Happy New Year, sweet book bbs. I have just finished Patricia Lockwood’s delightful memoir Priestdaddy, my first book completed for 2020. It’s lyrical when it’s funny as well as when it goes deep into her fiercest recollections, and so many moments are simultaneously both. Her audiobook reading has the added benefit of Patricia’s impassioned impersonations of each of the members of her family, so fascinating and stark that I hear her version of her younger sister in my head when I reread the first line of this post.
Sweet book bay-ya-baaaays.
I highly recommend it, but today I am actually going to talk a bit about a series of books that my husband and I have come to love, Peter Clines’ trilogy (as of this writing…could there be more!?) referred to as The Threshold Series.
The series consists of three books: 14, The Fold, and Dead Moon. It’s a loose series, and one you could conceivably even read out of order! Each book takes place in the same narrative universe, with different characters and scenarios in each one. My personal favorite is the first one, 14. It’s about an apartment building that’s just strange enough that all the tenants are a little confused, though not frightened, by its structural oddities. Light fixtures that only emit black light. Randomly locked doors. Floor plans that don’t meet at the correct angles. The most suspicious aspect is the rent: well below the standard for the outskirts of Los Angeles. Did they get a good deal on a rickety old building, or are they part of something profoundly weird? This book has an extremely likable cast of characters, as the tenants gradually form a group of apartment explorers. They meet on the weekends to look at the sunset, have a beer, and follow clues about the building’s history. The more they discover, the more questions they seem to have.
In the second book of the series, The Fold, the weirdness is front and center. A man with some unusual intellectual abilities is called to investigate a research team that believes they have, more or less, invented a teleportation device. The facility is deeply protective of its information, but rumors are starting to get out in the infosec community. Erratic behavior, secret meetings, and promises of the impossible. Science fiction is no longer fiction at their R&D center, so how is it that the wildest part of the operation…is the scientists themselves?
The third book in the series is called Dead Moon. It is about the colonization of the moon. And it contains many zombies. I think that is all I can properly tell you about this one, lest I give away too many good bits.
I know what you’re thinking: “How are these books related in a series?” But friends, they definitely are! It’s up to you to read the books and figure out the common theme. These slow-burn science fiction stories have excellent action, horror, and humor. The audiobook narrator, Ray Porter, lends a lot of heart to every voice and fills out the world in a remarkable way.
What were your favorite science fiction stories of 2019? What are you looking forward to reading in 2020?
Rating: 5 out of 5 Heinekens on a Southern California rooftop…that might be humming? Slightly?
Earl Grey and A Million Words 