ZOMBIE VOODOO PIRATES!: So, Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides.

The good: zombie voodoo pirates! Plus lots of action scenes, which aren’t my thing really, but Powers does them incredibly well–action-adventure revealing character and possessing pathos.

Two great characters, the puppeteer John Chandagnac and the pirate Phil Davies. And maybe Blackbeard, although he’s more a… character-shaped horror, than a character.

As usual, Powers just punishes his characters; you can’t have fantasy of salvage without wrecking everything first. I love how he does that.

The bad: There are two women in this novel. One is a shrieking adulteress, and the other is completely passive for 95% of the book. LOL NO. I totally understand why the second character is passive; but it doesn’t work, because again: only two women. I know this is a pirate book, thus mostly full of men, but see, that’s why you don’t make your one major woman basically a pawn or prize.

This is also the first Powers novel where I’ve ever found him tendentious or moralizing. (On a very related note, this book also includes the only Powers character I thought was just misconceived from start to finish, the utterly OTT Freudian curdle Leo Friend.) If I were to speculate wildly (and apparently here I go!), that might be because Powers thought he was writing a voodoo novel, when in fact he wrote a very Catholic novel about voodoo, and that disjunction between authorial intent and execution might have caused a lack of self-overhearing. I felt the author leaning on me during some of the moralizing passages. Which was totally unnecessary, since Powers can get all his moral effects just through heartbreaking horror scenes, which he writes wonderfully. (On Stranger Tides is almost as much horror novel as action-adventure, I think; Powers crosses genre a lot, and horror is usually the secondary one.)

So… look, it’s zombie voodoo pirates! If that makes you want to read it, you probably should. If you’re ambivalent, read other stuff by him first–Declare is still the standout among the Powers books I’ve read, but Last Call is also really, really good, and I think most people would like The Stress of Her Regard much more than I did.