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.

Trust No One by Paul Cleave

 

This turned out to be a reasonably engaging thriller, if not a particularly believable one, there are things going on as it unwinds that just fail plausibility checks in ways that at least make the willful suspension of disbelief more difficult. The main character is a guy with early-onset rapidly-progressing Alzheimer's, which is reasonably fine, and the tension in the novel is whether he's really the killer he (sometimes) remembers being, but the ways that tension is resolved just seem like not things that happen, and some of the characters end up doing some pretty dramatic heel-turns. The narrator here is, of course, amazingly unreliable, and it's a credit to the author that I didn't simply spit the bit and stop reading--the voice is nicely tuned and the phrases run to the brilliantly turned--but the premise just kept me from trying to figure out what was really going on, as the twists just kept folding in on themselves until the ending kinda imploded.

The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon

 

This is ... not exactly narrative non-fiction, but there's a strong whiff of memoir to it--probably stronger than Lennon intended, but he's all over the book as a character, even though his crime is arguably less-examined than the other three. The book seems from the cover copy, and sometimes feels reading it as though it wants to be, a critique of true crime as a genre; but while it pokes some holes, it's really not exactly a takedown, at least most of the foibles Lennon aims at are ones I'm at least aware of. Three of the four killers here are not the sort who'd normally be profiled in some true crime book or show--there's the gay man who killed and dismembered his (arguably abusive) sugar daddy; the mentally ill Black man who took part in the murders of two priests; and the White drug dealer who killed someone who (he thought) was looking for an angle to take over his (possibly metaphysical) turf. Of course, the fourth one is a guy whose case broke big in the 1980s and has been occasionally reexamined over the past decade--part of the book's thesis is that there are only so many straight white people killing each other, and true crime is needing to reach out to find new stories, there's only so much reexamination the old stories will bear. Because the author is in prison--and all the other guys at least were when he spoke to them--there's also a fair amount about what prison life is like. Honestly, it probably says more about mass incarceration, the effects of the gutting of public mental health, the blowback effects of stripping education and other self-improvement programs out of prisons, and other aspects of the American (or at least New York's) criminal justice system, than it does really about true crime. It's a solid and interesting read, if not really a happy one.

Please Join Us by Catherine McKenzie

 

This is a reasonably effective legal thriller (it's written by a former practicing lawyer, and it's steeped in legal and legalistic processes, it's a legal thriller regardless of whether the publisher bothers to call it one) that also has things to say about feminism and women's friendships and cults and hero-worship and family; the story is sturdy enough to carry much of that, though the cultish aspects of the sisterhood group in it are really obvious, as is the fact there's a larger plan at play. The story starts off in two timelines, more or less, but it's persistently clear about when you are, and you're always in the head of one (first-person) narrator. Many of the characters end up being really murky, because many of them are lying from the first time you see them and don't stop, which does sometimes make it a little hard to tell what's going on, but things do resolve pretty clearly, with a hint that at least some things will go better, that the good guys have won (and the protagonist--that first-person narrator--is very much a good-guy, as are some small number of other characters).