Beyond the Blue Moon

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After catching up on Sandman Slim, I felt in the mood to revisit some Simon R. Green. Specifically, I felt like re-reading Beyond the Blue Moon, the final book in the Forest Kingdom arc. These books have been out quite a long time, but even so, I suppose I should just warn for spoilers if you haven’t read them yet.

Beyond the Blue Moon starts out in Haven with Guard Captains Hawk and Fisher who, along with all other Guardsmen, have been called in to quell a burgeoning riot on the docks. The human workers aren’t happy with the zombie scab labor. They really don’t want to hurt these people who are just trying to provide for their families the only way the can. Of course, it all goes to hell in a hand basket quite quickly.

Hawk and Fisher make it through the riot-cum-zombie massacre thought skill and sheer bloody mindedness but they pay a heavy emotional price for it. They didn’t kill anyone they knew but they didn’t want to kill anyone in this case. Most of the now dead were only trying to make a living. They’re feeling a bit depressed about their circumstances and wondering how to change it when they get an unwanted visitor.

Allen Chance is the official Questor for the Forest Kingdom and he has come to find Prince Rupert and Princess Julia, legends of the Dark Night, to figure out how who killed King Harald. Needless to say, they are less than pleased by this but they hear out the young man who is quite earnest. And he has a bloody great dog who talks. In the end, they decide that this is just the impetus they need to get the hell out of Haven. But they don’t go quietly. They raid the Guards stores and take out every criminal they could never lay hands on because they were too well connected through bribes and politics.

When they get back they find that the murder of Harald isn’t the only thing they have to deal with. There are all sorts of political factions vying for control of the court, most of whom want to Queen out of the way in one form or another. Plus something called the Inverted Cathedral has popped up-or in this case, down, hence the inverted. Hawk and Fisher have to figure out what the Inverted Cathedral is for, how to stop the Blue Moon from coming back and, if they have time, find a killer. Just another day in the life of Hawk and Fisher.

It is an excellent novel, an excellent series. A+. Read it!

Devil in the Dollhouse

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Oh Richard Kadrey. Please keep writing Sandman Slim stories. I do adore them. 🙂 The Devil in the Dollhouse is a Sandman Slim short story. It focuses on Stark’s first few interactions in Hell as the new Lucifer. He’s trying to play all factions against the middle so that no one remembers that Stark was just a plain old human rather than a fallen angel like the rest of them.

One of his advisors (name is eluding me at the moment but I’m sure if you looked up demonology on the web, you’d come across it), convinces him that something needs to be done about what is essentially Hell’s out-house. And not in a bathroom sort of way. Well actually, it is that too come to think…Anyway, this area is supposed to hold demons and souls so bad they give other demons the heebie-jeebies.

Stark is good at kicking ass but he’s not very good at politicking or out thinking his opponents so he’s basically talked into this trek.  There are three rings of challenges to get through, each hard than the last but they weren’t really physical challenges so much as mental/emotional ones.

Turns out these challenges weren’t so much keeping demons out as keeping the uber-scary demons in. And rather than demons it is demon, singular. He claims to be the original Lucifer, the one who was the original cast out. Well, considering that there is a Sandman Slim full sized novel due out in a couple weeks, you can hazard a guess as to who wins this showdown.  😀 Anyway, loved the story because it whetted my appetite for more Sandman Slim. Read it. A

Good Omens

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Man, I haven’t read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in years but I just finished it up yesterday. I forgot how great this book is! It is right up my alley. Plenty of dry British humor, great descriptions an a good story.

Good Omens follows the exploits of demon A.J. Crowley and angel Aziraphale as they try to avert the apocalypse by influencing the upbringing of who they think is the Antichrist.  Think is the operative word because the boy they think is the Antichrist, a young American named Warlock, really isn’t. The Satanist nuns  that were supposed to switch out the Antichrist with the American baby accidentally switched him out with a baby of a regular old stodgy British couple instead.

Instead of growing up with Crowley and Aziraphale’s respective interference, the Antichrist grew up in a regular human home with a regular human family and friends. And that just throws a monkey wrench in the whole end of the world bit. So if you’re looking for good book and are a fan of either of these authors, I highly, highly recommend Good Omens. This book came out a long time ago but I would love to see more of Crowley and Aziraphale. Please? 🙂 A+ book.

Butcher Bird

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I just finished reading Butcher Bird by Richard Kadrey on my commute home (woot public trans). It was interesting enough that I’d be willing to read a sequel if he wrote one. But I’ll be honest, it took me a while to finish this one. I picked it up after I read the third Sandman Slim book (love those books!). I felt that Butcher Bird was slower to start than Sandman Slim. I stopped after a few chapters and went off to read a few (okay, a lot) more books. I recently came back to it and I must have been in the mood for his dark and snarky style of writing because I ploughed through what I had left.

Butcher Bird features a tattoo artist by the name of Spyder. It starts out with him and his lesbian best friend called Lulu trading worst way to die suggestions at their favorite dive bar in San Fran. Sometime during the drinking, he meets a blind lady by the name of Shrike. Not long after, he gets beat to shit by a demon while taking a piss in the alley next to the bar. Shrike saves his as with some cool swordsmanship (you heard me, the blind chick is a sword master. Pretty sweet). But this incident leaves Spyder with something he never wanted. The truth. Or the sight. Or whatever term you want to use for suddenly “seeing the world the way it really is”.

Spyder takes this suddenly seeing demons thing pretty cool. I’d probably be freaking the fuck out but Spyder’s all like “huh…weird”. Wondering if he got hit just a little too hard by his demon mugger, he goes to find Lulu. Only to find that Lulu isn’t exactly Lulu any more. She’s been selling off pieces of herself to these weirdos called the Black Clerks to be able to keep doing smack and not look like it. I pictured the Black Clerks a bit like The Gentlemen from Buffy, only talkers.

Not long after this, Spyder finds Shrike again and gets pulled into this sort of supernatural intrigue with her. Her partner’s been murdered and she needs a man to stand with her and look tough and intimidating. Spyder apparently fits the bill, being tattooed from neck to feet. The pair of them get hired to go to Hell (literally, not figuratively) to retrieve a powerful book from a demon.

I won’t say too much more because spoilers. 🙂 After this assignment is made though, the book really starts to pick up. I guess I felt the beginning as a bit too exposition-y. Richard Kadrey’s interpretation of Hell in this book is a bit different than the version in the Sandman Slim books. Sandman Slim is a much darker, much more chaotic place. I’m not quite sure how to describe his vision of Hell in this book. His characterization of Lucifer is quite interesting though. All in all, I’d say this is a solid B, maybe leaning just a hair to B- because it took so long for me to finish.

Dancing Deliliah

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I read a couple of anthologies recently, Hex Appeal and Blood Lite III, and I came across a short story by Carole Nelson Douglas. I can’t remember the name of the story but it featured a woman by the name of Delilah Street and I had been intrigued by it. So I went off to Amazon and found the first story of Douglas’ that featured Delilah Street called Dancing with Werewolves.

This world starts out intriguingly. It starts out with young orphan Delilah (Why always orphans? Why don’t the main characters of these books ever have a happy childhood? That would be interesting to read), and her orphan peers waiting to see what happens at Y2k. Instead of nothing happening as it did in real life, there was some sort of great magical awakening. Douglas was somewhat vague as to what this was however. I wasn’t clear if the magic already existing in the world just swelled to the point where humans couldn’t ignore it any more or if the magical creatures in the world came out of the supernatural closet. However, I’m willing to pass this vagueness off as being the poor recollections of a child, which Delilah was at the time.

Delilah Street grew up into an investigative reporter. In Kansas. Having lived in a mid-western state, I can only imagine that being as thrilling as it sounds. Delilah tried and failed at dating the vampire anchor at her local news station and his new squeeze, the weather witch, promptly sent a tornado to destroy Delilah’s home. Ooookay then. No explanations as to why the vamp or the weather witch were suddenly so keen to get rid of her but its was a convenient plot device to get Delilah to move on to…Las Vegas!

Here she has a magical encounter with some random dude in a park that gives them both an orgasm of a life time….Really? Already? Trope-tastic magical encounter with sexy male supe, check! Let’s move on to the next cliche. The magical encounter is observed by some rich shut in from his conveniently next door home that is bristling with surveillance. He offers her a job investigating old Vegas crimes. Why? Because he’s a TV producer of course! And he runs the umpteenth version of CSI. Okay, that I found funny. 🙂

So she starts investigating the crime that induced her magical sex ride with the sexy supe (Ric). Which leads her to equally sexy but definitely a bad-guy, probably a vamp but will never admit it, Snow. An albino vampire, he owns the Inferno Hotel (as in Dante’s Inferno). And he has an immediate thing for Delilah. Of course. But the supernatural run ins don’t stop with him. She has a run in with the werewolf mafia, zombies with magical overlays to make them appear as old cinema stars, and weird faerie type creatures.

I almost felt like she was trying to squeeze every trope imaginable into a story that was about 300 pages. The short story was far more intriguing than this longer book. There are several more books in this series and I don’t think I’m going to read them. It was a promising premise but I feel like a writer such as Simon R. Green or Jim Butcher could have done so much more with it. Rating: D-D+. This is harsher than I usually am, but I feel you’d probably be better off skipping this one. Unless you like trope heavy stories, in which case have at it and to each their own. I love cheesy sci-fi movies after all, so who am I to judge? 😉

Live and Let Drood

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Oh.  My. God. Simon R. Green has done it again. Live and Let Drood is the latest in the Secret Histories arc featuring Eddie Drood, secret agent. Eddie has just recovered from his last mission to Castle Frankenstein against the Immortals. He’s returning home with his lady love, Molly Metcalf, when he runs into something he never thought possible: a completely destroyed Drood Hall.

With his family seemingly dead, Eddie goes looking for clues in the ruined hall for revenge. Who could possibly be powerful enough to take down the mighty and paranoid Drood family? Eddie has to find out what happened to his family and get revenge. But not all is as it seems and some questions from Eddie’s past are going to be answered while more are raised.

I’m not going to give too much away since this is a brand spankin’ new book. But it is fantastic! And I’m happy to report that it is NOT the last of the Secret Histories. There is at least one more due out called (at the moment) Casino Infernale. So get this book! A+ And if anyone knows of any books similar to Simon R. Green, please let me know!

Under Wraps

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*Here be some spoilers. In fact, please just assume that my posts include spoilers. I try not to but you never know.*

So I read two new books by Hannah Jayne called Under Wraps andUnder Attack. They both feature “plain Jane” heroine Sophie Lawson, a worker for the Underworld Detection Agency. This agency is really misnamed because it isn’t so much a police force as a social security network for all the supernatural set. If you want to live/work in the “above ground” (San Fran in this case), you have to get your credentials through the UDA.

These books are a bit simply written. Epic it is not. They’re shorter novels than I’m used to reading as well. The first one was interesting enough for me to read the second book but I’m not entirely certain if I’m interested in reading the third, Under Attack.

Sophie Lawson is the main human in this series and the thing that seems to set her apart from the other humans, and thereby accepted by the supes, is that she is immune to magic. Very trope-y. And it seems that the only other creature in this universe that is immune to magic is Satan. Of course. Why not? Very, very trope-y. I think Jayne could have gone with some other ‘power’ for Sophie Lawson and made her a much more interesting character. Oh yeah, and Lawson is obsessed with sex. Like every other to-herself thought is about how one male character or another features in her fantasy. It doesn’t move the plot along at all. Jayne really didn’t need to put that in and yet, she did.

Under Wraps is about world domination. Again, of course. And Sophie is one of the keys to gaining world domination. Of course. The redeeming bits of the book are the comedic elements. I really liked the over the top vampire Nina, who feeds on bags of bloods and turns her hunting instincts to haute couture instead of humans. She and her vamp nephew Louis (or Vlad as he insists on being called) are pretty funny characters.

And there is the obligatory sexy male lead, Alex Grace, a fallen angel. He’s tracking down the baddie to wants to take over the world, since he’s set up as an FBI agent. And Alex has the obligatory secret as well, which turns out he’s looking for some sort of powerful object that he lost while an angel in heaven. This object is called the Vessel of Souls and it contains all the souls waiting to be distributed out to a newly born person. If someone ‘breaks’ this object, they could win the war between good and evil, so a lot of creatures are looking for it. I’ll give you three guesses as to what, or who, this object is but you’re only going to need one.

Under Attack is about a different, evil fallen angel searching out the Vessel of Souls for the dark side, um…evil side. The evil fallen angel is named Ophelia and she is Sophie Lawson’s long lost half sister. They share the same daddy, who may or may not be Satan (we haven’t seen Satan pop up saying, ‘yes, she’s mine’ yet). Ophelia is bat shit crazy and enjoys torture. She went over to the dark side a long time ago and now really wants to screw over everyone, even baby sis Sophie. Especially baby sis Sophie.

Under Attack reveals that the Vessel of Souls, in whatever physical incarnation it has, always has seven guardians. Six of Sophie’s guardians are already dead. Number seven is a sexy, English fireman. Just once I’d really like to see a male character as just average looking. Maybe with a plain old desk job. A lot of male characters either seem to be drop dead gorgeous or ugly as sin/badly scarred. A little originality people!

At any rate, I’d rate Under Wraps a C+, interesting enough concept but not very well fleshed out. Under Attack is more like a C-/D, pretty darn trope-y. It is really making me look forward to Simon R. Green’s Live and Let Drood. Now he is a good writer!

One Salt Sea, Again

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I just reread the Toby Daye novel One Salt Sea by Seanan McGuire and I fell in love with it again. This is the latest published Toby Daye novel and I cannot wait for the next one to come out. Toby has been given the title (and knowe) of Countess of Goldengreen. This previously was held by someone who had been murdered in the first book. The Queen of Mists gave it to Toby out of spite. But that isn’t Toby’s immediate problem.

The immediate problem is that Toby has been tapped by her aunt, the Luidaeg (apparently pronounced Lu-shak or similar according to the handy pronunciation guide), to stop a war between the Undersea and the land dwelling fae. The Luidaeg is incredibly powerful, being the first born of Oberon and Maeve…but apparently she cannot do anything to harm harm the children of Titania (most land-dwelling fae). I see this as a convenient way to rein in her abilities so she doesn’t become the deus ex machina of the series.

On top of that, Tybalt is back and sniffing around Toby. I really hope they shag in the next book because the UST is so thick between the two of them. There didn’t seem to be much chemistry written between Toby and her chosen love interest Connor, a Selkie from Half Moon Bay. It just seemed like she chose him because 1) Tybalt disappeared after the last book because the Cait Sidhe were decimated by poison and 2) She’d had something forbidden with Connor before she’d turned into a fish (in the first book).

I thought this was really the best book in the series so far. I enjoyed the plot quite a bit and I really dig the character of the Luidaeg. She’s a bit like House in her temperament and she’s far too old to really care about what anyone thinks. I sincerely hope they explain why everyone is so afraid of her in an upcoming book. I’d rate this book as an A and I really, really can’t wait for the next one!