Odd Girl Out drops the detective elements almost completely in favor of action-adventure, which is less to my personal taste. Even more unfortunately, it more-or-less reprises a set piece from an earlier books (there’s even some dialogue along the lines of “remember the last time we had to fight in a baggage car?”). Once again, I saw the big reveal coming way before agent Frank Compton figured it out. Rather bafflingly, the stage was clearly set for another twist, but the penny was never dropped. And although Odd Girl Out certainly advances the overall plot arc, the characters are more static than in the previous novels.

I still enjoyed it, and I will get around to reading the recently-published fourth volume sometime. But I worry that the schtick may get exhausted — or my patience with it, anyway — before the story is concluded.

needs more demons? maybe.

“The Lights of Armageddon” and “The Essayist in the Wilderness” manage to be funny as well as surprising and creepy. The former evokes the intricate rules of Tim Powers’ and James P. Blaylock’s magical alternate universes with startling economy, and the latter features a narrator of consummate, Donald Antrim-like self-delusion.

“Downloading Midnight” and “The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness” unflinchingly examine the social consequences of pervasive virtual reality; they brought to mind George Saunders’ dystopian near-futures more than any of the usual cyberpunk suspects.

The pièce de résistance for me was “The Oddskeeper’s Daughter.” It’s at once a strikingly original brief fantasy and an rumination on how love can make someone feel like the luckiest person in the world — dangerously lucky, even. I found it so powerful that it’s transformed how I perceive my own luck in the days since I’ve read it, to the extent that I left a day-long visit to a hospital emergency room feeling positively blessed.

The title tale didn’t strike me as one of the strongest, but it reminds me that I once heard a rock band play a song that was probably actually called “She’s Under Water.” It seems improbable, but I can’t help but wonder if Spencer could have seen the same band and misheard the name of the song the same way I did.

Needs More Demons? Not a bit of it.

My inadequate definition of slipstream is that it almost always uses some of the trappings and motifs of speculative fiction, but compared to “traditional” fantasy or science fiction it’s much more concerned with literary qualities like style, voice, mood, and theme. It’s correspondingly less concerned with plot, and, to a lesser extent character development (at least in a realistic mode).

Although Olympic Games sprouted, more or less, from the slipstream story “The Goddess is Alive and, Well, Living in New York City,” the novel itself strikes me as more fantasy than slipstream, and it takes off in tangents that give the whole work a different feel and larger scope. This is definitely to its benefit; I found myself much more caught up in the story of the supernally-gifted, reclusive artist called Possum, and his ensorcelled love Penelope, and less interested in the modern world doings of Zeus and Hera. For the most part I thought What did an excellent job of steering clear of genre clichés, despite the familiar territory. The tone is mostly light, but never broadly comic, and certainly not without emotional resonance. The novel reminded me in bits and pieces of several different authors, but it didn’t seem specifically derivative of any one particular voice.

A quibble I can’t stop myself from including: If I’d judged this book by its cover, I never would’ve picked it up. Michael Dashow’s cartoonish illustration evokes the wrong mood entirely — it seems much more suited to a more overtly comic fantasist like Robert Asprin or Terry Pratchett.

I sometimes feel a little hamstrung by using Needs More Demons? as a metric, but, anyway, it doesn’t.