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.

Nexus by Ramez Naam

Ramez Naam astounded me with Nexus. In this novel Naam has not only extrapolated a very believable, very frightening, future world, he has populated his creation with interesting characters who don't just talk or info-dump to each other. They think, they feel, they doubt. Through these people, Naam tells one hell of a story.

Naam knows how to hook a reader. Consider this opening:

--------------------

1

THE DON JUAN PROTOCOL

Friday 2040.02.17 : 2255 hours

The woman who called herself Samantha Cataranes climbed out of the cab and walked towards the house on 23rd Street.

------------------

The chapter title is definitely intriguing, the timestamp says "yeah, we're in the future here and by the way, we're on military time." And why exactly is this woman "calling herself" Samantha Cataranes?

A good writer tells a tale that draws the reader forward page by page and Ramez Naam is more than a good writer, he's a great writer. That's what surprised me. It's not that the writing is flashy, it's that the story telling is superb.

The story is one of consequence. In the future, people are augmented. Contact lenses are computer displays. Soldiers have genetically enhanced muscles and reflexes. Some people have developed a drug called Nexus that enables a kind of brain to brain techno-telepathic linkage. Nexus is illegal and the next generation of Nexus, Nexus 5, is extremely illegal, very sought after and very powerful. Because Nexus 5 lets the people run software in their heads.

Kaden Lane is a young scientist working on Nexus and the woman who calls herself Samantha Cataranes is working for people very interested in his work. And things get very interesting, very fast.

In describing Nexus as a novel, it's tempting to compare Naam's work to that of other, more established novelists. The book has the pace and technical depth of a Michael Crichton novel but in my opinion Naam does a better job with his characters. Ironically, despite their augmentation, they come off as very human.

The world of Nexus is slick and dark and paranoid, like the worlds described by folks like William Gibson or Cory Doctorow but even paranoids have enemies. Nexus is a very philosophical novel that is also a non-stop thrill ride. Naam manages to write believable gun fights and surprising effective scenes of software debugging and computer hacking. It's a neat trick. He has written an action thriller with a strong mental element and some very heroic Buddhist monks.

Nexus is Naam's first novel, but it reads like something written by a wise, assured master at the top of his game. Perhaps Naam himself has had an upgrade? Or maybe he's just amazingly talented and smart enough to learn from other great writers. In any case, I've got one inexpensive, legal prescription for anyone looking to upgrade their brain with a smart thriller that will make you think: Nexus.

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

I am a big Joe Hill fan. His previous novels, Horns and Heart-Shaped Box, proved that Joe is a masterful writer who creates not just great, pulse-pounding stories, but characters whose lives and deaths are really something the reader cares about. Those first two novels made me put Joe's latest, NOS4A2, on my "deliver to my Kindle the instant it's available" list. This was a very wise move on my part.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time recounting the plot of NOS4A2, there are plenty of summations of the story on Amazon and elsewhere. I will say that I found this tale of terror to be perfectly paced. At over 700 pages, it's a big book but it doesn't feel at all bloated. It's big and powerful and scary as hell, much like an old Rolls Royce Wraith being is driven by dead man.

Like all of Joe's books, it is the characters and pitch perfect dialog that make you buy into the fantastic world where the dead don't stay dead, evil smells like gingerbread and scrabble tiles can give you answers but never proper names. The good folks are flawed and the evil-doers have their own seductive logic to justify their actions and I am so glad I went along for this dark and wonderful ride.

It is a very rare thing that I find a book so good I buy it twice, but NOS4A2 is such a beast. After scarfing through the Kindle version, I saw the hardcover in the bookstore. The end pages and illustrations are both lovely and horrifying. And the final afterword, including a "Note on the Type" not included in the e-book, add an extra level of unease to a very haunting tale.

Mink River by Brian Doyle

I know that there are people who would not love Brian Doyle's novel Mink River. Some might find too much detail in the cataloging of creation, the lists of berries, the inventory of a workshop, the supplies packed for a journey. Some might find a novel filled not just with the thoughts of people, but those of birds and bears as well, to be too fantastic. Some people do not love the flow of words, the shape of them in the mouth, the way the words tumble together to form sentences, ideas, stories and worlds. But if you can love a place painted with words, a town of filled not with characters but with real people, many of whom you'd be proud and happy to count as friends, then let Brian Doyle tell you of this place, a town on along the Mink River, next to the ocean on the Oregon Coast.

The town is Neawanaka, a town built from what comes from the trees and what comes from the sea. Most of the people of the town are either Salish natives or Irish immigrants, two traditions rich in the telling of tales, and the tales and people combine on the banks of the Mink River in ways that are often wonderful and wise. There is the old nun who raises a young crow and teaches him to talk, the old men whose Department of Public Works studies everything including the nature of time. There is the young boy who crashes his bicycle, the family trying to survive via farming and fishing, the man named Cedar pulled mostly dead and then reborn from the river, the artist struggling to create and struggling against the black depression threatening to bury her. There are lives in this town, fascinating, intricate wonderful lives.

It is hard to pull a single passage from this novel to give you a sense of its flavor. The problem is akin to that of describing a river by handing you a single glass of its water. This is perhaps a problem that Worried Man and Cedar from the Neawanaka Department of Public Works could study and solve and I wish that they could help me with this right now. But I will do my best with this small example, this tiny bit where the bear has been summoned to pull Daniel up from the ravine where he has crashed his bicycle:

"The bear is confused and excited and angry. She cradles the boy in her huge dark arms and rumbles uphill right through the bushes. This animal is broken, she thinks. It smells bloody. The blood makes her hungry. She remembers the ground squirrels. The word for ground squirrel in the language of bears is meat in holes. The night is as black as she can ever remember. Daniel’s braids flop and swing. She has never touched a human being before although she has seen and smelled many of them, all different flavors and sizes. In the dark language of bears the word for human being is killer brother."

Mink River is a story of many stories, beautiful, flowing and wise. It is full of the dark language of bears, the wisdom of crows and the wonder of humanity.

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

For a story to succeed the writer has to grab the reader, either by empathy or interest, and lead them through the twists and turns of the tale. In the case of Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill had my interest from the start, but it took him longer to engage my empathy. Judas Coyne, the aging heavy-metal rocker who is the protagonist of this story, is not a character one instantly warms to. Jude collects gruesome artifacts of death and also has a habit of using and discarding a succession of young goth girl friends, girls whose true names are too much of a bother so he calls them by their states of origin. He sent his last girlfriend, Florida, away when she became too troublesome and now she's dead, but even before Florida's train had left the state, Jude had picked up her replacement, a girl he calls Georgia, at a strip club. Hey, life goes on.

But sooner or later, the dead catch up...

I was hooked, like Jude, by the ad on the internet. It read:

I will "sell" my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder. . . .

The tangible bit is a dead man's suit and what Jude thinks he's buying from a stranger is a joke, another item for his collection of the macabre. But when Jude clicks the "Buy Now" button what he gets is a suit that comes in a black, heart-shaped box and genuine ghost. And the ghost and the package did not come from a stranger.

It took me a while to make it through Heart-Shaped Box because the horror in this novel is truly horrifying. Craddock McDermott, the vengeful ghost, is absolutely scary as hell. The battle between Jude, Georgia, and the dead man becomes an epic road trip and like all good horror, I honestly had no clue as to whether or not anyone would survive. But somewhere along this long dark road, Joe Hill shifted the story into overdrive and I found myself caring not just about the puzzle of the Heart-Shaped Box, but about Jude and Georgia and what had really happened to Florida.

Joe Hill certainly knows horror and he writes it well. But Joe writes the living even better than he does the dead. He makes words into people, people that you root for. And that's not horrible, that's wonderful. And so is Heart-Shaped Box.