Star Crossed Lovers in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Saga:  Volume One

Written by Brian K. Vaughan

Illustrated by Fiona Staples

Published by Image Comics

Reviewed by Amanda
4 Out of 5 Stars









 

How to describe Saga? It's like someone took Firefly, coated it liberally in WTF, and sprinkled a little Quentin Tarantino on top. Yeah, it's some wonderfully messed up stuff.
 

The Family That Fights Together . . .

The planet Landfall is at war with one of its moons, known as Wreath. The indigenous people of Landfall seem reliant on technology and sport some nifty little insect-like wings, while the people of Wreath have horns (they may be my favorites as each character in the later issues has horns varying from rhino, to antelope, to ox--you get the idea) and are skilled in the use of magic. The war between these cultures has become an accepted part of life, the hatred of the enemy deeply ingrained in both species.

Now enter Marko and Alana, from Wreath and Landfall, respectively, who are ex-soldiers in this war. Defying their cultures, they have fallen in love and the birth of their newborn child, Hazel, has marked them for termination by basically everyone in the universe. Both have known violence and are adept at using it to protect each other and Hazel. On the run from the numerous assassins tracking them, they banter away like a married couple and slowly reveal the history that brought them to this juncture.

And now a convenient list of the absurdities that await the Saga reader, so you can gauge whether or not the "WTF" element is for you:

--a planet known as Sextillion that specializes in, you guessed it, sex, but not just any mundane sexual act; this place is like the Baskin Robins 31 flavors of sex
--prostitutes that consist of giant heads teetering on top of Rockette style legs
--a forest that actually grows rocketships
--a race of robots that have television screens for heads
--graphic sex scene featuring the aforementioned robots
--a topless assassin who is all woman (sans arms) from the waist up and all arachnid from the waist down
--the ghost of a teenage girl who must have suffered a gruesome death as she's nothing but hanging intestines from the waist down; naturally, she tags along as Hazel's "babysitter"
--and LYING CAT, my new favorite comic book character is a giant feline sidekick to The Will, one of the assassins contacted about offing Marko and Alana; Lying Cat can detect whether or not others are engaging in a bit of creative truth telling



Lying Cat Spots a Fib

While the base storyline is one we've read before, the execution is unlike anything I've ever read. Vaughan gleefully injects new and intriguing absurdities into the premise and it's really difficult to get a fix on where this sucker is going--but that's part of the great thing. The ride is so much fun that I really don't care. The artwork by Fiona Staples has a raw and edgy quality that suits the storyline perfectly.

I've been getting the monthly issues, which have the added benefit of a letters section in which Vaughan responds to reader letters. The results are often hilarious and I find myself looking forward to this section with the same anticipation I look forward to the storyline. 

Saga:  Volume Two

Written by Brian K. Vaughan

Illustrated by Fiona Staples

Published by Image Comics

Reviewed by Amanda
4 Out of 5 Stars











In the first 6 issues of Saga (which comprised volume 1 of the trade edition), Brian K. Vaughan threw in enough weird ass shit to keep me in a delightfully perpetual state of "what the hell was that?" So much so that I worried the inventiveness might eventually wear thin, begin to feel as though it's trying too hard (as I sometimes feel with China Mieville's Dial H), or simply create such a labyrinthine mythology that it's just not worth trying to puzzle it all out. The second 6 issues have definitely allayed those fears as they are as outrageous and genuine as the first story arc, losing none of the bat shit craziness or heart.

 

The Will and The Stalk: 
Lovers and Assassins

Hazel, the newborn daughter of Marko and Alana, continues to narrate the story of her parents from an unknown point in the future. Marko and Alana, both soldiers from two warring alien races, have a romance that reads like Romeo and Juliet on crack. On the run as fugitives from their respective races, they continue to search the universe for a safe place to live, love, and raise Hazel. But, alas, bounty hunters continue to plague them and, worst of all, the sudden appearance of ex-flames (an enraged Gwendolyn, Marko's one time fiancée) and in-laws (Marko's parents seek out their wayward child at the worst possible of times, complicating his escape with Alana).

This arc provides background on several significant characters, including how Marko and Alana met, as well as the history of the relationship between The Will and The Stalk, the star-crossed (and bad ass) bounty hunters hot on their trail. For those uninitiated to Brian Vaughan's work, however, be forewarned: there will be sex scenes, giants with pendulous scrotums, and enough deviant behavior to make Sodom and Gomorrah blush with shame. However, I also appreciate the maturity with which the relationships are portrayed--they're real without being romanticized. Saga works beautifully because of this and because of the huge debt the series owes to illustrator Fiona Staples. The work of any other artist could have made Vaughan's ideas too cartoonish, too over-the-top, but Staples's work is the right mesh of quirky and realistic that roots this world in an organic quality that gives it weight and authenticity.


Exemplary Illustrations by Fiona Staples
Give Saga a Raw Edginess

In short, I can't praise Saga highly enough. It's a testament to what comics can achieve when writers and artists are let off the leashes of pre-conceived, "safe" concepts and allowed to chase after their most vivid, fevered imaginings.

**Saga:  Volume 1 is available now.  Saga:  Volume 2 will be available on July 2.

AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS: Desire and Rage Among Men
DAVID MCCONNELL
Akashic Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In American Honor Killings, straight and gay guys cross paths, and the result is murder. But what really happened? What role did hatred play? What were the men involved really like, and what was going on between them when the murder occurred? American Honor Killings explores the truth behind squeamish reporting and uninformed political rants of the far right or fringe left. David McConnell, a New York-based novelist, researched cases from small-town Alabama to San Quentin's death row. The book recounts some of the most notorious crimes of our era.

Beginning in 1999 and lasting until the 2011 conviction of a youth in Queens, New York, the book shows how some murderers think they're cleaning up society. Surprisingly, other killings feel almost preordained, not a matter of the victim's personality or actions so much as a twisted display of a young man's will to compete or dominate. We want to think these stories involve simple sexual conflict, either the killer's internal struggle over his own identity or a fatally miscalculated proposition. They're almost never that simple.

Together, the cases form a secret American history of rage and desire. McConnell cuts through cant and political special pleading to turn these cases into enduring literature. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives come breathtakingly alive. The result is more soulful, more sensitive, more artful than the sort of "true crime” writing the book was modeled on. A wealth of new detail has been woven into old cases, while new cases are plumbed for the first time. The resulting stories play out exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of events—grisly, touching, disturbing, sometimes even with moments of levity.

My Review: It is no secret that I'm a leftist, anti-religion queer. I loathe the existence of the systems of "Rightness" that the murderers in these crimes use to justify their actions. The mere ability of a person to point to a bible and have any segment of society secretly or not-so-secretly justify or even agree with the heinous crime of murder is shameful to us as a society.

That said, it's still true. These accounts of the motives and actions of some seriously mentally ill young men, certain that they are Right and they are Correct in the actions, are enlightening and chilling.

I spent most of the time I read this book alternating between scaring my dog with loud, rasping screeches of outraged indignation that such stupidity is allowed to exist by this gawd person most of these boys, their families, and their communities profess belief in, and miserable, hopeless weeping of sympathetic pain at the agonies of loss, grief, and longing that the families, the parents, the loving friends of the murdered men will spend the rest of their lives experiencing, because the holey babble and its hellspawn idiot-friendly "culture" don't like the idea of men having sex with each other.

Who cares what you think? Did someone ask you? Drag your mind out of the prurient gutter of thinking about what other people do in their bedrooms.

McConnell has written a book as horrifying and as necessary as [In Cold Blood], and as likely to stand the test of time as a document of the consequences of sociopathic thinking. I can't recommend that you read it; but really, you should. Depressingly, most of you won't. It's not YOUR friend, brother, cousin, so why bother?

Because until people confront the horrible consequences of their smug, exclusionary language of "salvation" and the like, this won't be the last time a book like this is necessary.

I received a review copy of the book from Akashic Books.

Meet the Shelf Inflicted Staff - Sesana

Today's guest is Sesana.  She is allergic to all nuts except filberts.

How did you discover Goodreads?
I followed a link on a YA book blog. This was about two years ago, and I don't remember now which blog it was.

What have been your most memorable Goodreads experiences?
The first time I got a comment on one of my reviews from the author. Luckily, it was a nice, "thanks for reviewing" sort of thing. Getting the Shelf Inflicted blog up and running.

Name one reviewer not in the Forbes 25 that people should be aware of.
Toughest question, by far. There are tons of really talented reviewers on Goodreads. But since I can only name one, I'll say our own Carol. The fact that she wrote the About Us page on the blog has absolutely nothing to do with this. Really.

What was your initial reaction to Amazon buying Goodreads?
Cautious ambivalence, I guess. I knew it was possible that Amazon would destroy the site entirely, given time, and that the best case scenario would be that they would basically leave it alone. But since that's exactly what Amazon did with IMDB, I wasn't terribly concerned.

How many books do you own?
Since I do a lot of my reading through the library, not as many as you might think. I'd go completely broke if I had to buy everything I read! I probably have around 200 physical books, and close to 100 ebooks.

Who is your favorite author?
Victor Hugo, without a doubt.

What is your favorite book of all time?
Les Misérables. I actually took French in college because I wanted so badly to read it untranslated. That was doomed to failure. I've read it five times, and own every available English translation. There are very few books, very few pieces of media, that have touched me so deeply or lived with me so long. I love this book so much I can't even write coherently about it. Trust me when I say that it's beautiful beyond words, or at least beyond my ability to form words. And yes, I do love the musical every bit as much.

What are your thoughts on ebooks?
I'm finding that I like the idea of ebooks more than the reality. For me, clicking a button will never compare to turning a page. And yet I do love how compact it can make a library, the ready availability of free and cheap ebooks, and how it makes self-publishing much easier.

What are your thoughts on self-publishing?
The good thing is that it makes it easier for writers who aren't working within standard publishing house boxes to get their work out there. And more voices in the marketplace is good. Sure, there's a lot of dreadful books to wade through, but there's also a lot of dreadful books published by major publishing houses
.
Any literary aspirations? 
HAHAHAHA no. It's for the good of all, trust me.

What is your ideal super villain lair? 
An abandoned missile silo would make a fantastic lair. Cool history, unique architectural details, mostly underground and thus defensible... What else can you ask for in a lair?

And here's a website with some cool pictures with converted missile silos:
http://weburbanist.com/2010/07/25/nuclear-family-housing-life-in-a-missile-silo-home/

Love, Drugs, and Indie Rock

Claire Dewitt and the Bohemian Highway
Sara Gran
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Anthony Vacca's review: 4.5 out 5 stars

 

First and foremost, a shout-out to the good people over at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who did me a kindness and let me read this book a month in advance of publication, so that I in turn would, you know, write this review you are now allegedly reading. I can’t say if they are gonna be happy with the result of their trust (folly), but now it's too late for them to stop me.

 Ladies and germs, welcome to my review of Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway.

This is a sequel to Sara Gran’s first entry in her series—a series that she promises will be no longer than three books, as in a trilogy, as in this is the next to last book in the series, as in you need to read the first book before this one if you really want to enjoy all the joys there are to be had in this book, as in you really needed me to expound on that point, as in I love having complete control of this review and making this sentence so unnecessarily long with its very loose use of correct punctuation—and that first entry I was talking about, by the way—before my digression from the very simple task of finishing one lousy prepositional phrase (which this in turn is also effectively doing)—is the wonderful hard-boiled gem of a book Claire De Witt and the City of the Dead.

 In the first book we met the eccentric but dangerous Claire DeWitt, one of the world’s greatest detectives. Her unusual methods for solving mysteries comes from her devotion to a nearly mystical book called Détection which was penned by an illustrious French private detective before his slip into the bitterness and despair that claimed the last years of his life. Oh, and Claire did a whole lot of drugs, which seemed to help, I guess. It certainly made it easier for her to make surreal dream-like associations between the different clues that came her way and that actually produced results.

 But Claire’s substance abuse served a much greater purpose than making the book just stand out as edgy or what have you, and this is because Sara Gran understands exactly the profound personal effect a first-person private detective novel can carry. In City of the Dead we were given quick glimpses into Claire’s personal life, before she temporarily but effectively stuffed the cracks full with drugs and alcohol. And what we saw was a woman with a deep well of sorrow, built brick by brick with self-loathing.

And in The Bohemian Highway we start really getting our chance to climb down that well and see how lonely and miserable a person Claire is when she is not at work on a case. The trouble here for Claire is that her case this time is inescapably personal.

Paul Casablancas was a fairly successful musician living in San Francisco. He and his wife, Lydia, who is also a talented musician, were local celebrities in the indie music scene and punk-rock circles. They were the end-all-be-all cool kids couple. But then someone broke into their ridiculously expensive house one night and shot Paul dead. The police are thinking it must have been some kind of robbery gone sour on account of the five guitars missing from Paul’s personal collection. But Claire has a hard time believing that because Claire has a hard time believing anything when it comes to this murder, especially that the world is now a place where Paul Casablancas no longer exists. The thing of it is, Paul is the only person Claire was really ever truly in love with.

So Claire decides that she is going to figure out what really happened to Paul. And she is also going to start doing a shit-ton of cocaine so she doesn’t have to think about herself thinking about Paul. The second of these two activities is very telling in regards to the first. Claire has no illusions about justice; she knows that finding Paul’s killer will do nothing to bring Paul back, or make up for any of the mistakes she assures herself she is guilty of having committed. The most important crime of all being that she wouldn’t let herself open up to Paul or any other human being for that matter.

This is the groundwork for one of the more impressive aspects of this novel: as in any good private detective mystery, Claire has to do a lot of footwork and talk to a lot of people. Every person she questions—all the devastated friends, band mates, past lovers—all feel the loss of Paul in their own humanly impossible to understand ways; which is to say that no one can ever know exactly how much loss fucking hurts another person. But Claire is determined to feed off their emotions in attempt to keep her rotting memories and feelings towards Paul resembling something like life.

And as the case seems to proceed no further along towards any kind of revelation, Claire begins to ruminate on a particular missing person case she worked as a teenager in New York City. These recollections serve a two-fold purpose. One, it acts as a sub-plot that intersects the chapters of the main narrative; and Two, the memories allow Claire to wallow in even more misery due to the fact that this missing person case was one of the last times she ever saw her best friend Tracy. Tracy’s disappearance was a case Claire never solved and further compounded her extreme sense of abandonment and self-loathing. And as we watch Claire in the present continually abusing her body with cocaine at an alarming rate, these scenes of a younger and more naïve Claire help to create the overwhelming sense of loss that permeates throughout every page of this book.

These two plot threads come to powerful and emotionally-energized conclusions that, for this sad bastard of a reader, left an ache in that thing we all call our heart. And as this book reaches its final pages, Gran makes her only misstep for me. She ends the book with a cliff-hanger that seems pretty non-sequitur even for a novel that is dreamy and ethereal as much as it is nasty and vicious. I am no fan of cliff-hangers stuck on the end of a book just for the sake of making you cough up the cash the next time a new book comes around. So even though this one fault kept me from making this a 100 % rabid rave review, I still found Claire De Witt and the Bohemian Highway a fantastic read for fans of mysteries as well as good-old fashioned literature. Sara Gran packs her pages with quirky and painful insights about love and trying to reach out to other people that kept me highlighting the electronic pages of my ARC again and again. And yeah, I’ll definitely be waiting to see how things turn out in a year or two when Claire makes her curtain-call in the third book in this trilogy.
Or maybe, hopefully, Claire will be back for more and more. She’s a great character and one of my favorite private detectives. So here’s for me holding out in my belief that all writers are liars. And they’re the worst kind of liars, too. They make you believe them every time.

So let me steal an idea from my friend Dan, and give this review 4 out of 5 happy stars with one cocaine-bloodied nose of a half-star passed out at the end.

Also posted on GoodReads

The Questing Knights of the space-time contiunuum

Neverness

David Zindell

Harper Collins

Reviewed by: Terry
4  out of 5 stars

 

This is a really enjoyable 'big idea' science fiction novel that takes place millenia in our future on the planet Icefall, also called Neverness. It's kind of _Dune_ meets Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_ with high level mathematics, posthumanism, and trippy metaphysics thrown in.

The story follows the life of Mallory Ringess, a trainee enrolled at "the Academy" that was founded by a pseudo-monastic order of truth-seekers called 'the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame' hoping to become a pilot. Now in this day and age a pilot is a very special kind of beast who combines the aspects of a theoretical mathematician with those of a questing knight. Using advanced mathematics the pilots are able to navigate within the manifold, a kind of hyperspace that links all parts of the universe, but whose dangers can lead the untrained or the unwary to get lost in the tangled skeins of space-time. The pilots are thus a special breed. They are men and women who live for the precarious dangers of the manifold and who search, quixote-like, for the proof of the elusive Continuum Hypothesis which would allow a pilot to fall from any point in the universe to any other without the complicated mathematical mappings normally required to traverse hyperspace.

It is also a quest for godhood as the pilots search for the secrets known as the Elder Eddas. These secrets are said to allow beings to transcended their mortality and become gods of one sort or another, and the galaxy is sparsely populated with some of these dangerous and unknowable superbeings, former humans whose consciousness is now housed in nebulae or moon-sized computers. This dangerous life has brought about the motto of the pilots: "Journeymen die", for it is few pilots who ever survive to their mastership.

The world Zindell creates is a fascinating one full of strangeness and wonder. Mallory is an interesting character, equal parts idealistic dreamer and pompous ass. His best friend Bardo is even more entertaining...a figure equal parts Falstaff and Porthos. The story bogged down a bit for me in the middle where Mallory and his fellow searchers look for the Elder Eddas among the Alaloi, a group of humans who had 'carked' their flesh and minds to become like the Neanderthals of earth in rejection of the advanced technology used by the other people of Neverness. Overall, however, this is a great tale, bursting at the seams with crazy-awesome ideas that leave a lot of food for the imagination.

Recommended.

Also posted at Goodreads

The Forbes 25 Reviewers - #21 Lady Danielle the Book Huntress

Today's guest is Lady Danielle the Book Huntress.  She also posts at Danielle's Book Thoughts.

How did you discover Goodreads? 
Someone on the Amazon romance forum mentioned it as a good site for book lovers. I love chatting with other booklovers and I don’t have many friends in real life who are avid readers like me, so I jumped on the opportunity. Now, it’s an obsession for me.

What have been your most memorable Goodreads experiences? 
That would be hard! I’ve had so many interesting experiences in the almost five years I’ve been on the site.

Name one reviewer not in the Forbes 25 that people should be aware of. 
I, Curmudgeon—he always writes thoughtful reviews.

What was your initial reaction to Amazon buying Goodreads? 
I don’t have a strong opinion about it. I am hoping they will have the option to import books that I buy off Amazon because I’m lazy. :)

How many books do you own? 
Over five thousand. It’s hard to do an exact count because I’d have to go through all my bookshelves and books to do that, and I haven’t had the time or energy to do so. Plus I continue to acquire more books...

Who is your favorite author? 
Anne Stuart, who writes romance with a dark edge. I want to have every book she ever written in my collection.

What is your favorite book of all time? 
That’s a tie between Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase

What are your thoughts on ebooks? 
They are a good adjunct to my paper book reading. I think they help to expand the available books because indie authors can more easily break into the publishing game. I like that books that are out of print are becoming available as ebooks. And I like when I can get good books for very cheap prices.

What are your thoughts on self-publishing? 
I think it’s a good thing because it allows more writers to get their books out, but it’s a double-edged sword. Self-publishing has a stigma because there are many poorly edited and unpolished works out that should have been more stringently edited before they arrive under the public eye. As a result, many roll their eyes when they hear about a self-published author/book, thinking it will live down to the reputation.

Any literary aspirations? 
I love to write. One day I will actually get something I wrote published. :)

Locke & Key

by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez

VOLUME 1: WELCOME TO LOVECRAFT

oooooo.... an eerie old mansion on a woody estate, strange mysteries and dangerous secrets, a tangled and forgotten past, a san francisco family of three - father slain - seeking a new life on an island named Lovecraft off the coast of massachusetts, in a place called The Keyhouse. a beautiful girl who lives at the bottom of a well, an insane killer on the hunt for magical keys, doors that open into odd places, walk through one door and change your gender, walk through another door and turn into a ghost... who knows what else? the mysteries multiply. awesome!

the art is excellent: a muted kind of vivid, smooth and professional, with a sometimes whimsical but basically realistic approach to illustrating the characters. and the writing is even better. characterization and narrative feel carefully honed, sketched with smaller strokes, intimate details parsed out slowly, the mysteries unfolding at an even pace, flashbacks that adroitly serve to both increase suspense and to render each character completely understandable, the narrative sinister and endearing and magical all at once - and always compelling both the quick turn of the page and the more contemplative search for hidden meaning in past pages.

i really enjoyed this one a lot. i wish i had read it on Halloween. or on a rainy day in a creaky mansion on an island off of massachusetts. heaven!

***

VOLUME 2: HEAD GAMES

oooooo..... more eerie adventures on that strange island in that creepy Keyhouse with that poor, haunted family. wonderful! while the first book was focused on slowly bringing the family and the reader into this fascinating world - introducing a handful of magical keys, throwing out a few hints of the incredible backstory, setting up a confrontation between the family and both a dreadful psycho & a creepy spirit villain - the second book zooms in on one particular key and one particularly fertile concept.

the key in question is fascinating: it gives you the ability to unlock your own head, put things into it (like a textbook! who needs to study? just pop that baby right into the box and all the answers are instantly available), and take things out as well (like bad memories... like fear... like an ability to feel sadness or doubt or even cry). and how this is exactly accomplished is one of the most enjoyable and rather jaw-dropping conceits of Head Games. i literally gasped out loud, then laughed and laughed and laughed. awesome.

Head Games is a lot more than just a perfectly realized and fairly unique idea. it takes that idea and expands upon it, in a truly literary style. no, scratch that, not "literary"... this is a graphic novel and the artist Gabriel Rodriguez is an equal partner in the undertaking. his art is wondrous. the word that comes most immediately to mind is limpid. Head Games deals with a lot of cloudy, ambiguous, mysterious goings-on and the art illustrates these mysteries with a clarity that is nearly hallucinatory. does that make any sense? a kind of hallucinogenic, so-real-it's-stylized pellucidity.

but back to what i was saying. what makes Joe Hill such a strong writer is that he doesn't just unveil his gem of an idea and leave it there. he expands upon it, he works through it: what the inside of a person's imagination may look like (some extraordinary details there), how someone's fears and emotions can both hold them back and make them who they are, how we are controlled by our memories of different events and how those memories may differ from reality, how different people engage in different ways with their own personas, and more. a lot of food for thought. it is exciting to see how Hill plays with his ideas while keeping them carefully rooted in an astute, clear-eyed view of how our emotions rule us - how the human mind actually works.

all that plus the stories of two very different but equally tragic supporting characters, a villain who is slippery & cunning & menacing & yet terrifically real, a well-developed gay character, an increasingly intriguing backstory, and some very endearing kid protagonists.

***

VOLUME 3: CROWN OF SHADOWS

oooooo... the eeriest of the eerie, The Crown of Shadows! and what exactly is a crown of shadows? well, the wearer of this fell crown becomes the Dread Lord of All Shadows. and what exactly does that mean? well, shadows become solid and are now at your beck & call - to dance, to fight, to search for magic keys, to battle man and woman (and poor little children and headstrong teenagers as well), to wreak havoc and to bring down terror amongst your enemies. i want one! i can think of a lot of things i could accomplish with this nifty crown.

dark, devious, delicate, occasionally despairing, often delightful... this fourth installment in the Locke and Key series is yet more imaginative, high-quality adventure. kudos, creators! this series is surely one of the finest achievements in graphic novels birthed in the new millenium. the art is typically splendid - vivid, beautifully colored, often happily surprising. the sight of a giant-sized Tyler opening up the Key House like it was a dollhouse - opening it up from the inside - was worth the price of admission. just as well-done: a marvelous opening battle between two swirling ghosts (with two very different agendas).

Joe Hill's writing remains top-notch. this volume has less characterization than previous volumes and often feels like a non-stop whirl of action. all of that is accomplished perfectly. but he remains a writer of depth; in between and during the adventures, we see Kinsey continue to form tangible, supportive, rather off-beat friendships and we continue to see the impact of her literal removal of the ability to feel either fear or sadness. rather a mixed bag, that. we also see the drunken mother... remain a drunken mother. not a whole lot of wish fulfillment there. the mother is sympathetic, sad, pathetic, and monstrous - all at once.

***

VOLUME 4: KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

oooooo... the eeriest of rollercoaster rides, a rush of images, sinister vistas zooming in and out of view, unreal tableau cascading pell-mell, willy-nilly, hurly-burly: an homage to Bill Watterson, a bloody battle between birds and wolves; racial dismay and distortion in an insane asylum; a hockey loss, a greenhouse comes alive, sprouting wings, battling chains, battling squirrels, a death-tune, the end of friendships, battling teddy bears, battling friends, the worst way to win at hockey; an homage to EC Comics, soldiers in battle, a ghost with an agenda and an autistic child, a "philososcope"; a long-awaited confrontation, the return of a terrible tune, a terrible death, a terrible transformation... Hill (brilliant writing) and Rodriguez (brilliant art) unleash everything at once and the effect is wonderfully disorienting, the carefully scattered puzzle pieces begin uniting in mad spurts, the slow pace moves into fast-forward, everything comes together, everything falls apart... my hands gripped this volume too tightly, my eyes wide, my mouth agape, my brain began to hurt...

***

VOLUME 5: CLOCKWORKS

oooooo..... eerie backstory time! and the infernal force behind it all is... and this is no spoiler because hey check out the title of the first volume... CTHULHU! of course. i've been waiting for that title to have real relevance. ah, Cthulhu. ::happy sigh::

well maybe not Cthulhu specifically (rest in peace), but one of his siblings: that fetid pool of unlife, the "she-goat of a thousand young"... Shub-Niggurath! yay!

this is another superb volume in the superb series. this one is all about the reasons why and the how things happened and the when - most importantly, the when. the featured key takes you back in time to witness various important events. we get to see revolutionary america. we get to see the dead father of our young protagonists, when he and his peers were about their age. we get to see lots of things.

[Enter Positive Comments Here]. i can say nothing about this series that hasn't been said before, by me and by many others. it is brilliant. the dynamic characterizations, the layered mysteries, the sadness and melancholy and loss and sense of wasted potential and wasted lives, the feeling of a grand adventure gone terribly wrong, the genuine sympathy that Hill creates for his vividly depicted cast, all the subtlety and nuance... all there, intact. the art is just as wonderful. i love it! across the board, no complaints.

***

GUIDE TO THE KNOWN KEYS
&
GRINDHOUSE

 

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

one-shots

oh these

awesome

one-shots

picture if you will a sick child. the child is brave, the child is sweet, the child is loved. the child longs for adventures his frail little body will never allow him. the child will die in agony. picture if you will a father. if you were the father to such a child, what would you do? you are a father who has done things, who can do things, magic things. and yet there is no magic cure. but perhaps you can do something yet. create a fantasia, create a perfect childworld. bring back ghosts from the past. take your child backstage of the world's theatre and show him that there is wonder there too. take your precious child to the moon, and beyond!

picture if you will a home invasion. a trio of scumbags, each one worse than the last. they truck in death - murder and rape and molestation; they deserve death themselves. picture a happy home waiting to be invaded and picture a happy family of sitting ducks. does this make you anxious? never fear! the home is The Keyhouse. the family is armed with keys. Magic Keys! pity instead the hapless home invaders. no, scratch that. rejoice in their destruction! it is well-earned and especially tasty.

Hill constructs a sweet and ever so sad fable in the first - a paean to what can never be and what may still be, in dreams, in a father's hopes and fears for his child, in places a child may go but never return. Rodriguez matches him with art that is by turns winsome, grounded, and just a little bit phantasmagorical.

Hill creates a vivid and visceral tale full of mordant humor in the second. you've seen these characters before, in cheap grindhouse films. here they are placed in a new setting, The Keyhouse - but with all of your typical grindhouse film's jacobean-revenge-drama-writ-small nastiness left intact. Rodriguez matches him with art that is influenced by film noir and low-budget horror movies and, of course, ugly grindhouse cheapies.

good stuff!

The Bastard Son of Travis McGee - George Pelecanos' Spero Lucas

While he only takes 40% of the recovered property rather than half, Spero Lucas seems to be the spiritual successor to John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee character, transporting the salvage consultant concept from the seedy underbelly of Florida to the mean streets of Washington DC.  The fact that Spero Lucas is adopted could make him the actual bastard son of Travis McGee rather than just a figurative one.

The Cut by George Pelecanos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When an imprisoned drug dealer hires Spero Lucas to find out who's been stealing his product, Spero takes the case. Can Spero recover the stolen weed and collect his forty percent?

The Cut is a breezy crime tale that reads as smoothly as an Elmore Leonard. Pelecanos makes Washington DC as much of a character as Leonard does with Detroit and Miami. Spero Lucas is a compelling lead, an ex-marine who works as an investigator. The drug case he's taken quickly spirals out of control. However, the case wasn't as interesting to me as Spero himself.

Spero's a complicated man and no one understands him but his woman. Or maybe I'm thinking of someone else. At any rate, I liked the idea of an Iraq war veteran who's having trouble adjusting to normal life. His tastes in food and Jamaican music further endeared him to me. The guys he goes up against are pretty well drawn as well, particularly the Holley family. Pelecanos' bad guys have relatively reasonable motivations and come off as real people rather than caricatures.

One thing I really liked was that Spero's brother is an English teacher and has his students read crime books, like Richard Stark's The Hunter and Unknown Man #89 by Elmore Leonard. That's a class I would have loved taking back in the day. Spero listening to Ernest Ranglin and King Tubby also sweetened the deal the for me.

That's about all I have to say. If I had to complain about something, it would be that I wanted the book to be about twice as long. I'll be reading more Pelecanos in the near future.

The Double by George Pelecanos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While trying to clear a man for the murder of his mistress, Spero Lucas takes on another case, the case of a painting stolen by a woman's former lover. Further complicating things is a love affair Spero is having with a married woman. Can Spero recover The Double and survive his new lady love with his health intact?

First, the official business. I got this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for reviewing it. This new Kindle is quickly paying for itself.

The first Spero Lucas book, The Cut, was also my first George Pelecanos. Since then, I've read the Nick Stefanos trilogy and the first two books in the DC Quartet. Pelecanos really does like his heroes damaged, doesn't he?

As in the first book, Spero Lucas is a Gulf War vet with some trouble adjusting to civilian life. He makes his living recovering stolen property for people in exchange for 40% of the value. The Double, the painting of the title, will net him 80 large should he manage to recover it. That's a thick slice of pizza. The addition of his love affair with Charlotte really sets this one above most other detective stories. When a ladies man like Spero falls for a woman, he falls hard. I found myself empathizing with him while he was waiting for her to call him.

The villains of the piece, Billy Hunter and his cronies, were reprehensible pieces of garbage and I couldn't wait for Spero to catch up with them. The thing that keeps this from becoming a mindless actionfest is that Spero has a lot of soul searching moments and a lot more baggage from his time as a marine than originally displayed. Not that he can't dish out the violence. The final fist fight in this one is among the most brutal I've ever read.

The Double was a little lighter on musical references but it still hit all the sweet spots for me and my unconventional tastes, namely Ernest Ranglin and numerous mentions of dub records. I like that Pelecanos brought back much of the supporting cast of the first book. I'll be sad once he starts picking them off.

To sum up, I liked this just as much as the The Cut. It's top notch and I'm reading for another Spero Lucas novel. Get writing, George!

Meet the Shelf Inflicted Staff - Arbie Roo (aka Robert)

Today's guest is everyone's favorite sombrero-wearing hedgehog, Arbie Roo

How did you discover Goodreads?

A friend of mine sent me a link to it.

What have been your most memorable Goodreads experiences?

Possibly everything connected to reading The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose whilst others tried and failed or finished way ahead of me. Even (in fact way) harder than the Feynman Lectures Vol.3. What’s a Lie Algebra again? What’s sheaf cohomology again? And why doesn’t Penrose know about orbital spin?! And General Relativity is only proved to conserve energy/momentum/angular momentum for asymptotically flat cases!!!

Seemingly endless arguments about the Weak Anthropic Principle with Manny.

Being shocked to find people “voting” for my reviews.

Name one reviewer not in the Forbes 25 that people should be aware of.

Nikki.

  What was your initial reaction to Amazon buying Goodreads?

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh! The Horror!

 How many books do you own?

Dunno, over a thousand almost certainly.

Who is your favorite author?

Ursula K. LeGuin

What is your favorite book of all time?

The Farthest Shore byUrsula K. LeGuin

What are your thoughts on ebooks?

I wish they weren’t platform dependent; that stifles competition and tends towards monopolisation of the market.

What are your thoughts on self-publishing?

What’s the difference, these days?

Any literary aspirations?

I’m a published author but I don’t expect many people are interested in such titles as, “Correlation between Scintillation Indices and Gradient Drift Wave Amplitudes in the Northern Polar Ionosphere” and “Imaging Meso-scale Ionospheric Structures.”

 My Evil Villain Lair:

This Watson Wears A Mini-Skirt

Elementary - Season One

CBS

3 out of 5 stars.

By Kemper

There are some mild general spoilers to Elementary’s first season, but I have avoided giving away any of the really juicy details.

How many filmed versions of Sherlock Holmes can one generation watch?

It seems like someone is seriously trying to answer that question. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law have been portraying Holmes and Watson as steampunkish action heroes in a couple of movies by director Guy Ritchie.   The BBC’s critically acclaimed Sherlock has Benedict Cumberbatch playing the detective in modern London with Martin Freeman as his blogging Doctor Watson.  Holmes had even been reinvented as a grumpy pill addicted doctor who solved medical mysteries instead of crimes in Fox’s long running House M.D.

Since CBS has been dominating the TV ratings in recent years with a schedule filled with police procedurals, a series about one of the best known fictional detectives of all time was a natural fit, but it also seemed like it’d be a watered down version, if not an outright rip-off, of Sherlock.  However, there’d be some differences between the two like setting the show in America and giving Watson a sex-change operation.

In Elementary, Sherlock Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) is a recovering drug addict who has moved from London to New York.  Holmes’ estranged and wealthy father has hired a sober companion to keep Sherlock off the needle.  Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) was a surgeon who quit after she accidently killed a patient and became a live-in drug counselor who moves into Holmes’ brownstone to help keep him clean.  Holmes shows off his brilliant deduction skills by solving crimes as a consulting detective for the NYPD’s Captain Gregson (Aidan Quinn).

While the idea of a Watson being a sober companion was a clever twist, the series didn’t seem like anything special in the early episodes.  Predictably, Holmes and Watson clash with Sherlock resenting having a full-time baby-sitter, and Watson irritated at his arrogance and eccentricities. The show seemed like many other CBS procedurals that revolved around bizarre crimes with just enough red herrings to temporarily throw Holmes off the scent, but he’d still always be able to identify the criminal by the end of the episode. 

While Miller was doing an interesting interpretation of Holmes and the dynamic between him and Liu was fun, there wasn’t much else going on to make Elementary stand out from any other crime-of-the-week show.  However, as the season progressed and the show gained confidence, it steadily built up the character stories that added new layers to the show.

Over the course of the season we learned of the tragic reason why Holmes took to drugs and left London. The revelations coming out of this led to a much more likeable and sympathetic Sherlock than we usually get.  The foundation of this was Miller’s performance.  Rather than sticking to a strict Arthur Conan Doyle original version like Cumberbatch brilliantly does by playing Holmes as so arrogant and aloof so that he sees himself as above normal human concerns, Miller’s Holmes has distinct touches of compassion and empathy.  His arrogance and insistence on trying to look at everything logically is a mask he wears to conceal his own emotional damage, and Miller deliberately lets the mask slip every now and then to let us get a glimpse of the wounded person behind the brilliant detective image.

This particularly comes out in his interactions with Watson.  Rather than treating her as an audience to applaud his brilliance, this Holmes genuinely respects Watson and her opinions. For her part, Joan finds herself increasingly intrigued by Holmes and his methods.  When her time as his sober companion ends fairly early in the season, Holmes offers to teach Watson how to become a detective, and to her own amazement, she accepts. It feels like the beginning of a partnership and while Holmes often delights in tormenting Watson with his training methods, Joan is there as an equal, not someone to worship and document Holmes’ accomplishments.  (The show’s producers have also been smart enough to keep their relationship completely platonic with no hint of romantic tension.  Knock wood that they keep thinking that way.)

This was steady improvement for a freshman show, but the best came in the twelfth episode M. Vinnie Jones portrayed a brutal serial killer that Holmes had failed to catch in London with disastrous results.  When M. comes to New York and starts killing more people, Holmes goes off the deep end on a mission of revenge without regard to the consequences, and we got to see a very different and angry side of Sherlock.  The fall out from this episode lingered over the second half of the season and it set-up the terrific season finale in which Holmes finally confronts his greatest enemy as well as a fair number of personal demons.

So while Elementary’s first season occasionally got bogged down in trying to come up with puzzling crimes in stand-alone episodes that just weren’t that compelling, the performances of Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu helped keep interest alive until the show could introduce some serialized elements that tapped into Holmes lore and put fresh new spins on them.  Hopefully the second season will continue that trend this fall.