Author: Matthew E

I am a writer in Canada.

Crystal Minton

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A couple of elements of the Generation X stereotype are a) we are kind of bad, and b) we cut through to the truth.

Many people were surprised by Donald Trump’s first election victory, and didn’t know how to process it. Didn’t know what to expect from it. Didn’t know how to react to the things he did. Some of these were Trump’s own supporters, who found that they had released forces they couldn’t control.

One such person was Crystal Minton (c.1981), a Trump voter and prison employee who was displeased with how the government handled hurricane relief in Florida. She said, of Trump, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” And, for a lot of GenX, that’s what it’s all about. Are enough of the right people getting hurt?

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“Trump voter: ‘He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting'” MS NOW, Steve Benen, Jan. 8, 2019.

News: Patreon

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I have started a Patreon. It’s for, I explain uselessly, all the writing I do that doesn’t appear here or at Legion Abstract. No, really though; most things I do will still show up where you’d expect them to show up, including *Palace Guard*, which I will be getting back to, but sometimes there will be things on Patreon and sometimes they’ll be behind a subscription wall.

One such is the short story “How Silently”, which is available to subscribers now. So okay! Let’s get this going! Tomorrow the world!

Here’s a link to my new Patreon page. All are welcome!

My Top Twenty Books of 2025

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Well. Around twenty, anyway.

The book I’m currently reading is Iron Flame (Rebecca Yarrow), second book in the Empyrean series. I’m on page 40 and the book enjoys a bountiful 637 pages, so I conclude that I’m not finishing it today without heroic effort, effort which I am disinclined to provide just to increase this year’s book count by one. So I can put this year’s book list to bed.

I read 69* new-to-me books in 2025. That’s low for me. I’m usually up over a hundred. It seems eventually mental health struggles will affect one’s reading habits. Anyway, the number isn’t the point. Maybe in 2026 I’ll be reading books like a fiend, but they’re mostly rereads or really long books that I’ve been meaning to get to. Kristin Lavransdatter and Infinite Jest. And my final count will be like twenty. That would be fine.

Here are the best books I read in 2025, loosely ranked from less best to best, with commentary where available.

Hemlock and Silver (T. Kingfisher) Kingfisher is a fantasy machine these days, keeping ’em coming good and fast. This one’s up to her usual standards but I wasn’t really feeling the poison-and-mirror themes.

The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (Alison Goodman) I had to look this one up to remember which one it was. It’s one of these books you get a lot of these days, with a plucky heroine turning this or that benighted historical period into something we’d like better (complimentary). This one’s set in the Regency era, and is particularly energetic.

All the Birds in the Sky (Charlie Jane Anders) I suspect Charlie Jane Anders may be good at this, and I will have to investigate her bibliography more deeply.

The Tainted Cup; A Drop of Corruption (Robert Jackson Bennett) I’m a sucker for a Nero Wolfe pastiche, which this turns out not exactly to be, but it’ll do until one comes along. I’m not in love with this world, with its militaristic society, sea monsters, and biotech magic, but they’re well-written fantasy mysteries, so I will overlook much.

Wild Cards: House Rules (George R.R. Martin, ed.) The Wild Cards series has gone pretty far from its roots to get to this one, involving strange goings on in a mysterious house off the English coast, but I’m committed to Wild Cards for life, and I’ve never regretted it.

The House in the Cerulean Sea (T.J. Klune) I was hoping for something more, I don’t know, fanciful, fairy-taleish, than this found-family romance, but that’s not the book’s fault; the book’s perfectly good.

To Love and Be Wise (Josephine Tey) I may have more to say about this one in a separate article, but it’s a well-crafted Golden Age murder-mystery, only without a murder. That’s not often done.

The Averoigne Chronicles (Clark Ashton Smith) I had long been curious about Smith’s fantasy stories set in pseudo-medieval France, and I finally got the chance to snap them all up in one volume. Summary: weird! In a good way.

Advocate (Daniel M. Ford) Book Three of Ford’s Warden series, which I’ve been enjoying. I hope there are more, because the story of Aelis is clearly not over.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Alix E. Harrow) You’ve got to love that title. Promises a lot. And the book mostly delivers, even if it is kind of a conventional exercise for contemporary fantasy.

Written on the Dark (Guy Gavriel Kay) I’ve described Kay as the greatest living fantasy writer in English, and this book, an adventure in medieval France (it was a medieval-France kind of year for me) strengthens his case yet again.

James (Percival Everett) I read this at around the same time I read Big Jim and the White Boy (David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson). They’re both retellings of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim. And both quite good; the only reason the Walker and Anderson doesn’t appear on this list is because it’s a comic book, and this list is for prose. (Nothing against comic books. I love comic books. They’re great.) It’s a tribute to TAoHF that people consider it worth reinterpreting in this way and creating books this good in reaction to it.

Fourth Wing (Rebecca Yarros) YA fantasy about a girl who becomes a dragonrider. Like with everything that’s been done a thousand times, all you have to do to stand out from the crowd is to do it well.

Woodworking (Emily St. James) Much-praised novel about a trans woman trying to figure things out and getting reluctant help from the trans girl who’s one of her students. It’s a really good read.

Space Oddity (Cat Valente) Sequel to the previous Space Opera, which was also great. Tons of fun in a Douglas Adams kind of way.

The Outskirter’s Secret; The Lost Steersman; The Language of Power (Rosemary Kirstein) I don’t know how I got this far in life without knowing about this series. I have taken to describing it as, “It’s pretending to be fantasy for people who like science fiction, but really it’s science fiction for people who like fantasy.” I hope Kirstein manages to finish the last two books before too long.

A Gentleman and a Thief (Dean Jobb) The only nonfiction book on this list. It’s the biography of Arthur Barry, the great Jazz Age jewel thief, and it’s wonderful.

The Bright Sword (Lev Grossman) Grossman has added a new entry to the Arthurian canon with this one. I read it in February and suspected at the time that it was going to be the best thing I read all year, and so it was. If you’re into King Arthur at all, this is one you have to read.

There!

Can’t wait to see what 2026 brings.

*Acknowledge.

Review: The Marionette (Terry Fallis)

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One of my Christmas books was The Marionette by Terry Fallis. It’s the first book I’ve read by Fallis, a Canadian author who seems to have developed a reputation for quality and humour. And it’s a spy book, too, so I was optimistic when I cracked it open.

And I didn’t hate it. Reading The Marionette was an amiable experience. It’s about, if you must know, a Canadian author of spy thrillers who narrates his experiences rescuing some people from a tight spot in Mali. And it’s presented as a light comedy, not a Clancy-like exercise in grimtech. That’s fine.

What’s not fine is that it’s too simple. Our hero and his allies set out to rescue the people, and they succeed. Everyone turns out to be just who we think they are, and there are no surprise twists. There is a climactic scene where danger threatens, and, to Fallis’s credit, it does seem like the plan could go very wrong here, but then they get out of it. And after that there’s a long denouement where we look at the number of pages remaining and think something interesting might happen, but it doesn’t. And that’s it.

I’m sure I’ve read books where the machinations of various factions become so complicated that I really have no idea who’s doing what or why, and that’s not good either. (To the extent that it’s the author’s fault that I can’t follow it.) I’m not asking for complication for complication’s sake. But I do think a book about spying should have a few more moving parts than this one. Unless there’s something else going on that’s the real main attraction! Like, for instance, humour. If the story, the characters, the dialogue, the prose is hilarious, it doesn’t matter if the plot’s overly straightforward. And I think that might have been the assumption here.

Unfortunately The Marionette isn’t funny. And when I say that I don’t mean that its jokes don’t work on me. I mean that there aren’t any jokes. There’s a light dad-joke kind of tone that the narrative voice provides for us, like a Linwood Barclay protagonist, but nothing that you can point to and say, “That. That part’s supposed to be funny.”

For all that, it’s a competently told story. I can’t call it good because there’s not enough to it; I might have liked it better if it had been interesting enough to be bad.

On Kinder Surprise DC Comics Playmobil

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There I was, innocently Christmas shopping, when a candy display in the drugstore caught my eye.

Kinder had a line of Kinder Surprise eggs with DC Comics Playmobil figurines inside, on sale for the holidays.

Now, I am a big fan of DC Comics; have been for almost all my life. If you’ve been reading my online writings for any length of time, you may know this about me. What you may not know is that I also really like Playmobil. This goes back to when I was little. I had a friend who had a big huge Playmobil setup in his basement or playroom or whatever. And I wasn’t allowed to play with it. I wasn’t allowed to look at it! I don’t think he was allowed to play with it! Because this was one of those homes where everything had to be just so. Anyway, I wasn’t able to indulge my Playmobil cravings until I was a grownup.

They just look so neat. Cheerful, colourful, clean, vaguely European, the figures ready to have a medieval adventure or work on a horse farm. I find the Playmobil aesthetic endlessly appealing.

So anyway I snapped up the Kinder eggs. Eight boxes, three eggs each, twenty-four figures. I couldn’t tell which ones I was getting; it turns out there were sixteen different characters available and I got twelve of them and twelve doubles. (Lots of Aquamans.) They aren’t full-sized Playmobil figures. They’re scaled down to about half size, and don’t have full mobility. Anyway, here are the little petants:

Twelve DC Comics Playmobil figures: Batman, Batgirl, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Mera, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Joker, Riddler, Catwoman, Superman

Still missing four characters: Harley Quinn, Supergirl, Robin, and Black Adam. I may not get them; there may be no more on the shelves around here. I’d like to have Supergirl and Robin, at least. You may be sure that I’ll keep you up to date on these important matters.

The Grounding of Group 6

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The Grounding of Group 6 is a teen novel from 1983 (when GenX was aged 1-22), written by Julian F. Thompson. It was his second teen novel of nineteen.

There’s a lot that can be said about the book, but let’s stick to the premise: five basically normal kids are sent away to a boarding school. Secretly, their parents have paid the school to murder them, because they’re getting in the way of the parents’ big plans in one way or another.

The dean says this about the kids, when discussing this unusual service offered by his school: “You’ve got the dregs, of course, the ultimate bad seeds, […] Guys like Hitler, for example–they were that same type, I bet. Others of them we can teach up here. They learn. A Six-er never would. Grounding is the only way.”

So yeah.

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The Grounding of Group 6 (Julian F. Thompson). Avon Books, 1983.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/children/scholarly-magazines/thompson-julian-francis-1927

Cubie Burke

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Cubie Burke (1964) was one of the first GenXers of note in music. His family, the Burkes, had a vocal group, the Five Stairsteps. When Cubie was three years old, he began performing with them, mostly dancing. He went over big with audiences and they marketed the act around him. He even sang lead on some songs, including “New Dance Craze.” But he wasn’t that interested in singing, and had stopped performing with the Stairsteps by the time they had their big hit in 1970, “O-o-h Child”.*

Cubie’s interests lay more in dancing than singing (although he did release a single, “Down for Double”, under his own name in 1982, which was still early days for GenX in music), and he eventually had a distinguished career as a dancer, dance teacher, and choreographer. Died young, of complications from an old brain injury, in 2014. He didn’t get the hit song. But he did what he wanted to do.

*”O-o-h Child” is a notable for-GenX song itself. It’s sung from the perspective of an older person telling a younger person, presumably a small child, that things may be terrible now but, someday, they’ll be better, and we’ll live to see it.

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Platforms; Pagan Kennedy. St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Page 131.
“The Five Stairsteps and Cubie – 1968 – Our Family Portrait”. Album review on funkmysoul.gr website.
“The Five Stairsteps”. Biography on last.fm website.
“Cubie Burke Dies…”; Bill Buckley. Article on soulandjazzandfunk.com website, 2014.

Zombie minks rise from the grave

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In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, mink farms in Denmark had to destroy their stock because they might have been infected with the virus. The poor minks were buried in a mass grave… for a while. Their corpses bloated and swelled, bursting through the too-thin layer of soil above them, as though they were zombie minks risen to claim vengeance on us all. Unfortunately, no such appropriate ending to our story was forthcoming, and the minks were reburied.

Perhaps this sounds like too trivial an event to include here. A temporary problem involving some dead animals in Europe? Who cares? The significance is that, at the time, we regarded the prospect of undead minks rising from the earth to set things right as, not the logical next step, but a logical next step. “Yes, of course, this makes sense,” we thought.

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“Culled mink rise from the dead to Denmark’s horror” The Guardian, Jon Henley, Nov 25 2020

“Roots Rock Weirdos”

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Robbie Fulks (1963) is a singer-songwriter from the eastern U.S. His music is sometimes called alt-country and he’s got a sense of humour. In 1999 he released the song “Roots Rock Weirdos”, which had a prescient portrayal of its villain, Hank.

The song is about a dead night in a small town, where the only mildly interesting thing happening was an oldies band starting their act at a local bar. Suddenly a bunch of eccentric fans of old music, attracted by the sound, swarm the place. The bartender tries to restore order, asking them what their deal is. Their leader, Hank, starts to explain, but is soon off on a megalomaniacal rant promising the conquest of all culture by him and those like him. It’s a fun song.

These weirdos are antifeminist: they want all women in fishnet stockings and bright lipstick, and Hank speaks with the kind of too-online intonation that has definitely pronounced the word “milady”. They’re white supremacist: they talk in slang they consider Black but want every band to consist of four white guys. And they want nothing less than domination for their 1950s aesthetic. They want to turn the clock back. Music should be for them, not for young people, and they’re going to make that happen for the sake of Elvis Presley, their “fat dead cracker king”. Obviously, then, they don’t even respect Elvis. Obviously, then, they’re doing this for the sake of nothing.

The song puts a ribbon on this portrayal with a suggestion of Naziism by one of Hank’s people speaking in a German accent commenting on the song’s purity. Fulks couldn’t have known he’d be predicting anything with this song, but he painted a pretty good picture of the MAGA movement, years early. Substitute Trump in for Elvis; it’s a pretty good fit.

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https://robbiefulks.com
The Very Best of Robbie Fulks (album)