Tag: books

It’s a challenge and a half to try to write a sequel to no less august a book than Frankenstein, and for that alone, I must give my fellow Drollerie author Gary Inbinder props. I’m also pleased to say that although there were parts of the book that didn’t work as much for me, by and large, I feel he did an excellent job at his appointed task!

The opening of the book does ask you to accept the idea that sorcery of a kind exists in the Frankenstein universe, since the entire plot only gets underway when the monster, fresh from killing his creator, is taken in by an old Russian witch. In repayment for his working for her, she grants him his greatest wish: to be human and to be able to have a real life of his own. If you’re used to the version of the Frankenstein story more popularly depicted in the movies, the presence of magic may be jarring; however, my spouse pointed out quite correctly that the original story does heavily pursue the idea that Victor Frankenstein was dabbling as much in black magic as he was forbidden science in creating his monster. So it’s not too much of a stretch for me to allow for actual magic existing in this world.

But. This is really only the start of the plot, and the greatest portion of it by far is taken up by the creature–now calling himself Viktor Viktorovich–not only winning himself a life and a family in Russia, but achieving a meteoric rise to power. In fact, the vast majority of the plot is taken up with his participation in the wars against Napoleon. For me as a reader this had quite a bit of interest, but the real heart of the story doesn’t come until the final third, when the truth of Viktor’s origins begins to come back to haunt him.

And this is also where the story ultimately let me down a bit, since I was expecting more creepiness than I actually got, and one plot device in particular that was used as part of Frankenstein’s backstory struck me as quite unnecessary. But that said, overall I did find this a gripping read, and it’s worth checking out if you liked the original. Four stars.

I’m a huge Indiana Jones fan. To the tune of Raiders of the Lost Ark remaining my all-time favorite movie ever, and collecting every one of the novels I could get my hands on. I even went to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull twice.

So this should give you the proper context when I say that I really, really wanted to like Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead. It combines two of my favorite things: Indy and zombies! Plus, it’s a story that’s set during World War II and which included Mac, the character we saw in Crystal Skull. So, cool, I thought, we can get a glimpse into what actually happened to Indy during World War II, which was one of the interesting little side details about the movie.

The big problem is, the character occupying the lead role of this story is not the Indiana Jones I know and love. He’s too prone to bursting into dry, didactic lectures, a habit we never once saw him have in any of the movies, including the last one. This character failure alone distracted me a lot from the story, and made it difficult for me to enjoy some of the other aspects of this version of Indy that I did like–for example, since this is an Indy up in his 40’s, it did seem reasonable to me that he was starting to get sensitive about his age and yet was still quite capable of being charmed by, and charming to, the young female lead.

A similar lack of character development pretty much plagued the bad guys as well, for the most part: the German and Japanese commanders. Since this is a WWII setting, it’s pretty much inevitable that we’d have Japanese forces involved along with the Nazis, and to be fair, this does add a bit of nice variety. And there’s quite a bit of plotting and counter-plotting between the two commanders as they both try to catch up with Indy and Mac to get the final MacGuffin. But none of it had quite the punch it should have had for me, and only occasionally did either of the commanders ever seem like real characters. They definitely paled in comparison to the actual primary bad guy: the voodoo sorcerer who was controlling the zombies.

And I will say that okay, sure, the zombie part of the plot was entertaining enough. But on the whole the story didn’t feel enough like a proper Indiana Jones story to me–because Indy just didn’t feel enough like Indy. Two stars.

Undone is the first of rachelcaine‘s new series Outcast Season, the offshoot from the Weather Warden books, and as series starters go it’s not bad. We’re introduced to Cassiel, a djinn who’s forced into human shape–and, as a result, forced to work with the Wardens on whose power she depends to keep herself alive. But when the Warden assigned to work with her is killed along with his wife, she must turn to his brother instead to track down their killers. And all the while she has to cope with the unwelcome side effects of prolonged incarnation in human form.

The story’s not without flaws, most of which are repeatedly played too heavily: how much Cassiel hates being human, the cute child insisting on calling her Cassie despite being told repeatedly that she prefers to be called Cassiel, how the Wardens keep assuming that if something goes wrong it’s clearly Cassiel’s fault, how Cassiel being incarnated into human form is part of a Greater Plan(TM). Taken individually, none of these quibbles are too bad, but as a whole, for me as a reader, I could have liked all of them toned down just a tad.

Also: the token appearance of David and Jo at the very beginning of the story honestly detracted from the rest of the story for me, and it really felt like a question of “let’s put them in here just to prove to the reader that this is the same universe as Jo’s stories”, since David and Jo didn’t really provide any other plot relevance to the story–and we’re not even told why Cassiel, incarnated into human shape, is dumped on David and Jo to begin with. Lewis has far more pertinent reason to show up at the beginning, since he’s the one that lays it out to Cassiel how it’ll have to go if she expects the Wardens to work with her. But much as I’ve enjoyed David and Jo’s story over in the Weather Warden books, they just didn’t need to be in this one.

All this said? There’s still a good solid story here. I liked the edgy interaction between Cassiel and Luis, still very much too edgy to be a proper romance yet, and hopefully it’ll be a relationship that takes a while to develop. The Big Bad of the story intrigued me, as did the backstory there between the Big Bad and Cassiel herself. And yeah, I’ll be checking out Book Two. For this one, three stars.

Michele Lee delivers a compact little horror story in Rot, a novella that goes into the ramifications of people in society being able to bring back loved ones from the dead–only in this case, rather than true resurrection, it’s the capturing of a living spirit inside an otherwise still-dead body. Yes, folks, this is a zombie story, but one where the zombies retain sentience for as long as their bodies retain enough physical cohesion for their brains to work.

And this opens up a host of unhappy results as nursing homes for the undead crop up as locations to dump your resurrected zombie loved ones when you no longer want them. Not to mention the myriad unpleasant excuses for reviving your loved ones to begin with, such as Patrick, a gay young man who’s brought back by his fundamentalist Christian parents who promise to put him back in his grave if he’ll “repent”.

With this as a background, the story’s protagonist, Dean, a watchman at one of these zombie retirement homes, discovers that certain ones of the residents are going unaccounted for–and as he’s moved to investigate, he discovers that these zombies, already rendered pretty much non-people by the sad circumstances of their existence, are helpless prey for even darker motivations than the ones that put them there to start with.

What circumstances give society the ability to create zombies is only glossed over, but really, that’s fine; this story is short enough that that really doesn’t need to be explained in depth. The focus is where it rightfully belongs, on Dean, on Patrick, and upon Amy, who is the latest of the zombies in the facility to go missing. Dean must bring himself to trust Patrick enough to take him out of the facility with him as he tracks Amy down, and the dynamic between the two is very nicely done indeed.

All in all, it’s a tight little tale and worth checking out. Four stars.