Books I'm Reading

Really enjoyed about 80% of this. A great set up of dominos in the beginning... really letting us sink into the world of this novel, meet the characters, their histories and intertwinings. All written wonderfully! Another author channeling the muse of Stephen King, with super-limited 3rd POV and semi-liberal use of italics, paragraph breaks into rambling thoughts, etc. A blurb on the back described it as "pitch perfect" which I agree with. Just good, solid writing. Unfortunately the muse of Stephen King didn't end there, and the ending kind of blew. I just didn't care much for it. I was skipping pages in the end. Some of it came off silly, but I won't get specific here. It also came fast - I think this book could have been 1.5x the length honestly. A long, solid beginning and then THE END. On the whole I still enjoyed it a lot.

Fun classic whodunit kind of mystery set in a near-future world. I really enjoyed the kind of Philip K Dick humorous takes on future tech. Kind of silly, but also pretty real. Like servo drones deliving your food. The last 20% definitely had me flipping pages fast as the dominos descended down the line of "omg who did it" and things got revealed, turned, twisted, revealed, etc. Nothing legendary here, but a fun quick read.

Mehhhh. First person present tense. Enough said? The writing just wasn't there for me. I didn't like the main character, who was entirely forgettable. The only time I really enjoyed coming back to read this book was near the end when everything started unfolding. Unfortunately, I just wanted to see it happen: by it, I mean the reveals... I already guessed them, very early on. Nothing subtle here. I liked the cover tho.

Loooved this. 10-seconds-in-the-future late capitalism dystopia, a commentary on "work" and "life" and if there's a difference at all, probably not! I loved the narration, this clinical, direct tone that occassionally (rarely) dipped into extremely conversational and had a clever use of parenthesis. Almost meta-fictive the way the narration played off itself, a kind of self-awareness. Makes sense giving the ending, tho no spoilers here. Surreal, but also TOO real. Abernathy was an idiot, at times a loving idiot and at time a real idiot monster idiot. But capitalism made him that way... makes us all that way, really.

I didn't realize this was "dark humor" until I got reading. Dumb on my part, since it's described as such on all the blurbs. I usually expect "dark humor" to be a bit more... dark. This was just silly. Bly Manor where the ghosts are all real except it's comical? "Haha, there so and so goes puking black vomit. It's OK, I adjusted." I just like my horror to be done straight. I wanna be scared. I couldn't get more than 100~ pages into this one. So my rating is based on that, plus my misunderstanding of genre. Kind of like a bad Amazon rating for an item because it arrived late; it's probably not the book's fault. Still. (I also didn't like the prose, it felt amateurish, but perhaps that was just the genre trappings too?)

Interesting little novel exploring various branching multiverses in a person's life. This is told a series of interconnected short stories more or less, but the threads between stories are tightly stretched so I definitely still see it as a novel. Friends become lovers, who die, who are alive, who never existed... etc. A lot of "Everything Everywhere All At Once" vibes, where some of the multiverses have split so long ago into surreal realities where, for example, mothers become hordes of animals upon the birth of a daughter. So much is explored here. Trauma, grief, love, sexuality, gender, and all very tenderly, deeply, and in beautiful prose. Nothing extraneous, and often surprising, I really enjoyed the style here.

I lost my current novel on the train, so I picked this up at the library and ATE IT in one day. Extremely unique, extremely "now" and extremely GenZ. Memetic corecore montage image assault. Emojis. Text fragments. The cover is perfect, ASCII art and DOS typeface. Each story has it's own ASCII or kawaii character. Chef's kiss; the cover got me, and like usual, my judge-a-book won again. I will say this collection leans strong on the first half, and reaaaally slumps after that. The "genius" I was shocked/awed/in love withh in the first few stories gradually gets scraped away and the author's white/cis/het/rich New-York-Girl privlege becomes kinda gross. Do I still love the stories? Yeah. I guess that's saying something.

Thought this was gonna be a bit more horror than it turned out to be. A deep vein of dark humor lessened a lot of the impact potential here.. the main character frequently spoke in flippant jokes to the antagonist ghost lady. It kind of worked, in a fully synthesized idea way, but not a "for me" way. On the whole though, this was a simply plotted, easy breezy read, a kind of "beach horror" at times funny, at times frightening, set in a Tuscany villa and full of delicious, familiar, super-real family dynamics. The final act was a bummer (she leaves the villa and returns to New York and it's all kinda boring) and the ending was way too easy, not surprising, and not climactic. Somehow I still walked away from this one enjoying it! It didn't try to be anything grand. It knew what it wanted to be the whole time. I appreciate that.

• Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This novel had one of my current favorite conceits: haunted media (ala Mister Magic, Black Tapes podcast, etc.) Set in Mexico City in the 90's, full of rich detail of the time and place, featuring Nazi occultists, film nerds, and two main character POVs I genuinely enjoyed... until the last bit where romance was forced between them. NOT the vibe! But a fun romp. Not scary-scary, but definitely creepy.

• Death Valley by Melissa Broder

So loved this. Laugh out loud funny and also so real and serious and true and heartbreaking. Reminded me a lot of Tom Robbins, the surreality and talking inanimate things and topics. Might have to check out her other works!

• A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

How many times do I need to read T. Kingfisher to realize I don't vibe? I want to so bad. I think I said all this in my last review, too. The set up and initial writing pace and style reminds me of my own, so I always want to like it! And I do! And then nothing happens! And I really don't like her humor. Aaaand... Well, this was horror, right? It was not, until the last maybe 20% and then it got REALLY SILLY b-movie hilarious "horror". I flipped quick through the last maybe 25 pages, I just didn't care anymore. Blah.

• Nestlings by Nat Cassidy

A classic horror, refreshing after Kingfisher's "horror but just in theme, not actually scary" stuff. This was disgusting, wretched, evil, nasty, scary! In a good way. The comparisons to Rosemary's Baby were spot on. Add in the spice of Stephen King's superclose 3rd person POVs (especially the racist scumbag guy).

• Beholder by Ryan La Sala

I'm pretty sure I liked this book. I mostly liked this book. At times I wanted to put it down; at times I could nothing but rush through the pages gripped in it's spell. Hmmm. "Beholder" wanted to be a lot of things, a lot of really cool things, like long lost eldritch horrors from historic Greece, Lovecraftian interior design, a queer anthem for sad kids, a luxe New York penthouse heist, a conversation on Art and Beauty and Love Loss and other capital-letter things. It did all of these, but maybe it stretched itself thin in doing so. On the whole, I had fun and just when I thought "oh, boring" some new aspect would burst forth and suddenly we're in the labyrinthine 'negative spaces' of New York, trying to escape a demon monster god trapped in a mirror, then I'd be bored again and... repeat! I'm keeping my eye on this author all the same.

• The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada (translator: David Boyd)

I found this title in a Staff Recommendation booth in a bookstore downtown Seattle. When I saw my local library had it, I was excited. Thin enough to bring with me on the airplane as a backup book on a recent trip. Unfortunately, though the premise was interesting, the tone fell flat and boring for me. The stylistic choices of POVs jumping across paragraphs and dialogue running amok through time, place, and character was confusing. I think I'd have gotten more from the story if it was told straight. I liked the Vandermeerian ending, but it was pulling teeth to get there.

• Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward

Loved this one, blew through it in 2 days. I couldn't stop. I had no idea it was going to be about what it is actually about, but the blurb on the back should have given me an idea. ("Writers are monsters. We eat everything we see.") The layered storytelling kept throwing me for loops... so fun. Terrible imagery, in a good horror-genre way (deglove!). Plus, it was set in Maine, where I'm from, so it was fun to know where the characters were. After reading Sundial, and now this, I can consider myself a Catriona Ward fan. Happy to be back on my horror shit.

• Plastic by Scott Guild

Surprised to enjoy this. The reviews were super hit or miss and I saw that the dialogue was apparently in meme/doge speak. It seemed to have bothered others, but I didn't mind it at all; it was good dialogue and made the plastic figurines seem kind of helpless or enabled me to care for them in a special way. Mostly this book was a normal "10 mins into the future" cli-fi dystopia, but Barbies, plus a nestled mise-en-abym story, which I'm a sucker for. It felt very Chuck Palahniuk. It also hit hard with some gut wrenching scenes... I don't read a lot of fiction that drives the knife like that, so that was... pleasant? It was terrible, but to feel so deeply for these plastic people in their world with such strong emotions, well, it made for a good read.

• Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

Kinda fun. I was expecting more actual horror, but it's more like an homage to old scary movie flicks, with a camp kind of vibe. None of the turns surprised me, but I was OK with that: I was still excited to see it revealed. Easy reading, nothing special on the line level, but enjoyed myself.