books

Phil Rossi’s Crescent was a bit of an odd read for me. I started off with actually listening to the podcast version, but partway through decided to go ahead and switch over to reading the Kindle edition. So this is a bit of a hybrid review.

Salvage pilot Gerard Evans accepts a job working for the mayor of Crescent, a run-down station on the fringes of colonized space. Things start to go south very quickly, though, as he finds out that not only is the mayor up to his eyes in the shadiest of shady dealings–but that something is loose on Crescent, something that’s out for blood and lives.

The podcast version, or at least the initial stretch of it I listened to, was intriguing listening. Rossi reads well, and is good at varying accents to give you a sense of the voices of the different characters, something you don’t get as well when you’re just reading the ebook. There are also neat tricks done with certain sound effects that maximize the creepiness of a few key scenes, something else you don’t get in the ebook version.

Either way, I found myself poised between wanting more SF to this story and more horror at the same time, possibly because it had a foot in both genres and didn’t quite commit to either one, and possibly also because the horror tropes that the story invokes aren’t really the ones that work best for me. In particular, I found it had way too much reliance on acts of senseless violence–especially rape of random side characters, which happens twice–as a means of creating the horror.

When it avoids those tactics, which is thankfully the majority of the time, Crescent does achieve some genuine moments of creepiness and suspense. So, three stars.

I was very surprised and pleased to win The God of the Hive as a First Reads book from Goodreads, and took it as just cause to rush back and get caught up on the previous Mary Russell book, The Language of Bees. Fair warning to any Mary Russell fans who may be behind on the series: for the love of all that’s holy, do not start this book until you’ve read the previous one. This is part 2 of the story begun in The Language of Bees, and you really need to read them back to back if at all possible to appreciate the full scope of the story.

There’s little I can say here without divulging spoilers, but I can say that I was quite surprised by the hard right turn the overall plot took in this half of the story. Things which were set up in The Language of Bees turn out to be much less of the point than I’d previously expected. For the most part this worked for me, although the overall villian struck me as a trifle weak once that revelation was finally given to the reader. I was equally struck by how a character who didn’t show up at all in the previous book became a significant driving force for the action–a little bit too much so at times, given how late he comes into the story. This character does however provide some thematic ties back into bees and beehives, which was at least a bit of nice callback to the previous book.

And meanwhile, there’s a great deal to love here. It was a refreshing switch to see a whole lot of plot emphasis on Mycroft Holmes, especially in the context of the overall theme of how England in general and the intelligence community in particular is advancing in the twentieth century. And the character of Estelle, Damian Adler’s little daughter, is particularly charming; she’s very much believable as a canny little granddaughter of Sherlock Holmes.

I’ve seen other reviewers comment that in the course of the series, Laurie King’s grown as a writer; I’ll definitely go along with that. I’ve quite enjoyed the expansion of the viewpoint from Mary herself out to other characters, which lent The Language of Bees and The God of the Hive both a respectable gravitas that the earlier books in the series don’t yet achieve. Overall, four stars.

I first went through The Zombie Survival Guide in audio form, but on my second pass through I went to a print edition and was quite pleased to do so. While the audio edition is played absolutely straight, with the narrator doing his reading in deadly earnest (and therefore infusing the whole thing with delicious zombie-laden lulz), the print copy comes with crude little illustrations scattered throughout the pages. They’re perfect for the schtick of the book, because they’re exactly the kind of hand-drawn style you’d expect in a combat manual for fighting the living dead.

Which is, of course, what this is. The level of detail for weapon selection, attack and defense strategy, and planning escape routes is surprisingly thorough–and if you look past the zombie schtick, a clever reader could find possible tips for surviving actual real-world disasters in here. What kicks it up another notch for me as a reader though is the backstory laced in with the combat and survival advice: the history of the “Solanum” virus, how it affects its victims, and the entire section at the end devoted to recorded attacks painstakingly by the manual’s in-character “author”.

All in all it’s great fun for zombie buffs, even if it doesn’t quite manage the sheer unadulterated brilliance of Brooks’ followup, World War Z. Four stars. Or in this case, maybe, brains.

If you’ve read Max Brooks’ entirely deadpan and therefore entirely chortleworthy The Zombie Survival Guide, then you’ve already pretty much read the content of this graphic novel. If you haven’t, then what you’ve got here is a nice little collection of zombie attacks throughout recorded history, in a setting that assumes that they’ve been going on all this time and that they only seem more recent because we’ve just gotten way better at recording them.

For Max Brooks fans, the main virtue of this volume is the appeal to completists and to those who might like the art. There’s no new content here, so for me, the selling point was seeing the stories I’d already been introduced to in the Guide depicted visually. And there are certainly some arresting visuals to be had herein, such as the fight scene at the beginning between a zombie and a prehistoric African in a jungle setting–or, much later, an initiate in a secret order forced to spend the night alone in a chamber full of severed zombie heads in jars.

Not all of the encounters in the Guide are depicted in the graphic novel, so this volume’s best as a companion to the Guide‘s stories, and not as a replacement. Three stars.

I came into The Language of Bees very belatedly–and only because I actually won an ARC of its immediate followup, The God of the Hive, on Goodreads! I therefore wound up reading them pretty much back to back, and that’s definitely how you should read them, since the two are linked parts of one overall story that really doesn’t come into true focus until you’ve read them both.

For this review, though, I’ll deal specifically with The Language of Bees. It starts off domestically enough, with Mary and Holmes returning home for the first time in many months to discover a minor mystery awaiting them: what’s happened to one of Holmes’ hives? Right along with that, though, they’re handed a much bigger one. For Holmes has an adult son Damian by his old affair with Irene Adler. And Damian needs his help to find his missing wife and daughter.

I was almost disappointed that the mystery of what happened with the hive got only a little bit of camera time at the beginning. Mary spends some time on it while Holmes departs with Damian, and while she does eventually find the answer, it barely comes up later on. But I could forgive that easily, for the edgy uncertainty between Mary and Holmes as she tries to fathom how he’s dealing with the discovery of not only Damian, but of Damian’s wife and daughter, was thoroughly gripping character development. This is the meat and potatoes of why I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this series in general; not only does King know her Holmes lore intimately, but she extrapolates beautifully from what’s in the canon. I absolutely bought into the character of Damian and how he grew up with the specter of his famous father looming over his life.

Perhaps because I hadn’t actually read any of the Mary Russells in a while, I was slightly jarred by the realization that this book was set in 1924. I’m used to thinking of “Sherlock Holmes” in the context of “late 1800’s”, or at the very least, no later than WWI. Yet the undeniable technological advancements of the 20’s are in play here, and serve as symbols of what comes up as a distinct theme all throughout this book as well as the next one: Holmes and his brother Mycroft growing old enough that the world is developing past them.

Toss in the connection of a mysterious cult that seems to have ensnared the missing Yolanda and the potential danger to Damian’s little girl, and suffice to say that I found this highly entertaining. Even if I still want to know what the heck happened in Japan, a question still unanswered after a couple of novels now! Four stars.