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Okay, I've done seven of these before this, from ghastly novelization to outstanding geology, plus the movie bits, plus all the rest. Y'all know that I can find something to say about just about anything that holds my attention.

I'm at a loss.

Most of The Terror is a dense, dark historical novel about one of the unsuccessful efforts in the first half of the 1800s to find a way to sail around the northern edge of Canada to the Pacific - the Northwest Passage, that is. It draws very deeply on history and has the mass of detail both physical and social that you'd expect in something like a Patrick O'Brien novel, with a touch of horror. The narrative unfolds in cross-cutting present moment scenes and journals and other recollections of the past. In present time, the expedition's two ships have been stuck in the ice for more than a year, the commander's dead, and the survivors are being hunted by a monstrous something on the ice. We find out how they got in such a fix and how they go about surviving.

That's the first three quarters or so of the book.

In the last quarter, we find out what's been going on all along. And, well, it's a shift.

My friend Ed, who really introduced me in a serious way to anime and manga, used to have a good explanation of what a manga fan had to learn to live with for the sake of otherwise good work's merits. You could, for instance, get a 50-chapter murder mystery. In it you'd get 48 chapters of tightly plotted, well characterized, well illustrated crime story, laying out the victim, the suspects, the investigators and investigation, the whole deal. And then in the last 2 chapters it turns out that the murder was committed by the ineffable unity of things and everyone goes off to distant lands for obscure reasons. The Terror is like that.

It's not that the last quarter is bad. Far from it. It's a fascinating piece of historical fantasy, really well anchored in Inuit mythology, beautifully presented. It's just that...well, not long ago I re-watched the film version of Murder on the Orient Express. It's a great yarn and a lot of fun. It wouldn't be improved by the revelation that the murder was actually done by secret alien allies of the Meiji Restoration, and the solution hinges on an understanding of conflicts within the Japanese government and the extraterrestrials who have come to manipulate Earth's flow of feng shui, and all the personal tragedies uncovered so far are actually irrelevant.

The shift in The Terror is that radical, and what it did - and this is what took me so long to articulate to myself - is leave me feeling that the details of the first three quarters didn't actually matter. The characters were as doomed as dinosaurs one fine day 65 million years ago. Their deaths have no connection with their lives. And this isn't even like a book about the people killed a misdirected aerial bombardment, or a toxic emission from a factory, or a suicide bombing. Those at least still have some context of humanity and the modern milieu. It's closer to the plagues that swept the Americas in the wake of European contacts, but much more so.

I feel like I'd been happier reading either a final quarter that matched the first three better, or a first three quarters that set up some reader expectation for the last even if the characters didn't get any clue.

Later this summer (or at least, sometime this year) I'll review a series that I think did pull off that feat, Brian Stableford's trilogy beginning with The Werewolves of London. The Terror...I dunno. The whole seems less than the sum of its parts.

Let's just quote the preface, for starters:

I wrote Zardoz in 1972 at my home, a lost valley in the dreaming hills of Wicklow. It came out closer to a novel than a screenplay. Gradually I worked it into a film form that proved too radical for most of the studios. Finally I got some backing and shot the movie in our local studios, Ardmore, and locations around my house between May and July 1973.

In the final weeks of preparation, Bill Stair - who worked with me on Point Blank and Leo the Last - came in to help rationalize the visions that threatened to engulf me.

While editing the film I decided to restore the story to novel form. I asked Stair to help me with it. It follows the film very closely but draws heavily on the earlier versions. It offers an interpretation of the film and helps lay to rest those ghosts that stalked the Celtic twilight pressing this strange vision of the future upon me.

John Boorman, September 1973

Basically, if you liked the movie but felt it would have been better with a lot more time-manipulating gestalt intelligences and a fair amount more about the Vortex havens as tests of concept for spaceships and a little bit more tallying of possibilities about how things might go after the Eternals get what's coming to them, then this is the book for you. I can't hate it. There's a strain of this kind of weirdo pretentious not-exactly-mysticism that runs very deep in my subconscious. I realize it's ludicrous, but so what? So's everything, if you look at it the right way.

This is what happens, by the way, when you co-develop an rpg that appeals to the players eager to feed their adventures-with-talking-gorillas jones. They send you things like this. So, you know, keep it in mind when planning your career.

One of the fun things about modern publishing technology and culture is the quiet little floods from obscure corners of things you - or at least I - would never think to look for on my own, but that turn up when browsing through aggregrators' and front ends' listings. Renaissance eBooks is a publisher like that, digging up old-school sf/f/h (and other genres) and listing them in storefront operations like Fictionwise, which is where I found this one.

The Citadel of Fear was known to me previously only as something mentioned in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". "Francis Stevens", the author, turns out to be quite an interesting person in her own right, and it's worth your checking out that link there - she'd be a good character in someone's historical novel. And now here's one of her novels.

This was a blast. I had so much fun reading it, a nibble at a time before bedtime, when up during the night, and in snippets during the day. If I'd known about it then, it would most certainly have gone onto the Adventure reading list. Two tough-guy treasure hunters stumble onto a lost city of the Aztecs in the southwestern desert, get taken prisoner, escape, don't quite make it out, skeptically scrutinize mystic phenomena, and get separated. Time passes. The survivor settles down and marries and goes on to a reasonably steady life, only to have all that he thought he'd left behind show up again with nasty sharp pointy teeth. The prose...okay, I'm not going to try to describe it. This is the opening:

"DON'T leave me-All-in--" The words were barely distinguishable, but the tall figure in the lead, striding heavily through the soft, impeding sand, heard the mutter of them and paused without turning. He stood with drooped head and shoulders, as if the oppression of the cruel, naked sun were an actual weight that pressed him earthward. His companion, plowing forward with an ultimate effort, sagged from the hips and fell face downward in the sand.

Apathetically the tall man looked at the twitching heap beside him. Then he raised his head and stared through a reddening film at the vast, encircling torture pen in which they both were trapped.

The sun, he thought, had grown monstrous and swallowed all the sky. No blue was anywhere. Brass above, soft, white-hot iron beneath, and all tinged to redness by the film of blood over sand-tormented eyes. Beyond a radius of thirty yards his vision blurred and ceased, but into that radius something flapped down and came tilting awkwardly across the sand, long wings half-spread, yellow head lowered, bold with an avid and loathsome curiosity.

"You!" whispered the man hoarsely, and shook one great, red fist at the thing. "You'll not get your dinner off me nor him while my one foot can follow the other!"

And with that he knelt down by the prostrate one, drew the limp arms about his own neck, bowed powerful shoulders to support the body, and heaved himself up again. Swaying, he stood for a moment with feet spread, then began a new and staggering progress. The king-vulture flapped lazily from his path and upward to renew its circling patience.

Which is to say that it's florid as all get-out, with some striking imagery along the way. Stevens has a lot of engaging similes. The pacing is also keen, and reminded me a lot of the original Dracula with its epic cliffhangers (literally, in some cases). There's a certain daredevil recklessness about the whole thing, partly just the freedom of working without an extensive genre history to set expectations, but partly (to judge from this and the part of another of her books I've read so far) a very theatrical sense of her own.

Another part of the pre-genre fun is the authorial sense of just how much you can mix and match. There's truth in the Aztec myths here, and that's no surprise, but there's also truth in other myths, in ways that are very much not like Moore/Gaiman syncretism or anything else that readily comes to hand now. The way the gods manifest in the extended showdown near the end just plain didn't remind me in detail of a whole lot else, and felt very fresh as well as very vivid to me.

Here be pulp! Highly recommended for those who like their adventure with a healthy dose of magic and horror.

Cormac McCarthy's prose is really dazzlingly good when read aloud by a good reader.

The astute observer will have noticed that Scott Smith's second novel, The Ruins, was the first entry in this series. Here he is again. If he had more books in print, they'd be in the queue, too; as it is, I'll be making a 100 movies entry for the film adaptation directed by Sam Raimi with a screenplay by Smith, sometime soon.

Some while back I read a thoughtful review of Brett Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho in, of all places, National Review. The reviewer pointed out that there are works of moral criticism which include in them some viewpoint character or independent narrative voice to explain what's gone wrong and why and what must be done to fix it. And there are works in which the moralist simply shows you what's going on, in the hope or trust or wish that you as a moral person will see for yourself that doing things the way of the story leads inevitably to an untenable, awful conclusion, and therefore it's necessary for some repenting and changing of course. Ellis, the reviewer argued, is a moralist of that sort. Rather than give you diatribes about what awful things people raised without any overarching values can do, he just gives you stories about the awful things people raised without any overarching values do.

I commented of The Ruins that it struck me as a very un-judging book, and it still does. A Simple Plan is a different kind of work, more like one strain of film noir. The author doesn't ever stop to lecture the reader, but there's a strong current of understanding the characters' folly but not forgiving it. The root of the difference, I think, is that the characters' folly in The Ruins gets themselves into increasing trouble, while the matching folly in The Ruins gets other people hurt and killed. That's a pretty sensible threshold, too.

The story, for those who may have missed it, has a, um, a simple plan. Two brothers in a Midwestern town, one moderately successful, the other stuck in a loop of unproductive drifting, and the deadbeat friend of the less successful brother, come across a wrecked plane with a dead pilot and four million dollars in cash inside. They decide to hide the money for six months, long enough to see who comes looking for it once the wreck's discovered, and then they'll divvy it up and go off to rich new lives. It doesn't work. Concealment of loot leads to accidental and then to premeditated murder and escalating carnage, and at the end of the story, those who survive are not able to profit from what remains. Crime does not pay; weaknesses that normally just make life less enjoyable than it should be become lethal, and while we're invited to understand each step, we are not invited to condone it.

The narrative is first-person, from one of the survivors, and it works on two layers. The narrator has some good insights into the problems of the people around him and (too late) into some of his own. But he's also not quite facing up to some things, and Smith really, really smoothly uses what the narrator misses to fill in the rest of the gaps.

I loved this book, a lot. I have a great fondness for crime stories that use the crime as a lens through which to see a whole society (a description I first encountered in conjunction with Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, and which I've used many times since then). This is one of those. The big open question in the heart of it is, just how typical are these people, and what does that mean for the rest of us? Smith isn't going to hand out his answer, and I've been ruminating about it ever since I finished the book a few days ago. I like it when that happens. Highly recommended reading here.

Executive summary: Niven and Lerner have together produced a book that has a lot of the strengths of vintage Niven and also a lot of the strengths of the work he's been doing since "Madness Has Its Place", without the features that have made so much of his output of the last couple decades just plain not fun for me to read. This was just plain good fun.

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I am ashamed to realize that I forgot to mention the wonderful artwork by John Picacio in Elric: The Stealer of Souls. He presents a gorgeously vibrant cover and delightfully moody black-and-white interior pieces. Follow the link to see some examples from his blog. They greatly enhance ye olde reading experience, and I should have properly acknowledged them in the initial post.

When I was young, I favored series arranged by their internal chronology. But my experiences working on serial material and a general shift of outlook as I age has led me to find a lot of value in being able to trace the work's evolution out here in the real world. So I like getting things in publication order. Del Rey has set about enriching themselves by catering to this desire. First it was their Robert E. Howard reprint series, and now they're doing it for and with Moorcock.

For ten thousand years did the Bright Empire of Melniboné flourish—ruling the world. Ten thousand years before history was recorded—or ten thousand years after history had ceased to be chronicled. For that span of time, reckon it how you will, the Bright Empire had thrived. Be hopeful, if you like, and think of the dreadful past the Earth has known, or brood upon the future. But if you would believe the unholy truth—then Time is an agony of Now, and always will be.

Ravaged, at last, by the formless terror called Time, Melniboné fell and newer nations succeeded her: Ilmiora, Sheegoth, Maidahk, S'aaleem. Then memory began: Ur, India, China, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome—all these came after Melniboné. But none lasted ten thousand years.

—"The Dreaming City", 1961

Elric: The Stealer of Souls is subtitled "Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melniboné, Volume 1". It's got the five stories collected as Stealer of Souls ("The Dreaming City", "While the Gods Laugh", "The Stealer of Souls", "Kings in Darkness", and "The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams"/"The Flame Bringers"), and the four novellas* collected as Stormbringer ("Dead God's Homecoming", "Black Sword's Brothers", "Sad Giant's Shield", and "Doomed Lord's Passing"). But wait, there's more!

* No, I haven't checked the word count. If anyone has and wants to comment about their actually being novelettes or whatever, please feel free. No point in being unnecessarily wrong.

It's got a wonderful assortment of additional material, starting with a reflective introduction about Moorcock himself as a young man, the inspirations for Elric, ways he dealt with response and criticism (and what he regrets and what he stands by), the whole deal. It has a few pages of a John Carter-esque pastiche comic strip he wrote and James Cawthorn illustrated not long before Moorock wrote "The Dreaming City". It's got cover art, Cawthorn's first map of the Young Kingdoms, and some funny comments about the art side of things. It's got a couple long letters/mid-sized essays Moorcock wrote at the time about Elric, the first review of Stormbringer (which does a great job reinforcing a point I'll go into in a moment), and then to round it out, a 1924 letter by Anthony Skene about the recurring Sexton Blake villain M. Zenith, whom Moorcock cites as a major inspiration. So it's a book about the stories as well as the stories themselves.

The thing Moorcock emphasizes throughout in his present-day commentary is how really different the fictional environment was for these pieces from the early '60s (1961-64, to be precise). What we now think of as the fantasy genre more or less didn't exist. There were authors who wrote a variety of fantastic literature and fans who liked various authors, characters, and series in various combinations. But it was nearly all really obscure small-press stuff, or put out in small quantities by larger publishers. This very much extended to Lord of the Rings, which Moorcock notes came out from a publisher known then and for some time after much more as Freud's English-language publisher than Tolkien's; Middle-Earth was another exotic rarity (often taken at the time as perhaps a post-apocalyptic pastoral) along with Gormenghast, Dunsany's works, and the like.

With the scattered exception like Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, none of this hit the mass market until Lin Carter's stint at Ballantine Books, starting in 1969; his Adult Fantasy line reprinted classics of the genre back to the turn of the century and also gave a boost to newcomers like Katherine Kurtz. That's when fantasy emerged as a publishing category, and also as a genre in the sense of having readers who identified it as the object of their reading pleasure (or displeasure, depending). So it's going to be very interesting to see Moorcock's reflections and supplemental material for future volumes of this series, as we get to Elric as part of a genre whether not it's quite what Moorcock wanted.

In the meantime, this is just a delight. There is a vivid purple hue to a lot of the prose, the sort of thing a young writer writes in the heat of the desire to pull inspirations together into something distinctive and new and the pressure of publishing on tight deadlines, often for people who really just wanted the pages filled with something reasonably sellable. It's unbalanced and drifty and fervent, and I really, really enjoyed it, a lot.

Jeff couldn't think how to respond to this. All the options that presented themselves were unacceptable. Hewanted to shout at her, to shake her by her shoulders, slap her across the face, but he knew that nothing good would come from any of this. Everyone seemed so intent on failing him here, on letting him down; they were all so much weaker than he ever would've anticipated. He simply trying to do the right thing, to save Pablo's life, to save them all, and no one seemed capable of recognizing this, let alone finding the strength within themselves to help him do any of the difficult things that needed to be done. "You should get back," he said finally. "Tell them to give you some water."

I read this because Sean Collins recommended it, and his credit is really, really good with me. I thought the film A Simple Plan, made from Smith's first novel, was a glorious triumph of modern noir, and was curious to see how that ambience might work with horror. Turns out the answer is "Brilliantly."

I'm not going to tell you anything about the story that might conceivably be a spoiler, and I echo Sean: It's better to come into this fresh.

The setup is simple enough. The main characters are on vacation in Mexico after having graduated college, and before heading off to work or grad school. From my 40-something perspective it's all too easy to look at such people and think rude thoughts like "slacker", but in fact they're not slackers. They have no great sins and not many significant lesser ones. They're not doing anything that would normally ever be wrong, until they go off on what should be a lark and isn't. Calamity ensues. They're naive, yes, but then part of the point of a civilization is that people don't get thrown into the state of nature all the time so a little naivete won't kill you.

Smith has an amazing gift for getting inside his characters' thoughts in a very specific sort of way. We see what they're thinking and feeling when life is good, and then how they each break down in their various individual ways. Increasingly separated, they crumble more; I don't think I'm reaching much to say that there's an implicit message about how people complete each other, when things work right. There's also some very interesting passages about the denial of reality in the face of the intolerable that reminded me a bit of the opening of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." The characters are not allowed any safety within which to dream, and when dream (and fantasize) they must, it becomes part of the danger.

The Ruins is thoroughly its own work. I can point at possible influences and inspirations, but it's not really a whole lot like any of them. Those of you who like horror should check it out.