The Thread: Your Face Tomorrow: Fever & Spear by Javiar Marais

This will be the thread I continue to post on while reading Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javiar Marias. If any reader feels so inclined, you may of course post your thoughts about the book in the comments section below.

I'm not sure how I feel about Your Face Tomorrow: Fever & Spear, the first book in Javiar Marias' trilogy about Jaime Deza, an agent in the British Intelligence Service with the uncanny gift of seeing "people...clearly and without qualms, with neither good intentions nor bad." On the one hand, this is a mostly philosophical text, heavy with profound insights into "seeing and not seeing," various kinds of relationships, literary and historical fogginess...On the other hand, the prose is, at times, awkwardly worded and punctuated - something that Jose Saramago used to great effect but which, here, feels contrived - and unnecessarily repetitive. There is no plot per se that I've been able to discern - I have 100 pages left of the novel - but that, for me anyway, is almost never a bad thing; some of my favorite works are "mood" pieces or, at least, don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end (see: Michal Ajvaz's The Golden Age, Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps, Eric Basso's The Beak Doctor or, even, Cormac McCarthy's Suttree). What Fever & Spear lacks, however, is an interesting narrator. That's not entirely true. Jaime is interesting or, rather, his thoughts on other people aren't interesting, but seems as if Jaime (or Jacques or Jacobo or Jack or Yago, as he often goes by) doesn't really know himself. Marias is himself aware of this, even writing about it: "He doesn't think much about himself, although he believes that he does (albeit without great conviction)." Obviously, it's an author trick, but I'm still not sure of it's purpose.

Reading: Won't You Join Me?

Below, I've posted the books I'll be reading in the first three months of the new year. I think it would be wonderful of any of you dear readers would like to join me in reading these books. After the two week reading period (or thereabouts) for each book indicated below, I'll post a short blog on my thoughts about the content and you can post yours in the comments section if you so choose. (Note: none of these books is slated for publication in 2012; they've all already been published and most are either available in paperback or on the kindle and other ereaders.) So. Are you ready for this? Okay then.


01/01/12 through 01/14/12 Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker

01/15/12 through 01/28/12 Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javiar Marias

01/29/12 through 02/04/12 Germline by T.C. McCarthy

02/05/12 through 02/18/12 After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh

02/19/12 through 02/25/12 Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery

02/26/12 through 03/03/12 The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

03/04/12 through 03/17/12 Alliance Space (including the novels Merchanter's Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna) by C.J. Cherryh

03/18/12 through 03/31/12 Up Against It by M.J. Locke

Take the plunge with me, won't you? And happy holidays!

News of the Day: Tin Tin Can Update, NaNoWriMo, Fender Stitch, The Weird & More

This will probably be my last post for the month of November. Thanksgiving is right around the corner and I'll be spending much of it in my hometown. I'll be back in December with the year-end Best Of lists. In the meantime, I'll leave with these (hopefully) juicy tidbits:

Tin Tin Can

We've nearly finished the mixing the process of the record. By the end of this month, it should be on to the mastering phase, and hopefully in your hands shortly after the new year! A lot of the artwork has already been sorted out, and we're throwing around titled for the record. It'll be 9 songs. We're all very excited to get this out. It's been one hell of a ride.

NaNoWriMo

I've faltered a bit on this front, but not because I didn't like what I was writing. There are definitely elements that need to be fixed. To be honest, I'm not sure I like the narrative voice, which means I'll need to start from scratch, but I'm okay with that. Since Clarion, that's usually how I write. I will get 6-10K words written and realize the voice isn't quite right, then in "revision" (in quotes because sometimes my revisions are a complete overhaul of the story), I'll fix it. A few sentences usually remain an the overall concept is similar, but I have to find the right voice to tell the story in. This is what makes writing so much fun! (On a side note: Once I've completed this novella/long short story, my sister Mandy Monk, a gifted artist in her own right, will be doing drawings for it. Very excited about this too!)

Fender Stitch Magazine

A new online magazine has opened for submissions. It's called Fender Stitch, they pay pro rates, and have an interesting, interactive experience for reading on the internet. Elliot Turner, the owner/editor of site, is a friend of mine and I'd like to see this thing really take off. So, any of aspiring and/or pro writers out there, go their site and submit!

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories

This anthology covering 100 years of Weird Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, is out now from Corvus Books in the UK, which you can buy here. Though it isn't scheduled to be released until 2012 in the US, you can purchase it here and there is no shipping fee. This is a must-have for fans of Lovecraft, Borges, Kafka, Krohn, and lovers of anything Weird in general (and for those who just like to see how a genre, if you can call it that, evolves over time). The Vandermeer's have also started a fantastic site dedicated to chronicling All Things Weird (including a wonderful comic on Reading the Weird by Clarion chum Leah Thomas): www.weirdfictionreview.com. 

Upcoming Fiction from Yours Truly

I will have stories out in New Dawn Fades Anthology from Postmortem Press (available around Black Friday), Shimmer (forthcoming in 2012), and a review of Tim Pratt's Briarpatch forthcoming in Bull Spec #7. Expect updates as these become available.

If this doesn't get you through the holidays and all that turkey and tofurkey, I don't know what will. Have a good'n. See you soon.

Review: Unstuck Magazine

The inaugural issue of Unstuck Magazine remains true to its name: these twenty-odd stories and poems have come unglued and float, however precariously, in the firmament, in "otherness," in worlds almost like our own but somehow, someway...skewed.

Take, for instance, Sharona Muir's "Air Liners," concerning invisible "bioluminescent" microbes formed during the act of lovemaking; or Helen Phillips' exhilarating "R," where the lives of twins Rose and Roo diverge in mysterious and unexpected ways after they experience, for the first time, the sensation of wind. Zach Savich builds "a bridge with nothing on either end" in his poem "My Ideas Have Set Nothing on Fire - Yet." Imagine witnessing the end of the world from a continent-sized garbage dump in the middle of the ocean as the characters in Matthew Derby's "Dokken" do; now imagine that this is the happiest moment of your life.
Neatly wrapped-up endings do not fit. Instead, these pieces toy with and subvert form, structure, and what's expected from a story. Rennie Sparks's excellent nonfiction piece, "The Eel," offers the reader this insight: "All we can ever know for sure is that the things we remember, real or false, are flags stabbed into the dark fog of the brain." Is there a better statement of what this issue of Unstuck stands for? It is movement free of predictability, the story or poem allowed to go where it will.

There are, however, moments of almost-revelation here; of glimpses into "our" world, the recognizable, the root of tangible experience. In Judson Merrill's "Inside Out" a prisoner escapes into the ventilation ducts of the prison only to meet the big land spider that dwells there. An uneasiness descends on this story and refuses to let up; yes, it gets weird and weirder by the end, but there is something terrifyingly human in the narrator's fear and lonesomeness, of being trapped in small spaces, of never getting out.

Many of the stories in this collection also deal, in some way, with that stickiest of mysteries: death. Macabre opener, "Monument," from Amelia Gray explores what happens when townspeople gather to tidy a graveyard and something goes terribly wrong. Rachel Swirsky imagines what love is like in the afterlife in "Death and the All-Night Donut Shop." In Matthew Vollmer's "The Ones You Want to Keep," the tragic events of a couple's honeymoon sends the narrator to the brink of madness. Each comes at their subject differently - Gray using the mysteriousness of death, Swirsky a bit of humor, and Vollmer the tragedy of continuing to live after the one you love is gone - never forcing the kind of deeper understanding so many stories try for (and most often fail at); instead, letting the various elements coalesce, the shape of the meaning different in each reader's brain.

Yet, for all the grim-reaping, there are also stories full of life here. The narrator of Karin Tidbeck's brief but exquisite "Cloudberry Jam" grows a "carrot-baby" in a tin can, and a strange new creature is brought into the world. That the end is full of a unique sort of longing and deep sadness only illustrates the hope of life. The same may be said of "Peer Confession" by John Maradik and Rachel B. Glaser. Here, a young girl must choose between the church she's known (and the painful, unfashionable braces she wears) and Church Hello - where practically anything goes, including braces-free boys and promiscuity. Is life all about the moment, this story seems to ask, or can we love life even with a little pain?

Perhaps just as interesting is Matthew Domiteaux's artwork which acts as bookends between the stories and poems. Mostly abstract, the drawings add texture and deepen the mood of each piece while preparing the reader for whatever is next. In particular, the wave-like drawings that separate the verses of Kaethe Schwehn's "Sea Air Breezy; Nothing Dreadful," mirrors the length-descending lines of each consecutive verse while heightening the sense of dread.

Ultimately, Unstuck has managed to gather a collection of stories and poems that relate and play off each other in exciting and often surprising ways. If there is one thing that ties these stories together, however, it is not a common theme but an intimate attention to detail and a sense of wonder of the world we live in or might live in, even if only briefly. Highly Recommended.

-Dustin Monk

NaNoWriMo Excerpt: Claw & Eye

The following is an excerpt from the novella I'm writing for NaNoWriMo. This is a pretty rough draft and already I can see where certain things need to change, sentences need tightening, bigger and bolder descriptions necessary, etc. In the interests of sharing and seeing how 1,667 words a day looks like (at least for me), however...well, here you go then:

Claw & Eye

By Dustin Monk

Worship of the ascendant eels begins beneath the city, in the Temple’s underground pools. Here is this man, Baldahlbrus, wearer of bowler hats, long coats, various beards (tonight is matted gray), with a limp he got fighting, and who dreams most every night of hiding in the thick, oily stalks of burningroot while around him the sounds of dying and short blasts of rifle fire carry on the wind, feeding an addict to the ascendant eels’ babies. The phosphorescent baby eels—who look like cold, white leaves and are sometimes called drifters because of the way they seem to float in the water when not eating: aimlessly, causeless—now nibble at the body like an angry mob, floating over him, illuminating his yellowy hair and knobby fingers and open, dead eyes with their phosphorescence. Their tiny, sharp teeth are stained ruby red.

            The addict must’ve died in the morning. Already his body stinks. Or maybe the stink is from the luminescent nerves twisted and knotted and thick as tree roots pulsing, clinging to the walls. The nerves smell like curdled milk.

Baldahlbrus stinks too—he smells of gasoline and vomit—but he will not bathe in this pool. The drifters will eat the living as heartily as they eat the dead. He watches. After a time the baby eels drift away from the addict’s carcass. What is left—shreds of meat and gristle and bone—sinks beneath the muddy green waters. He does not want to think about the amount of bones littering the bottom of the pool or what sort of monster they have formed.

He has knelt throughout the feeding. Now, he stands, feels out the limp in his leg, pulls his bowler hat closer to his eyebrows, straightens his long coat. The nerves along the walls pulse messages in bluish-gray but he cannot decipher what is said. Perhaps the message is: not so long ago we left and we are not coming back because we are dead. It might say that.

            His boots echo loudly on the stone tiles of the cavern dumb priests built to worship the ascendant eels in the bellies of their home. No one worships them anymore. He walks up the winding steps, click-clatter-clatter-click-clatter. Part of the roof of the grand chamber of the Temple has caved in. Large chunks of ceramic tiles lay scattered across the floor. Half-dead nerves—their ends the color of charred bodies, which Baldahlbrus has seen enough of—snap and fizzle like blown-out fireworks. Sister moonlight shines upon the gaping mouth of an ascendant eel painted on the floor. Once there were great sermons held in this chamber; a great many people knelt on the mouth of the eel. Now it glistens, lonely, as if mocking Baldahlbrus. I will devour what I please. Whatever was once treasured in this place is gone: chalices, painted windows, golden and gray curtains, the holy bowl.

            He pushes open the large wooden doors of the grand chamber, exits into the inner chamber and washes his face and hands in cracked clay bowls he’s found abandoned in alleys and filled with river water, and limps through the Temple’s smaller entrance into—

*

Nerve City. Night. Argana a pinkish pearl in the sky, looking down upon her thrumming, bleeding city, the cruel crater of her heart shimmering in streetlamps and in the eyes of addicts. Her twin Argala hangs behind a cloud in the shape of a frown. You were always the forlorn moon. Baldahlbrus gets out in it. Buildings rise like stark, bluish-gray tendrils—like thickened, widened mirror-others of the same nerves that cling to their facades—almost as if they too long for the ascendant eels’ return. The cobbled streets bustle in the dark.  Baldahlbrus steps around horse-pulled carriages, shit, and broken bottles. He averts his eyes from passersby: it is not good to know too many. Yet, he is not oblivious. Shadows stalk alleyways: half-illumined dealers form question marks against corners of buildings. Do you? Do you? Do you? Addicts get cold in the night too. In front of the brothel is Carakhi playing viola. Bevendraj’s eyes bulge as she looks at a huge clump of dirt in her hands. On the other side of the street, accosting passersby like the idiot he is is Galat, showing off his new silver tooth. A spiky-haired addict Baldahlbrus doesn’t recognize, shuffling back and forth in front of an abandoned grocery store, asks if he’s got it. He doesn’t.

In all the books he has read—and he hasn’t read that many—this is exactly what the end of the world looks like. It isn’t the end of the world, it is the beginning. It is the beginning of the world. That is a loop he gets easily caught in. The world spins as it sometimes does when he limps too fast and Baldahlbrus wishes Maj was here. He liked to lean on her and she let him sometimes. She hadn’t minded his limp either. Yes, I am in love with her. Almost as much as I am in love with getting so high the drifters talk to me. This isn’t how I find her. This isn’t my pining. She was a girl and I was a boy, once, and we were both soldiers and, hiding in the burningroot, we sometimes held each other. That is the kind of love I know.

Weird Fiction Review Launches! Now You Know Where To Go

Weird Fiction Review: Your Non-Denominational Source of the Weird launched today, the "brain-child" of authors/editors/friends Ann & Jeff Vandermeer! Why the exclamation point, you ask? Because this is awesomely exciting news! From the (I would assume, tentacled) desks of the Vandermeers:

"Hugo Award-winner Ann VanderMeer until recently edited Weird Tales Magazine and has co-edited several anthologies with her husband. Jeff’s last novel, Finch, was a finalist for the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award. Together they edited the just-released The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories (Atlantic/Corvus), a 750,000-word, 100-year retrospective of weird fiction.

The site kicks off today with the following features:

---Exclusive interview with Neil Gaiman about weird fiction:

http://weirdfictionreview.com/nonfiction/books/2011/11/01/exclusive-interview-neil-gaiman-on-the-weird/

---First episode of exclusive “Reading The Weird” webcomic by Leah Thomas:

http://weirdfictionreview.com/fiction/2011/11/01/reading-the-weird-web-comic-episode-1/

---Translation of Thomas Owen’s short story “Kavar the Rat” by Edward Gauvin:

http://weirdfictionreview.com/fiction/2011/11/01/kavar-the-rat-thomas-owen/

---The full Table of Contents for The Weird compendium, with notes:

http://weirdfictionreview.com/blog/2011/11/01/the-weird-a-compendium-of-strange-and-dark-stories-table-of-contents/

---Weird Gallery, Featuring the art of New Orleans artist Myrtle Von Damitz III:

http://weirdfictionreview.com/nonfiction/art/2011/10/31/myrtle-von-damitz-iii-gallery/

Come back later this week and next for: “Weirdly Epic: A Century of First Lines,” exclusive interviews with Kelly Link and Thomas Ligotti, a feature on artist/writer Alfred Kubin, Kafkaesque entertainments, China Mieville’s “AFTERWEIRD: The Efficacy of a Worm-eaten Dictionary,”  and a feature on classic Weird Tales women writers. An ongoing “101 Weird Writers” feature will also begin next week.

Weirdfictionreview.com will initially focus on features related to The Weird compendium, but its primary mission over time will be to serve as an ongo­ing explo­ration into all facets of the weird, in all of its many forms — a kind of “non-denominational” approach that appre­ci­ates Love­craft but also writers like Franz Kafka, Angela Carter, and Shirley Jack­son – along with the next gen­er­a­tion of weird writ­ers and inter­na­tional weird. Writer Angela Slatter serves as the managing editor."

It's NaNoWriMo Time, NaNoWriMo Time - NaNoWriMoWithABaseballBat

November nears and, for me at least, this means it's time for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I will be participating again this year (here, here, here, and here are my posts from last year), though my goal this time around isn't to hit 50K words (though that'd be nice) but simply to get through my long story/short novel, which I've tentatively titled Claw & Eye. (Uhh...yeah it's the same title as last year's story, but totally different, I swear.)

The problem with last year's event was that, though I managed to make the 50K goal, I didn't really like anything I wrote - the prose was sloppy, the characters not-so-well thought out, and overall just plain limp as far as story goes. This was in part because I had made a conscious decision not to plan any detail out before I began the challenge. Well. That might work for some people but, what I discovered in the process, is that it doesn't really work for me.

Instead, over the last couple of months, I've been jotting notes, chiefly concerning world-building, characterization and action in larger scenes, as well as writing different entry points - a piece of advice I picked up from author Jeff Vandermeer during Clarion - to the story. I've also completed a short page-and-a-half synopsis of events.

I will be uploading the story here two or three times a week throughout November (and into December or later - basically, until it's finished) for your perusal, should you wish to read this thing I'm writing.

Best First Opening Lines of the Year (With Conditions)

I thought I'd do something fun in gearing up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) as well as the requisite "Best Of" lists that will populate this here bloggy-blog for the rest of the year, mostly. And that fun thing? Oh, you know, the 10 best first opening lines from novels or stories I've read this year - which means, of course, not all of these are from books or stories published in 2011, though most of them are. Are we having fun yet? Okay, great. Here goes:

10. "Interviewer: Can you introduce yourselves?
      "Alpha: We are third-generation intelligent agents of LogiComm Works, Inc., designed to calculate and settle agreements for our clients.
      "Beta: We are designed to filter out emotional noise factors that may prevent human agents from coming to an equitable resolution that maximizes efficiencies." - "Saving Face" by Shelly Li and Ken Liu (from Crossed Genres, January 2011)

9. "The tent is draped with strings of bare bulbs, with bits of mirror tied here and there to make it sparkle. (It doesn't look shabby until you've already paid.)" - Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine

8. "We sat on a hill. We watched the flames inside the balloons heat the fabric to neon colors. The children played Prediction." - Light Boxes by Shane Jones

7. "It began, in a way, with the midget hunchback tuk-tuk driver." - "Aphrodisia" by Lavie Tidhar (from Strange Horizons, August 2010)

6. "I'd never wanted to go to Earth until the doctor told me I couldn't, that my bones were too brittle." - "Long Enough and Just So Long" by Cat Rambo (from Lightspeed Magazine, Feb 2011)

5. "It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future." - The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

4. "For years the air above the earth had begun sagging, suffused by a nameless, ageless eye of light." - There is No Year by Blake Butler

3. "In some places, time is a weak and occasional phenomenon. Unless someone claims time to pass, it might not, or does so only partly; events curl in on themselves to form spirals and circles." - "The Aunts" by Karin Tidbeck (from ODD? Anthology, October 2011)

2. "There is no book about me. Well, not yet. No matter." - "The Book of Phoenix: Excerpted from The Great Book" by Nnedi Okorafor (from Clarkesworld Magazine, March 2011)

1. "Morning light the sulphur color of the mine dumps seeps across Johannesburg's skyline and sears through my window. My own personal bat signal. Or a reminder that I really need to get curtains." - Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Reading: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

I was reminded, to a certain degree, of the works of Angela Carter in Catherynne M. Valente's lovely The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. This might well be a YA kind of story but, as with most of Valente's work that I've read - and like Angela Carter - there are sufficient heapings of gloom and doom (uhh...not that YA can't have that or something; remember M.T. Anderson's Prince of Nothing duology or Sue Towsend's hilarious but ultimately heartbreaking The Secrety Diary of Adrian Mole, to name a couple?). So I guess what I'm saying, in a very roundabout way, is: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making rocks.

September, our heroine, is transported to Fairyland upon by the Green Wind - who has taken pity on her. Once in Fairyland and after having chosen the cruelest of three paths, Setpember sets out on a quest to return a spoon stolen by the Marquess - the current ruler of Fairyland - from the witches Hello and Goodbye, and their wairwulf husband Manythanks. The journey becomes much more than a spoon's quest, however, as September learns that something is terribly amiss in Fairyland and it seems the Marquess is to blame. Along her way September gains companions A Through L - a wyvern fathered from a library - and Saturday - a sea creature called a Marid who eats stone. The journey for the spoon - and then later for a sword - will take them across Fairyland, though it isn't like any Fairyland you've seen before: this Fairyland is dangerous and, afraid of angering the Marquess, many will do her bidding, making it hard to know who to trust. By the end, even September is not the innocent, young girl she was when the Green Wind whisked her off from her parents' house. Highly Recommended.

Here is an excerpt of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making:

In Omaha, signposts are bright green with white writing, or occasionally white with black writing. September understood those signs and all the things they pointed to. But the signpost before her now was made of pale wind-bleached wood and towered above her: a beautiful carved woman with flowers in her hair, a long goat's tail winding around her legs, and a solemn expression on her sea-worn face. The deep gold light of the Fairyland sun played on her carefully whittled hair. She had wide, flaring wings, like September's swimming trophy. The wooden woman had four arms, each outstretched in a different direction, pointing with authority. On the inside of her easterly arm, pointing backward in the direction September had come, someone had carved in deep, elegant letters:

                              TO LOSE YOUR WAY

On the northerly arm, pointing up to the tops of the cliffs, it said:

                              TO LOSE YOUR LIFE

On the southerly arm, pointing out to sea, it said:

                              TO LOSE YOUR MIND

And on the westerly arm, pointing up to a little headland and a dwindling of the golden beach, it said:

                              TO LOSE YOUR HEART

Reading: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, the debut novel by Genevieve Valentine, is the best book I've read so far this year. The language of the novel is poetic and hypnotic and moving. It's a short novel, but Valentine managaes to get across so much with so little - a gift if ever there was one, truly.

It's about a traveling circus in either an alternate Earth or a post-apocalyptic Earth. The circus is run by the enigmatic Boss, a woman with an ambiguous past and strange magical powers. In this circus, many of the performers are kept alive by adding mechanical components to their bodies - from Panadrome, the one-man orchestra, to Elena the aerialist with brass bones. Even as the circus is hounded by "government men," there is a quiet war between several performers and a pair of gold wings Boss keeps.

You might be saying to yourself, isn't the whole circus thing kind of worn thin? Perhaps so, but Valentine injects it with grace (sidenote: now I'm imagining a needle full of grace in my arm) and heartbreak. Even though it is a somwhat nonlinearly structured novel, every scene works toward its inevitable conclusion with surprising wonder. Supremely-doo-remely Recommended.

Here is a an excerpt from Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti:

Little George was slated to be fixed, but Boss keeps him out of the workshop even after he asks, and so he keeps moving slowly through time until he's older than Ying, until he's nearly as old as Jonah, who has been twenty-five since the day he came to the circus and was gifted with his clockwork lungs.

Slowly, Little George begins to wake up to the world in a way he cannont name.

He does not know that Ying will never be older; he does not know why he takes such care not to anger the Grimaldi brothers. He is not aware, only awake.

He knows nothing for certain; he only sees that when the government man is gone, the circus gathers in two groups to see what Boss will do: who are alive, and those who have survived the bones.

Reading: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

What initially piqued my interest in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs was the use of "found photographs" within the text. Most of the photographs are from the archives of Robert Jackson and, make no mistake, there are some truly peculiar, even haunting, photos here. However, I found the conceit wearisome after about 100 pages with each photo being introduced by a sudden "remembrance" from the narrator - surely, there are more ways to incorporate the photos than merely "I remember..."? The twists near the end of the story I also thought were predictable and not all that interesting, making it fairly easy to see how the story will continue - this book being the first in a series. That doesn't mean Riggs won't surprise (though I can't imagine the second book using found photos again as its hook), and I'm invested enough in the characters I'll give the next book a fair shot.

In this story, young Jacob's grandfather tells him stories of a strange past - fighting monsters and living in a boardinghouse on an island off the coast of the UK with other "peculiar" children, all of whom had some sort of strange power, whether it be invisibility or amazing strength or weightlessness - but Jacob's father convinces him that his grandfather's stories are just stories, despite the photographs to the contrary, and that his grandfather had been escaping Nazi Germany during WWII. But Jacob's life is turned upside down when his grandfather suddenly dies and clues point toward the truth of his mysterious past as a "peculiar" child. On the advice of his therapist, Jacob visits the island where the boardinghouse resides, and meets some very strange folk there.

Here is an excerpt from Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children:

I recognized them somehow, though I didn't know where from. They seemed like faces from a half-remembered dream. Where I had seen them before - and how did they know my grandfather's name?

Then it clicked. Their clothes, strange even for Wales. Their pale unsmiling faces. The pictures strewn before me, staring up at me just as the children stared down. Suddenly I understood.

I'd seen them in the photographs.

The girl who'd spoken stood up to get a better look at me. In her hands she held a flickering light, which wasn't a lantern or a candle but seemed to be a ball of raw flame, attended by nothing more than her bare skin. I'd seen her picture not five minutes earlier, and in it she looked much the same as she did now, even cradling the same strange light between her hands.

I'm Jacob, I wanted to say. I've been looking for you. But my jaw had come unhinged, and all I could was stare.

Reading: Emma Bull's Territory

Just finished reading Territory by Emma Bull. And: Wow. Must. Read. Everything. Bull. Has. Written.

 Territory, anyway, is a western story, set in Tombstone, AZ, in 1881, a few months before the famous shootout at the OK Corral - with one huge difference: in Bull's Old West, there are supernatural forces at work. It's a wonderful alternate history leading up to the events of the famous aforementioned gun fight. But if you're expecting the stereotypical western story (read: big shootouts, mysterious strangers, marauding Apaches), you will be disappointed or, in my case, pleasantly surprised (some of these things are there, but in very unexpected ways). While reading the book I was reminded of the awesome short-lived and much-loved HBO series Deadwood with its mixture of real people and fictional characters, although no one in Territory said "fuck" as much (heh). Bull's absolutely intoxicating prose made the world and the characters come to life - every sense was satisfied. Supremely Recommended.

Here is a short excerpt from Territory, during which one of the characters, Jesse, is taming Virgil Earp's horse:

Spark came down again, and to his knees; reared again, staggered back on his hind legs. Jesse stayed with him. Sweat blackened the hair on the colt's neck and flanks and legs. Jesse talked to him, his voice gentle, while he kept the strap tight in his right hand.

He hated this part. He hated the fear the horse felt, the way that fear grew as the animal learned that nothing it did could win this fight. If he'd handraised Spark as he had Sam, this wouldn't be necessary. But Sam had been made to believe since before he'd first stood up that Jesse was stronger than he was. Spark still had to be convinced. The more of his strength he used, the more of it there was for Jesse to turn against him.

Humans expected horses to think like humans. Jesse knew better - but it troubled him that, in a horse, wisdom could grow out of fear.

News of the Day

I've finished reading George RR Martin's A Dance With Dragons a few days ago and I may do a post on my thoughts on the book tomorrow, but I wanted to give a heads-up as to what I'll be doing in August on this here blog. Essentially, I'll be playing catch-up on recent books I've read and haven't had time to do reviews on. Readers of this blog should expect these forthcoming reviews, though not necessarily in this order:

The Curfew by Jesse Ball

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine (I'll try not to gush too much)

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Light Boxes by Shane Jones

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz


I'll also begin a new series of reviewing recent record releases, kicking off with the Spencer Krug's new project, Moonface, and debut album, Organ Music not Vibraphone like I'd Hoped later this week.

In the meantime, there is this:

Clarion +1: A Year of Writing

This time last year I was on an airplane, nervous with anticipation, for a 6-week writing "boot camp" in San Diego. I was on my way to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. It is an intensive workshop taught by some of the best writers in the field. The instructors during my six weeks were Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner, Dale Bailey, George RR Martin, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. Their insights, as well as the insights of the seventeen other classmates (all of which I'm proud to call friends and who are some of the smartest writers you'll ever read), have inspired me to not only understand what it is I do better but, simply, to do it better. With that in mind (instead of waxing nostalgic in this post because, let's face it, I miss those Clarionites every day), I'd like to post a few of my accomplishments over the past year.

Since Clarion, I've had two short stories published in Aphelion Magazine, Prime Mincer Literary Journal, and one forthcoming from Digital Science Fiction in July. The story published in DSF is a revised Clarion submission story; and the story published in Prime Mincer was the story I submitted during the final week of Clarion.

Not including these three stories, I've completed 13 short stories - most of which are in the 4,500-5,500 word range, though some are longer, nearing novelette and novella status and some are flash fiction pieces, less than a thousand words. A few of these pieces have been submitted to various markets and are awating rejections/acceptances from editors and, though some have been trunked indefinitely, most are still in the revision process. Altogether, my total word count for short stories is approximately 47,500 words.

In November, I joined the National Novel Writing Month competition, completing half of a novel at 51,180 words. To be honest, I didn't finish it because I had decided to go into the competition without a game plan. It was actually a conscious choice - I wanted to see what it was like to write without knowing anything about the story or, at the very least, having the vaguest, roughest of outlines. The outline wasn't plot-centric; the character description was for only one charater, named Moo, and it went something like this: "Moo is a thief but he doesn't know it." Beyond that and a couple of names for worlds (this was a multi-dimensional galaxy spanning story), I had nothing.

What I've done the past few weeks, however, is returned to this novel to see if there was anything worth scraping. There is, in fact, a lot worth scraping, but I don't think the novel (or half the novel) works together. About two-thirds of the way through I break from the main characters to focus on a character that, though he was secondary to begin with, kept creeping up in the text to the point where 9,000 words was dedicated to telling his story, though his story had nothing to do with the main action. Reviewing the novel has shown me that there was a lot of interesting things going on that didn't have much to do with one another and, rather than try to tie it all up in some forced bow at the end, it seems the best way to handle the situation is to create two or three novellas out of it. This is exhilarating to me for a number of reasons. Chiefly, because it has been a long time since I've written anything over 10,000 words, and I've always enjoyed longer works (yes, I am obsessive over word count). I'm also excited because I really love the voices of several of the characters - Moo, Tok Willow, Nyanna, and Balador - and am looking forward to getting back into writing about them.

One of the other lessons learned from NaNoWriMo is that I need to plan if I'm going to attempt a novel. Between short stories, I've been jotting down notes for just such a task in a faded green notebook with a bird on a limb that I markered in black permanent marker. By the end of July, I'd like to seriously start working on it. (I've always read more novel-length works than short stories anyway and, in much of the feedback from editors and beta readers, I've been told there is enough material within some of my short fiction to extend into a novella or novel. Let's hope that's true.)

My sister Mandy and I also worked on a moleskins project together. This consisted of me writing a very short story (sometimes more than one in a single volume) in a moleskin notebook, leaving blank pages at certain intervals in the tale. Mandy would draw pictures to coincide with the themes or scenes from the story. I think we made eight of these. Several sold at Spencer Bell Legacy shows my band, Tin Tin Can, performed at.

Currently, I am working on four stories. Two of them are science fiction, a third is horror, and the fourth has elements of heroic fantasy though it isn't quite that. The first of science fiction pieces, tentatively titled "The Contra-Tuba's Soul," is coming along nicely though it, like a lot of my fiction, wants to be longer than I initially thought it would be; the other science fiction piece, tentatively titled "Sleeping Bird," is in its beginning stages, even though I had the idea for it the fifth week of Clarion. The horror piece is a story I wrote at Clarion, titled "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Aye," but I never submitted it for critiques because it really wasn't a story yet - it was a piddly thing of no significance, full of gratuitous sex and violence (instead, I wrote and submitted a terribly sentimental piece about an elderly lady taken to a sock hop by an alien and which caused Jeff Vandermeer, co-instructor that week, to exclaim, in full lambasting glory, "It's as cheesy as Beaches!"). After some thought, however, I've decided to retool the story because, despite most of the action, I'm fond of the narrative voice. The sort-of-heroic-fantasy story concerns a small island village and the soldiers who return home from a war. It is a melancholic piece. It's the kind of story where all of the elements fall into place and the world is so vividly realized for me that all I really have to do is type.

Looking toward the future, I'll be working on the above-mentioned novel from my bird-on-a-limb notebook, as well as piecing together - or pulling apart, rather - the two or three novellas from the NaNoWriMo half-novel. I also have several ideas - some of which have been floating around in my head since December (and one since 2005, eesh) - for a few other novels, so I'll begin writing notes for these soon. I also hope to continue writing short fiction: thankfully, every time I fear I'll run out of ideas for short fiction, another one inevitably comes along.

So. The final word count - it always comes down to the final word count, doesn't it? - for the first year post-Clarion is 98,680 words. I've had 3 acceptances, 4 currently pending, and 43 rejections. Before Clarion I wasn't serious about writing - I had written one and half novels when I was 19, five short stories in college, and two since graduating that were rejected from one literary magazine each and trunked. In fact, I'd only decided to get serious about writing shortly before being accepted to the workshop, starting off by writing something - anything - every day, no matter what. I've done that, almost without fail, for over a year now. But, since Clarion and my wonderful classmates' and instructors' techniques and insights, I do so with a better understanding of the craft and labor of writing. Thank you all.

Review: Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente continues her mastery of turning fairytales on their heads in her latest, Deathless. Set against Stalinist-era Russia, Deathless tells the story of Marya Morevna, youngest of four sisters, and Koschei, called Deathless, the Tsar of Life.

Each of Marya's sisters marry men who previously had been birds fallen from the tree outside Marya's window. Marya waits for her magical bird-man to swoop and whisk her away too; instead, eleven other families move in to the house and, in an attempt to escape the encroaching claustrophobia, Marya falls in with the house's magical creature-protector-imp Zvonok, a domoviye. Zvonok introduces Marya to an invisible world, a world of magic, of the Tsar of Life and Tsar of Death, to a place only a few humans have ever visited.

Finally, a man comes for Marya: Koschei the Deathless, the Tsar of Life. In Russian folklore, Koschei is usually depicted as villainous and, though he can be monstrous in this retelling, Valente invests enough empathy in him a small amount of tenderness and love leaks from beneath his savage veil. And Marya, in love with Koschei, yearns to become a queen of this invisible world, of the island of Buyan; however, she must successfully complete three tasks set by Koschei's sister, Baba Yaga.

Deathless isn't escapist fantasy, however; being Koschei's queen is not how Marya Morevna survives the Stalinist regime and the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Instead, Marya experiences the horrors of war firsthand on two levels: 1) the "comprehensible, real" world and 2) the magical realm of Koschei. Marya moves between these worlds, fighting in a war between Koschei and Viy, the Tsar of Death, a war they've been waging since time began, and surviving during the siege of Leningrad. Valente balances these paralleling worlds - the real and the fantastic - with skillful grace. As Marya recounts to her magical friend, Comrade Lebedeva, "If a novelist wrote a true story about how things really happened, no one would believe him, and he might even be punished for spreading propaganda. But if he wrote a book full of lies about things that could never really happen, with only a few true things hidden in it, well, he would be hailed as a hero of the People..." It is the hiding of these "few true things" that makes Deathless so compelling - the chapter concerning the siege of Leningrad seen through Zvonok the domoviye's point of view is particularly affecting, as is the push-pull nature of Marya and Koschei's marriage.

Adding to this intriguing fairytale is Valente's captivating prose. Her words are always full, nearly bursting with wonder, and Deathless is Valente at her finest. Here is an example (Zvonok speaking to Marya):

Last week a man held a concert Glinka Hall. Snow fell in through the broken roof the whole time, piling up on the oboist's head. The air raid sirens played, too. We all listened from the roofs. Like cats. But not like cats. There are no cats left in Leningrad. Ivan said, If only we could eat violin music. I kissed his thumbnail. He said he was glad of me. Then he crawled into that bed...

Valente expertly mixes a sense of dread and hopelessness with something like absurd normality: as families starve during the siege, a man holds a concert and everyone listens from the roofs of their houses. And even after Ivan wishes to "eat violin music" he says he is "glad of [Zvonok]." In the direst moments hope is still preserved.

In the end, Deathless is a dream: of different worlds - ours and the magical - coexsting together, understanding the differences between what is living and what is really dead, and where each of us belong. Recommended.

Also recommended: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter.

Review: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (the pen name of the ubiquitous Daniel Abraham and George R.R. Martin's assistant, Ty Franck) is an engaging by-the-seat-of-your-pants space opera, replete with noir grit, excellently realized futurescapes, and "vomit zombies."

The story is told through the voices of two distinct characters diametrically opposed to the other's views on just about everything. The first is Franck's James Holden - XO of the Canterbury, an ice-hauling freighter. Despite some previous naval experience and being an Earther in the Outer Planets, Holden has remained an optimistic fellow. He sees the solar system in black-and-white terms: "So, now the Canterbury and her dozens of sister ships in the Pur'n'Kleen Water Company made the loop from Saturn's generous rings to the Belt and back hauling glaciers, and until the ships aged into salvage wrecks. Jim Holden saw some poetry in that." Holden's universe is an easy math equation where people are naturally good and everything adds up.

On the other side of this is Abraham's Joe Miller. A detective on Ceres Station in the Belt. A noirish cynic. The guy who's seen it all and buried it at the bottom of a whiskey glass. Though he works for a security company owned by an Earth corporation, Miller is a Belter by birth and distrustful of anyone who's ever seen a sky or not had their water and their air pumped in from outside. Yet, what makes Miller a good detective is his ability to detach himself when necessary, to notice the facts, regardless of personal sentiment. As Abraham notes, "When Miller started working homicide, one of the things that had struck him was the surreal calm of the victims' families. People who had just lost wives, husbands, children, and lovers. People whose lives had just been branded by violence. More often that not, they were calmly offering drinks and answering questions, making the detectives feel welcome...A month earlier Miller...had been the steadying hand of the law. Now they were employees of an Earth-based security contractor. The difference was subtle, but it was deep."

Holden's and Miller's worlds collide when the Canterbury picks up a distress signal from a derelict ship - the Scopuli - and responds, to discover the horror that's happened to its crew. As Holden transmits data that ignites an already tense situation between the Belt and Mars, Miller is assigned the job of searching for the missing Julie Mao. The link: Mao was one of the crew on the Scopuli.

There is a lot to like in Leviathan Wakes. The aforementioned "vomit zombies" are a real treat. There is a great backstory concerning the colonization of the solar system and the evolutionary process of humanity. There's a sleek generation ship built by the Mormons. There are gunfights and secretive corporations. There are elements of hard SF mixed with rock 'em sock 'em adventure, giving the story a realistic and gritty tone throughout. Hints of Heinlein and Clarke are all over the place.

However, the foremost engaging part of Leviathan Wakes is the relationship between Miller and Holden. It's about watching these characters grow and feed off each other (zombie pun intended) and shape events around them, understanding the future from their point of view. Through Miller's eyes Holden can look a naive fool who believes the best in people; through Holden's eyes Miller is an unpredictable wild man with a penchant for getting shot at and shooting everything in sight. Yet, through their own eyes, each man is sensible and rational and seeing things through the best way he can. Highly Recommended.

Leviathan Wakes is the first in the Expanse series and will be released June 15th, 2011. It is available for pre-order now.

Also Recommended: Dread Empire's Fall Trilogy by Walter Jon Williams.

A List of My Favorite Books (So Far) in 2011

With awards season right around the corner - we've got Locus, Nebula, Hugo, Jackson, to name a few  - I thought I would go ahead and list some of the books I've liked reading the most in 2011. They're weren't all published this year or even last year and I don't think any of them are nominees for any of the awards listed above except Nora Jemisin's first book, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Regardless, these are books I'll probably read again and again.

Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord (Small Beer Press)

The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season by Brian Conn (Fiction Collective)

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms/The Broken Kingdoms by NK Jemisin (Orbit)

Babel 17/Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany (Vintage)

Light Boxes by Shane Jones (Penguin)

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (Orbit)

Half World by Hiromi Goto (Viking)


Most of the aforementioned books I've reviewed on this here blog, but a few, like Shane Jones's Light Boxes, I haven't had time to yet; others, like Leviathan Wakes, will have a review within the next week or so. I'm currently reading Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless and really loving it.

Though I have quite a backlog of books to get through, I've recently picked up the following and I can't wait to read them:

Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine (Prime)

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (Tor)

Embassytown by China Mieville (Del Rey)

Up Against It by MJ Locke (Tor)

A Dance With Dragons by George RR Martin (Bantam)


Do YOU have any favorites?

Review: The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

The Broken Kingdoms, the second book in N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, is, simply put, wonderful. Jemisin has crafted an intelligent, entertaining and, ultimately, heartbreaking sequel to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

It begins ten years after the events in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The Arameri family still rules the palace of Sky and all of the hundred thousand kingdoms of the world; however, a giant tree grows through the middle of the palace, and the city that hus sprung up at the foot of the Tree is called Shadow. Bright Itempas - once the only god worshipped of the Three - must contend with the worship of other gods, particularly two new ones, the Lord of Shadows and the Gray Lady. It is a time of change in the world.

Oree Shoth, a blind artist with a gift for painting who sells her trinkets and baubles in a market in Shadow, one day finds what appears to be a godling - one of the many children of the Three - in a muckbin. Oree has two gifts, really: painting, and the gift of sight through use of magic. She can follow godling footsteps, make outlines of them in the darkness of her world - when magic is used around her, Oree can see. Here is how Jemisin describes Oree seeing the godling, whom she's nicknamed "Shiny", one morning: "...he turned his gaze outward again, his hair and shoulders beginning to shimmer. Next I saw his arms, as muscled as any soldier's, folded across his chest. His long legs, braced slightly apart; his posture relaxed, yet proud. Dignified. I had noticed from the first that he carried himself like a king."

Shiny does not speak  - not at first. Oree and he carry on a muted existence with Shiny constantly unaware of the dangers of his mortal-like body. Oree must clean up the blood of one of his fatal accidents more than once, but always, Shiny resurrects, emotionless and distant to his surroundings. It is not until Oree finds a godling murdered - a thing thought impossible - in an alley near her market that Shiny shows any outward sign of emotion. From here, The Broken Kingdoms spirals into the world of Shadow: against heretical and non-heretical priests of the Order of Itempas, down through godlings (one of whom was once Oree's lover), into the palace of Sky where Oree is burdened with a heavy revelation about herself, into darkness where one of the weirdest conglamarations of a demon ever written awaits.

It is the relationship between Shiny and Oree, however, that is at the heart of The Broken Kingdoms: how Shiny's disdain for mortalkind becomes begrudging respect and then, perhaps, something more; how Oree's initial dislike of Shiny's carelessness with his own body and his arrogance changes as she changes, discovering more about herself and the mystery of who and what Shiny really is. Jemisin seems very interested in understanding the differences and similarities of love and hate, and where the two collide.

There is also a lot of action in The Broken Kingdoms, yet Jemisin retains a meditative-like tone throughout. Her prose is clean and cool and, though she is working on a large canvas, her world-building rings true and nothing is unclear by novel's end. The voice of the story, however, really belongs to Oree. She is a strong, sympathetic character and Jemisin endears her to us. Though blind, she sees more than a person with perfect sight; yet, she is also flawed, blind to her own past. The aforementioned "heavy revelation" only adds to her complicated, interesting personality.

It's often said that the middle book of a trilogy is the least cohesive, it having to tie up loose ends from the first book while also threading new plot twists to be tied up in the concluding book. Jemisin avoids these pitfalls by letting the books stand alone, though reading them in order (her third, The Kingdom of Gods is due out later this year from Orbit) one can see her deft world-building and carry-over threads working gloriously. Recommended.

(Also recommended, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the first book in the Inheritance Trilogy.)

-Dustin Monk

Review: The Dragon's Path by Daniel Abraham

The first book in Daniel Abraham's new fantasy series, The Dagger and the Coin, does not turn tropes on their heads or reinvent the genre; instead, what Abraham is concerned with is engaging fantasy - including its strengths and weaknesses - on its own terms. Indeed, in the "Extras" section at the end of The Dragon's Path, Abraham discusses having "permission to be part of a greater body of literature." Where his first fantasy series, the critically acclaimed and excellent Long Price Quartet, gave readers an interesting and new take on magic and placed it outside the traditional Medieval European setting, The Dragon's Path travels the rutted road of many epic fantastists - yet, it has all of Abraham's charm and wit, making The Dragon's Path an entertaining and engaging read.

Part of what Abraham does so well is write compelling characters. This is epic fantasy, to be sure, but the important players in The Dragon's Path are not great warriors or sorcerers or sorceresses (though, each of these certainly make appearances). There is Cithrin, an orphan and ward of the Medean Bank, who must smuggle the free city of Vanai's wealth across the countryside after her city is sacked. And Geder Palliako, the "lone scion of a noble house" who is more interested in speculative essays than swordplay, and is constantly made fun of for it. Marcus Wester is the closest Abraham gets to a great warrior; however, Marcus's glory days (tinged with tragedy though they are) are well behind him and he has become a mercenary and caravan guard. Dawson Kalliam, childhood friend of the king of Antea, is a man of tradition, whether right or wrong, and will do anything to keep the kingdom from falling. His wife, Clara, also plays into the action near the end of the novel - she is certainly more intelligent than Dawson and has a better grasp of court politics and the great changes sweeping through the kingdom.

The most interesting characters in The Dragon's Path are Cithrin and Geder, however, because their actions, at the best times, are morally ambiguous, deeply affecting, and, most important, truly human. When Geder is forced into a position of power, his conclusion of Vanai sets in motion various other power plays in the kingdom of Antea, where Geder hails from, and eventually sets him out on a journey unlike anything he's known. As dangers coalesce around Cithrin, her decision concerning the wealth of Vanai will potentially make her a very powerful woman - as war hits the continent, many nations may depend on loans from her branch. Both Geder and Cithrin make good and bad choices. Geder's naivete and near-sociopathic tendenies will have you cursing him at some points in the book; yet, in the end, you want Geder to win or, at least, do something right. Cithrin, too, is a complex character: her growth from a frightened girl in a world of unknowns to a confident banker is marvelous, though she is still fueled by the folly of youth.

The world Abraham's built is based around the end of the reign of dragons and the creation of the thirteen races of man. He spends most of the novel with the Firstbloods, glossing over the other twelve races with superficial detail - "tall-eared Tralgu, chitinous Timzinae, tusked Yemmu...The Dartinae had small braziers in their eyeholes...a Kurtadam with clicking beads." If there is a weakness in The Dragon's Path, it's here; however, this being the first book in a series of an expected five, it's possible Abraham well get more in depth with these races as they become important to the tale. Part of the first book in a series of this magnitude is setting up the world, letting the reader know the rules, and Abraham succeeds in that.

Beyond the political intrigues and banking contracts, Abraham has constructed an interesting if familiar back story concerning the age of dragons (who are now extinct, but left jade roads called "dragon roads" in their wake), and a temple of priests who can tell whether or not a person is lying and are concerned with the End of All Doubt and a very nasty spider. The revelation of the "End of All Doubt" is Abraham's intriguing spin on the "looming darkness" or "freeing of the great evil lord" common to commercial epic fantasy; it'll be exciting where he leads us.

Though The Dragon's Path shares similarities with past epic fantasy series', Abraham knows his strengths as a writer and, what might come off as cliche in a lesser writer's pen, here reads excitingly fresh. Recommended.


-Dustin Monk

Review: The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington

For readers expecting more gruesomeness, grotesquerie, and vulgarity from the author of The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, Jesse Bullington's second novel, The Enterprise of Death, will not disappoint. Cannibalism, necrophilia, venereal diseases, the walking dead (sometimes all at once!): Enterprise has these - and more! - in spades. "Pity Boabdil," Enterprise begins, and pity the reader with a weak stomach, for Bullington is a master at gritty, harrowing and awe-inspiringly macabre detail.

Enterprise follows Awa - lesbian African slave and reluctant necromancer - on her strange journey to find the book that may (or may not) break the curse her master put upon her through a Europe in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. Along the way Awa encounters fictional and nonfictional characters alike - from the pistol-toting mercenary Monique to the real-life Reformationist and artist, Niklaus Manuel of Bern. Some of these people help her, others seek to destroy her and name her for what she is; throughout, however, is Awa's perserving spirit.

If Enterprise's humor is sometimes darker and smattered less generously than its predecessor, it's because, at is heart, Enterprise is a more serious and deeper investigation into our humanity. Bullington isn't afraid to tackle questions of morality, particularly whether the performance of necromancy is good or evil, because Awa - for all that she is a witch and raises the dead with or without their permission - is trying to live the best possible life a black homosexual woman with supernatural powers can live during the Inquisition.

Bullington utilizes his writing strengths - clever, gritty prose and witty asides - much as he did in his debut. The difference is, instead of the heretical graverobbing murdering bastards at the heart of Grossbart, Enterprise has characters - despite their many sins - you can root for. Manuel and Monique, and especially Awa, all strive for genuine goodness. But, as Awa surmises, "The problem with telling tales about real people [is] no summary can convey every truth, every facet, and what is good for the hare is not good for the fox."

Enterprise skillfully continues the macabre niche Bullington is carving out for himself, but also brings something new to his table.

-Dustin J Monk