Reviews and Comments

I really liked Gilman's urban fantasy books, Thunderer and Gears of the City. This one takes place in the American West-steampunk universe, and is nowhere near urban fantasy. I'm not generally a fan of steampunk, but this time the usual anachronistic technology was melded with supernatural elements that seemed pretty incongruous at first, but started to grow on my about midway through.

It wasn't a chore to read (unlike Mieville's The City And The City), but I didn't really feel super-compelled either. I didn't really care for many of the characters, with the exception of John Creedmore, who was SUPPOSED to be a horrible killer, but who came off as a mix between Mark Twain and Val Kilmer's portrayal of Doc Holliday from the movie Tombstone (at least in my mind XD). The rest of the characters were pretty transient, which is sad because the protagonist is supposed to be the doctor, Liv Alverhuysen.

Maybe it's because the characters are actually in the service of much higher powers: The Line and The Gun, two supernatural forces who inhabit machinery (massive steam engines for The Line, and finely crafted firearms for The Gun). With these two forces at war, constantly looming over everything and basically destroying everything they come into contact to for their own selfish reasons, any and all characters are pretty much throw-aways in the service of one or the other. It's the neutral characters who suffer the most, since they can't possibly stand up to either without spiritual support of their own (which is actually present in the form of a hospital. Seriously).

Overall, it's a well written book, IMO. Steampunk fans may get a bigger kick out of it then I did, but it was a quick and easy read, so long as you're not expecting a groundbreaking or groundshaking novel of millennial importance.

Here's another off-the-wall offering from Moore. I liked this one, but it's was a bit TOO much of an unusual premise to get the extra star. The writing was solid, and Moore's ability to straddle the humorous and the serious is in full effect, but overall it felt like a really bizarre sitcom episode (on premium cable).

The story follows the unfortunate exploits of Tucker Case, a pilot for Mary Jean, the stereotypical holy rolling CEO of a big-time cosmetics company (what you'd expect Mary Kay to be like, I guess). After a really wacky accident involving a prostitute, a plane and Case' penis, he's fired from his job, only to find a new one as an on-call pilot for missionaries on a small Pacific island. Case eventually finds that his employers aren't missionaries, but are trafficking in human organs harvested from the island's native population, the Shark People. The missionary's wife tricks the natives by posing as the Sky Princess, a nude representation that the natives recognize from the nose art of a WWII bomber that landed on their island in the 40's, under the direction of Captain Vincent, who sent the occupying Japanese packing. Yeah, it's pretty convoluted. There's also ghosts, a talking fruit bat in sunglasses, and a transvestite Filipino named Kimi. And a cannibal.

I think the whole menagerie of non-standard characters is what set me off on this one. Case is called a "loser in a cool-guy's body" or something to that effect, but I didn't buy it. He scored with numerous women, always has one-liners and come-backs, and never seemed really behind the 8 ball the way a loser should be. The missionaries were never really fleshed out beyond greedy and immoral. The most interesting aspect of the novel was the depiction of the Shark People who, while just as off-the-wall as everyone else, at least had their culture depicted and explained to some extent. Then there was the whole "cargo cult" aspect, and it went off the deep end.

Christopher Moore is very good at bridging the gap between a serious story and an absurd farce, and out of all of his books that I've read so far, this one is probably the best at mixing the humor with the drama.

The story is about Charlie Asher, a second-hand store operator who finds himself as a "minor death": not able to kill people at their appointed time, but responsible for caring for their soul until it can find a new home. Unfortunately, Charlie obtained this role the day his daughter was born, and the day his wife died. As a new, single father who must bear the responsibilities of a "Death Merchant", Charlie has a lot on his plate.

What makes this book different from the other Moore books I've read is that it deals with death both as a serious subject (Charlie quickly obtains a deep respect for palliative care workers), a source of humor (the other Death Merchants are a really quirky bunch, as are the people in Charlie's normal orbit), and also with a heavy helping of macabre. There were times I thought I was reading a sillier version of a Stephen King or Clive Barker novel, but the proximity of the truly dark content to the outright absurd is really a fire that keeps the engine running. It never becomes over the top, one way or the other, and turns from one to the other at just the right times.

One key concept that I wanted to mention was Charlie's role as a "Beta Male", because it's really central to the character, and is amazingly spot on. Unlike the more testosterone, successful Alpha Males, Beta Males survive by weighing options and knowing the better part of valor. Charlie is a very unlikely hero, an unlikely choice to deal in death, but he's made better by this responsibility as a Death Merchant, and as a single father.

This book didn't make me laugh out loud like Lamb, but it felt very well constructed and fantastically entertaining.

Books like The Scar are examples of why people have to read over sitting passively in front of a TV or movie screen. There's no way that this kind of book could be turned into moving pictures without reducing it to cheap tricks that attempt to make the imagery that Mieville brings forth acceptable to a wider audience.

Thankfully, this is not the kind of book that a "wider audience" would enjoy. Mieville is very much a pro at world-building. One of the hallmarks of this high-style of "urban fantasy" is to make sure the reader recognizes the environment both as geography AND as a character in the story. The book isn't overdone with flowery description in the Anne Rice vein, thankfully. It's both the description that we DO have, combined with the cadence of the writing, that sets each scene. These descriptions and the writing style felt very much like the SCORE of the book.