Didread: Anthology of the Killer, Between Worlds

Bonus Level: Anthology of the Killer

Jul 14, 2024

This rules. It's a compilation of nine short comedy/horror walk-and-talk games, about a zine-writing gal trying to get by in the city (and having to constantly evade serial killers). The art is delightfully rough and scrappy. The camera behavior is comically bad, possibly on purpose. The writing is brilliant and hilarious and surreal. This is a game where an antagonist says:

I realized that we needed to go back, to rejoin that sacred continuity of force, severed from us by revolutionary turmoil.

Back to violence sanctified by myth, when one could be a Gilles de Rais upon a holy quest instead of just some asshole strangling kids in the parking lot behind the Stop 'n' Go.

And where, under totally unrelated circumstances, the protagonist/narrators say:

"A tasteful plaque acknowledges tax-deductible charity donations from the Zacklerz, of opioid industry fame. Wait, that can't be right. Zacklerz?"

"They changed their name to seem relatable to younger juries."

The first two games are a little rougher than the others; in my opinion, Drool of the Killer is where it really started firing on all cylinders.

Most of the games take a single sitting, maybe 30-40m; my routine was to play one in the evening as I was winding down for the night. (The last one is longer, but it lets you resume from the act breaks.)

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower (re-read)

July 31, 2023

Hey guess what, read the fuckin Raven Tower. This must be the third or fourth time I've read it and it's 100% as good every time. My favorite Hamlet riff combined with the triumph of the World's Strongest Spinny Rock.

Graydon Saunders — Under One Banner (re-read)

Aug. 5, 2023

Hey guess what, the Commonweal series is still some extremely good strange fantasy. This is the one about a scholar who built their personality around doing fiddly stuff with material science, but is coming to realize their true calling is maybe in horrible violence instead.

Graydon Saunders — A Mist of Grit and Splinters (re-read)

Aug. 21, 2023

Once I re-read book 4, I kind of just rolled into book 5.

Martha Wells — Between Worlds: The Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories

May 10, 2024

I think only a couple of you have read the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, but anyway, Ile-Rien was also the setting of two of Wells' earlier books, and Cineth is the other main setting in that final trilogy.

The thing about Ile-Rien as a setting is that it's kind of inconsistent and busted, and the stories set there work in spite of it, not because of it. There's reliable scholastic magic that operates as basically a branch of physical science, but then there's also literally the Fae... and then there's also real-world technology based on physical science (gaslight, gunpowder, steam engines and steel railways and ocean liners), but it doesn't cross-breed at all with the equally scientific scholastic magic. And then there's distinctly Christian-flavored religion in the background in various places (largely ignored by the main characters and doctrine wholly unclear), but if there's no Judaism and no Rome in the setting, then why's it shaped that way? Etc. etc.

Ile-Rien is a hodgepodge, is what I'm getting at. My read is that she had things she wanted her characters to do, and spaces she wanted them to move through, and she threw stock elements into the setting as needed to enable that. Fair enough!

Cineth, on the other hand, feels solid. I fucking love Cineth. Everything in that setting (the lifestyles, the technologies, the family structures, the gods and magic, the cultural conflicts) feels much more organically intertwined, standing toe-to-toe with the settings of Wells' later works. So, I see the trilogy as sort of the key bridge work between her early and later novels, and it's kind of funnily symbolic of that when Tremaine from Rien decides to stay in Cineth at the end.

Wow, what a massive digression that was! Anyway, this is a collection of short stories about existing characters from Wells' novels — one story for Kade Carrion, one for Nicholas Valiarde and Reynard Moraine, and four for the boys from Cineth.

As I might have mentioned before, I think the novel is Wells' natural format; her short stories aren't especially notable on their own, but they can work really well when she's using them to add more depth to characters she's already rounded out at novel-length elsewhere. Which is exactly what's on offer here, in the four Cineth stories. Actually, that one about what originally happened to Ilias is kind of haunting me; I thought that story was great, mostly for the way it refused to dress up an unforgivable crime with any tidy answers or closure.

(The Kade and Nicholas/Reynard stories are more just about dusting those characters off and taking them out for a short romp; fun enough, but they won't stick in my memory.)

So tl;dr, read this collection if you like those wizard-huntin' boys from the Fall trilogy, who are basically my faves. 👍🏼