Category: Reviews

I’m only a few pages into the new Delta Green novel, Denied to the Enemy, and I will no doubt finish it. However, I am overwhelmed with a strange compulsion to rant. First I will quote.

Before he joined in 1938 he was frightened almost all of the time. Oh now, how he missed those innocent days. Since his induction into the group Bruning was in a constant state of paranoia and fear. The things he had seen! The way his world had changed in under one year! He had a skill you see, a talent with language which was necessary for the group to achieve its goals. Bruning had studied many ancient tongues and was lettered in three very difficult ones. In addition he had a skill with cyphers, something developed during a stint at Oxford and his study of the works of John Dee. If only he was not so clever! His mind, something he had considered a blessing in his murky past now was a terrible weapon at the disposal of the Reich, and although the intangible front he fought upon was won or lost through the study of words, of meanings and innuendoes and secrets, the casualties caused by such battles were real enough.

I, too, suffer from the affliction of the comma abuser. I, too, use commas to extend a sentence far past its healthy conclusion. But man. I think the problem here is as much the absence of commas in key locations as the overuse of them. This is disappointing, particularly insofar as the novel comes from a company known for meticulous editing and painstaking care.

After seeing Napoleon Dynamite, I am greatly heartened to know that should something happen to Wes Anderson we’ll still have someone to make Wes Anderson movies. Very minimalist, very charming if you don’t assume it’s intended as mockery of the title character. Dryer than the average Wes Anderson movie. I liked it.

The Chronicles of Riddick was not as good as I wanted it to be, but it was also not as bad as I feared it might be. It’s the perfect Warhammer 40K movie; there’s very little pure good in the world, the antagonists have psionic powers, and there’s lots of blood and guts. If you can’t take a guilty pleasure in spiky bitz, it’s not a good movie for you. If you can, then it’s worth the viewing.

As promised, David Twohy created a huge mythology to inform the movie. None of it is particularly explained, because the payoff needs to wait for the rest of the prospective trilogy, but you can tell there are bones beneath the musculature of the story. Sadly, the only real connection to Pitch Black is Riddick — while both movies are interested in questions of faith, I wasn’t ever really convinced they were taking place in the same universe. I kind of liked the non-supernatural universe better.

Vin Diesel is excellent. Alexa Davalos, who plays Jack from Pitch Black all grown up, is really good. Everyone else is pretty much OK.

I’m hoping this makes enough to greenlight the two sequels, but I’m kind of suspecting that it won’t.

I’m normally not much of a Harry Turtledove fan. I found the Worldwar series to be incredibly long and dull with poor characterization and fairly uninteresting aliens. He clearly knows his history, but he wasn’t so good at getting the story across. For some reason I took a plunge on American Front anyhow.

Surprise, it was remarkably readable. I think this is perhaps because there’s a whole lot of populism in it, and I’m a sucker for populism at the moment. So I went ahead and read the whole trilogy, and then the second trilogy set in the same timeline, and now I’m waiting for the next one.

It’s an alternate history timeline in which the Confederates won because Lee didn’t lose his battle plans. A few years later, the South won again. Lincoln went over to the Socialists, marginalizing the Republicans and putting the Democrats solidly in power. Marxism became popular among blacks in the South. Utah is grumpy and rebellious. Etc.

In 1914, the CSA is allied with France and England while the US is allied with Germany. Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated in Serbia. Things proceed as one might expect.

Now, I’m not going to say it was smooth writing or anything. For one thing, it’s a multiple POV book, a lot like George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. The POV segments are, oh, maybe four or five pages at a shot, so there’s no way it’s not going to get choppy here and there. Not all the characters are as interesting as one might like — but there’s good variation among them; he’s not writing the same character over and over again.

And, you know. Marxist rebellions in Georgia. Heated debate about the appropriate role of the Socialist Party with regard to those rebellions. Upton Sinclair, Presidential candidate. Custer as a should-be-retired general. Neither the CSA or the USA depicted as good guys. Mistakes made on all sides.

Half of me wants to lasershark it and use it as the setting for an Unknown Armies game. Or a Vampire game. Or something. Even if I don’t, though, it’s fun reading.

I’d been pretty pleased with the Freaks and Geeks DVD set through six episodes, but in the seventh episode the beautiful new girl in class walks into the room in slow motion to the dulcet strains of Billy Joel’s “C’etait Toi.” And Jason Schwartzman guest stars. Now I’m just wholeheartedly recommending it.

18 hour-long episodes, drama with a lot of comedy to it, teenagers in a Wisconsin high school. Not unlike That ’70s Show, except not played for laughs. Decent acting, mostly by people who didn’t act much before or after — I’m sure there’s a story to the whole ensemble and how the show got made, but I dunno what it is. Painful if you don’t want to relive your high school years.

Belatedly: yes, Kill Bill: Volume 2 is a big fat pile of talkative fun. It is not as violence-packed as Volume 1, but it is certainly a tale of bloody revenge and the fight scenes are top-notch. Tarantino’s obsessed with flashbacks and non-linear storytelling, right? So Volume 1 is the action, and Volume 2 is a kind of weird metaflashback that goes back over all the violent impulses and actions of the first volume and explains the motivations behind them.

Maybe not. But it’s still tres cool. Not super-deep, but super-cool.

The Atrocity Archives is pretty enjoyable if you’re part of the vanishingly small target audience. I like espionage novels, and I’m a computer geek who knows a fair bit about the history of the field, and I like H.P. Lovecraft, so the book worked for me. But man, it’s dense-pack fiction. You need to know who Turing was and it helps to understand what a device driver is and you ought to be steeped in sysadmin/programmer culture and the espionage bits build on the work of Le Carre and Len Deighton.

Possibly Atrocity Archives should come with annotations, like “The Waste Land.”

I should note that I don’t see anything wrong with any of this; in fact, I rather like it. It’s OK for novels to be difficult. I’m certainly not going to castigate Charlie Stross for writing difficult novels that happen to fall within my area of expertise. Nobody complains that James Joyce was pandering to linguists, after all.

So, yeah: in the afterword, Stross explains that the conceit of the novel is that the horror of Lovecraft and the Cold War espionage of Len Deighton have a lot in common. The big difference, in his mind, is that the espionage hero has hope and the Lovecraftian hero doesn’t. (Or if he does, he shouldn’t.) But he draws pretty convincing links between the amorphous horror of the Lovecraft mythos and the inhuman horror of pending nuclear war.

Certainly the fusion works in the writing itself. You replace the threat of weapons of mass destruction with the threat of invading entities from another dimension, and everything kind of falls into place. The structure is, alas, weakened by the interjection of Dilbert-esque corporate satire; it’s hard for me to believe that a top-secret occult espionage organization runs on a matrix management style. I don’t mind that the hero is a Neal Stephenson hacker — the fish out of water stuff works well — but I do mind that he seems to have somehow convinced his agency to turn into a 90s dot-com.

Apart from that, though, it was a good read with fairly interesting characters. Nobody makes any permanent sacrifices, but the threats are convincing and Stross can write horrific passages when he’s not being overly clever; the descriptions of the relics in Amsterdam are very chilling.

I didn’t like Five Deadly Venoms as much as I thought I would. The kung fu was awesome, particularly the final battle, which provided a suitable climax to the movie. The DVD transfer was, again, superb. The story didn’t really grab me, though.

I think in retrospect I was expecting big kung fu action with all five Venoms from the first minute, which is not what I got. Instead, I got a somewhat complex mystery, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for that. It was a pretty good mystery, and I only figured out who was who five minutes before the revelation. Also, I’ve realized that I like the big sweeping epics like Water Margin better than the close-focus kung fu flicks, on average.

Worth watching, and I have another Venoms movie to watch (same actors, not a related plot), and I’m looking forward to that one. Just not as much fun as the other Shaws I’ve seen so far.

Poppy Z. Brite’s new book, Liquor, is a pretty huge change of direction from her early work. It’s not horror, it’s not gory, and it’s not the work of a writer fascinated by young gay men in New Orleans…

Strike that last; maybe it’s not such a huge change. Still, no vampires or other creepy-crawlies. It’s a foodie novel set in New Orleans, and it’s well-written, so it’s pretty much perfect for people who love cooking. I wouldn’t call it terribly deep but I enjoyed it. Her husband is a cook, and she’s got the feel of the restaurant world down pat as far as I can tell based on the summers I spent running dishwashers on Nantucket.

As a novel, it’s got a fairly loose plot and a paucity of tension. As a slice of life piece, it’s a lot of fun.

Yeah, so Hellboy. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a great adaptation of the comics. It’s by no means a great action movie — it’s a good one, but not great. But the comics aren’t great comics, either; they’re just (just?) very very entertaining pulp. Hellboy is exactly that.

Also, del Toro infuses the movie with some of the best Lovecraftian feel since Dagon. The monster design is great, the villain design is great, it’s all great. I loved the tentacles. The movie looks just about perfect. Likewise, Ron Perlman is ideal for his role.

Flaws: the pacing of the ending is really odd. There are a couple of places where the transitions make absolutely no sense (weren’t those demons in New York five minutes ago?). But really, that’s about it.

And Hellboy’s stone right hand is excellent. It moves right, it feels like it can swat a tank through a wall, and someone was smart enough to use Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” in the soundtrack. Ironic musical gracenotes make my day.