Keith C. Blackmore is so much fun to read. After thoroughly enjoying The Majestic 311, I felt compelled to pick up the first in his Mountain Man ZombiKeith C. Blackmore is so much fun to read. After thoroughly enjoying The Majestic 311, I felt compelled to pick up the first in his Mountain Man Zombie series, and it was just as much fun as I had hoped.
Set in Nova Scotia, very close to the border of New Brunswick, where I taught for many years at Mt. Allison, Mountain Man has all the trappings of your good, old fashioned Zombie apocalypse with some fun Canadian flourishes that make it the perfect Zombie experience for a Maritimer. Needs, sort of an Eastern Canadian version of 7-11, makes a fun appearance, our characters often use hockey gear as body armour, it's hard not to imagine former doughnut man, Scott, working in a Tim Horton's (or Robin's), and Gus's constant race to horde as much as possible before the coming of the snow, all feels very Canadian.
But even if the Canadiana doesn't scratch any itches, the fact that Blackmore adds so much beyond Zombie's to his Zombie riddled North should. There's a serial killer taking out all the stray living folks he runs into, an Alamo level battle that makes our Mountain Man the Mountain Man of the title, a truly terrifying break in the action when one of our characters fears he's been infected while hundreds of Zombies mill about the place in which he's hastily taken refuge, and the compound on the mountain almost offers a place of normalcy unmatched in any Zombie tale I've seen or read.
Good enough to keep going in the series? Abso-fucking-lutely....more
Shift was another strange reading experience for me, and I've been having a lot of those lately. The reason for my strangeness with this book is not uShift was another strange reading experience for me, and I've been having a lot of those lately. The reason for my strangeness with this book is not unique to Shift, however. I have happened to be reading a lot of prequels (and watching film prequels too), and I have to admit I really struggle with the form.
And so it turned out with HughHowey's Shift. I'd struggled throughout with the question of whether I really wanted to be reading the book or not, compounded with the thought that maybe Howey should never have even written this chapter of his tale, that maybe the events that preceded Wool should have stayed in Howey's mind, or as a jumble of notes in a file folder in his filing cabinet.
Prequels -- and even sequels -- take away one of the great joys of the creative experience for the reader. Because I think we all forget that thing Wolfgang Iser was trying to tell us about being a reader, that idea that the stars in the firmament are fixed but the person looking into the sky connects those stars with lines that provide shape. So the drive to monetize what came before and what comes after a truly creative series diminishes the imaginations that connect those stars. As I say, however, I struggle, because Howey, surely, doesn't want some other writer coming along when he is gone, and imagining a completely different set of precedents to Wool because some book company or family member or movie company wants to cash in with his brilliant tale. At least this way, with Shift, we get the authoritative events as Howey intended. We now know what happened to the world, we know who, how and why a Solo became, and now no one can take that or change that.
But I miss those days when there were only three Star Wars films and an entire afternoon on a bus then an LRT then on foot, then in a comic book store, then back on foot to the LRT and another bus could be filled with "what ifs?" that could only ever exist in our heads and in that space of a single day with no external record or fan fiction or potential to preclude anyone else's imaginings we could live our very only series of Star Wars prequels. That creativity was fierce and lovely and pure. I long for that creativity as a reader / viewer to come back. And I was enjoying something like that for a spell after putting Wool down.
Shift took that away. Yet here I am still giving Mr. Howey 4 stars, because I really enjoyed Shift and I am glad I read it -- even though it wasn't what I had imagined for myself. ...more
This book was a slog. Steven Erikson is an impressive author, and all his skills are on full display in Deadhouse Gates, but it is not an easy read.
SThis book was a slog. Steven Erikson is an impressive author, and all his skills are on full display in Deadhouse Gates, but it is not an easy read.
Sounds like I am really taking it to Erikson, but the truth is Deadhouse Gates isn't meant to be an easy read, nor should it be. In fact, I imagine that the sloggy nature of the read was Erikson's design.
For a great, big, massively huge portion of the book -- essentially the entire book -- Erikson has us following one massive, nearly never ending, running battle. I've never seen anything quite like it, to be honest. I've seen plenty of that classic fantasy battle we're all familiar, some version of The Battle of the Pelennor Fields, that big battle that a small band of intrepid adventurers finds themselves in, the battle that either ends the conflict or comes very near ending it so long as some surprising, seemingly unrelated task is completed elsewhere. I have also seen plenty of those small, personal, highly bloody fights or assassinations, full of guts and blood and horror. Those sorts of moments are increasingly popular in fantasy. And then there are our ever familiar massacres, like the Red Wedding, that remind us of just how terrible and brutal fantasy world should be.
But the Chain of Dogs, Coltaine's bloody march, is something else entirely. It is massacre after massacre after massacre; it is packed with personal brutalities; it is full of outrageous, overwhelming group brutalities; it is a battle joined by countless groups who either perish or leave or disappear; it contains heroism, selfishness, stupidity, politics, entitlement, attrition, disease, exhaustion, and death. So much death.
I think Erikson wanted us to feel what a battle, a true battle -- even if it was in a fantasy world -- is like. It is sort of the Western Front of fantasy battles. It is interminable. It is exhausting for the reader. We are meant to be uncomfortable, to wonder when this battle is going to end, to almost wish it would end so that we can move on to something less depressing.
Erikson wasn't content to tire out his readers, however. He wanted to offer us the promise of some culmination, some giant, wild payoff, some gift for making it through all that pain and blood and shit he poured down on us. So he offers the quest for the Deadhouse Gates, as a parallel to the Chain of Dogs, and then ... (view spoiler)[he says fuck you all, and delivers a denouement that really isn't. I want to get angry about the way he destroys the expectations he has created, but I can't because that disruption of expectations makes the Chain of Dogs even more hopeless, pointless, and devastating than it already was. (hide spoiler)]
Erikson does all this to make us feel things as fantasy readers we probably haven't before, and likely won't again. It is a tough read, you have to be dedicated, but holy shit was it worth it for me. I loved it despite the slog. No, let me fix that. I loved Deadhouse Gates because of the slog. ...more
So there's this thing that happens in post-apocalypse stories that I need to talk to you about.
You know how in a zombiepocalypse story we occassionalSo there's this thing that happens in post-apocalypse stories that I need to talk to you about.
You know how in a zombiepocalypse story we occassionally receive hints that it might be better for the women to stay safe so they can make babies? Usually it's only hints, and the male characters don't seem to want to offend the post-feminist sensibilities of the women, so instead the women tote guns and put their wombs at risk of becoming a zombie-buffet. But everyone gets along-ish, and there are usually plenty of women and men, so it doesn't seem like fertility is the most important concern.
Or you get the big, bad group of fascist men trying to turn some poor girl into a "breeder" for the new human race, but she tends to rise up, spank their patriarchal asses, escape with her girl power intact, and hook up with some nice guy with whom she's fought for survival.
And in the bleakest of apocalypses there's no hope anyway, so who gives a shit about procreation? Everyone's dead or dying, cannibalism is running rampant, society has failed, and humans are doomed to extinction. The best the survivors can do is keep hiking down some road to whatever is further down the road with the world as nothing but the road.
But I've totally fucking had it now that I've read Y: The Last Man. This book really pisses me off to no end.
I'm fine with the Amazonian self-mutilators (I can buy an angry, post-apocalyptic group of violent women). I am willing to suspend my disbelief that Yorick and his monkey make it through the manpocalypse as the only surviving Y chromosomes. I'll yawn and tolerate the Yankee setting of yet another apocalypse. I'll cringe but cope with yet another bad ass, dreadlocked, African-American woman who's the most capable and violent person around. I'll even believe that spindly little Yorick can pass as a woman as long as he has his gas mask on.
But what I won't believe, what I won't buy, where I won't suspend by disbelief, where I am not fine is with the idea that Yorick would ever, EVER, be allowed to wander around the winter of homo sapienism with one body guard, risking his testicles for some stupid, pointless, selfish, idiotic search for the love of his life and his sister. His sperm, and Ampersand's, would be the most important substances known to womankind (not because he is a man but because of sheer practicality). He would be protected whether he liked it or not. He would be imprisoned. His sperm would be used to impregnate. It would be used to find an immunity for future boys. It would be used for the survival of homo sapiens. Period.
I heard this book was really great -- a must read graphic novel. At best it is okay ... if you look past the idiocy of Yorick's wanderings, his insufferable smarminess, that stupid fucking monkey, and the poorest characterizations of women you're ever likely to see. Why two stars then? Because it isn't quite as bad as the Luna Brothers' Girls -- though it is damn close....more
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