Review: Once & Future

Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I tried my best with this book, but I just couldn't manage it. The description seemed like the kind of thing I would like: a queer, genderflipped version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, set in a space opera-ish future. Unforuntately, I got about two-thirds of the way through and my reading and enjoyment ground to a halt. The story is dull, the characters are thin and cardboardy, and the worldbuilding is embarrassing. (Sorry, but casting the Galaxy-Wide Corporation as the Big Bad without the slightest explanation of how it got that way and what happened to other planetary governments--not to mention what happened to Earth--doesn't cut it. Not to mention the science and technology doesn't even rise to the level of Star Wars Lite.) I was also reading another non-fiction book, and when I realized I looked forward to picking that one up and continuing a lot more than I did this, I knew it was time to give it up. This book gets donated to the library, and I hope they can find a better audience for it.

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Review: Shattered Bonds

Shattered Bonds by Faith Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's not many long-running urban fantasy series left nowadays, but this is one of them. I had actually skipped a few of the books after reading the opening volumes, but I decided to dive back in again with this one. I was pleasantly surprised, both with Jane's character growth and the deepening layers of Hunter's world. In the earlier volumes, Jane was very much the "lone wolf"--or "lone skinwalker"--depending on no one but herself and actively shirking responsibility. Needless to say, this tended to get her in more trouble. This fault, and its consequences, are dealt with fully in this book, as Jane learns exactly what happens when she tries to run away from her duty.

Jane's relationship with Beast, her mountain lion second soul, is also a highlight of the series. The two of them are working together more than ever before, and this deepening partnership saves the day on more than one occasion. (Jane also promises to find a mate for Beast and have some kits. That should be interesting.) The vampires and witches in this world are a bit different than the norm, with the former in particular coming in for some fascinating world-building. There are also other magical creatures introduced, including a unique (at least to me) variation on arcangels I want to see more of.

Plot-wise, this is a fast-moving story with real consequences, some of them bad. The characters must face up to what they have done and are doing, and Bruiser (Jane's boyfriend) gets some good scenes along those lines. The ending set things up for a changed characters and world going forward, and definitely reignited my interest in this series.

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Review: Catfishing on CatNet

Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the novel-length expansion of Kritzer's charming Hugo-winning story, "Cat Pictures Please." The original was a funny, whimsical little story of a newly emergent artificial intelligence who wants to help people and look at cat pictures. This expansion has that, but it also asks pertinent questions about the ubiquitous intertwining of the internet into our lives, and how an AI develops a conscience and a set of ethics.

It's set just a few minutes (a decade or so) into the future, where 25% of cars on the road are self-driving, and robots teach sex ed (in a hilarious sequence where the protagonist and the AI reprogram said robot to answer questions with accurate information instead of the standard chickenshit "You must talk to your parents about [subject]" answer). Our protagonist, Steph--or Stephania--lives with her mother, a woman on the run from Steph's father, a charming psycopath. The very first scene in the book has Steph's mother hauling her out of the town where they're living in the middle of the night and moving to another small town. Because of this chaotic lifestyle, Steph has no friends other than her online friends on CatNet, a suspiciously well-run site with no spam and an admin, CheshireCat, who appears to be constantly online.

But Steph's past is buried in secrets, as she begins to discover. In the process, her friends on CatNet, and especially CheshireCat, become even more important as those secrets begin to unravel. CheshireCat, of course, is our very young and inexperienced AI, whose actions are pretty much the definition of "unintended consequences." CheshireCat faces some tough ethical dilemmas throughout this story, and the author introduces an interesting formula for the AI's developing an ethical outlook. Put this together with the story's rather unnerving (especially at the climax) examination of how the internet is wound into society's every move, and you have a thought-provoking book, despite its teenage protagonists and fast pacing.

Steph is a well-drawn character, and the characters as a whole are so very teenage. (The scene where Steph and her new friends Rachel and Bryony are fleeing from Steph's father while Rachel and Bryony are simultaneously fighting in the front seat of the car particularly struck me as being true to life.) The only quibble I have about the plot is what I thought was an unnecessary side point of just why Michael Quinn, Steph's father, is so hot to find her and her mother. I think it diluted the domestic violence angle of the story, and also diluted Quinn's worth as a villain. But seeing CheshireCat stumble, make mistakes and learn in the fight to protect its friends was a delight.

This storyline was pretty well wrapped up, but the last chapter and epilogue set things up for a sequel. I'm definitely up for it.

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Review: Storm Cursed

Storm Cursed by Patricia Briggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Urban fantasy isn't the force it once was, but there are still a few long-running series out there. The Mercy Thompson series is one of them. This is the eleventh book, and while I didn't like it quite as much as last year's excellent Silence Fallen, it's still an entertaining blend of vampires, werewolves and witches. In this case all three of the above interact with the human world, which brings the messiness of human politics into the mix.

As always, our protagonist is Mercy Thompson, the skinwalker daughter of Coyote. Mercy is endearing precisely because she isn't a superpowered badass; she's a coyote shapeshifter, which means she can't take on a werewolf or a witch head on and has to rely on stealth, smarts and cunning. (That doesn't mean she doesn't have surprising powers of her own--she can see ghosts, and as she discovers at this story's climax, she has her father Coyote's power over the dead.) It thus falls to her mate and husband, Adam Hauptman, the leader of the local werewolf pack, to get the big fight scenes. The mature, supportive relationship between the two is one of the highlights of the series, as they have each other's backs at all times.

A story and world like this can easily become fraught with cliches, but Briggs manages to keep her universe relatively fresh. A big part of this is the supporting characters, particularly Stefan the vampire and Zee the fey. This book doesn't offer any big character reveals or world-shattering plot changes, but it's a good entertaining read.

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Review: Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays by Peter Watts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Peter Watts is the author of one of my favorite SF books ever, Blindsight. He also has a long-running blog called the Crawl that many of these pieces are drawn from. So I've read a lot of them before (and I wish the comments on the pieces could have been included, as he has an intelligent and witty commentariat). But there are a few new entries from a Polish SF magazine Watts writes a monthly column for, and the entire book is very much worth your time. Watts may be a cranky, pessimistic curmudgeon, but he is never less than entertaining.

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Review: Empress of Forever

Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a frustrating book. I almost gave up on it several times, with its dragging pace. Then I would run across an interesting and unexpected plot twist, or a few pages of prose like this:

The kettle spoke, and as Yannis poured, she flickered. Her scales glistened gold, her head proud, unbowed, feather-crested, her teeth long and fierce, her skin threaded with fire: immutable, unbendingly vicious, a violence that once stalked prey through some prehistoric alien swamp, still, still, each heartbeat closer to a pounce. The preconscious mammal buried somewhere in Viv's body saw that shape and reacted with hot-stove speed; before she realized what was happening, she'd half risen to a crouch and dropped her teacup.

When Gladstone's prose sings, it really sings. Unfortunately, he spends most of the book walking a perilous tightrope between sublime and purple, and he falls off rather more than I'd like. This book, and its characters and world, are not subtle. You've noticed I tagged it "science fantasy" instead of science fiction? There's a reason for that; I've rarely seen a book that lived up to Arthur C. Clarke's old maxim of "advanced technology indistinguishable from magic" more than this one. Whatever laws of physics might exist in this universe are definitely not our own, and the characters break most of them anyway. Which other authors have also done: Yoon Ha Lee, for example, with his excellent Machineries of Empire series. But Lee's books have rules, and make sense, in a way this book does not.

The characters also have problems, because with the exception of the protagonist Vivian Liao (and even she gets in on the action at the end) most of them are either godlike or full-blown gods, whether or not they're called that. This gets boring after a while, as there don't seem to be any limits. It's like having a universe full of Superpeople. I liked Zanj, for instance, but good heavens, seeing her whip through pretty much everything thrown at her, swelling up to gargantuan size, and wielding her spaceship like a damn sword got on my nerves. The only one Zanj can't bring down is the Empress, and the final twist....no, I don't want to get into it. It was completely unsatisfying, at least to me.

I suspect this will be a bit of a marmite book. Those who like it really like it, while those who don't....will probably do what I'm going to do and donate it to the library. It was okay in spots, but for me, that's not good enough to keep it around.



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Review: The Deep

The Deep by Rivers Solomon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has an interesting backstory. It's based on a song of the same name, recorded by the rap group Clipping. (featuring Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame), which was on the Hugo ballot last year. Rivers Solomon, one of the nominees for the Campbell Award (now the Astounding Award) for best new writer, was asked to expand the story into a book. This novella is the result.

I tagged this "science fantasy" because it's definitely not science fiction--pregnant African woman thrown overboard during the Atlantic slave trade are not going to give birth to babies (merpeople, actually) who can live in the ocean, and the descendants of those babies are not going to expand to become an entire society of wajinru (as they come to call themselves) living in the deep. The scientific basis for the world is not the point. The point is memory, history, and responsibility; and the weight of all of these and the price one pays to bear it.

Yetu is our protagonist, the historian of the wajinru, carrying six hundred years of memories in her mind. She only shares them once a year, during the Remembrance, to remind her people of who they are and where they came from. (There is very little said about "our" world except for the mention of a past war between the wajinru and the "two-legs." Solomon does not go into specifics, but it got me to wondering if the wajinru, with their control of the ocean waters, wiped out most of two-leg civilization.) There is only one historian at a time, and the burden of the memories is killing Yetu. Thus, when it comes time for the Remembrance, she downloads all the memories into the minds of her people--and makes her break, swimming out of the deep to the surface, leaving her people behind.

This is an interior-focused, character-based story, with no villain as such. Yetu's fight is with herself, to come to terms with who she is and what she wants. During her surface sojourn--trapped in a shallow tide pool--she meets several two-legs, including one she becomes increasingly close to, Oori. Oori is the last of her people and cannot understand Yetu's turning her back on her history. This clash of values forms the heart of the story, as Yetu, in a sense, grows up. She returns to her people, determined to change the status quo, but willing to take the memories back if she cannot. This proves not to be necessary, as she teaches all of her people to take on the weight of the memories and, in essence, turns every wajinru into a historian, spreading the burden. Afterwards she goes in search of Oori, and wielding a little ocean magic, transforms the human woman into a creature who can survive underwater and brings her to the deep.

This is a layered, multi-faceted story, speaking to the weight of history and how trauma is transmitted from generation to generation. The metaphor is obvious, or at least it should be, and I freely admit that I as a white person cannot fully understand it. Stories like this are necessary, to illustrate and educate, and I'm glad Clipping. picked a talented writer like Rivers Solomon to expand on their vision. There's a lot to think about here, and if you like a fast, action-based plot, that is not this story. It is, however, tailor-made for those who can appreciate how speculative fiction can, in creating a parallel world, shine a bright, unflattering light on our own.


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Review: Stormrise

Stormrise by Jillian Boehme
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This started off reminding me of the Chinese legend of Mulan. The men in the country are called up to war, and a young woman pretends to be a man and takes her father's (in this case, her brother's) place. She learns to fight and fights well, and after the war is over she returns home in triumph. In this case, there is also magic and dragons (the former made specifically from the bodies of the latter), and a teenager named Rain L'nahn, who runs away to save her brain-damaged brother Storm from going to war. To conceal her "monthlies," she buys a pouch of powder before she leaves, powder made from the body of the ancient dragon T'Gonnen. This causes her to dream of his mate Nuaga, and eventually she finds Nuaga in the flesh and released her from a centuries-long sleep. To save the kingdom, Rain and Nuaga must release the rest of the dragons from a similar sleep. Rain has to do this while still pretending to be her brother Storm, navigating basic training with her unit, and journeying with them to save the High King...and along the way, she discovers one of the other soldiers in her unit, Forest, is the betrothed of her sister Willow. (It was an arranged marriage, which is why Rain has never seen him or known who he was before. And of course she falls in love with Forest.)

If all this sounds a bit angsty and soap-opera-ish, it is. This is not a terribly deep story, either in characterizations or worldbuilding. The side characters are not very fleshed out, and the love interest Forest is just bland. I also question some of the plot choices. The antagonist, Sedge, is a right bastard though most of the story, behaving like a nasty caveman when he discovers Rain is female, and at the climax she suddenly forgives him because he saw his ass was grass and threw in his lot with Rain and Forest? I don't think so. The ending is particularly unbelievable. Just because Rain almost single-handedly saves the High King, he is going to throw away centuries of tradition, allowing Rain to become a grandmaster in this society's martial art of Neshu and teach young girls this same art, just because she asks? Misogyny and patriarchy is not that easily overcome, alas.

What bugged me the most was the dragons. They are just weird. They are six-legged, with fur and manes instead of scales and horns. I tried Googling to see if this was based on any Chinese or Oriental dragon myths, but I couldn't really find anything. That really stretched my suspension of disbelief, and snapped it outright at some points.

This seems to be a self-contained story, which is a good thing, as I wasn't going to continue even if there were further books. It's okay, but there are better young adult dragon fantasies out there.

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Review: Protect the Prince

Protect the Prince by Jennifer Estep
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book provides a good illustration of that wise old maxim, "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it." In the first book of this series, Kill the Queen, our protagonist Everleigh Saffira Winter Blair fled from the palace after the massacre of her family and fell in with a gladiator troupe, vowing to wrest the throne from her traitor cousin Vasilia. By the end of the book, she had succeeded in her quest--but the book ended with the intimation that her problems were just beginning.

This book explores those problems, and is all the more interesting to me because of it. Court intrigue is a juicy sub-genre of epic fantasy if done well, and this one is. As this book makes clear, holding the throne is far more difficult than gaining it. Everleigh has to juggle the backstabbing, sneers and power grabs of her nobles, negotiate a treaty with a neighboring country with an eye to defending both countries from an invasion by her enemies, learn the wiles of power and diplomacy, work out how she feels about one Lucas Sullivan, the magier who works for her previous gladiator troupe...oh yeah, and expose a hidden assassin trying to kill her.

Along the way, she learns more about herself and her powers, and just what it means to be a "Winter queen" (hint, it has nothing to do with said powers, and everything to do with the ability to make hard choices and sacrifice her own needs and desires for her people). The book ends with the treaty negotiated and allies gained, and the resolution of her romantic subplot--but the war with Morta is looming ever larger on the horizon. Presumably this will be the focus of the third book.

This isn't deathless literature, but it's an interesting, fast-paced, slightly pulpy epic fantasy. It's a good beach read, I think.

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Review: The Twisted Ones

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

T. Kingfisher, also known as Ursula Vernon, has been publishing award-nominated and -winning stories for quite a while. Her stories are combinations of magical whimsy and pragmatic, ordinary characters. This is the first novel of hers I've read, and it's a lot darker than the stories I've read of hers to date. But it takes the same basic situation, of an ordinary person thrown into an extraordinary situation, and steadily ratchets up the dread and terror.

Melissa, aka Mouse, is a freelance editor who gets roped into clearing out her grandmother's house after Grandma's death. Grandma was a bitter, nasty old woman, and also a hoarder, something Mouse doesn't discover until after she and her redbone coonhound Bongo arrive at the house. (It matters a great deal what kind of dog Bongo is--as Mouse admits in her writeup of events, if Bongo had been a border collie, she wouldn't be here now to write down what happened.) The house is in the middle of the North Carolina woods, surrounded by loblolly pines, kudzu, a very strange rock in the back yard, and woodpeckers--or what she thinks is woodpeckers--going tap tap tap.

The first night she is there, Mouse discovers a journal left behind by her late step-grandfather, Frederick Cotgrave, and as she reads it, a particular phrase repeats itself over and over: And I twisted myself about like the twisted ones. Cotgrave is trying to find the "Green Book," which his wife, Mouse's grandmother, has taken from him and hidden, and he writes down as much of it as he can remember in his journal. Thus we have a story within a story, which slowly unfolds as Mouse's story does, giving clues to "the twisted ones" and "the holler people."

This is a slow, stealthy escalation of terror, until halfway through when all hell breaks loose. Suffice to say you will never regard the word "effigy" in the same way again. Kingfisher is in complete control of her story and characters at all times. Mouse, like so many of Kingfisher's (and Vernon's) characters, is not a hero, or a badass; she's muddling through as best she can, gradually rising to the occasion as the situation gets worse. She is surrounded by several well-drawn supporting characters, particularly Foxy, the sixty- or seventy-something next door neighbor. Foxy is a delightful character, and I would love another book about her. All the characters are relatable, everyday people, and you really care what happens to them.

Kingfisher also gets that horror and humor can live side by side, and she deftly plays with the absurdities of the tropes she is writing about. There are multiple laugh-out-loud moments in this book alongside the multiple creeptastic moments (especially the Last Stand in Grandma's Kitchen at the end of the book). This book (according to the Author's Note at the end) is in conversation with, and inspired by, a turn-of-the-century (the last century) horror story, The White People, by an author I've never heard of, Arthur Machen. I'm not sure if the "white" or "holler" people were meant to be the Fae--in one way it sounds like that, with their hidden gateways to faerie mounds in alternate worlds, maybe in Wales and maybe not--but these White People are like no Fae you've ever read before.

This is one fine, scary book, but let me assure you the hound doesn't die: in a lot of ways, he saves the day, in his lovable dimwitted manner. And if you, the reader, never want to step into a hoarder's house again, and if you particularly don't want to deal with leftover doll collections...after closing the covers of this book, that's perfectly understandable.

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Review: Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kröger
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a very ambitious project: gather together the unknown, forgotten, overlooked and underappreciated female pioneers of horror and speculative fiction. There are the usual suspects, of course: Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Tanith Lee, Anne Rice. Unfortunately, to an extent, this book became the victim of its own ambition. I appreciated the obvious research that has been put in, especially for those writers I've never heard of before. At the same time, I wish some of these writers had been expanded upon, and excerpts and analyses of their stories included. As it is, though this is a worthwhile book, it ends up being a rather superficial one.

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Review: Containment

Containment by Caryn Lix
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second book in a series, following on the heels of last year's Sanctuary. I did like this book, enough to pre-order the third one....but it does have its problems.

I characterized the first book as "the Young Avengers meet the Xenomorphs." The series takes place in a corporate-controlled future, with metahumans being born after the arrival of alien probes fifty years previously. The first book took place on the space station/prison Sanctuary, with its cohort of teenage superheroes coming under siege by aliens. Our protagonist, Kenzie Cord, is the daughter of parents aligned with the megacorp Omnistellar, the owner and operator of the station, and unbeknownst to her an "anomaly" herself. Over the course of the first book, she comes to question everything she has been taught, discovers the truth of her past, and throws in with the group from Sanctuary battling the aliens.

This book continues Kenzie's story, and the kids she has taken up with, her new-found family. The biggest failing in this book is its uneven pacing and often silly plot twists. The first book was taut and suspenseful, but this one has a bad habit of dragging. Kenzie and her group get captured way too often, and although due to their various superpowers they are usually able to break free, this tail-swallowing circle gets tiresome after a while. Someone should have taken an axe to the middle of this book and tightened up the plot. Also, Kenzie's powers are expanding, and so are the other characters'. (Apparently their powers are a direct result of genetic manipulation due to the aliens' life cycle. This doesn't really make much sense, so don't dwell on it too long.) This is handled rather well, better than the overall plot, and the last few chapters do feel a bit better paced. Of course, we end on a cliffhanger, with all the dangling threads to (hopefully) be wrapped up in the third book.

Having said all this, the moments of characterization are where this book shines. Kenzie's PTSD from the first book is acknowledged and dealt with (even if the reason for it is reversed in the dumbest plot twist of the book), and all the main characters show satisfying growth. I wish the pacing could have been kept under better control to allow the characters more of these interesting moments. This book really seems like it could have used another draft and a firmer editorial hand. Hopefully the final book will overcome these problems.

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Review: The Outside

The Outside by Ada Hoffmann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book melds several genres into its own thing, and while for much of the story it's a slow burn, by the end I couldn't put it down. Fascinating worldbuilding mixed with an unsettling version of Lovecraftian cosmic horror (and the even more unsettling concept of quantum supercomputers mutated into humanity's gods and conquerors) and you end up with a creepy, unique, unforgettable tale.

Much has been made of this book's protagonist, Yasira Shien, being autistic (and her antagonist, Dr. Evianna Talirr, obviously is as well, though it's not as directly stated). I appreciated this, but Yasira was not the most interesting part of the book to me. Her character was well drawn, but a few of the side characters (particularly Tiv, her lover, and Enga, a totally badass, cynical cyborg) are worthy of books in their own right. The focus is mostly on Yasira throughout (with some viewpoint sections from Akavi Averis, an augmented servant of Nemesis, one of the AI Gods).

What disturbed me more than anything else were some of the worldbuilding nuances. This far future of humanity has its own new, twisted religion--supercomputers that have ascended to sentience and made themselves gods, complete with their own (patently false) history and myths. (A lot of this is revealed in the book and article snippets at the beginning of each chapter.) We don't meet any of the Gods as such, just Their creations--humans turned into "angels," chosen and modified with so much technology their brains are half organic and half silicon chips, and in the case of Enga, whose bodies are implanted with weapons that would swat a Terminator away like an insect. Ordinary humans are second- and third-class citizens, restricted in their movements and technology--they're forbidden from progressing past old-fashioned vacuum-tube style computers, for example--and treated with a smug patronization by the servants of the AIs, who think said humans should be grateful for everything the AIs have done for them. If you dare to object to this setup, you're called a heretic, and captured, tortured and terminated.

Into this uneasy status quo comes Yasira, who invents a new power source that, unbeknownst to her, links to and sucks in the titular Outside, Hoffman's version of the Lovecraftian mythos--an extradimensional universe full of myth, monsters, and metaphysical concepts of time and space (time and space, along with everything else, is "lies," according to Evianna Talirr, a motif repeated through the book). The Outside was first discovered by Yasira's mentor Dr. Evianna Talirr, who disappeared three years ago. After the Talirr-Shien reactor malfunctions and destroys the space station where it was built, Yasira is dragged into the quest to hunt down Dr. Talirr, who has evidently been facilitating increasingly dangerous Outside incursions to further her own agenda.

The story revolves around Yasira's pursuit of Evianna Talirr, and the slow reconstruction of her character, as she comes to question everything she has been taught to believe. This is a slow, deliberate progression, befitting Yasira's character. I like Yasira and Evianna well enough, but truthfully, I would love a prequel to this universe, showing how it came to be. How humans came to accept quantum supercomputers (and the characters know they are supercomputers, originally built by the present generation's ancestors) transforming themselves into all-seeing Gods, and the fact that after death, their consciousness and memories are harvested by said supercomputers to maintain their own supremacy and existence (and even before one's death, if you want to become a "sell-soul")--well, that would make a terrifying tale in its own right, it seems to me.

This is some of the most original worldbuilding I have ever read. I loved it. I'm grateful for this book's slower pacing, to give the reader time to absorb what's being presented. And the ending, which sets Yasira and her lover Tiv up to lead the rebellion against the Gods--well, my goodness. This book's sequel (if, as I fervently hope, there is one) will be an insta-buy for me as soon as it comes out.

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Review: Middlewest, Book One

Middlewest, Book One by Skottie Young
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was recommended to me on a website where I hang out. It's something I would never have stumbled across on my own, because I've perused one of the author's previous graphic novels (I Hate Fairyland) and wasn't impressed. This one, however, has a better storyline and characters, and the art is bright and bold.

Abel is a young boy with a talking fox sidekick and an emotionally abusive father, who flees after his father loses his temper and reveals himself to be a tornado monster. (The talking fox is revealed on page 6, so we see right away that the town of Farmington is not quite set in our world.) The story follows Abel's flight and the monsters and others he encounters, including trolls, crow monsters on a train, and a wizard. Abel's father left a brand of power on his chest, and it soon turns out Abel is a budding tornado monster himself. In a desperate attempt to stop this, Abel hunts down the carnival troupe of a mystic named Magdalena, takes up with them, and begins to make a home for himself.

One thing I appreciate about this comic is that it isn't rushed. Some comics (Marvel is particularly prone to this, I think) just push too much into 12 pages, or whatever the average issue size is. This one takes its time unfolding its storyline, characters and worldbuilding, and lets them breathe. This can be a fine line to walk, juggling between deliberate and slow, but this graphic novel succeeds. I came to care about the characters and want to know what happens to Abel, particularly since this volume ends on a massive cliffhanger. Which is an annoyance, of course, but it just about guarantees that I'll pick up Volume 2 when it comes out.

Give this a try. I think many of you will like it.

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Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vol. 1: High School Is Hell

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vol. 1: High School Is Hell by Jordie Bellaire
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is an updated reboot of the Buffyverse, as is clear from the cover--Buffy is holding a stake in one hand and a cell phone in the other. The first issue starts with her already having gained her powers and moved to Sunnydale, just like the show (which I watched religiously during its run). There are immediate differences: Willow is already an out lesbian and sporting the chin-length bob of later seasons, not the longer hair of the first; Cordelia is an actual nice person, not a "mean girl"--although from some remarks she makes, I wonder how long that's going to last; Spike and Drusilla make their appearance right away; Anya is already running the magic shop; and Robin Wood from Season 7 is a teenager at Sunnydale High.

If all this sounds overstuffed, it kind of is. This volume covers the first four issues of the comic, and for the most part it feels far too rushed. It seems like Jordie Bellaire is trying to get the Scooby Gang back together too fast, without letting the different relationships evolve naturally. For example, Buffy meets and hangs out with Willow and Xander in the first issue, and elicits enormous laughter when attempting to explain the existence of bumpy-headed vampires to them; and yet only two issues later, when she confronts Spike and Drusilla, they come charging in with a shovel and a baseball bat to help her. The shock of and reaction to their discovering that demons and vampires are real things, and the Hellmouth is in Sunnydale, is completely glossed over.

All that said, I will pick up the second volume. I just hope the pace slows down a bit and the characters are given some room to breathe.

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Review: Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You

Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You by Scotto Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a neat little tale of Lovecraftian horror and rock and roll, encapsulated perfectly by the cover blurb: "Moore understands a key truth about Ziggy Stardust: Rock and roll messiahs are really fucking scary."

One could say the central figure of this musical horror story, Airee Macpherson, is sort of a genderbent Ziggy Stardust. If one defines a "genderbent Ziggy Stardust" as a "psychopathic criminal from a future dimension," who is using a sinister marriage of music and occultism to blast open a portal to return to her dimension. Our story is narrated by an unnamed music blogger who stumbles upon a new band, Beautiful Remorse. The very first chapter, Track 01, describes the effect this music has on him (or her? The story doesn't specify either way):

Time stopped while I was listening to it. Elation swept through me, as if I could die now, secure in the knowledge that I had at long last heard the most beautiful piece of music in the world and if I never heard any other music ever again, it wouldn't matter, because all music after this was going to sound like shit anyway.

Our music blogger hunts down the band's singer, Airee Macpherson, and scores an interview with her the following night at the band's show in Houston. Thus begins a steadily ratcheting tale of terror and suspense, one track at a time, with Beautiful Remorse's musical horror virus spreading throughout the land. The blogger is complicit and admits it, refusing to leave the tour even when band members are sacrificed onstage. There's obviously a Lovecraftian feel to all this, even if Cthulhu isn't mentioned (especially when Track 07 opens the wrong portal and a giant tentacle comes through). With Track 09, Airee finally manages to open the right portal, and disappears into it after leaving our narrator with Track 10 and a promise: if anyone ever wants her to return, just play the track and she'll come back to finish what she started.

The last chapter, "Coda," picks up the story ten years later, when--you guessed it--the final track gets loose on the internet. The song's name? "Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You." Which is a shivery bit of meta, ending on a promise of unopposed mayhem. This is a taut, well-written horror story that's worth your time.

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Review: The Haunting of Tram Car 015

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Last year, P. Djeli Clark wrote the excellent novella "The Black God's Drums." This novella takes place in a different world, an alternate-history Cairo where alchemy is a real thing, magic works and djinns and various otherworldly beasties exist. This makes for several interesting worldbuilding concepts, including one where Egypt kicked the British out forty years before and there is a Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. Our two protagonists, Hamid Nasr and Onsi Youssef, are agents of said Ministry.

What starts out as a seemingly simple case--the haunting of a tram car by an unknown supernatural being--steadily escalates into a crisis. This story is well paced and tightly written, and the world is something I would like to explore further. Clark tells this story with a great deal of droll humor that had me laughing out loud more than once. Having said all this, I didn't like this as much as "The Black God's Drums." But it is worth your time.

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Review: Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water

Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water by Vylar Kaftan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This novella started out very promisingly. The protagonist, Bee, and her lover Chela are trapped in a cave system; Bee doesn't remember what they did to be marooned there, and Chela refuses to tell her anything beyond that they're telepaths and they killed four thousand people. The first three chapters are very good, intriguing and well paced. Then another telepathic voice intrudes on Bee's mind, the mental voice of the wife she's forgotten, and Jasmine breaks Bee out of the Matrix-like hold she's in....

And the whole thing goes downhill from there.

Honestly, I wish the editor had insisted the author chop the remaining four chapters right on out. This is simply not the story that should be told, in my opinion; it's not well thought out and characterized at all, and the worldbuilding (what there is of it) is severely lacking. The end reveal (who Chela really is) had me rolling my eyes. It's sad, because I would have read the heck out of a story featuring Bee and Chela trying to escape from their prison, and exploring whether Bee really is a mass murderer. I only rated this book (barely) two stars because of the first half. The book felt like a cheat, setting itself up to be one thing and then doing a completely unearned turn in another direction.

Don't waste your time with this one. I'm afraid you'll be disappointed.

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Review: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is terrifying. Up till now, I hadn't read such a thorough explanation of the horrors climate change will visit on the planet, and the first section of this made me want to hide under the bed. I can understand why Greta Thunberg and other young activists are so pissed off right now, because they'll have to live with the consequences of the world's inaction.

A good companion to this book would be The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen. This book points out that all but one of Earth's past mass extinctions were fueled by climate change. This includes the end-Permian extinction that killed between 90-95% of all life then existing on Earth. The Uninhabitable Earth starts out comparing current trends to this extinction, in one of many chilling paragraphs:

In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years--perhaps as long as 15 million years.

I recommend this book, but be prepared to be depressed afterwards. And then emerge from under the bed and prepare to fight, because this is the only Earth we have, and there is no Planet B.



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Review: Shadow Captain

Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I gave the first book in this series five stars, and unfortunately this book turned out to be quite a disappointment. This continued the story of Adrana and Arafura Ness, in the far future (extremely far future--millions of years at least, possibly hundreds of millions) of humanity, when all the planets have been smashed to rubble and humans are eking out a not-too-great existence in the remains. There have been boom-and-bust cycles of civilization and technology, thirteen of them, and those who make their homes in the Thirteenth Occupation are surrounded by this forgotten technology, contained in the worldlets called "baubles."

(This book only brought home what an enormous unaddressed hole in the worldbuilding this idea is. How could all the planets in the solar system be broken apart? More importantly, why would anyone destroy the Earth? That question is the giant Oliphaunt, to borrow Tolkien's description, in the room, and so far the author has not answered it.)

This second book picks up the Ness sisters' story, and is told from the point of view of the older sister, Adrana. In looking over my review of the first book, I said that I hoped this would happen. Unfortunately, I need to remember to be careful what I wish for, because Adrana is a bland, staid character compared to the dynamic and obsessed Arafura. The pacing of this book is poor, with a huge chunk of the middle devoted to a pointless wandering around on a worldlet trying to get medical care for an injured crewmember, while more interesting mysteries (namely the origin of the seemingly sentient quoins) fall by the wayside.

Just a disappointment all the way around, sadly. I hope, if there is to be a third book, the author goes back to his more interesting character (Arafura) and really drills down into the worldbuilding. There seems to be a giant overarching mystery being set up here, but this book is so meandering and out-of-focus it has dimmed my enthusiasm for the series quite a bit.

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