David Yoon
It's 1940s Manhattan and psychiatrist David Manne is called out by the police to diagnosis a violent husband and subsequently has the suspect, Mr Esterhazy, committed. It doesn't sit well with Manne who finds himself checking Esterhazy, who maintains his name is Smith, out of the institute he's been sent to and bringing him into his home. After a series of tumultuous events Manne finds himself living as Smith - or maybe he was Smith all along?
Clues and echoes reverberate as we dive into this möbius strip of a book. It's a credit to Wilcken that he manages to maintain the conceit throughout the book. It's an incredulous plot that should strain believability but on the page it turns into an engrossing puzzle that leaves the heavy lifting to the reader. Pay attention.
Deming Guo is 11 years old when his mother leaves him. It's not the first time. Making the trip to the United States Deming's mother Polly finds she's too late to have an abortion. Still an infant, Polly briefly leaves Deming in a stiff plastic bag on the pavement under a bench in New York but returns to him. Deming gets sent to China to live with his grandfather for a time before returning to live with his mother, her boyfriend Leon, Leon's sister and her son Michael.
At 11 Deming's mother disappears without a trace. Deming soon finds himself in upstate New York with Peter and Kay, two well meaning liberal arts professors. Deming Guo becomes Daniel Wilkinson - perennial f**k up. Directionless, Daniel has racked up a sizeable gambling debt, dropped out of college and can't find a path that fits him.
Both characters seem less than sympathetic but Lisa Ko builds them out so that while you may not agree with their choices, you can certainly empathize. It's a tough look at the immigrant experience, struggling to fit in while trying to integrate between warring cultures and identities, finding your place in an indifferent world and living with the choices you've made to live within it.
What Emil Ferris manages to do with a handful of colored pens is nothing short of incredible. Laid out on spiral bound notepaper it's a sprawling novel that does away with the traditional comic conventions of contained boxes and defined gutters. Words crawl up the sides of pages, images bleed into each other and carry across the persistent wire-bound fold. The way Ferris renders classic paintings in ink is jaw-dropping and she transitions to pulpy, classic monster comic covers just as easily. Her people are rendered with Robert Crumb-like exaggeration and then with portraiture precision especially when it comes to Anka.
Anka lives upstairs from Karen our 10 year old narrator who lives with her womanizing brother Deeze and her mother who is in the late stages of cancer. It's 1960s Chicago but the world this 10 year old builds from the perspective of a half werewolf includes dealing with bullies at school, and changing friends, the Holocaust, child prostitution in Nazi-occupied Germany, race relations, a possible murder investigation, classic art scholarship and ruminations on love and the budding awareness of her own sexuality.
It careens all over the place and at it's heart is this 10-year old obsessed with monsters, looking for the bite that will keep her and her family together forever. There is that seeking curiosity that takes in the world around her and puts it on the page in all it's messy confusion. Where looking for a werewolf is just as important as understanding the mysterious woman upstairs and St. George and the Dragon is just as pivotal as Ghastly Issue 03.
At 32 Helen Moran is Korean born, American adoptee barely living in New York. She's inexplicably a counsellor for troubled youth where she may or may not be under investigation.
She gets a call that her non-biological, but also Korean, adopted brother has committed suicide. It's not her adoptive parents that make the call, and even when she arrives at her childhood home in Milwaukee her parents seem almost surprised by her arrival and are on edge the entire time. She hasn't talked to them in 5 years and it seems everyone would have been completely fine if that had gone on for another 5.
Meanwhile Helen is sleuthing around her old home town to try and decipher why her brother killed himself with all the nuance of a 12 year old storybook sleuth. It's a weird and disjointed read. People float in and out of Helen's narrative. Later in the book we find Helen's brother wondering whether she's bipolar or schizophrenic. We're seeing the world through her eyes and it's off kilter and meandering filled with jarring affectations and sneaky contradictions. The writing proved elusive to me and I just never made a connection.
It's the semi-autobiographical story that starts with Craig from his childhood, sharing a bed with his brother huddled against the cold of Wisconsin winters. It's a bed that is both a battleground and a life raft.
It mirrors his relationship growing up in the Christian faith, the child of devout parents. Christianity is a refuge against the small-town bullies but becomes something he has to wrestle with in the throes of young love when he meets Raina.
It's such a particular Western story. While nowhere nearly as devout I recognize both the strength and the torment growing up in the faith can have. I know that Jesus painting, I recognize the narrow confines of the church and it's almost desperate proselytization. How the raptures of faith can come up hard against the awareness of first love and how both can be utterly transporting and wildly confusing.
Thompson's brush work is perfect and clear and somehow manages to evoke the nervous awe of first love, the creative impulse, Christian guilt and the raw imagination of youth.
I loved this collection of short stories. I forget what podcast I was listening to that proclaimed that it's the book everyone who read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy should be reading instead. Author Chavisa Woods managed to escape the gravitational weight of her hillbilly backwoods origins but still writes from a place of recognition and compassion. It's the rural poor, bible belt, military heartland that voted overwhelmingly in favour of Trump. Chavisa on the other hand is a New York based, lesbian performance artist and poet author.
The writing is sharp and with some fantastical elements but for the most part hews close to her experience growing up in rural Illinois. Get out of your East coast liberal, MFA literary bubble, reading about rich white people problems and dive right into this exploration of meth labs, ufos, truck stop prostitutes, fundamentalist Christian sects, Mensa party acid trips and a living replica of the Gaza strip on someone's head.
Book one of the Dublin Murder Squad and I can see why it elicits such devotion from fans. French certainly delivers a gritty crime novel that kicks off when 12 year old Katy Devlin is found dead at an archeological dig, displayed on an ancient sacrificial altar. But it's intertwined with the investigating detective's history there. 20 years ago Adam Ryan was discovered nearly catatonic backed up against a tree his nails digging into the bark, his shoes filled with blood and absolutely no memory of what transpired those few hours before that led to the disappearance of his two closest childhood friends. It's been a closely guarded secret and now as Detective Rob Ryan he can't help but wonder if the two cases spanning decades might not be related or at least shake some memory of his past loose.
Police procedures, red herrings, mythic woods, partner tension, physiological toll - it's all there and written far better than any genre fiction needs to be. French ratchets up the tension and you're never certain where the story is going to take you next.
Darren Matthews is a Texas Ranger. He's also on suspension, drinking a little too heavily and clearly on the outs with his wife. And he's black.
Pulled into the tiny town of Lark to look into a double homicide where nothing is as it's seems. It's a local white girl and an affluent, out of town black man. Attica Locke is here to explore the tensions between rural and urban blacks, race in the South, justice and how it splits alongs color lines and the simmering reality of the Aryan Brotherhood.
I'm usually on board for this kind of exploration but I felt Bluebird, Bluebird stumbled within the confines of it's purported genre. It didn't entirely work as a detective story or a thriller and instead read like the first arc of a longer serial.
Having killed a handful of company employees on his previous job the self-described Murderbot quietly hacks it's own governor module and essentially becomes a petulant, self-conscious emo teenager that would rather watch soap operas than deal with humans. One armed with military grade weapons and defensive systems mind you.
Now on a planetary mission where things aren't adding up, the crew including Murderbot find themselves in mortal danger. Murderbot having gifted him/herself with free will is no longer restricted to following orders but still works to keep his/her human crew safe. The book doesn't overstay its welcome and manages to pack a tight little story in under 200 pages. And it looks like its building a world that will continue on with a new book slated for this year. A quick sci-fi hit.
It's an exploration of big pharma, corporate rule, love, ownership of people, robots and even ideas.
Jack Chen is a pharmaceutical pirate that reverse engineers drugs to make them available to people in need. She does this by selling hacked in demand pills to fund her more altruistic efforts. Imagine selling off market Viagra to fund malaria relief efforts.
Now imagine Pfizer sending out armed goons with a license to kill to “protect” their intellectual property. In this case it's a military grade robot and his/her human handler that burn a bloody swath across the globe looking for Jack.
The pill in question is Zacuity. It's marketed as a productivity enhancer but in some cases leads to death as work becomes as addictive as heroin compelling users to do nothing else at the expense of food, sleep and drink. There's a horrifyingly funny throwaway when a thinly veiled version of a Tim Hortons worker (this is set in Canada after all) is so compelled to make donut holes that he begins feeding it other things including a stray cat, other customers and his own leg as he screams “We're just making donuts!... Timmo's bots make the best donuts!”
Despite all the future world-building going on here it moves at a brisk, race against the clock pace.
It's a book filled with marriage advice - which clearly dooms this book to a purgatory of well-intentioned bromides and Pinterest worthy quotes suitable for placement over a picture of a sun dappled tropical beach. But Ada Calhoun is far smarter and way more real-talk than that.
Her advice on not getting divorced? Don't get divorced. The idea you'd take a bullet for your husband or wife - that bullet is infidelity. No easy advice here - and she backs it up with candid vulnerability and a courageous willingness to share her own experiences.
It's an antidote to the heartfelt admissions couples make at weddings. Ludicrous bargains, impossible standards and smaltzy analogies. When she shares some hard won advice that the first 20 years are the hardest, she's not kidding. She's smart, funny and willing to throw open the doors of her marriage and let us snoop around inside without having tidied everything up first. Hers is messy, chaotic, broken in places, hopelessly mundane in others but still home.
The book opens with Crazy Craig Hollington, the leader of Aryan Steel, calling out a hit on a man, his wife and their child - all from his Supermax cell at Pelican Bay State Prison. The language is all prison patois and rumbles along with a syncopated menace. This is going to be fun.
The dead man walking is Nate McClusky, out after a five year prison term but marked for death when he kills Craig's brother in prison. He doesn't get to his wife in time but manages to grab his 11 year old daughter Polly. They're on the run but they're not laying low and instead are hitting Aryan Steel hard in an attempt to get their hit lifted.
The whole book feels like the non-mutant version of Logan. Hugh Jackman as Nate McClusky, Dafne Keen as Polly, the girl with the gunfighter eyes and the stuffed teddy bear she expertly pantomimes. And it works so well.
Crooked cops, drug mules, prison hits, the story is lean and ripped, moves fast and hits hard. How this doesn't get made into a movie I don't even know.
Let me just say right off the top that The Dry is just about the perfect thriller mystery. The writing is straightforward but the strength of the story comes with how well it manages to work with all the genre conventions. You have intimations of an unreliable narrator with a mysterious past that haunts him still, a crime scene with some open ended questions and a barren and hostile landscape that drives much of the plot. You really don't really need to read much more than that to enjoy this.
Federal agent Aaron Falk is called back to his rural hometown of Kiewarra for the funeral of his childhood friend Luke Hadler. Luke has killed his wife and young son and then, shortly thereafter, himself. Kiewarra is a hardscrabble little town in the grip of a multi-year drought. Businesses are closing, people are struggling and the unrelenting heat has everyone ready to erupt. It's the last place Aaron wants to stay having been drummed out of town 20 years ago after the mysterious death of Ellie Deacon. But Luke Hadler's dad insists he stay on and and resolve whether his son is a murderer or not. He sinks the hook when he tells Aaron that he knows he lied about where he was when Ellie died years ago.
There are red herrings, plot twists, and enough clues that you get the thrill of figuring out mysteries moments before it's revealed on the page. Kiewarra could be anywhere, an inward looking, insulated small town in the grip of near poverty. An Appalachian speck where the mill has closed down years ago, a Newfoundland community on it's last generation of fishers. It's the kind of place where desperation and desperate measures bubble just under the surface. It's not literary fiction by any means but I have to give it a 5 for sheer enjoyment at just the right time.
It's a lovely New York tale that starts back in 1968 when we're introduced to Lillian Kagwa and Brian West. They would marry and eventually have a boy named Apollo. By Apollo's fourth birthday Brian West had disappeared. It's a familiar story simply told with only the slightest hint of magic.
Apollo grows up, meets his wife and they have a son they name Brian. He's your typical father in this connected age, uploading dozens of photos of his boy to Facebook, looking for the flurry of likes. A doting father trying to make it work.
And then we wake up in an entirely different world that's violent and seething just under the surface. This in an old world fairy tale where horrifying things happen and happily ever after has no place in the world. LaValle slips effortlessly between the world we know and then past the glamour that hides the world we don't see. And like Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country it's a fairy tale that's made all the more unique when instead of Aryan boys and girls traipsing through Germanic pastoral landscapes it is centred around a black man in modern day New York contending with ancient forces while being hyper conscious of what the stakes are as a black man circling a tony suburban block in the middle of the night.
Being a parent is a harrowing, tooth and nail struggle against the forces of your own personal history, the baggage that the world is intent on foisting on you and the realization that your partner may not exactly agree on how best to navigate this unfamiliar territory. And everyday it only grows in scope and potential terror. Good luck.
I had to pick this one up as soon as I finished Joe Ide's debut IQ where we're first introduced to Isiah Quintabe. Righteous picks up shortly after IQ closes and still has that rollicking East LA voice.
This time Isiah finds himself dealing with a Rwandan gangster, Chinese Triads, Mexican gangs, and his brother's ex-fiance Sarita. She's worried about her Vegas DJ sister and her bro-tastic, loser boyfriend as they find themselves over their heads in gambling debt. Ide once again juggles several stories at once as Isiah begins to question whether his beloved brother was exactly what he appeared to be. Dodson also returns as Isiah's don't-call-him-a-sidekick, partner - now expecting his first child and hustling to make an honest buck.
With Righteous we see Isiah isn't just a fantastic inductive detective but a first rate problem solver. Still a fun read but it does suffer a bit of the sophomore slump as we work to build Isiah's character as he makes the transition from stumbling innocent to a more mature adult. His relationship with Sarita is all old school John Hughes instead of John Singleton and rings a little too predictably. And while I have to give the Japanese American author who grew up in South Central a pass I still cringe a bit at the probably realistically named Chink Mob and their garbled Engrish that has them saying things like “You no my fren, you go way now or we killing you for sure!”
Still I like the world Ide has created and I'm curious to see where Quintabe and Dodson head next.
I needed this fun detective romp and had such a blast reading it I followed it up immediately with Joe Ide's sequel Righteous. This is Devil in a Blue Dress meets the Hound of the Baskervilles as written by Kendrick Lamar. Right away we meet Isaiah Quintabe or IQ as he's known. He's in the process of thwarting a pedophile child abductor with the help of a modified grenade launcher. IQ is the African-American resident problem solver of East Long Beach Los Angeles. He's Sherlock Holmes, Encyclopedia Brown.
IQ tests at near genius levels and can look forward to an assured trajectory riding an academic scholarship to his choice of Ivy League institution. But that all changes when the older brother he idolizes is killed in front of his eyes by a hit and run.
From there we follow two timelines. There's IQ and his tentative partner Dodson as they try to solve the mystery of who exactly is trying to kill the wildly successful rapper Calvin Wright aka Black the Knife - which is at times a hilarious send up of peak fame in the rap game. Ide has a keen ear for the language drawing from his experience growing up in South Central LA .
We also flip back to the immediate aftermath of IQ's brother's death as Isiah tries to find his place in this new world and it works as a suitable superhero original story set in the hood.
Four women work the night shift at a boxed lunch factory. Slogging through the numbing, repetitive work they return home to contend with ungrateful children, absent husbands, demanding mother-in-laws, mounting debt and daily indignities that chip away at their happiness. When Yayoi finds her husband has completely blown their life savings gambling, drinking and chasing a club girl, she snaps and kills him.
With no where else to turn she enlists her no-nonsense co-worker Masako to help her dispose of the body. It's too much for the two of them and armed with the promise of money Masako also enlists her fellow co-workers Kuniko and Yoshie.
It doesn't take long things to unravel when pieces of the murdered husband are discovered, carelessly disposed of at a nearby park. There's the investigating officers, the loan shark hustling for the next buck and the club owner framed for Yayoi's husband's death that all converge as the story relentlessly ratchets up the tension till it builds to an over the top, graphic, bloody climax.
How could I not pick this up. Michael Shou-Yung Shum is a poker dealer and sometime rave DJ in between getting a doctorate in Psychology and another in English - as you do. What sealed the deal was reading an excerpt from the book over at the Literary Hub. There's a precise sense of growing tension and this works well as a standalone short story that feels like the Coen Brothers meets Chuck Palaniuk. It's seriously good.
In Queen of Spades we've got a poker dealer at a worn around the edges casino outside of Seattle. A pit boss with a terminal condition and an enigmatic older women known as the Countess who seems to have mastered High Stakes Faro.
Shum brings his experience of working the felt to the pages and I loved it. I can see the casino in my head. Garish carpet with extravagant patterns worn at the edges, the chirping of chips and the riffling of cards. But it's not the high gloss bling of the Vegas strip, it's more Fear and Loathing by way of Fargo. Here we have bookie enforcers opening up a gym/salon, mystic healers, gambling addicts and dealers meditating over the differing weight of ink on playing cards.
It nudges up against the mythos of long odds, lady luck and vagaries of chance. It's something that's always left me suspicious as I tend to a more pragmatic, mathematical approach when it comes to gambling. As a result I find myself distrusting the narrative, unwilling to just let it ride.
And here we have the epic nod to Bill Watterson with the single issue called Sparrow. Rodriguez is pitch perfect in his drawing and Joe Hill even gets in on the action having Bode adopt more of the effusive language typical of Calvin. I love that the comic medium allows for this leeway and tangential diversion. Even better is that this seemingly random diversion is still brought back around in the final volume. Hill and Rodriguez are hitting their stride and showing a high degree of confidence in what they're doing here. There's a lot of moving pieces across the board in preparation for the climax and the volume ends with a violent bang. One hell of a cliff-hanger.
Listen, reviewing this incredibly fantastic run as separate volumes is a dumpster fire. What good exactly is giving volume three 5 stars when it's part of a six volume series? I will say off the top that this is one of my all time favorite long running graphic novel series. Over the span of 35 issues Hill and Rodriguez tell a gripping horror story filled to the brim with a huge host of characters that nonetheless feel fleshed out and wonderfully realized. Rodriguez' artwork never flags, never feels like midway through he's just phoning panels in to meet an issue deadline. The artwork is intricate, interesting and ambitious. Hill avoids over dialoging and other traps traditional authors might fall into making the transition to comics. The two together have crafted a brilliant piece of work that understands the medium it's in.
Which is to say I'm not sure how well this is going to make the transition to TV. I mean in this the first volume we see Rendell Locke violently murdered by two students. The rest of the family barely escape death, the mother is raped and the eldest kills one of the perpetrators. And yet in the aftermath after the family has moved across the country to the family's Keyhouse Estate the youngest Bode seems remarkably well adjusted and still in possession of a wide-eyed innocence and curiosity. The eldest are still quick to trust new friends and are no more mopey than any typical highschool teen. In comics that gets a pass for the sake of the medium and it's need to push the story forward. On TV - that's going to feel weird and may require some handwringing and inserted family drama which slows down the pacing. It's not going to be an easy transition. Speaking of transitions... I guess I'll continue reviewing these across the volumes. Not all are 5 stars, I figure the entire run averages a 4.25 stars overall.
Can there even be spoilers at this rate? I mean I'm assuming you haven't picked up volume 3 without reading the first 2 already. Hill continues to flesh out his characters and imbue them with a depth not normally found in easy horror. Sam Lesser in death regains some agency and we better understand how tortured he is. He's more than just a cardboard cut-out, stock evil character. Kinsey, Kavanaugh, Jamal and Jackie's segment is handled beautifully, sets up the caves, and lends depth to the friendship. Keys are lost and found and finally we see some cracks in the family dynamic.
We finish up Volume 4 with the Locke family thinking they've rid themselves of the evil Lucas Caravaggio but we know the demon spirit is inhabiting Bode! And now he's got the Omega key. It's all kinds of bad so Hill gives us a chance to catch our breath. It's a deep dive into the history of the Keyhouse Estate and the “Omega” door. And we manage to get a bit more of Rendell Locke as a high schooler and the drama crew.
Our cast of characters begins to grow - little do I know how much I will grow to care about these people over the course of the run. The introduction of the head key is a brilliant bit of magic illustrated perfectly by Rodriguez. I love tying the magical system to a physical object which means the magic can be lost, found and stolen. We're setting up the board at a breakneck pace but it never flags even though I'd say the kids are all handling everything far better than might normally be expected.
So when Tyler is recounting letting his sister Kinsey get in the car with the clearly smashed Shep, the paramedics attending to the badly injured Kinsey have got to be Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez themselves. Later we get the epic, tongue-in-cheek nod to Stephen King's Carrie. The series has been a home run and Hill and Rodriguez are rounding the bases and waving to the fans. It's coming full circle as we built to a shattering climax. We once again return to the caves while Rufus makes his way to Keyhouse, his journey mirroring Sam Lesser's in Volume one. A satisfying end to a new favorite graphic novel series.
Matt Ruff's initial vision for the book encapsulates it perfectly. He imagined it as TV series pitch ala X-Files where characters explore the unnatural, giving Ruff the opportunity to examine horror, sci-fi and fantasy tropes and how they change when you put a black character at the centre instead.
Atticus Turner and his friends and family find themselves embroiled in a power struggle amongst the Order of the Ancient Dawn. Each chapter follows a distinct character, set within familiar genre standbys like the ancient cult, alien horror, haunted house, evil doll, Jekyll and Hyde and others. The stories are linked and build to an overarching climax but it can be jarring going from chapter to chapter. The paranormal horror also pales in comparison to the realities of being black in Jim Crow America circa 1954.
It's no mean feat being a white author telling the stories of black characters while invoking a racist white writer to inform the themes of the story that explores the black experience against the backdrop of a racially charged America. There is so much that could have gone horribly wrong so it's tellingly significant that my biggest beef is that it didn't offer up enough traditional horror scares.