millennial_dandy's reviews
339 reviews

I had no idea what to expect when I picked up this novel, knowing only that Neil Gaiman is an incredibly well-regarded contemporary author and that American Gods had been made into a TV series.

What I got was an incredibly well-crafted, thrilling, road-trip fantasy with more twists and turns than Shadow's coin tricks.

Our protagonist is an ex-con named Shadow who, immediately following his release from prison, finds himself embroiled in a clash between all of the gods who have made their way to America over the centuries and some newer upstarts like Media and the god of the internet.

Dark, witty, and quite often poignant, American Gods was one of those books that kept me up at night huddled under my reading lamp, 'one more chapter' turning into three or four until the words began to blur on the page.

And the finale doesn't disappoint.

In the post-Game of Thrones world, I, like so many others, am wary of stories that seem too complex for their own good, afraid that complex will devolve into convoluted or downright clunky. This is not one of those stories.

For all that new plot elements are introduced all the way up to the final chapter, when you finally get the answers to all the burning questions you've been posed since the first chapter, they click. I wasn't satisfied with every single reveal, but I believed them.

That all being said, if you're looking for a memorable protagonist, you won't find them in Shadow (though I suspect that's by design). He feels like enough of a real person to carry the weight of all the incredible things that happen to him, but his character arc is a passive one, every decision he tries to make manipulated by outside forces.

The cast of side characters in American Gods on the other hand is colorful, each of the gods and people Shadow meets along the way distinct and interesting.

This edition of the book included chapters building up how certain gods came to be, of those who worshipped them, and how some of them died. While I can see how taking these asides out would slim down the novel considerably and streamline the narrative, I was happy to have them since on their own each was singularly interesting, and I never once contemplated skipping over it to return to 'the story.'

Unfortunately, I sat on this one too long to be able to give a super in-depth review, but the details I do still have enforce my lukewarm impression of this installment in the Goosebumps series.

The set-up had potential, and we got some good use out of the 'my parents don't believe me' tension. And frankly, I didn't even really have a problem with our protagonist. But so much of it felt derivative of Fever Swamp to really stand on its own.

I assume to combat that comparison the climax drags the reader sideways into what feels like a totally different story that's just too goofy compared to everything that came before to feel cohesive.

Not my favorite, though it did make me want to crack open Fever Swamp to see if my suspicions are correct.

This fifth installment in the Samurai Detective series sees Seikei return to his hometown of Osaka, and takes us, the reader, along for the ride to explore a new part of 1700s Japan.

The cultural backbone of this mystery is the art of ningyo joruri --a type of puppet show peculiar to Japan. In particular, we're introduced to the play 'The Five Men of Naniwa', written by Monzaemon Chikamatsu.

Unlike in the previous installments of the series, the stakes in A Samurai Never Fears Death felt much lower. We get to meet Seikei's siblings, and it was interesting to explore that part of his background, but it didn't feel like very much was done with it.

Our time was split mostly between the theater and his family's tea shop, leaving less time for development of either, though as in all the novels, the fleshing out of Osaka overall is vivid and distinct.

The mystery itself, in addition to having lower stakes, felt much more straightforward than in the previous stories, and in the end nothing of consequence really happens other than the criminal being brought to justice, though this is largely 'off-screen'.

Seikei, despite being confronted with his past, doesn't seem to develop at all as a character in this adventure, and all-in-all it feels like a filler episode rather than a continuation of the series more broadly.

Still, it was a quick, fun read, and I always enjoy returning to this world and I always walk away having learned some new tidbits about the Japan of Judge Ooka's day.

Rating: 3.5

3.5

Comedy is quite possibly the most difficult genre to write because something 'being funny' has a much wider range of subjectivity than other qualities, and even the things we think are funny generally can fall flat due to some lack of je ne sais quoi.

I went into 'Portuguese Irregular Verbs' right on the heels of 'Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit' by fellow British humorist P.G. Wodehouse (side note: if you enjoyed this novella, you should check out the Jeeves series). Both rely on similar comedic mechanics: linguistic humor relying on clever turns of phrase, the carnivalesque, absurd misunderstandings and assumptions (often going hand in hand with those carnivalesque aspects), and this omnipresent 'social commentary' element.

Both of them are indeed, to my satisfaction, very funny.

The episodic nature of 'Portuguese Irregular Verbs' works when it works, but drags when it doesn't. The first five stories are tight and fast-paced, and deftly balance situational and linguistic humor. The final three, however, suffer from the fact that the basic premises just aren't that funny. The set ups are simply too mundane and grounded to be good springboards for this type of comedy. Tone is also a bigger problem in these three stories, especially the last one, ;Death in Venice.' And unfortunately, ending on such a wrong note really colored my feelings of the collection as a whole. It's a shame, because it started off so strong and some of the jokes and situations were so well done that I actually laughed aloud at points.

For instance, in one episode, our protagonist travels to Italy and discovers that the innkeeper is deeply prejudiced against German tourists, and so spends his entire trip trying to disprove the stereotypes she has, to the detriment of his own holiday and to the reader's great amusement).

This type of set-up is really good because the stakes are actually incredibly low, and the artificial raising of those stakes lays fertile ground for humor.

On the other hand, we had chapter seven wherein the protagonist falls in love with his dentist and attempts to woo her. Not only are the stakes here higher, but many of the punchlines are more meanspirited.

In the Italian episode, one of the innkeeper's stereotypes is that Germans eat too much. To disprove this, he increasingly accepts less food from her for dinner, but is then so hungry that he tries to seek out opportunities to get food elsewhere in town only to continue running into the innkeeper. Again, very low stakes, something he does to himself that he could undo at any time, and not harmful to anyone.

In the dentist story, our protagonist gifts his dentist a copy of his book on Portuguese Irregular Verbs as a token of his affection for her and later sees that she uses it as a step-stool. This type of 'joke' just doesn't land as well because it's not ~really~ funny; it's kind of sad both that she didn't really like the gift and also that her not liking his gift is an indication that she's not very interested in him.

In any event, the first five stories are well worth the price of admission, and I think it's a shame no one encouraged author Alexander McCall Smith to leave the others on the cutting room floor.

I picked this up mostly, I'll be real, for a laugh. I had just been doing some reading from a 2005 National Geographic article on the Bird Flu panic (which, incidentally, cited the man of the hour himself, Dr. Fauci). It's a really interesting read in retrospect, and if you can get your hands on it, I'd recommend it. Many of the points about how viruses form, mutate, and spread will all be incredibly familiar to anyone living on planet earth since the year of our Lord 2020, but it's still interesting and even a bit eerie to read about the concerns epidemiologists were having even back then about how overdue the world was for another pandemic.

Enter Dr. Daniel Kalla of Canada. I assume he either also read the then contemporary National Geographic story or that 'killer flu' was part of the medical zeitgeist at the time because the backbone of his novel mirrors it all the way down to the ominous 'we're overdue for another pandemic' byline the story opens with.

Much of the medicine in 'Pandemic' (coronavirus, N-95 masks, 'stop the spread,' quarantine, and so on) feels like little Easter eggs to we readers of today, and I delightedly pointed each of them out to my indulgent partner as I read.

Unlike our Covid-19, the 'Killer Flu' of Kalla's pandemic is lethal in 25% of those that catch it (perhaps the reason the people populating Kalla's fictional world more willingly stay at home and help out with contact tracing? Either that or Kalla just had more faith in his fellow man than turned out to be realistic) but much less contagious than 'the 'rona'.

Another key difference is that the pandemic in Kalla's world was intentional. I know there are those 'plandemic' believers out there in our real world who would probably view 'Pandemic' as prophetic or even as non-fiction, but for the sake of this discussion let's try to stay on one plane of reality at a time.

Kalla made a few interesting choices when it came to his own fictional 'plandemic.' First of all it must be noted that while many of our primary characters are Americans, Kalla is Canadian. And in true Canadian fashion there are no punches pulled when it comes to punching down on America by way of cultural appropriation.

Now, when I say cultural appropriation I mean that in a very academic sense. I'm not sure how much time Kalla has spent in the US, but he writes about it like someone who got their knowledge of the country purely through watching action films from the 90s and early 2000s. Or maybe honestly just Independence Day. Now me, personally, I found this to be both refreshing and kind of hilarious. In fact, I'd go so far as to make sections of this required reading in a class on the topic so that Americans could kind of feel how cringy (at the very least) it is to be on the recieving end of cultural appropriation.

For instance, here are a few snippets just to give you a sense:

"Haldane had never before been to an air force base, let alone one which was set to launch a critical military operation, but the sense of purpose was palpable in the air. He welled with patriotism." (p.321)"

And how about another gem while we're here:

"The president leaned back in his leather chair. In his early fifties, he wore a navy suit with an open collared light blue shirt, and he towered half a head above the others at the table. He had thick salt and pepper hair, expressive gray eyes, and a prominent chin. He wasn't classically handsome, but he had a commanding and compassionate countenance. Haldane decided he had a perfectly presidential face for photo-ops." (p.262)

One more just for fun, coming at the end of a scene where our two doctor heroes have been in a bioterrorism meeting with the President and his cabinet and others. They've just found the bad guys' base and then the President says this at the end of their negotiations:

"That leaves us forty-eight hours to catch these sons of bitches," the President said. "I authorize you to use any and all means necessary to do just that." He looked around the faces at the table and then stared directly into the camera. "Am I clear?" (p.268).

Putting it another way, in his Wikipedia article it says that Kalla's interest in writing started after he took a film course. Yeah, I got that. This could easily be a flick from 2007 starring Tom Cruise as the main doctor with Scarlet Johannson as the leading lady.

Which leads nicely into my first gripe with 'Pandemic.' Not the cheesy writing? you may gasp. No. The cheesy writing was great. 10/10; exactly what I wanted from this. My first gripe is that according to Dr. Daniel Kalla the world is made up of two, and only two, groups of people: skinny, stunningly beautiful people, and schlubby fat people. And that's it. I really mean it. About a third of my way through 'Pandemic' this stood out to me so much that I started keeping track and I'm pretty sure that literally the only character in the entire novel who isn't in exactly one camp or the other is this one bureaucrat Haldine and co. meet in NYC who gets to be 'bony.'

My issue with this isn't even the very un-PCness of it all; this was published in 2005, after all. My issue is in just how odd it feels for specifically a doctor to write people this way; you'd think given how closely to the public a doctor works he'd have more of a sense of how diverse humans can be in terms of looks? I dunno. It was weird.

My really big issue with 'Pandemic' was this weird tick wherein every single time our protagonists (all medical professionals, by the way, and written BY A MEDICAL DOCTOR) had to wear face masks because (gasp) they were dealing with a super deadly flu epidemic (the title 'pandemic' is also slightly misleading, but forgivable) they would whinge about it. It was a thing.

Most aggregiously, at one point two of the doctors are UNDER QUARANTINE (at a 5 star hotel) and continuously meet up with each other during that time and then one of their colleagues comes to visit--just on a whim-- and then this happens:

"Haldane opened the door. Duncan McLeod stood on the other side with a surgical mask covering his scraggly beard. He wasn't gowned. And a baseball cap stood in for the shower cap he was supposed to wear. [...] He sauntered into the room and flopped into the loveseat behind the desk [...] Mcleod pulled off his mask. "Christ, I'm tired of these things. I know you're no risk to me." (p.258-259)

Sometimes you just have to say to yourself: what the fuck.

Kalla. My dude. Why?

The political messaging was pretty unambiguous and kind of slaps the reader in the face, so I don't think it's giving anything away to say I came away from 'Pandemic' with the following understanding:

Kalla does not like American interventionism, and also really wants the reader to understand that were a 'plandemic' to ever occur he would not be surprised if it were done in retaliation for that very interventionalism. BUT, he also wants to make it super, super clear that even though such retaliation would quite possibly come out of the Middle East that it would still be only extremists actually thinking that bioterrorism was a good and justified idea. To that end, we have one of the best characters in the novel, a detective in Cairo who is obsessed with Western detective stories and who also has this very on the nose quirk of constantly reminding everyone who will listen that terrorists make Islam look bad and he and the VAST MAJORITY of Muslims hate them.

Very subtle stuff, clearly. And definitely not a surprise that it wasn't an American who wrote it, particularly in 2005. We Americans can get pretty touchy about being portrayed as the 'bad guys.' And to be fair, America isn't 'the bad guy' in the novel; that's definitely the terrorists, but still, there's something there. A tone if you will. Something something America needs to stop being the world police and also is super oil-hungry and needs to please not drag the rest of the (ahem) 'definitely not questionable in any concievable way' rest of the 'Western World' into their nonsense. Or something like that. Like I said: there's a tone.

To summarize: this is pulp fiction at its finest. Absolutely everything you expect to happen happens. The people you expect to make it out do. There's lots of disaster porn for we degenerate connoisseurs of such ficitonal subject matter (as in: if you like movies like 'World War Z' or 'The Day After Tomorrow' you will like this). And the dialogue. Oh my god, the dialogue. I don't know what happened to Kalla at about the halfway mark of writing this, but it's about at that point that he stops trying to pretend these characters are real people (see the samples above).

If you, like me, want a little bit of catharsis after the fatigue of nearly 2 full years (TWO FULL YEARS) of real-world pandemic, you should read this. It's good schlocky fun.

After going on an R.L. Stine read and review binge last year, I took a little bit of a breather before now coming back to the task, this time by going through a slew of 'Fear Street' rather than 'Goosebumps' novels.

It's December, so naturally I had to start with one of the chilliest of the lot, 'Ski Weekend.' First off, this book is drenched in winter aesthetics to the point I'm surprised it isn't literally freezing to the touch. Cold permeates every moment of the story, from the inciting incident wherein a group of ill-fated friends attempt to drive through a blizzard in a car with a busted heater to a climactic scene skidding out of control on a frozen lake.

Even tucked away safely inside in a cozy flat I felt the urge to put on a sweater.

The plot itself is not so unusual for 'Fear Street,' but it is a particularly good rendition of some of Stine's favorite character tropes: scaredy-cat female protag, handsome but possibly sus stranger, guy who's too macho for his own good.

Normally, these tropes cause the cast of each of the novels to bleed together, and I can't say this group of teens is any different, but at least the tropes actually served the plot rather than just seeming like they were pulled at random out of the air. For instance, it's established as a sort of random fun-fact about our protagonist early on that she's interested in science (a piece of information that easily could have gone nowhere) and by god, that actually organically becomes useful later on. Pour the wine; Stine has built himself a real character!

The tension in 'Ski Weekend' is what really worked for me.

People (including me) are free to say what they will about how interchangeable some (possibly most) of Stine's characters can be, but let it never be said he doesn't understand how teenagers tick.

The impulsivness and just downright reckless stupidity of some of our protagonists' choices are just so charmingly, frustratingly realistic. I think as a teenager reading 'Fear Street' I resented how immature some of the behavior in the books was (I, of course, being a bastion of maturity myself), but the older I get the more I realize that teenagers really are kids. Kids in a different way than, say, an eight year old, but still...kids.

And that actually let to a really great interplay with the main villain of the story.

So much of the trouble our protags find themselves in is a direct result of the power imbalance they face purely as a result of being kids faced with an adult.

This guy takes them in and ostensibly saves them from freezing to death, sure, but he's a creep and an alcoholic who makes multiple completely inappropriate passes at one of the girls, and generally lords it over them that despite the fact that they outnumber him, he's the adult so they ultimately have to defer to him.

And they do.

And that's to say nothing of the lengths Stine demonstrates that people are willing to go not to break social niceties. Despite the fact that our villain, Lou, behaves outrageously and pays no mind himself to conventional politeness, the kids never point it out because...well...that would be rude. Heaven forbid.

This is on a much smaller and less fleshed out scale than others of its type (the film 'The Invitation' probably being the best example), but it is scary to contemplate just how much we're willing to let slide for the sake of not causing a scene.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Lou is one of if not the best 'Fear Street' bad guy. This is a horror novel, so we can assume that he's going to go off the rails at some point a la Annie Wilkes, but you don't know how or when.

I've met guys like Lou in real life. A friend of mine calls guys like him 'chuckle-fucks.'* Such guys love making inappropriate comments (whether that be sexual come-ons, edgy jokes, or what have you) just for the pleasure of seeing how far they can push an audience paralyzed by politeness, unable to really push back because it's so hard to know if a person who acts like that is harmless or dangerous. It's the uncanny valley of human behavior.

I loathed this guy. A+ scumbag writing, Mr. Stine. 10 points to you, sir!

Now, I would be remiss if I sang the praises of 'Ski Weekend' without pointing out quite possibly the most cursed set of lines I think I've ever read in a Stine novel.

Our narrator, Ariel, is grappling with her feelings towards the boy she and her friends offered a lift to, and with my own blessed eyes, I had to read the following:

"He brushed back his wavy red hair with one hand. He looked like a little boy when he did that. I realized I was very attracted to him."

Stine. Girl. I blame your editor for not catching this, but my guy--this was atrocious.

Good story otherwise though. The 'twist' wasn't hard to spot, but just as with the character tropes, it was at least put to good use.

*Upon looking into the etymology of the word 'chuckle-fuck' I discovered that it has been used to mean just about anything anyone can think of, but this definition from the 3rd back of 'Urban Dictionary' is closest to how I myself would use the expression: "A person who indulges (often at length) in laughing obnoxiously at their own statements, be they humorous or not."

This was the first non-R.L.Stine pulp horror novel I'd picked up since reading 'The Ruins' over the summer, and it really was so much fun. When people talk about reading for fun, this is the kind of book I imagine. The ice cream of books, if you will.

Is the pacing the best? No. Do the characters act in a rational, realistic way? Not especially. Is it a banger of an original idea? No.

But this kind of book really scratches the itch I sometimes get for a 'desserty' read. You get the sugar rush of a fast-paced plot that may have tropes you've seen before but in some novel configuration that you don't have to think about too hard.

Now, I'm all in favor of and would even encourage readers to take the analysis of 'pulp fiction' just as seriously as literary fiction; nothing is void of meaning and messaging, after all. But sometimes you just want to turn your brain off, and I've found that 80s pulp horror really hits that mark for me.

You have your obligatory for the time 'Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars' commentary at points, and a witch possession story that utterly lacks any kind of internal examination.

If you look too hard, you realize the dissonance between the message that the witchhunts were bad because so many innocent people were murdered, and yet, in this timeline, witches are real and consorting with the devil, including the villain of this story who we are also supposed to sympathize with because she was an innocent victim... It gets a little murky.

Similarly, 'The Presence' has a weird relationship with religion. It establishes fairly early on that witches do in fact get their power from the Devil, but then veers off into how they're using psychic energy via the 'third eye' as studied by parapsychologists. There are also seances (that don't really go anywhere), discussions of 'poltergeists' as excess psychic energy. The science vs. religion aspects are a bit all over the place. And that makes the discussions of God a little awkward in-universe, because if we're meant to accept that the Devil is somehow behind all the goings-on (by harnessing psychic energy via the witch-ghost Abigail who channels it thorugh the girl, Emma???) then I would assume God also exists? And yet while all the characters accept the paranormal psychic-energy/Devil explanation, they ridicule the one character who is a born-again Christian fanatic?

It's...murky.

The way everyone behaves in this novel is a very amusing comedy of errors, especially given that like the protagonist, Carla, I've worked with children at a school. There's absolutely no way that a competent teacher or school would handle some of what happens the way they do in this book.

The art teacher flags a picture drawn by our villian-conduit, an eight year-old named Emma. The picture shows an image of someone being hanged in the background. Both he and Carla agree that this is odd and disturbing, but decide not to mention it to the girl's parents so as not to upset them (???). Then, the girl's step-mother straight up asks Carla if Emma is behaving strangely, or if she's noticed anything, and Carla, instead of mentioning this weird picture of the hanging or the general despondancy she'd noticed in Emma, just sort of shrugs it all off and tells the step-mother that everything's totally fine. And at no point, no matter what Emma does at school, does Carla think it's appropriate to tell the parents about it.

Carla gets her comeuppance for this gross negligance, though. Once Emma masters her 'third eye' she gives Carla constant headaches just because she was annoyed with her in one of the more 'yes, this definitely feels like an eight year-old' moments.

That all being said, I found the little idiosyncrasies of 'The Presence' to be more amusing than frustrating, the way a schlocky film can be entertaining. And the two 'on-screen' deaths that we get are delightfully gory and inventive (hey, this is a horror novel; we've got to talk about the gore!). Author Yvonne MacManus doens't shy away from killing kids either, so no one is safe. I also appreciated that for once the attractive, single female protagonist didn't get arbitrarily paired-off with whatever man happened to be closest by. She actually gets to finish out the story as single as she started and without even a single romantic subplot. I thought that was a nice break from tradition.

2.5 rounded up to 3

This is the second of the 'Fear Street Super Chiller' spin-off that I've read this year. While 'The Dead Lifeguard' felt worth the extra page count, 'Silent Night 2' didn't do much to raise the stakes throughout and so it felt bulky at times, particularly in the front half.

It also does that thing a lot of series were doing at the time where the cover is completely misleading. It's been many years since I read the original 'Silent Night' novel, and so maybe the Christmas aesthetic played into the story more (at the very least, I feel like the song 'silent night' played a bigger role in terms of the creep factor).

Not only is the cover much creepier than anything we find within the pages, it's completely misleading. This is an incredibly straightforward kidnapping heist story with absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever.

The teenagers, as is typical of a Stine novel, feel like teenagers and use teenage logic and decision-making. This was easily the best part of the story. I can 100% imagine a pair of teenagers coming up with this kidnapping plot as a means of, I kid you not: randsoming the daughter of a rich local businessman for a million dollars.

The literally don't think it through any more than that. There's no discussion of how they'll get the money without being identified, they allow themselves to be seen lurking around the department store with zero explanation for why they're there and no thought at all about the fact that if they called from within the department store, their location would be easily traceable.

They're appropriately immature is I guess what I'm getting at. And that was fun to read about as an adult.

But the plot really dragged due to a lot of false starts, and the subplot about Reva trying to steal her cousin's boyfriend, while relevant to part of the climax, got entirely too much 'screentime.'

I'm glad I read it, though, if for no other reason than as a reminder of how much better the original 'Silent Night' was.