2012 in Review

I read 136 books in 2012. Not many of them, I must admit, were new releases. Those that were, I discuss in my part of this Strange Horizons yearly sum up article. Not so surprisingly for readers of this blog, my picks of the year (or at least of the limited slice of it I've so far gotten to) are: Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, K.J. Parker's Sharps, and Felix J. Palma's The Map of the Sky.

As for the books I read in 2012 that were either a handful of years or more than a few centuries older, twelve in particular seemed worthy of note...

Beginning this list with a sixteenth century epic poem was not something I expected to be doing. Ariosto, however, writes with such sheer style that the poem’s age becomes irrelevant, that its gargantuan length becomes a blessing that simply promises more lines to love. The knights that we meet here are larger than life. They battle heroically, engage in fantastic (in every sense of the word) quests, and dish out truly stunning amounts of sass. (Many of these strengths are wonderfully brought out by David R. Slavitt’s translation… which also wanders away with barely a nod to the poem’s second half. Goal for the new year: figure out how it ends!)

The Company Man is a novel about lost causes. It has a noir hero navigating a steampunk world that is gradually subsumed by the cosmic. Its gaze is unflinching and far-reaching. And its marvels are manifold. I talk more about Bennett’s powerful novel here.

Like Lovecraft, Blackwood was a writer of Weird tales from the early part of the twentieth century that has now, decades later, received the hallowed status of a classic in the genre, even if he has never received Lovecraft’s wider acclaim. To view Blackwood as simply a contemporary of Lovecraft, however, is to do a great disservice to this venerable practitioner of the cosmic. Blackwood writes with insight and great skill of the shallowness of our world and perceptions, and, amidst his frequently naturalistic settings, he uses a mixture of the subtlest signs and the most powerful and building climaxes to ram home the majesty of what is beyond. I wrote about this particular collection of his at great length here.

Drawing Blood is the story of Zach and Trevor, and those two young men are some of the strongest and most alive characters I’ve ever encountered. Brite binds their every feeling inextricably with the readers', dragging us along as they live their bizarre lives. And, when they hurt, we feel every bit of their pain. I reviewed the novel here.

There has never been an evocation of shame like this. Nor has spite ever come forth like this from the written word. The Underground Man is a genius, and he is a hateful and loathsome beast, and his every utterance stabs deep. He begins: I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man (p.1). When reviewers and writers and instructors yammer on about having a voice, it is this that they are wishing for.

Goodis writes noir of the most downbeat, hard-hitting variety, and The Burglar shows him at its best. The novel has a gripping plot packed with turns, characters struggling with their all, and the world poised to take them down regardless. I talk about the novel, and others, at greater length in my review of the Goodis collection Five Noir Novels of the 1940sand 50s.

In her second Mathew Swift novel, Kate Griffin takes everything that worked about A Madness of Angels and improves it. This is a wildly creative book stuffed with gripping pyrotechnics, writing that forces you to see, and an apocalyptic villain that few can match. I reviewed it here.

Dune vividly demonstrates the heights that Science Fiction can reach. It has a truly epic plot, a world that is both consistent and wondrous, and interacts with the most profound philosophical ideas. The rise of Paul Atreides works on every level, an arc that is half messianic and half simply badass.

This may be one of Haruki Murakami’s early novels, but it is the one of his that has most stuck with me. Here, Murakami is wry, surreal, imaginative, and more than a little brilliant. I reviewed the novel at some length when I reread it at the beginning of this year, to which I will just add that, as it nears its climax, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World also boasts the best evocation of melancholy I’ve ever seen in fiction. Pressed to name a favorite novel, I would quite possibly go with this one.

More than a few moments in Lolita had me holding the book as far away from myself as I could as if trying to avoid contact with some hideous contagion or foul mess. This is a sickening read. It grabs you and shoves you up against the darkest corners of our collective morality. There is no way to not confront its issues when reading it. And there is the little fact that Nabokov’s prose is simply peerless:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta (p. 1).

To call Nabokov’s prose beauty amidst filth is to sell it horribly short. Alas, we would probably need Nabokov’s own skills to devise a suiting panegyric for it, so we shall have to be content with that.

The inclusion of The Lord of the Rings on a list like this probably isn’t so surprising, but I must admit that I actually was rather surprised when I reread the trilogy this year for the first time since my childhood. Tolkien’s work may have been picked at by generations of scavengers by this point, but it still possesses a strength that almost none of them have been able to match.

Each of the three stories in Wrong Things is packed with heart and, as the characters might have it, weird shit (p. 98). Despite the high standards of all, Kiernan’s “Onion” is still the clear winner. It’s the aftermath of a Weird Tale, a painful look at the human suffering left in the wake of the cosmic. I discuss it and the others at more length in my review.

SOME GENERAL STATISTICS

The above, though, doesn’t say much about my reading for the year as a whole, being the cherry picked highlights of it. As for the rest, well, I’ve kept lists of all books read for a few years now, but this is the first time I’ve sorted them into (childishly simple) piles. The results rather amused me, and I figured they might amuse some longtime readers as well. Needless to say, books can be in more than one category, some were not in any category, and the whole tallying is a tad inexact:

Fantasy: 15 books read

Science Fiction: 27 books read

Horror: 19 books read

Crime: 7 books read

Literature: 31 books read

Nonfiction: 26 books read

History: 16 books read

Not (originally) in English: 27 books read

For class: 45 books read

By female authors: 24 books read

The spread of genres did not wholly surprise me. Ordinarily, I certainly don’t read primarily Science Fiction, but the Warhammer binge over the summer (thirteen books total, read almost straight) pushed it over the edge. Literature’s winning overall was not unexpected, as it not only had the greatest number of reads from classes but also got to suck in many of the non-genre reads that I had no idea what to do with, such as the aforementioned Orlando Furioso.

The other significant figure up there is the last number, that of books by female authors. Twenty-four out of one hundred and thirty-sex is not very impressive there. Actually calculating out the numbers rammed home how unbalanced my reading is, and I would like to swing the total back the other way a bit next year.

David Goodis - Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s

The world was spinning in the wrong direction (p. 190).

Decades ago, David Goodis penned millions of words for the pulp magazines, worked on innumerable screenplays, and released a slew of classic Crime novels, including The Wounded and the Slain. Now the Library of America has released five of Goodis' novels in a single hardcover volume, and I gladly took the chance to delve deeper into the author's brutal depiction of our urban underbelly. Between the five, the characters, plots, and the presence of hope all vary considerably, but the quality of Goodis' work and the desperation of his vision are inescapable throughout.

The synopsis on the volume's back describes Dark Passage as the story of an innocent man railroaded for his wife's murder. It's accurate, but the railroading is broader than that. Goodis' characters entire lives have been railroaded. They have been condemned to live in a world they did not create, in a hopeless situation that they almost certainly cannot escape. As Goodis writes of Nathaniel Harbin in The Burglar: The world was an avalanche, taking him down (p. 362).

Goodis writes of desperation and of defiance. His men and women may find themselves in a hopeless world, but they do not surrender to it, and they will not, no matter the damage it does to them. In Street of No Return, a famous singer is beaten by two thugs. He can stop the blows any time he wants. All he has to do is give up on the woman he loves. Convinced? they ask as the blackjack falls. Convinced now? Every time, his answer is No (pp. 702-3). Finally, they hit his throat, and he loses his voice. They leave him, and he thinks that they have won. But, if Goodis is the visionary of hopeless realities, he's also a master of the hope within us, no matter the odds against it. As the singer tells himself, They didn't convince you after all (p. 749).

This kind of hope is not one borne of chances or a belief in success. It's not an indomitability of flesh but of spirit. It's not simple masochism; it's neither a wish for pain nor an ideal belief to hold actionless in the night. It's simply that Goodis' characters cannot, and will not, quit, and their determination is a matter of them and their goals, not of attainability. At the end of one novel, an innocent man, his case now hopeless, speaks to his love one last time and begins to list the nearly endless fortune they would require to ever see each other again. We'll skip the ifs, she tells him (p. 192). Reading those lines is a strange experience. Everything in the novel before them has gone wrong. The protagonist is on the run, and he can never fully escape. And yet the reader is feeling almost empowered as they turn the last page.

While hope is crucial to Goodis novels, ambition for the worldly is not. The things – the luxuries – that ambition brings are, for Goodis, almost immaterial. Though some are, it's a mistake to think every Goodis protagonist destitute. The wonderfully named Nathaniel Harbin is even covetous of material wealth, and Nightfall's James Vanning has stumbled across a massive fortune. But those fortunes prove as restraining, and as ruining, as poverty. Nathaniel knows that, ultimately, luxurious sensations never lasted for long and even while it happened was accompanied by the dismal knowledge that it would soon be over (pp. 417-8).

Goodis' characters hope for simpler things, more essential things. They crave survival, though it is far from a sure thing in these pages. They want happiness, nothing extravagant, but rather the simple and ordinary kind (p. 5), as the protagonist of Dark Passage puts it. And, perhaps the most powerfully of all, they hope for love and love's success. They know, of course, that these goals are not necessarily all compatible. Caring for another hurts them. Love hurts their chances. It is, without a doubt, a problem (p. 596). Often, it threatens to doom them or actually does. Nonetheless, it may be the only thing that makes all the pain worthwhile. It may be the only way to truly escape, or maybe even to transcend, the misery of the world. Speaking of Street of No Return's singer and the love he was beaten for, Goodis writes: In the bed with her it was dark but somehow blazing like the core of a shooting star. It was going 'way out past all space and all time (p. 689).

All of this is beautifully forced upon the reader by some of the strongest prose I've ever read. Goodis' writing is a complex art crafted from the simplest of building blocks. On the sentence level, Goodis is fully capable of fantastic imagery, such as: In the ash tray near the bed, the stubs became a family that grew through the night (p. 298). But those sentences are easy reads, graspable things, and, above all, perfectly in character. Every sentence is the very embodiment of the speaker or viewpoint's soul and mood and thought. It's likely this gift with plain but evocative prose that grants Goodis his gift for dialogue. His characters speak with their own voices, and he has the rare gift of being able to let them converse on any topic that enters their mind while still showing so much of their character so as to never feel as if he is going off topic.

Things don't stop at the sentence level, though, for, at the novels' key moments, these sentences flow into one another, thoughts flowing into thoughts, until we end with passages of nearly free association, of a stream of consciousness made of the simplest parts that never loses their easy heart of understandability. In this way, Goodis blends individually clear images with one another to create wholly new modes and tones, and his protagonists wrestle with themselves and their own thought as the text follows along with their argument, an internal debate that reads with all the force of our own. A relatively brief example, in which the protagonist of Dark Passage thinks of the constraints he was under even before the crime:

He was going back and taking chunks out of his life and holding them up to examine them. The young and bright yellow days in the hot sun of Maricopa, always bright yellow in every season. The wide and white roads going north from Arizona. The grey and violet of San Francisco. The grey and the heat of the stock room, and the days and nights of nothing, the years of nothing. And the cage in the investment security house, and the stiff white collars of the executives, stiff and newly white every day, and their faces every day, and their voices every day. And the paper, the plain white paper, the pink paper, the pale-green paper, the paper ruled violet and green and black in small ledgers and large ledgers and immense ledgers. And the faces (pp. 102-3).

In terms of the novels themselves, the first two are by far the closest of any of the pieces here. Both Dark Passage and Nightfall star men wrongly pursued by the full weight of the law and desperate to clear their names. Furthermore, both possess puzzle style crimes that the protagonists must solve if they are to have any hope or proving their innocence. The mystery in the latter relies to a large extent on one very nonsensical act that makes guessing it before the reveal just about impossible, so, in that regard, the former is the stronger. Still, Nightfall can boast the bizarre but fascinating relationship between its protagonist and the detective that pursues him and, gradually, begins to believe in his innocence and to strive as hard as he to clear his name.

Like those two, The Burglar has a suspenseful plot that has its characters struggling to escape the law and keep their lives. But, and rather unlike them, its heroes are most certainly not innocent. Nathaniel Harbin and his closest friends are professional burglars. But while they might be nominally outside of society's rules, they are not out of its heart: Every animal, including the human being, is a criminal, and every move in life is a part of the vast process of crime. What law, Gerald would ask, could control the need to take food and put it in the stomach? No law, Gerald would say, could erase the practice of taking. According to Gerald, he basic and primary moves in life amounted to nothing more than this business of taking, to take it and get away with it (p. 416).

Nathaniel and his fellows were born at the bottom, were left with nothing. They refused to stay there, and they have fought their way to a living. But that living is not secure, and, now, they have come up against a foe that may prove as unprincipled and as determined as they are. Despite its solid illegality, The Burglar is not an amoral novel. Though a crook, Nathaniel has not left honor. Behind as his mentor once said: What mattered, what mattered high up there by itself all alone […] was whether things are honorable (p. 418). As it progresses, The Burglar becomes a tale of honor tested and also of different and impossible kinds of love. I won't spoil the finish's particulars, but I will say that The Burglar has one of the most crushing endings of any book I've read.

Though still certainly a Goodis work, The Moon in the Gutter is a very different beast from its fellows here. Like The Blonde on the Street Corner (not included here), it is a largely plotless exploration of society's lowest rungs. Kerrigan is very aware that he and all the other denizens of Vernon Street are riding through life on a fourth-class ticket (p. 496), but he has nonetheless fallen in love with an uptown woman who loves him back. Furthermore, he must face his sister's pointless and ugly death mere months before. The novel's climax comes as Kerrigan looks out a window, over the houses and denizens of Vernon Street, and suffers the following revelation:

And no matter where the weaker ones were hiding, they'd never get away from the Vernon moon. It had them trapped. It had them doomed. Sooner or later they'd be mauled and battered and crushed. They'd learn the hard way that Vernon Street was no place or delicate bodies or timid souls. They were prey, that was all, they were destined for the maw of the ever hungry eater, the Vernor gutter.

He stared out at the moonlit street. Without sound he said, You did it to [my sister]. You (p. 615).

Though inevitable, the revelation is not altogether satisfying. When Kerrigan decides that he and his love can never be together, it's not a surprising decision, but the reader has still never seen a single scene of their failing to be so, only presentiments that it will happen. It's painful to see one of Goodis' narrators give up his struggle and bow his head to fate, but, while The Moon in the Gutter is a powerful read, it's the least successful one in this collection.

Street of No Return is a more eventful than the preceding read, but its strongpoint is not its plot, which is held together by a bevy of coincidences and a revelation that is not as hard to piece together as the characters might have you believe. That is not, however, to say that it is a weak novel, for here Goodis excels with his atmospheric depictions of Philadelphia and through his portrayal of his protagonist, the once-famous singer that I discussed long ago in the review's beginning and that singer's slow motion suicide, his life lived after his loss as Going down. One step at a time (p. 708). Furthermore, Goodis quickly and sympathetically establishes his police characters and those of the other souls the novel's protagonist meets in his flight. The book's climax is a triumph, and a clearing of the main character's name, but it is not a final triumph, and, after what could in many novels be a Happy Ever After, Goodis shows his hero return without a word to the near-hopeless brutality of the life he's left.

In this collection, the Library of America was kind enough to give us five brutally powerful novels, each resplendent with not only overwhelming darkness but also strength and hope. David Goodis is a master of Noir, and this is the largest, and likely best, collection of his work you'll find anywhere.

Best Reads of 2011

Largely, I think, due to reading so many magazines and so many parts of various books for classes, I read the fewest books in 2011 that I did in any year since I started keeping track in 2009. Still, I've ended up with the at least somewhat respectable total of one hundred and nine volumes conquered, and, needless to say, quite a few of those were rather excellent. And so the time has come for the eight best of them, presented in alphabetical order. We begin with…

Reviewed here.

The Wounded and the Slain isn't an exciting book. It's downbeat, instead, not to mention depressing, dejected and dispirited, filled with character and heart and written with a kind of rough poetry. Though there is a crime at the book's center, it's very much a crime with a small c, not a jumping off point to adventure but a tortured, haphazard, regrettable, and, above all, pointless thing. The descent into darkness thing is an inexorable crawl, not a glamorous leap. I don't think you could ever call this a pleasant book, but it's one that'll hit you hard, and it's a damn good one.

Reviewed here.

As stark as it is focused, as streamlined as it is jagged, Red Harvest embodies much of what interests me about the noir genre. Though wholly concerned with matters of justice, this is a compassionless novel, maybe even a(n intentionally) heartless one. Morality here is a brutal force, and the idea of right is relegated to strength and violence. But, in this nigh lawless place, even the lawman, the only one standing up for us, might be corrupt to the core. This is a fast novel, a fun novel, and a damn disturbing one.

Reviewed here.

Like Red Harvest, The Ammonite Violin is disturbing and raw, but here those qualities don't come from bare language, harsh violence, and a lack of emotion but rather from a series of stories that are almost unutterably rich in their composition, filled with overwhelming and enveloping language and positively overflowing with feeling. The longing shown here is the kind of calculated, unbearable, and revelatory longing that might come gushing forth from an excised heart with all the force of the heavy, dark blood that comes with it.

Grimscribe is horror extraordinaire Thomas Ligotti's second collection, and it takes place wholly within nightmare, on the edge of utter dementia itself. Its stories toy with that border, giving glimpses and tantalizing, horrifying hints, leaping across for brief moments where sanity howls before falling back. Amidst it all are several of Ligotti's best tales, including Nethescurial, an insidious and Lovecraftian beast of a tale that can actually be read for free (albeit with an annoying formatting issue or two) here. In my personal rankings, Grimscribe is roughly tied with the author's Songs of aDead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco for the overall prize of his best work. Suffice to say, this is a brilliant collection.

Reviewed here.

I knew I'd like Sandkings going in, maybe even knew I'd love it, but I didn't know how much. The Stone City is a Science Fiction Weird Tale in every sense of the word, and an absolutely brilliant one at that, fiction that probes the limits of human understanding and strangeness with as much skill as Lovecraft himself brought to the table. This isn't, though, a collection with one centerpiece. Every tale here is filled with breathtaking images and audacity, entire worlds and some of the best characterization you'll ever come across. I know a lot of readers view Martin's older works as a now-done sideshow compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doing so is a dire mistake.

Reviewed here.

Embassytown is the rare Science Fiction novel that is not only alien in its choice of colors and its number of tentacles. The aliens shown here are convincingly inhuman, but it's the aspects of language that Miéville uses them to explore that are stranger and more intriguing still. Those concepts are explored in full, taking the humans in the narrative to and past the breaking point, twisting and shattering and reinventing every aspect of their world. Miéville's as skilled as any with coming up with brilliant and challenging ideas, has the ability to ride them for all they're worth, and the talent to present the whole with his fantastic prose. Though it's very different from his early work, Embassytown is no less excellent.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion builds a vivid, colorful, and fascinating world and populates it with larger than life, well explored, and somehow believable characters. I think it says a lot about the novel that I chiefly remember two scenes, one the thrilling, grand, and inventive climax and the other an unimportant scene where the main character eats some rather unpleasant food in a diner. Try as I might, I can't decide which of those I liked best, or which felt more real, and, amazingly enough, the two fit so well into the same narrative that, looking back, they really don't seem all that different in importance at all.

Review to come.

A Fire Upon the Deep operates on a scale so much vaster than what can be easily conceived that the reader's practically pummeled with awe as they turn the pages, and turn them they will. The central plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is a gripping adventure story that takes place amidst an unimaginably complex and fascinating universe, a story filled with grand ideas and with a cast made up in large part of some of the best made and most convincing aliens I've ever seen. A Fire Upon the Deep isn't only one of my favorite books of this year: it's one of my favorite Science Fiction novels ever and even one of my favorite novels.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

Though it also had its fair share of excellence, 2011 packed in more than a few disappointing novels: Boneshaker, If You Could See Me Now, and even the legendary Frankenstein among them. But the latter two had some good ideas, if a fumbled execution, and even Boneshaker was more formless mush than actively bad. Only Wicked Things managed to truly and genuinely piss me off, not because it hadn't met my expectations (though, needless to say, it hadn't) but because it was simply an awful book, one that rambled about aimlessly, setting up numerous hints and clues, and then oh-so-cleverly keeled over dead before resolving anything. Ha ha. Wicked Things tries to be a stylish, plot-based read, but the ending reveal leaves it a thriller that forgot to thrill, a horror novel whose only real horror moment is a and unsubstantiated cheap shot, a novel whose characters are stick figures then jerked out of their unremarkable paths, and a book with nigh no redeeming features.

Reading in June

I haven't since July posted one of my supposedly monthly reading recaps, with the books being discussed being from way back in May, and, while they're far from the blog's centerpiece as far as content/insight go, I do miss them a tad. Wandering about the delightfully cluttered "Hat Rack" section of my hard drive I noticed I'd actually written a summary of my reading in June but never posted it, so I decided it was high time for a jump back to the halcyon days of summer, the distant days of June...

Leviathan Wakes, the creation of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, is a Science Fiction novel manages to be a gripping mixture of Space Opera awe and a horror-derived, maybe even noirish, sense of claustrophobia. In the midst of all that, the book's fast paced, fun, and stars two excellently portrayed characters.

I'll admit to some measure of disappointment with The Blonde on the Street Corner. This is the third novel of Goodis's I've read – coming after The Wounded and theSlain and Black Friday – and both of those were downbeat tales of the low and the lonely, each depressive and captivating in its way. The Blonde on the Street Corner has the majority of the formula down. Our protagonists are deadbeats in the depression, bumming off their families with no prospects whatsoever. So the theme's there, and Goodis's prose is dotted with the same flares of poetic sorrow that I've come to expect. But what's missing is anything to grab the reader. This is a book that simply meanders along, but, unlike The Wounded and the Slain, we're never really presented with a reason to care. Though this certainly isn't a bad read, it's nowhere near the level that Goodis is capable of operating on.

The Hour of the Dragon is the only full length novel of Conan the Barbarian that Robert E. Howard ever penned. It's filled with all the hallmarks that are associated with the character – or, perhaps I should stress, those hallmarks that come from the creator's tales and not the lobotomized cinematic or otherwise later versions. This story is filled with adventure, intrigue, and tension, and though Howard manages to drag Conan through almost every aspect of his former life – pirate and thief and so on – it never feels like a rehash or like there's an author up above the pages dragging the characters this way and that without giving them any say. As for the writing, it's Howard's usual, which is to say that it's equal parts painfully exuberant excess and vivid mastery. If you're a fan of the character, this is a necessary read.

The full version of Thomas Ligotti and Brandon Trenz's screenplay Crampton – the earlier, abridged, and derivative version of which I read earlier this year – is a fascinating read for any Ligotti fan. The expected themes – the ephemeral and illusory nature of the world, the hollowness of all existence, and so forth – are present, but the author's hypnotic prose is absent, replaced by tightly written dialogue, bits of banter, and even expletives. Crampton moves at a fast and enjoyable clip, and the finishing anticlimax is powerfully done, but I still do have to say that, overall, the depressive and vivid ecstasy that Ligotti's writing normally brings is, by necessity, absent here. This is an interesting item to be sure, but it's most certainly just for the diehard collector, and not just because of the forbidding price tag.

George R.R. Martin's as adept at short stories as he is at doorstopper epics, and almost every one of the tales in this collection shows his mastery of the form. Reviewed here.

Fevre Dream, Martin's novel of Vampires and steamboats, has lost nothing with time, and it wasn't diminished on reread either. This is a novel rich in characterization and atmosphere, something not to be missed by any fan of Martin's work. Reviewed here.

In many ways, All the Pretty Horses is an inversion of the author's landmark Blood Meridian. John Grady Cole, our protagonist here, is a romantic and a dreamer trespassing on the brutal and unforgiving Wild West that McCarthy's become so justly famous for, and the results are at once heart breaking and even, at times, beautiful. Though I can't say that this novel's as revelatory as Blood Meridian, it's still an excellent read.

The third collection of horror writer Reggie Oliver, Masques of Satan is a volume of subtle ghost stories woven into theater backdrops. My reaction to Oliver is very similar to my reaction to the M.R. James stories I've read, and I mean that both in the positive ways that Oliver's adherents cite and also in the negatives that those Weird Tales-devotees would most certainly not agree to. Like James, Oliver writes in a formal but inviting style, and his words draw you in and make you feel like a part of the conversation. Also like James, his mastery of his subject area is obvious from every word he speaks, but – due to the aforementioned welcoming tone – the knowledge imparted is interesting rather than onerous. Oliver's ghosts, however, are – like James – the least interesting parts of his stories by far, little twists of the supernatural that aren't particularly memorable in and of themselves. I enjoyed this collection a fair bit, but I'd hesitate to recommend it at the forty or fifty dollars you're likely to find it for, and I certainly was not enamored enough with the stories here to spend the several hundred needed to read the author's first and second collections.

I'll admit it: I'm just bewildered here. Boneshaker was a forgettable read packed with problems and a few good ideas that weren't even taken advantage of. How, again, did this ever get near a Hugo? Reviewed here.