The Indie Book Review: The Dancer's Spell

There's a perfectly good word that doesn't get used all that much these days: prig. The freedictionary.com defines it as: A person who demonstrates an exaggerated conformity or propriety, especially in an irritatingly arrogant or smug manner.

The Dancer's Spell is the story of Wim Brink, a prig. He's a man adrift in a world changing around him in ways he'd prefer it didn't change. 

It's 1905, the Mata Hari is dancing her way through Paris, morals are loosening, automobiles are starting to be seen on the roads, weapons like the machine gun are radically redefining the cost of warfare, and all in all the world is a twitter with change. And Wim would have been significantly happier in 1885.

This is a character driven novel. In many ways, this reads significantly more like a memoir than a novel.

So, I'm reading the memoir of a fictional man who is adrift in the moral climate of 1905. But, for as much as I think Wim would have been unbearable to live with, I did find reading his story, and how he tries to cope with the world around him, compelling.

The Mata Hari

As things begin, he's spending a night in Paris with his brother-in-law, who is something of a wastrel. Max, said brother-in-law, takes him to see the Mata Hari dance. Wim is utterly horrified just at the idea of a woman taking her clothing off in public, and then, to make matters worse, he thinks he knows her.

He thinks she's the girl he was sweet on back as a young teen.

For those of you, like me, who grew up in the '80s this is basically the plot for the J. Giles Band's song, Centerfold. And while the unnamed narrator of the song deals with it by assuming this means he can now go sleep with his Angel, Wim, a 19th century mind stuck in the early 20th century handles it by having something of a midlife crisis, and desperately trying to find out how his sweetie could have gone so wrong. 

One of the things I admire about this story is how perfectly in tune Wim is with the 19th/early 20th century mind. There is no hint of the sexual revolution, feminism, free love, or anything post 1920s about him. He is utterly horrified to see the Mata Hari and on several levels that you just wouldn't expect in a modern man. There's the fact that she is doing something so scandalous. There's a feeling of revulsion that he knew and loved someone who could have done something like this. There's fear that somehow he's tainted by her acts. That just by having known her, decades before she began dancing, that he, too, is sullied by her sins. There's a frantic searching of his own mind and her history, trying to find what catastrophe could lead her on the path of sin, and how to avoid it for his own daughter.

For most modern people, the only time you'd see a reaction like this is if you turned out to be the best friend of the serial killer who just got caught with twenty-three different eyeballs in his freezer. But that's because as members of the 21st century, we don't care all that much about sex. But for Wim, clinging to the 19th century, sex is a big deal.

When it comes to sex, Wim is the model Victorian. The problem is, it's 1905, Queen Victoria's been dead for four years, and that level of sexual repression isn't coming back. This is a man who loves his wife, finds her beautiful, and is still horrified when she tries to seduce him on their wedding anniversary. This is a man who sees sex as something dark, ugly, done only to produce babies, but the world around him is starting to change about that.

So, while the world celebrates the Mata Hari, writes articles about her, and puts her on postcards, he fixates on his cousin, a peasant girl he sees as the epitome of pureness and perfection, untouched by the sullying hand of sex. He starts to create a mental fantasy of Ingrid (the cousin) helping him raise his daughter, helping him mold her into an upright and pure woman, shielding her from bad influences (like his wife, who is not horrified by the Mata Hari in specific or sex in general).

The entire conflict of this story is Wim dealing with Wim's fear/revulsion of sex, and how the world at large, and his family in specific doesn't seem to agree with his mindset. 

For depth of character and getting historical attitudes right, this story gets five stars. 

The problem lies in the plot and climax. For the plot, there's just not all that much of it, and what plot there is tends to meander about, hovering on episodes and experiences that for all the story is about Wim's internal conflict with Wim, just don't matter. I found myself skimming on at least three occasions, and jumping forward to see how many more pages of (whatever) I'd have to get through before the next section started twice.

Then there's the climax. Given the conflict set up of man v. himself, I was expecting some sort of resolution of the deeper conflict (Wim V. Sex). But Wim doesn't really change. He gets a bit more comfortable with who he is. He realizes, on the verge of doing something very drastic, that he's being a twit, but there's no hint that the underlying issue (sex is bad) is ever resolved. So, by the end of the main thrust of the story, he's doing a better job of managing the symptoms of the problem, but the problem itself remains untouched.

Then there's the... I'll call it an epilogue, since it takes place ten years after the rest of the story. Wim watching the Mata Hari's execution. (In World War I the Mata Hari was tried and executed by the French as a German Spy. Though some historians think she was being used by the French to mask their inept battle plans, in the '70s the Germans released papers showing that she was indeed one of their agents.) I had been hoping for a clear emotional response, after all the man goes well out of his way to see her die, but there's no real sense of conclusion, no clear sense of this is how it ended and this is how Wim feel about it. Maybe that's accurate for the character, maybe he doesn't really know, but it does make for a somewhat unsatisfying ending.

All in all, an intriguing story with a difficult main character. If you love characters you love to hate, Wim might be worth your time. If you love stories where the author stays true to the times and doesn't try to pretty them up for modern eyes, then you'll love Dancer's Spell. If you want a detailed psychological drama, this one will fit the bill.

Indie Book Review: For the Sake of the Future

And, after a rather long delay, the Indie Book Review is back! (I know all three of you were waiting with baited breath for the next installment.) Today we're going to look at For the Sake of the Future.

One of the online communities of writers I hang out at has been bouncing around the idea of whether or not you should hold onto an idea if you don't think you're a good enough writer to tackle it yet. Now, I'm a big fan of not waiting. I think you'll lose a lot of what you want with the idea if you just set it on the shelf. At the same time, I don't think you should publish that work until you are a good enough writer to do it proper justice.

Why is this relevant? For the Sake of the Future is a great idea. I wish I had come up with the plot for this story, it's so good. Val Panesar unfortunately is not a good enough writer to do it justice, yet.

The plot: The Big Bad wants to change the world. He's gotten a hold of eight people right after they died, The Undying, and offered them the chance to go back in time and rewrite the world, to make human existence 'meaningful' by going to war and making sure the 'right' people die. Apparently his main characters are a little stupid, and a little shook up from just having died, so they all agree. They start changing the past. From there we get twists, turns, crosses, double crosses, paradoxes, and the fun that time travel allows.

I really wish I had thought of this plot. And that I was or knew a really good graphic artist. For the Sake of the Future would have made an incredible graphic novel. There's action galore, and the main character, Neelam Lochan, is a huge manga fan. Starting this plot off in a fairly realistic drawing style and slowly morphing it into a manga style would have worked really well.

I liked the characters. Neelam is engaging and pleasant. Greg, Sean, and Marid, back up characters, are all interesting. As I mentioned above, the characters are a little dull, but unlike a lot of writers who indicate their characters are the smartest thing ever, and then they start doing stupid things, Panesar never tries to sell us on the idea that his characters are brilliant. They're regular guys (sort of, this would be one of the twists mentioned above) dropped into an extraordinary circumstance, and it takes them a while to realize this is not a good plan.

So, that's the good points.

The bad part is that this book desperately needed both an editor and a proofreader.

An editor was necessary to reign in the point of view hopping, chronology hopping, and chop about a quarter of the story out. Now, I don't hate head hopping in a book, as long as it's not done mid-scene. One point of view per scene takes care of the job nicely.  And I understand that parts of this book are supposed to be confusing, but randomly hopping about in the chronology, swapping POVs only makes the confusion worse. The idea is to write the story so that the confusion of the characters shines through, not to write the story so that the reader is scratching her head going, "What just happened there?" On top of that this is a long (and trust me, I write long books, I know long.) book, and it doesn't need to be quite that long.

A proofreader needed to go through and fix up the grammar, typos, and formatting issues. Now, I'm not going to be winning any awards for Grammarian of the Year. On top of that, I don't much care about grammar mistakes that don't jump off the page. But there were enough issues with For the Sake of the Future that I was irked by them.

Basically it's a rough draft.  It's a rough draft of something that could become a good book. On Goodreads two stars means the book was okay, one star means I didn't like it. Neither of those options really work. This book isn't okay; it's not well enough written to get an okay. But I did like it. I'd really like to see what it might look like after Panesar takes a few years to really study how a story hangs together and gets a good editor. So, no stars for For the Sake of the Future, just a review.

Indie Book Review: Optical Delusions In Deadwood

Deadwood Violet is back in Optical Delusions, and she's brought along all the things I loved about Nearly Departed.   Witty writing, killer dialog, red-hot sex scenes, a corker of a mystery, and a tinge of paranormal that leaves the reader wondering if the supernatural is really happening or not have all come back for Ann Charles' sophomore offering.

In the wake of the action in Nearly Departed, Violet's developed something of a reputation as the local spook finder.  All the more ironic because Violet still doesn't really believe in ghosties and ghoulies.  But, setting fire to the "haunted" residence of the local psychopathic killer will get you that sort of reputation.    Newly minted reputation in hand, Violet gets approached by a small, mousy woman in need of a realtor.  In a matter of minutes, Violet knows why she was picked, the house, in addition to having a reputation for being haunted, was also the location of a murder-suicide a few months earlier.    

On the good news front, the house is perfect.  On the better news front, the Sturgis Harley Davidson convention is on, and Deadwood is packed with out-of-towners, some of whom are looking for real estate.  On the downside, something just isn't right about the owners, and that triggers Violet's need to get down to the bottom of what is going on.  She's thinking it's a simple matter of a not-all-there mother being taken advantage by her daughter and almost daughter-in-law.  But of course, it's so much more than that.  Next thing Violet knows she's got witches, demons, and spooks in her life again, and she'd really prefer they weren't. 

If that was all the plot this story had, it'd be a great read.  But it's not all the plot, the Deadwood mysteries are romances as well as who/what-done-its.  I'll admit to being a bit disappointed in the romance for Optical Delusions.  When we left Nearly Departed, Doc and Violet were heading toward happily ever after.  There were some big obstacles in the way, and I wanted to see how they would deal with them.  Two weeks later we begin Optical Delusions and apparently during the intervening time Doc's character got a personality transplant and went skittering into hiding because he's oh-so-scared of a real relationship.  So, for all practical purposes Doc and Violet go back to square one and start over again in Optical Delusions. 

Now, the actual romance plot line of: guy acts like jerk, guy decides he can't live without woman, guy does valiant things to get back into woman's good graces, forgiveness, and happy time is just fine.  It holds together well and works.  Charles handles it with grace and wit.  But I was hoping to see the romance actually move forward, as opposed to end up in precisely the same place it was when we got done with Nearly Departed.  None of the major issues facing Doc and Violet as a couple are any closer to resolved.   He's still a psychic.  She's still not sure she believes such things are real.  Her best friend is still in love with Doc and she's not sure how to handle that. 

And, while I wouldn't call that a minor issue with the book, it is one of personal taste.  Optical Delusions is extremely well written.  The characters are vibrant and spending time with them is a genuine joy.  The mystery has twists, turns, red-herrings, and fully satisfying ending.  Charles' ability to balance paranormal creepiness with the real world and leave the reader on the fence as to what is actually going on is reminiscent of the best episodes of the X-Files.   Plot threads that were sprinkled into both Optical Delusions and Nearly Departed look like they'll get picked up in the third book.  This is another carefully written, carefully plotted book.  I want to know what happens next.  I just hope it doesn't involve Doc and Violet heading back to square one again.

Indie Book Review: Hungry For You

A while back, I remember a friend joking about how there were vampire romances, werewolf romances, ghost romances, and finally after musing over the different shades of paranormal romance out there, he said, "What's next? Zombie romance?"

A.M. Harte's Hungry For You answers that question with a resounding yes.  It's a collection of short zombie love stories and poems.  The topics range from zombies in love, to humans in love with zombies, to humans in love with each other fighting off the zombies, to humans facing their loved ones slowly turning into zombies.  If zombies and love can be worked into it, Harte's written about it.

As writing from the point of view of flow of words, elegant prose, and vivid description, these stories were quite lovely.   As writing from the point of view of world building and taking an old classic trope, the zombie, and spiffing it up for the modern reader, they are very well done.  In fact, my only real complaint about this book is that it's a collection of short stories and not a novel.

There are so many intriguing questions raised by this collection: How did the zombie plague start?  How did it end?  Why?  What happened to the zombies when it was over?  and on and on, all of which I would have been very happy to know more about.  It's high praise to tell a writer that you wanted more, but this collection was a bit like going to a really good restaurant, getting a plate covered in little tidbits, some are plate licking good, some are just tasty, but in the end, as you're staring at that empty plate, you're still hungry.  

As with any collection of short stories, some of the tales were stronger than others.  The first few in particular didn't seem like complete stories to me.  I kept expecting the book to go back to those characters and tell me more about what happened.  But they were left in eternal literary limbo.  Once past them, I lost the sense of "Huh?  That's it?" and enjoyed the stories that came next immensely.

So, if you'd like to expand your paranormal romance horizons, go grab a copy.  It's well worth the money and time.  And, maybe, if enough of us buy Hungry For You, we'll encourage A.M. Harte to write the full story of her version of the zombie plague.

Indie Book Review: Hard Day's Knight

"I hate waking up in an unfamiliar place. I’ve slept in pretty much the same bed for the past fifteen years, so when I wake up someplace new, it really throws me off. When that someplace is tied to a metal folding chair in the center of an abandoned warehouse that reeks of stale cigarette smoke, diesel fuel and axle grease - well, that really started my night off on a sparkling note."

Thus starts Hard Day's Knight, first book in the Black Knight Chronicles.  I love this book.  It makes me happy in a way that hasn't happened in a long, long time.  Now, this is not lofty literature here, this is Jay and Silent Bob get turned into vampires, grow up a bit, and decide to become private eyes.   It's cute.  It's fun.  It's insanely well written.   If it were food, it would be a perfect chocolate chip cookie with just enough milk.  The kind of thing that makes you feel good after you've eaten it.

The plot is what you might expect if Keven Smith were to write an episode of Angel.  Jimmy Black, and his sidekick/partner Greg Knightwood  (The Black Knight of their detective agency and the title.) have a problem.  The client pissed off a witch big time, and needs help so his whole family isn't killed.  They go in thinking this will be an easy little case of use the vamp mojo to scare the witch and all will be fine.  But it's never that easy.  Turns out the problem isn't a witch, she's a possessed little girl.  And, in the meantime, kids have been disappearing, and the demon's got something to do with it.  What started out as a quick little job turns into a full on forces of hell in the black hats versus Jimmy, Greg, their best friend who's a priest, and a fallen Angel in the white hats. 

The characters may not be breathtakingly original, but once again, they're perfectly done.  Just like the chocolate chip cookie, it doesn't have to be original to make you happy, it has to be good.   

John Hartness' strength is great dialog, and he compounds that strength by telling the story from Jimmy's point of view.  Jimmy is literally telling us the story, which means John gets to use his best skill through the entire tale.    And once again, someone who's really good at a skill, using that skill, makes me very happy.

I'll leave one final bit of praise here, before I go from enthusiastic reviewer to mad fan girl: Dad, the priest, is actually a good guy.  Lately it seems like every third paranormal book has an evil priest in it, like the whole point of being Catholic and joining the priesthood is to rain terror and unholy pain down on innocents everywhere.  So, I'm pretty happy when I see a book that shows a man of faith using that faith to make the world a better place.

Hard Day's Knight is my first five star review of 2011, and it's well earned it.

Indie Book Review: The Judas Syndrome

Okay, so supposedly, when you see a bad review, it's a case of the book not living up to the expectations of whomever purchased it.  That makes sense.  You rarely see reviews that state something like, "I absolutely loathe horror stories.  So in a masochistic fit  I picked up Seven Co-eds Get Horribly Murdered In A Haunted House.  It was a horror story.  I hated it."  (And if you do write that review, you deserve to be smacked upside the back of the head Gibb's style.)

No, usually bad reviews go something like this: "I purchased Seven Co-eds Get Horribly Murdered In A Haunted House because I love horror stories, and there were a bunch of great reviews.  Then I cracked it open.  I don't know what the other reviewers were smoking while they read it, but it didn't live up to the hype."

So, you see a book, you read the write up, you check out and the reviews and develop expectations.  You read the sample and develop more depth to your expectations.   Having done that, I expected The Judas Syndrome to be Red Dawn redone with a whole bunch of teen stoners.

Unlike the potential negative reviewer, I was very pleased to see my expectations were not met.

I'd say the first quarter of the book followed the traditional post-nuclear Armageddon script pretty closely.  We meet the main characters and the secondary characters.  We see them party and do a ton of drugs.  They come home and find the world has been blown to smithereens.  They huddle together for survival.  Up until this point it looks like a sophisticated version of many teen fantasies of life hiding out with your buddies, an unlimited supply of drugs, no parents to kill the buzz, and enough danger to keep everything interesting.

And then the story begins to shift.  We move from teen fantasy mode into metaphysical questioning mode.  We go from nothing deeper than getting laid and the next joint to an in depth exploration of a psyche at the breaking point.

This is not a light fluffy read with a happy ending.  The title, which I barely paid any attention to when I was thinking about the book before I read it, is a warning about how it's going to work out.  Joel, is a frighteningly well done psychological profile of a man slowly burning out and arising from the ashes not a phoenix, but a devil.  The world is gone.  Family and most friends have died horribly.  As the seven month course of the book continues, more friends die.  This is more stress than most people could possibly handle, add in the paranoia inducing effects of large quantities of cannabis, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

It's a compelling read, heartbreaking, but emotionally very, very real. 

There are however, aspects of the story I found jarring and out of place.  Joel and his friends are too young.  They're high school seniors, seventeen or eighteen years old.  And while I do not subscribe to the belief that all teens are twits, I can say that all the teens I've personally met who were as interested in drugs and partying as these kids were twits.  They needed more time to grow up.   College seniors would have worked better, post-grad students, better yet.  Basically, I just ignored how old they were supposed to be, and mentally advanced them to twenty-six ish, it made the story work a lot better.

What actually happened seemed quite fuzzy, too.  We know the terrorist mastermind had nukes.  We learn he had a lot more than anyone thought he did.  We know Joel and his buddies live in some middle of nowhere farming community, 200 miles from the nearest big city.  When they get back from their camping party weekend, they find town destroyed, sort of.  People are dead, some of them.  Some look like they died peacefully in their sleep.  Some are covered in burns.  Some are running around looting.  Some places the buildings have burned and cars are toppled.  Some are just fine.  What happened?  Is this some sort of fall out from a bomb over 200 miles away?  Did the terrorist have enough weaponry to go after little, middle of nowhere farming communities?  And why didn't any of Joel's group come down with radiation sickness? 


Joel's home and a nearby barn are perfectly set up for surviving the apocalypse it turns out.  And while I get Poetl didn't want to spend too much time dealing with the physical hows of survival, the set up was just a bit too convenient.  It's not only that everything is already set up with generators, but that they also manage to find a tanker truck filled with gasoline so they could run those generators.  

What Poetl did want to spend time on was ripping away everything Joel knew or believed about himself.  He built his character up, turned him from a lay about stoner into a leader, and then as stress piled on stress, turned him into a paranoid addict.  And from there things only get worse.  As I said earlier, not a light and fluffy read. 

Joel is the only fully developed character of the lot.  And I'm not sure if this is intentional or not.  We get the story from Joel's POV.  So are two dimensional secondary characters an indicator of lazy writing or of Joel's inability to really see and understand the people around him?  Part of the reason I'm not sure if this is intentional or not is that the writing as a technical matter of grammar and construction ranges from great to error prone.  When I see technical mastery of prose, I assume that things like the shallow secondary characters when told with first person POV is intentional.  When it's not, I'm not sure if it's another indicator of sloppy writing or an indicator of deep writing with limited technical skills.

Voice, assuming you pretend Joel is twenty-six, is well done.  Action scenes are believably chaotic.  (Though, as others have indicated, the sudden military prowess of a crew of high school seniors wasn't.)  Joel's descent into self-destructive madness was extremely well done.  You almost don't notice he's slipping away because he doesn't notice he's slipping away.  The ending isn't much of a shock.  Once you realize the title isn't kidding, and the last line of the description really isn't kidding, you know how this is going to end.  And while not a shock, it still evokes the pain of losing a character you wanted more and better for.
   
More careful editing, and more attention to making the setting/characters match the gravity of what happened, and this would have been a five star book.  As it is, I'm comfortable calling this four stars.

Indie Book Review; Expert Assistance

Sit back and imagine, if you will, a story where Lazarus Long, Hannah Montanna, and Marvin the Paranoid Android on prozac get together to liberate a planet.  Got that image in your head?  Sounds like fun doesn't it?  Yep.  Reading it was fun, too.

Jake, the main character is something of a cross between Han Solo and Lazarus Long.  Like Han he's in financial trouble.  Like Lazarus he seems to have seen and done everything at least once.  And like both of them he exudes a sense of fond grouchiness at the naive-cute-and-fuzzy-puppy types that keep tripping through his life.

Like Lazarus, Jake has a sentient computer/spaceship with a brain the size of a planet.  This one is not depressed, but does seem to have a dry sense of humor and irony sensors on overdrive.  Odin, in addition to knowing basically everything that ever was recorded, also has teleporter technology, can build almost anything, and crack basically any code.  As you can imagine, Odin is a very good friend to have.  Odin was built as a military vessel.  He became sentient and decided he did not want to be a warship.  Jake found him floating abandoned in the middle of space, probably bought him some fuel, and the two have been together since.

And now, looking for some fast money, Jake has a new job.  Two new jobs really.  One is shuttling Evvie Martini (Hannah Montanna, down to her dyed hair) from gig to gig.  The other is helping the people of Antioch Two throw off  Sordius Maxi, the owner of their planet.

Of course, eventually Evvie finds out about the revolution, gets involved, and a cute little tale that can be described as "Yay Liberty!" ensues.  The story is more or less the fictional equivalent of kettle corn.  It's sweet, crunchy, yummy, but not exactly nutritious.

Here's why.  In the past I've mentioned something called power balance.  So, let's talk a little more about plot and power balance.   For a plot to work, the good guys and the bad guys need a shot at winning.  It can be a one in a million shot, that's good reading, too.  But unless you want to study some sort of human emotion, (ie lit fic) the guys on one side can't so completely overpower the guys on the other to the point where the guys on the other have absolutely no shot at winning.  Sure the struggle of David V. Goliath is good reading, but the struggle between Goliath and the quadriplegic toddler isn't.  The toddler has no chance at all.

Maxi never had a shot.  Odin isn't so much taking a gun to a knife fight as taking a tank and making sure that Omniscient God Almighty is driving it.  Maxi was so far out gunned by that computer it wasn't funny.  And to throw the power balance off even further, Maxi is a lot more like Fredo Corleone than Michael.

There's no tension to this plot, because there's no real danger.  There's no chance the revolution won't work.  There's no possibility of any of the main characters being in any danger.  Because of that, none of the main characters experience any real change.  And why would they?  Nothing was really risked.  Evvie is just a childish at the beginning of the revolution as she is in the end.  The rebels are just as clueless; they never had to learn anything.  Odin, well, he's already the pinnacle of intellectual evolution, so there was nowhere for him to go.  Jake has no deeper understanding of anything because he knew it all to begin with. 

If you'll forgive the comparison, this is not Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  It's not even close.

When discussing revolution it's hard to avoid politics.  This was a fairly innocuous screed against commercialism, without being insulting or annoying.  I'm about as far off on my side of the political spectrum as it's possible to get, and I didn't find the political content too bothersome.  I doubt anyone else who can still claim to be somewhere on the rational scale would either.

So, if you want a cute and safe read, an adventure where you know everyone comes home just peachy and the good guys are guaranteed to win, this one's for you.

The Indie Book Review: Asatru For Beginners

A few days ago I got a new review query, this one had a book in it called Asatru For Beginners.  Asatru is a recreated version of the ancient Norse religions.  Now, I was a religious studies major in college.  I've got friends in the Pagan and Wiccan communities.  I'm pretty well versed in the various New Age magickal philosophies.  I read fantasy. I write fantasy. I'm up to date on my European mythos.  No one needed to point out to me who Wednesday was in American Gods.  So this looked like a fine addition to the vast pile of religious information in my arsenal.  I was happy to accept it for review.

Now, I'm not, by any stretch of anyone's imagination, an expert on Norse mythology.  I can identify Odin, Freya, Midgard, Thor, etc... and because of my RS background concepts like a multipartite soul was  already something I'd run into, but given all of that, I found Asatru For Beginners to be confusing.

First off, the formatting was doing nothing to make the reading easier.  The Kindle sample I downloaded had real issues.  On the most basic level, if you start the book off with a FAQ, doing something to differentiate the questions from the answers (indenting, starting them off with Q: or A:, putting the questions in bold or italic, anything) would have made the reading easier.   Maybe post FAQ the formatting improved.  But the author sent me a .doc version, so I don't know if the Kindle version improved.

Secondly, beginning with a FAQ was a bit odd.  Not just because of the questions asked (Did the Vikings wear helmets with horns on their heads?  Are all Asatuars white?) and not asked (Who are the main gods? What is Ragnarok?) but because if you really are a beginner a quick overview before getting into the FAQ would have been helpful.  Beyond a FAQ, what this book very much needed was a glossary.  For every question the FAQ answered there were at least three terms with no definition or a definition that occurred much later in the book.  Likewise, a pronunciation guide would have come in handy.  Terms like: Fjorgynn, Ljossalfheim, fylgia, have no sound in my mind.  I have no idea how to pronounce them.

Thirdly, it is very clear this was written by someone who knows absolute scads of information on the subject, and has known scads of information for so long that she's forgotten what sorts of things a beginner doesn't know.  For example: there's a section with a list of gods, in this section we learn of the god's hall and where the god has influence.  Now, while I'm sure this information is useful to someone who already knows something about the subject, if you don't really know what a hall is or where these places are supposed to be, it's confusing.  Likewise the term Ragnarok is used something like twenty times before it's defined.  In effect this book would more correctly be called Asatru For Already Conversant with Norse Mythology, or Asatru For the Low Intermediate.

Fourthly, the organization of this book left a lot to be desired.  It's laid out in sections: Frequently Asked Questions, History, The Gods, Other Beings, Beliefs and Morality, Rituals, The Three Kinds of Magic, and Resources.  Now, as a logical flow goes this didn't flow all that well.  There were often bits where I'd want more information, and that information would be in a later section.  As I understand a religion it's the beliefs that are the core.  I would have started there, moved into rituals (as we learn in the beliefs section Asatru is a religion of actions, not belief), then gods and other beings, slid from there into history, finished up with magic, and then wrapped up the book with the FAQ, Glossary, and list of resources.  

So, now that we've gotten the book as a device for the transmittal of information out of the way, how about the quality of that information?  Now, as I said earlier I'm not an expert on this subject, but from the very brief bit of independent research I did, everything in the book looked fine.  Other Asatruas might have different opinions on the subject, but to an outsider it appeared to be complete.  The writing was engaging and fairly easy to follow.  It was a quick and pleasant two hour read with a good deal of information I had never run into before.

As a religion Asatru had things I appreciated, and bits I was less than thrilled with.  I'm a fan of religions based on actions rather than beliefs, and Asatru is a religion of action.  You do not have to believe in literal land spirits to be an Asatruar, but you do have keep the folkways.  Likewise the idea that works of both men and women is of value held appeal.  And the very intense affection for freedom struck a resonant chord.  However, as a moral framework, Asatru did nothing for me.  But, as the author pointed out, it's the morality of a pirate culture.  These were not pacifistic farmers living in harmony tilling the soil.  This is a recreated version of the faith of the Vikings, and the Vikings were not known as easy neighbors. There appears to be no idea that a human is of value because he is a human.  Anything that improves the lot of the (family, clan, tribe, country, the unit gets bigger as populations grow) is good, anything that harms that is evil.  Rape, murder, theft, those are all fine and dandy, as long as not done to members of your group, meanwhile oath breaking is considered just as bad as killing a member of your group.  And, while I'm a massive fan of keeping your pledges, I'm also a fan of the idea that humans are of value, and harming outsiders for personal gain is not appropriate.       

In effect Asatru is a religion where the actions of the Nazis can be seen as honorable.  They were, after all, out conquering their neighbors to improve the lot of their own (narrowly defined) group.  The Jews, gays, politicals, mental and physical defectives were all defined as "others."  They weren't part of the master race.  Killing them and confiscating their goods to enrich the race is, by Asatru thinking, a moral good.  The great irony here being that the Asatruars were also rounded up, classified as politicals, and killed by the Nazis.  Now, the author points out that she personally considers fascism evil, but she also points out that's her own personal interpretation of their morality, and that others disagree.  Obviously, I may be missing some of the subtleties of the religion, and I'm going off of just the one book here, but I'm not seeing anything besides a sense of personal disgust that would condemn the Nazis or any other group before or since that decided to destroy the "other" to enrich itself.

At the same time, there is an elegant and unapologetic simplicity to the morality of Asatru.  The rules are exceptionally easy to follow.  There is no existential angst, no worries as to the nature of salvation or forgiveness.  Sin is a matter of breaking the law, and the laws are few and far between.  Live well, enrich you and yours, keep your word, die fighting your enemies, and you too shall dwell in the halls of your gods, feasting and practicing combat until the end times come and you once again pick up your sword and fight for your kind. 

All in all, if you really are a beginner, I'd suggest heading over to Wikipedia and searching Asatru.  Not only will you get about the same amount of information (about 20k words) but the Wiki article is easier to understand and better organized.  Then, once you've read that, go get Asatru For Beginners to start filling in the holes and rounding out the picture.

Indie Book Review: Death Has A Name

Death Has a Name by Jerry Hannel is a lovely bit paranormal mystery.  Several other reviewers of this book claimed they couldn't put it down, and while that wasn't literally true for me, it was as close to being true as I ever get with a book.  

So, what is so wonderful about this little gem?  Brodie Wade. 

There's a term from fan fiction that has crept into the world of original fiction: Mary Sue (or if male, Gary Stu).  A Mary Sue is a character that can do anything.  She's got amazing powers, gorgeous looks, a winning personality, there's no problem she can't solve, and she's probably kind to animals as well.  She's just perfect.  And, she's annoying as hell.  Unfortunately she has a tendency to show up a lot in fantasy because it's just too easy to write a story where Mary Sue has the magical power that just saves the day.  Now, in good storytelling, if a character has some sort of great power, it also has to have some sort of flaws or weaknesses.  Brodie is an example of good storytelling.

He is described as a psychic.  The Truth (not an Obi Wan Kenobi-your-point-of-view-my-point-of-view-truth, but the literal, Platonic Ideal, imagine it standing next to the rest of Neil Gaiman's Endless, TRUTH) is real and wants people to know it.  Brodie, for whatever reason, can see the Truth, and it can see him.  It's very insistent about getting its message across.  To the point of beating it into Brodie when need be, and it defines need as pretty much whenever Brodie doesn't immediately hop to and do whatever it wants.  So, Brodie has great power; he knows what's really going on, even when he doesn't want to.  He knows he's sane.  He knows what he sees is real.  But he's jumpy, nervous, and constantly on the edge of institutionalization.  Every day of his life is a struggle to hold onto a thin veneer of normal.  And, of course, as a result of this, he doesn't exactly have a booming social life. 

Characters like that make me especially happy.  When I see real world set paranormal/fantasy I want to see characters struggling with the fact that the rest of the world doesn't believe in what they see.  I want to see a cost to great power.  Brodie is a broken mess of a man, but he's a very appealing mess.  The kind of character that encourages a desire to take him home, clean him up, and try to protect him from the big, bad world.  If Hannel had marketed this to the YA world, Brodie would have a huge collection of devoted teen girls swooning over him.  

Okay, before I get too far into fan-girl-mad-crush squeeing, let me get back to being a critical reviewer.  In addition to Brodie, is Detective Phil Dawson.  Brodie uses his skills to freelance investigate cold cases.  Detective Phil is actually a member of the LAPD.  We don't get a lot of backstory, (Actually, we get no backstory on this.) but somehow these two are friends.  Maybe they worked a case together and just clicked.  Maybe Phil also finds Brodie's mess of a life appealing.  For whatever reason, Phil actually likes Brodie; believes, as much as he can, in Brodie's talents; and supports him.  Phil is the guy Brodie calls when he's missing his cat and jonesing for a cigarette to deal with the stress.  (Brodie is very attached to his cat.  If he's got a love of his life, it's the cat.  Hear that sound? It's a thousand teen girls sighing.) 

Brodie wakes up in the middle of the night, his cat is covered in blood, and the Truth wants him to investigate a murder.  The next morning, Phil gets a call: a horrible murder has just happened.    And thus the plot is set in motion, because, of course, those cases are one in the same.       

The pacing is quick, hence the 'couldn't put it down' reviews, and the dialog is sharp.  Without dialog tags you can tell Phil from Brodie.  The plot is interesting, but not overwhelmingly complex, which also aids in keeping the pacing quick.  Though this isn't the greatest comparison, not the least because they spend no time in a lab, this book reads a lot like an episode of CSI.  There's not a ton of background on the characters, the case is the primary motive aspect of the plot, and the writing is tight. 

The lack of background is my main quibble with this story. I would have liked to have seen a deeper backstory.  I would have liked to know why Phil believes in Brodie.  I would have liked more information about The Apprentice (the bad guy), Contego Veritas (the mysterious organization protecting the world from Death), how the whole Death thing worked (Death is trapped in a box kept safe by Contego Veritas, and trying to get The Apprentice to get him out.)  You've probably seen someone say a book is only as good as its villain?  Well, that's not necessarily true.  This is a good book, but the villain is very sketchy.  An extra fifty pages spent following him, showing us how he got to where he was, what was motivating him, how he was finding his victims, all would have been welcome.  More than welcome, that would have made this very good book a great one.

Brodie is the only character we get any real backstory on.  I would have liked to know more about him as well, but I think the level we got was appropriate.  There are mysteries left to solve and quirks left to discover for later novels. 

My other quibble with the book was the ending seemed rushed.  Phil's storyline gets dropped.  We leave him hanging, having to prove his case is right under penalty of losing his job.  The reader knows he's correct, but we never find out if he's able to convince his supervisor he was right, soon enough to not get fired.  I understand why it was left out, after all, we already know how the story ended, but a bit of extra wrap up on him would have been nice.  Likewise Brodie's storyline also felt a little rushed.  Not bad, but very quick.  All the plot lines converged in a matter of minutes (literally, in story time the climax takes maybe fifteen minutes tops) into the climax of the story. 

All in all Death Has a Name made me very happy.  I'll call it an extremely well recommended four star.  Brodie will be back soon, and I'm looking forward to it.

Indie Book Review: The Summoner

Spoiler alert: read at your own risk!

So, what do stories and chocolate have in common?  They both come in different levels of darkness.  Some days you want light creamy white chocolate, sweet with just the scent of chocolate.  Some days you want black, bitter, barely sweet with hints of the land it grew in 80% cocoa chocolate.  The Summoner is a dark story.  This is not a light, cute, or fun little read, but when you're in the mood for a dark story, it satisfies like Dagoba Eclipse (87% cocoa) chocolate.  

For a little self revelation here, Paranormal Thriller is not my first choice genre.  Not that I don't like it, but I don't seek it out either.  But if it's yours, The Summoner is an excellent example and well worth the reading.

This is the first book in a series, and as such the story arc gets the characters together and gives them a reason to stay together.  In a weaker writer's hand this becomes the main focus of the story, and the plot suffers for it.  This is not true of the Summoner, the plot, although neatly accomplishing this goal, is not overpowered by it.  Also, unlike other several other ensemble stories, where it seems like the only reason the group could possibly stay together or function is the author wants it that way, these characters actually work together well.   

And who are these characters?  Dominic is the leading man.  He's working diplomatic security for the American Embassy in Harare Zimbabwe, and watching his career fizzle like the last ember of a campfire with a wet towel tossed on it.  As he puts it, his moral compass and the moral compass of his bosses do not agree on what direction north is.  He values everyone's life.  They'd prefer he did his job, making sure the (American) people around him are safe, ignoring whatever chaos and danger might be around unless it threatens them. 

Then a friend of the American Ambassador, a man called William Addison, goes missing.  He and his girlfriend visit a religious ceremony in the bush.  William walks into the center of the ceremony and vanishes.  Because he's a friend of the Ambassador there will be an attempt to find him.  Dominic gets called in to investigate (Why him specifically is a little fuzzy.  We're left with the impression that he was available.  He wasn't a cop or missing persons investigator in his pre-security life, and most of his current investigations are in visa fraud.)  But this is Zimbabwe, so it's not like he can just go off and John Wayne it.  The Zimbabwean government wants him to have someone from the Government with him at all times. 

Enter Nya.  We don't ever find out what specifically she does for the government, but we do know that investigating missing Americans isn't part of her usual tasks.  She's reserved, mistrustful of the Americans, and has a vaguely sinister air about her.  After all, she works for the Zimbabwean government, not an entity known for its justice, competence, or its dedication to providing the best possible outcomes for anyone who isn't the government.   She's wary of Dominic, unsure if he's a colonial lay about, out to abuse the locals, or an ineffectual do-gooder.  He's wary of her, seeing a woman willing to work for Mugabe's thugs. 

Between them: the professor.  Victor is a religious phenomenologist.  He studies how people understand the things that happen in relation to religious experience.  He's the guy who wants to know how people react to a bleeding statue of the Virgin Mary, not the guy who tries to figure out why it's bleeding.  He's also my favorite of the characters.  The fact that I've got a degree in religious studies and did some course work on phenomenology may have something to do with this.  The fact that we're not given much background on him, and he's left a mysterious and complexly dark character is also part of the attraction.

And so the story begins, these three are going to find William and learn to trust each other.  Of course, it's not a simple disappearance.  Like the X-files at it's best, this is dark, creepy, and by the end you don't know if magic actually happened or not. Both Scully and Mulder could have walked away from this case satisfied that their own personal truths had been vindicated. 

The setting is Harare, Zimbabwe, and the surrounding suburbs and bush.  Before reading this story what I knew about Zimbabwe could be summed up like this: it was doing its best to make North Korea look competently governed.  After finishing The Summoner, I want to get more books on Zimbabwe and it's religions to learn more about it.  Reading The Summoner I feel like I was there, that for a little while at least, I got to spend some time in a beautiful country ruined by ugly men.  The setting also works as a metaphor for the religious ceremony at the heart of this case.  The dark Juju ritual is exotic and terrifying.  It, like Zimbabwe, is far outside the experience of most westerners, and tinged with a vague sense of discomforting awfulness.    

I liked the romance, but it's a men's romance.  There's basically only one spot in the story where a bit of lovin' fits in, and it's right there.  I don't know if it's common enough to be a cliché, but I've certainly seen it in a lot of stories written by men.  The hero gets beaten to a pulp.  The heroine patches him up.  They've got a few hours until it's time to move onto whatever the next step it.  Sex ensues.  The romance makes sense and is in character for the characters, but as soon as you see Nya going for the first aid equipment, you know what's coming.  What I did find especially refreshing (though this might be a side effect of being written by a man) is that Dominic and Nya certainly like each other, and are tentatively moving toward something solid and permanent, but they don't start spouting declarations of undying love.  Characters that fall in love in three days turn me off.  Characters that value each other and are willing to fight for each other in that short of a time make me very happy.  

I have one fine quibble with The Summoner, on several occasions the plot is forward by the characters doing stupid things.  They have a tendency to wander off and investigate on their own, without telling the others what they're up to.  Now, I get these aren't bosom buddies who have long ties to each other, but still, people are getting killed, the bad guys are really bad, with torture and fates literally worse than death on the menu, and still, keeping each other in the loop is haphazard at best. 

In storytelling there is the meta story, the story as built by the author.  Characters acting stupid to keep the plot going is the kind of thing where the meta story starts to show to the reader.  If the characters do a good job of checking in with each other, then the death-defying, last-minute, out-of-the-blue rescue can't happen.  If everyone keeps everyone in the loop, the mystery of what happened to Nya doesn't work, and the reveal of the bad guy happens a bit sooner than Green wants it to. 

Another example of the meta showing is Dominic is a jujitsu master.  He's a match for any two guys, and often more than that.  He was a Marine.  He's got deadly force down.  But, when going to the rescue, when he has the advantage of both range and surprise, instead of pulling out a gun and blowing the bad guy away, he closes in for fist fight. (The careful reader will mention here, but he didn't have a gun to pull out.  He'd lost his gun by that point.  To which I'd reply, why didn't he get a new one or find his old one earlier?  He had time and opportunity to do both between losing his gun and getting into the position where he could have shot.  He doesn't have a gun because the author wants it that way.)  Victor, also in perfect sniper position, opts for creeping in unarmed, and taking his chances instead of shooting the N'ganga (The Summoner, the alpha bad guy) from afar.  Now, a few clean bullets don't make for good storytelling.  They don't ratchet up the drama.  They don't allow for more last minute saves and tension filled fights where Green gets to show us how good he is at writing combat (and he is good at it.)  They do however, make a whole lot of sense if you believe the set up, that Nya is being horribly tortured, her skin ripped off a few inches at a time, and that every minute they delay is another minute in excruciating pain for her.  If you believe in that set up, and supposedly those characters do, they should be doing everything they can to move as fast as possible to get her out of there.

This is not a perky little read.  There is no happily ever after here, especially not for William.  The mystery of what happened to him is solved, but everyone is left with scars, physical and or mental, from this case.  I found the ending is all the more satisfying for it's reality.  Dark, gritty, stories where horrible things happen and then the main characters skip off into the sunset are like walking in too small shoes to me: irritating and painful.  While I'm sure Dominic and Victor will be back, I'm less certain about Nya.  She may be too broken to have much of a role in the coming stories.  Or not.  We're left with some hope, but no certainty with her.  The one thing I do know with certainty, when Dominic Gray II comes out, I'll be there to read it.