Review: A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill

A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 17, 2019



For all its Lovecraftian references, A Cosmology of Monsters is a deeply human story: of monsters both literal and figurative, of the petty pains and beautiful heartbreaks of the horror-haunted Turner family and the monsters they meet, embody, and unleash. The scourges of mental illness, the soul-sucking micro-pains of a life lived at the ragged edge of the middle class, and the daily suffocations that family---the people that you can never truly escape---require . . . these things combine with rather more tangible horrors, some very literal monsters in the dark, to create a story that manages depth without sacrificing its fantastical elements for the sake of its metaphors. (As I began reading this, part of me was afraid the monsters would be figurative. Rest assured, this is literal horror. The monsters that stalk the Turner family are very real, though much of the book is devoted to the more mundane monstrosities we ordinary folk experience: poverty, sickness, conflicts within the family, etc.).

Overall, I enjoyed this quite a lot. I won't speak too much about the plot, as the mystery of what's actually going on is part of the fun. Suffice to say, we follow here the lives of an ordinary American family whose lives are drenched in horror. From a father's love of horror fiction and haunted houses, passed down to his children and eventually serving as a family business (in the creation of a haunted house called The Wandering Dark), to the more more mundane horrors of poverty, sickness, and familial clashes, to literal horrors in the dark that haunt each generation of Turners, this is a horror novel quite literally about horror.

It takes a lot of skill to mesh the mundane with the fantastical in a way that that diminishes neither, and this depiction of American life is almost as unsettling as the eldritch City that haunts and hunts our characters. The marriage that 'should' have every element needed for success and fortune, smashed against the rocks of small dreams, smaller incomes, and the lack of fulfillment so endemic to so many lives. The running of a small business, the closest thing to a religion that America has, treated like the daily grind of precariousness that it oh-so-often is. The institution of the family, that most sacred thing, twisted and rotted into an inescapable prison.

I see this is being categorized under cosmic horror, but that's not an entirely accurate description. This story's bones lie in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, not in what I'll refer to as the Innsmouth/Cthulhu 'shelf' of cosmic horror. In other words: this isn't really about the horror of the unknowable, the madness of glimpsing what man is not meant to know---it's about the riders on the night winds, monsters both seen and touched, and an eldritch, inescapable land which we must, and must never, visit.

I did have some quibbles. A group of characters appear that I found rather plot device-y, and the ending, which I found (overall) to be very appropriate and satisfying, did have a couple of illogical elements and some things I thought should have been fleshed out a bit more. But overall, this was a well-told story with an interesting plot, something horror fans and non-horror fans should definitely both enjoy.

Review: The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher

The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 1, 2019


Upon the death of her grandmother, a freelance editor grabs her glorious dog Bongo and heads off to to clean out her grandmother's rural North Carolina house. Said grandmother was quite a bitch, which isn't really relevant to the plot (except in one somewhat hilarious way that I kept expecting to be expounded upon or subverted, but never actually was). Said grandmother was also a hoarder, which definitely is relevant to the plot, as it turns a quick clean-up into a much longer affair. And as the days pass and the shadows lengthen, our oh-so-unlucky narrator discovers certain eldritch truths lurking in the forest surrounding the house. And then she discovers that certain of those has decided to follow her back to the house. (She also discovers that Bongo is both the best and worst of dogs. You'll see what I mean there.)

The first three-quarters of The Twisted Ones is one of the best horror novels I've read in a long, long while, the sort of book I kept reading late at night and then yelling at myself for reading late at night, because every wind gust and house creak was suddenly causing me to freeze in place while trying not to glance in shadowed corners.

However and most unfortunately, as we reach the home stretch, that carefully-built sense of dread just up and dissipates, like fog hit with a fan, until I suddenly felt like I was reading a far more generic slasher-esque chase story than what had come before. I knocked off a star for that, where I'd have cheerfully given this five stars and beyond had the promise of the earlier sections been maintained through to the end.

There is a tie here to a . . . I wanted to say a horror classic, but I'm not sure the book in question qualifies as that. (Certainly not in the sense of being a 'shorthand' novel among horror fans, one of those books whose quotes, plot, and references any good horror reader would immediately recognize.) Rather, this is tied to a lesser-known book by the same author as a clear cosmic horror classic, so it'll be familiar to some readers but definitely not all. In any case, I myself hadn't read the book in question, and didn't even realize what was being tied into the plot while reading the book, and I certainly had no trouble following the plot.

If you're any kind of horror fan, definitely pick this up. Just be forewarned: the ending might disappoint you.

Review: The Nobody People by Bob Proehl

The Nobody People by Bob Proehl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 3, 2019

This book is not about the X-Men, but you might be forgiven for forgetting that fact as you crack open this 400+ page . . . not doorstopper, because I don't think it quite qualified there, but it's definitely a book of great girth. (Whatever the proper term for that would be.) The Nobody People calls its superpowered humans Resonants instead of mutants, but there are so many parallels that it's impossible to really talk about this book without mentioning its clear inspiration. (Primarily, but not just the X-Men; the author clearly had a lot of fun peppering this book with a plethora of tiny SFF references, from Doctor Who to The Magicians to what I could swear was a dash of The Highlander. But those are easter eggs at best; the X-Men clearly lie at the bones of this story.)

The problem with that, though, is that I didn't feel the author really did anything new with its inspiration(s). It's not an interrogation of the X-Men, or an expansion of the ideas behind that series, though it definitely explores similar (in places, identical) themes of prejudice and power. It's a book that's about many of the same things, and I don't know that lampshading the similarities did anything to elevate this into something more original.

There were things I enjoyed here--there's an almost Stephen King-ish quality to the writing, not in the 'horror' sense but in the episodic attention to characterization--but I also felt the pacing dragged. This is a decently long book, and it often felt even longer, to the point where there were times I had to force myself to keep reading (and not to skim).

Overall, I'd say this is one of those books that I could see others enjoying a lot, but just wasn't entirely my cup of tea.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Throne of the Five Winds by S.C. Emmett

The Throne of the Five Winds (Hostage of Empire #1) by S.C. Emmett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 15, 2019


If you're looking for bloody battles or magical duels or epic quests . . . look further, cause this is definitely not the book for you. There is no magic here, no quests (unless you consider 'trying to stay alive in a palace with more assassins per capita than there are bankers in Manhattan' to be a quest), and the only (physical) battles end well before our narrative begins. But if you, like me, find court intrigue absolutely riveting, then oh god do I have the book for you.

The newly-reconstituted Empire of Zhaon, the Land of the Five Winds, has just defeated its fierce neighbor Khir in battle. As part of the surrender terms, the Great Rider of Khir's only daughter has been dispatched to marry the Crown Prince of Zhaon, accompanied only by a single (quite fierce) lady-in-waiting. The two women must navigate a palace that's less a snake pit than a bloody, shark-filled ocean, as the Emperor's health worsens, his six sons (and their mothers) vie for power, and enemies beyond their borders begin to plot.

The writing here is absolutely superb. This is a very long book (the first of a series), with a decently large cast of characters, but at no point did I ever have trouble remembering who was who, who was allied with whom, etc. And the author is one of those truly gifted writers whose prose I can just fall into; her language has cadence, rhythm, depth---beauty to spare. Her scenes are exquisitely crafted, conversations with double meanings crafted so brilliantly I was literally in awe, each word honed to absolute perfection.

Fans of books like The Goblin Emperor, or political/court drama in general (or even regency romances---the romance factor here is clear and present, though never overdone) will find a lot to love here. (But with way more assassination attempts. Seriously, there is a ridiculous amount of assassination attempts in this book.) This is a book I'll probably be pulling out to comfort-read on rainy days for years to come, and I'm really excited for the sequel.

(As an aside, it's mentioned in the back extras that S.C. Emmett is a pseudonym for Lilith Saintcrow. Never in a million years would I have guessed that! I've read some of her other works--some I liked a lot, others that weren't my cup of tea--and this is definitely the most ambitious writing, worldbuilding-wise, I think I've seen from her yet.)

Overall: highly, highly recommended.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 1, 2019


Half Way Home isn't a novella--I don't have the word count, but it's structured and plotted like a full-length novel, albeit very much on the shorter end of that scale--but it definitely feels like one. In scope, in character development, etc., this stands as a complete story, but could easily be appended as "Part 1" of a longer cycle, though Goodreads tells me that isn't the case. (Also, that this is being re-published, so unless there are plans to continue on later, this is definitely a stand-alone.)

The plot is relatively straightforward: to get around the distance issue, humanity has begun 'seeding' worlds with blastocysts instead of fully-grown colonists. An AI raises and teaches the humans (decanting them as full-grown adults), builds the colony for them, and . . . well, and it's programmed to incinerate everyone and everything if the chosen planet turns out not to be as hospitable to life as originally thought. Which happens--sort of--at the beginning of our story; a group of 15-year-olds end up decanted early while the rest of their proto-colony burns, for reasons the AI refuses to discuss. That mystery---where they are, what's gone wrong, etc.---drive the story to its conclusion.

Overall, I enjoyed this a lot. It's a fun little story, engagingly written. (A certain famously cheesy scifi series was clearly the inspiration here, and if you finish this without knowing exactly which one I'm talking about, then there's really no hope for you.) Will this enter the scifi canon as one of the greats? Definitely not. But if you're looking for an afternoon's entertainment, this is the perfect story to curl up with.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: A Lush and Seething Hell by John Hornor Jacobs

A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by John Hornor Jacobs 
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 8, 2019

Cosmic horror is by far my favorite subgenre, so I was really excited about A Lush And Seething Hell, a duology containing a novella ("The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky") and a short novel ("My Heart Struck Sorrow"), both dealing with the horrors within and the horrors without and the horrors teeming beneath. Overall, I'd say this is an excellent addition to any cosmic horror afficionado's bookshelf, though I definitely preferred the second work to the first, as I'll discuss below:

THE SEA DREAMS IT IS THE SKY: The first (and shorter) work in the duology has a lot to recommend it, but---unfortunately---also a lot to condemn. The central concept is refreshingly original: two refugees from Magera---a nonexistent Latin American country that ticks all the boxes Americans associate with that region, including suffering under a brutal American-backed dictatorship---encounter each other in a cafe in Spain. One is a famous poet, wanted by the regime and haunted by his experiences in his homeland . . . and by an otherworldly text whose translation contains, and brings, madness. The other, our narrator, is a young academic who gets caught up in the poet's, and her homeland's, many horrors.

I loved the ideas behind this. A Latin American country that never existed . . . or did it, now? If an eldritch horror overtook a country Down There and pulled it from existence, how many Americans would even notice the hole? Here, cosmic horror provides the perfect analogy for American influence on, but ignorance of, Latin America that I can possibly think of.

But . . . well, the main joy of cosmic horror lies in what isn't and can't be shown. That's why it's a genre that's always incredibly difficult to translate well to the screen. But that doesn't mean a writer can go for long, interminable stretches ignoring the whole 'cosmic horror' part of their cosmic horror tale. Far too often, "The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky" suffers from that worst malady: it's more concerned with its narrator's navel-gazing than with any eldritch horrors. "Turgid" is probably the word I'd use; not for all of it, of course, because the parts in past and present Magera, suffering from its otherworldly 'miasma', are quite fantastic. There just aren't enough of them. (I've never read Roberto Bolano, which the description tells me is an influence, so perhaps there are depths here that I missed. All I know is, I had to force myself to read through parts of this because my attention kept wandering.)

Overall, this is the sort of story whose plot I kind of want some other author to steal and re-work, because the ideas behind it are superb, it's just . . . the execution is somewhat lacking.

MY HEART STRUCK SORROW: Had this been a stand-alone, I'd have given it five stars without blinking. Heavier on plot and far, far creepier than its predecessor, "My Heart Struck Sorrow" stars a folklorist who, recently having lost his wife and son to tragedy, discovers the chilling records of a famous colleague's trek through the Depression-era South, in search of an eldritch song. Racism and madness, guilt and suffering, the past and present darknesses of America and their ties to our cultural products: each of these strings gets deftly plucked, but unlike in "The Sea Dreams It Is The Sky", the author here never wallows in his characters' sense of self. The story charges, bull-like, through to the teeming horrors just out of vision, virulently present but just out of reach, acknowledging horrors within and without and beneath but never prioritizing one above the rest.

One of my favorite aspects was the weaving of traditional Christian ideas about hell and horror (oh, those rotten apple trees!) with 'traditional' cosmic horror ideas about true horror existing beyond and beneath our conceptions. (You can see the shadow of The King in Yellow overlaying the plot, but only a whisper, only a dream; this is its own horror, and all the deeper for it.) I really liked the author's incorporation of real American music, the way the author ties the real to the profane. I'd never heard of "Stagger Lee" (which is and definitely is not the song in question) before, but YouTube tells me it's old and popular. It takes a deft touch to draw on popular music like this (I'm looking at you, Battlestar Galactica and All Along The Watchtower!) but the author manages to avoid any triteness here while still wrapping otherworldly horror beneath the skin of our more ordinary horrors.

Overall: if you enjoy cosmic horror, or any horror at all, I'd say definitely pick this duology up. There's a refreshing, intricate originality in both stories that's well worth your time.

I received a free copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Bone Ships by R.J. Barker

The Bone Ships by R.J. Barker
My rating: 2.8 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 24, 2019


As a longtime fantasy reader, few things annoy me as much as writers who needlessly invent words. I don't mean words for new concepts, new animals, new magical elements, things like that; I mean word substitutions that serve no logical purpose. Saying "sither" instead of sister. (Still using "brother", though!) Saying "Skearith's Eye" instead of "the sun". An endless slew of Those Dreaded Compound Words---we all know and fear them!---when the author slaps two or more unrelated words together to describe an object that probably doesn't need a name to begin with, attempting to dazzle us with their worldbuilding skills while only succeeding in ripping us out of the story.

The Bone Ships sins greatly in this regard, and it sins right from the start. The sheer quantity of unnecessary invented words operates like the story version of a speed bump; just as you start getting into the story, whoops! Here's another string of nonsense words whose only purpose is to force you to stop and figure out what the hell is being described. By the time you return to the story proper, all sense of pacing and plot and character development has metaphorically tumbled off the cliff. (The fact that most of this story takes place on a ship, which already has lots of unfamiliar elements, does not help matters.)

The story is uncomplicated. Ship captain ('shipwife', all ships here being dubbed as male) Joron Twiner loses a fight (and command of his ship of condemned criminals) to the famous Meas Gilbryn, and ends up serving as her second-in-command on a quest to save the last known arakeesian (a sort of sea dragon, a long-thought-extinct race whose bones are used to make ships), hopefully bringing peace between two warring seafaring nations in the process. Many and sundry things happen along the way, few of which held my attention for any length, leading to a somewhat anticlimactic ending and a setup for Book 2.

Part of me wonders if I'd have enjoyed this more had the story been centered on the island archipelago, not on a ship. Because the politics of this society are, if not always the most logical, certainly more enthralling than the action on the open seas: in this world, much of the population is born deformed in some way, and political power is held by women who prove their 'strength' by giving birth to unblemished children and surviving the births, (and by the men who service them sexually). Each firstborn child is sacrificed to the ships, creating magical 'corpselights' that the population believes are necessary to power the ships, even though ships exist that have no corpselights and everyone knows those work just fine. They also seem to assign jobs to the malformed based on what they've lost: lose a foot, you become a cobbler. Lose a hand, you have to sew. Like I said, this is not the most logical society in the fantasy genre, but I think you really can't go wrong with human sacrifice and a fertility-based political system, at least when it comes to the entertainment factors.

Overall, this was just not my cup of tea.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publication Date: September 10, 2019

I cannot even conceive of a reader who could hear about Tamsyn Muir's swashbuckling debut Gideon the Ninth without immediately lunging for a copy. It is literally beyond my comprehension that any sane person could hear that there exists a book about an intergalactic empire of space necromancers and just, like, shrug it off. Go about their day, whistling a jaunty tune, not reading about the lesbian necromancers in spaaaaaaaace.

Alas, for those sad souls that have been doing just that, know this: in a beautiful castle ten thousand years dead, the undying Emperor has gathered the heirs to the eight ruling Houses and their sworn cavaliers to battle it out for the ultimate prize: the immortality of a necro-saint, and a place at the Emperor's side. Through much and assorted fuckery, the hilarious and delightfully obscene master swordswoman Gideon Nav ends up as cavalier to her nemesis Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the House of the Ninth, the House that even the other Houses dread. (Which says quite a lot, as this is an intergalactic empire literally ruled by necromancers.) Bitching merrily the entire way, Harrow and Gideon descend upon the castle of the First House hoping for power (Harrow) and freedom (Gideon), only to find a vast labyrinth of ancient and eldritch secrets, byzantine politics, and more skeletons than any sane person could ever want, in places that skeletons should never, ever be. 

Seamlessly blending the hilarious with the macabre and the scientific with the magical, Gideon the Ninth is a true tour de force, the sort of book that cries out for a sequel. (And one's in the works, thank goodness.) The characters practically do somersaults off the page, written with a lightness of the soul that's more Addams Family than Stephen King, though the blood and body count are definitely more the latter than the former. You will love Gideon, or you will show yourself a liar. And you will love her world, bones and viscera and all. It's weird and wild and wonderful, and now that I've finished it I want nothing more than to read it again from the start. 

Murder and mayhem and madcap hilarity; what more could a reader want?

Review: To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers

To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 3, 2019


Becky Chambers is one of those writers whose star in the science fiction world definitely seems to be waxing, so when I got the chance to review a shorter work of hers, I was excited to give it a whirl. I'd picked up her debut The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet a while back, only to put it down a quarter way through; not because it was bad---it seemed well-written---but because something about the plot, the voice, just didn't grab me. I always intended to pick it back up, but . . . well, the world is vast and so is my TBR pile. "I'll pick it up again tomorrow," I told myself, and of course tomorrow never came.

To Be Taught, If Fortunate is a standalone novella, following four astronauts sent on a crowdfunded deep-space exploration mission to explore a series of worlds light-years away from Earth. Via our narrator Ariadne, we follow the joys and heartbreaks of their discoveries, the introspective and social narrations of their interpersonal conflicts, and we sit silently beside them as the slow, creeping realization hits that, back home on Earth, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

There's a lot to like here. The worldbuilding is fantastic and the writing is vivid; that perfect exhilaration, that crucial sense of wonder, is tangible whenever the story delves into the team's scientific adventures. Chambers isn't one of those authors who writes about a scientific expedition but handwaves away the science, which I really enjoyed. Many sci-fi authors can get tedious in those portions, but that never happens here, and that alone bumped this up a star.

There are flaws, however. For a foursome that never has any conflict rising above the level of passive aggressiveness, there's a bit too much introspection here, or so I felt. Some of those parts dragged a bit. And part of the ending, I thought, followed a logic stream that I found completely unrealistic. It kind of pulled me out of the story, because they end up making a decision that just seemed utterly bizarre to me. (And the fact that our narrator spends so much time explaining it . . . that that was necessary in the first place is a hint that the decision itself doesn't flow naturally from what came before it.)

But ultimately, that was probably a minor thing. Melancholy and vibrant simultaneously, To Be Taught, If Fortunate made me wonder if I should pick The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet up again. I think I probably will.

A big thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: October 8, 2019


In an unknown country, in an unknown time period, there sits an isolated, pre-industrial village known only as 'the county', where the name of the game is "Patriarchy, Patriarchy, Dear God What The Hell Is This Maddening Super-Ultra-Mega-Patriarchy?". Women are either wives, servants, or whores---but more often than anything they're corpses, seized and dismembered for the 'magic' that supposedly resides within their flesh, or sent to the gallows on paper-thin pretexts by the men closest to them. Before being forced into marriage or servitude, the village girls are sent off to spend a year---the titular "grace year"---in some unknown place in the wilderness. Not all of them will return. And those that do return, likely won't return whole.

THE GRACE YEAR is one of those books that hooks you on the first page, then drags you, kicking and screaming, through an obstacle course made of flensing knives and over a finish line set atop a briar patch. It's ostensibly YA, but vicious enough to get bumped up into the adult category. (Like many YA books, in my experience.)

What I loved: the writing, the psychological drama, the author's beautifully-done analysis of institutional sexism and her refusal to fall into the "all men are evil and all women are brainwashed" tropes I feared when I started reading. One thing I really liked is how a certain plot twist that I fully expected to occur (trying not to spoil too badly here) with the 'poachers' ended up never occurring; the control system the 'county' has instituted reaches far and reaches deep, and sometimes stories told to frighten people end up not being exaggerations at all.

What I didn't love: our heroine is oddly subservient to a particular character (as are other characters) despite there being certain reasons this makes no sense. Also, a romance occurs that I thought needed a bit more time to develop than it actually got (though overall I thought it was well-done).

Overall, I thought this was beautifully done.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Turning Darkness Into Light by Marie Brennan

Turning Darkness Into Light by Marie Brennan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: August 20, 2019


A standalone sequel to the MEMOIRS OF LADY TRENT quintet, TURNING DARKNESS INTO LIGHT is reliant on its predecessors to, if not make sense---I think there's enough info for even a newbie to understand the gist of what's going on, if not necessarily care about it too deeply---then to give the reader some reason to read on. The first half was oddly dry, and though the story picked up in the second half, I didn't think it did so well enough to bump this up any higher than three stars.

The plot follows Isabella's twentysomething granddaughter Audrey`as she translates an ancient Draconean epic amidst much Scirland-based skullduggery. The story lacks the globe-trotting adventurism of its predecessors, but never really manages to replace that with anything equally interesting. (I almost wrote that the author squelched the mannerpunk elements, except that isn't strictly true; they're probably stronger here than in any book since A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS, it's just that Audrey cares so much less---and is bound so much less---than Isabella that they just feel absent.)

The author's choice to construct this as an epistolary novel just added to the dryness, I thought, as did her choice to write out *the entire Draconean epic*, along with the translators' notes, neither of which were really interesting enough (even to a devoted reader of the previous novels!) that I thought they really needed to be written out in full. Yes, there is a mystery involved . . . but at some point, it all started feeling like bloat.

I really, really enjoyed the characters, though I think I would've preferred to see them interacting with and in some different plot. (Also, this book made me wish for Jacob's seafaring adventures to get their time in the sun.) Cora, especially, was well-done, and the complexities of the Audrey/Mornett situation had a great deal of potential. But again, I felt the epistolary format sapped the character interactions of much of their vigor.

This is one of those novels that I think would've worked much better as a novella. Readers who haven't yet read the Lady Trent novels should absolutely start there, especially as this book contains a number of huge spoilers. Readers who haven't read the earlier works will, I think, have some difficulty getting through this one.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio

Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2) by Christopher Ruocchio
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: July 16, 2019


When EMPIRE OF SILENCE was first released, I read many reviews comparing it (favorably and unfavorably) to THE NAME OF THE WIND. And it occurred to me, after I sat down and actually read through it, what a hideously unfair comparison that was. How that sets the reader up for disappointment, and what a disservice that does to the author. Because a major reason THE NAME OF THE WIND is so popular is that it allows readers to live vicariously through Kvothe, to experience his many victories as if they were our own. Kvothe wins, you see; many battles, if not necessarily (or does he?) the war. And he racks up wins immediately, or near enough to make no difference. The story overflows with tidbits showing him outwitting his enemies, manipulating the world to his benefit, and such and sundry. And since Kvothe is a born genius/polymath, it's like that from the very beginning.

EMPIRE OF SILENCE, in contrast, was not a book dedicated to watching Hadrian outwit, outplay, or outfight the universe; it was a book, I thought, dedicated to dragging him through the mud. And every time you thought he was going to pull himself out of the mud, he just got hammered further and further down. It got to the point where I was forcing myself to keep reading, not because it was bad---it's an excellent book---but just because I as a reader was feeling Hadrian's pain, and it was hard to see a light at the end of the tunnel when Hadrian himself was constantly prophesying even greater failures to come. (It didn't help that this book is extremely lengthy, so the reader spends a lot of time watching Hadrian get kicked around. Yes, there's the idea of dragging someone down so you can build them back up . . . but Hadrian spends A LOT of time being dragged down. And the "picking himself up" part(s) seem much shorter than the others, and less frequent.)

Much of that dynamic continues into THE HOWLING DARK, if not always at the same . . . intensity? In the sense that Hadrian's "I am the hero in a fairy tale and Reality's just gonna have to deal with it" mentality continues, and though he wins out over Reality rather more here than he did in EMPIRE OF SILENCE, he's still not at Kvothe/Harry Dresden/Paul Atreides/etc. levels. (Though the ending gives reason to believe Book 3 will upend that, at least partially, in Hadrian's favor.)

We open with a time jump, passing over the early years of the Meidua Red Company's time as mercenaries and picking up after they overthrow a dictator and pick up some new recruits (an incident that seems important enough in-story that I actually looked to see if there was a bridging novella I'd missed). The quest for Vorgossos, and a peace we know will never come, monopolizes THE HOWLING DARK; I'll say little about how it plays out, but know that while it is definitely a slow burn, it is never, ever a boring one. By the end, we get a clearer sense of the board our game is played upon, and (possibly?) more about what sort of game is actually being played. To say nothing of what pieces are really in play.

One thing I love about this series is how deeply it plays with the notion of the devil and all accompanying facets. Hadrian's prose style is melodic---but never forget that, as Milton showed us, Satan is Creation's most eloquent child. Hadrian Marlowe's Lucifer connotations were clear to see in EMPIRE OF SILENCE, if somewhat underplayed thematically, but the comparison really gets jacked up to eleven in THE HOWLING DARK, and looks to go further still in future books. Free will is the name of the game, as are treachery and temptation, and Hadrian's role in all of these is crystal-clear as muck. (As an aside, I think the series would've been better served if it had played up the Lucifer/Devil themes of the narrative, marketing-wise, rather than comparing this to DUNE or THE NAME OF THE WIND or some other book that hits completely different character and story rhythms.)

One aspect I really adored, worldbuilding-wise, was the Luciferian tie-in with America. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to mention that the "Mericanii" play a role here (though I won't specify how), which makes sense: of all the nations of Earth, who has more in common with the beautiful, charming, tempting, "better to rule in hell than serve in heaven" Bringer of Light than America herself? There's something so delicious about how Ruocchio transmits the common elements of my culture into Luciferian horror, and even beyond, to something explicitly eldritch. (To say nothing of certain . . . other . . . cosmic horror elements. I just love cosmic horror. Space opera without cosmic horror is like tea without sugar.)

If books were food, THE HOWLING DARK would be Death By Chocolate: rich, decadent, inviting . . . but something it takes rather a long time to consume. I expected to have this review up a month ago at the latest, but I'd spend hours absorbed in the story, only to look up and find I'd only made it fifty pages. So pick this up, but be prepared to sink into the quicksand of the story; don't expect a quick race to the end.

Highly recommended, and I'm really looking forward to Book 3.

A huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: July 23, 2019

A Jazz-Age fairy tale based on Mayan myth, Gods of Jade and Shadow is both tantalizingly original and inexpertly crafted, the sort of book that feels like it should have been far more exciting than it was. (Making it something of a prototypical 3-star book.)

Casiopeia Tun is a (lampshaded!) Cinderella, a poor relation used as an unpaid servant in her wealthy grandfather's household. After an encounter with her cousin (and tormentor) Martin, Casiopeia opens a locked chest and accidentally releases a weakened Mayan death god, partially dismembered by his jealous twin brother. Casiopeia then gets shanghaied on a quest to find the god's missing body parts, which takes her everywhere from the Yucatan to Baja California to the depths of the Mayan underworld. The story plays out exactly as you'd expect, this being a fairy tale, and also nothing like you'd expect, this . . . not actually being a fairy tale. Ahem.

The setting is tremendous, and is by far the book's best feature. Jazz-age Mexico and the Mayan underworld aren't settings that get used very often in fantasy works, so there was a freshness here that really drew the eye.

The characters swim between archetypes and complexity--intentionally so, as the book makes clear--but while some of them were well-done (the Martin/Casiopeia relationship was a classic fairy tale trope given a degree of depth and complexity that twisted it around a bit) many of the others, especially the variety of demons and sorcerers encountered along the way, felt wooden. (And I would have liked more development of the Caiopeia/Hun-Kame relationship, which felt a bit like it was following tropes so clearly that it didn't think it needed internal development of its own.)

Where the story fell hardest, I thought, was the prose. Something about the author's word choices kept clunking against my ear. Too many sentences just didn't really . . . ring true? It was the sort of thudding you often get from translated works, where the translator sacrifices prose flow in favor of meaning, and often ends up losing the meaning as well. (I realize this is not a translated work, I simply use that as an example of where I've encountered similar qualities.) And the prose style, which is clearly meant to evoke a sort of fairy-tale , too often comes across as merely dull, yanking the reader out of the story.

Overall, I really liked parts of it, but I just didn't love the whole.

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott

Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: June 4, 2019


There are books out there that you think you should love, and fully expect to love, but when you finally crack open the spine (or your e-reader of choice), you discover to your horror that the story's a bit of a slog.

That's Rotherweird in a nutshell. The entire time I was reading, a tiny voice in the back of my mind kept whispering 'you should be enjoying this!' To the point where I almost felt guilty about how difficult it was to get through each chapter. On the surface, the story sounds grand: a town founded by geniuses, an ancient conspiracy, oddball characters, alternate realms . . . but the whole thing is told in this sort of halting, dry tone that just sucks all the life out of it.

The story feels weirdly emotionless. We're given a vast cavalcade of characters---who I had little trouble keeping straight, oddly enough---but they're drawn with so little feeling that it's nigh-impossible to care about any of them. At one point a character is straight-up murdered, and it falls upon the reader's heart with the same emotional intensity as a tax audit. The prose is very 'tell, don't show,' with a sort of blase-ness that could perhaps have been meant as whimsical . . . but if that was the intent, it failed pretty drastically.

Overall, this just wasn't to my taste.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 10, 2019


This is a book to drown in.

January Scaller is precocious, adventurous, and sheltered, qualities that serve her poorly in the mansion of her father's robber-baron employer Mr. Locke, in an early 20th century America that looks down on those who aren't the 'right' color. And January most definitely isn't white . . . though what ethnicity she and her father actually are isn't quite obvious to anyone, for reasons that are (but shouldn't be) a mystery. She's seven years old when she discovers her first Door, one of many mysterious and magical gateways scattered in the secret places of this world, and steps through it to another world---and she's much older when the mysteries of the Doors, and her own family's past, crash down upon her life.

How many ways can I say how much I adored this book? The prose is lush, inventive, addicting . . . I found myself reading it as slowly as I could, savoring each perfect sentence, each effortlessly stunning turn of phrase. I was literally angry at the idea that this book would eventually end.

This is the sort of book that I just want to hand out to strangers. Possibly throw at them. Alix E. Harrow is going straight to the top of my auto-buy list, and I can't wait to see what she comes out with next.

A superb debut, and highly, highly recommended.

A huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: The Immortal City by Amy Kuivalainen

The Immortal City by Amy Kuivalainen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: September 19, 2019


Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Dr. Penelope Bryne was publicly disgraced when she went public with research that claimed the legends of Atlantis were based on a real place, a la Troy, even though that struck this reader as a perfectly logical academic argument for her to make, and the whole "she's saying magic is real" assessment of the academic community was a giant non sequitur cause she never even implied that. When a woman is ritualistically murdered in Venice, with strange symbols scrawled around her, Penelope ends up heading to La Serenissima to consult with the police.

This book was . . . bland. After the first few paragraphs, I decided this would probably be a breezy fantasy-laden murder mystery---light, but fun. Well, light this certainly was, but the fun part ended up being nowhere to be found. The plot didn't just fail to grab me; things happen that are clearly meant to be major plot points, and all I could think while reading was "I am bored to tears". The plot feels like it has no stakes, even where it clearly should have stakes, and quite a few parts were, honestly, just very badly written. The author's sense of pacing was pretty nonexistent.

There is a certain sameness to the characters, a thinness, a superficiality; I didn't care what happened to them, and their dialog always sort of clunked against the ear. Everyone spoke in the same way, with the same voice, and that voice was . . . not like how people actually speak. The magical elements were handled in a weirdly pedestrian way, which . . . sounds pretentious, I know, but I'm not sure how else to describe it. Magic just sort of plops woodenly into the plot. There was no magic to the magic. I felt like I was reading about a billing argument in a dentist's office, not an ancient magical feud.

Overall, I'd say this was definitely a clunker. Not recommended.

Review: The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey

The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Publication Date: June 11, 2019


Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

There is nothing worse to a reader than a book with a great opening line and a terrible follow-through. And The Grand Dark has a fantastic opening line: "The Great War was over, but everyone knew another war was coming and it drove the city a little mad." That's a line with promise. That's a line that beckons you to read on.

And so I read on . . . and almost immediately, my eyes started glazing over. I'm not sure what the opposite of a gripping story is--a loose story? A slippery story? Words like "tedious" really don't capture the thing--but suffice to say, this is that. Things began happening in the last quarter or so, which isn't a compliment.

I bumped this up from one to two stars only because the writing, though numbing, is at least technically competent. I generally reserve one-star reviews for books that I legitimately believe shouldn't have been published as-is. This book is far from skillfully written, and it wasn't nearly as interesting as it meant to be, but at least it seemed professionally produced.

Overall: not recommended.

Review: Walking To Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Walking to Adebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: May 28, 2019


Walking to Aldebaran is a stand-alone novella starring astronaut Gary Rendell, a member of an international expedition team sent to explore an alien artifact that suddenly appeared out beyond Pluto. We follow Gary as he wanders the halls and corridors of the artifact (which he calls the Crypts), intermixed with flashbacks to the strange events that led him there. To say any more about the plot . . . well, that'd be a pretty honking big spoiler.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of those incredibly prolific writers who somehow manages to be incapable of writing a bad book. I've long thought of him as the male Seanan McGuire, and this installment just reinforces that impression. His prose sucks you in, and when you're finished, you flip around to find the next installment (and get kind of cranky when there isn't one!) I really loved the overall aura of the setting: it comes across as this sort of bizarre hiking story---like being on some Lovecraftian version of the Appalachian Trail, with fellow hikers you do and definitely *don't* want to meet.

And let's just say, it's definitely the sort of book you'll want to re-read.

Highly recommended.

A big thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Seven Blades in Black by Sam Sykes

Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publication Date: April 9, 2019


Sal the Cacophony--bounty hunter, former mage, and wielder of the damned gun Cacophony--has been captured by the forces of the magic-less Revolution, scheduled to be executed before a cheering crowd. Playing Scheherazade to her executioner, she gives us the tale of how she came to be imprisoned: a hunt for seven rebel mages who did her a terrible wrong.

What that wrong is, she doesn't say until well past the halfway mark. Which is odd, because the story description straight-up announces it. (And because if Sal is a Vagrant, and Vagrants are rebel mages, and Sal doesn't seem to have any magic aside from the Cacophony, then it isn't hard to do the math.)

There's a really fun story in here, with some genuinely witty writing. The problem is that it's buried beneath at least a couple hundred pages of needless bloat. This leads to some pretty severe pacing problems, and a book that was far more of a slog than it should have been. Add in the plot twists that any reader who's paying attention should see coming from a mile away, and this was a pretty unsatisfying read.

A huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

Review: The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
To Be Published: June 18, 2019


Shaharazad Haas, who is essentially the bastard love child of Sherlock Holmes and Johannes Cabal, is a consulting sorceress in the semi-drowned city of Ven. Captain John Wyndham, native to the land of Ey (which went a bit Puritanical after overthrowing their Witch-King), suffered a bizarre wound fighting the forces of the Empress of Nothing beyond the Unending Gate, and ended up rooming with Shaharazad in Ven; Ey being less than sympathetic to men like Wyndham, who began their lives as women. When an old frenemy/lover comes to Shaharazad seeking help with a blackmailer, a partnership for the ages is born.

This is not the first Sherlock Holmes/cosmic horror mashup I’ve read, but it is by far the wittiest, cleverest, funniest, and most engaging. The characters are richly drawn, Wyndham’s deadpan narration mixing with Shaharazad’s batshit insanity across a series of well-fleshed-out Lovecraftian dreamscapes to create an engrossing narrative that I had trouble putting down.

This better end up being a series, or I will be quite cross.

If you love weird fiction, detective fiction, or any sort of fiction that finally elucidates what happened in Carcosa once the Revolution came for the King in Yellow, then this is definitely for you.

A huge thanks to Penguin First to Read and the publisher for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Aftershocks (The Palladium Wars) by Marko Kloos

Aftershocks (The Palladium Wars) by Marko Kloos
My Rating: 4 of 5 stars
To Be Published: July 1, 2019


Huge thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Five years after the end of a system-wide intergalactic war, civilians and former combatants are desperately trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, just as a new threat emerges from the shadows. (Well, it doesn’t really emerge. By the end of the book, the threat remains firmly ensconced in the shadows, which as a reader, I found somewhat problematic.)

This is a difficult book to rate properly, because it didn’t really feel like Book 1 in a series. It read more like a prologue to Book 1: it introduced the characters, fleshed out the worldbuilding, introduced some hints toward the overarching plotline, then . . . ta-da, The End.

Which is not to say it was bad. Far from it! This was my first Marko Kloos book, and it won’t be the last. (Which, as a reader, is probably the highest praise I can give.) The prose is clean, fresh, and perfectly styled; the work flowed effortlessly, in that particular manner that only truly talented authors can manage. The story has enough potential that I very much want to read the rest of the series.

Had I been able to go straight from this to Book 2/3/whatever, I might not necessarily have found the lack of plot resolution so jarring. (Also, two of the POVs wouldn’t have felt quite so , , , bare bones.) As it was, I read to the end, then I wanted to double-check to see if my e-ARC file was corrupted. The book does not end on what feels like a full-book storyline. It’s the sort of ending that has you expecting to turn the page and see “Chapter 1”.

Recommended, but be aware: very much the first part of a series, even more so than readers accustomed to reading series might expect.

Review: In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant

In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant
My Rating: 5 of 5 stars
To Be Published: June 30, 2019


Add one part Scooby-Doo to one part Lovecraft, sprinkle on a heavy dash of agony, and you end up with this delightful novella about friendship and family and the unnaturalness of straight lines.

Harlowe Upton and her three best friends are teen detectives who’ve left their teenage years behind and are wondering what comes next. What comes next turns out to be the mystery of Spindrift House, an old Victorian manor in a slowly-drowning New England town with a history of mysterious deaths and other, more horrific things. Harlowe is our narrator and our Velma, and also somewhat more than both those things, though if that’s a spoiler then you weren’t really paying attention. 

Lovecraftian anything is very much my cup of tea, and add in the inestimable Seanan McGuire, and it’s guaranteed to be a treat. This was no exception; even at such a short length, the characters breathed, the story gripped, and I kind of didn’t want it to end. Despite the aforementioned agony. 

(As an FYI: this is under her Mira Grant pseudonym, which usually is more mad science-y than her Seanan McGuire work, but if there was a science basis to the story here, I missed it. So be aware of that, if that’s important to you.)

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review.