January 2010

One of the nice things about reading a lot of ebooks as of late is the sheer number of older classic works available in public domain electronic copies. Among these is the Feedbooks ebook edition of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and I decided it was high time I read it.

We all of course know the basics of the story, but what I didn’t know was that the original story is not from Jekyll’s point of view at all, but rather from that of a third party. The lawyer Mr. Utterson is an old friend of the doctor’s, and is the keeper of his will as well–but he’s recently been given a newer version that names a Mr. Hyde as the beneficiary of all of Dr. Jekyll’s worldly goods should the doctor ever die or mysteriously disappear. This, coupled with a disturbing report from another friend that Hyde has been seen in the street causing cruel hurt to a child, alarms Utterson deeply and puts him on to finding out exactly what has befallen the doctor.

What follows is mostly not surprising, aside from a few particular plot details that I won’t mention in case someone else like me who hasn’t read it yet wants to take a peek. Like many works of its era, though, a lot of the storytelling is done via the device of letters rather than shown directly on screen. For me this dampened the impact somewhat of the events described–though on the other hand, Jekyll’s explanation in his final letter of the moral experiment that led him to create his infamous potion in the first place was interesting reading.

Overall this was a much shorter story than I’d expected, though, and very quickly and easily breezed through. Three stars.

ReVamped, J.F. Lewis’ second book in the Void City series, picks up pretty much right where Book 1 left off: with Eric, his vampire protagonist, getting blown up. Which, you have to admit, is a pretty tough state to come back from–but Eric isn’t just any vampire. He’s an Emperor-class vampire, with enough power and enough followers to pull off even coming back from the dead. Thus, we’ve got the stage set for Book 2.

Eric is understandably less than thrilled at having been made to explode, but that’s only the beginning of the curveballs his resurrected existence throws him. His newly vamped girlfriend, Tabitha, has dumped him in favor of a far more powerful and physically repellent vampire. His almost-a-thrall–who just happens to be Tabitha’s apparently resurrected sister Rachel–is exerting magic upon him for unknown reasons. A local demon wants him to acquire the Stone of Aeternum, conveniently enough from the very same powerful vampire to which Tabitha has given her attentions. And on top of it all, Eric’s discovered he’s suddenly got an undead car.

There are certainly plot twists galore in this installment, and things advance intriguingly not only on the Eric/Tabitha front, but also in explaining what’s going on with Rachel and quite a bit about Eric’s own background. But ReVamped didn’t have quite the same punch for me as Staked did; there were parts that matched that book, but overall it didn’t flow quite as smoothly, perhaps because Eric seemed to spend a lot more time in reaction mode rather than being proactive. Nonetheless, I’m up for Book 3! For this one, three stars.

Unsolicited, the first of Julie Kaewart’s Alex Plumtree series, is a book I’ve actually had for some time and which I had the yen to re-read. Specifically, in print form–since the hero, Alex, is the young owner of a publishing company in London, and it therefore seemed wrong to re-purchase this particular volume in ebook form.

You’d think the British publishing business would be a sedate and staid affair, but as this is after all a mystery novel, you’d be wrong! It seems that Plumtree Press has scored big with its first fiction release, a novel written by an anonymous author known only as “Arthur”. Now Arthur is penning his sequel. But! He’s gone missing, and with him, the last five chapters of the novel. As Alex does his best to track down his reclusive writer and secure the missing chapters–or risk his publishing company going under–he soon discovers that there’s a lot more involved with this manuscript than just fiction. Arthur, whoever he may be, has taken actual World War II events pertaining to the kidnapping of British children and worked them into his book. Moreover, he’s about to reveal the perpetrator.

This is Kaewert’s first novel, and it shows a bit; she overuses the “if I had only known such-and-so was about to happen!” device, pretty much as code for “and something suspenseful is going to happen in the next chapter!” Plus, the book’s got issues with being dated even though it’s set in the 90′s, not that long ago. Arthur is described as being fond of communicating exclusively by fax, and in a scene where Alex’s office computer is trashed, he tells the reader in an aside that it’s a good thing that the culprit only broke the monitor instead of the hard drive where the actual data is stored–in what read to me clearly as a passage intended for readers who weren’t likely to be at all familiar with computers.

But all this said, Alex is a charmingly self-deprecating hero, and it’s refreshing to see a hero with severely bad eyesight, enough that he’s pretty much legally blind if he loses his glasses. Moreover, his devotion to Sarah, the banker who works with him on Plumtree Press’s finances and for whom he carries quite the torch, is quite sweet. So all in all, a nice read. Three stars.