I Will Ruin You by Linwood Barclay

 

Tapped out of this one before getting a hundred pages in. Going for kaleidoscopic and failing by a wide margin, lots of uninteresting--some of them really fucking dim, even ones I don't think were supposed to be--POV-ish characters. Clearly something big and squidlike was going on in the local underworld, but I wasn't buying any of how it was manifesting in the putative main's life. That's another author I'm done with, I'm afraid.

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

 

I went into this novel with something like high hopes, and they more or less did not come to pass. The novel is cluttered and crowded, muddled and kinda muffled, and manages to feature both vague Lovecraftiana and incompetent (or at least out-of-their-league) criminals, two of (at the moment) my least favorite things. The characters all kinda blur together, and there's stuff going on that wraps up in like a last-minute rugpull. It's clear Igleasias holds Puerto Rico dear, which is about the only really good thing I can say about it.

Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen

 

When one sees a Hiaasen from the mid-late 1980s in the library, one checks it out. Obviously this is really early Hiaasen, but it's really goofy and really off the chain in ways he kinda got away from for a while, with less in the way of his current satirical inclinations. I suspect that if one knew Florida history well enough, one might be able to unpick some elements of reality from Skink's story--this is a really early version of Skink and might be the beginning of the character--but that's less relevant than it might seem. The characters kinda loop and swirl their way through the story, I guess it's possible there's at least a little punching-down at televangelists and their flocks, and at pro fishermen and their audience, but given Hiaasen's feelings about Florida and the environment and the fact that both the above are hip-deep in bad development (evergreen Florida, there) I think it's pretty easy to tell where the ire is really directed. Really funny and fast-paced and a great read, if not particularly great literature (or even intended to be).

Saints at the River by Ron Rash

 This novel starts with a heartbreak, and it doesn't get much easier. The people in it are almost all hurting, or soon will be, and Rash draws their suffering through a flame like a silver thread, and he weaves beauty. I was underwhelmed by another of his novels, but I'm glad I gave this novel a chance, it's beautiful and stark and craggy like the Carolina mountains it's set in. What peace or hope emerge are rooted in sorrow and pain, and they feel more precious for it; what answers there are neither simple nor easy. The characters are all well laid out and laid bare, the prose is solid, the ear for dialogue seems spot-on and manages to capture some regionalism without trying to capture dialect--there aren't cute improper words or grammar, here, just some phrasings.

Firewatching by Russ Thomas

 

I read this last night and kinda forgot to post about it. Oops. It's a decent enough procedural, I guess, lots of emphasis on LGBT+ characters and issues, which is fine, but there's some muddle through most of the novel that mostly arises from the decision to have a POV character suffering from pretty severe dementia, which makes her hard to trust ... and then she apparently turns out to have important information--not that "procedural" has all that much in common with "fair play," of course. The characters are often kinda murky, mostly because the author is doing slow reveals, there are really important things that come up kinda late in the novel. There are some dynamics between the characters that feel as though the author might intend or expect to write more novels around them, and he's welcome to but I won't be reading them. This wasn't anything like a good enough novel that I want to read more.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

 

Uh, holy fucking shit, y'all. It's a time-loop novel that actually works for me, and it's fucking beautiful, it took me a moment to remember to breathe. There are moments that feel like having your heart ripped out, but it's not a downbeat novel at all, it's a novel about how love is worth fighting for, worth dying (repeatedly) for; it's a novel about hope and how it can be armor. There aren't many authors who do slow-burn romance the way Harrow does, integral to everything else but no more dominant than it needs to be. Even the villain is more ambitious than anything else, at least at the core (the complete ruthlessness, the dehumanizing of enemies and allies, that stuff is built on the ruthlessness' foundation). The prose shifts registers amazingly well, the more everyday language of the story and the slightly heightened prose of the chronicler, the POV characters talking so much about what the other does is handled gracefully. This doesn't start quite so rough-and-slow as some of Harrow's other novels, probably because the loop thing keeps at least some parts of the novel's story kinda short.

A happily-ever-after only lasts as long as you're willing to fight for it.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

 

Weekend Reading Project: Completed. I didn't realize Joe Hill had gone a decade without any other novels--there've been other projects, and he's apparently taken to writing books with the approximate dimensions of bricks. This is a superb novel, well worth the wait. It's nearly 900 pages, but it's not bloated, it doesn't feel badly-paced, even a little. The narrative voice (and the ear for dialogue) are both nicely wickedly funny, sometimes while being gleefully gruesome--turns out, he is his father's son. Don't worry about that blurb on the front: It's not a fable, that author's a bit of a hack but she's popular. There probably are some thematic things going on in the subtext, things about power and corruption and what exactly heroism is, and about what sacrifices might be worth making, but they're well-contained and the story runs rampant over them all, complete with at least three references to Stephen King's books (possibly more, but I'm much less familiar with his 21st-Century books). If this novel's size doesn't intimidate you, I highly recommend it.