sunn_bleach's Reviews (249)

Bought this on a whim in January during an online sale, having not previously heard of Jones but of course now his reputation is well-known as a horror author steeped in Native American mythology and diaspora. Mongrels follows a family of werewolves as itinerants throughout the USA, with the main character being a boy that isn't sure if he inherited the werewolf gene from his teenage mother.

This book has a lot of issues I see in contemporary horror and gore: yes, it's horrific, but I don't actually feel many stakes. The constant traveling is autobiographical from Jones' own comments, but I simply was left feeling cold as every character sneered at each other. Spec fic authors: please, please stop having your characters sneer. 

A classic in mountaineering literature regarding the impacts of oxygen deprivation and hypoxia, in addition to the body's role in acclimatization. Unfortunately also in desperate need of an update, if not all-around rewrite; Houston was born in the 1920s, and his method of writing (with lots of vignettes about climbing in the 1960s) is engaging but haphazard. 

Vagabonds! is a series of nominal short stories that take place in the genius loci of Lagos, Nigeria. Did you know Nigeria is one of the most populous countries in the world, and Lagos one of the biggest cities? If you're an anglophone like me, your secondary education likely skipped over much of Africa; it's like dismissing New York City as just a big city. And like NYC, each neighborhood has a soul - from Greenwich Village to Ajegunle. What happens when that soul rebels? Or: does the spirit of a city reflect the city, as opposed to the city reflecting its spirit?

Very LGBT and very prescient for Nigeria's banning of homosexual relationships in the 2010s. My main criticism is that it attempts to wrap things up in a grander narrative of rebellion by the titular vagabonds (LGBT persons, prostitutes, abused women, lost men, etc.) but would have been better as discrete short stories framed by the loci. 

Frankly, it earns the hype. Using different fonts for each voice gave this book a Greek chorus feeling with new insights as opposed to repetition. That concept humanizes the one-off killed soldiers and characters treated as cannon fodder in so many other media. "Humanizes"? Too blasé of a word; the man you killed had hopes and dreams outside of being a soldier, too (as immortalized in Tim O'Brien's "The Man I Killed" from The Things They Carried). Successfully got over my bias against epic fantasy, and oh my poor sweet boy the defect tortoise, you deserved the world.