Nice and Easy...with a Convoluted Plot

Blonde Faith by Walter Mosley
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another solid addition to the Easy Rawlins series.

I've read books from three of Walter Mosley's series and private detective Rawlins is so far my favorite character. He's old shoe comfort, easy like Sunday morning, and a good mix of thoughtful and tough. His courage makes sense and his honor is admirable.

I really like that these books are set just after LA's Watts riots of '65 when the city was in racial tumult. It adds tension to just about every scene.

Blonde Faith has a more convoluted plot than others in the series that I've read and I dug it. It played well off of Easy's concerns for his family.

Strongly recommended.

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Easy on the Hippies

Little Green: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins series is one of my "comfort food" reads. And it's not even a guilty pleasure like so many of my other comfort reads, because Mosley is a damn good writer and he's got it all going on with these books! I love the characters, setting, pacing, plotting...it's all good!

It's the late 60s in LA. Hippy culture is everywhere, but the peace and love message that started in San Francisco has got mixed up with weirdos, drugs and crime down in the City of Angels. Black detective and WWII vet Rawlins is just getting over a very serious car accident that put him out of commission for two months. He comes in and out of a coma like a junkie trying to get clean. Everything's a bit hazy at best.

As a favor for a friend, he goes looking for a missing young man on the Sunset Strip and comes into contact with all manner of colorful characters. You can tell Mosley is having fun reliving his memories of LA during this period. I believe he was finishing up high school in South Central at the time all this would have taken place. Much of his past has been poured into this series.

Little Green, the 12th Rawlins book, keeps this beautiful soul train rolling down the tracks. It's so very solid, yet it's not without fault. For one, the "mystery" is solved halfway through, and yet the story keeps going. Yes, there are reasons for it, but it does give a reader a strange feeling when you're midway through and you've essentially already arrived at the end, only to be told there's a new destination and you've got to keep going. But it's a minor quibble, because having to read more of this glorious writing is no chore!

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Fungoid

Fungoid by William Meikle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When a horrible rain falls, ravenous fungus infects anyone it touches. Can Shaun make his way across Canada to reunite with his family before the fungus consumes the world?

Fungus and its life cycle have held a fascination for me since my first morel hunt and fungal fiction like City of Saints and Madmen holds a place in my heart. Fungoid now joins them in my chest cavity.

It started simply enough with rain, rain that burned and unleashed some kind of super fungus that consumed everything organic. The end of the world has arrived and it is by fungus. Imagine not being able to let a drop of rainwater touch you or you'll die horribly. That's the gist of things, at first, anyway.

Meikle uses several viewpoint characters to show how the fungoid chaos has spread across Canada. There are a couple hazmat guys, a mycologist, a woman taking care of her sons and the man on his way home to them. Some characters live and some die.

It's not until the fungus starts fruiting that the crazy shit really starts, when the fungus starts using its adaptations to kill even more people. I'll keep things vague but things went from bad to worse very quickly.

Fungoid is a survival horror tale somewhat reminiscent of John Wyndham's "cozy catastrophres," although there's nothing cozy about it. It's Fungin' great! Four out of five stars.

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Amid the Darkness

Leslie Lee Sanders
Self-Published
Reviewed by Nancy
3 out of 5 stars

Summary

Weeks after an asteroid strikes Earth, hurling Elliot and Adam into a fight for their survival, the two take shelter in an underground compound known as Refuge Inc. Shaking their past seems impossible as it comes back to haunt them, weakening the foundation of their relationship. Elliot, hung up on guilt over his former actions, tries to right his wrongs which leads him face-to-face with the troubling secrets of the compound. Adam's run-in with the enigmatic prophet makes him question Refuge Inc. and the survivors' future.

Working together to uncover the mysteries of Refuge Inc. not only reveals much about the sunless world beyond the compound walls, but exposes the truth about the compound's occupants … including themselves.

If their haunting pasts continue to dominate, it will steer them directly into a miserable future and their companionship will forever suffer. Either way, they are forced to prepare for the ultimate fight for survival.  Can they fight together and make it out on top?

My Review

This is the second story in the Refuge, Inc. series and I liked it quite a bit better than the first. Adam and Elliot are now living in Refuge, Inc., an underground bunker designed to protect people from the devastation outside. Adam and Elliot provide their names, occupations, and hand over their meager possessions to a man in white. Pets are not allowed, however, so Titan is taken away to the canine nursery.

The doors are closed, and Adam, Elliot and hundreds of frightened and injured survivors are given medical care, assigned pods and given duties based on their previous occupations and experience. Elliot is in food service and preparation and Adam is in law enforcement. No one needed to know that in his previous life he was really a dancer who dressed as a cop.

Life at Refuge, Inc. sounds too good to be true, and it is. There are plenty of characters here with devious motives and bad intentions. There was the prophet, a strange guy who Adam saved from being stabbed. There was Patrice, the woman who tried to stab him. There was Tami and her friend, Anita, who were the first survivors that Adam and Elliot met. There was also Jena, Adam’s fiancée who abandoned him, and the mysterious Mason.

I enjoyed the heavy focus on the plot – the mystery, suspense, action. I liked the variety of interesting secondary characters and the growth and development of Adam and Elliot. Elliot is less needy, whiny and more understanding. He is willing to back off and let Adam make his own relationship decisions and instead becomes more focused on the events within the compound. Adam gradually becomes more open and learns to accept himself. Both men are more mature and responsible, and the love they feel for each other continues to grow.

Though I enjoyed this story overall and it ended well for our heroes (and Titan), I don’t feel a need to continue on with the series.

Black Bolt vol. 1 Hard Time

Black Bolt, Vol. 1: Hard Time by Saladin Ahmed
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Black Bolt wakes to find himself caged and chained.

He is in the very prison he intended for Maximus, but he learns even his treacherous brother doesn't deserve such a cage. Black Bolt must find a way to escape without his powers and with whatever allies he can find, including the Absorbing Man Crusher Creel.


Hard Time was a bit of a let down. It didn't truly delve into any aspect of Black Bolt. It's rare for him to be able to speak, but rather than him saying or thinking anything interesting he's largely acting kingly. This is funny considering his long ordeal through Inhuman and Uncanny Inhumans that saw him abdicating the Inhuman throne. I guess old habits are hard to break.

The story is straight forward once the scene is set. Black Bolt and the others are in an inescapable prison that is no longer the prison it was intended to be. It's a place of torture, death, and rebirth. The protagonists spend all their time working on escaping.

Hard Time felt unnecessary and didn't feel compelling at all.

2.5 out of 5 stars

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THE MAN WHO CAME UPTOWN BY GEORGE PELECANOS

The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”When he read a book, the door to his cell was open. He could step right through it. He could walk those hills under the big blue sky. Breathe the fresh air around him. See the shadows moving over the trees. When he read a book, he was not locked up. He was free.”

The best thing that happens to Michael Hudson is getting locked up.
The second best thing is meeting prison librarian Anna Kaplan Byrne.
The third best thing is the day he opens a book and lets the magic happen.

The body might be caged, but books are time machines, enablers of armchair travelers, and facilitators for readers to live hundreds of lives in one lifetime. They can be a raft in a turbulent life. They can induce emotions that have never been felt so strongly before. They can give the reader a code by which to live his life. They can be a balloon tied to the wrist of the crushingly depressed that gently lifts them up.

Books are as dangerous as black sorcery, as compelling as white witchcraft, as powerful as a wizard’s staff. Is it any wonder that they were burned by the Nazis as if they were a living entity or by the Inquisition as if they were a heretic of flesh and bone?

Anybody need to be locked up? If you don’t read, maybe some time in solitary will cure you of your affliction.

”To him, a book was like a painting that hung in a museum. It was like a piece of art. There was nothing that compared to holding a book in his hands and scanning the words on the page. It made him ‘see’ what he was reading. It was how he dreamed.”

*Fist bump* to all the readers out there that do more than read, but also see.

Phil Ornazian is a man on the make. He is a private investigator who helps find people. He recovers lost valuable objects. He robs criminals. Most of the time he tries to do the right thing, but there are no lines between right and wrong for him. They blur into one another with vast amounts of room for interpretation. It might take a wrong to make a right. He lives by the Ornazian code of conduct.

Ornazian has a chat with a witness, and next thing Michael Hudson knows, he is free. When Ornazian pulls up in his black on black Ford Edge and makes sure that Hudson knows why he is walking around wearing something other than an orange jumpsuit, Hudson has a sinking feeling that staying straight is going to be difficult when you owe a guy like Ornazian.

Being free is generally an illusion for most of us.

George Pelecanos’s reverence for books is on full display. Books are dropped into the plot like exploding hand grenades. I was adding books to my want-to-read list on Goodreads as fast and furious as a Halo video game grand champion blowing through the early levels. My brain was lit up like a flamethrower. I was eating up pages like they were coming out of a Mickey Mouse pez dispenser. As if I weren’t hooked enough, Pelecanos mentions Don Carpenter’s book Hard Rain Falling, which is one of the best hardboiled books I’ve ever read, right up there with Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Chaze and the best of Raymond Chandler.

So bring this book, and let’s take a walk uptown together, and see how much trouble we can get into.

I want to thank Little, Brown and Ira Boudah for sending me a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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A Slave's Story

Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A powerful and apparently true firsthand account from a free black man sold into slavery and his first to be free again.

Twelve Years a Slave is gut-wrenching stuff written by an immensely readable writer. Northup's journey is incredible...almost too incredible to believe. One has to continually remind oneself that he was not born into slavery, nor was he taken from overseas. His education is evident. This is no ignorant man denied an education and made to struggle along communicating with English as an untaught second language. In his accounts of his time upon Louisiana plantations he often is clearly more intelligent than his masters. So accustomed have we become to hearing former slave accounts relayed in some kind of pidgin English that it makes this cleanly and concisely related narrative seem like a fabrication.

The brutality is so finely detailed, the complete lack of justice so well elucidated and the story unfolded so seamlessly, that a reader wouldn't be faulted for mistaking Northup for an established novelist.

Twelve Years a Slave is gripping for its subject and execution, and I highly recommend it.



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The Dunfield Terror

The Dunfield Terror by William Meikle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When a strange glowing fog descends on a Newfoundland town, Frank and the rest of the snow plow crew try to save their neighbors. But what does the fog have to do with a bizarre experiment on the Dunfield in the 1950s?

In the chaos that ensued during the tribulations at DarkFuse, this went on sale and I snapped it up. I passed on it when it showed up on Netgalley, thinking it was a pastiche of HP Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror. I was wrong.

You can see the confusion, though. It doesn't take much to get from Dunwich to Dunfield and William Meikle has written his share of Lovecraftian tales. However, this was more of an homage to The Colour Out of Space by way of the The Philadelphia Experiment.

The story is told in two threads: the present day and the time of the Dunfield experiment and its aftermath. The parallel structure does a lot to enhance the dread. If scientists couldn't contain the fog, how the hell can a crew of snowplow drivers?

Frank and his neighbors have been haunted by "the fucker" for decades, a glowing fog that warps and kills anything it touches. When the fog shows up during a blizzard, things go south in a hurry. The isolated townsfolk drop like flies and Frank knows there is very little any of them can do. The juxtaposition of the blizzard with the fog makes for some tense moments, pitting otherworldly horror and the everyday horror of death by exposure or frostbite.

The experimental thread focused on the horrors of the unknown and things men wasn't meant to know. The weird tech reminded me of Pentacle, making me think it probably takes place in the same universe, and also The Fold and 14. I also thought it was great how Meikle used The Philadelphia Experiment for the basis of a horror novel.

I feel like I've come to the William Meikle party late but I'm here for the duration now. Four out of five stars.

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Before the Darkness

Leslie Lee Sanders
Self-Published
Reviewed by Nancy
2 out of 5 stars

Summary

After an asteroid strikes Earth, a series of violent earthquakes destroy secluded Phoenix and leave survivor Elliot struggling to stay focused in the bleak aftermath. And then he meets fellow survivor Adam. Together, the two search for reliable shelter and other survivors while distant murky clouds fast approach. Their hunt for shelter leads them down an alternate path when they find spray painted symbols directing them to a mysterious place: Refuge Inc.

As ominous clouds slowly shut off all light to their devastated world, they are forced to come to terms with their pasts and their growing attraction for each other.

Neither thought their pasts and personal crises would affect their ability to endure the horrors they're forced to live through. Neither thought they would be drawn so close to one another in the aftermath of an unimaginable catastrophe. By working together, can they continue to survive? Or will the mystery of Refuge Inc. cause diverse expectations and lead them to decisions that further threaten their lives?

My Review

I love post-apocalyptic stories and was thrilled to get the opportunity to read this short novel about two survivors drawn together after their city and everything they knew and loved was destroyed by several massive earthquakes resulting from an asteroid that struck somewhere near the west coast.

Elliot had been walking for many hours. Exhausted, hungry and thirsty, he had no idea where he was or if anyone else survived. He eventually meets Adam, and both men are ecstatic that they are not alone. They talk a lot – mostly about the things they need to do to stay safe, about their lives before the asteroid struck, and about how scared they are. Oh, and they find time to have sex too.

I like my end of world stories fraught with danger and desperation. A little crime and violence and real struggles for survival wouldn’t hurt either. The main problem with this story is I never felt the characters were in any real danger despite the fact that the world they knew no longer exists. There was a developing romance, coming out issues, guilt, clinginess, whining and insecurity. The two main characters exhausted me at times and I often wished they would just shut up and get back to their business of surviving.

Two things kept me reading – the search for Refuge, Inc. and the injured dog, Titan. Just when the story started to get interesting and the search was over, it ended. I’m curious about how the men’s lives will change and am planning to dive into the next book.

Barren

Barren by Peter V. Brett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tibbet's Brook has embraced the arrival of the fighting wards. The Brook has formed a militia and many of the town's elders have reaped the rewards of magic by growing younger once more. Selia Square, the woman known as Barren, is one such woman. The return of her youth has rekindled many parts of her. Selia seeks love in the arms of a young woman while trying to protect the Brook from the coming demon swarm.

Barren was an interesting story that really highlighted the life or Selia. When I first heard that Peter V. Brett was working on this story I didn't imagine it would be as compelling as it was. I hadn't read The Core when I first heard Brett was working on Barren and didn't know what a scandal Selia had been involved in during her youth. Loving a woman in the wrong family in a time and place where such was considered an abomination by many.

The story also reinforced one thought I always had regarding Selia Barren, that she does not play around. Selia from a young age was willing to put herself in harm's way to protect a person regardless of if she had to stand up to the Watches or a coreling. Selia will stand for what she believes in and protect everyone she can. It was good to see her get a chance at love even if she was somewhat uncomfortable with what people would say.

It was interesting to see what happened to Tibbet's Brook since it didn't really get it's own story conclusion in The Core. The Brook took to fighting demons with similar fervor to Cutters Hollow. It didn't have the wardcraft the Hollow possessed thanks to Arlen and Leesha, but it was innovative in lesser ways. Brett did a good job involving characters many people were likely to have forgotten about such as Brine Broadshoulders.

Barren is a good novella that brings closure to the good people of Tibbet's Brook along with a peek into Selia Barren's life.

4.5 out of 5 stars

I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

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