No good deed involving pseudo–mass murder and cannibalism goes unpunished. [loc. 2915]
Dr Theo Cray is called in by the FBI to investigate an inexplicable murder( Read more... )
As they fade from the earth, the gods do not hover over with their haunting, whistling sound. I notice it here, the silence around death. They have departed, the ones who oversaw death. They have gone and they will not be back. [loc. 99]
Based on, but not exactly a retelling of, the Oresteia. Tóibín depicts a world without gods or furies, in which 'what you did is all you have'. The novel is in three parts, with three narrators -- Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra -- and tells the story of Iphigenia's sacrifice, the murder of Agamemnon, and the vengeance wreaked by his children. ( Read more... )
The cards looked like The Lord of the Rings as illustrated by Salvador Dalí. Most of them packed in enough kooky symbolism for a dozen Lady Gaga videos. [p. 87]
Alanis McLachlan, a telemarketeer, is surprised to learn that her estranged mother has bequeathed her a New Age shop and tarot-reading business -- the White Magic Five and Dime -- in the small town of Berdache, Arizona. ( Read more... )
“A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?” [loc. 1981]
This is a dense, concentrated novel, a challenge to review. Part One is about life online, specifically 'the portal' (which may be the whole of the internet, or just social media, or just Twitter which demands compact pithy posts). The nameless narrator has achieved fame via a viral meme, and travels the world talking about the portal and interacting with people, especially those who are exactly the same amount of online. It's a life lived more on-screen than off, artificial and self-referential, magnifying the importance of the portal, divorcing its afficionados from reality and from honest emotion. 'This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?' [loc. 289]
Part Two, which is 'autofiction' (i.e. based on actual events experienced by the author), is equally intense, more harrowing, and utterly real.( Read more... )
'...the body will turn out to be thousands of years old.’
‘It might not,’ says Judy. ‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘They certainly have,’ says Nelson. ‘And mostly to us.’ [loc. 231]
I'm in that strange reading mood where the familiar is best, and where if I like something I want more of the same thing: hence reading this novel straight after the previous one in the series ...
The eponymous Night Hawks are a group of metal detectorists who prefer to roam the countryside after dark. One night they discover a dead body on the beach, almost on top of a tangle of bones and metal. The skeleton is Bronze Age: the more recent corpse might be an illegal immigrant. ( Read more... )
'...I got the idea from the Lantern Men. We were a light in the darkness, guiding women onto the right path. Sometimes the kindest thing is to save the women from the world.’ [p. 335]
Set two years after The Stone Circle: Dr Ruth Galloway is now living in Cambridge with Frank the American, plus Katie and Flint. ( Read more... )
“Your story isn’t about spells and magic. It’s about sisters. When you focus on them, you are quite brilliant. Curses don’t belong to you, Mr. Calina. You should take them out of the story.”
“And leave them to you,” I said.
A nod. “I understand them better.”
“Why is that?”
“I’m under one,” she said, meeting my gaze. “Can’t you tell?” [p. 256]
Sixty years after the rainy summer holiday by the shores of Lake Geneva -- the venue for the famous ghost-story competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and John Polidori's The Vampyre -- another group of five passionate artists gathers at the villa. ( Read more... )
...the Hunter lifted a fistful of torn pages to his teeth, bit into them. Blood ran down his mouth, as if words bled. Talis swallowed, his throat paper-dry. [loc. 1400]
Twenty years ago, the mage Atrix Wolfe created a monster to stop a war. Peace came at a terrible cost: death, infertility, a mute child scrubbing pots in the castle kitchen. Atrix Wolfe eschewed magic and shapechanging, and turned away from humanity, working as a healer of animals in an isolated mountain village. But then Talis, heir to one of the kingdoms saved and doomed by Atrix Wolfe, discovers an ancient spell book, where the words on the page don't mean what they say.
( Read more... ) 
...it’s horrible out there, in history. It always was, even before we shattered it to bits. It’s full of war and plague, starvation, intolerance and misery. [loc. 529]
A cheerful tale of the postepochalypse, narrated by an unnamed veteran of the Causality War, which destroyed time itself. Our narrator is determined to maintain world peace forever, despite the many visitors he receives -- time travellers like himself, trying to see how far forward they can travel, who reach 'this last perfect day before the rest of time happens'.
( Read more... )
...his haste had nothing to do with the man’s glinting eyes, or the way the shadows huddled and plotted on the wall behind him. [p. 9: 'A Study in Black and White', Bridget Collins]
A collection of eight ghost stories -- well, are they all ghost stories? They're all wintry, all chilling, and all quite different from one another. The stories are mostly by women (Andrew Michael Hurley being the exceptioon) and are all set in Britain: some are contemporary and, I think, none are set earlier than the nineteenth century.
( Read more... )
To lose love was a very terrible thing. To lose affection for one’s own self – this must be worse. For you could, at least in your mind, move far off from others. But from yourself you never could, until death released you. [loc 1161]
A novella ('The Heart of the Moon') coupled with a short story ('The Dry Season'): I hadn't read either of these before, and they contrast one another excellently.
'The Heart of the Moon' is set in a secondary world reminiscent of ancient Greece: Clirando, on discovering that her lover Thestus is having an affair with her best friend, Araitha, bests them both in combat and sends them into exile. Araitha, in return, curses Clirando never to sleep again -- and when the ship she sailed on is wrecked, Clirando has no hope of the curse being lifted. She is sent on a holy mission to Moon Isle, where a mysterious conjunction takes place once every seventeen years. There, Clirando meets a number of disconcerting entities, and falls in love with Zemetrious, who's also tormented by his past. A spiritual journey, an inn-room with only one bed, and a psychological resolution: classic Lee.
'The Dry Season' is also set in a world with echoes of antiquity, in this case Imperial Rome -- the Remusa featured in some of Lee's other work. Seteva is a military commander who falls in love with a young woman who's about to be sacrificed. He does not listen to the excellent advice he is given. No good comes of it.
I have loved Tanith Lee's work since I encountered her writing when I was in primary school. Given the sheer volume of novels, stories, plays and screenplays she produced, it's not surprising that I am still, six years after her death, discovering new fiction by her. I don't regard either of these stories as representing her best work, and I didn't enjoy them as much as I had hoped: but they are strong stories and it's good to see them in print.
‘You’re the one who risked a demonic incursion to win best pumpkin at the village fair.’ [loc. 2647]
The setting is Woodville, a small Kentish village, during the Second World War. The protagonist is Faye Bright, seventeen (a period-typical seventeen, rather young for her age by contemporary standards), who's just discovered that her dead mother was a witch. ( Read more... )
It had been a French city then, with the French understanding of who, and what, the free colored actually were: a race of not-quite-acknowledged cousins, neither African nor European, but property holders, artisans, citizens. [loc. 2034]
In 1817, Benjamin January left New Orleans for Paris. In 1833, after the death of his wife, he returns to a city that has changed in his absence -- and not for the better.( Read more... )
If you were in the habit of vanishing under a hill into a realm where time stood still, then, supposing you wanted to live in the world again -- and after all, one must do something -- you might very well decide to go to college to catch up on what the world had been doing. Adolescents are awkward; they know nothing; nobody is surprised at any ignorance they display. Mingle with college students and nobody would notice you twice. [loc. 6227]
Reread again: I adored this when I first read it in the second millennium (review from 1998) but was less enthusiastic when I next read it (review from 2015). I think I may have attained some kind of equilibrium this time around:( Read more... )
Everyone across the United States of Asgard will be watching the ritual in Philadelphia as his priests spread the ashes from his death pyre into the roots of the giant New World Tree. Cameras will flash, the seethers will sing, and everyone will wait as—slowly, slowly—Baldur the Beautiful climbs hale and whole out of his own ashes: new, golden, and alive. [p. 29]
This novel, highly relevant to my interest in Norse mythology, was published in 2015: how have I been oblivious to its existence until now?!
( Read more... )
He wanted to find every friend who’d ever ditched her... and force them all to walk barefoot across a room full of Legos for the rest of their lives. [p. 243]
One day, Chloe Brown is almost hit by a car: she chooses to take this as a message from the universe, to the effect of 'get a life so your eulogy won't be boring." ( Read more... )
Miss Tillingdon was always a little shocked by Helen’s interest in the one-time Emmy Hart. She believed that women should be liberated, but not, perhaps, quite so liberated as Lady Hamilton. [p. 41]
Labelled as a Regency romance, but to my mind it's neither: it's set in the 1780s, and the romance is secondary to the historical narrative. ( Read more... )
...hair the color of… no, don’t start trying to decide what organ at what stage of decomposition is that shade of red. Pick something else. Something that isn't horrible. ... Smoked paprika. [p. 29]
Galen is a paladin of the Saint of Steel, and thus prone to occasional berserking: otherwise upright, moral, courageous and well-armed. Piper is a lich-doctor (think forensic pathologist) who prefers the company of corpses, has a minor wonderworking talent which he prefers not to discuss, and would also rather not discuss or even admit to having emotions. Earstripe is a gnole, working for the city guards.
Together they fight crime.( Read more... )
... in waking life, she was dogged by anomalies, discrepancies, attacks of jamais vu. In every street, there were new stores and restaurants, appearing at a pace that seemed impossible even for New York. She didn’t know most of the songs on the radio. She didn’t know half of the movie stars. [loc. 628]
New York City, in the year 2000: a Green woman senator is president, astronauts have landed on Mars, the Jerusalem peace treaty has been signed and carbon emissions have declined rapidly. '...the first year with no war at all, when you opened up the newspaper like opening a gift' [loc. 350]. ( Read more... )
Over the hot white rock and the deep green of the maquis, the judas trees lifted their clouds of scented flowers the colour of purple daphne, their branches reaching landwards, away from the African winds. [p. 11]
Read 'on location' in Crete, this is an oddly timeless thriller (published 1962: apparently quite different from the film version) with a feisty and impulsive heroine, Nicola Ferris. ( Read more... )
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