41. The Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

The Economist had a podcast series called The Prince that went deep into the background of China's Xi Jinping.  It was excellent and led me to their follow-up series on China called Drum Tower, which is also quite good though a bit meandering and judgemental at times.  I was tempted to subscribe but am already overwhelmed with podcast and print content.  They recommended this book as a really good and interesting snapshot into modern China.  I found it at half-price books.

This kind of fiction is just not for me.  Let me start off by saying that it is well-crafted and a couple of the stories were quite good.  It comes from what I call The New Yorker school of short fiction, which is stories where not much happens and end on an ambivalent note that is supposed to give you some kind of feeling which makes upper middle class people feel that they are clever.  I have not read enough of these kinds of stories to know if they all have to be mildly depressing but I think that is also generally expected, as happiness and things working out isn't considered deep by anxious grad students.  The stories in the Land of Big Numbers were all mildly depressing.  What was really damning, though, is that I didn't feel that I really got that much of a better understanding of modern China.  This felt very much like the western judgement of all the flaws of modern China: quaint villages with traditions destroyed for crass wealth and modernity, the controlling but bumbling state apparatus and so on.

China has issues for sure, but I am sure there is a lot of good stuff about life there and I would have much preferred at least one or two stories of what is the good life in China today.  This all felt like a western visitor who was steeped in daily life but didn't actually grow up in China and is approaching it (and the writing) with an a priori critique.  There are many moments of local life that are interesting and did give an excellent sense of the day-to-day.  Two stories, one about a new fruit that has almost magical properties and the other about people stuck in a subway platform, were really good.  But the rest kind of bummed me out.  The worst one was about a young Chinese-American nurse travelling around the Grand Canyon with her douchebag outdoorsy American long-term boyfriend.  Oh boo hoo your boyfriend may be cheating on you and doesn't listen but you'll probably marry him anyways. 

I should have known but I have a vague memory that it was suggested this book was vaguely science fiction or some stories set in the near future and that sucked me in.  Also, the slick trade dress seduced me.  It was a quick read, the prose being tight and flowing and I finished it while stuck in traffic trying to get on the Lions Gate Bridge, so I appreciate it for that, but otherwise just not my jam at all.

40. The Young in One Another's Arms by Jane Rule

I found this in the free box on Esplanade and just had to take it.  So many factors contributed to this decision:  classic 70s painted cover, Canadian lit and finally it takes place in Vancouver where we were heading for "vacation".  I was wary, believe me, I mean just look at the title.  I was hoping that the location and period trappings would maintain my interest if the narrative got too cloying.  Fortunately, it is not an overly sentimental read, though spent too much time in the main character's head constantly fretting.  Unfortunately, I suspect the author was American and though living in Canada, didn't really seem to either want to or was not able to give it any real Canadian or B.C. or Vancouver flavour.  I wonder if this was a deliberate choice to try and make the setting approachable to potential American readers, like so many films shot in Canada but pretending to be the U.S.

The story is about Ruth Wheeler a middle-aged woman who owns a large house that she manages as a boarding house.  Her daughter died in a car crash a few years earlier at the age of 22 and her husband is away most of the time working on road projects up north.  She is effectively a den mother for a disparate group of what I guess is supposed to be a representative range of the youth of the late 70s, including a draft dodger and a young military runaway.  The neighbourhood they live in has been slated for development, all the houses to be demolished.  Hers was purchased and the dilemma is what to do next.  She plans to move into a condo with her older mother-in-law (also a tenant) and Warren, the shoe salesman with some kind of mental disability that she knows she can't leave him on his own.  Much of the book is the dramas of the various members.  There is a love triangle, then a quadrangle.  The deserter gets arrested.  The husband comes back from time to time and is a chauvinist jerk, though mainly in rhetoric as he doesn't actually block Ruth from doing what she wants.  It's all semi-interesting, though I never felt a strong emotional connection to any of it, beyond admiration for Ruth and her mellow approach to her charges.  Later, a Black character arrives, an educated gay guy whose shtick is to parrot stepinfetchit language and parody the racism around him.  This portrayal is very 70s, though he ends up being a cool and interesting character, about as well fleshed out as the rest of them.  What I did enjoy about the book is that none of the drama was exaggerated or hyped up to create fake tension in the reader.  It just happens and that made most of it feels quite realistic and natural.  There was one false where she recounts a childhood memory where a neighbour smashes all her watermelons because she wanted to taste them before they were ready which just seemed utterly false.

As I read this book, it reinforced the simplistic yet somewhat truthful idea that one could argue that every book is a genre book, with specific conventions that appeal to specific demographics of readers.  The Young in One Another's Arms is ostensibly just a novel, but ultimately it feels targeted to a certain type of semi-progressive but ultimately bourgeois female.  Just as I take pleasure in reading about men preparing equipment and calculating the odds of climbing a snowy mountain pass, I suspect women want to read about other women's constant inner monologue on their changing emotional state in reaction to their past and current events.

I read about Jane Rule and she was indeed an expat and a significant voice of lesbian rights and fiction back in the day.  She spent most of her life with her partner on Galiano and sounds like she was quite a nice person.  I have expanded my CanLit knowledge!

39. Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold (#10 in the Vorkosigan Saga)

I read this in the omnibus
"Miles in Love"

I love reading and since the dip from my daughter's birth, I have been steadily turning it into a constant habit.  It's kind of like eating for me now, which is cool.  I have to say, though, that sometimes it can be a bit of an effort, especially when a book is annoying or boring.  Reading these Vorkosigan books is the exact opposite.  They are like delicious ice cream sundaes that aren't too filling and not unhealthy.  I had set a goal to find a long science fiction series and many voices suggested that Bujold's saga be the one.  They were right.  However, now that I am over halfway through and really am getting (and really enjoying) the style and rhythm, I have the dilemma of wanting to plow right through them but also wanting to savour them and not wanting them to be over.

This dilemma is only amplified by Komarr being my favourite so far and it leading to a potential romantic situation whose outcome I am desperate to learn!  Komarr takes place on, you guessed it, Komarr. It's the planet situated right next to the only wormhole that goes to Barrayar and is thus strategically crucial for Vorkosigan's planet (and growing empire).  The Cetagandans did a deal with Komarr to allow them through the wormhole to invade Barrayar.  When Barrayar repulsed that invasion, they then came after Komarr, invading it and securing the planet and the wormhole.  Miles' dad was a principal military leader in that invasion and it ended with a bunch of Komarrian politicians and rebels getting massacred after having given up their arms thus earning him the nickname "The Butcher of Barrayar".

Several decades later, the power relationship has softened somewhat as Barrayar has tried to integrate and assimilate rather than dominate.  The Barrayan emperor Gregor has fallen in love with a Komarran scientist and they are to be wed, when suspiciously destructive accident sends a freighter into the massive solar reflector that is crucial to Komarr's terraforming project.  Miles, newly appointed and youngest of the Imperial Auditors is sent out with an older colleague and engineering expert Lord Vorthrys to investigate.

This premise alone is intriguing and satisfying, but this book becomes doubly delicious when they are sent to stay with Vorthrys' niece, Ekaterina Vorsoisson.  She is a stifled wife and mother married to a career bureaucrat who is just on the border of being truly abusive.  However, you define his behaviour he is one of the most dislikeable characters I have read in a book in a long while.  He has a rare genetic disorder that makes him a "mutie" in the Vor prejudice and deals with it in the most loserish way possible, by hiding it and avoiding getting the treatment because he wants to do it in some faraway place where nobody will know which is way beyond their means.  Even worse, his son also has it and he keeps delaying the treatment for him as well.  He is also just a generally insecure and mean dick and the wife has long suppressed herself to be able to survive with him.

What makes the book so fun is that Miles is immediately smitten with her.  She is his physical type and then keeps revealing more and more layers of a great personality with suppressed potential.  These books are very much romantic adventure fantasies in the Georgette Heyer mode (others have made this comparison) and here the comparison is particularly apt.  There are so many great scenes of Miles using his class, charm and experience to try and get her to like him.  The fantasy is on both sides as we want her to fall in love with Miles and we also want him to user his wealth and power to grant her the life she deserves.  It's good stuff!

There is also some cool space stuff (though at the planetary level) and a fun conclusion with some action.  I stayed up way too late.  Now I want to jump into the second one to see how the relationship progresses but also want to wait.  Dillema!

38. Killer Mine by Mickey Spillane

I'm not a huge Mickey Spillane fan and he is generally considered a lesser rated writer by hardboiled aficionados.  I think he is also slightly tainted for being somewhat extreme in his language that is a precursor to the right-wing Dirty Harry/vigilante mentality that really came to fruition in the Death Wish cinema of the 80s.  A friend of mine gave this to me and I thought I should give him a revisit, since to be fair, I had no memory of actually why I wasn't a fan of his as I hadn't read him since college.

This is actually two novellas put into one book.  The first, Killer Mine, is about a police lieutenant who is sent back to investigate some murders in his old tenement neighbourhood.  He is a good cop and had worked to put that world behind him, but his inside knowledge is seen as an assett by the department.  The plan is that he goes in "undercover" in the sense that everybody knows he is a cop but he is back in the neighbourhood because he has taken up with an old fling (who also was from the neighbourhood and kind of an old fling) who is still living there.   She is a police officer as well.  Big names have been getting killed and it seems to link up to something bigger in the mob.

The story was okay and I guessed the mystery quite early on.  Spillane also has a lot of weird very dated romantic interactions that I guess were supposed to seem modern and edgy at the time.  They aren't quite as psychologically convoluted as John D. MacDonald but have a similar tone and language.  The depiction of the neighbourhood, it's grime and various locations as well as the characters that live there and even some history was quite rich and well done.  A decent enough read.

The second story, Man Alone, also stars a cop, who just got acquitted from killing a mid-level gangster and taking bribes.  We start out with him sneaking out of the courthouse and getting in a cab.  He was framed and now he is pissed.  The plot here was quite convoluted and I got a bit confused, though I also guessed the main mystery (both involved somebody who was supposed to be dead but wasn't actually).  However, I quite enjoyed the protagonist's journey.  There is some good investigating (which I always appreciate) and some nice tough language.  This one was a good read.

So I'll re-assess Spillane somewhat.  He definitely churned them out with a certain cynical style towards selling books and there is a simplistic escapist fantasy element in there that is a bit too blunt for me to take him seriously.  Nevertheless, he sets a good scene and moves things forward.  There is entertainment here.

37. La Vie Secrète des Jeunes (volumes I, II & III) by Riad Sattouf

There are 3 volumes in total

I'm going to be somewhat ignorantly expository in this post, as I suspect most of the masses of readers will not be aware or able to read these.  I get the sense that among a certain set of Parisian, they were quite impactful at the time.  It was a daily one-page strip in Charlie Hebdo (the satirical magazine that became known outside of France after the horrible attack by some psycho extremists because they dared publish a picture of the prophet) depicting various scenes and incidents that Sattouf (though I wonder if it was just him or if he got anecdotes from other people as well) witnessed and overheard mostly on the streets and metro in Paris.

For the most part, they do not portray the people of Paris kindly.  He got a lot of feedback from readers not believing that the exchanges were real and he swears they all are.  I have to admit that some of the behaviour was quite shocking.  I had heard from some French expats here that it is very hard to be a woman on the street in France and this book bears that out.  There is a lot of really horrific street harassment which--while shit happens here in North America for sure--would just not be acceptable.  Also several straight-up violent attacks.  More common is frank sex talk and cliched Parisian rudeness, like a woman letting her dog shit right in front of somebody.

There is also an interesting theme of the various French people of North African descent. It was quite fascinating to see how Sattouf portrays these people who are often but not alway an underclass in the comics he did much earlier in his career than L'Arabe du Futur.  It helped me to learn a lot of French slang, some of which is common among young Parisians (the verlan, where they flip sylabbles on words so "noir" becomes "reno" which is supposedly a non-perjorative term for Black people) and other specific to those of Arabic descent ("le bled" literally means the village but is used as "back home" or "back in the old country").  Nobody comes off well in this book, but the portrayal of the French Arabs (what is the right way to label them) is particularly rough.  Without any sociopolitical context, it also can be seen at times as stereotyping.  I suspect this editorial stance was not limited to just this cartoon in Charlie Hebdo and that may have also been a factor in the attack.

There are also many frank sexual discussions that are also fascinating (and somewhat shocking as well) to read.  While sex is all over the place everywhere in the west now with the internet, it still seems that at least in the early 2000s, French women were way more sophisticated and sexually liberated than their North American counterparts.  And the men seemed to benefit.

I wouldn't say these are brilliant as they are just single-page strips and the art is kind of deliberately ugly, sort of a more cartoony and smeary Jules Pfeiffer (though the lines getting firmer as his style evolves).  But it is an eye-opening bit of anthropology and quite funny at times.

36. Pascal Brutal by Riad Sattouf

June is Riad Sattouf month here at Olman's Fifty.  Since stumbling upon L'Arabe du Futur, I have pillaged the library for his previous work.  Pascal Brutal come out in the early 2000's in the earlier phase of his work, though he had already established himself, where he was less polished and way more edgy.  It was published regularily in Fluide Glacial, which I need to learn more about, and then released in 3 albums (and later a fourth), which are what I read (thanks again to the awesome bande-desinnée collection at the Montreal library system).

These are fucking hilarious.  I don't think they could be translated into english, unfortunately, and it took me a lot of looking things up on the internet to understand some of the jargon.  Much of the cultural in-jokes about the French, the Bretons, the underclass and Arab/north african French I could only surmise or missed entirely.  Though reading Pascal Brutal itself is an education in these subjects and I felt that I better understood that part of the material as I advanced in the volumes.

The parts that do come through to any reader, and especially of my generation, are the anarchic energy and amplifying of extreme virility.  Pascal Brutal pokes at that hilarious intersection where the straightest, machoest toughest guy is so manly that he may as well be gay.  There are several scenarios where this indeed happens. His animal dominance of all other males and sexual irresistability to all females is also a big theme and super funny.  

The setting is also quite a funny take on the neoliberal direction France and the world was heading in the early 2000s.  France is now a depressed near third world country of concrete apartment blocks and discount supermarkets (the Toutattiprix "all at a cheap price" chain is a running joke).  We get glimpses of the rest of the world as well.  Belgium is a fascist gynocracy, Russia a savage post-nuclear wilderness and the Arab states a super progressive and united utopia.  It's very fun but also a painful reminder that sometimes the only way to not lose it altogether in the shit hole we have allowed our planet and society to become is via humour.

Pascal Brutal is in a similar tradition to Red Ketchup and the less well-known Terror Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T).  It's a counter-culture parody and examination of manliness and violence from the perspective of nerdy comics creators who love the genre but aren't of it.  I wish there were more!

The first three volumes are rougher in drawing and the stories more straightforward.  The fourth volume, which came quite a few years after the first three, has a more polished style, richer colours and takes the concept of Pascal Brutal to a more meta-level, with hilarious movie concepts and him leading the French soccer team in the world cup.  

"I'm going to make love to all of you!"

This one where he is training his dog and
gets set up on by some old enemies is my favourite

35. Watership Down by Richard Adams

My daughter is way into rabbits.  Obviously, Watership Down is the classic of the rabbit adventure genre and I had been wanting to read it to her for years but was wary due to my own memories of how harsh and potentially traumatizing either it or the movie had been.  These memories were hazy.  We finally bit the bullet and read it over most of the first half of the year. It's a fairly long book.

At first, it was a bit slow and took her a while to get into it.  There are lots of asides about rabbit behaviour and mythological rabbit stories, but as the gang of runaway rabbits make their journey, you start to get to know their characters.  Once they are settled into Watership Down and start to face the real threat, the neighbouring Efrafa warren and their control-freak leader Woundwort, we were fully invested.  The climactic ending was epic and moving.

I think it's fair to put Watership Down in the same classic fantasy genre epic as Lord of the Rings. It creates a rich alternate fantasy world that parallels our own and yet adds a level of excitement and heroism.  It builds up a conflict between good and evil, though interestingly the evil is less about industrialized world-destroying tyrants than an obsession with order and control of society.  The world destroyers are us humans and so powerful that it is basically the catalyst for the initial destruction of the home warren and then barely felt throughout the rest of the book.  As a particular fan of animal adventure narratives and the notion that our world to a creature of smaller scale can be as fantastic and escapist as any fantasy world, I actually would now lean towards Watership Down as a preferable read (though I haven't read LotR since I was a kid myself).

The one big bummer with Watership Down is how painfully and ignorantly sexist it is.  The adventuring party are all males, which while creating a good narrative need, took my daughter out of it at first and I've since read is also scientifically erroneous.  Warrens are actually more matriarchal in structure.  It's crazy how powerful and assumed our social stances are when compared to reality and especially discouraging when you see how entrenched they are in the fantasy and science fiction genre, which is supposed to be about moving beyond those stances.  You could simply swap the genders entirely in Watership Down and it would have been exactly the same and as good, except that nobody would have read it and those that did at the time would have probably scoffed at its unbelievability and lack of realism.  It would only get discovered decades later.

Anyhow, we got over it and ended up really enjoying it.  I strongly recommend it.  Needs to be rediscovered by today's nerds.

[VERY MINOR AND BROAD SPOILER ALERT CONCERNING HOW SCARY AND DARK WATERSHIP DOWN MAY OR MAY NOT BE]

I think now that I may have never actually read it myself and only saw the movie, which indeed has some pretty intense imagery and gore.  Because I had pumped up the harshness of the book so much, both me and my daughter were constantly in dread of some of our favourite characters getting offed throughout the whole reading.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that while it definitely has some real world death that comes to rabbits, the narrative as a whole is quite classic and heroic and in the end good mostly prevails.

We did watch the movie after, which is quite faithful and it has two sections that are definitely quite freaky.  The retelling of the gassing of the first warren has some imagery that while somewhat abstract is still effectively horrifying as the rabbits all bunch up in the tunnels. The final act is also just straight up really gory with some very red blood.  Not recommended for little ones but fine for 10 and up.  Her real issue with the movie that I thought was quite accurate was that it bunches the narrative up and everything happens too fast. It definitely should have been a trilogy.  We are going to check out the series next.

34. L'Arabe du futur by Riad Sattouf

I had already returned #1 to the library

I had vaguely heard about this bande-dessinée when I found books 5 and 6 (in almost new condition) in a free giveaway box just doors from our place.  I took them, started reading number 5 and then realized I really needed to read it in chronological order and so got the first 4 from the library (and they came via inter-library loan within a few days; gotta love the library).  I dived right in and basically didn't/couldn't stop reading until it was done.  This is the kind of book that makes it easy to not go to the internet (and makes it hard to turn off the light at bedtime).

It is the story of the author's childhood and youth, with a tail at the end summarizing his early success as a comics creator.  But it's really the tragic story of his father, a Syrian who did quite well in school that he was able to come to the Sorbonne, where he met Sattouf's mother.  He (and the family by extension) is torn between his main goal to build a palacial home on his hereditary land in Syria and the pressures of living there on him and mainly on his family.  Not only is Syria impoverished and a dictatorship, but where he moves his family too is way out in the country, which is even poorer and very traditional (trying not to be judgemental here, but from the mother's perspective also backward to the point of being scarily primitive).  It's fascinating to see how to our western perspective, the father seems strict and almost abusive in his attempts at raising his family in the Islamic tradition in which he was raised.  Yet from his family's perspective, he is going to hell because of his lack of practice and faith.

It's really hard for me to do justice to this book (or these books, as it is in 6 volumes).  It really is an epic tragedy but also chock full of humour, warmth and interesting observations on culture and politics and humans.  I was completely absorbed while reading it and moved with many emotions and thoughts.  There is an english translation so I would strongly recommend that you seek that out, via bookstore or library.

On a graphic note, Sattouf uses a slightly cartoony style and it deceives the reader into a lightness of reading that hides the depth underneath.  It is episodic and many of the narrative capsules are enjoyable moments in and of themselves.  The characters are made sympathetic with their round noses even if they often actually aren't and over time it makes the horror of what is actually going on really sink in (or sometimes slammed into you at certain particularly shocking moments).  It's incredibly effective storytelling.  

On a personal tangent, reading this book reminded me of a thing that went on right after I got out of college.  My girlfriend had met this dude from Morocco when she was travelling in Spain with her lesbian girlfriend a few year before we got together and he had become a kind of remote stalker.  He would phone her up from time to time and try to convince her that she was siding with the devil.  Her mother gave him her new phone number when we were living together (wtf) and I picked up when he phoned once.  I was aware of this situation and launched into a macho (hey I was in my early 20s) attack about how I was going to find him and kill him and then he did the same and we had a brief spazzy back and forth before we both calmed down and ended up having an interesting conversation for about a half-hour.  The guy was living in some small town in Morocco and believed that he was trying to save her.  It was actually kind of sad.  The poor guy was still obsessing over her and had some toxic mix of sexual/romantic attraction (she was quite lively and engaging with people to the point that there were boundary issues) mixed with fascination/revulsion of her being a lesbian.  I tried to argue with him on a philosophical level but he was more mollified that she was now with a man, though disappointed.  I can't remember how it ended but it wasn't negative and we never heard from him since, but who knows as we broke up a few years after that.

These fucking old school religions and their obsessions with controlling female sexuality end up fucking up the guys just as much (though of course it's the women who suffer).  The cultural differences go beyond just sex in L'Arabe du futur and it powerfully captures how this conflict can tear a family apart and by subtle extension also demonstrates how it continues to cause conflict in France.  Strong recommendation.  I am now on the hunt for Sattouf's other work.

33. The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

A friend recommended this book to me, sort of out of the blue and it looked up my alley (British dude walking) and I was lucky enough to find it right away at my local library.  Now that I have read it, I have mixed feelings about it.  First off, I have to acknowledge it is a very well-written book, very accessible and clear.  And the journey itself is insanely impressive and crazy, all the while its craziness is very much downplayed by the author in classic British understatement.  However, that understatement is also tamping down a lot of privilege going on behind the scenes here.  Stewart is basically a Scottish aristocrat with a possible military intelligence background and definitely a strong diplomatic background (which he has continued quite successfully into a significant political and academic career).  It's not that he doesn't acknowledge that his sufferings are his own choice and that he is consciously aware of the differences in his life context compared the people he meets on the road.  There is just a subtle attitude of slight superiority or something in this book that only once gets made explicit in a footnote where he tries to argue that the original British colonial exploiters in the Middle East were more engaged and connected to the locals than any of the "experts" coming in after 9/11.  Again here he is broadly right, but it's the attitude behind that made me go whoah.  Also the New York Times calling it a "a flat-out masterpiece" really doesn't help.

Stewart basically walks from Herat to Kabul, across extremely dangerous environments.  Until he gets close to Kabul, the danger is mostly environmental, but it is no joke. You do not get any real sense of the true discomfort he was experiencing.  He mentions quite a few times that his boots were soaked through but only once that actual temperate, which was -20!!!  He also is suffering from dysentery most of the time and eats the most minimal diet, with basically stale bread and water at points for several days at a time.  It's pretty fucking hardcore if you have ever done any actual hiking and read between the lines.

Also hardcore is his social/tourist courage.  He is basically walking through a country that has been engaged in 2 civil wars (to put it simply) first against the occupying Russians and then against the Taliban and now only slightly "pacified" by the coalition led by the Americans.  It's a really dangerous place.  Yet he just goes and knocks on people's doors and asks if he can spend the night.  As an individual on foot, most people are not threatened by him but more confused.  The Islamic tradition of hosting is also a factor, though much diminished with the extreme poverty (and destruction from war) that many of the villages he visits are experiencing.

It's a really interesting book, just to get a sense of how remote and removed these places are, not only from the foreign empires that are invading them, but even from their own cities and regions a few hundred miles away.  At the same time, Stewart peppers his narrative with lots of neat history (particularily the journey of Babur, Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor) so you get a sense of how connected it once was.  It is also a bit repetitive and not a lot goes on but him walking. I didn't mind this at all, but just noting it for those who want to argue that it is a masterpiece.  Anyhow, I'm glad I read it.

32. The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart

I'm going to laud the physical aspects of this book more than its contents.  Unfortunately, once again I can't remember where I found this, but I do remember that I picked it up because of the way it looked.  I also had an inkling that I had wanted to read some Mary Roberts Rinehart and that she may have been another forgotten female suspense author.  Unfortunately, The Bat was rather light, slightly goofy and too long, overstuffed with dialogue and fakeouts to artificially prolong what little suspense there was.  It felt a lot like a long version of the much-maligned Mr. Chameleon old-time radio show*, written more to appeal to people who want to read about the upper classes than actually feel suspense or solve a mystery.

The story seemed promising, as did the main protagonist.  The book begins with a prologue where various people of authority cry out how this new nefarious criminal genius "The Bat" must be stopped.  The specifics of his crimes are left unsaid but they involve at least two murders and he always leaves some kind of bat symbol behind, even a dead bat once.  We then get into the main, local narrative.  Miss Cornelia Van Gorder is an elderly aristocrat who has rented out a new summer cottage and longs for some adventure in her life.  Her main companion is her histrionically (I think this was meant to be funny) frightened maid Lizzie and her niece Emma is staying with her for the summer.  The previous owner of the house, a bank owner whose bank was recently embezzled by a teller of hundreds of thousands of dollars and foreclosed had died and his nephew, in need of cash, had rented it out.  Now Miss Van Gorder has received two threats to not move in and the previous owners' cook and housemaid had quit in fear, leaving only Billy, the Japanese butler (though overall treated fairly as a character, was pretty much the stereotype of the inscrutable oriental and was referred to as "the Jap" throughout).

Things started out okay, but soon there were just too many characters (the detective, the doctor, the new gardener) and inconsistent plotting so that some little things are revealed explicitly to the reader while others aren't so that it was just kind of a mess.  The woman, except Miss Van Gorder, are always frightened, screaming and fainting and the men are mostly obdurate and stupid.  I pretty much guessed the broad lines of the mystery before halfway, which given how bad I am at ever figuring out mysteries, is a bad sign.  The book is not terrible, and some of the elements I didn't enjoy are more cultural tropes of the period, but it really could have used a major rewrite driven by a more plot-focused editor.

Speaking of period, as I said it's a beautiful little book in great condition (somewhat dinged now that I read it sadly).  My wife took particular notice of the cover and asked about it (unfortunately she thought it was going to be some dark horror suspense).  I was quite surprised when I finally parsed the roman numerals in the copyright page (MCMXXVI) and they came out to 1926!  This book is almost 100 years old.  That is very cool and may make it a keeper despite it not being a great book.

31. Valérian - L'Intégrale Volume 3 by J.C. Mezieres and Pierre Christin

Now we are starting to get into the meat of this series and I can see that it really is very reminiscent of Star Trek (interestingly I somehow convinced my daughter to watch the first two episodes of the original Star Trek with me; she was not negative).  I'm also noting the playful tone of the first two volumes continues and even reinforces itself here, with a lot of the banter being Valérian treated as the big hero while quietly Laureline does much of the work behind the scenes (while worrying about Valérian).

 

L'Ambassadeur des ombres (1975)

This story was really cool, totally would have blown my mind if I had read it when I was a nerdy adolescent.  This is the cool joy and chaos that I suspect makes this series so influential.  The action here takes place on Point Central, which in and of itself is an awesome concept.  It's the first meeting point in space between two civilizations.  They connected their vessels to make a little space station.  Other civilizations came and joined them to the point that countless millennia later it is the meeting place for all known space beings, a massive, unregulated conglomeration of ships that is basically a massive, barely mapped, multi-celled world.

Valerian and Laureline are transporting (and supposed to be security guards for) the arrogant Terrian ambassador who plans to finally impose order on Point Central.  He (and Valerian) are promptly kidnapped and Laureline has to make her way through several fascinating cells of other civilizations to find them.  She is also responsible for the Transmuteur Grognon de Bluxe, a grumpy little creature who can eat one pearl or gold coin and then poop out thousands, so basically a walking wealth creator.

This one has a neat ending that both reveals some of the past of Point Central and has a pro-diversity anti-control message very appropriate to the period in which it was created (and a message even more necessary today).

Sur les terres truqués (1977)

This is the classic real world is like a videogame story, where Valérian is sent out on a mission to what looks like 20th century France but keeps getting killed.  It was a neat little story and perhaps they invented the concept here, but at this point, it`s been done so many times that the twist didn't seem all that special.  It was also was so typically french where the concept was that this mysterious designer had create simulations of ancient earth because he found its conflicts so fascinating, but except all the various simulations Valérian visits are basically in France and of course 19th century France.  So typically frenchly solipsistic. They love their Belle époque!  :)

Les Héros de l'équinoxe

This story is a fun opportunity for Mézières to really go to town with the art and design.  Four heroes representing different types of civilizations (aristocratic warriors, industrial collectivists, spiritual naturlists and humble Valérian) arrive at a planet that depends on a quest every generation to go the Island of Children and bring back new babies.  Their heroes have failed and gotten too old.  We get these great parallel panels, showing the four heroes first in their backgrounds and then as they go on the quest and battle the various challenges.  Of course, Valérian wins and gets to ball with this awesome fertility babe goddess creature.  A lot of fun.

30. Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

I got this from my brother-in-law for Xmas.  I was quite looking forward to it, hoping mainly based on the trade dress that it would be a fun, sci-fi/action ride sort of like a dystopic future Joe Abercrombie.  It's actually much more serious than that and has a very specific political agenda, a critique of the American prison system (and adjacent professional sports as well).  It's preachy at points and too direct for me, but once you accept that the message is the point of the book, it is quite well-done.  The world-building of a too close near future where prisoners can get themselves out of jail (and into another kind of prison) by participating in death games.

The main narrative is two of these convicts, Thurware and Staxxx, who are at the 1 and 2 spot in the sport and are nearing "freedom" status, though so far nobody has ever actually been freed.  They are also lovers and friends in their chain together.  Interwoven throughout their story, are short insights into all the other various people who are involved with these games: the protesters, the board members, the prison bus driver, fans of the games (including a really cringy portrayal of a couple where the mansplainer boyfriend convinces the more sensitive girlfriend to get into the games).  None of it adds up to much in the real world, which is fitting as this is meant to be a realistic extrapolation of our world.  There are asterisks with footnotes discussing real world statistics and issues in our prison system.  These are written first in a factual style and then concluded with polemical sentences.  I found these off-putting.  If the facts don't convince the reader of the utter fuckedupedness of the American prison system, then falling into emotional and poetic language isn't going to either.  Maybe this is a release for the writer and maybe the internet generation now responds to these kind of emotional appeals/self-confirmations.  It's not my jam.

The details of this new reality sport are really well thought-out and they shine a dark light on how these things work in today's sports entertainment world.  The participants are ranked according to how many kills and they earn Blood Points by sponsorships which allow them to buy perks like good food and a better sleeping cot and advantages like watching video of their upcoming opponents and better weapons and armour.  The fan experience is tracked and narratives developed while these flying eyeball things surround the players almost all their lives recording them.  It's frightening.

If you want some serious near sci-fi, socially hard, that explores in an interesting way, how the prison system and professional sports intersect with race and sports, then I would recommend this book.  The characters are interesting and there is some pretty brutal combat, but it's not a super-entertaining ride.  

29. The Chill and the Kill by Joan Fleming

Great cover, but come on

This is the second of the two Joan Fleming books that I bought based on the cover and the blurbs (very briefly skimmed) alone.  It's a different story and situation, but the books are very similar in their broad construction.  Both are wrapped up in the trappings and conventions of genre but really the bulk of the book is just about a bunch of interesting people in their environment.  The cover here is particularly egregious in how what it communicates has almost nothing to do with the actual book.

The main narrative is about a young adolescent girl in a small country town in England, who when struck by the Vicar's car, develops precognition.  This shows itself immediately when upon awaking and seeing the locum (new word for me, in this case it is the temporary doctor replacing the regular one), she announces that he will be found dead in the woods in a few weeks.  This indeed happens and she starts to become a sensation.  There is also eventually a murder (of which she also had a vision), but it happens almost at the very end of the book, with a few chapters of mystery speculation and then it is all resolved.

Most of the book, which is quite engaging, though is about the small town of Marklane, the various characters (with an emphasis on her family and the aristocratic family of the town) and their relationships.  The girls ESP powers are the thing that hangs it all together and create some change/conflict, but the book would have been probably 90% as enjoyable without that or the murder mystery.  I get the feeling Fleming had all this local life in her to write about but needed marketable elements to hang it on.  These aren't masterpieces of daily life, more like a pleasant and engrossing few hours in a gentle little British village. Not a bad way to spend the time.

28. Running Wild by J.G. Ballard

This really is a novella, but it is in its own, separate book, so I'm counting it.  It's written from the perspective of an unnamed psychiatrist who though not well-respected because of some of his more outlandish theories and approaches, is called in to investigate a mass murder and kidnapping in a gated upper middle-class estate.  In a matter of hours, every single adult was brutally and efficiently murdered and all the children spirited away.

SPOILER ALERT BELOW!

Though it is presented initially as a mystery, the basic secret is pretty obvious right from the get-go.  I wonder if we have become that much jaded in our media since 1988 when this was written that it is possible at the time that it wouldn't be obvious what happened here.  The lack of mystery is okay,  because this book is really more of one of Ballard's many explorations of an idea.  What's great here is that he is basically foreshadowing the potential horrors of extreme helicopter parenting (tip of the hat to Meezly for pointing that out).  As the investigator explores the estate, we learn how the children there had the perfect lives, with everything taken care of and  their parents being hyper-sensitive and loving but also hyper-vigilant.  All the kids were successful, high-achieving and well-adjusted.  Until they weren't.

I also add that Ballard is just a very good writer, with clear, direct prose that moves along with just enough imagery and figures of speech to enrichen without distracting.  He does descriptions of murder scenes in a very effective way without ever needing to go really into the gore.  At the beginning, I got the feeling he was enjoying simply exploring the horror of this perfect estate on its own without even referencing the murders that had happened.

A fun, instructive and gruesome little read.

27. The Black-Eyed Stranger by Charlotte Armstrong

I respect Charlotte Armstrong, but I'm not sure I love her works always.  She has a tendency to emphasize the inner thoughts of her characters over actual action, so you get a lot of pages where it's not clear if anything has happened.  Her characters also tend to wallow in their anxiety, which I think is representative of the time and milieu in which she wrote but also perhaps of her feminine perspective.  She is very skilled in her prose, her plots and characters, for me, they are sometimes submerged too deeply in the fretting and worry of half-sentences and unfinished thoughts.

The Black-Eyed Stranger went particularly hard in this direction and it was a bit of a slog for me to get through.  It also felt somewhat implausible and that the main character's actions didn't entirely make sense.  The story opens in a party somewhere where uptown girls shouldn't be and an uptown girl, an heiress is off to the side when an older man notices and strikes up an odd conversation, basically suggesting in a pleasant way that she probably shouldn't be there.

This older guy is Sam Lynch, the black-eyed stranger, a journalist with a knack at figuring things out and holding his tongue, to the point that it has hurt his career.  In the next scene, he stumbles upon the gangster, Ambiellie and his gigantic and simple right hand man "Baby".  Lynch cottons on by his knack that they are planning to kidnap the heiress.  Driven by his conscience (and because he was so charmed by the girl), he decides he finally has to act rather than just sit on the sidelines, but he risks his own life because if Ambielli learns that it was Lynch who warned the family, he would definitely go after him.

It's a great premise, but we get pages and pages of dialogue where nobody (and especially Lynch) will just come out and say what is going on.  It is sort of justified, but it is also super spazzy.  He doesn't trust the family to properly protect her, I guess because they are so naive about the world of crime or something and he then does something really crazy.  The heiress' fiance is an upper-class "do-gooder" who studies crime (that's why they were at the party), but also made out to be a real idiot and obnoxiously opposed to Lynch.  He never gets a satisfying comeuppance.  The ending is kind of exciting and it all sort of came together with a weird sort of older man younger girl romance of respect.

26. A Ticket to Hell by Harry Whittington

Ah, that's more like it.  After slogging through the muddled and over-stuffed Blue Moon, I needed a well-written palate cleanser and who better to turn to than paperback pro Harry Wittington. This book starts out moving forward, lean and focused with a trunkful of intrigue.  A guy (whose name we later learn is Ric Durazo) is driving a porsche fast across a desert state. He's picked up a young punk hitchhiker and he knows the punk is going to try and roll him.  In the first few pages, you that he is bitter, that he is tough and that he has some kind of mission in the small town of Los Solanos, New Mexico.

For some reason, he is supposed to check into a specific motel and lay low there, awaiting a call.  Of course, right away there is trouble. The hotel owner's wife has "her pants on fire" (I love this phrase) and immediately becomes resentful and nosy when Ric rejects her advances.  Worse, while waiting in his room and looking through the blinds, he sees the dude in the cabin next door sneak out, turn off the gas line (which will kill the pilot light to the heater) and then turn it back on again, seemingly attempting to murder his wife asleep inside.  And thus the moral choice is thrust upon him, either don't get involved and wait for the phone call (whose provenance is not yet explained but is clearly of the ultimate importance to Ric) or go out and save the girl.

Ric, of course, does get involved and shit gets complicated.  As it turns out, Ric's back story and his reason for being out there is the main narrative and more interesting.  Whittington does an expert job of both putting Ric in an impossible position and slowly teasing out what he is doing out there.  We get a long chase in the desert mountains, some intense romance (hinging on Ric providing the woman with her first real orgasm, which is either a bit much or quite fun or both) and a cool shoot-out.  It's an intense, readable little thriller, though ultimately falls on the heroic rather than noir side (which I appreciated, being a big softie).

I picked up this Black Lizard edition for a buck at the Oakland Museum White Elephant sale.  I actually have a very minor indirect history with Black Lizard books. I worked during my college years at a book distribution warehouse for a minor empire of used books and remainders and they had an excellent collection of Black Lizards.  The story goes that Barry Gifford himself delivered them and was a total asshole to the point that he was throwing boxes of books from the back of the truck onto the guys from the warehouse trying to unload them.  It never was explained what he was so mad about, but I'll forgive him as Black Lizard books was crucial to reviving the careers and reputations of several great crime authors and The Devil Thumbs a Ride and other Unforgettable Films is one of my all-time favourite books.

25. Blue Moon by Walter Wager

I can't remember who recommended Walter Wager's books.  I noted that they had specifically recommended the books Viper Three and Sledgehammer.  This was the first I had found in years (at Moe's in Berkeley) so I grabbed it.  Unfortunately, it really wasn't good to the point that I think I will have to take his name off my list.  The issues I had with Blue Moon were deep enough that I do not have confidence that any of his other books would be to my liking.

Blue Moon was written in 1980 and the novel idea is that the protagonist is an ex-CIA turned head of a private security agency who is a badass (but super hot) woman.  The story here is that she is hired by a top-level background mafia don (he flies her via helicopter to his armed and secured outpost in the desert) to investigate a ransom extortion plot against several mafia-run hotels in Las Vegas.  Anonymous badguys are asking for 5 million or they will bomb several hotels.  Because the mafia doesn't want any of their background activities revealed to the feds, they hire Alison Gordon.

The fundamental problem with this book is apparent early on, excessive explaining.  I hoped this would only be in the beginning, but it is pervasive and exhausting.  This book could have been 2/3 possibly even half the length and a lot of more fun if somebody had gone through and cut out all the side references and diversions that I guess were supposed to be interesting but just seemed distracting.  The second major problem is that the plot and the characters are all over the place.  The actual stuff going on is not bad, but it is all revealed so awkwardly, with fake-out red herrings that are not satisfyingly resolved and a second conspiracy that is weaved in and out in a confusing fashion so that by the time the big climax is setting up, you kind of don't care any more.

There are also several annoying behaviours in the writing, that one could critique as not being PC but are also just stupid and tiresome.  He is just constantly going on and on about Gordon's beauty and in particular her breasts.  Pretty much every female character has her breasts discussed and breasts are constantly mentioned even when there aren't specific characters.  Hey, I love breasts and am quite happy to read about them, but this felt like it was edited by a 13 year old boy who wanted more boobies.  Likewise, I know this was the end of the 70s and the early 80s, a very awkward period for us Yakubians culture-wise, but again it's just the constant mentioning of the race of a character (of which to be fair there was quite a diverse group amongst the good guys) and then some cliche or (even cleverer) a surprising anti-cliche!  Oh look it's the black driver who also has a Ph.D!

This was really a slog.  The actual story could have been a lot of fun, with a combo of ex-military bank robbers and a Carlos-type (literally named Carlos) radical left terrorist plotting a bomb attack using RC airplanes.  Unfortunately, the layers of badness eliminated pretty much any of the fun. 

24. Every Man a Menace by Patrick Hoffman

This is the second Patrick Hoffman I read.  I found it, if memory serves, at the Oakland White Elephant sale.  I had read The White Van and quite enjoyed it but very little of it stayed with me.  I hope Every Man a Menace stays with me and it should because it really impacted me as I read it.  I had to wait a couple of days before jumping into my next book as this one was so enjoyable (and went by so fast, I basically read it in a day) I wanted to marinate it in my mind for a while.

The title is great and broadly fits the book as you are reading it (as most of the people in it are menacing) but becomes specifically very apt at the end.  It could also have been retitled "and those who aren't a menace are victims and the trap is closing tightly around them and it is just a matter of time before they realize it when it is too late."  This is a rough, unforgiving book.  I don't normally enjoy books where bad things happen to people, but Hoffman successfully walks that thin line where you know the character is screwed while understanding and believing how impossible his position is without it being too obvious or unnecessarily cruel.  It is divided into 3 parts with 3 arguably 4 main protagonists and a variety of geographical and character diversions that round out into a rich morality play about crime in the age of globalism as well as a thoroughly enjoyable fictional documentary on the logistics and relationships of said crime.

The crime in question is the smuggling and distribution of large quantities of ecstacy coming from Asia and into the United States.  The first part of the narrative involves Raymond Gaspar a young Californian man recently released from prison where he was the right-hand man to Arthur, a powerful, connected drug dealer.  Arthur sends him to check up on a straightforward and lucrative deal that he had put in place years before where a Filipino woman picks up a bag of ecstasy and sells it to an older white guy who has recently been acting eccentrically.  Arthur gets a 10% finder's fee on this deal every time but for reasons that are not clear, he wants Raymond to check it out and possibly cut out one of the two players and take over that side for himself.  Things immediately are not as easy as they seemed.  I want to highlight a great scene where he goes to meet the supposedly eccentric ecstasy recipient and the guy is truly unsettling and weird, forces him to take acid and then tells Raymond "you crazy son of a bitch!  You're crazy!"  It's hilarious.

The scene shifts to Miami in part 2 and we learn about the two Israeli expats who met in the IDF and are the ones bringing in the ecstasy from Thailand.  This section goes into detail in their background and how they were able to connect to the big asian drug gangs.  It's very cool.  The third section brings in a new player that I won't reveal as the fun is in the reading.  Suffice it to say that a lot of wild shit goes down and it's a lot of dark fun.  I read this in 24 hours (took a reluctant break to go to bed; proud of self-discipline) and enjoyed every page.  Hoffman was an investigator himself and I don't know how realistic all the details are in this book, but they felt real.  I think you could make a good analysis that this book is also about globalism and the impact of corporate decisions on individuals.  Though more directly violent, there isn't a lot of difference in the way people are exploited between a "legit" global corporation and an illegal narcotics network.  Anyhow, a great book.  Strong recommendation.

23. Hellspark by Janet Kagan

I am actually looking for Kagan's other book, Mirabile, however since she has only published three books, I was happy to find Hellspark.  She is a lost author whom sci-fi heads really respect and whose loss at only 61 due to Lyme's disease and other immune complications still leaves a quiet sadness among the community.

Hellspark is real science fiction in that its main purpose is to investigate and explore a very human concept in the context of technological advances and space travel.  The concept is language and how humans communicate across cultures, but extrapolated here to a future or a galaxy where humanity is spread across solar systems and the language differences go far beyond just spoken language, but cultural and physical ways of communicating.  The set up is that the protagonist, Tocohl Sosumi, is what is known as a Hellspark Trader.  She is responsible for trading between worlds, but this seems almost secondary to her skill in languages and cross-cultural communication. 

Tocohl is hired by a member of a survey team who has been investigating Lassti, a super electrified planet for an exploratory/exploitative company called EKM.  In this world, there are strict rules about which planets can be exploited and the big one is if they have sentient life.  Lassti has these feathered humanoid creatures labelled "Sprookjes" who seem only able to exactly mimic the words of the surveyors but haven't demonstrated any specific signs of sentience.  The leader of the survey team quickly sends a final report saying there is no sentient life but most of the surveyors object so Tocohl is hired.  Also, one of the surveyors died in a suspicious accident.

It is not a super action-packed story.  Most of the narrative is Tocohl interpreting first the various cultures among the survey team and helping them to better get along with each other.  She also has a companion "interpolative computer" which is what we could call today AI called Maggy and a lot of the story is Maggy also learning about how these various galactic humans communicate as well as how sentients in general behave.  The main mystery is whether or not the Sprookjes are sentient and if so how can it be discovered?  The accident/murder, though central to everything else is almost kind of an afterthought.

This kind of book is really not my jam, but I just found it slow-going rather than annoying wanking in some sci-fi books that want to explore a theme.  In many ways, it was very ahead of its time as now with the global internet and cultural understanding being such a big part of public discourse.  I struggled to stay focused on the puzzles of interaction between the various humans, but the deduction of how the Sprookjes commuicate and how it is a function of their environment (constant electrical storms, plants that shock, etc.) is really cool and well thought out.

Hellspark was written in 1988 and it really reminds me how much this horrid wave of consnerdatives whose loud and tiresome voices have polluted nerddom.  This book would probably be considered "woke" by these losers, but it really was much more a general reflection of the broad ethos of sci-fi at the end of the 20th century: the general goal is to be caring and respectful of others and try and work together for the betterment of all. It is pleasant to read a book that doesn't have to be fighting against that notion but just assumes it.

22. Tether's End by Margery Allingham

I tried to read Margery Allingham years ago (More Work for the Undertaker), when I was way too young.  I may have even read it twice and both times was thoroughly confused and unentertained.  The wise Kenneth Hite who has excellent taste in literature, among other things, recommended this one  (under the title "Hide my Eyes") in one of the Ken and Robin Consume media posts.  He said:

Chief Inspector Luke suspects a killer operates from the London backwater of Garden Green; Campion agrees. After a riveting prologue, Allingham reveals the killer cubist-fashion from multiple perspectives over the course of one day’s investigation. Superbly constructed crime thriller with Allingham’s gifts for character and observation (especially of the grimier parts of London) tuned to perfect pitch.

You can see why I was inspired to hunt this one down.  It took me a while despite Margery Allingham being not hard to find in most used book stores.  I think it was because of the different titles, (also called "Ten Were Missing").  I finally found it at the Oakland Museum White Elephant sale.

I can't disagree with most of what Hite says above, except perhaps the "perfect pitch" part.  I found the book at times really enthralling and at other times somewhat frustrating.  It's not a mystery so the suspense was not in figuring out what happened but whether or not the innocent people would fall victim to the sociopath.  His elaborate alibi plotting was quite interesting as was the police's investigation.  However, I felt that at times the suspense was elongated because of unrealistic human behaviours.  Several times, the police haughtily dismiss clues as being worthless, which just seemed fake since they were desperate to figure the case out.  Likewise, the young hero (whose adventurous day with the murderer was quite fun to follow) behaves with this weird chivalry of avoiding the police so the young girl he loves name won't be besmirched.  It all felt a bit forced to me.

The plot involves a widow who runs a curio museum in a side alley in London's east end.  She is friends/surrogate mother to a charming man who we learn quite early on is also a sociopathic murderer.  She has written to a distant niece by marriage hoping that she will come and inherit her shop and even possibly marry the man.  The niece's younger sister comes instead (as the elder sister is already married) and happens to write a young man, Richard Waterhouse, who is from her village as a precaution.  Richard smells something fishy (and is slightly jealous) with the sociopath and investigates.

If I were desperate, I would not hesitate to pick up another of Allingham's books, but since I have a plethora of British women mystery writers already to choose from and I suspect her style is not so much to my liking, it will probably have to be specific circumstances or recommendations for me to read her again.

21. Black Reaper by Roger Blake

Actually a nice illustration

Pulp slave fiction is not really my jam, but I bought this one (part of my Encore Books mini-haul) because it was from the New English Library.  The NEL is of course now known among paperback-heads for its  quite rare skinhead series.  I have never seen one in the wild, so thought I should pick this one up.

Wow, is it ever bad!  The n-word is used extensively, but the real offense in this book is the utter lack of any skill or effort at any of it.   I was about to go into detail about the lack of structure, the random jumping between characters perspective, the jumbled exposition but really the entire thing feels like it was written in one go in a day with zero editing (though to be fair, everything is spelled correctly and the grammar is error free), which it probably was.  Nothing in this book evokes the slightest emotion in the reader.  The characters are empty stereotypes.  When things happen, they are told in such a dull, rote manner that you don't care.  The action scenes have zero energy.  Even the sex scenes, of which there are many, are maladroit and the opposite of titillating.  

I guess the point of the book was to sell copies based on the 70s trend of the history of slavery.  The cover is basically Kunte Kinte, no?  And maybe the thought of some violence and black on white sex would further move copies.  Imagine my surprise when I read that this is the sequel to Black Harvest! (The same author also wrote Black Summer and Black Fury.)  I can not begin to imagine how the backstory would hold any interest.  

The story such as it is involves Hester Grange who owns a bunch of land in Canada (!) where she attracts runaway slaves but actually basically treats them like slaves.  Now Canada did not treat runaway Black Slaves very well and we have a shameful history and ongoing present of racism in this country, but Roger Blake clearly did not even try to base this on reality.  The book begins in confusing medias res with Grange ordering a slave hunter to shoot Paul, the slave who was supposed to kill her husband.  The rest of the book is the slave hunter plotting to get revenge on Paul and Hester (though it's not clear why other than racism that he is so particularly mad at Paul who didn't do anything but run away).  This is interspersed with Paul making friends with the local Ojibway tribe and falling in love with the chief's hot daughter.  Meanwhile Hester is sending all her men to hunt down Paul because he was a witness but really because she lusts after him.  She has the markings of an interesting character but her being a tyrannical outpost leader whose downfall is her libido is just a mess.  Even though she is super hot, nobody wants to have sex with her.  She gets Paul drunk, forces herself on him and then spends the rest of the book trying to abort the baby they made.  I know it sounds grotesque and over the top in a pulpy way but really it is all so incompetent that you just don't care.

To top it off, the glue holding the cover to the spine disintegrated and now it is falling apart. I can't bring myself to just recycle it as it is a book after all, but it's in such a bad condition and I really can't imagine anybody else wanting to read this that I don't know what to do with it.