Nate
This was so good! Also sad. Also infuriating.
I came in expecting more ‘fuck capitalism' satire in the vein of Landscape Under Invisible Hand, and I got that, but what I didn't expect was the depressing exploration of how algorithm driven content drives people into segmented niches and cliques, reinforces (and refuses to challenge) their beliefs, and softens/hides the harsh realities of the world while brazenly, surreptitiously, cruelly, and kindly is always trying to peddle shit. How people raised and taught by an algorithm driven hyper-capitalist nanny are exactly perfectly ill-equipped for any sort of real moments requiring patience and introspection. How our weird self-induced technological isolation bubbles are completely fucking our brains into vapid misery.
It's fun. I loved it.
5/5 worldbuilding and imagery. I love the setting so much. Gothic sci-fi western? Yes please. So fucking cool.
1/5 characters and prose. Especially the male gaze-y fawning zero agency female characters. Ugh. Gross. Incredibly bad writing too :(.
I'll probably read more of the series. It's fun and light. Maybe some of the later books are better.
Probably more like a 3? 3.5? The first half was super solid. The interstitials were perfect. The prose was top tier and what really drove me to the end. The part with the turtle is the best (worst?) part of the book. Loved it.
Very very VERY predictable though. After the initial shock wears off and the meat of the story gets going in full force it all plays out exactly how you would imagine.
Easy read though, drags near the end, especially after you realize that yes, it is just going through the motions now and is done doing anything novel.
Terrific prose. As a story-teller you can definitely find better, but on the level of pure word-craft? Maybe one of the best in the field.
Solid and well paced the entire way through. Hit some really strong emotional highs near the beginning and at the end, but (no spoilers) I expected something a bit darker and raw.
One of the rare books I'd actually be excited to see adapted into a film. Really really enjoyed it, and the mixed media format was super charming and refreshing.
Came into this one with the mindset of like, “oh this book got super popular and people are hating on it because it's offensive, it must be doing some cool modern transgressive shit that people don't understand”. I was hoping I'd like it and be one of the cool kids in my pretentious ‘you guys just don't understand art' club.
Nope.
It's not really that offensive and mostly just kinda reads like incel fanfiction. There's nothing transgressive about being a successful toxic white guy who treats women bad and is secretly kinda sad and lonely. Tucker Max ran this well dry like 15 years ago.
Guy mostly just has a bad personality and thinks he's cooler than he is. It's got big unreliable narrator vibes but not in the fun way where it makes you question the deeper elements at play, but in an annoying eye-roll way that makes you wanna pat the guy on the shoulder and say “ok champ, good luck with that”. It feels like you're being lied to by some sad incel dipshit who thinks he's some Machiavellian mastermind.
Got a bit better near the end where it seemed like he was actually being the tiniest bit vulnerable, but by then I was completely checked out.
Really hard to rate this one. I grabbed this one because every single time a book recommendation thread comes up asking for books like Twin Peaks, Wayward Pines trilogy is inevitably the top comment.
And as a book trying to give Twin Peaks vibes? 1/5. The Twin Peaks comparison is completely superficial. Yes, they both involve a idyllic PNW mountain town whose charming wholesome exterior masks a pulsing heart of darkness. But that's just setting. If someone asks for movies like Jungle Book, are you gonna recommend Predator because they both take place in the jungle and have a big sneaky antagonist with fangs?
Thematically they're so wildly incompatible that I feel almost insulted. TP is a deeply humanist work that answers the question of violence, human cruelty, and cosmic darkness with compassion and understanding. Ethan Burke however, REVELS in violence. He fantasizes about it, dreams about it, performs it, and only abstains from it when he's afraid of being caught for it. Pines apes Twin Peaks style without understanding beyond its surface details. It's Twin Peaks written by Michael Bay.
The thing is though, on its own merits? This is a pretty good fucking book. A blistering page turner with a fun puzzlebox at its core that completely falls apart and faceplants the ending. I read this in two sittings. It is delicious schlocky entertainment.
Was vacillating between a 4 and a 5 for most of my reading, but the ending dropped it to like 3-4, but since I'm curious enough to have grabbed the sequel, I'm thinking 4.
Not a whole lot changed from the original nosleep stories, but super fun to revisit.
Ending was a gutpunch. Loved it.
Such a frustrating book. Probably about 100 pages too long.
Vacillates back and forth from brilliantly profound and hilariously surreal, to flat rambly nothingness frequently. In the first half I was convinced I had accidentally been putting off what would end up being the best book I'd ever read because of the leftover taste Murakami's mediocre Miso Soup left me with. But by the end I was just dragging myself over the finish line.
Really really disappointing.
Also maaaan Murakami seems to REALLY hate women. I remember thinking it in Miso Soup and Tokyo Decadence, but it is on FULL display here. Just unnecessarily hateful, and not in an interesting/satirical/transgressive way that feels like he's got something to say. But in that weird “hey fellow men, aren't women dumb and gross? Especially when they get older (read: over 20) but want to look younger (read: under 18)?” way that just feels meanspirited and disgusting.
But still. That first half is pretty incredible. There are some passages in this that are straight up all-timers. Just wish the diamonds were hidden in piles of dirt and not piles of shit :/
Couldn't put this one down. Layered with allegory and possible meanings, deeply feminist, but also darkly misanthropic (or maybe just misandronic?) and charming. I feel like this book could mean lots of different things to lots of different people. My personal read? It's about cycles of abuse and hurt people hurting people too. About capitalism and systems of oppression.
The writing could have been better. Definitely a first novel, and the end kind've petered out. Also a minor pet peeve, but I get annoyed when an author fills the book with ‘said' synonyms. Every character in this is either shouting or screeching or croaking or whispering or conceding or hemming or hedging or whining or cackling or etc etc etc. Just use ‘said' my man. It's too much.
Powerful novel though no matter what. Easy recommend. 5/5 I fucking loved it.
Holy shit this was good.
The Tombs of Atuan mirrors A Wizard of Earthsea in the absolute best ways possible. Both are coming of age stories. Whereas A Wizard of Earthsea was an epic globe-trotting journey of a boy owning up to his errors on the path to manhood, The Tombs of Atuan is a much more personal and intimate story about the loss of innocence and the choice between hiding in safety and naivety or embracing bravery and facing the unknown. Tenar is flawed and relatable, and her character development is heartfelt and beautiful. The metaphor of her exploration of the perpetually dark labyrinth contrasting her imprisonment, guilt, and loss of faith is next fucking level.
This book is a goddamn masterpiece.
This book really makes me think Le Guin was a secret pulp fiction fan, of Robert E. Howard in particular. The parallels between this novel and many of the Conan stories are too close to be ignored. Drugs and dreaming, dark dangerous magicians, high seas adventure, and interesting fully realized cultures are staples of REH.
I think this novel may have even been a rebuttal to Howard's dark world view.
Where Howard espouses a philosophy wherein civilization is an island of relative stability doomed to constantly sink back into barbarism, Le Guin counters with relentless optimism. She argues a core of good in people, and the desire to be better. While she doesn't shy away from dark motifs, there's an overarching theme of hope in her writing that, while I don't fully agree with, I find refreshing and charming.
Le Guin's writing style is wispy and beautiful. Her prose magical. I'm constantly bombarded with imagery in the style of Amano Yoshitaka and french impressionism. I've never had writing evoke that kind of response from me. It's kinda cool.
Also. Can I please just fucking live on a flotilla with the Raft People? I love theeeeeem.
There's something singularly beautiful about the way Le Guin writes. She eschews complex narratives. Her pacing is terrible. Her characters are flat and boring. Despite all that, her books are true art and high literature.
She shares a strange kinship with Lovecraft in that her nontraditional style is enchanting and enthralling (I'd argue both of them had undiagnosed Asperger's. Fight me.). Le Guin (like HPL) is a worldbuilder. A supremely skilled worldbuilder with a uniquely anthropological slant. She says so much with so little. I wish she'd have taken a bit more time out and hit me over the head with her points a bit more though.
A Wizard of Earthsea tells a very straightforward coming of age tale in an amazingly actualized universe. Once I was able to quiet the voice in my head screaming “She's not showing! She's telling! That illeeeeeegal!”, I was able to not just come to terms with her unique prose, but see the magic and skill involved that's led to Le Guin's lasting appeal.
The more I step back and fight my biases over what a novel can and can't be, the more I'm enjoying her work.
I can't wait to dive into the sequels.
Also I have a new headcanon for dolphins now, so that's fun.
Just straight up one of the best books I've ever read.
Interesting year in books for me so far. More books added to my top ten list than any other year, and more books given 1-2 than I've ever given.
Iain M. Banks wasn't just the greatest sci-fi writer to have ever lived, he was one of the best writers ever. This book proves it.
Since his death, I've slowed down my consumption of his books dramatically. Knowing that as soon as I finish reading his final works, there'll be one less thing in my life to look forward to.
“But then, as she knew too well, the more fondly we imagine something will last forever, the more ephemeral it often proves to be.”
Not my favorite Cooper, but super good nonetheless. Devoured it. Love his writing style so much.
Feels kinda like a prototype to a lot of the themes he really leaned into later in The Sluts.
There's this vibe/tone Cooper's book exist in; something I'd maybe describe as like, lonely nihilism driven by a core of yearning? Or maybe like absurdist meaning found through transgression/self-destruction? It's a tone that speaks to me more directly than basically any other author. I imagine we'd get along.
I am a newly minted Grady Hendrix stan.
If Ligotti is a multi-course meal at a Michelin starred restaurant, Grady Hendrix is take-out from Five Guys. Cheap, quick, amazing, and greasy as fuck. And just like Five Guys, I couldn't stop stuffing it into my face by the handful.
Loved this book. Horrorstör drips style, oozes charm, and reeks of menace. Also, am hungry now.
I've been thinking about The Marbled Swarm a lot since I finished reading it. Trying to put my thoughts in order. I've got a ton of feelings about the book, but trying to sort them out and put them into words is proving to be a herculean endeavor, titanically difficult. More than anything, a sisyphean task... and other Greek idioms.. Which makes perfect sense, because this book is a winding labyrinth with a minotaur at the center. The Marbled Swarm is less a novel, and more a transgressive literary experiment. It's fun. I promise.
Maybe labyrinthian isn't exactly right though. Synecdochal? That sort've works.. The titular “Marbled Swarm” refers to the twisted winding prose of the narrator, itself a bastardization of the flowery manipulative French his father (a billionaire Svengali-type with a penchant for perversion) speaks, which is then twisted and confused again through the translation to English. But it also refers to the narrator's crimes, ALSO a bastardization, mistranslation and failed copy of his father's. So it's a synecdoche right? The Marbled Swarm is both a microcosm and a macrocosm of its constituent parts. The title, the prose, the plot.
No. That doesn't feel right either though. Recursive? I guess, but also not as specific as I want.. Maybe fractal is closer to how I feel? Would I feel pretentious as fuck saying, “The Marbled Swarm” is the novelization of fractal geometry? Definitely. Lets go with it.
You know how when you zoom in on a fractal you get recursive structure? As you zoom into the center of this book you get recursive structure. Every character has a doppelganger, every estate has a copy (and mazelike secret tunnels), every transgression has a doubling. Every action is nested within itself.
For example, there's a scene near the exact center of this book where the main character is being told a story by his lawyer about a woman being told a story by her son about a surreal Kafkaesque play he performed in (written by a doppelganger of the main character's father) spanning the course of days which is a near perfect recursion of the plot of the entire novel.
Then at the same time I think it's a statement on modern transgressive fiction? A transgressive author transgressing transgressive fiction by parodying it and himself? TOO MANY LAYERS I CAN'T KEEP UP. SEND HELP.
On a side note, what's with me and fiction involving cannibalism lately? It feels like every other book I've read this year trades heavily in cannibalism as symbolism. There's something about the allegory that I just find.. tasty (pun nintendo). It probably has something to do with the last 5 years in the world and the gross hyper-capitalistic dystopia we live in that treats humans as consumable and disposable? Something for me to chew on I guess.
Aaaaaannnyyyway. 4/5. A Baudelairean nightmare, a Sadeian fever-dream. I recommend this book to no one.
Didn't really love it. Super quick read though.
Just maybe a touch too much of the YA tone for me? Also maybe just a little too optimistic for my shriveled heart :/. I dunno, wish I liked it more than I did.
Fucking loved that dog though!
Finished this like a month ago and meant to write a semi-analytical review once I was able to gather my thoughts. Now I can't remember what I wanted to say... ADHD strikes again.
Absolutely amazing book, one of my top 5 of the year. Stokoe is like my ideal fusion of Dennis Cooper and Zahler. Like Zahler with more ambitious literary aspirations. Or maybe like Cooper with more pulp sensibilities?
There are a few scenes (the liquor store!) and ideas that will stick with me for a long time. A perfect companion piece to De Palma's ‘Body Double' which I watched for the first time when I was like 50% through this book and really informed the way I interpreted it. I'm pretty certain this book was heavily inspired by that film. At the very least they're in deep conversation, and IMO anyone who reads this book needs to also go watch that film.
Hopefully full-er review to come...
Ugh. I really really wanted to like this book, but it was a SLOG to get through. After being catapulted through a fantastic first third-ish, I tried to ride that momentum to the end, but it petered out hard.
Three things ruined this book for me more than anything else.
First off, the writing style/length. Holy shit this dude is verbose in the most useless way possible. It was padded out like a bad highschool essay. At least a third of this novel should have been left on the cutting room floor.
If you're going to describe literally every place and room and character down to the shoes on their feet and the texture of the floor, at least do some fucking environmental storytelling with it.
You don't need to tell me about every single character's red/brown/black coat/jacket/sweater with holes/dirt/tears. Tell me what they do differently. How they're surviving. Tell me about the orphan trying to hide two golden rings on a chain under his shirt. Tell me about the old man with prison tattoo style tally marks on his face. Tell me about anything that could be remotely interesting about these people that I can care about.
Same with the corpses that are literally everywhere and used as lazy grimdark set dressing. Just telling me there're bodies everywhere gets repetitive and boring real fast. Give me something interesting to grab onto. Show me a family in a bedroom and empty pill bottles. Show me cars at the bottom of ravines. Show me remains that tell me something about these people in their final moments, protection/betrayal/love/fear/regret/ANYTHING. Instead it's just spooky skeletons everywhere, no humans anywhere.
Also UGH sometime after around the halfway point, the prose slips into this weird hokey colloquial corny ass country voice for the rest of the book?
Secondly, and this one is kinda nitpicky, but there's a shitload of fridge logic in this book. Fridge logic works in a two hour movie because I don't really have time to do the math on how much food you'd need to find to feed an army of thousands for seven years in a post apocalyptic scavenger society. But in a thousand page book?? I'm constantly taken out of it by the absolute nonsensical shit that is just glossed over. No one's refining gas, but they have barrels and barrels of usable gasoline after seven years? It's raining and muddy all the time but somehow people are still finding cardboard boxes to sleep in?
Even worse, we're introduced to a group of orphans after the seven year time skip, who have been living alone for the most part the entire time. They're all 10-17ish, so they were 3-10ish when the bombs dropped. They all speak better English, and besides the fact that they're kinda dirty, are way smarter and more civilized than I was at that age. You'd expect some kind of unique culture to emerge right? Some unique traditions or slang or behaviors/fears/traumas? Nah. McCammon is more interested in telling you that the cave walls are slightly damp and shiny and that the room is warm and smells like stale gunpowder and farts.
Finally, I REALLY wish someone would have told me that this novel is basically Christian prosperity doctrine fanfiction. The core philosophy of this book is repulsive and implies some shitty beliefs.
The Good characters are all born Good. Goodness is an intrinsic quality and Good characters are surrounded by Good people, they do Good things and Good things happen to them. They don't have to make any difficult decisions because the Right path is always clear. There's always a heroic option for them to take and they take it without any second thoughts because they were divinely chosen and have magic powers and this is their destiny and they are Good and Righteous and blah blah blah
The Evil characters are all intrinsically Evil, etc etc etc.
No fucking nuance, no depth, no challenge, no growth. People are what they were born to be and nothing else.
It's a survivalist wasteland, but only the evil characters have to make any difficult choices. Why do they have to compromise their morals to survive? Because they were born evil and deserve to be punished, obviously.
I have more to say, but this is getting way too long and I think I might be ranting at this point.
First third of this book, up to the bombs dropping? 5/5. Everything up to the timeskip? ~3.5/5. Everything after? 1/5 at best.
I always want to be punk and hipster and hate Chuck Palahniuk because he's popular, but I can't. Fuck. Whatever. I guess I've read Invisible Monsters twice now, and fuck, it was even better the second time through, and fuck, the remix format is kind've fucking brilliant. The calling out of the fashion magazine vignette-y format at the beginning brought some next level verisimilitude. It feels like a House of Leaves style experiment, but more streamlined? More focused? What's another word for verisimilitude? Cinema verite? Who knows, fuck it. I love this fucking book.