Category: Updates

In 2022, I read 30 books (novels, graphic novels). The complete list looks like:

Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward
1777 BC the year civilization collapsed – Eric H Cline
The Marco Effect – Jussi Adler Olsen
The Hanging Girl – Jussi Adler Olsen
Summer Bludgeon – Various (Unsettling Reads)
The Crystaks of Mida – Sharon Green
Talking about Detective Fiction – PD James
The Death of Stalin – Nury & Robin
Batman Year One – Frank Miller
Ronin – Frank Miller
Perfume – Patrick Suskind
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman – Haruki Murakami
Malorie – Josh Malerman
Mirror Man – Lars Kepler
Maus – Art Spiegelman
The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides
The Cathars – Sean Martin
Hyperion – Dan Simmons
Fall of Hyperion – Dan Simmons
Endymion – Dan Simmons
Rise of Endymion – Dan Simmons
Terror – Dan Simmons
They Thirst – Robert R. McCammon
The Devotion of Suspect X – Keigo Higashino
Technocolor Time Machine – Harry Harrison
Cibola Burn – James SA Corey
Nemesis Games – James SA Corey
Babylon’s Ashes – James SA Corey
Persepolis Rising – James SA Corey
Stories of Your Life and Others – Ted Chiang

Some highlights:

I’ve again gotten hooked on The Expanse series by Corey. For some reason, when I started reading these the other year, I stopped at book 3 (probably because the TV show season 4 had just come out and I wanted to binge it without thinking). This time around I finally got around to continuing the series (since the TV show ended) and it’s been quite pleasant and surprising – particularly book 7 with the surprise time jump and new narrative direction.

Olsen’s Department Q series continues to be addictive and enjoyable Scandinavian Noir with its wonderful cast of characters revolving around curmudgeony detective Carl Morck.

Revisiting my love of graphic novels has also been a nice change of pace.

The Disappointments (and there were many)

The first book of the year was also, well, the worst.

The Last House On Needless street was an incredibly hyped “horror” story. Everyone sang its praises, including apparently Stephen King. It even started off strong, with intriguing ideas tossed in all over the place and the promise of going somewhere but…

I think it was around page 30 where I realized how the book was probably going to end. I hoped that I had gotten it wrong – no way the book would end like that, the author would have seen through and lined up some other twist. After all, the ending that came in my mind was probably the dumbest way the book could end. It had to be something else.

But unfortunately not the case. Not the case at all.

Very early on, the novel made it clear it was using the “unreliable narrator” trope pretty liberally, and being no stranger to having apparently read other books, it jumped out that more likely than not this wasn’t a true horror book but that everything was in the main character’s head more or less.

And it was. After over two hundred pages of build up, it pulled out the big “gotcha” that was neither a surprise, nor pleasant, nor anything really. I suppose some folks must have found it surprising (such as people who have never read, say, a book like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), but it was sadly just a confirmation of my first fear of what would be the worst ending to the book, and then the slow pain of watching it actually be the case.

Not great.

The second biggest disappointment was another book that pulled a “gotcha” out right at the end which I also guessed (albeit, about 50% of the way through the book) – The Silent Patient. While this “twist” was also unfortunate, predicatable, and kind of unfair, the book was nevertheless written with a fun sort of manic, no-shits-to-give energy up until that point that I would probably read another book by Michaelides… but not so with Ward.

The third true disappointment was 1777 BC The Year Civilization Ended. True, it was about 1777 BC, but a more appropriate name for the book would have been “A brief history of royal paperwork from the ancient world” or “The exciting hidden lives of financial ledgers.” Yes, there is an interesting narrative in there somewhere, but it’s largely buried under the authors (most likely) graduate work on papyrus, tablets, and other material remains.

And the final pair of disappointments in the year of many, were books 3 and 4 of Simmons’ Hyperion series. For some time I had ranked the first book of the series as one of the all time great science fiction novels. I still might, but it was inevitably lessened by the catastrophes that made up the final two books. Where the first was a brilliant collection of literary science fiction stories bound together by mystery and thematic beauty, and the second a more traditional space opera, I have few words of praise after that.

Book 3 (Endymion) had some promising elements but it is ultimately reduced by the appearance of a direct sequel fourth book that is one part meandering, two parts auteur excess, and a sprinkling of bloviating kumbaya. I can compare it to Moby Dick in the sense that both books fill up more pages with descriptive, fascinating nothing that does little to propel a story along and in fact more often than not kills it on the spot.

And then there’s the creepy voyeurism of a middle aged author having a strange fixation on teenage heroines (both here and in Terror too, for that matter). In the age of #MeToo and more awareness of sexual misconduct, it’s hard to read any story about a much older man who befriends a teenager only to later become lovers with them. Making the teenager a willful, “adult” spirit does little to hide the sense of grooming that goes on and what comes across as some honestly creepy wish fulfillment on part of the author.

Needless to say, it was hardly a powerful conclusion to the series, nor a strong incentive to come back to it any time soon.

The Shrike is one of the more memorable creatures of science fiction.

Appearing in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos as an enigmatic and dangerous entity that travels through space and time, the metallic Shrike acts as a primary foil or antagonist in the first two volumes, before becoming something of a wild card / deus ex machina in the concluding two volumes.

However, more than its role in the plot, it’s probably so well remembered due to the way its described. Being impossibly tall, four armed, and covered head to toe in razor sharp blades, the creature decidedly isn’t something you’d want to run into in a dark alley.

Despite (or perhaps due to) all the wild descriptions of the monster, I’ve seen some radically different interpretations from artists trying to describe what exactly this monstrosity looks like.

We were given some interpretations on the front covers of the novels. However, as is common to sci-fi / fantasy book covers, the illustrations were a little hockey / a little comfy, resulting in the beast looking like a tall dude with a couple of spikes. Workable, but not exactly the stuff of nightmares.

So, because apparently I’m the kind of person who wants to see more stuff right out of nightmares, I decided to give generating a shrike image using Midjourney – the art “AI” (machine learning) that everyone is going wild for (either loving or hating).

I chose Midjourney due to familiarity but also because (from experience) it is quite good at generating freaky humanoids and generally terrifying pictures from its prompts.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get there as quickly as I was hoping.

First Attempt at Generating the Shrike

For my first attempt, I went simple.

hyperion shrike

My hope was that there would be enough artists impressions out there (and the books well known enough) that I would get what I wanted right out of the gate.

Unfortunately, and as I should have known better, Midjourney has a way of surprising you.

Here’s what I got:

Right. Shrikes are types of birds.

And there are certainly infinitely more images of those than the elusive time travelling monster from some books first written back in the late 80s.

In any event, those are at the very least some fairly handsome birds and I’ll have to remember this prompt if I find myself needing more like them for any random reason.

Second Attempt at Generating the Shrike

In my second attempt, I tried to be more specific. My assumption was that I simply had to give clearer instructions about the type of Shrike I wanted generated.

So this time around I went with:

hyperion shrike ultradetailed realistic octane render four armed metallic monster of doom lord of death and pain and spikes

Off the top of my head, that seemed more appropriate – notably the parts about four arms and spikes.

From past experience, I also knew that octane render was decent for metal and inputting lords of “death” or “pain” also tended to give some pretty heavy metal album cover style renderings.

However, what I got wasn’t quite it either:

We definitely got the metal and the spikes and some of the dread that the Shrike could inspire, but we’re still being tainted by our lovely little “shrike” bird elements.

An improvement, at the very least, but still not really there.

I ran it through another time hoping a re-roll would clear things up, but alas.

Still seeing all kinds of creepy, with more spikes per square meter, but ultimately this is still some kind of cosmic bird monster.

Third Attempt at Generating the Shrike

This time, I tried using some verbage from the way the monster was described.

Because I was too lazy to open my Kindle and hunt for passages, I copied a section off the Hyperion Wiki where it described the Shrike:

a roughly humanoid entity three meters in height, with a carapace made entirely of a metal resembling chrome steel. It had four arms, with the lower pair being slightly shorter than the upper pair, and four hands tipped with scalpel-like fingerblades.

See https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Shrike

That description felt pretty spot on. However, as Midjourney does, it took it in a direction I wasn’t anticipating.

For reasons unknown to me, we not got mostly black and white or grey scale images of our monster.

Except, where did all the spikes go? Where are our scalpel fingers?

Maybe that bottom image is what our Strike looks like when they’re taking the day off or before they’ve suited up for some human rending?

I gave it another reroll and got the following:

Well, the bottom row is definitely a weird, horrifying robot thing made of metal.

But where are my spikes?

Fourth Attempt at Generating a Shrike

This time, I decided to take a more hands-on approach. If the internet couldn’t provide one, nor even the wiki, it was time I took a stab at describing it myself.

I churned out some details and familiar keywords and went with:

7 foot tall humanoid with four arms, made of metal and covered in spooky spikes, horror art, lord of pain, made of armor, scalpel finger blades, realistic, ultradetailed, science fiction, horror art

The result?

Hello! Not quite there but getting close.

We now have a creepy humanoid made of metal and covered in spikes.

He was a little lacking in the arm department, so I re-rolled until I got one with four arms:

Now that got me excited. Not only did I have a metal creep covered in spikes, but I got my four arms! All I had to do now was run some variants of that bad boy and I’d be all set.

Unfortunately, that’s when it hit me – there was one very distinctive aspect of the Shrike that my image was missing.

The red eyes.

Dammit.

Fifth Attempt at Generating the Shrike

This time I went back and edited my prompt to include some glowing red eyes:

7 foot tall humanoid with four arms and burning red eyes, made of metal and covered in spooky spikes, horror art, lord of pain, made of armor, scalpel finger blades, realistic, ultradetailed, science fiction, horror art

I was confident I would get where I wanted now with only a roll or two.

My next attempt came out looking like this:

Gotta hand it to Midjourney to creatively (or insanely) interpret things that seem so straightforward to us.

This time around we got the metal, the monster, the four arms, the spikes, but instead of red eyes, I got, well, some red highlights.

Progress. Or so it seemed.

I rolled a couple more times, but every time it refused to give me those burning eyes.

I tried instead to remaster some of them and see if that took it in the right direction:

Unfortunately, as I’ve known for a while, remastering does odd things… sometimes ever odder than the rest of the prompts.

In the case of horror art, I always found it made things a little goofy, especially where faces are concerned.

While the one on the left is nice and nasty, he’s not too metallic. The one on the right, however, looks like an evil marionette or hand puppet.

I tried again. I got this goofy bastard:

Not quite where I wanted to take it. But at least it had red eyes.

Sixth Attempt – actually, wait, I’ve given up

By this time, I’ve more or less given up. Especially since, concurrently, a friend saw what I was trying to do, and also generate a couple dozen shrike abominations that didn’t quite fit the mold.

I decided to go back to some earlier rolls and pick a few that I did like, even if they might not match canonical descriptions by any account:

This guy is pretty good. Certainly terrifying, certainly four-armed.

And how could I ever say no to this four-armed son of a bitch? Sure, not all arms are perfect, or even all that spiky, but at least he could terrify the living hell out of most humans.

So, it’s possible I’ll give it another shot in the coming days, but for now I’ll leave dejected and defeated.

My Shrike is in another prompt.

June, 1944, Lieutenant Adam Richelieu of the Canadian 5th Commandos is being ferried high above the English channel in the belly of a Whitworth Albermarle with two dozen of his best men. However, before they can reach the drop zone, flak rips through the belly of the aircraft and the lieutenant survives the drop with fewer men than he can count on his fingers.

Unrelenting, he carries on to meet his French Resistance contacts at the tiny village of Ange-Gardien, only to find the hamlet mysteriously deserted, save for an old flame and and a strange infestation more dangerous and horrifying than the local SS garrison.

My dark horror meets sci-fi WWII novelette, “Archangel” details that fateful night for a handful of Canadian servicemen fighting their own strange battle against stranger foes in the Normandy countryside. It will be appearing later this year in the collection called War by the always wonderful Black Hare Press.

Pre-orders are now available. Hope you enjoy.