Kim Miller

This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.

In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.

The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.

The stranger speaks of things he could not normally know and has a wisdom that is beyond 13 year old boys - such things as "that behavior is not inflammable. People do not burn in hell for that reason by itself." Such sayings make the local boy think that perhaps this new friend who now lives with his family really is the devil after all.

The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of rising paranoia and of people torn apart even from their inner selves.

And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.

This is the book that melted me. It's a deeply powerful work of wonderful prose that reads like poetry, telling a story that hits the reader like a runaway train.

In the summer of 1984 a man posts an ad in the local newspaper, inviting the devil to speak with him. Soon after that a ragged 13 year old boy wanders into the town and is met by that man's 13 year old son. The stranger has that newspaper and says he's come to answer the invitation. "Come and I'll take you to my father" says the local boy. And so begins a new friendship and the dissolution of everything in a town too small to contain the trouble.

The narrator is the local boy grown old and is now 71. The voice swaps seamlessly between his old and young self, sometimes with a change of chapter, sometimes with a new paragraph. The old man still carries the events of his younger self and knows he will die with his memories, and perhaps even die from them.

The book is a Russian matryoshka doll of metaphors, each one revealing the next one within, as McDaniel unfolds all the sins of mankind under the influence of this one unknown boy. Her poetic prose fires the narration to a hard glaze as the story takes us deeper into levels of bigotry, abuse, discrimination, love and loss, friendship and betrayal, of people torn apart even from their inner selves.

And at the end the whole thing explodes as the impossible is demanded of each of these two boys, their family, and the town. And as the explosion clears we see the wisps of those that are left as they wander into whatever future they can each make for themselves.

Ten stories, three of which are set in Gibson's Sprawl world of Neuromancer. They vary in content and there are some winners.

We have to think back to the time before the cyber world became a reality for these stories. The stories paint a future where corporations have overtaken government and personal autonomy, but these are increasingly our own reality. Apple and Amazon churn out cheap products at the expense of those who make them and we are mostly OK with that because it benefits us. The 2024 American election resulted in Elon Musk becoming a non-elected 'assistant president' and he wants to control everything.

Putting these issues aside, the stories have some deeply human moments. Gibson writes emotions into his stories in a way that makes the reader retain empathy for the characters once the book is closed.

As humans everywhere start dying in a zombie apocalypse a different kind of narrator steps up to tell us what happened. Say "Hello" to S.T. the pet crow. His master is dead and with the pet bloodhound he goes exploring.

The premise was engaging for a while but the writing let it down. The zombie thing was caused by some kind of virus that was animated by 'too much screen time' as if this was a cautionary tale. Ho hum. Then there was the constant use of the word, 'murder'. OK, so a group of crows is called a murder but the constant use of the word became tiresome. The humour tends to the juvenile end of things, such as S.T. stands for Shit Turd, which is a pity as the sadder parts of the story need a more adult balance.

There was also a sense of aimlessness through the book. S.T. didn't have any goal, he just wandered through most of the story and refused help until it was forced upon him. Even to write it as a hero's journey trope would have given the book more focus and direction and allowed S.T. to mature in a meaningful way.

And a hint to those wanting to write. It's OK to kill off your next to main character, but make sure it's for a good reason. Don't do it for something stupid.

Written in 1920 with all the turgid prose of the era when the author is trying to be formal and profound. It's an exploration of religion and philosophy and moral values set in a metaphorical trip to another planet.

The protagonist meets many different people with whom he debates morality, every day a new person and a new topic. Ironically he leaves several of them dead in his wake. With many he commits himself to their point of view but tomorrow changes his mind with the next interlocutor.

The end of his journey is marked by his acceptance of ultimate disillusionment.

This is a book that did not age well. H.G.Wells explores atomic power, seeing it as powering industry (atomic powered planes and cars) as well as weapons of warfare. But he wraps it in a manifesto of his thoughts on the future of humanity and one world government and the story falls dead under the weight of his postulations.

There are three main sections. First he looks at how people have powered their world through history, and how such things as steam power took a long time to emerge even when people had been seeing the lid bounce on top of a boiling kettle for centuries. And nobody ever thought, "Hey, I could use that power for something." Similarly, he tells of a man who studied glow worms and luminescence and thought, "That thing is releasing energy in small doses. I wonder how I could speed it up." And from such thoughts of radiation came atomic power.

Second section is the story of atomic bombs being dropped by hand from aeroplanes like large grenades. Because of the half life of radiation the bombs keep exploding for weeks. Most major cities are destroyed in an orgy of destruction. Had he written a complete novel on this portion alone it would have been a much better book.

Third section is a long long long diatribe about peace coming through the voluntary giving up of all political power to a single world wide authority and the people of Earth can then live in peace by focusing on art instead of farming.

There is some value in reading about his understanding of radiation etc, considering that the book was written in 1912. He gets lots of stuff wrong, and his view of the future is limited. For example, his atomic powered planes in the war he sets in 1955 are still fabric covered timber frame machines and the bombs are dropped over the side by hand by the copilot. As a writer who saw the talk of a looming war on one hand and talk of nuclear power on the other, he joined the two pretty well.