Kaileb's Dream

Kaileb's Dream

by Kaileb Varney

Blurb:

Once just a dream, now turned into reality the young Master of the White Blades, must fight to save the world. There is always good and evil, and the struggle is just a part of that existence. Having only been a Warrior, (an ancient race born in the early years of recorded history) for a few years this young man, must deal with the responsibility of both his new found power, and life. He must learn to find a balance within the world, and himself.

My Reaction:

This was selected by the 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back podcast.  I read this aloud with Donald, as we usually do with the podcast's reading choices.  (As you might imagine, reading aloud only adds to the enjoyment of the rich and unusual language typical of these novels.)

Um... Well, that was an experience.  This is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read, even for 372 Pages, but I have to say that I'd much rather read this than Shadow Moon or Bob Honey... or even Artemis.  At least this one kept me laughing (and wasn't painfully dull, like Artemis' action welding scenes).  

Sometimes I Lie

Sometimes I Lie

by Alice Feeney

Blurb:

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me:

1. I’m in a coma.

2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.

3. Sometimes I lie.

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks, is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

My Reaction:
I'd completely forgotten I hadn't reviewed this one, yet, so I'm coming to it a while after finishing it...

I listened to the audiobook version, though I don't remember much about the narrator, which is probably a good sign.  If I still remembered something about it, it would likely be because I'd found it irritating (like the childlike French accent used for one of the characters in the audiobook I listened to before this one).

I think the book was interesting, though infuriating at times.  I don't think I saw the main twist coming... But I do remember that a few things at the end don't seem to add up to me, straining my ability to suspend disbelief.  And the very ending is just a bridge too far.  What is that even supposed to mean?  

It was fine, for a mindless thriller.  Just don't expect a masterpiece.  (That's true for most of them, to be honest.)

The Paris Apartment

The Paris Apartment

by Lucy Foley

Blurb:

Jess needs a fresh start. She’s broke and alone, and she’s just left her job under less than ideal circumstances. Her half-brother Ben didn’t sound thrilled when she asked if she could crash with him for a bit, but he didn’t say no, and surely everything will look better from Paris. Only when she shows up – to find a very nice apartment, could Ben really have afforded this? – he’s not there.

The longer Ben stays missing, the more Jess starts to dig into her brother’s situation, and the more questions she has. Ben’s neighbors are an eclectic bunch, and not particularly friendly. Jess may have come to Paris to escape her past, but it’s starting to look like it’s Ben’s future that’s in question.

The socialite – The nice guy – The alcoholic – The girl on the verge – The concierge

Everyone's a neighbor. Everyone's a suspect. And everyone knows something they’re not telling.

My Reaction:

(I listened to the audiobook version of this novel.)

This took a while to really get going.  I think the constant shift among different points of view, and at least a few of them with accents that blurred together at first, didn't help.  It took me a while to recognize the names and voices/accents.  Then the story was just kind of treading water for chapter after chapter.  

Once it finally got going, it wasn't bad, but some of the bigger "twists" were predictable—possibly unavoidable when you've read or listened to this many examples of the genre.  

Also, I know you're not supposed to expect/require likeable characters, but it's not always easy to care what happens to characters you don't like. There are a couple of okay-ish people in this mix, but none of them are particularly easy to love. I just felt very "meh" about this collection of characters, and I got very tired of listening to Mimi's baby voice and intonations.  (Sorry, but after a while she drove me nuts.)  

Still, it was something to listen to!

The Naked Clone: A Nick Nolte Mystery

The Naked Clone: A Nick Nolte Mystery

by Conor Lastowka, Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Sean Thomason

Blurb:

This hilarious mystery was written serially by the minds behind RiffTrax, with each writer picking up where the last left off.

There’s trouble in Hollywood.

Big surprise, Sheepdip, there’s always trouble in Hollywood. But for Yours Truly, Nick Nolte, private dick, actor, entrepreneur, collector of exotic and often dangerous commodities, and People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (1992), Hollywood is a filthy, decaying, half-empty swimming pool, and I’m gonna dive in head-first.

Someone’s kidnapping Hollywood bigwigs? Hell, I wish I’d thought of it first. Clones runnin’ amok from Pismo to Tijuana? Sounds like fun, hand me a gun. A dame in distress willing to hire me for a sack a’ quarters? I’m in. I’ll even put on my best shirt for the job, which is easy, ’cause it’s my only shirt. A diabolical plot to mess with the space-time continuum and take over Tinseltown, maybe the whole damn world? I’m on the case. I might get distracted, or black out a few times, or both, but I won’t stop till I bring in these evil peckerknobs and win the heart of the femme fatale…

…Sorry, blacked out there for a minute. Maybe an hour. Maybe a day—look, who’s counting?

So strap in, Shortpants, it’ll be one full-throttle, mind-twisting, weirdass ride, and I got the wheel. Just hand me that bag a’ pills and that can a’ Sterno and try not to scream so damn much.

—Your Pal,

Nick

My Reaction:

(Donald and I read this together to fill in gaps between 372-Pages podcast episodes.)

This is one crazy ride.  I can recommend it for hardcore Rifftrax fans, but if someone unfamiliar with Rifftrax were to read it, they'd be baffled.  Considering that it wasn't really planned out like a normal novel—and that it was passed along from author to author, chapter by chapter, I don't think it would be fair to critique the plot as I would with a typical book.  There were some laugh-out-loud moments, and I think that's the most you can ask of something that's essentially a strange writing experiment.

I do wish there were some sort of key or something at the end to indicate which person wrote which chapters.  We speculated about that as we read and would've been interested to check the accuracy of our guesses.

"The Thing in the Hall"

"The Thing in the Hall"

by E.F. Benson

Synopsis:

A man invites an unknown spirit into his home.  This proves to have been unwise.

My Reaction (with SPOILERS):

I don't have much to say about this one.  It has some gruesome and creepy elements, but I didn't find it particularly effective, overall.  Not destined to be a favorite, I'm afraid.  The main thing that stuck out in this one, for me, was the fact that cheating at cards is presented as roughly the equivalent of torturing one's own pet to death.  Both are described as "depravity", but needlessly, intentionally hurting an animal (especially one you've agreed to protect and care for) is several orders of magnitude worse than card sharping, in my opinion.  The two aren't even comparable.  I've observed this attitude in books before: In the past, at least in certain circles, cheating at cards was seemingly a much bigger deal than it seems to me.  Not that I condone cheating, of course, but it simply doesn't feel deserving of quite the level of gravity that some authors grant it. 

That my main focus from this story was this should tell you that the rest of it fell a bit flat for me.  There are some things going for it, but they are undercut by the same pseudo-scientific approach and strange pacing that plague many of these stories (from what I can recall of the ones I read years ago).  There are moments of horror and eeriness, but sometimes they're buried under too much "evidence".  Does the author think we can so quickly forget that these are fictional short stories?  Frankly, I'm not interested in made-up science or "proof", because—how can I put this politely?—I know you just made it up.  Trying to dress it up as scientifically documented truth is pointless.  Just make it feel creepy!  To be fair, Benson is doing essentially the same thing as M.R. James and many other successful "ghost story" writers, framing his tales in realism and attempting to lend them a sense of verisimilitude, but maybe he's just not as good at it.  Some of his horror tales are lacking in a sufficiently haunting atmosphere and instead have an almost clinical feel.  

And...that's it!  That was the last story in the collection of E.F. Benson's short horror fiction!

This was a bit of a weak note to end on, but I'm glad to have finally finished this collection of short stories so I can scratch it off the list once and for all.  I can't believe it was sitting neglected on my Kindle all this time with only two stories left to read!  

It's been so long since I read the bulk of the stories that I no longer recall much about the individual tales.  My opinion is that Benson is a much better satirist / humorist than writer of horror, but that's not to say that his eerie stories aren't worth reading (and some might be worth a re-read, at some point).  However, I suspect most of them may be a little too dry to appeal to the casual modern reader; they're better suited to people who appreciate a more old-fashioned writing style.

"Inscrutable Decrees"

"Inscrutable Decrees"

by E.F. Benson

Synopsis:

An unnamed narrator stumbles upon the death notice of a remarkable woman he once knew.  He then shares his memories of the woman, followed by a discussion with an old friend, which reveals the solution to a macabre puzzle.  

My Reaction (with possible SPOILERS:

I can no longer recall if I stopped writing reviews for individual stories in this collection of E.F. Benson's short stories that I have... I know I stopped reading, years ago, but am uncertain of whether or not there may have been a backlog of stories I had read but not reviewed.  At this point, I suppose it doesn't matter.  I thought I might try to finish the collection, so I'm picking up where I left off with reading (if not reviewing).  

I found the beginning of the story was actually more amusing than horrifying, which reminded me that it may be time to revisit the Lucia series again.  As for this story, it was merely okay.  There's some vague creepiness, but you see the culmination coming from a mile away, so there's no element of surprise, and if anything, I thought the crime committed was milder than expected.  The ghostly element undercuts the horror, I think.  I'm not big on stories with seances that reveal visible ghosts, and... well, spoiler alert, I guess!  There's a visible ghost called forth by a seance.  Not the best of his work, but the central character herself is an interesting one for an armchair criminological psychologist to ponder.  

Bitter Sun

Bitter Sun

by Beth Lewis

Blurb:

"Stand by Me" meets "True Detective" in this stunningly written tale of the darkness at the heart of a small mid-Western town and the four kids who uncover it. In the heatwave summer of 1971, four kids find a body by a lake and set out to solve a murder, but they dig too deep and ask too many questions. Larson is a town reeling in the wake of the Vietnam draft, where the unrelenting heat ruins the harvest, and the people teeter on the edge of ruin. As tension and paranoia run rife, rumors become fact, violence becomes reflex. The unrest allows the dark elements of the close-knit farming community to rise and take control, and John, Jenny, Gloria, and Rudy are about to discover that sometimes secrets are best left uncovered.

My Reaction:

DNF one-third of the way through the book.  

This book—or as much of it as I read, since I abandoned it after reading the first third—was such a disappointment!  I enjoyed The Wolf Road, the author's first published novel, and had high hopes for this one.  When I finally had a chance to read it, I jumped right in, but almost immediately it just wasn't working for me.  I think I gave it a fair chance, but instead of improving it was starting to seriously annoy me.  It's time to set this one aside and move on to something else.  I'm still interested in trying another of this author's books, in the hopes that they're more like her first work and less like... this.

So, what didn't I love about this? 

• Set in the United States, yet too often the characters use British words and turns of phrase that simply don't feel authentic to me.  I could overlook this in a more compelling read, but on top of everything else, it was grating.  
• I could have done without some of the tangents (commentary on the Vietnam War, for instance).  Maybe they're supposed to set the scene and paint a picture of the time, but I didn't like them, and in a slow-paced book, the last thing we needed was more blah-blah-blah that didn't advance the plot. 
• I couldn't believe half the things that happened (and that was just in the first third of the book).  Bizarre things, and way too many of them.  No, I don't think this is a fair portrayal of small-town America in the 1970s (or ever), and that annoys me (as someone from small-town America). 
• Gosh, these characters!  There's hardly a decent person in the book. Even the kids were utterly blah.  Everyone feels like such a cardboard cut-out cliche.  There's no joy in reading about these characters.  
• I need a plot that actually moves at something above a snail's pace.
• There are a LOT of "bad guy" characters in this book, and according to their descriptions, they're all absolutely disgusting.  (Quite a few of the baddies seem to be fat, too, by some strange "coincidence"...)

I skimmed some reviews to try to at least see what happens in the end, but I'm still not sure what (if anything) is the solution to the mystery.  What little I did gather about the conclusion is even darker than I was expecting, so I don't think I missed much.  Maybe I'll skip to the end and see if I can learn more, but I doubt it's worth the effort.  The impression I get is that it's not a particularly satisfying conclusion, even for those who like the book.  

I'm just glad to put this in the rearview mirror and try to find something that doesn't make me angry every time I read it!

Doggone Christmas

Doggone Christmas (Polly Parrett Petsitter #1)

by Liz Dodwell

Blurb:

Polly is juggling the care of her wheelchair-bound mother, her pet-sitting business and the sale of the family home. On top of that she finds herself having to deal with an arrogant but really sexy realtor, and Christmas is coming! None of that seems important, though, when she finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation and must find the real killer before an innocent homeless man and his dog are wrongly convicted.

My Reaction:

Donald and I needed something to fill the gap between 372-Pages books, and it was still in the Christmas-y time of year, so we decided to read another "Christmas cozy" from the podcast's shortlist of cozy mysteries.  We went through the ones not selected this time around and chose one that was available to us for free.  

Well, all I can say is that I think it's a good thing they chose the book they did instead of this one.  I'm sure they could have found things to talk about, but this felt much more like a standard cozy mystery to both of us, compared to the one they ended up choosing.  It's very much what you expect from a cozy mystery.

I've forgotten most of the things that stuck out, but I do recall deciding that the author must be British, because a few words/turns of phrase stuck out to us as not sounding authentically American—someone was described as being "in hospital", for instance.  Just a point of interest!

The Pesthouse

The Pesthouse

by Jim Crace

Blurb:

Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. The machines have stopped. The government has collapsed. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope passage on a ship to Europe.

Franklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Confronted by bandits rounding up men for slavery, finding refuge in the Ark, a religious community that makes bizarre demands on those they shelter, Franklin and Margaret find their wariness of each other replaced by deep trust and an intimacy neither one has ever experienced before.

My Reaction:

It took a little time to get into the flow of the language with this one, and even once I did, I had some issues with the pacing, but on the whole, I found this an interesting tale.  I appreciated that it wasn't remotely as gratuitously dark as so much post-apocalyptic fiction tends to be; that made for a nice change.  

There's a lot I still don't understand about the world the author built in this book.  Why have people forgotten so much about their history, for instance, while they've managed to hold on to other things (like the traditional, Founding-Father names)?  

Anyway, I find I don't have much to say about this, now that I'm done with it.  It's different... If you don't mind a meandering pace and feel intrigued by a future civilization that feels more like a medieval/Old West mash-up than The Jetsons, this is for you.  Ah, just be forewarned that it's a post-apocalyptic romance, minus much of what you usually find in a romance!  (It's an odd book.)