The Core Dump

Cruel Zinc Melodies continues Glen Cook’s often wonderful Garrett, P.I. series, a heady mash-up of old-school hard-boiled private investigator fiction and swords-and-sorcery magic.

Unfortunately, Cook phoned this one in. The plot is all over the place with way too many subplots that never gel, and the laconic “P.I. voice” comes dangerously close to a parody of the genre rather than a homage.

Only for the hard-core fan of the series.

The Scar is China Miéville’s follow-up to Perdido Street Station, which builds on the successes of the first novel while avoiding the problems it displayed, making for a strong and compelling sophomore effort.

The world building remains impressive and obsessively detailed, and The Scar introduces much stronger and more interesting characters together with a plot that while over-the-top builds in a gratifying way.

That being said, The Scar does start off slow and takes a while to gather steam (rimshot!).

Probably the most troubling aspect of Miéville’s work is that it makes you ponder the unthinkable: If I like this, does that make me a liker of steampunk?

Perdido Street Station

Lord of the Silent Kingdom is the second installment of Glen Cook’s Instrumentalities of the Night series, following and easily surpassing series opener The Tyranny of the Night.

With Lord of the Silent Kingdom, Cook has dialed in how this world works and established all the needed backstory, leaving him to pack the novel with a fast-moving and Byzantine plot rooted in grim and grimy Realpolitik.

Oh yes, this is dark fantasy, indeed.

Cook makes no concessions for new readers, so don’t even try to enjoy Lord of the Silent Kingdom without first reading The Tyranny of the Night.

Other Core Dump reviews of Glen Cook:

A Cruel Wind
Passage at Arms
Bitter Gold Hearts
Sweet Silver Blues
The Tyranny of the Night

Perdido Street Station is one wild ride. Part sci-fi, part Victorian-style steam punk, and part horror, it’s a hard novel to characterize. What’s clear, though, is that China Miéville is blessed with an imagination that works overtime and solid writing skills.

Taking place in New Crobuzon, a nightmarish city populated by humans and an endless amount of strange aliens that all try to scratch out a living in a pitiless and corrupt environment, the novel follows a disgraced scientist as he goes through a series of horrific events.

The strengths of the novel are a solid sense of place and structure as well as a plethora of characters in various stages of derangement. Miéville creates vivid, cinematographic scenes that stay with you—sometimes whether you want them to or not.

But it’s far from a perfect work. The plotting is a bit weak, especially once the novel settles on its monster-hunt theme, and Miéville’s baroque writing style which sometimes adds great atmospehere to the novel also sometimes goes overboard and obscures rather than enhances the story.

Perdido Street Station is interesting and highly imaginative.

The best comparison might be if Neil Gaiman had been locked in a room with Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral set on endless repeat as he worked.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is Scott Lynch’s debut novel. Unlike most fantasy, it’s the story of a thief and his escapades with a plot focused on the schemes he pulls and the way the underground economy works, so there’s a refreshing lack of Fights Against Evil That Wants to Take Over The World.

It’s an interesting concept, and Lynch executes it well, with a detailed world and interesting characters.

Unfortunately, the novel takes a while to get up to speed, and while it isn’t bad, it doesn’t really grab the reader. The ending ratchets up the pace quite a bit and has some interesting plot twists, but it might not be worth slogging through the beginning.

The Lies of Locke Lamora is an OK read, and sets the stage for a sequel that will be worth checking out.

A Cruel Wind is an omnibus edition of the first three novels in Glen Cook’s Dread Empire series, which has long been out of print and difficult to find. The novels included are A Shadow of All Night Falling, October’s Baby, and All Darkness Met. As you can tell from the titles alone, Cook doesn’t truck much with unicorns and puppies.

This is the granddaddy of dark fantasy, merging the usual concepts of swords and sorcery with a grim world view, where all the characters are painted in shades of grey, and all have their own motivations and flaws. With a huge cast of people introduced without any exposition and a plot packed with fast-moving Realpolitik, Cook doesn’t make it easy for the reader to follow along. You have to pay attention.

The series starts out a bit tentative, and is quite frankly a bit difficult to get into. As with his characters, Cook wastes little time on setting up the world and its history. Instead, your understanding grows as the plot moves along. But if you persevere, the series becomes mesmerizing—after a while it becomes very difficult to put down.

Highly recommended.

Other Glen Cook reviews:

The Tyranny of Night
Passage at Arms
Bitter Gold Hearts
Sweet Silver Blues

Twilight Watch is the third novel in Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch trilogy, and continues the story begun in the other two installments.

Lukyanenko continues building up his universe, and the novel reveals more of how the world of the Others actually works while introducing some interesting new characters.

It’s fast-moving and gritty, and apart from endless plot twists and turns also delves deeper into the differences between light and dark others, in the process making everybody more grey.

If you’ve read the other two installments in the series, I defy you to not read this one and find out how the story ends.

Unfortunately, it suffers a bit from third-novel syndrome, with the author it seems getting a bit bored with the limitations of his characters and upping the ante a bit too much for the climax, but it’s still a great ride.

Mopey, conflicted Russian magicians are fun!

Related Core Dump Reviews:

Night Watch
Day Watch

Day Watch is the second novel in the trilogy begun with Night Watch (my review here). As with Night Watch it’s a series of interrelated short stories chronicling the struggle between light and dark Others, but is told more from the perspective of the dark Others, which makes a nice change of pace.

With the settings and concepts mostly set up in Night Watch, and Lukyanenko more comfortable in his reality, Day Watch is faster moving and more emotionally charged.

It’s one of those few novels were you literally have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Highly recommended.

Related Core Dump Reviews:

Night Watch
Twilight Watch

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko is the first novel in a trilogy set in modern Moscow, and is also the basis for the excellent movie with the same name.

If you’ve seen the movie, the characters and settings are similar, but the plot is significantly different, and there are some curve balls in there.

If you haven’t seen the movie, the basic concept is that there are “Others” among us—magicians, werewolves, vampires, witches, etc. They are people, but can tap into something the book calls the Twilight, and the movie calls the Gloom, a sort of other reality. Sort of. The Others are divided among the light and dark, with the light Others wanting to help people, and the dark others wanting to use people, sometimes as with vampires quite literally.

But there are many shades of grey among the Others.

It sounds silly, and at heart it is, but Lukyanenko uses the concept to build engaging characters who deal with moral dilemmas in a distinctly non-Western way. A world-weary Russian mentality underlies the fantastic events and people of the novel, setting it apart from the pack.

It should be noted that the novel is actually made up of several interrelated short stories.

If you like fantasy in any of its forms, put Night Watch at the top of your reading list.

Related Core Dump Reviews:

Day Watch
Twilight Watch

Bitter Gold Hearts is the second novel in Glen Cook’s Garrett Files series, and this time Garrett finds himself sucked in to a strange kidnapping in the upper crusts of TunFaire society despite his best efforts to stay out of the job.

Glen Cook is a bit more comfortable blending fantasy and noir this time out, making it more efficient than the first novel in the series, Sweet Silver Blues.

An interesting plot, an interesting world, and a cynical private investigator. What else could you want?

Great fun.

(No book cover image available from Amazon’s associate central.)

Sweet Silver Blues