The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

 

The novel I read this evening was pretty much the opposite of Annihilation: There's barely any weirdness in it (just a possibly-haunted stretch of riverbank) but the characters' interior lives are clear and drive their actions in ways that VanderMeer either doesn't care to write about or can't manage to capture. Kreuger knows the people of the northern Plains--all the people and peoples. This is mostly a crime novel, but it has a handful of threads in it, lots of (mostly at least somewhat damaged) characters.  It's set in the late 1950s, so even the good people in it are variously struggling with things that most of us (at least until a few years ago) would have considered mostly solved, which serves as a reminder of what might be lost. Thematic concerns abound, here: secrets, honestly, forgiveness, the differences between people who break and people who bounce back.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

 

Hey, I read this little book in a coffeeshop this noon-ish. I can sort of see why someone might want to make a movie about it, and I can see why that movie might ... fail to find an audience. It might seem as though the novel's about all this weird stuff that's happening, but the authorial voice--that removed, aloof first-person POV, where it's hard to care about the narrator or the events of the novel because it doesn't seem as though the narrator does--that's the single creepiest thing about the novel, really. The events barely register, muted as they are by the deadened narration.

The Wild Life by David Gordon

 

Yet another really enjoyable book in this series. Things are changing in ways I wouldn't have guessed from the first couple of books. The impossible couple are a couple, past the no-backsies point, and the complications from that should be kinda delicious. Gordon writes zippy, spritely prose and has a master's ear for dialogue and eye for character. There are only a few characters that don't come across as human, and they ... mostly come to bad ends, deservedly. I have one more book to read soon (so it can go back to the library) then I'm caught up.

The Shadows by Alex North

 

Based on everything on the cover--art, blurbs, jacket-flap summary--this novel looks for all the world like a Horror novel, and it sorta kinda plays at being one, sometimes. It's not. It's a novel about crime, and there's a little tension in it, and a twist or three (mostly crap, just total rugpulls with no textual clues) but it mostly just kinda trundles along. The big weirdness I noticed is that though the voice is clearly and distinctly Brit--especially in some moments of dialogue--this version/edition at least is typeset so as to be more familiar to Americans (spelling and punctuation); what's weird is that there's nothing about any of the places in it to put it anywhere, either American or English--there's nothing remarkable enough about the setting to keep it from being wherever the reader imagines it to be. Which kinda goes with the rest of the novel, really, there's not much distinctive about the characters or anything else in the story.

The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai

This is not as good a novel as I Have Some Questions for You--it's really not even close--but it's still a novel worth reading, a novel that has points to make as well as a story to tell. The fact it kinda tells its story backward--the narrative moves from 2000 to 1954 to 1929 to 1900, and keeps unfurling secrets as it goes--works reasonably well, and isn't really all that weird a way to tell a story. There are threads here about the toxicity of patronage, and about the secrets families keep, and about what art is worth, and about intentional artistic communities (such as art colonies); roughly no one and nothing ends up looking really good, which might not entirely be the intent, but which seems consistent with reality.

The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

 

A pretty wild very-far-future SF novel, with lots of humanity's deepest sins--empire and conquest and colonialism foremost. It struggles some in the early-middle with twee and I think a bit of muddle in the setting, but it very much mostly sticks the landing. Atonement for the sins of the past is possible, and the path there is well-placed loyalty and love: familial, friendly, romantic (often queer); I cannot muster much argument with that.

Swan Peak by James Lee Burke

 

A grim novel about crime and corruption, and the past catching up to the present, with more than a little in the subtext about it infiltrating beautiful places--and scarring beautiful souls. Complex, prismatically so, with insights into all the POV characters. There's at least one vague redemption arc, probably unexpected but earned. The big "twist" is one I saw like a hundred pages before it landed--which felt mostly like the author putting in the work for it. Also, of course, lots of juicy turns of phrase--Burke does that particularly well.

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington

 

Not a novel, which ... well ... some of the events described in the book would stretch credulity in fiction. It's a book about the lies we tell ourselves about the criminal justice system, and it kinda indirectly raises some of the questions some of the novels I've read the past few months have, about true crime as entertainment--I think this book is less opposed to it than some of those novels, just more skeptical about the magic of forensic science. The upshot: Judges should not be the ones deciding what scientific (or "scientific") evidence is admissible--they are, as it happens, really bad at it.

Tropic of Stupid by Tim Dorsey

 

This was a reasonably pleasant read, if a distinctly gonzo one. It's probably not a book to take all that seriously, or at least to question its plausibility; while it'll give your suspension of disbelief a workout, it's pretty forthright about the nature of what it's doing. You know what you're in for pretty quickly, and that's pretty much what you get: Various sorts of bad people come to various sorts of bad ends, with various digressions through Florida's history and culture, and occasional fourth-wall-breaking. The frequent laugh-out-lout moments tend to come from unexpected angles, at unexpected times, and do a good job of balancing the sometimes over-the-top violence.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

 

Just over three hundred pages of a novelist realizing his story contained several stories, or that his several stories were all the same. Written as though "fragmented" and "kaleidoscopic" are the same thing, with characters who are all dragged through the events of their stories by the actions of others, with no climax and bloody little resolution. Shocking how the "brilliant" literary fiction of fifteen years ago completely fails to hold up--almost as though "literary" were just a lie, not even a genre like all the others.

Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay

 This is a book full of pain, probably some of the worst emotional pain available to humans. (Physical pain is present, but it's mostly elided.) The prose borders on luminous, the shape and telling of the story is confident and precise, the characters in all their quirks and pain feel remarkably like real people. None of the narrators is exactly reliable, so trying to figure out what exactly is happening in the novel is ... something like impossible--that touch of PoMo is probably the novel's sole weakness, along with the attendant ambiguity about whether there's anything actually supernatural happening (I think the signs point to yes). Very strong and very worth reading, and I'll be keeping Tremblay in mind on future quests for reading material.

Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

This is a novel about people who are broken and not yet stronger at the broken places, though at least the two POVs you can see how and where they will be. Laden with grace and empathy, with undercurrents of lived pain--if not the lived pain of the characters. It's hard to be depressed, and it's hard to be in love with someone who's depressed, and there are feedback loops Ms. Buchanan captures, that she seems to know well.

 

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

 

There's really a good deal to like about this book: the writing is at least mostly graceful, the characters are--best I can tell--more or less round and full and have approximately the correct number of dimensions, the themes at play--family, secrets, trauma, greed--are mostly handled subtly and well, it's not at all ambivalent or ambiguous about the monster. The problem for me was that I didn't believe the story for a moment, not one single word; I'm not even sure I can put a finger on any single thing, but my disbelief was never suspended even a millimeter--and because I couldn't ever believe (or at least not disbelieve) the fiction, here, I couldn't ever at all care about it. That's very possibly a me thing.

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

This is a pretty good time-travel story, reasonably well-thought-out as far as at least most of the implications, with a deeply romantic take on family--especially parenthood. The safest place to be is on the other side of the Grandfather Paradox. It meanders a bit--or at least seems to--through the middle, as it's working to set up at least some of the relationships and other stakes that become more relevant at the end: The cover copy implies something more like a chase novel, but really it's more like a novel of ratiocination--there's a puzzle to be solved, though not a murder mystery. The fact the denouement kicks off with something remarkably like something from a *Bill and Ted* movie is ... charming--seriously.

I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas

 

This novel has a bit of a reputation as being something of a takedown of cons and Lovecraftians, and ... yeah, it's that. There's more here than Mamatas taking the piss out of those things, though--it's clear there's some real admiration of at least some of Lovecraft's writing, in addition to a clear-eyed grasp of his faults; there's also a good sense of the issues inside a Fandom, and Lovecraftians are probably not all that different in how that works. The structure of the telling, with alternating narrators (one of whom is dead) works pretty well; the story grabs effectively early and hard, but the ending gets a little slippery and murky. Endings are notoriously difficult. I'm happy to have found and read this.

Against the Law by David Gordon

 

This was a fun novel to read. Breezy prose and snappy dialogue and a story that seems real-world-adjacent but isn't really all that plausible. The situation in the series changes abruptly in this novel--I seem to have been mostly correct that the situation at the end of the previous book simply could not hold--but there are some things that might be pending, and there are some situations that seem likely to evolve in one direction or another. While there's probably some benefit to reading these in order, Gordon does a good job of making sure the reader has enough context to understand what's going on.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Mirakami

 

There are really two primary stories in the novel, though the connections are mostly kinda tenuous and some of the backstory for at least one of them is handled a little clumsily. Lots of people make all kinds of assertions which don't hold up against the events of the novel, weird things happen, all kinds of light and noise so you don't notice that on the other side of the curtain is a pretty thin bildungsroman. There's really one character who's kinda interesting and he's neither of the mains.