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Review Date: 3/8/2012
Even average Stephen King is worth reading. I'd call The Colorado Kid, a short novel (almost a novella) a notch above average, maybe 3.5 stars.
It's not really a "hard-boiled" mystery, though, and I don't know why it's labeled as such. That sultry dame on the cover is pretty misleading; the story is actually an unsolved murder being related to a young reporter working on a small tourist island newspaper in Maine by two old-timers who've been living there and reporting for the paper since forever.
There are two stories here; one is the human interaction between the old-timers and their young protege as they discuss fine nuances of human behavior wrapped in small mysteries, everything from why they didn't leave a tip on the table for a hard-working waitress to why they don't tell the big city reporter working on a series for a Boston paper about any of the real mysteries they know about, and stick to old unsolved ones everyone knows about like the mysterious coast lights and the poisoned church picnic. King has always been good at inserting little bits of human mystery like this into his stories.
The second story, the one The Colorado Kid is really about, is that of a man from Colorado who was found dead on this Maine island back in 1980. As the two journalists tell the tale, more and more odd details surface, and as they try to work through answers to each one, the case becomes stranger and stranger.
The thing is, The Colorado Kid is actually a bit of a meta-story, and appreciating it requires knowing a little bit about Stephen King. Like the fact that in recent years he's been connecting all of his fiction loosely together in a self-referential manner.
Consider a supernatural thriller with inhuman creatures, magic, aliens, or whatever, operating in secret. Imagine the collateral damage these stories leave lying around: dead bodies, burned down buildings, unexplained holes in the ground. What happens when "mundanes" come across the aftermath of such incidents? They have no idea about parallel dimensions or battles between good and evil, they just know there's a dead body lying here and they have no idea how it got there or how he died. They try to piece together the clues, but there are holes in any story they come up with, because even if they are open-minded enough to consider the paranormal, they can't know the whole truth.
This story is kind of like getting a peek at a mystery like that. If you take it at face value, it's just an odd tale about an unsolved death. If you think about all the other King you've read, you say, "Damn, some shit went down here, and these people just have no clue..."
It's not really a "hard-boiled" mystery, though, and I don't know why it's labeled as such. That sultry dame on the cover is pretty misleading; the story is actually an unsolved murder being related to a young reporter working on a small tourist island newspaper in Maine by two old-timers who've been living there and reporting for the paper since forever.
There are two stories here; one is the human interaction between the old-timers and their young protege as they discuss fine nuances of human behavior wrapped in small mysteries, everything from why they didn't leave a tip on the table for a hard-working waitress to why they don't tell the big city reporter working on a series for a Boston paper about any of the real mysteries they know about, and stick to old unsolved ones everyone knows about like the mysterious coast lights and the poisoned church picnic. King has always been good at inserting little bits of human mystery like this into his stories.
The second story, the one The Colorado Kid is really about, is that of a man from Colorado who was found dead on this Maine island back in 1980. As the two journalists tell the tale, more and more odd details surface, and as they try to work through answers to each one, the case becomes stranger and stranger.
The thing is, The Colorado Kid is actually a bit of a meta-story, and appreciating it requires knowing a little bit about Stephen King. Like the fact that in recent years he's been connecting all of his fiction loosely together in a self-referential manner.
Consider a supernatural thriller with inhuman creatures, magic, aliens, or whatever, operating in secret. Imagine the collateral damage these stories leave lying around: dead bodies, burned down buildings, unexplained holes in the ground. What happens when "mundanes" come across the aftermath of such incidents? They have no idea about parallel dimensions or battles between good and evil, they just know there's a dead body lying here and they have no idea how it got there or how he died. They try to piece together the clues, but there are holes in any story they come up with, because even if they are open-minded enough to consider the paranormal, they can't know the whole truth.
This story is kind of like getting a peek at a mystery like that. If you take it at face value, it's just an odd tale about an unsolved death. If you think about all the other King you've read, you say, "Damn, some shit went down here, and these people just have no clue..."
Review Date: 1/10/2011
Helpful Score: 4
Inasmuch as The Crying of Lot 49 has a plot, it's about a suburban housewife, Oedipa Mass (all the characters in this book have pun-ny names like that) who, after being named the executor of her wealthy ex-boyfriend's will, discovers a secret society connected by an underground mail service. Or, she becomes a delusional paranoid. Either reading is possible.
This is a trippy book. It was written in the 60s, and it's Pynchon's shortest, but that doesn't make it a particularly easy read. I can see why it's highly regarded among the literati -- Pynchon writes imaginatively and inimitably, and the structure of the novel is deep but very straightforward. The plot, however, is not. This is the sort of book you probably have to read several times to "get." I kind of have a love-hate relationship with it after reading it -- I am not usually a big fan of literary fiction that emphasizes style over substance, but there is substance here. I'm just afraid a lot of it went over my head (and I'm usually a pretty deep reader).
Fans of conspiracy thrillers, particularly Robert Shea and Robert Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy or Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle would do well to check out The Crying of Lot 49, since it's very much in that genre, but whereas the former two are more overtly conspiratorial and science fictional, the conflict in The Crying of Lot 49 is mostly internal, involving the main character, Oedipa.
This is a trippy book. It was written in the 60s, and it's Pynchon's shortest, but that doesn't make it a particularly easy read. I can see why it's highly regarded among the literati -- Pynchon writes imaginatively and inimitably, and the structure of the novel is deep but very straightforward. The plot, however, is not. This is the sort of book you probably have to read several times to "get." I kind of have a love-hate relationship with it after reading it -- I am not usually a big fan of literary fiction that emphasizes style over substance, but there is substance here. I'm just afraid a lot of it went over my head (and I'm usually a pretty deep reader).
Fans of conspiracy thrillers, particularly Robert Shea and Robert Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy or Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle would do well to check out The Crying of Lot 49, since it's very much in that genre, but whereas the former two are more overtly conspiratorial and science fictional, the conflict in The Crying of Lot 49 is mostly internal, involving the main character, Oedipa.
Review Date: 2/19/2012
Helpful Score: 1
Superheroes and zombie novels appeal to the fourteen-year-old boy in me, and when I read one, I am usually disappointed because I am no longer a fourteen-year-old boy. Ex-Heroes is the ultimate superheroes+zombies mashup, with the Earth's surviving superheroes (okay, Los Angeles's surviving superheroes) protecting what remains of the living human population from the undead hordes after the zombie apocalypse.
This very "high concept" premise makes for a fun story that would make a pretty entertaining comic series, and Clines delivers plenty of gonzo superheroic action combined with gonzo zombie gore. You can really see he is trying to describe multi-panel superhero slugfests and gut-ripping zombie action in full four-color spectacle just as it would appear on the pages of a comic book, which is why the fight scenes are prolonged and detailed and full of roars and screams and sound effects and people getting knocked through walls and blasted about, interspersed with hero/villain banter and the occasional monologue. So Clines has the feel of the genre for sure.
But that's all this book is: a novelized comic book. The characters are interesting insofar as we get flashbacks to their origins, a description of their powers and major personality quirks, and then their current doings in post-zombie-apocalypse LA, but no one really comes alive as more than a comic book illustration accompanied by a list of vitals. Cerberus is the chick in the mecha suit, Stealth is the emotionally detached mastermind who dresses in leather lingerie, Gorgon is the guy whose underage girlfriend got zombified and now he is muchly angsted, the Mighty Dragon is Superman with fire-breath, etc. The Big Bad, when he finally appears, is only mildly threatening since we're pretty much told he's an idiot, which means he'll rack up a few casualties and then be defeated.
Clines delivers servicable action, but his writing is not great and his characterization is about par for a comic book. This is a fun but eminently forgettable romp, though I might listen to book two the next time I need some entertainment only slightly less mindless than a zombie movie.
This very "high concept" premise makes for a fun story that would make a pretty entertaining comic series, and Clines delivers plenty of gonzo superheroic action combined with gonzo zombie gore. You can really see he is trying to describe multi-panel superhero slugfests and gut-ripping zombie action in full four-color spectacle just as it would appear on the pages of a comic book, which is why the fight scenes are prolonged and detailed and full of roars and screams and sound effects and people getting knocked through walls and blasted about, interspersed with hero/villain banter and the occasional monologue. So Clines has the feel of the genre for sure.
But that's all this book is: a novelized comic book. The characters are interesting insofar as we get flashbacks to their origins, a description of their powers and major personality quirks, and then their current doings in post-zombie-apocalypse LA, but no one really comes alive as more than a comic book illustration accompanied by a list of vitals. Cerberus is the chick in the mecha suit, Stealth is the emotionally detached mastermind who dresses in leather lingerie, Gorgon is the guy whose underage girlfriend got zombified and now he is muchly angsted, the Mighty Dragon is Superman with fire-breath, etc. The Big Bad, when he finally appears, is only mildly threatening since we're pretty much told he's an idiot, which means he'll rack up a few casualties and then be defeated.
Clines delivers servicable action, but his writing is not great and his characterization is about par for a comic book. This is a fun but eminently forgettable romp, though I might listen to book two the next time I need some entertainment only slightly less mindless than a zombie movie.
Review Date: 2/19/2012
This is definitely popcorn entertainment. Superheroes + zombies: it's a novelized comic book, and it reads like one. I thought the first book (Ex-Heroes) was pretty cheesy and mediocre if enjoyable. The second book is also cheesy, maybe just a notch above mediocre. Clines's writing has improved in this sequel, and it particularly shows in the plotting. Instead of a dumb boss fight with a predictable conclusion at the end, there are several fairly clever (if very much conforming to standard superhero tropes) twists, some of which made things that initially had me rolling my eyes suddenly become more credible. The battle at the end is more complex and has more factions and is left a little bit inconclusive (well, in typical genre fashion, you can't ever have a villain decisively killed).
In Ex-Heroes, we were introduced to a gang of superheroes who were defending "The Mount," a fortress inside what was once Paramount Studios in Hollywood, where human survivors have barricaded themselves against the zombie hordes that have overrun the world. In this second book in what is obviously meant to be an ongoing series, we're introduced to a group of "super soldiers" who were engineered by the U.S. Army just before everything went to apocalypse. Led by "Captain Freedom" (yeah, yeah), they discover the Mount when they fly a predator drone overhead. The heroes send out Zzzap, their energy form hero, and soon the superheroes are meeting the super-soldiers, there is the obligatory initial misunderstanding leading to a completely unnecessary hero battle, followed by the two groups deciding to join together, followed by the discovery of sinister secrets, a hidden bad guy, a returning foe, and more "killing dead zombie celebrity" jokes.
I gave the first book 3 stars; I give this one 3.5. I don't think Peter Clines is going to be putting out anything really fantastically well-written or brilliant, but although falling a bit below my usual quality threshold for series I want to keep following, I have enjoyed both books enough that I will probably snap up the next book when it's released. This is very much hardcore zombie-superhero-nerd fantasy, but if that hits your sweet spot, take the time to enjoy the unabashed enthusiastic genre love here.
In Ex-Heroes, we were introduced to a gang of superheroes who were defending "The Mount," a fortress inside what was once Paramount Studios in Hollywood, where human survivors have barricaded themselves against the zombie hordes that have overrun the world. In this second book in what is obviously meant to be an ongoing series, we're introduced to a group of "super soldiers" who were engineered by the U.S. Army just before everything went to apocalypse. Led by "Captain Freedom" (yeah, yeah), they discover the Mount when they fly a predator drone overhead. The heroes send out Zzzap, their energy form hero, and soon the superheroes are meeting the super-soldiers, there is the obligatory initial misunderstanding leading to a completely unnecessary hero battle, followed by the two groups deciding to join together, followed by the discovery of sinister secrets, a hidden bad guy, a returning foe, and more "killing dead zombie celebrity" jokes.
I gave the first book 3 stars; I give this one 3.5. I don't think Peter Clines is going to be putting out anything really fantastically well-written or brilliant, but although falling a bit below my usual quality threshold for series I want to keep following, I have enjoyed both books enough that I will probably snap up the next book when it's released. This is very much hardcore zombie-superhero-nerd fantasy, but if that hits your sweet spot, take the time to enjoy the unabashed enthusiastic genre love here.
Review Date: 5/6/2011
Hyperion pretty much ended in a cliffhanger. The Fall of Hyperion picks up where part one left off, and for once, I found the second volume to be better than the first. Simmons doesn't let each character take over an entire section of the book this time, but divides chapters among many different characters, shifting from Hyperion to the homeworlds of the Hegemony and giving us both the big picture of the war against the Ousters (and eventually, the hostile AIs of the TechnoCore) and a resolution for each of the characters we met in book one. Each of the pilgrims who set out to meet the Shrike in Hyperion does meet it. For each of them, the outcome is different, but as we learn the secret of the Shrike, every encounter becomes more important.
This is classic epic space opera, and the chapters with the war and the revelations about the Shrike and the TechnoCore are the best. There were some less interesting chapters (mostly those involving the cybrid "reincarnation" of John Keats) and places where the story dragged while characters moved from place to place and didn't know what was happening with the other characters, and sometimes just when things were getting really interesting, Simmons would end the scene in a cliffhanger and move to a less interesting POV, and not come back to the thread he left dangling for several chapters. So I wasn't always thrilled by the pace of the story and I thought the book was just a little longer than it needed to be, but the payoff was worth it.
Recommended for anyone who likes epic space opera and grand metaplots that end in a bang, but read book one first and be aware that you'll need to read both to get everything out of the story. Unlike Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion does not end with things up in the air -- the story comes to an end, more or less, though obviously the future is uncertain and so there are two more books in the series, which I will get to in due time.
I like this kind of mega-scale SF with epic conflicts when done well. The Hyperion Cantos is not the best I've ever read, but it's definitely in my top ten. I liked book two more than book one, so I give it 4.5 stars, but I just can't quite give it 5 stars.
This is classic epic space opera, and the chapters with the war and the revelations about the Shrike and the TechnoCore are the best. There were some less interesting chapters (mostly those involving the cybrid "reincarnation" of John Keats) and places where the story dragged while characters moved from place to place and didn't know what was happening with the other characters, and sometimes just when things were getting really interesting, Simmons would end the scene in a cliffhanger and move to a less interesting POV, and not come back to the thread he left dangling for several chapters. So I wasn't always thrilled by the pace of the story and I thought the book was just a little longer than it needed to be, but the payoff was worth it.
Recommended for anyone who likes epic space opera and grand metaplots that end in a bang, but read book one first and be aware that you'll need to read both to get everything out of the story. Unlike Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion does not end with things up in the air -- the story comes to an end, more or less, though obviously the future is uncertain and so there are two more books in the series, which I will get to in due time.
I like this kind of mega-scale SF with epic conflicts when done well. The Hyperion Cantos is not the best I've ever read, but it's definitely in my top ten. I liked book two more than book one, so I give it 4.5 stars, but I just can't quite give it 5 stars.
Review Date: 1/12/2012
Helpful Score: 1
I am not sure why this book is so popular, other than the personality-less melodramatic protagonist who has two boys both lusting after her, which I guess appeals to a lot of teen girls. Mary, the first-person narrator, spends most of this post-apocalyptic zombie novel whining about how much her life sucks and the village sucks and the world sucks because the undead have destroyed civilization and as far as they know, they are the only human beings left alive.
I would have liked to like this book more, but I found the world-building flat (really, you have this one village in the middle of nowhere and no one ever questions or tries to change anything or go looking for other people, and they're basically all waiting for the inevitable moment when the Unconsecrated break through the fences and kill everyone) and the characters had little in the way of personality or believable motivation.
Also, Mary gets almost everyone around her killed and still manages to make everything all about her.
This book is a textbook case of the formulaic YA novel with an obligatory love triangle that constantly distracts from any real story and sucks all the life out of the characters and the world. I found the writing bland and simple, though with occasional flourishes that promised the potential for something better.
I probably would have enjoyed this more as kid, but it's a very juvenile novel reworking themes and a plot that's been done much better, many times, by everyone from Richard Matheson to Stephen King.
I will not be seeking out Ryan's sequel to this one. I give it two stars because it did have a readable quality to it that kept me going until the end, but unlike other YA novels with a high body count, like The Hunger Games, The Forest of Hands and Teeth never really made me care who got ate, I felt no emotional reaction to the casualties, and only annoyance that Mary wasn't one of them.
It's not a terrible book, it's just not at all original nor is the writing very good, so it gets a big "meh" from me.
I would have liked to like this book more, but I found the world-building flat (really, you have this one village in the middle of nowhere and no one ever questions or tries to change anything or go looking for other people, and they're basically all waiting for the inevitable moment when the Unconsecrated break through the fences and kill everyone) and the characters had little in the way of personality or believable motivation.
Also, Mary gets almost everyone around her killed and still manages to make everything all about her.
This book is a textbook case of the formulaic YA novel with an obligatory love triangle that constantly distracts from any real story and sucks all the life out of the characters and the world. I found the writing bland and simple, though with occasional flourishes that promised the potential for something better.
I probably would have enjoyed this more as kid, but it's a very juvenile novel reworking themes and a plot that's been done much better, many times, by everyone from Richard Matheson to Stephen King.
I will not be seeking out Ryan's sequel to this one. I give it two stars because it did have a readable quality to it that kept me going until the end, but unlike other YA novels with a high body count, like The Hunger Games, The Forest of Hands and Teeth never really made me care who got ate, I felt no emotional reaction to the casualties, and only annoyance that Mary wasn't one of them.
It's not a terrible book, it's just not at all original nor is the writing very good, so it gets a big "meh" from me.
Review Date: 12/16/2011
Helpful Score: 2
Haruki Murakami is a fascinating and interesting writer and boy howdy is he preoccupied with his penis. I mean, his protagonist's penis. Penises in general. Every book of his I've read is penispenispenis.
But boy can he write. Kafka on the Shore is "magical realism," which as the old joke goes, is "fantasy when it's not written in English." More seriously, it's one of those books where otherworldly things happen that the reader is asked to simply accept. There is no explanation for how someone can exist simultaneously as an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy in order to be in two places at once, or why conceptual incarnations take the corporeal form of Colonel Sanders, or why Nakata can talk to cats.
Kafka Tamura is a teenager running away from his father's Oedipal prophecy. The voice in his head is a boy named Crow, who tells him he must become "the world's toughest fifteen-year-old." He takes up residence in a library overseen by a gender-bending librarian, encounters a woman who may be his mother and a girl who may be his sister, and screws both of them. It may be a dream. But Murakami describes every encounter in very corporeal detail. Penispenispenis!
Meanwhile, Nakata, an old man who was mentally damaged/traumatized by an event that happened to him at the end of the war but left with the ability to talk to cats, has to find a family's housecat and stop a cat serial killer. This leads to him becoming a fugitive, where he encounters a truck driver who joins him on his quest to find a stone, in a bizarre urban Japanese inversion of your typical fantasy quest.
Nakata's quest and Tamura's are linked, but the links are never clearly defined; indeed, it's not entirely clear how their two character arcs are connected at all, though they may be the same person.
If this review fails to convey much sense of the plot, it's because Murakami's plots are... really hard to describe. He throws a little bit of everything into the story. And lots of penis. But the prose is liquid and lyrical, even in translation, and the story carries you along like a rushing stream, batting you about so you're not quite sure where you are going but you at least have a vague sense that you are going somewhere. And where it dumps you, who can say?
I liked it. But it's weird. Like everything Murakami writes. And seriously, dude, enough with the penises.
But boy can he write. Kafka on the Shore is "magical realism," which as the old joke goes, is "fantasy when it's not written in English." More seriously, it's one of those books where otherworldly things happen that the reader is asked to simply accept. There is no explanation for how someone can exist simultaneously as an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy in order to be in two places at once, or why conceptual incarnations take the corporeal form of Colonel Sanders, or why Nakata can talk to cats.
Kafka Tamura is a teenager running away from his father's Oedipal prophecy. The voice in his head is a boy named Crow, who tells him he must become "the world's toughest fifteen-year-old." He takes up residence in a library overseen by a gender-bending librarian, encounters a woman who may be his mother and a girl who may be his sister, and screws both of them. It may be a dream. But Murakami describes every encounter in very corporeal detail. Penispenispenis!
Meanwhile, Nakata, an old man who was mentally damaged/traumatized by an event that happened to him at the end of the war but left with the ability to talk to cats, has to find a family's housecat and stop a cat serial killer. This leads to him becoming a fugitive, where he encounters a truck driver who joins him on his quest to find a stone, in a bizarre urban Japanese inversion of your typical fantasy quest.
Nakata's quest and Tamura's are linked, but the links are never clearly defined; indeed, it's not entirely clear how their two character arcs are connected at all, though they may be the same person.
If this review fails to convey much sense of the plot, it's because Murakami's plots are... really hard to describe. He throws a little bit of everything into the story. And lots of penis. But the prose is liquid and lyrical, even in translation, and the story carries you along like a rushing stream, batting you about so you're not quite sure where you are going but you at least have a vague sense that you are going somewhere. And where it dumps you, who can say?
I liked it. But it's weird. Like everything Murakami writes. And seriously, dude, enough with the penises.
Review Date: 1/21/2013
The lightning bug, or firefly, is neither a bug nor a fly, but a beetle. I like bug, because it has a cozy sound, a hugging sound, a snug sound, it fits her, my Bug.
Deep in the dark blue air sing these lives that make the summer night. The lightning bug does not sing. But of all these lives, it alone, the lightning bug alone, is visible. The others are heard but not seen, felt but not seen, smelled but not seen.
Lightning Bug is set in the early 1930s, in the fictional Ozark town of Stay More, Arkansas. Stay More (falsely called "Staymore" by the U.S. Postal Service) is a tiny town that's only getting tinier. It has a single post office, run by Latha Bourne, who is taking care of her niece, a beautiful girl named Sonora who provides the town's nightly entertainment with the boys who gather on Latha's front lawn to fight for her attention.
Stay More, like most small towns, is full of secrets and petty grudges. Years ago Latha was engaged to one man and in love with another. They both went off to war, and only one came back. Every Dill wanted to marry Latha, but she refused. Then Every was run out of town. Before he left, he raped Latha and robbed the bank.
Years later, he comes back to a town that still remembers and hates him. Now he's a revivalist preacher, and he's still in love with Latha. And Latha might still be in love with him.
Latha is a very earthy woman; the narrative shifts between third-person limited and the first-person POV of "Dawny," a five-year-old boy in love with Latha at the time of the events in the story, relating facts and history and his own still-burning torch for his pre-pubescent crush. Is Dawny the author, Donald Harington? It's not clear because the author is an unreliable narrator, just as Latha is when the third-person limited omniscient narrator dips into her thoughts. The story is an interesting little small-town drama about the return of Every Dill and the unveiling of all of Latha's secrets.
I was impressed by both the plotting, which held suspense and interest even in such a low-key story, and the prose, which really expressed the mood of a 30s Ozark summer. Harington's Ozarker dialog was flawless (well, not like I would actually know, but it seemed authentic without being forced stylistically, or unreadable). And the book was a fine blend of humor with a streak of darkness, from the Revenuer tied up in the barn who seduces his captor's daughter to Latha's escape from an insane asylum to the final will-they-won't-they? between Latha and Every. Latha refuses to marry Every until he makes love to her; Every refuses to make love to Latha until they are married.
Doc Swain jumped out of his car and kicked it viciously with his foot. "Goddamn scandalous hunk of cruddy tinfoil!" he yelled and kicked it again. "Sonabitchin worthless gas-eatin ash can!" Then he turned wildly about, yelling, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
"Here's your true sign, Every," Latha said to him. "The Lord wants you to be a doctor."
"Naw," he said. "I'm afraid it's something else."
"A horse?"
This book is Ozark-literary — there are interludes about the chemical properties of lightning bugs, and Latha has a poignant, humorous, and semi-profound conversation with Jesus, and in between there is an awful lot of sex.
That said, if the idea of a woman holding a torch for her rapist turns you off, this book might make you throw it against a wall. But if you believe a rapist can be redeemed, then Latha and Every's "romance" is kind of twisted, yet believable and oddly touching.
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