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? perhaps, but not as many as before.

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.

More wordily:

On the fifth page of of Brain Thief there’s an editing gaffe that had me staring at three short paragraphs for a good minute trying to work out what Jablokov had intended to convey. This is noteworthy because it’s such an aberration. If there were any rough patches later on, I was far too caught up to notice; Brain Thief ’s tightly coiled plot is like some finely machined watch in the act of exploding.

Brain Thief marks the first time I read a physical book and wished I was reading an electronic copy instead. This was partly because I spiked it with a dozen bookmarks for passages that exemplify Jablokov’s prose tightrope-walking between evoking classic noir and sleek sci-fi flavor (”He wore a black suit jacket, which Bernal pretended to himself he could identify as Armani,” “an old gray-water recovery unity with dangling filters made of nylon stockings stood next to a high-end rotating composter that smelled of rotting meat”, “the warbling bleert of an old dial-up modem”, “heavy batteries . . . everything in the modern world had become small and light, except the very heart of their power, which still had a Victorian mass”, “a warm day, the first day when the warmth seemed sincere rather than a smile pasted on a lurking winter” — Jablokov’s dialog crackles, too, although it’s harder to excerpt without running afoul of spoilers). But it was also because I kept needing to flip back to review previous scenes as new twists evolved my interpretation of events (Brain Thief rewards close and careful reading).

I’m not entirely clear on how eligibility for the major SF awards works, so maybe Brain Thief can still garner at least a (richly deserved, in my opinion, because there’s some serious thoughtfood under the thrillride) nomination for best novel. But I think it may not. Brain Thief is packaged as science fiction, but if you absolutely had to choose, it’s more a mystery novel with science fiction elements than a science fiction novel with mystery elements.* Perhaps that will keep it from being seriously considered as an award candidate in either genre. Which leads me to a thought about all the calories fans and critics (myself included) put into micro-classification: genre identification is helpful if it leads you to something you enjoy, but it’s harmful if it excludes something you might enjoy.

Brain Thief is also mostly set where our kittens hail from — between Boston and The Berkshires — and has some slyly mutated takes on some New England institutions which endeared it to me even more.

* Brain Thief reminded me of Rian Johnson’s terrific film Brick in how it incorporated the traditional elements of noir fiction into non-traditional noir setting, bringing a startling freshness to well-worn genre tropes.

needs more demons? good gravy, no.

Zahn’s rail-connected universe is by no means hard sf, but as in the previous book, Zahn delivers some solid science fictional twists to the mystery. One of them is so obvious that I got a little impatient waiting for the penny to finally drop, but I think that may have been in part a diversionary tactic on Zahn’s part.

Somewhere in the build-up to the climax I got a little confused about which planetary system everyone was off to and why, but my favorite plot twist snapped me back to full alertness.

I’m wrestling with myself over whether I want to read the final book now! of wait another month to prolong my enjoyment of the series. Now! may win.

needs more demons? nope.

Zahn is clearly aware of the sources he’s riffing on — at one point Compton and his maybe ally/maybe femme fatale actually watch Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes — but two attributes of the novel save it from sinking into parody. The first is Compton’s narrative voice, which seems to be modeled on Hammett’s Continental Op. He’s quietly competent, eschewing the misogyny and personal demons of Chandler’s Marlowe, and Compton always takes his own situation seriously, even when Zahn’s tongue slips into his cheek. The second is that the unraveling mystery works fairly well in science fiction terms. (There’s a point where the seasoned SF reader may find a conclusion obvious well before light dawns on Compton, but on the other hand Zahn finds more-or-less credible explanations for some of the flimsier tropes of detective/espionage fiction that he borrows.)

Night Train to Rigel wraps up with a lump of exposition before a pair of predictable (if emotionally satisfying) set-pieces, a minor flaw in a novel that seems tailor-made for the description “ripping yarn.” There are two more novels in the series (although this one is complete in itself) and I look forward to reading them once I dig out of my soon-to-be-overdue library book pile.

needs more demons? no.

I was primarily bothered by details of tone. Character names like Unwin, Pith, Screed and Travis T. Sivart (maybe he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going?) seem chosen either for humorous or allegorical effect. Those names, coupled with some early scene-setting strikingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil gave me misgivings that The Manual of Detection would either be a madcap fantasy à la Jasper Fforde or a derivative Orwellian/Kafka-esque exercise. It’s neither of those. I suppose it would be possible to read some aspects of The Manual of Detection as symbolic of commercial and governmental encroachment on privacy, but I’m inclined to read the novel at face value — a noirish detective story with some fantastic or magical realist aspects, that happens to be set in a surreal environment.

Be that as it may, after the first few chapters I was thoroughly captivated and quit worrying about whether character names were sometimes goofy. Berry displays a deep familiarity with the classic noir tropes and a nice sense of which ones to honor and which to subvert. His prose is marvelously suited to the book — spare, almost reportorial, enlivened by carefully positioned adjectives. I can well believe Berry spent hours polishing his deceptively simple sentences. When Unwin must revisit some of Sivart’s old case files, on the other hand, they recall Chandler’s cynical protagonists and the offbeat metaphors that define the typical first-person noir narrative voice (”I was about as useful as a jack-in-the-box with his lid glued shut,” is how he describes his lack of double-jointed ability to slip out of restraints).

Director Richard Linklater may be done making movies with dream-like themes, but if there are alternate universes there must somewhere be one where Linklater directs an animated adaption of The Manual of Dectection in a style similar to Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, and I really hope it’s this one. Sylvain Chomet (of The Triplets of Belleville) could probably do it justice, too.

I also can’t discuss this book without mention how lovely the physical design of Penguin Press’s hardcover is — The Manual of Detection that exists inside the novel is described in some detail, and the real book matches the description, gold foil “Never Sleeping” logo and all. The poor marketing puff and pull quotes are relegated to the endpapers.

needs more demons? nope.

I have noticed that private detectives do not spend much time discussing the injuries incurred in the line of duty, or whatever it is they call their work. They alll seem to have this incredible ability to shake of serious beatings, sometimes with blunt objects, with a remark to the effect that they were a little stiff the next day but a good shower and massage would take care of it
…
I’m not like that. I bruise easily. The contusions I suffered from that fall in the warehouse in Bicêtre left ugly yellow and purple blotches. I’d probably have them for months. And they hurt. I won’t mention it again, but I did want you to know.

Much of The Alternative Detective’s pleasure is meta-textual — it assumes you’ve read enough hardboiled PI fiction that you will appreciate how it honors some of the time-worn genre conventions and inverts or undermines others, like the more-or-less invincible protagonist. The Alternative Detective also riffs on some of the shopworn plot elements of the genre, perhaps most explicitly on The Maltese Falcon-styled tales. For my taste, The Alternative Detective never got quite so silly that I stopped paying attention to its plot entirely; nor did it ever get so serious that I gave it the kind of scrutiny I give to Dashiell Hammett’s fiction.

I was a little bugged by the narrator’s hippie-ness (worse, actually: ex-hippie-ness) — but that’s mostly a personal problem on my part, and anyway I wasn’t bugged enough to stop.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no,” though it’s a close call.

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.