Fiction
In A Lonely Place: Stories by Karl Edward Wagner
This was a republishing of an out of print horror short story collection by Wagner, a fellow native of Tennessee. He set out to become a doctor in the late 1960s but became quickly disillusioned with the medical industry’s focus on reactive rather than preventative care. Instead, he leaned into writing with horror & fantasy being his favorite genres. Wagner struggled with mental illness and used alcohol to self-medicate. He died in 1994, at age 48, from heart and liver failure due to alcohol. His stories are in the classic pulp vein, a little sleazy & very scary.
The most influential of these stories is Sticks which served as an inspiration for the first season of True Detective. It is the most purely Lovecraftian of the stories in the book. It follows horror illustrator Colin Leverett as he goes on a trip into the Adirondacks just before he ships out to basic training for World War II. Colin comes upon strange stick sculptures and an old house with dark secrets. The story jumps to after the war, and Colin is haunted by what he saw overseas and what happened in that house. His strange drawings get the attention of a publishing house looking to reissue volumes of a Lovecraft-styled author’s work. But there is so much more happening than the artist realizes. A solid collection worth checking out if you are in the mood for some good scary stories.
The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper
Set in New York City circa 1990, this novella follows Monique, a transwoman, who discovers her girlfriend Donna has vanished without a trace. They are both homeless after several backlashes occur against them due to their gender/sexuality. Monique has heard about a shambling ragged monster with talons that hunts homeless people in the city and is convinced this creature has taken Donna. The beast emerges one night, and Monique follows it to a secret lair where a cult prepares to offer themselves up to The Worm, their god. This is a wild & trippy store that has some entertaining mind-bending concepts. We learn the Worm extends across the entirety of the universe’s existence and is unmoored in time, unlike us. The ending is a mind-bending psychedelic ride that matches the grotesque descent into the earth’s bowels.
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
The winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the Bram Stoker Award, The Devil Takes You Home tells the story of Mario. He is a Puerto Rican man living in Austin, Texas. As the novel opens, Mario & his wife are facing down their daughter’s terminal illness. Mario takes a criminal job from his junkie friend Brian to help pay medical bills, but it’s all too late. In the aftermath, Mario’s wife leaves, and he turns to a darker mood. Brian offers a new job, and his acquaintance Juanca wants to take out cartel members and steal millions in cash. However, the journey is fraught with horrors. The people that Juanca associates with are brutal characters, making human sacrifices and employing a mutilated witch to help bless their men before they send them into battle. I was reminded of the work of contemporary horror writers like Stephen Graham Jones and Sylvia Garcia-Moreno, who make substantial use of their cultural backgrounds to inform their horror. This is a quick read; the momentum will keep you going and deliver a satisfying, dread-filled conclusion.
Straight Man by Richard Russo
William Henry Devereaux Jr., aka Hank, is the interim English department chair at the fictional West Central Pennsylvania University. Hank is a curmudgeon, always making sarcastic remarks whenever he gets ticked off. The book opens with his best friend & colleague Teddy rushing Hank home after a nasty incident during a department meeting. Unfortunately, a notebook’s metal spiral gave Hank an impromptu nose piercing when he was struck in the face with it. This novel has a relatively simple story but a sprawling cast of characters. His department pressures Hank to get money and confirmation on a full-time chair for the coming year. When a local news crew comes to cover the groundbreaking of a technical skills building on campus, Hank is the type of protagonist you can empathize with but are not meant to want to emulate. He doesn’t do anything irremediably wrong, and the novel’s stakes are reasonably low. Hank is a middle-aged guy realizing he’s middle-aged, and tries to make sense of what that means. He has two adult daughters, one of whom is going through marital difficulties, he has a secretary whose short stories end up being loved by Hank’s agent more than Hank’s own work, and he’s up against a corporate machine taking over the university. This was my first experience reading Richard Russo and I quite enjoyed his voice. The television series, Lucky Hank, that was based on this book is not worth watching though. What a stinker.
Ubik by Phillip K. Dick
I have not read a lot of Philip K. Dick books. Before this, it was just Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. I really like what I have read, but with Dick, each book has a lot of ideas, so you don’t necessarily feel like diving back in right away. This is another winner set in the distant future of 1992. Some humans have evolved to have extrasensory perception, and these abilities get them hired as part of corporate espionage. The other bit of technology essential to the story is cryogenics used on people who are in the process of dying, allowing people to communicate with their passing souls in businesses called moratoriums. Joe Chip works for a prudence org that specializes in using people whose abilities cancel out other ESPers. Chip is introduced to Pat Conley, a young woman who can cancel out precognitives but not in the standard ways. Instead, she can chemically alter events from the past, causing the precog’s prediction to be nullified as impossible. Then, there’s an ambush on Chip’s people, which leads to a spiraling nightmare. Are they alive? Are they dead? Are they merely figures in someone else’s dream? Strong elements of Lynchian storytelling here, a book that completely unsettles you when you reach the end.
Runaway: Stories by Alice Munro
This was my first read ever of the fantastic Canadian author Alice Munro after seeing her name come up for years. She offers up stories that spotlight crucial moments in women’s lives. Spanning the decades, these stories all deal with choices these women made at some point and the results of those choices.I immediately understood why she is so beloved. Her stories are rich character studies, less concerned with plot beats than placing people in a situation and spending time on how they feel and react to what is happening. Through these reactions, the character is illuminated for the reader, and because these stories are all very grounded, we can then reflect on our own lives and similar moments. The title story is about a woman who plans to flee her marriage after suspicions that her husband killed her pet goat. Of course, their marriage falling apart is about far more than this animal, but it serves as the catalyst. “Trespasses” has all the potential for your standard Dateline NBC exploitation, yet in the hands of Munro is handled with such profound love and humanity. “Passion” relates the events of a woman who strikes up an affair with her fiance’s brother after becoming enmeshed as part of the family. Each one is thoughtful and centered in a deep understanding of humanity.
Eileen by Ottessa Mosfegh
This was my first encounter with the writing of Ottessa Moshfegh, and I loved it. I was reminded of Jackie Ess’s Darryl, another novel with a profoundly strong character voice. Eileen is a twenty-four-year-old woman living in an area of 1960s Massachusetts. She works in a juvenile detention center for young men, mostly doing paperwork. Her home life is incredibly depressing, focused around her angry, hateful alcoholic father. Eileen is obsessed with scatological subjects and picking apart her own body. Most of the book is just letting her ponder a whole host of topics, getting her twisted perspective. No one really knows these things about Eileen as she doesn’t speak them out loud.
Told in reflection from the 2010s, Eileen lets us know she is leading up to a fateful meeting with a new employee at the prison. Moshfegh takes her time getting to the drama at the story’s center, but I never felt like she was stalling. Having a solid understanding of our protagonist’s psychology makes the details of the central narrative hit harder. Eileen constantly talks about getting in the car and driving away, never telling anyone where she has gone. Her fears pull her back, more comfortable in the squalor of the life she knows than the dangers of the world outside her bubble. I was stunned at how incredible this book was, and I plan on reading more of Mosfegh’s in the new year. Eileen has been turned into a very well done feature film that is currently in theaters and set to drop on VOD soon. Both the book and the movie are well worth your time.
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
The feeling I have when I finish an Octavia Butler work is always complicated. I love everything I have read from her, which makes me so angry that she died so young, only 58 when she passed. It is unfair to both her and us that she left this world so early because what she gave us during her short life showed Butler was a true visionary. In Parable of the Sower, she imagines a not-too-distant future where America descends into dystopian chaos. Society is more stratified than ever, and a young girl named Lauren develops the beginnings of a new religion called Earthseed that centers on the inevitably of humanity to transcend this planet and live on other worlds among other beings.
Early on in Parable of the Talents, we learn this is written from the perspective of Larkin, Lauren’s daughter, and that our protagonist from the first book is now dead. However, much of the novel comprises entries from Lauren’s journal, so we get to spend some of the most crucial years of her life with her. During this time, Lauren develops her community in Northern California which she has named Acorn. Meanwhile, America has elected a religious demagogue who assures the petite bourgeoisie that they must purge the country of “sinners,” basically anyone they hate, and then the economic woes will be solved. This “Christian America” movement makes what was already a bad situation even more nightmarish, and it is only a matter of time before they discover Acorn.
Parable of the Talents is one of the best pieces of science fiction literature I have ever read. It feels so of our moment despite being written decades ago. That makes me realize that this crisis was already alive and building when Butler was writing. She was actually “woke,” a term which, like many in America, has lost the roots of its actual meaning. Butler could see the true nature of her present moment and, through the lens of history, extrapolate where things would go. It is shocking to see how accurate she has been thus far. More people should read these two books because they remind us we are not alone. The fears & anxieties you have are shared by many, and that should imbue us with solidarity. Butler doesn’t write Lauren as a flawless figure, either. Lauren has to decide if her priority will be Earthseed or her family at one point later in the novel, and she chooses the collective good. That is a difficult choice, but shortly, we must understand that the interest that serves the whole is necessary if our species can continue.
Nonfiction
Hollywood: The Oral History by Sam Wasson & Jeanine Basinger
To say this book is thorough is an understatement. It begins with the advent of cinema as a popular entertainment form with snippets from interviews with performers, producers, and filmmakers who worked in the industry at the time. I got a strong sense of how new media like YouTube or TikTok is perceived with the caveat that early filmmaking was much more open-source. Where contemporary media services have created walled gardens, almost anyone could get into filmmaking early on and make something of it.
There is an extensive section on the era of studio contracts where every worker was guaranteed/required to output a certain number of films a year. One of these chapters is broken into parts where every single member of the crew gets spotlighted, their craft defined, and what it was like to work in those fields is well-explained. I learned the difference between a production designer & an art director (it just comes down to the title & pay). It helped give me a model for how to look at American films in four eras – Early/Silent, Studio System, Franchising & Licensing, and now our modern era, which is where any iota of artistic inclination is being removed to make media companies focused on finding new revenue streams. If you are a film fan interested in the people who made these movies, Hollywood: The Oral History is a no-brainer. This is chock full of interesting anecdotes that humanize figures you might have never considered regular people.
Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman
This is probably one of the more controversial books I’ve read, if the Goodreads reviews are any indication. Some people praise Schulman’s embrace of the complexity of human interaction, and others seem incredibly upset by her. Some of this pushback comes from her being a Jewish-American woman who went from blindly supporting the state of Israel to adopting a more logical stance of condemnation of the inhuman treatment of Palestinian people in the country. Schulman challenges many of the “protective” policies in recent years that don’t actually address systemic inequality but create comfy bubbles for people to live in, free of ever being presented with a contrary idea. She’s a big advocate of in-person conflict resolution (when possible), showcasing how modern modes of communication (text messages, email) allow the offended to quickly & efficiently shun the offender rather than work towards a solution.
Now, this doesn’t mean she puts the burden of things on victims. Schulman repeatedly defines the differences between conflict and abuse. Abuse is predicated on an unequal distribution of power and its habitual & intentional misuse. Most of us encounter conflict when there are disagreements, which can be worked through with both parties emerging better off than before.
Schulman’s best chapters are those talking about toxic family dynamics. She identifies the two types of families present in American culture. The “good family” takes an “us versus the world” approach toward everyone outside the family being seen as a potential foe to overcome. The “bad family” is where they turn on each other, not maintaining a single-unit mind. The “good family” is also the one that protects abusers in their midst because “they are family.” Schulman’s what a true “good family” should be is one where we hold each other accountable for how we treat those outside the family unit, something that is rare to find in the United States. I highly recommend this if you are interested in how we grow towards the type of solidarity needed to create a better world.
The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin by Corey Robin
Not a single book, but a collection of essays. The question at the start is, “What do conservatives actually believe?” not what they say. The answer, in short, is that they adhere to a strict, regimented hierarchical worldview. People are meant to live under the boot heel of a superior institution, by their thinking. Conservative is not the correct term for these people because they are disinterested in conserving anything.
Instead, they are reactionaries; they have invested their identities in the established hierarchy, and therefore, anything that challenges or changes that system is a threat. The hierarchy can move the goalposts, and these people will mindlessly follow along because it comes from their “masters.” They speak of “Liberty” but do everything they can to limit people’s freedom, especially if they are outside the dominant class. Robin comes to some fascinating conclusions, most notably how these reactionaries, for all their clamor about tradition, are often the ones most responsible for destroying long-held traditions. Look at how this ideology ravages indigenous cultures and their traditions.
Reactionaries live in jealousy of the revolutionary who engages in conflict with the world, who is right in the middle of the tumult of life. Therefore, reactionaries will always adopt the language of those they perceive as their enemies because it is a language that addresses the reality of the human condition. They will corrupt that language until it loses all meaning and confuses people about what those words actually mean. Look at how the Republicans go on and on about “the elite” while cozying up to the wealthiest, most evil entities in the world. You can also see how “socialism” and “communism” have lost all coherent meaning in the reactionary lexicon, becoming stand-ins for “things I don’t like.”
Robin’s essays on Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia are particularly illuminating and well-written. Rand, especially, is a figure I find has garnered a completely undeserved amount of admiration in the States. Her entire philosophy is flawed down to the roots, and she’s also a terrible writer. If you want to understand what the reactionary mind wants the world to be, then this is a must-read.
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of Marxist critical theory by Guy DeBord, a figure in the 1960s French Situationist movement. The book is composed of theses in the form of 221 aphorisms. DeBord wants to figure out why modern life feels so unsatisfactory and concludes this is due to authentic life being replaced by hollow representations of it. We now live in a state of having rather than being. We feel fulfilled when we have things rather than being a thing. DeBord relates this to the realm of work where so often, people outside of most blue-collar jobs, do work that leaves them feeling disconnected from the world. They sit in offices and do seemingly meaningless actions that have no direct impact on themselves or their communities.
DeBord argues modern humans under capitalism work two jobs. One job is the thing you do for around eight hours a day. The rest of your life is spent on your second job, consumption. As more and more of life is commoditized, you must consume more. You may consume for good reasons (food, housing, clothes, education), but you also consume to maintain a status in the social game you’re caught up in. The spectacle is not images but a social relation to others. Think of how reality television has profoundly influenced how people engage with each other in real life. Haven’t you noticed how many people live their lives projecting a persona that fits into a reality show archetype?
Because everything is commodified, it must constantly be repackaged to create a false sense of novelty. You are, in fact, just getting the same swill your parents & grandparents were fed with a shiny new coat of paint. He points out that plagiarism as a form of inspiration is not wrong; we are inevitably influenced by the input we receive. However, in the establishment’s manner of nostalgia, we have old, broken ideas sold to us as something new & exciting. DeBord points out the idea of the “lonely crowd” wherein an individual can be literally surrounded by people or virtually (the internet), yet everyone is psychologically isolated and feels utterly alone. This is a short but dense work to take your time with and let sink in. Once again, it’s another old piece of art that shouldn’t be relevant anymore, but damn, if the people in power hadn’t kept it just as potent as when it was first written.
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media by Michael Parenti
Talking about how awful mainstream media in America is has been complicated so horribly by the Trumpian “fake news” angle. If you try to critique the ways “respected” institutions like the New York Times or CNN report on domestic and foreign events, you often get lumped into the same category of people that are anti-vaxxers or believe anyone in power really gives a shit about Hunter Biden. Growing up, I was bombarded with propaganda about how awful the media was in those Communist countries. They would willingly lie to their citizens to promote the dominant ideology. As if all of this couldn’t be said about American news media.
Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is often pointed to as THE book on this subject (and I do like that book), I think this text does a great further dissection. In Inventing Reality, Parenti focuses on the fact that news is “presented” in America, not simply relayed. Many decisions are made about how stories will be shown to the public. Parenti lays out the stakeholders involved and how an often unspoken but silently understood loyalty to the upper classes is enforced from top to bottom. The news is owned by the wealthiest people, the editors want to keep their jobs and benefit from the distortion of reality, and the reporters have learned how to self-edit to not disturb the status quo.
Parenti can concisely lay out his arguments with a plethora of evidence and, most importantly, wit. This is not only informative but an engrossing, enjoyable read. I tore through it in a matter of days. He even lays out counter arguments he has faced or anticipates from the reader and respectfully shuts them all down. I’m not a fan of online debate as I see it as devolving into gish galloping at every turn; the best arguments are laid out in long pieces of writing because the ideas have adequate room to breathe and develop. Parenti is a perfect example of this very thing.
Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict by Phil A. Neel
There is a gross distortion when people talk about who exactly it is that supports the growing tide of fascism in the United States. More often than not, the economically comfortable liberals point to “uneducated” people as the problem, and they mean the poor working class. This, in fact, is not the source of the reactionary rise, though a lack of education is a crucial piece because the roots of fascism have always been within the petite bourgeoisie. It is the working class that is just comfortable enough but still desperately clinging to these crumbs that fuel genocides and oppression. They are the outcome of the destruction of worker solidarity. Phil Neel knows there are more than enough books on the middle class, and instead, he gives us a front-seat view of the forgotten class: those people who live in the desolate regions of the United States where mono-industries dominate, whether it be mining, oil drilling, chemical processing, or any other activity that results in more wounds to the planet and its inhabitants.
Neel grew up in this type of working-class home, took part in Occupy Seattle, worked abroad in the industry in China, returned to the States where he was charged & arrested with rioting, served in a work-release program, and then “re-entered society” with less than he started with. He can describe those parts of America I’ve only ever flown over or driven past without a second thought. In illuminating these corners that traditional media ignores, we understand that all our comforts are built on the backs of breaking people, working them to the bone until they lose touch with their own humanity. We understand why speed and opioids are commonplace among these working poor. Neel connects what he sees outside of Seattle on the industrial fringe and witnesses the communal anger & police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri. He talks of medical centers in the outlands where cold storage shelters are brought in and filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses of people who worked themselves to death so another person could become obscenely wealthy.
I loved the meandering in this book. Neel refuses to simply relate data points and writes with a poeticism that reminded me of the beautiful horror in Cormac McCarthy’s books. There is a genuine love on the author’s part for every subject he tells about who struggles to survive in these conditions.
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