Literateur: Capsule Reviews, Volume ?

As Mötley Crüe once said- BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS!

Pressure by Brian Keene

Keene is probably my favorite horror author. And this is his first big hardcover release by a mainstream publisher. Good for him! And it's a great gruesome sea monster thriller. Good for him again!

Over Your Dead Body by Dan Wells

The fourth sequel to I Am Not a Serial Killer. It is awesome.

The Hillbilly Moonshine Massacre by Jonathan Raab

Great title, not-so-great book.

Best Sellers by Phony McFakename

Better than getting thrown in a vat of hydrochloric acid!

Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal by Ian Christe

A fantastically-told, lyrical history of the heaviest of genres. I know a lot about this topic, but I didn't know Billy Joel released a heavy metal album in 1970 until I read this thing.

Songs of the Dying Earth by George R.R. Martin (Ed.)

Solid collection of stories set in Jack Vance's Dying Earth milieu, edited by the guy who refuses to write the books you want to read.

Cujo by Stephen King

A fantastic story about an ad exec trying to save his company, and a solid story about a killer dog to boot!

Peckinpah: An Ultraviolent Romance by D. Harlan Wilson

A phantasmagorical, surreal, uncategorizable book that takes tropes from Sam Peckinpah films, throws them in a blender, and splatters you with the end result. Lots of neat words strewn together into sentence.

The Land Leviathan by Michael Moorcock

I randomly read this because I'll read anything by Moorcock. Turns out it's book two in a series. But that's okay, because it's also a proto-steampunk book from the early 70's. I was delighted to find that Moorcock invented that genre by way of this book. It's an inversion of Indian/British history where Ghandi is president and Britain is an oppressed Indian colony. Good stuff.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

No one seems to have heard of this book, but it's pretty solid! Also it's 500% more brutal than the movie. People get disemboweled and ripped to shreds. Jeff Goldblum's character dies after spending half the book suffering horribly and delirious on pain meds. And John Hammond hates his grandkids and goes delusional by the end before being murdered by his own creations. And it ends with the island getting firebombed into oblivion by Costa Rican authorities. Yowza!

The Deep by Nick Cutter

I really dug Cutter's twisted The Troop, but this is a disappointing follow-up. It's a pastiche of every alien/undersea movie ever made, but the writing is turgid and overstuffed. Great metaphors and descriptions, but the endless flashbacks stop the narrative momentum cold. And the characters either act irrationally or are totally unlikeable.

The New New Thing by Michael Lewis

Lewis follows around the guy who invented Netscape. That company was important at one point, kids.

The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse

Jeeves and Wooster, up to their usual tricks. Awesomeness.

The Stickmen by Edward Lee

Lee is known for being the most hardcore of hardcore splatterpunk authors, but he wrote this fairly traditional sf thriller in the late 90's and it's a perfectly entertaining X-Files-influenced alien yarn.

Mistborn: Secret Histories by Brandon Sanderson

This is what happened to Kelsier after he died in Mistborn. The narrative drags as it's mostly a guy in a blank otherworldly landscape. But there are some good revelations about Sanderson's literally world, like the fact that there was originally a god there who was killed by 16 people who split the god into 16 pieces that they shared among themselves, granting each of them a special power.

Women of Wonder: The Classic Years by Various Writers

Mostly okay pulp fiction stories

Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff

Ruff takes a look at African-American life in Jim Crow-era America and makes it more terrifying than anything Lovecraft ever wrote. Though there's a strong Lovecraftian flavor here for seasoning.

The Red Skull by Kenneth Robeson

Doc Savage 4ever!

Generic Romance by Phony McFakename

Beats getting stabbed in the butt with a scimitar.

Panacea by F. Paul Wilson

Wilson rules and his medical thrillers are always entertaining. This one's okay, but Wilson's okay books are still pretty great.

AND NOW...An Oral History of Late Night with David Letterman by Brian Abrams

Major weakness: not a word from Letterman himself. But an entertaining and engaging look at a game-changing late-night show that kicked down a lot of doors.

Dark Passage by David Goodis

Solid enough crime novel.

Boomerang by Michael Lewis

Kinda a sequel to The Big Short- about the global economic consequences of that story's events. Funny and depressing. Like life.

Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson

Funny riff on Shakespeare, positing a parallel world where everything in his plays happened.

One by Richard Bach

I dunno. I lost interest. Felt like the author did that thing Kurt Vonnegut talked about, where literature crawls too far up its own derriere. The author made himself the main character of the story. I dunno. Maybe it'll change your life. Some people get their lives changed by this book.

Lovecraft's Legacy by Various Authors

Pretty mediocre collection of Lovecraft-influenced tales. It bats .200, at best.

The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

There are dragons. They are ridden. In Pern.

Home Game by Michael Lewis

Lewis talks about becoming a father. I didn't know his wife was former MTV news anchor Tabitha Soren. Neat.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Hilarious book where books are worlds unto themselves that you can inhabit. And kidnap people from. Very Pratchett-y, Douglas Adams-y humor. Rapid fire and suspenseful, to boot.

Benchley- Or Else! by Robert Benchley

 
The man's a national treasure of funny-ness. No one attacks your giggle reflex harder.

Cemetery World by Clifford Simak

I dug Simak's epic City, but this one left me cold. Some decent writing, but just not much of a story.

Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum

Ketchum is known for his super-brutal horror tales, but this one is a pretty mild tale of a boy who falls for a girl who takes him down some dark roads. It has an intense finale and some solid heavy emotional writing about small-town alienation. But it's about as intense as an average YA thriller.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy

People in a dance competition that goes on for days as their bodies and minds fall apart. Every evil dystopian game show story owes their story to this mean 1969 tale. Hunger Games was ripped as a Battle Royale rip-off. But Battle Royale was a Running Man rip-off. And Running Man- and The Long Walk, also written by Stephen King- got their story idea here. There's no original ideas, folks. Just original spins on ideas.

Tronald Rump Vs. Cockroach Zombies by Phony McFakename

Far superior to getting framed by the police for murder and then sent to the electric chair.

The Complete LaNague by F. Paul Wilson

This collects most of Wilson's early libertarian sf novels in chronological order. Some cool scenes and ideas here- like the idea of genetically engineering and re-creating dinosaurs in his 1989 Dydeetown World- but it's for Wilson completists only.

Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy by Matt Ruff

So this thing on the dedication page nearly scared me off:

NOPE.

But then the book more than redeemed itself. It's an oft-hilarious goof on Rand's ideas and concepts, stripping them bare and showing how they'd actually work if they were applied in a more realistic concept. (Spoiler: they don't work.)

My Planet by Mary Roach

These are light domestic anecdotes from the funny lady who likes writing about dead bodies (Stiff), digestion (Gulp), idiosyncrasies of space travel (Packing for Mars), and the details of sniper diapers in warfare (Grunt). Lotsa harmless giggles here.

Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

So serious and relentlessly cold, it often verges on self-parody. The story about the clown cult is pretty awesome but the rest all blur together. Ligotti follows the Lovecraftian tradition of frail, academically-inclined, inaction-hero protagonists. Not terribly compelling. Some good writing, though. (Ligotti's the guy that True Detective ripped off in season one, btw.)

The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov

The title story rocks (and reveals that the movie adaptation pretty well captured its essence). And Asimov's witty and self-deprecating commentary on each story is a lot of fun. But the "Other Stories" in the title aren't anything special. He'd been cranking out multiple books a year for 37 years by the time he dropped this in 1976. Not saying he was phoning it in, but...yeah, he was sort of phoning it in.

Vampire Junction by S.P. Somtow

I see this book at every used book store and every book sale I attend. So I finally grabbed it. It's okay. Some of the nightmare sequences are well-rendered. It's very gory and jumps all over the place, so it's an early example of both splatterpunk and post-modern literary horror. But nothing about it made me want to read either of its sequels. <rant> NOT EVERYTHING HAS TO BE A TRILOGY. </rant> Is anyone else gonna point out that Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire sequel- The Vampire Lestat- was about a vampire rock singer and came out one year after this book about a vampire rock singer? Anyone?

H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism by S.T. Joshi

Lots of great perspectives on the author. It's easy to forget that he had a great sense of humor since his work and outlook were so dour.

How to Stay Alive in the Woods by Bradford Angier

Conclusion: I am going to die in the woods. Also this book has some pretty funky passive grammar and ornate sentence construction going on. I wasn't expecting it to be Elmore Leonard, but a bit more directness with the prose would be preferable as every sentence in the book is structured in a way like the sentence that you are reading now and would really like me to wrap up and stop inflicting on you, as the attention required by this sentence is unreasonable.

Coach by Michael Lewis

It's a teeny-tiny reminiscence of the author's childhood baseball coach. I don't really care for baseball, so meh. Maybe you'll like it?

The Second Book of Lankhmar by Fritz Leiber

Leiber's lovable rogues, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, are up to their usual antics in this collection of their last four story collections. Nobody wrote this stuff better than Leiber. (Sorry, Mr. R.R. Martin!)

End of Watch by Stephen King

55 books this guy wrote. They can't all be zingers. Killer in coma reaches out with psychic powers and drives people to suicide. Then attacks people through a mobile game app. Sure, okay. Not for me, but King probably has another book coming out in a few days that I'll like better.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

But does he really?

The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick

I don't remember anything that happened in here. Just that it was trippy and mind-bendy and awesome. So it's the usual awesomeness from Mr. Dick.

Heroes in Hell by Various Authors

This was a thing with the D & D crowd in the early 80's. Short stories about historical heroes' experiences in Hell. Not as fun or interesting as it could be. Tons of books in this anthology series. It just went on and on. And has a pretty bad critical reputation. Someone must have liked it, I guess.

Implant by F. Paul Wilson

Less awesome than Wilson's other medical thrillers, Deep as the Marrow and The Select. I only read it because I'm running out of Wilson books I haven't read. But I'm a completist. It's my curse. I like a writer, I read everything they do. Even the filler.

Eric Roberts: The True Story by Phony McFakename

Definitely beats getting mauled by rabid alligators.

Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson

But why do they like you?

The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange) by Various Authors

The opening tales by D. Harlan Wilson are the balls. Kafkaesque and darkly funny. I could give or take the rest. Carlton Mellick III's story had some great writing and visuals, but- as with most of his books- has an unrepeatable title and I can't in good conscience recommend it. None of the other Bizarro writers did anything for me. Just a cool bit here and there. I guess I technically write Bizarro, but I don't feel I belong with the guys in this collection. Maybe I'm not obscene enough?

Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Football player plays football.

Grunt by Mary Roach

Roach explores the funny and more intimate side of modern warfare. Everything you ever wanted to know about military fashion, diarrhea in the battlefield, artificial limbs, and more!

Sleep Disorder by Jack Ketchum/Edward Lee

Gross stuff, a disappointing and repugnant collaboration between two normally reliable authors.

Three Hainish Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin

If you're looking for Hainish novels, this is the place!

Slowly We Rot by Bryan Smith

I read this post-zombie apocalyptic Western road trip yarn a bit at a time over a few months. Didn't like the raging alcoholic main character. Wasn't much fun. But I was never sure where it was gonna go next. And I certainly can't say that about Walking Dead.

The Third Level by Jack Finney

Cool 1957 short story collection by the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Check it out of you like cool 1957 short story collections by the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

The Gathering Storm by Brandon Sanderson/ Robert Jordan

Long book. I got bored by the first Wheel of Time book, so I skipped right to the one that was written by an author I love, Brandon Sanderson. (He took over after the original author died.) I listened to it on audiobook and I realized that after 23 CDs, I still wasn't sure who anyone was, where they were, what they were doing, or why they were doing it. Can't blame Sanderson. I skipped 11 books to get to this one. Some cool little moments, but it mostly feels like a rough draft for Sanderson's awesome, epic (and coherent!) Stormlight Archive books.

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

It's bigger than you could imagine.

Next by Michael Lewis

This column is mostly reviews of Michael Lewis books. I admit that. And I won't apologize for it. This is his 2001 book about high-tech stuff that's now ridiculously out of date. Mostly fun to see how people visualized the future of tech and the Internet 15 years ago.

Acolytes of Cthulhu edited by Robert M. Price

I'm burned out on Lovecraftian fiction. But if you're in the mood, this collection is perfectly fine. Lots of lost gems you probably missed.

Tangled Up in Blue by Joan Vinge

If you like her, that's fine. Lots of important writers seem to like her. That's cool. This high-fantasy-masquerading-as-sf just didn't do nothin' for me.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Bronte-saurus tears it loose! I was okay with the present-day stuff. Felt haunted and dark and intriguing, despite the meh characters. But the flashbacks and character explanations- which take up the bulk of the book- just didn't engage. I hear some folks like it, though.

Ring for Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Having burned through Wodehouse's Psmith, Blandings Castle, Uncle Fred, and (most of the) Jeeves & Wooster books, I'm now going after anything I've missed. And was slightly bummed to find that this book only has Jeeves and not Wooster. It's still fun, but it's not the same. And I want it to be the same every time!

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life by Philip Jose Farmer

Farmer takes pulp hero Doc Savage and writes his biography as if they guy was real. Goes off on some random tangents, like the endless comparisons to Burroughs and other unrelated writers in the first section. And it's a bit dry. Pages and chapters pass without a single laugh. Plus Farmer could have made this into an adventure or done something meta-narrative-y with it instead of writing it like a Wikipedia entry. Some missed potential there. Fun if you're a Savage fan, though.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

Fun paranoid thriller. Drags a bit, but okay overall.

Night of the Ripper by Robert Bloch

Jack the Ripper is pretty scorched narrative Earth by now, but this is still a solid tale and I'm sure was more original in 1984. The most interesting and disturbing parts were the brief descriptions of historic atrocities dating back to ancient Egypt that begin each chapter. Creating a "man's inhumanity to man" theme there. Super-depressing. But well-researched.

The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick

I have no idea what happened in this book or who I am anymore. This book robbed me of my perceptual consistency and ability to

Dragons of Darkness edited by Orson Scott Card

Not bad. Card's intro was solid, as was his tale. This dragon story anthology is a companion to Card's Dragons of Light, which I guess is brighter.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

No comment.

Used Zombies by Phony McFakename

Better than getting a chainsaw to the chest.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Anarchist libertarian sf tale that does a much better job preaching than telling a story. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was very similar- and very similarly flawed- but it had a better story.

-Phony McFakename

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