Moonflower Murders, by Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz does a rather daring feat in this whodunnit. The solution to an eight-year old murder is discovered by a young woman in the pages of a murder mystery, and she promptly disappears. The author of the mystery is dead, so the book's editor is called upon by the nervous parents to solve the disappearance of their daughter. The daring feat is that in the middle of this whodunnit, Horowitz actually prints in toto the mystery book. Sadly, though, the mystery is rather dull in comparison to the page-turning frame novel. And while the whole is clever, and engaging, the prose is basically that of a fleshed out screenplay. Not surprising, then, is the fact that the author is a television screenwriter, as well as writer of the best-selling Alex Rider stories for young adults (which have also been filmed). Moonflower Mysteries clocks in at over 580 pages, and while I enjoyed it, I think I would have gotten as much pleasure out of it in the form of a two-hour movie. At least the time spent with it would have been shorter.

The Writer's Library, by Nancy Pearl & Jeff Schwager

The subtitle of this book, "The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives," promised something a bit different to me than what it actually delivered. I wanted something more in depth, but this book is a series of chatty interviews with twenty-two authors, about half of whom I was already familiar with. But the chattiness is only skin-deep, and  too often I felt the authors straining to include names of Writers with Whom They Are Friends, or Writers That Must Be Name-Dropped. Oddly, for a 350 page book about books, I was not once tempted to look-up an unfamiliar book mentioned by either the authors or their interviewers, nor did the authors unfamiliar to me entice me to seek their works. That is a feat, if one opposite than intended. 

Supernatural Tales 45

Supernatural Tales, issue no. 45, is kind of like a small anthology, edited by David Longhorn. It contains eight stories, none especially long, with a broad range of topics that do fit under the title's rubric.  Most are well-written, but a few of them are oddly structured and less satisfying than they might have been. Mark Valentine's story "And Maybe the Parakeet Was Correct" is arguably the best story in the issue, but it meanders around various locales of European football before it finally jells into something intriguing near its end. Iain Rowan's "The Wildness" is a story of a woman's dissolution via her own "wildness," but it seemed a bit too short. William Curnow's "The Roundabout" is not the best written tale, but the most interesting story-wise, about how a man processes his grief over his wife's death via terrifying visions on a roundabout. In "Stricken," by Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin, a woman with a feverish illness has to face monsters, while in "The Terminal Testimony of David Balfour," Malcolm Laughton gives a tale of enacted revenge.  Rosalie Parker's "The Decision" concerns a woman wavering over whether to keep her inherited childhood home (and her boyfriend) or leaving it (and him) to go to London.  As she decides, she is haunted by the sound of laughter that no one else hears. Charles Wilkinson's "The Harmony of the Stares" concerns a musicians attempt to reproduce a version of the sounds of starlings in a "murmuration," though this cloaks some murkier happenings too. The only dissatisfying story (for me) was Tim Foley's "The Ghost of Niles Canyon," which is a nested double-vanishing hitchhiker-tale whose ending was telegraphed far in advance.  A worthy and enjoyable issue overall.  Order via Lulu,  or see more details via the blog. 

Cheek by Jowl, by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a slim collection of eight talks and essays, as the cover notes, "on how & why fantasy matters."  But the book is dominated by the title essay, "Cheek by Jowl," which takes up almost half the volume and is a thoughtful and critical study of the roles of animals in children's literature. As with most of Le Guin's essays, there are many insightful and quotable observations. I'll cite just one here, "To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizable error."  The collection came out in 2009.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

This book, published in 2015, was filmed as Love, Simon in 2018.  It's a teen rom-com with a twist: the boy is gay. It worked nicely as a two-hour film, so I wondered how the book might be different. It turns out it differs by a lot.  The basic story is still there in both versions, but in the film the details and scenes are all amped up to simplistic Hollywood movie proportions, sometimes at the expense of logic and character motivations. The book is more real to life, but it is very simplistically written. It's all plot and little art, but it's at least readable. (The "bonus" materials in the copy I read are all insignificant, the author and friends gushing over meeting Actors, and two teasers for other books by Albertalli that aren't very interesting.)

The Darkling Wood by Brian Stableford

The Darkling Wood (2016), by Brian Stableford, is expanded from the novella "Tenebrio" which appeared in Ellen Datlow's anthology, Vanishing Acts (2000). In book form it is subtitled "A Scientific Fantasy" and that's what it is. A few academics (two scientists and one historian) are roped into a fight between a developer and an eco-warrior who hopes to find some reason to champion the preservation of the ages-old Tenebrion Wood. They are joined by a Fortean Times reporter. It makes for a motley set of characters, who are well brought to life, but the mystery that unfolds, concerning a supposed liquid form of life, is rather a let-down. In the end, the Fortean Times reporter sums it all up accurately:  "I can't get a viable handle on it . . . I can't make it plausible as a series of deductions, in such a ways  that our readers would be able to grasp it." The book is heavy on dialogue, both in the witty repartee and in the biological speculations.  I enjoyed the book, but  really wished for something more in terms of story. 

The King of the Hummingbirds and Other Tales by John Gardner

This is the third of Gardner's three volumes of fairy tales. It is also the least successful of the three--one feels that Gardner was tiring of the form. Though he lived another five years after the publication of this book, it contains his last four fairy tales. Like the second collection, it is illustrated by Michael Sporn. Again, the illustrations add nothing to the stories, which are a bit less focused than previous ones, and which move outside the circumference of usual fairy tale subjects, dealing at times both reverentially and later sarcastically with religion. Gardner seems to be going through the motions, occasionally cackling to himself and forgetting about the reader.

Gudgekin the Thistle Girl and Other Tales by John Gardner

Gudgekin the Thistle Girl and Other Tales (1976) is John Gardner's second collection of modern-styled fairy tales. Like his first collection, Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales, it contains only four tales. The title story is about a girl named Gudgeklin who collects thistles for her never-to-be-satisfied step-mother. She is aided by the queen of the fairies. Other stories concern a kingdom threatened by a griffin, and an emperor threatened by shape-shifters. The final story, "The Sea Gulls," is about a king who makes unfortunate bargains. Like Gardner's first collection of fairy tales, this one is also illustrated, this time by Michael Sporn. Save for the colored cover, they are all ink drawings, and while interesting in their own right, they don't seem to me to artistically compatible with the stories. But the stories are well worth reading.

Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales by John Gardner

John Gardner was a larger-than-life literary figure in the U.S. in the 1970s and early 1980s, until his untimely death at the age of 49 in a motorcycle accident in September 1982. He published around a dozen novels, a few collections, some nonfiction books (on writing), some translations (The Complete Works of the Gawain Poet; The Alliterative Morte Arthur and Other Middle English Poems, and Gilgamesh), and one biography (The Life and Times of Chaucer).  Gardner also published some books of modern-styled fairy tales. Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales (1975) came out from the distinguish literary publisher Alfred A. Knopf. It collects four fairly short tales, and is illustrated by Charles Shields.  The illustrations, excepting the cover, look dated and are unappealing. The tales are pretty good. The title story and the second one ("The Tailor and the Giant") concern kingdoms preyed upon by a dragon in the first, and a giant in the second. They are well-done, and refreshingly not what the reader might expect them to be. The remaining two stories are a bit more original. In the third, a deceitful miller's mule tries to get his owner killed; and in the fourth, the final tale in the book, a young chimney-sweep saves the last piece of daylight before the world goes dark. I enjoyed the collection and will continue reading more of Gardner's fairy tales.

Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the second of three volumes of the "Annals of the Western Shore" series.  It begins several years after the end of Gifts, and starts with a new main character, Memer, a young nine-year old girl growing up in a town that was defeated by religious zealots some ten years earlier, now a place where books are banned and burned, and freedoms (especially for women) are unknown. After Memer turns seventeen, Orrec and his wife Gry (of Gifts) come to town to tell stories and perform. The town is rife for rebellion, and Memer helps to bring it about. Like Gifts, this volume is an extended meditation on power and responsibility.  Voices is a more substantial book that Gifts, and both are fine achievements even if they fall short of the majesty Le Guin created in her Earthsea volumes.

Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is the first volume of a young adult trilogy that has the overall title "Annals of the Western Shore." It is a coming of age novel, about a young boy Orrec and his best friend Gry, a girl of the same age, who are both learning about their inherited "gifts"--certain magical powers that manifest along family lines. The book is also a meditation on power and its uses and abuses. It's a much softer work than Le Guin's deservedly acclaimed Wizard of Earthsea, but it's well-done and engaging. I look forward to the two remaining volumes.

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys

It's really hard to believe that this book, published in 1960, could ever have been considered a great work of science fiction, but it has an entry as one in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985). The passage of time has not sat well on it. All the characters are manipulative and unpleasant people, shackled with the attitudes of the late 1950s. Worse, the characters are incompatible with the psychological drivel they spout at each other in long passages. Their expressed motivations actually do not fit their actions. And then there is the plot--most of which doesn't make any logical sense. Rogue Moon reads like a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, fleshed out a bit more into a cheezy novelization, but lacking in the zinger ending. 

Recollections of Oscar Wilde, by Charles Ricketts

Charles Ricketts was a painter, illustrator and book designer who was a friend of Oscar Wilde from about 1889 until Wilde's death in 1900. Their friendship was much closer before Wilde's trial and imprisonment, though they corresponded until shortly before Wilde's death. These recollections were written thirty years later, and one year before Rickett's own passing, and they were published in an elegant limited edition by Nonesuch Press the year after Rickett's death. (The version I read was a slim paperback published in 2011 by Pallas Athene as a "close copy" of the rare original 1932 edition.) While these memories have a great deal of interest based on acute observation, they seem at times a bit inhibited and occasionally stiffly written. It's clear that it took Ricketts's a long time to feel able to write about his dead friend, but there remained a lot that he must have felt he couldn't write about at all. Yet here are some nice observations by someone who knew Wilde well before he became the famous playwright, and before the tragic downfall and exile. Ricketts found Wilde to be a man who embodied kindliness and who engaged in scintillating conversation:  "there were two personalities in him: the exhibitor of well-rehearsed impromptus, of which he had a stock, and the spontaneous and witty critic of Life. In the cadenced phrases of his prose, in the elaborate retorts of his actors, we miss the flash and glitter of his speech. Then, many of mechanical epigram, or inversion of some common saying, would be told with humour and conscious exaggeration, a smile, a wave of the hand, gave it its proper significance, the quality of his laughter preceding it (for he often laughed before speaking) gave the key to the temper in which an epigram should be understood." These recollections entice the reader; yet one wishes for more than these guarded observations that Ricketts eventually decided to share with posterity. .

Blue Lily, Lily Blue, by Maggie Stiefvater

The third book of the four volume Raven Cycle accelerates the downhill trend begun in the second. While the first book was tightly constructed, the third is sprawling  and unfocussed.  Again, the characters seem to act solely to move the plot in whatever direction the author wants it to move, rather than with any interior logic to their natures and development. And the "bad" characters are not only caricatures, but actually silly. Yet there are still a few interesting aspects to the story (though less here even than in book 2), and if there were more than a single final book remaining to read I'd probably give up now and cut my losses. We'll see if it's worth it.

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

Okay, The Dream Thieves is the second book of the four volume Raven Cycle, of which the first, was The Raven Boys. The second continues on with the main story-line, expanding and making it all more complex. The first volume was more taut, conceptually, and the second more sprawling, and in some central ways disappointing. That is, some of the characters appear to be motivated entirely by the author's needs for the plot, and that is a failing, especially when it pulls you out of the story as a reader and makes you think what-the-fuck. Overall I still enjoyed the book, primarily because as a fantasy novel it is unusual in what it attempts to do. So I found aspects of it surprising and intriguing. But I'm beginning to think it would make a better tv series than it does as books. I'll see what happens with volume 3. 

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

This YA book is an odd volume. Slow to find its groove, and set-up from the beginning with some strange plot strictures, it nevertheless comes into its own in the second half of the book. It's set in Virginia, where a young girl (from a family of psychics), with four boys from a privileged prep school, continue an improbable quest for the burial of Welsh historical figure Owen Glendower along ley lines in America. This is the first book of a four-book cycle, and it just ends without much plot resolution. But I am interested enough to check out the next volume.

Cartes de Visite by Mark Valentine

Sad to say, but this small book of prose poems, Cartes de Visite (2019) by Mark Valentine, was a real disappointment, primarily because there is so little content spread out over many pages (including facing page translations into Portuguese, plus lots of white space). Really, there is less than seven pages of text to read in booklet of sixty-some pages.  The best writing is in the final item, titled "Clues":

Be attentive to the hints that hide behind the facade, sift and consider the glimmerings. Never to be daunted when the day is dull and the walls are silent. Knowing that another day, or dusk, or evening, will bring again clues. And perhaps in old bookshops find chance volumes long forgotten where one single phrase has been waiting to be rediscovered, a phrase whose meaning was hidden even to the one who wrote it.

The Pale Illuminations

Robert Morgan was the uncredited editor of three anthologies reviewed here previously, all of which I greatly enjoyed, so it's nice to see him take credit for them all on this new volume, The Pale Illuminations, which takes its title from a quote from a Charles Williams novel All Hallow's Eve (1945): "She was free from the pale illumination of the dead." Sadly, this collection seems to be the lesser of the four, though it's not a bad compilation at all. All four stories seemed to me a bit off structurally, or a bit too unfocused. The Peter Bell tale drags on for too long, while the Reggie Oliver story felt too short.  Mark Valentine's tale, after an uncharacteristically slow start, comes to life too late, and the ending almost but not quite makes the whole work.  The Derek John story has some interesting sections, but doesn't hang together in toto.  Still a decent anthology, but not quite up to the higher levels of the other three.

The Ogre's Wife

The Ogre's Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups (2002), by Richard Parks, is a collection of fifteen stories collected from magazines and books published in the seven years prior to its compilation. Five come from Realms of Fantasy. Others come from Asimov's, Black Gate, SF Age, and Weird Tales. There is a laudatory introduction by Parke Godwin which rightly notes the eclectic nature of the tales and claims it is "one of the best  SF/fantasy collections I've read in years." Sadly, this is typical overpraise. While the stories are competent and sometimes intriguing, they mostly feel like writings exercises from workshops rather than inspired stories in their own right. And the prose is workmanlike, never exhibiting any special traits or reaching for more than bemused irony.  A decent collection, still, but it didn't make me want to seek out more by this author.