Finished The Atrocity Archive last night. Enjoyed it, not sure I fell in love with it quite as much as some folks here have. I do appreciate that the technical details are actually pretty good, and the whole first story was wildly inventive in a way I associate with the more excitable periods of sci-fi in the '60s and '70s. Already have the second one loaded up and looking forward to it, so I liked it at least that much.
Good to hear you’re moving deeper into the Laundry series. I’m about halfway through my re-read of the series (so far…the latest novel starts a new trilogy). A lot of stuff that was hinted at in that first novel gets a lot more detailed in the next few books - CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the prime example. And Jennifer Morgue in particular makes use of a particular pop culture reference - James Bond movies - that I found very entertaining.
I just finished Ghostwater by Will Wight. It’s book 5 of the Cradle series. This was the best book yet. Book 1 introduced so much, and then Book 2 and 3 were about process and world building (and really tough to read, filled with technical details), then Book 4 took the characters and put them on an adventure! An honest to god adventure! It was refreshing.
And now Book 5 separated the characters and put them in two separate adventures! Yay! More good stuff! I really enjoyed it. I’ll have to ruminate on it, see if it fulfills my criteria for great science fiction or fantasy (i.e. does it give you insight into your own life, or the world you live in, or does it help you understand new concepts or help you grow as a person after reading it). I suspect it does not. But it’s still a fun read.
My wife found Watchers by Dean Koontz at a little free library and I got excited - a reread of something I think I read a few times when I was a teenager. Blast from the past! It’ll be fun to see how it holds up!
…and it doesn’t, really. It’s about a guy, Travis, who used to be Delta Force, but that never really comes into play. He’s just an alert dude who tens to make good decisions quickly. He makes some traps at the end and keeps guns all over the house. Then there’s Nora, a sheltered woman who thinks she’s ugly, but it turns out she’s super beautiful, and she and Travis are in love, and get married, and raise their son, Einstein, the super-intelligent dog. Yes. Einstein learns to read and understand human speech, spell words with Scrabble tiles, and basically becomes the friendliest furry friend of all time. He’s the result of a government program to breed intelligence, and his counterpart is genetically engineered to be a weapon. That’s The Outsider. They were raised together, and the Outsider hates the dog because the dog is favored and beautiful and the Outsider is ugly and hated. So TO wants to kill the dog. There’s also a hitman with delusions of immortality, but because the book is so sprawlingly unfocused we’re not sure until the end if he’s deluded or actually magical.
That’s the problem. It’s wildly all over the place. It veers from straight-ahead thriller as government agents try to stalk The Outsider and the dog, to wide-eyed fantasy as Travis and Nora explore Einstein’s capabilities, to a few horror scenes as The Outsider stalks and kills, and then there’s numerous just…diversions into weirdness. Particularly in the 2nd half as they go on the run, the pace just falls into a hole with explanatory distractions. Travis knows how to get fake IDs from an SF mobster who works from a basement in a Tenderloin strip club (yep, a strip club - we see it all through Nora’s eyes, letting her be aghast at the looseness of the dancers—and even propositioned by one of them, so we get titillation and a moralistic slant!). Einstein gets sick and we have almost 50 pages of them holing up with a vet, helping out, and musing on how awesome dogs are. It really feels like we’re along for the ride as Koontz follows his obsessions, and unfortunately he’s not much of a writer and can’t illustrate or explain in some pretty hacky ways. A lot of his writing, in fact, is about the nuts and bolts of how people move through a particular challenge—Nora’s elderly lawyer evading government agents to try to contact her, the hitman Vince navigating the particulars of approaching a target for a hit, Travis working out how to communicate with Einstein—and while in many books this is the meat of my interest, it feels like Koontz follows too many things too closely. He gets absorbed with cleverness and minutia, forgetting to tell a story. It’s almost like talking to a deeply nerdy engineer type, who’s interested more in deep particulars than in following the thread of a conversation.
He’s also very sentimental and romantic throughout, and while it works a few times, the feeling is jarring next to some pretty brutal descriptions of the Outsider’s victims. The most affecting idea in the whole book is that the Outsider resents the dog and wishes for love itself, but is too much a weapon of war to find a path outside of violence. It’s final moments are touching and horrifying, even if the climax as a whole feels rushed and unsatisfying.
I think a lot of this stuff would work if I was 15 degrees more into whatever Koontz’s thing is, but without a certain credulity and willingness to go into his world, much of Watchers feels hacky and overwritten.
I want to read a few other old Koontz favorites, Midnight and Dragon Tears, to see how they hold up and relive some of the strange plot elements they each have—Midnight in particular is my template for ‘crazy shit goes down in an isolated town b/c of government tests’, a premise that still appeals hugely. But I don’t have high hopes for them holding up, not after this. Glad I read it, though I skimmed chunks that just went on and on and on; it’s fun to tour through something I used to love.
Yeah, I soured on Dean Koontz pretty fast when I tried him. Great premises in a number of cases, but the follow through…ugh.
I don’t remember the title (maybe just The Rain) but there was one about some sort of horrifying rain that was raising weird fungi and whatnot that seemed great and then he decided that oh look it’s Satan and I was like “uh…okay, dude.”
I just finished a book called The Night Janitor. I went in blind and mostly selected it because I was in the mood for a thriller, and this one is categorized as such. It’s also got a great review score.
Unfortunately, although it’s listed as a thriller it was actually supernatural schlock involving various forms of faith healing and a cat and mouse game. Sure, the characters are paper-thin stereotypes, the antagonist is nothing but a rage monster, and the good guys take 3/4ths of the book to finally relent and explain the hows and whys of the situation to eachother (and the reader) but its biggest crime is that it is super duper predictable. The reader will see every twist coming from a mile away.
I’m quickly losing faith in reader review scores.
I have a fondness for that era of Koontz from my youth as well. I remember liking Watchers. My family would listen to the book on tape during our long drives to visit my grandparents in Port Angeles, Washington. Was Midnight one of the Christopher Snow books? I remember liking those a lot as well.
I enjoyed his Frankenstein series. At least until he didn’t want to put out one of the books, got pressured into writing it, and it was complete crap.
After that I was done with him. The first Odd Thomas book was very good, though.
I totally ignore Amazon and Goodreads reader reviews. I don’t know these people, I don’t know their tastes. I usually feel the same way about the big review periodicals like Booklist etc. Don’t read them, don’t know if the praise in the blurb means anything in this context. What I look for on Amazon or Goodreads is blurbs from authors I’ve read and enjoyed or reviews by same (more of a Goodreads phenomenon). In my experience, if someone writes books I like to read, they will read books I like to read.
Did they make a movie of Watchers? That sounds a lot like something I saw in the 80s.
Dear God in Heaven, reader review scores are fucking worse than useless. As supporting evidence, I submit to the court a random selection of literally any three reviews selected at random from Amazon or Goodreads. You will never get those ten minutes back.
As hacky as I may have been in any previous life that may or may not have allegedly existed, at least I wasn’t those fucking people.
They’re useful in the very narrow sense of finding out if the e-book is done right. Proper fonts, pagination, that sort of thing, especially for stuff that’s in the public domain.
But, yeah… I don’t care whether Kittylover264 loved the main character.
Yes, they definitely did. But IIRC, they replaced the main character with one of the Coreys.
I remember reading Phantoms out loud one week during a summer on a houseboat. It was family-friendly enough that other 12 year olds and the parents could enjoy it. A great time.
Stipulated.
Let’s just say that the vast-majority-so-overwhelming-it-may-as-well-be-everyone of people who are moved to review books online do…not share my criteria for evaluating novels.
Seven of Infinities by Aliette de Bodard is quite good. Set in her Vietnam-inspired Xuya space opera universe. It’s a pastiche on the later Arsène Lupin stories by Maurice Le Blanc in which Lupin is mostly retired from thieving because it’s too easy and boring, and he sort of swoops down on someone in trouble to mess with the bad guys and typically falls in love with a damsel in distress.
Except of course in this novella Lupin is a female-oriented Mindship thousands of years in the future, and the damsel is an empire-accredited scholar of poetry with more than one dark secret in her past…
I just read a short story by her in Galactic Empires, an anthology about…Galactic Empires. It is very space opera, and no clunkers yet (about halfway through now).
Will have to check out more of her stuff, thanks for the review!
I finish it recently as well. It was okay.
I did kind of figure the co-author wrote it, I thought it was a little more different than you did.
Reacher was quite a bit more talkative than usual.
Not bad, but I’ve never been a fan of the co-author sellout.
Although, I guess Lee Child jumped that shark when he touted Tom Cruise as Reacher.
Yeah, I tend to view the Reacher series like the old Mickey Spillane novels: A fun read, but light. Which in these days is welcome.
Good old Mike Hammer!
Although I can bet that they will never get republished as politically incorrect as they were…