A Reader’s Journey: 2024
I: Before
Shine on morning skyfire
Ablaze this final day
The autumnal end, the dawn of man
The centuries fade below my feet
--“As Embers Dress the Sky,” Agalloch
It’s empty here, fellow readers. Autumn morning light ablaze outside my window on the final day before the Pacific Northwest rainy season begins. Countless words have been spilled about the beauty of such light. On this morning, though, the light does not guide me to silent reveries or spiritual musings. Instead, the light illuminates the overstuffed bookshelves behind me, the contents of which lean dangerously forward and say:
Where are the words?
Where are the words? Pages upon pages of them passed before my eyes this year. Some good, some bad, too many indifferent. That’s to be expected. What made this year different is simply: none of them sparked into a fire ablaze. None of them tore open my mind, raced my heart, sent my head reeling with possibility. None of them made me say Yes! This is why I read, this is the reward, the sweet high I chase.
Of course it’s near impossible for a story to inspire such an emotional high. But this year not a single one did, and I can’t remember when that was last the case. Don’t get me wrong: as you’ll see below, I read plenty of work I enjoyed this year, and most of the time that’s enough. What I didn’t get is anything that inspired me, that gave me that delicious sense of frisson. And I don’t mean as a writer (I try not to wear my writer’s hat when doing this overview each year) but as a reader. Not a single book did I muse upon in the shower or during one of my walks. Not a single book did I spend the day impatiently anticipating until I had the chance to read in the evening.
Where are the words?
Where indeed? Confession time: I had a full essay written for this intro that I spent most of the year working on. I tossed it. (Well, it still exists in draft form, but you get the point.) I tossed it because I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was nothing more than an old man yelling at clouds rant about what doesn’t work for me in so much current fiction. Who wants to read that? I don’t and neither do you. So instead I’ve apparently written an old man yelling at clouds rant about not finding inspiration in anything I read this year.
This is, to put it charitably, unfair. The books are simply the books. Take them or leave them, they neither weigh nor prescribe judgment. And didn’t I say many did bring me pleasure? Isn’t that enough? If I’m not finding the books that truly inspire, maybe I’m just not looking hard enough. Maybe I’m changing the goalposts. Maybe I’m just cranky.
Or impatient. Time is relentless and mortality is unavoidable. The truth is: I’m scared. See, that spark, that excitement that a magical, challenging story brings is part of what makes me feel truly alive. I fear that if I’m not finding it, it means something has burned out in me. Some piece of the machinery broke during the journey and I don’t know how to locate it, much less fix it. I don’t know how many days I have on this planet but I do know I don’t want to spend them relentlessly searching for inspiration. I want to enjoy the journey, knowing that every so often I will read something that makes me go “Holy shit!” Or causes me to lie awake at night, pondering.
I simply want reassurance that the machinery is not broken. Here’s to next year…
II: After
I wrote the above in October. Since then, as you may have heard, there’s been an election here in the states. Anxiety and unease hang in the air as 2025 looms and, presumably, a lot of upheaval and change. I’ve since heard/read a number of comments about escapism in art, which seem to boil down to an argument about the value of art that takes you away from the world vs. art that confronts the present moment.
Wading into those waters is not my purpose here – I have neither the skill nor, at the present time, the energy. What’s of interest to me is how this cultural context—this anxiety—colors what we are looking for when we read fiction.
There is at least one nonnegotiable tenet. A story must be interesting and well told. It doesn’t have to be blazingly original – if you want to make the argument there hasn’t been anything original in fiction in the last 50 years I’m not necessarily going to argue (unless it’s late at night and I’m tired. Then I might even resurrect yesteryear words like “poppycock.”) This tenet is necessarily broad and, of course, largely subjective. No two readers are the same. And any further pronouncements I make on behalf of the royal “we” would be poppycock.
So let me get annoyingly personal for a moment. I read a lot of weird/horror fiction. I also read a lot of other fiction. Sometimes even I need a break from the bleakness and the continual erasing of boundaries that the best weird/horror fiction provides. Strangely, though, not when the world around me is saturated with anxiety. I just finished reading The Deluge, an extremely ambitious, complicated 2023 novel about climate change but also politics, relationships, cultural evolution, alternate history/future and much more. In other words: very, very uncomfortably on topic. I’m not sure that I agree with Stephen King that it’s “a modern classic.” What I do know is that I felt compelled to read it in a way I’ve not felt about any other book this year. In the post-election days, with my exhausted mind and soul awash in anxiety, I needed a book that confronts the big questions and the big fears. One that tells me it’s not necessarily going to be ok. Thanks to The Deluge, I’ve received my reassurance that the machinery is not broken. The frisson returned. There is no way to read a book like The Deluge and not be profoundly impacted.
One of the great gifts of fiction—of any kind of art—is to help us process our moment in history, both on a personal level and on a cultural level. It can push us to think about the big questions, the big concerns in different ways. The little collection of lies that make up a fictional tale reveal greater truths and a bigger picture. If we are now living in a “post-truth” society, then fictional tales can serve as something other than propagandic noise or simple escapism. They can hold a light to the complex beauty and frailty within us all and hand us a flashlight to locate a trail in the dark. We stand revealed, reminded of what it is to be human—and to be part of the human community.
And that’s an amazing, challenging, frightening and beautiful thing.
Books Read in the Past Year
I Am Behind You, John Ajvide Lindqvist
Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr., eds.
Blood’s A Rover, James Ellroy
The Illiad, Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Wolves Evolve: The Ulver Story, Tore Engelsen Espedal
The Puppet King and Other Atonements, Justin A. Burnett
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner [RE-READ]
Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation, Steven Hyden
Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, Dayal Patterson
This Wretched Valley, Jennifer Kiefer
The Book of Love, Kelly Link
Die A Little, Megan Abbott
The Acid King, Jesse P. Pollack
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, Brian Evenson
In Excess of Dark, Red Lagoe
Magic, William Goldman
Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
Make Them Die Slowly: The Kinetic Cinema of Umberto Lenzi, Troy Howarth
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
Climbing High: A Woman's Account of Surviving the Everest Tragedy, Lene Gammelgaard
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Last to Leave the Room, Caitlin Starling
You Like It Darker, Stephen King
Ghost Station, S.A. Barnes
The Great Movies, Volumes I-III, Roger Ebert
The Inconsolables: Stories, Michael Wehunt
Jungle of Stone: The Extraordinary Journey of John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya, William Carlsen
Carmilla, J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization, Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Haunting of Velkwood, Gwendolyn Kiste
In the Valley of the Headless Men, Hernandez, L.P.
Nicholas and Alexandra, Robert K. Massie
Small Town Horror, Ronald Malfi
Mia Zapata and The Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution, Steve Moriarty
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, John Farris
Not A Speck of Light, Laird Barron
A Sunny Place for Shady People, Mariana Enríquez
The Cult Films of Brigitte Lahaie, Cédric Grand Guillot
Glowing in the Dark: Collected Writings on the Horror Film 2011-2023, Orrin Grey
Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer
The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, Alan Lightman
Monstrilio, Gerardo Sámano Córdova
The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.: A Biography, Peter Ames Carlin
The Deluge, Stephen Markley
If you're new to Reader's Journey, welcome! I've been doing these for over a decade now. You can find the last five journeys on this site. A couple of notes:
Neither the long or short takes are meant to be comprehensive or proper reviews. They are just thoughts I had about the books while reading. I picture you and I sitting across from each other in a bar or cafe having a passionate discussion about books and reading over the drinks of our choice. Reading this on the screen of your choice isn’t as fun, but we have to make the best of it.
The list above is limited to new novels, collections and non-fiction books. I don't include re-reads (I did make one exception this year) or other formats, if only because I have to draw the line somewhere.
I don't write up non-fiction, even though I read plenty - musing about fiction is my métier. I did make one exception this year in order to share some thoughts about populism as a gateway.
King of the Hill is my annual review of what Stephen King and Joe Hill published in the last year. Alas, it’s been five years since I had anything to include from Joe…
Questions? Thoughts? Arguments? Leave a comment or reach out via my contact form. I’m always happy to hear from folks.
The Deluge
As mentioned above, Stephen Markley’s The Deluge was the most impactful novel I read this year. How could it be anything but? At a monstrous 880 pages, this is a BIG book about IMPORTANT things – chiefly climate change, but also politics, social issues, social media, addiction, human relationships, AI and just about anything else you might see in the news (regardless of where you get your news from.) The Deluge swings as big as a novel can possibly swing. That it doesn’t necessarily succeed in all aspects does not make the attempt any less impressive. You can’t read this book and be indifferent. I couldn’t, anyway.
The Deluge does not offer a straightforward narrative. The novel utilizes multiple major protagonists telling their story in first, second and third person. Additionally, there are interviews, magazine articles, transcripts, briefing documents, character thoughts in boxes next to the actual narration…but for all this, the book never felt messy to me, or difficult to follow. I wouldn’t even really call it experimental – when it plays with narrative form, it does so in an accessible manner. However, it does not dumb down the science or political wonkiness. I could see this putting off some readers, but for me it’s a major plus. The Deluge treats the reader like an adult.
The book’s biggest problems are in the area of characterization. Markley has an ability to create intriguing characters, but the book’s attempts to pull back from its grand scale and zero in on the human impact of its themes are not always successful. Though certain segments, like a man rushing into an inferno to save his daughter, work extremely well on an emotional level, often the character’s relationships don’t feel as lived in as Markley wants them to be. It’s a problem of narrative distance. Additionally, one thing that bugged me is the only character to have a redemptive arc also happened to be the least compelling character out of all the major protagonists. Perhaps one might make the argument that a shorter, tighter book would alleviate these characterization issues and better communicate the novel’s concerns.
I’m not going to make that argument. We live in a messy, complicated world and books that tackle large-scale reality head-on are all too rare. The Deluge is more than just its ambitions though. It is compelling reading—I honestly can’t believe how quickly I read it (less than two weeks.) It forces you to think about what we are doing to this pale blue dot we call home—and what this pale blue dot is doing in return. The Deluge doesn’t care about your comfort.
In the last 200 pages or so, lecturing takes over storytelling a few too many times as the book rushes to its conclusion. Yet somehow this only underlines the power of what has come before, making the story even more urgent. I forgive the book its flaws given everything it does accomplish.
This is an important book. It’s a scary, urgent book. What saddens me the most is it won’t be read by the people who would most benefit from reading it. There aren’t many of us who read this kind of challenging (in both length and subject matter) novel anymore, as demonstrated by the virtual sinking of the book when it was published (despite being published Simon & Schuster, a major publisher.) I only learned of it accidentally, on a podcast where the guest was asked what the one book he’d read was that he wished he could give to everyone. The guest made such an impassioned plea for The Deluge that I immediately went out and bought it in paperback – something I rarely do with new fiction authors anymore (much of my fiction reading is via Kindle.) Reading it, I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of it. That this maddeningly amazing novel wasn’t discussed, well, everywhere that books might be discussed. If not for the smallest chance of fate, I would have missed it.
Maybe we don’t deserve novels like this, novels unafraid to go big or go home. Maybe we’re too cynical, too privileged, too narrowly focused, too indifferent. Maybe we just don’t care.
This horror has no conclusion. It will not end in my daughter’s lifetime or even the lifetime of any descendent she can hope to love. She will know no other future outside this claustrophobic emergency, this coffin we are all now pounding on the lid of. She will know death and pain with unthinkable intimacy and likely become inured to the suffering pouring forth from every region of the world in order to keep going. No matter what ideologies arise, what myths we embrace, what technologies we invent, what dreams we offer, this crisis is effectively our eternity.
When I look at her fragile, beautiful face, when I watch her hold a pinch of dirt from our garden and go soft and quiet with mystery, I agonize over it. What will she think of us? What will she think of the expanding deserts, lost soil, acid seas, poisoned land, baking heat, horrific diseases, and a horizon black with storms? I imagine her asking me someday with the hot fury of a teenager’s clarity, Was it worth it? Was a raped and murdered world worth it for a few decades of excess? How did you let this happen? You all knew. Everyone knew. She will gaze up into this haunting vortex, the consequences of what was done in just a single human lifetime, with nowhere to run or hide or escape this uncharted and endless future.
All I will be able to tell her is that some of us tried, baby. Some of us fought like hell.
The Illiad
Initial notes upon reading The Illiad:
Boy, are my limbs tired!
Achilles is the original emo boy.
Speechifying then gutting, speechifying then gutting. Anoint with olive oil and repeat. Puts the splatterpunks to shame.
Where does the epic oral tale sit as effective storytelling in 2024? Push scholarly considerations to the side – does the tale connect with the reader? In The Illiad we never connect with the humans as humans—the poor sods simply have no agency. The gods, meanwhile, offer pettiness that knows no bounds, a veritable soap opera, dysfunction junction. Which is fine if it’s entertaining. Emily Wilson clearly wants us to feel the same powerful emotions she does when she reads The Illiad—her splendid, essential introduction makes this clear and is a moving piece of writing in its own right—but, as much as I loved the rhythm of the tale and the language (god, the language is a dream!) I struggled to get past the distance of ages and connect to the heart of the tale, if it even has one. I did not have this problem with her translation of The Odyssey, but The Illiad is about war, war and more war and the motivations/cultural context are too distant from our own times to connect. The need for glory, tribute and spoils isn’t something I can relate to or find much interest in. One could argue that The Illiad is really about the meaninglessness of war. No one is ever happy with their lot, even if they don’t die, and no one can so much as sniffle without a god intervening. The humans are no more than ciphers, chess pieces for squabbling gods. And ye gods--what good is being immortal if you are so bored you have to create drama all the freaking time? Maybe that’s a good argument against being immortal. If the gods were real, we would never have needed to invent reality television. The Illiad will always be extremely important historically. And this translation is both approachable and engaging. The question is whether the story itself still has anything to offer. I can’t quite decide if it does or not…
Monstrilio
Well…where do I begin with this one? How about with a note of thanks to my wonderful sister-in-law who recommended this strange yet not strange tale of a boy grown from a piece of lung. Córdova’s tale has been referred to as literary horror but if that’s true, it’s only in the broadest sense of both terms. The book covers the titular character’s life from conception (the mother feeding chicken broth to a piece of lung graphically removed from her deceased child) until he’s in his early twenties. Each chapter of his life is told from a different character’s viewpoint, which can leave the reader feeling uncentered until the latter half of the book, where the relationships take on a true life of their own. Monstrilio is an exploration of unconditional love, or maybe it’s better to say an exploration of how we deal with the cruelty and darkness in those we love. One could ladle a lot of academic BS onto this tale quite easily, but that would do it a tremendous disservice. Monstrilio is a book that genuinely surprises. How many books can you say that about? Not nearly enough. That alone makes Córdova’s debut a journey well worth taking.
A Sunny Place for Shady People
Last year, as part of my reader’s journey, I wrote quite a lot about Mariana Enríquez’s ambitious novel, Our Share of Night. It was one of—if not the—most celebrated horror novels of 2023 and there was much I admired about it while also being completely frustrated by it. This year sees Enriquez back on familiar territory with her latest short story collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People. It’s probably the best collection of the year in the genre and a firm reset for anyone who struggled with Night. Stories like “My Sad Dead” and “The Suffering Woman” are disturbing while radiating a deep empathy for their characters, most of whom have been broken at some point and the duct tape holding them together is stretched thin. The collection is not perfect – word choice can feel awkward (which could be a matter of translation) and some stories exhibit conceptual thinness. For every story like the latter, though, you get a story like “Different Colors Made of Tears” which feels like the strangest of giallos. And like a wonderfully strange giallo, I had no idea where it was going—except that it was probably somewhere quite dark. (Reader, it was.) I don’t think A Sunny Place for Shady People quite scales the heights of prior collections Things We Lost in the Fire or The Dangers of Smoking in Bed but it is a solid addition to a body of work that continues to challenge and unsettle. The collection’s best stories feature a new level of maturity in Enríquez’s writing.
Absolution
Back in 2014, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy accomplished something I thought impossible: three new, thoroughly current (modern) weird fiction stories that somehow also honored and encompassed the entire history of the genre. It’s hard to explain, but the trilogy was so thoroughly free of weird fiction tropes and told with such new, unique, even startling imagery – and yet one sensed the entire history of weird fiction behind it, as though the trilogy were a culmination of centuries of storytelling, but not beholden to that history. Basically, for this reader, it remains the single most exciting genre event in this still young century and certainly one of my favorite reads. All the more impressive because I generally don’t care for series storytelling – one and done is my preference.
There was no reason to believe there would be another book in the series, but here in 2024, seemingly out of nowhere, comes Absolution. Acting as both a prequel and a coda, Absolution contains three separate-but-related stories that interact with the ghosts of the original trilogy in some interesting ways. Through the first two stories I thought I’d found my favorite book of the year, but I struggled enough with the third story that I can’t in good faith say it was an unqualified success. To go into plot would miss the point – I would argue that all the Southern Reach books are more about an uneasy, strange atmosphere than concrete plot, especially because the stories manage the rare feat of being truly alien…and yet skewed enough towards the familiar that the reader almost grasps the enormity. Almost, but not quite.
I had a discussion with a friend who loved the original trilogy just as much as me, and for him Absolution was an unqualified success. He was able to set aside the approach of the third story that remained a blocking issue for me. And while I thought the middle story could have used some tightening, he found it perfectly paced. All of this demonstrates that the best books inspire different perspectives that go far outside the box of “good” or “bad.” We would both agree that if you’ve read and enjoyed the original trilogy, you should read Absolution, but reading the original trilogy is a requirement or Absolution is likely to be an incomprehensible experience.
The Book of Love
Kelly Link is, to put it bluntly, one of the greatest short story writers I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. In my personal pantheon, she is up there with Carver and Ligotti, a true master of the form. And now, decades into her writing career, she has written her first novel. Does her storytelling magic translate into extended length?
Yes, mostly. The Book of Love is easily one of 2024’s most enjoyable novels, utterly charming and fun to read. It’s not perfect—we’ll get to some nitpicks in minute—but artistically it must be considered a success. Link has not only made the leap into longform, she’s done it without losing or diluting her unique voice. To read Link at her finest—and this book often scales those heights—is to experience pure storytelling magic. Her prose is effortless. Link is one of those writers that makes it all look so simple. Her unpretentious, whimsical voice is always conversational and eminently approachable, no matter how weird her tales get.
Perhaps the most impressive achievement of The Book of Love is how it casually yet fully fleshes out its world, never overexplaining or otherwise laboring. The reader experiences this world (largely recognizable as our own) through the characters and their interactions, rather than endless paragraphs of text describing what a particular room looks like. And speaking of characters…one of the things I appreciate about The Book of Love is that every character is flawed and confused. This is not a good vs. evil tale at all. Beneath its oft-whimsical tone, The Book of Love has some meaningful things to say about death and love and how both color every step we take in this world.
The nitpicks are all common for a first-time novelist. At 600+ pages, the pacing is uneven. Towards the end—let’s say the last 100 pages or so—I began to feel fatigued with these characters, threatening the investment I had in the outcome of the tale. Fortunately this was not enough to damage the book or ruin the ending, but I do think the conclusion is the weakest part of the book—the “oh shit, I need to wrap this all up somehow” syndrome. A strangely perfunctory ending, which I think stems from the whole pacing issue. That said, the line writing itself never falters, and the Kelly Link magic carries through right to the final sentence. Unlike her short stories, I can’t say it stayed with me, but while reading, The Book of Love made me feel like a kid on a summer afternoon, lying under the trees and utterly lost in the magic of the tale. Man, what a gift.
The Haunting of Velkwood
Gwendolyn Kiste has been on my radar for a while, and with this year’s The Haunting of Velkwood I finally dove in. I was rewarded with a solid novel that evokes a feeling of overwhelming disconnection. Velkwood does not break any new ground, but it’s an assured book with a strong sense of author investment in the story. The latter point may seem obvious, but how many books have you read where the author seems disinterested in the story they are telling, moving from one plot point to another with all the enthusiasm of a kid trudging off to do homework? Kiste writes with a straightforwardness that captures the exhaustion and psychic damage of her characters without wallowing in jadedness. This prevents the reader from sinking under the book’s heavy themes of abuse and trauma – with neither a light touch nor a bludgeoning one, Kiste instead expertly threads the needle, allowing full empathy to flower for her characters and their plight. The book never comes across as preachy or, worse, trauma porn. If anything, Kiste is almost too subtle in the early going, too slow to acknowledge the reader has likely already connected the dots. But this is a minor quibble. Add Kiste to the list of voices doing important, necessary work in the genre—and telling damn fine tales while doing so.
Blood’s A Rover
James Ellroy is almost as a great of a writer as he thinks he is – which means he’s damn near genius-level. He would, of course, not agree with the “damn near” part of that phrase but we aren’t here to debate his occasionally funny, often tiresome public persona. We are here to talk about Blood’s A Rover, the concluding book of the Underworld USA trilogy and a genuinely thrilling, brilliant and ALIVE novel. You can call it historical fiction but Blood’s A Rover (and the other two volumes of the trilogy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) is as much alternate history fantasy as any book Harry Turtledove ever wrote. This is prime Ellroy: staccato sentences, broken characters, conspiracy and paranoia. A hardboiled wonderland where conflicting moral codes drag their unfortunate bearers forever through the mud, where life is cheap until it isn’t, where allegiances change as often as men shave. Few writers thrill me with their wielding of the English language like Ellroy does. He races, breathless, from one scene to another, the words spilling onto the page like drive-by bullets spraying across a storefront. For all the relentlessness, though, Ellroy’s approach is that of a disciplined, masterful storyteller. An American original in the best sense of the word.
This Wretched Valley
Telling your readers in the first few pages of a novel that none of the characters will survive requires serious self-confidence. You are essentially making a bet with the reader: you know how the story ends, there is no hope…but I will make it compelling enough that you want to read the book anyway. That, dear reader, your curiosity is too great. You have to know. Jenny Kiefer makes the bet with this, her debut novel…and damn if she doesn’t mostly pull it off. I read the entire novel in a single afternoon. It’s a classic “I can’t put it down, just one more page” book. I was frequently reminded of the Scott Smith’s The Ruins, one of my favorite horror novels of this century. Like Smith, Kiefer places a set of characters who already have underlying relationship tensions in a hostile remote environment that eventually turns out to be downright alien (in the weird fiction sense of the term—no little green men here.) Knowing the outcome from the beginning puts a lot of weight on these flawed humans—if the reader can’t empathize at least a little bit, they will likely abandon the story. I will say that Kiefer’s characterizations are occasionally more motivated by plot needs than their personalities—but Kiefer always plays fair with the reader. Sometimes you just want a good campfire tale, and This Wretched Valley delivers. Though perhaps the campfire over which it is shared should be in your backyard, and not deep in the wilderness…
The Inconsolables
Rare is the short story collection where every story works for a reader. And while not every story in Michael Wehunt’s 2023 collection The Inconsolables worked for this reader, most of them did. More importantly, in the stories where all the elements cohere, the reader is witness to a strange, unsettling power that only the best weird fiction offers. The final story, “An Ending (Ascent)”, was one the best stories I read this year, locating a relatable point of emotional connection that some of the other stories lack. Perhaps not surprisingly, “An Ending (Ascent)” is also the one story not constrained by genre, bringing in elements of sci fi to offer a thoughtful if uncomfortable meditation on the concept of immortality. Other strong stories include “Caring for a Stray Dog (Metaphors)” and “The Tired Sounds. A Wake.”, both of which showcase the modern weird tale at its finest. Wehunt’s one weakness, in this reader’s eyes, is an overreliance on meta cleverness that leaves otherwise fine stories inert – these tales are too busy eating their own tail to get under the reader’s skin. And let me be upfront: meta stories are a pet peeve of mine, so what doesn’t work for me may work very well for other readers. Wehunt is a talented writer whose best work is still ahead of him but The Inconsolables is well worth the time for genre fans.
Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies trilogy
Populism, as it relates to art, is a concept that has been on my mind the last year. In our fragmented culture, populism has become something of a dirty word, if not downright sinister. I think the fear is that a populist voice must somehow water down their passions, generalize, make sure there is nothing too strong or weird in the soup. Or, worse, the idea that a populist voice can only be achieved through dumbing down. And that’s a legit fear, but the best of Roger Ebert’s writing offers the positive side: an accessible doorway to art and ideas that might otherwise seem unapproachable. Ebert is not the best cinema writer I’ve ever read but you never, ever doubt his passion. Even when I don’t agree with him (he never understood horror cinema, for example, there are less than a half dozen out of 300 in the three volumes of Great Movies), he makes a clear and thoughtful case for where he is coming from. His work no longer functions as a gateway – it’s now too dated for that – but it offers a decently comprehensive overview of the first century of cinema and renders complicated nuances easily digestible without dumbing down. That last is the rarest of gifts and one sorely lacking in our current culture.
King of the Hill
Question: Will there be any reader for whom You Like It Darker, Stephen King’s 75th (give or take) published book and seventh short story collection, is their first Stephen King book? It really doesn’t seem likely, does it? Constant Readers are well-versed in his bibliography, casual readers have likely read at least a few of the classics, and even new readers don’t seem likely to start with You Like It Darker – not when Night Shift, Skeleton Crew and so many others exist. I found myself musing on this question as I worked through Darker, in part because I tried to imagine an unknown author submitting these stories for publication and finding it hard to believe that they would be published.
Not, I stress, because they are terrible. They are not King’s best work, but they are readable and tick all the boxes that we would expect a King collection to tick. And that’s the big question. King is such a giant of the field that we simply accept that he tells a story in a certain way, hits certain themes, and basically keeps on keepin’ on. As it should be! King stories are uniquely King. We’d have it no other way. That all said – I don’t think a single story in Darker would get published on its own merit. They exist in their own universe that really has nothing to do with the horror genre today – or with literature at large. King is an anachronism, his stories still locked to the approach to genre fiction he pioneered in the 70s and 80s, no matter how many references to COVID he throws in.
If Darker was someone’s first King book, and they were only vaguely aware of his reputation, they’d certainly come away wondering what the fuss was about. Several times as I was reading, I felt King was losing his touch. As much as anything, he seems to want to write mysteries these days, and he’s not a good mystery writer. (There are also way too many detectives in these stories.) Increasingly his stories are hinging on flimsy premises (this has been evident on and off in his previous two collections) that even his generally ace characterizations can’t save. And I’m not sure what I think of the callbacks to his earlier work – “Rattlesnakes,” arguably the best story in Darker, revolves around Vic Trenton, the father from Cujo. The story is by no means a sequel, but by bringing in a known character and all the history, King undercuts the tale he wants to tell now. A less charitable view would say it’s a cop-out, but I don’t think it’s that. It just left a strange taste in my mouth.
Unsurprisingly for a writer rapidly approaching his eighties, most of Darker’s stories feature protagonists between 60-80 years of age and it’s this that kept me reading, whatever struggles I otherwise had. It’s fascinating to see King truly wrestle with questions of mortality in ways that only those of us blessed with a long life can. There’s a deep melancholy in Darker, a melancholy I’m not sure King even knows is there, and that stuck with me more than any individual story. I’ve been reading King for three-quarters of my life and while I logically know there are only so many more years I get to read new King books, emotionally I can’t imagine a world without King. Morbid? No, just confronting my own mortality, as King himself is doing. On this scale, it doesn’t matter whether Darker is “good” or not. The fact that it exists is gift enough for this Constant Reader.
Everything is still quiet on the Joe Hill front, so far as I can tell. He did pop up in a few horror documentaries this year. I’ve been thinking about his work recently, and I sure hope there is more in the future. He carries the torch for a certain kind of standalone everyman/woman popular storytelling that feels increasingly rare in our niche-driven, lore and series-saturated society. I miss his voice.
Short Takes
The modern author writing an authentic-feeling pulp-noir novel set in mid-century America has a considerable challenge: they must place themselves in the novel’s era and erase all memory of history and cultural context that has taken place since. It’s something all writers of historical fiction grapple with, and it has shipwrecked more than a few books before they can ever properly set sail. One of the most impressive achievements of Megan Abbott’s 2005 debut novel, Die A Little, is that she succeeds at capturing the vibe of 50’s-era paperback pulp without ever sounding remotely postmodern or self-conscious. She never tries to do more than spin a good yarn and Die A Little is great, quick read, the kind of book you use as a palette cleanser between more complex/challenging books or pick up when you need pure escapism…
William Goldman made most of his impact as screenwriter (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men and Misery are just a few titles in his impressive list of credits) but he also wrote a handful of popular novels, including The Princess Bride—which seems likely to live on forever, but largely due to the movie (which he did write the screenplay for as well.) 1976’s Magic is another of his novels for which he also wrote the screenplay. I came across the 1978 film decades ago and could barely stomach the hammy overacting of a young Anthony Hopkins. Still, puppets are a horror trope for a reason and I’ve always wanted to read the book. And…eh. Goldman was known as a great writer of dialogue and, fellow readers, there is *a lot* of dialog in Magic. The smarmy showbiz witticism approach quickly grows tired as it escapes the mouths of stock characters with the depth of a wafer after it has been ground to dust. I imagine Magic was a more interesting read in 1976 but today it’s little more than a curio. Worth a look if you find it in your deceased aunt’s trunk but don’t spend actual cash on it…
Speaking of the 70s, John Farris’s All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By is very much a novel of its time. So much exposition! There are really only a half dozen or so scenes in the entire book; the rest consists either of one character telling backstory to another or of extremely long, detailed descriptive passages (a lot of research was done for the book and clearly Farris wanted to utilize all of it.) That’s how a lot of genre novels were written at the time. Popular books could be, for a lack of a better word, slow. Beyond the question of approach though, modern readers will likely be uneasy with Hunt’s handling of race. While historically accurate for the novel’s time period (Southern gothic, roughly 1900-1950), there’s a lot of assumed privilege in both the concept of the novel and in the writing itself. Despite these major caveats, I found Hunt a mildly pleasurable read – the characters and setting are compelling and there’s a decent horror tale beneath it all, but not unlike a lot of classic pulp, you have to account for the era it was written in. For some readers, that is understandably not going to be enough…
Ronald Malfi is a prolific horror/thriller writer whose books are solid escapist reads. In the epigraph to this year’s Small Town Horror Malfi states he’s “thinking of Peter Straub” and you can sense the late writer’s influence in the novel’s atmosphere. Malfi lacks the literary layering of Straub’s prose, which is not necessarily a fault but does frequently render passages bland if functional. The storyline manages to hold its mysteries quite well until the ending pages. About those pages, though…it’s tough to say if the ending worked; the last chapter might well have been a different novel. I appreciate the bleak note and how it calls into question all that you’ve read up until that point. I’m just not sure if the jarring feeling I got is the jarring feeling Malfi intended. Still, it’s a solid horror novel overall and a worthy addition to Malfi’s bibliography…
Daphne du Maurier’s 1971 collection Don’t Look Now and Other Stories (also published as Not After Midnight and Other Stories) contains five expertly crafted tales. Of course “Don’t Look Now” is a highlight, though it is also a rare case of the movie being even better than the book. That’s no knock; the movie is an all-time classic meditation on grief that manages to be both scary and genuinely sad. Those emotions also loom large in the story but are arguably more subtle. Second story “Not After Midnight” has a plot that falls apart if you think about it too much but conveys unease through some expert character work. “A Border-Line Case” is an odd reading experience and cannot help but feel dated, yet it held my attention. “The Way of the Cross” forces you to spend a lot of time with annoying people who gradually discover they are annoying; your tolerance for that sort of thing will dictate your enjoyment of the well-structured story. For this reader, final tale “The Breakthrough” was the highlight of the collection. Elements of sci-fi and horror combine to a surprisingly moving tale that echoes many of the themes found in “Don’t Look Now.” Morality and ethics are complicated in the tale; it is rich with nuance and never preachy. Honestly, the window dressing might be dated, but the core concerns feel extremely relevant in the age of AI.
Even Shorter Takes
I quite enjoyed Caitlin Starling’s 2019 debut novel The Luminous Dead. This year saw the publication of her third novel, The Last to Leave the Room. Room is a solid and at times great doppelganger novel that injects a healthy dose of sci-fi into its horror mix…Speaking of sci-fi, Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark is an occasionally devastating post-apocalyptic novel that avoids cliche, offering instead a series of intertwining character studies that showcase a deep empathy for the human predicament…
I don't normally include re-reads in this list, but it has been so many years since I initially read As I Lay Dying it was practically a new read anyway. Faulkner's brilliant tale of the Bundren family's quest to bury their matriarch in her hometown still enthralls; I read the entire book in an afternoon. Characters are richly drawn with a minimum of fuss. Even though I grew up across the country and decades later than the book's setting, it still conjured powerful feelings of the small town I was raised in and its inhabitants. Faulkner remains one of the greatest American writers. I can't picture a time when that won't be the case…I’m well over a decade late here but Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus offered a soothing balm for my anxiety and depression this past summer. Escapist? Fluff? I don’t care, at the time I needed to a story that spoke to the hopeless romantic in me, which has been pretty much snuffed out as of late. And it did a fine job, reminding me that flowers do occasionally sneak up through the cracks in the concrete…
In Conclusion
Every year I somehow I spend the entire year working on this post and I never write the conclusion until I’m actually posting the damn thing. I suppose there is never a conclusion to the Reader’s Journey, right? Not for this reader, anyway, not until that dark day comes when the body fails. If any of these books intrigue you and you have the means, please consider purchasing and supporting the writers, independent bookstores and small presses. There are no small gifts in the arts; everything counts. Thank you for reading and I’ll see you next year!