Runa's Obsession

Update - starting again...

2012-01-30T22:55:00.000-05:00

I am lazy and I am bad. I keep reading books and forgetting to make any notes about them. If I made new year's resolutions (which I don't) I would resolve to be more diligent and organized about writing about the books I read.

To put things into some perspective however, I should say that I have been extremely busy with a major move of household, several recent injuries (upper back - disc - related, and a broken big toe), and basically a lot of upheaval and chaos in my life. I haven't been reading as much as I usually read, and I definitely haven't had my head together enough to write down my reactions and impressions of what I've read.

Probably the most noteworthy and memorable book I've read since I last wrote a review here was A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. At first I hated it, but quickly grew to love it, and by the end I was completely forlorn that it was all over and I had to wait for the sequel.

I am resolved to get back to making proper notes of my reading adventures...

Latest Stack of Novels

2011-09-05T11:52:00.002-04:00

The Fall by Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan

This creepy, spooky, disturbing novel is the sequel to The Strain. The writing sucks me right in to the story and keeps me there until it's all over - always the mark of a successful writing job for me. The Master's vampire take-over of the world is well underway now, having spread past New York into most major global cities. The vampires in this series appear to be something like extra-terrestrials except that the infection that they pass on is not simply a biological colonization of the human body, but also something which affects the mind and the "soul" or "spirit" since there is a sort of "hive-mind" at work. I continue to enjoy the band of vampire hunters: the "old man" (whose entire life has been dedicated to vampire hunting) Abraham Setrakian, Eph Goodweather ex CDC, Vasily Fet the exterminator, and Augustin Elizalde (aka Gus) ex street tough. I'm looking forward to reading the next novel in the series when it comes out.

Bullet by Laurell K. Hamilton

I don't care what the detractors say, I am a die-hard Anita Blake fan. Hamilton manages to keep producing novels in the Anita Blake series which never fail to keep my interest from start to finish. I'm always sorry when each book is done because it means I have the leave the world and imagination of my favorite bad-ass female vampire executioner/necromancer. Anita may be physically tiny, but her powerful personality is awesome. In the face of all the challenges thrown at her in each book, she keeps on growing , learning about herself and others, becoming wiser, more complex and sophisticated, more loving, and also more ruthless (as necessary). Death-dealing is never easy for her - it comes with a price that she must pay - and that others are not so willing to pay. In this latest novel in the series, The Mother of All Darkness wants to possess Anita's body, soul, and mind for her own and Anita needs everyone's co-operation to win the fight.

It says on the back jacket that Hamilton is a full-time writer. My wish of the day: when I grow up I'd like to be like her - a successful, published writer who makes a viable living doing what she loves to do most. I've started buying some how-to- write novel books. I'm taking notes every night in one of my brand new journals (I am a such a journal-nerd-girl). My goal this year is to educate myself as well as I can about how to write my first book, and then to set about doing that. I turn 45 this year. I think it's time for me to "grow up" by now...I've wanted to be a "real writer" since I was a tiny little girl.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

This is the first sci-fi or speculative fiction novel in a series. It's set on a human-habitable world somewhere in the Universe where people have been infected with the ability to read each other's minds. They can't shut the power out, so it drives a lot of them crazy, and results in some awful consequences and extreme reactions (like killing off women, making classic gender-divides even worse, and so on). It's well written. I like Todd the main character. I am curious to see what happens next. Can Todd be corrupted by the other men into "falling from grace" or not?

Arcane Circle by Linda Robertson

Persephone Alcmedi aka "Seph" is a witch, and a Master vampire's Master. Her boyfriend is an uncomfirmed Domn Lupe waerewolf whose power is locked down in the mysterious tattoos all over his body. The leaders of the werewolves must challenge and confirm Johnny's powers. To save his life, Seph and Johnny must work together to solve the mystery of the tattoos all the while planning their foster daughter's 10th birthday party. A light and entertaining supernatural read.

The Hidden Goddess by M.K.Hobson

I enjoyed reading The Native Star so much that when I saw this sequel on the library shelves I grabbed it. This is a hybrid genre novel combining steam-punk and witch-craft, and set in a Reconstruction-era America. The heroine is one Miss Emily Edwards. She is a very down-to-earth, smart, independent Earth-Witch, who is willing to do whatever it takes to save the Earth and all it's peoples, and who is totally uninterested in the ego-trappings of power, wealth, and fame.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

This gritty urban fantasy is set in a futuristic Johannesburg, South Africa. Some humans become mysteriously "infected" or "cursed" with the dubious and mysterious gift of symbiotic animal familiars and individual shamanic magical talents. Protagonist Zinzi December is smart, tough, street-wise, and has a talent for attracting disaster and for finding missing things and people. Let the trouble begin...

The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow

This book has a series of fantastic reviews by famous authors. After reading it, I understood why. It is one of those books which stands out from my stack and glows with a life all of it's own. The writing is luminous, magickal, and hypnotic. Sentences and phrases light up in the mind and float there, waiting to be explored like rooms in a mansion, or secret doors in mysterious closets that lead into alternate worlds. Cassandra Brooks is a diviner, from a family of diviners. She doesn't just find water though, she finds a lot of other things too, in the past, present and future, in her life and other people's lives, in life and in death.

My sincerest thanks to author Bradford Morrow for teaching me the meaning of Syzygy in a most meaningful manner, and for writing beautiful thought provoking passages that I felt compelled to copy down and save in my personal journal. This one is special - a real keeper.

I amend my original wish - when I "grow up" into the "real writer" I hope someday to become, I'd like to be something like a combination of Laurell K. Hamilton and Bradford Morrow. Despite the snootery certain critics heap upon best-selling authors, I don't think that there is anything wrong with making a successful living writing books that people actually buy and enjoy reading.

I've been lazy!

2011-08-01T13:54:00.003-04:00

Bad me, I've been lazy.
Well, to be fair, I've been busy too and I haven't had time to write about what I've been reading most of this summer. I'm still busy, but I feel guilty now for neglecting my blog. So I will make some short notes.

Recent reads:

Night of the Vampires by Heather Graham
This novel is set in the Civil War era American south.
The female heroine is half vampire, half human. She teams up with a hunky human male from Texas. Together they set out to hunt down and eradicate an insidious vampire horde which is taking advantage of the killings on both side of the war. Heavy on the romance. I'm not really someone who enjoys the supernatural romances on the market, but I will read them when I'm short on other kinds of more interesting reading material.

This Side of the Grave by Jeaniene Frost
That said, I still continue to enjoy reading about the relationship between half-vampire Cat Crawfield and her full vampire husband Bones. They are hot, spicy and sassy! Together they get up to all sorts of fun, sex, fighting, trouble, murder, mayhem, violence, and trying to save the world over and over again. Cat's psychic/vampire abilities continue to evolve -- a bit like Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake who I also enjoy reading about -- except Cat is only having wild monkey sex with her husband. As an aside, I probably should add that unlike some people who complain about Anita Blake's sex life, I don't have a problem with polyamory and other sorts of more exotic bedroom sports as long as they are between fully responsible, consciously consenting adults.

Deadworld by J. N. Duncan
Jackie Rutledge is a tough female FBI agent who finds herself dealing with a serial killer who happens to be a vampire. In the course of her investigation she finds herself falling for a yummy PI named Nick Anderson who also happens to be a vampire. Yup, I really lucked out this time folks. Another romantic supernatural story.

Slim pickings at the library make for one desperate reader here...

Living on the Edge by Shannon K. Butcher
This one's closest claim to supernatural status is that the author's husband is Jim Butcher, author of the fabulous Harry Dresden wizard series. I guess Shannon's writing is ok as far as the romance-thriller genre goes, if you like that sort of thing. Sloane is the female heroine of this novel. She's tough and trained as a paramilitary body-guard. She falls for Lucas, a tough and handsome ex-soldier. Together they take down an evil Columbian drug lord while saving the life of one of Sloane's best friends. Lots of guns, violence, blood, and explicit sex in this one. Uh huh.

Walking Dead by Greg Rucka
Out of all the books in this group this one was the best and it wasn't even a supernatural one. The monsters in this novel were all too human and all too believably evil. In fact, this novel was so upsetting that it really affected me for days afterwards, and even kept me awake with the lights on the night that I read it.

Atticus Kodiak and his wife Alena Cizkova have retired from their former (very dangerous) professions to hide out in a tiny little town in the former USSR. All they want is to live the rest of their lives together in peace and safety. Unfortunately as long as you are human and living with other human beings, there is no where you can go to escape the evil of mankind.

Atticus and Alena are drawn into the world of human sex trafficking when the daughter of their neighbor is kidnapped and the rest of her family slaughtered. Atticus goes on a long journey around the world to track down the 14 year old girl, exposing an intricate network of ruthless human exploitation, deep suffering, violence, greed and corruption.

This is one fabulously researched and written novel about a horrifying reality and the sort of true evil that people are capable of. I will be on the look out for more novels by this author even though he does not write within my usual preferred genre.

After reading that, who needs vampires and zombies? Me. That's who.
I will be on the lookout for some new novels of my favorite genre soon.
Wish me better novel hunting luck than I had this last time!

The other thing I've learned is that if I don't make any reading notes about what I'm reading before I return the books from the library, I quickly forget what the books were about unless they were truly spectacular - such as what has happened with the last list of books I mentioned in the previous post, but did not get around to writing anything about. :-(

Lesson learned.

Recent Reads - quick post

2011-05-19T12:24:00.002-04:00

Here's a list of recent reads that I haven't reviewed yet
but have to return to the library!

Dead Streets by Tim Waggoner
- An unusual sort of zombie with his own free will, soul, and consciousness fights crime in the Underworld with his half vampire lover at his sort of not completely decaying side. Talk about 'til undeath do us part...or some such forever romantic nonsense...

Dreamfever by Karen Marie Moning
- Bad FAE! Hooray! Not silly useless cherubic fairies.
I just hate it when I pick up a book, love the story and the characters but something like the third or fourth book into the series already). (More later. )

The Messenger by Jan Burke - Immortal guy who can talk to the recently dying meets female soul mate destined to share his powers and abilities and together they defeat a big bad. Nice cemetery dogs.

Ghost Ship by P.J. Alderman - Murder mystery with someone who can talk to ghosts. Ho Hum.

Flirt by Laurell K. Hamilton - Better than some recent writing. (More later. )

Karavans by Jennifer Roberson - Ok.

Witch and Wizard by James Patterson - Young Adult. Great subversiveness.

A Brush of Darkness by Allison Pang - (more later)

Must run to library now to return books before I get more fines...and get new books out to read of course.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice

2011-05-14T11:59:00.000-04:00

Brian Aldiss
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (1937)

It requires little sophistry to consider Daniel Defoe's immortal Robinson Crusoe as a metaphor for a man stranded on an alien planet. Crusoe is an exile, and exile has proved a perennial theme within the genre of science fiction. Of all its great themes, lingering on the fringes of comprehension is Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon (1882-1950). Stapledon was an exile, his childhood spent between Egypt and England. Star Maker is both illuminated and darkened by a feeling of not belonging, the essence of exile.

It was published in 1937, when it received a rather chilly reception; the public did not know what to make of it. If it was influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost, it was doubtless also formed by the terror of the war against Nazi Germany, which was about to descend upon us.

The opening sentence of Star Maker is: "One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill." The lonely voyager through the cosmos finds world after world, some worlds inhabited by races of bird-clouds, some by insect-like creatures, each of whose swarms form the bodies of a single mind. Such is the mystery of creation; what of the spirit itself? "When I tried to probe the depths of my own being, I found impenetrable mystery." Something of which we all know but can hardly enunciate – certainly not as Stapledon does. The speaker, on its spiritual odyssey throughout creation, gains a cold, almost incomprehensible confrontation with the Star Maker itself.

What can we make of this terrible thing creating and controlling entire galaxies?

"All passions, it seemed, were compromised within the spirit's temper: but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation."

Stapledon's book embraces the firmament. Read it and you will be forever changed.

Margaret Atwood
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

As a young teenager, I devoured Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 by flashlight. It gave me nightmares. In the early 1950s television was just rolling forth, and people sat mesmerised in front of their flickering sets, eating their dinners off TV trays. Surely, it was said, "the family" was doomed, since the traditional dinnertime was obsolete. Films and books too were about to fall victim to the new all-consuming medium. My own parents refused to get a TV, so I had to sneak over to friends' houses to gape at The Ed Sullivan Show. But when not doing that, I fed my reading addiction, whenever, however, whatever. Hence Fahrenheit 451. In this riveting book, books themselves are condemned – all books. The very act of reading is considered detrimental to social order because it causes people to think, and then to distrust the authorities. Instead of books the public is offered conformity via four-wall TV, with the sound piped directly into their heads via shell-shaped earbuds (a brilliant proleptic leap on the part of Bradbury). Montag, the main character, is a "Fireman": his job is to burn each and every book uncovered by the state's spies and informers. But little by little Montag gets converted to reading, and finally joins the underground: a dedicated band of individuals sworn to preserve world literature by becoming the living repositories of the books they have memorised.

Fahrenheit 451 predated Marshall McLuhan and his theories about how media shape people, not just the reverse. We interact with our creations, and they themselves act upon us. Now that we're in the midst of a new wave of innovative media technologies, it's time to reread this classic, which poses the eternal questions: who and how do we want to be?

Stephen Baxter
Hothouse by Brian Aldiss (1961)

Billions of years hence, the sun hangs swollen and unmoving in the sky. Across Earth's sunward face a riotous jungle is dominated by a single continent-spanning banyan tree. And in the canopy, Gren, an adult at nine years old, the size of a small monkey, is one of the last humans: "[Earth] was no longer a place for mind. It was a place for growth, for vegetables. It was a hothouse."

When I first read Hothouse as a teenager I was thrilled by the vivid detail of Brian Aldiss's fecund far-future jungle, set within a grander Stapledonian vision of an Earth blooming in the light of its long evolutionary afternoon. The vividness surely derives from Aldiss's own youthful experiences; he served in the chaotic second world war theatres of Borneo and Sumatra. Meanwhile the book's depiction of a devolved mankind in a wistful far-futurity recalls scenes from HG Wells's The Time Machine – Aldiss has always been a great Wellsian. This is a very British evocation. In the hands of an American author there might have been some way out; Gren might have been allowed to discover ancient machineries, to reconquer the Earth. Aldiss, like Wells, is pitiless: "Man had rolled up his affairs and retired to the trees from whence he came." But the book was embraced by the Americans too; it won a Hugo award, science fiction's Oscar, named for Hugo Gernsback, king of the US pulp-fiction magazines.

Looking at Hothouse now I can see foreshadows of Aldiss's later works; for example, it is an audacious exercise in world-building, like the Helliconia trilogy of the 1980s. And I can admire its technical audacity. Its depiction of not-quite-human consciousness recalls Golding's The Inheritors. Hugely inventive, straddling genre forms and literary aspirations, and at once chilling and consoling in its long perspective, Aldiss's great book thrills me now as much as it did when I first discovered it some four decades ago.

Lauren Beukes
Watchmen by Alan Moore (1986-7)

It took me years to read Watchmen. Every time I'd get to the men in tights and the giant naked blue guy, I'd think, "Ack! Superhero comic!" and put it down again. It wasn't that I was against comics. I'd read 2000AD Monthly religiously since 1989 and Alan Moore's The Ballad of Halo Jones, about a girl from an interplanetary ghetto who wanted to get "out", was my favourite series of all. But I liked the dark, twisty stuff that had something to say about the world and superhero comics seemed tediously codified with no room for moral ambiguity. I should have known better. What Moore does best, even at his silliest or most obtusely philosophical, is subvert. He uses story to crack open the dark places of the human soul like a crab shell, revealing the pasty meat within, and then pokes it with a cattleprod to see it writhe.

He's the kind of writer who makes you feel very smart (Kitty Genovese and the moral bankruptcy of crowds in Watchmen, for example) and very stupid (a dozen obscure Victorian literature references interwoven into every page of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) at the same time. He pushes the medium. Every panel, every background detail, every interlude, whether a vaudeville song or a beat-style short story or seemingly wholly unrelated pirate horror comic, counts. He stretches the boundaries of storytelling in ways other writers wouldn't attempt, let alone pull off – and does it with a ferocious social conscience that challenges everything we are.

And when he has a mind to, when he's not off on some grand mal meditation on the nature of magic or sexual desire or what stories mean, Moore tells the perfect story. Inventive. Surprising. Original. Utterly devastating. From being the comic I couldn't read, Watchmen became the narrative I hold up as what fiction can be.

John Clute
City by Clifford D Simak (1952)

We know better now, of course. But they still entrance us, the old page-turners from the glory days of American SF, half a century or so ago, when the world was full of futures we were never going to have. In the mid-1940s, when he began to publish the episodes that would be assembled as City in 1952, Clifford Simak, a Minneapolis-based journalist and author, could still carry us away with the dream that cars and pollution and even the great cities of the world – "Huddling Place", the title of one of these tales, is his own derisory term for them – would soon be brushed off the map by Progress, leaving nothing behind but tasteful exurbs filled with middle-class nuclear families living the good life, with fishing streams and greenswards sheltering each home from the stormy blast.

Fortunately, Simak soon gets past this demented vision of a near-future world saved by technological fixes, a dementia common then to SF writers and gurus and politicians alike, and launches into an astonishingly eventful narrative of the next 10,000 years as seen through the eyes of one family and the immortal robot Jenkins, and all told with a weird pastoral serenity that for a kid like me seemed near to godlike. In its course City touches on almost everything dear to 1940s SF, and to me remembering. Robots. Genetic Engineering. Space. Jupiter. Domed cities. Keeps. Hiveminds. Matter transmission. Telepathy. Parallel worlds. Paranormal empathy. Mutants. Supermen. It's all there, and, thanks to Simak's skilled hand at the wheel, it's all in place: suave, sibylline, swift. The whole is framed as a series of legends told by the uplifted Dogs who have replaced the human race, now gone for ever. They have been bred not to kill. At the end, only Jenkins remains to keep them from learning how to repeat history and die.

It all seemed immensely sad and wise then, but fun. It still does.

Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Light by M John Harrison (2002)

Light is the kind of novel other writers read and think: "Why don't I just give up and go home?" That was certainly my first reaction on reading its mix of coldly perfect prose and attractively twisted insanity. It's also the only book to bring me unpleasantly close to sympathising with a serial killer. But this is M John Harrison: so antihero Michael Kearney is a mathematically brilliant, dice-throwing, reality-changing hyper-intelligent serial killer haunted by a horse-skulled personal demon.

Harrison's genius is to tie Kearney's narrative thread to those of Seria Mau – a far-future girl existing in harmony with White Cat, her spaceship, surfing a part of the galaxy known as the Kefahuchi Tract – and Chinese Ed, a sleazy if likeable cyberpunky chancer with a passion for virtual sex.

This is not a kind book, or even a particularly likeable book. But then I suspected it was never intended to be, and the author wouldn't want the kind of people who want to like characters as his readers anyway. What it is is stunningly written, meticulously plotted, hallucinogenically realised and brutally honest. No one who reads it could doubt that Harrison might win the Booker if he could be bothered.

Light is also the book that novelist and critic Adam Roberts was so sure would win the Arthur C Clarke award, he offered to change his name to Adam Van Hoogenroberts if it didn't. We're still waiting . . .

Andrew Crumey
The Brick Moon by Edward Everett Hale (1870)

The term "science fiction" hadn't been invented in 1870, when the American magazine Atlantic Monthly published the first part of Edward Everett Hale's delightfully eccentric novella The Brick Moon. Readers lacked a ready-made pigeonhole for it, confronted by a fantasy about a group of visionaries who decide to make a 200-ft wide sphere of house-bricks, paint it white, and launch it into orbit.

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon had appeared five years earlier, so Hale's work was not unprecendented, but while Verne chose to send his voyagers aloft using a giant cannon, Hale opts for the equally unfeasible but somehow more pleasing solution of a giant flywheel.

Hale gives technical details and calculations to support the plausibility of the venture. He even works out the total cost of the bricks ($60,000). There is an info-dump about latitude and longitude: the brick moon is designed to orbit from pole to pole so that people anywhere can determine their location by observing it. There are ruminations and speculations – and, to be honest, quite a few longeurs, even in a compass of only 25,000 words. But crucially there is humour. The brick moon gets launched accidentally with some people inside. Those left behind watch through telescopes as the travellers make their own little world, communicating by writing signs in big letters. They grow plants, hold church services, and their brick moon becomes a tiny, charming parody of Earth.

The Brick Moon did not appear in book form until 1899, when Hale was in his 70s, by which time HG Wells had appeared on the scene and Hale was slipping into obscurity. Nowadays he is little more than a footnote, remembered for having been the first to imagine artificial satellites. But what makes The Brick Moon still worth reading is not scientific vision, but sheer joyful quirkiness.

William Gibson
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1957)

The idea of literary "favourites" makes me uneasy, but Alfred Bester's 1957 novel The Stars My Destination has remained very close to the top of my list for science fiction, since I first discovered it as a child (though I much prefer Bester's original title Tiger, Tiger, which was evidently deemed too arthouse for the trade). Bester was an urbane and successful Mad Av dandy, an anomaly among American SF writers of his day, and his best work is deliciously redolent of the brains and flash and bustle of postwar Manhattan. TSMD is a retelling of Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, its protagonist one Gully Foyle, lumpenprole untermensch turned revenging angel in a world utterly transformed by the discovery that teleportation is a natural and teachable human talent. Perfectly surefooted, elegantly pulpy, dizzying in its pace and sweep, TSMD is still as much fun as anything I've ever read. When I was lifting the literary equivalent of weights, in training for my own first novel, it was my talisman: evidence of how many different kinds of ass one quick narrative could kick. And that sheen of exuberant postwar modernism? They just aren't making any more of that.

Ursula K Le Guin
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it, though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven't read anything else. Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I learned a lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf.

I was 17 when I read Orlando. It was half-revelation, half-confusion to me at that age, but one thing was clear: that she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive. I'm thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the marvellous strangeness of that moment 500 years ago – the authentic thrill of being taken absolutely elsewhere.

How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging the reader's imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous, complete.

In Flush, Woolf gets inside a dog's mind, that is, a non-human brain, an alien mentality – very science-fictional if you look at it that way. Again what I learned was the power of accurate, vivid, highly selected detail. I imagine Woolf looking down at the dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she wrote in and thinking what are your dreams? and listening . . . sniffing the wind . . . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog's timeless world.

Useful stuff, for those who like to see through eyes other than our own.

Russell Hoban
HP Lovecraft (1890–1937)

The main thing about HP Lovecraft is his too-muchness; he never uses three adjectives when five will do, but he writes words that haunt the memory: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." My recall of the multiplication table is shaky but those words disquiet me today as freshly as when I first read them.

Where did dead Cthulhu come from? Why did he rise up from the murky depths of Lovecraft's mental ocean? I say it's because there is a need for him and the rest of the maestro's monsters. Why is there such an appetite, such a hunger for scary stories and films? I think there is a primal horror in us. From where? From the Big Bang when Something came out of Nothing? From the nothingness we must become at life's end? I don't know, but I know it's there and we like to dress it up with a bolt through its neck or a black rubber alien suit; or as Cthulhu. Get a load of this: "A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings", with elements of "an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature", "but it was the general outline of the whole that made it most shockingly frightful". Close your eyes and try to imagine this creature of non-Darwinian evolution. Just the look of this bozo is already a major horror, and we're not even into the story yet. While he's dead and dreaming in his house at R'lyeh ("Dun Foamin"?) his Cthulhuvibes are spreading worldwide and causing strange rites and observances here and there. Lovecraft is not everybody's mug of Ovaltine but I have always found him horribly cosy.

Liz Jensen
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)

As a teenager, one of my favourite haunts was Oxford's Botanical Gardens. I'd head straight for the vast heated greenhouses, where I'd pity my adolescent plight, chain-smoke, and glory in the insane vegetation that burgeoned there. The more rampant, brutally spiked, poisonous, or cruel to insects a plant was, the more it appealed to me. I'd shove my butts into their root systems. They could take it. My librarian mother disapproved mightily of the fags but when under interrogation I confessed where I'd been hanging out – hardly Sodom and Gomorrah – she spotted a literary opportunity, and slid John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids my way. I read it in one sitting, fizzing with the excitement of recognition. I knew the triffids already: I'd spent long hours in the jungle with them, exchanging gases. Wyndham loved to address the question that triggers every invented world: the great "What if . . ." What if a carnivorous, travelling, communicating, poison-spitting oil-rich plant, harvested in Britain as biofuel, broke loose after a mysterious "comet-shower" blinded most of the population? That's the scenario faced by triffid-expert Bill Masen, who finds himself a sighted man in a sightless nation. Cataclysmic change established, cue a magnificent chain reaction of experimental science, physical and political crisis, moral dilemmas, new hierarchies, and hints of a new world order. Although the repercussions of an unprecedented crisis and Masen's personal journey through the new wilderness form the backbone of the story, it's the triffids that root themselves most firmly in the reader's memory. Wyndham described them botanically, but he left enough room for the reader's imagination to take over. The result being that everyone who reads The Day of the Triffids creates, in their mind's eye, their own version of fiction's most iconic plant. Mine germinated in an Oxford greenhouse, in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Hari Kunzru
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972)

Soviet-era Russian science fiction deserves a wider audience in English. The Strugatsky brothers collaborated on numerous novels and stories, the best known of which is this, partly because it was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, in 1977. The novel takes place 10 years after a mysterious alien visitation, which seems to have no rational explanation. No one saw the visitors. Their presence caused disease and blindness in the areas where they landed. Now, in the six "Zones", the laws of physics (and, seemingly, of reality) are disturbed by anomalies, and littered with inexplicable, deadly wreckage. Only a few brave "stalkers" risk their lives to enter the zones to gather alien artefacts for sale. Some of these artefacts offer the promise of extraordinary powers. Unlike Tarkovsky's film, which concentrates on the hallucinatory, vacated landscape of the zones, the novels portray a society adapting to an inexplicable, terrifying event, an eruption of the unknown. Though written in 1971 and published in English in 1977, the novel was heavily bowdlerised by Soviet censors, and an authoritative text wasn't available in Russian until 2000. It's a book with an extraordinary atmosphere – and a demonstration of how science fiction, by using a single bold central metaphor, can open up the possibilities of the novel.

Kelly Link
Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011)

I can't pick just one book by Diana Wynne Jones. She wrote so many books, all of them essential, and funny, and weird, and true. She mixed up fantasy and science fiction and the domestic so that unhappy families and awkward adolescents got smooshed up, quite believably, with mythological figures, extraterrestrial powers, and all other sorts of dangerous beasties. I was already a science-fiction reader before I found Dogsbody. But I might have outgrown science fiction quickly, moved on to books about horses and girls and high schools, if it weren't for books such as Dogsbody and The Homeward Bounders and Archer's Goon, and if it weren't for characters such as Kathleen, who rescues a puppy and falls in love with a star, and Jamie, who spies on a dangerous game that They are playing, and Howard, with his two very complicated families.

Wynne Jones's books are often literally about other worlds, but her characters belong very firmly to this one. They are eccentric, flamboyant, pragmatic, lonely, sometimes selfish, often stubborn, always recognisable. How they navigate the territory that they find themselves in is, I suppose, a kind of metaphor for the process of growing up. But I'm grown up now, and have a child of my own, and I rely on her books, her pinprick insights into familial relationships, her astonishing way of seeing the worlds.

Ken MacLeod
A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller Jr (1960)

Walter M Miller Jr's A Canticle for Liebowitz is one of the few SF novels to have won lasting mainstream literary acceptance. It is also one of the very few SF novels to present the Roman Catholic church in a kindly light.

Its premise is straightforward: centuries after our civilisation self-destructs in a nuclear war, the church preserves fragments of its scientific knowledge in the desert monasteries of a battered America. A Jewish convert, the engineer Liebowitz, played a major part in saving books from the anti-science backlash after the war. These ancient texts – the Memorabilia – spark a new Renaissance, to eventually reboot an industrial civilisation more advanced than ours. This civilisation, in its turn . . . but you're ahead of me, yes? So is the church, which this time takes its remnant – and the vastly expanded Memorabilia – to the stars.

This millennial tale is told in close-up. We follow monks reverently copying diagrams they don't understand, and venerating relics we know to be detritus. We hear litanies in which Fallout is the name of a demon. Dramatic ironies multiply as the first of the new scientists scoffs at an abbot's quaint belief in evolution. And although the successor civilisation has interstellar colonies, the texture of its daily, earthly life is the same as ours, or rather that of the 1960s: cars, television, communications satellites, cold war, nuclear tensions. This isn't a failure of imagination: Miller was, as his many short stories show, well capable of imagining far-future worlds. It's a dramatic device to bring us to the most chillingly science-fictional recognition of all: that our civilisation, too, is one of post-catastrophe recovery.

We smile at the monks of the Order of Liebowitz, laboriously inking in a blueprint instead of just copying the lines, but the joke is on us. We're Rome, rebooted.

China Miéville
The Island of Doctor Moreau by HG Wells (1896)

In his own thoroughly strange 1946 novel Life Comes to Seathorpe, Neil Bell appropriates the term "rare books" to designate members of a new, dissident literary canon. A book, he says, is rare if "[i]t stood by itself . . . among all books . . . [and] was in a way unique." Of those mooncalf, ill-fitting, ineffably strange examples he lists, his first and most outstanding is The Island of Doctor Moreau.

He is right. This short, merciless novel of a vivisectionist's efforts to remake beasts as humans is a shattering text. A peerless piece of science fictional horror, saturated with wrongness all the more powerful for its cold prose, it doesn't evoke so much as demand visceral, social, philosophical dread. Wells was always politically the most interesting and cantankerous of the Fabians, but, as so often, the critiques, contradictions and catastrophes in his fiction go further by far than those in his self-consciously political non-fiction. Like all worthwhile fiction, the book evades allegorical reduction, but among the phenomena it is "about", one, ostentatiously, is colonialism. It oscillates in extraordinary superposition between two countervailing critiques of empire: one we might roughly gloss as reactionary – that those colonised cannot be "civilised"; the other more radical – that the colonial project is a nightmarish House of Pain.

Like its earlier close relative Frankenstein, Moreau is regularly traduced as a warning against hubris, of the dangers of Meddling With Things that Should Be Left Alone, and so on. In fact, both texts are rebukes to that tedious and craven fingerwagging – though, published a mere biblical lifespan apart, in poignantly opposed ways. Where for Shelley monstrousness arises out of Frankenstein's refusal to engage with the social reality of what he has done, for Wells, it is brutal, ongoing engagement itself that is the cause of the horror. Frankenstein warns of disaster if we fail the Enlightenment: in nihilist Fabian terror, Moreau cries out that the Enlightenment has failed.

Michael Moorcock
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1956)

Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress was the first book I bought with my own money. It made such a strong impression on me that, still a convinced agnostic, I started out believing a book should have at least two levels and contain some sort of moral element. Christian learning to be a decent man by facing the dangers and temptations of the world was a pretty good lesson for a would-be writer. I searched out other visionary texts. Milton's Paradise Lost was the natural successor and a subtler one, for here the villain is enormously attractive and appeals to all our emotions, including pity. Blake made up the initial three. Magnificent visions, strong moral voices. Christian's adventures are dreamlike and powerful and possess some tremendous prose. The book contains everything I came to look for in imaginative fiction, even when an author denied he had no specific moral purpose. In science fiction such as Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, the author refuses allegory (though not idealism) and insists all he's doing is telling a romantic story based on The Count of Monte Cristo, set in the future, but I already found a little more to it when I read it in Paris at the age of 16, sitting outside Shakespeare and Co, having earned the money to buy it from busking. Bester's predictions included a world where all the powerful aristocratic families carry the names of Heinz, Chrysler, Sara Lee and most of the brands we are familiar with; a world where democracy has been subverted and strange cults, reflecting aspects of our modern world, have grown up. For me, it made as strong an impression as Bunyan and reminds me why the best science fiction still contains, as in Ballard, vivid imagery and powerful prose coupled to a strong moral vision.

Patrick Ness
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson (2003)

Bypassing all requirements of "importance" or "influence" or "classic status" – though I'd argue that it has all of those things – I've simply gone for the sci-fi novel I enjoyed reading the most. Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is a huge (900-plus pages), brilliant, Arthur C Clarke award-winning story about the founding of modern science. It's also – incredibly – outrageously good fun.

Packed with research, a mind-boggling array of real historical characters from Isaac Newton to William of Orange, and digressions on anything from philosophy to finance to cryptography, Quicksilver manages to never be obnoxious about its smarts. The destinies of fictional early scientist Daniel Waterhouse, "King of the Vagabonds" Jack Shaftoe, and former-harem-girl-turned-economics-wizard Eliza improbably (yet inevitably) weave together through court intrigue, Le Roi himself and the founding of the Royal Society, but even that doesn't begin to cover Quicksilver's joyous sprawl. It's funny, cheerfully violent, and eye-wateringly ribald. You'll also thank your lucky stars you never had a kidney stone in 1661.

Exhilaration is too rare in fiction. That rush of delight, that desperate need to get back to the pages to find out what happens next, particularly in a novel as clever as this one, is worth cherishing. When Quicksilver first came out, I described it as less a book, more a place to move into and raise a family. I still believe that. The best science fiction, indeed the best fiction, contains whole worlds. You'll be hard-pressed to find one as splendidly entertaining as Quicksilver's.

Audrey Niffenegger
Time and Again: An Illustrated Novel by Jack Finney (1970)

Time and Again is an original; there is nothing quite like it. It is the story of Si Morley, a commercial artist who is drawing a piece of soap one ordinary day in 1970 when a mysterious man from the US Army shows up at his Manhattan office to recruit him for a secret government project. The project turns out to involve time travel; the idea is that artists and other imaginative people can be trained (by self-hypnosis) to imagine themselves so completely in the past that they actually go there. Si finds himself sitting in an apartment in the famous Dakota building pretending to be in the past . . . and ends up in the Manhattan of 1882.

The story makes good use of paradox and the butterfly effect, but its greatest charms lie in Si's good-humoured observations of old New York and the love story that gradually develops between Si and the beautiful Julia, who doesn't believe Si when he tells her he's a time traveller. Time and Again is laden with authentic period photos and newspaper engravings which Jack Finney works into the narrative gracefully. When I first read WG Sebald's Austerlitz, a very different book in both subject and mood, I realised that it owed something to Finney's innovative use of pictures as evidence within a novel. Really, the pictures seem to say, this did happen, I saw it, don't you believe me? The pictures cause us, the readers, to sway slightly as we suspend our disbelief; they look like proof of something we know is unprovable. Isn't it?

There is something wistful about time travel stories as they age: 1970 is now 41 years past. A lot happened in those years, and these characters are blissfully unaware of the future. I get a little shiver of nostalgia in the book's opening pages: gee, people used to go to offices and sit at drawing boards and get paid to draw soap. What a world. Perhaps if I could imagine it completely enough, I could visit . . . but no. I'll just read about it, again and again.

Christopher Priest
The Voices of Time by JG Ballard (1960)

When he died two years ago, JG Ballard was widely celebrated for his novels, and rightly. Empire of the Sun, an account of his wartime internment in Shanghai, brought him a Spielberg movie and a worldwide audience, but he also wrote the remarkable novels Crash, High-Rise, Cocaine Nights and many more. Inspired by Dalí, De Chirico, William Burroughs and Jean Genet, his talent was unique: his vivid, surprising and often beautiful prose was put to the creation of dreamlike and sometimes shocking images, while telling a deceptively straightforward narrative.

Ballard began writing in 1955 (he was in his mid-20s) and his first serious novel, The Drowned World, did not appear until seven years later. Before that he produced a stream of astonishing short stories, which to long-term admirers of Ballard's writing are among his finest fiction. In them he explored for the first time many of the themes which in new guises were to coil their way through his better known later work. Supreme in these stories is an extraordinary novella, The Voices of Time, first published in 1960 and later the title story of a collection.

The plot almost defies summary. An imminent global disaster is seen from the viewpoint of a group of sleep-addicted scientists, slowly going mad in a desert installation surrounded by salt lakes, where genetic experiments have bred mutant animals to resist the radiated atmosphere. Meanwhile, a countdown to the end of the universe has begun, a suicidal madman engraves a mandala on the floor of an emptied swimming pool, a sleep-deprived astronomer cruises the dunes in a white Packard saloon, a raven-haired temptress named Coma plays the men off against each other. Somehow it all seems to make crazy and brilliant sense. I have read the story a dozen times, never actually understood it, but also have never failed to draw inspiration and encouragement from Ballard's pellucid writing and the amazing and surreal images.

Alastair Reynolds
The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke (1956)

Everyone has their touchstone text, but for me it must be Arthur C Clarke's The City and the Stars. By the time I encountered it, at the age of 12 or 13 (I recall picking it out of a rotating bookstand, near the door of a bookshop in the Lake District, during one of those rain-sodden childhood holidays), I was already familiar with Clarke as the sober-minded chronicler of near future space exploration. In scores of short stories, and in novels such as Earthlight, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke took me to the Moon, Mars and beyond – always in that same benign, sceptical, calm voice of scientific reason.

The City and the Stars was a magnificent shock to the system. Rather than being set a hundred or two hundred years hence, and rather than dealing with astronauts and implacable alien artefacts, The City slams us billions of years into the future, telescoping entire aeons and ages into mere eyeblinks. It's about Diaspar, the last city on Earth. And what an astonishing, beautiful creation it is. Rarely, for a novel written half a century ago (and which owed its origin to a work predating the second world war), The City's core ideas still feel bold and far-reaching. Diaspar's citizens entertain themselves in virtual realities, are born and reborn time and again from computer archives, their personalities remixed from iteration to iteration, and they can organise and edit their own memories at will. Their placid lives are perfect, their utopian city endlessly self-renewing. And yet . . . they have no interest in what lies beyond Diaspar's awesome walls. Until a citizen is born, Alvin, who seems never to have existed before. And Alvin very much wants to know what lies outside.

Clarke was a scientist, and his work sits squarely in the tradition of "hard SF" – a largely detestable term, but we're stuck with it – which is to say, science fiction with one eye on strict scientific plausibility. Much hard SF is stylistically dry, with little concern for character or what one might consider the finer literary virtues. There was rather more to Clarke than mere nuts and bolts description, though. On a good day, he could rise to the genuinely poetic – Diaspar is a lovely, evocative name – and there are countless passages in his work where a genuine sense of wonder is achieved. The City and the Stars is full of them, and it remains my favourite novel of the deep, distant future.

Adam Roberts
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)

Not my favourite SF novel, but my gateway drug: Frank Herbert's Dune. When I pick it up now I tend to see only its flaws (Herbert's leaden prose, incapable of concision; his limited, and essentialist and in some cases homophobic characterisation). But if I cast my mind back to my 10-year-old self, and remember the effect it had on me, I'm able to remind myself that the book's strengths eclipse its shortcomings. It achieves a genuine grandeur, something that has a lot to do with the brilliance of Herbert's mise-en-scène – the desert-world of Arrakis, the beautiful, imagination-snaring barrenness of his locations. Herbert is sometimes praised for his "worldbuilding", but this isn't quite right (on the level of worldbuilding the novel has notable flaws, not least the absence of any means of oxygenating the planetary atmosphere). Rather, Dune's deserts function eloquently as metaphor and topographical signifier, empty enough of conventional geographical features – the frontispiece map is a blank page barely sullied by dotted-lines showing occasional features – to provide an uncluttered aesthetic and imaginative space. The novel presciently anticipated the sort of environmentalist concerns, "ecology" in the idiom of the 1960s, that have subsequently become culturally central – Dune was, indeed, the first novel with an ecological theme to have a significant impact.

In a sense, Herbert's triumph in Dune is precisely finding simple but eloquent tropes for important but complex subjects such as these. His future society is clothed in the simplified feudal lineaments of a medieval fantasy – computers are banished by religious edict, society is strictly hierarchical – which enables him to sketch large questions of human social and political interaction. Even now I'm an adult, Herbert's sandworms still move through the deserts of my imagination.

Kim Stanley Robinson
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969)

One of my favorite novels is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K Le Guin. For more than 40 years I've been recommending this book to people who want to try science fiction for the first time, and it still serves very well for that. One of the things I like about it is how clearly it demonstrates that science fiction can have not only the usual virtues and pleasures of the novel, but also the startling and transformative power of the thought experiment.

In this case, the thought experiment is quickly revealed: "The king was pregnant," the book tells us early on, and after that we learn more and more about this planet named Winter, stuck in an ice age, where the humans are most of the time neither male nor female, but with the potential to become either. The man from Earth investigating this situation has a lot to learn, and so do we; and we learn it in the course of a thrilling adventure story, including a great "crossing of the ice". Le Guin's language is clear and clean, and has within it both the anthropological mindset of her father Alfred Kroeber, and the poetry of stories as magical things that her mother Theodora Kroeber found in native American tales. This worldly wisdom applied to the romance of other planets, and to human nature at its deepest, is Le Guin's particular gift to us, and something science fiction will always be proud of. Try it and see – you will never think about people in quite the same way again.

Tricia Sullivan
Octavia E Butler (1947–2006)

I was teaching in New York when I came across Octavia E Butler's Kindred in a secondary-school catalogue of novels recommended to support diversity. It caught my attention because Butler was described as a science-fiction writer. I thought I was familiar with science fiction, but I'd never heard of her – nor have a great many other readers, I suspect. For many years, Butler was the sole African-American woman novelist in science fiction. Kindred tells the wrenching and unforgettable story of a young black woman who time-travels and saves the life of her slaveholder ancestor, but it is, in Butler's words, "a grim fantasy", not science fiction.

Beginning in the 1970s, Butler wrote three sequences of novels: the Patternist books, the Lilith's Brood series and the Parable novels (incomplete at her tragic death in 2006). Critically respected, she won the Hugo and Nebula awards, received a Clarke nomination, the PEN lifetime achievement award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. A serious writer working in a field that is seldom taken seriously, Butler addressed biological control, gender, humanity's relationship with aliens, genetics and even the development of a fictional religion. Her narratives leave space for the reader's involvement while exploring the nature of change. They gaze unflinchingly on power dynamics. "Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles," Butler stated, "and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together." Butler's writing is courageous, stimulating and infused with a rare purity of intention. Crushingly, she died at the height of her powers. Bloodchild and Other Stories is a good place to begin discovering her work.

Scarlett Thomas
Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

I first read Neuromancer when I was living in Torquay in 1999. For me it was a time of cheap junk food, cigarettes, videogames, arcades and Hello Kitty hairbands. The novel was just the right thing for the time, and its post-industrial Japanese wastelands didn't feel so remote. There's so much trivia about Neuromancer, and everything it inspired, from the name "Microsoft" to the Matrix films – perhaps even the whole internet. But what I've always loved about Gibson are the same things I love about Jane Austen and Chekhov. Gibson uses small, precise details to build a world in which people are defined by their contemporary technologies, fashions and material culture. In Neuromancer, as in Gibson's other books, you always know what the characters are wearing. Here, one character turns up dressed in a "suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist". A woman's hairband "might have represented microcircuits, or a city map".

I'm surprised Gibson is seen as a highly masculine writer, given the focus on fashion and the consistently romantic plots. Yes, there's hot RAM (the fact that people are trading RAM in megabytes in the "future" is one of very few details that date the novel), a military outfit called Screaming Fist and simstim consoles. But there's also the uber-cool razorgirl Molly, kicking ass in her "cherry red cowboy boots". Gibson's prose style is in the tradition of Chekhov, Carver, Chandler, Burroughs and Hemingway. Lots of verbs, lots of nouns – things – as opposed to feelings, over-explanation and exposition. Before I began writing The End of Mr Y, I put three books on my desk as lucky charms, and this was one of them. My novel isn't cyberpunk, but I wanted my readers to feel something of what I felt when I first read Neuromancer.

Out of this World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It is open from 20 May-25 September 2011 at the British Library, London. Admission to the exhibition is free. For more information call 0207 412 7332 or visit www.bl.uk

Multi-catch-up summary list

2011-05-04T17:11:00.001-04:00

Once again I've read a bunch of books and fallen behind on writing about them. None of them were truly outstanding or made a very deep impression on me. Most were just mildly entertaining - which explains why two of them were books I'd already read, and forgotten that I'd read. So this will be a short form catch up post summing up the bare bones of what I've read recently.

* Unusual Suspects ed. Dana Stabelow

Mixture of supernatural/mystery short stories by various authors. Not terribly exciting for me.

* Born of Ice by Sherrilyn Kenyon

I actually liked this one. It had some shades of Joss Whedon's Firefly to it, kinda sorta.

* Death Spiral by James W. Nichol

A WW II war vet comes home with an uncanny ability to discover "who done it" and why. And somehow he seems to be at the center of all sorts of murderous activity that suddenly breaks out in the sleepy village he has come home to. Quite entertaining. Canadian too eh. ;-)

* Dragon Mage by Norton and Rabe

An adolescent's book, but nevertheless, well written, full of fun and fantasy, ancient Babylon, and Dragons.

* Trick of the Light by Rob Thurman

I had forgotten that I had read this book a few years ago. I liked the main female protagonist, a kickass supernatural Trickster character slash bar owner, but I wasn't bored or desperate enough for entertainment to read it again so I guess I didn't like it *that* much. However, if I found another one of her books with the same character in it but a different story, I'd probably read it for fun.

* Seventh Witch by Shirley Damsgaard

Another book I had already read a few years ago. This one is almost a "cosy" supernatural mystery. It's ok. I definitely didn't like it enough to read it again once I'd realized I'd already read it.

* The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This is a post-apocalyptic novel following the struggles of a father and son to survive when civilization is destroyed. It's very dark, and it certainly suits my mood and outlook on the dismal future of the human race and our ongoing destruction of the planet at the moment.

Ghost Shadow by Heather Graham

2011-04-08T10:22:00.000-04:00

This story is barely worth a mention in my opinion. It's typical American surface writing - New York Times bestselling fare, a completely predictable formulaic murder mystery with a love interest, and a woman with a gift for seeing ghosts who help her solve the crime/s. Ho hum, dee dum. Toss.

The Shape-Changer's Wife by Sharon Shinn

2011-04-08T10:19:00.000-04:00

This is a lovely little gem of a story about a young wizard in training.
Aubrey is the pure of heart hero who is tested by darkness and corruption.

His most dangerous adversary is also his teacher - the Shape-Changer.
His forbidden love is his teacher's wife - who is not quite human, although she appears to be on the surface.

At stake is the choice to become a person of power, and to choose what to do with that power. Will Aubrey choose to emulate his teacher and become the type of wizard who lusts for power and control at the price of the suffering and oppression of those he has under his control, or will Aubrey use his power to to restore balance and freedom to those he could have power over?

As I said, it's a delightful little gem for an evening's worth of reading.

Chalice by Robin McKinley - and a reflection on modern society

2011-04-08T09:33:00.003-04:00

I loved the world that Robin McKinley creates in this book. It is a world where the land and all creatures are intimately linked to the human beings who live upon it and vice versa. The humans are literally the caretakers of the elements, the woods, the animals, the bees and so on. The land is divided up into smaller parcels called demesne, and everyone has a place and a role to play in keeping the balance. Everything and everyone is interconnected in a delicate yet strong living web of life. When the balance is upset by some human flaw in character and behavior this has dire consequences on the environment and all of it's inhabitants.

Enter a woman who had humble beginnings as a woodskeeper and a beekeeper. The landsense choses her as the new "Chalice" which is one of the most powerful positions a woman can hold in a demesne. She has had no training or apprenticeship and comes to the job in a demesne which has been neglected and abused by it's former Master who died suddenly in a fire. The land is suffering. The people are suffering. The former Master's brother who was apprenticed to become a priest of the Fire element is brought back to take up the role of Master, but he is poorly suited to the job (at first), being almost completely changed into a fire elemental himself. Then in their weakness, they must face a threat from the arrogant and power hungry Overlord and a pet outsider he proposes to replace the blood related Master with.

The story of how these two people must go through huge transformations and trials in order to save their demesne and people is a fascinating one, which drew my imagination and empathy in and caught me fast. And, I couldn't help wishing that our world was more like this one - where the priority and responsibility of keeping a healthy balance in all elements, land, resources, and living creatures was held higher than anything else.

If only humans had the "land-sense" - an awareness of, and sensitivity to the land and it's creatures that they lived upon, maybe we wouldn't be in the horrible trouble that we are in right now. Instead we have the Japanese dumping millions of tons of nuclear contaminated water into the oceans over who knows long a period of time? The radiation that has travelled in the air streams across the globe has so far reached from the West to the East coast of North America. Even where I live, I know that radiation contaminated rain has already fallen. It may be "low" levels at the moment, but radiation is radiation, and there is no end in sight to the poisonous emissions issuing from the devastated Fukushima Nuclear site. Over time it will accumulate. Over time, different kinds of radiation, with different half-lives and potencies will emerge from the site and gradually and inexorably pollute the earth, air and water for generations to come.

We depend upon the Sun for our lives, for the growth of plants and so on. But if the Sun itself were to suddenly visit the Earth, it would kill all of us, and everything on the planet. Balance. Proper time and place. Life is a delicate thing. Most humans are so arrogant, (like the Overlord and his outlander usurper wanting to supplant the ones who have the natural land sense and care for the land.) we think we can continue to rape, pillage, plunder the earth and all of it's denizens, and live our artificial lives which are in complete disharmony and imbalance with everything else, including ourselves with no consequence. But, like in Chalice, everything really is interconnected, earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. What happens on one corner of the Earth will eventually affect the other areas of the Earth.

It's not just the radiation which is worrying me. There are so many other things that worry me which human beings in power are responsible for. There are Genetically Modified crops and other organisms. There are cloned animals. There is the over dependence upon fossil fuels. The latest thing seems to be silver nanoparticles which are destroying essential microbes and plants and who knows what else as they've just started to study their effects... There is Big Science, Big Pharma and a powerful Western dominated mono-medical industry that I simply do not trust or respect, which in turn does not respect or acknowledge alternative or more natural forms of health management. Big bloated and falsely inflated Money. Big Government. Big Military and War. Poverty. Human Trafficking and Slavery. Exploitation and Abuse of all kinds. I could go on and on...but the point is, the direction in which we are headed is, I fear the wrong direction, and I find it hard to live my brief little life as a human being on this planet and feel any sense of peace or harmony or purpose in relation to the human societies I see around me. I'm very troubled by all of this. My heart feels heavy. My spirit is saddened. I'm ashamed of my fellow human beings. I do the best that I can with my little life. I exercise and try to make healthy environmentally conscious food choices. I live a very modest life with the smallest carbon footprint I can make. But, I know that this little bit that I do is not enough. I think that ultimately the human race is going to kill itself and everything around it will suffer and be destroyed along with us.

Over the last couple of weeks since Fukushima, I kept thinking about the "Resident Evil" movie series. The Umbrella Corporation is the source of a powerful biohazard virus which either turns people into flesh devouring mindless zombies, or causes unpredictable, usually horrifying mutations in living creatures. Alice is the one rarest of all exception - she bonds with the T-virus and gains super-powers which the Umbrella Corporation lusts to own and control and use for its own power and profit.

For the first time I began to think of zombies as more than the mindless, disgusting, ravening creatures of horror film I have always seen them as. I began to see them as metaphors for the large majority of humans who mindlessly and selfishly consume everything advertised to them as desirable, as they scramble just to exist (and be "successful") within the artificial structures and machinery of society created for (and by) them. And, the world in Resident Evil which dries up and becomes mostly dead from the effects of the T-virus is the dead and destroyed world which I see in our future.

No wonder I escape into the type of books that I do. They offer alternative realities in which all of these issues can be explored and examined and experimented with. When bad things happen in each of my dark dystopian books it is a small catharsis for me to mourn the pain, the violence and bloodshed, the myriad of evils, corruptions and injustices, the losses, disasters, and horrors I see happening all around me every day. Sometimes "good" and balance wins. Sometimes, just like in life, "bad" and imbalance wins.

Neil Gaiman's Blog about Diana Wynne Jones

2011-03-27T20:36:00.000-04:00

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/03/being-alive.html

I love Neil Gaiman's work.

I just read his blog about Diana Wynne Jones dying of cancer and it made me cry. It's a lovely tribute to her.

Jeepers I've been in a dark mood lately.

The Man With The Golden Torc by Simon R. Green

2011-03-19T21:47:00.007-04:00

So it's the Super Moon - the closest Full Moon we've had to the earth in 20 years. It's nearly the Spring Equinox, a time of year which is supposed to herald the return of new life, and the beginning of a new year of growth and goodness. However, we have recently had the horrific Tsunami, Earthquake, and resultant Nuclear Meltdown disaster in Japan, and war, violence, death, and destruction going on all over the world. We are all so in need of a hero and some hope right now. I don't feel full of optimism at the moment. In fact I am feeling downright dark at the moment and this story suits my mood and nature perfectly right now.

The Man With the Golden Torc, is about a heroic guy who is born into a famous and powerful family (The Droods aka Druids) of what he believes to be heroes, people who supposedly fight for the "right". He himself has always been a bit of a loner, and a bit of a rebel, but one with a good heart, not one who is easily seduced into doing "wrong".

His cover name in the outside world is "Shaman Bond". I love this name of his because it's a nod to both the magickal aspects to the story, and a nod to the every day spy-technical aspects to the story.

Not far into the story our hero cum rebel begins to discover that not all is as it seems, even for himself - a man of the "Twilight", a person living not quite in and not quite outside of either the supernatural or the every day worlds, and someone who is not completely inside nor outside of the Drood family as well.

Can I ever relate to his liminal status! I love this character. He could be my male twin.

Another character which I love in this story is Girl Flower. Girl Flower is a nod to the Welsh myth of Bloddeuwedd . As anyone who knows me, and has kept up with my blog is aware, I have a particular fondness for owls. Bloddeuwedd" is Welsh for "owl".

The hero of the Welsh tale Lleu Llaw Gyffes is cursed by his mother to never marry a human wife. Well this doesn't seem fair does it? Every man has to have a woman all his very own right? Hmmmm... Oh that wicked driving human need to own and possess and control...

To circumvent this seemingly unreasonable curse two magicians Math and Gwydion take the flowers of the oak, broom, and meadowsweet to create the most beautiful maiden ever known to be Lleu Llaw Gyffes' wife. However, while he is away, she has an affair with the anti-hero Gronw Pebr and the two create a plan to murder Lleu.

Lleu is another one of these twilight persons. He cannot be killed as long as he is fully in one or another place or time or situation. He can only be killed when he is somewhere/somewhen inbetween. (e.g. he can only be killed at dusk, wrapped in a net with one foot on a cauldron and one on a goat and with a spear forged for a year during the hours when everyone is at mass.)

His wife shares this information with her lover and he tries to kill Lleu. The murder is not quite successful, and when Lleu returns, he transforms his unfaithful wife into an owl and curses her:

Blodeuwedd meets Gronw.

“

You will not dare to show your face ever again in the light of day ever again, and that will be because of enmity between you and all other birds. It will be in their nature to harass you and despise you wherever they find you. And you will not lose your name - that will always be "Bloddeuwedd (Flower-face)."^[1]

”

I've always thought this was a grossly unfair story to burden owls with. I think owls are lovely birds. However, it is true that they are mistrusted and feared in many cultures, being associated with death, darkness, ghosts, curses, and ye wicked old witchcraft. Le Sigh. Poor things.

Anyhow back to our deliciously Jungian story. For some mysterious reason our hero, Shaman Bond is driven out of the Drood Family by the Matriarch and the entire world is given license to hunt him down.

He has to take refuge in the underbelly of British civilization, with all the criminals, and he even has to go delving into the stinking city sewers for help and answers. Along the way, having to enlist help from the "dark side", he attracts a small band of helpers including Mr. Stab (Jack the Ripper), Molly Metcalf the wild witch, and Girl Flower (who is described as an elemental who can manifest as either a beautiful girl made of lovely flowers or a wickedly violent and murderous female made of owls talons).

Underground in the sewers Girl Flower takes a decimated rat's body and drops it into her bodice.

"Poor little ratty."

"Oh ick." said Molly.

"I am flowers darling." Girl Flower said stubbornly." And all dead things are as compost to my pretty petals." She slipped the rat carcass inside the front of her dress, and it immediately disappeared.

Molly looked at me. "Think about that the next time she invites you to unbutton her blouse."

I looked determinedly in another direction. "If she starts coughing up owl pellets, she's going back."

(Green p. 171)

(I'm liking this Girl more and more all the time by the way. )

Probably one of my most favorite parts of the story involves Mr. Stab revealing one of his underground super secret stashes of mutilated dead women's bodies posed around a Victorian table. Girl Flower examines the scene and she...

"floated prettily around the room, bending over withered shoulders to stare into corrupt faces, humming a happy song to herself. "You shouldn't have let this get to you darlings. All living things have their roots in dead things. It's the way of the world." She slipped a hand inside her dress and frowned prettily for a moment, and when she brought her hand out again it was piled high with seeds. She walked up and down both sides of the long table dropping a few seeds into the gaping mouths and empty eye sockets of every corpse. "Let new life bloom," she said. "It's nature's way."

Mr. Stab looked at her, and Girl Flower smiled happily back at him, entirely unafraid. And the man who was once called Jack by a whole horrified city nodded slowly.

"Perhaps I'll come back, in some future time," he said. "To see what strange new life has blossomed here."

I didn't kill him. As an agent in the field, you learn that sometimes you have to settle for little victories.

(Green p 174)

So. The novel is basically about the ambiguity of human nature and it's overwhelming selfish drive for power and control. Right and wrong, day and night, good and evil, life and death...things are not always so...black and white. Sometimes they are more grey, inbetweenish, and twilighty...and I have always identified myself as existing in that place so the novel suits me just fine.

I'm distinctly unhappy with the human race tonight. More-so than usual. I've never been happy with the way it runs its affairs. I don't trust any politicians or power systems in the world. I despise the way humanity rapes and pillages, plunders and exploits, destroys and poisons the world, and tramples pettily upon pretty much anything beautiful, valuable, vulnerable and natural that it cannot patent, possess, control, and make money off of.

As a Pagan, as a Witch. as a Woman, I'm supposed to be celebrating the Full Moon tonight. I'm supposed to be celebrating the Spring Equinox in a few days. How am I supposed to do that when I look around me and the whole world is in major upheaval: War, Corruption, Oppression, Pollution, Global Warming, Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Nuclear Meltdown...and political lie after lie after lie...

How long will we last to safely breath the air, drink the water, eat from the earth, and turn our faces to the sun after all that we have done, and when we reap what we have sown? What blooms will bloom this Spring and what fruits will ripen this Summer? What harvest will we see this coming Fall? And what will our Nuclear Winter be like?

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
-- William Butler Yeats, January 1919"

My feeling tonight is incredibly dark, dismal and dim -- dark enough to
quote a famous biblical phrase which is terribly unlike me.
I feel that ultimately we shall "Reap the Whirlwind" and that we will have deserved it.
"They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind"
This quote comes from the Book of Hosea in the Hebrew Bible.
It was used by Bomber Harris in response to the Blitz of 1940.

I know human beings are constantly predicting doom and gloom, apocalypse
and so on, but really, how often do we have to @#$% things up before we don't
get any more second and third chances? How far do we have to go before we've
gone past the point of no return? We never learn from history. We are all so bloody
arrogant and selfish.

Forgive me or not, I really don't care, but I'm distinctly identifying with the view points of Mr. Stab and Girl Flower right now.

Ah well. That truly is Mother Nature isn't it. That which is meant to die and decay will. That which is meant to live will be born out of death.

Runa (aka Bloddeuwedd) gives Four Talons to Simon R. Green and The Man With the Golden Torc.

Sleep well little earth. I'm a pissed off witch tonight. So I'm letting go, and going with the flow. I'm thinking about Black Holes and imploding and exploding galaxies right now. Stars being born and stars dying. We are dust on the feet of the dancing Universe. Lord Shiva is dancing with the Goddess Kali.

Waking The Witch by Kelley Armstrong

2011-03-05T20:31:00.001-05:00

I'm rather fond of this Canadian author partially because she lives in Ontario (my home province), and she writes decent quality supernatural thriller/detective novels with convincing kick a$$ strong female leads. I am always confident that when I pick up a book by her, I am going to be entertained and so far, I have not been disappointed.

This particular Otherworld novel features young Savannah Levine as the main female character. At 21, little Savannah is growing up into a proper good-bad witch/sorceress! And she's ready to take on the detecting tradition of her guardians Paige and Lucas herself - with just a little back up from a couple of friends of course.

I have to admit that this one really kept me guessing right to the very end, although I did start suspecting just one of the many bad "guys" sprinkled into the plot a little earlier on.

Overall it was a fun read for an non-stop rainy day. Just WHEN *is* it going to stop raining anyway? I am just going to have to start reading another library book to while away the evening hours...

Eeny meeny miny mo, which book is the next to go?

A Bad, Bad Girl

2011-03-04T19:27:00.000-05:00

I've been a bad, bad girl. I've been reading, but neglecting to write up any reviews. As a result I've totally lost track of how many books I've read and liked (or not liked) since my last entry. :-(

Right now I've just got two already read books left out of my latest stack of novels that I haven't returned to the library yet. They are:
Indigo Springs by A.M. Dellamonica
Blood and Ice by Robert Masello

I also have a stack of brand new library books which I haven't read yet.
They are:
Waking the Witch by Kelley Armstrong
The Great Tree of Avalon by T.A. Barron
The Man with the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green
Ghost Shadow by Heather Graham
Chalice by Robin McKinley
The Shape Changer's Wife by Sharon Shinn

-------------------------------------------------------

Blood and Ice was a vampire story. Basically two British vampire lovers get chained together and thrown overboard by a hostile nautical crew near the South Pole in the last century and are frozen solid until modern day South Pole researchers find them, bring them up, thaw them, and then have to deal with the consequences. An interesting setting, full of fascinating tidbits about what the flora and fauna of the South Pole is like, and historical data as well. Obviously a lot of research work was done to write this book.

Indigo Springs was a dark fantasy story filled with magickal forces, magickal creatures, magickal transformations, and the eternal battle between human good and evil. There were some interesting character developments in this novel. I particularly liked the main female character Astrid who is quite complex and conflicted in many ways and on many levels, including her bisexuality. Very imaginative and creative. Not just your average night of simple entertainment novel. I would read more of her work if I could get my hands on it. A.M. Dellamonica's (who by the way is a Canadian gal living in B.C. with her wife Kelly Robson) next novel in progress is called The Wintergirls. I will be keeping an eye out for it.

Ok. "It is a dark and stormy night". Environment Canada has just issued a heavy rain warning. Sounds like the perfect night to dig my head deep into a nice juicy book. Waking The Witch is my first choice of course!

Edge by Thomas Blackthorne

2011-01-17T09:00:00.011-05:00

Truly a keeper! 4 Talons!

It's not often that I am blown away by a novel anymore. I read so much, so often, that I take in an incredible amount of fiction on a regular basis. Most of what I read is enjoyable entertainment to me, and it helps me to pass the time.

However, every once in a while a novel comes along that really grips my imagination and truly engages every part of me on multiple levels. Edge by Thomas Blackthorne is one of those rarities.

To begin with I should introduce the author. Taken from the back of the book: Thomas Blackthorne is a pseudonym of a British science fiction novelist named John Meany. John Meany has written To Hold Infinity, the Nulapeiron sequence, Bone Song, Dark Blood and The Ragnarok Trilogy. His writing has been shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Award, won the Independent Publishers Best Novel Award in SF/Fantasy, and won the Daily Telegraph Books of the Year.

Meany has been a teacher of business analysis, and software engineering on three continents. He is also a black belt in shotokan karate, and has cross trained in other (martial) arts. He is also a trained hypnotherapist. His short bio makes him sound like a man of many talents, intelligence, and personal discipline. For a somewhat nerdy gal with a bit of a background in martial arts like me, he sounds like a rather "hawt" gentleman. ;-) To see what I mean, read his more complete bio on his website: http://www.johnmeaney.com/bio.html

Edge is a science fiction novel that is set on Earth, not too far in the future. It's a recognizable Earth, just with slightly more advanced technology, and logically progressed political and economic situations from what presently exist today. It's as if the author has taken what exists to the known world today and simply pushed the clock forward, imagining the world as it might become if everything goes along just as it very easily could.

First of all, I love that it's set mainly in Britain, as I'm quite tired of the predominance of novels that are set in the same old, self-centric USA. Secondly I fell in love with the two central characters, the hero and heroine, Josh and Suzanne.

Josh Cumberland is a fascinating man - to me at least. He is a "retired" military man with very specialized training in combat and computer technology. He no longer really works for any one government, but is part of an elite team that trains other people for money.

Suzanne Duchesne is a beautiful, intelligent French born black woman who is a highly trained hypnotherapist. Her techniques and abilities to control and manipulate the human mind make Spock look like a Neanderthal.

Together they make one heck of a team. Then, add to the mix a bunch of Josh's hi-tech special forces "Ghost Force" buddies and you've got a miniature army capable of nearly anything...

In this novel they have two objectives.
1) Find and safely retrieve the young runaway son of a powerful British tycoon.
2) Expose and topple the highly corrupt people at the apex of the British government who are profiting from using the living bodies of poor young people as factories to create and farm new drugs in "Virapharm labs".

I particularly appreciated the extreme mental and physical disciplines that the protagonists immersed themselves in and exercised throughout the novel. Yes, there was a an extreme amount of violence involved (the legalized popularized public knife dueling is just a part of it), but having studied and practiced Jiujitsu myself at a younger age, I was able to relate to the high art and science of training your mind and body to survive under extreme conditions.

In other events which occur in the book, I could also recognize my own present life concerns and anxieties about how the US government is continuing to devolve into religious right wing extremism and fanaticism. When so much power is in the hands of people who are headed in such a frightening direction, the rest of the world really should sit up and take notice and be worried...

Anyway, I was riveted right from the start, all the way to the finish of this book, and when it ended, I nearly couldn't stand it, and I was already jonesing for more. It had such an impact on me that I literally do not want to return this book to the library. I've already renewed it once -- just because. It's almost like I can hold the characters in my hand and connect with them that way, through the book. Weird huh? Yeah, I guess I'm weird. :-)

Point, the sequel to this novel is already in the works, and hopefully it will be available for purchase ASAP!

Thomas Blackthorne aka John Meaney can be found at www.johnmeaney.com

He is one of those authors who I find so inspiring, that he makes me imagine all over again that maybe, just maybe, I could turn all of my own quirky inner ideas into a book/s someday. I'll be reading along and start going, "Oh hey, I recognize that thought/concept/philosophy/perception of the world! I can really relate on a very personal level!" and "Oh, yeah, I love that character - he/she's something like what I've imagined before!" or "Gosh if these ideas and these characters and this writing can be successful...could it be possible for me as well?" And so on...but...sigh...I am most likely doomed to forever be a reader, not a writer...

Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane

2011-01-04T01:21:00.000-05:00

I thought this novel was really fresh, and refreshing. It had a strong and interesting female lead character in Chess Putnam, a witch, brave ghost hunter, and drug addict. It had a world made new by the rise of angry, deadly ghosts which need to be kept under control by a new kind of religion - one which relies upon the existence of violent spirits and the need to control them for the safety of the living. And of course there are the black magick users who want to challenge those in power, drug lords and rival gangs, and the push pull attraction repulsion between Chess and two very different men. It made me want to read the next one in the series just to find out what happens to Chess next...I cared about her, and that made the reading good.

Apocalypse of the Dead by Joe McKinney

2011-01-04T01:15:00.000-05:00

Despite the fact that novels about vampires and zombies are both about death and undeath, they approach mortality and immortality in very different ways. Novels about zombies have different kinds of horrors and fears, and explore different physical, spiritual, psychological and emotional states. There is nothing remotely sexy and seductive about obviously decaying corpses stumbling mindlessly about driven by an implacable desire to rip, rend and tear living human flesh with filthy fingernails and blunt human teeth teeming with zombie plague bacteria with one purpose only - to spread the disease.

A biological apocalypse brought about by an outbreak of zombies raises issues of sheer survival. What happens if civilization as we know it breaks down suddenly, quickly, violently, and irrevocably? Who will survive? How? Why? For how long? What qualities does it take for people to survive such an event? What sorts of leaders and followers will emerge? When the old order breaks down, what sort of new order will rise to takes it's place? What can we believe in - government? religion? science? Who can we place our trust in when anyone might become infected, and new enemies might arise at any time, and from familiar faces? When the body arises from the dead, what survives, if anything of the person or spirit or spark which once inhabited and animated that body? Is there anything at all after the death of the body? Are we any more or less than hunks of blood and flesh and brain synapses firing?

These were some of the issues raised while I read this novel. I thought it was well written and entertaining, and definitely disturbing.

American Gothic by Michael Romkey

2011-01-04T00:57:00.000-05:00

This novel crosses generations from 1863 to the present. It examines addictions to drugs, alcohol, violence, power, and blood. It probes the pains of love and loss, depression, and the meaning or meaninglessness of life and death. And it uses the theme of the vampire to explore what it means to be monstrously monstrous, monstrously human, humanely monstrous, and what can be found to be redeeming in humanity. The writing weaves in and out, meandering through time and places and lives in a hypnotic and compelling way. I was surprised that I enjoyed reading it as much as I did. I wasn't expecting that when I started out.

Night Tides by Alex Prentiss

2011-01-04T00:36:00.000-05:00

This book was a lot more centered around sex and sensuality than most of the books I read. However, the sex and sensuality was core to the story, and it had an unusual spiritual layer to it as well which made it all the more interesting.

The lead female character has an incredibly intimate relationship with the Native spirits of the Madison, Wisconsin lakes she lives near. She communes with them sexually, but they also help her with an ongoing mystery involving beautiful young college girls being abducted.

I enjoyed the developing relationship she had going with the lead male character, but of course it had to run into it's challenges which will be explored in the next novel.

An entertaining and intriguing read to while away an evening.

Insomniac Reader's Catch up Post

2011-01-04T00:28:00.002-05:00

Ok. I have insomnia. I've given up and made some decaf green chai tea and decided it was time for me to catch up on my reading blog.

Things didn't work out like I expected with the werewolf books (see "Wolf's Bluff). I went to my local library to order them (reserve them) but discovered to my disappointment that my library doesn't bother to catalogue their paperbacks and so if I want to read the previous two books in the series I'll have to get them from Amazon.

So, to satisfy my insatiable reader's craving I had to settle for whatever dark urban fantasy, horror, etc. books I could find on the library shelves at the time. Since I last made an entry here I have read:

Night Tides by Alex Prentiss
American Gothic by Michael Romkey
Apocalypse of the Dead by Joe McKinney
Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane

Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs
(This was another great book by Briggs. I always love Patricia Briggs for a great evening of reading entertainment)
and
Dead Beat by Jim Butcher (Again, Jim Butcher is always a go-to guy for a great night of reading. He's a guy who never lets me down! ;-) )

More to follow...

Update

2010-12-17T21:00:00.000-05:00

I've been incredibly busy with "life" lately - so busy that I have not been able to find the time to read any new novels. This is highly uncharacteristic of me, as for most of my life I have usually had at least one novel on the go. So, this means I really am, really, really busy!

However, right at the moment I'm resting my aching feet and giving my tired brain a rest by watching the SPACE channel, and enjoying a Canadian produced show (Go Canada!) called "Famous Monster". It's a profile of the famous sci-fi fan, writer, and editor Forrest J Ackerman. (I deliberately did not put a period after the J because that was his personal preference.)

By the way, I also think that it is so cool that the editor of Rue Morgue Magazine is a female horror fan!

Fabulous!

My next project is going to be in response to the comment written here in my blog by author WD Gagliani of the excellent werewolf novel Wolf's Bluff. Encouraged by him, I am going to order, read, and review his previous two werewolf novels. Hopefully he also has some new material soon to be on the way!

The Better Part of Darkness by Kelly Gay

2010-11-15T19:50:00.001-05:00

This dark urban fantasy novel is set in Atlanta - a re-imagined Atlanta which has become a desirable destination for "off-worlders" from different dimensions called "Elysia" and "Charbydon". Elysia is like a sort of heaven. Charbydon is like a sort of hell. The visitors from these dimensions have special powers for good or for evil, light or dark.

The protagonist is Charlie Madigan. She is a single mother and a tough cop on the "Integreation Task Force" who has returned from the dead with some mysterious, newly emerging magickal powers of her own. Charlie and her Elysian partner Hank find themselves grappling with the terrible effects that a deadly new narcotic called "Ash" has upon those who try it. Ultimately the fate of the people of Atlanta depends upon Charlie developing a greater control over her new abilities.

Not bad. Entertaining enough for an evening's reading.

Personal Entry

2010-11-10T11:52:00.001-05:00

My mother called yesterday morning. She wanted to know (again) when I was going to write my first novel. Sigh. I wish I knew.

Here's something I read in The Body Sculpting Bible for Women that I think applies here:

"Combining action with desire and discipline creates the three musketeers of achievement. Many people have great ideas, foolproof plans and creative knowledge, yet everything falls apart for them. Why? Because they never act or they never act persistently enough. The difference between a person who knows and one who succeeds resides in the individual's ability to act." (p. 23, The Body Sculpting Bible for Women by James Villepigue and Hugo Rivera)

"Act as often as possible!" (p. 23)

I am too busy reading other people's books, and frittering away my time doing other things, avoiding sitting down and actually writing something for myself. I avoid acting on my desire by not imposing discipline upon myself. As long as I continue on this way I will never write that book I've been dreaming about writing since I was a little girl.

The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

2010-11-10T11:17:00.008-05:00

Wow. I was truly blown away by this insidiously spooky, goose-flesh-prickling ghost story/psychological thriller.

Caitlin R. Kiernan has 9 novels published so far. The Red Tree is her newest. She specializes in developing characters that are marginalized outsiders, lost, complex, confused, struggling, in pain, flawed, dirty, raw, and unfinished. She also does a great deal of research to create a richly detailed, multi-layered story filled with fascinating references, historical details, and evocative quotations from classical authors. Her writing is magnificent. She is able to describe places and events and evoke atmospheres and moods in a completely convincing manner.

The more I read, the more I was hypnotized by and sucked into the story, and into the world and experiences of the protagonist. I found myself forgetting that I was reading a journal written by a writer that was written about by a writer. I became tense and anxious and honestly frightened as the character herself felt those emotions. I worried for the character while she lived completely isolated in an ancient New England farmhouse, too bogged down by depression to write her next novel, pressured by a publishing deadline she will never meet, haunted by the ghost of her suicide girlfriend, increasingly obsessed with a wicked demi-demon-deity of a tree and a phantasmagoria of ghouls, werewolves and ancient spirits, and confused by ambiguous experiences where the lines between truth, fact, evidence, reality, memory, fantasy, fiction, nightmare, dissociation, and hallucination become completely blurred. By the end of the story I was as disoriented and uncertain as the protagonist as to what really had happened.

There are multiple narrative voices within this novel. It's sort of like finding a treasure box within a treasure box within a treasure box, a frame within a frame within a frame, or a reflection within a reflection within a reflection on and on into infinity. Reading this novel is definitely an "Alice through the Looking Glass" type of experience (which is heavily referred to and drawn upon in the novel.) There is the voice of the writer-protagonist, the voice of Dr. Harvey's academic manuscript which she reads (an anthropologist and folklorist who lived at the farmhouse five years before and who hung himself from the oak tree), newspaper articles and various historical documentation about the tree and other people in the past who had horrific and catastrophic experiences with it, a short story apparently written by the writer-protagonist but she doesn't remember writing it, the writer-protagonist's journal, exerpts from Poe, Lewis Carroll, and various other famous authors, and the writer-protagonist's editor who writes at the beginning of the novel after the death of the writer-protagonist. At the end of the novel is a note by Kiernan writing in her own voice about what inspired her story.

It isn't very often that a book is able to scare me anymore, but this book was successful. When I finished reading it, I was uneasy turning out the light and worried about what I might "dream" about.

Four Talons. A truly excellent novel. A real keeper. Now to find and read her other novels!

Caitlin R. Kiernan can be found on the following websites:
www.caitlinrkiernan.com
greygirlbeast.livejournal.com

Interesting trivia about the author:
Before Caitlin became a novelist she was trained as a vertebrate paleontologist.
She currently makes her home in Providence Rhode Island.

Midnight's Daughter by Karen Chance

2010-11-04T23:21:00.000-04:00

I didn't realize it right away, but I had already read this novel a couple of years ago. I hate it when that happens. That's one of the reasons I started this blog!

Here's another half vampire, half human. The protagonist Dorina Basarab is a dhampir and dhampires hunt vampires. Her father, Mircea is a vampire, and brother of the famously evil Dracula. Dracula has escaped imprisonment and that means trouble for everyone, especially Dorina who must hunt him down.

It was ok - not as good as some of the books I read in this most recent batch, but still ok.

Destined For An Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost

2010-11-04T22:49:00.000-04:00

I always enjoy reading books from the Night Huntress series. Over the years I have developed a real fondness for Cat Crawfield half-vampire, and her vampire husband Bones. Cat is spunky and stubborn and there is always interesting trouble brewing when she is around. Bones is intelligent, complex, and undeniably sexy. As a couple they are always setting off fireworks.

In this novel their relationship is under serious pressure when an ancient vampire named Gregor is obsessed with Cat, insisting that he is her true husband. By the time this story is over Cat, and her relationship with Bones will have gone through a major transformation.

Wolf's Bluff by W.D. Gagliani

2010-11-04T22:34:00.003-04:00

Werewolves! Bloodthirsty, violent, scary werewolves!! It's about time!

I loved the character Nick Lupo, tough homicide cop and werewolf with a conscience. I also loved his girlfriend who is a doctor with a secret gambling habit, and who is also not afraid to wield a shot gun when necessary. And, it does become necessary when the highly dangerous and top secret military werewolf group code named Wolf Paw comes hunting Nick and everyone associated with him...

Lots of sex, lots of blood, lots of murderous mayhem and messy death in this one.

Fun, fun, fun! I got lucky with my last lot of library books.

The Woods Are Dark by Richard Laymon

2010-11-04T22:23:00.002-04:00

This is not the deplorably hacked up first edition that Warner Books put out. This is the original pre-hacked version which Richard Laymon wrote and intended to have published. After his death his daughter dug through her father's files until she found all the pieces and put them back together the way her father first wrote the book.

I've been reading horror since I was a kid so not much creeps me out anymore. But I do have to say this book was truly freaky. It starts out like a train out of control and just keeps on chugging away towards the horribly horrific ending. Horror. Horror. Horror. Yup. That about sums this one up.

Bravo Richard Laymon! It's a terrible shame you didn't get to see your book published properly the way it deserved to be while you were alive.

Oh. No vampires. No werewolves. No witches. But still scary.

Novel: Queen of Shadows by Dianne Sylvan

2010-10-21T00:35:00.003-04:00

I have a new favorite author!

I literally could not bear to put this book down and stop reading it.
I loved, loved, loved, Miranda Grey, the heroine of the story.
She is tiny and beautiful and incredibly talented. She is terribly vulnerable, but also incredibly strong. She starts off tortured by her powerful gift of empathy which she has no idea how to control. She's a musician living in the city of Austin, TX, and the only way she can bear her empathy is to channel it through music. But, she is so tortured by sensing other people's emotions that she is slowly being driven mad.

One night after performing in a bar, she is brutally raped and very nearly killed. If you are particularly sensitive to this sort of thing you probably won't want to read it. I found that it was a graphic scene and very upsetting to me. But, she is saved by David, (the "Prime" male vampire in charge of the Southern parts of the USA) who takes her back to his vampire "Haven" in the Texas Hill country. There he patiently helps her to heal, and teaches her to control her gift of empathy. The two of course fall in love, but try with all their might to resist the attraction, very nearly to the end of the story. I gave the book extra bonus points for this factor. This isn't one of those stories with gratuitous sexual scenes oozing all over the place. It is definitely more about the story and character development which I prefer.

In the meantime, there is a deadly war among competing vampire factions to be fought. Miranda and David try a separation thinking that it will save her life. They do everything that they can to try and forget about each other for months (which thankfully, they finally realize is impossible). While David is trying everything he can to outwit his elusive enemies, Miranda works on her music, becoming ever more famous and successful, and she also studies Martial Arts. Having studied JiuJitsu during my University days I was *very* into Miranda's Martial Arts training.

By the end of the novel Miranda has been completely transformed from the frightened, mousy, nerve-wracked empath out of control to a supremely powerful force to be reckoned with. The end was a total triumph and I was standing up cheering for "Queen Miranda!"

Four Talons. A keeper. I won't forget this story, or it's author.

My latest stack of novels to read

2010-10-19T20:54:00.000-04:00

Just picked up from the library today:

Queen of Shadows by Dianne Sylvan
Wolf's Bluff by W. D. Gagliani
The Woods Are Dark by Richard Laymon
Midnight's Daughter by Karen Chance
Destined For An Early Grave by Jeaniene Frost

I've started off with Queen of Shadows by Dianne Sylvan. Only 6 pages in and I can already tell I'm going to eat this one right up. It's well written. It's dark urban fantasy (set in Austin, Texas), it has a strong female protagonist, and it has vampires. Ok. I'm off to devour it...

Novel: Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

2010-10-15T12:50:00.000-04:00

This novel was the best one out of the most recent batch. It was "hard-boiled", dirty, nitty gritty, rough and tough. It was very well written, with a refreshing style all it's own. Think dark, extremely violent, modern-urban, sarcastic, cynical, supernatural, bounty hunter/spaghetti western, mystery, horror and action all rolled into one.

The protagonist James Stark survives as a hitman in Hell for eleven years. Somehow he escapes Hell and returns to Earth for revenge against some very nasty old "friends". He can take some serious beatings and come back for more, over, and over, and over again. How and why he's survived so far is a total mystery to everyone in Heaven, Hell and on Earth, including himself.

Turns out he's a nephilim - half angel, half human. He's got special powers all his own and he uses them to dish out mighty a** whompings of all evil creatures that get in his way, demon, vampire etc. In the end he manages to stop the apocalypse and save everyone. Hoo Ra! Did I say I liked this one? Well, I did. Three Talons. A percher, but not a keeper.

Ok. Now I can return all my overdue novels, pay my fines and get out some more books.

Novel: Legend of the Jade Dragon by Jasmine Galenorn

2010-10-15T12:35:00.000-04:00

Prolific Wiccan fantasy author Jasmine Galenorn cranks it out again. I think I'd call this one a supernatural mystery "cosy".

The protagonist Emerald O'Brien owns a quaint, charming, and successful tea shop where she also offers psychic readings. She is also a hereditary witch, and a single mom of two children.

A troubled customer arrives for a reading and leaves her shop only to be hit by a van. Just before dying, he hands her a mysterious and valuable Ming dynasty jade dragon which carries a terrible curse. And, we are off on another Galenorn adventure.

It was fun and light, but not so deeply memorable and moving that I'd want to read it again. I was mildly amused but nothing more than that. So, this book barely registers on my Talon vs Owl Pellet rating system. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it. It was just..."ok".

Novel: Night Souls by L.H.Maynard & M.P.N. Sims

2010-10-15T12:28:00.000-04:00

This horror novel has a different interpretation of the vampire myth. Vampires are not "the undead", but a different race from humans completely which have always co-existed alongside of man. They are called "Breathers". They feed not only upon blood, but also upon the inner organs, and the soul energy of humans using special feeding claws in their hands which puncture the body, a feeding tongue which can enter the mouth and throat and extend deep into the stomach, and if a male even the sex organ becomes a feeding tool. They have split off into different factions which want different things. One wants to keep the status quo and continue to feed off humans. The other wishes to develop a special hybrid race which can exist without feeding on humans and wipe out the human race completely.

A secret UK Government organization which specializes in the paranormal becomes aware of the Breathers and their threat to the human race and sets out to battle them.

It was an ok read. Not thrilling or terrifying for a horror novel. I never felt a moment of unease or fear while reading it. Maybe I'm just jaded and spoiled, but I wouldn't bother reading it again. No talons, and no pellets. Just all Ho Hum De Dum.

Novel: The Seventh Witch by Shirley Damsgaard

2010-10-15T12:20:00.000-04:00

I have stolen an extra hour or so from the day so I can catch up on my novel reviews.

This novel is set in a small Southern town, complete with a magickal family feud between rival witch clans. I thought it was quaint and cute, fluffy and cosy. It wasn't frightening or challenging or exciting in any way. I guess I'd call it supernatural "lite". It's definitely not something I'd read again. Kind of boring actually. Snore...

Yikes! I have really fallen behind!

2010-10-14T12:08:00.001-04:00

It's been far too long since I made an entry here. I've been sooooo busy! I have a stack of four novels that I have read through and are waiting to be reviewed before I return them to the library. They are probably overdue by now. I will have to log on to the library system and renew them if I can. Anyway, I intend to make an entry if not today, hopefully tomorrow.

Novel: The Warded Man by Peter Brett

2010-09-18T12:37:00.000-04:00

The Warded Man (aka The Painted Man in the UK) is Peter Brett's first novel. Four Talons! This one is a keeper for sure.

The hero grows up on a planet where the days are safe, but filled with backbreaking work to survive. The nights are filled with terrible danger from demons which rise from the core of the planet to wreak havoc, destruction and death upon all humans. The only defence the humans have against the demons are written symbols or wards which they place on their doors, windows and walls. Most humans have grown used to huddling behind their wards at night. However, sometimes the wards weaken and fail and the demons get past them and then the humans are defenseless.

The protagonist grows up wanting to fight the demons and the story is all about his search for a way to fight back and defeat the demons. He goes through a mostly solitary journey of discovery and personal metamorphosis. In his searches through ancient ruins of past civilizations destroyed by the demons, the hero discovers a way to tattoo both the defensive and offensive wards right into his skin.

Then he goes out into the night armed with warded skin and warded spears and other such weapons which he creates. In helping and rescuing others, and teaching them how to fight the demons, he becomes the subject of legend and prophecy, although he resists being called the long prophesied "Warded Man". Along the way he also finds an ally in a young woman who has been trained as a Herb Gatherer and Healer. I found myself really liking both of these strong male and female characters.

The writing is very well done. I was totally drawn into the story and could hardly bear to put the book down. I was honestly very disappointed when the story ended, and now I can hardly wait to hunt down and read the already published sequel The Desert Spear.

I have read on Brett's website that there is a possibility of a movie coming out of this story! It may be produced by the same people who made the Resident Evil series which is a favorite of mine. (Go Alice!)

You can find the author and his works at www.PeterVBrett.com

As an aside I find it interesting that with the last two books I've read, tattoos have been magically significant in both. This isn't anything new, but it is a fascinating subject. Tattoos have had mystical and magickal significance in many cultures throughout history. Whoever is the artist of the one below, I want his number! Gorgeous work!

Novel: Night Myst by Jasmine Galenorn

2010-09-17T12:10:00.000-04:00

Night Myst is the first in a series about the Indigo Court. This novel was a real hoot! I couldn't put it down, and I was very disappointed when it ended all too soon and left me hanging. The next book in the series won't be out until next summer! Booo! It's like having to wait for the next season of True Blood.

Not only are there the big bad vampires of the Crimson Court, there are the even more bigger badder vampiric Fae of the Indigo Court. All the vampires are pretty darn scary - powerful, bloodthirsty predators that they are.

Obviously you can tell from my blog that I love owls. Well, wasn't I chuffed to discover that the protagonist Cicely Waters (who is as tough and brave and streetwise as they come) just happens to be a human-fae hybrid wind witch who is from a line of fae who changes into owls! Hoot! Hoot! :D She also has some pretty hot magical tattoos (wolves and owls). Also, looking at the cover, wouldn't I kill for a set of abs like hers! The cover artist did a nice job!

Her lover is a full Fae who changes into a wolf. He also has magical tattoos. Unfortunately he's been turned by the Indigo Court.

The author Jasmine Galenorn is able to write about magic and the supernatural with convincing ease and comfort - and no wonder since she is a witch in real life. She's also a very prolific author with several supernatural series under her belt.

Well worth checking out. Three Talons!

You can find her at www.galenorn.com

Novel: Daemon's Mark by Caitlin Kittredge

2010-09-15T12:16:00.000-04:00

Daemon's Mark is the fifth in Kittredge's "Nocturne City" series. The protagonist Luna Wilder was bitten and turned into a werewolf in her teens then grew up to become a tough female cop working supernatural crimes. The world that she lives in is full of supernatural creatures like magicians, selkies, trolls, and harpies. Throw in some Russian mobsters trafficking in supernatural females for the sex slave industry, and some supernatural bio-engineering and it's a suitably creepy, fun and entertaining novel. It's not badly written. It took me "away" while I read it so it was a success. I didn't mind my escape ride into Luna Wilder's world at all. I'll be on the look out for more of Caitlin Kittredge's books. I'm perching on three Talons out of four!

From her back cover photo she is young and cute and dresses just a little bit Goth.

She has a website: www.caitlinkittredge.com

Enjoy!

Next on my list to read: a dark supernatural novel by Yasmine Galenorn (who besides being a prolific fantasy author is also a Shamanic Witch in "real life".)

TV series: True Blood, Haven, Lost Girl, Boardwalk Empire

2010-09-14T12:39:00.000-04:00

So, "True Blood" is over until next spring/summer. Boo! *long dark sulk*

I guess I'm just going to have to make do by catching up with "Vampire Diaries", "Haven", and the new succubus/fae show "Lost Girl". The interesting thing is that "Haven" and "Lost Girl" are both Canadian made productions. I caught a glimpse of one our red Toronto streetcars in one of the scenes of the series premiere this past Sunday. Haven is shot out on the East coast.

I might give Boardwalk Empire a go as well. It's not anything supernatural, but it is about prohibition, mobsters and flappers (aka, booze, violence and sex). I'll temporarily make do with that if I can't have my supernatural fix.

Novel: Wild Hunt by Margaret Ronald

2010-09-12T12:53:00.000-04:00

Wild Hunt is Margaret Ronald's second book in a series. Her first book was Spiral Hunt.

The first question I always ask myself after finishing a book is, "Would I read it again?" I think if it was a few years later and I found it on a library shelf and I couldn't find anything else to read at the time I'd check it out again. It wasn't so thrilling that I'd go and buy it from a bookstore and keep it on my shelves, but yes, I'd read it again, so that means it was a decent read. I'd also get the first novel out the library to read as well.

As is usual for my preference, the protagonist Evie Scelan is a strong, independent, kick-a** female character. She works as a mundane bicycle courier in Boston. Her supernatural nature is that of a "Hound" and it comes down the family line from the "old Irish" (whatever that really means - the author isn't historically or culturally specific enough). She isn't exactly a shape-changer, but she has all the abilities to "scent" and track and chase down whomever she needs to. Since taking down the corrupt Fiana organization who ruled the Boston "undercurrent" in Spiral Hunt, she is now the de facto person in power of the city. Her boyfriend, irony of ironies, turns out to be a very reluctant werewolf. (He is also a nerdy graduate student with a miserable TA job. This brought back memories for me of being in the same situation so I felt quite sympathetic towards him). And then there is the stolen horn of the Wild Hunt. So there is lots of magickal canine influence afoot, anose, and atail in the city of Boston. Woof!

Not epic, but basically well written, entertaining, and fun to read. This one gets three owl talons. It's a percher, but not a keeper.

Finished "The Search" and on to the "Wild Hunt"

2010-09-11T12:07:00.000-04:00

I've been so busy lately I only have a couple of hours at the end of each day to read a few chapters. I finished The Search last night.

In general I liked the protagonist - at first - but then she gradually began to annoy me. She's a strong woman. She practices martial arts, she can shoot a gun, she runs and works out, she's independent, she has good taste, she likes to garden, she's neat and clean and organized, she can escape being tied up, drugged, and locked in the trunk of a car by a serial killer, she's told by a female FBI agent that she'd make an excellent agent, and basically she's an all around intimidatingly efficient alpha female. She's is without a doubt, the great heroine of the book. And she accomplishes this all without being Barbie doll perfect or gorgeous. But still, I think she turns out to be a New York Times Bestsellers List caricature of what a strong female character should be like.

The one thing I could not fault was the dog-training. The protagonist could easily have been a female version of Cesar Milan, Dog Whisperer.

The writing is slick and glossy, and I was taken in by this when I first started reading the book. There aren't any really obvious problems with the writing until you start to realize that it's the unidimensional characterizations and the really simple plot which are the true underlying faults. Then the book starts to taste like the Fruit Loops that the protagonist likes to eat for breakfast -- all white sugar and no nutritional substance boxed in cardboard.
The protagonist captures the second maniacal killer (in training by the first), hands him over to the police, and accepts the wedding proposal of the hunky man at the end of the story. Too pat for me. Don't you just hate such a cliched happy ending?
She doesn't really grow or change at all during the entire novel. She's too strong, too independent, just "too, too, too" to be believable, or to have any sympathy or empathy for her. She's like an unassailable mountain.
The two villains aren't scary to me. To me they are just too flattened out and simple.
Her boyfriend/fiancee isn't really all that complicated either. He's good for sex, making furniture, and using his fists on the face of the would-be killer at the end.
There isn't an ounce of supernatural mystique or danger to the story at all. It seems I am hardwired
to need an element of "otherness" to my stories.

Owl Pellets for this one!

Ah well, on to the next novel - which IS a proper dark urban fantasy novel set in Boston with a nitty gritty tough heroine who while dangerous, isn't unassailable, and there's lots and lots of magick in it. It's called Wild Hunt. (And no it's not the one by Jane Yolen - who is another one of my fave authors).

The only thing that The Search and the Wild Hunt have in common is the basic theme of "Sniff Rover, go find!" Both have dogs (or hounds) which chase down and find things by scent. I hope that's not giving away too much.

By the way, (totally random factoid inserted here), I attended my first Belly Dance class last night. Woo Hoo for me! Fun Wow!

Spiritual Sensuality in Writing and Music

2010-09-08T10:33:00.000-04:00

I went to the library yesterday and picked up three new novels to read.

Strangely enough, one of them is not "dark fantasy" at all. It's a Nora Roberts book called The Search. It has search and rescue dogs. I work with animals. It has a woman living independently in a cottage on an island which is very close to my own lifelong dream. She trains search and rescue dogs. Can I ever relate to her frustration at trying to teach people how to interact with their dogs! She enjoys blogging everyday on her dog-training blog. Hello! I have caught the blogging bug! There is an unusual, intelligent, attentive, creative, and intriguing man as a romantic interest. There is a diabolical serial killer on the hunt for the main protagonist. That's close enough to a vampire if I stretch it I suppose. At least it adds just that necessary bit of danger to my reading. But, I'm glad I don't have any serial killers after me in real life! It's written fairly well -- meaning that none of the sentences or paragraphs set off any of my bleep-o-meters. So it gets a pass even though it's not dark fantasy, and I'm only 143 pages into a 488 page novel.

As I lay in bed reading myself to sleep last night I realized a salient point. More than anything else, Robert's use of everyday, earthy, sensual details to keep the reader grounded, engaged and interested appeals to the Pagan and Witch in me. Part of the slowly simmering seduction between the protagonist and her love interest involves teaching the man to relate to his puppy through the senses of a dog. Another part involves healthy, homemade food like a crock-pot of minestrone, a loaf of rosemary bread, good red wine, and a dish of olives. (YUM!) He makes wood into artful furniture and convinces her to let him uproot an old stump which he wants to make into a massive sink. She agrees only if he will buy and plant a new tree in the void left by the removal of the stump. What makes the story and the characters come alive for me is their perceptions of the quality of light, the time of day or night, taste, smell, hearing, and feeling, their concern for their environment and the interconnection of all things. How much more Pagan can you get?

And this realization made me create some connections outside of the novel. My last thoughts before I turned out the bedside table lamp lingered on how early it got dark last night. We are just in the beginning of September, and it was pitch black at 8:30 pm. For a Pagan, the amount of light or darkness one has each day as the Wheel of the Year turns is extremely important. Every day, with all of our senses, we pay attention to the Sun, the Moon, the Air, Fire, Water and Earth.

This summer I re-kindled a fixation upon Kate Bush's music and it is this same focus on The Sensual World (the title of one of her albums) which also grabs the Pagan in me. To illustrate, below are the lyrics to her song "Nocturne" which is on her Aerial album. The lyrics intertwine the sensuous and the spiritual all at once - which the Pagan in me knows is the best way to have things. It seems that both Nora Roberts and Kate Bush feel the same way. So here's to the spiritual immanent within the sensual!

"On this midsummer night
Everyone is sleeping
We go driving
Into the moonlight

Could be in a dream
Our clothes are on the beach
These prints of our feet
Lead right up to the sea

No one, no one is here
No one, no one is here
We stand in the Atlantic
We become panoramic

We tire of the city
We tire of it all
We long for
Just that something more

Could be in a dream
Our clothes are on the beach
The prints of our feet
Lead right up to the sea

No one, no one is here
No one, no one is here
We stand in the Atlantic
We become panoramic

The stars are caught in our hair
The stars are on our fingers
A veil of diamond dust
Just reach up and touch it

The sky's above our heads
The sea's around our legs
In milky, silky water
We swim further and further

We diving down
We diving down

A diamond night
A diamond sea
And a diamond sky

We dive deeper and deeper
We dive deeper and deeper
Could be we are here
Could be in a dream

It came up on the horizon
Rising and rising
In a sea of honey, a sky of honey
A sea of honey, a sky of honey

Look at the light
At all the time it's a changing
Look at the light
Climbing up the aerial

Bright, white coming alive jumping off the aerial
All the time it's a changing like now
All the time it's a changing like then again
All the time it's a changing
And all the dreamers are waking"

So busy!

2010-09-07T11:59:00.000-04:00

I can't believe it. I've been so busy the last week or so that I haven't had time to read a book! Now that *is* busy! I usually have the time to read something. But, between work and my new gym work out routine I have no time and energy for anything else. I finish this one job on the 19th. After that I will have more time to read, and post in this blog. In the meantime, I was thinking I might go back over some of the novels I read in the past and write up a bit about what I can remember. It's not as good as writing right after reading a book, but it's better than writing nothing at all. Apologies to all following if I'm boring you!

TV Series: True Blood - Season Three - Episode 12

2010-08-30T11:27:00.000-04:00

We are one episode away from the end of the third season of True Blood. Since next weekend is Labour Day weekend we will have to wait for the following Sunday for the season finale. Then it will be over for another year while we all wait for season four to be cooked up.

As a real life Wiccan, I have a particular pet peeve and that is about the character of Holly. I was not at all impressed with her portrayal of a Wiccan ceremony last night while she cast a spell for Arlene to have a miscarriage. First of all, she drew her circle widdershins (meaning right to left or counter-clockwise). This is a huge "no no". The only time we ever move widdershins might be in banishing a circle, not in creating a circle. Second of all she used her athame to pierce Arlene's skin and draw blood. This is another serious error. The athame is never used to draw blood or to physically cut anything. In fact athames are usually blunt edged just so they cannot be used to cut anything. The only rare exception to this might be during a Handfasting if a couple wishes to cut their wedding cake. Otherwise, the athame is only ever used to direct metaphysical energy.

So for the first time in this show I had some serious concerns that I will not like it -- because of the way Wiccans and their ceremonies may be portrayed. I thought that Charlaine Harris did a fine job in her books drawing the line between bad witches and good witches as well as the fact that there is a difference between Wiccans, and Witches. Wicca is a religion with a set of morals and ethics to "Harm None" that involves magick. Meanwhile, people can be Witches (good or bad) who use magick without the religion.

One thing that is central to the show is the role of vampire blood and how it affects everyone in the show. Vampire blood is extremely powerful and magickal. Like anything powerful, it can be used for good or evil. It can heal, lend strength, act as supernatural Viagra, grant immortality, and give you access to spiritual realms and insights. It can also drive you crazy, give you an eggplant sized and shaped penis (Priapism in the extreme - poor Jason), make you into a Junkie, subvert your morals so that you will do anything to get it, and make you an even more dangerous and monstrous supernatural (if you are a werewolf or something similar). If you are a vampire, you become very powerful, but you have the choice of how to use your power. Power can corrupt, but you can also struggle against the corruption.

So, I am quite concerned about Lafayette and his yummy new boyfriend Jesus experimenting with "V". The moment when Jesus seemed to be wearing a malevolent "devils" mask and came at Lafayette was genuinely frightening. Then there are all the dancing, talking voodoo dolls. It seems that the two's use of "V" may have opened up some dangerous metaphysical doors that Lafayette may have some serious trouble closing. Jesus may not be as "good" as Lafayette may have thought in the beginning. Be careful "La La"!

Finally, I have to admit that there is just something about Eric which seems to have soaked into my subconscious girly parts against all my better judgement. I've always been a Team Bill girl before now, but just on the edge of falling asleep last night I had quite a sensuous and erotic encounter with Eric. I wonder if he's been slipping some of his "V" into my evening tea? I sure hope he doesn't die with Russell Edgington out in the sun. Too bad I have to wait two whole weeks just to find out. They should both be pretty crispy by then.

Novel: Elfland by Freda Warrington

2010-08-29T17:58:00.000-04:00

I managed to read my way through most of this novel over the last couple of days. Over all it was pretty good. I can see why it was the Winner of the RT Book Reviews Reviewer's Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2009.

Unfortunately, I thought the quality of writing was a bit spotty. While parts of it were lyrically beautiful, at times I found myself impatiently skimming over paragraphs and even full pages because there were sections where the writing was just too wordy for me. I thought better editing to cut out the superfluous material would have helped keep the flow going more evenly.

If you are like me, and you prefer your Faeries with a dash of danger and darkness, you may enjoy this story. Faeries who live on this side of the "Gate to the Otherworld" and try to pass for human are called "Aetherials". There is always a Gate Keeper who guards the ways between the different realms, but of course there is something terribly wrong with the reigning one in the story. There are seasonings of "star-crossed love", agonizingly unrequited love, painful adolescent crushes, and some warm sensuality and sex, but it is all part of the plot and doesn't ruin the story. Most of the relationships are quite complicated, and there are plenty of the common sorts of mistakes in judgement and abysmal errors in life choices that people often make. There were moments when I got irritated with a particularly stupid move and felt the urge to knock a character on the old noggin. I suppose that's all part of caring what happens in a story.

Below is an exerpt from the Aetherial creation myth.

I like it because it describes the process of creation and destruction as I imagine it probably does occur - a cycle of implosion and explosion, a spiral inwards and a spiral outwards over and over again. I've long been fascinated with Black Holes and their potential for destruction and creation. I'm also fascinated by those huge holes that people make in their ears these days with ever increasing sizes of "plugs". Staring at such a large void in someone's earlobe seems to have the same inexorable, magnetic sort of effect on me as the Accretion disk around a Black Hole has on any matter which approaches it. I feel dizzy, as if I will fall into the hole, like Alice in Wonderland and who knows what transformation will happen on the other side?

I also love the description of the Star Goddess Estel.

"First there was the Cauldron, the void at the beginning and end of time. As if the void brooded upon its own emptiness, a spark appeared like a thought in the blackness. That spark was the Source. For the first time or the ten millionth time -- we can never know -- the Source exploded in an outrush of the starfire."

"As the star-streams cooled they divided and took on qualities each according to its own nature: stone and wind, fire and water and ether. From those primal energies, all worlds were formed."

"On that outrush came Estel the Eternal, also called Lady of the Stars, who created herself with that first spark of thought. Her face is the night sky, her hair a milky river of stars. For eons Estel presided over the birth of the sun and planets and hidden realms. " (Freda Warrington, Elfland, p: 62).

Below is a passage describing a city in the homeland of the Aetherials that I thought was quite lovely. I wouldn't mind visiting, in fact I wonder if I have in dreams. :

"Rosie opened the diary and said, "Dad, listen to this."
I see a city of gleaming black stone that shines with jewel-colors; crimson, royal purple and blue. I see labyrinthine passages and rooms where you can lose yourself for days, months."

"Lofty pillars. Balconies onto a crystal-clear night full of stars, great sparkling white galaxies like flowers. Statues of winged men looking down with timeless eyes. I want to stand on those balconies and taste the breeze and hear the stars sing and be washed in the light of the moon. There will be ringed planets, and below -- the tops of feathery trees blowing gently. An undiscovered land full of streams, with birch trees in spring green, and oak and hazel -- and their elemental guardians, slender birch-white ladies with soft hazel brown hair -- and mossy banks folding into water. "

"And through this citadel walk graceful men and women with lovely elongated faces and calm, knowing eyes -- with a glint of mischief -- and they are perfect and know it and they are imperfect and know it. They have seen too much. They might wear robes of medieval tapestry or jeans and a shirt but you would never mistake them for human. It's so much more than beauty. Look at them once and you can't look away. These are Aetherials in their oldest city, Tyrynaia. "

"They have been building the city for thousands of years and it will never be finished. Upwards it spreads, and outwards, and down into the rock below. Their seat of power. Their home."

"They take the names of gods, on occasion.
And sometimes they are heroic and help the world.
And sometimes they are malicious and turn it upside down.
Some might be vampires. It's hard to tell.
In the deepest depths of the citadel, a ceiling of rock hangs over an underground lake and here is Persephone's chamber. She welcomes and cares for those who come, soul-sick with despair, seeking solace, rest and sleep. Here they need not speak, only sit on the black marble lip with their feet on the thick glass, and watch the lake and the luminous fish beneath, which is like a reflection of the sky far above. If you lie down in despair, Persephone will lie down with you." (Freda Warrington, Elfland p: 519)

The following is a quote from Pablo Picasso. I think it works for both the delights and the terrors that make up fantasy:

Newspaper Article: "Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile" from The Sunday Times

2010-08-27T10:09:00.000-04:00

Not that the type of books I generally read for entertainment would be considered quality reading, but still it is possible to write dark fantasy and horror and do it well. Why aren't there more writers of a higher caliber in the genre? Why does so much crap get published?

Here is a revealing article on the dismal state of modern publishing:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article784051.ece

From The Sunday Times
January 1, 2006

Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile
Jonathan Calvert and Will Iredale

THEY can’t judge a book without its cover. Publishers and agents have rejected two Booker prize-winning novels submitted as works by aspiring authors.
One of the books considered unworthy by the publishing industry was by V S Naipaul, one of Britain’s greatest living writers, who won the Nobel prize for literature.

The exercise by The Sunday Times draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent.

Typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of Naipaul’s In a Free State and a second novel, Holiday, by Stanley Middleton, were sent to 20 publishers and agents.

None appears to have recognised them as Booker prizewinners from the 1970s that were lauded as British novel writing at its best. Of the 21 replies, all but one were rejections.

Only Barbara Levy, a London literary agent, expressed an interest, and that was for Middleton’s novel.

She was unimpressed by Naipaul’s book. She wrote: “We . . . thought it was quite original. In the end though I’m afraid we just weren’t quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further.”

The rejections for Middleton’s book came from major publishing houses such as Bloomsbury and Time Warner as well as well-known agents such as Christopher Little, who discovered J K Rowling.

The major literary agencies PFD, Blake Friedmann and Lucas Alexander Whitley all turned down V S Naipaul’s book, which has received only a handful of replies.

Critics say the publishing industry has become obsessed with celebrity authors and “bright marketable young things” at the expense of serious writers.

Most large publishers no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts from first-time authors, leaving the literary agencies to discover new talent.

Many of the agencies find it hard to cope with the volume of submissions. One said last week that she receives up to 50 manuscripts a day, but takes on a maximum of only six new writers a year.

Last week, leading literary figures expressed surprise that Naipaul, in particular, had not been talent spotted. Doris Lessing, the author who was once rejected by her own publishers when she submitted a novel under a pseudonym, said: “I’m astounded as Naipaul is an absolutely wonderful writer.”

Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, who teaches creative writing, said: “It is surprising that the people who read it (Naipaul’s book) didn’t recognise it. He is certainly up there as one of our greatest living writers.”

While arguing that the best books would still always find a publisher, he added: “We need to keep the publishers on their toes as good books are as rare as hens’ teeth.”

Middleton, 86, whose books have a devoted following, wasn’t surprised. “People don’t seem to know what a good novel is nowadays,” he said. Naipaul, 73, said the “world had moved on” since he wrote the novel. He added: “To see that something is well written and appetisingly written takes a lot of talent and there is not a great deal of that around.”

“With all the other forms of entertainment today there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is.”

Non-fiction: The Tribes of Britain by David Miles

2010-08-26T13:19:00.001-04:00

A friend lent me a promising non-fiction book called The Tribes of Britain by David Miles. I have only read a bit of the first chapter so far but it appeals to the Pagan and the Anthropologist in me, as well as the fact that my genetic heritage includes "English", "Irish", and "Welsh" blood. It also doesn't hurt that the book is well written by an author with some functioning brain cells.

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Here is the blurb from the back cover:

"Who are the English, the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh? -- a ragbag of migrants, reflecting thousands of years of continuity and change.

Now scientific techniques can explore this complex genetic jigsaw; ancient Britons and Saxons, Celts and Romans, Vikings and Normans, and the more recent migrations which have created these multicultural islands.

Drawing on the most recent discoveries, this book both challenges traditional views of history and provides new insights into who we are today."

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"Massively informative and earthily evocative, it does some of the preliminary work necessary to understand, if not cure, our current identity crisis." Sunday Times.

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Here is the author's Bio:

David Miles was Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage from 1999 to 2004. Previously the Director of Oxford Archaeological Unit and an Associate Professor of Stanford University, he is a Research Fellow of the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. As consultant to the Historic Royal Palaces Agency, he has organized excavations in the Tower of London and Hampton Court. His principle projects at English Heritage include Stonehenge, coastal and maritime surveys, and the National Mapping Programme, using aerial photography to explore the English landscape. David Miles is the author and co-author of many books and articles on history and archaeology including [U]An Introduction to Archaeology[/U], [U]An Atlas of Archaeology[/U] and[U] The Countryside of Roman Britain[/U]. He was a columnist for the Oxford Mail and Times for ten years and frequently broadcasts on radio and television. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and Scotland.

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Sounds good so far! Now to find the time to read it! ;)

On the Toss Pile: Wright and Chance

2010-08-26T13:17:00.000-04:00

Just checking in with an update. I've been busy this week, with not a lot of time or energy to read. A lot of the new books I took out of the library last week turned out to be very disappointing. I could barely make it through the first chapter before pitching each of the books aside. Unfortunately, this happens all too frequently.

Two novels which particularly irritated me were Confessions of a Demon by S.L. Wright (sex, sex, and more sex blah, blah, yawn) and Claimed by Shadow by Karen Chance. 1. The writing is mediocre, and 2) the plot centers around a geis put on the -- sexy of course -- female protagonist by a possessive vampire. Ho Hum. It was all I could do to force myself to read the first chapter. I don't think I even made it all the way through. My attention kept wandering. Toss.

I hope I have much better luck the next time I go fishing in the dark fantasy pool at my local library.

Here's my vote on Wright and Chance:

Some thoughts on Laurell K. Hamilton's novels

2010-08-24T12:43:00.000-04:00

I really enjoyed Hamilton's character Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter in the early novels. In the beginning the writing and the plots were good enough to draw me in and keep my interest. Anita was an admirably strong female character, tough, brave, intelligent, and skilled - perhaps a grown up, hard-boiled, Buffy the Vampire Slayer squared. I didn't mind some of the graphic sex scenes as long as they were integral to the larger plots, weren't in every other chapter, and didn't seem to be the raison d'etre for the books. It was intriguing when Anita first started developing some extra talents in addition to her abilities as a necromancer and vampire hunter. I also enjoyed the tension between Anita's two suitors: Jean-Claude the Master Vampire of the city of St. Louis, and Richard Zeeman the Ulfric (leader) of the local Werewolf pack. (And no, Stephanie Meyer, author of the saccharine sweet, insipid, teeny Twilight series most definitely did not invent the Vampire vs. Werewolf competition over the female love-interest!)

However, I was very disappointed when Hamilton began to cross the line between what was believable and interesting to what was eye-rollingly unbelievable and even boring. Anita began to develop just far too many supernatural and cross-species qualities for me to take them seriously anymore. It's one thing to "push the envelope". It's another thing to stuff the envelope so full that the envelope explodes and everything that was once thrilling, risque and exotic becomes commonplace.

I'm not against polyamory (or anything else as long as it's safe, sane, consensual and between adults), but I think that there have to be some limits somewhere, and Anita's endlessly proliferating octo-entourage of were-animal and vampire boy-toys eventually became, well, just plain old multiple partner, cross species, boundary-less pornography. (Actually her only boundaries seem to be that she stays Heterosexual and Christian -- two boundaries which make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever). The later novels began to make me think of a three ring circus of interspecies sex. Anything else outside of sex which might have held the plots together has long since been lost. Speaking of circuses, it just might have been around Circus of the Damned and after, that the novels began to deteriorate.

Finally, the novels became shorter and shorter, the writing and plots of poorer quality, and much less satisfying to read. Perhaps Hamilton was put under too much financial pressure to quickly produce mass quantity instead of quality. Whatever the reason, it's a terrible shame, and I'm very sorry to say that I stopped buying Laurell K. Hamilton's novels (both her Anita Blake vampire hunter novels and her Meredith Gentry fae novels) just over half way through the series. I've been so disappointed by the loss of quality that I can't be bothered to even take the newest ones out of the library anymore. I truly mourn the devolution of what started out to be a very entertaining, exciting and promising novel series.

Still, if you are interested, it wouldn't hurt to try out the first few novels before the writing quality began to take such a steep nose dive.

Here is a link to her website: http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/

Novel: Skinwalker by Faith Hunter

2010-08-23T21:40:00.000-04:00

Last week I brought home another of my typical stacks of dark fantasy books. One was so good that I gobbled it up all at once. I started reading it around 4 pm and was done before midnight. It was called Skinwalker by an author known as Faith Hunter (I suspect this might be a pseudonym but I don't know for sure).

The protagonist is a Cherokee woman who is a shape-changer. Jane Yellowrock can take on the shape of nearly anything that is approximately close to her own body weight. Any excess mass she temporarily stores in rocks. She rides a Harley, practices "dirty" martial arts, knows her way around all sorts of guns and knives, is 6 feet tall with 4 foot long black hair, knows how to belly dance, eats massive mountains of bloody steaks (shape-changing is hungry work!) and drinks gallons of gourmet teas from around the world. (I have a particular soft spot for anyone who appreciates fine tea.) She is hired by a consortium of New Orleans vampires to come to Louisiana and hunt down a rogue vampire that is killing both vampires and humans alike and attracting far too much negative attention.

One of the things I particularly liked about Hunter's writing was how she was able to switch the internal running dialogue of Jane's thoughts between her normal human thoughts, and the thoughts of her inner "Beast". Jane's thoughts are pretty typical of any woman's thoughts (as long as she is a tough vampire hunting chick). "Beast's" thoughts are truncated, cutting out anything superfluous, and focused upon the heightened senses of an animal. Hunter does an excellent job of describing the world through smell, taste, touch, sound and sight. She also is able to make really clear what are the important things for a predatory animal such as survival, the hunt, dominance, territory and possession, and mating. And, both Jane and the Beast have their own senses of dark humor.

Just the way I like them, the monsters are most definitely monsters - albeit complex monsters. Humans are monstrous in their own ways just as the supernaturals are. Relationships are complicated and fraught with tension, uncertainty, deception and risk. There is sex, but the book doesn't start, end and revolve around it. This is not vampire "lite" Harlequin Romance shlock. Fights are dangerous, bloody, and believable. Characters really get hurt and die. There is great suspense, and many twists and turns that keep me guessing. I truly had no idea who the "Big Bad" was until the very end.

Here is a link to Faith Hunter's website: http://www.faithhunter.net/wp/

I can hardly wait to read the second Faith Hunter book in the series which is called Blood Cross. The third book comes out in January 2011 and is called Mercy Blade. Until then...