Nearly twice as long as The Blood That Bonds, Blood Hunt picks up several months after the first book left off, and finds Two back in New York City, searching for vampires so that she can rejoin their ranks. The book contains more characters, more locations, and more points of view than TBTB did, while also delving deeper into  characters’ personalities, motivations, and desires. It also explains a lot more about the four primary vampire races, and about the political structure of the vampire world.

Of course, along with all of this there’s a lot of darkness, violence, sex, drugs and booze, topped off with healthy quantities of sweet, sweet profanity. This is, after all, a II AM Book!

Blood Hunt costs $2.99 for the eBook and is currently available for Kindle (US/UK/DE), Nook, iPad/iPhone/iPod and other major eReaders (via Smashwords). It will soon be available at the Sony, Kobo and Diesel eBook stores, but if you’re impatient, the Smashwords  EPUB version will work with both Sony and Kobo readers.

Blood Hunt was simultaneously released in print. You can order a copy from CreateSpace or, if you want, you can order a signed copy direct from me. The print copy is $11.99 either way, and I will ship signed copies to anywhere in the world (just choose the appropriate shipping option).

For full information, please visit the new Blood Hunt website – http://iiamtrilogy.com/bloodhunt

The Passage by Justin Cronin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” is a complex novel that at, over the course of its reading, left me at times enthralled and at other times enraged. I think that’s a good thing, but if you ask me tomorrow, I may have changed my mind again.

What I can say about the book is that it’s a sweeping sci-fi/fantasy epic that fits very nicely into a long and proud tradition of novels in which their author gleefully destroys most of humanity and then sets about telling us what happens in the aftermath. I’ve seen it compared to Stephen King’s The Stand, and the comparisons are warranted. There is a long and utterly engrossing set-up to the end of the world, which eventually happens with remarkable speed. King spent more time dealing with the actual apocalypse part of his post-apocalyptic world than Cronin does, but considering the heft of the book as it is, it’s perhaps for the best that Cronin literally skips over the 90 years or so between “when the bad stuff happens” and when the story picks back up.

The similarities continue throughout. There’s a group of traveling friends, and not one but two old, black ladies who like to talk about God. There’s a pregnancy and a divorce of sorts. There’s a bad guy who is drawing others to him. There’s a big showdown at the end and a pronounced denoument. Throught the book, people die. Most of them die badly. There’s a lot of The Stand in here, yes. But to call the book a copy or even highly derivative would be an outright lie. It stands as its own work, one with is intriguing and exciting, pulse-pounding at times, sad or uplifting at others. There are characters to hate and love, although I never found myself hating and loving them quite so much as I have with some other books.

As a fellow author of “vampire books” (though my vampires are apples to Cronin’s oranges), I love what he’s done with the myth. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book, give or take, are nearly flawless. Cronin paints a portrait of a near-future United States that is hyper realistic, bound up in protocol inspired by fear over continued terrorist attacks, with states mistrusting each other and the federal government operating in many clandestine ways to get what it wants. You can SEE this world, you can feel it, because it’s not so improbable. You become caught up in the story and the characters immediately, and you spend much of the time waiting for The Virals (as they become known) to break lose. You know it’s coming and that it’s going to be bad. Cronin doesn’t disappoint here.

To say that the story shifts gears at this point is an understatement. It’s something more akin to parking the car, getting out, and switching to an entirely different vehicle. Yes, it still takes place in the same world, with the same problems and even a few of the same characters, but in the 90-year shift the story also moves more out of the realm of Science Fiction and into that of Fantasy. I don’t have an inherent problem with this, but I did find the shift jarring. I also found the sudden introduction of more than a dozen new characters a bit overwhelming at first, though in the end you figure out who’s who, and you are properly outraged at the times you’re supposed to be, when the heroes are being held up by people who don’t understand that, damn it, they’re the heroes and they’re right.

The problems I had with the book, the things that threw me out of reading mode and made me frustrated, all happened in the second half and were mostly small issues. For one thing, Cronin is guilty of the extremely modern belief that all human beings immediately lose whoever they were before, at the moment they hear they are having a baby (or in extreme cases, at the moment of the baby’s birth), and instead become dedicated only to the existence of that child. For another, I’m tired of old women who love God. I don’t find any comfort in the idea of predestination or “God’s Will” and I don’t find characters who do to be particularly sympathetic.

I also had extreme issue with one decision a primary character makes, late in the novel, not even so much because I didn’t like the decision, but because it’s given barely an ounce of explanation and is a pretty clear setup for a later event. It felt like the character was only doing it because the story needed her to. If you’re going to have the cavalry show up, you need a reason for why it wasn’t there in the first place, and this reason seemed flimsy. The character in question supposedly has her reasons, but they’re never given (or barely so), so the decision she makes seems amazingly arbitrary.

There are a few other moments like this — Cronin kills off a character whose name might as well have been “Obvious Choice” at one point — but I may be stressing the negative too strongly. In the end, the important thing was that whenever I put the book down, I always wanted to pick it up again, and preferably soon. This is the first in a trilogy, and I’m looking forward to the second and third books. They’ll probably frustrate me too, but I bet they’ll be a lot of fun to read while they’re doing it.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a remarkable writer Cormac McCarthy is. This is the second of his books that I’ve read, and while it was more difficult to follow than The Road, it was also a significantly better book (and I really liked The Road!). An unflinching look at the American and Mexcian old west in the pre-Civil-War era, Blood Meridian follows the exploits of a young man who finds himself embroiled in the exploits of the Glanton Gang, a real-life group of scalp-hunters turned outlaws. McCarthy describes scenes of brutal violence and quiet solitude with the same slow, deliberate, biblical prose, and it’s up to the reader to make judgements upon the people who he describes. There are bad guys aplenty in the book, but no real good guys, and I appreciated that fact. There are few good guys in real life, and there were even fewer to be found in the desperate places on the edge of the country (and beyond it).

The lack of quotes and general eschewing of punctuation didn’t really bother me, but I did have some trouble with the extreme run-on sentences, frequently joined together with “and” over and over … sometimes by the time I got to the end, I had to go back to the beginning to remember where the sentence started. Still, the book was fascinating and deeply engrossing. McCarthy is a master.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is no Orciny … is there?

The City & The City is a somewhat difficult book to start, and it evolves into a difficult book to put down. Somewhere between the two states you come to realize that you understand the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Quoma, despite the fact that Miéville has gone to great lengths to avoid explaining them in clear language.

I appreciated this. A lot. It would be a difficult feat to describe how two cities can occupy the same physical space even if one was simply aiming for abject description. Miéville instead uses the framework of a crime novel to let you come to understand the two cities, not to mention the semi-sinister entity known only as Breach, in an organic manner. In a way, I think this allows the reader to learn at a more measured pace, rather than trying to digest huge lumps of expository information.

The key to enjoying the book is to worry about the murder mystery first, and the cities second. The information you’re looking for will come, by and large, though Miéville chooses to leave great gaps in the reader’s knowledge at times (the narrator is not omniscient, and there are many things that he, and thus the reader, will never truly know). Once I stopped worrying about understanding everything, and instead focused on enjoying the story, my overall appreciation for the book grew.

The story’s climax is suspenseful, and the book ends in pretty much the only way it really could. Many questions are answered, many more are left open, and Inspector Borlu comes to understand the truth about the cities, and about the shadows claimed by each, by both and by neither.

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Much ado has been made over the current “vampire trend” and its potential longevity. People are curious: why and how have vampires become so popular? What has caused them to capture the fancy of the mainstream public after years of being appreciated mainly by fans of the horror genre? The answer to that question lies in the slow move from terror to sympathy that people have made over the past few decades, due in large part to the efforts of many authors, screenwriters, directors, and other artists.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, vampires were the bad guys. Remember those days? Dracula bending menacingly over a delirious Lucy Westenra; Kurt Barlow and his servant Mr. Straker slowly bringing the town of Salem’s Lot to ruin; Keifer Sutherland and his cronies menacing Corey Haim’s family … vampires were nearly always portrayed as voracious, evil killers …

If you’re interested in reading the rest, you can find it at Reading with a Bite. I think it’s a pretty solid essay, and of course I get to plug my book, The Blood That Bonds, as well! Thanks very much to Lindsay for the opportunity.

Oh, and the control to turn off the music that starts when the site loads is over on the right, a little bit down the page. ;)

]]> http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/09/29/the-blood-that-bonds-is-live/feed/ 16 http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/08/04/books-j-k-rowlings-harry-potter-and-the-goblet-of-fire/ http://www.cwbuecheler.com/2009/08/04/books-j-k-rowlings-harry-potter-and-the-goblet-of-fire/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:30:31 +0000 chris http://www.cwbuecheler.com/?p=1386 Continue reading →]]> Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling really begins to embrace the darker tone that she first begins to explore in the Prisoner of Azkaban, and the result is a book that I found more engrossing than any of the first three. I like a little darkness, and I like that Rowling is unafraid to show that Harry exists in a dangerous world where people, both good and bad, are in possession of powers that can be extremely physically punishing to those at the receiving end.

Rowling continues to expand her compelling cast of characters, introducing new students both from within Hogwarts and from two other schools of wizarding, as well as several members of the Ministry of Magic. Two other new characters of note include the highly enjoyable “Mad-eye” Mooney, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, and the highly obnoxious Rita Skeeter, an invasive journalist who’s not above making up large chunks of her stories.

We also get to hear from many old favorites, not the least of which being Potters’ inseparable friends Ron and Hermione, although the former proves at least semi-separable for a while as he battles with jealousy over Harry’s constant position in the limelight.

All of this is nice, but kind of expected by now. What’s impressive though is the deft way in which Rowling wraps many of these characters’ stories together and ties them into the central Goblet of Fire storyline. In this storyline, we learn that (as is par for the course), someone is trying to kill Harry. The assumption of course is that his premature entry into the extremely dangerous Tri-Wizard competition was orchestrated to accomplish this goal, and in a way it was … but not how Harry or anyone around him expects.

The book culminates with a confrontation that results in the first “on-screen” death of a character in Rowling’s universe and sets up some extremely important threads that will carry through the rest of the titles. It’s also the first book in the series to end with no indication of who won the house cup (or if it was even given out given the tragic circumstances of the Tri-Wizard competition), and no indication of who won the quiddich cup. I thought it was nice and realistic that these issues – so seemingly important in the earlier books – have taken a back seat to the life and death concerns that Rowling is introducing into the books.

I think this is the best of the Harry Potter books that I’ve read so far, and I’m looking forward to Order of the Phoenix.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really didn’t expect that it’d be so easy to find a book that’s even more depressing, startling, and at times outright uncomfortable than Requiem for a Dream, but all one really has to do is look to Selby’s earlier work, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Selby’s novel – itself more a series of novellas featuring related characters – is populated with drug-addled drag queens, prostitutes, thugs, and a particular union organizer who is an awful man in nearly every respect. That you end up feeling sympathy for nearly all of these characters, even said union organizer, is a testament to Selby’s remarkable ability to invest his characters with realism and humanity. These are deeply flawed people, all, but they’re still people, each with their own set of wants, needs, and dreams.

As in Requiem for a Dream, Selby’s writing style is light on punctuation and grammar, near stream-of-consciousness, and at times extremely difficult to read (the scenes near the end of one drag queen’s night out with “the girls” are borderline incoherent … an intentional effect). This makes it a bit tough to get into the book at first, but once your brain adapts, reading becomes pretty easy.

It’s easy to understand why this book caused so much controversy when it was released in the sixties. It contains enough sex, drugs, and profanity to ruffle many feathers today. That said, it never felt to me like Selby was trying to be exploitative. Rather, he was trying to paint an accurate picture of the kind of underworld that forms in cities, and was particularly prevalent in New York through much of the second half of the twentieth century. He brings you into these peoples lives and, without sentiment or sensationalism, shows you the world that they live in.

In all, I found the book engrossing and at times moving. These are not people you want to spend time with, and often not people you can identify with, but they are nonetheless human, each with their own tragedies, big and small. Like no other author I’ve ever read, Selby is able to express this without ever stating it outright, and for that his work demands respect and attention, no matter how vile its subject matter sometimes becomes.

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My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m going to go ahead and guess that my review of Twilight is going to sway neither the book’s legion of fans, nor its serious detractors. In all honesty, I’m kind of torn about reviewing the book at all. Its first-person protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl, and the book is very clearly angled at girls in their early-to-mid teens. I am a thirty-two year-old man, and thus am not exactly what one would call the target demographic.

I read the book because my wife advised me to, because I am author who is trying to get his vampire novel published, and she rightly figured that it couldn’t hurt to check out the book, and see what it does well. There ARE things that it does well, despite what some negative reviews might say. There are also many things that didn’t work for me, but may be right for the target audience. Then there are a few things that I think it does legitimately poorly … we’ll get to those.

So. What I liked:

I think — and again, I was never a girl, so I can’t be sure — that it does a good job of expressing the all-consuming strength of a young woman’s first love. Bella’s absolute obsession with Edward is driven home over and over (to the point of tedium for me). Less well-explained is why Edward feels so strongly for her, other than that she smells good, but you still at least get a strong sense of his desire both to love her and to chomp down on her neck, which creates some fun dramatic tension.

I also liked that each vampire had a special little power of their own, something they brought with them from their human lives. I thought the book got stronger as it went along, with the last sixty pages or so of the book, not counting the epilogue, being legitimately exciting and fun to read.

What I didn’t like:

The first 350 pages of the book are nearly a straight teen romance novel, and the first 100 pages or so are brutal even accepting that fact. There’s absolutely nothing happening, action-wise. Bella comes off as bitchy and unlikable. The writing is stilted and hasn’t yet found any sort of voice other than said bitchiness (few sentences have anything resembling stylistic flair). Again, this improves as the book goes on, almost as if Meyer is becoming more comfortable with her characters and the world she’s creating.

I also felt that Edward was too perfect. I realize the novel is more a romance than it is anything else, and this is a common approach to romance novels, but it makes him a less-likable character because basically his only flaw is that he can’t accept that he’s in love and just deal with it. I don’t mind him being gorgeous, or powerful, or intelligent, or charming, or witty, or sensual, or telepathic, or even some combination of these things, but all of them together create a character so flawless he’s hard to relate to.

The epilogue is hard to believe. I find it midly improbable that Bella’s dad would be easily forgiving of either She or Edward after what he had to go through. Also, Bella returns right back to being oblivious and kind of bitchy, as if she’s learned essentially nothing from her experience. I was hoping for a bit of character growth for both of the leads, but there’s little to be seen.

Overall, I think the book does a decent if unspectacular job of conveying a fairly typical first love story with a rather important twist. The last sixty pages or so, where the real meat of the action is, are better than the rest of the book. I have no plans to read the other three in the series, so I went ahead and read their synopses on the internet, and doing so basically reconfirmed that I’m not interested enough to read more. It seems, though, like Meyer understands her audience and has put together a series which they clearly enjoy.

If you’re old enough to drink — and not an aspiring author of vampire novels who likes to keep abreast of what’s happening in that genre — Twilight’s not terrible … but it’s probably not the right book for you.

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My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

While not quite as brimming with homoerotic undertones as the first in the series, Throne of Jade nonetheless presents the reader with plenty of repressed man-dragon love to go along with a few aerial battles, a murder plot, and an interesting encounter with a sea serpent. Also, there are some Chinese people.

Ok, that’s a bit of a glib summary, but I’ve never been a huge fan of spending my entire review giving plot details. It’s worth noting, however, that the book is somewhat less action-oriented than the first. It spends a good deal of time focusing on the infuriating nature of diplomatic relations with wildly disparate cultures, and does some interesting and applicable pontificating on the treatment of dragons and its comparison to the slave trade. Some of the latter is spelled out a little too obviously, especially near the end, but one doesn’t typically read fantasy series for their subtle political metaphor.

Novik seems to have done her research on the era she’s set her books in, and the story is peppered with references to the actual politics of the time, including England’s struggle to establish strong diplomatic ties with China, and to prevent the French from doing the same. The slavery comparison is also tied nicely into the book as the dragon Temeraire and his captain Will Laurence travel to China and witness the level of freedom given to Chinese dragons, comparing it against the treatment of European breeds.

I enjoyed the book enough to give it three stars, although I thought the first one was better. I found the sea voyage section of Throne of Jade a bit interminable, and I was surprised by how little of the book was actually set in China (well less than one third). I did enjoy the further revelations about dragon breeding and the interesting ways in which Novik interweaves dragons into every-day Chinese life. I found myself wishing that more of the book had been set in China, not so much because of the foreign setting as because I’m interested in the back-story and breed specifics of Novik’s dragons, and it’s in China that the most information about them is known.

Overall the book is an interesting, if somewhat less action-oriented, successor to the first novel. It’s a good “airplane novel” with a unique setting, solid plotting, and enjoyable dialog. I look forward to picking up the third installment in the series.

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