Solitaire Book Club times two

So, we should all know the drill by now, so let's get right into it.

Made to Kill by Adam Christopher. The trouble with writing an hommage to Raymond Chandler is that it is too easy to slip into a bad parody of Raymond Chandler - it is a very delicate balance to capture Chandler's voice without going over the top, and I have to say that Christopher's prose misfires once in a while, especially at the beginning of the novel. But the world he creates - an indeterminate-era alternate Hollywood seen from the perspective of the last robot on earth - was so engaging that I stayed with it, despite a bit more amorality in the protagonists than I would have preferred. The mystery and adventure click along to a satisfying climax, the Right Things are done, and there is the hint of Things to Come. Christopher has given us two more books in this series, and I will be continuing.

 

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette. Eight years ago (!!) I wrote about the challenge of creating a sense of wonder and freshness in a genre that has seen so many treatments: can characters in a zombie story respond as if they haven't seen a dozen zombie movies? And more to the immediate point, can characters in a post-apocalypse novel act as if they have never seen an apocalypse movie?  Doucette leans right into that challenge and shows us how it's done. His story of seven survivors of a mysterious cataclysm is grounded in the different responses each one has to their circumstance, creating a richness that is cliche-free - on top of which, his apocalypse is sufficiently complex in nature to avoid the standard tropes. I guess the best recommendation I can give is that I picked this book up at the library yesterday and I finished it the same day - it is a ripping (and gripping) yarn.