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]"At the start of the Civil War, a Russian mining company commissions a great machine to pave the way from Seattle to Alaska and speed up the gold rush that is beating a path to the frozen north. Inventor Leviticus Blue creates the machine, but on its first test run it malfunctions, decimating Seattle's banking district and uncovering a vein of Blight Gas that turns everyone who breathes it into the living dead.
"Sixteen years later Briar, Blue's widow, lives in the poor neighborhood outside the wall that's been built around the uninhabitable city. Life is tough with a ruined reputation, but she and her teenage son Ezekiel are surviving until Zeke impetuously decides that he must reclaim his father's name from the clutches of history."
What with strong word of mouth and the exceptional power of a few recommendations from other genre authors, Cherie Priest's Boneshaker has, since its release in 2009, gotten itself quite the reputation. Take Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis and blogging geek god Wil Wheaton - they all love it.
The Speculative Scotsman, on the other hand, does not. Not quite. For all the choice quotes that adorn its excellent Jon Foster cover, Boneshaker falls somewhat short of the hype. It's not a bad book, let me be clear, not by any stretch of the imagination - in fact, it's a great deal of fun - but Priest's latest endeavour suffers from enough niggling issues that any interested parties would be best advised to understand the nature of this novel before placing their orders.
If you'll forgive the aside, I'll keep it brief: I've read a great deal of Stephen King in my time. When Point Horrors and slim Choose Your Own Adventure volumes were my literary intake of choice, King was one of a very few authors whose more mature efforts I enjoyed. In many ways, he gave me the perverse hunger for horror that I have to this day, in light of which you'll find me to be something of an unlikely defender of the so-called Dickens of our day. That said, even I tend to come away from all but the best of his fiction thinking... well, for a Stephen King story, that was pretty fine. Never would I recommend his work without that caveat.
What I'm getting to is that the incredibly prolific King writes, we can but presume, rather quickly. Perhaps it's the inescapable cost of putting out a new book every Christmas, even into his 70s, but whatever the cause, it shows. It shows in his careless prose and the utterly unsatisfying conclusions his novels often dead-end into. It shows in his endlessly repetitive plots and too-cardboard characters; that you slip so easily into their particular rhythms and idiosyncrasies is no surprise when you realise that you've met them before, in each of King's previous efforts.
This, though, isn't a review of the disappointing behemoth that was Under the Dome. I digress to such an extent only that I might suggest Cherie Priest is not the contemporary corollary of Jules Verne or Mark Twain - as several of the deceptive cover quotes assert - but rather the Stephen King of steampunk.
I do not write as much unkindly. The Speculative Scotsman will be on board for the next installment of The Clockwork Century series, because Boneshaker, when it gets going, is an often thrilling ride through an underworld rife with rotters - which is to say Priest's zombie substitutes; and much as I'd like to see a spade called a spade for once in genre fiction - exactly how the living dead are any more original a threat when writers refuse to refer to them as such, I don't know - rotters, I'll admit, has a nice ring to it. In any event, after a slow start, Priest puts paid to the dreary dynamic between Briar and Zeke and gradually ratchets up the tension. She doesn't relent until Boneshaker has run its course.
The myriad of action scenes to occupy readers in the interim are tense and well executed, descriptive without being overly verbose. Amid the devastation of inner-city Seattle, in fact, with airships crashing all around, rotters running amuck and poisonous gases threatening the mother and son that are our protagonists in the interim, Priest achieves a commendable clarity. You never find yourself lost in the chaos of it all, and chaos - cruel, crackling, calculated chaos - is what Boneshaker is all about. From the second Briar sets off after her wayward ragamuffin of a son, the uncertain world around her crumbles.
They're not the brightest bunch, nor, at that, the most hygienic, but Priest treats her zombie doppelgangers with more than the usual comedic disdain, effecting from them a great deal of tension. It's the place itself, however, the small area walled off from Civil War-era Seattle after the Blight, that is Briar's most present threat. The hopelessness in there is palpable, and worse still: she and her son are stuck amongst it, of their own free will, interminably.
Of course it isn't just Zeke and his mother against an army of rotters and some seriously bad juju. Boneshaker has an original, intriguing, if somewhat underdeveloped cast of supporting characters who live or make their livings in and of the isolated area. The allegories, if it isn't too soon for them, between the infected city of Priest's imagination and New Orleans post-Katrina are appropriately revealing: "Some of 'em didn't want to leave their homes. Some of 'em got stuck, and some of them thought it'd all blow over." Other residents are there for the lemon sap, an eventually-necrotic drug distilled from the awful Blight by a mad mechanical genius.
Danger awaits Briar and her son in every imaginable avenue, and Priest does well to sustain the tension for the duration of this grungy steampunk adventure. Fast-paced, tense in tone and packed with action, Boneshaker is at its exciting best when the third-act thrills and spills are in full effect. As the author says herself, "I realise the story is a bit of a twisted stretch," and so long as you expect this book to be the literary equivalent of the best low-budget zombie flick you've ever seen, rest assured: you'll have a Blight of a time.
"Sixteen years later Briar, Blue's widow, lives in the poor neighborhood outside the wall that's been built around the uninhabitable city. Life is tough with a ruined reputation, but she and her teenage son Ezekiel are surviving until Zeke impetuously decides that he must reclaim his father's name from the clutches of history."
***
What with strong word of mouth and the exceptional power of a few recommendations from other genre authors, Cherie Priest's Boneshaker has, since its release in 2009, gotten itself quite the reputation. Take Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis and blogging geek god Wil Wheaton - they all love it.
The Speculative Scotsman, on the other hand, does not. Not quite. For all the choice quotes that adorn its excellent Jon Foster cover, Boneshaker falls somewhat short of the hype. It's not a bad book, let me be clear, not by any stretch of the imagination - in fact, it's a great deal of fun - but Priest's latest endeavour suffers from enough niggling issues that any interested parties would be best advised to understand the nature of this novel before placing their orders.
If you'll forgive the aside, I'll keep it brief: I've read a great deal of Stephen King in my time. When Point Horrors and slim Choose Your Own Adventure volumes were my literary intake of choice, King was one of a very few authors whose more mature efforts I enjoyed. In many ways, he gave me the perverse hunger for horror that I have to this day, in light of which you'll find me to be something of an unlikely defender of the so-called Dickens of our day. That said, even I tend to come away from all but the best of his fiction thinking... well, for a Stephen King story, that was pretty fine. Never would I recommend his work without that caveat.
What I'm getting to is that the incredibly prolific King writes, we can but presume, rather quickly. Perhaps it's the inescapable cost of putting out a new book every Christmas, even into his 70s, but whatever the cause, it shows. It shows in his careless prose and the utterly unsatisfying conclusions his novels often dead-end into. It shows in his endlessly repetitive plots and too-cardboard characters; that you slip so easily into their particular rhythms and idiosyncrasies is no surprise when you realise that you've met them before, in each of King's previous efforts.
This, though, isn't a review of the disappointing behemoth that was Under the Dome. I digress to such an extent only that I might suggest Cherie Priest is not the contemporary corollary of Jules Verne or Mark Twain - as several of the deceptive cover quotes assert - but rather the Stephen King of steampunk.
I do not write as much unkindly. The Speculative Scotsman will be on board for the next installment of The Clockwork Century series, because Boneshaker, when it gets going, is an often thrilling ride through an underworld rife with rotters - which is to say Priest's zombie substitutes; and much as I'd like to see a spade called a spade for once in genre fiction - exactly how the living dead are any more original a threat when writers refuse to refer to them as such, I don't know - rotters, I'll admit, has a nice ring to it. In any event, after a slow start, Priest puts paid to the dreary dynamic between Briar and Zeke and gradually ratchets up the tension. She doesn't relent until Boneshaker has run its course.
The myriad of action scenes to occupy readers in the interim are tense and well executed, descriptive without being overly verbose. Amid the devastation of inner-city Seattle, in fact, with airships crashing all around, rotters running amuck and poisonous gases threatening the mother and son that are our protagonists in the interim, Priest achieves a commendable clarity. You never find yourself lost in the chaos of it all, and chaos - cruel, crackling, calculated chaos - is what Boneshaker is all about. From the second Briar sets off after her wayward ragamuffin of a son, the uncertain world around her crumbles.
They're not the brightest bunch, nor, at that, the most hygienic, but Priest treats her zombie doppelgangers with more than the usual comedic disdain, effecting from them a great deal of tension. It's the place itself, however, the small area walled off from Civil War-era Seattle after the Blight, that is Briar's most present threat. The hopelessness in there is palpable, and worse still: she and her son are stuck amongst it, of their own free will, interminably.
Of course it isn't just Zeke and his mother against an army of rotters and some seriously bad juju. Boneshaker has an original, intriguing, if somewhat underdeveloped cast of supporting characters who live or make their livings in and of the isolated area. The allegories, if it isn't too soon for them, between the infected city of Priest's imagination and New Orleans post-Katrina are appropriately revealing: "Some of 'em didn't want to leave their homes. Some of 'em got stuck, and some of them thought it'd all blow over." Other residents are there for the lemon sap, an eventually-necrotic drug distilled from the awful Blight by a mad mechanical genius.
Danger awaits Briar and her son in every imaginable avenue, and Priest does well to sustain the tension for the duration of this grungy steampunk adventure. Fast-paced, tense in tone and packed with action, Boneshaker is at its exciting best when the third-act thrills and spills are in full effect. As the author says herself, "I realise the story is a bit of a twisted stretch," and so long as you expect this book to be the literary equivalent of the best low-budget zombie flick you've ever seen, rest assured: you'll have a Blight of a time.
***
Boneshaker
by Cherie Priest
2009, TOR: New York
[Buy this book on Amazon
Recommended and Related Reading
I read this after reading Perdido Street Station and found it just like you say, entertaining and fast paced. I guess I was hoping for a little more meat. After I had finished it, I was still hungry for something else. It was kind of like a rice cake. I will consider reading her next work, but only as filler between more substantial fare.
ReplyDelete"Like a rice cake" has to be about the best and certainly the most apt review of Boneshaker I've read yet. Kudos, my man, kudos.
ReplyDeleteThis is the closest review I've seen to how I feel about the book, though I'm even less enthused. I feel like I just read a first draft of the brilliant manuscript that everyone else got. I'm writing my review now - a mere two weeks after reading - and the whole book feels like a distant memory already.
ReplyDeleteYep. And Dreadnought is even more forgettable. Really like how the text is brown though, and uh... well. That's nice. ;)
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the cover and title. Those are FANTASTIC. I probably had more people ask me about this book than any other I've ever read based on them.
ReplyDeleteIt's got its fans, and that's the truth. Looking back, I can't honestly imagine why. Steampiffle more like.
ReplyDeleteBut wait, but what in the Hellmouth's name are you doing commenting on this old review when you've season two of Buffy to watch? Good god man! I swear it gets a whole lot better, and soon too.
Haha, man, you are a terrible influence. I was trying to get some writing done, and you had to remind me of my DVDs. Now they're staring at me, sitting right over there...
ReplyDeleteAh well, I suppose I can always write after the Judge gets what's coming. Or, I guess, ends all of humanity...