A fic only an author could love
So, I was trying to get inspired to write and I realized that I really, really like a story of mine that nobody else seems to. There are good reasons not to like it: it lacks narrative flow and just sort of ebbs away at the end. But it works for me, in part because it doesn't have a real flow; it's a story of a breakdown, of a man who thinks so hard he destroys the natural course of his relationships. No link, because this isn't about trying to get you to read it -- what I wanted to know is whether other authors reading this have beloved monsters, stories that you like even though they didn't get a positive reaction, or as much of a positive reaction as other stories of yours.
What are your orphans, and why do you hold them close to your heart? I would like links, if you're willing to give them, whatever fandom. Readers, your thoughts are welcome too, if you've got them.
And now, a huge number of fiction books: Martha McPhee, Umberto Eco, Stephen King, William Gibson, Tim Cockey, The Mammoth Book of New Horror, Alan Dean Foster, Graham Greene, George Turner, Walter Tevis, Patty Dann, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer v. 2, Steven Brust, Kage Baker, Peter David, Hot Blood XI: Fatal Attractions, and James Maxey. I'm pretty sure that's a list that hasn't ever been put together before.
Martha McPhee, Gorgeous Lies: I love my mother-in-law, but I'm afraid we're never going to agree on fiction past David Foster Wallace. She keeps giving me what I suppose are gems of contemporary fiction, and I keep looking longingly at my knights in shining spaceships. Gorgeous Lies is about a sort of sacred monster, a man named Anton Furey who has two wives and a passel of children; the book starts with him on his deathbed and goes back and forth through time to show how he became the center of a tangled web of screwed-up kids, screwy wives/ex-wives, and a very strange house with a lot of debt. As a portrait of a guy whose self-love keeps him from seeing how he's caused pain in a million tiny ways and a thousand big ones, the book is very well-done. It's just not the kind of thing that trips my switches. If Anton were a vampire, too, now ...
Umberto Eco, Baudolino: In the thirteenth century, Baudolino the liar, friend of kings, tells his story. A friend of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Baudolino's real allegiance is to his dream of Prester John's kingdom, a dream he brings to life in the minds of his friends and companions. Essentially a layered series of fantasies and fantastic descriptions, told in contrast to the history of the destruction of the splendors of Constantinople, the book seemed incoherent and pointless to me, but minds of a more literary bent might find more there.
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower V): I strongly believe that, a century from now, Stephen King will be recognized as one of the great novelists of the late 20th century, perhaps the great novelist. That said, I've always thought his pure horror was his glory, from Carrie to Christine to Firestarter (his women have always been strong, haven't they?), even The Tommyknockers, written when he was out of his mind on cocaine, and his masterpiece It. The linked Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game proved he could do horror that was pure psychology (Misery was gripping, but being about writing was more self-absorbed and less universal than his best work), but I was never quite sure about the Dark Tower books, never convinced there was a point, even as King started bringing characters from his other books and stories into the Dark Tower multiverse.
I'm convinced. In this book, Roland and his ka-tet, having survived Blaine the mad train, are called upon to help the good folk of Calla Bryn Sturgis against the Wolves, raiders who sweep down about once a generation and take half the children, returning them months later "roont," mind-slaughtered and doomed to early, painful death. The people of the Calla don't quite understand what it is to ask gunslingers for help, but they'll find out. One of the denizens of the Calla is an old friend from a very different time and place; he helps them with some other business left over from New York, where Eddie has to go see a man about a rose. Also, Andy the friendly robot lurks nearby; there's something not quite right with Susannah; and young Jake has finally made a friend, only to discover that he might have to destroy that friend to save everyone else. At long last, the elements King's been playing with are starting to come together into the epic he's said all along he was writing. His genius for detail, which always seemed to me better served when he was talking about brand names and popular songs - about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters - brings the Calla and its slightly off ways of speech and thought to glorious, beating-heart life. I haven't loved a King book since Gerald's Game, not really, even though I liked some of the stories in Everything's Eventual just fine, but I am back in the "worshipful adoration" column now.
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition: This book gets filed in the SF section because of its author, and maybe because of its day-after-tomorrow world with a protagonist who's allergic to trademarks, jet-setting around to vet branding campaigns for multinationals and trying to find the source of a mysterious film circulating in short clips on the Internet. But it's not SF. It's about September 11, 2001, even though not much of the book discusses the events of that day. I wasn't sure I liked it while I was reading it, but when I was done I was quite impressed. Gibson movingly and persuasively describes how the world changed for people like me, who never thought that the world - that other people -- would be so cruel. In a way, the protagonist is a Job who never gets to talk to God about whether there's meaning in suffering, though she does get to talk to other souls as confused and confusing as she is.
Tim Cockey, Murder in the Hearse Degree: A mortician-cum-PI is a new twist. Hitchcock Sewell is no Kay Scarpetta; there are very few details of death here. What he does have is an okay sense of humor, though he thinks it's better than it is, and an ex-girlfriend in a spot of trouble. Her nanny is dead, and pregnant, and the combination turns out to be very bad news. This is the literary equivalent of potato chips - fine when you're travelling, but not a good idea to overindulge.
Alan Dead Foster, Reunion: A Pip and Flinx Novel: I keep buying ADF books, hoping that I'll enjoy them the way I did when I was a kid, and I keep getting disappointed. It makes me scared to revisit Slipt or The Man Who Used the Universe or the title story of With Friends Like These .... Pip and Flinx are a boy and his minidragon, not respectively; Flinx has growing but unreliable psychic powers conferred on him by genetic manipulation by the Meliorares, a suppressed sect. To my great shame, I bought Reunion without realizing I'd already read it, and I didn't remember until more than halfway through, in large part because nothing happens until over halfway through. Flinx just flits around looking for information. While this is perhaps realistic, I wasn't exactly looking for realism. Also, Foster suffers from an excessive attachment to his thesaurus, never using a common word when an exotic, nay, outre one will do. This is a particular weakness in a book like this one, which is mostly description and very little dialogue, Flinx being a guy who generally keeps his own counsel. Sigh. Next time, I will try to resist and preserve some of my childhood illusions.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, ed. Stephen Jones (2003). I don't really understand the beginning and ending chunks of the books in this series - this one spends over 80 pages on "Horror in 2002," an essay that's not completely comprehensive, not really a list, and not really a set of reviews, the latter of which could be quite useful. Instead, the author throws out occasional sly comments on the quality (or, usually, lack thereof) of a few of the books mentioned. And then the end is "Necrology" - like the song says, these are people who died, usually people who worked in the horror/fantasy field. But what about the stories, you ask? Neil Gaiman and China Mieville lead off with typical offerings - you know whether you like them or not - and nothing special happens until Brian Hodge's "Nesting Instincts," whose organizing metaphor works brilliantly, even though people aren't wasps. Glen Hirshberg's "The Two Sams" is a disturbing story about miscarriage, one in which there might be nothing supernatural at all. Kelly Link shows up again with "Catskin," a story I hated the first time, but Kim Newman's "Egyptian Avenue" is good old-fashioned mummy-hunting. Graham Joyce tells a story that I can only describe as magical wartime realism in "The Coventry Boy," and the editor's prediliction for Lovecraftesque stories pays off in "The Prospect Cards" by Don Tumasonis, a story told in postcards, and "The Cage" by Jeff Vandermeer, about a city in the grip of a visitation so terrible the inhabitants just sit and wait for death, and about the used-furniture dealer who comes to clean up when a family has been wiped out. Other authors: David Schow, Nicholas Royle, Stephen Gallager, Jay Russel, Ramsey Campbell, Basil Copper, Joe Hill, James Van Pelt, Caitlin Kiernan, and Paul McAuley.
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair: I don't generally read outside "genre" fiction. I like books in which things happen, and "things" don't include love affairs and related angsting. There's nothing in this book but a love affair and related angsting, and it's wonderful. The writing is beautiful, the sentiments are universal but expressed far better than I've ever seen, and there are no easy answers. Greene's Catholicism is present, but not in the way you might think, as he tells the story of a married woman, the author with whom she had an affair, and the cuckolded husband, all of whom are not quite who you think they are at first. You could say that God is the fourth main character, but I don't think that's true; this is a book about the absence of God, and what that means for people of faith.
George Turner, A Pursuit of Miracles: This is a collection of stories by an Australian sf author, written in the 1970s and 1980s. The concerns of that period - overpopulation, extinction, poisoning of the atmosphere - run through the book, making the stories seem similar in a way they might not have seemed if I'd read them contemporaneously. "Generation Gap" is the title of one story, but all of them are about failures of communication of one sort or another, caused by anti-aging technology, cultures formed in Earth orbit meeting those of old Earth, genetic manipulation that makes one generation exponentially smarter than the next, laws that declare some people to be half-persons and others full citizens, and the like. Overall, fairly depressing but not particularly memorable.
Walter Tevis, Mockingbird: It's a few centuries from now, and a suicidal robot is running the decaying city of New York, looking after its drugged human inhabitants who have been trained from childhood to believe in Privacy, meaning that they don't interact, don't live together, don't talk, don't fall in love. A NYU professor (go NYU!) who has, incredibly, taught himself to read, meets a woman living at the zoo who's dropped out of the system, and they begin to rebel. This is the kind of book that people say is about the triumph of the human spirit, but it just made me kind of cranky. It's not badly written, but I didn't care about the plight of the protagonists or the fate of humanity in the robot's hands. Do people who let themselves be lulled into quiescence with movies and drugs, who drove almost all other species to extinction, who don't want to read or think, deserve to survive? Maybe I agreed too much with the robot.
Patty Dann, Sweet and Crazy: Another non-genre book, which we bought because we passed a bookstore in which cute quotes from the book were displayed on placards slowly twisting on strings. ("The cricket-hot night my husband died, my four-year-old-son [sic], Pete, looked at me and said, 'Now you're a window,' and I did not correct the child.") The book is by the author of Mermaids (which got turned into a film starring Cher, Winona Ryder and an extremely young Cristina Ricci). It's about a widow with a young child, set immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. As the widow tries to deal with her shattered personal life, her Ohio community tries to deal with its shattered worldview. There's didactic racism, cute children's wisdom, and a new love affair. I didn't really see the point - but then I'm a snob like that. Pattern Recognition, which focused so much less on the actual events of that day, was much more cathartic and insightful than Dann's book, which tried too hard to link the personal and the world-historical.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tales of the Slayer Vol. 2: This volume is superior to the average tie-in book, maybe because the authors understand the point of the Slayer mythos: There's only one at a time. So for there to be nine different Slayers in the book, there have to be nine Slayers who died, and sometimes they die during the stories. The 980 AD Japan story set at the Imperial court, the terrible story of Watcher/Slayer love set in Brittany in 1320, the Civil War story with a famous cameo, and the flapper Slayer in 1920s NYC are my favorites; the last is told from the viewpoint of someone who's neither a Slayer nor a Watcher, and it addresses the fundamental human problems that nobody gets what she wants, not really, and that being a hero can be just as awful as not being a hero.
Steven Brust, The Lord of Castle Black: Back to Dragaera, where the men are men and the dialogue is flowery. The first book in this trilogy (?) really annoyed me, but I seem to have been in a better mood this time around. Although the stylized dialogue and deliberately pompous narrative aren't my favorite tricks, this time the pragmatic-yet-honorable people underneath the silly reportage show through in a successful contrast between style and substance. Morrollan, who Vlad knows only in the fullness of his power, is just learning how to deal with humans (aka elves) and how far his power extends, and conspiracy threatens the Phoenix heir. The book also introduces some new threatening bad guys - gals, really - and even though disaster is averted this time, the trouble is clearly Not Over. I'm glad I swallowed my annoyance with the previous book, because I'm beginning to trust Brust again.
Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World: Baker's previous works have all been about the Company, a cross-time organization dedicated to gaining wealth and power by abusing its knowledge of future history. This fantasy novel invents a new world full of demons, clans, and caravans. Actually, "novel" is a misnomer: What we have here is three linked novellas featuring Smith the former assassin and the people and demon/godlings whose lives intersect with his. This is good, hearty fun, with a lot less angst than Baker's Mendoza generally has, even though bad things happen to good people and whether justice is ultimately served is, at best, debatable.
Peter David, Knight Life: King Arthur runs for mayor of New York City. No, really. This is light satire - that is, the satire is light, though the execution is sometimes heavy-handed. If you're into Arthurian transplants and don't demand dignity from your knights, you might enjoy this book, though if you want real, juicy reworkings of the myth you'd be better off sticking with Matt Wagner's Mage. This is no Fisher King, just an immortal guy trying to do the right thing with the help of a Merlin who's aging backwards into a twerpy little kid.
Hot Blood XI: Fatal Attractions, ed. Jeff Gelb & Michael Garrett. Eleven books already? As you'd expect, the quality of these erotic horror stories varies, but this book has a few decent ones. Bob Ingersoll's "Making the Jump" is a fairly standard, but sexed-up, revenge tale, while Edo van Belkom's "Separate Vacations" is just an annoying gotcha-fic. Michael Garrett does better with sudden reversals in "One to Die For," about a reality show for which no one volunteers, while Jeff Gelb's "Night of the Giving Head" gives a whole new meaning to the idea of zombies eating people. Which I suppose was the point. The sexiest story for my money is Graham Masterton's "Epiphany," about a portrait and an obsession, or two. The creepiest is Mick Garris's "Starfucker." Other authors: P.D. Cacek, Thea Hutcheson, Max Allan Collins & Matthew V. Clemens, Debra Gray de Noux & O'Neil de Noux, Christa Faust, John Edward Ames, Sephera Giron (yeah, right), Stanley Wiater, Yvonne Navarro, Nancy Holder, David J. Schow, and Brian Hodge.
James Maxey, Nobody Gets the Girl: The back cover describes this book as a comic book novel, which drew me in, but the introduction was so self-satisfied and annoying that I feared what would come next. The premise - no, it is too complicated; let me summarize. There's a guy, a wanna-be stand-up comic, who wakes up one day invisible and, in fact, erased from the timeline. The guy who did that to him, by accident, finds him and offers him a job helping to defend humanity from things like Baby Gun, a giant baby doll with a gun the size of a school bus for a head. Dr. Know has two beautiful daughters, the Thrill and Rail Gun. The newly renamed Nobody starts to fight crime, and then things really start to get strange. There is clearly a comic book sensibility here, but it might have worked better as a comic book. One segment grabbed me, for reasons that will be obvious to many of you, when Rail Gun is lying on the grave of her long-lost little brother Alexander:
"I killed him," she said.
"I know. Sarah told me it was an accident."
"I don't remember," she said. "I've heard the story of what happened so many times, it seems like a memory, but I don't know. I've blanked it out. My father weaves so many lies. There are no photos of Alexander. What I remember of him is so hazy, more like imagination than memory. I sometimes wonder if there's anything under this slab at all."
I usually dislike epics that reduce just to family politics, as if the fate of empires and democracies wasn't important unless there's a dad to avenge/conquer/whatever, but the comic book form is one in which it can work. I would rate this a moderately successful version of the story, for serious comic book enthusiasts but not a real crossover hit.
What are your orphans, and why do you hold them close to your heart? I would like links, if you're willing to give them, whatever fandom. Readers, your thoughts are welcome too, if you've got them.
And now, a huge number of fiction books: Martha McPhee, Umberto Eco, Stephen King, William Gibson, Tim Cockey, The Mammoth Book of New Horror, Alan Dean Foster, Graham Greene, George Turner, Walter Tevis, Patty Dann, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer v. 2, Steven Brust, Kage Baker, Peter David, Hot Blood XI: Fatal Attractions, and James Maxey. I'm pretty sure that's a list that hasn't ever been put together before.
Martha McPhee, Gorgeous Lies: I love my mother-in-law, but I'm afraid we're never going to agree on fiction past David Foster Wallace. She keeps giving me what I suppose are gems of contemporary fiction, and I keep looking longingly at my knights in shining spaceships. Gorgeous Lies is about a sort of sacred monster, a man named Anton Furey who has two wives and a passel of children; the book starts with him on his deathbed and goes back and forth through time to show how he became the center of a tangled web of screwed-up kids, screwy wives/ex-wives, and a very strange house with a lot of debt. As a portrait of a guy whose self-love keeps him from seeing how he's caused pain in a million tiny ways and a thousand big ones, the book is very well-done. It's just not the kind of thing that trips my switches. If Anton were a vampire, too, now ...
Umberto Eco, Baudolino: In the thirteenth century, Baudolino the liar, friend of kings, tells his story. A friend of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Baudolino's real allegiance is to his dream of Prester John's kingdom, a dream he brings to life in the minds of his friends and companions. Essentially a layered series of fantasies and fantastic descriptions, told in contrast to the history of the destruction of the splendors of Constantinople, the book seemed incoherent and pointless to me, but minds of a more literary bent might find more there.
Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla (The Dark Tower V): I strongly believe that, a century from now, Stephen King will be recognized as one of the great novelists of the late 20th century, perhaps the great novelist. That said, I've always thought his pure horror was his glory, from Carrie to Christine to Firestarter (his women have always been strong, haven't they?), even The Tommyknockers, written when he was out of his mind on cocaine, and his masterpiece It. The linked Dolores Claiborne and Gerald's Game proved he could do horror that was pure psychology (Misery was gripping, but being about writing was more self-absorbed and less universal than his best work), but I was never quite sure about the Dark Tower books, never convinced there was a point, even as King started bringing characters from his other books and stories into the Dark Tower multiverse.
I'm convinced. In this book, Roland and his ka-tet, having survived Blaine the mad train, are called upon to help the good folk of Calla Bryn Sturgis against the Wolves, raiders who sweep down about once a generation and take half the children, returning them months later "roont," mind-slaughtered and doomed to early, painful death. The people of the Calla don't quite understand what it is to ask gunslingers for help, but they'll find out. One of the denizens of the Calla is an old friend from a very different time and place; he helps them with some other business left over from New York, where Eddie has to go see a man about a rose. Also, Andy the friendly robot lurks nearby; there's something not quite right with Susannah; and young Jake has finally made a friend, only to discover that he might have to destroy that friend to save everyone else. At long last, the elements King's been playing with are starting to come together into the epic he's said all along he was writing. His genius for detail, which always seemed to me better served when he was talking about brand names and popular songs - about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters - brings the Calla and its slightly off ways of speech and thought to glorious, beating-heart life. I haven't loved a King book since Gerald's Game, not really, even though I liked some of the stories in Everything's Eventual just fine, but I am back in the "worshipful adoration" column now.
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition: This book gets filed in the SF section because of its author, and maybe because of its day-after-tomorrow world with a protagonist who's allergic to trademarks, jet-setting around to vet branding campaigns for multinationals and trying to find the source of a mysterious film circulating in short clips on the Internet. But it's not SF. It's about September 11, 2001, even though not much of the book discusses the events of that day. I wasn't sure I liked it while I was reading it, but when I was done I was quite impressed. Gibson movingly and persuasively describes how the world changed for people like me, who never thought that the world - that other people -- would be so cruel. In a way, the protagonist is a Job who never gets to talk to God about whether there's meaning in suffering, though she does get to talk to other souls as confused and confusing as she is.
Tim Cockey, Murder in the Hearse Degree: A mortician-cum-PI is a new twist. Hitchcock Sewell is no Kay Scarpetta; there are very few details of death here. What he does have is an okay sense of humor, though he thinks it's better than it is, and an ex-girlfriend in a spot of trouble. Her nanny is dead, and pregnant, and the combination turns out to be very bad news. This is the literary equivalent of potato chips - fine when you're travelling, but not a good idea to overindulge.
Alan Dead Foster, Reunion: A Pip and Flinx Novel: I keep buying ADF books, hoping that I'll enjoy them the way I did when I was a kid, and I keep getting disappointed. It makes me scared to revisit Slipt or The Man Who Used the Universe or the title story of With Friends Like These .... Pip and Flinx are a boy and his minidragon, not respectively; Flinx has growing but unreliable psychic powers conferred on him by genetic manipulation by the Meliorares, a suppressed sect. To my great shame, I bought Reunion without realizing I'd already read it, and I didn't remember until more than halfway through, in large part because nothing happens until over halfway through. Flinx just flits around looking for information. While this is perhaps realistic, I wasn't exactly looking for realism. Also, Foster suffers from an excessive attachment to his thesaurus, never using a common word when an exotic, nay, outre one will do. This is a particular weakness in a book like this one, which is mostly description and very little dialogue, Flinx being a guy who generally keeps his own counsel. Sigh. Next time, I will try to resist and preserve some of my childhood illusions.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, ed. Stephen Jones (2003). I don't really understand the beginning and ending chunks of the books in this series - this one spends over 80 pages on "Horror in 2002," an essay that's not completely comprehensive, not really a list, and not really a set of reviews, the latter of which could be quite useful. Instead, the author throws out occasional sly comments on the quality (or, usually, lack thereof) of a few of the books mentioned. And then the end is "Necrology" - like the song says, these are people who died, usually people who worked in the horror/fantasy field. But what about the stories, you ask? Neil Gaiman and China Mieville lead off with typical offerings - you know whether you like them or not - and nothing special happens until Brian Hodge's "Nesting Instincts," whose organizing metaphor works brilliantly, even though people aren't wasps. Glen Hirshberg's "The Two Sams" is a disturbing story about miscarriage, one in which there might be nothing supernatural at all. Kelly Link shows up again with "Catskin," a story I hated the first time, but Kim Newman's "Egyptian Avenue" is good old-fashioned mummy-hunting. Graham Joyce tells a story that I can only describe as magical wartime realism in "The Coventry Boy," and the editor's prediliction for Lovecraftesque stories pays off in "The Prospect Cards" by Don Tumasonis, a story told in postcards, and "The Cage" by Jeff Vandermeer, about a city in the grip of a visitation so terrible the inhabitants just sit and wait for death, and about the used-furniture dealer who comes to clean up when a family has been wiped out. Other authors: David Schow, Nicholas Royle, Stephen Gallager, Jay Russel, Ramsey Campbell, Basil Copper, Joe Hill, James Van Pelt, Caitlin Kiernan, and Paul McAuley.
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair: I don't generally read outside "genre" fiction. I like books in which things happen, and "things" don't include love affairs and related angsting. There's nothing in this book but a love affair and related angsting, and it's wonderful. The writing is beautiful, the sentiments are universal but expressed far better than I've ever seen, and there are no easy answers. Greene's Catholicism is present, but not in the way you might think, as he tells the story of a married woman, the author with whom she had an affair, and the cuckolded husband, all of whom are not quite who you think they are at first. You could say that God is the fourth main character, but I don't think that's true; this is a book about the absence of God, and what that means for people of faith.
George Turner, A Pursuit of Miracles: This is a collection of stories by an Australian sf author, written in the 1970s and 1980s. The concerns of that period - overpopulation, extinction, poisoning of the atmosphere - run through the book, making the stories seem similar in a way they might not have seemed if I'd read them contemporaneously. "Generation Gap" is the title of one story, but all of them are about failures of communication of one sort or another, caused by anti-aging technology, cultures formed in Earth orbit meeting those of old Earth, genetic manipulation that makes one generation exponentially smarter than the next, laws that declare some people to be half-persons and others full citizens, and the like. Overall, fairly depressing but not particularly memorable.
Walter Tevis, Mockingbird: It's a few centuries from now, and a suicidal robot is running the decaying city of New York, looking after its drugged human inhabitants who have been trained from childhood to believe in Privacy, meaning that they don't interact, don't live together, don't talk, don't fall in love. A NYU professor (go NYU!) who has, incredibly, taught himself to read, meets a woman living at the zoo who's dropped out of the system, and they begin to rebel. This is the kind of book that people say is about the triumph of the human spirit, but it just made me kind of cranky. It's not badly written, but I didn't care about the plight of the protagonists or the fate of humanity in the robot's hands. Do people who let themselves be lulled into quiescence with movies and drugs, who drove almost all other species to extinction, who don't want to read or think, deserve to survive? Maybe I agreed too much with the robot.
Patty Dann, Sweet and Crazy: Another non-genre book, which we bought because we passed a bookstore in which cute quotes from the book were displayed on placards slowly twisting on strings. ("The cricket-hot night my husband died, my four-year-old-son [sic], Pete, looked at me and said, 'Now you're a window,' and I did not correct the child.") The book is by the author of Mermaids (which got turned into a film starring Cher, Winona Ryder and an extremely young Cristina Ricci). It's about a widow with a young child, set immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. As the widow tries to deal with her shattered personal life, her Ohio community tries to deal with its shattered worldview. There's didactic racism, cute children's wisdom, and a new love affair. I didn't really see the point - but then I'm a snob like that. Pattern Recognition, which focused so much less on the actual events of that day, was much more cathartic and insightful than Dann's book, which tried too hard to link the personal and the world-historical.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Tales of the Slayer Vol. 2: This volume is superior to the average tie-in book, maybe because the authors understand the point of the Slayer mythos: There's only one at a time. So for there to be nine different Slayers in the book, there have to be nine Slayers who died, and sometimes they die during the stories. The 980 AD Japan story set at the Imperial court, the terrible story of Watcher/Slayer love set in Brittany in 1320, the Civil War story with a famous cameo, and the flapper Slayer in 1920s NYC are my favorites; the last is told from the viewpoint of someone who's neither a Slayer nor a Watcher, and it addresses the fundamental human problems that nobody gets what she wants, not really, and that being a hero can be just as awful as not being a hero.
Steven Brust, The Lord of Castle Black: Back to Dragaera, where the men are men and the dialogue is flowery. The first book in this trilogy (?) really annoyed me, but I seem to have been in a better mood this time around. Although the stylized dialogue and deliberately pompous narrative aren't my favorite tricks, this time the pragmatic-yet-honorable people underneath the silly reportage show through in a successful contrast between style and substance. Morrollan, who Vlad knows only in the fullness of his power, is just learning how to deal with humans (aka elves) and how far his power extends, and conspiracy threatens the Phoenix heir. The book also introduces some new threatening bad guys - gals, really - and even though disaster is averted this time, the trouble is clearly Not Over. I'm glad I swallowed my annoyance with the previous book, because I'm beginning to trust Brust again.
Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World: Baker's previous works have all been about the Company, a cross-time organization dedicated to gaining wealth and power by abusing its knowledge of future history. This fantasy novel invents a new world full of demons, clans, and caravans. Actually, "novel" is a misnomer: What we have here is three linked novellas featuring Smith the former assassin and the people and demon/godlings whose lives intersect with his. This is good, hearty fun, with a lot less angst than Baker's Mendoza generally has, even though bad things happen to good people and whether justice is ultimately served is, at best, debatable.
Peter David, Knight Life: King Arthur runs for mayor of New York City. No, really. This is light satire - that is, the satire is light, though the execution is sometimes heavy-handed. If you're into Arthurian transplants and don't demand dignity from your knights, you might enjoy this book, though if you want real, juicy reworkings of the myth you'd be better off sticking with Matt Wagner's Mage. This is no Fisher King, just an immortal guy trying to do the right thing with the help of a Merlin who's aging backwards into a twerpy little kid.
Hot Blood XI: Fatal Attractions, ed. Jeff Gelb & Michael Garrett. Eleven books already? As you'd expect, the quality of these erotic horror stories varies, but this book has a few decent ones. Bob Ingersoll's "Making the Jump" is a fairly standard, but sexed-up, revenge tale, while Edo van Belkom's "Separate Vacations" is just an annoying gotcha-fic. Michael Garrett does better with sudden reversals in "One to Die For," about a reality show for which no one volunteers, while Jeff Gelb's "Night of the Giving Head" gives a whole new meaning to the idea of zombies eating people. Which I suppose was the point. The sexiest story for my money is Graham Masterton's "Epiphany," about a portrait and an obsession, or two. The creepiest is Mick Garris's "Starfucker." Other authors: P.D. Cacek, Thea Hutcheson, Max Allan Collins & Matthew V. Clemens, Debra Gray de Noux & O'Neil de Noux, Christa Faust, John Edward Ames, Sephera Giron (yeah, right), Stanley Wiater, Yvonne Navarro, Nancy Holder, David J. Schow, and Brian Hodge.
James Maxey, Nobody Gets the Girl: The back cover describes this book as a comic book novel, which drew me in, but the introduction was so self-satisfied and annoying that I feared what would come next. The premise - no, it is too complicated; let me summarize. There's a guy, a wanna-be stand-up comic, who wakes up one day invisible and, in fact, erased from the timeline. The guy who did that to him, by accident, finds him and offers him a job helping to defend humanity from things like Baby Gun, a giant baby doll with a gun the size of a school bus for a head. Dr. Know has two beautiful daughters, the Thrill and Rail Gun. The newly renamed Nobody starts to fight crime, and then things really start to get strange. There is clearly a comic book sensibility here, but it might have worked better as a comic book. One segment grabbed me, for reasons that will be obvious to many of you, when Rail Gun is lying on the grave of her long-lost little brother Alexander:
"I killed him," she said.
"I know. Sarah told me it was an accident."
"I don't remember," she said. "I've heard the story of what happened so many times, it seems like a memory, but I don't know. I've blanked it out. My father weaves so many lies. There are no photos of Alexander. What I remember of him is so hazy, more like imagination than memory. I sometimes wonder if there's anything under this slab at all."
I usually dislike epics that reduce just to family politics, as if the fate of empires and democracies wasn't important unless there's a dad to avenge/conquer/whatever, but the comic book form is one in which it can work. I would rate this a moderately successful version of the story, for serious comic book enthusiasts but not a real crossover hit.