Marcy Dermansky's HOT AIR

Nobody I can think of can write such absolutely despicable characters and make me want to spend hours in their heads like Marcy Dermansky. And her hour may yet be approaching.

I have to confess, though, that she's kind of a low-dose author for me. I enjoyed the hell out of her debut novel, Bad Marie, many years ago, but it left me feeling just icky enough not to want especially to indulge in that very specific kind of pleasure again for a long time. Which is to say that I haven't read any of Dermansky's work since Bad Marie. And her newest, Hot Air, hasn't changed my view of her work one bit -- even though I really liked it. 

Dermansky's subject is, at bottom, class envy, and it's a subject about which she is wickedly funny. The titular character of her first novel is a delightfully trashy person with whom to spend a few hours, watching her unhinged schemes go awry as she goes on a one-woman/one-child crime spree. Well, more of a misdeeds spree, although she happens to commit a few petty and one decidedly un-petty in the process. She has been badly used by her upscale friend who made the mistake of hiring her as a nanny, and feels perfectly justified, she tells us over hundreds of pages, in committing whatever malefaction she likes against that friend. We are happy to be persuaded, over and over again, even if she never really convinces us.

For Hot Air Dermansky has expanded the perspective she gives us to that of several characters, though pretty tightly focused on her signature distressed bourgeois heroine, Joannie. Joannie is somewhat recently divorced and rents an unsatisfactory-to-her apartment* in a neighborhood dominated by what sounds like a lot of McMansions. She has a daughter, Lucie, a tween who is well on her way toward becoming even less tolerable than her mommy is and for whom Joannie is about to set a whole lot of bad examples in one disastrous weekend-and-change.

Joannie lives next door to Johnny, a decent looking divorced guy with a son, Tyson, who is Lucie's approximate age. Johnny owns a very nice house with a very nice swimming pool, more or less next door to Joannie's apartment complex. Johnny is so nicely set up that he even gets along well enough with his ex-wife to have her living in the very nice house across the street from him, so he even has an easy time sharing custody of Tyson. Are you humming the Brady Bunch theme right now? I was. And so are Joannie and Johnny, as we quickly learn when the novel opens with Joannie on a pseudo-date with Johnny. To save on childcare expenses, Joannie has manipulated Johnny into having the date over at his house, with Tyson and Lucie banished to the basement with their various screen-equipped devices. So far, so good.

Except, as Joannie informs us pretty much right away, she is not feeling like their boy-girl Lego is ever going to click (I love that phrase, which I stole from William Gibson, because of course I did), and while it's mostly because their names will sound dumb together, Joannie and Johnny, it's also because she's just not feeling it with him, especially after he rather inexpertly kisses her. And kisses her. Oh noes! She forgot to make arrangements with someone to send a fake emergency text to get her out of this!

Fortunately, the plot happens. In the form of a hot air balloon that a rich, brash techbro type rented to celebrate his wedding anniversary after only having had a few lessons. As in not enough lessons to responsibly be allowed to pilot a balloon unsupervised, but when has that ever stopped a rich and famous and handsome billionaire?

As you already would know from a glance at the jacket copy, the billionaire's balloon comes crashing into Johnny's swimming pool and hijinks and sexcapades and a whole bunch of other bad decisions ensue. We're barely acquainted well enough to dislike Joannie and Johnny and here's Marcy Dermansky, serving us up an even more annoyingly privileged couple to dislike even more. One can never accuse Dermansky of being stingy with us; Jonathan (yes, there is a Johnny and a Jonathan in this awkward little bottle-book) and Julia have fallen out of love with each other, believe the world has done them dirty despite being billionaires, feel entitled to absolutely everything including Jonathan's personal assistant, Vivian (whom Julia wants to adopt as their own Vietnamese orphan despite Vivian being an adult with perfectly good parents of her own, and Jonathan just wants to bone, basically) and, once they get a load of Joannie and Lucie, to Lucie. They stop short of offering to buy Lucie, but only just.

BUT, lest we start feeling much in the way of sympathy or empathy for Joannie, who has barely gotten over her sick envy of Johnny's swimming pool and ridiculously over-equipped kitchen before being given people to really envy (and it turns out Jonathan just happens to have been Joannie's first kiss, at a summer camp when they were kids, who then ghosted her the day after Joannie's first kiss), she kind of seems like she'd maybe be down for selling Lucie, or at least renting her out for a little while? In exchange for a chance to share, just a little bit, in Johnny and Julia's fabulous lifestyle? But no, that would probably be too icky.

We have only this slight and kind of token assurance that Joannie has a firm line on what is and is not too icky, by the way. Because there are so many other icky things that she doesn't really even need to be pushed into doing. So many. So icky. But at least she is somewhat redeemed, as Bad Marie was in her novel, by her deep and true love for her little girl. Even though the little girl is a whiny brat.**

And all we can do is point and laugh and wait for consequences. Which, since this is fiction and not the actual world, do happen somewhat, at some points. See why I'm saying Dermansky's big moment may only just now be arriving? Despite what looks like has been a pretty decent literary career?

Just, you know, life sure do like to imitate art, don't it?

Anyway, I'll read some more of her back catalog someday, probably. If nothing else, it might soon be my only safe outlet.

*That, I dunno, sounds pretty nice to me, but I guess I must grudgingly admit that after living a nice, somewhat prosperous married life in a nice house, it's the kind of come-down that would sting some. Still, if we want to talk about class envy, this woman is living in a nice and safe area with good access to schools and shopping and is able to support herself and her daughter in pretty decent style off a literary career. Um. Where's my micro-violin?

**Really, the only character with even a pretense of likeability is Johnny's son, Tyson, but he doesn't get a lot of ink and would probably show obnoxious true colors if he got much more. Dermansky isn't about winning you over with loveable characters, you guys.

Matt Lee's THE BACKWARDS HAND: A MEMOIR

My E-ARC copy of Matt Lee's The Backwards Hand: A Memoir has, presumably as an anti-piracy measure, undergone a blanket text edit in which all "fi" and "ff" letter combinations have been replaced with two taps of the spacebar. So, for example, "film" has become " lm" and "effect", "e  ect" through the whole book. It's jarring at first, but shortly my brain adjusted to it and just took it in stride. 

The possibility has occurred to me, of course, that this is not just a factor in my copy from Netgalley but an intentional gimmick in the text as a whole, to make a point about neuroplasticity or human adaptability or something, but probably not. Lee isn't interested otherwise in being either subtle or gimmicky; he is here to tell you, very plainly and without sparing anyone's fee-fees, what his life with a very unusual congenital difference has been like.

Lee was born with bilateral radioulnar synostosis; the two bones in his forearms, which actually rotate and cross over when an unaffected human rotates their hands front to back, are fused together in the crooks of his arms. Surgically un-fusing them, at least back when this was offered to him, would unavoidably damage a cluster of nerves located right where the bones are fused, leaving him with constant pain (something I know all about and wouldn't wish on Elon Fucking Musk, for all that he wants to put chips in the brains of people like Matt Lee and myself and maybe all of us because of reasons) and a still-deeply limited range of motion that wouldn't even approach "normal." Not exactly a win-win proposition.

There are notes of existential terror in this text, much of which is devoted to famous disabled people and other "freaks" from history and how they were depicted in art and treated by their families and, most importantly, by the authorities. Lee spends a lot of text, for instance, to the Nazis' euthanasia program, which targeted the mentally and physically disabled; eugenics is never far from the discussion when societies discuss policy toward us. This fear has only grown with the results of the recent U.S. election, of course, but that development was still in the future when this book went to press. 

Lee's own story is far less bleak, however. He has married and has a child who does not share his disability, has had an acting career and has developed a clear and concise prose style and a dedication to thorough research that should serve him well moving forward in life -- and, as he takes care to emphasize in The Backwards Hand, he doesn't owe all of the setbacks he has encountered on the way to this state to his disability. Some of it is attributable to his own immaturity, infidelity, or general assholery. Disabled people are neither monsters nor saints; it just took him a while to realize that his disability did not automatically make him a monster. 

But man, this book has made it a little harder to go into 2025 with anything like a sanguine attitude. But, like that was going to happen anyway, amirite?

Who knows, maybe we'll end up in the same camp and I'll get to tell him in person that I appreciated this book and told all my friends to read it. Except I'm housebound because nobody will take basic precautions against diseases that could kill us, so instead of actual friends, I'm telling whoever still reads this blog. Read this!

Michel Houellebecq's ANNIHILATION (Tr Shawn Whiteside)

Michel Houellebecq is an author I don't particularly like but I add compulsively to my towering, teetering TBR pile the way I often shake a few drops of bitters into my plain soda water. It's just not the same without it, though it tastes like ass by itself.

I don't read a lot of him in a row, is what I'm saying.

But when he publishes a new book, I'm never not interested. 

But so, since I have Houellebecq filed in my head as an unpleasant but necessary man to read, not as bad as Robert Silverberg or Albert Cossery in that I never want to read anything else by either of those authors ever again but still as someone I kind of need to brace myself for, imagine my surprise to discover that his latest novel, Annihilation is moving, human and lovely!

This is not to say that Annihilation is not bitter or bleak -- I mean, just get a load of the title! -- as I was expecting; there's still plenty to grit one's teeth through in this story of a prosperous civil servant enduring the disappointments of middle age in 21st century France. But our man Paul, whose image first really came into focus for me in a scene straight out of my favorite Editors song, depicting him smoking outside the hospital where his father has just been admitted as a coma patient, is the most sympathetic character I've seen Houellebecq create, and it's not even close.*

We first meet him as he's beginning to tackle a worrisome problem at his job, where I imagine him as a sort of colleague of Bug's father at Not-Nutella. An unknown entity is releasing very provocative video clips on the Internet, designed to stir maximum fear and unrest in French society. One even depicts the head of Paul's department, Bernard, who is the French Minister of Finance and a potential candidate for the next President of France, being decapitated. For a while, then, Annihilation feels like it's going to be a fancy high tech thriller/crime investigation, as Paul calls in personal resources to help him unravel who is doing this and why. For instance, an old friend who founded one of the best cinematic special effects companies in the world reviews the footage so far and quickly informs Paul that nobody, not his own firm, not Industrial Light and Magic, nobody, is currently capable of creating what they have been reviewing at the level of detail and realism they are seeing.

And then things get weirder and worse.

In the midst of all of this intrigue, Paul's elderly, widowed father, a retired intelligence agent who still retains some files that his former masters have asked Paul to get back for them (possibly, somehow, related to the case Paul is currently working on, meaning dear old Dad may have one last chance to be a hero), has suffered a medical emergency that has left him in a coma. And Paul, whom we've seen so far as something of a typical cold and bitter Houellebecq character, is landed in a whole mess of family drama, involving his father's "companion" Madeline (originally a live-in nurse but now a romantic partner that it's easier to just regard as a wife), Paul's devoutly Catholic sister Cecile and her easy-going husband Herve and their daughters**, their much-younger brother Aurielle and his insufferable wife, Indy, and a whole host of compassionate but firm medical professionals who are there to ease them all through the transition from having a busy and still-active father to having one who will probably never walk or talk or do things for himself again.

All of these characters are richly realized and sympathetically portrayed enough to give the scenes between them considerable emotional heft without ever drifting into melodrama.

But lest I sound like Houellebecq has gone completely soft in his old age, there are still a few passages like this, which could have been lifted from The Elementary Particles, to remind us of with whom we're dealing: 

For some years, it's true, the balls of shit had been copulating in smaller numbers, they seemed to have learned to reflect one another, they were aware of their mutual stench, and disgustedly parted company; an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable in the medium term. That left other trash like cockroaches and bears, but you can't sort everything out at the same time, Paul said to himself.

This as he contemplates the recent destruction by the mystery terrorists of a Danish sperm bank. A golden star to you if you can guess what the balls of shit are in the above.

But all of this is just camouflage for the book's true nature. Houellebecq lies in wait for us at the bottom of a sandy funnel to which he has baited us with illusions of technothrillery and heartfelt family drama. We've traipsed along these fascinating and moving edges like an ant on a patch of sand, not noticing the funnel shape the sand is gradually assuming until abruptly the sides have gotten too steep. We fall into Houellebecq's waiting jaws; he will drain us and toss our husks back onto the pile of corpses above, the pile that we also did not notice while we were distracted by Paul's rediscovery of his marriage, by his father's apparent holding of the key to the mystery. 

And at last the title of the novel, heretofore seeming maybe an ironic joke at our expense, makes sense. I won't call Annihilation a shaggy dog story as such, but it shares some of that thing's qualities, though in service of a point a shaggy dog story lacks. I will caution you that,  for a little while after finishing Annihilation, I felt a bit disappointed in it. So might you. But I suspect that on further reflection you might overcome this feeling, as I did a few days later, when I realized what Houellebecq had, in fact, achieved. 

I suppose if anyone was, with his (probable) last book, going to reveal himself as a literary ant lion, it would be Michel Fucking Houellebecq.

Now excuse me; I am dealing with my own issues with aging and also with unhipness. I have only just discovered that Houellebecq is in a film with Iggy Pop. How the hell did this escape my notice????? Oh yeah, there was a presidential election and stuff going on, even way back then.

*Not that I've read all of his novels; just most of them.

**One of whom has an encounter with Paul out in the world that is possibly the funniest passage I've ever encountered in Houellebecq.

Jeff Noon's and Steve Beard's LUDLUDA (With a few remarks on GOGMAGOG)

"What's wrong with him?"

"A demon is wanking off inside his head."

"Oh, I hate it when that happens."

One of the things I love best about the genre that we still tend to call "the New Weird"' is how just plain funky it is. The best work of its major propagators -- Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville, Alastair Reynolds, et al -- oozes with fluids and crusts, seepages, saps, slimes, scabs, but never gets too too gross. Though your mileage might vary. 

Another master of the New Weird, though not traditionally as enraptured by the Grand Guignol as the guys I mentioned above, is Jeff Noon, who in his diesel punk/steampunk/biopunk (at what point do we just drop the modifiers and call it plain old "punk?") (but then an even better catch-all term occurs to me: Analog Punk) diptych with Steve Beard, gunks it up with the best of them from the very beginning of the first of the two novels. 

I'm here officially to talk about the second book, Ludluda, which I was so excited for after loving the first one, Gogmagog, back in April that when I saw it on Netgalley I realized I didn't want to wait any longer than I had to. I didn't review Gogmagog on this here blog back in April, though, mostly for health reasons, but I'm going to make up for it here, or try to.

Just, you know, it's Ludluda I'm honor-bound to review. I just don't think I can talk coherently about it without also talking about Gogmagog.

Which, Gogmagog is so richly imagined, baroquely plotted and populated with so many bizarre variations on what constitutes a person, a natural phenomenon, a creature or a monster, and is chiefly concerned with wild hybridizations of any or all of these, that I had to quickly read it again to recall what all was going on and who everybody was and which kinds of people have little wings of varying degrees of functionality and which sprout cute little psychic antennae at puberty but only after a ritual that involves fusing themselves with funny little insects and how many different ghostly entities (with very different priorities and personalities and orientations toward the world) were spawned when an enormous, as in 60-mile-long, dragon was killed by a heroic king from outer space. Yep.

So, you see, it's not that Gogmagog isn't vivid and memorable, just that it's a lot, and I read a lot of books every year, and I'm happy to re-read good ones anyway so, why not? 

But so, Ludluda. Which picks up the day after most of the events of Gogmagog as the ragtag crew of the steamship Juniper, after traveling upriver through the ghost body of the ghost dragon to the great capital city of Ludwich for a great festival and the chance for one passenger to maybe experience her strange psychic bug puberty and for the ship's captain maybe to get her about-to-bloom flower buds pollinated by the city's king's very special flower so the captain can finally reproduce after centuries and centuries of life.

Buckle up. 

Gogmagog kicked off as our protagonist, Cady Meade, retired steamboat Captain, met a strange pair who desperately wanted her to resume her trade and take them to Ludwich in time for The Hesting -- a festival when tons of people flock to the city to celebrate and trade while scores of young members of the tribe/species that has the weird puberty in which they grow their psychic antennae undergo their rite of passage. The pair are Lek, a glitchy old robot of a decidedly low tech/magical kind, and his tiny young charge, ten year old Brin, who is due to "Hest" there in just a day or so.

Cady, a character I just adore, is crusty, gross and cranky, a belching, farting, pooping, smoking, drinking and coughing old sea dog (river dog), who doesn't seem to have much left to look forward to except a dwindling life of cadging cough drops and rotten food (she prefers it when her vittles have gone a bit off -- we kind of learn why later) from local shopkeepers and friends, but of course has a heart of gold and lets herself be persuaded to make the trip despite the dangers she operatically warns about.

And off they went through many bizarre adventures, sailing up a filthy river and through the ghostly body of the dragon Haakenur.

A sort of semi substantial dragon Griaule is Haakenur, dead but still very much a force in her world and inhabited by all kinds of supernatural and mundane creatures, and very much a resource for all kinds of magical energy and effluent around which entire weird ecosystems and economies have grown up. But nobody calls her Haakenur anymore; Haakenur was the living dragon, and her physical body is long gone. What Cady and co. must steam through is her ghost, Faynr. And occasionally they must deal with incursions from her other, more evil ghost, the Gogmagog that gives the first volume of the dyptic its name.

What I liked best about these books is a central idea they embody that I don't see in a lot of weird/fantasy fiction: that magic and magical processes have byproducts and produce waste and leave scars on the land, like industry does in our world. So the landscape through which the Juniper chugs is blighted with various effluvia and junk and hazards left behind by a recent war (including unexploded bombs; the war that took place here is very much a parallel with World War II, and we learn in Ludluda that the story takes place in the 1950s of this world and ours), and the inhabitants of that landscape are grudgingly living with the effects of this, with varying degrees of success. 

This is all exacerbated by the fact that Faynr, the ghost body of the great dragon through whose body the ship is also traveling, is very sick and getting sicker. My favorite illustration of this comes when they pass the ghost dragon's gall bladder, which is developing gallstones in the form of great chalk cliffs to either side of the water, from which chunks have fallen. The chunks accrete more and more chalk and become serious navigation hazards until the river's course is almost entirely blocked and the Juniper is in danger of becoming another "chalkberg" as the material starts building up when the ship finally grinds to a halt.

Within the ghost organ of a ghost dragon. As one does.

But of course, since there is a sequel, we knew our heroes would get through this somehow, and they do, hence Ludluda.By the time the party reaches Ludwich, by the way, it has grown a bit with the addition of one Numi Tan, a sort of clay golem magically animated by the spirit of a dead girl who seeks the long lost lover with whom she romantically drowned herself (but the lover has never turned up among the clay golem people for a joyful reunion) and Pok Pok, another Thrawl that Lek rescued from a decrepit factory that used to churn out their kind. Pok Pok is too damaged to be a fully independent crew member but happily serves as a new figurehead and navigation assistant for the Juniper and utters gnomic observations in between steering directions.

As Ludluda gets underway, a few of the crew's quests are meeting successful ends, or at least apparent resolutions, even as others begin or continue. This results in the sundering of the company, who, after all, were newly met traveling companions who have reached their destination. Will we ever see some of them again? Will they appear as friends or foes? 

We also gather some new companions, like Jed Yeomanson, a promising young man (if he does say so himself) who attaches himself to the group just before everybody splits off, helps one achieve a stated end by dubious means, and signs on as the Juniper's cabin boy. And Leopold Hill, half of a famous cartography house, co-author of the river navigation charts that are Cady's most prized possessions, and possible holder of the secret Cady most seeks: the location of the flower that will allow Cady to seed a new generation of her plant-hybrid people!

Cady and her new friends are no sooner acquainted then sent off on a new quest that is only kind of a continuation of the original one; Brin has been revealed to be something other than the gormless little innocent she appeared to be and now must be stopped from pursuing her true aim, which threatens not only Cady's world but the good old mundane world that we know, too, kind of, meaning that yes, this second volume manifests as a sort of reverse portal fantasy for a little while when Cady enters the world of postwar London in pursuit of insights and artifacts from her old friend (remember, Cady is really, really old) Doctor Dee. Like you do.

I will confess to not having been at all prepared for this development, but I can't complain that it's not an organic one within the story. When fantasy is weird enough, it can go anywhere it pleases, after all, and Cady's adventures in de-mob London are every bit as tense and involving as those along the river Nysis or in the various districts of Ludwich. As are her experiences after this visit, which take her to incredible (and gross; it might seem hard to top the levels of disgust flavoring Gogmagog but Noon and Beard would very much like you to hold their funky, murky, smelly beers, please) depths and heights and leave her with as satisfying an ending as an ancient nature spirit-cum-river hag could ask for.

Noon remains a writer whose work is on my automatic buy list; Beard is not one I had heard of before but I will be seeking out his work soon, starting with his other team-ups with Noon. Meanwhile, they have my enthusiastic permission to continue this partnership and take it wherever the hell they want. I'm here for all of it. But then, I have a strong stomach. Do you?

Bartle Bull's LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A 5,000 YEAR HISTORY OF IRAQ

My home only celebrated its centennial as a U.S. state when I was 20 years old, so it's quite a thing to contemplate a land with over 5,000 years of recorded, settled history. So for me to read Bartle Bull's extensive and exhaustive history of Iraq was to regard our planet's oldest civilization from one of its youngest. 

Then, too, while I am slightly knowledgeable or in a few cases fairly so about certain periods of the region's long history -- chiefly the Sumerian and Alexandrian eras -- I've been largely ignorant of great swaths of it between then and my first personal awareness of Iraq, when the modern nation fought a war against Iran in my childhood. And, of course, when my college campus erupted in "No Blood for Oil" protests when the U.S. took it upon itself to rescue tiny little Kuwait from its big, bad neighbor. 

And then when the second President Bush and his ilk maneuvered us into "finishing" the fight the first one didn't, of course.

And I've read the Koran (in an English translation, of course; I have the merest smattering of Arabic, chiefly picked up while studying Urdu in grad school when I should have been doing my actual course work) long ago, always meaning to read it again sometime as a more mature and better informed adult, but my grasp of the origins and nature of, say, the Sunni/Shia schism was tenuous at best.

It's always bugged me, this barely-more-than ignorance of mine, so when I saw Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000 Year History of Iraq available on Netgalley, I gladly grabbed it, thinking it would serve my purpose well.

 

I had underestimated just how well it would serve, though. Or how compulsively readable it would be. Bull, I knew, is chiefly a journalist, rather than a historian, so I expected a better than average narrative out of this book, but what I got was a truly exceptional as well as informative read! There's something that feels very illuminating about a history that takes in all of the great figures, all the different peoples and cultures, who had an impact on this part of the world, in a single big narrative, Ur to Babylon to Baghdad.

There's a section where Bull makes a choice I find peculiar, though. When it comes time to discuss the Ottoman Empire, sometime opponent of the then-Persian/Iranian powers that held most of Iraq and sometimes that power itself, he chooses to do so thorough the lens of one Ogier de Busbecq, the Hapsburg Empire's marginalized ambassador to the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent. Heretofore mostly devoid of explicitly European perspectives in favor of sources much closer to the experience of the actual denizens of Iraq and its many conquerors, it seems weird to me to do so at this point in history, where surely a modern scholar has access to more direct sources about life in this fascinating period, especially since Busbecq never visited Iraq. But I am just a humble blogger who's never been anywhere, so who am I to pick this nit?

Except it happens again in later chapters, which are more about European archaeologists digging up the ruins of cities we visited earlier in this history. This is less jarring since it is through their efforts that anyone even knows a lot of what we do about places like Mosul and Nineveh, and this figures like Sir Austen Henry Layard are quite legitimately figures in Iraqi history. But Busbecq?

Anyway...

After years kicking his heels in Constantinople, Layard finally gets funding for a proper dig in what was then Ottoman-controlled Iraq.What Layard encounters as he approaches the likely site of the ancient, Old Testament city of Nimrud is very much the kind of information I hoped to find in these pages: 

"The tiny party alit in the gloaming and made their way on foot to the local village. It was empty, deserted, a "heap of ruins," without even the dogs that Layard was used to seeing in Arab villages. Then, through "the entrance to a miserable hovel," Layard saw the glow of a small fire. 

Inside the ruined house was a sight typical of the devastated country around. An Arab family - a father, three wizened wives, some half-naked children, and "one or two mangy greyhounds" - had taken shelter in the abandoned village. When Layard entered, the family cowered, thinking he and his party were "Osmanlis." Seeing that the newcomers were not Turks but Europeans, the Arabs relaxed. Layard heard their story from the father. "Plundered by the pasha," their sedentary tribe had dispersed across the countryside. This family had taken refuge alone in the abandoned village.

One man's archaeological site is another man's refuge, and the father of the family becomes the nucleus of the European's workforce. How very colonial.

And so begins a long history of locals being employed to dig up amazing artifacts, possibly the work of their own ancestors' hands, to be exported to fill Western Museums and private collections (Hi, Hobby Lobby).*

As I've said, this is an exhaustive work of historical writing, including biographical details of figures from Cyrus the Great through Alexander the Great through Suleiman the Magnificent and King Faisal I of (first) Syria and (later) Iraq in plenty of context. This may be more than most readers are looking for, who want to understand the modern nation of Iraq and its ancient ancestor states a bit better, but I suspect that most readers will not notice that while they're reading. I found no point in this book when I got exhausted and wanted to know how much further I had to go, for instance.

This was a particularly illuminating read in concert with Emmanuel Carrere's V13, in which some of the West's sins with regard to this region of the world were forcibly brought home to roost, meaning this is also an excellent book to which to refer when trying actually to understand "why they hate us" or how Islam can both claim to be a religion of peace and inspire brutal terrorism; indeed, it is the best exploration of many of the divides and schisms in that religion that I have yet found.

Bartle Bull has done us all a great service in producing this outstanding book.

*Of course, it is only due to this colonial extraction that I have ever been able to look at such things with my own eyes at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Nick Estes' OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE: STANDING ROCK VERSUS THE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE, AND THE LONG TRADITION OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

"In a very real sense, the founding of the United States was a declaration of war against indigenous peoples."

From now on, I demand that Nick Estes' exceptional contextualization of the #NoDAPL protests, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, be taught alongside whenever classics like Frances Parkman's The Oregon Trail, Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, to which this book is a necessary foil and reply, and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which Estes both amplifies and magnifies, are on a syllabus. You don't need to have read any of these other books to appreciate this book, mind, but if you aren't at least interested in having a look at one or two of them after reading it, I'm going to wonder if you even read, bro.

With its vast, 400+ year, scope and its long, scholarly title, Our History is the Future may seem like it's going to be a dry and academic study, but it's actually one of the most readable and emotionally affecting books of its kind I've ever encountered, full of candid interviews (wherever possible) with witnesses to and participants in, not only the protest named in the title, but the entire history of interactions between the Indigenous peoples of North America's Great Plains region and the waves and waves of mostly white settler colonists who came to take their land and water, kill them and their non-human relatives (especially the bison herds), infect them with diseases, sell them guns and alcohol, condescend and proselytize to and massacre them. So in addition to the scenes most of us saw on television in 2016, at which Estes (a member of the Oceti Sakowin nation who recently and proudly sent a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The guy speaking on behalf of the Seven Council Fires? That means the Oceti Sakowin, which most of us know as the Sioux) was present, he also has much to share about the original contact, conflict and forced migrations that characterized most of the 19th century, the United States unending history of breaking treaties with Indigenous peoples, the Ghost Dance, lesser known efforts to enforce or insist on treaty rights in the early 20th century, the humongous negative impact of the Army Corps of Engineers' post-World War II Pick-Sloan plan that created several large reservoirs in the Dakotas but flooded out thousands of acres of productive Indigenous lands that were helping to feed several reservations' worth of people, and yes, both battles at Wounded Knee, in 1890 and in 1973.

He also saves a whole chapter for something that many of us -- me, for example -- never knew a thing about: continuing efforts to achieve international recognition of North American Indigenous sovereignty via the United Nations and through shared programs of solidarity with Palestinians, South American Indigenous Groups, and other ethnic and cultural minorities striving to regain or retain their rights all over the world. Estes pays special attention here with the Oceti Sakowin and other groups' joint efforts with the Palestinians -- many Palestinian activists have acted as Water Protectors since the #NoDAPL actions started, partly in reciprocation for North American Indigenous help with Palestinian protest actions over the years. As this book was published before the current genocidal war between Israel and Hamas that is killing Palestinians right and left every day, the current tragedies are not mentioned here but are impossible not to think about and weep over through every page of this chapter. I wonder if there are Oceti Sakowin or other peoples over there trying to help the Palestinians right now; I'm sure some are out there lending their voices to protests against the killing.

Indigenous Resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and non-human relatives, and with the earth.

Estes isn't nearly as interested in documenting the United States' (and some of Canada's) crimes against Indigenous peoples, though, as he is in telling the stories of those who tried to stop them, both well known ones like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull but also Moving Buffalo Robe Woman and Deskaheh and Madonna Thunder Hawk. There is much more pride in Estes' tellings than there is sorrow.

Read this.

Virginie Despentes' DEAR DICKHEAD (Tr Frank Wynn)

Epistolary novels have never been my favorite, but when its author is someone like Virginie Fucking Despentes I'm going to drop everything and read it anyway. 

Especially since it kind of sounds like an epistolary novel of hate, as the title, Dear Dickhead (Cher Connard in French), heavily implies. 

The correspondence that unfolds here is between a world famous French actress and celebrated beauty, Rebecca, and an almost as famous French novelist, Oscar. As we quickly learn, both of them have seen better days; Rebecca has hit middle age, is no longer much of a sex symbol and isn't getting much in the way of work anymore; Oscar has recently come to the attention of the #MeToo movement for his treatment of one of his first publicists, a woman named Zoe Katana (gotta love Despentes' character names; this is the best since Vodka Satana in the Vernon Subutex trilogy) at the start of his career.

They knew each other slightly as children, when Rebecca was the best friend of Oscar's older sister, Corrine, who makes a kind of side appearance in the novel as a topic of discussion between the two, but Corinne is not terribly important. What matters is that Oscar, newly in shock, as he excuses himself, from his exposure via his former publicist's blog, recently made some very unkind remarks to the press about Rebecca's appearance these days. And Rebecca, not one to suffer dickheads gladly, emailed him a scathing personal reply that is... very much the kind of thing I read Virginie Despentes for.

I don't think anyone would truly want to read a novel-length flame war, however, and Despentes has other things in mind than just a moderately novel storytelling device. Not long after the opening exchange of fire, Rebecca and Oscar settle down a bit, not only out of mutual respect for Corinne or their own childhood connection to one another and the memories they share, but out of a simple curiosity that blossoms into empathy and then into a combative kind of friendship. Part of the catalyst for this is Rebecca's own investigation of Oscar's sudden #MeToo infamy, exposed when the publicist becomes a middling internet-famous feminist blogger and tells her side of the story, which we get to see in interludes quoting entries from her blog. 

Rebecca neither leaps to Oscar's defense nor takes Zoe's side, but, through her imperfect understanding of Zoe's experience as filtered through her own, makes a very good attempt at leading Oscar to consider how his behavior might have seemed very different from the point of view of an unwilling object of his attentions. Very good, but not perfect: Rebecca hasn't been as powerless as Zoe was since she was a young teenager, and has since lived the cosseted and insulated life of an international superstar. Still, she starts getting through to Oscar, enough to lead him to start reconsidering many aspects of how he has lived his life and treated other people -- and his relationship with drugs and alcohol.

Before we know it, Rebecca and Oscar have more or less talked each other into getting clean, with Oscar starting to actively go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and soon realizing that he's actually finally found the only people in perhaps the world that don't care about the sexual harassment allegations against him, and, once the COVID-19 epidemic first hits and changes the world/ Rebecca eventually follows him, first lurking on the online meetings Oscar has to resort to when Shelter In Place becomes the new norm and then, discovering the same value that Oscar has found in his participation, cautiously turning on the camera and allowing others in recovery to know that she is there and is also finally ready to admit that her own drug use has maybe been a problem.

The two never share a physical space; everything unfolds in true epistolary fashion through their emails and bits from Zoe's blog that allow us not only to see an outside perspective on what they are doing but also, at least from Zoe's side, the price that Zoe is paying for speaking up as part of #MeToo, because of course Manosphere internet trolls start harassing her, threatening her, letting her know via disgusting physical parcels that they know where she lives and driving home that she is trapped there while the epidemic rages unchecked.

The character arcs thus explored are extraordinary and moving without ever feeling sentimental or manipulative; both Rebecca and Oscar are acerbic, brave and, eventually, honest. They never stop needling each other; Rebecca never really stops calling Oscar a dickhead even after they've both come to realize that they genuinely care about each other. Their individual voices are wickedly fun and brutally entertaining. Zoe's is less so, but she still gets a chance, if somewhat indirectly, to appeal to the reader's understanding and empathy. The result is a novel that not only met my exceedingly high expectations of Virginie Despentes as a novelist (who, let's face it, made my automatic buy list long ago) but exceeded them. Despentes is an absolute wonder, and I can't wait to see what she does next, if she chooses to do anything next at all, which I sincerely hope she does!

Emmanuel Carrere's V13: CHRONICLE OF A TRIAL (Tr John Lambert)

I was emotionally unprepared for what awaited me within Emanuel Carrere's V13: Chronicle of a Trial. I imagine few readers are prepared, except perhaps for those who were present for the terrible events in Paris on November 13, 2015, or who attended the trial of the surviving accused of the multiple attacks at a nightclub, a sports arena, and a few cafes.

Nor did I even know that this same group of men were also responsible for suicide bombing attacks in Belgium, on an airport and a train station, on March 22, 2016, by which time I was even more distracted by events here in the U.S.

Let's be real; the attack I previously knew as "the Bataclan shootings" mostly escaped my notice; there were ridiculously awful things unfolding closer to home then, and I don't follow the Eagles of Death Metal -- the band playing the Bataclan that night -- or international football -- there was a friendly match between France and Germany at the Stade de France -- very closely. I would probably still have been pretty ignorant of this whole affair had it not been a significant element of Virginie Depentes' Vernon Subutex trilogy, which she was still writing when the attacks took place and into which she wrote them with devastating effectiveness. 

Oddly enough, it was as I was grabbing Despentes' newest novel, Dear Dickhead (coming soon to a blog near you) off of Netgalley that I saw V13*, recognized the author (Carrere penned my favorite biography of Phillip K. Dick, I Am Alive and You Are Dead), and noticed the coincidence: she who first made me take serious notice of the Bataclan attack had a new book out, and a book about the trial was there for the taking at the same time. How could I not get them both?

Carrere was present for almost every day of the nine-month trial of the 14 men accused of helping plan or abetting the attacks; most of the men who actually entered the locations, fired the guns, and activated the suicide vests, died in the attacks or in later battles with police (some in Belgium, where the same Islamic State cell carried out additional attacks in early 2016). One of the defendants was supposed to blow himself up but changed his mind; some others were caught up helping him escape; others rented the cars or the apartments in which the attackers stayed, or watched ISIS beheading videos with the attackers at their hangout spot in Belgium back in the day.

Normally propaganda hides horror. Here it puts it on show. The Islamic State doesn't say: this is war, sadly for good to triumph we must commit terrible acts. No, it lauds itself for its sadism. It uses sadism, displays of sadism, and permission to be sadistic to recruit.

As I read Carrere's careful, vivid and extremely empathetic account of the trial, my mind kept looking for diversions from the tragedy, often using my ignorance as an excuse. Thus upon discovering that three of the attackers who killed and died that day rode into Paris in a SEAT, I took time out to reflect on how the only other time I've encountered that model of car in literature was in Graham Greene's charmingly bittersweet Monsignor Quixote, in which the title character and a Communist ex-mayor of a Spanish town drive around the countryside in a SEAT they've christened Rocinante. What becomes of my pleasant associations with that car -- which I assure you has not once crossed my mind since I read the Greene novel sometime in the late 1980s or so -- I started wondering. No, Kate, focus. It's not like this book is boring. It's just unbelievably tragic and tough and terrible. Because Carrere, and his English translator John Lambert, are committed to putting me right there in the courtroom while a few hundred witnesses and victims, investigators and, yes, perpetrators, tell their stories, and some very capable and committed defense attorneys try to do right by their clients... in an utterly unfamiliar-to-me justice system.

In the course of testimony, which includes that of François Hollande (who was the president of France at the time of the attacks), something happens which I can't imagine ever happening in a U.S. trial: the actions of the host nation are called into question, considered seriously as justification for what the accused and the deceased attackers did. France was heavily involved in bombing Syria, attacking the Assad regime that had mounted the first big backlash against the Arab Spring and which was continuing to repress its people -- but also, in attacking the territory ruled by the regime, harming civilians. The V13 attackers, many of whom had gone to Syria to defend Islam, felt that they were striking back. If they were culpable, so was France. And many other countries, including mine.

Carrere also devotes time to the stories of the defendants themselves, several of whom were close friends with the ringleader of V13, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and were involved at various levels in his journey to Syria to help the Islamic State help Assad's victims to fight back, and to establish and defend their hoped-for caliphate. Some even were along for the trip and spent time in Syria, even to bringing along their families -- an account of the experiences of one of their wives is especially memorable and harrowing.

Many of the attorneys on both sides, many of whom became friendly acquaintances of his during the Long months of the trial, also get time in Carrere's spotlight. On both sides they were highly skilled, professional and committed to finding the truth and seeing justice done.

In sum, if you know nothing about the attacks, if you want to know more about them, if you want to understand better what turns ordinary immigrants into terrorist killers, or just more about the French justice system and the investigative process that uncovered the identities of the assailants, living and dead, then you owe yourself a look at V13. If none of those things interest you, but you appreciate top level journalism and non-fiction writing, then you owe yourself a look at V13. Even if non-fiction isn't usually your bag and you just appreciate a compelling story and good storytelling, you owe yourself a look at V13.

Just maybe keep some tissues handy.

*The title refers to the day of the attack -- V for "Vendredi" ("Friday" in French) and 13 for the day of the month. Yes, the Paris Attacks occurred on Friday the 13th because of course they did.

Jeff Vandermeer's ABSOLUTION

Did I know, when I got my ARC of Absolution, Jeff Vandermeer's coda/prequel to his Area X trilogy, that I was about to add a new deity to my shrine of household gods? Of course I didn't. Should I have known that was a distinct possibility? Yes, yes, of course. 

 Listen.

 

When I was a kid, somebody gave me a rubber alligator that I imaginatively named Allie. I was fascinated by everything about it: the smell of the rubber, the textures of its skin and tail, the weird flexibility of its teeth, and especially its evil, oversized eyes. I used to take it with me into our wading pool of a summer, along with my barbies, knock-off and branded. At first Allie attacked them, of course. But later, when I decided it would be more fun if my barbies were villains instead of whatever they were supposed to be, I decided that he was their pet and ally, chiefly used to destroy tiny toy cities or help them to go on terrifying crime sprees. Allie made them badasses, though it would be years before I would dare to use such a word, that had "ass" in it. 

Many, many, many years later, Jeff Vandermeer, who had already written a whole trilogy in which the ecosystem itself has become a kind of villain/punisher figure, or, more accurately, has developed a whole new set of priorities that have nothing to do with humanity at all except in that humanity keeps sending walking and talking raw material into its clutches to play with, brought back these weird early memories of Allie when he wrote the best saurian antagonist since that crocodile ticked and tocked its way through Peter Pan, and he gave this saurian monster the best possible name: Smaug.*

But then, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, he, and his army of biologists who first introduce Smaug onto the Forgotten Coast that will be known as Area X in 20 years, immediately rename her The Tyrant. I hate this decision and stomp my ineffectual little foot at it, but this giant mutant alligator of preternatural awareness and uncanny ubiquity is referred to for the rest of Absolution as The Tyrant. Phooey.

But this is my review, dammit, so I'm gonna keep calling her Smaug.

Smaug and a few other gators introduced to the Forgotten Coast, play merry hell with the biologists who bring them almost from the very first. Collectively known as the Cavalry (Central's code word for the series of enormous" packages the biologists hump into the area, sufficiently large and heavy and mysterious to lead the suspicious locals to conclude that they're not alligators -- which the FC already has plenty of -- but bars of gold with which the biologists will buy necessities and bribe suspicious locals), they're allegedly being released to study their migration patterns and to see if any of them make their way back to their original habititats. Which, of course, they don't. Much more fun to drive scientists crazy with anomalous signals from their tracking harnesses, stalk scientists, mysteriously turn up dead yet still be giving off signals that indicate purposeful movement in other locations, etc. 

I would read a whole novel of this alone, but of course Vandermeer has other, bigger, weirder ideas. Like mysterious echoes of beautiful piano music that turns out to be the exact same piano music played by one of the latter day suspicious locals of Area X in, I think, Acceptance. You know, when Old Jim plays his hands off that one night in the bar. Except, you know, that's 20 years in these biologists' future. 

And the music is the least of their problems.

In these dreams, the meadow "had become some other place," ill-used by "constant battle." A weird green-gold light came from the horizon, framed by the cleft between two mountains. An army of "scientists and psychics" struggled "across a plane of sand and bones toward the light." Grim-looking men and women, "who looked like veterans of some longer conflict..." All three claimed to see figures "stitching their way" through the undergrowth outside of Dead Town, and that these figures wore "old fashioned armor and helmets and some rode upon horses." But these figures had no faces, only the toothed hole of a lamprey's open mouth, endlessly circling a limitless gullet (italics mine)**

This passage is an amalgamation of text from the notebooks of three of the biologists who first bring Smaug to the FC in the first of Absolution's three constituent novellas, "Dead Town," as pieced together by none other than Old Jim, long after Smaug and a mysterious humanoid figure called The Rogue have inflated into legend, yet some time before Old Jim becomes the piano-bashing barkeep of the original trilogy. 

Old Jim, it turns out, was indeed more than he seemed in those original three books. 

Which, now that I think about it, kind of correspond to the three novellas of Absolution: the first, Annihilation, told from the point of view of the 12th Expedition's Biologist, aka Ghost Bird, as she first encounters Area X, to "Dead Town," relating the story of a team of biologists sent to study the region 20 years before it became Area X; Authority, focusing on the bureaucratic eccentricities of the Southern Reach as experienced by the grandson, Control, of the great Jack Severance of Central fame, to "The False Daughter," which relates Old Jim's maddening and dangerous experiences with that same Jack Severance and his terrible daughter/Control's mother, Jackie, as they come to grips with how weird the FC is/was even before the Border came down and Area X became an undeniable thing; and Acceptance, weaving the two prior storylines together even as the whole weird train disappears into the Cacotopic Stain possibly a whole 'nother galaxy or universe, to "The First and the Last," similarly syncretizing the prior two novellas into an even weirder whole that also manages to make the original trilogy even weirder than it already was, just by context! 

Oh, but see all that stuff about "old fashioned armor" and a "plane of sand and bones" and whatnot? Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's goddamned time travel in this witches' brew of a fictional milieu, too. I can't swear on it; I think I need to re-read this whole quartet again, possibly in reverse chronological order, before I commit like that, but I'm pretty sure that both wibbly wobbly and timey wimey are at least factors, if not driving forces, in Area X. Though possibly they've only become so now, as is hinted in bits of dialogue like "I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. It should be different already."

But lest I make it sound like Jeff Vandermeer has finally disappeared up his own asshole, I must take this moment to assure you that no, he is still very much here with us and still very much in control of what he is doing. This is still our man at the peak of his powers, and he makes sure he knows it by playing to all of his strengths: rapturously lovely nature writing, deeply researched and probably lived redneck anthropology, grotesque body horror, and, of course, wildlife behaving badly. As in rabbits devouring live fiddler crabs badly. To say nothing of the swimming, wallowing, munching, rushing, biting anomaly that is Smaug and her Manfriend.

Look, I could talk about this all day. I could rage on for a few hours about the howling fantods this book gave both me and my best reading buddy, SJ*** with its extended sequences involving house centipedes. I could share all of our slightly disjointed theorizing about who Smaug's Manfriend "really" is (we were both wrong, by the way). I haven't devoted any lines yet to how the character I despised the most in the original trilogy is now my favorite character in the whole cycle. He really loves drugs, you guys. Like a lot. You think Hunter S. Thompson loved drugs but that was a casual fling compared to how much this character regards drugs with the worshipful devotion of a Bacchante of old. And you really want to know who I'm talking about now, don't you? 

You've got to read the book your own self to find that out. Which, come on: you probably have it from Netgalley already, too. And probably already agree with me that while Absolution may not be the best Area X book, it is absolutely (heh) the most Area X book.

But I'm still gonna buy this when it's available. On audio. I can't wait to hear how a narrator handles this madness.

And yes, I still think Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay is still the retroactive origin point of this whole fictional universe. If that's even a thing. Well, it is now. I've made it one. Area X is Ground Zero of the Kilnification of Earth. If you get it, you get it.

*After the dragon in The Hobbit, natch.

**I'm much too lazy and fatigued from a vaccine hangover as of this writing to check the text right now, but I swear the bit I've italicized is more or less a verbatim description of one of the cacogens in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Possibly even that of my sometime namesake (in that I've copped its name for a gamer tag or social media handle more than once), Ossipago?

***Aka Popqueenie, who buddy read this with me and wrote of Absolution one of the most glorious book reviews of a glorious career of snarky book love. Go read it!

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS

Was Monday Night Rehabilitation your favorite scene of Idiocracy but you wish it was not only serious but a searing indictment of the United States' incarceration- and punishment-focused criminal justice system? Are you looking for some brutal speculative fiction that will also educate you fairly thoroughly (for a novel) about the history of human rights abuses in the prison system, but with a heaping helping of material that illustrates how high technology could make it all magnitudes of order worse? Do you like footnotes* in your novels?

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has you covered, friends. 

These are not complaints about his book, by the way. Quite the opposite!

Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of those books that you go into expecting to be emotionally and spiritually slapped around and punched in the gut for your own good, and you will be, but it's far from being the mere hybrid of Oz and The Hunger Games that its marketers would have you expect. For one thing, it's primarily a love story, if a most unconventional one. And no, I'm not calling it "unconventional" because the protagonist and her lover are both women. Or both incarcerated. That's actually pretty conventional for stuff that I read. And anyway, I don't mean that kind of love story; this isn't a romance novel. A love story. 

First, though, a basic outline of the book's premise, which alone is enough to induce nightmares. In a dystopia near you, technological advances in prisoner control have reached nightmarish levels, to the point where new inmates are subjected to the implantation of devices that allow their jailers to literally drag their bodies along with magnets, or hold them motionless, or, most horribly, induce levels of direct neurological pain beyond anything previously known to science without doing any actual physical damage. Just a load of psychological damage to personality-warping, or even erasing, levels.

This alone would make for a harrowing story, but Adjei-Brenyah has more horrors for us. For not only are prisons now fully privatized, and seem to have completely absorbed entire sectors of the U.S. economy like manufacturing, food processing, anything that requires, you know, labor -- but the mega-corporations who own them have decided that their neo-slaves should also become the entertainment industry. Select inmates are pulled out of their ordinary prison-hells and turned into modern-day gladiators, forced into nomadic lives marching in small teams called Chains from city to city all over the country, and when they reach the next city on their eternal itinerary, fighting to the death in sports arenas before enormous live crowds and worldwide television (holographic?) audiences.

Oh, and pretty much all their time trudging between cities and camping overnight is a reality show that's every bit as popular as the games. No holds barred. No privacy at all. So, e.g., if our heroine, Loretta "Blood Mama" Thuwar and her lady-love Hamara "Hurricane" Stack choose to enjoy intimacy in their tent at the end of the day, four or five little autonomous drone cameras will be in there with them, getting all the angles for the titillation of millions.

Why would anyone agree to such an existence? Well, first of all, did you pay attention to the horrible coercion technology I described above? And second, it's kind of a way out of the prison system; if you're killed in battle or en route (or in camp by a member of your own Chain), you are regarded as Low Freed. If you survive a set number of battles, you can be High Freed - as in released back into the general population, on your own recognizance. Back in the real world.

We don't just follow Thuwar and Stack on their bloody perambulations, though. Interspersed chapters introduce us to some ordinary prisoners and let us share their brutal daily lives by way of tracing a person's journey from, say,  neo-slave meatpacker to becoming one of the guys destined to face Thuwar's nasty, heavy war hammer or Stack's vicious scythe.

And we also meet a few people on the outside, including the host of the premium sports feed of the actual battles (only the reality show of between-battle life is free; tickets to the fights are hideously expensive, and the telecasts aren't too cheap either) and his wife who is slowly being seduced into becoming a fan of the show, and a handful of activists who still think all of this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and are trying to do something about it.

Most poignant of these is Patricia, a woman who dedicated her career to ending the kind of pain that tormented her father as he slowly died from bone cancer in her youth, but whose work (you can just feel it coming already, can't you?) wound up actually yielding the pain-inducing technology the prison system has come to rely on. Her story alone would make a compelling novel, but is much more devastating woven in here with those of the victims she never intended and the people working for a little bit of clemency for them. 

But remember how I called this a love story? It truly, truly is. Thuwar and Stack are lovers, sure, but not in the, say,  Mickey and Mallory Knox sense that a scenario like this might lead us to expect. They are convicted murderers, both of them, and have each killed many more people since their original crimes, but they are both still committed to maintaining their humanity and dignity -- and to helping the rest of their Chain to do the same. While most Chains are free-for-all blood-baths of treachery and literal back-stabbing, Thurwar and Stack have managed to make theirs more like a family, though it's one of which they, and particularly Thuwar, who is pretty much the G.O.A.T., are in charge, and since it's composed of murderers and rapists turned bloodsport athletes, it's an all but farcically dysfunctional one. 

And the pair have at least partly made names for themselves for extending love not only to their fellow gladiators, but to their opponents (Hamara telling each that she loves them, and holding them tenderly as they die) and even the spectators getting their jollies by ogling them, catcalling them, betting on them and watching them murder other human beings. You know, the thing they got sentenced to prison for. 

Love, too, pervades the stories of the abolitionists trying to end this system, some of whom, we find, have every reason not to want these inmates back in society. Adjei-Brenyah has a fine sense of drama.

He also, and this may make this book more attractive to some readers than it did to me, very good at writing fight scenes and other violence. You players of, like, Mortal Kombat and whatnot will be very satisfied on that score. No character wholly escapes the brutality, and we're not spared it either. It's not stomach-churningly gory, but it's very, very violent. And very, very sports.

I like neither of these things, nor do I like reality TV. But I like books that confront the kind of issues that Chain-Gang All-Stars does, especially when they do it as well as Chain-Gang All-Stars does.

But yes, I skimmed the action scenes. 

*Adjei-Brenyah employs footnotes throughout the book for two distinct and interesting purposes; one, to convey factual information about our own actual world of 2024 in the U.S.A. in all its merciless ugliness, and two, to offer a running meta-commentary on the characters the narrative introduces to us, makes us care about, then kills off spectacularly. The combination forms a unique rhetorical device that I hope does not become a tiresome trend but wouldn't mind seeing a little bit more of. Speaking of which, I really hope there's a sequel to this because I really want to watch what happens to [REDACTED] next!

Tim Powers' MY BROTHER'S KEEPER

Anglican Church," he muttered. "You nearly never go to church anyway -- your church is the moors, your priest is your dog, your God is -- I don't know what. The wind.

Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than ten minutes knows how much I freaking love Tim Powers. He was the first author I ever put on the Automatic Buy list, long before I realized I even had such a thing.

But because he was the first and was, for a long time, the only, I still collect him in hardcover. Which is a format which I read with increasing difficulty as the years go by.

So while I was running around screaming like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting for Powers' latest, My Brother's Keeper, to come out, had pre-ordered it the moment that was possible, I'm only now, almost a year later, finished reading it.

I beg you, do not take that as any kind of commentary on its quality, anymore than you should take its dirt-common title or its cover blurb from, of all people, Orson Scott Card.*

Because My Brother's Keeper is Tim Powers' tensest and creepiest read since he invented his own micro-genre of literary historical weird fiction (which lesser mortals have failed to duplicate. Cough. Seth Grahame-Smith. Cough) with The Stress of Her Regard, to which he returns here, not with a sequel like the serviceable but not exceptional Hide Me Among the Graves, but a true spiritual successor, pitting the Brönte sisters, their hapless brother and their Yorkshire parson father against a family of sort-of werewolves. I say "sort of" because these are werewolves in the way that the lamiae of Stress/Hide Me are vampires. This is still Tim Powers, an OG chaos magician of literature, the kind of guy who says "what if these classic monsters but both cooler and more sorrowful?"

And yes, of course there is a very Heathcliff-esque character striding the moors with Emily Brönte and her gigantic bull mastiff, Keeper (who is one of the best dog characters I've encountered in recent years and within recent years I read Jeffrey Ford's Well-Built City trilogy. Keeper ranks up there with Wood!), but he is not an inspiration for Heathcliff; the Emily of My Brother's Keeper already has a completed manuscript of Wuthering Heights in her writing case, has indeed been tempted by her brother, Branwell, to meet the wonderfully sinister and perfectly named villain, Mrs. Flensing, by suggestions that Mrs. Flensing has publishing connections in London. 

No, Powers just lets Alcuin Curzon, the "one-eyed Catholic" whom Emily and Keeper rescue one day, serve as a sort of unremarked-upon slant-rhyme to Heathcliff, the better to enlarge the imaginative power of she whom Emily Dickinson named "Gigantic Emily Brönte" by his presence, instead of diminishing her by creating a lame figure for her creation to be based on.

I like it.

Honestly, I haven't been this excited by a Tim Powers novel since the very first time I read Last Call. Do not snooze on this one, or I'll let Mrs. Flensing get you.

*Just, remember that we liked Card once, and he wrote some good books before he started milking his IP dry.

Hildur Knútsdóttir's THE NIGHT GUEST (Tr Mary Robinette Kowall)

...when you stop sleeping, there are suddenly so terribly many hours of the day.

The early chapters of Hildur Knútsdóttir's The Night Guest were some of the hardest reading I've done and have still left me more than a little bitter, you guys. Not for their quality, not for the prose, not for any literary reason at all, really, but for their specific content and how it resonated with my own past and continuing experience -- until it didn't. 

For The Night Guest starts off with a young woman in quest of a diagnosis, an activity that ate up over a decade of my own life, so I related very hard, at first.

But our heroine, Iðunn, is in Iceland rather than America, so while she encounters some of the same bullshytt that I did from family and friends as she seeks an answer for how she wakes up every morning from sound and adequate sleep with incredible fatigue and soreness and mysterious wounds and injuries, she does not encounter the kind of hostility, disbelief, blaming and accusations of drug-seeking that so many Americans do in her situation.

So I spent a while envying her for that. But then it got worse.

Because there is an answer to her problem that isn't medical, which is partially spoiled by the very jacket copy of this book (thus robbing these early chapters of a lot of tension that might have made them more relatable and interesting even for people like me), so then I was envious of her for two reasons. 

That's a lot to cope with when trying to assess a book critically, which I of course promised Netgalley I would do. Wanting to yell at and/or slap pretty much everyone in the opening chapters of a book is never a good sign that you're going to find what follows is in anyway worth one's precious reading time. But here we go.

Before you can say "have you tried yoga" (which of course she has, and she's a vegetarian, too) Iðunn has other problems, some of which stem from her deep past; her parents willfully misunderstand everything (a typical phone exchange when her mother is shopping for a family dinner goes something like Mom: Do you eat chicken now, I forget? Iðunn: Nope nope nope ty nope. Mom: Oh, well, chicken breasts were on sale but I'll make lots of rice) and are not dealing at all with a family tragedy we don't even realize took place until almost half of the book is over.

Meanwhile, Iðunn has started to notice some odd phenomena in her surroundings, is being stalked by a married ex-lover/co-worker who is starting to get obnoxious, is trying to start something with an attractive new guy whose motives for courting her will seem a little suspect to the reader but whom she accepts at face value, and her sleep issues just keep getting worse and worse.

One thing Knútsdóttir does incredibly well is capture how long-term sleep deprivation (something with which I am also incredibly, uncomfortably familiar) affects cognition and communication -- and one's ability to implement their good and sensible coping strategies, to follow actually helpful and professional advice. This is chiefly communicated via chapter length and brevity of sentences; as Iðunn deteriorates, she tells us less and less until some chapters are only four or five words long. I wonder if this is a quality of the original or is something that translator Mary Robinette Kowall introduced or enhanced. Anyway, it's a brilliant example of the classic writing advice of "show, don't tell" that I truly admire.

Ultimately, though, that brevity feels like truncation, the ending telescoped and rushed, though admirably without sacrificing the tantalizing ambiguity, even at the very end. If you value tidy endings with all narrative questions answered, though, look elsewhere. The Night Guest is probably not for you.

But if you like a story that remains mysterious throughout (and you can overcome any misplaced feelings engendered by its opening act) and just want a short and tense read, get this.

M. John Harrison's WISH I WAS HERE: AN ANTI-MEMOIR

My first and still favorite M. John Harrison read was The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, in which the speculative fiction elements take place so far in the background of the story that they're barely noticeable. The focus instead is on a pair of mostly dysfunctional characters, barely competent at living their own lives, utterly incapable of even paying a little attention to the bizarre changes taking place to the landscape and society around them, which feels faintly like a prequel to J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World might -- if we're interpreting the subtle and widely scattered clues, clues like a sudden and seemingly culture-wide obsession with Charles Kingsley's Victorian era children's book The Water Babies -- at all correctly.

Author and editor and all around badass M. John Harrison's new book, Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir, works on much the same principle. The details of Harrison's life and career are present mostly in the negative (with the exceptions of some anecdotes about an aging cat and about his obsession with rock climbing); the positive space is filled with the figures and ideas and opinions and bits of imagery that have occupied his mind while all of that was going on. It's a fascinating and original way to approach the arts of biography and memoir that I, only the most casual reader of these genres, have never encountered before, and I love it! 

Thus instead of "I" and "me" and banal narratives of mere events in Harrison's life, we get accounts of a sort of dream-self he calls "Map Boy" (everybody writing about this book is going to remind you that "the map is not the territory, blah blah blah, how anti- do I have to get, here?), exploring remembered landscapes and word games and dreams, and of "Beatrice," Harrison's "writer friend" to whom he attributes various mini-manifestos about genre and character and why world-building is pretty bad, actually, and other matters of writing and inspiration and work. Were we to create an image in which these two constructions face one another in profile, the space in between them might in some way be a portrait of Harrison -- but it would be a pretty weird and distorted one. Just the way he wants it, I suspect.*

I can't say for sure that I like Wish I Was Here; I found it beautiful on a purely aesthetic level, full of striking ideas and images, and the very concept of it fascinates me. I do plan to read it again a few times as I become more acquainted with the rest of his work, though. I think it will resonate much more strongly for me when I recognize more of the material in it from his fiction, as it did on this first read when I kept recognizing notions and locations from The Sunken Land, like this: 

We find that, pinkish and surrounded by brand new wire netting, the surface of the tennis court is already sinking into the mud, so that the drainage channels around it, which are still to be filled in, look more like the remains of a half-hearted rescue attempt. Someone has scratched the mileage off the nearby road signs, as if to hide the town or perhaps deny its existence.

I mean, I didn't really feel like I got The Vorrh on the first reading but now it's very likely my favorite of all trilogies.

I have a very strong feeling that Wish I Was Here will grow on me like that. But I don't mean to use it as a sort of key to all his mysteries, which I'm pretty sure was not remotely what he set out to, or indeed did, write. As he pointed out several times in this text, he deliberately cultivates ambiguity and sets out to leave much to his readers' imaginations. Guys like that don't write Dummy's guides.

What they do write, apparently, is the kind of "huh, look at that" narrative that I most associate with (again) Ballardian protagonists, though Harrison has shown a lot more agency than those passive and detached observers of their lives. Ballard protagonists don't cultivate habits like base jumping in middle age, for instance! I mean, if Harrison ever wants to write a whole big non-fiction book about what that's like, I'll sure as hell read it. For I have at least concluded this: I'm down to read whatever he cares to write, and I'm very excited to read his back catalog, much of which has occupied space in my to-be-read piles, sometimes for decades. Sometimes it just takes something special to make me yank them out of the heap and let the stuff that was on top of them fall as it may. Wish I Was Here was more than adequate to that job, if nothing else.

*But can't say I know, because I'm still very much an M. John Harrison newb, for all that much of his career has had significant impact on much of what I've enjoyed the most in my reading life. But, I mean, I haven't even read all of the Virconium tales yet!

Jason Pargin's I'M STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT THIS BLACK BOX OF DOOM

I worry a bit, in the middle of the dumbest year in living memory (so far), that the people who most need to read Jason Pargin's I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, as well as those who are most going to appreciate it, are not going to bother finishing it because of its singular flaw, one that has been creeping very slowly into Pargin's work from the beginning: it's a bit didactic at times. As in there are some scenes that all but descend into Socratic dialogues.*

And there are no elements of hilarious supernatural horror (like in Pargin's John and Dave and Amy books), nor of over-the-top plutocratic science fiction (like in Pargin's Zoey Ashe books) in his latest novel. Pargin would seen to have concluded, like, say, William Gibson did before him (at least for the Bigend/Blue Ant trilogy) that the real, mundane world that we actually live in is plenty weird a setting for his brand of horrifying comedy and searing pathos, thank you very much. 

Which makes the fact that I was reading an ARC of I'm Starting to Worry... at the very instant the news first broke of the shooter at the Trump Rally in Butler, PA on July 13th of this stupid year of 2024 so freaking weird and perfect and unsettling that it made me feel like I was suddenly a bystander in either a John and Dave and Amy novel or a Zoey Ashe novel, for reasons I'll talk about here in a bit.

The plot of I'm Starting to Worry... chiefly concerns a disaffected young man, Abbott Coburn, who accepts a Lyft request from a mysterious woman who needs help transporting the titular Black Box, a roadie crate covered in band stickers, at least one of which stickers looks quite a lot like a radiation hazard sticker as depicted in the cover art, from California to Washington D.C. In Abbott's dad's tricked-out practically brand new Lincoln Navigator, of which Abbot believes his dad is more proud and protective of than he is of Abbot himself. 

We are treated, here and there, to  just enough foreshadowing about the eventual fate of box and car l, and about the subsequent fame of Abbot and the young woman, who gives the improbable but cool name of Ether when Abbott demands to know what to call her, to know that this trip they're planning is not going to go smoothly or end well. Which, of course it isn't; this is a Jason Pargin novel. His first book gave away an unhappy ending in its title! 

The duo's eventual fate is sealed by two unhappy circumstances they don't even know about until miles and days later, when one of them finally breaks the rules of the trip (don't look in the box, don't bring any devices that can track us, etc) and realizes that the Internet has lost its collective mind over their journey and conspiracy theories about it abound; the true point of I'm Starting to Worry... is thus revealed to be that said Internet has given us all a chronic case of what Malka Older named "Narrative Disorder" in her Centenal Cycle: our brains, already inclined to pattern seeking and narrative creation where neither pattern nor narrative actually exist, also can't really tell the difference between the stories it has fabricated and objective reality. Or at least not without more effort than most of us are used to expending to overcome the inherent efficiency/laziness of our brains, the better not to hog all the glucose so our muscles and organs can have some, too.

Anyway, not only did that sticker on the box capture the imagination of some of the worst sufferers ever of Narrative Disorder (aka Reddit users, which, get ready for them: big chunks of the novel take the form of conflicting theories, insults and wild speculation in Reddit threads, even unto the creation by rebels from one subreddit about the escapade of a whole 'nother one, denouncing the users and moderator of the original), but also, the vehicle Ether had originally tried to use to take the box cross country by herself... did in fact set off a radiation detector when investigators found it broken down and abandoned not far from where Abbott picked her up.

 

Oops.

So people think the pair are maybe some kind of terrorists transporting a dirty bomb to set off on the Mall in Washington D.C. No, wait, actually, Abbott is just a dupe in this plot, seduced into driving by Ether, who is a trained Russian sex-spy. No, the radiation is actually from an alien (or alien corpse) that the pair are transporting from a seekrit location to D.C. for a dramatic reveal to finally force Disclosure; Abbott and Ether are heroes! No, wait...

See why it was freaking weird to be reading this on the day a poor marksman took a potshot at the Republican nominee for POTUS?

Anyway, the mystery ropes in two unlikely "detectives" who have assigned themselves to the case: a recently retired FBI agent named Joan Key, and Abbott's father, Hunter, who, it turns out, actually does care quite a bit about his son, thank you (he's just really bad at, you know, emotions and stuff), and would really rather not see his boy go down in a hail of bullets on national TV.

But as Key and Hunter try to track Abbott and Ether -- Key to stop what she is sure is a terrible domestic terror threat that none of her former colleagues will take seriously, Abbott to save his son from certain death or even worse fates and also maybe congratulate him for finally doing something interesting with his life -- they can't help but join a howling pack of weirdos who are all doing the same thing for different reasons, spurred to action by the insanity on Reddit and Facebook, mostly, but also...

We find out early on that Abbott isn't just a Lyft driver who still lives with Daddy, but is also a YouTube streamer of middling popularity; this all really got touched off by a quick post to his channel advising that he was going to be offline for a while having a real life adventure. So some of his fans, hip to what's been going on on Reddit, etc long before Abbott himself is, are out to save him from the Evil Woman who tempted or kidnapped him into being her unwitting stooge.

And there's a big scary and heavily armed guy the duo refers to as the Tattoo Monster on their trail, too. The Tattoo Monster seems to know what's actually in the box and to believe that it's rightfully his, and is surprisingly resourceful for a dude who looks like he hasn't paid attention to anything since Hunter S. Thompson wrote Hell's Angels. In which Tattoo Monster (he has a real name but Tattoo Monster is more fun) could easily have been a character.

It all builds up to a satisfying climax in typical Pargin fashion, both way over the top and just believable enough, both coming at you out of nowhere and telegraphed almost from the first paragraph. 

In the middle, though, we get lots and lots and lots of pseudo-philosophical exchanges between Abbott and Ether, mostly about how much the world sucks and it's going to hell and it's especially bad for unattractive young white men (Abbott, who "spent half his life sensing he was in someone's way and the other half actually being in someone's way but failing to sense it") vs It's only bad from a very narrow, specific and privileged viewpoint and everyone really has a bad case of Internet poisoning and toxic levels of loneliness (Ether).

I have this theory that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what's happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It's like a filter that only shows you others' bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn't exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it's designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort.

- Ether, explaining why she refers to social media tech as the Black Box of Doom 

So yeah, if you're a fan of Pargin's old work at Crackd, his many podcast appearances on shows like Behind the Bastards, or his TikTok channel, these passages won't be too much of a bother, covering similar mythbuster-y ground to those, but they do slow down the action some and often feel quite preachy if you're already on Pargin's wavelength re: what modern technology and living standards and capitalism have done to our brains and how important it is to unplug and get some perspective -- I can only imagine but that is even worse for those who are not. So I'm sure lots of people are going to be online soon complaining that Pargin has Gone Woke or whatever new slang for pointing out that things could stand some improvement in the equity and kindness departments will be by the time the book is published later this year. 

For this was a Netgalley pick for me, and, weird July 13 experience it was for me, I'm mighty glad to have gotten it.

Pargin doesn't need fancy magic or sci-fi trappings to tell a great, and frequently funny, story. He made my auto-buy list a long time ago, but I maybe need to bump him up to must buy in hardcover.

*I'm aware that this is a strange context in which to use the word "descend" but this is supposed to be genre fiction, and Pargin's audience is not, I suspect, going to like the lecturing and arguing that characterizes a lot of the interactions between our protagonist and his primary companion. I'd love to be wrong!