Books I Didn't Finish: Needful Things

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I was recently recovering from a bout of covid and found myself unable to do much of anything to pass the time. What I needed, I decided, was a book that would grab me. Something fast-paced and not challenging, something that would go down easy.

What I needed was my favourite author and close personal friend, Stephen King. And none of his bad newer stuff. I wanted vintage King. As luck would have it, at some point I had picked up his 1991 release Needful Things in a Kindle sale, a book that I knew absolutely nothing about. Despite hailing from the middle of King’s golden age, it’s not one that seems to get discussed a lot.

Turns out, there’s a reason for that.

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Old Soul

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A while back I did one of my posts where I callously judge books based solely on their covers and synopses for your entertainment. One of the books I gave a “will check out at some point” thumbs-up to was Susan Barker’s Old Soul, which happened to recently be available cheap in the Kindle daily deal. Let’s check it out.

As described in the above-linked post, this is a story about a mysterious, ageless woman—she goes by many names but her own narration simply calls her ‘the woman’ so I’ll stick with that—who has crossed paths with numerous people stretching back decades. Whenever she pops up she puts someone—typically a friend or loved one of the person recounting the tale—under her sinister influence; that person begins to act in alarming or scary ways before dying, by which point the woman is long gone.

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This Book Will Bury Me

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True crime has become a bit of a hot-button topic lately. The genre (if it can accurately be called that) saw a steady surge in popularity over the course of the 2010s, driven in part by breakout hits like Serial and Making A Murderer, and then exploded over the course of the pandemic, turning into one of the biggest and most lucrative Youtube and podcast scenes around. More recently, the genre has seen a heavy backlash, in part due to people digging into some of those viral hits and revealing them to not be quite as accurate as they claimed, in part due to the more ghoulish side of the community acting in a way that’s disrespectful to family members of victims. It doesn’t help that there’s a not-insignificant overlap between the true crime community and the disturbing serial killer fandom.

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All The Sinners Bleed

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Thrillers and crime novels aren’t a genre I usually have much interest in, but in the last few years I’ve made an exception for the works of SA Cosby after being impressed by Blacktop Wasteland, which seems to be the book that got him attention from readers in general. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to suspect that book might have been a fluke; I didn’t end up reviewing it on the blog, but I found his follow-up Razorblade Tears so lacklustre that I couldn’t finish it. Having now read All The Sinners Bleed, I’m disappointed to report that the problems I had with Razorblade Tears are just as present in this one as well.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Throne of Glass

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I decided to take a look at Sarah J Maas’s Throne of Glass after it came up in a Kindle sale. This, alongside A Court of Thorns and Roses, is Maas’s major contribution to shaping the modern YA landscape and its romantasy off-shoot, so I figured it would behoove me as a blogger to familiarise myself with it. Maybe it’s better than A Court of Thorns and Roses!

No, unfortunately it’s even worse. Let’s go through the opening chapters and figure out why.

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Empire Of The Vampire

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Empire of the Vampire.

Empire…of the Vampire.

It’s not just me, right? That title is really awkward, isn’t it? I think I’m going to call this book Vempire for the rest of this review.

(Note: The first half of this post will be spoiler-free, but the rest will contain major spoilers for Vempire, The Last of Us, and the first season of The Last of Us TV series)

Jay Kristoff is an Australian author and portmanteau enthusiast who has written quite a lot of novels, both adult and YA. Vempire is the first entry in an ongoing adult dark fantasy trilogy. Strangely, the book is illustrated, in a style that looks much more at home in a story aimed at teenagers. No, don’t worry, this isn’t another Secret YA novel. It’s for adults, and it feels like it…except for the illustrations. Kind of odd.

The trilogy’s premise is kind of unique. It’s set in a fairly standard fantasy setting, roughly 18th-century equivalent technology level, with regions that are clearly based on various European and Northern African countries in the real world. So far, so standard. However, rather than presenting us with this setting at a time when the status quo is firmly in place, the story picks up after a cataclysmic event has massively transformed the world.

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Books I Didn't Finish: You Like It Darker

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My roughly once-a-year desire to read a Stephen King book has returned, and luckily he has a new short story collection out just in time. I’ve always thought that King excelled at shorter fiction much more than his gigantic 900-page epics, and the title seemed to promise spooks a-plenty, in contrast to the bulk of King’s recent work, which has been more in the crime and thriller genres. So I went into this not as a hater, but genuinely quite excited to read it.

Turns out, I got my hopes up for nothing. Based on the roughly half of it I could stand to read, You Like It Darker is at best rushed and underbaked, at worst severely phoned in. Let’s see how many Stephen King tropes we can spot while we go through the stories I read! Will there be autobiographical elements, do you think?

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Adventures In Tie-In Fiction: Ciaphas Cain

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I am not, strictly speaking, a fan of Warhammer 40,000. I got into it for a few years when I was a kid, along with every other nerdy boy I knew, but I was always much more interested in assembling and painting the miniatures than actually playing the wargame, and since that’s an expensive hobby to sustain when you’re a child, it didn’t last long.

My dormant interest in the hobby was rekindled by reading Arthur B’s reviews of the extensive tie-in fiction range, which reminded me that the setting is absolutely batshit insane in a way that I remember finding kind of stupid and off-putting as a child, but which I can appreciate now as an adult since I’ve realised that said stupidity is fully intentional, and indeed a big part of the charm for many people. Thus, over the years I have spent an amount of time scrolling the labyrinthine Warhammer 40k wiki that’s frankly embarrassing for someone who doesn’t play the game or collect the models, or even play any of the many, many video game adaptations. But I’ve never actually taken the plunge into the tie-in novels—until today.

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The Poppy War

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RF Kuang’s The Poppy War isn’t exactly on the top tier of fantasy hype, but it’s certainly far from the bottom. With Kuang also winning acclaim and (I assume) strong sales for Babel and Yellowface, that means she’s seeing the kind of cross-genre success that comes very rarely in the publishing industry.

I tried reading Babel a while back and couldn’t get into it. Having now finished The Poppy War, I have to report that I’m currently zero for two on Kuang’s books. What I heard is that it’s a brutal, mature political fantasy about the horrors of war. What I found when I cracked it open for myself was depressingly familiar: an adult fantasy novel with the tone, prose and complexity of a YA novel, and a plot messy enough to make me seriously believe that it might actually have been one until fairly late in its gestation process.

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The Troop

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A few times here, On The Blog, I’ve lamented the state of horror fiction. Horror is one of my favourite genres in movies, TV and games, but I rarely find a horror novel that does it for me. Even amateur internet horror has more hits for me than professionally-published horror fiction.

For a while now I’ve been aware of Nick Cutter’s The Troop, which according to Amazon is “TikTok’s favourite horror novel” so you know it must be good. It’s also got the enthusiastic approval of Stephen King, so again, you know it must be good.

But is it?

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The Three-Body Problem

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So the Game Of Thrones guys, David Benioff and the other one whose name I can’t remember, have a pretty bad reputation after everyone massively over-reacted to the end of the series (fight me). Admittedly, they didn’t help themselves by proposing—and then swiftly un-proposing—a TV show where the American Confederacy continued into the modern day. But mostly, it’s the massive baby tantrum that people threw over Game Of Thrones that did it.

Their big comeback attempt is a Netflix adaptation of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, which is due to release in January. Being on the cutting edge of popular culture as I am, I had to check out the book ahead of the show’s launch to see what all the fuss is about. Here’s what I found.

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Fourth Wing and the YA Vortex

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I have to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this post: this is not a review of Fourth Wing. I haven’t read most of the book, nor am I currently feeling well enough to do so. This is more an explanation of why I bounced off it so quickly and viscerally when I tried to read the sample, but in a way it’s not really about Fourth Wing at all; it’s more about a particular trend I’m noticing in the adult fantasy genre that very much doesn’t agree with me.

After I briefly mentioned the book in my Gizmodo round-up, Rebecca Yarros’ dragon novel seems to be taking off in a big way, showing every sign of becoming A Thing in the publishing world. Given the lightning speed that pop culture moves at today, that means we’ll probably have a movie or streaming series adaptation within a year, and an aborted attempt at a cross-media Dragonverse by Christmas 2025. Naturally, I had to get on this bandwagon early, so I downloaded the sample of Fourth Wing (or to give it its full current Amazon title, Fourth Wing: Discover TikTok's newest fantasy romance obsession with this BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick! aka FW:DTTNFROWTBBCR2BCP!) and hopped on board.

It…well, let me walk you through it.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief

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Recently, or possibly a year ago (my grasp of time isn’t great these days), I saw people on twitter lamenting that they could no longer read Harry Potter due to JK Rowling’s controversial stance in the Gender Wars™. Lots of Twitter commentors were recommending Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series as a replacement, which got me thinking that I’ve never actually read any of those books. By the time they started coming out I had moved on from middle-grade fiction, save for some old favourites, and they were off my radar.

Also, they’re about Greek gods swanning around in modern-day America, and as I mentioned once or twice in my recent book preview post, that’s not my jam.

But now I’m a big cool adult, so I can read whatever I want without feeling self-conscious about it! Plus, there’s an Apple TV+ series coming next year, which means that we might soon be in the midst of full-on Percymania. Can you really afford not to be part of that cultural zeitgeist? I’m performing a public service here, if you think about it.

Anyway, I only got about halfway through it.

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Station Eleven

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Hey everyone, here’s a very quick, spoiler-free post on why I found Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven disappointing. I actually read the whole thing before I decided to review it this time!

For 90% of my time with the book, I actually thought I was going to come away from it feeling quite positive. Then I got to what I guess passes for the climax of the book, and that changed quickly.

The story takes place before and after an apocalyptic flu pandemic (the opening chapters are great if you want to flash back to early 2020 and feel really anxious), with initially-disconnected characters and plot threads that are gradually intertwined, in your typical literary fiction “people’s lives connect across space and time in unexpected and beguiling ways” (85% of all literary fiction is about this). As far as those kinds of stories go it’s pretty well done, especially in the second half when the different threads start coming together.

However, having gone to all the work of setting this up, the pay-off is extremely underwhelming. The climactic action of the story comes really abruptly and is dealt with in the space of a few pages, via means that don’t really have anything to do with the protagonist or any of the plot elements established up to that point–even though (and this is the part that kills me) the scene in question does actually bring in all of those elements, in a way that seems like it’s going to really tightly wrap up all the book’s thematic strands. They’re just not relevant at all to what actually happens.

The impression I get is that Mandel was fed up with the story and wanted to wrap it up even though the story seemed like it had enough fuel to keep going for a lot longer. At the point it goes into the climax, it felt like there was another third of the book still left to go.

Station Eleven got a TV series adaptation recently which, going by the episode descriptions, seems to flesh out the ending much more as well as tying one particular character more tightly into the rest of the plot, so apparently I’m not the only person who noticed these problems.

Books I Didn't Finish: The Atlas Six

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So I was recently strolling through my local bookshop, looking at things to buy on my Kindle for substantially cheaper prices, when I spotted one of those “BookTok made me buy it” shelves, and I got curious—what are the TikToks making the kids buy these days?

Of the options available, Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six seemed the most up my alley. I had vaguely heard that it’s Buzzworthy and Bingeworthy and various other kinds of worthies, so surely it has to be a compelling and well-written tale, right?

Right?

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Books I Didn't Finish: Seveneves

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I’ve never read any of Neal Stephenson’s books before Seveneves, but I’ve been aware of the guy for a long time, always as a titan of sci-fi who writes very intelligent smart-guy books for smart-guy people. Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, Anathem—these and more have a reputation as being big, dense bricks full of science and cryptography and philosophy. Something like a sci-fi Umberto Eco, in other words.

So I was surprised when I cracked open Seveneves, read a few pages and then asked myself “Is the whole thing written like this? Are all of Neal Stephenson’s books written like this?”

I can’t say for certain because I didn’t finish the book, but what I did read was enough to tell me that Neal Staphenson is not the sci-fi version of Umberto Eco. He’s somewhere between Andy Weir and Joss Whedon, a location otherwise known as the Hack Zone. Let’s dip our toes in, shall we?

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Dune vs Dune

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Frank Herbert’s Dune is famous primarily for being the permanent favourite book of the r/books sub-reddit, but it’s also gained a minor reputation as a seminal sci-fi classic.

A few years ago I read it for the first time and didn’t really like it all that much, so when the new movie was announced I didn’t pay much attention. Until, that is, I found out it was being helmed by my boy Denis Villeneuve, director of Enemy, Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. Those last two happen to be among my favourite movies of the last ten years, so I was willing to sit through a story I didn’t much care for if it came with some of that patented Villeneuve visual flair.

In this post I’m going to briefly go over why I didn’t like the book, then review the movie to compare and contrast.

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