The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse by Tom Holt

Published by Orbit on October 10, 2023

I don’t read much fantasy, particularly the kind that involves swords and wizards, dragons, and epic battles. I make an exception for Tom Holt’s interpretation of fantasy. He seems to recognize that most stories in the genre are a bit silly. He exploits the silliness to wring humor from the genre’s tired ideas.

Dawson, Ahriman, & Dawson is a firm of commercial and industrial sorcerers, thaumaturgical and metaphysical engineers, and scholarly magicians. Their clients are primarily nations, planets, and huge businesses. Ahriman possesses fearsome power. He doesn’t usually work but he shows up at the office now and then to demand that the firm generate more money so he can cart it away. He doesn’t need the money but he likes to abuse his partners.

One of the partners, Edward Sunshine, probably doesn’t need to work since he can fill his palms with diamonds from his bottomless purse whenever the mood strikes. A woman who received a delivery intended for Alpha Centauri (the delivery notice says “left with neighbor”) brings it to Sunshine because a friend told her that “weird shit is what you do.” After determining that the object in the package is sentient and malevolent, Sunshine turns to Harmondsworth to help him deal with it. Harmondsworth usually lives in a drawer in Sunshine’s desk but sometimes moves his residence to a tea kettle.

Tom Dawson handles executive recruitment for the firm’s clients. He’s been hired by the planet Snoobis Prime to find a replacement for their god, who died. The not-quite-gods he’s interviewed clearly don’t have what it takes. He considers recommending Santa Claus, who has free time 364 days a year. Santa already has magic and it would only take worshippers to turn him into a god. The position interests Santa, assuming the health plan is adequate.

Brian Teasdale, the youngest partner, takes on the case of a wedding photographer who is troubled by the image of a woman who appears in every picture she takes. The partners eventually realize that the woman in the pictures has been trapped in an asteroid for four thousand years, where her ex-husband imprisoned her after a nasty divorce. Out of spite, she has taken control of the asteroid and has set it on a collision course with Earth. She expects the collision to free her from the asteroid as it destroys the planet that her husband received in the divorce settlement.

A few more characters round out the firm. Tom’s evil twin brother Jerry lives in a steel box in the basement, from which he is allowed to emerge to vote in partnership meetings. Tony Bateman is a shapeshifter. He might be a tree or he might be a toilet in the ladies’ room. Gina, who was once Queen of the Night, works as a sort of office assistant. The characters are considerably more fun than the typical swordsmen and sorcerers of fantasy who take themselves much too seriously.

The loose plot follows characters as they labor to save the Earth from the approaching asteroid, except for those who are interested only in saving themselves. Characters also engage in office politics as they try to undermine each other in their respective struggles to control the firm, or the Earth, or the universe.

Tom Holt excels at dry wit mixed with occasional moments of slapstick. Humor permeates the novel. Teasdale gets his morning coffee from a little caterer in Plato’s ideal reality, making it the best possible coffee. One of the firm’s clients is Consolidated Landrape. A mother creates a planet for her liberal young daughter to save and tells her, “now you really are the centre of the universe. What more could someone your age possibly ask for?” The plot is goofy but coherent, the characters are endearingly grumpy, and the laughs are plentiful. I would say this is Tom Holt at his best, but Tom Holt is always at his best.

RECOMMENDED

Touched by Walter Mosley

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on October 10, 2023

Walter Mosley has a laminated spot on my list of three favorite crime writers. When he strays from crime fiction, I’m less enthused about his novels. Touched is a horror novel. It’s based on a puzzling concept and isn’t nearly as compelling as his Easy Rawlins novels, but Mosley has mastered the art of holding a reader’s interest.

Martin Just is arrested for exposing himself, naked and erect, to a distant nine-year-old girl while he is standing on the second-floor deck of his home. His wife believes he was sleepwalking. Martin knows he was awake but isn’t sure how he came to be on the porch — or, for that matter, back on Earth.

Martin believes he is one of 107 people who were taken from Earth, trained for a millennium, and returned to change the Earth in 107 different ways. A pile of glowing blue rocks told him that mankind will reach a state of interstellar domination that will result in oblivion, ending all existence — not just on insignificant Earth, but throughout the entire universe. Martin woke up with that knowledge and with an erection. That’s a lot for Martin to process.

At least some of the 107 have made it their mission to wipe out humanity. Martin takes a different approach. Martin is the Cure. Or the Antibody. Sometimes he’s called the Antibody Cure. Martin wants to save the universe by fixing humanity rather than destroying it. This perspective puts him in conflict with the destroyers.

Maybe this was all a dream. Maybe Martin is delusional. But Martin believes that his newfound beliefs are true. The reader will agree with that conclusion before the novel reaches its midway point because the story is better if Martin is really waging a war against those of the 107 who want to end human life. Still, Martin’s explanation of his return to Earth and his newly split personality (he’s sharing his mind with a more toxic version of himself he calls Temple) never rises much above incoherent babble. In fact, the notion of choosing and training 107 humans to save the universe by fighting each other makes very little sense. At the very least, it needed further development.

Martin is Black. Before the battle with the destroyers begins, Martin needs to deal with the police, who decide to punish him for exposing himself on his deck. They place Martin in a cell with a large and brutal white supremacist who decides to strangle him. When Martin wakes up, he discovers that he is charged with murdering his cellmate. Fortunately, there were no witnesses and he likely acted in self-defense, so a judge releases him on bail. Mosley’s confidence in the judicial system is surprising, given that Mosley is far from naïve.

As Martin tries to explain all this to his wife, he realizes that he has physically changed. He feels younger. He’s stronger and more vigorous. Thanks to Temple, he’s become a sexual dynamo. That change pleases his wife (Martin feels a bit jealous that she loves shagging Temple) but she also seems to be changed by his touch. His wife takes steps to change his two children, making them soldiers in his war. This leads to a minor side story about his wife’s former (and possibly not so former) lover, but like most of the novel, that story is essentially thrown away before it develops into a significant subplot.

Mayhem ensues as Martin and his small army of reformed criminals (plus his family) battle a reincarnated killer, a demon dog, and a powerful member of the 107. That battle is essentially the heart of the novel, but it’s over too quickly to amount to much, given Temple’s ability as a warrior.

With no disrespect intended — again, I love Walter Mosley — the story seems a bit silly. Why did Mosley write it? I suppose Touched is a contemplation of death. Mosley’s point seems to be that death never defeats life. Everyone dies but in a universe that has existed for billions of years and will continue for billions more, the death of an individual life on a single planet isn’t all that significant. Death is “merely a prop for life, a yardstick that measured our advance.” It might be comforting to hold onto that thought until death prevents us from thinking. In any event, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the tiny specks we are in the vastness of space and time. A secondary lesson (and one familiar to fans of Mosley's work as a crime novelist) is that bullies can be defeated by showing them how “small and insignificant” they are.

Touched isn’t as substantial as Mosley’s crime fiction but it might appeal to horror fans who are satisfied with a bare-bones story. I recommend it to that limited audience with the caveat that readers looking for Mosley at his best are likely to be disappointed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem

Published by Ecco on October 3, 2023

Every other Jonathan Lethem book I’ve read, I enjoyed. This one didn’t speak to me. The story, to the extent that one exists, is told in a series of vignettes that explore an significant number of mostly male characters of varying ages and races and their relationships in Brooklyn between the 1930s and the upcoming end of the Trump administration.

The first sentence of chapter 2 is “This is a story about what nobody knows.” Count me among those who don’t know. Lethem later confesses that he’s probably losing the reader. Count me among the lost. Confessing that you're turning off readers is a very postmodernist thing to do, but it makes the book unappealing for anyone but diehard students of postmodernism.

I don’t fault Lethem for lack of ambition. I imagine he was trying to create a micro-history of Brooklyn with an emphasis on its unsavory flavors, a chronicle of changes that replaced impoverished criminals with wealthy ones. I fault the meandering execution, the episodic storytelling that never quite coheres, the failure to encourage readers to invest in the characters. To me, the novel felt like scenes cut from a movie. I would rather have seen the movie.

Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. Lethem’s attempts to create a level of intimacy with the reader that he fails to achieve. I generally enjoy Lethem's prose, as I did in this novel, but sharp sentences just aren't enough. Some street scenes are vivid; some characters have the feel of authenticity. But — perhaps because I’m getting old — I lost track the characters and then lost track of my attempts to keep track of them. Finally, I lost interest.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Lazy City by Rachel Connolly

First published in the UK in 2023; published by W.W. Norton & Company/ ‎ Liveright on October 3, 2023

Lazy City is a snapshot of a young woman’s life in modern Belfast. Since it isn’t much more than that and since her life is largely wasted, I have mixed feelings about the novel.

Erin was dating Mikey before she moved away to attend a university. She always felt a distance from other people but felt less distance from her college roommate Kate. She had difficulty processing Kate’s death. After a few weeks, she walked away from her academic life and returned to Belfast. Erin stayed briefly with her violent and unforgiving mother before it became clear that she was not welcome. This is the backstory of a novel that opens with Erin working as Anne Marie’s live-in nanny and cleaner.

Erin is a lonely party girl. She knows her housing situation is temporary and that she’ll need to find a new place to live (and thus a new job) if Anne Marie reconciles with the husband from whom she separated. Erin avoids thinking about her future by getting drunk most nights, sometimes adding coke or ketamine to the party after the bars close. She hangs out with her friend Declan, a gay bartender/artist whose physician father is from Sri Lanka, but otherwise tries to avoid people who know her.

Erin doesn’t know if she wants to reconnect with Mikey although she knows she will. She gets along with Mikey’s brother, who might be the novel’s nicest character (apart from Declan), but he has serious drug and alcohol problems. While she’s pondering what to do about Mikey, she meets a somewhat older American who is teaching English literature at Queens. She has mixed feelings about her drunken decision to sleep with him. She is soon sleeping with Mikey or the American a couple of nights each week.

Both Mikey and the American might have other relationships they are concealing from Erin. Why this should bother Erin baffles me since she isn’t telling either of her sex partners about her other sex partner, but Erin nevertheless feels victimized. Still, she manages to address her concerns with both men without hysteria or other pointless drama, which is to her credit.

Erin is bright and straightforward, not given to pretension. The American uses words like technocapitalism that he can only vaguely define. Erin wonders whether he is posing. She suspects that people like to blame capitalism for problems because it’s easier to repair economic systems than to repair people. She’s glad that the American doesn’t try to talk about the Troubles because he would probably say something that is culturally insensitive, or maybe she would, although she understands the people who survived the Troubles never talk about it.

Erin doesn’t feel she can tell anyone about the pain she associates with Kate’s loss. She isn’t particularly religious but she visits empty churches, lights a candle, and shares her life with Kate’s spirit.

Erin’s internal monologs, including her conversations with Kate, are sometimes insightful. She isn’t sure why she has sex with the American or Mikey. She chalks Mikey up to being a habit. She keeps sleeping with the American because “the loneliness in him means something to the loneliness in me.” Or maybe it’s the “sense that his vulnerability makes mine less obvious? That I have the upper hand?” Only later does it occur to her that he might be asking himself why he wants to have sex with her.

Rachel Connolly creates a sense of intimacy with her unadorned, conversational writing style. She portrays Erin as a likable but troubled woman, the kind of person for whom it is easy to be both sympathetic and impatient. Erin wants to be true to herself, but she seems to think that her true self should be drunk and high most nights. She needs to get her life together. That’s presumably the novel’s point. By the last chapter, as she makes New Year’s resolutions, it’s clear that she understands what she needs to do. It’s less clear that she has the will to do it.

Novels like this one, depicting a few months that aren’t going well in the life of a young woman, seem to attract publishers. I assume they attract readers or publishers wouldn’t buy them. I often feel a bit disappointed when I read them, perhaps because my impatience with the troubled young woman overcomes my sympathy. Erin’s epiphany — that her return to Belfast was an act of running away but also an act of running toward something — is a bit obvious, particularly after Erin spells it out for the reader. So is the last sentence, as Erin leaves a church and starts walking forward, presumably charting the path that will be the rest of her life. (I hope that’s not a spoiler, but I’m not sure how it is possible to spoil a story that has no real ending.)

The novel doesn't amount to much, although the writing is sufficiently sharp that I am hesitant to condemn the story as shallow. I recommend it as a decent slice of life story about yet another troubled young woman, but I can’t recommend it as anything more than that.

RECOMMENDED

Judgment Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 3, 2023

This is a Prey novel, so Lucas Davenport is the featured character. As is increasingly common in Prey novels, Virgil Flowers plays a nearly equal role. John Sandford published his last standalone Flowers novel in 2019. Since then, he’s published four Lucas Davenport and two Letty Davenport novels. Virgil can’t complain about a lack of love because he gets cameos in the Letty novels (just as Letty earned a cameo in this one) and is increasingly likely to be a co-star in the Lucas novels.

Virgil is hoping to transition away from law enforcement. He sold a novel that is about to be published and is working on another. Virgil tells Lucas that a writer told him that “books have three parts: the set-up and the climax, and then in the middle, the swamp.” Sandford is a master of the swamp — the characters and subplots that keep the reader entertained while awaiting the big reveal that drives mysteries or the final confrontation that drives thrillers.

The set-up in Judgment Prey is simple. Two boys and their dad are shooting hoops in the back yard. They go inside when it starts to rain. Someone in a hoodie follows them inside, shoots them all (not with the efficiency of a professional), spares a baby in a basinet, and leaves with their cellphones and laptops. The dad is a federal judge so the FBI joins the investigation. Lucas is asked to show the flag for the U.S. Marshals since protecting judges is part of their remit. Flowers shows up on behalf of the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The St. Paul police do most of the legwork but Davenport and Flowers team up to look for the clues that other cops miss.

The plot differs from many crime novels in that the killer’s identity is soon known to the reader. The novel is not a whodunit. Instead, the reveal explains the killer's motive, a key that must be unlocked before Lucas and Virgil can solve the crime.

The judge’s wife, Maggie Cooper, is understandably distraught and ultimately vengeful. She intends to find the killer and end his life. To that end, she receives moral support from her best friend, Ann Melton, with whom she occasionally has sex. Whether Maggie will kill the killer before Lucas and Virgil catch him, or whether he will add Maggie to his list of victims, is the source of the novel's dramatic tension.

The swamp involves the investigation of people who might have a motive to kill the judge, including criminals he has sentenced. Davenport and Flowers also look into a charitable organization that was expecting a donation from the judge. The organization turns out to be shady, leading to a collateral investigation that prompts a couple more murders. The killer also comes after

Characterization is typically built in the swamp. The have been so many Prey novels (not to mention Flowers novels) that the characters are now well known. The swamp instead gives them a chance to find new ways to insult each other. That never gets old.

The motive for killing the judge and his family struck me as unlikely, but people kill for unlikely reasons so I’ll give Sandford’s reveal a pass. Otherwise, the climax involves the kind of action that is common to Prey novels, complete with chases and gunplay. That climax doesn’t quite resolve the main plot, but a second climax does. All of this is great fun for a John Sandford fan, which presumably includes most readers who enjoy crime novels. Judgment Prey doesn’t stand out from the large stack of Prey novels, but even an average Prey novel is worth reading.

RECOMMENDED