porge_grewe's reviews
164 reviews

 This is a worthy and really interesting follow-up to the brilliant first Book of Blood.

Barker has changed gear here, from what at various points in the first set of stories are essentially very physically-focused, grisly social comedies, into a more psychological frame. To me, he stumbles slightly with the shift, but only slightly, and two of the stories, "Hell's Event" and "The Skins of the Fathers" rank easily among the best of the first set in my opinion - Similarly, the opening story, "Dread", while a bit overwrought, is also the most memorable, setting the tone with the kind of human-to-human nastiness which The Books of Blood often avoids. The other two stories: "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament" and "New Murders on the Rue Morgue" both felt like they got a bit lost in their own high concepts - Barker was clearly having fun, and more power to him, he deserves it with the quality of work he is putting out in these, but they never quite clicked for me.

 

This is a fascinating book. The elevator pitch - "Did you hear about the heist of 299 bird skins from the Natural History Museum by a concert flautist who wanted to make Victorian fishing flies?" - Well, it was enough to get me through the door. And I am very glad it did! Johnson has pieced together an impressive history of the case, incorporating a brief account of how the bird skins were collected and their history at the museum, followed by an introduction to the modern hobby of Victorian fly tying and the community's greatest shame: Edwin Rist. There follows an account of the heist and the circumstances by which Rist was caught, his trial, and the afterlife of the case, including the author's own attempts to recover more of the lost bird skins. It really is a gripping story, and Johnson tells it compellingly - There really is very little I can add! If the concept appeals, you'll most likely enjoy it, if it doesn't... There's still a very good chance you'll be on board by the midpoint. Johnson tells the story in such a way that it feels important, even as at some points it feels like he is trying to convince himself that the legwork he's put in has been worth it.

I do have two gripes about Johnson's retelling, however. The first is that his speculation about Rist's diagnosis with Asperger's syndrome feels clumsily handled. It is clear that Johnson is not an expert in psychology, nor should he be expected to be, but by the same token, this feels like an unnecessary and ultimately fruitless road for him to have gone down.

The other issue is to do with his treatment of genius. Johnson at various points in the account contrasts the "good", scientific use of bird skins with the "bad", commercial trade in them, with people who make Victorian flies somewhere in the middle. This is fair and, happily, in line with the law, but Johnson is oddly uncritical of the place of Alfred Russel Wallace in colonial history, presenting his expeditions to collect bird skins and live birds as entirely scientific, and noble because scientific, endeavours, even representing clearly racist notes written by Wallace seeing the birds as his manifest destiny as a White European. For an otherwise-thoughtful writer, this felt like a surprising level of buying in to the ideologies of colonialism, even as I recognise that this is not his focus or background.

Otherwise, a really excellent book!

"This is MY end... and MY death!"

This book is the epitome of the two series it ends (the Horus Heresy and the Siege of Terra): big, overwrought, campy, gothic, dumb fun. The majority of this book is two big blokes having a punch up while Dan Abnett casts around for new ways to make the fight sound metaphysical and important (what does "bleeding years" actually mean, though?). This is not just a punch-up - This is a punch-up throughout space and time! The entire history of the species has been leading up to this punch-up! And after this punch-up... Nothing will ever be the same again.

Bless it. Bless this delightful, stupid series.

All that said, Abnett fumbles the ball a bit on the setting - It is always hard with these books to get across that, while the things the Imperium are fighting are terrible, the Imperium is itself also a horrific dictatorship, and Abnett comes down a bit too hard on this just being a tragedy of a good man whose plans for the galaxy failed - Warhammer always has to walk that Judge Dredd tightrope, and this book falls a bit too hard on one side.

An improvement on Alloy of Law, characters are fleshed out a bit more, we start to see some more of the overall plot of this series (though that plot is a bit overreliant on other Cosmere stories), and we start to see its connections with the previous Mistborn books. An improvement, but still not up to the standard of the first trilogy.

This is a weird one, and a bit of a disappointment after the excellent if flawed first Mistborn trilogy. A lot of this book feels like a rehash of the first trilogy but with much of the more interesting elements (Vin as a character, the compelling friendships and romance, and the setting) stripped out and made less distinctive. Sanderson's skill at dialogue still comes through sometimes, but oddly not often and the story lacks the usual build up of twists toward a satisfying climax - Instead it all just falls a bit flat.

More than anything, it is strange that Sanderson went for telling essentially a more straightforward superhero story, more specifically a Batman story, and then restricts the actual discussion of vigilantism to the same tired old "am I the problem, should I stand back and let the police handle things, am I doing this for the right reasons?" fretting that anyone interested in these stories read and got bored of years ago.

This is an absolutely brilliant set of horror short stories! But then, that's pretty obvious - This is the debut set of short stories by a writer who is now accepted as one of the greatest and most prolific horror writers of all time. It would be a massive understatement to say that his reputation precedes him, but it's a reputation which, in my experience at least, doesn't do justice to this book.

Clive Barker is synonymous with the excesses of horror, particular sex and gore - Splatterpunk of a kind - And while this collection includes elements of this, especially in its first and last stories, it would be a sad disservice to the stories to reduce them to those elements. The first two stories, The Book of Blood and Midnight Meat Train, is a masterpiece of gore and unsettling horror, setting the stage for Barker's excess and drama, verging sometimes on melodrama. The Yattering and Jack, my personal favourite, is a comic horror focusing on the tribulations of a devil set to break an impenetrably dull victim in excellently-realised English suburbia. Pig Blood Blues lets Barker have fun in some properly unsettling, cultic territory. Sex, Death, and Starshine is a fantastic, oddly hopeful, and wonderfully melodramatic piece centred on the theatre, almost a reworking of Phantom of the Opera. Finally, In the Hills, The Cities realises one of the best horror high-concepts I have ever read brilliantly. The prose could occasionally use tightening up, but there is really very little for me to nitpick - This collection is great and Barker is underrated!

 This is the best, most cohesive collection of short fiction sci fi dystopias I have ever read - Whether in high concepts like the manless world of Women and Women (oddly reminiscent of Ogawa's Memory Police) and the odd utopia of That Old Seaside Club, or in the social horrors of You May Dream and Night Picnic, Suzuki blends brilliant ideas with striking, relatable prose (the translators have done a fantastic job here!). Binding what could have been quite disparate stories together is a pervading listlessness to Suzuki's main characters which makes even the strangest dystopias seem both entirely normal and utterly intolerable - It's a great narrative trick and it only gets brought to the forefront in the last story of the collection, the eponymous Terminal Boredom.

Gender roles, sexuality, capitalism are also all common themes in the work, and in themes, in depth of exploration, and in approach to alien life, Suzuki's work feels like an ideal companion to Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle - Itself a major recommendation.

Read this book! You will not regret it. 

Love at First Bite is fine - It's a fun story and probably a fun film, a madcap 70s comedy focused on wacky misunderstandings and excess in New York. It has that very effective kind of comic writing where the jokes come thick and fast enough that you will find yourself quoting it for a long time into the future, an effect likely distilled by the presentation here, even as its treatment of race, gender, homosexuality - Most things - make you cringe.

But we're not here to talk about the story of Love at First Bite - We're here for the experience of the Fotonovel, and wow, this is a weird artefact! "The inevitable companion to the silver screen" it calls itself with what now feels like a desperate confidence, staring bravely into a future in which it will always be impossible to own your favourite films to watch at home - And it does admittedly feel like a bit of a shame that, for example, film novelisations are still going strong when fotonovels have been left by the wayside, and that may be in large part due to this being, on sober analysis, a bad format for storytelling. The approach borrows from comics, with blocks of text acting like speech bubbles on screencaps from the film, all printed on pretty high-quality glossy paper. The problem is that the film shots weren't composed to accommodate text - Why would they be? - So the reader is often left trying to piece together the right order of speech chunks, and/or straining to read the text itself. But... There's something so deeply endearing about the attempt, something which evokes trying to tell a film's story from snapshots and memories. It's a bad medium for storytelling, but I am so, so glad they tried!

And I am also glad that these things are still hanging around, waiting to be discovered like the bizarre little curios they are.

A big improvement on the first volume - More focused, more affecting, and successfully making the necessary move from despair to inevitability, with a few curveballs thrown in. It does not make nearly the use it could have of time being broken, however.

The most Cosmere-heavy of the Year of Sanderson books, and the worst. The book strongly feels like a transitional issue of a comic, in which a character needs to get from one place to another and we might as well have a story to get them there. The afterword indicates that this was the case and that Sanderson felt that he should have a more Cosmere-focused story to add to his year.
Usually Sanderson gets through these less interesting entries with fun concepts and characters,  but this book just doesn't have either - The main characters are dull and the world, while full of all the usual Sanderson high concept magic, had no real urgency and didn't connect with me - Giving most of the characters incompatible and difficult names to remember did not help. Nor did having one ineffectual villain and another which doesn't do anything because they're just being set up for another story.
All this leaves the Year of Sanderson to end on... a filler episode. Weird.