I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (MAY 2023 EDITION)

Well that was a slow month – or it would have been if I hadn’t spent three hours waiting at the bank for something that took ten minutes to sort out.

X-Dimensional Assassin Zai Through the Unfolded Earth by Jason Franks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If there’s one thing I’ve come to expect from Jason Franks at this point, it’s that he delights in delving into different genre tropes with the primary goal of taking a wrecking ball to them. In this case, he takes on the international-assassin-for-hire template, starts off a bit whimsical and gets progressively weird with it – in a good way. Zai is a Japanese hitman hired by a mysterious company based in Karachidor, a country that doesn’t exist – at least not on Earth as we know it. In fact, the Earth is multidimensional with various hidden realms, and the company wants Zai to travel to them and kill people.

This turns out to be a dream job for Zai, who is very good at assassination but is in it mainly for the tourism. Consequently, the first half of the book is sort of a mash-up of Lawrence Block’s Keller stories and Ursula K. Le Guin’s SF travelogues, with Zai being sent to a cloned medieval village, a secret space station, an aerostatic city-state and a post-apocalyptic Faerie Land, to name a few, where he spends as much time sightseeing and trying local food as he does assassinating. Then things take a turn for the worse when one of his employers goes rogue, after which we meet ninjas, wayward gods, refugees from Atlantis and kitsune spirits straight out of Studio Ghibli (with a possible John Carpenter homage thrown in).

Part of the fun is of course the different locations and cultures that Zai encounters, but the real appeal is that Zai is a rather likeable character (another first for a Franks novel, at least for me) for a cold-blooded assassin. And as someone who has done a lot of traveling myself, I can relate to his desire to explore local culture away from the tourist traps. Zai’s amiability also gives his final assignment and its denouement some extra emotional heft that would otherwise be lacking (and thus wouldn't have worked). All up, for me it’s his most enjoyable book since Bloody Waters.


Snuff Fiction by Corgi

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rankin is one of those authors where I’ll generally read anything I find by him, even though most of his work is a variation on the same theme (i.e. some occult apocalyptic event or conspiracy theory, with jokes, set in, near or about Brentford). But then credit where it’s due – not everyone can stretch a sack full of running gags across 40+ books and get away with it. And so it is here, one of the few of Rankin’s older books I hadn’t managed to get a copy of.

And yet it’s something different in that it’s ostensibly a biography about a powerful Brentford tobacco billionaire known as “the Doveston”, as told by his childhood pal Edwin – albeit one written years after the collapse of civilization from the Y2K Bug (a topic Rankin tackled in a different book, though it’s not connected to this one). The story covers their school days in 1950s Brentford – where the Doveston is already exhibiting a genius knowledge of tobacco products and hints of megalomaniacal ambitions (as well as a fondness for dynamite) – all the way up to the Y2K Bug and its aftermath. There’s also wild parties, man-eating plants, secret govts and whatnot.

And, for possibly the first time ever, I found myself thinking, “Gee, this was a bit bleak, wasn’t it?” It has all the elements one expects in a Rankin book, to include a lot of funny bits, and while the plotline feels scattershot, it more or less gels by the end. That said, what it gels into is a shaggy-dog revenge story that – when you step back and look at it – is a bit grim. It may also be that I was put off by one key bit of animal cruelty that, while not graphic, is quite mean and sad and not at all funny – the fact that this seems to be Rankin’s intention doesn’t really help. Anyway, it’s not a bad novel, but it’s one I enjoyed less than his other stuff.

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