I think I know by now what evil really is

[sovay]

I am evidently not the target audience for Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves (2012), which rushthatspeaks has been reading and describing to me; I think that if one of your central characters is vampire John Polidori, people should always be asking him if he got it from Lord Byron and he should be so tired of having to tell them ("Byron wasn't even a vampire, damn it!") no.

Comments

[sovay]

Stalin's successes at warding off invasion, for example, are credited to an intelligence that lives underneath the Kremlin and is being fed purged dissidents in return for her services, alternately called Zat al-Dawahi ("Mistress of Misfortunes") or Machikha Nash ("our stepmother").

This sounds like a direct literary ancestor of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, no, it TOTALLY is. That's one of the other reasons I like it so much.;)

I also very much admired the one with the body-hopping card game, set in Las Vegas, not least because Bugsy Siegel is a character...Last Call. I have a copy of Medusa's Web that I intend to read soon, too.