2025 read #19: A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

432 pages

Published 2021

Read from December 24, 2024 to February 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

My partner R picked this book out for me for our annual Jólabókaflóðið exchange. I happily read the first 50 or so pages that day, then just kind of… wandered off to read other things. After that, I got weirdly avoidant about it. I didn’t pick it up again until February 13.

In 1912 Cairo, where magic proliferates on the streets and clockwork trams crisscross the sky, Fatma is a suave, well-dressed agent for the ministry tasked with the supernatural. She gets pulled into a case of murder that has roots in the origins of magic in the mortal sphere, a case that threatens global catastrophe.

Mysteries will never be my chosen genre. As paperback blurbs used to say, though, Djinn is compulsively readable. The setting is top-notch, living and breathing with vibrant detail. Clark expertly weaves examinations of wealth inequality, colonialism, injustice, and bigotry into his narrative. This is a book with something to say, inextricable from the story being told.

Also included in this volume is a long novelette: “A Dead Djinn in Cairo,” originally published in 2016. I kind of wish I’d read it first, as it comes before A Master of Djinn; much of the plot gets spoiled in the novel, as Fatma thinks back on the prior case. Still, it’s quite well done, balancing character and worldbuilding with its mystery plot.

2023 read #136: The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale.

The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale

275 pages

Published 2016

Read from November 21 to November 24

Rating: 3 out of 5

Yet another book I learned about thanks to the Prehistoric Pulps blog. This one is a trio of novellas connected only by their setting: a weird western world of witchcraft, where alchemical tampering has opened rifts and allowed Cretaceous dinosaurs — and sea levels — to pour out all over the planet.

The Long Past is a fine small press outing, one of the better works of dinosaur fiction I’ve come across. Unfortunately, it hails from what I've dubbed the Wake of Vultures era: when we well-meaning white progressives appointed ourselves the voice for the disenfranchised global majority in the fight against racism. White progressives absolutely must address racism in our fiction. But volunteering to tell a more marginalized group’s experiences with racism has so many ways it could go wrong: lack of nuance, unconsciously utilizing stereotypes, white saviorism, crowding out titles from writers of color. It isn’t up to me to say whether Hale avoided these pitfalls.

The titular novella is the tale of Grover, a trapper in coastal Colorado, who gets drawn into a magical conflict with global stakes when Lawrence, his former friend and lover who happens to be an elemental mage, reappears. At almost 150 pages, one could argue that “The Long Past” is actually a short novel. My favorite bits were Hale’s descriptions of how the Cretaceous ecology has interwoven with the West: stray Tenontosaurus graze in buffalo herds, Quetzalcoatlus hunts mountain goats, magnolia infiltrates groves of aspen. Hale makes an effort (not fully consistent, but appreciated nonetheless) to make her prehistoric fauna identifiable without employing names scientists invented after 1864. Grover, for example, rides a big “ridingbird” he raised from a chick. It’s a nice, plausible folk name for an ornithomimid (though the rationale gets fuzzy when Lawrence marvels that no one else had thought to tame and ride one before).

“The Long Past” also benefits from having a sweeter, more erotic, and more believable relationship at its heart than, say, “The Virgin and the Dinosaur” did.

The much shorter middle novella, “The Hollow History of Professor Perfectus,” moves the scene almost thirty years later, after free magic has been banned throughout most of the United States. The magic necessary for modern living is conducted by captive mages held in electric collars. Our narrator Ashni is an underground mage who makes her living in Chicago with a fake magic show, which she performs via an automaton dubbed Professor Perfectus. If you think that all sounds a long way away from dinosaurs, you’d be correct. “History” is all about misogyny, magic lobotomies, steampunk police drones, and the horrors concocted by the American white supremacist Christian patriarchy in every timeline. The story also touches on how white feminists mostly want to look after themselves, and make unreliable allies at best to women of the global majority.

Worthy material and a solid story, shocking and memorable on its own, but perhaps not the clearest follow-up to “The Long Past.” Lack of dinosaurs aside, though, “History” might be the strongest story in this collection.

We wrap things up with “Get Lucky,” which features more dinosaurs than “History,” but not by much. Our hero faces more danger from a jellyfish than from any dino. “Lucky” is a serviceable yarn about a young man (named Lucky) who happens to rescue the man who’d once promised to run away with him before disappearing three years before. A borax fortune is involved. The two of them must escape the clutches of the patrician Swaim brothers along the shores of Illinois’ Inland Sea.

After the previous stories, it was something of a shock that Hale made one of her “Lucky” protagonists a Pinkerton agent. A heroic Pinkerton agent, no less. That wasn’t very social justice-y of her; it cooled a lot of my enthusiasm for the story.

2023 read #107: The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark.

The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

111 pages

Published 2018

Read from September 27 to September 28

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

It is 1884 in New Orleans, a free and nonaligned city in a land still divided between Union and Confederate. Creeper is a teenage street kid blessed by Oya, goddess of storms, life, and rebirth. She overhears CSA officers plotting to obtain a supernatural weapon that helped free Haiti: the Black God’s Drums, also called Shango’s Thunder. No one in their right mind wants that kind of power in the Rebs’ hands, but Creeper also wants to get something back from exchanging the information. Enter the captain of the airship Midnight Robber. The trade Creeper asks of her: letting Creeper join her crew.

Another solid outing from Clark, who has unmatched skill at spinning vivid, immersive alternate histories. This one mingles airships and divine magic with dangerous repercussions. Echoes of Haiti's use of Shango's Thunder linger as tempêtes noires, which "turn the skies into night for a whole week." The mix is unique and engrossing, as always brought to life by Clark's quick prose.

2023 read #104: The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark

131 pages

Published 2019

Read September 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

It is 1912 in Cairo. The release of djinn and other spirits, and the harnessing of magic, has made Egypt a world power. Cairo is a vast, modern metropolis, populated with diverse people and “boilerplate eunuchs,” crisscrossed by djinn-made aerial trams. Agent Hamed of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities is accustomed to working alone, but has been assigned a rookie partner, Agent Onsi. They’ve been given a particularly difficult case: the haunting, or possession, of Tram Car 015. Meanwhile, the women of Egypt campaign for the vote, and some machine-people are discovering their own identities.

This is another outstanding, atmospheric outing from the author of Ring Shout. Clark finds new life and fresh energy in his steampunkish world. Haunting itself is brilliantly constructed, laying out the characters, the setting, the situation, and its complications with exemplary and efficient pacing. While many books this length (long novella? short novel?) feel compressed or hurried, Haunting has the rare distinction of feeling like it’s exactly the length it should be. No wasted paragraphs, but also nothing squeezed to fit. The different plot threads all pull together in the end. Wonderful!

2023 read #80: Pimp My Airship by Maurice Broaddus.

Pimp My Airship by Maurice Broaddus

314 pages

Published 2019

Read from July 13 to July 30

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

This book was unlucky enough to fall into one of my occasional ADHD reading slumps. The prose is solid enough; the worldbuilding is fascinating; I enjoyed the characters; I loved the social commentary that underpins everything in the book. And of course I have to love a book so riddled with classic funk references. But I just couldn’t focus and read it for more than a couple pages at a time. That’s summer when you have a kid to look after, I suppose. (Let alone the summer when the global climate undergoes an obvious and perilous phase-shift and we face all the dread of an uncertain new era coupled with a redoubled rise of fascism.)

In a steam-powered Indianapolis still subject to the crown of Albion, Broaddus builds a grim and altogether too close-to-home satire of a right-wing corporate authoritarian state. Residents (especially Black folk) are brutalized by City Ordained Pinkertons while state-approved news media regurgitate fascist talking points praising privatization and the free market solving governmental inefficiencies. The entire system (little different than our own, in case you missed the allegory) functions to strip Black people of their status as people and ship them off as free labor for capitalists.

Poet Sleepy is in the wrong place at the wrong time and must go on the run with his new acquaintance (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah. Meanwhile, young heiress and disgraced scientist Sophine must navigate upper-crust politics, ubiquitous sexism, racism, and personal tragedy while unraveling a mystery with far-reaching ramifications. As is often the case with alternating perspectives, this structure gums up the pacing, shunting us off to a different storyline just when the other is accelerating. One chapter might end on a cliffhanger, and then the next will breeze through several weeks of perspective from the other character.

Pacing, I think, is the main thing that detracts from this book. I can’t tell if all the novellas and short fiction I’ve been reading have made me forget how longer books are paced, or if it’s something intrinsic to this particular novel. Either way, I greatly enjoyed reading it, overall!

2015 read #64: Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan.

Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan
380 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 18 to November 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5

The first volume of Duncan's Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series, The Bullet Catcher's Daughter, was sustained by its zippy prose, which flung from one incident to the next with enjoyable velocity, if nothing else. Unseemly Science, the second installment, unfortunately lacks that same sense of propulsion. The titular mystery doesn't become evident until halfway through the book -- the first half, instead, is taken up with incidents of disguise, pursuit, and incarceration that serve as a muddled postscript to the events of the first book, without adding anything particularly new to the overarching plot (which promises nothing short of global revolution and the smashing of class hierarchies), nor even any beats that weren't already hit in Daughter (which saw our heroine similarly disguised, pursued, and jailed). When the "unseemly science" finally makes itself visible, our investigators fail to notice clues that, for the reader, may as well have neon arrows pointing at them -- never a good state of affairs in what is ostensibly a novel of mystery and investigation. The climax lands with a thud, Duncan's former skill at maintaining momentum getting gummed up with a succession of sadistic heavies and mad scientists who struggle to maintain one dimension to their characterizations, let alone two, and action sequences that stumble and clunk rather than swerve and stab. As a whole, Science is mediocre and forgettable rather than outright bad, I suppose, but given that I've been waiting about four months to get my hands on a copy, that's more than enough to leave me disappointed.

2015 read #33: The Bullet Catcher's Daughter by Rod Duncan.

The Bullet Catcher's Daughter by Rod Duncan
374 pages
Published 2014
Read from July 8 to July 13
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The outline of this novel sounds more like a gumbo of cliches and fads somewhat past their expiration date: A steampunk alternate history in which technology is regulated by a sinister Patent Office, and traveling "gypsy" circuses cobble together arcane devices to relieve "jossers" of their money. A daughter of one of these performers, on the run from a lascivious nobleman, earns a living as a private detective, disguising herself as a man when the lights are dim, following the clues of an aristocrat's disappearance into the very world of traveling performers she had had to flee. Soon she discovers that the aristocrat absconded with contraband technology, and soon the Patent Office -- as well as the lascivious nobleman and a traveling circus jealous of its secrets -- are after her. It's like you asked someone to come up with the most contrived and steampunk-y of steampunk plotlines and turned it into an actual book. The only thing is missing is some half-baked appearance from Ancient Horrors.

And yet, for its first two-thirds or so, The Bullet Catcher's Daughter elevates itself above the triteness of its outline, thanks largely to Duncan's zippy prose and his appealing narrator. Only in the last third of the book does the momentum break down, impeded by a change of scenery less interesting than Duncan perhaps supposed, weighed down by the appearance of new central characters that have little life except as plot contrivances. The twists at the end carry no emotional weight because of how little effort went into these characters. We're told the missing aristocrat was motivated by love and a desire to smash the class hierarchy, motivations the glossary implies are carried forward in ensuing volumes by our narrator, but we aren't shown this -- the mere telling of it feels like the last gasp of a storyline that ran out of steam (har har) a hundred pages before.

Perhaps the ensuing volumes will better serve the promise of Elizabeth Barnabus as a character, though I'm not sure what surprises the setting itself might be able to offer, given how generic its setup has been thus far.

2014 read #113: Queen Victoria's Book of Spells, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling
350 pages
Published 2013
Read from November 27 to November 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

An anthology of original stories recruited from contemporary top names in the subgenre -- I haven't read this sort of thing since After the King, almost two years ago. I haven't read a Datlow and Windling anthology since 1988's Year's Best Fantasy, just about one year ago. Both books were disappointing. But I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. The theme has promise: gaslamp fantasy is a catch-all term for fantasy derived from the 19th century and all things British-y, a classification that includes but isn't necessarily defined by steampunk. If even a third of these stories have the charm and verve of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, we're in for good times. Though given the inconsistent quality of stories delivered to themed anthologies, and Datlow and Windling's questionable tastes way back in the '80s, we'll just have to see. The names I recognize on the contents page rarely disappoint, at least so far, so that's something.

"Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" by Delia Sherman. Which came first: The name of this story or the title of the anthology? This entry almost reads as if Sherman were tasked with constructing a story around the title. Which is not to say it's bad or even unenthusiastic. The story is brisk and competent. But it's a bit on the simple side, following a very basic stock story format: Magical grad student unlocks the spells concealing secret passages in the young Queen Victoria's titular commonplace book, while grumbling about the parallels in his own life, viz. a tyrannical doctoral advisor and a struggle for self-determination. His crisis of conscience provoked by Victoria's secret and shady past helps him resolve the academic conflict entangling him, and gets him a date with the unexpectedly sweet and perceptive magical archivist to boot. It's unsurprising stuff that just about any fantasy author could write in their sleep. But still, it has charm.

"The Fairy Enterprise" by Jeffrey Ford. Interesting but half-cooked satire on Victorian industrialism. There are a couple images and incidents that tantalize with possibility, but the bulk of the narrative feels hastily assembled, scribbled down without the delicate magic I expect from Ford (and far more potty humor than I associate with him, including the immortal line "I shat a populace"). This, I fear, may be the risk of original anthologies -- everything is written to order and hurried to meet deadlines, rather than cultivated organically.

"From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvellous, Scheduled for Premiere at the Great Exhibition (Before the Fire)" by Genevieve Valentine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title, this is an epistolary story, heavy on catalog entries and scholarly notes, light on personal letters or affect. If there had been a strong tradition of faery fantasy in the 1950s or early '60s, I could well imagine this sort of story appearing then -- it has that same businesslike tone, recording the "facts" of the case from various snippets but not fleshing out story and character per se. It's okay, I guess, so far as it goes, but it's a disappointing use of a terrific title.

"The Memory Book" by Maureen McHugh. Another middling effort, dusting off the usual set dressings -- a governess, a tawdry family, fashion as a competition for status, a vacation at the seaside -- to sketch a tale of sympathetic magic. Nothing special, and in fact its denouement is a bit too similar to "Queen Victoria's Book of Spells" -- it felt like an inferior repeat.

"La Reine d'Enfer" by Kathe Koja. The first story in this collection with a bang-up opening and a distinctive, urgent narrative voice, and the first excellent story overall. Easily the best story so far, a superb and sensual joining of style, incident, and character, giddy with vengeance.

"For the Briar Rose" by Elizabeth Wein. Another which-came-first problem: Did I have trouble getting into this story because the narrative doesn't flow well, or did I feel the narrative didn't flow well because I couldn't get into the story? A fictionalized snoozer on the life of Margaret Burne-Jones (daughter of the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who did a famous series of paintings on the subject of Briar Rose), which inevitably (and artlessly, I thought) mingles in a touch of Briar Rose folklore before concluding that childbirth can suddenly make everything in life clear and that motherhood is "a great act of creation" equal to poetry or art. The message is a bit too breeder-chic for my tastes, but my real issue with the story is how boring and unremarkable it is.

"The Governess" by Elizabeth Bear. In execution this is a workmanlike and too-predictable gothic piece of domestic and sexual tyranny, but the thematic linkage between the captivity of a selkie and the complex social traps of gender and class subjugation is inspired. I always appreciate a story that employs its genre conceit to illustrate a social injustice.

"Smithfield" by James P. Blaylock. This story is almost the reverse of "The Governess," in that it's an atmospheric and boldly-penned piece built around a corny premise: a young Arthur Conan Doyle taking photographs in Smithfield at the end of the gaslight era and discovering supernatural orbs caught on his plates (which, of course, vanish as soon as the electric lamps get switched on). It's been a while since I read anything by Doyle (aside from The White Company, which is in an archaic style and doesn't count), but I've read more books by him than by anyone else (except Stephen King, who also doesn't count). I don't think Blaylock quite catches Doyle's cadence. I appreciate that he made the effort, though -- it's only the second story in this collection that tries to do anything interesting with the narrative voice. I also appreciate the Ackroydian image of Doyle's plates "developing" into consecutive layers of Smithfield, accumulating backward through the ages until they become completely blackened and impenetrable. It's too bad the story itself is nothing much.

"The Unwanted Women of Surrey" by Kaaron Warren. Not a bad story, but one suffused with 1980s-style nihilism, in which a group of "hysterics" maintained in a home for the convenience of their husbands and families become the agents of a cholera plague, believing their actions will please the Grey Women and reward the "hysterics" with free will. It reads at times like earnest, Russ-esque venom and vengeance fantasy, but the ending -- in which the Grey Women greedily slurp up the blackened, shriveled soul of the plague-spreading ringleader, and all the other women utter a collective "Oopsie" -- complicates any allegorical reading. I should note that it isn't a great story, either.

"Charged" by Leanna Renee Hieber. This brief character study has enthusiasm but clatters along in amateurish prose: "My gift urged me to live by reinvented terms" has a certain lack of polish more consonant with the unpaying underbelly of online publication, and this sort of "arrogant antihero grasps at what he believes is rightfully his" boilerplate is a yawn.

"Mr. Splitfoot" by Dale Bailey. A solid entry, nicely chilling horror playing with the "reality" behind the sham of the Fox sisters. This sort of horror has a limited palette, but Bailey employs it to good effect. Though the "stinger" at the end (the devil was loosed upon the world just in time for the 20th century!) is eye-rollingly unoriginal.

"Phosphorus" by Veronica Schanoes. This is exactly the sort of story I want to write: A remorseless look at working conditions during the height of capital's power -- when workers were replaceable parts and could be worked to death without a second thought, poisoned into walking corpses, all the more gruesome because it's based on historical fact -- and the early, all-too-often forgotten working heroes who began the struggle against it. That said, something about this particular story leaves me cold. Much of the blame is on the second person narration, which sacrifices character and depth in favor of a false sense of immediacy. Then there's the plotline hinging on the magical Irish grandmother, a cheap and easy storytelling device that leaves me unsatisfied. The subject matter here is worth digging into (and it enriched me with the knowledge of phossy jaw as well as the London matchgirls strike itself -- who says fantasy can't be didactic?), but Schanoes' execution is only average. Schanoes' afterword (each of the stories here is followed by an afterword in which the authors explain their inspiration) is almost more moving than the story itself.

"We Without Us Were Shadows" by Catherynne M. Valente. Almost as good as "La Reine d'Enfer," this a charming piece on the Brontë siblings done in full The Girl Who... mode. It could be a lost chapter from that series; that sense of familiarity undercuts the effect, just a little bit, with the feeling that Valente has brought us here before and shown us identical wonders. Nonetheless a satisfying effort.

"The Vital Importance of the Superficial" by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer. Charming and hilarious. An epistolary story, again, but this time composed of unfailingly polite correspondence between contending wizards as well as their long-suffering family members. This one is definitely up there with "La Reine d'Enfer" and "We Without Us Were Shadows" as the best stories so far.

"The Jewel in the Toad Queen's Crown" by Jane Yolen. You'd never guess a story in which Prime Minister Disraeli uses kabbalistic magic to turn Queen Victoria into a toad (twice) would be boring, but this one is. Rather than demonstrating their working relationship in any way, Yolen has them thinking daggers at each other, Dune style, but without the dense political intrigue and interest factor of Dune. The internal monologues dammed any sense of impetus or flow, leaving me flipping pages to see how much more of this I was expected to read. I'm not sure what would suggest the connection between Disraeli and kabbalah in the first place, aside from, you know, the fact that he was born into a Jewish family. That creeps a little close to Magical Negro territory, so to speak, for my tastes. It's a shame -- a title like that, penned by Yolen, had led me to expect a charming fairy tale of a toad monarch in a mighty pond.

"A Few Twigs He Left Behind" by Gregory Maguire. Ah yes, another Maguire fanfiction -- I mean, another Maguire reinterpretation of/addendum to a beloved classic, this time A Christmas Carol. It's adequate enough, not as good as "Scarecrow" (reviewed here), not as godawful as Wicked, which I couldn't even finish (and so never reviewed). Maguire tries too hard, I think, to be Dickensian and picturesque, but with only indifferent success.

"Their Monstrous Minds" by Tanith Lee. A steampunk yawn centered on a cold, indifferent, megalomaniacal genius-inventor hurling lightnings and giving life to a Frankenstein superman on a remote island. Mechanical, omniscient prose, emulating the less enjoyable aspects of early Victorian storytelling, contributes to the reheated feeling of the piece.

"Estella Saves the Village" by Theodora Goss. Estella Havisham (I thought the name sounded familiar, but I had to look it up; I haven't, alas, read much Dickens yet) races to save a village populated by various other Victorian characters (from Lady D'Urberville to one Mr. Holmes) from a plague of nothingness -- which turns out to be memory loss in the brain of the modern woman in whose imagination the village exists. This sort of thing is corny in an inoffensive way, and kind of sweet. I'd hoped for a more bang-up closer, but hey, this story was palatable, and at least the book is done.

While I'm happy to have had the chance to read "La Reine d'Enfer," "We Without Us Were Shadows," and "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," most of the stories here were slapdash affairs, middling at best, tedious at worst. I'm beginning to suspect that original anthologies represent a easy cash-in for authors able to meet deadlines, not a promising field for all-time great works.

2013 read #4: Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer.

Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy 2, edited by William Schafer
292 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 6 to January 7
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Okay, so that Tad Williams book, The Dirty Streets of Heaven? I couldn't even get through two pages. I love Tad Williams, I really do -- I've read eight of his books, which places him (in raw numerical terms) among my all-time favorite authors. But Dirty Streets was godawful. For whatever reason Williams chose to write it in that self-consciously hip and "self-aware" too-cool-for-school voice that sophomore creative writing students favor, at least when they're 19 year old boys who think they're going to set the literary world on fire and then piss on its ashes. One of the first stories I ever rejected from Scareship was written in that same painfully uninteresting voice. I don't author worship, so I'm not subjecting myself to that trash for Williams' sake.

Instead, I started on this book here after letting it sit in the pile for two months. It's a short story anthology. I always say I need to read more short fiction, and lately I've wanted to write more dark fantasy, so finding this on the shelf was a stroke of fortune... or so I thought. As it proved, the stories were rather subpar, ranging from godawful to actually pretty good. Most of them closer to godawful, sadly.

Since this is my first short story collection of the year, I shook things up and snarked on each contribution as I read them.

"Wolverton Station" by Joe Hill. This was a middling, unremarkable story told in middling, unremarkable prose. Michael Swanwick went down similar tracks in 1998 with his story "Midnight Express," albeit with significantly more originality, style, and delicious perversion. Plus Swanwick didn't drag in a soapbox and repeat stale gibes at American economic imperialism and vulture capitalism. In fact, seriously just go check out Swanwick's Tales of Old Earth right now, if you don't mind a hefty helping of male gaze in your literary SF.

"The Passion of Mother Vajpai" by Jay Lake and Shannon Page. Scope this opening line: "The scent of sandalwood cut through the hot, humid Kalimpuri night like a knife through a disgraced courtesan's wrists." Seriously? With an opening like that I assumed this would be a tongue-in-cheek parody of some kind, but unless my satire sense is failing, I'm afraid this was written in all seriousness by not one but two published, paid, professional authors. No wonder I get so many luridly overwritten submissions at Scareship, if this is the sort of shit getting published these days. At one point someone's vagina is referred to as a "sweetpocket." Oh lord. Prose issues aside, this was a forgettable bit of Orientalist assassin guild fluff. I'm not sure what makes it "dark" fantasy; fumbling attempts at sexuality and romance aside, it would have fit right in with Sword & Sorcery magazine in the late '90s.

"Chivalrous" by Kelley Armstrong. Another lycanthropy story? Really? Okay, so maybe "Wolverton Station" was technically an anthropomorphic animal story, but still. Booooring. This one's also doing the tired old forbidden romance angle, so I'm doubly sick of it. The big "twist" was obvious not even halfway through. I'm having serious thoughts of ditching this book already, but damn it, I'm almost a third done with it now, I may as well struggle on. Sunk cost fallacy and all that.

Snarking as I go is fun and keeping up my motivation.

"Smelling Danger: A Black Company Story" by Glen Cook. Oh lord, a short story with a subtitle. One type of submission I'm guaranteed to reject at Scareship is the serial short, where the author writes a string of sequential short stories about the same characters in the same universe and tries to publish them separately instead of just writing a novel already. Some people like serial shorts. Not me. This story, of course, is military fantasy. I'd rather read supernatural romance than military SF. Military SF is possibly the most derivative of SF subgenres, a collection of monochromatic cliches where men's men gamble, whore, and fight, where the prose is as graceful as hammers falling in mud, where the emotional compass points only to anxiety, duty, hate, and lust. Don't get me started on the nicknames. The narrator is named Croaker because he's the doctor. Get it? Boy howdy, that's clever, that is.

Yawn.

"The Dappled Thing" by William Browning Spencer. A standard-issue Ancient Horror story with standard-issue steampunk stage dressing. But I don't dislike steampunk entirely, not yet, so I found this one merely mediocre instead of terrible.

"Not Last Night but the Night Before" by Steven R. Boyett. Holy shit, this one's actually pretty good. This is the first story in this collection that I would accept for my own magazine without a second thought, and the first one I can actually recommend you should read. It's nothing original, but it's the sort of intimate, human-scale story that gets me every time, told with delightfully bleak humor. Even if the second half of the book is as terrible as the first half, this one story makes the entire read worthwhile.

"Hydraguros" by Caitlín R. Kiernan. I think I've seen the term "crustpunk" tossed around for stories like this: ambitious young street toughs narrating in stupid "futuristic" slang and doing odd jobs for drug-fueled criminal syndicates. That shit bores me. It reminds me of sophomore creative writing students. This story crams that together with tired old Invasion of the Body Snatchers cliches and contrail conspiracies into a completely underwhelming amalgam. It also ends abruptly, leaving half the story untold, but I'm not complaining.

"The Parthenopean Scalpel" by Bruce Sterling. Wait, the Bruce Sterling? What's he doing slumming with this crowd? Granted, I haven't read any of his stories so far as I know, but he's won like awards and shit. He's the first one of these clowns I've heard of. This story was satisfyingly entertaining. I still like the Boyett story better, but this one was pretty decent.

"A Pulp Called Joe" by David Prill. I found the magical-realism conceit here charming. Another pretty good one.

"Vampire Lake" by Norman Partridge. The title made my heart sink as soon as I turned the page. That and the fact that it's the longest damn story in this collection. How are there that many words left to write about vampires? But hey, at least it begins with this hardboiled pulp Western thing going on. I can get down with that. Fantasy western is kind of my bag -- that fact can override even the presence of vampires. This story got a little wordy and dull in spots, but otherwise it was surprisingly fine -- a lot of fun, even. They really backloaded this collection, didn't they?

"A Room with a View" by K. J. Parker. The last half of Subterranean 2 has been worlds better than the first, but here we are at the last story and I must admit, I'm about ready to be done with this book. This one appears to be (or is trying to be) a wry tale of bureaucratic wizardry. It was occasionally amusing in a wry way, I guess I'm just disappointed that there wasn't a mindblowingly creative and original story in this mix. I'm realizing there are only so many ways you can introduce variety into a story about wizards, really. You play with the setting, you play with the rules of magic, and of course you go the "funny" route and make magic as humdrum and regulated as plumbing work. Still, I liked this one too.

I was going to give this book an abysmal score, but the string of solid stories in the last half convinced me to bump it up at least a little bit. I can't recommend this book, but not all the stories were bad, so take from that whatever you like.