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This was written in 1998 – I’m consolidating book reviews. For a bibliography of Attanasio’s work, see http://prissears.com/aaa/

The third book in AA Attanasio’s fabulous telling of the King Arthor myths, the Wolf and the Crown follows the young king through the first year of his reign. He must prove to his subjects that he is a worthy king, and must prove to himself that he is a good man even though he fell prey to his witchy half sister’s seductions. This book, as all of Attanasio’s, is very different from its predecessors. The chapters are short, perfect two-page cliff hangers that whirl the reader between the various characters and situations. In some ways, this book is much more horrific than the ones that came before, but it is leavened with great humor. It focuses on Arthor’s humanity, but has the elements of the strange and magical we’ve come to expect from Mr. Attanasio. Gods old and new, ghosts, witches, demons, angels, vampires, dwarfs, a monkey, elves, stolen and misplaced souls, the hell that is our present day, the fabulous world tree that is the magnetic field surrounding the earth, the hollow hills above the dragon at the heart of the earth, heroic adventure, and selfless sacrifice, it is all there weaving a tapestry of magic and realism. Attanasio is not bound by any of the old tellings of this myth, he takes the characters and elements and makes them uniquely believable, uniquely his own. As in many of Attanasio’s books, such as his fantastic first novel Radix and the rare The Moon’s Wife, the heroes are flawed by their own humanity and must take on painful journeys of self-discovery and change. Don’t miss this book, I can’t wait for the next ones. I hope he follows the King to Avalon and on, to that far future day of need that is predicted for the King’s return.

Imagine you’ve been deployed to the Middle East, for longer than anyone dreamed would be possible when the war started. You’re finally getting to go home. It’s emergency duty in New York City, but it’s still home. There’s an epidemic. It’s everything the swine flu was feared to be and then some – extremely contagious and up to 5% lethality. There is no vaccine, which is unfortunate as some of the sick experience symptoms much like rabies – dementia, paranoia. They become … dangerous.

That’s the nightmare in which Charlie Company’s Second Platoon find themselves in Craig DiLouie’s 2010 novel Tooth and Nail. It’s a gritty take on the zombie apocalypse, fought on the streets of New York. The military framework is a natural – where else would you want to be during a zombie war than in the best funded military on Earth?

The characters aren’t cookie-cutter cannon fodder or stereotypical power-crazed officers. They react in spectrum of ways – selfish, loyal, craven, implacable. They have to contend with the tension between following orders and the prospect of having to fight other Americans that have been infected by the virus. They also face rapid breakdown in services, lack of supplies and medicine, and a public that is demanding, self-centered, and terrified. And then there are the sick people. The “Mad Dogs,” as they become known.

Zombie stories have a reputation for metaphor, and this one is no exception. It can be seen as an intense take on the morality of combat in a civilian zone, where the line between civilian and non-combatant and soldier, regular or guerrilla, erodes.

The main character is the Army itself – the culture, language, rituals, rules and tools. The individual cast members are embedded in this matrix, to such a degree that sometimes they stand out sharply, but their features sometimes fade and they move as gears in the military machine. DiLouie’s Army is detailed and believable. The reader feels as if she is there with the soldiers, often with grim humor, as they struggle to fulfill their orders amid chaos and panic.

I won’t be surprised when I hear this book has been picked up for a movie. It would be a welcome addition to the genre – an inside view of a powerful army faced with defeat from a foe that fights with tooth and nail.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin’s debut is a fascinating speculative fiction, set in a world in which gods exist, war, fall out of power, and can become enslaved by mortals.

The main character, Yeine, is the nineteen year old leader of her small tribe, a matriarchal culture in which men’s aptitude for glory and bravery is dismissed much like women’s is in contemporary American culture. Daughter of a royal who abdicated her position to marry into the tribe, she is drawn into a deadly competition for a throne and her life changes quickly when she is drawn into the political intrigues of the capital city.

The world Jemisin builds is rich with mythology. The sibling gods of night and day and the goddess of twilight warred against each other, with one dying, another becoming enslaved, and the last used by the royalty to rule the world. The exploration of the fate of the gods as it entwines with Yeine’s is engrossing. This is the first of a trilogy, I am looking forward to the next installations.

The Stranger by Max Frei

The Stranger is a slow-moving, epic dream-work. First published in Russia in 1996, it was finally released in English translation in 2009. The author and narrator, Max Frei, is an underachiever night-owl who dreams of another world.  Near the beginning of the book, he is rewarded for his persistent dreaming and is given a job in the dream world, and instructions on how to get there. Skeptical, he tries – and succeeds in entering Echo, the city he’s been dreaming about. He is given a job working the night shift for “The Department of Absolute Order,” something like a city police investigative bureau. He acquires new friends and responsibilities with his new position, and eventually comes into some very strange powers.

It reminds me in some ways of China Miéville’s books about strange cities. And in some ways it reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork city guard, although the humor is not as broad. But mostly, it’s unique and not easy to describe.  The language is strangely formal,  perhaps an artifact of translation. It has a surreal feel, as appropriate for a novel set in a dream. The ‘authorities’ are strangely unmoved by the murders and mysteries they encounter.

I did not discover two additional delightful features of The Stranger until several weeks after I had finished it. First, the author, Max Frei has written many more books set in this dream world called Echo, and second, Max Frei is actually a pen name of Svetlana Martynchik. The bad news is that only this first volume has been translated into English.

It’s hard to say that I ‘liked’ or ‘disliked’ this book. The author is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography. The book’s main character and narrator is a writer, who works in publishing and pornography.  The plot turns on the repellent idea of a writer who is persuaded to create fictional pornography featuring real women and a serial killer, in return for exclusive interviews with the killer. The hard-up writer also pens a vampire-romance series under his dead mother’s name (funny) and has an ongoing sexually tense relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl that he ghost-writes papers for (creepy).

At one point Gordon’s narrator says something about reading that I have never seen articulated this quite this way before. This kind of insight made it impossible to dislike the book entirely, despite the sleaziness.

“Why do we read? In the beginning, as children, why do we love the books we love? For most, I think, it’s travel, a flight into adventure, into a dream that feels like our own. But for a few it is also escape, flight from boredom, unhappiness, loneliness, from where or who we can no longer bear to be. When I read, the words on the page replace the voice in my head and I cease, for a little while, to be me, or at least to be so painfully aware of being me. These are the real readers, the maniacs, the ones who dose themselves with fiction the way junkies get high, the way lovers adore the beloved: beyond reason.”

Reading is lot like that, for me at least.

The narrator goes on to say that “This kind of reading, ironically, precedes all judgment.” Ironically,  because it is just these manic, omnivorous devourers of genre fiction that go on to become book snob academics – or book reviewers.

Lest you think I have not been reading lately, here’s a bundle of short reviews of the latest works to stain my brain.

Foolproof, a novel by several authors, Barbara D’Amato, Jeanne M. Dams and, Mark Richard Zubro. It’s a NYC-based mystery novel, which starts out very strongly with an affecting portrait of 9/11 seen through the eyes of two Twin Towers survivors that were late for work that day. It eventually deteriorates into silliness – the main characters become 007-esque anti-terrorism globetrotters. A Bill Gates analog blackmails the president to further his scheme to take over all the oil in the world. Entertaining but doesn’t really live up to those first chapters.

Vengeance Child by Simon Clark. A nicely done horror story about a child that accompanies bad fortune. I enjoyed the dilemma the main characters found themselves in – the child is a sometimes-reluctant harbinger (or is it instigator?) of violence and death. What would you do if confronted with such a child? Is it ever right to torture or kill a child?

The Gates (of Hell are about to open/”want to peek?” or “mind the gap”) by John Connolly. I really wanted to like this book. It fits my penchant for books about heaven and hell, and it features the Hadron Super Collider. The narration is in a chatty, directly-addressing-the-reader, copiously footnoted style reminiscent of Terry Pratchett, and the episodic adventures of a young main character were evocative of L. Frank Baum. I even appreciated the production quality, the cover art, text fonts and such are quite attractive. But (you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you?), I fell out of love with it on footnote number 12. “It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark.” Etcetera. This big spoonful of gender essentialism, topped with a cherry of “women are some strange species that is not human” put me off. Already feeling like this book didn’t like me, I wasn’t as ready to suspend my disbelief of the stereotypes, gender insults, and general derivative nature of the story.

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker. A gothic horror masquerading as a “women’s” book. I appreciated the bluntness of the harsh story, the painful explication of a woman who has to marry her rapist, without ever directly naming it for what it is, and how the fallout from this affected an entire town. But, the first-person omniscient narration made me sea-sick. As the narrator described events and thoughts she couldn’t possibly have witnessed, I couldn’t decide if she was supposed to be making things up, or magic, or what.  The fascinating narrator was a woman with some form of giantism, and the cover made me wonder what the sociological images blog would make of it. You can have a look at their post on women’s body types as depicted on book covers  here, but the general gist of it is that even if a book is about a “large” woman, the woman pictured on the book cover will be thin. In this case, the book cover features a heavy looking mannequin.  I know the author probably had little to no input on the cover image, but still find it fascinating that the publishing house would opt for a headless mannequin rather than actually depict a large woman. Regardless of the cover art, I will be looking forward to Baker’s future books.

“Where are all the women SF writers?” you might hear someone ask. Even though you might think there are few based on our numbers receiving Nebula and Hugo awards (see this post for more on this issue), there are actually many! Here is a totally non-exhaustive list, please add to it! (“SF” in this case is the broader category of “Speculative Fiction” than strictly “Science Fiction:)

Eleanor Arnason
Margaret Atwood
Elizabeth Bear
Alison Bechdel
Leigh Brackett
Libba Bray
Lois McMaster Bujold
Emma Bull
Octavia Butler
Pat Cadigan
Angela Carter
Suzy McKee Charnas
C. J. Cherryh
Jo Clayton
Storm Constantine
L Timmel Duchamp
Suzette Elgin
Carol Emshwiller
Karen Joy Fowler
C. S. Friedman
Lisa Goldstein
Nicola Griffith
Sarah Hall
Barbara Hambly
Zenna Henderson
P.C. Hodgell
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Nalo Hopkinson
Tanya Huff
Shirley Jackson
N. K. Jemisin
Gwyneth Jones
Nancy Kress
Mercedes Lackey
Tanith Lee
Madeline L’Engle
Ursala K. LeGuin
Kelly Link
Laurie Marks
Maureen McHugh
Vonda N. McIntyre
Judith Merril
Naomi Mitchison
Elizabeth Moon
C.L. Moore
Lyda Morehouse
Pat Murphy
Andre Norton
Rebecca Ore
Tamora Pierce
Marge Piercy
Page Rockwell
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Joanna Russ
Pamela Sargent
Melissa Scott
Nisi Shawl
Racoona Sheldon
Mary Shelly
Joan Slonczewski
Tricia Sullivan
Cecilia Tan
Sheri S. Teppe
James Tiptree Jr.
Catherynne M. Valente
Joan D. Vinge
Michelle M Welch
Kit Whitfield
Kate Wilhem
Liz Williams
Connie Willis
Jeanette Winterson

For specific titles, may I recommend the “Mindblowing SF by women and people-of-color” list.

Not the fabulous South Korean horror/comedy movie of the same name, this is the new book from Stephanie Meyer. If Robert Heinlein had page-counts like Stephen King, and rose from the grave to re-write The Puppet Masters as a romance, this might be the book he would have ended up with.

Not having read the sparkly-vampire series, but having heard lots about it, I was not sure what to expect from Ms. Meyer’s “first book for adults.” It turned out to be the perfect book to read on a sick day, with snow and sleet falling outside. Perhaps overly long at over 600+ pages in hardcover, it was still a quick read. The main theme of the story was similar to the vampire stories – impossible love. “He’ll never love me, I’m a parasitic alien controlling his beloved girlfriend’s body! Perhaps if I try really hard and am a perfect saint, he will learn to love me the way I love him.” Seriously, that is pretty much the way it goes.

Passes the Bechdel test, presuming multiple women in one body count, as the infesting alien and her host converse constantly throughout the book, mostly about guys but also about staying alive in a post-alien-invasion world. Meyers is an effective world-builder – the theme of alien parasites isn’t a new one, but she has her own unique twists. The aliens are peaceful and even beautiful when seen outside their host bodies.

It might be an allegory – the peace-loving aliens feel justified in taking over the entire human race since the humans are so vicious and murderous to each other and the rest of the planet. Is Meyers making some point about gun control? If you let the pacifists take the guns away, the whole world will be full of boringly nice alien Democrats?

Eventually our main character alien becomes a self-sacrificing hero and probably saves the human race. It’s left wide open for a sequel or three, although it’s hard to imagine girls getting worked up about the main male love interest characters, they are both kind of jerks. Meyers seems to have a bit of a “young-woman/older-man” fetish going on here, so maybe that will attract the younger set. It’ll be harder to make your eyes shine silver than to make your skin glitter!

I’m not particularly religious, but I’m a sucker for good books about the war between heaven and hell and the folks caught in between. This is a quality entry in that tradition.

I admit, I noticed the William Gibson blurb on the cover. I like Gibson and if he’s that enthusiastic about it, I figured I could give it a try. I was a little leery of Gibson’s characterization of it as a “dirty-ass masterpiece” – what does that mean? But I took the chance, and really enjoyed the book.

The thank-you to Tom Waits in the Acknowledgments, for permission to use lyrics, also gave me high hopes. The last time I saw someone thank Tom Waits for such permission was in a Kinky Friedman book, and it was pretty good. I was pleased to find that the lyrics Kadrey used were from “Alice,” not the “Nighthawks at the Diner” days. Not that there’s anything wrong with those days, it’s just good to see people are keeping up with the newer stuff.

Maybe Gibson thought the book was “dirty-ass” because in addition to being a writer, Kadrey likes taking pictures of women wrapped in electrical tape. But the book itself isn’t porny, it doesn’t even have any sex scenes. The main character gets involved in a movie rental business but considers the porn-addled customers losers, not role models. So, I’m not sure what Gibson was getting at.

Anyhow, the book was good. Very visual, easy to imagine it as a movie in the head. It would be entertaining as a movie on the screen, too, as long as it didn’t star Keanu Reeves. Maybe Viggo in his LoTR hair and a burnt-up leather jacket.

There are strong women characters (although I am not sure it passes the Bechdel test). Magic and alchemy. Devils, angels, violence, and did I mention Tom Waits lyrics? The only false note was the title – the “Sandman Slim” moniker doesn’t appear ’til halfway into the book, and it doesn’t seem to make sense to the main character, either. It’s his celestial lucha libre name, pinned on him by someone else and it never has much meaning for the story. The uncharitable part of my mind wonders if it’s an attempt at pulling in unsuspecting Neil Gaiman fans. The more charitable side says maybe it was a title the author had really wanted to use for years and finally he said “screw it” and pinned it on this book.

There is plenty of room for this book to become a series, and that would be just fine by me.

A short horror novel with an interesting claim to fame – self published online, it was movie optioned and picked up by a major publisher.

The story is a twist on the traditional zombie tale. In this case, the zombies are alive, self-aware, and like being zombies and feel justified in what they are doing.

It flirts with allegory but never ties it up neatly. The main character is a jerk, one of those guys who drifts along in life, feeling entitled to everything without working for any of it. He is whiny and dissatisfied, hates his wife and the kids that he doesn’t seem to understand how he acquired. Then something mysterious happens and he becomes extremely strong, and murderously violent to anyone around him who hasn’t also become a monster. A “hater.”

The scenes of violence are detailed and genuinely shocking. A girl beats her best friend to death. A spouse attacks out of the blue.  I am not sure I’d want to see all that played out on the big screen.

There are sequels in the works, so the story was left hanging at the end. It’s good enough to make me want to pick up the next ones when they come out.

To the person who checked out this Jim Thompson before me:

I couldn’t help but notice your
68 brackets
54 parentheses
27 paragraphs underlined
3 stars
and one
question mark
littering this yellowing paperback
like dog turds
on a sidewalk.

A book rare enough that 25 years ago
the university library bought
it in a reissued paperback
and added boards to it
to give it a little gravitas
and hide the lurid
cover.

I thought you should know
that my eraser and I have
taken care of your
68 brackets
54 parentheses
27 paragraphs underlined
3 stars
and one
question mark.

I am become
the serial killer
of your thoughts.

No one will ever
have to step in
what you think is
important
again.