CBR #60 – Lotta Miles On The Road Still To Go

Christine by Stephen King

I think it’s infinitely appropriate that Uncle Stevie is my sixtieth book on this journey.  On my Kindle are several King books, newer ones and the ones I’m not sure that I’ve read or not.  I got into Stephen King when I was ten or twelve.  Always fascinated with horror stories, it was whenever in school we were given The Raven by Poe.  So I devoured Poe.  And then some sinister and wicked-hearted librarian steered me towards Stephen King.  It was definitely in those formative years.  I know the first sex scene I ever read was from The Tommyknockers.  I read that motherfucker until it was burned into my retinas and it wasn’t even particularly salacious — a desperately fumbling where a pretty young thing reached under a plaid skirt and pulled down her Woolworth’s panties.   But this from a generation that would stare fixated at scrambled porn signals for the prayerful glimpse of a tinted nipple.  So I cut my teeth on Stephen King.  But I can never remember which I had gotten to.

I knew the tale of Christine.  A teenage boy’s car comes to life and kills his enemies.  Stephen King loves his murdercars.  Maximum Overdrive.  From a Buick 8.  Hell, his son even has The Wraith in NOS4A2. And they both did a killer trucker versus biker tale in Throttle.  It’s hard not to think about killer cars.

But Christine is so much more than that.  It’s a coming of age story in the most brutal fashion.  A loser who finds a car, who finds his backbone and his energy in an automobile.  He fights back against his parents, against his cooler friends, even against the girl who eventually falls for him.  Too bad he’s fighting back because he’s haunted by the vengeful and bitter spirit of a complete shitter from WWII.  It’s very much a young man’s tale.  In fact, I was fascinated at the dichotomy between Christine and King’s later From a Buick 8, which is also about a murderous classic car.  Only, in Buick 8, King has a bunch of old cops sitting around a picnic table, telling tales of the killer car.  It’s the Portrait of an Artist in his Sunset Years.  It’s compelling to compare the two stories, one from when King was still a young man starting out, dwelling on those teen years that were still within fingertip brushing reach, and the other from when he was much older and had birthed his own children fostering their tales.  Both stories are excellently told, though truth be told, I probably prefer the seasoned Buick 8 slightly better.  Christine is narrated through the unreliable eyes of Dennis, Arnie Cunningham’s footballer best buddy, and so it’s kind of got a dimmer patina to me.  That’s how the story had to be told, and it thankfully doesn’t go for the happily ever after finale.  But it’s still got a bit of a burr on it.

It actually made me realize how much — without having read it first — King’s influence has seeped into my own writing.  The novel I’ve been working on for several years now, A Well-Oiled Machine, is very similar to Christine.  I’m walking a different path, but it’s the same neighborhood.  I’m inspired and pleased to have that grounded for me.

CBR #59 – You’re Like a Disease Without Any Cure

Champion by Marie Lu

Nope. Nice try, with your Hungry Play Novels.  But you made a fatal mistake.  You gave everyone a disease.  Seriously, in the last book, basically everyone gets sick.  Day has a brain tumor, which will probably kill him in a month.  His brother Eden was Patient Zero for a virus which is now infecting the colonies and causing them to attack the Republic.  June was sick in the last book, and this is having repercussions.  And Tess gets the plague and is probably going to die.  You can’t make everyone sick and expect it to work.  It’s like a motherfucking Victorian novel where everyone’s got fucking consumption.

Plus, John Green did A Fault in Our Stars.  Flawed or not, he’s pretty much written the book on melodramatic teen death romance.  Cancer trumps bioweapons.  Every. Fucking. Time.

There’s just too much story to fit in to the last book.  She sets up this epic battle that never comes about.  And since we’re only focused on Day and how angsty he wants to bang June, we just don’t have room for how it needs to play out. We get diversions, like how Antarctica’s society is set up like a video game where you earn experience points to achieve rank.  Again, that’d be cool, but we’re gone.  The entire battle between the Colonies and the Republic essentially comes down to June fighting Commander Jameson and Day almost dying while he’s dying.

And then the ultimate ending feels like a cop-out.  It’s bad, and then gets worse, jumping ahead ten years.  I’m sure when she wrote the last lines, she thought she was nailing it.  I’ve done that too.  And the audience rolled their eyes and vomited.  It just feels tacked on and lame and left me sour on the series.  Not as bad as I was with the last book in His Dark Materials.  But still.  It’s a definite meh.

CBR #58 – You Got Herd

Solitude Creek by Jeffery Deaver

Crowds are horrible.  I get what I refer to as mall rage whenever I’m in a big box store or a mall for longer than ten minutes.  I get uncomfortable and enraged and impatient.  There have been times I’ve had to leave and go sit in the car.  No idea what causes it.  But I hate them.

In this mystery, Deaver gives us another Kathryn Dance story — his kinesiologist who uses body language to solve mysteries for the CBI (California Bureau of Investigation).  Dance is alright, but she’s sort of a lesser spin-off of the better Lincoln Rhyme series.  Dance is CSI: Cyber to Lincoln Rhyme’s original recipe CSI.  She’s an interesting enough character, with her little foibles.  Her supporting cast is less interesting, which I think is the problem.  Especially TJ Scanlon, a twenty-something caught in the sixties who’s constantly making jokey non-sequiturs. But I digress.

There are a couple storylines as per usual.  Dance is working a task force on a drug pipeline running from San Fran to LA to Mexico, when she essentially gets duped by a perp and disarmed.  She then gets reduced to the Civ Div, where she’s tasked with investigating Solitude Creek, a bar where a terrorist basically orchestrated a concert crowd to panic by faking a fire and blocking exits.  The ensuing crowd trampled several people to death.  And he hasn’t stopped there.  Also, there’s a bunch of hate crimes being orchestrated in the town.

Now, I read a lot of mystery, so I pretty much picked up on who the mole on the pipeline case was, who was responsible for the hate crimes, and what was going on with the Solitude Creek case.  I kept wondering, am I just that good, or has Deaver lost a step?  Dude’s four books in on Kathryn Dance and like twelve or thirteen on Rhyme.  Only so many ways you can shake out a mystery.

But.  He got me.  He led me by the nose.  Sure, I was totally on board, and managed to avoid the red herrings.  But see, that was his game all along.  It wasn’t the who it was the why that was impressive.  He didn’t just twist the plot, he totally changed the tune, and it worked.  It’s why I’m a fan.

CBR #57 – Killabytes

The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross

I’ve been enjoying this series quite a bit, and while it gets tech heavy, it’s still well-wrought and imaginative.  And this particular novel was very well done.  It’s my favorite yet.  I had to wait until it came in at the library to read and review it.

Vampires are bullshit.  I mean, we’ve been inundated with them.  First there was the sparkletits of Twilight and then we had the psuedo backlash to that where then vampires were reimagined back into the unfathomable horrors.  Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan did the whole leech-cthulhu beasts with The Strain, and Justin Cronin’s due to wrap up The Passage.  And True Blood and The Sookie Stackhouse series.  Vampires have been done to death.  Like zombies, it’s finally to the point where it’s hard to keep it fresh.

Unless you’re Charlie Stross.  In the world of The Laundry Files, math is magic.  And so in his world, the other members of his cabal believe that vampires don’t exist.  Until they get vampires.  Bob’s ex Mhari is working for a bank in investments when their tech kid suddenly discovers a bit of code that renders them into vampires.  They crave blood, they are hurt by ultraviolet light, and they have the ability to use glamours.  However in Bob’s world, it’s not quite vampirism, but it’s a symbiote that feeds through the blood of the PHANGs.  And causes something similar to K Syndrome, which is a fatal disease that mathemagicians suffer which basically eats away at their brains like Creuzfeldt-Jacob Disease.

Only.  Now that alone would be badass. But the story itself is sort of battle of wills between two hidden vampires — actual vampires apparently.  One of whom is a mole in the Laundry.  And the ultimate repercussions of the story — Bob’s relationship with Mo, her mystic violin weapon, several unexpected and gruesome deaths — really drive this to another level.  The imagination and execution on this story are quite good.  As I said, the Laundry Files are great, and seem to be getting better.  I’m not sure how many Stross is planning, but I’ll keep eagerly reading.

CBR #56 – Love Conquers All, Except Corporate Oligarchies and Fascist Militaristic Dictatorships

Prodigy by Marie Lu

So we move onwards in the story of June and Day.  The teen dystopia jumps back and forth between the two leads, which is distracting and ineffective.  The only other time I saw this was in Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles, which did for Egyptian myths what Percy Jackson did for Greek.  Except you know, unsuccessfully.  While Percy Jackson became two five book series, Kane only went three books.  Not because the Egyptian myths weren’t interesting, but because the narrators were fucking HORRIBLE.  It was mostly Sadie, who managed to be the most insufferable voice I’ve ever listened to.  And her brother was no charmer either.  Same here with June and Day.  June’s pretty much a puddle every time she even thinks of the word Day and Day spends his time between mooning over June and moaning that his brother Eden is a pawn of the government.

Side note:  Ugh, the character names.  It’s one of those worlds — happens in Sword of Truth as a matter of fact — where the characters alternate between irrational names and rational ones.  It’s like Junebug and Day, then you’ve got John, and their younger brother Eden.  There’s Razor, and also Baxter and Kaede.  Pacquo, but we’ve also go Anden.  Thomas, who loves June’s brother Metias.  It’s like someone tried to type up the dramatis personae of an Aeschylus play and just left in the autocorrects. Also, Day is described as part Mongolian (his real name is Daniel A. Wing) but he has long blonde hair.  Like anime long.  And yet, he’s some sort of super criminal who has never been caught.  Except when he was caught.

Well now, Day is a revolutionary hero.  The Republic is claiming that Day was executed, and so June and Day are on the run to the Patriots, the revolutionaries fighting against the Republic.  They end up in the Colonies, the other part of America on the other side of the wall.  Surprise!  It’s not a utopia.  It’s a corporate sponsored state where everyone works for one of four corporations and things like police help and food all must be purchased with company credits.  It’s squalorous too!

Also, the Patriots have set up an assassination attempt on Anden, the new Elector Primo.  They want Day to do it.  So they get June close to set everything up so Day can shoot Anden.  It’s all set up by Razor, the leader.  Only, surprise!  Something isn’t quite right, and so June kiboshes the entire thing and Day goes along and now everyone hates them.  The entire city of LA is under quarantine for a virus released by…I don’t want to explain this.

Lu spends most of this book taking up time she could be using to explore the mind boggling huge world she’s set up but has all the depth of a Minecraft construct. Instead, she sets up a love rhombus.  Day and June — total nutso for each other.  Only, June also might have feelings for the Elector, who is crushing on her like a CW show.  Also, Tess, Day’s sidekick and now patriot, has a huge crush on Day.  And she doesn’t like June.  So that’s happening.

It ends at another cliffhanger, one so monumentous I have no idea how in the piss Lu’s going to wrap this up in one book. . It’s a huge sprawling story.  Probably she’ll just cut corners so more love story can ooze out.

CBR #55 – A Good Walk Spoiled

The Match: The Day The Game of Golf Changed Forever by Mark Frost

My father was an avid golfer, and so I grew up with the game.  My brother and I didn’t take to it as well.  They called us Splash and Divot.  My brother swung so hard he’d churn up meteors that would chunk the fairway.  And if you put a cup of water in shadowy gully ten feet off the fairway, I’d land my ball in it. I enjoy the game, but it’s not my favorite.  Still better than basketball.

Frost came to my attention because he wrote two books about Arthur Conan Doyle that were speculative fiction that I have yet to read. They were numbered seven and six, so I was checking to see if he wrote a five yet.  No. He did however co-create Twin Peaks and wrote for Hill Street Blues.  And he has since taken up writing golf books,

The Match is interesting in its place in history.  I’m a sucker for when pop culture and history mesh.  I fucking eat that with a spoon.  People shit on him, but I love Erik Larson for the same reasons.  Ben Mezrich.  All them guys.

Changing the game of golf forever might be a bit hyperbolic.  What happened was, a bet between two wealthy guys resulted in two amateur golfers challenging two professional golfers in a best ball competition.  Frost nicely doles out the game play — lovingly describing the golf holes on the course they play and the challenges there in.

But it’s the write up of the history around the event — the current events, the stories of the golfers — where the book shines.  Ben Hogan, Lord Byron, Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward are each put in the juxtaposition of the events going on around them.  At the time, being a pro golfer was not as lucrative.  It was hard to scratch out earnings, hustling around to tournaments where the first prizes barely justified the travel expenses.  You’d have to play upwards of forty or fifty tournaments a year.  Meanwhile, amateurs were often doctors or salesmen, dilettantes who had skill and could play on a whim.  Amateurs often competed at the professional level, but didn’t want to relegate themselves to a hustler’s life just to scratch by.

So this epic match became a fight between the amateur and the professional.  Personal tragedies, grudges, challenges, it was all worked out in the scope of this showdown.  The most entertaining was hearing about Bing Crosby’s part in orchestrating all this.  He used to host a Pro-Am that would become a four day bacchanal.  And from that spouted this match up.

Really interesting if you enjoy golf and hearing how the game fell in place during the early part of the 20th century.

CBR #54 – We Got Ruby Fucking Slippered

Confessor by Terry Goodkind

Ruby slippering.  Dorothy gets whisked away to a nightmare world filled with anthropomorphic horrors where she’s forced to commit homicide twice at the whims of two psychotic despots who are trying to rid their kingdoms of the old woman who can set them straight.  In the end, she finds out she didn’t have to go through any of that shit, and that the power was there all along.

After endless speeches and mansplaining and cringeworthy obsessive love, we finally get to the great showdown.  Which is the same showdown from the first book, the Boxes of Orden.  And so eventually everything susses out.  We didn’t even need the big goddamn battle that raged through the land, or any of that crap.  Jagang doesn’t even get a horrific death.  Instead, we got ruby fucking slippered.  Richard didn’t need the Book of Counted Shadows, or the How to Be A War Wizard in Four Successful Steps or even really need Kahlan.  He didn’t need to know which copies mattered or to stop the stupid Dark Sisters of the Traveling Pants to cast spells.  None of that mattered.  He taps the Sword of Truth against the box and magicks everything right.

Or well, he magicks shit.  Basically he takes all the people who hate magic and who follow the Empire and builds them an exact copy of the world (sans magic) and he makes them live there.  They’ll get what they want and they’ll all die sad and anti-Objectivist.  So of course Jennsen goes there because reasons.  And they have a baby.  And it’s going to end up becoming that fucking friend from high school who reads Atlas Shrugged and wants to start a construction/landscaping company.  Good.  Meanwhile, everyone else will be in the regular world where they have magic but still can act like dicks because that’s Amurricas God Given Right for gay married couples to protect their marijuana crops with assault rifles.

But this comes after forty pages of pure speeches.  Just speeching the fuck out of everything. Speeches.  Finally the series is over though!

But it isn’t.  Because Goodkind decided there’s one more book.  And that book is four books.  Because why use a sentence or paragraph to say something you can say in four chapters.  So why not write a coda to your series by writing four more books.  Because Robert Jordan’s last book was so big Brandon Sanderson had to write three books while writing four series.  Goodkind needs FOUR books because he’s just that much harder of a worker.  Ugh.  Onwards and upyours.

CBR #53 – Knockoff Productions Presents The Hungry Games At Twidusk

Legend by Marie Lu

Imitation is allegedly the sincerest form of flattery. And in entertainment, it makes sense.  I mean, if something makes money, you’re gonna rush to production to make as many knockoffs as possible.  And teen dystopia is hotter than Hansel right now. And I read a metric fuckton of it, and I love it.  I really honestly truly do.  It’s almost always the same formula.

A teen is forced to compete in some sort of trial/challenge/game to determine their place in a fascist government over force where there’s distinct social schema.  They inevitably fall in love with their heterosexual opposite, but there’s usually someone else to form up the love triangle/quadrangle/rhombus.  They discover they’re special and they, the teen, are the ones to overthrow the government.

Now, that sounds like it’s boilerplate, but there’s a lot of fucking room there. I loved the Hunger Games series.  Divergent started out good and fell apart. Same with James Dashner and the Maze Runner series.  Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker series and Chuck Wendig’s Heartland trilogy take shit to a new level of astonishing.  And I still don’t think I can separate Hugh Howey the person from Hugh Howey’s Wool series enough to say I liked it.  If we were in elementary school, he’d get a valentine, but I wouldn’t write anything on it.  I’d purposely skip wishing him a Happy Birthday on Facebook.

Marie Lu’s Legend series is a copycat.  It’s Hunger Games adjacent.  It really leans heavy on the lovestory, and the two leads — June and Day — go full on Twihard.  It’s sad, because it spoils what could have been interesting.  Plus, Day’s got the worst fucking nickname this side of Buck in Left Behind (who was named because he “bucks tradition.”  I just got CANCER and DIABETES from that bullshit.)  The world flooded and what’s left of the United States has been divided along the Rockies by a wall.  The Republic controls everything with an iron fist, and children aged 12 are forced to take the Trials, which places them in advanced schooling for military positions.  June’s a prodigy, the first one to get a perfect score on the Trials, and as such she’s been blasted through the training.  Her brother is murdered, supposedly by Day, a criminal who wreaks havoc on the Republic by stealing food and medicine, blowing up their airplanes and destroying shit.  So June goes undercover to capture Day, and it becomes West Side Story.

Lu doesn’t spend enough time worldbuilding.  It’s sort of patchwork set pieces to build her moon-y love story.  Which is the weakest part so it’s hard to love the story as much.  These two epic heroes — teenagers in an adult world — hinge on everything.  It’s a bit far fetched and makes the story less satisfying.

CBR #52 – To Protect and Slobber

Suspect by Robert Crais

I have always been scared of dogs.  Since I was three and got bitten by my grandmother’s dog Midgie.  So I’ve always been nervous and scared. Whenever people have dogs they always say, “Oh, he’s never bitten anyone.”  And then their dog would lunge for me.  Or growl at me.  Or sometimes they would press up against me and try to protect me from everyone else.  Which freaked me out because I didn’t know why this dog I didn’t want near me was trying to press itself against me.

So when my fiancee and I got engaged, she decided she didn’t want an engagement ring. She wanted a puppy.  And so we got ourselves a dog.  Porkchop, our shar pei-pug mix.  I can’t think of a bigger commitment to “I will always be with you and I will change myself in whatever way is necessary to be a better person” than to get a dog.  I faced my fears.  This was an animal that I had no control over.  I’d have to stick my hand in his mouth.  I’d get bitten.  I’d get barked at.  I’d get growled at.  I’d be responsible for cleaning up any assortment of messes: puke, pee, poop, slobber.  I would commit myself to a life where I would never be able to go out in pubic without at least 15% of my ensemble covered in fine white dog hairs.  I was scared to death.  And my life has changed forever.

I don’t want to become one of those sanctimonious douchewaffles who stare intently at you and say with church-carnival fortune teller eyes, “You don’t understand how much you will care about a dog until you own a dog.” They are the same people that seem to believe that their child is the first child that has ever been born and is more special than any other child possibly could be.  But there is an element to truth.  I’ve never ever thought I could honestly kill for another living creature until I got a dog.  I would literally straight up murder a motherfucker if they tried to hurt a dog.  Without a fucking blink.  And not a clean kill either.  I’m talking shit that makes the fucking front page of Reddit murder.  I love my dog more than other people.

So now I start reading Robert Crais’ Suspect, which is a procedural set in Los Angeles.  It’s basically the story of two wounded cops, a patrolman gunned down while his partner dies in a seemingly random shootout and a Marine dog who watches his owner get blasted by an IED and then gets hit by insurgent sniper fire.  It’s harrowing and it leaps back and forth between the perspective of the dog and the policeman.  Both are seriously damaged and have to heal one another.  I know that sounds like a fucking Hallmark Movie of the Week, but it honestly works in this story.

The procedural portion is a bit boilerplate.  I mean, once we get into it, it’s every cop story ever.  This book is kind of somewhere between a more artfully done version of James Rollins’ Tucker Wayne series and a less captivating version of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series.  I liked it, and I will definitely try to find a few more Robert Crais novels, because I like his style and he’s good with Los Angeles.  And he builds a great relationship between the dog and the damaged cop.  I felt myself getting upset, but again, I didn’t know if that was just that new heartstring getting plucked that makes it impossible to type the words Jurassic Bark without starting to tear up.

And with that review, first Cannonball COMPLETE.

CBR #51 — It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s A…Romance Novel?!?!

Superheroes Anonymous by Lexie Dunne

I’m pretty sure I got lured into reading this by a sidebar ad on Goodreads (be my friend!  follow my reviews!  FOLLOW ME AS AN AUTHOR!).  I’m totally on board with superhero mythology that doesn’t involve the origin stories of a superhero.  I love the ancillary stuff.  It’s why I love The Venture Bros so so much, it’s more about the not being a hero than the actual heroics.  Also, Lexie Dunne wrote this through NaNoWriMo.  So I support this venture.

I was not expecting a love story.  And that’s more where this headed.  I mean, it’s not full on “purple-headed codpiece” meets her “velour womancowl” kind of romance.  It’s more chick-lit than anything else.  But I’m man enough to enjoy that shit if well done.  And Dunne done it well.

It’s a great premise.  Gail Godwin is known as Hostage Girl because the supervillains of Chicago keep kidnapping her, and Blaze, the superhero, keep rescuing her.  After one such mishap, Gail awakens in the hospital, and gets dumped by her longterm boyfriend, who everyone suspects is Blaze and who is moving to Miami.  And then Blaze, wordlessly, arrives to see her, and to say goodbye as he begins crimefighting in Miami.  And so Gail kind of loses her identity as Hostage Girl.

Only then Gail gets kidnapped by Dr. Mobius, a villain who escaped from Detmer — their version of Arkham.  Mobius injects Gail with a secret compound that’s radioactive, as a means of luring Blaze.  Only Blaze isn’t in the picture.  So Mobius sets Gail loose where she gets hit by a car and escapes from the ambulance.

It’s a really intriguing concept: Lois Lane loses Superman, only to get injected with a superserum and now she’s suddenly Supergirl. Then enters the love story complications.  As Gail copes with the effects of the serum, she also must cope with the effects of her two former flames — Blaze and Jeremy — and the new life she’s forced into.  It’s a hell of an origin story, and a really well thoughtout plot.  It leans a little too heavily on the love story for my tastes — which is too soap opera-y.  But otherwise, it’s an intriguing start.  It also is clearly part of a larger series — whether trilogy or not, I can’t say.  But motherfucker does it end HARD.  This isn’t just a cliffhanger.  It’s a fucking train trestle missing while a freighter goes over.  So I’m all for Supervillains Anonymous, the next part, coming out later this year.