target acquired

Gravity's Revenge is high fantasy hostage thriller. pretty original! the plot was a unique experience for me. kudos to the author for putting together a fantasy with an exceedingly well-developed magic system, appealing characters, a unique setting, a lot of twists & turns, and a highly intriguing threat. and a hostage situation! I just cannot emphasize enough how pleasantly surprised I was to realize that this was what the novel was essentially about.

this is an indie book that was supported by what looks like a successful kickstarter campaign. and, unfortunately, there is a lot that could have been improved prior to publication. I think a stern and unforgiving editor could have done wonders for this novel. the writing is hit or miss and the dialogue in particular needs so much work - a real case of trying too hard there.

but the originality and the breadth of imagination on display almost (but not quite) cancels all of that out. a narcoleptic sorceress who crafts her spells while sleeping! that was awesome. an order of religious fanatics called Bright Palms who glow with a healing light and who have been drained of all emotion. that was also awesome. a magical academy where gravity does not apply and so we have floating pools & lakes and a 'skyway' and a lot of fights & chases up walls & on the underside of bridges & all over the place. that concept is so awesome that it is begging to be visualized in anime format. and a high fantasy hostage situation! so awesome.

The Throat is an often brilliant thriller that is concerned with big questions about identity, the past and our memory of it, the demons that shape us and the demons we carry with us. It is intricately structured, densely layered, full of eerie and haunting dreams and flashbacks, and is impressively thoughtful in its take on murder and vengeance. As a third book in a trilogy, it also must extend and wrap up storylines started in the preceding novels Koko and Mystery – and for the most part it delivers. But sadly, the novel is a deeply flawed one. There are many minor irritations that I could look past, but I can’t ignore the flaw at its heart: its terrible mismanagement of a certain key character. The person at the heart of the novel seems to be the character that Straub lost all interest in fairly early on – which leaves the novel with a hollow core rather than one that should have been full of mystery and meaning.

 

Brief synopsis: Tim Underhill from Koko and Tom Pasmore from Mystery come together to solve a series of killings by a resurfaced – or new? – Blue Rose Killer. The Blue Rose killings and their legacy lived in the corners and shadows of the previous novels and so I was full of anticipation in seeing them given their due.

 

It is a strange experience to read a book, admire the technical skill of its writing, and spend hours upon hours living in its world (The Throat is nearly 700 pages long)… and end up feeling utterly disappointed. And yet I don’t feel like I wasted my time. Straub is a masterful writer. This novel reconfirmed to me that he is the yin to Stephen King’s yang, the coolly intellectual brain to King’s bloodily beating heart. King has kinetic characters who jump off the page just as his narratives can spin messily out of control. Straub has dispassionate, contemplative ciphers as characters who live in stories that, despite being both lengthy and dreamily ambiguous, are still narratives that are carefully mapped out. I don’t think one writer is better than the other; they are both masters. And so because I enjoy Straub's intelligence, his concentration, even his quasi-Jungian flourishes. Although it was ultimately a disappointment, it was also a fascinating experience and I don’t regret the many hours spent within its pages.

 

“Then the nightly miracle took place once again, and I fell down into the throat of my novel.”

 

SPOILERS FOLLOW. ALSO, a lot of bitching. So if you loved this book, you may just want to skip it all.

 

Okay, the minor irritations. First: there is a very sloppy bit of meta-nonsense in the beginning where Peter Straub is a character in the novel; this is done to resolve the problem of Mystery’s island setting - which is incompatible with the story started with Koko and ending with The Throat. That sloppiness casts a shadow on the characters of Underhill and Pasmore, who now confusingly seem to have the same childhoods. Or not, who knows – Straub doesn’t clear things up. Second: the setting of Millhaven is schizophrenically portrayed: at times a small town where everyone knows everyone and you can easily walk from one end to the other in the space of a couple hours, at other times a highly dangerous city of industry (365 murders a year! For real?) modeled on Chicago or Milwaukee or Detroit. Third: by the middle of the book I easily figured out the identities of all three killers: Old Killer, New Killer, Surprise Killer. It was obvious to me and I am no Tom Pasmore: the Bad Man, the Good Man, and the Catalyst (for the story itself) are all too-clearly telegraphed as the killers on numerous occasions. Fourth, Lt. Bachelor is compelling but is also a second-rate Colonel Kurtz, living in his Vietnam era heart of darkness. Fifth, the use of race riots as a backdrop in a novel that itself doesn’t engage with race or racial tensions felt… disrespectful and sorta cheap.

 

I could actually have looked past all of those things and still given this novel a somewhat qualified thumbs up. But the laziness in dealing with central character John Ransom just drove me up the wall. This is a character who is the catalyst for the entire novel. He is given an intriguing introduction that sets him up to be fascinatingly multidimensional; his flashback appearances in Vietnam are likewise interesting. But that is not the character we spend the most time with – instead we get a John Ransom who is a petty, whiny, greedy dipshit who exists to bitch, moan, roll his eyes, and make a series of foolish mistakes. He becomes a tedious drag to the story whenever he appears. John Ransom needed to be an ambiguous creation, evasive and mysterious yet real enough to come alive on the page – practically every other page, because he’s that much of a lynchpin to The Throat’s narrative. He needed to be resonant; instead he is flat, flat, flat. Fie, Straub, fie! The heart of darkness is not a petulant douchebag.

"But books lie, even those that are most sincere. The less adroit, for lack of words and phrases wherein they can enclose life, retain of it but a flat and feeble likeness. Some, like Lucan, make it heavy, and encumber it with a solemnity which it does not possess; others, on the contrary, like Petronius, make life lighter than it is, like a hollow, bouncing ball, easy to toss to and fro in a universe without weight. The poets transport us into a world which is vaster and more beautiful than our own, with more ardor and sweetness, different therefore, and in practice almost uninhabitable. The philosophers, in order to study reality pure, subject it to about the same transformations as fire or pestle make substance undergo: nothing that we have known of a person or of a fact seems to subsist in those ashes or those crystals to which they are reduced. Historians propose to us systems too perfect for explaining the past, with sequence of cause and effect much too exact and clear to have been ever entirely true; they rearrange what is dead, unresisting material, and I know that even Plutarch will never recapture Alexander. The story-tellers and spinners of erotic tales are hardly more than butchers who hang up for sale morsels of meat attractive to flies. I should take little comfort in a world without books, but reality is not to be found in them because it is not there whole."

Reality may not be found in books, but truth can exist there, in some books.

Marguerite Yourcenar imagines the life and perspective of the roman emperor Hadrian, utilizing literally a lifetime of research on her topic. Insofar as the specific activities and people in Hadrian's life are recounted, when the evidence is not there to back up her narrative, she wings it - but in such an elegant way that her own suppositions blend seamlessly with that research (and, happily, she notes each of her additions in her afterward). "Seamless" is a pretty good word to use when describing the entire enterprise. Nothing jars. It is all of a piece. A brilliant book and a thing of beauty.

The seamlessness of its story is also rather besides the point. The author is doing so much more than reimagining certain incidents; she is imagining a whole person. Memoirs of Hadrian is a reconstruction and an ode, a love poem to a man long dead and the means to understanding that man. Hadrian is not the main character in the book, he is the book itself.

And so it reads like an actual memoir - and I'm not sure that that is what I expected. The narrative is one man's life; although there is plenty of excitement and even some suspense, it is a life recounted by a person who knows himself, who wants to explain his life and the things he's learned, but who is not really interested in the kind of storytelling that provides escapist fantasia or thrilling adventure. Although the book is full of enchanting prose that richly illustrates the details of a past world through imagery that is palpable, sublime... I did not find myself really living in ancient Rome, not in the way that I've lived there in more traditional novels or in various television series like Rome or Spartacus or the stagey but ingeniously realized I, Claudius. Rather, I found myself living inside of Hadrian: he is this novel's world. It is an excellent head to live in. His musings and recollections made me muse and recollect; reading Hadrian challenge his own perspective made me challenge my own point of view, my own way of living my life. One would think that contemplating politics and battle, love and beauty, life and death and sickness and fate, on such a potently intellectual level... that this would make for a dry and heavy book. Quite the opposite: I found the effect to be calming, it inspired meditation. Memoirs of Hadrian soothed me.

Not including two afterwords, it is divided into six parts.

ANIMULA VAGULA BLANDULA

The beginning starts at the end. Hadrian takes his own measure and finds himself at times wanting but often satisfied as well.

Meanwhile, I took measure of the novel. I did not know what to make of it. Was this all some sort of idiosyncratic introduction? When would the proper story start, when would the familiar pleasures begin to happen? While I waited, certain things struck me. The joy of moderation. Love-making as a true path to understanding a person. Sleep, precious sleep.

VARIUS MULTIPLEX MULTIFORMIS

Hadrian recounts his early life and the stops & starts on his way to becoming emperor. His relationships with his predecessor, emperor Trajan, and with Trajan's highly impressive wife Plotina. And many other people - personages both major and minor are all rendered equal in Hadrian's musings. The beginning of his lifelong love affair with Greece; a similarly long-lived fascination with cults and the occult, with the world beyond, with signs and wonders. Hadrian the diffidently ambitious young man, the nature-loving warrior, the clear-eyed mystic.

This is where I became enchanted. I realized that this was not truly a novel; Memoirs of Hadrian is a conversation. Despite being the listener, I was an equal part of the conversation. Memoirs of Hadrian told me fascinating stories and I was duly fascinated - but even more, I came to understand a way of looking at the world, at life, at all of its mysteries. The conversation was not a debate and so it did not matter if I agreed or disagreed. Nor was the conversation one between friends around a campfire or lifelong partners retelling tales to each other, comfortably. It was the sort of conversation you have in the beginning of a relationship: you are hearing stories but mainly you are learning about a person; you are learning how to understand them, and so you are learning about yourself as well. How you feel about what they feel. How they think and see and act and move about in the world - and so how you think, and see, and act, and move about in the world. The similarities and the differences and the gaps and bridges in between. I became enchanted, but not just with Hadrian. I became enchanted with the process, with the way I was learning and evaluating and reacting and, above all, how I was moved to constant contemplation. I was enchanted - by Marguerite Yourcenar. By her ability to become Hadrian and to speak to me in his voice.

TELLUS STABILITA

In this lengthy section, Hadrian recounts his goals and challenges and accomplishments as emperor.

This is painful to admit, but I will be frank: I was often bored by this section. Hadrian was a superb emperor, a liberal of the old school, admirable in nearly every way. And so it all became a bit much, this meticulous listing of admirable actions. Just as I am bored when listing my own accomplishments - or, unfortunately, when hearing others list their accomplishments. It doesn't matter that they are excellent achievements and that they say important things about a person and that person's perspective. I will applaud that person. But reading a lengthy resume is rather a chore.

The saving grace for me occurred at the ending of this section: Hadrian and the night, the stars, the mystery and strangeness of the world above and beyond us. Here was the Hadrian I wanted to know.

SAECULUM AUREUM

The beloved youth Antinous: his introduction to Hadrian, their life together, his death, Hadrian's sorrow.

Oh that voluptuous grief! It spawned coinage and cults, temples and cities. I'm familiar with that excessive sadness, that paroxysm, I've seen it and I've felt it. Hadrian became his most real yet when he was at his lowest point. That intensity, that rage, the grief at a life over too soon, that burning need to show the world who that person  was, to make the world grieve with you. That inability to express yourself clearly, the feeling that no one can understand your sorrow, not really, not the way you are actually experiencing it. All of this described with passion and delicacy, in language that shimmers, but with the same distance as all else is described. The remove of a memoir written by a thoughtful man. Hadrian describes his excess of emotion meditatively - without excess. That stripping away of drama provided yet another opportunity to step back, to calmly contemplate such terrible things, to better understand others who have experienced the same. Oh Hadrian! Oh, life.

DISCIPLINA AUGUSTA

Hadrian's recounts the autumn of his reign. A bitter uprising in Judea and various thoughts on the nature of religion. Fanaticism is punished and it is given approbation; as always - on matters not relating to Antinous - Hadrian is the most even-handed of men. And at last he introduces the emperors who will follow him - the gentle, decent Antoninus and the s(S)toic, modest Marcus Aurelius.

By this point I knew Hadrian as I know my own hand. I was in a relationship with him, a positive and supportive relationship that had moved beyond and outside of romance into a sort of loving warmth, a complete ease with his viewpoint, a genuine empathy. It was not so much that he could do no wrong - I saw him as I see a true friend. He was a man to me and not a character in a book. I looked up to him but he was no god; he remained mortal through-and-through. At different times in the book Hadrian describes a particularly faithful ally or servant or lieutenant - not in terms of servility but as someone who actually sees him, who sympathizes with him out of understanding and respect, not by command and not with open-mouthed awe. I could be such a person to the Hadrian of this book. Yourcenar somehow, somewhere along the way, made her love for this good emperor a love that I experienced as well.

PATIENTIA

Hadrian wrestles with his sickness, his longing for death. He contemplates the end of things and those things that will continue beyond him. He muses on death itself.

I read much of this book while my friend was dying. I read it in his living room while he slept, bed-bound for weeks at a time, yet not really believing his death was approaching despite all signs to the contrary. I read it at home and at work. I took a long break from the book as well, and then returned to its pages as if meeting up with a sorely-needed friend. I read it in the hospice where I had taken my friend to spend his last days - a beautiful place, a place of contemplation. I read it as he slept there, moaning, hands clenching, legs kicking fitfully. Hadrian and my friend were entirely different but their similarities were deep ones. A fascination with mysticism. An awful loneliness after the loss of their love. And a need to do the right thing - to do right by the world, for the world. They shared those things and they also shared terrible pain at the end, messy and humiliating, an inability to go gently into that good night. I read this last section after my friend had passed on. It was a hard and beautiful thing to read. All men live and love and suffer and all men will die. Some die with eyes closed but others die with eyes open, weary but still curious, still a part of this world, to their very end, and beyond.

Tomorrow I pick up his ashes, his death certificate. They seem like such small things.

His last coherent words to me: "Mark, remember... one book does not make a library!"

Such an odd and funny thing to say. I wonder what he meant. I will probably always wonder.

I miss you already, my friend. Rest a while. I will see you again.

 

The Glass Books trilogy concludes with the marvelous Chemickal Marriage. I loved this book just as I loved its two predecessors. Together, all three books make for a major achievement and I'm really looking forward to rereading them. I just wish they had the popular success that they deserve.

 

This poor novel debuted with no fanfare and was nearly impossible to locate in advance on - ugh - Amazon's search engine. Quite a far cry from the first novel in the series: The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters made it to the New York Times' bestseller list and Dahlquist was reportedly paid an advance of 2 million buckaroos. Clearly Bantam was capitalizing on the popularity of steampunk and had high hopes that Dahlquist's series would proved to be a lucrative bridge between literary and genre fiction. Just as clearly - and despite its brief bestseller status - it proved to be a disappointment. Reviews were mixed, the public was often confused and annoyed, and it did not achieve the far-reaching, sustained popularity that was expected. Sigh. Fickle public! Well I'm just happy that Dahlquist stuck to it and completed his series, despite his dwindling readership.

 

The plot of the trilogy, in brief (and this will be difficult because this is a joyously labyrinthine series): young heiress Celeste Temple, damaged assassin Cardinal Chang, and teutonic spy Doctor Svenson find themselves mixed up with various sinisters cabals who want to control the British government - and then the world! - through the use of bizarre blue glass books with many properties including the ability to transfer memories and personalities to and from individuals into and out of the glass books themselves.

 

The trilogy is, in a word, delicious. A rich, scrumptious, lavish meal. Celeste, Chang, and Svenson are compelling, amusing, sympathetic, and all too fallible protagonists. Sexuality is a constantly bubbling undercurrent. The Victorian setting is vividly described. The huge cast of villains and supporting characters are spicy and strongly rendered - particularly the chief antagonists, the deadly and brilliant Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza and the visionary, thoroughly repulsive Comte D'Orkancz. The dialogue is juicy, with many a condescending quip hurled from protagonist to antagonist and back again. The writing is top-notch; I can't actually think of another steampunk novel that operates at such a high level and whose prose truly impressed me. The pacing is breakneck - except for a chapter or two in the beginning of each novel devoted to giving the protagonists some breathing room to plot and plan - the narrative is always in motion, hurtling forward as characters run, hide, run, hide, jump on trains, get trapped on dirigibles, cross rooftops, and skulk, run, and hide in various mansions and government buildings. I suppose the excess of characters and schemes and locations can be exhausting to some; for me it amounted to a thrillingly immersive experience, one where I just had to let go, go with the flow, and not worry about the barrage of information and potential villains being thrown at me.

 

And best of all is a resoundingly proletariat perspective that constantly chafes at the inequities that arise from money and class. The novel spits on aristocrats and politicians and power brokers. The protagonists often spit on those types as well, literally. Love that!

The Pyx is the story of Elizabeth Lucy, a high-end call girl who dies on the first page. The novel has many flavors: pulp noir, mystery and crime story, character study, tragedy, with some Satanism tossed in to make things even more spicy. The tale is told in alternating perspectives: 'The Present' features soul-deadened detective Henderson searching for clues and 'The Past' features soul-deadened Elizabeth, slowly moving towards her terminal destination but trying to do one last good thing. Her ending is one that she fears but somehow craves as well.

 

The language has the brutal beauty of the best of pulp crime fiction. Hard-boiled and poetic in equal amounts, full of terse dialogue, barely understood longings, bleakly sardonic commentary on the smallness of lives, bottomless despair and monstrous cruelty conveyed in brief and ambiguous turns of phrase, paragraphs that describe the living breathing bustling world that suddenly end with an off-hand sentence describing bloodstains on a sidewalk. It is a beautiful novel and Elizabeth Lucy is one of the more memorable examples of the hardened prostitute with a heart of gold that I've read. The book is the same: deeply cynical and angrily pessimistic but allowing many characters - Elizabeth, Henderson, a sensitively rendered gay friend, a mourning father, an alcoholic priest, and several others - to show their souls in ways that are genuinely moving. The Pyx is a surprisingly soulful book, and I loved it for that.

 

It has a very an off-putting final chapter that reveals the mystery of the pyx and the motivations of the primary villain. It appears to be written by another person entirely - "Daniel Mannix" - but I don't know if that is true or not. The style is certainly different than anything that came before, so I'm inclined to believe it. The ending reminded me a lot of the ending of the film Psycho: that smarmy psychologist, attempting to render all of the strangeness and ambiguity that have come before his scene into something that is logical, even prosaic, an uncomfortable but still easily digestible set of formulaic motivations. And as with Psycho, the memory of all the strange ambiguity that came before renders The Pyx's final chapter as nothing more than a footnote. Or perhaps even just a wink to the reader, much as Hitchcock was winking to Psycho's audience. Sure, things can be explained, things that are horrible or beautiful or full of pathos or just unnervingly and threateningly weird. But can you ever truly explain away such things? And why would you want to? They defy explanation.

 

 

 

 

Worther or Mrs. Latimer would want the body, but alive, alive to peddle it, to feed it heroin, to dress it up, to make it entertain lechers who had nothing but money and erotic energy, to make it stop belonging to a human being, to make it wind up here with a long jump, or a long push.


She felt, not cut off, but far away from what was happening, the people existed just like a radio you've forgotten was on, and her walking was motion that she wanted to stop soon.


She said very quietly, "Coffee, please," and sat down at a table. A while ago, perhaps years, she would have noticed his action and smiled, enjoying the effect she had. She might even be pleased a little. But now, she couldn't be pleased or flattered by her beauty; it wasn't part of her consciousness; it was just a fact, a thing that was part of her life, something others thought she was lucky enough to have, something others wanted. She had no mental picture of herself as an outwardly visible person; she had only an inner vision of...

"Here's your coffee, miss."

Salon article, Part 2

 

Check out the article, mentioning our own wonderful Ceridwen!

 

The first article by the same author got a lot wrong. This time, while I don't exactly agree with everything that's been said, I think it's a lot more balanced, which is really all that I expect from a journalist.

 

So, awesome that the article exists, but I'm confident that it isn't going to change Goodreads' policy changes (or ham-fisted implementation style).

 

 

Mystery in Space

 

Poor Teacher! He wakes up cold and naked and without a memory, his only companion a mean little girl, on board a gigantic spaceship called “Ship”… whatever should he do? Why, he should move forward of course, forward, ever forward! Otherwise gigantic monsters out of some monster’s imagination will collect and/or devour him. He needs to figure out who he is, what his purpose may be, and what the heck is happening with Ship, or he’ll die. And so begins his brief and rather frenetic adventure. Or rather, his “adventure” – because this is less of an adventure and more like a nightmare that he cannot escape.

 

Greg Bear is one of the most respected ‘hard science’ writers of science fiction currently working. He’s probably some sort of genius scientist in his spare time, like Alastair Reynolds. But I didn’t really get a sense of hard science being central to the story. Nor, unlike other reviewers, did I feel this was an exploration of a Big Dumb Object. All the pleasures of both things are there, certainly. Fascinating science that makes my head spin and a BDO that is awesome in scope and also functions as a terrible haunted house in space, full of deadly traps and creatures just waiting to kill off poor Teacher. Again and again. Sorry, that last sentence was rather a spoiler – but an ambiguous one that only makes you want to read this book, right?

 

Despite the hard science and the big dumb object, I think the author is mainly interested in exploring things like Identity and Memory. The novel and its protagonist continually contemplate what makes us who we are – whether it is how we act in the here & now or whether it is about what we have done in our lives, our context, our relationship to ourselves, and how those things impact how we move forward. Ever forward! Teacher is a tabula rasa, which can prove frustrating at times and amusing at other times – particularly when he realizes he has just said or thought a word that is new to him, which is often. But I think that Teacher, whether frustrating or amusing, is mainly a blank slate so that the reader can contemplate what is needed to fill in those blanks.

 

The novel is fun but it is also surprisingly cerebral. It has action and wonder and mystery and it has some endearing characters and it has plenty of fearsome beasts, all of that fun stuff. But this is more of a novel of contemplation than one of adventure. The protagonist is ever moving forward, trying to survive… but I spent most of my time musing on all the moving parts that make up a human, that create the human condition itself. I think that that is exactly what Bear intended when writing Hull Zero Three. 

David Sumner has a problem: the world as he knows it is about to end. what's a brilliant young man and his equally brilliant family to do? why, bring back members of that extended family, store supplies, circle the wagons, and build a lab which will eventually help the Sumner family to repopulate the earth, of course. sounds like a good plan to me.

there's something about the 70s that I just really dig. many things, actually. besides the wonderfully hideous clothes and the wonderfully not-hideous moustaches and of course all of the brilliant movies, one of the things I like about that decade is the science fiction that came out of it. sci-fi that is confident mankind is headed for cataclysmic change any day now; sci-fi writers that came up with all sorts of ways that mankind can survive or transform or transcend or even just die. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is such a book. one of the very 70s things about this novel is its sweet but not saccharine attachment to nature... if you don't dig nature, you have a lot to learn man. there's a vagueness to that sentiment just as there is a vagueness to what exactly is causing the world to break down. and that vagueness is also pretty 70s. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is not the sort of novel that will spell things out for you. you either dig it or you don't dig it.

Molly of the Miriam Sisters has a problem: she went on an expedition to see what could be found out there, and she came back changed. she doesn't see things the same way. she should probably try to change back; she's making her duplicate sisters uneasy and her community deals with unease in fairly drastic ways. but she doesn't want to change. she's not sure why she is drawing these disturbing images or why she finds such new comfort in nature, in being by herself. but she likes it. she likes being an individual.

and that's another great thing about the 70s, in sci-fi and beyond: that interest in exploring the necessity of both individuality and community. Wilhelm does not paint this after-the-fall society in broad strokes so that the reader can easily hiss at it. there is a nurturing, loving vibe to this future community. people support their siblings automatically. sexuality is nonchalant. it is a community that cares for its citizens. well, in its own way. but of course in the end Wilhelm cherishes individuality and this community is shown to be deeply flawed. if this sounds like the novel may be some kind of didactic screed on individualism, well, it's not. Wilhelm is subtle. she is a lovely writer but she is also fine with making the reader a bit uncomfortable. Molly's "descent" into individuality is eerie and unnerving, haunting, as strange an experience for the reader as it is for this new and vaguely threatening Molly - no longer of the Miriam Sisters.

Mark has a problem: he is not like the lab-bred brothers & sisters, and they don't like that. the clones don't like this natural-born kid. but they need him, they need his skills, they need his bravery, they need his ability to understand nature and to be by himself. unfortunately, they don't actually know they need him and how badly they need individuals like him for their survival as a race. at one point Mark builds a snowman. the young clones don't understand it and they don't really see it - because it is a lone snowman, no lookalike snowmen surrounding it. so they pelt it with snowballs and tear down the monstrous lone thing.

I love how this kid is portrayed as an arrogant little asshole who mercilessly pranks his clone relatives, blithely uncaring of the genuine harm they can and often expressly want to do to him. assholes make the best heroes for me because I can often see myself in them. I like their flaws, their humanity; heroic heroes are often quite tedious in the end. the 70s had no problem with asshole heroes. but although Mark is quite a jerk, he has something his family members don't understand outside of their clone groupings: empathy. jerks who are empathetic know how and where to hit the hardest. and so Mark hits the clones hard, right where it hurts.

great novel! a classic.

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I dunno, I'm just not feeling too inspired to write a review, it's like I'm forcing myself here. is it the novella's fault? the story is about intrepid, quick-witted Miles on a secret mission in a POW camp. it's rather a perfect prison: just a big force field dome, the prisoners can do as they like, they are given clothes & bedding & regular food rations and that's pretty much it. the folks who have built the prison trot it out as some kind of benevolent example of how to do things and how to give the inmates a sort of freedom; they are using this place as a kind of publicity stunt, one designed to allay any criticism and to illustrate their ultimate benevolence. one that exists to hide its creators' true intentions. and the inmates turn on each other while their captors just watch - because it's not their fault after all, right? it's just business.

so Miles figures out how to solve things fairly easily - a bit too easily for me, which made for a certain lack of tension. there are a couple deaths in the end and they serve to make a very strong point. still, Miles handles things remarkably well and very little gets in his way. although Miles is a genius, so of course.

sure, you can try to heal your homosexuality. or you can just

and get the last laugh! so much more satisfying.

Joseph Nicolosi is an American clinical psychologist, founder and director of the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Encino, California, and a founder and former president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. He is also clearly a

I'm excited to read this! although the subject matter looks only slightly interesting to me, all of the 1-star reviews of this book are so hilarious that I am sold. but not because they are making the book look bad, not at all. all that disgust over the casual sexism and the characters' relentless talk of masturbation & horniness & erections... reviewer dismay over all of that is what is so frickin' hilarious! I'm not sure what some reviewers are looking for in a book. their perfect teenage male who has never had such thoughts or conversations? ha! good luck with that. well they better avoid literary fiction at all costs. and not just literary fiction, genre fiction geared towards adults too I suppose. it's a tough and often realistic world out there!

almost as hilarious is this blog by some nitwit author who holds those same reviews up as examples of "bullying"... sweet Jesus, it's like everyone has lost their grip on reality. I wonder if my previous sentence would be considered bullying. I did use the word "nitwit" after all, uh oh. more to the point, since when is calling a book out for its sexist characters - as misguided as I personally think that may be - remotely like bullying? perhaps these people have never had their feelings hurt before and so when they see critical things being said, they think that is bullying. obviously they have never been bullied before. as someone who has at different times been a bully and who has been bullied, it irritates and amuses me to no end to witness the constant misuse of that word. they should all watch The Bad Girls Club to see what actual bullying looks like.

people are so fucken amusing!

hey did you know that acclaimed children's author Roald Dahl also had a sideline in dark, pervy short stories for adults? after reading several reviews of this book, it's clear that some people find this to be awfully disturbing. my God, a children's author, capable of such things! heaven forfend!

oh you silly humans with your hilarious way of looking at things. although I shouldn't be judgmental. back on Robot Planet, we have long moved beyond such rudimentary binary coding - and perhaps you will too, eventually, post-invasion. it will be one of our mandates.

Switch Bitch (man, that title: perfect!) is a quartet of thematically connected tales. sex and sexuality are central to each of these stories - particularly sex that is ambiguous or disguised or that happens for reasons beyond our intellectual control. or for reasons that stem from our need for intellectual control. Dahl is a clever writer, and more. although his cleverness and humor shine brightly (well, "darkly" is probably more appropriate), he also knows how to craft a beautiful description, an evocative turn of phrase, sentences that glide effortless into one other, a character that jumps off the page, a situation that intrigues and disturbs and surprises. he's an artist with the prose. even rather fussy at times, in his choice of details. he's also a little dangerous, which should not shock fans of his kid's fiction. he wants to make you laugh, sure, but he also wouldn't mind stabbing you in the back as you chortle spastically away. he's the best kind of misanthrope: amused, amusing, discriminating, and devious.

I've put this on my "sexathon" shelf, but you should know that it does not contain any graphic sexuality. everything is (nearly) left up to your own imagination.

4 Stars for the first tale: "The Visitor"
here we have a perfectly awesome and awful protagonist, the sophisticated world traveler and insidious casanova Uncle Oswald. Dahl captures his drily witty, hygiene-obsessed, caustically classist voice perfectly. Oswald is a grand storyteller, a well-read art collector, a wealthy man who prefers the company of other wealthy people. he is also a collector of spiders and scorpions! this practically psychopathic lothario is not so much misogynistic as he is utterly incapable of even recognizing a woman's worth beyond her beauty and beyond the maximum 8 hours he will spend with that woman before becoming indescribably bored and, oh dear, time to move on my love, that was wonderful on top of the pyramid tonight, wasn't it, so sorry to hear that your sheik husband may have to cut off your head because of our affair, but darling you really are becoming a rather vulgar bore with all of your pleading and screaming, I think I shall have to let you out right on the corner, farewell my dear! happily, Uncle Oswald's adventures lead him to a stately mansion in the middle eastern desert, where he finds a Syrian family more than capable of matching wits with him. this is a brilliant and incredibly fun tale. I loved it. I especially enjoyed the wee tale within a tale - about a boy addicted to honey - that mordantly parallels Uncle Oswald's own addiction. and I especially especially loved the cruel and fitting ending.

3 Stars for the second tale: "The Great Switcheroo"
two cheerio my good chap type suburban husbands decide that the best way to spice up their lives is to start sleeping with each other's wives - but without telling those wives. sexy suburban shenanigans ensue. plus a wonderfully deflating blow to the male ego at no extra cost.

2 Stars for the third tale: "The Last Act"
I'm sure this deserves more stars, but I just can't. I hated this story. it starts sensitively, detailing the life of a new widow who was devoted to her husband. of the four stories, this one is resolutely not comic. Anna Cooper starts off sad and sympathetic, and it was a real pleasure watching her grow back into herself and embrace life again. and so I did not appreciate the brutal evilness of this story's ending. it felt cheap and it was depressing. one can't fault the prose itself, it is excellent. and the thematic connections to the other three stories are there too - disguise and surprise and a reprise - so I get why this story was included. I just don't get why it was written in the first place. ugh.

3 Stars for the fourth tale: "Bitch"
Uncle Oswald is back and he has found an equally pervy comrade-in-arms: the olfactory scientist Henri, who is about to create a scent for women that will cause men to go in a sex-trance, rip off their clothes, and immediately and violently ravish the scented woman on the spot. Oswald and Henri have sinister plans for this scent, oh yes they do! ::rubs hands together villainously:: and those plans include the American President, of whom Oswald is not overly-fond. this being Roald Dahl, things don't quite come to fruition in the way these two villains imagined. ha!

the book has a Terry Southern feel to it. not in its prose - Dahl is the superior wordsmith - but in its distinctly dated feeling of being born in a milieu that is all too comfortable with casual sexism. a book the characters in Mad Men could be seen reading. but I would not actually call this a misogynist book. the women are not treated particularly well - although a few of them have the last laugh, which is certainly appreciated - but the men never have the last laugh. the men become fools, their plans backfire, their tricks turn around and bite them right where it hurts - in their so-called manhood.

first off, although there is an Evil House at its center, this is not a haunted house story, not really. it is rather the tale of two men pitted against ghosts of the distant past and the evils those ghosts have conjured up. and a rather starry set of ghosts they are, as they feature such celebrities as Aleister Crowley and Dennis Wheatley. the narrative moves all over place, through various locales and backwards in time as well. but outside of the climax, very little time is actually spent within the house in question, at least in its modern and ghost-ridden incarnation.

Cottam is an effective writer and the novel is a good one. he's also a classy writer, one who puts characterization before special effects, so I was spared a lot of eye-rolling. the novel recovers from a rather risible start (sorry, the image of a soldier dressed in his camouflage gear as he spies on a funeral made me snort a little) but other issues come in to play. mainly minor: a tiring over-reliance on dropping the names of oh so many songs and a tendency to include details that have nothing to do with anything whatsoever. one major issue: he leaves a couple very important scenes out - scenes that would have strengthened the novel. I suppose I understand why we don't get to witness the 4 girls and their prof's experience at the scary Fisher House that drive the narrative forward (but gosh that would have been awesome); I am more perplexed at why we don't see a very important confrontation and death happen at the end - it's like the author didn't care enough about that character.

but despite the flaws, I still liked this one. several reviewers did not appreciate how the novel jumped all over the place, but I thought that was one of the novel's strengths. I would have loved to have read a story about people stuck in a haunted house - but that's just not this novel and it is certainly not the novel's fault that it wanted to be something else! demon-hunting in Africa, a sad visit to a Welsh village, flashbacks to college life in 80s London... I enjoyed all of that and thought it was well-executed. I especially liked the very lengthy flashbacks to the 20s (I think that was the era). the story of photographer Pandora Gibson-Hoare's misadventures with a group of dastardly satanists were my favorite parts. poor, brave Pandora!

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musical accompaniment

Alice Coltrane: Journey in Satchidananda
talkdemonic: mutinysunshine
Jimmy Scott: All the Way