The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

 

I read this last night but am only getting around to posting it this afternoon; I have no excuses or jokes to make about that, oops. This is a novel I've had around for a while, probably one of the first times I read a bildungsroman that I knew what it was (and the word for it). It's a decently creepy novel, honestly more what I thought Perotta's Ghost Town was going to be (but wasn't) though it's set in the mid-1960s, not the early-mid-1970s, and the POV is younger--there's less in the way of drug use, what's there is mostly alcohol (and mostly a parent being/getting drunk, and therefore secondhand, and the POV's mom is an alcoholic, which is portrayed as bad). There's also actual tension, though the novel does tend toward the episodic/picaresque; the bad thing/s happening in the suburb are real and bad. There's a strong whiff of the supernatural, a ghost experience, but the evil in the neighborhood is very definitely human, though that human does seem to have some preternatural stuff going on. The mundane stuff going on the POV's life in parallel--family and school and neighborhood kids--serves as a pretty effective counterpoint to the Boy Detective/ghost story threads; it never felt as though things weren't moving on multiple levels. The denouement is sorta bittersweet and wistful, laden with the idea that there are things we leave behind when we leave childhood, and maybe sometimes doing that makes us less than we were. I bought this about when it came out (published in 2008) and I'm sure I read it about then, I'm glad I reread it, it's really good.

The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel

 

I've had this book since some point in the 1990s, and I'm still a fan of the author and this series (yeah, I know I don't much like series fiction--I have what Fitzgerald would have called a "first-class mind"); I have a lot of books I kinda want to reread, and tonight was a weird night timing-wise, so I figured I might as well reread this. It's good, in the way Book One tends to be, it sets up most of the overarching tensions of the series, it establishes at least the two main characters and some of the ancillary ones (though I think there's some churn in the latter). Some of the backstory, I think, ends up getting dragged forward--I don't think the characters ever age all that much past where they start (though it seems probable the Jesuit priest's situation might evolve). The prose is solid, and Coel seems to enjoy and appreciate these characters, and the physical place they're in. Not deathless literature, but something the world is better for having in it.

Strange Pictures by Uketsu

 

This was a weird little book. The art is supposed to be a big thing but the pictures didn't really make any difference in my ability to follow the story; the story is really disjointed, very nonlinear and not entirely coherent, it loops and sworls and kinda trundles its way through to the end. The nonlinearity is handled in such a way that I found that much of the narrative tension was lost; the solution to at least one of the parts of the story turned out to be much less interesting than what the narrative seemed to be pointing toward, the story didn't much reward trying to think ahead. Clearly there's something cultural around it, but the novel itself seemed not all that--not bad, but not sensational, either. I have a sense there might be translation issues, here, the voice itself seemed almost stilted at times; I have a known tendency to struggle with translated books, though, this might be my priors speaking.

Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton

 

A really clever title for a moderately interesting book. Spends a lot of time talking about the building of the infrastructure of training and materiel that had to happen to make the sabateurs and guerillas the book's about, before paying that off with recountings of some of their greatest hits. Sabateurs can do stuff that matters. Because things are happening in an order, there's more structure here than in some other pop-history-type books, but there's still a lot in the way of not names and information that don't always have obvious connections; the "what became of these people after the war" epilogue might not have been the best choice, though it did allow for a couple of elegiac moments.

Mary by Nat Cassidy

 

This is not a particularly bad novel, but it's not really a very good one, either. There's a blurb on the back that compares the main to Delores Claiborne but the King female character that persistently came to mind was Annie Wilkes--and the novel is mostly (except for some vaguely epistolary stuff at the end that feels more like an homage to Carrie than anything else) told from the main's first-person POV. The first ... 250 pages or so of this 400-ish page novel are bordering on fricking tedious, even as it becomes clearer that the main is a nutter (probably a nutter with some supernatural stuff going on, but a nutter). Yes, the novel has lots to say about how women are seen--or often not--especially as they get to middle age and beyond, and it's practically shaking with (justified) feminist rage; as has often happened lately when I've read (especially horror) fiction that wanted to have a Point, the author has forgotten that the story has to carry the weight of the subtext, not the other way around. As with much more-current horror, there's some confusion and/or conflation between monster/villain and hero, which leaves the novel without much of a leg to stand on when it comes time to take a moral position (and horror especially must take a moral position). The prose is relatively solid, I guess, neither jarring or really anything to write home about--Cassidy might be aiming at "invisible prose," which is a reasonable enough thing, but in the absence of a good story it leaves the reader without a lot of pleasure to take from the book. But it was not so bad I couldn't bring myself to finish it, which is something for me and current horror, these days.

Forever and a Death by Donald E. Westlake

 

A suitably pulpy cover for a book by one of the grandmasters of pulp action/mystery/thriller novels. Apparently derived from a treatment Westlake wrote for a Bond movie--which is believable, though this is not a Bond story, the putative main kinda disappears through the middle then turns into one of an ensemble. There are side characters who die brutal, sudden, arguably undeserved deaths; there's a remarkably brave and competent young woman who almost dies like twice (and serves as a kinda understated love interest in her spare time); there are lots of characters who aren't straight white guys doing pretty impressive things, sometimes at least bordering on the heroic; there's a villain who's willing to cause millions of deaths (including some of his co-conspirators, because villain) in order to empty some bank vaults, who gets a marvelously apt death. The prose snaps, the dialogue is convincing, the plot is ... well, it maunders a little bit, but it gets where it needs to go and even some of its side journeys are more than reasonably pleasant (oh, the joys of free-writing). It's really hard to find Westlake's older books in hardcopy, but I'll keep trying.

Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

 

These days, Nick Harkaway is filling in blank spaces in his dad's ouevre, but dude's got some game of his own--I'm sure he finds what he's doing now much more remunerative, and that's not a thing I'm going to snark on, but I do wish he would chase his own muses still. This book is a really taut noirish SF novel that doesn't have even a whiff of cyberpunk about it (well, maybe the occasionally lethal corporate maneuvering ...) that basically treats the Sf aspects as facts of the world, there's no worldbuilding as such deployed; the blurb on the front cover from Gibson seems amazingly apt, in that and several other ways, now that I think about it. The prose has some terse dry British humor (shocking given the author is a Brit) but there's a distinct snarl deployed as needed; the characters are really pretty spot-on without any real caricature; the pacing and plot are practically taut enough for a highwire act. Really, really good, and I'll definitely be looking for more of his own novels.

The Drop by Dennis Lehane

 

A pretty good little novel, barely 200 pages, but dense and tangled. Lots of characters with hidden depths and other sorts of secrets, which works in this novel because Lehane spends the whole time in various degrees of tight third-person--there's no sense of a character either actively lying or carefully not thinking about whatever secrets the author wants to hold onto as long as possible. The underbelly of Boston Lehane describes feels plausibly right, at least from the POV of the characters in the novel. It's a novel about change in a lot of ways, but most of the character-change in it is death, the city and its underbelly just persist in churning. Witty and clever but eventually kinda grim.

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

 

This is listed as a novel but it's really more like three sequential novellas, the time skips between them make it hard for me to pitch this thing as a really cohesive novel. The novellas are really, really good, and there are things about Harlem and the Black experience there (and arguably elsewhere in America, though NYC is very much the focus). I'm not a huge fan of stories about low-level crooks way out of their criminal depth, and that's kinda what these novellas all are--though to be fair it's the main's cousin who keeps doing the really ill-considered things. While Harlem is the canvas for this novel and street-level crime is the paint, I think family is really the main subject, here: Not only is the main doing progressively more desperate things to try to protect his cousin, he's also working to make a life for his family as the neighborhoods he knows are basically ripped out from under him (and of course as much of the legal and social and governmental structure is substantially tilted against him). Obviously the racism of that parenthetical is also an important layer of what's going on, here, and it's both personal and systemic. Whitehead's actual writing is a joy, his voice dances and sings and growls and screams as needed. I am really happy to have read this book.

The Fold by Peter Clines

 

This is a thriller novel at its heart, though it does have a strong whiff of SF about it--more even than most technothrillers, which this really mostly isn't. The science here is whack enough that I'm inclined to call this more like SF-flavored Fantasy, but I'm not sure trying to nail genre down so hard is particularly helpful. The main character is a weird genius with a functionally eidetic memory; he's arguably a freak, but Clines does a pretty decent job of humanizing him. The writing here is solid, the prose sparkles and shines and has some nifty and amusing turns of phrase; the pacing of the story is pretty taut and the the characters all feel remarkably plausible (even the freakish main). It's a bit jarring to jump to a new POV for the first time somewhere in the last fifth of the novel, that's a choice I'm not sure I like, but I guess Clines needed to show some things he couldn't any other way, it doesn't break the flow of the novel too badly. There's a biggish reveal about two-thirds of the way through that's pretty well-foreshadowed, but no stupid twists. Second good novel I've read from Clines, I'm not interested in his series for my own reasons, but I'll see if I can't find more of his standalones. (This ends as though he was thinking about writing more with some of the characters, but I don't think he ever did.)

Playworld by Adam Ross

 

Started this yesterday in a coffeeshop, finished it tonight--last night ended up being unexpectedly social. It's ... really not a horrible book: The prose itself is solid; the characters all feel plausible, even if some are kinda obvious to the point of cliche, the fact the novel's set in like 1980s makes it reasonable for the characters in the novel, including the first-person POV, not to figure out what's going on with them; the place and time feel right, consistent with my memories of at least the latter. There's plenty of wit and sparkle in the writing, and humor and joy--as well as grit and grime and teenagers (and the adults they're still depending on) behaving badly. The story, though (and given that it seems like an intentional bildungsroman, "story" is probably not the primary goal) is kinda bland, fragmented (picaresque seems also intentional, maybe connected to the bildungsroman thing) and mostly doesn't so much resolve as just stop. Given that the novel is like 500 pages, that's a lot of reading for so little real impact, it goes a long way to make a very small point.

Down Here by Andrew Vachss

 

Sometimes you just want as dark a novel as you can find that doesn't involve demons or whatever, this is about that. The goodguys aren't exactly nice, and the badguys are either unhinged or complete sociopaths (or plausibly some combination). This is from like 2003 or thereabouts--someone in the novel mentions it being about two years after 9/11--so some of the countermeasures the mostly-altruistic criminals take are a bit dated, but other than that the novel has aged pretty well. There are still people who abuse those weaker than them, and there are still people who work to stop that from happening. Vachss wrote with passion and skill about that, and this novel is a fine example of his strengths. There are occasional flickers of humor like whistling past a graveyard, the dialogue carries character and narrative, the pace is brisk and snappy.Down

The Risen by Ron Rash

 

Ron Rash writing about Appalachian backcountry pain is one of the best bittersweet pleasures I find in relatively recent fiction. There's tension and sometimes agony, but often very little violence. This novel is a really good example of what Rash does really well. It has a historical thread, this time in 1969 with all the countercultural stress that comes with the time, though in a place about as connected to the rest of the US then as Mayberry. The novel has a lot to say about family--both how the elder generations abuse the younger and about the resentments and regrets of brotherhood. This is arguably another novel where someone is willing to set their family on fire rather than lose control of it, which seems a very human attitude, and sadly not uncommon., The dialogue here captures regionalism without trying to nail down accent/s, which I think it probably the way to do it, and it serves to drive the story and differentiate characters. Speaking of: The characters are all eminently believable. The pacing is quick like a knife to the ribs, and the ending is just an open space the reader can fill in or fall into, a beautiful void. Superb.

Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League et al. A Compendium of Evils by E. M. Rauch

 

Whatever magic there is in the Buckaroo Banzai movie, Rauch (one of the screenwriters) has none of it left. This is taking a charming 1980s thing and smearing it with secondhand Burroughs and Pynchon. It's utter shit, I tapped out after almost 100 pages and that was at least twice as much as I should have read.

The Babysitter Lives by Stephen Graham Jones

 

This is a kinda strange little horror novel, very much a Bad Place novel--there are ghosts galore, but they're being held by the house for ... reasons, I guess--Jones never explains any of the why, which is defensible enough since all of the characters basically seem to have come to be held by the house and found it more or less as it is, without reason or explanation. It does make for a kinda unsatisfying novel, though, since the rules of reality (in the context of the novel) feel as though they're always in a state of flux. There's clearly no escape for the titular baby sitter, even though she's arguably alive, and there's not much chance for several others, either--and there are apparently going to be ramifications on the "real world" outside the house (the world in the house is arguably supposed to be real, but it always feels too dreamlike to really buy as real). It's not as though Stephen Graham Jones suddenly forgot how to write a horror novel--the writing here is mostly good--it's just that this one doesn't work as well as much of his more recent stuff. Oh, well.

Small Town Horror by Ronald Malfi

 

Well, this was a disappointingly mediocre horror novel. Read for a while like a spin on IT with less functional main characters, and a first-person POV narrator that never sat entirely right. Lots of tedious crap, lots of people (or at least the POV) refusing to believe what's right in front of them. Then there was a Sudden Reveal a bit more than three-quarters through that kinda made it OK that he died at the end. The novel comes across as though it wants to say things about parenthood, and about how motherhood is different from fatherhood, but it's not a good enough novel to carry the weight of narrative, let alone the weight of subtext. There are probably some weirdnesses here coming from so many horror novelists being so heavily influenced by slasher movies, and from my strong dislike for slasher movies; you don't even have to squint to see the lone survivor of the quintet being cursed--and the only woman--as a bit of a Final Girl. The writing musters an occasional sparkling glint, and the dialogue seems reasonably plausible; that's the extent of the good, here.

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

 

Saw someone elsewhere mention this book, and it seemed at least vaguely relevant to some of my interests; it's indeed a relevant book, though I think what the white evangelicals have done is hollow their Christianity out as much as corrupt it. Yeah, they've sold out to power for various mostly-garbage reasons, but in the process they've destroyed much of what is at the center of what they say they believe. Clearly a well-researched book, by a writer who is obviously ... distressed, I guess, by what these people are doing in the name of a religion that bears the same name as hers--and I cannot blame her for being distressed; as a former Christian I am utterly disgusted for reasons both theological and aesthetic by the vast majority of the leader-types she name-drops. As with many books like this, it's a collection of narrative and narrative threads strung together, sometimes woven, and it's barely skimming the surface of its subjects. That's not snark--the writing's messages, both textual and subtextual, are clear, and the book is informative if kinda depressing.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

 

Spent a couple-few days reading this, because my brain was a little scattered. It's Gibson and it's good, and it was an interesting read because I read the book that comes after it (Agency) before I read this, because that's the order I saw them at the library. The futures in these books are grim, like really grim--the "Jackpot" involves various climactic, ecological, and epidemiological catastrophes that end up wiping out something like eighty percent of humanity--but there's still something like hope, humanity persists and lands on a new survivable (if not entirely pleasant, the word "klept" is used for government/culture for a reason) status quo. There is much of what people her and now would describe as "abuse of power" in the novel, especially in the farther future, but that's kinda how that culture works, and it's probably one of the things some of the people in that time like least about it. Gibson's prose crackles and snarls and snaps, the dialogue is frequently hilarious in a very gallows-humor way. The story takes a bit to get going, but it does and it's very good.

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.