November reads

Ten read in November (thank you, long weekends).  The first one barely counts as I read the bulk of it in October, but I didn't finish it until November.

• I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.  I'm not really a true crime girlie, but after the author's untimely death, I'd read enough about the book to be interested.  And I knew nothing about the Golden State Killer at all.
• The Devils by Joe Abercrombie.  I adore Abercrombie's First Law trilogy and successive in-universe book.  His voice is very clear in The Devils but it's a different world with its own wonderful, scary, heart-breaking and very, very, very flawed characters.  Loved it.
• How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin.  As a girl, Frances learns via a palm-reading session that she will be murdered.  She spends her whole life preparing and attempting to prevent such a thing.  After her demise, her great-niece Annie must solve her aunt's murder in order to inherit her estate.  Fun, low stakes.
• The Care and Management of Lies by Jacqueline Winspear.  NOT a Maisie Dobbs novel (we'll get back to those shortly) but set in England during WWI as a young farmer's wife must keep things running on the home front when her husband and her best friend enlist.  I liked it quite a lot.
• Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear.  Yes, the next Maisie Dobbs novel as our intrepid psychologist and sleuth investigates the murder of horse-whisperer Eddie.  WWII is drawing ever nearer and Maisie is uneasy about her fella's involvement with Winston Churchill and his ilk.  Really good installment.
• Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this one, Maisie investigates the murders of two young Indian women, working in London as household help.  She also starts listening to her heart.
• Shift by Ethan Kross.  Non-fiction, about trying to get a grip on, and adjustment to, one's emotions.  Interesting but didn't offer as many actionable tips/tricks as I had hoped.
• Never Leave the Dogs Behind by Brianna Madia.  This is Madia's second memoir, covering her struggles in Moab, post-divorce.  She's a bad ass, no doubt, but reading this was especially poignant given that one of her beloved dogs, Dagwood, just died last week.
• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher.  I guess this is the third installment in the Sworn Soldier series: I've read the first, What Moves the Dead, but not the second.  I do like these books, set in olden times, with some alt-reality and dead things that flail around in the dark.
• Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar.  This one is written like a true crime book, with the author as the main character, but it is, in fact, a novel.  I liked this a lot, liked the hybrid feel of it.  

That was a good bunch - I rather liked most of them.  What have you all been reading?

October reads

 Lots more books read in October, due to a week of vacation in a place with no TV or internet, and actually getting them posted timely here, due to getting my shit together somewhat.

• Night Shift by Stephen King.  A re-read of his first collection of short stories because I didn't want to start in on my horde of library books until vacation started.  You know how I feet about his short stories.  You should probably read them, this one or Skeleton Crew to start.
• Nestlings by Nat Cassidy.  Reviews seem to think it's akin to a lovechild between Rosemary's Baby and Salem's Lot, which I guess I can see.  I found it weird and not entirely cohesive, plus I didn't like either of the main characters.
• Fever House by Keith Russon.  A couple of enforcers sent around to collect for their boss end up with a severed hand that incites madness, bloodthirsty killing and uncontrollable rage.  The hand makes its way across the city, wreaking havoc.  This is supposed to be a sprawling horror/crime novel and sprawling is right - the interconnections didn't really interconnect for me and the ending is a clear set up for the sequel.  Didn't care for this one all that much.
• Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.  At this point, I'm on a roll with books I don't love.  When Abby's mother-in-law dies, she goes all in to save her husband, fight the mother-in-law's ghost and create the perfect family for herself.  The gross parts are fun and it's definitely got some funny parts - but again, I just didn't like the protagonist.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.  In which we switch gears from horror to fantasy.  Piranesi lives in a labyrinth world, ruled by tides and populated only by him, birds, statues and dead bodies.  This is a weird one, with ruminations on knowledge and belief, but I did like it.
• You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron (which sounds like a pseudonym to me, which is fine).  A young adult slasher in book form: a bunch of kids who work at a live action haunted house, set up like a summer camp in a slasher film, actually find themselves face to face with a masked killer on the last night of the concession.  It was cute, I guess, and pretty murdery.  But also pretty light-weight.
• The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs novel!  Maisie is hired by American parents to track down the English nurse their son fell in love with during WWI, before he was killed.  But it looks like he was killed by his own men ... Good one.
• Hawk Mountain by Connor Habib.  Todd, single father and English teacher, gets gaslit by a former high school bully, Jack, after a chance (?) meeting at the beach.  Jack insinuates himself into Todd's life and things escalate A LOT from there.  This is like two totally different books and ends up going completely off the rails.  I sort of liked it until I definitely didn't.
• A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear.  Back to Maisie Dobbs, who does an undercover job  for the British Secret Service as a professor in Cambridge, as Europe rolls inexorably towards WWII.  I am so glad I found out about this series - I do love British murder mysteries.
• A History of Fear by Luke Dumas.  University of Edinburgh graduate student Grayson Hale achieves notoriety when he murders a fellow student and then claims the Devil made him do it.  The novel is from the POV of Daniela, a reporter, as she goes through the evidence after Hale is found dead in his cell, reading Hale's memoir and adding her own comments and portions of third party interviews.  Twisty, slow burn, unreliable narrators.  Pretty good.
• The Songs of Trees by Davie George Haskell.  What ho - non-fiction!  Haskell visits a number of trees around the world over a period of years, commenting on their connections to the life around them: fungi, bacterial colonies, other plants, communities of animals, indigenous people, the owners of the corner bodegas.  Everything is connected, in this increasingly fragmented world.

September reads

So overdue!  We were on vacation for the first week of October, when I normally would have posted my September reads, and then when we got back, I had to dive right into the Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series.  Who has time to read books?  I only got to a few in September, actually:

• An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs mystery wherein the intrepid sleuth investigates goings-on in rural England during the hop-picking season.  I learned quite a lot about hops, but this wasn't one of my favorites.
• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear.  Book #6 in the Maisie Dobbs series.  I did like this one, a lot, as Maisie and Scotland Yard try to catch a madman blowing people up across London as 1931 comes to a close.
• Skeleton Crew by Stephen King.  It has been a while but I reread this short story collection in anticipation of the movie version of The Monkey coming out.  He's so good at short stories and this collection has quite a few good ones.
• Mrs. March by Virginia Feito.  The titular Mrs. March, an Upper East Side housewife, starts to become a bit unraveled when it appears that an unlikeable character in her author husband's new novel is based on her.  I didn't love it but I appreciated the end - didn't see it coming.
• The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty.  The final volume in the Daevabad trilogy.  Djinn and ifrits and demigods all along the Nile.

Stay tuned soon for my October reads!

August reads

It's only September 6 and already August seems so long ago.  Here's what I read way back when.

• Senseless by Ronald Malfi.  A horror thriller set in Los Angeles, this has three storylines that sort of come together at the end.  One follows a cop, trying to solve some gruesome murders; one follows a soon-to-be trophy wife whose soon-to-be husband isn't quite who he says he is; and the third is about a mentally unstable dude who thinks he's a human fly.  Didn't love it.
• The Ruins by Scott Smith.  Way back in 2008, I reviewed the movie made out of this horror novel.  The book is decent and now I feel like I want to see the movie again.
• This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger.  An American epic, loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, about four Great Depression-era orphans escaping from a Native American boarding school.  Pretty good.
• Spider Woman's Daughter by Anne Hillerman.  The author, daughter of Tony Hillerman, continues her dad's Leaphorn and Chee series with a focus on Navajo policewoman Bernadette Manualito, Jim Chee's wife, out to solve the case after Joe Leaphorn is shot.
• Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear.  In which I discover the wonderful British murder mystery series with psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs at the center.  This first book introduces us to the remarkable Maisie, who worked her way up from household help to WWI nurse to astute investigator.  In addition to the protagonist being a great character, I am not as familiar with the Great War as I should be, so the history is interesting too.  Loved it.  And am now working my way through the rest of the series.
• Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear.  Several years later, Maisie has now set up shop for herself, hired an assistant, Billy Beale, whom she first met as a nurse during the war, and is hired to track down a runaway heiress.  Loved it.
• Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear.  In the third book of the series, Maisie is forced to revisit her time in France during the war when she is hired to prove that her clients' son really died in combat.  Again, loved it.
• Shadowland by Peter Straub.  Described as "if Harry Potter were written for adults," this one has boarding school, malevolent sorcerors, blood and carnage.  When I was reading it whilst waiting for a car inspection, the cashier gushed about how much she loved it.  I was more meh about it.
• Malice House by Megan Shepherd.  Horror fantasy with art and books.  Protagonist and broke artist Haven has to clean out her famous author dad's home (the titular Malice House) after his death.  She uncovers a hitherto unknown manuscript containing new fairytales and decides to craft illustrations for some posthumous publishing.  Then things start going bump in the night.
• The Paleontologist by Luke Dumas.  Abducted sisters, creepy museums and dinosaurs.  I mean, what more do you need?
• Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear.  This time, now in 1931, Maisie is hired to investigate the death of a controversial artist.  Meanwhile, Britain is struggling with the legacy of WWI at home and the growing unrest in Germany and Italy.  I didn't love this one quite as much as the first three, but still quite, quite good.  I do love a British murder mystery.

There are eighteen Maisie Dobbs books (so far), so expect more of that to come.  

July reads

 Of the nine books I read in July, I really liked three of them and didn't hate any.  That's pretty good, right?

• Sunshine by Robin McKinley.  Magical humans, conflicted vampires, delicious pastry - I loved this award-winning fantasy.
• Just the Nicest Couple by Mary Kubica.  Since I had mostly liked Local Woman Missing, I thought I'd try another one by Kubica.  Didn't like this thriller as much but it was okay.  (Spoiler: they're not really the nicest.)
• The Butcher's Daughter by Corinne Leigh Clark and David Demchuk.  The "hitherto untold story of Mrs. Lovett," from Sweeney Todd.  I thought this was great fun, grim and dire and funny and bloody.
• Phaedra by Laura Shepperson.  There sure do seem to be a lot of new novels retelling/re-interpreting Greek myths these days.  I used to be obsessed with Greek mythology growing up so I am enjoying revisiting the stories this way.  This novel is a much more woman-positive retelling of Phaedra's story than most.
• William by Mason Coile.  This novella is part of my local library's summer reading program so I just picked it up on a whim.  Psychological horror + robots.  Not my favorite but it wasn't long.
• Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher.  This is the third one that I just loved, a fantasy/fairy tale about the third daughter who must complete impossible tasks to save her older sister from an evil husband.  What it really is about, however, is found family.
• Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher.  Another fairy tale, this time a hero-swapped version of Sleeping Beauty.  
• The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo.  A historical fantasy, set in Madrid during the Spanish Inquisition, this one focuses on Luzia, a Jewish servant who has to hide both her faith and her magic.  Most online reviews describe this one as a "slow burn," and I would agree with that; it took me a while to get into it but I was down for the ride by the end.
• Survivor by Tabitha King.  (Yes, TK is Stephen King's wife.)  After an automobile accident, Kissy Mellors's life is changed irrevocably.  This one felt like it could have used some ruthless editing.  There's no real plot to speak of, just meandering along through the protagonists' lives; Kissy (oh god I hate that name) makes terrible, inexplicable decisions about men and has lots of fairly explicit s3x (which is fine, but just be warned); and the very ending seems abrupt and from a totally different book.  Meh.

June reads

 Holy moly it's been so long since I read these books and then finally got around to posting about them that I have almost entirely forgotten what most of them are about.  Luckily there's the internet (and not, might I add, fucking AI which - has everyone forgotten about Terminator?).

• The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik.  #2 in the series (see A Deadly Education in my last post).  Loved it.
• The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik.  #3/last in the series (see above re same).  Also loved it.  Good fun.
• Buried Deep by Naomi Novik.  I'm on quite a NN tear, aren't I?  This is a collection of ghost stories.  Mixed bag.  Liked it, didn't love it.  Short stories are hard, y'all, but when they're good, they're great.
• Where I End by Sophie White.  Dark and disturbing, set on an isolated Irish island where Aoileann and her grandmother care for her disabled mother.  This one is brutal.  And the narrator, while deprived and abused, is unlikeable.  
• Just Like Home by Sarah Gailey.  After getting a call from her estranged mother, Vera Crowder comes home to care for her.  It's more complicated than that, though, because Vera's now-deceased father, whom she loved and who loved her, was a serial killer.  Her mother has been trading on that notoriety and all kinds of sketchy folks are attracted to it.  The characters are all interesting but unlikeable and things take a supernatural turn towards the end.  Meh.
• The Witch of Colchis by Rosie Hewlett.  There seems to be a recent surge of modern novelists taking a stab at ancient Greek mythology (just wait 'til the July reads).  I have a particular fondness for Medea, having done my senior Classics essay on her.
• Still Life by Sarah Winman.  I loved this one: set mostly in Florence, Italy, beginning at the end of WWII, this novel is about found family, art, luck, love and spies.
• The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny.  The nineteenth book in the Armand Gamache series, this one is a bit of a cliffhanger, to be finished with The Black Wolf.  Not necessary one of the strongest of Penny's mystery series but this one does bring back characters from previous books, for those who enjoy a callback.
• Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica.  Mystery thriller.  Eleven years after she and her mom and another, unrealted woman go missing, Delilah reappears in the town she used to live in with her family, after having been locked in a cellar since she was a little girl.  Her reappearance overjoys her grieving father, annoys her little brother (who had preferred being an only child) and calls into question everything about the missing women.  Twisty.  I really enjoyed it right up until the ending.

So what sort of summer reads are you enjoying?

May reads

 Only eight this month.

• 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill.  This volume of short stories is a re-read.  Hill is, I think, as good at spooky short stories as his dad is.
• The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.  And I think this one may be a re-read too, although I sure didn't think I had read it ... until I started it.  Brutal, heart-rending novel about a family on vacation and the dangerous home invaders who insist that one of them (the family) must choose to die in order to avoid the impending apocalypse.  Like, immediately.
• Sign Here by Claudia Lux (that must be a pen name, right?).  A mid-level desk jockey in Hell is on the verge of a promotion if he can just manage to get the right humans to sell their souls.  Uneven in tone, clever concept.
• Tin Man by Sarah Winman.  I really liked this one, character-driven and realistic, with nary a witch, warlock or dragon in sight.  Ellis and Michael meet as boys and grow up together.  Neither's life turns out quite as they thought but it turns out that chosen family is sometimes the very best family.
• Elemental Forces is another horror short story collection by various authors.  Mixed bag, much like the anthology movies I have such a weakness for.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas.  The first book in the series, impoverished Feyre kills a wolf to help support her family.  The wolf is a faerie in disguise, however, and Feyre is whisked away to atone.  Her captor is, of course, tall and handsome and tormented.
• Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki.  Set in mystical California, this book has multiple generations, a women-centric cult and time travel of a sort.  Each section is from a different character's POV; I liked Opal's best.
• A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik.  I may have read this one before - parts seemed awfully familiar - but this is great fun.  A boarding school for sorcerors where the school itself is actively trying to kill its students and the narrator is resisting turning into a world-destroying dark mage.  Funny, snarky, gory and immediately engaging.  The second in the series will be my first book ready in June.

April reads

 I'm late!  Which is hilarious, given how rarely I post on this little blog anymore.  But we were on vacation in the desert for ten days at the end of April/beginning of May and I read a bunch of books in between outdoors things and drinking (also sometimes outdoors), and then we came home and I got overwhelmed by laundry and real life and here we are, way late in sharing what I read in April.  Pluswhich, it's been so long I don't know how much I remember any of them.

• A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher.  I keep trying to read her older stuff but this is the newest one.  When your mom's an evil sorceress, it makes things difficult for everyone.  All the reviews say this is a "dark retelling of the Brothers Grimms' Goose Girl, but I don't really remember that one either.
• Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay.  Told by a somewhat unreliable narrator, this riff on a cursed movie tells the story of the making of an ultralow budget 1990s cult horror movie among a group of friends.  Unsettling for sure.
• Holly by Stephen King.  Holly Gibney returns to solve more murders in this mystery-horror mashup.  She's a great character and I like how King has kept her story going after her partner (and the main protagonist of the first few books in the series) has left the scene.  Good stuff.  Kind of icky.
• Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie.  This is a collection of short stories set in the First Law (etc.) universe, telling back stories and side stories that didn't quite have a place in those books.  Lots of fun (and rather a lot of knives).
• Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.  An 1872 lesbianish vampire novella, this is a precursor to - and perhaps inspiration for - Bram Stoker's Dracula.  I loved it, although I thought the ending sort of fizzled out.  I was DELIGHTED to subsequently discover a 2015 Carmilla webseries on YouTube - recommend you read it first and then watch it.
• Home Before Morning - by Lynda Van Devanter.  This memoir, recalling the author's stint as an Army nurse in Vietnam, is basically a blueprint for the subsequent novel The Women that I read in March.  It leaves no question that war is hell, and so is the homecoming sometimes.
• All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Crosby.  Changing gears, this one - which I quite liked - is about a black sheriff in a small southern town, fighting racism and the tattered remains of the Confederacy, while also trying to hunt down a serial killer.
• The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward.  Stolen children, serial killers, recluses and charismatic cats are woven together in this one.  I was entralled all the way through and there are multiple twists as you go along.  So fun.
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher.  A retelling (huh, another one) of The Fall of the House of Usher, this time with more mushrooms.

March reads

I have inadvertantly stumbled into reading a bunch of Middle Eastern-ish fantasy books.  No idea why, but it happened.  Not mad about it.

• A Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark.  A fantasy murder mystery set in steampunk 1912 Cairo, with a lesbian detective protagonist.  What's not to like?
• The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty.  More djinn, plus ifrits, magic and, yes, Cairo again.  This one is a little more dense but the heroine is flawed and feisty and I liked it enough to read the second one in the series too.
• Duma Key by Stephen King.  Ah, yes, a re-read.  I knew I'd read this one already tho - just wanted to read it again.
• The Queen by Nick Cutter.  Teenaged girl insect horror.  Pretty gross, kinda meh.
• I'll Be Waiting by Kelley Armstrong.  Supernatural horror with haunted houses and lingering spirits.  This one I liked quite well.
• What-the-Dickens by Gregory Maguire.  A fairy tale - tooth fairy, to be precise - for the younger set by the author of Wicked etc.  Didn't love it.  Didn't really see the point of the framework story.
• A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny.  I am now caught up on all the Inspector Gamache novels and have to wait for her to write the next one.  Great cop/murder mystery series set in a remote Quebec village.
• Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout.  I don't really remember the first, Pulitizer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge but this one rejoins Olive as an elderly woman.  It doesn't really have plot per se, just different vignettes in each chapter (which is not my preferred style - I like lots and lots of plot).  But it draws you in.
• The Mothers by Brit Bennett.  Contemporary novel set in a black community in southern California following three young people as they navigate family, high school, church and young adulthood.
• The Women by Kristin Hannah.  Set during the Vietnam War, this one follows Frances, a young nurse who volunteers to serve in country in the U.S. Army.  Initially way, way over her head, she finds loyal friends throughout the war and back home, dealing with the aftermath.  I liked this one and found it poignant, especially when the returned veteran nurses tried to get help only to be told time and time again, "there were no women in Vietnam."
• Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea.  Inspired by the author's mother's own experience, this novel follows posh Irene who, escaping an abusive fiance, volunteers with the Red Cross as a "donut dolly" in the European theater of WWII.  Irene and her BFF Dorothy are hot tickets and I realy liked this one too.
• The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty.  Second volume in the Daevabad trilogy.

February reads

 Hahahaha best intentions and all that: the second book I read in February was an accidental re-read but all the rest of them were new-to-me:

• Normal Women by Ainslie Hogarth - I don't remember much about this one now but I liked it well-enough.
• The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher - I liked it the first time I read it (whenever that was) and I liked it this time too.  Scary portals to other worlds and rampaging taxidermy.
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman - You know how if there's a book and a movie, it's usually the book that is better?  The movie is better, for me anyway.  It may have been the edition I read.  And the movie is so well-cast, so iconic, that it kept getting in the way of what I was reading.
• Loot by Tania James - Historical fiction set in India and England.  Didn't love it, found it a little tedious.
• Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.  Pretty good, seemed a little lightweight.
• How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelman.  Really liked this one: a retelling of classic fairytales via a support group for traumatized women.
• Into the Mist by PC Cast.  Post-apocalyptic, women-focused, mystical.  Characters seemed a little thinly drawn.
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo.  Power, privilege and dark magics on the Yale University campus.  Really liked this one, as well as the second one in the not-yet-complete trilogy.
• Hellbent by Leigh Bardugo.  Continuing the story from Ninth House.
• The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djeli Clark.  This one is a novella and seemed lighweight.  Didn't love it but it was okay.

Hooray for libraries!

January reads

 It's 2025 and the country is on fire, literally and figuratively; my dog has now decided to be afraid of the fridge; and it has been cold and dark but without the snow our mountains desperately need.  So what's to do?  Slightly resurrect this little blog to report on the books I've read each month.  I just got a new library card - my second: one for the SLC library system I've had for years and the new one for the county system - in an attempt to support local.  I've always liked libraries as I read so quickly as to bankrupt myself were I to purchase all the books I read.  And I've always got at least one book going at any given time, re-reading old favorites if I'm in between library visits. 

That's what prompted this second library card, when I realized I'd re-read three books in one month (as outlined below), despite the lengthy to-be-read list I have.  So here's January's list and I'm planning for February's to have no re-reads:

• Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie - the final volume in the First Law trilogy.  I love Joe Abercrombie's stuff (re-read)
• Off Course by Erin Beresini - I stole this one from Mr. Mouse's library haul.  It's about obstacle course racing (non-fiction omg)
• Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman - Horror fiction looking closely at hauntings and addiction
• The Bone Orchard by Sara A. Mueller - Gothic resurrection horror and ooh I liked this one a lot
• The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean - Kind of weird, literally about people who eat books, like vampires but words and paper instead of blood
• Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy - menopause horror!  I liked this one a lot too
• Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie - The first of three standalone books in between his two trilogies, set in the same universe, using some of the same characters.  Swords and sandals and bloody, bloody treachery (re-read)
• The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie - The second of three standalone books in between his two trilogies, set in the same universe, using some of the same characters.  Swords and sandals battle fantasy, frigging amazing (re-read)

What are you reading?  What's on your to-be-read list?

Mini book review: Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three by Clive Barker

I thought I was a Clive Barker fan but as it turns out, I haven't consumed enough of his output to count.  Sure, I've seen and quite liked Hellraiser (and Nightbreed is on my list of to-sees).  But I also thought I'd read some of his books and, scanning his bibliography, I guess I was wrong about that.  Because I thought I was a fan, I was surprised whenI didn't like his short story collection, Books of Blood, better.  I do like horror shorts a lot and thankfully, this collection has a lot to indulge in.  I found a few stories that I did like: the battle of wills in "The Yattering and Jack," the theatre's immortality in "Sex, Death and Starshine,"  "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," when movies take form in "Son of Celluloid," the worst island in the world in "Scape-Goats."  Again, however, many of the characters felt thin and I had difficulty connecting with the little worlds created in each story - which, again, I don't have any trouble with in the short stories of King, Hill and Gaiman.

Mini book review: The Outsider by Stephen King

When well-liked youth coach Terry Maitland is arrested for a sadistic and gruesome murder, his community is shaken to its foundation.  When Maitland's family and friends prove that he was literally in two places at the exact time of the murder, lead Detective Ralph Anderson doesn't know what to think.  And when things get weirder - like supernaturally so - Anderson has to put his faith in evidence and police procedure aside and put his faith in things he cannot see. 


The Outsider by Stephen King is a middling King novel, not his best but not his worst.  The crimes committed are terrible but the villain himself is not super-scary.  It has the return of Holly Gibney, a main character from the Bill Hodges trilogy of Mr. Mercedes / Finders Keepers / End of Watch, who uses her expertise in the world of the weird to help Ralph Anderson, while Anderson helps her re-engage with the world after Bill Hodges's death. The Outsider doesn't have the depth of characterization of those Bill Hodges books, though - for the first part of the book, I assumed Terry Maitland was going to be main character, not Detective Anderson, and I was a little surprise when the focus switched.  This novel does have some nice call-backs to the Hodges books, however, and it was nice to see Holly again.  Maybe I should re-read that trilogy.

Mini book review: We Are Where the Nightmares Go and other stories by C. Robert Cargill

It's not even September yet so it's far too soon for horror movies.  I have, however, been in the mood for some horror books, inspired by NPR's recent article.  I am particularly fond of horror short stories (Stephen King, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman when he's feeling especially macabre) and thus first pounced upon C. Robert Cargill's We Are Where the Nightmares Go and other stories when it became available at the library.  To be honest, I didn't love it.  I thought the stories were pretty uneven and the prose didn't readily pull me in (as does the prose of Messrs. King, Hill and Gaiman).  I did enjoy several individual stories:  the title story, "We Are Where the Nightmares Go," which has doors to other worlds, bad clowns and lost children; "The Town That Wasn't Anymore," about an Appalachian town that is dying away, not just because the mining is tapped out but because the town's dead just won't stay dead; and, most wonderfully, "Hell Creek" which is about ZOMBIE DINOSAURS.  I mean, who doesn't love zombie dinosaurs?  Bad people, that's who.

Mini book review: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King

Sleeping Beauties is a 2017 collaboration between horror master Stephen King and his son.  No, not Joe Hill, pretty famous in his own right, but Owen King, who still relies on the family name.  This ponderous book follows what happens in small town Appalachia - standing in for the world - when a pandemic brings down all the women.  When a female human falls asleep, she does not wake up and becomes wrapped in a cocoon.  When the men try to take the cocoons off, the sleepers attack, violently and mindlessly - so it's better to leave them wrapped up.  A very few women stave off sleep - the insomniacs, or those with access to amphetamines or cocaine - but for the most part, the men of the world are adrift.  And that does not go well.  Oh!  And there's a supernatural woman - goddess or witch, perhaps - who has ushered in this state of things.  Some of the men want to protect her.  Some of the men don't.

I'm sounding pretty flip here but I did like Sleeping Beauties reasonably well.  It reads largely like a Stephen King book (so I wonder how much collaboration the co-authors did), with its detailed, intricate world-building and knowledge of small town life.  It's also a fairly political novel: King is liberal and it is clearly pro-feminist, as well numerous digs at the current administration.  Lots of the characters (and there are LOTS of characters) are pretty thinly sketched, including Evie, the goddess/witch, and one would think that she would be more developed, being so intrinsic to the story and all.  I wouldn't put it up with King's best works by a long shot but would put it lower-middle of the pack.

A couple of itty-bitty book reviews

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman.  I usually LOVE Neil Gaiman.  I love his world-building and the intelligence of the language he uses.  I also love mythology.  When I was a kid, I would take out all the mythology books in my grade school library; I especially liked Greek, Egyptian and Norse, reading the myths and stories over and over again.  Perhaps that's why I didn't love Gaiman's 2017 Norse Mythology: I already knew all the stories he told, so none of it was new.  I also didn't feel like his voice came through at all, which would have freshened the myths up a bit.  For people who don't know the old stories about Thor, Loki, Odin, Baldur, Freya and the rest, this is a nice, accessible introduction.  But for me, it was a bit of a waste of time.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove  by Karen Russell.  This one, a short story collection by the author of Swamplandia (which I know I've read but apparently didn't review here), was not a waste of time.  Each story is touched with a bit of fantasy - vampires, human silkworms, American presidents reincarnated as horses - and each is very different from the other.  Some agreed with me more than others but all were very original, building specific, interesting worlds in just a few pages.  Lots of fun, that one.

Preacher recap "The Possibilities" S1E3 6/12/16

HOUSTON:  Tulip meets with Danni, handing over the map ("Property of Grail [sp?] Industries") for which she battled through the cornfield in exchange for someone's last known address.  Danni also lays out a scenario in which Tulip could kill her husband for her but Tulip isn't down with that.  The address gives her a flashback: screaming "Wait!" in an alleyway after a fleeing car, an alarm blaring.  In the now, she tells Danni that was the day when it all went bad for her and Jesse.  And now someone's got to pay.  After Tulip leaves, Danni drives to a warehouse and slips into a snuff film festival (we don't see anything but hear screams and power tools).  She hands the map to a white-suited man in the audience, saying that she told him her girl was good.

ANNVILLE:  Sheriff Root is interviewing those two weird dudes in their motel room.  They say that they're after something horrible that got lose, and they're deep undercover, and he's to leave them alone.  "We'l call if we need anything."  Sheriff Root is shaken by imagining what horrible thing is on the prowl in his town.  After he leaves, they start to arm themselves with all kinds of weaponry.  "No surprises" this time.

Emily stops by the brain-damaged girl's house [Tracy? is that her name?].  Her mother is amazed that Tracy's eyes are open and feels badly that she was so rude to the preacher when he told her something was going to change.  The only thing that has changed is that the girl's eyes are open but still, to her mother, different is better.  In another part of town, Donnie speaks to his son en route to the school bus.  The boy apologizes for going to the preacher.  Donnie says that "grownups are complicated ... I love your mom," deeming explaining pain-sex games too difficult at this point.  His son says that he beat up a kid at school who had been talking about the funny sound Donnie made when Jesse broke his arm.  Donnie's all, good - but when the bus pulls up, all the kids are like "It's the bunny-man!" and start squeaking and squealing at him.

Emily finds Cassidy at the church and instructs him to take the recently delivered coffin (whatsisname who cut his own heart out) to the crematorium.  When the vampire goes to get the keys to the van, he finds Jesse skulking in the kitchen.  Jesse: "I wanna show you somethin'."  What he does is demonstrates his power on Cassidy, making him hop, confess a secret, shadow-box, sing Johnny Cash etc.  They learn that the power is limited to what the person can actually do: when he tells Cassidy to fly, the vampire throws himself at the wall but is, in fact, unable to fly.  Cassidy is thrilled but Jesse is pretty close to thinking he's crazy.  "It might feel like a curse ... but it doesn't have to be.  Someone like you, with something like this.  I mean, come on, padre.  You just imagine the possibilities here."

On her way back to Annville from Houston, Tulip gets pulled over for speeding.  She talks her way out of it.  That's about it.

QUINCANNON MEAT AND POWER.  Odin Quincannon likes to listen to the slaughterhouse over the intercom while he has his lunch.  Yeesh.  Donnie reads him a letter from some company ("Green Acres") who is either horning in on QMP's territory or wants to work together.  Donnie's feathers are ruffled but Quincannon doesn't seem too fashed at this point.  Not really sure what's going on here.

Jesse meets up with Tulip on the road in the boondocks.  He tells her again that he doesn't want to get back into a life of crime and she snaps at him, "This isn't crime, preacher.  This is justice."  Jesse stares at her: "Carlos."  And then he has the flashback she had earlier, only he's just shot a security guard in the head as the alarm blares and Carlos drives off, leaving Tulip screaming after him.  "Rat-bastard, money-stealin', child-killin', life-ruinin' sonofabitch," confirms Tulip here and now, waving the address at Jesse.  "Jesse, come on.  Let's go kill Carlos."  And just like that, he's in.

At the motel, the weird dudes are locked and loaded and ready to roll.  On his way back from the crematorium, Cassidy sees them drive by in their black SUV and is all, they found me again.  After the sun goes down, the dudes advance on foot towards the church.  Their goals:  "First the can [that coffee can], then the preacher."  But they don't get very far before Cassidy roars up in the church van and runs them over.  When he gets out to survey the carnage - and they are ALL messed up - he is amazed to see that they look just like the two guys he buried.  "Clones," he decides.  As he walks off to fetch something to clean up this mess, a light flashes; when he comes out into the church, the two dudes are there.  Again.  Cassidy starts beating on one of them with a croquet mallet he found in the closet, growling, "How do you keep finding me?" until the dude who is not getting beaten interrupts, saying "We're not here for you."  And then they have a bit of a sit-down, saying that the preacher has something of theirs and they need to put it back.

Tulip has to stop to gas up her car.  Jesse tries to tell her about what's happening with him but she's all wired, getting belligerent with another gas station patron, so he blows it off and hits the head instead.  In the bathroom, he gets ambushed by a pistol-toting Donnie: "Who's the bunny in the bear trap now?"  Jesse of course uses the Voice to make Donnie shove the gun in his own mouth but just before he forces the other man to pull the trigger, he sort of gives himself a little shake, realizing that he seems to be enjoying this power a little too much.  He says to himself, "I get it," and tells Donnie that he can go.  And when he rejoins Tulip out at the pumps, he says he's changed his mind.  As he starts walking back to town, he tells her that he's staying [in Annville].  She shrieks, "Well, I ain't leavin' without you!" but he just shrugs and keeps walking.

Back at the church, the two weird dudes tell Cassidy that if they don't collect what's inside the preacher, death and destruction will follow.  He questions why they want that power - military, economics, psychosexual mind control - but they're like no, it's not to be used at all.  They tell Cassidy they're from the government but when he, being a good conspiracy theorist, starts rattling off agencies and acronyms, they break in:  "We're from Heaven."  Cassidy: "I see.  Right."  He tells them that they're going about this the wrong way, hunting down Jesse, but if they just take a step back, he'll talk to his best mate and convince him of their mission.  I can't tell if he's playing them or not.

As the episode ends, Jesse and Emily are the only attendees at the funeral for Whatsisname (who cut out his own heart).  The camera pulls back as the preacher gives the reading and the valve on a standpipe out in a nearby field snaps open with a hiss.  What does that mean?

Previously on Preacher /  next time on Preacher

Mini book review: The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

In Depression Era Chicago, a not very nice man named Harper Curtis stumbles into a derelict-seeming house.  The House (for it is a House, not just a house) is different on the inside: in a room upstairs, there are trophies taken from women that Harper will kill.  The House has a listing of these "shining girls," and whenever Harper opens the front door, the House delivers him to a different time between 1929 and 1993 so he can locate these girls and snuff out their light.  Although he starts awkwardly, he quickly becomes quite good at these vicious, seemingly untraceable murders as he bounces back and forth through time.  But in 1989, Kirby Mizrachi manages to escape Harper's knife, despite her belly and throat being slashed.  And because she manages to escape, she systematically begins to track down her would-be murderer.

Time travel stories are always tough but despite a couple of passages that I had to read and re-read to figure out who was sticking what knife into whom, The Shining Girls is pretty successful.  It's very violent - the descriptions of Harper's attacks are detailed and extremely bloody - but also very convincing.  The amount of research Lauren Beukes did to create the Chicagos of the various times must have been staggering.  The characters, including all of the victims, are fleshed out and real, interesting, sympathetic; the only one who gets short shrift is Harper but he's such a horrible person that I really didn't want to get to know him better.  I recently had a rare rainy Sunday when I didn't have to do anything, so I sat down and read The Shining Girls all in one go.  If that's not a recommendation for a book, I don't know what is.

PS - I have also read Beukes's Broken Monsters and liked that too, but it's a weirder book and didn't connect with me quite so well.  Don't know why I didn't review that here.

Here:  link to links to buy the book.

Mini book review: The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman

The Museum of Extraordinary Things, by Alice Hoffman, is historical fiction taking place in New York City in the early 1900s.  It is told from a couple points of view: Eddie Cohen, a Russian immigrant making his living as a photographer in Brooklyn; and Coralie Sardie, who performs as the Mermaid in her father's "museum" / freak show, which competes with the other, larger attractions in Coney Island.  When Eddie, a witness to the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, is hired to find out what happened to a lost young woman who had escaped the fire, his life becomes intertwined with Coralie's, as she tries to extricate from her father's clutches.

I actually found the romance between Coralie and Eddie to be the least interesting part of this book, instead finding the details of the two terrible fires - the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Dreamland Fire - much more compelling.  I had never heard of either of these two disasters before this book.  The Triangle fire was particularly sad, the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City, in which 146 immigrant garment workers died, either burned to death, because their bosses locked them in the work rooms, or killed when they jumped from the building's eighth, ninth and tenth floors to escape the flames.  The Dreamland fire happened just months later, when exploding light bulbs at the amusement park ignited tar that was being used to patch a roof leak.  Over sixty exhibition animals died and the once-elegant park was destroyed, never to be rebuilt.

Mini book review The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

I think the most important question is: how has it taken me this long to read The Golden Compass, the first book in His Dark Materials, a beloved YA fantasy series by Philip Pullman.  I suppose it's because it came out in 1995 and I was just a few years out of college at that point, not spending much of my time reading YA fantasy.  But now that I am much, much older, I am happy to have discovered the series.

The Golden Compass follows young Lyra Belacqua and her shape-shifting daemon Pantalaimon as they discover that the world is much bigger and more complicated than they were led to believe.  At first ensconced among the aged academics at Jordan College, Lyra has run wild for the first twelve years of her life.  But children have started disappearing in the town and strange deals are being struck behind the College's closed doors, and Lyra soon finds herself at the center of it.

There is a lot of world-building on which to come up to speed quickly here, daemons (an animal familiar, bonded to every person at birth, which can shapeshift until its human partner reaches puberty at which point the daemon settles into its truest form) and armored polar bears and canal-dwelling gypsies and hot air balloons and treacherous relatives and dead children and the Northern Lights.  I got sucked in quickly, my interest only fading slightly towards the very end when it was apparent that things were winding towards the next book in the series.  Lyra is an interesting, imperfect protagonist - I am looking forward to seeing what she gets up to next.