Then We Came to the End... Who is "we"?

I just finished this book, so I'm giving you the freshest and least nuanced of reviews of it.  It is Joshua Ferris' debut novel and a pretty good one at that.  I liked the book.  There were no vampires, werewolves, fairies, unicorns, or mer-men, but it was still riveting literature.  Imagine that.  In the absence of mystical creatures there were at least one whore, one complete idiot, and one maniacal mad man, who went on a shooting spree after being let go.  With a paintball gun.

It focused on the office dealings of a rather large ad agency in downtown Chicago.  So, I would say a major theme of the book is "office intrigue."  Everybody loves a little office gossip as long as it doesn't "hurt" anyone.  (Quotes are there to indicate that hurt is a percieved notion.  Pretty much everyone is hurt by gossip over the course of a high school career or a year in a college dorm, but in the grand scheme of things, these are the small tragedies of life.)  I think the reasons that I liked the book personally is because I did know a lot of the places Ferris described in an off-hand unstudied way about Chicago.  Like the use of Oak Park as an idyllic suburb that people have normal lives in.  Oak Park, in real life, is a rather expensive and left-leaning suburbs, which tries, in many ways, to keep the cutting edge feel of being close to a major city without making people feel like they live, for real, in a major city.  There are good schools, nice restaurants, low crime, etc.

Another reason I liked this novel is because you learned about a lot of characters, but the majority of the narration was given from the first-person plural, the "we".  This was interesting because you wanted to know which one of the characters was actually narrating and hiding their real feelings in the "we", but after a while you get to realizing that the "we" was amorphous and changed depending on the situation.  However, you could rely on the "we" to provide a grand sense of the collective consciousness of the office.  So, I feel like, for a first time author, relying so heavily on the "we" was risky.  Ferris did it well.  If you see him, give him a pat on the back. 

One of the strangest and most engaging parts of the book was an interlude between halves where an omniscient narrator told the truth behind what their boss was going through.  It was a different writing style and a little weird to adjust to (being spoken to by the Borg for most of the book).  But it did answer some pressing questions and gave the reader some information that the "we" didn't know until much later.  Very nice use of a interlude.  I'm pretty impressed by this Ferris guy.  Buy him a shot in addition to that pat on the back.

Here's the real question.  He's using all these fancy plot devises and literary nuances and plays with the language and the reader's mind; he gives us so much on his first attempt, it's polished.  So, what are we going to see from Ferris in the future.  Will he write himself into an office story niche?  Is he going to be the author with the "we" narrating all the time?  I don't see how he could and survive in the currently literary climate.  He will have to raise the bar on himself.  He will have to write a new novel, just as interesting and engaging in different ways to prove to the public and his skeptical fans that he is worthy of their continued attention. 

This book is a national best seller and was a finalist for the National Book Award.  Where do you go from there, Josh Ferris?  How much higher can you go?  Having already given a good swing at the "great american novel", what more do you have to show?  Have you blown your load, or will you be still bringing in the cash in your 60s after over 40 books like Stephen King?  Who knows? 

His second novel came out this year already, and I haven't heard anything about it. It's called The Unnamed, sounds like a sophomore slump if you ask me. Nevertheless, he got things right as a rookie. 

On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony

Our story begins with the introduction of Zane, a dissolute man who decides to commit suicide. As he raises the gun to his head, even beginning to squeeze the trigger, Death enters. Zane manages to yank his arm away from his head and shoots Death in the face, killing him. Fate promptly arrives to explain to Zane that since he killed Death he must now take over the office of Death.

And the adventure begins! Death, as an office, is a peculiarly complicated job. Death is only called for a personal appearance when the soul of the person to die is in perfect balance between good and evil. Death then analyzes the soul, decides which way it must go and sends it off. If Death cannot get a valid 'reading' he drops the soul off to purgatory (which calls to mind the office setting/personal of the DMV), where exhaustive accounting takes place. Aside from the office of Death, there are five other Incarnations; Fate, Time, War and Nature. After some interaction with these other office holders, Death learns that he has been set into his office on purpose.

He is called to the death of a powerful magician who basically wills his daughter to Death. This woman, Luna, is destined to thwart Satan in twenty years. Satan, however, has no intention of letting Luna live long enough to prevent his 'master' plan. Of course he sets it up so Luna will die early. Ah, only Death can save her now!

This book is quite interesting in that it examines the place of death in life. The dialogue Death has with others, as well as internally, treats death as a puzzle and the attempt to solve it moves the storyline forward quite well. There is definitely a strong Christian bias in the portrayal but it manages to leave most doctrine at the door. While God and the Devil are certainly individual actors (especially the Devil as we meet him) the focus is mainly on the concepts of good and evil and there is a good smattering of relativism tossed in for fun.

I would definitely recommend this book. It is entertaining and thought provoking and provided you aren't too sensitive to the Christian slant, it would be suitable for most any reader.


Grade: A+

Horns by Joe Hill - Horny Madness

Horns by Joe Hill
I did not stumble upon Joe Hill.  Amazon and WeReads recommended the author’s novel, Heart Shaped Box.  After about a year of the suggestion popping up in my profile, I finally downloaded the ebook.  I like the first chapter so much that I ordered the audiobook from my local library.
I enjoyed Heart Shaped Box immensely.  The story began innocently as a ghost story and ended as a complicated love story.  I could write that it was a story of revenge and love or a story about redemption and love.  I will not.  It was a creepy story that, had it ended any other way, would have left me scarred for life. 
So, of course, I sought out his most recent novel, Horns. You can find an excerpt here 

One hundred or so pages in, I was so creeped out that I decided to take a break and Google the author. 
Joe Hill is no ordinary creepy author. Hill’s famous father, Stephen King, has been creeping us out for years.  Since I have read no King books, I really did not know what to expect.  I could not use King’s novel based movies as a standard. Why would I?

Armed with the information, I went back to reading my book.

Okay, it has a creepy factor of 9.7 out of ten.  Totally creepy.

The events of the story take place over a week or so but the author filled about 30 or more tracks with flashbacks.



Back to the summary.  There is the whiny guy named Ig Perrish who has lived a righteous life.  His rich family have respectable positions in the community.  His girlfriend’s murder continues to haunt him as the anniversary of her death approaches. Despite having lived a virtuous and respectable  life in the small town of Gideon, everyone thinks he is a rapist/murderer. 
The grieving man visits the site of her death to be near her.  Not to repent anything just get shitfaced and cry.  A few hours later, Ig wakes up from a drunken stupor with a set of horns erupting through skull.  He follows a logical path.

First, he reviews what he can remember; Got drunk, Pissed on a statue of the Virgin Mary, Did not go home…..
Next, he determines that he is not hallucinating. He heads to the apartment that he shares with the local bad girl, Glenna.  Yes, she and other people see the horns. No hallucination, but his problems have just begun.  People start to tell him their deepest, darkest, and disturbing secrets.  He cannot stop them.  He tries but his horns affect a cleansing therapy that everyone wants to experience when they are near the horns.

"You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know."
— Joe Hill (Horns)
 
Then we follow Ig as he seeks out people whom he feels have no dark secrets, he knows all their secrets, or whose secrets would be banal. He visits places all over his little town just to learn that he knew absolutely nothing about the true desires of his family and friends.  It was sad, really.  I kept thinking to myself, he should just stop.  Like bad plastic surgery.

All of his actions seem reasonable.  He even began giving the poor souls advice concerning their deep secrets.  Fist pump.....That is a way to make a bad situation better.

After a  day of this, he slips into a depression and seeks a place to be alone with the horrible confessions and memories of people he loved and respected. That place turns out to be near the murder site.  He is not alone.  He is visited by hundreds of snakes.  Then the pontificating about God, evil, forgiveness, death, and love begins.  His thoughts move the story along with the exhausting flashbacks.

The novel kept me interested although to quote the words of another reviewer: “it meandered a bit.”
At one point, I began to suspect that the author and the editor were lovers.  Hill indulged himself with metaphors and extended flashbacks so much that I said at least once to myself, “enough already.”   I fast forwarded whole minutes of audiobook narration. I laughed after the 50th metaphor or so.  I just wanted some plain writing by the end of the book.   Hill and a thesaurus are a dangerous liaison.

The narrator did not have a lot of distinctive voices for the various characters.  I followed the story by figuring out who was talking.  Despite this, Fred Berman, did an excellent job with his characterization of the Glenna.  He took a minor character and fleshed her out for me.  I began to listen for her appearances in the novel.  I do not know if I would have connected so well with the character if I had read the book. 

Finally, this is not a whodunit novel.  It is not a story about a man turning into a demon.  Not a love story with snakes. Not a tale of unholy revenge in a small town.  It is just good story telling with dashes of spirituality, love, and betrayal.  Or maybe it just a monster tale.  You decide.
My score A- with a dash of creepy.

"The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rear view mirror on your way to something better."
— Joe Hill (Horns)

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris

This is another installment of the Sookie Stackhouse series, a series which spawned the creation of True Blood on HBO, by the way. Now, I started watching True Blood when it first began and I was totally sucked in...get it? hee hee hee... Anyway, I put off reading the books for awhile because, as we all know, the books and movies/television series that are based off of books never align properly. I liked the show too much to risk 'ruining' it by reading the series...until after the second series when I finally broke down and started reading them. I'm not going to spout off about which is better, that's rather irrelevant for this forum and for my own part, I like them both.

The thing about the Sookie books is that the main character is, well rather annoying. The stories are good but Sookie just irritated the hell out of me. The whole whiny, bad things happen and it's really not my fault, and inability to accept responsibility was just irksome all the way around. However, this book finally shows us a maturing Sookie who, while she is still prone to tantrums and whining, at least recognizes that she is being silly or overreacting, etc. This more fully developed Sookie does have several adventures (gosh being a bartender in a small town is rough!) per usual.

So, we have issues with the local Were community (attempted takeover) that Sookie finds herself stuck in the middle of. We have issues with the vampire community (successful takeover) that Sookie is again smack dab in the middle of and we also have sidelines with Tanya, Sookie's brother Jason, her roommate(s) and Bob the former cat, and to top it off, Sookie meets her Fae great-grandfather and her cousin Hadley's child (who appears to have the same abilities as Sookie).

The storyline is, as always, entertaining and fast paced. I found myself tearing through this book and that dreaded "just a few more pages" that turns into "oh crap it's 6am already!" definitely popped up. The Sookie books, as a whole, are all similar in that way. Most of the stories I've finished in a day and even when Sookie is acting like a total 'tard I still look forward to reading the next...

Overall the Sookie Stackhouse novels are a fun read. They aren't terribly deep or challenging but the are perfect for light entertainment. I am definitely excited to see what happens with this new, wiser Sookie.

PS--the third season of True Blood starts in a couple of weeks so I'm not sure when I will be reading the next book in this series...

Boneshaker: Was this a teen book?

Last Sunday, I read Boneshaker by Cherie Priest all in one day.  Impressive right?  It's not a short book either.  416 pages. And it was full of all sorts of fun stuff.  A steampunk vision of a Civil-War era Seattle.  Zeppelins.  Crazy machines.  A gas seeping from underground that makes people into zombies... I mean what more could you possibly want.

But the fact that I read the book in one day makes me suspicious.  Did I just unwittingly read a teen novel?  Was I fooled by DPL's faulty book organization into reading a book written for high school students?  Or did this fun, if a little awkward, book meet its intended audience in my charming readership? 

Well, I suppose there must be a way to determine this.  First off, it was published by the SyFy conglomerate.  So, someone at SyFy thought this was an appropriate story to attract their viewership to the written word. People who watch SyFy are not necessarily a certain age, they just have a certain group of interests.  Fair enough, so this is inconclusive.

I guess we want to believe that teen novels should be a little tamer than adult novels... which is not necessarily true.  I can bet you that the first sex scene I read was from a "teen novel." I am also pretty sure that there was nothing in this novel that wouldn't be found in an adult novel or a teen novel. There was violent death, there were creepy characters, there were dysfunctional families, and there was evil.  The protagonist was a single mother who had to venture into the walled off city of Seattle which was ensconced in a poinsonous gas they called "the Blight."  The Blight had been unleashed by her deceased husband by his crazy invention, the Boneshaker.  If you breath too much, you die and then sometimes reanimate.  They called the zombies "rotters".  So the mother goes to rescue the son.  The basic structure of the story is "family friendly"; it could easily be made into a Disney film. There is nothing so harsh and cold and evil about the story that I could not end up in the teen book department.  Also, no sex.  Because there is NOTHING romantic about have to wear a mask at all times to keep the Blight out and there is nothing romantic about have to be quiet so the rotters don't catch wind of you.  Nobody was getting it on.  Too dangerous, not enough clean air.

If it is considered an regular novel for adults, it's awful tame. I kind of think that it might have done better on the teen market regardless.  The only other reason I think it might be a teen novel is because I was able to read it in one day.  It was fast; the words were pretty large (they were also printed in dark brown ink instead of black, which I think is cool and show-offish at the same time.)  So, I'm pretty much decided that this is a teen novel.  It's like a coming of age story for the son, and while he's not the "main" character, he does go through finding out that his father was not blameless when it came to the Blight accident.

Sad day.

My last question is about the picture on the front.  Do you think that's the boy, young boys look like girl sometimes?  Or the mother, who really shouldn't be that young looking? I can't figure it out.  I start to lean towards the mother, but then I'm like it could be the son.  Oh bother.

As for whether I liked the book, well I did, but the writing could have been smoother.  I felt like I was reading the awkward examples in writing textbooks on how to create believable dialogue.  It got better as the book went on.  But you can tell this is her first "real" novel.  The cover says "break-out novel".  I think she should write a sequel, in which the son figures out how to either stop the gas and restore Seattle or tame the rotters and take over Vancouver.  Bother are good choices as far as I'm concerned.  If you are tired of your paranormal romance, try this steampunk romp on for size, but don't expect to find it challenging.  Just sayin'.

Savor Me Slowly by Gena Showalter

This book is part of the Alien Huntress series, of which, I believe I've read a couple though I cannot recall the titles off hand. Basically the background of this series is that it takes place on Earth at a time when aliens are no longer sci-fi, they are, in fact, the newest immigrants. There are a variety of species who pop up and while a great many of the new citizens are peaceful, there are of course the occasional 'bad apples' amongst them. This is what prompted the formation of A.I.R. (kind of an FBI type of organization except they deal exclusively with bad aliens). The hero of the book, Jaxon, works for this organization and we begin our story with him trapped in a cell, having been tortured for an unspecified amount of time.

Enter our heroine Mishka Le'Ace. Mishka is an assassin who was created in a lab. She is part human, part machine, part animal (which animal(s) we are never told). This mixture makes her a particularly effective killing machine for whoever owns her at the time. Yep, I said 'owns'. See, it turns out that Mishka has a chip that was implanted in her brain when she was a child that allows her to be controlled by whomever has custody of her control panel. It's not like a remote control, how dull would that be, rather it grants the power of life and death over her and the ability to 'punish' her with excruciating pain at a whim. As you can imagine, this makes for a rather interesting childhood and such.

So Mishka has been ordered to rescue Jaxon. No biggie for our assassin except she finds herself strangely attracted to him. (What a surprise!) So she whisks him away to a safe house provided by her employer/master. Of course Jaxon was not rescued out of the goodness of anyone's heart. She is supposed to find out everything that he knows about a new race of aliens that have come to Earth who have been infecting human women with a nasty virus that causes them to a.) slowly start to rot while living and b.) turn into icky cannibals. As Jaxon is badly injured, Mishka must care for him for several weeks before she can even attempt to interrogate him. Enter strange attraction--it grows between both of them (duh) and eventually they do the deed.

Neither one will admit that they are falling for the other. Ho-hum... Then Jaxon is re-rescued by his teammates from A.I.R. and things start getting more interesting. Two of his teammates have met Mishka before and let's just say they don't like her very much. Oh the tension! Meanwhile, they are still tracking down the mega-STD aliens. It turns out that these aliens have already decimated at least two other planets (one of which was the home-world for an earth-born alien who works for A.I.R., which ties another book in nicely).

Enter action, excitement, blah blah blah... and eventual resolution of both the alien issue and the Jaxon/Mishka issues. Yea for happy endings!

So, overall I did enjoy this book quite a bit. It's definitely light reading but the pace is good the characters are interesting. The romance/sexiness scenes are amusing, if a bit drawn out. I particularly like that there are several areas that tie the stories together. Each book that I've read (so far) is a decent stand alone but they all share an underlying theme that is definitely a build up for the final story. It is done subtly enough to intrigue. I will be interested to read more of the series.

Grade: B+

BEST NEW Paranormal Romance: Part 1

Hey Gluers,

I've got a treat!  I'm reading through an anthology of Paranormal Romance stories... I've gotten half-way and I've decided to give you mini-reviews for each story in the anthology.  This is the book's cover, in case you are driven to go looking for it:

Ok, it's a mixed bag, full of surprises, so I'll get started.

The first story "Follow Me Light" by Elizabeth Bear is kinda strange.  The main character is a very ugly man named Pinky.  And still the narrator sleeps with him/falls in love.  Because she can see his swampy coloured aura, nice.  Also, because, even though he's really really really ugly, he's got an awesome voice.  She says "oh, la" when she hears his voice for the first time. Not to belabor this, he's like a fish god or something, but they're in Arizona, ZOMG DRAMAZ.  Then his fishy brother shows up, things get weird.  It was a strange story.  It was brave to attempt to make a romance with a really ugly fish god man work.  It didn't.  I also don't know why the story is titled as it is.

Story number TWO, "A Maze of Spaces" by Claudia O'Keefe.  I think, well, I read it about a week ago and I can't really remember anything useful about it.  The narrator is the Goddess of Lonely Spaces.  She lives in a creepy part of West Virginia, she falls in love with this guy named Landry.  When they finally consummate their love, she passes her "special gifts" onto him and has to leave the area.  It's weird because she is in control of the whole county, like she can manipulate nature, and the weather.  And she makes people feel lonely, so they leave.  'Nuff said.

Third story is called "The Shadowed Heart" by Catherine Asaro and it takes place in the FUTURE.  And it's on a planet where days and nights are about 30hrs each.  Harrick is 1/4 of a empath team and a bionically modified fighting machine.  The other 3 died in a crash (oh NOES) and he's searching the crash site for something.  He find Rhose.  (LOL!) Rhose got stuck in the crash site because she couldn't make it home before night (which you will remember is about 30 hours). They run into each other, they start to empathize or something... they boink.  Then he goes psycho crazy because the towns people start to attack him (fighting machine, remember).  The only one he won't kill is Rhose, because they are empaths.  It ends well. 

Story number 4. "Walpurgis Afternoon" by Delia Sherman was not romantic.  At least not in the "somebody gets laid" sense of the word.  Maybe in the historical sense or the literary sense.  There are witches.  They are lesbians.  They get married... but that's not the center of the story.  The center of the story is the family next door, and they are already married with children.  Not romantic.  The story is nice and pretty and ends pleasantly.  But it's not romantic.  Get it out!  Gone!

The fifth story is "A Knot of Toads" by Jane Yolen and it is set in Scotland.  This girl comes home because her father has died.  He apparently died of fright.  There's toads everywhere.  Basically it's a witch story, the witches attack the girl.  But at the end of the story... a man saves her!  Wooo!  And of course it's the charming boy from her childhood who's grown into a real man.  However, there is no sex.  Shame.

The 6th story, and final story for this part, is "Calypso in Berlin" by Elizabeth Hand.  This Calypso is the same Calypso from Greek mythology.  She is in love with a man.  More than in love, in fact, he is her muse.  She met him and can't stop painting him.  So she takes him into the forest outside of Berlin and enchants him and paints him for a year and then she lets him go. Sort of anti-climatic...

That's part one... who knows what the rest of the book will bring.

To be continued!