This Storm, by James Ellroy / **** ½

About a year ago, I opened my review of Perfidia, the first entry in James Ellroy’s Second L.A. Quartet, by comparing reading Ellroy to a shot of whiskey – one that burns all the way down, but also energizes you, as long as you can handle the initial unpleasantness. That feeling goes double for This Storm, Perfidia‘s followup, which feels even more visceral, aggressive, overwhelming, and phantasmagoric than its predecessor, as World War II kicks off, only to be greeted by a slew of corruption, war profiteering, xenophobia, and more.

If Perfidia centered around the rise in anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of Pearl Harbor, This Storm focuses on the larger impact of World War II, and how so many took advantage of a national crisis to make a buck. That’s a bit less clear of a throughline, to be sure, and as a result, I don’t think This Storm is quite as tight or focused as Perfidia (if books that are this long and this dense with plot can be said to be “tight”). It took me quite a bit to find the theme of This Storm, which seems to boil down to how often political movements are just fronts for greed, narcissism, and self-gain, and how hatred and anger just play into them all the more.

None of that really matters while you’re reading This Storm, though, as Ellroy sprays you with the dual firehoses of his prose and his plotting. Of the second, once again, to summarize This Storm is a bit of a fool’s errand, but let me make an effort: in the wake of Pearl Harbor, three cases – two old, one new – begin to draw together. A body is unearthed after a storm in a park. That same park, once destroyed by a blaze, begins to inspire questions about the origin of that fire. And two corrupt cops are killed in a clubhouse designed for quite “hush hush” activities. How all of this ties into a shipment of gold, or a possible meeting of various world powers for post-war planning, or Dudley Smith’s increasingly psychotic actions and devotion to the trappings of fascism, or a young woman seduced into the police force after a tragic accident, or Hideo Aishida’s continued complex relationship with the aforementioned Smith, or a few police who are growing a bit of a conscience…well, it gets complicated. (Did I mention that the “Dramatis Personae” in the back of the book features at least ninety names? Oh, it does.)

But as with all noir, that plot is just a delivery service for the themes and the prose, both of which Ellroy has in spades. Immersing us unblinkingly into a sea of racism, violence, corruption, sex, scandal, and brutality, This Storm once again isn’t for the  light of heart. Ellroy never looks away from the ugliness of sexism and racism of the time period, inundating the reader with slurs, insults, hate crimes, and worse. It’s done with a purpose – this is far from endorsement – but it can be hard to take, and I can’t honestly say how it would feel to read this as someone in any of these groups. Would I appreciate the fact that Ellroy depicts racism in its worst form and refuses to look away from it, or would it be too hateful? I can’t say, but it’s something that people should know before they jump in.

And then there’s Ellroy’s prose. For some, his vicious excision of as many words as possible is exasperating and hard to read; for me, it’s exhilarating and intoxicating. Here’s a short bit from the first chapter:

Band 3 popped sound. Breuning and Carlisle bullshitted. Who shivved the Dudster? Their rambunctious kids. This meter maid with jugs out to here.

Breuning and Carlisle gassed. They hashed out the Fed’s phone-tap probe. The PD was knee-deep in shit. It’s a nail-biter.

City Hall was bugged and tapped, floor-to-rafter. Rival cop factions spied on each other. Grifter cops, tonged-up cops, cop strikebreakers. The Feds took note and launched a probe.

Cop fiefdoms. Cop thieves. Cops in the Silver Shirts and German-American Bund. Calls to the DA’s office. Calls to Mayor Fletch Bowron. Detective Bureau cops be scaaared.

Elmer was scared. He ran a call-girl ring. He peddled flesh to the L.A. elite. He made biz calls from the Vice squadroom.

The radio browned out. Shit – line crackle, static, hiss. Elmer twirled the dial. He caught some luck there. Good Lord – it’s Cliffie Stone’s Hometown Jamboree.

It’s auld lang syne for displaced crackers. That was him, defined. Cliffie connoted hayrides and moonshine. Cliffie brought back Wisharts, North Carolina. Wisharts was Klan Kountry. Geography is destiny.

That’s about what to expect for 600 pages – and to some degree, that’s relatively clear for  Ellroy. By the time you’re getting into interrogations, hallucinations, opium habits, and conversations, it all either works for you or it doesn’t. Me? I couldn’t love it more – Ellroy’s staccato, rapid-fire prose overwhelms me, immersing me in his horrifying world, tossing me adrift in a sea of horrible people, violent crimes, selfish motivations, and bad people needing to take at least one good action to balance the scales.

And really, those are the moments that stand out the most in This Storm – amidst the awfulness, amidst the violence and brutality, there are those who realize that some things are beyond the pale, and a line has to be drawn. It’s not much, but it’s something. That’s the heart of the best noir, and it’s the tiny ray of optimism in Ellroy’s nightmare world – the thought that people might just be able to see the darkness and make a stand, even if it’s only a small one.

Postscript: One last note, before I forget: this is not the place to start with Ellroy. Even setting aside how his prose has only become more and more…Ellroy-ish with each passing book, This Storm assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the events of Perfidia. (You don’t have to have read it the day before or anything, but a brush up will help you know a few things going on here.) Like most fans, I would tell you that the original L.A. Quartet is the place to start – The Black Dahlia would work, but L.A. Confidential is a classic for a reason. Alternatively, American Tabloid was my gateway – Ellroy’s first volume in the Underworld USA series – and I never looked back.

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The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal, by Carey Pietsch and the McElroys / **** ½

“Petals to the Metal” is, for my money, the first truly great arc of The Adventure Zone. Oh, “Here There Be Gerblins” was a lot of fun, and “Murder on the Rockport Limited” gave us a sense of how good Griffin was at designing stories without the backing of premade campaign notes. But “Petals” was the first time that I found myself truly swept up in this story – not just loving the goods and absurdity, but genuinely excited and riveted by what was unfolding – namely, a multi-episode Fast and the Furious/Fury Road car race extravaganza that was imaginative, thrilling, fun, and absolutely wild.

As a result, I was maybe more excited for this volume of the TAZ graphic novel adaptations than any other – and more worried. After all, “Gerblins” had the advantage of adapting a rocky arc and lining it up with the rest of the series and the plots/characterization to come, while “Rockford” was a murder mystery with a solid plot but a lot of goofs to enjoy. And the McElroys and artist Carey Pietsch knocked both of those out of the park, truly finding a way to capture the spirit of each arc while also embracing the comic book medium.

So it’s a relief to say that, on the whole, Petals to the Metal continues the winning streak of Pietsch and the McElroys, adapting the arc smoothly and in such a way that plays both to the fans of the podcast and to new readers. More than anything else, I felt while reading Petals that everyone involved managed to streamline the arc wonderfully while neglecting none of the best aspects, to say nothing of truly celebrating the silliness that makes TAZ such a joy in the first place. From the opening apocalyptic visions during a lunar carnival to a glorious “edit” between two chapters, from some memorable encounters with plants to a reunion with an old friend, Petals nails the first half of the story, giving it all a momentum and throughline that nicely sets up the real draw of the book: that amazing car race.

That car race really gives Carey Pietsch a chance to shine, and by and large, shine she does, as she brings the plethora of bizarre wagons to life, trying to sketch out the same personality in brief encounters that Griffin could do through verbal descriptions. Giant hamster wheels, octopus water tanks, flaming boars – the race has it all and then some, giving you the wild imagination and scope that made the arc so memorable in the first place. More than that, Pietsch plays more and more with wordless tableaus and neat panel design here (and, really, throughout the volume), giving the work a confidence and playfulness that helps the material all the more. Pietsch’s art can be cartoonish, but that works for the goofy heart of material, and makes her ability to pull emotion out of her characters’ faces all the more effective and powerful (particularly when it comes to the Bureau’s director, whose facial expressions are gut-punches to anyone who knows some of what’s to come).

The race also does underline Pietsch’s one area of weakness, though, and that’s action sequences. Pietsch tends to favor short, quick panels for dynamic scenes, and while that’s a neat idea, that means that it can get difficult to follow some of what’s going on sometimes. TAZ has never been an action-heavy story, so that’s largely worked, but it takes more of a toll here, with some of the car action being a bit incomprehensible unless you’ve listened to the podcast before – and honestly, even as someone who has listened, there are a few scenes that left me a bit confused as to what happened. It’s the one weak spot in the volume, but given this arc’s focus on action, it definitely hits Petals a bit harder than it has the previous stories.

In the end, though, that weakness isn’t enough to truly hurt Petals, especially if you’re already a fan. It’s a treat to see how this crew adapts the arc, streamlining the diversions, adding in new jokes, strengthening character beats, and even righting wrongs (without getting into specifics, it’s no surprise that the crew addresses their one major regret about this storyline; even so, I was delighted at how they found a way to handle it that stayed true to the story in more ways than one), all while never missing the spirit or appeal of one of the first truly great stretches of the original show. I can’t say that the graphic novels will ever surpass or supplant my love of the original series, but they make for a worthy, satisfying companion piece to this thing that I loved, and that’s good enough for me.

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Network Effect, by Martha Wells / **** ½

Ah, Murderbot. What a treat it is to come back to you. After marathoning the novella-length entries in the Murderbot Diaries series, I was excited to check out Network Effect, Martha Wells’s first novel-length entry in the series. On the whole, it’s every bit as good as the rest of the series; while the storyline can get a little convoluted and dense at times, it more than makes up for it with some ambitious storytelling gambits in its back half – plus, of course, the joy of Murderbot’s usual dry, witty, snarky narration throughout.

By now, if you’ve read the novellas, you’ll know the broad outline of what to expect here. And let me stop there, because you really should read the novellas before you jump into Network Effect. I assumed that Wells’s first full novel in the series might be a good entry point for new readers, but Network Effect really trades off of the earlier books in some ways that make it far better as the fifth entry in a series than it does as a standalone. That’s not so much true from a plotting perspective – by and large, this is a self-contained story, like all of the entries – but there are some recurring characters that definitely will make more sense if you’ve read earlier books, and more than that, there’s Murderbot’s current status in the universe, which can be…complicated.

So, the basic rundown: Murderbot is a SecUnit – a robot with organic parts designed to function as a security unit for hire for various organizations and corporations. Only Murderbot (its own private name for itself, after a horrifying incident) hacked the software keeping it under control, and has spent several books trying to figure out what exactly its purpose is now that it’s “free”. Those adventures have led to friendships with other robots and AIs, as well as a surprising bond with one particular group of humans who have managed to stop seeing a rogue SecUnit as property and have thought of Murderbot as something akin to a friend. Meanwhile, Murderbot’s discomfort and disinterest in the world rarely change outwardly, with the unit far preferring to watch TV rather than listen to dumb humans.

Which brings us back to Network Effect, in which a simple mission turns very strange when Murderbot and the daughter of one of its favorite humans – and some others – find themselves captured by a ship piloted by some very unusual inhabitants. And as if protecting the daughter isn’t quite enough, well, Murderbot soon realizes that it has a connection to that ship that means Actions Must Be Taken.

From there, the plot unfolds in pretty typical Murderbot fashion – lots of corporate intrigue and greed, some interesting world-building that hints at a very complex science-fiction world, and great action sequences. And, as I mentioned, that plot can get a little convoluted at times – there end up being a lot of humans to keep track of, and not enough of them stand out or really stay memorable, and while the choice to essentially group all of the book’s villains together makes sense, it ends up making a lot of them forgettable and or confusing some of the layout of scenes. What’s more, though, the final explanation of what’s going on really opens up the world of the series in some big ways that need a bit more explanation than we get, and as such, it all feels a little Calvinball-esque as we hit the climax.

For all of those minor issues, though, Network Effect is a blast throughout, and so much of that comes back to the voice and persona of Murderbot. Snarky, dismissive, disinterested, and yet somehow a better creation than it wants to admit, Murderbot makes for such a good narrator that every chapter is just another treat, no matter what’s going on. Whether tuning out from human arguments to watch TV or finding itself unable to speak because someone has acted with kindness toward it, there’s something wonderfully awkward and introverted about this lethal piece of machinery that’s come to true life – emotions with which I can deeply empathize. And as if that’s not enough, Wells breaks things up in some neat ways in the book’s final section – ways that I don’t want to spoil, but add some neat new dimensions to her writing and the tone of the books.

The best thing I can say about Network Effect is that it’s perfectly of a piece of the rest of the series – there aren’t major twists or surprises here, just more of the same. And that may sound like faint praise, but when “the same” means this narration, this fun world and universe, this great style for action sequences, and this sense of fun and humor – well, that’s not faint at all, is it?

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The Devil Finds Work, by James Baldwin / *****

When I reviews Notes on a Native Son, I talked about how reading James Baldwin’s discussion of cinema was like catnip to me. So it should be no surprise that, when I found out that Baldwin had published a book entirely focused on film criticism, it jumped to the top of my reading list. The Devil Finds Work is that book – a mixture of personal essay, memoir, and criticism that blends into something all the richer, all while being driven by Baldwin’s intelligent, insightful, and dryly funny voice.

Unsurprisingly, The Devil Finds Work is very much a book about what it’s like as an African-American to watch white cinema, giving a new perspective on very familiar films. Yes, Baldwin spends some times on some seminal race relation films – and we’ll come to those soon – but he also talks about some of the films he saw as a child, and the scattered reactions to them along the way. Indeed, the book’s early going focuses on Baldwin’s initial experiences with cinema and some of the formative ones with theater, including a viewing of the famous Haitian-set version of Macbeth staged by Orson Welles. To hear Baldwin talk about these early experiences is to get a reminder of just what a potent and powerful tool cinema can be, and how it can open our eyes to so much.

But The Devil Finds Work really comes to life as Baldwin digs through cinema to look at landmarks of racial depictions on screen to provide commentary. Unsurprisingly, The Birth of a Nation gets a withering, sarcastic evisceration, but just when you think that Baldwin is ready to entirely dismiss the film as cartoonishly racist beyond understanding, he finds an insight into the film’s view of interracial children that allows him to unpack its cultural meaning in terms that I had never considered, and turns it into something more than just horrendously, monstrously racist.

More fascinating, though, is Baldwin’s approach to “progressive” film milestones, particularly In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which receive equal absurd confusion and dry commentary. Through discussing both films, Baldwin makes it clear how much movies like this are designed by white audiences for white audiences, laying bare just how little the actions of the films’ characters – and especially those of Sidney Poitier in both cases – make any sense to an African American audience. That may be most heartbreaking when he’s discussing the way Dinner understands nothing about the complex relationship between black fathers and sons, but really, throughout both films, Baldwin’s insight and analysis is strong and thoughtful, constantly coming back to the same question:

The root motive of the choices made can be gauged by the effect of these choices: and the effect of these deliberate choices, deliberately made, must be considered as resulting in a willed and deliberate act – that is, the film which we are seeing is the film we are intended to see. Why? What do the filmmakers wish us to learn?

There is plenty more to devour here, from Baldwin’s account of his time in Hollywood struggling to write a screenplay out of Malcolm X’s autobiography (side note: one can’t read this section and not lament that we never got to hear Baldwin’s thoughts on Spike Lee’s Malcolm X) to his complex evisceration of Lady Sings the Blues (which “is related to the black experience in about the same way, and to the same extent, that Princess Grace Kelly is related to the Irish potato famine: by courtesy”). But what everyone remembers – and rightfully so – is his closing discussion of The Exorcist. For Baldwin, the once outwardly religious preacher turned racial commentator, the idea of seeing a film about the nature of evil is compelling and yet something he feels unsure about. But his final take on the film is something wholly more powerful and gutpunching than I expected.

For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real for you, nor are you real for yourself. The devil has no need of any dogma—though he can use them all—nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He does not levitate beds, or fool around with little girls: we do.

The mindless and hysterical banality of evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks—many, many others, including white children— can call them on this lie, he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet.

This insight – this sense of how The Exorcist comforts us by turning evil into something external and ignoring our own culpability – is the sort of thing that Baldwin makes look effortless, and yet lingers for so long. If you can pass that “we do” without even a pause, more power to you.

In the end, The Devil Finds Work probably isn’t “essential” in the same way that The Fire Next Time or Notes of a Native Son are. It’s brilliant, as ever with Baldwin, and it’s insightful and thoughtful, but if you only read one, you should probably read one of those. But if you’re a lover of film, or already a fan of Baldwin, this one is unmissable – it’s riveting, engaging, entertaining, and thought-provoking, and that doesn’t even get into the craft of it all.

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Journeys Through Faladon: The Titan Divide / ****

I get some interesting sales pitches when someone asks me to review a copy of their book, but I don’t think I’ve ever had one where a book was pitched as being co-written by more than 40 co-authors. But such is the case with Journeys Through Faladon: The Titan Divide, which was written using a platform called ForgeFiction – a platform designed to allow collaborators to create a story together. Here, an online community known as “The Ruinsong Order” came together to write the first volume of an epic  fantasy series, with more than 40 members coming together to write a single novel.

Given that idea, you’d expect The Titan Divide to feel far more fractured and uneven than it does. Instead, the book flows genuinely well, to the degree to where the “40 co-authors” thing faded so quickly from the front of my mind as to be a non-factor. Instead, what I got was an engaging, imaginative piece of fantasy, with a slew of interesting races, some neat plot reversals, and a generally solid plot; sure, there are some issues here – and we’ll get to those – but on the whole, The Titan Divide is good enough that it overcomes its potentially gimmicky origins.

The Ruinsong Order has brought to life a rich fantasy world, populated by races that come to life and work in interesting ways. From our main protagonist, a stone giant named Ürbon, to a lunatic wizard who’s the last of his race, from a fearsome lizard to a warrior demigod, Faladon is a world populated with enough races to really bring the setting to vivid life. There’s a genuine sense of life and history to this world, and rather than feeling like the cluttered product of forty minds pitching over each other, The Titan Divide flows seamlessly, giving us a sprawling land where races can be so isolated as to never learn from each other.

The plot is a bit complicated and incident-heavy; suffice to say, what starts as a prison escape becomes a series of partnerships against great evils, encounters with vampire armies, raids on evil temples, conflicts with dwarf clans, verbal jousting with mad mages, quests for magical artifacts, and much more. As I said, it’s an incident-heavy plot, with every step of the journey complicated by another new side quest or another party member, but it all generally works, flowing together and giving us a nice sense of adventure throughout, as well as setting up a solid core crew of characters who bounce off of each other and build a nice rapport. (I was particularly a fan of that broken last member of his race, whose anarchic sensibility adds a wonderful element to the series.) Now, things definitely get a bit too complicated by the end – I was struggling to keep track of some of the threads, and the book’s decision to let its overarching plot not truly come out until the final pages is an odd one – but on the whole, the book works well and entertains nicely.

None of which is to say that it’s all flawless. Now, a disclaimer about this next paragraph: I’m told that the version of the book I read wasn’t the revision of the book that would be published, and that the finalized version would be much tighter. Nonetheless, with forty different people working on the book, it’s more frustrating than ever to find as many grammar errors and issues throughout the book, breaking up the flow of the book and the story with fragments, comma splices, homonym mixups, and more. Add to that too many repeated words and phrases (especially in a row, with some repeated verbatim within the space of a single sentence), and you can’t help but wish that one of those forth had been a proofreader, or at least in charge of reading back over things. It’s the kind of thing that makes self-publishing feel second rate, even when it’s creating rich, interesting tales like this one. Now, if the final version is stronger, that’s all the better, but I can’t help but discuss these issues, especially since I don’t know if they were all addressed between now and published.

But for all of that, I’d recommend Journeys Through Faladon on the whole; it’s an engaging, exciting piece of adventure, with a rich imagination and a series of fantasy races that come to life wonderfully. It handles its lore well, letting it unfold as part of the story rather than turning into info dumps, and more importantly, it lets that lore influence the world instead of just being background for its own sake. Would I like it to have gotten a bit more polish, and maybe a little bit of streamlining in the back section? Sure. But there’s no way I expected a book cowritten by forty people to flow as well and be as enjoyable as this one turned out.

Faladon.com

Of Mice and Minestrone, by Joe R. Lansdale / *****

One of the things I’ve always loved about Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard books is the way he’s avoided ever giving much of an “origin” story for the men’s friendship. Hap Collins is a white martial arts expert who went to jail during the Vietnam war for being a conscientious objector; Leonard Pine is a gay black man who fought in that same war. And they’re friends, and have been their whole lives. Simple enough, and like most friendships, it simply is – there’s no big dramatic story behind it. They’re just devoted friends.

So you could forgive me for being a little antsy about seeing that the short story collection Of Mice and Minestrone was subtitled “Hap and Leonard: The Early Years.” Did we really need a series about the two of them as teenagers solving crimes? But I shouldn’t have worried, because Lansdale gives us a volume that’s on par with any other entry in the series, with at least one story that ranks among the best the series has ever been.

In general, Of Mice and Minestrone gives us five short tales set in the younger years of our heroes. We start things off with “The Kitchen,” a short vignette from Hap’s childhood about dinner with at his grandmother’s house, giving us a sense of the family life that led to the man we’ve come to know. But the collection really kicks off with the title tale, a two-part story in which Hap takes a job at the police station, only to get an ugly look behind the scenes at how justice works in Texas – and how it works differently depending on your race and who you happen to know. It’s a Leonard-free tale again, but as Lansdale says in his introduction, it’s a story that gives you a window into why Hap is the way he is, and how he sees the world – both in terms of justice and in terms of race.

Leonard enters into things in “The Watering Shed,” showing the aggression and lack of fear that defines him so well as he drags Hap along with him into a backwater bar that doesn’t see a lot of black visitors. That same attitude shows up in the collection’s longest tale, “Sparring Partner,” in which the two teenage friends get involved in a boxing club with some scummy managers, some stoked racial fears, and a lot of dangerous fighters. Both of these are pure Hap and Leonard gems, with Leonard’s swagger backed up by Hap, even through his anxiety, and the two men trading verbal quips with each other as much as they are the unwilling straight men around them. As ever, Lansdale plots beautifully, letting the story unfold in a way that pulls you along while making clear that the draw here is the characterization and the writing, and the plot is just a way to deliver all of that.

But if there’s a story that really reminds me why I love Hap and Leonard, it’s the closing tale, “The Sabine is High.” The plot here is nonexistent; put simply, it takes place right after Leonard has returned home from Vietnam, and not long after Hap has been released from jail for his refusal to serve. The two men reunite and go fishing, and while they’re there, they talk about their experiences. That’s all there is to the story…and yet, what you get there is something beautiful and effective, as these two men open up to their best friend in the world about their horrors and trauma in these places, whether it’s Leonard’s guilt about his actions in the war or Hap’s PTSD about walking through the prison yard. There’s never a moment where Hap or Leonard spells it all out, or talks in therapy terms, or gets too broad; no, it’s just these two old friends telling stories, talking in a way that’s as close as they will ever get to opening their hearts. That Lansdale ends it on such a perfectly hilarious line that captures the nature of this friendship (and, indeed, a lot of male friendships) only makes it better. Really, “The Sabine is High” may be my favorite Hap and Leonard story in many ways; what it lacks in thrills and violence, it more than makes up for as a look into these men and their bond.

Now, after the stories end, you’ll see more of the book to come – a collection of recipes of the food mentioned in the stories. You might think, oh, interesting, but inessential. But there you’re wrong, because the recipes are written in the voice of our characters, peppering the recipes with commentary, insights, jokes, and even epilogues to some of the stories. I can’t think of another set of recipes that made me laugh this much, or that brought me this much joy, and I’m so glad I didn’t skip them.

Should you start with Of Mice and Minestrone if you’re new to Hap and Leonard? I’d say probably not; these stories are good, and you’d enjoy them, but they’re richer for knowing these two men and their lives. But they’re every bit as good as basically every other Hap and Leonard writing Lansdale has ever done – and that’s no small thing at all, given how consistently great this series is.

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The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa / ****

It’s somewhat difficult to describe Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, a fascinating novel about a world in which a mysterious government agency “disappears” whole concepts and ideas, slowly erasing things like birds and emeralds from the natural world. To describe the novel as Orwellian isn’t entirely inaccurate – this is a novel about an authoritarian government that controls people’s via their thoughts and ideas, inspiring fear and quiet acts of rebellion that are more about maintaining a way of life than they ever are of fighting a larger power. And yet, to think of this as a modern 1984 is to set yourself up for the wrong kind of book, because The Memory Police is far quieter, more moody, and more subdued than that idea would suggest.

Indeed, this isn’t a book with a huge amount of plot. Not content to leave her island setting unnamed, Ogawa does the same with almost every character, giving us an anonymous narrator, an old man, and an editor named R as our primary cast. How do the Memory Police erase ideas and concepts? Why are they doing it? How did this society begin? None of this is the concern of the book, which instead simply immerses you in this strange world and witnesses as the disappearances begin to happen with more frequency and watches as our narrator struggles to focus on her novel in progress, people’s lives continue to erase, and society continues to change.

That’s about all of the plot there is here, but that lack of specificity and detail works for The Memory Police in many ways, turning the story into an allegory that doesn’t insist on a single meaning. I’ve read commentary that links the book to our own refusal to acknowledge the realities of climate change, while other readings focus on the internet and the way things keep erasing and fading with time. Still others have pointed out the book’s connections to a world in which politicians shift the nature of debate in such a way that the meanings of word get away from us. And the things of it is, each of those readings works well, as do plenty of others. (Also, it’s notable that the book is not from the Trump era or even the 21st century, but 1994, having finally made its way to America after 25 years.)

So, there’s little incident to speak of in The Memory Police, and the central metaphor can be hazy (which I think of as a plus, but I can see where others would disagree). Why recommend the book, then? Well, The Memory Police works because of the mood and emotion of it all – it’s a book whose truth comes not from its details or its veracity, but from its grip on human nature. As we watch the island’s reactions to these disappearances – and what’s more, their easy acceptance of them – it’s hard not to find the truth in these moments, no matter how strange the situation becomes. (And, admittedly, it takes some strange turns in the last bit of the book.) That emotional richness makes the book truly work, and is what makes the allegory so rich and effective – it makes Ogawa’s book feel timeless, and still resonant 25 years later.

If you’re looking for a thriller, or a modern 1984, The Memory Police will leave you more puzzled than anything. But if you view it as almost a mood piece that’s used to explore a situation that’s both universal and deeply strange, it has a way of sticking with you and working far better than you’d otherwise expect.

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Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin / *****

I still have yet to read the fiction of James Baldwin, but the more I read of his work, the more compelled I am to find more. After the pointed social commentary of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son offers us a collection of shorter essays which gives us a sense of the man himself – while his beliefs and ideas are as present as ever, there’s a sense of personal openness here that’s impossible to miss, giving us a sense not just of Baldwin the social critic and thinking, but of Baldwin the person behind the pen.

Even though Baldwin frames Notes of a Native Son as a sort of memoir in his 1984 introduction to the book, that’s not entirely true of the entire collection. Yes, some of them get into Baldwin’s own life – and we’ll talk about those – but there’s also a sense of Baldwin as someone who consumes art and culture. It’s a treat, as a cinephile, to read his thoughts on Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, Preminger’s all-black adaptation of the opera Carmen, while the English teacher in me savored his analysis of Richard Wright’s Native Son, or his  discussion of the flaws of novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other “protest novels,” as he calls them. These essays comprise Part One of the collection, and what they may lack in autobiographical revelation, they more than make up for in intelligent, thoughtful writing and insight, giving you a sense of the brilliant mind at work that could look at these works not just as piece of writing or film, but as social objects that could work or not, despite their intentions.

It’s Part Two where Baldwin allows his essays to turn to his own life, all while still bringing his same brilliant mind and writing to bear. “The Harlem Ghetto” finds him discussing what it’s like to grow up in that titular world, but more than that, offering insight into how the inhabitants of that world see things – the various arms of black journalism outlets, for example, the appeal of religion to the inhabitants, or a discussion of the fraught relationship between black communities and Jewish Americans. It’s the closest Baldwin comes to the outright social commentary and analysis of The Fire Next Time, all condensed to a short essay. Meanwhile, the second essay in the part, “Journey to Atlanta,” tells the story of his brother’s choir trip – a trip that serves to illustrate the gaps between African-Americans and the Progressive Party, despite their avowed goals. And there’s the richness and vividness of Part III, in which Baldwin writes of his time in Paris, giving us a sense of his complicated feelings of why Europeans struggle to understand black Americans, or the types of GIs in Paris, or most notably, his encounter with the French legal system, in a harrowing, Kafkaesque story. Indeed, there’s not a bad essay in Notes on a Native Son, and there’s not a one that  didn’t enrich me, didn’t teach me something, didn’t delight me with its insight and craft.

But it’s the final essay of Part II, the titular “Notes of a Native Son,” that truly staggers, and to which I want to devote the most time. The most nakedly honest and autobiographical essay of the collection, “Notes” opens thus:

On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated on these events there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.

Over the course of “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin explores these disparate threads – the anger in black communities; his fraught relationship with his father; and, linking it all together, his own rage, anger, and coiled spring of violence that he sees in both of these events. It’s a complex, dense piece of writing, one that affected me deeply on numerous levels. There’s Baldwin’s depiction of his father, a paranoid, angry man who Baldwin needed away from, and yet regrets the distance between them. This relationship is complex, and painful, and Baldwin’s conflicted feelings about all of it shine through:

I had told my mother that I did not want to see him because I hated him. But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin; it was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

There’s his honest depiction of his own anger as a black man constantly scorned and spit on by America, and that own anger reflected back through both the life of his father and the riots around him. And it closes with this remarkable, devastating passage:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But that  did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.

All of Notes of a Native Son should be essential reading, and once again, I find myself sad that it’s taken me so long to come to know Baldwin, even as I’m pleased to have so much of his work to look forward to. But it’s “Notes of a Native Son” that has most haunted me since reading it, and continues to do so, depicting emotions that are so painful, but so well-realized and described, that it is impossible not to recognize then humanity in all of it, even if to do so is uncomfortable.

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The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson / ****

Expectations can be a massive hindrance to enjoyment of a book. Sometimes those expectations can come from hype or reviews (see my recent review of Black Leopard, Red Wolf for one example of this). Other times, though, it can come from preconceived notions of an author’s work. Such was the case with The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson. Even setting aside the iconic title story, my notion of Jackson is someone who can be darkly, wickedly funny (We Have Always Lived in the Castle), psychologically chilling (The Haunting of Hill House), or capable of fascinating insight into human cruelty and pettiness (“The Possibility of Evil”). So I assumed such would apply to this, the one collection of her short fiction published during her lifetime.

Instead, what I got was something odd and oblique – stories without an evident point sometimes, stories that feel like they’re building to an event that never comes, stories that feel incomplete or fragmentary. Far from the horror collection that so many blurbs and marketers would have you believe it to be, The Lottery and Other Stories immerses you in Jackson’s world, and gives you some glimpses of her talent, but it can’t help but suffer in comparison to those works I mentioned above.

That’s not to say there are no gems here. “The Witch” is a gleefully nasty little tale about a young boy on a train and a conversation with a stranger that goes in a wholly unexpected direction, one that’s all the more chilling for its banality. “Like Mother Used to Make” immerses you in the head of an anxious, controlling man who needs his world just so, and finds himself adrift in the face of a woman he doesn’t know how to handle. “Trial by Combat” finds a battle of wills being played out between two women, each of whom knows a reality that neither wants to acknowledge. One of my favorites, “Pillar of Salt,” follows a young woman in the city as the overwhelming activity slowly breaks her down. Some, like “Seven Types of Ambiguity” and “Elizabeth,” find Jackson depicting perverse, inexplicable acts of cruelty whose purpose may not even be known to those who commit them. Meanwhile, tales like “Colloquy” and “My Life with R.H. Macy” express Jackson’s feeling of disconnection with society and the world around them, while “Flower Garden” and “After You My Dear Alphonse” find her looking at racism both overt and tacit, respectively.

But even those stories can’t help but feel a bit odd, especially compared with the tension and unease that Jackson is so capable of creating – and more, it doesn’t touch on stories like “The Intoxicated,” in which a man has a conversation with a girl at a party about the changes in the world, and that’s all. Or “A Fine Old Firm,” where two women whose sons are friends meet and greet each other before the story ends. Stories like these feel like vignettes without much purpose, leaving me unsatisfied and a bit frustrated – especially when compared with the better ones above…

…and most especially when compared with the juggernaut that is “The Lottery,” justly one of the most famous American short stories of all time, and every bit as good as you remember it. “The Lottery” is what I think of when I think of Jackson – not the story, per se (honestly, Hill House is my go-to Jackson book) – but that mood of suspicion, unease, psychological torment, outsiders, and so much more. “The Lottery” feels like Jackson letting loose, and leaving it to the end of the collection feels right here – it feels like she’s finally cutting loose after holding back for so many stories, and the nightmarish catharsis is almost welcome.

In the end, I can’t tell if my disappointment with The Lottery and Other Stories is how little most of the collection fits with my preconceived notions of Jackson, or the stories themselves. As I glance back over the table of contents to write this review, I find myself remembering many of these and liking them more than I felt at the time, and indeed, as they sit, I find myself admiring the craft and technique of many of them. But many feel abrupt and incomplete, leaving you wanting or confused – and more importantly, you can’t help but compare them to Hill House, or Castle, or “The Possibility of Evil,” or even the title story. But to be fair, how much can compare with those?

So should you read The Lottery and Other Stories? Probably so – if you’re a fan of Jackson, you’ll want to read it, even if I think you should start with some of the other works mentioned. But be aware that what you’re getting may not be what you expect.

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The Final Winter, by Iain Rob Wright / *** ½

It’s a cold night in a British pub, as the usual crowd hangs out, banters, flirts with the owner, and chats about the news. Oh, it’s cold outside – snowing like crazy. Of course, according to the news, it’s snowing everywhere right now. Not just Britain, mind you – everywhere on the planet. Weird, right?

And then the power goes out, and things get bad.

That’s the setup for Iain Rob Wright’s The Final Winter, a horror novel that’s going to be a bit hard to talk about because of how much it depends on reveals in the back half of the story – not just about the nature of the horror, but even the nature of some of its characters along the way. And while Wright’s reveals undeniably make sense with the plot of his book, that doesn’t make them any less of an unexpected – and a little bizarre – direction to take the book, giving a genre shift that may not be to the taste of all readers.

But for a while, The Final Winter gives you a pretty great horror read. As the snow falls around the town, Wright takes us through some of the various businesses of the area, introducing us to a cast of characters that we know will unite at the bar eventually. From hateful grocery store managers to best friends hanging out at a video store to the town’s resident gangster/drug dealer, Wright gives us archetypal characters, only to gradually reveal many of them to be much more complex than we expected. It’s a choice that works incredibly well when it works, although it does also end up making the characters who stay more two-dimensional sticking out all the more.

It’s evident even early on that Wright has given us a crew of misfits and antiheroes, though, with alcoholics running from trauma, calm fronts hiding twisted interiors, and more. What you end up with is quite a motley crew, and as mentioned above, some work better than others. All have a place, though, and there’s a reason Wright has pulled this crew together in this place for this night…but now we’re getting into spoilers.

Without ruining the story, suffice to say that Wright’s explanation for events takes the story from traditional horror into another genre entirely. And while he uses elements of that genre to startling effect, it ends up feeling like a truly strange shift, one that throws a lot of mythology at us all at once and assumes we will accept it, despite it not entirely making much sense. (For instance, the way that one character is put forward as the key villain of a sort feels odd, given how much worse other characters clearly are.) Is it inventive and unexpected? Sure, it is…but I’m not sure it entirely works, and that goes double for the book’s ending, which feels unearned and easy.

Still, that opening stretch is great, and I can’t say that I hated The Final Winter at all. I love the way it gradually reveals depths to so many archetypes, and Wright has a knack for some good horror elements and visions here. And whatever else you can say, it sure isn’t boring. Does it work? Maybe not…but at least it’s different.

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