GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT BY LILY BROOKS-DALTON

Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”I heave myself out of the darkness slowly, painfully.

And there I am, and there he is…”

----Jean Rhys

It is interesting that Lily Brooks-Dalton named this book after the Jean Rhys’s novel of the same name. I’ve never read the Rhys’s book, but it is a notoriously depressing novel. The premise of this novel could certainly lead readers to believe that this book, too, is destined to be depressing, but for me it proved to be strikingly uplifting. Jean Rhys takes her title from an Emily Dickinson poem.

Good morning, Midnight!
I'm coming home,
Day got tired of me –
How could I of him?

Sunshine was a sweet place,
I liked to stay –
But Morn didn't want me – now –
So good night, Day!

Dickinson---Rhys---Brooks-Dalton are writers who are connected through strings of written words that are like strands of DNA passed from page to mind to pen from one generation of writer to the next. One writer lives in the next one who then influences the next one.

The Earth goes silent.

There is no bang, no debris cloud, no chaos.

Augustine, who elected not to be on the last plane out of the Arctic Circle, is strangely contented. He has never really cared for the rest of humanity. He has always been lost in his own brilliance and focused on his astronomy career, which took off like a meteorite, but now at 78 years old, he isn’t really sure if he has achieved all he was meant to achieve. ”His work ethic was strong, his ego engorged, his results groundbreaking, but he wasn’t satisfied. He had never been satisfied and never would be. It wasn’t success he craved, or even fame, it was history: he wanted to crack the universe open like a ripe watermelon, to arrange the mess of pulpy seeds before his dumbfounded colleagues. He wanted to take the dripping red fruit in his hands and quantify the guts of infinity, to look back into the dawn of time and glimpse the very beginning. He wanted to be remembered.”

He seduced women. He made women fall in love with him. It became a game for him. He played hot and cold and felt even more empowered over their desperate efforts to get him back. ”It was a thrill just to exist. There were control rooms full of humming equipment, enormous telescopes, endless arrays. There were beautiful women, college girls and townies and visiting scholars, and he would’ve slept with them all if he could have.”

There is, after all, only so much time in a day.

For most of us, if we were at the Arctic Circle or floating along in space and suddenly lost all contact with the rest of humanity, we would probably have a moment of panic or maybe even a complete meltdown. Augustine’s reaction was more along the lines of... huh, interesting. Of course, after being too high in the stratosphere his whole life to have relationships, beyond his physical needs, this isn’t that much different from his normal life, except things are quieter. He can focus.

Well, except some moron left their eight year old daughter behind.

How could this happen? Just at the moment he thought he was completely free, a cable snakes out from the ground snagging him, keeping him tethered to the Earth. He is angry. He was so close.

The other story we are allowed to follow is of Sully and her fellow astronauts on their way back from an exploration of Jupiter. ”The receivers were picking up the murmurs of space all around them, from celestial bodies millions of light years away---it was only Earth that wasn’t saying anything.”

The silence is deafening.

They are professionals who are trained not to panic. They will have been gone two years by the time they touch down on Earth. They put their minds to work on the possibilities. We are noisy creatures, now silent, which makes them believe that whatever is wrong with Earth is catastrophic.

Augustine would have never bothered to go fire up the radio, but now that he is responsible for Iris, he feels he needs to make some attempt to find another human being. He reaches Sully. Neither have the answers the other needs. They are both lost in their own desolations.

The calmness of this novel reminds me of On the Beach where the people who are left alive are resigned to their fate and are trying to enjoy the last few days of their lives. There is no pell-mell race for safety, because there is no safety. The publisher is also making connections to the recent post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven even to the extent of using very similar cover art. This is a mature work with tight prose and elegant observations. Brooks-Dalton even manages to make me like Augustine by finding the spark of humanity in him that was always smothered by his brilliance.

This is the most tranquil end of the world book you will ever read. Highly Recommended!

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The Perdition Score (Sandman Slim #8) By: Richard Kadrey

The Perdition Score by Richard Kadrey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love this series, I ainttttttttt going to lie, I put things down to read a new Sandman Slim book. It's like old school noir books crossed with Dresden files tossed into a bag with Iron Maiden albums and old Thrasher magazines and shook up till everybody smells like old beer, apple fritters and sweat.

That glowing review aside, this isn't my favorite of the series...even not being the fav child..it still beats the brakes off most urban fantasy out today. It's fun from front to back and I want posters made out of the covers (whomever decided on making the recent installment covers like old movie posters deserves a raise)

GO buy this, and Mr Kadrey, you are gonna make me mad in book nine aren't You? (hate cliffhangers and sense a disturbance in the force)

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The Interminables By: Paige Orwin

The Interminables by Paige Orwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Note for review readers, I have a crashed computer so I am reviewing from a phone and tablet, so I may be more disjointed than usual, if that's possible.

I really enjoyed this story, it had most of the things I dig, interesting world, I really liked the main characters, it was a humorous story, and they had great interaction. My cons are very few, although I could tell where Ms Orwin was going with her tale, her writing style is a bit disjointed and might throw some people off. That being said, great fun read and I recommend it, (thanks to the overlords at Angry Robot for the ARC)

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A Perfunctory History of France

A Brief History of France by Cecil Jenkins
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm too damn familiar with British history, I told myself recently. Time to branch out!...My branch didn't stretch too far.

The histories of France and England are deeply entwined (which always seemed odd to me considering how very different are their people, language, food, etc), so reading about France's history wasn't exactly like taking a trip to another galaxy. Since declaring nationhood, their almost constant warring would always insure some old familiar atrocity to ground my sense of time and place.

With that kind of background knowledge in place, I wasn't looking for any especially thorough or comprehensive history on France and that's just what I got in A Brief History of France. Very brief. Not particularly thorough. That's all right! There's a place, time and person for this kind of history-quickie and I'm it!

The real problem with this book revealed itself fairly early. It's uneven. In chapter one, within a few slim pages, we get the entirety of human civilization in the French region summed up in the quick mention of some cave paintings recently discovered. There ya go, a nice tidy summation of a couple million years. Then it jumps directly into Roman Gaul with a page or so on Julius Caesar and Vercingetorix. With the whole Roman Empire and its rule over Gaul taken care of, we now move into Medieval France, where Charlemagne and the early chivalric knights roamed. And all those hundreds and thousands of years are, not only lumped in with all of prehistory, but it's all jammed together in one twenty page chapter. I was a little miffed, so I flipped ahead and discovered that the period after the second world war up to the present, approximately 70 years worth, takes up 100 pages and an entire third of the whole book! So yeah, as I said, this is uneven.

Another issue, and it's minor, is the casual tone. I don't think I've ever read a history text before that referred to a historical figure in terms of their "bitchiness".

War, huh yeah, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, you say Edwin Starr? Wrong! War is good for history books. That shit really fills the pages! It's all over this mother. I suppose that's not Cecil Jenkins' fault. I blame the French.

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FF, Vol. 1: Fantastic Faux

FF, Vol. 1: Fantastic Faux by Matt Fraction
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The new FF are struggling to hold down the fort. Bentley gets up to some mischief. The future Human Torch awakens and the future he's predicted draws nearer.

Ant-Man and company continue trying to fill the shoes of the Fantastic Four and go up against a leviathan, The Wizard, Blastaar, and The Inhumans but their biggest enemies seem to be themselves.

That might be stretching it a little but Matt Fraction and Mike Allred have created a throwback to the Fantastic Four of the 1960's, a bickering team that still feels like a family.

I dig Matt Fraction's writing. Maybe not as much as Dan Slott's on the Silver Surfer but he does a good job of writing something that works to Mike Allred's strengths and fits his art style. He also gets some mileage out of The Wizard and the Inhumans, something I don't think many writers do a good job of. I also like how he's planting seeds for the next volume while doing some good character development within the FF cast.

I really like what Matt Fraction is doing here and I'm keen to start the next volume. Four out of five stars.

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Conversation Hearts

Avon Gale
Dreamspinner Press
4 out of 5 stars
Reviewed by Nancy

Summary

It’s Valentine’s Day, and grad student—and male escort—Levi Barron expects to spend his evening with a client who’s paying him for his services in bed… not an assassin who needs to borrow the view from his hotel room in the morning.

With nothing to do but endure the company of his unwanted guest, Levi and the assassin, Sinjin, spend some time bonding over HGTV, minibar beverages, Flannery O’Connor short stories, terrible Valentine’s candy, and the necessity of lying about their jobs.

Their evening takes an unexpected turn when they decide to indulge in their mutual attraction, and in the morning Levi doesn’t know if he’s spent the night with a hired killer or a hydraulic engineer with a very specific fantasy. Either way, the two have enough chemistry—in and out of bed—that Levi isn’t sure one night with Sinjin will be enough.

And a message left in candy suggests the feeling is mutual.

My Review

I’m old and haven’t done a good job keeping up with pop culture, so had to look up the following:

- RedTube
- Pete Wentz
- Jason Statham
- Hot Topic
- Property Brothers
- Surface texture paste

That said, my lack of knowledge didn’t at all detract from my enjoyment of this story.

Levi Barron is poor graduate student working for an escort service. While waiting for a client who doesn’t show, Sinjin arrives. Sinjin is as surprised as Levi, because according to the hotel database he hacked into, the room was supposed to be empty. Having Levi around seriously puts a crimp in his assassination plans. Sinjin wasn’t planning to kill Levi, but he can’t very well let him leave, can he?

This is a fun, fast-paced and clever story that is hilarious and also ridiculously hot.

I loved the banter between the guys, the tension, the red boxer briefs with little hearts, and the chalky heart candies with words on them.

I’m thinking I might like to borrow Levi’s Surface texture paste. It may be less goopy than what I’m currently using.

Hope and Red

Hope & Red by Jon Skovron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bleak Hope is named after her village that was annihilated because of the Empire's biomancers. A legendary Vinchen warrior trains Hope in the Vinchen ways despite it being illegal to do so because she is a female. Rixdenteron is the son of a painter from a rich family and a male whore. He finds himself homeless when his parents die. He's taken in by a dangerous woman and renamed Red. Hope and Red come together to get vengeance on a ganglord and biomancers, but most specifically the biomancer who slaughtered Hope's village.

First I want to say I love warrior women. Perhaps it was because I watched a lot of Xena Warrior Princess as a child and she was the embodiment of a warrior. She battled gods and men alike and beat them down. That was absolutely what drew me to this book because who doesn't love a good warrior woman.

Hope and Red feels very much like a young adult novel. All the standard tropes apply. Special orphans and chance meetings with great people who almost inexplicably care for and train these youths. The YA fantasy mold is not broken or even bent here. So imagine the standard YA fantasy heroes and you have Hope and Red.

The chapters with Red were challenging for me from the beginning because of the massive amounts of slang used. Leaky, tom, mollie, slice, old pot, leeward, wag, and many other slang terms are squished into the lines in Red's chapters. There is a glossary, but after a little while it's unnecessary. That being said I wasn't overly fond of their slang.

The biomancers did present themselves as something unique from the rest of the story. These people use a mixture of magic and science to create living things from living things. Unfortunately rather than using criminals to further their research they use towns and villages for their experiments which is the crux of Hope's revenge tale. The biomancers are basically mad scientists that feel as if nothing is more important than their research. They seem to have the Emperor's permission to use seemingly whoever they wish to make new weapons to protect the Empire.

All in all Hope and Red was just an average YA fantasy book.

3 out of 5 stars

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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All-New Wolverine Vol. 1: The Four Sisters

All-New Wolverine, Vol. 1: The Four Sisters by Tom Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Laura Kinney X-23 was cloned from Wolverine in order to make the perfect army of killers. With Logan's help she escaped that life. After Logan's death, Laura has decided to take on his mantle as Wolverine.

Something devious is happening now. Laura learns that a science team has cloned her in hopes to fulfill the dream of an invincible army.

The sisters, as they are referred to, have escaped a facility and the head of the facility wants them back.

Four Sisters was a good but unspectacular first arc of The All-New Wolverine. I thought the first issue was outstanding, but I quickly found myself bogged down by the cloning story. It seemed insane that the science team that created clones from Laura's DNA would be dumb enough to involve her, but they did.

The character interactions are absolutely what helped me hold on to hope when the cloning story dragged. The sisters themselves were an odd bunch as they each developed varying personalities although they were raised in the same fashion.

Their interactions were interesting although I wasn't overly interested in them as characters. The next major interaction was between Angel and Laura. Their continuing relationship is intriguing to witness.

Angel doesn't want Laura to get hurt, but she is recklessly using her healing power to it's fullest.

The best relationship may have been Laura and her clone Gabby. Despite being trained to kill, Gabby has retained her innocence and she speaks to Laura like she's her pesky little sister.


In the end I'd say I love Laura Kinney and she is a remarkable Wolverine. I didn't love the story, but I imagine her arcs will be exciting in the future.

3.5 out of 5 stars


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MAN DROWNING BY HENRY KUTTNER

Man Drowning by Henry Kuttner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”Everything around was bleached dun, the color of a cow skull I’d seen stuck on a pole that morning on the road in, but there were shadings, from blinding, scalding, dry white to tawny earth, that had all the vigor sucked out of it ages ago by the Arizona sun. Everything was the color of something burned, even the black rope, which had the color of oily cinders. It moved itself from left to right across the woman’s throat with a slow disgusting motion. She put up a claw of a hand and rubbed its head with a finger that had skin coarser than the snake’s. I heard a dry scratching. The snake quieted. It hung there. Once its tongue flickered out. It was still.”


I’m very fortunate to have a 1st edition squirreled away in my library.

Nick Banning hits Phoenix with maybe two red hot dimes to rub together in his pocket. He can say he is just passing through, but what he is really in town for is to see his ex-wife, Sherry. She is making time with the owner of the club she sings in. When he hears the news, it is like someone jammed a railroad spike deep into his brain and impaled every good memory he ever had.

She was supposed to wait for him to get his shit together.

The problem is Sherry has done her time. The violence that is coiled like bands of barb wire around Nick’s muscles is always on the verge of unleashing. His razor lashed soul is leaking drops of insanity into his bloodstream. His anger is always so close to the surface it is amazing that he doesn’t glow like a lightning bug.

”’What are you really doing in Phoenix, Nick?’ She asked, without looking up.

‘Is that the way you want to play it?’

‘Stop it, Nick.’

‘I thought I was stopped. Till I saw you again.’

‘Then you’d better stop seeing me.’

I didn’t move. I watched the shiny black table and Sherry’s face, upside down.

She pushed the ash tray forward so that it covered the reflection.”

Nick takes a job with the De Anza’s, the Count and Countess. The Countess is like something long dead that has crawled out of a mummy’s tomb, with her bony skull and her red rimmed eyes. She is bored, bored, bored, and needs a constant source of entertainment. She plays the roulette wheel like she is playing with house money. She likes to hang a Kingsnake around her neck, snake scales slithering over human scales. *Shudder* She is loose with money in a way that people are who didn’t have to earn it. Her husband, the Count, can’t decide if he is sick of life or just already dead inside. He lays in bed with white paste on his face and dark sunglasses over his eyes. They deserve each other, but each is scheming to get away from the other.

Sherry doesn’t want Nick, but she needs $3,000.

Nick watches the Countess put $7,000 in cash in the floor safe.

7 will get you a lot further than 3.

The puzzling thing for Nick is always... did I do it or did I just dream it?

”Something made me look down. There on the seat beside me was the gun. Two of us together, the gun and I.

The car roared past the highway sign and the side road and kept on straight ahead. I knew where we are going. We were going to Sherry.”

This is hardboiled with a capital H. This is such a great example of the genre. I’m simply shocked that I am the first person on Goodreads to write a full review of this book. I won’t be the last. Centipede Press is putting out a limited edition of this book in the near future, which will hopefully create more interest in this lost classic of the genre. The De Anza’s are so bleeping creepy and crazy. Banning is a homemade bomb with a lit fuse and no timer. By putting these three people together, there is no chance that something horrible isn’t going to happen. The question is how high is the body count going to be?


The husband and wife team of Kuttner and Moore.

Interestingly enough, there are rumors in the trade that Cleve Cartmill actually ghost wrote this book to be published under Henry Kuttner’s name. I’m not an expert on Kuttner, but from what I’ve read about this book, it has Kuttner’s fingerprints all over it. Maybe Cartmill wrote the bulk of it, and Kuttner put the polish on it. Kuttner had a John Lennon/Paul McCartney type relationship with his wife, C. L. Moore. They collaborated on nearly every story they wrote, regardless of whose name it was published under. One would write and leave the typewriter, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, and then the other would step in and continue the story. It was a borg alliance of married writers.

Unfortunately the relationship was short lived; Henry Kuttner died from a heart attack at age 42.

If you like hardboiled noir, you have to read this one.

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A Collection of Jeeves' Work

Jeeves Takes Charge and Other Stories by P.G. Wodehouse
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's deja vu and there are actual repeats. I started reading Jeeves Takes Charge and Other Stories and it felt very familiar. That happens almost every time I read a Wodehouse, so I didn't think much of it. But by the second or third stories I realized I actually had read most, if not all, of what this collection has to offer.

And what does this collection have to offer? Well, for starters it includes one of my favorite Wodehouse lines: "She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season." There are plenty such gems. Here are the contents in summary with my two cents:

"Jeeves Takes Charge" was first published magazines in the United States in 1916 and in the UK in 1923. Odd that. After all, Wodehouse was English. Its first book publication was in 1925 in Carry on, Jeeves, a good solid starter in the Jeeves/Wooster line. Anywhoodle, this particular story is the one that introduces us to the amazing Jeeves, who swoops in, revives Wooster with one of his restorative pick-me-ups and is immediately hired as Wooster's gentleman's personal gentleman. It's a great mini version of nearly all the best stories that were to come involving this dynamic duo.

"Without the Option" is the story of how Wooster and a friend get done for misdemeanors, and Wooster feels bad enough for the position he's put his friend in that he goes to great lengths and personal embarrassment to right the situation...sort of. This is an excellent example of Wodehouse's oft used masquerade plots in which a character poses as someone else with the innocent intention of doing some good. Little good ever comes of it for the character. However, it usually comes with plenty of laughs for us readers.

"The Artistic Career of Corky" is one of Wodehouse's New York-based stories in which Wooster's struggling artist friend is in love with a chorus girl and at odds with his uncle. Never a fan of the NY stories and having read and seen a tv version this one numerous times, I skipped it this time.

"The Aunt and the Sluggard" is similar to the above story, in which an artistic friend (poet this time) named Rocky, who wishes nothing more than to live a lazy life, is forced into an unpleasant labor (unpleasant to him) and Wooster takes the burden upon himself. Everything seems shipshape until.... Another NY based story I really didn't enjoy as much as Wodehouse's England-based stories.

"Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" is about a blighted manchild being dropped into Wooster's life. It contains some excellent descriptives, especially at the start, which showcases the reason Wodehouse is much better read than seen. You don't want to miss out on Wooster's narration. This story makes me want to enter rooms with the greeting, "Hel-lo, allo-allo-allo-ALLO! What?"

"Jeeves and the Hard Boiled Egg" tells of the predicament one of Wooster's NY chums finds himself in and the clever scheme Jeeves cooks up to settle the matter. Knowing this one all too well, I skipped through it, but I can recommend it well enough. Short as it is, it packs some good punches, especially the jabs at Americans.

Once I figured out these were stories taken from another source I was ready to give it up. However, this was an audiobook (very well narrated by Alexander Spencer) and I was doing a longish drive, so why not speed down memory lane once more with some good old friends?



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