10 Novels I Read in 2017

Happy New Year, everyone! Before I get into the last year in movies, I want to talk about some books I read this year. These aren't all from 2017; they're just ones that I read for the first time last year. And they're not the whole list of books I read, either.

According to my Goodreads log, I read 34 books last year. I'd set a goal for myself of 24, so I met that, even when you consider that six of those "books" were short stories. Thirteen were graphic novels or collections of comics (a lot of Tarzan, but also some '70s Batman and Marvel collections). Those totally count, but I'm not talking about them here. I also left off some re-reads (a couple of Burroughs' Tarzan novels) and a couple of books that would need more space to write about than I want to give here (those are Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Zorro: The Complete Pulp Adventures, Volume 1). If you're doing the math, that's a total of 23, but I'm going to talk about the 24th when I talk about one of the ten below, because they're thematically linked.

What's left are ten novels that I read in 2017, listed from least to most favorite.

10. On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers



You know I like pirates, right? I may have mentioned it. And Tim Powers' book was either an inspiration for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie or shared enough common elements with it that Disney paid for the title. Since I was disappointed by that movie, I thought I should read the book and get the original take on Blackbeard's search for the Fountain of Youth. Sadly, this was disappointing, too.

It's very well written in terms of craft. Powers knows how to create captivating characters and give them distinct voices. He's also great at period details and introducing a compelling mystery. Where the book lost me though was halfway through when the story's magical elements fully took over the nautical adventure. At that point, it becomes full-on fantasy and the villains might as well be wearing pointy hats with stars. It was also grating to realize that the one female character is actually nothing but a MacGuffin for the hero to chase after and try to protect. This is the only book on the list that I didn't finish.

9. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad



This was another disappointing book and a couple of things contributed to that. One was that its psychological terror had been hyped beyond its ability to deliver. But the other is that Apocalypse Now (which is a loose adaptation of it) had also raised my expectations about how disturbed I would be. The novel never got there for me.

Nor did it answer any of the questions I had about Kurtz or what went wrong with him. That's probably the point, but I was still looking for some insight that the book doesn't deliver. There's a lot of talking about how strange and wonderful Kurtz is, but I never experienced his profundity for myself or related to Marlow's intoxication with him. There are some great themes in the book, though (I love the warning about how thin and easily cast off the armor of civilization is), and some unforgettable scenes (particularly during the journey upriver and the arrival at Kurtz' camp).

8. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline



I'm not usually one to read a novel before seeing a movie adaptation. Generally, I prefer to see the film first and then enjoy the book afterwards. I tend to like both versions when I do it that way, instead of watching the movie and comparing it to the book.

But I was in the mood for some science fiction at some point last year and Ready Player One is so well spoken of by my friends that I chose it, even though Spielberg's adaptation is about to come out.

I very much liked the plot and the puzzle-solving and of course all the references to '80s pop culture. I didn't as much enjoy the trash-talking and posturing of the socially awkward main character and his friends. In fact, there was a point early on where I considered giving up. But I pushed through and was pleased that the arrogance lessened as the stakes increased, the characters' relationships deepened, and they all had to focus on other things.

If you want more detailed thoughts on the book, I highly recommend Nerd Lunch's discussion of it. I didn't participate in that, but they did an excellent job covering the novel's strengths and weaknesses.

7. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L Frank Baum



I've wanted to read this for years and finally pulled the trigger this holiday season. And I liked it quite a bit.

It's usually a drawback for me when a book's chapters are episodic like they are here, but it works in this. First of all, it's a children's story and easy to imagine Baum sitting in a nursery and telling these tales to a group of eager, young listeners. But also, the individual adventures work together to build towards the completed mythology of Santa as we know him today.

Baum's writing voice is pleasant and I enjoyed spending time in the world he created. It beats Rankin-Bass' version of Santa's origin story, Santa Claus in Coming to Town, in almost every way, though R-B did also adapt this novel and now I'm super curious to see that.

6. A Room with a View by EM Forster



The film version of this book is very solidly an '80s movie, but I always think of it as a '90s film, because it started two of my strongest '90s obsessions: period dramas (especially ones produced by Merchant Ivory) and Helena Bonham Carter.

I love the film version of A Room with a View so much that I have most of it memorized and when I finally read the book last Spring, I was surprised at just how faithful the movie is. It's so faithful that I experienced very powerfully the thing that most Read the Book Before Seeing the Movie people cite as their main reason for preferring that order: It was tough not to imagine the film actors in their roles as I read. Or read the dialogue with anything other than the inflections those actors used.

But there are differences between the two. Some things, the movie does better, like the ending. It's not drastically different, but it does make Lucy's climactic revelation more emotional and exciting. In the book's favor, though, I appreciate the additional insights it provides. For instance, I never picked up on why Lucy chose Schubert instead of Beethoven when playing for Cecil's family. Forster's still subtle about it, but he makes it clearer than the film does. And there's a whole subplot about George's mother that's left out of the film. All in all, it's a lovely book that made me want to revisit the movie as soon as I finished it.

5. The Monk by Matthew Lewis



After I spent Halloween 2016 talking about gothic literature, I've been slowly digging in and reading some. I'm a big fan of Castle of Otranto and have re-read it multiple times, but Mysteries of Udolpho was a slog and put me off the classics for a while. The Monk has renewed my interest. It's lurid and super spooky.

The trick I've learned with early gothic literature is to not grow impatient with the plot, but to immerse myself in the details of the moment. This is especially rewarded in The Monk (with the Bleeding Nun segment being an awesome sidebar to the main narrative, and arguably the best part of the whole novel). I'm also finding it working for me as I try The Mysteries of Udolpho again, though. I hated it on first reading, but am thoroughly enjoying it the second time around.

It was cool reading this alongside The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter by Ambrose Bierce, which I also read in 2017. Both stories go different directions from the same concept. They start with a virtuous monk, then put irresistible temptation in his way to see what happens. But while Lewis' character needs an outside influence to pull him towards sin, Bierce's falls all on his own.

Lewis has the more thrilling story, because it's so racy, but Bierce's (which does go to some ghastly places as well) is the more effective warning. Not just for religious people, but for anyone tempted to justify selfish, prideful activity in the name of trying to "help" someone.

4. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson



This got on my reading list when someone described it as Southern gothic and it does have creepy, gothic elements to it. What I enjoyed most though was the mystery of the Blackwood family and what exactly happened to make them such pariahs in their town.

It's not a difficult mystery to figure out, but getting to the solution is a hauntingly beautiful process as Shirley Jackson slowly reveals not just details about past events, but about the present mental states of the surviving family members. It's a lovely, unsettling book.

3. Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty



This is another one that I picked up because it sounded rather gothic. I was browsing at a book fair and liked the cover with the spooky house. The back cover blurb pulled me in further, talking about a young girl with a cryptic past who lives in the cellar of Biltmore House and is pulled into a mystery of disappearing children.

It's not really all that gothic, but it is a great mystery in a cool setting and with characters I got very fond of. There are supernatural elements, but the novel never crosses into true urban fantasy territory (a genre that's a tough sell for me). The supernatural bits are used sparingly and don't retread territory I've been over in other stories. Beatty is way more interested in the way that Serafina has been isolated her entire life and finally begins to connect with society. I liked that a lot and am looking forward to reading the sequel.

2. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame



My only association with this classic has been through Disney, first through Mr Toad's Wild Ride at Disney World as a kid, and later through their animated adaptation that's packaged with "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad. I finally went back to the source and I'm glad I did. I loved it.

It's a beautifully pastoral book. The opening chapters read like a series of short stories about the same, recurring characters. Since I was mostly familiar with Disney's focus on the irritatingly hyper Mr Toad, I was surprised and pleased to find so much of the book concerned with Mole and Rat. They're pleasant characters who live in a pleasant place and Grahame's wonderful descriptions make me want to live there, too.

I love his prose and especially the observations he makes about human (or animal, I guess) nature. I was completely hooked as soon as I read Mole's thoughts about vacations: "...he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy working." Grahame gets me.

There are stories about hospitality and homesickness and curiosity and traveling and worship. They're all lovely. As they progress, Badger and Toad also enter the tales and the stories start to become more connected, so that there's a strong narrative pushing through by the end. That's the part that Disney latched onto, and it is entertaining, but it's not the best part to me. The earlier, quieter chapters are the ones that are going to stick with me for a long, long time.

1. Hope and Red by Jon Skovron



If you're looking for great book recommendations, I highly recommend following author Kelly Sedinger on Goodreads. His reviews have added several books to my reading list, including my favorite book I read in 2017. I hope to get to the others this year.

Jon Skovron is primarily known as a YA fantasy author, but with Hope and Red he breaks free from the restrictions of YA. That means that there’s sex and cursing, but unlike some other authors who’ve made the same transition, the adult elements in Hope and Red never feel gratuitous. The sex is hot, but emotionally real. And the language is the natural result of the story's being set in a seaside slum with its own particular slang. (I always get nervous when fantasy books include a glossary, because it’s always annoying to me to stop reading and go look up a word just to understand dialogue. But Skovron’s glossary is there for flavor, not homework. The slang in his world is largely based on ours and even when it’s unfamiliar, I’m still able to figure out meaning from context).

What Skovron absolutely brings over from YA is fast-paced adventure and compelling characters with strong, emotional cores. Hope and Red are the names of the leads and even though they don’t meet until deep into the book, their individual stories are equally fascinating. I never found myself wishing that Skovron would wrap one part up and move on to the other. By the time they met, I knew them both well and was eager to see how they would affect each other's lives.

What makes the whole thing especially palatable for me is that it’s set in a fantasy world of oceans and islands. This is the pirate fantasy that I wanted from On Stranger Tides. Hope begins her life living in a remote island village, but when something horrible happens to the rest of the community, she’s rescued and sent to live first with an even more remote group of warrior monks and then aboard a merchant ship. For his part, Red grows up in the aforementioned slums and spends some time as a pirate. You might expect them to meet from Red’s group attacking Hope’s, but Skovron has something else in mind. Which describes my whole experience with the novel. Skovron consistently twists and swerves around expectations and completely hooked me into wanting to know what’s going to happen next.

That's something that he does with the ending of the novel, too. He picks a great place to put a break in the Empire of Storms series, but it is a cliffhanger to be resolved in the next volume. I can't wait to read it. Not just because I have to find out what happens next, but because I really really want to spend more time with these people.

Gothic Gotham [Guest Post]

As promised, occasional guest-Adventureblogger GW Thomas is back. He's actually sent in a couple of posts that I wanted to have up before now, but needed to figure out how to fit in with Countdown to Halloween. Not tone-wise, but just schedule-wise. Having to post a couple of times a day for the last couple of days helped me figure that out though, so this morning we have GW on the importance and influence of gothic literature (very timely for the season!). Then this evening I'll talk about another horror movie. Enjoy! And thanks to GW for the great piece! -- Michael

In 1764, a bored English peer, no longer active in politics, builder of a fairy tale castle in the middle of Twickenham, came up with a strange idea for a book. He wanted to tell a modern story but with elements of days gone-by. You know the kind of thing: ghosts, violent sword-fights, secret doors, family curses, desperate adventures. The only problem was he lived in the Age of Reason. Nobody wrote that kind of silliness anymore. Man had Intellect. He had Science. Books were for instruction, logic and improvement. Why would anyone want to read such an anomaly, such an anachronism?

But he wrote it anyway. And published it under a pseudonym. It was a bestseller. For the second edition, he revealed his authorship and some felt it was a cheat. For he had presented it as an old manuscript, not a new story. Others didn't care and wrote more stories just like it. The book was called The Castle of Otranto (published in 1765). It was the first Gothic novel and it's importance (or perhaps more importantly the Gothic's importance) is only now being truly revealed. Horace Walpole's tale of lost heirs, gigantic armour, family curses, fleeing through tunnels, improbable plot twists and operatic dialogue seems quaint by today's standards, but its legacy drives all the most popular media of today.

The Gothic is the fountainhead from which all genre fiction springs. Its inspiration of the Horror genre is pretty easy to see. It's not that far from Otranto to Dracula. From the dreams of a young woman, Mary Shelley, it became Science Fiction. From there it sprang, through the genius of Gothic master, Edgar Allan Poe, into the Mystery and Detective genre. The mainstream toyed with the Gothic for a while, taking in and then kicking it out again, but not before such writers as the Bronte Sisters, Sir Walter Scott and Henry James borrowed from it for "serious" novels. From these it became the less serious Gothic Romance. Blending with mythology and fairy tales, it became Sword-and-Sorcery and Modern Fantasy. The daring-do of the Gothic inspired flamboyant heroes as far apart as the Scarlet Pimpernel, Captain Blood and Allan Quatermain. It was the Pimpernel that would grandfather Jimmy Dale, the Gray Seal, (by Frank L. Packard) the first of the Masked Avengers, siring the Pulp heroes from the Shadow to Phantom Detective. And it was only a very short bus ride from there to the Comics.

Let's skip ahead 174 year after Otranto to 1939. A young artist named Bob Kane teams up with writer Bill Finger to produce a new, stranger kind of detective to stand out from the crowd of Superman wannabes. Masked (of course) but winged as well, he was Batman (first appearance Detective Comics #27, May 1939). Not since Superman started leaping tall buildings in a single bound had a character caught the public's fancy so strongly. But unlike the Man of Steel, Batman is dark, creepy and utterly Gothic. Where Superman is an alien from another planet, Batman is just a man tortured by loss, the Heathcliff of superheroes. Where Superman gained powers given him by his birthright, Batman has to rely on his own inventiveness to create new gadgets. Superman faces forces from outer space, while Batman deals with insane criminals of a more earthly nature.

I was struck by all this recently while watching the pilot of the new Gotham series. Even though the detectives mentioned things like DNA and used computers, the feel of Gotham is so close to Bill Finger and Bob Kane's original dark vision. The fun of the show for some is the old "Year One" effect. In other words, let's see where all these heroes and villains came from. And in this way I did enjoy it too. But it was actually the Gothic effect that really made me watch. The driving force of Gothic is the past trying to destroy the future. The death of Bruce Wayne's parents begins a course of action that will lead to everything that will happen to Batman. Like a good Noir novel (a very Gothic enterprise, indeed), the tragedy that makes Bruce Wayne the Batman pulls in two directions. It makes him a superhero, more than an ordinary man, but it also consumes him, robbing him of any kind of ordinary happiness. It is this conflict that makes Batman so enduring. It is this frisson that keeps us watching even when the plot lines get convoluted and (let's be honest) so improbable that we could not possibly buy it if presented any other way. The Castle of Otranto has this same goofy logic that has earned it the hatred of the Reasoners, those scientific Rationalist who poo-pooed the Gothic back in the 1700s (Jane Austen's Northhanger Abbey hinges on this contempt and the idea that reading Gothics ruined young women's minds.) It was the same hatred that Fredric Wertham presents in Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and for the Senate Committee on Juvenile Deliquency (and I would extend that even to the vitriol heaped upon Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. I have almost forgiven Tom Hanks for being in Mazes and Monsters (1982). Almost.)

I have often thought humanity divides pretty easily here. Let's call it the Otranto Line. For some the world of facts, ledgers, evening news, sports, DIY and all things seeable, proveable. On the other side: Walpole's camp, are the dreamers, the LARPers, the fanboys, those who stood in line for hours to see The Lord of the Rings first, who see that this season we have Arrow plus three other DC shows and cry tears of joy. These are my people. They are the Children of the Gothic. Those who dwell upon the unseeable, the unproved. Who felt a little chill the first time Michael Keaton said "I'm Batman!" Long live the Gothic!

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Vampire Free Style feeds my inner goth

I often feel a little nervous about reviewing self-published and small press books. Those projects have a difficult enough time getting any kind of attention that I don’t want to crush anyone’s butterfly with a negative review. When I don’t like a small press book, I usually just don’t write about it. Fortunately, Jenika Ioffreda’s Vampire Free Style is simple to review, because it’s lovely and charming. It’s not without flaws – mostly grammatical errors and some unnatural dialogue – but I found those increasingly easy to ignore because I liked the story and the characters so much.

Vampire Free Style is a gothic mystery/romance with heavy manga influences. Something that's not immediately apparent by looking at me is that I have a strong inner goth. It probably traces back to Universal monster movies, but I grew up on Sisters of Mercy and The Mission UK and love stories with dark, crumbling mansions, beautiful innocents, and sinister forces that conspire against them.

My manga experience on the other hand is extremely limited, but it's obvious even to me that Vampire Free Style’s sense of humor and pacing owes a lot to Japanese comics. Ioffreda’s art even reminds me a little of Bizenghast, the manga-inspired gothic series by M. Alice LeGrow (though I like Vampire Free Style a lot better than that one).

Vampire Free Style is about a young witch-boy named Padroncino who’s just lost the love of his life. His girlfriend Elea has gone missing and he’s distraught. If you made it past “gothic mystery/romance with heavy manga influences” above, I’m hoping that the characters’ names aren’t off-putting to you. It’s a trope of the genre and Ioffreda uses it well sometimes (I quite like Elea’s name, for instance) and not as well at others (Baron E. Van Darth).

As the story opens, a stray cat wanders into Padroncino's life and it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that the cat is in fact Elea. We know this because the cat keeps having flashbacks that are obviously from Elea’s point of view, but Padroncino knows nothing. As he investigates Elea’s disappearance, the real mystery for the reader isn’t what happened to her, but how did it happen and why?

Complicating the situation is a young man named Edward who’s hanging out with a group of goth kids. When he accidentally comes into contact with the cat on the street, he begins to have strange flashbacks to the eighteenth century where he also met and fell in love with a girl named Elea.

I don’t know how long Ioffreda intends the series to run, but there are six issues so far. It feels like she’s close to revealing everything, so I don’t want to go into any more detail about the plot and risk spoiling something. I’ll just say that the description above goes through around the third issue and that revelations abound in subsequent issues.

As much as I like the mystery aspect to the series though, I’m equally invested in the romance. At times, it feels like it's building toward a Casablanca-like dilemma for Elea. If she’s the same girl with whom Edward fell in love with in the past (the title of the series might be a clue to how that’s possible, but doesn’t explain all the details), she’s going to have a decision to make at some point. I’m not saying whether she is or isn’t the same girl; I’m just noting that Ioffreda plants the idea and that made me want to keep reading.

Like a lot of manga characters, Elea comes off a bit perfect, but it’s impossible to dislike her. She’s so sweet, so ideal – and Ioffreda draws her so beautifully – that I can’t help but root for her. The same goes for Padroncino. I want these lovely, crazy kids to end up together, even as I’m hoping that nothing bad happens to Edward in the process. That’s the story that drives Vampire Free Style and makes we want the seventh issue.

Though it’s primarily available in comics shops in the UK, I imagine that if you contact Ioffreda through her website, she’ll be glad to arrange something with you.

Graphic Classics' Halloween Sale

Graphic Classics is a great line of comics anthologies that uses top-notch artists to adapt stories by classic authors. Each volume contains one or two familiar stories as well as obscure ones that you may have never read. None of the volumes I've read - and I've got most of them - have failed to entertain and educate me at the same time.

Several of the volumes are horror-related, so from now through Halloween Graphic Classics are on sale for 20% off when you buy them through the publisher's website. I'm not getting paid to advertise for them; I just really like these books and know some of you will too. Now's a perfect time to try them out.

31 Things I Love About Halloween: Horror Books

As slowly as I read prose, it's not cheating to list this separately from Horror Comics. I can get through several graphic novels a week, but prose books of any length take me about a month, so I have to be very particular with which ones I commit to.

This season, I'm re-reading a couple of shorter novels. I should finish Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto tomorrow and then I'll dig into Stephen King's Carrie. If you're unfamiliar with Otranto, it's generally acknowledged as the first gothic romance and a major inspiration for books like Dracula and Frankenstein. It's got a spooky old castle, an evil nobleman, a couple of innocent young girls for him to terrorize, a mysterious stranger, a dangerous knight, a giant suit of sentient armor, and a ghost that materializes from a portrait. And it's only a little over a hundred pages. Highly recommended if you don't mind the archaic writing style, including extremely long paragraphs and no quotation marks to differentiate speakers in dialogue. It's very very readable, but not what you're used to.

Any of you guys reading anything good and spooky right now?

Art Show: Yetea for Two

The Twisted Tree



Artist Unknown. [Curt Purcell's Flickr]

Night's End



By Berni Wrightson. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

The Bride



By Art Adams. [Frankensteinia]

Expeditions of the Mysterious



By Joey Chou.

Pass the Comics: Sinbad, Conan, Deep Sea Spies, and More

I think I've finally stumbled onto a title for this feature. When my siblings and I were growing up, there was only ever one section of the newspaper we were interested in. "Pass the comics" was a common request in our house and I'm happy to pass these along to you.

The Captain's Quest



I don't know much about the characters of Zip and Li'l Bit, but their latest adventure takes place on a whaling ship. The webcomic just started and updates every Sunday. [By Trade Loeffler.]

K-51: Spies at War



I've shared this one before, but it popped back up on Golden Age Comic Book Stories again [you have to scroll down aways to get to this story] and it's one of my favorites. As the title suggests, it's not just tentacles that our hero has to deal with. It's also filthy Nazi deep sea divers.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad



By John Buscema. [Hairy Green Eyeball 2]

The Castle of Otranto



I love a good Gothic Romance story. Unfortunately, a lot of them tend to be tortuously long and rambling novels, but Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto isn't one of those. It's short, sweet, and chock full of vengeful ghosts, floating skulls, secret passages, swooning damsels, heroic young men, and of course a dark, evil, mustache-twirling villain. The adaptation for Adventures into the Unknown isn't nearly as fun and atmospheric as the book, but it's wonderfully illustrated by Al Ulmer. [Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine]

Hour of the Dragon



The first part of Robert E Howard's Conan novel as adapted by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane. [Diversions of the Groovy Kind]

Escape from Planet Nowhere



Otis Frampton's giant robot webcomic has kicked off with a bang (and a couple of thooms).

Adventureblog Gallery: Gothic romance, Queen La, submarine vs. dinosaurs, She-Hulk, and Zatanna

The Black Dog



Not sure who painted this, but there's a whole gallery of similarly gothic book covers here.

Queen La



By Roy G. Krenkel. (More here, here, here, and here.)

The Land that Time Forgot



By Frank R. Paul.

She-Hulk



By Jean Baptiste Vendamme.

Zatanna



By Matt Kindt.

Gothic Classics

My review of Gothic Classics is up at the Newsarama blog.