Blood Drama by Christopher Meeks

Christopher Meeks knows how to engage a reader and tell a story. His collection of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea showcases Meeks' mastery of small moments and was the book that made me a huge fan of his work. The great joy I found in those stories compelled me to buy every other book he's written.

In this book, Blood Drama, tells a longer story. It begins with Ian Nash, a drama school grad student who is having a bad day. After being dropped from his Ph.D. program, Ian stops for coffee and manages to wind up as a hostage in a bank robbery gone wrong. It's a classic case of a bad day gone much worse.

Meeks takes all the cliches of a thriller, the desperate criminal, the wise-cracking cops, the beautiful FBI agent and the hapless every man caught in the middle and takes them mostly in the ways you'd expect. But there are enough "wait, he did what?" moments in the tale to keep you turning the pages and the dialog sparkles and cracks with wit. I found, as I turned the pages, that while I certainly didn't like every character (indeed, I found Ian pretty annoying at times) I cared what happened. I bought into the story and the characters.

Meeks is not afraid to be outrageous and while the book comes dangerously close to collapsing under the "writer's fantasy problem" (Do you think the beautiful FBI agent is going to fall for the annoying, self-absorbed, Mamet-obsessed writer-type? Is said writerly guy going to grow as a person and save the day? Well, what do you think!) Meeks manages to both play by the cliche, poke fun at it and hit a layer of truth underneath it all. When I've described some of the more outrageous scenes to friends they've said "that sounds awful." And you'd think it would be, but somehow under Meeks' watchful eye and wise pen, it's not.

Meeks writes about people trying to solve problem of making it through the day. Blood Drama sees just how bad a day can get. Meeks takes the thriller and gives it a heart. A dopey, exasperating heart, but one that beats true.

Twittering from the Circus of the Dead by Joe Hill

I'm a big Joe Hill fan. I've reviewed his three novels (Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2) here and last month I got to meet Joe at the Seattle Public Library. Joe is a great guy and not that scary in real life. He gave a great reading, answered numerous questions, posed for pictures with fans, and signed books and Kindles.

I was thrilled yesterday to find that a new Joe Hill story was published as a $0.99 Kindle single. I clicked the buy button in a heartbeat and plowed through Twittering from the Circus of the Dead in one sitting.

Joe Hill is a terrific (and terrifying) writer and he proves it here by telling a story entirely in tweets. His bored teenage protagonist thinks she is on the worst vacation ever. When things get more interesting, she finds things much worse than boredom.

Twittering from the Circus of the Dead is a quick read and quite scary. I love Joe's novels and and now I'm loving his short stories. I'm still dipping into his short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts. Twittering from the Circus of the Dead is well worth the buck I paid for it.

Keep those stories coming, Joe!

Crux by Ramez Naam

In his first novel, Nexus, Ramez Naam burst onto the science fiction stage with a terrific book filled with credible augmented humans set in a fascinating future. Nexus was a thoughtful thrill-ride that came to a very satisfying, action-packed conclusion. In his latest novel, Crux, Naam takes his readers further into a world changed by Nexux, the mind-linking, mind-enhancing technology combining nano-technology, pharmacology and software.

Crux is a thoughtful thriller. While the book is filled with gunfire, assassinations, fist fights, carbon fiber and nano drones, once again it is the very human struggles that propel the story. Crux is fundamentally a story about power, the powers of the government and the powers of the individual.

The events in Crux take place six months after the events that made up the story in Nexus. Naam vividly describes both great good and great evil made possible by Nexus enhancement. Some people are empowered, some are addicted, some are enslaved. Naam is very good at writing conflicted characters, showing how evil can come from good intentions, how good people can fail and how hard choices can be.

Naam never lets philosophy get in the way of a good story. While his characters do battle with their consciences, they are mostly busy trying to stay alive and the story zips right along. Naam does manage to find the time to add small bits of humor to his tale, including a great scene where an enhanced Chinese clone and a grizzled CIA operative compare battle scars. Another great running joke are the repeated scenes where the reader is shown that running Bruce Lee software in your head doesn't make you Bruce Lee.

Crux does the work of great science fiction, it makes the reader look closely and critically at what kind of world we are building here and now. In Crux, Naam doesn't let the reader off with easy answers. Instead he gives them fascinating questions, compelling characters and one hell of a story.

(Note: I was fortunate enough to receive an Advance Reader Copy for this review. Crux will be published later this month.)

The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea by Christopher Meeks

Christopher Meeks is a master of capturing moments. The thirteen stories that comprise the collection The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea are all brief but none feel too brief. They feel instead like moments from the lives of real people, people who are interesting, wondering, fearful and trying to get along in this world. I believed and enjoyed each of these tales.

The moments described in these tales are pivot points in the characters lives but Meeks' real talent is in reminding the reader of the wonder contained in even the simplest of situations, the most seemingly mundane circumstances. Some of these moments are dark, others funny, many are wise, all are true. This is the highest work of fiction and Meeks prose makes the telling seem effortless. In the moment, the reader is captured by the story.

If I had to pick favorites from this collection I'd be hard pressed to come up with a list less than thirteen stories long, but the wryly titled story, "The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea", the third tale in this volume, was the one that moved me from being a reader to being that guy who walks up to random strangers and says "Have you read Christopher Meeks? You should.  He's very, very good!" Meeks' story "He's Home" is wonderfully scary while his lesson called "The Fundamentals of Nuclear Dating" is warm, witty and wise. "Engaging Ben" is, well, a very engaging story, one that reminded me of some of the best writing of T.C. Boyle. The story "Nike Had Nothing to Do With It" is one of the saddest little stories I've ever loved.

Meeks has a second collection of stories called Months and Seasons which I was delighted to add to my Kindle. And I'm delighted to find that Mr. Meeks has some novels out in the world as well. The Brightest Moon of the Century, Love at Absolute Zero, and Blood Drama all await me. I'm a lucky man.

The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea is a great set of short stories. I'd never heard of Christopher Meeks until I read this collection and now I'm a huge fan. I'm still going up to people and saying "Have you read Christopher Meeks? You should. He's very, very good!"

Joyland by Stephen King

Let's cut to the chase, I loved this book. This is not one of those big, sprawling Stephen King tomes with loads of gore and an epic mythos (although SK does an awesome job when he writes those). This is a smaller story, a surprisingly sweet tale of a 21 year old kid with a broken heart & a summer job at a rickety 3rd-tier amusement park called Joyland. It's a wonderful tale filled with characters whose dialog and motivations ring true, a dark mystery at the heart of the park and just enough of a supernatural edge to keep you guessing and turning pages.

This is a book for anyone whose had a first job, a first love, a broken heart and a mind that wonders if all we see in life is all there really is. There is no joy without sorrow, but there is far more joy than sorrow packed into these 283 pages. Stephen King can take you back to 1973 and a place called Joyland. Go to your bookstore and buy a ticket, it's a wonderful ride.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Lauren Beukes is an excellent writer and a very good teller of tales. She writes smart, believable dialog and characters that ring true. Her latest novel, The Shining Girls, is a tightly constructed thriller involving a very bad man named Harper Curtis who travels through time killing young women. Kirby Mazrachi survives Harper's attack and, understandably, becomes obsessed with hunting him down. To that end, she becomes a journalism intern at the Chicago Sun-Times and partners with Dan, a world-weary reporter. The dialog between Dan and Kirby is really quite wonderful. For example, here's a bit from when Kirby and Dan first meet:

“I’m much more interested in crime.” 

He spins slowly in his wheelie chair to face her. 

“Is that so? Well, I got real bad news for you. I cover baseball.” 

“But you used to be on homicide,” the girl insists. 

“Yeah, like I used to be able to smoke and drink and eat bacon and not have a fucking stent in my chest. All a direct result of working the homicide beat. You should forget about it. It’s no place for a nice wannabe hardcore punk girl like you.” 

“They don’t offer internship positions on homicide.” 

“For a very good reason. Can you imagine you kids running around a crime scene? Christ!”

Kirby spends much more of her time trying to find links between murders than covering sports. Dan provides both support and skepticism:

“Drugs. He wasn’t on drugs. Or not any I’m familiar with.” 

“Expert, huh?” 

“Have you met my mom? You would have taken drugs too. Although I was never terribly good at it.” 

“It doesn’t work, what you’re doing, Deflecting with humor. Just tells me that there’s something you need to deflect from.” 

“Years on the homicide beat had made him a keen-eyed observer of humanity, a philosopher of life,” she intones in a movie-trailer voice, two octaves down. 

“Still doing it,” says Dan. His cheeks are hot. She gets to him in a way that’s infuriating.

Beukes seems to have taken the writer's phrase "kill your darlings" to heart because she paints lovely word portraits of each of Harper's victims before he swoops in kills them very violently. This is not a book for the squeamish.

The Shining Girls is brilliantly constructed with chapters flitting though time and shifting in focus from Harper to Kirby or Dan or any of Harper's many victims. The many threads loop and intersect and ultimately tie-back in perfect arcs and bows, wrapping the tale like a perfect gift.

I am a big fan of Lauren Beukes's work. I thought her first novel, Moxyland, was brilliant and I absolutely loved her second novel, Zoo City. But while I loved both the premise of The Shining Girls and find no flaw in the execution of the book, I can't say that I loved the book. It just didn't click with me. Harper was evil and Kirby and Dan were both likable characters, but I got no sense of being engaged in a big struggle that I cared about. It felt more like doing a really clever crossword puzzle.

Not all books connect with all readers and ultimately The Shining Girls didn't shine for me. I felt the story was well worth the price of admission, but this isn't a book that I'll rave about to my friends or remember for years to come.

The Lives of Tao by Wes Chu

I'll bet that Wes Chu's life motto isn't YOLO ("You Only Live Once"). In The Lives of Tao, the title character is a very old, somewhat snarky alien who has been stranded on earth for generations. Tao and his fellow aliens crash landed here many years ago and they can only survive in host bodies. When the host dies, they must move on and Tao has moved on many, many times.

The book opens with a bang, literally, as Tao and his host are in a spy-vs-spy caper that goes wrong. Bullets are flying and Edward, Tao's host, makes the ultimate sacrifice in a dive off the John Hancock building. Edward's body doesn't survive, but Tao lives on.

Tao doesn't have time to be too picky in selecting a new host and he settles into the body of Roen, an overweight, not overly ambitious IT technician. Now Roen has a voice in his head and a world of trouble headed his way.

The Lives of Tao is a fun romp. Combining the action of a James Bond movie with a secret history of the world worthy of it's own subdivision of the X-files, Tao and a cast of aliens and humans work to whip Roen into the shape he'll need in his new role as soldier/secret agent/spy. Because, you see, there are two factions of aliens and they're at war.

In a way, The Lives of Tao, is kind of the ultimate self-improvement book. Roen has to get fit or die. There's a lot he has to learn. Tao may live forever, but Roen's survival is always in doubt. In a way Wes Chu might have done too good a job in casting Roen as a hapless every man, I found the other characters, especially Tao, more compelling. But Roen improves as the book goes on and I found myself rooting for him.

The hidden history that gets revealed in The Lives of Tao is clever and sometimes teasingly referenced. The book doesn't get bogged down in heavy details, it blasts along as an adventure, the kind of thing that would make a fun summer movie, the kind that leaves the door open to host of sequels. I have no idea if The Lives of Tao will ever be seen on a movie screen (it should!) but that sequel book is already in the works.

There's no need to YOLO. You can have more fun and action than can fit in one life. The Lives of Tao is a complete story with heroes and villains, life and love and non-stop action. But Wes Chu has more to tell us about The Lives of Tao and that's a good thing.