THE DISCO AT THE END OF THE WORLD, moonbases and alien motherships inside discoballs...WILD!

THE DISCO AT THE END OF THE WORLD
NATHAN TAVARES
Titan Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An alternate 1970s science fiction romance blending first contact and queer counterculture in the Los Angeles disco scene, perfect for readers of Vajra Chandrasekera and Victor Manibo.

In 1977—a world where America launched its space program shortly after WWII—Mitch Ward is a grunt in the US Spaceguard. Stationed in a backwater base on the Moon, his only friend is Gloria, who performs "Lady Moondust" for fellow soldiers, until he's briefly reunited with Flynn, a love from his youth who has never been far from his heart.

Following a visit from an unseen, terrifying but also maybe euphoric being, Mitch and Gloria find themselves quickly discharged from the Guard, and sent back to Earth. Moving to Los Angeles to chase their dreams, the duo scrape by, dancing between joy and defiance at the discos in a rapidly changing city that's unwelcoming to those who don't fit the Golden Age of Hollywood standard.

But when Flynn crashes back into their lives, he comes with a warning. He claims to be the host for a traveler and emissary of a utopian civilization, who has caught notice of Earth. This civilization is either the source of humanity's salvation—or its destruction. And they're on the way.

With the strange new powers blooming in Mitch and Gloria and Flynn's motives perhaps as hazy as those fog-filled LA dance floors, it's up to this community of disco-loving misfits to stand up for what is beautiful and right. And save those who maybe wouldn't do the same for them.

They're not going down without a fight—and one hell of a party.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd give it four stars just for the Mothership being a disco ball.

As it was, I gave it four stars because the chilling terribleness of a 1970s Reagan presidency coming as a natural development of Ronnie's disgusting authoritarian conversion in the 1950s, ushering in a repressive crackdown in place of Stonewall...well, it was a seasick feeling of "are we *sure* this didn't happen?"

I spent less time pondering Flynn's freaky-deaky...um, alteration?...than the alternate history elements. In fact the aliens were not particularly convincing to me, in that their role in the story felt less than integral to my sense of what should happen next. I found the ending flowed from their presence, so it wasn't joltingly out of place...just wasn't what I'd've preferred.

The Metronomes substitute for the christian nationalist horrors of our time quite neatly. Substituting one set of soi-disant judges for a different one is a wish-fulfillment move. It's like thinking the grade-school "how would you like it" argument on steroids...unconvincing, flimsy, and ultimately self-defeating. I'm not raving like I would be had we stuck to our alternate history premise, but honestly...I was having fun, so I unpuckered and got the pleasure the story I was reading offered me. I left the pining for something else on the dance floor with the fifth star.

MORRIS KIGHT, Humanist, Liberationist, Fantabulist: A Story of Gay rights and Gay Wrongs, important story about unjustly neglected pioneer

Book cover photo credit: Henning von Berg
MORRIS KIGHT, Humanist, Liberationist, Fantabulist: A Story of Gay rights and Gay Wrongs
MARY ANN CHERRY
Process (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Morris Kight fought for gay rights the only way he knew how—outrageously

New York and San Francisco gay liberation activists’ work is well documented but allow us to introduce Los Angeles' preeminent gay rights pioneer—say hello to Morris Kight. His activist work began in the 1930s as a teenager. As the only male living in his mother’s Texas brothel, he secretly helped women working there get vital healthcare.

During the 1950s, he was part of an underground network of gay ‘safe houses’ that provided bail, health care, and legal advice at a time when the United States had laws criminalizing same-sex relationships. He turned his unique charisma and organizing skills to the 1960s anti-war movement and then working the rest of his life in the now public fight for “Gay Liberation.” He fostered vital relationships with fellow activists, politicians, socialites, and gangsters. His style of organizing and activism showed the power of the “influencer” decades before social media brought millions together with a meme.

He founded groups that lead seminal protests that resulted in: The American Psychiatric Association removing homosexuality as a disease from its diagnostic manual, protecting civil rights for gay citizens in California, and reducing police violence against the gay community. And for every good thing Kight did, he took credit for more. He was a man who, with his many flaws, managed to alienate as many people as he brought together. His story brings to life his work as remembered by those who loved and loathed him.

Morris Kight, an exciting rebel among rebels, came to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s and immediately addressed the needs of a marginalized fraction of society: gay men. He wrote his phone number on walls in jails and bars to offer help with an underground bail fund, private counseling, and backroom treatment for STDs. This was the beginning of a community where there was none. Influential in the anti-war movement in the 60s, Kight then parlayed his energies into the post-Stonewall bi-coastal gay revolution. Through coalition building, he created a seat at the table of social reform for homosexuals.

This biography tells Kight’s personal tale entwined with a narrative of activism and the gay rights movement. Though Kight is included in many anthologies, historical narratives, and feature-length documentaries, this book is the first in-depth analysis of the man, the activist.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Know any freshly-out babyqueers looking around for evidence of their elders? I can't think of a better character for them to learn about than abrasive, annoying, essentially contrarian and always cranky Morris Kight.

He comes across vividly in Author Cherry's personally grounded recreations of Morris' life of outsiderdom...mother ran a brothel in Bible-Belt Texas!

He came by his larger-than-life persona honestly. And Author Cherry writes it direct, pulls no punches, hides no warts. There were so many wonderful things he did, he started, he forced into being by his will alone. (Or so he'd've told you.)

All of this work, all of his contributions, and is he lauded and celebrated today? Under the current kakistocracy, of course not. But I am here to tell you, my cishet siblings, this man's life is one you should trumpet to the young, directionless, disheartened and downhearted, because there's no better cure for paralysis than action. Kight's story is a klaxon, a billboard with a searchlight on it, an unmistakable shout from the past: "Get up and do the work!"

I recommend it. I wish it'd had inline citations, but really the endnotes are very, very extensive; just not quite as useful for source checks as I would like. There are many illustrative snapshots and photo ops, but I left most of them out...much of a muchness after a while, more there to set the scene and build the mood of the times.

A quality addition to the fast-fading memory of my own elders, whose work and sacrifices have let me lead a better out-life than they could.

THE DARKEST GAME, cerebral LA Noir, third in a series

THE DARKEST GAME
JOSEPH SCHNEIDER
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Bad things happen every day. No one knows this better than LAPD Detective Tully Jarsdel. He also knows that bad things often go unpunished—all it takes is a glance at his dusty stack of cold cases to see that time is kind to sinners.

A museum curator is found shot point-blank, his home torn apart. It's the sort of random crime destined to fester in an evidence locker. But it's a case tailor-made for the academic turned detective—he can't leave any question unanswered. In pursuit of an untouchable killer, Jarsdel soon uncovers a web of fraud and corruption that leads him to sunny Catalina Island, Hollywood's bygone playground. There, nothing is as it should be: the past is ever-present, and Jarsdel unwittingly finds himself embroiled in a widespread conspiracy. While reckoning with a dark legacy, he'll exhume long-buried secrets of LA's troubled past and with it, deadly consequences.

A searing mystery from critically acclaimed author Joseph Schneider, The Darkest Game is a story about dread, greed, and anguish; how it spreads like rot, and how one detective struggles to keep it at bay.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There are a lot of things wrong with starting a series with Book Three. I am usually very twitchy about this topic. I would, after having read this book, have felt much better had I had the history between the two leads. As it was, in medias res with them as a bickering old couple (not in the sexual sense), I was able to enjoy the story for itself. I still wish I'd had their history to hand in my brain's filing system, though.

The mystery itself got announced in a fairly usual way: Someone not obviously murder-worthy is found in a trashed home...there's just enough off about the situation to make the Odd Badge-wearing Couple poke more into the dead guy...and thus a very thorough policing job, one that proceeds without undue haste, uncovers some very rotten doins in both past and present that merit a lot of trouble being heaped on people more accustomed to doing the heaping. And, to be sure, they try their goddamnedest to do that heaping again. Tully, having "disappointed" his professor parents by *shudder* becoming a cop in LAPD, isn't likely to let a little thing like Official Disapproval stand in his way of a successful solution. Morales? He's along for the ride, an always-complaining partner-in-crime (solving) with more to gain by staying with the insufferable Tully than moving on. Plus he's not exactly easygoing hisownself.

Tully's abandoned life of being another Professor Doctor Jarsdel has, it is to be noted, equipped him with far more information than the typical cop. It didn't give him his powers of observation, however, and those are the key characteristics that get Tully into enough hot water that he gets quite viciously attacked...twice...and, the second time, he's almost killed from it.

Not only do both he and Morales survive, the second attack...and the murder of their chief suspect...coalesce into a picture of the actual murderer and the real motive for the entire sad affair. It was very, very well-handled, I thoroughly enjoyed Tully's snobby references to things others do not catch or care about, and still thought, "why hasn't friendly fire taken this oh-so-superior guy out?" Because he may grate on the ordinary people around him, but he gets the job done where most of them are honest enough to admit that they might very well not have done.

If you liked watching Endeavour on the TV, or liked the Gervase Fen series or the Nero Wolfe series, these stories will likely scratch the itch well. He's not as arch as Fen or as august as Morse, but Jarsdel will definitely be well-placed on your radar.

I spent most of my life in Texas, but was born in California to a native Californian, a man from Venice Beach. We visited Catalina Island many times, and I've seen the Huntington Museum that forms part of this mystery...but the main thing to know about the settings is that they are there to evoke moods and emotions in the reader. Yes, you'll recognize the places if you've been there or live there, but essentially these aren't used to make it impossible to "get" the full extent of the mystery the way some London- or Paris-set stories are. Like having read the first two entries in the series, it would add something to know what's what, but it isn't in any way *crucial* for you to have done so.

CALIFORNIA BONES: Unsettling, exciting beginning to a series

CALIFORNIA BONES Daniel Blackland #1
GREG VAN EEKHOUT
Tor Books
$14.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When Daniel Blackland was six, he ingested his first bone fragment, a bit of kraken spine plucked out of the sand during a visit with his demanding, brilliant, and powerful magician father, Sebastian.

When Daniel was twelve, he watched Sebastian die at the hands of the Hierarch of Southern California, devoured for the heightened magic layered deep within his bones.

Now, years later, Daniel is a petty thief with a forged identity. Hiding amid the crowds in Los Angeles—the capital of the Kingdom of Southern California—Daniel is trying to go straight. But his crime-boss uncle has a heist he wants Daniel to perform: break into the Hierarch's storehouse of magical artifacts and retrieve Sebastian's sword, an object of untold power.

For this dangerous mission, Daniel will need a team he can rely on, so he brings in his closest friends from his years in the criminal world. There's Moth, who can take a bullet and heal in mere minutes. Jo Alverado, illusionist. The multitalented Cassandra, Daniel's ex. And, new to them all, the enigmatic, knowledgeable Emma, with her British accent and her own grudge against the powers-that-be. The stakes are high, and the stage is set for a showdown that might just break the magic that protects a long-corrupt regime.

Extravagant and yet moving, Greg van Eekhout's California Bones is an epic adventure set in a city of canals and secrets and casual brutality--different from the world we know, yet familiar and true.

My Review: Want to know something amazing? My assisted-living facility's library, which I created from my own library, cannot keep this book on the shelves.

So what, I hear you think really loudly. So this: I'm in a place where I'm young at 55...most of these eager readers are over 70.

This gives me the happy. It proves to me that, if you tell a good story well, people it with easy-to-relate-to characters, and pull no punches, any and all ages will grab and snatch and fight to get their shot to read it.

I'm no fan of teen heroes, get highly irked by teen angst, and never want to hear the phrase "coming-of-age" again; I am usually bored into a coma by magic; altogether this book should have made me sleepily grouchy. Instead, I was flipping pages and holding my breath, and so are all the library users I've spoken to.

For me at least, one of the main appeals is the future L.A. van Eekhout posits, a place turned into a quasi-Amsterdam by the devouring sea. I love that idea mostly because I don't like California despite being born there. But also and more positively, I got the image fixed in my head immediately, enjoyably, and permanently. Now I see photos of the real L.A. and feel confused...where's the sea?

Greg van Eekhout changed my image of a place I've been to a zillion times. He's that much of a wizard with his words. I can't wait to be able to afford the next two books! C'mon February, Daddy needs new books!