A thrilling demolition of tropes and expectations in The Demon Cycle

From The Week of December 30th, 2013

There are many ways to measure a man. We can judge him on how he treats his fellows, on how he acts when there's no one around to watch him, even on how he represents himself to those who know no better. But these observations can only tell us so much, and mostly about the public and private faces of someone shaped by a million different experiences and interactions. Hence, it's popular to suggest putting him to the most extreme test, of stripping away every advantage to see what he is like when the crucible is upon him. But even cowards can find courage when there's nothing left to lose. No, the best way to measure a man is to give him the world, to grant him godlike powers to change the destinies of himself and everyone he knows. Only then, when there are no societal checks left to confine him, can you truly know him. And this truth is vividly rendered in Peter V. Brett's fascinating and often exhilarating series.

In a devastated world, ground to dust by an unstoppable threat, life is as difficult as it is short. Civilization has been reduced to isolated hollows, semi-autonomous hamlets notionally under the control of various neighboring duchies. But while these regional authorities provide a threadbare framework of centralized control, this is, at best, lip service to a humanity traumatized into servitude by immortal demons which, every night, rise up from the earth's core, yearning for destruction and sustenance. Manifesting from stone and wood, from wind and fire, these seemingly unvanquishable foes reek havoc upon society, preventing it from advancing upon the medieval creeds and conditions that define it.

However, despite the insurmountable obstacles these demons represent, not all hope is lost. For these creatures are susceptible to sunlight, which dispatches them back to the hell they came from, and to the Wards, a hieroglyphic language that, when properly composed, has the power to not only repel the demons with magic, but to harm them as well. Only, the secrets of this language have been long lost, forcing the surviving humans to huddle in their houses, behind the few wards they remember, and pray for a dawn that never comes swiftly enough.

This gruesome stalemate, however, is shattered some 300 years after the rising of the demons when an ancient city is re-discovered by a wandering youth, searching, earnestly and hopelessly, for answers to the demon threat. At great peril, the young man liberates not only warded weapons from this sacred place, but also knowledge of long-lost wards that may well allow humanity to hold its own against the demons. However, this city is not of his heritage and the fight that ensues, over possession of its relics, and the mantle of its stewardship, may well shatter humanity forever and see a permanent night ascend from the Core to claim the world.

A thrilling ride through a broken world yearning for any sign of hope, the first three volumes of the Demon Cycle is, on balance, excellent fantasy fiction. Drawing on the venerable traditions of the epics that have shaped the genre, Mr. Brett begins with a premise that that has underpinned thousands of tales like it, the young man rising out of obscurity to defeat the indefatigable dark power. And yet, instead of relying upon the tropes typical of such tales, he exploits them, establishing the reader's expectations only to shatter them with creative developments of character and plot that charge what should be a stale adventure with energy and vigor. This is no mean feat; it is far easier to travel the well-worn path than it is to strike out on one's own. Thus, Mr. Brett should be celebrated for the exhilarating surprises his subversiveness generates.

While The Demon Cycle, thus far, has a cast of engaging, if overexposed characters, and a familiar world so reminiscent of more epics than I can name, it is pleasingly original in its willingness to draw in the symbols and the tropes of different genres to forge something new. Elements of horror, romance and dystopianism are all present here, lending the work the doom of a post-apocalyptic novel. And yet, these various threads are united by the work's protagonists, all of whom stubbornly put a shoulder into the plot until it is flying along, the work of potent, if opposing, wills. What's more, the author has drawn on the tropes of the video-game world to provide an even more familiar structure to the plot which sees heroes and villains alike methodically ascending from powerless obscurity to triumph and wonder.

The Demon Cycle ought to be a Frankenstein, a monster built from the stolen parts of unconnected creatures and, certainly, it has its bad moments. The genre-bending sees Mr. Brett discordantly inject episodes of extreme violence and physical and sexual abuse into a tale that, at times, feels as emotionally harmless as the Lord of The Rings. What's more, it's borrowing of things familiar to us leads it down a road to cultural insensitivity. For Mr. Brett has uncritically appropriated swaths of Bedouin and Arabic society to stand in for his world's desert people, exposing his readers to a thoroughly westernized view of cultures more complex than he often gives them credit for. These are flaws that drag on the three published novels, burdening them with unnecessary baggage. And yet, given that the series' strength is its capacity to subvert, perhaps these too are simply expectations being set up to be knocked down. We can hope.

This is a superb and unexpected delight that resists being set down. An adventure of the most darkly engaging kind... (4/5 Stars)

A relatively tame but entertaining jaunt in The Exorcist

From The Week of October 8th, 2013

Though humanity is understandably hailed for its many gifts, intelligence, endurance, and dexterousness to name but a few, perhaps its most unsung virtue is its keen sense for what is and is not real. Thanks to the human brain's capacity to chronologically order our memories and to differentiate between our conscious and unconscious states, we can distinguish, without effort, reality from dream, the actual from the fantasy. By and large, we take this virtue for granted. After all, few among us ever experience even a moment's uncertainty about the concreteness of the world around us. But to spend even a few moments with those laboring under any of the disassociative disorders is to understand that our sanity hinges on this bedrock certainty, that to question what is real, even for a moment, is to lose confidence in our ability to distinguish it at all, creating a vicious cycle of doubt that plunges the afflicted into a world of phantoms and confusion. This is a truth William Peter Blatty deploys to wonderful effect in his famous work.

Chris MacNeil has it all. A famous, wealthy actress, with homes in Washington D.C. And Los Angeles, she wants for nothing. She has the loyalty of her friends and the love of her family, in particular, Regan, her 12-year-old daughter whose sweet nature brings light to her life. But despite being at the peak of her powers, despite opportunities to become a director, which would launch her on a new and exciting faze of her career, her life is about to take a sinister turn. For her lovely, Georgetown home is experiencing numerous, inexplicable disturbances -- strange sounds, weird chills, foul odors -- that appear to culminate in the sickening of Chris' cherished daughter. While Regan's body wastes away, and while her disposition descends into viciousness and cruelty, her mother and her household flail for answers even while being pulled down into a dark, malevolent world they cannot comprehend.

First published in 1971, and later adapted into a famous film, The Exorcist is a strange and somber work that largely withstands the ravages of time. But for a few memorable scenes, Mr. Blatty rejects the baseness and depravity of modern horror for a somber, almost contemplative journey into madness and wickedness. Consequently, the modern reader is initially compelled to adjust to a slower-paced narrative that revels as much in its quiet moments as it does in the shocking and fantastical. Itself n adaption of two actual exorcisms that occurred in the 1940s, the work is deliciously creepy, a Gothic drumbeat that patiently builds to a snarling, thrashing crescendo that makes the slow build worthwhile.

There would've been little that The Exorcist's first-run readers would've found charming about Mr. Blatty's entry into the world of the weird and vicious. However, with the passing of more than 40 years, one cannot help but wryly appreciate the decades of cultural change that transpired between then and now. The novel depicts its characters as fundamentally rational beings, people who first look to science for explanations long before falling back upon superstition. Mr. Blatty undoubtedly emphasized this point to better establish the contrast between the actual world and the wicked forces attempting to work their will in it, but the work's distrust both of pseudo science (psychiatry) and the unprovable (religion) expose it as a piece of its time and certainly not of ours. One senses that Chris MacNeil would've been far quicker to leap into the arms of pharmacology today than she was in her time. This is not a flaw. On the contrary, it adds a valuable, anthropological component to an otherwise ordinary work.

That said, The Exorcist is beleaguered by tameness. Our expectations for gore and brutality have been so profoundly shaped by contemporary works of film and television that, but for a few notable moments of foul language and sacrilege, the work is virtually devoid of frights. It is far more comfortable in the arena of the creepy than it is of the scary which distinguishes it from the masses but at the expense of making it seem almost quaint by comparison.

A successful piece of charming entertainment... (3/5 Stars)

Blood, cruelty and a dark future of exploitation in The Bel Dame Apocrypha

From The Week of March 18, 2013

Though it seems, at present, the only effective means of solving international disputes, war exacts a terrible price from its practitioners. Its bombs and bullets, missiles and machine guns, may well be blessings that resolve disagreements through conquest, but with every death, with every cratered building, hatred is inflamed in the hearts of the victims and their families, a hatred that, when properly nourished, prolongs war and ensures that neither side can extract themselves from its embrace without scars that run soul deep. Thus, war's price is more war, war that does not end. For even if the battlefields are cleared and the enemy is in chains, revenge lingers in the minds of the vanquished, making the prospect of peace nothing more than an idealist's fantasy. This Ms. Hurley makes exquisitely and tragically clear in a trilogy that is as difficult as it is engaging.

On a distant world far in humanity's future, civilization has descended into nightmare. After centuries-old attempts to terraform the planet only partially succeeded, the technologists and gene masters who sought to turn this arid planet into a paradise withdrew, leaving their descendents to flounder in the desert sands of a world baked by two vicious suns. Cities on Umayma are isolated havens protected from the worst of the planet's depravities by programmable organic filters which sheathe these ports of civilization, keeping out the grotesquely mutated monstrosities that slither and snake across the rest of its blasted surface. But even though these filters protect the humans from Umayma's natural dangers, they cannot protect them from themselves.

Since the withdrawal of the colony's founders, Umayma's inhabitants have devolved into religious and territorial warfare that has virtually halted technological and societal progress. Umayma's various nation states, each of which zealously practice a form of Islam, have fallen back on the barbarism of biological weaponry to enforce their particular beliefs. This chaos has not only sewn blood feuds into the very fabric of Umaymian life, effectively ensuring conflict for generations to come, it has distorted their faiths and their societies in ways that would be unimaginable to their ancestors. Not only have the traditional gender roles been distorted, but political power has accreted into the hands of the few, while doctrine has cruelly stagnated, offering no solace to those mutated humans who are more creations of Umayma than they are of god.

Through this hellish environment moves Nyxnissa so Dasheem, a rugged, resilient bountyhunter haunted by her past. After a stint on the front lines of her nation's most recent hot war, she was welcomed into the service of the Bel Dames, a government-sanctioned death squad tasked with removing inconvenient and undesirable elements from her country's landscape. The harsh and ruthless Nyx proves herself quite adept at being a Bel Dame, taking pride in her grizzly work, that is, until she is betrayed by her superiors and cashiered from the Bel Dames, abandoned, without friends or income, onto the rough streets of her hometown. Nyx slowly rebuilds her life, hiring on a team of assassins to help her execute the jobs that come her way. Unfortunately for Nyx, no job of significance can take her far enough from the halls of power that she won't be drawn back in to the world of vicious politics and planetary conquest that dismissed her so thoughtlessly. Nyx survived having her title revoked, but can she continue to win and live in a world that seems set upon her death? Only the gods, who have so clearly forsaken Umayma, can say.

As violent as it is bizarre, The Bel Dame Apocrypha is fascinating fiction. A harsh mashup of the science fiction and urban fantasy genres, it is a ruthless and jagged portrayal of lives lived at the very limits of physical and spiritual endurance, on a world too reminiscent of Hell to be coincidental. Sparing neither favorites nor fools, Ms. Hurley is equally savage with her wicked pen, heaping depravities and betrayals upon her beleaguered characters, demanding only that they survive, that they continue, no matter how slowly or painfully, towards their bloody destinies. This cruelty is, at times, wearing, but not since Martin has it been so successfully executed.

Though The Bel Dame Apocrypha reads, superficially, as little more than an exercise in torment, there is something revolutionary here. For Ms. Hurley has used the demands of war as an excuse to completely invert the traditional roles of men and women. In nasheen, the country that doubles as the trilogy's primary setting, the conflict has lasted so long that men are a scarcity, their numbers hurled for so long into distant battlefields that society has re-shaped itself around women who talk and act like men. In fact, were they given male names, their actions and attitudes would be completely indistinguishable from men. Ms. Hurley's is far from the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women. However, it might well be the first attempt to envision a society dominated by women who fill the roles and dispositions commonly held by men. Which begs a fascinating question.

Are the various attitudes and postures adopted by the genders inherent to those genders, or are they, as Ms. Hurley imagines, inherent only to the roles society requires them to fill? In other words, Are female politicians, warriors, assassins and merchants just as likely to be selfish and corrupt as their male counterparts, or do their natural dispositions shield them from the worst excesses of power's abuse? Arguments for both sides are plentiful, but there can be no doubt that Ms. Hurley has clearly and convincingly stated her case, that only circumstance distinguishes the genders from one another, that we only view women more favorably because we've narrowed their opportunities to be corrupted by power. A provocative view that makes for engrossing reading...

There are flaws here. The Bel Dame Apocrypha is ceaselessly violent. There are few chapters not marred by death and dismemberment. Moreover, Ms. Hurley makes virtually no attempt to gently embed the reader in her world. In fact, she seems to go out of her way to be obscure, to gleefully watch as the reader attempts to orient himself in an utterly foreign environment. This will frustrate some, but for those who stay with her trilogy, this bold strategy pays off wen the rhythms and the schemes of Umayma become all-too-painfully familiar. What's more, the trilogy could have benefited from some additional characters, individuals who would have done a better job fleshing out Ms. Hurley's world. As it is, the perspective rarely strays beyond Nyx and her team which can be, at times, tiresome.

In lesser hands, The Bel Dame Apocrypha might well have been little more than an excuse for savagery. But Ms. Hurley has imagined a world as rich and different as it is dark and cruel. From its organic technology to its paternalistic women, it churns out surprises and profundities with equal measure. This is in no way fare for the weak of heart or stomach, but for those looking for an adrenaline-fuelled ride through an outer circle of Hell, look no further. (4/5 Stars)

A beautiful, bleak tragedy slowly unfurled in Hugh Howey's Wool Series

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Our lies are always with us. For as much as we try to extricate ourselves from them, their stains linger so long as the truths sequestered by their telling remain obscured. And even though it is within our power to remove such a stain with a simple, straightforward confession, most of us cannot bring ourselves to do so. For with the passing of every moment, a lie grows in power, accreting in proportion with the damage it would cause when revealed. For most of us, this is a relatively small problem confined to relationships which operate almost entirely on trust, trust that is undermined with every falsehood. But what about the big lies? The lies institutions sell, the lies societies nurture, the lies governments spin? What if a lie is so monstrously large that the confessing of it would break the world? Mr. Howey uses this question to wonderful advantage in his engrossing and creepy series.

Centuries from now, Earth has become a wasteland. Soaring cities and resplendent nature have been rubbled and ruined by human hubris. What form this hubris may have taken has been obscured by time, by the passing of generations absorbed by the rhythms of life. And yet, the evidence of that ancient disaster remains, the images of gray skies, vicious winds and dead earth beamed into the silo that now harbors what is left of humanity. Outside, the world is cold and decayed, but within the Silo it is warm and vibrant, 144 floors of orderly existence shafting deep into the earth where oil and nitrogen, the essentials of life, can be mined and used to empower civilization.

From all outward appearances, the Silo is quite a harmonious place. Modelled on a small American town, it deploys a hierarchical power structure to safeguard the survival of the species. Its many trades, from engineering to portering, are clearly delineated, their talent pools refreshed by a well-organized cast system that, though not completely rigid, ensures that vocational knowledge is largely past down through families instead of being lost in the chaos of self-determination. This eliminates the need for universities. For aside from some basic knowledge, children grow up absorbing what they need to know from their friends, their family and their environment, a perfect incubator for the generation to follow.

This harmony, however, is a facade. For within the Silo, knowledge is tightly controlled, the rebellious sins of the past erased by not just censorship, but the pact each individual makes with the Silo's collective, that he or she will obey the laws and will avoid heretical questions about the past and the outside, the contemplation of which can lead to disaster. The Silo is largely successful in maintaining this pact, but when the wife of its sheriff is broken by the discovery of one of the Silo's most terrible secrets, the Silo's lawman initiates an investigation, the consequences of which will rock the Silo for generations to come.

One of the first major, sustainable successes in self-publishing, The Wool Series is a riveting collection of short stories which re-imagines the post-apocalyptic drama for the 21st century. Harnessing the most terrifying elements of horror, mystery and science fiction, Mr. Howey manages to infest the reader with a powerful sense of creeping wrongness, of gnawing claustrophobia, of crushing bleakness which, though potent, is rarely off-putting. This is a serious alchemical achievement. For activating such emotions can, when overcooked, provoke in the reader an antipathy that, when conjured, is all-but impossible to suppress. That Mr. Howey has found the proper balance here exemplifies his skill.

Though the series adopts a fairly novel approach to an old premise, the notion of a civilization in a bottle, this is not its only virtue. Mr. Howey has imbued his characters with winning personalities that rarely stray into two-dimensional caricatures. What at first appears to be overly simplistic blacks and whites eventually evolve into far more complicated grays whose ambiguities please far more than they irritate. Moreover, the author's sense of cause and effect is delightful. For its clear that the entire plot of the series is kicked off by a single, subtle action, one that creates a subsequent chain that ignites wholesale changes in the author's universe. Instead of fighting this, or even modulating it, Mr. Howey appears only to encourage the eruption, to follow eagerly where the falling dominos lead him. This is a refreshing development for a fairly stale genre.

For all its virtues, though, The Wool Series is not without its flaws. Some of its ex-post justifications for how the world came to be so twisted are decidedly threadbare, revealing gaps in logic that are troublesome. Moreover, after the first five stories, which grapple with the lives of those within the Silo, the series branches out to try to animate the days leading up to the disaster that created this dark world. This fails both theatrically and as a character study. For not only are the near-future characters decidedly less interesting than those who populate the Silo, the premature revelation of how the Silo came to be robs us of one of the series' most successful features, that the reader knew only as much as the Silo's characters knew, a reality which allowed us to unknot the mystery of its secrets and its origins alongside them. Granting us this omnipotent perspective severs this intimate connection with the Silo. It's clear that the author did this with an eye towards converging past and present at the climax of his tale, but the price he has paid for this is, to my mind, too high.

This is excellent, cross-disciplinary science fiction with the power to keep one up at night with dreams of a dark, authoritarian future. It would be worthy of your hard-earned even if each tale wasn't priced at $1, a supreme value that lights the way to the future of publishing, a little coin from a mass audience. One of the most inventive reads in some time... (4/5 Stars)

The Expanse: Books 1 and 2 by James S.A. Corey

From The Week of September 24, 2012 While many, in our civilization, have rightfully blamed religion for much of the chaos and war that have tormented the last 2,000 years of human history, science is equally capable of enshrouding the world in death and darkness. For science without morality is not a tool by which progress is made through rationality; it is nothing more than a systemic means by which the few exploit the many in the name of the greater good. Good science, then, must adhere to the same standard that drives good religion, a positive, ethical framework that always places the rights of the individual above the welfare of the masses, knowing that, to do so, guarantees the rights of everyone. This is a difficult lesson, one that requires us all to overlook our biases to glimpse a deeper, more universal truth about human behavior. It is a lesson devastatingly taught in these first two volumes of a fascinating and disturbing trilogy.

Centuries from now, humanity will not have solved all of the problems that plague it today. There will not be medical cure-alls that dispel all diseases; there will not be wonderful technologies that obviate the need for extractive economies; there will not be political structures that promote good works while discouraging corruption. Instead, there will exist a species much like our own. Oh, humans will have invented interplanetary engines that will allow them to settle on the planets and moons of our solar system. They will even have made discoveries in genetic engineering that will allow them to grow useful crops on these inhospitable rocks, allowing humans to live and breathe in any of a dozen habitats beyond the orbit of Earth. But the underlying inequities will remain. The shortsighted sins that have hobbled our species for the whole of recorded history will still be with us, only now the greedy and the lustful, the powerful and the ambitious, will be armed with weapons and engines capable of destroying entire civilizations.

In Leviathan Wakes, the series' opening salvo, we meet two very different individuals trying to live in this dangerous, complicated universe. James Holden is the executive officer of the Canterbury, a spaceship designed to retrieve water, in the form of ice, from the solar system's less hospitable zones and deliver it to human habitats where it can be bought and consumed by the some 40-billion humans who now live and flourish in the glow of our star. An idealist, formerly of the UNN, the naval arm of the United Nations armed services, Holden endeavors always to act in the best interests of his crew and of humanity. And if that means he must trumpet dangerous truths from the deck of his ship to the rest of the solar system then that is how it must be. Consequences be damned... For truth must always triumph over secrecy. There is no other way for justice to prevail over corruption.

Joe Miller is Holden's polar opposite. A middle-aged detective thoroughly captured by the harsh demands of policework, he has been beaten down by thirty years of investigations and arrests that never seem to make a dent in the crime he's been contracted to control. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, vice will continue to flourish in a society plagued by inequities and broken dreams. His life takes a decidedly sharp turn, however, when he is asked to retrieve a wayward rich girl from the slums of the asteroid belt and forceably return her to the wealth and privilege of her Martian parents. For in accepting this contract, he stumbles upon a terrible secret. Someone is playing with genetics in a way so foul that it disgusts even the hard-hearted Miller who, through circumstance and good fortune, teams up with a grieving and infuriated Holden to get at the heart of a most grotesque mystery. Someone has unleashed a terrifying virus upon humanity. But why? And to what end? In Caliban's War, the series' second instalment, ambition has once again endangered the human race. The protomolecule, that most alien and incomprehensible virus that ignited so much death and chaos in Leviathan Wakes, has resurfaced in two vastly different ways. The most obvious strand is currently feverishly reconfiguring Venus, transforming it from a Hellish hothouse into a planet of unimaginable design and destiny. The subtler strain is at work in a secret laboratory on Ganymede, a populated moon of Jupiter, where the theft of some immuno-compromised children has gone entirely unnoticed thanks to a quick but brutal shooting war between troops loyal to Mars and Earth. When the dust has settled and Ganymede lays in ruins, sixteen missing children is hardly a priority except for one man, the desperate father of one f the girls who'll do anything to get her back. Holden and his crew, made frantic by the protomolecule's re emergence, adopt the father's mission in hopes of it leading them to the powers who insist on risking humanity's very existence.

Dominated by blood and war, zombies and viruses, The Expanse is exquisite, cinematic science fiction. James Corey, the pen name for a collaborative effort between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, has assembled from numerous inspirations two powerful, winningly original novels that are as painfully realistic as they are unflinchingly gory. Many influences are made manifest here, from the horror of Dean Koontz to the institutional corruption of Richard Morgan, to the space-combat realism of C. J. Cherryh, to the biological realism of Paul McAuley. But The Expanse is neither a re-imagination of, nor dependent upon, these influences. On the contrary, it rises well above the fray, rejecting the derivative destinies of most works of its kind to chart its own ambitious and exhilarating course.

There is plenty here for everyone: political corruption, institutional mismanagement, zombie horrors and creepy alien technology. There are wars and firefights, terraforming and genetic engineering, but in the end the series' genius lies in its characters who were as carefully laid out as they are stunningly realized. Holden's idealism set against Miller's cynicism is the most obvious and successful polarization, but Abraham and Franck have taken just as much care with their world's secondary characters, animating them with a power that can be both delightful and terrifying. There is an exquisite exactitude here, a vanishingly rare attention to character detail that makes every single one of the actors in this drama come to life to a degree that puts to shame the efforts of lesser lights.

There is no question in my mind that The Expanse is the kind of science fiction that could be successfully brought to the silver screen, causing a new generation of TV-viewers to fall in love with the genre. For like the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse puts the fiction before the science. It cares more about its characters and the ethical dilemmas they are confronted with than it does about the science which, nonetheless, is successfully welded atop this foundation of character. It is a futuristic war shaped by a Wikileaks-style debate over the control of information and the ambition of institutions to do as they please. In this, it cannot but be relatable to our masses.

Winning work. Occasionally a bit too preoccupied with gore, but in every other respect extraordinary. (5/5 Stars)

Countess Dracula by Tony Thorne

From The Week of September 17, 2012 cruelty is a force as puzzling as it is pernicious. Capable of ruining lives and cultures with equal ease, it has engulfed entire centuries in blood and war, its ugly urges spelled out in scars that persist to this day. But while its existence is undeniable, its origins are less clear. For humanity is a species built on altruism, on the singular notion that one act of kindness will be returned with interest. It is this very system of positive reciprocity that has built our civilization. This too is undeniable. Where, then, is there room for cruelty in this equation? It seems antithetical to the very ideas that have elevated humanity out of the muck of ignorance. Whatever its origins, its power is tragically clear, a truth demonstrated in Mr. Thorne's biography of one of history's most gruesome figures.

A woman now hopelessly sheathed in legend, Elizabeth Bathory has become a titillating symbol of cruelty. A 16th-century daughter of one of Hungary's most powerful noble families, she has had ascribed to her, by various, contemporary sources, unimaginable acts of brutality which she was said to have salaciously inflicted upon her own female servants. Having reputedly cultivated a small circle of cronish confidantes to execute her fiendish will, she subjected these helpless girls to boiling baths and sadistic floggings which were said to have filled her halls with blood and death. So legendary was she that her cruelties inspired the myth of the heartless mistress bathing in the blood of virgins in order to recapture the beauty of her spent youth.

But who was Elizabeth Bathory? And just how cruel has history been to her? To answer this question, Mr. Thorne, a cultural historian, delves into the histories of both the Countess and the region that birthed her to unearth a handful of tantalizing clues about this most controversial creature. He discovers that, while the Countess was by no means an angel, her deeds were only remarkable for having been authored by a woman. Bathory was a product of a dark, warlike period in European history, one that produced many masculine atrocities. When these crimes are committed by men, Mr. Thorne argues, they are accepted as the deeds of a man shaped by his time. But when a woman wields a knife dripping in innocent blood, then these are not crimes but unforgivable sins that cannot be tolerated.

Charting the political forces that animated Bathory's world, Mr. Thorne makes the convincing case that the Countess' crimes were inflated by men who had every reason to discredit her. For proof, he points to Bathory's perilous position. For while she was undoubtedly one of her realm's most powerful figures, she was a widow with vast estates and near-endless wealth, both of which were coveted by her family and her rivals. With enemies lurking in every corner, waiting only for a weakness upon which to pounce, her downfall was as certain as sunrise. And so, when the abused bodies of dead servants were discovered on her land, and this evidence married to the compelling testimony of a loyal priest who had previously complained about rumors of ill-treatment from Bathory's castle, the means of her demise was assured. She would be devoured by the wolves she could no longer keep at bay.

Though Countess Dracula is at times dry, burdened by a blur of deeds and families that have long-since been pulled down into the depths of history, it is simultaneously a tempered and scholarly reconstruction of the life of a woman of her time. For Mr. Thorne is correct to contend that, if we but thought of Bathory as a man, these awful deeds would be contextualized in the broader life of a tyrant. Any of a hundred men have done no worse than Elizabeth Bathory, but these cruelties are viewed through a more adoring lens. In the Countess' case, her gender makes her unusual, allowing it to play into Christian preconceptions of sinfulness that have helped propel her out of reality and into nightmare. Bathory was undoubtedly brutal, but she is also a reminder that cruelty does not stand alone. It has causes. And if we are willing to recognize this for Tamerlane, then we must also do so for the Countess.

A sober but rewarding analysis of a difficult subject. Mr. Thorne does well with what he has. (3/5 Stars)

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

From The Week of August 27, 2012 Genius presents itself in many forms. It resides in the tactical brilliance of a general, the mathematical wizardry of a savant, the emotional acuity of a politician and the masterful memory of an historian. From the business world to the academic, from high finance to everyday life, its expression benefits us all, oftentimes in ways we neither witness nor appreciate. But then, once in a great while, genius emerges from the tumultuous activity of a few billion souls, manifesting and demanding with its power that, in ways large and small, we recognize its glory. For it has brought into the world something new, something bold and something beautiful. Mr. Kushner captures just such an event with this fascinating biography of two very different geniuses.

Born in different years, in different states, and to different lives, no one could have foreseen the bonds of trust and ambition that would weld John Carmack and John Romero into the creators of the most revolutionary gaming franchise of the 20th century. Products of broken homes and blunted dreams, they came of age in the shadow of the Cold War of the 1980s, not the technological revolutions of the 1990s. They were told, by their world and their parents, to seek out conventional lives in the arms of customary industry, to make successes of themselves in the boring fields of the tried and the true. But the two Johns were not ordinary men living ordinary lives. Driven by a heady mixture of talent and determination, they rejected the old to welcome in the new, to flood themselves with its glories and its limitations, to find in its code a stage upon which they could perform.

After years of struggle, of sleepless nights and restless weekends, of toiling for the man and his masters, of striving to overcome the restrictions of technology and ignorance, they would break through, publishing in December of 1993, Doom, the first in a series of games that have transformed the PC industry. Combining a relentlessly hellish aesthetic with startling advancements in gameplay, Doom would go on to spawn numerous, successful sequels as well as comic books, novels,films and board games. But while their fortunes rose, their affection for one another waned until an end to their successful partnership in the late 1990s sent the two Johns on very different paths: one into the arms of fame and gaming and the other into mathematics and rocketry. But though their years of collaboration may be few, their legacy will live on for decades to come.

Masters of Doom is a lively history of the rise of the modern, technological world as seen through the eyes of two men whose creations helped create it. Mr. Kushner, an American journalist, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour across the southern United States, following John Carmack (coding wunderkind) and John Romero (gaming visionary) as the winds of fortune blew them together, as their complementary talents interlinked, and as their powerful thirst for success drove them to change the world. The author maps out the history here wonderfully well, describing the dominant gaming cultures of the late 1980s and early 1990s, cultures that would be radically restructured by the happy disruption of ID software's revolutionary products. But he is easily at his best when capturing the two Johns, detailing extensively the similarities that helped forge their partnership and the differences that destroyed it.

Mr. Kushner does not ask the reader to root for Carmack or Romero even though it would have been easy for him to do so. He does not pass judgement on their foibles or their failings even though they are powerful and legion. He remains pleasingly agnostic concerning the major themes that emerge from his work: pride and power, genius and revolution, betrayal and hubris. Like the extent to which the two Johns overturned the paradigm, all of this is left for the reader to sort through, concluding as he sees fit. This is a rare and welcome gift. For many such experts seek to pontificate more than present. There is none of that here.

Masters of Doom shimmers with personalities and blood, with cultural subversion and libertarian economics. It is an irrepressible ride through a time that may never come again, more's the pity. For it is difficult to imagine more change resulting from the efforts of a handful of societal rejects. We would be so lucky to have history repeat itself in the years to come... (4/5 Stars)

The Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman

From The Week of August 20, 2012
As much as we yearn to know ourselves and our loved ones as profoundly as possible, divining the depths of the human soul is a dangerous and oftentimes scarring experience. For down in that abysmal chasm churns the darkness of our grim nightmares, our secret desires, and our raw emotions, none of which should ever be allowed to rise up into the light of day. For these are the antecedents of our animalistic heritage, the leftovers of our primal urges that have been tamed by both the strictures and the structures of civilization. They are the ghostly shadows of who we might have been had we been born a million years ago, when there existed nothing other than the law of the jungle.

What if they were brought into the light? What if all of our worst thoughts and fears, needs and passions, were given form, made reality by nothing more than the wishing of it? What kind of world would result from such unleashed animae? Ms. Friedman speculates in her sprawling trilogy.

On a world thousands of lightyears from Earth, life has evolved along profoundly different lines. For while some conventional animals prowl the surface of Erna, these are but offspring of an immense, unknowable force that emanates from the very heart of this enigmatic world. In ways unfathomable to anyone else, Erna is alive, its eminently malleable power distributed along spiritual and physical faultlines that cover the planet's surface, ever changing to perfectly reflect the wishes and the needs of the creatures that call Erna home.

e Having known only tranquility for millennia, this power is profoundly disturbed when human colonists first descend upon this strange new world. Refugees from thousands of years of cold sleep, this small band of men and women were lead to Erna by the judgement of their ship's AI which, having been designed to comb the galaxy for worlds habitable to humans, decided that Erna was hospitable to human life. But the AI could have never imagined the threat into which it sold its creators. For Erna's lifeforce can now learn the patterns of the nightmares fostered by human fears, turning once peaceful Erna into a dangerous world of darkness and despair.

In Black Sun Rising, the trilogy's opening salvo, more than a thousand years have elapsed since humanity's disastrous arrival on Erna and, though humans have lost the knowledge and the use of the advanced technology that delivered them to this exotic world, life has stabilized. For not only has humanity managed, to a limited degree, to work these energies unique to Erna, a powerful church has also risen to impose order upon the chaos of human civilization, teaching its followers to control their emotions and their dreams, to redirect those energies to a benevolent divine. It's clear that this divine does not exist, not initially, but if sufficient numbers believe in him, then he too shall be conjured into being by Erna in the same way the vampires and ghosts, demons and ghouls, have been.

A ranking member of this church, Rev. Damien Vryce is one of the sorcerous few who can influence the native Fae, a fact which earns him nothing but suspicion and standoffishness from the notoriously anti-Fae church. Still, the church will require Damien's specialized talents if they are to discover just what kind of nightmare is stalking the streets of its capital and devouring the memories of some of its citizens' brightest minds. Taking on the duty to find and kill this nightmare, Vryce initially sets his sights on the legendary Hunter, a vampire-like nobleman who has fed off of the fears of young, impressionable women to stay alive for centuries. But when the answer to this mystery proves to be far more profound, Damien is forced to make unpleasant alliances in order to cross half the world to find and uproot the source of this destructive evil.

In When True Night Falls, the trilogy's second instalment, Rev. Vryce finds himself at the heart of an even more insidious web. For his most recent mission has revealed that a deeper game is afoot, one that will require he and the Hunter to leave everything they know to travel east, into an empire from which no westerner has returned in living memory. Received warmly by the empire's matriarchal version of the Church, Vryce is initially taken by the peace and the cohesion the Church has managed to exert over the notoriously fickle subconsciousnesses of its human subjects. But when a series of shocking revelations expose the truth of this place, Vryce embarks upon a dangerous journey south, into the very lair of a demon, in hopes of averting a war that will drench his world in blood.

In Crown of Shadows, the trilogy's concluding work, events come to a climactic head when Rev. Vryce discovers that a class of powerful demons has been ruthlessly manipulating recent disasters, conjuring threats that have not only cost Vryce his friends but the support of his Church. Left isolated by his enemy's maneuverings, Vryce is forced to once again draw upon the knowledge and the power of the hated Hunter to try to steer the world from the demonic vision of the future his enemies are trying to bring about, one in which everything he knows and cares for is sold into slavery to a dark power made manifest by their own dark desires. What hope have two almost men have against a thing that can draw power from the pain of millions?

Though troubled, at times, by poor pacing and burdened, throughout, by an over-reliance on quests, The Coldfire Trilogy is imaginative work that withstands the test of time. In her attempt to externalize, to make real, the fears of mankind, Ms. Friedman has conceived of a darkly fascinating world with the atmosphere of Gothic, Victorian England married to the tropes of the classic, questing high-fantasy novel, the union of which has produced a series that is as readable as it is chilling. The Fae as manifestation of human emotion is not precisely novel, but the vigor with which it is applied here causes the work to rise well above the fray, confronting, head-on, the profound costs, to our environment and our fellows, of the arrogance of the human-centric worldview.

Ms. Friedman is, here, positively ruthless. Whereas many authors of fantasy shield their heroes from not only the worst of what their evil enemies have to offer, but the consequences of their own actions, she is willing to pervert what is pure, to defile what is holy, to end what is innocent. She compels her characters to compromise themselves in every imaginable way and then she demands they surrender yet more of their humanity in a kind of cosmic test of their endurance, to see how much they can take before they break under her remorseless hands. In this, she is well ahead of her time. For this work, initially published in the early 1990s, calls to mind trends from much later in that decade, and the next, in which authors and television-show creators tested their heroes on the wrack of their wills, pushing them beyond their stress limits, demanding that they take more, more, more, until they, and the illusions they were responsible for, give way. We are meant to love what is unclean and rebel against what is pure, not as an exercise in simple, dumb hedonism, but in order to shed our prejudices and our blinders, to embrace ourselves in all our flawed glory.

But whereas Ms. Friedman excels at dark storytelling, each work in this trilogy is troubled by lethargic pacing and relentless questing. Each novel is easily a hundred pages too long, bloated by repetitive details that do nothing to deepen the already rich mythology, or advance the already elaborate story. They serve only to hammer away at the grimness of the reality which has been already thoroughly established. Moreover, the high-fantasy conceit of a quest to save the world seems decidedly out of place in a story this dark. Yes, they are handled well in each volume, but Ms. Friedman is a talented enough storyteller to leave aside this tired structure that, anyway, poorly fits her world. The against-all-odds questing merely serves to re-enforce the specialness of her characters, none of whom require such gilding.

The Coldfire Trilogy is engrossing work. It establishes a challenging world and sticks to it with enviable consistency. Moreover, its characters are as flawed as its environment is Gothic, a fact which should please anyone who appreciates darkly flavored fantasy. Well ahead of its time... (4/5 Stars)

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

It has now been 50 years since the publication of Stanislaw Lem's classic, Solaris. And though the passage of time has antiquated certain technological aspects of the tale, it has, in no respect, reduced its philosophical might.

In the distant future, humanity has taken to the stars, exploring interstellar space and setting foot on far-flung worlds. But though these achievements are noteworthy, they stand humanity in poor stead when it stumbles across the enigma that is Solaris, an ocean world riding an awkward orbit between powerful, binary stars. The planet's oddities are sufficiently compelling to earn it a manned research station which is assembled and then lowered into Solaris' atmosphere, where upon it studies the seemingly landless planet. Though there is disagreement over the how and the extent, the experts agree that Solaris is alive, its all-encompassing ocean? A single, conscious entity. This is no simple intelligence, no plant or tree. This is an entity capable of observing even while it is being observed by the human scientists studying it for clues to its composition and its origins.

Kris Kelvin, a trained psychologist, arrives at Solaris, intent upon observing it as well as the station's crew. But though our protagonist seems to possess an admirably ordered mind, his formidable intelligence is immediately threatened when he begins to see things on the hovering station, apparitions that cannot exist. What's more, these manifestations (Guests), which, for Kelvin, take the form of his long-dead wife, are flesh, organized reality sourced from his deepest memories. Slowly, as days give way to weeks, Kelvin, like the crewmen before him, is driven to madness by what cannot be. Haunted by the guilt over his wife's untimely death, he fights for understanding, for a way out of the alienness in which he has been ensnared, but it's clear that, even if he does succeed in physically escaping Solaris, it will always be inside him, enmeshed in his spirit.

Mr. Lem bites off a great deal in a piece which, though it is intellectually engaging, offers little in the way of the satisfying escapism common to most science fiction. He challenges readers to consider what first contact with aliens might be like if the extraterrestrials are not some variation on a familiar form but a thing entirely foreign to us, an organism whose thinking, existing, is so inaccessible to us that it is necessarily inscrutable. In this, Mr. Lem asks us to contemplate the nature of consciousness. How do we know that we are not dreaming? How do we know that we are not part of some hallucination? How do we maintain our sanity in the face of something that can pull from us our deepest fears and use them to examine us even as we are examining it? Though these existential questions are callbacks to Western philosophy, they are also meaningful to the 21st century reader aware of and interested in the ethics of exploitation. The presumptuousness of the human scientists prodding insensitively at Solaris and getting back a response they cannot handle is analogous to the way we have savaged our environment, running roughshod over it and its creatures in an effort to understand ourselves and our world. And though this may have been largely unavoidable, we cannot expect to freely exploit without consequences for ourselves and our civilization.

Solaris is delightfully creepy, entrapping our minds on a distant, alien shore where reality is malleable and enigmas abound. But though the philosophy here is enjoyable, I needed there to be more of an actual story. Mr. Lem is a skilled illuminator of the nature of deteriorating, human relationships, but he does not truly explore Solaris. This may have been an intentional choice on the author's part; after all, how can one explore something one does not understand. But the novel was poorer for it. Nonetheless, Mr. Lem has captured the dark underbelly of human emotion, particularly our tendency to destroy what we do not understand and he's done so with rare skill. (3/5 Stars)