Thursday, December 31, 2020

I'd forgotten how much this wrecks me

 I've likely discussed Christopher Pike's The Midnight Club on here in passing, but I was given a virgin copy for my birthday, and I ended the year with the tale. 

The plot isn't typical for YA, although the themes do fit in with some of Pike's better work. We open on Ilonka, ready to turn 18, even though she has cancer and is dying in a Washington State hospice. Her roommate, Anya, lost her right leg to cancer prior to the story beginning.  Both are members of the eponymous therapy group, along with Kevin, who has leukemia; Sandra, who has lymphoma; and Spence, who has advanced skin cancer of some kind. The group meets at midnight every night in the Hospice study (the hospice is a large mansion converted for the purpose on the Pacific coast), and tells stories, varying on theme based on the teller. 

Indeed, the first one we hear is Spence's tale of Eddie, who starts shooting people from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Followed by Anya's tale of Dana, who makes a deal with the devil to split her into two identical girls, so that one can go party. Ilonka's first tale we hear introduces the concept that she remembers her past lives, although two central figures come out of those recollections... One is assumed to be Kevin, the other a gentleman named The Master, who is kind of synchronous with Jesus or Buddha. The final tale of the first night is Kevin's tale of Herme, the Angel/Muse who falls in love with Teresa while copying paintings in the Louvre. At the end of his first night, Herme is made human by God to persue Teresa. After Ilonka's tale, an oath is sworn (much to Sandra's dismay) that whomever dies first should find a way to create a sign for the others, to show that life goes on after death. 

Between this and the next night's sessions, we meet Kevin's girlfriend (who doesn't know he's dying), and see Ilonka go for more tests, convinced that her herb and vegetable diet is curing her tumors. We also hear Anya's confession of where her pessimism comes from. 

The next night's tales get started with wine, which Spence has provided, before the tales begin. Kevin and Ilonka talk a bit before Ilonka goes to bed and passes out. Anya says a few things to her before she sleeps, and when she wakes, Ilonka finds Anya dead. And a sign. Anya's belongings have vanished, much like something in one of Ilonka's past life tales. 

Word goes through the hospice not long after, that someone had been misdiagnosed. Ilonka thinks it was her, but it wasn't. It was Sandra. Ilonka breaks down, and Kevin stays with her. He finishes his tale for her alone, dying in the morning. 

In the end, Spence and Ilonka meet one last time, and less metaphysical mysteries get solved. In the end, we're left with hope, as new incarnations of Kevin and Ilonka travel to the stars above. 

As I said, this book brings up a heck of a lot of emotions with me. While Ilonka's particular set of issues are not my own, my own issues are adjacent to hers, so some of the realizations she goes through resonate loudly with me. One thing I hadn't really noticed on previous readings had to do with Kevin's alter ego in Herme, in that he had his own lessons to learn before he and Ilonka could heal their relationship and move on together. (Honestly, I don't think Ilonka noticed either.) The other major milestone, for me at least, is the fact that one of the central characters comes out of the closet towards the end. Yes, it turns out his cancer is AIDS related, but still a gay character in a YA novel in the mid 90's, who actually manages to admit to enjoying being gay... it was unheard of. 

In the end, while some of the dialogue is a bit stilted in a few places, the book still resonates very deeply with me.

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

A return to the return

As part of the relaunch of Fear Street, they evidently bundled the first four novels in the series by R. L. Stine into an omnibus edition titled The Beginning. Of which, I remembered the first one, but the other three I didn't.

We start with The New Girl, in which one Cory Brooks falls madly in love with the blond he keeps catching glimpses of named Anna. He eventually discovers Anna lives of Fear Street with her brother. (As a side note, these early books show that much of the background developed later. There's no mention of the Fear family, Fear Island is undeveloped, the only mansion mentioned on the street has been recently renovated...) Anyway, as I said, I remember reading this one, so the big twist about who's who at the end wasn't particularly shocking to me. 

Then we start The Surprise Party, in which Meg learns quickly that several people actually did think they knew who murdered her friend, but even they were wrong. It's kind of silly, and there's a touch of Mazes and Monsters condemnation of role playing in there, even if the geek does end up saving everyone in the end. 

In The Overnight, the Shadyside outdoor club takes an unauthorized trip to Dear Island for an overnight after their faculty advisor cancels it at the last minute. Della gets attacked by a stranger on the island, pushes him in a ravine, and buries him under leaves. Then she and everyone else get notes from the dead guy, leading to a few reveals once the advisor takes them on the sanctioned trip out to Fear Island. 

Lastly, we have Missing, wherein Mark and Cara's parents don't come home from work for several days, their cousin who lives in the attic does his best gothic wife impersonation, the place where the parents work has no record of them working there... While I agree with one review I read of this which stated this ending of the one came out of left field, I will say that it rings closer to reality in the modern age than any of the other three in here. 

One thing I caught reading the omnibus that I now wonder if it continues in the rest of the series is the minor character continuity. Cory, who shows up in book one, and Lisa, his neighbor show up at various points in the other books, as do a few other cameos. 

The books are a lot dated, having been published before the internet and mobile phone boom, and the plots are kind of corny, but they remain kind of fun. A bit of comfort food for the soul.

Sunday, December 20, 2020

A return

 I was kind of shocked to find out R. L. Stine returned to one of my favorite haunts a few years back, writing a few new Fear Street Superchillers. (For those not of a certain age, Fear Street was a Young Adult horror series set in and around Shadyside, where the Fear family have a long and shady history, a street named after them, as well as other landmarks bearing the surname. Mr. Stein was quite prolific with them prior to starting series aimed younger.)(I'll also note Mr. Stine was born in Columbus, and half the town names in this twofer are around the Cleveland area.)

The Twofer is two books in one! 

We start with Party Games, concerning poor Rachel, who works at Lefty's diner to makes extra money. Brandon Fear, of the Fear family, invites her out to his 18th Birthday party at the family summer house on Fear Island. To get us in the mood, we hear about the family history at the house, what with the Fears hunting down the servants, and an Aunt taxidermying herself to death. 

Anyway, Many of the girls going to the party find a dead animal in their beds a few days before the party. Rachel thinks its her boyfriend Mac, who is mildly abusive who did it. As the party gets going with a Scavenger Hunt, dead bodies start popping up. Then two or three twists happen, along with one maybe supernatural twist added in for fun. While one of the twists I saw coming as soon as the ball got rolling, another was a surprise. However, as we're in YA Horror, we have to follow the rules of no dead teenagers. 

The other story, Don't Stay Up Late, reexplores a familiar YA trope, as our heroine Lisa ends up babysitting on Fear Street. Problem being, Lisa's father just died in a horrific car accident, and Lisa's concussion is causing her to hallucinate. Or is it?

While it is nice to see the series enter a more modern age (the protagonists have iPhones, although Fear Island has no signal), I found myself amused that in Shadyside, the legal age to drink is 18. 

Fear Street was never deathless prose, but it was a fun way to spend hours as a teenager. As it turns out, it's still a fun way to spend hours as an adult.

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Where to start

 I ended up buying Michael Travis Jasper's To Be Chosen: Second Edition because the author is a Twitter friend, and I enjoy supporting my friends.I'll be gentle here.

The plot concerns Roman, Blair, and Darby, three normal humans who find themselves given powers by Jehovah themself to become God's Hammer. Roman, a businessman gains the power of healing, Blair's Witchcraft becomes amplified, and Darby gains some kind of kinetic abilities. This happens in the first 3 chapters. 

We find out demons, who turned their collective backs on G-d, live on the planet Gehenna, and most of the planets they have conquered are named after various Hindu deities or sephiroth. We have literal angels running around, friends of the Avatarn (the collective name for the trio), and quite a bit of betrayal and death. 

And mostly, we're racing around at breakneck speed with no room for character development or a chance for anyone to register as more than a blip before dying or betraying everyone else. Hell, we get two babies who grow up nearly overnight at one point. 

I mean, I see the moral he was shooting for, but it comes at the cost of narrative... we get so many deus ex machinae to give away plot points that it starts feeling like "Hey, I need this to happen, so here it is." I fond myself wishing that instead of trying to cram so much into one book, maybe perhaps it be spread across a trilogy so we had a better chance to get to know everyone and maybe care about them when they die, betray, or go nuts. Emotional moments where the dead come back to reveal plot points are blunted by the fact we didn't really get to know the dead beforehand, so them reappearing with some piece of random information feels more like "I'm sick of trying to write this section, so here's what needs to happen to get us closer to the end."

 While it held my attention, I don't know it's one I'd read again. 

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Driving all night, hands wet on the wheel

 So, a while back, R. S. Belcher wrote an audiobook, and they finally made it a published paperback. (I have nothing against audiobooks, I just can't listen to them at work or home.)

And thus we come to The Queen's Road.

 We meet Ray, young drag racer/barkeep in Port Arthur, Texas, who's mother owes money to the local drug dealers. Ray is trying to pay off her debt, which requires more money than he has access to at the time. He runs across a late 60's Ford Galaxie and tries to boost it, only to find out someone's still alive inside. Said living being dies and gives Ray a ring and directions to seek out someone named Chain. 

Which leads to the fun of the titular road, kind of an intergalactic autobahn, with connections all throughout the universe. Turns out one race of worshipers of Chaos and entropy are back from exile, and it's up to Rey, Chain, and a whole host of other Rangers to stop it. 

What follows is part heist, part fish out of water, and really fun, even if it does feel a bit like Hal Jordan fighting Audrey II to defend the Frontier from the Ko-Dan Armada. 

Needless to say, it's a really enjoyable read, and everyone should read more of Belcher's work.

Sunday, November 29, 2020

The first PRIDE was a riot

 It took a lot of lugging, but I finally finished David Carter's Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. (It wasn't a slog, but it was a very involved recounting of 1968-1972. It was also recommended as the better of the two books that have the most recognition on the subject.)

So, there are several bases that need covered here, the book itself, my takeaways, and a few comments on the Goodreads reviews of this book. 

We'll start with the book itself. It covers in some detail the geography and history of Greenwich Village on the Lower East Side, in particular Christopher Street and Christopher Park where the Stonewall stands. We hear of the history of the building prior to a Syndicate boss buying the property and likely spiting his father with the purchase of a designated Gay Bar. We learn how Mafia owned gay bars of the era operated (without a license, usually "members only", most of the drinks being watered down well liquor poured into top shelf bottles, no sanitation, no fire exit, and raided fairly frequently. And paying off the police quite a bit.) 

We learn of Ed "the Skull" who operated at Stonewall, and tended to be the last one some of the young hustlers were seen with. We hear of NYC politics in the late 60's and how morality raids seemed to increase in city election years. We get a really sad quote about how Corruption was the only source of hope for gay people in the city at the time, since gay bars couldn't get a liquor license. We get Mattachine New York doing the demonstration that I still find amusing, wherein they went to bars, announced the were homosexuals and wanted a drink, which was enough to shut down a gay bar at the time. The straight bars didn't care and served them, with one or two exception (one was already losing its license, another closed, rather than deal with the press.) 

The riots happen June 28th, 1969. By the time we start, we have a really broad overview of the known players. (We'll come back to this later. While certain personalities were known at the riots, the mass of people didn't take a head count or get everyone's names.) What we know for certain is that Captain Pine planned the raid because of the Mafia payoffs. What happened was not something he expected, nor should we assume he held animus towards the GLBTQ+ community. While we can rightfully assume some of those under him did, there's a very long argument in the conclusions as to why Carter is likely telling the truth about that. We see people getting removed from the bar, and instead of dispersing, standing around and watching. We hear about the police keeping the transvestites in the back. (The general rule of the era was that you had to have on at least 3 items of clothing for your assigned at birth gender to not run afoul of public decency laws. And given it was 1969, and unisex clothing was all the rage...) And then comes the arrest of the unknown lesbian, who got in and out of the wagon 3 times before shouting her challenge to the lingering crowd. By this point the first wagon had left, with what was assumed to be employees and managers of the bar. The police were unprepared for a riot, the 6th Precinct ignored calls for help, and the crowd had turned, going from camp catcalls to throwing pennies and other change to a few folks digging up loose cobblestones and throwing them. The cops retreated into the bar, at which point trash cans started getting set on fire and thrown at the barred windows. (Rumors abounded that the drag queens were being held captive in the back room.) The first cries of "Gay Pride" were heard. We see the arrival of the riot police, and how the geography of the area and bravery of the street queens pretty much allowed the rioters to outmaneuver the police the first and second nights. Lest we forget them in the name of brevity, we should mention the street kids doing kick lines and chanting to keep the focus of the riot police as long as they could. (We won't reprint the chants here, since I try to keep a "G" rating on public blogs, but they are pretty funny. A Google search should bring them up for the curious.)

The riots broke up around dawn Saturday, and started up again, with more people, Saturday night. (We hear tales of people who weren't in Stonewall during the raid, who got called to the scene during the outbreak. We also hear of curiosity bring people to the area Saturday night, and a second night of riots. By the accounts we have, Sunday through Tuesday were fairly dead, what with the police presence and Stonewall trying to reopen as a juice bar. Wednesday, however....

 Anyway, the upshot is that several gay groups formed in the wake of the rioting, eventually replacing the more sedate and milquetoast predecessors. The first was the Gay Liberation Front, which seems to have splintered off based on internal fighting of how to proceed, and later, the Gay Activist Alliance. Much of the last chapters deal with this, as well as the Snake Pit Riots, wherein a Venezuelan man on an expired visa was taken into custody and wound up impaled on a fence outside the station house. 

Carter's conclusion chapter goes about exploring different parts of the legends that have sprung up around the riots and presenting what his research found in terms of proof positive or negative about them, Captain Pine's veracity and whether or not Judy Garland;s death played a role in the anger being among those. He concludes that Pine was telling the truth, given his story hasn't changed in the intervening years, and that any mentions of Garland's death in connections with the riots seem to point to it not being at all related. Indeed, it could be argued with the materials presented that Garland's death heralded the end of the gay scene that adored her and set the stage for the new scene born from the riots.We'll also mention he does mention different events on the West Coast that also loosened restrictions on gay folks, but since most of those that precede Stonewall didn't have quite the national impact that Stonewall had. (As an aside, I'd love to read books about the different regional movements that were going on. I mean, other than an old collection of Gay Sunshine magazine articles, I have yet to really see much that particularly explores the history that lead to the national movement. I mean, some of it is out there, but usually it's a footnote in relation to something else.)

As for my conclusions from the book,. the one thing that really struck me, and Carter does briefly touch on it towards the end, is that the rank and file of the rioters: the street kids, the non middle class gays who didn't really have a quiet closet to exist in, the flamboyant, the drag queens; they didn't get the benefit of a place at the table in the new movement. While some outreach was evidently made, it didn't get far. Honestly, and you'll forgive me for dragging musical theater into this, I almost felt like the best reflection of the new movement could be found in the students of Les Miserables or perhaps the confrontation between Mark and the Homeless Lady in RENT. People in a better place trying to improve the lives of people they on some level consider beneath them. Which is an ugly thought, but one I fond myself considering quite a bit. 

Now, I mentioned I'd discuss the reviews on Goodreads, which accuse Carter of idolizing cis-white and ignoring less colorful and less binary people involved in the riots. In particular, one reviewer gave it one star because it gives no credit to one Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha, who in modern life considers herself Transgender, was at the time, mostly considered a drag queen, and she did go around in her male persona on occasion. By the accounts of her contemporaries, she was exceedingly nice as a woman, but downright evil as a man. Also, most mentions of her presence at Stonewall were the second night of rioting. Accounts from the time record the first stones thrown as by a red head weaving in and out of the crowd, who no one identified. Second, Carter uses the terminology of the era, which would likely be how the folks identified themselves at the time. Indeed, one of the transsexuals interviewed had her 18th birthday the night of the riots, and had a man who was going to pay for her operation. Fifty years on, she'd likely identify as transgender and not worry as much about the other labels so prevalent at the time. One also needs to consider how much terminology changes over time, even over the course of a decade, to the point of what in 1969 was called Scare Queens would today be Skag Drag. Or the fact that Queen referred less to a particular shade or performer and more a catch all term for any gay man of the era. While there are indeed several folks of color mentioned in the rioting, there were also quite a few white boys participating. (What pictures of the riots exist show a nice mixtures of shades and tones, so it wasn't exactly an all white or all darker shades party.) I ran into this problem reading Blossom of Bone earlier this year, in which trying to apply modern labels to people who didn't identify as such at the time is mostly guesswork. And with the riots being 51 years old and on the other side of a pandemic that really killed a large amount of people from the era, it's a heck of a lot harder to get accurate information from sources that aren't using archaic forms. (I'll point out here that The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley and Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood will also show how much has drifted over time.) By reading this through a modern lens, after legends have grown up out of it, we also risk letting a good story that vindicates our worldviews make us reject the less legendary truth that lies beneath the story. 

I'll leave it at this. I enjoyed it, thought it was well researched, and most of the detail matched up with what the few survivors of the era I have the privilege of knowing have confirmed from their memories.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Perfect moments happen, even with nougat

 I'd read Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time previously, but it has been a while. Given I also read it early on berfore having read much of the rest of Discworld...

The story centers on Death's sort of nemeses, The Auditors, who prefer order and therefore hate humanity, and their plot to end time. Which means Death is running around with his granddaughter Susan trying to stop it. We also have Lu-Tze, the history monk/sweeper and his apprentice Lobsang trying to stop the apocalypse, and Jeremy and his Igor building the clock that will stop time and the behest of an Auditor who has taken human form. We also get a minor role in Nanny Ogg, who holds information Susan needs to solve the problems of what's actually going on. 

Essentially, Jeremy is building a glass clock, that will trap the personification of Time in the smallest increment of time possible, thereby stopping time. (The way this is presented, and the reason I had it confused with a similar Douglas Adams quote, is that time is destroyed and recreates the universe every instant.) The Auditor finds that being in a human body creates individual thought, which is anathema to the Auditors. Lu-Tze figures out Lobsang can actually balance the time spinners better than anyone with no training, and winds up taking him to stop the clock from being turned on. We also get to see the other personifications of the Apocalypse, all of whom are dealing with the same issues the Auditors have, where having been created by Humanity, are now human shaped and dealing with human flaws. 

While this will never be my favorite Discworld book, it is much more entertaining having read everything else. It's also a fairly good treatise on the passage of time and the nature of being human.

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Special K and Demons

 I was actually kind of sad when I got a few pages into Christopher Pike's The Blind Mirror, since that about how long it took for me to remember I'd already read it years ago and hated it. 

I'm afraid time hasn't tempered my opinion of it much. 

When I was younger, I really enjoyed Pike's Young Adult fiction. Yes, he wrote a few stinkers, but some of it really influenced me back in the day. Then I found out he had a few adult novels, and they were universally stinkers. Well at least the two I know I've read have been. The other one, The Cold Ones, had similar themes to his YA fiction, but went darker, and it really didn't work well.

Then we have this one.

At the risk of major spoilers, the plot resolution involves people using Ketamine saturated in Ozone to artificially create out of body experiences, during which they can trade bodies with someone else who is also out of body. And then we find out demons are real. 

Which is sad, since the set up leading to this abject silliness is actually pretty interesting as a set up, as we have David returning from New York City to his hometown north of Santa Barbara with a novel to paint a cover for, and discovering a body on the beach at the same place he last saw his ex girlfriend Sienna. The feds and the local sheriff are sure the body belongs to Sienna, but Sienna keeps leaving phone messages for David. In the meantime, people from David's past keep dancing through his narrative, including Julie, a former cheerleader, who ends up seducing David. 

It gets silly fairly quickly, as the FBI agent investigating Sally (AKA Sienna's) death winds up confessing much that a real agent would never disclose, just to get the plodding plot moving a bit faster. We have the terrible novel David is reading that he's supposed to paint the cover for, which, while it does explain some of what's going on, seems mainly there so the author can show off his knowledge of the Platonic Year. Even if you buy into the book's central idea that everything going on is elaborate choreography, the level of coincidence really shakes believable circumstance. I mean, given some of the crap I've read, I'm willing to stretch my suspension of disbelief, but the sudden jump outside the bounds pretty much breaks it here. 

Eventually, I'll reread some his YA fiction again and get the horrible taste of this out of my mouth.

Monday, November 2, 2020

Skeletons Dancing on Pumpkins with Small Children

 As I mentioned a few books back, we're now returning to the glory days of pulpy horror paperbacks, most often found littering the shelves of the local grocery store. This time courtesy of Grady Hendrix, who evidently fell into a used books store, wound up with a cart full of late 70s-90 horror, and got inspired to write a history of them in Paperbacks From Hell

While the subject matter might be a bit on the cheesy side, the book is lush in its treatment, with pictures of several of the more lurid covers printed in full color. Indeed, what ended up helping me decide to add this to my collection was the fact that a few titles displayed in the front cover were ones I remember having at a young age. 

With this being non fiction, it's arranged by subject matter, starting with Satan and ending with Splatterpunk, meaning we go from Blatty's The Exorcist to Bright's Lost Souls, with such luminaries as V. C. Andrews and Graham Masterson in between. For the most part, he avoids going too in depth with the really big names to give the spotlight to much lesser known authors, although he generally does start with the big book(s) that started a trend, and explore what flooded the shelf imitating them, as well as discussing what likely contributed to said explosion in the subject. 

This helped fill in a few gaps, since some stories I only vaguely remember, or never knew the full story on, like The Amityville Horror, exactly how far the Satanic Panic of the 80's had spread (indeed, more than a few "non fiction" titles discuss the books that presented us with Satanic Cults running day care centers, the backmasking on Beach Boys albums, how Dungeons and Dragons will lead you to try to jump off the world trade center, and how Heavy Metal will make the Dark Lord rise. (That sound is my eyes rolling back in my head.)

We get details on the lives of the folks who painted the cover art, we hear about how art directors introduced die cut covers and embossed images to get the books to pop. We learn of the histories of several publishing houses and imprints prior to either going out of business or being absorbed by a larger company. Honestly, while not as blunt or direct, parts of this reminded me quite a bit of that one scene in The Devil Wears Prada, where Miranda explains in graphic detail the business of fashion. (Indeed, a publishing change which allows houses to ship back and shred non selling inventory means books have roughly 6 weeks to catch on, or else. It also means many midlist authors don't get published, since they won't make back their advance.)

It was interesting to learn the stories of a few imprints that particularly influenced my reading habits as a kid, namely Zebra and Abyss. The former was the really pulpy stuff, produced on the cheap and usually poorly edited; the latter was post splatterpunk, allowing for similar sensibilities without the machismo and less nihilism. (Indeed, if you follow the tag on here for Rick R. Reed, his was an Abyss book.) It was Zebra, in particular that had lurid cover art featuring skeletons and porcelain skinned cherubs. 

While I had read more than a few volumes discussed in here, there were several I haven't yet. I fully expect to spend time perusing used book stores looking for fun treasures now.

Well worth the read.

Friday, October 30, 2020

Run to the hills

 Eventually, I'm going to get the tag fixed on R. S. Belcher's always fun Golgotha series, but....

Let me start by saying The Ghost Dance Judgement is a bit different than the previous three volumes, mainly because its frame story is set in the modern era, which may or may not explain a few references that happen in March of 1872. We start with one of Deputy Jim Negry's (the one with the jade Eye of the Moon) arriving in the nearly abandoned ghost town of Golgotha and stopping to ask questions at the general store run by one of Malachi Bick's descendants. It's here we hear the tale of the Ghost Dance some 20 years prior to the more famous outbreak. 

We start with Izsua as a little girl dealing with the slaughter of her village by settlers. She winds up finding a cave to the underworld, where she learns secrets of the dead. (This is roughly 18 years prior to the main bulk of the story.) She's involved with Deputy Mutt's old nemesis, Snake Man, we find out later. Anyway, she's found a way to lead the dead back to fight the living, with the promise that they'll drive the settlers back to Europe.  

In the mean time, President Grant has sent General Caxton to Golgotha to take care of the "savages" raiding the area. Along with him comes Deputy Kat's old boss Pinkerton, who's back to wooing Deputy Kate, even if she is in love with Sheriff Jon Highfather. Porter Rockwell, Brigham Young's right hand man, is also in town to ostensibly help Mayor Pratt with the Indian problem, but also make sure that Pratt's role as the Mormon champion won't challenge Young's leadership of the Church. Pratt's dealing with his relationship with both James Ringo and Black Rowan, the local brothel owner. Rowan is trying to get Pratt to get a Mormon encampment to move to make way for a dogleg of the railroad, but Pratt has reasons for resisting this. 

And then we have Maude and Constance, who are the first to encounter the dead Indians in the desert. And find out the Sons of Typhon have come to Golgotha to find an avatar for the thing under Argent Mountain, here referred to as both Uktena and Typhon. That plot involves Augustus's baby, which may or may not have been conceived prior to his wife bringing him back from the dead. This winds up roping in Professor Mephisto, who helps sort out the mess under the mountain. 

By the end, which involves a few armies converging on Golgotha and a fight under the mountain, we have quite the fun experience, since there really aren't that many people in the book who qualify as moral and upstanding. I mean, yes, the residents of Golgotha are essentially good people, but the moral gray areas with everyone, including most of the villains are ample enough to swallow the desert. 

Again, Belcher gets points for his portrayal of Pratt, who's closeted relationship with Ringo rings with honesty and pathos. Really, this goes for all the folks in relationships in the book. He also gets points for making a reference towards the end to the black sheriff in Rock Ridge. 

This also provides another sterling example of something I've long suspected, since a certain entity named Coyote shows up in here about halfway through. I'm fairly convinced at this point that Coyote and his prose portrayals are all the same creature existing across several universes at a time, since regardless of who's writing him, he steals the scene and behaves in very specific manners. Here, he gets bonus points for breaking the narrative long enough to point out he hasn't really been talked to since book one. 

The only problem I had, which I never did go back to figure out if the page numbering reflects it or not, is that one of the chapters is printed twice, back to back. I read it again, to see if maybe there was a subtle difference, but no, pretty sure this was a print error.

Great book, though. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Clearing the board

 There was some concern that Jim Butcher was going to end his long running Dresden Files with his new Battle Ground, but by the end, it's more like a musical Rondo, bringing the story back to the beginning, only with some new accoutrements. 

We pick up where Peace Talks left off, in the deep hours of Midsummer Night, as Ethniu and the Formor begin rising from Lake Michigan to repeat what a certain cow did year ago to Chicago. Given the book more or less climaxes at dawn, that's roughly 400 pages of the war for Chicago, as members of the Unseelie Accords combine to battle a Titan bearing the Eye of Balor. (For the record, this has been a recurring artifact in a few fictions I've read since this started. I guess mythology only has so many artifacts to dig up to destroy everything with.) 

It seems appropriate that one of the pop culture quotes that pops up is from Ghostbusters, since some of the battle is similar to that sequel, wherein The Winter Knight manages to get a seething mass of Humanity to rise up under his banner to help take on a varied mix of bad guys, including the return of the Black Court of Vampires (which also has a shout out to the best book in the entire series, Dead Beat.

While with the number of major characters dying throughout this battle, it does seem like this could be the end, it does, like I said, wind up feeling much more like resetting everything to new paradigm closer to how this all started. We get a few new plot threads for him to build off of, like whom Marcone is allied with, the true nature of who set this big battle in motion, and Mab's designs on securing particular alliances, as well as some new ideas that could easily fill volumes of their own, like Mab's long lost humanity, The Winter Lady's relationship with her parents, and whether or not Butcher isn't trying to sell us an Anakin Skywalker story over 20+ books. 

As an added bonus, there is a short story set about 6 months after the main event at the end. That one made me laugh and cry in the course of about 10 pages, particularly the idea that Queen Mab watched Frozen at some point.

Given how long we were between books before this two in a year, I wouldn't be surprised if Butcher takes another sabbatical, since this one really didn't end on a cliffhanger. (Really, the only major pressing event is set for a year from the ending. Everything else is background noise.)

So, in the end, it's a fitting ending to a particular chapter of the Files, and an interesting rearranging of pieces for a new chapter.

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Brotherly Love

 Before we actually try to review Silent Scream by Dan Schmidt, I feel we must discuss its existence before getting too deep. (This will become important again in about 3 books, since I picked up a book discussing the era this one got written in.) 

This one is out of the mid 90's, and bears the stamp of 90's horror mediocrity, Leisure Books, as the publishing imprint. Leisure Book, much like Zebra books, were commonly found with lurid covers over cheap paper, decorating supermarket book sections, enticing people into what may or may not be a memorable horror story. (Mostly not, although I do remember a few of them, and I imagine when we clean out Mom's attic eventually, I'll find even more.) 

Anyway, at it's heart, Silent Scream is a tale of two brothers, and why one hates the other. Mike, the younger brother, starts off a homeless addict currently roaming the streets of Philadelphia. Older brother John, has stayed in Glendale, Illinois, a farming community that's become a prosperous middle class urban utopia. John has a loving wife, 3 kids, owns and edits the town newspaper, and owns and runs a restaurant with the family. Mike runs into a former classmate who runs away screaming. Mike repeats a prayer he found in some obscure volume of self help literature. Mike finds a dead body with an amulet shaped like the symbol in his book. Mike puts it on, and wow, Mike can suddenly hear everyone's thoughts and start using his thoughts to control people around him! (Had this been 80's comedy instead of 90's horror, this would be a sex comedy.)

Anyway, back in Glendale, where Mike will eventually make his way back to, John is having issues of his own, including a letter from Mike that starts off the novel. We see the serene nature of John's life, and the occasional crack in that facade, what with drunk coworkers who want very badly to crack open the mafia connections that brought the money into Glendale. 

While John is potboiling his way through, Mike uses his new powers to start hitching rides west, starting with his old classmate. Mike's hearing a voice with his new powers, encouraging his revenge plans. 

Until the brothers finally meet up, we mostly get Mike getting revenge on people he feels wronged him and plotting against his brother's "perfect life" and John learning to be a more assertive person. And then they meet.

As far as readability, this is a decent read. I mean, Mike is a sympathetic antagonist, one whom you can empathize with to a point. John is not a great protagonist, as I found myself hating him throughout most of the story, and frankly, Mike does have reasonable grounds to hate him on. I mean, John did know the charges against Mike growing up were untrue, and he also knew the truth about other things that lead to Mike's victimization. And he said nothing. I'm sorry, keeping a trust fund of parental money doesn't excuse silence in the face of oppression of someone you supposedly love. 

On the other hand, Mike's actions with powers start losing logic of any kind when he goes after John's youngest, the one who most resembles the Mike as a youth. We never learn whether Mike's powers are inborn (it's mentioned that some of the side effects manifesting with the powers mirror illnesses Mike had growing up), or come from an external being, maybe a demon or a god of some kind. We get very vague hints about some of what Mike went through as a kid, but never enough to really flesh out some of what happened.... I felt like had this been written a bit later, Mike would have been revealed as being molested or even gay, but instead, we just know he was falsely accused or raping a girl, even if it never went to court. We know something happened in the bushes with another boy and his dad beat him half to death over whatever happened there. We also get more than a few scenes of the misogyny that tends to inhabit pulp horror, which does tend to make Mike quite a bit like the monster everyone thought he was as a teenager. And when we find out love and prayer are Mike's weakness, the ending takes on a vaguely moralistic stance that in no way redeems anyone while feeling tacked on to satisfy an editor. 

Honestly, I enjoyed it, although I felt like I was checking off boxes on the genre all the way through.

Wednesday, October 7, 2020

As you wish

 So, after more than a few years, I finally got around to reading William Goldman's The Princess Bride

Honestly, there isn't much to add here. Most folks have seen the movie by now, and laughed and been enchanted by it. The story in the book is pretty much the same, although instead of getting Columbo reading to Kevin, we instead get a bunch of self depreciation from the writer. (Not that some of it isn't amusing, particularly when he starts discussing Steven King....Note that I was reading the 30th Anniversary edition, which includes chapter 1 of the follow up.)

I checked around, and despite being listed as an abridged version of a bigger foreign work, this all belongs to a self depreciating author, who frankly doesn't come off well when talking about himself. 

On the other hand, it's hard not to love Westley and Buttercup, root for Fezzig and Inigo... (The book does go into somewhat greater detail on backstory, which the movie skipped over a bit. We actually find out how Buttercup wound up engaged to Humperdink, for instance, and Miracle Max and his wife have more fleshed out roles, even if it's impossible to read their section without hearing Carol Kane and Billy Crystal speaking.) 

And the actual ending is a bit different, which annoyed me. I think he fixed a few things in the screenplay, even as he messed up other things. But hey. It's a charming read, and easy to forgive for minor problems.

Thursday, October 1, 2020

The desert never lies

 So, finally circled back to finish Mercedes Lackey's Dragon Jousters with Aerie, which I know I read at some point, but honestly didn't remember anything about.

And frankly, given how scattershot the plot is at points, that isn't a big surprise. 

Kiron and Aket-ten are having separation missions throughout, as she's stationed in Mephis and trying to raise a female only wing of dragon jousters and Kiron is at the newly discovered city of Aerie trying to find ways to keep the Jousters active. 

Eventually, among all the relationship drama, Kiron discovers a plot that leads back to the long ago vanished Nameless Ones, which ends up getting Aket-ten and him going to the Two kingdom border with the Chosen of Seft. 

And eventually, Altia gets attacked by the tribe of the East with their Goddess of Vengeance, Tamat. 

Oh yeah, and a subplot about one of Aket-ten's trainees finding Kiron's mother. 

Despite my quibble about the plot being scattershot, there is actually a very interesting argument in here about the relationship between Gods and Humans, and how both end up influencing the other. That made the latter half much more interesting.

Monday, September 28, 2020

A rose in winter stilll smells of rose

 I actually finished Seanan McGuire's A Killing Frost last week, but given I was on vacation...

 Again, we're back in October Daye's liminal world of fairie, and we're still waiting on our Dochas Sidhe changeling to marries her cait sidhe suitor.  

This time, she gets sidetracked by a quest out of the Kingdom of Saltmist, as Dianda points out her fey father Simon (who was good, then lost his way again) has to approve or he can claim insult. This sends Toby running around stirring up several hornet's nests to find Simon again, then figure out how to give him his way back. (Which involves finding something REALLY important, which becomes the point of the book by the end.) 

Anyway, since it is October, everything works out fairly well in the end, with quite a few surprises along the way. Hopefully the next book shows us more of what the repercussions of those are, since I'm kind of curious as to what happens now.

Monday, September 14, 2020

Endings beginning

 Finished Winds of Wrath, book 15 of Taylor Anderson's increasingly misnamed Destroyermen trilogy, and actually an end to the series as well. 

Which means most of the book concerns wrapping up the Grik war in Africa (down to one major army of Grik) and the League of Tripoli and Holy Dominion armadas in Nuevo Grenada on South America. 

It's quite involved, and quite a few major characters die, although some of the core does survive to appear in any followup series. One of those deaths is actually quite shocking, since it involved changing a moral or two around. 

Anyway, It's a fun read and a good end to a solid series, with a few loose ends, including two large explosions around Japan that go unexplained at the end. 

Honestly, for a series I wasn't sure if I'd like or not, I wound up sticking around for all of it, and falling in love with characters just as much as I do with other series.

Friday, August 28, 2020

Welcome to Manderley, now located in Amityville

 So, in the year's edition of Riley Foster's Abandonment Theater, we have Home Before Dark, which, while the main character retains some of the formulaic character building in all of Riley's heroines, Maggie does have an ongoing and current relationship with her parents, albeit one strained by her father's bestseller House of Horrors, detailing the 20 days they live in Baneberry Manor in Vermont. Dad, who recently died of cancer, and who claims to have never returned to the Manor, still owns it, which Maggie finds out about as she's visiting the estate lawyer. Maggie's mom offers to buy the manor outright, because neither mom or dad seem to think Maggie needs to be there. 

We get glimpses of "The Book", as the narrative alternates between Dad's book and Maggie's narrative as she tries to piece together what really happened when she was 5. Dad's narrative has all the pieces of The Amityville Horror, with specific sounds happening at specific times of the morning, bells ringing with no one pulling the strings, Ouija board communications, and 3 ghosts his daughter sees, Mrs. Pennyface, Mister Shadows, and a little girl. 

Maggie, as an adult, has no real memories of her time at Manderley, and indeed thinks her dad was full of crap. Some of that might be from the fact that once people found out she was the daughter from the bestseller, relationships changed. When she inherits the house, she, as a contractor, goes to fix and flip the Manor. 

Many of the characters from Dad's book are still alive and living in town, and many of them have similar memories to the book. Maggie also finds out one of her friends, who was written about in the book, disappeared the same night Maggie and her family fled into the night. 

As Maggie gets into house, some of the things her father wrote of start repeating, like the main chandelier turning on when she isn't home, a record upstairs playing "I am 16, going on 17" from the Sound of Music (which, given how much I hate that musical, even I will admit that its use here is really well done and creepy), things appearing and disappearing...

It may not be the most original story, and once again Sager uses more red herrings than a Seattle Fish Market, but it's a fun mash up of Amityville and Scooby Doo.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

He's a Dead Ringer for his brother

 I'm a day late writing this, but...

Sanctuary by Mercedes Lackey is the third book in the Dragon Jousters series (and reads like the last book in a trilogy. Amusingly, there's a 4th book, which is up when I finish my library reserves.) 

Again, we're following Kiron and friends in the desert city aptly named Sanctuary as they deal with the aftermath of leaving Alta, following finding out the Mages have been using dark aligned magic to keep from aging on both themselves and the royal family. About a third of the way through, as refugees from Tia come pouring in, we find that a schism among the mages has lead to the Tian royals to be similarly corrupted. 

We really don't see much of Tia, though, as Kiron and his wing are busy dealing with another city unburied in the sand, a former wild dragon of Tia roosting there, and then the whole saving the Winged Ones from Alta and eventually the remains of the Healers. 

It's a crowded book. 

By the end, two kingdoms have more or less fallen (in Alta's case, literally, as the earthquakes caused by the Mage's big magnifying glass cause most of the city to sink into the swamp) and Kiron and friends are looking forward to a normal life. Eventually. 

I've enjoyed this reread, but I find it really doesn't have as much emotional depth as some of her other works. On the other hand, it hold attention quite well, so I can't complain.

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Delta Blues

 Book 2 of the Dragon Jousters, Alta, opens with Vetch (now Kiron) leaving his time with the Bedu and finding his way into his home country of Alta. He acyually lands in the courtyard of Lord Ya-Tiren, who's youngest son, Orest, and only daughter, Aket-Ten fall head over heels in love with Avatre. 

Kiron gets his wish and joins the Altan jousters, he teaches them the ways of raising tame dragons, which gets him a wing of 8 boys to do so. One of these is of course Orest, but also one of the twin princes in line for the throne. Aket-ten, ine the mean time, is becoming a Winged One thanks to her gift of Silent Animal Speech. 

Now, as happy as everyone is, we end up finding out the Magi of Alta are actually bad people, draining powers from dead soldiers, Winged One, Fledglings, etc to fuel their spells. It's not pretty, particularly when the prince winds up dead after accusing the Magi of being traitors. 

In the end, the other twin prince discovers the Voice of Prophecy, the dragon wings find a way to ruin the tala that keeps the wild caught dragons tractable in both Tia and Alta, and everyone winds up in a city in the desert they call Sanctuary, including Ari and Kashet from Tia. 


It's again a fun read, just really a case of frying poan and fire for Kiron.

Monday, August 10, 2020

Land of De Nile

A while back, someone gifted me a copy of Mercedes Lackey's Joust, which I last read when it was released. It was fun to revisit one of her not so major series. 

For the sake of summarizing the setting, this first book focuses on the kingdom of Tia, which is roughly analogous to the Upper Egypt of antiquity. Our focus is on the Altan serf, Vetch, who's family was put into serfdom after the Tians invaded their farm. (Alta, of course, being analogous with Lower Egypt, where the Nile reaches its delta.) While the two countries share similar Gods, the hierarchy of deities is a bit different, as are some of the practices. 

Anyway, Vetch labours under Kefti-the-Fat, who pretty much abuses the heck out of his serf, his servants, and his apprentices. Indeed, much of the first chapter gives us details on curses Vetch is trying to lay on his evil master. Then Ari lands, and Vetch's life takes a turn for the better. Ari is one of the famed Dragon Jousters of Tia, who rides dragon back to keep Tia safe. He ends up conscripting Vetch and making him his Dragon Boy (a squire and caretaker when in quarters). 

Vetch excels at his new job, and Kashet, Ari's dragon, loves him. Kashet was raised by Ari from an egg, unlike most of the other dragons in the compound, who were grabbed from nests around the time of their first flight. As the book goes on, and we find that Ari is sympathetic to Vetch's problems, we hear all about how to train a dragon. Which comes in handy later on, as one of the wildborn dragons has a mating flight and lays an egg Vetch ends up hiding in an empty pen and eventually hatching. 

By the end, we all sing one of those 70's numbers as Vetch and Avatre fly free on her first flight. All is revealed in the last chapter, as Vetch gets a bit of help from Ari and heads to Alta. 

While not as epic in scope or as prolific as some of her other series, it's still fairly quality and good for a read.

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Wow, that's a dark view of humanity

I technically finished Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett yesterday, and totally forgot to post a review.


So, we're back with Sancia, Gregor, Berenice, and Orso, who run the Foundryside house in the Commons, and have figured out how to twin Lexicons. Which is nice, since they can now pretty much Robin Hood the major houses' trade secrets.

Sort of. Gregor's Mother, it seems, have found a way to bring back Craesedes Magnus, the first Hierophant, who is running around in Scrived bandages that make him look like Papa Monsoon, who comes to take the dead on Shorefall Night. (Think Carnival, only with a darker twist.) Which gets Valeria, the Construct, up and moving again.

All of which leads to some real ugliness, as they end up killing Gregor long enough to watch how Craesedes and Mama Dandalo Scrived time to bring back Gregor whenever that happened. Speaking of that Scriving, this also allows Craesedes to take control of Gregor's mind about halfway through.

Eventually, we get a very bleak view of humanity, as both Craesedes and Valeria discuss their views on how to bring peace to humanity.

We end on a low note, which sets up a war to finish off the trilogy eventually. But wow, what a read. I looks forward to seeing how the heck this can end.

Monday, July 27, 2020

He's getting almost as bad as George R. R. Martin

Jim Butcher finally released Peace Talks, number 16 in his Dresden Files series. While he's not quite into the decades between releases that George R. R. Martin is, the wait between books is a bit longer than other series authors.

Was it worth the wait? Yeah, mostly.

We open on Harry Dresden raising his daughter among the Dark Elves. (I am not typing out the appropriate Norse name.) He's still Mab's Winter Knight, but upcoming Peace Talks among all the signatories on the Unseelie Accords (To admit the Tree People and the Formor) mean that he's pulling double duty as both Mab's protector and Council Warden. Lara Raith, Queen of the Chicago White Council is owed favors by Mab, so Lara gets 3 favors from Harry, which he isn't happy about, particularly when Harry's Half brother, Thomas, gets caught breaking into the Dark Elves's HQ and killing someone right as the Armstice goes into effect.

Which means Harry has to navigate around the Accords to save his brother without breaking them, since pretty much every party involved wants to kill him.

Ultimately, we get a brief glimpse at the war that's been foreshadowed for several books, and end on another freaking cliffhanger. Not quite as bad as the one where he got shot, but still.....

I mean, I enjoy it, since the past few books have turned into Heist stories, which are always fun and mostly self contained. But we also have a dangling plot thread about the police investigation into events from Skin Game, as we get reintroduced to CPD's Finest, who are looking for evidence to take down Harry and Karin. However, as the supernatural courts begin to meet, they fall by the wayside in favor of saving Thomas. (Note: according to Wiki, we get another book in September. So, two books in one year, one story split in twain.)

Fun read, maybe not as good as the stuff that came before, but still something that sucks me in.

Friday, July 17, 2020

Never meddle in the affairs of dragons

So, I found myself rereading an old favorite this week, as sticking my hand into the bookshelf looking for for something wound up drawing out Ragnarock by Stephen Kenson. While this particular volume is not my favorite of his tales of Talon, it's probably the most plain fun of them.

This is actually set in the Sixth World of Shadowrun, an RPG set in the mid 2060's, where technology has hit Cyberpunk levels of advancement, and magic has reentered the world, leading to metahumans and dragons being prominent. (This is a largely oversimplified description of the setting, it's kind of like what would happen if D&D created a setting encompassing Philip K. Dick's writing.) Shadowrunners are essentially semi-criminals who do work for various employers, often one of the megacorporations trying to one up another one. The largest of the Megacorps is Saeder-Krupp, which is run by one very large great dragon named Lofwyr, and they're the ones employing our hero Talon for this book.

Talon is an Arcane Mage (the other type of pure mage in the setting is a shaman.... I think there's a lesser magic user called an Adept, but it's been years), who runs a fairly standard team, with two meta humans (an orc and a troll, who are brawn), a computer specialist (who more or less project their conciousness into the Matrix, think a VR version of the internet), and someone who does something similar with vehicles of all kinds. Along the way, they wind up joining forces with the Elven Paladin Speren. Talon's team gets a rather juicy contract to track down a professor who found a magical artifact that is being sold at auction in Germany and bring him to Lofwyr.

Straight forward assignment that gets complicated quickly as the Professor is working with a group of Human supremacists with some fairly large magical resources. Followed quickly by taking the artifact directly into Lofwyr's presence, where it nearly kills the great dragon. Fleeing from a very angry corporation, we eventually find out there's a lesser known great dragon behind this plot, and our climax happens at a music festival where two very large dragons have an astral battle over top of a thrash metal band.

I've pretty much mangled my description of this, and I hope if Steve ever reads this, he'll forgive me for that.

Anyway, the reason I say this isn't my favorite in this series has to do my first exposure to Talon. See, I was totally unfamiliar with the setting, and ran across Crossroads at one of the local gaming stores while dice shopping. It looked interesting, so I bought a copy and wound up getting sucked into it, getting particularly excited when I found out that Talon is gay. Given how rare this is in Science Fiction, Fantasy and RPG materials, let alone to have a main character who happens to be gay... well, it was awesome. Particularly since most of Talon's arc in the other books has to do with dealing with his shadow self, something I could relate to at the time. Anyway, I was discussing it with a friend of mine, who pointed out Steve's husband was author Christopher Penczak, whom I had never read, but who also has written a few books dealing with gays and spiritual matters. He's written more than that, and there's more to both of them, but again, simplify.

End result. Fun series, with more going for it than one would expect.

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Going Dark

Wit the library finally reopening, I managed to get my hands on Benedict Jacka's Fallen, which I think is the 10th book in his Alex Verus Chronicles.

Frankly, given the corner he had his characters backed in to after the last one, seeing Alex finally stop avoiding and start acting was kind of nice. Not that it's going to fix much....

After the prison break, Alex and Anne are subject of inquiry after inquiry. Fairly quickly, Council finds out most of what happened, and proceeds to try to arrest Alex and Anne. They hide in Arachne's lair. Arachne makes a few cryptic statements, then the Council shows up, forcing Anne and Alex to run deeper into the cave, while Arachne does something... at any rate, it looks like this may be her last appearance in the flesh. Trying to escape leads them into Richard's hands, where the mind mage in Richard's camp forces Alex to get Anne to cooperate.

So, by the end of about 2/3 of the way through, Alex has now lost Anne to her shadow personality, who is now possessing a Djinn.

This leads to Alex going after an artifact we haven't seen in a few books, followed by Alex pretty much going full Dark Mage.

It's actually kind of fun watching Alex go dark. I wonder where the series goes next, though, given how many bridges get burned here.

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

We are an old people

I've had Randy P. Conner's Blossom of Bone on my bookshelf for a few years now, but up until now, with the pandemic and the libraries only recently reopening, it's been hard to find time to wade through it.

Conner's overall goal is to draw connection between expressions of what now would be listed as homosexual desire and expressions thereof, including androgyny, gynandry, transvestism, and gender variance, and expressions of spirituality from prehistory to modern practices. Which he does an admirable job of, although one can tell which among these various threads resonate the most with him, since a few come very much to life in description, while others seem as dry and as dusty as an archaeological dig.

But...

We start with Paleolithic shamanic practices, tracing different practices across Native American tribes, what became Russian tribes, etc. From there, we follow what the usual historical progression of Western history, through Greece and Rome, with discussion on such things as Gilgamesh and Cybele, which goes deep into the mother figure blessing two male lovers. (I'll be honest here, as someone who's delved deep into Greek mythos, I was not all all familiar with Cybele, even if she is sort of an aspect of Demeter/Isis. There's a much longer discussion to be had here about syncretization of religious worship, and how different "cults" developed in different areas, then get joined into the existing branch, often becoming known as either an existing member of the pantheon or somehow borne from an existing figure. This is often the problem when studying Egypt, as we see compressed into one timeline, not really getting a feel for how the Gods of Upper Egypt were separate from the Gods of Lower Egypt, evolved for centuries in their own area, then merged during the periods when the two Egypts became one Egypt.)

We examine Norse and Celtic practices as well, as we move towards the patriarchal beliefs that came part and parcel of Christianity as it spread across Europe. (Interestingly, we never really examine much in the Middle East prior to Islam; then again, much of that has the same issues in research that pre-Christian belief in certain areas has, as the victors tended to erase or record what was left in ways that reflected their paradigm. While this doesn't stop syncretization, as quite a few Gods became saints. This gets discussed in more detail during the sections on Meso-American and African Diaspora spiritual traditions.)

We discuss more American visions of homosexual/inverted/homophilic spirituality from Whitman and Thoreau to Harry Hay and Arthur Evans, with talk of Crowley and Wilde thrown in across the pond.

We discuss the Middle ages and what little bits of records of gender variance exist from the period. We discuss Carnivale, and the traditions therein. The final section deals with Aztec, Mayan, and African traditions, and how their views were/are over time. (Given African Diasporan traditions are still here, having evolved into Vudou, Santeria, Bardo, Candomblé and Yoruba... although, again, many of the spirits have taken on the faces of more familiar  biblical faces....) which, while I have a basic grasp of, given a friend of mine is very much into Orisha veneration, was mostly newer information to me.

Ultimately, he leaves us with the thought that as gay men (while lesbianism is discussed a few places in here, the major focus is on gay men), we are heirs to a long, convoluted thread of priesthood and shamanism, and our spiritual nature is there if we want to take it or acknowledge it.

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

On top of old smokey....

Once again, I get sucked into another M/M romance by pseudonymous author Morgan Brice, this time dealing with adoptive cousins and hunters Dawson and Grady King. Dawson is around 3 years older than Grady, and as the book opens, is returning to Transylvania County, North Carolina, after 4 years deployed with the Army. He's expecting to be greeted by Uncle Denny and Grady (whom due to the age gap, and a fear of having him want someone else, Dawson has been holding at arm's length for quite some time), but is instead greeted by previous friend with benefits and now just friend Colt, due to Grady dealing with his father dying on another mountain after being bitten by a werewolf.

Grady, who is undergoing his own PTSD (something he shares in common with Dawson), has been holding a torch for Dawson since the onset of puberty, and as the narrative progresses, we get to see flashbacks of the two of them going out of the way to poke each other with figurative sticks.

As the book progresses, and they drive each other nuts by NOT consummating the relationship due to fears on both sides, we see that Dawson is prone to omen filled dreams and Grady now has the unique ability to get emotional readings of monsters they hunt.

While I enjoyed this one, as these characters danced around long smouldering desires for 200 or so pages, but I really wish the nature of the family business (both hunting and the auto shop) had been more explored, since it would help better root both men into the story, because at times, it feels like two phantasms floating through scenes trying to find their own resting place. Still, this is the outset, and who knows what future volumes will bring?

Sunday, June 21, 2020

There's always more to the story

While we were away for the weekend, I finished reading the newest edition of an old favorite. For those unaware, Neil Gaiman's American Gods has a new Annotated edition, with notes added in to the Author's Preferred Text added by one Leslie S. Klinger.

While the plot remains the same as it did 20 year ago, the annotations add more details to the text in places. Sometimes. We'll return to this here in a bit.

So, we open on Shadow Moon finishing up his last week in an unidentified prison, waiting out his last week to return to his wife Laura. He gets called into the Warden's office, and informed he's getting released early because his wife is deceased. Thankfully, transportation had been arranged prior to his early release, so Shadow is able to switch around airline tickets to get back to Eagle Point, assumed to be somewhere in Northern Indiana. (While there are real locations used in the text, a few, like Eagle Point are very vaguely defined as to where they actually are as they don't exist.) On Shadow's last flight, he gets bumped to First Class, where he winds up sitting next to Mr. Wednesday, who offers him a job, given the job he's supposed to be returning to doesn't exist. Shadow ignores this at first, until Wednesday provides proof his would be employer died in the same car crash that killed Laura.

Needless to say, Shadow does eventually take Wednesday up on the job offer, but not before dealing with Laura's funeral and getting a gold coin from Mad Sweeney, the Leprechaun. The coin has a weird property that brings Laura back to an intelligent zombie like life after Shadow drops it in her casket.

To skip ahead a bit, we soon find out Wednesday is really Odin, and just about everyone Shadow meets and interacts with in the novel winds up being an American incarnation of a deity or folk tale from outside the US. Except the New Gods, who represent ideas important in the US, like Media (with whom the opportunity to match up with Medea is sadly never realized), Technology, Television, and MIB.

Wednesday is trying to line the old gods up for an upcoming war and winds up dead because of it. Shadow has his own issues, as he moves from Cairo, Illinois to Lakeside, Wisconsin with several trips between before the biggest scenes in Virginia and Rock City, Tennessee.

Between chapters, we get pictures of the arrival/and or mostly unrelated modern lives of foreign gods and creatures on US soil. The chapter involving the Irfrit/Djinn still has the ability to make me cry, as does the one concerning the slave trade.

It's a magnificent read from start to finish, filled with memorable characters and interludes discussing arrivals in America. It also introduces the biggest scene stealer ever, Anansi, who's children fill up another volume down the road.

As for the annotations... These were somewhat of a welcome addition to the text, since they were nowhere near as obnoxious as the are in, say, House of Leaves. and generally informative when they weren't mentioning that "This Passage/sentence was not in the First Printing", which is roughly what 1/3 of the annotations consist of. Many of them include further information on who particular Gods are (although we still get no clues as to whom the Nameless God might be), notes from the handwritten first draft, pictures of locations visited, and pointing out connections in the text that one might not catch during a first reading (like Sam's "I believe" speech en route to Peru containing a reference to the later Coming to America story about prehistoric people crossing the Bering Strait during the ice age). A few appendices follow the main text, with a deleted scene of Shadow meeting Jesus during Odin's vigil, a list of gods appearing, and other references.)

While I would recommend the main text to everyone I know, I wouldn't recommend the Annotated Version to first time readers. More than a few plot points intregal to the big reveals gets given away in the notes, which would spoil the fun for a newbie.

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Crossovers aren't normally this fun.

So, Unholy, pseudonymous Morgan Brice's new Witchbane entry crosses over into the authors other works in a big way, as Evan and Seth enter Charleston, South Carolina, and thereby enter the author Gail Z. Martin's other same world characters. Which gets interesting, since half the appeal of Witchbane is that the protagonists are fairly underpowered humans running around trying to stop fairly high powered temporarily immortal witch disciples, and the folks we meet in Charleston....aren't. On the other hand, we get around this major power level gap by having the main antagonist be someone working on a much more hidden level than what the crossover characters normally deal with, while doing things that eventually get them helping out in ways that don't detract from the actual hunt.

The set up for this one involves finding out that the Disciple in this one, Longstreet, traffics in relics and in human magical trafficking. However, we find out Longstreet has already made his sacrifice prior to Seth and Evan's arrival, which allows him to cause a car wreck involving the two, followed by a soon to be fatal curse that prevents them touching each other.

At which point Martin's characters come to the fore, helping stave off the effects of the curse, as well as helping speed up the research portion of figuring out where Longstreet is and what his amulet and reserve are. We get phone cameos from Brice's other series, as two of her other series protagonists phone in with psychic visions.

And we wind up with a satisfying ending that kind of helps point out the magical ivory tower verses the marginal magicians of the proletariat, and how a sneeze in one group hits the others.

It's a good entry, and I look forward to a point where the novella that covers what happens after this gets a physical copy.


Sunday, June 7, 2020

Going back in time

So, I'm a few days late writing this, but it's been a rough week.

As I mentioned last time, The 6 Messiahs was a sequel volume. As it happened, I found out I owned the previous volume, The List of 7 by Mark Frost already, but only after ordering a used copy. Anyway, I finished this Friday afternoon, so here we go.

We start with a pre-Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle trying to get various stories published that have naught to do with his detective, as he isn't excited about being a doctor. He also seems to be a lapsed Catholic, more interested in examining the nascent Spiritualist and Theosophy movements than surgery. We open on his invitation to a seance, invited by a landed noble to prevent something catastrophic. The seance goes to hell pretty quickly, and Doyle is good to escape with his life intact, rescued by Jack Sparks, an agent of Queen Victoria, who's trying to figure out who is behind a recent spate of supernatural occurrences in the country.

We travel the English countryside, meeting such luminaries of Madame Blatlavsky and Dion Fortune; Queen Victoria herself at one point. We find out some of the criminal element is getting Zombiefied through Haitian drugs and vicious surgery. And we find out that Jack's brother is the mastermind behind this.

It's quite thrilling until about the last chapter, when after a very big lead up, we, along with Doyle hear about the conclusion through a third party.

Other than that horrible ending, it's a fun read, with a few really funny moments, such as Doyle throwing a very heavy book at a zombie pursuer, only to find out the volume was none other than HPB's Psychic Self Defense. Fun read. Just don't expect to be impressed by the ending.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Ecumenical Silliness

Mark Frost's The Six Messiahs has been an interesting beast to solve, what with figuring out partway through that it's a follow up, ordering the first book, then realizing I already own the first book.Which will make reading through that volume more interesting, since some of the major characters here have a history there.

Anyway, we open on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his brother Innes getting ready to board a ship for America for tour to celebrate Doyle's most famous creation, who had recently been revealed to have gone flying off a cliff with his archnemesis Moriarty. Mind you, people in both England and the US spend most of the book asking Doyle how Sherlock survived the fall, since no one can believe he died.

As the ship sails, we get glimpses of other characters, some of whom are already state side, like Walks Alone, the Dakota assassin; Rev A. Glorious Day, who's busy building a utopia west of Flagstaff; Jacob, the Chicago Orthodox rabbi and kabbalah headed to Arizona; Kanazuchi, a Japanese man hiding among the Chinese with a quest of his own.

On the way over, Doyle meets Lionel, Jacob's nephew; and in New York, Presto, a Indian man with a quest of his own. As the book continues, we find that most of the characters are seeking stolen holy books, most of which have been stolen by a German man, who a few decades later would have been an Aryan ideal.We also connect with Jack, who Doyle knew ten years prior, and whom served as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, it would seem, including falling off a cliff while killing his evil brother. Most of the characters have been having dreams of tunnels under the sand, and standing with five others to do...something. None of them particularly remember the dream well enough to figure that part out.

It becomes a very merry chase through New York City to Chicago, then west to Phoenix and eventually The New City as we finally find the destiny of the Six Messiahs (from a Jewish concept that the Messiah is less a single person destined to throw off oppression and more a handful of people throughout time who hold the world on their shoulders) and the redemption of some while others fall.

I really enjoyed the book, although frankly, the ending is quite abrupt. We get several big revelations, followed by wrapping up 400+ pages of ecumenical mysticism with about 2 pages of doing the thing and finishing the story, which leaves several dangling plot threads. It would have benefitted from a bit of expansion here.

Monday, May 18, 2020

Ain't No Canyon Low Enough

So, in finishing up Gregory Hinton's published works, we close with Santa Monica Canyon, which is another California story, this time set in and around Los Angeles. Focused on Mark, a younger man dating a big time film actor, and John, an artist living in the eponymous canyon, we watch as their lives entwine and connections that shouldn't exist between them become apparent.

We open on Mark, who teaches poetry at a city college, swimming in the Pacific, getting noticed coming out of the sea by John, who needs models for his paintings and sketches. John has taken to hiring in models from various agencies, but this hasn't worked out well, since the first one we meet is on drugs and wants to be an escort more than a sitter. We see Mark returning to the stylish DeMille estate home he shares with long time lover Edward, who's hosting the Lame Ducks, the inner circle and the only people who particularly know about the relationship between Mark and Edward. Mark is uncomfortable with the trappings of fame and the severe closet Edward is forced to reside in. Edward is also over 10 years older than Mark, and uses "Boy" as a pet name. Besides the obvious stresses there, a video of Edward getting serviced by an anonymous john has been making the rounds, leading to the favorite game of rumor quashing.

Eventually, John does approach Mark on the beach, and convince him to be a sitter for his art. What eventually causes Mark to relent is finding sketches of Edward among John's drawings that he knows nothing of. Edward gets an offer from an up and coming actress to star in a project she's working on, and ends up leaving Mark for the summer to film, citing Mark's need to heal from the recent death of his father as a reason for Mark not to tag along. Mark hits a local lit store and gets more information on John from a gossipy frenemy of John's, who discusses how John's lost talent since his break up with Danny, a caterer who also served as a model for John.

As John and Mark grow closer, Mark's distance from Edward leads to fighting between them. Edward eventually calls and tells Mark he sent him a letter that he wants Mark to burn without reading. Which spirals into Mark finding the full series of sketches John did of Edward that reveal the truth about a lot of things between all sets of lovers.

In the end, we are left to decide for ourselves what we think of everything, as we see everyone without masks or pretenses, and like viewers of the portraits, it's up to us to see what the artits wants us to see and make up or own minds about the truth in the picture.

Like the last one, this one also name drops quite a bit, as we in flashback meet Christopher Isherwood and his partner and their circle of friends.

It's also kind of a heavy trip, and I find myself understanding but hating the choices made in the end.

Monday, May 11, 2020

Rocky Mountain High

The Way Things Ought To Be by Gregory Hinton tells a variation on coming out that becomes odd in its contemporary historical narrative. I think some of this comes from being published in 2003, but telling a story from 30 years earlier, in 1974 Boulder, Colorado.

We open on the break up of our main character, Kingston James, and his boyfriend, Lex, following witnessing an airplane crash while hiking. We hear bits and pieces out their foibles, from moving to California and back, how they met in a bible study group, how their Study group leader Nicolas called King's parents and told them about their son's sins.

King ends up moving out, taking on a rental room in an off campus apartment, where his new roommates share a bedroom with a bunk bed. The one roommate's girlfriend, Jen, makes lot of noise when she visits. He starts dating Sam, but Sam worries that King is growing too attached. Sam and Theo get King to attend a dance, where same sex couples dance to gain visibility, seeing one of Jen's sorority sisters on the floor. This leads to his roommates kicking him out, leading King to move into a studio courtesy of Theo, who's the brains behind the local Gay Rights organization. (Theo isn't comfortable being the face of the movement, so that falls to Sam; Theo is the one behind the scenes organizing everything.)

King goes back to a hotel with Matthew, whom he meets at a bar. Matthew is a romantic, like King, but Matthew, who's real name is Ralph, is also married to a woman in Pittsburgh. He buys King a leather jacket and goes back to Pittsburgh.

Jen winds up pregnant and moves in across from King and adjacent to Theo. When King's friend Tim gets killed by the cops after being caught doing lewd acts behind the Taco Bell, Jen joins the protest with King.

We see King meeting his Creative Writing teacher. Connie, at Le Bar, one of the 3 bars at the Boulderado hotel. She shows up with her bisexual boyfriend, Robert, because Allen Ginsburg will be there reading his work. (There's a bit of name dropping in here, as Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs both show up. By far the best moment is a few pages when Ginsburg and King wind up doing Transcendental Mediation together later on.)

King and Theo hook up, but despite Theo's insistence on sex being sex, it becomes obvious he has feelings for King; indeed, when Theo winds up dating Barry, Theo starts bringing home as many men as he can to make enough noise to annoy King through the walls.

Barry is the UC quarterback whom King meets at the local bathhouse. While Barry is very closeted (indeed, he has a fiance) due to his football stardom and likely draft by the Miami Dolphins, he and King share a very nice romance. Which ends rather abruptly one night as King sends Barry home so he can think, and the next thing we as readers know is King is in the hospital having been raped and bleeding profusely. Given Barry is the one who called the ambulance, everyone thinks he did it, but King denys that. (We do find out later on what actually happened.)

King's father gets drunk and drives to the hospital, but he takes a header off a cliff on the way. (King's family relations are a long involved subplot of the book. Dad's a drunk who gets sober; Mom hates sober dad. His brither is distant from the parents, and is also gay.)

Anyway, eventually all the plots come around and we finish with King graduating.

So, ultimately, I can't really comment on how close to reality this is in terms of 1974 Boulder. I will say it is nice to read a book about gay folks of the 70's which isn't coastal or all about rich gay folks, or worse, some midwestern morality play. On the other hand, most of the language of liberation and assimilation take on more modern terminology, and no one gets referred to as a homophile. While I'm sure someone will point out where I am wrong here, I don't think there was any kind of coordinated national movement quite this early, most of the organization was regional at best.

However, I think King is kind of Shakespearean in his own way, I'm sure more than a few readers can identify with his struggles with love and sex, and how the two, while separate, intertwine.

Monday, May 4, 2020

Valley of the long Elven names

So, Blade of Empire by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory picks up not long after the last book, as Vielessar Gets physically throned on the Unicorn throne. She sends a few folks north and westm and we hear no more of her forf the rest of th ebook, instead mainly focusing on her unwilling bonded,
Runacar, who goes from War Prince of one of the 100 Houses to leader of a rag tag army of Beatstling, basically sentient Otherkin, like centaurs, minotaurs, gryphons, and bearkin. We get a few interludes, as the dark ones begin the Red Harvest in the Windsward, and more than a little bit of politicing around the Sanctuary of the Star, but yeah, we're mainly focused on Runacar as he sweeps folks to take the coast.

Which is odd, since most of the Otherkin hate the elves. Yet he earns their trust, and ultimately leads them to victory over the remaining coastal cities with help from the Waterkin.

It's one big campaign, and it's mentioned that no one has heard from Vielessar since the enthronement, in what they refer to as the Great Silence.

By far the biggest problem here is that any concept of time goes out the window. I think by the end, we figure out 10 years have passed between the beginning and end, but the sense of time is really awkward.

PAst that, it's a good follow up, and I hope they actually finish the trilogy eventually.

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

The Innocence of Youth

So, Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life has been on the TBR pile for a while now, but it's taken some time for me to actually get around to reading it. Now, a quick perusal of wikipedia shows McCammon was popular in the late 80's to early 90's, during the horror boom that Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul were all household names, but for some reason, despite my brother having a few titles on his shelf, I never read any of his stuff. As such, it shouldn't come to anyone's surprise that his works draws comparisons to the others' work mentioned. Which is sad, since even if Boy's Life shares a few passing similarities with IT, it's really got more in common with John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

We open on Cory, 11 years old in 1964 Zephyr, Alabama, in the early Spring of 1964. Cory's dad delivers milk for the local dairy, and occasionally Cory will make the rounds with his father. Which is nice, until the morning they round a curve by Saxon's Lake in time to see a car go across the road and into the lake. Cory's dad swims out to try to rescue the driver, only to find that the man is lead, bludgeoned in the head and garroted by a wire. He has a visible tattoo of a skull with wings. Cory, in the meantime, also notices someone watching and finds a green feather on his shoe. Keep in mind, we see this at the start, but it really doesn't wind up having much to do with anything until the very end, as the story keeps wandering around like a boy on a bike and nowhere in particular to be.

Anyway, Cory's dad is a bit upset by this, obviously. He spends most of the book getting more and more despondent as he's haunted by the man in his dreams.

On Good Friday, we see the Parade, when the elderly black woman, The Lady, from the town across the Gargoyle Bridge (with busts of Confederate Soldiers) goes to the middle of the bridge with his husband, the Moon Man (who evidently has vitiligo; his face is half black and half white, thus the Moon Man moniker) goes to feed Ol' Moses, one of the local creatures that lives in the river. Except she calls it Damballah, and feeds it all kinds of fun things like chicken's feet and beef heart. Ol' Moses ain't feeling it this year, as he doesn't show up. Later on, when the rains won't quit, after the rains wake up the wasps in the Methodist steeple during Easter services, and the Tecumseh River starts flooding, Cory and his Dad join the rest of the men of Zephyr across the river in the Black town helping sandbag the flood waters (after much protests by some of the white folks.) While fighting the river, Cory comes face to face with Ol' Moses, saving a young black boy from the hungry sea monster by using the old cartoon trick of sticking a broom in its craw. This earns him the attention and affection of The Lady, who begins to find ways to help out Cory and his family.

We see his childhood adventures with his friends, we see him stumble into more adult matters that end up causing trouble down the road. We see him become a storyteller, winning a local writing contest. We meet the characters that inhabit the town. About 2/3 of the way through, he has dinner with Vernon, the local nudist whose dad owns most of the town. Vernon himself published a book, and his man-child speaking reveals that he set out top write a book about a southern community and the publishers wanted a hard boiled mystery. As such, Vernon edited in a mystery to his novel, which is pretty much how this all works out.

By the end, we do find out who killed the guy in the car and why, but not before we watch Cory confront death and learn to hold on to his boyhood. Indeed, one of the most affecting moments for me involved Cory's dog Rebel getting hit by a car and Cory's accidental zombification of the dog. Until the ghost of a dead boy comes to claim it.

While Cory is an unreliable narrator, his story is compelling and sad and joyous in equal amounts. It just takes its good sweet time to get there.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Desert Bloom

So, I found out recently that Gregory Hinton had written a sequel to his Cathedral City, and thus did Desperate Hearts show up in my mail a few days later.

While it's mostly the same cast, the situation in Cathedral City is quite a bit changed from where we left it. Father Gene has been removed from St. Louis Church, and the new priest cares more about his new upscale parishioners than the dispossessed seniors and Mexicans that had been the backbone of the parish. Solia, of the port wine birthmark, works at the church when not babysitting Kenny and Maria's baby Concha. Maria is busy running her restaurant, although the clientele is not the same as when Nick and Kenny ran it. Ruthie still sings at Maria's, but the new clientele doesn't seem to care that much. Kenny and Nick are in Reno, still keeping secrets from each other. Pablo is back in Cathedral City after graduating from Stanford.

We also have new characters Bambi and Madonna, the mixed race lesbian couple that delivers produce; Officer Bob, the Border Patrol agent; and Sister Agnes, the nun at St. Louis who harbors more than a few secrets of her own.

The plot has a few different centers as it meanders around, what with Bambi and Madonna's involvement in smuggling a pregnant woman across the border, Pablo's romance with Bob, Ruthie's detox from anti depressants that eventually leads to her kidnapping of Concha and eventual death in a flood, and Nick and Kenny's revelations. We also finally get a bit of closure with Inez and Thomas, as Inez comes back to Cathedral City to be with her family as Thomas dies of El SIDA. We also have the odd case of Solia and her birthmark removal following it taking on the shape of the Virgin of Guadelupe.

While the first book was heavy on the pathos, this one is much darker by turns, with touches of the mystical sprinkled throughout. Indeed, while everyone does eventually get a happy ending through quirks of fate, I felt like most of that was a forced Deus ex Machinae, as none of this would likley have ended up as well in reality. Still worth reading though.

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

This seemed appropriate

So, along about the time the Stay-At-Home orders started, I wound up ordering a new copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which, thankfully, unlike my old copy that I think I donated to the local homeless library a few years back, is the Complete and Uncut version. (There are noticeable differences between versions; the first time I read it was right after the release of the long version. Then several years back, I picked up the original published version on paperbackswap.)

Anyway, for those who've never swam across the ocean that is the 1200 pages...

The set up revolves around a superflu that breaks out in 1990. A manmade shifting antigen flu. With 99.6% fatality rate. That escapes from a California lab with a security guard who gets out before everything locks down. Most of the first hundred pages take us through the initial outbreak and the plethora of death that accompanies it, giving us glimpses of our main characters before the world after gets going. We meet Stu, a quiet man in East Texas, who is one of the first immunes identified by the government, since he was one of the first in contact with Patient Zero. We meet Frannie, of Ogunquit, Maine, who has just found out she's pregnant. We meet Larry, who's new single is going up the charts, but whom is in deep debt following living the high life on the royalties. We meet Nick, a deaf-mute who we first meet getting mugged in Arkansas.

And people die. Quite a few people die. If not of flu, but of the aftermath. Stu, who was sent first to Atlanta, and then to Vermont, winds up meeting Glen, and then hooking up with Frannie and Harold, who is the brother of Frannie's now deceased best friend. Larry escapes from New York with Rita, who ends up ODing upstate. He then meets Nadine and Joe, who have their own issues. Nick meets Tom, a mildly retarded man, and they eventually meet Ralph. In the background, we have The Dark Man, Randal Flagg, and Mother Abigail, the 108 year old black woman who still bakes her own biscuits. And Lloyd. Lloyd who's in prison after being part of a tristate murder spree. The Dark Man breaks Lloyd out of jail eventually, and they head west. Oh yes, and we can't forget The Trashcan Man, who's a pyromaniac who starts turning refineries on Lake Michigan into giant bombs.

Anyway, survivors are all having dreams of both The Dark Man and Mother Abigail, so everyone starts moving West to Nebraska or Vegas. Mother Abigail is in Nebraska, and is other directed by G-d. Although G-d sends a vision to Mother Abigail, so everyone winds up in Boulder, where a rumor during the plague meant a large scale evacuation and the lack of humidity makes for a lack of rot.

Everyone has adventures getting cross country, picking up people as they go. Boulder tries to restart a government, Vegas is ruled with an iron fist by a psycho who's crucifying those who cross him. Nadine and Harold end up switching sides, cause issues, and four of the men end up walking from Boulder to Vegas. Then we get a few hundred pages after the climax of two people trying to get back to Boulder.

In any book this large, any reread is going to uncover things you missed on previous readings. Like, in modern parlance, Harold is essentially an Incel. Like the ending likely taking place somewhere other than the Earth of the rest of the book. (Mind you, if you wade through The Dark Tower, The Dark Man shows up quite a bit there, as well as in The Eyes of the Dragon, so this makes sense.)

Is this my favorite King? No, that still belongs to either It or The Waste Land. Is it good King? Yeah, because the pacing, despite the volume, keeps it going for the most part. Mind you, it's the hundred of so pages of story afted the Climax that keeps it from being downright stellar, but....

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Desert Rose

I seem to recall reading Gregory Hinton's Cathedral City many years back, based on reviews comparing it to Tales of the City. It's not quite like Maupin, but I can see where that review came from.

We're in the very late 90's in the Coachella Valley, outside of Palm Springs in Cathedral City, which is slowly transforming from a desert oasis filled with those not welcomed to live in the higher end desert communities to a modern city, complete with megamalls and ice skating rinks. We're centered mainly around Nick's a bar run by Nick and Kenny, a gay couple who've been together a few decades. Nick's become a drunk over time, running the front of the house, while Kenny runs the kitchen with some newly minted citizens of the United States. We hear of Nick's upbringing in an orphanage and Kenny's out out rejecting by his campus priest after confessing to a random encounter with another guy. Indeed, Kenny seems to almost enjoy tormenting Father Gene at the local parish, although Father Gene does eventually admit to waiting to retire to be who he is. Jealous of Father Gene's obsession with Kenny is Inez, who lives across the alley from Nick's. Inez is a very hard woman, having issues getting her citizenship due to a problem with some blood work. Inez was upper class in Mexico, but now is cleaning houses and rooms at one of the local gay hotels. She cleans Ruthie and Sam's house; they own most of the tar paper shacks lived in by the immigrants and the land Nick's sits on. Ruthie was a lounge singer, but she suffers from sever depression. Sam is Jewish, and fights against the constant racism he encounters in the area. We have Pablo, who comes from very rich stock in Mexico, but enjoys hustling in the desert; and we have Maria, who we meet through Kenny when he winds up joining her and her grandmother in an illicit border crossing.

As the book progresses, we watch as all of these relationship stretch, break, expand, heal, and grow in new directions. We watch as Sam tries to protect his quadrant of town from developers, we watch as Marcella the bar maid tries to get a cut of the developer's funds to set up herself. We watch at how hard she falls and how she ends up redeeming herself. We watch Inez and Pablo heal rifts in each other. We watch Kenny and Nick, as Nick dries out in Betty Ford. And towards the end, we, as readers, are privy to all the secrets these people have been hiding from each other.

It's hard reading in places, as I think most readers can fully understand some of the emotional places everyone visits within, the loneliness, the separations, and ultimately, redemption for most. While not all of us will ever get that last, it's worth the hope invested.

Underrated book. A good one for fans of Maupin or Rechy.

Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Cocoa for Cuckoo puffs!

In a nice break from the current situation, I finished Seanan McGuire's Imaginary Numbers, book 9 in her InCryptid series. Here, we're following our favorite Jhorlac, Sarah, who is mostly recovered from wiping the memories of most of New York City 5 years ago. For the most part. We also spend some time with Cousin Artie, the half-Lilu incubus, who's relationship with Sarah borders on soap opera.

So, we start with Sarah traveling from Cleveland to Portland and the family compound. When she lands in Portland, she runs into another Cuckoo, whom she promptly beats the crap out of. That order of business taken care of, Sarah reunites with Antimony and her gang at Roller Derby. She and Artie drive back to the compound, having an accident along the way caused by the Cuckoo from the airport.

Long story short, Sarah gets lured out of the compound by the hive of Cuckoos in Portland, who are trying to make her evolve into a Queen. Sort of. (Jhorlacs are sort of humanoid wasps from another dimension, so there are a few insect metaphors in here that get more complex as the plot begins to resolve. For the sake of keeping this simple, run with this.)

Anyway, this all happens after Sarah and Artie finally admit to their feelings and kiss. Which is when Artie becomes the focus of the narration for a while, as he and the family deal with the fake Sarah in the living room and the great Cuckoo rite they're trying to get Sarah to run.

Eventually, Artie and Sarah start trading chapters as somehow everyone ends up in Iowa and Sarah starts the metamorphosis into her fourth and final instar. We end on kind of a cliffhanger, although based on several mentions of the Aeslin mice in both the main novel and the Follow the Lady novella tucked in at the end, one expects that they might be able to resolve some of the conflict unanswered at the end.

Said novella takes place between the last book and this one, as Antimony, Sam, James, Fern, and Cylia break down near the Healy family hometown in Michigan and meet Grandma Alice. While the main novel is very good, the novella has the gut punch for me, as Antimony finally discusses how she feels like the expendable spare in the family.

Once again, a great entry in one of my favorite series.