needs more demons? maybe.

needs more demons? no.

needs more demons? avast!

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.

I didn’t enjoy Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List nearly as much, partly due to mismatched expectations. This was a rare case where I really did want to read the same-book-only-different, but Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List is a very different novel. The title plainly telegraphs the impetus of the plot: if two people need to keep a list of people neither of them are allowed to kiss, it’s a sure bet that someone kissing someone is going to create conflict at some point. The list-keepers are Naomi, who, even though she has a boyfriend, is still nursing a long time crush on Ely, despite his being actively and unambiguously gay. When events force Naomi to confront the futility of her crush, they both react at least a little badly, and stoke the fires of respective grudges for several chapters. This is really my biggest problem with the novel: it’s not much fun to read about two people who obviously care about each other deeply being really mad at each other. Also, I thought both the gay boy-love-interest and the straight boy-love-interest were kinda dull. And whereas I thought Dash and Lily’s alternating narration worked very well, the multitude of first-person narrative voices here was a bit overwhelming; I think it would have been better to stick with the core four.

On the plus side, there is some courtship by mixtape, which invariably makes me go, “awwww!”. And Naomi and Ely are vividly portrayed. I just spent much of the book being kind of annoyed with them.

needs more demons? mmmmaybe.

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.

But jeez, I hated this book. Flat prose, lifeless characters, and a plot that was neither surprising nor internally consistent. Particularly given the allegations some of made about the real-world Dodgson’s association with Liddell, portraying a very young “Alyss” in a friendship with a romantic dimension troubled me (the more so because the plot doesn’t actually require it, since Alyss ages substantially over the course of the novel). And although I know the use of “black” as a poetic metaphor for evil is a longstanding tradition, the novel’s positioning of “White Imagination” as good and “Black Imagination” as bad bugged me a lot, too.
And I suppose it’s not really much more violent or militaristic than Star Wars, but The Looking Glass Wars‘ body count and general blood thirstiness seemed excessive a kids’ story (when this book’s Red Queen screams “off with [his/her] head!” she really means it).

needs more demons? yuck.

p.s., I should let this go, but I can’t.

“Quel est ceci?” asked the magistrate, not amused

Can one of the first-year French students please tell the class how we say “what is this?” in French? Now, let’s not always see the same hands.

Of course there are exceptions that prove the rule, and happily, Predator’s Gold is one of them. Surviving characters from the first novel continue to grow and evolve (I’ll eschew specific spoilers, but if Reeve is perhaps not as cruel to his protagonists as, say, Joss Whedon, he’s assuredly not the sort of novelist from whom all sympathetic characters escape unscathed), and Reeve introduces new characters who also go through significant changes — there’s none of the stagnant quality to character dynamics that sometimes afflicts sequels. Some of Reeve’s people make appallingly bad choices in this novel, but that didn’t lessen my emotional involvement.

Reeve introduces a few nifty wrinkles to his world-building, and more importantly, deepens the moral complexity of the story; what was shaping up to be a a mostly-good versus mostly-evil conflict in the first novel becomes substantially more nuanced, nicely mirroring the good-people-doing-bad-things aspect of the plot. Speaking of the plot, it’s satisfyingly twisty and suspenseful. And once again I found Reeve’s language, coinages, and nomenclature delightful. I laughed aloud several times, and inflicted read-aloud passages on my patient wife.

needs more demons? no, no, and again, no.

It wasn’t quite perfect. I strongly suspect a dose of roman à clef, which means in part that while most details are contemporary, a few jangly notes seem to belong to an earlier decade. More significantly, Donnie is maybe a little too oblivious to some of the clues he’s thrown (God knows teen boys can be plenty clueless, but the reader may get impatient waiting for him to put pieces together). But overall I liked this very much. Lyga consistently avoids obvious, pat plot choices, and I found his characters believable and emotionally compelling.

needs more demons? No. and I will absolutely, positively read more from Lyga.