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.

Blitzed by Norman Ohler

 

I read this this evening after dinner. It's a short book--barely a hundred pages longer than the Scalzi I read in the coffee shop--but a dense one. It makes a convincing case that the Germany was the drug dealer to the world (at least to Europe) after World War I, and after a brief flirtation with anti-drug moralism turned that pharmaceutical expertise inward, making sure the soldiers and officers--and the high command--were suitably wired. Ohler seems to have found evidence (or be interpreting it) that indicates the Blitzkrieg, especially as applied to France, was fueled and possibly inspired by the amount of methamphetamine the Wehrmacht were consuming. He also seems at least led to believe (the record is intentionally and unintentionally sparse) that Hitler's gradual then sudden decline was fueled by the amount of drugs of all kinds that his personal physician was injecting him with; this is usually seen the other way around in histories of the Reich--that his physician was unable to prevent said decline--but Ohler seems convinced (and he is convincing) that the physician was causing it. Fortunately the nature of this kind of nonfiction book means the translator can focus more on meaning and clarity than on trying to capture some ineffable character of the prose, and the translator here did more than well enough. Interesting stuff that might long-term change some of how I think about the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht, well worth reading.

The God Engines by John Scalzi

 

I read this, this morning in a coffee shop. It's a good novella if more than a little grim, and easy to read as saying something about religion in the real world--and not really something nice. The prose is not Scalzi at his breeziest, which does fit the themes of the story. There are some interesting twists and turns in the novella, the reality of things reveals itself to the characters in the novel (at least the human ones) at roughly the same pace as it does to the reader--though I suppose some readers might twig to some things in it more quickly than I did. I've seen this around in the local libraries I spend time in, and reading it was worth the small effort to check it out and the short time it took me to read it.

The Boxcar Librarian by Brianna Labuskes

 

This is another very good novel by Ms. Labuskes, a story that gets kinda complicated but resolves nicely; her habit of writing three timelines that end up (at least mostly) coming together by the end is an effective technique, and she's always clear there are multiple timelines going on--it's not ever some lurking gotcha. The prose is solid and the characters are solid and well-complicated; the setting seems to have some basis in experience and research; the events going on around the story are gritty and real. Ms. Labuskes is clearly something of a romantic at heart, because she gives so many of the characters in her novels love-story-ish endings--that's not a complaint, it's often one of the primary tensions needing resolution. The mystery portions of the book feel pretty organic to the rest of the story, and the climax is suitably chaotic.

Blood Like Mine by Stuart Neville

 

Apparently I have read too many mediocre-at-best vampire novels lately, because this was like 350 pages of grinding on my nerves with its predictability. Someone in the blurbs mentions a twist in the middle of it that I think I saw coming at least 50 pages ahead--this is just predictable regurgitation of tropes, some vampire, some detective (there's a detective on his own downward spiral in the novel). None of the characters are particularly interesting as heroes or as villains (or as antiheros or as sympathetic villains, it's possible the novel considers itself above and/or beyond such considerations--fine, none of the characters are really interesting as characters). The prose is relatively solid, I guess, if kinda stolid and inert, which might be weirdness caused by the Irish author trying to write like an American; he mostly succeeds, the dialogue isn't horrible, the places feel as though he night have been to them a time or three. Even the twist in the epilogue is predictable. Not bad enough to force me to quit, not good enough that I don't resent that.

Foregone by Russel Banks

 

This turned out to be a stranger novel than I anticipated, not so much in any genre or genre-adjacent sense, just that it's told strangely, in a strange voice (those are not the same thing). The ... primary POV/narrator--though he's not exactly narrating in first-person--is dying imminently of cancer that is affecting his central nervous system, especially his brain (or the treatment for the cancer is doing so, the difference doesn't seem important) so his memories and thoughts and his ability to express them are all in doubt, though his sincerity and his rage at his struggle are not. The narrative starts out as a relatively straightforward and believable thing, but gradually then rapidly becomes wildly disjointed and harder to discern the truths of. The themes actually clarify, though--maybe even emerge--as the narrative fragments, and the novel has some pointed things to say about the ways people (mis)treat and (mis)use each other, and the lengths we will go to tell and hide our inner truths, and the way/s we see our lives and the duration of them and their inevitable end. It's not an easy novel, textually or thematically, but it's a strong one, and I found it well worth reading.