#Review - Ordinary Monsters by J M Miro - #extract

Ordinary Monsters
J M Miro
Bloomsbury, 7 June 2022
Available as: HB, 672pp, e
Source: Extract via NetGalley
ISBN(HB): 9781526650054

I'm grateful to Bloomsbury for providing an advance extract of Ordinary Monsters by J M Miro. The review below is based on that extract and may not reflect the full contents.

Publisher's blurb: 1882. North of Edinburgh, on the edge of an isolated loch, lies an institution of crumbling stone, where a strange doctor collects orphans with unusual abilities. In London, two children with such powers are hunted by a figure of darkness – a man made of smoke.

Charlie Ovid discovers a gift for healing himself through a brutal upbringing in Mississippi, while Marlowe, a foundling from a railway freight, glows with a strange bluish light. When two grizzled detectives are recruited to escort them north to safety, they are confronted by a sinister, dangerous force that threatens to upend the world as they know it.

What follows is a journey from the gaslit streets of London to the lochs of Scotland, where other gifted children – the Talents – have been gathered at Cairndale Institute, and the realms of the dead and the living collide. As secrets within the Institute unfurl, Marlowe, Charlie and the rest of the Talents will discover the truth about their abilities and the nature of the force that is stalking them: that the worst monsters sometimes come bearing the sweetest gifts.

The first in a captivating new historical fantasy series, Ordinary Monsters introduces the Talents with a catastrophic vision of the Victorian world, and the gifted, broken children who must save it.

What I thought: the opening of Ordinary Monsters reads almost as the origin story for a superhero tale.  Marlowe is discovered in a railway van by a young woman fleeing from her abusive master. Charlie, a Black man in the US South, is a victim of racism, framed for murder and locked in a warehouse where he is daily beaten - and miraculously recovers. The two have come to the attention of a mysterious organisation which wants them.

For good or ill? I honestly don't know. There's a hint, perhaps, in the mismatched pair of detectives sent to retrieve them: Alice, a woman out of place, and the enigmatic Coulton. Both seem marginal figures like Charlie and Marlowe themselves, so perhaps they're on the right side. But what became sin the future, I don't know.

What I do know is that the opening of the story is atmospheric, intriguing and very readable. Miro depicts two very different settings - the dire poverty of London's East End, in an age when the poor might resort to picking up coal in the street or raking through the filthy river mud for lost trinkets. When an avenging "gentleman" can more or less have his way regardless of police or the legal system. It's the dark side of Sherlock Holmes, the disease-ridden, starving and tainted end of town. And then there's Natchez, Mississippi, where an overseer can wield a whip 'just like it was still 1860, just like no war had ever happened and nothing had been abolished and freedom wasn't yet the lie it was proven to be.' 

Perhaps, actually, there isn't a great difference. But the story switches fluidly from one locale to another with the special atmosphere of each delineated and within them, as well as the, well, the different weirdness of the two special people who will be important to the later story. Miro is good with character, taking in Alice and Cotton as well, and a number of almost Dickensian personages in London, especially the tattooed wrestler Brynt and her mountebank evangelist friend, Reverend Walker, who take in Marlowe and his saviour Eliza for a time.

All in all, what I've read of this book promises a cracking good read which goes to the weird size of Victoria's time without getting all steampunky.

For more information about Ordinary Monsters, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers by Jackson Ford

A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers (The Frost Files, 4)
Jackson Ford
Orbit, 12 May 2022
Available as: PB, 496pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 978-0356514673

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for an advance copy of A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers to consider for review.

With book 4 in a series, there can be a risk of things becoming stale. Still readable, yes, still what you came to it to get, but - flat. After all, why change anything and risk putting people off?

It's a trap that Jackson Ford avoids here with aplomb. Crazy Powers - while I don't want to say too much about its outcome - upends the safe little world (well, for rather exotic values of "safe") that Teagan Frost, possessor of awesome psychokinetic (PK) abilities and would-be chef (if she can ever scrape together the money to train) has inhabited so far.

A recap. Teagan ('She has zero strategic skills, no filter, a constant ability to screw up even the best-laid plans. She can be ungrateful and whiny, and she takes sarcasm to an Olympic level') was gifted her abilities by mad-scientist parents who endowed her brother and sister with equally awesome, but different, powers (seeing infrared and never having to sleep, respectively). Teagan's brother then killed her parents and sister, and she herself was snapped up by the US Government which uses her for black ops in the Los Angeles area. Over the previous three books we've seen this situation gently come apart, culminating, at the end of Book 3, Eye of the Sh*t Storm, in Teagan sitting in hospital with her friend Annie, who's in a coma, and blaming herself for that. 

This story picks up exactly where that previous one ended. Teagan is still battered, drained and haunted by the earlier events, and may have fatally exposed the secret of her powers by saving hundreds of people from a horrifying death, but she gets no rest, oh no. Ford plunges her into the midst of a kidnap attempt which leads up to one of those fabled LA police chases, all broadcast live on ghoulish news networks. From that point it only gets worse and worse. China Shop, the outfit for which Teagan works, is tasked with providing security for a convention of arms dealers (in an LA hotel? Something seems a bit off here) - and she's not even started to recover from recent events...

I loved this book. Totally loved it. Ford blends together a pack of irritable, exhausted operatives, living on shreds of their nerves; a new group of antagonists in the form of a weird, religious cult; and a bizarre location - the hotel itself, a gothic pile with rumoured hidden tunnels, a helipad and secret rooms. And a mystery, whose unpicking will show the whole sequence of books so far in a new light. He's also very sharp on the setting - we meet 'people who are able to take a red pen to black budgets' (watch out, China Shop!) in a milieu where 'Like most crowds of rich people, it's a mostly white, mostly male demographic.')

At the same time, old antagonists also return, affording Annie, who's a likeable and interesting character, a whole adventure of her own in parallel to that of Teagan and the rest. Annie is also battered and bruised, and her escapade - accompanied by Teagan's boyfriend Nic (is there a bit of a spark there? Ouch...) - gives an opportunity for her to reflect on her own early life, sharing details with the reader that we didn't know before. It also illuminates the relationship between her and Teagan, revealing a much more human side to both that Teagan's endless banter and Annie's chilliness has so far concealed. (Teagan's friendship with ex-gangster and drug dealer Annie is touching - 'Teagan is one of the most exasperating, irritating and confusing people that Annie has ever met... but she is also her friend. Maybe her only real friend.')

Both women, basically, get put through the mill here - one can almost taste their weariness and pain - and it's made plain that both care about much more than their own survival. There's a bond there, but there's also a sense of wider ethics and involvement in society, and perhaps also a sense of growing up, maturing (a bit. A little bit.) A reminder that they're not just action heroes. As you'd expect, it makes this a compelling and must-read instalment of this series and one which sets things up for another which I'll eagerly await. Truly, Teagan (and Ford) throw lots of sh*t up in the air and who knows where it will ever come down?

For more information about A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers see the publisher's website here.

#Review - The Somebody People by Bob Proehl

Design by Julia Lloyd

The Somebody People (Resonant Duology, 2)
Bob Proehl
Titan Books, 13 July 2021
Available as: PB, 663pp, e, audio 
Source: Advance e-copy via NetGalley
ISBN(PB): 9781789094633

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Somebody People via NetGalley.

The Somebody People picks up where The Nobody People, one of my favourite books of last year, paused. As Proehl notes in his acknowledgements, it is more like the second half of a story than a sequel and if you haven't read the first book yet there would be a lot of value in reading one immediately after the other as there are many linking storylines, key events and things whose significance evolves from one book to the next. I didn't do that of course, but I still found The Somebody People an exciting, satisfying and cathartic ending to the whole story.

The first book introduces the idea of "Resonants" - individuals with what we'd call superpowers. Their number has apparently been increasing through the second half of the 20th century and The Nobody People tells how they are eventually forced to go public provoking a storm of prejudice and, eventually, persecution.

That story was told partly through the eyes of Avi Hirsch, a journalist injured while embedded with the Army in Iraq, and we saw his increasing obsession with the Resonants alongside the slow collapse of his marriage to Kay. By the time The Somebody People opens, Hirsch is out of the picture but his daughter Emmeline features in the second book as do many of the characters from the first one. There are also some flashbacks to the earlier life of Kevin Bishop, the mysterious head of a school for Resonant kids in New York, including one that describes how it all started

Alongside the treatment of Resonants as a persecuted group, The Nobody People also pointed to a militant faction among them and this - and the reason behind it - features strongly in the present book, set a decade or so later following a Civil War in which the Resonants and in particular that Black Rose Faction gained the upper hand. There is an atmosphere of ethnic cleansing and segregation in the background of The Somebody People with battle lines drawn and the survivors of Bishop's circle seeking to defeat the evil that seems to be driving the Faction. The action to that end is complex, with multiple plot threads and various characters trying to cope, principally Fahima Deeb who's managing badly in the absence of ex-girlfriend Alyssa. Alyssa is a "baseliner" ie a "normal" person - referred to by the hardliners in the Black Rose Faction as "damps" - and had to leave New York during the "evacuations".

It's all fast moving and Proehl throws in concepts such as multiple timelines, extra-dimensional spaces and something very close to possession, to support or impede our heroes as they try to safeguard humanity and see off the Faction. There's a haunting sense of moral ambiguity (I love the smell of moral ambiguity in the morning...) as we know that the extremes seen here are in part a reaction to the persecution shown in The Nobody People. Characters here are damaged in various ways, physically and mentally, by what was done to them, or suffering from guilt at what they have done. There is a real sense in Proehl's writing that people make mistakes and do bad things for good reasons. There is also more than attach of PSTD in many of them. It all feels very real for a world with superpowered inhabitants - the stress is on the human dimension not the wondrous abilities - and there are very few characters I didn't have at least a sneaking sympathy for.

My favourites were possibly the gay couple Dom(inic) and Clay, Resonants with secure middle class jobs and an adopted boy at a prestigious school, who become concerned about what is happening around them and about his future and - rather than seeking sober advice - embark on what I feel are some spectacularly ill thought out plans, landing themselves in the centre of the action as a result. I enjoyed that despite it all, they seek to secure their relationship and protect their boy and that they are in a sense ordinary people who for most of the story are just trying to survive but who achieve some very brave things. Most of all, despite those dubious decisions, their hearts are always in the right place. 

But there are many others here worth a mention. Kimani, perhaps, whose special power is to be able to create a room, outside space, which she can make appear anywhere on Earth (oh please, I want that ability!) and who uses it to shelter Emmeline. There's something special about Emmeline, and one of the themes of this book is her discovering that for herself and trying to learn how she can avoid being used by others, inevitably bringing her into conflict with both "sides" here.

In short, The Somebody People is both a rattling good story in its own right and an excellent completion of The Nobody People, teasing out themes that were sketched there and creating a wholeness to the story that confirms it is, indeed, a unity. I would recommend.

For more information about The Somebody People, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Eye of the Sh*t Storm by Jackson Ford

Eye of the Sh*t Storm (The Frost Files, 3)

Jackson Ford
Orbit, 29 April 2021
Available as: PB, 496pp, e, audio
Source: Advance e-copy provided by the publisher
ISBN(PB): 9780356514666

I'm grateful to Orbit for an advance e-copy of Eye of the Sh*t Storm.

'So it turns out, you can totally fall asleep while escaping from a gunfight on the back of a really loud motorcycle.'

I was watching the Oscars last night, broadcast from Union Station, Los Angeles. But I didn't see the glitz and glamour, oh no. I saw an exhausted Teagan Frost and her gang breaking into the empty station at night to escape from an increasingly dystopian, post The Big One, LA.

That scene really is in the book, so if you want to orient yourself, go and look at the coverage. 

You'll have to imagine, though, that things are somewhat more desperate that you can see on TV... 

In this one, Teagan is definitely running on empty. A few months after the events of Random Sh*t Flying Through the Air, China Shop, the removal firm that's really a secret agency, is falling apart after the loss of a key member of the team. Teagan, whose psychokinetic ability is at the centre of the operation (she really is The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind, appears on the brink of losing her other, found family (her birth family, who made her what she is, having died years before). Teagan's alienated her boyfriend, colleague Annie hates her and she's STILL no closer to doing that chef's course (in fact, further off, since most of LA's kitchens no longer exist).

It is, I'd say, a doomier book than the previous parts of The Frost Files. LA was devastated in the earthquake that China Shop couldn't prevent (although they stopped it being much, much worse). What's left is a ruined landscape full of shuttered businesses, unsafe buildings and homeless people trying to keep their lives together. The team seek refuge in Union Station because it's shut and they need somewhere to go. Transport across the city is difficult with bridges down and roads blocked, and many of Teagan's favourite restaurants are no more. As the gang, splitting into different factions, set out on a nightmarish journey to reunite a young boy with his father, there's a real feeling of things falling apart.

It's not only exhaustion, hunger and hostile forces that bring the darkness. The events of the first two books have left scars, and Teagan - who is, remember, very young - is clearly struggling. With guilt, afraid that she - or what she is - caused much of the harm, and that she may do more. With relationships, having drifted away from her boyfriend Nic (though he pops up again here to give her an excoriating lecture on racial assumptions and privilege - Teagan's put her foot in it again: "I still tried to tell a black American about how the law wouldn't protect me.") And with the dark legacy of how her powers arose, and who else may share them.

The book is, basically, a single desperate chase, running from one danger into another with very little time to consider the bigger picture or work out what may be happening. There's a little reflection on that from Reggie, Teagan's quadriplegic handler (and we learn more about Reggie's past too) and also from Moira Tanner, their distant and scary boss in Washington DC, but these don't interrupt the flow much, it's action, action, action for Teagan and the stakes are scarily high. 

If you have read either of the previous books in this series you'll know more or less what to expect, but there is a sense here that Ford has now got into top gear, and the pages of this book simply fly by. I really, really can't imagine what's going to happen in Book 4 - because, no, The Frost Files isn't a trilogy and with Teagan getting in touch with her roots (as well as picking up a couple of new and lamentable habits along the way) there is a strong sense by the end of this book that ANYTHING could happen next.

A firm recommendation from me for this one, and if you haven't caught up with the series yet, DO IT NOW.

For more information about Eye of the Sh*t Storm, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Nobody People by Bob Proehl

The Nobody People
Bob Proehl
Titan Books, 25 September
Available as: PB, 640pp, e
Read as: Advance PB review copy
ISBN: 9781789094619

I'm very grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of The Nobody People to consider for review.

This book was originally planned to come out earlier this year and like many others, it has been delayed due too You Know What. I've been waiting impatiently to share just how good it is - and now I can!

Set in a near-future USA over some ten years, this is a book of epic scale about prejudice and the slide into what can only be called fascism. Framed round the treatment of those - "Resonants" - who possess what might in other stories be called superpowers it isn't about them as cardboard cutout heroes and villains but more about how we accept - or don't - difference. Ringing deeply true, The Nobody People doesn't, of course, have to make this up, rather it can reference what has actually happened (and indeed, 2020 of all years, what is happening now).

But it's about more than that. The Nobody People is, as I have said, wide-ranging and also addresses family, growing up, assimilation and more. Our first introduction to this world is through journalist Avi Hirsch, wife Kay and young (six or seven when the story begins) daughter Emmeline. Avi's just been given the first tip that will lead the three of them into the USA of the Resonants and we see him follow that up, learning more about them and increasingly trading on his relationship and knowledge. He's perhaps the classic iffy ally, slightly self satisfied about how accepting he is, exploiting his "in" status professionally and personally, but also frustrated that he can't, in the end, be one of them. (At times he comes across as petulant and entitled. At the same time, he's suffering himself having g lost a limb in Iraq and Proehl depicts the consequences of that, the PSTD and guilt and how this loss affects Avi's sense of himself and his place within his family.)

And yes, I'm using the language of marginalisation and allyship here, if advisedly, because Proehl's book invites those comparisons, building on the infrastructure of oppression and discrimination in US law and society and referencing, implicitly and explicitly, not only the treatment of African Americans but also of Japanese American internees in the 1940s and of Muslims after September 11th - the latter, especially, through the character of Fahima, a young Muslin woman whose father and uncle were arrested and "disappeared" on flimsy pretexts. Along the way we see prejudiced cops, vigilantes and militias, on-the-make politicians, talk show hosts determined to exploit the situation and that most frustrating of figures, the reasonable man, who just thinks the way ahead is to invite both "sides" to a dialogue. Proehl identifies and shoots down the false equivalence in that:

'Fatima's no psychic, but she can see through the senator's thinking. It's a standard ally line of thought... It ignores a major inequality.... The ally assumes these are viewpoints, meeting on equal ground. No. One person is right, one is wrong. One person wants to be, one wishes the other was dead.'

We also meet Kevin Bishop. And he is an enigma. Maybe he is THE enigma here. A leading light among the Resonants, perhaps the oldest of them, Bishop's earlier life is only hinted at but it seems he Knows Stuff about their origin and, perhaps, future. It's his project to bring them out into the open and it's him who has founded a specialist school (in New York City) to teach young Resonants. The Bishop Academy is a much, much more grittily depicted school for supernaturally gifted kids than Hogwarts, by the way. Proehl's portrayal of the students, many of them teenagers, has the rawness and awkwardness (half self-assurance, half paralysing doubt) of that age. He does a brilliant job of integrating the obvious oddness arising from their "abilities" (and from the treatment they've had from communities and family) with the ordinary oddness of teen life.

This is a book that takes its time, introducing its world and grounding us in its reality. Proehl establishes the actuality of Resonance, never discussed as magic or in fantastical terms but as science (albeit bizarre science) with Fahima the experimenter, inventor and geek who can translate the ability to fly, project a death ray or bilocate, into plausible science. He also establishes the actuality of a gnawing, entitled hatred, always just a heartbeat from power and control, that operates at the most mundane levels of society - people looking the other when a woman is bundled into an unmannered van - as well as stalking Senate corridors and police canteens.

It's a disturbing, unsettling view of modernity in which the real horrors are not actually these with scary superpowers, not even those who put such powers to harmful use, but the great, placid mass of unsocial, ordinary people. A very timely picture, really.

Now, after not being able to wait to share this review, now I can't wait to read the concluding part, The Somebody People.

For more information about The Nobody People, see the Titan Books webpage here.

Review - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind

Cover by Steve Panton

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind
Jackson Ford
Orbit, 20 June 2019
PB, 444pp

I'm grateful to Nazia at Orbit for a free advance copy of this book.

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind is Jackson Ford's debut novel, it's published today, and you should read it.

Teagan Frost is having a bad day at work. A VERY bad day. It begins when a routine job goes wrong, endangering her and a colleague, gets worse when her boss gives her a carpeting for how she got out of that situation, and positively implodes when she's framed for murder and has to go on the run as the city of Los Angeles burns around her.

Oh, due to being on the run, she has to miss a date with a nice, single man at THE up and coming restaurant in LA.

And she hasn't slept in 48 hours.

Welcome to the world of The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with her Mind. Teagan is The Girl, and she can, indeed, move - stuff - mentally, a talent referred to as psychokinesis (Boss Paul won't let her call it PK for reasons explained herein). That talent's employed in the service of a secretive branch of Government, Teagan's cooperation the price she pays for not being taken away to a secret lab and vivisected to find out how she works. It doesn't make her very happy, but it's a living, and as long as she's living, she can dream and plan about opening her own restaurant.

I just LOVED this book. It's a non-stop, hectic chase around the seedy side of LA (presented with no glitz and glamour: somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Wambaugh's LA based police procedurals) as Teagan and her colleagues seek to establish her innocence while a mysterious opponent plays them from street to street, mall to mall and scuzzy diner to scuzzy diner. And that fire just keeps getting closer.

Written largely from Teagan's point of view and giving us a lively, if rather pissed-off, protagonist who's perhaps just a little too persuaded that she's right and that everyone around her is stupid, the book is nothing if not engaging. For a story with such a gaping, fanatical premise - PK is real, people, and can be genetically engineered - the writing makes it very believable. Getting the register and attitude of a bored, annoyed and overtired employee in a dead end job just right, Ford evokes roughly the same psychological/ bureaucratic space as Charles Stross's Laundry books, except that Teagan's not a diffident English male geek but a forthright LA woman with views on everything, especially food. And rap music. And her colleagues. And did I mention food?

It is, really, simply fun and a joy to read - though it does go to some very dark places. Teagan's Nemesis, whose point of view also features, is a truly grim and mixed-up person, especially dangerous for being convinced of being right (and, indeed, having some degree of justice to back that up) and does some truly grim and mixed-up things. And, as I've said, the book doesn't spare us the seamier side of the city, presenting the paradox of a vast area where the homeless live in tents amidst the wealth of one of the world's richest cities. There are also gangs, corruption and a particularly nasty black-ops soldier who really has it in for Teagan.

When you see what Teagan has to go before she can have a meal, a sleep and a beer, you won't be surprised how cross she gets - but you might be surprised by the results...

In all, a great read and, yes, I can see this becoming a popular and I hope long-running series. I wouldn't want to work with Teagan Frost but I do want to read more about her, please Mr Ford and please, O Orbit.

For more about the book, see the Orbit website here.