Your Humble Blogger, having read and enjoyed Garth Nix's books, mostly, what with one thing and another, picked up a copy of Across the Wall, which contains a novella or some such long story set in the Abhorsen world. I was looking forward to that bit more than to the other stories in the book, which looked to be a combination of juvenalia, unpublishable crap, and filler. It turns out, though, that the book is a combination of juvenalia, unpublishable crap, filler, and good stories.
The title story is a bit weak, actually. I mean, it's fine, and there are some good bits, but he starts out with a country-house setting, and instead of using the country-house, he has Our Hero first locked up in the dungeon underneath the country house, and then has a hideous monster kill everybody in the country house. And, you know, those are both good things, but there is very little of the country house about them in the story.
My favorite story in the collection, at the moment, is a bizarre Annie Oakley fights the Hitler-Demon thing that is much better executed than it sounds. I mean, it's still a pretty goofy concept, and I have ... political? Yes, I guess they are political ... problems with the whole Hitler-was-the-Devil thing, and this story grates on those problems the way that you could grate on problems if the metaphor worked. I mean, the blackshirts (or maybe brownshirts) are essentially possessed; when the Annie defeats the Hitler, they are cured and aren't fascist anymore. But by then Annie has killed a bunch of them, which would presumably be bad if they were unwilling (or at least non-willing) pawns of the Black King. So under the circumstances, I judge the story by how well the writer keeps me from thinking about that stuff until it's over, and by that criterion, Mr. Nix does very well indeed.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.