Arctangential

I finished Dinosaur Conquest this evening. It’s the last book of the Dinosaur series, and it actually did tie things up, but not in a particularly satisfying way.

Frankly, this book could have followed directly after the first book, tied everything up fairly well, and it would have been an OK pair of books. However, for whatever reason, they decided to cram 4 extra books in between these two.

So what happens at the beginning of this book they end up back in the dinosaur timeline, retrieve the time machine, and jaunt around fixing things they’d messed up, and tossing pieces of “temporal machinery” into various other timelines like they’re magical talismans. Eventually they end up back home and everything’s fine. Yay.

My next book is E.R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses.

I just realized that I bought the wrong version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I just finished Mulengro. It was actually pretty good, and quite different from de Lint’s other work.

I make fun of de Lint a lot, because he has some very specific patterns in his writing — his stories tend to be about young women, generally impoverished, usually living in Toronto or Montreal. They’re mostly musicians, and always seem to end up finding out that fairies and ghosts are real, and have Many Exciting Adventures. Now of course I continue to read his books, and for a few reasons. First off, he’s an entirely competent writer, and even when he’s in his most repetitive mode, his books are very light and fun to read. Secondly, there are times when he diverges from his well-worn path (even if only a little), and those books are quite fun. Mulengro is one of those books.

It’s about Gypsies, and while it is set in Ottawa, and one main character is a violinist, not much is made of either fact, so it hardly felt like a de Lint book at all. What’s going on is that an evil Gypsy wizard who had been driven mad by the Nazi atrocities he survived has escaped from his mental hospital in Europe. How he ended up in Ottawa is unclear, but he’s on a mission to cleanse the Rom race of those whom he considers to be traitors to the race. He has control of the ghosts of the dead, what the Rom call mule (whence he gets his eponym, incidentally) and he uses them to kill people all over town. Eventually, the police get involved, and we meet another Rom witch, named Ola. She runs from him, but after meeting some friends and learning that she has to stand up to him, she eventually confronts and defeats the Mulengro with her own ghosts and a good bit of self-sacrifice.

There were some strange and ultimately useless subplots, and a common problem with horror stories, where the author realizes that the bad guy / monster hasn’t done anything really horrific for a while, so he invents some new characters who are then immediately slaughtered and then have no further impact on the story. It’s annoying, but expected.

Now I’m reading the final dinosaur book, Dinosaur Conquest. I am glad this series will be over soon.

I finished Dinosaur Empire this evening. It wasn’t bad.

It wasn’t really good either. Just more of the same; the group of people jaunting from time period to time period, dealing with local politics and enemies, and then moving on to the next period in history. This book had them first in ancient Egypt, and then in ancient Rome. At some point one of the “bad” dinosaurs from the dinosaur world ended up in Egypt and learned to talk Egyptian (!), but they ended up killing him by throwing a bomb into his mouth just as it exploded. Yeah.

Now I’m reading Mulengro by Charles de Lint. This is, amazingly, one of his darker works and it actually not bad at all. So far anyways.

I finished Better in the Dark at lunch yesterday.

Like the previous of Yarbro’s books that I read, this could have been a very interesting historical novel. Instead, it’s a historical novel made mediocre by the introduction of a besotted and lachrymose vampire named St. Germain. He’s different than most vampires you see in literature and movies — he doesn’t seem to drink blood much, he can cross running water and he can even go out in the day with impunity. He says that some of these things make him feel uncomfortable, but it never seems to stop him from doing anything. Anyways.

The story begins in the middle of the 9th century, deep in the dark ages. St Germain arrives in a remote German fort when his boat crashes and is nursed back to health by the woman in charge of the fortress. Due to a rather contrived accident, he ends up drinking some of her blood, and this somehow causes him to become deeply in love with her, so he decides to stay there for a time. He helps the locals out in various ways — turning moldy bread into penicillin, adding counterweights to their gates, making stronger steel, etc. He faces opposition on a few fronts — the local monastery and the resident priest make a fair number of unreasonable demands on the fort, there are bands of starving peasants, outlaws and Danish raiders who attach them from time to time, and the demands of the King overtax the town and fort. None of these things directly affect St Germain; they more affect the life of the fortress itself, and he tries to help out with them.

I was going to write a whole thing about how this book did well describing the effects of either unaccountable leadership (the King) or leadership chosen for the wrong reasons (the Church), but then I changed my mind.

Anyways now I am reading Dinosaur Empire, the 5th dinosaur book, by Stephen Leigh and John J Miller. It’s ok.