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?

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.

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.

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.