The Night Flowers by Sara Herchenroether

 A pretty good novel, I guess it's like a cold-cast procedural with some (unfortunate) supernatural elements--there are ghosts in some sort of afterlife, or like a pre-afterlife where you wait until you're ready for the afterlife, and that really detracts more from the detective/procedural threads; I think there could have been other ways to get at least most of that information into the novel, and I think Ms. Herchenroether would have been well-served to look into them. That niggle aside, the characters are solid and at least mostly believable, and the story works pretty well, too, with an ending that is more about hope than anything else (while not being purely a strictly happy ending).

Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman

 This is a pretty weird novel, with strong whiffs of Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, along with some weird horror and SF stuff going on, and the slight strangeness of four guys who played in the Army Band in World War II being in a rock band twelve years later--not strange enough to break suspension of disbelief, but strange. The idea of them taking high-end audio equipment into the depths of the Namib desert, on the other hand, does break suspension of disbelief: There's no fucking power source mentioned--power cords, yeah, but not what they're plugged into. The supernatural stuff isn't handled super-gracefully, and there are several things presented as non-supernatural that cannot be so. The prose is pretty solid, and the story is more simple than it looks, once you peel away the POV-switching and timeline-hopping. Not blown away, but I don't feel as though I've wasted the past couple of hours, either.

Opioid, Indiana by Brian Allen Carr

 

This is a pretty good and interesting novel, maybe novella--the book's like just over 200 pages, and typeset with a lot of whites space. It's not really in any genre that I can identify, in a more reasonable time it'd probably be something like mainstream, but I guess it's probably literary, or at least it has aspirations in that direction; these days "mainstream fiction" is ... barely a thing, or maybe the mainstream these days is Romance (the genre, which is the engine that powers publishing). Anyway, this is pretty gritty small-town fiction with a late teenager staring mostly unblinkingly at rapidly approaching adulthood; a moment of smartassery leads vaguely to his being suspended from school for a week, and he uses that week to figure some things out about himself and his place in the world. His future looks ... pretty OK, if not exactly bright, though I wouldn't say the story exactly has a happy ending. Lots of nice turns of phrase, the POV/narrator seems pretty spot-on.

The Chill by Scott Carson

 

On the one hand, one of your standard types of Horror novel: Ghost or Bad Place, mostly, with just a little bit of Human Hubris thrown in, maybe a whiff of Ancient Evil woven in. On the other hand, it's well-executed, and the characters manage mostly to come across like people, even when some Old Thing is bending them back and forth like a paper clip. Pretty straightforward, if you know the genre, which can be fine if that's what you want. There's an interesting theme that family and/or tradition is, if not the problem here, then like the problem's mechanism of action, which is an interesting and kinda surprising take for a Horror novel that addresses tensions between rural folkways and urban science.

The Jezebel Remedy by Martin Clark

 

This is not as interesting a book as The Substitution Order: The voice is less breezy, the main characters are ... more idealized, I guess, even though the situation they're caught up in is probably less plausible; taking several pages to convey a countersuit in all its numbing legalese glory was a bold choice, one that really didn't work for me. There's still arguably a redemption arc, here, though the redemption feels in some ways less earned, and less central to the story. Also, the only people who actually succeed in bending the legal system to their will are the bad guys, the good guys succeed primarily because the facts of the case are on their side in spite of their opponents' chicaneries; in some ways that's ... less the unexpected course of events, I think.

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes

 

This looks from all appearances like a pretty standard-issue serial killer thriller, of the sort that flooded bookstore shelves in the wake of Thomas Harris and Hannibal Lecter. There are all sorts of relationships that are making all sorts of tensions, and there are some other threads that seem to be pulling at some sort of right angle to the main line of the story. Then it takes a turn toward the weird, the strange and lands in some weird supernatural Horror place, and at least most of those threads turn out to be playing other structural roles as well, helping to hold the story in place, sort of, while it goes into this strange "What if Jame Gumb was some sort of divine herald?" place. That supernatural element is reasonably well-handled, but still deeply jarring; these are perhaps genres that do not entirely play nicely together. I'm not going to slag on this book: It's ambitious, and it's remarkably well-written, with good prose and good dialogue, and a pretty good depiction of 2014 Detroit, especially considering the author isn't from anywhere near it.

Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones

 

Oh, hey, I read this today. It's a good little horror novella, with lots to say about the ways families get broken down on the margins of society (especially the Reservations). The POV character's life seems desperate and hardscrabble, both as an adolescent and in the brief denouement as an adult. There aren't really any heroes in the story, heroism isn't something any of the characters can really afford.

Raft of Stars by Andrew J. Graff

 

This isn't a great novel, in the sense of being deathless literature, but it's probably good enough. The fact it's set in 1994 is at least in the cover copy--and clear in the text pretty quickly, if you miss that--and it's evident that Graff loves rural Minnesota and the people of it; the novel seems to be gesturing in the direction of what the people who survive going off to war (and the people who survive those who don't) live with, how things change for them, how they themselves are changed. There's some real life-and-death stakes in the story, and the climax is actually people doing stuff, which makes me wonder just what the heck they're teaching MFA students at the University of Iowa these days.

29 Seconds by T. M. Logan

 

It's not every day that one comes across a book that sets itself the goal of mediocrity and embraces it so completely. The prose is unremarkable and unmemorable, the story is the sort of convoluted shallow thinkers think is clever, and the main character is remarkably blank--as though the author has no particular insights into her, no clear idea of who she is. So on-the-nose it hurts: The main makes a dangerous deal with a mysterious--and mysteriously honorable--gangster, and she has a PhD in English Literature, specializing in Christopher fucking Marlowe. Not believable for even a page.

The Stars Now Unclaimed by Drew Williams

 

This was a fun SF novel. It's probably some sort of space-opera, maybe with some post-apocalyptic grace-notes--it takes too many liberties to really qualify as hard SF, I think--and the characters are neatly drawn, the arcs and behaviors plausible. The prose is deft and witty and smooth, and there's a sense of humor lurking around practically every corner. Maybe--maybe--the main character is implausibly badass; it's wasn't a problem for me.

Those We Thought We Knew by David Joy

 So, there's a case to be made that reading a crime novel set in mountain-rural North Carolina the night after reading one set in rural Florida is much of a muchness, but ... as it turns out there are severe differences in extent and kind, here. This is much more noirish than I was expecting, and much more steeped in grief and like generational pain, and the title is one of the most apt I've come across in a while. This has that licking live-wires feeling that I can't resist running through it. There are times when it some of the characters seem to have the right words to appropriately flummox other more thoughtless characters, which does become jarring after the second or third instance, but that's the only nit I can pick. I will be looking for Joy's other novels.

The Disappearing by Lori Roy

 In many ways this is a standard-issue thriller novel: The main character who moved back home not entirely willingly; the creepy stalker-type who works as a groundskeeper; the daughters under threat; the family secrets; the past they don't talk about and barely understand. In other ways, it's not so standard-issue: The groundskeeper/creep is arguably not the biggest threat in the novel, among other things. It's even mostly a well-executed novel: The prose is well-executed and the story moves and grabs even with some weird non-linearity and most of the characters are pretty well-drawn and easily understood and mostly consistent (certainly consistent enough to be people); but the climax feels undercut by the twists going on, and what's going on with the downbeat ending--after the twists--isn't really clear.

Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

 

Carl Hiaasen writing about implausible criminal antics in Florida is always a good time, and a novel where he turns that slightly loopy ferocity on a certain artificially-colored commander in chief and veers from comedy to satire ... that's good stuff. This is not a novel written by someone who particularly likes things as they are, but it's also clearly a novel written by someone who sees the possibility of better things, better outcomes: I remember reading someone saying something to the effect that in order to write satire well you needed to be both angry and hopeful, and Hiassen is definitely both, here.

Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore

 This isn't a horrible book: The prose is deft, with nice turns of phrase; the characters (within limitations) are consistent and coherent; there's even something like a story. Problem is the premise is crap, and I honestly was hoping the main/s would have the courage of their convictions and reject what they were hearing from self-identified voices of the universe what the universe wanted of them. The promised escape from the endless cycle of reincarnation turns out to be a lie.

The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig

 

This was a hard book to really get into, in the sense that I kept almost putting it down in the first half-ish--the characters weren't working for me and what was going on wasn't, either--but it came together, eventually. The characters started feeling as though they were behaving like people, and what was going on clarified, the stakes were revealed and named. In the Afterword, Wendig talks about the difficulties he had writing this novel, and all the drafts that might still be buried in it: That might be part of at least where the issues I had to start with came from.

Ragdoll by Daniel Cole

 

Wow, this is a stupid garbage-fire of a book. Not only is the story so graspingly convoluted that it's literally impossible to keep track of, not only is one of the POV characters being deceptive about his involvement with the situation--in third-person narration, where it's not a matter of what he's not telling you; the author switches POV characters mid-chapter, as though he's writing in the nineteenth century or something, and there are errors of grammar and usage (commas around one end of parentheticals but not the other; at least one instance of principals when the author clearly meant principles; at least one occasion where there are two apostrophes back to back, in either a contraction or a possessive) that are frankly fucking bizarre to find in a book from a major publisher. I guess it's piling on to point out that the characters are barely differentiated and still manage to be inconsistent and incoherent.

The Making of Incarnation by Tom McCarthy

 

This is a book. It contains words. Those words describe people, places, things, and activities. What the words in the book describe seems to fall into a few different threads, which don't really seem to have any meaningful connection to each other. There is roughly no tension in the book, if it were a person I'd describe it as having "flat affect," nothing really goes anywhere and anything that might have had any meaning or point disappears like farts in the wind.

One Last Thing Before I Go by Jonathan Tropper

 

This novel was a genuine pleasure to read--the first in what feels like longer than two weeks, there were some mistakes made. Some wonderful, juicy turns of phrase, and characters that are a delight to spend some time with in a novel, even if many of them would almost certainly become wearying in life; actual thematic things to say: mostly arising naturally from the main character's ... understanding (so intuitive that it takes him most of the novel to articulate anything close to it) that if he's going to choose to live, his life should be worth living. This is another novel steeped in Jewishness that probably sounds more depressing when reduced to a blurb than it is.