Before I picked up Neverwhere, I’d never read any Neil Gaiman. I know. I couldn’t believe it either.
I went for Neverwhere because American Gods seemed like too much of a commitment (but I’ll get to it), and it intrigued me as an archetypal urban fantasy novel, a genre I’m trying to get more into.
Everyone seems to love Neverwhere. It seems to occupy a space of underground reverence (no, that’s not a pun). All of my friends on Goodreads have given it five stars, and nobody will dare utter a bad word about it.
So I will. I’m sorry to say I thought Neverwhere was just okay.
I’ll probably keep this much shorter than most reviews. Andy Weir’s follow-up to his mandatory-reading sci-fi novel The Martian is just okay. And you know what? That’s okay. It would be unrealistic to expect any human being to replicate the utter brilliance of a novel like The Martian. Its shadow is long, and its influence is broad. Not even Barry Bonds hit a home run every time he came to the plate, and he was on drugs.
There are many arguments to make for Artemis, and if we didn’t already know what Weir was capable of with The Martian, Artemis would be a standout novel in its own right. The world-building is utterly fascinating. The science is authentic but never exhausting. And Artemis still contains Weir’s nerdy, amazingly fun wit, not to mention the atmospheric charm that we’re reading something written by a guy who legitimately loves the playground he’s playing on.
Where Artemis falters is, perhaps, in something Weir took for granted with The Martian. The premise of The Martian is so immediately gut-wrenching: Astronaut Mark Watney is caught in a storm during an emergency evacuation, and his team, thinking he is dead, leaves him behind. But Mark is not dead. He is alive, and he must survive until his rescue.
In many ways, The Martian is an inferior story. It’s clearly a premise intended for Weir to play with survival scenarios on Mars. Those are fascinating in their own right, but they are not a narrative.
This thing has been a long time coming. Through many rewrites and revisions, the throes of misfortune that is the publishing industry, and the existential crises, the one constant has been that this story was mine, and it lived only in my head. And now it doesn’t. Now, it’s ours, and I hope you consider venturing into the wilds of Lumen with me.
It’s far from perfect, but I’m proud of it and think it’s something special. I hope you do, too.
Catch up with me on Facebook and Twitter, and let me know what you think.
Generally speaking, whenever someone says, “the book was better,” about a book-to-film adaptation, I feel the need to punch them in the throat. I could go on a long digression here about my feelings of film adaptations, the different camps of people wanting them to be faithful, and creative freedoms of artists as well as the nature of truth, but I’m not going to do that. Suffice to say, The Girl With All The Gifts film adaptation gets it both wrong and right in really fascinating ways.
At long last, the novel that found a home on cold, metal e-retail warehouse racks in 2014 has moved onto the cozy, wooden shelves of your local book store. Yes, it’s exciting, gratifying, satisfying, terrifying, but the one thing that’s undeniable is my little book is all grown up.
So, let’s party.
Over the next week, I’m going to hold a giveaway contest on Facebook and Twitter. Like, share/retweet, and use the hashtag #CarryingCarrier for an opportunity to win signed print copies of the new edition, a $20 Amazon gift card, and an Amazon Kindle Fire.
Concept: Everything from Western fairy tales, fables, and myths is real. The powers of good and evil, light and dark, are locked in an eternal struggle that goes all the way back to the beginning of time. A modern day woman finds herself wrapped up in the war as she discovers she has the power of influence, to command the light and the dark, but the other side of that coin is she has become a target.
Execution: Do nothing that is obvious. Subvert expectations time and again. Build a rich, alluring world that incorporates fantastical elements of old Anglo-Saxon cultures to modern urban contemporaries. Create unique characters based on familiar ideas. Entertain. Stimulate the intellect. Cut the fat and reject nonsense. Tell a simple, powerful story that’s never been told before.
My experience in reading Frightfully Ever After by Nick DeWolf had a recurring theme, which was to be continually impressed by how incredibly imaginative it is. Originality and creativity are planted firmly in the driver’s seat. In trying to analyze the experience, I kept thinking of words like “alluring,” “captivating,” and “immersive.” I’ll no doubt use those words multiple times as I write this.
Though not a tome—and by fantasy standards, it’s relatively short—it secretes imagination. Cracking this book open, breaking its spine for the first time, I had to wonder if this thing was bound in the bone marrow of Beowulf or Edgar Allan Poe.
Notes From a Necrophobe by T.C. Armstrong is a novel about one family trying to survive the end of the world with zombies and biological hazards and terrible humans, oh my! It may sound familiar, but it isn’t. Keep reading.
This is a world that is coping with a parasitic threat, which has turned our most precious resource (water) into the most deadly substance on the planet. There hasn’t been a total collapse, but we get the immediate sense that the collapse is still happening. There are authorities, though their power is limited, and as expected, they only get less capable as the story progresses.
One of the main themes is that life goes on after the apocalypse but that there’s a yearning for the time before. The difference is that, after the end, some modern conveniences persist, including the Internet and TV. The characters grow to rely on these resources, which makes their inevitable removal that much more painful. It’s an interesting approach to the end because it’s somewhat atypical. The theme is familiar, but it has new nuances.
The treatment of the infection seems to be that the threat is the disease, not necessarily the monsters it creates. It’s a really interesting tone. The characters have to be especially careful about the environment, and the zombies are part of the world they find themselves in. They are an elevated kind of vermin. One character even laments in one of my favorite lines early on, “They are like cockroaches these days.”
Another favorite line of mine involves one of the characters calling another a “wenchbag.” I like it because it reminds me that this novel has a very wide range of tones of voice, and T.C. juxtaposes it in a humorous way. T.C. writes from the perspective of a mother as well as all of her children, one of which is an adolescent. Each of the characters have a distinct voice, and it’s certainly one of my favorite aspects of the book.
In fact, much of the story is told from the perspective of the children, and this gives the book a somewhat young adult feel to it. It’s well done in that it isn’t overwrought with ignorance to convey youth. We aren’t beaten over the head with it. The kids are people with their own personalities and ideas. Though, it certainly contains its fair share of high-level writing, including some scientific exposition, as well as adult-level ideas and themes. Of course, there’s the violence and gore.
In a way, Notes From a Necrophobe spans all ages.
It reads like journal entries, but it isn’t an epistolary. The writing style is a good mix of contemporary and modern fiction.
Apart from the standard terminology, T.C.’s writing has a specific personality. At times, it is morbidly funny without being pure horror satire. The comedy is based in these characters being jaded with the horrors of their world, but they aren’t casual about its dangers.
There are pretty clearly three acts to the story, though they aren’t delineated in text. With each act, the characters’ situation obviously grows more dire, and it is when conditions are at their bleakest that I felt like T.C.’s writing was at its most potent. That said, I tend to enjoy that kind of thing more, and another reader may find one of the other acts more entertaining or interesting. In this sense, Notes From a Necrophobe offers a range of experiences.
Overall, Notes From a Necrophobe succeeds in distinguishing itself in well-trodden territory. I think any zombie fiction fan will find it enjoyable, but even outside of the genre, there’s plenty of intrigue and enjoyment to be had.
I’m sitting here at my desk, and instead of working on moving my WIPs to the “Ready for Humiliation” folder, I’m staring at my bookshelf. I’m gazing at the spines of Justin Cronin’s The Passage trilogy, and I’m thinking about reading them again.
I recently finished the third book, The City of Mirrors, and it’s one of few trilogies that I can legitimately, honestly say I loved. It has everything (well, many things) I look for in fiction: a fantastical, alluring world; rich mythology; risky storytelling; deep characters; solid writing that is at times literary; complexity in just about everything. In a word: depth.
I loved it, but I’m not thinking about reading it again only because of how I felt about it. You see, The Passage is one of the only trilogies or series I bought into immediately. I can’t recall any others that I picked up before they were all completely written. And Justin Cronin isn’t cranking out a new novel every quarter. He’s putting three or four years of his life into a book, and that’s a lot of time for a reader between books. But it’s part of the reason they are so good.
I’m increasingly of the mind that good fiction cannot be rushed out the door, that authors need to live in their worlds and with their characters to truly grant them the substance they need to create meaning and allow readers to leave and take with them whatever it is they find there in those pages.
Granted, I know plenty of authors who put out really good work annually and semi-annually. Those people are freaks.
I don’t know if this is the book you deserve, but it’s the book you need. (That’s clever, you see, because there are a lot of Batman references in this book… ahem, anyway.)
Blake Twenty-Three by Slade Grayson begins with a message the literary world needs to hear: “Just have fun.” We often forget reading and storytelling is supposed to be something we enjoy. Many of us get so stilted and wooden with our critical analysis and pushing our nerd glasses up on the bridges of our noses that we overlook an integral part of the reading experience: escape. If one-half of storytelling is information conveyance, the other half is signal quality. Maybe “integrity” is the right word there. I don’t know, but what it boils down to is a measure of enjoyment.
Reading Rich Hawkins’ novella, Black Star, Black Sun, is a bit like waking up and finding the world has already been consumed by fire, and the final embers are burning the ashen remains. It is a fearless journey into an abyss of despair.
Why would anyone want to read that? Because it’s hauntingly beautiful.
We begin with Ben Ottway returning to his hometown, a small village in England, after the mysterious disappearance of his wife, but this is no thriller with plot twists you can see coming a mile away or that are surprising because they’re utter nonsense. Ben’s wife is gone, and the point is his world has ended, yet he fights it and remains hopeful.
