The Ritual by Adam Nevill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Survival Horror!

Just in time for October. Wanna dive into some very nicely creepy atmospherics and get reacquainted with your old buddies on a camping trip, just getting away from the old world, finding out what the big deal about Scandinavia is?

Welcome home.

Of course, these four men are a bunch of ponces. They eventually grow on me after some of the real festering shit comes out, but before then, there's very little positive I can say about it other than the fact that the atmospherics are pretty awesome. And that's fine. We're used to horrors that are filled with all manner of flawed characters and they either eventually step up to the plate or they're served on it.

Welcome home!

Of course, that's only half the novel. The second half was much better, in my opinion. It kept up the oppression and atmosphere but changed it into a glorious death metal tribute full of cliches and old school satanism tripes AND remained a survival horror with the same creepy vibe as before. We've just added new layers to the creepy. The payoff is pretty sweet, too, and all my struggling with the initial characterization was worth it.

It's so hard to see a character grow with something like genuine understanding, but when it happens, it is delightful. :)

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Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Malerman's first novel Bird Box and picked up on the See no Evil, Hear no Evil vibe going on between both of these novels, looking even more toward the next which will have to be a Speak no Evil one or I'm going to give up on reviewing anything forever.

That being said, oh so melodramatically, I wanted to like this particular Hearing Evil novel much more than I did. All the setups in 1957 with a rock band getting propositioned by the US Government on a super secret project was delightful. The back history was great. Unfortunately, I wasn't all that impressed by Philip.

He was the ultimate English Patient, too, filled with a long recovery and memories in a prolonged reveal, and while the base story was damn interesting and the waits were well worth it, I still didn't connect all that much with the MC. Maybe I've just been spoiled by some recent excellent authors. Maybe it really is the MC. Either way, it reduced my overall enjoyment. Things happened to him. A lot. And while he does get some actions on the page, it wasn't all that satisfying.

Great concept, somewhat middling execution unless it is meant to be a riff on old movies and novels all the way down to the style and devices. And if that was the case, then I'd have to say it succeeds. Nurse falls in love with a patient and notions of duty conflicting hard with personal limits. There's even a cool number of old-style scares, both hazily scientific and religious, all of which feel very period.

I'm not complaining. Seen from a certain viewpoint, this is a very successful novel in that it captures a very specific feel. Unfortunately, that feeling may or may not be agreeing with me. Nor, I presume, with a few others. Honestly, it feels like a partial modern novel, cherry-picking classic tropes and killing it with clever newish ideas and sealing it with a solid mystery-horror vibe, all the while falling into the trap of awkward pacing and lack of agency.

Like I said, I wanted to like this more, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy it... because I did. I was fascinated for grand stretches of the novel and the promised reveals drove me on. The core is all sorts of wonderful. :)


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The Changeling by Victor LaValle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my second Victor LaValle and after the Ballad of Black Tom having washed through me and left me wanting so much more, I was very, very happy to be reading this.

It has a very different feel in one way, but in another, it's exactly like coming home. Being in the story you always want to be in. What do I mean?

The devil is in the details. It's very homey, feeling like delightful snapshots of family and home, full of the sweet and the bitter and the genuinely odd stuff that always comes along with life, and this feeling never lets up even after the really funky stuff starts messing with the MC. I felt warm and wrapped snugly in the story in a way that I rarely do, or at least, not this deeply. Maybe it's because of the new parenthood threads or maybe it's because of the geeky book-nerd outlook or maybe it's because the deepest thread in the novel happens to be one of the darkest myths handed down through the ages, but anyway that I looked at it, I was invested.

From high hopes to deep stress to tragedy, horror, and a long, wrought quest full of very emotional reveals, this novel manages to put us through the ringer. I loved all of these characters. And I mean love, love. I'm still thinking of them in the same way that I keep thinking of Black Tom. It's the realization, amazing ability that all these characters come right to life and stay with us.

And of course, it's the story, too, and what a mindf*** that was. :)

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Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pirates and bounty hunters on the high chemical and electronic frontier! Add a bit of transgendered robot issues, a bit of do-gooder pharmaceutical mayhem, and time split between labs, parties, sexual repression, and a few really big questions explored deftly and interestingly, and we've got ourselves a very interesting SF.

Let's look at the top layer a little. Slavery issues. The novel takes them on for both robots and humans equally. I'd expected that from both the blurb and the cover, of course, but I don't think I expected the writing to have such good world-building thrown in. The whole chemical and big pharm complications were neither simple or dismissable, and that was only on the human side.

What would a world be like with open patents and sharing of chems and development, all of which is still being slowly strangled by capitalism? Take it a bit farther. Now let's start programming or deprogramming ourselves since we're so reliant on our own biologies.

Seriously, this is some pretty neat stuff and while we've had a bit of a discussion in this field for decades already, Newitz makes a cool tale and makes some very deft comparisons and mirroring here.

The tale itself if good if not spectacular. I had a good time. Still, I obviously appreciate the explorations of the messages more than anything else. :)

Thanks, Netgalley, for the ARC!

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Ghost Road Blues by Jonathan Maberry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I managed my expectations pretty well for reading this one. I wanted regular horror and got it. It's October, after all, and isn't this the season to enjoy a run of scary?

Or is it simply the desire to see evil as plain as day, to root for the underdogs, to gather up all the misfits and see all the jerks and the ultraviolent assholes of the world get their comeuppance?

Maybe a bit of both.

Fortunately, there's a lot of bigger-than-life characters in this small town and the good guys are good pretty much all the way through. The bad, however, are really bad. :) And did I mention a recurring string of gruesome murders in a small town known for it's spectacular Halloween festivals meant to scare your pants off?

Yeah, well, aside from a few great scenes and pretty epic buildup, I'm gonna have to hold my horses to see the grand explosion because this is a trilogy!

That's fine, of course. Sometimes a tale is very long. I just have to wonder what it might have been like to have this as one gigantic tome like the good old days of epic horrors instead of the bite-sizes publishers think we want. *shrug*

So maybe I'll just pretend it's one book. That's the ticket! And people think that readers are without imagination! I'll show them!

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Weaver's Lament by Emma Newman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This second novella in the Industrial Magic series picks up nicely where the previous leaves off... with one exception: we're left with a fairly interesting historical footnote but not much of that does our MC Charlotte much good in terms of character development or interesting plot other than something like a one-off.

I personally would have been ecstatic with a firmer grounding in the magic and the training if she's going to be bucking the Royal Society like this. Even an untraditional schooling is better than this, and just slapping the previous baddie onto this tale might work when we finally get down to it, but I thought there was enough possible growth in the world to make this tangent both unique and poignant without falling back on an already familiar plot point.

That being said, however, both the writing and story were interesting enough to negate a huge portion of my gripe and getting a heavy and oppressive feel of the Cotton Gin, even under the auspices of being a spy, was quite clever and cool.

I figure, as long as a consistent stream of new situations and chances to flex those magical UF muscles keeps coming along, I'm not going to have much of an issue.

I had fun, regardless!

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!

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Brother’s Ruin by Emma Newman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A few years ago I would have been startled to think that there was such a thing as Historical Urban Fantasy, but yeah, it's a thing now.

And now that we've got cotton gins and the Royal Society deeply involved in the magic business, with all sorts of fear and corruption and intrigue, I shouldn't really be surprised. So the question is: is this good?

I think it's quite fun, personally. It's a simple setup and Charlotte is a pretty cool character with a magical secret. And she deeply mistrusts the Society... for good reason, as it turns out. It's a simple story, a comedy of error and circumstance that becomes a cross between a heist and a romance.

Wait... simple?
Well, yeah, it's a short setup for a longer series, obviously. It's gonna require investment. Fortunately, it was fun and I don't have any problems with that. :)

Historical UF is fun!



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