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, 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.