Favorite Reads: August 2017

I read some books and I have things to say about them.

Winged Victory by VM Yeates: If you follow me on Twitter you would have seen me talking about the depressing book I was reading and wondering whether the protagonist would die or drink himself to death. Whelp, that book was this one about World War 1 RAF pilots. It’s good, but it’s bleak. It’s an unrelentingly depressing autobiographical novel loaded heavily with dollops of cynicism and despair that’s by turns horrifying and beautiful. I liked it, but it’s certainly not for everyone and a lot of it is repetitious, but still if you like war novels this is a good one.

Also, biplanes!?! Can you imagine being 15,000 feet in the air in basically a wooden go-cart? That’s nuts!

Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock: I LOVED this book and really recommend it. It’s a series of vignettes following two families (and various others) into a future where technology heavily impacts reproduction and our concepts of family. It’s a fascinating read, and Charnock stays to the core of the situation without getting too hung up on logistics. For one, I’m glad there’s no plot regarding religious conservatives objecting to the technology. On the other hand I can see that bugging people, the way the world situation and reactions to the technology get glossed over. The two complaints I had with it are slightly different. First, nearly all the characters are upper middle class, or near to it, and second, they’re all white-Anglo seeming. (It wasn’t too hard to imagine characters being West Indian, but overall the book doesn’t dig too heavily into the politics or economics of the tech it explores.) But yeah, if you like plotless social SF this is worth the read.

Moriah by Daniel Mills: This is some straight-up Hawthorne darkness going on here. Civil War veteran and broken man Silas Flood heads to Moriah Vermont to examine a family of spiritualists. It’s heavy and stark with dark secrets brewing below the surface, but if you like atmospheric horror centered on the human condition and our inability to cope with our own frailty, then track this down.

Hex-Rated by Jason Ridler: Retro-pulp smut that reads like a cartoony Rockford Files mixed with a porno flick that’s trying to ape Hammer Horror. While the 1970s veneer might be only skin deep and Brimstone’s sensibilities clearly our own, it’s fun reading along as he punches his way through Nazis, cultists, and devils. Sure, it might be cartoony, but it’s nice to read something that delights in being so richly itself.

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss: In a way this is like the Brimstone book in that it’s cartoony, only the cartoon’s a different one. Where Brimstone’s like something from Heavy Metal magazine, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter is like Penny Dreadful by way of the 1960s Adam West Batman. Until I got my head around that, this was a bit hard to get into, but once I saw POW! word balloons and lurid 1960s colors on this Victorian romp I was on board. And like with Penny Dreadful, this is a who’s who of Victoriana as various female protagonists, led by Mary Jekyll, attempt to solve a series of crimes linked to her father’s experiments. It’s fun.

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