The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein

As an essayist, I find the writings of Joseph Epstein appealing. I don't always agree with him, but what he says, and how he says it, can be quite engaging. The Novel, Who Needs It? is a longish essay, or a shortish book. In eighteen meandering sections--some very short, some very long--Epstein argues the novel is "the supreme literary genre." There is much wisdom sprinkled throughout the book, but his succinct conclusion is worth noting:  "Without the help of the novel we lose the hope of gaining a wider and . . . more complex view of life, its mysteries, its meaning, its point. . . . The novel at its best . . . seeks to discover deeper truths, the truth of the imagination, the truth of human nature, the truth of the heart." In answer to the question posed in the book's title, Epstein notes that we all need the novel ("even people who wouldn't think of reading novels"), and in this "great age of distraction we may just need it more than ever before."

Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World is the sequel to Aristotle and Dante Discovery the Secrets of the Universe. Published almost ten years after the first book, it nevertheless begins at the point the first book ends. Basically it covers the final year of high school, and the summer after, for the two teen protagonists of the title. The sequel is also rather longer than the first book. Parts of it are pretty good, part of it are contrived. As Aristotle comes out of his shell, three girls who were formerly despised antagonists become his instant best friends, and Dante recedes into the background for too much of the book, before petulantly bringing about a contrived ending. The book has the cheesy feel of a Hallmark tv movie, G-rated, with both melodrama and tragedy. Overall it was slightly disappointing, but readable.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I watched the new film Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe before I knew that it was based on a novel. It is a coming of age story of two Mexican-American teenage boys, set in El Paso in the 1980s. The film is well-acted and visually compelling, with an initial a slow pace that leads to some of the subsequent important scenes feeling rushed, with the motivations of characters mixed or unclear. This flaw made me wonder how these scenes were dealt with in the novel itself. And hands-down the novel is better in many ways, including with the particular issues which brought me to read the book. A high proportion of the dialogue in the film is taken directly from the book, but the words are moved around and put into different scenes where they don't track completely smoothly in terms of context. I suppose this is a common issue with the process of turning a book into a film, but the it seemed a problem to me even before I read the book. Overall I liked the film, but the book is better.

Over Sea, Under Stone, by Susan Cooper

I've had the five volumes of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series for many year, but somehow never got round to reading any of them before now. One deterrent was certainly the film The Seeker, which apparently melded aspects of the series into a universally-derided single movie. But back to the first book, Over Sea, Under Stone. I probably would have liked it more if I'd read it when I was a teenager (or before then). As it stands now, it is merely an adequately told children's adventure tale with some tinges of fantasy (Arthurian, to be specific). I gather that the folow-up books are notches above this one in terms of quality.  The second in the series was a Newbery Honor Book, while the fourth won the Newbery Medal. So it will likely be worthwhile to continue reading the series. But the first book is one of those odd books that were standouts in an uncrowded field when first published, but as the quality rose in many so subsequent later books in the genre, it would have been left in the dust. So without the more ambitious later volumes in the series itself, this book wouldn't have the stature it does today.  

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers, by R.J. Ivankovic

Imagine H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu" re-written as children's verse, and illustrated in the style of Dr. Seuss, and that's a pretty good description of R.J. Ivankovic's book. If that concept interests you, this book will too. The verse is at times a bit awkward, but not horribly so. The artwork is of uniform high quality. It makes for a fun ten-minute revisiting of Lovecraft's story. Ivankovic did a follow-up volume, H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon, which I'll have a look for.

Russian Secret Tales, by Aleksandr N. Afanasyev

Aleksandr Afanasyev was the major nineteenth-century collector of Russian folk and fairy tales. Unlike other collectors such as the Brothers Grimm, Afanasyev also collected bawdy folktales, though these are much less known that his fairy tales. Russian Secret Tales: Bawdy Folktales of Old Russia is one such collection translated into English. It first appeared in 1966, and was reprinted, with a new foreword by folkorist Alan Dundes, in 1996. The volume contains some seventy-four tales, some very short, others longer and presented in variant versions. The tales are ribald and quite fun. My favorite in the whole collection is "A Crop of Prickles" --yes, prickles are what you think they are; the translation for the most part avoids what might be considered obscene terms in English (so we occasionally read of two people futtering, or one getting futtered, etc.). Some of these tales are quite imaginative. In "A Crop of Prickles" two farmers are planting their respective fields with rye, but when asked by a traveler what they are planting, one farmer tells the truth, while the other lies and says he is planting prickles. And that is the crop he reaps, and when harvested produces comic results.  

The Tales of Patrick Merla

This slim collection was published in 1985. It contains nine stories (two of which are so short as to be negligible), puffed out with wide margins and blank pages to make up a page-count of 103. All are fairy stories, which the publisher says are "in the tradition of George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brother Grimm."  Well, maybe, but Merla's tales do not stand up well next to those by such classic authors. Edmund White, in a review of the book in the Washington Post of September 22, 1985, noted that: 

Often a Merla tale begins with a vice--pride, cruelty, greed--that is exercised with stubborn willfulness. Next a terrible fate befalls the vicious man or woman, who must then set out in a quest of atonement. After much suffering (and isolation), the voyager is forgiven and learns the error of his or her ways. 

Which is true, but White fails to account for the lack of fairy tale magic in the stories. They never engage the reader, and each story merely plods on until it reaches its end. There is no literary style, no wry modern perspective, nothing to make these routine tales stand out. John Gardner was writing such modern fairy tales (I reviewed some collections below) at the same time as Merla, yet Gardner did it much better.

Storm Front, by Jim Butcher

Most of the lists that I have seen of best fantasy novels of the 21st century include something by Jim Butcher, usually Storm Front, which is the first book of his multi-volumed series, "The Dresden Files," named after the main character, Harry Dresden, a Chicago-based "wizard" who works with the police to solve unusual (often occult) crimes. The series is currently up to seventeen novels, with more to come. Storm Front is plot-driven commercial fiction, written in the first person in Harry Dresden's own jocular and self-deprecating style. The mystery is engaging enough, but the prose reads simply like a fleshed-out screenplay, heavy on the dialogue. It's no surprise, then, that the SyFy channel produced one season of a show called The Dresden Files consisting of twelve episodes. Episode 8 is titled "Storm Front" and is partly based on this novel. Though disappointed by the novel (mostly because of the style in which it is written), I tuned into the series and watched all twelve episodes. Fun, but not great, and of course the series was cancelled after one season, so it barely got the chance to set-up its secondary world. I'm glad to have experienced one novel, but I'm not inspired to read any further.

The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw

This novella can perhaps best be described as body horror. It is the story of two characters: the narrator, who is called a mermaid but isn't one by usual definitions; and her associate, called the "plague doctor," who is given annoying and distracting they/their pronouns (my gripe is in the using of a plural term for a singular entity). The pair have escaped the destruction of the mermaid's husband's world, which has been devoured and destroyed by the unrelenting teeth of their daughters. The pair meet some odd children, mired in the worship and rituals of three mysterious surgeons, who kill, maim, and even bring the children back to life. Of course there is a clash between the differing parties. It results in an impressive display of different kinds of bodily mutilation. The prose is dense, sometimes smooth but often clotted. I'm not sure there is a point to it all. The ending is cliched. And oddly, after the acknowledgements at the end of the book, there is a seven page story giving the set-up for the book. If it is extraneous, why include it at all? Or rather, if is is essential, why isn't it at the beginning of the book? Much about this novella seems half-baked, when it isn't being deliberately pretentious. Intriguing, but with considerable problems.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This Is How You Lose the Time War came out four years ago, but I've just gotten round to reading it. It's an oddly structured epistolary novella, concerning two female operatives on opposite sides in the time war. Red is with the Agency, while Blue works for the Garden. They start exchanging secret letters with each other, as they pass through various lives, time-strands--past and future--and differing realities. The prose is dense, and the set-up slow, but the reader is soon quite engaged. It won a Nebula and a Hugo for best novella, as well as other significant awards (from Locus, and the BSFA, etc.). I wouldn't have expected it to be a multiple award winner, though I enjoyed it.

Boys Like Us, edited by Patrick Merla

This book appeared in 1996, and at that time, according to the editor, it was a few decades in the making. It sounds like a good idea in itself, as expressed in the subtitle: gay writers tell their coming out stories. It collects some twenty-nine essays by acclaimed writers, plus an introduction by the editor. The first essay is by science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, and it sets a high standard that I feared the subsequent essays couldn't reach, and they didn't. Delany's essay is introspective, and deeply thoughtful, in ways that most of the rest of the essays aren't, for many descend to being not so much coming out stories (drawing individual fences around that term), but merely stories of early sexual experiences. None of them are bad, most are well-written, and if personally insightful they aren't especially revealing of the societal web of meanings for the term coming out. The second most interesting essay after Delany's is that by poet Carl Phillips, which closes the book. These essays are now almost thirty years old. It would be interesting to read an entirely new collection of similar essays on what coming out means to current writers. 

Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang

I read Babel last year, and heard murmurs about Kuang's next book, which was to be a satire on the publishing industry.  Yellowface is now out, and it is about the publishing industry, and other things, but its hardly a satire. It concerns two young women writers, one white (the narrator), the other Asian. They have a competitive sort-of friendship, and when the Asian writer accidentally chokes to death, the white writer steals her late friend's just completed manuscript, and rewrites it, passing it off as her own. Publishing success ensues, as well as controversy about a potentially plagiarized or stolen manuscript, about a white women writing about Asian history, and who should be allowed to writer about such stories. Of course social media goes nuts. And the reaction of everyone in publishing to the controversies and possible revelations is the heart of this narrative. The reason the book is not a satire is that all the craziness is true to contemporary life. Twitter, etc., is toxic, and the reactions on all sides are basically abuses of power done primarily for marketing reasons. Yellowface is still a page turner, even if it is cringeworthy at times, but it really is basically an attack on social media and on the posturings of privilege and exploitation, and other trendy issues. A very different book from Babel. When I finished Yellowface I felt like I'd just emerged from a literary sewer.

Beautiful Blood, by Lucius Shepard

At the sentence to paragraph level, Lucius Shepard was a brilliant writer, with an elegant prose style and a honed worldview that delivered acute observations of humanity in quotes like epigrams. He seemed most successful working at the novella length. His longer works, which include several novels, often start brilliantly, but at some point two-thirds of the way through Shepard's interest seems to wane, and while the reader gets an ending, it doesn't really satisfy the promise of the beginning. Such is the case with Shepard's final novel, Beautiful Blood, which is part of his series about the Dragon Griaule--whose immensely large corpse, situated vaguely in Central America, shelters cities at its side, while Griaule's malefic influence permeates the entire land and peoples. Over a thirty year period, Shepard wrote six Griaule novellas (published as a fix-up, The Dragon Griaule, 2012), followed by the novel Beautiful Blood. Here a man named Rosacher makes a business out of stealing Griaule's blood and selling it as a mostly harmless but always pleasant drug. He builds this business into a quasi-religion, but once Rosacher moves into the scheming realms of politics, the novel loses steam. The story does wind up, with a conclusion, but one feels that the whole is something less than the sum of its parts. The first half of the novel is brilliant, the rest merely so-so, in a way that may be true to life, but unfortunately (as with too much of Shepard) it doesn't deliver on the promise that the reader has been led to expect. There is an observation about Rosacher at the end of the book that nearly defines the novel itself:  "he is rankled by the fact that his life seems to have no sum, no coherent shape, to be nothing more than a sequence of imperfectly realized scenes in an ill-conceived play."

Mr. Breakfast, by Jonathan Carroll

Mr. Breakfast is, apparently, Jonathan Carroll's sixteenth novel, though the publisher calls it his twentieth. The discrepancy is likely caused by counting some short novellas, published stand-alone, as though they were novels. Whatever the case, this book has a curious history, in that it was published in Polish four years ago, and in Italian three years ago, before finally appearing now in the language in which it was written. Carroll has long had difficulties with his English-language publishers, both because of his original and unclassifiable style, and for the fact that marketing departments don't know how to sell him. His style is smooth and assured, better than that of many modern realist's, but the bulk of his novels are filled with fantastical happenings, which literary readers can't seem to abide. Which is to their loss, as well as ours, when publisher's can't sell enough of Carroll's books to want to keep publishing his new ones. Mr. Breakfast fits the usual mode of a Carroll novel. Graham Patterson is a failed comedian, at a turning point in his life. Through a magical tattoo he is able to venture to and return from other versions of his future life. Eventually he must choose the one he wants to live. Thereby Carroll touches on, but never deeply, ideas of reincarnation, fate, relationships, and how the past affects our choices and our lives. This novel seems to have been born of someone of age reflecting on their past, and the choices made, and the paths abandoned. It is less profound than it sounds, yet it still has a complete clarity, and Carroll's prose brings to the reader a page-turning response. With the exception of Carroll's magisterial first novel, The Land of Laughs, he has a problem with endings. Most are merely okay, and not quite as satisfying as one would expect from the rest of a novel. It's like being served, after a great restaurant meal, store-bought jello instead of specialty chocolate mousse. The ending of Mr. Breakfast evokes a similar response, but the reader's path to getting there is lovely and wonderful.

Pictures of Apocalypse, by Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti, as a prose writer, is one of the best post-Lovecraftian horror writers. He has also published a small number of poem cycles, and Pictures of Apocalypse is I think the fifth of these. It is illustrated (quite admirably) by Jonathan Dennison, and the book (with accessories) is very well-produced by Chiroptera Press. The volume consists of some twenty poems in the cycle, some very short, some long, with a prose introduction. But like his other poem-cycles, the form fails to show Ligotti at his best. There are occasional striking images ("The sky above was streaked with veins, / winding like rivers of color, sickly pale" from VI. "The Cult of Melancholy"), but despite Ligotti's talent for poetic prose, the poetic form itself seems to limit his ability to achieve the qualities found in his prose. There, his mesmeric style can grow into something more potent as he goes along. Here, though, with techniques like repetition (even with slight differences), it leads to unsatisfying things like "A Poetics of Existence" (IV), which is only eight lines long, and the first four are dull: "We had grown tired of the cycle: / beginning, middle, and end, / beginning middle, and end, / beginning, middle, and end." This early in the volume, the sentiment is prophetic for the rest. Ligotti's stories are essential reading; his poem cycles are not. Ligotti's devotees will enjoy this, but readers new to Ligotti should begin with the fiction.

The House on the Brink, by John Gordon

The House on the Brink is John Gordon's second novel, published in 1970, after his first, The Giant Under the Snow (1968). Both are a kind of folk horror for young adults, and both are in the mold of Alan Garner, with children protagonists encountering weird phenomenon. The House on the Brink has also been acclaimed as a novel in the style of M.R. James's ghost stories, but there is little spookiness in this flat tale of two teens who are haunted by a recurring tree stump in the marshes which may or may not be animated, and in association with a local legend of King John's lost treasure. The teens also learn they are water diviners, and they mix with peculiar adults with potentially sinister motives. This could have made a good story, but the real problem is in Gordon's punchy newspaper-styled prose, with lots of sentence fragments and metaphors that stick out like sore thumbs. This leads to many ambiguous sections where the reader simply isn't told properly what has happened, and is left to infer by subsequent events. As a story I found it a real disappointment.

The Big House, by Naomi Mitchison

Originally published in 1950 as a children's book, The Big House might better be described as a Scottish fairy novel with two children as the protagonists. It is overly descriptive and wordy, using many unusual Scottish terms and representing the characters' speech in a Scottish dialect; it is hard to imagine children of today having the patience to read it through to the end. It is also a timeslip novel, with a critique of class structures. Set at the end of World War II, it tells of young Su (short for Susan) of the wealthy Big House in western Scotland, and her friendship with a fisherman boy called Winkie, who together, one Halloween night, befriend a piper Donald Ferguson who has just escaped from the fairies after being captive for two terms of seventy years. The piper is pursued by the Prince and others of the fairies, and Su and Winkie help him to be reborn among modern people, while they timeslip back twice (to multiples of seventy years) in history, first to recapture Su's stolen shadow, and then to restore baby Donald's purloined soul. If this sounds confusing, that's because it is. The book, which has many intriguing aspects, unfortunately fails to bring life to the story, and it feels more like an exercise than an entertainment.

The Collectors, by Philip Pullman

This is another short tale associated with Pullman's His Dark Materials series, published as a small book, illustrated by Tom Duxbury. This time the tale is set in another world, visited in the past for a short time by Marisa van Zee, known to Pullman's readers as Mrs. Coulter. Marisa was painted as a young girl, and her monkey daemon was rendered as a one foot high bronze statute of special malevolence. This story concerns the history of art collectors acquiring  the painting, or the statuette, seemingly then randomly acquiring the other, with ill results. The tale is self-contained, but one wishes there were more meat to it. The story was originally released as an audiobook in 2014. The printed book came out in 2022.

The Good Neighbours, by Nina Allan

This is an odd mix of a murder mystery with elements of a fairy novel. Cath is photographer who works in a Glasgow record shop, but she returns to the island where she grew up, intending to photograph murder houses. One of these is the house where her best friend was murdered when both girls were in their teens. Killed at the same time were the mother and the younger brother, followed quickly thereafter by the death of the father (the presumed murderer) in a car accident. Twenty years later Cath wants to understand the murders, and her amateur investigation leads her haphazardly to new friends and new theories. One of the theories involves the fairies, or the "good neighbours" as they are sometimes called.  Cath's leaps of intuition seem followed by discoveries that lead her further, but the internal logic of the narrative is flawed. And the ending (like the ending in Allan's earlier novel The Rift) is very unsatisfying. The dust-wrapper blurb describes the book as "an enquiry into the unknowability of the past and our attempts to make events fit our need to interpret them"--which seems a highfalutin way of saying that the book is about misdirection and failure. Certainly the author means this, but the author writes well enough to keep the reader going, even as one realizes the frustrating direction that the tale is following.

Stalking the Atomic City, by Markiyan Kamysh

The subtitle gives a good picture of what this book is about: "Life Among the Decadent and the Depraved of Chornobyl"-- published originally in Ukrainian in 2015, and translated into an occasionally chic (by intention) but faltering (in slangy expression) English in 2022. It is a quasi-memoir of a man from Kyiv who is obsessed with exploring the Exclusion Zone around Chornobyl, the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster. He leads westerners through the area in a kind of disaster tourism, all the while drinking heavily, smoking heavily, and complaining about the winter cold and snow obsessively. Kamysh wonders frequently what its the point of him doing so, and so does the reader. He stalks the area (the apt terminology is clearly intended to echo Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film, The Stalker, doubtless an inspiration), encountering looters and scrap hunters, and trying to avoid the police who chase them. All the while he has a complete indifference to the toxicity of the area. There are photos (which are bland) and a map (which leaves out many of the sites visited in the text). Otherwise the text is merely a paean to danger fetishism.

Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat, by Morrell Gipson

The oddly-titled children's book originally came out in 1950. The comics writer Gary Larson found the book when he was three, and made his mother read it to him over and over again, many times. Thus the book and its quirky humor were in some sense a kind of spark which inspired The Far Side. Larson said in 1986:  "There was something so mesmerizing about the image of this big bear going through the forest and squashing the homes of these little animals. I just thought that was the coolest thing in the world."  And it might just be one of the coolest things in the world.  The story is amusing and clever, and the illustrations (particularly of the "very stupid" and at times surly bear) are complementary--they are signed only as by "Angela." The book was reprinted in 2000 with a short Foreword by Gary Larson.  And it came out again in 2014, credited as the 65th anniversary edition, with Larson's piece moved to the end of the book. Fun.

The Light Between Worlds, by Laura E. Weymouth

This is basically Narnia fan-fiction. Of course its details are altered, for copyright reasons, from the C.S. Lewis books, but the basic premise is: what happened to the Pevensie children after their return from Narnia?  Only here it is three children instead of four, the world is called the Woodlands not Narnia, and its figurehead is a white stag named Cervus, not a lion called Aslan. If you like Narnia a lot, you may find interest here, but if Narnia leaves you cold (as it does me), this is a pallid remembrance, and not especially well-written. It reads like something thought up in a cynical publisher's marketing department, and executed by a pre-selected hack writer. Readers looking for at least some originality should steer clear of this exploitation.