A Reader’s Journey: Books Read in 2021

Autumn 1990. My junior year of high school has just begun. I have a big, gorgeous hardback edition of the new Stephen King book Four Past Midnight and I eagerly devour it, as I do every new King book. Four Past Midnight consists of four novellas and it is the second one, “Secret Window, Secret Garden” that really snags me. Hunched in a chair, I get lost in the story as the magical early autumn aura envelopes me, hazy refracted light drifting through the family room window, the smell of the leaves turning wafting in through the screen door. One scene in particular grabs me: Late one afternoon (the very same time I am reading the story) the protagonist approaches an abandoned house and climbs through a broken window. I have a full picture of his hunched figure, carefully slipping through the frame so the remnants of glass do not cut him, the autumn sun casting sinister shadows around the house as dust motes dance in the air, the faint smell of decay…the scene grabs me not because it is central to the book but because of the startlingly clear picture it paints in my head.

Except this scene doesn’t exist.

At least, it doesn’t exist in the story on the page. It exists in my memory of the story. When I think of “Secret Window, Secret Garden” my mind is full of hazy, atmospheric images that sometimes align with the printed story and sometimes don’t. When I reread the story a couple of years ago, I was shocked to discover that this scene, so clear in my mind, was nowhere to be found. In fact, the actual story was far different than what I remembered. I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that this scene was in the story! Given the warm fuzzies thinking of “Secret Window, Secret Garden” has prompted over the years, I would also have thought I correctly remembered major plot details.

Memory is a tricky thing, isn’t it? Setting aside novels I’ve read so many times I could recite them (take a seat, ‘Salem’s Lot and The Haunting of Hill House) it seems the novels that make an impact on me often live on in my brain via a series of fuzzy images, some abstract and some surprisingly clear. Whenever one of these images wanders into my brain it triggers the emotions I experienced while reading the story. These emotions are not necessarily inspired by the story itself, though they certainly can be. Just as often, though, it is the circumstances experienced while reading the story. What was going on in my head, in my environment, in my life. Case in point: I read “Secret Window, Secret Garden” on a perfect fall afternoon. As I read, the noise of the world around me ceased—that magical whisking away of “real life” that only reading can provide. At some point while reading the story the words on the page triggered the scene in my head, which represents that autumnal feeling in a way the actual story doesn’t. The scene was false to the story’s plot but not false to my experience of the story. Through the years, this scene became sweetened with the sugar of nostalgia, the memory of that young person I once was but have not been for decades.

Interestingly, rereading “Secret Window, Secret Garden” did not ruin or even change the experience of this memory. The memory is now wholly distinct from the experience of reading the story. I actually found “Secret Window, Secret Garden” to be much less interesting than I would have thought. I mean, I enjoyed it as I generally enjoy all King’s works, but it is mid-tier at best and with decades of reading now under my belt, the tropes that were still relatively fresh when I first read it now grate a bit. But that perfect autumn afternoon? That will live forever in my mind, in a scene that never existed.

Welcome to my 2021 reader’s journey. Previous years can be found here, here, here and here. Only time will tell if the experience of any of these books lives on with me like “Secret Window, Secret Garden” but regardless I enjoyed a lot of what I read this year. If I’m being honest, though, nothing provided the transcendent, spiritual experience that the greatest books do – but that may have more to do with me than the stories themselves. And there are some mighty fine stories below. Every book I open still has a chance to give me another perfect autumn afternoon. Thank you for reading.

Snowblind, Christopher Golden
Seattle's Forgotten Serial Killer: Gary Gene Grant, Cloyd Steiger
The Teeth Of The World Are Sharp, A.X Salvo
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, edited by Otto Penzler
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories, Mariana Enríquez
Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Winter Sister, Megan Collins
The Lost Village, Camilla Sten
Lovesickness, Junji Ito
Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
Gateways to Abomination, Matthew M. Bartlett
A Collapse of Horses, Brian Evenson
Mean Deviation: Four Decades of Progressive Heavy Metal, Jeff Wagner
So Deadly, So Perverse: Giallo-Style Films From Around the World, Vol. 3, Troy Howarth
The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu
The Wilds, Julia Elliott
Sleeping with the Monster: Stories, Anya Martin
They’re Watching, Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella
It Will Be Just Us, Jo Kaplan
Night Film, Marisha Pessl
The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), Katie Mack
Later, Stephen King
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963, Sylvia Plath
I Remember You: A Ghost Story, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
The Same Deep Water As You, Chad Lutzke
Billy Summers, Stephen King
Rainbow in the Dark, Ronnie James Dio
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated Edition, Carol Clover
The Doll-Master: And Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates
The Letters of Shirley Jackson, Shirley Jackson
Thirty Hours with a Corpse and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol, Maurice Level
My Heart is a Chainsaw, Stephen Graham Jones
The Last House on Needless Street, Catriona Ward
Nothing But Blackened Teeth, Cassandra Khaw
I Would Haunt You if I Could, Seán Padraic Birnie
The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway
This Thing Between Us, Gus Moreno
Killer, Come Back to Me, Ray Bradbury

To say the volume of books written about Sylvia Plath is rather extreme is, to put it mildly, an understatement. It’s hard to see how a new biography can possibly bring anything new to the table. Yet Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath not only pulls off this feat, it renders are all previous Plath biographies irrelevant. This is the most comprehensive and well-written Plath biography (I can say this with authority; I have actually read them all.) Even better, it brings the focus back to Plath’s actual writing via insightful deep dives into key stories and poems. These deep dives both present Plath’s work as a product of her time and place as well as illuminating why her work continues to speak to so many of us. There is nothing that feels tacky or lurid in Red Comet. To be sure, the book benefits (and does not shy away) from access to a handful of previously sealed letters written by Plath to her therapist. These letters do provide some additional clarity regarding the endless speculation of Plath’s last months but Red Comet is far more important as a contextual telling of Plath’s creative journey. While the best of the previous biographies attempted this, Red Comet is the first to pull it off and honestly? There is no need to read (or write) another. The best Plath biography and the only one you need…Last year I read the first volume of Plath’s complete letters and this year I completed the journey by reading the second volume, which covers the years 1956-63. The aforementioned letters to Plath’s therapist are included in this volume, where they gain much contextual relevance. Over the years I’ve read Plath’s Unabridged Journals at least half a dozen times; I found the two volumes of letters added deep enrichment to Plath’s voice as found in Journals. As great as Red Comet is, the journals and letters offer nearly 3,000 pages of Plath’s life as she experienced it and are therefore truly essential for any serious admirer of her work.

One of the best things I read this year was Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw. Set in Japan, this short novella is a quick-paced ghost story about a group of five “friends” (in quotes because no one seems to actually like each other) who have gathered to conduct a wedding in a haunted house. Things quickly go off the rails. A little too quickly, honestly--the one weakness of the book is it is simply too short to develop the relationships of the characters and flesh out their backstory. Combined with the fact that none of these so-called friends seem to be actual friends, the stakes never feel as high as they should. However, the book delivers on all other fronts. The atmosphere shifts from suitably creepy to outright repulsive without overdoing the grotesque imagery. And Khaw has a fine ear for language. Teeth skates right up to the edge of purple prose at times but never tips over. There are some wonderful turns of phrase and descriptive passages—I found myself repeating sections aloud just to feel them roll of my tongue. It’s a rare book that inspires me to do that. Given that this is Khaw’s first published work of any length (so far as I can tell) I can easily forgive her growing pains and I’m quite excited to read more from her in the future. I’d be remiss to not point out that this book easily has the best cover I’ve seen in a long, long time…

In 2012 Stephen Graham Jones published The Last Final Girl, a slasher meta-novel that followed the adventures of Lindsay, a true final girl if there ever was one. At the time I thought the novel was interesting but the excessively meta approach robbed the story of enjoyment; it’s not an approach I care for and in the end I didn’t think the book worked. Yet it stuck with me somehow, to where I now have a higher opinion of the novel than when I first read it. And now here in 2021 we have Jones following up his breakthrough novel The Only Good Indians with My Heart is a Chainsaw, a slasher meta-novel that mirrors The Last Final Girl in multiple ways. There is one key difference: Jones is a much stronger novelist now and Chainsaw is consistently engaging, with a spunky protagonist named Jade whom you can’t help but love. Jade was an absolute blast to spend time with. Chainsaw does unravel a bit in the last quarter or so; it simply goes on too long (the best slashers get in, do their work and get out.) Chainsaw is also not likely to reach as wide of an audience as Indians. You really do need to know your slashers for the story to work at all. If you don’t, you are likely to be lost/annoyed at the endless trivia and trope drops. Jones does his best to explain these as the story unfolds but I think it would be a reach for anyone that doesn’t have true love of slashers. Fortunately I do and despite my misgivings about the approach and the ending pages, I greatly enjoyed my time with Jade and her colorful companions…but I will always be much more of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original, of course) guy than a Scream guy. Nudge nudge wink wink oh aren’t we clever slashers are just the worst…

In the months leading up to its publication, I swear The Last House on Needless Street was popping up everywhere. For whatever reason the book seemed to be getting a lot of attention. That can be a dangerous thing, but I’m happy to say Needless Street more than lives up to the hype. It’s hard to discuss why the book so good without giving away major plot points. So let me just say this: Catriona Ward weaves an artful, twisting tale about identity that is thought-provoking and empathetic. Every time I thought I knew just where the story was going, the ground shifted beneath my feet in a most subtle, beautiful way. It’s a rare book that can take you through multiple character viewpoints—some of which are clearly at odds with one another—and empathize with them all, even as the actual story events continually reveal the terrible damage we do to one another, especially the young. Honestly, if I’d seen a synopsis of the story I might never have read the book, and what a loss that would have been. That said: there is child abuse in this story and though it is handled extremely well from a writing standpoint (and is central to the story), I feel a trigger warning is necessary. This is the most important book in the genre this year and at the same time feels too large for the genre to contain. A stunning achievement. After you finish the story, be sure and read the absolutely essential afterword. The Last House on Needless Street will stay with me a long, long time…

There’s a pinch of Pynchon, a dose of Vonnegut and a whole lot of Tom Robbins swimming through Nick Harkaway’s 2008 debut novel The Gone-Away World. My friend who recommended the book described it as a beach read and while that’s not inaccurate, I think is sells the serio-comic sci-fi/thriller/action yarn a wee bit short. Harkaway is not in full control of his style here, with some of the narrator’s digressions crossing the line from amusing to tedious. As with so many debut novels, it’s rough around the edges and could stand to be more tightly paced. But I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the book overall; the world-building in particular was satisfyingly unique. Underneath the comic tone Harkaway want to say Important Things about Big Subjects but he treats such statements as throwaways so the novel never gets preachy or self-important. In the early 90s I read every Tom Robbins book published up to that point. Robbins constantly juggled a near-impossible comic/action/almost profound blend yet managed to pull it off as often as not; Harkaway does the same here. I tend to read an awful lot of weighty, dark, “serious” novels and it was nice to read something with a sense of humor again…

King of the Hill: Still prolific as ever, this year saw two new Stephen King books. The first, Later, was released via Hard Case Crime, making it King’s third book for the publisher. Hard Case Crime is a noir/pulp crime publisher and therefore a difficult fit for King, who hasn’t really written anything pulpy since Night Shift. In Later, King’s tropes get the best of him. Guess the occupations of the two adult protagonists? Why, they are a book agent and a cop! Can you believe it? I was shocked, I tell you, shocked to read a King story involving someone in the book trade and a cop! The utterly ridiculous story involves the book agent’s son, who can see dead people (yes, it really is that clichéd) and of course the book agent’s primary client dies without writing the final novel in a series that is the meal ticket for all involved so the boy has to take narration from beyond the grave but don’t you know that’s shady and leads to problems when the book agent and cop, who are lovers, break up and of course the cop has a nasty drug habit and falls from grace and so has to kidnap the boy to solve an unsolvable crime since he sees dead people and…oh to hell with it. Look, the characterization saved this book from being an outright disaster and I’m always grateful for a new King novel but this is absolutely lower tier King. I confess I’m having growing difficulty dealing with King’s “all my protagonists are writers or in the writing trade, professors or cops” schtick. I can’t count how many times I rolled my eyes reading Later…

…but then we come to Billy Summers, King’s second book of the year and while it has some of the same flaws, I couldn’t put it down. To dispense with the most obvious flaw: yes, once again, the writing profession is utilized in the most ludicrous way. Everyone in Billy Summers apparently wants to write a book—we are treated to a hit man that reads Émile Zola while pretending to be dumb; meanwhile the criminals who have hired him (to take out another sniper) concoct a cover story wherein he is a writer (with one of the criminals posing as his agent) and so of course he pretend writes a book and of course we are treated to long passages of it and of course Mr. Hitman finds the courage to believe he, too, might be a True Writer. So ridiculous it’s almost sublime. Fortunately, other aspects of the book are successfully compelling. King has been steadily drifting towards crime/thriller fiction for the last couple of decades. The results have been wobbly at best, but Billy Summers is his best effort to date (certainly much better than the Bill Hodges trilogy, thus far the nadir of King’s twenty-first century work.) The first half of the book is tight and tense—there is very little action and this works to the book’s great benefit, given King’s strengths with characterization and detail. The second half of the book takes a dark turn via the introduction of a second protagonist and for a moment I was pretty sure the novel was about to go off the rails…but once again King’s superb characterization saves the day and if the motifs are fairly trite from this point on, King’s execution of them is not. Billy Summers is really two books. I’ve seen this idea elsewhere, but one does wonder if the onset of the pandemic during book’s creation changed its direction. There are only a few oblique references to the pandemic in the novel but one can sense that the story King wanted to tell changed partway through. There’s not a whiff of the supernatural in Billy Summers (aside from a couple references to the Overlook Hotel that really should have been left on the editing room floor) and though he’ll forever be labelled one, I’m not sure King has been a horror writer for the last 30 or so years. And it doesn’t matter. He is a great storyteller. Billy Summers succeeds where Later largely fails and for this Constant Reader, at least, proved there is life in the old beast yet…

In 2015 Word Horde put out Giallo Fantastique, a fun collection of giallo-inspired tales. Far and away the highlight of the anthology for this reader was “Sensoria”, Anya Martin's indescribable Lovecraftian rock and roll giallo ball of wondrous weirdness. This tale also features prominently in Martin's 2018 debut collection, Sleeping With the Monster. I'm annoyed that it took me this long to finally pick it up because I've been dying to read more of Martin's work. Monster is one of those collections where every story is so radically different--at least within the loose genre borders of weird fiction where Martin largely works--that whatever it might lack in cohesiveness it makes up with the punch of its best stories. While every one of these stories is about a monster, Martin sees no restrictive parameters in the term, applying different techniques and approaches without losing the emotional core of the stories. Simply put: this is a marvelous collection and you should head on over to Lethe Press and buy it now…

I greatly enjoyed the melancholy humanism of Chad Lutzke’s Stirring the Sheets, so when I saw he had a new novella titled after a song on one of the greatest albums ever recorded (Disintegration) I was quite excited. The Same Deep Water As You is a different beast than Sheets but retains the same sense of sadness and humanity that makes his work stand out. I read most of the novella sipping coffee in the air-conditioned lobby of a hotel room in Walla Walla while temperatures soared above 100 outside, after the most stressful 24-hour stretch I’d had in years. (It’s a long story, for another time and place.) The effects of the heat, stress, caffeine and lack of food put me on the same wavelength as the story, the words and emotions washing over me. Lutzke is one of the genuine good guys out there and his work is a strong reminder that without emotional connection, a story is nothing more than words strung together. Here’s to more writers writing what they feel compelled to write instead of content for markets…

By and large I’m not a fan of weird fiction stories involving lost films or film-making in general. These have become hoary tropes the last few decades and much of the resulting work is unimaginative—passages describing what a character is seeing on a screen are tedious to read and too often a crutch for authors looking to create a weird/surreal scene without putting effort into world-building. In the hands of a skilled storyteller, though, they can still be an effective tool and Marisha Pessl is a skilled storyteller. One of the things that lifts Night Film far above other such fare is its sense of humor. Humor in horror is tricky to pull off and Pessl does so wonderfully, using it sparingly but effectively and never short-changing the unsettled atmosphere that builds throughout Night Film until it’s well-neigh unbearable. Pessl endows her characters with heaps of personality that allow them to transcend their stock origins, resulting in a well-paced book with surprisingly emotional stakes. Night Film isn’t perfect, but the minor flaws do not prevent it from being a thoroughly enjoyable read…

Another book that gets the film-making tropes right is Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village. The setup is about as cliché as it gets: amateur film crew attempts to make a documentary about an abandoned village steeped in mystery. Bad things happen. Mystery is ultimately resolved. Yet Sten makes it work, vividly portraying the empty village and desolate Scandinavian landscape. The protagonist is well-drawn but the supporting characters are a bit thin for the emotional drama they are asked to shoulder—the relationships feel sketched instead of earned. It’s nothing that affects the book too much and is more than made up for by the well-paced story and unfussy prose…

It's pretty brave to name a character Persephone in a psychological mystery novel--you are bringing the mythic right up front and if you don't pull it off, well, it's going to be naively pretentious at best, unreadable at worst. Fortunately Megan Collins pulls it off in her debut novel The Winter Sister, crafting a compelling narrative around mother/sister bonds and the family secrets that lurk in every closet. The plot is a bit too reliant on coincidence and is more than a little preposterous but the characterization is ace, especially the compelling, complex protagonist. Really all the book’s characters are satisfyingly complicated. A few passages are overwritten but nothing unusual for a debut novel and Collins has a compelling style. She's since published two more novels which I'm curious to check out…

Despite my interest in Grand Guignol, I was unfamiliar with Maurice Level until coming across Thirty Hours with a Corpse and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol in my favorite local independent bookstore this past summer. The title alone made it a must-have. The collection itself is interesting and more than a little oddball. These are extremely short tales (most are 3-4 pages) and only a small handful have the qualities of graphic (for the time) amoral horror one associates with Grand Guignol. These tales are the highlights; the rest focus on a certain bleakness of then-contemporary peasant life and/or World War I. There is a social commentary element to all of these tales which is certainly interesting in a historical context yet there is also a strange lack of emotion that dulls the impact. Ten tales would have been enough…

Snowblind is my second Christopher Golden book, following 2017’s entertaining Ararat. Snowblind reads a lot like a lost character-driven King/Straub/McCammon mainstream horror novel from the early 80s. Whether that is a good or bad thing is, of course, subjective. On the positive side of the ledger, Golden writes wonderfully developed characters and imbues even the most minor players with depth. His workmanlike prose gets the job done with no frills. On the negative side, the book suffers from one subplot too many and could have used some tightening. More problematic is the approach to the horror elements of the story. Golden seems torn between the realistic approach of the King/Straub school and true cosmic weirdness. As a result, when it comes time for the monsters to make their appearance they are unable to transcend their inherent silliness. The book loses its identity at this point, whipsawing between tonal extremes. Basically, there are some really interesting philosophical ideas here but they are never developed or explored in any depth, the book instead hurtling on through its last third before landing at a pretty rote conclusion. It’s not a bad book but it’s not a successful one for this reader. I was left wondering if Golden was really writing what he wanted to write…

Debut short story collections are as much about potential as anything else. They trace the path of a writer's earliest published material through a breakthrough story or two and often conclude with a story (or two) that look to the writer's future. Seán Padraic Birnie's I Would Haunt You if I Could fits comfortably in this framework. A few stories feel unfinished, but the bulk of this collection is impressive. "Out of the Blue" is the breakthrough story wherein everything comes together for the first time--you can almost feel the author's excitement. The title story, while overlong, is a well-done character study where talent begins to mix with maturity. And in the final story, "Other Houses," Seán Padraic Birnie reaches a new level in his work, the writing having matured into a beautifully strange beast. Honestly, I don't know if these stories are chronological, but they feel that way and the end result is a journey well worth taking…

Short Takes: Joyce Carol Oates has long been one of my blind spots. Part of the problem is, with such a vast and varied bibliography, I had no idea where to start. I ended up going with a collection of her short horror tales, The Doll-Master: And Other Tales of Terror. I don’t know how representative this particular collection is but she has a strong, unique voice no matter the time period or tone she is going for in any given tale. It honestly took me a bit to get used to her style, but every one of these six tales has something to recommend. “The Doll Master” and “Big Mama” were the highlights, though the characterization and voice are strongest in “Gun Accident” and “Equatorial.” I’ll definitely be reading more of her work…A collection long on my to-read list, Matthew M. Bartlett’s Gateways to Abomination is a series of queasy, gruesome vignettes that are, at times, deeply unsettling. Gateways isn’t so much a story collection as a manual of disintegration. They read like someone’s long lost LiveJournal (remember LJ?) transmitted from a town that suddenly found itself in a corner of hell. Pretty cool stuff, though not recommended to those of a delicate nature…Jo Kaplan’s It Will Be Just Us is an uneven but atmospheric ride through a haunted swamp. You can feel the weight of Southern Gothic in its prose, which is sometimes too self-consciously clever for its own good (there were a couple of passages I had to re-read in order to discern what the actual actions taking place in the scenes were.) That said, does any genre do family dysfunction better than Southern Gothic? It Will Be Just Us fits comfortably in that gnarly, twisted tree. You can practically smell the fetid swamp water. The book is stronger (and scarier) when building the mystery as opposed to unraveling it in the final pages but overall does the tradition proud…

Shorter Takes: Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us starts out as a promising exploration of grief within the context of a refreshingly modern weird tale. Unfortunately it loses its way in the second half and ends up a fairly generic weird tale. I like what Moreno was going for, he just didn’t quite get there. The promise of the first half has me interested in checking out more of his work…Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia was one of my most pleasurable reads of the year. Perfectly titled, mixing elements of the ghost story and the weird tale, it is one of those books you disappear into every time you open it up…Way back in 2005 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go blew me away; it was one of my favorite books of the decade. Yet I never read any of his other work until this year’s Klara and the Sun. While it won’t go down as one of my favorite of the decade, it was still a thoroughly enjoyable book that managed to work on multiple emotional levels…As with Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Shirley Jackson is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Jackson’s work and how the social and cultural forces of the time influenced (and at times) defined it. Inspired me to reread Ruth Franklin’s excellent Jackson biography, A Rather Haunted Life…I’m a few years late to The Three-Body Problem. There has already been an infinite amount of debate around Liu Cixin’s book; I don’t have anything new to add but will say I found it a most fascinating read both for the ideas contained in the story and for the distinctly non-Western voice, which was refreshing…

It's time to close this one down, I think. There is always more I could write but this will never get published if I do. Once again, thank you for reading. See you in 2022!