Category Archives: fiction

The Lady Trent Memoirs

fantasy, fiction September 17, 2019 Leave a comment

Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent memoirs may have been for young adults. Really. I’m not sure.

But I really liked them! They featured a really strong minded female character. AND DRAGONS. I would have been just like her, if I lived in her universe. There were five Lady Trent memoirs. In order, they were:

A Natural History of Dragons
The Tropic of Serpents
Voyage of the Basilisk
In the Labyrinth of Drakes
Within the Sanctuary of Wings

Isabella is a tomboy with four brothers, growing up in would-be Victorian England. Her version is Scirland. The world in the book is very much like our world in the 19th century, except there are dragon in distant parts of it, with much about them unknown. They’re in very remote regions and are very dangerous, making them very difficult to study.

Isabella’s parents – her mother in particular – want her to be a proper lady (meaning definitely no studying dragons) and want her to marry, and she does. She eventually marries Jacob, a gentleman, who is like minded about scientific research and who she manipulates into going on a dragon expedition financed by a famous scientific wealthy backer. After she cracks, breaking down in tears and explaining to him that she really wants to go because basically all she’s cared about since she was a kid was learning about dragons, Jacob takes her with him and convinces their backer to let her come to be a sketch artist and secretary for the trip.

Jacob is probably my favorite character in the first novel. He is kind, and understanding, and treats Isabella as an equal. He is quite hurt when he thinks Isabella doesn’t love him, but she does, she’s just super bad with her feelings.

The stories are of Isabella’s expeditions in the wild to study dragons – her obsession since she was a kid. I love her relationship with Tom, at first an antagonist, then her partner and best friend. Like Isabella, Tom also has trouble being accepted into the high society scientific community. Isabella is of high birth but is a woman, and Tom is a man but of a lower class. They make a great team in the later novels.

She is finally accepted by the scientific community, rather grudgingly, but accepted all the same.

I really enjoyed these books. The world building was good. It’s true they were a bit predictable but overall I didn’t mind this because 1. they weren’t mysteries, 2. Isabella was a really wonderful character, and  3. THERE WERE DRAGONS.

Like Isabella, I am also obsessed with dragons. I liked these books a lot. They will not be for everyone, but I enjoyed them immensely.

2018: The Year of Stephen King (Part II)

crime novel, fantasy, fiction, mystery, supernatural September 16, 2019 1 Comment

Because Stephen King’s Dark Tower audiobooks are popular at the library, I couldn’t just listen to them all in a row. I had to wait in between and listened to more of his books in the meantime. The other Stephen King books I completed last year were:

Doctor Sleep
Gwendy’s Button Box (co-written with Richard Chizmar)
Mr. Mercedes
Finders Keepers
End of Watch
Salem’s Lot

Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch were a series of detective novels featuring retired detective Bill Hodges and his nemesis Brady Hartsfield. I don’t know if I loved the supernatural-ish twist the series took, but overall I really enjoyed it, especially because Hodges’s side kick characters, Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney.

Holly might be the best female character King has written. She is neurotic, socially inept, and has a ton of anxieties, but she is brilliant, loyal, funny, and infinitely capable. I loved loved loved her, and she appears in The Outsider (which I haven’t read yet), and is apparently getting her own book next year. I am so excited.

Gwendy’s Button Box was a novella set in Castle Rock, Maine, where 12 year old Gwendy meets a stranger in dark clothes who invites her to “palaver” (hello, reference to The Dark Tower series) and gives her a box with – you guessed it! – buttons. This was a novella, mostly about personal choices. It was ok. I didn’t love it as much as other books by King this year.

Doctor Sleep was a sequel to The Shining, which follows once cute 5 year old Danny Torrence into his alcoholic adulthood. Alcoholic Dan is way less adorable but he does pull it together to help Abra, a girl with “the shine,” who is being hunted by the cult True Knot. I liked Doctor Sleep, but for some reason felt it was missing something. Can’t quite figure out what it was.

Salem’s Lot is the story of a man named Ben Mears, who returns to his childhood town to discover it’s being taken over by vampires. I watched the TNT miniseries starring Rob Lowe in 2004 but never got around to reading the book. This was one of the books I listened to last summer at the gym (I spent A LOT of time at the gym last summer). I really liked this one. It’s one of King’s earliest books and easily one of his most famous and beloved. I liked a lot of the vampire lore that King built on (again, this was a Dracula year) and I liked the ending immensely. I decided to listen to the whole story because Father Callahan appeared in the The Dark Tower novels.

So that was my year with Stephen King. I plan to continue with his stuff. King can suck me into just about any story within a few pages, which is a talent beyond measure. How many books do I start and then drop because they just aren’t interesting? Quite a few, but none of Stephen King’s books, that’s for sure.

2018: The Year of Stephen King (Part I)

fantasy, fiction September 15, 2019 1 Comment

I did a lot of Stephen King in 2018 – so much that I’m going to split him up into two posts, because it feels pretty unruly not to.

My big achievement is that (after a several year break) I finally finished King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus: The Dark Tower series. I had already read The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, so I listened to the following last year:

The Waste Lands
Wizard and Glass
Wolves of the Calla
Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower

Of these seven books, I think I liked Wizard and Glass the most, followed closely by Wolves of the Calla. Overall, I loved the series. At first, I didn’t think I would.

Roland Deschain – the last gunslinger and, arguably, our main protagonist – is not, at first, a very likable hero. He is singularly focused on his quest for the Dark Tower (it’s a place that holds all the worlds of the universe together), and it doesn’t matter who gets hurt on the way as long as Roland is successful in his quest. It was going to be a very long series if Roland was going to be a dick the whole time.

Roland is in a different world than ours, but he can travel to ours. In his quest for the tower, he pulls Eddie, Susannah, and Jake from different times in New York into his own world and timeline. Eddie is from the 1980s, Susannah is from the 1960s, and Jake is from the 1970s. Together, along with the billybumbler Oy, the ka-tet travels through MidWorld towards the Dark Tower. The Tower is the center of all creation, and Roland wants to question whatever god or being is there. So, the ka-tet tries to prevent it from being destroyed by The Crimson King.

It’s not a simple story, but it is a compelling one. There’s also plenty of room to add to it, should King so choose.

By the end, as Roland comes to care more and more about the members of his ka-tet rather than just his quest, he is quite the lovable hero – at least to me. His capacity to change was his best quality.

The only part of this series I was less than floored by was the part where King inserted a fictionalized version of himself as a plot element. Yes. He. Did. King had been in a near fatal accident not long before writing the events of the final two (three?) books and the series takes a couple of weird twists (I think) because of it.

For those who don’t know where to start with Stephen King, this series is probably the best place. There are references to this series in King’s other works (including IT, Salem’s Lot, and Hearts in Atlantis among others) and the series serves as the pinnacle of his multiverse.

In spite of some twists I didn’t particularly like, including the self-insert, the series was a great way to spend the summer. I listened to a lot of this series during marathon efforts at the gym. The only book of this series I didn’t do in 2018 was Wind Through the Keyhole, but I’ll listen that one eventually too.

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

Dracula

fiction, horror, supernatural August 15, 2019 1 Comment

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a classic and one I’d been planning to read since I was about 12. Finally got to it at 30. Oooffff.

Basic premise: Count Dracula is trying to move from Transylvania to England in order to spread his undead curse, and the story follows the small group of men and one woman battling against him, led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing (the other most famous character to come out of this book).

Interestingly, I feel the need to add the premise here. Count Dracula one of the most famous characters in all of fiction – definitely the most famous vampire and possibly the most famous in all of horror fiction. He has influenced vampire lore and hundreds, if not thousands, of stories over the last 122 years. But I’m willing to bet that, at this point, most people are not familiar with the original tale. I only had a vague idea of it.

Unlike another original horror story I’ve read – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – I actually liked this one. The story was pretty well paced, I enjoyed the villain as a villain, and it was a lot of fun hearing all the old stuff I knew about vampires in its original context.

The only thing I didn’t like about this book, and I admit it was a minor flaw, was the constant meetings of what my grandmother would call the “mutual admiration society.” Nobody was ever just called by their name – Arthur, John, Lucy, Mina, etc – there was always at least two adjectives describing the person before their name followed by a description of their personality. “Dear, sweet Lucy who was always so kind and gentle,” or “Brave, stoic Arthur who put on a good face for his wife…”

…throughout the entire book. And all the descriptions were favorable. ALL OF THEM, except for the ones of Dracula and his ilk, nobody had a bad word to say about anybody. This was so over the top that it was comical. I mean, I know the Victorians were a courteous lot, but come on.

Anyway, aside from the over the top, over flattering descriptions, I truly enjoyed Dracula. So many hours of fun with other books, movies, stories came from Bram Stoker’s book. It’s one hell of a legacy for a guy who was best known as an actor’s personal assistant when he was alive.

Mr. Dickens and His Carol

authors, fiction, history August 14, 2019 Leave a comment

One of my favorite stories ever is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and Dickens gets a lot of credit for “inventing” Christmas with that story. His tale of a crotchety, miserly old man visited by three ghosts of Christmas whose teachings grow his heart three sizes  warms my heart every Christmas. I make it a point to read/listen to A Christmas Carol each year, and each year I watch the movie with my mom. The best version is the black and white version with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge.

Samantha Silva’s Mr. Dickens and His Carol is one of a series of tellings about Dickens writing his famous Christmas story that have arrived on the scene in the last few years.

The premise: Dickens, his latest novel (Martin Chuzzlewit) a flop with critics turning against him, is blackmailed by his publishers into writing a Christmas story to save them all from financial ruin. This includes Dickens himself, whose growing family and social circle is becoming more and more unruly, with his wife planning a large Christmas party for just about everyone they know. With a nasty bout of writers’ block and an approaching deadline coming up fast, Dickens meets a muse named Eleanor Lovejoy, who sends Dickens on a Scrooge-like journey of his own, testing his beliefs in generosity, friendship, and love.

The story he writes changes the way the world looks at Christmas.

A little history: this era in England – the Victorian era – was the time when celebrating the Christmas season was becoming a big deal. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularized the Christmas tree in Britain, and carols had experienced a revival. Other Christmas stories had proven successful, so it isn’t unbelievable that Dickens’s publishers would coerce him into writing one.

I loved this book. I thought it would be sappy and over sentimental but it wasn’t. I liked that Dickens was a grumpy old man and that he bah humbug’d it a couple of times. I liked that his relationship with Eleanor was more that of friendship than dirty old man, which was what I was expecting. I don’t know why I was expecting this, but I was wrong and was happy about it.

A Christmas Carol was supposedly written in a frenzied six weeks, with much of the work composed in Dickens’s head as he took long nighttime walks around London (some accounts say as many as 15-20 miles) and I felt Silva did a particularly good job conveying this time crunch in the book. Writing the whole thing in six weeks required a lot of frenzied periods of activity, and I felt that here.

Dickens put an emphasis on a humanitarian side of the season, and that was felt here too, showing Dickens influences due to his relationships with his family, friends, and fans.

And of course, there was a happy ending.

Mr. Dickens and His Carol is a must read for anyone who loves Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and the spirit of the holiday.

The Historian

fiction, history, horror, supernatural, suspense / thriller August 12, 2019 Leave a comment

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova may have been my favorite book of 2018 for its detail, complexity, and the blending of the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula.

It kicked off a series of Dracula books for me in 2018. Dracula is a fascinating legend to begin with, and as I said previously, I did a lot of “scary” in 2018. The Historian isn’t a typical “horror” story but there are a lot of elements of it, and it’s definitely a suspenseful book. I’d put it mostly under historical fiction, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

The Historian is a story within a story. It’s actually a story within a story within a story, but it begins to get confusing if you think about it too hard, and it really wasn’t a confusing book. Don’t get me wrong – it was long and quite dense. I did the audiobook version and it was 24 hours? 26? It was long. But it wasn’t confusing.

The unnamed narrator, in Amsterdam in the 1970s, finds a vellum book with a woodcut of a dragon associated with Dracula, and she asks her father, Paul, about it. He explains that he found it in his study carrel during his time as a graduate student in the 1950s. He took it to his mentor/advisor, Professor Bartholomew Rossi, and discovered Rossi had also found one when he was a graduate student in the 1930s. Rossi researches Vlad Tepes, the Dracula myth, and these mysterious books. Rossi travels as far as Istanbul, but unexplained circumstances and characters send him back to his graduate work at the university and Rossi, in the 1950s, informs Paul that he believes that Dracula is, somehow, still alive. After meeting with Paul, Rossi disappears.

There are smears of blood on Rossi’s desk and on the ceiling, but other than that, everything is in place. The police suspect run of the mill foul play, but Paul is certain that something involved in research into the Dracula legend is to blame for his disappearance.

The majority of the book follows the 1950s story, with cuts in and out to the 1930s and 1970s storylines, with all three of the main characters – the narrator, Paul, and Rossi – researching the Dracula myth in Europe and eventually converging later in the book.

As I said, the blending of history and folklore in this story made it one of my favorites of 2018. There’s tons of cool info about Vlad Tepes, the Dracula legend, and Europe in general. I loved the story surrounding the narrator, Paul, and Rossi as well as the ambiguous ending.

The Historian was one of those books that made me sad it was over, like it should have kept going, like there was even more story that could have been told. It was so good that I jumped on Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, which ended up being one of the books I returned early and didn’t finish last year. I don’t know if Kostova is a one hit wonder, but if she is, I very much enjoyed and highly recommend this one hit. If you enjoy history and folklore like I do, I think you’ll like The Historian as well.

The Darkest Evening of the Year

fiction, horror, supernatural, suspense / thriller August 11, 2019 Leave a comment

This was my first Dean Koontz book, and honestly, I borrowed it because it featured golden retrievers.

Our heroine, Amy, runs a rescue group for abandoned/abused golden retrievers. Her dedication to saving abused animals can be reckless. She has a love interest who she can’t fully commit to, and when she adopts Nicki, a series of strange incidents start happening that indicate she’s being stalked.

Ok, so I don’t remember that much of this book. Honestly? It wasn’t that good. What I do remember is the impression that golden retrievers are awesome (I now have one and he is super awesome, but he is a handful), this wasn’t the horror story I thought I was getting, and miracles are a cop out way to end a book.

This was marketed to me as a horror story but it seemed more supernatural/suspense because of the whole dogs are angels and a higher power is at play aspect of it. Like I said, miracles are a crappy way to end a book.

I know that Koontz wrote this book because of HIS golden retriever. IIRC, he said to the dog that she was an angel sent from Heaven, and that the dog seemed to recognize that he said this.

I believe it. Totally legit. Dogs ARE angels sent from Heaven.

This book’s biggest redeeming qualities are the golden retrievers. I love them, they are wonderful, and they are without a doubt special angels. The miracles and lack of interesting plot weren’t my favorite aspects. Buuuut golden retrievers. The book gets a pass.

Doll Bones

fiction, horror, supernatural June 25, 2019 Leave a comment

Doll Bones was the first of three stories I read by Holly Black in 2018. I didn’t realize it was a YA book when I started it, but I liked it enough to continue listening once I realized it was.

The story is about three kids named Zach, Poppy, and Alice who all play together and, now, at about 12 years old are caught between being kids and being teenagers. One of the characters in their game, the Great Queen, is based on a doll Poppy’s mother keeps in a case. Poppy, not wishing to grow up and wishing to keep her friends close to her (she’s figured out Alice has a crush on Zach and that Zach is now, for a reason unknown to her but revealed to the reader, embarrassed by the fact he plays with them) tells her friends that she had a dream about the Great Queen, and she’s actually a haunted doll made of human remains that wants to be put back in the cemetery where she belongs.

Poppy, Alice, and Zach end up on a quest to return the doll to its rightful resting place.

This was a good story that captured the heartache of adolescence so well. Everything’s hard, everything’s awkward, everything feels like the end of the world, even though it isn’t. I related too well to Poppy’s sense of losing her friends, to Alice’s crush on Zach, to Zach’s embarrassment about doing “baby” things but still loving them.

That said, the “horror” aspect to this story was a little weak. It wasn’t clear if the doll was haunted or if the kids were imagining it. A little more background on the girl who was supposed to be haunting them would have been nice too.

I also was sad because it was over too soon. I think the whole audiobook was done in about 5 hours and I wished there was more of it. Or a sequel. Sadly, there’s not.

Doll Bones was a fun one. It also convinced me I wanted to read more of Holly Black’s book, which I did later in 2018.

The Apartment

fiction, horror, supernatural, suspense / thriller June 24, 2019 Leave a comment

The Apartment by the S.L. Grey (which I think is actually a pen name for two people, IIRC) was disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, the premise sounds good. From Amazon:

Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan. They find a genial, artistic couple with a charming apartment in Paris who would love to come to Cape Town. Mark and Steph can’t resist the idyllic, light-strewn pictures, and the promise of a romantic getaway. But once they arrive in Paris, they quickly realize that nothing is as advertised. When their perfect holiday takes a violent turn, the cracks in their marriage grow ever wider and dark secrets from Mark’s past begin to emerge.

Not as good as it sounds.

First, my entertainment curse continued: I figured out where the book was going pretty early on. I didn’t know exactly how it would get there, but it did. I won’t offer many spoilers here, in case you want to read the story. I didn’t find the ending great either. A haunting that travels? Please.

Second, I found the horror aspect of this story underdeveloped. There was not a lot of horror here. In fact, the book seemed a little bit confused about whether it wanted to be a ghost story or a psychological thriller. The mix made it fail a bit at both. It had some suspenseful moments, but overall…meh.

Third, I found Mark and Steph annoying, Mark infinitely more so. Steph was neurotic and paranoid and scared for her daughter, which is plenty annoying, but Mark just…ugh just brooding and whining and self-indulgent.

I will say there are literary references to Daphne du Maurier here. I don’t remember what they were at this point, but I remember thinking that I really enjoyed that aspect of it.

I won’t say that The Apartment is a complete waste of time, but I wouldn’t recommend it, either.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

fantasy, fiction, horror June 23, 2019 Leave a comment

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the first Ray Bradbury book I’ve attempted since Fahrenheit 451 in high school. I hated Fahrenheit 451. It was something about the way they taught it in Yorktown High School, because all my Yorktown friends hated it and all my Somers friends, who went to Somers High School, loved it.

Anyway, I never felt inclined to read another Bradbury book. “Overrated” came to mind when I thought of Fahrenheit 451. But in the end I caved.

I went with Something Wicked This Way Comes because, and this will become more evident with later book choices in 2018, I started looking for dark fantasy/horror/sci-fi books. Not so much sci-fi, but I didn’t rule it out.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the first of those books. I think I picked it because I read that Stephen King liked it, and because it was available on audiobook at the very moment I needed a new one.

I liked it. Mostly. It was a little slow for me. The basic premise is that the town two 13 year old best friends live in (their names are Will & Jim) is visited by a traveling carnival. The carnival is run by a man named Mr. Dark, who is especially attentive to Jim.

After seeing several disturbing things at the carnival, the boys are eventually kidnapped by Mr. Dark, who has been recruiting people into his carnival for a long time, and, basically, have to fight their way out.

It was an interesting book, a lot of allegory for good and evil, and, as I said, a little slow. I will say that the whole thing thoroughly creeped me out in a lot of ways, so mission accomplished there. I don’t like carnivals. At all. But I think my feelings about the story overall may have been influenced by my dislike of the narrator of the audiobook. I didn’t enjoy his performance much.

That said, everyone raves about Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed this novel far more than Fahrenheit 451, but the little voice in my head still whispers “overrated.”