The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I had intended to simply glance at the first page of The Angel’s Game and then set it aside to finish other books I was reading, but the first paragraph ensnared me… The Angel’s Game follows up on the promise of its first paragraph with great skill. The book is a fantasy, a mystery and mainstream fiction about a writer’s life all at once. It is an iteration of the legend of Faust, but it seems wholly new in the hands of Carlos Ruiz Zafon and his talented translator, Lucia Graves… I was fascinated by The Angel’s Game from cover to cover. It held me in thrall for the entire week over which I read it; I lived there far more than I did in the world where I was going about my usual business. I am still puzzling over the ending, fascinated by the way Zafon manages to wrap up all the threads — but doing so the way a magician makes a scarf appear and then disappear again, leaving one to wonder just exactly what one has just read… Read the rest.

The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell

What does the United States look like 25 years after zombies have led the nation into an apocalypse? What is life like for a teenager born ten years or so after the apocalypse? What has she seen, and done, and what is the state of her soul? These are the questions first-time novelist Alden Bell attempts to answer in The Reapers Are the Angels, a soul-searing novel that looks at some of life’s hardest questions through the lens of violence so common and natural it isn’t even evil… This is one of the oddest and best zombie novels you will ever read. The focus isn’t on the zombies at all… In some very strange ways, this book is almost a prayer of thanks for all that remains when the worst has happened… Read the rest.

Feed by Mira Grant

I have grown weary of zombies. In the past five years, everyone started writing zombie novels, apparently out of ennui at the thought of writing yet another variation on vampires, and that was good. But the mass of zombie material all seemed to hit the market at the same time, and it was too much, too undiluted, with too many books that weren’t good enough to be worth reading. Soon I was avoiding any book that purported to be about zombies, because, hey, enough already. So when Mira Grant’s Feed came on the market, I was not inclined to read it… Then Feed turned up on the list of Hugo nominees; and at about the same time, I learned that Mira Grant and Seanan McGuire (who has become one of my favorite writers for her October Daye urban fantasy series) are the same person. Okay, I thought, one more zombie novel. If I don’t like it, I won’t have to read the others in the series… Read the rest.

Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald

… Cyberabad Days is set in the same universe as McDonald’s River of Gods, a highly praised novel that won the British Science Fiction Award in 2005, and received nominations for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. In the seven stories of Cyberabad Days, linked by setting and technology but not by characters, McDonald imagines a mature India split asunder by politics and the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, but still a cluster of countries that constitutes a major world power. These are countries of immense contradiction, where the rich are richer than ever and the poor are completely left behind… This is science fiction at its very best, challenging intellectually yet stylistically well-executed. These stories make you think, imagine and wonder even as they entertain. This collection is not to be missed. Read the rest.

According to Webster’s, “occultation” means “the state of being hidden from view or lost to notice” or “the shutting off of the light of one celestial body by the intervention of another; esp: an eclipse of a star or planet by the moon.”  Both definitions seem appropriate to Laird Barron’s collection, Occultation and Other Stories, the latter as metaphor, because Barron can scare you as much with what remains hidden in his stories as with what he drags from the shadows and exposes to your horrified view. This second collection by this relatively new horror writer builds on the promise of The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, and makes it clear why no “year’s best” gets issued these days without at least one piece by Barron in it.

“Strappado,” for instance, is one of the most frightening stories I’ve ever read, and it haunts me even though it’s been a couple of years since I first read it in Ellen Datlow’s anthology, Poe. It’s the story of a couple of wealthy men, dissipated but still interested in new experiences of vice, art, and drink. After a passionate sexual interlude following a chance reunion in an Indian tourist town, they make their way to a disco off the beaten path. After drinking themselves almost into oblivion, they hear of a chance to see a Van Iblis exhibition. Van Iblis, it seems, is a guerilla artist, unwelcome in most countries “[b]ecause the shit he pulls off violates a few laws here and there. Unauthorized installations, libelous materials, health code violations. Explosions!” The excitement of seeing one of his exhibitions cannot be denied, and the men crowd into a rental van with a number of other thrill seekers for a long drive inland. The setting for the exhibition doesn’t seem too exciting:  prefabricated warehouse modules and storage sheds, a bulldozer and, ominously, plastic barrels of hydrochloric acid. The longer you read, the more you can feel the jungle starting to close in, and the more things start to feel off kilter; this just isn’t right. Very much not right, as things turn out, though I’m not going to tell you another word about it, except to say that I’ve begun to reconsider having red as my favorite color. If this story doesn’t give you nightmares, it’s only because you haven’t read it yet.

A few of the other stories make it clear that Barron is doing for the Pacific Northwest what H.P. Lovecraft did for New England (except that Barron is a better writer). There are Old Ones living in the forests, and they mean us no good. In “Mysterium Tremendum,” Willem finds a book entitled “Moderor de Caliginis” – “The Black Guide” – in a Seattle general goods store off the beaten track. It promises to contain directions to “secret attractions, hidden places, and persons ‘in the know’ regarding matters esoteric and arcane.” It seems just the thing for planning a camping trip he and his lover and another couple will be taking soon. One particular site catches his eye: a dolmen on Mystery Mountain.  Glenn, Willem’s partner, had told him that there were no megaliths or dolmen in Washington State, but the guide seems to differ. It sounds to him like an ideal place to explore.

The four head out in a sky-blue Land Rover for their trip, spending the first night in an old hotel in Olympia and heading onward to the Dungeness-Sequim Valley just in time for the Lavender Festival. A night of drinking in a local tavern turns into a hell of fistfight when some of the drunks decide they don’t like the gay foursome drinking in the same place they’re drinking. The four prevail rather bloodily and head for the wilderness – and now things start to get strange. The road they’re on is almost impossible to navigate, the sheer mountainside to their left and a cliff to the right. The first night of camping leaves the group with “horror-show dreams,” they all wake up aching from the fight, and it’s time to go hiking for the dolmen, which seems like a much spookier prospect now than it did when they were making plans.

They find it. It would have been better if they hadn’t.

Barron doesn’t use Lovecraft’s word “eldritch” once, and the goriest his story gets is in describing the fight, not in telling what happened at the dolmen. By no means, though, should you get the impression that this means he doesn’t write enough. He is a master at writing just the right amount of description for your mind to run away with images of places you’d really rather not visit. I, for one, don’t expect to ever encounter a dolmen in the woods of Washington State; Barron even writes in the story that there aren’t any there. I’d suggest that you not attempt to confirm this, because if a dolmen exists in Washington, it’s definitely home to things that don’t love you. Or maybe they love you too much? Either way, you don’t want to meet them.

“The Broadsword” is another story that helps build up the alternate reality of Washington State that Barron is creating. The wilderness there is vast and deep, something those who keep to Seattle don’t think about too much, and a man can get lost in those forests. That’s what happened to Terry Walker on a surveying trip; his partner, Pershing Dennard, never saw him again. Well, at least not until much later in his life, and under considerably different circumstances. See, he didn’t exactly get lost; he got taken. And now he has the opportunity to take Pershing along with him:

Pershing was taken through a hole in the sub-basement foundation into darkness so thick and sticky it flowed across his skin. …

An eternal purple-black night ruled the fleshy comb of an alien realm.  Gargantuan tendrils slithered in the dark, coiling and uncoiling, and the denizens of the underworld arrived in an interminable procession through vermiculate tubes and tunnels, and gathered, chuckling and sighing, in appreciation of his agonies. In the great and abiding darkness, a sea of dead white faces brightened and glimmered like porcelain masks at a grotesque ball. He couldn’t discern their forms, only the luminescent faces, their plastic, drooling joy.

Can you hear the Lovecraft?

Barron would like you to read “—30—“ only after dark, and preferably when you’re alone, but really, in order for this story to completely creep you out, none of that is necessary. A team of two naturalists, one male and one female, is studying an area in the hills is what seems to be Eastern Washington (yes, the wilds of Washington State again). There’s a coyote den that doesn’t seem to be quite right, and the insects aren’t behaving the way you’d expect them to, and wow, it’s really isolated where they are, and isn’t she starting to act rather strangely, now that he thinks about it? When he starts having dreams in which he “limp[s] across a plain that stretched beneath a wide, carnivorous sky,” the end doesn’t seem like it can be long in coming, but you’re only halfway there.

Occultation and Other Stories contains nine stories, three of which are original to this volume. There is a smart introduction by Michael Shea, the author of The Autopsy and Other Tales. The book is published by Night Shade Books, a small press that I much admire, and they’ve put together a nice product with a cover painted by Matthew Jaffe that is appropriately odd – his first published cover art.

As I’ve been writing this review, the fog has been creeping over the hills where I live. Already I can’t see past the house across the street into the canyon behind it. It’s almost as if Barron’s stories have crept out from between the covers of this book and started infecting my world, so I’m going to finish this up in a hurry by telling you that there isn’t a clunker in this whole bunch of stories, damn it, and they’re all scary as hell, double damn it, and if you’d like to know about the future of horror, you need to read this book. Just keep a tumbler of whiskey by your elbow to deaden the effect, though whether that will really work is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t seem to help Barron’s characters much.

Disclosure: I met Laird Barron at the World Fantasy Convention in October 2009, and had a burger with him and John Langan, another fairly new horror writer who is equally talented in a completely different way. I told Barron how much his stories scared me, and he looked very pleased – which is sort of macabre when you think about it, isn’t it? Isn’t it sort of sadistic to take delight in scaring people? Except that he’s a really nice guy. Anyway, I think this is why Barron named me in his acknowledgments at the front of this book, and I am honored. But if I felt that this would prevent me from being straight with you about my reaction to this book, I would not have reviewed it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The news that Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is coming out in movie form in March 2012 finally moved me to read this book, which one of my young nephews has recommended to me with extravagant praise. That nephew is going to be a darned good literary critic when he grows up, because he’s absolutely right: The Hunger Games is an excellent adventure with plenty of depth to it. Suzanne Collins clearly set out to make The Hunger Games a book that older as well as younger readers can enjoy. The setting is a dystopia of the future, in a world where the United States no longer exists… For those who are at all politically minded, this book reminds us of what we have in America, for all her faults, and serves as a cautionary tale of what we could become if we do not solve our problems before they become unsolvable… Read the rest.

Saffron and Brimstone by Elizabeth Hand

…This collection of mostly longer pieces is as evocative as its cover photograph of a butterfly in extreme close-up. Most of the stories make one’s skin creep, even as one revels in Hand’s language and characters. All of them, in one way or another, are about transformation, about becoming. They are about change and how people cause it, embrace it, reject it, or all three… Saffron and Brimstone belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves literate, unusual, extremely well-written fantasy. Read the rest.

We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle

We Never Talk About My Brother, published by the small but estimable Tachyon Press, is a collection of ten of Peter S. Beagle’s recent stories… This is one of those collections that I read nearly straight through, barely pausing to set the book down. Many single author collections tend to have much of a sameness about them, I have discovered, and suffer from that sort of reading. Not Beagle; not this collection. The stories are varied in theme and tone, though alike in craftsmanship. This slim volume is not only worth reading, but worth adding to your library, for you are likely to find yourself returning to these stories again and again. If you are a reader, you will find sheer pleasure in them on each rereading. If you are a writer, you will explore them to find out just how Beagle does it. He is one of the most able writers of the fantasy short story working today. Read the rest.

The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams

…John Joseph Adams has chosen his material wisely in The Living Dead, a collection of short stories about zombies by some of the biggest and best names in the horror business, as well as the newest and hottest. I resisted this book for a long time because I’ve never been fond of zombies, but upon diving in, I discovered that the zombies aren’t really the point; the point is to tell a good story. And these authors do that, with a vengeance… Usually anthologies have a few throw-away stories, a few that just don’t work as well as the others do; one expects it, understanding that one’s own taste will not correspond 100% with the editor’s. But either John Joseph Adams had such a wealth of stories at his disposal or he and I are utterly simpatico, because there was not a single story here that I feel one could skip without regret. Everyone who wants to understand contemporary horror fiction needs to read this book. If you’re a critic, reviewer or scholar, you’ll most definitely want to own a copy. Read the rest.

Vicious Grace by M.L.N. Hanover

M.L.N. Hanover’s urban fantasy series, The Black Sun’s Daughter, gets better with every new book. Vicious Grace is the third book in the series (which is intended to last for ten books). It is an exciting, well-written example of what urban fantasy can be at its very best. Jayné Heller remains one of the realest heroines there is in all of fantasy literature; but best of all, she continues to grow and change. She faces difficult problems head on… Hanover continually pulls the rug out from under Jayné’s feet, and she’s dancing as fast as she can just to stay upright. Most people would crumble under this sort of pressure — pressure on all sides, emotionally, physically, psychically — but Jayné keeps going, guided by an internal moral compass that doesn’t ever seem to lead her astray. And yet, Hanover manages to keep Jayné feeling like a real person, not a superhero. It’s an impressive achievement for an urban fantasy, and makes for compelling reading… Read the rest.

Tithe by Holly Black

Kaye is not your typical 16-year-old… the fairies have come up with a plan to — well, to say they plan to sacrifice Kaye is seemingly a tad strong. But there is no question that they want their freedom from the rule of the Unseelie Court, and that they intend for Kaye to play a dangerous role in their plan to win that freedom… Tithe reads at a fast clip, with engaging characters in complex situations, cast on their own wits to figure out how to deal with some very exotic problems. Traditional motifs are used to great advantage, including the posing of riddles, the binding nature of one’s use of another’s name, and the loss of will in the face of a fairy’s enchantment. Tithe isn’t a horror novel, but some of the scenes are horrifying in their effects… Tithe seems “YA” only by virtue of the fact that her protagonist is a teenager. Adults who enjoy good fantasy with complex problems — those who, say, like to read urban fantasy — are likely to find Black’s novel enjoyable. Read the rest.

Glen Hirshberg is one of our modern short story masters. His first collection, The Two Sams, won the International Horror Guild Award for best collection, and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award as well. American Morons was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for best collection in 2007. Short horror fiction is difficult to write well, but Hirshberg does it consistently.

Hirshberg is an “edgy” author because his fiction tends to reside in the twilight between fantasy and horror known as dark fantasy. He doesn’t write stories that make you cringe at the splatter, and the Cthulhu Mythos doesn’t play host to his characters. Rather, they all live in a world that is ours, but just a shade off. And who knows but that we might find ourselves living in those shadows one day?

“The Muldoon” is the best story in American Morons; it was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award for best mid-length fiction. It is told from the point of view of Miriam, who, with her elder brother Martin, undertakes some midnight explorations in her step-grandmother’s room on the night following her grandfather’s funeral. The children’s ages are not stated, but they seem to be at that pre-teenage stage of maximum mischief – ten and twelve, perhaps. They begin by exploring the closed rooms of “the hags” – their great-grandmothers, both bedridden as long as the children knew them. Both women were unpleasant in their own ways – “mean,” the children say. Exploring a room where an old woman died is scary enough, but finding the belongings of their dead relatives is even spookier. Worse yet are the discoveries yet to come about exactly how those two women died. “The Muldoon” is a wonderful story about family, and especially about a family in extremity.

“Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air” is about a carousel. The question posed by the story is where the carousel is and how much it encompasses – and how you get off. How much power did the maker of those last beautiful horses have? What magic did he wield over the three characters who brave a ride? It’s an odd, almost surreal story.

I also loved “Safety Clowns,” about a young man’s first day selling ice cream from a truck along with a more experienced driver who has been recruited to show him the ropes. “The ropes” are a whole lot trickier than Max, the first person narrator, thought they were going to be, and pose some serious ethical dilemmas. Not all the ice cream being sold from those trucks is the kind made with milk and sugar. But being a drug pusher seems like not such a big deal, not when everyone seems so happy and the driver knows everyone – and the cash rolls in. At the end of the day, Max can see that he’s got a serious choice to make. But lucky Max: fate steps in. What makes this story eerie is the mechanism that fate uses. It’s not surprising to learn from Hirshberg’s notes that this story has some basis in fact, because the details add such realism that the frisson of horror on which the story ends feels completely authentic.

“American Morons” is about a couple of Americans in Italy who get stranded on a highway when they fail to put diesel into the gas tank of their rented car, using regular gas instead. They choose to trust in the kindness of strangers, even in an era when Americans are not particularly well-regarded abroad (indeed, they even claim to be Canadian for a time). As the story closes, one is forced to conclude that their trust was misplaced.

“It’s better to die horribly than live horribly, given a choice. Don’t you think?” asks the owner of a book-crammed bed and breakfast hotel of Nagle, the protagonist of “Like a Lily in a Flood.” Nagle has been coming to this particular B&B for years now, but he’s never before seen the journals that his hostess reads to him one night. The journals tell the tale of a doomsday cult that was disappointed when doomsday didn’t arrive on schedule in the middle of the 19^th century. What do the cult members do as a result, and to whom? On whom do they wreak revenge; and those who were the victims of their revenge, on whom do they wreak revenge? This dark story reminds us that history isn’t dead – and it isn’t even over.

“Devil’s Smile” is an oddly beautiful, though horrifying, tale of a love that doesn’t die. Despite its terrifying denouement, it stays in the memory as a story of faith and endurance. “Transitway” is similar in tone, with an elegiac quality that makes death seem ugly and horrific but also peaceful. How can Hirschberg make a hideous, loud, horrible death seem so authentic?

On the strength of these stories, I’ll be tracking down and reading everything Hirschberg has written to date, and I’ll greet every new story with joy.

Deadline by Mira Grant

… Deadline feels much shorter than its 600+ page length: the pace is usually frantic, even when the crew is holed up in a secure hideaway. You might tell yourself that you’re going to stop reading and go fix dinner when you reach the end of the next chapter, but you’re likely to find yourself three chapters farther on and an hour late chopping the onion because you just couldn’t stop, not without knowing what happened next. Unfortunately, the book ends on twin cliffhangers… One of those cliffhangers comes close to destroying the suspension of disbelief the reader has thus far had no trouble giving Grant; it will require some serious explanation if she is to maintain the scientific credibility she has thus far established… It speaks volumes about the quality of both Feed and Deadline that the reader feels confident Grant will be able to pull it off — and is counting down the months until Blackout arrives. Read the rest.

Ilario by Mary Gentle

For pure storytelling, don’t-want-to-stop-reading-it fun, Mary Gentle’s two Ilario books, The Lion’s Eye and The Stone Golem, are among the best I’ve read. I lived in Gentle’s world even when I wasn’t actively reading the books. I dreamt of her Mediterranean Renaissance. I fretted about Ilario. I couldn’t wait to get back to the books when I’d set them down. Gentle’s worldbuilding is extraordinary, her characters are complete individuals, and her plot compelling. This is fantasy with a heart and a mind… Read the rest.

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

A few years ago, I discovered a completely new — to me — subgenre of fantasy. It is bloody, full of battles with swords and maces, always placed in a medieval setting, and very nearly devoid of magic. Its practitioners are the likes of Richard Morgan and Matthew Stover — and Joe Abercrombie, in the dark, brutal and compelling Best Served Cold. I’m still not quite sure that I like this type of book; though it is certainly exciting, it is also troubling. Perhaps that is precisely the intent of the authors’ writing about a very visceral and immediate type of battle, one far removed from the surgical precision of computer-guided missiles floating through the door of a house to pinpoint the death of a terrorist… Read the rest.

Bone and Jewel Creatures by Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear appeared on the scene in 2004 as if she were Athena, sprung fully formed from Zeus’s forehead to be a major player in the science fiction and fantasy genres… Now Bear has a new nomination, this time for the World Fantasy Award for Bone and Jewel Creatures. I discovered only after I finished reading it that Bone and Jewel Creatures was marketed as a story for young readers from nine to twelve years old. I was surprised; this novella strikes me as a very sophisticated, adult tale with plenty of allusions and implications that would go right over the heads of all but the most well-read of children. It does not seem childlike in any way. Bone and Jewel Creatures is a sort of fairy tale, though; a story of magic and wizards and necromancers… Set aside an hour or two to spend with this book. It may be a trifle compared to Bear’s more challenging trilogies or novels, but it is a lovely trifle — a jewel. Read the rest.

The Taborin Scale by Lucius Shepard

… Lucius Shepard writes ravishing novellas. The Taborin Scale, set in the same universe as the novella The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter and the short story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” gives us yet another perspective on the massive Dragon Griaule… The novella is published by Subterranean Press, which often publishes novellas in beautiful editions that justify the high prices it charges. This book, for instance, is signed by Shepard and, opposite the title page, bears a picture of the Dragon Griaule by J.K. Potter (who also did the lovely cover) that just might haunt your dreams. It’s a small detail, but I was particularly taken by the endpapers, which are textured to resemble the dragon’s skin and scales… The Taborin Scale is as beautiful to hold and touch as it is to read. If you are already a Shepard fan, you’ll want to add this book to your collection. If you’re not, think about investing in another Subterranean book, The Best of Lucius Shepard, which opens with “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule.” Shepard is worth savoring. Read the rest.

The New Weird by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

It’s easy to imagine two different readers reacting in opposite ways to The New Weird. One might find it delightfully odd; the other might find it as terrifying as Kafka on LSD. And a third might find it delightfully odd because it’s as terrifying as Kafka on LSD. Certainly, no one is likely to find it boring… The New Weird is an engaging and thought-provoking if imperfect book. Scholars of the fantastic will certainly wish to include it in their libraries, and it is a good impetus to discussion. Casual readers, however, may find it much more difficult to appreciate; still, it is a good place for them to start on an exploration of this little corner of science fiction/fantasy/horror, one where all three genres seem to be bundled into one very strange whole. Read the rest.

Killing Rites by M.L.N. Hanover

M.L.N. Hanover’s series, THE BLACK SUN’S DAUGHTER, gets better with every book. The latest, Killing Rites, advances the story of Jayné Heller’s growth, but it also continues to build the world in which she operates. Metaphysical questions about the existence of God and the nature of the demons start to become integral to Heller’s life. Furthermore, Hanover refuses to ever take the easy way out, always choosing the most difficult — and most interesting — plot twists over the development that a reader in the urban fantasy genre would expect. Hanover’s decision to always up the ante makes this one of the best series in the field today… Killing Rites is full of action at the same time that it is full of ideas and religious quandaries. Hanover meshes all these plot elements beautifully, creating a story that leaves one both hyped by the physicality of the plot and intrigued by the mystery… Read the rest.

First novels by new authors are like surprise packages that come in the mail: you don’t know what you’ll find inside, not really, even if there was advance hype. Sometimes you find something so unappealing you wonder that anyone could have thought it was for you. Other times you get a teenaged sociopath who’s fighting hard not to become a serial killer despite his deep-seated wish to create dead bodies, and then you know you’ve got Dan Wells’s I Am Not A Serial Killer.

This funny, sad, scary novel stars John Wayne Cleaver, who notes himself that his name seems to be made for a serial killer: John Wayne, the first two names of John Wayne Gacy, who raped and killed at least 33 young men and boys in Chicago during the 1970s, and cleaver, a potential murder weapon. Never mind that he was actually named for a western movie star; this feels like fate to John. Especially since his father is named Sam, making him the Son of Sam. That he lives over a mortuary and has been helping embalm bodies since he was seven is just the icing on the cake.

John has all sorts of rules to keep himself from killing people. He has a best friend he pretty much hates, and he forces himself to pay compliments to people who anger him. There’s a monster he keeps behind a closed door in his mind, and he intends to never let him out. The occasional school paper on Jeffrey Dahmer is just to intrigue teachers and let off a little steam. It helps that he has a good therapist, even if his diagnosis is antisocial personality disorder.

All is going fairly well until an actual, practicing serial killer comes to Clayton County and people start dying in an especially gruesome manner. John finds out who the perpetrator is, and begins looking for ways to stop him, using all his own serial killer skills to do it. It makes things a lot more difficult for John to keep his monster caged, because it requires John to break quite a number of his rules. But his obsessive knowledge of serial killers and their backgrounds and methods gives him the perfect tools to catch a killer no one else would suspect.

This book reminded me a fair bit of the DEXTER novels by Jeff Lindsay in the way they speak of the killing part of a serial killer as a separate entity with which the protagonist shares brain space. But the similarity ends there. John is a troubled teen who truly does show all the signs of a serial killer, including the MacDonald triad, three traits shared by ninety-five percent of serial killers: bed-wetting, pyromania and animal cruelty. Wells writes some excruciatingly familiar scenes to anyone who has ever been a teenager that are even more excruciating because of John’s, um, disability: talking to a girl at a school dance, dealing with the school bully, helping out an elderly neighbor. He has a real flair for his material, both the killing part and the typical teenage part. All of it is written in clear, straightforward, first-person prose. The reader cannot turn the pages fast enough.

Surprisingly, Wells brings the supernatural into his story. I am not sure why he made this decision, and have been trying to decide whether it is a flaw. I’ve been uncertain ever since reading the book whether the notion of the supernatural was a means by which John dealt with the serial killer (i.e., it was easier to think of him as a demon, not human, and therefore someone it was okay to hunt and kill; it was part of John’s psychosis to make him an “other” in his mind) or whether the killer really was a demon (John’s mother witnesses events that seem to confirm the killer’s demonic nature). Most murder mysteries can be forgotten within moments of reading the last paragraph. This one sticks with you.

One note: this book seems to be aimed at a teenage market. I think it’s probably fine for those who are about fifteen and up, but it’s not something I’d give to a precocious 10-year-old who is reading at a young adult level. It’s a little too intensely violent – which is probably why older teens will love it.

If you like this book, there’s more of John Wayne Cleaver in Mr. Monster and I Don’t Want to Kill You. I’m looking forward to getting to these two books after the fun of Dan Wells’s first outing. Perhaps they will explain more about John’s world, in which the supernatural coexists with the natural; or about John’s psychosis, which turns normal people into demons so that John can deal with them. Either way, I’m eager to see what comes next.

The Company by K.J. Parker

…The Company is about five war veterans who band together to form a farming colony on an uninhabited island… Parker’s style is straightforward and workmanlike, however complex the story might be. Parker continues to build suspense even when it appears all the juice has been wrung from the plot. When a particular outcome seems certain, watch out: Parker has a trick up a sleeve. There are some problems with Parker’s characterization… Even so, I was fascinated by this story. These characters are so true to each other and to their past unity as a fearsome military unit, and so incomplete as individuals, seeming to lack purpose or even any joy in life — that my attention never wavered. Friendship and betrayal played out against a background of a struggle for survival make for a dark story that lingers in the imagination. Read the rest.

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

Ian Tregillis takes the notion of an alternate history of World War II to new heights in his first novel, Bitter Seeds. The weapons Germany and England bring to bear on the conflict include not just men and guns, but also magical forces… The writing is more assured than one would expect of a first-time novelist. The plotting is skeletal, given the complexity of the tale, but it is sufficient; I expect that it will be fleshed out in further novels in the series. My only substantial problem with Bitter Seeds was that the characters seemed more like types than full-fledged people… I’d like to see more depth in each of these characters, perhaps something unexpected from one of them now and then… This is a promising first novel, a dark story of a dark time in human history, told with a substantial twist that does not change the basic fact that the twentieth century was a bloody one. I’m curious about what Tregillis will do to history next, and how — and if — his characters will survive. Read the rest.

The Grass-Cutting Sword by Catherynne M. Valente

The Grass-Cutting Sword is a metaphor, comprised almost entirely of exquisite imagery, and every single word has obviously been chosen with a poet’s eye for sound and sight. It is a creation myth and a Grendel for the nuclear age, a story of beginnings and endings, of beauty and hideousness. The images Catherynne M. Valente chooses in The Grass-Cutting Sword will haunt your nightmares and inform your dreams… This book requires and rewards a concentrated, thoughtful reading, one that revels in every word, one that sees the colors and hears the sounds. Do not stint yourself on time when you read this beautiful book. Luxuriate in it. Wallow in it. Let yourself be lost in its glories. It is exquisite. Read the rest.

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Joe Hill is the most promising new horror writer on the horizon… Heart-Shaped Box contains enough change-ups, chases, oddities and horrific images to keep any seasoned horror reader in goosebumps. Far more accomplished than most first novels, Heart-Shaped Box is the best kind of scary pleasure…. it is refreshing to read a good, solid ghost story. It is thrilling to follow this rollercoaster, one with unexpected drops and odd, wild turns. The writing is crisp and clean, the characters sharply delineated. Clear your calendar for a day to read this one — and do so with the lights on… Read the rest.

In the Palace of Repose by Holly Phillips

Holly Phillips is a brilliant prose stylist, and it shows in her first collection of short stories, In the Palace of Repose. These stories, all but two of them original to this volume, range from the joyful to the mysterious to the ominous. They are uniformly excellent. Phillips uses words the way a musician uses notes, playing a resonant, fey tune. It is easy to journey with her into the foreign and fantastic worlds she builds, just as one might follow a gentler Pied Piper… Here, the tales are not only told in lovely words, but are lovely stories. Phillips is a writer to watch, and I look forward to whatever she has to offer next. Read the rest.

The Hotel Under the Sand by Kage Baker

…Nominated for the 2009 Andre Norton Award for Young Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Hotel Under the Sand is the kind of book that you resolve to send to your nieces and nephews even before you have finished the first page. Any book that starts, “Cleverness and bravery are absolutely necessary for good adventures,” is a book you know those budding book lovers in your family are going to enjoy, and maybe even the non-readers who are usually busy playing sports instead… The Hotel Under the Sand is an instant classic. Read it to your nine-year-old, or let your 12-year-old read it to you. Or if you’re a grown-up, like me, just sit back and enjoy it. One is never too grown up for this sort of book. Read the rest.

Vanished by Kat Richardson

The fourth book in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, Vanished, is the best in the series so far. Harper Blaine, Richardson’s private investigator protagonist, gets a telephone call from an old boyfriend — not necessarily an unusual event, except that, in this case, the boyfriend happens to be long dead. He hints that there is much that Harper does not know that she needs to find out, quickly, and encourages her to come to Los Angeles to look into her past… Richardson’s writing is improving the more she writes. She is making people and places more and more visible for the reader… Richardson has also ramped up the quality of her plotting. This is a nice, tight novel in which everything happens for a reason. Despite the length of the book, nothing is extraneous. Richardson has done her homework in the byways of London, delving into historical geography even down to the sewers. Reading about Kat slipping into and out of temporaclines in order to figure out what’s going on is a great pleasure… Read the rest.

Labyrinth by Kat Richardson

Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series is absolutely noir and it reaches the darkest tones ever in the fifth book, Labyrinth. In fact, this book is unrelievedly dark, scary and suspenseful. Richardson topped herself with the fourth book in this series, Vanished; now she has topped herself yet again. Labyrinth requires one to have read the earlier books in the series; it does not stand well by itself. In fact, I was astonished to find how many clues Kat Richardson had lain about her fictional detective, Harper Blaine, as she told her earlier stories… Her mastery over her character and her character’s past is impressive… When Harper is overcome from time to time, Richardson makes us understand and even feel it, telling Harper’s story almost as if she is narrating a documentary instead of writing fiction. Labyrinth is compelling; the writing propels you from event to event, and being able to listen in on Harper’s torment as the Grey reaches ever more deeply into her brain, her body and her soul is fascinating and frightening. Read the rest.

Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Fairy tales were my first love when I was a child. My mother introduced me to the joys of stories with The Golden Book of Fairy Tales long before I learned how to read. My early reading included the first three volumes of The Junior Classics and Andrew Lang’s colorful fairy tale books. When Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling started editing anthologies of new takes on the old tales for adults with Snow White, Blood Red, I was delighted. And when Datlow and Windling started editing a series of original fiction for young adults based on fairy tales, I couldn’t resist them. Troll’s Eye View is one of four in a series of books for ages 10 and up, which also includes A Wolf at the Door, Swan Sister and The Beastly Bride…. This collection is one to read with your child; you can take turns reading stories out loud to one another, together figure out what classic tale is being retold, and bond over your mutual love for fairy tales in whatever form they take. Read the rest.

Depression-era America in the Dust Bowl must have seemed like living through the apocalypse. The very earth was drying up and blowing away. Nothing would grow and the rain never came. There was no food, families were disintegrating, and death stalked the land. This is the setting for Mr. Shivers, a first novel by Robert Jackson Bennett.

Upon reading the first several chapters of Mr. Shivers, one forms a mental image of the author: old and craggy, a face like a few miles of dirt road, hard and sad. It’s something of a shock to see the fresh-faced young man who gives a Mona Lisa smile from the book jacket. He looks more like a college student than like the cross between John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy one would suspect of having written this bleak prose. Indeed, Mr. Shivers is a book that mostly inhabits the real world, and only crosses over into dark fantasy in a major way in the last third. No wonder it’s classified by the Library of Congress merely as “fiction,” even while horror fans welcome this new voice.

Connelly is a bereaved father who seeks to avenge the death of his young daughter, a death that has all but destroyed his marriage as well as his heart. He knows what the murderer looks like: he is man with a strangely, grotesquely scarred face. Connelly quickly falls in with others who are looking for the same man, for essentially the same reason. Together, they move from Hooverville to hobo camp to riding the rails in pursuit of the scarred man, who always seems just a town or two ahead of them.

Along the way, they encounter many who are heading west to find a better life – or, barring that, at least paying work that will allow them to feed their families. Bennett portrays the depth of desperation of these folks, as in describing one extended family that spent the last of its ready cash on a few cars. It is almost immediately clear to Connelly that the dealer conned this desolate family into taking some of the worst vehicles on the road. Bennett shows us a key aspect of Connelly’s character in his charity to this family, as he fixes up the cars so that they can at least make it to the next town without a breakdown.

Indeed, Connelly often is kind and thoughtful to those he is traveling with, as well as those he meets along the way, which is why it is so shocking when he commits acts of incredible violence. Some of those acts are required by circumstances, but others seem unnecessarily cruel, and we start to wonder exactly who Connelly is.

Even more, we start to wonder who this scarred man he chases is. The man has left a trail of death behind him, but it is never clear exactly how he killed his victims, or why. When Connelly finally meets up with the man, he asks why the man killed his daughter; the scarred man replies, “So she would be dead.” This chilling answer is a key to our understanding of the fundamental nature of Connelly and the scarred man, and it is here that we find ourselves in the horrifying territory of a struggle that is not only one of life and death for two men, but for all humankind.

Bennett is masterful at creating atmosphere. The book is permeated with brown – the brown of dust in the air, the brown of the naked earth of the Hoovervilles, the brown of clothing worn too long and too hard. It is brown, not black, that is the color of death in this book, the brown of an earth that refuses to let anything grow any longer, the brown of a world with no rain.

Bennett is also skillful with dialogue. You can hear the voices in your head, from the old man Connelly meets early on who tells him to go home to the scarred man himself, who speaks as plainly about his task on Earth as anyone could.

If Bennett’s plot is ultimately entirely predictable, well, that is the nature of writing about mythological figures. Even as one hears the echoes of Stephen King’s Dark Tower sequence in the events of Mr. Shivers (Connelly is the gunslinger, the scarred man the man in black), it is evident that Bennett is trying to say something new about his themes. His ending is frightening and sad. And true.

Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a terrific series going with his Shadows of the Apt. Dragonfly Falling, the second in what will be a series of at least ten books, continues building a unique new fantasy world in which mankind is divided into numerous races that resemble, in some ways, various species of insects. It’s a weird idea, but it works, and the differences between the races seem often to drive the narrative. Dragonfly Falling gives us many more species than we’ve seen previously, and draws out the characteristics of each race… The third book in the series, Blood of the Mantis, awaits my attention. I can’t wait to dive in. Read the rest.

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

I’m a huge fan of books that don’t let me go until I’ve reached the last page. Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones, the first in her Mortal Instruments series, is that kind of book. Ostensibly written for young adults, this is a novel that adults will enjoy just as much as teenagers, for all that the protagonist and her friends are high-school aged… The action is nonstop, with characters the reader quickly comes to love in nearly constant peril… You’ll want to read all of the nearly 500 pages in one sitting, if you can, and once you’ve turned the last page, you’ll want to reach immediately for the next book in the series. Cassandra Clare knows how to hold a reader’s attention, no matter the reader’s age. The themes are appropriate for teens, with most of the violence occurring offstage, except for the killing of demons, who are the baddest of bad guys. Clare manages to avoid profane language and yet still have her teenagers sound like teenagers, and while there are plenty of intimations of sexual attraction, there are no X or even R-rated scenes. I think my nearly 12-year-old nephew would call this book “Awesome!” — and I think I know what he’s getting for his birthday. Read the rest.

The Dragon’s Path by Daniel Abraham

Daniel Abraham is a very busy writer. Under the pen name M.L.N. Hanover, he is writing a series of excellent urban fantasies… As James S.A. Corey, he and Ty Franck are writing a space opera series. Under his own name, Abraham broke into publishing in 2006 with The Long Price Quartet, a refreshingly nontraditional fantasy series set in a world with an Asian flavor. Now Abraham has embarked on a more traditional series entitled The Dagger and the Coin, the first book of which is The Dragon’s Path. The Dragon’s Path is set in a vaguely western European milieu, complete with kings and castles and squabbling nobles. It also partakes of the ruthlessness of the viewpoint characters in the work of writers like Joe Abercrombie and Richard Morgan. Yet The Dragon’s Path is its own creature, resonating with the fantasy genre but playing its own chord… The Dragon’s Path is a promising beginning to a promising series, with characters written to be far more real than the usual archetype. You’ll turn the last page looking forward to more. Read the rest.

The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass

According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2010, 40% of Americans believe “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” I’m not particularly interested in starting a debate about evolution versus creationism, but what I find interesting in this statistic is what it says about how religion seems to be edging out science in our country. Personally, I’ve never understood why anyone thinks they need to be in conflict, and the Catholic Church, in which I was raised, appears to agree with me (in this century, at least). But many seem to see them as being not only incompatible, but metaphorically at war. Melinda Snodgrass takes this concept one step further, and has them actually at war with one another. And from her viewpoint, it is science — and Lucifer — with which righteousness lies… Read the rest.

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

…Fortunately, authors still occasionally write stand-alone fantasies. One of the good ones in this category is Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris. Sanderson’s first novel is self-contained, even if its ending does hint at more to come in the same universe. The book is engagingly written, with plenty of intrigue, events spinning out of control, favorite characters in peril, and a magic that works rather like a science. Best of all from my perspective, one of the three primary viewpoint characters is a smart, competent woman who changes the fate of a kingdom and of her world… It’s a complicated, many-stranded tapestry that Sanderson weaves in Elantris. The plot and its devices are sufficiently different from the run-of-the-mill fantasy to make this book something special… Read the rest.

The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo

Some books marketed as children’s books strike me as fables for adults instead. The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo is one of these. Clearly children will enjoy the story for itself, but it would be a shame if adults passed up the chance to read this charming book about following one’s dreams…. a tale of determination, love and magic. The poetic text is accompanied by the beautiful illustrations of Yoko Tanaka, who works in shades of grey and a level of detail that makes them worth gazing upon for much longer than it takes to read a page of text. Read the rest.

Indigo Springs by A.M. Dellamonica

Indigo Springs is the first novel by A.M. Dellamonica, who has been publishing short fiction for nearly two decades. It shows the skill of someone who has long practiced in making words do what she wants them to do, and also the inexperience of a first-time novelist who has a great idea but doesn’t exactly know how to execute it. It’s a terrific story with new ideas and a unique magic system that works. With a stronger structure and a more coherent ending, Indigo Springs would have been a contender for major prizes. As it stands, it is fun to read and offers great promise of even better work to come… Dellamonica has written a sequel, Blue Magic, to be published in April 2012. If it’s as good as Indigo Springs, with the added advantage of actually finishing this tale, it’ll definitely be a winner. I await it eagerly. Read the rest.

Thunderer by Felix Gilman

Felix Gilman‘s Thunderer is set in the city of Ararat — a name well-chosen for a place where gods are manifest… The city itself is the real subject of the book, a place of never-ending fascination. But perhaps the description of a city alone cannot be a tale. Gilman does not leave us without plot, though there are times in the novel when it seems he’d like to endlessly explore the byways of the city without returning to his characters, who are often less interesting… Ararat is too wonderful a place to be contained in a single book… Gilman succeeds at an author’s most difficult trick: causing the reader to cry, “More, more!” Read the rest.

We are living in a Golden Age of the short story of the fantastic, as is ably demonstrated by John Langan in his first collection of short stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. Langan writes the sort of psychological horror that reminds one of both Henry James and M.R. James, as Elizabeth Hand points out in her introduction to this collection. Each story is elegantly written, with craft evident in every sentence.

Langan’s Jamesian heritage is especially clear in the first story in the book, “On Skua Island,” which uses a plot device that should be worn past using by now, though Langan shows us it is not: the tale told to a group of friends during a social gathering. This particular gathering is in a house on the coast of an unnamed ocean during a strong February storm. Those gathered, who appear to be mostly academics and writers (or at least individuals very well versed in the tropes of horror fiction), pass some time talking about vampires, werewolves, zombies and mummies, concluding early in their discussion that nothing new can be said about mummies.

Until Nicholas speak up, that is. Nicholas, who has been largely silent during the party, tells his story of an archeological dig on Skua Island, located north-northwest of the Shetland Islands. This island, located far from any human habitation, is apparently of some interest to MI-5, Britain’s intelligence agency, and the dig is a cover; but Nicholas doesn’t care, because photographs of the area show that he might well make a discovery on the island crucial to his own particular theories about the Vikings. Nicholas’s time on the island is limited by the needs of MI-5.  He must move quickly. So, when he discovers runes on a column that stands above his site, he cannot wait to translate them before proceeding to find what lies underneath. Nicholas discovers, to his regret, that one should always read the instructions first – and thereby hangs his tale.

“Mr. Gaunt” has an equally venerable storyline: the family member who enters the private space of a superior family member, only to find something he or she does not wish to see. The classic tale is “Bluebeard,” of course, in which a wife opens a room she’s been told never to enter, only to find the dead bodies of her husband’s previous wives. This tale, again told in a frame (a man who discovers an audiotape left to him when his father dies), is of a boy who enters his father’s study when his father is away. There the boy discovers the true nature of his father’s servant, Mr. Gaunt – and, it might well be said, of his father as well. The story, even with its ancient heritage, is altogether new here, and Langan tells it with grace and terror.

“Tutorial” is the weakest story in the collection, but it relieves the tension Langan has built up in his first two stories. It tells of James, a creative writing student who longs to write but is an atrociously bad writer. He doesn’t quite know this; he thinks he’s merely writing great horror fiction that his instructor can’t appreciate because he disapproves of genre writing. When his instructor sends him to a tutor, he and the tutor argue about the usefulness of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style and whether Samuel Delany is a writer of any worth (“He writes science fiction,” James says; “Which explains why I’ve never heard of him,” the tutor responds). The tutor gives up and passes James on to another tutor, further downstairs in the Humanities Building, who goes through much the same process. “Omit needless words” from Strunk & White makes another appearance, and James again snorts with disgust at the advice. This tutor, too, sends him on, further downstairs, this time to a man known only as The Editor. The Editor has some, well, interesting ways of making fledgling writers behave. The story is clearly intended to be self-mocking, at least to an extent; but it ultimately fails because of the inconsistent ending. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the in-joke, because I did, but this story really is one that The Editor probably should have had a good crack at.

“Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers” is as science fictional as Langan’s writing gets, and is a strange experiment in imagination. It is the oddest love story I’ve ever read, or at least the oddest story of seemingly romantic obsession. No explanations are offered for anything that happens in this story; as one might expect from the title, it seems to start in the middle. All we know is that two humans are traversing a world gone awry, where cars are stopped in the middle of the road and populated by purple flowers. It reads like a particularly bad nightmare, and one I hope never to experience for myself.

In “Laocoon, or The Singularity,” the final and best story in the book, Langan returns to more traditional storytelling. The protagonist is Dennis, an artist still struggling to finish his master’s degree in fine arts. He has little patience for the classes he teaches as part of his work, even though he is in line for a tenure track position should he ever complete his degree. And he has lost his family, including his two sons, because he is simply too much of a loner, lost in his appreciation of art for art’s sake, to pay sufficient attention to getting anything accomplished. Not that he is a dreamer, exactly; Langan paints him as more of a stubborn ideologue who enjoys being contrary.

The story begins when Dennis discovers what appears to be an artwork of an alien creature in the trash, and hauls it back to his apartment. He is not satisfied with the face the creature has been given, and devotes much thought to how to craft something new, something exactly right. But from the start, this “artwork” has exercised a strange power over him, not even counting the wound he suffered in hauling the thing up his stairs – a wound that won’t heal, that has become strangely infected. When inspiration for the Face does strike, it strikes with a vengeance. “Laocoon” is an accomplished story that you won’t forget, no matter how hard you try.

The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-Everett

If we could use our minds to make others see what we wanted them to see, rearrange people’s internal organs and dissolve their musculature, call animals to do our every bidding, or know others’ thoughts as intimately as our own, wouldn’t we rule the world? Or would we be so preoccupied with fighting with others like us that humans would be mere pawns, little worth toying with? Or, even worse, would we be so damaged by our powers that we would be dangerous to ourselves and others?

These are all questions posed by Ayize Jama-Everett’s short, powerful first novel, The Liminal People. Read more »

Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm

Chris F. Holm’s first novel, Dead Harvest, is supernatural noir at its best. Sam Thornton, who is as surely named for Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade as he is for the Hebrew judge of the Bible, is the best sort of hero to serve as the basis for a series (THE COLLECTOR): despite being damned, he still has a strong sense of right and wrong, and refuses to do wrong whenever he has the option.

The novel is based on one occasion when Sam has that option. His job is to collect damned souls to speed them on their way to their eternal punishment. His boss, Lilith (whom he always calls “Lily,” which she hates), has assigned him to collect the soul of Kate MacNeil, who has just killed her entire family. There is no doubt about this, because she tortured her mother until the police showed up, when she ended it by slitting her mother’s throat in their full view. But when Sam reaches into her chest to collect her soul, he is nearly blinded by the bright white light of her innocence — and more, he learns that something took possession of her body to commit those murders. Read more »

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers

Tim Powers does not often write short fiction, but when he does, he comes up with doozies. The Bible Repairman and Other Stories contains a mere six stories, but each one is so well-crafted that it will stick in your brain, giving you odd jabs now and then, twisting a thought or causing goosebumps… This slim volume is a must for anyone who admires Tim Powers and his unique voice. I know of no other author in the science fiction, fantasy and horror community who can write a ghost story with the Powers panache. The first five of these stories are accessible to anyone coming to Powers for the first time; the last is best read by those already familiar with Powers’s work with Shelley and Byron. All the stories have poetry to them, some literally. The world changes shape when you read Powers, and that’s a good thing. Read the rest.

Reunion by Rick Hautala

As we grow older, we tend to think of childhood as a golden time, when the hours poured through our fingers like water, glistening and plentiful. Summers were especially wonderful, those days when school was out and there was nothing to do but play. But when we call up specific memories, they never seem quite so golden; our friends never seem quite such good friends; and there are terrors that we have worked hard to forget. Perhaps that’s why so many books have been written about that time when we transition from childhood to young adulthood, the moment when we begin to regard our childhood fancies as childish. Read more »

After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh

I’ve read Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things” at least three times now, and I admire it more with each rereading. It appears just a bit less than halfway through McHugh’s thought-provoking short story collection, After the Apocalypse. The first-person narrator is a woman living well outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a time when the United States seems on the brink of collapse: the economy is terrible, and water is extremely scarce in the Southwest — a time that doesn’t feel very far away from today. The narrator lives hand-to-mouth making dolls, particularly dolls called “reborns” that look almost, but not quite, real. She’s alone in her house but for her friendly dogs most days, which only makes her nervous when South American laborers crossing the border stop by her house looking for a meal in exchange for labor. She’s apparently on some list shared by these illegal immigrants as a kind woman who always has a handout. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t bring herself to turn these men away. But when she returns from an errand one day to find that her hospitality has been abused, she makes a few decisions about how to go on. This is a quiet story, one that describes a couple of days during which something bad happens — nonviolent, but certainly distressing – and the changes that follow. But it says much about what one will do when pushed just beyond the stretched yet tolerable limits by which one lives. Read more »

End of the Century by Chris Roberson

In End of the Century, Chris Roberson takes us on an Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail. While that would be plenty for most writers, Roberson isn’t content to stop with only one story; he also tells the story of a search for a serial killer in London around the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and of Alice Fell, a sixteen-year-old following a vision that may simply be a symptom of epilepsy in 2000. The three stories have a number of factors that seem to be similar, particularly the big fellow who goes around attacking people with a sword that can slice through anything, accompanied by dogs with blood-red ears and teeth. Only in the last 75 pages or so do things start to come together in a startling way… Roberson juggles all of his characters and their seeming disparate stories with great skill, slowly dealing out the similarities in the different time streams, slowly building the personalities of his various characters, slowly building a plot that is going to explode at the end of the book… Read the rest.

Masked edited by Lou Anders

… In Masked, superheroes and supervillains move off the illustrated page and into the realm of pure prose. Sometimes this works beautifully, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all, making this anthology uneven. The best stories are those in which the notion of super beings is taken with the utmost seriousness; the weakest are those that seem to mock the tradition…. Still, the ratio of good stories to bad stories is high. Even so, the stories started to seem repetitive to me after I’d read 200 pages, and I was still only halfway through the book. There are only so many things you can say about these fictional beings, and most of them have already been said in comic form. It’s hard to see that this book of prose really adds anything to what one can find in illustrated form from DC or Marvel. Read the rest.

Personal Demons by Lisa Desrochers

At first, Personal Demons reminded of those Christian romances I devoured like potato chips when I was in high school — the ones where a hot date meant getting together to read the Bible. Frannie, the high school girl who is the principal viewpoint character, comes from a large Catholic family and seems, initially, to be intent on remaining true to every bit of her Catholicism. In my own large Catholic family, that would most definitely include allowing no boy to touch me between my neck and my knees before my wedding night. So I settled in for what I thought would be a conservative young adult novel that would make its points about morality by having the persuasive swain be, literally, a devil. Fortunately, Lisa Desrochers completely surprised me by giving Frannie a mind of her own that is all modern teenager… Read the rest.

Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling are the two greatest short fiction editors of fantasy and horror of our time. Their annual collections of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror provided us, for 16 straight years, with the best short genre and slipstream fiction from all sources. Their anthologies have defined cutting edge fantasy. Salon Fantastique is more uneven than most of Datlow and Windling’s collections. This themeless anthology, containing stories intended, as the introduction states, “to evoke the liberating, creative spirit of a literary salon,” contains some very fine stories. It also, oddly enough, contains some very bad stories… Salon Fantastique as a whole doesn’t overly suffer from the lesser tales… The good stories in it are that good. Read the rest.

Underground by Kat Richardson

Underground is the third in Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, which features Harper Blaine as a Seattle private investigator who can see the “Grey” — the borderland between reality and magic, life and death, past and present… Underground starts so slowly that I feared Kat Richardson had lost her way… the book really gets going about halfway through. Richardson has clearly done her homework about underground Seattle, Seattle history, and Native American mythology… What especially makes this novel sing in its second half is its incredible sense of place. This seems to be true of some of the best urban fantasy out there these days: Seanan McGuire writes about San Francisco and environs in her October Daye series, while M.L.N. Hanover wrote convincingly of post-Katrina New Orleans in Darker Angels. Richardson tops them both with her detailed writing about Seattle’s past and present and its many different sorts of inhabitants. I’m already eager to read the next in the series, Vanished, which will take Harper Blaine to England, a place redolent with history. Read the rest.

The Princes of the Golden Cage by Nathalie Mallet

The Princes of the Golden Cage is a fine debut fantasy by Nathalie Mallet. Mallet sets her fantasy in a vaguely Arabian setting, with a Sultan and his many princes by many wives… Like Scheherazade, Mallet gives us a world of sand, roses and tulips, flowing silks in the richest colors, jewels and riches in a treasury worthy of Ali Baba’s cave, and sumptuous captivity for scores of young men all yearning for a single throne. This is both a fantasy and a mystery, and it plays a scrupulously fair game, should one wish to follow the clues rather than become lost in the glamour that Mallet creates with her words. It is a shame that this delicious first effort is marred by poor proofreading that can jar the reader out of the story with sometimes hilarious typographical errors. Still, I am looking forward to Prince Amir’s continuing adventures in The King’s Daughter. Read the rest.

Downpour by Kat Richardson

Kat Richardson’s Greywalker novels reached a crescendo with Labyrinth, the 2010 entry in the series. It is not surprising, then, that Downpour feels anticlimactic. But Richardson has surprises in store for her readers, as usual… Most of this novel takes place on the Olympic Peninsula, and Richardson does her usual excellent job of establishing her place and time. Her descriptions of something as ordinary as the weather make the reader feel very much there with Harper as she confronts a series of unnatural creatures… Downpour is a competent addition to the series, but I missed the life-or-death breathlessness of Richardson’s earlier novels… Certainly there is nothing about Downpour that will discourage me from reading Richardson’s next Greywalker novel. To the contrary, there is much that is encouraging… any book that can make you long for the next one is doing something right. Read the rest.

It’s just a fact: Mondays are horrible. So why not spend Mondays reading horror? As a new feature here at FanLit, we’ll be reviewing a horror novel, collection or anthology on Mondays that are just too horrible for a Magazine Monday column. Let’s kick off with a look at Stephen M. Irwin’s debut, The Dead Path.

Good horror novels must be devilishly hard to write well. There has to be a proper balance between gore and straightforward exposition; between the supernatural and the real; between those who look askance at magic until it is too late, and those who embrace magic regardless of their previous disbelief. Stephen M. Irwin gets the balance just right in his debut novel, The Dead Path.

Nicholas Close becomes enmeshed in the plans of a very, very old witch very early in his life. She has her eye on him because he has a “gift” — one not realized until his beloved wife dies, but one he cannot escape thereafter. Nicholas can see ghosts. More precisely, he sees the ghosts of people who died violent deaths at precisely the moment of their deaths. And he sees these scenes replayed over and over and over. It’s a wonder he’s not completely insane. Certainly he’s at the end of his rope when he returns to his hometown of Tallong, Australia, soon after he has buried his wife in London.

His return seems to stir something up in the town, though, and odd things start happening very fast. A boy disappears in a crime almost identical to that committed against Nicholas’s best friend when he was a child. A man commits suicide on Nicholas’s front porch. And the woods that seemed so frightening when he was a child are even worse now. Now his “gift” enables him to see the ghosts of children hauled off into the woods by invisible hands, children whose bodies turned up with their throats slit.

Little more can be said about this novel without giving away important plot points. You should have the opportunity to confront the thrills and chills of this book for yourself, and I do recommend that you give it a try. Irwin is a fine new addition to the horror genre, and I look forward to whatever he writes next.

One cool point, something I’ve never seen on a book before: when you put this book down at night and switch off the lamp, the jacket glows. Spooky!

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

…Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim is urban fantasy with a kick to the head. Stark is the kind of anti-hero who becomes more of a hero the longer you read about him — he makes an effort not to kill anyone who doesn’t deserve it, and is even sorry that he decapitated one of his enemies and kept the guy’s head alive to be captured by another one of his enemies. Stark tells his story in a first-person narrative that never slows down, not even when he sleeps. From sending the bad guys scampering from a bar they were blackmailing to taking an angel’s sword straight to the gut, Stark is a tough guy Dashiell Hammett would recognize, if Hammett wrote about the supernatural… Read the rest.

Child of Fire by Harry Connolly

… Harry Connolly’s Child of Fire is the first in a series of urban fantasies known collectively as the TWENTY PALACES series. There are three novels published to date, plus a prequel available only as an ebook, with no further books planned, unfortunately; according to Connolly’s blog, they just didn’t sell as well as hoped, despite considerable support by the publisher. I liked Child of Fire so much that I immediately got hold of all the other novels in the series — and I’m hoping that the ebook of the prequel sells well enough to make it worth Connolly’s time to keep going. These are urban fantasies of a different flavor, with a male protagonist (as opposed to the usual leather-clad young female) who has been around the block a few times. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett seem to be Connolly’s influences, rather than Charles de Lint and Laurell Hamilton, which is all to the good… Child of Fire moves fast and never lets up. Anyone who likes a heavy dose of mystery mixed in with his or her fantasy is likely to find this novel engrossing and enjoyable. Read the rest.

Fathom by Cherie Priest

Fathom is an entertaining horror novel once it gets going. Cherie Priest spends the first 100 pages of Fathom setting a scene, complete with pages upon pages of infodumps… Once all the characters are gathered in Ybor City, this novel really begins to cook. Suddenly the story, which had been composed of exposition and conversation with random bursts of action, becomes all action — and dramatic, high-tension action at that. This is the point at which the underpinnings of the novel start to make sense, and a devoted reader will now find it hard to set this novel aside without finishing it. One gets the impression that Fathom could have benefited from a final rewrite. Priest has what it takes to write original, exciting horror, as the last half of this novel demonstrates. Moving the characters into place, though, poses a difficulty for Priest here. It will be interesting to read her next book to see whether she can pull together her considerable skills for a truly consistent, frightening story. Read the rest.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is one of my favorite writers. He only writes one short story, novelet or novella a year, it seems, but every one is a masterwork. A year in which Chiang’s name does not appear on every award ballot means that he’s skipped writing for a year… The Lifecycle of Software Objects is the first work Ted Chiang has written that fails to live up to the high standard he has set for himself. He has hold of an idea that deserves a full novel: what duties do humans owe to the artificial intelligences they create? But rather than write that novel, he has forced his work into the confines of a novella and these concepts are too deep to be convincingly explored in such a short space… The Lifecycle of Software Objects is the longest work Chiang has ever written, but it should have been longer yet. Read the rest.

Mozart’s Blood by Louise Marley

Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say, and in the case of Mozart’s Blood by Louise Marley, that is very good advice indeed. One would expect a torrid romance novel from the painting of a woman with disproportionate breasts and a look of impending orgasm on her face. But one would be wrong. This vampire novel contains its fair share of passion, but it is more a character study than a romance. And while the structure of the novel is flawed, it is nonetheless a pleasant book with which to spend a few hours… Marley’s tale is full of information about Mozart, about opera, about the history of castrati, about music in general. It’s a new spin on vampirism, and that’s always welcome in a genre that threatens to go under from the weight of so many bloodsuckers… the musical detail makes this book sing. Anyone familiar with “Don Giovanni” can hear how its bold, dark chords color the plot. It is worth reading Mozart’s Blood just for the opera scenes, a conclusion with which Marley’s vampires would likely agree. Read the rest.

Ghosts in the Snow by Tamara Siler Jones

The police procedural isn’t just for the mystery genre any more. Frequently, fantasy writers are combining mysteries with magic in order to produce hybrids that provide all the fun of both genres in a single novel. Tamara Siler Jones accomplishes this feat in her first DUBRIC BRYERLY novel, Ghosts in the Snow… It’s fun to read about forensic techniques in a medieval setting, as this book is something like “CSI” set in the Dark Ages… Ghosts in the Snow is the first in a series, and won the Compton Crook Award in 2005. As far as I can tell from Jones’s blog, the series is continuing, even though the most recent book was published in 2006. Jones’s books are not for the faint of heart, as some gruesome crimes are described in necessary (that is, not gratuitous) detail. As a lover of mysteries and thrillers as well as fantasy, I found it enthralling. I’m looking forward to reading the other two books that have been published to date, Threads of Malice and Valley of the Soul. Read the rest.

Toads and Diamonds by Heather Tomlinson

I have always loved the Charles Perrault fairy tale called simply “The Fairies.” A girl goes to a well to draw water for her family and is approached by an old, threadbare woman who asks for a drink. The girl gladly gives her water. As a reward for her kindness, the woman (actually a fairy, disguised) gives the girl a gift: for every word she speaks, a flower or a jewel shall fall from her lips. The girl returns to her stepmother, who is astonished at the gift and resolves to send her own daughter to the well. That daughter is rude to the fairy, who this time appears as a wealthy old woman (thereby foiling the mother’s instructions to treat a threadbare old woman with kindness). The fairy therefore rewards the daughter with a different gift: for every word she speaks, a toad or a snake will fall from her lips… Heather Tomlinson has written her own, more modern — and foreign — version of this fairy tale in the young adult novel Toads and Diamonds… It’s easily appropriate for children as young as eight years old, but sufficiently sophisticated that a teenager is likely to enjoy it as well. And for those of us who enjoy fairy tales retold, it is good reading no matter our age. Read the rest.

Birdbrain by Johanna Sinisalo

… It isn’t easy to tease out the fantastic in this novel, which seems much more like a depressing mainstream account of an ill-matched couple on a disastrous vacation. Although the descriptions of the landscape and wildlife are occasionally exhilarating, the relationship between Jyrki and Heidi, and the interactions they have with other hikers along the way, are so unpleasant as to dominate the narrative. If Sinisalo’s intent was to make the primitive, untouched wilderness seem a more equable companion to the human race than either of these two, she succeeded — but she did so without making the environment a character in any sense of that word, without making the world seem like much of a marvelous place or nature a beautiful, rather than a purely malicious, force. Other reviewers have touted this novel as a forceful environmental novel, calling it, for instance, “a brilliant piece of writing about the environment.” I simply found it a bore. Read the rest.

Tower Hill by Sarah Pinborough

…Tower Hill reads as if it were written to a formula. The characters are types rather than individuals, and Pinborough makes limited use of her setting… Pinborough has been hailed as one of the fresh new voices of horror fiction. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. But this novel belies that reputation. Tower Hill is the fifth novel Pinborough published in five years, and perhaps the author simply became fatigued with writing about dark and horrible happenings, because this novel is unremarkable. Though it is competently written (despite her misuse of Catholic ritual), it fails to provide the thrill of terror that leads one to read in this genre. Read the rest.

Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon

You know it’s going to be a bad day when, first thing, someone steps in front of a moving subway train right next to you; and next, when you have a major fight with your ex-wife about your daughter, it’s hard to believe things will get any better. When the third thing that happens is you have a heart attack and die, it can’t really get any worse, can it? But maybe it can get better. Maybe you can come back to life with the aid of a passerby. Things might get confusing in the immediate aftermath — why is the old lady who came to your aid so intent on making sure you don’t get to a hospital? How did she manage to transport you from the back of an ambulance to a grassy plain and back again? And why is she calling you “Rabbit”? It must be hard, after decades of a normal life, to find that you are not entirely human. When you get that information on top of the morning you’ve already had, well, that’s the stuff novels are made of. And it’s quite a beginning to Mike Shevdon’s first novel, Sixty-One Nails… Even when Shevdon finds his historically fascinating plot, though, the pace remains a serious problem. There is a fine novella hiding inside this novel… Read the rest.

The Dragon DelaSangre by Alan F. Troop

Peter DelaSangre is a dragon. Yes, he looks human; that’s because dragons are shapeshifters. And he appreciates a lot about the human race, including such things as television, music, and women — but he probably appreciates the way they taste most of all. Because for dragons, humans are prey, and nothing else will really do, at least not in the long run. Alan F. Troop’s protagonist in his first novel, The Dragon DelaSangre, is therefore not a likeable character. It’s quite a challenge for a first-time novelist to make the bad guy his first-person narrator. Troop can’t quite pull it off, though it has to be granted that The Dragon DelaSangre is a unique approach to dragons. These are not Anne McCaffrey’s useful dragons, nor the dragons that knights are wont to confront: they are not particularly wise, they have no mercy, and they are by no means a mode of transportation. Certainly, despite Peter’s odd fascination with the race, they are not even close to being human… Read the rest.

Haunted Heart by Lisa Rogak

… Lisa Rogak’s Haunted Heart, a biography of Stephen King, is interesting and entertaining, but does not provide any information that is in the least new. It is surprising that this book landed on the Edgar ballot in the Best Critical/Biographical category because, while it is competent enough, it is not in the least revelatory… Rogak competently summarizes everything in the public domain about Stephen King’s life. While that might be sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of someone who is just today discovering King’s writing, it is frustrating to anyone who has been following King’s career since Carrie first came off the presses in 1974. I suspect that the definitive King biography will not be written until decades after his death — which I hope, for the sake of my reading life, is many, many years away indeed. Read the rest.

Hamlet’s Father by Orson Scott Card

Those of us who majored in English in college have all read Shakespeare’s Hamlet at least once, and we’ve all seen at least one performance. Some of us go to as many performances as we possibly can, enjoying every new spin on the old tale. I’ve seen at least three movies made from the play and seen it staged at least five times. I’ve studied the text of the play in detail, and one thing never changes: Claudius murders King Hamlet in order to bed the king’s wife, Gertrude, out of good old heterosexual lust; and out of a lust for power, for the right to take the throne rather than see it go to Hamlet the younger when King Hamlet dies. Trust Orson Scott Card, noted for his outspoken condemnation of homosexuality, to turn Shakespeare on his head and make his new novella, Hamlet’s Father, all about King Hamlet’s homosexuality. And not just his homosexuality, but his pedophilia. This transparent political and religious argument masquerading as a “revelatory version of the Hamlet story,” according to the copy on the back cover, never rises above its polemic to become a genuine story worth reading… Read the rest.