Lotus War #2: Kinslayer

Jay Kristoff had a charming debut with Stormdancer, but one I had some reservations with both morally (falling on some outdated fantasy tropes) and with its actual execution. The world he created resembled Hunger Games, The Last Unicorn, Miyazaki, and Kurosawa, but the novel had some logic and pacing issues that kept me from fully loving it, but was intrigued and entertained enough to continue. In a trilogy the second volume really only needs to be a decent bridging volume to succeed, but there is another way to tackle one. Kristoff thankfully went the latter route. This book betters the previous volume in every measure, creating a book more complex, gripping, brutal, tense, violent, realistic the handling of its themes, and morally probing. The action scenes are terrifically paced, the atmosphere is grim but captivating, and the new characters and plots lines all succeed. This book is so brutal in fact any lingering suspicions that this is a YA series disappear. But, the grim is undercut by strong characters and the thoughtfulness and maturity of the author’s performance, no grittiness for grittiness sake. The amount Kristoff learned between these two volumes is pretty impressive. The only problem (besides the demon subplot which still feels tacked on and unnecessary), is how he is going to better this for the finale. It is going to be tough but I will be there to see him try.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Gaiman has become a highly visible writer in the science fiction/fantasy field with pretty impeccable taste, an accessible prose style, a good sense of humor and sense of wonder. This has deservedly gained him vast popularity outside of the genre. I once saw hints once of an ambitious writer. His first two books Neverwhere and Stardust were a little clunky at time showing that they had been pulled together from other mediums, and his comic book work had some amazing stuff in it even though I never fully fell for Sandman (never fully worked for me but certain storylines where remarkable). Then American Gods which was a very ambitious epic possibly a bit derivative of Tim Powers but savage and wonderful as Power’s work, and up there with his peers and friends Kathy Acker and Alan Moore. It was a thoroughly ambitious but accessible novel that rightly placed him in the literary firmament. . Since then it has been comic novels, books for children, movie scripts, and unsuccessful returns to comics, and plenty of blogging and twittering. Now we this charming little book, one that started as a short story and probably could have stayed that way. It has great ideas and characters and was a thoroughly engrossing read but could have been an equally great short story, doesn’t quite justify being a novel. I still have this concern looking over his recent career that we are witnessing a talent in full coasting mode.

Empty Space: A Haunting

The finale to Harrison’s trilogy is as confounding, obtuse, and beautiful as the rest of the series. His prose is crafted so impeccably and relentlessly it is hard to resist chewing over each line and word choice (it is also very discouraging for the amateur writer) and occasionally losing the plot. But with Harrison you know you are going to read it again, soon I might restart the trilogy and see how they work together. His imagery, imagination, and prose are on such a level that they put much science fiction (is there anyone else who writes in the genre recently that is comparable as a stylist, Wolfe, Mieville, Shepard, or Gibson?) and other fiction in its shadow. Jodorowsky and Lynch should have skipped Dune and waited for these books to adapt. Quantum physics, Gnosticism, and dream imagery mixed with cyberpunk, noir, depressing near future science fiction, and space opera for a dense, cinematic, and surreal nightmare.

Brian Evenson Fugue State

Fugue State by Brian Evenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fugue State is another worthwhile collection of Evenson’s brilliant, angular, and disconcerting takes on fiction. He uses short fiction in way very few contemporaries do, Ligotti definitely comes to mind though. Beckett’s desolate spaces and comic narrators, Poe’s diseased and obsessive minds, the suffocating traps of Kafka are Evenson’s peers, but his collection of mutilations, plagues, amnesiacs, liminal spaces, and bizarre rituals are distinctly his own voice. Zak Sally the cartoonist and former bass player of the wonderful band Low provides some stark little illustrations and one full on collaboration with Evenson.

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Crackpot Palace: Stories by Jeffrey Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ford has the keys to the landscape of our dreams. Taking the ephemera of our pop culture such as comic books and strips, pulp science fiction, the drudgery of day to day living, our dreams, our myths, and turning them into a startling dreamscape filled unsettling evocative images, characters, wonder, and terror, a rich and occasionally quite horrific world. Each of his short fiction collections is a wunderkammer, a cabinet filled with curiosities, grotesques, and eerie beauty but presented with an earthy sense of humor. His novellas like Relic and the Wish Head are the most consuming and realized but shorter pieces like Dr. Lash Remembers and Daddy Longlegs of the Evening manage to create whole universes, and really the only story that felt a little half-baked was Ganesha.

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The Great Lover by Michael Cisco
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title is both hilariously provocative and slightly embarrassing to read in public. This book finds Cisco presenting his most disorienting outing yet. In some way it seems like it could be his most accessible, resembling both a Frankenstein story and a dark urban fantasy where bizarre worlds and creatures exist in a gritty, recognizable urban tableau. This basic outline won’t help much when you are reading it. Cisco’s writing is at its most art damaged and discombobulated, and inventive and beautiful. Tim Powers remixed by William Burroughs. Weird rituals, alien worlds, and surreal mayhem are what you get. This resembles another beautiful book I have recently read, Grace Krilanovich’s The orange eats creeps, and in a just world this book would get the praise that book so deservedly got. Rhys Hughes intro alone is worth the price of this book.

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Immobility by Brian Evenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Noir character edge, apocalyptic tone, Marx Brothers meets Beckett (if they are at all different) dialogue, comic but sinister duos, stark prose, identity and reality in doubt, and probing moral questions are all present and mark Immobility as both a representative and a thoroughly accomplished example of what one our best writers, Brian Evenson, does. This is his take on the post-apocalyptic genre and it is lighter in language and tone then his previous venture (the beautiful and singular Dark Property: An Affliction being a prime example) into the territory. As a literary example of the genre, comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are inevitable, but the characters in this book are the ones the son and father in that book cower in woods and attics to avoid. Evocative of absurdist drama, seventies science fiction, lean, experimental tinged writing, and nasty noir, this book is recommended for any fan of such styles and of course fans of Evenson’s particular brilliance.

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The Other City by Michal Ajvaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City reminds me of Borges and Kafka of course, more distinctly though of Carter, Shulz, Kubin, and Lovecraft, but especially of Shulz and even of modern fantasists such as Mieville and Vandermeer. The book is a maze of shifting realities, beautiful and ominous images, and parodies of epic poetry, that is a fully enthralling and at times exhausting journey that skews from metaphysical slapstick comedy to psychedelic surrealism without much downtime. You don’t travel here for character development or any such furniture of fiction, this is not realism, and this is a book that forms its own reality.

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Stephen Hunt

The Court of the Air
Court of Air is a nonstop carnival of imagination, Doctor Who, Superhero comics, English History being captured by a trio of Moorcock, Sterling, and Powers on amphetamines and pulp novel overload with the satirical vision of Jack Vance. The tone is swashbuckling and comic despite how dark and violent pretty much all of it is and the invention is dense and relentless. If this book fails it does so in excess.

Mark Charan Newton

Nights of Villjamur (Legends of the Red Sun)
Bleak and brooding, with minimal violence but intense, characters drag you along with them. This is not a reinvention like many are touting and Newton’s prose and dialogue are not as gripping as some quarters insist, but he is taking much of the invention of new weird and attaching it back to more traditional fantasy, thankfully the subgenre of Dying Earth is his milieu, and writing it with noir energy.

Newton’s Nights of Villjamur was a somber moody success, almost like a fantasy novel that read like a Scandinavian crime novel. The second entry is louder, more packed with grotesquerie and invention, and more emotional. Gang wars, bizarre technology, dystopian politics, inter-dimensional war, weird ancient technology, mutant animal/human hybrids, religious fanaticism, homophobia, and vampires are packed in with the somber mood retained from the first book, in this wonderful revitalization of the dying earth sub-genre. The plot tears you from grim set piece and danger to another and then all stops are pulled out are the apocalyptic siege of the city of Villiren. Brutal, relentless, and thunderous this is breathless reading. City of Ruin is a very impressive second entry in this series.
City of Ruin


Book of Transformations

The Last Page

An inventive modern fantasy from a promising first time author. Nerdisms like invented languages…especially the invented slang (I tell you authors be wary of its use…hard to ever take seriously). Beautiful elevated language which occasionally clunks but usually is a thick stew that pulls back for intimate characters moments. Intimacy and excess, too much and not enough of something and it stumbled in the initial school sequences. Like the high language as it provides a beautiful feeling of otherness that fantasy requires. Frustrating and uneven with some segments unsettlingly beautiful then crude character dialogue which works maybe better than trying to elevate the dialogue but is tonal shift nonetheless, I guess if it was more artfully handled and the character less distant to me it would work better. Also for an author who creates such superb terms for things why call airships zeppelins? Is there a Count Zeppelin living in this alternate world? These flaws are present but this a work of full-bore imagination and I can’t wait for the next segment (it’s a duology). A mix of new weird, high fantasy, steampunk that is full of wonder and has me impatient for what is next.

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart

The Brothers Grossbart is a creation that resembles the fruit of the effort of collaboration between Tarantino, Brothers Grimm, Hieronymus Bosch, Cormac McCarthy Evil Dead era Sam Raimi, Angela Carter, Edward Gorey and Barbara Tuchman. Fairy Tale, gritty medieval tale, splatterpunk, creepy horror (there are some very scary moments), gross out humor, and real life disasters (Black Death, Jewish Pogroms, and the pillage of Alexandria), carnivalesque bizarreness coalesce in a book quite unlike much else. Some issues like the quick switching of viewpoints and overlong chapters could be cleared up with some different formatting.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Burton & Swinburne)

A lot of recent outings in steampunk/gaslight adventure that I have encountered have been little anemic in their composition as opposed to some classic examples from Tim Powers and Kim Newman. In the tradition of these two authors is Mark Hodder’s debut, a brainy adventure that exists in a copiously realized world with an internal logic and characters and runs that gamut between ridiculous and sublime. The central conceit of the story is at its heart rather sinister and dark which adds some weight to this ripping yarn.

Felix Gilman

The Half-Made World
Gilman crafts a superb synthesis of dystopian literature, dark fantasy, satire, western and some would argue steampunk, but I would argue that it uses some the witty anachronism of said genre without any of its clichés. Mixing the horrors of world war one with the creation myth of the wild west ( and Australia’s outback) he comes up with some thoughtful metaphors with the struggle between the Line, the Gun, and the Republic. Each of these is abundantly realized and imagined and don’t act as props for the author to present ideas. The main adventure and backstory provide meaty and pleasing reading while the ideas bounce in your head. It’s hard to compare Gilman to Mieville or Jeff Vandermeer as his writing is so much clearer and well placed, but his imagination and ability to present an upside down portrait of the world very similar.


Thunderer:I enjoyed Gilman’s Half Made World and I am happy to report that I found his sensibilities fully formed on his debut novel. Much stock has been made of the author admitting in an interview that he was inspired to write by China Mieville, but anyone expecting to dismiss Gilman as a rip off or wanting carbon copy cloning of Mieville will be disappointed as Gilman is a writer with a more varied palate. While his inspiration channels horror, science fiction, pulp, and surrealism into baroque monstrosities, Gilman writes in clear headed and fluent prose that resembles magic realism. This isn’t to say he is more adult and more boring, for darkness and weirdness is very much present alongside sense of wonder fantasy constructs and surreal set pieces. I found the darker moments more so as Gilman makes his characters live and breathe increasing the stakes. Gilman writes mythic fabulism with smart narrative turns and an amazingly assured voice for a first time author. The final third plays with reality in similar way to vintage Moorcock and Borges and gets me excited for the sequel, even though this book feels beautifully self-contained.
Gears of the City
Gilman follows up his impressive debut with a book that layers on excesses and shows such brazen ambition that it should be a loud messy failure. Like Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet, and Hal Duncan’s Vellum a twisting series of timelines, genre, and realities is presented that should reduce the narrative to collage but as in the last half of the Thunderer the author retains a consistent narrative energy that holds the story together in ways that those two mentioned(and wonderful) books don’t. Like Duncan and Moorcock, Gilman also uses the multiverse theme to present essays on various genres so cyberpunk, high fantasy, new wave science fiction, gothic surrealism, steampunk(definitely more from the reality of 19th century ruled by filibusters and other men with guns than Sherlock Holmes and penny dreadfuls), and war stories coexist. An ambitious fantasy that sags a little in the middle, but comes back in a big way and is what I wish the movie Dark City had been like.

The Alchemy of Stone

Sedia provides us with fairy tale/fable with touches of steampunk and new weirdness that comes to a troubling end that is very open to interpretation. The dialogue and prose are guileless and provide a platform for her story, characters, and setting. Shades of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Quay Brothers, Angela Carter, and Guy Maddin are found in a story that manages to be charming, creepy and ultimately quite dark. I found the heroine Mattie quite appealing and found the book quite worthy of note; E. Sedia is a writing of great imagination that presents her stories with effortless writing.

The Devil All the Time

Donald Ray Pollack takes the desperation and despair of his Knockemstiff stories and stretches them into a crime novel, like Jim Thompson troubled by readings of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor and insomnia. Serial killers, pedophile priests, suicide, killers, religious fanaticism and a heap of dead bodies fill this grim tale. Pollock gives this story a hero and we have someone rightly or wrongly to root for which is a difference from his influences. Devil all the Time is a decent first stretch into novel length by Pollack hopefully to be followed by stronger ones. This won’t make him a household like his influences but puts in company with fellow interpreters of their gothic Americana such as Daniel Woodrell and William Gay (who provides a blurb).

The Narrator

Forget all the critics telling you about this or that fantasy novel saving the genre by bringing adult themes to the stock tropes of the genre. And why should you forget them? Because the real salvation of dark fantasy and if I maybe so bold literature in general is in the writing of Michael Cisco. There isn’t writing this savage and disorienting happening really anywhere else. Set in an alternative world (whether an alternative earth, future or completely secondary isn’t ever really answered) wracked by an unreasonable war, eerie ruins, political oppression, and surreal events and creatures. The story is the journey of the titular narrator Low through this world, his friendships, his love for the cannibal queen, and other adventures most notably the final sequence which is an unrestrained riff on Tarvosky’s Stalker and Brothers Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. Nothing can really describe the actual experience of reading this book veering from wild inventions to observations of human behavior that burn with recognition. Not for the feeble of sentiment as violence and grotesquery haunts nearly every page. Brian Evenson’s blurb mentions both Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and William S Burroughs and the cover mentions M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, and Ligotti, and Cisco is firmly in their company while being utterly unique.

Richard Calder

Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things


Calder’s Dead trilogy is a Frankenstein monster made up of masturbatory fantasies about anime, serious fevered study of De Sade and Bataille, love of the baroque prose of Nabokov and Angela Carter, and fin de siecle decadence held together with cyperpunk wiring and then torn to pieces with narrative scatterbombs from Burrough’s Nova trilogy and Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet. If you don’t like these references, you won’t like Calder.

Frenzetta
A baroque picaresque/romp of surrealistic porn and grand guignol a la Angela Carter’s Passion of New Eve or Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, with a mix of the decadent adventures of Moorcock, and more than a hint of Ballard pushed through a vision where anima, 30’s pulp, and French Symbolism are of equal import. Strangely fun if you give it a chance and wade through the purple prose with lots of cruelty and outrageous gore and an overload of style. Set in version of world where an event called the Abortion forced another reality on our own with lots animal people, a weird mix of technology (airships and muskets, teleporter and one stomping robot), and divided into Afric, Europa, Cathay, and Atlantis who wages war on all with their air navy and robots and in a wonderful inverse are the last remaining humans (the others ruled by the tribes of the perverse). Romping through this world on their way to the Moon and mythical freedom are a goblin princess (half rat and human) who will die when she orgasms, a brain eating revenant, and their dwarf maid. Balloon rides, a birth from a corpse, squid weaponry, necromancers, a queen who has her brain transplanted in a freshly killed young girl every year, a mix of myth and technology add to the perverse thrills of this book. Edgar Allen Poe and Marquis de Sade would have loved this one.

The Twist


A surreal western evoking Henry Darger, Angela Carter, and Lucius Shepard(especially the Nazi fantasia of “The Spanish Lesson” and “Bound for Glory”(a chapter bears this title.). A mix of western, 50’s sci fi b-movies, dark fantasy, and an exploration of death. This is a mix of ridiculous and the sublime like all Calder. A 14 year old girl narrates the proceedings like a jaded post grad, people quote Schopenhauer during gunfights, but the hallucinatory imagery and beautiful prose makes this so weird you can’t help but love it a little bit.

Malignos



Cynical, decadent adventure tale like Moorcock(including a living sword) or Vance(with a protagonist as arrogant and obnoxious as Cugel) that is remarkable straight forward for Calder with little of his baroque prose and density of weirdness. Set in the same future as his Frenzetta but set so far in advance of that book that its events have become a fable. This book has everything you would want from an adventure story: a world decaying with lost secrets, traps, narrow escapes, traveling carnivals, a hollow earth(or an underground hell or demon realm in its center), plenty of action, ancient technology, castles, ghosts, dimensional gateways, cruel experiments, and a quest. The place and character names are all taken from Milton, De Quincy, and the Old Testament which adds to the atmosphere. The protagonist is so arrogant and self centered I wonder if Calder is poking fun at his own notoriously solipsist protagonists. So this was a rip roaring adventure with plenty of pulpy and gothic wonders but a little to straightforward to be one of Calder’s better work. Maybe he wanted to see if he could restrain himself and actually write a book that kind of made sense? Fans of Moorcock, Vance, Wolfe, Rudy Rucker (Hollow Earth), Milton, Lucius Shepard’s Dragon Griaule stories, and E.R.Burroughs, will find this a fun addition to their bookshelf

Sleepless

Sleepless is a mix of zombie movie,a future is now(actually an alternate present), a hard boiled thriller, and strangely a meditation on a family. This is written in a more convoluted style than Mr. Huston usually stripped down style for a couple reasons I suspect, mainly his use of invented author as the teller of this story and I suspect a mild overload on research. He is using punctuation marks on his dialogue so any of those lunatics who find this stylistic trait so annoying as to write off author’s entire oeuvres can rest assured that their delicate sensibilities will be left unruffled. There is some intriguing stuff in this book and it will be seen whether this will be the first step in an evolution of an author or a one off, but if it is the former it needs some tweaking as this was an interesting but a little cold as a book. Some of the fight scenes made think I was trapped in the video games that everyone in the book are playing. The central disease is beautiful and terrifying and the world is an unsettling portrait of our own, a brilliant slice of the future is now in the style of Gibson, Brunner, and Warren Ellis

Cherie Priest Clockwork Century

Boneshaker


Trafficking in two tired zeitgeists (zombies and steampunk) Ms. Priest is not adding much to those two genres. But, to be fare she that really isn’t her intent. She seems to want to craft an adventure, and she crafts a fun one. Dragging some unlikely protagonists ( a social pariah single mother and her teenage delinquent son) and some lovable rogues and some fiendish villains into a series of close calls and last minute rescues. She has written a world to have these adventures in that reminds me of Escape From New York, Dr. Who, Mike Mignola, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, George Romero, and The Wild, Wild West. Lots of action, pulp clichés, and a couple of surprising plot twists happen along the way. It moves and is easy to read. She seems to be writing a series and I think I’ll probably read those as they come out.

Clementine



A fun adventure in Priest’s Clockwork Century a steam punk alternative history of the American Civil War (an underused idea since a war fought with gatling guns, ironclads, primitive submarines, and balloons should fire more steam punk imaginations).Pirates, Pinkertons, A woman confederate spy, escaped slaves, airship battles, and a doomsday weapon and the barest sketching of the historical background are along for entertaining a pulpy ride. I feel like I’m just getting tastes of this series so hurry with more Ms. Priest! For fans of Howard Waldrop, Mike Mignola, and Joe Lansdale’s weird west




Dreadnought


I was about to dismiss Cherie Priest and her Clockwork Century series as over hyped, finding them pleasant enough while being slightly confused by enthusiastic praise being heaped on them. But, this final scheduled volume (hopefully there will be more) changes most of my concerns. This is a great adventure with lots action and terrific pacing. There are too many characters with too little differentiating a lot of them and the ending is a bit of a fizzle. The extended Civil War has always been in the background in the first two books and here we finally get to see some of it. So this is an adventure with war, steam punk gadgets(never overbearing), zombies, intrigue, bandits, and some terrific set pieces. I could definitely read more of these.

Ganymede
Coming soon!