I'm Back! Don't Look So Disappointed

Yes, I have returned to walk amongst you, my people. My time away has left me with half of my wardrobe smelling of dogs, the other half smelling like it was used as an ashtray. These circumstances are sadly unrelated. Sadly, because if they were related, it might mean that I had found the mythical Poker Playing Dogs. My journey has also lead me to the conclusion that if I spend next New Year's Eve with Friend Alex, I'm deciding where we spend it. Because this is the third consecutive year the party he's chosen for us to attend has abruptly ended when people reached the critical level of inebriation where they start getting violent, and it's getting tiring, and I've lost all faith in his friends ability to not make asses out of themselves when alcohol is involved. Observing the changes in personality, behavior, mobility, and mental capacity as they got drunker was interesting, though.

But really, other than last night, the trip wasn't bad. I had some good times, and the usual sad feeling I get when I leave, because I know it'll be several months before I see them again, which at least shows I was enjoying myself. But now I'm back for more cash, or I would be if I got paid for this. So I guess I'm back for more love. Talking about books my father got me for Christmas probably isn't the best way to do that, but, as Joaquin Andujar put it 'youneverknow'.

I don't know why I asked for Richard Morgan's Broken Angels. I just picked it off the sci-fi shelves, and I guess the description on the back made it sound good. It wasn't bad, but I'm not sure it was good. It has a somewhat Ghost in the Shell feel, since people can regularly download their consciousness into new bodies, and live for really long periods of time, as is the case with main character Takeshi Kovacs, who used to be some super-secret guy from the Envoys, who are kind of like the Spartans from Halo, or maybe Jean-Paul Valley (Azrael), folks who are taken in, and given a rigorous training program that makes them elite killing machines, whether covertly, or in big, ugly, open battles. Kovacs has gotten involved in a conflict on Sanction IV as a professional soldier, because the pay is good, and he's a valuable enough asset that if his body is badly enough damaged, he's basically guaranteed to get another one.

Early on, Kovacs is approached by another solider with an offer to get in on a chance to make big bucks, with theoretically less chance of dying. It involves a working hyperspace gate, and something that lies on the other side. The gate's a product of "Martian" technology. There's no guarantee they actually originated on Mars, but that's where they were found first, so that's what they were dubbed. They're missing now, but their technology is well in advance of human tech, so all human outer space colonization has been following in the footsteps they've laid out.

I think my opinion of the book suffers because what I was interested in was not what Morgan was interested in writing about. He seems to want to tell us all about how cool Kovacs is, and how interested in him everyone else is, so it seems as though Kovacs answers the same or similar questions repeatedly in the book, just from different people. But I didn't really see anything that particularly intrigued me about the character. He's a soldier that's independent, out for himself first, but shows occasional bouts of concern for others, so kind of a Deadshot-type. I was more interested in the Martians, what happened to them, how they lived, what happened to them, all that. He says they were descended from the equivalent of a bird of prey, that intrigues me, I want to know more, but that's not really the point, I suppose. Even when some of that starts to get dealt with, it gets derailed to show off Kovacs' skills at killing lots and lots of people. I think if that's of more interest to you, you'll enjoy it more than I did. One warning: All the characters tend to. Talk like. This. At times. Breaking up sentences. Into smaller. Separate sentences. For no discernible reason. It gets annoying, because it doesn't feel like they're pausing for dramatic tension, more like they keep losing their train of thought. Which I guess could be the case at certain points (radiation poisoning comes into play eventually).

Book 2, Brother Odd, by Dean Koontz. I discussed my feelings about Koontz' work before, though I didn't have the problems with this book I've had with others, so maybe I'm getting used to his style. This appears to be a story with a recurring character in Koontz' work, called Odd Thomas, and he sees ghosts. And usually tries to help them find peace. But he's suffered heartbreak and retreated to a small abbey in the mountains to recover. But he sees a sign that something bad is about to happen, and has to figure out what and how to stop it. For help, he has the various monks and nuns that live there, a dog named Boo, and the ghost of Elvis Presley.

Don't look at me like that, Koontz is the one that wrote it. It does cause me to wonder if Elvis has sought out others that can see ghosts prior to Odd, but it wasn't addressed in this book. The cause of the trouble is very reminiscent of a particular old sci-fi movie, which Koontz is smart enough to mention in the book itself. Personally, the part of the book I enjoyed most was Odd's interactions with the other guest at the the church, a Rodion Romanovich. There's this constant game of Odd testing Rodion to see if he is who he says, and Rodion make various clever and amusing remarks in response to Odd's attempts at entrapment. The one thing I wasn't so pleased with was some of the inner monologue, if you can call it that. I think this works as an example, from page 7, as Odd tracks an evil spirit creature he called a bodach through the night:

'Here depicted, a solemn St. Bartholomew stands with his right hand over his heart, left arm extended. In his upturned palm is what appears to be a pumpkin but might be a related variety of squash.

The symbolic meaning of the squash eludes me.'

There is just something about the last line that feels off, especially since things of that sort crop up often. I just can't tell who's trying too hard to be clever, Koontz or Odd. This is apparently a manuscript that Odd is working on, and he's been getting advice on writing from a friend from his earlier adventures, so maybe it's meant to represent Odd's particular writing tics? I'm not sure, but it tends to shake me out of the mood of a given scene.

That aside, I probably enjoyed this more than Broken Angels, for what that's worth. It certainly felt less meandering, and more focused on a particular primary plotline, while Broken Angels seemed to shift focus from one to another, sometimes too frequently to keep things coherent.

For the record, I'm planning to pick up last week's books tomorrow, review them, then I've got some movies to discuss Thursday, new comics for this week on Friday, and then a two-week ABP post on Saturday. Oh, and the Year in Review posts will be forthcoming soon. Just need to sit down and review the titles I actually bought this year.