Pike

Pike by Benjamin Whitmer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Reformed criminal Pike's life is turned upside down when his estranged daughter dies and a twelve year old granddaughter he never knew existed is tossed in his lap. Pike and partner Rory head to Cincinnati to find out what happened to his daughter. Meanwhile, a dirty Cincinatti cop named Kreiger has interests in Pike's daughter and granddaughter...

Benjamin Whitmer's debut novel is a bleak noir tale that explores the Kentucky backwoods and seedy underbelly of Cincinatti in the old days of 1985. He does equally well depicting the redneck way of life as well as the ghetto life of pimps, junkies, and whores.

Pike reminds me of an older version of Richard Stark's Parker. He'll do whatever it takes to get the job done, dragging Rory along with him. It's essentially a detective story, Pike digging into his dead daughter's past as a junkie and prostitute, but it also feels like a western at times. The violence is frequent and brutal.

As I said before, Pike reminds me of Richard Stark's Parker and I can see Stark's influence in the writing at times, but the primary authors Pike brings to mind are Jim Thompson and Chester Himes. Pike's struggles with his past remind me of Thompson quite a bit and I couldn't help thinking of Chester Himes when Pike and Rory went to Cincinatti. They reminded me of redneck outlaw versions of Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. Normally I don't go for stories written in the present tense but I feel Whitmer used it well here.

Any complaints? Not really. I wouldn't have minded more of Pike's granddaughter Wendy and a little more of Kreiger but those are pretty nitpicky complaints.

That's about all I can say without blowing any of the plot. The book is short but really powerful. Much like a good punk rock song, it was perfect at the length it was and any more would probably have been too much. It's an easy four star book.





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The Wolf Gift

The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


A young reporter narrowly escapes being mauled by a man wolf and soon finds himself changing into a man wolf by the light of the moon. He begins taking the law into his own hands and soon has a horde of police and scientists looking for him, as well as others of his kind...

Ever run into an old flame and try to rekindle the spark? For years, I was a devout Anne Rice fan, wolfing down the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches books with reckless abandon. After a few years of that, I started seeing changes in our relationship. After a few disappointing books like Blackwood Farm, Anne and I parted ways. Late last year, Anne's path crossed with mine once again when I learned of the Wolf Gift. Could we recapture the old magic?

NO! And here's what went down.

I really wanted to like this book but there are many reasons why I didn't. First off, I didn't care about the main character at all. His name is Reuben, he's 23, and he drives a Porsche. While I'm sure there are likeable 23 year old Porsche drivers, Reuben is not one of them. He's a really bland character with no real traits other than inexplicably having sex with women who aren't his girlfriend and talking like a 45 year old philosophy major.

The rest of the characters are similarly thin. I know I'm supposed to think it's interesting that Reuben's brother is a priest or his mother is a doctor but they are pretty much definied by their jobs. The other man wolves are pretty interchangeable as characters.

The writing isn't very good either. It's clunky and chock full of infodumps. Maybe I'm looking back at Anne Rice's previous work through the rose colored glasses of nostalgia but I can't remember her earlier work being this badly written.

All that being said, I did find some things of value in The Wolf's Gift. I actually like the mythology she's created for her werewolves, the Chrism and so forth, as well as the origin of the species. I also like that Reuben was accepting of the change and started acting like a werewolf version of Batman. The rest of the book just didn't do it for me. It was obviously meant to the be the first book in a series and the climax of the story occurs way before the end.

Sorry Anne, maybe we'll try again in another ten years. 2 stars.



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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired to solve the decades-old murder of Harriet Vanger, member of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden. Aided by a tattooed, antisocial hacker named Lisabeth Salander, Blomkvist unearths horrible skeletons lurking in the Vanger family closet...

For a few years now, I've been avoiding The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Since so many people told me I just had to read it, many of them non-readers, I assumed it was a lot of over-hyped, dumbed-down crap. Well, I may have been wrong. All hype, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a damn good book and I feel it goes beyond just being a mystery.

Larsson creates some memorable characters. We've got Mikael Blomkvist, the tarnished journalist, Lisabeth Salander, bad ass hacker, for the leads, both multi-dimensional characters. Neither are by any means perfect but I liked them just the same. The Vanger family and the staff of the Millennium aren't as well drawn as the leads but Ericka Berger and some of the Vangers are good characters in their own right.

I'll be honest. It took a little while for me to get moving but I was enthralled pretty early on. You wouldn't have thought I'd be that interesting in what could have been a tedious subject to read about, namely researching family archives for hints. Someone Larsson managed to grab me, though.

There isn't a lot of violence but what there is is pretty brutal. The hacking was pretty well done nad not completely unbelievable. I guess what really sold the book for me was that I really believed in the characters. Both of them are pretty flawed but completely believable.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a few minor complaints. Aside from the pace, I felt like Larsson threw in some needless details. I didn't need to know the brands of a lot of products or what the characters were eating. I also thought that Mikael Blomkvist being a sort of James Bond in regard to the ladies was a tad unbelievable. Honestly, those are my only two complaints.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo deserves a lot of the hype it gets. Now go out and read it if you haven't already!


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Empire State

Empire State by Adam Christopher

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Two battling superheroes open a rift into a parallel dimension. On the other side of the rift is The Empire State, an imperfect copy of New York. Empire State detective Rad Bradley's search for a missing woman brings him into conflict with forces from New York. But do they mean to save the Empire State or destroy it?



Why I liked this book:
Parallel universes are awesome, aren't they? One out of ever five Star Trek episodes uses them in some way. The Empire State is a copy of New York that reminds me of The Dark City. Many New Yorkers have analogues in the Empire State. In the course of this story, many of them meet their doppelgangers. Some people's doppelgangers were not very dissimilar from the originals.

The setting is a pseudo-New York of the 1930's, with robots, detectives, prohibition, and a war against an Unseen enemy. Ray Bradley is just a gumshoe that isn't all that bright and keeps finding himself in the thick of trouble. The two superheroes, Skyguard and Science Pirate, after pretty interesting. Nimrod and Carson were both characters I'd like to see more from. I had no idea where the central mystery was going.

Why I did not think this book was amazing:
Let me take a deep breath and... for a book that's promoted as a superhero book, there isn't nearly enough super hero action. The logic of how New York and the Empire State are connected was inconsistent from chapter to chapter. None of the characters were particularly well developed. I know I was supposed to care when the Skyguard's identity was revealed but I didn't. I felt like a lot was going on and it never really came together into one cohesive story. In that way, it kind of reminded me of Stephen Hunt's Court of the Air.

I think if the book had been more focused and about a hundred pages shorter, I would have liked it a whole lot more. It had it's moments but felt plodding and bloated in places. It's not a bad book, though. It's pretty entertaining if you can stomach the slow parts. I've giving this one a 3-.


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Stiff

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Mary Roach writes about what happens when you donate your body to science. Hilarity ensues. Well, maybe not hilarity but it is a good dose of edutainment.


Way back around the time the earth's crust cooled and life spread across the planet, late 1994 or early 1995, I should think, I visited a chiropractic college with the rest of my Advanced Biology class. This trip was memorable to me for three reasons:

1) It was the first time I experienced an excruciating caffeine withdrawal headache
2) It was the first time I saw a human cadaver
3) I smoked five of my classmates playing pool in the student lounge at lunch.

Obviously, #2 is the one pertinent to this review, although I am still quite proud of #3. The cadaver I saw had its face covered and its skin looked shriveled, somewhat like beef jerky. My 17 year old mind briefly wondered where the man had come from before my hormone-fueled brain returned my attention to the nubile young ladies in the room. Anyway, let's get down to review business.

Mary Roach manages to take a subject that give many people the heebie-jeebies, donating one's remains to science, and makes it humorous at times. She covers such topics as learning surgical techniques via practicing on cadavers, human decomposition, ingesting human remains for medicinal purpose, using corpses in car crash tests, using cadavers for ballistics tests, crucifixion experiments, and even head transplants.

While it's not ideal meal-time reading, I didn't find it as stomach churning as some reviewers did. The talk of decomposition and quack remedies of the Middle ages were fascinating and I was really interested in the head and brain transplant experiments. Frankenstein's monster doesn't seem as unrealistic as it did yesterday.

Apparently, necrophilia is only illegal in 16 states. Imagine if that was one of your criteria when choosing a place to live. "Honey, I'd love to live in Florida but then we couldn't have our sexy parties..."

Actually, the funeral bits were also pretty enlightening. Did you know they have to suture the anus shut to keep nastiness from leaking out during a funeral? Or that dead people can fart from gas trapped in their intestines? Or that they insert special caps underneath the eyelids to keep them from suddenly opening? Fascinating stuff.

Stiff is a very interesting read for those interested in what happens when you donate your body to science, softened somewhat by Roach's sense of humor. Three easy stars.





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Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


After the death of his longtime mistress, disgraced former puppeteer Mickey Sabbath sinks deeper and deeper into a prison of depression...



First off, Sabbath's Theater won the National Book award in 1995. It's not surprising since it was superbly written. On the other hand, it's also dirtier than a stack of used Longarm's. Seriously. Every time I thought it couldn't get any dirtier, Sabbath did something like masturbate on his mistress's grave.

There really isn't much of a plot. Sabbath's mistress dies and his life comes apart, forcing him to explore his past. Good thing he has the memories of unbelievably numerous conquests to dwell on. Sabbath's such a pervert that I couldn't seem to read more than fifty pages of this at a time. I cringed when a friend took pity on him only to catch him in the process of masturbating to a picture of his college age daughter.

There are themes and other novely things in Sabbath's Theater but it's hard to see past the river of semen to get to them. It seems to be about how people are unable to escape the prisons they create for themselves. And fornication.

It's a testament to Philip Roth's skill as a writer that he made me feel sorry for a dirty old man like Mickey Sabbath. Actually, I don't think there's a character in this book I liked.

I wonder if the next National Book award winner I read will have this much smut in it...







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They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Robert and Gloria enter a marathon dance contest with $1000 as the top prize. Too bad Gloria thinks about death more than winning...



Horace McCoy is bleak enough to be one of Jim Thompson's drinking buddies. This tale is really slim but also kind of exhausting. McCoy's depiction of a dance contest that lasts over a month is hellish and he paints a depressing picture of life during the Great Depression. See what I did there?

It's a pretty powerful story. You know how it ends in the first few pages but getting there is still an ordeal. I felt for Gloria at times but others times I was waiting for her to get to it. She wasn't a likeable character but I did feel sorry for her when she wasn't being a bitch.

That's pretty much all I have to say. If Jim Thompson wrote a book about a marathon dance contest with a suicidal contestant, it would look a lot like this.



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