Enchanted Pilgrimage

Enchanted Pilgrimage
by Clifford D. Simak
p. 1975

Doubletake

Doubletake
by Rob Thurman
p. 2012

Family reunions are the name of the game in Rob Thurman’s 2012 contribution to the Cal Leandros mythology, as each of the three main characters deal with blasts from the past intent on upsetting their already tumultuous lives. A chain of events brings these shady relatives into Cal and Niko’s orbit and leads the brothers to question whether they can trust someone new (hint: no.) while it leads me to question whether Thurman is capable of something new. (hint: yeahhhhhno.) 

It’s Goodfellow’s kin that sets off the series of reunions as every puck in existence gathers in New York City for ‘The Panic,’ their thousand-year reunion meant to tally their number and participate in a lottery to decide who must reproduce to keep the population going for another thousand years. Robin has opted to hire Cal and Niko as bouncers to keep the situation under control and the results are predictably awkward but undeniably hilarious. It’s important to remember that all the pucks look nearly identical, so even though ‘their’ puck is the only non-participant, due to his ongoing experimentation with monogamy, it’s impossible to escape the sight of Robin fornicating with everything in sight, including variations of himself. Cal and Niko’s front row seats to the orgy of the century were so hilariously outrageous that for a few chapters I almost wondered if perhaps Thurman was attempting to do a humorous filler novel for once. It would have been the perfect place for it—coming directly after Cal’s emotional stint with amnesia, which ended with him wiping out the remnants of his monster-reject family, the last vestiges of his Auphe family tree.

Or so he thought. Naturally, there was one ‘brother’ that Cal missed, and he becomes the central antagonist of Doubletake, and definitely future installments too, considering he’s still kicking it above ground by novel’s end. This monstrosity was one of the last failed experiments of the Auphe, incapable of facilitating their evil plan but still capable of creating gates and very much in possession of the Auphe’s twisted sensibilities. Once he escaped from his captive adolescence, Cal’s twisted ‘brother’ educated himself, taught himself to fight, adopted the name Grimm and relegated himself to the fringes, waiting for his chance at revenge against his race. When Cal robs him of this chance, Grimm switches his sights to Cal, and reveals himself for the first time in Doubletake with a new plan for creating his own destructive race—and he wants Cal’s help to get things started.

Disappointingly, it’s more of the same with Grimm—the slimy, all-powerful villain who talks too much and is evil for evil’s sake. This of course means lots of diabolical monologuing and heavy angst. It also means another villain whose intentions are predictable and not at all relatable. It also means, I am cheated out of my potentially humorous filler novel, but that rude awakening preceded Grimm’s entrance in the form of Niko’s shady relative—his erstwhile father, Kalakos, a gypsy bounty hunter of sorts who is in town hunting down the Vayash Clan’s latest escaped responsibility, Janus. Janus is a monster made of metal and fire and it is intent on tracking down and killing every member of the Vayash Clan (even, according to Kalakos, exiled members like Cal and Niko who want nothing to do with the clan). The brothers reject Niko’s father’s attempt to reach out, but are forced to rely on him when Cal is gravely wounded by Janus.

Kalakos was definitely the thread I was most interested in, of the three family reunions. Where Cal’s interactions with Grimm brought nothing new to the table and Goodfellow’s kin brought only laughs, it is Niko’s reaction to his father that brings the most questions. Cal is loyal to a fault; we know he trusts no one and will choose any avenue that most thoroughly protects his brother, so he leaves the decision to Niko on whether or not Kalakos should be allowed in the picture. As Niko’s estranged father accompanies the boys on their two-way Janus hunt, the latter are forced to ask themselves whether they can forgive Kalakos after abandoning them all their lives.

I’ll admit, I wondered if it could work out. Cal and Niko had accepted others into their circle before. Promise and Rafferty are always on the guest list and of course one doesn’t get more ‘inner circle’ than Goodfellow, who the brothers trust implicitly. I allowed myself to hope that perhaps Kalakos could earn forgiveness and be another capable character for the brothers to rely on, maybe a rogue who pops his head in every now and then to offer support...

... Oh, how foolish that was.

Sure enough, Kalakos not only proves what Cal and Niko knew all along—that he is not to be trusted—but he also completely loses the cool, rational demeanor he’d held for the entire book and spontaneously starts monologuing about how eeeeevil he is. It’s almost like Thurman’s villains cannot help themselves. They just have to prove their evil worth by not shutting the fuck up.

It’s disappointing because there are dozens of ways this could have gone and I imagined most of them. Kalakos could have been on the level and become a new ally, he could have have been on the level and died tragically, the brothers could have not trusted him then regretted it when he turned out to be legit, or they could have allowed themselves to forgive only to be let down. Literally any option that allows some combination of these characters to grow emotionally would have been more interesting than what we got. But instead, Kalakos was a bastard all along, surprising precisely nobody. But we’re going to pretend like nobody saw it coming so he can get his villain on in the final act. Yawn.

I’m being a little hard on Doubletake. I liked it like I liked any of the other books in this series, I’m just hoping for a new take on things soon, a promise of emotional growth, and maybe some new characters for the inner circle. If anything, Doubletake actually took away one of the inner circle in the only surprising twist in the book, which I have avoided mentioning until now because it seems about as relevant in this review as it does in the actual book. What I’m referring to is the revelation that George—Cal’s old psychic paramour—the good-hearted girl next door who exiled herself when Cal refused to let her in—the girl whom we haven’t heard from or spoken to in at least 4 books—was brutally murdered by Grimm ‘off screen,’ so to speak. The truth isn’t revealed to our intrepid heroes this time around, making its inclusion here seem kind of random, but in a good way, like a bullet that has been fired but has not yet found its mark. When that bullet hits, I expect all hell to break loose. I only hope that we get proper chance to say goodbye to Georgie when that happens, because she deserves better than the ending she apparently got.

American Gods

American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
p. 2001

American Gods is a book I’d been meaning to read for quite some time, penned by Neil Gaiman, whose specialty—I’ve gathered, now that I’m three books in—is taking old school fantasy and mythology and transplanting it into a contemporary setting. With Neverwhere, it was magic and mysticism. With Good Omens it was angels and demons and Horsemen of the Apocalypse. With American Gods, it’s the gods and myths of various cultures. In all three, there is a recurring theme of these legends struggling to fit into a world that has no place for them anymore.

American Gods is so thick and layered that it would be impossible to cover every detail in a few paragraphs. The gist of the story is that a young man named Shadow is released from jail following the death of his wife and finds himself falling in with a mysterious conman named Mr. Wednesday and his strange and quirky associates. Wednesday employs Shadow as a bodyguard and reveals himself, in time, to be the modern American reincarnation of Odin, the Norse god. In this story, the power of the gods is determined by how strongly people believe in them. Some, like Wednesday and his colleagues, are Americanized incarnations of the old gods, brought over from other continents in the old days, and their power has diminished as they get farther away from their origins. Others are new American gods, created and molded by a society whose values have moved on to other things—such as technology and drugs. Both factions are in a sort of cold war which Wednesday believes to be heating up; he has dedicated himself to rallying the troops accordingly for the coming battle, and Shadow finds himself caught in the middle of it all.

That only begins to describe everything that is going on in this heady book. There are tons of vignettes and side stories, some depicting various gods and their histories traveling to the Americas, some about Shadow’s dead wife, resurrected with a magic trick and dedicated to protecting her husband in exchange for a return to the living, and the longest subplot: Shadow’s time hidden away by Wednesday in a small town called Lakeside, where he bonds with the locals. It seems strange that in a book about gods and goddesses and mysterious men in black and the undead that one of the most compelling parts would be Shadow’s attempts at domestication in small town USA and yet, when Shadow is inevitably outed and exiled from the modest life he has created for himself, it is somehow the most heartbreaking part of the story—even more than Wednesday’s ‘death’ just prior.

I was a little disappointed by American Gods, perhaps because the hype exceeded the depth of the material. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the story, but I also found it a little boring at times, and I think the climax of the book was a bit of a letdown. What prompted me to finally plunge into Gaiman’s book was hearing that it was soon to be developed into a miniseries for cable. Upon reading it, I can see now that that is really the only way it can be translated to screen. A movie wouldn’t begin to cover it all, not even if it were split up into a trilogy, because (as we learned with The Hobbit) there is no logical stopping point for each film. In this golden age of matured television programming, a miniseries would be best, and then only for cable, where the subject matter can be explored on American screens without the restraint of network censorship. I’ll look forward to seeing how the material plays out and may have to check out Gaiman’s other stories set in this same universe.

Who Are You

Blackout
by Rob Thurman
p. 2012

The sixth novel in Rob Thurman’s series about half-human Cal Leandros starts out a little differently than the others, with a mystery... sort of. Our intrepid narrator wakes up alone on a beach in South Carolina, surrounded by dead monsters and without a single memory to call his own. The reader may know it’s our very own Caliban, but Cal is completely in the dark... until his past shows up to reclaim him in the form of one very protective older brother and a sarcastic puck.

Thus begins the central plot point in Thurman’s Blackout: Cal has lost his memory thanks to a nasty dose of venom from one of the creatures he fought. It’s not any kind of crippling amnesia, thankfully. More the made-for-TV kind of selective amnesia that still leaves the important parts intact. In this case, Cal retains his fighting skills, his knowledge of the supernatural, his overactive emo-angst, and—most impressively—his snarky sense of humor. The first three I could excuse with minimal hand-waving. The fighting skills and knowledge of the supernatural? Sure, I’ll accept that as muscle memory, instinct and luck of the draw. The angst-overdrive is not too crazy either, considering Cal’s situation; hell, I’d be doing a lot of freaking out myself if I forgot who I was and woke up amidst dead creatures. For some reason, it’s the sarcasm I have the most trouble buying. It’s Cal’s background and surroundings that give him that inimitable sass; I just have a hard time accepting that it comes to him naturally.

But I get it, I do. I can imagine Thurman sitting down attempting to try this new thing out and realizing that it was just half the fun with a fundamentally altered Cal. I mean, what is a Thurman novel without crippling sarcasm and dueling wits? So she kept her favorite elements while still giving us a slightly different Cal. Unfortunately, I think this Cal just wasn’t altered enough to create an interesting character development. In fact, I believe Thurman missed a huge opportunity to do something new and unexpected with her central character, and as a result, I was a little let down by Blackout.

I would have loved seeing a dramatically altered Cal, one who has forgotten about all the supernatural, and not just his own demonic heritage. How intriguing would it have been to see him try out being an average guy, to truly believe a normal life was possible... only to find out as his memory returned that he could never be that guy? How intriguing to see if Niko could let his brother go if it meant he could be truly (if ignorantly) happy for once? It would have been heartbreaking, sure, but Thurman’s never been one to shy away from devastating character developments. I would happily have withstood a ‘Cal-less’ novel for the payoff of his inevitable revelation.

Regardless, I did find Amnesia-Cal’s verbal sparring with Niko and Goodfellow to be highly entertaining, more and more so as his memories returned to him and he settled in to his ‘new’ old life. I found myself laughing out loud at the scene when Cal—after finally disposing of the decomposing thorn in his side that was the mummy, Wahanket—charitably adopts the former informant’s mummified pet cats and descends on Goodfellow’s swanky apartment with the whole herd of them. That entire development was pure gold, and I’m glad Cal finally found an animal that likes him in the form of Spartacus.

Cal’s amnesia came at a good time, too. Our favorite half-human, half-Auphe got some hard truths dealt to him in Roadkill, not to mention an ultimatum in regards to his gate traveling abilities. After finding out you may inherit your evil forebears’ cruel tendencies in spite of everything you’ve fought against, who wouldn’t want to run away, forget everything, and start anew? For a while, I actually wondered if Cal’s condition was a mental defense self-constructed or brought on by Rafferty’s meddling, but it really did end up being the Nepenthe spider venom controlling his memories. The only ‘twists’ in Blackout were that a) Niko was re-dosing Cal out of some misguided notion of protection and b) a sort of out-of-the-blue revelation that Cal had living ‘siblings,’ courtesy of failed Auphe experimentation prior to his birth. Not sure why this was included at the end of this novel, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter anymore! Unless, of course, it was just to plant the idea in our head that there could be more ‘successful’ hybrids running around to be dealt with in the future. If that is the case, things could get really interesting. And really, why wouldn’t there be? Why stop at one, especially when that one is so inherently resistant to their ideals? I wouldn’t be surprised if we get an anti-Cal somewhere down the road.

Blackout’s ‘big bad,’ Ammut, is the first lady big bad, but on the whole, she doesn’t differ much from the other main villains. In fact, she is probably the least visible of all the central antagonists, as she barely appears. I guess I’m okay with this; it meant we were spared some banal villain dialogue and it made the whole thing murkier because it’s easy to forget who the real problem is when you’re so far removed from your nemesis. Promise is back, but she stays away for most of the novel, giving Amnesia-Cal some space as he relearns how to accept monsters into his life. The Delilah problem is progressing slowly, but I’m interested to see how it turns out. There isn’t much else to say because the point of view this time around is all Amnesia-Cal. I did get a kick out of his outside take on Niko-as-martyr-brother, if only because it addressed something I’d thought before—that Niko really is perfect and needs a good wake-up call where his brother is concerned. Overall, not my favorite Cal Leandros novel, but it gave me some new things to think about going forward.

Highway to Hell

Roadkill
by Rob Thurman
p. 2011

The fifth book in Rob Thurman’s yearly series, which began with Nightlife, has Niko and Cal Leandros and company hitting the road on the hunt for the latest supernatural threat, Suyolak, a demonic “anti-healer” with the capability of releasing a plague on the world. To do so requires the help of their own healer associate, Rafferty, and his cousin, Catcher. The pair of them, along with stalwart pal, Robin Goodfellow, chase Suyolak as he weaves a path of sickness and destruction across the country while concurrently dealing with the consequences of Cal’s casual trysts with werewolf paramour, Delilah, a Kin wolf whose association with Cal has earned her the distrust of her fellow wolves.

For the most part in Roadkill, the song remains the same: one-word compound title that is vague and encompassing, but relevant enough, bickering family, intense, frequent and bloody battle scenes interspersed with snappy dialogue and mountains of manly angst (or mangst, as it is conveniently referred to in some circles), big bad evil toying with the brothers until the inevitable ‘boss fight’ at the end... but Thurman changes up the style in ways that are noticeable enough to make the book feel somewhat unique.

For starters, in the last book, Deathwish, Thurman changed the formula by switching for the first time from a 100% Cal narration to a dual Cal and Niko narration. She continues that here, but Niko is subbed out for Catcher (of all characters), at a ratio of about three Cal chapters to every one Catcher chapter. I think this choice was a misstep overall. Deathwish provided the most insight into Niko as a character since the first book in the series, and taking away his narration relegates him back to the stagnant prop character he has sort of become. I mean, Niko’s awesome and all, but he borders on Gary Sue territory in his utter infallibility.

I also didn’t extremely care for the Catcher chapters because it just felt like more of the same stuff we were already getting from Cal. Thurman drew a really apt parallel between Niko and Cal and Rafferty and Catcher, the latter of whom are really like a soft version of the former, but it didn’t lead to any new revelations, at least not for the Leandros brothers. Catcher’s story (left open-ended post-Nightlife after the werewolf cousins disappeared for a few books to sort themselves out), is mildly interesting, predictably heartbreaking, and sort of wrapped up at the end. Rafferty is, for all intents and purposes, written off here as well, set aside for until Thurman needs a miracle in the future, no doubt. It’s clear Thurman is not done with him, but his story is concluded in a way that is satisfying for the time being.

Another change is the complete absence of Promise. After the sticky events of Deathwish, maybe Thurman thought the readers (and Niko) needed to take a bit of a break from Promise, but it’s kind of weird to me that she’s not even mentioned. Maybe that’s a result of Niko losing his narration, and if he were more abundantly represented, perhaps we would have caught a glimpse of Promise this go around, but at least we could have glimpsed Niko or Cal calling her for help once or twice. Geez, even Goodfellow’s boyfriend, Ishiah, was more prominently featured than Promise, thanks to the subplot of Goodfellow’s attempt to be monogamous. I was still okay with the lack of Promise overall though, because she can be something of a prop herself, and her absence in Roadkill gave Delilah a chance to shine and show what a complex character she is.

One thing that didn’t change, to my chagrin, is the Big Bad’s personality. Thurman can sketch out a damn good battle scene but her villains are all kind of the same. They are ridiculously powerful (too powerful, usually, for the brothers to beat alone, which you think they would have picked up on by now), spout some ridiculously evil, slimy dialogue, toy with our heroes like they’re playing with food, then inevitably go down in flames. They’re all just... sooo evil. And their intentions are all the same: death, chaos, victory, darkness rah rah rah. It took me five books to realize how tedious all the villains have been. I hope for a more complicated villain next time, one whose defeat leaves me with mixed feelings perhaps. Someone with motives we can understand, someone who has weaknesses. Hell, Suyolak is so powerful, there is literally not a chance that Cal and Niko could have defeated him on their own. They needed Rafferty or they would have been taken out in round one. Knowing that kind of makes the whole chase rather perplexing; what are Cal and Niko thinking chasing after something they have no idea how to beat? The Leandros brothers may fight hard, but they don’t always fight smart. Instead of exchanging banter and dwelling on brother-monster parallels, I would have welcomed seeing more interaction with Abelia-roo and the slimy Vayash clan who brought the problem into the world if it meant figuring out a way to defeat Suyolak without leaning so heavily on their deus ex machina healer.

I found some events in this book easy to aniticipate: I knew Catcher and Cal wouldn’t be cured of their respective ailments, I figured Delilah would only kind of betray Cal, I figured Goodfellow would be remain monogamous, and I just knew that having a healer literally on your side meant Cal would take more beatings in this book than any book previous (and how), but my biggest ‘totally called that’ moment was Cal’s inevitable downward spiral as he embraces his Auphe side. The only part I didn’t foresee is that the solution would come so quickly or so harshly. Cal’s mystical brain bomb should provide some interesting predicaments in future novels. Perhaps the predictability is a bad thing; perhaps it’s just a sign that, after a few books, I’ve really got these characters (and Thurman’s style) all figured out.