Currently Reading - 30-Aug-16

Currently Reading

The Bloody Red Baron, Kim Newman

Carrying on from Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron moves the story on to the Great War. It's 1918 and Dracula is now Germany's war leader as the Allies brace themselves for the German spring offensive using the troops liberated from the Eastern Front by the surrender of Russia. Something dark is brewing on the German side of the lines at Chateau Malinbois, home of Baron Von Richthofen's Flying Circus and Charles Beauregard, now one of the ruling troika of the Diogenes Club, assigns young intelligence office Edwin Winthrop to Condor Squadron to watch over their attempts to penetrate the security of the Chateau. Condor Squadron is an elite assemblage of ace pilots, ranging from Albert Ball to Biggles, each of them a vampire, as are many pilots and infantrymen in this post Anno Dracula world.

Beauregard's vampiric partner, Geneviève Dieudonné, has retired to California to raise oranges, but Kate Reed, the vampire reporter from Anno Dracula, is in France, theoretically as an ambulance driver, and determined to figure out what Charles is up to, when she isn't making a nuisance of herself by exposing incompetence in the high command. Meanwhile, in Prague, Edgar Allen Poe, also a vampire, and exiled from America after fighting for the South in the Civil War, is offered the chance to redeem his flagging literary career by ghosting an autobiography of Baron Von Richthofen.

Condor Squadron's first attempt at Chateau Malinbois sees the drained body of their pilot dumped onto their aerodrome. Winthrop joins the second attempt, made in greater numbers, and becomes its sole survivor, forced to make his way back to allied lines through No Man's Land, with a short diversion as a dinner guest, or perhaps just dinner, in a mash-up of Good Soldier Schweik and Heart of Darkness. He emerges a changed, harsher man. Meanwhile Kate Reed embarks on a peregrination towards the front that shows her the grim reality of life in the trenches, while Poe arrives at Chateau Malinbois to discover the horrific secret of the Flying Circus.

And finally the Spring Offensive launches, and Condor Squadron meets the Flying Circus head on, while Dracula watches his plans unfold from his command zeppelin, complete with Engineer Robur on the pipe organ. Kate is caught at the front, while Charles is stuck at HQ, able only to watch.

Also included with the Kindle edition is Newman's rather different reworking of the story into a film treatment for Roger Corman, and Vampire Romance, a novella set in '20s England. Geneviève Dieudonné is back in London, having fled Prohibition Era America, though Charles is off in India, putting down a rebellion. She emerges from having her hair bobbed, ready to recreate herself as a flapper, only to find Edwin Winthrop waiting for her. The Diogenes Club would appreciate a favour.

Meanwhile, in Mildew Manor in dankest, rain-swept Cumbria, vampire-obsessed schoolgirl Lydia Inchfawn is awaiting the arrival of the vampires invited by her Great Aunt, Mrs Gregson. Mrs Gregson believes that there is a power vacuum at the head of vampirekind, and proposes to annoint the new King of Cats from amongst the elders she has invited. What she gets instead are those who can be bothered to turn up, and Geneviève.

Attendees include Kah Pei Mei, High Priest of the Temple of the Golden Vampire, waited on by his nameless, sailor-suited, child-vampire bodyguard (soon rechristened Mouse); Kleopatra, with her spokesman Professor Bey; Countess Marya Zaleska, daughter of Dracula; the bluff and brutal Australian vampire Hodge, supported by former secret policeman (and antagonist of the Diogenes Club) Caleb Croft, the pair of them likely proxies for former PM Lord Ruthven, and General Karnstein and his wife, supporting their strangely familiar son Liam. And lurking in the shadows is master criminal the Crook.

No sooner have the rising waters cut off the Manor then the traditional entertainments of English Country House weekends start with the first murder. It's up to Geneviève and Winthrop, or maybe Lydia and Mouse, to find the killer, and maybe stop a revolution before it can get started.

I found the opening of this a little irritating, Lydia's vampire infatuation is laid on with a trowel, but Geneviève's sections are fine, and Lydia's soon segue into more traditional girl's boarding school stories territory. Add a couple of nicely engineered plot twists and in the end I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Once Broken Faith, Seanan McGuire

The latest outing for Toby Daye sees her dealing with the fallout from her previous escapade, which saw her unseating yet another fae monarch, while her tame alchemist Walther managed to invent a cure for being elfshot, potentially destabilising the entire political structure of faery. Forbidden to kill each other, the pureblood fae find that elfshot, which puts its victims into a century-long enchanted sleep, makes for a rather nice substitute. Add its use as a judicial punishment and a cure is not seen as a good thing.

Toby has people she needs cured, people she's equivocal about, and people who need to sleep the full hundred years. It's complicated, and gets more complicated when Arden, her Queen, turns up on her doorstep, wanting Toby's help to end-run a couple of cures past High King Aethlin's injunction against any further cures before they've held an all-Kingdoms conclave on the matter. The fallout from that gets Toby commanded to attend the conclave herself, along with Quentin her squire (aka Crown Prince Quentin).

That means Toby as the only changeling amongst a whole ballroom's worth of pure-blood fae, most of whom would look down on her for being a changeling, never mind the kingbreaking, and god forbid anyone should mention the killed one of the fae Firstborn thing. Fortunately Toby isn't entirely without allies. There's Tybalt to start with, her fiancé, and King of Cats, though enforcing his equality among the other royals means he's going to have to snub her, at least at first. And Queen Arden, though she and Toby are still negotiating a way around the pricklier edges of their personalities. Not least of Toby's allies are the High King and Queen, who owe her for raising their son in secret.

And then there's the Luidaeg, Faery's favourite scary monster, and Toby's aunt, who shows up at the Conclave with Toby's 15yo honorary niece Karen in tow. Eira Rosynwyr, the Luidaeg's even scarier sister, and creator of elfshot, isn't content to go unheard when people are debating the destruction of her most famous creation, not even when she's lying elfshot and comatose in the back of beyond, and she's found a way to make Karen her mouthpiece. And then the killings start.

So it's Toby trying to find the killer inside a locked building. We've been here before and even she admits she's not actually very good at it. But she has a clue, and that's more than the rest of Faery, the only question is whether she'll find the killer before they find someone she can't bear to lose.

It's an entertaining story, though I'm not entirely convinced by the murder gimmick. There's still character growth going on: Arden is growing into her role; Quentin into his adulthood, and Toby is still learning how to deal with being the daughter of Amandine, daughter of a Firstborn, without sacrificing all of her humanity to it. And best of all, we get the Luidaeg for almost all of the book, which hasn't been the case in recent books.

Also included is Dreams and Slumbers, a novella featuring Arden as the protagonist. It isn't as frenetic as a Toby story, revolving around Arden dealing with the slow emergence of a decades-old plot against her, but if she doesn't deal with it, it could cost her the one person she's spent her life caring for, her brother Nolan. It's mostly a story of Arden growing in to being Queen in the Mists, but there are also plot developments for Walther, and for Toby's niece Cassandra (Karen's sister), which are likely to have consequences down the line.

Up Next

Probably Dracula - Cha Cha Cha, next up in the Kim Newman Dracula books, Kate Reed flies out to 60s Rome to be with Genevieve Dieudonne and Charles Beauregard as Charles' life draws to an end, but Dracula is also in town for the society wedding of the year - his.

Web Comics

Cut Time, an unplanned new one, its banner ad on one of my regular comics caught my eye. Not very far into the story yet, it's a typical fantasy world (Legend of Zelda influenced?) which is still introducing the key characters. The core character is Rel, a young woman (girl? it's difficult to be sure of her age) with a mysterious mission. Cursed to be blind, she has a guide-falcon, and that concept had me hooked from the moment I realised what the bird was. At the moment she's haphazardly assembling an expedition, including a young noble, Solus, who is disenchanted with his gilded life and Nal, a mysterious doctor cum wizard, there's also an assassin floating about in the background who really doesn't seem overly enamoured of his choice of careers. The manga-influenced art is fine, more than competent, my only complaint is it's very difficult to determine character ages, I initially took Solus for 30-40, while it's more likely he's actually around 20, Rel could be anywhere from12 to 25, and Nal looks 16 and acts 45.

Web Fiction

Great Deeds, I read a bunch of online military AH stuff while I was stuck with no creative energy from the chest bug I had. One of those is APOD, 'A Point of Departure', a collaborative effort that spins out of the published French-Language France Fights On/La France Continue, with the point of departure being that France doesn't surrender in 1940, but evacuates to North Africa. APOD looked at alternate strategies for the British Empire, and one of those was the possibility of invading Norway before D-Day, which is where Great Deeds comes in. It's a 57k short novel, about neutralizing the German battleship Tirpitz, Bismarck's sister-ship, in its lair in the Norwegian fjords; something that occupied British thinking for a large part of the war. Great Deeds is APOD's very innovative, yet traditionally British solution. It reads as fairly traditional British military fiction in the Dambusters/Sink The Bismarck/Heroes of Telemark style. Not quite professional quality, but not bad.

 

That Oh Shit Moment...

... when you come half-awake, try to roll over, and feel the laptop start to slide off your chest.....

I'm quite impressed I almost managed to grab it in mid-air, but I didn't quite. Fortunately it landed on its end, had only dropped about a foot and seems to be fine.

But that was not my favourite way to wake up.