Four Books

[firstfrost]

Fudoki (by Kij Johnson)

I read The Fox Woman long ago; this is a sort-of sequel to it. Set in long-ago (and mythic) Japan, it's about a cat who loses her home and family, and made a human for a while by the spirits. It's also about the seventy-year-old princess, dying by inches and writing the story of the cat-woman. It's not a very exciting story, but it doesn't strive for that. It is thoughtful, and wistful, and poetic - and there are some bits I found particularly amusing, having to do with instantiating NPCs. Three and a half stars.

The Changeling Sea (by Patricia McKillip)

This is a small book - a fairy tale rather than one of my more usual epic fantasies - but it's lovely and haunting. Here is a bit of minor spoiler, which needs a bit of context. The main character's father was a fisherman lost at sea. There are people pining for the sea, and the land under it; her mother pines for her lost husband. Did he drown, or did he go to the land under the sea? The girl asks the sea-queen, and is answered:

"If your father had cast his heart into the sea, his body might have wandered into her country. But his heart came with his boat into harbor every night. So his bones may be in this sea, but his heart remains where he kept it all his life."

I love that. I don't want to talk like that in real life, but I want to play characters who can talk like that. I want to be able to give them that sort of dialogue. Four stars.

Orcs (by Stan Nichols)

This is supposed to be the book that makes you never see orcs the same way again. It had good praise quotes by reputable people on the cover, and a nice back blurb (someone on Amazon said "The person who wrote the back cover blurb should have written the book", which I agree with but didn't think of myself). But by the time I decided to retire it, it hadn't really gone anywhere remarkable (humans, orcs, elves, dwarves, ancient artifacts, kobolds, battle scenes, more battle scenes, even more battle scenes) except into the sort of gratuitiously over the top "evil" that suggests Dungeon Keeper to me rather than Sauron. Except Dungeon Keeper was parody, and this takes itself way too seriously. Anyway, the sentence that I am sure was meant to be creepy as opposed to over-the-top campy and made me give up: "She climbed down from the altar and unstrapped the bloodstained unicorn horn she used as a dildo."

Bone Song (by John Meaney)

This is, essentially, a police procedural set in a society where all electricity and half the populace are running on necromancy instead. It's a great setting, an interesting story, a likeable main character, and a good book. It has a couple of flaws - the love plot was so sudden that I was suspicious of it all book, and there's a bit that was too clichedly "And now I throw off the spell by the power of being the protagonist!". For all that Bone Song is festooned in even more gothic-horror decoration than Orcs was, I appreciated it a lot more. When it's Hallowe'en, there's no such thing as too over the top. Four stars.