I’m not an expert in this field, so I don’t know how it ranks among books about identity design, but I certainly found it accessible, engaging, and informative.

needs more demons? 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.

The Peace War wasn’t much to my taste. It posits a rather magical technology which a regime exploits to prevent global thermonuclear war, at the cost of halting technological advancement except within its inner circle. (In both of these novels I found the implicit politics intermittently hard to stomach). It has some interesting characters (and a few tiresome stock figures) and an action-oriented plot that might translate well to film. But fundamentally it relies on a gambit I’ve always thought a bit unfair: the reader spends the first chunk of the novel working out what the characters already know about the “magic” technology, and then Vinge changes the rules abruptly.

Marooned in Realtime was more my speed. In it a small group of humans from the near future find themselves in the far distant future, apparently after the rest of humanity is extinct. There are conflicts between factions that want to rekindle human civilization, and some with other objectives. Vinge sets up an intriguing variation on the locked room mystery, again involving extrapolations of his “magic” technological innovation. The primary viewpoint character is a 21st-century ex-police officer struggling to solve the murder, which requires trying to comprehend the motivations and motives of people whose subjective lifespans have been hundreds or even thousands of times longer than his. Vinge doesn’t play completely fair by whodunnit rules, but changes the game in mid-stream less than The Peace War; there are some feints toward some rather hoary resolutions that Vinge thankfully doesn’t follow through on. A curious mix of pessimism and optimism marks Marooned in RealtIme; Vinge suggests that our capacity for self-destruction is likely to stay with us; I found his nearly-empty future Earth distinctly depressing. But the human spirit and survival drive offer a glimmer of hope, if not as steadfastly and rosily as they do in, say, the Star Trek universe. I’m certainly not sorry I read these books.

needs more demons? adequately equipped with demons.

I liked it enough to read more from Smith.

Since I wondered: Moist, published in 2002, uses a plot element that the The Sopranos first explored in 2000 (and then largely dropped until Season 6). Given what I know about the incubation period of novels and screenplays, it seems unlikely that one influenced the other.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no.”

And in fact, the prose authors delivered several of the high points. My favorite story was McDonald’s “Tonight We Fly” — brief, moving, unexpected, hard to discuss without risking spoilers. Baxter’s Daryl Gregory’s streamlined and action-packed “Message from the Bubblegum Factory” put his debut novel Pandemonium onto my to-read list. I also liked Stephen Baxter’s “Vacuum Lad.” Screenwriter Joseph Mallozzi makes his prose debut with the novella “Downfall,” a story about a reformed villain living undercover. I was gripped by the first three-quarters of it, but thought the dénouement sank into cliché. Chris Roberson’s “A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows” deftly ties together a number of ’40s pulp elements with a few twists much more original than its heavily-used title.

Many of these stories opt for an approach that seems inspired by Alan Moore’s landmark Watchmen, emphasizing grit and emotional realism, with liberal amounts of violence and pseudo-realistic extrapolation. (One might get the impression that nanomachines are the millennial equivalent of hard radiation doses in Golden Age comics.) I found this a bit wearying en masse and I would have liked to see something in the outré vein of Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol, or some satire of comics’ overblown excesses. (Peter and Kathleen David’s “Head Cases” provided a welcome shift of mood, but although I found its setup promising, I didn’t think it followed through.)

One very positive note: the volume is largely free of in-jokes of the “figure out which trademarked character I’m slyly re-purposing” variety.

needs more demons? needs a smidge more variety

I liked My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands much better than the other one, partly because it’s raunchier, but mostly there’s something approaching character development. I also thought it was funnier.

needs more demons? I do find it kind of amusing to imagine a smallish demon horde materializing at one of Chelsea’s parties and giving her more significant challenges to overcome than a shortage of Ketel One vodka*. And you know what? I think she might think it was funny, too. That is, if it happened to somebody else.

Hopefully she got some free cases for all the product placement.

Puchner’s Music Through the Floor is a short story collection that really doesn’t require this approach — the breadth of these nine stories is impressive. There’s something dark, in some cases even grim, in all of them, but their tones, voices, and themes are strikingly different. Even something as generic as “these stories are about people struggling to overcome communication barriers,” can’t encompass this collection. “Neon Tetra” derives its tension from the gap between its young protagonist’s understanding of the situation, and cues the adult reader recognizes. (It’s a short enough piece that this disparity is sufficient to carry it). “Children of God,” isn’t about the narrator’s struggle to communicate — it’s about how he uses his bond with two “developmentally disabled” men to avoid communication.

What these stories do have in common is sharp observation and vividly drawn characters. They’re all good, and some of them are jaw-droppingly, I’m-so-jealous-of-your-talent, I-can’t-believe-this-is-your-first-book good. My only criticism is that the resolution — the final sentence, even — of a few of these stories seems a little too tidy. (Perhaps this is a reaction to the fact that the stories in the last comparably strong collection I read, Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, went out of their way to avoid definitive closure. In any case, it’s a teeny quibble.)

needs more demons? nuh uh.

When Franz finally departed for a place he referred to mysteriously a the Halfway Club, I resolved to confront Professor Krak as soon as I saw him again, & was he planning to use me & Fru Schleswig as guinea-pigs? And if so, he had no right to make assumptions of any sort about what we would & would not do, unless a very tempting financial offer was involved! And then for the first time in my life, I enacted what I later learned was a strong tradition amongst the inhabitants of that country & and time in which I now found myself: I trained my eyes on the silent flickering televiison screen, across which passed a stream of images, by turns boring, sugary, violent, & plain incomprehensible, & fell asleep.

Aside from its fantastic premise, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time is a novel which refuses to commit itself fully to any of the genres in which it could perhaps be placed: it’s not twisty nor dramatic enough for adventure, not uproarious enough for broad comedy, not incisive enough for satire, not bawdy enough (despite its title) for erotica, nor sentimental enough for romance (though it comes nearest the mark on this last; Charlotte’s heart is, inevitably, electro-plated). Instead it’s a little bit of all these things, which I found formed an enjoyable, if not exactly compelling, muddle.

needs more demons? perhaps.

I was primarily bothered by details of tone. Character names like Unwin, Pith, Screed and Travis T. Sivart (maybe he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going?) seem chosen either for humorous or allegorical effect. Those names, coupled with some early scene-setting strikingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil gave me misgivings that The Manual of Detection would either be a madcap fantasy à la Jasper Fforde or a derivative Orwellian/Kafka-esque exercise. It’s neither of those. I suppose it would be possible to read some aspects of The Manual of Detection as symbolic of commercial and governmental encroachment on privacy, but I’m inclined to read the novel at face value — a noirish detective story with some fantastic or magical realist aspects, that happens to be set in a surreal environment.

Be that as it may, after the first few chapters I was thoroughly captivated and quit worrying about whether character names were sometimes goofy. Berry displays a deep familiarity with the classic noir tropes and a nice sense of which ones to honor and which to subvert. His prose is marvelously suited to the book — spare, almost reportorial, enlivened by carefully positioned adjectives. I can well believe Berry spent hours polishing his deceptively simple sentences. When Unwin must revisit some of Sivart’s old case files, on the other hand, they recall Chandler’s cynical protagonists and the offbeat metaphors that define the typical first-person noir narrative voice (”I was about as useful as a jack-in-the-box with his lid glued shut,” is how he describes his lack of double-jointed ability to slip out of restraints).

Director Richard Linklater may be done making movies with dream-like themes, but if there are alternate universes there must somewhere be one where Linklater directs an animated adaption of The Manual of Dectection in a style similar to Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and I really hope it’s this one. Sylvain Chomet (of The Triplets of Belleville) could probably do it justice, too.

I also can’t discuss this book without mention how lovely the physical design of Penguin Press’s hardcover is — The Manual of Detection that exists inside the novel is described in some detail, and the real book matches the description, gold foil “Never Sleeping” logo and all. The poor marketing puff and pull quotes are relegated to the endpapers.

needs more demons? nope.

The first few chapters and that foreknoweldge, in fact, gave me the impression that ths was going to be Huston’s misguided pander-to-the-fanbase book, like those Irving Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk novels I didn’t actually read, but always assumed from the reviews recapitulated themes from their breakthrough books while cranking up the gross-out quotient.

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death does bear superficial resemblance to Caught Stealing, and it leads with basically all of the commonalities: like Caught Stealing’s Hank Thompson, Web is a kinda naive but more-than-a-little-disaffected smartass with a complicated and somewhat dark past who gets involved way over his head with some rough stuff. And the first few pages make it plain that Huston’s lack of squeamishness is not at all diminished, while the sharp and salty dialogue seemed pushed almost to the point of parody. I was plenty willing to be onboard for a Hank Thompson retread, mind you, but steeled myself for disappointment after the more complex and satisfying The Shotgun Rule.

I needn’t have worried. Web turns out to be a very different sort of protagonist from Thompson, and the novel’s respective plots become much less similar as they progress. Like The Shotgun Rule, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death displays greater thematic depth than the Thompson books (while still delivering action a-plenty). Anything that seemed gratuitious about the opening was utlimately pretty well supported. And while it took The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death a few more pages to sink its hooks in me, they eventually went deep; I finished the novel in two sittings. Since finishing it, I’ve been trying to figure out if it is my new favorite Huston novel, or if I still like The Shotgun Rule a smidge better. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death didn’t have any 80’s music gaffes like The Shotgun Rule, but it did have a couple gristly lumps of exposition. Really, I think the two novels are a little too apples-and-oranges to make a clear call, so I’m declaring it a tie.

needs more demons? no. But Huston aficianados may be interested to note that this novel features past-tense narration and even a handful of literary devices like metaphors.