The Spire

 
 
The Spire
by Simon Spurrier

art by Jeff Stokely

Boom! Comics

2016 
 
 
The Spire collects an 8 issue comic book miniseries written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jeff Stokely. It tells a neo-noir mystery, complete with a hardboiled investigator protagonist, set in a New Weird fantasy city. 
 
The namesake city of the comic, the Spire itself, is a towering cone of adjoining buildings, all in the same shade, like a sandcastle or a wasps' nest. It sits in a wasteland, called the 'Nothingland', and the outside air is poisonous to normal humans. The city's residents are a mix of humans and beings who are politely called 'Sculpted' but usually called by the slur 'Skew'. Their name seems to me to imply that the first sculpted were created from humans by genetic modification, probably to survive the outdoor pollution, and possibly to perform specialized work, during the 'antiki-times' where all the best tech comes from. 
 
There are various tribes of sculpted who all share the same traits, like the messengers - tiny bald men with the proportions of infants who fly on miniature wings and are propelled forward by farting. Humans resent the sculpted for taking up space in the Spire (when they could live outside), exploit them economically (giving certain low-paid jobs to the sculpted, and demanding annual tithes from the wasteland tribes), and then resent that too (because "they're taking our jobs"). The city is a multiracial society with an official policy of strength through diversity, but it's also tense. Also living in the wasteland are a religious sect who preach death to all the sculpted, and who use antiki-tech environment suits and shelters to survive the toxic air.
 
The modern-ish city, the unique nature of the humanoid residents, and the attention to race and class inequality reminds me of China Mieville's city of Bas Lag from Perdido Street Station. (I think Mieville had some babbling little flying men too, now that I think of it.) Stokely makes everyone look vaguely grotesque in a way that matches the low tone of Spurrier's writing. The city is dirty, people piss themselves in fear, mock each other for smelling like shit, swear constantly. The upper city dwellers, who get the majority of the natural sunlight, are racists and snobs, the religious are zealots who preach genocide, the cops and military are reading to beat anyone who's insufficiently respectful, and they'll actually carry out a pogrom before the book's over. But the overall tone mostly varies between ironic detachment and darkly humorous. There are only a few moments when it seems we're encouraged to feel sincere emotion.
 
Our hard-bitten investigator is Sha, the captain of the city watch. Sha is a Medusi, a sculpted person with jellyfish characteristics, including thin tentacles she can use for climbing and catching criminals, the ability to heal from injuries (except the missing eye she wears a patch over), and the ability to reshape her skin, temporarily as a disguise or more permanently if required. Sha's an amnesiac who is estranged from her tribe and never ages. She's like one "snikt, bub" away from being a female Wolverine. Sha is foul-mouthed, an overly demanding boss to her put-upon subordinant, obnoxiously rude to ever other member of the city government, and , inadvisably, is sleeping with the younger daughter of the royal family (who can't really understand that her family won't allow her to make a lesbian relationship with a racialized commoner public or official).
 
The mystery here is a series of murders of servants close to the matriarch of the royal family that start right after her husband dies of a disease of old age. The older daughter will soon take the throne ... unless the murderer ultimately plans to kill a royal and not just their staff. Sha is determined to solve the case and protect the family, even as the incoming queen prepares to undo her father's progressive reforms, make peace with the zealots, and persecute the sculpted anew. The solution to the mystery is based in events from decades earlier, shown in cryptic flashbacks, when the matriarch was young, and in the specific details of several sculpted tribes' abilities.
 
One detail we learn near the end is something Sha forgot long ago because of her amnesia - she's transgender. As a Medusi, she could fully and permanently reshape herself to become female without any outside help. That forgotten transition turns out to explain a number of things about Sha, and to be an important piece of the puzzle to finally solve the mystery by unraveling the killer's motivation. You can file The Spire next to All About My Mother as stories where a closeted trans woman gets someone pregnant, then abandons them in order to finally come out and begin living as a woman herself. I can only imagine the level of dysphoria that becoming a father might trigger in someone who was previously resigned to life as a man, but the nature of both narratives are that we see the aftermath of that decision, rather than the pain that led up to it, and the possibility that the couple could've remained together is never really considered.

Gnomon

 
 
Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf

2018

 

  

Gnomon is a very literary scifi mystery novel set in a dystopian near-future Britain. We follow Inspector Neith as she tries to determine responsibility for a death in custody of an elderly privacy advocate. Was she simply too old, stubborn, and frail? Or were her interrogators at fault for pushing her too hard, beyond what anyone could endure? To find the answer, Neith downloads a recording of victim's thoughts during the session - but instead of just one woman's memories, she finds four other people's stories too. Is it possible they could be true, or are they just a trick the woman used to avoid revealing herself? 

 

The System is a surveillance state that styles itself as a perfect democracy. Everyone is being watched all the time, not only by ubiquitous cameras and their own smart phones, but by their whole internet of things, fridges that know what they eat, washing machines that monitor alcohol intake and run pregnancy tests. But only the machine sees any of this, unless it flags something for human review, which will be conducted by a member of the Witness, like Inspector Neith. 

 

Everything is decided by direct democracy - sometimes by a jury-like subset, and sometimes by a plebiscite of the entire public. The machine decides who will vote, tallies the totals, and enacts the results. The machine, we are told, is perfectly fair and impartial, seeing everything and treating everyone the same, without the possibility of discrimination or corruption. (Though later we are asked to contemplate what it would mean if some people got preferential treatment, or if the electorate for some votes were chosen to ensure the result.)

 

Sometimes the System marks someone as suspicious and requires them to submit to questioning. If human Witness agents can resolve the suspicions, they will. But if the suspect refuses or seems dishonest, the machine can quite literally read their mind. The death Neith is investigating was someone who died while her thoughts were being recorded; in addition to traditional modes of investigation, Neith plays the transcript, meaning she experiences everything the dead woman thought from the moment they hooked her to the machine until she died. The substories framed by this main plot are narratives the woman was thinking at her interrogators, tales she was telling to avoid revealing herself, and perhaps to communicate another hidden message.

 

The title of Gnomon refers to a tool for drawing right angles, or a thing that is perpendicular to its surroundings, like the upright hand of a sundial, or it could refer to one who knows. The gnomon will recur in one form or another in each of the substories, and that's really just the start. There are a host of recurring images that repeat across the tales and accumulate new meanings and significances as they reappear, including five-factor authentication and the idea of a truth that can only be understood by superimposing multiple allegorical reflections, which doubles as advice for how to understand this book as a whole. There are frequent incidents of metalepsis, when events in one level of the story seem to affect another, and the kind of 'rhymes' Fritz Lang often used as scene transitions, like when one story ends with a character being kidnapped with a sack over his head, and the next starts with a different character being kidnapped the same way.

 

The structure of the book is a much-extended version of a traditional detective story, and that familiar formula helps you avoid getting lost along the way, which is important, because the substories are probably collectively longer than the frame story, and certainly they're long enough individually that you could lose track of where you are within the whole. Cloud Atlas famously used recurring themes and images across several stories that spanned over time and place, but in Gnomon, the substories are much more explicitly linked together. Remember that each of these stories supposedly has the same teller - the woman being interrogated by a machine that records her thoughts - even though there are multiple narrators, each so fully realized that they feel like an authentic person in their own right.

 

There's Constantine, a Greek math genius who became an investment banker. We join him as be has a life-changing encounter with a shark, which sends him on a stock-trading hot-streak, turning his life into a bacchanal while he ascends to multi-billionaire wealth. There's Athenais, an alchemist from Carthage and the former lover of St Augustine, who's asked to investigate an impossible murder and realizes she has a chance to make the mythical Alkahest. There's Berihun, a retired Ethiopian painter living in London who gets inspired to paint again by his genius granddaughter, who's making a video game about mass surveillance. Both Constantine and Athenais are mourning a dead loved one, and are offered a supernatural opportunity to be reunited. Constantine and Berihune's stories take place at the same time, starting before the Brexit vote and continuing a few years after. And then there's Gnomon, an artificial intelligence from the far future who has supposedly traveled back in time and occupied a human body on a mission to kill the other characters.

 

While Neith starts out convinced that these stories are nothing but a distraction, of course, I as a reader want them to be more than that. Granted, the whole novel is a work of fiction, actually entirely written by Nick Harkaway - but within that larger fiction, the stories are sub-fictions or hypo-fictions, they are presented as bring fictional even within the 'real' world of the larger fiction, and so I found myself questioning how 'true' they were supposed to be. I spent a fair bit of time considering that Gnomon the narrator might genuinely be a consciousness from the future. I do think that one of the narratives originally came someone else who was interrogated by the System, understanding how that story got inside this suspect's head is one of the many, many revelations you learn along the way.

 

I think of success of Gnomon the novel depends on the substories; if they were just a distraction, if they were merely well-told tales that are fun to read, then the book as a would be less successful than if they are (within the larger fiction of the novel) in some sense 'true'. Within these stories is hidden an account of how the System came to be, the story of someone who was horribly mistreated by it, and an account of why the woman being interrogated came to be arrested. Some of it is lightly fictionalized, some very allegorical, some extremely literal, and all of it told in such a way that the meaning and significance of what you've learned is revealed only after you've learned it, so the truth of each story propagates backward in time, changing the meaning of the stories in your memory as you think back over them. I think Harkaway was very successful here, in a way that's clearer now as I write this than it was when I first closed the book.

 

Lest you be worried, Harkaway did not cast Inspector Neith as a true believer in the perfection of the System, only to have her finish the case convinced she's right, that distributed democracy can't be manipulated, that total surveillance is good, that privacy and secrecy are inherently unacceptable, and that having certain knowledge of what people have done means the accused deserve no rights. But giving the System a robust intellectual defense and a defender whose own conduct is above reproach makes the later turn against it more satisfying. It takes no special insight to oppose a society that's obviously capricious and unfair. Like any good detective story, Neith's own tale will see her finding flaws with the side she serves and seeking to correct them, a quest that will put her into alliance with the interrogated woman and opposed to the System that interrogated her to death.

The Case of the Missing Men

 
The Case of the Missing Men
Hobtown Mystery Stories 1

by Kris Bertin
art by Alexander Forbes

Conundrum Press

2017 

 

 

The Case of the Missing Men is the first of what promises to be a series of Hobtown Mystery Stories, set in a very small fictional town in Nova Scotia. This is a graphic novel with black and white pen drawings. The backgrounds and scenery are quite detailed and realistic. The people are drawn in a way that shows all their human imperfections, especially on people who are dirty, injured, or have been shaped by a harsh life. The mystery here starts out like a typical case for teen sleuths, but very quickly becomes stranger and darker, so that by the end it feels more like a horror story.
 
The book's trade dress is clearly a homage to the Nancy Drew books, and the leader of Hobtown's after-school mystery solving club is a logical, confident blond girl named Dana Nance, who I think is supposed to remind us of Nancy Drew, even if she's not a direct stand-in. The other club members are non-identical twin brothers Denny and Brennan, who might be reminiscent of the Hardy Boys, and Pauline, who is intuitive, maybe psychic, and who doesn't seem to have a direct teen detective inspiration that I'm aware of. The case starts because new kid in town Sam is looking for his missing father. Sam and his dad look a lot like Johnny Quest and Mr Quest. I could be wrong though - the twins also remind me of the twin brothers in A Wrinkle in Time, Sam might be meant to evoke Tom Swift, or each could combine several inspirations, or what I think is a pattern might be a coincidence.
 
Dana and her friends meet Sam when she's assigned to be his study partner at school. Sam's been skipping class and acting out because he's stuck in a town he doesn't live in, his dad's been missing for weeks, and the local police don't seem to care. Dana and the others do care, especially when they learn that several other men have gone missing, though the others are from the margins of society, and Sam's dad is the wealthy owner of an aviation company. They check around town, looking into the last places the men were seen, while repeatedly being warned off by the police and Dana's dad. Then a teacher is murdered at school in the middle of the day, and the search uncovers the hidden corpse of a town councilwoman.
 
What started out seemingly straight forward keeps getting weirder and weirder. The teens spot some of the missing men, but their behavior is feral, inhuman. The solution to the mystery turns out to involve two separate groups committing murders, for reasons that reach deep into the town's history, with a number of prominent people implicated. The pace of revelation is good - the things we learn are strange, some are even supernatural, but each discovery helps things make more sense instead of becoming more confusing. What we learn is really dark, involving not only kidnapping and murder but also torture and brainwashing. By the end, the teens have learned some very heavy, adult stuff. This is not the sort of story where everything is okay at the end.
 
One story-telling device I'd like to note is that at a couple key points in the book, we switch from closely following the teens in linear time to a more distant perspective, with events related in flashback and under police questioning. The discovery of the hidden body, and later catching one murderer in the act are both depicted this way. The effect is like a chorus of narrators, with these important moments shown through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints - in fragments, from many angles. 

The Shamshine Blind

 
 
The Shamshine Blind

by Paz Pardo

Atria

2023 

 

 

I think alt-historical mystery novels are having a moment. Paz Pardo's The Shamshine Blind is one several recent books that fit that description. The first one I read was The Yiddish Policeman's Union, right when it first came out. I doubt it was the first book to fit the description, and it's difficult for me to believe that what's going on right now is connected to Chabon in any straightforward way. Seeing so many examples appearing around the sane time makes it seem like the two genres have a natural affinity, like alternate history worldbuilding and mystery-solving detective stories pair well in a way that allows each to reinforce the other.
 
Pardo also writes The Shamshine Blind with a kind of gonzo approach to the science part of her science fiction that reminds me of Nick Harkaway or Jasper Fforde. Because while the point where her alt history departs real history is relatively straightforward - what if Argentina won the Falklands War? - the cause of the departure is like something out of a comic book or cartoon - what if the way they won was by deploying colors that cause emotions as chemical weapons? By the present day of Shamshine, Argentina is the world's superpower, America is a bombed-out ruin with an economy decimated by hyperinflation, and 'psychopigments', colors that control how you feel, are both our primary pharmaceuticals and our life-ruining illegal drugs.
 
The mystery is narrated by Curdita, a field agent in Pigment Enforcement nearing the mandatory retirement age of 40, working in the suburbs of an abandoned San Francisco, still dreaming of a promotion to the big time in Iowa City or Boise. Curdita is a Depressive, as are all the other Pigment agents; depression weakens the effect of psychopigments. Neurotypical people are too vulnerable, and can be permanently brain-damaged by a level of exposure that Depressives can (mostly) recover from in a few weeks. 
 
At the start of the book, Curdita is tracking down a shipment of Shamshine, a counterfeit version of Sunshine Yellow, the psychopigment for happiness, which is taken daily in pill form by patients across the country. We hear about at least a dozen other pigments, but a couple of the most important are Deepest Blue, the first psychopigment, which causes memory loss and amnesia, and was Argentina's main weapon in the war, and Slate Gray, which causes ennui and a lack of motivation. 
 
Soon enough, the Shamshine case leads Curdita to a much bigger mystery. Someone is creating a whole new pigment with unknown effects, except that all the human test subjects are getting totally burned out by the strength of it. Once they get it right, whoever they are, whatever it is, they appear to have plans to use it to manipulate the public mood on a national scale, and in the meantime, they're killing or using Deepest Blue to erase the minds of anyone who might be a loose end. Curdita goes all-out trying to solve this and stop the looming disaster, spending the back half of the book operating out of a hospital room rather than the police station, and sacrificing her health, her sanity, her relationships, even the most intimate parts of her personal life, all to solve the case and save the day.
 
Pardo interweaves the present day mystery with Curdita's memories of her childhood and her time in the police academy, and a tour of a fallen America, transformed by years of psychopigment warfare and the periphery's love-hate relationship with the new Argentinian core. Americans listen to soap operas on the radio and eat imported hot sauce at every meal; and militant White nationalists dream of reclaiming lost glory. When Curdita gets exposed to Slate or Blue or Magenta Obsession in the course of her pursuit, her emotions are no longer her own, and the past, both hers and the country's, spills out of her mind and into the narrative in a kind of free association. 
 
Pardo takes her slightly silly premise and treats it seriously. San Francisco getting emptied out by a Magenta attack that disables fifty-thousand people by turning their fandom into true fanaticism is zany, but Pardo keeps an eye on the human cost. Her America is all hinterland, every major city made uninhabitable by Deepest Blue bombings that make them permanent superfund sites. I think that's part of what reminds me of Harkaway's The Gone-Away World or Fforde's Shades of Grey - an absurd apocalypse is still the end of the old world, and however strange the new world might be, people still have to find a way to live there.

Summerland

 
Summerland

by Hannu Rajaniemi

Tor

2018

 
  
Summerland is a spy novel in the tradition of John le Carre, set in London during the Cold War, its intrigue driven by the accusation that there's a traitor, a Soviet mole, in the heart of the British secret services. But this is an alt history. The year is 1938. Germany lost the Great War so comprehensively that it stands no chance of rearming to invade its neighbors. Instead, a tense stalemate between the UK and USSR plays out as the belligerents pick sides in another country's civil war, prolonging endlessly. But this war isn't in Vietnam or Korea - its the Spanish Civil War, with a British-backed Franco unable to defeat the Soviet-supported Republic. And, oh yeah, half the spies on both sides are ghosts.

 

In Summerland, the afterlife is a physical place, a layer of four-dimensional space just below the layer of the living world. Theosophical exploration discovered the ruins of Summer City in the 1890s, the remains of an earlier civilization built by the now vanished Old Dead. If a person can imagine a specific 4D shape as they die (with the help of a Ticket, a printed card that seems to function like a psychic QR code, a visual representation of the unique coordinates of a specific location), then their soul will reawaken at that location in Summerland. If you die without a Ticket, your remains near where you died, and rapidly Fades until you lose all of your memories and sense of self.

 

These discoveries have given rise to a world where the death has lost its sting. Indeed, the living envy the dead. Each nation exists half on Earth and half in the afterlife. The ghost of Queen Victoria still rules the British Empire, aided by her living Prime Minister, HG Wells. Spy duties are split between the dead in the Summer Court and the living in the Winter Court. Lenin still rules the Soviet Union as well - in death, Soviet citizens merge with their leader, transforming him into a truly collective superintelligence, the Presence. Because the dead are not gone, the torch is never passed. Living children remain beholden to their dead ancestors; Stalin is the dissident leader of a splinter faction, trying to use the Spanish Civil War to create a Communist but non-Leninist enclave.

 

When they visit the living world, ghosts can only see electromagnetism and souls. They can read emotions but not thoughts, and they can be blocked by Faraday cages. For a price, a ghost can temporarily possess the body of a medium wearing an electric crown. Ghosts make very good spies. In this world, radio and electric technology have advanced rapidly, all cars use electric motors for example, and medicine has languished. The only treatment for severe illness or injury is an overdose of morphine administered while you stare at your Ticket.

 

Summerland starts when a Soviet defector reveals to living British spy Rachel White that there is a mole loyal to Lenin among the ghost spies of the Summer Court. The mole is Peter Bloom, wunderkind and illegitimate son of the Prime Minister, who is simply too beloved for anyone to suspect. Because her defector tells her this just before committing suicide without a Ticket, Rachel gets demoted for fucking up her case. Not knowing who she can trust, if anyone, Rachel goes off-books to catch and expose Peter on her own.

 

Peter meanwhile is desperate to avoid getting caught, and to be exfiltrated to the Soviet afterlife to become one with the Presence. He's trying to stop Britain from switching their alliance from Franco to Stalin, and looking for a British secret to steal that's big enough to buy him a way out of his double life. He thinks he finds it, in the form of an old study HG Wells commissioned investigating the afterlife equivalent to the Fermi paradox - if the souls of any intelligent dead can travel to Summerland and set up civilization there, why was it empty when humans first arrived in the 1890s? where are all the alien minds? Not realizing that Rachel knows his identity, Peter picks her, obvious disaffected after a recent hushed-up embarrassing incident, and tries to use her to steal the physical file he needs.

 

Rajaniemi has really succeeded here on two fronts. First, this is a fun and imaginative scifi novel. What if Victorian era ideas about the affinity between electricity and spirits were true? What if the Theosophists' beliefs about immortal souls and four dimensional space were correct? And what if the tradition of all dead generations very literally weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living? I like how Rajaniemi imagines and describes the afterlife, and especially his depiction of movement through 4D space, and the ana and kata directions that function as analogues for up and down. I like the way he extrapolates. The ghostly storage of information resembles cloud storage of digital files, and the way everything in the afterlife can be located and indexed using hypercube diagrams reminds of librarians' ambitions for a semantic web, where all real-world objects, including people, have URLs that allow them to be linked consistently online. Rajaniemi provides enough detail so you can imagine this strange, half living, half ghostly society, and so that the powers and limitations of the ghosts appear consistent, but not so much that everything is belabored or weighed down in minutia.

 

Second, Summerland succeeds as a spy novel. The alt history sets up an alternative Cold War with comprehensible stakes and sides. There's plenty of suspicion and paranoia, plenty of intrigue, and well-described scenes of tradecraft like spotting a tail or developing an asset. Multiple characters hidden agendas, and Peter Bloom is not the only double agent. But at the same time, the characters are consistent enough that their actions remain plausible, even when they catch you by surprise in the moment. They have comprehensible motivations, whether loyalty, ideology, or self interest, and they behave true to those motives even when they're trying to act in secret. Getting close to both Rachel and Peter as viewpoint characters not only lets us see the living and dead worlds, it provides us with direct and accurate information about the two main covert ops being run. And both have personal histories that give them a complex relationship with the current state of the world, and relatable reasons for wanting to change it.

  

I would compare Summerland favorably to Rasputin's Bastards, which also features psychic spies, and very favorably to The Eyre Affair, which also has a fairly divergent alternate history.

 

My complaints are very few. First, Rajaniemi's dialogue almost never includes contractions. The effect isn't so much to make the speakers sound posh or proper as it is to make what they're saying sound a bit stilted and artificial. 

 

Another thing I found odd is that although the British PM is very specifically HG Wells, man of imagination, author of Little Wars and The Invisible Man, both of which play roles in the plot, for some reason Rajaniemi calls him 'Herbert Blanco West,' and then has to repeatedly make really obvious allusions to make sure you realize that 'HB West' is really supposed to be HG Wells. Rajaniemi references Lenin and Stalin by name, as well as radio inventor Marconi and 4D theorist Charles Hinton by name, so it's difficult for me to understand why he doesn't do the same for Wells. I even sort of wonder if it's somehow a legal or practical decision rather than and artistic one.

The Eyre Affair

 
The Eyre Affair

by Jasper Fforde

Penguin

2001, reprinted 2003

 

 

The Eyre Affair is the first in a series of mysteries involving living people who cross into, and fictional characters who cross out of, the world of books. Like the idea that our toys have secret lives that they act out when we're not looking at them, the thought that the characters in books are aware of their stories, are conscious of acting them out, even when we're not reading them, has a deep, almost primal appeal, a resonance with some of our earliest childhood imaginings. It reminds me of old Looney Tunes like "Have You Got Any Castles?" or "Book Revue" that depict everyone stepping out of their books at night to mingle and party. 

It's a scenario that makes intuitive sense, but that also doesn't fit neatly into the distinctions we usually draw between science fiction and fantasy, although in this case, Fforde fills up his world with alt history, time travel, mad science ... plus supervillains, werewolves, and vampires. His protagonist, Thursday Next, is a secret agent working for the busiest, least glamorous branch of British Intelligence, the ones who investigate book-related crimes. 
 
In Fforde's world, the Crimean War that started in the 1850s is still dragging on in the early 2000s, Britain and France use time traveling spies to sabotage each other's histories, cloned dodos are a common pet, and the general public is fanatical about classical literature and live theatrical adaptations thereof, seemingly to the exclusion of almost any other form of entertainment. Instead of football hooligans, you get crowds dressed up like Shakespeare or Milton rioting because they encountered a banned art style like Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, or they witnessed a play that illegally departs from approved interpretations. Those sorts of crimes, plus lots and lots of attempted forgeries, are the things Thursday ordinarily investigates.
 
At the start of The Eyre Affair though, Thursday gets a temporary promotion to a division that's trying to arrest super-criminal Archeron Hades, who's bulletproof, invisible on film and security footage, who can dominate men's minds, and who's just stolen the original manuscript of Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit. The attempted arrest goes badly; Hades overpowers and kills the entire team of investigators, except Thursday, whom he merely injures. 
 
The structure of the plot reminds me of a Bond film - short job, reassignment, meeting with the tech guy, long job. After the massacre, Thursday transfers from London back to her old home town to recuperate. She visits her family, and her genius uncle shows her his latest inventions, including the Prose Portal, his brand new device that will let a person travel inside a book. Later, while Thursday's at work, Hades steals the device, kidnaps her uncle, and announces his plan to extract the character of Martin Chuzzlewit from the manuscript and kill him, unless his ransom demands are met. If you use the portal to enter an ordinary book, you'll only change that one copy, but if you enter an original manuscript, any changes will affect all the other copies that are based on it.
 
Thursday's uncle manages to sabotage Hades's first plan, but that only prompts him to go after an even bigger prize, the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. Thursday is too late to prevent the theft, or the initial kidnapping, which results in half the book getting erased. But Thursday is able to go into the book to rescue Jane and thwart Hades, which accidentally results in the book getting a new ending, the one it has in reality.
 
I'm assuming that future Thursday Next mysteries will also involve the Prose Portal and travel into other books. I don't think I'll be continuing though. Fforde's worldbuilding feels like an unsuccessful collage, the smorgasbord of different genre elements never really blending into a coherent whole. I liked Shades of Grey, a later work of Fforde's which is equally wacky, a novel of manners set in a dystopian future where social status is based on the ability to see color. But Fforde's humor in this one didn't really work for me, and the plot felt too unwieldy. 
 
Thursday has a few episodic book-police adventures felt extraneous, although Fforde did give them some connection to the main plot in the end. Her dad is a rogue time traveler who repeatedly stops time to pop in and have a non sequitur chat with her before disappearing. Thursday has a lot of bad memories of her time in the army in Crimea, which relate to a present-day plot about whether Britain will escalate or finally seek peace. And she has a romance plot with her old boyfriend that I think is supposed to parallel Jane and Rochester, but that mostly ends up feeling incredibly rushed and emotionally unrealistic. It's a lot! And to me, it just doesn't work together well enough to make me want to continue.

Too Like the Lightning

 
 
Too Like the Lightning

by Ada Palmer 

Tor

2016 

 

 

Too Like the Lightning is the first book of a planned duology that later expanded into a quartet. There are a few series I've restarted this year, where I read the first book some time ago, and liked it, but never went further. I'd felt burned by the sequel to Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, I think, and had decided to only enjoy first books as stand-alones for awhile. Anyway, several of the series I'm reading right now are ones where I'm rereading the first book, and then continuing on ahead. So it's possible that I'll eventually get in a similar mood again, and come back and decide to finish Ada Palmer's series, perhaps because curiosity someday gets the better of me, but I really didn't enjoy this first book, so I kind of doubt it.
 

Too Like the Lightning is set in the 25th century, in the 2450s, as far from our time as we are from the Early Modern era, and there are a few conceits at work here. First is that we're being told the story of a moment of revolutionary change, when the system of world governance that is already so different from our own is about to collapse and be replaced by whatever follows it. It is written as a document for that further future, explaining how their world came to be. The second conceit is that the narrator, the extremely chatty and not terribly reliable Mycroft, is intentionally writing in an archaic style, as though this book were the product on one of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire.
 
One way that manifests is that Mycroft often includes asides of his imagined future audience members scolding him for the way he chooses to tell the story. Things like 'but Mycroft, thou'st were not present for this exchange, how can'st thou quote it so precisely.' This is a matter of personal preference, but I fucking hate that sort of thing; I really can't stand when columnists and bloggers do it, and I find it equally annoying here. 
 
Another manifestation is that Mycroft refers to everyone as 'he' and 'she,' as Enlightenment authors might (and as Palmer and her actual readers are accustomed to), but which most of Mycroft's 25th century peers would find akin to referring to everyone by a slur. In almost all spoken dialogue, everyone refers to everyone else as 'they,' and it's unclear to me if people actually have gendered identities that they never speak about, or if Mycroft is taking additional liberties by assigning genders and not only by announcing them. He seems to expect his future readers to recognize these pronouns and to assume they correspond to specific anatomical features, so for every, I don't know, tenth character or so, he explains why he's calling someone by one pronoun when you the reader might expect another. I found this annoying too. It's an impressive effort at making the familiar strange, but I would genuinely hate for someone describing me to point out which of my features might tempt them to call me a man, but then insist that I'll count as a woman in their narrative because I work in a library.
 
I will credit Palmer that she clearly put a lot of thought into her worldbuilding, and that she's willing to throw us into the deep end and trust us to eventually take it all in, even as we're trying to keep up with the plot. Palmer's world is maybe a bit like what the Earth of A Half-Built Garden might become after enough time. Both Palmer and Emrys are grappling with imagining how people might adjust to omnipresent internet, to changes in gender and other norms of politeness, to the transformation of the nation-state system into some other kind of political power. 
 
In Palmer's world, religion is effectively banned, with three or more people allowed to discuss belief only if a 'sensayer' is present. Households have been replaced by 'bashes', which are larger and mostly voluntary rather than hereditary, as though the most common living arrangement was something like a commune or a sorority house. Nations still exist, but their importance is nearly erased by omnipresent public transit in the form of flying cars that can get you anywhere on Earth in, at most, a couple hours. People identify with their ethnicity about as much as they do with their jobs (limited to 20 hours a week, except for workaholic 'vokers') and their many and varied hobbies. The seven world governments are called Hives, and you can only join one after you become an adult. You can also choose to remain Hiveless, and if you do, choose what level of obedience and protection you're willing to offer the law. Blacklaw Hiveless are basically anarchists who are allowed even to murder each other, though it would still be illegal for one to kill a Hive member, and I think a Hive citizen would still be breaking their own laws, which they voluntarily consented to be governed by, if they killed a Blacklaw.
 
Mycroft, our narrator, is a Servicer, a prisoner who is a kind of public slave. Servicers aren't incarcerated, but they also aren't allowed to have money or own property, and spend all day doing public service proects in exchange for their meals. Palmer apparently got this idea from an Enlightenment-era thought experiment. We don't find out what Mycroft's crime was until halfway through the book, we barely even get any hints, but once we learn, he talks about it frequently and matter-of-factly, which I think is emblematic of the way Palmer uses Mycroft to dole out key information. The book is a mystery, and it doesn't get solved in this volume, so maybe in book 2? But by the end I'm half prepared to think that Mycroft did it, and simply won't let on until some other character proves it. It's one thing for a narrator not to spoil the ending of their own story, quite another for them to withhold things they and the other characters all knew before the story even started. Based on Mycroft's obsession with gender and sexuality, I initially thought he might've committed some sort of sexual crime, perhaps voyeurism. When we eventually find out, it's so much worse than I expected. One character who learns the truth reacts like Mycroft is Jack the Ripper, and certainly, we discover only after this point in the book, he is equivalently infamous, and not someone you'd expect to be trusted to be a Servicer. The way this sort of information is withheld makes understanding the worldbuilding harder, because Mycroft will keep something secret from us for hundreds of pages only for it to later turn out to be common knowledge. (Although the fact that THIS Mycroft is THE Mycroft Canner is a secret. The public assumes that that criminal was executed, so people who meet him just think he has the same, previously relatively common, first name.)
 
As I said, the story here, which purports to show how one world order collapses and is replaced with a new one, is also a mystery. Every year, the world's most important newspapers publish their Seven-Ten lists of the most important people on the planet. The first seven are usually the Hive leaders, and the next three are other influential citizens. A few days before the lists are published, someone steals the list from the pan-Asian Mitsubishi Hive's paper, and sneaks it into the a Humanist bash, specifically, the bash of the extended, chosen family who operate the flying car network. It's not initially clear why anyone would do this, except that the investigation into who and why threatens to make all kinds of secrets public.
 
Among the secrets are the exact nature of the relationships among the world's ruling elite. Power is highly concentrated, and many of the Hives' leaders have public relationships - the Humanist President's sister is married to the Mitsubishi Chairman, for example. The Mitubishi Chair's many adopted children each have jobs close to the other leaders. JEDD Mason, the adopted son of the Masonic Emperor, has a high-level job in every Hive, and like Paul Atreides, is revered as some kind of chosen one by each, which looks a lot like forbidden religion. As with Mycroft's crimes, once you eventually learn the truth about all this, it's a lot more uncomfortable than you probably expected. Also, Mycroft is some sort of confidant to each leader, which is already unusual for a Servicer and would be a global scandal if the public found out.
 
Mycroft has one more secret that's threatened too, although this one we learn on the first page. In a secret room on the estate of the bash that operates the flying cars, with the help of one bash-member but without the knowledge of the others, Mycroft is raising an orphaned boy whom he found on the estate as a toddler. The boy, Bridger, has the supernatural power to turn any representation of a thing into the real thing, like turning a drawing of food into real edible food, or bringing his plastic army men to life. Bridger is a sweet kid, who seems to understand the risk of turning into the kid from that one episode of  Twilight Zone who sends people to the cornfield, and tries to use his miraculous powers responsibly. Mycroft claims that by the end of the story, we'll see that it's Bridger, even more than the intimately entangled Hive leaders, who will be responsible for transforming the world. Although that doesn't happen until book 2 or later, so I guess I may never find out how or why everything changes. 

The Yellow 'M'

 
The Yellow 'M'

Blake and Mortimer 6

by Edgar Jacobs

translated by Clarence Holland

Cinebook

1956, reprinted 2007

 

 

The Yellow 'M' is an early Franco-Belgian comic about a mysterious villain's crime spree in London. At first, the criminal just seems exceptionally competent, but he evades capture in ways that are truly superhuman, which suggests the involvement of a mad scientist in the whole scheme... The Yellow 'M' is the sixth book in Edgar Jacobs's collected Blake and Mortimer comics, although I gather it might be the most popular, and it was the first one of the series reprinted in English.
 
Probably the best known Franco-Belgian comics, for American audiences, are The Adventures of Tintin. The Blake and Mortimer comics are visually very similar to Tintin, with the same ligne claire art style, with fairly realistic drawings, thin outlines with no shading, and flat colors. (The best known FB comic characters are probably the Smurfs, but most Americans would known them from their cartoons, not their books, and they're stylistically very different.)
 
Captain Blake is in MI5, and Professor Mortimer is a physicist. They solve mysteries in London in the late 1940s and early 50s (which was present-day at the time they were written), and I gather that a lot of their adventures are like this one - initially fairly realistic, but increasingly science fictional as the uncover the fantastic methods employed to commit the crimes. In The Yellow 'M', for example, the pair eventually uncover that the mastermind behind the crime spree is using hypnosis, various psychic powers, and a machine that projects something like radio waves to remotely dominate people's minds!
 
At the start of the comic, 'the Yellow M' is the codename the London police have given to an unknown criminal who's been on a very successful burglary spree. He announces his crimes in advance, manages to commit them despite increased surveillance, and signs a yellow M in chalk at each scene. (In the earliest Batman comics, the Joker gets his start by announcing he will poison specific people and then succeeding. I wonder if this was a common villain plan back then?)
 
We witness the Yellow M's latest crime, the theft of the crown from the royal Crown Jewels, from the perspective of the beefeater guards. They're totally outmatched. Only one even sees the thief, and he's knocked unconscious, with no memory of the encounter.
 
Blake gets assigned to the case because the local crimes have become a matter of national importance, and he calls in Mortimer to consult. At this point, the Yellow M switches from stealing to kidnapping, abducting several gentlemen who belong to the same club as Blake and Mortimer, including a newspaper editor and a judge. It seems like the Yellow M is going after anyone who investigates him, but Mortimer intuits another connection between the victims, an old libel case from before WWII, involving a scientist who claimed to have discovered psychic powers...
 
Eventually Blake and Mortimer figure out who's responsible, and find their hideout, a facility constructed for official use during the Blitz and abandoned after the war. I hope it doesn't spoil too much to say that 'the Yellow M' is not just one man, working alone. It turns out that the investigators know one of the criminals better than his own partner does, and they use that one advantage as a wedge to drive them apart. (The villain they know is recurring from an earlier book in the series, so if you read them in order, you'd recognize him too.)
 
Because Blake wears a uniform and works directly for the British government, he's quite unlike Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. And while he's able to fight as well as a soldier, he's no superhero. He catches the super-powered thief with police work, not superior martial arts. Mortimer is the one with the most intuition, and the one who finds the vital clue, but mostly does that by researching court cases and newspaper scandals in the library. His status as a scientist maybe lets him understand how the Yellow M's machines work, but he doesn't have any genius insights or deductions. It's more like teamwork and proper procedure win the day, allowing competent but ordinary investigators to solve and stop an extraordinary crime.

No One Left to Come Looking for You

 
No One Left to Come Looking for You

by Sam Lipsyte

Simon & Schuster

2022 

 

 

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a mystery set in the underground music scene in Brooklyn in the winter at the very start of the Clinton administration, in the last week of January 1993. 

 
Our narrator is Jack Shit, bassist for the struggling noise rock band the Shits, as he goes in search of his missing roommate, the Shits' lead singer the Banished Earl, and his missing bass. Jack's stint as an amateur detective starts when he gets a call from the pawn shop that the Earl was just there trying to trade Jack's bass for cash to buy heroin to feed his 'bag fever.' Jack's on the clock, because the Shits have a big show in a week. What seems like a simple task quickly becomes complicated when the Earl isn't at any of the band's usual haunts, the person most likely to've seen him is found dead, the police get involved, and Jack gets entangled with a punk femme fatale. It's like if the cast of Scott Pilgrim got trapped in the plot of Inherent Vice.

 
The mystery here isn't particularly complicated and would probably annoy whodunnit fans. For all the Jack spends his time retracing his friend's steps, going over his memories of their time together as bandmates and roommates, and even prying into some of the Earl's private business, what's really going on has almost nothing to do with the singer himself. He's just collateral damage in a feud between his father, who owns a small construction company in the Bronx, and a certain real-life real estate figure who's infamous for not paying his contractors. There's nothing else really to figure out, especially since the audience already knows what Jack refuses to accept, which is that no one with the power to hold this particular man accountable has ever been willing to do so.

 
The inclusion of Donald Trump was my least favorite part of No One Left. I am so, so fucking tired of this guy. And I know that New Yorkers have hated him since the 80s, so his inclusion isn't exactly anachronistic ... but still, I don't think if Lipsyte had really written this in the 90s that Trump would've appeared in it by name. All the bands in the book are made up. The only other real people are Thurston Moore, who gets name-checked because Sonic Youth is the most successful band making the kind of music the Shits aspire to, and Andy Warhol, who appears in Jack's mom's oft-retold anecdote about the time she almost got to have sex with a celebrity, if not for her meddling husband. If this book weren't written in 2022, I doubt Trump would've made the cut.

 
What I did like was Jack Shit's narrative voice. He's a guy who is deeply, almost religiously immersed in and committed to the Brooklyn music scene. He knows all the people, he can describe all their bands, both how they sound and their relative status within the scene, he uses all the slang. Jack desperately wants to be cool, and of course, precisely because he's such a try-hard, he isn't, and can't be. The Banished Earl, a sort-of GG Allin figure, who founded the Shits, who chose his war name based on a book he found while dumpster diving, who's the only working class boy in a band full of college kids, IS cool, with an effortless authenticity than Jack can only dream of. He's also on a trajectory to be dead by 27, unless the current misadventure ends him sooner.

 
That ironic perspective, that gap between who Jack wishes he could be and who the reader clearly sees that he actually is, is what makes him such an appealing narrator. Jack's other friends soemtimes slip up and still call him Jonathan Litpak. His band isn't popular; even within the scene it's somewhere between obscure and unwanted. Lead guitarist Cutwolf barely seems to care about his friend's disappearance; drummer Hera has already joined another, better-liked group. The big concert Jack's so worried about is the Shits opening for two other, bigger acts. The cops find him annoying. Multiple characters repeatedly lecture Jack for being a tourist, a gentrifier, a wannabe. 

 
But Jack has a determination borne of commitment, of being a true believer in Art generally and his own art in particular, and his never-say-die optimism had me routing for him to find his friend and his axe and to get to his concert in time, even if it'll probably be the Shits' last-ever show.

 
Reading about Jack trudging through the snow, ducking into cheap bars and diners, running into people he vaguely knows, trying to project the persona of who he wants to be, reminded me of winters when I was in college, when I walked and bused all over and my favorite places had all-night hours and dollar specials. It reminded me of grad school, when the overlap between the trans community and anarchist community meant that I, a total square, got to hang out with people who turned their rental houses into communes and never used their government names, and when I got really into a couple local bands and went to all their shows. But my nostalgia isn't really a reason for you to read this. I kind of think you'd be better off with Pynchon. But if you like 90s alt rock, dramatic irony, and Nick Carraway narrators, you might still give it a try

Shady Hollow

 
 

Shady Hollow

by Juneau Black

Vintage

2022 

 

 

Shady Hollow feels both brilliant and inevitable, because what author Juneau Black has done is to take the plot conventions of a classic cozy mystery and place it in the setting of a contemporary cozy video game, like the Animal Crossing series. It makes perfect sense, because both already take place in the same sort of environment - an isolated small town where everyone knows everyone, and where there usually isn't any real hardship or trouble. What separates Shady Hollow from other cozy mysteries is that all the characters are lightly-anthropomorphized animals.
 
I want to note briefly that Juneau Black is the singular pen name of a pair of authors working together, like James SA Corey or Lewis Padgett. This isn't a secret; they explain it in the preface and pose together for the author photo at the back of the book.
 
So, Shady Hollow is a little town tucked away in the northern woods. (I love the double meanings of the word 'shady' here.) The town borders a river, and its chief industry is the wood mill owned the the industrialist von Beaverpelt family. The town has a newspaper, a thriving coffee shop run by a moose (or perhaps a caribou?), a bookshop run by a raven, and a new vegetarian restaurant run by a recently immigrated panda. The police are bears, the usual suspect is a raccoon, the college professor's an owl, and most of the townsfolk seem to be mice, rabbits, etc, wild animals, the kind that usually live in forests. So "A Murder in Richard Scarry's Busytown" remains an available concept to any copyright-courageous writer wanting to turn Black's insight into a subgenre.
 
We start with an introduction to the cast of main characters, written to cast suspicion on absolutely everyone, a map of the town, and then we're off to the races, when the hummingbird gossip columnist spots a dead body floating in the mill pond - the grumpy old toad who lived by the pond and liked to argue with everyone. Aspiring star reporter Vera Vixen picks up the story, determined to both report the news and solve the mystery! She talks to the other townsfolk to try to understand the victim and his relationships. Meanwhile the murderer isn't idle. Someone else is attacked, and then Vera becomes a target herself...
 
The concept of using animal characters gives Black permission to make them all a bit simplified in a way that works well for the story. The dynamic between Vera and her boss, for example, reminds me of Lois Lane and Perry White, or Mary Tyler Moore and Ed Asner. Not flat, but archetypal, iconic. Each character has only a few traits, so you feel like you get to know them quickly, including some of their secrets. This is not a dense or difficult book, it's a page-turner, and at just 200 pages, a quick, enjoyable read.
 
I honestly appreciated that the solution to the mystery was relatively straightforward. There was no locked-room puzzle to untangle, and unlike a couple mystery miniseries I watched recently, no too-clever implausible twist at the end. The answer is grounded in the relationships between the relevant characters that Vera and the audience discover together.
 
Black is also quite careful and playful with language. The townsfolk are 'creatures,' never 'people,' never even 'women' or 'men.' There are 'pawkerchiefs' and folks considering things 'on the one paw,' but never any 'hands' or 'feet.' There are a few little puns and other language jokes, especially in the bookstore, but not so many that they dominate. The snake medical examiner talksss like thisss, but only gets a handful of lines. It's funny without bring overwhelming, a neat balance.
 
As I was reading, I found that the way I imagined the characters shifted between various visual inspirations. At times, I imagined them like the stop-motion puppets from Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox movie. Other times I pictured them looking like Hannah Barbara cartoons, like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and so on. The racoon I kept imagining as the vagabond from the boardgame Root; the sheep I pictured as Lambchop. And once, when the bear police detective picks up an injured Vera to help her to safety and her heart flutters with romantic excitement, I saw them as Little John and Maid Marian from Disney's foxy Robin Hood. It made me wonder how the authors imagined their own characters, and how other readers picture them.
 
Using the same rhyming logic employed here, of combining genres because they share a word in common, it's easy enough to imagine a cozy catastrophe with a cast of talking animals. For all I know, that'll be Juneau Black's next project. But I'm curious if anyone's ever mashed up the cozy mystery and cozy catastrophe, and had an amateur sleuth poking around a murder in the one town that's miraculously unaffected while the rest of the world succumbs to an off-camera apocalypse?

Titanium Noir

 
 

Titanium Noir

by Nick Harkaway

Knopf

2023

 

 

Titanium Noir is probably Nick Harkaway's most accessible book to date. At under 250 pages, it's less than half as long his others; compared to the rest of his output, it's practically a novella. It still has Harkaway's usual blend of genres, this time mixing dystopian scifi with a noir detective mystery.
 
The future tech that drives this one is the T7 injection, a miracle drug that biologically de-ages a person's cells to pre-pubescent, then rapidly reruns a decade of puberty in a month. The result is that any injuries are healed (even lost limbs and cancer,) the patient is perhaps 20% taller and heavier, with denser bones and another 60-80 years of natural life to look forward to. They have become a titan. After one dose, someone who started very short or thin might pass as a very tall unaltered human - though few would want to.
 
Titans are the elite. The first dose is unthinkably expensive, but the reward, beyond near immortality, is the kind celebrity and license to misbehave that today we associate with rock stars, football players, royalty. The future world is one or two hundred years past our own, yet in many ways scarcely changed from our own. Our society's uppermost class has been supplanted by the titans, the oldest of whom would be alive today. The city where the book takes place has a sparkling neighborhood of skyscrapers that accommodate the titans' homes and offices that must've taken decades to build. But aside from things like that, it feels more like the world of 2050 than 2250, because the titans can be conservative to a degree our own elites, many of whom are old, but not like 'born before the Civil War' old, cannot possibly match.
 
It's maybe not a mysterious why Harkaway was thinking about near-magical medical technology. In the acknowledgments at the end, Harkaway thanks a hospital employee who was very understanding on a particular date in December 2020. Harkaway's father was John le Carre, who died then, of complications from a fall, only a few days apart from my own father, of covid. Out of a terrible couple years, that December still managed to be one of a handful of notably awful months. A lot of people lost someone then.
 

I don't know, but I do wonder if that's part of why this book lacks some of Harkaway's usual manic exuberance. I missed his signature style of abundance and excess, of digressions and diversions and flashbacks and philosophy. Compared to his other offerings, this one seems trim and streamlined. There are minor characters who I thought we'd see more of, who could've gotten whole unnecessary chapters just because he liked them, who show up just once, or get mentioned again only in passing. We don't learn the history of the city, or find out much about our narrator's life before this particular case.
 

And a couple plot threads seem ill-proportioned to the shorter length. There's a red herring clue about the Marx Brothers that carries on far too long and has almost no payoff; encounters with a titan crime boss and repeated listenings to multiple versions of the same rumor likewise feel too big for the book they're in. In a 500-pager they'd fit in fine alongside the other extravagances. Here they're like a man too big for his suit coat, tearing stitches from all the seams. Maybe that structure is intended to remind us of how the titans take up too much room compared to the normal humans around them? Or maybe Harkaway was sad and his heart wasn't quite in it.
 

The protagonist this time around, Cal Sounder, is the sort of fellow who maybe Humphrey Bogart would've played in the film version if the timing had worked out right. He's a consulting detective, but I think he's also Harkaway's thought experiment about what good police would look like. Cal is kind, deeply empathetic, smart, and he fights dirty enough to win even when he's physically outmatched. Cal cares about humanity, and he tries to help the little people when he can. I liked his cadence, especially his way of recounting what a witness said in response, without needing to state his own questions.
 

Cal is kind of a fixer in titan-related cases. Sometimes, I think, he helps clean up their mess and protects them from bad press. This time, he's investigating a dead, possibly murdered titan, and he's there to protect the cops from retaliation if someone upstairs doesn't like the answers they come up with. Cal's ex-girlfriend is now a titan, and the daughter of the man who invented the injections. She was dosed after she was badly injured, which makes Cal kind of a friend of the family. I badly wanted to know more about her, and about their life together before her injury.
 

Like Memento, the solution here hinges on something forgotten due to the terrible pain and trauma of growing a foot and aging a decade in a month. I was very glad that Harkaway didn't make Cal a secret titan who'd forgotten the truth about himself! But I think the point of the book is the tour through the dystopia that is very rich people having too much power, moreso than it is the solution to the mystery itself.

Gideon the Ninth

 
 

Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

Tor

2019

 

 

Gideon the Ninth is obviously very popular, and some of my friends absolutely love it. My initial reaction was a sense of alienation from the text - at first Muir seems to be targeting a specific audience, and despite being a queer woman in the Millennial age range, I don't think I'm part of it. In the early chapters, Gideon the book seems to borrow from the tropes of fanfiction, and Gideon the character talks like a Very Online person posts. Muir's close third person narration, centered on Gideon, adopts the same sort of netspeak whenever she needs a metaphor or analogy. I did warm up to the book though, and really enjoyed it from about page 150 onward.

 

The book starts out on the sepulcher homeworld of the Ninth House, one of eight royal families who each have their own planet, ruled by very Catholic-seeming necromancers, who serve the Immortal God Emperor of the First House. The Emperor's self-resurrection, ten-thousand year reign, and unceasing interplanetary war against unspecified enemies bear more than passing resemblance to Warhammer 40K.

 

Harrow is the royal daughter of the Ninth House, and Gideon is a commoner and indentured servant with the demeanor and vocabulary of someone who spends about 12 hours a day on Twitter and Tumblr, although what she actually does is practice swordfighting. How it's possible for Gideon to be the way she is is never addressed, you just have to accept it. 

 

Harrow and Gideon are both in their late teens, and are the only two people under 40 on the whole planet. This ominous fact is stated once, early on, and then rarely referred to again until about 300 pages later, when we get the official version of what happened, and then the truth like 1 page after that. So the amount of foreshadowing and pace of information reveal could've been better, in my opinion. 

 

Because they are the only two children, Harrow and Gideon grow up a bit like sisters, but with a vast inequality in their relationship that makes them seem like rivals who hate each other at the start of the book. Early on, I assumed they were in an enemies-to-lovers romance arc, which is basically a fair statement of their trajectory. To make sense of their behavior, I think you have to be pretty familiar with that trope, and/or assume that they always loved each other but neither knew how to express it, or else their eventual reconciliation and pairing seems awfully fast and not well supported by events shown in the text.

 

Okay, so, the Emperor invites one necromancer and their sworn cavalier from each House to come to the First House and learn to be his new Lyctors, since the original immortal house-founders are finally ready to be replaced. Harrow's actual cavalier flees the planet, so Gideon is recruited to tag along and pretend to be Harrow's faithful, loyal servant, in exchange for freedom from her indenture afterward. To help with the ruse, Harrow also orders Gideon to pretend to be a nun under a vow of silence.

 

Pairs from each of the eight Houses gather in the disused and gigantic First House building, where they're told that they're there to learn how become Lyctors, and that the first thing they'll have to learn is how to learn that. Harrow sneaks off to start studying immediately, and Gideon is a mute witness to everyone else's interpersonal drama without really understanding any of it. 

 

One thing that's clear is that the Ninth House is unusually small, devout, and isolated, like a remote convent. The others are still necromantic royalty, but they vary in their degrees of ceremonial pomp, religious intensity, kindness and cruelty, and most of them know each other from previous state dinners and the like. Everyone's last name is based on their House number, which is convenient for a reader trying to keep track of the large cast, and also contributes to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the worldbuilding. The characters all take themselves very seriously, but Muir has set them in something like the Adventure Time version of the 40K universe.

 

For me, the point where things finally really got interesting was when Harrow realizes that she can't do this alone, asks Gideon for help, and starts sharing information. We get some very D&D-esque scenes where the pair explores the halls of the labyrinthine First House looking for secret doors, then studying tableaus of objects trying to discern what they indicate about the previous occupants. 

 

The way Harrow and the other necromancers learn here is to find preserved ten-thousand year old laboratories where they can repeat key necromantic experiments that show them how to cast new spells. In what feels like a nod to Jack Vance, the spells are essentially equations or proofs - math that has become magic. The labs date to a time just before the Empire, and belong to a world that's recognizably the near-future of our own contemporary Earth. The experiments all require cooperation between necromancer and cavalier, which forces Gideon to trust her body and spirit to Harrow's magic, which she does more readily than you'd expect.

 

And this is the other interesting thing about this section. We finally get to see who Gideon really is, as revealed by her actions, rather than her words, ironically, especially so once she discards the fake vow of silence. Gideon talks like a shitposter and fancies herself a super cool tough-guy badass, but behind her bravado, we eventually see someone who's much kinder (and much more vulnerable) than she thinks she is. She's also kind of a pushover for any pretty girl who's nice to her. My regrettable tendency to see reflections of myself in fictional red-heads led me, in spite of my initial annoyance, to sympathize a great deal with the Gideon we see in the latter half of the book.

 

The final element of the plot, that adds time-pressure to everyone's search for new spells, is that about halfway into the book, necromancer-cavalier duos start turning up murdered, and suddenly we're in an Agatha Christie And Then There Were None style locked-room mystery. I didn't care for this development when it cropped up in Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, but it really works here. Interestingly, to me at least, despite the fact that everyone's magic is powered by death energy, and they've mainly learned it so they can go off and fight in whatever war the Empire is engaged in, they're all shocked by the murders and consider the killings to be immoral.

 

So, the femslash romance, the magic school competition, and the whodunnit plots define the middle and most interesting section of the book. Initially you wonder if it's Obvious Suspect, before eventually discovering that no! it was Unlikely Suspect all along. This is another area where I think Muir leans on her audience's familiarity with the tropes to make up forestall questions you might ask based on what she wrote alone. Because I think Unlikely Suspect does a few things that are difficult to square with the eventual revelation of their guilt. It's clear Muir knows the tropes well and is skilled at playing with them, but I wish she didn't seem to lean on them to supply logic to actions whose motives she doesn't explain herself.

 

Once all three plots resolve, what we get for the last 50 pages or so is one long climactic fight-for-your-life fight scene. And to give Muir credit, she certainly knows how to write action. If someone wanted to make a movie out of this, I think they'd be happy with the tour de force boss fight that caps off the story.

 

This is an ongoing series, and to judge from the fan response, continues to improve after the first book. I haven't decided if I'll continue. Certainly not right away. I am glad I stuck with it through my initial reservations and doldrums, because once the pace picked up and the stakes of the story were revealed, I really liked reading from that point on.

The Inugami Curse

 
The Inugami Curse

by Seishi Yokomizo
translated by Yumiko Yamakazi
Pushkin Press

1972, reprinted 2020

 

 

The Inugami Curse is a Japanese mystery novel. Originally published in 1972, and just recently translated into English, it's set in the immediate aftermath of WWII, with soldiers returning home from the war playing key roles in the plot. Yokomizo wrote a series of mysteries featuring detective Kindaichi - according to the publisher of the translation, this one is the best-known in Japan. My sister was reading it last year while we were both in Ohio, which is how I learned about it.

 
The patriarch of the wealthy and powerful Inugami family, and founder of the family-owned silk manufacturing company, has died, and so the extended family has gathered at the family estate to learn how the inheritance will be divided. Detective Kindaichi is there too, because the family's lawyer is afraid that the reading of the will is going to lead to murder.

 
The old man never married, but he had three mistresses and a daughter with each mistress; each daughter had a son, and the three grandsons have been helping to run the company. The oldest grandson (son of the oldest daughter) is Kiyo. There are months of delay after the old man's death before the will is read to wait for Kiyo to return home from the war. When he does, his face is disfigured by injury, and his mother has commissioned a creepy rubber mask that looks like his old face for him to wear at all times. The other family members wonder if this is really Kiyo, or if his mother has disguised an imposter to secure her share of the fortune.

 
In addition to those grandsons, there's a girl Tamayo who's the same age. She's the granddaughter of a local priest who served as the old man's benefactor before he became rich. (The old man and the priest are also rumored to have had a gay affair.) Tamayo has an adopted brother who acts as her bodyguard. There's also another grandson, this one a secret, the same age as the others, whose mother was a much younger mistress, that the three daughters frightened into running away shortly after she gave birth. His location is unknown.

 
So, the will gives Tamayo a few months to pick one of the three main grandsons to marry. The couple will inherit everything, and the others nothing. If all three grandsons die before the time is up, Tamayo alone gets everything. If Tamayo dies or doesn't marry before the time's up, the main grandsons each get ⅕ of the fortune and the secret grandson gets ⅖. If any of the main grandsons die, their share goes to the secret grandson, but if he dies, his share goes to charity. 

 
It's kind of a complicated set-up! Naturally, everyone is upset by the will. Kindaichi observes that it gives the main grandsons a motive to kill their half-brothers, and/or to rape Tamayo to force her into marriage, Tamayo a motive to kill the three main grandsons, and the secret grandson a motive to kill all the others.
 

Sure enough, during the months before the marriage deadline, two of the grandsons are killed, seemingly by a soldier with a hidden face, who's variously suspected to be either Tamayo's adopted brother, or Kiyo, or the secret grandson. We learn the true nature of the old man's relationship with his benefactor, the truth about what the three sisters did to the other mistress, and in general, we see almost everyone revealed as violent, amoral, and selfish. Finally there's a third murder, and then Kindaichi solves the case, too late to do very much good.

 
Yokomizo's writing uses a lot of short sentences. It's generally very direct, even journalistic. But he also editorializes sometimes! Yokomizo tells us there will be murders from the beginning, points out every time Kindaichi misses a clue or fails to realize something, and passes moral judgment on the characters and their actions. I liked the foreshadowing, but wished he'd trust me to know that murder is bad without him needing to be preachy about it. In this translation at least, he overuses 'demonic' as a descriptor for the crimes, says they're 'chilling' and 'straight from hell' and so on, to an extent that I thought sort of detracted from his otherwise very straightforward prose.

Rasputin's Bastards

 
 
Rasputin's Bastards
by David Nickle
Open Road Media
2012, reprinted 2020

 

 

Rasputin's Bastards is a psychic spy novel set during the 1990s, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. One thing that author David Nickle does very well, both here and in his earlier book Eutopia, is to use free indirect verse to depict in close third-person the perceptions of people who are under the sway of some form of mind-control or illusion. Which, as you might imagine, is pretty important in a psychic spy novel.

 
In Nickle's vision of psychic spycraft, there are spymasters called 'dream-walkers' who can go into sensory deprivation tanks, project their consciousnesses into the world, and can take over the bodies of specially conditioned agents, called 'sleepers.' The sleepers don't know they've been conditioned and have no idea that they're spies. Whenever a dream-walker is piloting a sleeper (or has given them instructions to complete on auto-pilot), the sleeper experiences themselves as returning to a comforting daydream of their childhood. 

 
All the spies we meet are the products of a secret underground Russian science city, and the plot is about them finding new purposes now that the Cold War is over, the USSR is gone, and no one living remembers them.

 
The structure of the novel is such that we open in media res, and primarily follow sleepers, so we learn the truth of what's going on at the same time they do. All the viewpoint characters have important secrets, kept even from themselves, in their pasts, and so even as the overall plot moves forward, we also keep moving further and further back, through the accumulated lies of their lives, to discover the truth about each of them.

 
The story opens with a Canadian human trafficker buying a group of children from a Turkish arms dealer, a deal that takes place on the ocean between a yacht and a submarine. The deal goes badly when several sleepers intervene, and when it turns out that the children themselves are a new generation of powerful psychics, capable of dream-walking in anyone, not just a specially conditioned agent.

 
The children want to go to Canada to be free, former spymaster Babushka wants the children and every sleeper in the world to come to Canada so she can psychically rule over them, rival spymaster Fyodor and his sleepers want to intervene to thwart Babushka, and the gangster wants omnidirectional revenge on everyone for messing up his deal. 

 
It's a rather complex conflict, whose sides and stakes become clear only gradually, at the same time that the viewpoint characters are gradually becoming aware of the truth of their lives. Nickle handles this juggling act well, both in terms of the overall pacing, and in terms of planting seeds of doubt and unease at each stage that blossom into new revelations in the next.