I just found out that "Family History," the Paul Park story in which I briefly feature as a despicable villain, will be coming out in an anthology from Daw Books, "Other Earths," sometime next year. This is good.

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Not much to report as far as writing goes, but I've been cranking away very slowly on the w.i.p.

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In an attempt to justify the existence of this entry, her are, in no particular order, the novels I've read in the last year. (At least these are the ones I can remember. I might be missing some.) If the list seems a little short for the length of time involved, it's both because I really don't quite inhale books the way some people I know do, and also because I have novel ADD. 3/4 of the books I start reading I sort of end up putting down at some point and never finishing, especially if I'm not that into it, but sometimes even if I *am* into it but something else coems along to distract me. In any case, I'm only counting the all the way through ones here. Without further ado:

(1) "Kitty Goes to Washington" by Carrie Vaughn

Bleh. I loved the first novel in the series, "Kitty and the Midnight Hour," but this lost 99% of the angsty emotional resonance that was at the heart of why the first book worked, and ended up feeling like a lazily imagined and bloodlessly executed sort of cookie-cutter contemporary paranormal-type novel, without even much of the werewolf stuff that was so much fun in the previous book. I don't know why the writers of these kinds of light-horror-ish, werewolf/vampire type books always seem to feel the need to introduce all kinds of additional supernatural elements in the second book of each series, or why it always seems to be the *same* cookie-cutter extra superantural elements, but I wish they wouldn't. It makes it even worse when you have authorial intervention in the actual text, where the main character thinks something like "well, I guess if I believe in werewolves, this is no harder to swallow" and I'm sitting there reading it thinking "yes, actually, it's *much* harder to swallow." It's a bad fit aesthetically, it fucks with my suspension of disbelief and for me at least, it makes the books a lot less vivid and interesting.

(Although for whatever reason it tends to work for me better when--like in Robin McKinley's "Sunshine"--we start with a world in which the rest of the magical stuff is part and parcel of the framework and put vampires or whatever in *that* world, rather than working the other way around.)

That problem was compounded by the fact that I basically didn't believe that any of the stuff the villains were doing could happen, either in terms of motivation or logistics. (Spoiler-level detail: A U.S. Senator kidnaps her *and* puts the whole thing on TV *and* doesn't anticipate the obvious negative consequences of this? Sorry, no, the judges award that no points.)

...and given how little that one worked for me, it's amazing that I ever got around to reading the sequel to *that* book:

(2) "Kitty Takes a Holiday" by Carrie Vaughn

...which I actually quite liked. Go figure. Good book. You should read it.

In fact, thematically, and structurally, it kind of reminded me of:

(3) "Fledgling" by Octavia Butler

...which was excellent subversive fun, fondly riffing off all kinds of contemporary vampire subgenre conventions but doing so with a very unique, and quite definitely science-fictional, feel to it. The line that summed up the whole thing for me was the following. The vampire (or the member of the species that's the source of humanity's vampire legends are based, anyway) appears physically to be an eleven year old black girl. When she meets face to face in good lighting the first time one of her victims, a middle-aged white female librarian, the librarian slumps her shoulders in disappointment, explaining that based on her reading, she expected the little girl to be a tall, handsome, fully grown white man.

On a less interesting but still fun aspect of a related subgenre, I should mention:

(4) "Carpe Demon" by Julie Kellner
and
(5) "California Demon" by Julie Kellner

Yep, these are those "demon-hunting soccer mom" books. Great literature? Well, maybe not, but smoothly-written, Buffy-ish fun? Definitely.

(Update: I pretty much agree with everything Hannah Wolf Bowen says about it--following the links to her previous entries from here--except that the asides didn't particularly bother me in the first book, and I haven't read the third one yet, so I can't comment on that.)

And, before we completely leave the light-horror-ish side of things, I should also mention:

(6) "Ghosts of Albion: Accursed" by Amber Benson and Christopher Golden

Victorian-setting Buffy rip-off, fun premise, but spoiled for me by distractingly bad writing ticks, like pages of authorial intervention info-dumping every character's motivations, emotional reactions and backstory. Excellent evidence for Nathaniel Hawthorne's point about easy reading being damned hard writing.

What else? Oh yeah, on a completely different note:

(7) "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein

This seemed like a classic I should really get around to reading, so I did, and I'm glad I did. It was certainly easy, reasonably fun reading, it's got some historical/cultural significance ("grokking," etc.) and conceptually it was probably the most interesting of the Heinlein novels I've read. That said, I think that as an actual novel (characters, setting, plot, suspension of disbelief, stuff like that) it was probably the worst of the four I've read. (The four being Stranger, Starship Troopers, Farnham's Freehold and Puppet Masters.) For my money, out of those four, by far the best *as a novel* is Puppet Masters, which despite some slan aspects to the hero and some obnoxious (and explicitly infodumped) political analogies, was enormous fun, had some moments of being genuinely scary and had an almost phildickian sense of paranoia running through bits of it.

And of course talk of Heinlein leads in a natural progression to:

(8) "Old Man's War" by John Scalzi

Loads of fun, with what felt like a really vivid, imaginative set-up, despite having some obnoxiously reactionary political subtext that it gets pretty hard to ignore. Everybody always talks about it as a Heinlein homage, but for my money it was actually much better than Heinlein's space-war stuff. I thought the *weakest* moments in the book were the parts that felt the most Heinleinian: the (thank God, only ocassional) collaborative-lectures-disguised-as-dialogue and the insultingly unconvincing two-dimensional character who only exists as an ideological foil for our hero, and who quickly dies. Ugh. Although what's possibly lost in this is that I really did enjoy the book a lot, and in fact inhaled the entire thing, front to back, in a single sitting while I was on the plane to Portland for Potlatch. Certainly I was more than willing to give a chance to:

(9) "The Ghost Brigades" by John Scalzi

...which was actually way better. More of the stuff I liked from the first book, less of the stuff I didn't like, adding up to a much darker, more complex and more interesting story. And you have to give mad props to a self-consciously retro space opera that includes an extended homage to Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." I will wait for the third book, "The Last Colony," to come out in paperback before devouring it, but I'm at least half-way tempted to break down and get it in hard-cover.

And speaking of super-quick plane reads:

(10) "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman

I love Gaiman's graphic novels (I own the first 10 volumes of "Sandman") and what I've read of his short stories ("A Study in Emrald" is fantastic), but I've never been able to get into his novels. I'll read a few chapters and be reasonably entertained but find them all too easy to put down. My sense of this is that his best stuff (e.g. Sandman) manages to strike a balance between goofy fun and genuine mythic/poetic resonance that I really love, whereas in his novels he tends to completely go over to the goofy fun side of the spectrum in a way that ends up leaving me pretty cold.

All of which makes it odd that I actually inhaled "Anansi Boys" quickly and happily. Whether it was because it was intrinsically more to my liking than the other Gaiman novels I've looked at or just because I was stuck on an airplane with nothing else to read I don't know, but there you have it.

And on a completely different note:

(11) "The Poison Belt" by Arthur Conan Doyle

Professor Challenger is a wonderful, vivid and absurd character, and I enjoyed this a lot for most of the book, right up until Conan Doyle flinched from the dark, starkly vivid place it was going and stuck in a deus ex machina ending.

...and speaking of vaguely comic-booky stuff:

(12) "It's Superman!" by Tom DeHaven

I actually can't recommend this enough. This is what the TV show Smallville should have been, would have been if it didn't have some of the very worst writing on television. Whereas this, actually, for a novel about...well... Superman....it has shockingly high literary production values. And really, it's not about Superman, it's about Clark Kent, and it doubles as a lovely 1930s period piece. I knew I was going to love it when the first section was entitled "the WPA guide to Smallville" and teenage Clark clacking away at his typewriter working on "scientifiction" stories to submit to the pulps.

It's as well-written as anything I've read in a while, and loads of fun.

Also fun:

(13) "War for the Oaks" by Emma Bull

...which I was actually re-reading, but then again my previous reading was when I was *maybe* 12, so I was pleasantly shocked by how well it held up.

Stuff that definitely was new to me, on the other hand:

(14) "Move Under Ground" by Nick Mamatas
and
(15) "Under My Roof" by Nick Mamatas

"Under My Roof" was a good book, plenty of fun to be had reading it. The elevator-pitch description says it all: kid whose father builds a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb, sticks it in his front yard garden gnome and declares his independance from the United States. I'd heartily recommend it.

By contrast, if "Under My Roof" was a good book, "Move Under Ground" was a fucking amazing book. The way I ended up thinking about it--and this is certainly presumptous, and I wouldn't claim that it grounds out in anything more than my personal impressions--was by analogy to what Emmanuel Carrere said about the "Valis" trilogy in his PKD biography, "I Am Alive And You Are Dead." Carrere thinks "Valis" should be read as co-written by Phil and Fat, whereas the sequel, "Divine Invasions," was Horselover Fat's book and the third one, "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer," was Phil's book. (If none of that means anything to you, you should go read Valis!) Having been a long-time reader of Nick Mamatas's blog, nihilistic-kid, and having (very briefly) interacted with the guy in person, my impression is basically this: Under My Roof was nihilistic-kid's book and Move Under Ground was Nick's book. Nihilistic-kid would be the no-holes-barred satirist and flame warrior, tongue never very far from his cheeck, you get when you tune into the blog. Nick would be the actual leather-jacket-wearing, relaxed and friendly Greek-American guy who happens to be the creator of that on-line persona.

Now, nihilistic-kid's book was, as you would expect, a lot of fun, displaying a sharp and nasty sense of humor, but at least to me, Nick's book was more interesting.

All of which leads up to the fact that I fucking loved "Move Under Ground." It's taking a huge risk to write first person from the p.o.v. of someone who wrote book after book of incredibly stylistically distinctive, autobiographical "fiction," but Mamatas pulled it off expertly, and the way that that breathless Keruoac-voice bleeds seamlessly into the Lovecraftian stuff is fantastic. As someone who likes Lovecraftian horror and spent a lot of his teenagerhood obsessed with the Beats, this was pretty much perfect for me, reading this and having all the little aha-moments when I recognized one more reference to Ginsberg or Borroughs or whoever in the text. *Plus* the individual phrases, the choices of metaphors and similes, throughout the book kept on blowing me away.

...and, while still retaining the fun and funny elements, it actually ended up culminating naturally in what amounted to a suprisingly interesting political and philosophical critique of Buddhist ideas about eliminating desire. I actually chewed over the ending for a long while after reading it.

At the end of the day China Mieville's cover quote--"intense inspired crossbred homage-cum-critique-cum-vision" gets it just right, although I must admit I only mentioned it so I'd have a segue to:

(16) "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville

About which I have two things to say:

1. This is a really tremendous novel, lovely, dark and deep.

and

2. That said, it is a bit of a flaw that the story didn't really start until page 221.

A couple of chapters of atmospheric build-up? Fine. 221 pages of it before we even find out what the plot's going to be about is an imposition on the reader's patience. The first time I tried to read it, I petered off around p.100, not because what came before wasn't well-written, but because I was being given too little reason to keep turning the pages. Nor is this a purely eccentric personal reaction. I know at least a couple other people (fast and attentive readers all) who did exactly the same thing. I recommended it to two *other* people, both of whom made comments to me to the effect that they'd almost put it down around that point, but were really happy that they didn't, because a couple of hundred pages in it got really, really good.

Which was exactly my feeling when I finally picked it back up. Now, this might be a really deep division about what kind of reader you are, because I've heard the opposite response from more than one person, that they actually liked the first half better than the second. That reaction is absolutely incomprehensible to me, but I can respect that this is a matter of personal taste.

Again, that structural quibble aside, this really is now one of my absolutely favorite fantasy books. Lush, atmospheric world-building that managed to be reminiscent of cyberpunk, Dickens and Lovecraft all at the same time, vivid enough that while reading it I dreamt about living in that world, and laid out on the Neuromancer novel of a continually jacked-up world-building ante. Wonderfully and horribly vivid demons. Political themes that managed to be intensely resonant to our world without being preachy or gratuitous. A deeply-felt and erotically described love affair...with a grotesque insect-headed creature...that was completely and immersively convincing. Endlessly lovely bits tossed out as throw-away details mid-sentence, like a description of the scene late at night including "golems, cobbled together by drunken college students, dissolving in the streets..."

It's in that tiny, special category for me of books that I'd love to re-read, but I can't, since every bit of that book is way too deeply imprinted in me right now for re-reading to be possible.