Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey

 

This is a weird novel that is weird. People do weird things for weird--or at least inscrutable--reasons, even if they're POV characters, so their motivations should arguably be at least somewhat understandable. It's not even that their behaviors seems particularly out of character, there's barely enough information to determine what's in character for these people. Eventually the weird things come to an end, in a way that's kinda abrupt and vague and of course inscrutable. There are at least three POV characters, and weird interpolations that look like dictionary entries--which might plausibly be connected to one of the POV characters being a translator. Plausibly understandable story structures are for lesser novels.

The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard

 

This is a kinda weird book. Not in the sense of being Fantasy or SF or Horror, just in the sense that its apparent premise--the one that shows up in the cover copy--isn't really what the novel's about. Yeah, there's a family that all have superpowers, and yeah, they're Black, and yeah, there's a criminal chasing down an old guy because the old guy stole money from him; but really the superpowers seem mostly irrelevant, and the issues that could be about race seem more about money and privilege, and the criminal (and his organization) turn out to be easily defanged. What this novel is about is a family--part born and part made--that screwed up and screwed each other and kinda fragmented and blew apart and is starting to move toward ... not necessarily putting itself back together, but plausibly making something new out of itself. It's not a worthless novel, but it's kinda muddled and it feels much longer than its ~275 pages and it really feels kinda scanty and thin and disjointed, almost as scattered and fragmented as the family it's about.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

 

It's apt that this novel contains the world "stories" in its title, in the plural, because this novel contains many stories. Most of those stories pick up somewhere after their beginning, and most of those stories drop off somewhere before their ending, and they branch off each other in an almost fractal concatenation, occasionally merging with or burying themselves inside others. Eventually the whole thing kinda runs out of forward momentum and it slows to a halt like some sort of inland delta--or as an alternative metaphor, collapses under its own weight.

Devolution by Max Brooks

 

Another epistolary novel about monsters in something like the real world. In this case the monsters are sasquatches, and I guess Brooks does what he can to write them as believable giant-ape monsters, but--alas--the real world is conspiring against him, here. On the other hand, his imagined eruption of Mt. Rainier, followed by a series of lahars wreaking destruction as far as Tacoma, is as best I can tell distressingly plausible; likewise his depiction of various sorts of governmental failure post-catastrophe. I do not know if the USGS has had its budget slashed as Brooks describes--especially in the case of Mt. Rainier, close as it is to population centers, I sincerely hope it hasn't. One of the things people can't stop mentioning in the blurbs is the humor that purportedly exists in this novel: I wouldn't say it's completely thuddingly humorless, but there really weren't any moments of funny, either. That said, it's a really clear-eyed horror novel, set in a moment of plausible social collapse, and it's reasonably well-written.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

 This is ... not a happy go-lucky novel. The world is shit--specifically, Sri Lanka is shit, because the shit world powers (local, such as India; global, such as the USA) are working to make sure it remains shit--and life is shit because shit people use whatever extra authority or power (material or metaphysical) to make sure your life is much shittier than theirs. All you can hope for is to maybe do a little good that will probably sink into the lake of shit that is life, and disappear into nonexistence after experiencing a distinctly shit personal afterlife. So I guess take what pleasures you can, while you can, because ... shit.

Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt

 

Not a bad book. Nothing really new for me, but I've been reading TRPG history a bit lately--more scholarly-type books--and I'm clearly not the target market for the book. Also, a lot has happened in the hobby since this book was published in 2013; the primary thing is that "I play D&D" doesn't plop you inside a plague circle the way it once did. I gotta say it's unfortunate that some of the TRPG people he talks with in the book (I won't name names) have since 2013 turned to be varying sorts of asshats, but they've had nigh unto a decade to show their asses. What Ewalt does well, though, is capture why people play TRPGs and what they get out of it.

Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

 

If you've been looking for a novel that riffs on Scooby-Doo, landing somewhere in the overlapping middle ground of piss-take and loving riff counterpoised with small-town Lovecraftian badness, with side helpings of awesome doggo, bildungsromain, and lesbian romance, look no further--this is the book that's been missing in your life. Even if you aren't looking for such a novel, this is very much worth reading: The prose is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and there's deeper stuff lurking in it (and that's not just the abandoned mine).

Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller

 

This book has a sequel, and a prequel, published in that order, and I read the prequel then the sequel then this. All the novels stand alone, you can read them in any order. Miller has a deft hand and an ear for dialogue and a knack for phrasing. This book--like How to Find Your Way in the Dark--is laden with (righteous) Jewish fury, at the world, at Europe, at the USA, at time; and there's some grimness at its heart, and a really bittersweet/open/ambiguous ending that might feel heartless but is anything but.

Small Town Sins by Ken Joworowski

 

A relatively slim novel, the cover copy and blurbs would give one to think it's a thriller or crime novel of some sort, but it's really not. It's a pretty conventional novel, albeit a kinda small-town-gritty one with three narrative threads that don't really connect but in the most tangential ways--though they do at least happen simultaneously. It's a pretty decent novel--I don't doubt for a moment that the blurbs are sincere--it just isn't the kind of novel you might expect from looking at the cover.

Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey

 

Wow. This is gonzo as *fuck*, makes Hiassen look staid and strait-laced. Just a bonkers crime novel set in South Florida, with a lot of characters who might not be entirely operating in consensus reality. Frequently laugh-out-loud funny. The only other writer I've seen write this bonkers and make a readable novel out of it is Christopher Moore--though, to be clear, Dorsey doesn't write much like Moore. Clearly well into a series, and maybe more after, stands on its own well enough. I'll probably be reading more, even though I don't prefer series fiction.

A People's History of the vampire Uprising by Raymond A. Villareal

 

So the premise is that vampirism is something like a contagious disease--one which somehow turns people into things which manifest all the classical (meaning Eastern Europe via Stoker) signs of being vampires. Problems are Villareal fails to convince on the science--for example: "radiation that prevents all cameras from working" seems as though it might screw up a CCD, but that sort of radiation seems unlikely to have any sort of effect on a camera with film, using a mechanical shutter--and fails to convince on the sociology and psychology--there'd be little incentive for someone whose fame and social cachet were derived from performances that were captured on film/video/compute to choose to become that sort of vampire (one of the sub-conceits) and his POV characters fail to convince as actual people. The fact Villareal has chosen to present the novel as a modern-day epistolary novel--all the narratives are presented as transcripts of various testimonies and interviews, from several different people who seem to have little to no connection with each other--means whatever narrative there might be in the novel comes across as fragmented. Maybe that would be more like "kaleidoscopic" if I could be bothered to finish it, but I tapped out after ~150 of ~400 pages.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

 

This book feels like one of them literary books where things happen in whatever order the author chooses to tell you about them, until the author decides to stop telling you about them; where there's not one big thing that happens, where the climax might not happen, or where it might be some quiet moment, some subtle decision; the sort of book where there's not really a hero and plausibly not even really a protagonist, just some people whose points of view the author establishes. Ms. Mandel writes smoothly and well, but this novel ends up feeling as though there's not enough substance to support its weight--and at less than three hundred pages, it don't weigh much.

Playing at the World by Jon Peterson

 

Spent Sunday and Monday evenings plodding through this. More than six hundred pages. Sloggy, often dry, occasionally digressive, but eventually informative. Probably only interesting if you're much interested in the history of TRPGs, why they are as they are. All kinds of historical perspective, both on the emergence of TRPGs from Avalon Hill-style wargames in the late 1960s/early 1970s (D&D was first published in 1974) and on the various influences as far as rules, setting/genre, and what "role-playing" and "character" mean in their context, and how those meanings came to be.

Final Girls by Riley Sager

 

This novel reminds me of The Serialist by David Gordon: It's a knowing take on serial killer fiction--especially slasher movies--that tangles and twists and loops. The difference, of course, is that Gordon was setting out on some level to take the piss out of all the tropes, and clearly didn't take any of it all that seriously (while still taking the novel seriously) and wrote with deftness and skill; Sager seems to take all the tropes seriously as hell, writes like a bison that's just run off a cliff, and has written a novel it's impossible to take seriously. The fact I at least flashed on who the killer was about halfway through might be evidence of that authorial clumsiness, evidence of authorial fair play, or evidence that I've read too much crime fiction and horror (of which this novel is closer to the former than the latter).

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

 

This is pretty typical current Scalzi. Funny, maybe a little blithe, sarcastic as hell, quippy-funny coming from odd angles. Had me laughing out loud at point, clearly the kind of funny I needed this afternoon. I wouldn't say the novel is shallow, exactly, but what thematic concerns there are--family, corporate evil, cats--are neither subtle nor strongly played; there's no reason to take this novel seriously, but it's great fun to read.

Every Hidden Thing by Ted Flanagan

 

A pretty standard-typical urban thriller, everyone is corrupt in their own ways--the politicians, the police, the press, the paramedics--and the fact the city is kinda small and the relationships so tangled and crossed seems to make it darker and more cynical. The big narrative innovation, here, is the double-protagonist situation--themselves with a tangled and screwed up history. While I'm pretty sure the author intended the paramedic to be the hero of the novel, I think there's a case to be made that the reporter is. Not badly-written, even if there's a subplot that plausibly could have been excised, and there's some behavior late in the book that seems to run counter to what's established prior.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

 This was a book that looking at the cover copy, I wondered if it was litfic that wanted people to think it was SF, or if it was Sf that wanted people to think it was litfic. Well, the "SF" in it is at best marginally coherent--some of which might be because it's ten years old, yes, but most of which is because it doesn't seem to have been thought through particularly well, if at all--which ends up making the story it tells at best marginally coherent. There are things the novel wants to say, or at least gesture at, around religion and faith and prioritizing either of those over actual people, but it's mostly a muddy mess. The fact that the "climax" is, apparently a decision, the results of which are left undescribed--they happen after the novel stops--does not clarify things.