Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

 

This novel looks kinda like it's a Horror novel, but it's not--the closest thing I can think of is something like Magic Realism. A town where ghosts are part of the social fabric, a slaughterhouse and butchery that employs genetically engineered anthropomorphic pigs: There are obvious attempts at symbolism of various sorts here. The story isn't horrible, but the characters aren't really what I found to be engaging; the novel seems to be more interested in saying something (probably about letting the past be the past, mostly) than in telling a story, which is kinda the opposite of my preference, at least on that axis.

One Fatal Mistake by Tom Hunt

 

This is a thriller in which people make decisions best described as morally dubious and, mostly, not a lot bad happens to them in the long term. Since most of the story is driven by a series of awkwardly implausible coincidences, I guess that's all right. It's like a fingerpaint version of Fargo or something: all bad stupid people doing varying degrees of bad things, for various bad reasons, with varying degrees of stupidity, in thick smeary stick-figure prose.

Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig

 

An interesting Horror novel, centered around rural family and small-town. Suitably grim as it needs to be, but elements of hope. On the one hand, I have to think that using apples as the vector of evil has to have intentional and unintentional subtext to it; on the other hand, the Afterword goes to some lengths to make it clear that Wendig is into apples, and his expectation is that not everyone is going to get that he's weird that way. Both these things can be--and probably are--true. Other little things to notice in reading the novel: The 2020 election in this involved the same two candidates as the election in Wanderers, and the epilogue of this novel has a strong whiff of King's The Stand to it.

Zero Days by Ruth Ware

 

Well, it's good to see people are still writing and reading old-fashioned pursuit thrillers--like pretty much everything Ludlum wrote, or some of Grisham's early novels (if you filter out the legal stuff). This is a pretty decent take on it--the POV (the pursued) makes some dubious decisions early in the novel, but they're not completely implausible, and even if the who was pretty obvious to me pretty early on, the why is nicely subtle, and well-handled.

A Dark Matter by Peter Straub

 

I read this book something more than a decade ago, so I'd forgotten how very excellent it is. It's one POV character collecting the stories of his wife and several of their friends of the time everyone but the narrator spent in the thrall of a typical--stereotypical, even--charlatan-guru in the 1960s. None of them seem to have seen everything--though there's one who saw more than the others--and it's up to the reader to put together whatever sort of real story there is. Unless I missed something, this is the last novel Straub wrote, and it's a helluva last novel, deeply dark and staggeringly complex.

The Wager by David Grann

 

So Spain and England were fighting a war over colonial power and money, fueled by propaganda about some dude having his ear cut off, and a squadron of English ships sailed around Cape Horn looking to capture a Spanish galleon laden with gold, losing a few ships on the way. This is the story of the sailors on one of those ships, who endured months as castaways and in some cases years as prisoners, not to mention lifetimes as pawns. There are some characters in the book with connections to future notables--Lord Byron's grampa, mostly--but none of the characters in the book really come off the page as people. Part of it might be that castaway narratives haven't ever really been my thing, of course. Not the easiest read ever, and a book I nearly quit a few times--the conflict between the author wanting a singular narrative and the disparate threads the sources gave him made it a bit of a slog.

World Gone By by Dennis Lehane

 

A beautiful novel about life as a mobster (in 1940s Tampa) and all the contradictions and complications of it. Lehane clearly has an ear for dialogue, and a sense of all the moral and logical and legal compromises the life brings with it. People persist in trying to be moral even as their morality is ruthlessly stomped out of them. There are no good outcomes for anyone, and the ending is like getting shivved.