Wow, this one is bleak. A VERY quick read, a real page-turner, but also very, very bleak.
I watched the movie adaptation of this a few years ago (direcWow, this one is bleak. A VERY quick read, a real page-turner, but also very, very bleak.
I watched the movie adaptation of this a few years ago (director Jonathan Glazer, starring Scarlett Johansson), and found it entertainingly weird and surreal and horrifying, with kind of an unsatisfying ending. I somehow completely missed that the book it was based on was written by Michel Faber ("The Crimson Petal and the White" and "The Book of Strange New Things") until this title came up on BookBub and I decided to give it a try. Other than the fact that the main character is an alien who hunts hitchhikers for food, the book and the movie are COMPLETELY different.
While the movie is very light on dialog and explanations, seeing everything in the book from the viewpoint of the main character Isserley means we get the complete backstory on who the alien race is (think foxes. They're not foxes, but it's the closest you're going to get), where they're from (a ruined world where everyone has to live underground), and why Isserley signed up for a really AWFUL assignment (basically, she was poor, and poor people get sent to the worst places on their homeworld to slowly die of overwork and disease, unless they can find another job.) The book shows everything else that runs through her mind at being transformed and in constant pain so she can look like her prey, the better to drive around endlessly and interview hitchhikers to make sure they don't have anyone who might notice if they never arrive at their destination.
The reversals in this book are fascinating. To Isserley, she and her fellow workers are the human beings, and the dominant race on Earth are "vodsels", basically animals. We briefly see inside the minds of the hitchhikers Isserley picks up, many of them checking out Isserley and her breasts, sizing her up like meat while she's doing the EXACT same thing, for different reasons. We see all of Isserley's justifications and rationale for snipping these men out of their lives, serving a corporation to provide a source of income she will NEVER benefit from, and trying to believe she's worth more than her unaltered coworkers who never seem to understand where all her hostility is coming from. A visit from a pampered son of a corporate head provides even more odd flipped viewpoints as he argues for the dignity and preservation of poor, exploited fellow sentient beings, and you KNOW he's obviously got a point while also thinking - like Isserley does - that he's out of touch and annoying and doesn't actually understand anything. And let's face it, when you're part of a section of the population that has to choose between working until they die, or just dying, compassion and empathy are the first things that get beaten out of you.
There's a core of...something in Isserley. Something that appreciates how beautiful Earth is and feels sick at what her job involves and really wishes that a beautiful human being would love her despite everything. What she goes through in this book is harrowing, to say the least, and it's up to the reader to decide if where she ends up at the end has any triumph in it, or just more tragedy....more
I really wanted to like this series, but I finished reading this volume and felt just underwhelmed.
I think the big problem is that the book's writers I really wanted to like this series, but I finished reading this volume and felt just underwhelmed.
I think the big problem is that the book's writers brought in a lot of characters from Mike Carey's Lucifer series (Mazakeen, Elaine Belloc, Rachael and her brother Paul) without a whole lot of explanation about who they were. At the same time though, either the DC New 52 ended up changing the backstory for some of those characters, or the current writers failed to grasp what happened in the end of Mike Carey's series (Elaine, for instance, is only the god of her alternate universe and has no interesting in being god of this universe, even though the Mike Carey series blended all the universes together, leaving Elaine in charge when God abdicated.)
If you've read everything leading up to this current series then you're constantly confronted with the changes that were made to an established story. And if you haven't read everything, then you have a lot of characters that you're supposed to identify with, even though you have no idea what's going on. Why is Rachael's infant brother Paul able to talk? What's the deal with the little girl who can see the future and shape things with her mind? If a series tries too hard to rope in both new and old fans, you run the risk of creating a comic that pleases nobody.
Lucifer is still the charming monster, and I admit to being pleased that his love affair with Mazakeen is now out in the open. But I think we've lost a lot of the nuance we had with a Devil that has lots of agendas but for the most part doesn't actually CARE about anything. The fact that the series was abruptly cancelled and the writer only had a few issues to wrap up all of the storylines that were created by the previous writer Holly Black made everything feel rushed and way too convenient. The Christmas stories that open this book are worth a look, but for the most part I think you can give this one a pass....more
Wow. There's almost too much going on here and it's wonderful. In one book we get new stories, new plots, and new characters with complex (and yet comWow. There's almost too much going on here and it's wonderful. In one book we get new stories, new plots, and new characters with complex (and yet comfortingly mundane) relationship problems. At the same time we also get to see characters that I've been missing ever since Three Parts Dead, plus all the gorgeously, intricately strange details about a world where gods and their worshipers have to share space with magic-users who eat gods for lunch (okay, that's probably not fair. The people who work with Craft on a daily basis are more likely to carve gods into profitable chunks over a boardroom discussion, and then eat lunch. Charged to a corporate account, naturally.)
And if that's not enough, there's also sentient mass-transit, ie: a dragon the size of a football field. Max Gladstone just pushes all the right buttons with me....more
"A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressiv"A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking. It is progressive and inevitable as the seasons. Winter still comes after autumn though you may have died over the summer."
It's Alice In Wonderland, but seen slightly from the side and a few paces behind.
Alice's very dull little friend Ada (she's not actually all that dull, but she's been told that so many times by everyone that even she believes it now), stumbles down the same rabbit hole that Alice fell into, and then spends the rest of the book trying to find Alice so they can both go home. That may sound like a straightforward adventure story for children, but this is Gregory Maguire, so things are going to be anything but simple. Or easy to understand.
Ada has a unique view of the world even on a normal day, so she sees Wonderland as maybe more difficult to understand than Oxford England, but not MUCH more. She questions everything, and she's pretty hard to intimidate, so she isn't very discouraged at the KEEP OUT signs on doors, or impossible-to-reach keys, or strange characters that keep mistaking her for someone else and keep deciding what her motivations are no matter what she says.
(Side note, Ada's visit to the Mad Tea Party was my FAVORITE part of the book. The Mad Hatter decides the moment he sees Ada that she's a thief, the March Hare keeps taking everything too literally, and the Dormouse spends the whole time asleep in the teapot, occasionally whistling through the spout. It's amazingly fun, and Maguire does very clever things with the dialog here.)
Ada's chapters alternate with the chapters told from the point of view of Alice's sister, Lydia (who was doing a lot more than just read and nap while Alice is off having adventures). Lydia is a little more worldly than Alice, but not much more, and she's caught up in the details of just another normal day in Oxford. Well, normal, except her whole family is in mourning for her mother, and Ada's governess keeps pestering her to help find Ada (who she thinks has wandered off with Alice, who is also missing. Again.), and Lydia's father is being visited by a very attractive young American gentleman who's traveling with a rescued former slave, and also with Charles Darwin (yes, that Darwin), who's Theory of Evolution and what it means for science and religion is pretty much turning everyone's understanding of their place in the universe upside down. So yes, a "normal" day.
The world of Wonderland is even more like a fever dream than I remember the original being. The landscape grows and shrinks randomly. A hallway turns into a jungle and then back again, people appear and transform and then wander off, and you're never quite sure where the sunlight is coming from. It all makes a bizarre kind of sense, and you get a lot of great moments when a new character or setting is introduced and you get a "Oh hey!" moment when you remember where you've seen them before.
You don't quite find out what happens to everyone (at least one character may be lost to the "real" world for good, but since it was their choice to be lost then you're almost happy for them), and Ada's story ends on a strangely triumphant note. Pretty impressive for someone who had zero dialog and one one or two brief mentions in the original book. ...more
What an odd little story. Mieville loves to drop the reader into the middle of a setting and let everyone pick up the details about the world we're inWhat an odd little story. Mieville loves to drop the reader into the middle of a setting and let everyone pick up the details about the world we're in. By the end of this novella we still don't know a lot about this world/time/country where the story takes place. The world had dried up or fallen apart at some point in the past, but we don't find out why. We don't know the narrator's name, or why he's under guard, or where exactly the rules came from about everyone having Three Books in them (one of numbers, one for yourself, and one for everyone).
The way the story is told, you can see that most of this information is missing because it's told either from the point of view of a child (who won't have a grown-up's understanding of history or society) or from the point of view of someone who doesn't HAVE to explain things that his readers will already understand.
And for all of the fact that the narrator grew up in wide-open spaces on a mountainside, it's a strangely claustrophobic book. It's one little boy left all alone with his father, after witnessing his father doing something horrible. And no one believes him. Well, okay, maybe everyone believes there's a chance he's telling the truth, and they certainly believe his father is capable of it. But they're all so certain that what he saw can't be PROVEN that they just end up making sure the little boy stays with his father anyway. Because rules, or something. It's like a child trying to tell someone that a monster under his bed is going to eat him, and the monster is right THERE, smiling and nodding and being so meek and polite that no one can come up with a good reason to make it leave.
About the only people who actually try to DO something to help the boy are the feral children in town (and I loved how quickly they jumped in when he needed help) and the census taker, who's name we also never learn. We don't know exactly what the census taker finds, or what happens afterward, but that's good because what I IMAGINE for both of those things is pretty satisfying.
Like I said, it's an odd story, told in bits and pieces, with information missing or lost. I liked it. I keep hearing rumors about the idea that this was the START of something, and I hope that's the case since I would like to learn more about this character and the society he's found himself in. ...more
I think this was the second of the Xanth series I read, starting this one right after I read "Dragon on a Pedestal". I thought this was almost exactlyI think this was the second of the Xanth series I read, starting this one right after I read "Dragon on a Pedestal". I thought this was almost exactly as entertaining a book, with lots of cute puns and an interesting story. Piers Anthony combines the "mare" in "nightmare" with both "mare" for female horse and "lunar mare" (the dark basaltic "seas" that are the large dark patches on the moon's surface), to come up with the "Night Mare" concept of black horses carrying bad dreams to sleepers. I still think that's pretty clever wordplay there, and I thought Mare Imbri was an appealing, sympathetic character who didn't have enough meanness in her to really make people suffer in their sleep. All in all it makes me nostalgic for a time when the Xanth books were all about the story, and less about raunchy, twee ideas with as many bad puns as you could collect from readers and then cram into a paperback. ...more
There's a line from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, something about everyone being very rich and no one being poor, well, nobody who really matteredThere's a line from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, something about everyone being very rich and no one being poor, well, nobody who really mattered, anyway. I thought a lot about this line while I was reading this book, because it seemed to sum up the situation for the main character and everyone he cares about.
Everything goes Reuben's way. He's now an immortal and indestructible werewolf who can change whenever he wants to. He has a beautiful mansion, and he's surrounded by loving and intelligent friends (fellow werewolves). He even gets to have a beautiful werewolf lover AND have normal human child when his ex-girlfriend announces she's expecting his child and plans to hand it over to him as soon as it's born.
(And can I say that the whole Celeste pregnancy story made me extremely uncomfortable? It was mostly the idea that it's a valid course of action to coerce, shame, or - as in this case - outright bribe a woman into carrying a baby she doesn't want to carry to term. But I also had a problem with taking a strong female character and turning her into a walking incubator, with everyone wiling to put up with her vindictive attitude and just nod and smile, knowing that they'd only have to be nice to her until the baby was safely spawned, and then they'd never have to have anything to do with her again. I couldn't actually feel sorry for her - she really was a hateful person in just about every scene where she had dialog - but still, uncomfortable.)
As is usual for Rice's books, even more so for her recent ones, everyone feels everything very deeply. There's a lot of soul-searching and agonizing over decisions; Reuben's lover Laura makes the decision to become a werewolf, and less than four pages later he's decided he's a little horrified and worried that she won't be as appealing to him if she's not fragile and easily damaged. It turns out fine, of course. Everything's always fine for Reuben, even if he has to suffer emotional trauma about it.
This happens to every one of the characters throughout the book. Everyone has something horrible happen, some life-altering event, and it all basically works out in the end to be the very best thing that could happen. Only the very bad people suffer without getting to recover, and you don't have to worry about them because in Rice's world the bad people have no redeeming qualities and the werewolves can smell the evil on them so they can be messily killed without anyone getting upset about it.
Like the first book, there are lots more details in this novel about wealth and what it can do for people. Clothes, food, renovations to the beautiful house, and an overwhelmingly gorgeous Christmas celebration that takes up the entire mansion and the grounds and the picturesque nearby town, the descriptions can go on for chapters at a time. It's almost as if Rice has spent the last few decades as poor as a churchmouse and has been daydreaming about having enough money to do everything she's ever wanted. All of that lovely affluence contrasts nicely with the scenes where the Morphenkinder satisfyingly tear apart and devour some awful person, or dance around a bonfire in an ancient pagan Midwinter ceremony.
It's a fun book, even if it is a little too convenient sometimes (the drug-dealer storyline towards the end was one of the most contrived bits of writing that I've ever read), and I enjoyed it once I accepted that there wasn't a whole lot of substance to it. ...more
Out of all of the authors I read, China Mieville must have the most unusual mind. I'll never understand how he comes up with some of the concepts in tOut of all of the authors I read, China Mieville must have the most unusual mind. I'll never understand how he comes up with some of the concepts in these stories, and like most of his books he drops the reader into the middle of these concepts and slowly lets you figure out what's going on. Or not.
A lot of these stores can be divided into two categories: normal people in the middle bizarre situations that they have to try to survive or at least understand (without going crazy, which is always an option), or normal people already in the middle of bizarre situations that they've somehow already gotten used to.
"Three Moments of an Explosion" is an example of the second category, with corporate-sponsored demolition effects and explosion-specific thrill-junkies. So is "Polynia", where the world has been dealing for some time with floating icebergs hovering over cities, and "Covehithe" with the brand-new but instantly-recognizable life form that's been crawling out of the sea.
Stories like "The Condition of the New Death" and "Keep" are an example of the first category. In "New Death" the world's dead have taken on a new form; it's so simple, and so beautifully and creepily bizarre, like a 3D blip in a computer program. "Keep" follows a scientist who's trying to cope with a world-wide epidemic. Mieville's almost too good at his usual habit of withholding information in this one; I couldn't figure out what exactly the plague was doing until about eight pages in and I had that sudden, "Ohh, crap, yes that would be a problem, wouldn't it. (This story also has one of my favorite phrases in the book: "Suicide by second floor.")
A couple of the stories are strictly horror, like "Rabbet" or (shudder) "Sacken" (very disturbing stuff, that one). And three of the stories are actually screenplays for imaginary horror-movie trailers: "Escapee," "Listen The Birds," and my personal favorite, "The Crawl." I want to see someone make the actual movie for "The Crawl," I would watch the hell out of that.
"After The Festival" was amazingly creepy, and ended too abruptly. I don't need everything answered in the stories I read; sometimes that's an effective storytelling technique. But that felt more like someone accidentally tore out the last few pages. "The 9th Technique" did something similar, with a lot of lead-up to an abrupt (but very unsettling" finish. "The Dowager of Bees" more than made up for that with a wonderfully satisfying ending and all those unspoken rules about how card players have to deal with rare impossible cards that randomly show up in the middle of a game.
"Dreaded Outcome" was as close as these stories get to a madcap comedy. Imagine a whole branch of psychotherapy that's based around the methods a therapist uses to treat what's wrong with their patient, when what's wrong involves other people.
And then there were stories like "A Second Slice Manifesto," "Four Final Orpheuses," "Estate," and "The Rope is the World," all of which were more like vignettes than stories, I loved all of these; they were all more of Mieville's impossible worlds and/or impossible situations, all with that matter-of-fact tone that of course this is how things are, why would you expect anything different?
These stories are a lot of work, and while I enjoyed the heck out of them I didn't always get the point of each one. If there's one sentence that could sum up most of these, it would be "We don't understand. (And we probably never will.)"...more
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