Tag: Eoin Colfer

Highfire by Eoin Colfer: Enter the Dragon (the Drunken, Netflix-binging, Lousiana Swamp-Dwelling, Crotchety one)

Highfire

Highfire

by Eoin Colfer

Hardcover, 373 pg.
Harper Perennial, 2020

Read: February 18-24, 2020
Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

He knows where I live. And Momma, too.

Squib was marked and he knew it.

I gotta sort this out, he thought. I gotta get out from under that dragon.

Which is not a problem most people have to solve in their lifetimes. In general, most folk who get to meet a dragon only get to think about it that one time for about five seconds.

Here’s the punchline: I’m not sure I’ve read another book this year that was this much fun. It’s a great mix of comedy and action, with just a smidgen of heart. But best of all, it’s got a dragon. A fantastic dragon character. Sure, it’s been less than 2 months, so that compliment rings a bit hollow. Let me try again: pound-for-pound, this is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in the last two years.

Vern (short for Wyvern) isn’t your typical dragon. In fiction, dragons tend to be old, wise creatures that act as sages who occasionally light something/someone on fire. Or they’re incredibly violent, greedy things (frequently incapable of thought). Not Vern. He’s over three thousand years old and has lived all over the world. He’s on the small side (relative to dragons, not humans), and is a little sensitive about it—and fictional depictions of dragons. When he’s asked about, for example, Game of Thrones, he responds:

Game of Thrones? Are you tryin to push my buttons, kid Game of [expletive] Thrones! Those dragons are like servants—you see me doing any [expletive] mother of dragon’s bidding? I’d never serve humans!…[Expletive] lapdog CGI [expletive] fire lizards. Heap of [expletive]”

Most of Vern’s time is taken up by avoiding detection by humans, hanging out in a swamp near New Orleans, drinking Vodka and watching a lot of Netflix. He’s doing a Keto diet, loves Flashdance and the music of Linda Ronstadt. Like I said, not your typical dragon.

It’s not a great life, but it’s a safe one. Up until the day a fifteen-year-old known as Squib stumbles onto Vern’s existence while trying to avoid the local constable (who Squib just observed doing something very illegal).

Through some bad timing and a real sign of guts by Squib, Vern doesn’t kill him immediately. He eventually will bring Squib on as his go-between to the outside world. He’ll primarily be responsible for providing things that Vern can’t get— booze, food, etc. From this, a friendship of sorts develops between the two.

Which is great, because Squib needs a friend like Vern. You see, the constable has figured out that it was very likely Squib who witnessed his criminal act on the swamp, and now he hs to get ride of the boy before he finds a more honest legal authority to spill his guts to. While he’s at it, he’ll use Vern to advance his criminal career.

These two are going to have to lean on each other pretty hard if they’re going to get out of this okay.

That’s pretty much all you need to know.

I should talk a little about Squib (and his mother), but I’m not going to—he’s a fun character, but I want to focus on Vern.

In general, Highfire focuses on the biology, the history, and the life of dragons and those associated with them. In particular, it focuses on Vern’s his fire. Typically, I don’t remember getting a whole lot of information about a dragon’s fire. Colfer gives us a pretty thorough description of where it comes from, how a dragon can produce it, how it’s unlike the fire that humans are accustomed to, and so on. For example:

My fire don’t burn slow. No one ever got mildly scalded from dragon flame.

“Fulminated” was the word, or used to be.

A few pages later, he gets into a great description of how Vern lights his breath, and eventually, he’ll describe the effect that it has. We don’t get a lot about his flying ability (Vern doesn’t really get it either, beyond that the practical).

There are two action scenes in this book—they are both fan=fracking-tastic. It’s been months since I’ve read a fight/battle/action scene that grabbed me the way these did (pre-the last Lee Child, possibly the last two). The pacing, the detail . . . everything is just what you might hope it would be. The book is worth the time just for those two scenes.

There’s a great reference to Pete’s Dragon, The Princess Bride, and others. Vern’s a veritable font of pop culture references. Vern may be a crotchety old guy, he’s a great character. I really enjoyed that about him. There’s something to at least grin about on practically every page. Between the voice, the comedy and the great action scenes? This is a must-read for dragon friends (or just about anyone else).

Now, Colfer has written a few other Adult novels—I’ve read three of them. Plugged and Screwed share a similar voice (but are heavier on the violence), And Another Thing… couldn’t be more different, but he was playing in Adams’s sandbox with that one. But for people who’ve read his adult work, you’ll appreciate this if you don’t mind a dash of fantasy. If you’ve read this and liked it–and you don’t mind the lack of fantasy–get on his other adult work. I wouldn’t say that Highfire is appropriate for most of Colfer’s younger readers, but a mature teen reader could handle it as long as he realizes this isn’t going to be along the lines of the Artemis Fowl books.


4 1/2 Stars

2020 Library Love Challenge

This post contains an affiliate link. If you purchase from it, I will get a small commission at no additional cost to you. As always, opinions are my own.

Screwed by Eoin Colfer

Screwed (Daniel McEvoy, #2)Screwed

by Eoin Colfer
Hardcover, 304 pg.
Overlook Hardcover, 2013
Read: Jan. 27-31, 2014

I saw that the sequel to Colfer’s Plugged was out, and I had a dim recollection that I enjoyed Plugged (and can look up my rating on Goodreads), but I can’t remember a lick of it. Which bothered me, but I figure it’ll come back to me with some work — so I put a reserve on it at the library. When I went to pick it up, I still couldn’t remember anything about its predecessor, which still bugged me. I read the jacket copy — doesn’t help, and now it’s driving me crazy. I read the first two pages — nothing. But at the bottom of the second page I read:

And those eyes? Big and blue, rimmed with way too much eyeliner. Men have climbed into hollow wooden horses for eyes like that.

With lines like that, who cares what I remembered? This is a great read, so much fun, and laugh out loud funny when you’re not horrified by the violence. Colfer writes like a Don Winslow who hasn’t slept in a week thanks to existing on a truly inhuman amount of energy drinks.

It’s not long after that observation that the tide starts to turn for Daniel McEvoy, our narrator. The two-bit gangster he angered in Plugged has decided on a way for McEvoy to start to make things right between them. Sure, it’s probably just a set-up, but what choice does he have? Especially with his best friend and the owner of those eyes serving as handy targets.

Before he gets the chance to figure out just what’s going on, Daniel stumbles across his long-lost aunt (in the middle of a decades-long bender), his grandfather’s fourth (or so, I don’t remember exactly) wife, a young wanna-be wiseguy, the wanna-be’s actual wiseguy henchman, the would-be gangster, a couple of corrupt policemen, a masked assassin, a killer lightning bolt, a car at the bottom of the river, and a few other obstacles. Daniel deals with each of these with a combination of world-weary cynicism, gallows humor, an unexpected romanticism with a trace of optimism and lethal force. The latter is really what carries the day, obviously, but it’s the rest that makes reading his exploits worth it — and darn enjoyable.

For example, towards the end of the book, Daniel makes this aside:

The Key to staying alive until you die is to not get yourself killed.
I saved this nugget till close to the end on account of how bleeding obvious it reads, which might bring on a little gnashing of teeth. But to most people not getting yourself killed involves nothing more than just doing what you’re already doing and maybe cutting down on mayonnaise, which is more or less liquid fat.

All Daniel wants to do is hang out with his friends, make some money with the casino/bar he and a partner are opening, and maybe, juuuust maybe pursue a romance. When describing some of the jokes he and his friend are making rather than deal with the harsh reality of their situation, he says

. . . Zeb and I spend a lot of our free time, as two single middle-aged bucks, watching TV. How cool and edgy is that? Most of our references are pop culture and our favorites at the moment are old episodes of the egregiously canceled shows Terriers and Deadwood.

Colfer buys himself and extra half-star or more for name-dropping Terriers and complaining about its cancellation — twice!!*

When you boil things down in the end, Daniel McEvoy is a basically decent man who’s seen and done things that no one should. Which prepares him (possibly makes him seek out) more of the same now. Which doesn’t change the fact that he’s really a good Irish man who likes telling a story and loves to play with language — even if the story (and his life) end up being hyper-violent and he has a propensity for letting his metaphors run out of control. Grab Plugged for context if you want, but definitely grab Screwed and buckle-in for a fun ride.

One more quotation that doesn’t fit anywhere, but made me chuckle enough to copy it down:

[I]f you want to see teenagers crap themselves laughing, try explaining what a pager used to be. You tell ’em about cassette tapes and they think you’re only a lying, old Depends-wearing motherfucker.
The following is a transcript of a conversation I had with Jason’s nephew:
Me: The songs were pressed onto a long tape. Six songs per side, then you turned it over.
Nephew: Turned what over?
Me: The tape in the machine, but you had to be careful or the machine would eat the tape and you’d have to straighten it out with a pencil.
Nephew: Fuck off, Gandalf. You’re making this shit up.

—–

* Not entirely true. It was my plan early on, but the book turned out to be too good to require that.

—–

4 1/2 Stars

Opening Lines — Screwed by Eoin Colfer

Been awhile since I’ve done one of these posts, but — nothing against most of the books I’ve read in the meantime — haven’t had a reason to until now.
We all know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover (so why do publishing companies spend big bucks on cover design/art?). Opening sentence(s)/paragraph(s) are fair game, in my book. So, when I stumble on a good opening (or remember one and pull it off the shelves), I throw it up here. Dare you not to read the rest of the book

—–

The great Elmore Leonard once said that you should never start a story with weather. That’s all well and good for Mr. Leonard to say and for all his acolytes to scribble into their moleskin notebooks, but sometimes a story starts off with weather and does not give a damn about what some legendary genre guy recommends, even if it is the big EL. So if there’s a weather at the start then that’s where you better put it or the whole thing could unravel and you find yourself with the shavings of a tale swirling around your ankles and no idea how to glue them together again.
So expect some major meteorological conditions smack bang in the middle of Chapter One, and if there were kids and animals around they’d be in here too, screw that old-timey movie-star guy with the cigar and squint eye. The story is what it is.

from Screwed by Eoin Colfer

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén