2021 Book Notes
Corpsepaint
Notes:
An unnerving and violent novel about apocalypse, folk-horror, and black metal.
Max is a legendary but difficult and drug-addled black metal musician. Roland is a young drummer-for-hire who has been recruited to help Max work on his next album. Both of them are heading to a remote compound in the Ukraine, where another mysterious musical collective have invited them to make Max’s next masterpiece. What they find when they arrive is much stranger and more dangerous than just a remote group of niche musicians. And the events surrounding their arrival reverberate out into the entire world.
Books about musicians are often either tritely referential, or reference the making of music to some other non-musical end. But Peak clearly knows black metal, in its iconography, its sonic touches and concepts, and the culture of its fans and musicians. To that end, people with even a passing familiarity with the sub-genre will see things, names, and concepts that they recognize, and especially black metal’s interest in death, apocalypse, mythology, and decay. All of these concepts are woven through a novel that grows from being a story about an attempt to make a niche-genre record into a story about how the world ends, with the sound of death-growls, blast-beats, and all-treble distorted guitars.
Really great thrilling folk-horror, and a kind of dark love-letter to making music, and the impact of music on others.
Gateways to Abomination
Notes:
A hallucinogenic and creepy collection of horror and weird fiction that takes the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts and its environs as subject, setting, or both.
The stories in this collection range in length from a few paragraphs to longer short-stories. They are loosely held together by a recurring motif of WXXT, a mysterious radio station that broadcasts creepy or horrific news, and is probably inspired by WRSI (The River), a Connecticut Valley radio institution. There are also wonderful nods to Northampton, and other Valley towns, and as a former resident of the area, it was delightful to see places I’d trod pop up in the stories, as well as the occasionally drawing upon the colonial past of the region.
As with all collections, ymmv. Some I liked, some I didn’t care for. All of the stories share a weird aesthetic, where mystery and ambiguity are foregrounded over explication or understanding. That’s the kind of writing I like, and made the collection a fun and engaging read. Bartlett’s writing is explosive and metaphor rich, which occasionally felt overbearing to me, given the light touch of his plots and ideas. Still, it was an enjoyable ride through an alternate, nightmare-version of a place I know and love.
The Fisherman
Notes:
“A beautifully written novel about grief and making peace (or not) with death. It’s also a story of astonishingly baroque and disquieting mythology, and of magic as only a barely comprehensible force in the world.
The structure is ““story within a story”” and I found that it felt a little tonally one-note, given the wildly different time frames, perspectives, and settings that were recounted therein. Many character spend multiple pages (or multiple chapters) retelling stories they heard or ones from their own lives. It sometimes felt like multiple stories in the same world, uncomfortably smashed together and without any real reason.
But all together it was well-written, genuinely creepy in places, and a great yarn. "
The Urban Bizarre
Notes:
A rich, eclectic and weird collection of short fiction, themed loosely around the rough and fantastical edges of urban life.
All of the stories are characterized by an electric prose, befitting the electrified urban thematic content. There’s also a lot of sex–strip clubs, groupies, pornographers, and fiends abound. There were stories I liked and stories I didn’t, but all of them were entertaining in their own way.
Stories I particularly enjoyed included:
Tuck by Michael Hemmingson–a story of 9/11, about how selfishness and violence metastasize.
The Defragmentation of Thomas Crane by Jeff Somers–a creepy and funny study in paranoia, claustrophobia, and transformation in an old apartment building
A Dangerous Day by Douglas W. Texter is about urban revolution, counter-revolution, and the way histories of violence and inequality repeat themselves. Propheting, given our current moment of Black Lives Matter, and the conservative responses to it.
Perhaps the Snail by James Maxey–an erotically charged story about rock and roll decadence and groupies, but around the edges, something more sinister (and slimy) lurks.
Back to ‘2021’
Skin Folk
Notes:
“A beautifully written collection of strange stories that draw on the folklore and history of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora while still charting new worlds into the present and future.
Sometimes the stories are visceral and horrific, like ““Snake”” or ““The Glass Bottle Trick.”” Other times they draw on the trappings of science fiction, like ““Under Glass”” or ““Ganger (Ball Lightning)"”. Other times they are more in the magical realist vein, a la ““Slow Cold Chick.”” And at other times, they are just stories about people, trying to connect across lines of difference, like the sensual and sweet ““Fisherman””. All the way along, Hopkinson writes with sensitivity and rich emotion, particularly about the immigrant experience of living somewhere far from ““home””. Hopkinson’s adopted Toronto is a re-occuring setting, and as a former resident myself, it was fun to picture the places she populates with her wild and interesting characters. "
The Wanderers
Notes:
A propulsively written and cinematic plague novel that feels breezy even at 800-odd pages.
One day, random people in the United States start wandering west. They don’t communicate, they don’t stop, they don’t eat or sleep. They just walk slowly and deliberately westward, and anyone who tries to stop them finds that they explode. These wanderers set off a political, cultural, and religious firestorm that divides an already divided country and sets the stage for an even greater catastrophe. The characters are family members of the wanderers, scientists trying to understand them, and religious and cultural leaders who find the wanderers a way to advance their own interests.
This is a big, multi-character story that stretches out over months and years. The characters are a little wooden, but service the rich and complex plot. It definitely read quickly, and I never felt like the book was overstaying its welcome. No real surprises or literary delights, but it was definitely entertaining.
Shadow and Claw
Notes:
“A gorgeously written, thoughtful, and meditative piece of speculative fiction about fate, suffering, and survival.
The book is set in a far-future Earth in which the sun is beginning to dim. The people on Earth are living in a world that has seen numerous technological civilizations rise and fall, including some that achieved interstellar travel. Those civilizations are now memories or myths or both, and the societies that remain are organized in a kind of feudal urbanism, with cities, monarchs, guilds, peasants, and religious orders.
The main character, Sevarian, recounts his own life story as a member of the guild of torturers, who are tasked with judging and punishing lawbreakers or those who run afoul of the Autarch, the supreme ruler. A chance encounter during a youthful evening excursion with some friends puts him into the middle of a conflict between the great political powers, and eventually leads to his exile from the Guild’s citadel.
What follows is a journey that takes him into the lands beyond his home city of Nessus and into the strange world beyond, filled with remnants of old technology, monsters, stories, and the people trying to live in a dying world. Wolfe made each encounter an opportunity for philosophical rumination, and there are long exchanges between Sevarian and the many characters about love, suffering, history, and fate.
In other words, it’s not your typical sword-and-sorcery novel. To me, it felt much closer to something like Delany ““Dhalgren””, where a single character wanders a strange world and the journey is, itself, the destination.
Wolfe’s prose is gorgeous, and filled with strange and archaic words that re-inscribe the idea that this is a place with a deep and almost unknowable history, and where language forms an imperfect record of lost things. I lingered on sentences and passages, enjoying the lushness of the words and poetry of the phrases.
I found that I liked the first book (““The Shadow of the Torturer”") slightly better than the second (““The Claw of the Conciliator”"), which was much slower and more philosophical. But both books are tremendous and justifiable classics. "
The Tooth Fairy
Notes:
“A strange, creepy and heartfelt story about growing up and all that it costs.
Sam is a young boy growing up in Coventry, with his two friends Clive and Terry. The book opens with a shockingly violent attack on Terry that indicates the menace and violence that will haunt the entire book. Not long after, Sam begins to be visited by a monstrous creature called the Tooth Fairy, and these visits expand outward into violent, dangerous, and horrific events for which the Tooth Fairy (or possibly Sam himself) seem somewhat responsible. These interactions expand in scale as Sam gets older, and begin to encompass Sam’s and his friend’s experiences with maturity, sex, death, and growth.
The book maintains an ambiguity about the reality of the Tooth Fairy. At some moments, it seems possible that the Tooth Fairy is Sam’s hallucination and rationalizing of his own actions. At other moments, it is suggested that the Tooth Fairy is a real being or force, acting malevolently in the world. This ambiguity is an ongoing thread in the book, but not having it one way or the other allows Joyce to get out of having ““rules”” about the Tooth Fairy and instead focus on Sam’s attempts to grow up, make sense of change, and engage with his friends and family as they change and grow.
I think I heard about this book from Stephen’s King’s book ““On Writing”” where he glowingly praises it. Perhaps because of this connection, I found myself comparing the book to ““It”” which was published around the same time, and which deals with many of the same issues–the dangers and menaces of puberty, obsessions with sex, death, and violence, and monsters personifying these forces. But where ““It”” is a rather warped adventure story of overcoming the monster of growing up, ““The Tooth Fairy”” is more thoughtful and ambiguous about the gains and losses that growing up entails. It’s also not easily fit into King’s ““Good versus Evil”” framework, and therefore, to me at least, was a much richer book. "
The Stars are Legion
Notes: A wonderfully weird space opera / single-gender world story about love and birth and death and growth.
I loved a lot of things about this book, starting with the fact that it’s a feminist utopia/single-gender world story that makes no effort to explain why there are no men. The infrastructure of the world sort of suggest an origin, but unlike most single-gender fiction, there isn’t some big reveal that says where the men have gone.
The world is rich, and compelling, and imaginatively explored. As Zan (one of the two main characters) climbs her way back through the ship/world/god into whose belly she’s been cast to be recycled, we see all of these amazing places in which she stops, each of which begs could be the setting for its own story, and which call out for further exploration and explanation. Hurley doesn’t rest in these strange places, but allows us to live with the idea that, just as Zan is confused and in wonder of them, so are we.
The book asks rich questions about what it costs to change a world, or change a person, and how that cost is implicated in love, violence, birth, and death. Honestly, I couldn’t put it down.
The Children of Old Leech
Notes:
“A mixed bag of stories, playing with the astonishing creative worlds from the mind of Laird Barron.
Perhaps somewhat ironically, given the mostly masculine tone of his work, the stories that I liked the best were written by women. Gemma Files, Molly Tanzer, and Allyson Bird all brought really interesting and tonally diverse stories to the table, ranging from the comedic e-pistle by Tanzer (““good Lord show me the way”"), to the dark, feminist piece by Files (““The Harrow”"), to the thoughtful and brooding dreaminess of Bird (““The Golden Stars at Night”"). I also dug Paul Tremblay’s ““Notes for ‘The Barn in the Wild’”” and Stephen Graham Jones' ““Brushdogs””. Cody Goodfellow’s ““Of a Thousand Cuts”” goes against type by rooting his shockingly violent story in the bloody world of Barron’s first novel ““The Light is the Darkness”” which makes little to no reference to his more famous ““Old Leech”” mythos for which the book is named.
You’re probably only going to grab this if, like me, you think Laird Barron is one of the finest practitioners of horror and weird fiction in the 21st century. As with all anthologies, your mileage may vary, and the rest of the stories are all good–the authors are clearly having fun playing in somebody else’s sandbox. "
The Parker Inheritance
Notes:
A smart and socially relevant mystery for kids that directly confront the history of racial segregation in an understandable and sensitive way.
I read this with my (somewhat precocious) 7 year old and he loved it. He liked the way the mystery unfolded and got excited as new clues were revealed. He also appreciated the various flashback chapters that provided backstory on many of the characters.
The central conflict of the book centers around some racial violence, and I was worried that it’d be too much for him, but Johnson (the author) does a great job of establishing the stakes of the conflict and violence while not lingering on it in a vulgar way (despite it being vulgar!)
The main characters are fun and interesting kids, who, it turns out, are dealing with various contemporary prejudices around sexuality and gender, and this provided some interesting parallels with the racial conflicts that haunt the history described in the book.
Railsea
Notes:
“A wonderfully adventurous weird tale, and maybe my new favorite Mieville.
The plot is a quest story–a search for a mythical heaven in the eponymous ““Railsea”” where the normally chaotic mess of train tracks that crisscross the dangerous and monster-filled desert recede into a single line. Along the way, there are giant moles, hunted like whales in the 19th century, the almost archaeological salvage of ancient and forgotten tools and technology from lost civilizations, pirates, legends, and a bewildering array of unique trains and the people who drive them.
There’s also (ultimately), the atrophied infrastructure of class struggle–this is China Mieville after all–and an amazing array of almost incomprehensible creatures and machines.
The prose is written in an unusual and specific style, with in-world language and syntax that initially seems confusing, but gradually coalesces into almost another character in their own right.
I sometimes find that Mieville’s books, whose worlds are so rich and delightful, finish somewhat flat. This novel definitely satisfies, with a series of human and inhuman battle scenes that are electrically described. Really fun, strange, and engaging. "
