Do You Like Vampires and Movies? Kim Newman has Somethin' for ya.

I'm going to preface this by saying it does help a little if you are already a reader of Kim Newman's awesome takes on the supernatural, vampires, and alternate history through his other "Anno Dracula" tales and maybe his Diogenes Club stories as well (You guys! What I'm technically saying is you might like everything he writes!) But if you like movies and tv, and genre fiction--if you like subtle name-dropping and pastiche, if you like fast-paced stories and a developed fictional alternate history--and if you reaaaalllly dig vampires?

Oh, baby--this is for you. Because Newman covers the last quarter of the 20th century Hollywood style with some fangs for the memories, looking back through a cinematic lens while developing a story that will entertain as it chills. In it, the young get of Dracula slogs his way from the slums of Transylvania to the Hollywood stars, and there's no stopping him--or is there?

Well, you just have to read to see, and maybe you, too, will be aware of "the horror". I don't want to give away too much of the episodic doings that bring together characters from Anno Dracula novels past and some of the fixtures of moviedom's firmament, but it's good old fashioned disturbing social satire and art crit fun.

Review: Neptune's Brood

I've been terribly lax about reviewing things, anymore. I set up "Strangely Random Stuff" in part to separate my review posts from my political posts, but then I sort of failed to hold up my reviewing end. I think the problem is that I tend to be a more enthusiastic reviewer than a slagger; I like pasing on that I found a movie or a book or a product to be really good, as a service to the consumer, while finding that slagging a work I find substandard has a gratuitous feel to it.

If you have any sense of my personality, this insight probably doesn't synch. It strikes me as a weird quirk, as well.

That said, I read Stross' Neptune's Brood about a month ago, and was only jogged into remembering to write a review when I came across PZ Myers' review of the same.  Myers, naturally, was taken with the image of a communist squid-folk society.

I can't say I blame him. I am down with the squid, myself, and an oceanic socialism. I am likewise down with Stross. And I didn't dislike the book at all--oh no. There is naturally some slightly warped humor (is a piratical assurance agency Monty Python enough for you?) and the world-building framework of the Freyaverse, even a few generations down the line, makes sense. But I did find a bit of a peculiarity that I thought might be more something I would enjoy, and not necessarily everyone else:

You know how some works of sf go on about rocket ships and how the drives allegedly would work and maybe mention robots or some other tech in plausible detail to make you feel like "Oh yes. I see how that works." Well, Stross has dug a bit onto intergalactic finance and world-building economies. Space, if you hadn't heard, is big. And someone has to pay for going into it and doing things with bits of it. And the transactions occuring in an interstellar economy would be taking place over in some cases enormous distances and lengths of time that would even be shocking to a very long-lived android.

I have to congratulate Stross for really writing a work that is mindcandy for econowonks. I thought it was fun and fascinating and maybe a bit better than Saturn's Children, in the sense that I wasn't comparing it to Heinlein's Friday the whole time. It is quite different, and I rather liked it. It's just a bit hard to review.

If you like sf with a heavy dose of economics, this is probably your kind of jawn.

Summer Reading: What a great week.

So, it happens that I spent the last two days experiencing my version of happy, which means wallowing in new book acquisitions. I got two books that I was very much looking forward to, and like a great big goober, I swallowed them both up at once and sort of have to reread them a bit to try and maintain my "happy" a little longer. I'm a bit like a baby crying because the candy she ate is all gone.

But it was good.

First up, I got The Apocalypse Codex, which is part of Charles Stross' Laundry books, which follows the exploits of pseudonymous hero Bob Howard, computer geek, civil servant, and necromancer as he goes about the not-especially glamorous business of preventing the Eschaton (or at least preventing the eschaton-minded from nibbling the almighty fuck out of our corner of the universe, or out of the heads of people who inhabit it). I love this series, and this book was no exception. Here, we follow Bob as he and some new (possibly recurring?) characters investigate a charismatic evangelist preacher who seems to be "saving" souls--for someone to eat?

I like that Stross depicts the supernatural spy in real world ways--having his regrets and night-horrors, being flawed and needing to explore why he does what he does. I also enjoy that he interweaves real-world history with real myth and fiction in a seamless package. I'm slavering for the next installment of Bob's adventures--and kind of hoping for more entanglement with the newer characters introduced: Persephone Hazard and Johnny MacTavish.--whose interactions suggest a wealth of standalone possibilities.


Another lovely read I gobbled was the Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill graphic novel, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 2009. 

It's kind of hard to square the world as we know it, 2009, and the world as our heroes (mostly heroines) experience it, in Moore's 2009. I would not recommend anyone who wants to read LOEG start with this--by all means, read every one from the beginning.  But you'll not be disappointed when you get to this edition, just, um, depressed. Moore and O'Neill's 2009 (sort of like our world, but I hope not--much grimmer) is ugly and it's implied that the ugliness of our world has much to do with the ugliness/crassness of our literature. As with previous installments of LOEG, there is some lit and cultural criticism. But the portraits of Mina Murray, Orlando (as a woman) and others make this an oddly feminist work.

I am really loving the emerging character of Orlando/Vita, etc. The three thousand-year-old warrior and hermaphroditic immortal really is the voice of this issue. Also, you might shudder at the implied villain.

I totally recommend both of these books, but warn they are so devourable you'll really need to either read all the lit associated (and good on you, if you do!). Or you won't--it's a free country.  You do you, m'kay?

The answer to a long, hot summer? Read something chilling!

I'm like anyone else who likes to go on vacation, get out in the sun a bit, and try and have a relaxing time--but the problem with me is, I never relax. I like a bit of stress and discomfort to keep my alcohol-thinned blood pulsating through my cholesterol-thickened arteries. That's why, instead of choosing romances and such for my lighter summer reading, I like to read books with monsters and vampires and the odd Apocalypse, and things like that. After all, most romance novels are far too unbelievable. I've gotten part of my summer-reading done this week, and I'd like to share my "recommends". (I'm listing them in the order I got them, not necessarily in any sort of ratings-system. )

The first I'm recommending is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith, who is listed on the book cover as "New York Times Bestselling Author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." Although I know that book exists, I haven't picked it up yet, not being all that big on Jane Austen or zombies. Well, that's not entirely true. I liked what little of Northanger Abbey I read and generally approve of costume drama films, and I do like mindless dumb zombie movies of the "They get nourishment from the noorons of the human brain" type. The mash-up just didn't appeal to me on the right level, though, in quite the way that the idea of Honest Abe as a Slayer does.

(I will say, though, that I liked Grahame-Smith's writing at Huffington Post. His snark about McCain/Palin was pretty right on.)

The conceit of this book is that a secret journal reveals the sixteenth president's deep, dark secret: due to the death of his own mother, and a few other harrowing events, at the hands of vampires, the young Abe became a hardened warrior in the struggle to free America from their undead, greedy fingers. It's written in the same slightly gilded language we're accustomed to from Civil War documentaries, and props have to be given to Stephanie Isaacson, who is listed in the Acknowledgements for creating the creepy Photoshopped images that might just start to make the reader wonder if antebellum vampires aren't just a bit plausible. (I'd totally like to see someone make a movie of this in a Ken Burns style, actually.)

If you like history, and the kind of vampires that expressly aren't sparkly, this is pretty neat. The way the thirst and demands of vampires tie in with the other reasons for the Civil War are kind of ingenious as well as the way Grahame-Smith weaves them into Lincoln's real biographical details. It's fun, but makes you go, "Hmm."


Next up is China Mieville's Kraken. At five hundred-something pages, it's not exactly a "light read", but it is a brilliantly accessible story--something of a "shaggy squid" tale. We are presented with a crime scene: someone has David Blaine'd a massive dead Architeuthis Dux right out from the display case at the natural History Museum, and it seems quite possible that some outre cultists of the tentacular deep old ones are looking to immanentize the eschaton with it.

No, really. From the imagination of Mieville, with his great dialogue, smart details, and truly weird turns--this is actually a fun story about the trip a few regular people end up making through a sidereal London that is full of truly side streets and out of the out of the way places, knacky bastards whose B&E's might involve OOBE's or even tesseracts, and streetlights that actually do sometimes beat fatalistic warnings, and my own favorite side-story, the idea of familiars being organized, and even striking. (It's a lot to take in, and probably worth a few reads--it makes me wonder if he isn't planning on revisiting this world with another shaggy shoggoth tale.)

Oh, and lots of apocalyptic death-cultists of various stripes. Can't forget them.

It's a weird combination of fantasy that doesn't rely as much on Lovecraft et als as one might think, and crime drama, complete with hard-boiled cops who have even seen this sort of thing before. Sort of.



(Side note: I am a fan of squid myself. It's not really a sure thing why, but I kind of understand a squid cult. It's hard to make out what the squid pro quo is in worshiping the coming of an ubersquid. That he eats you last? First? Tooling about the Internet, I found a picture and story about the actual Archie. I link this because it provides detail for imagining a squid of immense size being broken out of a water-tight really big tank, and because the details of the preservation of such a specimen are really cool.)


Last but not least, there's Charles Stross' The Fuller Memorandum; A Laundry Files Novel. I think it might maybe be useful if you've already read The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue, but it isn't obligatory. It's just that my introduction to Stross' work was On Her Majesty's Occult Service via SFBC, and I fell madly in love with the universe he's created of a world where the works of Turing and Crowley are equally valid, and where the hypotheticals of Lovecraft's fiction unfold in Reimannian space, told in a way that is very amusing and has really interesting side jokes about technology. And I'd be madly in love with the protagonist: hacker, slacker, technomagus and secret agent Bob Howard, if I wasn't afraid of his significant other, Dr. Dominique O'Brien (who doesn't have to be in my dimension or even real to probably kick my ass or play her scary violin at me.)

The tale involves more potential immanentizing of echatons and the temporary disappearance of the "Laundry's" (the UK secret paranormal spooks') head spook in charge--Angleton, who is possibly weirder and older than we've been given to suppose before. If you're computer savvy and know a little high magick, this shit is funny as all heck. Even if you don't, it's a good tale. I recommend it a lot.