The Secret Lair

Hi, folks. I’m Doc Coleman. Chris asked me to come along and lend a hand with The Secret Lair. At first I was going to refuse, because I thought he wanted help picking the trash up off the floor. Yeah, it needs some help. But then he explained that he had some books to review and I decided that I could probably help out with that.

While horror as a genre isn’t exactly my thing, I agreed to read and review Gary McMahon’s novel “Dead Bad Things”. This is another novel in his Thomas Usher series, although it takes a while before you see Thomas. But even for someone like myself who hasn’t read the previous novel,“Pretty Little Dead Things”, this book makes sense in and of itself. Sort of.

Our story is set in England, in and around the city of Leeds. We begin with Police Constable Sarah Doherty and her partner Benson. Sarah has been having a tough time of it. Her father, the noted Policeman Emerson Doherty died a few months back, but she seems to see his ghost everywhere. The house is filled with his things, and still carries his presence. Her fellow constables all look at her as being Doherty’s daughter instead of letting her stand on her own merits. She remembers her father as an abusive manipulator, but to the rest of the force he was a hero. And then there is that other thing.

Her twitch.

Sarah has been seeing things. Feeling things. Dead things.

Unsure of what is happening, Sarah has been seeing echos. Of the future, of the past, of the dead. She’s been able to rely upon them on the job, but the rest of the time she just wants them to go away. So she drowns them with booze, and with sex, and curses her father for screwing her up so badly. And then her twitch led her to find a small boy with holes drilled into his skull.

Thomas has been in hiding. He’s been sticking to the grey zones, areas the living have forgotten, where even the dead won’t bother him. But someone wants Thomas badly enough. He gets a call from a mechanical voice. A clockwork voice. A voice that wants to hire Thomas to find someone. A call that came through on a dead phone line.

Trevor Pumpkiss had seen better days. Days when he went by his stage name, Trevor Dove. In those days he was a professional psychic, but now his gift, and fame, have deserted him. Trevor lives on, trying to find some satisfaction with young male prostitutes. But none of them compare to his dead brother Michael. Michael who committed suicide to escape Trevor’s sexual abuse. But now, now Trevor’s gift seems to be coming back to him. A spirit is calling him from beyond the mirror. If he can help it, perhaps it can help him find Michael again? Or at least find revenge against the man who took his gift away, Thomas Usher.

“Dead Bad Things” follows these three characters, as they search for their own goals in a dark world of sex, abuse, blood, and murder. Three characters spiraling in to an inevitable collision. The book is dark, gruesome, and unnerving in its examination of alternative realities.

For some folks, this book will not be a good read. Not only does McMahon change the point of view character from chapter to chapter, he shifts from first person to third person and on to other narrative styles that I’m sure have names but aren’t really worth naming. For some folks, this changing point of view will drive them up a wall. If you can get past this, the story is intriguing and has a number of surprises. One of which is how bleeding long will these characters go on before they meet up? Well, I guess I kind of spoiled that. It does take quite a long time before our characters meet up. I began to wonder if the author had something else in mind.

I give this story a 4 out of 5. Blood, gore, and gruesome isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but I found the characters to be consistent and relatively honest about their own dysfunctions. While the actions were drawn out over the course of the book, they remained believable and true to the characters. If you’re good with the changing viewpoints, and you’re into gory tales, I believe that you’ll probably like “Dead Bad Things”.

 About the Reviewer

Doc Coleman is a writer, blogger, podcaster, and voice actor. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Nifty Tech Blog (http://www.NiftyTechBlog.com), a technology review blog focusing on the best of consumer technology. He is also a regular on Flying Island Press’ Galley Table Podcast, and produces his own weekly podcast: The Shrinking Man Project (http://TheShrinkingManProject.com), a weekly journal documenting his personal weight loss journey. For news and information about Doc’s latest projects, check out his website athttp://www.DocColeman.com.

When Doc isn’t juggling projects, making his living as a Web Engineer, or mainlining podcasts, he is a gamer, an avid reader, a motorcyclist, ahomebrewer and beer aficionado, a fan of renaissance festivals, and frequently a smart-ass. He lives with his lovely wife and two Maine Coon cats in Germantown, MD.

If you’ve been following the wanderings of Jonathan Coulton this year, you know he had teased his live audiences with, at the time unreleased, new song goodness. Officially, as of Dragon*Con (and unofficially, as of PAX), his shiny new album,¹ Artificial Heart,² has been released to the wilds.

I have to admit, first impressions of this collection were somewhat underwhelming, with the exception of a few songs. Before the geeky masses descend upon me like a swarm of rabid antlions, I would like to add that after listening to it for three weeks now, it has grown on me. A lot.

Here’s the thing; if you are expecting this album to be chalk full of nerdy references a la zombies, sad vampires, and cephalopods, that is not exactly how this collection of music plays out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic set and has its fair share of geeky niche genre themed songs such as both “Still Alive” and “Want You Gone” in addition to an ode to the mustache, “The Stache“. However, as any hardcore JoCo fan knows, that is just a piece³ of Coulton’s song base.

I think what threw me at the first impression stage was the weight of the sad songs. JoCo writes sad songs? Yeah, I know big shocker, eh? The sad songs were so foremost in my head after the first few listens, that I had convinced myself that the album was a bit of a downer. In truth, the majority of the songs are interesting, beautiful, and entertaining. I blame “Nobody Loves You Like Me” for being so heavy it sticks to your heart and makes you want to give someone a hug. Heavy, man, heavy.

This version of “Still Alive” has quickly become my favorite rendition. There’s a brilliant and creepy theremin opening and the non-GLaDOSified vocals of Ellen McLain are gorgeous with Jonathan’s subtle background accompaniment. It warms the companion cube portions of my heart to no end, especially with the inclusion of “Want You Gone.”

“Down Today“, from the very first listen, is my all time favorite song of the album. It’s a cute and happy little piece even if it seems to be about a breakup while riding a balloon.⁴ A great song to listen to on repeat. Also, +10 ukulele bonus!

As for my other favorites, the lyrics in “Fraud” are mysterious and interesting and it makes me want to know more about this so called angel. It reminds me of a lost Doctor Who episode that I desperately wish existed. “Je Suis Rick Springfield” is a fun song about a dude at a bar trying to convince people he’s Rick Springfield and it’s entirely in French, which makes it even more amusing. “Sucker Punch” is fun, pop-tastic, and best listened at high volume in the car with the windows rolled down. “Good Morning Tucson” is an upbeat piece about a morning show personally with more than just a bit of the crazy. The rest of the songs are excellent in their own way.⁵

In short, Artificial Heart is a solid album and is definitely quintessential Coulton, even if it may take a few listens to fully appreciate its content and musical quality.

If you fancy getting your own fancy pants copy of the album, there are a few extra fancy packages for all your⁶ Artificial Heart needs available for a limited time at the official purchasing area.

1. Oh yeah, new album smell. [↩]
2. Now with human drummers! [↩]
3. A monkey shaped piece, at that. [↩]
4. I like to imagine it as a cute little airship like the one in The Mummy Returns. [↩]
5. Yes, even the sad ones. [↩]
6. Fanciest! [↩]

I’ve found that, while trying to write this review, that keeping things spoiler-free when you’re covering a series well into its lifespan is not so much easy. Nonetheless, I want to share my thoughts of A Dance With Dragons, which I managed to finish last Wednesday. I think I can sum up the experience of reading this book in a word representing the one thing of which this tome seemed to have a decided lack:

Editing.

I don’t mean typos, or bad grammar. There may have been some scant amount of either or both of those, but my shaky brain tends to translate past them, unless they’re glaring and/or idiotic. What I do mean is structure; cohesiveness; succinctness. Those, and the inability to hide the fact that the author seems to be chewing on a rich morsel that’s much, much too large for him.¹

Lemme ‘splain. As you may or may not know at this point, Dragons and A Feast for Crows were supposed to be all one book, but the story got so big that he needed to cleave it in twain. So he did, and he clove it so well that he put six years in between them.² But so be it: I’d rather wait for a great book than have a hurried so-so book. And since, though it certainly wasn’t the best of the series so far, Crows still had a lot going for it, surely a six-year wait would bring us a tremendous parallel to consume with relish.³

Too bad that didn’t happen.

What we got instead was a book that felt as though it were being held together by literary duct tape and prayer. The first half of the book seemed to catch us up with the characters that went untouched in Crows, so as to get them back in sync with the time line – which was fine, as that was pretty much what Martin said the book would be. But as I got to the halfway point, the realignment concluded, and then the book began to… sort of… wander… somewhere. We were thrust back and forth across the face of the globe, from continent to continent, with no cohesive rhyme or reason. Gone was the interlacing of story that we’d known so well in the first four tomes, where characters nearly – and sometimes did – cross paths, and actions in one place had ramifications in another.

Dragons was merely a set of vignettes – novellas, if you will – that were chopped indiscriminately into chunks and shuffled together like a deck of cards. I think the book may have actually been more enjoyable if the main character’s stories were left whole and read all at once. Martin seemed to make an attempt to thread a couple of the stories together, in the form of a faux Northern princess and a wimpy Dornish prince, but they were both forgetful and trivial, and could have easily been left out altogether.

As well, large chunks of storyline proved to be useless, in the form of characters regurgitating plot with infuriating redundancy. “Words are wind.” YES, WE KNOW ALREADY BECAUSE YOU HAVE BEEN MAKING LOTS OF WIND. And don’t get me started on Martin’s growing tendency to get Jordan-like in his descriptions of environment, especially his castles and manses. I feel like I’ve been to Lord Manderly’s receiving room myself.

All this is a shame, too, because his characters are still so compelling. Jon hones his leadership skills on the wall; Tyrion flees his troubles in King’s Landing; Daenerys deals with her dragons and a cesspool of slave culture. And some important characters only pop up for a chapter, or even merely a page or two. I sometimes felt like I was looking at a grand tapestry, but through one of those faceted insect-eye lenses you see on the $1 shelf at the toy store.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that Martin seems to be starting to write with the potential for presentation on TV in mind. There are no grand battles depicted in this book; the ones that take place are all mentioned second-hand or recalled first-hand in past tense. Scenes take place mainly in very localized spots. And the language has become fouler, along with the environment. The gore is up (even without the battles), and the word ‘whore’ is uttered I know not how many times, along with a ramping up of toilet humor. HBO is showing itself to have a negative effect on the storyline.

Now I sum up: Dragons, while it doesn’t completely suck, is certainly Martin’s worst showing so far for A Song of Ice and Fire. If it weren’t for the compelling characters he’s created riding the wave of his previous books, this volume would be hard pressed to aspire to mediocre. Certainly, it does not make up for the six-year break between books.

Let’s hope he makes a full recovery for The Winds of Winter, the tentative title of book six.

1. Which is saying something, if you’ve ever seen a picture of the man [↩]
2. He hit it so hard, he knocked it into next decade! [↩]
3. I hate pickles, though. Consume with mayo? [↩]