Battle of the Books, Fall 2012, Second Round :: Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy vs. Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson

We start the second round of the Fall 2012 Battle of the Books with Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy vs. Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson. The winner will be the book I most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Hemlock Grove: Farrar, Straus & Giroux trade paperback, April 2012, 318 pages, cover art by Matt Buck. Hemlock Grove advanced to the second round by defeating Dave Freer's Cuttlefish in the first round.

In the first 25 pages we met 17-year-old Peter Rumancek, who is suspected by the other local teens of being a werewolf and possibly responsible for the death of a young woman in the woods. The second 25 pages remove any doubt as to Peter being a werewolf, and another murder occurs. Meanwhile, we've spent more time with Peter's classmate Roman and his very rich and very weird family, including his mother and uncle who are having an affair with each other, and his deformed, seven-foot-tall sister named Shelley (get it?).

Further: Beyond the Threshold: 47North trade paperback, May 2012, 343 pages, cover art by Marcel Clemens & Algol. Further got past Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson to get here.

In the opening, we saw Ramachandra Jason (RJ) Stone, captain of the first interstellar voyage, wake from suspended animation to learn his ship was struck by a micrometeor. He is the only survivor, and 12,000 years have passed. In the next 25 pages, RJ and his guide, in the form of a metallic eagle, travel by wormhole gate to a dramatically transformed Earth, populated by a wide variety of humans, post-humans, and artificial intelligences. RJ is an instant celebrity. We know from the back of the book that another interstellar mission is in RJ's future.

The Battle: Werewolf stories have been done to death in recent years, and stories about a man waking up in the far future had been done to death before I was born. The lesson of today's Battle of the Books is that even a tired old story concept can be a lot of fun in the hands of a talented writer. Both Hemlock Grove and Further make for interesting and entertaining reading through 50 pages.

The quirky characters of Hemlock Grove make this feel like a werewolf story the way David Lynch might do one. Roman's family brings some soap opera elements to the story and McGreevy throws in genuine horror touches, notably a memorable description of Peter's transformation to a werewolf——he literally tears his human skin off to reveal the wolf underneath. McGreevy varies the tone of the story from scene to scene, and so far that's working well.

There is a wonderful exuberance to how Further: Beyond the Threshold attacks the far future. Roberson gives a dizzying array of details about his future Earth, including believable touches such as RJ unwittingly offending his guide by suggesting that AIs aren't "human" and quickly attracting fans nostalgic for Earth's past:

If I squinted, the two men might have passed for 20C Americans, but they wouldn't have stood up to any kind of scrutiny. They wore suits, ties, and hats such as were common in that era, but exaggerated to ridiculous extremes. The result was a sort of stylized zoot suit, such as those worn by lecherous wolves in old Tex Avery cartoons. As I drew near, the look on their faces was so hungry, so near lust, that I almost fancied I could see their hearts pounding out of their ribcages, their tongues rolling out like red carpets.

It's a nice touch that often RJ's best way of making sense of everything he sees is to relate it to virtual reality games he played as a kid.

While I'm definitely enjoying both of these books, I'm required to pick one to move into the semifinals. The Battle of the Books is inherently subjective, and I'm more in the target audience for one of these novels. The soap-opera aspects of Hemlock Grove don't have much appeal for me, while the whiz-bang style of Further is right up my alley, providing the kind of sense of wonder that I love.

THE WINNER: FURTHER: BEYOND THE THRESHOLD by Chris Roberson

Further: Beyond the Threshold advances to the semifinals, to face either Dark Magic by James Swain or The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Fall 2012, First Round :: Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy vs. Cuttlefish by Dave Freer

We begin the first round of the belated Fall 2012 Battle of the Books with Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy vs. Cuttlefish by Dave Freer. The winner will be the book I (Aaron) most want to continue reading after 25 pages.

Hemlock Grove: Farrar, Straus & Giroux trade paperback, April 2012, 318 pages, cover art by Matt Buck. Hemlock Grove is the first novel by new writer Brian McGreevy, but it has already been picked up for production as a television series, as part of Netflix's new line of original programming.

The book begins with discovery of the mutilated body of a young woman, possibly killed by an unidentified wild animal. In the eyes of local teenagers, this makes our 17-year-old protagonist Peter Rumancek a suspect, since he has admitted to being a werewolf. Through 25 pages, we're figuring he probably really is a werewolf, but perhaps he just said that because he likes to get a rise out of people. Peter is descended from gypsies; he has an offbeat way of looking at things and has trouble fitting in. But unlike many teenaged protagonists, this genuinely doesn't seem to bother him.

So far we've also met Peter's 13-year-old neighbor Christina, who is fascinated with Peter's rebellious attitudes (Christina is the one who outed Peter as a werewolf, when she noticed his index and middle fingers were the same length), and his classmate Roman, a BMOC thanks to his very wealthy family. Roman also has a hint of the supernatural, and at the end of the first 25 pages, he pulls a Jedi mind trick on some policemen who catch Peter and Roman poking around the scene of the girl's death.

Cuttlefish: Pyr hardcover, July 2012, 288 pages, cover art by Paul Young. South African Dave Freer (now relocated to Australia) broke into the field with the science fiction novel The Forlorn in 1999. He has since concentrated on fantasy, in multiple collaborations with Eric Flint and Mercedes Lackey, as well as his solo Dragon's Ring series. (Incidentally, we seriously need to get Baen Books to start submitting to the Battle of the Books. The cover of the 2012 entry in that series, Dog and Dragon, shows Lassie riding on the back of a dragon——how cool is that?)

Cuttlefish is a young adult steampunk novel, named for the illegal coal-powered submarine where much of the action occurs. In this alternate history, Britain has maintained its empire well into the Twentieth Century, and the polar ice caps melted ahead of schedule. Our two young protagonists are Tim Barnabas, a young black crew member who grew up in the tunnels under a partially submerged London, and Clara Calland, a spunky Irish girl who has taken refuge with her mother on the Cuttlefish.

Clara and her mother are being pursued by the British government and by Russian agents. Most of the initial 25-page section consists of flashbacks to when Clara and her mother first went into hiding. The scope of the efforts taken to find them suggest that the mother has made a very important discovery.

The Battle: When we started getting YA books for the Battle of the Books, we considered putting them in a separate YA bracket, but I couldn't justify doing that. As an adult, I've read YA books I've enjoyed as much as anything on the market (e.g., Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass and Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker); whereas when I actually was a young adult, I usually preferred adult books to what were then called "juveniles." So what would be the point in trying to apply different criteria to books marketed as YA?

This battle is a case in point. While I enjoyed some aspects of the first four chapters of Cuttlefish——I particularly liked the details about the coal-powered submarine——the book did not grab me as much as the opening of Hemlock Grove. I wondered briefly if I was being unfair, since Cuttlefish is aimed at young readers (the marketing materials say ages 12 and up) while I'm deep into fogeyhood. Then I realized that the 13-year-old version of myself also would have preferred Hemlock Grove, and by a wider margin.

Hemlock Grove is definitely not written for young readers——in an early chapter an unnamed person gets a hummer from a prostitute——but I think many young readers would appreciate it. The main characters are themselves teenagers, and the narrative has a wiseass teen's cynical point of view. Plus, I think young readers have sharp ears for dialogue, and the first chapters of Hemlock Grove feature much more engaging dialogue than Cuttlefish, for example this scene where Christina asks Peter about being a werewolf:

"Can I be a werewolf?" she said.

"In theory," said Peter, evasive.

He dangled his arm, snapping his fingers a few times, and Fetchit came and nuzzled the back of his hand.

"Little prick," said Peter.

"Will you bite me?" said Christina.

"Don't be retarded," said Peter.

"Come on." She lifted her leg so her calf was level with him. "Look how young and tender."

"Get that skinny, sorry drumstick out of my face."

Cuttlefish presents an interesting steampunk alternate history, but the strong dialogue and quirky characters of Hemlock Grove give it the edge in this battle.

THE WINNER: HEMLOCK GROVE by Brian McGreevy

Hemlock Grove advances to the second round, to meet either Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson or Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson.

To see the whole bracket, click here.