HAMMER OF THE DOGS, Blade Runner with teens in Las Vegas

HAMMER OF THE DOGS
JARRET KEENE
University of Nevada Press
$21.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A postapocalyptic adventure in Las Vegas for readers of all ages.

Set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Hammer of the Dogs is a literary dystopian adventure filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of her own fate as she helps to shield the Las Vegas valley’s survivors and protect her younger classmates at a paramilitary school holed up in Luxor on the Las Vegas Strip. After graduation, she’ll be alone in fending off the deadly intentions and desires of the school’s most powerful opponents.

When she’s captured by the enemy warlord, she’s surprised by two He’s not the monster her headmaster wants her to believe and the one thing she can’t safeguard is her own heart. Hammer of the Dogs celebrates the courageousness of a younger generation in the face of authority while exploring the difficult choices a conscionable young woman must make with her back against a blood-spattered wall. It’s a story of transformation and maturity, as Lash grapples with her own identity and redefines the glittering Las Vegas that Nevada is known for.

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

My Review: Post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, and the evils threatening to destroy the little bit of the world live in a hotel on the Strip....we sure this is fiction...?

It is indeed fiction, staring Lash, a young woman whose horrific life mid-apocalypse has left her, like so many others, with disfiguring bone-deep scars psychic and emotional. She and her scoobygroup need little enough to exist but even that is hard to come by in her Las Vegas.

Fights, squabbles, battles, all are normal in this hellscape...much like what we're told the world of the twenty-first century is in the US...and, as this book points up, it very much is not. This world is the fever dream of the seditious MAGAts.

It's also a rip-snortin' action-packed good time read, a great use of one's bits and patches of moments between things to enjoy and absorb this book. It isn't subtle, and it isn't pretentious. Give it to your teen grandson or nephew to woo him away from the console for that all-important family bonding time. (Of course, I'm assuming the family is like my own and reads together for fun.)

There's a map to satify the three-d screenhead. There's non-stop action. There's an impressive economy of verbiage that still evokes a strongly sensory world. There are betrayals and unexpected alliances. None of it has a word wasted. All of it makes up a beautifully constructed story.

I wouldn't give it to my granddaughter with the borning sense of women's oppression and the weight of the male gaze. Might not hand it to the boy who's into the awful J6 stuff. The gamer is going to be won over by its resemblance (evident to my eyes at least) to generations of videogames in storyline, plot, and action.

I don't intend this as a dismissal! It is, in its intent, an acknowledgement of the author's hard work to give the legions of gamers a reason to branch out into text-based storytelling. It is meant for them, and here I was flipping pages to see what happened next. That is one successful job, and a big round of kudos to the author.

Works well for its intended audience, and will make a successful gift for them.

THE UNTOLD STORY, eighth Invisible Library YA adventure story...unqualified hit of a read

THE UNTOLD STORY
GENEVIEVE COGMAN (The Invisible Library #8)
Ace Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.00 trade paper, available 28 December 2021

Rating: 4.5* of five, because 92%

The Publisher Says: In this thrilling historical fantasy, time-traveling Librarian spy Irene will need to delve deep into a tangled web of loyalty and power to keep her friends safe.

Irene is trying to learn the truth about Alberich-and the possibility that he's her father. But when the Library orders her to kill him, and then Alberich himself offers to sign a truce, she has to discover why he originally betrayed the Library.

With her allies endangered and her strongest loyalties under threat, she'll have to trace his past across multiple worlds and into the depths of mythology and folklore, to find the truth at the heart of the Library, and why the Library was first created.

The Invisible Library review–The Masked City review–The Burning Page review–The Lost Plot review–The Mortal Word review–The Secret Chapter review–The Dark Archive review

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

My Review: The entire purpose of a long-running series is to entice the reader back to its (hopefully) inexhaustible wells of Story. That the story in question is about the origin of stories and storytelling, about how Storytelling is the balance point between Order and Chaos, makes it all the more impossible to resist following. (And it isn’t like I’m famous for my ability to resist storytelling in almost any of its forms.)

There is something that happens, at 92% into the story, that made me put down my Kindle for a full weekend. I simply couldn’t process it, and I didn’t want to process it; I was shocked, hurt, appalled, and enraged. Obviously I picked up my Kindle again, but it was a close-fought battle between going on and simply causing all sorts of havoc and ruin to collapse onto a certain wicked Authoress. She knows Authorial Privilege…I know voodoo.

It’s a sign of how deeply invested I am in Irene, in Kai, even in Vale and Catherine, that I was able to stop percolating my fury through the ground-up outrage and betrayal.

I’m a little bit shell-shocked even yet.

I’ll stay within the bounds of propriety, though, and not discuss it in spoilery detail. Let’s say that, at this point in an ongoing series, things need to shake up and people need to bring their analytical A-game to bear on the underpinnings of the tale. Some very obvious issues have never been so much as gestured at in the first seven books, like “who exactly founded the Library, where’s the Language from, and what the Devil is up with this treaty idea anyway?!” This book is both gesture and resolution.

And this book is the point where everything, I mean everything, changes for the Scooby-group: Vale, Catherine, Kai, and Irene are never going to be the same within or without. Their entire gestalt is altered and, in my never-remotely humble opinion, for the better. They go through more testing fires in this installment than in previous ones, only this time it’s not the faintly repetitive “we’ll climb that hill when we come to it” task-oriented slog that it can feel as though they are by now. I mean…I’ve been here for seven books, I’m reading book eight, I know what to expect…and I still want to know what happens. So Author Cogman does what a smart Dungeon Master does and explains why we’ve gone round the houses this many times and uses that pent-up energy to propel the series onto a different orbitt around the same story.

There are things that I question about the Language still, so I’m primed to pick up book nine. There are ways the Big Burning Questions got answered in this book that leave me wondering what exactly it was that I saw…and that’s exactly what I want in a series read! So hasten to the bookery of your choice and pre-order this latest adventure from the Multiverse’s coolest Librarian-cum-Ninja-via-Bond private story hoard…I mean collection!...and let Irene “Winters” and Kai the Dragon Prince and their brood ring in 2022 with you.

MY WINNING PICKS FOR THE 2021 LOCUS AWARD...four of the eight I'd backed got the nod!

Network Effect has won Best Science Fiction Novel at the 2021 Locus Awards!

Ring Shout has won Best Novella at the 2021 Locus Awards!

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories has won Best Collection at the 2021 Locus Awards!

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking has won Best Young Adult Novel at the 2021 Locus Awards!

These were the ones I reviewed and had in my mind as the best choices in their categories. I am delighted for the winners in their richly deserved success! Incidentally, four of eight...50%!...of my own personal choices winning their categories is the best I've done ever in my long history of handicapping this contest. The entire list of winners can be found here.