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.

needs more demons? not really.

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

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.

needs more demons? for my taste, yes, a bit.

I liked it a lot. I thought Carriger mostly did a good job of incorporating some old-time flavor into her prose while keeping it streamlined enough to appeal to the modern escapist reader, viz:

The hackney rattled through the darkened streets. Miss Tarabotti, mindful of her hat and hair, nevertheless drew down the window sash and stuck her head out into the night. The moon, three-quarters and gaining, had not yet risen above the building tops. Above, Alexia thought she could make out a lone dirigible, taking advantage of the darkness to parade stars and city lights before one last load of passengers. For once, she did not envy them their flight. The air was cool and probably unbearably chilly so high up; this was no surprise, as London was generally a city not celebrated for its balmy evenings. She shivered and closed the window.

although sometimes characters’ diction struck me as not believably Victorian, with the utterance, “Plus, they are scheduled to return at any moment,” the construction that felt most glaringly anachronous.

While one might criticize the characters for being thinly drawn, the plotting is exuberant. And I definitely give Carriger credit for not only adding a significant variation to her creatures-of-the-night variation, but also for incorporating a legendary element that’s not fantastically overexposed.

Soulless kept me absorbed enough that I was able to read it on the subway without getting motion sick. That doesn’t work with every book by a long shot.

needs more demons? no.

Proof by Seduction did eventually win me over. The tension in romance novels is never about who gets paired off, it’s about how the emotionally correct pairing is legitimized in the eyes of society. In the Austen model that (I would argue) is the ur-template from which these novels derive, the economically appropriate pairing must be proven unsuitable, and vice versa, generally by a literal reversal of fortune. Milan injects some novelty into the tried & true structure; Proof by Seduction actually surprised me more than once. And it’s pretty overtly feminist for a novel in which heterosexual pairings are the expected “happy ending.”

Milan’s novel is set in London at the very dawn of the Victorian Era. Her portrayal has a bit more grit to it than Heyer’s Regency (or Austen’s), although I still found it hard to credit a description of the smells of London that omitted the obvious in favor of more pleasant and genteel odors. But in general it felt pretty well researched, at least enough to fool me. I thought the word “shag” might be anachronistic, but I looked it up, and Milan’s well within her rights to have her characters use it.

I also thought Milan did a nice job of balancing accessibility to modern readers with a little old-fashioned flavor in dialogue. I liked, for instance, Jenny’s description of the limits of her education: “I was drilled in my accent and taught just enough conversational French to start a good argument, but not so much that I would be able to do anything so gauche as to win it.”

There’s a sequel, and I’m looking forward to it.

needs more demons? no.

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.

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.