Tag: genres

Behold, Three Books

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Hunting Time, a Colter Shaw Novel, by Jeffery Deaver.

By the way, it’s “hunting TIME,” not “HUNTing time.” The sense is not “time to hunt,” but “we don’t just save time, we hunt it down.”

This is a very professional modern thriller and the author has tons of blurbs on the back from other modern thriller writers. The plot was intricate, the pacing tense, and the characters were distinctive enough to keep them straight and give some emotional momentum to the story. There was also at least one major twist that I did not see coming, and that I really thought was clever.

Possibly the best-drawn “character” is the Midwestern city of Ferrington, the picture of urban blight but without the glamour of a big coastal city. Ferrington used to be an industrial capital, but then many industries left the city, leaving people out of work. Now the place seems to be nothing but drugs, crime, and despair. There are lot of chain-link-fence-surrounded empty lots filled with trash, long streets full of abandoned warehouses, and there is a badly polluted river. The ugliness of the scenes described rises to the level of beauty. The cops are corrupt in some cases and spread too thin in others. I think the name Ferrington is supposed to remind us of Ferguson, Missouri, and this is where we start to get into the book’s flaws.

Though Deaver mostly sticks to the story, when laying his scenes he makes sure to get in occasional digs at the reader. Bigots are everywhere. Trans is good, gay is good. We capitalize Black but not white. Stuff like that. Oh, and of course, capitalists are the one who ruined Ferrington in the first place.

My other issue with this book is the female characters. They’re not terrible, but … but … well. They are just missing a certain je-ne-sais-quois. For example, one of the point of view characters is a woman, Allison Parker. Deaver uses third person limited with her and with Colter Shaw, the sleuth. When we are inside Allison’s point of view, he frequently calls her Parker. That is just a bit confusing. It makes it sound like there is another person in the room. I am pretty sure that most women don’t think of themselves by their last name. Although maybe men do. Which is really the problem: All Deaver’s “female” characters (he has three main ones in this book) think more like men. Allison Parker is an engineering genius, very organized, very no-nonsense. Her daughter Hannah is a math genius, also no-nonsense. Sonja Nilsson is a former military operative (you guessed it, no-nonsense!) who is willing to sleep with Shaw after having known him for a day or two.

This is not a problem with Deaver alone. Many, many female authors write “male” characters who think and talk like women. It’s just awfully difficult to get into the head of the opposite sex.

Finally, there are occasional little things that made me scratch my head. “Seahorses can be sensuous.” (They can?) “Five-high.” (It’s high-five.) Nilsson lost forty pounds, and kept it off, in order to go into witness protection. (Oh, I didn’t realize it was that easy. Especially since she left the military at the same time! But, as we all know, the only thing keeping fat people from losing weight is the want-to. Eye roll)

Due to all these little flaws, and because the reveal of the villain was less satisfying than I had hoped, I give this book three out of five stars.

Tomb of the Golden Bird, by Elizabeth Peters

This was pure fun.

The Emersons are a family of British Egyptologists. Emerson, “Father of Curses,” the paterfamilias, is married to Amelia Peabody, whom he calls “Peabody.” This hot couple began their Egyptian adventures back in the Victorian era, but now it is 1922. Their grown son, nicknamed Ramses, is married and has children, and the Emersons have a large, motley household of employees, longtime family friends, relatives, and adoptees, both Egyptian and British. They have returned to Luxor, Egypt, for yet another season of digging. Of course, there are going to be capers, skullduggery, and so forth, and all the Emersons will be involved up to their elbows. Will they be deceived by Emerson’s half-brother Sethos? Will they foil an international plot? Most importantly, will they ever get a peek into the intact tomb that was discovered–technically, by Emerson–and is now being opened by the odious Carter?

This series is exquisitely researched. About 60% of the story is told in the first person by Amelia Peabody, in near-perfect late Victorian/Edwardian language. Scattered everywhere are gems like this one:

… I identified several other [party] guests as journalists. I can always spot them by the bulges in their coat pockets which indicate the presence of notebooks, and by their predatory looks. Messieurs Bradstreet of the New York Times and Bancroft of the Daily Mail were known to me personally (through no fault of mine).

p. 241

The other 40% of the story is told in third person from the point of view of Ramses, who is a quieter character than his colorful parents, but it also includes gems:

He had thought of several innocent explanations for David’s behavior, including the one he had given. It was understandable that [David] might feel the need to be alone; the family en masse or individually could be wearing.

p. 254

I originally came to this series hoping for ancient Egyptian mystical mysteries. It’s not that. It’s more of a romp. Much of this book felt like following the Keystone Cops, but eventually there did turn out to be some twists that gave the whole plot shape and direction. Four out of five stars.

Matchingmaking for Psychopaths, by Tasha Coryell

I picked this up off the New Books shelf at the library. Perhaps I should have left it there, based on the title, but I had read the first few pages and found them engaging. Alas, I returned the book without finishing it. I would have liked there to be at least one main character who I was sure wasn’t a psychopath. A little psychopathology goes a long way.

When I returned the book, the librarian giggled and said, “Oh, that one was silly.” It was indeed silly. But silly and serial murder don’t mix well. At least not for me.

In Which I Read a Romance Novel from 1930

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

A year or two ago, someone challenged the famous curmudgeon Bookstooge to read Barbara Cartland. This was deliciously absurd, as Barbara Cartland is an incredibly prolific romance author from the last century, whose author picture, lest we forget it, looks like this.

These readalongs are supposed to happen in December.

In December 2024, Bookstooge and his 70,000 followers read Love Saves Day by Barbarba Cartland, which turned out to be essentially an unedited draft that was published after Cartland’s death by her children. Even so, the consensus was that we didn’t hate it as much as we expected to, and that for all its flaws, Cartland is a very professional hand at plotting.

This year, Bookstooge announced that the Cartland of choice was A Rainbow to Heaven. I purchased my copy, and everything was all ready to go. And then, after reading Chapter 3, Bookstooge bailed on us. He had his reasons. You can read them here.

But I am happy to tell you that I finished the book, and boy, did Bookstooge miss out because the plot really heats up after Chapter 3! Below, I will summarize chapter by chapter, and you will see what I saw, that Cartland has the touch when it comes to twists and turns.

And by the way, though this book was published in 1976, it is set in (and, according to the author’s note, written in) 1930.

Chapter 1

We meet Diana Headley, beautiful heiress whose father is a self-made man. We see her go to a party with the other “bright young people,” especially eligible society bachelor Hugo Dalk. We see that they are shallow, good-hearted snobs. We learn that Diana is a celebrity, whose picture is always appearing in magazines.

“I feel morbid,” she told Hugo brightly. “Let’s go and have a drink.”

p. 12

Chapter 2

Hugo proposes to Diana. She brushes him off. We get a little backstory about how this notorious playboy first got the bug for Diana.

Diana manages to get herself invited to the country home of Jack and Loelia Standish, a married couple whom she admires and who seem to represent some stability and kindness in her world. They have an estate called Huntsman’s House in the Malvern hills in Worcestershire. Jack mentions that he has an old army friend name Barry Dunbar who is “one of the most intellectual young men in Europe today.”

Chapter 3

Diana arrives at the beautiful, isolated and peaceful Huntsman’s House.

“So very, very pretty,” Loelia thought. “What a pity she leads such an aimless existence!”

p. 30

We hear more backstory about how Loelia came to marry Jack after a loveless first marriage to a man thirty-five years her senior. We hear how Jack, a sad, cynical soldier in WWI, met Barry Dunbar and was given hope and spiritual elevation by him. We learn that Barry has a project of retrieving obscure Hindu and Buddhist texts and getting them translated into English, and that Jack is helping him with funds.

Then we meet Barry himself. He is not impressed with Diana, and relates an incident in which he caught “three native boys” looking at a copy of Tatler, in which Diana appeared wearing a crazy costume that featured a bikini and top hat. Diana is embarrassed but tries to defend herself. Loelia is disappointed that Barry does not like Diana.

Chapter 4

Still at Huntsman’s House, we find that Barry has a way with both children and animals. Sitting in the morning room, intending to write a letter, Diana overhears a conversation between Jack and Barry. They discuss Barry’s travels, how great Buddhism is, and the need for a spiritual awakening in modern England, which apparently Barry’s Buddhist texts are going to catalyze. Jack presses Barry about whether he will ever marry. Barry admits to wanting a son, but doubts whether any woman could put up with his traveling lifestyle. He reiterates that he doesn’t find Diana attractive because her “mind is completely unused.”

The group walks to The Castle, a building on the Standishes’ land. They have fixed up a portion of it so guests can stay there. Eager to impress Barry, Diana asks for a copy of one of his books, and he lends her A Way. Diana finds it “extraordinarily beautiful,” but hard to understand.

Reflecting on the emptiness of her life of luxury, Diana returns to London, where she encounters her friends Cecil and Bebe,

a small vivacious blonde of her own age, who had startled London with her debut, and had continued to keep it considerably surprised ever since.

p. 51

Bebe and Cecil insist on Diana’s throwing a party, which they will organize. Hugo shows up and is disappointed that he can’t spend the evening with Diana alone.

Chapter 5

Diana and her large group of friends move from restaurant to theater to bar, drinking oceans of champagne and wasting lots of fine food which they can’t appreciate. Eventually, in the wee hours of the morning, Hugo brings Diana back to her London house. He wants to come in and “talk to her” (get an answer about his proposal), but she puts him off until tomorrow night.

Before going up to bed, Diana sees a light on in her father’s study and finds the body of her father, who has shot himself.

After the police are called and Diana’s brother Jimmy shows up, it is revealed that their father got into serious financial trouble and shot himself rather than declare bankruptcy. He was so active in the financial sphere that his ruin causes a crash, and causes many other people to lose their fortunes as well.

Chapter 6

There is a media frenzy making Diana’s father, Robert Headley, the villain. He is portrayed as intentionally looting the public, and luxuriousness of his house is exaggerated.

Quite normally decorated rooms were described as though they were treasure-houses of barbaric splendor.

p. 69

Diana and Jimmy lose everything, but the lawyer encourages Diana to keep her jewels, which she may be able to sell later. She assumes that Hugo will now not want to marry her. She boards a train and goes back to Huntsman’s House for a few days to get away from the publicity and to collect herself.

Chapter 7

Staying at the The Castle on Jack and Loelia’s property, Diana gets a letter from her brother Jimmy. He has taken a job at a garage, with the understanding that he will work under an assumed name so as not to damage the garage’s reputation. The other mechanics can tell that he’s upper-class, and they don’t respect him until he gets into a fight. Diana realizes that she does not have any marketable skills. Although she can ride horses, dance, and speaks several languages, she is not equipped to teach any of these things.

Barry catches her sitting outdoors, crying, and tells her that she still has “the only thing that matters … Courage.”

A friend of Diana’s finds a potential job her. She is to be a “companion” to the daughter of a socially climbing family called the Schnibers. This is quite a change for Diana, but she decides to take the job. Once in their home, she sees how Mrs. Schniber raises money and contributes to a lot of charities, but the wealthy patrons she is helping still don’t treat her with courtesy, much to her frustration.

The Schnibers go to Monte Carlo for the summer, and Diana accompanies them. At one point, she gets away from her duties to have supper with a nice young man whose eye she has caught. He reveals that he lost his fortune in the Headley Crash and will be starting work when he gets back to London. Diana excuses herself before he can realize who she is.

Also in Monte Carlo, the Schniber family bump into Hugo. Hugo is shocked to see Diana in reduced circumstances. He still seems to like her and want to get alone with her, but Mrs. Schniber has hopes that Hugo will pursue her own daughter.

Chapter 8

The Schnibers and Diana return to London. Diana sells her jewels to help her brother Jimmy pay off a debt that he became liable for while he was still at the university. Diana and Jimmy become closer, and each is impressed with the other’s resilience.

Diana encounters the young man from Monte Carlo, but this time he knows who she is and treats her coldly.

Diana goes to Huntsman’s House for the weekend, where she tells Jack and Loelia about her new job and begins to find it funny. She is happier than when she was wealthy. Jack admits to Loelia that he misjudged Diana.

Loelia and Diana discuss love, marriage, and Barry’s tragic backstory. Barry is unexpectedly also staying with the Standishes, and by the end of her weekend there, Diana has realized that she is in love with Barry. She is surprised by the intensity of this new sensation, and she feels more alive than she ever has.

Chapter 9

Diana goes back to working for the Schnibers in London. She remains obsessed with Barry. Hugo has continued to call at the Schnibers, and Mrs. Schniber has finally realized that his interest in is Diana.

While out shopping, Diana bumps into Loelia, who mentions in passing that Barry has joined a Buddhist monastery. Diana is devastated and moves through her days in a daze.

Mrs. Schniber notices the change in Diana and concludes that it is because she is wasting away with love for Hugo. She encourages Hugo to press his suit. He does, and Diana, feeling that nothing matters anymore, agrees to marry him.

Chapter 10

In the midst of preparations for her wedding, Diana hears that Barry is no longer at the Buddhist monastery. He spent only three months there as a monk in order to prove his seriousness and gain access to one of their priceless manuscripts. She flees London, leaving letters for Hugo and Mrs. Schniber, and winds up in a village that she picked essentially at random.

Diana spends a few months living with and working for a very poor young couple, Ted and Rose, who run a roadside garage and a small tea room. She is happy living in poverty and obscurity, but she is not eating well.

On a stormy night, Diana stays with Rose, who is in labor, while Ted goes off on his motorcycle to fetch the doctor. Ted crashes in the rain. Rose delivers a baby boy, and both she and Diana are hospitalized.

Diana has caught pneumonia from running around in the rain. In her fever, she continues raving about whether the doctor will come in time. The doctor can’t identify who Diana is from her possessions, but he finds her book A Way, which has “Huntsman’s House” written on the inside. He contacts Jack and Loelia, who bring Diana to recuperate at their home.

Chapter 11

Barry comes to visit, where he spends time with the thin and weak Diana. He tells her that he is going to go to his house, on an isolated island off the coast of Cornwall, to write a book. Diana decides to risk everything and pursue him there.

She manages to get Barry’s address out of Loelia, who admits, “Somehow … I’ve always felt that you and Barry would suit each other, even in the days when you were a very frivolous person.” (p. 150)

Diana hops on a train, charters a fishing boat, and manages to beat Barry to his house. It is beautiful, peaceful, and unique, with a vast ocean view and two Chinese servants. There, she announces to the shocked Barry that she is going to stay with him. After ascertaining that she is not planning a large, wild party, and that she is the only guest, Barry finally figures out that Diana is in love with him. He reciprocates. The two of them enter directly into Nirvana.

After That, the Dark by Andrew Klavan

On By Jennifer Mugrage4 Comments

Let me fangirl for a minute

I am not a person who eagerly awaits the latest release in a series, and pre-orders books as soon as they become available. Usually, I am the one who discovers the series 20 years after it came out. In fact, this series by Klavan is the only exception I can think of. I pre-ordered After That, and it came, as promised, on Halloween.

Mini reviews of the whole Cameron Winter series

This is the fifth book in the Cameron Winter series. The other books are:

  1. When Christmas Comes (O.K. Sets up Winter’s history, shrink, and issues.)
  2. A Strange Habit of Mind (I like it because my mind is also strange.)
  3. The House of Love and Death (Tragic!)
  4. A Woman Underground (Also tragic, but satisfying. Wraps up Charlotte)

After That, the Dark takes Winter on the next stage of his journey. It’s designed to be readable as a stand-alone, but you will find it more satisfying if you’ve been with him all along.

The Basic Review

Like every Winter book, this one deals with Winter’s psychological journey, and on a parallel track there is an equally devastating crime that he is trying to solve and, inevitably, prevent. Subplots include Winter’s love life and his battles with the leftie professors at the university where he is an English professor.

The title for this book is taken from a poem by English Romantic poet Tennyson:

… Who imagined that his death would be like sailing over the sandbar near the coast and out into the greater ocean.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

ibid, p. 160

Cameron Winter’s academic specialty is English Romantic poetry (about which Klavan recently published a book, himself). Throughout this series, it’s sort of felt as if Klavan wants to have the best of both worlds with his hero. Winter is a former government operative, a dangerous man, and also a soft, spiritual guy who just wants everyone to appreciate poetry. Sort of like a medieval knight. I haven’t felt that this tension was 100% successful in past books, although it does lead to the Superman dynamic where the nerdy guy takes off his glasses and messes up the bad guys good, which is always fun. But in this volume, Winter starts to integrate these two different sides of his personality.

The crimes in this book deal with transhumanism. The victims and potential victims are mothers and babies. One potential victim is an expectant mother who has noticed changes in her husband and can’t articulate them well enough to get anyone to believe her. It’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t have been able to handle a few years ago, when my kids were smaller. I kept reading only because this is Klavan, and I know he doesn’t like stories where women get butchered gratuitously. “Look, when there’s a killer chasing a girl with a knife, I’m on the side of the girl!”

So, if you like poetry, action scenes, demonic possession, or personal growth, you will get all of that here. It’s not exactly like any other action/crime book I’ve read. The hero is usually wrestling with his own demons, but in other books he doesn’t spend so much time talking to his shrink. It’s a bold move on Klavan’s part to allow the hero to actually start beating the personal demons. I don’t know how he’s going to continue a noir-type series once his hero becomes psychologically healthy, but I’m sure he’ll find a way.

As you can see, I’m a little conflicted about Cameron Winter. But I still wholeheartedly give this book five stars, and if you want to find out why, read on for some major spoilers.

Spoilers … and Jesus

I have mentioned before that what I live for in books is when the characters’ concrete experience and myth coalesce, so they are walking the specific path in front of them, but also enacting a mythological scene at the same time. This is a little hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. It’s what makes great art.

This fusion of the everyday and the eternal is most often found in the fantasy or sci-fi genres, because to be honest, it’s easiest to set up there. But to my delight, Klavan has here pulled it off in a modern thriller/true-crime type novel.

Let’s go back to the pregnant woman who starts to suspect her husband. Her name is Tilda, a name probably chosen for how vulnerable it makes her sound. Tilda used to be a “bar girl,” one of the town’s easy marks. Then, her husband Martin picked her up with the line, “Do you have a minute to talk about Jesus Christ?” Tilda thought that was a pretty good joke, but then Martin actually did. He actually did talk to her about Jesus Christ. And he was a perfect gentleman. Tilda married him, and she became a Christian and her life completely changed. But now, the man who led her to this change seems to have become a completely different person and Tilda, understandably, doubts herself. Sometimes, she secretly wonders whether she’s really faking this whole Jesus thing.

Winter, meanwhile, is on the track of a man he knows is out there. He knows this man will have undergone a dramatic personality change recently, and that if not found he will begin to commit gruesome crimes. Winter, though an atheist, is dating a Christian girl and she has given him a cross for his spiritual protection. Winter keeps the cross in the coin pocket of his jeans. When the bad guys, after beating him rather severely, have him handcuffed to a chair, he is able to get the cross out and use it to pick the locks on the cuffs. There follows an action scene wherein Winter, still holding the cross, manages to escape the bad guys and run barefoot into a cornfield. As he runs, a cornstalk punctures his foot. When he finally stops running and wonders why his hand hurts, he looks down and finds that the cross has pierced the inside of his fist. He has to dig it out.

When I read that, I looked up and said to my husband, “The hero just received stigmata.”

But Klavan isn’t done with Winter yet.

Tilda, meanwhile, is tied up in the crawlspace in a house her husband has been working on. She knows her husband is about to come and finish her off. Her mind is a hurricane of incoherent prayers for Jesus to spare her unborn baby.

Then Winter shows up, having already decommissioned the husband outside. Because he has been beaten so badly, his face is a swollen mess, “like a monster.” And the first thing he says to Tilda is exactly what I knew he would say:

“Don’t be afraid.”

This is how Jesus comes to us. “His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being, and his form marred beyond human likeness.” (Isaiah 52:14) He shows up looking like that, and He says to us, “Fear not.”

As Winter strives to calm Tilda down enough to rescue her, he keeps saying the sorts of things that Jesus says:

“Listen to me,” the man said. “I’m going to use a knife. No, no, it’s all right, don’t be afraid. I’m going to use a knife to cut you free. It will look scary, but I will not hurt you. Nothing will hurt you now, but I have to cut you free. Don’t be afraid.”

… The man had climbed out of the space. He was above her again, reaching down for her with both hands.

“[Your husband] is not here. Let me get hold of you. Don’t you hold on to me,” he said. “I’m stronger. Let me hold on to you.”

… Tilda was crying hard now. “I prayed to Jesus and you came,” she explained.

“Oh. Well, good,” said the man. “It’s nice when things happen that way.”

ibid, pp. 305 – 307

That last line, by the way, shows that Klavan is not trying too hard with Winter. Nor is he writing an allegory. This kind of double vision in a book is all the harder to do when you let it grow naturally out of the story and don’t force it. Kudos.

Two October Reads

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

You Don’t Own Me, by Mary Higgins Clark but actually by Alafair Burke, 2018

I reached for a Mary Higgins Clark because it’s autumn and I wanted me some New York City. I would never want to live there, mind, but a certain version of NYC gives autumn vibes that can’t be beat. I wanted wet leaves, Burberry plaid, private schools, brownstones, Italian restaurants, snobbery, and houses in the Hamptons. (Don’t even know where the Hamptons are, but I know they come with the package.) This book delivered those vibes adequately. It even had me turning to DuckDuckGo to look up some hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the art district that has been a NYC fixture for years apparently. Or I don’t know if New Yorkers would consider it a hole in the wall. The pictures make it look like one, to my West-of-the-Mississippi eyes, where everything is spread out from everything else.

Anyway. This was very New York-y. The protagonist’s dad is a retired NYC cop. There are Italian restaurants. There are nannies. The fiance has a live-in butler. The couple spend most of the book looking for an apartment that has to be in a certain part of the city. In fact, their realtor was so pushy that I started to wonder whether she would turn out to be in on the crime-spiracy. For NYC vibes, it was second only to a Mary Higgins Clark that I read years ago, where the protag’s mother was in the fashion industry and was killed in Central Park by being strangled with a high-fashion scarf.

As with every Mary Higgins Clark, the plotting is very good, very intricate, and the dialogue not so much. Every person who talks is very smooth, articulate, and sounds like a news anchor or else like the narrator. Oh well. I didn’t come here for Chaucer. This book went down easy.

Sweetgirl, by Travis Mulhauser, 2016

This is a Michigan gothic, which is like a Southern gothic, but with blizzards and rude people instead of polite people.

It veers very close to being a horror story, but my overwhelming impression is that of heartbreaking sorrow, but sorrow with a lot of human sweetness in it too.

The very first line sets up the whole plot by outlining the problem and introducing the principle characters in one fell swoop:

Nine days after Mama disappeared I heard she was throwing down with Shelton Potter.

Percy James is a sixteen-year-old girl who is an adult before her time. She has quit school and taken a job so that she can support herself and her druggie mother. Shelton Potter is sort of the opposite: he’s twenty-five, but his mental life is more like that of an immature teen.

The chapters alternate between Percy’s point of view, told in the first person, and Shelton’s, told in limited third. Although Percy goes through a lot of horrible stuff, which I won’t share because of spoilers, the parts that really broke my heart were Shelton’s internal monologue. Although Shelton spends the entire book high–making one horrible decision after another–a danger to himself and others–he still has thoughts and feelings. Quite a lot of feelings, actually. Mulhauser does an amazing job making us follow Shelton’s train of thought, feel his sorrow, and see his naive good intentions. Shelton really does have a good heart. It’s just that he doesn’t have any self-control or common sense. Oh, and he’s high all the time. Many books will give us an antagonist who’s a drug dealer/addict, may be violent and touchy, and may not be too bright, and often at or near the end of the book we get a tiny, poignant glimpse into this person’s sad back story. It’s a rare book that has us in that person’s mind from the very beginning, sympathizing with him to a degree but also hoping something stops him before he does major damage.

One more thing I will say in praise of this book: the prose is top shelf. To take just one example, the last paragraph of the book has Percy going through a variety of complex, poignant emotions. It does not have a single sentence telling us what Percy was thinking or feeling. Instead, every sentence in that paragraph describes something she can hear from where she’s standing. It’s all entirely concrete, and it will rip your heart out. That, my friends, is showing-not-telling. I learn at Travis Mulhauser’s feet.

Just Another Mormon Vampire Book

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

my review of The Penitent by C. David Belt, posted on GoodReads on July 31

I’ve been enjoying these Mormon vampire stories by C. David Belt. This one is the second in the trilogy. In the first book, The Unwilling, a Mormon man named Carl accidentally became a vampire while investigating what he believed was a cult that had seduced his sister. He took the vows you need to take to become a vampire, but didn’t mean them or think they were real. Hence, he is the first “unwilling” vampire in history. Whether or not you think that taking vows while holding mental reservations about them actually lets a person off the hook, for the purposes of this series, it does. The first book is written in the first person, present tense, from Carl’s point of view.

This second book is written in the first person, present tense, from the point of view of Carl’s vampire wife, Moira. (How that came about is a long story, told in the first book.) Moira is a Scottish lass who, more than two hundred years ago, became a vampire intentionally in order to get revenge on the British. But she has since repented and has managed to spend her life without killing any mortals. Hence, she is “The Penitent.” Through a long and convoluted chain of events, Carl and Moira are both somehow vampires and also faithful Mormons who were married in the Temple in Salt Lake City, and who call people to repent and turn to Christ whenever they get a chance.

The worldbuilding in these books is detailed and consistent, in terms of scientific explanations for why vampires are freakishly strong, why they can fly, what can and cannot kill them, and so forth. Oh, and how they can be Christians. The main antagonist is Lilith, “Mother of Night.” The lore around Lilith seems to be a little different in the Mormon world than elsewhere. I had heard that the legend was that Lilith was Adam’s first wife, created before Eve, but in one passage, the characters in this book refer to her as being “three generations down from Adam.”

The theology behind this book is Mormon, which is to say it sounds about 90% Christian, but isn’t quite there. For example, in one scene, Moira is telling a wretched, extremely bitter woman that instead of self-terminating, she should repent and turn to Christ. So far so good. But then Moira tells her that she can be saved if she “turns to Christ and lives a righteous life.” Meanwhile, this poor woman is obviously totally unable to live a righteous life. That’s her whole problem. Mormon theology doesn’t have a really deep grasp of sin nature. I really like the author of this series, C. David Belt, and I sincerely hope that he soon comes to grips with this problem and realizes that people are truly helpless sinners who need something more than what moralism can offer.

The language in this book is pretty good. I don’t personally prefer books written in the present tense, but Belt’s books include a lot of action and also vision/dream sequences that lend themselves to the present tense. Moira tells her story in a slightly Scottish dialect (for example, she consistently uses “nae” instead of “not”), and it’s fun to hear Carl, a former fighter pilot, revert to “pilot speak” when the vampires are flying on a military-like mission.

Based on the plot, worldbuilding, and language, I give this book 5 out of 5 stars for the genre, and in fact it may be the only series of its kind in this genre.

me and C. David Belt at a RenFaire a few years ago. I was dressed as a cartoon cave woman, and he was dressed as a medieval Scot.

I Like Farmlands

On By Jennifer Mugrage6 Comments

This is a view of my neighbor’s house on a smokey afternoon late last summer. It’s also part of the internal landscape of my mind.

Farmlands are one of my favorite biomes. (Yes, they are a biome. I will die on this hill. They are a part of Naure. They are what nature looks like when people live in it.)

Farms and I go way back. I didn’t grow up on one, but I grew up around farms and farmers.

My early years were spent in eastern Pennsylvania, which is a country of rolling green hills and low mountains. My dad was the pastor of a small country church, and most of its members were dairy farmers. Whenever we visited anybody, which was often, we would first be taken into the cow barn. These were black-and-white milk cows. As soon as you stepped into the barn, your senses would be filled with cow sensations: the chorus of moos, the smell. To this day, when I smell a cattle lot, it doesn’t smell bad to me, just like a clean farm smell.

And even cleaner farm smell was the “milk room,” a little brick building with a large stainless-steel tank of milk in the center, and a drain in the middle of the wet floor. It smelled like coolness, milk, and water.

These are memories from when I was very small. That same family that I have in mind, although they had indoor plumbing, also still had a working outhouse in their back yard. There were bees, and the smell wasn’t so nice, but it was raised up on several steps, not just thrown together but definitely constructed. My brother and I would torment this family’s chickens by pulling backwards on their tails so that they flapped. (Not recommended.) We would sit in corrugated buckets filled with water to cool down in the summer, and drink from the garden hose. This family had Dobermans, and I can remember a black bear hanging up in their barn after the father shot it while hunting. Later, it was stuffed in a scary pose and placed in their study.

The dairy farmers in our church also had fields of crops. Our own house had a yard of about an acre and a half. At the back of this yard was a line of poplar trees, and right beyond them, fields rolling away towards the creek. Beyond that, you could see a mountain. They must have rotated the crops in these fields, but I know that at least one year, they were soybeans. We were allowed to pick the pods, open them, and eat the tiny, hard beans out from inside. There was a lot of milkweed, which was fun to pull open and let the tufty parachutes out when it was ripe. There was a lot of ragweed, which my brother turned out to be allergic to, and one year a plague of tent caterpillars turned the mountainside brown.

My dad had a somewhat free schedule, and he would take my brother and me (and later, our sister) on walks in the countryside. These were probably short walks, given that we were little kids, but I remember them lasting hours. We could walk along the borders of the fields and find new fields, or the creek. This habit set “walking between farm fields” permanently in my mind as a normal thing to do. If it was nighttime during this walk, my dad would sing “Walking at Night,” which, in retrospect, is probably a German hiking song.

When I was eight, we moved to western Michigan. Worse, we moved to a city. I complained hard about this. It was the first remotely tragic thing that had ever happened to me, and I was determined to milk it. By this time, my crush on American Indians was well-developed, and I was keenly aware that it was tragic to be driven off your land.

However, despite that we technically lived in a city, our tiny church there was still about half farmers. There were still many opportunities, on prayer meeting and picnic and potluck nights, to run on vast grassy lawns while the adults sat and talked, to climb trees, walk between fields, and hide in the hay lofts and corn cribs.

The countryside in Michigan was flatter and dryer than it had been in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, my small denomination (the “Michiana Mennonites”) straddled the border between Michigan and its neighbor to the south, Indiana, which is really flat. The summer camp we went to served kids from both states, and we often found ourselves crossing the border for pulpit exchanges and things like that. I have attended church in what was literally a tiny, plain white chapel perched at the edge of a sea of fields with no other building nearby. I have tramped over Indiana farms, again with my brother and usually another farm boy, while the adults sat in the house and talked. And these Indiana farms are truly the farmland biome, because there is nothing there but farms, not even a hill to break up the monotony.

The farmland biome combines the best features of wilderness and human habitation. You can walk for as long as you like in solitude. There is wind, there is the changing sky, there are wildflowers, and flora and fauna on the windrows. You can get lost if you want, and if it’s winter, you can get cold and miserable too. But as the sun goes down, you can see in the distance the lights of houses. Coming back from the walk to the warmly glowing farmhouse provides all the romance that a kid with a big imagination and a copy of The Lord of the Rings could desire.

Farms have always been with us, and, though technology has changed somewhat, the logistics of having fields surrounding clusters of buildings mean that farmlands in every place and time look essentially the same. You have the wide horizon, the walls, canals or windrows carving the space up and giving some sense of distance, and the lights low to the ground. Perhaps one reason I like fantasy, as a genre, is that it naturally includes farms surrounding the town and castle.

Some of my favorite fantasy series start with, and often return to, the humble but honest farming community. O.K., actually I can only think of two, but they are good ones. The Belgariad starts off with Garion growing up on Faldor’s farm in Sendaria. Actually, it starts in one of my favorite parts of the farm, the kitchen. And, of course, The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo is not really a farmer, he’s more of a country squire, but the Shire is definitely a farming countryside. The four hobbits’ journey starts out hiking through the fields, as every journey should. Their first encounter with one of the Nine takes place on an otherwise ordinary country road. Farmer Maggot, a wholesome character, takes the four friends in, feeds them, and gets them safely to the river crossing in his wagon. And, when the journey is over, the four hobbits must come back and rescue from collectivization the ordinary, boring farms that they sacrificed to save. What would we do without ordinary, boring farms, after all? We’d starve, that’s what. And we would go insane, because the farming life, though hard, represents a very basic pattern for the way people were designed to live.

I like ’em.

Pompeii: A Masterclass in How to Write Historical Fiction

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Pompeii by Robert Harris, pub. 2003

Dear Robert Harris,

I am sorry. I am sorry that I left your book, Pompeii, moldering on my bedside bookshelf for … I don’t know … several years after I got it … I don’t know … from my husband’s trucker friend, from the library sale shelf, somewhere like that. I should have picked it up and read it immediately. I thought it was going to be demanding and … you know … educational. I didn’t know it was going to be educational. Or gripping. Or The Perfect Historical Novel.

Spoiler: Vesuvius Blows

I don’t know, reader, whether you would pick up a novel about Pompeii. Perhaps you would worry that the tension would be somewhat lacking, given how everyone knows that the mountain explodes and buries the town. It would be, you might think, sort of like reading a novel called John Dies at the End.

Harris, of course, uses the volcanic eruption’s very fame to his advantage. The people in Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and in the other towns around the bay of Neapolis, don’t know what is about to happen to them. This gives the opportunity for an infinite number of ironic quotes and thematic moments, such as the line, “I ought to die and come back to life more often,” when a narrow escape from death causes a character to be met with newfound respect. You spend much of the book wondering which, if any, of these people are going to survive.

The Historical Background

No, I am not going to sketch all the historical background here. I’ll just tell you that an awful lot is known about Roman society of this period, both general things about the culture, diet, and technology, and specific things about individuals like Pliny the Elder. (And Nero. Nero had a favorite moray eel, did you know that?) Harris makes excellent use of all this research to build a story that grows organically out of the who the characters are and what they value.

At the beginning of the book is a nice clear map of the Bay of Neapolis and surrounding regions, which is critical to visualizing the action of the book. Special attention is given to the Aqua Agusta, an aqueduct which runs from the Apenine Mountains, past all the towns in the region, with spurs providing water to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and so on, until it terminates at the naval base of Misenum, in a reservoir called the Piscina Mirabilis, “Miracle Pool.” When you see how close the Aqua Agusta runs to Vesuvius, you can see that an imminent eruption might well cause problems for the region’s water system.

The Hero

Marcus Attilius, the “aquarius,” comes from a family of men who build and maintain the empire’s aqueducts (which, by the way, like the Aqua Agusta, are often not elevated but rather are underground pipes). He was sent from Rome to Misenum two weeks ago after his predecessor, Exomnius, mysteriously disappeared. When the water running into Misenum first turns sulfurous and then starts to lose pressure, everyone is ready to blame Attilius for not having foreseen or prevented this.

Attilius, realizing the gravity of the situation, orders the city’s water supply to be shut off. There is enough in the Piscina Mirabilis to last Misenum two days with rationing. Attilius, based on which towns have lost water and which haven’t, thinks he knows approximately where the break in the aqueduct is. By pressing very hard, he hopes in two days to sail to Pompeii, send a team inland to find the exact source of the leak, send another team to re-direct the water farther upstream, buy supplies, and work through the night with a team of slaves to fix the blockage. In this way, he hopes to prevent riots and death in the towns without water. The reader knows that Attilius is also racing against time to find the reason the aqueduct broke.

We learn a lot about the Romans’ amazing aqueduct system. All the cities had, essentially, free water as a gift from the Empire. The underground pipe was six feet in diameter, with a three-foot thickness on either side made of the famous Roman cement, made with seawater, which could dry underwater and which got harder with time. There are maintenance manholes at regular intervals, and water sinks along the route which allow the water to drop rocks and silt it’s been carrying. These are then used for gravel.

The great Roman roads went crashing through nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards–any more and the flow would rupture the walls; any less and the water would lie stagnant–they were obliged to follow the contours of the ground. Their greatest glories, such as the triple-tiered bridge in southern Gaul, the highest in the world, that carried the aqueduct of Nemausus, were frequently far from human view.

page 181

The Villain

Ampliatus is a former slave. His master, who used him as a toy (yes, the Romans were horrible people), set him free in his will at the age of twenty. Ampliatus, by this time a ruthless social climber, began to amass wealth by buying real estate around Pompeii. Several years before the book opens, the city suffered an earthquake. Most of the aristocrats fled, but Ampliatus is unendingly proud of himself because he stayed, bought up a bunch of buildings on the cheap, fixed them up, and became the nouveau riche. By the time the book opens, he has bought his former master’s estate. His bedroom is the one where he used to be molested. He has gotten his former master’s son in debt to him, and is persuading him to marry Ampliatus’s daughter. He is building an ambitious bathhouse in the middle of the city. As Ampliatus says to the aquarius when he’s trying to corrupt him, water is key to civilization.

As a former slave, Ampliatus outdoes the aristocrats he imitates in both cruelty and ostentatiousness. There is a memorable scene of a feast Ampliatus gives, of the kind that historians would probably call sumptuous. It’s held in Ampliatus’ triclinium (dining room) on a swelteringly hot August night, and no one but Ampliatus wants to be there.

And the food! Did Ampliatus not understand that hot weather called for simple, cold dishes … then had come lobster, sea urchins, and, finally, mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds. … Sow’s udder stuffed with kidneys, with the sow’s vulva served as a side dish … Roast wild boar filled with live thrushes that flapped helplessly across the table as the belly was carved open … Then the delicacies: the tongues of storks and flamingoes (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot. Then a stew of nightingales’ livers …

pp. 146 – 147

Reader, I have spared you the most disgusting parts of this dinner.

Ampliatus has commissioned a positive prophecy about the city of Pompeii from a sybil–an older female seer–and is keeping it in readiness for the next time he needs to get the people all excited … probably in order to ensure the election to public office of an aristocrat he has in his pocket. And here is what the sybil has said: Pompeii is going to be famous all over the world. Long after the Caesars’ power has faded, people from all over the world will walk Pompeii’s streets and marvel at its buildings. Ampliatus takes this as a very good sign.

The Scholar

Pliny the Elder, an actual historical person, makes an appearance as a prominent side character. Pliny was stationed as a peacetime admiral at Misenum. When Vesuvius started erupting, it was clearly visible across the bay. Pliny, who had written a whole encyclopedia about the natural world, received a message from an older female aristocrat in Herculaneum, begging him to come and save her library. (In Pompeii, this message is delivered by Attilius.) Pliny launched the navy without imperial permission, intending to save the library and also evacuate the towns near the eruption. But pumice falling from the sky, floating on the water, and clogging the bay prevented the ships from approaching the coast. Pliny and his crew were forced to take refuge belowdecks, and their ship was driven across the bay to Stabiae, where they took refuge overnight. Eventually, they had to evacuate on foot, but Pliny, who was fat and was perhaps suffering from congestive heart failure, chose to stay, and ended up dying in the gaseous cloud that swept along the coast.

The remarkable thing is that during this entire time, Pliny had his scribe with him, and he was dictating his observations about the “manifestation.” His notes were saved. It occurs to me that the stereotype of the British absentminded professor who is never rattled by anything, and always keeps his cool and approaches everything with perfect manners and scientific curiosity (and is an incurable snob), may have roots deeper than England itself.

Go read this book right now!

Despite the large amount of detail in this review, I assure you that I have merely scratched the surface and that this review contains very few spoilers for the novel. I really can’t say anything better about it than that it is, in my estimation, the perfect historical novel. Please go read it if you have any interest at all in the genre.

A Great Book You Cannot Read

On By Jennifer Mugrage7 Comments

The book is called Everything Has a Shape. This particular book is book-shaped. It is a proof copy of a draft written by my brother-in-law, Andrew McKeeth. It’s nicely formatted and readable, but still needs an editor. The main remaining issue is malapropisms and homophones.

Everything Has a Shape is similar to Alice in Wonderland, except that it makes a lot more sense. Alice falls into a world of nonsense, whereas the protagonist of this book, Prism, the daughter of a geometer, is invited into a world where everything makes its own kind of sense.

Everything Has a Shape also reminded me of The Phantom Tollbooth. If you were a kid who loved to read, you probably stumbled across The Phantom Tollbooth and loved it. In that book, Milo travels through a world where everything is a physical manifestation of language. For example, you can see a huge crowd of adjectives thundering over a hill.

Everything Has a Shape is sort of the mirror image of The Phantom Tollbooth, because in the world Prism must navigate, the primary mental unit is not words, but shapes. In fact, the denizens of this new place tell Prism that they did not have language at all until humans started coming into their world.

And what is it called, this strange place that Prism visits? It’s called Place.

“We come from Place. Oh, sorry. Of course this probably doesn’t make any sense either. The place where I live is called Place. It really is a terrible name, I know, but it fit so well that nobody had the heart to change it. It used to be all Space before we called it Place. Anyway, we want to ask you about Nothing. You see in Place, where I come from, there is always something. You humans, however, do believe in Nothing. You think that there is such a thing as void and vacuum. In Place everything has a shape. Even Space, which might seem empty, is really just an undefined shape.”

“If there isn’t Nothing in Place,” [asked Prism], “why are you coming to ask about it?”

“Well, as far as we know there has never been Nothing in Place, but we are beginning to think that there might be a little bit of Nothing now. What is Nothing? Can you measure Nothing? I mean, if there is Nothing, how could you know it?”

Everything Has a Shape, p. 15

The book is full of conversations like this, and they only get worse, which is to say, more confusing but ultimately more insightful as well. I will post quotes from this book in a few weeks, because they are so thought-provoking.

Place, once Prism gets there, is understandably hard to describe, but the author does a fair job of it. It is a world folded over on itself, with a parallel ground above it, called Oversky. Think of it as looking like the center of the earth. Place is populated with strange creatures and paradoxical landscapes that look like an M.C. Escher drawing. There is also a population of humans whose ancestors got into Place years ago and have been living there ever since. Prism’s journey will, of course, take her all throughout this world. She often has to use mental tricks in order to be able to navigate Place’s physical reality. These are similar to the mental tricks we might have to use here on earth, such as occupying ourselves to make time go faster, or closing our eyes to navigate an illusion room, but Prism’s experience in Place is more intense.

Prism ultimately has to face The Twister, an entity that is introducing chaos into Place by convincing the creatures to deform their own shapes. The Twister makes a strong argument that nobody has an inherent shape of their own, that having an unchangeable shape is a kind of prison, and that by helping creatures to destroy their shapes, he is setting them free. Creatures who have encountered the Twister leave broken.

Prism’s time in the Twister’s tower is confusing and poignant, especially when she encounters the Likeness, a girl who looks exactly like Prism but claims to be a better version.

“Did you used to have a shape of your own?” Prism asked.

“You mean before I became a Likeness? Yes, I used to believe that lie, but then I realized the truth that there is no shape. It is better this way. I can be whatever I like. You can only be you.”

“As I said before,” Prism said, “if I could be everything, I would stop being anything. It’s true that I am stuck with my shape, but I’m the only one who can be me.”

“You’re wrong. I am you right now.”

“You’re a copy. You are ‘like’ me, true. You can be like anything you want but you can never be yourself.”

“You don’t know what you’re passing up.”

“I would rather be me than be nobody.”

The Likeness grew angry and the real Prism wondered if she really looked that way when she got mad.

ibid, p. 166

As you can see, Everything Has a Shape is an insightful and compelling read. I hope it can be published someday so it can be enjoyed by more people. Furthermore, I would love to see an illustrated version. The scenes in this book would lend themselves to some amazing surrealist art. At the very least, it needs a beautifully done cover.

What do you think? Would you read Everything Has a Shape if it were available?

Forgotten in Death: A Book Review

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

The following review was recently posted by me on GoodReads:

So, it looks as if the “In Death” series by J.D. Robb is yet another very long-running series that I was unaware of. They are police procedurals set in the 2060s. This future world differs from our own about as much as you’d expect. Things are recognizable, and the terms, trends, and technologies that look different seem like reasonable extrapolations from what we have now. Obviously, this isn’t the only way the world could go, but it’s a plausible one. For example, people live slightly longer in this future world, so that one character casually mentions he’s going upstate for his parents’ 75th wedding anniversary.

The world and characters are introduced masterfully in a way that’s very much showing, not telling … so much so that I almost felt lost during the first few chapters. I don’t know whether this is because of an extreme leaning towards showing, or whether because this particular book comes very late in the series. The one thing I wished for more of was a physical description of Eve and of her husband, Roarke. Perhaps these were given in earlier books.

Forgotten also contains easter eggs. Eve’s husband, Roarke, and another family, the Singers, are both in the construction industry in New York City. Sound familiar? When I first started this book, I wondered whether it was going to be a re-telling of The Fountainhead. It wasn’t. There is also an allusion to The Cask of Amontillado. There are probably other literary allusions that I didn’t pick up on. These allusions take this book to a whole new level beyond its genre.

Realistic speech in books is important to me, and Forgotten excels in this area. The characters all speak differently from one another, whether they are a tough cop, a bubbly teenager, or a Russian gangster. I should also note that, although this book is gritty and deals with horrible domestic abuse and crime, it does not portray the world cynically. There are many characters who are genuinely good people, including main and side characters. I didn’t feel I was being sold a vision of the world where everything is class war or patriarchy or whatever.

Though long, this book covers only about three days of investigation. We follow the detective, Eve, through every minute of her day and night. Like many hard-boiled detectives, she and her team are very driven. She works late into the night. She forgets to eat unless someone makes her. She sleeps for … I don’t know. It looks like five or six hours maybe. I don’t enjoy this aspect of detective fiction, because it makes me tired. However, I know it’s part of the genre.

Personal Addenda because this is a blog:

I got this book from my husband’s trucker friend. After reading it, I checked on FictionDB, and oh my goodness! Forgotten is #53 of a 62-book series! And that series includes some books that are, say, number 11.5 as well. This friend of my husband’s is really expanding my horizons.

One other possible reason that I felt disoriented as I began this book was chronic pain. For the entire time reading it, I’ve been suffering nerve pain in my left arm. On and off, but mostly on. Update: it’s now about 7 weeks later, and the arm no longer painful, just pins and needles.

Quote: Take Out the Distinctive Stuff

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

Next to come to mind was my original literary agent delivering her verdict on my first novel. Don’t want to show it to anyone, she said. Why not? It’s a bad book. Have to think of your reputation as well as mine. Why bad? It falls between the stools, halfway betwixt mainstream and mystery. No way to promote it. And where does the bookseller shelve it? Stick to nonfiction, said my agent. I can sell that for you. How about me rewriting it? Well, if you do, get rid of the Indian stuff.

Tony Hillerman, acclaimed author of the Navajo mysteries, in his memoir, p. 5