Earthquake Weather Review

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Earthquake Weather ReviewI'll say this now, if you're sitting here shopping for new books and you've heard a little bit about this Tim Powers guy and you want to give him a shot because everyone says he's really good (and he is) and this is the book that you want to use as an introduction to him . . . you're doomed. There's just no good way to put it. For the newcomer, unless they're really good at reading between the lines, this book is going to come across as impenetrable. Not that it isn't good, but new readers are going to feel like they've missed something. Powers doesn't do many sequels to his books, most of his stuff is standalone, but this time he decided to merge some threads from other novels. In the novel prior to this Expiration Date, he introduced some urban fantasy stuff about ghost swallowing and the general rules about haunts and so on, as well as introducing Koot Hoomie and his adopted parents, Pete Sullivan and Angelica. Meanwhile in the now classic (and written some time ago) Last Call, Powers told the story of Scott Crane and how he became the Fisher King, the ruler of the West Coast (and so on and so forth). So this novel is basically a sequel to both those novels as Powers rams the two plotlines together. What happens is that Scott Crane is murdered by a woman apparently possessed by ghosts and Kootie is tapped to be the next king. However he's too young and not really prepared for it and so one of the Crane's loyalists, Arky, comes up with a plan to restore him to life. Confused yet? What follows then is a narrative that seems both ponderous and breakneck as new characters start to mingle with old, with two new catalysts for the plot, Janis Plumtree (the murderer) and Sid Cochran, who just lost his wife and has some history with the god Dionysus. Plumtree is supposed to be possessed but is mostly just someone with Multiple Personality Disorder, constantly switching from one to the other (in a way that reminded me of Crazy Jane from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run, except that Plumtree's don't have superpowers). The two of them meet in a mental hospital, but escape due to a convenient earthquake and from there hook up with the rest of the cast. It's hard to review this book without describing most of the setup of the plot because if I don't I feel like I'm losing context but at the same time there just seems to be no way around it. Powers' streamlining of the two earlier books is neat and fairly seamless but all the fancy stuff just seems to come at the expense of his normally complex plotting and we're left with something turgid, with the characters lurching from one scene to another. As long as you keep a handle on the main plot, you're all right but once sideplots start getting dragged in things start getting confusing since it's hard to say how relevant they are. Plus, a lot of the plot seems to consist of "plot coupons" where the characters have to gather special objects that will help them for no other reason than the plot requires it. Some of this confusion might be because I haven't read Last Call in years (or Expiration Date, though that was sooner), so that the stuff with the god Dionysus isn't too clear and I really wasn't clear what significance Armentrout had to the plot, except he was somebody to chase the other characters around (and that mannequin thing was weird), and I really don't know who half the other nameless people who were chasing the cast around were, either. Basically this is a book where you just have to "go with it" and hope that it will all make sense by the end and Powers is enough of a professional to keep things moving adequately so that you don't spend too much time worrying about the stuff that just doesn't seem to work. But while his other books felt tighly constructed and taut, this one has a more rambling feel to it and suffers a little bit for it. Not that there aren't bright spots, the relationship between Cochran and Plumtree (and her several personalities) is cute, the constant barrage of nifty ideas about ghosts is always fun, and I like how Powers does urban fantasy effortlessly, so that you could believe all this magic stuff is going on right alongside the "real world". The down side to all of this is that instead of getting a dazzling book (which is what we're used to) we get something that's merely "good". And as an introduction to the world of Tim Powers, it's terrible, but as a nice continuation of the lives of characters we've already met, it does that well and for longtime readers it might be worth it just for that.Earthquake Weather Overview

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