Books: Books Read In 2021

 

 

In the remaining hours of 2021, I finished book 52. Like always, I tend to start the year off strong as I set a personal –yet stupid, in some way- goal to get a bunch of books read by the end of June. I think the reason I do so well during this period is I know as the days lengthen (though you really don’t notice that until mid to late February), I can use more natural light to read by. I find it difficult at times to read under artificial light –I get tired quicker and my eyes seem to cross more. As the days get longer and the weather produces less chilly weather, I find reading outside on the weekends to be best for me.

On the flipside, by the time the days shorten, the new TV season begins (even if I don’t watch much of them), I grow bored with reading. I slow to a snail’s pace, despite the hundreds of unread books that sit next to me. Of course mood and daily issues like work tend to drag me down as well –I mean work is exhausting and I hate it and wish to any magical beings in the universe to get me a job I’ll actually look forward to going to (or give me the winning lottery numbers).

But here we are, on the cusp of 2022. This will be a very difficult one, filled with COVID (still), a battle in DC over the Insurrection on January 6^th, a mid-term election that could tip the States into Civil War.

 

This may be the year we can subtitle A Sacrifice of Angels.

 

01. The Constant Rabbit By Jasper Fforde

02. Double Feature By Donald E. Westlake

03. Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire By Dan Hanks

04. Ronan Doyle and Swamp of Certain Death By Thomas Lennon

05. Put a Lid on It By Donald E. Westlake

06. The Sentence is Death By Anthony Horowitz

07. Harrison Squared By Daryl Gregory

08. A Likely Story By Donald E. Westlake

09. We Are Completely Fine By Daryl Gregory

10. A Gentleman in Moscow By Amor Towles

11. Later By Stephen King

12. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Smith

13. Memorial By Bryan Washington

14. The Collapsing Empire By John Scalzi

15. The Consuming Fire By John Scalzi

16. The Last Emperox By John Scalzi

17. Quicksand By Steve Toltz

18. Alternate Routes By Tim Powers

19. Forced Perspectives By Tim Powers

20. Doctor Who: Paradox Lost By George Mann

21. Doctor Who: Touched by an Angel By Jonathan Morris

22. Doctor Who: Hunter’s Moon By Paul Finch

23. In the Blood By Margaret Kirk

24. The Album of Dr. Moreau By Daryl Gregory

25. Deadly Edge by Richard Stark

26. Slayground by Richard Stark

27. Nature Girl By Carl Hiaasen

28. The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle By Stuart Turton

29. Declare by Tim Powers

30. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo By Taylor Jenkins-Reid

31. Who Stole Sassi Manoon? By Donald E. Westlake

32. Black Buck By Mateo Askaripour

33. Doctor Who: Festival of Death By Jonathan Morris

34. The House on the Cerulean Sea By TJ Klune

35. Billy Summers By Stephen King

36. Dark Waters By Katherine Arden

37. The Thursday Murder Club By Richard Osman

38. Plunder Squad By Richard Stark

39. Dead Skip By Joe Gores

40. Shakespeare for Squirrels By Christopher Moore

41. The Colorado Kid By Stephen King

42. Raising Stony Mayhall By Daryl Gregory

43. Julia By Peter Straub

44. Doctor Who: The Secret in Vault 13 By David Solomons

45. Under the Whispering Door By TJ Klune

46. Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle By Ron Goulart

47. The Goblin Emperor By Katherine Addison

48. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

49. Swashbucklers by Dan Hanks

50. The Damsel By Richard Stark

51. The Long Call By Ann Cleeves

52. Calling Dr. Patchwork By Ron Goulart

 

Books: Calling Dr. Patchwork By Ron Goulart (1978)

“Raffles Tunny, a juggler in the employ of the United States government, is relaxing at his Swiss chalet when a killer comes to call. He’s found the next day, electrocuted in the style of serial murderer Shocker Fulson, the man with the electric touch. The trouble is, Shocker’s dead—cremated and interred in New Orleans—and Raffles is not the first victim. Six other government-employed entertainers are have been murdered, all of them killed in the style of an executed madman. A case this insane demands an equally insane detective, which means it’s time to call Odd Jobs, Inc. Jake and Hildy Pace have made names for themselves solving impossible murders. But nabbing the copycat lunatic will mean facing down the Amateur Mafia, a gang of belly-button ventriloquists, and the strangest doctor the future has ever seen. One false step, and they’ll follow Raffles to the great music hall in the sky.”

Set in the near-future world of 2002, author Ron Goulart shines his satiric wit at politics and entertainment-influenced society with a distinctly noir undertones of a detective story. Like a lot of Goulart’s sci-fi, it’s filled with absurd touches that includes a president who seemly won not on political acumen, but on the strength of their ability to be entertaining, along with the two-party system -the Republican-Democrats and the Democrat-Republicans. I’ve often bemoaned the idea that a lot of sci-fi writers of the Golden Age who wrote about the 21st Century still had people smoking. Of course, this was written in the 1970s after the Surgeon Generals reports on the hazards of smoking, so here Goulart’s 2002 includes the fact that tobacco smoking is outlawed.

Calling Dr. Patchwork is the first of four slim volumes Goulart wrote featuring Jake and Hildy and their company, Odd Job’s Inc. I’ll get to the other three in coming months. A prolific writer of that 60s and 70s era, Goulart created several series of various lengths. Some are just weird, but all are not that intellectually challenging –mostly because they seemly are juvenile in tone. I’ve often thought of him as a man who wanted to write hardboiled noir thrillers and “men’s adventure” books, but found a niche doing these types of books (he also was and still is, a great connoisseur of comic books).

Much like his Groucho Marx detective novels, this is light entertainment, silly jokes, and sly social commentary.

Now onto 2022.

Books: The Long Call By Ann Cleeves (2019)

 

“In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father’s funeral takes place. Once loved and cherished, the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too. Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death. The case calls Matthew back into the community he thought he had left behind, as deadly secrets hidden at its heart are revealed, and his past and present collide.”

The Long Call is the first in a new series of detective novels from the writer known mostly for the Vera Stanhope novels and the Shetland Island tales. It details the career and home life of Detective Matthew Venn. His back story is a bit interesting; at one time he and his family belonged to a strict religious community. When he was teen, though, he broke away when he finally realized he no longer believed in anything he had been taught. He was banished from the church and disowned by his parents. Eventually, he would become a cop and marry a man named Jonathan. But the death of father brings him back into the orbit of old life and with people he left behind. Now his job and home life are mixing, with the murder of a man who volunteered at the Woodyard, a community center where Jonathan is the administrator.  Per usual, there are many potential suspects, but Matthew’s team lack any evidence that connects anyone to the murder (and a few abductions of young women with Down syndrome, as well).

The story unfolds slowly, sometimes with tediousness, but ultimately a satisfying whodunit. It does not fully explore Mathew’s time after he left the church and his relationship with Jonathan is not that fully developed –they seemed more like best friends than spouses (Cleeves sort of neuters them, perhaps because most of the readers of her previous works are women who, while accepting a gay detective, don’t want to read passages where they show affection towards each other?).

Cleeves also does not offer any real opinion on Venn’s religious upbringing. Sure there are some typical lines about powerful men who make up rules because it brings them power and prestige, and his relationship with his mother is strained, but she plays it relatively safe here. Whether she plans to expand on this in the next book...well, we'll see. 

Anne Rice 1941-2021

I don’t think it’s flippant to say without Anne Rice’s 1976 best-seller, “Interview with a Vampire”, we would have had the TV shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, it’s spin-off “Angel”, “True Blood”, and the “Twilight” saga books and films would’ve never gotten as popular. She took a once Victorian style Gothic idea about repressed sexuality and transformed it into a highly erotic, still Gothic, but highly original premise and basically reinvented the tales of bloodsucking vampires. Her book, released a year after Stephen King’s “‘Salem’s Lot” in which that author tried to update the legends of vampires, was an immediate hit, but would be nine years before she produced a sequel, “The Vampire Lestat” in 1985. Between 1988 and 2018, she would release 11 more books in what became “The Vampire Chronicles”. She would write the screenplay for the adaptation of “Interview” in 1995, directed by Neil Jordan. While the film was a major success, Warner Bros. stalled on any potential continuation. A sequel would eventually be released in 2002, the standalone “Queen of the Dead” (the third book in the series), but that film more or less bombed at the box-office, despite heighted awareness that star Aaliyah had died in a plane crash several months prior to its release.

Rice would write a few spin-off vampire books, 1998’s “Pandora” and 1999’s “Vittorio the Vampire”, as well as creating “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” with 1990’s “Witching Hour”, 1993’s “Lasher”, and 1994’s “Taltos”. Eventually, the “Mayfair Witches” would be folded on the latter “Vampire Chronicles” books.

Her horror tales would expand with “The Ramses the Damned” series and “The Wolf Gift Chronicles”. She also wrote “Christ the Lord” series, “Songs of Saraphim” series, along with tales of erotica, “Sleeping Beauty”, published under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure, and two other novels, “Exit to Eden” (1985) and “Belinda” (1986) under the pen name of Anne Rampling. Her standalone novels included “The Feast of All Saints”, “Cry to Heaven”, “Servant of the Bones”, and “Violin”.

But her impact on the horror genre, much like Stephen King, should be acknowledged though. Again, she turned the “Dracula” idea on its head, creating creatures of the undead that are “about people who are shut out life for various reasons,” she noted in her 2008 memoir. “This became a great theme of my novels - how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately, out of human life itself.” It was while grieving her daughter Michelle’s death that Rice wrote “Interview With the Vampire,” turning one of her short stories into a book. Rice traced her fascination with vampires back to the 1934 film, “Dracula’s Daughter,” which she saw as a young girl.  “I never forgot that film,” Rice told the Daily Beast back in 2016. “That was always my impression of what vampires were: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.”

And while her novels were part of that genre, she commanded such power that she got mainstream bookstores to shelve her books in the Fiction/Literature section instead of the horror sub-section. That is quite a feat.

Her passing at age 80 from complications of a stroke is sad for many fans, but her legacy and legend is all but assured. Her son Christopher, a best-selling author himself, is working with the cable network AMC and AMC+ to bring The Vampire Chronicles and The Mayfair Witches to streaming in 2022.

Books: The Damsel by Richard Stark (1967)

The eighth Parker novels was The Handle. At the end of that book, partner Alan Grofield is wounded and Parker gets him safely to a hotel in Mexico City and has a doctor tend to the wound. Then Parker returns to the U.S., leaving Grofield with his share of the cash from the job, to recover.

It's at this point, The Damsel (the first of four tales spun-off from the Parker series) begins. Grofield is lying in bed in his fourth floor hotel room when, seemingly out of nowhere, a very attractive young woman climbs through the window. She's apparently fleeing from someone and thinks the room is empty because it is dark. Grofield surprises her and demands to know what she's doing. She tells him a few obvious lies; he tells her a few in return, and the story is off and running.

However, It doesn’t take the thugs long to figure out where Elly is hiding, and soon both are on the run.  The rest of the plot revolves around a complex web involving three fathers and three grown children, an imminent political assassination, a former governor of Pennsylvania, the current dictator of a banana republic, and a one-eyed scarred ex-convict running around half-naked with a very large knife.

There is an odd mix of violence and witty dialogue here, a far-fetched plot, and a bit of a travelogue thrown in as well. It seems, from my perspective, The Damsel is also a dry run for what would become the Dortmunder tales a few years later. Alan is an interesting character and Elly is perhaps Stark’s first genuine female character who is not out for herself.

So Grofield falls somewhere between Parker and Dortmunder. He has some dark aspects of the violent world of Parker, but offers a somewhat cheerful outlook, with some wittiness here and there. A fun diversion away from Parker and his killer takes all world.

Books: Swashbucklers By Dan Hanks (2021)

 

"When Cisco Collins returns to his home town thirty years after saving it from being swallowed by a hell mouth opened by an ancient pirate ghost, he realises that being a childhood hero isn’t like it was in the movies. Especially when nobody remembers the heroic bits – even the friends who once fought alongside him. Struggling with single parenting and treated as bit of a joke, Cisco isn’t really in the Christmas spirit like everyone else. A fact that’s made worse by the tendrils of the pirate’s powers creeping back into our world and people beginning to die in bizarre ways. With the help of a talking fox, an enchanted forest, a long-lost friend haunting his dreams, and some 80s video game consoles turned into weapons, Cisco must now convince his friends to once again help him save the day. Yet they quickly discover that being a ghostbusting hero is so much easier when you don’t have schools runs, parent evenings, and nativity plays to attend. And even in the middle of a supernatural battle, you always need to bring snacks and wipes"

Author Dan Hanks describes Swashbucklers as “Ghostbusters meets Goonies meets Stranger Things meets IT.” Indeed, this book plays homage to many things 80s, which often reminded me of Ready Player One –except less complex and smug. It plays out like a sequel to a previous novel, where the kids, now adults with lives, with their own children, and worries more grounded in reality than magic, must return back to their small town and confront the evil that they thought once stopped, only to discover the villain clings to the skin of the world –or worlds, as the idea of the multiverse is included here. It’s packed with a lot of charm, nostalgia, witty dialogue, and weird things. Dark Peak is right out of Stephen King’s Derry, a town that exists in ether, ignoring the dangers that surround them, and quietly passing them off as “gas leaks” or with other lies.

The book is fun, not necessarily too dark –most of it leans into the idea of adults (some who have never grown up) being too old to confront the magical evils of the world. The trope works here most of the time, but because Hanks is borrowing a lot from these 80s pop culture media and he’s having fun. The reader will have fun as well, even if they were not born or lived through the 1980s.

Hanks does one last 1980s homage here –the ending: a little Back to the Future and Quantum Leap, as someone “leaps” into their younger self and then goes off to right what once went wrong. I’m unsure if Hanks will write a sequel or just figured out a neat way to end the tale. It’s frustrating, if only because there is no real resolve, but also daring as well. I mean, not everything has to be a franchise.