At Midnight Comes the Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this 10th Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne novel the married odd couple becomes involved with a white nationalist group and the domestic situation of the abused spouse of one of them. Clare is an Episcopal priest and former army helicopter pilot. Russ is a recently involuntarily retired police chief. It seemed to be an inauspicious pairing to me, but the author managed to create a suspenseful tale when the body of a forest ranger is found in the remote wilderness of an upstate New York park. I’d give this one another half star if Goodreads allowed it. It suffers a little from its reliance on the reader knowing the main characters already. I didn’t and I learned barely enough to follow the family dynamics there. The final scene was too complicated. The shape and connections of the physical space are important and it just isn’t easy to envision from text descriptions. But I enjoyed having characters who weren’t potty-mouthed all the time and I especially liked the fact the author paid attention to law enforcement jurisdiction as a plot device. That’s so important in real life (I was an FBI agent), but is often glossed over or misrepresented in crime fiction. I never did figure out what the title had to do with the story.

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SUNO is an AI platform for making music. I’ve posted about it before. But it’s also a way to find new music. It’s not well-designed for that purpose, so it takes some work, but it’s been worth it for me so far. Once you’re a member, including a free member, you can search for songs using genre, creator, instruments, title, style, etc. The search results will be the creations of members, i.e. creations that the SUNO AI software made using text prompts, audio uploads, or a combination of the two, so it’s hit and miss. You have to listen to a lot of not-so-good stuff, but it’s quick and easy to just go on to the next one. I’ve found great songs there that way.

Another way is to create your own songs using those same techniques. With experimentation and luck you can produce something new that you really like. I’ve done that, too, in many genres: ragtime, blues, rock, gospel. I’ve created over 20 songs that I really like. You can download songs you created yourself. You can put all of the ones you like in playlists. In fact, every song you give the thumbs up to automatically goes into your Liked playlist. You can listen to your own liked songs later just by going to that playlist.

Here are a couple of SUNO rock songs I really like, one by a French creator and one I made:

Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jet is a 27-year-old woman still living at home after a failed law school attempt. She’s attacked from behind on Halloween with a hammer, but somehow survives. Only she suffers a bone fracture at the base of her skull which will almost certainly result in a fatal aneurysm. She has a week to live and is determined to find her “killer” although, as the title says, she’s not quite dead yet. She and her best friend from childhood, Billy, set out to do so. Billy is devoted to some unnamed woman he has loved since forever. Of course Jet is the only person too dense to figure out who that is. It’s an original plot setup. The family dynamics are very complicated. Jet has an older brother who is a rather angry sort and dealing with a father who doesn’t value him as he should. Their sister Emily was the rock star of the family, but died as an 11-year-old when her hair got caught in the pool drain. Billy’s mother took off and abandoned her family some years earlier. Everyone is blaming everyone else for these things. All these play into the final plot resolution. I couldn’t get excited about it, but the book was interesting enough to keep me reading to the end. Perhaps it qualifies as a beach read.

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I’m continuing to enjoy using SUNO AI to remix songs. This is more than just playing around with it. I used to be able to play guitar and even upload a few videos of my playing to YouTube, but arthritis robbed me of that ability years ago. I’ve really missed the creative side of my music. SUNO has given that back to me in a new way. Enjoy the Bessie Smith classic reimagined.

I recently experimented with SUNO, a music AI site. I uploaded my guitar version of the classic ragtime song Ballin’ the Jack and asked for a swing version. This is the product.

If you want to compare to my original, here’s it is:

The Humans by Matt Haig
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This very boring novel features an alien who comes to Earth to destroy it because his species thinks humans are illogical and self destructive and thus a danger to the universe if they acquire superior technical knowledge. The alien, in human form, quickly begins to appreciate humans and their illogical emotions. That much is no spoiler as it is pretty much the published description of the book in Goodreads and libraries. It is also pretty much the entire plot, which is the main reason it is so boring. It is very well-trodden ground in literature, movies, and TV. The author has added nothing to the existing genre.

Here’s a list, in chronological order, of several very similarly themed works involving human-looking or humanoid aliens with that initial view of humans: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 movie/1940 short story); Childhood’s End (1953), although the Overlords look like devils; Star Trek (1966) – Spock and the Borg are humanoid and both consider humans inferior, but only the Borg are hostile; Mork & Mindy (1978+ TV series); V (1983+ TV miniseries); Starman (1984); Star Trek: Voyager (1997+ several episodes); The Humans (this book – 2013); The Orville (2017+ TV series); Resident Alien (2021 TV series). This is just a sample; others exist. There are others where the aliens aren’t human/humanoid, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) but have a similar story line.

The plots of these vary somewhat, with differing degrees of initial hostility toward us; some aliens becoming appreciative of humans or affectionate and protective, and others leaving humans alone to fend for themselves, but generally change their initial view of us to a more positive one. The point is that there is absolutely nothing new in this book and it doesn’t even having the redeeming humor of several of the listed works. The only “humor” is the running gag present in every one of the above where aliens think we’re hideously ugly and can’t understand our illogical self-destructiveness like littering and fighting. That grows old real fast. The writing is a mundane narrative.

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