The City & The City

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China Mieville feels like an author whose time has kind of passed. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way; the man’s still putting out books. It’s just that after helping to start the whole “New Weird” thing during the early 2000s with the Bas-Lag trilogy, he’s moved on to less fantastical genres and non-fiction, neither of which have gotten quite the same amount of attention as his earlier work.

My first exposure to Mieville was Perdido Street Station, partially because the first edition had a sick-ass cover and partially because I was still young enough that the idea of reading really long novels still felt mature and intellectual (these same factors led me to reading The War Of The Flowers by Tad Williams several years earlier, a mistake I have still not entirely recovered from). Like a lot of people who read Perdido Street Station, I never finished it.

As a fantasy author, Mieville is seemingly more interested in settings than stories, and long-time readers of This Blog will know how I feel about fantasy world-building. With a Mieville book you’re at least getting really strange, original world building, but at the end of the day that’s still not enough to carry a fantasy brick on its own.

Several years later I read The City & The City and also didn’t finish it, for basically the same reasons plus a few news ones, but I recently discovered that there was a BBC adaptation and it piqued my interest enough to go back and give it another shot. Can I turn a Book I Didn’t Finish into a Book I Did Finish?

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Ready Player Two

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Ready Player One was a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, which became a brief nerd culture sensation before most people decided it was actually bad. I thought it was bad the first time I read it, although on subsequent attempts to revisit it I realized it’s actually far worse than I remembered; the plot in the first half is actually pretty exciting, which masks the poor writing and annoying retro pop culture references on an initial read.

A few years later Ernest Cline wrote Armada, which everyone hated, and then he vanished for a while until the Steven Spielberg movie adaptation of Ready Player One came out and was fairly popular. I can’t prove that Ready Player Two was knocked out in a hurry to capitalize on the movie’s release, but I’m going to argue that that was probably the case.

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I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid

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Note that I deviated from my usual review title format for this one, so as not to alarm my many loyal fans

You could sum up Iain Reed’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things in two sentences: a woman goes to visit her boyfriend’s parents. Things start out kind of weird, and then they gradually get extremely weird. But detailed plot synopses lasting at least two paragraphs is how we roll here in the content venue, so let’s dig into this some more.

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The Wych Elm

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Prologue: Into The Tana-verse

If you’re outside Ireland or the UK, you may not recognize Tana French’s name. She’s a big deal here in her home country and well-known in the UK, but I don’t think she’s reached the same status in the US or elsewhere. Before I talk about her latest novel, The Wych Elm, I want to briefly look back at her past career and explain why I’ve avoided her books like the plague up until now.

The bulk of Tana French’s work has consisted of the Dublin Murder Squad novels, a series of loosely-connected crime stories about...well, guess. The novels reached a level of mainstream success as somewhat literary works that most pulpier detective yarns don’t tend to achieve, and the series’ stature was increased further by the BBC TV series adaptation Dublin Murders, which gave the first two books that modern True Detective treatment and garnered a fair bit of critical acclaim (it says a lot about the state of Irish media that the BBC were the ones behind the show).

I read the first Dublin Murder Squad book, In The Woods, after it came out in 2007 and to this day it’s one of the most frustrating reading experiences I’ve ever had. The book’s premise is immediately arresting: when the main character was a child he and two of his friends went missing in a local forest, and he was found that night traumatized into amnesia and covered in weird scratch marks while the other two kids were never found; now all grown up and a homicide detective, the protagonist takes on the murder of a young girl on the outskirts of the same forest when clues pop up suggesting her death might be related somehow to what happened to him all those years ago.

Let me tell you, I was all about this premise. The first half of the book kept me hooked with a series of tantalizing twists and clues: the main character starts to remember something creepy and possibly supernatural happening before the disappearance, other people come forward with stories of encountering a spooky giant bird in the woods, the present-day murder seems like it has ritualistic elements, there’s all sorts of local political intrigue involved…

And then it turns out the murder has nothing at all to do with what happened to the main character, which he never comes any closer to understanding except for someone finding a sharp metal thing in the woods that might explain the odd scratches.

At the time I was so annoyed by this that I seriously considered tearing the book up or setting it on fire or something. As I’ve gotten older, read more and taken up writing myself I’ve started to understand more what French was going for, especially in light of later entries in the series which apparently make a habit of dancing around supernatural elements to various degrees. But the one flaw I still can’t forgive is that the resolution of the present-day mystery, the thing that actually takes up the bulk of the novel, is incredibly uninteresting, the sort of bog-standard murder tale that would be underwhelming in an episode of CSI or Criminal Minds instead of a fairly chunky novel that takes multiple hours to get through. Long-time blog readers of mine will remember me saying that it’s okay for an author to promise one kind of story and then give their readers a different one as long as the story the reader actually gets is at least as interesting as the one they thought the were going to get; In The Woods is the source of that little adage.

So I avoided the later Dublin Murder Squad books even as their critical reception grew. But then French wrote a stand-alone novel, The Wych Elm, and in addition to having a really excellent cover design (I’m shallow, what can I say) the book ticked off several boxes for me: cool premise, similarities to my current real life circumstances, and it takes inspiration from a topic of interest. So I decided to take the plunge. Did The Wych Elm disappoint me again?

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The Return Of The Stephen King Double Bill: Salem's Lot and Bag Of Bones

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Well, it happened again.

There I was, confined to bed with severe migraines and unable to do anything to pass the time. I needed something easy to read, something breezy and light. Then, just when all hope seemed lost, Stephen King floated spookily through my window and said “WoooOOOoooh read this book about vampires and also this book about ghosts or something WoooOOOoooh.”

Today I’m continuing my inexplicable love-hate relationship with America’s favourite creepy grandpa by looking at Salem’s Lot and Bag Of Bones.

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Guest Post: Ted Chiang Double Bill (Exhalation & Stories of Your Life and Others)

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I think I’ll always vividly recall watching the 2016 movie Arrival because of when I saw it: less than 48 hours after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, when it still seemed like the entire world might go tumbling off a cliff face and we were all about to die in a nuclear exchange with some country whose leader dissed The Donald on Twitter. (Not that that’s entirely out of the question now, mind you, but it’s become clear that the Trumpocalypse is a more death-by-degrees affair than a lot of people were expecting four years ago.)

A close friend and I had made the extremely unwise decision to watch the election results live even though it meant staying up into the early hours of the morning (I was in the UK at the time), both of us nervous but fully anticipating that Trump would lose. When that didn’t happen we decided to distract ourselves by watching a movie…and picked The Duke of Burgundy.

That’s, uh, not exactly escapist fiction, so the next day we went to see Arrival.

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Bad Writing Masterclass: Docile

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A few days ago I put out a call for bad books on Twitter, intending to either do a review or the next entry in my long-running and wildly popular Books I Didn’t Finish series. And I still intend to do that with other nominees, but someone tipped me off to a book so riddled with problems that I realized my review was going to turn into a paragraph-by-paragraph dissection.

The last time this happened was with a certain fantasy novel starring a red-haired lute-playing protagonist, and that resulted in me going through the entire thing and commenting on every single page. With my current health problems I don’t have the energy to commit to a long serialized post format—as evidenced by the multiple aborted attempts I’ve made over the last three years—but the book in question contains enough material just in its opening chapters to critique.

The intent behind this isn’t to simply point and laugh; it’s called Bad Writing Masterclass because my hope is that by dissecting the problems with this book, your own writing might improve. Even if you don’t write, maybe this can help you become a more critical reader and stop giving five-star ratings to total gar—I mean, improve your reading experience. Yes.

With that preamble out of the way, let’s begin today’s Bad Writing Masterclass on Docile by K.M. Szpara.

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Books I Didn't Finish: The Stephen King Detective Two-For-One Experience

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I was recently in the hospital for a week, heavily doped up on pain medication (it wasn’t anything serious) and I needed a breezy, light book to pass the time. And lo and behold, the Kindle daily deal happened to feature a selection from my spooky frenemy, Stephen King!

That book was Mr. Mercedes, the first entry in what would become a trilogy revolving around a detective named Bill Hodges. The books are kind of notable in King’s ouvre for moving all the way out of horror and into the mystery/thriller genre, a space that many of his previous novels strayed pretty far into without entirely making the leap away from horror or the supernatural. Today we’re looking at Mr. Mercedes as well as its sequel, Finders Keepers.

The fact that I didn’t bother to read the third one is a spoiler.

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Let's Read World War Z Pt. 9: Hoorah

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I’m skipping quickly over another chapter that doesn’t have much of interest besides revealing that post-zombie Russia is now a “Holy Empire”, this being one of three things countries can be in the near future along with Federations and New Republics. The chapter after that opens in Barbados and talks more about how the carribean is an economic hot zone because the various island nations were able to mostly avoid zombies…somehow. We were told before that they can cross oceans and that infected ships were a vector to transport them around the world, but apparently none of that was a threat to small island countries with lots of hard to defend coastline.

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His Dark Materials trailer polar bearnalysis

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I've written before about how I'm a big (but not uncritical) fan of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. If I were to have a pop cultural "thing" akin to Star Wars or Harry Potter like lots of other people have, this would be it. It was hugely formative for me and has massively influenced everything I've ever written.

I also run the premier trailer analysis website on the internet. Since HBO just put out a longer teaser for the first season of the BBC's big-budget TV adaptation, these two interests are now dovetailing nicely. Let's get out our alethiometers and dive in!

 

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How to write a Stephen King novel

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Many people think that only Stephen King can write Stephen King books. This makes sense at first glance--his name is right there on the covers, after all--but in fact, anyone can write a Stephen King novel or short story.

It's true! By following these simple rules, you too can create stories about dysfunctional people getting eaten by monsters.

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Let's Read The Kingkiller Chronicle sex comic

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No, this is not a joke.

I check in occasionally on r/KingkillerChronicle to see if there's been any news on the third book, or if that big ambitious multimedia adaptation is any closer to being an actual thing (it isn't). Usually it's just the dedicated fans becoming collectively more and more fed up with the failure of Doors of Stone to materialize, but today I found something different. Something both terrible and wondrous.

I found a sex toy review/sex ed webcomic featuring a strip written by Patrick Rothfuss, in which he interviews his characters about their sexual identities.

Reminder: still not joking. This is real. Link is NSFW, in case it wasn't obvious.

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The State of Blog April 2018 (with bonus book recommendations)

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You may have noticed that there's been a distinct lack of Kvothe posts here on ronan wills dot com. There's a reason for that.

That project was started during a down period in my current neurological woes (if you're just joining us, the short version is that minor car accidents can have not so minor effects), which I rather optimistically assumed represented the new normal, rather than a temporary reprieve. This turned out to be very much not the case.

As such, posts of that style are simply too much heavy lifting in terms of reading and writing, two activities that I can't do very much of at the moment. That does not, however, mean that I'm abandoning Kvothe and pals. It's just that instead of twenty to thirty more posts, there's going to be around, like, two. Possibly three. I'm just going to throw my thoughts on the books into large essays that can easily be shared, liked, faved and subscribed to, and then we're done with Kvothe until that third book comes out.

Those will appear whenever I'm able to do them, which means any time between now and my natural death. In the meantime, I will continue to sporadically post the melange of media reviews and rambling, long-winded diatribes that all of my blogging efforts inevitable devolve into.

While I've got your attention, I did manage to read some things over the last...four months? Is it actually April already? Jesus.

Anyway here are some books you should maybe consider checking out.

Winterglass by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Black and British by David Olusoga 

I'll Be Gone in The Dark by Michelle McNamara

Next up on my slow-reading pile is Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone, which landed with a fairly significant amount of hype. I'm quite eager to see if it deserves all the fuss.