How can one little street swallow so many lies?

 So, as I generally point out once a year when the Riley Sager pseudonym publishes a new volume, these improve with every iteration, even if they tend to recycle concepts. 

In Middle of the Night, we're dealing with 40 year old Ethan returning to the Hemlock Circle cul-de-sac in the middle of New Jersey outside Princeton. With one exception, all of the houses on the circle are occupied by the same families who lived there 30 years ago when Ethan's best friend vanished from a tent in Ethan's backyard and never reappeared. Ethan is separated from his wife, and living at the house he grew up in as his mom and dad have moved to Florida. Ethan is plagued by recurring nightmares of the sound of someone slitting the side of the tent. 

Throughout the novel, we get flashbacks (from other character's perspectives, even) chronicling the 24 hours prior to Billy vanishing, showing how none of the kids or adults in the Circle are particularly honest about anything going on 30 years prior. We have Russ, in the past the younger brother of one of the neighborhood bullies who OD'd/committed suicide, in the present he runs a sporting goods store; we have Angela, Ethan's former babysitter who's now home watching over her dementia ridden dad with her10 year old son; we have Ragesh, also a bully in the past who's now a cop with a husband. We have the usual strange and mysterious in the Hawthorne Institute, now a State Park. 

While this being Sager does mean we get 4 or 5 major twists as we get towards the end, this time they're better paced so the reader can actually absorb and react to them before the next one springs. We also get a throw away reference to both Final Girls and The Last Time I Lied, thus giving us a fairly unconnected shared universe. 

Honestly, this is probably the best the author has achieved, and I found myself enjoying it, even as I wondered how certain facts were overlooked in the past.

Well she wants to be the queen as she thinks about her scene

 So, since I'm waiting for missing books to arrive, I went digging through the library again and came up with Christopher Pike's Alosha, which looks like it was marketed as one of his adult novels, even if the main characters are 13 years old or so. 

As an aside, let's talk Christopher Pike. I'm pretty sure several folks around my age have fond memories of his YA books, as do I. (His YA fiction was about 90% fun reading and 10% WTAF. And there's more than a little crossover between them. From interdimensional sapient dinosaurs trying to kill teenagers, teenage ghosts solving their own murders, or the worst YA novel I ever read of his, where the main character is being tormented by the baby she's having aborted while both of them are dying...) His Adult novels haver a less favorable ratio. A few are pretty interesting, but plots that you can slide by with in YA don't work as well in adult fiction, like having Satan and Nazis use ketamine to force people's souls out of their bodies so the bad people can move in.

Ali is a 13 year old girl, living with her truck driver father after her mother died in a car crash on Ali's 12th birthday. Much of her free time is spent in the woods on the side of the nearby Pete's Peak, where she tries to guilt the loggers into not cutting down the forest. Her best friend Cindy isn't as keen on this as Ali is, but... 

Anyway, as we open, Ali is on her way up to the forest to tie ribbons on the trees as a small form of protest. She, however, gets interrupted by unknown creatures and winds up buried alive in an avalanche. She manages to escape, and convinces Cindy and Steve (a geek acquaintance) to go back up, since Ali is convinced it was Bigfoot. This occasion leads to finding Bigfoot prints, and Ali getting thrown in the river not far from the falls. She manages to escape and meets a talking tree who tells he she has passed two of seven tests and gives her the thrust of the plot: A Yanti has opened on the top of Pete's Peak, and she has two days to reach the summit and close it to keep Elementals from another dimension from entering our world, all while passing the other 5 tests. 

Which leads to Ali roping in Karl, who is slightly older, Cindy, and Steve to climb the mountain the next day, along with a rather larcenous Leprechaun and a troll she meets on the way up. 

For the most part, it plays out like a YA urban fantasy, and it's pretty good reading. 

Unfortunately, it's also book 1 of a trilogy, and while I found book 3 in my collection, I'm missing the second book, so we'll return to this when book 2 arrives.

And the Guf was empty

 For reason I still can't quite fathom, I decided to at least attempt to reread Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left Behind series, which unsurprisingly starts with Left Behind. (As a note, I read the series back when I first moved to Columbus in 2001, found the entire thing [mostly] at a used book sale, and decided to grab it, since it cost roughly $2.) Well, gee, let's start unpacking this.

We open with Rayford, Pan Continental pilot, flying New York to London. He's contemplating putting the moves on his lead flight attendant, Hattie. Well, problem being quite a few people on the plane vanish into thin air, leaving their clothing, implants, fillings, etc behind. One the flight also is Buck, reporter wunderkind for a weekly news magazine. Buck had been in Israel a few months earlier and watched as Russia bombed it, but through a miracle, no damage was done. 

So, Rayford finds his wife and son have vanished, but his daughter in San Jose is still there. Buck goes to Chicago, then does manage to get to London, where one of his sources blows up in a car bomb.

Rayford reaches out to the church his wife attended, and learns that this was The RAPTURE, and he missed being taken to heaven by Jesus, and must now become a Christian to make it to heaven 7 years hence after the world more of less gets destroyed. He works on bringing daughter Chloe into the fold, Hattie and Buck as well. In the mean time, a rising political star out of Romania ascends to the presidency of his country, then takes over the United Nations by the end of this book. That would be Nicolae Carpathia. By the end, Buck, Rayford, and Chloe join Pastor Bruce in forming the Tribulation Force, trying to survive the upcoming seven years of Tribulation. Hattie has become Nicolae's personal assistant. 

Now then. Anyone who's read this objectively will testify that the prose is horrible. That becomes fairly obvious after a chapter or two. The dialogue is stilted, and the world seems to recover from the disappearances a heck of a lot more quickly that one would imagine. Depending on how one reads The Book of Revelation, the Antichrist is the first seal broken, so his appearance isn't a great surprise. (I always through it was War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, but some translations lump War and Pestilence into one horseman. Neither here nor there. Given the series needs a villain, Carpathia steps up fairly easily.) We also get the "Two Witnesses" (Eli and Moshe) quite a bit earlier than the book this is supposedly coming out of places them. Here, they show up about 2/3 of the way through book one. In Revelation, they show up in Chapter 11 after the 6th trumpet. Again, not my concern. I'm not a biblical scholar by any means. Then again, as I understand it, the entire Rapture scenario isn't actually in Revelation, and instead comes from Paul's letters, and given there are entire non fiction books dedicated to arguing when exactly in the end of the world its supposed to happen, I can only roll my eyes and think of the scene in Life of Brian when everyone picks up his holy relics to make everyone else worship. Or the whole thing about how Carpathia resembles an original Roman, blond and blue eyed. (Sweetie, that's Northern Europe.) Or the complete lack of poor people or people of color in this. Or the random conversation between Hattie and Rayford about how Abortion doctors need pregnant women to stay in business. (Seems the babbies and embryos and fetuses all got taken up with the children.) 

I mean, when I originally read this series, I was looking for insight into how certain segments of society I was interacting with thought. 20 some years on, after listening to dog whistles being blown through megaphones for several years, yeah. There are several in here, like ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT, ONE WORLD CURRENCY, PEOPLE WITH MONEY AND INFLUENCE DESTROYING EVERYTHING (ok, that last one is kind of true, but here, it's more George Soros is working for the Antichrist than Elon Musk is flooding a platform he bought with racism and fascism.)

I just can't wait to get into the later books again, where we get condescension to any belief that isn't either Orthodox Judaism that will accept Jesus by the final book  or Crispy Christianity, or some Dante-esque moments where people they don't agree with are shown to have failed to be good Christians and are therefore being Tribulated. Wee.

Twisting your tinsel

 In yet another "Where did this come from?", I just finished The Fat Man: A Tale of North Pole Noir by Ken Harmon, about 3 months before the season it was meant to be read in.But hey, out of season is occasionally my thing, so....

Anyway, the book is narrated by Coal Patrol leader Gumdrop Coal. His entire job at Santa's workshop is to deliver coal to all the bad boys and girls. Until Santa fires him a few months before Christmas. Which leads to the promotion of one Candy Cane taking over a bunch of Santa's activities, an intrepid girl reported named Rosebud Jubilee working with Gumdrop to find out why, particularly after a human Gumdrop beat up to teach the son some manners winds up shot dead with a BB from a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model Air Rifle with a compass on the stock. (Yes, references to just about Christmas story ever told on film or in prose shows up at some point in here. And entire chapter in Whoville is written in Seussian verse.) 

By the end, we get a heck of a lot of Christian allegory on the meaning of Christmas, largely due to the appearance of a child with a blanket), a hell of a lot really funny scenes involving holiday entertainment references, and a pretty good mystery. We also get one particular scene in the Mistletoe Forest that doesn't really fit a Christmas trope or a hard boiled mystery. On the other hand, we do get an absolutely hysterical sequence involving all 12 days of Christmas.

After Halloween, if you find yourself wanting something fun to help you get past the sap and treacle that normally fills December, this is a great way to do so.

If only middle age refraction worked like that

 Once again, digging through the library as I continue towards shelving everything finally, and found Gary Zebrun's Someone You Know in a box. I have no idea when I acquired this, as it has no price tag, no scratched out library stickers, etc. Looked at the dust cover synopsis and decided "Why Not?"

Which may have been a mistake, since the first half dovetailed with my personal issues in unexpected ways. 

Anyway, We're following middle aged Daniel Caruso, a newspaper feature columnist (Think Dave Barry or Erma Bombeck), who is married with an 18 year old daughter. As we open, he's in Seattle for a news paper conference, and cruising a local S&M bar looking for penis. He picks up a firefighter, who takes him home. Daniel leaves Seattle for his home in Providence the next morning (Good Friday), and as he's waiting in O'Hare for a connection, he hooks up with a guy in a bathroom stall. After finishing, he finds someone has slipped a bottle of pills he found at the firefighter's house under the stall door. 

Seems ol' Daniel has an oddball stalker, one who kills every one of Daniel's tricks an hour or so after he finishes. 

I think we end up with 6 dead bodies with a condom attached to their chest by the end, which is Easter Monday. Admittedly, one of those is a person Daniel only kisses, but still... And to make matters worse, the stalker is emailing Daniel, sending souvenirs, and involving Daniel's family in the game. 

Given it's only about 200 pages, I can't get into too much detail abut everything that happens, but...

On one hand, the book is engaging, and Daniel's spiral is very well portrayed. On the other hand, we're again dealing with situations where Daniel should have been shooting dust or comatose from over exertion in the overly tight timeline we're given. That Daniel also travels quite a bit, winding up in New York City on Easter, the suspension of disbelief starts flying out the window after reading it. Mind you, the other problem was that I was pretty sure the identity of the stalker after about 50 pages, was correct, then tried to figure out how said stalker managed to avoid being seen in areas where Daniel would have recognized a familiar face in a strange place. 

I mean, like I said, it held my attention, but the engagement ended not long after the final page and the last bit of trying to insert Jesus into the narrative.

Sense and Sensability and Vampires

 Combining Books 2 and 3 of Philippe Boulle's Victorian Age Vampire trilogy into one review to save time and effort. 

Book 2, The Madness of Priests, enjoins us in Victoria and Regina travels to Paris, seeking the trail of her mother. We also spend time following Regina's father and her sort of fiance as they get variously involved in Kindred affairs, as well as get back to Beckett as he seeks information of Kemintiri, the thousand faced bride of Set. Oh yes, and Regina's best friend, who having watched her husband get murdered in book 1, winds up in a Sanitarium overseen by the Malkavian sheriff of North London. We also find out Mithras, the very very ancient Vampire Prince of London, is acting strangely, and he too gets locked in the Sanitarium by the end. 

Oh yes, and while in Paris, we meet Anatole, the Malkavian who becomes the Priest of Gehenna in the modern age. Here, he's running a rather infamous prison complex, perverting the proper rituals to suit vampires, all while luring in Regina and Victoria, who are in turn pursued by Regina's father and her fiancee. (The fiance is now under the control of the London Ventrue, but Dad's all wrapped up in the Society of Leopold, aka The Holy Inquisition.)

By the end, the stage is set for a trip to Hapsburg Vienna to find out why Regina's mother is so important to the Tremere.

 Which brings us to book 3, The Wounded King. We start in Vienna, as Regina has been turned into a Vampire by Victoria. Regina's father and fiancee also arrive, and again hook up with the Society while Regina and Victoria try to get an audience with the Tremere. It gets rather ugly, as Dad winds up dead, the fiance's best friend gets eaten by another vampire, Beckett runs off with Mom, Regina nd Victoria start arguing, and eventually we all wind up back in London and County Durham for a finale that involves a bunch of Thaumaturgy, the reveal of Keminitri, a Revanant family under Tremere control, and a bunch of ugly. Suffice it to say, no one winds up happy by the end. 

While it was nice to finally finish these after nearly 20 years, I still feel a bit like the main purpose was to hide cameos of the "Signature Characters" from the Dark Ages and Modern Clannovels in another era. On the other hand, with Hesha, we get a better look at the beliefs of the Settites (now The Ministry in 5th Edition) and how it can be reflected in every day things.

Pride and Predjudice and Vampires

 So, I was looking through my library, and found Philippe Boulle's A Morbid Initiation (Book 1 in the Victorian Age Vampire trilogy) sitting there reminding me I bought the first two books years ago and never read them. (To be fair, I started reading this one and gave up after a few chapters. Mind you, some of that was me being annoyed with the Revised Edition, some of it was the fact it takes forever before any vampires actually reveal themselves...) 

Anyway, much like the Clan Novels, this second attempt fared better. We spend much of book 1 focused on one Regina Blake, daughter of Lord Blake and Lady Emma. The family has moved back from British Cairo to outside London due to Lady Emma's illness. Emma dies, her family shows up, and they act very strangely. In the meantime, Victoria Ash shows up at the funeral, having been a friend to Emma in the past. (Indeed, Miss Ash walks in on Regina almost consummating her relationship with Malcolm Seward, one of her father's loyal soldiers.)

Urgh. Anyway, most of the book concerns Regina getting involved in Victorian Era Kindred intrigues as she tries to figure out why her mother's sarcophagus is empty, why her cousins seem to have fast healing, and why her presumed fiance killed her after ravishing her while she work a bull mask.

We also have Beckett escaping London and meeting up with Hesha, although the plot is pretty much a side note in the interludes. 

It's fun reading, once you get into it, although it takes its good sweet time getting going. People familiar with the signature characters from the Revised edition will probably get a kick out of the cameos made by people focused on in the Clan Novels, although likely people with no knowledge of the Vampire RPG will be as lost as poor Regina.

Meet cute and haunt

 So, as I was perusing my shelves for something I haven't read recently while I wait for library holds to arrive, I found Better Homes and Hauntings by Molly Harper lingering unobtrusively on one of my shelves. I have no idea where I got this from. There are no library stamps or barcodes, no price tags affixed to the UPC... We'll just assume it was a gift of the collection Gods and run with it. 

Which is a good thing, since it turned out to be a fun yarn that proved women can be just as pop culturally geeky as men. We open on Nina, a who runs a landscaping business in Rhode Island, arriving at Crane's Rest, an estate granted by the governor on a spit of land/island a ferry's ride away from Newport. Nina is accompanied by Cindy, the interior organizer, and her employer's best friend, Jake, who is doing the architectural design as part of the restoration. Her boss, Deacon Whitley, runs EyeDee, a Facebook style company he founded after graduating from Harvard. Problem is, the estate is haunted, and the Whitley family is cursed, all because of the unsolved murder of his great grandmother Catherine, presumably at the hands of his great grandfather Gerald. Part of the process involves everyone living on the island during the renovation, despite the fact the work crews have a tendency to get spooked by cold spots and phantom bodies appearing on the widow's walk.

Since this is light paranormal romance, we get various combinations as the couples work through their various issues on the way to couplehood, but we also get ghostly visitations, visions, and a mystery as to what happened and WHY.

It wound up being very entertaining and readable, and I'm sad that this seems to be a stand alone novel, since I'd love to read more about these characters.

Kind of surprised the Sacred Timeline hasn't been destroyed at this point

 So, Dragons of Eternity showed up right after I finished the second volume up, so yay!

Let me start this by saying this volume is much better balanced than the previous installments. Again, we're dealing with time travel in a fantasy setting, which tends to get a bit confusing, particularly since the "present" setting is mostly unaffected by changes further in the past, with a caveat that the River of Time doesn't rise at all once, thus with one setting being roughly 5 years prior, and another 5 centuries prior (or so)...

On the other hand, it's a great opportunity for fan service, as Tanis ends up getting sent back to the dawn of the War of the Lance in the "Chaos Timeline" to serve as bait while Destina and Brother Kairn travel back to the Third Dragon War to try to fix what they screwed up in the last volume. 

Which means, we get treated to re-imagined moments from the first ever book in the entire series as Tanis and the original Heroes of the Lance meet at the Inn of the Last Home on the night Riverwind and Goldmoon show up with the Blue Crystal Staff, only this time in a world where Takhisis won the Third Dragon War and the other Gods are now returning to try to free the world. 

There are some really great moments in there, like Tasslehoff bludgeoning Flint with the Blue Crystal Staff to cure him of his heart problems and Fizban being Fizban. There are some really confusing moments, since going back to a period where you were alive replaces that you with current you, or the fact that the return to the Third Dragon War suggests that people who traveled there in book 2 aren't there when two others return to the period. There are also a few WTF moments in there, like when Chaos Time Caramon winds up hitching a ride with Zeboim to get to the High Clerist's Tower. 

They do leave the timeline opened ended, since Dalamar has foreseen the Chaos War and the "5th Age", although it's never quite defined if it will still come to pass by the end of this.

Honestly though, something Raistlin says partway through helps, about how even if they have no memories of what happened in the alternate timelines, their hearts will remember, which does better explain how the Companions managed to work together long enough to win the war. 

While I understand the current owners of the setting have no interest in publishing novels, this will likely be the end of the saga for a while. And it is a pretty good place to end.

One would think high fantasy wouldn't involve so much time travel

 Thanks to goodreads, I found out books 2 and 3 of the DragonLance Destinies Trilogy had been released. Which was mildly annoying, since I missed it. Anyway, just finished Dragons of Fate, which is book 2, with book three arriving at the library this afternoon. 

When we left off, Destina (a new character from the era post Legends but prior to 5th Age) had taken her current iteration of Tasslehoff back in time to to the night when the entire series started and took Raistlin and Sturm back further in time to the end of the 3rd Dragon War. Issue, of course being that with both a Kender and The Greygem (which holds Chaos), time can be changed, as Raistlin learned the hard way in Legends. 

Ugh. so, This younger version of Sturm meets Huma and Raistlin meet Magius, and Detina dn Tasslehoff get invol;ved in their own escapades in the past. In the 'present', Dalamar and Justinius seek to repair the Device of Time Traveling which broke during the trip back to Huma. Which in turn allows the authors to highlight how artificers work in the DragonLance setting, much like 5th Age brought sorcery into the Wizarding world. Of course, Tas winds up meeting the Gnomes of the era....

Anyway, this one, much like volume one, ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, as the Butterfly effect comes into play based on one action. 

While I enjoyed this one more than the first volume (among other things, the pacing is a lot better), and I enjoy watching Raistlin and Sturm gain an understanding of each other they never had in prior outings, it still feels a bit like the balance between pathos and comedy is a bit off here. I mean, Tas by himself is hysterical, but it just doesn't seem as meshed in with the meat of the story. Still worth reading for fans of the Lance.