Tim Powers

On Stranger Tides, the inspiration for Pirates of the Caribbean was a wonderfully fun easy read that held up well against the movie series based upon it. Despite Disney's opinions otherwise, I'd love to see a movie that was truer to the book as there were a number of scenes where Tim Powers descriptions (especially those as some characters head into scenes from Dante's Inferno towards the Fountain of Youth that I don't believe my minds eye did justice too.

Jack Shandys rise to pirate fame is hardly believable, you end up rooting for his character all along the way as he's just a good guy that ends up being a pirate because of a couple instances of misplaced loyalty.… (more)

Firstly, the UK cover is both stunning and deceptive. If the library copy I borrowed had been the US edition, I think I would have passed. I thought I was getting another Brontë detective novel, a la Bella Ellis, and not whatever this was.

Secondly, what the hell did I just read? Werewolves and ghosts and Catholic sects, oh my. I won't ask why the Brontës were the main characters - that's what drew me in - but honestly, the plot was an insult to even Wuthering Heights, never mind Anne, Charlotte and Emily. And the author just - throws the reader in the deep end. Emily comes across a wounded man bearing a two-pronged knife at Ponden Kirk and tries to help him before going for back up. When she gets back, he's vanished but left his weapon, which she shows to her father. The Rev launches into a tale about a little dark haired child brought over from Ireland, who may or may not have been a werewolf, and all hell breaks loose. After that, I lost track.

Emily is the lead sister yet again, and she is both nonconforming and unrelenting, I'll give her that: 'Emily thought of the ways in which she was indeed already set apart. The idea of marriage and children had never held any attraction for her, and conviviality of the sort going on in the bigger room beyond the door at her back was unfathomable: dissipation, in every sense. The people of the village, and of the remote busy world, were ciphers - their motives, if any, only to be guessed at. Her strength and firm identity thrived in solitude.' Charlotte is either absent or opposed to her sister's behaviour, and Anne is quietly curious. Branwell - hoo boy, I forgot possession in the description above! - is not himself for much of the story, either. Emily's dog Keeper is the best of the supporting cast. I didn't really get a sense of the siblings' personalities or the Yorkshire setting, because the focus is heavily on the contrived supernatural plot. Werewolves as a horror device are ridiculous - overgrown dogs controlled by the moon and stopped by silver bullets - but the breath-sucking ghosts were cool. And on a nitpicking level, the constant reference to mid-nineteenth century women 'grabbing their coats', like the Brontës wore Barbour jackets, was jarring.

Note to self: pay better attention to the blurb in future.… (more)

This occult magic-based thriller is set in Hollywood 2015, but its cultural epicenter is the 1922 film production of Salomé directed by Charles Bryant and starring Alla Zaminova. There is also a gothic mood, informed by overt references to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher."

On the occultism front, I was hoping for something as good as Powers' own Declare, but I found the magic in this book more reminiscent of one of Chuck Palahniuk's books (say, Lullaby or Rant). The acute sense of place and local history also strongly reminded me of Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness, although the occult technology in Medusa's Web is an idiosyncratic sort of sigil magic rather than Lieber's megapolisomancy.

It's a medium-long novel, but it reads very quickly. The details of cinema history are well researched and effective, and the central characters are fairly compelling. I liked it pretty well. As I look back to compare it to Declare, I see that Powers must have followed a similar process with both, doing thorough historical inquiry and filling the gaps of motive and causation with a supernatural conceit. Since the results are so different in the two books, I continue to be curious about the author's other recent work.… (more)