I don’t think you need worry about Glimpses—I still think it’s the funniest of his books. The melée/chase scene toward the end of the book is worthy of the best of the Marx Brothers. I found Toyshop very good, but nonetheless it stands in the second rank for me.
Of the rest, I have a higher opinion of Holy Disorders than your current one, but I make some allowances for its being only his second book. I like Love Lies Bleeding for the Shakespeare plot element, and Frequent Hearses and Buried for Pleasure for the freakish conceits the settings allow him. (Which isn’t to mention that, since he wrote movie scores for a time, he knows exactly what he’s talking about in Frequent Hearses.) Swan Song is good in the parts that deal directly with opera (again, his experience as a professional composer and musician shows), but the murders seem contrived-at and forced. Gilded Fly shows definite signs of being a first novel, and The Long Divorce never does seem to jell for some reason, although many of its elements are good, taken separately. I didn’t care for either short-story collection at all, because they utterly lack the absurd humor that make the Fen novels such fun.
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Re: If Holy Disorders was in hardback...
Date: 2001-11-06 05:35 pm (UTC)I don’t think you need worry about Glimpses—I still think it’s the funniest of his books. The melée/chase scene toward the end of the book is worthy of the best of the Marx Brothers. I found Toyshop very good, but nonetheless it stands in the second rank for me.
Of the rest, I have a higher opinion of Holy Disorders than your current one, but I make some allowances for its being only his second book. I like Love Lies Bleeding for the Shakespeare plot element, and Frequent Hearses and Buried for Pleasure for the freakish conceits the settings allow him. (Which isn’t to mention that, since he wrote movie scores for a time, he knows exactly what he’s talking about in Frequent Hearses.) Swan Song is good in the parts that deal directly with opera (again, his experience as a professional composer and musician shows), but the murders seem contrived-at and forced. Gilded Fly shows definite signs of being a first novel, and The Long Divorce never does seem to jell for some reason, although many of its elements are good, taken separately. I didn’t care for either short-story collection at all, because they utterly lack the absurd humor that make the Fen novels such fun.