Stuck in the middle again

Dammit. Now I'm caught up on three different trilogies and am facing a wait of at least a year on each. I guess it's good news that each of the middle installments made me even more eager for the third.

The first was Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, sequel to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. And the sequel just made the longlist for this year's Booker; how cool would that be? The second was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, second in her All Souls trilogy about star-crossed witch Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew de Clermont. I liked that one so much I went and re-read the first book, A Discovery of Witches, and liked it way better on a second read. The third middle book was The Twelve, the follow-up to Justin Cronin's bestseller The Passage, a post-apocalyptic vampire epic. (Note to Twilight/All Souls/True Blood fans: These are not sexy kind of vampires.) The Twelve one doesn't publish until October but I got an advanced review copy and devoured it in four days. Three of which I was working for eight of my waking hours.

It's funny but reading, and liking very much, Cronin's work doesn't make me want to go out and get Stephen King's The Stand, the book to which it is frequently compared. I'd be more inclined to check out other dystopias except we've had a lot of that with the recent Key West Literary Seminar and all. If anything the books remind me most of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, just for their masterful plotting and command of huge casts of characters and multiple settings. In Cronin's case that even includes jumping around in time quite a bit and he still pulls it off. At several points in this book he would start with a whole new time, place and group of people and my initial thought would be, come on! I want to know what's going on with Peter and Lish, and how am I supposed to keep all these people, places and times straight? And then found myself getting totally absorbed anyway. Definitely the mark of a good storyteller. Now if only he (and our friend Martin) would write faster.

Why this image for this blog post? Well, there are, appropriately, TWO reasons. Anyone want to take a guess what they are?

Harry Potter for grownups, or realistic fantasy

Lots of books get described as Harry Potter for grownups. Deborah Harkness' work is the closest I've seen to truly fitting the bill. (Other contenders include Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I haven't read yet, and Lev Grossman's Magician books, which I read and liked but consider to be far more Narnia-infused than Potterian, despite the action surrounding teen magicians at a special magical academy.) When A Discovery of Witches came out, I read it and liked it though I fear I may have read it too fast -- it just felt like the crises were too many and piled on top of each other too quickly.

But I knew I was going to read Shadow of Night, the second in a planned trilogy, especially since the protagonists -- witch Diana Bishop and her vampire lover Matthew de Clermont -- were planning to travel back in time to 1590, the Elizabethan era. The book publishes in July but I got my hands on an advance review copy (one of the benefits of being a librarian) and devoured it in just a few days. Then I went back and bought a copy of A Discovery of Witches -- despite the fact that we have two copies in our branch of the library alone. And enjoyed re-reading it thoroughly; my earlier concerns about it just being Too Much seem to have disappeared. Perhaps a couple doses of George R.R. Martin gave me some perspective. Or maybe it really was my own fault for reading it too fast.

If you're vampire-curious, these are far, far better written than the Twilight series or the Sookie Stackhouse novels. If you like some romance in your reading, these have that, too, without many of the conventions and, yes, cliches that define so much romance fiction. If  you like old manuscripts and ancient conspiracies, set in academic libraries and old family castles, they've got that -- and I don't even want to mention Dan Brown in the same sentence, these are So. Much. Better.

So why call them Harry Potter for grownups? Because they fit into the same realm of realistic fantasy, a sort of yang to the yin of fantastic realism. While much of what gets labeled fantasy fiction takes place in some alternate universe or a mythical planet, the Harry Potter books, and these, take place in a world we recognize easily as our own -- only it happens to also be occupied by supernatural beings (which we always kind of hoped would be the case, right?). In J.K. Rowling's world, and Harkness', we can easily imagine ourselves living our daily lives, interacting with these witches and wizards and vampires and daemons. In Harkness' books, daemons are creative but often unstable, or as one witch puts it, "rock stars and serial killers." In the second book, Christopher Marlowe is a daemon, and a remarkably unstable one at that. Some people, like Queen Elizabeth, know about the existence of vampires and witches and the witchhunting craze at the time takes on even more sinister cast when there are real witches in danger of persecution simply because of who they are.

She also handles the attractions and dangers of time travel in the most deft way I've read since Connie Willis' Doomsday Book. From speech to clothing to the possibility of screwing up your own future existence -- or, in this case, revealing the fate of a being who thinks he is immortal -- it's all handled with the same straightforward approach. Magical realism has had quite a heyday. With vampires, werewolves and zombies all the rage, I'm ready now for realistic magic and I'd put Harkness at the front of the pack.