Review: The Waste Lands

Title: The Waste Lands

Series: The Dark Tower #3

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Low fantasy post-apocalyptic horror Western with portal fantasy elements is my best guess on this one

Trigger Warnings: Blood, death, death of animals, death of children, mental illness, forced institutionalization (mentions), gun violence, body horror, injury, child emotional neglect, drug use (mentions), sexual assault, rape (explicit on-page), excrement, bodily fluids, suicide

Spoiler Warning: This book is third in a series, and reading past this point will expose you to MAJOR spoilers of the previous books.

Back Cover:

Several months have passed, and Roland’s two new tet-mates have become proficient gunslingers. Eddie Dean has given up heroin, and Odetta’s two selves have joined, becoming the stronger and more balanced personality of Susannah Dean. But while battling The Pusher in 1977 New York, Roland altered ka by saving the life of Jake Chambers, a boy who—in Roland’s where and when—has already died. Now Roland and Jake exist in different worlds, but they are joined by the same madness: the paradox of double memories.

Roland, Susannah, and Eddie must draw Jake into Mid-World then follow the Path of the Beam all the way to the Dark Tower. But nothing is easy in Mid-World. Along the way our tet stumbles into the ruined city of Lud, and are caught between the warring gangs of the Pubes and the Grays. The only way out of Lud is to wake Blaine the Mono, an insane train that has a passion for riddling, and for suicidal journeys.

Review:

Only Stephen King could put a fantasy version of a Wild West gunslinger, a heroin addict from the 1980s, and a disabled activist with multiple personalities in a riddle contest with a sentient train and make it feel like horror. And not just horror, but really good horror.

After The Drawing of the Three, I really wasn’t enjoying this series all that much. I only read book two to discuss it with a friend, and said friend (and a spoiler he gave me after I finished book two) was the main reason I picked up this book.

And I’m so glad I did, because I actually enjoyed this one.

I think a large part of that was the setting. Instead of desert in The Gunslinger and an interminable beach in The Drawing of the Three, Roland and company actually went to some interesting places in this book. They spent some time in a forest, traveling across a grassland, and in a small village entirely populated by elderly people. But the most interesting place to me by far was the city of Lud.

Lud has a very post-apocalyptic feeling – even though it hadn’t gone through one singular apocalypse, it’s been devastated by years of war, two different factions fighting each other within the city walls, and terrifying technological happenings that take on a supernatural element because no one understands how or why they work. Considering that the gang was just passing through, I got to see a remarkable amount of the city, but I wish I had been able to explore it more. I love the idea of a long-lost people creating great architectural and technological marvels and the people living with them now not comprehending what it was that the ancient people actually did.

This book also reveals some more details about Roland’s world and why it is the way it is (giving no answers but raising plenty of questions), a bit about Roland himself, and a lot more about Jake. It gets Eddie on board with the “find the Dark Tower” quest, but it still doesn’t explain what the Dark Tower does or why Roland wants it so badly. There’s several encounters with terrifying ancient technology that were really interesting, and it’s definitely leaning harder into horror than the previous two books did.

I can’t call this one of my favorite books, but I actually enjoyed it. I was already planning on reading the next book, and then this one went and ended on a cliffhanger. As annoying as that is, it makes me glad I’d already decided to continue the series. If nothing else, this world is finally getting interesting.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: Severance

Title: Severance

Author: Ling Ma

Genre: Satire/Post-Apocalyptic/Horror

Trigger Warnings: Death, body horror, terminal illness, zombies, blood, gore, bodily fluids, existential horror, sexual content (minor), guns, death of children, pregnancy, confinement, death of parents, drug use (mentions), suicide, suicidal thoughts, car crash (mention), child abuse (mentions), religious bigotry, alcohol use, vomit (mentions)

Back Cover:

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

Review:

I barely skimmed the back cover before picking this up. I’m trying to read more broadly. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly read a satire, it’s by a Chinese author featuring a Chinese protagonist, and looked to be satirizing the meaninglessness of modern work culture (relatable) and post-apocalyptic fiction (I’ve read a lot, could be interesting).

This was published in 2018, but I had to check. I think it was supposed to be satire of the modern millennial life in NYC or modern work or the post-apocalyptic genre or all of the above. In 2018, maybe it was. But in February 2022, nearly two years into a deadly global pandemic that varies only slightly from the “epidemic” of the book, Severance isn’t satire – it’s prophetic.

This book is told out of order, altering back and forth between Before and After. Before and After what isn’t obvious in the book, but it’s clear to me. I can’t pinpoint a particular event or moment, but my life has definitely divided into Before Covid and After Covid. As Candace says, “It seemed to happen gradually, then suddenly.” Candace keeps going into work as everything slowly crumbles, keeps trying to do her job even though there’s less and less job to do, until suddenly it’s After and nothing is the same.

I am not going to talk about the After timeline. It has its own emotions and its own kind of horror, but the Before timeline is what mattered most to me.

I didn’t think I had much if any of that “collective pandemic trauma” people talk about. Then I read Severance, and it turns out I do. When Candace’s job started requiring N95 masks, I felt a sinking familiarity. When a character first said the phrase “these uncertain times,” it felt like a punch in the gut. This book pulls on the trauma of living through a pandemic and the horror of surviving an apocalypse and combines them into something vividly repulsive and hideously possible. It evokes the visceral terror of being in a place usually full of people and discovering you are alone; the agonizing helpless realization that even if you survive this, there is no future; the despair of knowing that even if the world is ending, the only thing you can do is get up and go to work.

I read this as an audiobook at work, my mind lost in the horror and despair of this barely-fictional world while my hands, nearly independent of the rest of me, did my job. Scan the box. Open the box. Take out the bag. Label the bag. Put the bag in a new box. Label the new box. I repeat the same process over and over again, just like the epidemic victims in the book. I think that – the monotonousness and mindlessness of modern work – is what Severance is supposed to be satirizing. But that is not what I took from it.

If there is an apocalypse, it won’t be like any of my post-apocalyptic novels. If it’s like any work of fiction, it will be like this. And if that’s the case, I don’t think I want to survive. I took several books off my to-read list. I have no more desire to read any post-apocalypses. I am too afraid of surviving the end of the world.

I’ve never legitimately described a book as life-changing before, but Severance is. I feel like I’ve just realized the world is about to end and can’t understand everyone continuing on and worrying about unimportant stuff. After I put the book down I felt off-kilter, like my life (or my psyche) was in a box that just got knocked off a table and nothing inside can ever be the same again. I feel like I have to sit down and figure out what actually matters because most of the shit I’m doing now just doesn’t.

Severance feels terrifyingly, painfully, imminently possible. If no one ever recovered from covid, we might be living in the world of Severance right now.

This book is not satire. It’s psychological, existential horror.

Review: Noor (DNF)

Title: Noor

Author: Nnedi Okorafor

Genre: Science Fiction

Trigger Warnings: Violence, blood, death, death of animals, terrorism (mentions), body horror, injury, ableism (severe), sexual content (mentions), fire, natural disasters, car crash (mentions), medical content

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 77%

Back Cover:

Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt…natural, and that’s putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was “wrong”. But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that crippled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is: A woman with a ton of major and necessary body augmentations. And then one day she goes to her local market and everything goes wrong.

Once on the run, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA and the race against time across the deserts of Northern Nigeria begins. In a world where all things are streamed, everyone is watching the “reckoning of the murderess and the terrorist” and the “saga of the wicked woman and mad man” unfold. This fast-paced, relentless journey of tribe, destiny, body, and the wonderland of technology revels in the fact that the future sometimes isn’t so predictable. Expect the unaccepted.

Review:

I have thoroughly enjoyed several of Nnedi Okorafor’s books (*cough*Binti*cough*), and found others to be just okay. Noor unfortunately falls into the latter category.

Nnedi’s books are not much for strong plots. This one is very similar to Remote Control in that a girl (in this case, a woman) who is different and powerful and terrifying to everyone else is driven from her home and goes on a long journey. In this case, AO was born with her legs withered and one arm just not there. A car accident in her teens destroyed her legs even further. She chose cybernetic replacements and other technological enhancements that are basically really awesome disability aids (honestly, if I had the option to replace my legs instead of using a cane I’d do it in a heartbeat). But the people around her think because so much of her body is metal that she has somehow become less than human.

On her journey to nowhere in particular, she joins DNA, a herdsman with only two cows after his group and most of their cattle were massacred for being herdsmen. AO wants people to accept that being more high-tech doesn’t make her less human, and DNA wants people to accept that sticking to his people’s traditional ways of life instead of selling his cows and going to work for a global megacorporation doesn’t make him a lesser person.

As is typical of Nnedi’s work, there isn’t much of a plot. The journey is the story, and AO and DNA travel to DNA’s village, through an eternal sandstorm, and other interesting places. The story is told in first person, and AO’s tangents build up the africanfuturist world these characters inhabit. I was interested at first as I was getting oriented to the characters and the world, and then the story started to drag. Neither of the characters had goals, there was no endpoint in sight, and it didn’t feel like either the characters or the story were going anywhere.

AO and DNA finally got to a place that seemed like it would be safe, and they both seemed to like it there. It felt like a reasonable ending for the kind of story this is and I was expecting the story to wrap up soon. But there kept being more chapters. Finally, I checked the timestamp and discovered there was still a quarter of the book to go. I had no idea what would be happening in all that time – neither character had found anything like a goal and there was no current outside threat to escape – and I was getting really tired of following along on what felt like a pointless journey.

So I stopped. I liked the world and the characters could have been interesting if there had been any point to the story. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, they had no goals or objectives – not even “find somewhere safe,” that happened by accident – and I was, quite frankly, bored. If even one of them had been trying to do anything in particular, I think I would have enjoyed this story a lot more.

Review: Pet

Title: Pet

Author: Akwaeke Emezi

Genre: The author doesn’t like genre categorizations, and this book doesn’t really fit a particular genre. Utopian/Low Fantasy is my best guess, but Pet kinda defies categorization.

Trigger Warnings: Violence, child abuse, pedophilia (implied), incest (implied), blood, sexual assault (mention), body horror, medical content (mentions), adultism. Highlight to read spoilers.

Back Cover:

There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life.

But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house.

Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question–How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?

Review:

This is a weird little book with a lot of big things to say. The genre absolutely defies categorization. It’s set somewhere in the future, where some sort of rebellion got rid of all the “monsters” – police, billionaires, racists, bigots, anyone who wouldn’t support the social justice utopia that the town of Lucille (or possibly the entire country?) has become.

This story is driven somewhat by plot and mostly by themes. It’s short (5.5 hours in audiobook, about 200 pages per The StoryGraph), and doesn’t devote much of that space to characterization or worldbuilding. When it comes to characters, it focuses more on the dynamics and relationships between them than giving any of the individuals too much depth. I didn’t mind that very much, though. The characters here are more of a vehicle to experience the story than anything, and I liked seeing the different dynamics between Jam’s family (just her, her mom, and her dad) and Redemption’s family (three parents, a little brother, and aunts and uncles all over the place). Jam and Redemption have one of the healthiest friendships I’ve seen in fiction, and I love that Jam is plot-savvy about the kinds of things that tend to hurt friendships in stories.

The plot is short and straightforward. There are no twists, there are no surprises, and I called the identity of the monster Pet was hunting about halfway through. But it’s engaging enough, and the theme is what matters. This book asks “How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?” but it also asks, more subtly, “If we get rid of all the evil in society, how will we put systems in place to make sure it doesn’t appear again?” It’s a story about two friends and an inhuman creature that crawled out of a painting hunting a monster, yes, but it’s also a story about how a one-off rebellion isn’t the final solution, how people who did very good things can also do evil things, and how society needs to have systems in place to stop the evil acts no matter who did them.

The most interesting part of this book to me was how the utopian city of Lucille seemed like something that is theoretically possible in real life, but there are the little details that keep throwing the perfectly realistic world just a bit off-kilter. Sure, there is the terrifying creature of feathers and claws that emerges from a painting, but there is also Jam’s ability to feel what’s happening in her house – who is where, their mood, what they’re doing – with no cue except feeling through the floorboards. Those kinds of fantastical elements don’t fit into the otherwise-plausible world, and I’m not sure what they mean thematically. Maybe that a utopia like Lucille is only possible in fantasy and creating something similar in reality would require more maintenance and vigilance to keep the “monsters” from coming back?

You could probably make an argument that the themes in this book are heavy-handed. They kind of are, but I think it works. I enjoyed it as a story, and I appreciated the wise things it had to say. To me, Pet has the vibe of a book you read in an English class for its important commentary on social issues, but one of those rare English class books that you also happen to enjoy. It’s the kind of book that wins awards and gets lauded for being both a good story and an Important Book. Balancing entertainment appeal and being Important is a difficult act, but I think Pet mostly managed it. It’s definitely worth reading – if you’re not into creatures crawling out of paintings, at least for the philosophical questions it poses.

Review: The Ever Cruel Kingdom (DNF)

Title: The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Series: The Never Tilting World #2

Author: Rin Chupeco

Genre: Fantasy/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, fire, cannibalism (mentions), violence, suicidal thoughts (mentions)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 35%

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of book one.

Back Cover:

After a treacherous journey and a life-shattering introduction to a twin neither knew she had, sisters Haidee and Odessa expected to emerge from the Great Abyss to a world set right. But though the planet is turning once again, the creatures of the abyss refuse to rest without another goddess’s sacrifice.

To break the cycle, Haidee and Odessa need answers that lie beyond the seven gates of the underworld, within the Cruel Kingdom itself. The shadows of the underworld may hunger to tear them apart, but these two sisters are determined to heal their world–together.

Review:

I went into my Currently Reading shelf on The StoryGraph to clear out a few books I’d finished, and I was genuinely surprised to discover that I had started reading this book. And that, I think, is the most damning criticism I could give it.

Book one, The Never Tilting World, was good. Not spectacular, but good. I was curious enough about the world and what really happened to break it that I was willing to pick up this one. But it didn’t grab me.

To be fair, not all of this was entirely its fault. This wasn’t a “Must read it now!” read so much as a “This could be interesting.” And picking it up so long after book one, I had a difficult time reorienting to how the magic worked and the details of the world. This would not have been an issue if I’d read it directly after book one.

That said, there were some issues in the book itself. Mainly in perspective. The story is still told in the alternating perspectives of Haydee, Odessa, Lan, and Arjun. Four narrators is hard enough to balance in any book, but since all four of them were in the same place doing the same things together, it was really hard to keep track of who was talking. The multiple narrators worked when there were two on each side of the world, but got confusing when everyone was together.

It also didn’t add much to the story. The only thing I remember about the characters from book one was that Odessa’s parts were a first-person account of a descent into madness, and that was interesting. In this one, they were all bland. There was Haydee the energetic sister, Odessa the quiet sister, Arjun, and Lan. This, again, probably would not have been an issue if I’d read this book directly after finishing book one so these people were fresh in my mind. But with several months between books, The Ever Cruel Kingdom didn’t bother to tell me why these people were worth reading about.

But I didn’t pick this up for the characters. I picked it up because I wanted to find out what happened. Why the world broke, why the two older goddesses each have one of the younger and told her that her sister was dead, what the truth really is. But 35% in, we’ve made almost no progress finding out the truth. The only people who know are the two older goddesses, and they flatly refuse to give any answers. I thought from the back cover that they might be going to the underworld and find out the origins of the whole goddess system. But they’re mostly just scrambling around in the desert (the least interesting of the two setting options), trying to get Haydee’s mother to give answers that she obviously doesn’t want to with very little indication that they might try another strategy later. The world was my favorite part of book one, and this one neither explores it nor gives me more information about it.

This isn’t a bad book. I didn’t hate it. If I’d read it right after book one I might have kept reading, and if you loved book one you’ll probably love this one. I just found it uninteresting. If I can forget I started it, I don’t see much of a point in finishing it.

The Never Tilting World series:

1. The Never Tilting World
2. The Ever Cruel Kingdom

Review: Utopia

Title: Utopia

Author: Thomas More

Genre: Classic

Trigger Warnings: Sexism, war (mentions), death (mentions), racism (mild), colonization, physical abuse, slavery, ableism, classism, adultism

Back Cover:

In this political work written in 1516, Utopia is the name given by Sir Thomas More to an imaginary island. Book I of Utopia, a dialogue, presents a perceptive analysis of contemporary social, economic, and moral ills in England. Book II is a narrative describing a country run according to the ideals of the English humanists, where poverty, crime, injustice, and other ills do not exist. Locating his island in the New World, More bestowed it with everything to support a perfectly organized and happy people.

The name of this fictitious place, Utopia, coined by More, passed into general usage and has been applied to all such ideal fictions, fantasies, and blueprints for the future, including works by Rabelais, Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, and several by H. G. Wells, including his A Modern Utopia.

Review:

This isn’t anything that a modern reader would consider a novel. There is no plot, no structure, and no characters unless you count the frame story from part one. This is, in essence, a description of what Thomas More thinks a perfect society should be, framed as a monologue from a traveler named Rafael telling Thomas about such a society. (Yes, the author put himself as himself into the novel – although I don’t think that was as unusual in 1516 as it is now.)

The word “utopia” has come from this book to mean a perfect society, but the Utopia in this book is not any place I’d want to live. To my modern sensibilities, it sounds more like a Puritan hellscape than anything. (Or proto-Puritan, I suppose, since the Puritan movement didn’t officially form until the 1560s.)

A few highlights:

• All people are perfectly equal, except that old men are served by everyone, women serve men, and children serve adults.
• Everyone wears the exact same clothing, which is shapeless and the color of undyed wool. Jewelry and decoration of any kind are considered childish.
• Families with too many children have some of them taken away and given to families that have too few.
• All religions are tolerated as long as they’re an acceptable form of Christianity, and not believing in the right things is punishable by slavery. (The Utopians were not Christian before Rafael showed up to their island, but of course they gladly converted when he told them about Jesus.)
• Twice a month, women and children have to kneel before their husband/father and confess everything they’ve done wrong.
• Potential spouses are presented to each other naked before agreeing to marry because “you wouldn’t buy a horse without examining it fully to check for defects, so why would you marry a wife when all you’ve seen is her face and hands?”
• Work is done efficiently so everyone has plenty of leisure time to spend in self-improvement. The only allowed leisure activities are reading and playing games like chess that improve your mind.

That said, there are some ideas from this society that I do like. One of the foundational ideas is what modern theory would call post-scarcity: if everyone stopped worrying about accumulating wealth and we got rid of all the societal roles (like nobility) that don’t produce anything useful, there would be more than enough. Nobody would have to bother with anything like money or hoarding wealth or goods, because why bother taking 18 bolts of cloth and stuffing them into your home when you can just take the one that you need now and get another one when you need it? I also like the idea of rotating who had to work on the farms outside the city and who lived in the city and giving everyone a chance to try any trade they wanted before deciding on one to make sure nobody got stuck with work they hated.

This book is definitely the product of its time. There was a conversation full of political commentary before the monologue started, and I definitely didn’t grasp the full nuance of it (likely due to never having lived in a monarchy). I’m sure many of the aspects of Utopia were meant to bring attention to specific social issues in 1516 – possibly relating to war since there was a heavy emphasis on “the Utopians hate war but if they have to here’s how they do it” – but I don’t know enough about the historical context to grasp what Thomas was trying to say. It was definitely an interesting book, but I think knowing the social and historical context it was written in would make it feel like something more than “here’s how Puritans think the world should be.”

Review: The Drawing of the Three

Title: The Drawing of the Three

Series: The Dark Tower #2

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Who knows at this point. Low fantasy portal sci-fi Western with horror elements?

Trigger Warnings: Drug use, drug abuse, needles, addiction, blood, death, injury (graphic), medical content (brief), racism, excrement, gun violence, racial slurs, sexual content, sexual content involving minors, murder, rape (mentions), mind control, someone inside your mind without your consent

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and both this book and this review contain spoilers of book one.

Back Cover:

While pursuing his quest for the Dark Tower through a world that is a nightmarishly distorted mirror image of our own, Roland, the last gunslinger, encounters three mysterious doorways on the beach. Each one enters into the life of a different person living in contemporary New York.

Here he links forces with the defiant young Eddie Dean and the beautiful, brilliant, and brave Odetta Holmes, in a savage struggle against underworld evil and otherworldly enemies.

Once again, Stephen King has masterfully interwoven dark, evocative fantasy and icy realism.

Review:

This was a weird reading experience. I’m reading this series more to talk about it with a friend than because I want to read it, and if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have continued after The Gunslinger. This book does get more into the action, so it felt less like an extended beginning and more like an actual story. At some points it was even enjoyable.

Roland spends this book going back and forth through doors that are only half there to collect the three people the man in black told him he needed. These three people are in our world in different times. There’s Eddie, a drug addict who’s on his first smuggling run when Roland meets him and who quickly became my favorite. There’s Odetta, a black amputee and two different varieties of racist stereotype. And there’s Jack Mort, whose section was fairly enjoyable even though I spent the entire time hoping that he would not have to end up joining the group.

That’s pretty much the plot. There’s an overarching plot of Roland has an infected injury and is trying to stay alive and the three shorter plots of what’s through the doors and trying to get the three people to join him, tied together by sections of walking down a disturbing beach. It is slow-paced, but it’s interesting enough, and compared to book one it’s absolutely action-packed.

It was true of book one, and only got more extreme in this book, but The Drawing of the Three falls into one of my biggest complaints with adult fantasy-adjacent books: relying on grossness and bodily fluids to portray “realism.” There’s a lot of urine, feces, sweat, pus, saliva, and all other kinds of disgusting liquid-ish things that the human body can produce. I know that it is realistic, but personally I read for fun and prefer all the gross stuff to be sanitized by the lens of fiction. I’m aware this is a personal opinion, but if bodily fluids make you squeamish you may want to skip this one.

I was also pretty weirded out by the preteen girl masturbation scene and the guy who orgasmed by murdering people, but it’s not like Stephen King has never written creepy sexual scenes before, so I guess that’s a risk you take when reading his books.

When I finished this book, I was really ambivalent about reading on. Even though this series isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read, it’s a little too slow and gross for me. This series was starting to feel more like an obligation than anything I particularly want to read. But my friend who’s also reading the series gave me a spoiler for future books that makes me more interested in reading on. So I guess I am continuing the series after all.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower

Review: A Pale Light in the Black (DNF)

Title: A Pale Light in the Black

Series: NeoG #1

Author: K.B. Wagers

Genre: Space Opera

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), guns (brief), violence (mild)

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 18%

Back Cover:

For the past year, their close loss in the annual Boarding Games has haunted Interceptor Team: Zuma’s Ghost. With this year’s competition looming, they’re looking forward to some payback–until an unexpected personnel change leaves them reeling. Their best swordsman has been transferred, and a new lieutenant has been assigned in his place.

Maxine Carmichael is trying to carve a place in the world on her own–away from the pressure and influence of her powerful family. The last thing she wants is to cause trouble at her command on Jupiter Station. With her new team in turmoil, Max must overcome her self-doubt and win their trust if she’s going to succeed. Failing is not an option–and would only prove her parents right.

But Max and the team must learn to work together quickly. A routine mission to retrieve a missing ship has suddenly turned dangerous, and now their lives are on the line. Someone is targeting members of Zuma’s Ghost, a mysterious opponent willing to kill to safeguard a secret that could shake society to its core . . . a secret that could lead to their deaths and kill thousands more unless Max and her new team stop them.

Rescue those in danger, find the bad guys, win the Games. It’s all in a day’s work at the NeoG.

Review:

I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to science fiction and fantasy, I much prefer the fantasy half of the equation. When I do pick up a sci-fi, I tend towards post-apocalyptic and steampunk over aliens and spaceships. So please recall that this review is written with personal opinions, and I don’t hold it against the book that I didn’t like it.

Considering that I’ve only read one other space opera (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet), I found it a weird coincidence that they both featured a young woman attempting to escape the expectations, infamy, etc. of their rich and powerful family by joining the crew of a spaceship in a far-away area of the solar system. In this case, there’s Max, escaping her family’s rigid expectations by joining the Near Earth Orbital Guard, which is like the space Coast Guard. She has a hard time fitting into the crew because she constantly doubts herself (#relatable) and the strict military discipline she grew up with doesn’t mesh with her new crew’s lax relationship to authority.

I don’t know if she’s supposed to be The Protagonist, though, or just one of an ensemble cast, because she doesn’t come in until a bit of the way in. The story starts with the crew before she joins on a mission, setting up a strong emotional attachment to the character that Max ends up replacing. A weird choice to me, but the rest of the characters weren’t terrible and I wouldn’t call it a deal-breaker.

What I really had issues with was the crew’s priorities. Personally, I was interested in the adventure and intrigue – why scavengers on a dead ship would be so afraid of being interrupted that they would resort to bribery, if the disappearance of 90% of long-range passenger spaceships from a particular launch was actually a conspiracy to convert up a failed drug trial, that kind of thing. But all the crew cared about was the Boarding Games. From what I could gather, the Games are an annual event where different branches of the military form teams to compete against each other in different events (like hand-to-hand combat and puzzle challenges) and the team with the most points at the end wins. It sounds like it’s fairly fun, but winning the Games was top priority for all of the crew and it was not at all what I cared about in this story.

From some of the emphases in the writing, the Coast Guard parallel is super prominent and (to the best of my non-military understanding) true to life. I almost categorized it under “Military Scifi” as a secondary genre because that really feels like what it’s going for. Maybe if you’ve been in the military all this will be more interesting and relatable to you, or you’ll like it more if you can get more invested in the Games than in all the other plot hooks. Either way, it’s not a bad book – just not one that I particularly want to keep reading.

The NeoG series:

1. A Pale Light in the Black
2. Hold Fast Through the Fire

Review: Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Title: Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Series: Zoey Ashe #2

Author: David Wong

Genre: Cyberpunk

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, gore, violence, guns, severe injury, body horror (mild), bullying, misogyny, body shaming, animal cruelty (mentions), kidnapping

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading beyond this point will expose you to spoilers of book one, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits.

Back Cover:

In the futuristic city of Tabula Ra$a, Zoey Ashe is like a fish so far out of water that it has achieved orbit. After inheriting a criminal empire, the twenty-three year-old finds herself under threat from all sides as a rogue’s gallery of larger-than-life enemies think they smell weakness.

On the eve of the world’s most lavish and ridiculous Halloween celebration, a steamer trunk-sized box arrives at Zoey’s door and she is shocked to find that it contains a disemboweled corpse. She is even more shocked when that corpse, controlled by an unknown party, rises and goes on a rampage through the house. Speaking in an electronic voice, it publicly accuses Zoey of being its murderer. This is the kind of thing that almost never happened at her old job.

The city was already a ticking time bomb of publicity-hungry vigilantes with superhuman enhancements and Zoey knows this turn of events is unlikely to improve the situation. Now, she and her team of high-tech tricksters have to solve this bizarre murder while simultaneously keeping Tabula Ra$a from descending into chaos.

Review:

I had so much fun with Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, the first book in this series, that I was eager to get my hands on this one as soon as possible. But then I realized the smart thing to do would be to finish the library books that are due before getting more, and, well, at least I got to this one in the same year.

This book tries to rectify some of the issues with the previous book. Zoey’s characterization is still a bit inconsistent, but this book at least tries to explain it. There’s also a bit of a Thing (I’m not sure if I should call it a character arc or a theme or what) around how wealth separates you from others and prevents a lot of human connection – which I do agree with, but it’s framed in a “pity the poor little rich person” way that undercut it a bit. Regardless, Zoey did start to feel like an actual nuanced person, so overall I’d call it an improvement.

If you like hateable enemies, this is your series. Book one had a very hateable incel-type antagonist, and this book has a whole organization of Zoey-hating incels. The threat is bigger, so you get more of the suits in action, plus the kind of antagonists you just love to hate, even though I simultaneously felt bad for some of them.

Now for my main problem with the book: it gets frustrating. My favorite part of book one was the way the suits were always 3-5 steps ahead of everyone. In this one they often end up several steps behind because their opponents are different from the usual type, but they can’t let go of their preconceived ideas about what threats should look like to see what the current opponents are doing. As a result, fully 80% of the action that happens in this book was unnecessary and avoidable, and that was frustrating to me as a reader. Zoey even suggested early on that they investigate something that would have put them back ahead and avoided the unnecessary action but the suits brush her off.

I did not enjoy this one quite as much as Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, but it was still a lot of fun and a very enjoyable read. Book one just set a high bar that this one didn’t quite live up to. That doesn’t make it a bad book by any means – as I said, it was plenty of fun and I did enjoy it – I just think book one was better.

The Zoey Ashe series:

1. Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
2. Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick

Review: The Gunslinger

Title: The Gunslinger

Series: The Dark Tower #1

Author: Stephen King

Genre: No idea. Post-apocalyptic low-fantasy western?

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, gore, gun violence, excrement, death of animals, sexual content, misogyny, infidelity (minor)

Back Cover:

Beginning with a short story appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1978, the publication of Stephen King’s epic work of fantasy — what he considers to be a single long novel and his magnum opus — has spanned a quarter of a century.

Set in a world of extraordinary circumstances, filled with stunning visual imagery and unforgettable characters, The Dark Tower series is King’s most visionary feat of storytelling, a magical mix of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that may well be his crowning achievement.

In The Gunslinger (originally published in 1982), King introduces his most enigmatic hero, Roland Deschain of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting, solitary figure at first, on a mysterious quest through a desolate world that eerily mirrors our own. Pursuing the man in black, an evil being who can bring the dead back to life, Roland is a good man who seems to leave nothing but death in his wake.

Review:

I am not the biggest Stephen King fan. He’s definitely a good writer, but I’m not very into the horror genre and that’s what he’s famous for. I didn’t know what this book was about going in or even if it was horror or not, but one of my friends has been going on and on about how awesome this series is and I figured I might as well give it a shot.

I have yet to see a description for this book that actually says much about what the book is about, instead of something like “the first volume in King’s magnum opus” or some other such praise that tells me nothing about the story. The story is about the gunslinger, whose name we later learn is Roland, tracking the mysterious “man in black” across a desert wasteland. Along the way he reflects on his past and tells some of his story to people he meets, so you slowly put together some of his backstory, what this world is, and why he’s chasing the man in black, although the book ends before the puzzle is anywhere close to complete.

That’s really all there is to the plot. Roland is traveling across the desert wasteland and we the reader get stories and flashbacks to orient ourselves to the world (and the characters, to a point) as we go. Even the mysterious Dark Tower that gives the series its name doesn’t get mentioned until the end and I have no idea why Roland wants to find it so bad. I actually have very little idea about Roland himself – the book contains a lot of things that he did or that happened to him, but very little about who he is as a person. He kept his thoughts and feelings tightly under wraps and that prevented me from connecting with him as a character. I didn’t dislike him, but I didn’t know enough about him to like him, either.

The Gunslinger grabbed me right out of the gate with questions: who this gunslinger is (he doesn’t get a name until quite a ways in), why he’s chasing the man in black, who the man in black is, and whether the gunslinger is just traveling through a desert or if the whole world is some apocalyptic desert wasteland. But then it doesn’t make much of an attempt to answer the questions. Even though it’s long enough to be a complete novel, the whole book feels like the first bit of a longer story – the part where the protagonist may have a goal but everything is relatively normal, and the reader is getting oriented to the world before everything goes sideways and the plot starts. I have to imagine this was intentional and Stephen wanted to make the whole series feel like a single story split into multiple volumes, but it was absolutely bizarre to read a whole book that felt like a beginning. It technically is a self-contained story, but the whole book had a feeling of waiting for the plot to start.

If I was just reading on my own, I probably wouldn’t continue the series. This book was reasonably interesting, but it wasn’t enough to grab me and leave me begging for book two. But I had a great time discussing this book with my friend, and my library has the whole series on audiobook. So I’ll probably read book two eventually, if for no other reason than discussing it with my friend.

The Dark Tower series:

1. The Gunslinger
2. The Drawing of the Three
3. The Waste Lands
4. Wizard and Glass
5. Wolves of the Calla
6. Song of Susannah
7. The Dark Tower