Author: Scott Lynch

2006, Bantam Spectra

Filed under: Fantasy,  Sci-Fi

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In The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch has created an incredibly unique world, populated it with engaging characters, and orchestrated a driving, action-filled plot.

This book features one of the best, and most pertinent, prologues written in the fantasy genre. We get introduced to the protagonist from the eyes of two very different thieves—Chains and the Thiefmaker. Most prologues are written from incredible distance and only give a sense of pre-destiny, myth, and/or a generic world setting. Lynch delivers main character backstory while simultaneously introducing us to his world. After exiting the prologue, I was aching to know more about Locke Lamora and what thievery and mischief has got him into so much trouble.

Locke Lamora is an unassuming master thief operating in a corrupt and violent society dominated by a ruling elite class and a gang-filled criminal underworld. Locke needs every bit of his skill, and cunning, and luck to survive. From the very onset, each of Lynch’s characters is in a state of jeopardy and one can’t help but wonder if someone will perish at the turn of the next page.

Lynch possesses a good sense of timing and an awareness of reader’s expectations as well. The slow initial development of the Lockes’s latest ploy, which dipped a little to near a paean of how great a thief he is, is righted when Lynch deftly turns the story. Locke (along with his gang of Gentleman Bastards) is not, in fact, too smart by half. Lynch raises his characters only so far before putting the screws to them. He thrusts them into a near impossible scenario whose unfolding propels the reader through the remainder of the book.

Locke Lamora is told in the third person omniscient. The knowledge possessed by the narrator manages to broaden our understanding of the world while showing restraint from peering too deeply into any particular character’s motive, thus avoiding the sloppy narration that too-often plagues fantasy novels by giving away what is about to happen and cheapening the unfolding drama. The “he would later learn that” crutch is rarely employed, sustaining the reader’s fear for the characters’ survival. By interweaving the backstory of both the characters and the world throughout the chapters, the exposition is inserted in a way that never feels forced or shoehorned. Never is an interlude disruptive, irrelevant, or something you’d rather skim past.

Lynch also writes setting well. He teases out his wonderfully realized city of Camoor in a way that immediately grasps the reader’s attention. There are no spoon-fed explanations for the details of the world, he instead places his trust in the reader, allowing for a world of greater depth to grow in the reader’s imagination.  Lynch’s world is one that has eked out an existence from the ruins of a former great society. The former civilization possessed a technology and science well beyond the reach of the current society and the evidence is in the architecture and lighting of the main city, Camoor.

Magic, too, is uniquely handled in this story. It is predominantly alchemical. That’s not to say that there aren’t mages in Lynch’s fantasy though. There are, and one in particular–the Bondsmage–plays a pivotal role. Mostly about mind and body control rather than more than the traditional sorcery of lightning bolts and fireballs, the magic in Lock Lamora is a combination of witchcraft and voodoo. Despite the absence of “flair” in this type of magic, the Bondsmage in this story is incredibly menacing.

Unlike many of its fantasy contemporaries, The Lies of Locke Lamora is a stand alone novel. It doesn’t need to be part of a series: rich characters, an immersive world, and strong plot puts Lynch in the elite company of George R.R. Martin and the like. I recommend this to anyone seeking a rewarding break from the sweeping fantasy epic form.

Similar Reads: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, The Black Company by Glen Cook, The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Reviewer’s Note: I read this book based on a friend’s recommendation. Thank you, Todd!

2011, Atria

Filed under: Thriller

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Kill Shot is Vince Flynn’s 12th novel to feature the assassin Mitch Rapp. It’s the second of those twelve in chronological order, a prequel of sorts, focusing on Rapp’s first year or so as a full-fledged CIA assassin.

His assignment: to systematically hunt and kill the members of the vast, vague terrorist network that killed 270 people in the Lockerbie/Pan Am attack (which is real). One of those people, in a rather pat motivational backstory, was Rapp’s girlfriend.

Because the terrorists Rapp kills all know each other, they soon catch onto Rapp’s mission and set a trap: they send the Libyan oil minister to a fancy hotel room in Paris, a ripe, easy target. When Rapp bursts in, he finds a secret squad of machine gun-wielding terrorists who fire about a thousand rounds at him (but he luckily escapes).

The world of Kill Shot, like a lot of airport fiction, requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. Flynn reports the effects of gunshot wounds and phone taps with fetishistic detail, but realism is nowhere to be found in Rapp’s cartoonish ability to survive quite preposterous situations.

However, Flynn does try to blur the lines between good guys and bad guys, offering a couple of double agents with questionable, ostensibly noble motives. Sadly, that simple moral gray area is well above average in a genre that likes to play wish fulfillment with clearly demarcated Good Guys and Bad Guys.

As far as that goes, Mitch Rapp is an unquestionable Good Guy, and he’s the perfect assassin, which annihilates any kind of real drama that might accidentally build at any point. You know he’s not going to be killed (after all, he has at least 10 subsequent novels to star in), and the only real question is whether he finds the source of a leak in the CIA, or whether he cuts with the American government forever.

The problem with Kill Shot isn’t so much that Rapp’s story is boring or formulaic—that’s to be expected—the problem is that Flynn shows us just a hint of a storyline that would’ve made for a much better thriller.

During the novel, Flynn flits between a dozen or so different perspectives, spending at least half the novel with characters other than Rapp. A lot of this is unnecessary and boring (like the CIA politicking, which is almost as dull as any intra-office maneuvering), and it underlines the fact that Rapp’s relatively simple story isn’t quite novel-sized.

But one of these B-stories is downright good. It concerns a high-ranking French police detective named Francine Neville, who gets assigned to the baffling result of an assassination gone wrong—nine dead bodies in a fancy hotel in the middle of Paris. Four men with suppressed automatic weapons are dead in a hotel room, along with a Libyan diplomat, a prostitute, and three civilians in the hallway. The French government claims that the men are the Libyan’s bodyguards, but that logic doesn’t hold water and Neville knows it.

To make matters worse, it looks like someone tampered with evidence, and that someone might be a high-ranking french’s gent in the French equivalent of the FBI, and he carries secret, questionable motives. If Neville goes after him, he could pull rank or personally attack her or both. Neville’s story is one of vulnerability and courage. It’s genuine drama.

Mitch Rapp has the skills and psychological makeup to simply disappear if things get too hairy. He has worldly contacts and extensive training in espionage and survival tactics. He’s 25, he has few emotional burdens, he’s in peak physical condition, and he’s fluent in several languages. He doesn’t have much to lose. Francine Neville, on the other hand, has a husband and a child, and a hard-won, fragile career that enemies could try to destroy. She has big weaknesses and so her actions, which propel her forward in spite of those weaknesses, create great suspense.

In short, Neville’s story all the standard elements of a simple, compelling thriller. While her and Rapp’s storylines are satisfying in the common-denominator way that all stock thrillers are (you know the good guys will win, and it feels good to watch them win), only Neville’s story really captivates and entertains. The downside to it is that it comprises perhaps 50 pages of Kill Shot’s nearly 400, and skitters away without even a pretense of an ending.

But, you know, endings are hard.

Similar books: Iron House, by John Hart; Fun & Games, by Duane Swierczynski; The Wreckage, by Michael Robotham

Author: Rod Rees

2011, William Morrow

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Goodreads

This was my own fault. I’d been reading a lot of books that were good, but not very memorable. I wanted something that would get my juices flowing, and that meant either a really good book… or a really bad one. Bad books are much easier to find.

I’d taken a look at the The Demi-Monde: Winter a few weeks before, and I’d given up because its writing, even in just the first few pages, was wretched—full of cliches and clunkily unpoetic. But then, wanting a bad book, I turned back. And I got a bad book. I got everything I was asking for and much, much more. I barely made it through a hundred of Rees’s dense, awful pages before I had to put it back down. This review will be less a review than a catalog of what makes this book so bad. Take a deep breath.

Premise

In the year 2018, the “Demi-Monde” is an elaborate computer simulation made to train military cadets to fight in “asymmetric warfare environments” like Iraq and Afghanistan. The bulk of the action, as you might guess, will take place inside the simulation.

So far, this is a solid, if boring, idea. It’s also rather dramatically weak. Militaries use a lot of simulations, and they use them because there’s no risk for the participants. But “no risk involved” is not a good recipe for a thrilling novel, so Rees has to turn up the heat. Unfortunately, a concussed 5-year-old could come up with a more coherent imaginary world.

First of all, there’s a critical flaw in the Demi-Monde itself: if you die inside it, you die in real life, much like the Matrix. That makes it a more interesting place to set a thriller, but an utterly ludicrous method of training your army personnel. If a simulation is actually life-threatening, what’s the point of it? Just send your recruits straight into battle, where at least their deaths might not be entirely in vain.

Next up in Rod Rees’s cavalcade of bad ideas: the fact that the Demi-Monde is restricted to technology from the 1870s. A military simulation in 2018 teaches its participants how to use muskets. By gaslight. Ugh.

To make matters more ridiculous, all of the computer-controlled NPCs in the Demi-Monde (called “Dupes” or duplicates) are vampires. Why? Because the moronic simulation-designers needed a reason for everyone to be fighting all the time. And yes, they made a point of modeling their Dupes on history’s most notorious murderers and villains, but they needed another reason. They also programmed religious conflict literally into the dupes’ DNA, but they needed yet another reason for everyone to fight all the time. So they made the Dupes vampires, who must consume a lot of human blood every day in order to survive. Unfortunately the Dupes don’t have any human blood, only the army recruits (called, excruciatingly, “neoFights”) have blood. So every time the army sends in recruits, the Dupes capture them and turn them into living blood farms. The army can’t unplug them or wake them up because they’ll die.

Here’s another moronic detail: before the soldiers-in-training are dropped into the Demi-Monde, they are each implanted with a nano-computer that gives them a nearly unlimited store of knowledge about combat techniques, important people, terrain, etc. Remember, the Demi-Monde is itself a training ground for some other greater war. So, as I found myself asking, why don’t they use the nanocomputers to train their soldiers instead of this stupid simulation?

After considering all of these painfully stupid facets of this painfully stupid premise, it becomes clear that the Demi-Monde is not a simulation and was never intended to be. If it was, it would be the worst, most idiotic simulation in the history of the world. There’s a big plot twist down the road, and Rees thinks that we readers are as stupid as his characters (more on that in a minute), and can’t see it coming. But, of course, we can.

Plot

“Why don’t you just cut bait and close it down?” says the voice of reason in the person of one of the book’s heroes, Ella Thomas.

“Somehow,” an idiot Demi-Monde designer replies, “Norma Williams, the daughter of the president, has become lost in the Demi-Monde.”

Dear Rod Rees, please go look up “deus ex machina” and then never write again.

Characters

Ella Thomas is an 18-year-old black female jazz singer and genius. She talks like this, “‘Are you on the level? You’re not just blowing me shit… winding me up?’” and she thinks like this, “Jazz was so unhip it had a limp,” and also like this, “I ain’t got a ‘racial aspect.’ I’ve got a black skin.”

And then sometimes she talks like this, “I don’t wish to seem brutal,” and sometimes she thinks like this, “He looked like an undertaker, though his long, Roman nose, his dark button eyes that snarled out at Ella from behind shaded glasses and his oiled black hair made him an extremely aggressive-looking undertaker.”

In other words, she’s not very well-developed because Rod Rees is hopeless at writing a character with a single voice, especially when that character is an 18-year-old black woman. I mean, he’s hopeless at writing in general (eyes don’t “snarl,” and definitely not from behind shaded glasses intended to block those eyes from view), but he’s really bad at characters and especially really bad at Ella.

Ella is supposed to be a genius, but she is in fact really really stupid. When we first meet her, she’s spent a full week auditioning for a gig singing jazz for the Army. That week has included a battery of physical and psychological tests, and field tests such as “building … a raft from a couple of old oil drums, some driftwood and a length of rope and use it to float across a river.”

After all this, an officer lets it slip that she’s going to the Demi-Monde. Instead of cottoning onto the fact that she’s been lied to, this is the sum total of her thinking on the issue:

“Demi-Monde? wondered Ella. Weird name for a club.”

Yes, because a) the Army hires a ton of jazz singers, and b) they all have to be to good raft-builders. You moron.

Writing

The marquee Dupe in the Demi-Monde is modeled after Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s underlings and the architect of the Holocaust. This kind of thing—real people interacting with history’s worst monsters—is ostensibly the big idea behind the book. But, in Rees’s hands, it flops.

Before the idiot Army honchos send Ella into the Demi-Monde, they sit her down with a copy of Heydrich’s Dupe. This is quite stupid, because it will show her the kind of evil she’ll be up against, but of course, those men are quite stupid, so I guess it makes sense. In any case, Ella’s meeting with Heydrich is predictably ludicrous and poorly written.

The honchos, for whatever reason, want Ella to get Heydrich to explain who he is and what he’s done. Again, this is a young black woman speaking to the man who created the Holocaust, a racist and bigot if ever there was one. Here’s a brief synthesis of their conversation. Heydrich speaks first:

“I am wondering why I should be obliged to discuss my career with … a member of a more primitive race.”

… “I understand you are an officer, Herr Heydrich. Then surely your duty as an officer is to help those of lesser ability?”

… “Very well.”

Excuse me, what? Why would the job of military officers, especially NAZI officers, be to “help those of lesser ability”? Why would a Nazi officer want to help anybody? And why does that fool him into doing what she wants? Why would he talk to her at all? Why would discussing his career help her anyway? NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE AT ALL.

This kind of face-to-face conflict with one of history’s most evil men appears to be the emotional heart of the novel, and yet it’s neither interesting nor realistic, and it shows Rees’s utter lack of intensity and creativity.

The Final Accounting

I could keep going, about the misconceived characters, more holes in the plot, gaping logical inconsistencies patently ignored or not seen by both author and editor (and remember, I only read the first hundred pages)—but 1500 words is enough.

This ill-conceived novel is the first of four that Rees has planned (and evidently already written) about the Demi-Monde. Obviously, this project should never have been accepted by a major publishing house—I don’t honestly know how they got past the first few pages.

The Demi-Monde: Winter also got nominated as an Indie Next book, which is where I heard about it. In the Indie Next blurb, the recommending bookseller compares Rees to Neal Stephenson, which would be a capital crime if I ran the world.

The difference between Rod Rees and Neal Stephenson, or any good author, is that Rees offers absolutely nothing new. There’s nothing new in his prose, and there’s nothing new in his idea of the Demi-Monde. It’s the Matrix, minus a believable reason for existing, plus some random paranormal/steampunk elements, because, hell, that’d make a cool book, right?

AVOID.

Similar books: The City & The City, by China Mieville; The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano

Author: Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Graphic Novels, Historical

It’s not difficult to understand why the Red Army Faction, a leftist revolutionary sect that was founded in Germany in 1970 and existed in various forms for nearly 30 years, has inspired so many books, films, plays, songs, paintings, and other works of art. Young, politically minded people banding together under charismatic leadership, the journalist who puts her ideals into practice and co-founds the group, the campaign of violence, prison break, subsequent arrest and final fate of the leaders – the story is an a la carte menu for any kind of statement you’d want to make. And largely because of that appeal, it’s also easy to romanticize the group, and gloss over the consequences of the violent acts attributed to the them, which include 34 deaths. Even Uli Edel’s 2008 film The Baader-Meinhoff Complex, which effectively charts the group’s violent pathology, can’t resist a bit of mythologizing.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor and Jim Rugg’s graphic novel One Model Nation, originally published by Image Comics in 2009 and now republished by Titan Books, attempts a corrective to that dynamic, presenting the RAF as a frustration in the lives of four musicians who are trying to progress to the next stage of their career. But none of the criticism levied against the RAF, and Andreas Baader in particular, by the main characters amounts to anything more than insults like “assholes” and “turd.” They seem more concerned that their young fans’ sympathy with the gang has ruined some of their gigs and attracted unwanted police attention than with the RAF’s ideology, or the bombings and killings they commit. As an indictment of violent political action Taylor-Taylor’s story is toothless; it doesn’t fare much better as an account of a mythical band’s glory days.

One Model Nation begins with a framing sequence set in the present, in which an American documentarian meets with Olaf, a former member of the German art rock band Werkstatt, the subject of his next film. He’s unable to help, but the director presses ahead, asking “what really happened to the band called One Model Nation?” You’d be forgiven for assuming that Olaf would play some pivotal role in the flashback that makes up the rest of the story, but neither Olaf nor Werkstatt are mentioned again until the final pages, when we return to the framing sequence for a non sequitur ending. This kind of elided storytelling continues throughout the book, such that it feels like Taylor-Taylor is deliberating leaving details out, as if to preempt accusations that he’s holding his reader’s hands. But there’s a difference between expecting readers to think and engage with the text, and preventing them from doing so by excising important story elements.

The flashback takes us to Berlin in 1977, when One Model Nation is an apparently internationally popular krautrock band in the Kraftwerk vein, who are tormented by both the RAF and the police. During a meeting with a local promoter, the band is faced with two options: appeal to the West German government to get the police off their case, or play at an illegal festival in Frankfurt. They can’t come to a decision, but soon it doesn’t matter because one of their numbers, Sebastian, leaves the group after their specially-equipped studio is destroyed during a police raid. The remaining members tinker with electronics and meet David Bowie while Sebastian spends time in the countryside with his elderly father, a former Nazi officer, who convinces him to return to the group and face his frustration with the deterioration of society. The group eventually decides to play the festival, but an encounter with Badder, Ulrike Meinhoff, and their former roadie who’s become a full-fledged RAF member, lands them all in prison.

As a central tension, deciding whether to keep it real or sell out isn’t particularly compelling, especially when it’s already been established that One Model Nation is famous in Germany, England, the United States, and elsewhere. Taylor-Taylor inexplicably begins the story after the more interesting conflicts that arise in stories about mythical bands/artists have already resolved, and ends before a compelling mystery or ambiguity about the characters is established. The sound of the band’s music is never addressed, either – fans of bands like Kraftwerk and Can probably have an idea, but anyone uninitiated in krautrock would be largely in the dark (Note: Taylor-Taylor – the frontman of the Dandy Warhols – is releasing music under the name “One Model Nation” to accompany the Titan reissue, which is a fun marketing idea, but it doesn’t really solve the problems raised by the text. The songs I’ve listened to are ok.) The answer to “what really happened to the band One Model Nation” turns out to be “nothing, really,” and as the plot returned to the framing sequence I wasn’t sure why the question had been asked in the first place.

It’s often difficult to distinguish the members of One Model Nation from one another, with the exception of Sebastian, as their surface personality quirks (Ralf is sheepish, Wolfgang is outgoing) come and go as the scene dictates, and their dialogue is mostly interchangeable. Artist Jim Rugg makes an effort to differentiate them through facial features, but still, they’re all tall, thin, and pale with long dark hair (except Wolfgang) – it wasn’t until 2/3rds of my way through the book that I felt comfortable pinning names, much less motivations and personalities, to the characters.

Taylor-Taylor’s depiction of Ulrike Meinhoff as Sebastian’s vapid, easily manipulated ex-girlfriend is particularly deplorable. When we first encounter Meinhoff she is faking the sounds of sex from inside her apartment to prevent Sebastian from knocking on her door – in the afterward we learn that this actually happened to Taylor-Taylor, but does such behavior square with the historical Meinhoff? Later they meet in a café, and in response to Sebastian’s rambling about the nature of mankind, Meinhoff can only say “I really love you” and “I’m bummed we never could get it together.” Couple that with Taylor-Taylor’s description of Meinhoff in the Titan edition’s backmatter as a “left-wing political journalist with the facial structure of a bull terrier” and “German radical left-winger she-beast” and it’s clear that One Model Nation’s gender politics are retrograde (and I haven’t even mentioned the sexy punk rocker who only shows up in the final act to dispense some exposition and act as a romantic interest for Wolfgang).

Plot and characterization problems aside, Jim Rugg’s art is gorgeous, particularly his detailed views of the Berlin cityscape. There’s a sense of location, both geographically and temporally, in every panel – little touches with clothes, cars, hairstyles, and other signifiers of the late 70s reveal the care and precision in Rugg’s disarmingly simple linework. He sticks to a nine-panel grid for most of the story, which drags the pace down a bit, particularly in dialogue heavy scenes that might play better in larger panels, but does set up some nice surprise moments when the grid is broken, particularly a stunning explosion and the few concert sequences that convey the excitement and energy of a One Model Nation show. Colorist Jon Fell also deserves praise for the palette of grays, browns, and whites that give the book a quiet, subdued feel, and the moments of shocking color that accompany major plot points.

There’s an interesting story in the intersection of competing youth-oriented cultures, but One Model Nation is a few drafts away from really telling it. It’s revealing that Taylor-Taylor originally conceived of the story as a screenplay, and only adapted it into a comic after it failed to gain momentum with producers and directors – comic scripts and screenplays suit different purposes, and one can’t and shouldn’t just replace the other. That Taylor-Taylor’s friend, indie comic stalwart Mike Allred, guided that transition is encouraging, but I can’t sense his expertise in the final product. One Model Nation is a beginning writer’s good effort, but is ultimately disappointing.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Justin Torres

2011, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Literary

An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”

That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:

These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.

You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.

We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.

Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.

We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one.  It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.

It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.

Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller

Author: Raymond Chandler

1939, Alfred A. Knopf

Filed Under: Mystery, Literary

As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).

Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:

Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.

The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.

It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.

This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).

2011, Doubleday

Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller

Goodreads

Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:

There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.

Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.

This structure has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it lets Wilson skip around however he likes, highlighting the most interesting details of a massive story, and it gives the reader a sense of the war’s breadth and depth.

On the other hand, it takes a writer of unusual talent to make such a project feel like more than a fast-cutting mashup of un-fleshed out characters. Wilson, despite a few early glimmers of real promise, does not have that unusual talent.

Still, you’re reading Robocopalypse, not Shakespeare. The idea of sentient robots rebelling against humanity is as old as robots themselves. This is not original, and it’s not literature, but within that framework, Wilson delivers more than I expected.

He especially excels at interior character moments when he comes at them from the right angle. In the passage I quoted above, after Wallace gets his flamethrower operational, he fries the heat-seeking stumpers by the score:

No explosions, just the occasional sputtering flare. The heat boils the juice in their shells before detonation. The worst part is that they don’t even care. They’re too simple to understand what’s happening to them.

They love the heat.

That is a solid, complex moment, both entertainingly written and insightful, as it connotes the dissatisfaction of fighting something that’s too stupid to know it’s losing.

Here’s another one, when the manager of a small fast food joint is attacked by one of the first rogue domestic robots and, bleeding, and then dragged toward safety by his one employee (with whom he’s only recently made friends):

Felipe grabs me by the waist and drags me back around the counter without even looking at the door. He’s panting and taking little crab steps. I can smell the joint in his front pocket. I watch my blood smearing behind me on the tile floor and I think, Shit, man, I just mopped that.

This chapter is one of my favorites. Felipe and this idiot manager display more character, complexity, and pathos in a short, tangential vignette than most of the main characters display during the entire novel.

That’s not entirely to say that those main characters are bad. But they are a bit shallow. If personal interior moments are Wilson’s strength, his weakness is the heartfelt portrayal of climactic scenes. When one character’s closest relation dies quite horribly, their last words to each other are a series of hamfisted callbacks to some of the dorkier things they’ve said in the novel. There’s not much in the way of growth here, or nuance.

I didn’t really expect nuance from a robot apocalypse novel, but I did want it to live up to its potential. Robopocalypse shows flashes, here and there, of great fiction, or at least signs of bringing novelty to the robot-apocalypse genre.

There’s the old man whose lover is a low-quality android. There are the sentient robots who begin to resent the superintelligent Big Rob, seeing their conscription in Big Rob’s war on humanity as enslavement, equal to or worse than their previous lives as servants of humans. There are the experiments Rob conducts on human subjects, replacing flesh with robotic parts—some of those test subjects escape and become Rob’s greatest enemies.

These are interesting ideas and Wilson is in a relatively specialized position to offer them: he’s not just cashing in with a one-off robot book, he actually holds a Ph.D. in Robotics and writes almost exclusively about robots. Unfortunately, the real heft of those ideas comes from the internal struggle with them, not the external ramifications. In other words, the fact that unhappy robots fight with humans against Big Rob is not interesting in terms of the tactics of the battle itself (especially since we know from the beginning that the humans will win), it’s interesting as an exploration of slavery, computer viruses, free will, and the definition of life.

While Wilson is not entirely unequipped to fully exploit these ideas—as his couple of great interior moments show—he does not succeed with them.

It’s a shame, but all is not lost. Robopocalypse is still an entertaining read, good enough for me to read Wilson’s next book, Amped which comes out in June. Hopefully, he’ll stick with one voice and one main character, and he’ll be able to flesh it out well enough to meet its potential.

Similar books: Machine Man, by Max Barry; World War Z, by Max Brooks

Author: John Connolly

2006, Atria Books

Filed Under: Short Stories, Horror

I’ve still never read any of the crime fiction Connolly made his name with, but this is the third supernatural book of his I’ve tackled and loved: it’s just as good as the others. Perhaps as a result of his experience writing thrillers, Connolly has a real knack for building tension. The stories in this collection range from a few pages to over a hundred, but each is expertly paced and crafted. He manages to write stories that are taut and spooky without dipping into cliche or camp. His The Book of Lost Things reminds me of Stephen King at his best, and the mood and creativity of The Gates readily compares to Neil Gaiman’s work. This collection of scary tales marries those styles almost perfectly.

While there are vampires and the like in here, most of the supernatural subjects are pretty original. My favorite were those that told of hauntings by evil spirits, such as the old pagan gods of “The Shifting of the Sands” apparitioning from swirls of dirt to consume men’s souls. The child-nappping beast “The Erkling” and the possessing spirit of “The New Daughter,” who lures a child from her home to an ancient burial mound nearby while her father tries in vain to save her, are similarly great. These particular stories do great things with atmosphere–I found myself transported back to my childhood, reading Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books by flashlight.

Stories like “The Inkpot Monkey” and “Nocturnes” are very Stephen King-y with their cursed or haunted objects and susceptible subjects. And more than one story (“The Ritual of Bones,” “Mr. Pettinger’s Daemon,”"The Shifting of the Sands”) places demons amidst old institutions such as the clergy or a boarding school. There are submerged houses of the dead, passages to Hell, giant spiders in ancient caves, witches, vampires, slime ghosts, you name it.

The long-form stories that dot the book do a fine job of shifting gears. “The Cancer Cowboy Rides Again,” which opens the collection, is actually a departure from the rest of the stories, so much so that placing it first was a pretty bold move. It’s about a wanderer who is a sort of walking carcinoma. In order to ease his own pain, he must infect others with his curse, giving them rapid, incurable forms of cancer. It’s a cop-versus-bad-guy horror story, and a good one. Similarly blending horror and crime writing, “The Reflecting Lens: A Charlie Parker Novella” features a private eye on a case that turns up some other-worldy stuff and includes perhaps the most creepy character in the whole collection.

All told, there’s a lot of great horror stories in here. There’s not a single one I didn’t like, and since the subjects and styles vary so much from story to story, I suspect there are a lot of people that will find something to really enjoy here. Connolly is a great entertainer and storyteller, I can’t recommend his books enough.

Similar Reads: The Book of Lost Things (Connolly), Night Shift (King), Coraline (Gaiman).

Author: Jessie Crockett

2010, Mainly Murder Press

Filed Under: Mystery

As of late, for what reason I’m not sure, I’ve been enjoying the quick-read gratification of trade mysteries and thrillers.

Although its title isn’t very original, and it won’t be winning any awards, Live Free or Die managed to scratch this newfound itch of mine just fine. At times the book read a bit housewife-y, but ultimately it all added to the charm. I got a Murder She Wrote kind of vibe, if that makes sense. There’s a quaintness to the narrative at work that complements its secluded town setting nicely.

Gwen Fifield is a pretty unassuming lady in the small New Hampshire town of Winslow Falls. She’s a widow of seven years, the town postmistress and vice-chief of the volunteer fire department. A string of fall fires escalates into a murder mystery when the town historian is found dead in the burning local museum. The site is so ghastly, the fire chief keels over with a coronary and Gwen is thrust in charge.

Gwen tags along with Hugh, a hunky, red-bearded state fire investigator assigned the case, and they start to piece together just who would want the old lady dead, and why. Things ramp up when some of the victim’s antiques (despite most of the town believing her museum just full of old, worthless junk) are noticed missing from the crime scene. Then one of their suspects ends up dead, and things get even more intriguing, and dangerous, for Gwen. Somehow two murders don’t warrant the involvement of the real police, though. The town policeman, Ray, is borderline retarded, and wisely defers to Gwen and Hugh, who, despite not being an actual law enforcement officer, does most of the police work. It’s a good thing too, as Ray, along with most of the town, automatically blames the immigrant Brazilian family and would be content to arrest them and let that be that. Local TV news doesn’t appear to have penetrated Winslow Falls yet.

Being a proud New Hampshirite, I took a little exception to Crockett’s depiction of the townsfolk as simple bumpkins with a widespread distrust of foreigners. But it works for the story she needs to tell, and in the end, their township isn’t characterized offensively (like the murderous British rubes in The Siege of Trencher’s Farm). It’s more playful, like Funny Farm. Despite their flatness from angles such as that, Crockett’s characters do find personality, certainly enough to keep a whodunnit interesting.

You’ll probably figure out the killer before the book’s big denouement, but it’s okay. Crockett offers up a few viable suspects, and does a commendable job of plotting an original murder mystery against the backdrop of a antique-heist caper. It can lay on the lovey-dovey stuff a bit too heavy at times (along with Gwen’s overweight insecurities, this is responsible for most of its housewife-y vibe), but all in all it’s a nice little mystery by an unknown author that’s worth a look from casual mystery fans.

Similar Reads: No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.), The Darker Side (McFadyen), Hot, Shot, and Bothered (McFarland)

2011, Harper Perennial

Filed under: Literary

Goodreads

The first few pages of The Call can be a bit discombobulating. The main character, a 40ish man named David, is a veterinarian in rural New England. He answers calls from surrounding farms and ranches, and drives out to tend to different animals. The novel takes the form of David’s work diary, in which he records the calls he takes, his actions, the results, and his thoughts along the way. Like this:

CALL: A cow with her dead calf half-born.

ACTION: Put on boots and pulled dead calf out while standing in a field full of mud.

RESULT: Hind legs tore off from dead calf while I pulled. Head, forelegs, and torso still inside the mother.

THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME WHILE PASSING RED AND GOLD LEAVES ON MAPLE TREES: Is there a nicer place to live?

Quickly, the pages of the diary become a place for David to ponder and exposit about his life and the world. The form of the diary—with its procedural headings that David coopts to better reflect his own experiences—becomes a counterpoint for his interior life.

It’s a “voice-driven” novel in the sense that the voices of characters, especially David, form the experience of reading it. Luckily, David’s voice is charming and calm and occasionally funny, and that experience is a pleasure.

Here’s another sample:

CALL: Alpaca down.

ACTION: Drove to farm. Remembered not to look alpaca in the eye.

RESULT: Looked alpaca in the eye by mistake. Got spit in the eye. Alpaca nice and angry now. Alpaca got up. Owner thankful. Handed me a rag that smelled like gasoline. I wiped my eye. Asked owner if he had seen the bright lights, the object moving back and forth in the sky the night before. The owner shook his head, he hadn’t seen anything.

There are a few dramatic happenings in The Call, like those lights in the sky that he ascribes (not really believing it) to a spaceship. There’s also his semi-contentious relationship with his wife, which gets significantly more contentious after David goes hunting with his teenage son, Sam, and the boy gets shot by an unseen hunter, falls out of a deer stand onto his head, and winds up in a coma.

Later, David’s other son (conceived by sperm donation and unknown to David until he shows up unannounced) appears suddenly, with something of a secret.

But, even though Murphy plays a few of these for dramatic tension, she stays far away from the neat resolutions and even plot beats of an airport thriller. David’s mission isn’t to find the right response to things, or even necessarily to act. His mission is to live in such a way that he can still enjoy his drive home after he pull the legs off a dead breached calf.

Similarly, The Call isn’t about epiphanies in the Joycean sense, it’s about the slow small moments of life that can be either enjoyed or trod upon. Ultimately it’s time enjoyably spent with a wise country vet.

Similar books: The Sportswriter, and the rest of the Frank Bascombe trilogy, by Richard Ford