The Risen by Ron Rash

 

Ron Rash writing about Appalachian backcountry pain is one of the best bittersweet pleasures I find in relatively recent fiction. There's tension and sometimes agony, but often very little violence. This novel is a really good example of what Rash does really well. It has a historical thread, this time in 1969 with all the countercultural stress that comes with the time, though in a place about as connected to the rest of the US then as Mayberry. The novel has a lot to say about family--both how the elder generations abuse the younger and about the resentments and regrets of brotherhood. This is arguably another novel where someone is willing to set their family on fire rather than lose control of it, which seems a very human attitude, and sadly not uncommon., The dialogue here captures regionalism without trying to nail down accent/s, which I think it probably the way to do it, and it serves to drive the story and differentiate characters. Speaking of: The characters are all eminently believable. The pacing is quick like a knife to the ribs, and the ending is just an open space the reader can fill in or fall into, a beautiful void. Superb.

Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League et al. A Compendium of Evils by E. M. Rauch

 

Whatever magic there is in the Buckaroo Banzai movie, Rauch (one of the screenwriters) has none of it left. This is taking a charming 1980s thing and smearing it with secondhand Burroughs and Pynchon. It's utter shit, I tapped out after almost 100 pages and that was at least twice as much as I should have read.

The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones

 

This is a kinda strange little horror novel, very much a Bad Place novel--there are ghosts galore, but they're being held by the house for ... reasons, I guess--Jones never explains any of the why, which is defensible enough since all of the characters basically seem to have come to be held by the house and found it more or less as it is, without reason or explanation. It does make for a kinda unsatisfying novel, though, since the rules of reality (in the context of the novel) feel as though they're always in a state of flux. There's clearly no escape for the titular baby sitter, even though she's arguably alive, and there's not much chance for several others, either--and there are apparently going to be ramifications on the "real world" outside the house (the world in the house is arguably supposed to be real, but it always feels too dreamlike to really buy as real). It's not as though Stephen Graham Jones suddenly forgot how to write a horror novel--the writing here is mostly good--it's just that this one doesn't work as well as much of his more recent stuff. Oh, well.

Small Town Horror by Ronald Malfi

 

Well, this was a disappointingly mediocre horror novel. Read for a while like a spin on IT with less functional main characters, and a first-person POV narrator that never sat entirely right. Lots of tedious crap, lots of people (or at least the POV) refusing to believe what's right in front of them. Then there was a Sudden Reveal a bit more than three-quarters through that kinda made it OK that he died at the end. The novel comes across as though it wants to say things about parenthood, and about how motherhood is different from fatherhood, but it's not a good enough novel to carry the weight of narrative, let alone the weight of subtext. There are probably some weirdnesses here coming from so many horror novelists being so heavily influenced by slasher movies, and from my strong dislike for slasher movies; you don't even have to squint to see the lone survivor of the quintet being cursed--and the only woman--as a bit of a Final Girl. The writing musters an occasional sparkling glint, and the dialogue seems reasonably plausible; that's the extent of the good, here.

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

 

Saw someone elsewhere mention this book, and it seemed at least vaguely relevant to some of my interests; it's indeed a relevant book, though I think what the white evangelicals have done is hollow their Christianity out as much as corrupt it. Yeah, they've sold out to power for various mostly-garbage reasons, but in the process they've destroyed much of what is at the center of what they say they believe. Clearly a well-researched book, by a writer who is obviously ... distressed, I guess, by what these people are doing in the name of a religion that bears the same name as hers--and I cannot blame her for being distressed; as a former Christian I am utterly disgusted for reasons both theological and aesthetic by the vast majority of the leader-types she name-drops. As with many books like this, it's a collection of narrative and narrative threads strung together, sometimes woven, and it's barely skimming the surface of its subjects. That's not snark--the writing's messages, both textual and subtextual, are clear, and the book is informative if kinda depressing.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

 

Spent a couple-few days reading this, because my brain was a little scattered. It's Gibson and it's good, and it was an interesting read because I read the book that comes after it (Agency) before I read this, because that's the order I saw them at the library. The futures in these books are grim, like really grim--the "Jackpot" involves various climactic, ecological, and epidemiological catastrophes that end up wiping out something like eighty percent of humanity--but there's still something like hope, humanity persists and lands on a new survivable (if not entirely pleasant, the word "klept" is used for government/culture for a reason) status quo. There is much of what people her and now would describe as "abuse of power" in the novel, especially in the farther future, but that's kinda how that culture works, and it's probably one of the things some of the people in that time like least about it. Gibson's prose crackles and snarls and snaps, the dialogue is frequently hilarious in a very gallows-humor way. The story takes a bit to get going, but it does and it's very good.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

 

I find myself deeply ambivalent about this novel. Most of the first part was tedious. The bits on the way to Dunkirk and in a homefront hospital were gritty and intense and really good. To the extent the second part made the first part worth the slog, McEwan undercuts it with a metatextual rugpull at the end and into the epilogue. The novel isn't about an atonement that happens, it's about one that doesn't, one that can't--this is fine, there are things that cannot be undone, severings that cannot be mended; and the ending hits kinda hard, the rugpull stings. But it's still a rugpull, and it drags most of the novel (I'm unclear on the extent to which that sloggy first part is supposed to have been written by a character in the novel) from the realm of fiction to the realm of lies. I hate being lied to.