My latest review, The Shadow Pavilion by Liz Williams, went up at SFFWorld yesterday. Although I enjoyed the first two Detective Chen books (Snake Agent and The Demon and the City), this one didn’t work so well for me. I don’t know if it was I who couldn’t connect with the book as well as I did with the previous novels in this series or if the book just wasn’t as good as the others. As I say in my review, I found some elements, particularly the plot to be somewhat of a rehash, but I also really liked how Williams continues to flesh out the cosmology of the world.
In other news, two books I recently reviewed are now on bookshelves, both physical and virtual, as of today. John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale and Tobias Buckell’s Sly Mongoose.
Mrs. Blog o’ Stuff and I caught Star Wars: The Clone Wars on Friday afternoon. (Gotta love the summer hours work schedule). I enjoyed it more than Episodes I & II, despite completely realizing it was a bit more for kids and basically an advertisement for the upcoming Clone Wars animated series. If Lucas wants to make another few million dollars in licensing, all he needs to do is make and market a Rotta the Hutlett plushie. Anyway, maybe the reason I enjoyed it is because I knew it was just a glorified commercial and wasn’t expecting too much. Still, for a $6 matinee, it wasn’t a bad way to pass along 100 minutes in the summer.
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson – The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul. This is contemporary literature with hints of the fantastic.
The Shadow Pavilion: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel by Liz Williams – The fourth Detective Inspector Chen novel. When Chen's partner, the demon Seneschal Zhu Irzh, disappears, along with Chen's wife Inari's guardian badger, Chen must enlist all of his allies and assets in order to locate them.
Meanwhile, Zhu Irzh and the badger find themselves trapped in an unfamiliar jungle hell, stalked by a rogue demon lord and his harem of tigress demons, an assassin from between worlds targets Mhara, the new Lord of Heaven, and a beautiful Bollywood starlet holds a deadly secret...
I read and enjoyed the first and second books in this sequence, so I'm definitely going to get to this one.
When and why has the subgenre proven so successful? The character and set of books that kickstarted this trend would arguably be Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. These books were able to catch on to the genre-reading public in no small part because of the success of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and perhaps more so, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV). Although the Anita Blake books may not have been the earliest in the latest trend, they have proven extremely popular. Vampires have always fascinated people and between Rice’s success in humanizing them and the strong, powerful female protagonist, Hamilton’s series is in retrospect a no brainer for success. Of the Anita Blake novels, I read the first four or five before being pulled away. Readers have criticized the later books for being little more than erotic fantasy with an overabundance of sex, but the early books are very good and are considered by some as a benchmark in this subgenre.
on retainer to the Chicago PD’s Special Investigations division. Cases involving werewolves, vampires, ghosts and other things that go bump in the night are his purvey and when the Police can’t wrap their heads around such a case, they call in Harry. I’ve only read three of these books but they could turn out to be a favorite series if the books continue to entertain me in the same fashion. The series is in the double digits with little sign of slowing down, so the good part is that there are plenty of books for me to read. The world Butcher has created for this milieu is incredibly detailed, and very well thought-out. He’s got the White Council, which is the governing body of the practice of magic, several Vampire Clans, a faerie world (Nevernever) two which Harry travels. A sure sign of the success of this series is that it started out in Mass Market Paperback and with the 5th or 6th book, jumped into Hardcover for the initial release of each book.
Before Anita Blake and Jim Butcher; however, Glen Cook was writing a little series about Garrett (Glen Cook Wiki entry), a Private Investigator in a “Fantasyland” called TunFaire. I personally haven’t read the books, but one member of the SFFWorld forums whose opinion I can trust (KatG) consistently recommends this series. From what I’ve gathered, the series functions very much like a hard-boiled detective story with goblins, orcs, and wizards thrown in the mix. Based on my enjoyment of Cook’s Dread Empire and Black Company, I’ve really got to check out these books, of which there are already 11 books.
A werewolf in modern times should be able to fit in, shouldn’t she, especially if wizards and vampires can? Well, Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville is doing her best as a radio talk show host in the series that bears her name. The first book, Kitty and the Midnight Hour published in 2005 to some positive reviews, including my own review. The fourth book is out this year and the Science Fiction Book Club put the first three books under one cover in one of their popular omnibus editions. The subsequent books seem to follow the trend of pleasing readers.
Liz Williams has a very strong series going with her Detective Inspector Chen novels. At least based on the first novel, the series seems to be working with a buddy-cop/police procedural template whilst mixing elements of magic and Chinese/Asian mythology. Night Shade Books is publishing this series, which is helping to make their already impressive list of authors even more impressive. Also, the first book Snake Agent was one of the launch titles for Night Shade’s Mass Market Paperback line. This is a very promising series as I said in my recent review of Snake Agent.
Tim Pratt (writing as T.A. Pratt) is two books into his Marla Mason series. I’ve only read a short story from that world, but what I saw I liked. The short story had a very Lovecraftian feel to it and I’ve got the first book, Blood Engines, on my To Buy pile. Here’s a nice review from Robert over at FantasyBookCritic.
Kim Harrison is another popular writer who seems to churn out a new book every year in her Rachel Morgan/The Hollows series. On the surface, the series blends elements of post-apocalyptic fiction with the “wizard detective,” or in this case, the “witch detective.” Morgan is similar to Harry in that she is an adjunct of sorts to the local law enforcement. I think the post-apocalyptic elements to this series sound interesting so I will eventually check out the books. My friend’s wife really digs this series, so I may just have to borrow the first book. Here is a recent discussion at SFFWorld.
