I can't say I recall noticing the prose except for once, which certainly supports the theory that it was on the thin side. (The one moment I noticed was "Never inflict a sentence like that on me again.")
(Tragically I do wish to know which sentence it was.)
Since there are books where I've noticed the prose being flat and thin, I can only conclude that I got sucked into the characters fast enough to crowd out other considerations.
Fair! I certainly have my share of characters whom I care about more than their delivery mechanism. In this case it kept snagging at me because the novel seemed to alternate between passages of intensely descriptive introspection and then dialogue with minimal tags and I would have liked the information more evenly infused. It would have mattered less to me if the novel had been more sparely written throughout. As it was, any time people started talking it began to feel under-described. Every now and then a really striking piece of someone's hair or hands or shadows would get through and then vanish again.
That made for a nice . . . I'll call it a swerve, I think
Yes. I like that the cold case of the murder has been concealing another crime; I like that it locks directly into the question of what justice looks like; I like that it is frankly an easier question to answer in the case of the present than the past crime and everyone has to live with that.
I'm curious, since your wording over there was ambiguous, whether you liked Spectred Isle and then nothing after it, or didn't particularly like Spectred Isle either.
Apologies for the ambiguity! Option A: I was surprised and pleased by how much I liked Spectred Isle, waited like everyone else for its f/f sequel that never materialized, tried some other books of Charles' in the meantime and went spang even off the ones third parties had personally recommended. I was willing to take a chance on Death in the Spires because the parts of my friendlist that got to it before me all stressed how much of a departure it was from her usual thing. Spectred Isle itself also feels to me slightly outside of her usual thing, which I had no way of telling when I first read it: closer to secret than alternate history in that its world appears to have had our World War I, but the facts of the War Beneath the War are not known to the general public even though they are the explanation for the wartime and post-war boom in spiritualism, theosophy, other varieties of the occult—the veil between this world and the other side really was rent irreparably and the consequences just leak in now. One of the protagonists deals with these consequences professionally, the other just puts his foot into the uncanny and the next thing he knows his life is suddenly filled with escalating weirdness and the potential for romance, both of which differently frighten him. I recommend it! Both men were soldiers, but took very different kinds of damage from their wars. Their romance evolves in pursuit of unraveling the mystery, which has good, eerily mythic roots and a superb piece of sympathetic magic at the climax. Structurally it's much less polished than Death in the Spires—and it does have the modern historical romance problem where every now and then someone sounds more like 2017 than 1923, especially in bed—but its old weird worldbuilding appealed to me and so did its twin-engined occult thriller and romance which gave me more to work with than the latter alone. I really was looking forward to further books in the series, as I liked its main cast very much. I was told she got hung up in trying to envision a version of World War II that would not just destroy reality and remain uncertain why she was even planning to leap that far forward in time.
Boo! A pox upon their houses! I like author notes, and anybody who doesn't like them can simply skip them. Whereas those of us who want to read them cannot make them magically manifest where they aren't.
Thank you. I actually find that very supportive. It was another experience that helped to convince me that people will like my art only if they don't get close enough to have to interact with me.
Hmmm, none that leap to mind -- it was more a feeling of, I don't know what I don't know, can't spot where there's a reference I'm not getting because then the odds are high I don't even realize a reference is happening. I would totally have gone for translations of the bits in other languages, though, as e.g. my Greek is only about 80% competent at transliterating the alphabet and can't begin to parse the meaning of the words. I wouldn't want the stories disrupted by the translation, but having those off in the back matter somewhere would have been great.
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yati
no subject
Date: 2025-07-02 08:53 pm (UTC)(Tragically I do wish to know which sentence it was.)
Since there are books where I've noticed the prose being flat and thin, I can only conclude that I got sucked into the characters fast enough to crowd out other considerations.
Fair! I certainly have my share of characters whom I care about more than their delivery mechanism. In this case it kept snagging at me because the novel seemed to alternate between passages of intensely descriptive introspection and then dialogue with minimal tags and I would have liked the information more evenly infused. It would have mattered less to me if the novel had been more sparely written throughout. As it was, any time people started talking it began to feel under-described. Every now and then a really striking piece of someone's hair or hands or shadows would get through and then vanish again.
That made for a nice . . . I'll call it a swerve, I think
Yes. I like that the cold case of the murder has been concealing another crime; I like that it locks directly into the question of what justice looks like; I like that it is frankly an easier question to answer in the case of the present than the past crime and everyone has to live with that.
I'm curious, since your wording over there was ambiguous, whether you liked Spectred Isle and then nothing after it, or didn't particularly like Spectred Isle either.
Apologies for the ambiguity! Option A: I was surprised and pleased by how much I liked Spectred Isle, waited like everyone else for its f/f sequel that never materialized, tried some other books of Charles' in the meantime and went spang even off the ones third parties had personally recommended. I was willing to take a chance on Death in the Spires because the parts of my friendlist that got to it before me all stressed how much of a departure it was from her usual thing. Spectred Isle itself also feels to me slightly outside of her usual thing, which I had no way of telling when I first read it: closer to secret than alternate history in that its world appears to have had our World War I, but the facts of the War Beneath the War are not known to the general public even though they are the explanation for the wartime and post-war boom in spiritualism, theosophy, other varieties of the occult—the veil between this world and the other side really was rent irreparably and the consequences just leak in now. One of the protagonists deals with these consequences professionally, the other just puts his foot into the uncanny and the next thing he knows his life is suddenly filled with escalating weirdness and the potential for romance, both of which differently frighten him. I recommend it! Both men were soldiers, but took very different kinds of damage from their wars. Their romance evolves in pursuit of unraveling the mystery, which has good, eerily mythic roots and a superb piece of sympathetic magic at the climax. Structurally it's much less polished than Death in the Spires—and it does have the modern historical romance problem where every now and then someone sounds more like 2017 than 1923, especially in bed—but its old weird worldbuilding appealed to me and so did its twin-engined occult thriller and romance which gave me more to work with than the latter alone. I really was looking forward to further books in the series, as I liked its main cast very much. I was told she got hung up in trying to envision a version of World War II that would not just destroy reality and remain uncertain why she was even planning to leap that far forward in time.
Boo! A pox upon their houses! I like author notes, and anybody who doesn't like them can simply skip them. Whereas those of us who want to read them cannot make them magically manifest where they aren't.
Thank you. I actually find that very supportive. It was another experience that helped to convince me that people will like my art only if they don't get close enough to have to interact with me.
Hmmm, none that leap to mind -- it was more a feeling of, I don't know what I don't know, can't spot where there's a reference I'm not getting because then the odds are high I don't even realize a reference is happening. I would totally have gone for translations of the bits in other languages, though, as e.g. my Greek is only about 80% competent at transliterating the alphabet and can't begin to parse the meaning of the words. I wouldn't want the stories disrupted by the translation, but having those off in the back matter somewhere would have been great.
Filed away for future reference.