• More Caitlín R. Kiernan

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    This next set of Kiernan‘s books is somewhat different from the previous set. Three of them are constructed as though they were written by their in-universe characters (unreliable narrators all) while the last is a short-story compilation in graphic novel form.

    The Red Tree is the literary equivalent of a ‘found footage’ movie. It is also brilliant. Beyond brilliant. Written in the form of a 1st-person diary as told from the point of view of a not particularly successful author on a summer retreat, it ends up eminently realistic and shockingly engrossing.

    The follow-up to the above is The Drowning Girl. It’s quite a bit more fantastical and abstract than The Red Tree is as a result of being written from the perspective of a schizophrenic. It also has an extremely nonlinear narrative which can end up somewhat confusing at times. It’s still a remarkably intriguing read, just not exactly immersive and better appreciated as a fictional work than a potential reality.

    Slightly changing gears from the previous two books, Blood Oranges‘ in-universe author’s lack of reliability does not come from mental distortions. Rather, it comes from her being a junky and prone to lies. Thematically speaking this is quite a bit different from the previous novels in that it’s conventional cut-and-dry urban fantasy rather than theoretical urban fantasy (i.e. fantasy that may just all be hallucinations/delusions instead of ‘real’). Presumably this is why it was written under the name of Kathleen Tierney… then again it says right on the cover: “Caitlín R. Kiernan Writing as“. So… who knows what the point of using a secondary name was. Anyway, it’s fairly amusing in a cynical fashion and quite entertaining. Somewhat busy though with lots of different supernaturals all crammed in together.

    Finally we come to Alabaster: Wolves. This is a graphic novel compilation of short stories focused on the albino girl who appears in Threshold. Curiously, her personality seems quite a bit different here than it does there. Different bad rather than different good; the conversations are atrocious. The stories also seem especially simplistic and are frankly not particularly enjoyable in any respect. On the bright side, this contains some fairly fantastic pieces of full-page artwork.

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  • Caitlín R. Kiernan

    Posted on by Offkorn Comment

    The five books I’m going to cover here start at the horror end of the spectrum and eventually metamorphosize into urban fantasy that leans heavily on the fantasy. They remind me of Justine Musk‘s two BloodAngel novels.

    Silk kicks things off with an intriguing story split among several viewpoints. The fantasy aspects are at their most subdued here, mostly taking the form of general horror and alternate perceptions. It’s nicely self-contained and simply works… for the most part. Having Niki spontaneously turn bisexual is a fairly abrupt plot development when you consider the reason she washed up in Birmingham in the first place.

    Threshold features both a different set of characters and a different set of antagonistic mythology, the latter of which will only appear in the later novels once in passing. Here the balance starts to shift away from horror and into more conventional urban fantasy. The antagonists have much more clearly physical manifestations and while there is still a bit of twisting perception, what occurs happens in a relatively straight-forward manner. The ending is unfortunate on a great many levels and sets a nasty precedent that will be revisited in Daughter of Hounds.

    Low Red Moon I feel is the best out of the five, striking the cleanest balance between reality and misconception with a nicely paced story filled with intriguing developments. It features different versions of the same characters from Threshold and yet another change of antagonistic forces.

    Murder of Angels is my least favorite of this bunch. It’s very, very close to being almost pure fantasy and picks up a decade or so after the ending of Silk with the same characters (along with a transplant from Low Red Moon). This takes what occurred in Silk and turns it into a half-bit imitation of grand fantasy. It’s fairly terrible all-around and painfully contrived (turning Daria into a pseudo-bisexual, Scarborough making his re-appearance, everything about the Dragon and the Weaver, etc.).

    Finally we come to Daughter of Hounds, which picks up years after Low Red Moon and revisits the horrid contrivance that ended Threshold; the ability to rewind time. There are few, very few plot devices cheaper than waving away everything that’s happened and simply pretending it didn’t. Time-fiddling aside, this novel takes a step back from the heavy-fantasy abyss of Murder of Angels to be slightly more grounded in the ‘real world’. It still has a significant focus on fantasy lands and wizards/witches, but presents them in a much less oversaturating fashion.

    All told, I’m rather glad I decided to check out Kiernan’s work. For the longest time I thought that I wouldn’t come across anything else like BloodAngel and these scratched that itch nicely.

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  • The Red Plague Affair, Bleeding Out, & Wages: Future Tales of a Hired Gun

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    The second book in the Bannon and Claire series takes place several years after the first and has a lesser focus on sorcery. It’s a bit more investigative and much more reactionary, with the protagonists being less proactive and instead forced to adapt to unexpected situations.

    Bleeding Out caps off Jes Battis‘ OSI series (according to the foreword anyway). It starts out pretty standard for the series, gets brilliantly abstract in the eighth chapter… and then peters out into a Contact-style ending that’s just aggravating on every level.

    Zack Parsons’ Wages: Future Tales of a Hired Gun novella is a dystopian look into a possible future through the eyes of a mercenary. It is wonderfully, darkly comedic in all the ways things can and do go horribly, horribly wrong. If you like any of his earlier work, from Liminal States to the extensive number of politically-themed articles written for Something Awful, then you cannot miss this.

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  • Bronze Gods, Graveyard Child, & Kat Redding

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    A. A. Aguirre’s (Ann and Andres Aguirre’s) Bronze Gods is a little off in some ways while being immensely interesting in others. Its first issue is… structural I guess. There’s this weird periodic absence of descriptive text, as if whole paragraphs of background flavor have been spontaneously excised with little regard to the holes left behind. The other complication is that the protagonists feel as though they’re being railroaded into an unnaturally deep relationship, which ends up particularly hard to ignore considering this has been written by a husband/wife team. Those two problems aside the book is a fairly engrossing window into a new setting.

    The fifth book in M.L.N. Hanover’s (Daniel Abraham’s) Black Sun’s Daughter series, Graveyard Child, is just as entertainingly unique as the previous four. It just has a certain flavor, a dash of the bizarre depicted in a remarkably believable manner that ends up working on every level. That all the previous plot points have been tied together into a basically complete whole here is just icing on the cake.

    E. S. Moore‘s Kat Redding series (To Walk the Night, Tainted Night, Tainted Blood, & Blessed By A Demon’s Mark) is rather severely flawed. The first book is not bad, merely average vampire-centered urban fantasy. Even so it has some annoyances in its penchant for branding (Honda DN-01) and the overuse of “I” coupled with a staccato sentence structure; “I did this. Then I did that. All the while I was thinking about what I would do when I got to where I meant to go.“. Just distracting. The second and third books however… those are actively unpleasant to read.

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  • Of Shadow Born, Blood Before Sunrise, & Crave the Darkness

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    Of Shadow Born is Dianne Sylvan‘s fourth Shadow World novel. Despite how overpowered its protagonists are, and despite the introduction of gods, elves, and grand designs in this particular entry, I enjoy this series quite a bit. There’s just something remarkably relatable about its characters’ personalities.

    Amanda Bonilla‘s second Shaede Assassin novel, Blood Before Sunrise, unfortunately does not share this trait. The opposite actually. Most of the character personalities in here are flat-out awful, the centerpiece being the protagonist herself. Not only is she completely lacking any sort of common sense or reasoning ability (which is particularly hard to swallow considering she’s supposed to be a century-old assassin), her combat abilities have spontaneously regressed to the point where she’s nearly helpless without assistance.

    Crave the Darkness is the follow-up to Blood Before Sunrise, which I only ended up reading since I ordered them both at the same time. In a way this turned out to be a beneficial development, as this third book is notably better. Not quite good mind you, as there are still lots of character-personality issues, but decent enough that I don’t regret ordering/reading it. That said… I don’t think I’ll be following this series any further. While Darian’s competence issues have mostly been cleared up here and Raif is perfectly fine, neither of the two love interests is particularly likeable (one is narcissistic and manipulative while the other is extremely over-protective) and it doesn’t seem as though their parts are going to shrink any time soon.

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  • Divergent, Silver Shark, & The Damnation Affair

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    The first two books in Veronica Roth‘s Divergent series (Divergent & Insurgent) are an interesting window into an attempted utopian community that ends up dystopian in the extreme. You can clearly see both the good intentions behind the society’s structure as well as all of the myriad ways that they can (and do) get corrupted and ultimately fail. So; so far so good. Hopefully the areas outside the city limits (which the third book will presumably focus on to some extent) will end up just as believable as the city itself.

    Silver Shark is a short novella by Ilona Andrews set in the Kinsmen universe. As with Silent Blade this story has a wonderfully detailed background setting that you really wish you could spend more time in. Where that lack of time really hurts though is in the romance arc, which ends up feeling incredibly contrived/rushed.

    Lilith Saintcrow’s The Damnation Affair supposedly takes place in the Bannon and Clare universe. To me, it did not feel even the slightest bit attached to that series… and it’s not just the genre switch from Steampunk to Western either; the supernatural bits seemed to work completely differently. Putting that aside, I didn’t like this story for two reasons. The first is that it turns out I strongly, strongly dislike ‘cowboy talk’ while the second is that the female protagonist is extraordinarily strong-headed while lacking any real power or skill to back it up. While not exactly helpless, against what this book throws at her she may as well be.

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  • Frost Burned, Touch of the Demon, & The Infernal Devices

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    Frost Burned is the seventh novel in Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series. It feels phoned-in. Lifeless. Artificial. Once Mercy and Adam finally got together the series probably should have either ended or switched focus onto different characters (though the latter would be rather difficult given the series’ title). As it is, there doesn’t seem to be anything of particular interest left to explore here that can’t be done in the Alpha and Omega series.

    Diana Roland‘s Kara Gillian series has never been one of my favorites. It was always more of a last-resort time-sink than something I looked forward to reading. That said I didn’t really dislike it either… until Touch of the Demon. The first segment is perfectly fine for the most part, but following the sigil carving scene (a high point in a number of ways) the dialog and most of the character interactions go right downhill and into the gutter.

    The Infernal Devices is a steampunkish trilogy (Clockwork Angel, Clockwork Prince, & Clockwork Princess) set in Cassandra Clare‘s Mortal Instruments universe, many years before that series takes place. There are quite a number of similarities between the two. In some cases that could be seen as a negative, but in this instance at least the similarities are welcome (the main one that isn’t is the tendency for those in power to be corrupt/treasonous). In any case, if you liked The Mortal Instruments you’ll almost certainly like this.

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  • Skyrim Modding – Dynamic Loot

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    I find myself in a curious predicament. Basically, I find myself in the role of the “idea guy”. I have what seems like a rock-solid idea, yet am not able to personally implement it… it’s a somewhat distressing situation.

    The issue is this:

    Normally if I get a modding idea I simply fire up the relevant modding utility and make it. In this particular instance though I seem to be totally disinclined to learn how Skyrim’s scripting language differs from Oblivion’s (never even mind the fact that I haven’t dealt with Oblivion in what feels like decades). Even if I were interested in figuring it out, it would require using a Toolset and I pathologically avoid Bethesda-made Toolsets because they tend to be clunky messes for the most part. So I’m doubly stuck and it’s eating at me something fierce.

    What’s the idea? The idea is simplicity itself:

    Quite some time ago someone made a Dynamic Loot Mod for Skyrim that created dynamically enchanted weapons/armor on enemies. They did this by making a ton of pre-enchanted ‘blueprints’. That method is incredibly inefficient and introduces all sorts of continuity issues if used with any sort of weapon/armor rebalancing Mod. What I want to do is use a method similar to that used over in the Dynamic Weapon Speed Mod, switching out the ‘change the speed’ bit for ‘add enchantment x’. That way anytime the base unenchanted version of an item is spawned it would get dynamically enchanted (all the default generically enchanted weapons would be replaced by the unenchanted version through TES5Edit’s “Change FormID” functionality).

    This should not require much effort, which raises the question of why hasn’t it been done yet (though perhaps it has, as I’ve only checked Google and Nexus). Can you not add enchantments to weapons via quest or item-based scripts? The default enchanter obviously uses a script to add them and the Enchantment Shouts Mod appears to add enchantments on the fly… so that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    Maybe it’ll eventually bug me enough that I’ll actually investigate some day. It’s more likely I’ll just fix the bugs in the existing Dynamic Loot Mod (such as its Orcish Shield templates using the Draugr Boots item values) and then forget about it though, as Skyrim angers me to the point that I have little desire to actually play it.

    —————-
    UPDATE
    —————-

    So yeah, I made that patch for Dynamic Loot after all. Not going to bother uploading it to Nexus because I’m lazy.

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  • Prophet of the Dead, Ever After, & Slashback

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    Prophet of the Dead is the fifth and final book in Richard Lee Byers‘ Brotherhood of the Griffon series. It wraps up the Rashemen storyline while leaving Jhesri’s internal combustion issue hanging for a future series. It’s neither bad nor particularly notable.

    Ever After, by Kim Harrison, is the eleventh main entry in the Hollows universe. It has three primary features; finally giving some solid background information on the demons and revealing the exact relationship they had with the ancient elves, trimming the main cast down to manageable levels (though the way it was done in a particularly central case seemed a bit haphazard), and advancing Rachel’s relationship with Trent.

    Rob Thurman‘s most recent Cal Leandros novel, Slashback, curiously does not deal with the other Auphe hybrid at all. It instead focuses on a serial killer related to the brothers’ past. The key events in here are Cal and Niko learning that angels/demons actually do exist (which was shown in the Trickster series), Cal once again losing access to his gating ability, and the introduction of reincarnation. I’m not happy at all about those last two… particularly the reincarnation bit.

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  • Daughter of Smoke & Bone & As the World Dies

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    I read the first two books in Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke & Bone series a few months ago, and put off commenting on them for this long for reasons mentioned in the second part of this post. I remember little about them now besides that the first book was very, very interesting while the second (Days of Blood & Starlight) felt like it got lost within its own mythology. The connection to the ‘real world’ was almost entirely severed and it shifts from being Urban Fantasy to almost pure Fantasy. It’s not a shift I was particularly fond of. The way it concluded though indicates that the third book might have more of a mix to it.

    The As the World Dies trilogy is a set of zombie novels by Rhiannon Frater (The First Days, Fighting to Survive, Siege) whose first installment starts out fantastic. As things progress however and the main characters reach ‘The Fort’ it starts to fall apart. Maybe it was the strain of trying to create unique voices for so many different characters, but the end result is a collection of… well… characters. Characterizations rather than people. They feel fabricated, typecast. I ended up having to force myself through the second book and was so put-off by the dialog that I avoided reading the third for almost three months. Just read it now, finally, and… I don’t even know. Mysticism was introduced out of nowhere to completely dominate the story and end things on a… happy, I guess, note. It reminds me of how reincarnation was pulled out of thin air in Nalini Singh’s Guild Hunter series or of what I’ve heard regarding the ending to Lost.

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