Author: George Mann

2008, Snowbooks

Filed Under: Mystery, Historical, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

If you’d listened to our most recent podcast (you didn’t, because the recording got messed up, so you might never hear it at all), you would have heard me say this was a Sherlock Holmes-y book that was sort-of-but-not-really steampunk. I was half correct; full of airships and clockwork automatons and laudanum benders and Queen Victoria on an artificial lung crafted from bellows, it’s squarely steampunk. But to define it as that would be to sell it really short. Rather than relying on the setting, Mann writes a good story, leaving the setting to seep in around the edges.

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. There’s a blight on my reader’s record, a mark of shame I really need to correct. I’ve never read any of the Sherlock Holmes books. From what I’ve picked up (thanks mostly to Gregory House), this book shares a lot in common with Doyle’s beloved mysteries.

Maurice Newberry is a detective and an “agent of the Crown.” He’s not an actual cop, but is good chums with the head of Scotland Yard in addition to packing royal credentials as a sleuth. He lives alone, and spends long hours in his study, often reading books on the obscure or occult, and his hobbies include laudanum and deductive crime-solving. His Watson is a Miss Veronica Hobbes, a sharp and fairly courageous woman, who compliments Newberry nicely. (Her character is fairly nuanced, and quite possibly the strongest in the book.)

In the novel’s early going, there are three primary plot lines. Firstly, there is some sort of plague brought over from India. It is ravaging the slums, and is effectively a small, but obviously hazardous, zombie outbreak. Secondly, there as been a string of murders in Whitechapel, seemingly perpetrated by a glowing blue policeman’s ghost. Thirdly, an airship crashes catastrophically, killing 50, and no sign of the brass automaton pilot is to be found.

It’s fairly obvious of course, being the sort of book this is, that these three strands will eventually be braided together. The fun is in following Newberry and Hobbes as they solve the case(s). So I won’t spoil any of that. As it plays out, this book delivers from every angle. The characters are well rendered. The dialogue has a decorous, almost too-proper politeness to it, one that any fan of Victorian literature will probably find as charming and funny as I did. There are plenty of exciting action scenes, as well as cerebral “Aha” moments. The writing fits the novel’s historical motif well, never underwhelming but rarely going over the top either. The sci-fi elements are plentiful, but don’t overstep their welcome–or worse become so over-concerned with plausibility as to drag down the tone.

This is a fun, engaging book that I think may be criminally underlooked due to genre. Don’t let the steampunk setting repel you, the setting is crucial to the story, but in no way the reason for its success. If you like mysteries and adventure stories, you’re almost certain to enjoy this book.

Similar Reads: The Map of Time (Palma). Also, check out this cool Kickstarter project Nico came across.

Author: Alison Bechdel

2012, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Literary

Find it at Goodreads

This impressive graphic memoir is a great book, but not in any way I think I’ve read before. The bulk of the novel consists of Bechdel’s therapy-related endeavors. She remembers episodes from her childhood in terms of various infant-development theories, she recounts her own therapy sessions as an adult, she interprets her dreams, she recounts conversations with her mother, and she quotes frequently from academic papers about psychoanalysis. In fact, the act of creating the book itself might have been therapeutic for Bechdel, because, as she says, “for both my mother and me, it’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.”

Are You My Mother? is not funny, and the events it recounts are never earth-shattering—especially not compared to the central events of her first book, Fun Home, about her father’s closeted bisexuality and his suicide soon after Bechdel herself came out to her parents.

Instead of relying on these more traditional elements of story, Bechdel indulges her considerable talent for eliciting Nabokov-like patterns from the randomness of the world. She weaves a web of interconnected narrative tidbits—plucked from the entirety of her own life, as well as the lives of her parents, the memoirs and novels of Virginia Woolf, the work and life of Donald Winnicott, and many others—that echo and expand the smallest narrative hiccup until it ripples across the entirety of her existence.

Here’s a small example. One passage finds Bechdel discussing her mother’s affinity for Norah Vincent, a right-wing lesbian stunt-pundit who had begun to draw cartoons and had once beaten Bechdel for a prize. Bechdel finds herself paralyzed by jealousy, and expounds on this jealousy. On its own, that’s a small, somewhat overblown moment.

But later she recounts her mother’s pregnancy with her, how it might not have been planned—she notes that the pill was approved by Congress six months after her conception. Reading her father’s letters to his mother, she finds him a doting, generous man, with big plans to travel with his young wife as soon as he got out of the Army. This is nothing like the man she remembers, seen most frequently in this volume delivering cruel one-liners or in the marks he’s left on the house from throwing things during his rages.

Bechdel remembers a conversation she had with her mother, and surmises that her father might have asked her mother to get an abortion—children would’ve ruined their plans for travel. This moment, she hypothesizes might have crystallized her mother’s pro-life philosophy… the philosophy that, all those years later, led her to gravitate toward a pro-life lesbian thinker that her daughter hated and envied. It’s this kind of whorl, performed over and over through the book, that makes it special.

Bechdel also repeatedly uses themes beyond therapy. She plumbs the lives of Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott, noting various ways in which they were linked—geographically and by publishing house, for starters—though they never knew each other. Bechdel also returns to touchstones as varied as the theater, the transitional object, her habit of retouching her cheeks in pictures to make them appear pinker and healthier, and the practice of evacuating children from wartime London to houses or hostels in the countryside where they would be safe from bombs.

She peppers the narrative with informational tidbits about each of her hobbyhorses (the Narnia series began in a countryside child-evacuation house, Winnie the Pooh was the archetypal transitional object, etc). But the book really becomes something special when Bechdel braids all these themes together in certain twisting passages.

One of them begins during a flashback, when Bechdel (then 26 or so) goes to pick up her longtime girlfriend, Eloise, who’s a mechanic. Bechdel has just begun therapy, having that day returned from her first session with her new favorite therapist, a woman named Jocelyn who has essentially relieved her depression in one visit. Bechdel subsequently went out and bought the book The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, which will not only change her thinking but will also lead to her decades-long interest in psychoanalysis, and it introduces her to the work of Donald Winnicott, one of the load-bearing columns of this book.

This is what the next two pages looks like (click any image for a full-size version):

Beyond the discovery of Winnicott, these pages begin Bechdel’s search for her own “true self,” another major theme. Winnie the Pooh is a transitional object, and reading that book will lead to Narnia, from which Bechdel jumps into a discussion about the practice of evacuating children from wartime London to children’s hostels in the countryside. As it turns out, Winnicott worked as a therapist at such children’s hostels—a later anecdote gets into that.

Additionally, Eloise and Bechdel call each other “Beezum,” after Bechdel’s childhood teddy bear—another transitional object. And Bechdel’s refusal of sex and ignoring Eloise in the first page (even as she’s reading about the true self’s “state of noncommunication”) foreshadows their messy split.

These kinds of nested connections can continue in patterns for pages at a time, and the result is captivating.

Even so, this book is far from flawless. Bechdel has a tendency to over-intellectualize a lot of what happens, and she can be wincingly self-indulgent and dramatic at times, like this two-page spread about the guilt she feels when her mother calls her old number one night and can’t get ahold of her:

In fact, Bechdel might be the least likeable memoirist whose memoir I’ve really liked.

As for her drawing style, she says of it, “The kind of drawing I do has to be meticulously planned, every line has to convey some information.” I can see that, but the subject matter in this book does not often lend itself to such meticulous planning. There are hundreds of panels of her talking on the phone or to a therapist, panels that could be virtual Xeroxes of each other. Only a rare few are really beautiful or eye-catchingly creative.

In a sense then, this book is riveting, unique work. In another sense, it’s the dry whining of an overprivileged suburbanite with few real problems. I found it to be the former, but I couldn’t argue hard against the latter.

In the end, Bechdel’s whirling, braided tangle of patterns and connections won me over. A narrative continuum like this, so precise and intricate, so creative and yet so logical, is a wonder to behold. And perhaps that wonder is caused more by beholding Bechdel’s indirect effort—the years of her journal-keeping, the hours of transcribing her conversations with her mother—than by real enjoyment of the story at hand.

Still, even if it’s not for everyone, it’s a remarkable book.

Similar reads: Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli; Blankets, by Craig Thompson; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; Big Questions, by Anders Nilsen

Author: Brian Evenson

2012, Tor

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Find it at Goodreads

I’ve been in a long, dark reading drought lately. I’ve been reading only mediocre books, it seems, for months now. I could barely remember what a great read felt like when I got hooked by Immobility.

It begins with a well-used premise, albeit one I’m a sucker for: a man wakes up with no idea where he is, what he’s doing there, or who he is. As the answers come in fits and starts, the questions of his identity and place in the world become dreadful, ominous, and traumatic.

His name, they tell him, is Josef Horkai. He’s been “stored,” as it turns out, which is dystopian lingo for cryogenic freezing. As he regains his wits, he instinctively, almost unconsciously, tries to murder one of the men who woke him up. He fails only because he falls off the bed; he’s paralyzed from the waist down.

The world is in the midst of a nuclear winter, after an apocalyptic event they call the Kollaps. The leader of the small, underground community in which Horkai wakes is an awkward man named Rasmus. Rasmus’s father found Horkai many years ago, fried nearly dead by intense radiation. Somehow, Horkai survived, but he contracted a disease that’s paralyzing him by inches. It’s taken his legs and threatens to move up his spine and kill him, except for special spinal injections that slow the disease’s spread.

That’s why he was stored, Rasmus says, to slow the spread of his disease while they look for a cure. They haven’t found it yet, but they have need of his services in the meantime.

“‘You were a fixer,’” Rasmus says, “‘a detective of sorts.’” A violent man, evidently, one who wouldn’t flinch if dirty work needed doing. The perfect man, it turns out, for a special mission.

By this point, I was hooked. Evenson’s prose and his character work aren’t mind-blowingly special, but he sketches out a gritty dystopia filled with creepy, unnerving people and a potent sense of dread hanging over everything. Evenson excels at creating characters who have something wrong with them, but something you can’t quite put your finger on (and Horkai can’t either).

Often these characters don’t seem to be entirely human—like the twin men, called “mules,” who carry Horkai on his mission. They talk endlessly of “purpose” and don’t seem to understand the world properly. There’s something mysteriously off about these two, Qatik and Qanik, but Horkai can’t quite figure it out. His conversations with them, however, get philosophical and often quite funny. Like this conversation after the trio runs into a stop sign:

“What does it say?” asked Qatik.

“Have you never seen a stop sign?” asked Horkai.

Qatik shook his head.

“Can’t you read?”

Within his hood, Qatik shook his head again. “Neither of us can read. But I can recognize letters.”

Beneath him, he felt Qanik nod. “It’s not important for everyone to read,” said Qanik. “Some read and some do other things. We all have our purpose.”

“Who told you that?” asked Horkai. “Someone who can read, I bet.”

In this way, Evenson explores the idiosyncrasies of this new world in an entertaining style that makes the pages fly by. And mystery infuses everything, like why Qatik and Qanik need biohazard suits to spend even a day in the outside world without dying, but Horkai has no trouble with drastic radiation or, say, getting shot.

The answers, when they eventually come, can be picked apart slightly, but they’re solid enough that they don’t sour the page-turning entertainment of the journey.

In the end, this isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a very solid little piece of sci-fi, a simple idea well-executed, and the most fun I’ve had reading in several months.

Similar reads: Machine Man, by Max Barry; Pure, by Juliana Baggott; The Glister, by John Burnside; Genesis, by Bernard Beckett

[This outstanding collections of short-stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Eugene Cross

2012, Dzanc Books

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary

Find it on Goodreads.

If Dzanc books isn’t on your radar as a go-to press for outstanding collections of short stories, it should be. Once a year, for the past three years, a collection by Dzanc has blown me away. Lauran van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us was my gateway drug, and the way she combined the far-fetched and everyday made the collection one of my favorite books I read in 2010. In 2011, I read Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass, laughing at the sometimes lunkish characters while shaking my head with recognition. So when I picked up Eugene Cross’s collection, Fires of our Choosing, I knew I was in for something good.

Cross’s book does not disappoint. A combination of Phillip Meyer’s American Rust and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, Fires maps the lives of working-class men and women who often find themselves a dice-throw away from being down-and-out, problems with love, family, and alcohol complicating perpetual crisis of the wallet and the heart. 

It would be easy to call Cross’s characters losers, but only in the most literal sense: almost everyone in this collection has lost something or someone–a father, a sibling, a wife, direction, hope. In “The Brother,” a house painter haunted by his past is forced to give his girlfriend’s addict brother a job and a second chance. In “The Gambler,” a recent widower finds solace in the familiar circus of a local casino. “Harvesters” follows a man following the harvest, trying to win over a woman he has jilted before, and will jilt again, his departure as predictable as the seasons. If these sound predictable, they are anything but, and Cross continually wrong-foots readers, keeping them guessing until the last page.

Stories by Ron Rash and Bonnie Jo Campbell, who often cover similar, bleak ground, can act as a series of downward strokes when collected, which can be exhausting to read, but Cross’s stories are more varied, and Fires largely avoids this. Some of the most effective stories are the ones where Cross leaves behind the familiar and branches into different voices. “Rosaleen, if You Know What I Mean,” which chronicles a boy’s failed rebellion in the face of his dissolving family, and “Come August,” a brief story told as a second-person address that tells of a babysitter who finds her life irrevocably changed when she steals a few moments of sleep, are two of the most arresting stories in the collection.

Opening “Eyes Closed,” the story of a two-bit pool hustler hoping to pay rent with a big score, Cross writes that “Bars and pool halls were not places you went to turn your luck.” His characters know this, yet these are the places they are drawn to, where their luck changes momentarily before inevitably running out. These are the places in Erie, Pennsylvania, that Cross brings to life so well, the places his characters might find dignity and grace in the incremental victories gained against life’s uphill struggle.

Similar Reads: American Rust, by Philipp Meyer; Jesus’s Son, by Denis Johnson; Burning Bright, by Ron Rash; and American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Author: Mark Leyner

2012, Hachette

Filed Under: Literary, Humor

Find it on Goodreads.

Where to even begin with this book? This novel, if you want to call it that, is brilliant, perplexing, uproarious, and a little bit sad. One thing is certain: this is a superb bit of writing, and example of a writer at the top of his game, whose abilities with the written word put many of his contemporaries to shame. The rest is pretty much up for interpretation. If you want to glean more than just pretty bits of style from this book, come in prepared to to use parts of your brain you probably haven’t exercised in a while.

Leyner’s book is the sort of fictive work I used to read in grad-school literature classes. It is obtuse nearly to the point of being cryptic, but there is a method to the madness. If you’re willing to put in the time, you’ll find it worth your while. This is because, while there is not too much plot to speak of (I’ll get to that shortly), the book is bursting at the seams with substance. Structurally it’s a bit like a spiritual cousin to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is an epic poem that isn’t a poem. It flips between genres and writing styles like channels before a bored couch surfer blankly clicking a remote. Some sections are stream of conscious prose, but there are also lists, book blurbs, sing-songy rhymes, tabloid grab lines, text message interchanges, and more. Through a combination of the expert writing I already mentioned and a savage wit, Leyner makes each varying piece work for the whole like a perfectly calibrated tourbillon. Out of context though, it probably just seems mental, like these “Excerpts from Eulogies”:

“This was just the aristocratic, autoerotic attitude of those whose hot buttocks were the pure products of the imagination of the Gods who’d invented the platitude.”

“Ike—marionette, umbilicated to his Goddesses, murmuring in a language garnished with umlauts.”

“His birth as an object of divine desire, and his death—the Goddesses sated—supine and on fire, hated by his neighbors.”

“This shit’s retarded. It’s The Ballad of the Severed Heads. ‘It’s not toasted, it’s Pop-Tarted,’ Ike boasted to all his drug-addled, big-dick bards (the Upper Penis Committee) from the Upper Peninsula and Jersey City…”

The basic gist is that Ike Karton is going to die today. He’s going to eat breakfast, then get shot later on, probably either suicide-by-cop or gunned down by a Mossad agent. This is going to happen because he is a plaything of the gods. What gods? you may ask. Well, the book opens with a long, more or less insane introduction of a pantheon of gods and demigods who reside above the Burj Khalifa. They are created in the mold of the Greek and Roman deities, but these gods rule over every zany thing from balloon angioplasty and the movie Maria Full of Grace to, well, nutsacks. These gods, in particular XOXO (also known as El Cucho or Kid Coma, the god of head trauma, concussions, dementia, alcoholic blackouts, and about a zillion other things), are messing with the book as it is being told/written. The entire narrative is structured in this hyper-meta way: everything is being relayed through various styles and by choruses and characters and different narrators simultaneously before, while, and after it occurs.

I’m not sure I can describe it any better than that. Leyner pretty much lays out as solid description of the structure as you can get as part of his “What Makes Ike a Hero?” list:

G. Ike is the hero of the epic who simultaneously recites and reacts the epic of which he is the extemporaneous, albeit inexorably doomed, hero. This is why scholars frequently refer to Ike as the “Möbius Stripper,” i.e., the man whose lascivious dance (i.e., “his life”) is performed for the delectation of masturbating Goddesses.

This book is very funny, very stimulating, and completely ludicrous. It isn’t a book for everyone. If you’re looking to pass the time on a train ride, look elsewhere. But if you are up for some dense and experimental fiction firing on all cylinders, you will love this book.

Similar Reads: Palafox (Chevillard), Tristram Shandy (Sterne), Ulysses (Joyce)

[A review copy was provided.]

Author: David J. Kowalksi

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Historical, Thriller

Find it on Goodreads.

Writing a time travel novel is a big endeavor. There’s a slew of things you can mess up, and even one loose end can unravel the entire plausibility of your plot.

Needless to say, when I read the premise of this book (alternate history, time travel, some guy trying to save the Titanic) and that it was a debut novel 15 years in the making by a practicing OB/GYN, I didn’t really expect much. Even a few hundred pages into this behemoth of a book, I still wasn’t really sure which way things would fall. Luckily, they fell toward the side of awesome. I found myself really enjoying this novel, churning through the last few hundred pages excitedly.

As you might expect from 750 pages of time-travel fiction, the plot gets pretty complicated. It’s hard to explain my thoughts on the book without a somewhat lengthy set-up, so bear with me.

Things start out fairly straightforward. A man named Wells has traveled back in time and finagled his way aboard the Titanic. He’s from our present and he’s attempting to “correct” history by preventing the ship’s sinking. While he does manage to affect history and avoid the iceberg that famously brought the boat down, the ship strikes a different iceberg while correcting course and sinks all the same. Thus, some of the people who died on the Titanic now no longer died, and history changes.

John Jacob Astor IV is the new survivor most crucial to the plot. After returning to America, the influential tycoon involves the US in a diplomatic feud with England, which results in America staying out of World War I. Flash forward 100 years to 2012. World War II never happened. Most of the globe is split between the German and Japanese empires. The United States didn’t survive a second secession of the South and the Confederacy is now a nation of its own, largely in bed with Germany. The North, however, is largely occupied by Japanese forces. There is no active fighting between the empires, but things are tense and Cold War-like.

Joseph Kennedy Jr. (who couldn’t have died in a WWII that didn’t occur) has attempted some unsuccessful political bids and is now the head of the Confederate Bureau of Investigation. He’s been working on a secret project called Camelot, a gambit move intended to re-unite the USA through causing a clash between the empires. But Kennedy has deeper secrets: through a particular chain of events, he has access to the very same time machine as Wells. As the book opens, the Camelot plot, which involved lots of double agents and similar tactics, has broken down. However, things are still set in motion to trigger a great, and likely apocalyptic, war between the two sides–with America as the battle ground.

I’m oversimplifying things a lot here, Kowalski planned out everything fastidiously. The book is rife with historical figures and events, many skewed due to his alternate history. It doesn’t read like someone read a couple entries on Wikipedia and fictionalized some things, or dropped actual names into a plot that would work fine without them. Kowalski obviously did his homework, then took the time to properly synthesize portions of history into a fiction with clear lines of plausibility.

The main plot that follows features Kennedy and clan scrambling from now war-torn New York City to make a hail mary mission to the time machine (which is located in Nevada), in the hopes of correcting time and undoing the only history they’ve known. Not really sure what will happen, but assured that if they do nothing things will end in ruin (via a test run of the time machine to the future), they opt for a possible chance of freeing the world from doom, even if would result in they themselves ceasing to exist.

Just like Wells before them, Kennedy and his team believe the key to repairing history is… to save the Titanic. They concluded that Wells had brought the Titanic down, not attempted to preserve it. The dramatic irony this injects into the plot is palpable and satisfying. It was perhaps this twist alone that the book won me over. Dramatic irony is easy to abuse or otherwise misuse, but when executed properly it can do wonders for a book. In Kowalski’s case, it propels his characters nicely, and furthermore ratchets up the tension for the reader the closer the character get to achieving their goal. Eventually I found myself genuinely excited while reading, not something I had expected going into this book. Then, as the complexity of the plot’s workings became more visible, Kowalski introduces some very interesting and slightly brain-bending play with time travel and paradoxes, at which point I was all-in.

Further explaining the plot, though, or what those paradoxes might be would take forever and spoil too much. Suffice to say, as things move on, it becomes clear that Kowalski did an impeccable job with his plotting–many things crop up later in the book that I only then realized I had been clued into hundreds of pages earlier. But I rushed past the dangling hints while racing along with Kennedy in his urgent race to save the Titanic.

When I agreed to read this book, I didn’t think it was going to be very good, but figured just maybe it would at least be entertaining. It did manage that, but also managed to impress me. Kowalski’s never going to win any awards for his prose. There’s plenty of clunker lines like this: “He hid the dread behind the rampart of his face.” But when a book’s plot structure is as tight as Kowalski has delivered here, that’s fine with me. If Kowalski writes another book, I’ll read it. I just hope he takes his time with it and gives the particulars the care he gave Company of the Dead–even that means waiting fifteen years.

Similar Reads: The Revisionists (Mullen), The Map of Time (Palma)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author: Katherine Boo

2012, Random House

Filed under: Nonfiction

Find it at Goodreads

In the forty-odd years since New Journalism broke down the walls between reporter and subject, the first-person voice has become a plague in the world of nonfiction.

In certain situations, stories can benefits from reporters’ active involvement—like, say, if the reporter is Hunter S. Thompson and whatever he’s doing is more interesting than whatever he’s supposed to be covering.

But usually, these days, the word “I” points to some weakness or flaw in the writing: a lack of solid material, or a lack of effort on the part of the writer. By explaining how he came to find certain subjects, he can gloss over whether or not those subjects are crucial—or even important—to the story at hand.

For example, in a recent issue of the New Yorker, a piece about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker included mini-profiles of two signature-gatherers for the petition to recall Walker. The writer, William Finnegan, finds his first signature-gatherer, Joanne Staudacher, seemingly at random, and then latches onto another one through her. Finnegan writes:

Staudacher said that her hero was another Oshkosh circulator, known as Fighting Bob. I asked to meet him. Staudacher contacted him, and Bob—Bob Bergman—and I rendezvoused in downtown Oshkosh. Indoors.

This paragraph is mostly fluff, but it uses the writer’s personal experience as connective tissue between the two circulators. Why did Staudacher call Bob her hero? How had they met? Are either of these people central in any way to the signature-gathering? Are they average gatherers or did everyone else have a different experience?

The sentences describing how Finnegan moved from Staudacher to Bob obscure a lot of those points, and they make it feel like Finnegan talked to precisely two gatherers. But there are worse ways this technique, in the wrong hands, impacts journalism. From the next paragraph in the same article:

[Bob] had collected, he told me, eight hundred and thirteen signatures to recall Walker …

By sliding in that “he told me” Finnegan distances himself from the facts of the situation and from having to, like, count signatures. He also makes that statistic entirely worthless as a piece of reportage. That “he told me” translates to “I didn’t confirm.” It’s accepted laziness, and it’s become pervasive in today’s journalistic landscape.

So it’s refreshing and engaging to read a nonfiction book from which the author has absented herself entirely, leaving only hard-won facts to take her place.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers takes place in a Mumbai slum called Annawadi, a precarious patch of swampland wedged between the Mumbai International Airport and the fancy airport hotels (and tucked behind a wall covered in ads for an Italian floor company that proclaim, “Beautiful Forever” over and over).

In Annawadi, more than 3000 squatters stuff themselves into barely 300 hand-built huts, next to a lake of sewage (take another look at that idyllic-looking cover—it pictures literally an enormous puddle of shit). The most lucrative line of work here—other than organizing government corruption—is sorting and selling the garbage that scores of pickers scavenge or steal, mostly from the airport.

The central figure of the book, 17-year-old Abdul Husain, runs his family’s garbage business, sorting trash for hours on end, every day, and then packing it up and hauling it across town to the recycling facility.

Throughout the telling of Abdul’s story, Boo’s most remarkable talent is her intimate knowledge of her subjects, such that her narrative reads like a novel with an omniscient narrator. For example:

[Abdul's mother Zehrunisa] stepped carefully over one of his younger brothers, and then another, bending low to Abdul’s ear. “Wake up, fool!” she said exuberantly. “You think your work is dreaming?”

Superstitious, Zehrunisa had noticed that some of the family’s most profitable days occurred after she had showered abuses on her eldest son. January’s income being pivotal the Husains’ latest plan of escape from Annawady, she had decided to make the curses routine.

It’s a stunning style, and it makes the narrative immersive in a way first-person journalism can’t touch.

Here’s another passage, about the corrupt problem-fixer Asha and her beautiful daughter, Manju:

Asha grasped many of her own contradictions, among them that you could be proud of having spared your offspring hardship while also resenting them for having been spared. When food was short in Asha’s childhood, the girls of the family went without. Although most people talked of hunger as a matter of the stomach, what Asha recalled was the taste—a foul thing that burrowed into your tongue and was sometimes still there when you swallowed, decades later. Manju looked at her mother with compassion, not comprehension, when Asha tried to describe it.

Asha resents her daughter for other reasons, like the fact that Manju attempts to actually run the small school that Asha receives a government subsidy for—most schools convene only to take pictures or for the visits of government regulators.

Behind is full of moments like this: the problems of India, in microcosm, woven deftly into elegant, complex characterizations. Still, these characters and details aren’t Behind’s only strong suits. There’s also an engrossing, heartbreaking plot.

When a neighbor, jealous of the Husains’ success, finally loses it, she sets herself on fire and tells the police that Abdul tried to murder her. Abdul runs, and his father—a semi-disabled man whose absence won’t reflect in the family’s bottom line—tries to take the blame.

The Husains have to decide who to bribe and who to snub (they can’t afford to bribe everyone), and Abdul, in jail, becomes contemplative and compassionate in a way the slum never inspired.

Meanwhile, the Husains learn that their real enemies are not the airport officials threatening to pave over the slum and kick out all the squatters, and they are not the rich people trying to ignore their existence—Annawadians’ real enemies are each other. They fight amongst each other for every scrap of trash, and they let crippling jealousy turn them against each other.

It’s such a powerful narrative, with such well-defined characters, that I often forgot that it was all true. Until, that is, I hit the first video.

A still from the book's first embedded video, "Annawadi"

That’s right—videos. The “enhanced” ebook version of Behind comes with 4 videos, shot by both Boo and the denizens of Annawadi, at a total cost of $1 more than the unenhanced ebook. It’s an elegant use of ereading’s capabilities, and it serves an important function: reminding you that Abdul and Manju (and everyone else) are real people.

I’m no expert on Indian politics or society—for that kind of stuff look to a review like this one. But I can tell you that Behind is a remarkable experience. Anyone remotely interested in its subject matter should pick it up.

Similar books (selected with help from our nonfiction guru Marc Velasquez): Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers; Homicide, by David Simon; A Civil Action, by Jonathan Carr; Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand; Levels of the Game, by John McPhee; Among Schoolchildren, by Tracy Kidder

Also: here’s a profile of Boo herself.

Author:  Patrick Michael Finn

2011, Black Lawrence Press

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

Find it on Goodreads.

Patrick Michael Finn’s award-winning second story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, depicts the grim industrial nightmare and post-industrial hell of Joliet, Illinois.  Think of Dante’s Inferno and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” shuffled together and you begin to get a picture of just how grim this world is, and how pitilessly Finn depicts it, while still making us care about these characters stuck in their blighted urban Ninth Circle of Hell.  But when the damned are stuck in hell together, they do hellish things to each other, and nothing namby-pamby like the infernal and eternal talkers of Sartre’s No Exit.   No, these are all-American sinners, who take no prisoners, and have no pity for themselves, so why should they have any for their victims?

So in the course of the opening story, “Smokestack Polka,” a kid whose father has died of a heart attack on his walk home from his job at the Joliet railyards tries to kill the loathsome wife- beating thug who tries to put the moves on his mother, six months after his father’s death, at his cousin Reenie’s wedding.  The brick the unnamed narrator on the roof hurls down at Tomczak barely misses its target, and Tomczak takes the incident for an accident and concludes the story with, “But let’s get the hell out of here.  This fucking place is falling apart,” which, whether Tomczak realizes it or not, pretty much describes all the lives depicted in this powerful collection.

In the title story, “From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet,” Finn picks up this brick imagery, but uses it to describe the rats that another unnamed, almost teenaged narrator finds in his house, especially after their rat killing dog has died: “They were bigger than bricks and moved like blunt lengths of gray pipe on four legs…”  To the narrator’s growing frustration and horror, however, his parents are perpetually too drunk to even notice the infestation.  Well, infestation might be a little tame for this vermin invasion.  As in many of these stories, however, the narrator exacts a terrifying, and terrifyingly funny, revenge on his parents’ fog of inebriation.  I won’t spoil the pay-off, but it would not be out of place in a Poe story, only a lot grosser.

But Finn is just getting warmed up.  “Shitty Sheila” is a character study of a doomed woman who escapes a glitter factory in Paducah, KY, only to end up as an exotic dancer in Joliet, until she loses that less than rewarding job to drugs, drink, and a vile man; and then things get really bad.  But “For the Sake of His Sorrowful Passion” is both the lowest that Finn allows his characters to sink and at the same time, offers a glimpse of hope at its conclusion.  Another hapless teenage (Louis) protagonist lives in a foster home run by an immensely hypocritical woman, and attends a Catholic high school.  But he, along with some other students, are so inept  at sports and thus despised, they’re told not to bother participating during gym classes, so they hang out in the locker room, where the other sports-phobic boys, one in particular (who is repulsively described as “the dandruff eater”), force him to fellate them and whose body serves as a dart board for their ejaculations, which half excites and half revolts him.  Of course they’re found out, but the protagonist, being an orphan, is blamed for the incidents and the only one tossed out of the school.  He’s further betrayed by the woman who runs the orphan house, and exacts a brutal vengeance on her and on the hideous man who has made fun of him throughout the story.  Strangely, however, and satisfyingly, Louis finds a home of sorts by story’s end.

Finn’s writing is a marvel in all these stories.  He has the knack for a telling image (“By the time he turned twenty, Ray Dwyer looked like a movie gangster’s bodyguard.”—“Where Beautiful Ladies Dance for You”), but also the true artist’s ability to have his characters string soul denigrating insults at their defeated victims on a scale that Homer’s heroes, gloating over the enemies they’ve just slain in battle, might envy.  So an old drunk monster named Hudak hurls these imprecations at poor Louis, who is trying to run away on a “boat” he found: “‘What is our Fairy-Mary Louise up to out here?  What does our Miss Pussymoist have here so early?’”  Needless to say, Hudak gets his too.

Terrible things are done to and by terrible people in these stories.  Finn sometimes piles the horrors on so heavily, it’s hard slogging to keep reading.  More than a few times I felt like I did as a kid, while watching a horror movie, staring in repulsed fascination and turning away at the really gruesome and scary parts.  But Finn rewards a strong stomach.  He portrays characters blighted not just by urban blight but by their own severely circumscribed lives and life-chances.  Most of them are content to get drunk most nights and laid on Saturday night.  And one young very nasty thug shows a surprisingly tender side, in his love for his tropical fish collection.  A couple of characters escape, if only into the mercy of death or their dreams, and one or two actually make it out in one piece, but Joliet is forever seared into their hearts and souls.  As it will be in yours, if you dare enter this dread jungle.

Similar Reads: Alien Nation, Alan Catlin (Poetry); What Work Is, Philip Levine (Poetry); Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.; Mohawk, Nobody’s Fool, and The Risk Pool, Richard Russo

Author: Justin Torres

2011, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Literary

An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”

That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:

These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.

You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.

We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.

Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.

We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one.  It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.

It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.

Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller

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).