Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

 I've known for a while that Robbins was like a foundational influence on especially Christopher Moore but also Carl Hiaasen and likely John Scalzi, so I figured I'd finally get around to reading this book of his, which we had on our shelves. Reading it, a large part of where Moore comes from with his prose is clear--and his occasionally goody lewdness, though Hiaasen also has this in spades--and Scalzi seems to have some of it, but I get the sense he might have come to Robbins via at least one other writer (I have know idea who) under the Tom Robbins Influence. The prose has a strong whiff of baked to it, hallucinogenic and loopy and looping, routinely funny but also making strong points, sharply. The story is somewhere in that space between kaleidoscopic and fragmented, with what seems at first like a lot of POVs but which really comes mostly to like three or four; cause and effect sometimes seem at most loosely connected, the novel holds together mostly by an act of authorial will. I could honestly have done without the Von Däniken stuff, but the novel was written in the late 1970s, there are some things that were just going to happen; some of the countercultural-ish messages have likewise failed to age well. There's some didacticism at the end (in the epilogue especially) that leads me to think this is mostly intended as something like a satire, though forty-six years after its publication much of what it's satirizing seems unrecognizable (though not all). It's a readable and enjoyable novel, even if it is very much stuck in its own 1980.

The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

 

This is a kinda neat little mystery novel, with just a touch of weird in the premise. Plays mostly fair--the POV character, a first-person narrator, has some apparently wrong ideas about the sequences of events. It's one of those novels laden with mostly despicable people, if I were the narrator I'd want to be completely shut of the family; but he's a better person than I am, he works to prevent his grandfather from dying. The characters are moderately distinct, you get some sense eventually for who's who and what's what, but it takes several times through the loop before you get all that worked out (at least, it was several times through the loop before I did, I found all the names and characteristics kinda confusing, but I might be an idiot). This is definitely an unhappily unique unhappy family, but the prose--at least the translation I read--was breezy enough to make it a reasonably pleasant read.

Last Call by Daniel Okrent

 Spent a couple of days reading this, it's a kinda long, kinda dense book, and my life took a turn toward the weird. It's an informative book, laden with all kinds of juicy ironies about the rise and almost immediate fall of Prohibition. There are hypocrisies galore. Also some of the ideas people had about how to enforce the 18th Amendment remind me of the last czars, who couldn't have done more to ensure the coming of the Revolution to Russia if they'd tried--some of the ideas that floated around in the Hoover presidency were similarly working against their own stated aims. As with any more or less pop history book, it's kinda a collection of vignettes and short arcs tied together like beads on parallel strings; this is not snark or complaint. I don't know how much is going to stick, it's not a field I have a ton of prior focus on, but it held my interest more than well enough while I was reading it.

Horseman by Christina Henry

 

It has been too long since I've read a good horror novel. (April, and it was another book by Christina Henry. I might need to dig more into horror and try to find more authors I enjoy.) I don't know if the author and/or publisher would exactly call this "horror," but I'm content in the judgement, even if I just just dropped this book into the to-read pile of someone who's pretty explicitly not a horror fan, because I'm sure she'll see the beauty in it, most horror doesn't make my eyes burn the way this novel did. Ms. Henry writes with strength and grace, her world (all her worlds, really) feels real and lived in, her characters feel like people; the bad things that happen to them feel like fate or bad luck or sometimes justice. This book reminded me why I love horror so.

Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang

 

This novel looks on the surface very like a pretty classic English-country-village murder mystery, but you don't need to look very hard to see that it's a novel with very modern things to say. There are a lot of things about classism and eugenics and a marital situation that'd make Charlotte Perkins Gilman nod in recognition, and probably some interesting subtextual stuff about colonialism (though that's getting deeply granular and might not be entirely intended). Alas, it starts really, really slowly: The novel is well past halfway before the various elements and gears start to mesh and the story starts to move. The resolution is reasonably well-thought-through, and frankly less aggravating than many of the classics of the genre; I was able to put most of the bits together before they were revealed, and at least most of the larger plot, as well. The prose is reasonably solid, with some nifty chuckle-worthy turns of phrase popping up, the characters are mostly reasonably well-distinguished, the villain of the piece is truly abominable. Not great, but never really so bad I seriously thought about stopping.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

(Super-shiny library binding in weird light.) I've mentioned before that Book One of a long/indefinite series--not like a planned trilogy or anything--is often a really good read, all sort of introducing people and things that sorta become the status quo for later books, the situation that leads to the continuing story tends to be a good one. Sometimes, if an author decides to wrap up a series, that book is at least as good an idea to track down--it's all the resolutions that have been spinning like plates finally falling to the ground. I don't know the rest of Lehane's detective stories, this is the only one of these I've seen in the libraries I've been in, but there's something like a detective career's worth of stuff coming down, here. Clearly a finale, and kinda a grand one. Lehane's prose in this novel sparkles with wit and life, the characters are all remarkably well-defined, the story is clear and well-paced. Really good.
 

Nowhere by Allison Gunn

 

This was for a book club that I will not be going to. It's not often that one reads a book that is so boring and so unsubtle at the same time--the thematic stuff was making noise like a chainsaw early on. I don't need to read another horror novel about conformity, let alone one with no interesting characters that (I'd be willing to bet) get picked off and assimilated one by miserable one. So I noped out after just over a hundred pages.