Monday, March 4, 2024

Filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing

 So, it took me pretty much a month to slog through The Atlas Complex by Olivie Blake, which should be a warning sign. 

I hesitate to post this picture, but this narrowed down a bit has been my experience with this trilogy. 


 Because frankly, after spending the last book getting Libby back to the future via a fusion explosion, we spend most of this book watching the Six.... do absolutely nothing. I mean, Reina is running around trying to fix modern politics with Callum; Tristan, Nico, and Libby are at the manor trying to open up a door into parallel realities (or at least discussing it quite a bit); and Parisa is basicially busy trying to take over rival societies...

That's it. That's the plot. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets. They spend 2/3 of the book talking about their goals, and realizing that none of them can accomplish them on their own, and facing down the reality that the archives still want a sacrifice. Eventually, they do open a door to alternate realities, but by that point, I'd long ago checked out of the narrative, mostly reading for the sake of completion. There are really out of place filler moments going on as well, including a chapter of Book Club discussion questions, and a later chapter when Tristan and Callum meet in person again, where we get 10 pages of different variations on how that could have worked out. 

I mean, if the author's point is that everything is arbitrary, she succeeded in that theme, but lord, this really was like reading a tale filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing,.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Uncomfortable Territiory Part 2

 So, part of my planned "Trilogy of Trauma" is The Lookback Window by Kyle Dillon Hertz. The title refers to a period when New York extended some sexual assault cases statute of limitations to allow for civil cases against people who molested children, even if they couldn't be prosecuted criminally. As such, our narrator, Dylan, is trying to figure out if he should go after his sort of ex, who more or less pimped Dylan out at 14 to older men in exchange for drugs and money. 

Dylan is obviously older now, and narrating his life as he marries Moans, navigates therapy, deals with PTSD, and generally does a bunch of really bad stuff. (In the middle, he starts breaking vows to his husband. In the last third, he does Meth and GHB, winding up in the hospital.)

I felt a bit like I was reading a cross between I Spit on Your Grave and Go Ask Alice through this. I understand Dylan. Money proves nothing. Revenge doesn't bring back the years you were being relentlessly abused. Yeah, he goes to extremes I couldn't bear, but I understand his impulses here. I understand when he and Moans fight, because Moans wants to comfort Dylan, rather than let Dylan figure out his own wants. 

The biggest problem in here has nothing to do with the plot or the writing, it's more to do with the narrative jumping all over the place, particularly when Dylan is smoking meth or other things. There are a couple of jumps in there towards the end where I lost track of the narrative, as we go from one paragraph of him fighting with Moans to the next being in bed with another man shotgunning meth to him. 

The ending is satisfying, providing a sense of closure, while reminding us life goes on even through trauma. 

While I enjoyed this, your mileage may vary.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

Uncomfortable territory

 So, based on an odd recommendation in a LGBTQ+ book group I follow, I picked up Target by Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson. Really kind of regretting that decision now. Indeed, really tempted to go wipe the dust off LJ and blog about it rather than try to keep shit off this rather public blog. 

So, we open on 16 year old Grady, who's walking home from a concert he attended with friends. A guy asks for directions, then he and a friend grab Grady by the hair and beat the shit out of him, followed by anal and oral rape. We cut to roughly a year later, the "After" as Grady thinks of it. Grady is starting at a new school, repeating 11th grade, having dropped out in November at his old school. Grady, frankly, has survivor trauma. He's got a definite eating disorder, eating very little, and puking up what does go down. He needs tactile stimulation to function. He can barely talk. 

What follows is a tale of finding the courage to talk about what happened in the van, however long it takes. Grady is helped by new friends who more or less treat him like a personal mascot, not caring that he doesn't speak often, and almost never in complete sentences.

But we get a very good look at the guilt that comes with it. The whole "Why was I a target?" "Why did the cop assume it was a boyfriend of mine and I having a fight?" "I'm bigger than they are, so why couldn't I fight back?" along with (since Grady was a virgin who had touched boobs once) "Am I gay because they convinced me they'd quit if I climaxed?" Oh yes, and the fucking goddamn shame of it all. The whole "I can't fucking tell anyone because they'll ask the same fucking questions I keep asking myself!"

We also briefly get into him getting molested by a neighbor as a kid (admittedly not as intense as what happened in the van, but still...)

I'm also proud of our fictional character for going to the cops after it happened (not that he had a choice, some lady found him bleeding on the side of the road), and for getting help by the end. Two things that are sadly the hardest part. 

It's ugly, but it's cathartic.

Monday, January 8, 2024

Radio Free Europe

 Signs and Wonders by Morgan Brice has our heroes heading into the National Radio Quiet Zone to take down the next witch disciple, one who happens to also be both a cult leader and running a compter based business that's laundering money for the other disciples. 

Along the way, we get Brent and Travis from one of her other series, plus a gay couple in WV who are looking to go to Pittsburgh for obvious reasons. That one of them is the current descendant complicates things. 

At any rate, anyone reading this who has read the rest of the series has an idea of the basic structure, although now that there are only 5 disciples left, Evan and Seth are discussing what to do with retirement. Even if Evan is constantly becoming the Daphne of the series, constantly getting himself in unnecessary danger. 

Fun read.

Wednesday, January 3, 2024

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

 So, a while back, CT Phipps reached out and asked me if I'd be interested in reading his new book Moon Cops on the Moon! I told him I'd ordered a copy, but it was behind a library book in to TBR pile. Then employment got crazy, and finding time to read got a bit odd, but....I read it.

So, first thing to note, this is evidentially a shared setting with a few other series he's written, although this one is set further in the past than the other ones. Which is fine, since I'm kind of wanting to read other books in this setting now. Second, It helps if one has a mildly twisted sense of humor to read this particular volume, since it's very much what would happen if say, Dashiell Hammett wrote Shadowrun novels. (For those of you not up on such esoterica and are too lazy to google, he wrote several hardboiled detective novels, including The Maltese Falcon.)

Anyway, we open on our narrator, Neal Gordon, as he's getting ready to land on the moon to start his new assignment with Ares Electronics as a police officer. (Like much cyberpunk, much of what is civil service here in the present is private in the future. Neal has a lifetime contract. But at least the Moon is somewhat better than Antarctica.) Problem being that as soon as he lands, everyone, from the cybermen to the 90 year old woman landing with him, want him dead or alive. He winds up getting rescued by his new partners, Miss Lucy Westerna and a Corgi AI named Barksley who doubles as a flamethrower. (There's a running joke in there about Barksley, who is a sentient AI police officer listening to NWA and Ice-T. I'm sure most of you can guess the songs.)

Anyway, along the way, we get wrapped in in an intergalactic slave trading ring, other corporate agents with coking fetishes, and a lot about the last partner Neal had on Mars, who literally burned him. 

That's about as far as I want to go with this to avoid many many spoilers. 

I will say it was worth the price I paid to get a copy, and the references thrown in had me laughing quite a bit alongside some of the deeper questions about human rights and sentient AI, as well as the author's postscript about how the world may end, but capitalism will continue. 

Worth the read. 

Thursday, November 30, 2023

And again, Titania is an ass.

 Finished Seanan McGuire's The Innocent Sleep yesterday, which is kind of Sleep No More extended out, starting when Titania changed Fairie and ending roughly 3 months after Halloween. However, it's written from Tybalt's point of view, so we get a better idea of what life was like during the revamp for folks who weren't locked up in Titania's illusions, like Undersea and the Cait Sidhe. 

Which is to say, mostly ugly.

Undersea is cut off from the land, and Simon of course got shunted back to being Amandine's loving husband, which is mildly upsetting to Dianda and Patrick, not to mention both of their sons being trapped elsewhere. The Cait Sidhe are pretty much all trapped in the various Courts of Cats, as only those of Royal blood can get on the Shadow Roads. Which leads to a bunch of starving cats and kittens. Eventually, this leads to a very fun heist cleaning out a few of San Francisco's Costco's to feed the courts. 

A Roane in Undersea makes a prophecy letting all parties know that around Moving Day is when any moves to break the illusion must happen. Given that Moving Day is roughly 4 months away from the first part of the narrative, one can imagine the amount of angst involved. We do eventually get to a point where the previous narrative of these events starts intermingling with this newer perspective, and we finally get a few answers to things not stated in the past volume. 

After the narrative ends, we get a novella about one of the Octopi Fey native to the seas. Dianda's protector, actually. The book is downstairs, and I'm not attempting to spell her name or race without it sitting in front of me.) By far the biggest reveal in this is that Dianda is probably having a new girl baby pretty soon, fathered by both Simon and Patrick. Why the girl is so important we don't know, but I'm guessing it will eventually tie in to one of the last missing threads, what happened to the Other Queen (Maeve) after Janet broke the ride. 

Fun story, worth reading.

Saturday, November 25, 2023

And now for something fairly serious.

 So, many years ago, when I was really starting to be more open about being gay, a lady I knew from Cub Scouts and church gave me a book about a Presbyterian minister and his quest to become an ordained minister within the Presbyterian Church (USA). (Bit of obscure history. The Denomination split during the Civil War ear into the Northern United Presbyterian Church and the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States. There are a few other shards running around, but they tend to be...different. The two branches reconciled in 1982ish, which I remember. So, when this starts, it would have been the United branch, but by the end, we're in PC(USA).)

Anyway, Rev. Glaser tells us of his growing up Baptist, and finally realizing he's gay in college during the Vietnam era. He speaks of his calling to ministry and how he found himself joining the Presbyterians in Los Angeles before attending Divinity School at Yale. 

Eventually, we enter the fun of the 1970's Presbyterian Task Force on Homosexuality (I may have the name wrong, but basically, the General Assembly [the national governing board, which more or less makes decisions that the local Presbyteries approve or decline] appointed a task force to see about making recommendations on ordaining LGB people. (Trans folks weren't particularly included in the conversation at that point in time.) 

There's also whole sections on his work ministering to gay folks in college, and the problems he runs in to with being open about his avowed homosexuality from both the gay and straight students.  And the few openly gay ordained ministers in the era, one in the United Church of Christ and of course the Metropolitan Community Church. Anyway, the task force's majority report, suggesting guidelines for ordaining gay folks, got shot down and a watered down minority report instead got approved. 

Now, in between this, is an exploration of Glaser's thoughts on God and his personal dramas. When I read this roughly 26 years ago, I spent a lot of those sections going "Oh Guuuurl" or "Oh, get her". Much further on, I better understand what he's talking about, and how odd attraction and love are. While a lot of his more intellectual thoughts on faith tend to be Boomer reformation stuff, particularly in the epilogue he gets into some more meaty thoughts on sexuality as an expression of God, which given that just about everyone likes to ignore Song of Solomon, is something one really doesn't hear about often. 

And frankly, This was likely addressed more to a straight audience, helping heterosexuals better understand what it means to be gay and Christian, with a secondary focus on letting gay Christians know they are not alone. However, given it took PC(USA) until 2011 to finally reconcile on a national level with LGBTQ+ parishioners wanting recognition and acceptance, his happy ending really didn't happen until 30 years after where this book ends. (To be fair, individual churches and Presbyteries did make their own decisions prior to this, but mostly in the Out of Sight of the General Assembly, Out of Mind of the General Assembly sense.) This makes an interesting continuation of Congregations in Conflict by Keith Hartman, showing some of the same arguments happening 10-20 years apart in different settings. Supposedly, Glaser has written more books since this one, so I may eventually check it out and see how his story continued during AIDS and ENDA/DOMA.

Sunday, October 29, 2023

I feel very attacked

 So, as part of my mild Keith Hartman obsession (Ok, so I love his writing, I'm not stalking him or writing fan letters), I picked up a copy of his first published work, Congregations in Conflict: The Battle Over Homosexuality, written, near as I can tell, when the author was at Duke. 

I had read this previously, in maybe 2005ish, which meant even then, some of the conclusions herein are a bit outdated. (Copyright is 1996, even if most everything discussed tops out in 1995.) Nearly 30 years on, much of what's happened in the intervening years has shown that progress has happened, although at different rates among different factions. However, what I missed the first time I read this, was that all 9 situations explored are in the North Carolina Research Triangle Area. (While two of my brothers live there these days, I doubt either would have an interest in doing follow up for me.) 

Anyway, we start with a Methodist congregation and two Southern Baptist congregations, and how they deal with ministers trying to minister to gay members, and the problems that happen with that. (The Methodist congregation has an older population, and a younger population, with no in-between membership to kind of help reconcile the differing generational views. And since the older folks have the purse strings... Both Baptist churches, which eventually work out to be accepting congregations get expelled from the Southern Baptist Convention.)

We then move into the Episcopals and a bunch of drama concerning a same sex union and the Duke Divinity School dramas of 1992. 

Discussion gets into the Metropolitan Community Church of Raleigh (for those who don't know, they were founded as a church specifically for LGBTQ+ people), and the adventures in what to do with a growing congregation who've moved beyond being just celebrating Gays and God, and also dealing with a minister who's being pulled in several directions due to parishioners dying of AIDS. 

Then we get two chapters of Non-programmed Friends gatherings and the fun of trying to find clarity on blessing unions in both meetings, before getting involved in Dignity, the organization for Black Catholics, and the friction between them and a Jesuit church founded as an all Black congregation, made more complex by edicts from John Paul II and the now Benedict XVI. 

The Epilogue deals with congregations on a national level and the author's predictions on how the drama will play out over the next few years (as the book was written.)  

Thankfully, not all of them came true. Of particular interest to me was discussion on the dueling sexuality reports in the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1991. (I seem to recall perusing both reports in High School for an argument paper on gay rights I was writing. Yeah, that whole, explore gay issues by posing as an outsider trying to understand. Worked out soooo well.) While he (like everyone else) predicted that the Minority report would get adopted, I seem to recall it didn't, and the denomination wound up compromising one way and another. It was ugly, since while Homosexuality was main event, there was a whole "fidelity in marriage, chastity in singleness" clause that had a few folks asking if the ministers were going to become bedroom police. Of course, I also recall an agreement between a few Protestant denominations in the Reformed tradition that would require each denomination to recognize the other's ordinations, and that a few of those in that agreement (like the United Church of Christ) whole heartedly ordained the gheyz. In terms of the Roman Catholics, while they're still not where a lot of us would like to see them, the Scandals of the past few decades and the Promotion of Francis I have moved the needle a bit with them. As for the Episcopals, this was written before V. Gene Robinson became a household name for a few months and nearly broke the Communion. 

This remains a fascinating time capsule of church history and exactly how far things have come in 30 years.

Friday, October 27, 2023

So, pretty much everyone on Athas is an ass

 Finally finished up Troy Denning's The Prism Pentad with The Cerulean Storm, in which we find out everyone left alive in this series is an ass. 

So, when we left off Tithian had more or less killed off his rival Agis, had sent two dwarf banshees to encourage the Mul son on Neva and Caelum to kill the dragon, and had taken possession of the Dark Lens. Rajaat, who isn't dead so much as imprisoned in anextraplanar prison, is plotting to take revenge on his former champions (the current Dragon Boris and the Sorcerer-Kings) as well as escape from Shawshank. Sadira is still married to Agis and Rikus, although she's widowed on one front. The Sorcerer-Kings know the Lens is running loose and want to recover it before Tithian does something remarkably stupid.And the Half Giants are coming for Tyr, since the Lens lets them gain intelligence. 

All of which turns into a very long extended chase to the Dragon's lair, where pretty much everyone gets what they deserve to a degree. 

Again, it's epic sword and sandal and sorcery, with a bunch of characters you love to hate. I do love the ongoing visual of the silt skifs, riding the tides of dust in the dried up waterways of the desert. I like the idea that the villains in here were all Evil, but doing what they thought was best for the world. 

All in all, the series holds up as a memorable D&D adventure series, although one probably not as high quality as the DragonLance Sagas.

Friday, October 20, 2023

Titania is an ass.

 So, finished Seanan McGuire's Sleep No More yesterday, which finally sort of resolves the cliffhanger from the last book. Essentially, we pick up 4 months after Titania was found and essentially remade most of north and central California in her image of what a perfect Fairie would be. Which isn't exactly what anyone living in Fairie would particularly want, beyond certain elder pureblood sidhe.

As such, in this version of Fairie, October is living in Mom Amadine's tower with Dad Simon and Sister August, being a nice subservient changeling girl who knows her place among the purebloods. Quentin is now an utter asshole who likes tormenting her on the rare occasions she enters Shadowed Hills. However, it's a trip to the Hills that leads to October being taken to Tamed Lightning where the local Dryad April gets awakened and begins the long slow process of unraveling the Umbridge-esque pink of Titania's illusions. 

Oh, but it's fun. With the few mixed breeds and a few free changelings living well outside of San Francisco, all of Maeve's descendants either exiled or missing, and much of the kingdom being returned to the state it was in at the outset of the series (including at least 3 dead/elfshot characters coming back for the fun), and everyone's favorite sea witch being trapped in a tree...

Quite a bit is going on here, and the fact that the Summer Queen is a master of illusions means we're not entirely sure of how much of what's returned is real. (Indeed, the finale has a character observe something is up, but what that something is never really gets quantified, so I wonder if that will be the plot hook in the next book.) 

The author states it's fun writing stuff down finally that's been in her head since the outset. And it's fun to read. And I'm happy she didn't start here, since the series has given us characters whom we've come to know and love, and therefore are much more emotionally involved with as this apocalypse happens.