I also do book reviews

[rivkat]

Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye: Koontz and Stephen King both sell zillions of books and are both shelved under "horror," but they're really not that much alike. Koontz is about divine justice and how everything happens for a reason; King's theme is pretty much the opposite. Even if justice gets done in the end, the pain in the middle was still not necessary in any sense, whereas Koontz's characters generally achieve a state of grace in which they recognize that everything happens for a good reason. Me, I think that approach is fatalistic and fundamentally ugly – why didn't the people who suffered and died as the main characters went towards their happy ending deserve better? What makes the main characters so special? If the answer is divine election, that strikes me as a really awful reason rather than a hopeful one. (I might be wrong, but I'm not sure any Koontz I ever read takes place from the perspective of a character who doesn't make it out of the horror alive. King doesn't make any implicit promises about survival, and I like that better.)

Anyway, this book, set mostly in the mid-1960s, is about a psychopathic rapist/killer and the several lives with which he intersects, including a genius 3-year-old blinded by cancer, an artist raising her dead sister's daughter, and a police detective, all of whom share a kind of extrasensory perception allowing them insight into other possible worlds. I kept reading because Koontz occasionally threw off a phrase I really liked – like the line about three government bureaucrats who looked so alike that, if they were standing side by side, their mothers wouldn't have known who to blame for never calling. Or a tie that looked like the flag for a foreign country known mostly for its lack of fashion sense. Also, the psychopath's POV was occasionally interesting because he sometimes misinterpreted whether people liked him, which is not all that common in any POV characters. But by the end, the idea of divine justice as a perfect machine, leaving everyone properly content with his/her lot (everyone still living, that is) and every man with his woman, made me unhappy with the book. I remember Intensity, Strangers and Watchers more fondly, though they probably don't have fundamentally different philosophies; I just remember less talking about "goodness" and how perfect and pure of heart the hero-characters were.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Sins of the Blood: A different kind of vampire story. Vampires are sort of like a subspecies of human, with an addictive bite; in their first years of vampirehood, males can sire children, who are more powerful than made vampires if they turn – which most of them do. So far, that's not all that unusual worldbuilding, but Rusch posits an America in which the response to vampires has been mixed – in middle America, they can be exterminated, but on the West Coast vampirism is treated like an addiction and vampires are legally human. Ben, an orphan raised in the West ignorant of his heritage, begins to turn, while at the same time Cammie, a vampire hunter in Wisconsin, is having increasing trouble doing her job as memories of her childhood threaten to overwhelm her. In a desperate attempt to keep her sanity and her humanity, she begins looking for connections to her past – but she isn't ready for what she finds. The storytelling is occasionally clumsy and the resolution not fully satisfying, but there's power in this early Rusch. If you like vampire books generally, this is a good read; if the genre leaves you cold, this book won't convert you.

Steven Brust, Sethra Lavode: Okay, I'm not a big fan of the style Brust has adopted for his stories about the Dragaeran Empire, pre-Vlad Taltos. It's deliberately over-elaborate and repetitive. Kind of like West Wing dialogue, if that dialogue were written by Jane Austen about magic, court intrigue, and swordfights. But if you've followed the crew this far, the novel is worth reading, dealing as it does with the early days of the Phoenix Heir's reign, when her status as legitimate ruler was far from clear and threats both political and warlike abounded. Loyal friends, treacherous foes, and magic abound, and the battle through the streets of the capital at the end is actually pretty exciting.

James Alan Gardner, Radiant: Gardner's done interesting work with his "Expendable" Explorer Corps, composed of people with various uncorrected or uncorrectable physical deformities in a human society obsessed with physical perfection. Expendables are therefore outcasts, sent on the most dangerous jobs, in a universe in which galactic travel is open only to "sentients," defined as intelligent life that doesn't kill other intelligent life deliberately or negligently. I'm not the only one who likes what Gardner's doing, as evidenced by his promotion to hard-cover in this book, which introduces a new character, Youn Sue. She's a Buddhist and, in an odd way, a mirror image of Admiral Festina Ramos, whom she encounters when she's sent to deal with the very scary spore-race the Balrog. Unfortunately, I'm not sure Gardner's unfolding mythology, which involves the highly evolved races playing games with humans, is as interesting as the individual stories he told in the earlier books, when there were only hints of the bigger picture. The best part of the book is Youn Sue's interactions with other humans, secure in their superiority to her. If you like Gardner, I'd still say wait for the paperback.

Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones: A young girl is raped and murdered. And then she narrates this book. It's an arresting premise, and generally well-executed, as the girl follows the friends and family she left behind, describing how their lives are changed forever. The narrative works best when she's a pure observer; most of the book proceeds on the premise that she cannot communicate with the living or affect the world. Later, that premise gets relaxed a little, and I thought it was a betrayal of what went before. Still, it's well-written and worth a read.

Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul’s Bane: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book One: Yeah, not for me. “Darth Vader” gets a pass because it’s Star Wars, but naming your bad guy “Lord Foul” isn’t going to convince me there’s a real struggle ahead. The idea of a leper turned hero is intriguing in the first instance, but I found Donaldson’s writing stilted. Worse, his characters in the fantasy world to which Covenant is magically transported after being ripped out of our world were caricatures, speaking in speeches like that kid in The Phantom Tollbooth and naively credulous. I didn’t mind that Covenant was a cranky sort; I did mind that no one else seemed to be reacting to his crankiness like a real person might, though admittedly I gave up on the book and might have missed someone.

F. Paul Wilson, Deep as the Marrow: The President’s doctor discovers that his daughter has been kidnapped – his only hope of getting her back is to do what the kidnappers want. And what they want is the President’s death. High concept, with a decent execution once you accept all the thriller conventions in which catastrophe piles on catastrophe and luck, good and bad, intervenes at all key points. The real problem was that the reason the President was supposed to be assassinated was that he’d just come out in favor of legalizing drugs, and the Colombian cartels wanted him dead because that posed a threat to their business model. Supposedly, they didn’t just wait for the inevitable impeachment because the media had been well-prepared, with Nobel-winning economists ready to go on the Sunday talk shows and explain why legalization was good, and the cartels and the president’s advisers agreed that the public would come around. I can imagine groupthink setting in among the advisers – hell, we’ve seen plenty of that – but I can’t imagine the cartels being so foolish. I don’t care how many Nobels you’ve got, without the pulpits you’re toast. My fundamental rejection of the premise – which seemed to exist just so Wilson could exposit some standard libertarian principles – made it harder to enjoy the rest of the book, which was preposterous only on the level of small, individual events.

To-review pile getting smaller -- might even get to the comics soon!