Dan
Frustrating one this. It started slowly, but I persevered and ended up very much enjoying the middle section, where things escalate and there’s a strong sense of rising terror. But the final act is pretty underwhelming and doesn’t really stand up to much interrogation at all. Almost brilliant, but ultimately falls short.
I was a big fan of The Mountain In The Sea, and rated it as one of the most interesting debuts to come along in a while. This one also deals with non-human intelligence, but one closer to today’s headlines. Yes, it’s an AI novel. But what’s most interesting here is the form. It’s told from many different viewpoints, all of whom of have different levels of access to what’s really going on, and it ends up reading like a classic twisty espionage story. More than anything, I was put in mind of Dave Hutchinson’s fantastic Fractured Europe books. And like those, be prepared to be left scratching your head at the end, as you piece together what was really going on. A reread will, I think, throw lots of new perspectives on the novel, but even after a single read through it’s clear Ray Nayler is a hugely promising talent.
This is another exciting and well written fantasy novel from Jen Williams. I particularly enjoy her solution to the perennial problem of the boring middle volume of the trilogy, which is to simply not write it. In my review of the first volume I moaned about how analogous the setting is to Britain, and the reasoning for that becomes clearer here, as we dig deep into the myth and folklore of the country, even glancing at the Matter of Britain. These elements are far more weightily felt this way than they would have been had they been entirely fictional. They are part of our shared consciousness, freighted with import that the most skilled writer in the world couldn't manage from scratch.
But this became something that niggled me about the book, something that took me out of the escapism of reading for pleasure. In a time when fascists are weaponising asylum seekers, small boats full of foreigners are the new folk devil, and children are being demonised for fleeing warzones, then a novel that's about how terrible creatures from over the sea will land on our shores and cruelly destroy our way of life, and how the way to beat them back is go back to the traditions and lore of the old days lands ...awkwardly. I don't suppose for one minute that Jen Williams wrote this book as an anti-immigration screed (it's very good on LGB depiction for instance), but it's one of those things where once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
So yeah, it's entertaining as always, and I'll certainly be around for another epic fantasy series from Ms Williams, but this one sat a little bit funny for me.
I've enjoyed the Laundry Files less and less with each new book. Somewhere along the line these stories have changed from original inventive pulp romps to a tired cynical sneer at...well, pretty much everything. God knows there is a place for that in this society, but it's just so wearying to read several hundred pages relentlessly discoursing on why everything is shit. This seemed to reach a peak with the New Management books, which were so biliously misanthropic I almost tapped out. Fortunately this one sees Stross trying to engage with the light-hearted side of the series some more. It's not perfect (parts of it smack far too much of nerd wish fulfilment for one thing), but it's given me hope that the series can turn a corner and that maybe there is some actual fun on the horizon.
The vibe here is “what If Jean Rollin had directed an adaptation of A Canticle For Leibovitz?”, which to be fair is a brilliant idea, but the execution is a bit too ploddy and uninteresting for me. It's a short book, but nonetheless it feels a bit like walking through treacle and became an endurance test to finish. Great as a way to exemplify the limited and constrained lives of these women, not so much fun to read. I really loved Tender Is The Flesh, but this one missed the mark for me.
This could have gone terribly wrong. A successful middle aged man writing about young girls punished for being pregnant could have gone off the rails in so many ways, but Hendrix pulls it off (disclaimer: I am also a middle aged man, and it's quite possible that someone else may feel differently). This is full of tenderness and empathy, as well as some pretty full on body horror which does not flinch from the reality of pregnancy and childbirth. It's a powerful read, one that should leave you with a deep and abiding sense of anger. Hendrix doesn't labour the point, just a brief reference at the end, but in an era where the US establishment is closer than ever to rolling back safe and legal abortion, this is anything but a historical novel.
It was always going to be hard not to give five stars to a book that features at least two Aliens quotes, but fortunately Powell backs them up with another of his trademark rollicking space operas. His usual focus on warmth and human connection is here (even if not all the leads are strictly human), but it's juggled with maybe the nastiest and most chilling villains he has come up with yet. There's no tonal whiplash though, just an emphasising of what's at stake if we lose. It's a thoroughly modern book, but still manages to evoke the sense of wonder that attracted me to the genre when I was a kid trawling the local library for classic SF.
I said in a recent review that horror's back, and this is more evidence that the genre is enjoying an upswing. It's a well written, multi-voiced account of a centuries old evil. There's shades of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, a radically fresh take on vampire mythology, gore in the right places and tenderness in others, and a compulsive storyline that kept me reading and reading. Hands down the best horror novel I've read in ages, and one of my books of the year.
An interesting book that examines how we deal with grief and how we seek answers to the inexplicable. Sometimes things just happen, and no matter how much we look for patterns or motives, how much we try to impose order according to arbitrary rules, they can't be found. The crime genre is an obvious candidate for this sort of structure seeking, and Hegarty largely pulls it off. If I sound a little under enthused, it's because this was literally the
second book in a row I read that uses the scaffolding of cosy crime to interrogate something else, and so it wasn't as fresh for me as it might have been. It's a good one, though.
An eerie triumph of voice and atmosphere, this is hard to write about because it is nebulous and ill-defined, but that's kind of the point - it's the wide-eyed wonder of a childhood day spent outdoors exploring somewhere new you're not really supposed to be. It has a magical realism vibe, where things aren't necessarily logical but make emotional sense, with an ominous undertow bubbling away.
Ian McDonald has been busy quietly becoming one of our best writers over the past couple of decades, and while a departure into horror isn't likely to suddenly win him fawning accolades from the broadsheets, I'm happy to report that his prose is as good as ever here. There's a little aside early on to tell you that isn't folk horror - but it's not exactly not folk horror either, with its parade of ancient forces rising out of the landscape (and what a landscape - the descriptions of the bog and the surrounding terrain are transportingly vivid). It doesn't have the stately pace and low key weirdness of a lot of popular recent FH though - once everything kicks in here it goes like a train all the way to a climatic battle that is begging to be filmed. A lot of fun. Also worth noting that this is the second novel with a gerund for a title that I've read in the last few months. Horror's back, baby!
I didn't love this one quite as much as I did Daniel Church's previous book (or indeed some of the books published under the author's real name). The ensemble horror of The Hollows is replaced by a much tighter focus on just one character, and Church does a good job of getting into her head and explicating her past trauma, her fearfulness and resilience, and the walls she needs to break down. She's a compelling character, and her supernatural antagonist is a memorable creation, one that you can almost smell off the page. It's the human bad guys that let me down a little bit, as I just didn't believe that their schemes, especially the first one, could ever work - when it was outlined, my reaction was, oh come on, and what about..... The suspension of disbelief was wobbling. Yes, I was completely on board with an ancient evil that's twenty feet high and made of bones, but a villainous toff was just pushing it too far for me. Go figure.
I worked in a Japanese office for two years, and this short novel does well to capture the stifling conformity of the culture. It's kind of a bizarre love triangle, where one corner embraces the roles and routines of office life, another just wants to throw a (metaphorical) brick through them, and the third wavers between the two. It's quite a downbeat book, with a pretty cynical and jaundiced view of life, but an enjoyable one.
I mean, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy this, but all the way through it invited comparison with Tom Holt's The Walled Orchard (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1125846.The_Walled_Orchard?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_14). The subject matter (classical Athenian drama and the fallout from Athens' invasion of Syracuse) and the tone (broadly comic but not afraid to delve into the horrors of war and man's cruelty to man) are nigh on identical, and so, much as I liked it, the ghost of Holt* haunted my reading of this.
Also, to put on my classical pedant's hat for a moment, there is one absolute clunker in here early on, when a character refers to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex - rex of course being a Latin word that no Greek** would have used in the 5th century BCE. A contemporary would be much more likely to have called it Oedipus Tyrannos. Or even just Oedipus, as there are suggestions that the Tyrannos part of the title was a retrospective addition once Sophocles had written Oedipus At Colonus, which happened after the events of this book, but that is a pedantry too far even for me.
*he's not dead, as far as I am aware
**yeah, I know