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Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman - Jethrien bounced off of this, and I absolutely understand why: Firstly because it’s LitRPG, so the entirety of the worldbuilding and much of the characterization is based around explaining how this exact video-game-like world just happened to come into existence. Secondly it’s because this is a parody of roguelike/Diablo-like dungeon crawler games that she knows nothing about and doesn’t care about. (Also I found out later that the author is totally pants-ing the series and doesn’t actually know how he’s going to resolve anything he sets up...and yeah, that tracks.)
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton – This came up in the time-loop panel at Worldcon and got added to my list. The gimmick here is that the main character is trapped at a country estate and experiences the same day eight times as eight different people, and needs to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle before running out of time. So it’s both a sci-fi time-loop story (with a splash of Quantum Leap, as he’s in a different host each time and each host is contributing skills and personality) and a murder mystery with layers of twists. It’s not perfect—there are timey-whimey aspects of the loops that are glossed over and the main character has biases that it’s not clear are his or the author’s—but it was one of those things I was happy to get recommended.
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey – Like the other Felix Castor book I read, this was Carey wanting to write more John Constantine but not having the license to do so. So instead he’s got a noir detective exorcist who gets beaten up more than a human body should be able to manage as he deals with the fallout of his own fuckups and unravels a mystery of a museum ghost. If you like supernatural detective stories and off-brand John Constantine adventures, you get exactly that.
The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach - A dumbass who lives across the street from my first apartment in Williamsburg gets high and creates The Golem, the giant clay protector of the Jews, and both The Golem and the dumbass get entangled in local Hasidic politics and, in turn, in a midwestern antisemitic event. This is less a coherent novel and more a series of short story-worthy ideas that got connected up into a single narrative; it’s entertaining in the sense that you’re getting a different ADHD-research rabbit hole every three chapters and there are some decent lines and scenes.
A Hardy Boys and Tom Swift Ultra Thriller: Time Bomb by Franklin W. Dixon - I gave away my old collection of Hardy Boys books a couple of months ago, but I held on to this one because I remembered it as one of my favorites. (I read every one I could get my hands on, including my dad’s old collection, around 4th-5th grade. ARR never got into them.) Despite being published with the Dixon pen name, it’s much more of a Swift novel (and apparently was written by Bill McKay, who also wrote some of the YA Swift novels from the same period) that they side-loaded the Hardys into. It’s also following the continuity of the Hardy Boys Casefiles series of YA novels that I read dozens of, where the boys are a bit older and the stakes are a bit higher. In retrospect, it’s a mediocre book and the time travel gimmick was used poorly; it’s basically treated as a teleporter that can also send you to 1932 and 65,000,000 BC. But it’s a real humdinger of a story and I understand why it appealed so much when I was 11.
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton – This came up in the time-loop panel at Worldcon and got added to my list. The gimmick here is that the main character is trapped at a country estate and experiences the same day eight times as eight different people, and needs to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle before running out of time. So it’s both a sci-fi time-loop story (with a splash of Quantum Leap, as he’s in a different host each time and each host is contributing skills and personality) and a murder mystery with layers of twists. It’s not perfect—there are timey-whimey aspects of the loops that are glossed over and the main character has biases that it’s not clear are his or the author’s—but it was one of those things I was happy to get recommended.
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey – Like the other Felix Castor book I read, this was Carey wanting to write more John Constantine but not having the license to do so. So instead he’s got a noir detective exorcist who gets beaten up more than a human body should be able to manage as he deals with the fallout of his own fuckups and unravels a mystery of a museum ghost. If you like supernatural detective stories and off-brand John Constantine adventures, you get exactly that.
The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach - A dumbass who lives across the street from my first apartment in Williamsburg gets high and creates The Golem, the giant clay protector of the Jews, and both The Golem and the dumbass get entangled in local Hasidic politics and, in turn, in a midwestern antisemitic event. This is less a coherent novel and more a series of short story-worthy ideas that got connected up into a single narrative; it’s entertaining in the sense that you’re getting a different ADHD-research rabbit hole every three chapters and there are some decent lines and scenes.
A Hardy Boys and Tom Swift Ultra Thriller: Time Bomb by Franklin W. Dixon - I gave away my old collection of Hardy Boys books a couple of months ago, but I held on to this one because I remembered it as one of my favorites. (I read every one I could get my hands on, including my dad’s old collection, around 4th-5th grade. ARR never got into them.) Despite being published with the Dixon pen name, it’s much more of a Swift novel (and apparently was written by Bill McKay, who also wrote some of the YA Swift novels from the same period) that they side-loaded the Hardys into. It’s also following the continuity of the Hardy Boys Casefiles series of YA novels that I read dozens of, where the boys are a bit older and the stakes are a bit higher. In retrospect, it’s a mediocre book and the time travel gimmick was used poorly; it’s basically treated as a teleporter that can also send you to 1932 and 65,000,000 BC. But it’s a real humdinger of a story and I understand why it appealed so much when I was 11.
