• Reviews

    Review: Letters for Lucardo

    5/5 stars. Buy at: Iron Circus Comics (ebook) | Iron Circus Comics (Print) | Amazon

    Letters for Lucardo by Otava Heikkilä is a graphic novel and the first of four books. The protagonist, Ed Fiedler, is a normal human, 61 years old and a scribe by trade with rather unusual employers—the Night Court, ageless royals with a taste for blood (so, yes, absolutely vampires). He has the even more unusual distinction of being courted by the handsome, eternally-33 year old Lucardo. As both grow ever closer, they have to deal with a variety of culture shocks—a human among the inhuman, a man just this side of elderly with the eternally youthful, and a tangle of mortality with and against immortality.

    I loved the art and concept for this book when it first went up on kickstarter and jumped on the chance to contribute, and was so glad I did. I absolutely wish I had been able to buy in paperback, not just digital, but shipping to Canada is always a buzzkill. If there’s an omnibus of all 4 parts later? I’ll take the plunge for sure, because count me in as a new fan. (ETA May 2019: Thank goodness for conventions, I own this in paperback now).

    I found this work absolutely charming. It’s sweet and hot in equal measures, with a thread of potential tragedy running throughout, and a great sense of when to build drama and when to undercut it. Which is to say, it does one of my favorite things when characters are annoyed with each other, which is to get them distracted by how much they like (and are attracted to) each other.

    I enjoyed that Ed’s age wasn’t treated as a barrier to sexuality in any way, either to Lucardo or to the artist. Ed comments that age wasn’t kind to his body, but Lucardo really does not give a damn. It’s drawn likewise—he’s no silver fox, and Heikkilä doesn’t shy away from the physical features that often come with aging, from sagging chins to thin ankles and everything else in between. But it’s drawn with respect and affection and acknowledgement that he’s still sexual, both to himself and others, rather than being treated as off-limits or grotesque as older bodies so often are in media. Likewise, his desire for romance, intimacy, and a lot of really enthusiastic sex isn’t either ignored or treated as abnormal. (This should probably not be so rare as to be praiseworthy, but it is. And it is so deliberately and easily handled as completely normal here!) Likewise, Heikkilä is great at character design; there’s a wide variety of characters with distinct and varied appearances (and a very multi-ethnic cast as well).

    Oh, one note—this is not a book to read in public, at work, or around kids! There are a lot of graphic sex scenes and the heat index is quite high in it.

    Despite the thread of potential tragedy, it doesn’t feel like it will end up a sad story. This volume covers the setup to that developing tragedy, sure, but mostly seems to illustrate the political background and players for the story to develop further in the later volumes. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s visually delightful—and also, it’s a really good length, at 142 pages absolutely packed with content.

    I for one can’t wait to see volume 2 announced on Kickstarter!

  • Reviews

    Review: Hexbreaker

    5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble

    I picked up Hexbreaker (Hexworld #1) by Jordan L. Hawk as part of a goal to read through the other Rainbow Awards winners, and I literally couldn’t put it down once I started. Irishman Tom Halloran is a New York copper with a dark secret; Cicero, a cat shifter, is a flamboyant Italian  bohemian working as a familiar with the NY Metropolitan Witch Police. Normally, the two police forces don’t work together, since one handles regular crimes and the other crimes of hexation, but when a hex causes problems that leave both of them missing a friend, the two decide to team up and take on a case that nobody else is interested in.

    Friends, this is a turn-of-the-19th-century historical buddy cop police procedural soulbonding gay paranormal romance. If you aren’t at least intrigued by that description alone, I don’t know what to tell you.

    The mystery is very solidly written, where the twists and turns of the plot all make sense, but you still need to read through all the pieces to see it really come together. The characters are even more so; everything they do at every turn makes sense for their characterization, motivations, hopes, and fears—even the things you really wish they wouldn’t do all come from that solid base of knowing why they do it anyway. Tom’s situation is absolutely believable and his genuine good nature shines through in everything he says and does, and Cicero’s sharp-edged abrasive affection likewise. They both come from very different social spheres, and seeing how they try to adjust to make that work rings very true to me.

    Beyond that, the historical setting itself is an absolute delight (and I need to check out the reference book recommendations Hawk makes in the afterword). From tenement houses to tunnel gangs, from bohemian parlors to seedy dance halls, from anarchist publications to Oscar Wilde, you feel like you’re there—if it’s a there that includes professional hexmakers, spell forensic experts, and an entire group of people who change into animals and soulbond to witches, of course. Hawk blends this in seamlessly by capturing the spirit of the time through little details, such as playing off the boom in commercialism by using product slogans as keywords to set spells.

    Ultimately, this story is fun. Hawk has a real talent for knowing exactly when to throw in some relief from the more intense scenes, and if I were to list every moment that made me grin, I would probably end up spoiling half the scenes, so I won’t—I can only encourage you to check this out to discover them yourself. It’s also got a very high heat quotient, my goodness. The sex is steamy, erotic, detailed, and absolutely avoids the pitfalls that you sometimes see where it becomes about the acts rather than the characters.

    Hexbreaker winning best Gay Paranormal Romance in the 2016 Rainbow Awards might have been why I picked it up, but I’m going to purchase the next few books in the series immediately.

  • Reviews

    Review: The Bone Key

    5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

    The Bone Key by Sarah Monette is a collection of interconnected short stories which begin the adventures of Kyle Murchison Booth, the overall ‘verse of which is The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth. It consists of the first ten stories; of the remaining five, four are not in any collection but can be found available online (The Replacement, White Charles, The Yellow Dressing Gown, To Die For Moonlight) while the fifth can be found in her short story collection, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves. While this review is only for the Bone Key, I want to help make it easy for the rest to be found because I enjoyed this collection greatly.

    I nabbed the Bone Key off my shelf because I was very much in the mood for something vaguely lovecraftian, and I found that this collection scratched that itch nicely. Written as a tribute to Lovecraft and M.R. James, the stories aim to capture that unsettling air of creeping horror, but add to the mix a sense of consistent, ongoing character.

    The titular Kyle Murchison Booth is a socially awkward, uncomfortable man, a rare book archivist with the Samuel Mathers Parrington museum (and I can only assume that Monette wanted us to recall that Samuel Mathers) who dislikes conversation, physical contact, and having any expectations placed on him whatsoever, while he likes, mostly, books and being left largely alone. The first story begins with a queer take on a story like Lovecraft’s The Statement of Randolf Carter, where the timid protagonist is dragged along by the stronger willpower of his more charismatic friend. By making Booth gay and the one-sided tension between the two characters homoromantic, Monette launches into a strong start at establishing a character-first take on the discomfiting terror of the genre.

    Booth as a character has a lot of appeal to me—he’s neurotic and anxious and can barely get a full sentence out, but these things aren’t done for the sake of an exaggerated persona but are instead the product of a man who was emotionally abused and bullied through most of his life, and for whom every conversation is a potential trap. His mental voice is rich and full of intelligent metaphors; he just chokes on the words on the way out. I find him quite charming.

    Another reviewer on goodreads noted that while none of the individual stories were 5/5, the collection as a whole was, and I have to agree. Now, I’d rate most of the individual stories quite highly, but the real charm of the collection is seeing Booth grow, his terrifying experiences snowball, and his acquaintances return with the past between them still important. Ratcliffe’s offer to go to coffee with Booth “in celebration of the fact that we are no longer fourteen” absolutely sticks with me as so much of the underlying significance of these stories—that the people in them have a life beyond those horrible moments (assuming, at least, that they survive). And then, as a collection, this satisfied the desire for my wanting all kinds of paranormal creeps. Ghosts, vengeful and otherwise; strange eldritch horrors in the woods; incubi; the horror in the walls… Something for everyone, and deeply satisfying.

    I look forward to when Monette writes the next Booth story and I assure you I’ll do my best to be one of its first readers.

    Related Reviews: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

  • Reviews

    Review: A Tree of Bones

    5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

    A Tree of Bones by Gemma Files is the third book in the Hexslinger trilogy, with the first two being A Book of Tongues (which I review here) and a A Rope of Thorns (which I review here). I’m not trying to avoid spoilers for the first two books, only the third, so if you haven’t read the first two stop reading now.

    So, to begin this review: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!

    Okay. Now that I’ve got that out, let’s do this properly.

    After the horrifying outcome of A Rope of Thorns, the crew is left scattered across the land—and, in fact, across literal worlds. Chess Pargeter, last seen in hell, is trying to find his way back to his now Enemy-occupied living body, with only his abusive mother’s ghost as company. Ed Morrow is back working for Pinkerton, but a Pinkerton who has become a horrific soul-sucking artificial hex. Yancey is working with an unlikely group of hexes, struggling to use her skills to speak with the dead to be put to an unusual use. And, of course, Asher Rook continues to make only the most dubious of decisions while working for the wife-goddess who he has come to loathe.  

    If this wasn’t a perfect book—and I’m sure it has to have flaws, though I’m hard-pressed to find them immediately upon putting it down—it was close enough to it that I can’t even consider not giving it a 5/5 rating. The now-enormous cast all worked, everyone’s motivations driving their actions and knitting a good dozen B-plots together into the A-plot in a way that left me guessing right up to, and in some ways even through, the climax itself. The first book started with a small band of narrow-minded white men telling their own story while Othering everyone around them, and blossomed, over the next two books, into a bigger picture where a wide array of humanity were claiming their own stories and clashing together however needed to do so. I’ve been reading on my lunch breaks, but the story was too intense, and I actually neglected doing my own writing in favor of just finishing it off in one go tonight.

    In almost every way—I’ll get back to that in a moment—this is the story I had hoped it would be from when the first bad decisions began. I’m not a fan of grimdark, I think I said in an earlier review, but this story struck me as something that wasn’t grimdark. It was grim, and it could occasionally be gritty, and by god, it was visceral, full of blood and guts and sex and pain. But all of that is fine, if the message of the story isn’t hopelessness. And it’s not. It’s a story about redemption, a story where bonds are important from start to finish. It’s a story where you know from the previous books that even death isn’t the end to a person’s story, nor what they’re capable of—and by God, if you had any doubt in that despite Chess’s first resurrection, Files makes sure to start you off on that foot with Chess’s trip through the underworld and the chance to see the continuing stories, good or ill, of the people he meets there. Because of that, the stakes are able to be high and include death of a variety of characters without the usual problem of killing characters off—which is that death, in most stories, is the end. It can be a powerful tool in an author’s arsenal, because a dead character causes the readers’ shock at that character’s potential cut short, but it also means broken storylines, never to see an end. Starting from a premise of underworld gods and souls that have their own business, just not with the living most of the time, means that the same thing can be used for the same impact in the story but without the same cost. It was still high stakes, and still worth mourning, but you-the-reader knows that some part of those characters may have some conclusion to their emotional story at some point, even if we don’t see their personal afterlife journey.

    So ultimately it walks the edge of violence and pain and high stakes and loss without losing forgiveness and hope and redemption as possibilities for any of these characters.

    I said above that there was one thing that wasn’t what I hoped it would be, and it’s involving a specific romantic subplot. I’m going to avoid details for spoilers’ sake, but the way it had concluded surprised me, given how it had been set up and was developing. I think it absolutely could have given me that payoff that I had personally hoped for, from what had come before. But—and here’s the big but—just because it could have, and just because it was how I would have preferred it to end, didn’t mean that the way it played out wasn’t equally possible, taking all the circumstances into account. I’m sure some part of my heart is going to hope that some time in the unknown offscreen future, when things have been dealt with and settled more, the possibility could be there again. Pity my shipper heart! But at the same time, what did happen was fine too, and worked with what the story gave us, and on top of that, it opened other doors too. I was content with it, even if it wasn’t the outcome I had personally hoped for. As Chess Pargeter would say, if things weren’t the same, they’d be different.

    One of the themes of the story is that very thing—that there are multiple possible outcomes to situations, because people drive their own stories, and if things don’t happen one way, they’d have happened another. The way everyone’s stories come together and diverge, their lives playing out as their own motives push them forward, fit that perfectly; the author picked a hard, hard theme to embody through the story itself, but succeeded at it admirably.

    I feel like I have so much more to say—goodness, but I want to write an essay about Asher Rook and how his choices spun out of his traumas and fears!—but a review isn’t the best place for that. So I think I’ll just leave it at this:

    I’m glad I read this, and I highly recommend it.

  • Reviews

    Review: A Rope of Thorns

    4.5/5 stars. Buy at: Amazon | Barnes & Noble.

    Please note that this book is the sequel to A Book of Tongues, which I reviewed here. There will be spoilers for A Book of Tongues as a result.

    In Gemma Files’ A Rope of Thorns, Chess Pargeter has a fresh new batch of problems in his life, as any new-minted demi-god is likely to have. As his old lover Reverend Asher Rook builds up “Hex City” as both a refuge for magicians (who are otherwise forced to feed on each other’s powers) and a place to sacrifice them to the newly-embodied goddess Ixchel to build her power, Chess goes on the run, Ed Morrow sticking to him fast and loyal. Soon joining them is a young spiritualist lady, Yancy Colder, whose temper and stubbornness is something even Chess can admire. But Chess himself, a hardened killer, is finding that even if his heart is gone, his heart might have survived more than he thought was possible.

    First up, I want to say that this book definitely solved, for me, most of the concerns I had with the first one. It kept the strong writing and incredible characterization, but where there was a dearth of characters of color or female characters to narratively counter to the characters’ prejudices in book one, there are plenty more in this one (and only more upcoming, as I plunge headlong into book three even as I work on the review for book two). There are still characters’ casual slurs and assumptions in the narration, so fair warning to brace yourself for that if needed, but the narrative presentation of these characters supports them as individual characters with rich inner lives.

    I don’t think it’s speaking lightly to say I loved this book. The narrative was clean and the story’s throughline was coherently built. The characters drove the plot, including those who weren’t point of view characters; every character had their own motivations for how they were acting, and this built the story, rather than outside events happening to shape it. This is by far my favorite thing to read, because everything fits together so perfectly.

    And through this whole thing, bad and good decisions and damaged reactions and all, it’s an exciting Weird Wild West adventure with plenty of action, high stakes, revenge, bloodshed, sex, passion, and, yeah, the first strides toward redemption.

    Normally I try to space my reviews for a series out, but this one came right after the first because I admit I literally just couldn’t stop reading. If that isn’t a rec, I don’t know what is.