The Caretaker by Ron Rash

 

Yet another relatively skinny novel, yet another stunningly dense narrative. Impressively well-constructed and well-told, a story about a family that is so unwilling to live with their son's choices that they're willing to set their relationship with him on fire. Well, to be fair, their actions had a fuse of indefinite length, but the outcomes of the parents' choices were inevitable almost the instant their plans started taking narrative shape. A less violent novel than I would have expected, just the two instances of real violence, one an act of war and the other years' worth of enough paying off in a billiards hall. The prose hums like a live wire, the dialogue carries weight like a locomotive. Really a superb novel.

The Lonely Witness by William Boyle

 

This is a skinny little novel, but it's impressively dense, and remarkably relaxed about its pacing; things take some page-time to happen, more than you might think given there aren't much more than 250 pages. The prose scintillates, but the narrative threads seem to pull in an awful lot of directions at once, the POV character does a lot but spends most of the novel something less than entirely clear why she's doing it, mostly not even thinking about any actual intended aim. None of the people in this novel are exactly exemplars of superb mental health, probably because they're in what still exists of New York's underbelly, in places where gentrification can't even imagine going, and they're doing what they can to get by, and what they can do isn't always a lot, it's rarely more than barely enough. There are a lot of background characters in the novel that kinda run together, but that's reasonably explained as just having so little in common with the POV character or the people she prefers to hang around with. It eventually gets to a place that's worth the slim going, and it wasn't an unpleasant journey, it just felt a little rudderless through parts of the middle.

The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester

 

I've read a few other of Winchester's books about natural (mostly geological) things in the past, and I have enough brainspace dedicated to weather and such stuff that I figured this would be worth reading. It is emphatically worth reading. Winchester has a lot in common with Mary Roach, not least in his occasional discursiveness, at least in this book, where he's writing more about concepts and some thumbnail events to illustrated them for the interested (and perhaps somewhat knowledgeable) layman--something like his books on Krakatoa or the San Francisco earthquake can get more detailed about more singular events, which is a different sort of book. His prose is solid, rising to come impressive occasional heights, though his voice remains thoroughly British. The choice to structure the book to parallel the Beaufort Wind Scale is particularly clever, lets him work from winds people barely notice to winds that are impossible to ignore. Really readable and packed with information.

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikivsky.

 

Well, this is a hilarious and grim SF novel. Plausibly a little hope at the end, but only after things have been shown to be utterly and completely fucked. At this point there've been enough stories told from the POV of robotic protagonists that Tchaikovsky isn't breaking a tun of new ground with that, though his depiction covers much of what makes the character tick; In some ways it's a different way to invert *Huckleberry Finn* than Everett took, to make the escaped (or "escaped") slave also the naif, which isn't to say that was entirely intentional, just that it's kinda there. The writing here is mostly deft, lots of sharp turns of phrase and some interesting ways the robots in the setting communicate with each other--or at least how that communication is phrased. The characters here are mostly distinct, though there are really only a very small number of throughgoing ones. The story does kinda slog through the third quarter, but it wraps up pretty well. I hadn't read any Tchaikovsky before, he tends to write trilogies at least, I think, and those aren't super easy to find at the library as a bolus; I might look for something, though, this was interesting and fun.

The Boundaries We Cross by Brad Parks

 

This is a competently-written thriller that hits harder than it probably should, given that it kinda seems as though it's built around the sort of coyly lying narrator that's become popular, lately. That impression is at least mostly wrong: The narrator is deeply unreliable, but he's not at all coy--there are other dynamics at work, here. The novel also has the stuff going on with the thirties-aged male instructor maybe/maybe-not boinking one of his attractive teenaged students, and there are of course unfoldings around and about that, that would probably come off badly in a less-well-written thriller novel. The POV narrator isn't especially likeable at first, but he does get better, some of the unfoldings do a real beat-down on his ego and/or self-image. The other characters do not all come off super-interesting or nice, but a lot of that might be the various accruals of privilege so many of them have. I kept almost putting this down for the first half or so of it, but the back half made that mostly worth the going.

This Train by James Grady

This is not as bad a novel as last night's novel, but it's not very good, either. It's dominated by a voice almost as affected as late-stage Elmore Leonard, it feels as though the author was more concerned with the voice than with actual, you know, writing: it judders and stop-starts and rings false and hollow every time it tries to slip inside someone's head--and it tries to slip inside practically everyone's head who's on the fricking train--because the voice does not put words together in a way at all like how people put words together as they speak. The dialogue is mostly in that authorial voice, so it likewise rings false and hollow. There are occasional moments of like authorial insight, but they are quickly and inevitably subsumed into the voice. The story is a pretty basic heist--shockingly, on a train--with some honor-among-thieves stuff especially toward the end; there might be interesting stuff going on with that story, but (say it with me!) it's buried under and subsumed by that immensely annoying, gruesomely affected authorial voice.
 

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman

 Wow this was a bad and unintelligent and entirely unsubtle novel. Demonic possession by way of a cheap Fox News knockoff--but somehow laden with bothsidesism, especially toward the end. Lots of graphic and gruesome violence that somehow ended up not really mattering, and a bunch of characters who were all various shades of implausibly unlikeable. The prose is pretty readable, all in all, at least when Chapman isn't trying to do some nation-scale apocalyptic riff on "all work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy." (The King rips are fricking blatant here, y'all, and really not at all well done.) I'd read another novel that seemed kinda mediocre but this one was outright a waste of my evening, which I just kept reading out of a kinda bloody-minded masochism (or maybe optimism) I guess, and I resent the book and I kinda hate myself.