Witchfinder by Sarah Hoyt

 Once again, I have nothing truly new to report on the subject of Sarah Hoyt's novels. Love the blog, just can't bring myself to like her novels. I try, I really do.

Witchfinder starts out to be a story about a Duke in the world of Avalon who travels between worlds to save the lives of witches in other worlds, who are often persecuted or killed outright. His job used to be an official one in the kingdom, but was outlawed recently, so he must do it in secret.

After that, it becomes a story about a lost princess, all kinds of improbable half breeds of fairies and humans, fairies and dragons, centaurs and humans, and a small group's insane ambition to rape multiple worlds of their magic, gold and power. All of the POV characters seem to do far too much soul-searching, and get teleported about madly while trying to get to the heart of the conspiracy, save the kingdom, and rescue the princess.

Once again, I had to force myself to push through to the end. Life is too short.

Ah well.

Draw One in the Dark by Sarah Hoyt

So, I read According to Hoyt, Sarah's blog, nearly every day, and I find her commentary thoughtful and interesting, but I must confess that so far, though I've read Darkship Thieves, the first 50 pages or so of Ill Met by Moonlight, and a collection of her short stories titled Crawling Between Heaven and Earth, I have yet to find a series novel by her that leaves me thinking "Oh my gosh, I gotta read the next book!"

Kyrie is a waitress in a small café in Goldport, Colorado, who hears a scream in the parking lot out back one night, and steps outside to a scene that totally changes her world, probably forever. For most of her life, since adolescence, she has been able to convince herself that her memories of shifting to the form of a great black panther are merely hallucinations or extraordinarily vivid dreams, but when she encounters a bloody, mauled body outside, her visceral reaction to the blood scent is to immediately shift to her animal form, where she is surprised to find she is not the only shifter on site, there's also a huge Nordic dragon who, in human form, is Tom, a hard luck case that the owner of the restaurant, Frank, hired to cook there. As Kyrie is trying to get a rather stunned and blood soaked Tom away from the crime scene, a third shifter shadows them for a time, in the form of a great golden-maned lion, who later turns out to be a police officer, Rafiel.
(Sorry, folks...missing some paragraphs as originally written here. The following makes no sense without them. Darned laptop touchpad messes things up all too often.)
I kept pushing on through, though, as I really want to give Sarah a fair shake. The dragon triads keep after Mark, and then Sarah, and they eventually force Mark's estranged father (a sleazy lawyer) to try to track him down and convince him to give up the magic jewel, which Mark has hidden in a rather creative location. We later encounter a were-coyote murder victim, and then some were-scarab beetles (what's up with the clues on the identity of the scarabs? The first clue was plenty, she didn't need to show one of them sparing the life of another insect; are they really related, and then should all were-mammals band together to stop killing Bambi?), which for me is where it went even further off kilter. Are there actually any non-shifter humans left in the world, or does everyone have a shifted shape that they merely haven't been forced into yet. Were-slugs? Were-poodles? Were-bunnies?

I love Sarah as an astute observer and blogger, I really wish I could find her books nearly as readable as her essays. I pushed through to the happy ending, but I'm not particularly motivated to find out what happens to Kyrie and Tom and their friends.

Darkship Thieves by Sarah Hoyt

This novel really starts off with a great "hook". The heroine, Athena, is wakened from peaceful slumber in her Daddy's space yacht by the surreptitious treads of kidnappers or organleggers, or... Her general all around sneakiness and orneriness, combined with her lightning fast reflexes and mad combat skills enable her to elude the thugs and jump into an escape pod, in which she careens crazily through the asteroid belt...or some such.

An earlier, more technologically advanced civilization, sometime in the period after the fall of the USA to a central world government, developed a "plant" that grows energy pods, which absorb the solar rays and store them for later. Spacefarers harvest the pods before they grow too ripe and explode, and use them to power space ships and space stations, and all things spacey. When Athena dives into the heart of one of these power plants to hide from the aspiring abductors, she runs into (literally) a craft belonging to one of the Darkship Thieves, folks who were exiled long ago from Earth because of their extensive genetic biomodifications. Any who remained on the planet were lynched and horribly executed. Some of the exiles now live in secret in a hollowed out asteroid, and Athena's new acquaintance, Kit, is one of those folks.

So Kit (with modifications that make him look like a cat - really? Kit the Cat?) and Thena get along like the proverbial cat and dog (though she's really more of a fox), which tells you right away they're going to end up falling in love, right? I mean, how obvious can you get? Kit's world is organized politically and socially along libertarian lines. Unfortunately, aside from bits and dribbles here and there about how their laws, or lack thereof, affect Thena in her interactions with them, Hoyt doesn't really fully develop the background society, it just hovers there like some wafted in bit of scenery in a Broadway musical.

While it doesn't seem glaringly obvious to Thena that she's actually the beneficiary of some illegal and unapproved biological modifications, herself, it's obvious to the reader from nearly the start. She's almost as fast and strong as Kit, has incredible reflexes, and somewhere along the way discovers that she can communicate with him psionically, as well. Much of the middle portion of the book is dedicated to how she finally realizes she's got it bad for Kit, and unraveling some of his deep, dark, embarassing secrets. There's a bone tossed to Heinlein readers in the character of a family doctor who knows the truth, and who seems an awful lot like Jubal Harshaw in the way he acts and speaks his lines.

The style of the book seemed just a little too similar to some old SF, like E.E. "Doc" Smith's stuff, or some of the Burroughs Mars novels, for me to fully enjoy it. A touch contrived. Wondered if this was Hoyt's first novel. I'm torn about whether to spend the money for the second book in the series, or see if her fantasy novels are any better.

I stuck with it just to find out why the goons were trying to abduct her in the first place, but I grumbled a few times during the trip, "Are we there yet?"

Crawling Between Heaven and Earth by Sarah Hoyt

On the Baen books website, there has been for quite some time now, an area called the Baen Free Library, where Jim Baen encouraged his stable of authors to post a free electronic version of one or more of their works, so that readers would download them, try it out, and be encouraged to buy more work by that author. I don't know how that all actually worked out for them in the long haul, though early numbers were encouraging, but it doesn't appear since Baen's passing to have been promoted very heavily, and not much new stuff has been appearing. Anyway, after stumbling upon Sarah Hoyt's blog over the Thanksgiving holiday, I checked and found that I had a copy of this book from the Free Library already loaded on my Nook, and decided to "try before I buy".

This book isn't one of Hoyt's novels; it's a collection of short stories with no coherent theme - just a pretty good collage of her writing style and skills.

There's a pretty good fantasy story set in the time of Shakespeare, with the bard and his brother prominently featured, which left me thinking once again to myself that I really should dig into the massive tome of the Compleat Workes gathering dust in my library, as I couldn't tell whether some of the things old Billy had to say were direct quotes from his works, or just good stylistic imitations by Hoyt. She evidently has several novels set in this milieu, which may prove entertaining at a later date.

There's a couple of nominal SF stories about the fate of clones, one of which is wrapped around a mythological core of the story of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur. The other one was an even more tawdry tale about prostituting the clones of famous females, like Marilyn Monroe. Given the way her image and others are already being used in CGI commercials I don't find it all that far-fetched...aside from the whole cloning technology thing actually working, of course.

There's an intriguing ghost story, too, and lots of other tales, to introduce you to Hoyt's works. I found most of them a bit depressing, but still good enough to merit my actually buying and downloading one of her novels. The Free Library concept works.