Walking on the Moon

I was browsing around the library looking for a book and ran in to Craig DiLouie‘s name. He’s a horror author who mailed me a pre-print years ago for no reason I could possibly think of. I mean, this blog has a very select audience. Meaning that a couple people who know me and a ton of bots read it. But I liked Paranoia when he sent it to me so when I saw he was selling books, I picked one up.

Episode Thirteen is a horror story on a reality TV ghostbusting show. It’s told in an epistolary fashion, which basically means it’s a found footage telling. He plays the inter-cast drama, the is-this-real-or-not questions, and the mounting spookiness to keep the tension ratcheted up.

Overall the effect is like popping on a good horror flick on. The characters are all archetypal enough that you can get a handle on them quickly, but have enough breath of life in them that they’re believable. The epistolary method nicely mimics the feeling of a found footage horror movie. And the plot zips along well enough to cover the found footage holes.

Covering the found footage holes is a good test for me in a found footage/epistolary story. There are inherent difficulties to getting your characters to expose themselves through text or film that could reasonably turn up later and still be believable. If the story engages me enough that I don’t fixate on those limitations, the author is in business. And DiLouie is here.

Recommended.

This is a classic Czech SF novel by Karel ?apek, the fellow who coined the term robot. What strikes me most is how satirical it is on multiple scales. It does a fine job skewering individuals right up through nations and companies. It does so less in a structured way of stacking individual flaws into structural flaws – you don’t see nations acting the same way as nationals – and more as just showing the multi-scale irrationality of it all. And it’s a fun snappy read as it goes. I mean, it’s not going to wind up anywhere good, but with more whimsical resignation than call to action.

It was written in the 30’s so a lot of the satire of people and their ethnicities foibles has aged badly. The overall tone goes a long way in making it seem more misguided than nasty to me. The perceived quirks of the English middle class don’t really underlie the follies of humanity as a whole, so I rolled my eyes more than hung my head.

Overall an interesting piece of SF. Recommended.

I’ve read some great books from random recommendations on line. And I’ve read The Pussy Detective. That’s too cheap a shot to pass up but it’s unfair to The Pussy Detective.

The book is billed as a Blacksploitation Sex Magic novel, and it completely delivers on that. It creates a really fun Blacksploitation environment and uses the sex and magic ideas as mysterious elements to talk about the world. It would have been a fun 90’s Vertigo series. But it doesn’t rise beyond a pretty niche genre piece. To be fair, I don’t think that was DuVay Knox’s goal. In print, it overstayed its welcome a bit for me, though I did enjoy the Wash U pokes.

I want to be super clear. This is just a case of a work that I’m not the audience for. Knox builds a well-written unique book here. If you have an inclination to check it out, you’ll get a good ride.