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| 91
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| Aug 21, 2023
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it was amazing
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2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which
2024 reads, #8. To get an important ethical disclosure out of the way immediately, let me mention that I was paid to be an editor on this book, which would make it an ethical conflict for me to try to write an "unbiased review" of it here at Goodreads. (I mean, don't get me wrong, I love this book and I think you should read it too, but my opinion in no way should be considered a dispassionate, objective one.) So instead, let me link you to an interview I did with Kyle this week about the book, which I published through my free editor newsletter I publish every Friday. I hope you find this intriguing enough to go out and buy a copy of the novel!
...more
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| 0871404028
| 9780871404022
| 0871404028
| 3.61
| 34,098
| Nov 1975
| Apr 16, 2012
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2023 reads, #24. So, seven books now into the 18 I'll eventually be reading for the JG Ballard portion of my Great Completist Challenge, we've now reached what is far and away the most famous book of his career, a moment where his burgeoning experimental obsessions sort of perfectly crossed paths with the general public zeitgeist in a way it never had before nor ever would again over the course of his long 45-year professional career as an actively publishing author. It's tempting to say that it's when Ballard first found his "mature" voice, but that's not really true -- the measured and plain tone he uses to such great effect in this novel was there as well in his four-book "Catastrophe" series from the 1960s that started my completist look of him, back when he was starting out and could only find book contracts in the world of traditional Silver-Age straightforward science-fiction, just that it's easy to forget that when the last few books from the early '70s that preceded High-Rise had been written in a much more experimental stream-of-consciousness tone, like everyone else's had as well in the middle of the Countercultural Age in the early '70s when they had been written. As someone, though, who's now read all six of the novels before this, I can now state with some authority that this is at least where everything about Ballard that we consider "Ballardian" came together for the first time -- the better prose style of his earlier Mid-Century Modernist work (High-Rise is not confusingly written at all, but rather in the style of Ballard's peer Kurt Vonnegut seems to be deliberately simply written almost to make a comment on or perhaps even deliberately be playful about the dense, dark, almost transgressive conceptual ideas being conveyed), still with an incredibly bleak outlook on life, but now in the '70s with him able to go in a startling new direction with the source of his horror, not from a destroyed planet but rather from the detritus of specifically late-20th-century society, whether that's cars in Crash, the highways they drive down in Concrete Island, or in this book the skyscrapers where all those drivers live. Like literally all his other six novels before this one as well, it's primarily the story of a James Kirk-type chiseled-jaw white male Mid-Century Modernist-style hero, now finding himself completely over his head as the world collapses around him, although this time not a literal collapsing world like his '60s sci-fi titles, but one specific collapsing "skyscraper community." It's very, very important to remember that this was still a fairly new and startling idea in the real world, a single skyscraper that would also have its own grocery store, gym, swimming pool, preschool, and all the other amenities that could theoretically allow you to simply live your entire life there for months at a time without ever leaving. Weird little experiments in places like London in the '50s after the World War, they caught on a little more in the '60s when the Brutalist style of architecture started becoming popular, so that by the '70s they had become the hip faddish trendy thing that people were starting to talk about a lot, with their cold concrete facades and European Expressionist-style odd angles all over the place. This idea of your building as a fortress against the chaos of the sidewalk-level riff-raff was especially a hot topic in inner cities in the industrialized world in those years, as places like New York and Paris started falling apart in their inner cores to sometimes almost become lawless wastelands of random violence. It's no surprise, I think, that by complete coincidence (and it can be pretty easily demonstrated that they truly didn't know of each other's projects), Canadian horror film director David Cronenberg made the early movie Shivers (see my review at Letterboxd) at the exact same time Ballard was writing High-Rise, and both are about the idea that at one of these skyscraper communities one random year, everyone there actually goes insane and all try to kill each other. With this being the years of the Manson Family and Watergate, the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof, conspiracy thrillers in every theater and every bookstore, it makes sense that these creepily futuristic hundred-floor megalorotic monstrosities might come off as centers of existential menace to many people who looked at the world critically and artistically, and I think can largely explain why this book took off with the general public in a way that the one just previous, Concrete Island with its similar concept and similar writing style, just didn't. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's simply got such a killer, killer freaking premise; that in the face of a venue built specifically to let a thousand strangers live in a tiny space without a hint of conflict, using cutting-edge sociological/architectural theories and a series of pricy, high-end amenities, perhaps it might just backfire and do nothing but intensify the class-consciousness and resentment that courses through the blood of the average Briton, and convince people to violently fight for no other reason than to just prove who is right, determine who will survive, like two Karens who both spy the last Elf On A Shelf at Walmart on Black Friday and the next thing you know one has murdered the other, and is being led off in a confused daze with her hands cuffed behind her back and her face sprayed with blood. High-Rise is that, writ large, with all the details cranked up to 11, by which I quote yet another one of Ballard's weirdo contemporaries, Anthony Burgess, who was always talking about "the ol' sex and violence." That's what you get with Ballard Unleashed, which the '70s afforded him to do finally for the first time in what was now over a decade and a half as a full-time professional author; all the darkness and weirdness of his '60s sci-fi (which could get awfully dark and weird, a surprise for me when I first read them, as long-time readers of this series know), but with a '70s hippie death cult's worth of sex and violence, only this time set in a startlingly unique world of tasteful hallways with potted ferns and fully automated washers and dryers. And of course, also just like all six of the other books he'd published up to now, one of the Kirk stand-in's friends turns out to be someone who has learned to just embrace all the dark insanity and choose to dance off to the apocalypse with the rest of the sinning, decaying human race, here that being the mysterious architect behind the complex, one Anthony Royal, who lives up in an equally mysterious supposed entire house that's been plunked on top of the roof of the building. He sort of conceptually serves the same purpose as Dr. Robert Vaughn from Ballard's second-most popular book of his career, 1973's Crash, not in literal plot terms but that he's a character who fully understands and chooses to embrace the dark goddess of chaos known by many as Discordia, this understanding that everything's fucked so we might as well go along for the ride. This has so far been a defining thing for every single book of Ballard's career, at least one character in each who simply acknowledges that in a world gone insane, the most sane thing you can do is be crazy too, and I'm going to be interested to see whether Ballard will continue to keep this streak up in the eleven more books we have ahead. I gotta admit, that's kind of what took me so long to finally get to this, because I knew the actual storyline so well, I knew that it was going to turn out to be at least a bit of a disappointment to read a book that was going to be so similar to it. For those of us who are compelled to be completists, this is what pushes us to be them, because we tire of the popular and well-known, and want to delve into weirder and smaller corners to get a deep sense of what exactly made that artist tick. So in that spirit, next here with Ballard we tackle what is chronologically next but perhaps one of the most obscure titles by now of his career, 1979's The Unlimited Dream Company, which from its Wikipedia description sounds like it's going to be more experimental again in the style of The Atrocity Exhibition, inspired by 1700s weirdo William Blake and about a man who survives a plane crash and apparently gains superpowers, or perhaps is crazy and neither he as the narrator nor you as the reader know that. Sounds interesting if nothing else, which makes it worth taking on for a completist like myself, so I look forward to speaking with you again about that one very soon. JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High-Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006) ...more |
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| 3.69
| 180
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| 2020
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it was ok
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2023 reads, #9. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the
2023 reads, #9. (I'm now reading romance novels and women's erotica on a regular basis, in order to better help my freelance clients who write in the same genres. Check out my "romance" tag to see all my reviews.) It was only yesterday that I was raving about Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, an outrageous dark sci-fi tale in "fated mates" territory, or "reverse harems" or "why choose" or "imprinting" or "compelled to breed" or any of the other subgenres that basically all celebrate the more animal side of sexuality, and especially the what-if concept of human women developing legitimate estrus, which is the scientific term for "going into heat." It was while checking out Bequin's website and signing up for her newsletter that I learned that I could get a free "lead magnet" title from her within what's called the "omegaverse" subgenre of romance and women's erotica, which I've had a particular interest in since having it be the very first romance manuscript ever offered to me as a freelancer, something like nine months ago now. Part of its appeal is that there is no one uncontested understanding of what it is; but in general you can say that most people agree that such stories take place in some kind of reality or another where elaborate and complicated sexual rules exist regarding who gets to have sex with whom and under what circumstances (think Jon Norman's "The Chronicles of Gor," for example, which back in the 1970s set the model for how a lot of this stuff is thought of) and that there exists the alphas of this world (the sexually dominant ones who control all the breeding and pairing that take place), and the betas (who...um, don't). In fact, it's how the omegas fit into all of this that makes it so complicated, because sometimes the omega exists to fit traditional gender roles, and sometimes it can take on a radical queer identity and goals; sometimes it serves more a romantic purpose in a book, and sometimes more explicitly sexual. Bequin's Wounded Omega, though, gives a biological explanation for each designation -- the "betas" are the pale, zombie-like creatures that the majority of the human race turned into after an "unexplained airborne environmental event" called the Cataclysm; "alphas" are the small minority who "evolved" into better physical bodies (tougher, bigger, faster) and accompanying elevated sexual drive; and "omegas" are the 1% of women who evolved in order to breed with them, by having this ability to achieve estrus, which is treated as a sort of Star Trekian "pon farr" in that getting the urge for dick but then not getting dick can literally make a woman sick or even suffer from toxic shock in their universe. That's fine, I suppose, but when it comes to one of the main pleasures people get from this genre, of watching betas get cuckolded by their natural alpha masters, it's a whole lot less fun when the betas are chalky-pale zombies who don't even understand in the first place that only the alphas are getting all the trim, much less care. Ultimately, Bequin is just positing the same concept that drove my previous read of hers, the sci-fi Their Human Vessel, this idea that exposure to space alien DNA or spores or cum or whatever will turn humans into "the next stage of evolution," which happens to have a much more animalistic sense of sexuality and an unapologetically positive attitude towards "taking what you want." And that's perhaps a better way to see this, as a sister tale in her shared "Bequin Literary Universe" where the events and races of Their Human Vessel take place too, because it doesn't really work as an omegaverse tale as I understand the subgenre to me, but is like a smaller, tamer, less logically sound version of her exquisitely batshit previous novel about eight-foot-tall blue-skinned space aliens with literal horse-sized cocks. I have more traditional omegaverse reads coming later this winter, though, so keep your eyes out for that! ...more |
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| 154203759X
| 9781542037594
| B09PBJ3JML
| 3.99
| 12,603
| Nov 01, 2022
| Nov 01, 2022
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it was ok
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2022 reads, #50. Oh boy, time for another Amazon Prime Reads book! I've read 13 of these now, and have disliked all 13 of them, so will today's 14th t
2022 reads, #50. Oh boy, time for another Amazon Prime Reads book! I've read 13 of these now, and have disliked all 13 of them, so will today's 14th title finally be the one to break the curse? Spoiler alert: ...Er, no. Sorry, Wendy Webb. The problem here is the same one as a whole lot of these other books published by Amazon's own in-house "SEO keywords first, quality second" publishing imprints -- not that the writing itself is bad (it's perfectly serviceable, in the same way a random episode of Law & Order on a Tuesday night is perfectly serviceable), but that Webb has only put together a short story's worth of plot here in her...uh, "cozy horror" novel, I guess you would call it, then padded and padded and padded it out until it finally bloated up large enough to hold together the glue and cardboard covers for a 300-page perfect-bound paperback, thus officially becoming "1 Unit of Content" for Amazon's algorithmic robots to spin their SEO dark magick on. (And how's that whole "creative decisions made by robots" thing working out for you, Amazon? Or shall we ask Netflix how it's been working for them?) Thus, the story being told here is actually not that bad, about a young woman returning to the quaint Victorian mansion of the quaint Minnesota lake town where she grew up in order to turn it into a bed & breakfast, but then discovers nefarious dealings underfoot in a secret room that's been locked for decades (although like a lot of these kinds of "cozy" stories, I did roll my eyes at the prospect of her grandfather being essentially a hotel-lobby-style small-town Impressionist ripoff painter in the 1950s, an entire century after this stopped being daring or interesting, yet supposedly his work now sells for millions of dollars and hangs in the Museum of Modern Art); and if this had been a Kindle Single for 99 cents that I could've read from start to finish in a single afternoon, that actually would've been kind of a pleasant reading experience, and would've gotten it 3 stars from me or possibly even 4, depending on how Webb would've handled the overlong third-act reveal in her short-story version. But as a 300-page book it was pretty intolerable, and it's easy to tell that every person involved with its production was all just praying the whole time, "Oh God, oh God, please let this stretch out until it's just barely $13.50's worth of book, oh please God." That makes it an unpleasant reading experience when all is said and done, and a book I can't recommend, thus chalking up now my 14th bad review in a row of an Amazon Prime Reads book. I famously declared I was done with these after the 12th, something like a year ago now, but got tempted into them again starting last month because how can I possibly turn down free books no matter how bad they are, YOU TELL ME PLEASE; and that's exactly what Amazon is counting on, for me to be their 1 Audience Unit to be matched with their 1 Content Unit and for me to spit out a number they can bend, fold and manipulate into convincing me to do it all over again. So throw me into the machine, I guess, Alan Turing; I hereby officially succumb to The Algorithm, and I'm ready for another robot-recommended stinker whenever you are. ...more |
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| B09GW3P1KJ
| 3.53
| 70,986
| Jun 21, 2022
| Jun 21, 2022
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really liked it
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2022 reads, #44. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! Regular friends will remember that I'm reading all four of the novels (so far) by the beguiling
2022 reads, #44. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! Regular friends will remember that I'm reading all four of the novels (so far) by the beguiling Ottessa Moshfegh this summer in a row, after seeing a growing amount of friends start referring to books by other female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me wanting to know what that means. As we've examined in the other three books, that basically boils down to, "Stories about that mousy dishwasher-blonde receptionist at the insurance company whose existence no one pays attention to, who's actually much crazier than anyone has given her credit for, and who today has officially reached her fill of your unending fucking bullshit, thank you very MUCH;" and so that's why other high-profile novels like
Nightbitch
and
A Touch of Jen
have been receiving this "Moshfeghian" label recently, because they too delve generally into the subject of the put-upon overlooked bland mousy women in our society, and how in fact they might actually be much more insane than you thought them capable of. So that's what makes it all the more a surprise to learn that her fourth and newest, the just released Lapvona, is not Moshfeghian in nature whatsoever, and that there isn't a put-upon Moshfeghian Heroine in sight. Instead, this is a straight-up horror story, set in deeply religious Medieval times, the same sort of milieu where Robert Egger's The VVitch takes place. Or perhaps I should say the kind of Medieval milieu where Ben Wheatley's A Field in England takes place, or Aleksai German's Hard to Be a God or perhaps Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon: for Moshfegh's Middle Ages central Europe is a harsh and bizarre place, a land that cuts no one a break among a society that's barely still out of stone tools, where you're lucky to live to 50 without dying violently and painfully in a pool of your own blood and pus. Moshfegh pulls no punches here, and you deserve to know that we get rape, torture and cannibalism all before even the first half is over, to say nothing of the image of a 13-year-old boy greedily sucking on the tit of a naked, shrivelled-up 96-year-old woman who serves as the village's local shaman and sex magic purveyor (i.e. she gives all the young men of the village handjobs using a jar of her own urine that she says is a "magic potion," YOU'RE WELCOME). Moshfegh is deliberately reaching for cartoonish terribleness here, sometimes to the point of absurdity; so like we've talked about before, this is the latest and strongest sign yet that she's a big fan of Postmodernist nightmare creator JG Ballard, in that this book often resembles (especially during the long, surreally violent drought in the middle of the page count) Ballard's "Catastrophe" novels like The Burning World . This is an out-and-out nihilist tale to be sure, in which not a single character is redeemable whether they're presented as a traditional "goodie" or a "baddie;" Moshfegh wants you to feel bad about the human race by the time you're done here, just like Ballard wanted you to do too. And that's why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5, because Moshfegh is more interested in being miserable here than in delivering a satisfying three-act plot; think of this more as her saying, "Humans were shockingly cruel to each other for the entire thousand years of the Medieval Era, and here's a random two-year period where we watch the cruelty in detail." There's not really a satisfying ending to this, other than, "Yep, proof positive that all these people are just going to continue on in this miserable way the entire rest of their lives;" but that misery is expressed in such strange, crisp, disgusting detail here, you can't help but admire it for what it is, and consider the book mostly a satisfying experience until you get to the underwhelming end. I'll take that, given that I've out-and-out hated two of Moshfegh's four novels now; and more importantly, I admire Moshfegh's decision to deliver against "Moshfeghian" hype, and do whatever kind of freaky-ass weirdo cannibalism storytelling she wants without worrying like others do about how it might fit into her "existing canon" of work. This is just in general one of the things I admire about Moshfegh the most, that she seems to give less of a fuck about what the public thinks of her than just about any other commercially successful contemporary fiction writer these days; and I kind of love that right at the moment she's becoming this sort of intellectual feminst hero for writing these books about strangely executed female empowerment, she decides to pivot into left field and deliver a piece of fatalist historical fiction with no female heroes at all, one written in a style I suspect many of her current female fans will find too disgusting to even get through. The book itself is alright, but it's much more enjoyable as a statement of defiance by Moshfegh against both the literary industry and her existing fans' need to put everything they like into these neat little boxes, and then insist that the artist deliver nothing else but that the rest of their career. I look forward in another few years to seeing what newest left turn she'll have for us next. ...more |
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| 0451458125
| 9780451458124
| 0451458125
| 3.98
| 198,953
| Jan 01, 2001
| Jan 09, 2001
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liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation 2022 reads, #43. It's summer, which means it's time for another of Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" urban fantasy novels! As long-time friends remember, I've been trying to add a certain amount of these genre-oriented, easy-to-read books to my summer reading list for about ten years now, ever since getting nostalgic once in my forties about how I would join my local library's Summer Reading Program every year when I was a kid and do basically the same exact thing, and now here in my fifties I make room every summer for another book by such notorious beach and airport authors as Butcher, Lee Child, Elin Hilderbrand and more. Unfortunately, though, Butcher's books more closely fit the derided stereotype of such summer genre easy-readers than the others do; for while the others often bounce back and forth between legitimate brilliance and Tommy Wiseau-style "so bad it's good," the two Dresden Files novels I've so far read just sort of tread the thin line between so-so and mediocre without ever really fluctuating above or below it, the kind of C+ fan-service stuff you might expect from someone who's been attending fantasy conventions just as an enthusiastic audience member all their life, and has finally decided after reading about 500 of these types of books to finally try writing one themselves. And indeed, that's perhaps the biggest irony of the Dresden novels, that they first got the kind of outsized notice and popularity they wouldn't get now because he first started writing them way back at the tail end of the 1990s, the decade when urban fantasy first exploded in popularity due to such high-profile projects as Neil Gaiman's Sandman for DC's "edgy Generation X" imprint, Vertigo. There simply weren't that many urban fantasy novels around then, so Butcher was lucky to get a tremendous amount of coverage by publishing his when he did, the ongoing adventures of a hard-boiled Chicago private eye but with the twist being that he's an honest-to-God wizard, the only one of his kind in history to ever make themselves publicly known to the non-magic public, which works out just fine because most non-magicals think he's just an eccentric nutjob, making up the magic element as a way of generating easy publicity for his PI services (minus a few cops and reporters who instead take him very, very seriously). It's a really genius concept for a franchise, very basic-cable in that respect, where he gets both the benefits of episodic storytelling that can be read in any order, but with a light mythology to Dresden and his life that we learn a little bit more of with each new book. (And indeed, it's no surprise that the cable network formerly known as the SciFi Channel produced a Dresden TV show in the mid-'00s, which not by coincidence is when the books really blew up in popularity for the first time too.) But also like basic cable, so far none of these specific stories have been much more than a breezy, forgettable way to painlessly pass a boring Sunday afternoon, not bad and not good but just sort of...there, the kind of clock-killing light pleasure that con-going genre fans love, because con-going genre fans read an entire book in their loved genre every single day of the week (or, well, at least every other day). It bugs me that Butcher's personal prose style is best described as Joss Whedon on a bad day; it bugs me that he's constantly getting basic facts about Chicago wrong despite his franchise being set here (in this book, for example, erroneously stating that the lakefront area of the Hyde Park neighborhood where I live is a run-down wasteland of abandoned crumbling warehouses, and that the highly urbanized Gold Coast neighborhood is instead filled with a small amount of Gilded Age mansions that are each surrounded by acres upon acres of fenced-in private forests). It bugs me that there's no stereotype that Butcher doesn't love, and it bugs me that he uses a novel filled with female werewolves as a lazy excuse to call them all "bitches" over and over, dozens of times (because they're female dogs, GET IT?!). Mostly, though, it bugs me that this book feels so filled with tired cliches at this point, 21 years after it was first published, for supposedly being such a pioneer in the genre. I actually put together a list a few years ago which for better or for worse could be called an "Urban Fantasy Canon Primer," the most influential and popular titles in the relatively short 30 years this has been a mainstream genre; and reading this latest Dresden Files novel got me thinking about it again, and thinking about how my time would probably actually be better spent delving more and more into this larger list, and getting a greater diversity of story ideas and universe rules and prose quality under my belt, rather than just continuing to read these mediocre Dresden books again and again. (My full urban fantasy canon list is about 50 titles, which I've posted over at Twitter for anyone who wants to see them; but basically the first three after this are Cassandra Khaw's Food of the Gods, Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue, and F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack, because they were all particularly recommended to me by an acquaintance whose taste I admire, horror author Richard Thomas.) So, you may see me take a step back in the coming years from these Dresden titles in order to explore the bigger world of urban fantasy in general, and eventually this author in my Great Completist Challenge may become abandoned altogether. (Hey, it happens..) But until then, I can give this second book in the series a solid "meh," fine for urban fantasy completists who don't need a whole lot to be happy, but not really anything outside a typical Tuesday night on the modern CW anymore in terms of overall entertainment value or quality level. Make your choice on whether or not to read this based on that. Jim Butcher "Dresden Files" books being reviewed for this series: Storm Front (2000) | Fool Moon (2001) | Grave Peril (2001) | Summer Knight (2002) | Death Masks (2003) | Blood Rites (2004) | Dead Beat (2005) | Proven Guilty (2006) | White Night (2007) | Small Favor (2008) | Turn Coat (2009) | Changes (2010) | Ghost Story (2011) | Cold Days (2012) | Skin Game (2014) | Peace Talks (2020) | Battle Ground (2020) ...more |
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| 0525522131
| 9780525522133
| 0525522131
| 3.63
| 438,393
| Jul 10, 2018
| Jun 25, 2019
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really liked it
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2022 reads, #31. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the
2022 reads, #31. Greetings from my Summer of Moshfegh! As friends remember, this is the summer I'm finally reading for the first time all four of the novels by hipster-lit It Girl Ottessa Moshfegh, right in a row until I'm done, because of recently noticing a growing amount of my friends at Goodreads starting to now describe other surreal novels by young female authors as "Moshfeghian" in nature, and me having a desire to know exactly what they mean when they use a term like this. As we saw last time, during my read of her 2015 full-length debut Eileen, even with her first novel I got somewhat of an answer to that (namely, it seems to be shorthand for tales about that mousy little dishwater-blonde doormat at your corporate office who no one ever pays attention to, and how those women frequently turn out to be much, much crazier than you ever gave them credit for, a "Moshfeghian" story essentially being the story of the day that woman officially reached her fill of your fucking bullshit once and for all); but this didn't seem to explain why Moshfegh's fans tend to talk about her in the awed, hushed tones of true believers towards their cult leaders, in that Eileen is interesting but no great shakes, a sorta dour morality tale about The Most Unpleasant Woman In Human History (aka Saturday Night Live's "Debbie Downer" come to life and played for drama instead of laughs), leaving me sort of shrugging my shoulders at the end and wondering how Moshfegh managed to inspire a cult following with rather pedestrian prose like this. Ah, but then this week I read her 2018 follow-up, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and immediately everything clicked into place; for what this second novel proves is that Moshfegh is actually no less than the arts' newest JG Ballard, and people like Ballard have proven to be historically difficult to define, in that their work is so startlingly unique and difficult to directly compare to others, which is why such artists tend to become one-person genres and are subsequently described as "Ballardian" or "Moshfeghian" or "Cronenbergian" or "Lynchian." Here, for example, we're given the kind of metaphorically surreal premise that fuels such other recent "Moshfeghian" novels as Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch (my review) or Beth Morgan's A Touch of Jen (my review)—basically, a rather unpleasant young female New Yorker, living the kind of soul-killingly anonymous life that so many of these young urban creative-classers do, decides one day that she's done with it all, and makes elaborate plans to spend a year under the constant effect of surgery-grade sleeping aids, basically waking briefly once every few days to tend to bodily functions like eating and moving her body, but otherwise spending 70 out of every 72 hours in a blissful state of slumber away from all the constant fucking Sex in the City consumer capitalist nonsense being unendingly shoved down the throats of her generation (as best seen in our unnamed narrator's "friend" Reza, who lives in the spiritually empty Upper East Side of Manhattan and 100 percent buys into every self-shaming tactic the consumer capitalist industrial system throws her way, who our narrator treats with open contempt even as Reza perpetually responds in her shallow Kardashian air-kiss kind of gently clueless way). Unlike these other "Moshfeghian" novels, though, which ultimately just tend to be the same ol' MFA character-study drivel as always but just dressed up with a fancy genre premise, here Moshfegh completely and totally commits to the weirdness, pairing up our protagonist with a quack therapist who by all rights should have no business being able to hand out legal drug prescriptions like candy, but who hilariously does anyway. This is where many astute readers will first start explicitly thinking of Ballard while reading Moshfegh's work, because her Dr. Tuttle is just so outrageously over-the-top insane that you can't help but laugh out loud every few pages whenever she appears, much in the same style as Ballard's Dr. Robert Vaughn from Crash or any number of similar figures in his other books, a sort of straw puppet who both he and Moshfegh use to very deliberately make the point, "When society itself is insane, maybe the sanest thing to do is follow the insane person who sees the world for what it really is." In this sense, then, the unnamed narrator of Relaxation is much like the milquetoast narrators of many of Ballard's books as well, a thorough product of modern society's efforts to grind everyone down into a bland paste so to more effortlessly accept whatever worthless nonsense consumer capitalism is selling this time, who one day stands up and says, "You know, I've had just about enough of all this, and if the only alternative is to slavishly follow a clearly insane person so that they'll provide rationalizations for my own insane behavior, then I guess that's how it's going to be." That's another thing to really like about Moshfegh's work, both here and in the previous Eileen; she not only isn't afraid to make her protagonists these unambiguously repulsive characters, she takes great pride in rubbing their awfulness in your face, here doing a particularly insightful job at portraying yet another pretty blonde white girl in New York, the ones being hostesses at all the hipster restaurants and receptionists at all the art galleries, and showing just the seething hatred she has for not only the rest of the human race but really everything in existence, letting us see the Late Stage Capitalism youth culture of her age through the confused, cynical eyes of a space alien who can't understand what's going on and why everyone is acting in the way they do. This is another thing that makes Moshfegh very much like Ballard, in that it's patently clear that she simply doesn't give the tiniest fuck what you think of her or her work; she's unafraid to write these pitch-black looks at the worst of the human condition, not through the hopeful filter of a rootable hero trying to rage against the machine, but through the fatalistic filter of someone who's now been ground through the machine and spit back out, ready now to embrace the dark, chaotic abyss. That's a powerful and unusual thing in any situation, which is why we celebrate artists like Ballard and Cronenberg for the visionaries they are; but that's an especially unique thing here, because of Moshfegh's main fanbase and most passionate readers being the kinds of young mainstream females who have traditionally been shuttled off unthinkingly by the publishing industry into the bright pink, bow-wrapped genre formerly known as "chick lit" and now known as "bookclub fiction" (which is kind of like when this same publishing industry finally stopped calling it "Negro literature" just to instead call it "urban fiction," i.e. it isn't fucking fooling anyone, but that's another comment-filled essay for another day). For these readers to stand up and practically worship Moshfegh for the legitimate literary pioneer she is is a powerful thing indeed, because it gives all women something better and deeper and more cutting to enjoy than just all the endless fluffy tales about cupcake stores and social media influencers and cozy mysteries among used bookstore-owning amateur sleuths, just like recent movies like Sorry to Bother You and Everything Everywhere All at Once are finally making it okay for the first time to be both a person of color and into deeply weird shit. That's something to celebrate, when a writer so profoundly dark and strange as Moshfegh gets embraced by the mainstream as much as she has, because it deepens and widens the arts altogether and gives everyone more choices, especially in the direction of artists who have things that are fascinating, rewarding, and sometimes profoundly challenging to hear. In fact, the only two things stopping me from giving this a full five stars (although to be sure, even with the four stars it will be appearing on my "best reads of the year" list this December) are both instances where I felt that Moshfegh sort of doubted herself and fell back on easy MFA tropes instead; namely, there's this small but unpleasant section two-thirds of the way through when she attends the funeral of Reza's mother and suddenly has all these Vietnam-style flashbacks to her own youth, where the book suddenly backtracks into Eileen territory of "poor little eternal victim was hated by literally every person in her childhood," and just does way too much explaining and Monday-morning retconning about why our unnamed narrator is such a horrible person in her twenties to begin with, which this book doesn't need and quite frankly ruins some of the former mystique; and then, as most people will notice quickly, which is why I don't consider this a spoiler, although written in 2018 the book itself is set in the year preceding 9/11, and Moshfegh makes it a showy point to demonstrate how a bunch of people in our narrator's life are all going to end up in the World Trade Center on 9/11 through things like unrelated jobs, and then at the end she basically finishes everything with a one-page final chapter that's like, "Yep, and then 9/11 happened and they all died! Um, The End!" For the life of me, I can't figure out why Moshfegh decided to do this, given that she has no real point to make or no big metaphor about 9/11 to bring up, just this ostentatious ending that calls all this attention to itself for no particular reason. Then again, although I haven't confirmed this myself, I've heard that Moshfegh can actually be quite contentious in interviews, and like her book's characters doesn't really seem to give much of a shit what anyone thinks of her or her work; for example, I heard people say in their reviews of Eileen that Moshfegh has since confessed in interviews that she entirely wrote that book by dutifully following every step of one of those cheesy Kindle Unlimited "Write A Novel In 90 Days and Get It Really Published!" guides, and did it literally as an expression of contempt for the publishing industry and the torturous path to publishing that all her MFA buddies were telling her she had to go through. I'll probably never look up whether that's actually true, because I so badly want it to be true, and I love the image of a deliberately cantankerous Moshfegh out there in the world, flipping off all the stupids and the NPR nerds, deliberately trolling her audience with endings like, "And then 9/11 happened and everyone died, The End, Honor Our Fallen Heroes, U-S-A U-S-A FUUUCKKKK YOOOOOOOUUUUU CONSUMER CAPITALISM!!!!!1!!" But we'll be examining that side of Moshfegh more, I'm absolutely sure, in my next read of my completist summer, her 2020 out-and-out New Weird thriller Death in Her Hands. I hope you'll be able to join me again in a few weeks for that. ...more |
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| 0385546815
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| 0385546815
| 3.54
| 47,897
| Jul 20, 2021
| Jul 20, 2021
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it was ok
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2022 reads, #20. It occurs to me as I begin this maddening review of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch that for me as a straight male to call it disappointing
2022 reads, #20. It occurs to me as I begin this maddening review of Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch that for me as a straight male to call it disappointing, since I had been led to believe that it was going to be a clever and unique darkly surreal horror tale (because of having it algorithmically recommended to me officially one bazillion times while I was reading the similarly darkly surreal horror tales
The Doloriad
and
A Touch of Jen
last month), just to discover that it's merely another mediocre MFA novel about how tough middle-class women have it (no, really, guys, they do), is a lot like that moment in The Simpsons when Mr. Burns says, "I don't know what 'misogynist' means, but no women allowed!" That's because this hugely popular cult novel and soon to be Hollywood feature is pretty much male-critic-proof from the start, in that every single word of its 238 pages is about all the ways life turns to shit for one milquetoast youngish creative classer after finally having a baby, and that it's largely the penis-owners in her life who are the cause of it, including her constantly absent husband and the unrepentant douchebag known as her toddler son. In fact, you could say that a new mother who's not getting enough sleep under such circumstances can turn into A REAL ANIMAL, ha ha, am I right folks, am I right? which feels very suspiciously like where the idea for this entire book came from, by Yoder losing her shit once at three in the morning around her screaming newborn and her husband remarking, "Wow, you turn into a real animal when you haven't gotten enough sleep," and Yoder suddenly stroking her chin and saying, "Wait a minute..." That's a clever concept for a short story, I admit, the idea of the constantly repressed temper of a young frustrated mother eventually manifesting as a literal transformation into a violent, furious dog-creature; but like so many MFA authors from a short-fiction background trying to make the transition into full-length novels, Yoder didn't seem to actually know what to do with these 300 blank pages that were staring at her while she was tinkering around with the story idea, so in typical MFA fashion we just instead have only the original short story's worth of actual storyline, the author trying to make up for the rest with very pretty prose and roughly 75,000 words of minutiae about what the life of a youngish urban creative classer new mother is actually like -- the endless errands and acceding to demands, the never-concluding zombie sessions with other new moms at playgrounds and library storytimes, the trips to the grocery stores that can never just be a simple positive experience but must always, always blow up into tears and an angry crisis. There's nothing wrong with liking books that are about that, and I want to make sure everyone knows that I'm not trying to deny that, that anyone who wants to read a feminist-forward social-realist tale about the true headaches and nightmares that come with trying to simultaneously be a mother, wife, and theoretically earning career worker is more than encouraged by me to find, read and enjoy these books. But goddamnit, I was promised a fucking surreal horror novel, AND I NOW WANT THE FUCKING SURREAL HORROR NOVEL I WAS PROMISED, not some cleverly written "meditation" on how gently miserable all middle-classers are, which a bunch of ivory-tower eggheads are now gushingly calling a "horror novel" to their buddies like me just because it contains about the lightest touch possible of magical-realism elements needed to still be called a magical-realism story. This is always the danger of accepting recommendations for genre novels from indie-lit hipsters, that a certain percentage of them have no idea what they're talking about and are just spouting a bunch of nonsense about genres that's not actually true; and while I found the chances in my favor when it came to people recommending The Doloriad and A Touch of Jen to me, here the peanut gallery simply struck out by recommending so passionately a "well-done horror novel" that was neither horror nor well-done. A disappointment, although certainly I agree with all the things she says about how difficult modern motherhood actually is, and I admire her for at least trying to take a new approach at telling such a story. A big swing here, but unfortunately a big miss in my opinion, although Goodreads is clearly showing that I'm in the minority when it comes to this mindset. ...more |
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| 3.28
| 9,989
| Jul 13, 2021
| Jul 13, 2021
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #18. Wow, I went through quite an emotional journey with this book, starting with the fact that I initially gave up on it only 25 pages in
2022 reads, #18. Wow, I went through quite an emotional journey with this book, starting with the fact that I initially gave up on it only 25 pages in, because it originally looked like it was going to be just another stupid Brooklyn hipster MFA novel by another stupid Brooklyn hipster MFA author about a bunch of stupid Brooklyn hipsters who no one can stand yet everyone keeps seeming to write books about; and I've already had enough of that kind of nonsense in my life in the last year, so I put it down quickly and added it to the pile of books to take back to the library on my next trip. But like all of these kinds of DNF novels, before I turned it back in I skipped ahead and read the last chapter, just so I'll know how it ends; and that's where I discovered a scene with our stupid Brooklyn hipsters still whining and griping at each other, but now with apparently some kind of supernatural monster tearing down the hallway of the Brooklyn loft they're all in, wreaking havoc and trying to destroy them all. So at that point I was like, Well, fuck, I guess I gotta go back and read this entire thing, because that was simply too intriguing a detail to let pass by. While doing that, then, I also took some time to read everyone else's reviews of the book here at Goodreads, something I don't do until afterwards with books I like, but that I do in advance for books I'm on the fence about; and it was there that I saw that nearly every review now posted of this novel says something along the lines of "OMG THE LAST CHAPTER OF THIS BOOK BLEW MY FREAKING MIIIIIIND;" and that's when I started suspecting that this is one of those stories in the tradition of The Sixth Sense, where the story itself is actually only mediocre once you stop and really examine it, but has such an explosively unique and surprising ending that it literally changes how people feel about the 300 pages or two hours of film time that came before it. And so that's how I approached this book when I finally sat down and read the entire thing -- wary and on the alert for evidence that it was only going to be so-so, forgiving of the second act even while trying to make my way through it as quickly as possible, so that I too can see what everyone else has been raving about once you finally make it to the climax. And indeed, be forewarned that you're going to have to pretty much read the entire first half of this book before anything interesting actually happens, but that you can't skip it because it sets up everything that pays off later; and that you need to go into it understanding that the characters are not just being needlessly cruel to each other in this first half randomly, but that there's a logical and clever purpose behind every snotty barb and half-lidded shrug we see. That's a good example of what makes this book so frustrating yet so memorable, especially for people like me who are heavy readers; for despite being a Brooklyn MFA hipster herself, author Beth Morgan has not even the tiniest interest in turning in a traditional MFA three-act structure here, which results in things like the first and second halves being essentially two entirely different books (the latter very similar to Donnie Darko, the former reminiscent of that horrid go-nowhere character study in Kenyon Review you once choked down when you were 19 because you were trying to sleep with the author), or the fact that one of the major characters just dies out of the blue with no notice at a certain point, far from a place of climax or resolution that such a death would normally occur in an MFA novel, and in fact looks at first like it doesn't even have anything to do with the bigger plot going on, until you finally get to that infamous last chapter and say with a big smile, "Ah, okay, I see now where this was going." That's courageous of Morgan to do, and I can imagine her horrified professors during the first draft of this marking out giant sections with a red pen and scribbling "NO NO NO!!!"; and it also goes a long way towards explaining why the marketing staff of Little, Brown seems to have become completely befuddled by how to actually sell this book to the public, so made the unfortunate decision to present it as a goofy Millennial comedy about an trainwrecky Instagram influencer whose antics destroy the lives of a bland couple who develop a mutual obsession with her, when in fact this book doesn't resemble that description in even the slightest way. (Like these other idiosyncrasies mentioned, although Morgan does make our titular Jen an Instagram influencer, as an excuse for why our narrating couple know of her in the first place, we learn by the end of the book that that has not even the tiniest bit to do with the actual story being told here.) And of course this doesn't even touch on what turned out to be my personally favorite aspect of it all, that while the man in the protagonist couple looks at first to be just another cardboard-cutout whiny hipster bro, his actions become more and more repulsive and unforgivable the longer the pages continue, until we finally realize by the end that he's not actually the protagonist but the antagonist. This, then, makes for an extremely clever and interesting "anti-villain" tale, in the spirit of Breaking Bad or A Confederacy of Dunces, my absolute favorite genre of storytelling; and anti-villain tales are tough to pull off, because you basically have to hide the fact at first that the main character is actually the villain and not the hero, and then deal with the reader fallout when they've realized that you've tricked them. I know it sounds like I'm revealing a lot of spoilers here, but let me assure you that I haven't even gotten to the actual surprises in this book, and that there isn't anything I've said here that should ruin your enjoyment of this fascinatingly unique story, but in fact should hopefully guide you into not giving up on it on page 25 like I originally did. A beautifully flawed, unforgettable debut novel, I can say with a bit of certainty even now that this will most likely be showing up on my "best reads of the year" list come December, and I'm now looking strongly forward to whatever darkly surreal nightmares Morgan has for us next. ...more |
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| 0374605084
| 9780374605087
| 0374605084
| 3.14
| 2,745
| Mar 01, 2022
| Mar 01, 2022
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really liked it
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2022 reads, #17. I admit, author Missouri Williams first came to my attention, while reading the "newest acquisitions" newsletter of the Chicago Publi
2022 reads, #17. I admit, author Missouri Williams first came to my attention, while reading the "newest acquisitions" newsletter of the Chicago Public Library, because her first name is the same name of the American state where I grew up, and you simply don't hear of many people in the world named "Missouri," especially one who lives in England. But then I read on and saw that her debut novel is actually right up my alley, a nightmarishly perverted horror show of a post-apocalyptic novel, so I went ahead that day and became the first person in the city to put it on reserve, and just got done with it last week. The answer to the question, "Is anyone in Generation Z even allowed to make artistic projects that are dark, gross, offensive, and often truly transgressive, or will they be stoned to death for doing so by their earnest, shiny, happy, neon-clothes-wearing, cheerleader-dancing TikTok mouth-breather peers?" (spoiler alert: yes), the novel basically asks what the world might look like after an apocalyptic event if the only people who survived were the worst dregs of society -- the Springer trash, the Trump rioters, the rapists and the con artists and the unmedicated mentally ill? And what if their only option for trying to continue the human race was serial incest not only between the patriarch and matriarch but also any of the children once they reach childbearing years, creating a piglike brood of a next generation who all have physical deformities and barely measurable intelligence? And what if the only way to keep these slobbering, claw-handed animals from going wild and killing everything in sight was to build a harsh Calvinist-style religion around the batshit mother's supposed prophet-like status, ala The Island of Dr. Moreau? Well, it doesn't look too freaking great, I can tell you that without spoiling any of the plot; although I don't really need to give spoiler alerts anyway today, because this is one of those MFA kind of books that's much more about setting a mood than about relaying any substantial storyline. Unfortunately, though, this was one of those books that I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did end up liking; for not only does Williams assault us with her outre storyline and repulsive characters, she literally writes the story in the most aggressively reader-hostile way possible, using these unending paragraphs that last for four or five pages and sometimes results in page spreads that are nothing but two giant impenetrable black rectangles of ink (no, seriously). It's like she's punishing us for daring to take an interest in her writing, and I have to say, I kinda like that; but a little of that kind of stuff goes a long way, and it didn't surprise me to learn that after an early career so far of short work in impressive places like The Baffler and The Believer, this is her first full-length book, because this very much feels like a short story that Williams tried and mostly failed to squeeze out into a compelling full novel (and just barely at that, clocking in at a shade over 200 pages in a 5 x 7" paperback). Williams is just starting her career, and I'm really fascinated to see where she goes next, which I'm willing to bet will be in even weirder directions, but in the future with more and more of a mature control over her writing and less reliance on gimmicks; but here, while she admirably swings for the fences, the ball drops just short enough that you can't legitimately call the book great, but only on the intriguing side of okay. That would usually get a score of 3 1/2 stars from me, rounded up to 4 here at the no-half-star Goodreads. If you're intrigued at the mental image of a severely autistic, morbidly obese, legless teenage girl dragging her torso across a parking lot of debris using her claw-tipped arms, by all means give this a try; but if you're horrified by that image, then sister, you really don't want to read page two. ...more |
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| 1736164252
| 9781736164259
| 1736164252
| 3.80
| 54
| Mar 05, 2022
| Mar 05, 2022
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it was amazing
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So to disclose my connection to this book right away, I was its copy editor, and I also contributed some developmental notes to author Jacob Moon, the
So to disclose my connection to this book right away, I was its copy editor, and I also contributed some developmental notes to author Jacob Moon, the same thing I did with his previous novel, the jailbreak thriller
Furlough
, and the same thing I plan on doing with his future books too. So please keep that in mind when judging my enthusiastic recommendation of this book; but I also hope you'll believe me when I say that this is one of the better books I've edited in the last year, one I would've really loved even if I had just been some random customer like the rest of you. Set like his last book in western Florida, this is a cross-genre story that bleeds back and forth between crime and horror; but what really sets it apart is its racial-justice angle, in that much of the story occurs around a race riot that was supposed to have happened in the fictional small town in the years immediately following World War One, just like what happened in real life across the American South in these same years (most notoriously in Tulsa, Oklahoma). Moon has an assured, witty, veteran writing style, particularly notable since he's only starting his literary career here in middle age, after spending the first 30 years of his adult life initially in the Army and then as a Corrections officer (which is where he came up with the crazy, clever storyline behind Furlough, basically a look from an experienced jail expert at what strange set of circumstances might actually in theory lead to someone being able to accidentally escape from one). He's not trying to be as deliberately funny as his Floridian crime peer Carl Hiaasen, but his books share the latter's penchant for wild but believable plot turns, deep characterization, and for baking the sun-drenched, trash-filled Florida culture into the stories being told. If you liked the movie Candyman or the HBO series Watchmen, then there's a high chance you'll love this too, and those references should give you a good general idea of what you're about to get into without me having to divulge any spoilers (and many intelligent surprises are indeed afoot here, make no mistake). I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy when you have a chance, or register for a chance at a giveaway copy of this thick 500-page paperback here at Goodreads during the month of April, 2022. ...more |
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| 2867449235
| 9782867449239
| 2867449235
| 3.66
| 3,405
| 1991
| Oct 23, 2002
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liked it
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[UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!] 2021 reads, #43. T [UPDATE: All five of my "George Miles" reviews, including this one, are now collected and available as a standalone book at Amazon!] 2021 reads, #43. This is volume #2 of my five-book read this month of the classic LGBTQ "George Miles" cycle by Dennis Cooper, one of the heralded "New Transgressive" authors of early Generation X that also included Poppy Z. Brite, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis and others (but for a lot more details, see my review of book #1 in the series, 1989's Closer). Here just two years later, however, the bloom is already starting to come off the rose; for while I judged roughly 75 percent of Closer to be really great, mostly because it was based on the true-life stories of Cooper as a disaffected, drug-abusing gay twink in his 1970s youth, with another 25 percent that seems to be just deliberately outrageous made-up nonsense existing only to pad out the manuscript and give it a sense of notoriety, in Frisk this ratio seems to have gone in the opposite direction, with there being just very little of it that feels like actual real stories that could actually really happen, and the vast majority of it now being a bunch of silly bullshit about a Jeffrey Dahmer-like serial killer who moves to Europe because apparently Europeans don't care if you're a serial killer, and not only openly brags about his murders to everyone he knows but also convinces several of his friends back in the States to come over themselves and form a sort of serial-killer Friars Club, in which they all gleefully participate in the killings together (or, not "gleefully," I guess I should say, but rather "with a numbed, joyless sense of nihilism," one of the trademarks of this Generation X New Transgressive literature that marked it as different from the edgy literature of previous generations). There was a certain amount of this silly BS in Closer as well, but at least there it feels organic and related to the main theme, which is more a portrait of an entire generation of disaffected, emotionally dead youth, certain members of whom take tentative steps towards "the ol' ultra-violence" in a failed attempt to at least experience any kind of emotions whatsoever; but in Frisk this stuff feels really tacked on just for the sake of sensationalism and nothing else, including its notorious climax written out as a deliberately arty ten-page single paragraph with no line breaks, in which our anti-villain narrator engages in The Most Outrageously Vile Sex-Related Murder In The Entire History Of Sex-Related Murders, which admittedly is what got this book just a tremendous amount of attention and led directly to 1994's Try (the first commercial hit of Cooper's career, and closest he's gotten so far in his life to mainstream fame). To be frank, the only part of this book I found truly interesting was the youthful adventures of one of the characters back in his '70s countercultural youth, in which an alcoholic proprietor of a rundown used bookstore on the edge of town inadvertently helps the kid discover his homosexuality by letting him come in every day and spend hours perusing the beat-up gay porn in the back of the store, which feels so complex and realistic that I suspect that the entire section is taken verbatim out of Cooper's own real-life journals from those years. (Cooper is on record as admitting that these five novels are a blend of his real life and out-and-out fiction, inspired by his exposure at a young age to sex-related violence and his obsessive curiosity to try to understand why such stuff appeals to its fans, of which he claims he is not actually one himself.) It's telling, I think, that in other interviews from this same time period, Cooper talks in detail about how this was the first time in his life that he very seriously started getting into the strange intersection where academic pretension and transgressive eroticism meet, through such authors as Jean Genet, Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. That's exactly how this book feels, and especially that notorious ten-page finale, like Cooper is now writing for the edification of a bunch of pasty grad students and other denizens of the ivory tower, while Closer in hindsight feels much more like a burst of literary energy from a young confused gay man trying whatever he can to understand his own dysfunctional sexuality, adding only a few outrageous moments as "what if" games to see what the serial-killer hat feels like when he puts it on. Although it's still good enough that I'm giving it a decent score, I worry now as I prepare to begin Try that Cooper has already run out of interesting things to say before he's even halfway done with this series, and that the further three George Miles books will just devolve more and more into ridiculous B-grade horror trope territory. After all, with 30 years of hindsight now between our current times and the creative height of the Generation X New Transgressive movement, we can see that this is exactly what happened with many of these formerly revered writers of that group, whether that's Ellis's American Psycho or Brite's Exquisite Corpse, a snake eating its own tail in which the more famous these authors got for being outrageous, the more outrageous each new novel had to get, until finally after 9/11 the entire system collapsed and these authors started going in the exact opposite direction, writing happy little stories about happy little characters, and how great Jesus is, and all kinds of other sentimental tripe. We'll see what the rest of these books have to offer; but based on the slide in quality just between books #1 and 2, I'm not keeping my hopes up. ...more |
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Jul 14, 2021
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Jul 14, 2021
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| B0176M1BVG
| 3.55
| 164,610
| Jun 14, 2016
| Jun 14, 2016
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it was ok
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2021 reads, #25. Like many others, I was left angrily befuddled by Charlie Kaufman's adaptation last year of Iain Reid's psychological thriller I'm Th
2021 reads, #25. Like many others, I was left angrily befuddled by Charlie Kaufman's adaptation last year of Iain Reid's psychological thriller I'm Thinking of Ending Things, mostly because it's the most blatant example yet of the dreaded Netflix Original Syndrome* that has befallen so many other great directors as well; and like many others, I had heard that the novel it was based on was actually much better than the movie, and certainly much more straightforward and easy to understand. But alas, this turned out to be only moderately true; for while it definitely provides a conclusive explanation for what the hell is actually going on, that explanation is unsatisfying to say the least, and meanwhile is told in about the most unevenly paced manuscript I think I've ever seen from a mainstream press in my entire life. The problem here is that the book got all its original praise because of having a particularly clever surprise ending, within a genre that's notoriously known for its cookie-cutter plots and cardboard characters. But once you get past that clever ending, you realize that there's not much else there at all, a one-trick pony that literally goes nowhere for the entire first 75 percent of its running time, then kicks the David Lynch weirdness into manic overdrive for the rushed second and third acts squished together into a scant 50 pages, just to cop out on the very last page and reveal (view spoiler)[ whee, it was just a journal by a schizophrenic dude the whole time, wheeee!!! (hide spoiler)]. That may have worked with the book's first batch of readers, who weren't expecting anything remarkable from this debut novel by an unknown writer, and were pleasantly surprised by the admittedly interesting twist at the end; but like The Crying Game 25 years previous, once the word gets out that a story revolves around a clever surprise ending, that surprise ending becomes not nearly as clever as it was when no one was expecting it, forcing its second-generation readers to confront the fact that there's simply not much else here when it comes to the basic fundamentals of good storytelling. That is both absolutely why the notoriously head-scratching Kaufman was attracted to this story, and absolutely why his film adaptation of it came out a confusing, unwatchable mess; and while the book version thankfully doesn't take up much of your time (I read this from start to finish during a single six-hour train ride from Chicago to St. Louis this week), it still remains unsatisfying once you're finished, one of those heavily hyped books that leaves you frowning at the end and muttering, "Really? That's it?" Your results may vary, but in general I recommend to most that they skip it altogether. *Netflix Original Syndrome: When Netflix throws gobs of cash at famous directors for the purpose of creating a "content unit" for them, and provides them absolutely no limits, borders or structure, ironically resulting in the worst movie of that director's career. See also Alfonso Cuaron's Roma, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, David Fincher's Mank, etc. ...more |
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2
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not set
not set
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May 13, 2021
not set
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May 13, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 1941072771
| 9781941072776
| B0883CX823
| 3.80
| 5
| unknown
| Sep 01, 2020
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really liked it
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This newest title from the genre small press D.X. Varos starts off as a by-the-books haunted-hotel tale, but very quickly gets a lot better than that.
This newest title from the genre small press D.X. Varos starts off as a by-the-books haunted-hotel tale, but very quickly gets a lot better than that. Author Claryn Vaile, who up to now has only written nonfiction about historical architecture, creates an extremely real feeling place to set her debut novel, a supposed fading old grand hotel in the heart of downtown Denver, and the NPR misfits who serve as its docents and tour guides. Prone to a lot of stories about hauntings over the years, and constructed by a weirdo millionaire a century ago with all these bizarre references to occult theosophy in the architecture and interior design, the hotel was recently bought by a corporation known mostly for gaudy tourist destinations like cruise ships and casinos, who now want to turn it into a renovated high-end space for middle-class steampunkers and other cosplayers (which, frankly, actually sounds kind of awesome). But the NPR docents won't have it, which sends our plucky sixtysomething hero Rebecca on a journey that includes psychics, "Ghostbusters" style parascientists, menopause, dark secrets from the past, Freemasonry symbolism, the international brotherhood of historic hotel nerds, a wee touch of The Da Vinci Code, and perhaps some buried treasure to boot. It's all very breezy and charming, even if Vaile does broadcast her villains with all the subtlety of a movie-theater searchlight; and the surprisingly apocalyptic climax is a welcome raise in stakes for what will otherwise remind many of the British "cosy mystery" genre. It comes recommended in that spirit to such readers.
...more
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1
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not set
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Apr 23, 2021
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Apr 23, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 0312420331
| 9780312420338
| 0312420331
| 3.59
| 26,506
| Jun 28, 1973
| Oct 05, 2001
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really liked it
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse So before anything else, a technical note. The last time I was discussing my completist run of British countercultural author J.G. Ballard, back when I was reviewing his 1966 novel The Crystal World, I mentioned that I was going to do something highly unusual for me and this completist challenge, which was to read one of Ballard's story collections (to be specific, 1970's The Atrocity Exhibition), when I usually skip over story collections to concentrate only on an author's full-length novels. And that's because Ballard unusually first developed his mature style, and first amassed fans for this mature style, in the world of short fiction in the late 1960s, an arena less beholden to commercial pressures and therefore a place where much more experimentation could take place, unlike the science-fiction industry which forced him to write traditional straightforward tales with traditional straightforward James-Kirk-like protagonists, to serve as his first four novels when initially starting out as an unknown writer, the so-called "Catastrophe" novels whose review links can be found at the bottom of today's write-up. And so I did read it, but The Atrocity Experiment turned out to be so experimental and nonsensical, it barely holds together as a traditional narrative at all, and certainly would've been impossible for me to analyze critically like I usually do with these completist challenge reads. It did, however, successfully make the case to me that Ballard was writing the work he truly wanted to write here in the magazine world in those years; and in 1973, the culture around him finally caught up to his dark vision, when mainstream publisher Jonathan Cape decided to take a chance and publish his deeply unsettling, inherently controversial Crash, the first moment of Ballard's career when the author went "Full Ballardian" and still to this day one of his two most well-known books (the other being High-Rise, published two years later). And why is it so unsettling and controversial? Easy -- it's a nearly plotless 224-page ode to the sexually fetishistic possibilities of horrific car crashes, centered around the insane adventures of a mad scientist who leads a "Fight Club" type underground group dedicated to staging crashes for their own erotic whims, and whose ultimate goal is to die while simultaneously having an orgasm as he smashes into the limousene of the very real and very litigious Elizabeth Taylor, who didn't exactly take kindly to being included as the object of murderous obsession by the fictional protagonist of Ballard's novel. And indeed, reading it myself for the very first time this week, the book remains 47 years later so shockingly transgressive that it upset even me, and I've read just about every famous sexually transgressive novel that even exists by this point in my life. That's because the book isn't really about a bunch of weirdos who drive around the back streets of London staging car crashes so they can masturbate afterwards to the crime photos (the very thing that sinks David Cronenberg's disappointingly too literal 1996 movie adaptation), but rather is a metaphor for any person who derives profound soul-level satisfaction out of the misery of other human beings (the more perverse the circumstances the better), and by extension has been able to embrace the nihilistic mindset that allows them to float outside of themselves and see their own bodies as these "other humans" for whom they enjoy "inflicting misery" upon. It's essentially as bleak as countercultural literature ever got, kind of like if you wrote a full-length book that was a confession from a serial killer to a journalist about how much they love serial-killing, and having the journalist at the end go, "You know, I think I love serial-killing now too!"; and it makes it easy to see why it garnered quotes from mainstream publications at the time such as the New York Times' dismissal that "this is, hands down, the most repulsive book I've yet to come across." Unfortunately, though, it's still only getting 4 stars from me instead of a full 5, because it's just not very satisfying as a full-length novel-reading experience; as provocative as it is, it still only contains maybe 20 pages of plot development out of a 240-page book, and ultimately feels like Ballard stretching out one of his short stories from the '60s into a full-length book simply because someone paid him to. (And indeed, not only is there a short section of The Atrocity Exhibition very similar to this storyline, but that book also maintains a perverse obsession with Elizabeth Taylor, as well as a similar preoccupation with the genitals of then California governor Ronald Reagan that pops up in this novel too.) Frankly, I suspect this is also going to be the case when I get around to 1975's High-Rise, which I haven't read yet but have seen Ben Wheatley's 2015 movie adaptation, and so already know contains only a short story's worth of actual plot development, and in fact I suspect I may have to wait all the way until Ballard's '80s work before I start getting the traditional three-act story structures that I prefer as a heavy reader of novels. Before all that, though, I'll be taking on his very next book after this one, 1974's similarly experimental Concrete Island (in which a man becomes stranded in the desolate greenway between opposing lanes of a busy interstate highway, and discovers an entire society of misfits who are now living in the space full-time); so I hope you'll have a chance to join me here again soon for that. JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006) ...more |
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Sep 23, 2020
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Sep 23, 2020
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| 4.00
| 5
| Aug 21, 2020
| Aug 21, 2020
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really liked it
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I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't tu
I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't turn out to be similar to Saunders at all, I nonetheless found it pretty great. It's the story of a sorta Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis type character, an aging Hollywood action star whose best friends are a couple very similar to William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, two admired stage theatre veterans who pick up occasional film and TV work to pay the bills; so when his son and their daughter start dating and eventually get married, everyone seems to be blissfully happy. But there's a dark secret lurking underneath all this billionaire gloss, one that I'll let remain a surprise so to keep this review spoiler-free, but certainly one that eventually involves secretive assassins, a mysterious bordello, what may or may not be psychedelic hallucinations, and a whole lot of murder. Less David Lynch and more Eyes Wide Shut, you can reliably count on there being rational explanations for all the weirdness by the end; but it's the bizarre journey to get there that's the delight, a short and quickly paced novella that slips into the cracks between crime fiction and horror. It comes enthusiastically recommended in this spirit, a one-day read that will be just the ticket for genre veterans who are on the lookout for something a little more unique than usual.
...more
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not set
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Sep 02, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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ebook
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| B08GJ9CTMZ
| 4.00
| 3
| unknown
| Aug 21, 2020
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really liked it
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I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't tu
I picked this up because the dust jacket copy claimed that it was similar to the work of George Saunders, who I'm a big fan of; and while it didn't turn out to be similar to Saunders at all, I nonetheless found it pretty great. It's the story of a sorta Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis type character, an aging Hollywood action star whose best friends are a couple very similar to William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, two admired stage theatre veterans who pick up occasional film and TV work to pay the bills; so when his son and their daughter start dating and eventually get married, everyone seems to be blissfully happy. But there's a dark secret lurking underneath all this billionaire gloss, one that I'll let remain a surprise so to keep this review spoiler-free, but certainly one that eventually involves secretive assassins, a mysterious bordello, what may or may not be psychedelic hallucinations, and a whole lot of murder. Less David Lynch and more Eyes Wide Shut, you can reliably count on there being rational explanations for all the weirdness by the end; but it's the bizarre journey to get there that's the delight, a short and quickly paced novella that slips into the cracks between crime fiction and horror. It comes enthusiastically recommended in this spirit, a one-day read that will be just the ticket for genre veterans who are on the lookout for something a little more unique than usual.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 27, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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Aug 27, 2020
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1735078301
| 9781735078304
| 1735078301
| 3.61
| 28
| Aug 21, 2020
| Aug 21, 2020
|
liked it
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The entire time this week I was reading Doc Cage's American Slaughterhouse, the second of the first two titles by new transgressive small press Audax
The entire time this week I was reading Doc Cage's American Slaughterhouse, the second of the first two titles by new transgressive small press Audax Books, I kept thinking of the old joke about how Nihilists and Absurdists ultimately say the same exact thing in conversations, the only difference being the tone of voice in which they say it. (NIHILIST [glowering through the smoke of their clove cigarette as they apply another layer of mascara around their eyelids] "The universe is a meaningless void and individual human lives are worthless blips." ABSURDIST [sipping a craft beer in a t-shirt while laughing and shrugging] "The universe is a meaningless void and individual human lives are worthless blips!") That tells you everything you need to know about the difference between this book and the other of the first two titles by this press, Calvin Loch's Incel Mantis: Diary of a Redpilled Man, which I had a chance to review earlier this summer and was really delighted by. In the former case, Loch understood -- like Jim Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk, and Bret Easton Ellis have also understood* -- that these kinds of stories about serial killers, told from the viewpoint of the killer themself, need to have a pretty hefty dose of over-the-top outrageousness in order to go down smoothly with most readers; because fiction about serial killers is an inherently absurd thing to begin with, and most readers would generally prefer to lightly float on top of the story as a disinterested witness, not get dragged down into the muck where our raping, homophobic, racist anti-villain lives themself. After all, the creepy glowering goth dude with the clove cigarette has a right to exist, but we all know how excruciating it is to get trapped in the corner of the party with him. Ultimately American Slaughterhouse will have its fans, and these fans will be very satisfied with this book, which is why it's still getting 3 stars from me despite not personally liking it. But to be clear, those fans are the tiny minority of alt-right boogalooers who refer to Tr*mp as their "God Emperor," exchange their Qanon manifestos at 8chan, and consider Fox News to be "just not conservative enough." That makes the book an ultra-niche one for an ultra-niche audience, and not something with a larger and more cross-stream appeal like Incel. The "Supreme Gentlemen" of the world will like this book just fine; but if you'll forgive me for saying so, I myself prefer to laugh and drink my way through the Apocalypse. *And of course this is to say nothing of the growing number of lesbian and transgender writers in the transgressive genre, from Kathy Acker to Lynn Breedlove and more, all of whom seem to understand this need for absurdity even better than the straight white males who get a lot more attention and accolades. But that's a whole other story for a whole other time. ...more |
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not set
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Jul 22, 2020
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Jul 22, 2020
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| 9781777129507
| 4.62
| 39
| unknown
| Apr 12, 2020
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really liked it
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The problem with genres that are overly specific in their tropes, such as crime procedurals or zombie actioners for two well-known examples, is that a
The problem with genres that are overly specific in their tropes, such as crime procedurals or zombie actioners for two well-known examples, is that all the stories in those genres all tend to eventually blur into each other, until it's all sort of just one big collective story in our heads and with little difference between each title. That's the heart of the problem here with T.S. Beier's post-apocalyptic thriller What Branches Grow, her published debut through specialty press Nostromo; for while it's entirely well-written and a fine example of the genre, that genre itself (from Cormac McCarthy's The Road to Mel Gibson's The Road Warrior) relies on such a very specific combination of tropes that it feels more sometimes like Beier is filling in a puzzle, getting her Post Apocalyptic Bingo Card marked up one square at a time until she can finally turn it in and go home. That combination of competent but derivative usually gets 3 1/2 stars from me, bumped up to 4 here because of the unusual and interesting climax; but the majority of the book isn't anything different than The Walking Dead but with no zombies, so the main reason to read it is if you're a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre specifically, and enjoy reading a lot of different takes on the subject that are only slightly different from each other. It comes with a narrow recommendation to that specific fan base, who will like this a lot.
...more
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1
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not set
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May 24, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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ebook
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1946154210
| 9781946154217
| 1946154210
| 3.48
| 124
| Mar 03, 2020
| Mar 03, 2020
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it was ok
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I couldn't tell while I was reading this whether Roy Freirich is an MFA graduate who unwisely decided to try to write a genre thriller, or a genre aut
I couldn't tell while I was reading this whether Roy Freirich is an MFA graduate who unwisely decided to try to write a genre thriller, or a genre author who unwisely decided to try to write an MFA literary novel; then I read his bio and realized he's neither, that he's actually an LA-based screenwriting and song lyrics veteran, who unwisely decided to try to write a combination of genre thriller and MFA literary novel and unfortunately failed at both. I don't want to give away any spoilers, for those who do decide to check this out, but let's just say that the surprises in this psychological horror story are simultaneously too slow to arrive and too rushed when they do, with an explanation behind it all that Freirich wants to sound rational and believable, but is too dubious and far-fetched to let him pull off the "it's horror but not really horror, ah-hah" magic trick he's trying to accomplish here. Meanwhile, the actual prose is badly overwritten and purplish, the kind of book that inserts a paragraph of banal musings about our current state of social media every time a character checks the messages on their smartphone; and like most older writers, his attempts here to write in the vernacular of teenagers (a story thread that takes up half of the entire manuscript) just ends up embarrassing both of us by the end, the literary equivalent of Steve Buscemi declaring "How do you do, fellow kids?" in that one episode of 30 Rock. It's not terrible, which is why it's getting two stars from me instead of one; but you have to really want to like this to get any enjoyment out of it, an "A" for concept but a "see me after class" for execution.
...more
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Nov 30, 2019
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Nov 30, 2019
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2024
not set
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Jan 22, 2024
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| 3.61
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 26, 2023
not set
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Mar 26, 2023
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| 3.69
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it was ok
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Jan 16, 2023
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Jan 16, 2023
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| 3.99
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it was ok
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Oct 21, 2022
not set
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Oct 21, 2022
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| 3.53
|
really liked it
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Aug 14, 2022
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Aug 14, 2022
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| 3.98
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liked it
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Aug 03, 2022
not set
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Aug 03, 2022
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| 3.63
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really liked it
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Jun 19, 2022
not set
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Jun 19, 2022
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| 3.54
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it was ok
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Apr 26, 2022
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Apr 26, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.28
|
it was amazing
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Apr 14, 2022
not set
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Apr 14, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.14
|
really liked it
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Apr 06, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.80
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it was amazing
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Mar 19, 2022
not set
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Mar 19, 2022
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| 3.66
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liked it
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Jul 14, 2021
not set
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Jul 14, 2021
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| 3.55
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it was ok
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May 13, 2021
not set
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May 13, 2021
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| 3.80
|
really liked it
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Apr 23, 2021
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Apr 23, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.59
|
really liked it
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Sep 23, 2020
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Sep 23, 2020
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Sep 02, 2020
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Sep 02, 2020
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| 4.00
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really liked it
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Sep 02, 2020
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Aug 27, 2020
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|||||
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| 3.61
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liked it
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Jul 22, 2020
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Jul 22, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.62
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really liked it
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May 24, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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|||||
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| 3.48
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it was ok
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Nov 30, 2019
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Nov 30, 2019
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