Posts Tagged ‘mythology’
Wolfhound Century, by Peter Higgins
Posted on: April 6, 2013
Wolfhound Century, by Peter Higgins
Published March 2013
where I got it: received review copy from Publisher (Thanks Orbit books!)
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Musicians, think about the 7th for a moment, a minor 7th, if it makes you feel better. To oversimplify for everyone else, the 7th is the musical cue to move on. A 7th can certainly take you right back to the beginning of the chord progression, or the key could completely change in the next moment. That’s the thing about the 7th, it’s all potential, all possibility. For a split second, you’re not sure where the song will go. For a split second, the song is free of it’s predetermined chords. But all that potential has to go somewhere, because a 7th is unresolved. You can’t end a song on a 7th.
I’ll be back to this metaphor in a bit.
In the alternate Russia of Wolfhound Century, angels have been falling from the sky for generations. Along with control of the angel flesh, the totalitarian government controls everything, reports everything, defines everything. Mothers still tell the cultural myths to their children, but only in hushed voices. The ancient words are not to be used, the Pollandore is not to be spoken of or even thought of, because the Pollandore doesn’t exist. Lock something away for long enough, and people will forget it as quickly as they forget the events that birthed their own myths.
Higgins doesn’t just write, he doesn’t just put words on a page to get the reader somewhere, this man is an artist when it comes to prose. I’d quote passages to show you what I mean, but really, just open the book and choose a paragraph and random, and read it out loud. You’ll be transported. This really is some damn beautiful prose.
Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
Posted on: February 25, 2013
Jagannath, by Karin Tidbeck
published in 2012
where I got it: the library
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This has been a tough review to write. I finished reading Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath last week, and instead of jotting down notes for a review, or trying to come up with some witty blurbable phrase, all I’ve done is pick the book up again and again, reread a few of the short stories, and whisper “Wow”, over and over again.
Just, wow.
I am floored, I am awed, my faith in anything, in everything, has been restored.
Make sure you read Jagannath.
Jagannath is a skinny unassuming little thing. It’s the wallflower of the new shelf at the library, no fancy cosmetics or political slants or controversial stories. It doesn’t scream “read me” with alluring or sexy cover art. And it doesn’t scream “read me” after you open it, either. Sometimes you don’t want a book to scream at you, because it’s better when the book caresses you instead, rewards you for finding it, for choosing the wallflower. With a quiet, confident voice, the stories in Jagannath whisper your name, drawing you in closer and nearer, because it has a secret to tell you, and only you.
Using simple language, Tidbeck takes you to other worlds, places that are beautiful and frightening and cold. These aren’t horror stories, but they are tilted at just enough of an angle that it’s easy to lose your footing. Reading them felt like a one way mirror – I was on the mirror side, but someone else, someone in the story, was watching me from the other side.
You don’t even need to read the rest of this rambling review, just go get the book. You will be far more satisfied with reading Jagannath than with reading my review of its contents.
Krampus: The Yule Lord, by Brom
Posted on: November 16, 2012
- In: Brom
- 11 Comments
Krampus: The Yule Lord, by Brom
published November 2012
where I got it: Borrowed ARC from a friend
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In rural West Virginia lives 20-something Jesse Walker, and his life pretty much sucks. His wife Linda has left him for another man, his musical career is a disaster, and his only job leads are running drugs for the local thugs. It’s Christmas time, Jesse wishes he could afford gifts for his daughter, wishes he could make thing right with his estranged wife. And then, he sees Santa. On a sleigh, with reindeer, complete with bottomless bag of gifts, Santa gets attacked by demons, and in the shuffle, Jesse ends up with Santa’s bottomless sack.
Ahh, but Santa isn’t who you think he is, and that bottomless bag never belonged to him in the first place. This is where the story gets interesting, with Brom weaving together Norse and Germanic mythology and the stories of St. Nick and the pagan solstice holidays that Christmas eventually replaced. Jesse may being pulling gifts for his daughter out of the sack, but now he’s got Krampus, the Yule Lord, on his tail.
Imprisoned by Santa and left to die, Krampus has finally gained the strength to escape his chains. With the help of his supernatural Belsnickel servants, he’s learned the location of the sack. Although he looks the part, Krampus is not a devil. The original winter spirit, Krampus reinvigorated our freezing ancestors, to give them hope that they could survive the long, harsh winter. Gaining strength and feeding his hatred towards Santa, Krampus now has everything he needs to turn Yule back to its original meaning.
Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams
published November 2012
where I got it: Received ARC from the publisher
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Epic Fantasy requires the story to be bigger, the dragons be faster, the warriors be stronger, and everything generally be more. And Epic: Legends of Fantasy offers up just that – more mythos, higher stakes, more of simply everything.
Many of the entries are part of the author’s larger work, taking place in an epic fantasy world that the author has already written hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages about. Randomly, the stories I read first happened to be part of larger works, and at first, the lack of stand alone works bothered me, but I quickly came to appreciate it, and to learn the collection had plenty of stand alone stories as well. An anthology like this is a brilliant method of introducing readers to these larger fantasy worlds created by famous authors such as Robin Hobb, George R R Martin, Michael Moorcock, Melanie Rawn, Tad Williams, and many others, and serves as an excellent introduction to the writings of newer authors as well.
Some works were fairly new, but others were older than I am. the Moorcock for example was originally written in 1961. A pure classic sword and sorcery, complete with sexualized and helpless female, it might be offensive to today’s readers, but I’m happy Adams included it, as what’s the point of talking about Epic Fantasy if we’re not going to touch on the journey the genre has taken?
Clocking in at over 600 pages, Epic: Legends of Fantasy is itself a bit of a doorstopper. We eat clunksters like this for breakfast, so I was surprised at how long it took me to plow through it. ahh, but spending 600+ pages in one fantasy world is one thing. Try spending that quantity of pages in over a dozen fantasy worlds. More often than not, my brain needed a little break in between. This isn’t the kind of anthology to gorge on, this is the kind you savor, over many winter evenings.
Here’s my thoughts a handful of the entries:
Tiassa, by Steven Brust
Posted on: November 9, 2012
Tiassa, by Steven Brust
published in 2011
where I got it: purchased new
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I am among the fans who came to Tiassa with trepidation. The two books that come before it, Jhegaala and Iorich are slower, quieter reads. Not much happens, Vlad pines for his ex-wife, everyone is very sad about a lot of things, the witty snark was toned down. They aren’t bad books by any means (Brust’s writing will break your heart no matter what’s going on in the story) they just aren’t super fun to read. Would Tiassa be more of the same? I didn’t even care if it moved the timeline forward, I just wanted the feeling of fun, and adventure, and optimism that I’d gotten out of the earlier Vlad books.
After a handful of “meh” reads these last few weeks, I was desperate for a book that would grab me and insist that it was going to lead this dance. I needed a comfort read; an author I could trust to transport me to a different world, a book that would swallow me whole so quickly I wouldn’t even feel its teeth.
Steven Brust’s Tiassa to the rescue.
I saw a review on Amazon that said Tiassa was Brust’s love letter to his fans, and after reading it I have to whole heartedly agree. If you are already a long time reader of the Vlad Taltos series, you will be in heaven with Tiassa. But on the flip-side, if you’re new to the series, this is a terrible place to start (start here. really.).
The book is sharply divided in three portions, with interludes inbetween, and throughout everything a silver tiassa sculpture keeps coming up. A tiny, seemingly useless sculpture of a winged cat, it may have been forged by the gods or it may be worthless. Regardless, the little tiassa seems to be making its own plans. Packed with the requisite witty dialog but jumping around in time and touching on Draegaran mythology, Tiassa isn’t so much a Vlad Taltos book as it is a Dragaeran Empire book.
When Tim Powers’ recent novel Hide Me Among The Graves became available, half the speculative fiction fans I know cheered, and the other half said “Tim who?”. Have you enjoyed the recent Burton and Swinburne steampunk trilogy from Mark Hodder? How about Connie Willis’s time travel books? Did you like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, or maybe Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon? If you answered Yes to any of those questions, Tim Powers is an author you should be reading. Also, he’s got some major street cred – when you and I were in pre-school, he was chillin’ with Blaylock and Jeter and helping define what many of us now know as steampunk. Tim Powers is truly one of my heroes of literature, one of the authors I go to when I need a comfort read, something I know I’m going to enjoy, something that is guaranteed to knock my socks off. When I first read The Anubis Gates around 10 years ago, I didn’t know who Powers was, but I knew I wanted more.
Powers writes primarily alternate history, but he does it in a way no one else does. He likes to use what I call the “pockets of I-don’t-know” theory, where he finds pockets in history where something odd was reported, where someone was reported acting very unusual, or went missing for a few days and wouldn’t tell anyone where they’d been, or just something strange happened. The fiction of Tim Powers lives in these pockets, he’s writing the secret history of what really happened. or as he puts it:
“I made it an ironclad rule that I could not change or disregard any of the recorded facts, nor rearrange any days of the calendar – and then I tried to figure out what momentous but unrecorded fact could explain them all.”
Intrigued? Here’s a few more reasons you should be reading Tim Powers.
He’s a “gateway” author. Go the bookstore or the library, and Powers will probably be found in fiction, not science fiction. He’s perfect for people who “aren’t really into all that weird scifi stuff”. Do you like spy thrillers? Try Declare, about Kim Philby’s true mission, which might have involved genies, and something horrific living on Mount Ararat. Prefer contemporary dramas with some suspense and maybe a smidgen of mythology? Try Last Call, which takes place in Las Vegas, and touches on some of the mythological opportunities that might have helped the luckiest city in the world, because destiny is the ultimate gamble, right?
Clockwork Phoenix (anthology) Volume 3, edited by Mike Allen
published in 2010
where I got it: gift from a friend (and she got it autographed for me!!)
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This is Mike Allen’s third volume of beautiful and strange short fiction. In previous volumes, he showcased new works by authors such as Mary Robinette Kowal, Saladin Ahmed, Catherynne M. Valente, and Tanith Lee. And volume three continues in this vein, offering an intriguing collection of short fiction by well known authors such as John C. Wright, Cat Rambo, Gemma Files and Marie Brennan, along with works by lesser known folks that I am thrilled to have gotten to know a little better. The theme to these anthologies is “tales of beauty and strangeness”, and Allen has certainly chosen works that match that description. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, we can look forward to a fourth volume of beauty and strangeness, the surreal and the fantastic.
Anthologies tend to run hot and cold for me. It’s like buying an album (did I just date myself?). You buy the album for one song, and hope the rest of it doesn’t suck. I’m the same way with anthologies. Out of the fifteen short stories, maybe 3 of them were just okay for me. And the rest? The rest were pure winners.
In no particular order, here are my thoughts on a handful of my favorite short stories in the collection:
Murder in Metachronopolis, by John C. Wright – one of the longer works, and purposely presented in an unusual way. Jake Frontino has been brought to the city outside of time, Metachronopolis, the city of the Masters of Time, to work for them as a Private Investigator. They’ve sent him through time on missions to stop terrible things before they happen – to kill the mothers of dictators, to foil marriages and stop meetings from taking place. The Masters of Time supposedly have no enemies, but Jake has met those enemies, been party to their plans for a coup. The story is written in numbered portions, so the reader immediately knows we are not getting the story in chronological order, we are not getting “the truth” in the right order. And you know what I did the moment I finished this story? I read it again, flipping the pages back and forth so that with the help of the section numbers I could read it in chronological order, in the order that things happened to Jake. And it was a completely different story. I love it when that happens, when I can experience the same story in a completely new light.
The Gospel of Nachash by Marie Brennan – This is a retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden. I’m a sucker for any kind of old testament mythology, so this tale was right up my alley. Among its other twists, is the story of the Expulsion is told from the serpent’s point of view. The serpent, Nachash, was also a creation of God, was also in the garden for a specific reason. Nachash and God’s Daughter watch Adam and Chava’s lives after the garden, and they witness the birth of Chava’s two sons. How will this tiny mortal family populate the earth, with no other women? God’s Daughter has a plan, and Nachash is at the center of it. But that’s not the twist, oh no, Brennan’s got an ever better trick up her sleeve.
And Blue Skies from Pain (The Fey and The Fallen, book 2), by Stina Leicht
published in March 2012 from Night Shade Books
Where I got it: the library
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And Blue Skies from Pain is the sequel to Of Blood and Honey (reviewed here), and thus this review will involve some spoilers of the first book. You’ve been warned.
The super simple fast review is if you like your urban fantasy intelligent, powerful, and heart wrenchingly beautiful, this is the series for you. I lost sleep over this book. I was late to work due to sitting in my car, reading just a few more pages. If you are not reading Stina Leicht, you are missing out on some of the best urban fantasy being written today.
Northern Ireland, 1977, and for once Liam Kelly has something more pressing to worry about than The Troubles. He’ll do anything to avoid returning to the prisons, and he isn’t interested in working for any side again. He’s seen enough pain and enough death. With the help of Father Murray, Liam has learned to separate the shape-changing part of him, known as The Hound, and crush that portion of himself into the back of his mind. But the more he separates himself from who and what he truly is, the more dangerous he becomes to himself and others. At least his Fey father, Bran, is finally speaking to him. But the Fey have problems of their own, and Bran may not be able to drop everything every time his son calls to him.
As part of a truce agreement between The Church and the Fey, Liam is offered up to the inquisitors so the Church can determine what exactly he is. The inquisitors were the most gut wrenching, frightening part for me. While the Hound in the back of his mind is telling him to get out, the voice in my head is screaming RUN. This is beyond Danger Will Robinson. My emotional reaction was pure animal, pure visceral, pure and utter lizard brain fear, telling me to run until I ran out of earth to run on. Other readers certainly may not experience it quite as ripely as I did, but still, this is some successfully scary and worrysome shit.
Of Blood And Honey by Stina Leicht
Posted on: April 24, 2012
Of Blood and Honey, by Stina Leight
published in Feb/March 2012 by Nightshade Books
where I got it: the library
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Against the backdrop of The Troubles of Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Liam Kelly just wants to live his life. He’s a teenager at the beginning of the book, and like all teenagers, he finds trouble. In casual support of the local riots, he’s arrested. I was addicted to this book on page 2, and less than 30 pages in I was directly invested in Liam Kelly’s future. In and out of internment camps, and hoping to return to his betrothed, Liam trust that his Confessor, Father Murray, will help plead his case.
Through little fault of his own, Liam gets a reputation during his time in the camps. His friends at home always knew he was a little off, always knew he had a temper. But now, people who hurt him, people who threaten his safety or the safety of his family are later found dead and mutilated. Liam didn’t hurt them, but somebody did. And every day, Liam gets closer to turning into that something.
The word that kept coming to mind while I was reading Of Blood and Honey was “sharp”. Leicht’s prose style is sharp, and I mean in that in the most basic dictionary definition – sharp like a razor. Her words cut and punch and bite at the most vulnerable parts of your body. And I couldn’t stop reading, I couldn’t stop letting these stabbity little sentences have their way with me.
I recently reviewed Robert Jackson Bennett’s newest novel, The Troupe, and it was absolutely incredible. Seriously, go read my review. I’ll wait.
Mr. Bennett’s debut novel, Mr. Shivers was published in 2010, and while that novel was winning literary awards left and right, he was busy publishing his second novel, The Company Man. His fourth novel, American Elsewhere is scheduled to hit store shelves this coming winter. And beyond all of that wonderfulness, he agreed to let me ask him a bunch of strange questions. What a gentleman!
Everyone, please give a big round of applause to Robert Jackson Bennett!
LRR: The Troupe focuses around Vaudeville performers and troupes that traveled the country in the early 1900′s from theater to theater. Did you spend any time in the theater when you were younger? Are you a fan of music and theater of the early 1900′s?
RJB: I was a musician, actually – a classically trained violist. So I know a fair bit about prodigies like George, having met a few in my time. Some were hilariously self-involved, like George, and others were like the little circus dogs who only know how to perform, and haven’t ever done anything else. It could be a bit sad, in a way.
I’m a huge fan of early 20th century comedy – the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton… I still haven’t seen that many comedians who can do so much with so little.
Some people don’t get the Marx Brothers. Personally, I don’t get people who don’t get the Marx Brothers.
LRR: Did you always want to be a writer? If not, what got you started down the path to “Hi, I’m an author!”
RJB: I kind of think so. I think my parents might have raised me to be a writer without knowing it. My first word was “Melville,” if that gives you any idea, because that was our dog’s name. They were always giving me books and discussing them with me. It was expected of you to be culturally informed. And at some point in time I started thinking up variations of the things they were showing me or books I read on my own, trying to make them better and make them the sort of story I wanted to read, and eventually this just translated into writing.
LRR: What authors and books have inspired you over the years?
RJB: Oh, geez. A bunch. I grew up reading Stephen King, Madeleine L’Engel, Roald Dahl; then it translated into Neil Gaiman, John le Carre, Susana Clarke, David Foster Wallace; and lately I’ve been reading a lot of David Mitchell and Katherine Ann Porter.
I’m chiefly fascinated by work that examines one idea or a set of ideas. I still think of a novel as the most fun kind of thought experiment, trying to glean truths from fabulous lies, setting things in motion and smashing them together and seeing what’s left and what isn’t. I’d say most of my novels fall under this category.
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