needs more demons? » fantasy

Rick Riordan: The Lightning Thief

random — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:33:04 +0000

It took a while for The Lightning Thief to win me over. For much of its length, it felt too nakedly calculated to appeal to Harry Potter fans (with the interesting, but hardly unique, added dimension of a basis in Greek mythology). The character dynamic between Percy Jackson and his pals seemed a bit too Potter-esque, and there are several superficial plot congruities as well. (To be fair, there’s plenty that’s different, too: Jackson has more ‘tude than Potter, and a few interesting foibles, of which my favorite was his dyslexia.)

But I found myself unexpectedly involved with and satisfied by the concluding handful of chapters. I was expecting a twist, but not quite the twist that was delivered, and Riordan resolved at least one conflict I expected to be dragged out through at least another novel. I was at first thinking I’d part company with Jackson after finishing this volume, but I’ve been persuaded to go a little farther.

needs more demons? kinda, but (weak start + strong finish) > (strong start + weak finish)

Eva Ibbotson: The Secret of Platform 13

random — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:54:13 +0000

This past Christmas afforded me the happy opportunity of researching what-next-after-Potter? books for a young relation, and of course I’m reading a bunch myself. This book shares the plot detail of a mysterious train platform leading to another world*, but what it reminded me of most was Roald Dahl, perhaps because cute, quirky, and creepy are mixed in similar measure. I also thought that if James P. Blaylock tried his hand at a children’s book, he might produce something with a similar whimsical reworking of folktale tropes into a modern context. I thought the narrative was a little slow to gather steam, but it was surprisingly and satisfyingly suspenseful once it got going. I look forward to exploring Ibbotson’s work further.

* if anything, Ibbotson might have influenced Rowling; not the other way ’round. Unless one of the authors has a time machine

needs more demons? no.

Tanith Lee: Wolf Tower

random — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:29:23 +0000

This young adult novel, told in the protagonist’s diary entries, mostly detailing a flight across a hostile land in the company of a handsome prince, offers many opportunities for Lee to play with and subvert assorted fairy tale conventions. This ranges from minor details — female characters who are overweight, old, and/or bald are described as beautiful, huzzah — to a general “things may not be as they first appear” theme which manifests itself in a variety of contexts. The mood of the milieu is more post-technological decadent than pre-industrial; Claidi, our first person guide, describes it economically and impressionistically. The diary entry form has some weaknesses; since we only read what Claidi thinks is worth writing down, evolutions in her relationships with other characters sometimes seem a bit unfounded. The ending was a bit abrupt, and definitely had some elements of “set up the next book.”

needs more demons? maybe.

Stephen M. Irwin: The Dead Path

random — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 12:32:51 +0000

I can’t say The Dead Path didn’t get its hooks into me: I finished the final hundred pages at a single sitting, anxious for one of its characters, in particular, to escape the morass. There are some clever aspects to how it works an old religion into a modern tale; Irwin’ prose is reliably serviceable and occasionally better than that.

But the aspects that annoyed me outweighed those that intrigued me. Even as worry for a character quickened my pulse, I felt manipulated by the specifics of the threat. The main protagonist, Nicholas Close, repeatedly makes choices of such tooth-gnashing stupidity that it was difficult to maintain sympathy for him. The reader learns early on that Close sees ghosts. People-who-see-the-dead is such a well-explored device that there are “I see dead pixels” t-shirts parodying it; Irwin approaches it with a heavy-handed thoroughness, as if it were so fresh that it demanded a great deal of exposition.

The recurring motif of large quantities of large spiders at first just seemed lazy — an automatic gross-out for many people, with no subtlety — but eventually I got desensitized to it. Meanwhile, the repeated juxtaposition of arachnoid imagery with aged female sexuality suggests that they’re intended to be viewed as parallel scopes of horror, which I find unpleasantly close to misogyny.

needs more demons? well, not literally

Patricia C. Wrede: Dealing with Dragons

random — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:33:26 +0000

Dealing with Dragons shares several traits with the fantasies of Dianna Wynne Jones. It assumes familiarity with fairytale conventions and tropes, and reworks and subverts them, with a particular focus on excising sexism and adding subtle metatextual humor. Princess Cimorene is the sort of strong, quick-witted, and self-reliant protagonist who could easily be at home in Jones’ fiction. Wrede stands up well to the comparison. Her world-building is perhaps a little less rigorous, but the emotional tone is a little warmer. Wrede’s dragons aren’t quite like any others I’ve ever encountered, which in and of itself is a notable accomplishment. Dealing with Dragons works as a proper self-contained novel, not merely the first clump of chapters in a single story, but I look forward to reading more from Wrede.

needs more demons? no.

Tony DiTerlizzi, Holly Black: The Field Guide

random — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:12:12 +0000

I’ve enjoyed Black’s fiction for adult and young adult readers, and The Field Guide, the first volume of “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” demonstrates a similar playful attitude toward well-established tropes. At the outset the Graces are moving into a spooky new house, but in contrast to more traditional fare, the Graces have recently become a single-parent family. Jared’s been acting out in response to the stress of the divorce anyway, so when strange things happen in the house, his siblings and mother assume he’s responsible. The Field Guide wraps up this plot conflict, but clearly serves as a prequel more than a stand-alone work.

needs more demons? no.

Lou Beach: 420 Characters

random — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:18:00 +0000

I expected that limiting the length of a short story to 420 characters — as counted by Facebook’s software, spaces and punctuation included — would come off as a gimmick rather than an artistic constraint, but this collection of a hundred and fiftyish micro-stories is pretty amazing, in several dimensions.

The first thing I noticed was the vividness of the prose. In the service of these stories Beach deploys striking metaphors and similes, crisp and believable dialogue, and rich and evocative adjectives and verbs. It frankly astounds me that this is his first published fiction.

WIthin the first few pages I was also struck by the formidable range of Beach’s stories. They’re all over the map, both literally, and in terms of tone, setting, even genre and theme.

It’s also impressive how complete many of the stories are. Some not only establish character, setting, mood, but also establish a narrative conflict or even suggest its resolution. A few beg for continuation, to be seen as an excerpt from a longer work — and at least a couple of them are explicitly connected — but most of them don’t. They’re self-contained little nuggets. One of them is almost like a distillation of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle into, well, 420 characters.

I’m tempted to include a handful here, but I wouldn’t know where to start or stop. I almost want to retype the whole book, which would clearly exceed the boundary of fair use. And there’s a generous sampling at 420characters.com; if it’s not quite the set I would have curated, I think it’s fairly representative.

Lest I seem too gushy — I do think it’s far easier to make a great string of 420 characters than to make great strings of 420 characters that tie into a cohesive whole the size of a book, or even the size of a more typical short story. Last paragraphs are much harder to write than first paragraphs, and most of these stories are more like beginnings than like endings. Beach hasn’t proven to me that he can sustain the level of creativity he displays here throughout a work that’s judged by more conventional standards, less dependent on elision. But I really, really, want to see him try.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

Lawrence Watt-Evans: The Final Folly of Captain Dancy and other Pseudo-Historical Fantasies

random — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:57:21 +0000

It’s a bit tricky to describe The Final Folly of Captain Dancy without sounding like I’m damning it with faint praise, so maybe I should say up front that I definitely enjoyed this enough to read more. Watt-Evan’s stories have a bit of an old-school vibe; it’s easy for me to imagine him as a contemporary of Fritz Leiber, Lester del Rey, or Eric Frank Russell. The stories tend to unfold in a linear and largely unsurprising fashion; in a couple of cases I wasn’t quite sure if I’d read them when they were originally published and mostly forgotten them since, or if they just felt familiar because they hewed close to genre tropes. In general, in the genre-fiction scale from familiarity to novelty, this delivers less novelty than I prefer. But the pleasures here are in the details, with a good ear for dialogue foremost, and and a careful prose style that’s at once spare and evocative second.

needs more demons? not really.

George Mann: The Immorality Engine

random — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:52:52 +0000

I read The Immorality Engine even though I didn’t think much of the first two novels in Mann’s “Newbury and Hobbes Investigations” series, of which this is the third. Somewhat to my surprise, I liked it better than the other two.
I still found the prose a bit repetitive and the plot low on surprises, but I thought Mann did a much better job controlling tone. (He also upped the gore quotient a bit, pushing the novel toward horror, which worked better than I might’ve expected.)
Most importantly, the relationships between the characters were far less static.

needs more demons? perhaps, but not as many as before.

Chris Moriarty: The Inquisitor’s Apprentice

random — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:17:26 +0000

The Inquisitor’s Apprentice is set in a vividly rendered alternate late-19th-century New York city. Magic exists in this world, but — officially, at least — it is controlled by wealthy industrialists like “J. P. Morgaunt,” a character inspired by J. P. Morgan (some more sympathetically rendered historical figures appear under their real names) . Thirteen year-old Sacha Kessler discovers that he can see the use of magic, and swiftly finds himself apprenticed to Inquistor Wolf, who works in an elite police task force charged with the regulation of magic.

Moriarty delivers a plot compelling enough that I was able to read this book on the subway without getting motion sick (a rarity). Some plot points are a tad predictable — it is immediately clear that Sacha’s pride must lead to a comeuppance — but I found the ways even the requisite elements unfolded satisfying; and there were plenty of unexpected thrills (and chills; there is a dash of horror in Moriarty’s mix). Sacha is both engaging and a little off-putting, a neat trick. Moriarty does an excellent job of portraying the world through his eyes, so we see how he comes to decisions most readers would probably disagree with to some extent.

I loved the complexity of Moriarty’s milieu. Sacha’s life is impacted by economic disparity and prejudice, but the novel isn’t preachy in the least. The role of magic in society has some obvious metaphorical parallels (Prohibition and intellectual property issues both came to my mind) but it also works on a straightforward literal level. I also loved the integration of some folkloric elements that haven’t been done to death in recent years.

It is clear that Sacha’s gradual-coming-of-age will occupy more than one book; he does some significant growing up in this one, but he’s got a way to go. Moriarty ties up Sacha’s first major case with Wolf and company well enough, but leaves some things decidedly unresolved. Often this annoys me a bit, but in the present case it just leaves me very impatient for the continuation of Sacha’s story.

needs more demons? nohow.