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Review of Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith

SFFaudio Review

Unholy Night
By Seth Grahame-Smith; Read by Peter Nerkot
10 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Published: 2012
Themes: / Fantasy / Mythology / Occult / Christianity / Bible /

“Joseph? Mary? My name is Balthazar. This is Gaspar . . . this is Melchyor. We don’t want to hurt you . . . we’re just looking for a place to rest. But, Joseph? if you don’t put that pitchfork down, I’m going to take it from you and stab you to death in front of your wife and child. Do you understand?”

Wanted thieves Balthazar, Melchyor, and Gaspar, disguised as wise men, show up at a little manger in Bethlehem with a huge star blazing overhead, looking for a hideout from the law. But when Herod’s soldiers begin slaughtering the babies in Bethlehem, Balthazar takes the safety of the Holy Family into his own hands. As fugitives on the run to Egypt, they must escape not only Roman soldiers but creatures of mythology and the occult. Everyone’s either gunning for the Antioch Ghost with a price on his head or the innocent newborn who has such an unearthly effect on those around him.

Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) finally stops inserting his words into other people’s writing and writes a book in his own words. And a fine job he does of it too. For a violent, gore-filled, action-thriller there are a surprising number of very human characters, many of whom we are meant to recognize.

Pontius Pilate appears as an ambitious young officer ambivalent about truth. Mary and Joseph struggle with how to reconcile the truth of Jesus as God with the reality of a baby who must be fed, loved, and parented. Above all, this is Balthazar’s story, who has a complex story-line driving his actions and attitudes. We learn how he became the cynical Antioch Ghost and we wonder if he will find a more worthy goal than vengeance.

Above all, I was surprised to find myself eventually thinking of Unholy Night as modern midrash. Midrash is a traditional Jewish way of trying to understand the underlying spirit of scripture, sometimes connecting it to modern life, by creating parables. This allows for some imaginative storytelling as rabbis look for interpretations with are not immediately obvious but are nevertheless held within the original text.

Grahame-Smith lives up to the midrash ideal by both being respectful to his source material and also using his vivid imagination on a Biblical event that is wide-open to interpretation, Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt with the Christ child. Among other things, the author is very good at opening new views on familiar subjects, such as just how horrible King Herod was. It brings to life the terrible things he did very much as I have read them in history books. One also gets a deeper understanding of the locals’ simmering, resentful hatred of the Roman empire.

Narrator Peter Berkrot is a reader I haven’t come across before but will be seeking out in the future. He conveys just the right amount of cynicism as Balthazar, menace and insanity as Herod, and innocence as Mary. I am not sure how this book comes across in print but I’d listen to it again in a heartbeat thanks to Berkrot’s narration.

Grahame-Smith has delivered a story of Biblical proportions in Unholy Night: zombies, swarms of locusts, epic sword fights, outlaws, obsessed rulers, vengeance, redemption, and more are in this entertaining action tale. That he did it all while staying true to original material that can be unpopular reading these days makes him a writer I am going to seek out in the future. Highly recommended.

Posted by Julie D.

Review of The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

SFFaudio Review

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
By Susanna Clarke; Read by Simon Prebble and Lavina Porter
7 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: 2006
Themes: / Fantasy / Magic / England /

This is a collection of eight short stories that return readers to the world of Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. As I enjoyed Simon Prebble’s narration of Strange & Norrell, I returned to that format to hear these stories. Prebble shares narration duty with Davina Porter whose undeniable skill I enjoyed even more than Mr. Prebble’s and that is saying quite a lot.

Since all but one of these stories were previously published elsewhere, they vary from mere fragments (The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse) to retold fairy tales (Lickerish Hill). These are almost like some of the longer footnotes from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which often meander away to tell fully imagined stories before returning to the main narrative.

The one constant is Clarke’s skill at conveying readers to a magical England in the style of well known 19th-century writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Clarke has a dry wit which enlivens many of the tales and a good imagination for weaving attention holding yarns. I enjoyed all these stories quite a lot. If you are wondering whether to take the plunge into Strange & Norrell, these stories might be a good test of the waters.

Posted by Julie D.

Review of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

SFFaudio Review

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
By Susanna Clarke; Read by Simon Prebble
32 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: 2004
Themes: / Fantasy / Magic / England /

Mr. Norrell is a fusty but ambitious scholar from the Yorkshire countryside. He is also the first practical magician in hundreds of years. What better way to demonstrate his revival of British magic than to change the course of the Napoleonic wars? Jonathan Strange discovers, to his dismay, that he is a natural magician. Because he “feels” his magic rather than depending on books as Mr. Norrell does, they wind up representing two distinctly different ways of doing British magic. Clarke deliberately used a style that calls to mind Jane Austen or Charles Dickens and thus transports the reader to a time gone by when spelling varied, footnotes could be long and involved, manners were paramount, and when it is possible to believe in such a thing as British magic.

I tried this book several times but either wasn’t in the right mood or was expecting something different. Hannah read it, loved it, shoved it on my nightstand, and nagged me about it (with that hopeful, wistful, little puppy look that a mom can’t say no to…). Once I began reading I couldn’t understand why I didn’t warm to it before … the writing is charmingly understated and amusing. Set in England during the Napoleonic war, it is about magic, English practitioners of magic, books about magic, and the Raven King.

However, once I was well into the book I got bogged down with the many wayside visits and long footnotes that added atmosphere but didn’t seem to advance the story. That is when I picked up the audio book from the library. Once I was listening, I began enjoying it immensely more than before. I think I do better with meandering books when on audio for some reason. Eventually I almost became addicted and couldn’t stop listening.

At the end the book suddenly picked up the pace with one thing happening after another. It ended in an unexpected way with some story lines being firmly concluded while others were left to drift off. Usually this would bother me but, in a sense, it was very true to real life, which makes me reflect upon the fact that the way the story was told was very like having someone tell it to you in person. They take little byways of explanation that may not have too much to do with the story and then come back to the point. In listening to the book this made for a delightful and somehow restful story.

This was wonderfully narrated by Simon Prebble whose dulcet tones and perfect pacing helped make the long sentences easily understood and who emphasized the humorous bits without overdoing it. There is no doubt that his narration is the key element that not only got me to the end of the book, but actually left me sad when it ended. Recommended but only for those who do not object to long, meandering stories with a lot of footnotes.

Posted by Julie D.

Review of Joe Ledger: The Missing Files by Jonathan Maberry

SFFaudio Review

Joe Ledger: The Missing Files
By Jonathan Maberry; Read by Ray Porter
4 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2012
Themes: / Short Stories / Supernatural / Horror / Bio-engineering /

The description for this brief collection of short stories says “… author Jonathan Maberry fills in the blanks in his action-thriller ‘Joe Ledger’ novels.”

This isn’t something I’d have picked up myself and, frankly, wouldn’t have bothered if it weren’t sent as a review book. I am usually disinterested in add-on short stories that sew up “loose ends” of novels or serve to tell us what a character’s been doing between one book and the next. In my experience, those are toss-offs and these days, what with 99-cent stories on Amazon, they just serve as money grabbers.

However, we all know I’m a sucker for Joe Ledger and I absolutely love the narrator’s way with these stories so if I wasted a few hours on mental cotton candy so be it. Also I was mildly interested in what seem to be two stories that aren’t connected to any novels, “Deep, Dark” and “Material Witness.”

Countdown: The prequel to Patient Zero and it told me nothing I didn’t learn in the beginning of the book. Honestly, it seemed as if it were a story prospectus given to a publisher to gain interest.

Zero Tolerance: The second story added a little to Patient Zero‘s ending since it could have been called “What Happened to Amirah.” (Pardon my spelling as I’ve only heard the audio for the novel.) Worth paying for? Not to me.

Deep, Dark: With the third story we get to something interesting. As is the case in Joe Ledger novels, it teeters on the knife’s edge between probability and supernatural/horror fiction. The Army has a little problem in one of their underground complexes. A little bio-engineered problem. It’s just a “bug hunt,” as it goes in one of my favorite lines from Aliens, but one that has righteousness on its side.

Material Witness: This story was more interesting than anything preceding it (or following, as it turned out … yes, foreshadowing!). However, that was mostly because Maberry was filling us in on another series of his: the creepiness that is Pine Deep, Pennsylvania. Imagine the house from The Shining, but … it’s a whole town! Maberry’s melding of the two worlds was rather intriguing but not enough to make me want to get whatever book it was he wrote about Pine Deep. For one thing, spoilers abound. I wonder if I already knew all about that “world” if the story would have kept my attention as it did.

Dog Days: The final story and the one which was the test of whether Maberry had improved at short story writing or whether the previous two just created interest because of the unfamiliar material. Yep. Choose door number two. It wasn’t a terrible story, just extremely easy to figure out as Joe Ledger goes to settle a personal grudge against the world’s deadliest assassin. The most interesting thing about it to me was the introduction of Ghost, the wonder dog. One feels (at least I do) that this should have been a prequel or flashback in The King of Plagues. I especially feel this since I spent much of the beginning of that book wondering what the heck happened to Ledger’s cat and why only one or two sentences gave us the dog’s history. This almost reads as discovery writing or something that was edited from a book. Ghost is ok, but he is definitely “made” to be Ledger’s dog, as he is a Wonder Dog with super-canine reflexes and understanding.

Summing up – these files could’ve stayed missing. It’s only four hours long but that is four hours you could use on something uniformly good.

Posted by Julie D.

Review of The King of Plagues by Jonathan Maberry

SFFaudio Review

The King of Plagues
By Jonathan Maberry; Read by Ray Porter
15.5 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2011
Themes: / Horror / Assassins / Virus / Bio-engineering / Thriller /

… He paused. “Tell me again what Scofield said to you. About the river of blood.”

I closed my eyes and found the words. “‘They said that if the rivers didn’t run red with blood, then the blood of my family would run like a river.'”

“Yes. That troubles me.”

“All of it troubles me. The phrasing doesn’t match the rest of what he said. He was clearly quoting, or attempting to quote, something that was said to him. It has a distinctly biblical structure to it. Rivers running red with blood. You’re going to need a different kind of specialist to sort that out. Not my kind of job … I’m a shooter.”

When a huge London hospital is rocked by bomb blasts, thousands are dead or injured. Joe Ledger arrives to investigate and within hours is attacked by assassins and then sent into a viral hot zone during an Ebola outbreak.

Joe has tangled with zombies and he’s battled with dragons. Now he’s up against the seven plagues of Egypt, the best that bio-engineering can provide. What would the seven plagues be without a secret society concocting them for our doom? Not much, of course, and The Seven Kings have a worldwide conspiracy that will test Joe to his utmost.

I especially enjoyed the fact that, unlike the previous two books, readers do not know what the terrorists are planning. Each new attack is experienced along with Joe Ledger as unthinkable plagues descend first upon one place and then another.

That said, the book is still fairly straight-forward about most of the “mysteries” Joe encounters. A young researcher’s family connections seem obvious, as does the source of the final attack that Joe and his team must stop to save the world. Misdirection may be the hallmark of the Seven Kings but it isn’t something that Maberry seems to worry about too much. If it works, then it works. If not, well there is still a ripping good thriller to read.

Interestingly, Maberry includes a henchman with more of a conscience than one expects in a conspiracy of unfathomable evil. This follows the trend of The Dragon Factory where Paris, though capable of committing abominable individual acts, draws the line at mass destruction or EVIL as Maberry would call it. Does this mean there is lesser evil and greater EVIL? Or is it rather like saying that Hitler loved dogs so he had a good side to his personality? I’m not sure just what Maberry is getting at, but it is a very interesting development in his villains.

Villains aside, there is not a lot of character development because it simply isn’t that sort of book, although we do get a bit more light shed on the mysterious Mr. Church. I also enjoyed the addition of Joe’s dog, Ghost, who seems to have almost supernatural abilities of his own as the most perfectly trained attack dog ever. (But, let’s be fair. What other sort of attack dog could keep up with Joe?)

On the negative side, an audio book is not the ideal way to experience some of the torture used on the people forced to help The Seven Kings. It is what one expects from this sort of thriller, but one description was enough and we were treated to several. Also, the description of the Biblical plagues and the contest between Moses and the court magicians was one of the worst I’ve ever heard. It wouldn’t have taken much to remove the idea of “God teaching Moses magic” and tell the original story. It certainly would have taken nothing away from the book. However, this is quibbling and not something that is going to dampen most people’s enjoyment.

Ray Porter continues to do a pitch perfect job narratin the Joe Ledger books. His narration is a key part of the “Joe Ledger experience” for me and, as I’ve noted in other reviews, is the reason I prefer the narration to reading the book myself.

Fast paced and tightly written, The King of Plagues just might be the perfect summer superhero book. If you like your superhero as a hard-bitten shooter, with a white dog named Ghost, who likes nothing better than slaying monsters, that is.

Posted by Julie D.

Review of The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt

SFFaudio Review

The Engines of God
By Jack McDevitt; Read by Tom Weiner
14 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2012
Themes: / Science Fiction / Archaeology / Climate Change / Aliens / Space / Space Exploration /

Climate change has Earth on the brink of disaster. The only viable solution is terraforming other planets to ensure survival. For a small group of archaeologists, however, terraforming is the worst possible solution. The only suitable planet is also the one planet with the most promising artifacts of an unknown alien race. Known as the Monument Makers, the aliens’ buildings feature a seemingly uncrackable code on them. The team is looking for the alien equivalent of the Rosetta Stone and must race against time to finish excavations before terraforming begins.

Despite the fact that the book begins by talking about climate change, which always gives me a sinking feeling, that is just the pretext for launching readers into a mystery. The team’s quest takes them to outer space, other planets, and into extreme danger as they follow the Monument Makers’ trail to discover their whereabouts and why every alien civilization has been abandoned.

This book reads as if it were a series of four novellas strung together with the common thread of tracking the Monument Makers. Each of the completed stories gives Jack McDevitt the opportunity to take the reader a bit further into archaeological mysteries while also examining different planets, space travel, and alien beings. Transitions between “novellas” are minimal at best and character development is weak. Still McDevitt wove a mystery that kept me listening at a red-hot pace. This is surprising because the author revealed his story in a very straight forward manner with plenty of foreshadowing. In McDevitt’s case, however, the telling itself was so compelling that I was fascinated to hear what would happen next.

In short, I enjoyed this very much, although at the end the story suddenly threw off narrative and resorted to bullet points to finish things off. “In audio, it was an abrupt ending that startled me, however, that didn’t spoil it as the story itself was done. In fact, I didn’t care about the “[insert name here] went on to do this” summary and it could have been left out without hurting anything.

Tom Weiner did a fine job of narrating the book. His reading was not something that stood out for any reason but which carried the story along very well. It left me with the memory of story rather than reader, which is surely what good narration should accomplish.

McDevitt tells a very good mystery that gives answers to some questions and leaves others to the readers’ speculation. Engines of God is ultimately a satisfying adventure which introduces us to a universe that he went on to write other novels about and which I will be seeking out.

Posted by Julie D.