Author: katenepveu

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Macdonald, James D.: (04) The Apocalypse Door

I knew I had to read James D. Macdonald’s The Apocalypse Door right from its opening paragraphs:

When Dante Alighieri wrote his guided tour of Hell one of the stops was the infernal city of Dis: the home of Pandemonium, all of the demons. Dante’s a great source if you want to figure out whether being an adulterer is better or worse than being an oathbreaker, but he doesn’t have the authority of Gospel. Dante said that the lowest circle of Hell is frozen, for example. Me, I don’t believe it.

Newark, New Jersey, isn’t the City of Dis, but it could play the part on TV without having to spend a lot of time in rehearsals. By day, Newark’s crowded and noisy and polluted, full of too many people going places too fast in pursuit of money or power or pleasure. By night it’s all that and dark as well, with danger waiting in the shadows to catch the unwary.

I’d just finished a job in Canada, checking out a report of Black Masses being celebrated, and was on a get-well tour in New York, staying in a midtown Manhattan hotel and waiting for the stitches to come out. Breakfast was Eggs Benedict. When I’m on the Temple’s expense account I don’t spare my coronary arteries.

Yeah, I’m a Knight of the Temple. We didn’t go away in the fourteenth century, no matter what Philip the Fair tried to pull. The Order has a mission and we’re carrying it out. To protect holy places, travelers in holy places, and certain relics. Straightforward. You’d think that people would let us just get on with it.

I read the first chapter on the author’s website, and when I hit “Yeah, I’m a Knight of the Temple,” I said out loud, “We are so buying this.” And we did.

Chad beat me to reading it, the day it arrived from Amazon, by the simple expedient of picking it up while my back was turned to check my e-mail. I see from the comments to his booklog entry that a couple of people have already decided to check this out. If you weren’t hooked by the opening or Chad’s review, let me take another shot at convincing you that you really do need to read this book.

The initial setup should be fairly obvious from that quotation: the story is narrated in First Person Hardboiled by Peter Crossman (not his original name), a warrior priest in the innermost circle of the Temple. He gets tapped to investigate a longshot lead in the disappearance of some UN peacekeepers: a warehouse in Newark with unusually serious security. It’s expected to be an easy job; it’s even going to serve as an on-the-job evaluation of a new Knight. When they break in, they don’t find the bodies of the missing peacekeepers; what they do find, growing in a crate, is something like mushroom stalks. That bleed when broken and recoil at the sign of the Cross.

This book is impressive because it manages to come up with wacky situations like eeeevil fungi (at one point while reading, I got up for a drink of water and commented to Chad, “Running the good cop/bad cop on a talking brass head . . . !”) while still taking its characters seriously. The warrior priest thing isn’t just a gag (or the assassin nun thing either—did I mention Sister Mary Magdalene of the Special Action Executive of the Poor Clares?), but part of the characters all the way down. Crossman gets caught in an ethical bind when his would-be assassin tells him, under the seal of the confessional, that she intends to kill him; discovers that giving last rites to someone who’s has his face sliced off is somewhat awkward; and asks if the dead people who just tried to kill him made good confessions earlier in the day. As you’d expect from a good sf writer, the implications of the setup have been thoroughly worked out. Which is not to say that there isn’t a joke in it sometimes.

I glanced over at Maggie. “Say, Mags—if this doesn’t work, when I get out of Purgatory do you mind if I look you up?”

She took my meaning. In Heaven there’s no marriage or giving in marriage, but no one ever said that there isn’t any fooling around.

I should also note that there’s a backstory thread interwoven with the present-day chapters. It does actually have a point, so stick with it at least the first time through. (I admit that when the point arrived, I wanted to pat the character on the head and say, “Don’t worry. It’s all ineffable,” but I suspect that the character hasn’t read Good Omens.)

Finally, it has a nifty cover (big image at Amazon, which is being weird again and claiming it’s not yet published.). At first glance, it looks like a fairly standard action/mystery cover: guy in shadow holding big guns against a vaguely flame-like background. Look closer, though: that’s a priest’s collar and a crucifix, not a tie, and a cathedral in the background.

The Apocalypse Door is a short, fast, tight book that’s just a heck of a lot of fun. Go read it. (And then read the Mageworlds books too, while you’re at it.)

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Smith, Sherwood: Wren to the Rescue; Wren’s Quest; Wren’s War

Sherwood Smith’s Wren Trilogy (Wren to the Rescue, Wren’s Quest, Wren’s War) ought to be really good, but it isn’t, and I can’t put my finger on why, which is annoying. (And no, it’s not just the cold pills, because I started reading these before the cold.) These are YA novels that appear to be comprehensively out of print; I got them out of the library.

Wren is an orphan who dreams of adventure. At the start of the series, she discovers that someone in the orphanage is really a princess in disguise—her best friend, not her. Tess (Princess Teressa) has been hidden in the orphanage because a wicked ruler threatened to kidnap any child of her father’s. Now, her parents think it’s safe to start bringing her out of hiding. They are, of course, wrong. Tess is almost immediately kidnapped, and it’s (you guessed it) Wren to the rescue. Along the way, Wren discovers she has an aptitude for magic. In the second book, Wren goes questing for her family. As an adopted kid, I’m rather sensitive to treatments of this topic, but it’s handled fairly well here. Meanwhile, back at the ranch [*], the court is experiencing an unusual level of tension; not only that, but Wren and Connor, her companion, find themselves pursued by sinister types. In the third book, there is indeed a war, though it’s not only Wren’s.

Wren is a great character, unaffected and full of cheerful pragmatism. She very vaguely reminds me of Lyra in Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, only less feral (bearing in mind that it’s been a while since I read those). Tess isn’t bad either, at least at first; I started disliking her towards the end of the second book, because while all the characters make mistakes, hers towards the end of the second and in the third seemed particularly stupid to me. The other two main characters are Tyron and Connor, who help the rescue in the first book and end up becoming friends with Wren and Tess. (Connor, in the usual fashion of inbred royal families, is also Tess’s half-uncle. The family tree in the front of the books is pretty scary at first glance, but it’s there for a reason.)

So there’s a good lead character, magic, and intrigue; what’s wrong with these? I wish I could say. I think it might have something to do with their incluing. (As in, how they clue a reader in. Jo Walton’s term.) A number of times I found myself saying, “Where did that come from?” Sometimes I’m not the most careful reader, but I’m pretty sure that I would have noticed these things if they’d been mentioned earlier. Parts of the plot aren’t sufficiently in the foreground, perhaps. I can’t quite articulate it, which inability is perhaps making more annoyed with these than I ought to be. Anyway, much as I enjoyed the Exordium series, I can’t really say I recommend these.

[*] There’s a lot of transitions of the form “just as X was doing Y, Z was doing Q elsewhere” in these. Normally, I would never notice this, but thanks to Lemony Snicket, every time I came across one, a voice at the back of my skull said, “Meanwhile, back at the ranch . . . “

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Lackey, Mercedes: Take a Thief

I’ve mostly stopped reading new books by Mercedes Lackey, but Take a Thief looked like it might be acceptably mindless lunchtime reading, so I took it out of the library. When we first met Skif in Arrows of the Queen, there was a throwaway comment about his past that suggested there was more to him than was immediately apparent. Take a Thief tells that story, describing Skif’s life as a, well, thief, and his first experiences as a Herald-Trainee.

I actually finished this almost a week ago, but I’ve been very busy and haven’t had time to log it. Of course, that busyness is probably why I came home early with a cold (not an ear infection, according to the doctor, which is something at least). Anyway, this was almost a perfectly serviceable book. The first half or so is the sort of how-to that I find oddly soothing, even if it’s “how to survive on the street by stealing.” The second half is sort of a how-to as well, “how to seek revenge while starting at Herald’s Collegium.” And it’s less twee than much of Lackey, though the big temptation scene at the end is badly overdone.

However. I hate, loathe, and despise dialogue written in dialect. And almost every spoken line in the first half is, well, here’s a sample from a random page: “What’s doin’s?” “Dunno fer certain-sure. Summun sez a couple toughs come in an’ wrecked t’place, summun sez no, ’twas a fight, an’ ev’un sez summun’s croaked, or near it.” There’s more to that exchange, but I can’t bear to type it. If I wasn’t an accomplished text skimmer, I would never have made it through this, and I can’t say that I’d recommend it to anyone over the age of 13.

And now the cold pills are starting to kick in, so I think I’m going to go lie down and read something else.

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Gorey, Edward: Amphigorey (omnibus)

It seems appropriate to log Edward Gorey’s Amphigorey on Halloween; I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but never got around to it, plus I dipped into The Unstrung Harp a night or two ago. This is a collection of fifteen books, including the only two Goreys I’d heard of before, The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Curious Sofa.

I really enjoyed The Unstrung Harp, or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel. I love the way all the characters have these flat hammer-heads protruding forward from their necks and no eyelids; they look so comically, tragically anxious. (Amazon has some illustrations; try the covers and page 5.) And the writing is wonderful:

Mr Earbrass has been rashly skimming through the early chapters, which he has not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why didn’t he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why aren’t there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?

As far as the rest of the works: I think there’s just something about graphical depictions that I’m really susceptible to. Prose stories, no problem—with the exception of The Shining, no book I’ve ever read has really frightened me. But I don’t watch movies that are even very tense (for instance, at some point most of the way through Unbreakable, I realized I was just Not Enjoying Myself, and so I shut my eyes for the rest), and I was really rather creeped out by much of Amphigorey. And not just because, according to The Gashlycrumb Tinies, “K is for Kate who was struck with an axe.” There really does seem to be something about having the images that goes straight to my backbrain.

Of course, a whole lot of these are objectively dark. Besides The Gashlycrumb Tinies, there’s The Hapless Child, which is about just that; The Insect God, in which we meet, very briefly, another hapless child; The Listing Attic, a series of limericks which includes “There was a young curate whose brain / Was deranged from the use of cocaine; / He lured a small child / To a copse dark and wild, / Where he beat it to death with his cane.” (The illustration for that one is particularly chilling.) Some of the limericks are in French, so I can’t understand them, but I bet they aren’t any cheerier.

Even The Curious Sofa, “a pornographic work by Ogdred Weary,” was disturbing, all the more so because everything is presented by implication. This is mostly amusing, as when we are told that Alice, “Looking out the window[,] saw Herbert, Albert, and Harold, the gardener, an exceptionally well-made youth, disporting themselves on the lawn. They were soon joined by Donald, Herbert’s singularly well-favoured sheepdog, and many were the giggles and barks that came from the shrubbery.” (All of the men are well-set-up, or well-shaped, or whatnot. When I mentioned this to Chad, he said, “Gorey was gay, you know.” Well, I didn’t.) Almost all of the prose, taken alone, is quite innocuous, and visually, there isn’t a naughty bit (as my former First Amendment professor, regrettably, would say) to be seen. So one’s imagination is free to roam. Unfortunately, I’m not creative enough to imagine what the “Lithuanian Typewriter” might be, so I’m instead left to contemplate the sentence “Still later Gerald did a terrible thing to Elsie with a saucepan,” and the truly vicious smile on Gerald’s face as he lunges out of the frame. And, of course, the sofa of the title.

This is all a long way of saying that I don’t like creepy stories with someone else’s visuals attached. If you aren’t as susceptible to that as I am, I do recommend this. (Chad also liked it, and commented about it on his book log.) As I said, The Unstrung Harp is great, and even the books I didn’t much care for have a very distinctive wit (I confess to being somewhat fond of “M is for Maud who was swept out to sea / N is for Neville who died of ennui”).

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Coville, Bruce: Into the Land of the Unicorns; Song of the Wanderer

After finishing The Sign of Four, I gave some children’s books by Bruce Coville a shot, specifically the first two books of the Unicorn Chronicles, Into the Land of the Unicorns and Song of the Wanderer. I’d vaguely heard good things about Coville for a while, but never read any of his stuff. Chad’s mom went to a breakfast presentation by him last week, and snagged a book for us. Unfortunately, it was the second book, but she also had the first one around—which is incredibly short, so it was no problem to read it while I was lounging around Sunday.

These might be good, but I’m too old for them—which was somewhat of a surprise to me, considering the amount of YA stuff I read. On the other hand, these are children’s books, not YA books, and it does make a difference. For one thing, they’re twee. I mean, unicorns: not your interestingly revised unicorns à la Pamela Dean’s Secret Country books, either, but your standard beautiful sparkly noble healing unicorns. Also, the prose kept calling Thog’s Masterclass to mind. One line from the first book stuck in my mind: after a unicorn clears a pond with his horn, we are told that drinking the water “was like drinking diamonds.” Ouch.

There are a few interesting things about these: a nice throwaway line in the first about the dual nature of chains, for instance, and a pretty good conceit behind the main villain. But mostly I’m just too old for these, too old and too cynical to not see the plot twists coming from a mile away, to put up with the twee worldbuilding, and to overlook the level of the prose.

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (02) The Sign of Four

Read a few things over the weekend. First, I finished The Sign of Four, by Arthur Conan Doyle. This is the second Holmes/Watson novel, and considerably better than the first, as it doesn’t derail in the middle for unnecessary exposition. I’m a little puzzled by the title, since most of the time the phrase appears in the story, it’s as the Sign of the Four. Doyle definitely likes the sensational; the introduction calls it “a rousing Grand Guignol of a mystery involving lost treasure, grotesque twins, [and other things that are spoilers].” My understanding of “Grand Guignol” is that it’s even more over the top than this, but one can’t dispute the characterization otherwise. I should note that it’s an ongoing explanation type of mystery, however, not the one-big-revelation sort. (I don’t think the chase scene is as good as the writer of the introduction does, though.)

In character news: Holmes, still sporadically annoying. Watson, still a pretty good bloke. Mary, Watson’s eventual wife: does, indeed, possess a name, though barely has a personality, though Holmes does give her something of a compliment at the end (I note that Irene Adler makes her appearance in the very next story). Somehow, it fails to surprise me that Doyle should not do romance well.

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (01) A Study in Scarlet

Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet is the first Sherlock Holmes story and kind of an odd one. The title refers to the famous image of “Rache” written on the wall in blood above a murdered man, which I imagine any number of writers have borrowed over the years (I seem to recall Diana Gabaldon doing so in Drums of Autumn, for instance, though I don’t have my copy to check).

Though I believed this is considered a novel, it’s really more a novella, running to a hundred pages in my paperback copy. What’s more, nearly half of it is a strange interlude, which provides the backstory for one of the characters. It strikes me as a poor narrative choice; not only does it kill the momentum of the story, but it’s presented in a very awkward omniscient voice. (It also contains a highly unflattering portrait of the early days of the Mormon Church, if that matters. I have no idea how accurate it is [a quick Google mostly turns up sources with axes to grind], but I wouldn’t be surprised if Doyle had taken some liberties; “The Five Orange Pips,” for instance, struck me as rather too sensational to be based in fact.)

I did get more of a sense of Watson’s character from this book, as I’d hoped. He seems like a reasonably decent sort, for his time and place. What’s more, the introduction to this edition (“On the Significance of Boswells,” by Loren D. Estleman; it’s the Bantam Classic two-volume complete collection, those very brown paperbacks) indicates that Holmes continues to evolve as a character over the series (and not just in how many times he’s been married). I’m looking forward to seeing that, because Holmes really is a jerk at times—more noticeably so in this story. Then again, I suppose the drugs may have something to do with that (having just read the first page or two of The Sign of Four) . . .

I note in passing that it’s interesting that, in this story, Holmes speaks of actually earning money from his detecting. In the short stories in Adventures, I recall nary a mention of Holmes pocketing any fees, and indeed, a few people say they’ve come to him because they’ve heard he’ll help poor people for free. I wonder if the few wealthy clients paid him off-camera, or maybe he’d amassed a private fortune in the meantime?

Going back to the story: I think A Study in Scarlet is a perfectly good fifty page story with an unfortunate growth in its middle. I imagine one could skip the historical digression entirely and not miss much, and I rather recommend doing so.

[ In other news, I’ve installed a new version of BlogKomm. You can now subscribe to comments threads that you’ve posted to—just check the appropriate box, and you’ll get any new comments in the thread via e-mail. (Of course, this means you have to 1) post and 2) leave your e-mail address when you do so, so not everyone will be able to use it.) Do let me know what you think of it, and please send me any bugs or issues. The developer is very responsive and I’ll pass your comments along.

(The new version also has an alternative notify feature, where you can e-mail a particular person to tell them that you’ve responded to their comment. I’ve chosen to enable the subscription instead, since comments threads on this book log tend to be fairly focused, but again, I’m open to feedback.) ]

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Robb, J.D.: (07) Holiday in Death

A little while ago, when I was wandering around trying to decide what to read (and eventually settling on Lords and Ladies), I thought to myself, “Gee, a J.D. Robb book would really hit the spot. Too bad I don’t have any on hand besides Purity in Death, which I just read.” The next day, I went looking for a lunchtime book at work, and lo and behold, there on the shelves of the paperback exchange was a copy of Holiday in Death. Handy, that.

I read this over lunches and finished it today; it’s a pretty standard sexual-serial-killer episode. I particularly like the bits with Eve buying presents (shudders at having to soon start thinking of ideas for Christmas presents; just about everyone on my list is impossible to buy for . . . ).

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Duane, Diane: (103) High Wizardry

A few days ago, I was in mourning for my copy of High Wizardry, by Diane Duane, which is in storage somewhere. Yesterday, what should I see in the library but High Wizardry? Clearly, it was A Sign, so I checked it out and did a fast re-read yesterday and today.

This is definitely my favorite of the series, and probably its high point too (no pun intended). Nita’s kid sister Dairine (and if anyone can tell me how you pronounce that, I’ll be very grateful) has been offered wizardry at a very young age. The younger the wizard, the more vulnerable—but also the more powerful. The Powers clearly want Dairine to tackle a very big problem . . .

I love the last hundred pages of this—sense-of-wonder at its finest—so much that I can forget, between readings, the blatant scientific error behind one of the cool plot devices. [1] However, reconciling the end of this with the subsequent books is something of a dubious proposition. After this re-read, I suspect more strongly than ever that this was meant to be the last book in a trilogy (as I speculated a few days ago, in a post about A Wizard Alone). To me, this isn’t a book-destroying kind of problem, but it is a minor annoyance to have to pretend that subsequent books take place in a slightly alternate universe.

[1] If you’ve read the book and are curious, I posted about this to Usenet a while ago. Warning: these naturally contain spoilers. Here’s my original post, and some follow-ups that didn’t thread properly.

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Conan Doyle, Arthur: (03) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Several months ago, I was browsing our Local Independent Bookstore with Chad and his parents, and discovered a rather nifty trade paperback, The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a reproduction of all of the Holmes stories that originally appeared in The Strand magazine, together with their illustrations. I thought this was kind of a neat way to read the stories, and it was fairly cheap ($8 for what was effectively four volumes), but for some reason I was dithering over whether to buy it. Chad’s mom asked to see it as I was wandering around looking at other things; I, thinking nothing of it, handed it over. Five minutes later she walked up and handed it back to me, in a store bag, and said, “Happy Easter, Kate.” I was impressed—I had no idea she could be that sneaky . . .

Anyway, I appreciated the thought then, and now that I’ve actually got around to reading some of it, I appreciate the fact, too. Believe it or not, these are the first Sherlock Holmes stories I’ve read. (I may have read one of the novels when I was far too young to appreciate it, but I don’t really recall anything about it.) I have no idea how I managed to get this far without doing so, but I’m definitely enjoying them now.

The first set of stories was apparently collected as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and includes some fairly famous ones. The first, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” is apparently our only in-canon glimpse of Irene Adler, who was always the woman to Holmes, probably because she managed to outwit him. She is the heroine of a series by Carole Nelson Douglas, which I may have to try after I’m done with the Holmes canon; I wasn’t impressed by her cat mysteries, but I think I have heard good things about these. A friend tells me that someone has advanced the meta-fictional theory that she and Holmes had an off-camera liaison which produced Nero Wolfe. I rather wish I hadn’t heard that before my first encounter with Holmes, because it was quite distracting . . .

These were mostly fun puzzles, though in a few places, I couldn’t help but remember Samuel Vimes’ famous opinion on Clues:

He distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. (Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay)

However, the puzzles were enjoyably imaginative and bizarre, even if they stretch credulity here and there. (For instance, I don’t buy that she would have called it a “speckled band.”) The odd thing is that I presently have very little sense of Watson’s personality. (And nevermind personality—as far as I can tell from these, Watson’s wife doesn’t have a name . . . ) I suppose this is the problem with starting with short stories; I’ve picked up A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four and will read those before going back to my nifty Strand collection. I’m looking forward to them.

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