A Reader’s Journey: Books Read in 2022
In considering my 2022 reader’s journey, I’d like to present four statements regarding genre fiction, specifically weird/horror fiction:
Statement 1: I’m finding it increasingly difficult to engage deeply with the genre fiction I read.
Statement 2: Art is subjective.
Statement 3: Creating content is not the same as telling a story.
Statement 4: The rapid advancement of technology the last two decades has left the novel somewhat anachronistic and a largely irrelevant part of the Western cultural landscape.
Let’s set the first statement aside for now and consider the other three.
Statement 2: Art is subjective. One’s reaction to any work of art – regardless of the artist’s intent – is inherently personal. Your reaction – in the gut, in the heart, in the head – rises out of a complex brew of thoughts, influences and life experience. Social and community involvement may also contribute to the brew, but what you feel inside is yours and yours alone. A novel may float your boat, it may gently rock your boat, it may rub seductively against the side of your boat, it may capsize your boat or blow your damn boat to smithereens – but it will be a reaction confined to you. Others may have similar experiences and you may commiserate with them, but they cannot experience your reaction, nor you theirs. Life tip: You dig what you dig. Others dig what they dig. Making generalized statements about a book (or any work of art), outside of the mechanics of it—which are never as interesting as we like to pretend—is futile.
So here I go.
Statement 3: Creating content is not the same as telling a story. More avenues are open for writers to get their work out there than ever before. Additionally, it’s easier to play around in different venues – the modern writer of the weird may dabble in screenplays, comic/graphic novel writing, video game writing, blogging, podcasting and numerous other content channels. Particularly if the writer wants to build a “career” – i.e., make money (even if not much.) There’s a constant hustle to create lots of work to spread around and keep your name out there when the playing field is so vast and attention span so short. At the same time, these content channels are competing for eyeballs and landing a writer with even a little bit of a cult name can go a long way. The end result is writers who achieve a level of visibility, even within a very niche field like weird/horror, risk become content creators. That is, they start to crank out content to satisfy the wealth of opportunity they have and spend less critical time on the stories themselves. The hustle becomes the focus of creation. The needs dictating that content be cranked out means the writing is competent but true personality is rarely achieved. In other words: lots of technically fine but bland writing, almost no great writing. Too little writing gets under the skin and sticks.
This is, of course, a generalization. I’m not interested in singling out particular writers – art is subjective, remember – but instead commenting on a trend I’ve watched rise over the last fifteen years or so. Why this might be leads us to statement four.
Statement 4: The rapid advancement of technology the last two decades has left the novel somewhat anachronistic and a largely irrelevant part of the Western cultural landscape. It’s not as simple as the internet killed the novel – it didn’t. The novel was already on the path to cultural irrelevance when the internet was still a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. The home video and cable television revolution of the eighties was, if not the initial blow, the first one to blast away a large part of the foundation and leave the novel teetering. The internet merely toppled it over. It’s not that novels can no longer reach wide audiences – see the pop culture dominance of YA fiction – but the days when someone might pick up an Invisible Man or One Hundred Years of Solitude outside of a classroom setting were largely gone by the turn of the century. Even when a novel appears to have penetrated the cultural conversation on some level, such as Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, it’s not actually being read by a cross-section of the general public.
In genre fiction, this evolution has been twofold. We see the problem of the content creator, simply trying to crank out as many books as they can get published (and with the ease of self-publishing, that can be one hell of a lot – there’s a whole long sad tale to be told about the death of the editor role that I don’t have the time or heart to go into here.) They need to keep up the hustle. Second, we see more writers focusing on attention-grabbing tricks, in particular utilizing a meta-approach to storytelling. This postmodern, often ironic focus on being clever—or worse, gatekeeping through appealing to trivia and trope knowledge—pains me to no end. It’s gradually driving me away from the genre I’ve loved all my life.
Oh look, we’ve circled back around to the first statement.
Statement 1: I’m finding it increasingly difficult to engage deeply with the genre fiction I read. Sounds like you need a break, buddy. How much of this is a me problem: subjective, purely about taste and how much is the weird/horror genre itself actually hurting? I tend to think it’s more of the former – I’m sure many people enjoy the meta-approach, for example, and find it more relevant to (Western/American) pop culture at large or it would be hard to fathom why it’s so widely utilized. The novel may be irrelevant to the general (Western/American) cultural conversation today, but so are rock albums and virtually all non-superhero movies – and plenty of people enjoy both (you can only sign me up for the former, though.) Given the sheer amount of cultural noise, the speed with which cultural ephemera surfaces and then disappears along with the ease of exploring niches, there is an argument to be had that nothing is relevant to the cultural conversation anymore. I’m not qualified to make the claim one way or another, but it’s important to consider within this context.
After the horror boom of the eighties collapsed, the next decade saw the genre retrench, get a bit lost and slowly rebirth itself. I think this is a healthy cycle. That period produced some amazing writers (can we even imagine the weird tale today without Thomas Ligotti?) and eventually culminated in a golden age of the weird tale that started sometime in the early aughts and is maybe just now starting to collapse. If it is collapsing, there are still plenty of signs of hope: the increased representation of marginal groups and the increased visibility of non-Western genre fiction are two that spring readily to mind. There are many others. The genre – and the writers who populate it – will evolve. Evolution is inevitable. It is for the reader to decide whether they will evolve with it.
Perhaps the most fundamental change in my reading approach happened in the past year: I gave myself permission to not finish books that weren’t holding my interest. Not dropping out after a couple of pages, mind you, but after a handful chapters, often up to half the book. It sounds so simple and yet I always felt I had to finish a book, that it was somehow wrong not to. This stance now seems incredibly silly to me and making this change has been incredibly freeing. The list below contains all the books I read this year (not counting rereads) but there are an additional half dozen or so that I dropped when they didn’t hold my interest. If I’m not connecting, I don’t need to push for that connection. Weeding is as much a part of growth as blossoming.
And let’s not forget short stories, which historically have rarely reached cultural ubiquity in the first place and in their brevity seem less prone to this engagement issue. I am by no means a believer that horror only works when short and to the point, but it’s undeniable that the horror short story requires a focus that must first capture the reader and then drive the killing blow in. No playing with your food. The challenge here is that authors who want to make a career out of genre fiction are pretty much shoved to the novel format by external forces, whether or not it’s where their true talent and/or passion lies. There is nothing more dejecting for me as a reader than reading the debut novel of a short story author I’ve loved and finding it…blandly competent. The voice that sang out so beautiful and strong scrubbed to a mechanical drone. A failure I can handle, even rejoice in (for it often means the author is reaching for something) if the author’s voice remains true. It’s the scrubbing of personality as the author strains to dot their i’s and cross their t’s that disheartens me. Open the hood of one of these books and you’ll find that all the basics are in place: the plot works, the characters are at least somewhat fleshed out, the writing gets you from point A to point B efficiently. But there is no voice. There is no sense that the tale wanted or needed to be told. And it reads just like the book next to it. Still: I have their short stories. As well, let us not forget there are always, always new voices to discover.
And so the search goes on. Maybe it’s a good reminder that it is the tale, not the teller. Enjoy each story that does work. When the story doesn’t work, set it aside and continue the search. Listen for new voices but don’t write off the established ones just because a story didn’t work for you: if they’ve earned your trust in the past, it’s worth revisiting them down the line to see if they spark again. Like everything in life, balance is the key. Evolution is inevitable.
Enough of the musings, let’s talk about some books! If you are new to my annual Reader’s Journey posts, first thank you for reading! The list below contains all the books I read in the past year. New (to me) books only, I don’t list rereads. Following the list are thoughts about a handful of the titles. I don’t cover every book on the list—I rarely cover nonfiction, for example. There’s no rubric involved; I simply write if I feel inspired to say something about the book. You can find previous years here.
Sunblind, Catriona Ward
Smashed: Junji Ito Story Collection, Junji Ito
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Fear: The Autobiography of Dario Argento, Dario Argento
American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett
Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Melissa Maerz
The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu
Death’s End, Cixin Liu
The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, Hannah Lillith Assadi
Such a Pretty Smile, Kristi DeMeester
Siouxsie & the Banshees: The Authorised Biography, Mark Paytress
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
Echo, Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Devil in a Coma, Mark Lanegan
The Lake of the Dead, André Bjerke
Cured: The Tale of Two Imaginary Boys, Lol Tolhurst
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, Dave Grohl
The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records, Jim Ruland
Nothin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion, Tom Beaujour
Passersthrough, Peter Rock
Lost in the Jungle: The Mysterious Disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon in Panama, Jürgen Snoeren
The Turnout, Megan Abbott
Double Talkin' Jive: True Rock 'n' Roll Stories from the Drummer of Guns N' Roses, The Cult, and Velvet Revolver, Matt Sorum
Dead Silence, S.A. Barnes
Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Laurie Woolever
True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant, Brad Ricca
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, Jason Schreier
Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, Cal Flyn
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
Destination Onward, Jeff Wagner
The Light Pours Out of Me: The Official John McGeoch Story, Rory Sullivan-Burke
The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, Michio Kaku
Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, Preston Fassel
Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies, John Langan
Bone Harvest, James Brogden
Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez
Fairy Tale, Stephen King
The Damnation Game, Clive Barker
Breakfast at Midnight, Louis Armand
Come with Me, Ronald Malfi
The Ghastly One: The 42nd Street Netherworld of Director Andy Milligan, Jimmy McDonough
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk
Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, Bono
The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination, Ursula K. Le Guin
Aureole, Carole Maso
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 1, James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle, eds.
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume 2, James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle, eds.
Last year I suggested that Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street was “ … the most important book in the [horror] genre this year and at the same time feels too large for the genre to contain.” This year Ward graced us with Sundial and the exact same words apply. I’ve been chewing Sundial over in my head for several days now, trying to figure out how to summarize my complex feelings about this book. While not a perfect novel, what it is trying to achieve seems to me above and beyond anything else I’m reading in the genre today, which is part of why I think it’s too big to be reduced to genre fiction and yet…if not in horror, where does it belong? As a reader, categorization is not important to me, but it can be critical in allowing a book to find its audience. Here’s the thing, though: Sundial is important, yes, but it’s also an unpleasantly harrowing read. Well, that’s what horror is supposed to do right? Not all readers—not all fans—may think so. Horror is often surprisingly safe and there is nothing safe about Sundial. Like Needless Street, I think a trigger warning is appropriate because it deals with abuse in an unflinching way. No, it’s not safe at all.
It’s also flawed. Most of the flaws are minor – a meta story within story that simply doesn’t need to be there, some questionable pacing, a twist ending that twists one too many times and deflates a conclusion that would otherwise haunt the reader. These flaws are largely a matter of confidence, of a writer learning to have faith in their material. The one flaw that is not so minor, though, is one of intent and is arguably not a flaw at all: every character in Sundial is a horrible person. That is hardly uncommon in the genre and not a problem in and of itself. It’s when Sundial’s characters are supposed to be feeling anything other than self-centered and destructive—as partners, as parents—that book fails because they are simply not believable. Whereas the darkness is portrayed with great detail and skill, the suggestions of light are barely even sketched in, tossed of in a couple statement sentences quickly contradicted by the actions of the characters. At first I thought this was intentional, but as the book spiraled into ever-enveloping darkness, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was supposed to feeling at least empathy for the two main characters and I simply couldn’t. By the latter pages of the book—which feature some truly harrowing scenes—everything felt distanced, instead of cutting me open like it should. This was not the case with Needless Street and I’m not sure why it happened here. Did I screw up as a reader? Maybe in some sense the book is more powerful for not forging that connection – maybe that allows a reader who wouldn’t normally approach this type of material feel able to do so.
Still, I can’t stress this enough: this is an important book and it should be read. Ward is a brave writer, tackling the material she does. In her books, she gives voice to the voiceless. Even at this early juncture in her career, she is an original: her work does not read like anyone else’s. The only other author who has pushed the field to this extent in recent times is Stephen Graham Jones with 2020’s The Only Good Indians. Jones has since retreated to the cozy confines of horror fandom with his Lake Witch trilogy; my hope is that Ward will keep pushing. If Sundial isn’t quite a masterpiece, it solidified my belief that she has one in her. It might be her next book and you can bet I will be reading…
If I had to choose a favorite short story collection from the last ten years, Kristi DeMeester’s 2017 collection Everything That's Underneath might very well be it. Wonderfully distinct, original stories from a thoroughly modern voice, DeMeester’s work opened up new potentialities for weird fiction. As such, I had a fair amount of anticipation for her latest, Such a Pretty Smile. It’s not her first novel (Word Horde published an earlier one, Beneath) but it is the first one I’ve read and, I believe, her first book with a larger publisher. Smile reads every bit as modern to me as her short fiction. The subject matter, which could be (a bit too simply) summarized as the continual silencing of women’s voices and the negative perception of women who don’t go quietly into that good night, is sharply conveyed and relevant. There’s no questioning DeMeester’s engagement with her subject matter. As a novel, though, the characterizations and dialogue felt rough around the edges. The book was structured oddly. Tightly paced sections bumped up against exposition dumps (particularly in the latter third of the novel.) Perhaps DeMeester isn’t yet entirely comfortable with the form? Even with its growing pains, Such a Pretty Smile is a worthy read. There’s no questioning DeMeester’s talent…
While I quite liked John Langan’s 2016 novel The Fisherman, I’ve found his short work to be hit and miss. That changed with this year’s collection Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies, which sees Langan reach a whole new level of craft. At times in the past his work has struggled to escape his influences (especially Lovecraft and Campbell) but in this new collection he fully comes into his own. The stories in Corpsemouth are exemplary; if someone were to ask you for an example of the modern weird tale at its best you could do no better than to hand them this book. The clear theme of this collection is family, bringing an emotional resonance to even the most bizarre stories. I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite; all are great. Highly recommended to those who love weird tales and adventurous readers…
King of the Hill: This has been the quietest year I can remember from Mr. King, with just one new novel published. That novel, Fairy Tale, is a book that I’m finding rather hard to write about. Because what it is, at heart, is exactly what it says it is: a pure fairy tale that boldly grabs a handful of extremely overused tropes and makes no bones about using them (minus an occasional self-aware wink)—and utterly succeeds in doing so. I found Fairy Tale a purely pleasurable escapist read, taking me away from the daily world and all its associated messiness. And isn’t that one of the reasons we read? Not every book has to be Great Art. Fairy Tale is not a book that makes a Great Statement about anything. It’s just fun. The first 200 pages are damn near perfect, some of my favorite King storytelling in years. You can feel him taking great pleasure in the act of spinning a yarn. And once the book really shifts into fairy tale territory, it’s still a blast, even though some of the characters/situations weren’t to my, for lack of a better phrase, aesthetic tastes. I still breezed through this magical tale, completely invested in its outcome. I really don’t know how Fairy Tale will land with most readers. This is the type of book to which you have a private, personal engagement. Either you will enjoy the journey or wonder why you ever bought a ticket, probably. I loved it. If King is starting to wind down, well, this Constant Reader remains thankful for each and every book he gifts us…On the Joe Hill front, it’s all tumbleweeds so far as I can tell. We are now six years from his last novel and three from his last collection. It seems like he’s doing a lot of adaption/screenwriting/comics work, which aren’t areas of interest to me. Hopefully we get something new soon. I’d always rather wait and get something inspired than get a steady stream of mediocrity anyway…
Speaking of horror lit legends, let’s chat about Clive Barker. Of all the “big” names of the 80s horror boom, Barker was the edgiest and the most subversive, his themes far more classical in nature than the middle-Americanisms of King, Koontz et. al. The Books of Blood remain one of the key texts of short-form horror (though some of the later tales approach novella length) and still have the power to utterly blow the doors of your mind open today; if there’s a more completely realized, utterly unique short story than “In the Hills, the Cities” I’ve yet to read it. When it comes to his novels, though, I’ve found him to be all over the place. Of what I read, not a single novel is great. Some are good (Weaveworld needed to lose 100 pages or so but was a decent yarn, I have fond if frustratingly vague memories of really digging Imajica ca. 1992 but I’ve never revisited it), some are meh (The Great and Secret Show, Sacrament) one was so tedious I didn’t finish—and this was back when I finished every book I started (Everville) and one is simply one of the worst novels I’ve ever had the misfortune to read in my life (Galilee, which I still maintain *must* be some kind of meta joke I just didn’t get.) Good horror novels rely on characterization and characterization is Barker’s weakness. He can write awe-inspiring, utterly unique visions but a fully fleshed-out character seems beyond his grasp; this is particularly noticeable the longer his books get. It's what sinks The Great and Secret Show, for instance. All of this is to say that while I’m happy to ignore all post-Galilee work—not getting burned there again!—I had never read his 1983 debut novel, The Damnation Game, often held up as an important horror novel. Perhaps being the closest to the immaculate Books of Blood, it would be a, if not great, at least interesting novel? Well…it was pretty good. Definitely one of the better Barker novels I’ve read, which is unfortunately a rather low bar. It does feature the best characterization I’ve read in a Barker novel, though he still struggles to convey nuance, frequently falling into telling instead of showing. I’ve read reviews that complain the story pace is slow and I actually found this a point in the book’s favor – Barker was aiming to really flesh out the environment of the story and I think it worked. The book is a fascinating blend of Barker’s more outré tendencies (most of which show up in the final pages) and the American market demands of the early stages of the paperback horror boom. This means the book never entirely finds its balance, but those market demands also reign in Barker’s most indulgent tendencies. The Damnation Game never feels as epic as it aspires to – yet that actually reinforces the story’s stance that evil is nothing so much as banal. Weirdly I found the nightmare scenes to be the least effective aspect of the book – Barker had yet to figure out how to make his more grotesque visions unsettling. In the end I thought The Damnation Game to be a fine book, a bit dated of course, but worth a read for fans of the genre…
American Elsewhere is a bit of a throwback book; it reminded me of something you might find on the drugstore rack during the horror paperback book boom of the eighties. Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel is an engaging yarn that manages to keep its increasingly absurd and crazy plot together, just like the best beach reads do. There were several times I thought it would go off the rails but it never did. That said, the novel struggled with the fine line between realism and absurdity, the failure to achieve the former (in terms of characters and the small town ambience it so desperately wants to peel back) keeping the latter from feeling as, well, absurd as it should. I never got the feeling of cosmic awe that the tale wanted to impart, but I did appreciate the well-balanced prose and thought the book moved along at a snappy pace, never dragging. While admittedly a mixed bag, I think it’s worth a read if you’re looking to scratch that ol’ prime McCammon/Koontz itch. I still don’t have one freaking clue what the title has to do with anything in the book, though…and naming the small town in question Wink must be some kind of inside joke I didn’t get…
James Brogden’s Bone Harvest is an occasionally grisly folk horror tale that largely takes place in modern-day England, with the backstory beginning during WWI. I’m not familiar with any of Brogden’s other work but found Bone Harvest to be a well-crafted, engaging horror novel unafraid to get its fingers into the guts, so to speak. There are some gruesome scenes but they are integral to the story and never feel gratuitous. Characterization is decent overall and the book moves along at a zippy pace. It probably won’t stick with you after you finish but it’s fine way to pass a couple of afternoons curled up on the couch…Ronald Malfi’s Come with Me is an effective mystery/ghost story. First-person narrated novels live and die on their protagonist and Malfi does an admirable job of investing the reader in the protagonist’s plight and the overall mystery. The well-constructed plot moves along at a brisk pace. I’m a tad unsure that I really buy the final reveal, but it is carried off well thanks to the character-building Malfi does throughout the novel. Not just a thriller, not just a mystery, not just a ghost story, Come with Me picks and chooses its elements wisely…Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s novel HEX is one of my favorite horror novels of the last decade, successfully updating the “spooky things in a cut-off town” formula with modern technology considerations, so I was excited to finally lay my hands on his follow up novel, Echo. Alas, I found it uneven, almost throwing it in the “didn’t finish” pile several times. In the end I persevered and was rewarded with a book that does a number of things competently but never coheres into the frightening story it wants to be. The mountaineering scenes were effective, easily the highlight of the book. Conversely, the narrator’s backstory didn’t work for me at all, greatly contributing to what were overall mediocre characterizations. Basically, not a bad book but not a great one either…
You want a damn fine pulpy sci-fi horror read? Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes has got you covered. This is a beach read in the best sense – the prose is unpretentious and straightforward while conveying an effectively creepy atmosphere. The psychological aspects aren’t exactly deep but work effectively to flesh out the protagonist’s motivations and add to the overall tension. This is far more on the horror side of things than sci-fi and I dug it, blowing through it over the course of several hot summer afternoons…On the opposite end of the spectrum, Carole Maso’s Aureole is a deeply sensual celebration of language and lust. There is no logic in approaching a work like this critically; you simply give yourself over to the magic the words conjure and let it transport (transform) you. You might want to keep a fan handy, though…
Elements of magical realism mix with the sorrows of aging and memory loss in Hannah Lillith Assadi’s wonderfully titled The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, one of my favorite reads of the year. Beautifully realized, deeply melancholic, its concerns mirror my own as I recognize that almost certainly more years are behind me than ahead of me. When you can no longer honor your own memories and there is no one left to hear you, the sea awaits…Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a slim volume of magic that lives in a world just outside our own. The book is a mystery box and the clues to unlock it are found throughout a magical dwelling of seemingly infinite rooms and corridors that occasionally get swallowed by waves of seawater. Our narrator does not really want to unravel this mystery but in the end he is, of course, forced to. It’s too simple, too reductive to say Piranesi is about the loss of innocence—hell, isn’t damn near every book about either the loss of innocence of the corruption of it?—but I found myself, much like Piranesi, reluctant to have the mystery solved. Yet solved it was, a reminder that we never get to stay in a state of wonder for long, the need to learn and understand will forever propel us forward, with understanding inevitably leading to new mysteries but leaving little pieces of ourselves locked in a past that no longer exists…
Megan Abbott is a mystery to me. I’ve followed her career with interest for the better part of a decade and I still somehow can’t get a handle on her overall body of work – taken as a whole, there’s something that remains just out of grasp. Paradoxically, I quite like her novels on an individual level, including 2021’s ballet drama The Turnout, which I read early in the year. Like all of Abbott’s work, The Turnout is extremely readable. At times Abbott’s writing can be rather pedestrian—humdrum is the term that comes to mind—but her plot situations and generally solid characterizations keep one turning the pages. As a mystery novel, I don’t think The Turnout works—the book fumbles through some exposition-heavy passages in its final pages and the plot is tied up too neatly. And yet I found it a rather compelling read, with our narrator equal parts sympathetic and plain ol’ pathetic. There’s no warmth in The Turnout. Everyone is broken, over-dramatic and self-important. Yet I still enjoyed the book. I suppose that is the real mystery… Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is one hell of a fun title and, bonus, the book is fun too. … Bones of the Dead not a particularly complex tale but it’s loaded with humor both obvious and sly and Olga Tokarczuk really knows how to turn a phrase. The astute reader will pick up where the book is going from the get-go but will have such a good time getting there it won’t matter. If I have a reservation, it’s that I don’t think … Bones of the Dead is grappling with the “big questions” as much as it thinks it is. This doesn’t detract from one’s overall enjoyment of the tale though…
I do not read a lot of science fiction but what I do read often strikes me deeply. With the final two books of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, The Dark Forest and Death’s End, this holds true to fullest extent. I go to science fiction with the understanding that ideas—thought exercises—are paramount, with characterization and even plot being a (rare) bonus. I don’t want to read a technology manual (which is why I generally give hard sci fi a pass) but I also don’t want simplistic good vs. evil nonsense or fantasy trappings. Yeah, I’m hard to please. And after finishing Cixin’s remarkable trilogy, I’m going to be even harder to please because this is sci-fi at its absolute pinnacle. Especially The Dark Forest. How often do we say the middle book of the trilogy is the best? (Meekly, I raise my hand for The Two Towers.) Getting into the plot mechanics of The Dark Forest would take pages, but I do want to call out that for a book of ideas, the plot is accessible and highly readable. The characterizations won’t win any awards but they function beautifully in the context of the story, allowing the reader to approach big concepts without being overwhelmed. By the end of The Dark Forest we are asked to consider an interpretation of the Fermi paradox that is profoundly disturbing – about as far from Carl Sagan’s hopefulness as one can get. At the same time, it’s miles away from a simplistic good vs. evil framework, which is why I’m convinced no Western writer could have written this book. Death’s End goes for even bigger ideas and, frankly, goes pretty much batshit in the last two hundred pages. On a story level, Death’s End doesn’t work. However, I admired its ambition and can’t deny it had me thinking—which is what I treasure most from sci-fi. These are grand books of grand ideas, essential to anyone with the least bit of interest in the genre. I also think they are instructive for Western readers, approaching these big ideas with a lens quite different from our own – a worldview that I found fascinating…
It's been sixteen years since Cormac McCarthy’s last novel. That book, The Road, brought him a far larger readership than he’d ever had. The book won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the notoriously reclusive McCarthy came out of the woodwork long enough to do an interview with Oprah. All of this was a strange spectacle given that McCarthy’s work isn’t the most accessible – however, The Road and 2005’s No Country for Old Men were far more approachable than his prior works. So does The Passenger continue down this road of approachability and, more importantly, was it worth the wait? To the former I’d say it’s a step back in accessibility, but it is still far easier to approach than anything before No Country. As to the latter…man, I don’t know. The Passenger is a weird-ass book, even considering McCarthy’s oeuvre. It’s also frustratingly uneven, to this reader at least. There were passages I simply loved and a lot more I didn’t. Frankly, I think we are kidding ourselves if we say there is an actual storyline. I mean, technically there is, but it’s a half-baked concoction and so clearly not McCarthy’s focus. The Passenger is one long series of rambling musings/digressions, often presented as endless, go-nowhere conversations. This is not necessarily a problem when the writing is sharp. Unfortunately, it is inconsistent. As well, some of McCarthy’s tics, like the lack of quotation marks and speaker attribution, come off a lot more affected and, frankly, annoying when pages of dialogue go on…and on…and on. An acrid strain of misogyny occasionally surfaces, not as bad as many of his other novels but still unpleasant when it does appear. Yet there are passages where everything clicks and I am reminded why I have claimed on more than one occasion that McCarthy is capable of being our greatest living fiction writer. In the end, The Passenger is not the book I’d use to make that case. It’s…fine. It should be *better* than fine. My experience with it has cooled my anticipation for the companion book, Stella Maris, as of this writing due to be published in a few weeks. Of course I will still read it—there’s always those brilliant passages that make it worthwhile, and I admit I’m a bit curious to see how he handles a female protagonist, given that his view of them is largely one-dimensional throughout his body of work (including Outer Dark, his second novel and his only other work to partially feature a female protagonist – but hey, everyone is one-dimensional in that book.) Maybe I’m being too harsh on The Passenger. If I’m being brutally honest, I hold the trio of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road on the highest pedestal but have found the rest of his work to be flawed. The Passenger is not without interest. Just don’t start here if you’re new to McCarthy…
When we think of horror and weird fiction, we are usually thinking of American and British tales. The fine folks at Valancourt aim to change that with their Book of World Horror Stories series, currently at two volumes. First, a plug: Valancourt does excellent work and, if you are able, fully deserves your support. They continually bring out of print and obscure horror/weird novels and tales back into print, stories that, even when they aren’t vital to the history of the genre, are pleasurable reads that deserve better than being consigned to the dustbin of history. The Book of World Horror Stories has a different, even more ambitious aim: to introduce us to the depth and richness of horror stories from around the world. Nearly every tale in both volumes has never had an English-language publication and the editors did much of the translation work themselves, a feat that I frankly find astounding. Of course any anthology with such a wide range – even if it has multiple volumes – will have hits and misses depending on one’s taste, but every tale in both volumes is finely written and worthy of consideration. It’s so fascinating and refreshing to read horror through different lenses than the ones we typically encounter. It’s nothing short of inspiring, and I hope there are more volumes in the future…
And now I think it’s best to wrap this up. Can’t wait to see what 2023 brings! Thank you for reading and may the next year provide enough candles to navigate the darkness.