Dungeon Crawler World: DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL & CARL'S DOOMSDAY SCENARIO

DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL (Dungeon Crawler Carl #1)
MATT DINNIMAN
Ace Books
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: The apocalypse will be televised! Welcome to the first book in the wildly popular and addictive Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman—now with bonus material exclusive to this print edition.

You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game–like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the Dungeon. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not.

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My Review: Samuel Beckett's absurdist humor meets The Truman Show by way of Cat Valente's Space Opera, but streamed on Twitch.

If any of that didn't make sense, this might not be the read for you. Wait for the TV show. They'll dumb that down.

Humor is the most difficult thing to review, since you are guaranteed not to think what makes me laugh is funny. Likewise, I'm sure. Princess Donut the cat was a sarcastic, clueless hoot. And I hate cats!

This is a video game, so you know. It didn't originate as one, but it really hit the same cultural nerve.

Boy howdy, did Dinniman hit an artery! A TV deal with Seth MacFarlane's company is the latest...before that the book's self-published editions sold well, his Kickstarter for deluxe hardcovers went past goal. There's something here that spoke to those under forty in stentorian tones.

I think you already know if you'll like this one, and I'm here to assure you you're right.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



CARL'S DOOMSDAY SCENARIO (Dungeon Crawler Carl #2)
MATT DINNIMAN
Ace Books
$30.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: "The training levels have concluded. Now the games may truly begin."

The ratings and views are off the chart. The fans just can't get enough. The dungeon gets more dangerous each day. But in a grinder designed to chew up and spit out crawlers by the millions, Carl and Princess Donut need to work harder than ever just to survive.

They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered prostitutes rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose.

Carl still has no pants.

They call it Dungeon Crawler World. For Carl and Donut, it's anything but a game.

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My Review: Reading something I liked, but didn't love, then its sequel, in less than a week was a bad decision. Princess Donut really worked my nerve this time, and not because she's a cat.

I'm not a gaymer. I've never kept my focus long enough to care about these games on screen, but the way they deliver the human addiction to story is pure and uncut. Is this a good exemplar of the text version of it? Since I read them both, and never even finished Ready Player One, I'm goin' with yes. The grace notes in this story are the basic reason I kept my eyes on the Kindle. Small things, deliberately planted, all through both books...this made me want to keep reading past the annoyance of the absurdities Carl and Princess Donut get up to, into, and yak on about.

I said it above: "I think you already know if you'll like this one, and I'm here to assure you you're right."

THE MATTHEW VENN MYSTERIES: THE HERON'S CRY second of Ann Cleeves's "Two Rivers" mysteries

THE HERON'S CRY
ANN CLEEVES (Two Rivers #2)
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
Kindle edition on sale for $2.99

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: North Devon is enjoying a rare hot summer with tourists flocking to its coastline. Detective Matthew Venn is called out to a rural crime scene at the home of a group of artists. What he finds is an elaborately staged murder—Dr Nigel Yeo has been fatally stabbed with a shard of one of his glassblower daughter's broken vases.

Dr Yeo seems an unlikely murder victim. He's a good man, a public servant, beloved by his daughter. Matthew is unnerved, though, to find that she is a close friend of Jonathan, his husband.

Then another body is found—killed in a similar way. Matthew soon finds himself treading carefully through the lies that fester at the heart of his community and a case that is dangerously close to home.

DI Matthew Venn returns in The Heron's Cry, in Ann Cleeves powerful next novel, proving once again that she is a master of her craft.

Here's Author Cleeves reading a piece of this book in the landscape in which it's set.

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My Review: While I'm a fan of Author Cleeves's writing, I'm also a fan of her mystery chops...the way a story comes together from the bits and bobs she makes it out of. In this entry into the Two Rivers series, DI Venn has murders and suicides and some extremely upsetting issues to deal with.

Oh, and his husband invited the Gorgon who gave birth to him, then rejected him for being queer, round to theirs for her birthday. Sunday roast, yorkie puds, cream-embellinshed birthday cake...champagne even!

How he didn't pass out from the stress I do not know.

But family drama is always good for a mystery. Put three families under stress and, well...it multiplies. In this book, in most approved Cleevesian fashion, we see Lucy and Maurice from the book before; we visit several beauty spots marred by tragedy; Jonathan goes whole-hearted and unthinking into best-friend mode when he should stop and think a minute; Matthew, well, he thinks himself into many corners and gets out when Jen and Ross need him to fix things for them.

And, in the end, when the deaths are finally apportioned to their causal agents, he's there to be thanked by those who have lived and cursed by those whose guilt was narrowly revealed. Jen, god bless her cotton socks, is a good friend. And Ross, a seriously bratty entitled goofball, might be salvageable yet. A bit like Sandy in the Shetland mysteries, it's not like he's a bad person just bad at self-control and self-reflection.

But possibly the most grim and revolting parts of this death-fest are not to be spoiled. I want y'all to experience the, to me at least, appalling and nauseating manner in which some people choose to conduct themselves without any prior warning. When you come across the information I'm referring to, you will know immediately. To my disgust, this is not something Author Cleeves dreamt up. It is a very real thing. It just...words can not do justice to the *fury* it inspires in me. I had to research the reality of it, and then re-write my review several times before I realized I can't say anything at all about it.

I hope it goes without saying that you are never, ever alone if you need help with suicidal ideation or emotional crisis. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline number is 1-800-273-8255. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline fields calls 24/7 for anyone with suicidal thoughts or who are in crisis. You could also get US help by texting "HEAL" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

Web searches for other countries return the same kind of information in seconds. Take that action before taking any other actions. Please. It can not be said often enough: That investment of mere seconds can do you no harm.

I'm sure there are many out there who, like me, very much appreciate the severity of the mental health crisis in the world today. This story is one that will cause a goodly number of its readers to think about issues that they might not wish to think deeply about...but really very much should. I hope the way the story is told will help you, if you're simply unaware of it, to process the delicacy of the hold many people maintain on their relationship to life. Please, even if you think you know, check on the reality of those in your orbit who strike you as troubled.

(And Ross gets off too easily in the end!)

THE MATTHEW VENN MYSTERIES: THE LONG CALL starts Ann Cleeves' new "Two Rivers" mystery series

THE LONG CALL
ANN CLEEVES (Two Rivers #1)
Minotaur Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

WINNER OF THE 2019 AGATHA AWARD FOR BEST CONTEMPORARY NOVEL!

SOON TO BE AN EVENT SERIES ON ITV/BRITBOX!

The Publisher Says: In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his estranged father's funeral takes place. On the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too.

Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death.

The case calls Matthew back to the people and places of his past, as deadly secrets hidden at their hearts are revealed, and his new life is forced into a collision course with the world he thought he'd left behind.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY LIBRARY. BE SURE TO USE YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS! THEY NEED US.

My Review: Don't you hate being Right? It's the police's job, though, isn't it; they have to be Right or the consequences are so dire for so many people...innocent people who don't know their trust has been abused.

And that's why we read mysteries! They're ma'at in action, aren't they? Small demonstrations that when our Negative Confessions come before Osiris, Hapi won't need to open those toothy crocodilian jaws and end our existence. And I'm using ancient Egyptian examples for a very specific reason.

Matthew Venn is a new series character for mystery veteran Cleeves, she of Vera and Jimmy Perez (Shetland) fame. She's chosen England's most beautiful county (and her own native ground), North Devon, for her setting. She's decided the twenty-first century's not going to take her down without a fight, so Matthew's gay, and a lapsed member of one of the seemingly innumerable weirdo strict-constructionist christian sects. His involvement in matters churchly having perforce lapsed when he came out, he doesn't have contact with his former friends despite being back among them in his posting as a Detective Inspector. He does have a lot of community ties, though, as he's married to the man responsible for the local arts-and-social-services venue.

And now that sense of place is established....

Murder and maleficent doings are afoot.

People who are possessed of money mistake its power for their own. They imagine that, because they can push money into open palms, they're the ones with Power. But the only ones without money, but who want it, are the only ones whose hands are open enough to close their minds, their eyes, their hearts. Those who don't care, whose worlds don't revolve around the money-god, are a sight more open to concerns that aren't important to the obsessed.

He was a man who’d turned his personal likes and dislikes into a moral code; because he didn’t enjoy spending money in the Woodyard cafe, there was something morally suspect about the people who did. The Brethren had been much the same. Matthew thought they’d created a God in their own image, hard, cold and inflexible.

It's this dichotomy that Author Cleeves mines for the plot of this tale. It is about power, and its abuse, and the only person who won't stay quiet about it is the one whose hands aren't outstretched for more, but in finger-pointing accusation. The moneyed, the influential, can't have that and they rally around the problem of their own positions, their absolutely justified and necessary access to More.

Looking at the assembled group, the families and the ardent young converts, Matthew had had a sudden understanding, as the early evening sunshine shone through the dusty glass, a vision close to a religious experience: this was all a sham. The earnest elderly women in their mushroom-shaped hats, the bluff good-natured men – they were all deluding themselves. They were here for their own reasons, for the power trip or because they’d grown up with the group and couldn’t let go.

It's such a shame that some Others must die to maintain it.

As always, Author Cleeves will lead you a merry chase and make your head spin with information you think could be important but...and then there's...what about...it's her stock in trade. All those Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez novels aren't accidental! But here's my beef with this book...like all Author Cleeves' work, there is a startling amount of sexlessness here. Matthew and Jonathan aren't even allowed a cuddle (British sense) on the page...there's no suggestion of sex in any of her books. Of the healthy sort.

All night, he’d been aware of Jonathan sleeping beside him, motionless, the gentle breaths not moving his body. Jonathan had a gift for sleep that Matthew envied more than anything. More than his husband’s easy confidence, his courage, his ability to laugh off hurt and insults. Now Matthew was alone in bed and that rarely happened. Usually he was the first up.

And that continues here. I quite strongly wish she'd move past this, what? reticence? distaste? whatever it is because this is new territory for her. These are the first gay people in her books! Use this freshness as a chance to stop pathologizing sex. Matthew needs Jonathan's comforting bodily presence as any husband who's just been through a physical and emotional ordeal would. But he isn't granted it. And it's true none of her other sleuths are, either, which is why I'm bringing it up now.

When Matthew's police work results in a resolution for this case that I must say I dismissed as improbable when it occurred to me, I was surprised. Author Cleeves brought in motives I didn't expect. She made me think, hard, about how she'd placed her tells and her Maguffins. If that isn't a sheer, unadulterated pleasure for an old, experienced bird-dogger, I don't know what is.

Book two of the series comes out tomorrow! You *will* want to get one. It's a new-series Cleeves mystery...how could you possibly resist?

THE HIDDEN GIRL and Other Stories, nominated for Best Collection in the 2021 Locus Awards

THE HIDDEN GIRL and Other Stories
KEN LIU
here is his website
Saga Press
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Kindle edition $1.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link) until 31 August 2025.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From award-winning author Ken Liu comes his much anticipated second volume of short stories.

Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years — sixteen of his best — plus a new novelette.

In addition to these seventeen selections, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories also features an excerpt from the forthcoming book three in the Dandelion Dynasty series, The Veiled Throne.

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My Review: Ken Liu is a busy, busy man. He is practically the sole engine behind Chinese SF being translated into English, and that's a major feat right there, especially while he was also being a lawyer and a software engineer...and also writing his own fiction. Thankfully the fact that his story "Good Hunting" was made into an episode of the first season of Love, Death + Robots for Netflix, and two seasons of a series called Pantheon is being made for AMC from these post-Singularity interconnected stories means that he's now a full-time toiler in the vineyards of literature.

There is, I suppose inevitably, quite a lot of focus on names, naming, descritpive labeling, and other methods of identifying unique points in the information flow-chart of the Universe. There are entities with graphic and mathematical-symbol augmented (or even composed) names; there are subtle jokes scattered around having to do with the sounds and definitions of the component parts of the names; it all feels playful, and is in part that. But think...a Chinese-American man, by the fact that this label is applied to him, becomes supremely sensitive to the power of names and naming. The power to create, destroy, invent, reinvent, control and rebel is in the power of naming. What better way to use that power, inherent in storytelling, than to signpost one's purpose without having to bash the reader with Messages.

A hefty proportion (possibly even all?) of the stories in this collection are set in that Uploaded (as opposed to Artificial) Intelligence/post-Singularity world. Liu takes his time exploring the inevitable losses of the end of the Anthropocene, making the coming of UI (that is, formerly human personalities freed of our slow wetware by insertion into quantum computers) "gods" inevitable. Then, as only Author Liu can, parsing out the ways humanity, freed of bodies, might optimize Life, the Universe, and Everything. These have the overarching feel of a novel that just wouldn't *quite* take shape. The key scenes are here...but there simply wasn't enough *oomph* to launch the project with a reasonable chance of success. But they're absolutely perfect cloth to shape a sixteen-episode TV series into!

I shall, in time-honored tradition, use the Bryce Method of story-by-story rating and explaining my reasoning for the ratings I've assigned them.

Ghost Days (2013) is a simple morality tale of memory's role in resisting Entropy.

Digging in the earth was a promise to the future as well as an acknowledgement of the past.
–and–
Which is authentic? he thought. The World or the Word? The truth or understanding?

This was a very interesting, though patchily pasted together, exploration of colonial memory syndrome: The old you is authentic, better, but the new you is what will enable you to survive. Squeaks to 4 stars

Maxwell's Demon (2012) revisits two low points in the world's history: The Japanese Internments and the atomic bombings. Takako, Okinawan-Japanese Nisei internee, is coerced into "serving her country" as a spy, does her job, solves a centuries-old physics thought experiment, and even gets to go home. Not quite the way she expected in any of these cases. Injustice towards women is the way of war, disproportionately of the world. 3.5 stars

The Reborn (2014) does a wonderful job of imagining the consequences of truly alien aliens with antithetical ideas about selfhood rollin' up on Earth, settin' up shop, and lettin' it rip. Superior technology, developed over functionally infinite lifespans, leads to very, very strange bedfellows when dealing with Humans.

Made much more poignant, then repugnant, by the first-person narrator's position in the new hierarchy. The fact is the aliens are correct, if not right, in their assessment of Humanity's deeply toxic relationship to Memory. It's the first 5 star story!

Thoughts and Prayers (2019) parses the coming Singularity and its inevitable role in grieving, virtue signaling, politicking, and trolling...because none of those human behaviors are goin' anywhere.

We prize "freedom to" so much more than "freedom from." People must be free to own guns, so the only solution is to teach small children to hide in closets and wear ballistic backpacks. People must be free to post and say what they like, so the only solution is to tell their targets to put on armor.

Possibly the wisest words this very wise man has written. A chilled, grateful-I'm-old 4.5 stars

Byzantine Empathy (2018) starts out written in the awful, chest-pokey second person. Then it goes into the Blockchaining of Charity. There wasn't a lot of hope for me and this story by then...the weaponization of empathy? Shall we call time of death?

I understand how she thinks, but she doesn't understand how I think. I understand her language, but she doesn't understand mine—or care to. That's how power works in this world.

Both heartbreaking and honest, completely unsparing and without self-pity; the true power of empathy is in clarity, simplicity, singleness of purpose. A rare thing in reality. Second 5 star story!

The Gods Will Not Be Chained (2014) posits the Singularity will come with far more human-derived baggage than one is accustomed to it wagging in fiction. A bit on the simplistic side, though I'm delighted by the author's plumping for the e'er-contentious holonomic brain theory, dividing roboticists and AI folk since 1946. 4 stars, though I expect it'd be more if I understood it better

Staying Behind (2011) tells us the story of The Singularity by way of Aldiss's Greybeard out of St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, only compressed into a short story. A lot has changed in the ten years since it was published. I don't hear much about human consciousness being uploaded these days. Folk are freaked out enough by the guaranteed-to-happen rise of some species of AI! This one didn't convince me it needed a place in the collection. 3 stars because he did it before everyone was on the bus

Real Artists (2011) failed to excite me. A woman gets her dream interview at Pixar A Movie Studio Led By A Young Man and discovers she's been Had, he isn't an Auteur he's a wicked good engineer. He needs her; she's got to decide if she can do the *real* job instead of the fantasy one in her head. Only okay. 3.5 stars because I suspect Author Liu has peeped Tinsetown's rapidly approaching reality

The Gods Will Not Be Slain (2014) wasn't quite what I expected...sequel to "The Gods Will Not Be Chained", prequel to "Staying Behind", and an altogether more exciting end of the story, of what clearly wanted to be a novel but didn't quite make the last hill before the torrent of plot would've taken it to the sea of Published Novels. Maddie and her mom and Grandma are going to remain in the suspend file, but no one is wise to bet against three women who can survive apocalyptic awfulness...they'll be back if they want to. 4 stars

Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer (2011) moved me in several ways...the love of an older parent for a final child, the deep and abiding sadness of losing someone you will always love, the careful way digital child..."god" in the parlance of the earlier stories set in this universe...Renée's mother (one of the Ancients, who remembers what it was like to have a "body") prepares her for the darkness that is always the future but we hope our kids won't live to see up close...well, the survival and even resurgence of the physical world is worth the price. I think.

"I miss you," Dad thinks to himself. He does not know that I'm still awake. "When Renée was born, I put the < star > in her name because I knew one day you would go to the stars. I'm good at making people's dreams come true. But that is one dream that I can't create for you. Have a safe journey, Sophia." He fades out of my room.

A man with a broken heart, one who loves where he is no longer...not...loved in return, will sound the same wherever he lives. 4 stars

The Gods Have Not Died in Vain (2015) brings us that one step closer to the virtual world of "Staying Behind" with Maddie's new little sister "Mist." It's heart-rending to know the world will end; it's also inevitable, it's been staring at us since before I was born, but I'm still impressed that Maddie has the strength to plow on in that cage of knowledge she shared with her father.

"You can't feed billions of people with backyard gardens," said Mist. "Nostalgia for a Garden that never existed is dangerous. The mass of humanity depends on the fragile, power-intensive infrastructure of civilization. It is delusion to think you can live without it."

It's really very simple. The equation won't ever balance. It's time to change the terms. 4 stars

Memories of My Mother (2012) does more with "time travel" than The Time Traveler's Wife or "Story of Your Life"/Arrival did, only in just a couple pages. Time behaves differently when you move at relativistic speeds; but, like Maugham's "The Appointment in Samarra" tells us, there is only so much running one can do before it's too late. Pithy, pungent, powerful...4.5 stars

Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit - Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts (2016) is set 500 years after the Climate Crisis, in a world so different...coral reefs on Harvard Common, submersible refugee pods to ride out now-lethal cyclones the world over...that it seems like an alien planet entirely. Are Maddie & Mist in their digital paradise in Svalbard? Permaybehaps, but no sightings or intersetions in this one. Instead we have a Thoreauvian scary-rich dropout from Humanity's Solar System spanning civilization, Asa < whale >-< tongue >-π, as she floats around the tropical seas over Boston.

The fact that the refugees remain stateless, so many generations after the wars that stripped their ancestors of homelands, seems to make it impossible for a solution to be envisioned by anyone from the Developed World—an ancient label whose meaning has evolved over the centuries,but has never been synonymous with moral rectitude.

I concur with story main character Asa < whale >-< tongue >-π when she says, from her billionaire's imitation of poverty aboard a refugee pod, that "Nostalgia is a wound we refuse time to heal." 4 stars

Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard (2020) visits those outside the technoparadise, the scavengers whose last contact with the wildly advanced nanotech-meets-CRISPR future's last-ditch effort to manipulate the material world has resulted in...what else?...new castes and classes of people who can, after drinking "Revelation wine," change into spirit-animal-like forms rooted in their...psychology? anyway, inner world. Permaybehaps a bit over-the-top in its bog-standard superhero genesis-myth borrowing. In the end, I could see the comic-book art too clearly to enjoy the amazing episode of Love, Death + Robots that I'd been watching in my head until that last Dedication to the Cause scene. 3.5 stars

A Chase Beyond the Storms: An excerpt from "The Veiled Throne", Book 3 of the Dandelion Dynasty is exactly what it says it is. Its existence has me AGOG for this long-awaited entry into the technological fantasy-world action. If you haven't read The Grace of Kings https://tinyurl.com/GraceOfKings, start there. Amazing, wonderful stuff. 4.5 stars because *squee*

The Hidden Girl (2017) changes scenes to 8th-century China...or is it a Klein bottle in the UI universe...either way, it is a beautiful, supremely filmable tale of stealing your own life from those who want to dictate what it should be. I hate that word "should" with its freight of guilt & coercion. Marred by some speechy dialogue but a glittering gem withal.

I emerge into the space above space, the space within space, the hidden space.

Everything gains a new dimension—the walls, the floor tiles, the flickering torches, the astomished face of the governor. It si as if the governor's skin has been pulled away to reveal everything underneath: I see his beating heart, his pulsating intestines, the blood screaming through his transparent vessels, his gleaming white bones as well as the velvety marrow stuffed inside like jujube-stained lotus paste. I see each grain of shiny mica inside each briak; I see ten thousand immortals dancing inside each flame.

Tell me you can't immediately see the VFX and feel the cold of Space at the same time. Solidly 5 stars

Seven Birthdays (2016) wonders if Erich Segal wasn't right after all, fifty-odd years ago, when he penned the deathless aperçu "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Bona Dea Nutrix creates and destroys from a cold distance with warm love and blazing, unending passion powering her. In the end, we're all someone's child, someone's parent, with eternal connections and consequences.

Ave Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.

I had once thought the Singularity would solve all our problems. Turns out it's just a simple hack for a complicated problem. We do not share the same histories; we do not all want the same things.

I am not so different from my mother after all.

I believe the profoundest truths are most effectively said in the simplest terms. Recursion rules. Another 5 stars

The Message (2012) privileges parenthood in a fairly heavy-handed way. "You're very much like your mother" is only a short mood-swing away from "You're JUST like your MOTHER!!" & is as destructive, if not as caustic.

Interesting setting of a long-dead alien civilization's death-palace. Also a very honest look at the cost of Humanity's itch to know. Just...sentimentalized. 3 stars

Cutting (2012) is a short concrete poem to the unstoppable power of loss.

The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.

It is too short to be a story, but functions very well as a coda to a collection of work dedicated to exploring the boundaries of our dimly perceived illusion-of-reality. 3 stars

DARK MATTER, or "Home is Where Your Multiverse Door Opens and This Time You're Glad to Be There"

DARK MATTER
BLAKE CROUCH
Ballantine Books
$17.00 paperback, $12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

Republishing my 2016 review here because we're getting a TV series of the book! It's a long one...settle in.

When I first reviewed the book in 2016, I posted a mild bleat of confusion regarding it on Goodreads:
I have no idea how I am going to review this book without spoilering every-damn-thing.

Several hours of hard thinking later:

Okay…what I can think of is this:
In anyone's life, there are decisions that have no correct answer. We make them and move on. Reading this book I revisited a few of mine, and luckily for me, I didn't feel I'd gotten them wrong.

And that's where I am, but now I'm going to spoiler every-damn-thing because if you're joining me here, you've made an effort to in full knowledge that everything's on the table.

I got a review copy of Dark Matter shortly after it was published. I'd requested an advance review copy, but wasn't approved. I was mildly piqued, but I've got many dozens of books sent by many other publishers to assuage the sting. Having mostly forgotten the whole incident, imagine my pleased surprise to receive the finished book! In a sign of just how much Crown, his hardcover publisher, thinks of Crouch and his chances to make a bestseller of this title, it was packaged in a black shiny bubble-mailer, with a specially printed and super-spiffed-out label with the book's title interrupted by a cartouche where my name was printed in fancy colored ink. Yowza! Anything for the guy with the TV deal, said my cynical inner blogger. That mouthy bitch got mouthier when the book appeared…handsome object…with the usual publicity sheet (whatever happened to the ONE-sheet? Now it's double-sided AND there are two of them) plus what used to be called a "compliments card" from Author Crouch hisownself. It read, in part, "I'm sure you get a lot of ARCs vying for your attention, but please know that I put everything I have into this novel." Oh good, gloated Inner Bitch Blogger, now I can wail on you without guilt!

You would think that, after the best part of two decades reading in order to write reviews and over 50 years reading an average of a book a day, I'd know better than to pre-judge my own reading experience. But noooooo, as Steve Martin said how-many years ago on Saturday Night Live. Still makes me giggle.

I read the book in a sitting, as so many readers seem to do. Five hours of rushing to find what happens next with pauses to piddle and stretch out the experience. Part of that celerity is down to Crouch's staccato writing style:

He says, "Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice."

Daniela says, "Life doesn't work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don't cheat the system."

That's either a reason to move quickly or it's a reason to put the book down. I was torn. In the end, I moved at a good clip there wasn't anything too awful terrible much to slow me down, line by line; this story's effect is cumulative.

That effect is, or was for me, to start another reverie on alternate dimensions novels I've read over the years, and how they've formed my sense of myself as an actor in my own life.

Time travel novels came first for me, starting with Michael Moorcock's wondrous The Warlord of the Air which I found one deeply boring to teenage me Watergate summer at The Book Stall, a used book emporium that my mother took me to one Saturday a month so I could feed my biblioholism. Since she shared that trait, it wasn't pure pain for her. But Oswald Bastable, hero of The Warlord of the Air and its two sequels (The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar), sleeps his way from a 1902 British Army defeat in Afghanistan (do people never learn? There is absolutely no point in trying to conquer the damned place if Alexander and Ashoka and Queen Victoria and the Soviet Union and now the USA have tried and failed) to 1973.

It's not our 1973, but it's still 1973, which makes the rest of the story into a time travel novel. The other two books are alternate dimensions of the 1973 Bastable bobs through, growing older but much faster than the lucky sods who live single-line lives in the novels, and the whole series is called "The Nomad of the Timestreams," a reference to Bastable's unmooring from his typical-human single track life. It was hugely influential to my teen self. My adolescent exceptionalism was strong, fueled by my position as my mother's sex-toy. There were obviously versions of me in a multiverse, too many to count, living lives that reflected better and more satisfying outcomes than my unhappy present. Unfortunately they all began with the present me, and stemmed from choices I *would* make in coming days, weeks, years. It wasn't rescue, it was hope that somewhere someone split off MePrime wasn't experiencing the special hell of maternal incest plus increasing same sex desire. The future on my own timeline wasn't a given to me, so this kind of action wasn't my favorite.

Later, though only a very short time later thanks to a with-it young man who had a strong pash for me who worked at The Book Stall, came the deeply romantic Time and Again by Jack Finney. It seemed like forever that Robert Redford was reported to have the rights to make this meet-your-soulmate-in-the-past tale into a feature film. Nothing from him or from any other quarter on that front in more than 40 years, and what a pity that is. The premise is a simple love triangle set in 1882 Manhattan spiced up with Si, the main character, being from 1970 New York.

Si's travails in living this bifurcated by time's arrow love affair said a lot to me, young as I was at the time (all of 13). I'd already had two requited love affairs. Neither was in any way unpleasant, except in the usual angst-ridden adolescent ways. My weirdo of a girlfriend took an inordinate pleasure in taking my virginity, so I had no heart to tell her I'd already done the nasty with a guy in my junior high classes, and wouldn't admit for almost 25 years what Mama was doing to me. Si and 1882's Julia had nothing on the intensity of passionate connection and mattress-igniting sex that we had. Along came the older store clerk and it was the 1882 love triangle! That made me feel both sophisticated and glamourous. And a life-long pattern of loving men, loving women, and telling all of them all about it was born.

But then came a game-changer, a book whose effect on my evolving awareness that this here-and-now is obviously not the only here-and-now possible or probable or present in the moments we live. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen follows the career of Cpl. Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police after he is moved from his marginally satisfying life to a reality existing at the same moment as his that bears no real resemblance to his familiar world's history or present. Pennsylvania's long history of resource-extraction based economy has left truly permanent marks of its passing, signs Calvin does not see in his otherwise familiar surroundings. Calvin spends several hours coming to terms with this self-evident fact and its inevitable conclusion: that he has been moved not up into a post-apocalyptic future, nor down into a pre-European past as the people he sees are clearly like him, but to the side across time's infinite tributaries.

Erwin Schrödinger first introduced the physics-based concept in 1952, and it has been a staple in science fiction ever since. In fact, it goes back much farther than that as a fantasy, and its survival as well as its scientific explanation (insofar as anything this vast can be explained) sit very well with most average people. It makes intuitive sense. The physics of it is dauntingly complex and also suffers from a testable-hypothesis deficit, but that doesn't detract one iota from many people's sense that it's just *right*. And for Calvin Morrison, it is a life-saving reality. His quick wits, political savvy, military prowess, and social conscience are perfectly suited to his new circumstances. His rise to the pinnacle of power is inevitable, and his character and knowledge base make him a dream ruler by local standards.

This book, another of my hippie bookseller supercrush's finds for me, perfectly reflected my sense of being wasted in my own life. I talked with him for hours about how there had to be, somewhere out there, a timeline/timestream/alternate reality perfectly suited to me, to him, to every other misfit we knew. How to find it? How to access it? Naturally we reached no conclusions, but we had a great time talking about it.

Since those early discoveries I've encountered grand-scale alternate histories by , as well as more intimate and personal ones like Kate Atkinson's widely read 2013 novel Life After Life. As much as I ended up admiring Atkinson's wonderful tale of the extraordinary fate of Ursula Todd, it wasn't on the same moral-compass heading as Dark Matter. The latter is a deeply personal Grail quest, an Odyssey whose modern Ulysses is physicist Jason Dessen. There are, as we all know by know, an inifinty of Jasons who have done almost the same things with varying degrees of success. Our point-of-view JasonPrime is the happiest man around because he's chosen to focus his energies on being a family man, fully present in his life with Daniela.

For her part Daniela gave up a burgeoning artistic life to bear and care for Charlie, further derailed by severe post-partum depression. For his part, JasonPrime lost focus on a potentially world-shattering quantum superposition technology that would have made him both rich and famous. One version of JasonPrime made the opposite choice and unlocked the secret to making macro quantum superposition, the key to travel across the multiverse. What he didn't have, and what Daniela didn't have, is Charlie, or a relationship; both feel the pull to make that decision again in this or another life. So Jason2, with his full-sized quantum superposition apparatus, decides he will be the next person to use it after a string of failed test subjects who didn't return. His colleagues don't know it, but he has no plans to return either. He is in search of his polar opposite, the Jason that kept Daniela and raised Charlie and was brilliantly successful at it. Instead of killing JasonPrime, he assuages whatever serves him for a conscience by making sure the prime gets to Jason2's luxurious and glamourous life.

Except that's not what the prime wants. And he fights and fights and struggles and fights some more to get home, Home, that one place where you *know* you belong, is just…there, and he'll stop at nothing to get there.

It's startling to me how much that resonates with me. I've always been in search of Home. Lots of near misses, but honestly I no longer expect I'll get there this time around. Where I am, who I am, what defines me as me…good enough. Plenty good enough. I experience long stretches of contentment, bursts of happiness, and significant amounts of pleasure.

But like JasonPrime's many visits to many Chicagos, it's not *quite* home. It's my talent to make do without fuss. But sometimes, it's past the periphery of my awareness and I wonder, what if….
Read this book for a propulsive, pounding joyride through spaces and places you didn't know that you didn't know you wanted to visit. I give it five stars of five and a strong push to buy it now.

GIRL SLEUTH, author Melanie Rehak's recounting of Nancy Drew's origins

GIRL SLEUTH: NANCY DREW AND THE WOMEN WHO CREATED HER
MELANIE REHAK
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$14.39 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A plucky "titian-haired" sleuth solved her first mystery in 1930. Eighty million books later, Nancy Drew has survived the Depression, World War II, and the Sixties (when she was taken up with a vengeance by women's libbers) to enter the pantheon of American girlhood. As beloved by girls today as she was by their grandmothers, Nancy Drew has both inspired and reflected the changes in her readers' lives. Now, in a narrative with all the vivid energy and page-turning pace of Nancy's adventures, Melanie Rehak solves an enduring literary mystery:
Who created Nancy Drew? And how did she go from pulp heroine to icon?

The brainchild of children's book mogul Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy was brought to life by two women: Mildred Wirt Benson, a pioneering journalist from Iowa, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a well-bred wife and mother who took over as CEO of the pioneering Stratemeyer Syndicate after her father died. In a century-spanning story Rehak traces their roles--and Nancy's--in forging the modern American woman. With ebullience, wit, and a wealth of little-known source material, Rehak celebrates our unstoppable girl detective.

My Review: When I was about nine, I went through a Hardy Boys phase. My mother, who went from buying Oldsmobile-priced cocktail dresses at Henri Bendel and Chevrolet-priced suits at Bonwit Teller to working three jobs to support us, never said no when it came to buying me a book. So I read my way through the catalog, and looked around for more. Mama somewhat diffidently pointed out the Nancy Drew books. I asked if she solved crimes. “Yes, and drives a blue roadster,” said the wily old girl, and I had another school year's reading at a quarter a book. (Used. We most often bought used...Mama said the words didn't wear out and who cared about the cover anyway?)

Ever after, I've had a “thing” for All-American boys and girls who just damn well do it for themselves. From such acorns....

Mystery-reading pleasure was a given. Mother and sister were big consumers of the genre. I got my own books, and they were not mysteries, but good heavens a boy can't survive on a book a week! I mean really! So I read their mysteries. I checked mysteries out of the liberry. I read all the Hardy Boys (always preferred Joe to Frank, Iola be hanged) and Nancy Drew (what a maroon Ned Nickerson was!) a couple times each. They lost their luster about the time I found good SF.

But do you ever forget that first kiss? I know I haven't. Nancy, Frank, and Joe...oh my how I treasured their orderly world. No one behaved badly (my narcissistic parents were astonishingly insensitive and ill-mannered in their divorcing) without consequences, and crimes were punished. I liked that a lot! And I still do.

Melanie Rehak apparently did, too. She set out to tell the story, public since the 1970s at least, of the origins of Nancy Drew, Girl Sleuth. All the ookie bleccchhhy part about families in conflict over Smothers-Brothers-y “dad always liked you best” and “I sit here with mom and you swan about” and so on; all the fish-out-of-water growing up of a major tomboy with a ginormous brain, in a rinky dink dink little wide spot in the road, leading to Iowa State and college degree in the 1920s; all the nasty mean greedy behind-the-scenes moneygrubbing everyone seems to have thought nothing of.

It's as good as a novel. It's as much fun as a Nancy Drew story to unravel. It's not perfect, but it's got a lot of story and it tells the story concisely, yet without leaving annoying holes or piling numbing crap all over the reader.

The focus is on Nancy, her “father” Edward Stratemeyer, her “mother” Mildred Wirt, and wicked stepmother Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. That's enough for a 600pp doorstopper, let me assure you! Author Rehak got out her laser, finely cut and carefully etched the truly important bits from these three peoples' lives and then soldered and electroplated the whole thing into a lovely, solid bracelet shaped like Nancy Drew.

Even if you've never read one of these books, THIS book is a very good read, and an intriguing side window onto American culture in the mid-20th century. As a hallmark of that finger-on-the-pulse quality that Stratemyer and his heirs have always had, Nancy Drew is getting her own TV show! The long-awaited CW TV adaptation has tapped a newcomer to play Nancy Drew. Exciting news, since the CW is the logical home for a drama based on her career.

DEAD WATER, fifth mystery in a quartet, very very enjoyable

DEAD WATER
ANN CLEEVES Shetland Islands Mysteries #5
Minotaur Books
$25.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Ann Cleeves returns to her critically acclaimed Shetland Island series with this stunning mystery featuring Inspector Jimmy Perez, who readers will remember from Raven Black, White Nights, Red Bones, and Blue Lightning. When the body of a journalist is found, Detective Inspector Willow Reeves is drafted from outside to head up the investigation. Inspector Jimmy Perez has been out of the loop, but his local knowledge is needed in this case, and he decides to help Willow. The dead journalist had left the islands years before to pursue his writing career. In his wake, he left a scandal involving a young girl. When Willow and Jimmy dig deeper, they realize that the journalist was chasing a story that many Shetlanders didn't want to come to the surface. In Dead Water, a triumphant continuation to her Shetland series, Ann Cleeves cements her place as one of Britain's most successful crime writers.

My Review: Cleeves' trademark simplicity of language, her amazing gift for limning a character in a sentence and a setting, her painterly use of color and composition to make the story richer: All present, all accounted for. And it's not one single bit of a surprise that British television pounced on these tales. May they have the monster (comparatively) success that Cleeves' other sleuth-series, Vera, has had.

Originally the books were to be a quartet, which I think we all know means four of something. Here we are on the *fifth* book in the quartet...and a cynical little part of me (known as "the whole body and soul") thinks this fifth entry was inspired by the TV show's existence. I feel it shows in the too-muchness of everything in the story. Too much angst, and from more than only Jimmy the widower. The secondary cast is all angst-ridden, frustrated, scared of something happening, something not happening, something coming out to embarrass them. This gets wearing. In the extreme. It took three days for me to read a book whose predecessors were devoured in hours.

One big surprise is the role of the Fiscal, previously a testy martinet. A new light is shone on her character and a resolution is crafted for her that I myownself felt was too sympathetic. The resolution of the mystery, in fact, seems too sympathetic, and the guilty are, well, sprung on us in a feat-of-detection solution to the logic puzzle that all mysteries are. This isn't my favorite of the series, but I can't deny myself the pleasures of reading even an oversized undermysteried Ann Cleeves novel.