Bookpost: the rest of California Bones

[roadrunnertwice]

Usually I do a bigger batch, but this includes the last book from 2019 that I hadn’t reviewed yet and also rambles on a bit, so hey, why not.

Greg Van Eekhout — Pacific Fire and Dragon Coast

Dec. 22, 2019, and Sept. 17, 2020

Sequels to the excellent California Bones. Hey guess what: This is a rare example of a back-heavy trilogy that maintains good pacing and sticks its landing!

Well — probably it's a back-heavy trilogy:

• Book 1 decisively disposes of its big bad.
• There's a time skip of years (~ a decade?) between books 1 and 2.
• Book 2 ends on a cliffhanger, and books 2 and 3 are both about one main project/problem that wasn't on the map at all in the first book.
• The second story sprawls out a little bit (new POV characters, etc.).

Seems about right. But: you could argue that it maybe has a Star Wars shape, where it's three book-shaped books except the second one has a bad ending. And that, I think, maybe points the way to a general theory of how to not wipe out and eat shit on Mt. Back-Heavy: instead of spreading one act structure across two books worth of space, use a Bad Ending to divide it into two parts with their own distinct shapes. The difference is kind of subtle, but it feels substantial.

Oh right, anyway, about these books! I loved this series, but I also set it aside in the middle of Dragon Coast for uhhh a LOT of months, just because it's a whole lot to deal with and there was a big chunk of the year where I kinda couldn't.

Eekhout writes about violence in a way that makes me feel incredibly ill. Not on account of physical gruesomeness; I've met worse. More like, I've never encountered an action writer who's this good with moral revulsion, especially w/r/t "justified" acts of violence or coercion. Reading about Daniel Blackland makes me feel like my soul ate something bad. In case this paragraph is unclear, I think this is excellent, and I also think it's aligned with how Daniel himself experiences his (incredibly bloody) life. Dragon Coast really leans into that; it seems like half the book is about all the ways in which his actions at the end of Pacific Fire were unforgivable (and won't, in fact, ever be forgiven). And again, I like Daniel a lot!

I think maybe the core idea this series is trying to get a handle on is: making the best choice you have available doesn't actually absolve you of anything. It goes hard on that in regards to violence, and it also goes hard on it in re: the use of fossil fuels, which he brilliantly re-casts in this series as a generations-long act of cannibalism. Never mind the surface tropes and trappings: that unblinking existential horror is what REAL noir is about.

Good shit.