octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

What a great idea for an anthology! Half the stories are about zombies, half the stories about unicorns, and connecting them all is the ongoing snark of the editors, both of whom are extremely partisan towards their chosen creature... and unrelentingly negative towards the other. Surprisingly, come the end of the book, I found myself solidly on Team Unicorn. I can't say I've ever been terribly excited about unicorns before - compared to the rest of the mythological animals they've always come across as a bit boring, to be honest - but the best three stories in here, by far, were on the side of the pointy-headed horses. "A Thousand Flowers" by Margo Lanagan, "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn" by Diana Peterfreund, and the hilariously, awfully named "Princess Prettypants" by Meg Cabot were all great. The rest of the stories were okay, but those three were the only ones I'd go back to. And I believe that Peterfreund has a series on the killer unicorns which I'm going to have to look up, because that one was, I think, my favourite.

Sometimes there's no other word for it but "rollicking". These historical adventure novels are highly readable. I'd call them amusing pieces of fluff, but I think there's probably far more thought gone into the historical settings and politics than I recognise. This seems less satirical than the last, in which Fraser absolutely skewers the British colonisation of India, but then I'm even less familiar with 19th century German politics than I am with India so I get the feeling I'm probably missing a great deal of the references here.

Flashman is as cowardly and duplicitous as ever, but he wasn't as actively evil, really, as he was in the last book so it's easier to like him better for it. Well, maybe not like. He's still a terrible person, which is why his catalogue of disasters is always so entertaining (he's one of those characters who really deserves every bad thing that happens to him) but what saves him, what makes him really interesting to read about, if not admirable, is his awareness of his own character. He's not under any delusions about what he is, and neither is the author, which is so refreshing to read. Often you come across characters who are terrible people and their authors don't seem to recognise the fact, or they fall over themselves to make excuses for it, but Fraser and Flashman are brutally shameless about what he is, and that makes him much easier to stomach. The whole thing is so cuttingly ridiculous, so full of snark and farce, that it's just so easy to keep reading...

Like the last volume, this is a likeable read, but I think the spread of quality is wider in this one. The ratings sort of averaged out for me - of the eight collected comics in this book, six were solid three stars reads. One was not my cup of tea at all - "Pog" was frankly awful, mawkish sentiment mixed with a deeply irritating patter that would have driven even Mrs. Malaprop to drink. Balancing out that one star comic, however, is the incredible "Rite of Spring", which is an essentially sexual encounter between Swamp Thing and a human... except being incompatible, what takes places is a extended metaphor of consumption and ecological connection. It's done extremely well, the best of all the Swamp Thing comics I've read so far.

My favourite of the collections so far! The feminist werewolf issue in here was really enjoyable, although as with Floronic Man in the first collection the story pulls back at the end instead of really going for it, and the horror is softened because of it. The most interesting story in here, though, was a double-issue of fish vampires. Yes, fish vampires - giant humanoid fish that lived underwater and preyed on local children, turning them into grey drowned victims with their own taste for blood. And that's not even getting into the giant floating egg sac that's the mother vampire. The whole thing is just batshit crazy, and I appreciated every single gory minute of it! All comic stories are visual, I know, but it was really easy to see that one as a creepy, atmospheric horror film.

A collection of largely unrelated odds and ends written by Neil Gaiman - mostly comics, but there's one short graphic novel in here. I've given it three stars because I think it's the rough average of what I thought of the individuals pieces, though I've tended to give the novel more weight I think. Anyway, there were a couple of four stars reads that I really enjoyed. "Sandman Midnight Theatre" is the graphic novel piece, and it's atmospheric and creepy as most of the Sandman works are. Gaiman talks in his introduction to it about the nine pages of party talk, and as an example of largely irrelevant background work they're outstanding - I'd happily read an entire comic of this type of thing, I don't care how trivial it is! Credit to the artists working on this one too, there's a sort of muted submarine palette that almost looks crayoned in places. It's the pick of the artwork in the collection, although the art in the second four star read, "Hold Me", is also impressive. This short little comic is sad and creepy and touching, no wonder it has the reputation that it does.

The remainder, sorry to say, is unremarkable. Two stars for every other piece collected here, but both "Midnight Theatre" and "Hold Me" make Midnight Days well worth reading.

I enjoyed this, but I had the same issue with it as I did with volume two. (Yes, I read them backwards but I've read them both before anyway, so it doesn't really matter.) The stories themselves, even when in draft form as they often are here, are lovely. I've always liked the story of the Two Trees, and how they're destroyed and transformed, and on their own the stories would get a higher rating from me. Unfortunately they're paired with what is often an excruciatingly pedantic analysis of the history of the writing - and, credit where it's due, that analysis is painstakingly researched and no doubt invaluable for academic work. For the lay reader, however, it can be a bit of a slog.

Four orphaned children find an abandoned boxcar in the woods and decide to make a home there. It is all enormously unbelievable, and of course they get a happy ending when a rich and kind relative comes along, which is just as unlikely I suppose, but still. What makes it likable in all its ludicrousness is that there's very little whining and a lot of cheerful making-do, as they construct beds out of pine needles and scavenge for crockery at the local dump and dam a nearby stream to make a place to bathe. It's not exactly Robinson Crusoe in its ingenuity, but then Crusoe was a miserable bastard who should have stayed lost, and I'd rather have these kids for company any day.

This is certainly a confronting book, and I'm not entirely sure that it deserves the rating I have given it, but then these are subjective things, aren't they? On the side of the good is the plot, which I find interesting - the idea of rehabilitation through lack of free will - and the language, which is excellent. Really, what Burgess does with language is the high point of the story. It's original and fresh and clever and I can't praise it enough. Unfortunately it is also in service of the most disgusting character I've come across for quite some time. I loathed him, and I loathed reading about him. Thankfully, our protagonist is meant to come across as repulsive, and this adds some shades to the debate about choice and free will that's going on in the text. But even so - I hate him so much that, despite the language, and despite the skill of the story-telling, I can't rate this any more than three stars. Even "liking it" is pushing it. I admire A Clockwork Orange, I appreciate what Burgess has done, but that nasty brat is so off-putting that I don't ever want to read it again.

Enjoyable story in which young Li Lan is slated to be married off as a ghost bride. She is not particularly impressed, either with the prospect or with her feckless father, who's so deep in self-indulgent grief for Li Lan's long-dead mother that he's pretty much managed to ruin the prospects of his only child. To make matters worse, not only is the suggested husband dead, he's also a dick. This last wouldn't matter so much if his ghostly form didn't keep coming back to the mortal coil to repulse his bride ever further, but all credit to Li Lan, she does eventually manage to disentangle herself from him and his train wreck of a family. Much of this disentanglement comes out of a lengthy stay in the spiritual realm, working with the dead, but needs must. Anyway, it's nicely written with a likeable protagonist. A couple of the twists (such as the identity of Li Lan's mother) are visible a mile off, however, and the whole subplot with Fan taking over Li Lan's comatose body was a drag on the main storyline, I thought.

A collection of four marginally related novellas, each dealing in some way with the liver. For all the different approaches, though, the tone throughout tends to be one of alcoholism and excess in the modern world, junkies and grubby grotesqueries. Not a particularly pleasant read, and not that interesting either to be honest - it's just so enormously overwrought that wading through all that desperate prose soon becomes plain tedious. With one exception: "Leberknodel". In this, the second of the novellas - and the only one where the prose is so restrained that the narrative becomes cuttingly observant - an elderly woman called Joyce, suffering from liver cancer, takes herself to Switzerland for euthanasia. Except her cancer seems to suddenly be in abeyance, a miracle cure, and Joyce is left in limbo... It's the only story here I enjoyed. On it's own it'd get three stars from me, but as it is "Leberknodel" isn't sufficient to compensate for its companion novellas.