I said medium well, not half baked....

So, at one of the used books sales I've been frequenting, I stumbled across Richard Laymon's The Stake. Having read a few of his other novels, I thought, "Hey, I know they're the literary equivalent of a bag of chips, why not?", and then firmly got the regrets upon reading it.

Laymon, back in the days I was still reading Fangoria magazine every month was famous/notorious in their pages for writing stuff that was a step above the Zebra imprint supermarket horror, but not quite good enough to be considered a classic writer. (Let me add here, that while most of the horror available at Krogers was indeed forgettable and pulpy, there were a few that I still own and occasionally re-read. Lisa W. Cantrell being one of them.) Indeed, the first book I read by him, Out Are the Lights, held my attention fairly well until the horrendously silly ending, that revolved around a deaf character being able to read lips perfectly on a movie screen. But, we're not discussing that one at the moment, even as much as I want to get another copy of that travesty.

The Stake's cover claims it to be "A novel of the supernatural" and even has a Stephen King blurb on it. The former is a misnomer, and the latter is proof that King was willing to blurb for anyone in the 80's.A reviewer on goodreads refers to this one as the novel where Laymon learned to pad out the length. This is also pretty true, particularly given the subplot that gets introduced in the last third and gets wrapped up with a Deus ex machina at the very end.

Anyway.

The book starts with our hero, a midlist splatterpunk author named Lawrence Dunbar and his wife Jean, out exploring ghost towns on the California/Nevada border with friends and neighbors Peter and Barbara. They wind up in a real one, Sagebrush Flat, which dried up in the late 1960's. The town is in disrepair, although the hotel has a new padlocked hasp on the front door. Being drunk and needing to advance the plot, the couples break in to the hotel to explore. Climbing the stairs, Barbara falls through, and Peter, getting under them in the basement, finds a coffin with a teenage girl. Said Girl has a stake through her heart, is surrounded by garlic cloves, and has a crucifix standing watch over her rest.

The couples leave in a hurry. Pete and Larry, though, later on decide to go back and get the body.

That comes later. First, we meet Larry and Jean's daughter, Lane. Lane, who's in High School, has what passed for typical teen issues in the era. Her boyfriend is interested in one thing, and she has a crush on her English teacher, Hal Kramer.

Before Larry and Pete return to Sagebrush Flats, we get a brief glimpse of Mr. Kramer, and his "friend", who happens to be Lane's classmate Jessica. That he's made her his friend through the use of razors and threats of murder isn't important until later.

The boys go get the body while the wives are out of town. While exploring the desert around the town, they find a skinned coyote that someone was obviously eating for dinner.

The corpse winds up in Larry's garage attic, as Larry and Pete decide to make a Amityville Horror style true story book out of the vampire in the desert. Larry starts dreaming about the corpse, seeing her as if she was alive. She keeps making him promises if he'll take the stake out.

Oh yeah, in case I forgot to mention it, Larry spends most of the book obsessing about the women in his life who aren't his wife.

Eventually, Larry finds out the girl's name was Bonnie, and she'd been Homecoming Spirit Queen in 1968. Kramer, in the meantime kills Jessica and her parents, sets their house on fire, and then prepares to make Lane his next "friend". Lane, oblivious to most of this, is doing things to intentionally draw his attention to herself.

And finally, late in the book, we meet Uriah, the one who staked Bonnie and her friends in 1968 and buried most of them under the hotel basement floor. He feels he's on a mission from God to eliminate Satan's vampiric spawn, although we're mostly left to wonder is he's insane or not.

All of this comes to a head in the literary equivalent of Prom in a teen movie. Everyone winds up coming over for dinner.

It's not a particularly badly written book, it just feels as if there's a better book just waiting to be chiseled out of the slab of words as presented. It would have also helped on my end, as a reader in 2017, if any of the characters had been better developed. I mean, we get to know Larry, and we get to know Lane, but everyone else seems like a paper doll, standing there waiting to be interacted with. And, much like Stephen King's early work, the plot doesn't actually do much until the last 50 pages or so.

If you're wanting something that will hold your attention but not really require much thought, give Laymon a try.

The End is the Beginning is the End

So, I picked up Kevin Hearne's Besieged, with the understanding it was a collection of short stories, but I was hoping it was some of the previously published stories that seem to only be available in digital format, particularly since those seem to hold a few crucial plot points that get glossed over in the actual main series.

Sadly, they aren't in here. Instead, we get 9 stories, roughly 4 of which take place after book 4 and 5 that take place after book 8, with one of the missing stories being used as reference around when they're set.

Which is fine, since the last story in the book sets up the events we're supposedly getting in the series finale in April, but...

Anyway, the early stories mostly fill in stories from Atticus's past, including questing to the Library of Alexandra to find some scrolls sacred to Seshat. After a bit of a scuffle with Horus, he finds out Bast cursed hers with the noise of mating cats should one who is not her priest try to read them.

We get stories of a few demon hunts, one of which happens in 1850 San Francisco, another in Kansas.

All of which are presented as campfire tales.

In the present, We get Owen's tale of how he met Atticus, Granuail's talkes of trying to id Poland of vampire after the pact takes effect, Perun and Flidais in a "cuddle dungeon", and trying to rid the Tasmanian Devils of some sort of facial cancer.

The last story, the set up for supposedly the last book, centers mainly on Atticus having to leave Oberon in Oregon having been informed by the Morrigan that Loki has visited Lucifer and is now ready to begin Ragnarok. 

While all the stories are good and readable, and a strong reminder of why I enjoy the series so much, I still feel like this book is mostly filler, a morsel thrown to keep the wolves at bay who anxiously await the next installment. That it also doesn't include some of the other stories is almost criminal, since not everyone is thrilled with e-publishing.

I just can't help wishing for more.

I miss the rains down in Bridgetown

So, I went in to R. S. Belcher's latest return to Golgotha, Nevada, with as much of an open mind as I could muster, since, unlike previous entries in the series, this one is focused predominantly on only one character. Given the last two books in the series have been ensemble pieces with all the lunatics playing their own roles in the proceedings, I wasn't sure if following Maude Stapleton away from Golgotha would retain the magic that made the first two books so entertaining.

As it turns out, I needn't have worried much, since it seems Golgotha's weirdness isn't the only pocket of surrealness in the post Civil War world. Indeed, while Maude's narrative is set in 1870, we also follow her "Grandmother", Pirate Queen Anne Bonney across the oceans of 1721 on a quest of her own to find Carcosa deep in the heart of Africa. And in one really strange passage, the two timelines converge, making for one heck of a passage.

So, basically, we catch up with Maude not long after the end of The Shotgun Arcana, returning to her roots in Charleston, South Carolina, where her father has taken her daughter Constance. Leaving behind her new love, Mutt, she seeks full custody of her daughter and control of her inheritance from her Grandmother. Not to say there aren't complications of both the normal legal, but that comes in later.

In the mean time, we join Anne escaping the hangman's noose in Port Royal, Jamaica. She's gravid with child, and ends up delivering a son on the beach as part of her escape. Giving her son up to a friend to deliver to her family in South Carolina until she can return, she sets off on a quest for a city she's dreamed of paved with the bones of monsters.

Anne's story eventually chronicles her voyage to becoming the first Westerner to become a Daughter of Lilith. Maude, already being one, and in the process of teaching Constance to be one, must deal with her sisters within the rather small company, who seem to think that Constance needs to be sacrificed to refill the Grail that Maude emptied towards the end of book 1. We learn of the origins of Lilith mythology in this setting, and we learn of Lilith's husband, Typhon, who has a sect of his own, the aptly named Sons of Typhon, who's blood is much like the slick oil that was causing people to go nuts back in book 1.

As with just about every book in the Golgotha series, there's much to unpack in terms of mythology represented. Anne's tale takes us through the Oya and Orishas, while Maude's contemporaries represent Aztec and Oriental cultural mythologies as well.

It's also fair to say that Golgotha gets a little of its own placement in the narrative, as letters between Maude and Mutt travel a few times in the narrative. Mind you, this is where the odder bits of humor float up, as the local golem maker is reported to have hooked up with Shelley Wollstone, and a new brand of snake oil is drawing in customers from places like far off Night Vale.

And Maude even gets a bit of non-Mutt romance with a reporter who trails her doggedly through the book, even joining in her desperate flight to Carcosa on Anne's old ship, the Hecate.

My only regret on finishing this volume is realizing it's likely be a few years before we get another Golgotha volume, since I assume we'll be dealing with his other two series again before we return to Nevada.

Shamantery

So, as I believe I mentioned previously, I've been reading through some books I've picked up at various book sales of late while waiting on reserves to show up at the library. I'm happy to report one of them came in and was picked up today, so I'll be reviewing new fiction pretty soon. In the mean time, let me tell you of the kind of adrift in the overall timeline of Lois McMaster Bujold's World of Five Gods series, The Hallowed Hunt.  (I say adrift because goodreads lists it as book 1 in the series, even though it was written long after the first 2.)


While the two books written before this take place in and around Chalion, This one takes place in what seems to be south of Darcatha in an area once known as the Weald. (They got conquered by Darcatha before this book starts, but it appears they've regained some autonomy since Aurak destroyed the old king. The retain the Quintarian Orthodoxy that Darcatha instilled, meaning that those with Weald era issues like having an animal spirit grafted onto their souls are considered as bad as Demon ridden sorcerers.)

Thankfully, Ingrey kin Wolfcliff has a dispensation from the temple that keeps him from being burned at the stake to rid him of his affliction, namely having a wolf soul grafted on to his by his father. Which is good, since we meet him en route to a former prince's home in exile, where the Prince is dead and the murderer is a young Chalionese woman the Prince was trying to kill in process of adding a leopard spirit to his soul. Somehow, Ijada got the leopard and managed to bludgeon her attacker to death.

Which, in the Weald's political climate makes her more apt to be burned at the stake or hanged for murder than vindicated with a finding of self defense. However, since everyone must ride back to the capital with the prince's body, this gives us time to get a better view of what it means to be a shaman. Particularly when Ingrey's wolf starts coming to the fore and trying to kill Ijada. Thankfully, Learned Hallana (a divine of both the Mother and a Sorcerer in the Bastard's Order thanks to a quirk of fate), arrives at one of the stops on the procession and finds that a geas has been placed on Ingrey. She manages to remove it, but in the process, it brings the Wolf out of the containment Ingrey had built for it. The Divine sends a letter with Ingrey to take with him to another Divine in the Capital to see what can be done.

While this meeting does eventually happen, it's not before we meet another exceptionally memorable minor character in the book, Prince Jokol Skullsplitter, who got his surname from the skullspilitting headaches his poetry gives his crew. Jokol is from islands away from the Weald, and in town to drop off an Ice Bear named Fafa to the Bastard's Order in exchange for a Divine for his island.

While Hallana and Jokol provide some much needed comic relief throughout the book, much of the actual plot centers on Wencel kin Horseriver, Ingrey's cousin. Wencel, it seems, has a horse of his own. And quite a bit more besides.

It's actually quite breathtaking in its plot, once it gets going. We have a conflict between what a man wants and what the Gods want, although the Gods are limited by what their vessels can be inspired and willing to do on their behalf.

When I read this the last time, it was right after I managed to sprain/break by elbow, so my perceptions were likely off with the presence of painkillers. However, a new reread does suggest that while the book takes some time getting going (it's roughly one third of the book before some of the bigger plot points start coming in to play), the overall book remains a fantastic read.