Atonement by Ian McEwan

 

I find myself deeply ambivalent about this novel. Most of the first part was tedious. The bits on the way to Dunkirk and in a homefront hospital were gritty and intense and really good. To the extent the second part made the first part worth the slog, McEwan undercuts it with a metatextual rugpull at the end and into the epilogue. The novel isn't about an atonement that happens, it's about one that doesn't, one that can't--this is fine, there are things that cannot be undone, severings that cannot be mended; and the ending hits kinda hard, the rugpull stings. But it's still a rugpull, and it drags most of the novel (I'm unclear on the extent to which that sloggy first part is supposed to have been written by a character in the novel) from the realm of fiction to the realm of lies. I hate being lied to.

The Good Killer by Harry Dolan

 

This wasn't as persistently funny a novel as last night's read, but I think it was probably better--it certainly was very much more in the inner ring of my personal tastes, anyway; Dolan's a writer I really like a lot, and this is him at or very near his peak (at least that I've read). It's a pretty realistic thriller, as thrillers go, the mains (and most of the rest of the characters, for that matter) are all the best at what they do, by any means, though some of them are very good, or at least have the right skills and knowledge for the situations they find themselves in. It's violent, especially at the end it's really fricking violent, but it never revels in that. There's all kinds of tension in the novel, from really early on if you read the cover copy and know the novel's basic premise/s. That tension never lets up until the end, as action and consequence and cause and effect impel things toward that bloody end. It's a pretty moral novel, though--the good characters get at least mostly the good endings, the bad ones get the bad ones. Though one does suspect that some of the characters might have suffered some career setbacks after the events. Dolan writes crisp prose that stretches taut like a high wire, and his characters all feel human, even the ones you find yourself rooting against.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

 

This was a fun read, crackling with energy and anger and humor. It's an inverted supers story, where the "supervillains" are at least less dangerous and damaging than (most) "superheroes," but doesn't read to me as any sort of takedown of the genre or anything so much as riffing on some (or a lot) of the tropes, looking at things from a different angle. It *might* be leveling at least some snark on a certain category of supers movie that features all sort of collateral damage. Also at America's "health care system" and possibly at corporate life in general. The characters here are mostly believable, the dialogue tends to sparkle and zing, the prose snaps and dances. There are some minor weirdnesses in the story--at least one bit of "skip ahead and backfill the gaps" that doesn't work as well as it could have--but there aren't really any dead spots pacing-wise.

You Know What You Did by K. T. Nguyen

 

This is not a particularly good book. The POV character--there's really just the one until the very end--is struggling so hard with mental illness that it's impossible to take any of her reported perceptions exactly literally, she's not primarily delusional but her perceptions are violently skewed. The novel takes like 170 of like 350 pages to get to what's arguably the inciting event, though there's a plausible reading it's not. It jumps around in time between at least three timelines, with some of those juddering and skipping between present and past. The characters aren't all that interesting or likeable, most of them seem really shallow and one-note. The prose is pretty solid; that and the fact that it's not endless twists (there's just the one and it mainly works because the POV is so limited) are the extent of the good I can muster, here. The author is clearly coming from a place of pain and writing about things very important to her, but much of this is just a jumbled scream.

Fan Fiction by Brent Spiner

 

This is a weird and witty novel, clearly has a lot of Noir in its ancestry but has a really dry sense of humor about it, and draws amply (and does well to do so) on Spiner's experiences making Star Trek: The Next Generation. There's a co-writer on the title page who probably deserves a good bit of the credit--and Spiner is generous in his acknowledgments. There are some moments that don't work as well as others, but that's not wildly unusual. There are hints that something like at least some of this happened for real, and it's clear Spiner appreciates fans while at least occasionally wishing they'd leave him alone, but this is not any kind of fandom takedown novel (if that's your jam, I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas is a good novel that does some downtaking of at least Lovecraftian fandom). Many of the  secondary characters are fictional versions of real people, which makes it hard to talk about characterization in the novel, but the dialogue feels at least mostly plausible; the moments where Spiner kinda captures the relationships between cast members are often wonderful. I'm not sure how much appeal this novel would have for people with no fond memories of the show, but I enjoyed it plenty.

The Gomorrah Gambit by Tom Chatfield

 

This was a pretty good book, really--not deathless, but good enough to spend and evening with. If I'm reading the signs correctly and it's book one of a series ... well, it's not good enough for me to chase down the rest of the series, but I'm a tough sell on that at best. The prose sparkles and shines, dances and sings; the characters all seem reasonably plausible considering that some of them are clearly larger than life. The implausibilities of the book don't matter all that much in the context of the book, things start almost normal and things build gradually to kinda bizarre, but the next thing is always pretty easy to swallow if your disbelief is still hanging overhead. There are some occasional moments of insight, here, and probably some vague thematic threads related to trust and power and suchlike, but this is not a very complex novel as far as all-a-that.

Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore

 

This was not a very good book, and also it was stoopid. At least the prose was readable, though. There was never any suspension of disbelief or particular concern about the characters or the setting or the story. I probably should have stopped reading like eighty pages in; as often happens when I push on, I regret the choice.

The Trees by Percival Everett

 

This is a really subtly angry novel. Well, the anger isn't all exactly subtle but the measure of it--the breadth and width and depth of it--doesn't become clear until the back third or quarter, when it takes a turn toward a sort of hard-earned borderline-apocalyptic nihilism. That's when the novel steeply increases the discomfort level, at least for this white guy reading it, but I think that's Everett's intention, or at least part of it. In some ways this is a more explicitly literate take on the "vengeance is another word for pain" thing that S. A. Cosby (among others) does so well, but here the pain has deep genetic roots all around. The prose crackles and sings, the characters are (mostly) well-defined--there is some strong hint of mockery of some of them, but that mockery seems deserved, not particularly like Flannery O'Connor laughing at all of her characters behind her hand. The ending has a strong "The Lady or the Tiger" vibe, though I'm not sure the reader has enough basis to figure out which way things fall. Very much a novel that might have people thinking late into the night when they should be sleeping.

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

 I've known for a while that Robbins was like a foundational influence on especially Christopher Moore but also Carl Hiaasen and likely John Scalzi, so I figured I'd finally get around to reading this book of his, which we had on our shelves. Reading it, a large part of where Moore comes from with his prose is clear--and his occasionally goody lewdness, though Hiaasen also has this in spades--and Scalzi seems to have some of it, but I get the sense he might have come to Robbins via at least one other writer (I have know idea who) under the Tom Robbins Influence. The prose has a strong whiff of baked to it, hallucinogenic and loopy and looping, routinely funny but also making strong points, sharply. The story is somewhere in that space between kaleidoscopic and fragmented, with what seems at first like a lot of POVs but which really comes mostly to like three or four; cause and effect sometimes seem at most loosely connected, the novel holds together mostly by an act of authorial will. I could honestly have done without the Von Däniken stuff, but the novel was written in the late 1970s, there are some things that were just going to happen; some of the countercultural-ish messages have likewise failed to age well. There's some didacticism at the end (in the epilogue especially) that leads me to think this is mostly intended as something like a satire, though forty-six years after its publication much of what it's satirizing seems unrecognizable (though not all). It's a readable and enjoyable novel, even if it is very much stuck in its own 1980.

The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

 

This is a kinda neat little mystery novel, with just a touch of weird in the premise. Plays mostly fair--the POV character, a first-person narrator, has some apparently wrong ideas about the sequences of events. It's one of those novels laden with mostly despicable people, if I were the narrator I'd want to be completely shut of the family; but he's a better person than I am, he works to prevent his grandfather from dying. The characters are moderately distinct, you get some sense eventually for who's who and what's what, but it takes several times through the loop before you get all that worked out (at least, it was several times through the loop before I did, I found all the names and characteristics kinda confusing, but I might be an idiot). This is definitely an unhappily unique unhappy family, but the prose--at least the translation I read--was breezy enough to make it a reasonably pleasant read.

Last Call by Daniel Okrent

 Spent a couple of days reading this, it's a kinda long, kinda dense book, and my life took a turn toward the weird. It's an informative book, laden with all kinds of juicy ironies about the rise and almost immediate fall of Prohibition. There are hypocrisies galore. Also some of the ideas people had about how to enforce the 18th Amendment remind me of the last czars, who couldn't have done more to ensure the coming of the Revolution to Russia if they'd tried--some of the ideas that floated around in the Hoover presidency were similarly working against their own stated aims. As with any more or less pop history book, it's kinda a collection of vignettes and short arcs tied together like beads on parallel strings; this is not snark or complaint. I don't know how much is going to stick, it's not a field I have a ton of prior focus on, but it held my interest more than well enough while I was reading it.

Horseman by Christina Henry

 

It has been too long since I've read a good horror novel. (April, and it was another book by Christina Henry. I might need to dig more into horror and try to find more authors I enjoy.) I don't know if the author and/or publisher would exactly call this "horror," but I'm content in the judgement, even if I just just dropped this book into the to-read pile of someone who's pretty explicitly not a horror fan, because I'm sure she'll see the beauty in it, most horror doesn't make my eyes burn the way this novel did. Ms. Henry writes with strength and grace, her world (all her worlds, really) feels real and lived in, her characters feel like people; the bad things that happen to them feel like fate or bad luck or sometimes justice. This book reminded me why I love horror so.

Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang

 

This novel looks on the surface very like a pretty classic English-country-village murder mystery, but you don't need to look very hard to see that it's a novel with very modern things to say. There are a lot of things about classism and eugenics and a marital situation that'd make Charlotte Perkins Gilman nod in recognition, and probably some interesting subtextual stuff about colonialism (though that's getting deeply granular and might not be entirely intended). Alas, it starts really, really slowly: The novel is well past halfway before the various elements and gears start to mesh and the story starts to move. The resolution is reasonably well-thought-through, and frankly less aggravating than many of the classics of the genre; I was able to put most of the bits together before they were revealed, and at least most of the larger plot, as well. The prose is reasonably solid, with some nifty chuckle-worthy turns of phrase popping up, the characters are mostly reasonably well-distinguished, the villain of the piece is truly abominable. Not great, but never really so bad I seriously thought about stopping.

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane

(Super-shiny library binding in weird light.) I've mentioned before that Book One of a long/indefinite series--not like a planned trilogy or anything--is often a really good read, all sort of introducing people and things that sorta become the status quo for later books, the situation that leads to the continuing story tends to be a good one. Sometimes, if an author decides to wrap up a series, that book is at least as good an idea to track down--it's all the resolutions that have been spinning like plates finally falling to the ground. I don't know the rest of Lehane's detective stories, this is the only one of these I've seen in the libraries I've been in, but there's something like a detective career's worth of stuff coming down, here. Clearly a finale, and kinda a grand one. Lehane's prose in this novel sparkles with wit and life, the characters are all remarkably well-defined, the story is clear and well-paced. Really good.
 

Nowhere by Allison Gunn

 

This was for a book club that I will not be going to. It's not often that one reads a book that is so boring and so unsubtle at the same time--the thematic stuff was making noise like a chainsaw early on. I don't need to read another horror novel about conformity, let alone one with no interesting characters that (I'd be willing to bet) get picked off and assimilated one by miserable one. So I noped out after just over a hundred pages.

Enemy of My Enemy by Alex Segura

 

So Marvel has started using Disney's money to pay successful novelists to write novels centered around Marvel's characters. Sure, I'll bite: There are some good stories in comic books, and Segura's a good mystery novelist. This novel is laden with all kinds of stuff people who are more into Marvel generally and Daredevil specifically will be utterly gaga for, but it's mostly just color; this is at its core a novel about a lawyer dealing with the conflicts between his morals and his ethics, across several threads. It does that really well, though the various comic-book-style fight scenes play a little weird in a text-only format, and all the various vaguely parenthetical references to events from the comic books read like some of the least attractive authorial tics one finds in series novels. The characters manage to come across as themselves--and at least mostly true to their various comic book versions--and the prose and pacing are both very solid. If you like Daredevil or Segura, the book seems like a no-brainer; if you have serious doubts about either (or especially both) you might want to give it a pass.