**spoiler alert** Like most of my reviews for shorter form literature, where I tend to clump them together somewhat logically, this is actually a coll**spoiler alert** Like most of my reviews for shorter form literature, where I tend to clump them together somewhat logically, this is actually a collective review for the first three-ish volumes (currently "abandoned" around the 90% mark on the third volume but I'm sure I will pick this up again...sometime. Maybe. For reasons.).
Before I begin, keep in mind that this series (and by extension this review) needs a trigger warning of child abuse and some of the abuse is definitely on the edge of sexual. You will see naked children (in the manga, not in this review) and the nudity is part of the "punishment" (as in, not just kids naked because of more innocent elements though there is also some of that). There are some odd comments. Discussions of genitalia. Whipping. Et cetera. This is not a drill.
I feel like there are three layers (pun 100% intended) to Made in Abyss and I am 100% on board for layer one, maybe 60% on board for layer 2, and -100% on board for layer 3 which makes me effectively want to just bail on the rest.
The first layer, the Doug-approved layer, is that there is an abyss. A large pit. It is a tower-climbing style story where some "god" thing is at the top and you must go through ordeals and struggles to climb only here the tower is inverted. The deeper you go the weirder it gets. The creatures are more dangerous. The terrain gets stranger. Why are they climbing it, besides the sense of "because it's there!"? There are relics buried in the walls of the abyss that must be mined. The deeper you go, the better the relics. Many of the relics are unknown in origin and are useful in odd ways. It is extremely Roadside Picnic if the Zone was more and more intense the deeper the Stalkers went. All this I love. I love the inherent horror. I love the "tower of god" trope. I love how the further you go down, the worse the impact is when you try leaving the pit. Simple nausea becomes bleeding from all the holes to an utter loss of humanity. The more pressure you endure, the more you are forever changed. I love digging out relics from some lost era. The weird beyond-the-ken of humanity vibe of history. I want to know how it ends and if the series had already concluded I might by the last couple of volumes and just spoil it for myself.
Except it hasn't, so I have to wade into the in-between.
The second layer, where I am more middlin' on, is that a lot of the focus characters are children. I kind of dig the Oliver Twist with a twist variation of there being a class of children who are orphans due to losing parents to the Abyss and the predatorial nature of this society that requires relics to drive its economy means that these children are forced to pay back the society that essentially put the children in that position to begin with. You can feel the power of that as an allegory: you create socio-economic pockets for people and then you punish them for being in those pockets. Considering the main characters are not really meant to go as deep as they go helps to forgive the sense of exploitation while also placing this right in the bosom of the long history of exploitation fiction. In other words, the author is exploiting the fact that these are children but also giving a sense that this is a bit out-of-norm. Which it is not.
In later volumes, this theme is visited time and time again. Children keep getting chewed up in this world. Literally, sometimes. Completely unnecessarily. The characters could have been 20+ and bleeding out their eyes would have been a thing, you know? It shortcuts some of the horror to make people so innocent and vulnerable the on-page targets and I find that cheap. I can get some of the power of such a story: here are people who have no choice against an entity so powerful that no-one can truly overcome it and yet they must. I can dig it. But I don't. Not really.
And then there is the third layer. By the end of the third volume we have two different scenes of children tied up nude and left to dangle on display and these are very much drawn in fetish style (one being a boy forced to dress like a girl by someone who is ostensibly a hero). We have multiple discussion of a young (robot) boy's genitals by other children and adults. We have things inserted into people. A scene with a character being whipped is drawn to make clear she is nude and the layout of the scene is very...itself. Some deus ex machina medicine is in suppository form.
It is only a minor part of the story and it is always treated as a throw away line but it is there and maybe once or twice you will think "Oh, that's over with...that was weird right?" and then it will return. You could 100% lose 100% of them without even slightly slowing the plot down. They are all in excess.
And for now I think I'm done. I should have likely bailed but the promise of a really cool Tower of God style story kept me going. I just think the steam has gone out the sails. Reading about the story ahead of time made me feel like I was going crazy because there were YouTube videos and various write ups (mostly about the anime, which I guess tones this latter element down) and none of them were like "HOPE YOU LIKE NAKED CHILDREN!" I was wondering if I was taking things out of context and no...no, I don't think I am.
Once the final volume is released I'll spoil it for myself....more
Cold Storage is clearly a post-Michael-Crichton novel [makes sense since the author co-wrote the Jurassic Park movie with Crichton] and clearly it is Cold Storage is clearly a post-Michael-Crichton novel [makes sense since the author co-wrote the Jurassic Park movie with Crichton] and clearly it is heavily informed by a certain style of horror movie. The science is thick in places and it is never exactly clear if it is meant to make sense. Some characters are deeply technical but not so much real world technical as the kind of technical that would track with the reader/viewer. Character count is kept small except for one scene (a nod to Dawn of the Dead), usually just 1-3 people in any given shot. Most of the setting is a long series of hallways and doors easily shot and reshot with minimal effort. Effects are largely practical (colors and splashes of goo and expanding shirts, the kind that would not break the budget). The character with the most focus time tends to narrate his thoughts out loud. Guns are present but largely wasted. Actual property damage is mostly limited to some tires, a single metal door, some dry wall, digging through some paint. The most expensive prop is a cache of big screen TVs and those are always described as being left in the box. The building's layout suddenly develops side entrances when they are needed. You get the idea.
You can taste the mid-range budget and the confusing geography used to mask the actual filming time. This novel is a love letter to a kind of horror movie half lost in recent times.
It is funny. It is icky. It is also kind of heavily understated. Koepp will go on pages-long backstory about characters that might be killed a few pages later (or disappear for long stretches). There will be paragraphs about the genetic and practical implications of what is going down and then most of it will not matter for much. The death count is notable but there is also something off with it where few of the deaths really are given any weight. You find yourself in a kind of a hall of mirrors, filled with spectacle but the sense that the actual threats and tensions are sparse. It is fun enough you give into willful suspension but it is rare a novel succeeds this well without something more to it. It made it, though, for me. I was willing to ignore all these moments just to read more.
It is a testament to just how fun this novel is that I slapped "five stars" on it as soon as I was done. Horror has many layers and many masks and one flavor that is never given enough appreciation is just how well horror tracks when you have likable characters in a contained situation acting as mostly background for them to go through hijinks and ordeals but still mostly remain likable. You want these characters to succeed but you also enjoy watching the goofy and terrible antics develop around them. The sense of something bigger but it is all focused on just a few people adlibbing survival until the credits roll.
David Koepp absolutely nails that vibe and for that I am grateful. ...more
It continues to baffle me that someone as important to Japanese horror manga as Junji Ito does not yet have a properly ordered and released definitiveIt continues to baffle me that someone as important to Japanese horror manga as Junji Ito does not yet have a properly ordered and released definitive English translation series [don't get me started on all the weird choices about re-releasing the classic EC Comics stories].
Instead, we get collections like this (being a translation of the 2011 "Masterpiece" edition volume 6 which was mostly a recollection of an earlier Museum of Horror collection which was a collection of stand alone tales, etc) that are sometimes a bit chopped up and released with virtually no information that could be used to place them into a timeline. While I am glad for any opportunity to indulge in Ito's art, it does disrupt that enjoyment when it takes digging online across multiple sources to find and verify that these stories date back into the 90s. People seeing the 2011 copyright might reasonably assume these are more recent than stories like Gyo or Uzamaki despite being written earlier.
Ito's own tendency to use very similar protagonists and settings does not help us to parse this data while stories like "Smoking Room" or even "Town of No Roads" make more sense when you have a better understanding of when and not just where.
The latter with its emphasis on spectacle and degradation of privacy becomes a strangely cell-phone-less quaint tale when removed from the fact that it was written prior to other stories about the same topic. In the context of mid-to-late-90s it can be seen as strange take on the growing trend of people sharing everything while wearing masks to barely hide their identity and possibly an allusion to forums and other new-to-the-internet technologies. In 2011 or 2024 it seems to copy stories that it might have helped to inspire (Ito revisited some of the visual and architectural tropes in the later Uzumaki, for instance).
That rant aside this collection is decent. Overall I would put it at something like 3.5-stars but with Ito I always round up. His voice is strong here and the quirks of the stories still shines through. "The Ice Cream Bus" and "The Inn" are two that work as is, being the right overall length and pacing. The aforementioned "No Roads" suffers from having three different plots - the weird stalker story, the peeping family story, and then the main tale - but the main tale is super strong and one of my favorite set pieces I have read by Ito. "The Ward" feels like a part 1 of a two-parter while others like "The Alley" or "Memory" are pleasantly mediocre. "Smoking Room" and "Mold" are nice indulgences to give Ito a chance to do some of his signature swirls and pen work even if the stories themselves are not superb.
My favorite is "Descent" which hits that right vibe of something completely weird without going too deep into trying to explain anything. That and the last half of "No Roads".
Overall not my favorite Ito collection but there are several things I enjoyed quite a bit. I just really wish there were dates or author notes or editor notes or something to help us see, now nearly 30 years later, how these stories linked together since I think that kind of information is pretty important when approaching older horror and the overall ecosystem in which it existed....more
There is a lot going on in this short novel and most of it works fairly well when deconstructed from the whole. There are elements of liminal spaces, There is a lot going on in this short novel and most of it works fairly well when deconstructed from the whole. There are elements of liminal spaces, nostalgia, fears of growing old, fears of separation, anxiety about losing yourself, and also (I'd say) a broad middle-aged push back against AI imagery. This last one takes some explanation, perhaps, and I will get to it.
However, while no single page is truly a problem and most of the pages are quite good there is a sense as a whole that these themes repeat and echo and get tangled up until they become kind of a chore. Which is surprising. A book that taps not only (1) the Gen X + Millennial nostalgia for the loss of the mall as a sort of cultural watershed, (2) the Millennial + Gen Z exploration of liminal space as a form of horror, (3) Boomer + Gen X handling of growing older and the change of the family dynamic, but also (4) how creepy mannequins can be FEELS like the sort of book that would have too much going on to have any time to proper loop back and linger. Except linger it does. Even when the latter portions of book introduces something else, something (5) *other*, those threads keep snapping taut into the same notes that started the book.
The notes sing and dance but the scent lingers. Muddies. The "being sent away from the world" portion would have likely hit harder if not tied by the neck to mannequins. I would love a novel about people having to survive in a giant "mall world" and all of its nightmare logic. The weird unexplored sections of the mall with *things* inside would possibly have been enough that a much longer novel could have grown from that instead of being backseated by that point by everything else. The elderly main characters seeing their own identity so long tied into the mall that is now dying could have been a full novel, horror or otherwise. The weird fiction elements towards the end could have swung so hard had they been more the point from earlier on, perhaps, instead of an added plot 80% into a novel that takes up 80 pages. Much like the mall-in-miniature menagerie imagery towards the end of this book: things are too compressed and the visuals are too cluttered to make sense.
As for my AI jab, there is a bit towards the end (but also before that) where the mall inside the mall is described as things being fused together and store brands become nonspecific nonsense that feels exactly like an image you might see if you went to Dall-E and typed "A typical American mall scene" and just let it roll. I actually tried it out myself and got an image with store names like "SamoGocok" and "Sbarlo" and people are sort of compressed together and the store merchandise is nonsense on the verge of making sense: a scene I have never seen but also have, a badly remembered memory.
Back to the book at hand, I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall [a title so close to a Chuck Tingle title that I feel almost compelled to add "...and Fell In Love with a Gay Perfume Kiosk"], my overall review is that is maybe two great short stories with a couple of interestingly odd vignettes occupying a space where none can quite function fully as they were. Which is perhaps a metaphor. A fairly early 2000s style of bizarro writing meeting a fairly 1990s style of suburban horror crammed too tightly together like that last heyday of the mall ecosystem itself.
Cutting any two elements and expanding more on the remaining would no doubt have made it flow much more strongly. Maybe just lose the mannequins. It is like clowns in the recent decade of horror or the Necronomicon. Too pat. Too self-contained. Too much weight on their own to not substitute elements that are actually more novel (pun!). I appreciate that horror novels about nostalgia and liminal spaces can very quickly get too maudlin and too technical (or too empty) without having some monster to haunt your labyrinth but all the same very nearly everything I loved about this novel was hidden away in between the moments where the obvious scary thing was trying to snag my attention.
All said, I like what Farthing is getting at here and will definitely read more. 3.5 stars, rounded down. ...more
I am going to keep it as real as I can for you right now: I adore this book with a strength I can barely contain behind a mere five stars but I also aI am going to keep it as real as I can for you right now: I adore this book with a strength I can barely contain behind a mere five stars but I also appreciate that this is the exact kind of book that people may not like. I am not gatekeeping. I am not sallying forth with a declaration of some privileged taste-buds and claiming that you all (or, as we say in 'Bama, y'all) are too unsophisticated to partake. I am warning you.
This is the novel equivalent of sitting down to play a new roleplaying game with some college buddies and Game Master Steve, by way of introduction, has just gotten to the Third Dragon War (which was actually the fourth) and how it impacted an alliance of the high elf council with the free federation of wood elf states and how the Fellowship of the Rood held back the tired of the Elwroth through a bargain with the cursed blade of Sha'al'Nak. All while you are just getting ready to go down into the basement and kill a couple of rats.
And Game Master Steve is just getting started.
The opening of the book is a short glossary and persona dramatis type brief and the words it says include such bits as
Aullaime - Allorwen conjurer with the Siblingries
Fellow-Monitor Brockelsby - Correct Conduct
School of Correct Appreciation (Invigilators) -responsible for art and the judiciary
By way of introduction. Dropping us right off into edge of space.
Book of the New Sun is evident. Vancian logic runs rampant. There are hefty doses of Pratchett's Discworld right at the surface. There's a hangman named Hoyst, an middle-management type called Companion-Archivist Nasely, and a priest named Yasnic who is traveling around with a tiny useless god.
There is the sense that the whole thing is just some thin analogy for either the current state of Europe or some previous era. The allusions to French with Blackmane's real name being "White Mansion" but it is being mispronounced (blanc manoir if you allow for the word placement). Allusions to numerous occupations and obsessions with perfection. Blended with Armigers and Siblingries (aka, "The brotherhood of the..." "The sisterhood of the.."). Probably more puns and references I missed. Definitely more that I missed.
All with plotlines that largely fail to resolve. A sense of realism in the betrayals and the stallings. A refusal to give into the fantastic while trucking deeply inside of it. Just as soon as a plotline tips over enough that it might actually spill out the rainwater it has collected for days, Tchaikovsky whips us off into another stop on the tour and by the time we finally circle around, most of that spilled water feels a bit murky and unclear.
BUT
The language is just so perfect. The worldbuilding and its madness are some of the best I have seen for some time. This is an act of lore creation above narrative fruition but the narrative portions are still interesting. It is an act of broad world generation but the focus is largely on a single city. It is a neologism but the language does make sense once you get into the vibe.
I had a lot of fun reading this, taking my time with it, just don't expect it to get to the point any time soon. Which, really, is the point. Too often are these grand fantasy creations built with the idea of a boundary, an ending, a teleological aspect. This is neither the start nor the end, both stretching on from days and day on either side. ...more
I mostly gave up on the old Arkham Horror series of fictional tie-ins a bit back (cannot even remember the last one I read but it has been a good minuI mostly gave up on the old Arkham Horror series of fictional tie-ins a bit back (cannot even remember the last one I read but it has been a good minute) but here we are. I came across the fact that there were several new titles and felt the old temptation stir. Why not try just one more?
What could be the harm in that?
The harm is now I feel a bit like diving back into this series after this one. Pratt has managed to take several of the elements that plague the core of several of the older books in the series — turning board & card game characters into interesting elements while also feeling they are primarily concerned with selling you more pieces of art on cardboard — and made it work very well. The pulpy side of Lovecraft-land is always a potential minefield of writing foibles and plot-holes but Pratt navigates the tricky passage of merging characters who finish off deep ones by rolling four six-sided dice or pulling elder sign tokens with the kind of threat that makes it feel like there is a reason to actually fight back against the darkness.
It is pulpy. There are shotguns. There are creatures that multiply by cutting off fingers. People get chopped up, tied up, bashed up. Shoggoths. Twisty passages and Thresholds of Salt. Redeemed cultists and irredeemable cultists. Various tokens of power show up to help here or there but — outside of the perhaps over-simplified final fight — it feels pretty balanced. Fun never taking a backseat to horror and horror never being forgotten.
Look at how Tim Pratt took the fact that Ruby Standish is an ally card (+2 to sneak, draw a unique item) that you might get by chance at the Silver Twilight Lodge and used that one little bit to weave a whole backstory for her. It never feels like you are reading a winking series of Fantasy Flight Games product placements. It expands the game and some of the elements without being obviously beholden to it.
It is a fun read. And, I hate to say this, I am going to have buy and read more. This is how they get you. Remember me, fondly. ...more
This is a solid version of a solid story. Keep in mind this is essentially just Godzilla: The Half-Century War with "Godzilla in Hell" as an odd extraThis is a solid version of a solid story. Keep in mind this is essentially just Godzilla: The Half-Century War with "Godzilla in Hell" as an odd extra (and cover galleries are nice, but that is not why folks are buying this copy).
Half-Century War does the two primary things that a Godzilla tale needs to do to work (exceptions, of course, are out there): gives fans a bunch of nods to the various movies that preceded it and gives us a passable (and hopefully better-than-passable) human-centric story.
Ota and his companions in the A.M.F. ("Anti-Megalosaurus Force" in a pitch-perfect decent into alphabet cheese) are great...eventually. First couple of issues just sort of plays off some cliches but around the time we are introduced to the more extended task force in the third sector (and the series baddie) you really start to feel like this could have been extended well past the five issue run into something with... well, teeth (pun not intended but apt).
The villain is simple enough to work. The quirks of the focus characters are endearing. Ota is a great failed protagonist who is driven by the imbalance of power to be primarily a watcher. A lot of real world issues are just ignored to find the escapist core (not every tokusatsu-themed reboot needs to be grimdark gritty). All with Stokoe art which makes the human element warm and tired and scrappy and organic.
The monster side is a bit more of a wash, alas. The story rarely gives time for most of the monsters to feel like more than a brief aside. Which is ok but also a shame. The Anguirus fight was good. The Space Godzilla bit was cool. And you kind of have to have Ghidora nowadays. Maybe trimming out about two-thirds of kaiju cast and picking only these could have helped to develop them as much as Stokoe developed the character-lore in those same five issues. I suspect this complaint is not a problem with others. We all love Mothra, even when she is shoe-horned into a couple of panels.
As said above, "Godzilla in Hell" is a strange short story mostly there for a few cool visuals. It is basically what it says on the tin.
Four stars because this is almost definitely the best Godzilla comic I have read. I wish there was more of it. Less monsters, more pages. If, for nothing else, to see more of Stokoe's excellent art....more
I bought and started reading this book because its name sounds very much like the kind of name a mystery parody might use. It is not, alas, a funny paI bought and started reading this book because its name sounds very much like the kind of name a mystery parody might use. It is not, alas, a funny parody but reading it I was enjoying the energy it had. Everything was pretty typical and fairly commonplace: English family has interpersonal conflicts, some people die, some more people die, and everyone sits around and talks about the implications of it while well-meaning but slightly bumbling police fail to really get to the bottom of it.
That one death was the family heir and his deeply disliked wife felt pretty bog standard but elements of the past help us to find some sorrow at their passing even if most people in the novel refuse to consider it a bad thing. The second death, one of a young and problematic type, feels more disruptive and emotional even if again a lot of the response was to snap back to a "stiff upper lip" frame. We had a variety of folks, most of who could be the culprits, going through a variety of set pieces and scenes and I was deeply interested to see it unfold.
The loss of a central detective meant that the normal pattern of the victims being the outsiders in the novel ostensibly about them was disrupted. We no longer had a hero type - usually a quirky hero type - to hang our characterizations upon. We were forced to deal with the crime itself (not even obviously a crime despite the massive SPOILER the title provides) and I was loving it. The mystery genre has long dealt with murder and terrible things in a way so unlike the horror genre because in part it so decentralizes the murder it is supposedly about. It becomes an element of a narrative rather than the loss of a person. By having the murder BE the narrative felt much harder to compartmentalize.
Then the detective showed up. And I had to go and look it all up and it turns out that Lorac's MacDonald is a well established series. Sometimes going in blind has drawbacks.
Shortly after that I put the book down for a long while because it felt I had approached it from the wrong angle. A Lorac fan would have been driven through those quiet moments waiting for the Outsider Hero to take control of the narrative and invert the focus away from the family. As a new reader, I was instead seeing the Insider Family lose focus and start acting much more deeply like the usual cast of devils in a crime novel where multiple suspects is the primary way to drive a page count forward.
I did reopen it a few days ago and finished this morning and I can say that I was being harsh but also being exactly right. The novel never quite regains that central emotional landscape that made the first portion work well in the constraints of classic detective fiction but the detective did not quite so disrupt it as I feared he might. Lorac returns to the focus family quite a bit at the time it matters and the entire situation is practically solved without him. A couple of clues are shoehorned in: "Oh, there was a vial hidden away!". A couple of characters are some what about-faced. Still, the novel manages to make the Hero Detective much more of a part of the rhythm rather than the main melody when it matters. That I liked.
I now feel the need to look up other novels because I sort of want to see what made Lorac make this change, even if the end the gravity of the genre template pulled it all back more to straight....more
This one is a bit unique for me in that my initial run was very near a perfect guess to an optimal ending and then with a slight tweak managed to beatThis one is a bit unique for me in that my initial run was very near a perfect guess to an optimal ending and then with a slight tweak managed to beat the book in something like half an hour. While that means that subsequent run-throughs to learn more about it and to see all the possible paths had some of the stress taken off, it also kind of felt too much like fluff. This is not really the book's fault, just a potential outcome of playing so many of these that you end getting a sense of what each author is really trying at.
What is the book's fault is that the One True Path (the Fighting Fantasy and Livingstone staple) is one of the most boring in the series: buy the right three or four items, get in a couple of fights (both relatively doable even at lower stats), avoid nearly everything but a couple of luck rolls. The Champskees' analysis puts it at 86% likely to succeed even with minimal stats (note, that link also has the walkthrough so only click if you don't mind possibly spoiling it for yourself). I've complained before shopping lists in these books — where it is impossible to know which items you need until after you play the books and once you accept that knowledge is playable then other clues and hints also seem on the table which alters some paths — and this one flags a bit in some of the path descriptions with several junctions being essentially "you see trees, east or west?" However...
The more I played this book the more I appreciated the mechanics behind it. If you think of this as a book to solve, then it gets maybe a bit too easy. If you treat it as a book to explore, both in the sense of the world and learning more about Fighting Fantasy mechanics, then it is quite solid. There is the fact that some of the encounters reference others — a boar running from a pack of dogs is referenced later when you meet the huntsman, a silver dart in a bear is referenced in a different encounter, and so forth — so there are these bits of micro-lore sprinkled in. Livingstone might have went a bit overboard with the density of disjointed encounters here but he was building a sense of inherent logic that I appreciate. At least some of the encounters are very well done and great sparks for the imagination, as well: the sassy gnome and the weird fungal clones come to mind, or maybe the way that a couple of the rougher fights can be cleverly avoided once you know how.
The general shape is something of a grid with a handful of encounters (or mini-dungeon) at various intersections and half-way marks. This means each path through the forest will have something to do and depending on some direction choices (especially swinging back and forth on the east/west axis) you can work quite a bit of adventure while working out the aforementioned boring optimal path. While this mechanic of a grid-based point-crawl becomes really obvious as you start mapping it out, it also means that folks can plot out it and map without having to use some of the fuzzy directions that other books in the series can require.
And that large shopping list at the beginning where only a couple of the items are needed to beat the game? Effectively every item has some place so even if you win it can be worth a mini-game of trying to map out where you might use the other ones.
Combine this with the addition of a "loop back to the beginning" option at the end if you did not solve the puzzle and you have a book that in principle is an excellent learn-to-play-Fighting Fantasy option. Slightly flawed in that a few of the fights have optional mechanics and others are not really described in detail, so it is one of those book easier to adjudicate if you already know Fighting Fantasy. This book needs a bit of a remake, I feel, to shore it up — and maybe allow people to criss-cross back over explored nodes rather than have to loop the whole book.
Not exactly my cup of tea with the encounter randomness and overall too low of a difficulty — a sentence I will regret more and more as I go forward in the series, I bet — but there is much here to love. 3.5 stars....more
I read through the earlier volumes/stories in this series sometime after my more general burn out on comics but also long enough ago that I remember tI read through the earlier volumes/stories in this series sometime after my more general burn out on comics but also long enough ago that I remember them largely as a fond, warm nostalgic soup rather than discrete portions of themselves. Which means that opening up a collection that starts out very much so in media res, skips about 80% of the small beats, tosses a bunch of people drawn sort of like but not exactly like they look when acted live blended in with the comic book continuity's own heady stew of tweaks...it was vaguely like diving into surreal slap-fest of shapes and more shapes where some of those shapes are words and some of the words are literally "Pew! Pew! Pew!"
I had fun but I feel like some of the fun was just a delight in my own sense of exploring this intense fandom-fiction like an anthropological construct not quite meant for me despite knowing the general translation of it.
GOOD STUFF INCLUDES:
+ I like how they engaged in some very fast and heavy worldbuilding while barely lifting a finger. You are shown a tiny bit of a picture and then another tiny bit and you kind of fill in a lot of the gaps. The world is vibrant and weird and dark and highly reminiscent of old science-weird comics of the 70s and 80s. Big bonus from me there.
+ The situation was tense but not so tense that you just felt beaten by it. It went a little DC without going full DC, and that's good.
+ The ad hoc ranger team is good. The new zords are good. The villain is decent.
+ Lots of fun visual tricks referencing elements from the 70s and onward are used, leading to some fairly clever panels and pages.
+ I like how the different ranger groups come in out of sync so that some characters have more development than others. The core characters picked are generally varied and have lots of reasons to be there.
THE BAD OR AT LEAST NOT REALLY GOOD INCLUDES:
- That being said, there are some half-to-full-dozen of deep character arcs we are supposed to juggle with only a couple coming from the comics and the rest requiring knowing the show. That is a LOT of homework but you can make semi-due if you are ok with picking up a lot of context or using the fandom wiki, etc.
- For all the fun art and heavy lean into the hokey Morphin awesomeness which drives the core fun of the show, virtually every action sequence feels wasted and too abrupt. Stuff shows up, sometimes explodes, and it can be hard to know what is going on. It is a suit glitch? Was it just some artistic lens flair?
- Despite having a proper adventure outside of the scope the show, despite this feeling like a truly original creation and one with a LOT of potential (I would 100% shift to an entirely Solar Rangers storyline quite easily), the vibe increasingly feels like the writers just want to wrap it up and get everyone back to their timeline. Which I get, but this was a story that could fly free and it always felt chained.
So, as I said, I had a good time. I will (one day) get the next collected volume and keep going in the series, but I am a little sad that this moment of proper weirdness has already finished flying....more
[Doug's Note: As always, 3-star reviews are me being honest while 5-star reviews are me embracing the sheer joy of a book like this. In fact, this is [Doug's Note: As always, 3-star reviews are me being honest while 5-star reviews are me embracing the sheer joy of a book like this. In fact, this is the first book I have read in some time that I feel I might just straight up make a hobby recommending to people without context, referencing it madly and stochastically.]
"Crime was one thing, and a duchess was another."
This is a weird, broken little book. For maybe a fifth of the read-time there is a quite decent if not groundbreaking horror story (most prominently towards the end in which it goes full horror for a few pages). The kind of stuff that E. F. Benson or Arthur Machen might have written when in a mood. Structure-wise, "The Great God Pan" is in evidence. It namechecks Jekyll and Hyde. It calls upon the classics but makes them a bit rougher, a bit queer-er, a lot more sexual. It openly confronts its sexuality and baseness rather than hiding it in metaphor.
Take that chunk of horror and then it embed it inside a deeply satirical, fairly loud, and possibly quite angry comical novel about a slightly alternate history Britain; only bringing out the horror aspects when the jokes run out. Prior to that, jokes on top of jokes. Mock people for not reading enough. Mock the fascists. Mock the communists. Mock the prejudices. Mock the foreigners. Waves and waves of very nearly incessant jabs and jibes and taunts and wordplays. There are so many asides it is hard to tell how many of the jokes are even funny. Some are. Some are maybe more of a "had to be there to see it" variety.
For instance!
It was no doubt this fine nose that had steered him so comfortably through the sedentary life of a successful soldier, for in England it is wisely recognised that to a Staff Officer good looks must matter very much more than they should to a mere actor with a painted face. It was of General Prest-Olive that Maréchal Foch was reported to have said: “It is soldiers like Prest-Olive who almost unite the English and French armies in affection for the Belgians.” His wife was one of the Leicestershire ffox-Vermins, and he had to like it.
What do you do with such a joke? Hug it? Cherish it? Raise as your own?
Pages and pages of it. How about...
“If you say so. Though one has heard of a queen having a rough-and-tumble with corporals.”
“Not an English queen, Icelin.”
“Of course not, sir. We have always had a sense of proportion.”
“May I ask what that means?”
“The corporal is promoted.”
More, you say?!
The man,” said Crust indignantly, “was a sapphist and a nymphomaniac.”
“Must be an acrobat,” said Wingless.
“He means,” said Icelin, “sadist and erotomaniac.”
It does go on.
Imagine reading ninety pages of that just to read a better-than-fair horror story across the other twenty? This is not a critique, per se. There are lots of better-than-fair horror stories. I have written a few of them, myself. I just mean, literally imagine reading quote after quote like that and then every few pages having a check-in to remind you that this is a book about brutal murders? That's how this book rolls.
There is almost nothing else like it. Now we have lots of horror comedies who lampoon society while taking jabs at being serious horror. At least a few. But for that to also involve such a high brow smarmy smearing of British fascism and wastrel nobility? To just breathlessly hammer home every trope on loop so that people like Douglas Adams end up looking restrained? No, this is something unique to itself. A Jekyll/Hyde satire/horror book that is a Jekyll/Hyde style whodunit where the actual Jekyll and Hyde mostly concerned was Britain's own love of fascism. Or something to that effect.
OH! Almost forgot this bit. The entire reason I found this novel was because I was researching the anecdote that Agatha Christie gives us at the start of The Murder on the Links, the one about "Hell, said the Duchess" (the eagle-eyed amongst you might realize where this is going). It looks like that was some sort of running in-joke about up-and-coming writers trying to get attention. That Arlen, who had unfortunately written a very successful novel and then been on a downward slope by this time, took that joke and just ran with it is kind of amazing to me. Is this ultimately an angry attack on the reading public? I have no idea.
I am glad he wrote it, though. And I am glad it stopped at this one.
By the way, the duchess never says, "Hell" in the whole novel. A web of lies, I tell you....more
This novel is a song whose notes sometimes clash and sometimes harmonize and all the instruments on stage are kind of doing their own thing but are laThis novel is a song whose notes sometimes clash and sometimes harmonize and all the instruments on stage are kind of doing their own thing but are largely in tune. Poirot's major novels are still in this novel's future but we already have a character established enough for this novel to play at being a middle-arc self-parody.
The fact that the plot has too many developments, that there are too many love stories, that there are too many French policemen, too many femme fatales, and too many times in which Hastings drops the ball is all besides the point. It's a delightful novel because it barely makes sense. The crime that kicks it off makes no sense. The attempts to solve it make no sense. Folks just basically teleport from place to place by train or car or boat. Clues brew up and then are later mostly discarded for more interesting twists. There are some hotels and some estates, sure. Some stage acts. It is a work accidentally surreal just trying to do its day job.
I love it.
Fascinating exhibit one:The Murder on the Links has the flavor of attempting to break Poirot out of a Holmesian mold (while simultaneously making Hastings more a stereotypical Watson than Watson ever was in the original stories). When you look through the suggested reading order provided by the back of this very novel, even, virtually all the stories this novel is meant to comment on are recommended to be read after you read the novel. In fact, while you can find quite a few bits about how The Mysterious Affair at Styles was written in 1916 but then slightly edited and published in 1920, it is surprisingly hard to figure out exactly how the reading public had tracked these early developments of Poirot. A fandom site shows there were around ten Poirot stories published, on a weekly basis leading up to the UK publication of this novel (which was after the US publication?).
Reading these in order nowadays means you have Christie being a bit done with Hastings and wanting to do something new with Poirot and then nearly immediately going back to stories involving Hastings and Poirot being Watson and Holmes all over again (probably written before but some were definitely published after either edition of this novel).
Fascinating exhibit two: The opening line is about how some new writers try to make their writing forcible by dropping the line "'Hell,' said the Duchess" and then has a character do the same thing a couple paragraphs later which ones more is Christie engaging in self-parody despite this being her third damned novel. It also opens up a strange split where early on in the novel there is a lot of commentary, spoken by various men, around the weak nature of women and the way women should behave and then later the novel is largely about the actions of women driving the plot forwards — even with a gender-swapped gothic staple of a male character fainting from emotion. I do not think Christie was really trying to tongue-in-cheek any feminist commentary here but it feels like there is some sort of joke being told, maybe one intended largely for Christie herself.
Fascinating exhibit three: Detective Giraud is a delightful parody of the self-important, quirky, socially-off-putting detective. Which means that Giraud is a parody of the very genre of detective that Poirot himself inhabits. There is such a missed opportunity here for Poirot to have dumped Hastings and moved in with Giraud. Which brings me into...
Fascinating exhibit four (aka, three-point-five): There is much early juxtaposition between physical evidence — the new way of solving crimes and also a jab at Sherlock Holmes — and Poirot's preferred method of using psychology. While some of the commentary about how physical evidence can be manipulated rings true, which is a plot point here and there, it is funny to think about this novel as a justification of ignoring evidence and instead of going on feelings. That's some Inspector Morse behavior, there: "Your honor, never mind the fingerprints, think about April 12th's *crossword* clues!" Of course, that is partially the point, right? This is a literary mystery. The reader cannot engage with finger prints or cigar ash but can very much engage with a third love affair involving a twenty-year old scandal.
Again, a delightful novel full of jabs and odd commentary and a whirlwind nonsense romance between a grown man and a seventeen-year-old acrobat that occasionally has some mediocre mystery butting in. I am a huge fan....more
Short Version: Hunter Shea's semi-surreal, mildly comic novel involving a road trip through an American landscape infected with spontaneous human combShort Version: Hunter Shea's semi-surreal, mildly comic novel involving a road trip through an American landscape infected with spontaneous human combustion works on a broad structural and set-piece level but fails overall due to the tiresome voice of its narrator, many typos, and a tendency towards repetition. Cautiously recommended for those who like quirky/unique apocalypse novels, especially if you like relationship drama to be a primary focus, but I would suggest you read other Hunter Shea novels (which overall I found more entertaining) instead.
== The Long Version ==
The slightly surreal journey novel is one the great devices in literature. Books like Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn tapping into that sense of wonder and displacement by turning various set-pieces into allegories of the personal experience. Not necessarily surreal in the definitive sense of the term but still strange and odd enough that as a whole the many experiences and stops along the way take on a sense of caricature. Perhaps loving. Perhaps scathing. Usually at least a bit comical.
In this broad category, Combustible plays its party fairly well. Roughly paralleling some of the experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic lock-down, it posits a much louder backdrop: the disease causes people to spontaneously combust if they sneeze. As Sam and Aja, a married couple going through the early days of a break-up/divorce, are forced to stay together to try and navigate to some safer location, they embark on a cross-country trip across the United States searching for the town of Consumption in Canada. There's the chubby sidekick character, the dog that seems immune, the violent version of Girl, Interrupted, the wannabe cowboy who quotes (among other things) Big Trouble in Little China. You have a socialist rodeo at the end of the world, the rest stop hippies, and an insane goth teen at a Cracker Barrell. People shove tampons up their nose to stop from sneezing, attack intruders with lawn darts, and squabble over which RVs to steal.
You get the point. It is outsized and does a great job of reminding you that during a pandemic all the open space in the world does not combat the sense of isolation inside of a tiny space. Especially when you deal with break-ups and emotional experiences that you now cannot escape. The pandemic brought out a lot of soul searching. This aspect the novel gets spot on.
The reason that I stopped reading this one, twice, and was ready to finally mark it as abandoned before deciding to just speed read the back half is because Shea made the really strange decision to hinge the entire novel on the voice of a petulant man-child that expresses absolutely everything in very slow, fairly selfish terms infested with his own limited worldview. I'm sure this technique could work and some applause is deserved for so transforming the flow of the book into this stilted, limiting voice but it just drained any ability for me to enjoy the various tricks that Shea was performing.
Even some of Sam's general tiresomeness might have been alleviated if it was not used as a strange excuse to put such large swaths of the novel into "redditor folksy." The book traverses a lot of relationship issues and issues of racism and abuse and addiction and puts it all in this kind of juvenile sheen like a freshman in college trying to write about real world experiences that he read through other people's blog posts. This gets really evident once they get to Canada and there's this sense that the country is just some of kind of no-man's-land. The little nods to everyday life dry up and get replaced by "The Great White North" so abruptly it is jarring. Doubly so in the way this gives Shea some odd excuse to dive into Western themes of First Nation people vs settlers with the main crew taking on the role of settlers.
Add in the fact that the book has its fair share of typos (there's a section where "flour" is spelled "flower" every single time and I had to stare at it a good minute because I thought it was meant to be some sort of joke and maybe it is, I have no idea). I flagged some of them on the app and then just gave up. Tossing in other repetitions where sections will add nothing new, bloated sections, and general pacing issues it ends up feeling like a book that needed an editor to shine.
Which is a shame because I would love to see the more polished version of this. Spontaneous Human Combustion meets surreal American journey is exactly the sort of novel that could have swung for the bleachers....more
I give this novel four stars for the fact that at the end I had four-stars-worth of enjoyment out of it. I could just as well as give it three- or twoI give this novel four stars for the fact that at the end I had four-stars-worth of enjoyment out of it. I could just as well as give it three- or two-stars had I finished it in different sittings or moods. It contains multitudes, good and bad, which has its charms. It is very much the sort of novel that will fit uneasily in the broad collective shelf but will fit quite snugly into some reader's dear hearts.
On a technical level, the book's weakest aspect, the first two-thirds is in that category of ad hoc family trapped in some limiting space by a horror-themed situation. There are numerous examples — King's The Mist and Romero's Night of the Living Dead being two really prominent ones — and most, including this book, follow the general lead of the whole. There will be clashes of personalities. There will be limited resources and despite some nod being given to the concept of "survival horror" very little actual time will be spent making the survival make sense.* Someone will act a fool. Someone will take charge. Eventually, when something like stability is reached, something will show up to destabilize it. People will be forced to leave the room with some pocket of the family. Etc. etc. It is a story that has been told.
Which is a shame particularly in this case because the situation is so primed for uniqueness. The limited space is a extremely well lit room where outside are things that watch. You spend a lot of the novel in the dark about what these watchers are but in principle this set-up is rife for metaphor. The main POV character sketches people. Everyone is described as being essentially that sort of person that people overlook. The old bossy woman. The young plain kid. The immature housewife. The artist with perfectly normal features. Trapped in a room where every night they must live out their starved, trapped existence on display. Is this a story about reality TV? About the internet and social media? About the way people are strangers to each other? They way we long to be seen? The way we fear it?
No.
It is a story about people trapped in a small place with no means to survive and yet they survive. Almost nothing is really said about the mechanics of their situation. Which is shocking in a book so prone to elaborate prose full to the brim with similes: "Her bones unfolded like broken patio furniture as she stretched her legs between the two front seats. She had never felt so old in all her thirty-three years. The bird, with its head quizzically atilt, seemed almost surprised by Mina’s unveiling." Much of the book is written like that. Impressionistic writing telling a fairly straight-forward tale. Even the contrast could have been something but it does not really meet in the middle.
I will leave discussions about how much distance folks can travel in one day to other reviewers. They are right, but also it is never the point. The point is always survival in this tiny mock society and how entertaining that survival can be made to the reader. To the watcher, if you will. I'll see myself out.
All these complaints should be understand to be an explanation about how I liked the novel, by the way. It excites me to see a relatively new writer like Shine show up with an idea so big and different. Even if this early novel sort of follows the established paths it gives me hope that future stories will find that voice and shout it loudly, because there is a lot of promise in that book.
Also, as far as the found family core of this book goes, Shine has probably written the one most tolerable in the history of this genre. Which is worth something.
==== * Three years in an apartment building with no contact with the outside world? Sure...why not just assume folks have some source of water!...more
The Brief: This one reads likes the novelization of a 2010 horror movie that never was but should have been. It flows (mostly) well; works best when iThe Brief: This one reads likes the novelization of a 2010 horror movie that never was but should have been. It flows (mostly) well; works best when it is funny, loud, and/or gory (which is about 70% of the time); and does a great job of setting up just enough of the land, enough of the people, and enough scenery to run mad for most of its page count. Flounders towards the end, then flounders some more. Three and half stars.
The Summary: A rapidly dying Scottish town gets caught up in a centuries long curse involving a "witch". Maggie Wall has woken up and the ritual to stop her from killing everyone involves one hell of a decision. The town's last five youth (four teens and a newborn baby) get caught up in the middle of this. It bubbles, it boils, and then bubbles some more. With lots of blood, screams, car crashes, and even a bit of James Blunt (to set the mood).
The Review: First off, Sodergren just nails the vibe of horror movies you might have seen around ten to fifteen years ago. Not that this is a proper faux-novelization (with ironic VHS/DVD trappings on the cover and wink-wink-nod-nudges to the medium inside), but it still embraces a style and era of horror from around 2010 and tops many of them with its ability to go further and wilder than could have been committed to screen (one town hall scene in particular would have been absolutely slashed to the implication).
As much as we horror dweebs love our literary spooks, horror movies is how the genre tends to grow nowadays (and for some time). It only makes sense that this flow of energy would occasionally reverse and books like this, heavily infused with the sensibilities of film but going a step further to find the elements where films cannot follow, would show up.
There are wonderfully funny moments. There are wonderfully gory moments. Action scenes. Emotional scenes. A geriatric orgy with a fairly spot on soundtrack. Car crashes. People ripping open. Flaming witches. When this book embraces the fun of chaos, it shines.
Unfortunately, the book has a serious case of whiplash as Sodergren goes from slower, more personal-drama start to full-on delightful-carnage to then reversing the book back down to being actually a character study the whole time. A character study of the one character in the entire friend group who absolutely refuses to show any signs of emotional growth whatsoever (well, Steve doesn't count, since he is obviously there just to be the stupid one). I get this is mostly over the course of a couple of nights but your enjoyment of the book as a whole package will largely come down to your ability to actually appreciate the main character's struggle. And I do. About three and a half stars' worth. Of course, one analysis could be [and note, this is a for real spoiler, so go gently]: (view spoiler)[I suppose it would be incorrect to point out that Beth acts like the bitchy friend of the final girl but mostly because Beth truly is the bitchy friend of the final girl...maybe the bigger plot twist is Sodergren convincing you are following the main character but you are following her emotionally broken bestie, instead. (hide spoiler)]
Would have most likely have rounded up if the obviously coming up plot twist (with the obvious answer) had maybe showed up earlier or had made more sense in the construct of the world. The plot twist is obvious because there are rules that Sodergren spends some time dwelling on but then it also manages to violate the rules.
The Bonus Thought: It is entertaining to see this as kind of a loud, garish cousin to Thomas Olde Heuvelt's Hex. Both feature towns longer under the curse of a witch. Both have disenfranchised youth accelerating the end game. Both have ultimately ineffective authorities with plans to handle the situation. A tiny little "what to do with the town witch wakes up, oh no" subgenre....more
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