The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

 

It's Scalzi being Scalzi. His books are immensely readable--witty and quippy and sparkling and poppy--and this is him, at his Scalziest. This is not a novel that needs to be taken seriously--it's probably not even a novel that's good, if it's taken seriously--but it's very definitely a novel that's fun, and there's probably some depth to it that'll reward paying some attention to it. Very worth reading.

Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

 

A Horror novel with an interesting enough premise--what if there were a drug that let you see the dead, and what if it let the dead see you--that, sadly, doesn't matter to do much with it. The characters are never really likeable (but perhaps people that young and as privileged as the narrator shouldn't be) and the fact the novel so closely parallels addiction narratives of the most Drugs Are Bad, MmmKay? type doesn't help. It's not a *bad* novel, but it's not really a *good* one, either.

The Hard Stuff by David Gordon

 

So, this is a sequel to The Bouncer, and it's clear at the end it's setting up for at least one more sequel, and that's pretty OK. Gordon's got an engaging voice and the characters here are pretty likeable and interesting, and it's clear the situation as it is cannot stand in several important ways; this does not feel as though it will be an interminable series. The eventual endgame is plausibly clear, here, and I'm kinda hoping Gordon gets to it pretty quickly--though I'd be willing to take some winding paths there, if need be.

American by Day by Derek B. Miller

 

So this is a kinda light-hearted novel with crime at--or at least near--the center of it, but it's completely aware of the seriousness of things. Has things to say about race in America, from a White (ish) POV, many of which are conviniently spoken in the text by a non-American character--it's easier to see from outside, I expect. Also has things ot say about idividualism as the cause of (and maybe solution to) many of America's cultural/social problems. Also also has a good story in it, and some genuinely excellent characters I'd be happy to see in their own books.

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

 

Another starkly beautiful novel about crime and pain in rural Virginia; there's vengeance at the end, but the novel is more about family and the difference between who we tell ourselves we are and who we are--the latter writ large because with gangsters the difference is such a chasm. Violent and brutal, and very worth reading, with an ending that seems more open-ended to me than the author maybe intended.

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

 

This novel looks kinda like it's a Horror novel, but it's not--the closest thing I can think of is something like Magic Realism. A town where ghosts are part of the social fabric, a slaughterhouse and butchery that employs genetically engineered anthropomorphic pigs: There are obvious attempts at symbolism of various sorts here. The story isn't horrible, but the characters aren't really what I found to be engaging; the novel seems to be more interested in saying something (probably about letting the past be the past, mostly) than in telling a story, which is kinda the opposite of my preference, at least on that axis.

One Fatal Mistake by Tom Hunt

 

This is a thriller in which people make decisions best described as morally dubious and, mostly, not a lot bad happens to them in the long term. Since most of the story is driven by a series of awkwardly implausible coincidences, I guess that's all right. It's like a fingerpaint version of Fargo or something: all bad stupid people doing varying degrees of bad things, for various bad reasons, with varying degrees of stupidity, in thick smeary stick-figure prose.

Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig

 

An interesting Horror novel, centered around rural family and small-town. Suitably grim as it needs to be, but elements of hope. On the one hand, I have to think that using apples as the vector of evil has to have intentional and unintentional subtext to it; on the other hand, the Afterword goes to some lengths to make it clear that Wendig is into apples, and his expectation is that not everyone is going to get that he's weird that way. Both these things can be--and probably are--true. Other little things to notice in reading the novel: The 2020 election in this involved the same two candidates as the election in Wanderers, and the epilogue of this novel has a strong whiff of King's The Stand to it.

Zero Days by Ruth Ware

 

Well, it's good to see people are still writing and reading old-fashioned pursuit thrillers--like pretty much everything Ludlum wrote, or some of Grisham's early novels (if you filter out the legal stuff). This is a pretty decent take on it--the POV (the pursued) makes some dubious decisions early in the novel, but they're not completely implausible, and even if the who was pretty obvious to me pretty early on, the why is nicely subtle, and well-handled.

A Dark Matter by Peter Straub

 

I read this book something more than a decade ago, so I'd forgotten how very excellent it is. It's one POV character collecting the stories of his wife and several of their friends of the time everyone but the narrator spent in the thrall of a typical--stereotypical, even--charlatan-guru in the 1960s. None of them seem to have seen everything--though there's one who saw more than the others--and it's up to the reader to put together whatever sort of real story there is. Unless I missed something, this is the last novel Straub wrote, and it's a helluva last novel, deeply dark and staggeringly complex.

The Wager by David Grann

 

So Spain and England were fighting a war over colonial power and money, fueled by propaganda about some dude having his ear cut off, and a squadron of English ships sailed around Cape Horn looking to capture a Spanish galleon laden with gold, losing a few ships on the way. This is the story of the sailors on one of those ships, who endured months as castaways and in some cases years as prisoners, not to mention lifetimes as pawns. There are some characters in the book with connections to future notables--Lord Byron's grampa, mostly--but none of the characters in the book really come off the page as people. Part of it might be that castaway narratives haven't ever really been my thing, of course. Not the easiest read ever, and a book I nearly quit a few times--the conflict between the author wanting a singular narrative and the disparate threads the sources gave him made it a bit of a slog.

World Gone By by Dennis Lehane

 

A beautiful novel about life as a mobster (in 1940s Tampa) and all the contradictions and complications of it. Lehane clearly has an ear for dialogue, and a sense of all the moral and logical and legal compromises the life brings with it. People persist in trying to be moral even as their morality is ruthlessly stomped out of them. There are no good outcomes for anyone, and the ending is like getting shivved.

The Bouncer by David Gordon

 

This is a quippy-clever thrillerish crime novel from an author who seems to make quippy-clever thrillerish crime novels almost as a matter of course. The main character is suitably troubled and complex, but mostly decent--or at least not unrepentantly evil--and the authorial voice is appropriately light and brisk. Reminds me of some of the stuff Evan Hunter/Ed McBain wrote when he was feeling witty. There is approximately no way one could reasonably take the novel as a serious proposal for a sequence of events that could plausibly happen in consensus reality, but that's not entirely a bad thing.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

 

My wife loves beautiful books. This was her favorite book of the last six-ish months, and I see why. It takes a little while to get going, but once the storylines and timelines come together the book burns bright and glorious. Arguably skitters on the edge of YA, but that doesn't matter--that's probably because the love stuff is mostly chaste, especially in the mind of someone who's just read a book by Christopher Moore--and it's not as though YA is bad, exactly, and I suspect Ms. Harrow just wrote the story she had, and let things like reader categories and genre sort themselves out.

Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore

 

I'm a fan of Christopher Moore, and this is one of his better books--maybe better than Noir, which this is a sequel to. He wrapped enough things up here that I don't see another sequel coming, which is fine: I'm ambivalent at best about sequels, anyway. This novel, like its predecessor, catches the feel of Noir fiction--the language and the narrative beats--and like its predecessor this novel takes more than a few turns toward the giddily absurd.

Midnight, Water City by Chris McKinney

 

One of my current thoughts about genre fiction is that there are setting genres and story genres; SF is a setting genre and Mystery is a story one. This is a Mystery (specifically, something like Noir) story in an SF setting--a bit more than a century in the future, but Earthbound, after various Things have happened. The story as a whole does what a Noir story is supposed to do, it's a fun ride, the setting and some of the Maguffin-ish aspects don't seem to have gotten as much thought, or at least don't seem to comport with my understanding of how the world works, how science works; and there are some things that plausibly looked like The Future but weren't that stick out like proverbial sticky-out bits. Clearly set somewhere near Hawai'i (which from the blurb in the jacket is McKinney's home) and clearly catches some of the political subtext of classic Noir and makes it text. Very worth the read, despite the few nits.

Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker

 

A pretty weird, pretty grim novel--grim because it's about a pretty horrific (and pathetic) crime; weird because of how it's told: The narrative conceit of the novel is that all the characters are being interviewed, but apparently are being told what everyone else is saying. There are stretches where the characters feel as though they are talking to each other via the interviewer, which is ... a bit odd. The conceit also makes for a really fragmented POV, and ends up playing the unreliable-narrator game several times over. It says some unpleasant things about true crime as a genre, and about the Internet (especially social media) but there are some things that feel a bit anachronistic and there are some other stretches that lead me to believe Mr. Sweren-Becker maybe drove through Frederick, Maryland, once--and maybe that's not enough to set a novel with such a specific idea of its setting in a place. Very much worth the read, if you either feel you're not the target or don't mnd being targeted.

All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones

 

This is a grim as hell novel, knotty like that wad of fishing line you found in your graddad's tackle box. Not exactly *believable* but absolutely sincere. Apparently the author's moved more toward Horror than this, which reads like a deconstructed Serial Killer/Profiler novel. This is not a novel wherein the profile figures out what's going on and captures his UNSUB at little cost of any kind; the resolution here is bloody and painful and ongoing when the novel ends.

The Second Shooter by Nick Mamatas

 

A novel that manages to be a slightly gonzo take on America, complete with takes from all over leftish philosophy, while being actually readable. Not something I'd have put money on, given my local track record with the type. Part of the fun for me was spotting the various hat-tips to classics in genre fiction. Alas, I'm probably too bougie/normie/mundane to completely accept the novel's core premises, but it mostly delivers--though it sadly doesn't quite stick the landing, oh well. (I'm sure I'm supposed to be able to figure out the three word phrase that's the magic spell in the epilogue, but I cannot.)