As a follow-up to David McRaney’s previous book You Are Not So Smart, You Are Now Less Dumb not only has a more positive spin to the title, it’s an overall better book. While the former reads much like what it was–a collection of blog posts assembled into book form–the latter is a more fleshed-out examination of how and why we act the way do, with tips on how to be “less dumb”, even if some of the tips amount to little more than “Here is some awful behavior you may find yourself engaging in, try to be aware of it.”
While the book follows the light tone of the first previous entry, each chapter offers more detailed analysis and studies covering many aspects of our social behavior. Some of the things revealed are not exactly revealing (most of the confirmation bias material) while others are downright chilling, like the chapter describing mob mentality, complete with examples of people yelling at potential suicide jumpers to jump–and then the jumpers doing just that, resulting in their deaths.
This isn’t a book that will change your life or make you overhaul the way you conduct yourself around others but it is informative, insightful and may make you that much more aware of the way you act, both positively and negatively. And that’s not a bad thing.
Rendezvous with Rama is an incredibly lean science fiction mystery. Clarke doesn’t spend dozens or hundreds of pages world-building, he doesn’t bolt on any number of subplots or drama between the crew members of the Endeavour, a solar survey vessel whose crew is tasked with exploring and analyzing the massive alien vessel dubbed Rama before it journeys out and beyond our solar system, possibly never to return.
In exchange for detailed character development and a complex plot Clarke serves up an almost documentary approach to how the Endeavour’s crew tackles the enigma of the Rama vessel, with government figures offering advice and orders from the moon, one of the many colonized celestial bodies in this world set in the 2130s.
Despite the presence of political wranglings (the Mercury colony is particularly willful) Clarke also makes no attempt to use his story to set up parallels to the then-present day of 1973, giving it a sense of timelessness, save for a few nods to the “swingin’ 70s” by furnishing the commander of the ship with two wives and having him note the inevitable low-gravity orgy that will happen at the end of their mission (without the wives, as one is on Earth and the other is on Mars).
This is otherwise a terse but fascinating examination of how we might explore a completely alien environment. Despite the sequels that came later, Clarke never intended to follow-up on the story and I would recommend treating it as a standalone.
Rendezvous with Rama is considered a science fiction classic and a cornerstone of Clarke’s body of work. If you like hard science fiction and have somehow missed it, I highly recommend picking it up.
I am not going to review one of the all-time classic American novels, since people with bigger brains than mine have already made much smarter comments about it over the past 89 years.
I will say that I was curious to see how I’d react to the book as an adult, having last read it as part of my high school curriculum nearly 89 years ago. I didn’t remember much about it except it involved places called Eggs, something something about cars and Gatsby, who was an enigmatic and ultimately pathetic sort of fraud. Mostly I recalled the lack of explosions, monsters, ghosts and sharks. It did have gun play and a car chase, of sorts, so there was that.
Mostly I am left with two things, having now re-read it lo these many years later: the bitter snark of Nick Carraway, the narrator, as he observes these rich and wretched people, and the utter bleakness of the story. Nick leaves West Egg essentially having gained nothing and being worse for the experience. Gatsby, of course, picks a very bad time to finally take a dip in the swimming pool. This is not the book to read when fantasizing about what you’d do if you won the lottery.
A surprisingly meaty (and slimy/bloody/gooey) collection of stories using Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Horror anthologies are notoriously uneven in my experience so I was pleasantly surprised at how solid this anthology is. While there is no singular standout story here there are also no outright clunkers that I was tempted to flip past. The weakest efforts are probably those that attempt to mimic Lovecraft’s actual writing style, like Brian Lumley’s “The Fairground Horror”. People probably shouldn’t do this.
The highlights include Laird Barron’s “The Men from Porlock”. While I found his style a bit ponderous at times in his own collection, his concluding story set post-World War I is wonderfully weird, gruesome and filled with men who curse like lumberjacks because they are, in fact, lumberjacks.
Charles Stross imagines weaponizing Cthulhu in “A Colder war” and the results are appropriately horrifying, while Elizabeth Bear’s “Shoggoths in Bloom” takes a quieter, science-focused approach to Lovecraft’s horrors that makes them almost cute. Almost.
Joe R. Lansdale’s “The Crawling Sky” features a sharpshooting preacher out to battle evil Old Testament-style. The speech and manner of the preacher reminded me (favorably) of The Dark Tower’s Roland.
The remaining stories cover time periods ranging from the early 20th century to the present day and shift in tone from not-quite-outright comedy to relentlessly grim, with a few detours into “What the hell is happening?” territory. There’s really something for everyone here, especially if you like faces filled with writhing tentacles or hair that is actually wriggling sentient worms.
Son of Rosemary is the sequel to Rosemary’s Baby, and is set in 1999, 33 years after the original (and was written in 1997).
The book retains Levin’s glib, breezy dialogue, coupled with terse description that keeps the action rolling along. In the story Rosemary falls into a coma in 1971 and only wakes up after the last member of the Bramford coven is killed in a car accident. During her decades-long nap her son has grown up and claims to have resisted his darker tendencies (being the son of Satan and all), has started a religious charitable organization and orchestrated its crowning event, a global lighting of candles to usher in the year 2000 and a new era of peace, love and all that jazz.
Rosemary has her doubts and Andy’s occasionally nutty behavior underscores them. Without going into spoilers, the story gets increasingly dark, the ends with a twist at the end that will delight or infuriate, depending on how you felt about the story up to that point.
I was left nonplussed.
Tonally this is, despite the potential for worldwide domination by big letter Evil, not to mention Armageddon, a lighter read than Rosemary’s Baby. There’s never much connection to the shallow characters, and those who are more fleshed out waver back and forth like pendulums in their thoughts and actions, making it hard to empathize. The twist ending almost feels like Levin saying, “You wanted a sequel? Here ya go, suckers!” Or maybe it’s too subtly clever for me to properly appreciate.
In the end the book is carried on the strength of Levin’s skill as a writer. If you enjoyed Rosemary’s Baby and think you might be interested in a goofy “What if?” scenario on events following that book, give Son of Rosemary a shot. There are otherwise better horror novels out there.
This is a nutty action adventure that combines Whitley Strieber’s beliefs about the soul, climate change and life after death with the 2012 doomsday prophecies, parallel universes and an overarching plot that has a pulpy L. Ron Hubbard feel to it, right down to a reptilian-humanoid alternate Earth that wants to crush (and eat) soft, puny humans.
It also features an explosive Ann Coulter cameo that proves Strieber still has a sense of humor.
Some spoilers follow, though most are revealed fairly early on in the story.
The story begins on an alternate version of Earth that is mostly the same but with a few notable differences–two moons instead of one, a different geopolitical make-up (no world wars, the British Empire remains ascendant, peace generally prevails). Fourteen ancient sites around the world suddenly blow up, revealing gigantic lenses that have been put in place thousands of years before to allow the inhabitants of Abaddon (evil snake people Earth) to burst through and nosh on the souls of alternate Earth. The soul is presented as a scientific reality, a kind of plasma that persists after a body expires, though it can be permanently extinguished. The snakes know how to bottle and destroy souls and feed on them. With their world messed up, they plan on using the lenses to take over both of the other Earths.
While the story gets progressively weirder and outlandish as the world of Abaddon is fully revealed, there are still plenty of well-executed scenes depicting alien incursions into both of the “good” Earths, and many of the characters have a loopy “what the hell” attitude that keeps things from bogging down. There is a sincerity in the way Strieber writes about family bonds and how they endure, even if I couldn’t stop picturing the enemies in the story as guys in big rubber snakeman suits.
2012 is not a great book and I felt the execution didn’t quite live up to the presentation but it’s an enjoyable enough read.
This short and surprisingly breezy novel answers the question of what you get when you combine group therapy sessions with body horror and unseen monsters trying to bust into our world, Lovecraft-style. In the hands of a lesser writer this might turn into a muddled mess but Daryl Gregory keeps a sharp focus, adroitly mixing humor and horror as a group of five individuals meet to discuss their common monster issues. These issues end up requiring more than just primal scream therapy to deal with. But there is assuredly screaming as well.
My only real complaint with the story is its thinness. It’s short to the point of robbing some of the emotional heft of the characters because events unfold so rapidly and speed toward the end. I wouldn’t say this feels like a first draft because the prose is nicely polished, but it does seem like there’s not quite enough meat on the bone. I was left satisfied but only just.
On the other hand, it’s kind of nice to read something where the author doesn’t spend dozens (or hundreds) of pages world-building and going deep into the backgrounds of every character, no matter how insignificant.
Recommended, particularly for those looking for a fresh take on the usual monsters-all-around-us plot.
There is no doubt that Laird Barron is a fabulous author name.
This collection of long short stories is populated by Barron’s tough guy protagonists who plow through Lovecraftian landscapes with their fists out, often telling their stories in the first person as they battle demons both personal and perhaps real. But no matter how tough these guys are, they all demonstrate an equally dense vocabulary and gift for imagery and metaphor that would leave the everyman with his jaw hanging, a “What did you just say?” look etched on his face.
And that is, perhaps, the biggest flaw of this collection. At times it almost feels like Barron is simply taking the same macho-but-well-spoken bruiser and working him through different variations of a surreal (and typically present day) world. Most of the stories take place in the Pacific Northwest, around Olympia and Seattle but the cities are left largely as sketches, more background to the mood, which is forefront. The mood is invariably dark, the only humor bitter and cynical, as these men get caught up in cults, the gaps between worlds best left unexplored and more horrific things.
Barron luxuriously works the description of things both ordinary and uncanny, taking his time to draw the reader in, letting the strangeness of his settings settle around like a big cozy blanket. A blanket with teeth and soaked in something that smells not quite alive, not quite dead.
The major issue I had with the stories is I found the protagonists, for all their bravado and quips, strangely unaffecting. I didn’t care what happened to them. Worse, Barron cheats with the first person perspective, using its intimacy to full effect while ending several tales with no real way for the protagonist to have been left in a state to actually tell them. It’s not quite “and they turned out to already be dead!” but it’s in the same territory.
I can’t deny the care Barron gives to each piece, though. The stories are like lovingly handcrafted carvings, the maker working carefully to get every facet just right. The highlight is probably the title piece, in which a brutish (but literate) small-time collector/muscleman gets a look at a photograph that literally changes him. Barron does a lovely job of drawing out the horror, revealing it though obscure photographs and nightmares. “Parallax” uses a gimmick (see the title) but is an effective and unsettling take on one half of a couple disappearing and the other being fingered for possible murder. “Hallucigenia” has a similar feel to “The Imago Sequence” but does just as well in creating its surreal environments.
Although I am left with mixed feelings on the collection as a whole, I can say without reservation that if you like any of this collection you will invariably like all of it. Barron’s writing is very strong and consistent. I’m just not totally sold on all of his characters and the writerly tricks he employs.
The Returned is Jason Mott’s debut novel and as a first novel it’s pretty decent. As a novel, period, I found it less effective, with a number of flaws and unrealized potential.
The premise is high concept and simple: without explanation, the dead return to life, unchanged from the time just before their deaths (ie. murder victims don’t show up with knives stuck in their backs). As the story progresses the number of ‘returned’ grows significantly and things take a turn for the ugly as governments grapple to deal with all of the freshly warm bodies.
The novel pays lip service to the wider effects of the dead coming back to life, mostly by having people observe news reports on TV or in brief interstitials between chapters that recount the return of various individuals across the globe. The bulk of the story focuses on the elderly couple of Harold and Lucille Hargrave, who have their eight year old son returned to them fifty years after he drowned in a local river, and how their small southern town of Arcadia handles the newly not-dead (hint: not very well at all).
The characters are broadly drawn–Lucille is deeply religious, her husband is a cantankerous atheist, there is the decent but powerless government man and the colonel in charge of the eventual operation in Arcadia is revealed to be all but psychotic. The latter, Colonel Willis (I couldn’t help but imagine Bruce Willis as the character, as it is essentially a copy of the character of Major General William Devereaux that Willis played in The Siege), is set up to be a major player but actually has a fairly small role.
I had two main problems with the story, the first being that the premise is never explored in any detail. The dead come back to life, their numbers create a problem for the “true living” and that’s it. There are a few vague hints about the why and the how of why they have returned, but these are nothing more than traces. It’s an interesting concept but in the end it feels like a plot device to hang the story on.
I was fine with the story focusing on the small scale of the Hargraves and their boy, along with some of the town’s neighbors and a few other sundry characters that get drawn in, but here again the story is curiously one-sided, with the author staying almost entirely out of the heads of the returned, and this was my other major problem with it. I often felt like half of the story was being withheld. The boy Jacob is little more than a polite cipher, a wind-up toy in the shape of an eight year old. While everyone frets and threatens and talks about the returned, the returned themselves are little more than wallpaper in the background.
The writing sometimes tries a little too hard to wax lyrical but I admit I may be the wrong audience for this style of writing. It comes off sounding corny to me. “It was bitterly cold, like a hard winter where the ground is frozen and cruel.” I just made that up, but it conveys Mott’s style of metaphor. There’s also a little too much of characters confessing how little they know about particular subjects “other than what I see on TV” that feels like the author trying to cover for his own lack of knowledge on various topics.
The Returned is not a bad book, though. The prose is clean and direct and the story never meanders. There are some amusing exchanges between characters. By the end, though, the whole thing felt a bit disjointed, with character arcs that play out to no real effect, action scenes that don’t quite ring true (there should be a moratorium on people shooting someone in an extremity) and a conclusion that wraps things up but left me thinking, “Well, okay. I guess the story’s done now.”
This is the third book in Karina Halle’s “Experiments in Terror” series, though the story is self-contained and any needed background is provided along the way. I chose it because a) the cover looks neat (yes, I am still drawn to a good cover) and b) I liked that this particular ghost story was set on an actual local island here in BC.
The story follows webcasting ghost hunters Perry Palomino and Dex Foray as they set out to document the alleged haunting on a former Chinese leper colony on D’Arcy Island, located off the coast of Vancouver Island. Dex is a chain-smoking gruff thirty-something with a Dark and Mysterious Past while Perry is a 22 year old with serious confidence issues and also the ability to see ghosts.
The story is told from the first person perspective of Perry and Perry likes to go into great detail about what she is thinking, what she is doing, what she might be doing, what Dex should be doing (falling in love with her, it seems) and well, everything and anything. This is another story where much of the mystery and drama is leeched away by the protagonist basically not shutting up about every subject under the sun.
The romantic tension serves as the undercurrent to the story and consumes a surprisingly large chunk of it. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the will-they-won’t-they thing but it’s all fairly predictable.
The adventure on the island goes south quickly with all kinds of terrifying and horrifying sights and sounds. As with many horror stories it works best if you don’t step back and try to piece things together logically. The biggest issue here is probably how Perry can see ghosts but Dex can’t–until it’s needed story-wise for him to be able to.
On the one hand I admire the author for having a protagonist who isn’t some uber she-warrior able to handle everything with panache. Perry is neurotic, throws up, passes out, trips, falls and generally has a terrible time of it, yet she comes through it all a little stronger and a little surer. The arc for both characters growing is small but there.
In the end, though, the writing itself left me feeling ambivalent about the book. Halle does a fine job in capturing Perry’s voice but at times it’s detrimental to the story, with the tone veering all over the place, from melodramatic passages you’d expect from a bodice ripper to near-slapstick. Perry’s take on things often feels like an overheated teenager. It’s funny at times but the shifting tone and casual, almost sloppy style detract from the overall experience.
Still, this is a decent bit of terror and it moves at a brisk pace. It’s not likely to make you want to go camping on a remote island any time soon.
Now that I am reading more I have moved my list o’ books from the Errata page to their own page, cleverly titled Books. It is available from the menu at the top of the site.
I’ll be adding more reviews and converting some (or all) of the existing ones to link to my Goodreads page, making it my Officially most Used Social Media Site™.
1. It was short and I wasn’t in the mood for a 1,000 page epic.
2. It was cheap. Cheap is always a good price.
3. I’m a sucker for apocalypse stories, especially ones that aren’t the start of a 20 volume series.
3a. I like to give a few untried authors a shot every year.
The Final Winter or as I like to call it, The Final Winter Where Every Character Shares Every Thought They Have with the Reader starts out with some measure of promise. A small assortment of people are effectively trapped in an English pub as an apocalyptic snowstorm rages not only outside but all across the world. Shortly into the story all phone service goes down and the power flicks off, leaving the group of people completely isolated.
A few others from a nearby supermarket and video store make their way over and the rest of the short novel chronicles the group trying to survive the storm and each other because most of them are miserable wretches.
The ending is right up there with “it was all a dream” or “and it turns out they were Adam and Eve”. It’s hokey as all get-out.
Overall, this is a mediocre effort, hampered by a few things that feel very “new writer” to me:
Each scene is told from a particular character’s point of view. This is fine. However, the author doesn’t merely jump into each character’s head, he snuggles comfortably in. Every thought and emotion is relayed in explicit (and often redundant) detail. There is no mystery at all behind anyone’s motivations at any point. Everything is quite literally spelled out for the reader. This gives the story a strange flatness, leeching out nearly all of the inter-character drama.
The plot drives the characters. The author seems to have hatched the plot for the novel and then contorts the situations and characters to ensure that everything moves from Point A to Point B to Point C. There are absurd coincidences, characters behaving stupidly (often wondering to themselves why they are acting so stupidly but carrying on nonetheless), all in service to keep the plot moving forward. The characters feel less like people and more like chess pieces being moved about to get to checkmate. That’s what the bad guy should have shouted at the end, really. “Checkmate!”
Without getting too much into spoilers, the depiction of good and evil flips between cartoonish and grimdark, but the tone shifts are awkward, as if the author couldn’t make up his mind whether to play things straight or for laughs.
The opening where the characters are first introduced and the mystery of the storm is not yet revealed works reasonably well and I was interested in seeing what would happen. By the end I was rolling my eyes regularly and happier about the book being short and cheap.
A disappointment overall and one I can’t recommend. If you’re looking for an apocalyptic tale I’d suggest the nearly 40 year old Lucifer’s Hammer before this.
You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself by David McRaney
