The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

 

There were several times reading this that I gave serious thought to putting it down and getting on with my evening, but I figured I'd keep going in case the novel every managed (or maybe bothered) to pay of its premise. I should have stopped, and spared myself the unending digressions pointlessly spiraling into pomo inanity about the impossibility of facts; then an ending that's really more like a stop. In between, La Farge manages to mimic Lovecraft at his least readable and the sludgy prose of a shrinkologist who can't get out of her own head without ever managing to demonstrate that he can write prose that is actually pleasant to read.

Safe and Sound by Laura McHugh

 

So, I'm clearly well on my way to being a big fan of Ms. McHugh. She writes well, and her stories are intricate and dense without being laden with Shocking Twists and other assorted rugpulls. This novel is structurally a lot like The Weight of Blood in that it's in two timelines, but there's a lot less of the bildungsroman in this. I mean, all the protagonists are young--like, senior in high school young--but this is not so much a novel about growing up as it is about getting away. Ms. McHugh tends to set her novels in small towns (in a relatively narrow patch of America) and she seems to know them in her bones--and she at least at times does not seem to like them. Given the way the small town in this novel seems to gather itself to punish anyone with the nerve to want to leave, I'm strongly inclined to say she doesn't.

Every Cloak Rolled in Blood by James Lee Burke

 

This is a really, really good novel, even though it plays in that space around death and life and includes plainly supernatural doings. Meaning, it operates in a similar space as last night's novel, which I didn't like as much, at least in part because it did those things. On the one hand, it's easy to say it's that Burke's a better write--he really is. On the other, though, there's something about the handling of things, the way so many of the characters in this novel rage and fight against the ghosts and the demons; Connolly's characters are either blind to all-a-that or they're deeply a part of it and just treat it as like Tuesday. Connolly's makes the horrific bland, Burke's embraces the horror while still somehow making the mundane horrific. There are spiritualistic undertones in the Burke novel that border on the religious, and that's really not my jam, but there are reasons, and Burke can write, so I'm just going to say this is a beautifully painful novel that at points slants against my preferences.

A Game of Ghosts by John Connolly

 

Look, a novel written by someone who actually cares about the story! And the characters! It's not a great novel, by any means, there are some premises that choke my suspension of disbelief, here, that might not if this were a complete story instead of an episode (this is apparently part of a long-running series); I'd probably have an easier time if it were straight horror instead of trying to commingle that with a detective story--in the sense of trying to be a detective story, rather than that of using detective story tropes to frame a horror story, which works just fine. As it is, this feels like some of F. Paul Wilson's later Repairman Jack novels, where he's fighting supernatural forces almost all the time; the author got a little creepy in a detective thriller and it sold and he kept needing to use more creepy in his detective thrillers. This is--really--a nicely-written novel that just does some things that don't vibe right for me. Better than the last few, anyway.

A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens by Raul Palma

 

Yet another novel laden with blandness the author attempted to cover up with dazzling and daffy local color. Cluttered and crowded and massively disjunct, with the strong whiff of an inability to tell dreams from detritus. Dude, you should have let the short story be.