Sunday, January 21, 2007

A Trip to "The Jennifer Morgue"

I really loved Charles Stross' first "Bob Howard" book, "The Atrocity Archives," a brilliant mash-up of Len Deighton and H.P. Lovecraft. I'm a little less enthusiastic about its follow-up, "The Jennifer Morgue," an homage to James Bond, but not by much. It could be that Deighton is more to my taste than Ian Fleming. Deighton's "Game, Set, Match" trilogy ranks as one of my very favorite espionage sequences, second only to Le Carre's "The Quest for Karla."

In addition to "The Jennifer Morgue," my latest Chronicle review also covers Alan Dean Foster's "Sagramanda" and Bruce Holland Rogers' "The Keyhole Opera."

I was also planning to review "The Terror" by Dan Simmons, but reading that 800-page saga of arctic misery put me over my deadline. It will have to wait until next month.

2 comments:

Bruce Holland Rogers said...

I know that the writer isn't (or at least shouldn't be) the intended audience for a review, so what I think means nothing. But even so, I enjoyed your review of The Keyhole Opera. As the Chronicle review comes on the day when I discovered my first Amazon reader review for the book is a rather troll-ish one, the review in the Chronicle still made the day very positive on balance.

-- Bruce Holland Rogers

Michael Berry said...

Bruce -- Glad you liked the review. I'm not a huge fan of short-shorts, in that so many of them leave me somehwat mystified about their point. But the ones collected in "The Keyhole Opera" made me happy that my editor had suggested I consider the volume for review.