Thomas E. Sniegoski
Mean Streets (2009)
Jim Butcher, Simon R. Green, Kat Richardson, Thomas E. Sniegoski
OK. I admit it. I’m an Amazon junkie. I often search for my favorite artists and look at coming releases to see if anyone I love has something new coming out. Which is how I stumbled upon Mean Streets. I believe it is possible I looked at the authors involved an actually squealed. But can you blame me? Kat Richardson, Simon R. Green, and Jim Butcher. All in one book? Have I died and gone to supernatural fantasy reader heaven?
And what makes pre-ordering even better, is that I get the joy of ordering the book, and then some point months later the book magically appears on my doorstep after I’ve forgotten about it.
How could you ask for anything more?
The first novella is “The Warrior” by Jim Butcher. Harry is worried that there is a threat to Michael, but in trying to Michael and his family, may only have put them in greater danger.
First, I’m delighted to see Michael again. Now that he no longer carries Amoracchius, there’s not a lot Michael can do to help Harry (or get him into trouble, and I’m not sure that a story where Harry and Michael go out to lunch would be very compelling. So I was glad to have Michael back for another story.
And to make it better, it was a good story. Michael gets to be all calm and accepting about his own fate, while Harry still doesn’t quite believe in the world as Michael sees it. But what I liked best was to see Harry working as a team with Michael and Molly.
I think both “The Warrior” and Jim Butcher’s last novella “Backup” are excellent additions to the the Dresden series, and I have to admit I think I almost prefer Jim Butcher in the shorter tighter format of a novella. We’ll test that when the next Dresden book comes out in paperback.
The second story was Simon R. Green’s “The Difference a Day Makes,” which starred the ever appalling John Taylor.
A woman wanders into Strangefellows looking for John Taylor. She’s lost in Nightside, with no memory of how she got there, what she’s doing there, and what she had done for the past 24 hours.
As this is Nightside, the answer is of course “nothing good.”
This time John is assisted by Dead Boy, and Dead Boy’s wonderful car of the future. After all this time, it’s hard to believe that Dead Boy is still held together. It’s got to be more than staples, tape, and wood putty holding him together at this point.
What continues to astound me about Nightside is that after all this time and all these books, he can still come up with things that make me squirm. John keeps telling Liza how terrible things are going to get, and as a reader I’m all, “Yeah, we’ve heard that before. What could be worse than the Lamentations?” Well, worse not necessarily. But he still comes up with some really horrific things.
I’m very glad I don’t live in his imagination.
Kat Richardson’s story “The Third Death of the Little Clay Dog” was third, and one I was very much looking forward to. I am really enjoying her Greywalker series and am waiting impatiently for the third Harper Blaine book to come out in paperback, so this was a lovely treat.
Harper is given a case that seemingly requires only that she take a clay artifact back to Mexico and lay it on a specific grave on the Day of the Dead. But with Harper’s talents, we know–as does she–that nothing is that easy.
Although I enjoyed the third story, I found the story somewhat confusing in the middle. We were given a bunch of information and not much in the way of an explanation. Although the explanation did come later, there were multiple passages I had to re-read so I could figure out what was going on.
This didn’t detract too much from my enjoyment of the story, but it made this for me a weaker story than it could have been. However, I really liked the resolution of the story, so things evened out in the end.
Also, I love how stories in an anthology can have longer more complex titles. I mean, “The Third Death of the Little Clay Dog” is really an awesome title that would work far less well as a book title.
The final story was Thomas E. Sniegoski’s story “Noah’s Orphans.” I have to admit that after finishing “The Third Death of the Little Clay Dog” I put the anthology down. I mean, I’d never even heard of Thomas Sniegoski, and here he is closing of an anthology of some of my favorite authors.
But despite myself I glanced at the first couple sentences. “OK,” I thought. “I’ll read a page or two. But I know nothing about this Remy character, and it looks like he’s got previous stories, so this doesn’t bode well…”
Next thing I know I’m finishing the story.
Remy Chandler–angel and private detective–is grieving over the death of his wife. He finds himself not just dreaming he sees his wife, but finds himself drawn into a case against his will, to find who has murdered Noah.
Yes, that’s Noah of the Ark.
The story was complex, yet not confusing, despite the fact I was meeting these characters for the first time. But I have this feeling as if I’ve read about Remy in another anthology, but can for the life of me figure out what anthology that was.
So this was an excellent anthology, and I believe it would be a good introduction to any of these authors or characters.
Rating: 9/10
A Kiss Before the Apocalypse (2008)
I first came across Remy Chandler when I read the anthology Mean Streets. Thomas Sniegoski wrote the closing story, and I ended up reading that story in a single sitting.
Remy Chandler is a private detective. And an angel. Except that he’s been on extended leave from being part of the heavenly choir and instead has been hanging around earth for millenia. He’s also married, although that marriage is coming to an end, for his wife has aged while he has remained ageless, so when he visits her in the nursing home, all assume she is his mother. He’s trying to deal with this impending loss when some of his brethren show up in his office asking him to the angel of Death, who seems to have disappeared.
I’m of two minds about this book. I very much like a good deal of what he’s done–I really like the fact that we’re seeing an immortal deal with the end of love rather than the start. That’s a fascinating perspective and one I thought was done extremely well. I also liked the characters, and the fact that Marlowe was a main character. I’m not sure that I think Marlowe could handle such complex thoughts as he sometimes managed, but I thought overall he did a pretty good job with it.
However. Having read the novella that follows this book, about halfway through the story I started to wish the story was moving faster, since I knew the basics of what as going to happen.
Was I overtired? Yes. Did this affect my opinion. Possibly. It’s hard to say. Usually I’m pretty good with just putting a book down and picking it up the next day. But not last night.
How does this affect my overall opinion of the book?
As I said, there are parts of the book that were very well done. I think the mystery was probably the weakest part of the story, and that may be why I was tired towards the end of the book, as the first half of the book was world building and getting to know Remy and Madeline and everyone else. And that part of the book was very very good.
And the novella that followed this was also very good (after all, it enticed me to go back and pick up the first book). So I’ve ordered the following book when it comes out in paperback, so we’ll just have to wait until then.
Rating: 6/10
Dancing on the Head of a Pin (2009)
Remy Chandler may have averted the apocalypse, but things aren’t looking any better for him this time around. He’s been hired to recover some missing weapons–weapons that are most certainly more than they first appear.
The second Remy Chandler novel actually follows the short story in Mean Streets. When I read the first book, A Kiss Before the Apocolypse, one thing I noted was that I started hurrying through the second half of the book, but thought it might have been because I’d read the novella in Mean Streets first, and so had a good idea what was going to happen.
Unfortunately, I found the same thing with this book. Part of it was possible the continual flashbacks to Remy’s life with Madeline. I get what the author was trying to do with the flashbacks, but to me they felt like speed bumps in what was otherwise a fast-paced story.
Additionally, some parts of the mystery seemed almost blindingly obvious. Relatively early in the story I thought, “well, that’s where the weapons are,” then thought, “no, that’s just entirely too blatant,” yet that was it precisely.
Not that parts of the story were not a surprise–they were. But even that was a bit of a problem. I kept being reminded of other books and tales (Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Simon R. Green’s Nightside kept coming to mind, as did Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels [Interestingly, all those are British authors. Do the Brits have a better idea of Hell than Americans?]) and kept finding this story falling flat in comparison.
One other thing. Upon inspection, this is a really terrible cover. Every time I looked at the cover, I kept thinking Ben Browder was about to be attacked by mini-glowy-eyed hyenas and extra tall, extra skinny jawas. I know that a cover shouldn’t make or break a story, but I really hate bad fantasy covers. With covers like that, small wonder no one wants to take the category seriously.
So although this story does have much to recommend it, it is most definitely not my cup of tea, and in comparison to other books set in Hell or that deal with Lucifer, this was unfortunately a letdown.
And now I want to watch “Farscape.”
Rating: 6/10
Remy Chandler: Mean Streets (2009), A Kiss Before the Apocalypse (2008), Dancing on the Head of a Pin (2009)
