 Or as billed on Goodreads, Out of Body - Stories - Darkly Inventive Speculative Fiction of Ghosts, Mortality, and the Strangeness of Being Human
The unwieldily long title says it all. But I decided to add a few words anyway. Mainly because I genuinely enjoyed this book, which is a rarity these days. Double so, since these stories feature characters from a generation that can be ... rather tedious. Sorry, but you know... Sure enough, there's all the confusion and aimlessness one might expect, but the journeys these lost souls undertake are nevertheless compelling and interesting. For this, major credit to the author. It's a very impressive debut all around, really. The main downdraw for me here was the closing novella. Yes, it had the purpose of tying the stories together and di so quite well, but it was too long, too rambling, too repetitive. (Sure, some repetition was to be expected given its theme, but here it was a tad overdone.) That aside, a very enjoyable read: literary, with speculative undertones, well written, emotionally and otherwise clever. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley
0 Comments
 I've long been curious about Tenebrous Press and their brand of weird. So I figured I'd check it out with this book, slender enough for a sampler and conveniently available at the library.
So, um ... this book wasn't weird. it wasn't even that good. It read like a higher end of self-published spectrum, which makes sense as the author has made his bones in that field, although now appears to be grabbing some legitimacy through small presses. Funnily enough, this book doesn't appear to have nearly as many reviews or formats as his self-pub work. So yeah, what you have is Inuit cannibals and a gay couple who inadvertently stumbles into their midst. Plenty of diversity boxes to check there. But the writing is flat - and could've done with a thesaurus to avoid sentences like "no helpful surfer to help him." The plotting in thin and over-reliant on cheap thrills. The ending is predictable. Presumably, both the press and the book fancy themselves edgy, but it's only in the way of kids trying on swear words - crude, meaningless, and overdone. It is entirely possible that this is what the modern genre reader wants and needs. Likely even, albeit sad. But those looking for originality and literary writing will be as disappointed as I was. No cherry on top.  I've been such a fan of Alderman that I downloaded this off Netgalley after barely scanning the plot summary. Something about strange new animals? Mimmoths? Sure, sounds good.
And if I had paid closer attention, I probably still wouldn't have known what I was getting into. The Strangers is the kind of book that tricks you. What it reads like is a deeply personal exploration of grief that reads much like a memoir wrapped in a thin cloak of fiction. The protagonist is a well-known author, Naomi Alderman. I don't know enough of Alderman's life to speak to the veracities of personal details, but what I do know matches up. And her professional life is spot on, including the writing of this very novel. Most of the novel is spent on Alderman processing her grief and contemplating aging and mortality. The mimmoths are there, but only as a foil. Their aspect of the plot is consistently malnourished. While Alderman holds some personal aspects back and expresses dislike of the descriptor auto fiction," I've no idea how else to adequately describe this book. Too heavy for tongue-in-cheek meta, too intimate for speculation, and too undercooked on the speculative side, it was a somewhat frustrating read, despite Alderman's customary beautiful writing. The Strangers is strange. While I salute the author's daring to try something new in the market increasingly reliant upon manufactured sameness, it didn't quite work for me. Ultimately, it was a book the author likely needed to write, but not necessarily the book I needed to read. User mileage may vary. Thanks Netgalley.  I honestly can't remember the last time a book took me this long to read it. Nightjars isn't even that long, and so of it was plain business, but there was something laborious about this novel. When I try to unpack that feeling, two highly subjective things come to mind:
1. the writing style is ... overwhelmingly literary? I'm not sure that describes it adequately. Wehunt is a very good writer, talented and with a clear and present gift for wordsmithing. But it gets away with him. When metaphors are occasional, they make you pay attention. (Some of Wehunt's are excellent.) When it's in every sentence it can be exhausting and likely to have more misses. And it does slow the book down. 2. I didn't care for its characters. Not the troubled Luke, and especially not the momma bear Kristen who can't seem to pause and consider who she's having children with. Luke was more interesting to follow, but when the author started switching up perspectives it became a bit of a drag. Though to be fair, meeting the market's demands these days, it's very difficult to just have a male protagonist. Full credit where credit's due, Wehunt did take a classic trope and spun it into something more or less original and did it while writing literary fiction with enough horrific aspects to please genre fans. So from that perspective, the novel succeeds. I'm sure it'll easily find more adoring audience than me, too. I did appreciate the overall quality. Thanks Netgalley.  Jeff Noon is an author who consistently impressed me with his John Nyquist series and seriously disappointed me with Vurt when I finally got to it. But since Nyquist books were his most recent, they made up the bulk of a favorable impression. Not only can he write, but he's got a genuinely impressive imagination.
What I loved most about those series is the worldbuilding, specifically the way Noon takes normal world and turns it just enough on its axis just enough to give it new and interesting rules. This is the technique he also employs in this pseudomemoir wrapped in fantasy. I normally don't read either genre, but exceptions do get made, and in this case, it was absolutely worth it. Joe Sutter is a young buy in the 1960s England - Jeff Noon-s contemporary - who lives in a world just like our own but full of magic dust. And as if that wasn't magical enough, he also gets to learn how to become a writer. The book is a nostalgic delight, albeit a wee bit drawn out for my taste. It's the kind of children's story adults can enjoy due to its overall timeless and ageless appeal. There's much to love about it, especially its mediations on the nature of writing, which - when done right- is just like magic. Recommended.  I've been a fan of Wayne for a while. He got his start in literary fiction and stayed the course until his recent Winner tiptoed ever so slightly into the domestic thriller territory.
That's a lucrative territory to set foot into. Thrillers are all the rage these days, their popularity increase directly proportional to their quality decline. By now, I've mostly stopped reading them altogether because of how blandly formulaic they've become. It's lamentable to consider that this is the direct response to what the audience wants, but to avoid digressing ... With this book, Wayne hits all the marks of the modern thriller: the troubled marriage, at least one eventually dead spouse, the hot au-pair, people with money behaving badly, etc. Yet he does it with his unique flair, which is to say he manages to subvert expectations by veering away from offering an easily likable protagonist and by making the narrative deliciously ambiguous and ... gasp ... literary. Is it going to sell in the millions like all the other trop-ridden genre crap out there? Possibly not. Is it considerably better than most of what genre has to offer right now? Absofreakinglutely. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but I don't need cheap gotcha thrills to turn the pages. If you're curious what all those genre tropes might look like upscaled, you'll likely enjoy this book too. But for purely selfish reasons, I do hope Wayne gets back to what he does so very well and continues to just write good, literary, character-driven fiction. Just as I hope one day the reading world will get back to considering that thrilling in its own right.  I've been a fan of Fink since Welcome to Night Vale. Then I read Alice Isn't Dead and was happy to learn he was excellent on his own, too.
This novella did not disappoint, either. While not as drolly amusing as the aforementioned gems, The Nudge still has a district tongue-in-cheek wry undertone and the same sense of macabre glee. In structure, it's simple enough: a conversation between two people, one checking into a remote hotel and one doing the checking in. If you're thinking Psycho ... kudos but think again. The hotel is strongly reminiscent of the Winchester's widow's house; its operator is just "off" enough to let it slip beneath the faultlessly polite exterior; and the guest has a doozy of a story to tell about how he came by the wounds he has. In the most delightfully dark and twisted way, it spirals from there. This was such a fun, quick read, a wonderful reminder of the superiority of the novella format when done right. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.  I've been a genre fan for a very long time, and I'm actively sad to see the direction in which it is heading, as evidenced by books like these.
Where do I even begin ... Well, it is described as gruesome, and gruesome it is. In the most disgustingly visceral way imaginable. If pages upon pages of graphic descriptions of vomiting and excreting are your thing, you're in for a real treat. The problem seems to be that the author confuses disturbing the audience with disgusting them. The former takes literary skill and psychological manipulation and such, the latter ... not so much. For another thing - and this may be controversial and therefore scary in its own right to discuss - this is the kind of book that leans heavily into the race aspect without really saying anything profound about it. Specifically, it is the kind of book where someone's race is the first thing you learn about them - and is then used as a crutch to shore up the notable absence of character development. Erewhon, the press behind this, specializes in publishing marginalized/minority voices and stories - a great mission and many kudos to them. I can only hope their other books use it in a more meaningful and thoughtful way. But the main thing here, whatever race the characters may be, they are just not interesting. Maybe because they so closely align to their terrible generation, maybe by design. But the 30-year-olds in this book act about 21 - and not a particularly mature 21 either. It's basically the cast of Friends - if Friends was ethnically, but curiously not in any other way, diverse. The group dynamics are incestuously close, mostly focused on one tedious triangle around the protagonist. Why is anybody's guess, because he's a loser (and not a charming one, either) through and through, even with their admittedly low-set bar. And yet, this tedious triangle takes up an inordinate amount of page time, because, once again, there's nothing else of interest to rely on. Mind you, there is a folk horror-eque plot aspect that could've been quite interesting, if it didn't get buried under all the whining and navel-gazing and will-they-or-won't-they garbage. So yes, it's easy to see the book didn't sing for me. Which is lamentable, because I think this writer can actually write, but nothing about his stylistic and narrative priorities worked for me, and I hated his characters. Maybe this book will sing for you. Or screech. But reading/reviewing is a subjective business, and for me, it was time wasted. Thanks Netgalley.  Everyone is talking about AI these days. And who better to do so than a writer and a computer scientist?
What I enjoyed most about Mason's Fabrications is how he avoided demonizing the technology. In fact, if anything, he humanized it. Without falling into cliches and offering easy scenarios, these stories speak of utterly plausible futures where one's existence may be augmented, assisted, etc. by the presence of AI. The other good thing about this collection is that Mason's clever enough to understand to use AI as a mere foil to talk about humanity and its numerous follies. I did find the stories uneven, with at least a couple of them (and of course they were some of the longest ones) losing my interest almost completely. But at its best, the book was really good, so my rating splits the difference. Literary, eloquent, thought-provoking ... this is literature, people. So, if you like that sort of thing, go for it.  I like novellas, and the first book in this series was original enough to try the second.
In The Other the theme remains the same, but the dynamics switch from a hiking group to a battle of the couples. Two couples, who are also hiking. It seems Neugebauer is determined to finally expose hiking for the unpleasant and potentially dangerous activity that it is. One of the couples is authentic, struck at a tough juncture in their marriage, deciding whether after fifteen perfectly happy years together as just the two of them, they want to ruin it all by bringing a baby into the mix. While they soul-search in fresh air, they encounter another couple that promptly morphs into them so much that they can hardly tell the difference. This is where it gets good. Until then, it's all just bland relationship drama, punctuated with too many 'y'alls. But the logistics of figuring out which person is your loved one and which is their doppelgänger and genuinely fun. The ending is suitable, expected, and is a rather lamentable commentary about reproductive social dynamics. All in all, a fun quick read. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2023
Categories |
RSS Feed
