Warbound by Larry Correia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Guns, Knives, Magic, and Aliens in a Shanghai Showdown Warbound (2013), the third book in Larry Correia's sf-fantasy-pulp Grimnoir trilogy, takes up in 1933 where the second left off: President Roosevelt is pressuring all American magical Actives to register and move to Active-only towns; Francis Stuyvesant (young owner of United Blimp and Freight who also happens to be a Mover) is not cooperating; Sally Faye Viera (a teen who's the most powerful Active in the world) is looking for someone to help her avoid becoming "a rampaging murder machine"; Jake Sullivan (a Heavy ex-soldier, ex-detective, ex-convict, ex-FBI hunter, ex-public enemy #1) is leading his team of Grimnoir knights, aided by their bitter Iron Guard Brute enemy Toru Tokugawa, on a probably suicidal mission in a cutting edge UBF dirigible into the dread Japanese Imperium to try to prevent a super alien predator (the Enemy) from coming to earth in pursuit of its prey, the entity known as the Power; while the Power (a symbiotic alien that endows certain humans with magical ability) is trying to survive. Correia is good at writing characters with different personalities and voices. Faye and Jake are fine co-protagonists. Faye is naïve, sweet, and ignorant but also ruthless, powerful, and intelligent (you wouldn't want to be a "bad guy" in her sights). She doesn't want to become a devil, but does sometimes hear a little voice telling her to take other people's Active powers. The description of a hero written by Raymond Chandler (Francis' wannabe writer accountant) suits Jake: a common, extraordinary, honorable, chivalrous, lonely, complete man. But Jake fears that he has the brain of a scholar in the body of a thug and is really only good at one thing: killing. In this third book Correia depicts Japanese culture more complexly than in the first. Here, although their evil "schools" are still twisting "pupils" into killing machines, and Unit 731 is still experimenting on living (magical) subjects, and the Imperium is still dedicated to purifying the world, there is also something appealing about their honor-based culture. Toru, so uptight while teaming up with his sworn Grimnoir enemies, is fun to follow, and Akane Yoshizawa (aka Lady Origami) is a sympathetic character whose origami plays a key role (and she even gets an interracial romantic relationship). Correia does interesting things with genre staples like zombies (attracted to bright colors in addition to loud noises, they may maintain their identities as long as they continue doing the most important thing in their natural lives) and alternative history (historical figures and things like John Ford, John Browning, Duke Ellington, Sigmund Freud, Rasputin, World War I, and the Berlin Wall are given magical spins). He explains magic in a science fictional way. The Power gives select people access to nodes of power so they will develop and increase them and return them enhanced to the Power when they die. Most Actives access but one type of magic, with expectable abilities: Cracklers manipulate electricity, Torches fire, Ice Boxes cold, and Heavies gravity; Mouths make people do what they're told; Beasties possess animals; Healers heal; Lazaruses make zombies; Cogs make intricate machines; Fixers fix things; Movers use telekenisis; and so on. All are limited to how much Power they may use without resting to restore it to their reservoirs. I do think Correia imagines too many overlapping abilities. Readers read people's minds, while Justices sense when people are lying; Brutes are super strong, while Massives make themselves indestructible; and Travelers (like Faye) teleport themselves and objects and people around, while Fades fade themselves and objects and people through walls and the like. And I can't grasp how demons summoned by Summoners fit into the physical nodes of the Power. Despite all the magic in the trilogy, Correia's true love is guns. Characters think, "Magic was nice in a fight, but it never hurt to back it up with bullets," and, “When you didn’t know what kind of trouble to expect, it was best to bring guns and friends with guns.” Sub-machine guns (Thompson and Suomi), shot guns (Winchester and Browning), pistols ("a British Webley with a snub barrel and a cut down grip" and a GP32 machine pistol with "a cyclic rate like a buzz saw"), giant Browning Automatic Rifles (enchanted and normal), even a bazooka (don't stand behind Faye when she's firing one), and more. When Correia adds to the guns and magic knives, swords, spiked war clubs, Russian stick grenades, Tesla Peace Rays, war blimps, etc., he ends up with graphically violent action scenes (brains sliding down walls, walls painted with dripping blood, bodies exploding into pink mist or bursting like melons, eyeballs cracking with cold or running down cheeks, bones melting, limbs being severed, heads decapitated, bodies impaled, guts disemboweled, etc.). This becomes unpleasant and numbing. But the 3+ hour climax is exciting (and the resolution is nice). Correia writes some neat lines: "Jake Sullivan may have been on the side of the angels, but they were some damn bloody angels.” And some funny exchanges: "You're one malicious manipulator, you know that Doc?" "It is nice to be appreciated." And some klunky dialogue: "You guys want some cookies?" "No, we're good." And some anachronistic English: “Fuller manned up.” And some libertarian leanings: "Governments are all about the same thing, bossing folks around." Audiobook reader Bronson Pinchot relishes Correia's pulpy prose. He does a great zombie, Lady Origami, Jake, and Faye, and a super "Tokugawa!" war cry. He owns quiet, malevolent villains. He's entertaining. People who read the first two books in the trilogy will be satisfied by the end of the third; people new to Correia should probably start with the first book (Spellbound), although he smoothly works in enough background from the first two books to follow this one. People who don't enjoy gunplay and bloody action and libertarian pulp should steer clear. View all my reviews
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End Zone by Don DeLillo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "It's only a game, but it's the only game." Gary Harkness was a standout New York State high school football player living his father's dream until he squandered full scholarships at big football universities like Penn State and ended up as one of the "outcasts or exiles" on the unknown team of Logos College in the neglected West Texas desert. Gary is the team’s starting full back. Introducing himself, he says, "Football players are simple folk. Whatever complexities, whatever dark politics of the human mind, the heart--these are noted only within the chalked borders of the playing field. At times strange visions ripple across that turf; madness leaks out. But wherever else he goes, the football player travels the straightest of lines. His thoughts are wholesomely commonplace, his actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream." Perhaps he protests too much. Anyone who says something like "We were in the middle of the middle of nowhere, that terrain so flat and bare, suggestive of the end of recorded time, a splendid sense of remoteness firing my soul" is anything but simple. And despite his love of football (practicing, playing, sweating, hitting, hurting, fighting, bonding), he may be too drawn to the desert, too disturbed by silence, too thoughtful and idiosyncratic to confine himself for long to chalked borders and straight lines. Will he sabotage his football career a final time? Also starting over at Logos is the new head coach, Emmett Creed, a two-time national champion who has been in scandalous exile after breaking the jaw of a back-up quarterback. Creed, "a land-locked Ahab who paced and raged," "part Satan, part Saint Francis," "a warlock and avenging patriarch," keeps a painting of Saint Teresa of Avila (who ate her food out of a human skull) and is determined to teach his players all about pain and sacrifice and character. He's also changed the team name from the Desert Wrens to the Screaming Eagles and gotten from Columbia Taft Robinson, a gifted and speedy running back--the first black student to attend Logos. Don DeLillo's second novel End Zone (1972), then, is Gary's first person account of a season of football at Logos, but in addition to depictions of coaches, players, practices, and a climactic game, it's about much more than football. Logos means the Word of God, or the principle of reason. After getting gang-tackled, Gary places football in a cosmic context: "Directly above were the stars, elucidations in time, old clocks sounding their chimes down the bending universe." Throughout the novel, characters discuss things behind or above football, like language, body identity, and history. Above all, Gary is obsessed with nuclear war, reading countless books about it, picturing the holocaust of cities, and auditing ROTC classes about it. The Air Force Major teacher speaks hypnotically about nuclear weapons and warfare and their "theology of fear." Gary's girlfriend Myna wears a dress featuring a white mushroom cloud. When Gary and his teammates do things like cite the "psychomythical," "ancient warriorship" of football or play bare bones football in a snowstorm, we sense that DeLillo is contrasting the different violences in football (intimate, archaic, limited) and thermonuclear war (simulated, computerized, killing the unborn more than the living). Yes, End Zone is a cold war novel. Mind you, DeLillo's vision is complex. Gary's exobiology teacher says, "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." And when Gary says, "The universe was born in violence," a teammate reminds him, "Gary, this is football." But when the team plays a "Bang You're Dead" game ("We killed with impunity, to die in the celebration of ancient ways") and the Major and Gary play a thermonuclear war simulation, it's clear that the same species who plays such games also wages real wars, and the title of the novel becomes a grim pun. One of the funny (and unsettling) things about the novel is that while some players speak like jocks ("Fug. That's the only word in my head right now. Fug, fug, fug"), some speak like philosophers ("What brought us forth from the slime? Whence are we headed? What is the grand design?"). DeLillo's language is idiosyncratic and natural, entertaining. He writes witty dialogue: "What is it like to be 300 pounds?" "It's like being an overwritten paragraph." He writes pithy lines: -"War brings out the best in technology." -"Death is the best soil for a cliche." -"Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish." -"A nation is never more ridiculous than in its patriotic manifestations." He writes atmospheric descriptions: -"Day after day my eyes scanned in all directions a stunned earth, unchangingly dull, a land silenced by its own beginnings in the roaring heat, born dead, flat stones burying the memory." He writes verbs like "macadamized" and adjectives like "unsyllabled." He embarks on unpredictable riffs on things like excrement, the best way to narrate a football game, patriotic displays, and love and salvation. But what does it all add up to? Isn't the ending too abrupt and enigmatic? Hmmm. Audiobook reader Fleet Cooper does great voices: the terse jocks, the insulting assistant coaches, the slimy PR guy, the hyper and paranoid biology teacher, Texas native Myna, up-state New York exile Gary. His reading is just right. Though DeLillo knows football and writes things like "The chains came out. First down. Hobbs overthrew Jessup, then Steeples. Taft went wide for two. Centrex returned the punt to their 33," fans of football who want a detailed, straightforward, and exciting narrative of the sport might be disturbed by End Zone. Fans of DeLillo or of richly-styled, ironic, and philosophical satires of contemporary American culture and human nature would probably enjoy it (but find it less substantial than DeLillo's epic Underworld). View all my reviews
Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A soldier, an arms dealer, and a psychopath-- Ex-soldier/sniper/assassin/security chief Tanner Mirabel was born on Sky's Edge, a backwater world colonized hundreds of years ago by the first and last solar-system-born flotilla of generation ships that upon reaching the target world disintegrated into a never-ending civil war. Thus when the people of Sky's Edge trade with space-living Ultranauts for advanced technologies, they eschew longevity in favor of weaponry. Other cultures like that of the planet Yellowstone's Chasm City's "post-mortal," body-modifying, and jaded aristocrats (who live in the Canopy above the Mulch-dwelling downtrodden humans and bio-engineered pigs) view Sky's Edge as a world of quaint savages. But Chasm City has its own problems, having been visited seven years ago by the Melding Plague, which mutated myriad nanotech machines, especially the "medichines" embedded throughout bodies, brains, and blood streams, and made nightmarish monstrosities like human-building hybrids. The plague is somewhat under control, thanks in part to the mysterious drug Dream Fuel--But what will happen when Tanner comes to Chasm City on a quest of revenge against Argent Reivich, a Sky's Edge aristocrat whose men shot off Tanner's foot and killed his arms dealer boss Cahuella and Cahuella's wife Gitta, on whom Tanner had a crush? And what is the meaning of Tanner's vivid "dreams" (complete with stigmata) of the life of Sky Haussmann, the man responsible for getting the flotilla to Sky's Edge but also for committing such heinous crimes that he was crucified, thereby inspiring a religion to spring up around his legend? Alastair Reynolds' big novel Chasm City (2001), like his others, is full of sublime space opera noir replete with driven characters and flora and fauna and technologies and cultures extrapolated from particular (often extreme) environments. Tanner is no saint, having become a clinical assassin killing even his own side's soldiers without questioning the reasons for his orders, and then having gone to work as security chief for war criminal Cahuella. But he does have a knightly code whereby if you help him he'll help you, if the situation permits he won't be unnecessarily cruel or homicidal, and if he gives his word he keeps it. He is quite the tough talker, as if having stepped out of a hardboiled pulp mystery and into a space opera. Indeed, some of the dialogue is cliched or klunky, like "Gideon is extremely bad news," and "Don't even think about trying something or you'll become an interesting addition to the décor." That said, Reynolds also writes some neat lines, like "You look so out of place, Tanner, that you're in danger of starting a fashion," and "Just start the thing up, or the only composing you'll be doing is decomposing." Anyway, Reynolds writes great, vivid, sf-strange descriptions. The giant hamadryad "snakes" of Sky's Edge and the outre denizens and buildings of Chasm City and the creepy kinky Ultras of no fixed address are all top notch. He does great space opera sublime, as in his depiction of super advanced alien maggots or grubs who've been space faring for at least 300 million years, long enough to make all human endeavor look like a veneer of dust atop a mountain. (Hey, I enjoy having my species get taken down a peg or two.) And check out this clockwork gun: "It was made completely out of carbon--diamond, mostly--but with some fullerenes for lubrication and energy-storage. There were no metals or explosives in it; no circuitry. Only intricate levers and ratches, greased by fullerene spheres. It fired spin-stabilised diamond flechettes, drawing its power from the relaxation of fullerene springs coiled almost to breaking point. You wound it up with a key, like a clockwork mouse." (Alas, after plenty of attention, the gun plays no role in the plot.) Reynolds writes exciting action scenes, featuring plenty of graphic violence. But he has a prudish aversion to sex, as in the only scene hinting at love making: I pulled her to me, looking into her face. "For today, yes." [Here we must imagine the sexy interlude that Reynolds doesn't write.] I woke before Zebra. He likes to start in the middle of the action and to dole out information little by little, so that beginning his book is disorienting, but if you persevere and grasp clues, you start figuring out what's happened and caring about what will happen. (In fact, a few times in the second half of the novel he tries to be too helpful by summarizing too much information to be sure the reader keeps up to speed.) There are plenty of compelling themes here: life and death, immortality and mortality, memory and identity, war and peace, the degree to which ethical action is essential or relative, the possibility of personal or social change, etc. However, I have trouble with the "Life's what you make it" theme and the suggestion that hero and war criminal are just fluid definitions applied by people in power. That's probably true, but such an attitude may be used to remove responsibility for war crimes and murder. Is Reynolds advocating a let-the-past-go approach to atrocities because we're different today, as if changing into better people frees us from having to pay for past crimes? About the audiobook. . . Although reader John Lee does a great booming Lago/Maggot, creepy Marco Ferris, and sandpapery Reivich and brings the book to life, too often he tries too hard to differentiate characters from the same class in the same culture via different accents, like Quirrenbach (German ?) and Zebra (British), both of whom are from Chasm City's Canopy, or Gomez (cockney or Celtic?) and Sky (British), both of whom are from the Santiago generation ship. And when he's not indulging in accents, many of his characters sound similar, due to his British base accent and somewhat snide dialogue delivery. Chasm City shares the same universe as many of Reynolds' other novels, but I believe they are all stand alones. Fans of big scale hardboiled space opera should like this book. View all my reviews
The Goshawk by T.H. White
My rating: 5 of 5 stars "He was born to fly, sloping sideways, free. . ." The Goshawk (1951) is T. H. White's fascinating account of when, "a deluded and imaginative recluse," he fled from the world and human beings into a wood, pared his life down to essentials, and tried via old falconry books and trial and error to train a young, wild male goshawk. The first part concerns his attempts in 1937 to tame and teach "Gos," the second his attempts to catch a new hawk, and the third his attempts to get a female hawk ("Cully") to make her first kill. He wrote the postscript in 1951, some fifteen years after the main events, when he finally published the book. White desperately wants to succeed with Gos. Unfortunately, as Helen Macdonald points out in her excellent book H Is for Hawk (2014), he sabotages his chances for success. As he himself says, "It has never been easy to learn life from books." His old falconry books persuade White to prevent Gos from sleeping for from three to nine days to exhaust the bird into surrendering to the gloved hand as to a haven. To White's credit (?), he torments himself along with Gos, staying awake with the bird. But when White recites Shakespearean tragedies to Gos and plays and sings operas and so on to prevent him from sleeping, one may recall the loud rock music forcing awake prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Ironically, when White notices malnutrition-caused defects in Gos' feathers, he panics and overfeeds him, against the good advice of his books. Despite knowing that one must use patience rather than cruelty to train a hawk, at times White feels like an executioner in a torture chamber. Indeed, he talks about his relationship with Gos as a war: "They were days of attack and counter-attack, a kind of sweeping to and fro across disputed battle fields." Hence White's numerous ways to describe the "baleful and extraordinary" bird, including names and similes that really reveal White himself: Caligula, Hamlet, Poe, Death, Byron, Van Gogh, Odin, Richard the Third, a sphinx, a Teutonic Tarquin, an insane assassin, an unfortunate tyrant, the accursed overlord, the hideous bilious princeling--my master. Interestingly, the name he mostly calls him, Gos, a hybrid of goose and gosling, expresses a foolish, innocent, and funny creature. White is for Gos mother, lover, teacher, master, slave. Gos is for White child, lover, student, tyrant, lord, enigma. Mixed feelings indeed. And when, after all the setbacks, White was on the verge of success, he--But that would be telling. The Goshawk, mind you, is not only a painful book. For White, contact with Gos is better than romance (conflict between men and women) and war (cruel and wasteful activity). Being with Gos leads to the fusing of human and bird, as when White feels with Cully that "Our veins coalesced and the blood ran in a circuit through both of us." Being with Gos leads to transcendence, as when White feels himself sitting on God's fist as Gos sat on his fist: "so transitory as to be eternal, so finite as to be infinite and a part of the Becoming." There are moments of pure joy, as when Gos first flies to the fist, and moments of comedy and numinous beauty, as when he takes his first bath. White's minute observations of Gos (careful, for hawks prefer regarding to being regarded) lead to many wonderfully vivid descriptions of him, like this early one: "The yellowish breast-feathers—Naples Yellow—were streaked downward with long, arrow-shaped hackles of Burnt Umber: his talons, like scimitars, clutched the leather glove on which he stood with a convulsive grip: for an instant he stared upon me with a mad, marigold or dandelion eye, all his plumage flat to the body and his head crouched like a snake's in fear or hatred, then bated wildly from the fist." And his careful observation and contemplation of the natural world in general leads to many great descriptions, of everything from pigeons ("Grey Quakers") to maggots ("crackling with life" and "perfectly persisting"). As we read The Goshawk, we learn terms and facts relating to falconry, which is as old as Babylon. An "austringer" (how White refers to himself) is a trainer of short-winged hawks. "Bated. . . . meant the headlong dive of rage and terror, by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom, and hangs upside down by his jesses in a flurry of pinions like a chicken being decapitated, revolving, struggling, in danger of damaging his primaries." White provides many details of hawks, from their not drinking water to their seeing farther and breathing faster than other animals (especially humans), and being highly strung: "For him everything was danger and exaggeration, life was a quiver far more taut than anything known to us." The audiobook loses White's detailed drawings of various accessories of falconry (jesses, perches, etc.) and of the birds (hunger traces, etc.), but gains Simon Vance's superb reading. Though White says of his book that "It would be about the efforts of a second-rate philosopher who lived alone in a wood, being tired of most humans in any case, to train a person who was not human, but a bird," like all great literature it is about more than its apparent subject. It's also about civilization, nature, and how humans negotiate the distance between them. It's about history, art, sport, life and death, and White's own idiosyncratic misanthropy. It's about writing books, about making something good and lasting, which is for White the best thing people can do. White's life goal and way of working towards it resemble Thoreau's in Walden: "To divest oneself of unnecessary possessions and mainly of other people, that was the business of life. One had to find out . . . what things were really needed." And like The Once and Future King (1958), The Goshawk is an anti-war book written on the eve of and early in World War II, and fans of White's famous work will find echoes of it in this one: the mixture of comedy and tragedy and romance and the empathic imagining of animal life. View all my reviews
The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Dr. Watson Channels His Inner Dickens The conceit of Anthony Horowitz' The House of Silk (2011) is that twenty-five years after Dr. John Watson helped Sherlock Holmes solve two inter-tangled cases, Watson is writing his account of the adventure because it was too shocking to publish in 1890, involving "A conspiracy that . . . encompassed murder, torture, kidnapping, and the perversion of justice." Now because Holmes has recently died and Watson is missing him (longing to join him), he's decided to write about the adventure, despite it still being so sensational and sensitive that he'll have the manuscript secreted away until 100 years have passed--so it feels like a recently discovered Holmes work by "Watson." The story begins with Holmes astounding Watson with his powers of ratiocination, observation, and deduction by saying without any preamble: "Influenza is unpleasant. . . but you are right in thinking that, with your wife's help, the child will recover soon." No sooner has Holmes explained the "elementary" way in which he "knew" what's been going on in Watson's life than a long-haired Wimbledon art dealer named Edmund Carstairs pays a call. He tells a dramatic story set in America and involving a Boston Brahmin, four landscapes by John Constable, an anachronistic train robbery, and a shoot out between a gang of Irish immigrant hoodlums and a posse of Pinkerton's agents. Carstairs is convinced that one of the surviving Irish gangsters has tracked him down for revenge. After the gangster apparently robs Carstairs' home and good old persevering but not wholly intelligent Inspector Lestrade gets involved, Holmes summons the Baker Street Irregulars and--"The game's afoot!" Horowitz clearly enjoys channeling Conan Doyle (and Watson) as he moves the story forward, introducing the mysterious and ominous House of Silk, riffing on familiar Holmes-isms (e.g., "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"), and having Watson allude to former "real" cases (e.g., The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Greek Interpreter, The Red-Haired League, etc.) and indulge in suspenseful foreshadowing (e.g., "He had entered a veritable miasma of evil, and harm, in the worst possible way, was to come to us all too soon"). One of the most enjoyable parts of the novel is the deep and abiding friendship between Holmes and Watson. Watson reveals how much Holmes liked him ("Dear old Watson. How good it is to have you at my side") and how much he liked Holmes ("I have to say that I took immense satisfaction in these moments of quiet sociability and felt myself to be one of the luckiest men in London to have shared in the conversation which I have just described and to be walking in such a leisurely manner at the side of so great a personage as Sherlock Holmes"). He expresses their relationship as affectionate and complementary: "Now that I come to think of it, I was as assiduous in my duties as his biographer as he was in the pursuit of his various investigations. Perhaps that was why the two of us got on so well." Horowitz writes vivid, witty descriptions, like "Lestrade had the sunken eyes and the general demenour of a rat who has been obliged to dress up for lunch at the Savoy," and "What a place of broken promises and lost hopes the pawn broker proved to be. Every class, every profession, every walk of life was represented in its grubby windows, the detritus of so many lives pinned like butterflies behind the glass." He also somewhat updates Conan Doyle. A minor example concerns Mrs. Hudson, in a passage that serves as a mild rebuke of Conan Doyle for never having done much with her, so that Watson confesses that he doesn't know how she came to run her house, what happened to her husband, and so on: "I wish I had conversed with her a little more often and taken her for granted a little less." The most important example is the exploitation of street kids, from which not even Holmes is innocent, and gives the novel thematic depth. Watson has a Dickensian social conscience. He is concerned by and ashamed of the plight of London street children ("Childhood is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child"), feels uncomfortable amid the "wealth and privilege" of a British Lord's baronial hall, and notes that most of the cases solved by Holmes concerned the well-to-do. There are some less impressive parts of the novel that may be flaws for some readers. **My kvetches contain enigmatic, mild spoilers, so if you haven't read the book, maybe you should skip ahead to the next paragraph.** First, I doubt Moriarty is necessary to this book, and suspect Horowitz of introducing him only to prepare the way a sequel. Second, there is an excrescent and absurd carriage chase scene in the climax that is unworthy of Conan Doyle. Third, I was able to guess the identity of Keelan O'Donaghue too early. Derek Jacobi is a great actor and a stellar reader of audiobooks. Here he is just right. Without changing his voice drastically for male or female or young or old people (though he dons cockney, Irish, or American accents for a few characters), he reads everything with spot on emotion, understanding, pace, and emphasis, and engagingly brings the book to life. Feeling that the original Holmes stories are mostly fine and sufficient, I have only read a few of the many pastiche Holmes novels, but I did find The House of Silk to most consistently channel Watson's voice and Conan Doyle's vision. Lyndsay Faye's Dust and Shadow (2009), for instance, which intriguingly pits Holmes and Watson against Jack the Ripper, loses hold of Watson's voice ("me and Holmes") and Holmes' persona (he breaks a man's nose in a fit of pique) and lets me figure out the occupation of the killer before Watson and Holmes do. Horowitz' novel really seems to add to the Conan Doyle canon. Fans of Sherlock Holmes and of Sherlock Holmes pastiches would probably like The House of Silk a lot. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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