Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

needs more demons? Literally, perhaps. Metaphorically, no way.

There are several nice touches. Miranda is given to flashbacks from her 500-year lifetime, but freely admits the faultiness of her memory. In particular, she’s seen The Tempest so many times that she’s a little vague about the differences between her own early life and Shakespeare’s portrayal of her. Lamplighter weaves elements from many different mythologies together, successfully on the whole. The menaces Miranda and her companions encounter make a nice change from the color-by-numbers vampires, werewolves, zombies, et al that crowd so much recent urban fantasy and paranormal romance. I appreciate her portrayal of elves: low on cutesy, high on unpredictability, even menace. It takes a while for the primary characters to define themselves, but they eventually do, and they don’t remain stagnant. At the end of this volume, Miranda is clearly on the cusp of a major epiphany.

This brings up my first problem with Prospero Lost: Tor’s (classy) cover nowhere communicates that this is not, in fact, a standalone novel. It doesn’t resolve any of the plot conflicts it establishes; it just comes to a screeching halt after introducing a new one.

Lamplighter’s tone is a little inconsistent; mostly Prospero Lost takes itself seriously, but occasionally it veers toward comic fantasy. The inclusion of one mythic figure in particular may stress some readers’ willing suspension of disbelief.

I also thought the prose was both a little flat and a little heavy. Adjective choices are rarely surprising: “The dark walnut frame held an embroidery of an elegant unicorn rampant upon a field of royal blue.” Happily, the writing seems to improve somewhat toward the end of the book, suggesting that Lamplighter has the potential to write a more thoroughly satisfying novel.

needs more demons? just a smidge.

The weakest of these stories, like “The Fluted Girl,” and “The Pasho,” rely too much on concealing information from the reader to achieve their impact. The latter in particular challenges the reader to determine which of a barrage of unfamiliar terminology is derived from current language, but (to risk a slight spoiler) while to “keep Quaran” has a nice pseudo-religious ring, it isn’t believable slang for “maintaining quarantine.”

Overall this is a strong collection. If nothing here quite equals “The Calorie Man,” several of the stories come close.

needs more demons? nope.

Pride and Prescience owes at least as much to the gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe as to Austen (with several unambiguous nods in the direction of Brontë’s Jane Eyre to boot). But Bebris doesn’t play for broad laughs; if Elizabeth Darcy finds herself in a stereotypical Gothic novel circumstance — in a drafty, Stygian hallway, overhearing strange sounds, say — she reacts naturalistically, and Bebris doesn’t club the reader over the head with the echoes of other novels.

In general, it’s surprisingly successful. The mystery is fairly satisfying on its own terms, with several well-laid red herrings, although some purists might well feel that that the dénouement doens’t quite play fair. Bebris adopts a prose style that blends 19th- and 21st-century stylistic conventions; the vocabulary is mildly high-falutin’, and some of the sentences aspire to Austen’s elaborate, graceful structures and sly reversals, but there are also short declarative sentences (and even fragments) to nudge things along for the modern reader. The copy-editing seemed much more competent than in several of the other books I’ve read recently; I noticed a few descriptive words repeated in close proximity, but didn’t trip over any real clunkers. Darcy and Elizabeth seem a tad modern in some respects — their private conversations are more frank than I think Austen would have ever imagined — but they are also convincingly rendered as members of a society quite different from ours (especially in their attitudes toward the servant class).

Overall I enjoyed it, and will read more in the series.

needs more demons? negatory.

I didn’t find the portrayal of the high-stakes poker world very convincing. Maybe it really is like all the movies, I dunno. The dynamic between Unger and her reluctant poker instructor Big Louie is a little too pat. And the ending seemed weak — Wener sets up situations where it’s just a little too obvious what the resolution has to be, and then draws the curtain down before a key scene.

But on the whole I liked this book. Unger is an engaging narrator, and Wener’s a keen observer of middle class life — her portrayal of a sad little local casino was every bit as compelling as that of the high-stakes room wasn’t.

This Perfect Play doesn’t lean as heavily on Wener’s previous experience in the music industry as Goodnight Steve McQueen did, but it does have a good handful of hip music references. At one point Audrey worries that her inability to grok nu-metal means she’s growing old, then she finds herself enjoying some of it. Been there, done that!

needs more demons? just a smidge.

Needs More Demons? Nope. But I need to read more Sean Stewart novels.

Almost all of the book is written in the present tense. Lindeen is sometimes deliberately cagey about whom she implicates in various activities, with a two-of-us-got-busted (not saying which two) story being the height of obfuscation. She’s also sometimes cagey about when an event took place in relation to other events. The book more-or-less follows the band from slightly-pre-inception to its eventual disintegration. In the beginning of the book she’s flashes back from the band history to her pre-band life, but later when she flashes back from mid-to-late band timeline to earlier band timeline it gets a little confusing, and that confusion is my chief criticism. The frequent jumps backward and forward in time stop the book from being frontloaded with a lot of “here’s my life before I began to rock,” and Lindeen generally ties the flashback thematically to an event in the current timeline, but I still could have done with a little less backstory.

I’ve never been on tour, but Lindeen’s descriptions carry jolts of recognition for me anyway. If I mentally string together all the out-of-town shows I’ve played, I get a similarly grimy and unglamorous mental picture. Lindeen likes a lot the same bands I like and hates a lot of the bands I hate, and I found her a generally agreeable tourguide even when she was being kinda grumpy (she acknowledges her grumpiness, which helps). The writing is a little rough in places, but she manages quite a few very trenchant observations and made me laugh out loud several times.

I read a publisher’s galley, so I feel like it’s not fair to pick on the copy-editing. But there were a few errors so strange and confusing, that, fair or not, I was amused and bemused, like the word “nice” with a gratuitous circumflex — yes, nicê — and “die” instead of “the” on multiple occasions.

Needs More Demons? Nah.