Spoilers! The Spider Thief Chapters 13 - 16

source: laurencemacnaughton.com

What this is all about: here

Andres informs Ash that he has Mauricio now and he wants the Spider. Before Cleo can stop him, Ash takes off to rescue his brother. Abandoned Factory Action Scene ensues! At the end of which, another thing I totally called is revealed!

Woot, four chapters of action! Exclamation mark! The scene setting is impeccable. I can see everything clearly and feel the blasting heat of the sun, the stark contrasts of light and shadow, the looming of the hulking factory. I've never been inside an abandoned factory, or to Colorado, but this story takes me there.

I laughed out loud at this exchange:

Ash nodded. "I'll go up first. You cover me."

Mauricio watched him climb. "What does that even mean, 'cover me'?"

Ha! Like I said, their relationship is one of the highlights of the book.

Poor Mauricio. Andres really is fanatical about the Spider and "her" powers, and he's now adamant that Mauricio should join his little cult. This dynamic becomes more interesting with the revelation that Andres first found the Spider in Colombia, but the brothers' dad betrayed Andres, presumably making off with both the Spider and Mauricio's mom.

Add to that a little doomsaying that Ash really is cursed to death and Mauricio may turn and be the one to kill him, and I officially cannot wait to see how this all turns out.

Do not disappoint me, Spider Thief! Spoilery discussion welcome in the comments.

Spoilers! The Spider Thief Chapters 9 - 12

source: laurencemacnaughton.com

What this is all about: here

Ash and Cleo wait out the rain at her mom's house. Naturally, Mom's out of town. Through their conversations, we learn the truth about the house fire that claimed his parents and Cleo's dad, who was the responding officer. The next morning, they discover the Spider's location. (I totally called it!) Meanwhile, Andres has caught up to Mauricio and reveals a disturbing connection. (Nooo!)

Honestly, I think I like Mauricio best out of the POV characters. He's endearing, relatable, and seems to have more unique traits than either Ash or Cleo. Ash and Cleo are serviceable as leading protagonists--smart, active, determined, emotional baggage, tragic pasts--but not much more than the plot requires, as yet. Even Cleo's odd hobby of collecting spider paraphernalia is because of the Spider's 'curse' from when they were kids. I presume the same is true of her career choice.

Moolah, Ash's dog, tends to make scenes more dynamic by breaking up serious discussions or tense moments, so I like him. Speaking of which, he got the name because he can sniff out money anywhere (important detail.) Sidebar: how can a smart investigator think Moolah is an African name, of all things?  She seriously never heard the word before?

So, about that romance angle. Haven't I seen this movie before? Yeah, the two teens who were in love and talking about getting out of their lame town, when something bad happened and one (usually the guy) took off without a word, leaving the other (usually the girl) to hate him. Then years later he resurfaces for a fraught reunion of mixed emotions. Then they get caught in the rain and must take shelter in intimate spaces, and since they are both soaking wet they will have to strip or use each other's body heat for warmth, or both! Okay it leads to nothing like that, but I did get a chuckle out of the setup.

Moreover, it added to this nagging feeling that aside from the Spider, it all feels...ordinary, familiar. That's not inherently a bad thing; the lack of zomg-extraordinariness in the description is what attracted me to the story, and the basics are there to be built upon. Thus far, I think the author has built something entertaining, so I'm rolling with it.

What does Andres want with Mauricio or the Spider for that matter? Will Ash and Cleo find him in time? Can the Spider's curse be broken?

We shall see. Spoilery discussion is welcome in the comments, if you've read The Spider Thief, are reading along, or are just curious.

Spoilers! The Spider Thief Chapters 5 -8

laurencemacnaughton.com

What this is about: here 

We meet Cleo, Ash's childhood friend. She's a gun-toting investigator of some sort, looking for Andres. She and Ash get caught up in another clash with Andres's men on the highway. We next meet Mauricio, Ash's half-brother, and we learn the last time he saw Ash was when Ash met with Andres to setup a deal: the Spider for one million dollars. There's a third party involved, a guy named Prez, whose motives are yet to be revealed.

Now things are tying together, though I still don't know why a whole two weeks are missing from Ash's memory, but it probably isn't significant. Once again, the chase scenes are the highlight. When it comes to muscle cars and car chase scenes the author sure knows how to choreograph around the machine's strengths and weaknesses.

Ash's got more personality, now that he's interacting with friends. He likes to joke but they don't seem to think he's terribly funny. Clearly, among the three friends, he's the unserious risk-taker. I still would like to see more from his POV.

I like what we've seen of the brothers' relationship. It seems to be a caring and daring one, but Ash, according to his brother, is never around for very long. A tragic past has something to do with that, the Spider and its 'curse', a house fire, and death. Oddly, I can't tell who's older.

And now for a sidebar.

The POV switches are how we learn Ash is white. It wouldn't be notable if not for the categorical ethnicities of the rest of the cast. Mauricio's mother is Colombian. Andres and his gang are Latino. Prez and his gang are black. No idea what ethnicity Cleo is, though her hair curls in the rain from its previous "straight" and "professional" state. There's nothing unusual about these choices (the gangs members seem typical, the hero is white, the love interest is ethnically ambiguous ), just that they are not left up to the imagination, which takes a conscious effort many authors shy away from. That's not insignificant.

Anyhow, I'm intrigued and looking forward to where this goes next. Spoilery discussion is welcome in the comments, if you've read The Spider Thief, are reading along, or are just curious.

Spoilers! The Spider Thief Chapters 1 - 4

source: laurencemacnaughton.com

What The Spider Thief is about: here.

What I've read: Ch. 1 - 4. I'll try to minimize spoilers, but, you know, beware.

Ash wakes up on the floor of an old, dusty shed with his worried dog, an old muscle car, the keys and some cash in his pocket, and no memory of how he got here. He soon finds himself going up against Andres, the Big Bad of the story, and Andres's goons. They want a mystical golden spider statue that Ash last remembers seeing when he was a boy. With his dog Moolah, Ash makes a daring escape from their clutches and drives off in the stolen car to get in contact with his brother who confirms it has been two weeks since this whole thing started--two weeks that Ash doesn't remember.

They say not to start your story with your protagonist waking up. They say waking up with amnesia is an even more egregious cliché. The Spider Thief does both and does it well, partly because Ash doesn't have time to languish in confused introspective and partly because I'm a sucker for a good mystery.

So it doesn't exactly open with a bang, but the bang comes relatively quickly and it's fantastic. The action scenes are the best part so far. They are kinetic with a crisp narrative and vivid details of the car, the terrain, and each dangerous setting.

Ash is as yet defined by his interactions with his dog and other hints that he's the Good Guy. His personality is obscured by the heightened state of urgency which necessarily reduces him to just adrenaline and survival instinct. At this stage, the plot is moving him instead of the other way round.

The clues about how he got in this mess are piling up, and I'm just letting most of them lay where they landed until we get more information. As for the Spider, we know touching it results in amnesia and a skin rash (which Ash has on one hand.) So, Ash must've had the spider recently. Where is it now? What else can it do? What does Andres want it for? And how did Ash get caught up in this mess?

We shall see. Spoilery discussion is welcome in the comments, if you've read The Spider Thief, are reading along, or just curious.

Spoilers! The Spider Thief by Laurence MacNaughton

 

source: http://laurencemacnaughton.com/

 

I'm about to do this thing!

So, I took advantage of two giveaways and got the first part free, read it, and then got the entire omnibus free. It's been sitting on my Kindle since, unfinished.

The thing I'm about to do: finish it! And blog as I go in ten or so parts roughly 4 chapters each, at least.

What The Spider Thief is about:

All of his life, Ash has been haunted by the ancient curse that killed his parents.

From the cobweb-choked ruins of a lost city in the Amazon emerges a gold spider statue with flashing emerald eyes. If the legends are true, the gold spider has the power to erase the past . . . change the future . . . perhaps even grant eternal life. But touching the spider will steal your memories -- and then your life.

For centuries, men have killed to possess the gold spider. Like the man who murdered Ash's parents. Now, the killer has returned, and Ash is trapped in the grip of the spider's curse.

His only hope is Cleo, his embittered high-school sweetheart, now a highly-trained agent obsessed with tracking down the spider. But Cleo knows something she's not telling Ash -- about a million dollars in dirty cash, and the terrifying secret his parents died to keep.

Can they solve the riddle of the gold spider before its deadly curse claims them next?

Aw, yeah! Stay tuned!

Updates:

• Chapters 1 - 4
• Chapters 5 - 8
• Chapters 9 - 12
• Chapters 13 - 16
• Chapters 17 - 22
• Chapters 23 - 26
• Chapters 27 - 34
• Chapters 35 - 44

Thoughts on Equoid by Charles Stross

I came away from Equoid feeling that something was just not sitting. On first impressions, it was what it said on the tin, a Lovecraftian horror story. Literally. The protagonist Bob works for a British agency that deals with all the things that go bump in the night. This time, he's sent to investigate a possible outbreak of nightmarish creatures in the countryside, armed with letters in which H.P. Lovecraft, Hisownself, described them as true unicorns, not the friendly sparkly version in popular culture.

Sure, I'm not a big consumer of horror, and I had quibbles with the protagonist and some instances of verbosity, but that's common, not enough to make me look sidelong at a story--and I was looking sideways at the piece for a good long while afterwards. The one thing that I couldn't stop squinting at was that the special victims, the ones not killed or eaten or merged but penetrated and possessed and enslaved, were exclusively young girls.

It seemed like an artifact, a relic of another time, and I don't mean just within the story's world. I mean the virgin sacrifice trope, which, for the record, I think is stupid and tired. Like I said, I had my quibbles, but with so much creativity and the subtle subversions of the Lovecraftian framework on which the story was built, the employment of this trope cheapened the rest of it, for me. It is used in a way that seemed uninspired, unexamined, and reinforced.

The trope is introduced in Equoid through the letters of H.P. Lovecraft, wherein he details his boyhood encounter with the equoid and its lure, a girl named Hetty. There are implications that H.P. is an unreliable narrator, "leaving stuff out, putting stuff in" and Bob had been sniping holes in Lovecraftian lore all along, but this one account remained unscathed. Lovecraft is never proven to have embellished a single gruesome detail of this ritual, as we are never given even a glimpse of an alternate version, like, say, the girls choosing to help their very own unicorn, or adults as vessels, or non-invasive mind-control, or the queen equoid evolving beyond the need for humans altogether.

So, if everything turns out as H.P. recounted, then Lovecraft couldn't have been just a "gynophobic" storyteller, himself just using questionable constructs. He was simply reporting the facts of nature, something that ever was and will be. Sucks to be you, little girls.

That's reinforcement. Happens all the time, but it's disappointing to find it at the core of a story so imaginative in every other way. Is it any author's job to fully subvert and dismantle tropes? No, but Charles Stross was doing a pretty decent job of it until we got to this. It's too bad, because the rest of the story, near as I can tell, is pretty successful horror and dark fantasy humor, well-crafted mythology and psuedo-science, and an intriguing bureaucracy caught up in the middle of it--action, suspense, thrills and chills. There's plenty to recommend, but I can't, not this particular story.

Have you read Equoid? What were your thoughts?

Loose Threads #3

Look 'Em In the Eye


He probably felt like the master of his domain. A big guy, he'd probably always taken up space, owned it, felt secure. Then she walked out as he was going in.

Gray hair in a no-nonsense bun, broad shouldered, tall in stature and poise. She looked at him, not up or down but straight in the eye.

He flinched.

She didn't.

"Excuse me," she said, and was on her way, leaving him to sort of shuffle aside and into the building, not quite as sure of himself.