Reviews Archive: H through L
Hammett, Dashiell: The Dain Curse
While this novel isn't quite as polished as The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse manages to be a slam-bang ride on the hardboiled roller coaster, as the Continental Op takes on a mysterious cult, morphine addiction, and a family screwed-up enough to be the subject of Greek tragedy. While the plot twists do occasionally seem to hinge on coincidence rather than logic (this is, after all, a fix-up), readers willing to sit back and enjoy the ride should have a great time. Plus, Hammett pays tribute to his weird fiction forebears, namedropping Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany. [4/2007]
Hammett, Dashiell: The Continental Op
Hammett's Continental Op could easily be called the Anti-Sam Spade. Anonymous, overweight, and absolutely loyal to his employer, the Op is one of the finest first-person narrators in all of hardboiled literature, and this collection of short stories bristles with '30s slang, droll humor, and plenty of Bay-Area verisimilitude. [6/2007]
Harrison, M. John: Light
Light is easily one of the darkest books I've ever read, and that's saying something. With a taut narrative split between three protagonists, a near-future serial killer/brilliant physicist (why are SF characters almost never mediocre physicists?), a far-future woman/starship with the impulse control of a spoiled and heavily armed child, and a "twink," a sort of futuristic virtual reality addict, Light moves along at breakneck speed, combining SF sensawunda, bleak noir cruelty, and lush, violent imagery shown through prose that is both shocking and beautiful. Oddly enough, it's also the most accessible M. John Harrison (Viriconium, Things That Never Happen, The Course of the Heart) book I've read yet. Recommended. [2/2007]
Hodgson, William Hope: The Dream of X
A ruthless distillation of Hodgson's classic future romance, The Night Land, which pares the original novel's epic length, some 200,000 words, down to the size of a novella (20,000 words), making it eminently more readable, and losing none of The Night Land's poetry, strangeness, nor charm. [11/2008]
Lake, Jay: Mainspring
The core conceit of Mainspring imagines that the solar system is actually a gigantic orrey, and that the movements of the stars, planets, and the earth itself are all controlled through a sort of deistic clockwork, giving physical form to the ages-old watchmaker analogy of creation. When the mainspring of the earth begins to run down, the archangel Gabriel engages young Hethor Jacques, a teenaged clockmaker's apprentice, to find the "Key Perilous" and rewind creation. As this cunningly-plotted quest plays out over the course of the novel, it is the mechanical universe that continually surfaces as its most beautiful and haunting image, one directing the lives and very spirituality of its inhabitants. Even Christianity is reimagined to fit this mechanical worldview, positing a brass Christ hung on Pilate's clockface, and when Hethor, in fits of fear and stress, traces the sign of the Horofix around his chest, it is easy to see the care, craftsmanship, and pure imagination with which Lake has written his novel. If it weren't for a handful of explicitly sexual scenes (though tastefully handled), this could be a life-altering, mind-expanding YA book. An easy recommendation, for those mature enough to avoid snickering. [7/2007]
Lake, Jay: Rocket Science
Rocket Science has Nazis, G-Men, Commies, and a talking space ship named Pegasus. How could you possibly go wrong with a combination like that? [2/2007]
Leiber, Fritz: The First Book of Lankhmar
Collecting Fritz Leiber's first four Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books (Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against Death, Swords in the Mist, and Swords Against Wizardry), The First Book of Lankhmar contains some of the best swords-and-sorcery tales out there. High points include 1959's "Lean Times in Lankhmar," 1963's "Bazaar of the Bizarre," and 1964's "The Lords of Quarmall." Great stuff! [10/2008]
Leiber, Fritz: The Second Book of Lankhmar
This omnibus, collecting the last three of Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books (The Swords of Lankhmar, Swords and Ice Magic, and The Knight and the Knave of Swords), finds its author approaching, in the time-honored tradition of aging SF authors, full-blown dirty-old-man-mode (at least Heinlein was able to attribute his latter-years satyriasis on a brain tumor). True, Leiber's duo of heroes, unlike, say, those of Tolkien, exhibited active libidos from the start, but here one can chart a sort of crescendo of kink, starting with the relatively chaste, but nudity- and sex-filled nonetheless, The Swords of Lankhmar (1968), but escalating rapidly in the last two books, as Leiber explicitly indulges the Mouser's ephebophilia and sadism ("The Mer She", from The Knight and the Knave of Swords, for example finds the Gray One repeatedly binding an adolescent stowaway to his shipboard bunk), and both heroes develop a Tourrette's-like tendency to drop c-bombs (and other misogynistic interjections) in casual conversation. But even a priapic Leiber could write rings around most authors (indeed, the penis mightier than the sword), and this collection is filled to overflowing with the wild romance, strange adventure, perilous plotting, memorable characters (Kreeshkra, the ghoul-girl from The Swords of Lankhmar, being particularly fun), and clever banter that have been hallmarks of Leiber's Lankhmar tales since 1939's "Two Sought Adventure." But one certainly cannot fault the little darlings for their occasional itch for each other, since their taste is so exactly like my own.
-Mouser [11/2008]
Lumley, Brian: Titus Crow, Volume 1
Fritz Leiber, creator of the best-known pair of adventurers in all of fantasy literature (and no stranger to the Lovecraftean pastiche) was no great fan of Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath, the first of the two novels collected in Titus Crow, Volume 1. This is not just science fiction,
wrote Leiber in an essay published in Fantastic, June 1975 (and reprinted in Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark). It is science fiction of the cosmic-war-of-the-gods sort which Lovecraft most detested.
And while Leiber certainly makes his point, he misses what The Burrowers Beneath actually aspires to be… continue [2/2009]
