From a spellshop to the valley of the kings: books

As I enjoyed Sarah Beth Durst’s The Bone Maker, I tried her fantasy cozy, THE SPELLSHOP, but ended up putting down unfinished.

The protagonist, Kiera, flees the imperial library when revolutionaries burn the capital. Accompanied by her pet spider-plant, she takes some of the surviving spellbooks back to the isolated island village her parents came from. She needs a found family, though she doesn’t know it yet; the dying village needs a shot in the arm. Hmm, this might work out well.

Durst said she wanted this book to be comforting, like a mug of hot chocolate, and she succeeded. However like a lot of stories about returning to your family’s small town it’s got the same worldview as the 1939 Wizard of Oz, that there’s no point in looking for happiness beyond your own backyard, and that really isn’t a perspective I can identify with. So it’s a no-go.

(Yep, another post where I’m throwing in random pet photos for eye candy)

In 1936, Lester Dent took a break from writing Doc Savage and among other writing sold two novellas, HADES AND HOCUS POCUS to the top magazine Argosy. In Hades, a med student whose education has ended early winds up helping out a movie producer who believes he’s uncovered a gateway to Hell — and something from Hell has followed him back. In Hocus Pocus, an unemployed stage magician takes a job investigating an evangelical fellowship’s alleged mind-reading powers and discovers the church has more sinister goings on than he anticipated.

The first has a fun cast, including the protagonist’s sidekick Haw (he laughs at his own, very bad jokes) and a professional strongwoman. However the plot feels too much like countless Doc Savage stories about elaborate supernatural fakes — I imagine Dent would have recycled this for the last novel in the series, Up from Earth’s Center, if his editor hadn’t insisted on a real supernatural threat. Hocus Pocus has less memorable characters but it’s a much stronger story.

EIGHT FANTASMS AND MAGICS is a mixed bag of shorts by Jack Vance. Three of them I’ve read before (two of the rereads are from The Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld), some are meh but the two best are very very good — the solution in “Telek” to the mutants vs. humans problem is really good. Overall, though, only fair for Vance.

WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF KINGS: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Sheppard is a mixed bag. It’s a good look at 19th and early 20th century Egyptology with a particular emphasis on the women who were involved and largely eclipsed — excavators, authors, teachers, women who underwrote expeditions, artists who captured temples and tombs on paper (the best non-invasive way to record discoveries as photography would have captured things in black and white). And yes, Sheppard is fully aware of the colonialist/cultural appropriation side of what European archeologists did and doesn’t hide from it. Unfortunately a lot of the book bogs down in inside-baseball stuff — lists of famous names (often nobody I’ve heard of), schools and books. Still worth a read though.

#SFWAPro. Cover by Jack Gaughan, all rights to images remain with current holders.