Paranormal :: All Things Andy Gavin

Archive for Paranormal

The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

Jan24

Title: The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack

Author: Mark Hodder

Genre: Steampunk

Length: 376 pages

Read: Dec 29, 2011 – Jan 23, 2012

Summary: First rate steampunk!

This is certainly not your everyday read, although it’s certainly a good one. Set in 1861, the protagonist is Sir Richard Francis Burton, the explorer, not the actor. The first fifty or so pages feel like engaging historical fiction.

Then all hell breaks loose. In a good way. This version of 1861 isn’t what we read in the history books. It includes steam powered flying chairs, insulting messenger parakeets, genetically engineered werewolves, robotic street cleaners and all sorts of goodies. Most of the characters are famous Victorians, or in this world Albertians given that Victoria was shot to death in 1840 (a real life attempt that was fatal in this alternate history).

The voice of the novel is third person, medium tight and usually riding with Burton. It does, however, jump over to some others occasionally like his side kick the Marquis-de-Sade-loving poet Algernon Swinburne and the title character. The tone is slightly flip, as the inventions and wackiness is just left of possible. Yet things remain consistently period and the characters are well researched and full of era-appropriate dialog, but also clever and engaging.

About midway, the book, already getting weird, goes totally off the the deep end. Enter Spring-Heeled Jack, crazy time traveler, and a host of steampunk altered villains including a double-brain grafted Charles Darwin and an Iron Golemized Isambard Kingdom Brunel. But this zaniness only makes the novel better. I’m reminded of one of my all time favorites, The Anubis Gates, but TSAOSHJ is less magical, more grounded in technology.

Bravo! This book really shows off tremendous world building and research while remaining fast paced and easy to read. If it has anything that holds it back from being a complete classic, it’s that the characters, while well developed, don’t really illicit any significant pathos. Things are just a little too distant and weird for that. It’s not a huge book, and Hodder crams in an enormously distinct world, so it’s no surprise this isn’t a character study. Still, I do feel that the complex character of Burton was well profiled, almost like in a good biography. Impressive.

I read this right after putting down another steampunk book, Clockwork Angel, just 20% in. Wow, what a difference. Both are set in alternate 19th century Londons, but other than a couple random “period words,” CA feels exactly the same as the author’s contemporary paranormal YA, with all its forced faux-romance. TSAOSHJ, on the other hand, is an adult book, and makes use of one’s babbage augmented, steam-powered, glass jar encased, cybernetic brain.

For more book reviews, click here.

By: agavin
Comments (1)

Posted in: Books

Tagged as: Algernon Swinburne, Anubis Gates, Book Review, Burton, Charles Darwin, Clockwork Angel, Literature, London, Mark Hodder, Marquis-de-Sade, Paranormal, Richard Francis Burton, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Spring-Heeled Jack, Steampunk, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, Victorian era

Forbidden Mind

Jan20

Title: Forbidden Mind

Author: Kimberly Kinrade

Genre: YA paranormal

Length: 134 pages

Read: January 18, 2012

Summary: Fast and fun. Recommended.

This little novel caught my attention yesterday while running a Kindle Select free day. I was sold by the tag line, “She reads minds. He controls minds. Together, they might get out alive.” I like the notion of a couple stuck together by the inherent nature of circumstances. I tried to build this dynamic into my second novel, Untimed — only it’s time travel, not mind reading.

I pounded through this book in one sitting, as it is only 134 pages, making it more a novella. This is a new trend made possible by the Kindle store. Previously novellas were basically impossible to sell and besides, I was never really into them, being more the 400,000 word per volume, ten volume fantasy kind of guy (I have actually read all but the last of the Wheel of Tedium). But now, being older and having less time, I’m finding I dig ’em.

Forbidden Mind is written in tight first person past. The prose is very snappy and light, the way I like it. Perhaps it could use the tiniest bit of further line editing, but it’s good. We drop right into the character and the story and race from there. In a 134 pages, there isn’t room to dawdle and Kinrade doesn’t. Things are lean, with the bare minimum description. The protagonist is very likeable. She isn’t super complex, but she has a nice non-snarky teen voice. The setup here is that she’s a mind reader who lives in a kind of Professor X’s school for the gifted — but they aren’t so altruistic. In fact they rent out the paranormal kids for clandestine missions (slightly Dollhouse like). The scenario is very intriguing and the book so breathlessly fast that we race right through the “school” scenes and into Act 2 and the B story (romance), which likewise blur by.

I’ve always liked mind readers and what’s known in the literature as mind controllers, pushers, or coercers. Some of my favorite books are Firestarter, The Case of the Vanishing Boy, Carrion Comfort (best horror novel I’ve ever read, and Stephen King agrees with me), and Intervention.

In Forbidden Mind, the story is the girl’s perspective and so we get more of the mind reading than the controlling. This part is well handled, but I thought there was some juicy potential in the synergistic relationship between a mind reader and a coercer that was left on the table. Things move fast and character is more Kinrade’s strongpoint than complex action so their extraction from their predicament is quick and straightforward. Being a crazy nerd I’ve spent an insane amount of time thinking about physic powers and their ramifications. I love books that deal in complexity with a system of powers. The Julian May books do, as does Sheri S. Tepper’s remarkable True Game series. I would have loved to see this pair escaping using a mental version of the three legged race. Plus, this is a powerful pair of powers: unlimited mind reading and mind control, so they could easily overshadow obstacles without a very threatening antagonist (a Heroes Sylar type) or significant limitations (like Firestarter’s cerebral hemorrhaging). We don’t have these. But Kinrade constructs the story in such a rapid and straightforward way as to avoid the problem. And the ending comes equally quick, but satisfying.

Which leaves us room to explore this interesting dynamic in the sequel. If you like paranormal teen adventure, try it out.

For more book reviews, click here.

By: agavin
Comments (3)

Posted in: Books

Tagged as: Book Review, Carrion Comfort, Case of the Vanishing Boy, Firestarter, Forbidden Mind, Julian May, Kimberly Kinrade, Literature, Mind control, Novella, Paranormal, review, Reviews and Criticism, Sheri S. Tepper, Stephen King, True Game, YA paranormal

Bleeding Violet

Mar24

Title: Bleeding Violet

Author: Dia Reeves

Genre: Paranormal YA

Length: 84,000 words, 454 pages

Read: March 14-20, 2011

Summary: Unique, good, and very different.

This is a weird weird book, and I mean that in a good way. Nominally, it’s about a schizophrenic girl, Hanna, who’s dad has died and who decides to move in unannounced with her mom she’s never met. But her mom doesn’t live in a normal town. She lives in some kind of weird place in Texas where gates between universes have let all sorts of strange monsters and realities in. A town with its own supernatural police.

The voice here is really fun. It’s first person past, but with a sort of cavalier devil-take-care crazy-girl style. I liked it. Some sentences were fantastic (both literally and figuratively). Not exactly in the lyrical kind of way that you might expect, but because of their deft wit, and quick and creative way of describing utterly fantastic goings on.

Because this book is FILLED, PACKED, STUFFED, with weird monsters and magic. Reeves uses the protagonist and POV character very deftly to explain it, or mostly just show what happens. She doesn’t feel the need to combine herself to easy concepts either. For example, sound sucking, student grabbing, invisible squids live inside the high school windows and one of the characters defeats them with a deck of playing cards! It’s a tribute to her skill that I could follow nearly all of this stuff. And it’s compact too, not being a very long book and containing dozens of strange encounters. The descriptions are lean but vivid. Occasionally she violates POV slightly on the side of clarity because the protagonist is new to this stuff and she explains it with a bit more understanding than she might be expected to have. But this isn’t very noticeable. Now I do wonder if someone with less experience reading speculative fiction in all its forms might have trouble with this novel. I mean, I’ve read A LOT (5000+ speculative novels), and played hundreds if not thousands of video games with magical systems etc. We won’t even count the movies and TV shows. Certainly someone who likes their reality… well… real, would be put off by the book. I wasn’t. The supernatural flavor was really interesting and unique, reminding me ever so slightly of something like the eerie Lost Room, or the wonderful but very out of print Marianne series by Sherri S Tepper.

The choice of using such a fractured POV character was interesting. There could be an argument that the entire book was some sort of delusion. I myself just treated Hanna’s view point as literal, and everything she saw as factual. The protagonist, and some of the other characters for that matter, don’t feel entirely real. They aren’t cardboard per se, as they feel well rounded, they just have a bit of surreal style to them that comes from their rather depressed moral compass. There’s a lot of killing and murder in this book, often horrifically grisly in fact, and no one seems to care too much. One of your best friends has been impregnated by evil demon spawn who are eating her from the inside out, well, just cut them out and leave her bleeding to die. That sort of thing. It works in the story, but if you stop and thing about the reactions any non psychopathic person might have… These characters just move on. It didn’t really bother me in the context of this story as the narrator’s view point tends to whitewash away the consequences.

There’s also a good bit of cavalier sexuality — a welcome break from the self censorship that seems to be the norm since the 90s. Hanna is certainly open minded in that regard, and likes to take off her clothes. Unfortunately 🙂 there isn’t a lot of detail, like most everything else in the book a lot is left to the imagination. This is also part of the trend. To tell the truth Judy Blume’s Forever (1975) is still the most explicit teen book I can remember.

Overall, this is a great book, but it’s much more FANTASTIC than your typical paranormal. Being a fantasist, that was more than fine with me.

By: agavin
Comments (0)

Posted in: Books

Tagged as: Bleeding Violet, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Dia Reeves, Fiction, Forever, Judy Blume, Lost Room, Marianne, Narrative mode, Paranormal, Paranormal romance, Playing card, Protagonist, Texas, YA, Young-adult fiction

Book Review: White Cat

Mar17

Title: White Cat

Author: Holly Black

Genre: Paranormal YA

Length: 76,000 words, 310 pages

Read: March 12, 2011

Summary: Well written, fun, but a little contrived.

This is yet another foray into the world of paranormal YA (I am, after all, doing research for my own writing). Holly Black is a but best selling YA and MG author. This book, unusually, has a male protagonist, and he’s part of a family of “curse workers,” although he himself doesn’t do any magic. He lives in an alternative reality where a small minority of people are able to “lay on hands” in a bad way and curse people. They are known to society, it’s even illegal, and formed into criminal gangs in the 1930s just like the Mafia.

The premise is decent, although I’m not a fan versions of our reality with outed paranormal groups. I didn’t really buy the changes at a social level. The whole existance of this kind of power in volume would throw everything off, and here the only real social change is that everyone wears gloves (because it’s through bare skin that the magic works). We are reminded often of the glove factor.

The writing is very solid and straightforward, in first person present. So straightforward it took me awhile to even notice the tense. Or maybe writing it myself is acclimating me to it. The protagonist is likable and felt fairly real, although maybe not all of his decisions did. And I didn’t really feel the proper weight of his emotions. Big things happen, but without big feelings. By page three or thereabouts we discover he murdered his girlfriend. We’re supposed to still like him. And we do, but mostly because it’s totally obvious that he didn’t REALLY murder her, he only thinks he did. Oh and we quickly hear about the one flavor of curse worker that’s REALLY rare. And guess who’s from a magical family and doesn’t have any power…

But I enjoyed the book — quite a bit — I read it in half a day after all. Another book I attempted to read that same morning was so execrable that I only made it to fifty pages, so this was a vast improvement.

A couple other beefs. At times the writing was so lean that I felt like I missed something in the action and had to page back to find it — but it wasn’t even there. Now, it was then obvious moving forward what had happened, it just seemed that the attempt at leanness and/or agressive editing had taken the edge off the clarity. Then as we moved into the second half we hit the “after the big reveal” syndrome which many books with reveals often suffer from. I’ve mentioned this before (like HERE or HERE), but basically this is where after the big shocker no one really seems to act with appropriate emotional gravitas. I’m used to it, and it’s a tough problem to solve, so I moved on to the ending.

Which was the weakest part. Everything juggled into place such that the people were served the plot rather than their character. The plot wasn’t bad, it’s just that I didn’t really see some of the characters acting like they did.

Overall, the story was fast and fun. As I said Ms Black is a skilled writer, and the prose zipped along, with nice quick descriptions, and she isn’t afraid to be a bit dark or sexy (considering it’s YA). The gratuitous twist on the last two pages bugged me, but I ordered the sequel (which the Twitter/FB buzz says is very good) and another of the author’s books.

How different these neat little package YA books are from a meaty tome like The Wise Man’s Fear (which I finished the same day). There are subplots in that book about the size of this entire story.

For a review of Holly Black’s first novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale, click here.