Reviews and Comments

Redemption's Blade dives full on into the series title at the top of the cover: After the War. This book takes place after a great fantasy war, when the evil demigod king and his legions of monsters have been defeated, but the scars-the traumas-are still fresh.

Hero Celestaine holds a sword that will cut anything, and she used it to help slay the evil, near immortal Kinslayer and end his war on the whole world. But the evil he did still goes on, and she feels urged to help fix some of it.

And thus the quest, the McGuffin, and all that are here. But what's truly refreshing about this book is the unflinching look at how it would really be, trying to recover from a war that literally brought hell with it. The suffering wrought by a hand without mercy does not simply vanish when that hand is cut off, and that is part of this book's central thesis. That, and how despite all the pain, life does still go on, in some way.

This book offers much. Engaging characters, grand adventure, moments of real hope, but also glimpses of the grim truth that war often brings only pain, even to the victors. It was a gipping read, and I look forward to future entries.

Automatic Eve, by Rokuro Inui
Translated by Matt Treyvaud

This collection of connected short works centers as much on the idea of what life is, or what souls might be, as it does on the plot of a secret creator of clockwork people in a fictional version of Japan.

The titular character is one of these clockwork people, who moves alongside the people of Tempu City like one of them. Her nature, and the secret of her creation, is central to a mystery that permeates this fictional Japan back to its very roots.

This work walks the tightrope linking philosophical rumination and fun fiction quite well. The conceptual heart never overshadows the action and characterization, making for a fun read that still takes time to ponder its oplwn assumptions.

Treyvaud's translation is smooth and apt. It deftly navigates a couple of tricky issues with kanji-based naming play, and maintains the nuances of archaic social roles without stooping to awkward honorific use. It's an easy read with no missteps.

It's interesting to read a book like this in German because I thought they didn't really have a lot of good old fashioned SF there. I was clearly wrong, because this is good, old-fashioned SF.

This is a collection of connected short stories unveiling the history of an intergalactic empire with a rotten piece of madness at its core. We are introduced to the empire via the "hair carpet weavers" of the title-a generational caste of men who spend their entire lives weaving a single, immensely intricate, carpet out of the hair of the women in their families. It sounds silly, but in context it is monstrous, and as the stories add context and background, it becomes almost horrific.

At the same time, there is a lot of heroic rebelling and dimensional bubbles and space-men among the primitives stuff reminiscent of "golden age" SF in the US. And just like that SF, there is a kernel of contemplation at the heart of this book: contemplation of empire, and colonization, and what it looks like when absolute rulers are truly corrupted.

I liked the book, even if some events leading up to the "reveal" are questionable. It's equal parts grim and fun, which is a rare combo.

What a long, strange trip it has been. I have been reading Stephen King for probably 30 years. When I was in Jr. High I used to sneak away from my mom at Wal-Mart to buy paperbacks, and hide them in my pockets until I could get to the privacy of my room. My mother was not a fan, you could say.

I loved those books. I loved the goriness, the crafty little turns of phrase, and the depiction of rurality that I recognized (being from rural Kansas, I guess there's not that much difference between little prairie towns and little New England towns). Over the years, I came to see what King himself called his "salami-making." These were fine, creepy yarns, sometimes even gutwrenchingly sad (Oh, Henry...). But they weren't "Litrachure." King had no pretensions of deep exploration of the human condition, he wrote scary stories to read in the dark.

But now, as I approach middle age, I'm starting to question that truism. Because there are stories like Hearts in Atlantis, or The Body, or this one, Revival, that seem to transcend the rough-ground spiciness of, say, Christine. It might just be the decades of life that have come to inform the writer's thinking. Or it might be the decades of life that have come to inform this reader. But somehow, I think King is tapping into a deeper vein these days.

Revival is at the same time a memoir of a life not wholly unlike Kings, a love letter to the origins of a certain brand of horror, and a look at what makes the first so good, and the last so bad.

For roughly the first half of the book, we read the story of Jamie's life as something not entirely unusual. There are the purely human pains of tragedy and disillusionment. There are also the more mundane growing pains of rough big brothers, feeling your way through first love, and addiction. There is little that could be called supernatural or ominous, apart from what Jamie himself alludes to in hindsight.

This is a slow burn. It builds a living character, a life of complexity and reality that other writers would rush through. But King does not rush here. He takes his time, because this weaving is what makes the latter half punch so hard.

In the latter half, the ominous shadow of Charles Daniel Jacobs (Charlie Daniels and the Devil in Georgia, huh?) grows heavy, and the threads of the weave begin to darken with the taint of Lovecraft, Derleth, and Machen (three names mentioned right at the top of the book...). For this book is as pure an expression of cosmic horror as any you'll find. Jacobs, the reverend of Jamie's youth, is desperate to tap into the powers that run the world behind the world, no matter the cost...

And the cost is great. Because this ending gathers up those threads of youth woven so slowly in the beginning of the book and brings them back to the end to come full circle. The joys of youth become the pain of age, now tainted with darkness from beyond the veil.

It's masterful.

And yet, there is still some salami here. Because King does what other cosmic horrors often avoided: he made the implicit explicit. He describes in detail what lays behind the veil, and in so doing removes much of its more lingering power. There is still dread here, but I can't help but think its was blunted by that choice.

I still think that this is one of the best expressions of King's strength, his characters, and leverages that strength to make a genuinely unsettling horror story. Revival is maybe the best of King, and a transcendence of the limits he placed on himself so long ago.