Currently reading
McGlue
Knife Fight and Other Struggles
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
The Good Lord Bird
Ancillary Justice
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
Dissident Gardens
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Complete Novels
A great read. That makes three in a row for Buehlman. And each novel quite different from the others. I haven't read the new Stephen King, but I am betting this is the best Halloween gift going. Full review at Bookgasm--
Earlier this year I struggled mightily with a misfire of a novel that mashed up high-falutin’ fabulism, a romantic farce, Cold War shenanigans and Russian folklore centered around the witch Baba Yaga. Praise be ambition: As much as I dig celebrations of the tried-and-true in genre fiction, I’m equally keen to see a talented writer rip up the playbook and reinvigorate our sense of what horror and dark fantasy can do.
That said, the book I’m talking about? Yeah, it was heavy lifting. The mash-up was mere mishmash, the book sold on its own slick whimsy. A dud. A whole lot of gunpowder and no spark.
So imagine my anxiety when another novel comes along with Baba Yaga and her chicken-legged house stomping about new territories. Christopher Buehlman’s THE NECROMANCER’S HOUSE is set in present-day upstate New York, The story takes another adult spin on magic integrated into the muggle world, stitches in mythologies from various cultures (Russian and Slavic folklore, this hemisphere’s Voodoo roots), and traces analogies to the new myth-magic of hacking and cybernetics.
Oh, and there’s a sexually mismatched romantic entanglement at the core. And a fair bit of engagement with the impact of addictions (and AA founder Bill Wilson has a small but substantive cameo). And a dead dog’s spirit is reincarnated with a wicker torso, prosthetic legs and a Salvador Dali painting as its head.
So, yeah. There’s a lot going on here, too.
And Buehlman nails it.
Read the reat of the review at http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/horror/the-necromancers-house/....