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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.