The stone wall crowded with huddled figures beautifully rendered in marble agony, damned souls locked in stone who huddle and teem and yearn toward the unfelt space denied them, groping from their anhedonic orgy for some dimly conceived paradise of emptiness. Though motionless they suggest motion, a surging wave of sculpted humanity impeccably rendered. The alabaster snarl carved on one wide-eyed face with crooked teeth. The flaring nostrils of one reaching figure always at the onset of a scream. Tension in the tendons of a reaching wrist.
Rape. Such an ugly and common act. Some have likened it to theft, others to a form of murder. Isiilde has become one rape-victim among many on Fyrsta. Having been one such statistic, I am aware of how little understanding the commonness of rape comforts the victim. Before anything comfort is able to reach your mind, you have to work through some of the fear.
Isiilde was an innocent at the time she was raped, a child in most ways, much like myself. Isiilde feels the loss of that innocence keenly and Sabrina Flynn manages to get across how complicated that loss is. Fear is not only complicated but also invasive, probably more so than the act itself. King’s Folly adds to Isiilde’s struggles by bringing her and her traveling companions into one harrowing experience after the other.
Rape is not the only way to gain power over people. Children are highly vulnerable. Even at times and in areas where children have to fend for themselves to survive, children remain the vulnerable ones in our society. Easily ignored and easily used for whatever deeds greedy people might want. King’s Folly does not ignore the challenges such vulnerability brings.
Greed. Hungering for what you do not have, whether that be sex, money or property, can lead people to rationalize themselves into deeds they might claim repulsive if others do them. Especially if “they” do them. Tharios is one of the greedy people whose ability to rationalize is no longer required. He is that far gone. But he holds power over others who do lie to themselves about the necessity of what they are doing.
Isek’s betrayal is difficult for Marsais to handle. As a seer, Isek’s betrayal hit his blind-spot because such behavior did not fit with the kind of person Marsais had thought Isek to be. Ironically, Isek soon discovers that Tharios would not hesitate to betray him. Now survival becomes a challenge for Marsais’ old friend.
Oenghus is loyal and nuts. Both Oenghus and Marsais are a little insane. Oenghus’ variety comes mainly through his berserker nature while Marsais has gained his through some awful choices he has had to make. Being a seer does not seem to be an ability to strive for and I imagine any person with a true ability would do their utmost to keep knowledge of it from the public. People do not seem to like it when they are told the truth about themselves.
I did only the necessary life things yesterday evening and today. Other than that, I read. King’s Folly was well-written, dragging me screaming and kicking (yeah, right) into its stream. Sleep was a duty I did not want to embrace. Definitely recommended.
I tried to find a link to all of the authors in A Forest of Dreams. As you see below, I couldn’t find them all.
Allan B Anderson: The Trouble with Dragons: This is a funny and cute story all about perspective. In The Trouble With Dragons we find a dragon, a town and knights.
Rose Blackthorn: When Darkness Falls, The Light: Flint Harmattan walks into the camp of Zaelryn and Vaeryn. Vaeryn is suffering from PTSD (an almost constant dissociation). Zaelryn makes sure she stays alive.
Cynthia Booth & Roy C Booth: Trespassers: Jenny, who is on her way to a job, stops at a cafè when her car becomes unsafe to drive. She is offered a ride to a safe place to stay.
Dave D. Burgh: The Bell: This is a really great and strange take on eternal life. Uldo and Emin are fun characters.
Jesse Duckworth: Runaway Clydesdale: A two-headed man, by the name of Clyde and Dale, is an exhibit at a freak show. He grows tired of this life and decides to run away.
Mani Fadn: Songs For Dead Hearts: People getting what they ask for isn’t always a good thing. Poor “young man” (all we ever know him as). A victim of his own abilities and the fickleness of the other villagers.
Jan Goeb: Accounting for Change: Here we find a tale that is about the first days of vampire life.
R.A.M. Graham: Dancing Doll: RAM Graham was the reason I bought A Forest of Dreams. I loved her story about Gwenmere. Dancing Doll surprised me. I love that. A little girl REALLY tries to listen to what her mother has told her to do. She really does. But we all know how tempting some things can be.
Rick Hipps: Squire William’s New Charge: What a great squire to have. Squire Williams is cast in the “teen-ager doing something his elders aren’t able to” role. Squire William’s New Charge is a fairly dark fairy-tale.
Axel Kohagen: Mudwife: I like these slightly creepy stories about consequences. Perhaps it could be said about this story that one should not trust first impressions and maybe even that it might pay sometimes to be less curious.
R. Scott McCoy: Only a Nightmare: Only a Nightmare is hilarious and creepy. Once again, things did not turn out how I expected.
Verna McKinnon: Dragon Toast: Dragon Toast is about the life of familiars and a dragon baby. It is adorable. Tupa is the cutest familiar ever. There is magic, action and adventure. My call is that Dragon Toast is a children’s story.
Angela Meadon: Intrepid Dawn. Not a children’s tale. Nope. More for the Young Adults who are able to read dark stories about monsters from the depths of the ocean.
Michael Merriam: All the Leaves Your Bed. I loved this little story about death, environmentalism and tree-magic.
Druscilla Morgan: The Last Unicorn: This is the story of the bunch that fit me the least. Rufus Armstrong is in charge of what appears to be a dangerous horse with a bump on its forehead.
James Pratt: King Kong Died for Your Sins. Oh my god. King Kong Died for Your Sins is a perfect portrayal of certain parts of our society. James Pratt nailed it. Absolutely hilarious.
Dyfedd Rex: Weapon of Mass Demoralization Test: Another story that I really liked. We get jaded old hunters, the military, overconfident magic-users, succubi and nuns.
Maggie Secara: Jack’s Day Out: We meet an old story-book character some years after the event. Jack and his brother Perian are on their way to visit the Lady when Perian disappears. Some of the other characters from the old story turn up as well.
Daminsen Shentay: In the Weft: Some shopkeepers are a little more dangerous to rob than other shopkeepers. Mitch should have been more careful about checking out the details of this job before agreeing to take it.
Most of these short stories were really great. There were two or three that didn’t fit me all that well, but I imagine they were still well-written. I find it difficult to know if a story that does not fit me is well-written. However, I do recommend A Forest of Dreams if nothing else but for Graham, Merriman, Rex, McCoy and Burgh’s stories. Those were my favorites.
TIME IS FICKLE, ever changing and flowing, ebbing like the sea. A vast ocean of moments brushing against the next, rippling beneath waters both turgid and calm. It slips between our fingers when we wish to hold it, yet moves with sluggish stubbornness when we seek to flee it, riding upon our shoulders like an oppressive yoke. Time is a burden we cannot escape. Our lives are swallowed in the cold, dark waters of its unfathomable depths; never to be remembered or recalled, fading like a whisper that never was. On occasion—a very rare occasion—one moment will brush against the next and a spark will flare to life that refuses to be extinguished. This is the moment, the spark, and this is how the end begins for a shattered realm—with a small nymphling who was cold.
For the insider, The Witch With No Name brings Hollows to an end with loads of action, death, betrayal, idiocy and heroism.
Master vampires have no sense of other people’s boundaries. They take psychopathy to its extreme. Seriously scary people. Anyone in their right mind would be afraid of them. Perhaps even seasoned demons. Young ones, like Rachel (the only young demon around), need to keep master vampires away from themselves altogether. Often fictional lives do not work out that way.
When a master vampire, like Cormel, wants something, he does not care at all about anything but what he wants. He utilizes anything he thinks will work to get Rachel to do his bidding. Hell, he’ll even use the tools at his disposal even if he doesn’t think they will be effective.
By now Rachel has come to love such an amount of people that Cormel can pick and choose who he wishes to hurt Rachel with. He wants the souls of the undead re-united with their bodies. Whether that is a good thing or not for the vampires, himself even, he cares not. My will be done! So be it! Lord and emperor in one is how he sees himself.
Psychopaths are seriously frightening people and noone wants them in their lives. But at least they are consistent in not caring, in abusing and in being bad for you. The rest of us though. All of us who deal in shades of grey. Man, we are the ones to be worried about. Some of us try to be half-way decent, while others of us tend to lean more towards deviousness and anarchy, but we are all unpredictable. These are the people who will do the most harm to Rachel and her loved ones.
Perhaps people can help it, but I haven’t seen signs of it yet. We do what we think will benefit ourselves and those we care for. It may be detrimental to all the involved parties, but somehow we find ways to justify godawful choices. Some of Trent and Rachel’s enemies are like that. They want what they think is best for themselves and those they wish on their side, even if part of them has to know (it just has to) that they are doing something stupid. Boy is their choice dumb, idiotic, beyond comprehension, yet oh, such a normal thing.
How does a person fight such people? Sometimes you can’t and sometimes you just have to do your best. In Rachel’s case her best can be pretty impressive. While Kim Harrison manages to convince me that Rachel is afraid and all of that, Rachel is way beyond my abilities – not thinking about the magic stuff now. She is simply brave. Brave and loving and dangerous and stupid. But she tries her best to make life better for her loved ones. Since this story is about her and her coterie, she is the one that matters to me. Forget the rest. LET THEM BURN. Or not. Fortunately it just so happens that what is good for Rachel and her people is also good for the rest of the magical population.
“The Supreme Grand Master smiled in the depths of his robes. It was amazing, this mystic business. You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it any more you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing, they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.”
”Vimes had half expected the Scone to explode, or crumble, or flash red-hot. Which was stupid, said a dwindling part of himself – it was a fake, a nonsense, something made in Ankh-Morpork for money, something that had already cost lives. It was not, it could not be real.
But in the roaring air he knew that it was, for all who needed to believe, and in a belief so strong that truth was not the same as fact … he knew that for now, and yesterday, and tomorrow, both the thing, and the whole of the thing.”
Terry Pratchett (2000), “The Fifth Elephant”, London: Transworld Publishers, Corgi Books
Saving the world is what heroes do. Tremaine Valiere is such a heroine. With the help of her friends and resurrected father she sets out to kick the Gardier out of her world and the Syprian world.
Sometimes the people we want to save do everything in their power to be destroyed. Falling for the lure of “something for nothing” could be tempting when your world is falling apart around you. Ixion promises much, but will he deliver? Oh, yes. He delivers. What he does deliver might not be what the Ile-Rien had in mind when they took him in from the wrath of Gilead and Ileas. We do stuff like this all the time. Internet and mail scams come to mind. Pyramid schemes. Hedgefunds. Humans must have evolved to be suckers. I love that Martha Wells shows some of the processes leading up to such catastrophic decisions.
Idiots or not, heroines do what heroines have to do. Her father is even more ruthless than Tremaine. Arisilde’s shade is as eccentric as the living person was. Ander is Ander. Gilead keeps on realizing how much of his works as the god’s vessel involves sorcery. Gerard tries to be the father-figure that Nicholas is incapable of. Florian’s abilities are stretched beyond what she thought possible. Even the Gardier prisoner proves an unexpected resource.
As I see it, the story is about Tremaine and her adventures and her ability to accept the world as it is. Just as falling for schemes seems to be part of our genetic make-up so does the inability to see people and situations for what they are. People are complicated. What I am able to observe in others, I am incapable of observing in myself. Lying to myself is no less part of autism than it is part of the lives of non-autists. This is what the societies we grow up in train us to do. Conforming to expectations and popular thinking gets you accepted, but so does not conforming as long as you do it the right way. While Tremain oftene goes against the Ile-Rien thinking on women, she has been inundated with their teachings from childhood. Breaking from the lies of society and her family through independent thinking and admissions of own strengths and flaws is incredibly challenging for Tremaine. But she keeps on trying. I think Martha Wells does an excellent job showing just that in her trilogy.
Before starting in on a review of the PSI books, I felt the need to revisit the Retriever‘s series’ Staying Dead. Too many books have come between the last time I read it and now. That, and Bonnie, the main character of PSI, has a walk-on in one of the Retriever books.
Staying Dead is a mystery with a dash of current (magic) added in. Well, a lot of current, but it remains mainly a mystery that just happens to be placed in an urban fantasy environment. Theft method is by current and the retriever of that object is also gifted by the ability to use current (electricity both wild and tamed). Lightning is an example of wild current. Tamed is hopefully self-explanatory.
Our main character is Genvieve Taylor. Next in importance is her partner, Sergei Didier. Sergei and Wren “retrieve” lost items. Retrieve is used in its loosest sense in their business. I kind of like it when the a thief is set to catch a thief who has hired a thief to steal from a thief. Maybe this is one crime where there is only one victim – the original one. Or maybe not.
Staying Dead is also very much about racism. Village Pest Removal services ask people to “Let us remove infestations and unwanted visitations”. Wren soon understands that they are talking about removing the fatae from New York. Fantasy and science fiction seem to have become the venue where serious discussions about the impact of racism and all the various forms of bigotry occur. Perhaps that has to do with the opportunity the authors have to create a landscape of humans vs. non-humans.
Our world is filled with racism. Norway is no exception to that. I doubt any country is devoid of it. Here pink in various hues is the majority color. Practically any tone of brown stands out. I admit to be racist. I am also a bigot. Neither fact makes me proud and I do try to keep my mouth shut about some the thoughts that appear in my head. But I have been raised in a faith and several societies that have shared racism as part of their underlying principles (only an explanation – not an excuse). Sergei is that kind of racist. He really tries to control what he says, but he does not trust the otherness of the fatae. Like humans some of the fatae are mean and some of them are kind. Sergei did not understand that until Wren knocked some sense into his head. I needed to understand group processes and exactly what was meant by the term racism and find a way to relate it to myself. Sergei gets to do that as one after the other of the fatae is beaten to a bloody pulp for no other reason than being fatae. Life is like that. Every once in a while something or some person comes along that lets us see people in a new light.
Many books have come between reading Staying Dead for the first time and this time. I am still definitely recommending it.
Two British traffic patrol officers from North Berwick were involved in an unusual incident, while checking for speeding motorists on the A-1.
One of the officers (who are not named) used a hand-held radar device to check the speed of a vehicle approaching over the crest of a hill, and was surprised when the speed was recorded at over 300 mph. The machine then stopped working and the officers were not able to reset it.
The radar had in fact locked onto a NATO Tornado fighter jet over the North Sea, which was engaged in a low-flying exercise over the Border district.
Back at police headquarters the chief constable fired off a stiff complaint to the RAF Liaison office.
Back came the reply in true laconic RAF style:
“Thank you for your message, which allows us to complete the file on this incident. You may be interested to know that the tactical computer in the Tornado had automatically locked onto your ‘hostile radar equipment’ and sent a jamming signal back to it. Furthermore, the Sidewinder Air-to-ground missiles aboard the fully armed aircraft had also locked on to the target. Fortunately the Dutch pilot flying the Tornado responded to the missile status alert intelligently and was able to override the automatic protection system before the missile was launched”.
So, how does an assassin go about killing a ghost? Scott Marlowe has certainly thrown his assassin a seemingly impossible job. Getting rid of a necromancer, who was supposed to be dead, is a task fraught with danger for our unnamed hero.
Killing the Dead is an action story with a happy feeling to it. Yes, there is fighting and death and necromancy, but Killing the Dead stays far away from being a dark fantasy. Definitely recommended.
Never underestimate the power of the right sort of alcohol. Especially if your life is on the line. Abelard discovers the importance of a well-stocked wine-cellar during his dinner with the person who apparently is going to be his assassin.
Scott Marlowe has written a funny and fun short-story.
Superheroes and comic books in novel format are challenging for me to read. Needing to suspend logic altogether places me well outside my comfort zone. Every once in a while I choose to expose myself to the genre. The Scent of Shadowsis one such novel.
Joanna Archer is born in the sign of the Archer. The Archer ends up being her secret identity, one that her enemies cannot pierce. Her metamorphosis into The Archer also brings about another metamorphosis, caused by the death of her sister and Joanne’s surprising survival.
She now discovers a world where healing happens at extraordinary tempos, and where death is difficult to achieve, the latter being a bonus for yourself but a minus when your enemies are just as difficult to kill.
I found the characters in Master Comics fascinating. Strangely enough, Master Comics is where Joanna finds her answers as to who and what she is. Not from her so-called allies, the Agents of Light. But then it might be difficult to trust someone who represents both our sides with information that could make them stronger. In fact, I think I liked the people frequenting Master Comics more than the rest of the characters of Scent of Shadows.
Ms. Pettersson’s writing is what drew me in. That and some really fun action scenes. One of those is gory, but does represent a need for vengeance that some (if not most) of us probably feel at one time or another.
“Mind your caste”, Rani is told several times both by people who wish her well and those who do not. But what is your caste when you family is killed along with most of the guild you were apprenticed to and you, yourself, are wanted for a murder you did not commit? Add to that being thirteen.
Being a thirteen year old girl in a medieval society was different to being a thirteen year old girl in a lot of countries today. One’s place in society was ensured from birth and one did not step outside of that area. Rani’s place is more fluid due to the circumstances of her life. Needing to hide enables her to cross caste-lines that she might not otherwise. Some of those lines include what the different castes think of as “good” and “bad”. It turns out that if you are a member of the Soldier caste your idea of what may or may not be done can be quite different to what the Touched caste thinks (not to mention the Brotherhood).
So! How does a girl know what to do? She doesn’t. To begin with her choices have to do with her brother. Later on her focus changes. Knowledge is part of that change. But there is also the matter of Rani having grown up in a religious and political system that encourages certain types of behavior.
Mindy L. Klasky‘s writing style was fascinating. It was as if the words snaked in and out of themselves. To me the intended audience seems to be Young Adults. There is violence, death, mystery, adventure and family choices. I liked it.
humanitysdarkerside 
