The Secret History of Star Wars is an exhaustive — and sometimes exhausting — investigation into the evolution of George Lucas’s Star Wars saga>, from two primary perspectives.

First, it examines Star Wars‘ influences, with an emphasis on Lucas’ tendency to incorporate aspects of properties that he unsuccessfully tries to license. Much has already been made of Star Wars‘ debt to Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon, Dune, and The Hidden Fortress (and Samurai culture in general). Kaminsiki goes deeper, asserting the influence of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen and Edgar Rice Burrough’s swashbuckling sci-fi, among others.

Second, it examines the changes the saga itself has gone through. Practically since the initial release of the first film, Lucas has claimed he had the whole saga worked out. Kaminski demonstrates — citing primary sources like Lucas’ own notes and draft scripts, as well as numerous secondary sources in interviews — that this was true only in the vaguest of terms. He gives particular attention to some of the films’ biggest twists. He makes the claim that when Ben Kenobi said, “a young pupil of mine, Darth Vader . . . betrayed and murdered your father,” in the original film, he was not dissembling, nor speaking metaphorically; in fact he asserts that the merging of “Father Skywalker” and “Darth Vader” happened during the script revision cycle of The Empire Strike Back. Likewise he explains that Luke and Leia did not become brother and sister until Return of the Jedi was written. Kaminski suggests that their siblinghood was introduced explicitly to tie off the loose end of “the other” potential Jedi knight mentioned by Yoda in Empire, and thereby exclude the possibility of sequels. Kaminksi devotes the most time to undermining the revisionist conception of the six films as “The Tragedy of Darth Vader.”

Kaminski provides insight not only into Lucas’ creative process, but his process for getting the films made. I had always assumed that Lucas was financially independent on the strength of Star Wars. (Famously, he had in insanely favorable merchandising deal, since the studio didn’t think the merchandising would be worth anything.) But Kaminski reveals that Lucas more-or-less bet the farm (Skywalker Ranch) on each successive picture.

The Secret History of Star Wars is thoughtfully organized and assembled, but it suffers from redundancy and some clunky phrasing. Kaminski mostly adopts an academic tone, with his sources diligently footnoted, which juxtaposes oddly with his use of geeky terms like “morph” and “port” to describe Lucas’ assorted artistic appropriations. But if you’re the sort of person for whom 600-odd pages about Star Wars sounds like an inducement, you’ll probably overlook its flaws, and — like me — read all the way through the appendices.

I’m enough of a geek myself to point out that Kaminksi makes one minor factual error that I found surprising: the first indication that Star Wars was “Episode IV” was earlier than Kamisnki says — it was first seen in the title crawl for the summer 1978 theatrical re-release, which we fanboys all went to in part for the Empire teaser attached to it.

needs more demons? where is that demon editor?

Turns out it’s not the same badass — each book starts with a (different) felon being released from prison, so the novels are thematically tied, but not necessarily directly linked in terms of plot or character, so perhaps I should have started with the most recent book. Small Crimes leaves me uninclined to investigate further. It is at least a little Huston-esque in its assured first-person voice and fetishistically lean prose, with nary a metaphor nor simile in sight. Of course, much of what made Huston’s Caught Stealing so compelling is that Hank Thompson doesn’t start as a badass; Zeltserman’s job is maybe a little harder out of the gate. But Caught Stealing also worked because it was funny, and a lot of that funny came out of Thompson’s relationship with baseball. Zeltserman doesn’t provide anything comparable to make Joe Denton more sympathetic or — and here’s the real fatal flaw — more interesting. (Denton does have a backstory, and something of an emotional internal life, but it’s strictly color-by-numbers; his most distinguishing trait is that he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.) Huston’s plot played around with the conventions of noir suspense, where Zeltserman’s plays straight through them, leans awfully hard on coincidence, and has at least one twist that won’t seem twisty to any alert reader.

It’s probably not a fair comparison — Zeltersman was clearly striving for an updated take on Jim Thompson in this novel, and it’s maybe worth mentioning that my appetite for Thompson isn’t boundless either. But a point-by-point comparison with Jim Thompson’s novels wouldn’t do Small Crimes any favors either.

needs more demons? at least needs to put the demons into some less standard configurations.

I found too much problematic about Sorta Like a Rock Star to recommend it unreservedly, but a week after I finished reading it I’m still mulling it over and trying to sort out my thoughts about it. That’s clearly a big point in its favor. It definitely engaged me on an emotional as well as an intellectual level — at one point I actually teared up a little. Even if I felt a little manipulated at the same time, I don’t crank up the water works for just any ol’ book. (In my defense, it did push hard on one of my particular weak spots.) And I thought several of the characters were sharply drawn and thoroughly believable.

On the negative side, I had a credibility gap issue. It helped a bit when I started to think that Amber might not be a completely reliable narrator — that maybe she perceived, for instance, her friend Donna to be richer/smarter/better looking than an objective observer might. But while the minor plot points of Sorta Like a Rock Star felt grounded and natural, the two biggest felt stagy and overplayed. The third of the book’s four sections uses a heavy-handed device that I think would have worked better with a little less formalism. I also thought Quick slightly overdid the verbal tics that define Amber’s voice. Really, this is a single complaint manifesting in several aspects: Quick has a tendency to ramp up the volume where I think restraint and subtlety would serve him better.

Of course, the whole reason I read this book was Quick’s Largeheartedboy.com playlist for it, which mixes R&B with heaping helpings of Dinosaur Jr. — and J. Mascis isn’t exactly known for low-volume subtlety either.

needs more demons? (Really not the right metric for this book.)

Initially I found The Séance a bit too similar to its predecessor, but it eventually reveals itself to be significantly different. Without wanting to spoil it too much, it pays homage to a different set of earlier works than The Ghost Writer, and it introduces a handful of genuinely surprising notions into the maybe-ghost trope. One particular device seems so appropriate — and so creepy — I can’t believe dozens of other writers haven’t exploited it. Maybe they have, but I’ve never read a work using quite the same trick.

Unfortunately, although the climax proper is appropriately hair-raising, the novel finishes rather weakly, with a hard-to-digest expository lump.

Despite my reservations, I recommend the book unhesitatingly to fans of a good old-fashioned spook show.

* Séance is actually set in the latter part of the Victorian era, and Harwood evokes the milieu far more successfully and convincingly than a great many writers who set fiction in the time period.

needs more demons? no.

It opens with a sequence that seems like a textbook example of magical realism; in his afterward Gold claims it has a historical basis, although, perhaps suspiciously, the only references I can find on the Internet to the event are in descriptions of Sunnyside itself. The event binds the destinies of aspiring actor Lee Duncan and Hugo Black to Charlie Chaplin’s career in some obscure fashion.

Roughly half the novel follows Chaplin from late 1916 through mid-1919, when he was creating films for Mutual with an unprecedented degree of creative control. He pals around with Douglas Fairbanks, squabbles with Mary Pickford, raises money for the war effort, and struggles toward a creative breakthrough that seems always just beyond his grasp. The rest of the book follows Duncan (a real figure) and Black (an invented one, seemingly unrelated to the Supreme Court justice who shares his name) through the war years.

Sunnyside entertained me in the main, but the logic that makes these three stories combine into a cohesive novel eluded me. I found the resolution of Hugo Black’s story particularly problematic; it departs significantly from the level of naturalism in the novel elsewhere to evoke mythic and religious tropes like the temptation of Christ and encounters with faerie. Charlie Chaplin meanwhile is throwing seemingly random plot elements into his film Sunnyside in a desperate attempt to make it all stick together. I found myself tempted to think that Gold is similarly striving for some apotheosis, shifting the tone and narrative structure of Sunnyside the novel in an attempt to make its whole somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

I don’t think it completely succeeds, but it’s brave and interesting in its attempt. I loved Carter Beats the Devil for what it was, but most of what I loved was the intricate construction of its plot, and to a lesser degree the emotional resonances Gold achieved. But Carter Beats the Devil didn’t operate on any particularly deep thematic level.

Sunnyside is a completely different beast, and it mostly leaves me impatient to see what Gold tries next.

needs more demons? no.

Here is The Sheriff of Yrnameer’s most overtly hitchhickeresque passage:

Cole’s head throbbed. He recognized the throb, a dull and tenacious sort that resulted from drinking too much of one type of alcohol, the compounded by drinking too much of a second type of alcohol that was incompatible with the first, and then further aggravated by the addition of a third or fourth type of alcohol that was incompatible with most organic forms of live. It was the kind of throb that made him wish he could go right back to sleep, and then die, while preventing him from doing just that.

(Adams would have written “whilst” instead of “while”, of course.) But The Sheriff of Yrnameer owes at least as much to Seven Samurai — filtered through a zillion westerns — as it does to Douglas Adams. In Adams’ Hitchhiker novels, the plot seemed to primarily serve the purpose of setting up comic situations — those books weren’t driven by “how ever will they get out of this?”-style tension. In contrast, Rubens seems much more concerned with plot and at least attempts to build suspense (although this is somewhat undercut by the tone clearly telegraphing the outcome).

At the risk of damning it with faint praise, it was a swell book to take on an airplane flight — enjoyable, a fast, breezy read, not at all challenging.

needs more demons? comedy/action is a tricky blend to pull off, I think. This kinda sorta succeeds in both dimensions.

It opens with a rather laborious description of personal combat ending with a gag death. The humor relies on the reader’s visualization, and I think it would have worked much better as a handful of pages in the other medium David writes in (comics).

After the fight scene, there’s 200-plus pages of flashback, with Apropos narrating his family/life history to date (he starts his story even before his conception). This is sadly pedestrian and predictable stuff — it’s only real hallmark is Apropos’ refusal to conform to the expectations of the fantasy hero — but I waded through enough of Stephen Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever” to know that’s really not so genre-defying after all. If I had been the editor, I would have suggested lopping out this third of the book entirely, and replacing it with a few dialogue asides to fill in the gaps: “Funny, my mother saw that omen the day I was born,” “Now I remember where I’ve seen you before!” and such.

Once the reader makes it back to the present day, there’s some mildly diverting Apropos-has-to-escort-the-princess-through-dangerous-lands-and-they-think-they-hate-each-other-but-are-inevitably-falling-in-love stuff. The mood is a bit like when the Dread Pirate Roberts has kidnapped Buttercup in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (or, really, about a zillion other books of all genres). But David is much bawdier than Goldman (often in a nasty, not fun way, as when Apropos recounts his mother’s gang rape in excessive detail) and perpetrates a few puns that even Piers Anthony might have passed up.

Why did I bother to finish reading it? For a while I was on an airplane, and my other books were wedged deep under the seat in front of me. Then I kinda sorta wanted to see how David resolved his conflicting plot threads (answer: with a little more ick than I bargained on). The worst thing? Because I expected (based, as it turns out, on false information) to enjoy this novel, I already bought a copy of the sequel. Oops.

needs more demons? mostly just needs abridgment.

The other Huston novels I’ve read so far have all had first-person narrators. The Shotgun Rule is structurally much more ambitious; it uses a third-person voice that intermittently lets the reader inside the head of a kaleidoscopic array of characters. It’s set sometime around 1983 or ‘84 and centers around four teen boys with an appetite for trouble. The trouble they get into winds up being shaped by lingering animosities from their parents’ generation in ways they can’t anticipate. One of the kids, Hector, reminded me of Jaime Hernandez’s “Locas” stories in Love and Rockets, but mostly The Shotgun Rule just reminds me of Charlie Huston: his characteristic breathless pace, intricate but mostly credible plotting, and unfllinching approach to physical and emotional harm befalling his characters are all on display. I generally think it’s an unpardonable sin to call a book “unputdownable,” but I literally did finish this book in almost a single sitting.

Two quibbles: Ozzy’s deceased guitar player spelled his name “Rhoads,” not like Fender Rhodes, and Face Dances was a crappy Who album, not a crappy Stones album (maybe Huston meant Tattoo You?) But these gaffes are forgiven, because, like Hector, I still remember the furious joy of dropping the needle on the first Suicidal Tendencies album for the first time, and Huston gets massive cool points for namechecking deep cut “Memories of Tomorrow,” instead of the more obvious (if still awesome) “Institutionalized.”

needs more demons? nuh-uh, nohow.

Still, it certainly kept me flipping pages. And it turns out to be a great book to read when laid up with minor injuries, because pretty much however badly hurt you are, you are bound to get a “well at least that didn’t happen to me!” lift at some point.

needs more demons? maybe

Suspense and Sensibility ramps up the silliness considerably. It follows directly after the previous book, as Lord and Lady Darcy cross paths with characters from Sense and Sensibility (several years after the conclusion of their own novel). Once again there are echoes of another book, this time The Picture of Dorian Gray (with perhaps a dash of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to boot). There’s also a bit of a Scully/Mulder dynamic evolving between Darcy the stolid empiricist and the more open-minded Elizabeth, and the cast of recurring characters expands to a gent with an improbable library of occult texts that seems modeled on Buffy’s Rupert Giles’ exceedingly unlikely assemblage of arcana.

It’s all very droll and goes down smoothly enough, but since Bebris is writing for a modern audience, she spells out the sort of nastiness that Stevenson and Wilde could only allude to, and thereby subjects some of Austen’s characters to indignities that I can’t imagine the authoress countenancing. Mystery elements take a backseat this time; it’s certainly not a whodunnit — more a whydunnit or howdunnit.

Bottom line: Pride and Prescience left me eager for more; this one makes think I’ll wait a bit before reading the next volume in the series.

needs more demons? Maybe needs a bit more restraint.