Review: Imaginary Numbers (Incryptid #9) by Seanan Mcguire

Imaginary Numbers (Incryptid #9) by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: February 25, 2020


Sarah's book! IT'S SARAH'S BOOK!

That's literally what I shouted (yes---out loud, like a lunatic) when a random package from Penguin Random House showed up on my doorstep, containing an ARC and a paper telling me I'd won one of those contests that I always enter but never, ever win, but somehow managed to win this time, and can you think of a more perfect day than that? Of course you can't. Don't lie.

(But I lied, gentle reader, because it turned out this isn't Sarah's book. Not entirely. This is Artie's book as much as Sarah's---well, at least on a 60/40ish or 65/35 split, though I'd have to crunch the page count to be sure. A fun surprise, and a welcome one; I really like Artie, and it was a lot of fun to see inside his head.)

Sarah Zellaby leaves Ohio for the Price family compound outside of Portland, mostly healed from her ordeal but very much aware she (and everyone else) is using the word 'mostly'. A dangerous encounter in the airport leads to far greater dangers descending on the House of Price, as Sarah reunites with her family, has to deal with her very complicated relationship with Artie, and is forced to face her fellow cuckoos and her own cuckoo biology.

It's difficult to say too much about the plot without being too spoilery. Suffice to say: the mice return (though I could have done with more mice! I know they're the seasoning and not the sauce---it's just that after their disappearance in the last book, I was expecting a bit more mice here than we actually get), the cuckoos descend, and by the end, nothing will ever be the same. And I mean that in the most literal way possible.

Are the cuckoos evil?

Yes.

And no.

And yes, oh god yes.

And no.

What they are, above all things, is invasive. I thought the earlier books gave us a good understanding of what that meant, but . . . prepare to learn some new stuff, children. It's gonna be a wild ride.

And that ending . . . oof. That is a big ending in and of itself, to say nothing of the potential . . . implications . . . for a certain longstanding background plot. I shall say no more than that.

Included at the end is a short story called Follow the Lady, which I'd actually recommend you read before the main book, if that makes any sense. It follows Antimony and her crew as, heading home, their car breaks down in a certain small Michigan town where they encounter a very familiar face. Much of the story is more or less a recap of the previous Antimony arc, so if you need a refresher this is actually a pretty great way to get yourself caught up.

Overall: definitely pick this up, and prepare to start whining about how the next one is a year away.

Review: Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed

Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


There are two stories here. One is the story of two longtime BFFs separated by class, race, and genius, now teetering on the cusp of adulthood and wondering how to reconcile their vastly different places in the world with an enduring friendship that might be blossoming into something more. The other is a tale of cosmic horror, of the hidden magical secrets of this world and the worlds beyond. If you'd asked me before picking this up which I'd prefer I'd have picked the latter without blinking; eldritch horror is the best of all horrors, and anyone claiming otherwise is a liar. But to my surprise, it was the story of Johnny and Nick---she a white world-famous child prodigy who has quite literally changed the world, and he the very brown working-class son of Guyanese immigrants, working at a grocery store and wondering about his future---that had me reading on.

Johnny and Nick have been BFFs since early childhood, when both were taken hostage during a terrorist attack and ended up getting shot with a single bullet, then remaining friends ever after, despite living in two very different worlds. Their relationship sits the heart of this story, and the author achieves a rapport between the two that took definite skill. Their relationship---he, unsure of his place in the world and very unsure of his place in her world, she keeping more secrets than anyone too young to drive ever should---pops off the page, with dialogue that feels fresh and real. I kind of found myself wishing I was reading a story about them facing something other than eldritch horrors, and that's pretty insane for me, cause usually I'm the person yelling that the book needs to stop with the interpersonal crap and get back to the eldritch horrors. (And oh, that ending . . .)

The main issue here is that the story really needed time to breathe. A lot more time. Once our main antagonist enters the story (and to be frank, that entity seemed less 'eldritch horror' and more 'video game villain') we're sent off on a worldwide adventure that feels oddly rushed and insubstantial. The story veers wildly from place to place, plot point to plot point, with our characters getting hit with quests and revelations and infodumps and new scenery. . . and nothing really has enough time to gel. Too often the worldbuilding felt unfinished, with Johnny giving infodumps in the place of plot development.

Overall, this had a lot of potential, and the author manages some really great rhythms between her two protagonists. But it needed to be longer than it was, with more care given to the worldbuilding.

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

Review: The Secret Chapter by Genevieve Cogman

The Secret Chapter by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publication Date: January 7, 2020


The latest book in the Invisible Library series is definitely better than some of the previous installments, but alas, still fails to achieve the sublime perfection of the first book. (I blame the plot's stubborn refusal to stay in Mad Victorian World, as I have dubbed Irene and Kai's current home base; none of the other worlds we see come close to matching the glorious batshittery of that one, so part of me just keeps wondering why we keep leaving the awesome world to go see so many less awesome worlds. I'd thought the events of the most recent book set up plausible ways for Kai and Irene to stay put in a plausible way, but if this book is anything to go by, that's not to be.)

The good news: It's time for a heist! It's hard to go wrong with heists. Irene, with Kai tagging along, gets roped into joining a crew of Fae (and one interesting dragon) who are stealing a mysterious painting in a version of Vienna under constant lockdown by a special government agency hunting magical creatures. (With an added twist I saw coming much sooner than I wanted to.) Along the way we learn some very interesting info about Kai's family, and then some very interesting and very dangerous info about different members of Kai's family, which seems like it'll be very relevant in future books.

The less good news: the plot meanders a bit, the heist could have been a bit better, and I had trouble differentiating between several members of the heist crew.

Overall: a good installment, but not a great one. I was entertained, which is the most important thing, and some tantalizing tidbits of dragon lore tied everything in with the overarching series plot in a reasonably interesting way. This was better than some recent installments, but again: still not quite up to the level of the first book.

Review: Frozen Orbit by Patrick Chiles

Frozen Orbit by Patrick Chiles
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
Publication Date: January 7, 2020


Four astronauts blast off in a nuclear-powered ship en route to Pluto, chasing after a secret decades-old Soviet mission that went awry. (I'd recommend readers avoid this book's Amazon/Goodreads description, as it basically spoils the big reveal. And not subtly, either.)

This was . . . not to my taste. Hard science fiction soars when it explores new realms of the possible, but it's also infamous for flat characters, tedious science descriptions, and emotionless prose. Frozen Orbit, alas, falls prey to two of those three mighty sins: the characters are pretty lifeless and the prose tends to plod. Moments that should feel emotional instead feel hollow, clunky. (I actually found the scientific descriptions to be somewhat interesting, which is unusual for me in this subgenre. )

The political machinations at home seemed unrealistic, and I didn't find any of the subplots (the 'mystery' of the Soviet commander's journal, the A.I., the relations between the crew) very engaging. It takes about two-thirds of the book to actually get to Pluto, which surprised me, and not in a good way; the early sections felt almost like filler.

Overall, I thought the description made the book sound a lot more interesting than it turned out to be---in part, I suspect, because the description basically spoils the 'mystery' of what was waiting at Pluto.

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

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.