octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I read and reviewed these two novels separately, so this is basically just for my own records. I'm not surprised the two stories were grouped together - they're very similar, both dealing with missing (presumed dead) family members and secrets unravelling.

The collection rates three stars from me, as it's the average of the two individual ratings: three stars each for Tell No One and Gone For Good. Both were fast-paced enjoyable reads, but both had a twist ending that I didn't love. The former because it was deeply irritating, the latter because it was just too obvious. I am not, perhaps, the best audience for twist endings - I very rarely like them - but if they're your thing then you'll probably enjoy these two thrillers.

Really very interesting, and I liked all the characters, even the kid. Usually precocious children in literature are AWFUL, but Lucy's surprisingly tolerable, probably because it's clear she's a total mess.

It's morbid to say, but I found all the autopsy and forensic stuff quite fascinating, which is I suppose an advantage of having the protagonist be an ME rather than a cop. The maple sugar thing just makes me hungry, though.

A collection of unrelated comics - well, they all take place in Sin City and the characters have been around before, but all the storylines are separate. Some work better than others. There's just not a lot of space in a single issue comic to develop plot or character, and the ones that work best here do so because they realise that and actively pared right back. "Silent Night", for instance, is so stripped back that there's hardly any dialogue and it's the best of the bunch. Others, like "Rats", which was also excellent, rely on small bits of repeated dialogue and the sense of the reader to figure it all out. At the other end of the scale were comics like the ones containing the "Blue Eyes" character (Delia) which tried to stuff so much in that it ended up relying on a bunch of tired old tropes and just not being that great, really. Averages out at three stars, I reckon.

I'm glad this is the last of the series, because I've solidly lost interest. It's all just so repetitive. Man has mysterious half-naked woman disappear on him, tracks her down and kills lots of people doing it. Can Miller tell any other story in this bloody city? Because I feel like I've read it a lot now, and it's always seasoned with many, many pictures of naked women - someone is seriously obsessed with tits - and a heap of exploitation. I get that Sin City is a crapsack world, but surely there are new ways it can be crapsack, because this is lacking in pretty much all imagination and originality at this point and no, that tired and boring hallucinogenic sequence in the middle did not make it better.

This is certainly bizarre. It's based on Burroughs' own drug-filled experiences, a loosely constructed novel - almost a series of vignettes - that are at once hallucinatory, surreal, and satirical. It's also genuinely grotesque, but as Burroughs points out (the edition I read included end pieces and various out-takes from a number of sources) that was exactly the point: drug addiction is sickness and sickness isn't pretty.

I have to admit I was in two minds about it. I was rating it a fairly solid three stars for most of the book. A lot of it's not to my taste, but there's some genuinely clever stuff going on here, and some of the satirical elements especially are brutally cutting. There's also a lot of really imaginative imagery, just astonishingly vivid, that I couldn't help but appreciate. But as it went on, and on, and on (all that extra end material didn't help) I began to drag. It took me a while to get through this book, and in places I had to force myself to go on. Not because of all the grotesquerie, but because I'd begun to be so fed up with the shapelessness and repetition of the whole thing. I was beginning to feel the sort of mild irritation I feel with two star reads in general, and I think at the end what I took away was that, incredible imagery aside, if you're going to want me to read 300 odd pages of anything, there had better be a damn narrative in there somewhere. And there wasn't here, or not enough of one, and I'd begun to find the whole thing moving on to tiresome the longer it went on. On balance, though, I've stuck to the three star rating largely on the strength of the imagery (and on the understanding that, if I'd read another edition, it would have been two-thirds the length and I would have had less time to get sick of it.)

I don't really know what I was expecting when I picked this up. It's got an interesting premise, and though it's ostensibly a novel it reads more like memoir. It's hard not to think that this novel about a poet isn't influenced by the life of the poet who wrote it. Granted, I wasn't familiar with Myles before this, so I don't know how much of this comes from real life and how much is made up out of whole cloth, but I suspect it's weighted heavily to the former.

And, you know, I enjoyed it. I don't think it's anything particularly startling - a novel structured after a poem and presented in a disjointed, interesting sort of way, but for all I get the feeling that Myles and Inferno are supposed to be confronting and perhaps uncomfortable, a wee bit shocking, I just found it mildly pleasant. Some of that's down to plot, I suppose - it hits every note you'd expect of a young poet trying to make it in New York (not that I've ever been a young poet trying to make it in New York, or even known one, but you do sort of absorb expectations of an artistic urban life almost by osmosis.) Most of my enjoyment, however, is due to the language, which if not always to my taste - I prefer prose with a bit more lyricism to it - slips down so easily, almost seamlessly. As I said: pleasant, and I don't mean that in a negative way. I read it in sunshine and it suited the day.

This is an interesting twist on a haunted house story - it's not the house that's haunted, but an object inside it. When Luna's parents die, she goes back to the house she'd been so determined to escape. While organising its sale, she comes across a packet of letters that tell the story of her grandfather, and how he found himself targeted by a creepy, white-eyed figure. Previous victims turned up dead, and two generations later Luna has to research her way to safety, trying to figure out what her grandfather and his colleagues did to stop the haunting.

I really liked the research aspect of this, the searching through libraries and old letters, but the story hinges on the fact that this supernatural threat is contained so long as no-one reads those letters in the first place. And all I can think is: So, Grandad, you chose to hide this lethal crap in your house, even knowing your little grandchild was tempted by the parts of the house you told her not to explore? (She failed to find the letters then, not for want of trying, but there was always the chance she'd succeed in the future - and of course she does, as an adult.) At the very least stick them in a lockbox and bury them in concrete ten foot down or something. It seems like a half-arsed means of keeping away your own supernatural stalker, is what I'm saying.

I haven't read this right this minute, but I noticed it on a list I'm reading my way through, and given that I did a reread of this series this year I'm just adding in the whole thing now for completeness. Anyway, I read and reviewed each volume separately, and the average rating comes to four stars for the set. Philosopher's Stone and Azkaban earned five stars each, Order of the Phoenix four, and the rest of them three.

For me, the high point of this series was Azkaban, and it sort of meandered it's way downhill from there. Don't get me wrong - I really enjoy this series, and have read it quite a few times now, and I do find the later books enjoyable. I also find them bloated. The length kept creeping up, and the story didn't always justify that, I think. Didn't stop them being entertaining, though.

The problem with assessing short story collections is one of averages. I quite enjoyed some of the stories in here, though they're clearly a product of their time. Taken together, it's come out as an ok collection for me. Glad to have read it, but I wouldn't reread.

Bar the utterly distasteful "Thorns" which relies on the ever-offensive "rape as turn-on" trope, it's the stories that seem to have spun off into series that got the most reaction from me. In two cases (Pern and the Tower series) this was positive. The final story, though, "Honeymoon", which ended up in the Brainship series, was pretty dire. Oddly, I remember reading that series when I was young and enjoyed it, so either my tastes have changed or "Honeymoon" was a low point.

I've had this on my list of things to read for a while, but was putting it off because the only other Hemingway I've read is The Sun Also Rises, which I did not like at all. But this was such an improvement! It took a while to get going (the second half is much more interesting than the first) and the prose improved, for me, as it went on. I wonder if a person's opinion of Hemingway relies almost entirely on their opinion of his prose. In Sun, I found it painfully bare. Almost stupidly bare. But this time, that prose is in service of a story that I actually care about, which improves it no end, and that stripped-back prose seems genuinely appropriate for all the action (whereas with Sun, it just made a boring story where very little happened even more boring). To be honest, though, the writing here just seems more accomplished all round. There was a line, about halfway through, referring to the war - "...I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it" - and that sentence was the point when I decided I actually like this book.