Books Read in 2016: A Ramble

I rarely read critical reviews of fiction. The main reason is, simply, I only have so many hours on this planet and I’d rather read a new book than someone’s opinion on a book (and at the end of the day, no matter how well-reasoned, any criticism of fiction is subjective. Non-fiction is another ball o’ wax.) This is not to say I think critical reviews of fiction don’t have a place. They do. At their best, they can bring a whole different context to the work in question, provoking questions and viewpoints you’d never thought of. In academia, I would imagine they are essential. For students, they help build a structure of critical thinking, something that is eroding way too fast in western society of late.

But they can also be pretentious, ludicrous, and force weight on a story that was never meant for any purpose beyond entertainment. And in this they can be dangerous—they can turn people away from reading for pleasure. Too often, they reflect the author’s biases and adopt a tone of condensation that reveals the author’s insecurity and apparent need for vindication or, at the worst, ego-stroking. It’s a strange hill to want to be king (or queen) of, but to each their own. For me, as a both a voracious reader and sometimes creative writer, the only question that matters is: did I dig it? This can take many forms, from a breezy read that leaves as soon as I close the book but gave me joy while reading to a read that makes me uncomfortable, challenges me, and sticks in my mind long after. Both experiences and the ground between are essential. It’s not an either/or.

The review as a promotional tool—essentially a function of the marketplace—is altogether different. I read these reviews to get a sense of what the story is about, which is necessary since I only have a few friends who read in the areas I do and book discovery is a consistent challenge. I generally discard the opinion of the review (unless it’s one of the aforementioned friends or, on occasion, an author list I find intriguing) and do my best to read between the lines and get a feel for whether I want to check the book out or not. I almost never write reviews, because one man’s trash is another’s treasure (though I do on occasion, when I think even the tiny signal boost of a Goodreads review might aid discovery.) What works for me may—even likely—doesn’t work for you. Which isn’t to say I’m not full of opinions about what I read (or watch, or listen to.) I just recognize that those opinions don’t reflect anything deeper than my reaction to the work in question.

I quite enjoy looking over what I’ve read each year. This is the third year I’ve written scattered thoughts on the year’s reading (you can find year one here and year two here) and I hope you enjoy it. These are just the random opinions of a guy who loves to read and sometimes picks up a pen and throws a few words onto the paper. Nothing more, and if we could discuss these or other titles over a beer someday, well, that’s the best way to have the discussion, no?  But you are far away and I’m here, so words on a screen it must be.

Read in 2016 (plus a couple from late December 2015)

The Troop, Nick Cutter

Thinking Horror: A Journal of Horror Philosophy, Volume 1

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

Collected Works, Flannery O’Connor

From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

The Case Against Satan, Ray Russell

The Dark Country, Dennis Etchison

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, Neil deGrasse Tyson

A Head Full of Ghosts, Paul Tremblay

The Visible Filth, Nathan Ballingrud

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty

Last Days, Adam Nevill

Furnace, Livia Llewellyn

Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, Martin Aston

2666, Roberto Bolano

Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, Bob Mehr

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz

The Dark Domain, Stefan Grabiński

Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love, David Talbot

The Fireman, Joe Hill

Lesser Demons, Norman Partridge

The Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson

End of Watch, Stephen King

The Last Final Girl, Stephen Graham Jones

Mongrels, Stephen Graham Jones

Hex, Thomas Olde Heuvelt

The City of Mirrors, Justin Cronin

Strange Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story, David Buckley

The Nameless Dark: A Collection, T.E. Grau

After Dark, Haruki Murakami

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, Paul Tremblay

The Elementals, Michael McDowell

Satanic Panic: Pop-Culture Paranoia in the 80’s

The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub

My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor, Keith Morris

The Spider Tapestries, Mike Allen

The Lure of Devouring Light, Michael Griffin

Burnt Black Suns, Simon Strantzas

Enter Night, Michael Rowe

Every House is Haunted, Ian Rogers

The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier

Concrete Island, J.G. Ballard

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

Damn, that’s a long list. I’m surprised, considering what a difficult year it was on a personal level. Reading is as essential as breathing. Support your local library, my friends.

The Two Most Important Books I Read in 2016

While I read many fine, enjoyable books this year, two titles loom above all in terms of emotional impact, provoking thought and spiritual contemplation. These two books—one fiction, one non-fiction—encapsulate the craft and art of the written word at its most transformative. I read both early in the year, and all these months later they still echo and reverberate in my head and my heart.

Every year I read at least one long, intensive and, for lack of a better term, literary novel. And each year I give thanks that such novels still exist, because I honestly don’t know who the audience, beyond possibly a handful of academics a few freaks like me, for these books are. Books that tackle all the chaos, past and present, of our sprawling, messy world and chase after the grand themes of life are a hard sell with the decline of the novel’s cultural impact. And yet Robert Bolano spent the last days of his life writing 2666 and left the world with an ostensibly unfinished, first draft of a book that no single writer could touch today even if they spent years woodshedding.

2666 is angry. It is sad. It is hilarious. It is political. It is existential. It is grounded in the everyday and completely abstract. It is hard to read and impossible to put down. It is a seething mass of contradictions. It contains multitudes. It has more to say about the disposableness of life, the passion of the heart and creativity than anything I’ve read in…I don’t know, I can’t even think of what other work you’d compare this novel to. Honestly, I’ve been trying to think of what to say about this book for ten months now and I’m still at a loss.

There are five sections to the novel, and they are handily labeled as such: The Part about the Critics, The Part about Amalfitano, The Part about Fate, The Part about the Crimes and The Part about Archimboldi. All are brilliant, but The Part about the Crimes is the hardest to read, the most politically-charged and angry piece of fiction I’ve read in years, and it accomplishes this without hectoring, without a lecture, leaving you despondent at how we fail those whose lives are on the margins (it covers, in a barely fictional sheen, the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez where an estimated 370 women and girls have been violently murdered or disappeared since 1993. I had never heard of these crimes until I read this book and was devastated to learn that they are real—and ongoing.) For as harrowing as this section is, it is but one part in a larger tapestry—the book is circular, the connections tenuous and incidental, one story spinning into the next. I was enraged, I cried and I laughed. Is it a messy book? Yes, tremendously so. And yet the rawness of the first draft carries an emotional weight and power that I’m not sure could have withstood polishing and organization. For some, writing is about craft. For others, it is about the story. For the rare few, it is an absolute expression of their soul and the soul of the worlds they inhabit. That is what 2666 is, and if this book was discussed in the living rooms of America, we’d live in a different world. Great writing doesn’t belong tucked away in dusty classrooms. It lives, breathes and seethes with our daily struggle to live and rise above our personal faults and the failures of our systems.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory is a memoir of one woman’s journey through the death industry in the United States. A large part of the book covers her first job working in a crematorium and extends into a powerful meditation on the funerary practices and culture in America, which Doughty believes need reforming. It ends as a call to re-think our entire relationship with death and how we say goodbye.

I think about and write a lot about death, but this book opened my eyes to how little I’ve thought about modern funerary practices. I didn’t realize how recent many of our practices are. A cornerstone—maybe the cornerstone—of my personal philosophy is that your death should inform your life. I talk to my death all the time. I have a journal I write to it in. And yet in all of this I’ve thought very little about what should or will happen to my body when I’ve gone, my point of view being essentially that I’m dead and won’t care, let my loved ones do whatever they feel the need to do. Smoke didn’t get in my eyes, it opened my eyes that I need to take a greater responsibility for my death, and that if Western society did this as a whole, we’d have a far healthier relationship with death. Caitlin’s work to pull back the veil and stop the death industry’s whitewashing of our final passage is admirable and deeply important. After I finished Smoke I discovered all of the great work and information sharing she (and many others) are doing via The Order of the Good Death. Their mission statement:

“The Order is about making death a part of your life. Staring down your death fears—whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety of modern culture is not.”

Smoke is the best kind of memoir—funny, sad, self-aware, insightful, passionate—and I have nothing but total respect for the important work Caitlin is doing. Read the book. Check out The Order of the Good Death. Change your life and your death.

Notes on a Selection of Novels Read in 2016

Discovering Paul Tremblay was a reading highlight of 2016. A Head Full of Ghosts answers the question of whether there is such a thing as truly great modern horror novel with a resounding YES! Suspenseful and engrossing, Ghosts manages to engage pop culture and the reality TV phenomena on a complex level while telling a story that you won’t be able to put down. It’s a balance that is near impossible to pull off and Tremblay does it beautifully. A must read… Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, Tremblay’s latest, is just a shade less brilliant, meaning it’s still a tremendously enjoyable read. The ending is a tad muddled but the fully-shaded characterizations and the complexity of familial and friendship bonds make reading this novel time well-spent. I hope Tremblay finds a wide audience; he’s already transcending genre and is one the finest fiction novelists writing today…

Another resounding success as a modern horror novel is Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex. More of a “traditional” horror novel than A Head Full of Ghosts, Hex inspired me to write a rare Goodreads review just so I could rave about it. I’m going to quote part of that review because it states as clearly as I’m able how much I loved this book:

“Hex is not only one of the best, if not the very best, horror novels I've read in a long, long while--it's also a thoroughly modern horror novel that is actually scary. The story works with several classic tropes of the genre and instead of getting cute and meta with them, it actually tackles the question of what would a classic horror tale set in today's world be like? Sure, there are echoes of classic works here: Pet Sematary, Blair Witch Project, The Monkey's Paw--but Hex is a unique tale that is both modern and ancient. I loved the characters, and when things started going south, I felt their sorrow and pain. The tension builds up at a perfect pace--this novel should be given to young writers to show how to do it right.”

I wanted to love The Last Final Girl but the structure was just too meta and too clever by half for me. There is a fun story behind all the cutesy tricks, especially if you love 80s slasher movies, but your ability to find that story and derive enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for metafiction…Much more successful, I’m happy to say (because I truly respect Stephen Graham Jones’s considerable talent) is Mongrels, the most focused novel by SGJ I’ve read and a real breakthrough. Episodic in nature, it suffers from some padding (it reads like a novella stretched into novel length at times) but I found it compelling and a fast, breezy read in the best sense. I think Stephen Graham Jones has a brilliant novel in him (if you haven’t checked out his short stories, do so—they *are* brilliant) and I sincerely believe it’s not that far off…

Is there such a thing as a “mainstream horror novel” these days? The kind of book you’d see back in the 80s on drugstore racks, in airports, in mall bookstores, even at grocery stores? That kind of market is surely dead, but how about the style of book? A book that does not cater to a niche audience, easy to read but full of gripping, thriller-like elements, not afraid of big ideas but largely character-driven, likely to get made into a movie? I ask because over the last four years as I read Justin Cronin’s Passage trilogy it continually struck me that it was the very model of a sprawling mainstream horror novel—in 1988. Hell, my local bookstore doesn’t even put it in the horror section; it’s in general fiction. City of Mirrors is a satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy, a gripping enough read in its own right even if you haven’t read the first two but really--you should. The book could stand to lose its epilogue and a little trimming of the side stories wouldn’t hurt, but I enjoyed it and the trilogy as a whole. Yet I can’t help but compare it to the other great trilogy of the decade, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach. The Southern Reach trilogy, in addition to being a fantastic read, feels like something new—a turning point for weird fiction, opening a path that pays respect to some of the roots but suggests a whole new storytelling framework, one that feels very much of the world we live in at this moment. The Passage trilogy, by contrast, feels archaic, which is not to detract from its considerable charms. It’s the type of major publisher mainstream book that is becoming increasingly rare, at least for horror; whether that is good or bad (or both) is a matter of individual preference…

The first half of Adam Nevill’s debut novel, The Ritual was fantastic but then it completely fell apart in the second half. Still, I came away thinking Nevill has too much talent to give up on, so I had some expectation and trepidation when I picked up Last Days. My faith was justified; Last Days is a fine novel about a fictitious late sixties/early seventies cult that seemingly comes to an end after a massacre in 1975 and what happens when a modern-day documentary filmmaker tracks down the surviving members. Crucially, it gets the uneasy feel of the seventies right…It’s sad that it took me so long to discover The Elementals by Michael McDowell. A Southern gothic tale with quirky memorable characters, it’s essential reading for horror fans…For the love of all that is good storytelling, someone explain to me why there is so much acclaim for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The worst book I read this year and one of the worst in recent memory, I don’t understand the adoration one bit. Only a dogged sense of duty allowed me to even finish it. To each their own… The Brief History of the Dead features an interesting premise about what happens after we die and how we live in the memories of all whom we’ve known. It’s also a book about the end of humanity. I quite enjoyed it even though it just kind of petered out at the end, dropping several subplots so abruptly that I ended up questioning why they were in the book at all. But life is not a tidy narrative, so why should death be any different?...

Ok, let’s talk about some of the famous names, starting with the most famous of them all, Mr. King. I’m on the record as being suitably unimpressed with the first two entries of the Bill Hodges trilogy. The final installment, End of Watch is the best of the three but it’s still a relatively weak SK book. The latter half, in particular, feels like autopilot King. It’s not terrible, but it’s only for hardcore fans and it’s territory he’s mined better elsewhere…The *only* 1980s King book I had somehow never read was The Talisman, his first collaboration with Peter Straub (the man responsible for Ghost Story, one of the finest novels of the genre and in my all-time top five.) I didn’t miss much. It probably felt a lot fresher then, but now it reads like a dry run for The Dark Tower series. I didn’t like Jack, the protagonist, at all. He was far too unbelievable and holy hell, was he whiny! Honestly, most of characters in The Talisman spend their waking hours bitching and moaning. It gets old real fast. I suppose I’ll read The Black House someday but it’s at the bottom of my King list...It’s official: I give up on Richard Matheson. I’ve tried so hard to like his work, and it’s undeniable how influential he was, but his writing is colorless and boring, and in the case of The Shrinking Man, misogynistic. I’ve no problem with unlikable protagonists, but Scott Carey is a self-pitying, predatory asshole with no redeeming features and the story itself is so dated now it has nothing to give. Matheson was better suited to writing for television (I would never deny his best Twilight Zone stories.) He may have helped ushered in a realistic, more mature style for horror/sci-fi, but pretty much everyone who followed did it better…Joe Hill’s The Fireman was an enjoyable read, building on the progress he made with NOS4A2. Although I did have the same thought I had about City of Mirrors, it really belongs in the 1980s and is archaic in style and tone. It doesn’t really detract from the book, but Joe’s got so much talent that I hope he doesn’t settle for mere variations on what has come before. The immense promise of 20^th Century Ghosts (along with Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners my favorite short story collection of the last 20 years) is still there; perhaps a return to short work? He is starting to succumb to the bloat and plot holes that plague his famous father. But he’s always readable, enjoyable, and that great modern novel may yet come. I’m not giving up hope…Kurt Vonnegut is required reading for anyone looking to understand the 20^th century. It had been years since I read him, and somehow I’d never read his most famous work, so Slaughterhouse-Five became the first post-election novel I read. Appropriate timing and sadly its themes are not dated at all…

Quickly on a few others: After Dark is the weakest thing I’ve read by Murakami. It’s not bad, exactly, but it was non-descript, the plot didn’t exist (which he usually turns to his advantage but failed to do so here) and the characters were unmemorable. Might have worked as a short story…Concrete Island can’t help but be dated but J.G. Ballard’s cold prose still holds power…Enter Night started with promise but by halfway through it was largely falling apart, and as such any emotional resonance in the ending was drained. I’d check out another book by Michael Rowe though, there is a potentially interesting voice there.

Notes on a Selection of Short Story Collections Read in 2016

Let’s start with the curdled cream of the crop, shall we? (Sorry, I’ve been re-reading EC comics this week and I’m starting to talk like The Crypt-Keeper.) T.E. Grau’s The Nameless Dark: A Collection was the best collection I read this year, and I’m extremely excited to see where this dynamic young voice goes. It also inspired a brief Goodreads review, which I’m going to nick:

“Fantastic. Fantastic! The best stories in The Nameless Dark are as good as weird short fiction gets, and the other stories are not far behind. There's not a weak story in the bunch. Grau has a gift for complex, sometimes touching characterizations which makes the darkness in his stories resonate. It's not that Grau is necessarily doing anything new with weird fiction tropes; he is wielding them like a master in the service of stories that do not leave you when you are finished reading (a much harder trick in this jaded age.) I can't pick one highlight, but I am certain I will not read better stories than "Tubby's Big Swim," "Beer and Worms," "Twinkle Twinkle" and especially "Love Songs from the Hydrogen Jukebox" this year. May the future bring us many more stories from this exciting voice!”

Did I mention it was fantastic? ‘Cuz it was fantastic. That blurb was written last summer and I still have not read any better short stories this year. Do not miss it if you have any interest in weird fiction at all…The Lure of Devouring Light caused some genre drama earlier this year that had nothing to do with the collection or author (and inspired this piece’s opening paragraphs). Griffin is a fine writer of quiet horror. Not every story works, but “Far From Streets” and (at least until the last few pages) “The Black Vein Runs Deep” mine a rich vein (heh-heh) of character-driven surrealism that, to me, encapsulate what the modern weird tale is all about. Kind of reminds me of early Barron at times, but Griffin has his own voice…Burnt Black Suns is a solid collection that peaks with the title story, which explores personal loss and the inability to reconcile the past in an emotionally intense narrative before veering into wild Lovecraftian territory. It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does and Strantzas writes clear, lucid prose with a firm hand…

Sometimes I suppose you come to things too late, and I just didn’t think Dennis Etchison’s The Dark Country was very good. Perhaps if I’d read it in the 80s when it came out? He’s undeniably influential but this collection was by turns too quiet or too thin on plot ideas, and the writing itself was pedestrian. Is there something better by him I should try? I feel like I’m missing something given how well-regarded he is…It’s kind of cheating to include Flannery O’Connor’s Collected Works here since I’d read about half of the material before, but if you haven’t read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The River” or “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” then you haven’t read a perfect short story. Much as I like Faulkner, he can’t touch O’Connor when she’s at her best…The Spider Tapestries I don’t feel I can judge because it became clear to me as I read through it that it simply wasn’t to my taste. So I’ll take this opportunity to again plug another Mike Allen’s collection, Unseaming, my favorite collection of 2014 and one of the best in recent memory. And while The Spider Tapestries wasn’t for me, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it has some absolutely beautiful language…Which is something I could also say about Furnace by Livia Llewellyn. Her 2011 debut collection Engines of Desire gut-punched me and immediately became one of my favorite books of the 00s, holding up over multiple re-reads. So perhaps my anticipation was simply too high for Furnace. I had trouble connecting with the stories, with two exceptions: “The Last Clean, Bright Summer” and “And Love Shall Have No Dominion.” Both these stories have strong narratives, and I guess that’s what I was missing in the other stories, which are frequently draped with gorgeous language and imagery but dissolve in my hands before I can feel their beating heart. And that’s probably a matter of taste, so please don’t think I’m down on this collection. Llewellyn continues to grow as a writer, I’m just not sure if her trails are ones I want to ramble down. I may give Furnace a revisit in another year and see if it hits me different. Curious to see where she goes next…

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” the saying goes, but it was the cover that first drew me to The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabiński because Franz Stuck is one of my favorite painters and Sensualité one of my favorite paintings. But the stories therein more than lived up to the cover. Calling Grabiński the “Polish Poe” or the “Polish Lovecraft” misses the point—neither of those authors have the rich veins of eroticism and surrealism running through their works as Grabiński does. It’s a failure of history that he is not as well-known as Poe or Lovecraft; his best material is just as good and perhaps even more unique. A treasure and a truly wonderful discovery from a local bookstore. Support your local library and if you can afford to do so, support your local, independently owned bookstore…I quite enjoyed Norman Partridge’s novel Dark Harvest a number of years back, and was pleased to find his short work in Lesser Demons was just as good. A confession: I don’t really care much for pulpy genre mashups, like horror western or horror noir. But Partridge’s stories are so good that when such a mashup occurs, I don’t even blink. His work is unsettling and veers into outright brutality at times without ever be exploitive. That’s a skill I very much admire in a writer. I need to get caught up on his other work…

Notes on a Selection of Non-Fiction Read in 2016

Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr was the best music bio I read this year and one of the better ones I’ve read overall. If you’re a fan of the band, you’ll be angry at them as often as you’ll cheer for them (no band was better at pointless self-sabotage) which really was the experience of being a ‘Mats fan. Everything about the ‘Mats was a mess, that didn’t make them brilliant (though they certainly were at times), it made them real. Our band could be your life, indeed. It’s also a deeply sad book for those same reasons. It caused me to see the records in a new light, amazing considering I’ve been listening to them since the eighties. Exceptionally well done and few lines ring more true than the ones on our family chalkboard: “God, what a mess/On the ladder of success/When you take one step/And miss the whole first rung”… Season of the Witch purports to be a history of San Francisco from the 40s on, at least as told through events/personalities selected for—well, I don’t honestly know, because the book really doesn’t know either. Written by the founder of Salon.com (a website that I have read steadily since its inception in the late 90s and that I have a love/hate relationship with), his love for the city shines through but the book itself seems disjointed—I think it’s trying to present SF as a microcosm of all facets of American cultural upheaval since the 60s, but it goes about it in a muddled way. Early on he brings fresh angles and insights into key movements and figures—Jim Jones, The Diggers, Patty Hearst—but the book really goes off the rails structure-wise in the last third, which robs the otherwise devastating, moving section on AIDS of its context and ludicrously suggests the 49ers saved the city by winning the Superbowl. I couldn’t even finish that chapter. A mixed bag, to say the least. Can’t really recommend…

FAB Press publishes some of the best cinema books ever to see the light of the day but with Satanic Panic: Pop-Culture Paranoia in the 80’s they have, by way of boosting small publisher Spectacular Optical (who published a limited first edition) ventured into the wider terrain of cultural studies. Do you remember the Satanic Panic? I sure as hell do, and this book examines many different aspects of the phenomenon, from Michelle Remembers to Jack T. Chick to Ricky Kasso and all points in between and beyond. The notorious Geraldo special, the Dungeons and Dragons controversy, Bob Larson…it’s all here and so much more. With so many contributors the tone varies wildly and it works in the book’s favor. Not every essay is perfect, which makes the story that much more human (no demons to be found, sorry) and many are worth more than one read. Just a great book, and I still think the scariest thing is Dee Snider’s hair. No, wait, it’s Geraldo’s mustache. That thing gives me nightmares.

My friends, we are over 5k words here. My thanks to you for having the patience to read this far. It’s funny—after such an intensive reading year I find myself here in the second week of December needing a break from any new reading. Instead I’ve been re-reading my favorite of the many biographies of Sylvia Plath, Rough Magic.As always, it inspires and saddens me in equal measure. Sylvia is one of my three cornerstones (the other two being Stephen King and Raymond Carver), her work is embedded so deeply in me it’s part of my DNA. Writing is rough magic, but reading is transcendental magic. It teaches and comforts, yells and whispers. I will never be able to read every book I’d like to in this lifetime, but I’m damn sure going to try, no matter what the circumstances my life is in at any given moment.

I will close with Sylvia Plath reading one of her best poems, The Applicant. (I’ve never found a recording of her reading The Moon and the Yew Tree, which is my favorite but all her later work moves me profoundly.) See you next year.