The Dead Path: Great Halloween Read

The Dead Path
Stephen M. Irwin
Doubleday October 2010 $26.00

Many thanks to Kristin Gastler at Random House for sending this my way.

Don't read The Dead Path if you are already scared of spiders. Really.

Irwin's prose combines exacting physical detail and a certain musicality of language. If you're already scared of spiders, that combination of immediacy and phantasm will make certain passages unbearable to read. You have been warned.

But spiders are only one scary tool in Irwin's arsenal. It seems that he's drawing on a legacy of every ghost story that ever made a breathless reader decide to sleep with the lights on, to create a tale of modern menace with mythic heft. In other words, an excellent Halloween read.

Mourning the accidental death of his wife, Nicholas Close returns to his boyhood home a haunted man. In all senses of the word. Everywhere he goes, he has begun to see ghosts, anchored to their place and moment of death in an endless, macabre, feedback loop. The ordinary things Nicholas tries to do, work, take an airplane flight, even move back into his boyhood home, make these intrusions of ghosts even scarier. Especially with the keenness of Irwin's details- the deaths are at once grisly and ephemeral.  Nicholas sees his wife Cate in their flat, falling from a ladder over and over again, even the marking the detail of plaster dust falling on her frozen-open sightless eyes. Brrr!

But homecoming is no refuge. The ordinary, sunny suburban town fairly thrums with menace. Impenetrably dark woods lurk alongside Carmichael road. Mothers caution their children not to walk that road. Young children have been kidnapped and murdered along that road. Among them, Nicholas's boyhood friend, Tristram.

Author Stephen M. Irwin does an excellent job crafting a menacing atmosphere. His impenetrable and spooky woods have a particularly ravenous scariness. Reports of kidnapping and murder send a small town into outraged uproar, quieting as the murderer is named, caught, and takes his own life. Because of the physicality of Irwin's writing, readers have no trouble feeling what Nicholas does, every cold sweat, every dread-induced twist of the stomach.

Irwin also adapts mythic elements into signposts to guide his particular story. Runes, dream imagery, even the legend of the Green Man, retain the heft of their mythic legacy, while being placed in the dark mystery surrounding Nicholas and stretching into his past and his hometown's.

If I had to quibble about anything in this well balanced, frightening tale, it would be the instances where other members of the Close family point to Nicholas as having been somewhat fey all his life, with hunches and ESP-like pronouncements.

Because the pacing and description work so scarily well to position scary moments against ordinary ones, I would have liked to have Nicholas be perfectly, randomly, ordinary, not chosen because he was somehow born special. The best and most vivid scares in this story came from the idea that tragedy, and deeply chilling haunting, could happen to anyone, anywhere, ripping them right out of any kind of commonplace life. Brrr! There's enough in the flashbacks of Nicholas's childhood, and the book's overall symbolism, to have pointed the way, without Nicholas being somehow keyed for it.

An Open Letter to Alexander McCall Smith

Dear Mr. Smith,

I am sorry. I have been a jerk.

For years, I have thought of you as an Author I Don't Like. (You may take heart in being in august company, as I can't stand Hemingway either.) It began with The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which my mother loved, and handed off to me. I don't remember why I gave up a few chapters in. I remember Precious Ramatswe drinking red bush tea. I like red bush tea. I usually like mysteries. Maybe I found the pace of your first novel a little too meandering. Maybe I was in finals week at college, which made me mean. Maybe I was hungry.

I must have tried one of your other series. A glance at the inner jacket of The Charming Quirks of Others reveals that you haven't let my disdain give you writer's block. Good for you! You've been busy, in Africa, in England, in Scotland. And I always read your titles a little regretfully, even, thinking "It's a pity I don't like Alexander McCall Smith, because "At The Villa of Reduced Circumstances" or "Tea Time for the Traditionally Built" or "The Unbearable Lightness of Scones" sound like such good titles. Oh well."

I should have tried the Scotland series, starring Isabel Dalhousie, sooner. They're set in Edinburgh. I love Edinburgh. So, even though I'm finding my introduction to the series a tad slow to get going on the mystery bits, I don't mind. I like wandering around Edinburgh. I've been there. I wish I could go back.

Isabel is a philosopher who edits a journal and occasionally gets asked to look into things, or help with things. Not to investigate, really, and not to meddle, which is what her partner, Jamie, thinks she is doing. I'm picking up Isabel's life with Jamie quite nicely. They're sweet together. And the investigation, though meandering, makes a certain amount of sense, if not much suspense just yet. (I've fallen into a habit of reviewing books while I'm not all the way through them. Shame on me.)

It occurs to me I don't actually know what philosophers do. There's either a joke, or some kind of academic and logical crux to that statement, I'm sure. I never took a philosophy class in college. I have a very very smart cousin who has written philosophy. And as much as I can gather from the book so far, and from Billy's article, it's about constructing arguments and language, and about ethics. Which strikes me as an interesting perspective for someone who's solving a mystery. Isabel seems a bit fanciful, prone to spout odd facts or make connections those around her sometimes have trouble catching. So, things are proceeding at a far less linear pace than I'm used to from a less-philosophical mystery.

But still, it's set in Edinburgh. How bad can it be?

Anyway, Mr. McCall Smith, I'm sorry I've been prejudiced against your books all these years. When you're in New York promoting The Charming Quirks of Others, drop me a line, and I'll buy you a beer.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth

Trudi Canavan does wizards well

A joint  review of The Novice, and The High Lord, by Trudi Canavan.

Both books are continuations of The Magician's Guild, which I read earlier this summer.

So much of the time, the books I wind up loving the most are the books that took a while to win me over. I am pretty sure I tried The Magician's Guild, once or twice, before I got into it.  But once I was in... I was basically engulfed. The kind of good, smart fantasy, where the characters and the social politics strengthened the sense of adventure. Where I'd read for chapters at a stretch, and then look up, kind of confused that nobody around me was wearing wizard's robes. (Yes, that would look strange on the subway.)

Canavan carried that same attention to supporting characters and cultural nuances through the next two volumes in the series, weaving together parallel stories for different aspects of a fascinating whole. I wish more fantasy writing were like this. Characters whose emotions feel human- nuanced, sometimes petty, sometimes pragmatic. So much fantasy writing gets into Ye Olde Overblown Life Or Death, Black Or White, Prophecy-Style stuff. I like that Canavan gave her characters room to change and shift, to learn gradually. And I feel that the ones who did shift, did so in mostly believable ways.

I like that the gay character was mostly just himself, and not very often A Gay Character in any political agenda sort of way. I like that he was neither completely shunned nor completely accepted, but it varied based on who he was dealing with, what their attitudes toward him and their cultures were. I like the way love stories and attractions played out, for any character. Also, loyalties and distrust. Canavan has an excellent sense of believably natural human progress and motivation. That's hugely important in selling a fantasy adventure.

After three books in her world, I'm willing to forgive her my initial source of grumpiness- excessive made-up-language without enough structure or explanation. I still think things could have been described and introduced better, for grounding, but it might have gotten in the way of what was a beautifully balanced, well characterized adventure.

Because I enjoyed the characters so much, I'm torn between wishing the series had gone on past three, and being impressed at how well resolved things were.

Damn. Now what do I read? I want more wizards, but I'm wary of reading any fantasy I won't enjoy this much. Canavan absolutely raised the bar on fantasy characters. I'll have to see what else she's written, or read nonfiction for a while, to get the wizards out of my head properly.

Blackout- Connie Willis

Blackout

Connie Willis

Ballantine/Spectra 512 pages

I love the way Willis uses time traveling historians, sending them back in time to blend in with daily life, giving them deep cover, proper costumes, even new accents. Even with all that planning, things go awry. They can't change history, and are wary of paradoxes, but there's also slippage- they may not wind up exactly in the right place and time, so they have to improvise and panic. There's suspense, sometimes scarily so. (Doomsday Book is set during the Black Plague. harrowing!) Of course I love these books. The historians are social historians, studying how ordinary people's lives were shaped by daily events and patterns of culture. Anthropology. Science fiction. Social media. Cultural zeitgeists. Pretty much everything I love to think about generally, is what drives this approach to history.

I don't know how or why I got out of the habit of reading Connie Willis. Her time travel books are especially good. To Say Nothing of the Dog is goofy, but a good intro to the way her time travel system works, and Doomsday Book was scary and immersive and made me cry. In a good way.

Blackout... this is just... I am blown away. Okay, bad choice of words for a book about World War II England, mostly during the Blitz. Willis is juggling chapters with an ensemble cast, invariably cutting off the action for one just at a really tense spot, jumping in and out of storylines and leaving me anxious to get to the next Mike chapter or Polly chapter, or Eileen, while pulling me into another set of action. With World War II, she's got a lot of great, well-researched material, that the historians are studying. Dunkirk. Evacuated children. London during the Blitz itself, with train stations becoming bomb shelters.

Another thing Willis is doing here is that she's really threatening the historians' sense of safety. The time and place slipperiness is especially dangerous at a time of so much bombing. Historians are realizing that the newspapers they've been using as archives didn't always publish accurate information. Some of what they're trying to study is getting in their way- everything from measles to obstinate contemporary people. And some of them are having trouble getting out of the past as cleanly as they'd planned.

But... before you go get yourself a copy of this... be warned. There's a sequel! I did not know this when I started reading and got hooked. And now I am stalling on finishing it because it's a cliffhanger. All Clear isn't even out yet. Two more weeks. I can wait two more weeks.  I'm going to try for a review copy, to see if I can get it any faster!

White Cat- Holly Black

White Cat
Holly Black
Margaret K. McElderry, May 2010 320 pages $17.99

I spotted Karen Healey's review of this and ordered it from the library. Loved it. I haven't read as much Holly Black as I probably should, given that she tends to write straight for my sweet spot: urban fantasy.  Or a specific subset where magic is well-incorporated into the fabric and customs of an otherwise normal world. Charms and hexes and spells and rituals are both background noise and social architecture. Maybe a little feared, maybe revered, maybe both depending on politics or the media spin. Another book that did this extraordinarily well was Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. (Sunshine gets an added plus for the descriptions of baked goods. Food lit and folk magic! It doesn't get any better than that! Also vampires.)

In the world of White Cat, people wear gloves because magic is transmitted by skin-to-skin contact. People who can do magic are called curse workers, or just workers. And the magic they can do exacts a price on them. It's called blowback. If you do luck magic, you get lots of good luck. If you do memory magic, your own decays. I like the specificity of this, building on already pretty common ideas of magic's costs (the pagan construct of three-times-three.) Given those structures, it makes perfect sense that some of the most powerful working families have a crime-family mob dynasty hierarchy. Which plays into the book's architecture.

Cassel is the only non-worker in a family of pretty powerful workers. A brother who can do luck, a mother who uses emotional manipulation to work cons. Cassel doesn't do work, but he's a troubled kid-- he killed his best friend years ago, and his family helped him cover it up. But... things are going strange for him, he's sleepwalking and clearly on the verge of a dangerous adventure that tips the balance.

I really loved the way the magic of this society was laid out, the way it happened around Cassel, and made him feel like an outsider as a way to come to grips with his family history. I love the cultural architecture of worker magic, set against normal things like teenagers at a boarding school, or family history, or even normal mystery plots involving shady dealings. The details are done really well. And the writing itself, of scene descriptions, both ordinary teenage awkwardness and distinctly freaky dream sequences. Dream sequences, especially in speculative fiction, impress me when they're done well. It's so rare that they're subtle and actually evocative rather than screaming out plot device.

It's a mixed blessing that this is the start of a series. What will I do til the next one comes out? Now I have two series continuations to pine for! Argh! I keep reading rumors that Robin McKinley will set another book in the Sunshine world. Write faster ladies! (And while I"m waiting for next volumes in series, could Laurie R. King get on with the Kate Martinelli series? Please!?)