Michael Van Vleet > Recent Status Updates

It's kinda fun where you reach a stretch where you're like "oh, an editor said the book was coming up short" so someone's like "what kinda filler about bees can I use to pad this thing out?"

Not at the "Merriam Websters defines 'bees' as..." level, but... close.

11% in and already lining up 5 stars. The chatter among writers I like for this book, pre-release, was entirely warranted.

Oh boy, the slog is setting in.

Starting to get the idea this Pinhead fella ain't the hero of the book. Seems downright... unfriendly.

Only two short stories in and I'm ready to declare this one of--if not *the*-- best book I've read this year.

"Please go on,” I said in the sympathetic, gruff-hearty tones of an inspector at Scotland Yard—all I needed was long underwear, a tweed suit, a walrus mustache, a British accent, a right-hand drive, socialized medicine, and a disarming manner.

(Only) Favorite moment so far is learning that the vampire Justus keeps canteens full of blood to drink from, because thinking of holding a narrow canteen neck up to the slacking flow of a victim, or trying to squeeze someone like an orange over a funnel... that cracks me up. Trying not too wonder too hard about why the canteen-blood doesn't clot up 'cause that's gross: not funny.

Best bit so far was right in the first interview, where a bank robber-- realizing the heat is on-- talks his uncle into ALSO robbing banks, so he claim it's not him who's on camera robbing banks... he has a DOPPELGANGER. (And it kinda works!)

I would love to know how that conversation went with his uncle.

It is really hard to write parody pulp. Really hard. But if you're going to include future Nazis... maybe sometime in the first hundred pages, say why they exist hundreds of years in the future? And let us know why our protagonist seems to be okay working for them?

I checked the publishing date (2015) so maybe it's just some edgelord nonsense, but in pulp Nazis weren't just a label and a wardrobe.

May drop this 1.

Lady gets chucked out a window into a lake, comes back as a ghost. Asks her living husband to chop off her ghost head which... brings her back to life?

How did she even know that would work, never mind WHY it works.

What the hell, European oral tradition.

I'm not afraid to say it: Grimm Bros? Your collected stories are overrated. "Then the prince got turned into a deer. Then the queen died. Oh, but the deer spat on the queen and through God's grace her life was restored."

Ugh.

I don't know that I'm necessarily /enjoying/ this one, as I'm halfway through this brick-sized paperback, but... it was a bestseller at some point. There must be /something/ here. There's a variety of narratives.

I have been concerned that I'm only still reading 'cause my copy is signed and, like, it'd be disrespectful to put it down. Which is nuts. That's crazy thinkin'. I didn't even get it signed.

I dunno if I'm gonna make it through this "hilarious" work about a white guy at a historical pinnacle of white-guy-stuff, full of ha-ha-historically accurate racism and sexism.

Sure, he's also supposed to be a villain, and a coward, and a liar. But is it too true to be funny? It seems like the gag is supposed to be that this rascal is embedded among actual historical figures, which ... may not be enough.

This book was originally intended to be a James Bond adventure, so I find that there's a part of my brain that spends every scene wondering "Was this guy supposed to be James Bond?"

Nobody is shaking-not-stirring. Nobody is a secret agent.

I have a nagging suspicion that Bond was replaced with an engineer when the license fell through.

On the one hand, I can recognize that this book is a significant writing achievement: 3 mystery narratives in 3 different time zones, each one adopting a different writing style of a noted mystery author.

But man am I stalling out in the last tale. Dude accidentally kills his son and then covers it up. The ending is inevitable, so I'm in no hurry to get there, and so I start reading other books instead.

Definitely a men's adventure tale. Only 30 pages in, and aggressively heterosexual.

Speed reading at this point, looking for anything original.

At about wheel 11 out of 18 and the going is rough.

Serial killers are boring.