Occasional reviews part umpteen

I’ve let this slide for so long that I have two review posts to do, instead of one. So let’s just launch into it, shall we? This batch is everything that isn’t SF and F, basically, though I snuck some comics and even a genuine graphic novel into the mix.

Everyone knows Dar Williams as a singer/songwriter. That is, if they move in the right circles, anyway. If you don’t, I’d suggest starting at The Honesty Room and going forward from there. But like that other New England singer/songwriter who writes books, Williams writes prose on occasion. Most specifically, she’s written two books for teens about a precocious girl named Amalee, who has been raised by her father and his very eclectic set of friends. I found both books pretty charming, with Amalee an interesting character. Great kids’ lit? Probably not. Will I keep buying them? Yeah. They’re well-written, have Dar’s trademark sense of humor about them, and the character strokes are strong. In this one, Amalee decides to make a movie as a result of getting to meet her grandmother for the first time. Perhaps the best part of the book is the way that the long-dead emotional undercurrents about her late mother are brought forward mostly through what the supporting cast doesn’t say; they all knew her, and have been keeping secrets about her until they felt that Amalee was ready to hear them.

Another one of those airport paperbacks. Another one of those books that trumpet hidden secrets from the long-ago past revealed through intrepid activities of thoroughly implausible archaeologists. This one even has a venal billionaire Russian warlord and his beautiful daughter. Uh huh.

But the archaeological speculation is actually kind of interesting. I have no idea whether the political issues surrounding deep sea recoveries in the Mediterranean are represented accurately or not (really? that many pirates operating in such crowded waters?). Heck, I can’t tell whether any of the McGuffins have any sort of plausibility to them. But in the wake of stuff like the TV show about whether the Biblical Plagues in Egypt were historical in some way, this explanation for Atlantis is actually rather neat. In the end, we see a civilization that is only slightly too grandiose to have been historical. It’s part of the convention of this sort of tale (see the Indy movies, the Da Vinci Code, and so on) that at the end, the wonderful discoveries must get lost again, of course. Check your skepticism at the door; it’s a fun ride, written in cliches, and it doesn’t matter, and look forward instead to the secret lairs, the giant golden doors, the volcano, the hidden passages, the decoding of the manuscript, and so on.

This book is blurbed by both Nicholas Sparks and Michael Chabon. There is much talk about how it proves that King belongs in the canon of Real Writers. Well, any writer who has tried to even mimic his apparently effortless voice knew already that damn, he can write. If at this point, the tics of italicized inner monologues that run on like radio stations the person can’t turn off in their head, careful use of brand names sprinkled throughout, the tropes of mostly empty houses that house old secrets, the psycho who seems somehow supernatural, the well-meaning cop who can’t see the obvious, the sunlit moment when radical horror that is totally mundane intrudes on ordinary life, the demise of something small and furry, and most importantly, the ending that veers from relative realism straight into sheer implausible fantasy and makes the book feel weaker (see: the giant spider at the end of It, goddamnit) — well, if they all seem like habits he leans on a bit too much, I can nonetheless say that the stuff that stuck, in the end, that ended up keeping me thinking about the book at odd moments for two days, was indeed the stuff that Chabon and Sparks praise in the blurbs.

But really, he had this same quality in many of his other horror novels. And this one, really, is another horror novel. Not a schlocky one like Cell or The Regulators, but a good one, like so many others he’s written.

A literary breakthrough? No, his breakthroughs in realistic fiction were in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Dolores Claiborne and so on.

I loves me some Harry Bosch. And this one has the interesting factor that it resolves the murder mystery itself in a satisfying way — a way cold case from much earlier in Bosch’s career — while leaving the big questions about his own life somewhat uncertain. Still one of the best gritty dark hardboiled series going, after all these years.

I picked this up because I had liked some of the Meltzer work I had seen in comics. Honestly, some of the comics work is actually better. But this is still pretty good. It’s basically a spy thriller, with a government conspiracy, and a rather entertaining serial killer, and the unshocking revelation that politicians are venal creatures who can be bought for a handshake and a smile and the promise of good public image. The hero is a guy who ought to know better, given that he’s worked with one such gladhander for a damn long time, and cannot seem to break out of his orbit. There’s a feisty reporter who does the social column but of course wants to do investigative work, and there’s a crude opportunist lawyer with a heart of gold.

If you like this sort of book, it’s probably one of the better ones.

Dark. Dark, dark, dark. I mean, all of Hellblazer is dark. And these days, seems like all of comics is dark. But this one, well, it’s about John Constantine being basically emotionally tortured for a hundred pages.

See, the issue with Constantine as a character is that he’s got a little bit of knowledge of the black arts, some punk attitude, and is basically a fuckup. So long stretches of every comic are about examining his utter inadequacy as a human being. He’s not interestingly flawed, he’s outright broken.

In this case, he has amnesia, and that means that for once, he gets to realize that himself. Everywhere he goes, he comes across the evidence of what a total loser he is, and gets slapped in the face with it over and over again. Whereas in most stories about him, innocents die and he shrugs it off because well, he sees the world as basically a dog-eats-dog cesspool, here he’s ordinary because he doesn’t remember, so when he has to throw children out of windows or watch helpful teenage girls get incinerated, he’s actually horrified.

This book, in the end is so dark that Constantine basically loses. He gives the devil his due, screws up completely and utterly, and in the process, loses even the innocence that he had as an amnesiac. It ends with him recovering his faculties and becoming once again the impervious pissed off pun krock quasi-magician, but somehow, the conclusion doesn’t feel like “he back and ready to kick ass!” but instead like “OK, now we finished killing him off as a human being, so let’s go back to the plastic version that we can actually keep writing about.”

I don’t know why I had never read anything from the Bros. Hernandez before. Sloth is really, really good. It’s mindbending: the same tale, in some ways, told from different angles with different characters who all know each other. You see, there’s a grove. And in the grove, town legend has it, there’s a supernatural boogeyman who can swap his life for yours, and nobody will ever know. Except the boogeyman is just whoever last swapped, still trapped there, in the lemon grove. And then we have three teens, each with their issues. They trade places, they get their dreams, they find they aren’t the dreams they wanted, and through it all, the notions of coma, of moving slowly in life, of sleepwalking, of dreaming itself, are woven together. You end up having to read it two or three times to catch all the references buried carefully in the panels.

Definitely worth reading, at least twice. It’s also the only actual graphical novel out of the bunch this time around, despite what comics marketing may tell you; all the others are collections of comic issues.

Once upon a time, Batman comics were in some sense police procedurals. I’m thinking here of The Brave and the Bold, and Detective Comics. Batman the character has always veered from the angsty one to the comic one, from the cartoony one with superhero pals to the Dark Knight type, and so on. But here, he’s barely in the book. Instead, what we have is an actual police procedural, for the most part. A bunch of cops, who are far more interesting as people than most any tights-clad metahuman in the entire DC universe. It’s written by Greg Rucka, who has done similar work before — I think I reviewed Whiteout at some point — and he has the touch for this sort of gritty thing, like an Ed McBain novel with Bats in the belfry.

The weakest part, of course is that supervillains show up. They have to, of course, just like we have to see Batman at least once. But really, it’s the small lives that are more interesting. We see the big conflicts with oversize personas so often in the funnybooks that it’s a lot more fresh to read about whether two detectives get along. Having a beat cop transmogrified into a horrible monster is, well, old hat. Reading about the lesbian detective’s harassment by other members of the force, that’s new.

Warren Ellis, of course, writes corrosively. If you read his blog, you know this. He’s gonzo, profane, off kilter, and anything he touches reveals rust, porn, grime, goop, and (I can’t believe I am using this word for the third time in one post) venality. He’s post-post-cynical.

Desolation Jones is about an ex-spy who screwed up and was used as a lab rat. He came out and he basically cannot feel anything, on multiple levels of meaning. He is sent to LA, which is explained as being the dumping ground for every imaginable ex-spy, ex-covert agent, ex-assassin, ex-smuggler, ex-wingnut, etc. There, he does odd jobs of the sort that a semi-psycho former killer for hire would do when his temping is for other former spies and covert agents, etc.

In some ways, this is a wonderful explanation for much of LA.

The story is good. Twists, turns, mysteries. Of course an innocent dies, because nobody in the world is innocent, so when Ellis writes one, he must execute that character to prove his point. It’s noir meets government conspiracy. His other creation, Spider Jerusalem, would have a field day investigating the case. But there was a joie de vivre in Transmetropolitan that isn’t here. There, innocents were gaily led into corruption, which actually saved them. This is an altogether more depressing affair, so be warned.