To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

 

Part of my occasional intermittent project to read books from the literary canon that I missed for one reason or another on my way through the American educational system. I gather from like cultural osmosis or something that the setting here is closely derived from Ms. Lee's childhood, it certainly bears a strong odor of familiarity (and of familiarity's direct descendent, contempt). Telling it from the POV of a young girl makes for some naivete-based unreliable narration, but because Scout is approximately never intentionally deceptive it's pretty easy to suss out what the people around here are really doing or talking about. There some elements that probably show the novel's age--something over sixty years as I write this: It starts out really slowly, the inciting event is like a quarter or more into the book; there's--in spite of the whiff of contempt I mentioned above--maybe a bit of "good whites in the Jim Crow South" in the attitude toward the characters, arguably some White Savior stuff that's a little thin. The story wraps a little obliquely, a little suddenly, and some of the other pacing is occasionally a little odd by modern standards. It's a good novel, though, at moments Lee's prose crackles and sings, and certainly American schools are doing well to include it in their canon.

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton

 

This is a strange murder mystery, told in something that looks like a post-apocalyptic version of *R.U.R.* (look it up, it's where the word "robot" comes from) but below the surface is probably not quite as post-apocalyptic as it seems. At a minimum, there's something like hope, once the humans are dead and just the robots remain. Of course, it turns out the apocalypse isn't really one for the robots, that's been a lie the whole time (and I never trusted it, not even from the start) and the nigh-omniscient narrator is about as reliable as Humbert Humbert, but plausibly less moral. Also, of course, the author plays some Dame Agatha-ish games by having the "murder" being solved turn out to be a suicide. The writing itself is pretty good, though the characters tend to blend together into either the "elders" (the humans who survived and are the rulers of the island) and the "villagers" (who are mostly subservient to the elders, as they've been designed to be) with a couple of exceptions among the villagers. For a moment I thought I was catching stray whiffs of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," but that was mostly not right, I think.

The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry

 

This is a mostly-standard thriller novel with a pretty interesting twist--there's a cop after a serial killer, who he thinks is just a guy killing high-end escorts. Turns out he's a hired hitman who lives with high-end escorts while he's doing pre-killing work, then kills them on his way out of town; he lives off the grid while he's sharing their home, then he removes the only witness. Of course, he's leaving extra dead bodies around, which turns out to be the flaw in his plan. Perry does his typical good job of conveying the various sorts of mundane--sometimes even tedious--things people do to get into the position of being the characters they are in his novels, and he does a really good job with the characterizations in this one--all the escorts are treated as people, and there's one who's given some interesting depth and extra nuance. The story moves with Perry's typical excellent rapid pace. Very much Perry at the top of his game.

Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa

 

This was about as radical a change of pace from last night's novel as I could plausibly manage. I wouldn't say it's not dark at all, but the darkness is very much lurking in the background, a sense that the narrator is recounting people she has lost, experiences she can never really get back to, perhaps a self she can never be again. It's a charming novel on the surface, all the characters here are remarkably likeable, if perhaps sometimes exaggeratedly quirky, even those se later see as deeply flawed or maybe worse (though I think actually evil isn't in the range, here). The language is crystalline, the alchemy of translation has done good work, here. The dialogue all rings true. The ending, the actual falling apart of things, unfolds really late and kinda suddenly, though there are ample precursors. It's a really bittersweet novel, almost as nostalgic as some of Bradbury's; I have a sense there's some intended thematic point, but I'm not really sure what it might be, other than apparently perfect surfaces hiding very imperfect depths. There are a lot of things I'm really not sure about, about this book, but that's very plausibly me. Beautifully written, if kinda puzzling.

The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

 

So, this is a book of apocalyptic fiction. The apocalypse here is kinda ludicrous, well past my own limits for suspension of disbelief; the writing otherwise is actually quite good: the pacing and the characterizations are excellently handled and acute, the authorial voice is just laden with neat turns of phrase, I kept reading well past the point where I'd given up on what the novel was trying to do because so much of the writing was so fun. This is Book One of a series, though, and the writing was not fun enough to make me want to read more.

Malice House by Megan Shepherd

 

This might be as quickly as I've bailed on a book in a while--not even twenty pages. At least four things wrong enough about reality that my suspension of disbelief came crashing to the metaphorical floor. The voice wasn't inspiring great confidence, either, all kinda short sentences with occasional fragments, but I might have been able to deal with that. Oh, well, yet another author to remember to avoid.

The Other Side of Night by Adam Hamdy

 

This isn't a crappy horror novel. It's mostly a bad science fiction novel disguised as a mediocre crime novel. It has the latter's addiction to twists and revelations instead of plot, and it has the former's gee-whiz attitude to the impossible. It's not a very good novel, it's too British for me to know if the characters or dialogue or setting hold up, but the prose itself is kinda stolid and occasionally clunky. The story itself kinda maunders around between various timelines, only settling down in the second half when the science fiction emerges from the shadows and things go wildly off the rails. I guess if I'd seen that Hamdy had ghostwritten for Patterson I'd have left the book on the library shelf. Oops and oh well, at least it wasn't so bad I didn't finish it.

The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry

 

It's so refreshing to read an actually good--really, really fucking good--horror novel. No hiding behind various "literary" authorial bullshit, just a horror novel that builds. It's a sort of almost generational haunted house novel, the house stands for nearly a century, the narrator lives through like twenty years, long enough that there's a real feel change when she transitions from writing about her memories of being a kid to writing about herself as an adult (and the sense her memories of things are shaping her narration of her childhood is real, without making her out to be a liar). The people in the novel feel like people, they might not be exactly like what you'd find in a working class, then gentrified neighborhood in Chicago, but they feel like people and that's what really matters. Henry's voice tends to the straightforward, there aren't any real flights of fancy, no straining toward something heightened, but it's solid and there are some nicely turned phrases and some well-realized dialogue. It's nice to see the inhumanity of the haunting (which is arguably something more than a haunting, but whatever) broken by very human emotions, a mix of what people would think of as good and bad but entirely human. A genuine delight to read.

The Pallbearer's Club by Paul Tremblay

 

Well. Almost two years ago I read a novel by Tremblay and thought it was really good stuff but there was a touch of PoMo that gave me pause. This novel is pretty much just that touch of PoMo, the novel being in the form of a memoir written by one character, with notes scribbled on it by another, the latter turns out to be something like a vampire, and she turns out to have destroyed the writer of the memoir entirely and in multiple ways. There, I've spared you the bother of struggling to read this distressingly boring novel, go and do something worthwhile with the time I've saved you.

The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block

 

This turned out to be a clever and occasionally funny detective novel, with some reasonable twists and turns and suchlike along the way. Block could write funny with a distressingly casual ease, but he could also see things you might not have notices and phrase them in ways you might not have thought of--he could do that sort of cleverness without being exactly funny, and he did it well, and a lot, in this novel. I presume it's intended to be happening in the early 1990s, when it was written (I generally tend to presume that fiction is set when it's being written, unless there's a good reason to presume otherwise) and New York then was a somewhat grittier place, and many of the attitudes were really unfriendly--at least some of the words were (there's a transwoman who gets talked about in some kinda jarring ways to 2026 sensibilities, but she's always referred to as "she," which for 1993 is really progressive). The prose is sharp and sparkles like quartz, the characters are deeply believable. Really, really good, and it makes me wish the local libraries had more of Block's novels from the 1980s and 1990s as physical books, so I could read them.

City of Others by Jared Poon

 

Grabbed this off my wife's stack of books going back to the library, after she enjoyed it immensely, and it turned out to be kinda the book I needed this evening. Obviously Book One of a series, but that's fine, sometimes those are plenty charming--and this one is. It's laden with internal drama as well as external, and there's sparkle and wit and even joy just strewn all over it; the prose at times practically sings and quivers with it. Things happen that are supernatural, plausibly even monstrous, but most of the important stuff is deeply human. Really impressively good.

I Will Ruin You by Linwood Barclay

 

Tapped out of this one before getting a hundred pages in. Going for kaleidoscopic and failing by a wide margin, lots of uninteresting--some of them really fucking dim, even ones I don't think were supposed to be--POV-ish characters. Clearly something big and squidlike was going on in the local underworld, but I wasn't buying any of how it was manifesting in the putative main's life. That's another author I'm done with, I'm afraid.

House of Bone and Rain by Gabino Iglesias

 

I went into this novel with something like high hopes, and they more or less did not come to pass. The novel is cluttered and crowded, muddled and kinda muffled, and manages to feature both vague Lovecraftiana and incompetent (or at least out-of-their-league) criminals, two of (at the moment) my least favorite things. The characters all kinda blur together, and there's stuff going on that wraps up in like a last-minute rugpull. It's clear Igleasias holds Puerto Rico dear, which is about the only really good thing I can say about it.

Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen

 

When one sees a Hiaasen from the mid-late 1980s in the library, one checks it out. Obviously this is really early Hiaasen, but it's really goofy and really off the chain in ways he kinda got away from for a while, with less in the way of his current satirical inclinations. I suspect that if one knew Florida history well enough, one might be able to unpick some elements of reality from Skink's story--this is a really early version of Skink and might be the beginning of the character--but that's less relevant than it might seem. The characters kinda loop and swirl their way through the story, I guess it's possible there's at least a little punching-down at televangelists and their flocks, and at pro fishermen and their audience, but given Hiaasen's feelings about Florida and the environment and the fact that both the above are hip-deep in bad development (evergreen Florida, there) I think it's pretty easy to tell where the ire is really directed. Really funny and fast-paced and a great read, if not particularly great literature (or even intended to be).

Saints at the River by Ron Rash

 This novel starts with a heartbreak, and it doesn't get much easier. The people in it are almost all hurting, or soon will be, and Rash draws their suffering through a flame like a silver thread, and he weaves beauty. I was underwhelmed by another of his novels, but I'm glad I gave this novel a chance, it's beautiful and stark and craggy like the Carolina mountains it's set in. What peace or hope emerge are rooted in sorrow and pain, and they feel more precious for it; what answers there are neither simple nor easy. The characters are all well laid out and laid bare, the prose is solid, the ear for dialogue seems spot-on and manages to capture some regionalism without trying to capture dialect--there aren't cute improper words or grammar, here, just some phrasings.

Firewatching by Russ Thomas

 

I read this last night and kinda forgot to post about it. Oops. It's a decent enough procedural, I guess, lots of emphasis on LGBT+ characters and issues, which is fine, but there's some muddle through most of the novel that mostly arises from the decision to have a POV character suffering from pretty severe dementia, which makes her hard to trust ... and then she apparently turns out to have important information--not that "procedural" has all that much in common with "fair play," of course. The characters are often kinda murky, mostly because the author is doing slow reveals, there are really important things that come up kinda late in the novel. There are some dynamics between the characters that feel as though the author might intend or expect to write more novels around them, and he's welcome to but I won't be reading them. This wasn't anything like a good enough novel that I want to read more.