Locked up

 Clockwork Asylum by Jak Koke, aka Book 2 of The Dragon Heart Cycle, picks up right after the last book ended, with Burnout swimming in the Snake River, possessed by the spirit Lethe.

This leads to Ryan Mercury and Assets Inc trying to track him and the Dragon Heart artifact down. All while Ryan and his girlfriend have to deal with the investigation into the death of Dunzlekhan, in which both are suspects. 

All of which leads up to an explosive conclusion in the Dragon's arboretum as almost every faction involved in the affair wind up in DC at the same time.

While this is better paced and much clearer than book one was, it still suffers from way too many plots not quite meshing together well most of the time. 

But still, I ended this one wanting to read the finale much more than I wanted to read this one after the first.

Death of a Dragon

 I picked up the Shadowrun DragonHeart Saga a while back, since evidently my favorite Mage in the setting showed up in here somewhere. While he isn't in the first book, what is in here is kind of interesting.

Stranger Souls opens with Ryan Murphy, an agent of Dunzelkhan (Elder Dragon, and newly elected president of the United Canadian and American States) running afoul of some kind of ritual in Atzlan (formerly Mexico.) Not long after Ryan goes down, Dunzelkhan blows up in front of the Watergate Hotel in the DC Fed. 

Then we briefly meet Lethe, a male spirit tasked by Thalya to find the Dragon Heart to keep the chasm between our world and the outsiders open. 

It's a lot to process, and made more complicated by the fact that Ryan, while not dead, is however being prepped to receive possession by a gent who currently lives on as a Matrix simulation. And lest we forget, there's Burnout, the cyberzombie, who, like a certain antagonist from another franchise, is much more man than machine. 

Eventually this all winds up with the Dragon heart fallin into the Snake Rive along with an antagonist possessed by Lethe while Ryan figures out who he is now that he has two different sets of memories. 

It's engaging, but it's messy.

Making a killing on the licensing

Grady Hendrix's new novel, The Final Girl Support Group, amuses and frustrates in almost equal measure, which isn't helped by Lynette, our focus character, being agoraphobic and paranoid, nor do a few dropped plot lines through the course of the book. (To be fair, Lynette first got hung on a rack of antlers in Utah by a guy dressed like Santa who then killed her boyfriend Tommy; a few years later, the killer's brother also dressed up as Santa and tried to shoot her.)

On the other hand, given the basis of the novel, this isn't exactly a great surprise, since the mostly 70's-80's Slashers popping up in here had similar issues. (I mean, one girl, Julia, went through this universe's Scream, which was the early 90's, and Stephanie, who we meet later on, just more or less undergoes the 2009 remake of Friday the 13th. The original is represented by Adrienne, much like Nightmare on Elm Street is represented in Heather, while Marilyn went through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dani's brother escaped the asylum on Halloween to try to kill her both at home and later at the hospital. Crazy Chrissy, who we meet towards the end, is not part of this group, mainly because she fell in love with the guy stalking her Homecoming dance, and now sells murderabelia. For those who haven't caught on to the naming conventions here, our Final Girls either share the name of the actress who survived the initial franchise offering, or have a name that's a play on it.)

The main girls here (Lynette, Julia, Adrienne, Marilyn, Dani, Heather) are all part of a long term group therapy session with Dr. Elliott. As happens with long term therapy, most everyone is in a rut, following the same patterns that they've been cast in. Adrienne now owns Camp Red Hook, which she's turned into a sanctuary for women survivors of violence. Not long after the start, a new massacre happens at Red Hook, leading Adrienne to kill herself. Someone else confesses to the murders Dani stopped, making her doubt that she did the right thing by killing her brother with a tire iron. The man who killed Lynette's family and boyfriend reveals the letters she wrote to him as part of a pen pal program and says that they'd had a sexual relationship, which sets her up as an accomplice. 

Not long after Lynette's apartment gets shot up, she starts believing that someone much have hacked her hard drive, read the book she was writing filled with her perceptions of her group mates, and is using that information to take down the final girls. (Some of this gets proven correct after all the girls get emailed copies of the book.) 

Lynette goes on the run, gets arrested, gets broken out by the lawyer she used to sleep with, then goes on the run with Stephanie in tow, thinking the newest final girl is likely also a target. 

Eventually, we do find out everything that's going on and why, but there's quite a bit of missing information towards the end, most of which involves secondary plots. 

I've seen a few posts on goodreads questioning this book vs. Riley Sager's debut novel Final Girls, and while they share similar themes, they are not the same book. While they share similar set ups, Sager's is a lot less movie obsessed, and the heroine there is less sure of her own motives. Hendrix, who's writing tends to center on various tropes and molding them into something new, takes this narrative in different directions, and doesn't make the rookie mistake of throwing the two biggest plot twists within a page of each other and 5 pages before the end. They're both fun reads. And other than a similarity of titles, they're very different reads. 

While a few loose threads brought this down a peg, I still really enjoyed this one.

Wedding Bell Blues

 Seanan McGuire's When Sorrows Come finally completes the long time coming nuptials of Tybalt, King of Cats, and October Day, one of three known Dóchas sidhe, albeit by a human father. Given how long this plot has been simmering, it's nice to see a payoff on it.

Mind you, the wedding's in Toronto, and just about everyone who's not dead, imprisoned in a deep fairie realm, or in enchanted sleep shows up for it, just in time to get suckered into an attempted coup on the High King of the West by doppelgangers acting under orders from another shadowy figure. 

Which means we're basically reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer Gets Married. Which is not a bad thing, as Buffy (despite Joss Whedon's recent revelations) remains some of the best TV made. 

But, it does mean that much of the narrative is essentially a case of let's solve a mystery while we get to the grand event at the end, which climaxes with Toby and her wedding party facing down archers while wearing formal dress. It's an awesome spectacle, cheesy as can be, but none the less deserving of a bucket of popcorn and cheering. And the sheer numbers of cameos throughout the main book (and the novella at the end, which is less a novella and more an epilogue, since Toby narrates the reception), bring a lot of plots covered in the prior 14 book back to the forefront, showing Toby how her unusual choices have lead to better outcomes for people who would otherwise not have had them. 

As to where this goes next, I cannot say. McGuire has stated she knows where October's story ends, but this seems much more of a resting point than a finale. I look forward to how this continues.

Running with the shadows of the night

 Robert N. Charette's final volume of Secrets of Power, Find Your Own Truth, is very exciting, and deftly maneuvers around several plot threads right up until the end, when it falls flat on its face during the dismount. 

We start with Twist/Sam off in Australia doing his best Indiana Jones and trying to recover a stone filled magic to heal his sister Janice of her Wendigo transformation. What he doesn't know is that said stone is a keystone keeping the totem of Spider in check. (Note to readers: most totems in the setting are "good". Insect and arachnid totems aren't.) 

Any rate, Sam's big ritual to heal his sister doesn't work, so he going looking for Howling Coyote, the Amerind shaman responsible for the Ghost Dance that reshaped North American politics not long after the Awakening. The Elves are looking for the stone, and Sato of Renraku who played a small part in book one is looking for Sam. Dodger is looking for the ghost in the machine he keeps running in to. 

Finally, in the third act, everyone finds what they're looking for, as Sam manages to recreate the Ghost Dance, and we get what feels a LOT tacked on as plot threads long ignored suddenly get tied in to the finale. Which is fine, it just feels a bit like a GM liking a players' idea enough to rewrite a plot line that they suggested into the canon. It happens, but it also feels very very tacked on. 

Was reading this trilogy worth it?

Yeah, even if the setting has developed well beyond the scope of what this early fiction presents. Which I'm not going to complain about, since it's fascinating to see how things evolved over the years.

Nice to know relations didn't improve

Robert N. Charrette's Choose Your Enemies Carefully picks up the tale of Twist/Sam and his search for his sister a few years after the events detailed in the first book of Secrets of Power. Although this time, we actually get to meet Janice, the goblinized sister. Indeed, she gets rescued from the Yomi walled neighborhood in Hong Kong in the first chapter. We gets glimpses of her as she works with another of her kind (implied heavily to be an orc or troll, although the big reveal at the end proves that assumption wrong), as she moves around the world. 

Her brother Sam, aka Twist, on the other hand is trying to raise money to go rescue her from Yomi, proving again to be an ethical Shadowrunner. He does wind up getting sucked into the books main plot through deceit by the people he cares about, winding up in England, dealing with a Circle of Druids trying to oust the Elves of Tir, which used to be Ireland. Said Druids first attempt recreates an old Christopher Lee movie (I'm ignoring Nic Cage's remake; this book predates it, plus no one is screaming about bees), then morphs into something else. 

By the end, Sam/Twist has dealt with betrayal from both Dodger, his hetero husband; and Hart, who was trying to kill him in the last book, and is now his side piece overseas. At the very end, after all the ugly chains of story resolve and we find out who all has been using everyone else throughout, we watch as Sam and Janice reunite briefly, and the consequences thereof, which will likely be one of the plot threads in the finale. 

While this book was not quite as readable as the first volume, it remained a pleasant experience. I mean, we're watching someone who's essentially a pawn learn to move outside of his programmed parameters, and how his relationship with his Dog totem is making him more of a Shaman of Justice more than anything else.I'll be interested to see how everything works out.