Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This is a short, funny, inoffensive novel by one of the biggest bestsellers in SF today: it does everything it sets out to do, does that well, and has delighted the author's many fans in the year since it was published. It's light SF adventure, humorous division, of the "what if <insert standard media trope> was actually real, and a normal guy fell into that world?" type.

I intermittently read books like this - just days before it, I hit Tom Holt's Barking, which is a fantasy version of exactly the same thing - and I struggle to say anything interesting about them. I find myself dragged between the opposite poles of pointing out how silly and referential those books are - which is the point of the exercise, and I know that - and just pointing and saying "if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like," which is deeply unhelpful.

Anyway: Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. It's got a cat on the cover! Cats are important in the book as well, in what I don't actually think was a cynical play for the famously cat-loving SF audience.

Charlie Fitzer is the usual protagonist for novels like this: early thirties, with one career (business journalism) and one marriage (heterosexual, of course) in ruins behind him, living somewhere comfortable that might not be good for him (his childhood home in Barrington, Illinois, after the death of his father), stuck and sad-sack and beaten down by the world. He wants to buy the local pub, as a random next thing to do in his life, but it costs over three million dollars and his only major asset is one-quarter of the house he's living in and not consistently paying his bills for. So the local bank is friendly but not particularly encouraging.

But his uncle Jake Baldwin - only sibling of his mother, who died when he was five - his just died. Uncle Jake, as far as the world knows, owned a large collection of parking garages across the Midwest, and was considered to be a billionaire. (Charlie, since he is a Nice Guy - or maybe just dense - doesn't immediately think, "Hey, I'm possibly the only living relative of a dead billionaire, so there's probably a way I can pry at least some cash loose from his estate, and I might even be an, or even the, heir.")

Luckily, Charlie doesn't have to do anything to chase that estate - because he's not the kind of guy who ever would. Uncle Jake has actually already left something to Charlie, and it turns out to be bigger and messier than "to my darling nephew, I leave the Dyna-Top Parking Complex of Boise and all its revenues," which is what a slightly smarter Charlie might have anticipated.

Uncle Jake, as the title of this novel implies, was a supervillain. Volcano lair in the Caribbean, giant satellite-killing lasers, intelligent spy cats, private bank stuffed with trillions, fiendish plots worldwide - that whole deal. And Charlie - this is before he learns the supervillain thing; I'm condensing for simplicity - is asked to run his funeral in Barrington. Charlie does, and sees a large number of clearly minion-coded thugs arrive, not actually mourn the deceased, and make sure Jake is actually dead. Charlie has to stop one of them from stabbing the corpse, actually, in the first of several very important random events in the novel, all arising from Charlie's immediate reactions to unexpected, usually violent, situations.

(The moral of Starter Villain, if I may be so bold, is "Good Guys will do the right thing automatically, and will be rewarded for it." It's downright medieval when you think about it.)

So Charlie learns about the supervillain thing, is whisked off to the secret lair, gets a whirlwind tour of same and a quick precis of Uncle Jake's vast shadowy holdings and business interests, and then jets off to a conclave of supervillains at a fancy Italian resort. (This is a short, zippy novel full of quips - the plot has to happen at speed, and it does.)

Things escalate from there, as they must, but Charlie several times instinctively does the Right Thing when confronted with sudden violence or other surprises - the Right Thing as defined by Scalzi, of course, being generally nice and positive and pro-humanity, including caring for cats and being in favor of union organizing - which means he is victorious in the end, almost in spite of himself.

I won't spoil that ending, but I will note that I don't expect any direct sequels, which is mildly disappointing. Scalzi set up a world that he could have spun out for more than one book if he wanted to, and then basically blew it up, at least as far as Charlie goes. I also don't believe one element of the very last chapter for a second, but this is a book for cat-lovers, and they will eat that up.

So this is a fun book that does amusing things with a neat and not over-used premise; it's very good for this sort of thing. This sort of thing may seem pretty small to many readers, and it kinda is, but, at this point in my life, I don't discount the power of a funny, short book that hits exactly the goals it has for itself and entertains readers just the way it plans to. 

Better Things: Brat in the Frat

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I was a teenager in the '80s; I grew up in New Jersey; I have a sarcastic streak a mile wide. So obviously I was a fan of the Dead Milkmen.

Sure, they were uneven. Yes, they peaked early, and, like a lot of bands, the ten-year mark is the outer limits of their Good Stuff (and, yes, they kept coming back after that, not all of which I kept up with). But, at their best, they were the snottiest, funniest, punkiest band imaginable, for a particular moment and a particular time.

A lot of their stuff is still awesome forty years later: Big Lizard is almost touching, Life Is Shit actually is touching, Bitchin' Camaro is the quintessence of teen-boy-dom for my generation, Punk Rock Girl is a nearly perfect pop song, and Sri Lanka Sex Hotel a magnificent pseudo-apocalyptic vision.

But snottiness is best in small doses, so the purest Dead Milkmen songs, to me, are the short ones. Stuart can be hard to listen to these days, so I'm going with Brat in the Frat, the outsider's big two-middle-fingers-up at all the assholes in his way.

Hey!
I do not like you college brat
I do not like you and your frat
I do not like you at the shore
I do not like you drunk on Coors

I knew that guy - I hated that guy too. And the Milkmen perfectly encapsulate that youthful feeling of I don't want this; I don't like anything about this. That's what punk is for.

Quote of the Week: I Say, I Mean, I Say, What?

You can send an Englishman cryptic notes, carried by crazed ex-dentists. You can lure him to inexplicable trysts and stand him up. You can shoot at him with silencers and silver bullets. Waste of time, if you're hoping to shattered his imperturbable Saxon calm. The only way you'll achieve that is to try and stick him for six pounds seventy-nine for a coffee, a sausage roll and a slice of caramel shortbread.

 - Tom Holt, Barking, p.221 

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I may be running out of new things to say about the Scot Pilgrim saga with this, the penultimate book.

But it does give me the chance to use one of my favorite words - penultimate, which is almost as good as the sublime "antepenultimate," a wonderfully precise word that is useful almost exactly never. But I see I'm digressing already.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe is the fifth of the six books by Bryan Lee O'Malley (which I read in the slightly newer edition colored by Nathan Fairbairn), in which Scott battles the twins Kyle and Ken Katayanagi, as he comes closer to the end of his not-all-that-new-at-this-point girlfriend Ramona Flowers' trail of evil exes.

(One bit of dialogue in this book reminded me of something I'd forgotten - these are Ramona's evil exes, not all of her exes. She dated other people who were not evil. And, presumably, when starting a new relationship in this world, if your new love dated five or six people before you, but they were all, say, Chaotic Good or True Neutral, you wouldn't have to fight any of them.)

The big parallel here between Ramona and Scott - I won't say there's one central parallel in each book, since I don't want to dig to prove that right now, but I'm thinking it pretty strongly - is the double-timing thing. Scott famously started the series dating the teenager Knives Chau, and, when Ramona finally confronts him on that in this book, he notes that he never cheated on her; he cheated on Knives with her. (Which is about as reassuring and adult as you might expect.) And Ramona, as we learn this time out, was dating Kyle and Ken simultaneously but secretly.

So maybe, to pull the threads together, we're all evil exes in our breakups, since we all did shitty things to our partners. Well, when we're in our early twenties and thoughtless, like Scott. I'd like to hope not everyone is a Scott Pilgrim, and possibly even that Scott himself can and will grow out of this phase of life.

Anyway, Kyle and Ken come to town, they challenge Scott, and they send ever-larger robots to fight him, mostly during parties. Meanwhile, the Scott/Ramona relationship is hitting a particularly bumpy patch, over the two-timing thing, which leads to first Ramona kicking Scott out of their apartment and then her disappearing entirely. In other news, the recording sessions are finally over, and Sex Bob-Omb's record is being mixed or something, and might eventually see the light of day.

Of course Scott eventually defeats Kyle and Ken - if he didn't, we wouldn't get to the sixth book - but that doesn't make everything all right, and it doesn't bring Ramona back. If we know the Hero's Journey, we expect this: the lowest point, when everything is lost and the loved one in the hands of evil, is right before the big final confrontation.

That will be the sixth book, which I'll re-read in another month or so. This one ends on something of a cliffhanger, but that's pretty common for penultimate books. You should expect it by now.

(Oh, and here are links to my posts on the first four books, which I didn't mention above: Precious Little Life, Vs. the World, The Infinite Sadness, and Gets It Together.)

The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke

No one should be surprised: this is a small book, only sixty pages long in a small format with printed boards, like a thousand other small books that sit next to the cash register and promise to be entertaining but not take much of the reader's time. And it does say "a short story" on the cover.

But so many people first encounter books electronically these days. Even if they're getting a physical book to read, they find it on a website and order it to be shipped. As I've said before, online every book is exactly the same size. (They aren't, but taking note of the difference is a knack most people either don't have at all or don't bother to use.)

So plenty of people have been surprised, that a short story - originally written for a BBC Christmas radio broadcast two years ago - is short. They might even be doubly surprised that the last nine pages are an afterword from author Susanna Clarke, meaning the actual story is even shorter than the book that contains it.

The Wood at Midwinter, according to that afterword, is set in the same world as Clarke's big debut novel Jonathan Strange &Mr Norrell. There's nothing in the story itself to prove that, but if the author says so, we have to believe it.

It's the 18th or 19th century, probably - two young sisters are riding in a horse-drawn carriage, in the woods near the city they live in, as the story opens. The sensible one is Ysolde Scot; her sister is Merowdis. (And I think I would be very difficult if the world had saddled me with a name like Merowdis, frankly.)

Merowdis has visions; she doesn't perceive the world like most people and has trouble fitting into society. In a modern context, we'd call her neurodiverse. In this world, there may be a supernatural explanation. She has few life-options in the world she lives in, and none of them appeal: she wants to spend her time with her animals (who talk to her) in the woods. Her sister calls her a saint, and the narrative (and Clarke's afterword) generally agree - or, to be more specific, think that saints are people who don't fit into society, are possibly neurodiverse, and see visions.

She has a dream: she wants a child. But not a human child, and not one, we think, born of her body. She has a vision of the child she will hold one day, in this story. It's so short I won't tell you any details. The actual child is in the future, beyond the story. The story is about learning it will happen, about wanting it and realizing this is a true vision.

Again, this is a short story published as a book. More than that, it's a heavily illustrated short story - the forty-four small pages that contain the story also contain art by Victoria Sawdon, and the art is dominant on many of the pages. (At times, it resembles a picture-book in format.)

It has chilly Clarke prose, a spikily intriguing character in Merowdis, fine atmospheric art by Sawdon, and a seasonally-appropriate mood (I read it on December 29th). As long as you're clear about the size of the whole package, it's a fine little thing.

Bigby Bear, Vol.3: The Explorer by Pilippe Coudray

The subtitle explains it: these single-pagers take Bigby, and occasionally his friends as well, off to further-flung regions than their usual mountains and forests.

As far as I can tell, creator Philippe Coudray has been telling stories about this bear for some time - he's called Barnabé in French, and some of his stories were translated as "Benjamin" a few years back by First Second. These three books from Humanoids - I've already covered Vol. 1 and For All Seasons - may collect some of the same material as the First Second volumes, or may be entirely separate. But, either way, this is a world Coudray has returned to over a period of time: this book lists original copyright dates of 2012-2019, and was published in English (translated by Miceal Beausang-O'Griafa) in 2020.

That gets me to Bigby Bear, Vol. 3: The Explorer. It contains ninety-nine single-page stories about Bigby, often featuring Rabbit, who I guess we call his best friend. There are other rabbits, small bears, and other creatures, too: Bigby has a fish and a bird (non-talking, most of the time) as pets who are part of some gags. Bigby's explorations include space, in rocketships sometimes shiny and modern and sometimes rustic and handmade, so there are aliens a few times as well. Oh, and a Yeti. And even a few humans, just in case we thought we had a good sense of how this world works.

I should say that Coudray clearly made these stories originally for younger readers. They're inventive and fun, with a delight in reversals and transformations, often wordless and never very wordy - though Coudray, or maybe Beausang-O'Griafa, doesn't avoid longer, more complex words and ideas; I just flipped randomly to one about an Electroencephalograph. There's also a vague sense of education or learning - the smaller creatures look to Bigby to explain things to them, and he's spending a lot of this particular volume going to new places, in space or under the ocean or just further away than normal.

Coudray has a confident, simple cartooning line, with medium-bright, high-contrast colors - it's not a hugely cartoony world, but it is a somewhat cartoony one, clearly a bit simplified from a realistic view. And his pages here are quirky and interesting - pitched at a younger audience, definitely, but not talking down to them or limited to them. This is an amusing series, on a light, accessible level, full of mild but thoughtful gags and a anything-is-possible attitude.

Barking by Tom Holt

This is a very random Tom Holt book: he's done one something like this pretty much every year for the past forty, and this is the one from 2007. I came to it because I found it randomly and cheaply a few months ago, and I'd read his When It's a Jar equally randomly early in 2024 and liked it.

Barking is...just fine. I found it somewhat less interesting than Jar, though it's a perfectly cromulent humorous fantasy that does everything it needs to do and tells a pleasant story well. I may need to check to see which Holt books are generally considered best and read those first: anyone who does so many books in the same genre is going to have a lot at about the same level of ambition and a few above or below that.

(I might have been hoping for more, since the books by Holt's alter ego, K.J. Parker, have all - at least the ones I've read - been spiky, interesting, smart things. But Holt is much more crowd-pleasing than Parker is, and I get the sense that his books have, not so much a formula, but maybe a recipe to make sure they have the things his audience wants.)

Anyway, Barking is about a lawyer named Duncan Hughes. He works at a horrible London firm doing tedious work, and is what I think is the usual early-thirties sad-sack Holt protagonist, with a failed marriage behind him and nothing whatsoever interesting in his life. But he lives in a Tom Holt world, so he's thrown into supernatural doings.

His old pack of schoolmates have formed a highly successful firm, and their leader, Luke Ferris, is suddenly trying to recruit him, really hard.

I don't want to say all of Holt's books get schematic, but this one definitely does. You see, both werewolves and vampires are real, and both of them run law firms. As far as we see, the werewolves are all men and the vampires are all women, and they are mortal enemies in a very British, fair-play kind of way, not so much trying to kill each other (both groups are very very very resistant to harm) as trying to get one over on the others. Oddly, this doesn't seem to come out in legal ways - Holt doesn't talk about major litigation or complex M&A work to confound the other side.

(Holt himself was a lawyer in Somerset. I don't want to cast aspersions on his knowledge of the field he worked in in his own country, but none of these big high-powered London law firms feel big or high-powered; they seem to be organized like a minor city's second-tier solicitors, and do that kind of work. And none of the lawyers seem to actually be experts in their practice areas the way I'd expect.)

So the werewolves/men are eternally feuding with vampires/women - we also learn that there are other packs of werewolves (one is made up of dentists, so maybe it's just these two firms of lawyers? There's a lot that's vague and half-explained in this world, to keep it light and amusing.) Holt is otherwise resolutely heterosexual here - there's not an inkling that all these furry men who spend all day every day with each other, bonding and running in the woods and doing all sorts of physical activity together, are more than just mates. Although...Luke does very very strongly warn Duncan away from "their sort," and that seems to mean women as much as it does vampires, inasmuch as the book makes any distinction between the two, which is not a whole lot.

There are further complications, of course. But that's the beginning: Duncan becomes a werewolf, becomes a partner in a better firm, turns into a dog in the moonlight to chase foxes with his pack, is warned to avoid vampires because they have cooties, that sort of thing.

He of course has A Destiny because he Is Special. There is a unicorn that signposts this and keeps showing up throughout the novel, which leads into the main plot, which I won't go into great detail about. Of course Duncan wins free in the end, conquers all enemies, and wins the appropriate gorgeous female (who otherwise barely shows up in the book and doesn't have an appreciable personality) as his trophy.

Again, I found this pleasant and entertaining but also facile and obvious. And these lawyers are working at a much lower, duller level than I expected, from doing marketing to actual high-powered lawyers for the past decade. So I may be back for more Tom Holt, but I expect to be substantially pickier the next time.

Better Things: I Want Everything

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

Some songs are koans, statements, mileposts. They say what they say in a way you immediately agree with, and take to heart, moving around furniture in your head to make room for them, so they can sit in the place they should always have been.

This is one of those songs for me: I Want Everything by Cracker.

The verses are allusive - I don't know what they mean. The singer is somewhere, thinking about someone. And "someone" is a huge question mark - it could be another person, personified nature, a god, nearly anything at all.

But the refrain is what matters most: that title, over and over. In a voice that doesn't demand, doesn't implore, doesn't whine. It just states: this is what it is, this is what I want, this is where I am.

I want everything

He's singing to someone; he's saying this clearly, powerfully, as directly as he can. Again, it depends on who you think he's singing to what it all means - what kind of everything it means he wants - but it works, no matter who you think it is. No matter how much everything includes or doesn't.

And I agree. I want everything. Not to take from anyone else. Not exclusively. Not in any negative way. Just in that sense of openness, of being part of the world: all of it, here and now and later and forever.

I want everything

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 15, 2025

One book to write about this week, in the middle of cold, snowy February - it's been snowing, where I live, every second or third day for the past couple of weeks. It hasn't been adding up to much - slush and freezing rain and sleet and the occasional nice fluffy snow that almost immediately crusts up into gleaming ice - but it's been coming down from grey skies and keeping everything wet and slick and unpleasant. So why not stay inside and read books?

Jules, Penny, and the Rooster is a new book from Daniel Pinkwater, from Tachyon. They've published his last couple of novels - Adventures of a Dwergish Girl and Crazy in Poughkeepsie, both excellent - and it is wonderful to see a somewhat regular publication schedule from Pinkwater these days.

(My personal theory - based on nothing but his publication dates and a long-running love for his books - is that Pinkwater is just too weird for most publishing companies to be comfortable with in the long run. So they do a three-book deal, or something, and then run back to boring books about kids who eat their Wheaties and have some kind of trendy Problems to entice the award-givers once they realize just how individual and wonderful Pinkwater's work is.)

(It's not what you might call a well-developed theory.)

Anyway - new Pinkwater book!

Jules is a middle-school girl, who has been promised by her parents ("My father has an excellent job in the deluxe shoelace industry, and my mother is a house plant psychiatrist[.]") that they would get a job once the family moved out of an apartment to a house where dogs were allowed.

You guessed it: they have made that move, and still no dog. Jules is somewhat peeved.

So she enters a newspaper contest: the best letter will win a purebred collie dog. As I understand it, she wins the contest, names the dog Penny...and then, when the two start exploring the neighborhood together, they discover the usual Pinkwaterian weirdness happening on the other side of an old stone wall.

It's being published March 11th, and I doubt I'll manage to wait that long to read it. Consider that a recommendation.

Quote of the Week: No Aspersions Meant to My Fine Colleagues at Work

Miss Huskisson, like so many of the female denizens of the Middle West, was tall and blonde and constructed on substantial lines. She was a girl whose appearance suggested the old homestead and fried pancakes and pop coming home to dinner after the morning's ploughing. Even her bobbed hair did not altogether destroy this impression. She looked big and strong and healthy, and her lungs were obviously good. She attacked the verse of the song with something of the vigor and breadth of treatment which in other days she had reasoned with refractory mules. Her diction was the diction of one trained to call the cattle home in the teeth of Western hurricanes. Whether you wanted to or not, you heard every word.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie, p. 253

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 5: The Happy Prince by P. Craig Russell

This is the end of the series - Wilde wrote nine fairy tales and Russell adapted eight of them into comics format between 1992 and 2012, and it doesn't look like he's going to go back to do "The Fisherman and His Soul" at this point.

I made a little project of reading all of them this year (I'm writing this at the tail end of 2024) - The Selfish Giant/The Star Child, The Young King/The Remarkable Rocket, The Birthday of the Infanta, and The Devoted Friend/The Nightingale and the Rose.

So now I've come to The Happy Prince, the fifth and final volume. The prose is just as deliberately didactic, as let-me-tell-you-a-story-young-lad, as the previous tales, with that jeweled Wilde prose that comes right up to the line of being too ornate but veers back at the last minute. And Russell still uses great wodges of Wilde prose, as he tends to do in all of his adaptations: Russell, I think, adapts things where he loves the words and not just the underlying story, so he wants to keep the words as much as possible.

The Happy Prince himself is a statue, on a tall column in the center of some unspecified town in Europe. It may be the "now" when Wilde wrote the story in the late 19th century, or a century or three earlier; in the usual fairy-tale fashion, a lot is vague. The Prince was once a living person, but he died young and now his soul inhabits the statue, for unspecified reasons but presumably so Wilde can have a plot.

The other main character is a swallow, a migratory bird that is tarrying in this city on the verge of winter for no good reason - he should be going on to Egypt to join his fellows, but was dallying with a reed in a river somewhere. (No, literally, he was flirting, over the course of weeks, with what seems to be one of the few non-sapient entities in a Wilde fairy tale, which is some kind of achievement, though not one speaking to his intelligence or discernment.) Anyway, the swallow swoops into town, perches on the statue, and meets the Prince.

The Prince is sad.

He is sad because some people are poor and other people are rich, mostly. So he induces the bird to take his valuables - first the ruby in the pommel of his sword, then his sapphire eyes, and finally the gilding covering the statue - and give those to specific, deserving poor people so that their lives can be better.

This delays the swallow long enough that he's killed by the frost, and makes the statue shabby enough that it's removed by the authorities and melted down. But both of them ascend to heaven immediately, on the direct orders of God. Yay!

It is just as didactic and middle-Church as the previous stories, as expected. These were improving stories for boys (and maybe girls, though Wilde didn't care much for girls) in the 1880s and 90s, and will always be that, no matter how many years later it now is. If you're in the mood for Victorian improving stories with Wildean prose and Russell art - both of which are gorgeous - there are five books available.

Trese, Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight by Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo

I think there's more to this story, that hasn't made it to my side of the Pacific yet. But that's nothing new for Trese - I said the same after the first three books, in 2010, when none of them had been published in the US yet. So I can wait, and maybe not expect, but anticipate and hope, to see an eventual seventh volume.

Trese, the series, is about a supernatural investigator: a young woman named Alexandra Trese, from a family intimately connected with the supernatural for generations. So far, so similar to a flood of contemporary fantasy starting in the '90s and plenty of "romantasy" today. But she lives in Manila, and the supernatural world she knows is particular and specific to the Philippines - and so strange and distinct and more fantastic to those of us from other places.

From the beginning, writer Budjette Tan used entirely local monsters and powers: these books, as published in the US by Ablaze, have short text features after each issue-length story to each explain one supernatural race or personage. He also made sure never to explain more than he had to, and kept a noir-ish tone to the proceedings, very appropriate for a place like Manila, a big city full of money and business and corruption and dark history.

And artist KaJo Baldisimo was also wonderful from the beginning, delivering gloriously inky pages of violence and terror and wonder and surprise, lovingly textured and filled with unique faces and (if I may use a cliché) even more unique monsters.

High Tide at Midnight is the sixth collection: there's a 2014 afterword from Tan, but this US edition was published in September of 2023. (Which is what makes me think there are more stories out there, from the past decade.) It picks up on major story threads from the fifth volume, Midnight Tribunal, [1] particularly the figure of The Madame - who is this fantasy world's version of a person many readers will recognize from the real world - and tells one long story in multiple parts, during a particularly devastating typhoon that hits and floods Manila.

In our world, a big storm is a force of nature. In Trese's world, there are powers that control storms - control water, control air, control fire, and so on. So a gigantic storm doesn't just happen: someone made it, for a purpose. And someone is taking advantage of it.

I shouldn't say much more than that. The Madame does get involved. There is a plot by supernatural entities to get more power. There's a new drug that effects supernatural beings in frightening, dangerous ways. Some of the supernatural creatures are very eager to kill humans, as often happens in stories like this. And Alexandra Trese can't handle this massive danger alone. Good thing she has four brothers and other allies - before this book is over, a larger group of Philippine supernatural protectors comes together, some people we've seen before in this series, some new, and go into a massive battle.

This is the biggest Trese story yet, and the series title is even more true: this is not just the story of Alexandra Trese, but of her family as a whole, all of them engaged in the family business, navigating the murky, turbulent waters between the human and supernatural worlds of the Philippines.

I wouldn't jump into the series here, but I do recommend getting here. Start with the first book, and know there's at least this much more waiting for you.

[1] Also see my posts on the earlier books: one, two, three, four.

Schtick Figures by Drew Friedman

Drew Friedman might have run out of themes for his big books of warts-and-all portraits. I say that because this, his most recent book, declares itself to contain "over 150 comedians, writers, humorists, musicians, actors, journalists, cartoonists, illustrators, editors, publishers, one art gallery owner, one magician, one photographer, two wrestlers, and one movie memorabilia store owner."

If that sounds like a coherent theme, I'll eat my hat. And I don't own a hat.

On the other hand, "Drew Friedman portraits" is arguably enough of a theme in the first place, and this book has, as mentioned, over 150 of them. They are miscellaneous, they are arranged in (mostly) alphabetical order, and they are glorious in their fleshy magnificence.

Schtick Figures came out this past summer, from Friedman's long-time publisher Fantagraphics, and I suspect it is the book that collects everything else he's done over the past decade or so - that it wasn't a specific project like Heroes of the Comics or Maverix and Lunatix. The pictures are presented full-page, captioned only by the name of the person - or, in a few rare cases, the project - with a section of short potted biographies at the back for those of us who don't know who (picking a few pages at random) Imogene Coca, Pigmeat Markham or Frank Kelly Freas are. (Friedman puts "Kelly" in quotes for Freas, which is weird and I think wrong, but oh well. There's also at least one entry in the bio section that doesn't have a portrait in the book, and a couple of places where the bio section is in a slightly different order than the portraits.)

The bios also contain occasional notes about the source of the image - there are a few commissions, mostly for the people pictured (which explains some of the weirder ones in the list up top), some covers for Mineshaft (whatever that is), work for Mad and The Village Voice and probably some other publications I don't recall right this second, and a few other oddities. Most are uncredited, which could mean Friedman has forgotten or wants to forget where they came from, that he doesn't have to mention original publication for those, that he drew them for this book, or that they came to him in a vision from the Man in the Moon.

Whatever: 150 Drew Friedman pictures. Mostly of people you will recognize, if you know who Drew Friedman is and have a passing acquaintance with 20th century pop culture. (Especially the odder, horror- and humor-tinged sides of it.) This book is a good thing, and it's fun to poke through. I may wish Friedman was still doing comics rather than single images - as I lamented when I wrote about his book The Fun Never Stops! some years back - but it's better for his health and bank account and probably life in general, so I can't kick too hard.

Indiscretions of Archie by P.G. Wodehouse

I still have a dozen or so Wodehouse books on my shelf I haven't read - and intend to collect the thirtyish more in the Overlook series I don't own - so I think I'll keep reading them every three or four months from now until I run out. Some are surprisingly good - Piccadilly Jim, for example, was a fully-formed mature Wodehouse novel from 1917 with a great impostor plot.

Indiscretions of Archie, from the same era - originally published in 1921 - is somewhat lesser, but still amusing.

Reading it, I suspected it was originally a series of short stories, and I was right - this appeared as eleven stories in The Strand (and most of them also in Cosmopolitan - back in the days when the Atlantic was wider, writers could sell the same material on both sides of it) during 1920 and '21.

Wodehouse rewrote the whole thing somewhat to make it fit more into a novel form, but it's still exceptionally episodic. Our hero is Archie Moffam, a Great War veteran of good family and no money, who arrived in America to make his fortune and found it in Lucille Brewster, the usual beautiful young thing, who he met in Miami and married after a whirlwind courtship.

Lucille's father is Daniel Brewster, the millionaire owner and manager of the Cosmopolis hotel in New York - the self-proclaimed best hotel in town - and Daniel dislikes Archie intensely. (Archie is another one of Wodehouse's dim bulbs, unable to say anything clearly but not quite as prone to self-satisfaction and causing mayhem as Bertie Wooster.) Archie is supposedly looking for his life's work, but makes no effort at doing so at any point in the novel - the premise is not that he's trying his hand at different jobs, with humorous results, but just that he's supposed to be finding himself a career, and not just sponging off his rich father.

But he is: the stories are of Archie helping friends, getting involved in various odd Wodehousian events (there's a pie-eating contest he puts a ravenous teen boy up for, two different unsuitable theatre-connected fiancées for his brother-in-law, an old war acquaintance with amnesia, and a stint with Archie as an artist's model, among a couple of others), and usually annoying his father-in-law along the way. Most of them leave the situation at status quo ante, but, as the book gets into the back quarter, one gets a sense Wodehouse realized he needed to have something like an ending, so Archie wins the role of manager at the new hotel Daniel is building downtown.

Oh, that hotel isn't constructed before the novel is over: Archie never works a day in the book. But he has the promise of a job and a career, and, at the very end, there's also the only Wodehousian reference to a pregnancy I can remember. (It is an exceptionally circumloqutious reference - touching primarily on Daniel going to become a grandfather - and I'm not sure whether to attribute that to Wodehouse or to 1921 or both.)

So this has some amusing Wodehouse material, but it's a clump of short stories standing up in a trenchcoat and pretending to be a novel. If you know that going in, it can be quite entertaining, but don't expect anything like an overall plot.

Better Things: The Exploding People

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

When I write these posts, I need to turn off whatever music I have already playing, dig up a YouTube link for the song I'm featuring, and get myself into the right mindset.

This time, though, I already have some Cloud Cult playing - their 2022 record Metamorphosis - so I might let it run for a bit as I type here. It probably makes no difference on your end. It's not a thing you would even notice.

Cloud Cult is the most positive band I know. Even better, it's not the flabby usual American positivity, it's a tough, muscular positivity, the kind that fights through jungles to get to that point, the kind that insists that it is going to be positive, no matter what, because it has to. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

There are a few other songs I almost picked - When Water Comes To Life still strikes me as their essential song, the one about why that attitude matters and what the singer went through (and I hate to say it, but I'm slightly tearing up just thinking about that song), and 1x1x1 is compelling and stark and brilliant.

But most of my favorite songs of theirs are from their wonderful 2010 record Light Chasers, which is something like a SF concept record. (Not a whole lot like, I guess, but something like.) And, so, today, I want to feature The Exploding People.

Can't escape from yourself unless you don't run.

That's the Zen koan at the middle I keep coming back to, the triple negative. A lot of Cloud Cult is about that big question: how do you live your life? Again, it's not coming from a place of authority, but one of vulnerability, a voice saying "I keep doing this thing that hurts and I need to stop."

This is a song about death, I think.

You never see the present, cuz you're always looking back.
Or counting down the seconds to your heart attack.
Bottle it up, and the bottle goes crack.
Do what you do, cuz you can't come back.
And one by one, the people, they explode.

About death in the sense that we all will die, everyone will die, and every moment you have not dead is a moment to use, to live in, to be alive in.

All the best Cloud Cult songs are like that: muscular, energetic, complex tangles of emotion about the big things that are also the personal things, and about failure at those things more than success. About how the singer wants to live, wants to be: what he keeps telling himself in hopes he can actually get there. I appreciate that a hell of a lot. Some days I need it more than others.