David R Slayton

Jul302011

Multiple Masks: Hero, by Perry Moore

Thom Creed is keeping two secrets from his father, and it’s a toss up on which one’s revelation will cause the most disappointment: Thom is gay, and he has superpowers. His father’s past as a masked crime fighter is responsible for one being a problem, his desire for a family legacy, the other. Yet Thom can’t help either fact. When an aborted runaway attempt brings him to the attention of the League, the world’s premier superhero team, Thom is soon juggling his own dreams against his father’s. Family secrets, including the cause of his mother’s disappearance will get outed, and Thom will have to choose between doing the right thing and losing his anonymity along with his father’s love.

Perry Moore’s Hero is yet another book, highly recommended, award-winning, and endorsed by no less than Stan Lee, that I’ve meant to read for a long while. I finally pulled it off the shelf this week and found myself deeply engrossed. It’s not often I finish a book, put it down, and contemplate immediately cracking it open again.

Hero draws a lot on themes of romance, being an outsider, and the search for a parent’s love and approval; but they’re given a good twist in the protagonist’s dual secrets. Moore weaves a world deeply inspired by those drawn by DC and Marvel. He lets the super-hero motif come to life with all the camp that spandex and capes imply. Moore writes frankly, imbuing Thom with honest commentary on his sexuality while perfectly capturing many awkward young adult moments. I cringed at a lot of these, because they often felt so genuine and familiar. The romance, a slow burn, is touching and difficult, as only first love can be. Thom’s need to be his own person while keeping his father’s respect is the central conflict, and it’s that issue which resonates the most.

Hero was especially hard to read knowing that Moore recently died and that we won’t be getting a follow up to Thom’s adventures or see any other great stories. I’m sad to see such a voice silenced so young and with so much potential. I will re-read Hero. It’s earned a permanent place on the shelf. This, and a strong recommendation, are the best testaments I can give.

Jul292011

Our Ancestors Were Us, but They Also Weren’t

“The past is a foreign country.” It’s a quote many of my History professors were fond of. What they meant of course is that the culture differences between us and say, the ancient Romans, are vast. Religious practices, sexual mores, familial relationships all might see familiar, but there’s a danger in ascribing modern perspectives to people who lived thousands or hundreds of years ago.

While accepting the differences, it’s also important to remember that they had the same minds, the same capacity for belief and treachery, love, and betrayal.

I’ve been a long time listener of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast. It’s been a great way to remember details I’ve forgotten since my History degree and for filling in many blank spots. The audio book recommendations, couched in a plug for Audible.com, given at the start of each show have really rounded out my library. A recent fiction recommendation was the Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis, a Roman noir novel.

Marcus Didius Falco literally collides with a fresh case in the Forum. The girl he saves from a pair of thugs knows far less than the full plot, but Falco is soon protecting the lady while avoiding his landlord, an aggressive Aedile, and his overbearing mother. Despite her innocence, the girl is tangled up in a crime whose reach crosses the Roman empire.

Davis does a fun job of weaving the ancient with more modern detective conventions. Falco has a big case to solve, and the job will take him from Rome’s seedier districts to the emperor’s palace and across the sea to Britain, a place he hoped to never see again.

Written in 1989, the Silver Pigs is a bit older, but you can do far worse in a detective story. There’s a bittersweet flavor to the ending that I really enjoyed, and if I happened to learn a bit about ancient history, well, that’s just a bonus.

Jul132011

On Voice and Language: You say Les-tat. I say Les-tah.

You know you’re a writer, or at least obsessive compulsive, when you wake up at 4 am with the thought: Did I use ‘sodden’ correctly in my Facebook wall post? Language is our biggest tool as writers. We study grammar and punctuation, knowing all the rules and following them before deciding when and where to break them. (Strict and proper comma usage is usually the first victim). But being able to spell or write a well-formed sentence doesn’t make one a good writer or create lucid prose. There’s a particular alchemy that occurs when you first write something that springs to life beneath your fingertips. Grammar provided the bones, but somehow you managed to tack on flesh and imbue the work with breath. It’s been compared to divine possession and called inspiration, but what you’ve done is feel the first stirrings of voice, the elusive, creative quality every writer seeks to find, retain, and master.

Language is the framework in which we play, and if we’re very good, we get to color outside the lines from time to time. In fantasy, there’s a strong tendency to twist language into lovely, unpronounceable forms. I’m guilty, and in all honesty, original names are one of my favorite elements of the genre. Yet at the same time, there’s a certain useful simplicity in naming your main character Will, Sally, or Brandon. Your reader isn’t thrown out of the story every time they see the name in print. Sometimes I listen to an audio book and when I see the protagonist’s name later. I can’t even recognize it, though I’ve heard it aloud a thousand times.

So what’s the answer in my opinion? It’s the answer I always give: balance. Keep it accessible. Don’t send me scurrying to the Internet to look up Old Norse phonetics unless you’re clever enough to sneak in some clues along the way. If your character has a much clearer nickname, just make that their common name. You can tell me they have some meaningful, twisty name later. You might be sacrificing some of the depth, but your reader won’t notice because they’ll be more deeply engrossed in your story.

Jul132011

A Hel of a Ride: Hammered by Kevin Hearne

Deicide is a serious affair. If you’re going to take down a god, especially one on Thor’s level, you’re going to need a pretty big sword and some serious cojones. Kevin Hearne’s Hammered, the third book in the Iron Druid Chronicles, takes things to a whole new threat level. Atticus O’Sullivan has a couple of promises to keep, and doing so will put his very long existence in danger as both commitments involve a trip to Asgard and a confrontation with the Norse pantheon. Worse, in Asgard, he’s outside the protection of his own gods and things back on earth aren’t going so well as the area of Arizona under his protection suffers a vampire invasion and attack from a group of Kabbalah practitioners out for his head.

Hammered is a great ride. We get some new companions for Atticus, a cameo from a major deity, and a clever recounting of backstories in a style reminiscent of Chaucer. Putting more pieces on the board serves Hearne well, because not everyone makes it out alive. Hearne isn’t afraid to raise the body count and says goodbye to some supporting cast members, a trait other urban fantasy writers could study. My only complaint is that we have to wait for the fourth book, Tricked.

Jul102011

Death Takes a Holiday – Torchwood: Miracle Day

Death is the simplest and most obvious threat your protagonist can face, but you generally can’t kill them. In some fantasy it’s possible to get them back with magic, but first person point of view isn’t going to work so well if your main character is taking a dirt nap. (I’m very anxious to see where the Dresden Files takes this in the next volume).

It’s easy to raise the stakes in a book or movie by killing off members of the supporting cast. I have a hard time thinking of many action movies where the hero’s girlfriend survives. Family members are usually a goner the moment they walk on screen. In television, an ensemble cast is relatively safe. Headliners don’t die unless the actors are leaving. Then you get one or two fatalities as the seasons drag on. One show where you get the sense that no one is safe is Torchwood.

By the end of the third series the cast had been whittled down to two headliners and a few second tier characters. Now Torchwood is back, in a partnering between BBC and Starz. They’re certainly giving it some solid promotion. Even Denver has billboards advertising it.

Torchwood benefits from being a British series. Its seasons, or series, are shorter, meaning we don’t get stuck with a lot of padding. Conflict can remain at the forefront. Whene an American series might stick in twenty episodes to create a season, the BBC format is fine with six to thirteen.

The first episode of the new series, Miracle Day, changes the rules of life and death on us. People cease to die, regardless of their injury. Complicating things further, the immortal Jack Harkness can suddenly be hurt, indicating that the writers aren’t afraid to sacrifice even him if the story calls for it. By offing the rest of the cast from the first two seasons, Torchwood let us know that anyone can be a target. Putting Jack’s mortality in play also helps to break up one of the problems of immortal characters in television (usually vampires): the current crisis is always related to some aspect of their past. If Jack is no longer immortal then the cycle of unfinished business always coming back to bite him can end. I’m glad Torchwood is back, but I suspect the body count is going to rise again, so I’ll be holding on to my seat.

Jul92011

Savants Make Me Nervous

I’ve never quite trusted people for whom things come too easily. Anything I’ve ever found worth doing took patience, practice, and craft. When another writer asks about my work, they aren’t asking about my leisure. Granted, the effort of writing a book is mitigated by the sense of enjoyment it gives me and the love I hold for it, but the sweat still falls. The apprenticeship doesn’t end, regardless of your success. This holds true for most things: effort and struggle are not only the rule of life, but they bring results.

This sense of reward for effort, the goal achieved after endless practice, is what makes me leery of over-powered protagonists. We’ve all seen them: the unbeatable swordsman, the uncatchable rogue or the mage who effortlessly slays demons and binds gods with his spells. Sometimes a protagonist embodies all of these types. He’s so powerful that he might as well not bother with companions. After all, he’s smarter than anyone else in the party, stronger too. Companions are only there to reflect upon how powerful and perfect he is. No matter what conflict arises, you never truly believe that the super-protagonist will be defeated, and this makes his epic journey (and it’s always epic) a terribly hard read.

When I read about an unbeatable protagonist, I never buy his backstory of poverty or struggle. He’s a savant, a natural hero destined to save the day. I put the book down, and then I think about Frodo.

Lord of the Rings kicked off our genre with a protagonist whose very people were the weakest, slightest, and least warlike in the world. Tolkien didn’t just saddle Frodo himself with some serious handicaps, but the other hobbits share them. Gandalf, the most powerful member of the Fellowship of the Ring gets his ass kicked pretty early on, letting us know the odds against Frodo’s mission to the Cracks of Doom is no cake walk.

Tolkien might have really stacked the deck against Frodo, but you do need some sense that a protagonist is truly facing a challenge. The antagonist or adversary needs to feel like a real threat. That’s the essence of conflict, and without it you’ve got a very boring book.

Jun272011

Into the Deep: Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry

Troy Chance thinks she knows who she is. She’s got a comfortable life, with all the right people at just the right distance. She’s safe. When an impulsive act of good sends her diving off a moving ferry in search of what might be a child thrown overboard, her previous self is washed away. Troy is soon balancing this upheaval against the mystery of the child’s abandonment, but solving it threatens to take away the catalyst of her new life.

Sara J. Henry’s Learning to Swim is just my kind of thriller: an intense opening with a mystery complex enough to keep me guessing and a thinking protagonist I can relate to. Henry gives Troy a rational mind, and even when she goes off half-cocked, there’s calculation in her actions. It makes her a nice change from main characters who act without thinking or against their better judgment.

The door Troy opens when she takes that dive changes everything. She’s soon reevaluating relationships and choices while trying to protect a discarded five-year old. The who and what of the mystery are too good for me to spoil, so I recommend just picking up the book. I couldn’t put it down, and it’s rare I find an old-fashioned page turner this intriguing.

Jun262011

And Then All Fell Down: This Year’s Hawthorne Moon Sneak Peek

An assassination costs Tris Drayke a key pillar of support for his shaky rule and a member of his family. Things in the Winter Kingdoms are getting worse, An invasion force led by a Dark Summoner had landed, and Tris must forge new alliances to save his people, throne, and the lives of his friends, wife, and child.

Gail Martin’s Fallen Kings Cycle concludes with more ancient spirits, magic, and intrigue with the Dread. Just reading the excerpt she released on twitter (@gailmartin) tells me she’s upping the stakes. Evil has the good guys on the ropes, and things seem at their bleakest before the conclusion.

If you’re new to the series, you can catch up in time, as the Dread won’t be released until February.

And when you’re ready for a teaser, click below to hear Gail read from the first chapter:

You can download this excerpt here.

Here’s a video of Gail describing her sneak peek event, the Hawthorne Moon, and how you can find excerpts, giveaways, and other goodies:

Visit Gail at her site, http://www.ascendantkingdoms.com to get started.

Jun182011

Plot as Engine: By the Hammer of …

This post is going to be pretty spoiler-ridden regarding Thor comics over the last several years.

Let’s just skip the movie for a moment and talk about the revitalized Thor comic. J. Michael Straczynski brought Thor back a few years ago, deftly displaying that he gets what makes mythological characters tick.

After a few necessary developments to bring Asgard back from Ragnorak, and cleverly dropping it in my home state of Oklahoma, Straczynski got on with the nifty plot twists: Loki’s return, his clever means of getting the more dubious Asgardians back on their feet, and his manipulation of time and Thor to put Balder on the throne were great reading.

We’ve moved on to other writers (most notably the talented Kieron Gillen) and seen combat and horror as Marvel’s Siege crossover centered on Asgard. After Siege we had a great trip to hell and a battle for the dead Asgardians’ very souls. Then came the most recent volume, the Worldeaters, and I felt like the series lost some steam.
Odin’s return and his reclamation of the throne from Balder felt forced. The status quo was largely reset to how things were before Ragnorak, and yet some excellent new ground was cleared and seeds sown for fresh stories.

I’m still reading as Thor once again became Journey into Mystery, and back to loving the scale and scope of the stories, but let’s focus on the bad for a moment. To set up some conflict in the next crossover, Marvel needed Thor, Odin and Asgard in certain positions to race them towards the next big event. The result will no doubt be compelling, but for a moment, the hood came up and we saw the gears of the plot moving.

It happens often. Sometimes plot necessitates a loss of story. Characters make a decision that feels disingenuous or unnatural for them. I don’t mean an act that forces them to go against their nature, which can be an important moment in their development, I mean a choice freely made. When it happens you recognize that the writer is manipulating things to bring about a certain outcome. The best analogy I can think of is watching a play. Rather than having the curtain go down for the stage to be rearranged, you catch the stage workers in the act. They intrude into the scene and start moving furniture while the curtain is still up. Your focus shifts entirely to them. Plot is an essential mechanic. Even the most literary book needs motion, for something to happen, but at the same time, obvious rearrangement and changes for the sake of the plot can throw the reader out of the story. It takes a careful hand to shoehorn in a game changing plot event in so short a medium as comics.

Jun172011

Kevin Hearne: A Fresh Voice in Urban Fantasy

“And the druids, they were into sex and death in an interesting night-time telly sort of way.” – Eddie Izzard

Atticus O’Sullivan is youthful in more than looks. A bit of a tree hugger and susceptible to the sexual charms of various Irish deities, Atticus is livelier than many urban heroes. Yet he’s also ancient, an immortal druid operating in modern Arizona. His magic is subtler than many urban heroes, giving him strong limitations that make his battles of a less certain outcome.

Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles get off to a rousing start with the first two books, Hounded and Hexed. I’ve happily burned through both. The series gives us some of the genre’s exhausted elements: vampires and werewolves, but they play third string to his use of less common tropes and get blended into Atticus’s well-developed supporting cast.

Hearne puts fresh spins on witches and gods without making them seem silly, as often happens when you try to update a cliché. Some immortals are better at blending into the modern world than others, giving them a nice contrast to Atticus, who poses successfully as an early twenty-something.

Little missteps, like a werewolf surprised by Atticus’s nudity after shape-changing can get overlooked when Hearne uses the scene for effective comedy. The mix of serious with light-heartedness is probably my favorite element of the series. I know I’m in for a fun ride without the constant weight of dire consequences that looms over so much epic fantasy.

The stakes are very personal for Atticus: threats are aimed at him, not the world, and I actually like seeing things toned down from the epic threat level of so much fantasy, though I don’t doubt that the looming conflict with a certain thunder god in the third book, Hammered, will take things to a higher level.

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