Thunderer
Felix Gilman
Spectra, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0553806769
448 pages, $24.00

Felix Gilman is threatening to kill a kitten at the end of the week unless at least four people write to say good things about his book. Fortunately, his book, Thunderer, is very good indeed, and I'm happy to help save the kitten's life.

Gilman's debut novel is set in the city of Ararat -- a name well-chosen for a place where gods are manifest. Not just a god, but many, many gods, gods evil and gods benign, gods appearing once in an eon and constantly present, gods changing the shape of the city and gods changing the shape of a life. The city itself is the real subject of the book, as I find to be the case with most New Weird fiction, a place of never-ending fascination.

But perhaps the description of a city alone cannot be a tale. Gilman does not leave us without plot, though there are times in the novel when it seems he'd like to endlessly explore the byways of the city without returning to his characters, who are often less interesting. Arjun is a young priest of the Voice, a god who has left its rural congregation; Arjun's theory is that the city has called to the god, who has become lost there. He has come to Ararat to seek the god. In the course of his search, Arjun incurs the wrath of another god, the interest of a group of philosophers, and, ultimately, some secrets left largely unexplored here -- perhaps the subject of a sequel?

A parallel plot involves Jack, a boy trapped in a particularly brutal workhouse until a god and his own cleverness work his release. His freedom fires his blood with a wish for the freedom of others, and he begins a crusade that threatens to swallow the city. When he joins forces with Arjun and the philosophers to rescue their leaders, Ararat itself seems to tremble on its foundations.

I'm hoping for more books set in this universe, because Ararat is too wonderful a place to be contained in a single book. This book explored a very small portion of the city, little of its politics, and almost nothing at all of the great mountain at its border. For a city with an endless supply of gods, few made a sustained appearance here, and I want to know more of them. Perhaps Gilman has succeeded best at an author's most difficult trick: causing the reader to cry, "More, more!" I am very eager to see more from his pen.

Many readers tend toward the compulsive for some reason: we keep lists of the books we've read, the books we'd like to read, the books we've recently acquired, the books we're looking for when we visit used bookstores. My Amazon wishlist is presently 44 pages long, and I have a paper wishlist that contains mostly different wishes that's another 37 pages. I have an online catalog of every mystery I own, and have made progress in cataloging the rest of the unruly shelves as well.

But one can never have too many lists. I've recently come across several lists that I find particularly drool-worthy regarding fantasy, slipstream, New Weird and institial fiction that I thought you might enjoy as well. Thanks to those who originally created the lists, who are credited below:

Jeff VanderMeer's Big-Ass Fantasy List

A Working Canon of Slipstream Literature, created by the Slipstream Panel at the 2007 Readercon (panelists included Paul DiFilippo, John Kessel, Cat Valente, Dora Goss, Brett Cox, Ron Drummond, Victoria McManus, Graham Sleight. Convention organizer Eric Van participated in preparing the list as well.

Bruce Sterling and Lawrence Person's slipstream list

List from OF Blog of the Fallen regarding books fantasy and SF readers perhaps should be discussing more often

There is that in me that wants to toss these all together and come up with one grand and glorious list -- perhaps combining it with Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, the Random House list of the best books of the 20th century, and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and come up with some sort of definitive list of books I'm going to read in this lifetime -- assuming I live to be 250 years old.

A request to readers: does anyone know of a list of mysteries or of straight science fiction to match the lists of fantasy and slipstream lists above? I'd be particularly interested in lists that include more contemporary works, i.e., works written in the last 30 years.

Leap Day! What an odd little thing this extra day is -- like an extra New Year's Day, in a way, a second day of the year in which to take stock and see what's what. How are those New Year's resolutions coming? Mine are in poor shape, but I can always renew them now, because it's still early enough. Those six classics I've never read that I was going to read this year? There's still time. The exercise I promised to undertake? Better late than never.

Best of all, those book reviews I was going to write? I can make them up, right here, right now. So far, 2008 has been a terrific reading year, so prepare yourself for some "must read" recommendations.

The Dog Said Bow-Wow
Michael Swanwick
Tachyon Publications, 2007
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 189239152X
256 pages, $14.95

This excellent collection of recent Swanwick short stories is one of those rare single-author collections you can read straight through. Swanwick doesn't repeat himself; each story is unique and uniquely exciting. I'm a particular fan of "Urdumheim," a story about the beginning of language and the invasion of evil into the world, a mythology of a world something like ours but not exactly. "Triceratops Summer" is a lovely, gentle story that is as different as it can possibly be from the story of the tawdry and brutal "Bordello in Faerie." I was not personally fond of the Darger and Surplus stories, three tales from a far future universe following two conmen -- well, one conman and one condog, to be precise -- but those who enjoy purer adventure tales in strange settings are likely to enjoy these. The collection as a whole has something for everyone, and is one of the best of 2007.

Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One
Kathleen Duey
Atheneum, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0689840934
368 pages, $17.99

The first of a projected young adult trilogy, Skin Hunger suffers from not being in the least self-contained; it simply stops. I found that annoying because I was so very much enjoying the story and wanted more right then and there. In fact, I was enjoying both stories, because this book is divided into two, with alternating chapters taking place in different time periods 200 years apart. In the first, magic is the work of charlatans -- yet real magic is pursued by one very ambitious, harsh, determined young man and his friend -- or is the friend his slave? Both are assisted by the viewpoint character, a young woman named Sadima, who has true magic in her and is in love with the friend. In the second story, magic is highly revered and very important, a demanding career for second sons of noblemen who do not care if their sons die in pursuit of it. The viewpoint character is one of the students, Hahp, who never sought out magic and hates his father for putting him in this dank cavern with these demanding, even torturous, studies. The novel is very dark and sad, with characters unable to help one another and, in the latter time, even strictly forbidden to do so. Skin Hunger was a finalist for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature, and deserved the recognition. But I do hope the next volume appears soon, because the book truly does suffer for being merely one-third of a full story. While most trilogies make some effort at bringing some sort of closure to any single volume, this one does not, and the reader is really left hanging. While it's a compliment to the author to say I want more, it's also really irritating to the reader to be left adrift for a year or more.

The Crime Writer
Gregg Hurwitz
Viking, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0670063215
325 pages, $24.95

Metafiction has always intrigued me, from John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman to Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and even including Stephen King's The Dark Half. I have a good-sized collection of fiction about writing and writers, and it's growing. You wouldn't think that the subject of a person sitting at a computer keyboard and pounding out prose could be fascinating, but many writers have made it so. Hurwitz has gone a step further and turned it into a thriller, writing about how a writer writes a thriller, this time with the author as the suspect in a murder about which he is simultaneously writing. It's a good trick, and he makes it work, right down to the portions of the manuscript edited by his agent. The mystery itself is complex and fair and taut, difficult to unravel unless you're paying very close attention -- though the clues are all there. I'll be looking for more Hurwitz after reading this one; this guy's got the stuff.

The Imago Sequence
Laird Barron
Night Shade Books, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 1597800880
239 pages, $24.95

If you like H.P. Lovecraft, this is the book for you. Only it's better than Lovecraft: better written, better imagined, scarier. I can't get the title story of this horror collection out of my head, and believe me, I want to. Its images, its circularity, the doggedness of the viewpoint character even when he's scared practically to death, his bravado in the face of things he doesn't understand, his refusal to give in even when he knows hope is gone -- they're all there in my head, but mostly it's the images that I want to get rid of. And I don't want the images from "Hallucigenia" wandering around in my brain, vivid as they are from Barron's prose, which leans toward the purple but only in a good way -- prose so bright and dark that it's as if it's lit with a black light. "Procession of the Black Sloth" does for Hong Kong much of what Dan Simmons did for Calcutta in Song of Kali, making me scratch that city off the list of places I need to visit before I die. In fact, why the hell did I read this book? In order to get my pants scared off, that's why. Barron did to me what no one's been able to do in a long, long time: genuinely frighten me. And all without once bringing up my gorge, either, because this isn't graphic in that way. Barron plays with your head, making everything happen there. And if your brain is anything like mine, there are some dark, dark places that he's going to make you visit, whether you want to or not. Read it only with all the lights on and someone you're sure loves you in the house with you.

The King of Lies
John Hart
St. Martin's Minotaur, 2006
U.S. mass market paperback, reprint
ISBN 0312363753
400 pages, $6.99

John Hart is a relatively new writer on the thriller scene; his latest novel, Down River, has been nominated for an Edgar this year, and deservedly so. I think I liked The King of Lies even better, though; perhaps it's because I sympathize so with the protagonist, a lawyer who doesn't want to be a lawyer anymore. Jackson Workman Pickens, known to all as "Work," has always done what his forceful father, Ezra, told him to do. But Ezra disappeared eighteen months ago, on the night Work's mother died. Now his body has been found with two bullets in it, and the police think that Work did it for the $15 million he stands to inherit. Work is afraid his sister did it, and is concerned above all with protecting her from going to prison; unlike the usual book in which a simple conversation would clear the whole problem up, Work is here prevented from clearing the air with his sister by her significant other, who is also a suspect. Complication piles on complication, the stakes growing progressively higher, until everything resolves in a satisfactorily explosive climax. Hart belongs on the same shelf with Turow.