Tag Archives: review

A Slow Thaw

Posted by natechen on

I admit that the Cameron Winter mysteries fill me with an odd sense of delight.

To explain that I feel I have to backpedal a bit to when I first read Andrew Klavan’s The Great Good Thing, a memoir of how he came to love writing, literature and eventually Christ. For a person who is fond of all three of those things, Klavan’s memoirs were fascinating reading. However after reading The Great Good Thing and listening to a few of his podcasts I thought I would try one of his novels out and bought a book titled Werewolf Cop.

Perhaps I should add a disclaimer.

In his nonfiction prose and his podcasting Klavan is witty, wry and humorous, beginning most of his shows with a two or three minute satire segment and inviting his audience to laugh with him through the fall of the Republic. I was aware that Klavan’s fiction was focused on gritty tales of crime. However I think I can be forgiven if my expectations for a book titled Werewolf Cop were slightly colored by how Klavan speaks when addressing his audience directly.

Klavan’s stories are fascinated with the darkest parts of human nature. They are also wrapped up in the question of how we, as people, must fight back against that darkness. However, in order to properly ask that question he first has to take us deep into the worst parts of our nature to confront who we really are when all the lies we tell us about how nice and kind we are get stripped away. We must know the enemy before we can fight it.

On my first reading of Werewolf Cop I was surprised by how dark the novel was, how little the surface level ridiculousness of the title bled through into the narrative and how closely tied to the existing culture the overall plot was. It wasn’t a bad book, in concept, but it lacked something in the execution. The protagonist was an interesting character but his ability to grapple with the evil of his situation seemed almost… off kilter. The darkness of the situation felt like it should have had a much bigger impact on him, on his family and on his life than we really got from the story. The impact of such a thing felt like it should have extended much further.

All this brings me back to Cameron Winter.

By structuring the series as a slow unfolding of Cameron’s past in conjunction with a series of very depraved crimes Winter must unravel in the present Klavan accomplishes two things. He allows Cameron to grapple with the present from a position of semi-detachment. At the same time he justifies Cameron’s distant attitude by telling us about Cameron’s past and the many deep marks it has already left on him. Klavan weaves the past and present together with great expertise. Stories play out over two time periods with the events in each period expounding upon those in the other.

In my review of the previous book in the series, The House of Love and Death, I mentioned that I thought Cam was at a turning point. After reading A Woman Underground I feel both vindicated and surprised. It is, indeed, a turning point in Cameron’s life but not quite the one that I was expecting. At the end of Love and Death Cameron was on the cusp of forming a healthy relationship with a woman for the first time in a long time. However at the opening of A Woman Underground we learn he hasn’t contacted Gwendolyn Lord, the woman in question, for over five months. He isn’t quite ready to take that step yet.

Then, for the first time in the series, Klavan allows a character from Cameron’s past to enter his life in the present of their own volition. Charlotte, the girl who is the source of half of Cameron’s neurosis, makes a brief and fleeting effort to contact him and throws everything in his life out of whack. The result is a slow rolling disaster that forces Cameron to finally face and resolve a small part of the misfortune that has twisted him into such knots for most of his life.

As usual, Klavan ties his plots of hard-hearted and selfish men and women with threads of modern day events. This is done more to create a backdrop for the story than for any political commentary, which I appreciate. Fans of recurring characters like the Recruiter or Stan-Stan will not be disappointed either. However the most controversial element of this story will probably be Charlotte herself.

By exhuming, staking and burying a ghost of his past Cameron has made a definitive step forward in his character arc, fundamentally changing the dynamic between himself and the rest of the cast he works with. Charlotte, who’s shadow defined most of the character work in the first four books of the series, is going to be much less of an element going forward. Some readers, particularly those enamored of the predictable formula of television, may dislike that. I am optimistic that it signals we are going to go even deeper into the element that made the series appeal to me in the first place: Cameron’s past and how it shapes his present.

There is also a meta commentary in this story on the nature of story itself, something most authors can’t help but slip into their work at some point or another. Both Cameron and Margaret, his therapist, comment on the hand of a storyteller at work in Cam’s life. It’s the first hint of faith we see from the stubbornly agnostic protagonist and a bit of a tongue in cheek fun from Klavan himself. More than that, there is an interesting subplot early in the story that hinges on an author. The use of fiction to push an agenda and reframe a story is an interesting twist. Normally this would be the plot element where an author makes their apologia for playing god but Klavan chooses to refrain from this particular cliché. Instead, that kind of editorializing author is left to a rather ignoble fate.

As an author myself I can agree with that message but as a reader it did feel a little intrusive. Fortunately this is not enough of a major plot thread to create a negative impact on an otherwise excellent story. While others may come away with a different opinion I implore you not to let doubts about such a storyline keep you from enjoying a well told tale. As usual, I look forward to reviewing Klavan’s next work, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Hopefully it will come soon.

Speaking of books, I am proud to announce the release of my first book! It compiles eight stories of high adventure in a West that never was. Follow Roy Harper as he makes a living as a magic wielding mercenary, making the West a better one bounty at a time. Get it here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNP7DC82

When Spoof isn’t Enough

Posted by natechen on

From the title page Out of the Soylent Planet is utterly unrepentant about what it is. Robert Kroese has written a pretty fast moving and incredibly silly book about an intergalactic conman named Rex Nihilo and his long-suffering robot sidekick Sasha. It has lasguns. It has spaceships. It has lots and lots and lots of robots who are all forbidden from having any kind of original thoughts (Sasha included.) What it didn’t manage that well was laughs, at least not in my book.

Right off the bat I should note that humor is an extremely subjective topic and the fact that I didn’t find Kroese’s work funny doesn’t mean you’ll be equally unimpressed. I’ve heard several people say they thought it was hilarious. From a totally dispassionate point of view Kroese builds a number of jokes in very workmanlike fashion and executes on them well. That’s fine, but workmanlike humor kind of misses the point, at least in my opinion. Again, humor is hard to quantify.

All that said, I don’t intend to critique the humor in this review. I recommend reading a sample of one of the Rex Nihilo books and seeing if you laugh at it, since Kroese’s humor doesn’t change much in nature or tone over the course of the book. What you see is what you will get. You’ll probably get a better grasp of how much you’ll like his sense of humor firsthand rather than trying to see it through the lens of this review.

Instead, I’m going to recommend you avoid this book because the story and characters are very lackluster. I’m not a fan of negative reviews overall, mainly because poor quality media tends to fall into the same pitfalls over and over again. However, while I didn’t like Kroese’s humor and I thought his story had a lot of flaws, I can say it was original! In a way. Which is to say, I found its failures unique and refreshing in their own way.

As I said at the beginning, from the title onward Soylent Planet wears its idea on its sleeve. It is all about making fun of well known scifi ideas and properties. It begins with a chapter long sendup of Star Wars. The issue I have with it is that the Star Wars parody plays out along side the introduction of our characters rather than serving as the introduction to our characters. Rex and Sasha play no direct part in that parody they just watch it play out. It’s parody for the sake of parody, rather than a parody that also tells a story of its own. It’s more a distraction from the story than an enhancement for it and it had the side effect of making our protagonists less than the most interesting thing in the room.

If nothing else, this isn’t a running issue in the story. After this strange introductory chapter Rex and Sasha step up into center stage and their decisions do drive the story and are the major focus of the narrative, rather than being a sort of side show to a parody Kroese is running in parallel. However once Rex and Sasha are in the limelight we run into another problem. Rex is a character that borders on total incompetence who manages to stumble through things on luck. Again, this can work in a humorous story. The Pink Panther films comes to mind. The effectiveness of that is down to the quality of the humor in the story, which again is going to vary from reader to reader. I’ve already said all I have to say about that.

Sasha, on the other hand, is a robot who is forbidden to have original thoughts of her own. If she approaches such a thought, a safety mechanism reboots her. That’s an interesting idea, reminiscent of the narcoleptic character in the movie Rat Race, and seems like it should be the center of numerous gags. It’s not. Instead, it’s a plot device that allows Rex to escape the final danger he faces which is fine, in and of itself. I’m not saying that Kroese should have cut this plot device from the climax of the story, I think the two things could easily coexist. I just felt like neither character really had a central element that really held the story together.

Instead, Rex seems to bounce around from one scenario to another, spoofing on famous scifi ideas, and Sasha is dragged along in his wake. Both characters feel dragged by the plot, reacting rather than acting. Now, character agency is a tricky thing and I do think that passive or reactive characters are just as good as active ones, contrary to popular belief. But I like my reactive characters to have strong, well define core motivations that define their reactions. While Sasha is programmed to serve, that’s as close as either character gets to such a central motivation. I would’ve liked to see a stronger core to both characters to balance their passivity in this book.

What I can praise Kroese for is a good setup and payoff for the plot. He does a reasonable job of putting all the pieces in place for his climax before he gets there and he clearly enjoyed writing it. While many of the transitions in the story are clunky, the core idea is pretty polished. I want to enjoy this book. It’s just crammed full of things that make it hard for me. I wanted this story to have a point, to do something of its own with its characters and world. Kroese built it to spoof on scifi ideas and tropes instead. He executed on that idea pretty well in Soylent Planet. Whether you’ll enjoy that or not is a matter of taste.