like figure who supposedly entered the
afterlife without dying. Campbell hopes
the interloper can show him how to get to
the world of the living. He’s accompanied
by Remington, a boy who can control
corpses and has a raven nesting in his
head, and the dandy Leopold, an inveterate gambler and carouser who is also the
only man in the afterlife with a functional
erection. Their journey includes multi-day benders in bars beneath the city, visits
to never-ending battlefields, and more.
This underworld is a fascinating city in
which people decay, time is currency, and
floods constantly rearrange the landscape.
The focus is less on action and more on the
sheer inanity of life after death, as in a
battle sequence where a monster built of
severed body parts uses video game techniques to defeat its enemies. Squailia’s not
yet a settled, assured writer, but he’s on
his way. (Mar.)
Harrison Squared
Daryl Gregory. Tor, $25.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-
7653-7695-4
Gregory (Afterparty) delivers a thor-
oughly entertaining novel built on H.P.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. The titular
Harrison Harrison lost the lower part of
one leg in the same boating accident that
killed his father. Now 16, he’s moving
with his research scientist mother to the
Massachusetts town of Dunnsmouth. The
other children in school are eerily quiet,
the town has no cell phone coverage, and a
fish-boy steals his comics. Things go from
strange to tragic when his mother is lost
in another boating accident two days after
moving. Refusing to believe his mother is
dead, Harrison investigates with the help
of a girl named Lydia and the aforementioned fish-boy, Lub. They encounter enemies including a knife-wielding maniac
known as the Scrimshander and a monstrous fish-woman intent on destroying
the world. Gregory delivers an enthralling
and exciting tale that should intrigue
both readers unfamiliar with Lovecraft
and longtime fans of the stories. The occasional in-jokes (buoys named after
Lovecraft, Poe, King, and Straub, and of
course Dunnsmouth itself) are subtle
enough to not distract from the rich tale,
and the YA vibe ensures a broad audience.
Agent: Martha Millard, Martha Millard
Literary Agency. (Mar.)
How to Live On Other Planets:
A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens
Edited by Joanne Merriam. Upper Rubber
Boot, $13.99 trade paper (386p) ISBN 978-1-
937794-32-3
Merriam’s interesting premise, a speculative fiction anthology of stories and
poems “focusing exclusively on the immigrant experience,” isn’t matched by the
uneven contributions. The highlight is
Bogi Takács’s “The Tiny English–
Hungarian Phrasebook for Visiting
Extraterrestrials,” which offers a translation for phrases like “Please do not touch
me. My tentacles produce a neurotoxin.”
Tom Greene’s “Zero Bar” explores racial
tolerance in a future where a child’s skin
color can be adjusted through gene
therapy, creating a dilemma for parents
who want their children to grow up
without being the victims of prejudice.
Erica L. Satifka’s “Sea Changes” builds
powerfully on its evocative opening: “The
room my father dies in is green: green like
his eyes, green like the carpet of the house
we used to live in, when we lived under
the sea.” But other entries are just underdeveloped concepts, and much of the
poetry is opaque or overwrought. (Mar.)
Into the Maelstrom
David Drake and John Lambshead. Baen, $25
(448p) ISBN 978-1-4767-8028-3
Writing from an outline by Drake,
Lambshead neatly adapts real history to a
science fiction framework in the second
novel of the Citizen trilogy (after Into the
Hinterlands). Among the far-flung colonial planets of the Cutter Stream, frustration with home rule verges on revolution.
Allen Allenson takes on the role of cap-tain-general and leads a squabbling
group of disjointed militias to war. If this
sounds familiar, it is because Drake and
Lambshead are telling the story of George
Washington as a space opera. The
authors’ adept contrivance of the
Continuum, a troublesome energy field
that allows interstellar travel but only via
light vehicles, allows for ingenious renditions: a battering trip along the
Continuum stands in for the crossing of
the Delaware, and problematic marsh
gases force the army to substitute catapults and knives for pulse rifles during
the recreation of the siege of Boston.
Surprises are scant, but knowing that
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