Trashlands by Alison Stine

 

This was really not a very good novel, clearly aiming for "kaleidoscopic" and landing on "scattershot." Way too many POVs, way too many narrative threads, way too little of anything more than the vaguest of throughlines. The setting being one in which all the environmental chickens have come home to roost, specifically on the already disadvantaged, does not make things better. Thuddingly bleak and depressing, to put it kinda mildly. On the micro-level, the prose, the dialogue and all-a-that, it's not bad, though there's not much sparkle or joy to the prose (arguably, given the setting and the thuddingly bleak and depressing overall tone, sparkle and/or joy would be out of place). I see the author has won a Philip K. Dick award for another novel: Given his glaring flaws as a novelist, one should probably take any award named for him with some skepticism. I kept wanting to tap out of this novel, but I figured maybe it would go somewhere, do something, that would be worth the while. It never did.

Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams

 

This is an interesting little novel, more literary than anything else--at least as I see it--though there's definitely some SF-adjacent premise that needs swallowed before you'll enjoy the novel. Heck, probably before the novel would even make sense. The novel is structured a little weird, with pretty distinct individual story arcs that mostly resolve in sequence, though there are some throughlines, and there is some sense that the sequence of resolutions is necessary. There are some pretty strong messages percolating up from the subtext, about tech and business and art and happiness and conformity. There's probably something about all the lies we tell ourselves, or at least allow ourselves to believe, wrapped up in something that smells strongly like the placebo effect. The prose is smooth and practically invisible, the characters are remarkably well-defined, though some might be more reliable than others (I don't get the feeling any of them is wildly unreliable, but it's always worth remembering--especially in something that bends at least a little literary--that the characters might not be telling what's actually happening around them). I grabbed it in spite of some skepticism, and I'm glad I did, there's a lot to like, here.

When These Mountains Burn by David Joy

 

Grabbed this from the library when I saw it, because I'm basically in some kind of love with David Joy's writing, and oh my gawds this is a brutal and beautiful novel. It's at least a little more hopeful than Where All Light Tends to Go, the ending turns almost elegiac, just the last handful of paragraphs as one of the POV characters is pondering the differences between the mountain life he was born into and the mountain life he's going to be leaving behind. Joy writes with belief and empathy and his prose is sweet like blood, his characters make choices they know are bad and they still often aren't prepared for how bad things will get, how heavy the consequences will be for their actions; he never shies away from telling their truths, from showing their pain. His novels are strong stuff, but they're worth it.

Erasure by Percival Everett

 

This turned out to be a more complicated novel than James was, at least in some ways. Some of that might have been the explicit intellectualism of the narrator, some might have been the insertion of another (much shorter) novel inside it--one probably too short to play as a novel for real, but enough to serve the larger purposes. The story is ... more nuanced than the cover copy, or reviews of the movie made from it, might lead you to believe. The language is well handled, both in the narrator's own voice (so to speak) and in the thing he writes out of some combination of rage and self-sabotage and desperation and pain; the characters all seem very much themselves, with the exception of the character who's slipping into dementia. The novel has a lot to say about a lot of things, identity (both in the sense of racial and in the sense of self) is the primary one, though there's clearly some amount of poking at the literary establishment of the late-1990s, when this was almost certainly written (publishing date of 2001). It's a pretty strong novel, though I can't pretend to understand the vast majority of what the narrator was writing about when he wasn't, erm, narrating.

We Ate the Dark by Mallory Pearson

 

It became clear within the first fifty pages that this was a novel about a bunch of Appalachian witches dealing with a murder and the Powers behind it. I kept reading anyway, and I really regret that choice. It's murky and muddled and the characters are barely distinct from each other and at the end the putatively good characters seem to have sacrificed another world and all the people on it. I wish it hadn't taken over four hundred pages to get to that ending. The fact the author seems to have at least occasionally reached for heightened prose and basically ... failed to get there did not improve things.

Long Haul by Frank Figliuzzi

 

Grabbed this little nonfiction book somewhere while we were on vacation a couple of months ago, it's a reasonably well-written book about what being a long-haul trucker is like, and what parts of their job and work environment play the largest parts in why some small number of them end up being murderers (and some smallish percentage of them end up being serial killers, as that term is defined in mainstream culture, which is different than its meaning in law enforcement) There are interspersed sections from the POV of former sex workers, and from law enforcement and social workers who are working to get those who are victims (most of them, as the author sees things, and I'm not inclined to argue) out of the life, as well as bits relating fragments of various investigations into murders committed by truckers. While the book is reasonably informative and well-written, it seems like 250-ish pages that could boil down to this: Serial killers have always been able to do more killing if they've been able to move around, and serial killers have always been able to get away with killing sex workers because in many places and many times they're women who won't be missed; given that trucking combines mobility with access to sex workers (at truck stops seems to be fading, but there's still a culture around the business) it's not at all surprising that long-haul trucker is a job that some serial killers would find attractive and appealing.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

 

I grabbed this because the idea of a novel about a protopunk band threatening a reunion seemed interesting to me. I wouldn't say there's nothing interesting in this, but I liked the novel a good deal less than I hoped. It's basically (mostly) the same story as any band that struggles and kinda makes it before the members come to kinda loathe each other. Also, the main story is the narrator (who's a fictional editor at a fictional music magazine working on a fictional book about the fictional band) working to forgive the Other Woman in her parents' marriage, and also probably her father, who died before she was born. It's plausible Ms. Walton knows this, but it's kinda buried under all the pseudo documentation. Because the text is mostly in the form of interviews (interspersed with the narrator's notes) the novel struggles of course to be kaleidoscopic rather than scrambled; it lands somewhere in the vast middle ground, there. The characters are reasonably clear, even if many of them are types someone with a knowledge of rock and pop history will recognize. The novel has things it wants to say about racism and sexism, both in culture overall and in the entertainment biz (at least the music division) and one of the reasons I was so disappointed was that I agree with those things, I just don't think the novel really did a good job of saying them--which probably connects to the fact I didn't think it did a great job of telling its story.