Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

 

I'm sure it's a shock that I loved this book. I hadn't read any Lehane before this other than the short story "Until Gwen," but he does have a reputation. Grim and grimy and gritty and dark, a novel of pain and vengeance with just a little hope. Appropriately, brutally violent. Amazing use of language throughout, along with witty, quippy, crackling dialogue that had me simultaneously cringing and laughing out loud. I expect I'm going to be reading more Lehane in the nearish future.

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart

 

So after not one but two recommendations, I have read this book. While in many ways the ancient China of the novel is dated, it was clearly written with deep love for the culture and its folklore (and arguably the folklore and fiction of other places--it can't be an accident that Key Rabbit repeatedly says, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear," and I spotted Russian folklore in the person of Koshchei) with just a touch of modern flippancy. The characters are tidily drawn, and the story unfolds cleanly if not always expectedly.

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

 

I've been a fan of Dan Simmons since way back, and "real-world author as novel character" is a thing he's done with some regularity--I can without struggling think of Clemens and Hemingway, and now James (not counting some of the others in James' social circle who also appear in this novel). Some of his other recentish themes are threaded in this book, but I suspect the greater interest for most people would be his take on Sherlock Holmes. The novel plays more like a modern-day thriller than anything explicitly supernatural (certain occurrences at the Columbian Exposition excepted) just set in 1893. Pretty much any writer in this novel (and Doyle is in this novel, if only because his most famous character is) gets roasted in this novel--including arguably Simmons. A good novel, I think, by someone who's been doing it for a long time.

Auē by Becky Manawatu

 

This book plays in a lot of the same thematic territory as a lot of S.A. Cosby's work: a racial-minority underclass dealing with the lingering ongoing effects of being brutalized, vengeance and pain, tradition, criminality. There are real differences, of course, between the Māori and their experiences, and Black Americans and theirs, and those differences are also clear in the reading. *Auē* is in many ways a more heart-breaking novel than what I've read of Cosby's, the non-linearity at play here turns at least part of the story tragic, a future you can't see coming, can't watch, can't look away from. Good, strong, difficult stuff.

The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

 

This novel won the first ever Hugo for Best Novel, and I understand why. Oh gawds I understand why. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun. Yeah, some of the psychology central to events is just a bit outdated, and there are ways in which society has evolved so as to make Bester's future more implausible than improbable, no matter. There are layers and layers here, and an homage to myth (spoilered on the back of my copy). The characters and their relationships are remarkably believable. There has been joy. There will be joy again.

The Manual of Detection by Jedidiah Berry

 

This could have been an interesting novel: a mystery where the detective needs to pursue an antagonist through the dreams of a sleeping city. This is not a very interesting novel. It's overcomplicated, laden with unnecessary twists and turns and layers, redolent with the sense the author isn't entirely clear on the what is what in the novel he's writing. Maybe if the author had more of a sense of how mystery novels worked, or was more willing to engage (not necessarily play by) those rules or expectations. I'm sure Berry wanted to say something about dreams and freedom and freewill and control, but he really doesn't seem here to have had the requisite skill to do what he wants to do.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

 

I have been enlightened, I see was at least some of the fuss is about. Twisty as its reputation (and yeah, the chauffeur ...) but what really makes the novel work is the combination of Chandler's somewhat heightened language and Marlowe's attitude (which might well be Chandler's from what I know of his biography). It's not a perfect novel (that chauffeur ...) but it is a very, very good one--deep in the foundational structure of Noir and other related Twentieth Century genre fiction.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

 

So this reads kinda like a cozy mystery, which is a (sub)genre I jovially detest, but there's a strong whiff of something elegiac to it, and some undeniable charm. The idea that there are people in this retirement community with secrets and pasts and secret pasts is ... carried off well, as is whatever is going on with the actual police officers in the novel. There's more to it than this single novel, of course it's kicking off a series, and with all the people always coming in to the community it's easier to see this failing to unsuspend someone's disbelief than some series set in a village with a population of fifty-three people and twenty-two hundred sheep. I have no need to read more, but this was a reasonably pleasant read on an evening when my other plans fell through.

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

 

Huh. A pretty straightforward story of revenge, with a moderately unreliable narrator, or a story of utter madness. I'm not sure Ms. Tokarczuk knows, either. The prose has an intentionally archaic vibe, sorta like in Piranesi, but much more deranged. I twigged to what's maybe the big twist about two-thirds through, it wasn't clever when Dame Agatha did it, either. Add an ending where characters behave in ways truer to the author than themselves. Yeah, call me underwhelmed, another novel that doesn't live up to its title.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

 

This is a relatively slim novel, but stunningly complex. The earlier chapters sort of reassemble themselves and change as you read later ones. The prose is remarkably clear and readable, even if it--at least at the start--has a distinctly archaic tang to it. A really strange fantasy novel, adjacent to the real world. Interesting thematic concerns including the natures of reality and identity. Borrowed this from a friend, who I hope will be able to muster the energy to read through it (I ... lost where the bookmark was, sorry ...)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

I read this book like thirty years ago (ack!) when I was in college, and I remembered liking it, and when my wife picked it as a classic-ish literary novel, I figured I'd read it while we had a copy in the house. It's ... maybe better than I remembered, even if there aren't a lot of particularly sympathetic characters. There are some strong thematic concerns here, more than I can enumerate or name, obsession and social strata and all-a-that, and probably more. The language in the novel--the prose--is something to sink your teeth into. I can definitely see why people get pulled into this novel repeatedly. It's a shame that so many people are exposed to it in school, have it crammed down their gullets, learn to hate it while it lies dead and quivering on the lepidopterist's pins; it deserves better treatment than that.

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

 

Grady Hendrix has a reputation for writing funny Horror novels, but this wasn't--and didn't really seem intended to be--funny; the fact it took just half the novel before some (and only some) of the characters stopped feeling like cariacatures didn't change that. It's a thoroughly conventional, if well written, haunted house story, complete with family secrets and an exorcism. I didn't much like the main characters (and I spent a lot of the novel convinced Hendrix didn't, either) but the ending of the story--and the short denouement--felt at least earned, and as though there'd been some change/growth/whatever.

No Gods, No Monsters: Book One of the Convergence Saga by Cadwell Turnbull

 

Awesome title. Unfortunately, hidden on the back of the book, buried in Design Elements, are the words "Book One of the Convergence Saga." The book as it is, is kinda a mess. Way too many characters, way too many different kinds of magickal stuff going on, for any sort of coherence to emerge. Maybe combining every kind of folklore you can think of isn't such a great idea. Stands up on its own about as well as could be expected, I don't need to wait for the rest, or read them. Probably pales immensely reading it so soon after Jemisin's books, which cover a lot of the same thematic and political ground. Read that, not this.

The Serialist by David Gordon

 

We grabbed this from a Little Free Library at a local organic grocery ... a few years ago, at least, and it's been sitting on a shelf since then. All the half-references in the jacket copy had me worried it was going to be pointlessly meta: It's not. It is a well-told crime/mystery novel, with plenty of twists along the way as well as more than a dash of self-knowledge. It reminds me in all kinds of good ways of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, though it's probably more of a serial-killer noir novel than a fair-play mystery. By turns witty and gripping. The novel's more than ten years old, and I'm curious to see if there's more. I'll be poking around and finding out, I suspect.

Winter's Child: A Wind River Mystery by Margaret Coel

 

I happen to own a copy of the first novel in this series: That was published in 1995, this novel was published in 2016. This novel conveys a strong impression that Ms. Coel knows there are a very limited number of novels left for her to write, whether that's about her own time or about the publisher/s deciding there wasn't enough money left in them, I don't know. It'd be a shame if she didn't have the opportunity to end this series on her own terms, at her own pace. There are some characters here that are very worth spending time with, and it's clear that Ms. Coel really likes the Arapaho and the Wind River reservation. I'll certainly be coming back to this series from time to time--I am a bit of a sucker for this sort of thing, apparently.

EDIT: I should add that I was impressed by the parallels in the novel between historic events (actual history, interpreted to suit the novelist's needs) and the present-day conflicts in the novel. Faulkner's line about the past not even being past seems to have been in mind when the novel was being written.

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim

 

This book was recommended to me by my wife, and I can very much mostly see why she found it so powerfully compelling (and/or compellingly powerful). I really didn't. The characters didn't do much for me--especially not the narrator, who doesn't seem to me anything like as clever as she and/or the author think she is. The blurbs make it sound like a mystery, and it kinda starts out that way, but the sound of axes on sharpening wheels eventually becomes deafening. I had hopes, but it was nearly four hundred pages of underwhelm.

Something More Than Night by Kim Newman

 

This is really, *really* good, if you're willing to deal with Newman having the courage to have as his POV 1st-person narrator in a noirish mysteryish novel set in LA *Raymond fucking Chandler*. I'm fine with it, not everyone will be. Oh, and Chandler is more like Watson than Holmes--the smarter character, the better detective, is Billy Platt, dba *Boris Karloff*. There is, fittingly, some man-made monstrosity here, as well as some older inhumanity--not so much evil as monstrously aloof. I've read and enjoyed some Newman before--specifically *Jago* and *The Quorum*--so I had some expectations for this novel, and it met them. Though, this has more humor in it than I remember either of those two novels containing.

Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman

So, imagine if a writer of crime novels read Misery like a dozen times and had read some of those dreary litfic novels where the English-professor/writer/protagonist gets into trouble by fucking colleagues and students and thought he could combine them, and he decided to make his Annie Wilkes equivalent someone who wanted as much as anything to get credit for the *better than anything else he's ever written* novel the writer/protagonist writes and is the leader of a cult-like organization that performs ceremonies in which the practitioners put on various kinds of degrees of body armor and shoot each other, and the fan turns out to be a criminal mastermind who's set up the protagonist to take the fall for several crimes, and the protagonist has loved ones in danger from the guncult.

That is *Gun Church*.

 

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

 The cover text calls this something like "one of the most important novels" blah blah blah. It's not a novel, it's a disconnected series of drug-fueled and -addled vignettes with no particular point or purpose: Word count alone maketh not a novel. The movie from the 1990s, with Peter Weller, was *vastly* better, mainly because it ignored pretty much everything about the novel other than its existence, and put some effort into telling something like a story. The most interesting thing in the book is the (badly outdated) essay-type material about drug-use, written after Burroughs had at least mostly kicked.

Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore

 

Every now and then I read a novel by an author that I normally really like, and find that it doesn't work as well for me. Most of the time Christopher Moore makes me laugh out loud and makes me think, and the best of his novels make my life ... easier to live with. This is not one of his best novels; it's a fine light and light-hearted novel with some wonky quasi-SF stuff, but it's not, overwhelmingly, *funny*. That doesn't seem from here so much as though there are jokes that don't land as much as it does that there just aren't a lot of jokes. It's not a *bad* novel, but I really was in the mood for the kinda screwball-funny Moore's a master of.

The Standardization of Demoralization Principles by Jennifer Hoffman

 

This is a novel that I think is about the absurd nature of a tightly-controlled surveillance state, about how the workers in that tightly-controlled surveillance state are just as powerless as anyone else, about how pervasively damaging the inability to trust anyone would be in a tightly-controlled surveillance state because of how persuasive the surveillance and the tight control would be. I'm not exactly sure what actually has happened in the novel, but that's plausibly connected to the point/s of the novel, because I don't think any of the characters are at all sure what has happened in the novel--especially not the POV characters. About the only thing any of the characters can be sure of is that in 1989, East Germany--and the Stasi--are about to become sociologically unsustainable, that is the dawning understanding at what passes for a climax in the novel. I picked it up because of the vague Magritte allusion on the cover, and the glorious bureaucratese of the title; I have little doubt the novel is as Ms. Hofmann intended, but the best thing I can say about it is it's short.