powell also discusses the negative aspects of her marriage with a candor that I’d find distressing if it were applied to me, but grimly intriguing when it’s directed at someone else. Of course, some of her digs at her husband could be among the parts of the book that are more fiction than not, but she provides ample evidence that she has a sharp and sometimes careless tongue.

Bottom line? I laughed, I cringed, my stomach turned. I feel like i was rewarded for stepping a bit outside my literary comfort zone.

Needs More Marrow? No. (variant metric courtesy Editrix)