fulfilling book riot's 2018 read harder challenge task #7: A western. extry points given to me, by me, for choosing a book i've owned for more than a fulfilling book riot's 2018 read harder challenge task #7: A western. extry points given to me, by me, for choosing a book i've owned for more than a year.
this may not be a super-traditional western, but i figure the whole point of the read harder challenge is to get people to explore out of their readerly comfort zones, and since i already like westerns, i can do what i waaaaaaant here.
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i felt a little cheaty reading this one for the book riot challenge, since it’s not a “traditional” western. turns out i needn’t have fretted - this is a weird western that’s really only just a little bit weird. or - it’s weird, but the aspect of it that makes it weird is so undefined it’s barely a ripple, and if we’re label-making, this is more hardboiled mystery than supernatural; thugs and guns and murder and a femme fatale turning man against man. which, true, are all also frequent flyer elements of westerns, but it’s got the interior monologue of a noir, with a protagonist a bit more sentimentally evolved than found in either your typical western or noir:
People are tied together in one way or another. Most men want to believe we are alone and dependent upon ourselves. But I had learned long ago life is like one big knot around your neck from the day you are born. Everyone in the world is tugging on their separate ends.
The trick is learning how to live without having the life choked from you.
it opens with a murder - a man is found stripped, nailed to a tree with railroad spikes through his wrists and ankles, his eyelids are cut away, and he's been left to die out in the desert sun. this is not the only crime between the book’s pages, but it is the ickiest.
ordinarily, the notion of “crime” in a western would be cause for laffter because rules, schmools
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pyew pyew imma cowboy!
but john t. marwood has been called to the town of haxan to bring the law, if not always the order. and whoooo called him? hard to say. he’s not even sure himself
Thermopylae. Masada. Agincourt. And now, Haxan, New Mexico. We go where we’re sent. We have names and we stand against that which must be faced. Through a sea of time and dust, in places that might never be, or can’t become until something is set right, there are people destined to travel. Forever. I am one.
marwood’s got a pretty squirrelly memory, leaving the reader informationally hamstrung, but there are hints - shimmers - of something … extra: people who are a little too adept with their weapons, visions and dreams, a half-defined calling and a something coiled within him which he is powerless to defy. in a certain angle and in certain light, none of this is necessarily supernatural any more than his inexplicable love-at-first-sight for the daughter of the (first) murdered man is necessarily romance.
but it’s czp, so you know they’re not gonna publish a straight-up western. even though we don’t know the specifics of what’s layered over the world as we understand it, we do see the eerie presence flickering throughout the text
The howls sounded like they were circling Haxan in an ever-moving ring, closing in. It gave you the crawlies.
Without thinking, I rested my hand on my gun.
It was then the howling stopped, and an uneasy silence filled the night air.
i’m hoping that the second book, Quaternity, which is a prequel to Haxan, goes a little further in explaining what all of this issssss, but as it stands, it’s a very entertaining mystery/western; somewhat episodic, sprinkled with mini-events, but also plenty of wide-arcs rainbowing over the whole story. the romance bits are shoehorned in there and feel unnecessary and implausible, but the rest of it is really good. and it is not cheating!!
”...nothing could be more pointless than to mourn the passing of a world that has only ever meant you harm.”
between the form and the cNOW AVAILABLE!!!
”...nothing could be more pointless than to mourn the passing of a world that has only ever meant you harm.”
between the form and the content, this book is challenging in many ways, and i don’t see it making oprah’s book club anytime soon.
even though i have been shamefully negligent of czp of late - good at purchasing the books, bad at getting to ‘em, i do generally adore their contributions to the dark fantasy/literary horror part of my heart and when this one was pitched to me as “monstrously…horrendously bleak,” that it was “exquisitely written” and would “destroy me in a good way,” well, i scoffed and swaggered, figuring my appreciation for bareknuckled grit lit and maudlin thomas hardy had me covered across the entire “bleak” gamut. but that’s back when i thought “bleak” meant something along the lines of “dismal,” “full of misfortune,” “pessimistic.” in canada, it apparently means “a relentless assault of pain and suffering that doesn’t even give you a moment to process before it shoves more at you until you JUST CAN’T EVEN.”
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just another of those slight regional linguistic variations, like how they call colored pencils “pencil crayons.”
interestingly enough, i once made a blanket announcement in my review for another czp title that the collective "you" couldn't handle it. this one might be worse.
and it makes you WORK for the pleasure of having your head exploded - it’s written in a claustrophobically baroque style with prose you have to chew your way through. it’s not that it’s difficult, vocabulary-wise, but it is stuffed-to-bursting with words and highblown syntax doubling back in circuitous patterns, repeating, revising, speechifying, layering words on words on words until you wanna yell “talk like a person, sir!!”
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Given free rein I would cleanse this program of all rhythm and restraint and periodicity and instead submit every single trainee to an unremitting stream of horrors. I would devise an assault of dazzling ferocity — better to let the legion go unreplenished than admit even one candidate who bears the taint of the mundane — and exterminate them all.
yo, jason hrivnak, you tweet? nah, if words were music, this would be you:
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ahhhh ya burnt!
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i typically prefer my writing less… deliberate, but there are some passages here so gorgeous they’ll blow your mind. in a good way, not in that way from before with the forcefeeding of words and the animals fleeing in terror.
it’s an immersion into the madness of a character named thomas, which accounts for the claustrophobic frenzy of the prose; it's dizzying and grim and disorienting, where time bends, motifs recur, stories are concluded many pages removed from where they began, and the focus is on a demon named dinn, who is shepherding thomas into the ranks of hell’s army using pain as a necessary converter, along with the desecration of the body through self-abnegation and the application of beautiful violence to carve a convert’s path towards something like a religious ecstasy, only more, you know, demony.
the process is … a lot, and one of the interesting details is that, in order to pass the training, it’s not just about being eeeevil,
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but also being willing to self-inflict some of that suffering. dinn recounts the tale of one of his less-successful recruits:
From the very start he showed a distinct tendency to employ mundane notions of an unvolatile self, treating his body as some static reservoir for accumulated knowledge and power. He dismantled external targets with great aptitude and rapacity but balked like a child whenever called upon to direct that violence at himself. The final outrage took place just a few months after his recruitment. I ordered him to shear the flesh from his feet and in reply he looked at me as if there had been some misunderstanding, as if his little studies and little spells had endowed him with a snowflake-perfect uniqueness I would be foolish to damage or change. At that moment he seemed to regard me as some petty university bureaucrat, a dean who refused to recognize a prerequisite that he’d already and with distinction obtained. I could only shake my head. ‘I have seen your kind before,’ I said. ‘You believe that the wounds raddling my body are some kind of mere accoutrement, that autodestructive violence is an adjunct to demonism that you can take or leave as you please. The truth, however, is that my wounds constitute the most reliable proof of my accomplishments, for a trainee can acquire none of the necessary skills without enduring monumental suffering. The demonic potential of a given individual inheres first in his hatred of his own mundanity and second in the pitch of the violence he sustains in chasing that mundanity from his body. So far as I can tell, you have garnered to your name no accomplishments rooted in deeds noxious to the self. You are a stranger to elective anguish and no level of attainment in any subdomain of our craft can compensate for this particular shortfall. True embrace of the left hand path means flinging yourself voluntarily into the shredder of the training program, submitting your body to a long brutalization from which no part shall emerge unscathed. It means besting me in a race to discover the pain that you are least equipped to bear,’ I said. The occultist knelt before me and grovelled at my feet like some pederast before the mob, but the error of having fixed upon me such a queer and condescending look had already sealed his fate. Instead of killing him outright I confined him to an installation where he now spends all his hours being rolled flat feet first beneath a massive stone wheel. Every day at the stroke of noon the entirety of his upper digestive tract erupts like a prolapse from his screaming mouth and every day at sunset his brain-matter explodes onto the blackened flyblown floor. His fate is typical as only a small minority of trainees from the occult subtype are able to make the leap to an evil bereft of narcissism, to an understanding that the left hand path is not some childish treasure-hunt but rather an endless torment in which the body perpetually reforms itself around the task of inflicting harm.
sorry for such a long quote, but that’s what happens when every sentence is swollen with words like he's some diabolical proust and it’s difficult to tell, in a book of block-text unrelieved by paragraph breaks, when to cut it off. that passage i find very successful, even though ordinarily, i would call “too many notes” on it.
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the breaking-down process isn’t all physical - it also involves isolating the individual from friends and family, although family may be doing itself in just fine on its own, The institution of the family is a damage-factory. It’s purpose is to ensure that only the very worst traits of the forebear are passed along to the child, each new generation thereby systematically divested of both the desire and the ability to improve.
there's also pain inflicted through nostalgia and loss and visions and oh, so many other ways:
I led him onward into a detailed mirage I’d crafted for this very occasion, a wide patch of floor that was lit from above as by a single downward-pointed spotlight. A long table stood athwart his path and as he approached it he saw that its surface was covered with all the treasures he had lost over the years. An inordinate number of the objects in question originated from back in his childhood, many so deeply buried in memory that but for the mishap of this late encounter he might never have thought of them again. Here lay the storybooks that had lulled him to sleep, favourite toys miraculously healed from states of irredressable breakage. The puppy that had died just weeks after entering his childhood home lay sleeping peacefully in a nest of blankets, calmly and factually restored from the death as through some brilliant form of forgetting. Other items on the table came from later phases of his life and these induced a more complex form of heartbreak for their status here was necessarily more strained, each having been treasures despite the certainty that they would eventually be lost.
there really is some beautiful writing here, and some descriptions that are going to stay with me, not all of them of the tooth-extraction/dismembered animal variety.
three stars because the style isn't my personal cuppa, but the guy sure can write.
”No wonder the world looked empty and blank, no wonder you saw no place within it for a creature as ignoble as yourself. By the onset of adolescence every mundane is a war-veteran and like every war-veteran he longs for a return of the peril in which he knew himself most alive. The adult is not the apotheosis but rather the wreckage of the child, the tall thin shadow of a toddler-king who reigns with the dawn at his back.
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hoooooooo....
not...an easy read. i feel battered, and i'm going to need to sit with this a bit before i can sort out thoughts and feelings and all that.
how wonderfully incongruous is it that there is, in this world, a charmingly illustrated children’s book by george a. romero? it’s on pNOW AVAILABLE!!
how wonderfully incongruous is it that there is, in this world, a charmingly illustrated children’s book by george a. romero? it’s on par (pun-foreshadowing) with alice cooper being a golf enthusiast.
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the unexpected delights that life provides…
humungo bongo is a children’s book in the vein of The Little Prince, with messages and metaphors and wisdom hiding behind its whimsy, and romero is both its author and illustrator. in the interview conducted by dave alexander that closes the book, he claims: “I’m not a wonderful artist,” but i think he does just fine, although since this is a prerelease digital ARC, i’m only going to share a picture or two, because they’re not going to look as good here as in the finished book:
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he draws better’n me and that’s the only measurement that matters.
it’s a story of the tiny planet of tongo, upon which live two giant humongos; one named pongo, who is two hundred years old and has been around and seen some things in that time, and the wide-eyed youngster bongo, a mere 98 years old, full of questions and energy and optimism.
bongo's youth also makes him very restless, and when he takes it upon himself to explore the edges of the Wood, he's inadvertently laying the foundation for a devastating series of events, the "been there/done that" recognition of which causes the world-weary pongo to sigh in resignation, leaving bongo to learn the life lesson he knows is about to unfold.
”I’m moving to the other side of the planet, “ replied Pongo.
“Why?”
“I fear there might be trouble.”
Bongo was puzzled. “Trouble?” he said nervously.
“If you insist on walking to the edge of the Wood, you might…” Pongo hesitated and looked at his young companion. “Well, you might cause something to happen.”
so off pongo goes, and bongo is on his own for the first time in his 98 years, however - since tongo is such a tiny planet, and humongos are so loud, he is able to communicate with pongo throughout their separation, taking advantage of the elder's experience and wisdom, if not exactly heeding his warnings.
“Pongo,” he cried. “There are some tiny, little creatures coming.”
Pongo called back from the other side of the planet asking, “How many legs do they have? Eight? Six? Four?”
“It’s hard to see. I think they have . . . yes, they have two legs. Like us.”
“Just what I was afraid of.”
“What do you mean? What are these creatures?”
“Peanuts.”
“Peanuts?”
“The little ones of Tongo.”
“Little ones? Well, they surely are little!”
“You should leave,” called Pongo. “Come and join me here, on the other side. And make sure they don’t follow you.”
“Why? What is there to fear from little ones like these?”
“They often bring trouble…”
oh, and they will bring trouble. troubles that will change a humongo, revealing just what he might be capable of under pressure.
the preface (by tony timpone) asserts that this book is about “intolerance, overpopulation, the environment, and even our notion of God,” all of which is entirely correct, but it’s also just a good old-fashioned allegory of society and culture clashes brought about because of language barriers and misunderstandings and demonizing the unfamiliar. or, essentially, a lesson in how to make an enemy.
but it is, and remains, a children’s story, more hopeful than not, and although there’s an ominous tone of a less-optimistic future, it’s up to the young to make sure that future stays in the realm of the potential or speculative. so make sure they read this, okay?
this book is actually twenty years old, having been published in belgium and only-belgium, in a language romero couldn't even read, poor guy, as part of a project commissioning “improbable film people to write for young readers.” but thanks to CZP, now the whole world can learn about humongo bongo, and NOT humongo Dongo, as he is named in french. heh. dongo
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i love how coyly "come hither" humongo bongo is on this cover,* but i assure you - despite my dabblings in the genre, this is not monsterporn, so you needn't flee from it like a Peanut.
* for accuracy's sake, i must disclose that that's actually humongo pongo in the picture.
”When was the last time you saw Molinare’s ghost?” asked Andrew.
Dominic set the cup down before Andrew.
“Just now,” he said. “Just a moment ago. He was at the bar, over there.” Dominic pointed to the far end of the bar, toward the Liberty’s street entrance. “He warned me, as he often does.”
“What did he warn you of?”
“Calamity,” said Dominic. “Always calamity.”
if you read Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism and thought to yourself “i liked it, but it coulda used more nazis,” then you are in luck, friend! this sequel is LOADED with nazis! and, yes, since i know you are thinking about asking me - i do think you should read eutopia before reading this one. i was surprised (but thrilled) to learn about this sequel, but with six years of forgetting-time between the two books, i was concerned that i would be lost. fortunately, he does a really good job hitting the touchpoints of the first book, memory-refreshers that don't come across as exposition-dumps. he also gets the reader up to date, bridging the timeline between where eutopia left us in 1911 and where this one picks up in 1931 with a few key moments. however, i do not think there’s enough in the refresher bits to catch a complete newbie up to speed. that’s not to say you can’t enjoy this as a standalone, but i think you will miss out on a lot if you try to be some kind of “i only read sequels” renegade.
this is the rat king of genre-blends - it’s science fiction, horror, and historical fiction, where historical personages like goebbels and that other guy coexist with familiar fictionals from eutopia as well as ghosts, jukes (which you will know to fear from having read eutopia), and the menacing new-to-the-scene orlok, whose taxonomy is…complicated. for now, just think of a combination of charles manson and drax - surrounded by naked and adoring hitler-jugend, bellowing "Joseph Goebbels is a man that I would not ever fuck" with a dave bautista belly laugh.
it’s only natural that a story with its roots in eugenics would become filled with nazis once it became era-appropriate, but it’s not the kind of nazi horror i’m used to, which is admittedly awesome, but a bit sillier.
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this is much more literary - the grown-up dark chocolate of horror writing where the historical detailing is as considered as the horror-bits and which highbrow manners you can pretty much tell from the titles; stiff and formal, invoking (involking?) brittle browned paper:
it's not dry, just ... respectable. although it's true that the horror in this one is less front-and-center than in eutopia. there’s one really creepy scene, but for the most part, it’s closer to supernatural historical than true horror. whatever it is, it is a very good book, which you will discover when you come to it after having diligently read eutopia.
because you have been so well-behaved, you may read the prologue for free here:
****************************************** this is available TODAY. i am still reading it, so you guys can go out and get it and lap me and then make fun of me for my slow reading of late. <---- LIES - it has been DELAYED!
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I DID NOT KNOW THAT THIS SEQUEL WAS HAPPENING, AND NOW I CAN'T EVEN CONTAIN MY EXCITEMENT!!! WWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHH
they're trying to be all grown by calling this a graphic novel, and that's as may be, but there are zero instances of the words "ka-pow" or "blammo," no thought bubbles or sequential boxes making up a grid, and not a scrap of spandex!
but kidding aside, there's only about 425 words in this book*, and the layout is traditional picture book style, with a couple of words per illustrated page:
but the true test is "could this be published as a story without its art?" and it cooouuuld, but it would be in some novelty halloween anthology, where it would be just one rhyming poem among many. the words are really just a vehicle to drive the art, the way tortilla chips are the vehicle that allows you to shove a ton of melted cheese into your face all at once. so between length and format and illustration-v.-text strength, i'm putting the "picture" at the forefront, even if the publisher is not.
Vincent developed his unique style by combining his affection for the 600-year-old art of intaglio printmaking with his love of computer graphics. Early in his studies he would scrape and etch and carve his images onto zinc plates of all shapes and sizes, then send them hurtling through antiquated hand-turned presses. This experience and love of an old world aesthetic is what sets him apart from other digital artists. He handles his digital paintings as he handled his etchings, focusing in on the line work and meticulously placing each pixel to convey a sense of mood and ambiance. Drawing from a personal library of over 500 original textures (each created with metal plates and hand-wiped inks) Marcone uses his computer to fuse together media of all sorts to create imagery that is part of a larger story.
its this fiddly-ness that really makes his work stand out from other artists, even other artists who specialize in creepygirl art - these have a texture to them; a depth that is likely not photographing as well as it looks in the book.
so of course, i had to go back and page through the whole thing again and lemme tell you - some of those birds are hiding pretty well, and there was much shouting of "where are you, you fucking bird?" in woodside that night.
but i found every one. what i didn't find was a working link to the short film narrated by peter murphy. the one in the book leads to a 'page not found,' and the one on his site requires a vimeo password, which i do not have because i am not cool. you are probably cooler than me, so here - vimeo away or whatever the kids are saying:
i am enjoying this so far, but i gotta say - this font choice is just way too small for heatwave-sleepy eyes. when i squint, i am just that
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i am enjoying this so far, but i gotta say - this font choice is just way too small for heatwave-sleepy eyes. when i squint, i am just that much closer to being asleep, and i kept drifting off in the hothouse of my apartment.... zzzzzzz
when noir just isn't rough enough, release nick cutter.
breathtakingly violent, there are situations in this book that made even ME squirm, and i'm baswhen noir just isn't rough enough, release nick cutter.
breathtakingly violent, there are situations in this book that made even ME squirm, and i'm basically just a jaded husk of "nothing fazes me, son." this is his take on what can happen when organized religion steamrolls personal liberties, and it's just brutal rolled in gruesome dusted with wrong. cutter's previous two novels have had scenes of sad and wasteful violence (dear god, not the TURTLE!) but this one kicks the asses of all others on a scale that will make your brain recoil. in a good way, naturally. there is a scene towards the end of the book - just a little sentence or two involving eyeballs and what can be done to them that gave me the full-body shudders.
those if you with animal-cruelty triggers - do not enter. because this book nearly made me forget that poor turtle with dear god, not the FROGS!!!
it's written in a very different style from both The Deep and The Troop. those were both written in the stephen-king-osphere, where creepy things happened to ordinary folks and the eeriness resulted from the familiarity of the characters and setting layered over by supernatural terrors. (okay, not so much the setting for The Deep, but we've all seen submarine movies, so it's a familiarity once-removed.) and we've all seen and read religious/political dystopias, but cutter's particular brand here is all his own. gritty and hardboiled, with wonderfully precise details in his world-building. it's a crime story and a social commentary all at once, where the chosen few - the acolytes - administer violent justice upon religious and social dissenters in a christian fundamentalist nightmarescape, all told with an Ellroyian flavour. bombs and preachers, circuit freaks and animal sacrifice, shotguns that turn people into red mashed potato, cannibals and mercy kills and emphatically UNmerciful kills. and family.
it's chilling and fast-paced, with very short punchy chapters and perfectly concise lines bigger than their word count:
Yeah, I could have.
which restraint punctuates a beautifully understated moment.
oh, it is a vicious book.
the thing is, i have met nick cutter, when he was wearing his craig davidson skin*, and he is such a sweet, affable gent. and he's sweet and affable enough to have included an afterword here that basically says: "i am not a monster - this is just a book" where he apologizes for some of what he's written and entreats you to not hold it against him. oh, canada…
so, while it is nothing like his first two in the cutterverse, it is a deviation, not a disappointment. read it if you have the balls for it.
it's no secret that i love both czp and paul tremblay, who is 1/2 of this p.t. jones person. or, rather, pseudonym - i don't think they have actually it's no secret that i love both czp and paul tremblay, who is 1/2 of this p.t. jones person. or, rather, pseudonym - i don't think they have actually been fused together. yet.
but like all heroic endeavors in their early stages, there are some kinks to be worked out. to the best of my knowledge, neither of these authors have ever written for a YA audience before, and might be working off an older rulebook. YA authors like John Green and Melina Marchetta have really raised the sophistication bar for teenlit, and have fostered certain expectations in how characters think and talk and act that is likely unrealistically adult, but has become the norm, and with this one, i found the voice a little problematic. mary is meant to be fifteen, but both she and her friends read much younger, and her decisions don't seem to be realistic as much as story-driving.
but, i mean - it's a story about an epidemic of floating children, so as long as you can accept that we are dealing with a fantasy world, and treat its events like the events of a fantasy world, you should be fine.
so, mary was at the birthday party of her younger cousin, where she witnessed a strange boy who ate all the doritos and then suddenly started floating away into the air, after bursting through the piñata-mad crowd and leaving dorito-handprints all over the other kids.
everyone sees him floating, and stunned confusion and wtf abounds, but they are soon easily-assuaged by a cover-up news story in which the incident is written off as a balloon-man's prop. it makes more sense when they tell it.
but then, other kids in town start floating as well.
mary's just coming off of a series of anxiety-attacks that immobilized her to the point of not wanting to get out of bed, passing her time with godzilla movies and stuck in her own head. this anxiety is cited as her reason for not mentioning to her parents the fact that she found her younger brother floating on the ceiling while babysitting him - she didn't want them to think she was relapsing and try to medicate her with zombie pills. instead, she tied his leg to his crib with a bathrobe belt and just ostriched herself away from the situation, preferring to investigate on her own, despite the fact that other kids in town were floating, so it's pretty clear that she wasn't making the whole thing up.
but again - fantasy world, fantasy solutions to fantasy problems.
mary investigates the floating epidemic as it begins to take over the children of the town from the very young to her own friends, even though she herself seems to be unaffected, which causes her a great deal of confusion, shame, and anxiety about her anxiety.
however, her anxiety disorder is treated more as a background element than explored with any depth which is a shame, because books that take on real-life problems that kids face wrapped up in fantasy clothes can be really effective in helping kids address their problems by acknowledging that they are fairly common, and it can be comforting. mary doesn't really act like someone who has recently gone through a psychological ordeal, and with everything that is happening to her in the meat of this story, it seems like she would have experienced a more dramatic relapse. there's a kind of holding-back here, maybe a hesitancy to explore issues that might cause discomfort to a young audience? so it's just a small missed-opportunity criticism.
but overall, it's an enjoyable fantasy story with a mad scientist and embarrassing relatives, and changing relationships and some nice protective qualities in mary towards her little brother, when she is otherwise pretty caustic and sarcastic.
it's fun and light, but i do think this is better steered towards younger teen or even strong-reading middle grade readers. the ultimate message is also appropriate for a younger audience - that whole idea of not being jealous of other people for their special skills because everyone's got some hidden talent and you will find yours. teens need just the opposite advice; they have already accepted that they are the most special and important thing in the universe and the next developmental rung on the socializing ladder is to rein in that overweening self-confidence and remind them that other people exist and we're all part of a grand mosaic or whatever.
this is one of the best short stories i have ever read. it was the perfect introduction to this collection, which is overall characteriIrregular Verbs
this is one of the best short stories i have ever read. it was the perfect introduction to this collection, which is overall characterized by a preoccupation with language/communication and by a strong sense of location. this story highlights both themes and is godawfully lovely and tender and sad and 100% relatable despite taking place in an imagined locale with very specific defining qualities. it is a truly moving portrayal of grief and helplessness within a well-developed world and i loved it to pieces.
Another Country
another really strong offering, concerning the plight of the assimilation of "prefugees" - individuals from various historical periods who escape their own times through a fissure that whisks them into the modern world and the man tasked with gentling them into their new temporal surroundings. it is both humorous and sad, cautionary and smart. one thing i love about this guy is his facility with linguistics, which is evident throughout, but is most humorously deployed here, with the very nice detail of the latin syntax. cracked me up.
Public Safety
this is a tidy little mystery story with the feel of steampunk without actually being steampunk. it is full of arcane elements, like phrenology and graphology, but also good old deductive crime-solving, where the crime itself is...atypical.
Beyond the Fields You Know
this one would fit really nicely into the whole tor shorts project. a dark tale about a narnia/wonderland-like world beyond ours where children pass through a portal and encounter talking animals and other children from "our" world, but with the shape more of a sweatshop than anything magically enticing, and where the secret dreams of children and their longing for adventure are exploited and used to ensnare them into servitude. there will be blood.
What You Couldn't Leave Behind
a noir reimagining of limbo.
When We Have Time
oh, man - well done, this. a small-scale sci-fi family story that is genuinely haunting with an extra little kick at the end. BOOM!
The Wise Foolish Son
this one is most notable for its structure, and i'm not sure i have fully figured it out on the first read. it is framed as a story being told by an old man to a group of listeners while a village burns in the background, but the story itself is actually two different story-threads, related and woven together - one a fairytale type and one more anthropological in nature, grounded by the central character dasat/dasatan, and the idea of home. good interesting stuff going on here, but i definitely need to give it a second pass.
Long Pig
short, funny, delicious.
Talking Blues
a new take on hell. if it were a film, it would be 12 years a slave meets cesar chavez meets inside llewyn davis and would probably win all the oscars.
The Face of the Waters
jewish diaspora, meet medical sci-fi thriller.
Outside Chance
a time-traveling retrohistorian searches for "the good one," amidst all possible futures, and finds a library, a conspiracy, and love.
Closing Time
a son endures his father's ghost resentfully through an interminable and expensive posthumous ritual only to find that maybe the old man still has some lessons to impart after all. this one has the feel of a genuine tale from "distant far eastern lands," which i think is one of johnson's strongest skills - he is able to create stories that feel authentic and true, but are in completely imagined mythologies and locales, borrowing tonal elements from the real world, but creating languages and other little details from outta nowhere. and nothing seems superficial - all the stories have a weight of confident structure behind them. it's a rare quality.
also, this story made me very hungry.
Lagos
the unexpected origin of the 419.
The Dragon's Lesson
this one has a shirley jackson feel to it, like if she were to reimagine a grimm's tale filled with jealousy, resentment, deceit, and dragons. a perfect, and completely unexpected ending to this one, a little nod to my favorite fairy tale, cap o'rushes, and a lesson in diminishing returns.
Au Coeur des Ombres
this is a sort-of callback to Public Safety with some Heart of Darkness overtones, but with a much more altruistic kurtz-figure.
Jump, Frog!
a fun little origin-story for mark twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
The Afflicted
a great new spin on the tired old zombie story: a.k.a. eldercare with rifles.
Holdfast
sigh, nothing to see here, just another one of his meticulously-rendered perfect folktales that reads completely differently from all the others that have come before. just complete mastery of craft, no big whoop.
The Coldest War
psychological suspense in the remote polar region. like a less-bloody version of the thing. ooorrr iiisssss iiiitt??
Written by the Winners
a time in which top hits of the 80's and family ties can become contraband, nixon never existed, and flirting is still difficult.
Heroic Measures
even the mightiest must one day come to an end.
The Last Islander
technology intervenes to restore what nature has destroyed for the sake of tourism and one man's memories.
in conclusion: a really solid collection of stories that i enjoyed primarily because they never fell into that samey-samey beige mash that affects so many single-author collections. while there are unifying themes between many of the stories, they are always approached from a different angle, with a different voice. it's kind of extraordinary, and i will definitely be reading his next collection or - dare i dream? a full-lengther.
even though i have come a long way w/r/t my feelings towards short stories, i still have trouble writing reviews for them. i have written rev3.5 stars
even though i have come a long way w/r/t my feelings towards short stories, i still have trouble writing reviews for them. i have written reviews in which i have painstakingly reviewed each individual story, but that is such a pain in the ass, because sometimes certain stories in a collection will just leave me cold, and once you've committed to that structure of a review, it's like "AARRGGH what was i thinking?"
and that is why i am not going to do that with this book. this book is a collection of 6 years worth of stories, and while they can loosely be grouped into an overarching stylistic similarity of "dark fantasy," they take on a number of different forms, lengths, and styles, some of which i really responded to and some which just left me a little flat.
the stories are loosely gathered in groupings designated by the parts of a house: the vestibule, the library, the attic, the den, and the cellar. and while some of these stories do in fact slot tidily into these groupings; for example - three of the stories in "the library" segment feature books in some way, some of them are less bang-on obvious. i speak exactly two words of german: das unheimliche, which of course means "uncanny," but more importantly, "heimliche" means "homely," so the truer meaning of the word is something like, "that which makes us uncomfortable in the place where we should be feeling most comfortable." and that's what many of these less-obvious stories do. while some of them do feature haunted houses or houses haunted by memories, troubled relationships, spiders, the past - some of them are just about discomfort within our supposed comfort zones: family, friends, work. the familiar rendered unfamiliar, and a little creepy.
but knowing what you know about me (do you know? have we met?), i am coming out of a long held "short stories? bluck!!" stance and while some of these stories didn't work for me, i can't be trusted, so you're on your own.
so - brief summaries only, and make of them what you will
Aces
first sentence is aces. hahahaaha!! DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?
Soelle got kicked out of school for killing one of her classmates.
actually - the whole first paragraph is pretty good, and sets up the entire collection nicely:
Soelle got kicked out of school for killing one of her classmates. They couldn't prove she actually did it, which was why she received an expulsion instead of a murder charge, but there was no doubt among the faculty that she was responsible. Soelle told me she didn't care if they kicked her out or put her in jail. She just wanted her tarot cards back.
basically, a spooky little girl with powers who is having an adverse effect on reality while her older brother/guardian tries to protect her and simultaneously protect the town from her.
Autumnology
this one touches explicitly on the whole das unheimliche theme when a character is confronted with a tree in full autumnal splendor despite all the surrounding trees having succumbed to winter bareness:
It's hard to explain why the tree frightened me so. I think it was what it represented. A place where it was always autumn. There was something unnatural about the idea. Unnatural. Un-nature. The tree was something that shouldn't be. It was a tree out of time. A living monument that shouldn't exist, and yet at the same time couldn't be ignored.
it's more of a quietly haunting story rather than a scary one. unsettling.
Cabin D
this one is probably my favorite. ancient malevolent forces and a very hungry man. a good build and a satisfying resolution.
Winter Hammock
lovecraft tentacles/zombies/mutations. like This is Not a Test in the "boredom of the apocalypse," parts, but also its own thing. an escalation of dread. and tentacles.
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A Night in the Library with the Gods
haunted books. this story, like many of them, has a stephen king feel to it. or that x-file episode blood:
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The Nanny
another one i really liked. a neat premise: exorcism by babysitting
The Dark and the Young
moar magical books. this one is way more sci-fi-ish, so i liked it significantly less than the other one, even though it is like 4 times as long. it's good, but it's got that thing that makes my head hurt. i have never read lumley, but this one reads the way i always imagined lumley would read. feel free to tell me i am wrong.
The Currents
this one is good- it reads like a folktale or song. i could see nick cave writing a ballad based on this.
Leaves Brown
this has a little callback to autumnology, and another iteration of the theme of "home."
"There's a writer who said you can't go home again. He was only partly right. You can go home again, but when you come back you find out home isn't home anymore. It's just a place where you used to live. It's lost something, but you can't tell what it is. It's like an itch that you can't scratch."
Wood
frankly, i am mystified by this one. the tone is suitably creepy, but i have no idea what the hell happened. this is like a meaner giving tree. and a little bit like this movie:
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The House on Ashley Avenue
similar to the nanny in that it is a more traditional haunted house story. this one might be my favorite, actually. it's a perfectly encapsulated little tale, with a solid ending.
The Rifts Between Us
sci fi and a short story? brother - you are going into this with two strikes against you. this is how i feel about most sci-fi - great ideas but the execution bored me to death. this one had what i feel was a particularly inelegant info-dump. which i think is my general problem with sci-fi.
Vogo
this is a very short story about a lake monster in which no one has intercourse with a lake monster, which is a change from most of the lake-monster lit i have read.
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The Cat
NO - THIS ONE!! THIS ONE IS MY FAVORITE STORY!
it kind of reminded me of that amazing stories episode - Thanksgiving even though it is nothing like that episode except in terms of unexpected sources of secret wishes coming true.
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i don't know why i can't seem to stop comparing these stories to completely unrelated things. but this is my path, now.
Deleted Scenes
this is a clever idea, and a treat for film geeks and fanboys. i enjoyed it, especially the sad trombone ending.
The Tattletail
this is pretty cute. slap some illustrations in here, and you got yourself a very marketable children's picture book. i would buy it
Charlotte's Frequency
where sci-fi meets spiders. this would also have been a fun episode of amazing stories. or to make myself sound about five years younger: tales from the crypt. or creepshow. no, that makes me even older. damn. but it's good - a little nod to Charlotte's Web, but with more dead bodies.
Relaxed Best
It looks like a Philip Marlowe novel exploded in here, observes one character. that is my take on it as well.
Hunger
another teeny tiny one, but the length works for it. more of a sensory piece than anything, but the sense is good and spooky, like that first episode of walking dead with all that hospital-confusion before it just turned into a show about people talking endlessly.
Inheritor
these family secrets are worse than your family secrets
Twillingate
dreamy childhood story more about wonder and innocence and that loss than anything truly ghostish. a haunty feeling without any true haints.
The Candle
another one with an effective atmosphere, but that i don't really get. like wood, i liked it without really knowing what it is about, really.
and that is my review!!
i would definitely read more by this author, especially if the next book is a full-lengther. and is about cats.
this is a very typical ghost story in some ways, anOH MY GOD, THIS BOOK MADE IT INTO MIDNIGHT MASS!!
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this is a very typical ghost story in some ways, and a very atypical one in others. it has all the hallmarks of classic horror: secluded house with a dark past, small town whose history continues to haunt its residents, uninformed stranger arriving to shake things up, ghostly childhood playmates, mysterious accidents, nightmares, and some brain trauma and memory loss to keep it good and ambiguous. but it brings new things to the table like a preoccupation with gender identity and a surprising conclusion which will affect and maybe even infect the entire preceding tale, making you want to go back to the beginning and approach it with new eyes. or, rather, a new understanding. you can keep the eyes you have.
i had heard great things about rowe's first book, Enter, Night, and how it rejuvenated the vampire story and made it viable again. and i meant to read it, but just hadn't gotten around to it yet, but seeing what he did here with the classic ghost story, i am very eager to give it a read now.
at the end of the day, there is nothing truly revolutionary here, until the ending comes to getcha, but that is enough. it is an engaging ghost story with a highly sympathetic main character in jamie, as it slowly leads you through his lonely formative years with his loving father, his unloving mother, and his one friend: a tomboy named lucinda who goes by hank. he also has a secret mirror-friend named amanda, but after a horrific accident which he believes she is the cause of, he effectively banishes her and forgets all about her.
but amanda is patient, and she has a long memory.
all grown up now, jamie comes into some money, and decides to buy the large estate crumbling all alone on blackmore island, off the coast of alvina, ontario, to turn into a bed and breakfast. once he arrives, he experiences troubling episodes both in the house itself, and back on shore with the townspeople.
things escalate, as they do in a ghost story, and jamie learns that the past can certainly be forgotten but forgetting doesn't make it any less dangerous.
i enjoyed his writing style, and the pacing is exactly what you want and expect form a psychological suspense/supernatural story. very slow and deliberate until it isn't. it is playing for more than scares, though, and it is full of sadness and all the various quiet horrors of childhood, adulthood, and death itself.
i was going to leave it at that, because it sums up my experience with the book ezzactly, but it's not really fair to the gyou can't handle this book.
i was going to leave it at that, because it sums up my experience with the book ezzactly, but it's not really fair to the gods of netgalley or to my beloved czp, so i suppose i can dig deep into my overtaxed brain and find another sentence or two.
the fact remains - you can't handle this book. and i'm not making a character judgment; you're fine the way you are, it's just that tony burgess is… how do i put this politely?? a maniac?? and also what i called him on this review. i'm not proud of it. but he is. three of the four books i have read of his are splattery nightmare fodder, full of people reduced to bloody clumps and bits and pieces with all this chilling psychosexual icing.
this time, he has outdone himself.
the thing is, reading my review, you might already be writing him off as some shock-value kind of hack who writes these disposable books that are just paint-by-numbers-with-blood teen-boy violent cathartic rage-fantasies. but they're more insidious than that, because burgess, god love him, can write. and he gets into your brain with his little ragged nails and you cannot look away, and you can't help but be affected by his books.
i've read my share of splatter-lit. some of them are pretty bad (which i can't believe got three stars out of me - i must have been more generous then), but when it's done right, it stands out, and as much as it might be uncomfortable to admit, it can be wondrously entertaining. and burgess always does it right.
this one just takes it about two steps too far into squeamish-territory. for you, i mean. and nearly for me, too, but there was just something about it that kept me reading, as the situation got worse and weirder and more…diseased. it is not the gentle zombies-orbiting-our-planet story it purports to be. oh, no. that is just to suck you in. what it really is is a stew of every horrific thing you can ever imagine with your little brain: all your fears and most tortured imaginings, posing as a piece of entertainment. ta-DAAA!! and you're fucked.
and maybe i am underestimating you, and you can, in fact, handle this.
feel free to come back and tell me how wrong i was about you, tough guy.
Was it terror, or was it love? It would be a long time before Ann LeSage could decide. For most of her life, the two feelings were so similar as to beWas it terror, or was it love? It would be a long time before Ann LeSage could decide. For most of her life, the two feelings were so similar as to be indistinguishable. It was easy to mix them up.
now that is how you open a book. those are the kind of lines my beloved jonathan carroll tends to open with, and while the opening chapter reminded me of carroll, with its date night whimsically impinged-upon by the supernatural, at some point this changes and becomes a much darker tale than he would write, full of psychosexual violence, control, and intimidation.
ann's ideas of love and terror are all awry because of her experiences as a young girl, when a poltergeist she named "the insect" was seemingly attached to her, and was responsible for horrific acts of violence affecting her family. she eventually learned to develop the mental strength to contain it in a prison of her own imagining, but now, as she is about to marry a man she thinks she loves, the insect is starting to reassert its presence, and terror-love is about to erupt into her life once more.
the story is told through events in ann's present-day situation interspersed with her childhood memories of the insect and her family life: a carefully-teetering collage of betrayal, misperception, vulnerability, and greed.
i don't know how much to say about this book, which always seems like a cop-out when i say it in a review, but i really mean it. i will say it involves a shadowy group of men with sexual desires well beyond the norm looking for the ultimate transgressive sexual high, and the ends they will go to to satisfy their dark erotic urges.
it's kind of like monsterporn all grown up. BUT WAIT! before you dismiss it on those grounds - i just mean it shows what literary monsterporn would look like if it weren't about detailing the act itself, but exploring the impulse behind it. and if it were horrible and terrifying instead of silly.
that's all.
it's really very good - it is a slow building tale with many small reveals along the way which culminates into a final scene of "yes.":
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you'll never look at dungeons and dragons the same way again, i can tell you that much.
a man and a bulldog on a road trip through hell and memories with nothing left to lose...
such a tiny book to be so sad and yet so funny. and the humora man and a bulldog on a road trip through hell and memories with nothing left to lose...
such a tiny book to be so sad and yet so funny. and the humor and the pathos both largely come from a situation the author himself must be all too familiar with:a writer - who has had some success, but not the kind that matters - the commercial success:
Readers wanted more mainstream material. They didn't want sentences that sounded like poetry. No one read poetry. No one liked poetry. This wasn't the fucking Renaissance.
because, yes, tom piccirilli writes heartbreakingly lyrical sentences, in all three of the books i have read by him, and yet he is largely unknown; a publisher-hopper with a cult following but no real name-recognition. and that is a shame.
you can sense the bitterness, which is undercut by humor, in his author-character:
"Anyway, they balked because they felt it wasn't commercial enough." "Do we even know what the fuck that means?" "It means not enough middle-age women or tween girls are going to like it." "Is that the only audience left?" "The only one that counts."
ohhh, it is sad and true, both.
his character is at the end of his rope. he has been left by his woman, evicted, and has pawned off all that he owns, including his literary awards,which have been tagged "paperweights" or "bookends"
he has seen the remaindered copies of his books stacked at the thrift store and being sold, or not, for a quarter each.
this is the heartbreaking state of literature.
and i hate to be the person who transcribes the paragraph from which the title is taken because it's a bit gauche, but hey - thanksgiving wine makes a girl do gauche things, and i think it is quite lovely.
There's a poignancy to it that's lacking in most of your other novels. You're writing from the marrow. I can feel every shallow cut you've ever suffered in it, all of them still bleeding, tearing wider and becoming deeper. You can die from a paper cut if it becomes infected. That's what I feel in your words now.
there is a feverish desperation in the struggle to overcome the shit life flings:
wasn't there anyone anywhere who would just let you go on your way without making you try to explain yourself? How could you articulate what you didn't understand yourself?
and that's what this book is: a rising up over hardships, a quest for self in all the emptiness, a howl of stubborn existence.
I didn't want to fight a cop. I didn't want to fight anybody. I wanted to be left alone, but I couldn't even walk down a street in the south Bronx with an illegal gun packed in my bag without some bastard with his whole shitting life in front of him and the power of right and might on his side bothering me.
so this holiday season, i am going to be thankful for my health, and i will share this link with you to help tom piccirilli, who does not now have his health, and also be thankful for my taste in books, that i can help the struggling authors; the ones who might not get the same kind of publicity as the ones the tweenies are glomming onto. because there are so many secret gems which unfortunately are often the ones that get remaindered because they lack mainstream appeal. i have no problem with the mainstream, but frequently the tributaries are more scenic.
buy this book direct from czp, and help piccirilli pay some medical bills:
i guess i am someone who reads short stories. it's what i do now. so, to celebrate the short, i am going to make this review a series of pithy one-seni guess i am someone who reads short stories. it's what i do now. so, to celebrate the short, i am going to make this review a series of pithy one-sentence... summaries? commentaries? of/on each story. this is not me being lazy; it is actually quite difficult. especially with stories like these, which frequently have little twists in them that i want to avoid destroying. so some of these sentences might even be misleading, a little. who knows, i haven't written it yet. come with me on my tiny journey.
query
some publishers will work harder for you than others.
gaytown
sorry, kids, apparently it actually doesn't get better.
home
obsession and paranoia in space just makes it hard on everyone.
assassination and the new world order
congratulations on being elected; now watch your fucking back.
i realize now that this was probably a bad idea, and this "review" is too reductive to give any sense of the true impact of the stories, and it makes it all sound a little silly. but i'm not good at covering my tracks when i make mistakes, so i'll just plow on into an overview of the collection. most of it was great - i wasn't crazy about the sci-fi/military ones, but that's a me vs. genre thing. these are highly original and stunning stories about the destructive force of love and obsession and the horrible decisions we make while in their throes. i think the only one i didn't like at all was shika. there were some that were okay, but the ones i loved i really really loved, so this was a more successful collection than most, and considering it took me almost two years to be able to get it into the store, i would say it was definitely worth waiting for.
oh, what, is that me and paul tremblay?? it most certainly is!
Trudi: haha! saw that title and my first thought was "oh noes, she has officially[image]
oh, what, is that me and paul tremblay?? it most certainly is!
Trudi: haha! saw that title and my first thought was "oh noes, she has officially reached rock bottom with the monster porn!" You have corrupted me. I have been corrupted.
i loved this post so much, i had to use it to start my review. i hope that is okay.
i love that you people thought this was erotica. and i think paul will love it, too.
it is not erotic, though, despite a golden-shower scene. it is hard to say what it is. this book is two stories stuck together, in a chimera that somehow works.
because at first, i wasn't sure what i was going to think of it. we find ourselves in a future-dystopia, where our hero is living out a sort of contracted indentured servitude on "farm," a tourist-trap theme park where guides wear plush animal costumes and lead tour groups through faux-bucolic settings to gawp at people who have given up their freedom in exchange for a little money to send home, while they toil to produce food for "city", and live animals have had their vocal cords removed, so that animal sounds must be pumped in to delight its visitors. "city" rests on top of a pier, under which all the homeless have been relocated and left for dead, and is a horrorshow of consumerism gone mad, whose inhabitants are aggressively accosted by people wearing television screens showing commercials, and live in fear of being sent under the pier.
this kind of satire of bureaucracy and commercialism usually bores my teats off. i get it, i get the dehumanization and the moral deadening, i get the complacency and the lassitude of people under the strongarm of capitalist greed and genetic meddling, but it rarely transcends its own delight in its own perceived allegorical cleverness to become anything more than just a sad empty shell of a story.
ah, but this one goes a step further. and it shuttles the reader back-and-forth between this lunatic setting and the memories of our hero's life before-farm, and the circumstances that led to his choosing farm in the first place. these parts of the novel are told in very clear-eyed prose, which contrasts nicely with the carnivalesque and absurd farm-and-city chapters.
by the end, when we find ourselves under the pier, the carnival all but drops away, and we are confronted with humanity at its most desperate, and there is such amazingly wonderful pathos, and i couldn't help but feel sympathy for a character who until that point had been under a pretty harsh spotlight.
paul promised:
I'll only say it starts off wacky, crazy, and hopefully funny, and gets darker/more serious as you go, until you're a weeping puddle by the end. Or something that like. ;)
and while i have never been a weeping puddle in my life (view spoiler)[ koff The Piper's Son koff Mother, Come Home(hide spoiler)], i will say that it does do a good job of providing an emotional counterpoint to what would otherwise have been just a cerebral endeavor.
and while i still hold In the Mean Time closer to my blackened heart, this book reaffirms my love for paul tremblay and for czp, the only publisher i have ever maintained a crush on.
years ago, connor told me about this idea he had for a game show. it would be called: guess what i'm doing to your dog!! and you can pretty much figuryears ago, connor told me about this idea he had for a game show. it would be called: guess what i'm doing to your dog!! and you can pretty much figure out the rules: contestants would be brought onstage, and based on the types of noises their dogs were making behind a curtain, they would have to guess what was being done to their beloved pet.
and that's how i have always thought of the books that czp publishes: they are usually about the insidious things lurking under the surface of the everyday; the unexpected creepiness attaching itself to your most trusted surroundings.
this book is something of a departure from that theme. there are occasional flashes of the supernatural, but for the most part, these stories focus more on the real and quiet betrayals of the promises of life. the realization that beloved uncles have character flaws, parents cannot always be counted on to protect, love is not forever, life owes you nothing...all the big and horrible truths that pierce our youthful optimism and make us into the failed adults that will go on to disappoint our own children.
plus two stories about what happens when a school bus meets a train at high speeds.
one of the big pithy reveals of this book is that The dead do not haunt the living - the living haunt the dead. i would go one step further to assert that sometimes it's just the living that haunt the living, and that most of the problems that occur in these stories are entirely caused by human frailty. and that's bad enough.
The Best Part is one of my favorites. it perfectly describes those hopeless downtrodden characters i always feel in my heart...that restlessness of wanting something better and the frustration of limited resources and zero opportunities that don't come about as a result of a life of crime...but that puppy-barking yearning that won't be silenced:
Maybe take art classes. That's what he's always loved, seeing something and making it come alive on paper. There are angles and shadows he sees all the time that he frames inside his head and wants to get down on paper just right, but he's usually with Truck who scoffs at art, or if he's not with Truck he's laid up in the bed trying to sleep off one of Truck's marathon benders he'd been foolish enough to participate in. Seems stupid, really. The one thing that gives him joy, the one thing he loves to do, he mostly just remembers doing a long time ago.
and oh, i feel you...
Like everybody he knows, he wants to get out of this town and start his life all over again. That was the thing he thought about more than anything else when he had been landscaping, mowing or pulling weeds or blowing leaves across somebody's lawn. He would imagine himself in a new place away from Mom's ratty old trailer, away from Truck and Chet and the ex-girlfriends that broke his heart, not because he'd loved them, but because he'd loved them young and now he sees them fat and lethargic, toting around toddlers with dirty faces and shit-heavy diapers, left alone by husbands who in one way or another had learned to abandon everything—including the boys they once were—as a matter of principle.
the best story in the collection is the second; the water tower, which is just perfect and heartbreaking. with a few of these stories, you can see what's coming before the characters can, but it doesn't ruin the journey one bit - it makes it more intense because you want to somehow stop it from happening, but you didn't write this, did you, hmmmm? slide and saving doll and the above the best part are all standouts here. i am definitely still on the czp bandwagon, and would recommend this one to anyone who wants some light supernatural but mostly just bad-enough natural stories of loss and choices and resignation.
it has been such a long time since i have finished a book and wanted to immediately start all over from the beginning again.
this is a boohhhhhhhhhhhhh
it has been such a long time since i have finished a book and wanted to immediately start all over from the beginning again.
this is a book that does that thing i love so much but would have trouble articulating were i to approach a readers' advisory practitioner for a stylistic readalike. so i have to advise myself, usually, but i will try to describe "that thing" so everyone can see what it is like in karen's head:
this book is like ribbon candy. not that it is sweet nor that it should be given to children by their grandmothers. but its scope is like that: temporally, character-wise, action-wise - it folds back on itself, but there is this connective stripe running through it that binds the action, and demonstrates that actions have consequences, even if they cannot be predicted. you know, like ribbon candy. this is such a shitty analogy.
this book is like The Seducer, which i think i described as "spring-shaped" *goes to check* no, but i described its sequel The Conqueror that way. same thing. i think "ribbon candy" is a better image, and goodreads reviews are all about images, right?
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this book centers around one neighborhood block, and five families that live there; their connections, both acknowledged and clandestine, their shared childhoods and grown-apart adult lives, their failures and secret guilts and long-nursed resentments. their revenges.
it is the dirty underbelly of a dark town. it is about emotionally damaged characters causing, usually, physical damage, only occasionally intentionally. it is 95% endurance, and 5% hope. with a touch of the supernatural. but just a dusting, no sookie here.
since we are inside my head, allow me to give you a peek into my experiential arc with this book...
"derr derrr derrrrr what do i want to read now?? i don't feel like reading YA... i don't want to review another downtrodden appalachia book right now...nothing too labor-intensive because i am swamped at work...no short stories...ugh - i have no books here....oh!! sarah court!! cool, i have had this forever, and i do love the czp!! canada! ...read read read read... wait - these are short stories?? but i said NO short stories!! oh, wait. ohhhhhh, that character was in the other "story." oh, and they are referencing something that took place before... ohhhhh wait - this is "that thing" i like! where the book fills in gaps left by its other parts later on and doesn't necessarily call attention to it, but there is mirroring and secret connections and picking up threads i thought were finished and it becomes this huge clove-studded orange of a book with everything plugged up and interlocking and beautiful and is really a novel that is disguising itself as short stories oooohhhh love love love - where's my sparkling ice - love love love"
basically.
i am endorsing this book. again - not to those of you who cannot abide cruelties to people and animals, because there is a bunch of that in this. but to those of us who can handle a little dogfighting and eye-transplant surgery.
i am going to go back and reread great swathes of it now.
the rest of you, enjoy your evenings...and forgive my scatterbrainery - it has been a long day week.
but everyone else likes olives. and i have tried time and again to understand olthe world is my oyster and this book is my olive.
i do not like olives.
but everyone else likes olives. and i have tried time and again to understand olives. i have eaten them in different contexts, and have willed myself to like them, but to no avail. they are just not for me. and it's weird because i like capers and pickles and marinated artichokes etc. but not olives.
this book has very high ratings here on the goodreads.com, so i know that it is simply me and my shortcomings preventing me from liking this book. and i have liked every other czp book i have read, so i am confident that this is something i have to work on.
because it sounds great: like deadwood with more magic and gay sex. who am i to turn that down?? but jeez, was i confused. and i should have known i was in trouble from the first page:
Today is ruled by Centeotl, the Lord of Maize, a version of Xipe Totec, Our Lord the Flayed One. Also known as Xilonen, "the Hairy One," he holds the position of fourth Lord of the Night.
blah blah blah then it goes on about aztec blahblah and mayan blahblah but i am already half asleep. words that begin with "x" kill me. this is a fact about me. add it to the list, whichever one of you is taking notes for my unauthorized biography.
but then it goes back and forth through time and there is magic and demonic possession and lots of shooting and betrayal (those parts i liked a lot) but i got totally tangled up in the mythology, and my brain stalled. it is an old brain - it needs to be tuned frequently.
books where the protagonist has magical abilities frustrate me. magic should remove all conflict. the protagonist should just be able to do whatever they want, with the magic, thus eliminating any conflict, obstacles, and plot. if you have all these powers, why not just A, or B?? but nooo, there is always a snag.
"but here is this other magic. and hell. and a guy with a mirror-foot."
"a mirror foot?"
"yeah, kind of..."
"pass the olives, please"
i don't know. the second part to this series has just come out, and i had it in my pile of books i was planning to buy yesterday, but instead i guiltily slipped it back on the shelf. i may still buy it in the future (and i know i will, because i have terrible completist tendencies) but i might hold off for an entire month before those tendencies overwhelm me.
internet, continue to like this book. i will be curled up in the corner cursing tapenade.
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