The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

 

The novel I read this evening was pretty much the opposite of Annihilation: There's barely any weirdness in it (just a possibly-haunted stretch of riverbank) but the characters' interior lives are clear and drive their actions in ways that VanderMeer either doesn't care to write about or can't manage to capture. Kreuger knows the people of the northern Plains--all the people and peoples. This is mostly a crime novel, but it has a handful of threads in it, lots of (mostly at least somewhat damaged) characters.  It's set in the late 1950s, so even the good people in it are variously struggling with things that most of us (at least until a few years ago) would have considered mostly solved, which serves as a reminder of what might be lost. Thematic concerns abound, here: secrets, honestly, forgiveness, the differences between people who break and people who bounce back.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

 

Hey, I read this little book in a coffeeshop this noon-ish. I can sort of see why someone might want to make a movie about it, and I can see why that movie might ... fail to find an audience. It might seem as though the novel's about all this weird stuff that's happening, but the authorial voice--that removed, aloof first-person POV, where it's hard to care about the narrator or the events of the novel because it doesn't seem as though the narrator does--that's the single creepiest thing about the novel, really. The events barely register, muted as they are by the deadened narration.

The Wild Life by David Gordon

 

Yet another really enjoyable book in this series. Things are changing in ways I wouldn't have guessed from the first couple of books. The impossible couple are a couple, past the no-backsies point, and the complications from that should be kinda delicious. Gordon writes zippy, spritely prose and has a master's ear for dialogue and eye for character. There are only a few characters that don't come across as human, and they ... mostly come to bad ends, deservedly. I have one more book to read soon (so it can go back to the library) then I'm caught up.

The Shadows by Alex North

 

Based on everything on the cover--art, blurbs, jacket-flap summary--this novel looks for all the world like a Horror novel, and it sorta kinda plays at being one, sometimes. It's not. It's a novel about crime, and there's a little tension in it, and a twist or three (mostly crap, just total rugpulls with no textual clues) but it mostly just kinda trundles along. The big weirdness I noticed is that though the voice is clearly and distinctly Brit--especially in some moments of dialogue--this version/edition at least is typeset so as to be more familiar to Americans (spelling and punctuation); what's weird is that there's nothing about any of the places in it to put it anywhere, either American or English--there's nothing remarkable enough about the setting to keep it from being wherever the reader imagines it to be. Which kinda goes with the rest of the novel, really, there's not much distinctive about the characters or anything else in the story.

The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai

This is not as good a novel as I Have Some Questions for You--it's really not even close--but it's still a novel worth reading, a novel that has points to make as well as a story to tell. The fact it kinda tells its story backward--the narrative moves from 2000 to 1954 to 1929 to 1900, and keeps unfurling secrets as it goes--works reasonably well, and isn't really all that weird a way to tell a story. There are threads here about the toxicity of patronage, and about the secrets families keep, and about what art is worth, and about intentional artistic communities (such as art colonies); roughly no one and nothing ends up looking really good, which might not entirely be the intent, but which seems consistent with reality.

The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

 

A pretty wild very-far-future SF novel, with lots of humanity's deepest sins--empire and conquest and colonialism foremost. It struggles some in the early-middle with twee and I think a bit of muddle in the setting, but it very much mostly sticks the landing. Atonement for the sins of the past is possible, and the path there is well-placed loyalty and love: familial, friendly, romantic (often queer); I cannot muster much argument with that.

Swan Peak by James Lee Burke

 

A grim novel about crime and corruption, and the past catching up to the present, with more than a little in the subtext about it infiltrating beautiful places--and scarring beautiful souls. Complex, prismatically so, with insights into all the POV characters. There's at least one vague redemption arc, probably unexpected but earned. The big "twist" is one I saw like a hundred pages before it landed--which felt mostly like the author putting in the work for it. Also, of course, lots of juicy turns of phrase--Burke does that particularly well.