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NEWS AND VIEWS - JULY 2018
WRITING NEWS Don't have too much to report here, writing-wise; I'm between projects at the moment. I'm having a hard time deciding what to write next. I've got several Signalverse novels planned out, including one fairly ambitious one, but every Signalverse book I've released has sold worse than the last one, which leads me to think people are losing interest in the series (to the degree anyone ever had any interest in the series). My Azuraan series is basically dead, meanwhile, and although I do have a sequel to Sam Fortune plotted out, I'm not sure I want to jump into it so soon after finishing the first book. So I don't know. * * * * * * * * THE REIGN OF THE DEPARTED, BY GREG KEYES Earlier this month I finished Greg Keyes's new book, The Reign of the Departed. This was a strange novel, and to be honest I'm not sure I liked it all that much. It's got all the usual Greg Keyes idiosyncracies: multiple POV's; magical young women; sudden, explosive, and often confusing incidents, which are written in a dreamy sort of way and which are usually only fully explained in the following chapter; etc. Some of his characters are familiar, too: the character David is basically Ghe, from The Blackgod: a villain who is driven to pursue the female protagonist and who becomes sexually obsessed with her. Here's my problems with it: 1) The Kingdoms, the fantasy world Aster and her friends are adventuring in, has an anything-goes fairytale sort of feel to it, which I didn't much care for. I like more fully-realized fantasy worlds. 2) Moreover, it's a very off-kilter fantasy world, with a bizarre Appalachian feel (it's inhabited by drawling, gun-toting kids, country doctors, and so on). But there's also knights and wizards and monsters. It's an odd mashup and I'm not sure that it works. 3) The book seems to be aimed at the YA audience, with the teen heroes and such, but it's very, very dark for a YA book; there's multiple implied rapes, creepy-ass monsters, the aforementioned sexually-obsessed villain, and quite a lot of serious violence. And Aster gets put into a menstruation hut at one point. That's pretty weird. 4) Love triangles all over. Aster/Errol, Aster/Billy, Errol/Veronica, Errol/Dusk...it was a little too convoluted. So overall, I really enjoyed the first third of the book, but after the group entered the Kingdoms it started going off in a direction I didn't particularly like. Still, it was a page-turner to the end, and I'll definitely be picking up the sequel; I want to find out what happens to these characters. * * * * * * * * NATHAN=NATHAN This is cool.
BH
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