Bleeding Edge

Pynchon presents a book somewhere between his lighter cartoony romps (Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice) and his more epic works. A strangely accessible work that parodies some recent crime fiction and cyberpunk, but is still recognizably Pynchon and shows off his obsessions with paranoia, secret worlds, and the fading of promise. He fixes on the dot com crash, the internet and 9-11 as the moments where an irreversible change occurred in our world and I find him profound as ever if a little goofy in the virtual reality parts. The cultural references were strange in this one I could have been convinced a Gen x writer wrote this or maybe William Gibson. The conspiracies surrounding 9/11 made me fear for a second that Pynchon was handing us a “truther” manifesto, but as usual resolution and clear political agenda are not Pynchon’s game, and every clue and hint is another sign in his labyrinth of elusive meaning and shadows. A book easier to digest than most of his work and one as filled with little shards of dissonance to ponder over.

Angel Baby

Noir and crime novels used to mean something. It used to mean damaged people with their souls and lives in tatters trying desperately for one last desperate bid for redemption. A landscape devoid of heroes filled with dive bars, luxury as a malevolent trap, gutters filled with blood, a world of desperate self-involved people hoping for love, a bit of the pie, and or safety in a world rule by greed and violence. Somehow crime novels have become boring collections of sexy lab staff, quirky detectives, super clever serial killers, police procedurals and other boring clichés. Richard Lange’s Angel Baby hearkens back to that older tradition, doomed despairing people fighting with no hope for life to mean more than the trap they have made it. Everyone is dangerous and there are no heroes, but the characters bring you along, and you try to be optimistic that anything good can come out of the proceedings. A little simpler of a story in the end than one would hope for, but when its blood drenched noir you are in the mood for, complexity isn't always called for.

Death and the Penguin

Post-Soviet Ukrainian existential and absurdist noir is new genre for me and one I think Andrey Kurkov owns, Kurkov crafts tales worthy of Kafka but with warm humanity and humor and plotting that are definitely his own. The hero is a writer with writer’s block and a pet penguin (gotten from a defunded zoo) and while this combination at first seems a little bit precious but their melancholy day to day is described with well-placed rhythms and details and is never too cute. The events get both sinister and humorous as the protagonist accidently gains a family, writes obituaries for living people that then die, and is forced to attend gangster’s funerals with the penguin in tow. Death and the Penguin is a beautiful and amusing book with a sad sack sense of humor, affection for absurd and ominous situations presented in clear language, and humanity.

Empty Space: A Haunting

The finale to Harrison’s trilogy is as confounding, obtuse, and beautiful as the rest of the series. His prose is crafted so impeccably and relentlessly it is hard to resist chewing over each line and word choice (it is also very discouraging for the amateur writer) and occasionally losing the plot. But with Harrison you know you are going to read it again, soon I might restart the trilogy and see how they work together. His imagery, imagination, and prose are on such a level that they put much science fiction (is there anyone else who writes in the genre recently that is comparable as a stylist, Wolfe, Mieville, Shepard, or Gibson?) and other fiction in its shadow. Jodorowsky and Lynch should have skipped Dune and waited for these books to adapt. Quantum physics, Gnosticism, and dream imagery mixed with cyberpunk, noir, depressing near future science fiction, and space opera for a dense, cinematic, and surreal nightmare.

Red country has been labeled as Abercrombie’s take on the western. This partially true, as Abercrombie has managed to squeeze as much of the tropes and furniture of said genre into this book. Showdowns in bars, scouts, wagon trains, native attacks, cattle stampedes, frontier towns, a stagecoach chase, ravaged homesteads, kidnappings, last stands, and others are all gloriously skewered and given homage. There are references to many of the classics, The Unforgiven, Outlaw Josey Wales, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Searchers, Blood Meridian, but the atmosphere most resembles Leone or Kurosawa’s similar grafting of westerns tropes onto a Samurai milieu.  I say only partially true as this essentially at its core nothing but yet another prime piece of Abercrombie fiction, a writer so thoroughly on the top of his game that it is kind of disappointing to read anyone else. This book is another rollicking black comedy with existential dread and skewered moralism and terrifically drawn characters. He has always skewered genres. His original trilogy was just his take on the classic fantasy trilogy, followed by a revenge/thriller, and then war fiction. These paint by numbers genre frameworks are just place for him to splatter paint all over. He is getting better and better and this is my favorite by him yet. He brings back many of his characters from his previous books. I will not give any spoilers by revealing which ones (one is barely disguised, one receives an ending I felt a little anti-climactic, and another is well disguised but I think I guessed who.), but while this will bring smiles to long time readers I believe you can read this book without any introduction. Waiting for his next book is going to be tough, but unlike Martin I know I won’t have to wait that long.

Brian Evenson Fugue State

Fugue State by Brian Evenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fugue State is another worthwhile collection of Evenson’s brilliant, angular, and disconcerting takes on fiction. He uses short fiction in way very few contemporaries do, Ligotti definitely comes to mind though. Beckett’s desolate spaces and comic narrators, Poe’s diseased and obsessive minds, the suffocating traps of Kafka are Evenson’s peers, but his collection of mutilations, plagues, amnesiacs, liminal spaces, and bizarre rituals are distinctly his own voice. Zak Sally the cartoonist and former bass player of the wonderful band Low provides some stark little illustrations and one full on collaboration with Evenson.

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Dennis Lehane Live by Night

Live by Night by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lehane has always had one foot in the gutter as he gazed towards Hollywood. Maybe he that gaze has grown increasingly longing over the years. This book features lots of crowd pleasing action pieces, stylized and over the top dialogue, some glossed over historical bits, and a super rushed and arguably botched ending. I was thoroughly entertained on each page though. Is that enough to recommend? I'll mull it over for awhile.

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Crackpot Palace: Stories by Jeffrey Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ford has the keys to the landscape of our dreams. Taking the ephemera of our pop culture such as comic books and strips, pulp science fiction, the drudgery of day to day living, our dreams, our myths, and turning them into a startling dreamscape filled unsettling evocative images, characters, wonder, and terror, a rich and occasionally quite horrific world. Each of his short fiction collections is a wunderkammer, a cabinet filled with curiosities, grotesques, and eerie beauty but presented with an earthy sense of humor. His novellas like Relic and the Wish Head are the most consuming and realized but shorter pieces like Dr. Lash Remembers and Daddy Longlegs of the Evening manage to create whole universes, and really the only story that felt a little half-baked was Ganesha.

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Immobility by Brian Evenson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Noir character edge, apocalyptic tone, Marx Brothers meets Beckett (if they are at all different) dialogue, comic but sinister duos, stark prose, identity and reality in doubt, and probing moral questions are all present and mark Immobility as both a representative and a thoroughly accomplished example of what one our best writers, Brian Evenson, does. This is his take on the post-apocalyptic genre and it is lighter in language and tone then his previous venture (the beautiful and singular Dark Property: An Affliction being a prime example) into the territory. As a literary example of the genre, comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are inevitable, but the characters in this book are the ones the son and father in that book cower in woods and attics to avoid. Evocative of absurdist drama, seventies science fiction, lean, experimental tinged writing, and nasty noir, this book is recommended for any fan of such styles and of course fans of Evenson’s particular brilliance.

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Kameron Hurley

God's War
A high bar in fantasy/ science fiction has been set with Morgan’s Kovacs series, Mieville’s and Vandermeer’s weird fantasy, Alaistair Reynold’s Revelation Space series, Ian Mcdonald’s emergent economy novels, and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl. In this context I must mention my joy at reading Hurley’s debut. Disgusting, disorienting, morally very troubling and inventive and filled with strong characters she is doing for noir infused science fiction what Abercrombie is doing for high fantasy, dragging into a filthy alley and producing the coolest, wickedest and damn fun you can find on a book shelf. The world is fascinating and disorienting (especially the technology), the religious aspect interesting, and the charactersdangerous, insane, and very human

Joe Abercrombie

The Blade Itself: The First Law, Book One (First Law #01)
Abercrombie can really write. I have read gritty takes on epic fantasy, but rarely do they offer much humor. Likewise most comic takes offer little seriousness and go for broad satire. Abercrombie manages to be consistently humorous without losing a moment of seriousness or brutality. This isn’t innovative in most of its elements, barbarians invading from the north, fading magic, a grumpy wizard, a grotesque character that is oddly lovable, a group of misfits pulled together to go on a quest, and many more are all present. He just decided to write the hell out it with the dark edge of a crime novel or a spaghetti western, characters that never seem false, clean writing that moves those characters in interesting ways, a realistic view of politics (no white legions fighting the dark lord here), a taste for brutality that makes this book just a black hearted delight. His use of repetition and multiple viewpoints is used in such a satisfying way that I’m little shocked that this is a debut. Recommend like it’s a good HBO series or Kurosawa film rather than an epic fantasy trilogy.

Before They Are Hanged: The First Law, Book Two (First Law #02)
I am tempted to throw all intellectual rigor aside and just write “kick ass! for a review of this book. But, really this accomplishes what a middle volume in trilogy does and more. The bleak humor, the brutality, the realpolitik, the skewering of tropes of the fantasy epic present is the first volume is all accomplished and the tension, intensity, and stakes are raised. By twisting European history and the elements of a fantasy epic into blood stained ominous volumes with likeable characters(I down right love some of them) Abercrombie is producing the most irresistibly reading I have encountered in a while.
Best Served Cold
Almost too much of a good thing in this blistering novel from Abercrombie. He has always tempered the inherent darkness in his stories with humor and a well-rounded approach to character and irresistible narrative pull. The narrative energy and character strength are not lacking, but this book is just so beastly bleak that the humor may seem almost ill placed. The only resistance to reading that this book gave me was in absolutely dreading what would come next for the characters that I had become attached to. For an author who has made a career of rendering unlikeable characters not just likeable but enthralling this cast is his toughest sell, shades of gray doesn’t begin to cover their individualities. But he gets me to care and in the web of deceit, murder, plots and counter plots, revenge, and bloody war I wondered whether a caper flick or Shakespeare tragedy was going to be the ending reached. I won’t give spoilers but to say it was somewhere in between. The believability of the setting is strength with the war torn kingdom of Styria resembling 16th century Italy or central Europe during the Thirty years war with marauding mercenaries, warring city states, intruding foreign powers, and unfortunate commoners. Abercrombie hasn’t even begun to hint that his energy and invention is ever going wear out
First Law #03: Last Argument of Kings
That someone has taken the tired form of the fantasy trilogy and turned it into the gnarliest, fully realized, and readable fiction in recent memory is a wonder of the ages. That the author has mentioned influences such as James Ellroy, The TV show The Wire, Shelby Foote, Kurosawa, spaghetti westerns and film noir alongside Moorcock and Tolkein speaks volumes. This is pop fiction that lives and breathes, feels like real history, can rarely be outguessed (one big twist I did see fairly early on), and is quotable, funny, furious and brutal. Suffocating darkness nearly snuffs out the humor but still manages to redeem it from being po-faced grit. I might have some more textured commentary for this book later, but in the weeks after reading it I’m still pretty giddy with excitement at reading it.

Zoo City

The pop energy of vintage cyberpunk brought to the tropes of Urban Fantasy. Urban fiction is my preferred choice, but urban fantasy with its use of mythic themes and gritty modern life rarely works for me (too wish fulfillment or something), but author’s pop sense, bloody South African noir, third world angst, and wit, redeems this tired form.

Wire to Wire (Tin House New Voice)

Appropriate blurbs from Willy Vlautin and Donald Ray Pollack as this is a similar tale of a low life group of outcasts, junkies, murderers, and fools. Shades of Thompson and McCarthy but similar to Kem Nunn in that the fall of the characters is echoed by the squandered potential of the landscape they inhabit. He nails the druggy despair of Lower Michigan, I had the outline for novel of druggy lowlifes in Michigan (where I grew up) but now I’m wondering what the point would be (weirdly the author also lives in the town I currently live in). The cleverness of the dialogue also brings to mind Robert Stone and Elmore Leonard. The energy and fluency of the prose enervates what would be an endlessly depressing story… Beautiful packaging by Tin House also.

The Devil All the Time

Donald Ray Pollack takes the desperation and despair of his Knockemstiff stories and stretches them into a crime novel, like Jim Thompson troubled by readings of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor and insomnia. Serial killers, pedophile priests, suicide, killers, religious fanaticism and a heap of dead bodies fill this grim tale. Pollock gives this story a hero and we have someone rightly or wrongly to root for which is a difference from his influences. Devil all the Time is a decent first stretch into novel length by Pollack hopefully to be followed by stronger ones. This won’t make him a household like his influences but puts in company with fellow interpreters of their gothic Americana such as Daniel Woodrell and William Gay (who provides a blurb).

Richard Calder

Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things


Calder’s Dead trilogy is a Frankenstein monster made up of masturbatory fantasies about anime, serious fevered study of De Sade and Bataille, love of the baroque prose of Nabokov and Angela Carter, and fin de siecle decadence held together with cyperpunk wiring and then torn to pieces with narrative scatterbombs from Burrough’s Nova trilogy and Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet. If you don’t like these references, you won’t like Calder.

Frenzetta
A baroque picaresque/romp of surrealistic porn and grand guignol a la Angela Carter’s Passion of New Eve or Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, with a mix of the decadent adventures of Moorcock, and more than a hint of Ballard pushed through a vision where anima, 30’s pulp, and French Symbolism are of equal import. Strangely fun if you give it a chance and wade through the purple prose with lots of cruelty and outrageous gore and an overload of style. Set in version of world where an event called the Abortion forced another reality on our own with lots animal people, a weird mix of technology (airships and muskets, teleporter and one stomping robot), and divided into Afric, Europa, Cathay, and Atlantis who wages war on all with their air navy and robots and in a wonderful inverse are the last remaining humans (the others ruled by the tribes of the perverse). Romping through this world on their way to the Moon and mythical freedom are a goblin princess (half rat and human) who will die when she orgasms, a brain eating revenant, and their dwarf maid. Balloon rides, a birth from a corpse, squid weaponry, necromancers, a queen who has her brain transplanted in a freshly killed young girl every year, a mix of myth and technology add to the perverse thrills of this book. Edgar Allen Poe and Marquis de Sade would have loved this one.

The Twist


A surreal western evoking Henry Darger, Angela Carter, and Lucius Shepard(especially the Nazi fantasia of “The Spanish Lesson” and “Bound for Glory”(a chapter bears this title.). A mix of western, 50’s sci fi b-movies, dark fantasy, and an exploration of death. This is a mix of ridiculous and the sublime like all Calder. A 14 year old girl narrates the proceedings like a jaded post grad, people quote Schopenhauer during gunfights, but the hallucinatory imagery and beautiful prose makes this so weird you can’t help but love it a little bit.

Malignos



Cynical, decadent adventure tale like Moorcock(including a living sword) or Vance(with a protagonist as arrogant and obnoxious as Cugel) that is remarkable straight forward for Calder with little of his baroque prose and density of weirdness. Set in the same future as his Frenzetta but set so far in advance of that book that its events have become a fable. This book has everything you would want from an adventure story: a world decaying with lost secrets, traps, narrow escapes, traveling carnivals, a hollow earth(or an underground hell or demon realm in its center), plenty of action, ancient technology, castles, ghosts, dimensional gateways, cruel experiments, and a quest. The place and character names are all taken from Milton, De Quincy, and the Old Testament which adds to the atmosphere. The protagonist is so arrogant and self centered I wonder if Calder is poking fun at his own notoriously solipsist protagonists. So this was a rip roaring adventure with plenty of pulpy and gothic wonders but a little to straightforward to be one of Calder’s better work. Maybe he wanted to see if he could restrain himself and actually write a book that kind of made sense? Fans of Moorcock, Vance, Wolfe, Rudy Rucker (Hollow Earth), Milton, Lucius Shepard’s Dragon Griaule stories, and E.R.Burroughs, will find this a fun addition to their bookshelf

China Miéville

Perdido Street Station. China Miville
Where I can understand people being off put by Perdido Street Station, it never did that for me it was pretty much reading crack for me and I lived only to read it when I first discovered it. It felt like reliving my childhood in a new light as it was so entwined with my first literary loves of Moorcock, Wells, Poe, and Lovecraft and also with my adult faves like Angela Carter, W.S. Burroughs, and Borges.


The Scar


The Scar is a wonderful evocation of the macabre adventure stories of Verne and Wells, philosophical treatise on dystopias/utopias, dark steampunk fantasia in the Moorcock vein, grisly spy story, mad quest worthy of Melville, and a language showcase. I think once the shock of the new wore off that caused people to fawn over Perdido Street Station(which for the most part deserved the praise) critics and readers dimissed the other two subsequent books of Mieville’s anti-trilogy. Well, they missed out because I think he got better. Not much in fiction is more intense than the last third of this book where it gets pretty messy.


Iron Council


Enough imagination for eighty books..my favorite of Mieville's anti-trilogy for some reason...seems like you walked into a Bosch painting for most of the book.The most dismissed of Mieville’s books maybe because the first hundred pages are a little confusing and the structure strains a little bit more than usual. While all his books have flaws his enormous imagination and stunning vocabulary (rivaling Wolfe and McCarthy) pave over any hesitations I have. This one focuses on a tragic and costly civil war and the idea of heroes and roles people decide to play. Of course it’s also a fun and yet disturbing adventure that is part gothic western a la McCarthy and features a surreal war that evokes Bosch and Lovecraft . A love for folklore, language, politics, and real history infuse this one with some heft.


Mieville in his Bas Lag books took the gothic secondary world fantasy of Peake and M. John Harrison added complexity worthy of Thomas Pynchon, a vocabulary matching Gene Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy, and grotesque imagery of Bosch and Ernst; and created a series that may have the cultural impact of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. This book features not even a hint of that. He must have lost his favorite thesaurus with all the sticky notes in the right place. If this was handed to me without a cover Mieville wouldn’t even be a consideration for me when guessing the author. That said I enjoyed this for the most part. He obviously intended to follow the police procedural formula to tell his story but most of the characters were pretty hard to distinguish so a lot of the plot revelations fell flat for me. This book also is intended as a tribute to Bruno Shultz and other Eastern European authors(impeccable taste as always) but a few references aside it didn’t do much for me there as nothing resembled Shultz’s night music laced world. The setting provided many memorable and thoughtful metaphors that will linger once the characters and plot fade. Glad he is trying different stuff but I won’t rush back and reread this one while I struggle to keep from rereading his other books.

The Manual of Detection

Jedediah Berry uses the stock images of the detective novel to create a Kafkaesque fable. Set in a quasi-victorian(where the steampunk label comes from)/quasi-30’s atmosphere this is an atmospheric, baroque, and endlessly readable fantasy where it could have been a dry run through of genre cleverness. The sum of the parts doesn’t quite bring it in for a totally satisfying ending but the ride is terrific. Great debut. On influences, well digested for the most part,though maybe a bit of an obvious nod to Angela Carter (her Infernal desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman a touchstone with the war of dreams and a character named Hoffman) and hints of Borges, Calvino, Jeunet/Cairo and Gilliam movies, Lethem, and Auster.

This Wicked World

Richard Lange’s debut novel is character driven literary crime novel influenced by Elmore Leonard and George Pelecanos. Like those two masters’ originality and complexity of plot isn’t the name of the game, its characters. Stretching out to handle a novel Lange looses some of the focus of his short stories but retains his grasp on L.A. and its surreal surroundings and his subtle sense of humor. Some descriptions and in some character’s background his imagination really unfurls. The pit bull breeder’s war story, Mando’s ghost story, Robo’s camping preparations, and apocalyptic finale are especially memorable. So if you want a beautifully written novel go for this, which it’s true doesn’t bring anything new to the game but will still burn into your imagination. Plus it starts with Minuteman quote (the awesome San Pedro punk band not those desert patrolling losers) which is a cheap way to my heart.

Sleepless

Sleepless is a mix of zombie movie,a future is now(actually an alternate present), a hard boiled thriller, and strangely a meditation on a family. This is written in a more convoluted style than Mr. Huston usually stripped down style for a couple reasons I suspect, mainly his use of invented author as the teller of this story and I suspect a mild overload on research. He is using punctuation marks on his dialogue so any of those lunatics who find this stylistic trait so annoying as to write off author’s entire oeuvres can rest assured that their delicate sensibilities will be left unruffled. There is some intriguing stuff in this book and it will be seen whether this will be the first step in an evolution of an author or a one off, but if it is the former it needs some tweaking as this was an interesting but a little cold as a book. Some of the fight scenes made think I was trapped in the video games that everyone in the book are playing. The central disease is beautiful and terrifying and the world is an unsettling portrait of our own, a brilliant slice of the future is now in the style of Gibson, Brunner, and Warren Ellis

Trance

A Delilloesque excavation of the Patty Hearst legend. Part documentary, deadpan screwball comedy with narrative cues from Delillo and Altman showcasing a variety of voices, snapshots, and vignettes to encompass a wide range view of the era. For its wide sweep it may play a little low key at times but the economy is a little tighter than Delillo and the topic endlessly fascinating.