Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight :: Wrap-Up

We have completed Fantastic Reviews Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books.  There were plenty of good book battles along the way.  Hope you enjoyed our reviews of samplings of these books!

Congratulations to Osama by Lavie Tidhar, winner of this Battle of the Books bracket!  Let's give a round of applause for all the participating books!

To see the whole completed bracket, click here.

Listed below are the sixteen books which were featured in this bracket, sorted alphabetically by author.  Click on the book title links to go that book's highest round book battle review.

Dead Religion by David Beers
The Diviners by Libba Bray
The Steam Mole by Dave Freer
Untimed by Andy Gavin
Destiny's Flower by Linda Harley
Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines
A Red Sun Also Rises by Mark Hodder
Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye
Sharkways by A. J. Kirby
Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon
Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan
Bad Apple by Kristi Petersen Schoonover
Grim by Joseph Spencer
A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer
Osama by Lavie Tidhar
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Some of these books and authors may be new to you, but after reading Aaron's book descriptions and battle reviews, I hope some of them sparked your interest.  Perhaps we introduced you to a few new books and authors.  Only one book can win each battle, and only one book can win the bracket, but there were many good books in the competition.

Battle of the Books match-ups are decided based on reading a sample of the book.  Most upon reading a mere 25 pages or 50 pages.  So if a good book starts slow, in this review format, it may face an uphill battle.  These matches are inherently subjective.  These battles were decided based on which book the reviewer, Aaron, would rather continue reading.

Stay tuned for Bracket One of the Battle of the 2013 Books.  Another sixteen books are lined up for this competition.  These are books we received earlier, but hadn't had the time to review yet because of real life getting in our way.  We're valiantly working to whittle down our backlog of books.  Jackie, a new Battle of the Books reviewer, will be judging this bracket.  We'll be announcing the books which will be featured as our next group of contenders soon.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, Championship Round :: Osama by Lavie Tidhar vs. Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

We have arrived at the championship round of our current bracket of the Battle of the Books. In one corner we have Osama by Lavie Tidhar. In the other corner we have Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines. Two fine competitors. I (Aaron) have read through Page 200 of both these books, and the novel I most want to continue reading to the end will be the champion of Bracket Eight of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the 2012 Books.

Osama: Solaris, October 2012 (published in UK by PS Publishing in 2011), 302 pages, cover art by Pedro Marques. Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli writer now living in London. Osama won the 2012 World Fantasy Award. Osama made it to the championship by overpowering The Steam Mole by Dave Freer in the first round, by defeating Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon in the second round, and by pushing past The Diviners by Libba Bray in the semifinals.

The setting of Osama is an alternate universe where Osama bin Laden is not a real terrorist, but the hero of a series of pulp novels, the plots of which parallel actual terrorist attacks from our world. Our hero Joe is a private investigator hired by an enigmatic woman to find the author of the Osama books, who writes under the pseudonym "Mike Longshott." In the first 100 pages, Joe tracked down the publisher of the books in Paris. Most of the next 100 pages take place in London, where Joe believes he will find the author. But Joe repeatedly encounters interference from people who do not want him to find his target. One clue leads Joe to an opium den, where he has a vision of another world like his own, but more frenetic and computerized. It's a world that seems strange to Joe, but not to us.

Libriomancer: DAW, August 2012, 305 pages, cover art by Gene Mollica. Libriomancer is the first volume in Jim C. Hines' latest series, Magic Ex Libris. Libriomancer made it to the championship by easily beating out Dead Religion by David Beers in the first round, by defeating Untimed by Andy Gavin in the second round, and by overcoming A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer in the semifinals.

The protagonist of Libriomancer is Isaac Vainio, who can reach into any book he has read and pull out objects described in the narrative. The trouble is, if he draws on this talent too often, he starts to lose himself in those fictional narratives. In the opening 100 pages of Libriomancer, a large-scale struggle broke out between supernatural beings. Isaac fears that the world's first libriomancer, Johannes Gutenberg, is behind the conflict. In the second 100-page section, Isaac tries to trace the rogue libriomancer causing the trouble. This effort prompts a dangerous visit with his dryad companion Lena to the underground lair of a great colony of vampires.

The Battle: One thing that becomes very clear doing the Battle of the Books is that there are many different ways to tell a good story. Osama and Libriomancer are awfully different but both excellent.

Libriomancer is a hoot for any lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy. I can often identify the books Isaac is drawing objects from before Hines even names them. Hines works through the underlying magical system convincingly. And in the second 100 pages, he gives us a clue about the nature of the villain Isaac is facing that I won't spoil for you, but I found it a terrific surprise.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding the consistently elegant writing, Osama has the feel of a well-paced noir mystery. But the mystery isn't really about Mike Longshott, the author of the Osama bin Laden books, but about how the universe of those books relates to our protagonist Joe. Why do people who know something about the bin Laden stories refer to Joe as a "refugee" or a "fuzzy-wuzzy"? The closer he gets to Mike Longshott, the less Joe understands about his own place in the world:

Joe looked up from the book and drew a deep breath. This was insane. Longshott's obsessively neat facts and figures seemed designed to snare him, entrap him: names, times, street addresses, hobbies for the dead men. London. He thought: fuzzy-wuzzies, and giggled. Was he searching for Longshott, or was Longshott searching for him? The pulp writer was leaving him a trail of crumbs to follow, and he was following, and the world was slowly unravelling around him, a threadbare tapestry that could no longer quite comfort him against the chill.

The Battle of the Books is not about making a case that one book is objectively better than the other. I'm not even saying one book is better in my subjective opinion. I decide the battles on a single subjective criterion: which book do I most feel compelled to keep reading?

Libriomancer is a lot of fun. I enjoy it every time I pick it up. I expect I will enjoy reading the sequels. But when I put it down, I stop thinking about it pretty quickly. When I put Osama down, it stays in my mind. Tidhar's language continues to resonate. I keep thinking about the book's tough but ultimately lost protagonist, the shifting boundaries between his universe and mine.

I don't know that Osama is better than Libriomancer. I don't even know if I'm enjoying it more. But I know I find it tremendously intriguing. And if I had a fire tonight and both books burned up, I know which one I would immediately have to replace so I could finish reading it.

THE WINNER: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Osama wins Bracket Eight of the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the 2012 Books. Congratulations to Lavie Tidhar as our newest Battle of the Books champion!

To see the completed bracket, click here.

We've crowned a winner for this bracket, but soon we'll announce a whole new bracket of sixteen books. Jackie, our new reviewer for Battle of the Books, will be judging the next bracket. This will give Aaron a break, to focus on some short fiction recommendations. Stay tuned for more book battles to come!

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, Second Semifinal :: Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines vs. A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer

Our second semifinal match in Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books features Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines going up against A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer. The winner, the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 100 pages, will advance to the championship round.

Libriomancer: DAW, August 2012, 305 pages, cover art by Gene Mollica. Libriomancer is the first volume in Jim C. Hines' latest series, Magic Ex Libris. Libriomancer made it to the semifinals by easily beating out Dead Religion by David Beers in the first round, and by defeating Untimed by Andy Gavin in the second round.

The opening pages of Libriomancer introduced us to Isaac Vainio, who has the magical ability to reach into a book he's read and pull out objects described in the narrative. Isaac has had difficulty controlling his power in the past, and so has been relegated to a desk job by the "Porters," who hold authority over magical beings. But some sort of war has broken out among the Porters, vampires, and possibly the first libriomancer, Johannes Gutenberg. In the second 50-page section, Isaac learns of a predicament faced by his sexy dryad companion Lena, and explores the scene of his mentor's murder and the destruction of one of the Porters' archives of magical documents.

A Pretty Mouth: Lazy Fascist Press, October 2012, 227 pages, cover art by Matthew Revert. A Pretty Mouth is a novella collected with four related stories, all of which place Lovecraftian creatures in a slightly odd context. A Pretty Mouth made it to the semifinals by overpowering Destiny's Flower by Linda Harley in the first round with its opening story "A Spotted Trouble at Dolor-on-the-Downs," and by getting past Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan in the second round with its story "The Hour of the Tortoise."

The second 50-page section of A Pretty Mouth consists of the story "The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins" (which previously appeared in Historical Lovecraft and The Book of Cthulhu) and the opening two chapters of the title novella. These tales take us further back into the history of the Calipash family, a cursed house of English aristocrats. The Ivybridge twins were two particularly wicked but amusing family members who lived in the 18th Century, while "A Pretty Mouth" dates back to the 17th Century, where a misguided young college student is fascinated by his dashing classmate Lord Calipash.

The Battle: As often happens by the time we get to the semifinals, I am enjoying the hell out of both these books and don't really want to put either one down.

In Libriomancer, Jim Hines is having a blast pulling props out of all his favorite science fiction and fantasy books. In the last scene of the opening 100 pages, Isaac uses potions from Alice in Wonderland to shrink himself and Lena down, rides his pet fire-spider into the wreckage of a destroyed building, where he gets in a fight with a powerful vampire, whom he defeats by pulling out a goddamn light saber. How could any genre reader not get a kick out of this?

One scene in Libriomancer that gave me pause was when the dryad Lena admitted her true nature to Isaac. She was created from a ripoff of John Norman's Gor series, in which a dryad is a sex toy perpetually hot for her master. And Lena wants Isaac to be her new master. Deliberately setting up a main character as a blatant sex object makes me cringe a bit, but there are hints that Hines intends to give Lena more control over her own destiny than this set-up might suggest.

Turning to A Pretty Mouth, "The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins" is a hoot. I especially enjoyed the sections during the youth of the twins, Basil and Rosemary, as they are raised essentially by an evil stepfather aptly named Mr. Villein. For instance, here the eight-year-old twins are grudgingly invited to a May Day celebration:

Rosemary arrived at the event in a costume of her own making, that of the nymph Flora; when Mr. Villein was interrogated as to his reasoning for such grotesque and ill-advised indulgence of childhood fancy, he replied that she had earlier proved her understanding that May Day had once been the Roman festival of Floralia, and it seemed a just reward for her attentiveness in the schoolroom. This bit of pagan heresy might have been overlooked by the other families had not Mr. Villein later used the exact same justification for Basil's behavior when the boy appeared at the celebration later-on, clad only in a bit of blue cloth wrapped about his slender body, and then staged a reenactment for the children of Favonius' rape of Flora, Rosemary playing her part with unbridled enthusiasm.

While the Ivybridge story is great fun, I confess that two chapters in, the next story "A Pretty Mouth" hasn't yet grabbed me. This may be a case of bad timing for the Battle of the Books: "A Pretty Mouth" started on page 85 and I haven't gotten very deep into it, so don't yet feel excited about the next 100 pages of this novella.

Aside from that small strike against Tanzer, this battle turns on the following passage from Libriomancer, where Isaac explains how the Porters keep libriomancy from getting out of hand:

"Catalogers flag potentially dangerous books. Take David Brin's Earth. He wrote about a microscopic black hole that fell into the planet's core, threatening to devour the entire world. That black hole would be small enough to fit through the pages, meaning any fool kid with magical talent who didn't know better . . ."

"Would it really destroy the Earth?"

"It's tough to say." . . . There were plans upon plans for such world-threatening eventualities, developed by Porter researchers. "We get review copies of every new book from the major publishers and most of the small presses. We usually catch and lock the troublesome ones before they're released to the public, though Harry Potter gave us some trouble."

J.K. Rowling had received a visit from Gutenberg himself, asking her to eliminate that damned time-turner from future books.

And that's why the time-turner never reappears, when it would obviously have been pretty darn useful to Harry in later volumes. Both Libriomancer and A Pretty Mouth pay tribute to great genre works of the past. But when you go the extra mile of actually fixing plot holes in beloved classics, you are too cool to stop reading.

THE WINNER: Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

Libriomancer advances to the championship round to face Osama by Lavie Tidhar.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, First Semifinal :: The Diviners by Libba Bray vs. Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Our first semifinal match in Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books features The Diviners by Libba Bray going against Osama by Lavie Tidhar. The winner, the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 100 pages, will advance to the championship round.

The Diviners: Little Brown, September 2012, 578 pages, jacket illustration by I Love Dust. The Diviners is a young adult fantasy set in the roaring 1920's. The Diviners made it to the semifinals by soundly defeating Sharkways by A. J. Kirby in the first round, and by overcoming Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye in the second round.

In the opening 50 pages of The Diviners, teenaged flapper Evie O'Neill arrived in 1920s New York, determined to make a splash. Evie is rather self-absorbed, but that's partly to mask her pain over her brother's death in the Great War. In the next 50 pages, Evie starts blending into the Manhattan social scene. She also accompanies her uncle, who is summoned to a murder scene as an expert in the occult. Using her strange ability to pick up thoughts from physical objects, Evie sees the victim's brutal murder and learns that an evil presence is loose in New York. Based on cryptic intelligence from her uncle, we suspect Evie will be one of the "Diviners" who will have to battle this presence. Another is Harlem numbers-runner Memphis Campbell, who had healing powers as a child, but abandoned them after they failed him when he needed them most.

Osama: Solaris, October 2012 (published in UK by PS Publishing in 2011), 302 pages, cover art by Pedro Marques. Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli writer now living in London. Osama won the 2012 World Fantasy Award. Osama made it to the semifinals by overpowering The Steam Mole by Dave Freer in the first round, and by defeating Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon in the second round.

Osama takes place in an alternate universe where Islamic terrorism occurs only in the pages of a series of pulp novels called Osama bin Laden: Vigilante. In the opening 50 pages a mysterious woman tasked our hero, a private eye named Joe, with finding the author of the Osama books. In the next 50-page section, Joe explores Paris and tracks down the books' publisher, despite warnings from some American thugs who do not want him to continue with his assignment. While in Paris, he meets another strange woman, who ends up vanishing from his arms, the most obvious of several signs that the reality of Joe's universe is rather tenuous.

The Battle: Judging the Battle of the Books gets difficult once we're to the semifinals, because the books that get this far are usually really good. Both The Diviners and Osama are well-written and mostly successful at everything the authors are trying to do.

Through the first hundred pages of The Diviners, the main protagonist Evie is engaging even though flawed. The narrative is funny when Libba Bray wants it to be, and genuinely chilling even to an adult reader when things get ominous. Bray effectively conveys the mood of the roaring 20s, with a narrative voice that nicely suits the period, for example in this scene where Evie's friend Mabel introduces her to a pair of elderly sisters residing in her building:

The Misses Proctor wore their long gray hair curled like turn-of-the-century schoolgirls. The effect was odd and disconcerting, like porcelain dolls who had aged and wrinkled.

"Welcome to the Bennington. It's a grand old place. . . . Sometimes you might hear odd sounds in the night. But you mustn't be frightened. The city has its ghosts, you see."

"All the best places do," Evie said with mock-seriousness.

Mabel choked on her Coca-Cola, but Miss Lillian did not take note. "In the seventeen hundreds, this patch of land was home to those suffering from the fever. Those poor, tragic souls moaning in their tents, jaundiced and bleeding, their vomitus the color of black night!"

Evie pushed her sandwich away. "How hideously fascinating. I was just saying to Mabel—Miss Rose—that we don't talk enough about black vomit." Under the table, Mabel's foot threatened to push Evie's through the floor.

That is a smart-alecky young heroine that I can get behind!

In Osama, Lavie Tidhar goes for a darker, more contemplative mood, but builds it just as successfully. His lush descriptions of a slightly altered Paris work very well. I love the contrast between Joe's noirish storyline and the excerpts from the Osama bin Laden: Vigilante books, which Joe and the other characters describe as pulp novels, but actually are narrated in a matter-of-fact style and are pulpish only in the sense that things often blow up.

Tidhar does a wonderful job of suggesting through subtle cues that the reality of Joe's universe is fragile. For example, when a bartender says of the odd woman Joe keeps encountering, "She's not all there," we're pretty sure he doesn't just mean she's crazy. Later, when Joe catches up to her again, she says she doesn't know where the fat man who publishes the Osama novels lives:

"Would you tell me if you knew?"

The girl shook her head again. When she looked at him, he felt trapped: he could not move away. The large brown eyes examined him, stripping him down without emotion, looking inside, a doctor checking for tell-tale signs of a terminal disease. "No," she said. "Why should I? He never did us any harm. And he cares, Joe. He cares. Life isn't a pulp novel, Joe, and death isn't either." And she got up and threw her head back and downed the drink, the last drink, and put down the glass on the counter and walked away, and he watched her, and it was another ritual established, another pattern followed, agreed upon, comforting. They both needed comfort, not of sex or even drink but of a reason, any reason, and in the absence of that there were only empty rituals. And the door closed behind her and the couples danced, seeking warmth in each other's bodies, and the slow recorded jazz played on, and the smoke from Joe's cigarette formed Lazarus castles in the air, gray and insubstantial, and he thought, I never told her my name.

Judge for yourself, but so far the enigmatic style of Osama is working beautifully for me.

So how to choose a winner after 100 pages, when both books are well written and entertaining? I want to give you some insightful literary analysis as to why one book is better, but I can't. All I can say is, if I were to declare Osama the winner, I would stop reading The Diviners. But if I were to name The Diviners the winner, I would continue reading Osama; I would not be able to put it down now if I tried. Which is what the Battle of the Books is all about.

THE WINNER: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Osama advances to the championship round to face either Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines or A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight :: Final Four

We're down to the Final Four in Bracket Eight of Fantastic Reviews Battle of the 2012 Books:

The Diviners by Libba Bray
vs.
Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines
vs.
A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer

We hope you've enjoyed this tournament so far. Now only four books remain of the starting sixteen. This bracket contained books from across the genre. There were horror novels or dark fantasies, adult fantasies, YA fantasies, and science fiction novels. To get to the Final Four, these books won their first two matches. The other books in the competition, and some of them were quite good, have been knocked out of the running, like in basketball's March Madness.

Judging between books, which can be totally different, based on reading only 25 or 50 pages can be difficult. But our Battle of the Books format allows us to sample and spread the word about many more new books and authors than we otherwise could.

In this bracket, three of the four books which were "seeded" reached the Final Four. The unseeded book which made it to the Final Four is The Diviners by Libba Bray.

Thanks again to all the authors and publicists sending us great books to consider. If you're an author or publicist, click here for the rules and an address to send your book if you'd like to be included in a future bracket.

We have had a great response to the Battle of the Books format. Several future brackets of Battle of the Books are now in the hands of our reviewers, so check back for many more battles to come.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, Second Round :: A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer vs. Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan

Our fourth and final match in the second round of Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books has A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer doing battle with Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

A Pretty Mouth: Lazy Fascist Press, October 2012, 227 pages, cover art by Matthew Revert. A Pretty Mouth is a novella collected with four related stories, all of which place Lovecraftian creatures in a slightly odd context. A Pretty Mouth defeated Destiny's Flower by Linda Harley to advance to the second round, on the strength of its opening story "A Spotted Trouble at Dolor-on-the-Downs."

The second 25-page section of A Pretty Mouth contains the story "The Hour of the Tortoise," in which a 19th Century author of erotic fiction named Chelone returns to Calipash Manor, the estate where she lived as a child and home of the mysterious Calipash family, whose history A Pretty Mouth chronicles. When the elderly Lord Calipash sees Chelone, he screams at her and promptly drops dead. And then the really weird stuff starts to happen.

Blood and Feathers: Solaris, August 2012, 364 pages, cover art by Pye Parr. Blood and Feathers is British author Lou Morgan's first novel, followed by the sequel, Blood and Feathers: Rebellion. She has also written a YA novel, Sleepless. Blood and Feathers defeated Grim by Joseph Spencer to advance to the second round.

In the opening 25 pages of Blood and Feathers, our protagonist Alice saw her father murdered and met two old friends of her late mother, who revealed themselves to be angels. In the second 25 pages, she learns about the angels and their adversaries, the Fallen. She promptly meets one of the Fallen, who takes the form of a creepy statue (or maybe she stumbled onto the set of Doctor Who?). Soon after, Alice finds herself standing in a pool of fire, a newly discovered talent of hers that means she is very important to the conflict between angels and Fallen.

The Battle: This battle pits urban fantasy with religious imagery against tongue-in-cheek Lovecraftian fantasy. These are each the author's first book, yet both narratives are effective, with the authors carrying off their chosen styles with aplomb. To pick a winner, I'm going to have to get nit-picky . . .

Blood and Feathers strikes me as a solid example of urban fantasy, with some nice images such as Alice looking down to find herself standing in a pool of fire. If you're a regular reader of urban fantasy, I think you'll enjoy it. On the other hand, if you're not a fan of the subgenre, I'm not sure there's much here to interest you.

In contrast, to me "The Hour of the Tortoise" transcends the Lovecraftian style. To start with, the voice of Tanzer's saucy narrator Chelone is witty and distinctive. She offers some amusing commentary about repressed Victorian society. She encounters an intriguing, at times erotic, mystery that's spun out nicely in such a short piece. And when Chelone gets into trouble and tries to send her editor a plea for help, Tanzer trusts her readers to spot the message hidden within the story's narrative.

"The Hour of the Tortoise" is a cleverly written piece that does not require the reader to be a fan of Victorian-era Lovecraftian fiction to appreciate it. It leaves me wanting to read further into A Pretty Mouth.

THE WINNER: A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer

A Pretty Mouth advances to the semifinals to take on Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, Second Round :: Untimed by Andy Gavin vs. Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

After getting distracted for a while with the Hugo nominees, we return to the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books. Today's match-up, our third in the second round of Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books, has Untimed by Andy Gavin going up against Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Untimed: Mascherato, December 2012, 326 pages, cover art by Cliff Nielsen. Andy Gavin is a successful video game developer. Untimed is a young adult time travel story. Untimed handily defeated Bad Apple by Kristi Petersen Schoonover to advance to the second round.

The first 25 pages of Untimed introduced us to Charlie, a boy nobody seems to notice, not even his mother. Charlie followed a clockwork man through a strange rift into 18th Century London. He quickly befriended a girl named Yvaine, who explained that Charlie and Yvaine are time travelers. Unfortunately, males can only travel to the past (although this is suspect — there are strong suggestions that Charlie's father has traveled to the past and returned). In the second 25 pages, Charlie meets Yvaine's group of companions, young pickpockets and ruffians straight out of Oliver Twist. Charlie ends up in a fistfight with the leader of the group, Donnie, but the whole thing is more ritual than conflict, and it seems the group will accept Charlie.

Libriomancer: DAW, August 2012, 305 pages, cover art by Gene Mollica. Libriomancer is the first volume in Jim C. Hines' latest series, Magic Ex Libris. Libriomancer easily beat out Dead Religion by David Beers to advance to the second round.

The hero of Libriomancer is Isaac Vainio, book-lover and SF/F fan and libriomancer. Isaac can reach into a book he has read and pull out objects described in them. He works as a librarian in the service of a secret magical society called the Porters. In the first 25 pages, he defended his library in Michigan's Upper Peninsula from vampires, with help from his pet fire-spider Smudge and a dryad named Lena. In the second 25 pages, we learn that a huge battle has erupted among the world's magical folk, and the world's first and greatest libriomancer, Johannes Gutenberg, has disappeared. Isaac meets up with Deb, a powerful libriomancer from the Library of Congress, but Isaac and Deb are not sure they can trust each other.

The Battle: In this battle we have a time travel story targeted at young adults and a contemporary fantasy targeted at book lovers. Through 50 pages, both authors are having fun setting up their storylines and both have done a nice job of pulling me into the tale.

After a fast-paced first section, the second 25 pages of Untimed slow down a bit to let us get to know the characters. The best part of this section is an unexpected detail about Charlies' potential love interest Yvaine:

"Thanks, Nancy," she says, taking the bundle from the lady.

Only candles light the cramped space, but now I can see that Yvaine's holding a baby. It opens and closes its little mouth like a guppy.

"You hungry, Billy?" she says. "Mama's got somethin' for you."

She tugs open the drawstring of her shirt and presses the infant close.

I'm not sure what surprises me more — that she's a teen mother or that I just saw my first glimpse of tit.

I like that Yvaine is a young mother, and the time travel framework sets up obvious possibilities that Charlie could end up the father of that child or maybe the child himself. Unfortunately, this passage also exemplifies my biggest problem with Untimed so far: in a first-person young adult story, the voice is critical; the narrator must sound like a teenager. Charlie in particular is portrayed as a painfully shy and awkward young man, except he often sounds instead like a middle-aged wiseass. "My first glimpse of tit"? Really? For a shy and awkward young man (and believe me I was one), seeing a pretty woman's chest for the first time is an occasion for reverent joy not a smart-alecky quip. Several times through the second section of Untimed, the narrator did not sound to me like the character he is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, I have no such quibbles with the writing in Libriomancer and I am having all kinds of fun with the story premise. In the second section, Isaac is subjected to an interrogation using a truth serum SF fans will recognize as fast-penta from Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. He pulls an herb out of Homer's Odyssey to cure the resulting headache. He then uses a personal shield generator from Dune to stymie an attack by machine gun. He obtains further help for his defense from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Starship Troopers, but the assailant responds with chlorine gas from a World War I history book. Luckily, the magic potion from the The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe is up to that challenge.

Jim Hines is having a lot of fun writing a book incorporating all the other books he loves to read. If you love to read them too, you should enjoy this one tremendously.

THE WINNER: Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

Libriomancer advances to the semifinals to take on either A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer or Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, Second Round :: Osama by Lavie Tidhar vs. Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon

Our second match in the second round of Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books features Osama by Lavie Tidhar doing battle with Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Osama: Solaris, October 2012 (published in UK by PS Publishing in 2011), 302 pages, cover art by Pedro Marques. Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli writer now living in London. Osama won the 2012 World Fantasy Award. Osama defeated The Steam Mole by Dave Freer to advance to the second round.

The setting of Osama is an alternate universe where Osama Bin Laden is the hero of a series of adventure pulp novels called Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante. Tidhar's narrative peppers in passages from those novels, which describe terrorist attacks that actually occurred in our universe. In the opening 25 pages, an enigmatic woman asks our protagonist Joe, a Western detective living in Laos, to find the author of the Osama Bin Laden books. In the second 25 pages, Joe travels to Paris, where the books are published. He asks a lady of the night about the books. She knows them, but when he seeks more information she bursts out, "They should leave Papa D alone," and promptly leaves.

Beyond Here Lies Nothing: Solaris, August 2012, 352 pages, cover art by Vincent Chong. Gary McMahon is the author of a number of books, mostly horror. Beyond Here Lies Nothing is the third book in the Concrete Grove Trilogy. Beyond Here Lies Nothing defeated A Red Sun Also Rises by Mark Hodder to advance to the second round.

After a prologue from a child's diary describing a bogeyman that goes "clikcety clikcety," the first 25 pages of Beyond Here Lies Nothing introduced us to Marc Price, who is researching the odd township of Concrete Grove. In the second 25 pages, Marc goes home with a strange woman named Abby, who he learns had a daughter who disappeared a few years earlier. We also meet a detective named Royle, driven to alcoholism by the unsolved disappearances in Concrete Grove. In a poignant phone call, we learn that Royle's pregnant wife has moved out until he can control his drinking.

The Battle: Here are two books with solid openings, both of which I genuinely want to keep reading.

Osama takes me to an intriguing universe where al Qaeda's terrorist rampage was somehow contained within the pages of a series of pulp novels. Beyond Here Lies Nothing introduces me to a memorably creepy section of London. Both books take the time for me to get to know their main characters, believable people with relatable problems.

Through 50 pages, I can already say that these are both strong novels well worth checking out. But the Battle of the Books rules devised by some idiot (me) require that I choose only one of the two books to keep reading. I know which one I have to choose, for a nitpicky reason and for a significant reason.

The nitpicky reason goes to the author's writing styles. The writing in Osama is, to my tastes, pitch perfect so far. If I had been in a writing group with Lavie Tidhar and had read this manuscript, I would have told him there's a typo on page 57 and had nothing else to say. The writing of Beyond Here Lies Nothing is also good, but I can find things to quibble with. There are some turns of phrase that don't quite work for me. (E.g., when Marc kisses Abby, "Her thin lips were hard; her large mouth was soft and wet" -- this throws me out of the story as I try to figure how someone could have hard lips but a soft mouth.) And there are several passages where a character perceives everyday places and objects as ominous, for instance:

The empty play park opposite looked different, as if subtle changes had occurred. The swings rocked slowly, the roundabout turned as if it had been pushed gently by an invisible hand; the climbing frame seemed as if it were tensed for movement, like a large spider waiting to pounce.

By itself, I rather like this passage. The problem is that there are a dozen other passages just like it, and for me a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. I prefer Tidhar's relative restraint, for instance pausing to describe airplane passengers as "like silkworm larvae in their soft cocoons" and then quickly moving on.

The more significant reason is that Osama has managed to draw me into the story slowly, taking time for strong characterization, while still giving me a pretty good sense of what to expect. This is a tale of alternate universes, where the bin Laden of our universe becomes a pulp hero in another universe. The sorry detective sent to get to the bottom of this is not going to like what he finds. I want to read that. Meanwhile, Beyond Here Lies Nothing also builds slowly with good characterization, but it hasn't given me a sense of the story's big picture. I know it is a horror novel where people, especially young girls, are apt to disappear forever. But I have no sense of what's behind it all, other than that it goes "clikcety clikcety." That's not quite enough to hook me through 50 pages. (Even so, it's made me want to seek out a copy of McMahon's The Concrete Grove, to try this series from the start.)

THE WINNER: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Osama advances to the semifinals to take on The Diviners by Libba Bray.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, Second Round :: Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye vs. The Diviners by Libba Bray

We begin the second round of Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books with Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye against The Diviners by Libba Bray. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: Penguin Books, September 2012, 198 pages, cover photo by Simen Johan. Stefan Kiesbye is a German author now living in New Mexico. Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone defeated The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker to advance to the second round.

In the first 50 pages of Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, three different first-person narrators look back on tragic events from their childhood decades earlier, in the small German town of Hemmersmoor. In the opening 25 pages, Martin recalled how a new family to the village was killed after being accused (probably falsely) of cannibalism. Then Christian told us how at age seven he murdered his sister when a carnival worker instructed him to capture her soul in a glass vial. The next 25 pages consist of a long chapter narrated by Linde, daughter of the gardener for the town's wealthiest family. When that family took in a widow and her child, Linde's mother began harboring suspicions about her husband and the widow. The mother pulls strings for the widow to receive a pension that allows her to move out, with unintended consequences.

The Diviners: Little Brown, September 2012, 578 pages, jacket illustration by I Love Dust. The Diviners is a young adult fantasy set in the roaring 1920's. The Diviners soundly defeated Sharkways by A. J. Kirby to advance to the second round.

In the initial 25 pages of The Diviners, a malicious spirit was released into the world, and we were introduced to two young people with strange abilities, flapper Evie O'Neill from Ohio and Harlem numbers-runner Memphis Campbell. A single long chapter about Evie arriving in Manhattan comprises almost all of the next 25 pages. While in the big city, Evie will stay with her uncle, an expert on paranormal activities. She learns from him of a prophecy of a "coming storm," the only defense to which will be "diviners" who can foretell the future.

The Battle: This one surprised me. While I liked the first section of The Diviners, I came to this battle expecting Your House Is on Fire to advance, because it had such a creepy and memorably unusual opening. However, the Battle of the Books format demands that authors quickly build upon a strong opening. Reading through page 50, I find it's Libba Bray who has best met that challenge.

The second 25-page section of Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone is certainly not bad, but neither is it as tightly written or compelling as the opening section. Linde's first viewpoint chapter is perhaps too long, and it doesn't show the young Linde to have much personality (compared to the older Linde we've already seen piss on an old friend's grave). The chapter has a tragic ending, but it comes as the unintended consequence of a kind act, which doesn't match the punch of the previous chapters. Perhaps more importantly, Linde's chapter seems little connected to the prior chapters, giving the whole book an episodic feel through 50 pages.

Meanwhile, in the second 25-page section of The Diviners, Libba Bray hits all the right notes to build on a good opening. As with Your House Is on Fire, the chapter that makes up most of this section is longer than the previous chapters. But Bray effectively uses that space to let us better get to know her character Evie. Evie is a flawed young woman, much too concerned with what others think of her. But she is also fun-loving, despite her understandable insecurities, in a way that makes her easy to cheer for, for example in this scene when the first person she meets in Penn Station takes advantage of her friendliness:

Evie stood uncertainly for a few seconds. She stuck out her hand for a shake. With a smirk, Sam Lloyd drew her to him and kissed her hard on the mouth. She heard the shoe-shine men chuckling as she pulled away, red-faced and disoriented. Should she slap him? He deserved a slap. But was that what sophisticated Manhattan moderns did? Or did they shrug it off like an old joke they were too tired to laugh at?

"You can't blame a fella for kissing the prettiest girl in New York, can you, sister?" Sam's grin was anything but apologetic.

Evie brought up her knee quickly and decisively, and he dropped to the floor like a grain sack. "You can't blame a girl for her quick reflexes now, can you, pal?"

While this chapter focuses on development of Evie's character, Bray also manages to pepper in enough references to the larger conflict brewing around New York that the story still feels like it's moving ahead with a purpose.

YA urban fantasy isn't necessarily my first choice in sub-genres, but so far The Diviners is too much fun to put down.

THE WINNER: The Diviners by Libba Bray

The Diviners advances to the semifinals to take on either Osama by Lavie Tidhar or Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, First Round :: Grim by Joseph Spencer vs. Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan

Our eighth and last first round match in Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books features Grim by Joseph Spencer taking on Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Grim: Damnation Books, September 2012, 168 pages, cover art by Dawné Dominique. Grim is the first novel by former journalist Joseph Spencer, who has since followed up with a sequel, Wrage. Grim combines elements of a crime thriller and a horror novel with a graphic novel sensibility. The main characters are Heath Grim and Detective Adam White. As hinted by the first names, this is a play on the Batman story. Grim is a very wealthy young man who spends his spare time fighting crime, only the criminals he fights tend to end up decapitated, their blood spattered about to gruesome effect. It seems Grim blacks out during these times, surrendering himself to a beast inside him. In the opening 25 pages, Adam White investigates one of these killings, and Grim comes under suspicion when a neighbor he mentions to White turns out apparently not to exist. Meanwhile, a local crime lord plots against the vigilante doing in his men.

Blood and Feathers: Solaris, August 2012, 364 pages, cover art by Pye Parr. Blood and Feathers is British author Lou Morgan's first novel, followed by the sequel, Blood and Feathers: Rebellion. She has also written a YA novel, Sleepless. In the opening 25 pages of Blood and Feathers, a woman named Iris follows her son into the maw of a set of giant teeth that appeared on her lawn. Then a young woman named Alice meets two strange people, Gwyn and Mallory, who claim to be old friends of her late mother's. When hands emerge from the ceiling and snap her father's neck, Alice bolts, but Gwyn and Mallory quickly return her home. They insist they are friends and begin to tell Alice incredible things she never knew about her mother.

The Battle: Both of these books have attention-grabbing first scenes.

Grim lives up to its title with a very dark opening scene in which Heath Grim returns home late at night, dripping blood, with no memory of where he's been, feeling feverish:

Yet, the reflection staring back at him in the mirror emitted an eerie glow so chilling that goose pimples broke out on the back of his neck and arms. Exhaustion slowed his senses to a crawl, and his eyes blinked shut. His heart raced. Bile crept up his throat.

The fiend broke its silence. "There's no escaping yourself, my son." The words came out of Heath's mouth, but the voice which said them wasn't his own. It was deeper, angrier.

That is a strong initial sequence. Meanwhile, Lou Morgan draws us in with an absurd opening scene that she makes believable, in which a woman's lawn is suddenly filled with tooth-shaped boulders leading to a throat. A throat with stairs. Stairs her son has just gone down . . . That's also good stuff.

However, while Blood and Feathers effectively builds on its opening scene, Grim quickly starts to lose its way. There are two decent scenes of a mob boss planning revenge against whoever killed some of his men. But the rest of the opening 25 pages are from the points of view of Heath Grim and Adam White, and all of their scenes are disrupted by unwelcome sidekicks. White has a resentful cop named Sinks trailing him everywhere, denigrating any women around and spouting idiotic lines at White like, "Let me show you how us real cops who don't get our names in the papers every fucking day do the dirty work for glory hounds such as yourself." Similarly, Heath Grim is constantly bombarded by wisecracks and lame puns from a Voice in his head, which sounds like his dead friend Craig. These sidekicks are unnecessary and unfunny and pretty much wreck the scenes with Grim and White, our two main characters.

In contrast, Blood and Feathers builds intensity through the first 25 pages. First, Alice sees her father inexplicably murdered. Then when she runs away, one of the two men she just met is somehow ahead of her, waiting. The two men tell her that her mother was an angel, a story she of course cannot believe, except that they don't allow her any choice:

"We knew your mother, Alice. We knew her better than even your father did. And we know you. Now it's time for you to know us." He closed his eyes, and the edges of the room suddenly seemed sharper, brighter. Everything grew lighter, and there was a sound like the wind in the trees, faint at first, then louder and louder.

As Alice watched, Gwyn unfolded his wings, and every bulb in the house blew out as one.

I am not a great fan of urban fantasies involving angels, but this is so well presented, it makes me want to keep reading.

THE WINNER: Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan

Blood and Feathers advances to the second round to face A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, First Round :: Destiny's Flower by Linda Harley vs. A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer

We are nearly complete with the first round in Bracket Eight in the Battle of the 2012 Books. This match-up features Destiny's Flower by Linda Harley versus A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Destiny's Flower: Infinity Publishing (a self-publishing service, not to be confused with Infinity Plus in the UK), September 2012, 312 pages. Destiny's Flower is labeled a science fiction romance. In the opening 25 pages, our leading lady Lynn Davis is abducted while teaching a college course and spirited away to the interstellar spaceship Destiny (although she doesn't yet know she's on a spaceship), which promptly has to battle past a fleet of enemy ships to get away from Earth. The dashing Lord Kyle von Talion needs Davis for something, we don't know what, and when he declines to tell her, she tries to escape through a ventilation shaft, putting the crew of Destiny in a tizzy. Linda Harley is a new author, with a PhD in Applied Physiology.

A Pretty Mouth: Lazy Fascist Press, October 2012, 227 pages, cover art by Matthew Revert. A Pretty Mouth is a novella collected with four related stories, all of which place Lovecraftian creatures in a slightly odd context. The first 25 pages consist mainly of the story "A Spotted Trouble at Dolor-on-the-Downs," set in Victorian or Edwardian times. When a Mr. Wooster loses a drunken wager, the price falls on his man Jeeves, who must confront a strange octopus-like creature. A Pretty Mouth is the first book by Molly Tanzer, whose latest effort is the Weird Western Vermilion.

The Battle: We've had some good luck in the Battle of the Books recently with self-published books that were written at a professional level. Untimed by Andy Gavin, for example, has already advanced to the second round of this bracket on the strength of a very entertaining opening section. Unfortunately, Destiny's Flower is not written to that standard. Linda Harley may yet develop into a fine writer, and if she does, she will look back on Destiny's Flower as an amateurish early effort. Comparing the first section of this book to A Pretty Mouth's strong opening illustrates what I mean.

Let's start with the descriptions in the two narratives. In the first few pages of Destiny's Flower, Lynn Davis is taken away from this planet and thrust into a bizarre universe of spaceships and quantum torpedoes. Except, it's not bizarre at all; rather, it's absurdly mundane. These people from another world sit on leather couches, eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, decorate their walls with paintings of women in straw hats in fields of lilies, and sleep on "a Victorian double bed covered with a white comforter embroidered with blue flowers." Davis's interstellar trip, which should be bewildering, is about as strange as staying at a Motel 6.

In contrast, Molly Tanzer's setting is closer to home, but she quickly brings it to life:

Dolor-on-the-Downs is, like so many seaside towns, a place of distinct seediness. There was one street of hotels acceptable for human habitation, and the rest of the place was a hotch-potch of inferior lodgings, taffy shops, ice cream parlors, boardwalks, performers busking on streetcorners, teashops where the very windows bore a light sheen of grease, and, of course, public houses. During the season, children with sticky faces and sunburns run hither and yon without heed for the eardrums of others, and the beaches are clogged with their adoring parents, also sunburned, but less-often sticky-faced.

As this passage suggests, Tanzer is having a ball applying the voice of P.G. Wodehouse to a tale of suspense. For example, when Wooster boasts about Jeeves to the mysterious Lord Calipash, Jeeves narrates his response like this:

'Really,' said the Lord Calipash, and though I am neither a whimsical man by nature, nor the heroine of a Gothic romance, I felt a chill as his eyes raked over me.

That is wonderful stuff. Through the opening pages, Destiny's Flower has yet to find that kind of a voice.

Which is the better story idea, a modern woman being abducted and thrust into interstellar politics, or a Lovecraftian monster encountered by Jeeves the butler? The latter strikes me as more original, but really it doesn't matter which is better. Story ideas are plentiful, but they don't get you anywhere until you develop the craft to tell the story effectively. The opening of Destiny's Flower has done little to pull me into the story. Meanwhile, Molly Tanzer's confident and witty writing style has me convinced she has a story to tell that I want to keep reading.

THE WINNER: A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer

A Pretty Mouth advances to the second round to take on either Grim by Joseph Spencer or Blood and Feathers by Lou Morgan.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, First Round :: Dead Religion by David Beers vs. Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

Today's first-round contest in Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books features Dead Religion by David Beers going against Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Dead Religion: Self-published, September 2012, cover art by Renu Sharma. Dead Religion is the stand-alone first novel by David Beers, who has since gone on to publish serialized novels called The Devil's Dream and The Singularity. The opening 25 pages of Deal Religion jump between three different time periods. In the present day, FBI agent James Allison is sent to investigate a terrorist bombing in Mexico, believed to be the work of an American of Mexican descent, Alex Valdez. James is reluctant to leave his 15/16-year-old brother, for they have no surviving relatives. In an earlier period, Alex Valdez struggles with recurring nightmares, which he and his wife Brittany fear threaten his delicate mental health. In the earliest time period, Alex nearly commits suicide, believing that he cannot escape the evil presence that killed his parents. The narrative hints this presence may be some kind of remnant of the Aztec religion.

Libriomancer: DAW, August 2012, 305 pages, cover art by Gene Mollica. Jim C. Hines is a fellow Writers of the Future winner, who has published four novels in his "fairy tale princess" sequence, three novels and a collection in the Goblin Quest universe, a stand-alone mainstream novel, and a bunch of short fiction. He has also won a Fan Writer Hugo Award for his blogging. Libriomancer is the first volume in his latest series, Magic Ex Libris.

The first-person narrator of Libriomancer is Isaac Vainio. (His first name is likely a tribute to Isaac Asimov, the first of countless SF/F references and in-jokes soon to follow.) Isaac is a book-lover and huge science fiction and fantasy fan, and he is a libriomancer, a rare person who can conjure objects out of the books he has read. He works for a secret magical society called the Porters. Having fared poorly at field work, Isaac now occupies himself as a librarian in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, cataloguing books that may be of use to his fellow magic-doers. In the opening pages, his library is attacked by three vampires, whom he fights off with the help of his pet fire-spider Smudge, a dryad named Lena, and a disruptor-pistol he pulls out of the book Vulcan's Mirror. Lena then tells him that a large-scale battle has erupted between vampires and the Porters, but there are hints that the conflict goes well beyond vampires.

The Battle: Dead Religion is self-published and it shows. The book desperately needed a professional editing job—there are no page numbers, tenses vary erratically, and Alex's brother's age changes from 16 to 15 with significant results (he says he can drive himself to school, but two pages later he's become too young to drive).

Despite these problems, there is an intensity to the narrative that I admire. Also, I think Beers handles the shifts between different time periods quite effectively, and the hints about Aztec mythology are interesting.

The bad news for Dead Religion, however, is that it ran into Jim C. Hines at his most amusing. In the first five pages of Libriomancer, Isaac has to fend off a customer who takes a fire hydrant to his fire-spider by threatening to revoke her Internet privileges. Then we really get a taste of the humor at the heart of Libriomancer when Isaac spots a group of three suspicious-looking people approaching the library:

The trio stopped to study the address of the post office across the street. One reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Her hand glittered like a disco ball in the afternoon sun as she scanned the buildings. She tugged her sleeve over her hand a second later, but that one glimpse was enough to identify them as Sanguinarius Meyerii, informally known as sparklers.

If you don't get the joke, Libriomancer is probably not for you; but if it made you laugh, you may be in Libriomancer's target audience. The book is written for people just like Isaac, people whose homes are overflowing with books, people who never tire of visualizing science fiction and fantasy scenarios, people who would love nothing better than the ability to bring something from their favorite books to life.

Is it pandering that Hines targets his book so shamelessly at core fantasy readers, making his hero a fellow fantasy-obsessed bookworm? Um, do I care? I'm having as much fun reading this as I suspect Hines had writing it.

THE WINNER: Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines

Libriomancer advances to the second round to face Untimed by Andy Gavin.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, First Round :: Untimed by Andy Gavin vs. Bad Apple by Kristi Petersen Schoonover

We continue the first round of Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books. The bottom half of the draw begins with Untimed by Andy Gavin against Bad Apple by Kristi Petersen Schoonover. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Untimed: Mascherato, December 2012, 326 pages, cover art by Cliff Nielsen. Andy Gavin is a successful video game developer whose previous book, The Darkening Dream competed in the Winter 2012 Battle of the Books. Untimed is a young adult time travel story. The protagonist Charlie is a kid nobody seems to notice. Even his mother has to leave herself notes to remember her son's name. Charlie's father is seldom around, and the father's most recent visit was cut short when an odd detective came looking for him. Charlie later spots the detective and sees him unbutton his suit and wind himself. Charlie follows the clockwork man through a rift in the street and finds himself in the 18th Century. He bumps into a girl named Yvaine, who (for a shilling) explains that Charlie and Yvaine are among the small population of people who can travel through time. The bad news is that males can only travel to the past; it seems Charlie can't get home.

Bad Apple: Vagabondage, August 2012, 186 pages, cover art by Jonathan Willmann. Kristi Schoonover has published a good deal of short fiction in the mainstream and genre small press, some of which is collected in Skeletons in the Swimmin' Hole. Bad Apple, her first novel, tells the story of a young woman named Scree, who grows up on an apple orchard. As the book opens, Scree has not yet started first grade, yet she already masturbates with the help of her favorite teddy bear. One day she accidentally drops said Bear into a well. She calls her mother for help, but then panics at the thought that Bear will tell her mother what she's been doing, so she pushes mother down the well also. That leaves her with a father who is probably not her real father and a womanizing brother, who soon drops his first child in Scree's lap to care for.

The Battle: This is a battle between two independent books, so the first question is whether their respective authors can actually write at a professional level. Happily, the answer here is yes. Both Gavin and Schoonover make effective use of language to tell their young protagonists' stories. Untimed is written in a quick-paced, breezy style that works very well. The prose in Bad Apple is more dense, which is suitable to its much darker tone.

While I like the writing in Bad Apple, however, I'm finding it difficult to become absorbed in the story. Much of the opening 25 pages show us Scree's unhappy childhood after her mother's death. But I'm finding it awfully difficult to feel any sympathy for Scree's troubles, when those troubles are a direct result of Scree killing her own mother. Even if we assume that Scree was too young to understand fully what she was doing (and the narrative suggests otherwise—Scree is very precocious, as evidenced by her early experiments with masturbation), it's very difficult for the reader to feel an emotional connection with her.

In contrast, the opening 25 pages of Untimed do a wonderful job of pulling the reader in. In only a few pages, Gavin makes Charlie very sympathetic by showing his stoic acceptance of the fact that nobody around him can remember who he is. Then, in a YA twist that never gets old, Gavin shows that this is actually because Charlie is very special. Before 25 pages are up, Charlie has already encountered strange clockwork beings, fallen through a hole in time, met a potential love interest, and even caught a glimpse of Benjamin Franklin. We are off and running! I think nearly any young reader would be pulled in by this opening, and it works awfully well for some of us old readers too.

THE WINNER: Untimed by Andy Gavin

Untimed advances to the second round to take on either Dead Religion by David Beers or Libriomancer by Jim C. Hines.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, First Round :: Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon vs. A Red Sun Also Rises by Mark Hodder

We return to the Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books, after a brief interlude to argue about puppies. The fourth match in the first round of Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books features Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon versus A Red Sun Also Rises by Mark Hodder. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Beyond Here Lies Nothing: Solaris, August 2012, 352 pages, cover art by Vincent Chong. Gary McMahon is the author of nine novels, a half-dozen collections and several chapbooks, mostly horror. Beyond Here Lies Nothing is billed as the third book in the Concrete Grove Trilogy, following The Concrete Grove and Silent Voices. But I've heard that each novel in the trilogy features different main characters and a story that stands alone. After 25 pages, I certainly don't feel like I've stepped into the middle of the story. The novel begins with a page from the diary of a child terrified of a bogeyman that goes "clikcety clikcety." Then we meet Marc Price, who has come to Concrete Grove for the funeral of a friend of his late uncle's, whom Marc had recently gotten to know while researching a news story or book. He accompanies the brother of the deceased to a nearby tavern, where he meets a provocative woman named Abby, who snaps at him rather rudely, yet seems determined to take him home with her.

A Red Sun Also Rises: Pyr, December 2012, 273 pages, cover art by Lee Moyer. Mark Hodder is best known as the author of the Burton & Swinburne alternate history series, the first volume of which won the Philip K. Dick Award. A Red Sun Also Rises is a stand-alone, unrelated to that series as far as I can tell. The protagonist of A Red Sun Also Rises is Aiden Fleischer, a 19th Century English priest. In the opening section of the book, Fleischer comes across as pedantic and judgmental despite being filled with self-doubt. He becomes infatuated with a new family's beautiful daughter, which potential impropriety the family promptly seizes on to blackmail him. Rather than confront the family, Fleisher flees to London, just as Jack the Ripper's killing spree begins. Through 25 pages, the alien creature on the cover of the book has made no appearance.

The Battle: Here is an interesting Battle. Both these books are nicely written, both feature obviously flawed main characters, and neither book has gotten to the main storyline in the first 25 pages——nothing science fictional or supernatural has yet occurred in either one. And yet, one book has pulled me into the story much more firmly. Let's see if I can articulate why.

First, while I have no particular complaints about the writing in A Red Sun Also Rises, neither has it especially caught my eye, while Beyond Here Lies Nothing has some very intriguing descriptions of its Concrete Grove setting:

As he drove, he was struck by the way things never changed around here. It was like a film set that had not been taken down when the production company moved on, and people had moved in to set up home inside the two-dimensional backdrop. There was a sense of impermanence, yet also the belief that everything would remain as it was now, as it had been since the estate was built.

Second, both authors include a prologue to let us know that fantastic events are coming, but McMahon's works better for me. A Red Sun Also Rises begins with Mark Hodder claiming the manuscript to follow was retrieved from a sunken sea vessel. I appreciate the nod to proto-science fiction novels, where the authors always felt compelled to insist, this really happened. But it didn't draw me in like the single page of a child's diary that opens Beyond Here Lies Nothing:

I think somebody hates us. he is in the house all the time but we cant see him. he makes noise when nobody else is here. he wants to hurt us. we hide under the bed when mummy and daddy are in the pub.

To me, that is chilling stuff.

Finally, while both books' protagonists are flawed, Hodder has yet to give his main character any likeable qualities at all (one hopes they're going to start to develop fairly soon), while McMahon's cynical loner protagonist is at least interesting. I want to know more about him, and about this odd place called Concrete Grove.

THE WINNER: Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon

Beyond Here Lies Nothing advances to the second round to face Osama by Lavie Tidhar.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the 2012 Books, Bracket Eight, First Round :: Osama by Lavie Tidhar vs. The Steam Mole by Dave Freer

Our third match-up in the first round of Bracket Eight of the Battle of the 2012 Books is Osama by Lavie Tidhar going against The Steam Mole by Dave Freer. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Osama: Solaris, October 2012 (published in UK by PS Publishing in 2011), 302 pages, cover art by Pedro Marques. Osama takes place in an alternate universe (possibly based on an alternate history timeline), where Osama Bin Laden is not the terrorist we know, but the fictional hero of a series of pulp novels called Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante. Through 25 pages, the novel alternates between chapters from an Osama Bin Laden novel, which depicts fictional terrorist attacks that actually happened in our universe, and chapters from the point of view of a detective named Joe living in Laos. A mysterious woman gives Joe the assignment of finding the author of the Osama Bin Laden books. The author's name is Mike Longshott, but Joe assumes that's a pseudonym.

Lavie Tidhar is the leading Israeli author of science fiction and fantasy, although he now lives in London. Osama won the World Fantasy Award after its initial release in the UK.

The Steam Mole: Pyr, December 2012, 302 pages, cover art by Paul Young. The Steam Mole is the second in a YA steampunk series, after Cuttlefish, which competed in the Fall 2012 Battle of the Books. In a steampunk universe where the polar ice caps melted ahead of schedule, our young heroine Clara Calland has escaped with her mother to Australia, pursued by the British government, which seeks a scientific breakthrough her mother has made. They made their escape on the coal-powered submarine Cuttlefish, and Clara has fallen for one of its young crewmen, Tim Barnabas. The Cuttlefish is grounded for repairs in Australia, and when Clara's mother falls ill, she ends up at the mercy of some well-meaning but clueless natives, while Tim is stuck working on the huge tunneling machines called "steam moles."

Dave Freer is a South African writer living in Australia. He is best known for his fantasy in collaboration with Eric Flint and Mercedes Lackey, as well as his solo Dragon's Ring series.

The Battle: Through 25 pages, the strength of both these books is the setting. The battle comes down to a matter of degrees.

I like how The Steam Mole integrates a steampunk sensibility into a post-global warming world. There are some nice touches, like how reluctant Australians are to go into the sun during the day, but they'll gladly send aboriginals on errands. Most of the first 25 pages are spent summarizing the previous book, but the story starts to move in earnest as Clara realizes how seriously ill her mother is, and the reader realizes she was poisoned by agents of a London duke.

Meanwhile, through 25 pages, I love the initial set-up of Osama. The contrast between the pulpish chapters of Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante and the lush descriptions of Joe's home in Laos is terrific. There are fascinating hints in Joe's chapters that the reality he sees around him is fragile. I very much want to see him poke at the edges of his own universe and start to get an understanding of ours.

While I'd be happy to keep reading The Steam Mole, I absolutely do not want to put down Osama.

THE WINNER: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Osama advances to the second round to take on either Beyond Here Lies Nothing by Gary McMahon or A Red Sun Also Rises by Mark Hodder.

To see the whole bracket, click here.