Ghost Month by Ed Lin

 

DNF. Got a little bit more than halfway through it and realized I didn't care at all what happened, and there wasn't enough enjoyment in the prose to make up for it. Spicy-zany local color slathered over bland.

The Dead Student by John Katzenbach

 

This is not a very good novel. It's inconsistent about POV, it's cluttered--though at least thank the gawds there aren't any stupid twists. The omnicompetent sociopath with the long-term plan that rolls to its conclusion without hiccup or hesitation ... that's several real strikes against the novel, right there. The prose is reasonably clear, and the characters who aren't the sociopath are well-drawn--though whatever future they have is not likely to be pleasant. The ending is morally ambivalent, in ways that might be thought-provoking if the novel were more intelligent.

Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty

 

This is a grim little crime novel, the main threads are the self-destructiveness of revenge and the horror of the police state. The copyright's 2009, but there's some very current stuff in there about American attitudes toward immigrants--mostly about how the people with the power and the money find them convenient and inexpensive; the Cuban internal politics might be right for the time, but that's before Fidel died. The characters are remarkably well-drawn, and there's a twist that someone interested in decoding novel-twists before they land might have been able to decipher; I don't usually put any real effort into it, sometimes I just understand things well before they appear (this was not one of those things). Pretty good stuff, and the library I was at today had a good double-handful of his novels, all I have to do is make sure I'm not picking up a sequel.

One-Shot Harry by Gary Phillips

 

A quick little very-genre mystery, set (mostly) in the Black neighborhoods of Los Angelis in 1963, with lots of racial tension in the air and full-throated racism still being much more socially acceptable than the present. It's clear that Phillips knows the area and the history, and it's clear he wants you to know--there are parts of the novel that feel like a history lesson or four. The main narrative voice is almost clunky, almost affectedly bland, there's not a lot of grace to it, it feels at times almost as though the text is summarizing the events of the novel; the teachings on history and social things come almost as fast and furious as the narrative elements. The story takes a few turns, ends up in a very noirish place, where the best the hero can manage is for the powers that be to leave him alone. It's not exactly a superb book, but it wasn't a waste of my evening, it wasn't ever so bad I considered DNFing it.

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead

 

There is no part of this novel that is not gloriously well-written, but the parts do not entirely hold together; nor does the novel add up to the sum of its parts. It's clear there are a lot of things the author wants to say about media and the early Information Age (the novel is copyright 2001, and set in 1996) as well as racism and other forms of prejudice, and I think most of those messages come through loud and clear--in many instances it seems as though the messages are louder than the story. The characters are mostly well-drawn, some much more likeable than others; the story threads get somewhat jumbled in all the flashy nonlinearity, but the shatteringly ambivalent ending/s will stick. I enjoyed reading this, but I can't say it's anything like as good as The Underground Railroad (by the same author).

Near the Bone by Christina Henry

 

There's a blurb near the top there that calls this "a perfect nightmare of a novel," and that's not wrong. There's a distinct nightmarish quality to the prose and the story, even the bits that are closest to plausible--maybe especially those: the kidnapped girl, twelve years later, is somewhere between a meme and a trope, probably not quite as fresh as back in the 2010s, but still there in our hearts beating to the pulse of true crime podcasts. The supernatural in the novel is overt and shocking and it seems fair to describe it as almost Lovecraftian in its alienness, its inhumanity; it comes and goes according to its own reasons and motivations, and there's nothing the people in the novel can do about it but run away from it. It's never explained in any concrete way, and I'm absolutely OK with this. The prose drills deep into the mind of the protagonist and takes the novel some surprisingly psychological places. The ending is about as upbeat as it could plausibly be, which isn't all that upbeat, but it works. Very good, indeed.

Agency by William Gibson

 

William Gibson has been writing essentially action/caper novels involving tech some degree of beyond the present day since like the early 1980s. This is from 2020 and has most of his concerns bundled in its propulsive prose. Gibson still writes like neon-encrusted noir dipped in silicon, and here he tells something that's almost a time-travel story, but with communication. The far future is at least as grim as Gibson's old Sprawl ever was, though there's a certain surface OKness that might lead one to miss that. That said, there's a core altruism to the far-future protags, here: They want to enable other timelines to be better than their own. There are hints their efforts matter, here, though nothing is guaranteed. Probably more up the alley of Spook Country or Zero History than that of Neuromancer or Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle

 

I requested this book through the library after a review that made it sound right up my alley, and it's ... pretty close, really. It's a novel about like neighborhood criminals, from the POV (mostly) of people who kinda got dragged into at least the fringes of that life without any real desire for it. It's a grim and tragic novel, but a human one, and one that makes it clear that the bad things that happen are consequences of ... choices the main characters make, which are at best morally gray. There are some vague problematic hints of something approaching bioessentialism--there's a kid who seems a lot like his dad, in spite of his dad's absence from his life--but there are plausibly other factors at play, even there. There's a kind of claustrophobia to the novel, the characters barely seem to get more than about twenty blocks from where they live, and that seems very true to some of those old neighborhoods and the people in them. The prose frequently slants toward beautiful, and there are some truly amusing turns of phrase embedded. It's not a perfect novel for me, but it's a very, very good novel.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

 

This is a novel that sits awkwardly between explicitly genre fiction and litfic, it's not anything like intense enough to qualify as a thriller, maybe something like "novel of intrigue" except that it's really not all that intriguing, either--maybe we'll call that genre label more aspirational than anything else. There's a lot of incident here, but not a lot of story movement, what narrative momentum there is, is perpetually interrupted by digressions on hominins and society and revolution, all in the form of intercepted emails so it's not as though there's an actual conversation going on involving the narrator. There's some gesturing at thematic concerns in the areas of ecological collapse, governmental espionage on and entrapment of citizens, personal moral/ethical codes, relationships; even though the narrator walks away from things in disgust it's hard to say anything is resolved--which might well be more realistic but is less satisfying. The prose is deeply readable, and there are flashes of mordant dark humor, but the overall impression is that the novel overall manages to be virtually substance-free while simultaneously collapsing under its own weight. I never really considered DNFing this, but it's not all that good, either.

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen

 Yet another Hiaasen novel, yet another blast of a read. Not a novel to read for detailed plotting or plausible storylines or subtlety of social commentary, but a novel that's worth reading in many ways because (not in spite) of that. It's amusing to work out which characters will come to spectacular, laughable bad ends, even if the details of those bad ends are often difficult to precisely predict. Hiaasen really loves Florida, and there are times when the things done to it make him really angry, and those are when his writing really shines. Also, you gotta love a novel that features a character who explicitly will not trust anyone who refuses a payoff.

What's Done in Darkness by Laura McHugh

 

At this point I feel a little like a slightly unhinged fan, but Laura McHugh can really fucking write. This is a dark as hell little thriller with all kinds of things to say about family and religion and how sexual assault victims who go to the police end up being victimized again, their situations often don't improve by much, the investigators often skitter on the edge of abuse. Also because Ms. McHugh has a thing for them, this has strong whiffs of bildungsroman to it. Strong characters, and the hope that emerges at the end is all the brighter for all the darkness one passes through to get to it. Better than at least one of the books I read yesterday, probably more enjoyable than both of them.

What Fire Brings by Rachel Howzell Hall

 

I read this book this evening, and it really wasn't anything like as good as the O'Connor, or any of six other books I've read this month. Cluttered and muddled, with a deeply deranged unreliable narrator powering twist after twist after stupid twist. It would probably have been a mercy if I'd stopped when she used "epitaph" when she meant "epigraph." That should have been a sign ...

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

 

I read this book this morning in a coffee shop, after checking it out from the library because there are about fifty samples from the movie of it in Ministry's song "Jesus Built My Hotrod." Turns out the novel is just about as nihilistic as those samples/quotations make it sound. *Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were were going to was never there, and were you are is no good unless you can get away from it.*This is actually a reasonably pleasant read, on the prose level, but it's impossible to get past the feeling that O'Connor doesn't like the characters and she can't stop laughing at them in a mean-spirited way. Laden with immediate post-WW2 Southern poverty and filth and casual racism, jam-packed with deeply unpleasant people that read like caricatures described with un/loving precision. The edition I read was apparently still using the prints of the tenth-anniversary edition, which had a little foreword from O'Connor in which she says something to the effect that she thinks non-Christians see the main character's integrity as being about his persistence in trying to get out from his religion, while she sees his integrity as being about not being able to; I think both of these things are correct, and I think both these things are wrong.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

 

This is a novel that I saw sitting on the library shelves, and I picked it up and put it back on a fw trips. Then I saw that Green blurbed some book I really enjoyed--I don't remember which--and it kinda worked backward to how blurbs are supposed to work, in that it led me to finally go ahead and read this book. I have the sense it got some buzz--clearly Green was someone sorta in the public eye before publishing this--but I knew nothing other than what was on the cover. It's an interesting, pretty good book. Green has things to say about celebrity and the internet (especially social media) and how they interact, and about how tribes form and conflict with each other online; some of those things look a little ... dated to me, looking back on this book published in 2018, but maybe I've just been paying attention mostly in the wrong places or to the wrong people. The story is reasonably OK, the narrator comes off badly enough that she doesn't seem really unreliable; there's clearly something of an unresolved ending, though the main does get to be something of a Messiah. There are things that are probably not super-plausible, especially in the science, plausibly in some of the professional ethics; I'm not an expert in the relevant areas but something seems off. The prose is bright and catchy and laden with nifty turns of phrase. There is, I gather, something of a sequel to this, and I'll probably grab that on some future library run and read it.

The Silence in Her Eyes by Armando Lucas Correa

 

Well, this was a pile of mediocrity. The prose itself wasn't total excrement, but just about everything else might be better served by being set on fire. The characters are all sketched out and barely more than one-dimensional; the storyline, such as it is, is jumbled and disconnected and episodic and overburdened with "twists" that are supposed to be "clever" but in fact are fucking tedious. The novels being name-dropped to indicate that at least one character in the novel is a "serious reader" would probably have been a clue where the author and I were going to part ways, if I'd seen it first.

The Reckoning on Cane Hill by Steve Mosby

 

This is a thoroughly stupid book, there's no way to sustain suspension of disbelief more than about halfway--once the omnicompetent bordering on omnipotent band of serial killers make their appearance it borders on laughable--but outside of that it's not horribly written on the prose level, nor is it exactly badly paced. The stupid twist about three quarters in, where it turns out it's not just multiple POV but multiple timeline, happens late enough that by that point you just might as well finish the daft thing. There's some sense of the characters being vaguely not all the same person, but that's at best kinda muddled. It's not a very good book, not anything like as good as last night's book, though it's more to my taste, genre-wise.

The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

 

This is just over 300 pages of a couple-three naifs (depending on how you count, one of which is at best skittering on the edges of plausibility) mostly failing to have things go well with/for them. Apparently Studio-era Hollywood was a pretty crap place. Also the Roman Empire. Who knew? One of the bad endings was clear and inevitable to anyone coming into the book knowing who Salome was; the other was at least obvious as like the shape under the blankets within the first 100 pages. There's still some tension in watching things unravel, but it's not a very pleasant read, in spite of the occasional charming turn of phrase.

The Old Man by Thomas Perry

 

This is another novelist I read and enjoyed something by, and figured I'd grab something else--an advantage of doing most of my reading these days from the local public libraries is that doing something like this doesn't cost me any money--and this turned out to be another novel well worth reading. Perry does seem to have a bit of a tendency toward prose that isn't so much "invisible" (an overrated ideal, I think) as understated, almost to the point of mundanity. There are no histrionics here, no linguistic fireworks, just solid sentences that turn into solid paragraphs that turn into solid chapters. The primary character here is perhaps a touch more ruthless than many readers will prefer, but his choice at the end is completely in-character (and might not be completely irrevocable); thinking about it, it seems as though plausibly the actual protagonist is the character most readers will think of as the antagonist, who only starts getting POV chapters about halfway through the novel: He's the character who changes most, after all. I am again impressed.

The Blade Itself by Marcus Sakey

 

This is a novel of the criminal life in Chicago, with all kinds of things to say: things about poverty and criminality and friendship and loyalty and love and family. There's violence, here, in many shapes and forms; there are characters, here, with lifetimes of history together, and making new lives together; changing understandings of themselves and each other. Past lives and consequences, good moves, bad moves, smart moves: the main here is struggling with all of those and what they mean and the context they fit into in his life. The ending allows for hope and leavens the grim some. There's something of a live wire, here, to chew on, and I like it.

You'd Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace

 

Unlike the overwrought and overthought novella I read in the coffeeshop this afternoon, this was actually enjoyable to read. Darkly witty turns of phrase, an almost acid misanthropy, a story that unfurls with remarkable grace; some obvious noise coming from the basement, er, subtext, about dementia and aging and family and grief--all handled deftly, nothing overweening, the story sits clearly and proudly on top. Probably the author's first concern was getting through a rough patch in her life, but she clearly cared about the reader's enjoyment in the novel.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

 

Hey! I read this book this afternoon! It's maybe novella-length, and as you might expect from someone who won a Nobel Price for Literature it's unrelentingly pretentious; it's also clumsy as hell; it has things it wants to say and it makes sure you know it, then it's completely unable to get out of its own way and actually say them. It's so uninterested in the story it contains that the story is literally an afterthought. The stolid, almost-wooden prose might be an artifact of it being in translation, but it certainly didn't help.