Carlos

Funny timing to finish this just as the US is freaking out over Chinese balloons.

I'd previously read The Hunger and Red Widow, but this is my favorite Katsu novel so far. As with Hunger, there's a fantastical conceit connected to a real historical tragedy, but I think this has a more powerful resonance between the fictional and historical threads. I'd also compare it favorably with Red Widow in its handling of the themes of patriotism and the moral challenges of the national security apparatus.

I've seen this compared to S.A. Cosby's Razorblade Tears and while there are may overlaps in terms of genre and theme, it wasn't nearly as good. The protagonist is mostly passive. The pacing is often slow. The incorporation of horror elements - drawn from the milieu of the Mexican drug world - was interesting, but otherwise this was okay but not particularly special.

Genuinely weird and unsettling in ways I hadn't expected. Shades of Usher and Hill House but very much its own unique twisted jewel.

This very much falls into the interesting idea/disappointing execution bucket.

In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person's dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

I think herein lies the contradiction at the heart of the novel. Experimental Film is not a film but a book. Consequently, the experience is less like dreaming another person's dream and more like listening to another person explain their dream to you, an experience which tends to be less haunting than it is tedious.

There's definitely an interesting idea here, something like an analog version of The Ring with an Old World god at its center.

The real weakness for me was the narrative style, which is clogged with references.

So, a moment of confrontation is filtered through a reference to a Larry Cohen interview, complete with a handful of notable films he created. A tense moment of silence is compared to a John Cage composition. Near the climax, the protagonist describes their predicament as “if Quentin Tarantino-directed a supernatural giallo or a Guillermo del Toro sitcom with a CanCon twist.”

Sure, it's clever, but it falls into that all-too-common pitfall of postmodern horror: a feeling of alienation from the text, from the characters, from the menacing forces driving the story. By the end, I was skimming and hoping for a really brutal ending because I wanted something to shock me into caring.

Overall enjoyable tale of would-be documentary filmmakers working in an isolated Swedish ghost town haunted by the mysterious disappearance of almost all of its residents. There's a lot to like in the story, from its creepy setting to the escalation of unease as the filmmakers begin to see signs they may not be alone.

This main plot is interspersed with scenes from the town just prior to the mysterious disappearance. As the mill fails and the town starts to die, a charismatic preacher arrives and starts to bring the town under his sway.

The ending was a bit of a disappointment, being both of a bit too much and not quite enough. The aura of ambiguous supernaturalism resolves into a series of revelations that are non-magical and yet borderline ridiculous.

Mostly a fun read, though the first section dragged a little. The unique setting (Old West by way of Bradbury's and Dick's Martian tales) takes a little getting used to, but once the story got going, it turned into an exciting, often creepy adventure.

DNF'ed at 28%.

I can appreciate the themes and elements (intergenerational trauma among women, particularly Latinas, and how it manifests in figures of darkness like La Llorona), but the execution just doesn't work for me. The prose is flat and repetitive, the characters are overdetermined, and there's no real sense of mystery or suspense. For me, it takes more than a few moments of gore to qualify as a horror novel.

I saw a tweet today which stated:

honestly PINK FLAMINGOS is such a potent depiction of the difference between transgression and edgelordiness

Francisco Goldman's story of his wife Aura and her tragic death. Very sad, sometimes difficult to read.

The aristocracy of vampires has gathered at the ancient fortress of Castle Banat in the Carpathian Mountains to argue politics and, for some, to partake of the Golden, a woman who has been bred to have blood of a particularly delectable and intoxicating quality. However, when the Golden is discovered murdered one evening, it falls on newly converted vampire Beheim, who was previously a police inspector, to seek out the culprit. He soon learns that this investigation will be like none he conducted as a mortal and that failure could spell his doom.

The first word that comes to mind when thinking about this book is “operatic.” The setting of Castle Banat, which is vast and mysterious enough to rival Gormenghast, holds many mysteries, and the intrigues between the vampires are often quite complex. Beheim is an interesting protagonist, largely sympathetic, though flawed; we see these flaws amplified as part of his new existence, and there are times it is easy to wonder if he will cross over from sympathetic to deranged. Shepard's style is up to the task of describing such an grandiose and fascinating story.

Ligotti's first story in his first collection is “The Frolic,” features a serial killer who seems to have supernatural abilities. Yet, in contrast to most psychopaths, real-world and fictional, he has no sense of grandiosity but an awareness of his own insignificance. Conspiracy reminds me of that story, in that Ligotti sets out to slay every illusion that one might hold about life, about mankind, about the universe, yet seems to realize the futility of this mission. A fascinating work of disillusionment.

When selecting books from LibraryThing's Early Reviewer's program, I usually try to avoid later books in a series, since this will mean hunting down and reading other books just so I can give the ARC a fair shake. I did not take such care with this novel, which is in fact the second in a series, following Jane Bites Back. The premise of the series is that Jane Eyre was converted to vampirism by an undead Lord Byron. She is living–at least as much as a vampire can–in a small town and upstate New York (where Byron also resides), managing a book store and trying to establish a literary career under her current alias of Jane Fairfax. Also, she seems to have picked up vampire Charlotte Brönte as a rival along the way. In this book, Jane is struggling with writing her second book while also dealing with a convention of romance readers and the upcoming visit of her boyfriend's mother.

Though I'm neither a fan of Austen-inspired novels or supernatural romance, I thought the book sounded like it might be kooky good fun. It's possible the book would have been more enjoyable had I started with Bites Back, but considering the books weaknesses, I rather doubt that. And the weaknesses here start with the basic premise: vampire Jane Austen. It sounds like a winning, if campy, concept, but the delivery leaves much to be desired. To start with, the novel's concept of vampirism is pretty weak; they are not affected by sunlight, do not look or feel different, can eat food and their hunger for blood is largely just an inconvenience. Without much of a sense of moral peril, the whole concept of vampirism seems largely defanged and bloodless. (Sorry.)

The other problem is Jane herself. I haven't read enough about Ms. Austen to have a firm grasp on her as a person, but what I get from her novels is that she was a keen observer of the social realm around her and well-attuned to its foibles and absurdities, which she was able to express with a dry, sophisticated wit. Now imagine such a character living for two hundred years. Well, stop imagining because that's not the Jane in this novel, who sometimes comes off as a bit of a blank. She is a likable chick lit heroine with a wit adequate for that role, but she falls short of being Jane Eyre. It's a little grating how inconsistently she's written. Jane allegedly hung out with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker in the '20s and then was in one of the original theatrical productions of The Rocky Horror Show in the '70s, yet she's utterly clueless about baseball. She mentions how Emma was adapted into Clueless, yet she's shocked that the film adaptation of her first Jane Fairfax novel involves changing the era. She doesn't come off as overwhelmed by modern life as just incurious about the world around her, which just seemed sort of pathetic. The book does attempt some social satire, with its second-hand observations about Jewish mothers and Hollywood vanity, but the author is no Jane Austen.

I will admit, the novel was often amusing, and if I preferred my vampires and Regency authors as bland and inoffensive as possible, I might have enjoyed it more. Bottom line, while the book has some merit as “fast-food fiction,” it's not really my cup of tea.

Though his tales are packed with philosophical ruminations, Borges is first of all an inveterate story teller, whether it's a simple tale of revenge or the history of the hidden face of God. His stories often feature a sense of uncertainty which lends them a certain immediacy, as if they were ancient legends, now distorted by time, or police reports, with caveats where the teller bumps up against the limits of knowledge–but the best of these combine a sense of both, linking the mythic to the procedural, the infinite to the particular.

The Painted Darkness is my first encounter with the work of Brian James Freeman, who if the blurbs on the outside and the glowing introduction by Brian Keene are any indication, may be something of a rising star in the horror field.

The book centers on its protagonist, Henry, in two different times. In the present day, Henry is struggling with a creative block which is interfering with his painting, which is his trade. As he attempts to break through it, he begins to remember the day as a boy when he saw something terrible, an experience he has blocked out. As he is struggling with these memories, Henry has to deal with the old heater in his renovated house. The story flips back and forth between, the present day, where Henry's travails with the heater take a dark twist, and the day in his childhood that he has repressed for so long.

Though clearly meant to be a horror story, I have to admit most of the real spookiness is concentrated in the middle section of the book, where Henry (much like the reader) is at his most disoriented. Once the action reaches its climax, the supernatural nature of the events became too fantastic for me to find scary. I'm no stranger to supernatural elements, especially in horror fiction, but Henry never felt fleshed out enough for me to let the danger to him get too far under my skin. The tale does retain a certain dark fairy-tale quality, and I would still recommend it.

(Note: I received The Painted Darkness through Library Thing's Early Reviewer's program.)

Mostly left me underwhelmed. I didn't hate these guys, despite the obvious jackassery. I didn't really find them that funny, either. This book felt more historically important than compelling. I preferred Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.

In many ways, this is a very enjoyable book. John Irving's style is pleasantly unadorned. His characters are fairly interesting, and they have some pretty entertaining adventures. But overall, I felt this was a flawed though enjoyable work.

Prayer is the story of two boys growing up in New Hampshire, the narrator and his friend, Owen Meany. The narrator has a very sweet and beautiful mother but he doesn't know who his father is. Owen Meany is small and has a funny voice, but he's very smart and serious and knows he's destined to serve God in some meaningful way. The story is actually told in flashback by the narrator, who has grown up to be an English teacher in Canada.

And if this were a novel about two boys growing up in New England, it would have been pretty enjoyable. But this is a novel about FAITH and GOD and the MORAL EXHAUSTION of AMERICA and its FOREIGN POLICY. Which is really too much baggage for the narrative to carry. The foreign policy angle is in some ways the weakest. It comes from two equally dull angles: much action takes place during the troop buildup in Vietnam, and the adult narrator comments on the Iran-Contra affair. The Vietnam material really doesn't offer anything new. Vietnam was a misbegotten foreign policy adventure, and the counterculture response to it was largely overblown, self-serving, and ineffectual. It's a perfectly reasonable position, and perfectly dull. Dull would be acceptable in an essay about Vietnam, not in a novel. The commentary on Iran-Contra is even deadlier to the novel, as it contributes little to the story. I generally agree with the narrator on Reagan and Iran-Contra; that doesn't make me interested in hearing him opine.

The spiritual elements are more integral to the novel and overall handled in a better manner. The main problem is that the issue of faith in the novel revolves around a miracle, one which we do not learn about until the very end. This miracle, which takes a tragic form, gives meaning to Owen Meany's life and leads the narrator to become religious. The miracle is heavily foreshadowed: heavily and somewhat obviously. I had a pretty good idea of what the miracle would be over 100 pages before it comes about, which made those pages particularly dull and robbed it of whatever impact it may have intended to have. The effect was less of a sense of mysterious forces at work and more of an author going through plot machinations to achieve an effect.

So, I overall enjoyed the story, especially the first half or so before the author really tries to bear down with those heavy themes that his novel is not really set up to handle.

Though the miseribalism gets a little heavy-handed at times, Mockingjay makes for a satisfying conclusion to the series.

Ernesto Sabato's El Túnel is the first person account of an artist's murder of the one person who understood him best. At an exhibition, Juan Pablo Castel notices a woman captivated by the window that takes up a small section of one of his finished paintings. She is the only person who appears to have realized the importance of the window, which leads to him becoming to become slowly and utterly fixated on her.

He seeks her out in a somewhat roundabout matter, finally running into her seemingly by accident. He learns that she has been thinking about his painting all the time since that showing. They become romantically involved, but Castel feels she is not being completely honest with him. He begins to suspect she has other lovers, perhaps even that he's just a plaything to her. He becomes increasingly obsessed with possessing her until his actions cross over into derangement.

This is a novel about obsession and man's futile struggle for meaning, and it is no surprise that Camus found it important enough to have translated into French. I must admit I was not entirely captivated by the story. Though I'm fond of eccentrics in literature (especially the obsessive kind), I often found Castel's obsessiveness more irritating than contagious. I also felt the metaphor of the tunnel as reflecting the essential loneliness of human existence was a bit on the literal side.

So, overall an interesting look at one man's obsession and how it reflects modern man's fruitless search for connection, but not entirely satisfying.

A satisfying conclusion to Mieville's Bas-Lag trilogy, Iron Council is both more political and more literary than its predecessors.

I have to admit that I cheated a bit by skipping the second essay on tennis. I'd say I tried, but that's not exactly true. I read about three pages and then realized that life is too short to spend it reading essays on a sport that I neither play nor watch. Overall, amusing, though not really as funny or as insightful as I'd hoped.

Two of the better pieces involve DFW commenting on an event where he clearly does not belong (one is the IL State Fair, the other a seven-day stint on a cruise ship), which were amusing in a this-is-a-quintessential-Harper's article sort of way. Perhaps there's something infectious about DFW's sort of academic navel-gazing which made me sort of self-conscious about my own narrow life/world views, and then a sort of mental claustrophobia sets in, which kind of limits some of the potential enjoyment.

There was a David Lynch piece, which I thought was quite good. (Although it did reveal that DFW was, at the time of its writing, a little clueless about Robert Rodriguez, which is a little odd since it's not like Rodriguez was that complex a director to start with.) A couple of other pieces, one about authorial intent and whether authors are really dead (in a lit crit sense) and one about literary responses to television, were just kind of blah. The first was a review of a book I was not familiar with and so didn't really stand well on its own. The second just felt dated, as if it documented an inconsequential cultural conflict that had long been superseded.

I guess, overall, I felt like there was a lot of talent and intelligence on display in these essays, but aside for a few moments, they just left me feeling cold–sort of, why should I care?

Would it be strange to wish that this book had been written by [a:Irene Nemirovsky 5772020 Irene Nemirovsky http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]? I'm not saying that Nemirovsky should have written of life under the Soviets or that I wish this book had her more subtle touch. I wouldn't change a word of it, but swapping Nemirovsky's name for [a:Ayn Rand 432 Ayn Rand http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1168729178p2/432.jpg]'s would make this a better book. (Also, lose any introduction or afterword.)I realize this sounds like a strange notion, but when you pick up a Nemirovsky book, you know that whatever it's flaws, the main goal is to tell a story about flawed human beings coping with the vicissitudes of life. “We the Living” begins in 1922 with the return of the Argounova family to Petrograd after the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. The action principally follows Kira, the oldest daughter, who is eighteen at the beginning of the story, but as the novel proceeds it expands to include members of Kira's extended family, as well as her friends. So we get a view of the horrors of Soviet Russia from several views, including that of young party members. One of these, a man named Andrei, who is a member of the secret police and a hero of the revolution, falls madly in love with Kira. However, she herself has already fallen in love with Leo, the son of an aristocrat.Rand is a powerful witness to the criminality of the Soviets: their corruption, their arbitrary use of power, their lack of principles. The powers-that-be talk about liberating the people, but instead they starve them, brutalize them and force them to volunteer hours to hold on to menial jobs, while corrupt party officials game the system for their own good and flaunt their ill-gotten riches. Though the dialog is sometimes clunky, Rand's writing is very evocative, conveying the destitution of the regime, the way it crushes some and corrupts others. Perhaps most heartbreaking is the plight of men such as Andrei and Stepan Timoshenko, men who fought against the injustice of the Czars only to be betrayed by the new regime.If Nemirovsky's name were on the title page, this would be a tale of the way that a brutal system damages people, and in Kira, we would see the odd girl whose reaction to the Soviets is flawed and off-kilter because she is just a human being reacting to a terrible situation. In truth Kira, like Gutierrez' Juan Moreira, is a character whose thoughts and actions I did not always agree with, yet whose willingness to stick to her ideals, even if it means death, makes her admirable.Yet, because this is a Rand novel, Kira is not just a flawed human being, but Rand's stand-in. Her off-kilter philosophy is meant to be the lesson of the book, and this is where the book's major flaw lies. “We the Living” presents us something peculiar, a novel in which the narrator is trustworthy but the author is not. Rand is a great witness of the life under the Soviets, but her interpretation of things (as reflected by Kira) leaves a lot to be desired.For Kira/Rand's view is not that the Soviets are an elite using power only to serve themselves while millions toil for little, but is that they scorn men like Leo, whose lives are more meaningful than those of ordinary men. This is perplexing, since it's never clear what makes Leo so great, except that he's handsome, haughty and selfish.If this were a “Brave New World”-style dystopia, where the contentment of the many bought at the cost of the creative or the different, this would be a reasonable objection. However, it's so clear that talk of the proletariat is just window dressing for a self-serving regime, that Kira's inability to see this makes her seem sort of clueless.Even worse, when Andrei once asks her, “Don't you know that we can't sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?” her response is not that this is precisely what the Soviets are doing are that you cannot bring about justice through injustice, but the following rant:What are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains?So, this should be a brilliant and powerful novel, did it not stop so often to remind me that it was in service to Rand's agenda, her idea of the proper places of the aristocracy and the rabble, the warped views of her stand-in.Rand meant this book as being not just about Russia or Communism, but about totalitarianism. However, the book falls short compared to Orwell's 1984, which sees to the true dark heart of dictatorship in which power is not a means but an end.

I have this notion that the similarities between Ayn Rand and H.P. Lovecraft merit a closer look, and so I was kind of excited, when I was about two chapters in, to discover that Anthem was first published in 1937, the last year that the Old Gent dwelt within the confines of Euclidean space. Because, and I cannot stress this enough, this novella starts off very much in the Poe/Lovecraft mode of the first-person Gothic tale, with our narrator confessing to his terrible crimes in writing. He's even writing by the light of a stolen candle, and it's hard to get more Gothic than that. And then we learn–more shades of Lovecraft–that the confession is connected to the protagonist's discovery of a subterranean space belonging to a lost civilization about which dark things are muttered.

The setting also has something of the feel of Lovecraft's Dreamlands, since the setting is a city of no later than medieval technology run according to traditions interpreted by a council of elders. (Though no mention is made regarding prohibitions on feline homicide.) So, here we have all the makings of a strong Gothic tale: the society with its arbitrary laws and customs, the daring (if off-kilter) protagonist, the discovery of the lost civilization, the quest for forbidden knowledge. I wish I could say that the story lives up to that early promise, but it doesn't, and since most people won't read this for its Gothic qualities, I'll try not to dwell too much on that.

The first chapter is actually solid enough. There are a few flaws in the world building, but nothing to really ruin the plausibility. In the second chapter, when the main character falls in love with a beautiful lady, we learn that men and women are not allowed to have sexual thoughts except for once a year when they have sex in order to reproduce. This society doesn't have powerful libido-suppressants or brainwave modulators or anything like that at it's disposal. It basically tries to suppress the human sexual drive through disapproval, a strategy with the same long-term prospects as stopping a locust swarm with a large umbrella. (Even Lovecraft, who liked sex way less than Rand did, would only have attempted such a thing with a society of aliens or transdimensional beings or something along those lines.)

Soon, the protagonist discovers electricity–through a plot contrivance that is, frankly, amateurish–and realizes that electricity and lightning (‘The power of the sky') are the same thing. Soon, he is experimenting with electricity and, having recreated a light bulb, declaring: “The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.” That's not the only instance of an increasingly mad scientist tone that the protagonist takes on.

Having figured out the principles of the funny glass spheres in the cave and the protagonist reinvents the light bulb. He gets excited about showing it to the elders, reasoning that never had such an invention been offered to men. And I realize that maybe he means the people of his current civilization, but the way it's written, I just wanted to point out the whole cave full of batteries and light bulbs and how he's taking credit for someone else's invention.

This peaks in the climax of the novel, when he shows the light bulb to the elders, and they say it will have to be destroyed, and he runs out, yelling, “You fools! You thrice-damned fools!”

That's also pretty much where the story leaves off being interesting. He runs away to surprisingly unpopulated woods, his lady friend joins him, he makes a bow and arrow (though there's no reason to believe he would have any training in how to do this), they find a conveniently abandoned and well preserved house where he learns (because she's a woman and not up for learning on her own, or something) about the past, and then he engages in a long and tedious rant which is either the kind of thing you're into (if you like Rand's politics/philosophy) or should just be skipped over.

Interestingly (and getting back to the way the story collides into Gothic archetypes), the story ends at a familiar premise: the hero in an ancient, isolated structure believing himself safe and the rightful lord of the property wherein he dwells. In a Gothic text, that tends to be where things start to go wrong

There are some other elements, minor absurdities which wouldn't stand out so much if the rest of the work was actually engaging. One thread is how certain words–such as I, she, he, and ego–have been forbidden, but it's kind of half-assed, and if you're interested in how a regime might manipulate language to make the wrong kind of thoughts impossible, stick to Orwell's 1984. (Rand may have experienced totalitarianism up close, but her understanding of it does not match Orwell's.)

Really, the main problem is that at this point in her career, the need to deliver a polemic has started to take over whatever gifts Rand has as a writer. At least a pulp stylist like Lovecraft could have made this entertaining, though the moral message would likely have been much more ambiguous. I do wonder what Ayn Rand's version of “Herbert West - Reanimator” would have been like, though.

A note on scoring: I oscillated between 2 and 3 stars for this. That lest section, though brief compared to the filibuster ending of Atlas Shrugged, is painfully dull, but right up until that point, I was entertained enough to be leaning towards 3 stars. I thought about downgrading, but since it's so eminently skippable, I decided I shouldn't penalize the novel for it.

Some people say novels should be about story or about characters, but The Bell Jar is a prime example of why prose quality matters, as well as a useful reminder why you shouldn't sleep on poets.

Yes, it's a harrowing depiction of mental illness. Yes, it's a searing look at the limited options open to women (even relatively privileged white ones) during the middle of the 20th Century.

More importantly, the book is fucking beautiful. I found the pages slipping by, while also finding myself pausing to savor a turn of phrase or striking image. Plath's mastery of language is breathtaking.

My boring “review as consumer guide” review:
This is another solid novel from Moreno-Garcia. Much like Mexican Gothic, the novel's character are engaging, the pacing is good, the historical Mexican setting is well integrated into the story and there's an interesting intertextuality, if that's the kind of thing that interests you. While it doesn't quite reach the same level of horrors as Mexican Gothic, it's still an excellent read.

My idiosyncratic “review as personal essay/literary commentary” review: As a tween, I owned an omnibus of H.G. Wells novels. I still remember reading the original Island of Dr. Moreau at 11 or 12 and the feeling that it may not have been entirely age appropriate. While the other novels in the collection had their dark moments, only Island managed to maintain a real “crimes against nature” atmosphere throughout the entirety of the tale. Moreno-Garcia's reimagining of this classic work takes a much gentler approach, finding the humanity in Moreau's creations while saving it's sense of horror for the systems of exploitation that Europeans created in the Americas. It's a nice twist on the classic novel.

Overall enjoyable if a little plodding at times. On the one hand, an interesting indictment of colonialism. On the other hand, its strike feels strangely Randian. For a while, I found it a little frustrating that the novel introduced this fantastical element but had history play out the same, but towards the end, I was struck with how much of an allegory it is, with silver standing in for lithium.