This takes place after the other Kintaran story I read, “Spoonfuls of Sugar.” Klarin-yal is now in command of the clanship Choosaraf, and she has a problem. Not only does the Choosaraf need more crew (which in turn means that the clan needs more members), most of the younger members of the current crew would prefer to leave and live planetside. At this point, that would destroy the clan.

Klarin-yal and her fraternal twin sister, Coli-nfaran, are able to find a few new crew members on Kintara Station, but not a Negotiator. That's when Coli-nfaran gets an idea: if their younglings were born on a ship but would prefer to live on a planet, couldn't it work the other way around? And so Coli leaves the Choosaraf in order to search Kintara for younglings that dream of living on a spaceship.

I liked this more than “Spoonfuls of Sugar,” but it was still disappointing. McCoy's greatest strength, in her novels, is her characters, and yet this story was too short for the characters to shine much. Also, Coli's strategy for finding suitable Kintarans was somewhat lacking. She basically just walked around on the planet until she stumbled into a clan, and then hoped that one of them would be interested in leaving with her.

I should mention that I still have zero familiarity with GURPS, which, according to a note in the copyright info, inspired at least parts of this story.

Extras:

The story begins with a glossary and names list. Even though “Recruiting Drive” was very short, I found that I had to flip back to the glossary a couple times to check the meanings of certain words, because those meanings were not evident in the text.

There were at least two errors in the names list. First, both Ch'ichat and Neeri were listed as Coli-nfaran's mother. I thought maybe they were lesbians or that Kintaran family structures resulted in all females in the clan being younglings' mothers, but then the story mentioned that Neeri was Coli-nfaran's grandmother. Second, Coli-nfaran's grandmother's name was spelled a couple different ways, and I have no idea which one was correct. She was “Neeri” in the glossary and “Neerri” in the story.

 

Rating Note:

 

I initially gave this 2.5 stars, but I chopped off half a star because I realized that those errors really bugged me considering that this file was only 24 pages total on my Nook Simple Touch.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

Of all the classic movie monsters, I'm least familiar with the mythology of the mummy, but as I think about it now, it seems to be reflective of the golem in Jewish folklore. Each is raised into being by magic, unstoppable, on a singular mission, and nearly indestructible, and once they're let loose, they usually wind up doing as much harm to their creators as to whoever they've been set upon. Either way, though, these kinds of stories are usually told so that the reader wonders what could be causing the kind of mayhem witnessed in the story, with the clues leading us down the road toward the mummy. With The Long Night of the Grave, we already know this is going to be a mummy story, so a lot of that tension is lost on us.

Still, the story succeeds despite that, thanks again to Grant's characterization skills, and how deftly he builds the atmosphere of his story. I'm not sure I ever felt outright dread while reading, but there was definitely a general feel to the novel that supported the subject matter. Plus, I realized with this book that Grant's characters are astute, saying to us what we already knew but hadn't realized we knew.

Combining the quaint old-town sensibilities of Oxrun Station with Egyptian lore seems odd. They don't go well together, and while I understand why Grant concluded the trilogy here -- the classic Universal movie monsters were Dracula, the werewolf, Franeknstein's monster, and the mummy (and the Frankenstein monster would have been even more out of place) -- the story feels forced into the setting. Grant drops historical hints to give us a sense of the timeframe of the story, which is later than 1895, thanks to a mention of Trilby, but not later than 1897, as Grover Cleveland is still in office. This puts it far ahead of the ancient Egypt craze that took place in the 1920s, which I thought maybe could account for the oddity of the story in this particular setting, but it doesn't work out that way.

The chronology of this story follows The Soft Whisper of the Dead, though it only references characters from that book in passing. It seems unusual that Grant chose to shift the chronology around, but it seems to work well enough. I didn't like this one as much as I did the other two books in the trilogy, but that might be due to knowing less about mummies than the other horror archetypes. Regardless, anyone who read the first two should finish the series out with this one, too.

This was a valiant but flawed attempt to translate the rules-light, broken-but-playable mechanics of the original In Nomine system to the crunchy-gears GURPS system. Given that it's very easy for two starting PCs in In Nomine to vary by as much as a thousand points when you write them up as GURPS characters, it worked about as well as could be expected. I would really not recommend trying to run a GURPS In Nomine campaign; if you like the setting, use the original system. However, this book is worthwhile if you want to add In Nomine-flavored angels and demons to an existing GURPS campaign.