Author: John Connolly

2011 Atria Books

Filed Under: Young Adult, Humor, Fantasy, Horror

Find it on Goodreads.

A direct follow-up to Connolly’s wonderful 2009 book, The Gates, Infernals delivers everything you could want from a sequel. It’s another great adventure, and delivers all the wacky characters and narratorial humor that made the first book so exceptional.

After helping to save the world from an invasion from Hell, Samuel Johnson, with his trusty dog Boswell by his side, is trying to get back to a normal life. It doesn’t last long. The leader of the failed invasion, Mrs. Abernathy (formerly the demon Ba’al before he was trapped in the possessed body of Samuel’s elderly neighbor), seethes in Hell. The Great Malevolence–Satan–has fallen into a weepy melancholy following the defeat, leaving the underworld open to a tumultuous civil war.

Abernathy, in an attempt to restore her standing as Hell’s #2 demon, as well as save her own hide by preventing the traitorous demon Abignor from usurping rule, manages to open a small portal to Earth long enough to capture poor Samuel and Boswell. They will be an offering to restore the spirits of The Great Malevolence.

Mrs. Abernathy’s shot goes awry though—she hits Samuel and his dog, but also two policemen, an ice cream man, and a van full of drunken midgets who travel around reenacting fairytales in shopping malls. At first, these drunken midgets (Angry, Jolly, Dozy, and Mumbles–known collectively as “Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs”), threaten to steal the show. It’s not often I find myself laughing out loud when I read, but these crass little characters did the trick.

As the characters traipse across the sprawling and desolate underworld in search of a way home, however, the spotlight is shared. Samuel’s timid bravery, the demon Nurd’s newly found humanity, along with a large cast of inventive and often funny support characters each have truly great moments from which the story draws strength. Indeed, what sets this book apart from lots of other YA is Connolly’s balanced and skillful writing. He’s a captivating storyteller, and moreover he’s developed a real knack for breathing life into his world through a sharp yet subtle wit.

As with its predecessor, Infernals is littered with footnotes. These are often informative, explaining, for instance, a certain lineage of popes, what the Higgs boson is, or the definition of the word “truculent.” Yet they are all filled with jokes, jokes usually just juvenile enough to be silly but not so infantile as to be unworthy of your time. Though the narrator is not named, and has no plot of his own, his constant presence and sense of humor is crucial to the experience.

Here’s the ending to a footnote explaining Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments on dogs:

This is known as “conditioning.” You have to wonder, though, if the dogs eventually got a bit tired of the shocks and the bells and the absence of food, and made their unhappiness known to Pavlov. This is known as “biting.”

On top of it though, he manages to sneak in clever, even insightful lines:

the past is a nice country to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Then, occasionally, it dips into downright good advice, revealing a motive on the part of the narrator that touches on endearing.

Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don’t particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don’t be one of those people. There’s a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.

It really is that simple.

And that hard.

(That was a footnote to a line about two reformed demons brewing cheap ale in the basement of a chemical weapons plant.)

These footnotes and asides build upon each other to give the book a sense of character and purpose that’s pretty rare in YA books lately. And beneath it all is still a charming adventure that strikes a perfect balance between childish fun and maturity of theme and emotion. If you haven’t read The Gates, give it a read first. But be sure to have this book at the ready; you’ll probably want to try and read them both in one sitting.

Similar Reads: The Gates (Connolly), The Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart), pretty much anything by Terry Pratchett.

Author: John Connolly

2006, Atria Books

Filed Under: Short Stories, Horror

I’ve still never read any of the crime fiction Connolly made his name with, but this is the third supernatural book of his I’ve tackled and loved: it’s just as good as the others. Perhaps as a result of his experience writing thrillers, Connolly has a real knack for building tension. The stories in this collection range from a few pages to over a hundred, but each is expertly paced and crafted. He manages to write stories that are taut and spooky without dipping into cliche or camp. His The Book of Lost Things reminds me of Stephen King at his best, and the mood and creativity of The Gates readily compares to Neil Gaiman’s work. This collection of scary tales marries those styles almost perfectly.

While there are vampires and the like in here, most of the supernatural subjects are pretty original. My favorite were those that told of hauntings by evil spirits, such as the old pagan gods of “The Shifting of the Sands” apparitioning from swirls of dirt to consume men’s souls. The child-nappping beast “The Erkling” and the possessing spirit of “The New Daughter,” who lures a child from her home to an ancient burial mound nearby while her father tries in vain to save her, are similarly great. These particular stories do great things with atmosphere–I found myself transported back to my childhood, reading Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books by flashlight.

Stories like “The Inkpot Monkey” and “Nocturnes” are very Stephen King-y with their cursed or haunted objects and susceptible subjects. And more than one story (“The Ritual of Bones,” “Mr. Pettinger’s Daemon,”"The Shifting of the Sands”) places demons amidst old institutions such as the clergy or a boarding school. There are submerged houses of the dead, passages to Hell, giant spiders in ancient caves, witches, vampires, slime ghosts, you name it.

The long-form stories that dot the book do a fine job of shifting gears. “The Cancer Cowboy Rides Again,” which opens the collection, is actually a departure from the rest of the stories, so much so that placing it first was a pretty bold move. It’s about a wanderer who is a sort of walking carcinoma. In order to ease his own pain, he must infect others with his curse, giving them rapid, incurable forms of cancer. It’s a cop-versus-bad-guy horror story, and a good one. Similarly blending horror and crime writing, “The Reflecting Lens: A Charlie Parker Novella” features a private eye on a case that turns up some other-worldy stuff and includes perhaps the most creepy character in the whole collection.

All told, there’s a lot of great horror stories in here. There’s not a single one I didn’t like, and since the subjects and styles vary so much from story to story, I suspect there are a lot of people that will find something to really enjoy here. Connolly is a great entertainer and storyteller, I can’t recommend his books enough.

Similar Reads: The Book of Lost Things (Connolly), Night Shift (King), Coraline (Gaiman).

Author: Cody McFadyen

2008, Bantam

Filed Under: Thriller, Horror

This is a book that will in no way exercise your mind, or place any demands upon you as a reader. When I first started it, I read the first few pages, gave a book-snobby, mocking laugh, and put it right back down on my counter. I scooped it up on the way out the door to work a few days later, since I was running late and couldn’t remember where I had left 1Q84.

I crushed through the first third or so of the book on my commute that day, and found myself engaged and ready to read on the next day. A thriller about team of detectives hunting down a serial killer, The Darker Side takes a lot of cues from The Silence of the Lambs, and, since the murders center around a theme of Catholic contrition, even more from Seven.

Here’s the gist. I won’t give too much away since some of the motive stuff doesn’t come out until later in the book. Basically, bodies are being found in conspicuous places. The cause of death in each case is a sharp puncture wound to the heart, and in the wound is stuffed a numbered crucifix. The bodies pile up and come from more prominent places, and the killer, who calls himself The Preacher, releases “user-tube” videos of the victims’ forced Catholic confessions just prior to murder. The victims are picked because they have deep, dark secrets that somehow The Preacher has uncovered. An FBI team frantically tries to get ahead of the killings and prevent more from occurring, but it’s clear The Preacher is pulling all the strings.

The writing is not particularly good. The prose and syntax aren’t problematic, but never shine either. It’s the depictions of the stock characters that provide the initial sticking points.

The leader of the team of FBI investigators is Smoky Barrett. She’s serial killer expert who survived a violent rape followed by the gruesome murder of her family by a criminal she was hunting. Her face is scarred–like her psyche–but her broken and repaired constitution provides her just what she needs to be the best serial killer hunter there is. Clichéd though it may be, McFadyen depicts this side of Smoky adeptly. It’s when he tries to flesh her out with moments of woman-ness that things get a little off:

I’ve never had a penis, never wanted one, but I’ve held them in my hands. I know what they feel like, smell like, taste like, but I don’t know what it’s like to hold one and feel it being touched at the same time.

This is her trying to relate to a transsexual victim. I’m sure a woman detective could conceivably go through a logic like this when thinking about trannies, but it feels a lot more like a male author trying to make his female protagonist look more definitively female than it does any sort of depiction of natural sentiment. Then, here’s how she relates to motherhood:

She assumes I know what she means, and she’s right. It’s universal mother-speak. Every child knows, when Mom uses your first and last name together, you’re in trouble. First, middle, and last? That particular triumvirate is reserved or the worst offenses, the greatest angers. Duck, cover, and hold.

No father has ever resorted to using middle names, evidently. Mothers only. The rest of the team members are similarly stilted. There’s the wisecracking bitch, who actually has a heart of gold; the geeky young tech expert, who happens to be gay; the white-knight family man, who has but one chink in his armor, etc. Once you get past all that, though, the book is pretty good.

This story is a lot like the plot of Seven. Ultimately that’s why I enjoyed it so much, because I really like that movie. Things get quite grisly, and at times very graphic sexually, so if you don’t like that kind of thing in your thrillers, stay away. Unlike–and perhaps due in-part to–Seven, there is lots of cookiecutterness to be found here, namely in Smoky and her team and the stereotypical serial killer at large. But you’ll almost certainly become drawn-in in large part because of the victims.

The auxiliary characters are the best in the book. Occasionally McFadyen pulls away from the main narration (which is focused though Smoky), and gives small chapters focused on these victims. These usually dip into the character’s past, and unveil for the reader the horrible things the victims have suppressed and The Preacher has uncovered. I usually don’t like perspective shifts like this in books, since it too often feels like the easy way. But in this case, it works great. These segments humanize the victims very nicely, and they can be tough to read. More than one made me squirm. Had McFadyen merely related the information through Smoky or The Preacher, it would have dulled the impact a lot and made it, well, preachy.

The Darker Side did a great job of sopping up time for my daily commute. If you like books/movies like those I referenced in the second paragraph, this is a good choice to occupy your commute, or to take on vacation for a mindless escape.

Just for fun, here’s one more silly, overly-titillating example of McFadyen’s woman-think:

Those priest eyes fix on mine and I feel the old, familiar flush of guilt. He knows, he knows. He knows I masturbate sometimes with the help of a vibrator. He knows I take a secret pleasure at making a man come with my mouth.

Similar Reads: No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.), The Siege of Trencher’s Farm (Williams).

[Note: I found this book sitting at an Au Bon Pain with a sticker on it that said “FREE BOOK.” Someone “released it into the wild” through a program run by BookCrossing.com. I’ve since started releasing some books for others to find. It’s cool idea and a program worth checking out.

Author: Kelly Link

2011, Jelly Ink (self-published)

Filed Under: Horror, Short Stories, Short-Run.

Get the book.

This is a short, little volume collecting, as you might have guessed, three zombie stories. Each of these stories, all by Kelly Link and originally published in different books, is good in its own way, but what really makes the collection worth notice is its consistent originality. There aren’t really any shambling corpses, no survivors banding together in a boarded-up house. One of the stories doesn’t even have actual zombies–or any sort of supernatural element–in it.

“Some Zombie Contigency Plans” is a very solid short story that will appeal to fans of realist fiction. It’s about a young ex-con, Soap, who cruises around crashing parties in his spare time. He finds his way into a house party  thrown by teenagers and gets to know a young girl in her parents’ bedroom. The narration does a great job of making Soap sympathetic (largely in part to his escapist fantasies of surviving a zombie attack), but there still a looming tension that surround his actions and uninvited presence in the house.

Taking an opposite tack, “The Wrong Grave” uses a wry sense of humor to keep the reader interested. Link creates a clever narrative structure, with the slightly distanced narrator shifting focus between characters as the story goes on. It opens on Miles Sperry, a bumbling schoolboy who digs up his dead girlfriend’s grave to get back some poems he had put in her casket that he wants to send in to a contest. He finds an unfamiliar, and very animated, tattooed and wisecracking dead girl in what he thought was his sweet Bethany Baldwin’s grave. This dead girl would fit better into Scrooged than Night of the Living Dead, which I think is why I found her refreshing. And on top of this, the story still manages to reach a point of poignancy as it follows her to its end.

The most traditional of the stories, from a zombie fan’s perspective, is still pretty out there. “The HortLAK” is about a convenience store situated on the edge of an area called the Ausible Chasm. This is a place where the dead roam and possibly have a settlement–no one’s really sure since they mostly keep to themselves. Occasionally the zombies shuffle into the store with a handful of leaves, or something else with no apparent value. The store owners, hoping to tap a new retail treasure trove, experiment with new ways to barter with the zombies. They stop using money, to the bewilderment of the few human shoppers that come through. The story gets pretty interesting, based mostly on the strength of its clerk characters, Batu and Eric, and its sense of humor:

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you. But when you looked closer, you saw they were from some other place, where things were different: where even the same things, the things that went on everywhere, were just a little bit different.

Like its companions, this story manages to succeed on more than just one merit. In addition to the humor, its creativity is to be admired (there are both CIA operatives and mind-reading pajamas), and it, too, adheres to a more traditional realist structure and pacing (not as common in horror and supernatural stories as you’d think) that make it an easy, pleasant read. All three of these stories are good, far better than I expected when I opened the cover. If you’re looking for some light, unique reading for your Halloween weekend, have one of these printed up and sent to you.

Similar Reads: Zombies Vs Unicorns (Black, ed)

2011, Knopf

Filed Under: Horror, Literary

Get this book

It seems like trying to write a “literary” book in the sexy-supernatural genre is the authorial movement du jour. Lately, many authors are hoping to cash in on readers who like Twilight but are too ashamed to admit it. Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Lev Grossman’s The Magician King are just three recent novels that try to adultify trending YA themes. Duncan is in the same boat, but he more or less succeeds where others have fallen short.

Why? Well, basically because the writing is pretty good, and the plot avoids being overwrought. (Neither The Magicians nor its sequel (while enjoyable) were very well-written; The Passage was a structural mess.) So let’s begin with the writing. Duncan is no Henry James, but he’s read him and it shows. He finds a great balance between action and tangent and he tinges his narrator with just enough snark. Most importantly, he has bouts of eloquence without looking like he’s trying too hard. There’s plenty of this:

I saw in her abstracted moments that she remained disgusted in spite of the months of violent self-baptism. She’d hardened herself in blood but not all the tender remnants were dead. She was a monster, yes, but all she’d lost could still ambush her, turn her gaze back to her childhood and force her to look. You Can’t Go Home Again. (Thomas Wolfe, Jesus how much more?) This hurt, very much. She’d be darling to so many, little black-eyed Lula with the high forehead and the beauty spot.

There’s also plenty of this:

Fuck. Kill. Eat.

The plot is nothing special; everything more or less works out how you’d expect. I actually find this one of the book’s strengths. Good YA authors always (always) rely on pitch-perfect plotting to tow the readers attention along like they’re landing a lunker. Good literary books on the other hand, often, but not always, allow the plot to take a subordinate role behind strong writing and thematic depth. This is perfectly fine depending on your subject matter (just ask Proust fans). This is not fine if you’re writing about werewolves, vampires, zombies, wizards, or anything else. People read these books because they want to read about werewolves eating people, or vampires molesting teenagers, or whatever else. So while everything that happens in The Last Werewolf is fairly predictable, Duncan still manages to make it interesting, but not tedious (unlike Proust).

Jake, the story’s lycanthropic hero, is a strong protagonist with a layered complexity. He’s a century and a half old, he’s full of peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, and he’s a homicidal shapeshifting predator. But he’s also a sympathetic character. Jake is weary, and it’s easy to feel for him–and to root for him when he finds motivation. Other characters also manage to take on traditional roles uniquely. Granger, who sees himself as Jake’s archenemy, isn’t one of them. He’s just a Van Helsing-like werewolf hunter who wants revenge on Jake (because Jake ate his dad). But fortunately he doesn’t have much face time. Instead it’s Ellis, Granger’s pretty-boy-genius protege, who steals the show. He is nuanced and weird and unpredictable in his reactions; every scene he’s in vacillates between tension and excitement in a way that really does wonders for the book. He’s one of the best villains I’ve ever come across in a book like this.

In the end, The Last Werewolf is fun. It’s well-written and interesting, but holds true to its roots as a supernatural thriller: it’s exciting, and titillating, and feeds some primal itch to witness some “fuckkilleat”–as wolf-Jake puts it.

Similar Reads: Jailbait Zombie (Acevedo), The Passage (Cronin), The Magicians (Grossman)

1969, Titan

Filed Under: Horror, Thriller.

Get the book.

This is a book that is (to the best of my knowledge) being reprinted for the first time since its original 1969 release. This is because it’s the basis for the movie Straw Dogs (1971), which is getting the remake treatment and hitting theaters this fall–with Dustin Hoffman being replaced by James Marsden. In fact, “Straw Dogs” is presented on the new cover in much larger type than the book’s actual title. This makes sense to me: with it’s one-dimensional characters and blindly stumbling plot, Trencher’s Farm would make a better horror movie than a book.

George MacGruder, an American professor on sabbatical, brings his family to a farm (Trencher’s Farm) in England so he can work on a book. George staunchly opposes the death penalty, and letters he wrote to the London Times and the British government influenced a widely debated capital punishment case in London. As a result, a deranged kiddy rapist was granted clemency. This pedophile, Henry Niles, escapes from an asylum ambulance on a road near Trencher’s Farm during a snowstorm, and soon after George runs him over in his car. Compassionate as he is, George takes him to Trencher’s, where they can ride out the storm and await the town doctor.

Meanwhile a little girl has gone missing, and as word spreads of Niles’s escape, townsfolk immediately correlate the two incidents. It doesn’t take the MacGruders long to realize Niles’s identity. This is where the book’s believability starts to fray. Instantly, George and his wife, Louise, go from feeling bad for the broken man on their sofa, to being mortally afraid of him, as if knowing he was a pedophile suddenly turned him into some invincible brute who could easily kill them all. It’s hard to swallow; Niles quickly proves to be nothing more than a harmless MacGuffin.

Then a search party shows up, looking for the girl. When George tells them he’s caught Henry Niles, they instantly go from drunk farmers to deranged psycho killers full of insatiable bloodlust. George barricades his family in, as he doesn’t want to give Niles up to people he believes will hang him without trial. Very soon after, the crazed farmers kill an innocent townsperson who stops by to check in during the storm, and the MacGruders find their house under siege.

That’s pretty much the set up for the remainder of the book. The whole thing is a long 3-vs-1 where drunks gone insane are too stupid to properly break into a farmhouse with one guy and his useless wife inside.

The rabidness of the farmers is pretty hard to swallow. I suppose it’s meant to be some weird insular community, like in The Wicker Man, but living in the English countryside isn’t enough to make their isolation believable. Coming together to cover up some dark town secret is one thing (and the heart of some decent horror books/movies), but being berserk murderers is another. Besides the fact they want to kill, Williams differentiates them from other English people with corny dialogue:

“Us’ll burn down the bloody house if us don’t get him.”

But even despite all that, there is very forced and jarring distinction between being English and American presented here. It fuels the attackers–and sets up some sort of artificial morality system to perpetuate the rage: Americans are soft and selfish, British are gritty and loyal to their communities. Every single character seems to have a fundamental understanding that Britons and Americans somehow occupy separate branches on the evolutionary tree. George’s do-nothing wife is continually used to prop this up.

“Don’t honey me, you all-forgiving bastard. What do you think being married is, the stupid PTA? God, you make me sick, look at you, all nicey-nicey smiles, you big sook. What’s going on in that great All-American head of yours? Eh? Be honest–for once.”

Now George really never does anything to cause all the American resentment, especially from his wife. And they’ve just relocated to England temporarily from their home in America, where we’re told they’ve lived for at least nine years, so it’s hard to imagine how she compartmentalized her resentment for so many years. The whole British and American thing simply makes no sense. Take this, again from Louise (Karen is their daughter):

Karen had her father’s habit of staring blankly at you, as though you had just told an obvious lie and she was giving you a chance to recant. It was a common characteristic in America. She’d never discovered whether the dead-pan face was meant to express contempt, or was a sign of incomprehension.

What? Her habits weren’t passed through George’s American DNA. Karen’s probably looking at her in contempt because she’s inconsistently stupid and vitriolic about Americans all of a sudden with no provocation, despite the fact that she’s lived there for a significant portion of her life and willfully raised a family there. The whole British/American thing is incessant and serves no purpose but to artificially and unconvincingly cram additional conflict into the story.

Five pages after that quote, Louise flip-flops and looks to her husband for comfort. Then she hates him again because he’s a peace-loving yankee. Then she loves him again. She rapidly cycles like a manic-depressive in need of a lithium dose. It’s just one more cheap move to prop up the toppling plot–keep in mind, during all this the murderous hick farmers are fighting a seemingly futile battle with the front door. Louise’s aberrant behavior is merely a way of forcing George into different emotional responses in order to distract the reader from the one-note story about those crazed lunatics throwing themselves against the door like a tsunami of rabid baboons. They can’t even manage to get through a window without George being able to defend himself in one way or another, so I can see the need to infuse additional tension, since that the logistics of the siege are hardly believable and not very sustainable.

That’s why the movie could be decent. You don’t need to worry about plausibility. You don’t have to rationalize psycho killers. Friday the 13th movies are watchable because (discounting the first) Jason’s basically a murderous robot. You don’t question his motives, nor are you expected to care. He’s built for that purpose. If there was a scene where he was drinking whiskey and thinking about how he could get away with wanton murder, it’d be lame. Or imagine if zombies had agendas. You don’t learn or want to learn the politics of the soon-to-be-victims. There are two possible outcomes, they live or die. The enjoyment comes from seeing that play out.

A movie adaptation can (and should easily) address the flaws in Willaims’s book. Louise’s outbursts will last only long enough to express marital discord–no need for motive or justification, we get it. George won’t need to turn to the screen and discuss the immorality of capital punishment, or dissect the irony involved when a threatened man is forced to contradict his pacifist beliefs for the safety of his family. It’ll just be a thrilling survive or die scenario. Take Jason again. You think he’s gone, the creepy music goes all andante… then bam, some naked girl gets her head cut off in a station wagon. If the whole movie was him failing to get into that station wagon while the girl argued with her boyfriend about whether he was an adequate lover or who was better at rolling up the windows, it would be stupid and unwatchable.

This book is what it is: an easy, mindless read, an empowerment fantasy, a paperback to be found on a take-a-book-leave-a-book shelf. And to that end, it’s all right I guess. If you’re looking for that sort of thing, it could be worth your time. Otherwise, wait for the movie.

Similar Reads: Lamplighter (Simmons). The movies The Shining and Cape Fear do a better job of conveying the type of thing I think Williams was going for.

2009, Fantagraphics Books

Filed Under: Graphic Novel, Sci-Fi, Horror.

Get the book.

This book is pretty messed up. I’m not even really sure what it’s about, but it’s pretty messed up.

Edward and William are two very smart little rich kids living off their father’s inheritance. As a hobby, they make steampunky musical instruments out of animal carcasses and phonographs and sundry things. There’s a crazy woman known as Pig Lady, and they somehow have a cavernous workshop hidden beneath the house their father left them. There’s their odd mother, and a girl named Morgen who gets banged in what I can best describe as a snail sorter. And there’s this:

There’s something about this book I really liked. It’s not the plot, because there really isn’t one. I don’t mean that I couldn’t suss out what happens in the surreal narrative, but just that it wanders. The story’s a bit like a fever dream, and it depicts a few of those, tumbling things even farther into its churning delirium. There’s a book called The Squirrel Machine that keep cropping up, but its relevance or importance is anyone’s guess.

It’s not the characters, because they are far from whole. And it’s not really the art, though that is certainly the most interesting aspect to be singled out. Rickheit is very talented with a pen. This book is full of quite detailed, even ornate, drawings. His ability to capture his imagination on paper is staggering (even if the product is more than a little disturbing). While the art is very good, you probably wouldn’t hang it on your wall; after finishing this book, it will be the subjects and not the artistry that sticks with you.

So pretty much what it boils down to is there’s a lot of intricately drawn death and gore and grotesquery, and a little bit of boobs. Mostly a lot of weird happens. None of the parts are all that great, but somehow the whole package left me quite satisfied. The experience is a bit like watching a David Lynch movie. I don’t think I get it, and I’m not even sure I’m supposed to. But I like it.

Similar Reads: Silverfish (Lapham), Kill Your Boyfriend (Morrisson)

Author: Jim Shepard

2011, Knopf

Filed Under: Short Stories, Historical, Horror, Literary.

Get a copy at Powell’s.

You Think That’s Bad offers 11 stories inspired by a diverse array of subjects, from flood control and avalanche research to World War II and the Japanese film industry. Each one is thoroughly researched, tightly written, and full of compelling, hopeless characters. As a collection, though, You Think That’s Bad strikes the same emotional chord a little too often to make the whole something greater than its best parts.

One story is about a Black World operative who can’t talk to his wife. One is about a Dutch hydraulics engineer who can’t talk to his wife. There’s a particle physicist who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Japanese special effects designer who can’t talk to his wife; there’s a Polish mountaineer who does a better job talking to his wife, but not nearly good enough to save either of them from himself. It’s tragic watching these obsessed men ruin their lives one after the other, but some things start to feel repetitive.

Each of the emotionally damaged specialists at the heart of these stories offers a distinct portrait of the unavailable husband. The Black World operative seems to thrive on keeping secrets for their own sake, while the Dutch hydraulics engineer just can’t seem to stop himself. At one point, he starts a secret bank account using an inheritance that he never tells his wife about. “What am I up to?” he asks the reader. “Your guess is as good as mine.” In different ways, they’re all likeable and infuriating.

But eventually—mostly after it’s too late for them or their spouses—they all come to some version of the same conclusion: that they should have said something; that they should have risked more; that they were hurting themselves as much as everyone else. All fair conclusions to draw from their mistakes, but each iteration decreases the tension from one story to the next. Is it going to work out this time? No. Somehow, it won’t.

On their own, each one of these stories is successful and compelling, mesmerizing in their expertise and deftly balanced with action and insight. “The Netherlands Lives with Water” appears in Best American Short Stories 2010, and “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” is an O’Henry Prize story for 2011, both with good reason. It’s just that once I started seeing a pattern, I found myself more drawn in by stories that broke it, like “Boys Town” and “Classical Scenes of Farewell.”

In “Boys Town,” Martin is back living with his mother after a middling military career and a botched marriage. He’d be more deserving of the reader’s sympathy if he weren’t so eager to ask for it. Almost everything he says contains a plea for someone to take his side. This is how he relates the time he pushed his wife down the stairs:

She was all like “You coulda killed me,” and I was like, “Hey: you shoved me first, and there was a railing, and there was carpet.” She said, “You don’t shove somebody at the top of the stairs,” and I said, “Well what did you do to me?”

You don’t have to read past the italics in the passage above to know what matters most to Martin. He stands out from the other emotionally damaged narrators in You Think That’s Bad by being far more fucked up and unrepentant. He’d be easier to dismiss if he didn’t have a point some of the time, and if he didn’t have a survivalist’s kit and a rifle.

“Classical Scenes of Farewell” is simply one of the most chilling stories I’ve ever read. It’s the story of Gilles de Rais, a homicidal fifteenth-century French noble, as told by one of his closest servants. It beats most horror movies for gore, but it’s the subtle indictments hidden in the language that keep me thinking back on it now. I won’t say anymore except that you should try to read it in one sitting. Preferably during the day.

For me, these two stories were the best in the collection, and not just because they stood apart from some of the other tales of obsession and personal loss. Every story here offers something to recommend it, but these stories took me to the greatest extremes, to places I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, and brought me back to a room that looked almost like the one I was in when I started reading them. They make me glad I have my own copy of You Think That’s Bad so I can go back to them someday when I get up the nerve.

Similar reads: Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Shepard), Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (Chabon), Jesus’ Son (Johnson).

Small Beer Press, 2010

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary, Historical, Horror

Readers familiar with Karen Joy Fowler most likely know her through her best selling novels, The Jane Austen Book Club, Wit’s End, and Sister Noon. But Fowler began her career as a writer of wildly imaginative short stories. Her newest collection is sure to add to this. What I Didn’t See is one of her strongest yet.

For some authors, a short story collections is like a science lab. The stories in this collection, published over a span of nearly two decades, show Fowler experimenting with many different styles and forms distinct from her novels. But no matter the genre or subject, the author retains what makes her full-length books so successful: an attention to detail, an ear for language, and compassion for her characters. For those who have found Fowler through her novels, these stories offer a chance to encounter an imaginative storyteller as she moves from subject to subject.

The stories in this collection are widely divergent. Next to a modern story of two sisters searching for a long-lost love in a small Italian village, you will find a fairy tale about a man with a wing for an arm. Beside the tale of an awkward adolescent friendship, Fowler takes us into a mid-century cult obsessed with immortality.

One of the pleasures of reading an eclectic collection is being constantly turned around and never knowing what to expect, but trusting the author to pull off the next story. Fowler does so brilliantly, whether chronicling a girl’s life in a brutal reform home or tying together a family history through the stewardship of a homemade submarine. Again and again, Fowler combines the mundane and the extraordinary to produce fiction as imaginative as it is relatable.

Many of Fowler’s stories are set in familiar periods of history: The title story concerns a woman who vanishes from a group of explorers hunting gorillas in the days of naturalists. Two stories tackle Lincoln’s assassination from different perspectives: Booth’s Ghost describes the life of Edwin Booth, older brother to John Wilkes, his life already tumultuous before his sibling assassinates Lincoln; in “Standing Room Only”, a young woman becomes obsessed with the young star as he passes through her boarding house. One of the oldest stories collected in this book, 1991’s “The Dark,” tells the tale of a feral child and his subsequent role in Vietnam.

Although the stories in this collection have been published widely, readers may be most familiar with “Private Grave 9,” which was included in McSweeny’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. In the story, an archeologist falls in love with an Egyptian priestess, whose ghost may or may not be haunting him, compelling him to violence as he exhumes her tomb. While developing a picture of the priestess’s sarcophagus, he discovers a ghostly image of the woman’s face superimposed over the print. “A photograph is a moment you can spend your whole life looking at,” the narrator muses. This is Fowler at her best: unearthing a specific point in history, falling under its spell, and bringing the characters’ stories to life to offer a detailed snapshot of the past.

Author:

2009, Penguin Books

Filed Under: Literary, Fantasy, Horror, Short Stories

Here’s one thing not to do with these stories. Don’t leave them on your bedside table so you can read one each night before going to sleep. They aren’t the scariest stories you’ll ever read, but they are warped little tales that will send your dreams off in strange directions over barren, unmarked terrain.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is one of the best-known Russian authors writing today, and this collection offers English-speaking readers an introduction to the supernatural side of her work. These stories range from classic ghost stories to apocalyptic allegories, with a few lighter touches in between. They all bring the straightforward manner of a fairy tale to a contemporary Russian landscape, where there are asylums and hospitals instead of dungeons, and where destiny can take the form of true love or mandatory government service.

The title of the collection is a spin on the first line of one of its shorter pieces, called “Revenge”: “There once lived a woman who hated her neighbor–a single mother with a child.” There’s nothing subtle or understated about Raya’s seemingly inexplicable hatred. She dumps a box of needles on the floor in the hall and tries to spill bleach under Zina’s door where the baby is learning to crawl. Her apparent insanity and her callous murder attempts might make her an obvious villain, but as the story twists and twists again, Raya becomes the center of a five-page story overflowing with moral questions without being overly moralizing.

“Twist” here should not be read in the conventional sense of a plot twist or a surprise, though this collection certainly contains surprises. In Petrushevskaya’s hands, “twist” should be read to mean “tightening,” like putting one more twist in a rope, or cranking the wrack one more notch. The turns her stories take do little to relieve tension or resolve mystery; rather they keep each one taught beyond its final moments.

In “Revenge,” we learn that Raya and Zina used to be friends:

Two unmarried women living in a communal apartment, they had a lot in common. They even shared friends who came by, and on their birthdays they gave each other gifts. They told each other everything. But then Zina became pregnant, and Raya found herself consumed with hatred.

While this early revelation may come as a surprise, it doesn’t explain Raya’s rage or its extremes. Instead, it raises the stakes. Raya is not only hateful; she’s jealous and rejected, seeking to harm someone she once loved, and who still looks on her as “practically an older sister, who would never abandon her in a time of need.” In the end, “Revenge” is not only a story about hatred , but about envy, dependence, obligation, and resentment.

In another story, a father tries to save his dying child by performing a gruesome act in a bizarre dream and in another, a girl wakes from dream to find herself in a foreign place “dressed in a strange black overcoat.” In each case, the easy plot twist might be showing that what was thought real was dream or vice versa. Here though, the resulting story is always something else, a hybrid of dreamlike reality and nightmarish fantasy, a challenge to the division between concrete and imaginary realms.

It’s Petrushevskaya’s ability to twist her stories in just this way that gives them their amazing compression. The whole book weighs in at just over two hundred pages, and most of the stories are less than ten, each one packed with mistakes and regret and long-awaited moments of redemption. If this technique carries over into her other, reportedly realist, fiction, then I’d expect to start seeing more translations in English very soon.

Similar reads: The Time: Night (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya), A House of Pomegranates (Oscar Wilde), The Street of Crocodiles (Bruno Schulz)