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Finder

2/5. Orient, who can find things just by thinking about them, teams up with a cop in the town between faerie and reality to solve a drug case and murders.

And I'm two for two on finding Emma Bull books deadly boring. This one at least has an interesting setting and cast of quirky background townies; too bad about the main players, the plot, and, you know, everything else. Well, that's not entirely true – the lady cop is competent and layered and interesting, and why the book had to be about some dude instead of her is totally baffling. … No it's not. We all know why the book is about some dude.

Though, to complicate what I just said, I spent the last half of this book reading the narrator as an agender person. It's easy to do – he accepts male pronouns, but has otherwise almost zero internal sense of gender, let alone external gender signals. Is it deliberate? Is it just empty characterization? Who knows, but either way, reading it in did not make this the least bit more interesting.

Uh. It's currently $2.9 9 on Kindle, I feel obliged to mention.

Territory by Emma Bull

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


One of those novels that lays a fantasy gloss over documented historical events, in this case the machinations of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in Tombstone, 1881.



Really enjoyable but not, I think, very successful. It would make a pretty good footnote in an essay about how writing fanfiction permits creativity and depth of reimagination that writing for traditional publication doesn’t. I loved the parts of this book that were about the twisted-up, co-dependent thing between Earp and Holliday, and the literal magic at play. But Bull can’t or won’t mess with her canon, she just wants to explain it, so she can’t actually do much with what she sets up, she can just gesture vaguely towards what we know eventually happens to them. I frankly would have enjoyed this more if someone as good a prose stylist as Bull (not that many, I realize) had posted this as fanfic, with all the free-wheeling that implies, and the ability to comment on the original events by changing them, not just by shoving some magic into the cracks of a rigid structure of set events.*



It was all unsatisfying, actually, including the original character arcs, no matter how charming they were. A bit unfinished, too loosey-goosey at the end. But the whole thing is like that, all about the day-to-day of Tombstone and its newspaper office and horse trainers and Chinese orphans, not about the forward throughline of the plot. And I liked the day-to-day – I think it’s one of the best things about the book – but a little more tension, please, a little more momentum. And a lot more resolution, thanks.



*What other books are fantastical-historical reimaginations of this precision? Not just "inspired by," I mean, but densely-researched interpolations of fantasy into a tightly-documented set of events? Tim Powers's Declare is all that comes immediately to mind -- any others? I wonder if I'd have a similar reaction to all of them, if this is just part of my textual orientation





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