Mini book review: Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

I like big books with intricate plots. Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay has 567 pages (hardcover) and a fairly large cast of characters involved in court intrigue, power struggles, rebellion, honor and poetry.  I do sort of wish I had liked Under Heaven more.

Second son Shen Tai has gone beyond the borders of the empire of Kitai, living in solitude as he works to bury tens of thousands of dead soldiers and lay their ghosts to rest.  He does this to honor his own deceased father.  At first it was terrifying, bleak and alone, ghosts howling and crying at night and no one but bones for company during the day.  But he keeps at his unending, impossible job and, by bringing peace to a few souls, begins to gain some for himself.  This solitary existence is rocked, however, when a messenger brings word that he is being gifted with two hundred and fifty Sardian horses - the most valuable and incredible horses in the world, a gift of inconceivable wealth.  This gift, ostensibly to honor Tai for the work he is doing, thrusts him back into court life as the emperor takes notice of him and lesser mandarins seethe with resentment.  As power players jostle for position around him, and assassins circle, trying to gain control of the horses, Tai must learn who his friends are and how to move in society again.

Set in a slightly fantastical version of China's Tang Dynasty, Under Heaven has hand-to-hand combat, concubines, evil shamans, sexy lychee nut eating and drunken poets.  Kay writes at a remove, however, so that I never felt a connection with any of the characters.  Perhaps part of it is that honor and decorum played such a large part in the characters' lives and the prose is designed to reflect those qualities.  Still, I had been hoping to be drawn in more than I was and, as such, Under Heaven left me a little cold.

Stephen King obviously doesn't need my help

The great and mighty Stephen King obviously doesn't need any of my help selling any books - his author book-jacket blurb flatly states "the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers" but I recently got the opportunity to knock two more of my all-time-King list: Revival (published in November 2014) and Mr. Mercedes (published in June 2014).  (How does he do that?  Publish two complete novels in the same year?)  I'm not going to count either of these as my favorites but I almost always enjoy a new King read.

Revival follows the life of Jamie Morton, and his connection with the at first charismatic, and later sinister, Reverent Charles Jacobs.  Reverend Jacobs is at first an electricity hobbyist but after a horrific family tragedy, becomes more and more obsessed with the power coursing through the earth and its sky.  Jamie's path keeps crossing with Jacobs; they are inexplicably intertwined, right up to the sharp swerve into The Dark Tower/Lovecraftian ending of the book.

Mr. Mercedes has no supernatural elements and is a straight-up cop thriller.  In an unnamed Midwestern city, a terrible mass murder case has gone unsolved after a masked man driving a tank of a Mercedes plows into a crowd of applicants at a jobs fair.  Retired detective Bill Hodges can't let the case go and, when he receives a letter purporting to be from the driver of that Mercedes, Bill is compelled to solve the case.  Told from twin points of view - Bill's and the killer's - the point of this novel is not to figure out whodunnit (you know who by page 42), but to see whether the good guys will be able to catch the very clever but all too human bad guy.

I liked Mr. Mercedes well enough (certainly moreso than Revival) and was interested to learn that King's latest, Finders Keepers, is a related book, revisiting with some of the characters but following a different plot line entirely.  I prefer my Stephen King on the spooky side but I'm always up to see what he's got for us next.

Movie review: Return to OZ

Disney's Return to OZ, the 1985 sequel to the beloved classic, The Wizard of Oz (1939), is a slightly disturbing return to the land of L. Frank Baum's imagination.  I'm not sure how well it did upon its release - I don't remember it coming out in theaters at all - but if it wasn't well-received, I can believe it.  This sequel is scary (this coming from someone who is still disturbed by the original's flying monkeys).

When the movie opens, we learn that Dorothy (a nine year old Fairuza Balk) has been unable to sleep since the tornado that destroyed the Gales' home and whisked her away to the land of Oz.  her aunt and uncle are at their wits' end and decide to take her to a mental asylum where she will be subjected to electroshock therapy in an attempt to cure her of her Oz-ish delusions.  The asylum is frightening, with unseen patients' shrieks and cries echoing through the halls.  The head nurse is brusque to the point of meanness; the head doctor seems far too excited at the prospect of zapping people with his electricity machine.  As poor Dorothy is strapped to a table and connected to the electroshock machine, a wild thunderstorm rages outside, knocking out the facility's generator.  In the confusion, a mysterious blonde girl frees Dorothy and runs outside with her.  The head nurse gives chase and the girls fall into a raging river, the blonde disappearing under the surface and Dorothy clinging to a battered, floating chicken coop.

In the morning, Dorothy of course finds herself in Oz, accompanied by a (now-) talking hen from back home, Billina (which begs the question, why wasn't Toto able to talk when he was in Oz?).  Looking for Dorothy's old friends, they journey to the Emerald City, only to discover the city in ruins due to the machinations of the Nome King.  Dorothy and Billina are menaced by nasty Wheelers (people with wheels for hands and feet who are fully as terrifying as the flying monkeys) and a very scary witch who switches heads on a whim, but gain some new companions - Tik-Tok, a clockworks soldier; Jack Pumpkinhead; and the Gump - before confronting the Nome King.

Return to OZ is pretty intense.  There are quite a few scary characters - even good, simple Jack is a teensy bit creepy - and the sets are not as candy-colorful as TWoO.  The animation is awkward and has not aged well but Fairuza Balk does a great job as Dorothy, who has been de-aged from TWoO to align more closely with the original books.  What I enjoyed the most about RtO, actually, was how much came back to me from the books, which I adored when I was younger.  Even though it has been literally decades since I've read any of the OZ books, I remembered Billina, the lunch-pail trees, Mombi the witch, the Gump and the Wheelers.  Watching Return to OZ has actually inspired me to revisit the books - you can scarcely ask more of a movie than that.

Mini book review: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

Finally a book that has enticed me enough to go after subsequent volumes in the series: Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch!  Peter Grant is a probationary constable with London's Metropolitan Police.  After learning to his dismay that his supervisors plan to put him into an all-paperwork job - Peter is perhaps a little too easily distractable for the Murder Unit - he just happens to speak to a ghost who is an eyewitness to a very strange and violent crime.  Peter learns that the Met actually has a supernatural investigations division, headed by the mysterious Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale.  Nightingale gets him transferred and soon Peter is learning magic, talking with river spirits and going through cellphones faster than you can say "Piccadilly Circus" as they try to discover, with help of Constable Leslie May and terrier Toby, who is behind a string of escalating murders.

Midnight Riot is an excellent entry in the mashed-up British detective/urban fantasy genre.  Written in the first person, with Peter Grant as the sarcastic, interested and sometimes baffled narrator, it is a real page turner with plot advancements coming fast and furiously amid gently pointed and contemporary observations about London's traffic, tourists, police, weather and spicy West Indian food.  I was charmed by Peter Grant and his magical, modern London and I will definitely be picking up the second book in the series, Moon Over Soho, in the near future.