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| 0593316762
| 9780593316764
| 0593316762
| 3.58
| 467
| Feb 13, 2024
| Feb 13, 2024
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2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie
2024 reads, #17. DID NOT FINISH. This book was just absolutely not for me in any way whatsoever, a Postmodernist fairytale from a former hipster indie-rocker with a [rolls eyes] PhD in creative writing, in which he comments in a disappointedly on-the-nose way on the ugliness and darkness of modern life through the filter of a Netflix-style streaming series about plastic dolls come to life, full of cutesy little twee details like all of them talking in the truncated, deliberately silly style of doge memes (“Forget eat lunch. Big hungry. Chicken look wow wow”), and everything in their world having cutesy little twee generic names, like Nuclear Family for the name of this plastic society’s most popular television show. Then if this wasn’t enough hipster tweeness for you, he then tells the story itself not through a regular omniscient narrator but by literally describing every scene out loud, as if he’s watching the show on Netflix and we’re on the other end of a phone and he’s just literally telling us everything that’s happening on the screen as it’s happening. (“And then the next scene opens with the plastic girl driving her car, and then...”) Ugh, contemporary literature really is dead, isn’t it? Like always with books I give up on, I went ahead and read everyone else’s reviews before writing mine, just in case something happens later in the book that’s so compelling that it inspires me to pick the book back up again (which, you know, has happened before); but when I did this with Plastic, I was suddenly confronted over and over with what I consider the scourge of online artistic criticism these days, review after review that said, “This made me cry! FIVE STARS!” That’s not a fucking critical review, people; I could punch you in the face and make you cry too, but that doesn’t deserve five stars either. It’s books like these that make me glad I’m entirely out of the indie-lit game now myself, and it’s also books like these that make me realize why I’ve been gravitating more and more in the 21st century towards good solid genre novels like crime, science-fiction and romance; and that’s because the only contemporary human-interest novels that can seemingly even get published anymore is silly little gimmicky easily-marketed MFA/NPR nonsense like this, where the author not only has nothing but a facile and obvious point to make, but then beats you over the head with this facile and obvious point, seemingly all their sins washed away because they wrote it in a cutesy style that makes for good Facebook updates. (“This made me cry! FIVE STARS!!!!!!!1!!!”) If you’re a fellow grown-up who weeps for the lack of good, solid contemporary human-interest novels for grown-ups anymore, avoid this one like the plague. ...more |
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Mar 18, 2024
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Mar 18, 2024
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| 0871404192
| 9780871404190
| 0871404192
| 3.64
| 1,968
| 1979
| May 20, 2013
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did not like 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 | 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, #83. So, the last time we were discussing my completist read of the entire oeuvre of JG Ballard, after just finishing the most famous book of the author's career, 1975's High-Rise (my review), I mentioned how I would likely be skipping Ballard's next book after this, 1979's The Unlimited Dream Company, because of it being just so obscure as to almost not even exist anymore; the paper version is long out of print, with no Kindle version ever having been made, no BitTorrented version inside the fairly complete Pirate Bay file on Ballard's works, and most importantly with not even a single copy available through the Chicago Public Library, such an unusual occurrence that it always causes attention to itself the rare times it happens. (For those who don't know, Chicago has the third largest public library system not just in America but the entire world, and so for the most part typically has at least one copy of pretty much every pre-Amazon novel you can even name.) But instead, this lack of accessibility made me even more curious about the book than before -- for what's the point in even doing a completist challenge if you're not going to read the most obscure titles of that author's career, the kind of stuff that pretty much no one else will go to the trouble of tracking down themselves? So, that's exactly what I did, going on eBay and actually purchasing a rare first edition of the book (for more money than I care to admit) so that I could add it to my own rare-book collection afterwards and partly justify the expense, with my copy eventually arriving a little earlier this year. Unfortunately, though, I quickly discovered this week why this book is so obscure, when I finally sat down to read it; for while High-Rise right before it is arguably Ballard firing on all cylinders, perhaps not the absolute best book of his career although with no one denying it's in the top three, the one after it is unambiguously the worst book of his career up to that point, a sloppy and self-indulgent mess that Ballard only seems to have gotten away with because of this coming straight after his unexpected bestseller and instant cultural touchstone, and with him therefore having the power to be as masturbatory as he wanted to be. And sister, believe me when I say that he wanted to be very, very masturbatory. And indeed, I suspect an important thing to remember here is that, far from being a slow-burning cult sleeper, High-Rise was hugely popular from almost its release among a certain hip crowd "in the know," with there having been serious plans to make a Hollywood adaptation starting literally weeks after the book was first published, which would've been directed by famed trippy countercultural filmmaker Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth -- ah, what might've been!). That I expect has a large part to do with why Ballard set this follow-up book in Shepperton, center of England's film industry because of Pinewood Studios (where most of the original "Star Wars" trilogy was filmed, in exactly the same years Ballard first wrote this), because you can sort of squint at this book sideways and kind of see that it's partly about the pressures of an indie artist trying to fit into mainstream respectability (after our book's antisocial, perpetually horny, often physically violent "hero" Blake impulsively steals a small aircraft in London one day for no particular reason, ends up crash-landing it in Shepperton, then seemingly can't escape that town once he's there no matter what he tries, in that the highways all improbably end up leading back to the city when he tries driving down them, etc.). But it's this facile description of the book's plot that's also an example of everything wrong with it, because Ballard seems to have codified his book's themes in such an impenetrably dense and personal way that it often feels like he's describing a dream he once had (among other developments, the entire city's population all turn into birds at one point, Blake spends most of the novel not knowing whether he's alive or dead, and an unsettlingly high amount of the citizenry seem to be convinced that he's the Messiah). And as most people can tell you, being forced to listen to someone describe one of their recent dreams is literally one of the most tedious experiences all of us have on a regular basis, because there's nothing inherently compelling about dream logic -- anything can happen, no actions have any stakes or repercussions, the laws of physics themselves can be conveniently ignored whenever the author wants, and in general it's much like trying to get emotionally invested in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, by which I mean it's not only impossible but a genre designed specifically to make it impossible. That leads to a highly unsatisfying reading experience, one in which just weirdo random things arbitrarily happen on a page-by-page basis, with you never knowing whether Ballard's ever going to come back and reference that turn of events again, whether it's important to our story or not, or even whether it's supposed to have "really" happened within the collective fictional reality of the world this story inhabits. In other words, in a book where dreams are apparently real, this book continues to feature dreams on top of that which aren't supposed to be a "real" part of the "dream world" where this book takes place, which gets so metafictional so quickly that it just left me with a giant headache before I had even gotten 50 pages into it. That's a shame, because after eight books of his now, I've come to realize that Ballard needed a lot of boundaries artificially placed on him for his writing to truly shine, such as when his career first started out and the only people who would publish him were traditional science-fiction presses who wanted traditional Mid-Century Modernist sci-fi tales from him. When the countercultural revolution of the 1970s erased this need for Ballard to deal with artificial limits placed on his unlimited imagination, the results started becoming extremely hit and miss, and for every brilliant book like High-Rise or Concrete Island (my review), he also put out a sloppy, stream-of-consciousness mess like today's book or the similarly frustrating Crash (my review). That's of course the entire point of doing a completist read of a specific author, to get a really deep sense of what made them tick as both a person and an artist, divorced from just the handful of "greatest hits" that will be the only books of theirs read by 99 percent of future audience members after that author's death; but while that's a worthwhile endeavor, it's sometimes not a fun one, as I was reminded of with this book I eventually just had to hold my nose and slog down as quickly as I could, like bitter medicine being force-fed to me by some bitter Ballardian nurse with a cruel streak and a loaded gun pointed straight at me. That's kind of what this book feels like, Ballard essentially punishing you for daring to be a fan of his writing, and it's easy to see why the book quickly died on the vine when it first came out and then was promptly and completely forgotten by society at large. Let's see if things get any better with the next book in the list, 1981's Hello America, whose synopsis at least promises more of the same. 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 |
Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2023
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Oct 30, 2023
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Paperback
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| 0877281475
| 9780877281474
| 0877281475
| 3.48
| 1,605
| 1917
| Jun 01, 1975
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2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was wh
2023 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. I've been wanting to read this short novel by the notorious occultist Alastair Crowley ever since I learned it was where Mark Frost cribbed the idea of the "Black Lodge" and the "White Lodge" for use in the "conspiracy of conspiracies" TV show Twin Peaks he co-created with David Lynch. But alas, while Crowley meant for both this and all his other "Simon Iff, Mystic Detective" stories to be easy-to-read pulp thrillers in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, at a time in his life when he was flat-broke and it was suggested that such easy-reading material connected to his famous name would sell like hotcakes, I don't think he really had any idea how to actually write pulp stories that would appeal to a large general audience, turning in a barely readable book here that's a mess both conceptually and mechanically. I must confess, even with this being not even 150 pages, I still barely made it even a quarter of the way through before giving up in confused boredom, not so much a novel as it is a sneaky way to publish an occultism academic textbook, complete with the pages upon pages of impenetrably dense New Age nonsense a term like that implies. Maybe the hardcore Crowley fan will be able to get through this, but for all the rest of us, this book works better as a concept than an actual reading experience.
...more
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Sep 22, 2023
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Sep 22, 2023
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| 0008272115
| 9780008272111
| 0008272115
| 3.86
| 79,557
| Jan 07, 2019
| Jan 10, 2019
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really liked it
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2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascis
2023 reads, #34. It's been nine months now since I read the latest novel by admired cross-genre "slipstream" author Bridget Collins, the "1920s fascism meets Hogwarts meets The Game" bizarro emo thriller The Betrayals, which of course I adored (you had me at "1920s fascism bizarro slipstream emo thriller"); but I learned at that point that many of Collins' existing fans actually preferred her debut novel a year previous to that, the Victorian alt-history urban fantasy tale The Binding, so I figured I might as well put that on reserve at the Chicago Public Library as well, and I just got around to finally reading that this week. But alas, I myself actually considered this a step downward when compared to her newest, although I can understand why people who first became a fan of Collins through the previous book would feel the way they do; for I don't mean "downward" in terms of quality itself, but simply in terms of narrative complexity, and presenting a general conceit with endless depths of complexity. She succeeds in that wildly with her later and more mature novel, by mashing together first an amazingly complicated art form that doesn't actually exist in the real world (a sort of combination of poetry, chamber music, ballet, philosophy, game design, and perhaps a little bit of actual magic); then adding this richly detailed and historic castle-school on a mountainside in the Alps where the art has been taught for millennia; and then imagining this Austria-sounding fictional country at a point in the early 20th century when a totalitarian regime has taken over the local government, but hasn't yet begun its plans for world domination, and want to turn this art form into a kind of nationalist propaganda, very similarly to how Leni Reifenstahl did with athletics in the real world with her Nazi propaganda film Olympia. In The Binding, though, we get a much simpler urban fantasy mythos that's much easier to understand -- that in their alt-universe, what we all know as "novels" actually are a way for people to permanently remove memories from their brain, through the use of a wizard of sorts who can somehow make the memories magically imprint themselves as words on the pages of a blank book. Thus, every novel that's read in their world is actually a form of stealing someone else's memories, and Collins uses this to expand on various kinda obvious social-realist issues and especially ones with a progressive political bent. (The main villain, for example, is basically a One Percenter who sexually abuses his household staff, then forces the girls to have the memories of the events "bound" so they no longer remember the crimes, and then reads the books regularly in his own private library whenever he wants to relive his accountability-free sins, while presumably giving an evil cackle and twisting the tips of his black mustache.) There's nothing wrong with that, and it's easy to see why fans of urban fantasies (especially strikingly original ones with a really unique hook) would go so gaga for this earlier novel, and be a bit disappointed by the follow-up set in such a different world and concerning such a different thing. I myself, though, am primarily attracted to stories by how complex and multifaceted they can be, so I feel the exact opposite about these two books than the "Buffy crowd" (for lack of a better term). The great news here is that both books have their passionate fans, which makes Collins a remarkable writer whose career is worth paying attention to, because I bet she's going to have something even more explosive for all of us with the next one. (She's been spending the last two years participating in anthologies and other short-form opportunities, or at least according to her Goodreads page.) I look forward to that; and in the meantime, I encourage you to check out both of these books, and see which one you might prefer as well. ...more |
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Apr 08, 2023
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Apr 08, 2023
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Hardcover
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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 |
Notes are private!
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Mar 26, 2023
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Mar 26, 2023
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| B08BCGC2BS
| 3.70
| 1,363
| Jun 16, 2020
| Jun 16, 2020
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it was amazing
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2023 reads, #8. (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, #8. (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.) This is one of a handful now of books I've read in what's called the "fated mate" subgenre; that's when a paranormal creature such as a werewolf or space alien is not only attracted to our story's female lead character (or FLC), but is literally compelled biologically by something in their paranormal makeup to mate with her no matter what they rationally think of the situation, usually explained away with some vague term like "werewolf DNA" or "alien blood." In the case of the "Twilight" books that first made this trope famous (called "imprinting" in those novels), this uncontrollable compulsion to mate falls more on the emotional and romantic side of things, so that werewolves suddenly find themselves with the irresistible urge to buy their girlfriend a teddy bear or wash her hair in the bathtub; but in Lizzy Bequin's Their Human Vessel, this compulsion is much more darkly sexual in nature, a story concerning the first human woman to ever visit a planet full of male-exclusive eight-foot-tall blue-skinned devil-looking space aliens, whose compulsion to breed is so strong that even after getting one whiff of her scent from hundreds of feet away, our male lead character (MLC) immediately has a groaning flood of an orgasm that splashes right on the ground in front of him without him ever touching his penis, which should give you a good idea of what exactly we're talking about here when we talk about one of these characters being "biologically compelled to breed." (Don't worry, though -- at one point he does wash her hair in a local pond, now still making it 100% of every romance or women's erotica novel I've ever read that has featured a scene of the MLC washing the FLC's hair in a body of water in one way or another. You ladies and your obsession with having your hair washed by your boyfriend, I swear, I just don't get it.) Essentially this genre provides a cleaned-up, woman-friendly means of engaging in the very dark but surprisingly common fantasy many women have about being gangbang raped, which in fact is so common that there's at least three different subgenres within romance devoted to the subject, not just these "fated mate" stories but also "reverse harem" ones (in which the FLC is more aggressive about the subject and actually loves having all these hunky dumb men at her beck and call), as well as "why choose" stories (in which each of the men actually act like a traditional romantic partner, essentially letting the FLC have three or four or five monogamous boyfriends all at once [well, the men are all monogamous, anyway], with all the guys being remarkably cool about the fact that she has four other boyfriends, justified in a way usually baked right into the book's gimmicky subject). And I have to admit, it's an extremely clever way to tell such a story, because the female readers get to both have their cake and eat it too; for if you wrote a book about just some normal human male who suffered from uncontrollable sexual urges, and who felt compelled to sometimes grab the nearest female, hold her down, then breed with her to completion, that guy would just be some gross rapist Harvey Weinstein creep, and take it from me, ain't no woman out there in existence looking for a romance novel in which Harvey Weinstein is the MLC. By making it a special part of a paranormal character's fictional biology, though, this allows the character himself to still be the kind of boyfriend women fantasize about -- thoughtful, tender, respectful, caring -- who just happens to get overwhelmed by by the "whateverian" in his bloodstream that once every blood moon compels him to insert his horse-sized dick (they're always horse-sized dicks) into his "designated seed receptacle" (the FLC, often in some kind of collar-focused light bondage gear by now) until the deed has been finished, as the puny human mewls and squirms under his rock-hard body, both loving and protesting every moment of it. Then, back to washing her hair in the bathtub! Let's be clear, a big part of what makes Their Human Vessel so enjoyable is that it's simply a great science-fiction novel to begin with, full stop, no matter what other genre might be attached to it, with Bequin clearly having the kind of mastery over SF's tropes that comes with undoubtedly being a con-going fan herself; the universe-building here is solid, expansive, believable and clever, the dialogue Peak TV-level (or, you know, Joss Whedon-level at least), the characters complex and easy to root for. But sister, then add the bright blue horse cocks and the space alien gangbangs, and I luuuuuuuurved it, because this is exactly the kind of dark, outre, go-for-it prurience I myself like in erotic stories, as someone now in his 50s and who has been exploring sexuality in a complex and nuanced way for over 30 years now. What makes this book great is that Bequin simply doesn't hold back here, like so many women's erotica authors do when push finally comes to shove at their manuscript's most graphic moments; here, our FLC is pinned down and fucked before she can even get out a question about what's happening, much less a protest, over and over and over by multiple characters in multiple situations throughout the entire book, in an unending fashion without breaks needed since the unique DNA of the horse-dicked aliens make them ready to go again mere seconds after their previous orgasm, because of course it does, of course. And, in perhaps the most clever detail of all, part of Bequin's mythos here is that small amounts of the aliens' sperm can literally reverse aging and kill cancer in humans (the big secret behind this planet, that a British East India-type private company has enslaved the entire alien population and hooked them up to dick-milking machines, to sell the sperm as a medical pill back on Earth), but large amounts of sperm will literally start turning a human into one of the aliens themselves; so every time our short-haired, small-breasted, nerdy, reader stand-in-feeling FLC takes another massive load from the three remaining non-enslaved space aliens left on the planet, in the unending aggressive gangbangs they perpetrate on her over and over in their Na'vi-looking glowing-plant-filled underground pond cavern oases, the more those loads start changing her body to be more ready to endlessly take on these massive gangbangs over and over, as her bluish skin toughens and her sex drive goes up and she understands how it can be to deeply love three men at the same time with no guilt or shame. Or, er, three eight-foot-tall blue space aliens with horse cocks, I mean. I gotta plainly say, I loved this book, women's erotica done really right, which perfectly treads that invisible line between silly and legitimately hot. I can see that this author also has a whole series in the subgenre known as "omegaverse," which I have a strong interest in exploring (the very first romance manuscript I was ever offered as a freelancer, in fact, was an omegaverse story, which sent me down a strange Wikipedia rabbit hole a full six months ago or so, which has made me curious about the genre ever since). So I may actually take that one on next, and if it's good then go straight to the group of other omegaverse novels I recently downloaded to my Kindle, when going to a promotional website recently and downloading 30 titles all at once, split up among such subgenres as Regency, contemporary, Christian, beach, cyberpunk, "knotted" (but whew, more on that another day), cozy mystery, urban fantasy, Irish small town, mafia, and...that's it. No, wait, and Tolkien "high fantasy." That's it -- that covers the 30 romance and women's erotica titles currently on my Kindle. Like, five of those are omegaverse novels, so I may or may not hop straight to those after reading Bequin's Wounded Omega, we'll see. Meanwhile, if you're the kind of person who needs something rather intense to really "enjoy yourself" as a reader (I think you know what I mean), this'll be just your ticket, a story that needs some disbelief suspended but that by doing so can really suck you in as a good old-fashioned very dirty story. ...With, you know, blue-skinned horse dicks, buyer beware. ...more |
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 15, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 0192838652
| 9780192838650
| 0192838652
| 3.37
| 6,002
| 1826
| Sep 10, 1998
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatn
2022 reads, #53. It's firmly autumn here in Chicago, so it was time recently to put away my beach-and-airport Lee Child and Elin Hilderbrand and whatnot, and instead turn to a series of very large and intellectually interesting tomes I'll be slowly getting through all the way until next spring and the return of warm weather. Coming later this winter will be my first-ever read of Gone With the Wind, a re-read of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, a binge-read of the entire seven-book "Narnia" series in a row, and my first attempt at Gene Wolfe's 950-page The Book of the New Sun; but first for these cold-weather long-form reads, it's the 150,000-word (i.e. Harry Potter-sized) 1826 forgotten "post-apocalyptic" "classic" The Last Man, by Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley, long overshadowed by her more famous book but now getting more and more of a serious 21st-century look again, when we take both genre literature and novels by women much more seriously. I purposely put air-quotes around both the terms above, because part of what makes it famous is precisely that it's not considered a classic by any way you measure it; in fact, it was sort of angrily rejected by contemporary audiences in the 1820s when she first published it, a little less than a decade after Frankenstein, as she hit middle-age and her work first started to fall out of favor, along with the other Early Romantics who were dying like flies all around her. And now that I've read it, I'm not sure even if you can properly call it a post-apocalyptic novel, at least not in the genre-thriller way we largely mean it now when we use the term ourselves, which is why that's getting air-quotes too. It's still super-fascinating, though, for what it is instead is Shelley talking about all these Early Romantics she spent so much of her youth around, and who had all recently died in a very short period, leaving Shelley essentially alone in the world -- not only her husband Percy, but her sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, her child William, and the charming asshole George Byron who held their whole circle together, otherwise known as Lord Byron. So in other words, the "last man" of her so-called speculative proto-sci-fi novel is not the lone survivor of the futuristic plague seen in her book; it's Mary herself, and this book is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel about what it was actually like to live within such a group of people, with just a few showy genre details stitched on to nominally make it a sci-fi story. So in this, it's really important to keep two things in mind about the world as it existed in the 1820s when Shelley wrote this: first, her father-in-law, the politically powerful father of Percy Shelley, had forbidden her from ever writing a memoir about her time with his son; and second, the entire post-apocalyptic "last man" trope of proto-sci-fi had already been around for over 20 years at that point, ever since the unexpected explosive bestseller The Last Man by French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville in 1805, which had suffered so many cheap ripoffs in the decades after that the "last man" trope was actually kind of a joke by the 1820s, even to the point that there were now popular parodies of the genre. That's why contemporary audiences angrily rejected the book when it first came out, because they took it all at face value and rightly concluded that this didn't hold a candle to the other, much more thrilling "last man" post-apocalyptic melodramas that had been published over the last 20 years. But we now 200 years later can clearly see it as yet another proto-example from the literary world, this time the prototype of the modern autobiographical novel, where Shelley is actually trying to record what her time among the tragic, often infuriating Early Romantics was like, and as such uses the "last man" trope only metaphorically to declare her the last among her artistic peers to still live and write new work, one of the only people who actually got to live long enough to approach it through the wiser filter of middle-age, and therefore has more complex and nuanced things to say about it than any of them did when they were in their passionate twenties. It makes sense, after all, once you learn that she had been forbidden by her father-in-law from publishing a "true story" about her time with Percy, Byron and the rest; but this was the early 1800s, after all, not long after even the novel as an art form had even been invented, and when it was still largely considered silly rubbish only good for women and children by the exact sober, older white men like Shelley's father-in-law. Of course Shelley could get away with couching her memoir of these times within a so-called science-fiction melodrama, especially a trope that had already been around and trendily popular for the last 20 years, because readers literally weren't sophisticated enough yet to read something like The Last Man and say, "...Oh, wait, she's actually talking about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, isn't she?" But sheesh, what else can you say about a character named "Lord Raymond," who is described as looking exactly like Byron, who in our late 21st-century setting of future England is a charming rogue asshole who wants to see England return to a state of monarchy, after the country fully converts into a secular democracy like the US in Shelley's "past future" timeline. Or what about his complicated, almost sexual relationship with who is supposed to be the current king of England if he hadn't abdicated, one Adrian Windsor who just happens to look exactly like Shelley's real-life husband Percy, who is 100% on the side of the rational Republicanists and has an antagonistic yet almost sensual relationship with Lord Raymond, who's trying to achieve the exact opposite thing and bring back "rule by the righteously ordained?" So if we use all this as proof that what Shelley was truly trying to do here was actually write an autobiographical novel about the Early Romantic inner circle she was a part of, that actually makes this quite the interesting book, and especially in the ultra-complex, ultra-nuanced way she portrays her version of Lord Byron here, very easily the true protagonist of the book even though it's supposed to be a sweeping ensemble drama where the abdicated king is just as important, as is his Shakespearean mother who schemes with Lord Raymond to bring back the monarchy, as is another dozen characters based here and there on actual figures from her real-life circle in those years. Shelley's the only one left alive at this point in real history, after all, so she can say whatever she wants to about these people; and it's clear that, just as we think about him today 200 years later, Shelley clearly found Lord Byron to be the most complex and mesmerizing person of their entire circle, and largely devotes her ensemble drama here to examining the detailed ins and outs of his character in particular. And like we've often been discovering just now in our #MeToo years, one of the things making this book worth revisiting here in the 21st century is that Shelley's post-death brutally honest assessment of Lord Byron is of a real MeTooer type -- charming and seductive in a way you can't tear yourself away from, but that you can easily see right away is damaging and too intense for your well-being, the kind of person to both build up a fervent circle of true believers and eventually resign with disgrace from that circle (if they live long enough, that is, which in the case of both the real Byron and the fictional Raymond was not the case), much more honest and sophisticated an examination of this type of "intelligentsia bro" than the traditional "Byronic Hero" that grew together during the Victorian Age. Unfortunately, though, I find myself once again paraphrasing Homer Simpson talking to Ricky Gervais when it comes to me discussing a novel from the Early Romantic period: "Lady, you take forever to say nothing!!!" And that's another reason you can see why contemporary audiences might've angrily rejected this book when it first came out, because for a post-apocalyptic thriller, it's slow as freakin' molasses, and I have to confess that I didn't make it all the way to the end of this thousand-page book before I had decided that I at least had read enough to write a measured and informed review. That review, as you can see, is that it's well worth your time to take on, at least the slow and extra-long first act which is where most of the character-building of these thinly veiled Early Romantics take place, before a second and third act that crank up the genre tropes considerably. (Also, be aware that Shelley didn't even bother trying to think of cool sci-fi what-ifs; the most cutting-edge thing anyone does in her book is travel long distances by hot air balloon.) In it, you'll get a more refreshingly honest and complicated look at these "world's first whiny hipsters" of Shelley's generation than perhaps you've ever seen an actual member of that generation talk about themselves before; and understand that if any of them had managed to live beyond their mid-thirties, like Shelley turned out to be the only one to do, all of them might have had a quite different attitude about this "age of the tortured romantic artist" that still very much exists to this day, even while seemingly getting snuffed out more and more by our rapid transition into our current Woke times. You may not last the entire book, but even the first couple hundred pages are well worth the time to read, even if you Wikipedia the rest of the plot; and Shelley in general deserves to be remembered as a towering pioneer of her age, and not just a one-hit wonder for Frankenstein in the style of, "Isn't it nice that Percy's wife got to do something too?" These books and others show exactly why, so ahead of their times that we're only catching up to some of them now. ...more |
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| 006283813X
| 9780062838131
| 3.49
| 12,584
| Nov 10, 2020
| May 18, 2021
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #38. One of the things I'm coming to realize here in my fifties, when I now have (according to Goodreads) a total of 2,500 books I've read
2022 reads, #38. One of the things I'm coming to realize here in my fifties, when I now have (according to Goodreads) a total of 2,500 books I've read over the course of my life, is that mostly what I'm on the lookout for anymore is simply stories that are unique, startlingly unique, and that sound like no other stories I've read before. That's why I was so excited this week to read through Bridget Collins' newest, The Betrayals, because it's not only extremely well-done, but is literally unlike any other book I've now read in my life. Like the best of New Weird literature (which is how I would classify this hard-to-categorize book), it just plunks us into the middle of our situation with no explanation of what's going on; it's only as we read further and further that we realize that we're supposed to be in an unnamed country that sounds very similar to Austria in the late 1920s or early '30s (the citizens are obsessed with French language and culture, yet the nation is filled with German-style beer halls where radical political activists meet), and that a Nazi-like fascist party has recently taken power but has not yet started its campaign for world domination. (In an interesting twist, people of a certain religion are being persecuted and whisked away here in the middle of the night, just like the real Nazis, but in this fictional case it's actually Christians and not Jews.) The Hogwarts-like castle/school up in the far mountains where most of our story takes place, then, is supposed to be a sort of haven from all this modern chaos, an Oxford-like space that hasn't fundamentally changed in a thousand years (both students and professors still wear monk robes to class, for example), and where the one and only subject being taught is what they call the grand jeu, French for the "Great Game," which Collins cleverly never fully describes but hints is a combination of music, dance, philosophy, debating and religion. Like Richard Wagner's bombastic classical music in real-life Austria in the 1930s, this artistic expression is considered part of the "national culture" of our unnamed country, with the newly minted fascist government in charge trying to politicize the endeavor and putting more and more pressure on the school to get on board with it. Whew! Okay, so that gets you to page 1 of the novel itself; for far from this being any kind of spoiler, what I've just described is merely the backdrop on which our actual story itself takes place, which has to do with the complicated relationship one young and rapidly rising administrator in this fascist party has with not only the grand jeu and its school but the political party itself, coming off as a sort of fictionalized Albert Speer who is happy to use the party for his own gain but feels morally troubled about the harsh ethnic-cleansing edges of their policies, and who had some sort of terrible thing happen to him when he was a celebrated student at the school himself, who most had thought would go on to a professional career as a game designer but who abruptly joined this fascist party right after graduating for reasons most can't figure out. That's what our story is mainly about, understanding through both present-day scenes and a full half of the book in flashback what exactly happened to this promising game master to make him eventually turn his back on the pursuit, and how this will affect him as an adult now that he's been dispatched against his will back to the mountain fortress/academy to serve as the party's in-house spy. And that, needless to say, is equally fascinating and unique as the background, but is best saved for a surprise which is why I won't mention any more. What can be said, though, is that the betrayals of the book's title are many and varied, with Collins delightfully dancing her nimble literary fingers on top of all kinds of issues that have to do with the subject -- romantic relationships (both straight and gay), political devotion, one's promises to their own younger self, and all kinds of other interesting, unexpected nods here and there. It's utterly captivating, as long as you can get into the spirit of it (I saw many other Goodreaders who instead just found it too confusing and gave up, and admittedly you have to have some patience and a natural love for speculative literature to fully get into this), and most importantly is utterly, completely unlike any other book of the 2,500 or so I've now read, which in this day and age is always worth celebrating just on its own, even more so when the book turns out to be great like is the case here. A novel that will easily make my "best reads of the year" list come December, it now strongly has me interested in going back and reading her debut novel as well, the similar alt-history speculative story The Binding (apparently taking place in an unnamed nation that feels vaguely like Victorian England). As always, check back here later in the year for my review of that, but for now get yours hands on this captivating latest as soon as you can. ...more |
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ebook
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| 1984879359
| 9781984879356
| 1984879359
| 3.24
| 44,691
| Jun 23, 2020
| Jun 23, 2020
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did not like it
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2022 reads, #37. 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, #37. 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. I've been through two of her books now, 2015's Eileen which I hated, and then 2018's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which I loved; but unfortunately her third novel, 2020's Death in her Hands, is much more like the former than the latter, which means I'm back to hating it again. The problem here, just like Eileen, is that Moshfegh is utterly uninterested in turning in a three-act story, giving us instead a 300-page plotless character study about The Second Most Unpleasant Woman In Human History (the aforementioned Eileen of course being the most unpleasant woman in human history), essentially what it would look like if you took Saturday Night Live's "Debbie Downer" and played her for drama instead of laughs, and then slowly revealed through one odd sentence every 10,000 words that she's in fact insane and that you can't trust even a single word coming out of her mouth. That's interesting as a concept, but fucking unbearable as an actual reading experience, just pages and pages and pages and PAGES of tedious minutiae from our put-upon unreliable narrator's daily life (she walks in the woods, she makes some dinner, she pets her dog, she goes to bed, she gets back up, she takes a shower, she walks in the woods...), just for Moshfegh to randomly insert exactly one weird sentence every 30 pages that makes you stop and say, "...Wait, I'm sorry, what was that?" She's definitely on-brand here with what I've come this summer to think of as the typical Moshfeghian Hero (namely, that dishwater-dull mousy doormat who works the receptionist desk at an insurance office and who no one on the planet ever gives a second thought to, just to reveal that she's actually much crazier than anyone ever suspected, and that today is the day she's decided she's had just about enough of your fucking bullshit, thank you very much); but while such an anti-villain is irresistible when paired with a bizarre, hilarious, JG Ballard-like pitch-black surreal storyline like in the case of Relaxation, our Moshfeghian Heroes are just barely tolerable when put in a go-nowhere MFA hipster circle-jerk character study like here or in Eileen, and I have to confess that after absolutely loving the former (Relaxation will definitely be showing up on my "best reads of the year" list in December), I detested the latter, and gave a huge sigh of relief when I finally made it to the end of this endlessly droning disaster of a book. That finally brings us to Moshfegh's fourth and latest novel, Lapvona which was just released a couple of months ago; and I've been told that that's actually a historical novel, taking a typical Moshfeghian Hero and plunking her into a Medieval village where strange and possibly evil events are afoot (think The VVitch), so please keep your eye out my review of that in just another week or two. ...more |
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Jul 09, 2022
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Jul 09, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0525522131
| 9780525522133
| 0525522131
| 3.63
| 438,386
| 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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Jun 19, 2022
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| 0385546815
| 9780385546812
| 0385546815
| 3.54
| 47,896
| Jul 20, 2021
| Jul 20, 2021
|
it was ok
|
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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Apr 26, 2022
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Apr 26, 2022
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| ||||||||||||||
| 0316704261
| 9780316704267
| 0316704261
| 3.28
| 9,989
| Jul 13, 2021
| Jul 13, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
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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Apr 14, 2022
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| ||||||||||||||
| 0374605084
| 9780374605087
| 0374605084
| 3.14
| 2,745
| Mar 01, 2022
| Mar 01, 2022
|
really liked it
|
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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Apr 06, 2022
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Apr 06, 2022
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| ||||||||||||||
| 1736164252
| 9781736164259
| 1736164252
| 3.80
| 54
| Mar 05, 2022
| Mar 05, 2022
|
it was amazing
|
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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Mar 19, 2022
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Mar 19, 2022
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| ||||||||||||||
| 0062409166
| 9780062409164
| 0062409166
| 3.86
| 32,605
| Jun 13, 2017
| Jun 13, 2017
|
2022 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. So after spending most of my adult life considering Neal Stephenson to be one of our era's greatest living authors, I'
2022 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. So after spending most of my adult life considering Neal Stephenson to be one of our era's greatest living authors, I've now had the displeasure of intensely disliking all three of the latest books in a row by him I've now read (but for more, see my reviews of 2019's
Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell
, and 2021's
Termination Shock
), and in fact this is the second one in a row I disliked so much that I didn't even end up finishing the whole thing. Co-written in this case with cross-genre author Nicole Galland, the subject matter itself is actually right up my alley; a rousing 800-page urban fantasy adventure, it posits as its central premise that "magic" used to be real, that in actuality it was the ability of certain people to be able to perform multiverse quantum mechanics in their heads, that the proliferation of technology in the Industrial Age blocked this ability to visit alternative universes, and that our modern age has figured out how to build hermetically sealed "black boxes" that entirely shut out the influence of contemporary technology (think of the Schrodinger's Cat theory built in real life), in which contemporary "witches" can once again perform this magic, leading quickly to a temporal cold war among the various past, present and future nation-state secret police forces and other intelligence agencies. But alas, I still ended up giving up around page 200, and that's because both the characters and the dialogue are so fucking twee and Joss Whedon-like that I just couldn't stand another page of it, not even one more goddamn page, despite not having nearly gotten to the point yet where the story seems like it really takes off, according to the plot synopsis I read at Wikipedia afterwards. In fact, I think it's fair to say that this isn't actually a book for grown-ups at all, but instead in the tradition of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is actually a Young Adult novel being sneakily marketed towards adults without fully disclosing the smoochie-woochie-poochie-doochie unbearably precious nature of its actual prose, the kind of writing that can only be loved by either 13-year-old girls or the middle-aged "Bookstagram" women they grow up to be. Those books deserve to exist, don't get me wrong, and more power to you if you like that kind of stuff; but these kinds of books deserve to have a warning label on them, cautioning the reader about what they're about to get into (which at the very least should include a "Young Adult" designation on the back cover), especially in a case like this where it's coming from an author who's usually associated with incredibly dense, intellectual, high-concept kind of mindblowing novels expressly for adults. I know I'm being extra-harsh here, but I'm just getting so sick and tired of getting a full 200 pages into books like these and only then having the rug pulled out from under me; I could've read an entire other short novel from start to finish in that time, for example like these little Italo Calvino books from the public library that have been sitting on my TBR shelf the entire winter now, still untouched. Poor little Italo deserves better than that, and so do I; so I think at least for the present time, I'm done with Stephenson for good for a while. Or, well, actually that's a lie; at the same time I checked this book out of the library, I re-checked one of my favorite Stephenson novels of all time, 2008's Anathem, which is just so crazily unique and like nothing else you've ever read that it will literally make your head pop right off your neck. I've gotten really depressed by having his latest three books in a row be so crappy, so much so that I've actually started questioning my own memories and wondering if his earlier books are actually as good as I remember them; so simply for my own edification, I'm re-reading that one to remind myself that, yes, Stephenson really does blow most other genre authors straight out of the water whenever he's at the top of his game. I look forward to revisiting that book with all of you next month; but for now, take a wide pass on this one. ...more |
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Mar 15, 2022
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Mar 15, 2022
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| |||||||||||||||
| 0962344729
| 9780962344725
| 0962344729
| 4.16
| 3,520
| 1977
| Jan 01, 1993
|
it was amazing
|
(2021 reads, #104.)
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Nov 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1883398088
| 9781883398088
| 1883398088
| 4.48
| 467
| Jan 01, 1979
| Oct 04, 1994
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #103. A recent rewatch of Prometheus had me looking up the Wikipedia page for the alien race featured in all the Alien movies; and while i
2021 reads, #103. A recent rewatch of Prometheus had me looking up the Wikipedia page for the alien race featured in all the Alien movies; and while it was a surprise at first to find that the page was the length and depth of the biography of some major figure in world history, upon reflection I realized that that shouldn't really be a surprise at all, after having the race featured in one slightly different form or another through a dozen feature films and hundreds of comic book issues. That got me thinking again about Swiss artist H.R. Giger, whose legitimately unsettling yet simultaneously metal-album-cover cheesy "biomecha" paintings in the 1970s (some of the first in the fine-art world to be painted with airbrushes, along with more entrenched gallery people like Ed Paschke) provided the first inspiration for the aliens in this franchise, and who was eventually hired by director Ridley Scott to come to London to design and build many of the first film's most iconic setpieces, for which he won an Oscar and forever changed the world of dark sci-fi (not to mention metal album covers). On an impulse, I checked out the two books on him the Chicago Public Library has, 1977's Necronomicon -- Giger's debut publication, the book that made it into Salvador Dali's hands by way of a mutual friend, who gave it to Alejandro Jodorowsky, who hired Giger to work on concept paintings for his ultimately doomed production of Dune, which is how he came to the attention of fellow staffer Dan O'Brannon, who soon afterward successfully pitched his Alien spec script to 20th Century Fox, which is how it is that Giger did all the alien design for that movie -- and then a book made out of Giger's concept art from Alien itself, first published in 1979 right after the movie came out. Or, at least I thought this was just going to be a book of concept paintings; but it instead turned out to be a much more interesting thing, which is those paintings combined with an extremely candid journal Giger kept at the time about the entire experience, and the copious still photos he took on the sets and inside the effects workshops where he and his buddies worked. It's fascinating, I have to admit, which is why I thought it was worth writing about here at Goodreads, even though I won't be doing any such write-up for the more traditional exhibit-catalogue-style Necronomicon; fully of snotty opinionated rants from the uncompromising Giger about all the details of the production that drove him crazy, it has the same "fuck these California normies" vibe as Charles Bukowski has in Hollywood, his memoir of adapting his story Barfly into a movie starring Mickey Rourke as a fictionalized version of Bukowski himself. That's being kind of unfair, though; Giger in fact has all kinds of complimentary things to say about the various hardworking production designers and special-effects bottom-rung employees that brought his nightmarish airbrushed visions to full three-dimensional life, plus he pretty rightly gives a lot of credit to Scott himself for having the singular vision of the film he did, and being Giger's quiet champion at various points when it seemed no one else would. It's this unfiltered look at how the sausage is made (literally in this case), combined with the nerd-amazing production photos, combined with the flabbergasting paintings Giger originally made, that makes this such a spectacular book, and comes recommended to an audience way beyond the fanboys who just like gawking at his robot-squid vagina-penis monstrosities. ...more |
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Nov 22, 2021
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Nov 22, 2021
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250075580
| 9781250075581
| 1250075580
| 3.96
| 11,100
| Oct 18, 2016
| Oct 18, 2016
|
it was amazing
|
2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might wan
2021 reads, #94 and 95. For a lot of us who eventually become artists as adults, when we're in our late teens and first get the idea that we might want to do this for a living, we don't yet have the experiences or portfolio to show off our own artistic sensibilities yet, so we tend to obsessively latch on to already successful artists who have similar sensibilities as ours. In my case, for example, that was David Lynch, whose mindfuck classic Blue Velvet came out my senior year of high school, which is pretty much the exact most perfect time to watch a movie like that. That made the airing of his notorious TV show Twin Peaks while I was in college not just popular but a legitimate phenomenon among me and my snotty little Generation X art-school buddies; and I've never rewatched the show since, for fear of diminishing returns ruining the purity of my enjoyment of it back when it was originally on the air, and we used to hold giant watching parties each week complete with multiple pies and pots of coffee. But I recently decided to drop my subscription to the streaming service Hulu, and Hulu is the current home of Twin Peaks, so I decided to finally watch the entire two-season run again before I lost access to it, which for those who are curious was pretty much the experience I was expecting -- it was okay, and I can see why we all went so nuts for it at the time, but Lord was it filled with a whole bunch of pointless filler, in Lynch's attempt to make what he considered a nighttime soap opera, which is what he always saw Twin Peaks as first and foremost. That then got me thinking about the companion books again for the first time in a long time, early examples of the kind of cross-media marketing and publicity we now take for granted, in which a series of three themed volumes gave gentle and not very important clues about the bizarro mythology driving the only storyline of the series anyone actually gave a damn about -- the death of Laura Palmer, that is, at the hands of what turned out to be an evil supernatural being, governed by a byzantine set of rules and laws these supernatural creatures have among the places along the magical veil where they dwell, the unique details of which were invented by Lynch during the open thinking stages within his lifelong habit of transcendental meditation. And that finally gets us to today's books, when I learned during my research of this rewatch that the show's co-creator Mark Frost actually published two more tie-in books decades after I and the rest of the world stopped being obsessed by the show, 2016's much bigger The Secret History of Twin Peaks and 2017's much smaller Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, both of which seem to have been greenlit because of the coming third season of the show, which debuted just a few months after these books came out. The "lore" of the franchise's Hollywood history often leaves out Frost, who although has the kind of sensibility to appreciate and produce Twin Peaks, nonetheless comes from a much more traditional background, having been a veteran already of more pedestrian fare like Hill Street Blues, The Equalizer and The Six Million Dollar Man, which I guess doesn't really fit the "brilliant weirdo genius comes out of nowhere" shtick that continues to drive the cult status of Lynch. Frost has had a middling career since -- he was co-writer of a couple of those "Fantastic Four" films from the early 2000s, produced half a dozen failed pilots, and seems to have spent more time than anything else on penning a series of Young Adult fantasy novels known as "The Paladin Prophecy" -- but it's clear with hindsight that he was the one sort of holding the original Twin Peaks together as any kind of watchable show at all, especially now that we have the evidence of a third season that was largely made without him, which is so viewer-hostile and obtuse that it might as well not even exist. Lynch may have been pulling random shit out of his meditation sessions and waking dreams for such details as the dancing dwarves and Log Ladies, but it's clear in Secret History that Frost was getting his inspiration for the mythos' details from much more mundane and trackable sources; for this book actually has very little to do with the show itself, but is rather an impressively researched look at all the actual bizarre little true stories over the centuries that would sound like Twin Peaks if they weren't in fact completely real, and which Frost quite methodically shows provided the inspiration behind such franchise details as the Black and White Lodges, owls as spirit animals, characters who talk backwards, even why the show was set in the Pacific Northwest in the first place. Turns out there's all kinds of bizarre stories from real life that sound like an episode of Twin Peaks: such as the fact that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was co-founded by two friends of occultist Alastair Crowley who regularly enacted his strange, sex-filled Satanist rituals (one of whom was Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard); or that 1950s entertainer Jackie Gleason was obsessed with UFOs, owning one of the largest libraries in the world on the subject and actually buying a mansion in the shape of a flying saucer that he called the "Mothership;" or that Gleason's widow after his death sincerely swore that he told her about his friend Richard Nixon getting drunk one night and showing him crashed UFO wreckage from Roswell; or that Merriweather Lewis of Lewis & Clark fame supposedly committed suicide under mysterious and suspicious circumstances, not very long after returning from a trouble-filled exploratory trip to the Pacific Northwest where they were spooked by Native American stories about evil ghosts in the woods. All of these stories are absolutely, 100 percent true; so in the tradition of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Discordian classic "The Illuminatus! Trilogy," here Frost takes all these stories and weaves them into one giant uber-conspiracy theory of which the events in Twin Peaks, Washington in 1989 plays just a small part. That's actually kind of brilliant, in this '80s indie Church Of The Subgenius kind of way (after all, the '50s-born Frost is the exact right age to love all these crazy old '70s and '80s underground occult-conspiracy "Hail Discordia" projects); and the book should be read in this spirit for full enjoyment, as an extremely clever and well-written way to present a broad overview of the most famous bizarro conspiracy theories over the course of US history, from Majestic-12 to the Kennedy assassination, completely bonkers '50s sci-fi author Richard Shaver, Project Blue Book, the Freemasons, and a lot, lot, lot more. And I suppose we'll forgive Frost for the short follow-up volume a year later, which seems to only and exclusively exist to provide tie-in promotion to the third season of the show, which was released the exact same month this book was released, and contains nothing else but hastily assembled overviews of all the show's main characters, and Frost's half-assed look at the general highlights of each person's life in the 25 years since. It's become known by now that Frost's main involvement with this third season was to throw together a bunch of ideas beforehand but not be involved with the day-to-day production, while Lynch then proceeded to get to the production stage and throw out a bunch of Frost's ideas at the spur of a moment while on set, because a fucking bee flew in his face that morning or whatever and suddenly now they're all going to go to the Black Lodge and see a giant thirty-foot-high CGI beehive floating in the sky, shedding blood or whatever, and that this is why the third season turned out to be so head-scratchingly awful. So this book written beforehand, frankly, doesn't do a whole lot to explain all the on-set turns towards the explainably bizarre that now marks the edited and finished episodes, and only provides the kinds of background details you'll quickly learn yourself over the first couple of episodes. It's kind of a shame that Lynch didn't have the boundaries of a nervous network or a TV vet like Frost this time, to rein him in and deliver a much tighter and more interesting third act to this beloved series (the Lynch projects with the most boundaries over the years have always turned out to be the best Lynch projects, whether that's Blue Velvet or The Elephant Man, Eraserhead or Mulholland Drive); but in the meanwhile, we have this "Transgressive's History of the United States" as a gift from the show's other creator, not really vital for learning about the show itself, but certainly an invaluable look at the kind of world that would greenlight a show like Twin Peaks to begin with. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Oct 18, 2021
not set
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Oct 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0874068134
| 9780874068139
| 0874068134
| 4.02
| 25,327
| 1890
| 1996
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it was amazing
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2021 reads, #88. This really shouldn't have its own book page at Goodreads, because it's really only a short story; but since it does, I'm going to go
2021 reads, #88. This really shouldn't have its own book page at Goodreads, because it's really only a short story; but since it does, I'm going to go ahead and log it so it'll count towards my year-long tally for my Reading Challenge! Known as one of the first great black-humor satirists in American history (don't forget, we didn't even have a "literary community" per se for the first time until the 1850s), this particular piece is a mainstay of high-school English classes, for being one of the first examples in American literary history of pulling the rug out from under the reader, first imagining the daring escape, detail by detail, of a proud Southern plantation owner who's about to be hung off a bridge for war crimes by Union soldiers, just to reveal in the last paragraph that (131-year-old spoiler alert) the whole thing was a last-second hallucinatory flash as the man's neck breaks in the now suspended noose. I mean, that's it -- it's not a particularly great story, but it's the very first example of something important, and for that reason it will live on forever no matter what the quality of the story itself. Certainly, though, it was a good reminder that I'd like to know more about this fascinating, deeply weird fellow. Maybe an extended reading project for next summer? Hmm!
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1
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not set
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Oct 13, 2021
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Oct 13, 2021
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ebook
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| 1982164557
| 9781982164553
| 1982164557
| 2.66
| 13,333
| Oct 20, 2020
| Oct 20, 2020
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2021 reads, #49. DID NOT FINISH. I woke up the other day and realized that I now had over 70 contemporary fiction novels in my To Be Read list, some n
2021 reads, #49. DID NOT FINISH. I woke up the other day and realized that I now had over 70 contemporary fiction novels in my To Be Read list, some now on that list for over three years; and that the reason it had piled up so high was because I've just come to dread taking on these books so much, in that the vast majority of contemporary fiction I read anymore (easily 95 percent of it) seems to just be an endless recycling of stories I've already heard, featuring characters I can't work up any interest in. So I made an agreement with myself, that I would try to get this list back down to a reasonable length by the time Christmas rolls around, by committing to only the first 50 pages of each one; and that, even if it's well-written, if the story hasn't grabbed me enough by that page-50 mark to make me want to read more, I would abandon it altogether and not even bother writing a review, but instead copy and paste this paragraph you're currently reading. So, that's what's happened here with my abandonment of this book; not necessarily that it's badly done, but that I simply found it bland and derivative, interchangeable with one of a thousand other contemporary novels I've already read. Keep it in mind when deciding whether or not to check it out yourself.
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not set
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Jul 23, 2021
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Jul 23, 2021
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 3.58
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Mar 18, 2024
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Mar 18, 2024
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| 3.64
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did not like it
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Oct 30, 2023
not set
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Oct 30, 2023
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| 3.48
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Sep 22, 2023
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Sep 22, 2023
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| 3.86
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really liked it
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Apr 08, 2023
not set
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Apr 08, 2023
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| 3.61
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it was amazing
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Mar 26, 2023
not set
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Mar 26, 2023
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| 3.70
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it was amazing
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 15, 2023
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| 3.37
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it was amazing
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Nov 20, 2022
not set
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Nov 20, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.49
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it was amazing
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Jul 17, 2022
not set
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Jul 17, 2022
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| 3.24
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did not like it
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Jul 09, 2022
not set
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Jul 09, 2022
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| 3.63
|
really liked it
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Jun 19, 2022
not set
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Jun 19, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.54
|
it was ok
|
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
|
Apr 06, 2022
|
Apr 06, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.80
|
it was amazing
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Mar 19, 2022
not set
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Mar 19, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.86
|
Mar 15, 2022
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Mar 15, 2022
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||||||
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| 4.16
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it was amazing
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Nov 28, 2021
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Nov 28, 2021
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| 4.48
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it was amazing
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Nov 22, 2021
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Nov 22, 2021
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| 3.96
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it was amazing
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Oct 18, 2021
not set
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Oct 18, 2021
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|||||
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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Oct 13, 2021
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Oct 13, 2021
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|||||
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| 2.66
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Jul 23, 2021
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Jul 23, 2021
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