Passing one (mostly) by

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, mysteries

The nine-tailed fox is a powerful figure in Asian folklore, appearing in some form in Chinese, Japanese and Korean myths. When I saw the title 9Tail Fox by Jon Courteny Grimwood, I thought it worth finding out how what sort of tail he'd launch with that. There's both good and bad here, and the bad is enough that I skipped over 3/4 of it to check that the denouement matched my deductions; I was only partly right.

The book states on its cover, "A novel of science fiction." There is no SciFi here at all; it is a supernatural fantasy. It didn't take long to determine that, once the protagonist, a cop named Bobby Zha, is killed and then restored temporarily to life in the body of a coma victim, he'd not just get the girl, he'd get every girl he encountered, frequently in several pages of detail. Then, the author has an equal obsession with the kind of detailed, sadistic descriptions of violence one finds in Ian Fleming's writing, and the writing becomes "blood porn". Sorry, dude; not the kind of thing I wish to inhabit my psyche. So I passed.