Two feuding Victorian magicians propel each of their innovations to new heights, but at a cost neither truly understands until the endless revenges rob them of truly fulfilled lives. Told through different character perspectives and in non-linear time the book itself is a magic trick that endeavours to surprise and delight in its arrangement of revelations. What a blast this was.

I had put this off for a while, having watched and loved the movie. Because some movies do transcend their source material and this might be one of them. Actually my familiarity with the story only helped the novel pull off its misdirection and obfuscation, I think. I don’t want to reveal the differences because I think it’s really fun to see how they are similar. But the book is certainly it’s own construction and it is a unique experience to see how it unfolds, regardless if you prefer one over the other. Clearly each author is interested in different aspects of the same story, and so in a way elucidate one another. Very satisfied and very happy for this outcome. And surprised, as for a while it was a 3 star read, but when it comes to a head, boy does the structure of the novel turn into a corker of a third act.

The classic coper with insides tugging toward the truth that the descent to actually find some drags him into subcultures and recesses one doesn’t emerge from whole or fully aligned. In looking for the killer dubbed the Black Dahlia there is no good guys. The not so bad are probably the victims and the pursuit of the killer is more to scratch the itch of an answer than to adjudicate normal Justice. Bad people doing bad things with unchecked authority is the name of the game.

You can tell right away too. The parlance is steeped in racial slurs from the onset. There’s no peace, just a vice that stops, briefly, what is currently predominantly wrong. Cobbled patchworks of people working jobs that appeal for unexamined reasons. We readers know far more about the detectives than they do, all they can do is drive, never perceiving the flog that will lead them to ruin. And who knows if they’ll find any capital A answers. If they burn themselves to the quick, and if they’re lucky, maybe they’ll get ab abstraction of what happened they can hypothesize about, possibly leading to the enactment of their own broken justice.

Needless to say, this is not a happy book. But it does make a lot of sense after a while. And that’s terrifying. It’s an indictment of everyone, even the the way the public indicts the victim. It’s also pretty fair, I feel. There’s no moral ground, least of all in the manmade, concrete system erected to “police” the public. And as misogynistic as this is, it’s toward a larger purpose, aimed at a condemnation of the right things, I think. I don’t think it fully nails the larger aspects of the underlying, underlined themes just yet. But the intent is clear. I imagine the next one will be more refine, and that will be quite something.

A closeted queer man dates and takes on a wife at the same time as attempting a clandestine affair with a gay man. Told through the perspective of the man’s wife on the death bed of the gay lover and the diary of said man at the time of the affair, now long over, we learn what and how the various secrets effect their lives.

This was fine, overall. It’s quite long for not much happening, feeling overwritten for my taste. When we get to the journal and the guy always refers to him as “my policeman” I was about ready to dnf it though. Mercifully I sped up the reading to get through that, it was so annoying. I think it’s got decent drama and tender characters, but the plot is predictable and I think I’ve just read a lot of stories like this done much better, so didn’t find myself affected by it much. The structure and framing and mystery do the job though, ultimately ended up feeling positive about it.

Adam Binder has to return home to a family that tolerates him rather than loves him, when his brother’s partner is assaulted by a possible magical force, and the family finds themselves in need of the protagonist black sheep. In his effort to unravel a much more complex problem than he initially thinks, Adam finds himself tied to a stranger and having no choice but to embroil his brother in the unseen world.

This sometimes gets referred to as YA in reviews, and I think that’s just from the plain, straight-forward commercial prose style that is pretty indicative of fantasy these days, because not much else signals Ya to me, other than maybe the queer inclusive romance, which sadly does seem like a staple of That genre when it should be pervasive throughout all fiction by now.

Regardless, this is pretty typical Urban Fantasy to me. Think Dresden files but with a low magic, gay, and different roots protagonist, but with very similar fantasy elements. The worldbuilding is quite quick but one of the more fun aspects. I expected his socio-economic background to come into play more so than it actually did. It’s setting material and I guess in stark contrast to some of the more powerful, “elite”? Magical creatures. But it’s didn’t feel like it was touched on all that much, possibly because there was quite a lot going on. There’s the insertion of the New Romantic interest but also another, prior one. Somewhat tropey but with so many other fantasy stories having that kind of power fantasy, I don’t begrudge it. By virtue of their being not that many stories with gay characters, it’s fresh enough. Then there’s the overarching problem that touches on his family and home life that needs to built up and divulged, on top of pacing out a plot.

It was descent in every respect, fairly typical of a debut in it being somewhat uneven, and navigated to enough interesting and cool parts that it wasn’t a chore. I’m not sure if I’d give the next a go, but it was a fun, light diversion from other reading and not a staple of my diet, though I’ve read quite a lot of fantasy in the past I am moving away from commercial fiction prose, as it just doesn’t engage me much and hampered this from fully connecting with me. I can see why so many people love it, though.

3.5 rounded up for the innovative aspects I enjoyed seeing

probably the most interesting meta construction about the collective unconscious and “story” continues. It’s breadcrumb storytelling like in all comics, but it sure is coming together. I had forgotten some of this, and the foreshadowing is honestly exquisite. Very fun as a re reading experience.

And good that I have the single issues, since ComiXology nuked their browser support and that’s how I read all my digital catalogue.

This is very well written and extremely pleasant to the ear, as the narrator absolutely kills it. Sometimes (infrequently) the advice is of a practical nature, sometimes she talks about the qualities lasting fiction has, and the normal speed at which fiction is typically generated; not comparing your work to prolific, quick writers, as they are the outliers, by far. There is rumination on past writing experiences and contrasts, quite a bit of how her life is organized around writing and, more-or-less, why she does it. In the forefront of this short work is just the craft of the book as a pleasant experience to consume, embodying her own art (exemplified in this text, itself). The last chapter, which I think feels poignant but when thought about after-the-fact, is rather facile.

Always this is so hyper specific to Dillard that any other writer has only the options of simply agreeing or disagreeing when encountering her thoughts, and that’s about all you’ll get from any advice that is divulged. There’s very little of the practical so do not approach it from a self-help or hyper informative standpoint—it’s mostly just the hyper-specific. So, it’s interesting but not useful, is how I’d characterize it, overall.

3.5 rounded up for hot hot sentences

Long term payoff to the max and double the page count of other trades, spoiled.

Off the back of the show I decided to give this a go. The time travel conceit tied to the plotting is really fun and engaging. Henry finds himself unmoored in time by way of, possibly, a genetic abnormality. As such, he ends up revolving around specific events and people—one of whom is his wife. As we follow each narrator we see her meet him at various times in his life, and her chronicle fairly linearly their story. Both have a structure to them, though. And the problems and various obstacles feel eclectic and imaginative.

It also has a healthy dose of humility and humour. How do you spend time with a child you know is going to be your wife, growing to be a woman. What does that dynamic become, evolve into? When and how can choices be altered and what is cemented, despite being terrible? What would the challenges of suddenly finding yourself in another time for an indeterminate amount of time be? The answers turn out to lean into the intricate plotting the setup benefits from.

The weakest part—which is more specific to my taste, probably—is that the conceit of when and how and where Henry jumps to is not adjudicated. It’s the way things are. Sometimes merciful, sometimes cruel. Only some of them do have structure or a pattern, of sorts. So, with that being there but the rest not being adjudicated, it shows exactly where the author has their thumb on the scale. It happens like that because it’s what’s interesting and what the plot benefits from, sure, but it also pulls back the curtain because that isn’t always the case. Otherwise the tricks pulled off with the unusual narrative structure couldn’t happen. Cake and ice cream, etc.

There isn’t really a bad instalment yet. The party breaks, Tom is wounded, and a side story becomes integral and works to reveal some cool stuff, along with threads from a long while back appearing again. The downbeat it needs after the wild ride before this one, basically. Very cool to see the Wilson in the studio scene from the thugs perspective and what that means, and that issues aesthetic is phenomenal. Unicorns and side characters. Hits better this second time, I think.

When Marcus and friends go to play essentially a geocache game, they inadvertently stumble close to the area of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. A bridge is blown up and one of them is hurt. Rather than hail help, though, they catch the eye of the DHS, who illegally detains them them for days, suspending their civil rights, and humiliates, plays them against one another, and tortures them. Told solely from Marcus’s perspective, once he gets out, instilled with fear and shame, he lies to his parents about being detained because they threaten him—subsequently one of his friends are still missing, possibly dead. The events radicalize him and some of the friends and they found a secure protocol over X Net (installed on exploited Xbox), and they begin to fight back against the mounting fascism the DHS continues to ramp up in the wake of the terrorist attack.

This was recommended to me many times as a great piece of present day cyberpunk (third wave, I’m guessing?), but I’ve only just gotten to it. Honestly, it would make a fantastic addition to a school curriculum, as it is YA, lightly touching on sexual experience in high school. The strength of the text, by far and away, is it’s ability to distill fairly complex technical details as they resistance ramps up. And it’s all real, as you’d expect from the author. I own myself a few xbox 360 with the exploit that could run this stuff. It talks about paranoid Linux and various protocols for encryption and communication. It’s really fantastic.

It also manages to show how an event affects the minds of different generations. Marcus’s dad is radicalized the other way, buying into the DHS propaganda because he thought Marcus had died, and that primal fear is always what feeds all breeds of conservatism, especially fascism. Under the guise of freedom of X and safety of peoples, the playbooks is exercised on San Fran, polarizing all of the characters one way or the other, causing plausible—though heavy handed—debates for each side to take place. In school and out of it.

Young adult isn’t my favourite just because of the prose style and how leading the text is. The author is pretty much always wearing his politics on the text, though does show arguments against the leftist rhetoric. The fact that it’s correct doesn’t make it that nuanced of an argument though, and you’ll feel the author using the narrative didactically for communicating, essentially, a real life playbook for resistance against a government that reacted similarly to, say, 9/11. Another reason to make it a discussion text: as with all of this authors work it is available for free, digitally.

Fantastic stuff all round. It would make a great book club, class room discussion piece and the character work is believable. It’s very easy to connect with Marcus and see the thought process behind his decisions; both constructive and destructive. There’s also a romance subplot that was fine, a bit tropey and slightly to be expected for the age range this is intended for. I think it’s handled well, but I didn’t care about it much. Though I tend not to, typically.