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.

The other thing that holds the novel together despite its changing mood and tone is the emotional core of the story. Briar Wilkes and her son Zeke have a lot of issues and history to work through. Wilkes is the widow and daughter of two notorious men. Their legacy casts a shadow over her life and Zeke’s. Wilkes has avoided many of Zeke’s questions about his father, grandfather, and the events that triggered Seattle’s zombie infestation. You could probably read much of the novel’s plot as an externalization of their respective struggles to overcome the barriers to clear and open communication between them.

In the universe of Boneshaker people are zombified by exposure to a toxic substance referred to as the Blight. Maybe it’s a stretch to think of the Blight as a metaphor for heroin, which was first synthesized at roughly the same time as Priest’s characters encountered the Blight. Priest lives in Seattle, so she might prefer not to reinforce any connection in the popular consciousness between her city and heroin. But I found it interesting to think about.

Priest apparently has additional novels set in the same overall milieu (but not direct sequels). I’m impatient for them.

needs more demons? nope, Boneshaker’s people are well supplied with personal demons.

I found The Affinity Bridge not un-entertaining, and although the reveal in the epilogue wasn’t too much of a surprise, it suggests a multi-novel story arc that I’m curious to see how Mann evolves. So I may read more. (The Affinity Bridge resolves as a stand-alone novel, but it is unambiguously the first of a series.)

On the minus side, Mann’s characters are flat and cartoonish. I had suspension-of-disbelief problems several times, most notably with iron as a structural element in lighter-than-air vessels and Mann’s depiction of the physics of railway carriages. Mann seems to struggle both with the rhythm of the prose and the blocking of action sequences (I assumed it was his first novel, but it’s not, so perhaps he is still seeking the right balance of faux-Victoriana and modern prose construction). I was less bothered by this when I started envisioning the fisticuffs shot in the clunky and often unintentionally humorous style of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who. A typical sample:

[The other man] got to his feet, careful to keep his pilot’s chair safely between the two of them. He smiled slyly. “Indeed we do.” He lashed out as he spoke, sending his fist flying toward Newbury’s face. Newbury ducked quickly out of the way, feeling the fist brush his cheek, ever-so-narrowly missing its target. He thrashed back at the other man, connecting hard with his sternum and causing him to stagger backwards, banging against the control panel. It wasn’t a graceful move, but it was certainly functional.

needs more demons? not as such, but a little more care in the writing would not have been amiss.

The prose of Gloriana is frequently gorgeous — it’s rich and evocative and pays homage to its obvious influences without being derivative. The book has many fans, all I must assume, with stomachs made of sterner stuff than mine. But if you start reading it and find yourself disturbed the first time you encounter a female character subjected to non-consensual, sexually-infused terror, my advice? Quit while you’re ahead. It’s not exactly a pervasive theme, but worse lurks in later pages.

Also: considering this is the author for whom I was willing to endure hours of junior/highschool ridicule to be enthralled by the sorecerous adventures of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, et al, Gloriana is really kinda slow-moving, and very sparing of actual fantastic elements.

needs more demons? scale really, really doesn’t apply here. I think Gloriana is very successful at being the novel it is — it’s just fundamentally not to my taste. I’m not even sure I should write about it, except for the theoretical “if your taste is like mine steer clear/if your taste is not like mine jump right in” value.

As in the prior novel, Irby seamlessly melds real historical figures like Harvey Firestone, Joe Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, and her third husband Henri de La Falaise into his fast-moving, twist-filled plot. Also as in the previous book, Irby leans hard on coincidence, mostly to establish connections between his upper- and lower-crust characters, but that bugged me less this time. Once again, there’s enough accurate historical detail that the reader could learn a few things without it ever getting intrusive.

One feature I didn’t mention when I wrote about 7,000 Clams is that sometimes there’s an additional level of irony. Some of Irby’s descriptions of 1928 could easily apply to other years up to and including 2009, viz a northern society lady’s first glimpse of a swank hotel:

[She] joylessly trudges through the well-appointed lobby of the Flamingo Hotel located on the bay side of Miami Beach. It is a huge, hulking barn of pink stucco, with a decor that strikes her as relentlessly Florida: pastels, marine life, palm fronds. Everything is bigger than it needs to be, glossy to the pint of smarmy, overbearing in its irrepressible invitations to “have fun” and “relax,” and above all dedicated to the haughty display of wealth. Why wear one necklace when six will do just fine? These sunburned barbarians talk loudly, guffaw like baboons, and careen about like they have been jolted with electricity.

(7,000 Clams similarly featured a brief trip to a Baltimore cop bar that was almost like a scene from The Wire.)

Here’s my most telling reaction to this book: If Irby writes another novel about Hearn, I’ll certainly read it. But I hope he doesn’t — I hope he finds some other improbably charming lowlife to write about instead — because I’d like to think that after the conclusion of The Up and Up Hearn might get to live out the rest of his days without anything especially suspense novel-worthy befalling him.

needs more demons? nossir.

But there’s nothing fannish about 7,000 Clams. Ruth is portrayed as a man ruled by his appetites — for food, women, and amusement. He’s a bit of a stinker, frankly, even if he’s not totally charmless. His massive presence — literally and figuratively — forms the gravitational core around which the other characters orbit.

Irby is a history professor, and 7,000 Clams is spiced with enough historical detail that one can learn a bit from the book, but not nearly enough to detract from its substantial entertainment value. Irby skillfully blends a handful of historical figures with invented characters. His people are vivid and multi-dimensional, particularly the brutish yet lovable thug/grifter Frank Hearn, and the two strikingly different dames he gets entangled with in his pursuit of the titular 7,000 Clams. Irby also concocts a remarkably unpleasant but chillingly believable bogeyman (as well as giving a cameo to a real-life nasty). The dialogue is filled with the requisite snaps and wisecracks, and Irby’s descriptions are clear and vivid. The handful of awkward sentences are certainly forgivable in a debut novel.

My one gripe is that Irby’s plot leans awfully hard on coincidence. His St. Petersburg seems like such a small place that there would be no way for people with connections to avoid running into one another. But if the twists strained my credibility, they didn’t much reduce my enjoyment. There’s a sequel, The Up and Up, and I’m eager to read that, too.

needs more demons? nope

North by Northanger evades most of my specific criticisms of the previous novel: it’s much more credible and takes fewer (and, I think, more justifiable) liberties with Austen’s characters. Even better, its less bound by genre conventions than either of its predecessors. North by Northanger doesn’t work as a whodunnit — the attentive reader will likely pick up on several obvious clues well before the Darcys — but nonetheless effectively creates dramatic tension, leavened, as always, with humor. It’s possibly my favorite of the series so far, and certainly much more sure-footed than Suspense and Sensibility.

needs more demons? nope.

I’m no literary critic; I’m read The Three Musketeers primarily because I recently saw Slumdog Millionare, and I’ve been making a conscious effort to read books a little farther afield from my usual choices.

But for whatever it’s worth, here are my impressions.

Initially I found The Three Musketeers an uphill climb, mostly because I didn’t pay enough attention during European History class. Pevears’s copious notes are very helpful, but he assumes more knowledge of 17th-century French (and even English) politics than I brought to bear. In particular, the balance of power between King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, and Queen Anne (of France, but who is not French) was a little hard to puzzle out.

After I more-or-less internalized the dramatis personae I enjoyed the novel quite a bit — for a while. Dumas weaves his genre-defining derring-do skillfully through the threads of actual history. It reminded me a bit of how fantasist Tim Powers spins tales of high and improbable action around real events and people (only without the fantastic elements). A good portion of my pleasure in the book derived from flipping to an end-note and experiencing the jaw-drop of “that part really happened!” And, thanks in no small part to Pevear’s lucid translation, some of my pleasure derived from moments of genuine laugh-out-loud humor.

As the novel goes on, however, its tone darkens considerably and I found it increasingly unpleasant. I know it’s unfair to chastise a 19-century novel for sexism, but the portrayal of the novel’s femme fatale, Lady de Winter, seems to go beyond that and into misogyny. (Richelieu is guileful, a figure to be feared, but ultimately not ignoble; Lady de Winter, whose ambitions, cunning, and vengefulness roughly equal those of the male protagonists, is unsupportable.) It might be interesting to see a modern recasting of Lady de Winter as the novel’s heroine.

needs more demons? (too a silly yardstick to apply to a literary classic)