forever we try

For the most part I've spent this month flitting from book to book, starting a bunch and finishing a few; I also can't clear out the brainspace for posting separate reviews. Partly I think this is just a general lack of energy problem--our summer program just started at work and even though class numbers are way down there's still the fact that our boss, in her infinite wisdom, decided that the only break summer staff needed after an entire school year was one long weekend--but I also tend to lose focus for reading when I'm writing a lot or watching a lot, so things do balance out eventually. 

Eventually. 

Over the Juneteenth weekend I finished two books--Eight Days of Luke by Diana Wynne Jones and the third Mary Russel mystery, A Letter of Mary. Luke has been on my backburner TBR for a while, and I polished it off in just a couple of days; it has a little bit of everything that makes Diana Wynne Jones books catnip for me: a put-upon and lowkey incredibly sarcastic main character, terrible relatives, a terrible relatives who turns out to have a surprisingly not-terrible side to them, magic interacting with the everyday world in wacky but mostly uncommented on ways, and a funny but clear-eyed view of human nature.

A Letter of Mary continues the series trend of being mostly character-focused, with an incredibly immersive setting and voice. The resolution to the mystery is unsatisfying in a way I can't quite put my finger on, though it possibly has to do with certain hints about the murder's motivations being dropped out and then never fully explored, or at least not explored in the kind of detail I was hoping for. But there is a very good red herring, and again, I really don't come to these books for the mysteries. 

Right now, I'm about halfway through The Last Place You Look by Kristen Lepionka, a hardboiled private eye mystery with a narrator (Roxane Weary) who has a little bit of Jessica Jones and a hint of Cass Neary to her; she's a hard-drinking mess not getting over the death of her police officer father, trying to track down a missing woman whom she doesn't believe is actually alive and stumbling on a possible serial killer case along the way. This one has a great voice and flow to it, and I'll probably be finishing it next. 

Next...who knows? I've got a decent backlog of books to finish, but I may keep ignoring those and start something completely different. Or not. I would really, really like to get back into The Institute, my current Big Fat Stephen King Book. 

A historical murder mystery bringing together a serial killer, an amusement park, Chicago's silent film industry, a crossdressing teenage girl, and a fictionalized version of the outsider artist Henry Darger.

It's 1915; Pin's mother works as a fortune teller in the Riverview Amusement Park. Pin, who disguises herself as a boy for protection, earns spare change delivering drugs for Max, another sideshow performer. One hot summer day, she watches a man and a little girl with a yellow dress enter the Hell Gate ride. The man comes out, but the girl doesn't. 

Curious Toys is gritty and disturbingly nasty in parts--it's told in multiple POVs, so in addition to Pin, Henry, an amusement park police officer, a screenwriter for Essanay Studios, and Charlie Chaplin (!), we get chapters from the murderer's perspective. Jury's out on whether the murderer or the Chaplin chapters were harder to read. Still, Pin is very much the main character, and her relationship with Henry becomes the emotional center of the book. 

If you don't know anything about Henry Darger (before opening this book, I didn't), I do think Curious Toys is a good place to start, since Elizabeth Hand clearly loves to research and is very good about weaving that research in organically. Darger worked most of his life as a janitor in a Catholic hospital, writing a multipage fantasy epic and creating weirdly beautiful but often disturbing artwork featuring young girls. He was obsessed with helping abused children and had ideas about forming a "Child Protective Service," which is how he and Pin cross paths in the book. 

Like the Cass Neary series, one of the things that makes Curious Toys so enjoyable is that it's all about art and the people who make art--Henry, the silent film actors, actresses, and screenwriters Pin comes across, the sideshow performers at the park, and eventually Pin herself. There's plenty about the dark corners of the industry, but Curious Toys is also about innovation and wonder. For one person, art might be an excuse to destroy people, but for another, it might be a way to save them. 

It's been almost exactly two years, which for me can be pretty much summed up with 1.) Pandemic; 2.) I graduated; 3.) I got a job! It was terrible!; 3.) I quit and got another job! It's less terrible!; and 4.) I drifted out of DW and fandom in general for what--to me--feels like a very long time. I've missed it. 

I still don't feel like I have the bandwidth to write fic or get as involved in fandoms as I used to be, but I'm hoping to at least get back to tracking my reading, hopefully in a way that's a bit more organized and substantial. But for the sake of getting the ball rolling again, here are a few quick and dirty highlights from the past month or so:

Billy Summers by Stephen King
I don't think this is one of King's best books, but it is one of his very, very good books. Billy Summers is a one last job story and a hitman with a heart of gold story, but primarily it's a story about the power of stories and storytelling, the goodness of ordinary people, and the intensely loyal relationships that spring out of chance meetings and a powerful, unmet need for love and connection. So, very standard Stephen King (including some wonky stuff at the end--he tries to turn the book's central relationship romantic for, as far as I can tell, no good reason whatsoever), but it mostly works well, and I adored it. 

The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King
Reread. A Sherlock Holmes continuation/retelling/self-insert fanfic with some MAJOR flaws, also incredibly immersive and very moving. It's in the 'Watson is an idiot' school of retellings, though if I'm remembering correctly that gets better in later books. Or maybe Watson quits showing up in later books. Anyway, this is an old favorite, even if certain parts of it are painful to reread. I'll probably continue with the rest of the series. 

The Cass Neary series 1-3 by Elizabeth Hand
My current obsession. Most of the characters whom I tend to think of as antiheroes are actually just heroes with an iffy past or an attitude problem. At least compared to Cass Neary. Cass is a genuine antihero. 

She's a photographer who published one book of photos, Dead Girls, in her early twenties before being raped and never really getting over that trauma; at the start of the series she hasn't shot a photo in years and is prone to terrible relationships and random acts of spite, like swiping a stranger's car keys (not because she needs a car--she just hides the keys in a dead, dried-out sea urchin). Cass get tangled up in murder mysteries because she's pathologically self-destructive and can't stay away from people who are damaged in the same ways that she is.

But she's also a sharp observer with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of photography and music and film, self-awareness, a sense of humor ("Looks like Sauron's fallen on hard times."), and a good eye. Cass is passionate about photography and photographers, about art and the people who create art. It's almost her only redeeming quality and definitely the one that keeps her head a bearable place to be in. 

Of the first three books (Generation Loss, Available Dark, Hard Light), Available Dark might be my favorite; it's set in an especially dreary Iceland, features black metal and a couple of folk-horror-tinged ritual murders, and ends with another ritual that's both extremely disturbing and weirdly, transcendently beautiful. But the whole series is addictive. I'm a little more than halfway through the fourth and so far last, The Book of Lamps and Banners, and bracing for withdrawal.  

(In my head, the True-Detective-style credits sequence for the prestige TV adaptation these books deserve is set to "White Foxes" by Susanne Sundfør.)