bloodygranuaile

I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?

Managed to sneak in a quick spooky season read, which I had picked up at Readercon over the summer: Sarah Monette’s A Theory of Haunting, a novella about the whimsically named murder house Thirdhop Scarp.

Our reluctant protagonist is one Kyle Murchison Booth, a shy archivist at an institution called the Parrington Museum, which appears to be somewhere in New York State. Kyle does not like small talk, or Spiritualism, or really much of anyone or anything, although more in a chronically anxious way than a mean one. Kyle really does not like the assignment he gets at the beginning of the story: the Parrington heir who funds the museum, who is basically normal if a bit bitchy, wants him to extract her extremely gullible sister from the circles of the guy who just bought Thirdhop Scarp, a slick and fraudulent occultist named, supposedly, Marcus Oleander.

To this end, Marcus Oleander has been somehow induced to hire Kyle to catalogue the four different messy occult collections Oleander has acquired and dumped in the library at the house. Kyle certainly finds enough proof of fraudulence to convince any reasonable person that Oleander is a fraud, but there’s really no such thing as enough proof of fraudulence to render the infinitely credulous Grisela Parrington skeptical about anyone or anything, so instead Kyle is stuck there weekend after weekend unwillingly uncovering the mysterious history of the house and getting dragged into seances and witnessing the power playing within Oleander’s pompously named occult society, and all sorts of other nonsense he’d rather not be doing. With the help of the adolescent medium Alexis, and despite the interference of Alexis’ guardians and various other unsavory characters that constitute Oleander’s posse, Kyle has to identify and then disarm whatever in the house keeps killing people before it, well, kills all of them.

This may not have been the most original work ever written–which is hard to do with haunted house stories; Shirley Jackson kind of solved the genre forever, in my opinion–but it was certainly entertaining and spooked me a bit at the end. My only critique is something about it feels more like Americans trying to write English stories than it does like an actual American story, despite the very classic American haunted house story features, like an “old” house that has only had three owners and was built barely 80 years ago. Some of this might be the vaguely steampunk quality to some of the names, like “Griselda Parrington,” and some of it might be that I was thrown off by how often the main character says “Er,” which I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone with a New York or in fact any kind of American accent say. We say “Uh” because if you said “Er” with an American accent that would imply that you were making an R sound, which nobody does; the English just spell “Uh” as “Er” because that’s how they’d pronounce “Er.” But regardless of what country it takes place in, it’s a nice 130 pages of atmospheric family secrets and occult happenings and sudden deaths and general mystery for tweedy nerds. I enjoyed it a lot and might check out the other short stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth, who I gather is a recurring Sarah Monette character.

In my “short story collections acquired at Readercon” selection that I have a copy of Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom. I like the Elizabeth Bear novels that I’ve read, although I also have a couple more novels of hers that are still on the TBR shelf through no fault of their own.

Shoggoths in Bloom has a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, and overall they’re all pretty good–some I liked better than others, obviously, but I don’t think I’d call any of them duds. We got a few stories set in larger worlds from her novels–there’s an Eternal Sky story, and a story from the POV of One-Eyed Jack, the genius of Las Vegas–and of course the titular “Shoggoths in Bloom” dips into the Lovecraftian mythos. There are twenty stories in this collection, which is challenging for me to review. The stories tend toward the serious; when there is humor, which is with reasonable frequency, it tends toward the dry. A few of the protagonists are cops/investigators/otherwise law-enforcement-adjacent of some kind; one is a sort of magical detective that has to work around the regular kind. This seems to be more for the ease of facilitation for mystery-solving plots than any particular ideological affiliation with cops on Bear’s part; even some of her cops are kind of down on cops. The more important thing is that the mysteries are good, solid short story mysteries with satisfying little twists at the end.

Overall, this is a good collection that might provide me with some extra impetus to also read one of the three unread novels by the author that are still on my shelf.

This year I decided to reread The Silmarillion! I have not read it in about… twenty years. Jesus, that makes me feel old. Anyway, I decided to break it up into chunks and read a bit each month for the first 6 months of the year. This meant reading about 60-odd pages each month, which is plenty for a book this dense.

I must admit that my first thought is indeed “Oh wow, this book is very dense.” I remember having a difficult time with it when I first read it in ninth grade–so many names! Such archaic language! So little dialogue!--but I am older and wiser now and have a whole English degree under my belt, so I figured it was largely an issue of it being Above My Reading Level when I was 15.

Alas, no, this really is a very dense and busy book. It’s actually four books, of which the Valaquenta (or Quenta Silmarillion) is the biggest one, and it covers many hundreds or possibly a few thousands of years and several generations of Elf shenanigans. Everyone has five names and is given a full genealogy of people who also have five names. All the places have five names too. In keeping with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of which Tolkien was a scholar, families frequently repeated name elements instead of having family names, so you get whole families whose names all start with Fin- or Ea- or El- or whatever. It is! So! Much!

That said, the language, while often hard to follow, has a grave and archaic regality to it, thus fitting the type of story it is exactly. And the stories, once you can get past the language and its reliance on abstractions (the thing I find most difficult as a modern reader, honestly–I’m not only used to much more concrete writing, but in many sectors of my life, that type of thing is a huge red flag for bullshit), are great–epic tales of fighting dragons and stealing gems and exploring the world, with doomed love and giant spiders and all sorts of extremely cool shit that other fantasy authors have been ripping off lo these past fifty years. We get the tale of Feanor’s bad decisions and his unfortunate family; the heroic exploits of Beren and Luthien; a short version of the Tale of Turin Turambar; and many other individual episodes that would probably each bear up a whole movie trilogy if someone with a huge budget and a sense of restraint could wrestle the rights away from the Tolkien Estate, which I’m kind of glad they won’t actually. This is not cinematic writing so you’d have to make up a whole bunch of new material and that would then annoy Tolkien purists, probably including me. But there’s a great sense of vastness here, a really impressive feeling that you’re looking at merely a sliver of a whole world long gone, and there’s something incredibly compelling about that.

Given that I have only read this book once, but in the intervening twenty years I have listened to Blind Guardian’s album Nightfall in Middle-Earth approximately infinity times, one experience I kept having was sudden tiny bursts of familiarity. I’d be reading these long dense pages trying to remember what I had read on the previous page, and suddenly a sentence or a turn of phrase would jump off the page and bonk me in the teenage nostalgia part of my brain, and I’d know exactly where in the album we were. Then I would have the relevant song stuck in my head for a bit.

Anyway, now that I’ve finished the book, I… kind of want to immediately go back and reread it again? There’s just so much going on in it that I didn’t retain; I need to do it again and maybe find a study guide this time.

There is a new Craft Wars book out! I was a bad girlfriend and pinched my ladylove’s copy of Max Gladstone’s Wicked Problems before she had a chance to read it, and then I didn’t finish it quite as fast as I’d intended to. But I did finish it so now I can give it back and begin being a bad girlfriend in a different way (impatiently bugging her to read it already).

Taking place shortly after the events of Dead Country, the problems we had at the end of that novel have burst their quiet little Edgemont-adjacent bounds and are now everyone’s problem, all over the world. Thus Wicked Problems is no longer just about Tara Abernathy’s family issues, no matter how much Tara Abernathy tends toward denial about her ability to single-handedly fix everything without bothering anybody else. Instead we get a big, complex, multi-faction epic where all our friends from previous books show up again whether they like it or not (usually not), including people I forgot about because I read the first five books of the Craft Sequence like ten years ago at this point. The journey takes us all over the world and involves dead gods, a prison break, creepy razor wire monsters, a trip to definitely-not-Paris to almost get murdered at the opera, the phrase “prophet-and-loss statement,” a somewhat self-indulgent appearance of the Tiffany Paradox (this was the one bit that took me out of the story a little too much, because I too have read the viral Tumblr post about the Tiffany Paradox, Max), and a lot of gay feelings that neither Kai nor Tara actually have time for (since they keep almost getting murdered at the opera by squids and razor wire monsters and, at one point, a vampire, which I had forgotten existed in this universe).

In the necromancy-flavored late capitalist hellscape that is the world after the God Wars, how to save the world from being eaten by the skazzerai from beyond the stars is not just a complicated question, but several complicated questions–questions like, is the world really worth “saving” given how incredibly fucked up it is? Can the brutally rational secularist power-hungry assholes of the Craft set aside their differences with the fanatically religious power-hungry assholes of various faiths for long enough to do anything useful? Is Dawn, Tara’s former student now semi-integrated with a god-esque creature made of sentient Craft, going to stop the skazzerai, or is her plan very bad and does she have to be stopped before we can stop the skazzerai? What are the skazzerai actually (since they aren’t literally giant space spiders), and where do they come from, and as the King in Red points out, how would you know you were facing one?

The immediate problem facing most of our several protagonists here is a little shard of what appears to be iron and it is so, so hungry. It seems to be a relic from last time the skazzerai tried to eat the world (they got run off but in the process the world broke and a functionally new one had to be reborn). Due to a series of mishaps the shard breaks out of its little holding container and winds up in a new holding container, which is the dying nature goddess Ajaia in the form of a rose, who is then contained in Dawn’s hand, which is then contained in a heavily warded glove. This multilayered battlefield of power in her hand, combined with her earlier merging with the new god-thing of Craft (now dubbed Sybil and manifesting as a serpent to maintain some separateness from Dawn), gives Dawn some truly terrifying power at her disposal, if she can figure out how to use it without getting eaten.

This was funny, scary, action-packed, and generally pretty good at holding my attention during the parts of this past week or so when I simply could not pay any attention to anything, so well done. Can’t wait to see how all these overpowered dickheads get themselves into and out of their next set of world-ending scrapes.

This summer I picked up an ARC of Martha Wells’ newest non-Murderbot work, a 400-page fantasy novel called Witch King.

Our protagonist, Kai, is a demon who can inhabit the bodies of freshly dead mortals, and also who can kill people by sucking the life out of them via touch. Despite these grisly powers he is our good dude. As a baby demon Kai had pretty much just wanted to hang out in the Saredi grasslands with his adopted mortal family in the body of Enna, a teenage girl who had met with some kind of unexpected illness or accident (I don’t remember) and whose body had thus been gifted to Kai so that he could join the family. But then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked when a group of impossibly powerful conquerors calling themselves the Hierarchs swept down from the south (the south is the top of the world in this universe), obliterating entire cities and installing puppet regimes in the ones they wanted to hang onto for a bit.

The book takes place mainly in two timelines: the “past” timeline, which is where Kai teams up with a satisfyingly ragtag bunch of other people who had been imprisoned by the Hierarchs to exact bloody vengeance and obliterate the Hierarchs and their pet expositors with extreme violence, and the “present,” which takes place a few human generation after the overthrow of the Hierarchs, where the Rising World coalition has solidified into the Rising World Empire and is having its own political intrigues. One of these intrigues resulted in Kai and his friend, a Witch named Zeide, being murdered/put into stasis and kept in an elaborate underground water trap tomb for about a year. Upon being ignominiously woken up by an expositor who had intended to magically enslave Kai and keep him as a familiar, Kai, Zeide, and their new street rat friend Sonja have to figure out how this happened. Solving his own murder leads Kai and friends to uncovering a whole conspiracy and also having to rescue Zeide’ wife Tahren. This is all a fun romp, for the epic fantasy definition of “romp” where people get exploded constantly.

The one bit that actually tripped me up was that I 100% expected Kai’s guess that he had been dead for about a year to be wildly off and when the resurfaced from his water tomb he’d find that he’d missed, like, 100 years, and have to catch up on a bunch of History. This is not actually where the plot went at all and I was nearly halfway through the book before I stopped waiting for that particular shoe to drop. So I was confused by my own overconfident genre-savvy, I guess.

Overall I do not think this is a book that particularly transcends the fantasy genre or that will change the game within the genre. However, it is a perfectly solid epic fantasy, with fun exotic worldbuilding and lots of big bloody action scenes and explosive magics and high-stakes intrigues. I enjoyed it a lot and will probably read the sequel when it comes out.

I have spent the last six months once again reading Dracula via email! I didn’t realize I didn’t have to sign up again to do another go-round of Dracula Daily; next year I think I will unsubscribe and follow along in my weird old annotated copy. (I am also being threatened with another round of The Beetle Weekly and that I think I simply could not survive.)

Anyway, Dracula continues to be a great story, about which most pop culture tropes and certainly nearly all film adaptations are a tragedy and a waste. Lucy and Jonathan especially are consistently done dirty. All the humor is stripped, a thing I think is more and more a problem every time I read the book and run across the corn speech, or Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat. Reading this book in small chunks with a bunch of insane Tumblrites is both a lot of fun and really ends up highlighting how a lot of mainstream and even academic Dracula discourse is at least as bonkers and wrong-headed as your average Tumblr-dwelling ball of mental illnesses.

Anyway it’s just. So good. The character work is so good. The horror is so good. It’s got a bunch of fucked-up Victorian English shit but unlike a lot of fucked-up Victorian English lit it’s got so much heart. This one is a classic for a reason.

For some reason Max Gladstone’s Ruin of Angels has been sitting on my shelf since it came out. I liked the first Craft quintet, so I think my completist brain just felt weird about another Craft book with different cover art and title convention and all that? Anyway, I was missing out, because Ruin of Angels is just as much of a fun time as the others, combining the hellscape of finance capitalism with the hellscape of necromantic god-war blood magic fantasy stuff. A train heist is also involved, as we know how I feel about heists.

Our protagonist, mostly, here is Kai Pohala, a priestess/idol-maker/investment banker from Kavekana, who scores a whirlwind business trip to the Iskari colonial city of Agdel Lex, which does not go according to plan. Agdel Lex is built on top of a place just known as “the dead city,” which is the former civilization of Alikand in its last moments, eternally being torn apart in the death throes of a major Craftsman in the Gods War. There are also, secretly, pockets of Alikand, remembered into being by the descendants of the old ruling families, before the Iskari showed up to impose their very specific and top-down version of order and good governance on the place, which at the moment is unfortunately just about the only thing preventing the dead city and all the creepy monsters in it from breaking through. The Iskari are some sort of squid-based parasitic religion with impressive mind- and reality-control powers, and also they are smarmy dickwads–really excellent villains all around.

Another thing Agdel Lex has is Kai’s estranged sister Ley, a preternaturally charismatic human who lots of people wind up loving and wanting to work with and generally taking paths other than “avoid at all costs” around, which usually seems to be ill-advised. Ley redeems herself at the end by working with a bunch of other people to help de-upfuck the situation that she got them all into by always trying to do big ambitious projects without telling any of the people she dragged into what the fuck was going on. Fortunately we don’t have to spend a lot of time in Ley’s head because for the first 90% of the book she truly just sucks as a person. Instead, we spend time with Kai, obviously, and with Ley’s ex-girlfriend and delving partner Zeddig, and Zeddig’s other delving partner Raymet, and a mysterious lone Camlaander knight errant named Gal, and a street urchin prophet named Izza, and our old buddy Tara Abernathy. These people do not all necessarily work as a team, and frequently find themselves at apparent cross purposes with each other, largely due to the fact that they are all operating on extremely limited information (a situation that is frequently at least partly Ley’s fault). Everyone tries to pick apart what the fuck is happening and protect, to the best of their ability, Ley as she flees from the cops and the squiddy Rectification Authority agents, who are after her for a murder that she absolutely, 100% committed. (She had reasons, but was she going to tell anyone what they were? No, she was going to demand help because Just Trust Me.)

I realize this grumping may make it seem like I dislike Ley as a character. I assure you the opposite is true. Ley is a great character. She is just a great character of a fucked-up, infuriating, utterly insufferable person. I enjoyed being all like “What is this bitch’s problem” very much.

This novel is longer than any of the other ones in the Craft series so far but I feel like that’s perfectly acceptable as we get to explore not just a new city, but a new three-cities-in-one, and also how laboriously difficult it is for our gang of fucked-up weirdos to get on the same page about anything is a pretty integral theme here, so stuff takes a while. The pace is fairly frenetic, as everyone is continually scrambling to stay ahead of the Rectification Authority, the cops, zombie gangsters, Ley, and sometimes each other.

Anyway, there’s been another book released in this series that I totally missed hearing about, so I’m hoping it’ll take me less than another five years to read Dead Country.

Several years ago at Readercon I picked up a copy of Amanda Downum’s Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, which, like many Readercon purchases, has sat on my shelf for quite a while. This Readercon, I attended a talk by Downum called “Ask a Necromancer,” which was mainly about all the fun and possibly-useful-to-writers stuff that she’s learned since her recent career change to mortician and embalmer. It was a fun talk and reminded me that I still had this book sitting around.

Despite the YA X-of-Y-and-Z structure of the title, this is not a YA book! In tone and subject it is definitely a book for adults, albeit a rather short one. It’s got too much drugs and sex and art galleries to be a YA book. The main character, Liz, is actually asexual, but this seems to mostly mean that she spends most of her time moping over her best friend, whereas everybody else spends most of their time moping over their romantic partners, and Liz’ boyfriend splits his time between moping over Liz and moping over somebody else’s girlfriend.

I’ll admit I didn’t like this book quite as much as I wanted to. The elaborate language just felt overwritten instead of evocative of the various wonders and horrors plaguing our dramatis personae. The blurb copy said it was supposed to be Lovecraftian but it didn’t feel Lovecraftian, it just felt… starving-artist-chic, basically. Every character has that sort of hapless quietist vibe that is why I don’t read a lot of modern literary fiction, where everybody has a PhD and everybody has read every book ever written and nobody spends any time reading or writing or doing any kind of work during the course of the story. The characters spend enough time being put physically through the wringer–continually ending up wet, underdressed, injured, sleepless, and/or drunk in the bitter midwinter in Vancouver–that they have no energy left to protag and it starts to push against my suspension of disbelief that Blake is the only one in a coma. It’s hard for me to pin down precisely what didn’t work for me–I’ve enjoyed plenty of books where the characters are pretty quiet and all the “action” is like, talking and feeling, and I’ve enjoyed plenty of books where the story takes place in dreams or otherwise in people’s minds or some other inscrutable other dimension. I don’t know if it’s because enough of the story is about GUNS and DRUGS and ATTEMPTED MURDER and MONSTERS FROM REALMS BEYOND that the poor little meow meow wet sock persona of basically everybody just didn’t do enough to carry it. Idunno, I liked a lot of the kinds of stuff in it but somehow this book just never quite got around to gelling, for me. (Maybe the fact that I don’t like books about quiet do-nothing academics overrode a lot of it. All the PhD’s I know–and I know a lot, because I live in the most overeducated metro area in the U.S.–both had to do a shit-ton of work in grad school/their PhD programs *and* manage to do, like, socialist organizing and shit.) I feel bad criticizing this book in such a vague way because frankly the things I don’t like about it also seem like failure modes I would fall into in my own writing if I ever got around to finishing something, which I have not, and Downum at least finished a book and got it published. But there were definitely a few moments where I had the feeling of “this reads like something I would write” and not in my halfway decent nonfiction writing way, either.

Overall it was basically a fine beach read, but it felt like it ought to have been the type thing I’d be absolutely captivated by, so that’s awkward.

After finishing my reread of The Lies of Locke Lamora I was compelled to then reread its sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies. This one combines two very fun settings: the first half is casino shenanigans and the second half is pirate shenanigans. It makes for a rather convolutedly structured book as our heroes, Locke and Jean, find themselves buried under an increasingly convoluted set of interlocking scams.

I find myself a little of two minds about this. On the one hand, it was fun! I thoroughly enjoyed about the first 700+ of the 760 pages, including the jarring shifts from one scam to the other. But I feel like it didn’t quite stick the landing, and it’s one of those situations where I feel sort of bad about criticizing it because I certainly can’t think of a better way to stick the landing either, but the fact is that stories that have multiple plot threads that all look like they’re about to kill our heroes generally function as setup for the conclusion, and much of what’s fun about them is going “I have no idea how our heroes are going to pull this off!” and then watching our heroes pull it off in an unlikely fashion. And I know that some stuff has gotta be left open for sequels, but also… it feels like they didn’t pull off everything they were supposed to pull off? They escaped with their lives, for now, which I suppose is very impressive given how fucked they were, but it didn’t quite get that satisfaction of having everything snap together at the end, which is a pretty significant part of the fun of these kinds of complicated heist/con/scheme sorts of stories. Anyway it was still a lot of fun for most of it.