Mary by Nat Cassidy

 

This is not a particularly bad novel, but it's not really a very good one, either. There's a blurb on the back that compares the main to Delores Claiborne but the King female character that persistently came to mind was Annie Wilkes--and the novel is mostly (except for some vaguely epistolary stuff at the end that feels more like an homage to Carrie than anything else) told from the main's first-person POV. The first ... 250 pages or so of this 400-ish page novel are bordering on fricking tedious, even as it becomes clearer that the main is a nutter (probably a nutter with some supernatural stuff going on, but a nutter). Yes, the novel has lots to say about how women are seen--or often not--especially as they get to middle age and beyond, and it's practically shaking with (justified) feminist rage; as has often happened lately when I've read (especially horror) fiction that wanted to have a Point, the author has forgotten that the story has to carry the weight of the subtext, not the other way around. As with much more-current horror, there's some confusion and/or conflation between monster/villain and hero, which leaves the novel without much of a leg to stand on when it comes time to take a moral position (and horror especially must take a moral position). The prose is relatively solid, I guess, neither jarring or really anything to write home about--Cassidy might be aiming at "invisible prose," which is a reasonable enough thing, but in the absence of a good story it leaves the reader without a lot of pleasure to take from the book. But it was not so bad I couldn't bring myself to finish it, which is something for me and current horror, these days.

Forever and a Death by Donald E. Westlake

 

A suitably pulpy cover for a book by one of the grandmasters of pulp action/mystery/thriller novels. Apparently derived from a treatment Westlake wrote for a Bond movie--which is believable, though this is not a Bond story, the putative main kinda disappears through the middle then turns into one of an ensemble. There are side characters who die brutal, sudden, arguably undeserved deaths; there's a remarkably brave and competent young woman who almost dies like twice (and serves as a kinda understated love interest in her spare time); there are lots of characters who aren't straight white guys doing pretty impressive things, sometimes at least bordering on the heroic; there's a villain who's willing to cause millions of deaths (including some of his co-conspirators, because villain) in order to empty some bank vaults, who gets a marvelously apt death. The prose snaps, the dialogue is convincing, the plot is ... well, it maunders a little bit, but it gets where it needs to go and even some of its side journeys are more than reasonably pleasant (oh, the joys of free-writing). It's really hard to find Westlake's older books in hardcopy, but I'll keep trying.

Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

 

These days, Nick Harkaway is filling in blank spaces in his dad's ouevre, but dude's got some game of his own--I'm sure he finds what he's doing now much more remunerative, and that's not a thing I'm going to snark on, but I do wish he would chase his own muses still. This book is a really taut noirish SF novel that doesn't have even a whiff of cyberpunk about it (well, maybe the occasionally lethal corporate maneuvering ...) that basically treats the Sf aspects as facts of the world, there's no worldbuilding as such deployed; the blurb on the front cover from Gibson seems amazingly apt, in that and several other ways, now that I think about it. The prose has some terse dry British humor (shocking given the author is a Brit) but there's a distinct snarl deployed as needed; the characters are really pretty spot-on without any real caricature; the pacing and plot are practically taut enough for a highwire act. Really, really good, and I'll definitely be looking for more of his own novels.

The Drop by Dennis Lehane

 

A pretty good little novel, barely 200 pages, but dense and tangled. Lots of characters with hidden depths and other sorts of secrets, which works in this novel because Lehane spends the whole time in various degrees of tight third-person--there's no sense of a character either actively lying or carefully not thinking about whatever secrets the author wants to hold onto as long as possible. The underbelly of Boston Lehane describes feels plausibly right, at least from the POV of the characters in the novel. It's a novel about change in a lot of ways, but most of the character-change in it is death, the city and its underbelly just persist in churning. Witty and clever but eventually kinda grim.

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

 

This is listed as a novel but it's really more like three sequential novellas, the time skips between them make it hard for me to pitch this thing as a really cohesive novel. The novellas are really, really good, and there are things about Harlem and the Black experience there (and arguably elsewhere in America, though NYC is very much the focus). I'm not a huge fan of stories about low-level crooks way out of their criminal depth, and that's kinda what these novellas all are--though to be fair it's the main's cousin who keeps doing the really ill-considered things. While Harlem is the canvas for this novel and street-level crime is the paint, I think family is really the main subject, here: Not only is the main doing progressively more desperate things to try to protect his cousin, he's also working to make a life for his family as the neighborhoods he knows are basically ripped out from under him (and of course as much of the legal and social and governmental structure is substantially tilted against him). Obviously the racism of that parenthetical is also an important layer of what's going on, here, and it's both personal and systemic. Whitehead's actual writing is a joy, his voice dances and sings and growls and screams as needed. I am really happy to have read this book.

The Fold by Peter Clines

 

This is a thriller novel at its heart, though it does have a strong whiff of SF about it--more even than most technothrillers, which this really mostly isn't. The science here is whack enough that I'm inclined to call this more like SF-flavored Fantasy, but I'm not sure trying to nail genre down so hard is particularly helpful. The main character is a weird genius with a functionally eidetic memory; he's arguably a freak, but Clines does a pretty decent job of humanizing him. The writing here is solid, the prose sparkles and shines and has some nifty and amusing turns of phrase; the pacing of the story is pretty taut and the the characters all feel remarkably plausible (even the freakish main). It's a bit jarring to jump to a new POV for the first time somewhere in the last fifth of the novel, that's a choice I'm not sure I like, but I guess Clines needed to show some things he couldn't any other way, it doesn't break the flow of the novel too badly. There's a biggish reveal about two-thirds of the way through that's pretty well-foreshadowed, but no stupid twists. Second good novel I've read from Clines, I'm not interested in his series for my own reasons, but I'll see if I can't find more of his standalones. (This ends as though he was thinking about writing more with some of the characters, but I don't think he ever did.)

Playworld by Adam Ross

 

Started this yesterday in a coffeeshop, finished it tonight--last night ended up being unexpectedly social. It's ... really not a horrible book: The prose itself is solid; the characters all feel plausible, even if some are kinda obvious to the point of cliche, the fact the novel's set in like 1980s makes it reasonable for the characters in the novel, including the first-person POV, not to figure out what's going on with them; the place and time feel right, consistent with my memories of at least the latter. There's plenty of wit and sparkle in the writing, and humor and joy--as well as grit and grime and teenagers (and the adults they're still depending on) behaving badly. The story, though (and given that it seems like an intentional bildungsroman, "story" is probably not the primary goal) is kinda bland, fragmented (picaresque seems also intentional, maybe connected to the bildungsroman thing) and mostly doesn't so much resolve as just stop. Given that the novel is like 500 pages, that's a lot of reading for so little real impact, it goes a long way to make a very small point.