okay, so this has alla the same cozy-feeling themes of food, friendship, and family that made Legends & Lattes so dang comforting, but then it ALSO haokay, so this has alla the same cozy-feeling themes of food, friendship, and family that made Legends & Lattes so dang comforting, but then it ALSO has a booknerdy readers' advisory angle?
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SEWELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SEVENTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your annual reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i've read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that's still a work-in-progress. however, because i don't have a lot of time to waste, and because my brain has felt scraped clean ever since my bout with covid, i'm not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap 'em again.
i am doing my best. merry merry.
DECEMBER 3
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five stars for a fifth JUDGE DEE story! seeing a red nose studio illustration thumbnailed on tor's free fiction page always makes the heart glad, and when it's attached to one of these undead-justice stories, it's doubleplusglad. i have missed reading these stories every week, but being away so long means it is now a tor-easure trove of unread goodies for me. my stocking is stuffed, my heart will go on, my edible will kick in.
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SIWELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the SIXTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2020 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
GR has deleted the pages for several of the stories i've read in previous years without warning, leaving me with a bunch of missing reviews and broken links, which makes me feel shitty. i have tried to restore the ones i could, but my to-do list is already a ball of nightmares, so that's still a work-in-progress. however, because i don't have a lot of time to waste, i'm not going to bother writing much in the way of reviews for these, in case GR decides to scrap 'em again.
i am doing my best. merry merry.
DECEMBER 31: HE'S VERY WELL READ - CATHERINE LACEY
I heard a woman complaining to another woman.
The complaint was that this woman was involved with a man who kept giving her books, and though these books all seemed to be very good books, books that this woman wanted to read and intended to read, she simply could not keep up with the rate at which he was giving her all these books. Each time he gave her a book, the complaining woman said, the man insisted it was a very special book, a book that meant a tremendous amount to him, and regardless of its length or density, he had always read this book many times over. The complaining woman also had many loving things to say about the man who was giving her all this reading material, so I gathered that, if these books had meant a great deal to him, then they both likely hoped that all these books would mean a great deal to her, and yet how could they know if she had not yet read them?
Several times during this complaint, the complaining woman reassured the listening woman that she was immensely grateful to receive these books from this man, as she loved reading and did a great deal of it, though she read at a regrettably slow pace, a handicap she often tried to improve, though it seemed that her reading comprehension suffered when she tried to read too quickly, and what would be the point of reading if at the end of a book you couldn’t recall what you’d read? True, she did tend to forget many details of a book regardless of the rate at which she read it, but she felt sure that her memory loss was greatly exacerbated when she tried to force herself to exceed her natural pace.
The listening woman interrupted with urgency: Had this man ever accepted any books from her? Oh, yes, the complaining woman said. And he read each of them so quickly and so closely! She was running out of books to recommend, in fact, and though she was glad that the man seemed to genuinely enjoy the books she gave him, she had to admit she was mildly alarmed by how he always came back to her with some criticism about the author’s style or disposition, criticisms he delivered with such elegant judiciousness that, even though the complaining woman usually did not want to accept the intellectual blemish that the man had located in the book, she had to admit that he was correct in his analysis.
She had a particular shelf, the complaining woman said, where she was keeping all the books he’d given her. When she could find the time, she intended to read each of them so carefully, but she had her own work to attend to and various arbitrary commitments, as well as other books that he had not given to her that she wanted or needed to read for some reason or another. Often, she would take one of the books he’d given her in her hands and consider it, thoughtfully but not without a little fear, yet most of them were still on the shelf, not yet read.
i'm probably breaking one of those mattress-tag laws by printing the entire story here, but it's gonna be a whole new year soon, whose arrival will nullify all the previous year's sins. what, you didn't know about that? it's true. in any case, this seems to be the perfect story to end this particular year, this particular challenge—all the books i didn't get a chance to read, all the pressure to read certain books at certain times, all the books that have gone unread as a result.
i know you feel me, booknerds. thank you for being here.
fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from abroad and then...never read.
We all remember things in our own way, she smiles, and we’re all correct…it’s emotional truth that matters.
hallett's debut, The Appeal, was an extremely fun mystery novel that invited the reader to solve a muuurrrrderrr along with the characters entrusted with the same task, providing a novel's-worth of emails and texts sourced from a number of suspects to sift through for clues in order to determine the victim, the motive, the accused, and the real killer.
The Twyford Code is another solve-it-yourself mystery novel, involving encoded children's books, treasure, nazis, a dickensian orphan boy taken under a criminal's wing, symbols, acrostics, patterns, red herrings, double-crosses, and redemption.
the clues this time are in the form of transcribed audio files, which may or may not lead to HIDDEN TREASURE! the files are of varying quality and significance, and the software returns some humorous phonetic translations, as well as lots of instances of ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS, [background noise] drowning out conversations, and intriguing elisions () of "indecipherable verbal content."
here is the intro-letter inviting a character and the reader into the mystery's deets:
Dear Professor Mansfield,
I am investigating a mysterious case and suspect you may be able to help. Let me explain.
An iPhone 4 is among a number of items belonging to a recently reported missing person. It is not associated with any mobile network and at first appeared to be blank, with no call records, music, emails, texts or photographs. Upon closer examination it was found to contain a series of deleted audio files: voice recordings in various encrypted formats, with dates that span eleven weeks in 2019. we recovered these files and deciphered them.
There are 200 files in total. We utilised specialist software and processed them in batches to speed up the transcription process. A key to this follows, along with the text. You will notice the transcription is phonetic, so spelling and grammar are quirky to say the least. On a number of occasions the software "mishears" or simply approximates words and phrases, especially when speech is in the vernacular. For instance, the phrase "must have" is frequently transcribed as "mustard." "Going to" becomes "gun a" and the town of Bournemouth is referred to variously as "bore mouth," "Bormuth," "bore moth" and "boar mouth." You will soon become accustomed to this and it should not interfere with your understanding of the material.
I've sent these files to you, Professor, in the strictest confidence. Quite apart from any personal connection you may have to the subject, your expert opinion on their contents would be very much appreciated. Call me when you've read to the end and we'll speak then.
Yours sincerely,
Inspector Waliso
with The Appeal, i felt reasonably-equipped to participate in the crime-solving; i have a good memory for details and for noting discrepancies between characters' versions of events, but here, i was verysoon outta my depth because codebreaking is not at all a part of my skill set. i'm fine with anagrams, but beyond that, my eyes kept balking anytime there was an explanation about how to go about cracking a code, and i just had to trust that the mystery would be solved by someone more capable at codesmithery and pattern recognition than dum dum me. however, i did try, and in the process, i played around with an online anagram generator and here are some choice selections from a much, MUCH longer list ( > 10,000) i generated using inspector waliso's name:
answers il octopi anoretic owl piss alts oneiric wops alpinist cow rose alp crow noisiest alien crow posits air polices towns ails inspector ow acts spoiler wino actors spoil wine actors loin wipes acorns stop Wilie Ascot loin wipers ASCII porn towels Alonso rips twice clitoris weapons
even though i was unable to participate in the investigative part of the experience, i had a ton of fun reading it. The Twyford Code has a better story to it than The Appeal, both because the structure of The Appeal isn't narrative, so it's jagged-by-design, but also The Twyford Code turned out to be more than *just* a mystery; there's a lovely and emotionally-rewarding story at its core THAT I WILL SAY NO MORE ABOUT (...).
in conclusion: When you get what you want, you lose what you have.
don't get me wrong, i'll giggle over monsterotica till the cows cum home, but my track record with literary erotica has been very disappointing, since it always seems to involve characters for whom the fact that they have sex is, like, their defining characteristic, and that's boring as heck.
but—phew—although this is about the adventures of a pair of rare book dealers searching for one of the few remaining copies of The Book of the Most Precious Substance; a 17th-century occult sex magick manual that promises its devotees ultimate power and orgasmic bliss, booknerds are—at the end of the day—still booknerds:
Like most book people, there was a shadow in his face, a hollow echo in his laugh, that let you know he'd rather be around books than people. Who could blame him? It was why so many of us were in this business. People had let us down. People had broken our hearts. We liked books and animals and messy rooms full of things that weren't people.
these particular booknerds have loads of sex, but they are refreshingly more than the sum of their private parts.
gran's writing is sharp, funny, relatable, and keenly observant, particularly in the prominent themes of loneliness and failure:
My father was a man with huge, unrealistic dreams and absolutely no acumen for everyday life. What he had in abundance was alcoholism, grandiosity, and maybe manic depression. My mother had studied English at Boston University before she looked for someone to ruin her life and found my father. My parents were both terrified of trying to improve our lives, long sapped of the strength for any more risk. But they approached failure with cheerful bravery, making every move and step down seem like a new adventure for as long as they could.
lily albrecht, daughter of this ambition-averse couple, seemed poised for success and happiness; writing an acclaimed novel at a young age and marrying her absolute soulmate before circumstances reduced her to the struggle of supporting herself by dealing rare books and the lonely burden of being a caretaker to a husk of a man who can give her neither physical, emotional, nor intellectual stimulation. abandoned by the literary fair-weather friends who once made up her social circle, she's become a creatively-drained incel, as trapped in a state of existing-without-living as her lump-of-meat hubby.
so, when she's offered the opportunity track down a copy of a mysterious black-magic-book alongside a sophisticated, charismatic gentleman companion; an endeavor promising a huge financial reward, a much-needed change-of-scenery, and the possibility of romantic shenanigans, she jumps at the chance. and if the magic this book contains has indeed been responsible for the wealth and success of countless people over the centuries, perhaps she can use it to turn her own life around.
it's a globe-trotting sexual awakening journey involving clandestine meetings with multiple people who have designated sex-rooms in their homes and books stiffly coated with layers of a few centuries' worth of human sexual fluids.
NB: if you find yourself in the private home of someone with a designated sex-room, you do not want to luminol their libraries.
since others here have already disclosed the Soylent Green reveal of the book's title, i'm gonna risk the torches of the Spoiler Brigade and share this GIF—the first i have ever been inspired to create:
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although i recoiled at every scene involving smearing sex juices on books (of which there are many), i really enjoyed this one, and for a novel so saturated with magical elements, the monkey's-paw realism of its ending was melancholy perfection.
PLUS, there's a perfect NYFC-shoutout when lily mentions eating at an indian restaurant in the east village that is ...cheerful, with bright decorations hanging from every possible surface: tinsel, Christmas lights, fake flowers, and is one of my own personal favorite establishments:
Sometimes I can’t believe how quickly it went, and sometimes I can’t believe I was ever allowed to have been so happy for so long.
okay, wow.
so, for a
Sometimes I can’t believe how quickly it went, and sometimes I can’t believe I was ever allowed to have been so happy for so long.
okay, wow.
so, for a few weeks now i have been obsessively clicking on the ‘upcoming' tab on tor's short fiction page, and nothing has been listed, so when a new story appeared unexpectedly, it was a complete surprise. it was an even bigger and better surprise that it was a story by peng shepherd, and i actually said "NO WAY" very loudly when i saw it.
i LOVED The Book of M, and her second book, The Cartographers, has been delayed by a whole dang year, so this was a real treat.
this is the first time i have not been dismayed to discover that the weekly tor short was actually a tor long. if anything, it wasn't long enough.
it contains everything i loved about The Book of M: the melancholic tone of a world in decline, the tenacity of the human spirit finding a way to connect and adapt despite life-altering events, and the enduring tendrils of individual legacy; what part of ourselves lives on in those we loved and what we have contributed to the greater realm of humanity.
it is an absolutely beautiful, tremendously moving, meaningful, wonder-ful story.
please give it all the awards.
it doesn’t quite make up for the yearlong delay of her second book, but it’s a start.
even though i am not an instagram-person, i accepted celadon's invitation to be part of their little free library promotion for this bNOW AVAILABLE!!!
even though i am not an instagram-person, i accepted celadon's invitation to be part of their little free library promotion for this book, and here i am dropping a copy off at
Charter #106653 Woodside Little Library 55-01 32nd Avenue Woodside NY 11377 Lat: 40.7557514 Long: -73.906108
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see the people who DO use instagram doing the same thing today @celadonbooks, #ThePlotBook
********************************************** All Jacob Finch Bonner had ever wanted to be was a writer.
well, those who can, do; those who can't, teach. those who hate teaching, steal from their students and make bank.
i’m probably being a little unfair to our dear antihero, the aforementioned former wunderkind-author jacob finch bonner, whose debut novel The Invention of Wonder received such critical praise that he seemed poised on the brink of becoming a Famous Writer. but that early promise fizzled, his career trajectory became a study in diminishing returns, and he ended up teaching creative writing in the low-residency MFA program of a shabby school, becoming more disengaged with each passing year.
you're not gonna fall in love with jacob, or even feel too sympathetic about his slide into the rut of failure. he's competitive and envious, and a little delusional about his own talent; his desire to be a writer is more about the prestige of being a writer than the actual work of writing, and he has a very 'but i WANNIT' sense of entitlement about his thwarted expectations.*
the novel opens on jake depressed by the detour his life has taken; his prospects limited, resigned to being a one-hit-wonder paying his bills evaluating the creative outpourings of his students; each year another batch of supremely unpromising wanna-be writers.
but then he meets evan parker, an arrogant fratboyish blowhard, who has this plot. a plot so unusual, so hooky, that it’s destined for bestseller status. evan hasn’t actually written much of it, but it doesn’t matter, because the plot, you see, is enough to guarantee his success. parker is so confident in the 'can't fail' of this plot that he's not looking for jake's input as a teacher/mentor—he's just there for the degree before before blasting off into fame and fortune. evan eventually, grudgingly shares the details of the plot with jake, who stews in jealousy over its originality, resenting the fact that this douchey bro is destined for accolades and success; to live the life he himself has been denied.
it is very much this dynamic:
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bone-deep jealousy of genius in the hands of a fool.
so lemme interject to talk about this amaaaazing plot real quick. it’s…fine, i suppose, but ‘nothing new under the sun,’ yeah? it’s a lifetime movie/domestic suspense thriller kind of premise—a variation on some fairly common tropes. it certainly has commercial viability and would appeal to the book club set, but strictly in terms of plot qua plot, i don’t think it’s an idea that would necessarily make anyone swoon over its conceptual originality.
anyway, time passes, jake slips even further down the professional ladder, and when he learns that evan has died suddenly, leaving no trace of his manuscript behind, he decides to snag that golden plot and write the book himself, calling it Crib, and it does indeed become a blockbuster sensation, catapulting him into the life he's always wanted—book tours and interviews and praise, marrying a wonderful woman who is—more importantly—a fan, and then he starts receiving anonymous messages calling him a thief and threatening to expose him.
which, no big deal, you can’t copyright a plot, right? and it’s not like he stole any of evan’s content, even if it’s a little ethically iffy because of the whole teacher/student thing. still, finders, keepers, dead men can’t sue &etc. only it turns out that evan’s plot was ripped from a real-life situation and someone isn’t too keen on their story being out there in the world.
jake's investigation into the identity of his accuser and the circumstances of evan's connection to the events of THE PLOT are back-and-forthed with excerpts from Crib that finally reveal the details of THE PLOT—the juicy secret someone's determined to protect.
it's not an aha shocker of a reveal—there are some references in here that'll set off alarm bells in savvy readers who have two specific book-notches on their belts, but korelitz builds suspense well, and i really enjoyed the claustrophobic tone of the ending (not the epilogue). but to be honest, the best part of the book was not the mystery, which was a bit predictable (and, frankly, i don't understand the why of it—why risk exposure?) but it was the writery stuff—the publishing details, the professional envy, jake's questionable self-evaluations and justifications, the frustration of settling and the humiliation of teaching—it's all wonderfully, bitterly exposed; a scab peeled back.
The Clive Cusslers and mom bloggers might still be persuadable that Jake was a famous, or at least a “highly regarded” young (now “youngish”) novelist, but the would-be David Foster Wallaces and Donna Tartts who were certainly present in the pile of folders? Not so much. This group would be all too aware that Jacob Finch Bonner had fumbled his early shot, failed to produce a good enough second novel or any trace of a third novel, and been sent to the special purgatory for formerly promising writers, from which so few of them ever emerged. (It happened to be untrue that Jake had not produced a third novel, but in this case the untruth was actually preferable to the truth. There had indeed been a third novel, and even a fourth, but those manuscripts, the making of which had together consumed nearly five years of his life, had been rejected by a spectacular array of publishers of declining prestige, from the “legacy” publisher of The Invention of Wonder to the respectable university press that had published his second book, Reverberations, to the many, many small press publication competitions listed in the back of Poets & Writers, which he had spent a small fortune entering, and, needless to say, had failed to win. Given these demoralizing facts, he actually preferred that his students believe he was still struggling to reel in that mythical and stupendous second novel.)
TLDR: fame, fiction, and revenge.
* this is probably too close-reading to be of interest to anyone casually checking out this review to see if they wanna read this book, so i'm plopping it into footnote territory because i appreciate the character-work. this is from an early scene (ARC p 18), at a start of semester barbecue where jake and alice—the poetry teacher, are chatting. alice has praised his work and been self-deprecating about her own, and jake thinks she may be flirting. he's a bit dismissive of poetry, but he's all puffed up by her appreciation of his novel, with being “thoughtfully admired” by another writer, and he responds indulgently with “studied modesty” and more than a little condescension until she divulges:
"I’m starting as an adjunct at Hopkins this fall, but I’ve never taught. I might be in pretty far over my head.”
He looked at her, his reserve of goodwill, already small, now swiftly draining away. Adjunct at Johns Hopkins was nothing to sneeze at. It probably meant a fellowship she’d had to beat a few hundred other poets out for. The university press publication was likely also the result of a prize, it occurred to him now, and just about everyone coming out of an MFA program with a manuscript went in for every one of those. This girl, Alice, was quite possibly some version of a big deal, or at least what passed for a big deal in the poetry world. The thought of that deflated him utterly.
oh, that seethe. it is worth noting that in alice's first appearance, she "looked to be about his own age," and in her second, she's a "woman...standing beside him," but then—tellingly enough, when he feels vulnerable by her accomplishments, he reduces her to a "girl." and i knoooow this is third person, but it's a very close third person POV...until it isn't, and that little dig is just jake all over.
there's another book on the publishing horizon that sounds like it might be friends with this book: Kill All Your Darlings, and even though i read and didn't love a different book by david bell (Bring Her Home), i really want to read this new one.
If you can bring me more such books, I will leave you every scrap of gold I can find.
a perfect, adorable, FREE short story. the whole time i was readiIf you can bring me more such books, I will leave you every scrap of gold I can find.
a perfect, adorable, FREE short story. the whole time i was reading it, i was braced for it to slant off into tweetown while still hoping it would be horror, since it is essentially the same set-up as my all-time favorite Amazing Stories episode:
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because we're all going through a thing right now and everyone's a little on edge, i'll spill the tone-beans THIS ONE TIME so you know what you're getting into: it is not horror. and it stays on the "good" side of twee—i thought it was charming and i'm an old salty curmudgeon.
however, the story ends on one of those tingly BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? notes that some of us—the old salty horror-loving curmudgeons of us—will imagine the next beats of in a way involving enough splatter to make y'all gentler folks faint dead away, but it's not our fault—our tastes have taught us all too well that you shouldn't take candy from strangers, or adopt a child or bring an animal into your home or communicate with entities you don't fully understand <--- none of which are true spoilers, but they all live in the same neighborhood of "cautionary tales this story is not teaching."
still and all, it's a fun story and reading it would be a nice and necessary break from watching the news and checking yourself for symptoms of vitamin d deficiency (i.e. DO I HAVE RICKETS?)
once upon a time, i read Hopscotch, cortazar’s fan-favoritiest novel, and i did it aaaaalllll wrong. i misunderstood the rules and thoNOW AVAILABLE!!!
once upon a time, i read Hopscotch, cortazar’s fan-favoritiest novel, and i did it aaaaalllll wrong. i misunderstood the rules and thought i was supposed to read the whole novel like a regular book and then go back and reread it using the page-order laid out in the “Table of Instructions” to “hopscotch” back through the story, and i don’t know what i thought would be revealed by this double-dip method, but it’s what i did and BOY, was i pissed to discover it was meant to be an either/or situation, not a “read this 600 page book twice, sucka!!”
so, if any of YOU are dum dums the way i was am a dum dum, let me clarify that THIS book offers the same reading options: you can either read it from page 1-472 (that’s the ARC page-count—if it’s longer in the finished book, don’t stop at page 472!), OR you can follow the Baroness sequence, which will usher you back and forth through the guts of the book, alternating between the three separate-but-connected storylines which is what i did.
i haven’t read it the other way; the conventional way, and that may also be a perfectly satisfying read, but you can read plenty of other books that way, most of them, in fact! very few books can be read as a backy-forthy journey, so when those opportunities arise, i say “take ‘em!”
this one reminded me of Cloud Atlas and The Mirror Thief, all of them time-jumping, multiple POV-having, samefolk-appearing fantasy adventures with a little of this and a little of that, genre-wise: romance and mystery and true historical events and personages* wrapped in an intriguing puzzle box guiding the reader through discrete storylines peppered with recurring motifs, but this is the only one of the three that you can read without knowing how many pages you have left before it’s over! it’s like chutes and ladders—the book; sometimes it’ll make you look like the fastest reader ever, sometimes it’ll look like you’ve been reading for hours and are only fifty pages in. it’s exercise and an adventure you can take without leaving your house!
this is a wonderful chonk of a book, and even though it is primarily a love story with other stuff stuck to it, and i do not give a fig about love stories, i liked this one.
i wanted to write a better review for this book but then the world got terrible and now my brain is bad. read the book and then write a better review than this.
* which is true of this one and The Mirror Thief, but maybe not Cloud Atlas? i’m leaning towards “no,” but it’s been a long time since i read it, so no yelling if i am mistaken!
for once in my life i'm glad i have the tendency to stockpile more books than i can read. this is my third date with peter swanson and he's fast becomfor once in my life i'm glad i have the tendency to stockpile more books than i can read. this is my third date with peter swanson and he's fast becoming my author-version of that friend you can call up anytime and be guaranteed a fun night out on the town.
these days i am easily distracted and my brain feels like porridge most of the time, so even pleasure reading has been difficult for me. but this was a short, fast, one-day delight of a book that made me remember what it was like to not have to struggle to concentrate and actually enjoy reading. i fell into this pretty easily and it held my attention throughout, so it's comforting to know i have THREE other books by him floating around in these stacks.
this one is a particular gift for fans of mystery novels, and young booknerds who grew up into adulthood with unrealistic, unmet, expectations of how it was all gonna be:
Being an avid mystery reader as an adolescent does not prepare you for real life. I truly imagined that my adult existence would be far more booklike than it turned out to be. I thought, for example, that there would be several moments in which I got into a cab to follow someone. I thought I'd attend far more readings of someone's will, and that I'd need to know how to pick a lock, and that any time I went on vacation (especially to old creaky inns or rented lake houses) something mysterious would happen. I thought train rides would inevitably involve a murder, that sinister occurrences would plague wedding weekends, and that old friends would constantly be getting in touch to ask for help, to tell me that their lives were in danger. I even thought quicksand would be an issue.
yet for our dear unreliable narrator mal—the mild-mannered co-owner of a mystery bookstore in boston—life is about to live up to the spirit if not the specifics (no quicksand, booo!) of his youthful expectations when he is visited, on a dark and snowstormy night, by special agent gwen mulvey of the FBI, who informs him that there's a killer afoot who is treating the book list mal made for the store's blog—a list of 'eight perfect murders'—as a to-do list, and the bodies are piling up.
dunh dunh DUNH!!
i love curating book lists and i am VERY GOOD AT IT. my much-mourned dream job was doing precisely this, and if any of my murdery lists had ever inspired a serial killer (blood on the snow! 'til death do us part! the killing games!), i would have been very flattered and ready to hunker down and talk about books all day long to help solve the crime, although i suspect my killer-catching skills are a distant second to my listmaking skills.
mal is decent at both, so he assists in the investigation, looking into several recent killings for connections either to the methods of murder or the philosophy of the murderers in the eight novels, sharing some, but not all, of what he discovers with gwen, for reasons. he will feel less conflicted about sharing with the reader the whos and hows and occasionally the whys of the murders in all eight books on his list. if you've already read these books, it's fun to see them adapted into slightly different murdershapes for swanson's purposes. if you haven't, well, it'll either be glass half empty and he spoils those books for you or glass half full and he saves you the trouble of reading them.
if you're an avid mystery reader, you've probably read at least a few of them, and if you have, you'll be savvy enough to predict a few moves that swanson's book makes, but calling some of them early doesn't diminish the fun of reading it at all; it's like taking a meandering meta journey through mystery's literary history—swanson incorporating elements from several different mystery subgenres before wrapping it all up in one big homage.
i am grateful that my porridge brain wan't too lumpen to enjoy this, and i admire swanson's confidence in writing this book, knowing that many people would be unwilling to read it because spoooooooilers.
these are the books on his list, which you will know things about if you read this book: