This is the second book in the “Bunnicula” series, although Bunnicula the
vampire bunny doesn’t actually appear in it. The Monroe family is going
off on a vacation, and leaving Chester the cat and Harold the dog at a
kennel called Chateau Bow-Wow. As usual, Chester is determined to play
Sherlock Holmes, and as usual Harold (the narrator) is just about capable
of holding down Dr. Watson’s spot on the roster.

Chester soon determines that the pair of wire-haired dachsunds (Heather
and Howard) are in fact werewolves; and when a French poodle named Louise
disappears, Chester is certain that she’s been murdered by her boyfriend
Max and his new friend Georgette. Or maybe by Lyle, the psycho-kitty.
Or by Max’s hanger-on, Taxi. And as more animals disappear, even Harold
begins to think that Chester might be right.

I’ll pay this book the compliment of saying that David enjoyed it very
much, and is looking forward to more; I’ll also say that I found it
rather boring, and not much fun to read aloud. I’d probably have liked
it more if I’d been able to read it silently (and therefore more
quickly), but alas–I fear that this belongs to the set of kid’s books
that really are only for kids.

There are two or three more books in the series, and I’ve no doubt we’ll
get to them all in time.

Every so often I take a shot at a hazard and find something unexpectedly
wonderful, and that’s definitely the case here. What’s even more
wonderful is that this is the first book in a series–and I’ve come to it
late enough that I think that the entire thing has been written. I just
need to go about and buy the subsequent books.

Lord of the Isles is the beginning of an epic fantasy with a
number of interesting and original twists. The world in which it is set
is divided into two oceans, the Outer Sea and the Inner Sea, by a roughly
circular ring of islands. At one time the islands were united under a
single king, but that last king, Carus of Haft, was brought down by a
would-be usurper; the ensuing struggles ushered in a thousand years of
chaos.

There are many wizards in the world of the Isles, and one interesting
twist is that few of them know what they are doing. They’ve got kibbles
and bits of learning, but few of them can perceive the forces they
manipulate by rote. The results they get can be wildly at variance with
their intentions. I like this because it turns one of my pet peeves on
its head–the hero who has exceptionally strong magic powers, but has no
idea how to harness them. Andre Norton wrote a good many of
these, but she’s not alone; Robert Jordan has turned the idea
into a saga that stands at ten books and counting. And the thing that
annoys me about it is the whole deus ex machina thing. Just when
the hero has gotten into a fix and is facing certain death, he reaches
down to the depths of his soul and in a triumph of nebulous, overwrought
prose does the dirty to his enemies in a blaze of wild magic. Which he
still won’t know how to control when it’s all over. I think Drake’s take
on it is much more amusing.

The problem is enhanced because there are magical tides of a sort.
Wizards can draw on two sources of power, the “Sun”, which is a good
principle, or Malkar, which is an evil principle. Most drawn on a
mixture of the two. But the sources are stronger at some times than at
others, and just as happened a thousand years earlier when Carus was
overthrown, Malkar is becoming ever more strong in the world. So these
various wizards not only don’t know what they are doing, not only can’t
they see where their power is coming from, but they are far stronger than
they would have been a hundred years earlier. They are like children
playing with molotov cocktails instead of matches.

On top of this interesting setting, Drake has created a set of intriguing
characters.

There’s Tenoctris, a wizard from an earlier age, cast
forward in time by the magic cataclysm that killed King Carus. Unlike
most of the wizards we run into, Tenoctris’ powers are extremely weak.
But unlike them she’s a scholar; and on top of that she can see the
forces they manipulate blindly.

There’s Garric, a descendant of King
Carus, with whom he has some kind of arcane link; he’s clearly destined
to be the next King of the Isles, though it’s nothing he desires.

There’s Cashel, shepherd, adept of the quarterstaff, and (though he
doesn’t think about it) a strong wizard in his own right. He doesn’t
draw circles and cast spells like the others; instead, he uses it
instinctively. He’s a man of character and integrity, and his magic is
part of that (as Tenoctris says, he has good instincts). He’s also, I
gather, half sprite, which may explain things.

There’s Sharina, Garric’s sister. There are two factions trying to
regain rule of all of the islands, and when she is discovered to be the
long and well-lost daughter of the Duke of Haft, and thus heir to Carus,
she becomes a pawn in their hands. But she’s well able to take care of
herself.

And there are as many others that I don’t have time to write about. I
like many of them. And they don’t bicker incessantly like
Robert Jordan’s characters, which is just about worth the
price of admission.

The bottom-line is, if you have any taste for epic fantasy, buy it.
You’ll like it.

Andrew Dalziel is looking out the back window of his house late one
evening when he sees a murder committed in the house just behind. He
dashes over and arrests the man with the gun, a local builder named Swain.
His wife is dead, shot through the head; Swain claims that she was trying
to commit suicide, and that he was trying to take the gun away when she
shot herself. His story is corroborated by the other man present, a
fellow named Waterson with whom Mrs. Swain has evidently been having an
affair.

But Dalziel knows what he saw, and he’s certain that it was murder.
Others, notably the Chief Constable, are less sure–in fact, they think
he’s flat out wrong–and Dalziel had been drinking.

While Dalziel’s doggedly pursuing a murder verdict nobody else believes
in, Pascoe is dealing with a series of letters Dalziel’s been sent, from
a woman who aims to kill herself. Not immediately, but some time in the
near future. The letters are anonymous, but we know she has to be
someone we’ve met in the course of the book, so who is she?

I liked it. But if you’ve been following along for the last couple of
months, you knew that. I must say, it’s a pleasure to read somebody as
consistently good as Hill.

The constable of the little Yorkshire village of Enscombe has gone
missing. He’s been on bad terms with many of the locals, and has engaged
in a fist fight with one of them. Still, his boss wants to know where
he is if he’s alive, and where the body is buried if he’s dead. And
that’s really what the book is about–where all the bodies are buried in
Enscombe.

Rarely has a mystery writer led me on such a tortuous and delightful wild
goose chase as Hill does in this book, and seldom have I enjoyed it so
much when I could see the pattern whole. At each stage I was sure I knew
what was going on–and I never did, right up until the end.

I become more impressed with Reginald Hill with each book of his I read.
I think this one is my favorite to date.

OK, so this one was better than The Deep Blue Good-By.
There’s less random violence, and perhaps marginally less cynicism.
It’s more of a straightforward investigation, rather than a treasure
hunt. And some of the side characters are really quite amusing.

I’m still unimpressed by the god-like power of McGee’s sexual healing,
though.

Bernie Rhodenbarr books are always good for a couple hours of good, light
fun. They follow a basic formula that every book about him I’ve read so
far hasn’t deviated from at all. Bernie burgles an apartment. Someone
gets murdered. Bernie gets blamed. Bernie has to figure out who did the
murder so he doesn’t end up in prison. Bernie does and all is well. It’s
comforting. Block elaborates a little with Bernie’s friend, Carolyn, the
lesbian owner of a dog washing service just down the road from his
bookstore. And there is the woman painter, Denise, and her genius son.
And Bernie’s “cop on the take”, Ray, who’s always there to make the final
arrest after Bernie figures out who did it. This one is no different,
really. Perhaps a little more thoughtful than the others when the fence,
Abel Crowe, dies. What I haven’t quite figured out is why I like Bernie
so much. He’s a thief, for goodness sake, albeit an ethical one. He could
make a go of his bookstore if he wanted but he likes to steal. And I
like reading about him doing it. I have more on the shelf waiting for
when I need a good, light read.

This is completely silly book, as anyone who read the authors’ earlier
book Rats, Bats, and Vats would expect. It’s also a much
better book, without the rough edges that made
Rats, Bats, and Vats a bit of a slog.

Pyramid Scheme is an alien invasion novel with a difference.
As the book opens, a funny looking black pyramid crash lands in the
middle of the University of Chicago. People who go too close to it tend to
disappear. Not all of them; but a large fraction. Sometimes they come
back; but if so it’s because they are dead or dying. With each person
swallowed, the pyramid gets bigger.

And what’s inside the pyramid? The whole world of Greek myth. What’s it
doing there? Ah-ah! That would be telling.

But you can take it from me, Medea’s been getting a bum rap all these
years. And Odysseus isn’t anyone you’d want to bring home to mother.

John Thomas Stuart has a friend, and a problem. The friend, whose name
is Lummox, is an alien creature with six legs that Stuart’s
great-grandfather brought back from a trip to the stars. Lummox is about
the size of a pair of hippos, stronger than a dozen or so elephants, and
will eat anything it can find. Anything. Steel girders, high
explosives, rose bushes, you name it. Lummox can talk, but appears to be
about as smart as, say, a three year old. Do you see the problem?

And then a space ship–a very large space ship–appears in the Solar
System and announces that if they don’t get Lummox back, they’ll take
steps. Informed sources assure the powers that be that those steps are
liable to include complete planetary destruction.

What’s a young man to do?

If you’ve been following the web log for the last few months, you’ll
remember that I’ve been trying to find all of the early Heinlein novels I
hadn’t previously read. I’m not sure, but I think this is the last one.
The interesting thing is, it’s written during the period in which
Heinlein wrote all his juveniles, and it does feature a young adult hero
and heroine, but it doesn’t have the same tone as his other juveniles.
The politicking that goes on at the end has the tone of
Stranger in a Strange Land or
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; I was actually rather surprised
that it wasn’t written about ten years later.

It’s like this, see. You’re a member of an advanced race, and the
Prime Directive won’t let you use advanced weaponry on the primitive
inhabitants of the backward planets you want to exploit for raw
materials. No, you have to bargain with the primitive little creatures.
And then one of your competitors has a bright idea. They kidnap an army
from a primitive planet–the creatures call themselves “Romans”–and they
make these “Romans” fight their battles for them, using the primitive
weapons they know best. It’s been a couple of centuries, and your
competitor is now top dog. What do you do?

If you’re like the alien in this book you go back to the same planet, and
see if you can find some Romans of your own. What you end up with is an
army of English longbowmen on the way to Agincourt, and everything seems
to go amazingly well–for awhile. But Englishmen have minds of their
own, don’t you know.

This is a fun book. It isn’t Poul Anderson’s
delightful The High Crusade, but it’s fun.

One of the problems with slightly offcenter speculative fiction is that
the reader has to understand the subculture or political situation or
technology the author is talking about. Authors quite often ask the
question “What if…” and then go on to tell a story or spin a tale that
answers the question. What if…we could clone dinosaurs from fossil DNA?
Jurassic Park. Not a particularly good book, way too gruesome for my
taste, but an interesting question in light of the recent developments in
cloning technology. Should we? How far do we go?

In The Man in the High Castle, Dick answers the question “What
if the Allied Forces had lost WWII? What would the world be like?” The
book is interesting not for his speculations but because his story
reflects light from what really did happen after the war. Of course you
have to know what happened after the war to appreciate the book. It was
written in 1962. The Cold War. The division of Germany. The diplomacy of
brinksmanship. The Stalinist state. Joseph McCarthy. Those things were
all current, still fresh.

In the book, the Allies lost. Roosevelt was assassinated before America
could enter the war. The US is divided roughly at the Rockies into a Nazi
German state and a Japanese one. Americans are a repressed nation. The
Four Freedoms and all the rest of the Bill of Rights have disappeared.
The Nazis have carried out horrific genocidal experiments in Africa,
thankfully not fully explained. The remaining Africans are slaves, as are
the Chinese. And one man writes a book about what could have happened if
the Allies had won the war. It’s a revolutionary thought. And it isn’t
suppressed in the more liberal Japanese west. I found the whole premise
very interesting.

Unfortunately, “A Scanner Darkly” didn’t hold forth with the same
quality. It was mushy in parts, hard to follow, long winded and not all
that pertinent to anything in general. Most of the problems I had with it
was that Dick was trying way too hard to find great meaning about society
and individuality in the drug culture. I don’t personally find much
meaning there. But part of the problem, I have to admit, is that the used
copy I picked up had obviously been used by a student reading it for a
class. Marginalia in pink gel pen with hearts over the I’s instead of
dots distracted me. Especially since she, and I can only assume the
writer was female, seemed to find it so deep. In fact I started reading
the marginalia and then the text just to see what the previous owner had
made of that paragraph or that sentence. And then I started to wonder the
kid who had taken these notes and why was she was finding this so
interesting. About that time, I realized I was pathetically bored and
put it down.

Too many books, too little time.