The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

 

Uh, holy fucking shit, y'all. It's a time-loop novel that actually works for me, and it's fucking beautiful, it took me a moment to remember to breathe. There are moments that feel like having your heart ripped out, but it's not a downbeat novel at all, it's a novel about how love is worth fighting for, worth dying (repeatedly) for; it's a novel about hope and how it can be armor. There aren't many authors who do slow-burn romance the way Harrow does, integral to everything else but no more dominant than it needs to be. Even the villain is more ambitious than anything else, at least at the core (the complete ruthlessness, the dehumanizing of enemies and allies, that stuff is built on the ruthlessness' foundation). The prose shifts registers amazingly well, the more everyday language of the story and the slightly heightened prose of the chronicler, the POV characters talking so much about what the other does is handled gracefully. This doesn't start quite so rough-and-slow as some of Harrow's other novels, probably because the loop thing keeps at least some parts of the novel's story kinda short.

A happily-ever-after only lasts as long as you're willing to fight for it.

King Sorrow by Joe Hill

 

Weekend Reading Project: Completed. I didn't realize Joe Hill had gone a decade without any other novels--there've been other projects, and he's apparently taken to writing books with the approximate dimensions of bricks. This is a superb novel, well worth the wait. It's nearly 900 pages, but it's not bloated, it doesn't feel badly-paced, even a little. The narrative voice (and the ear for dialogue) are both nicely wickedly funny, sometimes while being gleefully gruesome--turns out, he is his father's son. Don't worry about that blurb on the front: It's not a fable, that author's a bit of a hack but she's popular. There probably are some thematic things going on in the subtext, things about power and corruption and what exactly heroism is, and about what sacrifices might be worth making, but they're well-contained and the story runs rampant over them all, complete with at least three references to Stephen King's books (possibly more, but I'm much less familiar with his 21st-Century books). If this novel's size doesn't intimidate you, I highly recommend it.

Trust No One by Paul Cleave

 

This turned out to be a reasonably engaging thriller, if not a particularly believable one, there are things going on as it unwinds that just fail plausibility checks in ways that at least make the willful suspension of disbelief more difficult. The main character is a guy with early-onset rapidly-progressing Alzheimer's, which is reasonably fine, and the tension in the novel is whether he's really the killer he (sometimes) remembers being, but the ways that tension is resolved just seem like not things that happen, and some of the characters end up doing some pretty dramatic heel-turns. The narrator here is, of course, amazingly unreliable, and it's a credit to the author that I didn't simply spit the bit and stop reading--the voice is nicely tuned and the phrases run to the brilliantly turned--but the premise just kept me from trying to figure out what was really going on, as the twists just kept folding in on themselves until the ending kinda imploded.

The Tragedy of True Crime by John J. Lennon

 

This is ... not exactly narrative non-fiction, but there's a strong whiff of memoir to it--probably stronger than Lennon intended, but he's all over the book as a character, even though his crime is arguably less-examined than the other three. The book seems from the cover copy, and sometimes feels reading it as though it wants to be, a critique of true crime as a genre; but while it pokes some holes, it's really not exactly a takedown, at least most of the foibles Lennon aims at are ones I'm at least aware of. Three of the four killers here are not the sort who'd normally be profiled in some true crime book or show--there's the gay man who killed and dismembered his (arguably abusive) sugar daddy; the mentally ill Black man who took part in the murders of two priests; and the White drug dealer who killed someone who (he thought) was looking for an angle to take over his (possibly metaphysical) turf. Of course, the fourth one is a guy whose case broke big in the 1980s and has been occasionally reexamined over the past decade--part of the book's thesis is that there are only so many straight white people killing each other, and true crime is needing to reach out to find new stories, there's only so much reexamination the old stories will bear. Because the author is in prison--and all the other guys at least were when he spoke to them--there's also a fair amount about what prison life is like. Honestly, it probably says more about mass incarceration, the effects of the gutting of public mental health, the blowback effects of stripping education and other self-improvement programs out of prisons, and other aspects of the American (or at least New York's) criminal justice system, than it does really about true crime. It's a solid and interesting read, if not really a happy one.

Please Join Us by Catherine McKenzie

 

This is a reasonably effective legal thriller (it's written by a former practicing lawyer, and it's steeped in legal and legalistic processes, it's a legal thriller regardless of whether the publisher bothers to call it one) that also has things to say about feminism and women's friendships and cults and hero-worship and family; the story is sturdy enough to carry much of that, though the cultish aspects of the sisterhood group in it are really obvious, as is the fact there's a larger plan at play. The story starts off in two timelines, more or less, but it's persistently clear about when you are, and you're always in the head of one (first-person) narrator. Many of the characters end up being really murky, because many of them are lying from the first time you see them and don't stop, which does sometimes make it a little hard to tell what's going on, but things do resolve pretty clearly, with a hint that at least some things will go better, that the good guys have won (and the protagonist--that first-person narrator--is very much a good-guy, as are some small number of other characters).

Departure 37 by Scott Carson

 

Scott Carson is Michael Koryta's pen name, when he writes something that leans more into Weirdness than his more-usual thrillers (he makes no secret of this) and Koryta can really write, and he seems to understand how to paste kinda implausible premises onto his high-intensity fiction--sometimes this looks like horror, which this book really is not. The instigating event, here is ... kinda plausible, if you squint a little, but this is a time-travel novel--though it seems to be forward, one-way-only, which is the least implausible form, I think. It actually plays pretty close to some of the technothrillers I've read (though that's not a genre I reach for much these days) though Koryta manages to avoid the trap so many of them that I read fall into, of getting into fields I know anything about and then getting everything wrong; it's possible he gets stuff wrong, but I didn't see anything that kicked me out of the novel or anything. There are some weird facts in the novel that are true, and the US government's reaction/s in the novel to thing events it depicts seems ... likely. The most-effective plot threads in it are the more-personal ones, which makes some sense; the characters are all plausible; the prose and dialogue are solid and occasionally lively. Really good.

The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North

 This turned out to be a reasonably decent psycho killer thriller, playing some similar games as last night's novel, at least in the sense of hiding said killer's identity among the novel's characters. It's not as funny or as pointed in its social commentary, but it's not setting out to be the latter or really much the former. Most of the characters are pretty well-defined and plausible--the psycho killer is a bit on the out-there side, but in novels they often are; it's not extremely clear for most of the novel that the killer is not a survivor of the novel's backstory, which isn't awesome. The novel is told in multiple timelines and from multiple POVs, but it mostly holds together reasonably well, there's some sleight-of-hand about some things but it's not pointless endless stupid twists the way so many modern thriller novels are.

Very Slowly All at Once by Lauren Schott

 

This was another surprisingly funny novel, though it's really much more a novel of social commentary--almost but not quite satire, I think--than it is something like a crime novel or a thriller, both of which genres it does at least abut. All sorts of things in the text and subtext about striving and social climbing and social gatekeeping and money, and how just about everyone has someone they're looking up at, or down on, and how in a lot of places the social strata are fixed in place. The mains are deeply human, remarkably easy to empathize with, completely believable and plausible, and well written; some of the other characters feel a little sketchy, but nothing super horrible. There is something of an omnicompetent sociopath lurking or looming, and that's not something I'm normally willing to gladly let slide, but I'll gladly let it slide here, because the misdirection about the sociopath's identity feeds into much of the rest of what the novel's doing (and their eventual identity is especially congruent with the novel's other themes). A suitably mixed ending. Really a good novel.

Pariah by Dan Fesperman

 

This was a really good current-day spy novel, laden with intent and point about the various trends and vectors in politics as the author saw them (novel is copyright 2025, so probably written 2023-2024); Fesperman clearly has a take, and I think it's a strong one (and not just because I tend toward agreement with it, I think). A slow-burn narrative that spirals in eventually almost claustrophobically, with threads of sharp characterization and gallows humor. The humor serves as relief, but lets the darker turns draw more blood. The main character is a believable schmuck, and there's at least parts--maybe even most--of a redemption arc for him, and it's hard-earned, and he legitimately won't ever be the same person. I've enjoyed one of Fesperman's other novels and struggled with another, this was a blast if perhaps a distinctly twisted one.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll

 

I hadn't read any of this since like middle-school, and I figured it'd be interesting to renew my acquaintance. Uh, this ain't really good stuff, y'all. There are some occasional moments--every native English speaker probably knows some of them--but the overall things are really disjointed and shockingly uninteresting. I don't think it's just the datedness of the prose, it seems more like the wildly disjointed narrative wherein Alice is never really anything more than the one things are happening to, she rarely does much of anything (she's a seven-year-old Victorian girl, this is probably to be expected). What occurred to me was that the book probably does a decent job of what it's like to be a child--especially what it was like to be a Victorian chlld--with parents and other adults dragging you around without giving you any say and spouting things at you that make no sense but which they tell you are real. I dunno if I'm getting more contrarian as I get older (gawds, I hope not) but I was deeply unimpressed with this.

The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett

 

It's a hardboiled/noir detective novel where the characters aren't completely sloshed the whole time--they drink kinda hard but it's not so constant as in many others (some of which Hammett wrote). This is a dark and cynical novel of big city politics as much as it is a mystery--both of those might well be described as "crime novel," true--and the political workings are more the heart of the story than the main character figuring out who the killer really is, in spite of at least one false confession. The solution is one of psychology more than like physical evidence, which seems kinda forward-thinking for 1931--but Hammett is one of the giants, so. The dialogue feels appropriately rough for the mingled mash of thugs and politicians the characters are drawn from and pulled out of, and the descriptions are effective if occasionally weird in ways that might be because the text is nearly a century old--absolutely some of the slang falls weird because of that. The story is a little muddled for much of the length, but it does clear up in the last quarter. The old story kicks pretty hard, even in old-fashioned mass-market paperback.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

 

There are--or at least have been--days I would have finished this thing as some sort of self-flagellation or something but this is not one of those days; after reading 158 of 338 pages and getting no pleasure therefrom, I stopped.

Behind Sunset by David Gordon

 

A standalone crime novel by an author who's written a lot of books I've enjoyed. Set in 1994, which does make communications less ubiquitous and reliable, and because the Internet is not such a dominant feature of every day life, it's harder to find information as quickly; it turns out it's also just about at the end of media, which makes the blackmail storyline here possible, at least the Maguffin part of it. Gordon has a knack for turning phrases, and an ear for dialogue, and both are on display through out the novel. The story is a little ... convoluted, but it's not endless mindless twists in pursuit of cleverness. Very readable and I'm happy I made a little extra effort to find it.

A Killer in the Wind by Andrew Klavan

 

I read something by Klavan a while ago, it was more of an explicitly Christian very YA-seeming novel that seemed strangely unwilling to commit to there being at least one actual angel in it, and I found it strangely disappointing in spite of the prose itself being at times quite good. This is not that, what Christian references there are much more subtle, the morality is much grayer, it's not at all unwilling to commit to anything, and the prose is still quite good (there are some truly delicious turns of phrase scattered throughout). The story is perhaps a little loopy--I'm not sure I buy the psychological/pharmaceutical stuff--but it's easy enough to just decide to swallow it, and the novel holds together more than well enough once you make that choice. The characters are mostly believable (oddly, the 1st-person POV narrator is in some ways the least believable character in the book, see my comments about psychology and pharmaceuticals) and the events move along rapidly and smoothly. This seems to have a lot in common, thematically and otherwise, with at least some of Andrew Vachss' novels; it gets grim, but there is at least vengeance if not exactly a happy ending. Not perfect, but very good.

The Hunger by Alma Katsu

 This novel sits maybe somewhere just on the "better" side of mediocre, it reads vaguely like an attempt to reframe Simmons' *The Terror* (a vastly superior novel, as I remember) as a story about the Donner Party--though I'm sure Ms. Katsu wasn't thinking so crassly as that admittedly reductionist description makes it sound. I think much of the problem, here, is that there really aren't a lot of characters one ends up wholeheartedly rooting for: There are a couple who inarguably deserve better outcomes than the book hands them, but that's neither rare nor unreasonable in Horror, but it kinda reads like the main monster wins, here, without any real consequences to speak of (the ancillary monsters win but are arguably their own consequence). The prose is mostly solid, bordering on kinda stolid, there's not really much life or sparkle to it--even though it's not written in like 1840s vernacular or anything (not that I'm complaining about anachronism, tell the story as you can and as your reader will understand it). There's some subtext that's only barely not text about the white "settlers" being (or bringing) a disease, a plague; I don't disagree, but the novel is barely strong enough to carry even that weight.

Crusader's Cross by James Lee Burke

 

I couldn't tell you exactly why I chose this novel rather than any of the others in my stack, but it made an interesting counterpoint to last night's novel, to be sure. Putatively more realistic. Absolutely steeped in ideas about manhood and how they're damaging to everyone. Violent as heck. Deeply personal, as all Burke's novels at least seem to be (I have zero doubt there's some artistry, that the things that look like Easter eggs from Burke's life are--at least mostly--something like authorial sleight of hand). This has all of Burke's usual strengths, and in 2005 the characters wouldn't be far too old for some of the stuff they get up to. The prose is lean but lyrical, laden with delicious turns of phrase; the characters are all eminently believable--even and especially the worst of them--the story loops and whorls and eventually unwinds. Every James Lee Burke novel feels like a treasure.

The Mermaid by Christina Henry

 At this point if I see a Christina Henry book I haven't read, I'll grab it (the actual seven-book series is probably an exception, sorry). I have some high expectations and this novel met them squarely then exceeded them. It's obviously a bit of a riff on Hans Christian Andersen, but there's an intentionally fictionalized P.T. Barnum in it (among other real-world derived characters) and the mermaid here is much more the driver of her own story--and it turns out to be a romantic story in ways really incompatible with the better-known versions of the fairy tales, especially the Disneyfied take. While the mermaid in Ms. Henry's story looks kinda monstrous, it's the humans in the novel who at least mostly turn out to be the monsters. A very strong, very modern and feminist spin on things. The anger that shows up in some of Ms. Henry's more outright horror novels is less present here, but there are moments when the flames catch.