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.

Falling Up the Corporate Ladder

 Thanks to the rerelease of the original Shadowrun novels as Legends, I managed to get the original Shadowrun kickoff novels, Robert N. Charrette's Secrets of Power trilogy, starting with Never Deal with a Dragon (which, based on the narrative here, is sage advice.)

Anyway, we're focused on Renraku data analyst Sam Verner, who starts off as a pet of the Director, until his siters undergoes Goblinization (aka her genetics activated and turned her into something else, like an ork, troll, or elf), at which point he gets unceremoniously transferred to the infamous Renraku Seattle Arcology. 

Not long after arriving in Seattle, like not even gotten off the plane, he and some coworkers get kidnapped by a team of Shadowrunners. Sam ends up helping the runners after figuring out their original mission was going to wind up not doing what they thought it would, which earns him the enmity of Security lady Crenshaw, who spends the rest of the book trying to prove he's in cahoots with the shadowrunners, despite his odd corporate loyalty. 

So, eventually Sam decides to get himself extracted from Renraku and choose a new path. Which doesn't go well, since the team extracting him are using the extraction to cover putting a doppelganger INTO the arcology. 

And everyone seems to be double crossing one another, from the runners, to the corporate types, to the 3 dragons that show up at various points. (By the end, we've met the Eastern Dragon Tessian, and Western Dragons Lofwyr and Haesslich.)

We, as readers, get some idea of exactly how events seemingly unrelated manage to trap Sam in a life he never expected, although we never get a real picture of the actual game he's a pawn in. I mean, we are kind of left to assume that one way or another, the actual extraction was supposed to be the sentient AI trapped in the Arcology, but who wanted it and why remain a mystery, as do the promise of freedom it was working towards. 

Sam also learns that he has access to magic, and indeed a Dog totem somewhere in the mess that leads him down the Pacific Coast and to Montreal before winding up back in Seattle again. He also meets an elf decker named Dodger whom he forms a Bromance with. (I realize the publication on this predates the emergence of Bromance and probably the concept of Metrosexuals, but honestly Sam and Dodger appear to be queer coded, even if Sam is making the beast with two backs with Sally Tseung by the end.)

Was it a fun read? Indeed. Nothing amuses quite like Sasquatches with their own dragon backed agendas, fish out of water characters, and a sci fi pulp feels. Do I wish they had revealed one particular characters motivations earlier, since we find out a major factor in her pursuit a few paragraphs before she exits the narrative? Yeah, because while it makes her motivations a lot clearer, it also feels like something thrown in with no real connection to the rest of the story, or exactly how much said plot point would likely trigger a few readers. That side, it was worth reading, and I look forward to seeing what the next two volumes bring.

Gallows Humor

 Finishing up Stephen Kenson's Talon Trilogy with The Burning Time, which wraps up Talon's story quite well. 

I'm technically skipping the second book here, Ragnarock, since I read it last year, but ok.

Anyway, Talon and his crew get sucked into a new adventure thanks in part to a run gone bad. (I mean, that's pretty much Shadowrun for "You meet at the local tavern"...) In this case, trying to get something from Cross Applied Technologies, which ends up bringing Roy Kilaro involved. Roy, who wants to become a Seraphim, is in Boston from Montreal investigating an odd data stream he found from one of Boston's chip heads. 

On the home front, Trouble, the cabal's Decker, falls back in with her ex, since the gay street mage obviously ain't interested in the slotting she's offering. Talon, in the mean time, keeps running across his ex's ghost. And it would seem Mama Iaga is using Gallow to help pull off whatever plan she has for the Christmas return of Halley's Comet. (I get the distinct impression this particular book was written right before a new edition, since a second wave of goblinization known as SURGE starts happening towards the end, who lead to less rigid character creation in the system.)

By the end, everyone gets something akin to a happy ending, other than Mama Iaga, who pretty much gets what she had coming. 

I rather enjoyed this book, particularly towards the end when Talon more or less takes an Orphic journey to find Jason, his ex. While my love life has never been QUITE as dramatic as Talon's, the emotions we get through his adventures ring quite true. These are well worth picking up if you can find them.

Pop, Six, Squish, Uh uh, Cicero, Lipschitz!

 So, when I was looking up Fourth Down and Out, both Amazon and the library suggested Andrew Welsh-Huggins edited Columbus Noir, part of a much larger series of noir anthologies set in different cities around the US. (I kind of doubt Columbus is big on that list; given the series started in 2013 and Columbus is 2019....)

Anyway, while the stories are ok, and set in places I know, not many of them would be what I'd consider noir. No leggy women coming in to a detective's office, and leading him by the nose into trouble, no real black humor, no jazz playing in the background...

No, we mostly get women murdering their boyfriends or husbands, or getting other men to do it for them. Admittedly, some of it is interesting, like the editor's story about the governor cheating on his wife, and how his aide takes care of the problem on behalf of the governor's wife after he sleeps with her...

Oh yes. Almost none of the people in here are faithful. With a few exceptions, like Yolonda Tosette Sanders' Whitehall story that involves an alcoholic woman trying to solve her brother's murder years later, most of this is people killing off significant others, either theirs or someone else's. Usually over drugs, sex, but occasionally real estate. (Craig McDonald's German Village story being a major example of this.)

I was again sad that, even in Columbus's Gayborhoods, very few gay people played a major part in any of the stories. (One minor exception being Daniel Best's story set in the Short North, but even then the gay person in question in playing sugar daddy to his drug dealer, shows up for 2 paragraphs, then we get back to the felon killing his business partner and sleeping with said guy's wife.) This made me doubly sad, given how much queer coding was built into the old noir and pulp fictions that inspired this anthology. 

On the other hand, Khalid Moalim's North Side story does address several real life issues while giving us a parable on how gossip ruins lives. (In this case, a Somali girl who's much more assimilated makes her father angry by getting engaged to a black man. While this resolves itself in one dead body, and two important people in her life going to prison, it is a look at the weird dichotomy of how African immigrants deal with BIPOC in a culture where they themselves are often viewed as BIPOC.)

Do I wish it was more like what I was hoping for? Yes. I would have even settled for more realistic Tales From the Crypt style stories, where the morality play is there, but wrapped in such shenanigans to make it easier to swallow.

Me-OUCH!

 One of the stores in the Platform I work in sells Andrew Welsh-Huggin's Fourth Down and Out, and after reading the summary on the back, I decided to check it out of the library to see if it was worth buying for mom. 

What I found was, even if Mom would likely not enjoy it, I certainly did. 

Our story opens on Private Investigator Andy Hayes getting the stuffing beat out of him over a laptop in the back of his van, with the assailant also pointing out he lost a bunch of money on a game thanks to Andy. 

We flash back to the start of this adventure, as Andy gets hired at the Cup O' Joe in German Village to find out who's blackmailing his client with a video of said client cheating on his wife with an 18 year old. Which leads to the boyfriend of the 18 year old,  which in turn leads to his parents in New Albany. 

As the book progresses, we find out several people have reasons to want the laptop, from the lady who's been writing English assignments for Buckeye football players to keep eligible; the fixer, who hired her to write said assignments; the dad of the blackmailer, who has some shady financial deals on the laptop; and Andy's assailant, who was paid to retrieve it and got a bullet to the chest and a swim in the Grandview Quarry for his trouble. 

On top of this, we have a secondary investigation into whether or not a professor's wife is having an affair, which ends up being a red herring for the real mystery here. 

Towards the end, we finally find out why Andy's relationship with the fixer is so strained, and get a really good look at (in this case fictional) dirty dealings within the athletics department at Ohio State. (I realize this situation is fictional, I said that in the last sentence. However, given what's come to light since 2014 when this was published...)

I enjoyed it, even if some of the biggest fiction in here was finding parking in German Village less than a mile away from where you were trying to go. I doubt non residents of Ohio would find much of interest here, although you never know.