Author: Don

Local by Brian Wood

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book deserves all the hype it’s gotten. The total package, from start to finish, is an evolution in every sense of the word–the evolution of the character, the writing, the art, even the series concept. And I could tell that even before I read as much in the backmatter.

The main character, Megan, sums up her story and the point of the book (not just as a whole, but in each of the interconnected stories in each issue) thus:

You need to do what’s best for you, even if it means leaving some people behind, burning some bridges, severing some ties. You’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t. You only get one shot. Take it when you can, and don’t blow it.

This sort of advice can only be given by someone who did just that, and who took shots and actually did blow them sometimes. Most writers fall back into the grosser antisocial behaviors–alcholism, drug use, and other Raymond Carver-type stuff–to illustrate dirty and gritty. Here, Wood & Kelly show that the pain of just making mistakes and learning from them can be just as dramatic.

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Fell Volume 1: Feral City by Warren Ellis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Why the hell did I put off buying this for so long? I’ve read about it for years, Ellis’s experimental 9-panel 16 pg comic with art by Ben Templesmith.

Fans of Ellis’s writing will find a lot to love, here: a flawed hero who wins some and loses some, odd and sometimes disturbing facts seamlessly woven into the story, and not too much of, as another reviewer said, the usual ranting.

Two nits: The style of Fell’s dialogue sometimes blends into that of the minor characters, which is to say into Warren Ellis speak. Consider my favorite line, a bit from a narration box by Detective Richard Fell:

Grab a death coffee from Mr. Yang, the food pervert. He melts a Hershey bar into a pot of filter coffee, pours a 1602 and then drops a depth-charge of espersso on it. And maybe crystal meth. I don’t know anymore what feels worse: Having one death coffee a day, or skipping it. I can already feel my internal organs going into crisis mode. At the end of my shift, the world’s going to fall out of my butt.

As much as I’d love this coffee, the writing is the same stuff I read daily on Ellis’s blog.

Second nit is that, like Desolation Jones, I’m left hanging, waiting for more adventures. The last issue published was #9, which I bought awhile ago. I didn’t realize that I now have the entire series! 🙁

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The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: And Other Stories by John Kessel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“Genre-blending,” to me, usually means”genre+literary” (whatever “literary” means). But a lot of the blending in this collection is “genre + genre,” as in the historical-crime/fantasy story “Every Angel is Terrifying,” or the future-crime/sci-fi first movement of the Lunar Quartet, “The Juniper Tree.”

Kessel’s historical/literary mash-ups were brilliant, too: Orson Welles in a sci-fi story (“It’s All True”)–who’d have thought? The name and spirit of Tyler Durden carrying on in a lunar colony in the second movement of the Lunar Quartet, “Stories for Men.” “Pride and Prometheus” is a Nebula award winner for good reason!

My favorite thing, from a technical standpoint, is the near-flawless worldbuilding in each story, done such that the story’s obvious themes are never heavy-handed or preachy.

What made it one star short of five was the third movement of The Lunar Cycle. The cycle is comprised of 4 stories, one of them almost 80 pages long–and we all know how I feel about stories that go on longer than the average story by Etgar Keret or Lydia Davis. Oddly enough, I loved the longest story (“Stories for Men”). It was the significantly shorter story immediately after it, “Under the Lunchbox Tree.” It’s obviously supposed to be more low-key, but it still seems anticlimactic.

You can download the collection for free, from Small Beer Press, in multiple formats. I did, and I immediately knew I had to have the TPB.

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Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow, if I’d taken a precious few different turns in life, I might have ended up exactly like the protagonist of this story, Ben. Definitely hit close to home.

This may be the first time, though, that I’ve come across a protagonist I didn’t like. And I’ve read lots and lots of Carver (with whose work Tomine’s is often compared). Yes, the ending of Ben’s story is open to interpretation, but to me it’s pretty clear. Based on what I read, what Ben sees at the end is what he has and maybe all he’ll ever have.

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[Note to self: How come I’ve never used this feature from goodreads before???]