(I'm still not sure how I'll deal with the backlog -- perhaps some summer vacation time will be eaten up by plugging through some capsule reviews. I really wish I had more time for reviews, and I live in hope that someone will one day want to pay me to review stuff again -- actual money is a powerful motivator, and I never missed a deadline for my paying gigs.)
So here's what I read this month, with either links or a quick take. It's not what I would want in a perfect world -- but who ever said this was a perfect world?
- Matthew Stover, Caine's Law
(6/6)
I've been an unabashed Stover booster since the days of his first two novels from Roc, Iron Dawnand Jericho Moon
, and I bought everything he published for the SFBC when I still worked there. And his "Caine" novels -- Heroes Die
, Blade of Tyshalle
, Caine Black Knife
, and now this one -- are the books he clearly cares the most about, and pours the mot of himself into. (I've reviewed a couple of Stover's books here -- a Star Wars novel with an improbably long title, and Caine Black Knife -- and I'd recommend that second link for a longer explanation/advocacy of what the Caine novels are and why you should read them.) Caine's Law is officially the second half of the duology that Caine Black Knife began, but it's less specifically tied to Black Knife and more deeply enmeshed in the whole series than that would imply. I wouldn't start here, though -- this is the fourth novel about a complex character in a complex world, told in an even more complex way that the prior novels, and a new reader will miss a lot of nuance jumping in here. Luckily, since I last complained about Stover's unavailability, all of the earlier books have come out in electronic form, so just plop down your $7.99 (cheap!) for Heroes Die
- John Scalzi, Redshirts (6/12)
An actual, standalone review of this novel is really, really coming -- honestly, it's more than half done already, and it may even post today -- in my last-ditch attempt to remain relevant as an actual reviewer of recent books. Watch this space for a link to that review once it appears. 
Donald E. Westlake, The Comedy Is Finished(6/14)
In the late '70s, Westlake began writing a novel -- using his serious tone, like Kahawaor High Adventure
-- about a middle-aged TV host (somewhere in the territory between Dean Martin and Bob Hope) who is kidnapped by a group of leftover '60s radicals. It was still unpublished -- though apparently finished -- when Martin Scorcese's 1983 movie The King of Comedy
, with a somewhat similar premise, was released, and so Westlake shelved the book and it was forgotten until a photocopy turned up after his death in the basement of a friend and fellow writer. Thirty years later, The Comedy Is Finished slots in well with the tougher Westlake books of that era -- it's psychologically smart (though stuck in the idiom of the time, of necessity), full of cracking dialogue and some dark, sly humor, and strongly plotted with some excellent scenes. It's not right up at the top of Westlake's work, but it's close -- this isn't the typical trunk novel, just a book that missed its best window and then got forgotten for too long.
Frank Miller, Holy Terror(6/16)
I am very sorry to report that Frank Miller is Not Kidding here -- or, if he is, he's buried it so deep as to make no difference. This -- as reported, and derided, widely when originally published in 2011 -- is the story of not-Batman and not-Catwoman defeating the ridiculously over-the-top and entirely silly plot of not-al-Quaeda to randomly destroy stuff in not-Gotham City. Not-al-Qaeda does this because they are Evil, in the way that all Muslims (or possibly everyone not Frank Miller; this part isn't entirely clear) are. The art is full Late Miller -- big slabs of black relieved by small pops of color and what appears to have been a small troop of infantry walking over the completed pages in not-quite-clean boots. So that's dynamic, though often silly -- it's worth looking at, at least. The story, though, is a complete mess: a loud, incoherent rant about the necessity of ultraviolence in the service of one's cause -- which, with only minor tweaks, could as easily serve as an advertisement for al-Quaeda. It's always sad to see an artist who used to be at least moderately intelligent -- if never what one would call moderate in anything else -- turn so fully into a frothing parody of himself, but if this is what Miller wants to do, it's our duty to point and laugh as loudly as possible, in hopes that it will eventually penetrate.
Jean Shepherd, In God We Trust -- All Others Pay Cash(6/18)
This was the first of the five books collecting Shepherd's occasional magazine pieces, shoehorned into a fix-up to make them look like a single narrative. It's also entirely focused on Shepherd's childhood -- or rather the lightly fictionalized childhood of "Ralph Parker" of Hohman, Indiana -- during the Great Depression, unlike some of the later collections, which ranged more widely through Shepherd's work. (I reviewed The Ferrari in the Bedroomhere, some years back.) The fix-up frame is a very light one; Ralph has returned to Hohman and landed in the bar run by his childhood buddy Flick, and each of the (very short) interstitial chapters basically sees Ralph and Flick say "hey, remember that thing?" before the next chapter goes into detail on that thing. Several of those chapters will be familiar to fans of the movie A Christmas Story
, which was scripted by Shepherd based on stories of his childhood from this book and others. (The movie focuses on Ralph at about the age of ten, though, while the book ranges more widely, including several exploits from his teen years.) The whole thing is entertaining Americana, with only a minor undertone of cornpone -- Shepherd and his stand-in Ralph were fancy-pants New York writers revisiting the scenes of their unlikely childhoods, which led to the usual nostalgia, but even more a sense of "hey, remember that great story." Shepherd, luckily, was more interested in rolling out a great yarn -- he's a storyteller in the great 19th century American tradition of Twain -- than in polishing the image of his childhood. This isn't a great book, but it's a decent humorous look at How We Lived Then and a nice line extension for folks who only know Shepherd from A Christmas Story. Also: this is the book with the story about the Red Ryder air rifle (with a compass and sundial in the stock), which formed the spine of that movie.
Yes, that's pretty pitiful. I had three trips this month -- two for work, one to chaperone Thing 1's class trip to Washington, DC -- and also read essentially no comics/graphic novels/manga, but that's still a lousy showing. We'll see if I can do better next month.
.)
. It's the conclusion to the "Hater" trilogy, also including the novels 
and 
, about a deeply crapsack near future in which some sufficient reason has changed a large portion of the human race into "Haters," who apparently spend all of their time either killing the Unchanged or fighting with each other for dominance. (I find dystopias, especially horror dystopias, intensely dull.) Them Or Us was originally published in hardcover last November, but the trade paperback edition will be available on July 17th from Thomas Dunne Books.
, edited by Christopher Golden. And, yes, it's another collection of stories about zombies -- all originals in this one, 19 of them from folks including Orson Scott Card, Dan Chaon, Chelsea Cain, Jonathan Maberry, Simon R. Green, and Amber Benson. This one is from Griffin (a different imprint of the same company that publishes Them Or Us), and will also arrive in stores on July 17th.
, the second novel (after 
) in a secondary-world Young Adult fantasy series about a thief who calls herself Widdershins (she's young; what can you expect?). It's the kind of book that has a Church with a capital C, and a Thieves' Guild with a capital TG, not to mention a Guard ditto. It's been available in hardcover since early June.
, by Philippa Ballantine. (No relation, apparently.) This is another epic fantasy with a lot of Capitalized Names -- Hunter, Kindred -- and made-up names -- Vaerli, Casiah, Talyn, Byre -- and more than the recommended dose of angst and protagonist-torture (she "lost her people and her soul working for the man who was their destruction," to be precise). It came out in trade paperback last week -- but UK readers may find it familiar, since it was originally published there in 2006. (So how did the series turn out, O UK readers?)
, publishing in July from First Second. (It's written by Carla Jablonski and illustrated by Leland Purvis, like the first two volumes.) I 
, here during my last run of Book-A-Day in early 2010. (And I still have the second book, 
, a side-story to the popular Great Teacher Onizuka manga by the original creator Toru Fujisawa.
, was published to general acclaim and strong sales last year, so it's time for it to hit paperback -- and so it does, in a new Spiegel & Grau edition coming on June 26. I didn't read it in hardcover -- it would be more accurate to say I deliberately avoided it in hardcover, since I suspected I would have Strong Views about it -- but now a copy is in my home, and so alea iacta est.
, which I have sitting in front of me right this second, even though it won't publish (from Penguin) until August. Rift is some kind of supernatural story -- with a healthy dollop of romance, if I know my YA trends -- about a feisty heroine. I'm not entirely sure of the setting, though, and the book isn't much help -- I'm going to guess that it's late-medieval (historical fantasy division), but it could easily be secondary-world, alternate-history, or something even more baroque than those possibilities.
, the first novel by Megan Powell. It's a contemporary fantasy with secret groups wielding supernatural powers, but I'm not getting an urban fantasy vibe from it -- it looks more like early Stephen King (Dead Zone or Carrie). The heroine, Magnolia, escaped from her horrifying family and immediately was captured by a mysterious organization devoted to stopping people like (exactly like) her horrible family. Of course, it's not utterly unlike modern urban fantasy -- the back cover copy hints of a romance for Magnolia, as well. This is available from Amazon -- and any other retailers willing to collude in their own demise -- in July.
, a cross between that old chestnut, the waking-up-with-amnesia book, and the supernatural-investigator book, as epitomized by Jim Butcher. Quentin Draith -- supernatural investigators always have pretentious names! -- wakes up in a creepy private hospital, under the care of people who don't mean him well, and must reclaim his identity as an investigator (and blogger, I chuckle to note) of the supernatural, and re-learn his particular secret special powers. It's the first in a series called "Unspeakable Things," and it'll be out in July.
was way back in 2002), 
. It's a big near-future novel with many viewpoint characters and what may be an Enigmatic Alien Artifact -- so my guess is that this is Brin back in Earth-mode, concerned with the future of mankind, privacy, life in the universe, and similar weighty topics. It's coming as a Tor hardcover on the 19th.
, the second in the contemporary fantasy series that began with 
. And, yes, they're about a young female zombie -- who still has most of her own brains, despite her desire for eating brains -- who is not overly refined. (That's her, presumably, on the cover.)
by Tracy Hickman, the second in the epic "Annals of Drakis" series. (The first book was 
.) It's an epic fantasy series, of course, with a cruel elf empire, plucky human slaves battling long odds, and, most definitely, dragons.
