Kylie Lee Baker's BAT EATER AND OTHER NAMES FOR CORA ZENG (Narr by Natalie Naudus)

There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

Kylie Lee Baker would have been fun to have as a lab partner in high school biology, I decided about halfway through her creepy horror/crime hybrid Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She relishes the particular and intimate, yes, the gory, details of the insides of organisms, revels in the sensory details of textures felt and observed, how smells penetrate not only the nostrils and sinuses but also the back of the throat, if the substance giving them off is thick enough; the contrast of vividly colored internal organs and tissues to dulled and more uniform integuments and surroundings. 

So of course her heroine here is a specialty cleaner -- of murder crime scenes. And as we already know from comics and TV, that makes for an interesting enough character and milieu right there, but Baker has bigger and better ideas than the low hanging ones. 

Because, for starters, Bat Eater takes place in Manhattan at the height of the very first wave of COVID-19, when everybody who had the luxury was sheltering in place and hoarding toilet paper and being, perhaps selfishly?, grateful not to be among the corpses stacking up in hospital morgues, then meat lockers, then refrigerated trucks parked wherever they'd fit on the island -- and our heroine, Cora Zeng, is Asian. Specifically American-Born Chinese.

Oh, and just for extra fun, all of this kicks off just in time for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, when the gates of hell open up and let the spirits of the dead roam the earth again, demanding attention and sustenance from their loved ones. Ignore them at your peril; they might take a bite out of your coffee table. Or out of you. Best to give them what they actually want, maybe?

I mean, if you believe that stuff.

And if you accept your Chinese aunt's insistence that you acquire symbolic objects made of joss paper and burn them as appeasement offerings to your dead, rather than your white and Catholic aunt's snobbish attitude that Hungry Ghosts and joss papers are just icky Asian superstitions and you should really just pray and confess and enact ritual cannibalism instead. 

Cora, you see, is half-white. But her older sister, Delilah, is fully Chinese. And, as Delilah observes of their situation in a poignant flashback to when they suddenly came into each other's lives after some familial drama finally brought them together, how they might feel about it won't charge the fact that they're family. So they might as well be more grown-up about it than their parents seem to have been, and stick together. 

Until suddenly, Delilah announces right before shocking tragedy strikes, that this whole pandemic thing has Delilah thinking about breaking up the team and heading back to China without her mei-mei, who isn't fluent in Mandarin or the local dialect their father's family speaks, and anyway Cora has nice white relatives she can maybe rely on like she does their father to send her a check from China each month to help cover NYC living expenses that are beyond his girls and their useless liberal arts degrees...

I still have a mostly negative attitude about Pandemic Literature. Too many people, I knew at the time and still maintain, decided that lockdown was the perfect time for them to finally sit down and write that novel they always knew they had in them, which, that's fine; we've been dealing with tidal waves of NaNoWriMo projects for years now and some of them have even been good, so this alone is no reason to dismiss a book, but too many of them have been about COVID-19 and the writer's personal experience of lockdown and toilet paper shortages and fear and germiphobia and putting their groceries under a UV light before putting them away (if privileged enough to have the money to spend on such a gadget) and all the rest of the, yes, mostly pretty common experience that most of the planet seems to have shared unless they were deemed Essential Workers and had to keep going to work at risk of their lives either as healthcare or grocery stockers or ambulance drivers... and didn't get to stay home and write that novel they've always known they had in them. I mean, there's only so many of those stories that I, personally, have patience for, and that number is pretty close to zero. Unless...

Unless someone has a different experience of this to share with me. Which the protagonist/narrator of Bat Eater most certainly does, for not only is she facing a new excuse for racism evoked by the title; as the Leader of the Free World and all of his minions declared while pushing the infamous "lab leak" hypothesis even as they also blamed it all on a wet market in Wuhan, China, lots of people at least claimed to believe that COVID-19 was all China's fault, and by extension the fault of every person they might encounter who even looks vaguely Chinese, even if they're third or fourth generation Americans with dim origins in completely different Asian countries than the one where Wuhan is, even if they don't speak any language but English, even if they're actually Native American but just kind of vaguely look Asian. Against whom it is now perfectly okay to discriminate and even enact hate crimes to punish the "bat eaters" for the disease and its impact on everybody's sudden inability to get a haircut.

I mean sure, racism is racism, but it has to have been extra bizarre and extra scary to suddenly get called "Bat Eater" before being spit on (which, get ready for all the bodily fluids in this story; it's not confined to the blood that Cora and her colleagues have to clean up in the crime scene du jour) or shoved or assaulted or -- here we go! -- murdered.

...maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

It would seem that there's a serial killer at work in Chinatown, targeting young, single Asian women who live alone. The killer bursts into their homes at night, brutally and spectacularly murders them in a variety of different ways, and then shoves a bat down their throats or otherwise inside their bodies, to make sure everybody Gets the Message. But so far, only Cora and her two colleagues, happy go lucky and kind of doofy Harvey (nephew of the Chinatown dry cleaning mogul who pivoted his business to crime scene clean-up when the pandemic meant nobody needed their work clothes professionally cleaned anymore) and sharply observant, intelligent and no nonsense Yi-Fei* (who is every bit as at-risk as Cora herself, being an actual immigrant from China who still has a bit of an accent), the found family Cora comes to rely on when her actual family seems to have let her down, seem to understand what's really going on. At least until they get the call to come clean the crime scene where a Chinese-American member of New York's finest has gotten the bat treatment. He would seem to have noticed as well. And to have paid dearly for noticing.

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

Anyway, the relationship that develops between Cora and her co-workers -- a relationship she is in sore need of, as the above suggests -- is the best part of the story, for me. Both Harvey and Yi-Fei get to be fully developed characters who have important things to contribute to Cora's efforts to get anyone in authority to give a damn that young Asian women are being, not just verbally or physically attacked but murdered, to maybe track down the bad guy who ruined Cora's own personal life, and to deal with the Hungry Ghost that seems to be stalking her, and not just out of hunger. Because yes, the ghost stuff is far from incidental to the setting of this story. We get lots and lots of ghost action, some of it hilariously gory, some of it genuinely creepy, much of it heartbreaking. Good thing Cora has friends.

One thing I really like about horror novels like Bat Eater is how well they maintain a sense of ambiguity for as long as possible. Is this a fully supernatural tale, in which all of the adversaries, even the disease, are eldritch horrors from beyond the veil? Is the disease "natural" but the serial killer and the ghosts supernatural? Is the disease real and the serial killer just some asshole, but the ghosts are real? Or is all of this going to turn out to be aspects of Cora's psychological trauma? Baker kept me wondering and speculating about this until almost the last hour.

And all of this, to further muddy the issues, is delivered to us with a purring, cooing tenderness by narrator Natalie Naudus, who sounds like a mother telling us a weirdly contemporary bedtime story and doesn't want us to get too scared, but still relishes the disgusting details, described with immaculate syllabic precision so we can't elide or ignore them. I smelled, heard, and felt every drop of various fluids, every garbage pile, every whiff of bad breath. I'm pretty sure I showered a few more times than I needed to. I defy you not to.

Don't snooze on this one if you're in the mood for a good scare.

*I might have misspelled her name because audio book.

Otohiko Kaga's MARSHLAND (Tr Albert Novick)

Time is really like an army of cockroaches. I have to force my hands to keep moving; it is like making myself squash cockroaches, one at a time. By my calculations, it takes one hundred finished tags to squash one cockroach.

By the time the above passage hits and makes sense to the reader, she understands the character expressing it so thoroughly that she doesn't even notice how nonsensical these words seem unless she goes back and reads it again later. At the time, she just knows that she feels it deeply, knows exactly what the character means, has been there, too, counting cockroaches with luggage tags. We are in the hands of a master of his chosen form.

It's been a while since I've indulged my love of big, sprawling social novels that 19th century Europe and North America produced in plentitude. There are still many of them I haven't read yet. I've only scratched the surface of Balzac's Human Comedy, for instance, and there are still a few Henry James chonks I haven't read yet, and while I've made a pretty throrough study of the Big Russians, Anna Karenina is still somewhere in my TBR. But I'm a perverse chooser of what to read next, and very much on the sucker lists of Open Letter, Deep Vellum and the Dalkey Archive so of course when I got the urge to grab a mammoth again, I turned to... late 20th century Japan. 

First published in 1985, Marshland is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and flashes back to even earlier. It is, as I've hinted, a very long and involved and in-depth look at Japanese society, mostly in its post-WWII years but also in earlier times in the life of its hero, Atsuo Yukimori, ex-convict, ex-soldier, and, as we first get to know him, soon-to-be universally vilified suspect in a shocking terrorist attack on Tokyo's train system. 

Atsuo is a very satisfying and meaty character to follow through a realist fictional life, introspective and honest, ashamed but never blaming anyone but himself for his many strayings from the straight and narrow path his poor family tried so hard to set him on. We meet him first as a middle aged bachelor living a very self-regulated, respectable but limited bachelor life in Tokyo, where he is the shop foreman for an auto repair business in the heart of the city. But, as we know from the very first, he has a checkered past, a deserter from this service in the Japanese army during World War II (and we'll get all of the details of his less than illustrious career in the Empire's service), a petty thief, something of a con man, a pickpocket... But we also know, before novel's end, that several of his stints in prison were pretty much entered into by his choice as the only way to stay alive, sheltered and fed through the devastating years of Japan's reconstruction, years that didn't have much use for him as a free man but did offer the chance for him to gain useful skills as an incarcerated one.

But I'm focusing too much on Atsuo, who is about as much the main character of Marshland as McNulty is of The Wire; he's the first one we get to know but is only one of many, all of whose stories matter to the overall narrative and scope of the book. There's Atsuo's vain and self-important employer, Mr. Fukawa and his devious secretary/mistress; Atsuo's nephew, also a worker at the shop and the dormitory "mother" who runs it's employee housing; there's the beautiful young student Wakako, who brings love and romance into Atsuo's life even as she draws him, inadvertently, into the world of student revolutionary politics and the police attention that brings; there are the hard-working, poor and honest members of Atsuo's family and the spoiled, immature but passionate student revolutionaries busy occupying buildings and trashing businesses and preaching doctrine at each other; and the police officers and prosecutors who have been watching them and whose baleful and possibly fatal attention comes to rest on Atsuo and Wakako after a train bombing... And the defense attorneys and private citizens who come together in the name of justice and hope and won't let Atsuo and his fellow defendants give up. All of them have lives and backgrounds and motivations and fears and desires that a good thousand pages or so allow us to explore in considerable depth and lets most of not all of them claim at least a little of our sympathy.

And, in Otohiko Kaga, we have a supremely confident novelist who misses no opportunity to put the emotional screws to us like a detective interrogating a prime suspect. Thus even the moments that should shine through with supreme happiness are tinged with tragedy and despair and bitterness, while those of desolation and enforced solitude still have hints of bitter humor and, sometimes, of possibility.

All of this is accomplished in a sound and unflashy style, so spare and simple that I honestly don't know how much is Kaga's and how much is translator Albert Novick's. Regardless, neither is trying to show off any dazzling chops or experimental elan. They've got a big, complicated, emotionally devastating story to tell and they're too committed to it to mess around with tricks of language or narrative beyond the occasional extended flashbacks.

Kaga has, also, a magnificent gift for nature writing. I have so many examples of this marked, but I think this is my favorite, from when Atsuo and Wakako are out in the Hokkaido wilderness, exploring scenes from Atsuo's childhood when he dreamed of becoming a hermit in the titular Marshland:

Those columns of ice really did take on individual forms as they grew over time, forms that were ever changing; forms that expressed - something. Some kind of will, the will that set nature in motion. That was the thing. This was not human will. There was too much variety there. It was beyond what people could make. In Tokyo the will that moves nature was in hiding. It was hidden by concrete and steel and cars and glass - the things made by people. But the stars showed the will of the creator of the natural world. So did the forest, the sea, the lake.

And yes, partaking in even earlier literary traditions, the state of the landscape is a beautiful stand-in for the emotional lives of the characters as well as the essential changelessness of the world beyond the socio-economic and political struggles of Tokyo and Osaka and Nemuro. Indeed, the final chapter for Marshland is a bravura example of linking the break-up of the ice atop frozen rivers and lakes to the freedom of new possibilities the characters are only just daring to consider as they fantasize about leaping onto an ice floe and letting it carry them out to sea. The beauty is all the greater for having been earned through hundreds and hundreds of pages of every kind of sight and sensation and emotion known to man crowding in on us and seeming like they'll never let us budge.

Anybody out there who's wondering what to put on a syllabus alongside, say, Crime and Punishment or The Portait of a Lady or Middlemarch could do worse than adding this; anybody who loves deeply involving modern-ish narratives like The Wire or just in the mood for the deepest possible exploration of the mid 20th century and how its various tensions and social currents affected real people should block out some time to spend in the Marshlands. This book is brilliant.

Oyinkan Braithwaite's MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER (Narr Adepero Oduye)

I've always hated the saying that two people "fight like sisters," though at times I've also been grateful to hear it, once I realized that the kind of guy (it's always a cishet dude) who uses it is one I needn't associate with beyond what's necessary for politeness. Kind of like the guy who spends the whole first date bitching about his ex. There are red flags and then there are gigantic swaths of fabric the color of arterial blood and still wet enough to drip and fully, it sure smells like iron in here all is a sudden...

My Sister, the Serial Killer is first and foremost a novel about sisterhood, about a relatively plain but infinitely capable, patient and compassionate older sister, Korede, and a gorgeous, glamorous and slightly spoiled younger one, Ayoola. Korede works as a nurse in a hospital where she is highly respected, if not exactly universally liked, and is up for a promotion there; Ayoola gets jetted off to places like Dubai for weekend shopping sprees and night life on the arms of rich and shady businessmen. 

Guess which one their mom likes best. 

And which one a handsome doctor who has had Korede friend-zoned for years falls head-over-heels for after meeting her just once.

By the time Dr. Handsome meets Ayoola, though, we have learned that Korede's bombshell sister has an annoying habit of killing her boyfriends "accidentally" and "in self-defense" -- and of relying on her calm and competent, medically trained sibling to help her do away with the evidence and clean everything up.

Now Korede must watch as her crush falls in love with her sister, and seems handpicked by fate to be Ayoola's fifth victim (though at the time they meet, Number Three has only just been pulled out of the trunk of Korede's car and dumped into the lake). 

That all could feel very plot-by-numbers, especially given the short length of the novel (just above four hours in Adupero Odunye's note perfect narration); it could have resulted in a very formulaic novel. Debut novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite, though, saves her book from this fate by giving her point of view character an emotional candor that lets us really feel her conflicts as she goes about her complicated days at work and at home, and by giving us some very unusual and touching plot devices that carry her further into her dilemmas, like a lovely sub-plot concerning Korede's relationship with a coma patient at her hospital. Which sub-plot manages, deftly, to have a significant impact on the main plot. Braithwaite knows what she's doing.

We get to see Korede taking on the unaccustomed mantle of officially acknowledged leadership (having been an obvious but unrewarded leader for years beforehand) at the hospital, struggle with her feelings for Dr. Handsome and her fears for him, and deal with both her deep concern for and growing resentment of Ayoola*, often in the same taut and affecting scene, making My Sister, the Serial Killer a perfect little jewel of a novel that rewards your tiny investment of time in reading it far out of proportion to its brevity. I look forward to more of Braithwaite's work. And I guess I have to tweak my search parameters a bit in future, too.  I obviously don't read enough thrillers, you guys. 

*Beautifully complicated by the fact that part of her objection to the relationship between Dr. Handsome and her sister is that he doesn't love Ayoola for any of the reasons Korede thinks make Ayoola worthy of being loved; at one point when Korede asks him point blank why he loves Ayoola, all he can tell her is that Ayoola is "beautiful and perfect," meaning he doesn't know Ayoola at all. Meanwhile, Korede is listing off all of Ayoola's best qualities, which only Korede knows, in her head. That's a very good sister!

Filip Florian's LITTLE FINGERS (Tr Alistair Ian Blyth)

An archaeological site near a small town in Romania proves to contain not only the expected Roman artifacts and building foundations, but also a mass grave of more recent provenance.  How recent is the main concern of Filip Florian's depressing yet charming -- and very, very ambiguous -- Little Fingers.

One possibility, the one immediately favored by locals, is that the grave is a 14th century plague pit, its contents all victims of a wave of the good old Black Death - historically as interesting as the Roman stuff that was originally the point of the site but not terribly controversial. The local police are directed immediately to treat it as the other possibility, though: that the human remains discovered as the book opens are from the terrible 1960s, when the forces of Romania's Communist dictatorship committed mass political murder to maintain its grip on power. 

Our narrator is part of the archaeological team, a man originally from the local area and staying with a relative in the town and already suffering from ulcers and other ailments before the shocking discovery, but he's really the least interesting of a parade of personalities that could grace, say, a cozy English mystery or a new season of something like Doc Martin. Aunt Eugenia, for instance, turns out to be a member of the British aristocracy by marriage but is locally known for an incident when she was moving to a new house and a member of the moving crew accidentally let her 50+ cats free en route, few of which were ever recovered, most of whom were never seen again - but this just gave her an excuse to start a new colony of cats in her otherwise tidy little house, where she gladly receives our narrator in for tea and gossip about the to-do in the village.

A local photographer, Mr. Sasha, who takes portraits of visitors who come to tour the Roman site does so with the aid of a camel named Aladdin that he has raised from a calf. The camel is perhaps the most charismatic figure in the village, munching away on whatever food Mr. Sasha gives him, including meat; Aladdin is even something of a nicotine fiend as he loves to eat the cigarettes that villagers and Mr. Sasha's clients like to feed it. The one rule is to keep him away from alcohol, which makes him amorous to the considerable distress of local cattle and their owners. 

Then there's local hermit-priest, a man of many names but now mostly called Onufrie, who was born on a riverbank and left behind by his unfortunate mother, taken in as a youth by a local monastery and became a devout and faithful brother there -- until the Communists came and arrested all of the monks. He becomes an important figure in all that follows. Once freed from prison, he becomes a mountain hermit for years and years, is visited by the Virgin Mary several times, and becomes a kind of confessor-by-mail of an unknown person sharing the forest with him, all while pulling a Pierre Menard with the Bible, which he writes on pieces of spruce bark, using berry juice for ink. 

It is he above all who changes the town's fate after he is moved to go perform (Catholic) funeral rites for the bodies in the grave and is observed doing so by a journalist hurting for a story. By novel's end Onufrie's act and his claims about the Virgin put the town on the map way more than the Roman ruins or the mass grave so, as the area becomes a destination for pilgrims.

As for the often mentioned Argentine forensic specialists, they never even get names and are at best figurants. Florian isn't here to tell a detective story, seems barely interested at all in giving us a solution as to the identities of those in the pit -- though he is happy to take a good chunk of the last fourth or so of the book to present their bona fides via a history of late 20th century Argentina through the lens of its national football/soccer team, with proper homage given to both Maradona and Batistuta, which I did appreciate, but having already read How Soccer Explains the World, I didn't feel like I'd learned much that is new. I reckon not a lot of Florian's original readership have read that bit of pop history, though, and as a way of understanding this group of figurants might go, it wasn't a bad choice. 

I still found the experience of reading Little Fingers, the very title of which makes no sense until the last 20 pages or so, a baffling, yet still enjoyable one. If you have a decent tolerance for ambiguity, you might, too.

Yasmina Khadra's DOUBLE BLANK (tr by Aubrey Botsford)

February from the French now takes me back to Algeria, back to crime fiction, back to Yasmina Khadra and his incredible detective-cum-novelist (not unlike Khadra himself), Inspector Brahmin Llob.

The murder that gets the plot going in this second Inspector Llob novel, Double Blank, the sequel to the amazing Morituri, is an arresting and perfect encapsulation of the relationship between the elite criminals of Algeria and the police who have to at least pretend are trying to keep those criminals in check. Not even a full day before he told Llob that "Our country needs neither prophets nor a president. It needs an exorcist," and implied that Llob should be that exorcist, former cop, diplomat and author Ben Ouda is found beheaded in his luxurious home. Ouda's headless corpse stands near a painting that belongs to the nation but has hung in his private residence for who-knows-how-long. His head has been stuffed in the bidet in the bathroom -- concealing a bomb meant to blow up whoever shows up to investigate the murder. 

Oh boy.

This time around, the good inspector is accompanied not only by his accustomed sidekick, the shell-shocked officer Lino, but by a shooting range instructor who has decided to return to fieldwork after realizing that too many of his former students have turned up dead. This new character, Ewegh Seddig, is a Touareg so massive that everybody calls him a dinosaur upon first meeting him (and I can only imagine him as played by Dave Bautista). They only get to do that once, however; if they do it again, they find out that his reflexes belie his size and his reflex is always to lash out with a face-re-arranging punch. If you're thinking that Ewegh is my new favorite character, gold star to you.

A second body, that of a well-known professor, is barely cold before Llob, Lino and Ewegh have a list of suspects to track down; there were eyewitnesses, and the murderers made zero effort to conceal their identities. Their incredible beards proclaim them as vicious fundamentalists; their lack of concealment proclaims as surely as did the head-bomb-in-the-bidet that they really and truly DGAF if the cops come after them, unless it is in that very special "come at me, bro" way in which a certain type of male seeks to solve any and all problems. Not too different from how Ewegh handles insults, I suppose? But I never claimed to be a morally consistent reader. And there's a bit of a difference between attempting to blow some functionaries into Jahannam and punching a smart-ass in the nose. Swing away, Ewegh.

Interestingly, this is the first instance that I can recall in which the translator of a sequel is not the same as the translator of the first book. David Herman did the honors for Morituri, where from here on out it's Aubrey Botsford translating Khadra's work from the French. With this in mind I kept an eye out for differences in prose style, etc, but never noticed any except for one thing that I don't really know is a translation issue or just a surprising turn of phrase in the original. It comes fairly early in Double Blank, when Llob, Lino and Ewegh are interviewing the owner of the getaway car and he looks disdainfully upon them and tells them "I'm so allergic to pigs that even the sight of bacon makes me throw up." Which just sent me off on a tangent that looks like it's going to take me a while to sort out but, isn't calling a cop a "pig" an even worse insult in an Islamic country than in more omnivorous parts of the world? Or is that slang just universal now? So far I'm turning up a doughnut hole on this but I'm probably going to keep digging.

While on the subject of translation, there is one annoying tendency I don't quite recall in the prior volume, and that's some weird ambiguities in compound sentences that left me having to read them several times to sort out who was doing what. For example, I had to ponder a moment over "I ask my colleague to let me take the wheel and then get lost." At first I thought the narrator, Llob, had simply had his companion, in this case Lino, move over to let Llob drive, and then Llob took some wrong turns or something, but no; later context revealed that in fact Llob was kicking Lino out of the car, and furthermore telling Lino to go away or "get lost." As I said, there are several bits like this, and I don't know if they are Khadra's fault or Botsford's.

Regardless, as rendered by both translators, Yasmina Khadra is one quotable motherfolklore, each paragraph more searingly awesome than the last. Like, here's one of his many passages describing the psychic atmosphere of the city of Algiers and its casbah:

Here in this tangled web, resignation rises ceaseless and unconvinced, like a noxious dough. People don't expect anything anymore. With their feet in purgatory and their heads in limbo, their prayers are transformed into curses. The graffiti on the walls has the feel of epitaphs. Cobblestones raise bruises on the surface of the disgraced road. Doorways inject their shadows deep into men's minds. 

But lest you think this an entirely bleak read, I must hasten to assure you that he can be damned funny, too, in that deadpan way of all good gumshoes.

Meanwhile, the part about the crimes. Oh, the crimes. Because it's not just a string of brutal murders getting longer and more brutal all the time; Ben "Body #1" Ouda had recently lost a whole lot of money and was plotting some kind of baroque revenge against all the hotshot tycoons that watched from the sidelines as he did so.  Ouda's revenge was to be in the form of, what else, this is an Inspector Llob story, a book he was threatening to publish. Surely it was to be full of compromising information.

And a mysterious diskette was missing from his fancy safe.

The plot that is eventually uncovered is gigantic and audacious and certainly could never happen here, in the good old US of A, or now, in the 21st century. 

Except, oh, wait, it is. Or at least it's trying to. And, of course, has tried to before. Google the Business Plot sometime. Except, well, don't use Goog anymore. It'll waste your time. Just go straight to Wikipedia, or better, a good public library. 

Meanwhile, I find I am still in shock at how good this book was. And only 127 pages long. What are you doing? Go find you an Inspector Llob novel and let Yasmina Khadra scramble your brains without using a whisk. You'll be glad you did. Mostly.

Where will February from the French take me next? Watch this space, true believers. It will be somewhere they speak French, I'm pretty sure...

Fuminori Nakamura's THE THIEF (Tr by Sakoto Izumo and Stephen Coates)

With the bag completely concealed under my jacket, no one could see anything. I put my left hand inside, hunted quickly for the phone, hooked my finger through the strap and slid it into my sleeve.. just as I felt the warmth escaping from my throat, the phone in my sleeve shrilled loudly.

As my January in Japan comes to a close, it has brought me a tightly plotted Western-style thriller with lots of tasty and tense little scenes like the above, amidst all the gentle satire and deeply felt aesthetics that have colored most of my reading this month. The Thief, Japanese superstar Fuminori Nakamura's first novel translated into English, feels more like a Robert Ludlum or Richard Starks novel than any of the graceful and subtle literary fiction I've chosen for myself.*

The titular thief, Nishimura, is a pickpocket of sufficient skill and discipline to live within his means - but his means are very, very ample. He has cultivated a discerning eye for clothing labels and other even subtler details that communicate a person's wealth at a glance, and steals only from the wealthy, helping himself to the cash in their wallets but then dropping everything else, credit cards and all, into nearby mailboxes so his victims eventually stand a good chance of getting their IDs and whatnot returned to them. What a guy. 

An encounter with his old mentor, Ishikawa, alters his simple trajectory significantly, though; almost before he realizes it, Nishimura and an old friend, Tachibana, have let themselves get roped in to helping out a group planning to rob a politician's house and get some documents out of a safe. Nishimura's and Tachibana's job is to subdue and tie up a woman who lives in the house to keep her from interfering or calling the authorities while other members of the group force the politician to give up the combination to the safe. For which each of them will be paid a ridiculous amount of money. 

Easy! 

It all goes off without a hitch, but as they finish, one of the group members lingers behind on a related task, and Nishimura receives a cryptic warning to get the hell out of town as soon as he can. Lying low, he later learns that the politician did not survive that night, and that a series of related crimes all took place at about the same time Nishimura was trying not to ogle the half-naked woman he was responsible for incapacitating. Yikes!

The plot only gets more fiendish from here, which is quite enough enjoyment to ask of a good crime novel, but that's not even the best part of The Thief; the novel's greatest pleasures lie in Nishimura's reveries about his art, its techniques and greatest practitioners, and his impulsive all-but-adoption of a small boy he rescues from a store detective who's been watching him ineptly shoplifting at his mother's urging. The little boy knows a good teacher when he sees one, and soon Nishimura seems to be in danger of becoming an ersatz family man just when all the consequences of his earlier caper start appearing in his life. His shoplifting lessons with the little boy are  charming as hell for all that they're only adding to his burden of guilt and foreboding.

As Nishimura steals wallets, phones and finally an envelope sewn into a guy's jacket (!) through increasingly desperate and cunning means, the reader who is also a movie fan won't be able to avoid imagining Robert Bresson's masterful film treatment of his art, Pickpocket and indeed Nakamura lists the film as source material at the novel's end. Great art begets great art. Nakamura has convinced me I really do need to read more crime fiction.

And that's the end of my literary sojourn through Japan, in January. I enjoyed this so much I decided to do it again next month, but like a fool I posted a poll on Mastodon as to which country to visit next which one person answered, and so, probably because everybody loves a little alliteration, I'll be doing February in France, or more broadly, February in French because I've got some stuff on my TBR that was translated from French but originated in countries other than La France. Including some more crime fiction! Vive la.

*I only came into possession of this copy because a Twitter and Two Month Review podcast pal, Derek Maine, was culling his collection a while back and none of the stuff he was giving away was familiar to me, so I told him to surprise. And he sure did!

Yasmina Khadra's MORITURI (Tr by David Herman)

When Ghoul Malek ordered me to come and see him at 13 rue des Pyramides, I nearly drowned in my glass. An influential member of the old, ruling oligarchy, Malek had been particularly feared in the days of the single party. When he appeared on TV, it was enough to make people want to barricade themselves behind their curtains. Among his prerogatives were: the summary execution of 'undesirables,' changing the laws, making women abort and aborting social projects: in short, he had the power of day and night.

The classic noir detective character is either an ex-police officer, a hard-bitten veteran of one of the World Wars, usually World War II, or both, who Saw Some Shit on the mean streets or overseas and has lost what faith in humanity he had, which is why the narrative voice and prose style we associate with the genre are so distinctively harsh, brilliantly described without mincing words, vividly imagined, tough.

But there's a type of dude out there who could go toe-to-toe with any American Noir Guy and probably not even chip a fingernail, and that's the Disappointed Revolutionary, which is who we get when we transfer the classic noir plot to a place like late 1990s Algeria, barely ten years since that country's proto-Arab Spring, the October 1988 riots.

We don't know for certain whether Brahim Llob, the hero of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri , took part in those riots or on what side he would have if he did (he turned out to be an older man than I'd been reading him as at first, so likely he was already a police officer? But that doesn't indicate his actual sympathies, just what he was required/paid to do), but he is a disappointed revolutionary at least inasfar as he has seen that the uprising accomplished very little for all that it unseated a one-party oligrarchy somewhat. Our man circa 1997 is both a police superintendant and a moderately famous novelist, but that doesn't translate to him getting... really any respect at all, from anyone, even his supposed fans. 

Take how he gets the assignment that drags him through most of the plot of this short little novel: summoned to the home of the guy described above, one of those important kinds of men who combine the power of a government official with that of a crime lord without officially being either, he is rather contemptuously handed a photograph of the Missing Girl, told she's been missing  for a few weeks from the house she hardly ever even leaves, and given absoutely nothing else by way of clues how to even begin finding her. If Llob is a good detective, the photo will be enough, he is told, and really, he should be grateful that the important man even bothered to tell Llob the girl's name, which is Sabrine.

Llob starts looking for her in all the old familiar places and then some new ones. The scale of cynicism, corruption and moral decay that he encounters on a daily basis is on a whole 'nother level than what we get in good old American noir, stuff that would make even Phillip Marlowe blanch to behold:

The Cinq Etoiles is a brand new hotel. All bay windows with stained glass. With its eleven floors overhanging the hill and the city it resembles a futuristic mausoleum. They say that at the start a hospital was envisaged, but that by the time they reached the sixth storey the good intentions ran out of breath. Characters in high places got into the act. Before the ninth story the documents changed hands and content radically, to the extent that at the dedication, instead of the national anthem, the guests were treated to an evening of popular Algerian rai music.* The result: the poor continue to die in unbelievably filthy pigsty-like dispensaries... Bah! what good does it do me to bring her back, me, a roast chicken cop, a big mouth in a pinhead for whom the only fitting status is that of a cardboard target.

I mean, shit, man! But of course, Llob so cynical that at one point we learn that his standard for disrespect for authority is a Deputy of the Assembly.** And really, almost every paragraph of the novel is like this; for once my severe physical limitations when reading paperback books (the only way this translation is available, apparently) were actually a bit of a benefit, because they forced me to take this book in slowly and really savor its brutality, both in terms of the circumstances under which Llob works (his office gets carbombed! And the bombing isn't even investigated; that's just part of the Life of a Cop in Algeria!), what he thinks about them internally, and what he says to pretty much anyone who isn't his wife -- who is barely a character but at least he behaves decently toward her, so, while it might occasionally feel like we're straying near it, we're not in Albert Cossery territory here. Phew!

The book is incredibly tightly plotted as Llob and his partner Lino investigate opulent but shady nightclubs, humble shops and the homes of the elite, seemingly getting nowhere in the quest to find the missing girl until, of course they stumble across a very active terrorist network, one that fears cops about as much as you or I would fear the mail carrier, and then suddenly the plot noose tightens as much as possible; the last 20% or so of the book is one of the tensest  games of cat and mouse I've ever read. 

Inspector Llob is a popular character, though***, and I knew going into this that he's in three other novels, so he's in Doctor Who jeopardy, but hey, occasionally the Doctor's companions get hurt or killed, as do endearing bystanders, so I was still reading between the fingers stretched across my eyes, as it were.

This has probably ruined me for American crime fiction, though. If a gang of demented fundamentalists aren't hunting you while you try to find a bad guy's missing daughter, are you even detectiving? On the other hand, I do read the news...

*You know me; a book mentions music and I have to go check it out if I don't already know it. I went looking for some rai music from the late 90s (contemporaneous with this novel) and fell in love with this rather famous example by Rachid Taha:

**The People's Assembly is the lower house of Algeria's Parliament, so when he speaks of himself striding into his boss's office "As denuded of respect for the Republic as a Deputy of the Assembly" that's like saying "As denuded of respect for the USA as a Congressman." HOWL.

***So popular that, in addition to getting three sequels (all of which I have acquired thanks to good old ABEBooks; the English translations aren't available as ebooks, so I'm stuck with trade paperbacks, the most painful physically for me to read, but Morituri was so good that I'm going to find a way to endure), there's also a feature film. Nobody is streaming it with an English translation, but if you've read the book and studied any romance language, you can probably follow this YouTube presentation of the film with French subtitles. I didn't find it too difficult to follow, watching it right after I finished the book, anyway!

Roberto Bolaño's 2666: The Part About the Crimes (tr by Natasha Wimmer)

Blogger's note: I'm covering this giant doorstop of a novel part by part. This post is the fourth of five. To read prior entries in order, start with The Part About the Critics" HERE, then "The Part About Amalfitano" HERE, then "The Part about Fate" HERE.

We just passed the twelfth anniversary of the internet publication of the greatest book review ever written, and I was today years old when I realized that yes, in fact, "The Part About the Crimes" is the A Feast for Crows of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially as rendered in audio format by the talented but exhausted-sounding Scott Brick, whose habit of giving every sentence a rapid rise and quick plunging fall in pitch to convey a certain kind of drama just drives home the repetitive, almost liturgical quality of so much of this part of the novel, by far its most depressing and demoralizing oh my god too many hours, which, its title tells us right away we should not be expecting a walk in the park, but even by the standards of something explicitly about the tidal wave of femicide that is the primary thread in this big fat tapestry, this is grim stuff. I think this whole damned city of Santa Teresa must all be the kind of paid up subscribers to Black Dawn (see my post about "The Part About Fate") that drop everything when the new issue arrives in the mail and don't do a damned thing until they've read the whole magazine cover to cover. Or at least, that's what the cops do. When they're not relentlessly trading dated and exhaustingly horrible and sexist "what's the difference between women and X" jokes, anyway. Yuck.*

The stuff between the repetitions isn't much better, either. For instance, about midway through this part, a side character from "The Part About Fate", a Mexico City sportswriter named Sergio, pops up again, now back in Santa Teresa to write about its seemingly dual crime wave (we'll talk about about the Penitent later) in his new role as a crime reporter, takes a prostitute to bed and has a weird conversation with her that still kind of makes me want to scream.

Smoking a post-coital cigarette**, Sergio starts demanding to know what the unnamed prostitute knows about the murders, and gets pretty shitty when she tells him she has a "vague idea" about them. He berates her for not having solidarity with all these other whores who have been murdered since she is one herself, then she reponds, not by expressing sympathy or regret or concern or fear, even for herself, but by pointing out that Sergio has made a category error. The women being murdered in Santa Teresa have not been prostitutes, but, mostly, workers, employees of the maquilladoras. She emphasizes the word "workers" and just generally conveys the idea that as far as she is concerned, what she does for a living is not "work." Again, I'm kind of applying 21st century standards to a book set and largely composed during the 90s, but even back in those far off days, before we all as a society (or at least the left-leaning half of society) agreed that "sex work is work" we did refer to prostitutes as "working girls," so, uh, no.

I mean, I know I'm being picky and even a little precious about this scene in a novel section that basically exists to drive home that the failure to regard women as fully human has big social and individual costs that disproportionately (and often fatally) are paid by those same women, but hey, it's also an illustrative passage of how grim this part can be. But this is "The Part About the Crimes" at its lightest.

Overwhelmingly, "The Part About the Crimes" is about repeating one archetypal scene over and over and over and over again (I think the official femicide body count for this novel is 109, but I can't remember where I saw that and might be too lazy by the time I've written this post to track it down), just like Brienne of Tarth repeating Sansa Stark's description to every character she meets, except way more grim. It mostly goes something like this:  In (a month of a year), a (woman or a teenager or, a few times, a tween), who may or may not have a name, is found dead and unceremoniously dumped somewhere -- in a field, alongside a highway, etc. -- where she won't necessarily be noticed right away but (with a few grim skeletal exceptions) but is likely to be noticed after a reasonably short period of time. We get a description of her clothes. We learn whether she has been shot or stabbed or strangled. We get the important information as to whether or not she was raped and in what orifices. We find out which of Santa Teresa's Finest gets assigned her case. We get a half-assed account of his half-assed efforts. We are then told that the case was "closed" or "shelved", but here these two terms are basically interchangeable for verisimilitude; in real life, cops don't just say "we gave up."

Over and over and over again.

And while not every murder victim gets a name -- either because by the time she is found she is no longer identifiable, or simply because nobody ever shows up to claim or identify her -- every cop does, and gets a little vignette about as detailed as Stephen King's slapstick death stories midway through The Stand, usually with cameo appearances by other cop characters, but ultimately the cops' stories blur together and fade from the reader's  memory exactly as the murder victims have from the city's, because 2666 is not a whodunnit. There is not going to be a hero detective who puts it altogether and solves the crime spree.

Very few people, apart from the odd journalist (and what about Guadelupe? The female journalist? Who had an appointment with a locked up tall German towards the end of "The Part About Fate" but whom Oscar just leaves behind to drive to America with Rosa A?) even see that there really is a crime wave, let alone of the scale that it is. A few cops put their heads together about a few murders they're working on that share some grisly signature details and speculate about a serial killer, but that's only for a few of the murders, ignoring the vast number of dead women who did not have one breast sliced off and the nipple bitten off the breast that's still attached. Some of the individual murders do get solved, kind of by accident, in that they turn out to be the sadly predictable final outcomes of domestic violence, but on the whole, only we, Bolaño's readers, ever see the really big picture.

And really, this pretty much tracks for how murder investigations work in the real world. Real Cops don't solve crimes.

But anyway, this part, about the crimes, isn't just about the femicides (the recitation of which kept making me think of the sad but wistful continuing Roll Call of the Dead in Sjon's amazing CoDex: 1962). There's also a serial church desecrator on the loose! And his crimes are bizarre and spectacular and the closest thing to almost kind of funny that "The Part About the Crimes" gets.

Well, except for this one bit, when the femicides, in attenuated form, briefly have come to the attention of the powers that be in Santa Teresa, which is, I think, Natasha Wimmer making a smart and amusing choice in presenting in the sing-song of a children's book rather than the hard boiled no-nonsense crime talk we're expecting in such a scene:

Life is hard, said the mayor of Santa Teresa. We have three clear-cut cases, said Inspector Angel Fernandez. Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass, said the man from the chamber of commerce. I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight, said Pedro Negrete.

Pretty much the whole rest of the novel handles dialogue in the conventional, subject-verb forms of English prose, in which the scene would have looked like this:

"Life is hard," the mayor of Santa Teresa said.

"We have three clear-cut cases," Inspector Angel Fernandez said.

"Everything has to be examined by a magnifying glass," the man from the chamber of commerce said.

"I do examine everything with a magnifying glass, over and over, until I can't see straight," Pedro Negrete said.

The fact that this exchange is followed by a remark from the mayor that "the important thing is not to stir up any shit" may shatter the stylized children's book feel but drives home the real point being made, that this whole scene is a rote performance of professional concern, rather than a genuine attempt to communicate anything. It's the only time I actually smiled in this whole section. Thanks, Natasha!

But I haven't even got to what passes for the protagonists of "The Part About the Crimes", if there can be said that there are any. I reckon on two of them: Klaus Haas, a big tall German guy arrested on flimsy and circumstantial evidence for one of the 109 murders, who has various adventures in the Mexican jail where he awaits sentencing for so long that he eventually just calls a press conference to try to point the finger at another party for the killings; and the magnificently named Congresswoman Azucena Exquivel Plata, who has a disappeared friend, Kelly (real name, Luz-Maria), Kelly being linked, of course, to a series of orgiastic parties out on the ranches outside of Santa Teresa, to which many young and/or underage women are brought to be debauched. Hmm. The former gets involved in all kinds of inmate scuffles and, though he is himself so tall as to almost count as a giant, portentously keeps announcing to his fellow prisoners that The Giant is coming and they'd best be scared; the latter burdens us with the story of her insanely privileged life and her friendship with Ghislaine Kelly while she interviews/interrogates a private detective she's hired to find her friend.

Can these characters be protagonists, though, when one is only barely there and the other isn't even mentioned in passing until about the last 20% or so of "The Part About the Crimes?" Well, there's nobody else who comes close to qualifying, so, yes?

Speaking of that last 20% or so, it really veers off in its own weird direction, cutting up four different narratives into very small pieces and layering them on top of each other like so many jenga blocks to really drive home how much reader/listener annoyance Bolaño and Brick are going for. The Klaus Haas narrative bits start feeling like they're leading to a shaggy dog story, but you're never sure because just when they get interesting, you're torn away to another piece of Azucena's story, then to a bit about a figurant, Kessler (an American law enforcement consultant who is just sort of touring the scenes of all the crimes and letting everybody cater to him), then to another bit of corpse porn, then back to Klaus. Who, yes, sounds like he bears a more than passing resemblance to another absurdly tall German guy, whom, 700 years or so ago, three literary critics traveled to Mexico to find and bring back to Europe to accept his Nobel prize, Benno von Archimboldi. But Klaus is, of course, too young to be Archimboldi. Isn't he?

This brings me to the one thing that I'm still really impressed by in this section of 2666. Bolaño is playing a lot with the ideas of detective fiction, and several times seems on the verge of setting up one of his many interchangeable cop-or-journalist*** characters as the Detective Who Will Solve It All, only to Lucy-yank away the football from our Charlie Brown expectations. But I'm a Gene Wolfe girl, so I became convinced right away on my first reading (and still believe it on my second, here) that we, the readers, are meant to be the Detective. If this was Gene Wolfe's 2666, I'd be sure of this, confident that if I took the time to read this book six or seven times and make careful notes of which of the bodies got which treatment and was associated with which model of car, and, probably, drew myself a detailed map of Santa Teresa and its environs, and made a careful study of the onamastics employed, I could accurately solve every single one of these murders, which, of course, have not all been committed by the same guy, or even the same guys. Factor out the domestic violence/honor killings and you're left with, I think, three, possibly four parties (depending on if Klaus Haas is guilty of anything besides slightly knowing one of the victims and standing out as a ridiculously tall German in this city of maquilladoras and nightclubs.)

BUT I'M NOT SURE. This is still the only Bolaño I've read. Is he a craftsman on Gene Wolfe's level? None of my Bolañeros and Bolañeras seem to have read Gene Wolfe (it's a mission of mine to get them to one day, when they're ready. They're getting there), and I don't think any of my Solar Cyclists have read Bolaño, so I'm the only one in a position to compare them that I know of. And I want to be sure, before I start reading Bolaño like Wolfe, that it would be worth the effort. I'm not a young woman, my TBR pile is huge, I've already given up television in the interest of reading as much of it as I can before I join the Roll Call of the Dead, and I'm longing to re-read all of Dorothy Dunnett again before I punch out, too.

Anyway and otherwise, man, all I can say is that Roberto Bolaño must have been thinking a lot about Dunbar's Number while he was writing this. This is best illustrated by one of the cop stories, the account of the sheriff of Huntsville AZ, Harry Magaña, summoned to Santa Teresa by a citizen of his fair city who was recently in Santa Teresa with a friend, only to lose track of that friend until she turned up murdered. All excited to play white knight, Harry comes barreling into Santa Teresa fixin' to investigate the hell out of this one murder, with or without the cooperation of the local constabulary. He catches the situation's brutality like a virus and meets a mysterious fate in Tijuana and could now be the Santa Teresa PD's poster boy for Not Getting Too Hung Up on One Case, punished for caring about a single person among 109. Gulp.

And so, onward to the fifth and final "Part About Archimboldi." Which I only dimly remember, and might not remember accurately at all because I'm starting strongly to suspect that "The Part About the Crimes" may have made me lose patience with this doorstop. Did I finish it, or did I not?

Watch this space, true believers.

*Which, I grew up in a law enforcement family and turned around and took employment for ten years with that same law enforcement agency (as a dispatcher, not a sworn officer) and this is the most accurate depiction of cops I've yet found in literature. When I say yuck, I mean yuck. I was still eyeball deep in my own law enforcement career when I first read 2666 so I thought maybe this time around it wouldn't hit me as bad but, nope. I'm still projectile vomiting in my head at this.

**And man, do all of these characters smoke in this novel. I know it was the 90s and whatnot but WOW. Of course, I've been reading lots of other international literature in which this keeps featuring. Everybody in Drive Your Cart over the Bones of the Dead smoked. The very freaking pages of The Morning Star were sucking on coffin nails, etc -- and those are both novels written and set in this century -- so I'm maybe more sensitive to this than usual but man, oh man, this novel brought to you by the international tobacco industry.

***One of these is a late entry in the contest to become my favorite character, the hilariously named Mary-Sue Brava, a reporter from Phoenix who gets hung up on the disappearance of another journalist who was one of only like four people to show up for Klaus Haas' press conference. I would like more of her, please, but nobody cares what I want. Anyway, I don't care that your name is Mary Sue, Mary Sue, I still love you.

Zhao Haohui's VALLEY OF TERROR (tr by Bonnie Huie), with a slight sidebar on StoryGraph

I spent a lot of time while reading Zhao Haohui's Valley of Terror feeling like I had been let down a bit by the people who'd recommended it to me last October, when I asked Twitter for a couple of "spooky reads in translation", but then I saw that something rather clever was going on.

I really couldn't tell, from chapter to chapter, whether I was reading a supernatural horror novel disguised as a Sherlock Holmesian* detective story, or a Sherlock Holmesian detective story disguised as a supernatural horror novel. Was there going to be a Scooby Doo "it was old man so-and-so with this bag of mundane tricks" ending or was it going to end in some kind of exorcism? 

The tension between these two possibilities was maintained almost until the last chapter! And this made up for what, for me, were still some pretty annoying flaws in the novel that I'll discuss a bit below. But overall, the effect earns Valley of Terror a WOW! from me.

But first, a bit about pace. I'm not usually a reader much concerned with pace, but as I've started migrating my book-tracking from the problematic and Tech Giant-owned GoodReads to The StoryGraph (so far not Tech Giant-owned, with a very different recommendation engine, and all the tasty bar and pie graphs a dork could ask for), I've been unable to avoid noticing it. Every time you mark a book as finished over there, you're asked to describe it in terms of moods ("challenging", "dark", "adventurous", "lighthearted" etc) and pace.

Now, this might be a whiplash effect from my previous read having been Marcel Proust's Swann's Way** but boy did Valley of Terror feel fast-paced. Zhao, at least as translated by Bonnie Huie, is all about the terse declarative sentence, the quick establishing description, and above all keeping the story moving. If you're looking for a brooding noir-ish crime read where the personal drama of the detective is half the story, this ain't it. We're dropped right into the action -- a plague of absolutely mind-shattering fear has descended upon a Chinese city, with at least two people dead before we've even finished meeting our detective, Chief Investigator Luo Fei (and learned how very respected he is; everybody, barring one character I'll talk about in a bit, is either very wise and learned with a shining reputation who commands awe and respect from everybody else, or is basically just a figurant there to express that awe and respect). One went tear-assing out of a college library late at night and ran six miles in 40 minutes, essentially running himself to death, dying with an appaling rictus of terror on his face; the other suddenly left a wedding where everybody else was having such a great time they didn't notice that he was scared out of his mind, so scared that he tried to hide his head and entire body in a toilet and drowned. Also with the rictus.

And really, I almost feel like I took longer than Haohui does in describing this set-up. Dude is snappy! As in lickety-split, our Sherlock Holmes-analogue, Luo, has picked up a Watson-analogue at the local university, renowned psychologist Dr. Zhou, who has a living patient on his hands with a problem very like what the corpses seem to have experienced. Except he doesn't speak Mandarin; he only speaks a minority language, Hamo. And they don't even know who he is! Every bit as resourceful as Holmes and Watson, but with greater resources, they turn to the internet to solve this dilemma, and again, almost before we know it, BOOM! A third team member appears in the form of fringe historian Yue Dongbei.

And here's where Valley of Terror first threatened to get tiresome, because there is a lot of cliched sparring between Respectable Scientist Zhou and Crackpot Yue, even though the Crackpot has actual insights into the case; he had hired the living patient to go into the Back of Beyond to investigate a paranormal legend for him!

Thankfully, though, here is also where things get really fascinating for the Western reader, because the paranormal legend involves a lot of very real Chinese history that this American, even though she took four years of Mandarin in college and has struggled mightily to preserve what fluency she attained by watching a lot of Mandarin-language TV and movies over the years, didn't know much about. 

Way back around the time that Charles I was making everybody angry in England, the Manchu were invading China, and their forces were duking it out with the Yongling emperor's over territory near the modern day nations of Myanmar and Laos, with the almost-defeated Yongling forces left to the charge of one very capable and resourceful leader, General Li Dingguo, after the emperor fled to Myanmar (Burma back then). Li led something between a guerilla campaign and a siege defense in a mountainous region for years, achieving feats of military brilliance and command of logistics, but coming to a tragic and lonely end.*** BUT! In Yue's version of this history it is commonly believed that Li's prowess and incredible feats of derring do were only possible because he could command actual demons! Demons which were devilishly hard to overcome, as was Li until finally he and his supernatural aid were trapped in a vial via his blood. The vial is now a terrible, sacred treasure that must be guarded, lest the terrible monster Li escape and reincarnate and seek revenge on Those Who Brought Him Low.

Centuries later, this vial was looted from the region, smuggled into our man Luo's home city, and was in the process of being sold by unscrupulous traders to a collector from Myanmar a few months before the first scared-to-deaths occurred. This shady transaction was interrupted by none other than Supercop Luo, who in the process had to fire his weapon and managed to break open the blood vial! Did something escape from that vial besides some really old but well-preserved blood? Something that, say, can elicit mind-shattering fear in any unlucky human it/they encounter? SPOOKY!

We're still not even like 1/8th of the way through the novel, here, by the way. Lightning pace! Next thing we know Luo, Zhou and Dongbei are off on an adventure to the village to which General Li retreated centuries ago, to find Li is worshipped by the rustic locals, all of whom are descended from his defeated troops, as a rain god. A local Big Man, Chief Bai, a descendant of General Li's lieutenants, keeps the cult alive through a Scooby Doo mechanism: when the locals pray for rain, they make offerings and perform a ceremony and, if the "rain god" is pleased, his statue "cries" tears supplied on the sly by one Chief Bai -- or rather, one of his assistants. Except just as our investigative trio turns up, that assistant turns up in a state of severe shock and the General Li statue is crying blood!

Does this sound like good, pulpy fun, or what? But wait, there's more! Like a remote village populated by a minority tribe, the Hamo (kind of maybe based on a real life tribal people of the region, the Miao, maybe?), speakers of the language Dr. Zhou's terrified babbling patient was babbling terrifiedly in and believers in a version of the legend of Li Dingguo in which he is a terrifying villain who could summon demons and inflict sanity-destroying terror on his foes. The local belief system is upheld by yet another chieftain type, descended from the mighty Hamo warrior who originally, legendarily, defeated Li and put his blood in the vial, and a beautiful priestess, formerly the keeper of this vial who is descended from the lovely woman who was integral to the original plot to bring Li to justice.

See? So pulpy! So fun!

Continued tiresome arguments between Dr. Zhou and Mr. Dongbei aside.

And the annoying tendency for Zhao to describe his characters' physcial appearance in moral terms; we don't really know what anybody looks like in terms we're used to in western fiction, but we are often told that someone has an "honest" or "forthright" face and this is only my second modern Chinese novel but is that really a convention of Chinese fiction, that there are facial physiognomies that automatically convey trustworthiness or the lack thereof? Because, yuck.

Oh, and Zhou is constantly having leaps of insight that we're meant to just run with like being able to tell from a faint and messy footprint in damp mud that a dude was six feet tall, which, yes, deduction is mighty, but we're not treated to any deductive reasoning here, the other characters just say something along the lines of oh yes, of course, you learned that in police training!

And like I said, for a lot of the time I spent reading this, I was pretty annoyed at all of this, until I noticed how well the Big Mystery, the tension I mentioned above, is kept suspended. And so no, I'm not going to tell you which it is, but I am going to tell you that if you like mysteries, want to explore a different setting (and by the way, Zhao is a pretty competent scenery pornographer; China's equivalent of a Tourism Bureau should be slipping him a little something something for making people want to come visit Hunnan; it sounds beautiful), or like their spooky mysteries laced with a lot of historical drama. I might check out more of Zhao's work one of these day.

*With this title, and a bit of dialogue early in the novel evoking yet another Holmes mystery, I can't help but thinking a bit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear, eh wot?

**Which, yes, I'm finally going to read all of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past but no, I've decided I'm not going to inflict my thoughts about on this blog. Plenty of ink and pixels have been spilled on long dead Proust, most of it by people with smarter and more insightful things to say about it than I. Too long; didn't write: how did "Swann in Love" escape the 90s trend of adapting classic literature into a snappy teen movie? It's exactly a teen movie plot!

***I went down a bit of a rabbit hole on this but you know who really went down a rabbit hole on this? Zhao Haohui, who has a nifty afterword about it that basically tells the whole historical tale of General Li Dingguo and it's a pretty great story.

Justin Robinson's FIFTY FEET OF TROUBLE

The best Halloween present a pulp/noir/monster fiction fan could possibly get is a new Justin Robinson novel, and that is exactly what happened this year.* A sequel to his almost-illegally-too-fun City of Devils, it's Fifty Feet of Trouble.

Once again, our guide through the madness is Nick Moss, the last human private eye in Los Angeles, finder of missing persons, encounterer (sure, that's a word. Now.) of the titular trouble.** Which starts off in sort of the same vein as last novel, but has with it a whole weight of emotional baggage that you just don't have to deal with when a doppelganger of no previous acquaintance asks you to find her missing mummy husband.

This time around, Nick's quarry is human (Still. We Hope.), but not only is she human, she is a little girl, and not only is she a little girl, but she is the daughter of two close and dear friends who fought with him in the Night War (the conflict after WWII when the Monsters Took Over), and not only are they his close and dear friends but they already lost a child to the monsters and... see where this is going? There are several sub-plots that tie into this main one, but the missing little girl quest is the armature on which all of the other stuff hangs like a fifty-foot [REDACTED] off a giant floating stone [REDACTED].

So where City of Devils was mostly a slapstick romp with some moments of hilarious danger, there is a mature and emotionally powerful undertone to our hero's quest this time around. Be assured, though: this doesn't detract from the fun of reading it; it enhances it. And yes, there's still silly monster stuff. For instance, one of Nick's other assignments is finding a magical missing toad, so a witch friend of his can continue casting spells.

So, as I said on GoodReads, I wasn't expecting this to be Justin Robinson's best novel yet, but it's his best novel yet. The comedy and tragedy set each other off to perfection (a paragraph after a line that makes you howl with laughter and want to read pages aloud to some hapless stranger, there's a gut punch ready to knock you out cold), the new characters are beautifully realized, and the new over-the-top villains are used with admirable and judicious restraint,*** and no plot thread is left dangling. Like Nick and not-his-lady-friend off a giant floating stone [REDACTED].

So, if you're anything like me, you'll want to set aside a block of time to just utterly devote to this novel. Have some snacks ready. And some holy water. And some garlic. And some silver. And some salt. And a camera. And a bullhorn. Useful things, bullhorns. You just never know when you'll have to talk down a giant rampaging [REDACTED].

And, psst, best of all, Nick Moss has more adventures coming Not Soon Enough. Werewolf Confidential. Okay.

*What. Halloween presents are totally a thing. Where have you been? Well, yes, this first time I did have to buy it for myself, but I trust that this won't always be the case. Right? RIGHT?

**Now that I know Justin better -- he even blurbed my upcoming book -- I know exactly how much he loves words like "titular."

***You'll be glad of this. Reverend Bobo. I need a brandy.

Seth Harwood's EVERYONE PAYS

First off, why isn't every motherfolklore among you reading Seth Harwood? Seriously, he is one of the best we've got, and the crime genre he so loves to write in is lucky to have him. Any genre would be.

Harwood has proven this time and time again, in a sound and unflashy way, and then later in a spectacular way (seriously, if you are one of those types still crying that The Wire is all done and dusted, you owe it to yourself to go have a look at Young Junius, in which Harwood had the balls to go where the admittedly spectacular writing staff of that show never went, right up into the project towers).

And the guy keeps improving.

With Everyone Pays, Harwood returns to his beloved San Francisco to bring us what looks on the surface like a straight-up cops'n'killers story: a homicide detective and her partner find themselves on the trail of a serial killer. I yawn just typing that description. I cocked an eyebrow when I realized that's what my boy had written. But of course this is my boy Harwood, so lots more is going on.

For one thing, the serial killer in question is killing low-lifes who abuse prostitutes, so, Dexter-ish, he could almost become a sort of hero-villain. But that twist is not what makes Everyone Pays so special.

It's special for two reasons.

First, the way it's structured. Now, alternating points of view between hero and villain is not a new trick, and Harwood knows this, but he's gone that structure one better in a way that feels strange at first but subtly gives the experience of reading this novel more depth than I would have ever expected. As our hero, Sgt. Clara Donner, begins investigating the case, she and her partner come across crime scene after crime scene as they start piecing together who this guy is and what he's all about. Emphasis is placed more on Donner's interaction with her team members than on the gruesome details -- except, usually, for one unusual one (that's not necessarily gruesome, but is unusual enough to be the one thing you might expect these people to feel worth mentioning later on when they tell their tales at the bar or in the locker room. Aagain, not to unusual.

But then, after each crime scene, we get the crime from the killer's point of view. The strange detail gets put into context, the killer's story and motivations deepen and become (kind of sickeningly) more comprehensible, and while the first few times this happens it feels like a weird choice for Harwood to have made, it gives the novel a rhythm all its own that makes it stand out.*

So, that's pretty cool, but what really is going to make this a memorable read for me for a long time to come is how masterfully Harwood constructed a narrative about a female homicide investigator and made it work. Sgt. Donner is blue-blooded but her homicide investigator father insisted forever that homicide is no place for a woman. She became a homicide investigator anyway, but doesn't carry a chip on her shoulder about it. She gets stuff done, lives her life, seems to enjoy it, passes the Bechdel test fairly well, encounters some sexism but doesn't get distracted by it, is kind of constricted within a sexist world within her narrative but fights it with weary excellence. She's got to be twice as good and she knows it, but she doesn't resent this, just accepts it as part of her world and displays considerable skill in getting things done anyway. She's a great character and I kind of love her.

Then her quarry becomes aware of her. Her quarry who thinks God has commanded him to punish sinners and protect women from them. Her quarry whose understanding of women traps them, pacing like animals in an old-fashioned zoo, in the smallest possible space, and tries to force Sgt. Donner into a role he has imagined for her. The tension between who Donner is and who this most patriarchal of killers tries to make her be is powerful, and drives a lot of the second half of the novel.

So Harwood, in other words, is a white male novelist who has worked very, very, very hard to Get It. He's dared and succeeded to write inner city black characters with sympathy and plausibility and skill in other books; now he's turned that same sensitivity to a female character, and his work rings just as true.

And it's a hell of a good crime story. Good enough, once again, to make me wonder if maybe I shouldn't be reading more crime fiction. I run through this set of thoughts every time I finish one of Harwood's books, with the answer being "I probably should" but honestly? I have such a monstrous pile of TBR in my lifelong favorite genres (science fiction, science fantasy, weird fiction, etc), to say nothing of all of my other projects, that I just don't know how I'd ever fit in another whole genre with its own set of classics (and I've read the serious classics of the genre already. Dashiell Hammett forever, yo) and must-reads and newcomers and all that. Perhaps if I live beyond my century mark I'll pull it off, but man, do you know how much stuff I still haven't read in my chosen genres? To say nothing of the books yet to come? Motherfolklore.

But always, always, I will make time for Seth Harwood.

*At least for me, but I don't read a lot of crime fiction. It's just not my thing. I grew up in a law enforcement family, worked in the field myself for a decade, and so I just can't stand cop shows or novels. So I can't be considered an authority on them. But still, for me, this technique made the book special. Your mileage may vary.

J.R. Rain's SILENT ECHO

I don't even remember what the other offerings from the inaugural "Kindle First" selection were; as soon as I saw this pretty spiffy cover and read the blurb, I knew I wanted to read this, and soon!

Silent Echo is probably going to be marketed as mystery or crime fiction; I gather the other, J.R. Rain, is somewhat an established name in those genres, at any rate, and there is a mystery plot forming the novel's narrative backbone, but really, the mystery is the least interesting thing about the book.

The private eye tracking the killer - who turns out to be something of a serial killer, with signatures and weird motivations and the will to play games with the people trying to catch him and all -- is dying, you see. Of AIDS-related lung cancer. And it's not just a someday sort of dying; as the novel opens, Jimmy Booker has already lived two months beyond his prognosis, and is struggling every day to do basic things like get out of bed. Fortunately -- and this is where Silent Echo really stands out -- he has an amazing, selfless, generous and wise friend to help him through everything.

Numi, a Nigerian artist who has transplanted himself to Los Angeles and met Jimmy many years ago while Jimmy was investigating a case, skirts the "magical negro" trope for the most part, though he has moments. What saves him from just being one is the degree to which he has devoted himself to keeping his friend Jimmy alive; he's not a guru, not an impassive dispenser of wisdom, nor is he merely a helpmeet, though he is that as well. He is a kind and loving friend, who lets Jimmy occasionally act like a selfish jerk, calls him on it only very gently, helps Jimmy with even the most intimate of tasks, and has become the benevolent dictator governing who, in Jimmy's last days, gets to bother him.

A childhood friend of Jimmy's makes the cut, and that's where the murder mystery comes in; Jimmy's specialty is missing persons, and Eddie's wife (a sort of unlit old flame of Jimmy's as well) is missing, under circumstances that echo the missing persons case that started it all for Jimmy back when he was a teenager: the disappearance and murder of Jimmy's kid brother.

The plot, in other words, is dead simple, even a tad predictable, even given the twist of this being the detective's last ever case and one he can't investigate without an extraordinary amount of help. But this book is not to be read for the plot, it's to be read for the relationships, for the honesty and regret and bitterness and extraordinary (platonic) love and the chillingly plausible descriptions of what it feels like to be facing the very end of life, how a person's outlook and priorities change and how one real friend can make all the difference.

Quite a nice little read.