ISBN: 9780981989419
I have a mental list of movies I’ve seen, and I don’t regret seeing them, but I never want to see them again. What Dreams May Come, Philadelphia, A.I and Funny Games all have their places on this list. Slowly I’m forming a list of books that I’ve enjoyed and would recommend, but never I want to read again. Devil’s Marionette by Maurice Broaddus is definitely edging its way onto this list.
There’s nothing technically wrong with this novella about the cast of a black skit show/sitcom descending into madness. The characters are raw, pain-filled and clear and the story itself is unfurled with the casual unstopablility of an oncoming freight train.
But there’s a weight here that threatens to crush the reader as well as the characters.
Broaddus’s novella starts right at the end of things and offers little in the way of background, or explanation, instead focusing on each individual breakdown of an otherwise talented and intelligent black cast. The crew aren’t being crushed by the white network bigwig (despite his efforts at dominating them), though, it’s their own connection to parasitic performers of the past that pulls them into more than personal darkness. Here it feels like the odds are so astoundingly set against them that defying the curse of the black performer is like trying to defy the laws of physics.
Yet despite this immersive, and painfully open experience of being each character as hundreds of years of hatred and racism crushes down on them, the reader is left with the same feeling as someone who witnesses something beautiful or terribly in a quiet woods. It’s almost as if this pain is clear and known, but we are not supposed to speak of it, or even admit that we know it’s there.
The aura or spirit of this book far out shadows the actual story within the pages. It’s left me feeling not thrilled, or entertained, but uneasy, a perfect tone for a horror novella to strike, but one not that makes experiencing it an entirely pleasant experience.
Reviewed for MonsterLibraian.com
iUniverse, 2009
ISBN: 9781440135026
Available: New and Used
Hannah, a woman barely out of her teens, arrives in Cambridge to attend school, but she is also fleeing her past. After recovering from the pain of being abandoned by her boyfriend, Bret, Hannah began to realize just how abusive and manipulative their relationship had been. Since Bret was a vampire, and she narrowly escaped becoming one herself, Hannah recognizes that the break up was possibly the best thing to have happened to her so far. But Bret isn’t
quite done with Hannah yet.
This book is short—it covers more than a year in about 130 pages—but this is by no means a starved plot. Although there is room for fleshing it out, the story is well-paced and focused There are some small technical problems, likely because this is a debut book, but there is a lot to recommend. Although this is a vampire book, the author spends a fair amount of time on Hannah’s trying to resist the urge to blame herself for having been caught in an abusive situation and deal with her feelings of worthlessness that stem from her part in the relationship she had with Bret. The vampire aspect is so light it can easily be taken for a metaphor as well, making this book less about vampires and more about a teen recovering from an abusive relationship.
The YA and abuse recovery focus makes this an excellent addition to teen libraries, private and public, and Hannah’s Story could even be a gateway into helping adults talk to teens and tweens about abusive relationships. Recommended.
ISBN: 9781416551959
The back of this book bills it as a zany, thrilling mystery wherein our heroine, the quirky Dr. Amanda Bell Brown must find the cause for the death of a disgraced playboy evangelist’s baby. I received a copy by request through the LibraryThing Early Readers Program (where it was not disclosed that it was Christian fiction) and I requested it because fiction with minority leads is something I’m actively trying to include more of here at BookLove.
Unfortunately, I simply could not get into this book.
The story opens with a long, lamenting conversation between Bell and her BFF/kinda of love interest (except she’s married) which covers a lot of what happened in the first two books in the series and what happened between books. As a first time reader I was left with absolutely no clue what was going on, other than Bell, in an effort to make up with Rocky (the BFF who apparently put her marriage in danger before abandoning her, and who repeatedly teases her and calls her “babe” constantly) agrees to go visit a disgraced evangelist trying to make a comeback.
The second chapter opens with Bell and Rocky arriving at the location where the evangelist is filming his sermon. Bell is promptly assaulted by an old religious woman who calls Bell a hussy for being there with her pastor, and forcibly exorcises her, claiming a demon of interracial adultery is dwelling inside of her. Rocky, the charming BFF that he is, sits in his VIP seat and is amused by the antics, doing nothing at all to help.
After the sermon Rocky gets Bell backstage to meet the evangelist, Ezekiel Thunder. It’s there that Bell meets Little Zeke Thunder, Big Thunder’s 2 year old son. Bell is smitten, but launches into heartache over her own inability to have children, save for the fact that she’s been nauseated a lot lately. But she can’t have kids, she reassures herself, because she had a period since her husband left her and she has endometriosis, not to mention she has a tumor. With the subtly of a brick to the face, this “I can’t be pregnant despite obvious weight gain, morning sickness and soreness” becomes a repetitive source of angst. When Bell finally moves past the topic secondary characters constantly bring it up, accusing her of being pregnant, kicking off the whole response again.
In chapters three and four Bell insists she isn’t pregnant, then is threatened by the same person who assaulted her in the previous chapter, blatantly and maliciously manipulated by Thunder, again while her BFF Rocky just stands to the side, or defends Thunder.
It is never really explained why Rocky wants her to meet this clearly malicious, manipulative preacher. There’s eventually something about Rocky wanting her to find God again, but that should never excuse the sort of behavior Bell has been subjected to.
In chapter five Bell finally does something that made me like her, she self soothes with a peppy new haircut. But when she returns to work she discovers her parking lot filled with the vehicles of all her closest, except her husband. Despite being forewarned Bell walks into the intervention. What is traditionally a last ditch effort to get a person with substance abuse to realize the extent of their actions is bastardized in this chapter as Bell’s nearest and dearest claim the intervention is because she’s fat, because her husband (who left her) is heart broken without her and she should go back to him, and because she is clearly pregnant and too old to be so (Bell is 35). The conversation is excessively scattered and even deviates into one of Bell’s friends claiming it’s not always all about Bell, except one would assume that an intervention IS about the person being confronted.
I stopped when I read the following interaction:
“If Jazz (Bell’s husband) is the one who left me, and he’s the one who is drinking excessively, why didn’t you do the intervention with him?”
“Because all of this is your fault,” my mother said.
If I hadn’t been at a doctor’s appointment I would have flung the book across the room. I did try to skip ahead in the book to see if it picked up, only to land on a scene where a doctor tells Bell and her husband, Jazz that Bell has a grapefruit-sized tumor, several grape=sized tumors and is also pregnant with twins.
The artificial drama is staggering in this book and completely distracts from the mystery Deadly Charm is advertised as containing. There is no time or build up to allow for readers to grow attached to Bell and having every character treating her like utter crap doesn’t make her sympathetic. Furthermore the pregnancy side plot is a huge problem. The medical problems (pregnant, with tumors) reads as more unbelievable, and unneeded drama, there’s never a question in the reader’s mind whether Bell is pregnant or not, and the utter insensitivity that everyone else in the book shows for Bell’s reproductive problems is pretty insulting.
It’s a bad combination of writing flaws, so Deadly Charm ends up in the DNF pile.
ISBN-13: 9780441015894
I have to admit I found this addition to the Sookie Stackhouse series less than stellar. The writing is solid, of course, and Harris is excellent at creating real-feeling character as usual. But there wasn’t any overlapping plot, instead there were a series of wrap ups of ongoing plots, like a checklist, one after the other.
First, Sookie discovers a long lost relative who approaches her through Eric. Then on the way home someone tries to kill her, revealing a full scale assassination attempt not just against her, but against everyone linked to the warring local werewolf packs. By 140 pages in the whole packs-at-war situation is mostly resolved, thanks to Sookie, but the vampire situation flares up. This conflict too, not only ends far before the actual end of the book, but there’s a closed-eye approach to the adventure and fight scenes that renders them weak.
The book isn’t bad, as far as furthering the adventures of Sookie, and reflecting the massive changes that she and the people around her are going through while trying to recover from Katrina. But it’s not necessarily interesting to people who aren’t already emotionally invested in Sookie and her crew.
Perhaps From Dead to Worse is a cleansing book, clearing away the slate of old loose ends and making way for dramatic new adventures. But it just feels like the progress is minimized and halting rather than being an exciting new volume of a typically bardic tale.
ISBN: 1905704607
120 Diseases is a crash course on 120 diseases, conditions and syndromes, from common colds to STIs. It offers everything clinical (pictures, symptom descriptions, prevention tips and stats) in bite-sized digestible pieces that are a perfect starting place or resource for the writer or the casual reader.
There are explicit, and sometimes difficult to view pictures, as well as nudity that parents might want to keep away from a child’s reach and each disease is given a mere two pages, so this is not a book for in depth research. Also, it’s written from a British slant, which means some of the statistics and such wouldn’t be as useful to an American audience.
But each article is thorough, professional but understandable and the 120 diseases covered are the ones people are most likely to encounter. It’s a valuable addition to the writer’s research shelf.
14
Aug
_The renewal of Apex Magazine begins with “She Called Me Sweetie” by Glen Lewis Gillette. Here Gillette spins a wicked tale of clones and loneliness, all from a perfectly-toned child point of view. Readers can suspect what G might find when he jealously creeps into Mommy’s bedroom, but the story will hold their attention to the bitter end.
“…That Has Such People in It” by Jennifer Pelland can be summed up with the phrase “And the meek shall inherit the earth”. In this utopian appearing dystopia, humanity locks away its homeless and its violent in order to make things appear pretty for aliens visiting from a distant land. As the above-grounders flourish those below ground are healed, made sane and forced through starvation into behaving. While heavier-handed than many of Pelland’s stories it ends with an almost trademark finish which readers will find to be a bit of bitter justice.
Jeff Carlson’s “The Frozen Sky” is a halting tale of hard science fiction that pits Vonnie, a woman exploring for Earth, against Europa’s native insect/amphibian things. The tale is long and paralleled with what happened to cause Vonnie to be the Earth last survivor on the planet trying to face down the native species with her attempts at survival. This story will appeal to hard SF lovers, but it didn’t work as well for me, as I felt too distracted by other elements to get properly wrapped up in the dynamics of Vonnie’s fight for her life. This story is a classic example of a story that could be adventure with strong SF elements, or SF with some adventure elements with execution making all the difference between the two.
11
Aug
ISBN: 1-933274-17-4
Ulrik stands somewhere between the traditional horror werewolf and the newer urban fantasy werewolf. This follow up to Murdered by Human Wolves starts firm and fast with Shara, who some believe is the famed Mother, a female werewolf who can birth live young. Except Shara has given it all up, taking a serum to prevent her monthly changes so she can raise Joey, her werewolf son that other werewolves think proves her role, or represents an end to their familiar life style. As three, or more, werewolf factions prepare to fight, Shara must decide who to trust to save her son, not to mention herself.
First a warning, as part of a series Shara’s tale is not complete in this book. Also, I, at times, found Shara to be a wishy-washy characters as her drive to protect her child becomes quite sidelined once she is reunited with him and she promptly chooses to spend all her time with other people.
The pacing is slower than most urban fantasies, giving Ulrik a more epic fantasy/horror feel. Other book elements truer to horror are the multi-person, third person point of view, the way the characters are sympathetic, but the reader is not fully immersed in the characters and a two-step-removed angle to the love story. The werewolves themselves are also closer to traditional horror werewolves than the people with fur more commonly found in urban fantasy.
However like urban fantasy the politics of the pack and personal vendettas are the driving forces of the story, creating a complex plot greatly affected by the characters’ action or in action. The characters may not be immersive, but the werewolf culture and history are very important to the story.
In all Ulrik reminded me, in theme, style and characterization, very much of S.P. Somtow’s Moondance, which while not my traditional favorite style of shape shifter novel is one I find myself reading over and over again with just as much enjoyment every time.
Reviewed for MonsterLibrian.com’s Werewolf Month
Ace Fantasy, 2008
ISBN:9780441015665
Available: New and Used
Coyote walker Mercy Thompson has faced killer werewolves and has gotten mixed up in vampire feuds, but in Iron Kissed she is roundly told to keep out of fae business. Her friend and mentor, Zee, is being set up for the murder of a cop (who wasn’t exactly innocent), by the local cops, and the Gray Lords are willing to sacrifice Zee to keep fae secrets hidden. But Mercy refuses to abandon her friend, no matter what everyone around her says, or what it might cost her.
This is possibly the darkest Mercy book so far. Still reeling from the events at the end of the last book, Mercy is questioning herself and her actions. This book takes her to terrible places, where the reader might have trouble following her. Briggs expertly portrays the fae in the tradition of Grimm’s fairy tales, complex creatures that despise humans, except as toys, but are strangely dependent on them.
Iron Kissed and the other books in the series are recommended for public libraries, and for private collectors who like dark fiction, but might be tired of the familiar tropes of horror.