Fiction Book Reviews

I’ve mentioned before that I like Neil Gaiman, which is true. I still haven’t really read Sandman, though, the series of graphic novels for which he really first became famous. The biggest problem there is that there are so many volumes collected so many different ways, and my library site…is really messed up and confusing about what’s what. The only volume I’ve read so far turned out to be number 6 of 10 collected volumes, and it’s basically a series of one-shots that insert members of the Endless into real-world history. I’d really thought it was the first volume when I checked it out.

So that’s my disclaimer: these are, essentially, my first impressions on Sandman from having read one volume out of order. Go me.

Anyway, while I did quite like it–I adore Death, Dream is kind of fascinating, and the way it weaves itself into the stories of all these historical figures is really pretty awesome–it’s reconfirming for me the fact that I just don’t like American-style comics, or possibly comics in general, and why. I do seem to remember the Firefly comics (Those Left Behind and Better Days) being drawn in a style I liked and that actually looked like the actors in question, while I don’t particularly care for the style in the Buffy Season 8 comics (I’ve only looked at a couple of each–I don’t want to buy them because they’ll take me about 20 minutes to read, but Barnes & Noble doesn’t have all of them, either), but Sandman’s just reminding me–well, it’s not like I even have that much experience with comics, but something in every style used in Sandman (and there are several different ones, but all at one level or another of photorealism) is very familiar, maybe because of my dad’s old comics (all of which are adaptations of classic novels. What, you thought I was the first geek in my family?), and it’s not a good kind of familiar. Maybe it’s the uncanny valley effect–it’s comic photorealism in the wrong way and that’s why I find most of the characters off-putting (but less so people like Dream, who aren’t entirely realistic to begin with).

And the thing is, I’m not an anti-comics person by any means. (more…)

Pretentious as it might sound, the word that kept coming to my mind as I read Perdido Street Station was “virtuosity,” and I can’t think of any other way to sum it up. Mieville has more skill in painting with words than possibly any other author I’ve ever read; the way he uses words is nothing short of astounding. The steampunk and fantastical elements are somehow believable because it’s not presented as strange; dark and bizarre as it is, New Crobuzon seems real, a place where real people truly live and die. The city is beautiful in its ugliness; the characters love it because it’s home, for all its horror. The plot is more than a little slow to start, but once it does, things pick up and move along fairly swiftly, and you realize that you’ve slowly begun to care about these odd characters.

…and those strong points are exactly the novel’s weak points. Mieville evokes a wonderfully gritty atmosphere, but in doing so he tends to take time out from the plot to describe a certain section of the city–all of which is important for setting the stage, and it all left me rather in awe of his worldbuilding, but when the plot gets going, all that description throws off the pacing. Things start moving quickly, and then the next chapter starts with two pages of description, and I found myself wanting to skip it to get to some more action. The action scenes in particular can be more than a little hard to picture or understand, too.

And as for the ending…I’ll try not to spoil it. But here’s the thing: when I started reading this book, I got the feeling that it was more than a little cynical and dystopian, and as such it was almost certainly not going to end happily (putting the “punk” in “steampunk,” I suppose, since steampunk doesn’t always seem to require the dystopian elements cyberpunk does). In fact I thought it was the sort of book where one or more of the main characters would die in the end. So I kept myself distant from the characters, and in some ways it wasn’t too hard. Lin, Isaac, Yagharek, and Derkhan are all very interesting, but in their own different ways, they all manage to be just a little bit unsympathetic, even alien. But then we get the slake-moths, and things heat up, and they’re all forced out of normality and into situations that make them choose to fight back. In a way they were growing up because of all this horror. I started really rooting for them, wanting them to succeed. And…well, I admit it: I like happy endings. In fact I’d just rather not read a book that doesn’t end happily, somehow or other. I like seeing characters go through hell, but I want them to come out okay, somehow or other, with hints that there’s still hope. For these characters, they all get what they wanted, sort of…and at the same time, none of them does. It’s just too bad that by the time they came to that point, I really liked all of them.

I read Fangs of the Werewolf for research, believe it or not, because I’m planning to write a werewolf story as my thesis…believe it or not. In preparation for it, I’m reading as many werewolf books as I can, largely ones that describe the folklore about it rather than fiction (because my werewolves follow those in the Potterverse pretty closely anyway, and because I’d never reach the end of them if I tried to read every novel with werewolves in, and because that would mean I’d have to read Twilight). This was one of the few that came up on my search at the UEA library, though, so I grabbed it.

My main conclusion is that I’m guessing it would sell a lot better if they changed the title and cover. I wish I could find a picture of the cover, because if you could see it you’d know what I mean. It’s cheesy and stupid and ugly and very…sensationalistic, I suppose, which the story itself mostly isn’t. Maybe more importantly, while the cover features a hideous anthro-wolf, the actual story’s werewolf is at first mistaken for an Alsatian and consistently described as looking like one.

That said, it’s not a bad read. Not a terrific one, and not one that filled me with werewolf-related inspiration (it did generate a few thoughts about the moon, at least), but at least serviceable. It deals in the supernatural without ignoring science or the reactions of rational people to such an event, and it does so through ordinary human beings trying to balance jobs, concerns about making friends, moving, children and siblings, fitting in at a new place.

Oh yeah, and werewolves. There is that.

Setting the story in Wales was a smart move, with a sense of mysticism and loyalty to a village upbringing gradually convincing one character to take the lycanthrope idea a bit more seriously, while the focus of the story is on 13-year-old Allison, recently relocated here and not liking it that much. The identity of the werewolf is no surprise, but the mythology is used reasonably well within the plot, and the adults manage to fix things up, more or less, without shoehorning out Allison as protagonist; just as importantly, the writing itself is decent, using a style that brings to mind any of those “true adventure, this really happened!!!” stories in a way that really works here.. I won’t be following the folklore used here because I prefer other takes on the werewolf idea, but it makes for a good quick read.