I’ll try again later: Empty Space by M. John Harrison

Title: Empty Space
Series: The Kefahuchi Tract #3
Author: M. John Harrison
Published: First published 1 January 2012; my edition published 5 March 2013
Publisher: First edition published by Gollancz. My edition published by Night Shade Books
Genre: science fiction, space opera, literary fiction
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley

This isn’t so much a review as an admission of defeat and a comment on difficult books. After reading Empty Space, I don’t feel able to write any kind of useful review. I couldn’t even tell you if I liked it or not. The question is irrelevant, because I simply don’t get it, and I think I would have to do more reading before I can.

Before requesting a copy of Empty Space, I tweeted Night Shade Books to ask if it was necessary to read the first two books in the series – Light and Nova Swing. I’d read the former, but not the latter. They said this was fine. I respectfully disagree. Loudly and vehemently. From what I’ve read about them, it seems that Light and Nova Swing are fairly disparate. They’re set in the same universe, but tell two very different stories. Empty Space functions as a sequel to both, sharing characters and locations, and tying up loose ends. I re-read Light just before reading Empty Space, and found them to be closely linked. In comparison, I felt alienated from the aspects of the plot related to Nova Swing.

So to better understand this novel, I think I would have to read Nova Swing first. Then I’d have to re-read Empty Space. I had a similar experience with Light – it bewildered me the first time around; after the second reading I liked it more and felt like I’d understood it.

So what can I say about Empty Space in the meantime? Well, I can give you a bit of plot. Anna Kearney, Michael’s fragile ex-wife from Light, becomes a POV character in Empty Space. After Michael’s disappearance from a beach in America, Anna “fucked the first kind of person she found” who happened to be Tim Waterman (he made a brief appearance as her lover in Light). She married him after falling pregnant with their daughter Marnie. When we see Anna, it is almost 30 years after the events of book one and she is an old woman in her 60s or 70s, no longer suffering from anorexia but most definitely deranged, to Marnie’s great concern. She avoids visiting her therapist, takes long walks to snoop around other people’s homes, and does loopy things like swimming naked down a river in the middle of the night.

She also has experiences that sound completely crazy, but given the bizarre nature of the universe in this series, what she sees is most likely real (whatever that means). She keeps turning around to find that her summerhouse is on fire, except that the flames look fake, like something she saw on a tarot card, and after a while they disappear without having damaged anything. Her cat brings in glowing organ-shaped things from the garden. She has weird dreams that are no doubt more than just her subconscious at play. Notably, Anna is still carrying around an external hard drive that Michael gave to her before he disappeared. On it is the work he and Brian Tate were doing – the groundbreaking mathematics that enabled space travel and made the future storylines possible. Anna, however, has forgotten the significance of the hard drive.

Like Light, Empty Space has two narrative strands several centuries in the future. In one, the crew of the space freighter Nova Swing pick up a creepy, illegal alien artefact. In the third narrative, an unnamed policewoman known only as the assistant is investigating two decidedly weird murders. The victims’ bodies are found floating in midair, and as the novel progresses they rise higher while fading slowly into invisibility. The assistant used to work with a detective, but he’s dead now, existing only as a ghost hovering aimlessly in her office. The assistant is heavily gene-tailored and if she was once human she can’t even remember that time. With her heightened senses and abilities, she’s practically a weapon or a machine, and most people prefer to avoid her. Nevertheless, there’s one guy who keeps coming to see her, and somehow walks through walls to do so. His interest in her is based on the fact that someone – or something – keeps asking for her.

This person or thing is ‘Pearl’, an entity common to all three storylines. It is something between a bizarre phenomenon and an ancient, inexplicable artefact. When Pearl appears she/it says “My name is Pearlent and I come from the future”. She appears as a woman in grey, in a state of falling. Her existence remains incomprehensible to me, but as a character or plot device, she connects the storylines and brings a sense of closure to the series.

Empty Space shares many of the characteristics of Light – a tendency to connect characters, stories and timelines with little details; strange people who do strange things; incomprehensible alien technology; an abundance of violence and horror wrapped up in literary sf. There’s still a strong sense of the pain and terror involved in space travel and discovery, but with less optimism. Aliens exist, but you never see them. And of course there are cats, hundreds of cats. The future world feels more like the current one than it did in Light, perhaps because of the policewoman’s plot.

But I do not know what the fucking point is.

I usually knew what was happening in Empty Space but most of the time I didn’t know what to make of it. I could not have given you a reason why a particular scene was in the book or articulated the way in which it fit into the whole. Why does Anna’s cat bring her glowing neon organ-shaped things? Why do three characters dream of a vulva appearing in the wall? Why does the crew of the Nova Swing pick up a ‘mortsafe’ containing the fused, ghostly bodies of a child, his mother, and the nanny who started a weird sexual relationship with him?

I’m not writing a proper review because I can’t offer you any coherent understanding of the book beyond a prolonged plot summary. It might be brilliant. It might be a bunch of random crap cobbled together in a way that gives the illusion of brilliance. It could be anything in between. I can’t really say.

I am not despondent though. I felt the same way about Light when I first read it, but it was way better the second time. I also did myself a huge disservice by not reading Nova Swing. I could have skipped this blog post, but I felt like making a point about difficult books and re-reading. With a few exceptions, I try not to give up on books. Sometimes it’s obvious that a book is very bad or simply something that I won’t be interested in. Otherwise, I give it the benefit of the doubt, and assume I wasn’t ready to read it or that I was in the wrong mood for it. I choose to read books because I think they have something to offer me, and I’m willing to stick it out until the end to see if they deliver.

And in cases like this one, I feel that reading a book once just isn’t enough. That’s just the way some books are, and the fact that they’re difficult doesn’t mean they can’t be rewarding or entertaining. Some things simply take more time and effort than others. I’ll shelve Empty Space for now, and give it a second chance in the future.

Up for Review: Empty Space

After being both baffled and intrigued by Light when I read it several years ago, I’m feeling more than a little bit daunted by the task of reviewing M. John Harrison’s third novel set in that universe. But Empty Space promises the kind of surreal reading experience that seduces me as much as it scares me, so I will venture forth nevertheless. If I have the time, I’ll re-read Light beforehand. I’d like to read book two, Nova Swing,  as well, but I doubt I’ll be able to squeeze it in. At any rate, Night Shade Books has assured me that you don’t need to read either of the first two books to appreciate this one.

 

Empty Space by M. John Harrison (Night Shade Books)

NetGalley blurb:

One of science fiction’s premiere stylists, M. John Harrison has received abundant praise and awards for his wildly imaginative ideas and transcendent prose. Now he returns to the richly complex universe of Light and Nova Swing with a stunning new novel that braids three glittering strands into a tapestry that spans vast reaches of time and space.

In the near future, an elderly English widow is stirred from her mundane existence by surreal omens and visitations. Centuries later, the space freighter Nova Swing takes on an illegal alien artifact as cargo, with consequences beyond reckoning. While on a distant planet, a nameless policewoman tries to bring order to an event zone where ordinary physics do not apply, only to find herself caught up in something even stranger and more sublime. . . .

Empty Space was first published on 19 July 2012 by Gollancz. This new edition will be published on 05 March 2013.

Links:
Goodreads
Night Shade Books
Reviews: The Guardian I The Independent I Locus

About the Author:
Michael John Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945 and now lives in London.
Harrison is stylistically an Imagist and his early work relies heavily on the use of strange juxtapositions characteristic of absurdism. - Goodreads
Blog
Twitter
Goodreads
Wikipedia

Review of The Constantine Affliction by T. Aaron Payton

Title: The Constatine Affliction
Author: T. Aaron Payton (pseudonym for Tim Pratt)
Published: 7 August 2012
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre: science fiction, crime and mystery, steampunk, horror
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 7/10

Victorian England is definitively conservative, with its emphasis on prim and proper behaviour, its sexual restrictions and strict gender boundaries. In The Constantine Affliction, T. Aaron Payton (pseudonym for Tim Pratt) disrupts these delicate sensibilities with the titular Affliction  – an STD that either kills its victims or causes them to change sex, leading to a slew of gender troubles. For men – considered to be the superior sex, of course – it’s a colossal embarrassment because it implies that they’ve been consorting with prostitutes and puts them at the social and existential disadvantage of being female. For women, becoming male offers all sorts of empowering opportunities, but the law quickly to nipped those in the bud by declaring that everyone be treated according to the gender of their birth. You can’t have girls becoming men and inheriting family fortunes, after all. But laws aren’t much help for those who wake up to find that their spouses have changed sex, or for poor Prince Albert who became a woman and was locked in the Tower of London for the treasonous crime of adultery.

Surprisingly, the Affliction hasn’t made Victorian society any more open-minded about gender; if anything, it’s made it worse. However, it has led to the invention and reluctant acceptance of clockwork prostitutes – mechanical women who are lifelike enough to satisfy men’s desires without the risk of infection.

London is still full of real prostitutes however, and the plot kicks off when master criminal Abel Value blackmails Pembroke “Pimm” Halliday into finding out why his whores are being murdered. Pimm enjoys a drunken, leisurely lifestyle financed by his family’s fortune, but he has a brilliant mind and every now and then he sobers up enough to help the police solve crimes.

To help Pimm in his investigation, Value puts him in touch with Adam, a brilliant but very weird and intimidating physician who performs autopsies and specialises in reanimating the dead. Pimm also encounters another curious and lively mind – Ellie Skyler, a young woman enjoying a blossoming career as an investigative journalist by using the gender-neutral byline E. Skye. Ellie is researching the clockwork prostitutes when she stumbles across some very dangerous information about Sir Bertram Oswald, the Queen’s consort. Everything is somehow connected – Abel Value, Oswald, the clockwork prostitutes, the murders, and the Affliction itself. Both Ellie and Pimm find that their paths lead to the grand schemes of a mad scientist and they end up themselves tangled in a bizarre plot that is a wonderful metafictional genre mash-up of science fiction, steampunk, mystery, horror and adventure that includes automatons, zombies, and grotesque monsters, and weird inventions.

It’s a crazy combination, and it’s not all that surprising that the novel started with Pratt joking “ that the perfect commercial novel would be steampunk with zombies”, although the zombies ended up playing a small role and there’s no steam, so Pratt has labelled this “gonzo-historical” fiction. It’s all bit kooky, but The Constantine Affliction is a fun, adventurous read that’s also quite smart.

It has plenty of wonderful gender-play, of course. Ellie plays at being a man everyday in order pursue her passion for journalism, and she goes a step further when she dresses up as a man to infiltrate a clockwork bordello. Getting the right paraphernalia is no problem – a family friend of hers has made a business out of helping men hide the fact that they’ve become women – but it’s a bit harder for Ellie to adjust to the social differences of being a man.

My absolute favourite character is Winifred, Pimm’s stunningly beautiful ‘wife’, who used to be ‘Freddy’, Pimm’s closest friend. Pimm married Freddy to save him/her from society and his family and s/he is one of the few Afflicted to change identities and being new lives. Like Ellie, Winifred defies all notions that women are the weaker sex, but she also puts paid to the belief that gender defines who you are as a person. Like Freddy, Winifred is a bold and hilariously outspoken social butterfly who enjoys shocking people, she still prefers to sleep with women, and she’s a brilliant inventor. She isn’t exactly thrilled about the change, but she’s adapted to it perfectly. She and Ellie are hardly stereotypically bland Victorian women.

Just before reading this novel, I had read two articles – one at Tor, and one at The Mary Sue – about why historical accuracy is not an acceptable excuse for sexism in fiction, particularly fantasy fiction. If we can create other worlds, the writers argued, there’s no good reason to make them misogynist ones. Why is it that writers imagine worlds with dragons and wizards more readily than worlds where men and women are equal? At the same time, writing historical fiction about sexist societies doesn’t mean you can lazily create flat female characters who are just as weak and uninfluential as people believed them to be. “History is not society”, writes Tansy Rayner Roberts at Tor, and your characters should be people, not stereotypes. Having read those articles, I was particularly delighted to come across Ellie and Winifred’s characters, both of whom have to deal with the social restrictions imposed on women, but who are by no means defined or subdued by those restrictions.

What I also liked about The Constantine Affliction was its metafictional touches. We’re told that the first case of the Affliction was a man named Orlando, a direct reference to Virginia Woolf’s novel about a character who changes sex halfway through the story. Pimm has a bit of Sherlock Holmes in him. The best and most memorable reference however, is the character Adam, who turns out to be Frankenstein’s monster. Since the events of Mary Shelley’s novel, Adam has surpassed Victor Frankenstein’s abilities as a scientist, and he lives a strange but contented life in an underground lab, doing autopsies, bringing the dead back to life and running his own biological experiments. He is cold and methodical, but it’s easy to like him. He narrates in the first person (Ellie and Pimm are in third) and the reader is able to understand and care about him as a creature who was rejected by his creator, who distrusts humans because of their cruelty, but is still looking for someone to love and who can love him, no matter how grotesque he is. He ends up falling in love with the brain of a dead prostitute (I’m sorry, that’s a tiny bit of a spoiler, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it).

As much I loved pretty much everything I’ve written about this book so far, I do have reservations. The novel doesn’t really get into the average victim’s experience of the Affliction, and the social rather than legal attitude toward them. We’re forced to simply accept that the society hasn’t changed its beliefs about gender, without really understanding how or why. There is also a tendency to rely a little too much on long passages of exposition and the arch-villain is just far too crazy, taking the whole mad scientist act to extremes. In fact, I felt that the end of the novel got too ludicrous for my liking. It went from being fun to being silly and, finally, sentimental.

However, it could be said that this is just a natural outcome of the pulpy, outlandish stories Payton has poured into those melting pot of a novel. What else did should I have expected, having read about clockwork prostitutes, people changing sex, a drunken detective, a mad scientist with grand schemes to change the world, and an undead man falling in love with the brain of a dead prostitute (yay, I got to say it again!)?

But really, the problems I had with the novel are minor. It’s a great read, clever but light, with lots of adventure, likeable characters of all sorts and plenty of madcap dashes to save the day. Recommended.

Review of Terminal Island by Walter Greatshell

Title: Terminal Island
Author: Walter Greatshell
Published: 1 December 2012
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre: horror
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 4/10

Henry Cadmus returns to one of his childhood homes – the island paradise of Santa Catalina – in order to find his mother. They only communicate about once a month, but Henry got worried after she moved back to the island without telling him and bought an expensive apartment in a gated community he knows she can’t afford. Since then, he’s been unable to contact her. With his wife Ruby and their toddler in tow, the trip to Santa Catalina is part investigation and part family holiday, but also a chance for Henry to face his demons and reconcile with his mother. Ruby – some kind of New Age goth hippy – is determined to document the journey by filming as much of it as she can.

Henry’s memories of the island are mostly violent and disturbing – he recalls seeing a jackal-headed woman on a balcony, dripping blood; being chased by a terrifying ‘butcher’; and hearing a gruesome story about a crazed bison stampeding through a school yard. When he returns, Henry continues to experience such monstrosities, and he’s concerned that something terrible might have happened to his mother. He gets increasingly anxious when he can’t find any way into her apartment complex and no one on the island is willing to help him.

The narrative is divided into alternating parts – Henry’s present-day struggle, and the account of his childhood on the island, which still baffles and unnerves him. The island is so beautiful that it’s hard to imagine anything sinister could be going on there, and yet it seems to be host to unspeakable horrors. As Henry slowly untangles the mysteries of his past and present, he eventually realises that he’s trapped within them.

 

I generally like all these sorts of things in horror stories – an adult confronting a traumatic childhood, creepy imagery, weird communities hiding terrible secrets – but Terminal Island was disappointing. It started out well enough, but even then things bothered me. Henry is a war veteran, but thanks to a car accident, he lost ten years of his memory and remembers nothing about the war except a few scraps. While I love the idea that he’s left with his childhood memories and nothing in between to cushion them, the war veteran thing felt a bit pointless.

Henry’s wife Ruby wants to document the whole story, but her reasons for doing so are vague and I couldn’t understand why Henry tolerated her whipping out the camera every time he seemed to be having an emotional moment or looking back on his past. Yes, she’s his wife, but she clearly intends to show this to people and the whole idea is so invasive.

I also don’t quite understand Henry’s issues with his mother. When we see her in the childhood narrative, she’s perfectly ordinary. A bit daffy and insecure perhaps, but she’s a struggling single mother who tends to trust people too easily, so it’s easy to forgive her flaws. She’s also willing to give up a good job and leave the island when Henry becomes so fearful of his schoolmates that he won’t leave the house. The blurb describes Henry’s mother as “the one he fears most”, and he’s clearly anxious about seeing again, but we don’t see this fearful mother on the page. All we get are Henry’s anxieties, which suggest that he doesn’t fear his mother so much as the guilt and memories she evokes. And that’s rather unfair, given what she did for him.

Anyway, I was willing to just accept this all for the sake of the story, which, as I said, is interesting enough at the start. There is plenty of intrigue, in both the present and past narratives – lots of gory sightings, moments of shocking cruelty, creepy rumours about animal sacrifice, things that don’t make sense. Henry and Ruby are particularly baffled by his mother’s apartment complex, Shady Isles. It’s an upmarket gated community supposedly designed to give residents total privacy, but Henry and Ruby can’t find any way to get in. No one is manning the gate. They can’t contact anyone inside to open the gate. Entry is possible by appointment, but they can’t make an appointment. Not surprisingly, Henry starts to come up with sinister theories about what the islanders might be doing to the vulnerable residents of Shady Isles.

He keeps digging and uncovers part of the conspiracy, but that turns out to be only a fraction of the truth. When the rest is eventually revealed, a single character delivers it in one giant chunk of exposition so clunky that I wondered if it was a ruse. But it’s not, and the novel gets seriously chaotic from then onwards. It makes sense in a hazy kind of way, but what I didn’t like is that all kinds of insanity suddenly descend on you, so it’s like you’re carried away on a tide blood, pain, perversion and batshit-craziness. I’ve experienced this kind of thing in horror before, so some fans of the genre might like it, but to me it feels like overkill, with the author screaming as he hurls buckets of gore around, pausing only for more passages of exposition.

It lacks… style. All the weird things Henry has seen on the island turn out not to have much significance beyond being part of the general craziness. If you were wondering, for example, why he saw a jackal-headed woman or a hovering bison head in the bushes, the answer is simply that the island and its residents are FUCKED UP, and not because they were there for some specific purpose.

I don’t know if I need to add this, but none of that scared me in the slightest. It just grossed me out, and for me that’s never enough when it comes to horror. I’d also hoped for something better from Walter Greatshell, since his sf novel Enormity was one of my favourite reads this year. Perhaps I’ll just try and forget about this one and hope that his earlier novel, Xombies (2004), is better.

 

Buy a copy at The Book Depository

Up for Review: Earth Thirst

What is it with 8 January? So far I have five review copies of books that will be published on that day, and I’ve now banned myself from requesting any others (unless I really, really want them), because I’m already going to have to pull a masterful feat of organisation to get all these reviewed in time.

It’s been a while since I read anything about vampires, but I need a vampire book for a reading challenge, so Earth Thirst will most likely be one of the first 8 January novels that I read. It’ll be my first piece of fiction by Mark Teppo, although I already known his name from the Foreworld Saga.

Earth Thirst by Mark Teppo (Night Shade Books)

Marketing copy from NetGalley:

The Earth is dying. Humanity–over-breeding, over-consuming—is destroying the very planet they call home. Multinational corporations despoil the environment, market genetically modified crops to control the food supply, and use their wealth and influence and private armies to crush anything, and anyone, that gets in the way of their profits. Nothing human can stop them.

But something unhuman might.

Once they did not fear the sun. Once they could breathe the air and sleep where they chose. But now they can rest only within the uncontaminated soil of Mother Earth—and the time has come for them to fight back against the ruthless corporations that threaten their immortal existence.

They are the last guardians of paradise, more than human but less than angels. They call themselves the Arcadians.

We know them as vampires. . .

Earth Thirst will be published on 8 January by Night Shade Books. It is the first novel in a series known as The Arcadian Conflict.

Links:
Add it on Goodreads
Buy it at The Book Depository

About the author:
Mark Teppo suffers from a mild case of bibliomania, which serves him well in his on-going pursuit of a writing career. Fascinated with the mystical and the extra-ordinary, he channels this enthusiasm into fictional explorations of magic realism, urban fantasy, and surreal experimentation. Recently, he’s been building franchises and writing historical fiction. – from the author’s website
Website
Twitter
List of works on Goodreads

 

Review of Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht

Title: Of Blood and Honey
Series: The Fey and the Fallen #1
Author: Stina Leicht
Published: 1 Febryary 2011
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre: urban fantasy, historical
Source: own copy
Rating: 6/10

Of Blood and Honey opens in the midst of The Troubles in Derry, Northern Ireland, on 17 November 1971. The Catholics are fighting the Protestants, and the Irish are fighting the English. Sixteen-year-old Liam Kelly is in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets beaten, arrested, and jailed by British soldiers for rioting. His imprisonment marks the beginning of a violent and tragic personal struggle that is half mythical and half political. In jail (the first of two equally unfair imprisonments), Liam has some inexplicable experiences – when he’s angry or threatened, he feels an electric prickling under his skin that only stops when he touches iron; he sees a massive Irish Wolfhound watching him from behind the prison fence; and when he’s violently attacked by one of the guards, he becomes a monster that wreaks gory vengeance on his attacker.

Liam doesn’t understand any of this, because he was never told that his father, Bran, was a púca, one of the Fey, also known as the Fianna – a creature from Irish folklore. Bran has never spoken to Liam, although he sometimes watches over him or meets briefly with Liam’s mother, Kathleen. He never spends much time in the human world, as he’s one of the commanders in an otherworldly war between the Fey and the Fallen Angels.

Half human, half fey, Liam has inherited some supernatural traits from his father – an aversion to iron, heightened senses, and the ability to shift into a powerful, terrifying hound. He experiences the hound as a separate being inside himself, a monstrous other half that tries to take over when Liam is angry or threatened. For a long time he tries to keep the beast at bay, but it becomes harder as he grows older and his life becomes more dangerous, making it tempting for him to just give in to violence.

After his second stint in jail, Liam joins the IRA, less for political reasons than as a means of making a life for himself and his sweetheart, Mary Kate. Sadly, both the IRA and Liam’s Fey blood endanger them, and seem to make a happy life impossible.

I was surprised to find that personal drama and political struggle were major subjects of the novel. After all, the series is entitled “The Fey and the Fallen”, and the blurb suggests that this centuries-old battle is a major part of the story. In fact, the supernatural war is mostly relegated to the background. We hear about it mostly during Bran’s brief appearances, and through the figure of Father Joe Murray. Father Murray, a kind and loyal family friend, is also a member of a secret Catholic order devoted to fighting a divine war against the Fallen. For years he’s been watching Liam closely, concerned that he might be evil.

It’s only towards the end of the novel that the personal, the political and the larger supernatural aspects of the plot are properly merged. One reason it takes so long is that Liam spends most of the story knowing nothing about his father. He notices that people who do him harm tend to come to bad ends but doesn’t understand how or why. He struggles blindly with the monster inside him, and slowly starts to believe that he must be demonic, cursed. Of course Liam’s mother knows the truth, as does Father Murray, but they hide it from Liam in a bid to protect him.

I really hate it when characters do this. It always turns out to have been a bad idea despite the liars’ good intentions, and the author farms the situation for drama. In this case, I also think the lie is perpetuated for far too long. The reader knows about Liam’s heritage from the very beginning, but you’re made to wait so long for him to be told about it that the deception becomes frustrating.

And while we’re on the subject of misinformation, I found it slightly implausible that the Catholic order fighting the Fallen doesn’t understand that there’s a difference between the Fey and the Fallen, and that they’re actually enemies. For as long as it’s existed, this order has been killing the Fey, assuming that they’re evil fallen angels too. Apparently none of the Catholics ever spoke to the Fey, and none of the Fey bothered correcting the mistake. All it takes is one conversation with Bran for Father Murray to learn the truth, although his superiors later dismiss the idea as a fairy tale. Their error is chalked up to rigid tradition and blind belief in the Bible, which makes no mention of the Fey. Nevertheless, Father Murray learns the truth so quickly and easily that it seemed odd that no one from the order had learned this before.

Flaws aside, this isn’t a bad book.  It’s a strong, well-written character drama about a man dealing with the particularly dire problems of coming of age in a time and place fraught with political conflict. This is not to say that the fantasy element feels slapped on – Liam’s Fey heritage is perfectly entwined with the other aspects of his life. The monster inside him is an apt response to the injustices he suffers – an understandable urge to retaliate with brutality and kill those who wronged him. His internal battle with it is also a moral debate – is it acceptable for him to submit to the monster? Even if his victims deserve what they get, what kind of person – or thing – does that make him? Is it possible for him to be a good person with the monster inside him? Mary Kate, Liam’s girlfriend and eventual wife, is often at the heart of these questions as he contemplates making a life with her.

Of Blood and Honey certainly doesn’t feel like your average urban fantasy novel. It’s quieter, darker and more serious, with bursts of brutality. The historical setting is something new for me, although according to Calico Reaction’s review (which in turn references the reviews of Martin McGrath, and Liz Bourke at Strange Horizons), ignorance of the conflict allows you to enjoy the novel at bit more, as the historical inaccuracies can drive you nuts. Skimming over some of the basics though, I felt that a better historical background might have given me a better understanding of the way Leicht combines mythology and politics. It would be a good idea to educate myself then, before reading the sequel, And Blue Skies from Pain. It looks like it will have a greater focus on the divine war, and hopefully it will be mroe strongly linked to the Irish conflict. Also Liam will have a chance to properly explore his Fey heritage. I look forward to it.

Buy Of Blood and Honey at The Book Depository

Review of Infidel by Kameron Hurley

Title: Infidel
Series: Bel Dam Apocrypha #2
Author: Kameron Hurley
Published: 1 October 2011
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre: science fiction
Source: eARC from the author
Rating: 7/10

Please note: this review contains minor spoilers for Book One in the series.

Nyx had been better dressed, better armed, and better supported, once: running with her bel dame sisters instead of a cocky boy shifter and a reformed venom addict. Now, instead of collecting blood debt, she was babysitting diplomats and cutting up petty debtors when the First Familes paid her in hard currency. It felt more honest. But a lot less honorable.

This is how we find Nyx at the opening of Infidel, the second book in the Bel Dame Apocrypha series. The Nyx we met at the beginning of God’s War is now just a memory of when she “used to be young, and fiery, and strong. She used to be able to cut off a head in forty-five seconds with a dull blade. She used to be able to drive a bakkie like a demon”. Now, at 38, she is old, tired, and ashamed of the way her life has lost dignity and meaning, although she’s still very much the emotionally dysfunctional hard-ass from book one. Nyx is offered a chance to reclaim the prestige of being a government assassin when a rogue bel dame tries to kill her. A member of the bel dame council asks her to hunt down such rogues and in return, Nyx can have her bel dame status reinstated. The catch is that the rogues are going after the Queen, starting a civil war to bring down the monarchy and give the bel dames power over the country. This will weaken Nasheen, making it vulnerable to Chenja in their ongoing centuries-old war, and Nyx is nothing if not a patriot. Still, it’s a lot for her to handle, especially when she finds that she’s been infected with a strange, debilitating virus that does far worse than simply threaten to kill her.

Meanwhile, Rhys, Khos, and Inaya are living in the prosperous, genteel city of Tirhan, after abandoning Nyx at the end of God’s War. They’ve settled into quiet domestic lives: Khos and Inaya are married, Rhys has a beautiful if scatterbrained wife, and each family has two young children. But both Rhys and Inaya are involved in government work related to the plot that Nyx is caught up in, and you know it’s only a matter of time before she arrives in Tirhan to disrupt if not ruin their lives. Not that Nyx needs much of an excuse; it’s been six years and she still misses Rhys badly, even thought she would never admit it.

Their strange relationship was one of my favourite things about God’s War, after the excellent writing and worldbuilding, all of which made up for a somewhat lacklustre story. In Infidel, Rhys and Nyx are far apart for much of the novel and the writing is good but less arresting. Hurley continues with her excellent worldbuilding, but although Umayma is still an unusual planet, it’s now familiar and less exciting. On the bright side the story is stronger, better paced and more focused. It’s a good book, but less notable that its predecessor.

Mostly, I missed the weird character dynamics between Nyx and Rhys. They certainly made a very odd pair – a drunken, violent atheist, and a devout Muslim with extremely traditional (you could say misogynistic) views about women. It seemed unlikely that they could work together or even respect each other, but they found some kid of solace in each other’s company. I’m not even sure what to call their relationship– it wasn’t exactly a friendship, but it wasn’t just a partnership and it certainly wasn’t a romance.

In Infidel, this great character dynamic is lost, and I found that I don’t really like either of them that much. Nyx is too coarse and too violent. I prefer Rhys’s calm, gentle nature, but I can’t ignore his beliefs about women. Together, they balanced out each other’s flaws – Nyx was enjoyably brash in contrast to the reserved Rhys, and when he worked with Nyx you could forget the fact that Rhys believes she should cover her hair and avoid eye contact with men. Apart, Nyx is a brute and Rhys is a sexist bore. Their reunion doesn’t help much; the past has left too many scars, and the intervening six years have changed Rhys’s life too much.

I found Nyx to be almost thoroughly unlikeable this time around. She’s desperate, reckless, and doesn’t deserve the loyalty of companions. My sympathies actually fell with anyone allied with Nyx because, frankly, that woman is BAD NEWS. She might be a hero, she might be the only person who can get the (dangerous) job done, but she inevitably leaves a trail of pain and chaos in her wake and I’m never quite sure how I feel about her actions. I’m partly hoping she’ll leave poor Rhys alone in Book Three, Rapture. There are moments when he seems to miss the bounty-hunter lifestyle he had with Nyx, but for the most part he would be better off if she stayed the hell away from him.

I don’t necessarily mean all of this as a criticism, although novels are a bit less enjoyable when you don’t like or admire the character you spend the most time with. But I’ve got nothing against unlikeable protagonists per se, and we’re clearly meant to be critical of Nyx. I’d actually like to see her team up with another polar opposite – Inaya, a deeply conservative woman who spent much of her role in God’s War either crying or complaining. Inaya was a shifter who hated shifters, and although she suffered some tragedies that made me feel sorry for her, I couldn’t bring myself to like her. In Infidel however, she became my favourite character – she’s more assured and has unbelievably powerful skills as a shifter, even though she hates using them.

It’s cool to see her in action and, as I mentioned, the story as a whole is clearer and better-paced than the first book. I’m generally not all that interested in political intrigue, but the politics of the plot are simple enough, and Nyx’s purpose boils down to a smaller-scale investigation that involves tracking down the rogue bel dames. It’s very violent; if you’ve read God’s War you’ll know what to expect, although Hurley puts her characters through even greater ordeals this time.

And like the first book, Infidel offers you the pleasure of seeing women driving the plot, and women being fighters without having to be skinny, pretty, fair-skinned women too. There are lots of kick-ass heroines in genre fiction these days, but if book covers are anything to go by, they’re almost always cute white girls who look more like runway models than experienced fighters. The bel dames are big women, heavy with the muscle they need to do their job, bearing the scars of their brutal experiences. Nyx’s body takes such a battering that I started getting seriously concerned about how much more she could take.

Luckily, she ends the novel fully prepared for another bloody adventure in Rapture, although I wouldn’t be too surprised if it ended in her death. Although Infidel wasn’t quite as great as I’d hoped it to be, it’s a good book nevertheless and I’ll be finishing off the series soon.

 

Buy Infidel at The Book Depository