Cos­mi­comics Italo Calvino
Har­court Brace Jovanovich 1976World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Most of the sto­ries in this col­lec­tion are explic­itly tied together by the pres­ence of an appar­ently immor­tal nar­ra­tor named Qfwfq. Many of the sto­ries involve space, but they take place in many times and many set­tings — with Qfwfq in many dif­fer­ent incar­na­tions. In one, he describes life before the Big Bang, with every­one and every­thing coex­ist­ing in a sin­gle point. In another, he and another young friend play games with atoms and fly around on galax­ies. In yet another, he is a third-generation land dweller with an embar­rass­ing still-aquatic great uncle. Even within these fan­tas­ti­cal nar­ra­tives, Calvino often man­ages to add a fur­ther level of sur­re­al­ity: a dinosaur catches the first train and gets lost in the crowd, cos­mic beings trans­mute into ordi­nary humans, play­mates get locked in an end­less spa­tial loop. These sto­ries are quite good, although they’re not my favorites among Calvino’s works. My only real objec­tion is to his use of inten­tion­ally unpro­nounce­able names. Qfwfq is actu­ally a rel­a­tively tame exam­ple; other char­ac­ters have names like (k)yK, Granny Bb’b, and Rwzfs.

Rap­tor Red Robert T. Bakker
Tan­dem Library 1999World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Pale­on­tol­o­gist Robert Bakker has writ­ten a num­ber of books, but Rap­tor Red is his first (and so far as I can tell his only) novel. His char­ac­ters are all Cre­ta­ceous dinosaurs, with a female Utahrap­tor (Rap­tor Red) as the pro­tag­o­nist. The story fol­lows Red as she loses one prospec­tive mate and finds another; encoun­ters var­i­ous other species of dinosaurs and other ani­mals, many already known to her but some not; and meets up with her sis­ter and her two chicks. Aside from other ani­mals of var­i­ous sorts, Red and her fel­low rap­tors also must deal with strange new plants, bugs, weather, and nat­ural dis­as­ters as they travel through present-day North Amer­ica in search of food.

Through­out, Bakker pro­vides a wealth of infor­ma­tion about the anatomy and behav­ior of the dinosaurs and other ani­mals in his story. The behav­ior is, of course, edu­cated guess­work. He makes the Utahrap­tors very social crea­tures, which he argues for based on their rel­a­tively large brains and close ties to birds. As Bakker wrote this book in the mid-1990s, I’d be inter­ested to know if any new dis­cov­er­ies have been made in the inter­ven­ing years that might change his characterizations.

One quote from a review printed on the back cover of the paper­back edi­tion pro­claims that “Michael Crich­ton may be a good sto­ry­teller, but even he wouldn’t have the nerve to write a dinosaur novel from the dino’s point of view.” I might counter by say­ing “Robert Bakker may know an awful lot about dinosaurs, but he’s no mas­ter sto­ry­teller.” Not that the novel is the worst I’ve read — far from it. But, it’s far more inter­est­ing for its dinosaur infor­ma­tion than for its nar­ra­tive arc.

Ceme­tery Dance Dou­glas J. Pre­ston
Vision 2010World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Jour­nal­ist Bill Smith­back, a recur­ring Preston/Child char­ac­ter, is killed in a bru­tal attack in his Man­hat­tan apart­ment (this hap­pens on page 7, so it’s not really a spoiler). Eye­wit­nesses and build­ing secu­rity footage make iden­ti­fy­ing his killer easy, but a big­ger prob­lem appears almost imme­di­ately: the man is thought to have com­mit­ted sui­cide ten days ear­lier. There seem to be con­nec­tions between Smithback’s mur­der and a story he’d been work­ing on about a strange reli­gious sect at the north­ern tip of Man­hat­tan that has been accused of prac­tic­ing ani­mal sac­ri­fice. The deeper FBI Agent Pen­der­gast, NYPD Lieu­tenant D’Agosta, and Smithback’s wife Nora Kelly get in their inves­ti­ga­tion, the more it seems that the cult is not only sac­ri­fic­ing ani­mals, but also turn­ing peo­ple into zombiis.

Sigh… yet another Pen­der­gast novel. I was hop­ing that Pre­ston and Child would give their eccen­tric FBI agent a rest after six books in a row, the last four of which were increas­ingly Pendergast-centric. I long for a return to their ear­lier uncon­nected (or at least only ten­u­ously con­nected) nov­els, like Thun­der­head and Rip­tide. But, this book does bear some sim­i­lar­i­ties to the authors’ first col­lab­o­ra­tion, Relic: it takes place in New York, involves the Museum of Nat­ural His­tory (about which Dou­glas Pre­ston knows a great deal), and for the most part doesn’t involve Pendergast’s per­sonal life or fam­ily his­tory. For me, Ceme­tery Dance ranks not among Pre­ston and Child’s top five books, but I liked it bet­ter than that last few they’ve written.

Greasy Lake & Other Sto­ries T. Cor­aghes­san Boyle
Pen­guin 1986World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

This vol­ume of short sto­ries by T. Cor­aghes­san Boyle (who just goes by “T.C.” these days) is slim, but it con­tains fif­teen tales. Most of the sto­ries are dark or depress­ing to some degree, involv­ing death, fight­ing, adul­tery, theft, swindlery, obses­sion, and other less than savory actions, feel­ings, and atti­tudes. I found some of these to be rather thought-provoking, but I’m not sure I’d say that I really enjoyed most of them. Notable excep­tions are “On for the Long Haul,” in which a para­noid city-dweller gets sucked in by pro­pa­ganda about the threat of immi­nent nuclear war and moves his fam­ily to a secure com­pound in Mon­tana, and “Over­coat II,” which involves a Soviet bureau­crat and his first foray into the black market.

I also enjoyed some of the lighter sto­ries like “Ike and Nina,” which describes a short-lived affair between Eisen­hower and the wife of Nikita Krushchev, and “A Bird in Hand,” which tells of both a man’s futile attempts to get rid of star­lings and the (true) story of the man who intro­duced the birds to North Amer­ica. Over­all, this isn’t my favorite col­lec­tion of short sto­ries, but still worth read­ing. It has not, how­ever, yet inspired me to pick up any on Boyle’s other works.

The Egyp­tol­o­gist A NovelArthur Phillips
Ran­dom House Trade Paper­backs 2005World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

The Egyp­tol­o­gist opens with a let­ter, dated 1922, from archae­ol­o­gist Ralph Trili­push to his fiancée Mar­garet Finneran. In it, he tells her that he and her father, Chester Craw­ford Finneran, will soon leave Egypt and return to her in Boston. He also tells her that he is send­ing all of the jour­nals and research mate­ri­als relat­ing to his recent dis­cov­ery of the tomb of XII­Ith dynasty king Atum-hadu, and gives her detailed instruc­tions about what to do with them should some acci­dent (or attack) befall him on his jour­ney home to her.

Phillips allows the rest of the story to unfold in a sim­i­lar way: through let­ters and telegrams between Trili­push and the two Finner­ans, Trilipush’s jour­nals, and let­ter dated more than thirty years later from retired pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor Harold Fer­rell to a descen­dant of Mar­garet Finneran. Ferrell’s let­ters recount a strange case he’d had years ear­lier that began as a hunt for an Australian-born ille­git­i­mate son of an Eng­lish busi­ness­man, became a dou­ble mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion, and even­tu­ally led to his becom­ing involved with the Finner­ans and Ralph Trili­push. As the story pro­gresses, it becomes evi­dent that at least one — and pos­si­bly all — of the cor­re­spon­dents are lying to some degree. Trili­push and Fer­rell each write about want­ing to turn their tales into books, so a the very least it seems like they embell­ish their sto­ries a bit.

Phillips’s epis­to­lary nar­ra­tive style is quite inter­est­ing, largely because it becomes clear early in the book that you can’t be sure which narrator(s) to trust. The inter­play of con­flict­ing nar­ra­tives keeps the reader on his or her toes. Even in the end one isn’t quite sure how much of the story’s cli­max actu­ally hap­pened as described. This ambi­gu­ity might be annoy­ing to some, but I found it intrigu­ing and thought-provoking. It also, more often than not, leads to humor­ous sit­u­a­tions, as the reader begins to see through the nar­ra­tors’ lies to what is really going on. The Egyp­tol­o­gist, pub­lished in 2004, is Phillips’s sec­ond novel, and he now has four total. If the oth­ers are as inven­tive and well-written as this, then I would quite enjoy them.

River of Ruin Jack Du Brul.
New Amer­i­can Library 2002World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Min­ing engi­neer Philip Mer­cer attends a Paris rare book auc­tion, charged by a friend with buy­ing a nineteenth-century jour­nal writ­ten by Godin de Lep­inay. Lep­inay explored Panama dur­ing the plan­ning stages of the Panama Canal, and Mercer’s friend Gary Bar­ber thinks that the jour­nal might offer some clues to find­ing a fabled Incan trea­sure. At the auc­tion, a mys­te­ri­ous Chi­nese bid­der buys every­thing asso­ci­ated with the Panama Canal. Luck­ily the auc­tion­eer is an old friend of Mercer’s, and sets aside the jour­nal for him. But, Mer­cer doesn’t make it very far from the auc­tion house before he finds him­self being pur­sued by three Chi­nese assas­sins. He leads them on a chase through the cat­a­combs and sew­ers of Paris, even­tu­ally man­ag­ing to escape with the jour­nal intact.

Mer­cer then trav­els to Panama as quickly as he can, intend­ing to meet up with his friend. He arrives at Berber’s base camp deep in the jun­gle only to find the whole team dead. Mer­cer and Cap­tain Lau­ren Vanik, a U.S. Army offi­cer sta­tioned nearby, scope out the area, and are nearly killed by another team of Chi­nese mer­ce­nar­ies. Real­iz­ing that they have stum­bled into the mid­dle of some sin­is­ter plot, they set out to inves­ti­gate fur­ther. Along the way, they are joined by a team of French For­eign Legion­naires, a for­mer canal pilot, and a retired sea cap­tain, and reveal an impend­ing Chi­nese power-grab on the world stage.

I picked this book up because I was curi­ous what one of Clive Cussler’s “co-writers” writes under his own name. Unsur­pris­ingly, Cus­sler and DuBrul seem to be cut from the same cloth. River of Ruin con­tains many of the ele­ments that make up the stan­dard Cus­sler for­mula: a rugged scientist/adventurer, a gor­geous and very capa­ble love inter­est, an archae­o­log­i­cal puz­zle, water-based action sequences, and a nefar­i­ous plot to take over the world. DuBrul’s tale comes across as a bit more grounded in real­ity than do many of Cussler’s, how­ever; River of Ruin is still a thrill-a-minute adven­ture novel, but it is lergely free of the “oh, come on!” moments that abound in Cussler.

Sock Penn Jil­lette
St. Martin’s Grif­fin 2004World­Cat • Read Online • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Sock is, at its heart, a mys­tery novel; a woman is mur­dered and the pro­tag­o­nist, a police­man, sets out to find her killer. But, as one might expect from the self-described “larger, louder half” of Penn & Teller, this is far from your stan­dard detec­tive novel. The story is nar­rated by Dickie, the main character’s sock mon­key. Dickie’s owner, who we only know as ‘the Lit­tle Fool’ for most of the book, is a cop, but he’s not a detec­tive. He’s a police diver who spends most of his time pulling bod­ies out of New York’s East River; he doesn’t nor­mally solve cases. But, when one of the bod­ies he retrieves turns out to be that of Nell, one of his ex-girlfriends, the Lit­tle Fool decides to try his hand at detec­tive work.

He has to do so in a com­pletely unof­fi­cial capac­ity, of course, and he enlists the help of Tommy, Nell’s best friend and pedi­curist. The unlikely part­ners spend all their free time try­ing to recon­struct Nell’s last days and fig­ure out who might have mur­dered her. They get a break in the form of a note from the killer. But, as the Lit­tle Fool finds the note pinned to another body he pulls out of the river, it also means that they’re deal­ing with a dan­ger­ous psy­chopath who will almost cer­tainly kill again.

Penn’s sock mon­key nar­ra­tor cer­tainly pro­vides an inter­est­ing twist, but I found Dickie’s stream-of-consciousness nar­ra­tive style to be some­what dis­tract­ing. I could get used to it after awhile, but it made for a slow start every time I picked up the book. Also, although Penn has a fairly inter­est­ing story to tell, he does it in a very vul­gar man­ner. I’m not eas­ily offended, but I found the sheer quan­tity of curs­ing and descrip­tions of sex acts to be a bit much. I read some of this book while trav­el­ing, and at times I felt the need to cover chap­ter titles so that peo­ple around me wouldn’t see them. I can’t really rec­om­mend this book; I’d say that your time would be much bet­ter spent watch­ing some of Penn & Teller’s won­der­ful magic or their in-your-face skep­tic series “Bull­shit!” on Showtime.

The Chase Clive Cus­sler
Put­nam Adult 2007World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

In The Chase, Clive Cus­sler for the first time strays from his usual nau­ti­cal focus (although the book’s open­ing scene does take place on a sal­vage boat) and his inter­wo­ven casts of exist­ing char­ac­ters. His new pro­tag­o­nist, Isaac Bell, does take seom cues from the Dirk Pitt/Kurt Austin mold, but he also seems to take some inspi­ra­tion from James West (of The Wild Wild West as well. Bell is a young man from a wealthy fam­ily who, just after the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, is the best detec­tive at the pri­vate Van Dorn agency (mod­elled after the Pinker­ton National Detec­tive Agency.

Bell is called to Den­ver to help in the inves­ti­ga­tion of a par­tic­u­larly bru­tal bank rob­ber known only as the Butcher Ban­dit. The Ban­dit hits banks when they have large amounts of cash on hand, kills all wit­nesses, and always man­ages to dis­ap­pear com­pletely. Bell and his fel­low Van Dorn agents hunt the Butcher Ban­dit and his beau­ti­ful accom­plice through­out the west­ern U.S., involv­ing a train vs. car race through Cal­i­for­nia and cul­mi­nat­ing in a steam loco­mo­tive chase over the Sier­ras, through Nevada and Idaho, and into Montana.

I enjoyed this book more than Cussler’s last few nov­els. It’s fresh sub­ject mat­ter for him, and The Chase has no co-author. I hope that he’ll Write more Isaac Bell nov­els and that he’ll do them him­self, rather than farm­ing them out to his grow­ing sta­ble of collaborators.

Fool Moore, Christo­pher
William Mor­row 2009World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

Fool is Christo­pher Moore’s retelling of King Lear, told from the per­spec­tive of — who else — Lear’s court jester. The jester, who Moore names Pocket, may be a fool by trade, but he is cer­tainly no dunce. He has free run of the cas­tle, friends in both high and low places, and with Lear’s pro­tec­tion is free to make fun of who­ever he wants. He is also very close to Lear’s daugh­ters Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia. Pocket is most loyal to Lear and Cordelia, and through­out Moore’s take on the tale, it is his behind-the-scenes schem­ing that serves to pro­tect their inter­ests and lives.

Fool opens with a tongue-in-cheek warn­ing from Moore that “This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gra­tu­itous shag­ging, mur­der, spank­ing, maim­ing, trea­son, and hereto­fore unex­plored heights of vul­gar­ity and pro­fan­ity…” In other words, Shake­speare prob­a­bly would’ve loved it. Moore acknowl­edges that tak­ing on one of the most famous plays by the best known Eng­lish writer of all time was a daunt­ing task. But, then again, this is from the same man who wrote a novel about the lost years in the life of Jesus (and his best friend Biff). He retains basi­cally all of Lear’s com­plex plot, although he of course makes Pocket and his machi­na­tions more inte­gral to that plot. The end­ing is dif­fer­ent, though — you can’t have a comic novel with a truly tragic fin­ish. Moore also brings in dia­log and char­ac­ters from other of the Bard’s plays, most notably the trio of witches from Mac­beth.

I’ve read all of Christo­pher Moore’s nov­els, and I think that Fool is one of his best. I read most of the book dur­ing a stint in a pit orches­tra (coin­ci­den­tally for a pro­duc­tion of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeomen of the Guard, which also fea­tures a jester), and I had to be very care­ful not to laugh out loud at inop­por­tune moments. A famil­iar­ity with King Lear is help­ful but by no means a require­ment for read­ing Fool; read­ing the syn­op­sis on Wikipedia is prob­a­bly suf­fi­cient prepa­ra­tion. I can’t rec­om­mend Moore’s writ­ing highly enough, for those read­ers who enjoy a twisted sense of humor. Start with Fool, Lamb, or Blood­suck­ing Fiends: A Love Story, then check out some of his other novels.