octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

I really enjoyed this, though my desire to classify things has again led me to spend far too much time trying to grasp the difference between urban fantasy and fantasy-that-takes-place-in-a-modern-city, if you count Chicago at the end of the 19th century to be modern, and I do. The city, and the World Fair that's going on there at the same time as the events in the novel, is almost a character in itself. Setting is so interwoven with story here that I'm not sure the novel could be set somewhere else, and if it was it wouldn't be the same. That being said, urban fantasy tends to have supernatural populations of some sort, and this just doesn't. There's only single fantastic element here, a central character is essentially possessed by the soul of a murdered friend, and has to hunt down the murderer, and that very limited application of the supernatural kind of shifts it away from urban fantasy proper, I think.

The experiences of minority immigrants, and of anti-Semitism, permeate the text, and it doesn't help that Alter is gay, a fact that keeps him in many ways isolated from the community that he lives in. I haven't read many books with Jewish protagonists that aren't in some way connected with World War Two, certainly very few fantasies, so it was exciting to find this one. Admittedly, I had to resort to the glossary in the back on occasion, but that just meant that I learned new words, which I always like. I also like the relationships that Alter builds up with the people around him - his love interest Frankie; the middle-aged woman who lives next door and whose help he is always refusing until he realises it's a foolish thing to do; the excruciatingly poor fit of a girl he's set up with in a matchmaking scheme, who turns out to be a really good friend instead... It feels like a living world, a living community of people, instead of an indifferent background against which Alter is going about his life. 

Anyway, I zipped through it in record time, because it flowed so smoothly that I didn't want to put it down. I'll be making sure to look up more books by the author in future! 

I have to admit, I enjoyed the wide variety of primary texts here - everything from Sharknado to Amitav Ghosh to The Fast and the Furious - but I remain wholly unconvinced by the author's thesis. I'm actually reviewing this for Strange Horizons, so a full review will be up there shortly, but in a nutshell: there's an awful lot of bullshitting here, and I say that as someone who has done their academic share of it. Don't get me wrong, it's entertaining bullshit, and Bould's prose is for the most part lively and opinionated, with minor rambles into academic turgidity, but it seems to me, by the end, that he's overlooked an obvious counterargument. I can understand why, goodness knows I too am baffled by the levels of indifference people can display to our depressingly ongoing apocalypse, but wishful thinking doesn't make something so, and it's clear to me, at least, that Bould is wishing hard. 

 

I'm primarily a short fiction writer myself, but I was recommended this book by a friend who's into screenwriting, and I'm always interested in how writing works in other fields so I thought I'd give it a go. I think what struck me the most was the emphasis on structure, and how Snyder suggested going about trying to structure a film. Honestly, the effort looks gargantuan. Some of my short stories have been very structured, right from the beginning, and others have been a looser experience both to read and to write, but this is at another level entirely. Which should be obvious, but I've never given much consideration to script writing, so that was what stuck out the most.

Otherwise, it was an accessibly written book that's quite obviously directed at interested beginners. Both explanations and tips are clear and understandable, although sometimes I find the arguments for certain storylines to be almost unhelpfully prescriptive. One of the troubleshooting fixes for problem scripts, for example, argues that "A hero never asks questions" because "people look to him for answers, not the other way around" (p. 146). Perhaps I'm just difficult, but my mind went directly to "Well, what if the hero's a journalist or a detective or a scientist? Good luck not asking questions there," and promptly skipped to "What kind of stupid leader won't admit not knowing something, and what kind of stupid follower respects such a crippling lack of curiosity?" I mean, I get that Snyder's arguing for active, decisive protagonists here but, as I said, the brush strokes do sometimes appear a little broad. Then again, it's not my field, so what do I know? 

There's so much I like about this, and one thing that I really don't. The meat of the play, and the issue driving the central couple apart, is that back in the day the husband, who is in politics, did something terribly corrupt, and it's all about to come out. His best friend, Lord Goring, appears to most to be good-natured, flippant and incredibly useless, but only the first two are true, and he manages things so that the danger is removed, the husband and wife reconciled, and his own connection to the family assured. He does this, too, with a clear-sighted view of what Sir Robert has done wrong, and he calmly, sympathetically, makes Robert aware of his utter disappointment. The scene between them is the best in the play, and I was all set to give this four stars, but the weakness here is how the play presents Robert's wife Gertrude. She's a decent person who's also disappointed in her husband, but there's a horrible scene in which Robert blames her for the whole thing by saying it's her standards that have ruined them, and not his shocking behaviour, which, get fucked Sir Robert. Goring convinces Gertrude that men are more valuable than women, and so she should continue to support him in his political career, even knowing what he's capable of. Up to this point I'd sincerely liked Goring, but I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth there, and it's not much wiped away by the fact that Robert's truly ethical behaviour at the end proves his early sin a one-time lapse.

An enjoyable play, with a fantastic central scene between the two men, and a heaping side of misogyny. I'd like to say it's a product of its time, but given his own experience of marginalisation I expected Wilde to make an attempt at better. 

Oh, I don't know what to think about this. It's a compelling read, a well-written read, but it is not a likeable one, and it often doesn't reach beyond the superficial. In fact, it's hard not to feel an increasing lack of sympathy for the author as she chronicles her romance with Ted Bundy. On the one hand, I can certainly feel compassion for anyone who's sucked in by a serial killer, and Kendall's life with him did appear relatively normal for so long. But she kept getting sucked in, and sucked in, and sucked in, and eventually you have to stop and wonder what kind of person is just this hopelessly self-destructive. I realise she was an alcoholic at the time, and that clouded her judgement, but that judgement was still pretty fucking poor. I read another true crime book recently, Monster, and a large part of that was another woman refusing to let go of her romance with a serial killer, and it baffles me, it truly does. The total dysfunctional romanticism of it... honestly, it defies belief. To Kendall's credit, the added chapter at the end of the book (this is an updated edition) is much more clear-headed, and entirely absent of the excuses and the simpering which characterised much of the original text. Gone are the protestations of love; in their place is a unflinching recognition of evil. Well, better late than never.

Much more sympathetic is the final chapter added by Kendall's daughter, Molly, who was a small child when she first met Bundy. No-one could possibly blame her for trusting him, and yet it's clear that, as the years went on, she had a much clearer picture of him than her mother did, and when the truth came out, an absolute and inveterate hatred, untainted by sentimental reminiscences. I can only surmise that this common sense came from her father's side of the family, and I feel like a terrible person writing that, because I think that Kendall has likely been the recipient of a lot of unearned disgust over the years and I should probably not be adding to it. Bundy's actions were not her fault. She wasn't involved in his crimes in any way, and she went to the police for help when she suspected him. Her recovery from him, and from alcohol, should be praised... but this book isn't about her recovery, or not until that very final chapter. It's about her being all-in on an extremely unhealthy relationship, about her continually doubling down on that relationship against all sense and reason, and it was hard to read. The most sympathetic person here, apart from poor little Molly, is Kendall's friend Angie, who at one point walked away from her friend entirely because of her determination to wallow in this godawful relationship, suspecting as she did that her lover might be a murderer. Good for you, Angie. In this book, that level of self-respect is a beacon of sanity. 

What a lot of rubbish this is! Everyone in here is vain, touchy, violent, and stupid. Well, a few people are not stupid, but most of them only occasionally exhibit intelligence, and the rest are perfect dunces. I don't know why I'm supposed to be interested in them, but I'm not - they're unpleasant, and if the whole bunch had died in a fire, this overlong novel would be much shorter and much more engaging.

I hold one exception to the above. I slogged my way through 500 pages of this bilge before a compelling character came along, but when she did I was riveted. The Lady DeWinter is the only reason this book isn't getting a single star from me. She's awful, but she's interesting, and I was really hoping she'd survive, on the grounds that if there were a sequel she might succeed in knocking off some of these tossers after all. Her manipulative seduction of Felton is a masterclass of villainous characterisation, and having seen from it that Dumas can, indeed, produce characters I give a damn about, I'm all the more annoyed that he hadn't done so beforehand. 

Over the years, gay men are disappearing in Toronto. They're hardly looked for - outside of their own minority circles they're not even missed - disenfranchised as they are from the wider world. It sounds like a set-up for a serial killer, and it is, sort of, except the killer is a beast out of folk tale that seduces vulnerable outsiders, and carries them off to an extremely sticky end.

This pattern is repeated, over and over, and if I sometimes felt that the repetition went on a bit too long for my tastes, I can appreciate the intent behind it: the weight of the losses, of all the different types of losses, and the undertone of survivor's guilt. The most interesting thing here is the memoir thread of the author, running through, sometimes talking about his own experiences as a gay man, sometimes about how those experiences intersect with the horror genre, and it seems well-suited, thematically, an original structure, until the end where the borders between horror and memoir mix, and the stories come together in unusual ways (you can see from my talking around things that I'm trying not to spoil it). A very interesting structure - a very appealing structure, I think. 

This is a book written by - and starring - a person with an encyclopaedic love of slasher films. Now, I like slasher films. I like horror in general, and I like it a lot. But I'm forced to admit that slasher films, to me, are some of the least interesting forms of horror. I recognise a great deal of the references here, because I keep watching slasher films so that I keep increasing my knowledge of the horror genre in general, but I don't love them. Not like Jones does, and not like Jade. That's Jade's obsession with slashers becomes, through the book, an obvious means of navigating her own trauma is enormously sympathetic, even if the resulting monomania is sometimes a little difficult to credit. That said, the trauma she's hiding from is so immense, and so treacherous, that one can hardly blame a kid of finding any possible way to cope. By the time she's seventeen, this means of coping has become so embedded that Jade interprets the entire world through a slasher lens, which is occasionally frustrating but also, well, accurate. Something dreadful is going on at the lake, and Jade's predictions, her interpretations, are uncannily accurate. 

I kind of wish there'd been a more solid conclusion, but I understand that this is the first book in a trilogy, so perhaps ending on the emotional note of the bear, which was admittedly one of the most effective of the entire story, was the right choice. I only hope that, in the time between this book and the next, Jade broadens her viewing habits. Just a little... 

Not Wilde's best work, I think. Of the five stories collected here, I was indifferent to two of them: "The Canterville Ghost" is a bit silly and fractured, two genres stuck not very well together, and "The Sphinx Without a Secret" is very slight. The remainder were more likeable, but they still don't encourage me to repeated readings, I think, although the ending to "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." is probably the most compelling piece of writing in the entire book. 

A bit slight really - very short, and with an ambiguous ending. I will say, though, that it's nice to see a story like this in which hopeless nosy curiosity in a relationship comes from the man rather than the woman. Not that the secret (or non-secret) here rises to the level of Pandora or Bluebeard's wife; it's a very harmless mystery. The general theme of the story, however - if you go poking around in things that don't concern you, it may not turn out well for you - is similar. Just let people have their privacy, for goodness' sake.