Author Archives: Anna

Daytripper

by Anna

By Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon

Confession #1: Daytripper is the only comic that has ever made me cry.

Book cover: DaytripperAfter reading the review of it on NPR’s Monkey See blog, I had sort of vaguely put this on my list and then forgotten about it until I ran across it in the library a couple of months ago.

I promptly picked it up but read it over the span of a week or so, which is pretty unusual for me with  graphic novels. It reads like poetry, really, where a little goes a long way and after every ‘chapter’ of the book, I had to put it down and think about it for a little while. The plot, such as it is, is tough to describe; it is really more of a philosophical exploration of life, death, and the relationships that make up our lives.

It took me a while to write a post about it, because it is unlike any other graphic novel I’ve ever read. Glen Weldon at Monkey See described it way better than I could as “the way death, whenever and however it comes, retroactively imposes a shape on a person’s life.”

Confession #2: I read comics almost primarily for the illustrations; I mean it has to be well-written, too, but if the illustrations aren’t to my liking, I won’t read it no matter how well-written it is.

And Daytripper is absolutely gorgeous. The inking is expressive of the mood of each panel but the coloring is where it really stands out, with gorgeous, watercolor-like spreads. It is set in Brazil, and beautiful, expansive spreads showcase the city- and country-scapes of the region.

Seriously, check these out:

Illustration from Daytripper

Illustration from Daytripper

—Anna

The Old Gods Waken

by Anna

By Manly Wade Wellman

Book Cover: The Old Gods WakenSo, in my continued effort to not have to try anything new, I recently picked up The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman, a favorite author of mine in high school. His main protagonist is ‘Silver John,’ a nomadic folk singer who travels throughout the Appalachian area, picking up old songs and stories and tackling the odd supernatural force along the way. (He’s called ‘Silver John’ because his guitar strings are silver.) The cover advertises The Old Gods Waken as Wellman’s first Silver John novel, but he had several books of short stories previously published.

As a teenager, I had been fascinated with the descriptions of the very rural characters and settings, it being unlike anything I’d ever experienced so far, growing up in suburbs of Boston and Austin. It felt so authentic, so…earthy! There was a purity to the simple country lifestyle and I loved it. Even the supernatural elements seemed more realistic somehow, since they were often the product of old folklore.

Today, it reads quite romantic, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. It feels a bit contrived, like the Romantic Period, with all those paintings of pretty, fresh-faced shepherdesses tending flocks of bright white, fluffy sheep. (The first time I saw sheep in real life—a field trip in college—I was appalled at how dirty and kind of mean looking they are.) Wellman’s characters are all perhaps a little too folksy, his settings a little too pastoral, and his dialogue a little too colloquial; the whole thing comes off a bit manipulative and twee.

In a discussion with Rebecca, however, I wondered if perhaps I wouldn’t have felt all of this so strongly in a pre-Palin world, where I hadn’t been inundated with “you betcha’s” for a year or so. Perhaps it is not just me, but that the whole world is getting too cynical for a true appreciation of simplified life in nature. Or perhaps I’m just crabby because it is so damn hot.

— Anna

Fair Game

by Anna

By Patricia Briggs

Book Cover: Fair GameA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the first two Alpha & Omega books, and mentioned that the third one was out in hardcover. Fortunately for me, my new local library had it, so I was able to read it without paying a hardcover price. My expectations were moderate since Briggs has a tendency to lose steam with her ongoing series, but I was satisfied with Fair Game. It wasn’t as well-crafted as Cry Wolf, the first book, but I thought it stood on par with the second book, Hunting Ground, but in a different direction.

Cry Wolf had a really good balance of fantasy and mystery, while Hunting Ground tipped more toward the fantasy, pushing the mystery into the background a little bit and focusing more on the dynamics of the werewolves and vampires. Fair Game goes in the opposite direction, being a pretty surprisingly straightforward murder mystery with the fantasy elements just adding a bit here and there. Now, I really like murder mysteries, so this was a-ok with me, and if given my preference would almost always chose for the mystery to come first and the fantasy second.

I wish I’d thought to mention this in my previous post, but Briggs does this so well that while I really appreciate it, I don’t always notice it, if that makes sense. Her Alpha & Omega books are all written from multiple points of views, changing the narrating voice by chapter, or occasionally within different sections of chapters. It reads a lot more naturally than you’d think it would, with different characters stepping in when they have information that the reader needs. In the previous two books, the narrators have all been werewolves; in Fair Game, for the first time, one of the narrators is a human investigator, which is a refreshing outside perspective and emphasizes the mystery aspect of the story.

Spoiler-y, but not really: the very end does something very, very interesting with the world Briggs is building in the these books, so I’m actually now super-excited for the next books in both this series and the Mercedes Thompson series, which both take place in the same world, since there are going to be some dramatic changes.

— Anna

The Dead Authors Podcast

by Anna

By Paul F. Tompkins

So, I’m still atoning for my recent lack of posts, but haven’t read any new books to review, so here’s a link instead.

I first heard about this podcast in the comments section of a pop culture blog I follow regularly, and several people there recommended it. I’ve only just started getting into following podcasts, primarily because my job currently entails checking long documents page-by-page to make sure nothing screwy happened during the saving process.

The Dead Authors Podcast is a live performance at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles, and the premise is that H. G. Wells uses his time traveling machine to bring famous, now deceased authors from a variety of times to be interviewed on his talk show.

The actor playing H. G. Wells, drops interesting true-life biographical details of the various authors into the interviews, which are quite interesting. The actors playing the guest authors have done variable jobs of research, so some seem more in character (H. P. Lovecraft) than others (P. G. Wodehouse), which for me makes the podcasts varyingly entertaining. However, in each episode the actors/comedians are having such a good time doing it that it is very infectious.

Of the nine episodes currently available, I’ve listened to four, and “Appendix B: Friederich Nietzsche and H. P. Lovecraft” was by far my favorite, just for the bat-shit-crazy verve that the actors bring to those two authors. It was also the first one I listened to, and each subsequent one seemed to get a little less funny for me (Emily Dickinson, P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker), which might mean that the podcast doesn’t exactly match my personal sense of humor or that I was getting increasingly grumpy about my current work document. Those two possibilities seem equally possible, quite frankly.

I am still looking forward to listening to the chats with Aesop and Charles Dickens later this week, though.

— Anna

Alpha & Omega Series

by Anna

By Patricia Briggs

Sigh.

Sorry about the recent lack of posts. At the beginning of the month, I moved halfway across the country from Boulder, Colorado to the Washington, D.C. area. I was all prepared with three prewritten posts to get me through the chaos of the actual move itself. What I hadn’t predicted is that I would get so overwhelmed with everything being new and different that I would immediately retreat into simply rereading my trashy comfort books, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks at a furious pace.

I’ve reread all five of Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels books, which Rebecca has already written about, and both of Patricia Briggs’ Alpha & Omega books, which I figured I’d introduce here, since it could be a little while since I read anything new.

Briggs is better known for her Mercy Thompson series, featuring a female mechanic who shape-changes into a coyote, but was raised by a pack of werewolves. It is your typical werewolf/vampire genre series, but just done far better than most. Whenever I run into Charlaine Harris fans, I always make a point of recommending Patricia Briggs, since Mercy Thompson is everything Sookie Stackhouse isn’t: smart, independent, funny, etc. The first two books are immensely entertaining (I might read them next), and the third one is equally good but delves into some unexpectedly difficult-to-read territory (I am not going to read that next). After that, Briggs seemed to lose interest a little bit, and the subsequent books do not have the same quality of writing and plotting.

However, Briggs then turned her attention to a new series, the Alpha & Omega series, currently with two books in paperback and one in hardcover, which I haven’t read yet because I’m very much against hardcover books. This new series is great! It features peripheral characters from the Mercy Thompson books who are a little darker and tortured, which I always appreciate, and is set smack in the middle of the werewolf pack, instead of on the fringe.

The series actually kicks off with a short story/novella in the book On the Prowl, which is often shelved in the romance section and has a cover that will embarrass you to be seen carrying around. On Rebecca’s advice, I haven’t read any of the other stories in the book, but the Alpha & Omega story is actually good enough to be worth the full cost of the book, in my opinion. (Although, on a side note, the story is available on its own for the Kindle through amazon.com, which is one of the best arguments for a kindle that I’ve heard so far.) The story does set the entire series up to the point that the reader would be missing serious background information if they started with the first full novel.

Book Cover: Cry WolfThe first full novel is Cry Wolf, and just really delves into the characters and their relationships with each other, all within the confines of a very well structured and paced narrative. The second novel, Hunting Ground, doesn’t have quite the same tight plot structure, but is still very entertaining. I’m somewhat afraid I’m seeing a bit of a pattern with Patricia Briggs, so I’m mentally preparing myself for the third book being a potential disappointment, but I’m still very much looking forward to reading it. Right at this moment, I’m more into comforting fluff books than quality, so I’m sure it will live up to that.

— Anna

Vanish in an Instant

by Anna

By Margaret Miller

Book Cover: Vanish In An InstantI previously wrote about my love of pulp and noir mysteries, showcasing some of my favorites, and from the list, you can see that it is very much a man’s genre. Which makes sense, I guess; there weren’t as many published women at the time, and the kind of nihilism described in noir novels is kind of the antithesis of traditional femininity.

Margaret Miller is the exception, though, and she is brilliant. Vanish in an Instant, published in 1952, is my favorite, but I’ve read and enjoyed many of her other novels. The thing that makes Vanish in an Instant so exceptional that it is a love story in addition to a murder mystery, which should negate the noir style but only serves to emphasize it, as the two characters cling to their love as a fragile and temporary way to stave off the full bitterness of the world.

This quote captures Miller’s writing, and noir writing in general:

“Outside the wind was fresh, but he had a sensation of suffocating heaviness in his throat and chest, as if the slices of life he had seen in the course of the morning were too sharp and fibrous to be swallowed.”

Yay! I have no idea why this kind of writing gives me such satisfaction, but I do love these noir books and reading them actually brings me a sort of comfort in a way that I cannot analyze at all.

*I’d like to add that my copy is a reissue from the 70s and has much more subtle and attractive cover art.

— Anna

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea; Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China

by Anna

By Guy Delisle

Kinsey, these may be the comic books for people who don’t really like comic books. They are really more travel journals that use the illustrated panels to give atmosphere in a way written descriptions can’t quite capture.

The author is an animator who gets sent to various sites to oversee the outsourced animation, so in addition to the interesting locales, he also throws in a few details about the animation business, which is equally interesting to me.

Book Cover: PyongyangPyongyang: A Journey in North Korea was published in 2005. A couple of pages in, I realize that this is Eloise for adults! He lives out of a hotel for the entire trip, and has a guide and translator who serve as nannies for him, escorting him anywhere he travels outside of the hotel. The atmosphere he describes in North Korea also sounds very similar to that in Eloise in Moscow, first published in 1959.

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, published in 2006, is a disconcerting contrast to Pyongyang, still very foreign, but in an almost diametrically opposite way. After being immersed in the very communist North Korea, every mention of Rolexes and Gold’s Gyms comes as a bit of a shock.

Book Cover: ShenzhenAt the beginning of Shenzhen, Delisle says that he has trouble starting the writing/drawing process, and I have to say that it shows. It is much more a collection of vignettes and is a little disconcertingly random, while Pyongyang has a much tighter story narrative. I think that Delisle found his stay in Pyongyang not more enjoyable, exactly, but more interesting, just due to the foreignness of it all. He finds Shenzhen a bit of a grind, and it shows. I would recommend reading both back to back like I did, since I think they are good companion pieces, but if you are only going to read one, go with Pyongyang.

(From my quick amazon.com research, he has also done graphic chronicles of Jerusalem and Burma, both of which I very much look forward to reading.)

Short Story Glut

by Anna

I really like collections of short stories – I think they are a great way to get introduced to new authors and to see a lot of different authors’ perspectives on a shared topic. However, I’ve started to get irritated with these collections recently published that all feature a subset of the same best-selling authors the fantasy genre. It seems like such a blatant money-grab.

I love Patricia Briggs but do not care for Charlaine Harris, so instead of just publishing a book of Briggs’ stories, there is always one of hers in a collection that also includes Harris and other authors I have no interest in. And, I’m sure fans of the other authors feel that way about Briggs. So, this seems like a very calculated ploy on the part of the publisher to try to make us all buy books in which we are only interested in about a quarter or even less of the content (especially disappointing if that quarter turns out to be not all that great, either).

I fell for it and bought two such collections, but wizened up this time and went to the library, and am very glad I did. I originally intended to gather all of Patricia Brigg’s short stories that I hadn’t already read, but an Ilona Andrews story slipped in, too.

Book Cover: Naked City1) Naked City, with the tagline “Tales of Urban Fantasy,” has a nice theme of each story being set in a recognizable city that the author gives some attention to describing. Of the five stories I read (out of the 20 in the book), four of them featured plots that were very specifically tied to a feature of the city, which was very interesting. Oddly, though, the fifth, Melissa Marr’s “Guns for the Dead,” was actually my favorite, taking place in an Old West type environment that is kept somewhat generic purposefully for the plot reveal.

Patricia Briggs’ “Fairy Gifts,” was my second favorite, of course, with new characters for her and set in Butte, Montana, which is just so interesting to read about given the complete lack of romanticism around that city. Briggs clearly loves the area, though, and writing about immortal beings such as vampires and fairies allows her to delve into the history of the place.

Book Cover: Home Improvement2) Home Improvement: Undead Edition, with the tagline “All-new Tales of Haunted Home Repair and Surreal Estates,” also features Patricia Briggs and Melissa Marr, and theirs were the only stories I read out of the twelve. This theme didn’t work as well – perhaps it was too specific? Again, Marr’s story edged out Briggs’.

Marr’s “The Strength Inside” features a protagonist of a supernatural kind that I didn’t recognize from any of the normal Western mythologies. I’m not sure whether she was dipping into a more esoteric mythos or whether she invented it herself, but it was interesting either way. And, it is about battling Home Owners’ Associations, which is always entertaining, even if a little clichéd.

Brigg’s “Gray” features a vampire, though not one of her regular characters, buying and renovating an old condo. It has some very sympathetic characters, but isn’t anything original.

Book Cover: Angels of Darkness3) Angels of Darkness features Ilona Andrews, and was the most worrisome to me when checking it out. The cover looks more like paranormal romance than fantasy, and I knew that Andrews’ books walk that line more than my other favorite authors. And, I was absolutely right to be worried, though it was even worse than I feared.

You know how people criticize the story “The Beauty and the Beast” for basically being a romaticization of Stockholm Syndrome? Imagine Ilona Andrews tried to take that idea, make it super overt, but still try to keep it romantic. It is even more appalling than you are imagining right now.

At 124 pages, her “Alpha: Origins” story is more of a novella than a short story, and is set in a different universe than either her Kate Daniels series or her Edge series. It took me almost a week to finish it because I kept having to put it down because it made me feel kind of dirty, reading about this level of subjugation in a clearly romantic plot.

It reminded me of a call for submissions of fantasy romance books by a publisher that Rebecca told me about. They specified that the story had to feature an older or in some other way societally superior hero and the heroine had to be somehow in his power. It made me gag a little bit.

Book Cover: Down These Strange Streets4) Down These Strange Streets was my favorite collection, leaning toward the noir side of urban fantasy and mystery. There were some really terrific stories, and some not-so-terrific stories, but the great thing about a collection of short stories is that after a couple of uninspired pages, I can just move on to the next story.

It did bring home the point that a good noir mystery is harder to write than people think; the author has to somehow steep the entire story in a casual grimness. A surface gloss of darkness doesn’t cut it, and is quickly recognizable when reading a series of stories by different authors all in a row.

Once again, though, Briggs’ story took second place, this time to a really engrossing story by Laurie R. King, who I had previously known only as a mystery writer. Her fantasy mystery, “Hellbender,” was subtle, realistic, and unfolded with perfect plotting, and I would love to read a full book of the same characters and universe.

Briggs’ story, “In Red, with Pearls,” was my favorite of hers that I read in this glut, and featured one of her regular but peripheral werewolf characters, Warren, and his boyfriend Kyle. The short story structure didn’t give her as much time to explore characters and relationships as I would have liked, but was still a very entertaining mystery.

* * * * * * * * * *

Kinsey’s very acute analysis of her preference in memoirs made me revisit my short story collection preferences, and I think it is very similar. The more collections I read, the more I respect the editors. It seems like they need to tread a very fine line, where collections should have a common theme that tie all the stories together, but not such a narrow theme that the stories seem repetitive. “Urban fantasy” is too generic; “house renovations” is much too narrow.

—Anna

Finder Library: Volume 1

by Anna

By Carla Speed McNeil

Finder is my favorite graphic novel. Period.

As much as I defend graphic novels and truly believe that they can be equal to any novel, most of them aren’t. Finder, however, blows most novels out of the water. When I first stumbled across one of the graphic novels, Sin-Eater, at a library years ago, I was entranced; her stories and characters stayed with me in all the years since then, and last week, I was overjoyed to see that Dark Horse has published an anthology of her Finder novels, including Sin-Eater.

It is hard to even describe the scope of Finder. McNeil builds an entire world with a blend of futuristic technology and mysticism, and populates it with dozens of different tribes of people, many of whom borrow attributes from various real-world cultures, such as ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Native American. Our protagonist is from the tribe most like Native American, and he is a “finder” by trade, which is a bit of a cross between tracker and private detective. Through his adventures (and each book-length graphic novel follows just one) we explore the entire world, traveling to the different lands and meeting peoples of different tribes.

Every single panel of the 600+ page anthology adds details to the cultures and histories. Many of them include references to our real-world culture (though it is clearly not set in our world; or possibly our world many millenia in the future). Ones I caught included The Last Unicorn, Neil Gaiman, and Masquerade, and they were just enough for me to recognize that for each reference I caught, there were no doubt dozens that I missed.

For some of the ones I missed, McNeil has endnotes in the back (of both this anthology and the original graphic novels) in which she explains some of the references and elaborates on many of the characters and places. I had already been impressed with the expanse of the book, but the endnotes were where I really began to feel awe toward the author. She has back stories for characters that only feature in a single page and names for characters that only have a single panel!

The book is insidious, really—you pick it up thinking to read an adventure story about a lone-wolf character, but the density of it all gets in your brain and has you picking at it for days afterward, trying to unravel it all.

Jane Slayre

by Anna

By Charlotte Brontë and Sherri Browning Erwin

Book Cover: Jane SlayreI read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a few years ago and was not impressed. It felt like a very awkward mash-up, like just reading Pride and Prejudice, and then BOOM, ZOMBIES, and then back to Pride and Prejudice. It was very disjointed, with the inserted zombie scenes feeling unrelated and jarring in the rest of the text. Once I finished, I just wanted to read Pride and Prejudice without zombies.

Happily, Jane Slayre is significantly better. There are a number of possible reasons for this, and I can’t quite tell which ones actually apply and whether it is due to the author or myself as the reader:

  1. Sherri Browning Erwin understands Bronte’s voice better than Seth Grahame-Smith understands Jane Austen’s.
  2. Jane Eyre already has a gothic sentiment that lends itself better to the addition of vampires/werewolves/zombies than Jane Austen’s comedy of manners.
  3. I don’t actually remember Jane Eyre all that well, so it was harder for me to recognize when deviating scenes started.
  4. I also didn’t enjoy reading Jane Eyre as much as Pride and Prejudice, so wasn’t as disturbed by the added scenes, and didn’t have any inclination to reread the original.

I will say this, though: especially with the added vampires, Jane Eyre/Slayre comes across as the Twilight of 19th century with a fairly Mary-Sue-ish young woman (she isn’t traditionally beautiful, but everyone who sees her compares her to a fairy or some other elven creature) teaching an older and extremely rude but wealthy man how to love again.

However, the Slayre part (so clearly borrowed from Joss Whedon that it could possibly be grounds for a lawsuit if he were so inclined) gives Jane some added spunk and value as a character, and makes the admiration of all around her make more sense. Erwin weaves the vampires (and zombies and werewolves) throughout Jane’s entire story, so it does become an established part of her character.

I even thought several times that the additions Erwin made were interesting enough that they could have been the basis for a quite interesting original book, if she had only taken Jane Eyre as a inspiration and hadn’t had to stay so close to the original.

—Anna