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.

The Good Killer by Harry Dolan

 

This wasn't as persistently funny a novel as last night's read, but I think it was probably better--it certainly was very much more in the inner ring of my personal tastes, anyway; Dolan's a writer I really like a lot, and this is him at or very near his peak (at least that I've read). It's a pretty realistic thriller, as thrillers go, the mains (and most of the rest of the characters, for that matter) are all the best at what they do, by any means, though some of them are very good, or at least have the right skills and knowledge for the situations they find themselves in. It's violent, especially at the end it's really fricking violent, but it never revels in that. There's all kinds of tension in the novel, from really early on if you read the cover copy and know the novel's basic premise/s. That tension never lets up until the end, as action and consequence and cause and effect impel things toward that bloody end. It's a pretty moral novel, though--the good characters get at least mostly the good endings, the bad ones get the bad ones. Though one does suspect that some of the characters might have suffered some career setbacks after the events. Dolan writes crisp prose that stretches taut like a high wire, and his characters all feel human, even the ones you find yourself rooting against.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

 

This was a fun read, crackling with energy and anger and humor. It's an inverted supers story, where the "supervillains" are at least less dangerous and damaging than (most) "superheroes," but doesn't read to me as any sort of takedown of the genre or anything so much as riffing on some (or a lot) of the tropes, looking at things from a different angle. It *might* be leveling at least some snark on a certain category of supers movie that features all sort of collateral damage. Also at America's "health care system" and possibly at corporate life in general. The characters here are mostly believable, the dialogue tends to sparkle and zing, the prose snaps and dances. There are some minor weirdnesses in the story--at least one bit of "skip ahead and backfill the gaps" that doesn't work as well as it could have--but there aren't really any dead spots pacing-wise.

You Know What You Did by K. T. Nguyen

 

This is not a particularly good book. The POV character--there's really just the one until the very end--is struggling so hard with mental illness that it's impossible to take any of her reported perceptions exactly literally, she's not primarily delusional but her perceptions are violently skewed. The novel takes like 170 of like 350 pages to get to what's arguably the inciting event, though there's a plausible reading it's not. It jumps around in time between at least three timelines, with some of those juddering and skipping between present and past. The characters aren't all that interesting or likeable, most of them seem really shallow and one-note. The prose is pretty solid; that and the fact that it's not endless twists (there's just the one and it mainly works because the POV is so limited) are the extent of the good I can muster, here. The author is clearly coming from a place of pain and writing about things very important to her, but much of this is just a jumbled scream.