Queen Demon by Martha Wells

I haven't had to tackle a classic middle-book fantasy here in a long time; let's see what I can do for you today.

Queen Demon is the second of what will be at least three books in the "Rising World" fantasy series by Martha Wells. The first book was Witch King; see that post for the political background, the various magic systems, and other details. Various reports from earlier this year say Wells has been working on a third book, under the working title Hierarch, but there's no guarantee that book would end the series. (I suppose there's also no guarantee she'll finish the book and it will be published, but she's been doing this for thirty-some years; I have faith in her story-making abilities.)

Like the first book, Queen is told in two time-frames: The Present and The Past. Both timelines follow fairly quickly from the first book; this is a roughly continuous narrative, though each book is structured to be a novel on its own, and not just a few hundred pages of middle. (I edited fantasy for a long time; I saw a lot of "books" that were just collections of middle.)

The Past is set about sixty years before, during the (eventually successful) rebellion against a world-conquering Evil Empire, of the Hierarchs and their legions. That invasion and pacification had been going for a few years, maybe a decade or more, before that point: entire regions had been devastated and entire nations killed. We're getting deeper into that war in this book, but the series, I think, still sits solidly in the small subgenre of books that mostly take place after the world-changing cataclysm happened. A lot of the present-day concerns are about those cataclysmic changes, and what they did to the people who lived through them.

Because, even though it was almost two generations ago now, our main characters are all variously immortal or very long-lived. They were among the leaders of that rebellion, under the mortal man who became the first Emperor of the Rising World Coalition (and was the top general or war leader of the rebellion), Bashasa. And their various relationships to Bashasa in the past - and, in the present, to his heir Bashat, who is not exactly an antagonist in the series but you could call him one - are central to these books as well.

Primary among those main characters is Kaiisteron, once one of a fairly large number of "demons" - members of a long-lived, body-hopping race from a parallel dimension or world - who lived in the bodies of members of the nomadic Saredi people as part of a long-term peace pact between those two people. The Saredi were one of the first nations destroyed by the Hierarchs; there are other demons left alive, but not many of them. And, even sixty years later, it seems that no mortal Saredi survived.

So the obvious comparison to Wells' popular Murderbot books is that both series are centrally about main characters deeply damaged by trauma and still living through that. Kai is less of a raw nerve than Murderbot is, but he's had sixty years to build coping mechanisms: not least his self-created magic system, which subverts the Hierarchs' incantations by powering them with his own pain. (In the books, it does not come across as the unsubtle metaphor it might seem to be when stated bluntly like that.)

Witch was about, in the past, the initial organization of the rebellion: a futile act of resistance in the Hierarchs' northern capital, the Summer Halls, that unexpectedly was vastly more successful and led to the core of this rebellion forming, destroying those Halls, and fleeing to build their forces. The present-day plot started with Kai trapped in a dead body, having been captured about a year before, and with an over-confident enemy attempting to enslave him as a familiar. He took a new body and spent the rest of the book trying to find out what happened and to free his major allies.

Queen's past sections continue the story of the war, with Bashasa's forces maneuvering to set up for an attack on a major fort at the end and encountering a group of initially-hostile Witches along the way. And the present sections start out with the aftermath of the end of the first book: offstage, a major political convention to renew the Emperorship failed, as Kai had been planning for years (and had been lightly killed largely as a counter-plot to ensure the renewal). More importantly, a scholar connected to Kai's family and friends is worried that the Hierarchs' original power Well has never been found, and that there may be enemy forces regrouping there, building strength for another attack on the Rising World.

So there's another rush to get to a faraway place - this time heading into the distant south. Queen does not have a map, though Witch did, and I'm unhappy with that. It might be because there's a long trip along a straight line down into that unknown southern continent, and Wells hasn't defined enough of the surrounding lands to have them mapped. Still, even the map from the first book would have been a help.

Wells juggles her two plots well, keeping them solidly parallel. I noted there's a point, near the end, where both timelines are basically focus on "Kai needs to go kill a Hierarch right now," which was not just technically impressive, but gripping and visceral. And she's, as always, really good at damaged people and their relationships with each other, without ever making a big deal about it. Great fantasy is always about something, with concerns that its authors want to work out on the page, ideas that need to be embodied in characters and ideas and actions. (Poor fantasy is about gathering a sufficient number of plot tokens so the characters can send away to the author for an ending.) Wells is making this series about grief and survivorship, about coping with having lost everything, about how that can still feel raw even long afterward.

And about interesting, well-developed characters fighting to save their world, too, of course. That's the other side of fantasy.

MOME, Vol. 1 edited by Gary Groth & Eric Reynolds

This is not going to be the beginning of a retrospective series. This is not going to be informed by any particular expertise. I just noticed that my library app had a weird smattering of MOME issues - 3, 5-7, 9, 10 - including the first one.

And I like reading anthologies, at least some of the time, though I often say I hate trying to write about them here. (It always brings out memories of my early SFBC days, writing readers' reports, sitting with a manuscript and a notebook to scribble down every name and place and plot detail to write a sentence or three about exactly what that story was about.) Besides, the first of a series is usually some variety of signpost or manifesto, and so worth looking at even two decades later.

So I'm happy I read it, though I might cheat you folks out of anything thoughtful or detailed here. It's been more than twenty years, and I don't know most of these creators, so what can I tell you?

Anyway, MOME, Vol. 1 was published in the summer of 2005. The series was in trade paperback format, about a hundred and thirty pages, and ran quarterly. The last issue was #22, from 2011. The book itself says it was edited by Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds, though online resources tend to credit just Reynolds. Reynolds went on to edit another anthology series for Fantagraphics, Now, which I think is still going. I'm sure there are people online with detailed, passionate opinions about the varying qualities of the two series - I am not one of those people.

The table of contents of this first MOME lists seventeen pieces by twelve creators - Martin Cendreda has four single-panel cartoons each presented on a full page, and Sophie Crumb has three stories. They're all in various indy-comics styles, and some are from people I recognize (David Heatley, Anders Nilsen) and some aren't (Andrice Arp, Jonathan Bennett).

More than one story seemed to be from a world older than 2005, but I think that's just my memory forgetting how long ago '05 was. The opening story by Gabrielle Bell, a slice-of-life piece about a woman living in a gentrifying apartment building and the only slightly-jerklike man who lives above her, felt like something from the '90s or older, with the protagonist working at a video store for $5.25 an hour. (But video stores still existed then, and that was above minimum wage in 2005. The past is always lumpier than we imagine it.)

Only Crumb really engages with the world situation - the US was at war when these stories were created - or does work that looks beyond the personal. I don't know if that was a hallmark of MOME, but this first volume feels like it wanted to follow on from the flood of '90s single-artist series, broadening out to multiple viewpoints and less of a poor-neurotic-me focus (though Jonathan Bennett's story is solidly in that vein, and Bell is at least adjacent to that world).

It's a nice package, and more diverse - in art style, in concerns, in the angles stories take - than I might be making it sound. I'm not going to read through the back issues of MOME myself - I'd need to find a copy of #2 to even start, which I don't expect to do - but if you have access to them, I think reading one or several of them could be a fun project. The world needs more comics about different things, mostly anchored in real people, and MOME at least started out to do that. (I can't speak to what it did later.)

All of This and Nothing: Radar Love

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I won't say this is the only great '70s song for a long car ride. But it's definitely up there. Some of you - especially if you're my age - might have heard it too many times already to like it anymore; that's always a danger with songs that get huge.

It's always a problem with things that other people like, frankly: they like it so much so soften so publicly that maybe you decide you don't like it as much as you thought you did.

It hasn't happened to me with Radar Love yet.

This is the Platonic song of that all-night drive, the one that turned a feeling into musical reality, the dream of endless American highways turned into a rock beat by a Dutch band. (Because we always need strangers to clearly see the things closest to us.)

I've been driving all night, my hands wet on the wheel
There's a voice in my head that drives my heel
It's my baby callin', says I need you here
And it's half past four and I'm shifting gear

It's a mostly straightforward song: the singer is driving, probably too fast, to be with his baby, with whom he shares a near-psychic connection. (There's some argument that the last verse is the aftermath of his death in a car crash; every fast-driving song contains the seeds of its own death.)

And, again, it's the song that launched a thousand speeding tickets. If I was a traffic cop, I would absolutely hate this song. Good thing I'm not.

Quote of the Week: Hot Wheels

Mostly superheroes do not need cars because of webs and powers and so on. Even the Batmobile really only made sense back when it was introduced in 1939, because only about seven people had cars then. You could park a big black car with a bat on it anywhere then. But there is no reason for the Flash to have a Flash car, unless the Flash wanted to go much slower that day, or he had a bunch of luggage to take with him while crime fighting. There is no reason that the cosmic dictator Darkseid, who can teleport across galaxies in his endless quest for the anti-life equation, also needs a sexy Dream Van XGW with a painting of himself on it to bring dates back to after the state fair closes. That said, it's pretty amazing that he does.

 - John Hodgman, Medallion Status, pp.91-92

Incognito, Book 1: Perfect Victims by Grégory Mardon

This book is supposedly the first of a series, but I can find no record of further books - and the book itself seems to be solidly self-contained. So I'll note that this is apparently first in the "Incognito" series while not being quite sure if there ever was a second.

Incognito, Book 1: Perfect Victims is a psychological story - not quite a thriller, but fairly dramatic - from French creator Grégory Mardon. It was originally published in 2005, fairly soon after his book Body and Soul (which is in a similar vein), but not translated for English-language publication until 2017 (by Joseph Laredo).

Jean-Pierre is a young man in the big city - he feels invisible, unnoticed, forgotten, completely neglected. So much so that he believes he is actually invisible, or can be at will. (We see him try to do this, but mostly in his imagination; the book doesn't really give credence to his theory.) He uses this, as far as we can see - again, we think mostly in his imagination - to peep and stalk women he finds attractive but thinks will or do completely ignore him. (This part of the set-up reminded me a lot of a movie from almost exactly the same era, Cashback.) This imagination may be more like hallucinations, possibly - it's never quite clear what is real, what is in his head, and how it comes about.

During one of these ill-advised excursions - this one actually happening in the real world, after a night of drinking with a friend - he tries to climb the side of a building to get to a woman he sees in a window, his intentions unstated. He falls; he does some serious damage to his leg; he wakes up in the hospital.

And that lets us meet the other two characters of this three-hander. He was found and brought to the hospital by Berenice, a physical therapist who lives with her wheelchair-bound brother Ambroise. Jean-Pierre will need a physical therapist, and he's attracted to Berenice, so he hires her to start therapy once he's out of his cast. Meanwhile, we see her at home with Ambroise, who is a self-loathing, and her-loathing, monster who is verbally abusive almost every moment of the day, with a sadistic sexual edge to his comments: he insists she is always having sex with multiple men, every time she leaves the apartment, and eventually demands she bring one of them home so he can watch.

And that's what plays out in the end: Jean-Pierre asks Berenice out on a date at the end of his therapy, and they go see Suspicion (I guess Rear Window would be too on-the-nose with the wheelchair-bound Ambroise), then go to a café, and then, inevitably, back to her place.

She initiates sex, and Jean-Pierre...well, goes into one of his fugues, I guess. He does not have a healthy view of women: I can say that definitively. The Ambroise plot - there's some vague talk that he may have meant to kill Berenice's sex partner - doesn't end as expected, either.

And Jean-Pierre ends the book as he began it, with a new injury - to a different part of his body (and not that one) - and wandering through the streets alone.

This is a moody, odd, quirky story, populated by obsessives. Well, the men, at least. Berenice seems to be fairly level-headed, for all the good that does. One possible moral is that "all men are crazy," which I wouldn't expect from a male creator, but it does fit. Mardon's art is similarly moody and atmospheric, though he packs a lot of fairly small panels onto his pages to get through this dialogue-filled story.

Black Arms to Hold You Up by Ben Passmore

I don't know if Ben Passmore would call himself a radical cartoonist. His semi-fictional avatar in this book is presented as the unsophisticated center, the person learning about the world - and the real-world Passmore is well-read enough to point out that there are whole vast realms of people substantially more radical than he is. Maybe he only intermittently wants to burn everything down.

But Black Arms to Hold You Up will come across as a radical book to most readers - shockingly to most white ones, probably less so to Blacks who have been paying attention. The subtitle is "A History of Black Resistance," and that's what Passmore provides here - a graphic-novel tour through roughly the last hundred and twenty-five years of Black American history, focused on the people most directly fighting against white state power.

He begins with Robert Charles in 1900 New Orleans, harassed and threatened by racist white cops until he fought back - he died in a shootout a few days later. In the depressing way of the times, Charles' actions sparked a (white) race riot that murdered at least a dozen Black New Orleanians, burned down two schools, and lasted for a couple of weeks. We can realize Charles had no choice, and that he gave as well as he could, but it was a tragedy not just for him but for probably thousands of others.

The stories are mostly like that, because history is mostly like that: from the lowest level of collateral damage, like Philando Castile, where one Black guy gets essentially murdered by a cop but no one else dies, up to a couple of pages early in the book about the late-18th century race riots that destroyed entire Black communities. (Passmore is clear on this, so let me be: when he says "race riots," he means a mob of white people destroying entire Black communities out of hatred and to reinforce their control. They were common for decades.) As the century goes on, the Black figures get better armed, more organized, and much more politically specific - this is the part, I think, that Passmore is most energized about, the Black Panthers and MOVE and a dozen other splinter groups with variously anarchist, socialist, and capitalist plans to create Black societies where their people would be safe, in the American South or Africa or wherever.

Because Passmore wants to focus on Black people, we get their version of history, of why authorities are doing what they do, and I'm afraid that tends to lean into various paranoid conspiracy-theory ideas. The Great Man school of history is never more present than in conspiracy theories; no one wants to believe that their enemies all just mostly agree with each other and hate the same things - it's much more satisfying to be the target of a vast effort to keep you down specifically.

Passmore is the (fictional) main character for this (mostly non-fictional) book. His estranged father, already radicalized, comes to Passmore in his home during the unrest after Castile's shooting, and - by hitting him on the head with a bunch of books by Black radicals (and I'm hoping we're not supposed to assume he just stole them from a local Black bookstore during the riots, but it's not clear and that was my first assumption) - sends him on a journey through all of these stories. In the end, Passmore will do the same for the reader: hit you on the head with a list of further reading.

Passmore wants to be inspiring, which is a hard lift. If you think that the theories of the Black thinkers he names - he leans heavily on Assata Shakur, who was involved in multiple murders and robberies before breaking out of jail and fleeting to Cuba, and who was (your reviewer says dryly) not generally well-loved in my home state of New Jersey before her death in Cuba last year - are plausible, then it may be more so. But the thinkers with more concrete ideas tended to call for violent revolution, which I think even Passmore knows would not go well for the revolutionaries.

The fictional Passmore starts the book basically saying "OK, people are out in the streets protesting and destroying things for a good reason, but that's dangerous, so I'm going to stay safe." I think his underlying point is that no Black person in the USA is actually "safe," no matter what. So they might as well pick up guns and go for it. That's a bit nihilistic for me, but I'm not Passmore.

Passmore also seems to note without saying out loud that leaders of organizations tend to be people who want power, maybe even more than they want to further the ends of their organizations. The smaller or more radical the organization, the more so. There's a lot of well-observed infighting that this cynical reader takes as mostly angling for control, using revolutionary talking points as useful building blocks rather than things to necessarily believe in. Passmore, though, may want to say that they - at least some of them - really believe in what they're saying, and that these are important ideological arguments.

His art is strong throughout, big pages full of darkness with strong, striking layouts. Passmore is working in a three-color palette here, black and white and red for emphasis, and he uses those pops of red almost like a drummer, to keep the beat of his violent story humming along and note all of the death and destruction along the way.

I can't entirely agree with the conclusions of Black Arms, but I'm not supposed to: Passmore didn't make this book for me or anyone like me. You may have a different opinion if you're closer to it.

Medallion Status by John Hodgman

I don't want to hit a man when he's already no longer on TV. And I found this book very entertaining, with lots of great sentences and paragraphs, so I want to think the main thrust of this post will be positive. But I have to admit that I just don't get John Hodgman's career.

I think the "I'm a PC" series of ads was his origin moment - that he fell into those, despite not being an actor or looking for TV work- though I'm pretty sure there's a deeper, more complicated story. (No one builds an entire career by accident.) That led to his work as a correspondent on The Daily Show, somehow - both of which grew out of his prior work at a literary agency, where he was avoiding doing actual writing - and then other TV gigs. [1]

Medallion Status was John Hodgman's book from 2019, specifically the follow-up to Vacationland and the story of "how he's not on TV anymore." (According to IMDB, this may be technically true: he seems to be mostly doing voice work these days, so he's not "saying lines and making faces" at other people on TV shows in recent years. But it seems to be, at the very least, disingenuous.)

The central spine of the book is Hodgman's status level with what he calls "Beloved Airlines." As usual, he presents himself as a self-centered, neurotic type, stuck in his own head and obsessive about the oddest, least useful things. And, as has been true for a lot of similar guys for at least a hundred years, that's a funny schtick - Hodgman does a good version of it, and it works well.

The one caveat I have is that this book seems to use up all of that material, which is non-optimal for someone who wants to sustain a career. But then the meta-point is that Hodgman's career is entirely random and capricious, totally out of his control, because he's not good at any of this stuff anyway.

Medallion has twenty chapters, each one basically a separate story or linked group of stories from Hodgman's being-on-TV life. Being on TV, in this case, includes The Daily Show, though he doesn't talk much about that, as well as his recurring role on the sitcom Bored to Death, what he presents as a bunch of guest roles, and his standup comedy. Hodgman, since he's presenting himself as deeply befuddled and incompetent, doesn't give years or a coherent sequence for any of this - it's just "there was a time I was flying around the country all the time to put my face in front of TV cameras, and now I don't do that anymore, which makes me sad."

The stories are about things like staying at The Hotel in LA - I'm going to guess the Chateau Marmont - his one nude scene, the jobs he had before going on TV, auditions, splurging on vacations with his family out of guilt for spending so much time away from them, and similar things. They're all narrated in that Hodgmanian, unreliable-narrator style, full of arch circumlocutions to avoid saying the names of most things and people (The Hotel, Beloved Airlines, even the names of his family), and the point of most of the stories is that Hodgman is an unlovable, weird man-child who does strange things and got paid what we assume is a lot of money for that for a while, but no longer.

And, again, Hodgman makes all of this quite funny consistently. It's the sad kind of funny, and you hope he doesn't really mean it, but it is funny.

The underlying point, I guess, is that you can fall backwards into a kind of career in public if you have an appealing act - and "John Hodgman" is at least 50% an act by volume - but that craft and hard work and desire need to be part of the mix if you want to continue more than a few years. (Oh, and luck - always, always, a lot of luck.)

So this book is seven years old now, and Hodgman seems to still have a career, however you or he would want to characterize that career. He's not "on TV" the way he was in the late Aughts, and I have no idea if he's touring his comedy, but he's doing voice work at least, I think the recurring writing gigs (Judge John Hodgman and the like) are still going, and probably other stuff. He hasn't had another book since then, for whatever that means.

In sum: if you like the John Hodgman character, this is a big helping of it, fairly pure and well presented.

Two minor notes to close. First, one late chapter is explicitly about the dashed hopes of the 2016 election, which hits much more sourly here in the stupid depths of Trump II than it probably did in the early going of the 2020 election cycle. And, second, Hodgman, that quintessential middle-aged guy, is actually two years younger than me, which makes me feel incredibly old.

[1] Looking at the timeline, an awful lot of that seems to have started in 2006. Again, I find it very hard to believe it was all happenstance or a surprise. Maybe I'm wrong, and it really was a groundswell of casting directors all demanding a John Hodgman type at exactly the same time. But that's not the way the world works, as I understand it. I didn't check all the other activities against the publication date of his first fake-facts book, the publicity tour for which is much more likely to be the instigating moment.

The Undertaker, Vol. 3: The Ogre of Camp Sutter by Xavier Dorison & Ralph Meyer

So this is possibly confusing: the previous Undertaker book I read was "Volume 1," but it included the first two French albums. Right now, there are six of those albums, and I decided to read the rest of them one by one in digital editions from Europe Comics rather than the new American-published omnibuses. (There seems to be a second omnibus out now, and I bet a third one is in progress if not already released.)

This may not be the best plan, since I now think each actual story takes two album - which is probably why the American publisher is doing 2-in-1s. But it means I read shorter things, even if they're not quite complete, and that appeals to me. Besides, Undertaker is a deeply genre exercise that I'm mostly enjoying if not respecting, so smaller doses helps keep my level of potential snark reasonable.

All that leads me to The Undertaker, Vol. 3: The Ogre of Camp Sutter. If you're looking for a physical book in the US, you'll want Vol. 2, which includes Ogre as well as the French Vol. 4, The Shadow of Hippocrates. The whole series is written by Xavier Dorison and drawn by Ralph Meyer. (Yes, that doesn't sound like a French name to me, either. But it is.)

The series is set soon after the US Civil War, in that American West renowned in the comics and movies of Europeans for two or three generations now - not quite the same as the US version of the Western, and just as far away from the reality. The main character is, yes, a traveling undertaker [1] named Jonas Crow with a mysterious past that, of course, involves dark doings in the last days of the War. In particular, he's wanted for murder under the name of Strickland.

His "partners" in the undertaking business, after the events of the first book, are what the intro calls "a former English governess named Rose Prairie and Lin, a Chinese immigrant." Yes, an English person named "Rose Prairie," and supposedly being a governess, though the family in the first book had no detectable children for her to govern. Lin is a grumpy middle-aged Chinese woman, who declares she just wants to raise enough money to get back home to her son in Shanghai. (I suspect she will continue to say this, no matter what happens, for as long as the series runs.)

So: definitely artificial in that genre way. We open this book with the crew broke, largely because Crow's business should be with rich people, but he's a crass jerk who systematically offends those people with his every sentence. Rose tries to teach him, but he's also the kind of jerk who doesn't think he needs to learn. He is our hero, and we are supposed to like him. (Rose and Lin are also unpleasant, in their own ways, I should say: it's a crew of grumpy, spiky, unlikeable people, who are only slightly better than the monstrous antagonists of the series.)

Anyway, they get a lead on a job, to embalm and bury the rich wife of a Union officer (Colonel Charley Warwick) from the war - but, of course, the Colonel is a drunken mess and recognizes Crow, which leads to trouble.

So much trouble that the Colonel - an old, one-armed guy who mostly cleans up OK the next day - heads off with our undertaking crew, looking for a patent-medicine salesman and doctor (who I am sorry to say is named Jeronimus Quint) who is known by the moniker of the title for darkly-hinted activities during the war. The Colonel's son is one of many he has sent after Quint and not returned, so it's time for One Last Mission to get Quint and bring him to justice.

For those filling out their Genre Bingo cards, Quint is both a Talking Killer and a Creepy Doctor - he gets several opportunities to ramble on nastily to various members of the cast while the rest are occupied elsewhere, and also apparently did the usual hideous 19th century experiments with grafting limbs to living subjects, somewhat a la Frankenstein. He is a monster, of the plausible, smooth, seemingly-benevolent sort.

Our heroes do find him, capture him, and run off, but things get complicated from there, because Quint is deeply creepy and inventive and resourceful, and he very much doesn't want to be hauled off to justice. We get a bunch of speeches about how the rest of mankind are sheep and he's doing important work with his creepy experiments and so on - you know the drill from previous Creepy Doctor types.

As I noted up top, the plots of the Undertaker series seem to take two books each. So this is the beginning of this plot, but not the end. Quint has not been brought to justice as the book ends, and our heroes are in various troubles on the last page. I'm sure all will come out on the side of justice, but it hasn't happened yet,

Meyer still has a fine storytelling style, full of detail and energy - his pages are busy but easy to track, with great period detail and good panel flow. I'm not as fond of Dorison's work, which strikes me as much more clichéd - but that's the kind of book this is, so I might be asking too much of him. I think he knows the job, and gives his original European audience just what they want in their creepy Western adventure stories.

[1] This seems like a dumb idea, particularly in an era where bodies need to be buried quickly. But, as I say a lot, I try not to question premises, so I will take it as read. He's a guy with a black coach, and he wanders about California and similar regions looking for grieving families with rich enough recently-dead relatives to pay for his relatively fancy services at exactly the moment he can get to their town.

All of This and Nothing: Let Go

"All of This and Nothing" 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, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I'm counting this one as Obscure because the project only put out one long-player, even though at least one of this duo went on to be mildly famous afterward. And, by "mildly famous," I might just mean "I kept track of her career and bought her music."

(They're my rules, I get to decide what counts.)

For this week, the band is Frou Frou - which is what Imogen Heap did before she went solo - and the song is Let Go.

(And, yes, this song was on the Garden State soundtrack, and I did see that movie - I'm not saying everyone in New Jersey was required to do either of those things, but you know how it is.)

Like a lot of the songs I like the best, it's atmospheric and allusive: it could be about a lot of things, depending on what the listener needs and believes and cares about right at that moment.

So let go, let go
Jump in
Oh well, whatcha waiting for?
It's alright
Cause there's beauty in the breakdown

It is definitely a song about now: about this moment right here, for the singer and the person she's singing to. About needing to do something - maybe a specific thing, maybe just that general "do something" - to mark this moment, to show that it was real and it mattered.

And Heap has a lovely voice here, quiet and controlled but commanding, and it's entirely supported by the music, far away from a normal rock sound but compelling and crystalline.

We've no time for later now
You can't await your own arrival

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 10, 2026

Two books came in the mail this week - from Tachyon - and I grabbed one at the library. I'll take them in that order.

First up is is a new anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, Lovecraft's Brood. From the title, you can guess that it's all cosmic horror of one kind or another. Datlow's introduction does note that the stories mostly aren't full of purely Lovecraftian elements, which I take to mean that it's not a parade of Deep Ones and Mi-Go and so forth, but different ideas and beings and frights. Included are nineteen stories, all originally published other places over the past twenty years, from authors including T. Kingfisher, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Laird Barron, Conrad Williams, and Elizabeth Hand. I have a finished book, so it's available now.

Also from Tachyon is a new novel by David Liss, The Death and Birth of Iliana Marek. Liss is mostly a thriller writer, I think - I have a couple of his books on the shelf that I keep wanting to read, but haven't managed to get to yet - and this one presents itself as a corrupt-town novel, set in a small Florida town and focused on the title character, the stepdaughter and fixer of the local corrupt police chief. But I think there's at least one fantastic element somewhere in the mix - I won't speculate what or how, but I get the distinct sense this isn't a pure thriller. (Also just read a big chunk of the prologue, which is gripping and intriguing, so I might need to find time for this one soon.)

The library book is the new novel by Tom Perrotta, Ghost Town. It's mostly the story of a kid in the 1970s, as seen from decades later - from the title, you can probably guess there's a significant death early on, but the flap copy doesn't give that away, so I suppose I shouldn't, either. So far, I'm finding the writing crisp and sharp - almost too sharp to bear at times, as someone who was a boy in the 1970s and had a similar loss to Perrotta's protagonist.

Quote of the Week: Portrait of a Criminal Attorney

E. Andrew Prosker, as he called himself, had all the appurtenances of a rich man, including in a Long Island stable two racing horses of which he was part owner and in an East 63rd Street apartment a blond mistress of whom he thought himself sole owner. He had a reputation for shadiness in the Criminal Courts Building, and his clients tended to be among the more disreputable of society's anti-bodies, but no public complaint had ever been lodged against him and within certain specific boundaries he did appear to be trustworthy. As one former client reportedly had said of Prosker, "I'd trust Andy alone with my sister all night long, if she didn't have more than fifteen cents on her."

 - Donald E. Westlake, The Hot Rock, pp.78-79

All My Friends by Hope Larson

It's not always safe to say that a series is definitively over - writers, like life, find a way to come back - but when a third book came out five years ago and the creator has moved on to other projects, it's clear that what we have is a trilogy and we can treat it as such.

All My Friends is a 2021 graphic novel by Hope Larson, aimed at tweens. (The copy I read has a library sticker to that effect right on the spine, in a classy sans-serif display font.) It follows 2018's All Summer Long and 2020's All Together Now. The first book was the story of one summer in the life of thirteen-year-old Los Angeles girl [1] Bina, as she started to get more serious about writing and playing music when her next-door best friend Austin went off to soccer camp. The second one continued both those plots, as Bina formed a band with two other girls and also had a single (unsuccessful) date with Austin.

Friends cover roughly the first half of the next year: Bina is now fourteen, which is not specifically remarked on. But this is a book about doing more, reaching out more, expanding and trying to continue - even when some people around you want to curtail that. She's got a different band - there was serious Band Drama in Together, but that's smoothed over now, and her former bandmates are friendly with Bina - which is getting serious.

The band is Fancy Pink, and it's another three-piece: Bina on lead guitar, vocals, and songwriting, with bassist Lora and drummer Kesi. (Fiction tends to like small, tight bands, so as to avoid having too many characters to keep track of.) They have their first show early in the book, opening for a band of slightly older kids named Anne Surly. (From the evidence here, the LA band scene is entirely the realm of people not yet old enough to drive.)

This leads to music-career drama: first their best song is licensed for a TV show theme. (Larson elides the details here in a sneaky way - Fancy Pink must have recorded this song professionally in some studio, but later in the book they say they have no experience in how to record music.) Their parents are uneasy, but allow this.

They don't allow, though, when a label gets in touch and wants Fancy Pink to record an EP for them. The girls are Too Young, say the parents, and the music industry is Too Much.

The three bandmates hate this decision and will accept it only as much as they absolutely have to. Which means they obviously can't sign with that label without parental approval, but they can make plans to raise the money and record an EP on their own. They don't run any of this plan past their parents, who they assume would nix it. (And I agree with that: if I were one of these girls, I'd have been making arch comments about "the bad nursing home" to my parents by this point.)

Fancy Pink practices, writes songs, gets better. Bina has a date or two with Cooper, the fifteen-year-old frontman of Anne Surly. She doesn't like-like him - he has too many phony cruel friends - but they stay friends afterward. She also comes to think about Austin, who circles on the outer edges of this book, more and more.

It all comes together at a semi-secret benefit concert in a basement one Saturday afternoon, where Bina plays a brand-new song she wrote about Austin. (Tween drama! In all its forms.)

All My Friends is a fun book that closes out the trilogy well: it's very much a book for tweens, all longing to hold hands and be famous, so it might feel small and juvenile to some older readers. But if you can engage with it on its level, it has the energy and enthusiasm of youth, which is no bad thing.

[1] Thirteen is already fairly old for me to feel comfortable calling a young woman "girl," but it's also a bit young to call her "young woman." Life is complicated. (And I read too many 20th century books by men - or books by 20th century men - that use "girl" to mean "potentially available hottie" to be comfortable with any use of the word, frankly.)

The Hot Rock by Donald E. Westlake

Donald Westlake was two of my favorite writers. Well, maybe three, but two of them used the same name.

Perhaps I should explain.

Westlake wrote mysteries and thrillers and other kinds of crime novels for about fifty years, after an apprenticeship in sex books starting in the late '50s. ("Sex books" were not nearly as exciting as you might think, O person with access to the Internet in the 21st century. A fascinating bit of publishing and social history, maybe, but outside my scope here.) Come to think of it, Westlake wrote several things that it would be hard to fit under even the big umbrella of "crime fiction," such as the Alex Haley piss-take Comfort Station (as J. Morgan Cunningham). But I need to stop digressing, so I'll say "crime fiction" for short.

His first major success was with the Parker books, about a professional heist man, written in tough, taut prose and published under the name Richard Stark, starting in the mid-60s. I read and wrote about all of those books in a burst a decade or so back, under the tag Starktober.

Parenthetically, Westlake also wrote a lot of books under other pseudonyms - a series of PI novels as Tucker Coe, the four-book Samuel Holt series, one book under the unlikely name Judson Jack Carmichael - but I'm not going to get into them here.

The possible-third favorite writer is Westlake writing as himself, in non-series books. The best there, I think, is the very dark The Ax, but there's also a good stretch of winners like Humans and Kahawa throughout the '80s and '90s.

And, finally, I'll get to the way Westlake, using his own name, is one of my favorite writers: the Dortmunder series of humorous crime-caper novels. The first of those books is The Hot Rock from 1970.

This time, I read it in what I think is still the current edition, a trade paperback from 2001 (right when the tenth book, Bad News, was published) that included a short introduction from Westlake about how he came to write it. (Even shorter: it was a Parker idea that turned funny, so he needed a different protagonist. Even after he found one, he lost interest half-way through, put it away for a couple of years, but then rediscovered it and finished it.)

Westlake eventually wrote another fourteen novels and enough short stories for a collection about Dortumnder and his compatriots: they pretty much all stand alone, so you don't need to start here if you find another one first. (I've always been a big fan of Drowned Hopes, myself.)

They're all comic caper novels, which means one thing: plans go wrong, in funny ways. John Dortmunder is a middle-aged - in the way of series fiction, he doesn't get noticeably older over the forty-year stretch of these novels - career criminal, just getting out of his second stint in prison as The Hot Rock opens. He's depressive, hang-dog, put-upon - but also one of the great organizers of the criminal world, able to work out a heist to perfection.

Except for the fact that something always will go wrong - that's the "comic" bit.

This time, he's hired by Major Ibo, ambassador to the US of the African nation Talabwo. His nation and neighboring Akinzi have many low-key conflicts, including a dispute over a major cultural artifact, the Balabomo Emerald. That emerald is currently part of a pan-African exhibit at the New York Coliseum. The Major wants Dortmunder to steal the emerald; he'll pay thirty thousand dollars a man (up to five men) and weekly expenses.

Dortmunder agrees, and gathers his crew. Andy Kelp, his contact with the Major and what counts for Dortmunder's best friend, is already in. He gets driver Stan Murch, locksman Roger Chefwick, and utility player Alan Greenwood. (Who is something like an alternate-world version of Alan Grofield from the Parker books - or, for the more conspiracy-minded readers, the same person and the way to link the two series.)

They make plans, and hit the Coliseum, successfully getting the emerald...but not getting it out. Greenwood, who has the jewel, is caught by the police.

But they didn't get the jewel. So Dortmunder makes a second heist plan, to free Greenwood from a jail on Long Island. And that leads to a third heist plan, to get the jewel from where Greenwood stashed it, in a NYC police precinct.

That's three heists already: there will be six before the novel is over. All of them for the same emerald; all of them - save the last - with the same degree of success.

Westlake is good at escalation, good at repetition, good at specific telling details - and he'd been doing one-off comic crime novels over the previous few years. Those are good, but Hot Rock was where everything clicked: the structure, the characters, the world. A series needs all of those, a structure that can run out in multiple ways over time and a main character that readers will want to come back for - and Dortmunder and his world was clearly that.

Hot Rock is still funny, and fresher than some of the late novels in the series. There's (possibly surprisingly) no racism in the African background - the Major is a smart guy with hidden depths, and the emerald is a plausible, useful McGuffin. The one thing I'd call out for readers who came in later in the series is that the Parker parallels are stronger here: Dortmunder and his crew are willing to use violence in ways that I don't recall from later books - though, in the event, they don't need or have the opportunity to be violent.

So this is a funny crime novel that builds as it goes, with a great structure and a fine cast of goofballs who move it forward well. And it sets up for a longer series with books even better than this one.

This Beautiful, Ridiculous City by Kay Sohini

Comics can be almost anything. They can be fictional or non-fiction. They can be wordless or almost illustrated prose. They can be immediate or thoughtful, punk or academic, seat-of-the-pants or carefully constructed.

We tend to think of them in specific genres, with a pick-and-mix of those options and a dozen more - superheroes are all dialogue and action, with flashy layouts, for example, while young-adult books are brighter, with more softly rounded art, a personal connection and a heaping helping of earnestness. But any particular book can be its own subgenre, and further out on any particular axis than we're used to.

Kay Sohini is an academic - I think that's important. She's also an artist and a teacher of artists, and (obviously) a maker of comics. Central to this story is the fact that she's from India: born and grew up in the Calcutta suburbs, a native Bengali speaker who went to expensive, demanding English-language schools. Her first book was This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, a memoir of how and why she came to move to New York City; it was published last year.

On all of the axes I called out in the first paragraph, Sohini is far to the latter side. Her book is personal, factual, told entirely without dialogue, in a continuous narrative presented often as large paragraphs on her pages, told a decade or so after the fact, through the lens of a lot of personal and professional experience since. And her art is, I think, digital: colorful and illustrative and carefully-constructed, never quite aiming at photo-realism but often quite close, a camera eye that maybe is meant to show us how Sohini sees the world.

I don't know if Sohini did this deliberately, but it's the kind of thing I'd expect from an academic, from a person trained for years to analyze and interpret. City is somewhat organized in that classic way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The thesis is the image of New York and how that contrasted with Sohini's life growing up - her first chapter is about the first, and the second delves (in the most academic part of the book) into the question of how New York, and "the West" in general, was seen in her country growing up - and gets somewhat into the knotty question of colonization and the mindset of a post-colonial society.

The antithesis is a bad relationship Sohini had in her twenties. She never gives us a name or a face - her art style, and the all-narrative, no-dialogue script is very distancing, I assume deliberately - but she lived with a man who turned out to be controlling and violent, and who she learned years later was carrying on multiple other major relationships at the same time. Somehow, during this time - and Sohini does not want to make it clear to the reader how long this period was, or what years it covered - she still kept up her academic work, or came back to it.

And that gave her an escape: she applied to graduate school (several of them) in New York and nearby. She ended up with a full ride to SUNY Stony Brook, and went there. As far as the book says, this was at least a decade ago, probably the early Teens, and she doesn't mention ever going back to India after that.

Her life in New York is the synthesis. Sohini bluntly points out she is a very controlled, interior, introverted person - the kind that thrives in big, bustling, energetic, anonymous cities, where interactions are many but straightforward, where it's easy to be part of a vast sea of people, alone and specific and particular like everyone else.

This is not a confessional book in any way. She does name her husband and devotes a little page-space to things about him - but doesn't say how they met, anything about their wedding or cute relationship moments or respective backgrounds, or anything else personal like that. We also don't see him - this is a book about Sohini exclusively, about, possibly, the education and creation of an artist. It's how she got to this point: how she became the person who wanted to, and could, create This Beautiful, Ridiculous City.

There's something inherently chilly about City - appropriate for a book about New York, where everyone is happy to be helpful and direct while dodging deeper connections. I don't think Sohini has completely synthesized all of her theses and antitheses here, but they're her life: expecting that would be ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if she revisits some or all of these themes in another decade or so - especially if she ends up living somewhere else at some point. That's one of the intriguing points of any memoir - it can only ever show one side, one view of a life, and there can always be other sides or new experiences or reconsiderations.

Seven Places Without You by Juan Berrio

Just reading two books by a creator doesn't make you an expert: let me say that up front. I read Juan Berrio's lovely wordless Kiosco earlier this year, and was happy to see his name again when browsing through my library's app. (Either the app itself or the publishers putting work into it are not the best at metadata, so one book has the author "Juan Berrio" and the other "Berrio Juan," so they are not linked in any clear way.)

Seven Places Without You was a 2018 graphic novel, originally published in Spanish because Berrio is Spanish (living in Madrid) and translated by Fiona Marshall for a 2019 English-language Europe Comics edition. [1] 

The main character is Elena. She's young, living in a city - probably Madrid. Over the course of the book, we come to think that she's still a student. She's been living with Jorge, in his family's home, for some time, and it was good - at first. But Jorge is spending less and less time at home, ignoring Elena more and more. She doesn't know why, and he's been evasive when she tries to ask.

It has seven chapters, each set in a different place - hence the title. It starts in Jorge's family house, right at the moment when Elena decides she has to leave, and calls friends to see if she can stay there for a while. Those friends - Maria and Nacho - turn up in several chapters, as does Mario, another friend who has been pining for some time for Elena and awkwardly says so midway through the book. The second chapter is set in Maria and Nacho's apartment, before and during a party, and later chapters are set during a family dinner at Elena's parents' house, at Mario's apartment, in a park, at an evening out in a bar, and, finally, in Elena's new solo apartment.

It's mostly quiet and observational. Berrio focuses on Elena but we see her from outside. We know her thoughts - like anyone in the world - only from what she tells other people, and we're pretty sure she's not saying everything she feels. Berrio has a soft earth-toned palette, with squared-off panels not bordered by lines.

And, given the title, we assume, as the book goes on and there's no word from Jorge, that he will not be a character in the book. My just raising the question is possibly a spoiler, so I'll leave it at that. Seven Places Without You is a book about the Jorge-shaped hole in Elena's life, how she realized that it was already there and the ways that she began to fill that space in the early days after the break.

It's just as lovely, if a lot more melancholy, than Kiosco was. Berrio is incisive and thoughtful; his people are real and understandable and likable - even Jorge running away, even Mario clinging too close - and we see all of them through the lens of how they interact with Elena.

[1] I've praised Europe Comics multiple times before: they're digital-only and don't really promote much, since they're primarily a marketing effort from continental-European publishers towards English-language publishers, but they do - or did - a large volume of excellent books far outside the usual standard North American comics genres.