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.

And he delivers at least a few that stick for me. I learned things about the amygdala and the fear response that will be helpful when I’m allowed to ride a bike again; since I don’t remember the accident itself, I can expect not to be particularly afraid. And now I understand why for the past several years I’ve reacted so strongly to the sight of a car door opening ahead of me, even ones I can easily avoid and that pose no signficant threat.

I was also especially fascinated by Johnson’s chapter on laughter and tickling. After discussing compelling research that illustrates that laughter has very little to do with humor — maybe this is one of the hallmarks of the long-decay idea; it sounds counter-intuitive at first blush, but makes increasing sense as you think about it — Johnson stops just short of suggesting that laughter may have been a precursor to language. He argues that it’s a form of communication, and I’m inclined to think that what it communicates is largely “I’m going to interact with you in a non-threatening way.” (Even though we sometimes use it now to communicate the reverse.)

I didn’t find Johnson’s insight all equally affecting (and I’d bumped into some of them before, blunting their impact a bit) but they were all certainly interesting. As with The Ghost Map I found Johnson an exceptionally lucid writer.

But my naval-gazing response to his fear response chapter was no accident. Throughout Mind Wide Open, Johnson draws parallels between his personal anecdotal experience and the research he is writing about. The Ghost Map was so good that it earned Johnson a lot of leeway with me, and I’m glad I started with it instead, because otherwise I think I might have found passages like this irksome:

As I write these words, my attention is divided roughly between tw primary actions: thinking about the words as they are geneated in my head and materialize on the computer screen, and half listening to familiar songs playing in the background…I also have a vague background sense of mood — a bright midmorning working alertness, slightly caffeine enhanced.

Fortunately, that’s about the peak of the book’s self-involvement, but I can really recommend it strongly only to those who don’t mind a good bit of Steven Johnson the writer/husband/father mixed in with their brain science.

Perhaps predictably, I also became interested in the things Johnson might be saying without intending to say. He lives in New York and the book was written (judging from the interview dates) during 2001-2003 — and even so it was startling to me just how much of a shadow the events of 11 September 2001 cast over this book. (Speaking, for what it’s worth, as a resident at the time of the other city in which an airplane was flown into a building.)

needs more demons? perhaps just a touch fewer personal demons, actually

Here’s the sentence that made me give up: “Had he held the unlikely notion that she was not of a mind to re-enact connubial rites, the quivering little frisson she elicited when he kissed the inside of her thigh would have removed all doubt.”

I don’t mean to belittle Berdoll — she managed to write a whole book, after all, an accomplishment that still eludes me — or anyone who enjoys her work. But I think that fans of Austen the novelist, as opposed to Austen the font of movie adaptations, might just as well give this one a miss.

needs more demons? needs a demonically fierce editor

Missile Gap shares much of the Lovecraft + Cold Warrior vibe of Stross’s fiction featuring Bob Howard, operative of supersecret supernatural spy organization “The Laundry.” I think Missile Gap would appeal to most aficianados of the Laundry stories, although it’s somewhat darker in tone. In fact, I suspect that Missle Gap may have started life as a Bob Howard novella, but Stross either decided that it didn’t fit the continuity he’d established, or (perhaps more likely) wanted to play without the rules imposed by a continuing series. I also suspect that he may have tired of Missile Gap’s conceit before he turned it into a “real” novel; it ends abruptly, and leaves any number of plot threads dangling (although, arguably, that’s part of the thematic point). But even if it’s thematically consistent, I found it less than completely satisfying. It struck me as an interesting but not entirely succesful experiment.

needs more demons? incredibly, yes.

This, the concluding volume of a more-or-less self-contained trilogy, introduces fewer new elements than the previous books; mostly it lets the characters and situations set up in the previous volumes run toward their resolutions. Magic’s Child wraps up the major plot elements in a thematically appropriate fashion (but leaves plenty of unresolved threads from which to weave possilbe sequels). It continues to effectively exploit tension between the realistically depicted emotional life of its principals and the use of magic powers to actualize adolescent alienation and the growing dread of mortality. I found it satisfying and enjoyable, but markedly less surprising than the previous books.

needs more demons? mmmmaybe.

Magic Lessons continues the story of Reason Cansino as she grapples with the consequences of her new-found abilitites. I was braced for a let-down when I started the book. Part of the pleasure of the first volume ( Magic or Madness) was in puzzling out how Larbalestier’s system of magic works along with Reason, and I expected the second volume to be less surprising on those terms. Even the title seemed a bit lackluster. I had similar misgivings when I started Touching Darkness, the second of Westerfeld’s “Midnighters” books, and in both cases they were completely unfounded.

Magic Lessons makes it immediately clear that it’s not a sequel-as-afterthought, and that there are plenty of additional surprises in store. It starts, quite literally, with a bang, as mysterious forces lay siege from across the globe to the back door of a witch’s house in Sydney, and it never really lets up. Magic Lessons kept me wide awake on two unturbulent airplane flights — no mean feat, because climbing through the troposphere usually puts me out like a snuffed candle. Magic Lessons doesn’t end on a cliff hanger — it’s a satisfying read on its own. But I still can’t wait for the next one.

Needs More Demons? No. Amply supplied with demons.