Tony Noland's VERBOSITY'S VENGEANCE: A GRAMMARIAN ADVENTURE

It's quite a challenge, taking a trope as concrete and action-oriented as superheroes and setting them to work in an intellectual, abstract, intangible arena like language and usage. It takes a brave writer to try.

Tony Noland is nothing if not brave.

Disclosure time: Noland is one of my earliest Twitter friends, whose flash fiction and blog I've been enjoying for years. I therefore had a fairly high level of expectations for Verbosity's Vengeance, his first published novel. Especially since it's basically a superhero novel for language nerds. I mean, come on!

But like I said, that's a pretty conceptually difficult thing to pull off well.

It's also kind of a difficult thing to read. The language and syntax nudnik (of which I am one) has to evolve the ability to shut down that nudnik tendency if she is to enjoy much modern fiction because, let's be honest, few writers are really careful enough not to commit the odd hilarious sin now and then, usually involving misplaced modifiers or pronoun agreement gaffes.* Letting those distract one too much spoils the pleasure of reading fiction.

BUT...

It's really, really, really hard to shut down the nudnik tendency when grammar and usage are the very stuff of the story, as is the case here. Our hero The Grammarian (whose mundane identity has him dealing in rare and antique books and manuscripts! How can we not love this guy, Cliff Janeway with superpowers?) battles supervillain Professor Verbosity via innate powers and gadgets that turn grammatical constructions and sentence structure into weapons that work in the physical world; an early fight scene has Verbosity all but defeating the Grammarian via an exceptionally baroque and lengthy sentence of such weight (made literal by his gadget) that the Grammarian is pinned down helplessly while desperately parsing the sentence for any errors he can turn to his advantage.

The experience of reading a fight scene like that is painfully meta, the nudnik reader as helpless as the Grammarian in her struggle to sink into that happy reading trance and enjoy the scene. One can't ignore -- or enjoy -- the language when one's attention is constantly being drawn to that language's status as language. Had this not been the work of a friend in whom I have a lot of faith, I might have stopped after that first fight scene. But I really wanted to see if Noland could overcome this handicap of his own making.

Mostly, he does, by means of some clever and entertaining conceits. Like that whenever our hero uses his powers, which are derived from the language centers of his brain, whether its for attack, defense, or healing his often considerable wounds, his intelligence plummets.

There is also the fun to be had of a good round of Guess the Villain. We don't know who Professor Verbosity is; he could be pretty much anyone else the Grammarian meets in his mundane life. Is it the brilliant, pretty scientist? Is it the brash, successful businessman? Is it the pushy salesman the businessman seems hell-bent on planting in the Grammarian's bookstore? Each has qualities that might do well for a supervillain; each has an intense-bordering-on-creepy interest in his alter-ego. If one of them is the villain, do they know the Grammarian is also one Alex I. Graham, former video game tycoon and current book dealer? Do they suspect? And when will Professor Verbosity strike next?

Verbosity's Vengeance, in other words, winds up being a fun read (with a bit of an entertaining twist toward the end that really made me smile) once the reader's brain powers through the meta-weirdness. It has some first novel problems including a few instances of dialogue disguised as exposition, but it rewards the minor effort required to get past these. I look forward to more of this brainy hero's adventures.

*And publishing houses, let's face it, have been skimping on editing for years now, throwing the task to any old part-timer who didn't look busy enough that day, it seems like. And indie writers don't always have the financial resources (or, sometimes, the humility) to hire a good freelance editor. This is, therefore, increasingly a big, big problem for your basic nudnik reader of 21st century fiction. Ow.

Matthew Hughes' THE DAMNED BUSTERS #OneBookAtATime

First of all, just look at this cover! Angry Robot's design team knocked another one out of the park! And truly, it conveys pretty much exactly what you get inside.

And what is it that you get inside? Only the most plausibly implausible (or would that be implausibly plausible?) superhero story in the history of ever, that's all, fun in the way that only a story about an ordinary guy who accidentally causes a massive labor dispute in Hell and gets superpowers and a nearly omnipotent demon sidekick as part of the settlement can be fun.

And no, that's not a spoiler; all of that takes place in the first chapter or two. The fact these first few chapters are the most amusing bit of the book should not deter anyone, by the way; for this book is mostly in earnest, slightly silly premise aside. As are most superhero stories.

Chesney Anstruther is an actuary by trade, a man more at home with numbers and statistics -- and comic books -- than with human beings, despite his mother's extensive efforts to have him trained to do with his conscious, rational mind what most human beings do by instinct. So yes, probably a high functioning autistic, but maybe it can just be laid at mom's door, for she is a religious fanatic and a moralist of the strictest and most gleeful order -- her main hobby is writing scathing, hideously imaginative diatribes to whatever celebrity her favorite TV preacher picks on that week, diatribes in which the torments of Hell are lovingly detailed. So Chesney probably never stood a chance.

Then he becomes a superhero, of sorts. His settlement with Satan gives him pretty much unlimited power via his sidekick, but only for two hours a day, because his powers derive from his command over the sidekick, the amusingly sybaritic Xaphan, who has to be taken off his usual sinner-punishment detail to serve Chesney. He'll do anything Chesney demands, without loopholes, as long as Chesney's demands don't interfere with the fulfillment of anyone else's, more conventional, deals with the Devil.

Ah, there's the rub. Because it seems that some pretty important people have such deals in place, including, perhaps, Chesney's top boss, W.T. Paxton, tycoon and would-be politician, who is soon pursuing Chesney's superhero self (the Actionary!) with a proposition: help Paxton fight crime, and get access to all of the work of Paxton's firm, including the services of a crack team of top notch reasearchers and actuaries. Including Chesney himself. Oh, and Paxton has a mind-bendingly beautiful daughter, Poppy whom Chesney only seems able to talk to coherently while disguised as the Actionary...

So of course all of this comes into entertaining conflict, made just that more interesting by the introduction of yet another attractive girl, Melda, to turn Chesney's head and draw him into uncomfortable situations. And make Poppy jealous.

All of this combines into a pretty standard superhero plot, and that would make for a pretty decent read right there, but for two things. One is a stiff and mannered narrative voice that gets pretty distracting over the course of the novel -- for instance, throughout the book, Chesney is referred to as "the young man" over and over and over again* -- and the other is the author's insistence on playing a big meta-fiction game, to wit, the central argument the book is making is that it is a novel, a novel that God (aka Matthew Hughes himself) is writing, and it's a draft, and everything can change if the author changes his mind (as said author has many times in the past, or good Christians like Chesney's mother and her beloved TV preacher friend, Rev. Hardacre [who becomes Chesney's mentor] would never touch pork or shellfish or wear clothing made from more than one kind of fiber), and moreover it's going to change, so it's unlikely that contracts made with the Devil are going to be binding because the next big change is coming very soon. Or so the prevailing theory goes.

So uh, if you don't like characters discussing, sometimes at length, their status as characters in a novel, this might not be the book for you. Me, I'm on the fence a bit. Most of the time, I do not like this. I was a languages and literature major once upon a time and still bear the psychic scars of a whole course on meta-fiction and so generally hate this kind of twee crap like poison. But I quite enjoyed the goofy take on a superhero story and still have just enough curiosity about where all of this is going to have a look sometime at the book's two extant sequels, both of which I already have on my reading devices thanks to Angry Robot's ebook subscription.

I just hope it doesn't wind up being all about the meta-fiction. I really, really do.

*But then we come to a passage -- and mind you, this book is very much set in the present, meaning the 21st century -- where we find him sounding much older than he could reasonably be for a character constantly referred to as "the young man": "Chesney could remember when going tieless and unshaven was a mark of low socio-economic poverty." So he was around during the Mad Men era, was he? Yeah, so he's quite the whippersnapper.

Paul R. Hardy's THE LAST MAN ON EARTH CLUB #OneBookAtATime

The conceit behind The Last Man on Earth Club is without a doubt the most original idea for a science fiction novel I've come across in a long, long time. On a multiversal hub world to which refugees of apocalypses (apocalypti?) galore are brought after being rescued from Earth's destruction by everything from solar flares to zombie plagues to Heaven's Gate-style mass suicides on a planetary scale, six people, each of whom is the sole survivor of his home universe's variant on the human species, are treated for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as part of the process of integrating them into a brand new society. That's the book in a nutshell, setting, cast and plot all in one. Such a schtick carries with it both the potential to be horrible and gimmicky, and the potential to be weirdly awesome.

I'm happy to say it's weirdly awesome, though I was left feeling a little dissatisfied with the ending.

But the beginning and middle are all kinds of inventive fun, fun that manages to have a real sense of authenticity to it.*

Fans of post-apocalyptic fiction will enjoy the veritable buffet of ways the world has ended in these survivors' experiences. Hardy explores nuclear war (from the perspective of the man who just might have been the one to push the big red button that started it all), alien suicide cults (from the perspective of the only person to survive his blissful attempt to join those bright white energy balls who promised Heaven to anyone with the courage to join them -- and who is still trying to spread the faith in his new world), Matrix/Terminator-esque man vs machine wars (from the perspective of a cyborg found drifting naked in outer space), the ever popular zombie apocalypse (from the perspective of an embittered doctor who tried to fight it), a horrible history of slavery and final extermination of one human species by another who shared the planet with it (from the perspective of the last survivor of a failed captive breeding program to preserve the species in a zoo), and a comic book world where just over half of the population has some kind of superpower but that couldn't save them from some kind of mad science experiment gone horribly wrong and spontaneously combusting them all (from the perspective of a ditzy office girl who thinks everyone just took off and hid from her as a practical joke). As the stories are told, the survivors emerge as distinctive personalities and fully-rounded characters, characters in a lot of pain and denial and trauma, trying to cope with what happened and with each other's foibles.

This would be enough for a pretty interesting book, but author Paul R. Hardy was much more ambitious than that. Rather than just creating a sort of post-apocalyptic Breakfast Club**, he turned his novel into a serious discussion of refugee care, genocide, justice and jurisdiction in a way that still has me astonished.

He also spun all of this into a sort of mystery plot, tantalizingly hinting at the possibility that some or all of these planetary destructions and extinctions are linked, that they might have been the deliberate work of one or more races of bad actors. Several of the characters, in the course of their therapy, reveal clues to who this might have been and how it might have come to pass, and as the Hub prepares to receive another huge wave of refugees from a universe in which the Earth is being destroyed by solar flares gone wild (that might just have been deliberately set off, one suspicious survivor hints), resolve to try to take on this unknown entity and deliver to it/them the punishment/justice that the IU looks unlikely to ever mete out. Interesting stuff, this (but isn't it all?), but it is here that my dissatisfaction comes in: this is never tied up, really, at all. None of it is, really. The novel just sort of ends -- on a semi-promising note, sure, but not with any conclusions or finality. I've not seen any word on whether a sequel is in the works, but there had better be, Mr. Hardy.

There had better be.

*Having been treated for PTSD myself, I found the novel's depiction of this difficult, chancy and inexact process to be wonderfully true to life, even as the stories emerging from individual and group sessions were the stuff of pulp fiction and comic books. I admire the balance the author struck there exceedingly.

**Though on this level the book works just as brilliantly as the John Hughes film I refer to. These characters are vivid as hell, and while none of them could ever be called likable, they nonetheless inspire both sympathy and empathy and feel utterly real and believable.

100 Books #108 - Stieg Larsson's THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST

I think it's safe to say that the Sweden of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is very fortunate indeed that  big-time villain Alexander Zalachenko was a Male Chauvinist Pig. Had he encouraged his daughter, Lisbeth Salander, badass superheroine of the trilogy, in the development of her talents, had he cultivated her loyalties, the way he did his giant literally-feel-no-pain freakshow son, Niedermann, well, I'm just not sure this ficitonal Sweden could have survived it.

The only thing harder to deal with than Salander (and Team Salander) refusing to be a victim even after she's been shot in the hip, shoulder and oh yes head would be Salander helping daddy run his epic crime organization.

The action* in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest takes place immediately after the closing battle in The Girl Who Played with Fire, in which Lisbeth was not only shot as described above, not only left for dead but buried in a shallow grave -- and yet still managed to dig herself out and nearly succeed in offing Dear Old Dad. Again. As this third and, alas, final book (I'm told there were originally going to be ten of these, but for the author's unfortunate demise) opens, she and Daddy are rushed to the same intensive care ward, where doctors heroically save both of their lives so they can continue plotting to destroy each other.

Except now the police and the court system and the press are more involved in their family problems than ever before. And the buck doesn't stop there. Oh no. Because all the conspiracy pigeons are coming home to roost. And most of them are armed. Or have AUTHORITAH.

Unfortunately, I'm making this sound more exciting than the book actually is. There has been a plodding element to the other two books in the series -- we get a lot of minutiae mixed in with the excitement and adventure and really wild bad things -- but in this book, there's a lot more of that. We watch characters get dressed and plod around their kitchens making coffee and driving or walking up and down streets in way too much detail, way too often.

And perhaps that's always been the case in these books and I just noticed it more this time around because all that minutiae is padding out... courtroom drama (and a slow-motion courtroom drama that takes more than half the book to even get to the courtroom at that). Law & Order: Sweden. Which means with politicians. Who spend a lot of the time wringing their hands over the finer points of Swedish constitutional law. And drinking coffee.

Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of nifty cloak and dagger stuff, and when there is tension, it's very tense indeed, and involves some characters who, let's admit it, have kind of just been window dressing up till now (like Erika Berger, who, had this series progressed, could have wound up being a sort of attenuated Robin to Salander's Batman** except, of course, Robin would be older than Batman. And they'd both be female. But hell, wouldn't you want to read that? I would!!!). And added to the mix this time around are not just one but two new badass ex-policewomen, one working in the very government agency that's at the heart of the Salander/Zalachenko conspiracy, one working for the private security firm for whom Salander got her start in the earning money for being smart business.

And so yes, this means that all of the feminist issues that have been at the heart of this series from the beginning are still at the forefront; these stories aren't just crime stories, but stories about crimes against women, at all levels of society, in pretty much every way crimes can be perpetrated on women. Salander is our heroine of record, but really, any of the ladies who don't just get killed off in these novels could take a spotlight, too, I think. Not a whining victim among them; at their worst they are targets who come alive and shoot back. And if they happen to see a fella (or dame) they fancy, they make it happen, and the fancied one had better just get with the program (fortunately, all of them are glad to do so. Though really, I can't see any of these women, badass as they are, acting unethically in this regard. They know too well what it's like to be on the other end of that kind of attention).

This means I forgive them much, but still find this third novel the weakest of them. I'm not much of a legal thriller fan to begin with, and here I was being led through the ins and outs of a country and a government very different from my own. I don't mind learning about that, might even find it intriguing, but if I'm to be asked to do so to understand a piece of fiction, I want a bit more story than I got this time around. Or at least a bit more Girl; as I observed on Goodreads about halfway through reading this one, a better title for this last installment of the Milennium trilogy would be The People Who Talked About the Girl Who Did Stuff in Other Novels.

I got sick of Blomkvist, improbable chick magnet-cum-authorial wish-fulfilling stand-in, somewhere in the middle of the second book, to be honest, but here he is again like a bad, if very earnest and hardworking penny, stepping up his game to try to be a match for Salander (he does have some nifty, crafty ideas; he must have finally remembered that class he took in cunning from that fox at Oxford), but still ultimately depending on Salander to get to the bottom of things so he has facts to expose in his magazine. Even though she's in a hospital room recovering from all the gunshots and technically under arrest. But you know, he's the sidekick. It's what they do. And at least he doesn't complain about it, or try to be macho or dominating. He is protective, but in a motherly and behind-the-scenes way. There, putting it that way, I don't mind him as much. He can be Alfred. Why not.

Even so, while I read the first two books in the series at breakneck paces, barely stopping to sleep, this one, well, it's another one I kept putting aside for fun and shiny things, and finally finished out of a sense of duty, and possibly out of enslavement to the good old sunk cost fallacy. I was already in for two books and then some, better hang in there...

I'll still have a look at the film, though, because the other two films (I'm talking about the Swedish ones, here; I still haven't been able to bring myself to look at the American one) were cracking good adaptations of their books, and so I have hopes that the film of this one will be a leaner and livelier look at this story, too.

And Noomi Rapace was born for the role.

And I need to see her playing a smart person again to get the last taste of Prometheus out of my mouth.

*What actual action there is, I mean.

**Well, okay, that's a stretch, especially since there are other, more badass candidates for this theoretical female Robin in the story. What I'm trying to say is, Erika impressed me a little this time.

100 Books #34 - Stieg Larsson's THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

Last year I finally got around to taking up the first book in Stieg Larsson's massively bestselling trilogy (see my write up on that experience here), only to discover that what Larsson had written was not so much crime fiction or noir as exceptionally gritty superhero fiction. This second book in the Millennium trilogy only confirmed me in this opinion.

Sooner or later, superhero stories take us two places: into the hero or heroine's back story and origins, and into a bleak and challenging time in his or her (I shall just go ahead and use the one pronoun from here on out) life when she is misunderstood, suspected of being a bad guy, forced to clear her name. In this book, we experience both, right alongside our heroine, the tiny but stupendously badass Lisbeth Salander, and the people whose lives she has touched, for good or ill.

The Girl Who Played with Fire starts off at with an even slower burn than did The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, misdirecting our attention with an early red herring before launching us into the explosive murder mystery that also forces the authorities, the staff of the magazine that printed some but not all of the bombshell revelations made in the first book, and Salander's friend and former lover, Mikael Blomkvist to dig into Salander's past to help her survive her present, in which she is the prime suspect in a spectacular triple homicide and the whole country is hunting for her. In the process, Larsson expertly plays with the reader's expectations, of the genre, of the setting, and of Salander herself, so her guilt or innocence manages to stay something of a mystery for a good 80% of the book.

And yes, her backstory is completely over the top, as any good superhero's must be. And yes, she gets to be a scary badass again, making up in brains for what she lacks in brawn, even at one point taking down two big bad biker gang members with just a can of Mace and a Taser. But, as she demonstrates, you can get more with a kind word and a can of Mace and a Taser than you can with a kind word alone.

This one strained my credulity a bit more than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did, but not enough to stop me from reading almost the whole thing in one day. Because the burn, while slow at first, gets hot and powerful soon enough.

I think my eyebrows got singed.