The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

The Shining Girls was a book that I stole from my mum after she had finished reading it, although she seems to have forgotten it entirely by the time that I actually got round to reading it. I took it partly because I was intrigued by the premise, and partly because I had heard good things about the author Lauren Beukes.

The Shining Girls focuses on two main characters, Kirby and Harper. Kirby is a young woman who is trying to put her life back together after a brutal attack that nearly killed her. Attempting to track down the man who tried to kill her, she starts finding evidence that she isn't the first woman who he has attacked, but some of the evidence is just impossible. Meanwhile Harper, having found a house that inexplicably allows him to travel anywhere within the years 1929 and 1993, is compelled to kill a set of girls whose names he has found written on the walls of one of the rooms upstairs, leaving a memento from one of his other kills at the scene of her death.
So I really wanted the whole time travelling serial killer premise to work for me, but it just doesn't. It's quite disappointing, especially as the writing itself is solid and engaging. But for me, the time travel just wasn't implemented well, leading to two main problems.
Firstly, it's really tough to make a thriller tense when you know that most of the awful stuff that the serial killer is going to do has, in another character's timeline, already happened. Sure, the murder scenes are really well-written and horrifying in and of themselves, but it's tough to maintain the tension when the reaction to each new female perspective chapter is "well, here's the next sacrificial lamb". The time and attention spent fleshing them out and giving them engaging problems seems kind of wasted since the reader knows that the next time their name crops up, they'll be dead by the end of the chapter.
Secondly, it uses my most despised type of time travel, the ontological paradox, also known as a causal loop. If you're not familiar with that, essentially it's if person A is given an item by the elderly person B, then goes back in time to give that item to a younger version of person B. At which point you sit there and wonder how the item came into being in the first place if it's constantly looping between two points in time. It drives me up the wall, and the aggravating part is that Beukes spends so much time setting up this closed loop. Spoiler alert, it turns out at the end that the reason the House makes Harper want to kill people is because the House is Harper's spirit. Which is just infuriating, because it wants to be so clever and thematic, but it just brings up questions. How are the girls picked out as victims? Harper keeps mentioning that they shine, but the narrative never elaborates on what that is exactly. The only way that Harper knows about who he needs to kill and when he needs to go to kill them is via the House, so there's never any thought process about why or how his victims are selected. It unwittingly leads to Harper being a more or less flat character, as he has no real motivations other than follow the House's lead, for reasons that are never explained.

The Shining Girls is a prime example of an interesting premise that is its own worst enemy. What interest there could be from the impossible serial killer storyline is sabotaged by its own use of dated time travel tropes. There's little tension because all the killings have already happened in one timeline or another, and the painstakingly constructed causal loop only brings up questions of how this all comes about as well as depriving the main villain of any meaningful motivation. The only saving grace is the writing itself, but there's only so much that can be saved from this plot. 2.5/5

Next review: Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

Signing off,
Nisa.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer is one of those books that I have intended to read for some time, but just hadn't gotten to. It had gotten to the point where my sister was shocked that I hadn't actually read it yet, especially considering how much I like the whole cyberpunk aesthetic. So when I rediscovered where I had put the book, I couldn't really put it off any longer.

Neuromancer follows Case, a former data-thief whose nervous system was burnt out by some former clients who he stole from. When he is approached by a mysterious employer who is willing to repair Case's nervous system in return for going back into the Matrix on a mission that could be more dangerous than anything he's attempted before. Soon it's apparent that the only ones he can trust are Molly, a mirror-eyed street samurai, and Flatline Dixie, an AI approximation of his old mentor.
I'm still not quite sure how to feel about Neuromancer. On the one hand, it has all the atmosphere that I could possibly want in a cyberpunk novel. There is the weird kind of 1980s Blade-Runner-style idea of what the future would look like, which I like a lot more than I probably should. The plot is somewhat convoluted, but immersive nonetheless. And if you're willing to stick with some unfamiliar terms or are a big cyberpunk fan, then this is an obvious title to pick up. You'd pick it up regardless of my overall review really. As such, for those of you still on the fence, here are a couple things that you might want to consider before picking it up, in case they prove to be deal breakers.
The first thing that really gave me pause for thought is that, as a protagonist, Case is surprisingly passive. After years of fiction in which the main driving force of a novel can be firmly placed with a handful of characters of which the protagonist is always withing that number, it's a real shock to the system to follow around someone who has more or less no say in where he goes or how he acts. Sure, he sometimes does the odd thing that his employers don't expect, but never anything major enough to throw a spanner in the overall plan. And I guess I can see why that decision was made, so that there was an appropriate sense of distrust and paranoia between him and his employers, but that understanding doesn't make the experience of reading Neuromancer any less jarring.
The second issue I have is with the character of Peter Riviera. On top of being just generally unpleasant for no real reason, I still don't quite get why he is brought into the run. He's acknowledged to be a risk due to his perverse and psychopathic nature, but is brought onto the team to act as some poorly defined honey trap. I doubt that it was meant to be any kind of surprise when he betrays them, it just sticks out to me as an unnecessary risk in a plan that was supposed to have been set in motion by an incredibly intelligent and patient character.

If you like cyberpunk, especially the stuff that has that very 1980s feel to it, then you have probably already picked it up and really don't need my encouragement. For those of you on the fence, it is an immersive story, but one with some odd stylistic choices that could bother some people. The main ones for me were the odd passivity of the main character and the logical flaw in entrusting a key part of a mission to a character who specifically has a betrayal fetish. 3.5/5

Next review: The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Signing off,
Nisa.

The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons edited by Paula Guran

The last time I took a look at one of the Mammoth short story anthology, I was somewhat disappointed, as it didn't really fit the theme terribly well. So I started The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons with perhaps a little more trepidation than I initially picked it up with. But it did have stories by Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin, so I thought that there could at least be potential.

The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons is an anthology of short stories focusing on angels and demons, both traditionally Christian in origin and more modern reimaginations.
First of all, and this might just be a personal gripe, but this is the first anthology where the editor has preceded each story with a snippet of information and a whole dollop of why this story/author is awesome, and it's really not needed. Rarely is the snippet of angelology or demonology especially necessary to understand the story, and it's really distracting to have the editor act as a hype-man. If you've included something in an anthology, I am going to take it as a given that you like the story in question, it doesn't need to be hammered home.
As for the actual content, I found that the stories were generally more consistent in meeting the brief than my last Mammoth anthology. There were a few duds, of which the worst was easily "Only Kids are Afraid of the Dark" by George R. R. Martin. Considering that I was expecting his entry to be one of the safe bets, it was really disappointing to find such a poorly-written mess under his name. But while there were only a handful of outright duds, there were only five that I would actively seek out to read again: "Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel" by Peter S. Beagle, "Sanji's Demon" by Richard Parks, "Oh Glorious Sight" by Tanya Huff, "Elegy for a Demon Lover" by Sarah Monette and "Demons, Your Body, and You" by Genevieve Valentine. Beyond those four and the handful of duds, the stories included were just kind of okay. I would have hoped to get a better success rate than 5 out of 27, quite honestly.

Not a bad anthology by any stretch of the imagination, but there were only a handful of really good stories to appreciate here. While there were similarly only a handful of outright bad stories, that still leaves over half of the anthology as stories that will leave you going "meh". Having the editor act as hype-man before every story just made the experience aggravating on top of that. 3/5

Next review: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Signing off,
Nisa.