Book Review: Harrowgate, by Kate Maruyama

 5/5 

Kate Maruyama's Harrowgate came out of left field late in the year to rock my top ten of 2013. Harrowing (pun intended) yet can't-put-it-down compelling, Maruyama's debut defies genre: a unique family romance that both spooked me and pulled at my heartstrings, romantic and repellent at the same time. I'd love to say more, but you'll be glad I didn't.Harrowgate winks at some familiar tropes -- happy couple in spooky New York apartment? Check. Meddling older woman with special teas? Check. However, it unfolds in a truly unique fashion. An excellent and memorable debut novel. I look forward to much more from Maruyama!

Book Review: The Monstrumologist, by Rick Yancey

5/5

What a wonderful, terrible, hilarious, disgusting, compelling adventure yarn The Monstrumologist is! I've never read anything even remotely like it. In easy-to-digest list format, here's why you need to read this book.

1) The monsters -- Anthropophagi -- are refreshingly terrifying. Savage, headless man-eaters out of ancient lore (some of which Yancy's titular character references on the case), they are fierce, fast and thoroughly, foully, inhuman. This rarefied species has inexplicably appeared in a small New England town and embarked on what promises to be a no-holds-barred feeding frenzy. These nasty beasties are a welcome addition to the horror pantheon, which has nurtured so many romanticized monsters of late. You do not want to date one of these fellows, of that you can be sure. On they other hand, they'd love to have you incubate their offspring. They look a little something like this:


2) The sweet-and-sour relationship between the peculiar Monstrumologist (who is something like a bizarro-world Sherlock Holmes on one of his manic benders), and our narrator, the plucky and resilient twelve year-old orphan Will Henry. Will has, sadly, recently inherited his father's position as the monster-hunting scientist Dr. Pellinore Warthrop's assistant, and is about to be plunged into the kind of mayhem that makes even professional monster-hunters quail. Before the tale is told, Will will see (and do!) unthinkable things in the name of science and saving the world; learn the fine art of being indispensable; and forge himself a new family from the ashes of tragedy.

3) Yancey's writing is simply wonderful. Densely descriptive without being dull; poetic without being pretentious. Top notch plotting as well. I've seen reviews suggest it was slow at points, but I couldn't put it down at any point. When the action slows down, the character development picks up the slack with sharp, funny dialogue and moments of painful honesty about the human (and inhuman) condition. These quiet sections sometimes also serve to subtly build and attenuate the dread that hangs over Will's every step to a spectacular payoff. Beware this book's potential to induce squealing like a little girl and/or jumping out of your skin. Also? Some barfing, because . . .

4) It's viscerrific! The Monstrumologist is one of the bloodiest (and brain-iest, and pus-iest, and maggot-iest) books I have ever read. The gore is so over-the-top that at times I laughed and cringed simultaneously. I know it's considered a YA novel (and has the Printz-prize sticker to prove it); however I'm pretty sure it would have terrified me, even as a teen. Granted, I was kind of a wuss, but there were at least two scenes where the jaded, adult me felt the need to avert my gaze -- just skip ahead, la-de-da -- because I really didn't want any more detail about the particular variety of disgustingness happening on the page. (No, no, no, no, NO. A world of no.) You'd better be sure your kid can take the relentless gross-out -- I'd read it first, just to see if you can.

Grotesque, rollicking, unique and scary fun, The Monstrumologist has made a Rick Yancey fan out of me. I can't wait to get my hands on the second installment, The Curse of the Wendigo.

Book Review: The Drowning Girl, by Caitlín R. Kiernan

5/5

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” -- G.K. Chesterson

I chose this for an epigram, because it's the best way I can think of to describe Caitlín R. Kiernan's magnificent more-than-true novel, The Drowning Girl, in which fairy tales, art and madness all coalesce to form one of the most affecting books I've read in years.

The Drowning Girl is definitely something like a fairy tale, but it's a ghost story too, and a love story, a postmodern puzzle, and a journey through the labyrinth of mental illness that -- for anyone who has struggled with it, or loved someone who does -- feels completely genuine and never condescending. It's also a beautiful piece of postmodern art, with layer upon layer of myth and mystery, beauty and horror, mirroring one another in a flow of archetypes that challenge the primacy of the "real" over the "true." To wit: early in her story our narrator notes that she has saved the following Ursula LeGuin quote, which goes hand-in-hand with the Chesterton:  " . . . fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. And that is precisely why so many . . . are afraid of fantasy."

The memoir of India Morgan Phelps is an experiment. India (Imp to her friends) is a heavily-medicated but mostly functional paranoid schizophrenic, the daughter and granddaughter of lunatics and suicides, haunted by genetics. (She also keeps her mother's suicide note handy, which itself quotes Virginia Woolf's suicide note in a multiple regression of despair.) But Imp is responsible and self-aware about her disease; she takes her meds, she sees her doctor. Early on she declares: "It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people."

Besides being crazy, Imp is also a charming, literate diarist, and a frequent, admitted liar. Well, not exactly a liar; it's just that sometimes her memory betrays her, and she can't tell what actually happened from what did not. Which is why Imp is writing a journal: she means to work through the knots in her brain from two different (and yet eerily similar) sanity-shaking events: she calls it "telling [her] ghost story." You see, first, there's the time in the summer with the cold, wet, naked girl (mermaid, siren, melusine) who came from from the river; but then there's also the time in November, with the bedraggled girl-wolf/wolf-girl freezing in the snow at the side of the road. The same woman but in different places, in different months -- hell, in different states -- yet somehow in her mind, either time Imp stops on the side of the road to help the girl, the experience is discrete. Her memory houses two different versions of the same story. (And if you are confused, gentle reader, imagine how Imp feels.) Still, she knows: "Only one of these is factual, but both are true." Something has happened to fracture and double her fragile memory, to create a haunting she can't get past, and through her writing she means to face it head-on. Imp's tone is deceptively casual, but don't let her lull you. Her story requires careful attention, though it's a pleasure to follow our unreliable narrator on a quest through her wide-ranging, allusive imagination. Imp is certainly not afraid of fantasy, nor is she terribly afraid of being haunted. What she fears is getting to the truth.

I may have made The Drowning Girl sound lighter than it is. Though mostly chatty and charming, Imp does go to some very dark places on her journey, and Kiernan's muscular, beautifully detailed prose pulls the reader along for the breakdown. Several other macabre haunts (some real-world factual, and others Kiernan's inventions) obsess Imp, and dart in and out of her stubborn delusions. There's a painting she first saw as a child, called "The Drowning Girl"*; the story of The Open Door of Night, a cult who committed mass suicide by walking into the ocean; the gruesome murder of the Black Dahlia; a deep forest in Japan that is rumored to induce suicides; and "Red Riding Hood," a story Imp loathes, but which keeps insisting itself into her world. And, for those of us who think about our thoughts a lot, it's also possible you'll see glimpses of your own version of crazy in Imp; I know I did. It both made me feel comforted and gave me pause; we all harbor some crazy we try to keep under our hats, but it's a peculiar experience to see flashes of yourself in the writings of a madwoman.

Now, it's true that I sometimes just fall unreservedly in love with a book and fail to note its shortcomings. (I have a friend who still challenges me to explain why I love The Night Circus. I just do, okay?) In the interest of being fair and balanced, I will say there are aspects of The Drowning Girl which strain credulity -- and not the mermaids and wolves, either.

For instance: though she's frank about barely having been able to graduate high school due to her "terrible memory," Imp is quite casually erudite, peppering her memoir with offhand literary quotes and allusions. Shakespeare, Homer, Charles Perrault, Emily Dickinson, Moby-Dick -- they're all in there, along with  various peculiar historical facts. I suppose Imp could be an accomplished autodidact; she's practically a hermit, and has in her house a room she actually calls "the room with too many books" . . . and no television or computer. So she knows the classics -- but where did her ideas about meme theory come from? (I know she could read books about it, but the whole concept of a meme was half-born from watching popular media culture mutate. The interest in memes is a meme itself.) Of course an illiterate diarist would be an oxymoron, not likely to have written what I'm reading, so I'll bite.

Some readers will find the digressions and dream-logic chronology of Imp's story confusing . . . and they would be right. I was puzzled at first, kept going back over pages for clues to the order of things. Then I realized (hello!) that the confusion is ingrained in the text: India Morgan Phelps doesn't know herself how time in her ghost story of a life flows, so how can her reader expect to? With all its Jungian doubles, writerly games and general meta-ness, The Drowning Girl qualifies as the kind of complex novel a college seminar could occupy itself with for weeks, unpacking all the themes and allusions. (Some sickos find that sort of thing fun.) But it's also compulsively, immersively, readable. And I don't think you have to play games with literary theory to get it.

The Drowning Girl is the first novel of Kiernan's I have read, though I've come across some of her weird stories in anthologies. The first one I remember was "Pickman's Other Model (1929)" in New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird. (Anyone who loves Lovecraft is a writer after my own heart.) Come to think of it, TDG is more than a bit squelchy . . . and it's set in Providence, the birthplace of Things that Should Not Be. And I just discovered that Kiernan wrote a novella about The Open Door of Night cult called "Houses Under the Sea" which suggests the cult may have had an Innsmouth-like relationship with the ocean. (Oh goody, another interwoven piece of narrative to explore!) 

But I digress. What I mean to say is read this book. Something like the fine film "Silver Linings Playbook" (I have not read the book, though it's in the stack), whose success helped to generate fresh and open media discussion about mental illness, The Drowning Girl at its very least sheds a light on the dark places of the human mind in a way that generates understanding and empathy, and beauty. But it's much richer than merely that . . . its multivalence boggles. And, though the narrative is deeply engaged with the "trueness" of mermaids and sirens, wolves and ghosts, it deserves to transcend any genre labels that might cling to it. Imp's story not only feels true, but shows us the possibility of defeating the dragons and finding the truth in our own struggles.

The Drowning Girl most certainly goes on my best-of list for 2012. It's nominated (and rightly so) for both the Bram Stoker and Nebula awards for 2012. And, in breaking news: yesterday it was awarded the Tiptree Award for "works of science fiction or fantasy that explore and expand gender roles." I wasn't even going to try to address the themes of gender and sexuality in this review, but since this particular award has been won, I might as well add that Imp's on-and-off girlfriend Abalyn is transgendered. It's not made a big deal of in the book, though her decision is briefly and poignantly discussed as the only alternative Abalyn had if she wanted to live. Perhaps that's the point -- Abalyn is a character who serves as a positive model of self-awareness and  transformation, of overcoming of the merely factual to uncover what is true. So there's yet another avenue for college seminars (or careful readers) to explore.


* In one of those neat meta-media tricks, Kiernan's vision of Phillip George Saltonstall's (fictional) 1898 painting "The Drowning Girl" has been realized here.

The Number 121 to Pennsylvania & Others, by Kealan Patrick Burke

5/5

I am finding it hard to make time to review all the books I'm plowing
through lately, but The Number 121 to Pennsylvania and Others demands I make the time, for several good reasons.

I fully enjoyed every story in the collection, which is a rare thing. I've read several of Burke's books recently (Kin, and the whole Timmy Quinn series, review to come soon, I promise) and have yet to be disappointed; in fact I'd lay money that with his talent and his abundant output, he could be the "next big thing" in horror. With a nostalgic, sometimes elegiac, nuance that nods to Stephen King (especially in short form) and a deft treatment of the dark things lurking on the fraying fringes of normalcy that brings to mind John Connelly's Charlie Parker books, what's not to like? Also, Burke turns some lovely and evocative phrases: a graveside priest becomes "an oversized raven with a scabrous pink beak and a silver crown"; and a melancholy retiree watches "the sun die a phoenix death, bruising the clouds as it struggled to stay afloat." Maybe it's that Irish gift of palaver, but I'm hooked. The stories are so uniformly great I want
to write about them all, but that would ruin the fun, so I'll just mention a few that represent Burke's range.

On the black-comedy side, I loved "High on the Vine," a clever suburban retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, complete with disgruntled neighbors and paparazzi. And, as someone who went through the misery of quitting cigarettes fairly recently, I still have empathy for smokers, and snickered all the way through the nanny-state horror of "Prohibited," sort of like King's "Quitters, Inc." with a shot of post-911 paranoia.

As for the more traditional scare, Burke has an eerily evocative way with that helpless, paralyzing fear unique to childhood, the cold certainty that something is coming to get you -- and you can't do a thing about it -- which he uses to great effect in "Snowmen" and "Mr. Goodnight." And the tension-fueled, almost novella-length closer "Saturday Night at Eddie's," an excerpt from the novel Currency of Souls, made me buy the longer work immediately. Can't wait to dive in.

Finally, and this is big, there were two stories in this collection that are going to stay with me -- in fact, they horrified the absolute bejayzus out of me. I'm not an easy scare (but I keep trying), so that was a real treat. I would caution readers so very much not to take on the back-to-back brain-f**k that is "Empathy" and "Peekers" just before bed. I read "Empathy," an information age nightmare in the vein of "Ringu/The Ring," but rooted in an actual atrocity, and knew that shouldn't be the last thing on my mind before I slept. So I blithely continued on with the short, sharp and aggressively uncanny creepfest that is "Peekers," a story which makes me wish fervently that I lived in a wide-open warehouse space with no corners or doorjambs. (Alas, I live in a Victorian with many nooks, crannies and sliding pocket-doors just perfect for . . . peeking.) I stared at the space between my sliding doors until sleep finally carried me off. I felt like I was ten again, sleeping with the light on so nothing could get me. The following day I watched the short film made from that story (there's a link on Burke's author page here), hoping that if I saw it, it would somehow banish the lingering unease. No such luck.

So . . . well-played, Mr. Burke. You win, and so do your readers with this fine collection. Five solid stars.

Book Review: The Children of Men, by P.D. James

5/5 

Absolutely brilliant. I'd never read P.D. James before, though I know her reputation among mystery buffs is unimpeachable, and of course I've seen the film adaptation, which I like very much.But this novel very different from what I expected . . . there's very little "science" to this science fiction classic; instead I'd call it "philosophy-fiction." The Children of Men shines an unnerving light on the moral lassitude of a race with, quite literally, no future. But in James's vision, it's not the sudden flash-apocalypse of nuclear destruction or viral plague which brings the crisis, but a protracted period of infertility during which humanity has the leisure to contemplate its own pointlessness and existential fear -- and reacts accordingly.It's a society where senior citizens commit mass suicide in a state-sponsored ritual called the "Quietus"; where the last generation of children (the "Omegas") are treated like spoiled royalty; and where draconian government policies become embraced as part and parcel of giving what remains of society "freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom from boredom."

As seen through the eyes of historian and former Oxford don Theo Faren -- "former" because the only educational efforts now are soft courses which keep the population entertained -- it's a world of moral greys, which gradually turn, for him, into black-and-whites when he is approached for help by a former student who is, miraculously, pregnant.

The tale that follows is a subtle morality play, beautifully written and realized. Unlike the film, which has been recast in a more gritty, depressing and obviously "dystopian" light, James's novel, though containing horrors aplenty, also revels in the beauty of an English countryside gone back to nature, focuses on the moral considerations of what it means to be human . . . and holds out the hope that there will always be those among us who will choose the right path rather than the easy one.

Book Review: Mockingbird (Miriam Black #2), by Chuck Wendig

5/5

Ass-kicking "vulture" Miriam Black* is back, and trying to make a go of "normalcy." Sure, she's no longer grifting on the back of her visions of death, but then she's also dying a little herself every day. Sharing an Airstream with trucker Louis (who's never home), stifling her visions, and working the checkout counter at a crappy Jersey Shore convenience store just isn't cutting it. So when one more sunburned bitch in a muumuu makes a crack about Miriam's gloves . . . they come off. Both literally and figuratively. And we all know where that can lead.

Pink-slipped and pissed off, she's ready to blow town when Louis offers her a last-ditch peace-offering. He has a friend, a teacher at an exclusive all-girls boarding institution, who is willing to pay for Miriam's "talent," and she finds herself almost too eager to agree. Easy, in and out, right?

But as we all know, boarding schools just scream perverse and creepy, so she's not getting away that easy. When a casual encounter with a smart-ass student brings on a debilitating vision of the girl's torture and death at the hands of a bird-masked butcher, Miriam feels compelled to see what she can do about twisting Fate. Again.

While still rocking  plenty of Miriam's patented irreverent snark, and a bunch of epic fights (man can this girl take a beating -- she's either a Slayer or related to Harry Dresden), this book delivers a more introspective Miriam. We learn more about her seriously damaged history, and that recently, she's had a frequent visitor. She calls him  "The Trespasser," and he likes to arrive out of nowhere in the shape of a dead lover, the back of his skull blown off, delivering ominous messages regarding the "work" she has to do. Which is suddenly somehow related to the girls of the Caldecott School. So there goes Jersey . . . and the gloves. Who wants normal anyway?

Bravo, Mr. Wendig. A sequel that's as good as the first, possibly better (the yellow-line metaphors are certainly much more effective* . . . melting butter pats FTW!), Mockingbird also significantly ups both character development and the creep-factor, with Miriam facing a truly insidious and deeply disturbing adversary. A bit less noir and more horror than Blackbirds, this book kept me up late into the night, alternately cracking me up and building up dread . . . the twisted twists keep coming right to the end. Can't wait for #3 -- Cormorant -- due in 2013.

*See my review of Blackbirds (Miriam Black #1) here.

Book Review: All Men of Genius, by Lev AC Rosen

5/5

All Men of Genius is a charming foray into a burgeoning genre that might be called "whimsical adult fiction." (See also Gail Carriger, Lev Grossman, etc.) Drawing on both Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde for tone and characterization, Lev AC Rosen’s debut novel is a sparkling Victorian steampunk concoction of romance, intrigue, cross-dressing, mistaken identity and lots and lots of moving parts – some of them quite dangerous.

When Violet Adams, a talented and visionary young scientist, applies to the exclusive college of Ilyria, she is quite confident of her acceptance. The problem is that Ilyria is an all-male institution, and she has applied under the name of her twin brother Ashton. Can Violet maintain the gender-bending ruse for as long as it takes to prove she (or any woman) is as skillful as any man working in her field? Need I say that complications ensue? If you've ever read Twelfth Night or The Importance of Being Earnest, you’ll have a sense of where this is going . . . except you’ll have to add a lot of gears, steam, and creepy subterranean vaults into the equation. (And if you've read neither, it's okay. You'll still enjoy this clever book, and it might inspire you to do so!)

Peopled with lively characters, full of witty banter and romantic mistaken identity, All Men of Genius still has enough dark moments to make it a thrilling steampunk adventure. Don't mistake this book for young adult literature, as despite the book’s comedic tone, some very adult situations are presented without ambiguity: sexual situations (and misunderstandings) abound; booze flows; there is some rather impressively foul language (although it’s mostly from a rabbit); and a great deal of evil-robot perpetrated violence. For sure, this one’s a delight for the all grown-up kids out there, and I’m looking forward to more from Rosen and hope he continues to impress with his unique take on the classics – both literary and sci-fi.

Book Review: Under the Dome, by Stephen King

5/5

Likely King's best novel in years, Under the Dome grabs you at the first page and never lets up, with a propulsive narrative that is both as disturbing as you might expect, and even more so. Everything you need to know is right there in the title: the town of Chester's Mill, Maine has become cut off from the world by a mysterious transparent "dome" which appears out of nowhere on a crisp fall day. No one can leave, and no one can enter. The town is on its own.

Less a traditional horror story (though there's plenty of gruesome moments), and more a hostage situation on a grand scale, UtD is most effective when showcasing the evil men (and all the other inhabitants of beleaguered Chester's Mill) can do when traditional moral structures collapse around them, when the world shrinks and becomes alien and full of menace, when any idea of a sympathetic, or even rational, god has gone the way of fresh supplies . . . and fresh air.

Along the way the reader meets a cast of characters roughly the size of a small Maine town; chief among them the corrupt Selectman who views the crisis as a golden opportunity; the adolescent whiz-kids intent on helping to solve it; the Revelations-spewing meth addict who runs the town's Christian (and only) radio station; the overtaxed PA who becomes the town's de-facto doctor; and leading the cast, a former soldier on the drift, who manages to just miss his opportunity to get out while the getting is good.

With strongly delineated heroes  -- flawed though they may be -- to root for, and plenty of despicable self-proclaimed "good guys" to hiss at (small-town cops and elected officials take rather a drubbing, as do unchristian Christians),UtD takes an inexplicable disaster and puts a human face on the toll it exacts. I won't say any more than this -- when I was halfway through the book, I couldn't imagine any way things could get worse for Chester's Mill. Fortunately, good old Uncle Steve's imagination is a long way from running dry.

Book Review: Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville

 5/5

I can't believe how long it took me to pick up a book by China Mieville, and now I can't shut up about about him. Perdido Street Station is stellar and wholly original, truly literary weird fiction from a writer determined to subvert the reigning sci-fi/fantasy cliches. (In fact, Mieville is notorious for having referred to Tolkien as "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature.") Nevertheless, Perdido Street Station is, like LotR, essentially an epic quest tale, in which a mismatched group of everyday people must face overwhelming odds to rid their world of a menace so great -- and seriously unsettling -- it might mean the end of civilization as they know it. But that's where the similarities to "traditional" fantasy end.

 I know several otherwise perfectly sane and intelligent people who refuse to read Mieville on the grounds that he is "too hard" (as in "I'm not in grad school anymore, so fiction shouldn't hurt my head," hard). And to be sure, his postmodern political education credentials and ginormous vocabulary are intimidating; but Mieville is his (our? whatever.) generation's reigning master of the weird, and his strange and lyrical mastery of the English language is currently unparalleled in the genre.

Like a sci-fi Rushdie or Dickens, Mieville revels in detail and lush descriptive language, and his city of New Crobuzon -- with its vile slums and peculiar brothels, political machinations and crime networks, artists and renegade scientists, "xenian" races, sentient constructs and horrific "Re-made" underclass -- reflects world-building on such a massively detailed scale that by the time you've finished you feel as if you could navigate its strange, seething streets yourself. On a few occasions, especially as the many narrative threads start coming together and the nail-biting climax approaches, these dense descriptive passages feel as if they are bogging down the tale, but their intrinsic beauty and alien horror are well worth the time spent in detour.

As a sidenote, Perdido Street Station is the first of three books set in the world of Bas-Lag. The second, The Scar, is not really dependent on having read the first, but The Iron Council (review coming soon) really is. Read them all, and I guarantee you will never forget Bas-Lag.

Book review: The Scar, by China Mieville

5/5

The Scar is the second book set in China Mieville’s enormous and species-diverse world of Bas-Lag, and while it might help for readers to be familiar with its predecessor Perdido Street Station, it's not strictly necessary, as this is not strictly a sequel. It's enough to know that as the story opens our protagonist, linguist Bellis Coldwine, is fleeing her beloved city of New Crobuzan (the setting for PSS) in fear for her life. Unfortunately, Bellis has a tangential connection to the awful events that make up the narrative of PSS, and her friends and acquaintances have started disappearing in the resulting government investigation. Determined not to meet the same fate, Bellis hastily books passage working as a translator on the Terpsichoria, a ship bound for the distant colony of Nova Esperium. There she hopes to wait out the trouble, and eventually return home.

As her journey gets underway, Bellis – chilly by nature and in mourning for her lost life – remains aloof from her fellow passengers, though she acerbically records shipboard goings-on in a long, journal-like letter she means to send back to New Crobuzon at her first chance. Growing restless in the long, dull days at sea, Bellis finally strikes up a guarded friendship with Johannes Tearfly, a naturalist and fellow academic whose primary interests are in “megafauna” and exotic underwater life. She also grows curious about the hold full of "Remade" prisoners, intended to be used as labor in the new colony. (The Remade are the lowest class in New Crobuzan: usually criminals, whose punishment includes the forcible addition or alteration of body parts. These might be organic – beaks, claws, feathers, tentacles, extra human bits; or mechanical – legs replaced by steam-engine powered treads, arms replaced with tools useful in factories. The punishment generally fits the crime in some perverse way, and the possibilities are endless. In a world occupied by a multiplicity of "xenian" races, the Remade are among Mieville's darkest and most fascinating creations. But I digress.)

It's not long before Bellis is pressed into earning her passage, serving as translator in highly volatile and secret talks with New Crobuzon allies the Cray, who seem to have misplaced something large, top-secret and essential to government interests. There is clearly more going on aboard the Terpsichoria than meets the eye. When Silas Fennec, a mysterious passenger with enough clout to commandeer the ship, announces they must return to New Crobuzon immediately, Bellis is both alarmed and relieved.

And then pirates attack. Really. Just when the novel is building up a good head of espionage steam . . . pirates? Please don't let the narrative hard-left throw you – there will be many more – because now the action really begins.

Led by the mysterious and deadly swordsman Uther Doul, the pirates board the Terpsichoria and summarily execute the officers and most of the crew. The passengers, cargo and ship are then claimed for the legendary floating pirate city of Armada. (Another of Mieville's better conceits, Armada is a fully-functioning city-state, built from an endless array of ships captured over centuries, intricately refitted and lashed together. It is quite literally legendary, since the pirates of Armada leave nothing behind when they attack, and no one taken to their city has ever been allowed to leave.) The press-ganged Bellis understands her chances of getting home are now next to none.

But Bellis finds that Armada is not the lawless place she imagined: all the passengers, including the newly-freed Remade, are offered jobs and places to live. The political climate, while contentious, is relatively stable and egalitarian, consisting of several independent “ridings” in loose confederation, all overseen by a pair of mysterious leaders called The Lovers. In spite of her despair, Bellis begins working as a librarian in Armada's huge pilfered collection, and quietly getting to know her new home. But when a strange and important manuscript is discovered in the library, Bellis draws the uncomfortable attention of both Silas Fennec and Uther Doul – who serves as right hand to The Lovers. Drawn into their political machinations, her fate becomes inexorably bound with that of Armada itself.

I have given short shrift to some important aspects of this book – for example the moving subplot of Remade prisoner Tanner Sack, who finds his freedom and a modicum of redemption in his new maritime home; or the fascinating Uther Doul and his deadly quantum magic-fueled “Possibility Sword.” But to say any more (and there is so much more!) would be to deprive potential readers of the pleasure of discovering the myriad of strange beings and weird twists The Scar delivers before reaching its stunning climax.
Perhaps the most astounding thing about The Scar – a novel drawing on traditions as varied as the sea-shanty and “big-fish” yarn, political thriller, quantum theory and existential horror, and influences as disparate as Lovecraft, Borges and Melville – is that all the twists, turns and wildly complex narrative threads actually add up to something truly satisfying. Mieville not only builds a world so real you can see (and possibly smell) it when you close your eyes, he also sticks the landing like a gold medalist. The more China Mieville I read, the more in awe of his disturbing and fruitful mind I become. At this moment, I’m convinced The Scar is his best work – though I have no doubt he’ll surprise me again.

Book Review: Horns, by Joe Hill

 5/5

I love it when fiction slips the bonds of genre expectations and becomes something altogether more than what you bargained for. Joe Hill's debut novel Heart-Shaped Box was a tautly-written horror story, but if you've read his collection 20th Century Ghosts, you know he's also more than capable of work that's whimsical rather than than frightening, sometimes intensely disturbing, but frequently touching . . . and dare I say literary?

After having finished it -- in less than 24 hours, thanks to the propulsive narrative -- I can safely assert that Horns is not a horror novel, though it's certainly horrifying in places. It's an odd, funny, dreadful, compelling and deeply romantic story about average young people whose lives are touched by the violent and surreal.

Ig Parrish, Horns's metaphorically and literally demonized protagonist, will no doubt offend some irony-challenged readers with his (often hilarious) musings on God and the Devil -- "The Fire Sermon" is a philosophical and comedic gem -- but Ig's main concerns -- love, cruelty, revenge, and the ethical complexities of simply being human -- are universal to good literature. Hill's touch is sure, both with comedy and pathos, and the deftly woven narrative realizes his characters believably from the tumultuous desires of adolescence to the sharp wounds of adult responsibility. The ending may be slightly problematic for some (I'll need another read to be sure what I feel), but "Horns" is much more than the sum of its parts.

I won't summarize the plot here -- but I will say where Horns  fits into my literary pantheon. Touchstones would include Christopher Moore (though Hill is less giddily comic), Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses  (darkly absurd, hilariously offensive magic realism . . . and of course the horns problem), Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife   (genre-upending, wrenchingly real love story), and, for better or worse, Stephen King's classic story of adolescent innocence and experience, "The Body."

Joe Hill is one of the most promising writers working today -- in any genre -- and I hope he continues to defy expectations with every new piece.

Book Review: After the Apocalypse, by Maureen F. McHugh

 5/5

After the Apocalypse as a title is a bit misleading -- evoking as it does zombies (there are only a few), nuclear winter, or some "Mad Max" scenario -- and yet it's also quite perfect. Because, like Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers, Maureen F. McHugh's thoughtful  collection of stories is really about how we, just us normal people, get up and get on with it after the unthinkable has occurred.

At heart, these are intimate tales about people and their strange new  lives: keeping family safe, finding work, finding food, losing their homes, their minds and their innocence. While some common genre tropes appear (a government "zombie reserve" that doubles as a fight-or-die penal colony; an unstoppable strain of avian flu that takes its sweet, relentless time to turn a human brain to mush; disparate strangers inexplicably drawn to converge in a particular place), the apocalypses -- yes, the plural form is required -- in these stories are equally the result of problems already on our doorsteps: natural disasters; overburdened and failing urban infrastructures; economic meltdowns; and machines that might just be smarter than we are.

With clean, evocative prose, a killer eye for detail, and a sympathetic, humorous (but never indulgent) view into the human condition, McHugh has crafted a work of speculative fiction about what humanity might stand to lose -- or just maybe gain -- when we are faced with the burdens of the end times already rearing their ugly heads. Her characters are not always kind, not always moral. But they are astute, funny and absolutely believable. (And as a bonus, one wears the coolest t-shirt ever: "If You're Really a Goth, Where Were You When We Sacked Rome?")