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? for my taste, yes, a bit.

Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor — there had been no time for any fine polishing — but the book was animated by a fury that no reader could help but notice.

…words which could easily be applied to the novel itself. Like the protagonist Blomkvist’s book, which is mostly fact-dump appendices, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is angry, and its twin plots are intricately detailed, very much in favor of other niceties.

One of the issues Larsson is angry about is sexual violence perpetrated on women. Another thing I found problematic about this book is how Larsson deals with this theme. Like the old saw about anti-war films inadvertently glorifying war, this can be tricky territory to write about. It took a long time for Larsson to convince me that he was wasn’t just being lurid, sensational, exploitive, and playing to exactly the wrong audience; some readers might lose patience (or their lunch) waiting for the authorial viewpont to become clear.

Finally, what with the author and the male protagonist both being magazine editors, it’s tempting to suspect that Blomvkist might be an idealized version of Larsson himself. Given that, the proportion of the novel’s female characters who throw themselves at Blomvkist sexually seemed more than a little icky, not to mention a bit juvenile.

needs more demons? I realize there’s a lot of hubris involved in making value judgments about a book as popular as this, but if your taste is similar to mine, you might prefer to invest your time in a slightly more literary thriller.

On the bright side, although it’s the first of three volumes, it delivers closure on its plot and character arcs, so there’s no lingering hunger for resolution to impel me to read further.

Kill Me’s nameless, rich, extreme-sport-loving, narrator doesn’t want to be left a vegetable by an accident. He doesn’t even want to live with undiminished mental capacity if circumstances render him unable to live life to the fullest. He learns of a business venture — the narrator refers to them as the “Death Angels” — that provides a service to sufficiently wealthy clients. You sign up, they monitor you continually, and when your quality of life falls below a pre-determined threshold, they will snuff at your life, doing their best to make it look like an accident. The catch is, if you enter into an agreement with the Death Angels when you are of sound body and mind, they take any inclination to re-negotiate or abrogate the contract as an indication of mental unsoundness. There’s no backing out.

I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that this doesn’t go as well as planned.

White’s narrator provides a wealth of carefully-observed physical detail, presumably intended to counteract the book’s credibility problems. He also really likes to hear himself talk, and is convinced of his own profundity:

It was the kind of mindless financial foreplay that Adam would
have walked out of, the kind of meeting that if I had any guts I
would have walked out of. The suits ran out of ideas long before
they ran out of words, so I was ready for them to shut their
mouths long before they finally shut their briefcases. I hustled
out of the building and slunk down into the subway with about a
million other people and stuffed myself into a croweded car on the
Lexington Avenue line heading to Midtown. I could have taken a cab
or arranged for a Town Car or limo to go uptown, but despite my
whining I liked the crush of life in the tunnels below the city,
especially during rush hour.

I couldn’t tell if White wanted the reader to like the narrator despite his arrogance, or didn’t really care. I found the narrator largely credible — I haven’t met many, if any, people with quite as many millions as he’s got, but I’ve certainly met a few who aspire to have that much wealth, and act much as he does — but not compelling, nor particularly pleasant. I was interested enough to keep reading, but not emotionally invested.

I did struggle with suspension of disbelief throughout the book. The Death Angels seemed improbably well-resourced, so much so that I almost wanted them to be given a sci-fi-ish rationale (They’re from the future! It’s a secret CIA training program!) . The narrator often seems much better at cloak & dagger stuff than I would expect from a corporate executive, but misses some obvious tricks when the plot requires him to be blindsided.

I don’t want to give away any surprises, but will mention two things. It’s obvious that a book like this will have some twists. For a while I thought the twist might be that the Death Angels never actually killed anybody — that they used the threat of death to restore their members’ will to live. So first, if this is the sort of twist you’d prefer, this may not be the book for you. Second, I was frustrated through much of the novel with the narrators’ refusal to to contemplate the moral compass of people who would choose to work for the Death Angels — but if White’s narrator doesn’t think about this, at least White himself does.

needs more demons? Perhaps just not my thing.

Lewis continues to exploit the devices that distinguished his first novel: twin first-person vampire anti-hero narrators: Eric and his sometime-girlfriend Tabitha. Eric is a reluctantly unreliable narrator to boot; he has a capricious memory. (I like this notion; it seems very logical that storing centuries of memories in a human-like brain would get problematic — although Eric isn’t actually particularly old.)

On the plus side, Lewis (and Eric) don’t seem to take themselves as seriously as Hamilton (and Blake) do. Eric introduces himself by explaining that

In ice cream terms, vampires come in three flavors: chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. I’m grape sherbet — hard to come by and much more likely to give you brain freeze.

and utters lines like:

“My magic ice sword! I left it in the closet. If some damn fireman stole my magic sword, I’m going to be so fucking pissed off!”

And those aren’t the silliest things in Revamped.

If I’m comparing Revamped to Hamilton’s Blake novels, it’s only fair to specify that it resembles the earlier books, where the plot is more substantial than thin connective tissue between fight and/or sex scenes.

On the minus side, the the entrenched sexism of Revamped was hard for me to overlook. Somehow it’s a little easier for me to swallow female characters who act like players in a stereotypical male fantasy when the author is female. I suppose it also might help to envision most of the characters in the book as participants on a VH1 reality show.

needs more demons? just not my cup of tea

This was almost completely wrong. Huston is not a writer who chooses the easy, predictable path. He does revisit aspects of the previous books: some of the survivors of the previous novels make appearances, Hank’s ambivalent passion for baseball reasserts itself, and the central macguffin of the series continues to haunt Hank in surprising ways.

As I’ve come to expect from Huston, it’s hard to say whether funny or grim dominates; it’s both, not just alternately but sometimes simultaneously. It made me laugh out loud at least once, and probably made me cringe, too.

I still think Six Bad Things is the weakest of the three books, but this novel places it squarely in its context as a middle act. A Dangerous Man is pretty much a non-stop adrenaline surge.

needs more demons? noway.

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

It has a good first sentence:

Somewhere in the middle of my rant it occurred to me that I’d killed whoever it was I’d been yelling at, so arguing was no longer important.

I mostly like the setup, which melds elements of Memento (one of the viewpoint characters has strange blackouts and is not an entirely reliable narrator) and The Sopranos (he runs a strip club and power-jockeying in the underworld is the prime plot driver) with the now-standard Buffy/Laurell Hamilton-style modern world overrun by vampires, werewolves, and other things that go stab in the night.

My biggest complaint is lack of disclosure: the book is free of the usual “first in an exciting new series” cover blurb and the teaser for the next volume tacked after the last pages; it looks like a standalone novel, but it’s not. It resolves some of its conflicts, but structurally, it’s more like an episode of a dramatic TV series than a book that can stand on its own. I don’t necessarily mind that, but I prefer to know when I start a book if I can reasonably expect it to end.

The victory for Lewis is that I do want some what-happens-next satisfaction, so I will probably read at least one inevitable sequel despite the book’s other faults. The lack of internal consistency in the social environment bugged me (to be fair, this also bugs me about plenty of other books in the supernatural romance/thriller genre). Either killing people has consequences in a society or it doesn’t. For the presence or absence of those consequences to be determined by what’s expedient for the plot seems lazy. Staked also pushed my tolerance levels for cartoonish macho posturing and gratuitous violence.

But I do still want to know what happens next. Go figure.

needs more demons? not so much “more” as better use of the ones it has

The Jennifer Morgue isn’t perfect. The plot explicitly requires protagonist Bob Howard to be in the dark for most of the novel, but the alert reader will piece things together well before he does, and his whinging about being kept in the dark gets a little tiresome. Stross puts so much effort into making The Jennifer Morgue work on a humorous level that it’s seldom genuinely suspenseful — it’s interesting, cool, and more surprising than it could be given the set up, but not an edge-of-the-seat read.

Like its predecessor, The Atrocity Archive, The Jennifer Morgue is rounded out by a short story that pumps up the jokiness factor to a level that doesn’t work for me. It also features an essay, “The Golden Age of Spying,” with some intriguing ruminations of Ian Fleming’s famous super spy.

needs more demons? one or two more might not have hurt