detectives – Ceridwen Anne

The Year in Reading: 2023

As we approach the new year, I feel like it’s customary to look back and castigate ourselves on not learning French or how to knit or whatever, and promise to do better next year. I probably will never learn French or how to knit, but I will likely continue to read a lot. There isn’t any particular theme to my reading, but there can be clusters of interest. As always, there’s a disproportionate number of books which are zombie or zombie-adjacent narratives. I also seemed to gravitate to lighter Star Trek/Wars-y space opera this year. And if last year was the Year of Seanan McGuire, this year was The Year of Martha Wells, which kind of crept up on me. She was guest at Minicon, so I started reading her stuff to get more out of her panels, and then just never stopped. I also feel like I did more audio this year, although maybe it just feels like it because of the commute.

So here’s an incomplete summary of what I’ve read this year.

Zombruary: February was given over to reading zombie books, like usual, but then of course I read a bunch more as the year went on.

Devils Wake by Tananarive Due and Stephen Barnes. A bunch of juvenile delinquents try to ride out the zombie apocalypse in a summer camp outside of Seattle. Excellent dialogue and a well-rounded cast elevate a familiar early outbreak narrative, plus mushrooms are going to kill us all. I never read the sequel, but maybe this Zombruary.
Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton. Also set in the PNW, this zombie outbreak is narrated by a pet crow, which sounded delightfully strange. It has potential, but bogs down horribly in the middle with a lot of flashy, overwritten prose which doesn’t do anything, and I’m still mad about the death of that one character.
Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff. I’d read this before and enjoyed it, but then also really didn’t understand what happened at the end. I’ve always said zombie stories are especially attuned to location – at least as much as mysteries, if not moreso – and Last Ones Left Alive is very, very Irish. Orpen is raised off of the West coast of Ireland on an island free of the skrake; she has to go to the mainland once her mother is killed and her other mom bitten. I still don’t know what happened at the end, but at least the sequel came out this year so that might answer that.
Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindquist. Lindquist burst onto the scene with his take on vampires in Let Me In; here he tackles the reanimated dead. There’s a lot of nice stuff in here about how the return of loved ones would disrupt the grieving process and complicate the relief of death, and several sequences that gave me the screaming fantods – the bath, that eel – but the novel unfortunately falls apart in the end.
Eat Brains Love by Jeff Hart. Rompy YA novel with two pov characters: a just-turned zombie – the kind that look totally normal if they keep eating people – and a teenaged psychic who is part of a government team that puts down zombie outbreaks. The sort of Sleepless in Seattle-style romantic subplot did not work, but otherwise the plot zips along with enough action and humor to keep you from nitpicking.
Zombruary was over when I listened to Zone One by Colson Whitehead again. Boy, but I love that novel, which is weird, because it’s aggressively literary and absolutely unconcerned with genre, if you take my meaning. A depressed guy moves to New York, like he always dreamed of doing, and it doesn’t help the depression one bit. With zombies.
Everything Dies by TW Malpass. Complete opposite of Zone One: totally pulpy and genre-bound to a fault. It’s fine, but I am absolutely sick to death of cartoon bad guys threatening sexual assault to prove the situation is serious.
The Rise of the Governor by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. Remember that thing I just said about sexual assault? Well, strap the fuck in. Maybe, maybe this could have worked if it was a portrait of Phillip Blake — aka The Governor, early antagonist to Rick Grimes and the Rickocrats — largely through the lens of his younger, bullied brother, Brian. But then, plot twist! Brian takes Phillip’s name at the end, after his brother finally, deservedly gets his head blown off. This means I’ve read through several hundred pages of some asshole raping and murdering his way through the zombie apocalypse, only to have an eleventh hour protagonist switch which gives me zero insight as to how Brian turns into the Governor. I mean, I think I’m supposed to postulate some sort of dissociative PTSD-induced DID, but that’s fucking stupid and not how any of this works. Ugh.
The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem. Corpses of the newly dead start getting up and walking out into the snow; after an interval of less than a day, they fall down dead again. Set in 1950s England, The Investigation is something like a satire of the police procedural crossed with a Gothic novel, and as those are almost completely antithetical genres, it’s occasionally brilliant but often confusing. (The time displacement is a thing too; it’s been 65 years since this novel was written, and I found a lot of the social mores perplexing.) It’s still Lem though, so funny in a desert dry way and brisk enough to tug me along to the end, even if I didn’t always get what was going on.
Empire of the Dead by George A Romero. No one told me Romero wrote comics! Y’all are on notice. Set loosely in the “…of the Dead” universe, Empire of the Dead asks, but what if vampires too? This leads inevitably to existential questions re: the various kinds of undeath, some of which are dealt with hilariously. It is set in a very stupid classic dystopia tho, which I did not enjoy.

Various Series..es I Continued or Reread: I feel like I have an escalating number of series that I either haven’t finished or the author is still putting out installments, which isn’t helped at all by the fact that I have a tendency to wander away about two books into any given trilogy.

Wolfhound Empire by Peter Higgins. I read the first installment, Wolfhound Century, a dozen years ago when it came out, but then never followed up. I listened to that and the sequel, Truth & Fear, to and from work, and then discovered, to my eternal irritation, that the final installment was never read out as audio. Really cool steampunky alt-historical take on the Soviet Union, with a side of eldritch horror. I guess I’ll have to read the third.
I also listened to the entire Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer — Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance — which is an excellent audio. (Bronson Pynchot is a stupid good narrator; who knew?) I find that entire series incredibly disquieting, especially the second, and as I said before, mushrooms are going to kill us all.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovich. Urban fantasy set in London with a local historian’s eye towards London history. Really fun, with a cosmopolitan mix sometimes absent from urban fantasy, perversely. My one complaint is the inherent copaganda of a series with a Met copper as the lead, and in reality, the Met police are fucking awful. Managed to get to book two, Moon Over Soho, before I wandered off, but I’m sure I’ll get back to it.
Galactic Bonds by Jennifer Estep. The first and second of this series, Only Bad Options and Only Good Enemies bracketed the year. Not great! Romance-y space opera set in one of those feudal nightmares one can find in a certain kind of scifi. But I have a thing about mate-bonds and how terrible they are, and this series deals head on with how terrible they are, so. Shrug emoticon.
Class 5 series by Michelle Diener: Dark Horse, Dark Deeds, Dark Minds, &c. Compulsively read all five of the books in this series in like a minute. They all involve humans abducted and thrown into real Star Trek-y galactic politics. They remind me of Bujold’s Cordelia books, the way they have great escalating stakes for our principles to clever their way out of. Bujold’s probably crunchier, whatever that means.
Our Lady of Endless Worlds by Lina Rather. I liked the first of this series, Sisters of the Vast Black, better than the second, Sisters of the Forsaken Stars. The overt plot felt a little careworn: I have seen a lot of arrogant, dying empires commit atrocities in pursuit of recapturing their dominion, and might even be said to live in one. But I am a sucker for nifty space stuff, and a group of nuns living on a living spaceship and debating whether to let their living ship go off and mate like it wants to is major nifty space stuff.
Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse by Jim C. Hines. I read the first two a million years ago when I was writing for B&N, and then kinda forgot about the series. Finally finished the series with Terminal Peace. Hines lost his wife to cancer between writing book two and three, and the tonal shift is apparent: For a comedy, this has a strong current of grief. I didn’t mind, as this series has always had more serious themes underneath all the exploding space toilets. I also have big hearts for eyes for working class heroes, and our post-apocalyptic janitors get really inventive with cleaning products.
Earthsea by Ursula K LeGuin. Reread both A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. Much as I adore A Wizard of Earthsea, the way it dispatches with the monomyth in a tight 200 pages, I was struck by how quietly, perfectly subversive Atuan is. Gah, I just love it all so much.
Longshadow by Olivia Atwater. The third (and maybe final?) book in the Regency Fairy Tales series, I didn’t love this one as much as the first two, Half a Soul and Ten Thousand Stitches. Gaslamp fantasy in an alt-Regency setting, not dissimilar from Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown, but interrogating class & disability more than race.
Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison. Sort of an adjacent series to The Goblin Emperor, Cemeteries of Amalo is something like a police procedural without the police, but with lots of fun bureaucracy and the occasional ghoul attack. The main character is profoundly grieving, which you don’t figure out for a while, and colors all of his interactions with both the living and the dead. Really fine.
Resonance Surge by Nalini Singh. Yup, still on my Psy-Changeling bullshit. I reread the previous two, Last Guard and Storm Echo, to try to figure out what was up with the whole Scarab situation, but then I realized I didn’t care. Last Guard is the best of the Psy-Changeling Trinity books to date, imao.
Murderbot Chronicles by Martha Wells. I’d read them all before, but me and the fam listened to the first six novel/las in this series during long car rides over the year, culminating in the most recent, System Collapse. I just love Murderbot’s bellyaching about how it just wants to get back to its stories. Hard same, Murderbot.
The Fall of Ile-Rien by Martha Wells. Another series undertaken on the commute to and from work, for the most part. Completely odd series, because while I never felt like I was having my socks blown off or anything during books one & two, The Wizard Hunters and The Ships of Air, but by the time I got to book three, The Gate of The Gods, I was completely invested, and spent more time than I should admit to sitting in the garage after the drive home absolutely freaking out by some upset in the book. Kind of steampunk and sort of gaslamp fantasy, the Edwardian English-ish country of Ile-Rien has been losing badly to a mysterious people they call the Gardier. Honestly, the whole thing is so complicated I couldn’t possibly sum it succinctly. As a clash of empires story, it’s notably grounded in personal perspectives, and never loses sight of how trauma and grief work on both societal and individual levels.

Graphic: I didn’t read a lot of comics/graphic stuff this year. I started maybe a half dozen things, but nothing I wanted to read past the first installment. I feel like I used to have better recommendations on what series to check out, though idk what that was or where it went. Oh well.

All the Simon Stålenhag. I completely lost my shit over Stålenhag’s loose trilogy, Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, and The Electric State. The first two are a sort of oral history from the children who grew up around the Loop, a CERN-like installation in rural Sweden, in the 80s and 90s. The third goes to America and gets a fuck of a lot darker. I just cannot get over the weird mix of credulity and incredulity that one finds in the adult recount of childhood. Plus there’s this line from the movie Nope that I keep coming back to: what do you call a bad miracle? Because each installment, and increasingly, are characterized by bad nostalgia, which like a bad miracle seems a contradiction in terms. Nostalgia is memory without shame. Completely gutting. (The Labyrinth will also fuck you up.)
No 6 by Atsuka Asano. I’ve been very slowly working my way through this yaoi manga set in a classic dystopia. It’s not amazing, but I’m ride or die for Dogkeeper.

Gothic/Horror/Supernatural: The pandemic kind of messed me up there for a couple years, and I was unable to find much joy in the macabre. But I’m back, baby! Not all of the following books are strictly horror, but they’re all weird in their own way.

American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett. I’m very susceptible to horror which takes place in the Uncanny Valley — and if that town nestled in that vale is set dressed in mid-century modern trappings, more’s the better. Mona inherits a house in a town called Wink from her long dead mother. Wink is something like Los Alamos, a town created for the scientists in the facility on the mesa. What those scientists were doing was altogether as awful as the Manhattan Project, but more localized. Underneath all the squirming tentacles and mirrors which don’t reflect the rooms they are in is an intensely sad story of indifferent mothers and damaged daughters. Not my usual reaction to cosmic horror, but here we are.
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck. Another book I flipped my shit over, just 100% in my wheelhouse. Something like Soviet Noir, but the mystery is the nature of reality, not a murder. I adore a science fictional bureaucracy, and the world here appears to be literally, physically made out of bureaucracy. Solaris by way of The Southern Reach, with a little bit of Wolfhound Century thrown in.
The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw. I wasn’t in the right mood for this, but forced it, which is a shame all around. I can be on the hook for bloody, beautiful prose that is this side of overwritten (and certainly, for some, would be over the line), and what she does with The Little Mermaid is both upside down and inside out. I might reread when I know I’m in the mood.
The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist by S.L. Huang. Another retelling of The Little Mermaid with a central inversion. The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist is a gut punch of a story, and gave me the kind of world that I would absolutely kill to see in a larger fiction. Highly recommended.
Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison. I kind of can’t believe I’ve never seen a werewolf novel which uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for the body horror of pregnancy before. The voice is pitch perfect aging hipster millennial (and I mean that in a good way): both self assured and self loathing in equal measures, quipping, funny, allusive. And the werewolf parts are gross. That said, I don’t think the ending was altogether successful. It’s not bad, just kinda tonally off, and the revealed antagonist is disappointing. Still, it was an enjoyable read, and sometimes the getting there is worth the end.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. I’ve been desensitized to a certain amount of gore because of my love of zombie fiction, and even then the body horror in Tender is the Flesh was a lot. After an animal-borne pathogen leads to the eradication of everything from livestock to zoo animals to pets, cannibalism is systemized and normalized. Bazterrica is very deliberate in the linguistic distinctions between “special meat” and legally recognized people, and all of the ways those distinctions bend, break, and fail with even everyday stressors. The ending is abrupt, deliberately so, and features violations so intense I literally shuddered. Disgust is a function of both empathy and contempt. Jfc.
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. I feel like I need to make a tag called “tragic, romantic hair-brushing” for my reading. Just off the top of my head, I would tag this, the Dollenganger books, and The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. Somehow missed this one when I read all my Poe at 16 or so. Completely bugshit; loved it.
A Night in Lonesome October by Roger Zelazney. There are 31 chapters in Lonesome October to correspond with the 31 days in the month, so I did the thing where I read a chapter a day (mostly). The novel is narrated by a dog and features a cast of Gothic types – vampires, magicians, Sherlock Holmes, &c – and their animal familiars, so it’s definitely on the goofier end of Gothic fiction. Delightful and strange.
The Scapegracers by HA Clarke. I want to write some quip about how The Scapegracers is like The Craft for Zoomers, but this is exactly the same kind of facile analogy as when people call Lev Grossman’s The Magicians “a grown-up Hogwarts.” It’s not just The Craft for Zoomers; it’s a witchy, queer, neurodivergent coming of age that you didn’t know you needed, but you do.

Various One-Offs: Not everything fits into a neat category! So here’s some stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. Speaking of The Magicians, I decided to read this novel because I became completely obsessed with the show adapted from it. I liked the show better, but the book has a lot going for it. Station Eleven is often (but not completely) a post-apocalyptic pastoral, of the type that Ursula K Le Guin or John Crowley or even Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in the 70s and 80s, but haven’t had much traction in our more saturnine times.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. Continuing the Shakespeare month I was having, I listened to an audio version of Stoppard’s first play on the way back from seeing the most recent Guthrie production of Hamlet. It’s definitely the work of a young, clever man: brilliant in places, but also completely beset by its own im/mortality in ways the works of older people never are. Weird, that.
Final Night by Kell Shaw. Could also file this under “zombies,” but that’s not really accurate. Kind of an oddball mix of an alternate present based on some high fantasy fol-de-rol, and an urban fantasy set-up wherein a person has to solve her own murder, 20 years before. Not entirely successful, but then also energetic and interesting enough to keep me reading. I appreciate when people do weird shit with sometimes tired tropes.
Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer. I really, really loved the way Kritzer captured how friendships formed on the internet work, without treating them like lesser order relationships. I doubly appreciated how she captured the familiar/strangeness of meeting someone you’ve only known through a text medium. I haven’t read a lot of YA recently because it makes me feel old, but this was pitch perfect.
Redshirts by John Scalzi. Honestly, this is the laziest sf book I’ve read since late period Asimov, with exactly the same ratio of casual mastery to dumbass what-the-fuckery. Fans of Scalzi’s writing will find this the kind of thing they like; the rest of us end up with a stress-response to dialogue tags, because literally every single utterance has one, something which becomes unavoidably obvious when you, say, listen to the audio.
A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djèlí Clark. Neat little short story set in an alt-history Egypt, one in which the world-building is a central character. I keep meaning to read the other fictions set in this world.
The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien. It’s been a minute since I’ve read this, long enough that some of the movie-stuff got set as book-stuff, so it was nice to course correct. It’s such a flex to spend just ages talking shit about hobbits before ever getting into the story at all, and then when you do, it’s another age of Frodo mooning about the Shire doing a lot of tragic, romantic hair-brushing (another for the tag??) Andy Serkis does a damn fine job as narrator.

Currently Reading: I’m still working on a couple things.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. Historical horror set in a reformatory in Jim Crow Florida. Due has a really beautiful prose style, which is good, because the relentless cruelty the main characters are subjected to is painful. The novel is dedicated to an uncle who didn’t make it out alive.
Ghosted by Amanda Quinn. A gender-switched contemporary take on Austen’s Northanger Abbey which so far is pretty cute. The main character is Hattie Tilney, whose mom is the emotionally distant headmaster of a boarding school. It’s a little over-determined — the theme is ghosts, and a lot — but I’m really digging Hattie’s barely-maintaining overachiever and her shitty, transactional friends. I’m really curious how she’s going to manage the last bit in OG Northanger, where Gen Tilney turns Catherine Morland out like an asshole.
Exit Ghost by Jennifer R Donohue. Another gender-flipped take on the classics, this time Hamlet. Not as far into this one, so I have less to say, but I really loved what she did with the ghost-on-the-battlements scene.

So! That, as they say, is that.

(Here’s my roundups from 2022 and 2020; 2021 was difficult.)

Resurrection, and the Returned: “I’m not sure it would be a good thing.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched network television, I realized halfway through the premiere episode of Resurrection, which is the newest revived-from-the-dead offering on tv. (Though I’m not bothering to google this, there are several such shows in production at the moment, I am given to understand.) Though I kind of can’t imagine network tv taking on the latent and blatant nihilism and grimdark nature of the zombie show – despite Walking Dead‘s cable ascendancy – I could see the more domestic concern of people in a small town returned years after their deaths working as a sort of Lost-ish mystery show. Who returned Laura Palmer?

Network television can pull off the Gothic melodrama, with even creature-of-the-week procedurals like early seasons of the X-Files bending towards the childhood traumas and interpersonal machinations of the principles. Alas, what I got from Resurrection was a whole mess of anxiety about whether the viewer was even going to buy the premise. The cold open works as an image – this boy in the rice paddies and his collapse in a Chinese town – but once the cut-rate X-Files agents get involved, it all goes downhill. A seriously put upon agent of ICE, which might be the least sexy of all federal agencies, picks up a boy who has been repatriated to the US because obvs he’s an American? Why are we being showed this travel time? Start in China, switch to the small town. Also no, the agent doesn’t just haul off to magical New England town just on the say-so of some rando kid.

The thing that killed me about Resurrection was how arm-wheeling the emotional and social problems are, all of these painful conversations with ICE ICE agent, man of exposition and explication, reiterating over and over how obvious the stakes are. The childhood friend of the resurrected boy now a priest, stuttering through his homily as the boy’s mother ushers him into the pew. The fact that every single person in Stars Hollow appears to be related to the resurrected boy, down to his doc. Also, you are seriously not allowed to put a lynching joke in the mouth of Omar Epps in a show this white, no. After the joke, my husband yelled, “Omar Epps, everybody!” Sorry, that’s a fail.

There was altogether too much hugging, speechifying, and shaming going on in Resurrection for my taste. I do not even get why everyone ragged on resurrected boy’s dad for not believing this miraculous kid was his, even though the boy was unchanged after 20 years and reappeared on the other side of the planet. I get that Americans don’t like skepticism or science, but this is beyond the emotional pale for me. I’m going to need some time, DNA tests notwithstanding, to accept this manifest creature of a family’s grief as something other than its shocking reiteration. Quit mansplaining what I should think, ABC, sheesh. (Also, total waste of a few of my favorite character actors, especially the boy’s parents.)

Which was why the first episode of The Returned, “Camille”, was so damn good. The events occur in a small town in the French Alps, with four or five – its not entirely clear – people returning to their lives after years of the absence of death. Camille dies in a bus accident with 38 other people. Years later, we watch a group therapy group consider the monument to the loss that is to be installed in order to enact their dubious healing. Camille comes home and her mother follows her through the house, shaking, getting her a robe, pulling down the half-considered shrine on her dresser. “Why did you rearrange all my clothes?” the girl asks, and the mother doesn’t answer. A creepy boy keeps being framed through glass. A morpho eugenia butterfly, pinned to a display case, flutters, and then breaks free.

There is little dialogue in The Returned, more a series of reaction shots and tight Gothic interiors interspersed with tight Gothic landscapes: a reservoir, a row of suburban alpine houses, an underground walkway with flickering lights. None of the relationships are telegraphed in megaphone dialogue, but in subtle nods of the head. Camille’s parents are divorced now, but were not 4 years ago when she died. “Tu fumes?” she asks her dad, as he pinches a shuddering cigarette with his ex-wife beyond the glass of the sliding door, hissing at each other, what are we going to do? What do you even say, years past someone’s death? How awful would their return be, a tearing of all the scar tissue, both personal and societal?

I don’t mean to keep hat-tipping Twin Peaks, even though I do, but there’s something here that reminds me of that. Not in the pin-wheeling grotesquery of Lynch’s middle America, but in the Gothic dread of the small town, the flickering iteration of civic grief, and the half-careful invocation of the supernatural, like a shrine swept suddenly into a drawer. (Also because the cinematography is gorgeous.) When the priest avows the durability of the human soul and then demurs about the resurrection of the body – “I’m not sure it would be a good thing” – I was all in. I suspect there will be fewer answers in The Returned than there will be in Resurrection, which I count as a good thing. There is no answer to grief.

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Original review January 2012

As a reading experience, I loved Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey. I was sick when I started, looking for the literary equivalent to a Law & Order marathon. Space opera is the police procedural of the science fiction world, and this one has an actual police procedural embedded within. It’s a galactic billiards game, the ordinary made extraordinary through the right place, right time, a bunch of forensics/technology, a lot of fragility of life just on this side of the hard vacuum of space. I mean, gee whiz.

There’s a Jim Anchower article, Jim being one of the “columnists” for the Onion, that describes Star Wars: Attack of the Clowns as “like watching C-SPAN on some other planet” – a bunch of boring imaginary politics playing out in the most expository way possible. Space opera can fall into this so, so easily. The ships embody the engines of society, and authors get caught up in the schematics, reading out the blueprints. Look at this nifty pinball game I made! It’s cheering when books like Leviathan Wakes avoid this trap. The characters here are more types than actual people, but the cultures they inhabit, they were well sketched. This is an alien-less environment (for the most part) – so the conflicts are between people, in social terms: the Belters, several generations out living in low-g on Saturnine moons or asteroids, stretched by weightlessness, grousing about tariffs and taxes imposed by the colonizing Earthers or Martians; the freedom-fighters/terrorists; the subtle pull of cultural gravities in different places.

As befits a dual-author novel, this pings back and forth between two pov characters: a space ship captain cut from the same cloth as Malcolm Reynolds, with more high-handedness and less Han Solo, and a noir-ish cop who getting to old for this shit. The individual sections tend to be beautifully arced, little vignettes which build from one of those “he didn’t know that his day could get any worse” and then ramping up furiously until you hit the next ~~commercial break~~ section totally leaned in, freaking out. Maybe it sounds like I’m making fun of this, and I am just a little, but affectionately so. There is something to be said for this kind of masterful genre writing, the guns laid onto the table in deliberate, methodical gestures, and fired one at a time, hitting their targets with a casualness that belies study, and lots of it. Bew bew! The book is masterfully plotted, and absolutely joyful to read.

But, two things stuck in my craw starting at about half-way point. Miller, our exhausted, alcoholic Belter cop who is in over his head, leaves the culture which props up his personality – types, as I said, more than people – and at this point his character falls apart for me. His motivations become laughable, his psychology almost literally unreal. You cannot take a type like Miller out of his world, because he is his world or the lens on it, the situated observer, the commentary though moving mouthpiece. And his relationship with Julie is squicky in a way I can’t put my finger on, but in a way that dovetails into my next complaint.

At about 3/4 through, two women have a conversation about going to the bar and playing a game together, and then have some teasing fun. This is (I’m pretty sure) the only conversation that keeps this entire 600ish page novel from failing the second two parameters of the Bechdel Test – and that just barely, because this was not a necessary or meaningful exchange. Now, yes, the Bechdel Test was developed for movies, and failing the test does not mean the book sucks. There’s all kinds of situations that fail the Bechdel test because they are small, personal stories that take place with limited characters, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But a tumbling active story taking place all over an entire freaking solar system? It is incredibly discouraging to me to find yet another fictional solar system in which women are only love interests or ball-busting superior officers, vague individuals in a universe peopled by men almost exclusively. Miller’s relationship with Julie, in this context, seems like that shitty thing where a girl becomes an emblem, a chit in a psychological game that moves a man, because a man is what moves. I don’t think I’m supposed to heart Miller and the way this plays out, but it doesn’t feel good to read.

I don’t want to come down on this too hard or act like this book is somehow anti-feminist or anti-woman. It just feels like in riffing on these traditionally boys-only genres – the police procedural, the space opera, the cop show – no one bothered to notice the boys-onlyness. And there are, to make up for this lack, a pretty subtle sense of politics and societal tendencies, and vomit zombies. Vomit zombies! I’m not going to explain, because explanations is spoilers, yo, but the vomit zombies were part of a general inventiveness and genre-specific yee-haw! that I really enjoy reading. This is a first in a series, I am given to understand, and although this one ties off in a way that doesn’t dot-dot-dot to the sequel, I would totally read the next one. Gee whiz!

Edit: I’m feeling a little defensive for bringing up the Bechdel test, for no good reason, because it’s not like anyone has called me on it or something. I went and looked at the books on my space opera shelf, and at least half of them fail this test, as far as I can recall. It’s a pretty common thing. The names thing is little easier to pass in books, because it isn’t hard to name a female character on the page, even if she is throwaway and tangential. The rest though – that happens much less frequently. I would just like us all to image a boy version of the Bechdel test, where we look for a book that fails that, a book where there are not two male characters who have names, they don’t talk to each other, and when they do, they only talk about women. Can you think of even one book or movie that fails this test? I don’t think so. And sure as shit, you can’t think of a hundred.

Revival, Volume 2: Winter isn’t Coming; It’s already Here

The second volume of Revival is not quiiite as awesome as Revival, Volume One: You’re Among Friends, but some of that is just the inevitable settling that occurs when reading a series which starts with such a bang. Revival, Volume Two: Live Like You Mean It collects issues 6-11 of the ongoing Revival series, which details the travails of the town of Wausau, Wisconsin in the days and weeks after a discrete number of their dead get back up.

These reanimated people aren’t cannibal shamblers, and the reanimation does not appear to be contagious. Although the setting, art style and dialogue is naturalistic, there’s an edge of the supernatural: rural noir, Midwestern Gothic. While the revived seem mostly unchanged, some are still…twitchy, and everyone is on edge. The town is quarantined; various jurisdictions jockey; locals sandbag the Feds; religious leaders attempt to score points; scumbags attempt to profit. You know, the usual with a civic trauma.

This second volume sinks into the boredom and profiteering of the quarantine, with minor revelations punctuated by lots of wheel spinning, both literal and metaphoric. Winter is deepening. I wasn’t real enamored of the meth brothers and their theatrics – it felt like too much of a red line under a point – but the several conversations between two central sisters, the weird, dumpy religious lady lit up with her faith, the Hmong woman’s monologue – all of this worked in the strange, understated, deflected language of my Midwestern people.

comic panel showing cops talking at a roadblock

Fuck it, Tim Seeley is my new boyfriend.

Reluctant Boy Readers: Peregrine Harker and the Black Death

I requested Peregrine Harker the Black Death from NetGalley because I have a shine for the Black Plague, and young adult novels about ridiculously awful social and bacteriological devastation appeal to me in the abstract. Unfortunately for this reader, it wasn’t really about bubonic plague. This book also skews younger than the young adult label implies, really more for the 10-14 demographic than late high school or slumming adults. There’s been a lot of fracture in the age distinctions for novels in the past however long – apparently there is a category called New Adult these days? – but I think that sometimes those distinctions can be fruitful. Or if not fruitful, than useful for readers to determine interest level.

Peregrine Harker the Black Death by Luke Hollands absolutely screams to me reluctant boy reader, with its parentless boy detective type first-person narrator who is a cross between the pre-radioactive-spider-bitten Peter Parker and Tin Tin. He is hauled in by a superior at the newspaper and ordered to stop going off on wild tangents, and then immediately goes off on a wild tangent that gets him knocked on the head and embroiled in a Scooby Doo style mystery. There’s some mild family angst, but everybody is too busy running around and avoiding being buried alive and the like to really delve into melodrama.

Everything is extremely action-driven, and moves fairly breathlessly around an almost overdone Victorian England. The prose is very pip pip cheerio old bean bloke lorry loo, and it took me a while to determine that this wasn’t meant to be funning on British prose style, but straight up. Or maybe it is funning after all, but it is very over the top in its Britishiosity. I didn’t exactly like this, but I think for the demographic who should be reading this, it would be fun and novel.

I’m going to admit here I didn’t finish Peregrine Harker the Black Death. A book aimed at boys who don’t like to read and therefore gives them scads and scads of action to the detriment of anything else a novel might provide isn’t really my bag. I think I’m sounding a little bitter here, but I don’t mean to go that way. Stylized action vehicles are completely valid, especially if you’re trying to sucker some snot-nosed brat into reading instead of Minecraft. I think my 9 year old, who is an unreluctant boy reader, would probably enjoy this as action fluff. Young people who are afraid that books might have girl cooties all over them will likely enjoy this too. This is mostly cootie-free.

But I don’t think somewhat mindless action vehicles are ultimately going to turn the reluctant reader into an avid one, because there’s not a lot of here here. I don’t believe that reading is ennobling, and I don’t think it has to be didactic or educational to be worthwhile. The things that make reading rewarding, or differently rewarding than building Legos or Mariocart – finely drawn (or even exaggerated) emotional states, engaging or challenging prose, thoughtful plotting, any kind of character study – are not in evidence here. And not that this one novel has to adhere to my cranky old standards or solve all the issues I have with how reading fits into other media, gendered divisions in marketing, and whatnot. A perfectly slap-happy read for someone other than me.

Red by Kate SeRine: Sunday reads

RED by Kate SeRine has a premise which could have borne some potent observations about storytelling and craft, but opts instead for sight gags and quipping. Which isn’t really a problem, per se, and as the book in my hands on a Sunday afternoon, REDacquitted itself with the right kind of large gestures and hijinks so that I could carry on distracted half-projects without losing the threads. Certainly, in the wrong mood, this squandered opportunity for insight could have rankled. But really, Sundays I’m looking for a Law & Order marathon kind of read, which is precisely what I got. Dun dun.

At some point in the last couple hundred years or so, the denizens of Make Believe were accidentally stranded in the here and now. Tales, as they are called, are functionally immortal, though they can be killed, and can have magical powers as depends on their origin stories. Characters from folk tales, nursery rhymes, Shakespeare plays, mythology – even the Bennet-Darcys make an appearance – all inhabit this secret Chicago. Tess Little was once Little Red Riding Hood, but is now some kind of enforcer for the Ministry of Magic or whatever its called in this here reality. She is paired with Nate Grimm, once and still a Grim Reaper, on a case involving the brutal murder of some Tales.

Which all sounds very dark and mysterious and stuff, but is actually treated quite lightly. Red’s a quipper and a wise ass, quite impressed with how she wears combat boots and keeps getting hauled in by her superiors for being a loose cannon and all, and a bit annoying as a first person voice. There’s a lot of perp interviews played for comedy, like with a now-prostitute Snow White or a tyrant-chef Caliban, which work as sight-gag and not much else. Caliban is where I felt the lack the most, given how tied up that character has become in post-colonial theory. “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t/ Is I know how to curse”, et cetera. But really, is expecting urban fantasy fluff to take on hardcore racial politics realistic?*

Anyway, per usual with girl-fluff, it is the stuff about gender politics that resonates the most in this here thing. Red has to go through a usual suspects list of ex-boyfriends in her search for the killer, starting with the Wolf and running down the bed-post notches of bad boys she has been with since he huffed and puffed and blew her down. The sequence with Vlad Dracula is probably the most amusing/insightful, what with the ways vampires have become such hot boyfriends despite/because of their predatory natures. Vlad pretty much comes off as a hot douche, and my apologies for the metaphor there.

And that is interesting cut against her obvious and mostly downplayed love interest with the living embodiment of death. I don’t have the energy to bother with this seriously, but Death tends to be a really mannered dude in fiction: playing chess, being played by Brad Pitt, etc. And that’s the way he is here: the good cop to her bad cop, the bad boy with the heart of gold, the black-eyed smolder, the initially unwanted but finally embraced partner in the detective plot. Again, this book is mostly interested in quipping, so any analysis I’m running is petty half-justified stuff, but I thought the bad boys who are douches run against bad boys who have table manners thing was credible.

The quipping can get boring though – much of this novel is clumsy, down to the prose – and Red’s motivations sometimes run to the usual romantic crazy. Death boyfriend explains some backstory to her and she goes bananas in a way that makes no sense. I mean, I would go bananas too, but not for the reasons she did, but then I’m slightly irrational when the mate-for-life trope is invoked. I don’t really want to get into this in a big way either, which makes this review a huge reticence on my part to say anything at all.

A favorite troll comment on a review is “You are reading this too critically” which absolutely burns my ass. Criticism reads critically, motherfucker. But it’s a fair comment here in some ways, because this is sloppy, quipping, half-assed stuff, good for a Sunday afternoon and not much else. I don’t think REDis a disaster – it doesn’t make me angry – but it also doesn’t say much beyond the half-things said in any paranormal: your past is not your future, love is a soul-twinning bondedness, etc. The first I think is fine; the second makes my ass twitch. So, same same as far as these thing tends to go for me. But at what cost? The Law & Order dude would say.

*That question might not be as rhetorical as I’m making it out to be, now that I’ve typed it, but whatever. Slamming this one book for the larger failures of UF/PNR to address race anything but superficially, if it all, is largely unfair. I think I’m just annoyed because there’s a really obvious entrance here to talk about race, and it’s hugely squandered. Squandered like so many things in a narrative about fairy tale persons made flesh, so it’s just one among many, but a big one. Dun dun.

Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

When I read Yellow Blue Tibia, I was struck by the lack: why isn’t there more more Soviet Noir? It seemed obvious when I saw it there: the world-weary gumshoe, the crushing, predatory bureaucracy, the hidden history that is the very history of authoritarian regime. The official story is such glossy fiction, wrapped like a carapace over the bleeding sinew of the body politic. Yellow Blue Tibiais less alternate history and more historiography, the speculative fiction of national narrative and the secret speech that underpins it. Though, of course, Americans were the most well voiced creators of the Noir genre, Noir seems attuned to the Soviet history in a weird way. The commissioner won’t just bust you down to the beat, but disappear your ass to the gulag. Soviets had some of the most fabulously Noir bureaucracies ever built, only sputteringly efficient, capricious, and absolutely deadly.

Wolfhound Centuryis a strange animal, existing in the tidal edges of genre, the marshlands that are moving silt. Backwater police Inspector Vissarion Lom is called in by high ranking police official in the capitol city Mirgorod to investigate a Moriarty-ish terrorist, and gets caught up in the wheels within wheels of the Noir plot. I wouldn’t call this densely plotted, as at least part of the time has to be spent introducing us to the world. In this, Wolfhound Centuryprobably has some similarities with Mieville’s The City & The City. And I say “probably” just because I’ve never read The City & The City, but gossip has it that the detective plot of C&C is maybe perfunctory, while the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma are not. I felt there was a good balance of world building and happening here, anyway, and the action is relatively breathless, if you’re into that sort of thing. Short chapters, shifting points of view, a fair amount of bloodshed once the stakes start escalating like floodwaters.

Much of the ornament and language is Soviet Russian, something I once knew enough about to be smart, but that has gone hazy for me. Still though, Mirgorod (which translates to “world city” or “peace city”) and its origin myths smack hard of Peter the Great, standing out over the swamp that would become St Petersberg with his near seven feet. Or the Akhmatova hat-tip, or the fact that the secret police are call the NKVD (this the precursor to the KGB), or any of a hundred things. But this is not our world, not an alternate history in the strictest sense. The Vlast with its great unconquerable forests stretching off to the west, the steampunk-ish mudjhiks, the fairy tale palubas like some thing Baba Yaga would create, the fallen angels hard and stony: all of these strange, fantastical things shift the Soviet history, twist it. All in all, I get the impression that Higgins’s grasp of history is very, very good, and his choice to set this in an alternate reality is pointed, not lazy.

I probably don’t even need to say this isn’t going to work for everyone – no novel does, even your darlings – but it sure worked for me. I usually get really cranky when writers eschew the alternate history in favor of Bullshit Fantasy Planet, where the writer constructs a near-simulacrum of a time period, but then fudges the details for the needs of the protagonists. (Later day steampunk is guilty of this a good deal, and high fantasy, don’t even get me started.) But that is not what happens here. This isn’t so much alt-history as coded history: the extremity of the details, the weirdness, the bent genres, all calling into relief the ugly extremity of history, its non-inevitability despite the fact that it happened, and so on. There’s a time leakage at the center of the plots, a breakage of possible futures and presents, and given the harsh relief between lived lives and the propagandistic gloss under Stalin, this sort of fantastic time slippery is just a beautiful metaphor.

There’s a character called Vishnik here, a member of old aristocracy who, for a time, managed to hide his manored upbringing. But discovery was inevitable, and he was deposed from the university where he taught. He became an archivist of Mirgorod, a sinecure which he more or less takes seriously. He has been recording the moments when the possible present splits from the actual one, and those moments are stoppingly beautiful, half out of time and within it like a gestating creature. There are dog’s brains within armored suits which smash the way they must. There are fallen angels – harshly alien – who are at war with the forest. God, this kind of encoding and inflection makes me all giddy, especially hitched to a Noir plot that has breathless short chapters that run and scream from one encounter to the next.

Here’s the thing: I’m not pumped about this ending. I don’t hate it. I get why we end in the marshlands outside Mirgorod, in the interstitial place of sinking land and silted water. That part works for me.

The world and everything in it, everything that is and was and will be, was the unfolding story of itself, and every separate thing in the world – every particle of rock and air and light, every life, every thought and every event – was also a story, its own story, the story of everything becoming more like itself and less like everything else. The might-be becoming the is. The winter moths, on their pheromone trails, intent on love and flight, were heroes.

But the confrontation between antagonists drags, feeling like this itchy diversion before the real confrontations, which, whoops, apparently won’t be happening in this book. I suppose I could work a justification here for why the book never comes to the final crisis – blah blah, something about the insignificance of individual will versus the state kind, etc – and certain personal trajectories are completed satisfactorily, but if there isn’t a second book, I will be a cranky cat indeed. So, Mr Peter Higgins, get on that shit.

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

I once got in a huge argument with some friends when they uttered the following statement in my presence: “The post-Soviet economic system is a much purer form of capitalism than our own.” In addition to being vague to the point of meaninglessness, this idea, which I’ve heard several times in different contexts, is such a ridiculously American piece of twaddle, uttered in comfy American living rooms while outside government continues to function and basic services are rendered. Adam Smith’s sherry-snorting little capitalist would piss himself yellow when confronted by a New Russian when he came to shake down the widget factory for protection money. Before you jump down my throat, yes, I am aware that the US is a total kleptocracy, and that for many Americans, basic services don’t even exist. But what bridles me about this statement is the almost wistful idealism – in the classic sense of the term – that goes along with this statement: look at those lucky Russians living out the American dream of a total lack of government! Think of everything we could get done if we dismantled public education, a state-maintained infrastructure, and even the pretense of a impartial court system!

In 1991, I went on exchange to the Soviet Union, to Minsk in Belarus specifically. (Although, it was called Byelorussia in those days. I can see why the name change – Byelorus means White Russia, but spoken aloud by English speakers, this sounds like Yellow Russia.) I was 16 years old, and typically naïve, although not in a particularly precious or nasty way. We were exhorted by the exchange leaders and chaperones to be mindful of not becoming the dreaded ugly American. We all very earnestly took this to heart, but in some very real way, there was nothing to be done about what a complete mindfuck was coming our way. Turns out, the Soviets viewed history entirely differently than Americans. I mean, duh, of course they do, but it’s one thing to say this, and another thing to walk around in place entirely steeped in an alternate history. It’s like someone took all the regular labels, and, I don’t know, rendered them into Cyrillic or something.

I’m being flip, but here’s an example: I know it may be hard to remember, but the Soviet Union and the US were both Allies in the War. When I say the War, I mean WWII, which the Russians would call the Great Patriotic War. The War sucked for the States, absolutely: rationing, tons of people dead, Japanese internment etc, but this is a completely different kind of sucking than the Russians experienced: cities laid siege, the countrysides burned to ash, the lack of basic munitions for the soldiery. (And this is assuming the soldiery were even, in the strictest sense, soldiers. There were tons and tons of statues in Minsk – rightly so – to the partisans who fought the Nazis with absolutely no military training or back-up of any kind.) So when Russians speak with pride about their part in War, it’s a fundamentally different kind of pride than an American would understand. It’s personal in a way an American transported on government ships, outfitted with government weapons and generaled by American military leaders cannot begin to understand. Again, caveats all around about your Grandpa and how he got screwed this one time, or LeMay and what an idiot he was or whatever. My point stands: your Grandfather didn’t have a gun to both his front and back when he went to war. I’m not saying his service is less valorous or whatever; I’m saying it’s entirely different. If it weren’t for this experience, I might have been able to go along with the statement above, because I would have understood the word “capitalism”, with it’s embedded widgets and labor and markets and all that crap in a very specific way, and then thought I could export those ideas with their nomenclature intact. Wrong. No way.

I have roughly seven thousand different anecdotes about how my mind was blown by this country that was filled with humans, flesh-and-blood recognizable humans, and how their sense of history, community, and individuality was entirely different from mine. Yellow Blue Tibiatakes place in this Soviet Union, and I’m afraid a good deal of my pleasure with this novel is intensely personal. Which is not to say it isn’t good, because it really, really is. Frankly, I’m a little pissed off I had never heard of Adam Roberts before Mike’s review turned me on to this. Yellow Blue Tibiais a thoughtful exploration of the idea of alternate history, both in the literary and the cultural senses, in this po-mo meta way, but don’t let that dissuade you. It’s also maybe the first example of the Soviet Noir, in this incredibly funny way that zips the California flat-foot backwards, but don’t let that dissuade you either.

I’ve started this review a couple of times, but each time I get into the swing of things, the freaking battery on my lappy fails, and I lose it all. I wised up at some point, and started saving regularly, but the whole thing has been so frustrating with lost passages and I feel so sick and irritated with trying to recreate them that I’ve decided to chuck it all and start over. It’s kind of perfect, in way – although this may be the sour grapes talking – because this book is partially about history and the ways it is perceived, the way those perceptions are enacted and enforced. For whatever reason, I’ve been reading a lot of fiction recently in the mode of alternate history, and then also stuff about the paranoid conspiracy. I’m beginning to think maybe history is a paranoid conspiracy. Seriously, don thine tin foil works of millinery and gather round for this one.

As I’m writing, I’m sitting on the back porch while firecrackers bang around me in the dark. It’s Forth of July weekend, and we Americans are reenacting our big F.U. to taxes and England and whatnot. Our country was founded on an oppositional basis: we are not a monarchy, we are not British, we are something other, and that other is not-you. The Brits kind of fell off as our bad-guy of choice, but we’ve always found another other, which probably reached it’s societal pinnacle of othering with the Cold War. And the reason our conflict with the Soviets was so freaking perfect was that at the very same time, they were writing themselves as not-us. (I guess when I say perfect, I mean horrible and infectiously engulfing, but you know what I mean.)

Yellow Blue Tibiatakes place in the Soviet Union in 1986, mostly, when the Soviet narrative was beginning to crack and fail, on a collective level. (Har har?) The same could be said about that time in the States: the Berlin Wall had fallen, Germany was nervously approaching reunification, and we were all kind of losing interest in the whole thing. Meh, it’s done. Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech was in ’83, but this was pretty much a punchline on the era – for cripe’s sakes man, clearly you have been reading too much science fiction! (Although, that little chestnut was dusted off after 9/11, as you may recall, just another piece of evidence of how un-charmingly Cold War Era our “security systems” still are/were.) Anyway, the protagonist, along with a number of other science fiction writers, was called by Stalin after the Great War to script the war-after-the-next-war. After the Soviets put down the Yanks, they would need a new enemy to fight, and that enemy, my friends, would be aliens.

They beaver away at it, script the entire invasion, until they are told to stop and never to speak of it again. Unlike an American in the same instance, this actually means something, so they don’t. I’ve always laughed my ass off at American conspiracies, because the idea of governmental competence on that level is a real knee-slapper. If there’s one thing a group of Americans can’t do, it’s shut the fuck up on an institutional level. A Stalin Era Soviet, however, knew the true murderous power of an effective government, at least when it came to shutting you the fuck up. So he shuts up, drinks roughly 8 million cubic shit-tons of vodka, dries out, and manages to make it to ’86 more or less intact. Then the real fit hits the shan. He’s contacted by another of the writers from the group, who pitches the idea that all their fictions are beginning to come true.

There’s a lot of snicker-snack and some zippy plot-driven origami at this point, and I won’t go too far into it for fear of spoilers. But woo-ey, it’s fun, and more mindful of character than your usual high-concept exercise. There are parts that got a little to expository for me, especially near the end, but wow is that first several hundred pages worth reading when compared to the only partially lumpy infodump near the end. And even though I’m complaining a little bit, I still thought the ideasworked and they worked well, reconciling all kind of craziness into a neat pile of half-smoked Russian cigarettes. Roberts is the most fun sci-fi writer you’ve never heard of. Sci-fi nerds, get out and read this as soon as you are able.

Fast Women by Jennifer Crusie

About a third of the way into Fast Women by Jennifer Crusie, I had to fold back and check the publication date. I was pretty sure this had to have been penned in the 80s, given the attitudes and assumptions of most of the cast. Nope! 2004. I’m not saying this is retrograde or backward or anything, just that it feels like a period piece of women of a certain class from my mother’s generation, and, in fact, it might make more sense if it had been set earlier than the late-90s. But, then, I’m not really a member of the socioeconomic milieu presented her, so maybe it’s entirely on the nose. I do totally know these women though, or I knew them 20 years ago.

Nell is a year past her divorce when she gets a job at a detective agency. She’s mid-40s with a grown son, and pretty mopey and gutted from the divorce. There are a lot of very broad hat tips to Noir plotting and tropes, in a way that was very goofy and fun, played for comedy instead of machismo. And probably explains some of the period piece feel of the novel; Crusie seems to be working out some things about the genre. Even the title is a misnomer, because these women are anything but fast, more a collection of stay at home moms, trophy wives and the tragic widows. I mean, who even uses the term secretary anymore? Even the broadest caricatures, like the girl who’s putting the blackmail to some assholes, is treated sympathetically – spoiler coming – even if she is ultimately fridged. But I get where Crusie is coming from, because I think the scene in Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade’s secretary rolls him a cigarette and then holds it out for him to lick the paper is damn near the sexiest thing I have ever seen, even though my late model feminist ass doesn’t…well, it just doesn’t.

Rwwrrr.

If you think about it, a lot of the comedy from the Noir stuff in Fast Womenis turned in a domestic direction, more about dogs and affairs than about money and international political whatever, which is an interesting shift, the kind of thing I think women’s fiction can be attuned to. And, in fact, the murder plot was the least satisfying, feeling almost incongruous with the tone of the thing. But given all the sublimated feminine rage and violence – there is a fair amount of kitchen and office smashing & burning – I don’t think it’s ultimately out of place here, even if it’s kinda badly plotted. I am not a slick mystery reader, and I saw many things coming miles away.

And, speaking of money, money what may be the weirdest part of this book, for this reader anyway. I’m going to refrain from telling divorce horror stories – you’re welcome – but I will just note that many women, especially of my mother’s generation, were deeply, personally, and financially fucked by their divorces. I’m not saying that divorce doesn’t suck for men too or anything – it is a drag when love dies, and the basic economic unit in America gets busted up – just that, if you look at the statistics, women fare much worse after a divorce, and especially if they have children. So this coterie of ladies who are swanning around post-divorce with no nevermind of money issues felt weird.

Or, that’s not really accurate – there is some nevermind – just that the exact nevermind felt very specific to a certain demographic, one that assumes dudes provide, and then dudes do. (And not the demographic that assumes that because of the bible and Jesus, but just because that’s the way men and molls have always done it, if you catch my distinction.) Again, some of this is the working out of Noir tropes, but then how those tropes intersect with suburban upper middle class values. My eyes still goggled a bit when Jack gets all bitter and pissy when Suze gets a checking account. (???) Or, Budge was seriously paying the bills for Margie for the last seven years, even though they are not married. (???) Who are these people??? In 2004???

Still, though, even though they are aliens, they are in some ways familiar aliens to me. I enjoyed? is this the right word? the parts where the ladies talked about all their china in vivid, personal detail. I am not, nor have I ever been, a dish person, but I know these women. I have been served tea by these women in their stately St Paul manses, after coming in the back door, because that is how the working class is to enter such a home. I remember talking with Sarah and Atherton – these are not their real names – Sarah relating to me that she had married Atherton assuming he had old money, and he had assumed the same of her, and then, knot tied, it turned out that, whoops! they were both socially climbing on each other. But they sucked it up and, 60 years later, had clawed their way into St Paul society. Their bridge partners kinda hated Sarah and her feisty red hair and real estate. (God, Sarah was feisty. I really dug her.)

But most of these women are gone now, these wives of Mad Man with steel in their spines and hard appraising looks. Maybe these women are their daughters, insulated from ways the world changed by money and society. Maybe the hardcore society ladies are different from the more middle class version here, but there’s still that sense of the whole wealth displayed through domesticity thing, or maybe it’s power, or who even knows what it is. Which is part of the exploration going on in this novel, even if is occasionally silly and weird and not something that makes any sense for me personally.

I mean, I don’t require novels to be about people who look just like me, and it can be cool and fun to slip into narratives that are earnest in their examinations, even if that examination is a breezy, screwball comedy about sexual slash financial power dynamics and screwing your secretary. Sure, there’s probably lots of more literary examinations of these things, something with, like, elaborate plotting and tense deconstruction of Noir tropes, instead of comic inflection. And those would be fun, but they wouldn’t be fun in the way this book is, which is chatty girl-talk and goofing about sometimes serious matters. Nice.

Sacrificial Magic: Right Book, Wrong Time

I forced this read, and I’m sorry, because I think I crimped my enjoyment. Sorry, Sacrificial Magic. You were the right book at the wrong time. Blame it on the library, which only lets me renew thrice before I have to return the book, and with 10 days left to go, I figured, screw it, I can read this in a Sunday.

I read the first three books of the Downside Ghosts series in one of those cabin porch hazes, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Chess Putnam is a ghostbuster (though this term is never used) in an alternate present: in the late 90s, murderous ghosts broke free into the world, killing maybe half the population of the earth. The only bulwark against this threat was The Church, a non-theistic organization which replaced all the other religious and governmental powers that be. But that’s all backstory; this series is about Chess and her city. Chess is a powerful fuckup with a seriously damaged past, someone who managed to claw up just barely to near-polite society through some native talent hitched to the driving need to get out of her squalid upbringing. But just barely. She’s a junkie and an emotional isolationist, and I just adore her.

The first three books felt to me like they ran an emotional arc, with the third, City of Ghosts, rising to a crescendo of things I’d barely noticed hanging around on the edges twisting together into a big explosive clusterfuck. God, that was just grand. So, here, in Sacrificial Magic, I feel like we’re restarting a trajectory which will run for the next couple of books, and I’m just a little let down. It’s not that this book is place-holding, it is that it’s piece-moving. I liked a lot of the piece-moving, but, as I said, I forced it.

I think for me the weakest parts of this series tend to be the ghostbusting Church plots. Chess is given an assignment, and in a sort of Noir-lite manner, that assignment intersects with her Street life, her dealers, her drug use, etc. Here the Church assignment felt especially weak, with too many people I didn’t give boo about and couldn’t differentiate doing things way too sins-of-the-past for me to respond. The assignment had to do with a high school, which gives framework for Chess to ruminate about her shitty education and upbringing, and that part I really enjoyed, as I did her tense and fractious relationships with Terrible, Lex, and Beulah. And hoorah, I’m loving that Chess finally has a female friend – and that she realizes she has friends at all.

Pretty much with this book I was just shipping for Chess and Terrible, which is super fun, don’t get me wrong, but it made me feel a little antsy when the high school ghost plot was unfolding. Get out of the way, plot! Let us freak out about their last conversation! And the fact that Chess is still a huge junkie, the way she manages and feeds her addictions, continues to be one of the selling points of this series. There’s a scene where she notices others noticing her usage, and she gets really jealous and freaks: this is mine. This is my addiction. Quit looking. That we’re on book four, and Chess hasn’t had a big After School Special moment where she realizes Drugs Are Bad – addicts know drugs are bad, kids – is a very brave choice on the part of Kane. There are no easy answers, and the knowledge that you are fucked up beyond belief doesn’t magically cure you of the fuck up. Even addiction is one day at a time. Or one book at the wrong time; sorry again.

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