Review: Anno Dracula, by Kim Newman

The premise of Anno Dracula might seem a little out there, but it's straightforward enough. It’s a Victorian London where every fictional vampire ever written is real (along with a bunch of other fictional folk), and Dracula is married to the Queen. Jack the Ripper is on the prowl, targeting only vampire whores and tensions between vampires and “warms” (humans) are rising.

Whenever I go to describe this book I found myself saying things like ‘a cracker read,’ and ‘a rollicking good time, by Jove.’ All said with a rubbish British accent, natch. The book is just so overwhelmingly and charmingly British, circa the 1800s. Everything is all correct manners and cricket and chivalry. But at the same time Newman pulls off the impressive trick of sounding authentic and modern at the same time. The book did not read like a novel in 1880, is read like a novel set in 1880. A small but important distinction, if you ask me.

And you might think that all the Britishness would get old after a while, but I never found this to be so. The plot and characters are strong enough to carry it, and it makes for a highly unique and enjoyable read.

In some ways the book reminded me of Gail Carriger’s ‘Soulless,’ although ‘Anno Dracula’ has almost 20 years on it. But it’s a similar setting, and one where vampires have only just come out of the closet, as it were. Newman, however, delves far deeper into the ramifications and politics of this than does Carriger, and it was one of my favourite aspects of the book. I also enjoyed that, while many steampunk authors tend to glamorize the era, Newman does not shy away from the uglier side of the time. When asked what would they eat when everyone in Britain was a vampire one character points out, in a most reasonable manner, that they would simply import Africans to serve as cattle. A repulsive idea to you and me of course, but the matter of fact way its said in the book shines a light on the way people thought back then.

This book is also a literary nerd’s dream. The world Newman has created feels fresh and original, but really is the results of taking a whole bunch of other books and smooshing them together. There are scores of familiar faces, from Dracula to Jack the Ripper to Dr. Jekyll. But more fun than the named characters are the ones only mentioned in passing. I was ridiculously proud of myself when I spotted Anne Rice’s Lestat from only a sentence of description. ‘Oh ho,’ I thought to myself, ‘I bet not too many others were canny enough to notice that!’ Then I looked on the internet and realized for that one little reference that I’d gotten there were, oh, a bazzallion others that I’d missed.

And it didn’t effect my enjoyment of the book at all. So if your knowledge of classic works of horror is limited, don’t let it put you off this book. My only issue was that sometimes I would be unsure if a character was Newman’s original creation or if he’d borrowed them from somewhere. It would pull me out of the story a little and I’d have to go look it up to be sure.

The book technically isn’t steampunk, but the rise of the genre is almost undoubtedly why the book got reissued. I’m sure steampunk fans would get a real kick out of, as will vampire fans or horror fans or queen Victoria fans or, well, pretty much anyone who likes there fiction a little on the quirky side.

I bought this book

Review: Vacation, by Matthew Costello

It's never a good sign when you sit down to review a book you finished only a few days ago and realise that you can’t actually remember any of the character’s names. In my head they’ve become ‘the cop dad’ or ‘the teenage daughter,’ which would tell me, if I didn’t already know, that the characters in 'Vacation' lack any kind of depth. They come across like stand ins. As though when the author was sitting down to sketch out his story plan he said ‘ok, so there’s a dad, and he’s a cop,’ and then forgot to go any deeper.

But I know some people are able to enjoy books with flat characters, and so I suspect there are people out there who will enjoy 'Vacation.' It’s an action packed little books, one that you finish really fast even if you weren’t intending to. A cop gets injured on the job and decides to take his family on a holiday, except when they get to the holiday park things are not what they seem.

Oh, and there’s zombies.

‘Vacation’ takes what I couldn’t help but think of as the ‘Feed’ approach to zombies. The story is not about them. They’re an established part of the world, shambling about in the background while the main storyline plays out.

Which is not a criticism. I actually really like this approach. The first few desperate hours following a zombie apocalypse can be thrilling, but I also enjoy reading about societies that have adapted to co-exist with with their new shambling neighbors. This is probably ‘Vacation’s’ strongest point. The zombies have only been around for a decade or so, and while people are holding on you get the impression that things are still getting worse and worse. Fresh food is a real luxury, with most people living off perfectly healthy but unappetizing genetically modified food. I liked the way that the youngest son tends to fixate upon food, as he has never known a world where it was not scarce.

I say that this was the book’s strongest point. A less charitable part of me wants to say it was the books only strong point. The plot is unpredictable only in its predictableness. You think to you self, ‘no, that’s not going to happen it’s way too obvious’ and then it’s a small surprise when the obvious thing actually happens. Again and again.

I think maybe the book should have been longer. They get to the camp and instead of slowly jacking up the feelings of ‘not rightness’ for a few days, let the characters and the reader grow increasingly uneasy, things happen way, way too quickly. The reader isn’t given a chance to get attached to Officer whats-his-name and his family before their lives are in danger, which lowers the suspense considerably (and is another side effect of replacing real characters with cardboard cutouts).

Plus, ok, here is my biggest grievance against this book. I almost didn’t say anything because it verges on nitpicky, but it really spoiled the book for me. Mistakes in the continuity. Glaring ones! In an early chapter the cop refers to his wife as a really light sleeper and she always wakes up when he comes to bed. Then, in a later chapter, he thinks about how he’ll have no trouble sneaking out because his wife is such a heavy sleeper. The one thing this book has going for it is that it barrels along and you get caught up in it, but errors like that bring the whole thing to a screeching halt. I have to go flicking back through the pages to see if I read it wrong, which obviously yanks you right out of the story. And it’s not like that was the only example. At one point the cop thinks that his kid’s screaming is going to get them all killed, then only a few paragraphs later, mere paragraphs for crying out loud, he’s thinking about how proud he was that his kid never made a sound. I mean come on!

But like I said, it’s a quick read. And even though it’s all very obvious what is going to happen and it could have used a more thorough edit, I can’t say that I was ever bored. I would recommend this book to people who don’t care about characters as much as I do, or people who really like zombies in all their forms.

I bought this book.

Review: Melusine, by Sarah Monette

How is it fair that books like, well, I don’t think I need to name any names, I’m sure we can all think of at least one book that defies all laws of good writing and yet still has a huge fanbase. So how is it that books like that, with their sparkling vampires and their last suppers get printed and reprinted and reprinted again, while excellent books like Sarah Monette’s Melusine go out of print?

I had one hell of a time tracking this book down, let me tell you. If it wasn’t for a particularly enthusiastic discussion about it in one of the Goodreads groups I belong to I probably wouldn’t have bothered. And I would have been the one to miss out there, because this really is a very enjoyable read.

The book is told from two separate first person points of view, brothers Felix and Mildmay. It's not so easy, making multiple first person points of view work well. With third person point of view differentiaiting between characters is easy, because you’re naming them ever couple of lines. But you don’t have that luxery in first person. So many books that try to do this whole alternating first person view points thing fail because each character sounded almost exactly the same. This is not even close to being a problem for Monette. Felix and Mildmay are both incredibly distinct characters. The names at the start of each section were wholly unnessary, it was easy to tell within a single line whose head I was in. It seems like such an obvious thing- make your characters seem like different people. And yet so few authors pull it off as well as Monette did here.

Mildmay grew up as a thief on the streets and is now a cat burgler. His voice is ridiculously conversational and engaging, and I don’t doubt that he will be most reader’s favourite. He’s funny, in a cynical kind of way, and good at what he does. But dispite his coolly competent demenour he’s very self conscious, which was actually one thing I really liked about the book. Because Mildmay and Felix don’t meet until halfway through the book, you see Mildmay as Mildmay sees himself. Ugly and scarred. But then when you eventually see him from Felix’s point of view you realise that this is not the case at all. It was just another example of how skillfully Monette’s employed the dual view points.

In contrast to easy to like Mildmay, there is Felix. Handsome and charming, he’s a high ranking wizard and the king’s brother’s lover. His wit is sharp and biting, and while I liked him from the start I think fewer readers will warm to him. He’s just so snarky to everyone. That is, of course, until he goes completely mad.

Because, yeah, for most of the book Felix is completely fucking insane. A spell, and I won’t into anymore detail than that because of spoilers, leaves him mad and presumed guilty of a heinous crime. Which, again, could have really sucked. But Monette manages to walk a fine line between Felix’s madness and still keeping the reader engaged with the plot. It was actually really cool. Felix starts to see various characters as animals, and I had fun trying to figure out which animal was who. I also liked that on one level it was just Felix raving, but if you looked a little deeper you could start to assemble a picture of what was going on. It took a little effort, but I am certainly ok with putting a little effort into my reading, if it's for the right reasons, (like it was here).

I also really, really loved the world building. Different elements of society use different calanders, and different cities subscribe to wildly different kinds of magic. There was a very European feel to the world and it's history, almost like an alternate Venice. I would have liked to have seen more of the world building than what was in this book, but there are three other books in the series so I’m sure I’ll get my way.

The book isn't perfect, but it's definitely one of the better ones I've read this year. It certainly didn't deserve to be treated so poorly by it's publisher. I definitely recommend trying to find a copy of this one. I think it's still available in digital form, so if you've joined the ranks of the advancing ebook armies you'll have an easier time of it. Otherwise, like me, you'll be hitting up ebay and the like. But it's worth it. I promise.

I bought this book.

Review: Deadhouse Gates, By Steven Erikson

I don’t think I’ve encountered a single Malazan fan who doesn’t think that the second book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, Deadhouse Gates, is better than the first. So I’m hardly being original when I say this, but it still has to be said. Deadhouse Gates is a much better book than Gardens of the Moon.

And it’s not like Gardens of the Moon was a bad book, because it really, really wasn’t. Honestly I’m having trouble even identifying what it is about Deadhouse Gates that makes it seem so improved. This is going to sound ridiculously corny, but the only way I can describe it is to say that Deadhouse Gates has heart. I read Gardens of the Moon with half of my mind enjoying the story, and the other half analyzing it and trying to figure out what everything meant. As I said in my review of the book, to me Gardens of the Moon felt like a challenge. An enjoyable one, yes, but I was too busy trying to keep up to really immerse myself in the story.

This was not even slightly the case with Deadhouse Gates. The book certainly no less challenging than Gardens of the Moon (sure, we know who a bunch of people and events are now, but Erikson goes ahead and dumps a crap tonne more on you, lest you start getting cocky). All I know if while I read Gardens with an analytical mind, I read Deadhouse Gates totally and completely involved in the story. I didn’t take nearly as close a note of all the comments and references, but weirdly I feel as though I followed this one better.

There’s a scene, no spoilers here I promise, following a large battle where Erikson had me almost in tears. He had me felling truly wretched. And then only pages later there’s a scene where Coltraine is talking to the Malazan sappers (I'm sure anyone who has read the book will know what I'm talking about) and there I was with the huge, goofy grin on my face. I’m rarely very expressive when I read, but I think it would have been comical to watch my face while I read this book. Constant frowns and gasps and laughter.

The characters, both those we’d already met and newly introduced ones, went from being interesting people to being people I desperately cared about. And I think I just hit on why I found this book to be so much better. The characters. (Of course. Isn’t it always the characters?) When, for example, what happened to Crokus’s uncle in Gardens of the Moon happened, I thought it was some pretty cool writing but I wasn’t really sad or anything. But when what happened to, well, I could name pretty much any character from Deadhouse Gates here, happened, I was a wreck. I was right there with them, cheering or sobbing. Mostly sobbing. (Damn you Erikson!)

When I finished it I felt like I had run a marathon. I felt like I’d crossed the desert in Coltaine’s Chain of Dogs. In part because I normally average two books a week, and this thing took me almost a solid month to get through. But also because Erikson does not spare the reader at all. What his characters go through, you go through. And believe me, Erikson is not nice to his characters.

While I think I need to break from the Malazan world to recover (and I mean that in the best possible way) I look forward to continuing on in this series. I especially can’t wait to see Erikson’s improved skills applied to some of my favourite characters from Gardens of the Moon, like Anomander Rake or Whiskyjack. Or Quick Ben. Or Palan. Or, oh, Kruppe! And we can’t forget Brood… And I wonder if we’re going to meet that Prince who’s heading the Crimson Guard? And what about Tattersail? And, and, and….

I bought this book

Review: The Terror, by Dan Simmons

I am definitely a summer person. The cold and I do not get along. I spend all the winter months miserable and complaining, happy only when I'm sitting pretty much on top of a crackling fire with a book. I'm talking three blankets and a hot water bottle and I still can't feel my toes. (Meanwhile on the other side of the bed my fiance is happy with just a sheet. How is this fair?)

And yet, I don't think I know what cold really is. I mean come on, I've spent my whole life in Australia. I've never even seen snow. I think I'm a passing expert on heat, but cold? I'll defer to the crew of the ill-fated Terror on that one.

Spare a thought for these guys. They sailed off in an attempt to find the north west passage fully expecting, and this is the part that blows my mind, they fully expected to be stuck in ice for years of end. Stuck. In ice. For years. The ocean they were sailing through literally starts to freeze and instead of freaking out they're all, 'yup, that's about right.' It wasn't an unpleasant surprise, it was part of the game plan!

Are you kidding me? And that's not even fiction! Dan Simmons' 'The Terror' has its roots in true events. There have existed men who were willing to set out on an expedition fully knowing that they were going to BE TRAPPED IN ICE FOR YEARS AND YEARS WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN?

To me, being ice bound for months with the same men for company and dwindling food supplies would supply enough horror for one book. And Simmons certainly goes to town with it. The pages of The Terror just reek of desperation and boredom and that brittleness that comes from constantly being on the edge of hysteria. And the cold... Reading this book will put a chill in your bones, Simmons captures the oppressive cold so well.

Second in charge Crozier is the man who has to keep the men from killing each other. He's also an alcoholic who has to keep from killing himself when the rum runs out. He also has to worry about the ship which is slowly being crushed by the ice and the food which is spoiling too fast and, there's something else he has to worry about, what was it...

Oh yes. The freaking ICE MONSTER! Not content with fully exploring the unique blend of claustrophobic horror that results from a whole bunch of men, some good men and some not so much, being forced into close and freezing confinement for years, Simmons also throws into the mix an ice monster to pick them off one by one. (I hope that the ice monster is where the true facts end and the fiction begins, but who can say?)

Can you just picture it? Standing on the deck of a ship trapped in ice, your viability is shot, everything is white and cold and you hear a rustle. The wind? Or the ice monster come to eat you? Having read The Terror I can picture this. I can picture it all too well, because Simmons captures the atmosphere of it all perfectly.

The ice monster terrified me. And all the more so because Simmons creates such engaging characters that I really didn't want to see them get eaten. (Well, most of them). Crozier in particular was fantastically done. A deeply flawed man who nevertheless has to hold everything together, even though he knows he's not really up to the job.

As anyone who's ever read a zombie book already knows, the real monster always turns out to be man. And as The Terror progresses and things go from worse to worser, this becomes all too clear. The ice monster is a thing to inspire terror, but it doesn't even come close to the evils men are capable of.

We may never know what happened to the crews of the real Terror and Erebus, but I hope for their sakes that is was a nicer fate than the one Simmons dreamed up for them.

This book: I bought

Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

Now this is one stylish book. The pages are heavy and the font is beautiful. There’s some nice, brown decorative scrollwork on the page bottoms and ample photographs litter the pages. Plus the whole thing has this really delightful antique feel to it. It looks like the books my Nana’s bookshelf used to be filled with, like ‘What Katie Did’ and ‘The Secret Garden.’ Just lovely.

What a shame then that all of this thoughtful packaging houses a story that, while not terrible, is certainly nothing special. For all the book’s packaging screams ‘look, look! I’m old! And super creepy’ the story itself is standard young adult fare. It’s not even horror, which seems a crime given all the creepy photos throughout the book. It’s basically just a slightly more fantastical x-men.

But it started out so promisingly! Jacob grows up listening to his grandfather’s stories of monsters, which he eventually comes to dismiss as fairy tales. But then his grandfather is brutally killed by a creature that appears to one of the very monsters he used to talk about.

There’s this really wonderful tension throughout the book’s early chapters. And it’s not ‘will the monsters get Jacob?” It’s, ‘are the monsters real?’ Did Jacob catch a glimpse of a monster fleeing from his grandfather’s corpse, or is he just suffering from post traumatic stress? It’s genuinely unclear, and I thought the book was going in a really unique and dark direction.

But then all of this ambiguity is wiped away and in the space of a few pages the book goes from being something original and thought provoking to something we’ve seen many times before. I can’t talk too much about the latter part of the book on account of spoilers, but I will say there is nothing even vaguely creepy or scary about where the book ends up going. I don’t mean that it tries to be creepy and fails, I mean that it’s just not something the author even tries to do. And normally I wouldn’t even think to complain that a book isn’t creepy, except that the way this book is packaged promises an atmosphere of creepiness, so I went in expecting it. Who could look at those old photos and not expect to be creeped out?

Honestly, even without the false promise they offer, I could have done without those photos. It was obvious that they weren’t created specifically for the book, rather the author had dug them all up. Which is cool and all, but too often it felt like he was unnaturally twisting the plot just to fit the photos. There were just all of these long, complicated descriptions that were just there to justify the pictures inclusion in the book. It was like a game! This photo has a girl holding a chicken, how do we make that relate to the story? Plus, and this is probably more of a personal thing, but I found it jarring to form my own mental images and then be faced with photographs that looked completely different.

But despite all of these complaints the story itself is solid enough. The cliffhanger ending is more than a little annoying, but overall I enjoyed it. I just think, had the book been packaged more appropriately, I wouldn’t have been weighed down with pre-conceived notions and I would have been able to enjoy it a lot more. I am definitely all for beautiful books, but what’s the point if the story inside doesn’t match?

I bought this book

Review: Gardens of the Moon, by Steven Erikson

Everywhere I looked there were people saying how complicated and hard Gardens of the Moon (and the Malazan series as whole) is to follow. Which is the best thing that could have happened, really. Because it meant that I went into this book with the right mindset. I was ready to put the effort in, to read every word instead of skimming and give deep thought to the most offhand of comments. Not just ready, I was looking forward to it.

And in the end, I didn’t find Gardens of the Moon to be nearly as complicated as I was expecting. Kinda like when a book is hyped everywhere and you find it to be not so great.

Not that I’m saying Gardens of the Moon is a light and easy read. If I hadn’t gone in well prepared I doubt I would have stuck with it. As it was it took me three times as long to read as a normal book. But if you give it your full attention and really concentrate on everything then you’ll be ok. Mostly.

Reading Gardens of the Moon… To me it was like picking up book four in a twelve book series and trying to keep up. A whole bunch of really important stuff has already happened and the characters all know each other and have complicated histories. And it’s not a book four written by one of those authors who recaps every little thing, no it assumes that you just finished reading the first three books or at the very least you looked up some recaps on the wikipedia, so you know what’s going on.

Except, you know, there are no previous three books. Gardens of the Moon is book one, and if ever the proverb sink or swim was appropriate it's here. You just have to go with it, keep reading even though you have no idea what’s going on and trust that it will become clear.

And the best part it that, slowly, it does. Or at least it starts to. And trust me, it’s worth it.

Gardens of the Moon revolves around the efforts of the Malazan Empire to add another continent to its growing list of conquered lands. The scope of this thing is breathtaking. The book pretty much opens with a battle so epic it feels like it should be the climax of the whole series, not just the opener. And things barely slow down after that.

How many of you have seen the Final Fantasy VII movie, Advent Children? My fiancé is a fan of it, and I remember watching the special features once and the director said something along the lines of ‘every time we considered adding something, we asked our selves; does it look cool?’ Which shows in the film, because everything looks really cool. But underneath the coolness is, well, not much of anything.

Erikson may well have written this book with the same question in mind. Everything in the book is just really, really cool. The immortal Anomander Rake and his terrifying sword of doom? Cool. The magical warrens that mages tap for their powers? Cool. Elite military unit the Bridgeburners? Oh my god, so freaking cool. Except unlike with Advent Children, it’s not all show. This book has more depth than the ocean, and it’s twice as difficult to reach the bottom of.

Not that everything is all serious and thought consuming. There are moments of genuine humour scattered liberally about. I was actually really surprised with how funny the book was. Erikson has a good eye for when to break the darker moments with something lighter, which I as a reader appreciated.

At the end of the day you’ll only get out of Gardens of the Moon what you put in. It’s a love it or hate it kind of deal, I think. Personally, I can’t wait to read the other nine books in the series, and to see if things get any clearer or just a whole lot more complicated!

I bought this book