Certain Dark Things, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia / *** ½

There’s so much to enjoy about Certain Dark Things, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s vampire noir novel, that it’s a disappointment to feel so unsatisfied by the book as a whole. If you’d asked me at almost any point in the first three-quarters of the book, I’d have a ton good to say about it, from Moreno-Garcia’s novel take on vampire mythology to the blurring of cyberpunk and noir lines into the novel, from the view of a very different Mexico City to the dodging of easy parallels. But then there’s the ending of the book – or, more accurately, the lack of one – and it’s such a disappointing fizzle that I just can’t bring myself to have the same enthusiasm for the book that the rest of it deserves.

But let’s talk about the rest of the book, because there really is a lot here that I enjoyed. Certain Dark Things is the story of Domingo, a street kid who’s been surviving by digging through the trash and doing odd jobs to stay alive. It’s a weird world, mind you – vampire gangs are battling all around the country (though Mexico City has expelled all the vampires), for one thing – but Domingo is doing okay…until he meets the eyes of a beautiful young woman, who invites him home and asks to drink some of his blood. And quicker than you can say “Renfield” (a term that nicely gets repurposed here), Domingo finds him drawn into the life of Atl, whose Aztec-descended tribe has been decimated, leaving her on the run from some very dangerous vampires.

Even before I realized the book ended with a sort of mini-encyclopedia of vampire tribes and types, I was thoroughly impressed with Moreno-Garcia’s modernization of the vampire mythos. Each of her types wholly stands apart from the others, with not only distinct powers and abilities, but also with personalities and beliefs that make them instantly distinguishable from each other. Her allusions to other tribes (and those encyclopedia entries) only underline all of that, bringing this alternate world to life, and that’s before genetically modified animals or government agencies designed to monitor for the undead predators.

But just as much as it is a horror novel, Certain Dark Things is a self-proclaimed noir novel, and Moreno-Garcia does the genre right on the whole, starting with a woman on the run whose fatale qualities are evident even to the untrained eyes. Yes, Domingo may be too nice to do well in a noir, but that doesn’t really hurt the book that much – not when one of the fundamental questions is how far he’s willing to go in order to protect this woman (who’s far, far more dangerous than he could ever be). As Domingo gets in deeper and deeper, you can see the boundaries of society peeling back around him, plunging us into a world where human life is very disposable and where gangs have as much say over police procedure as any law ever could.

All solid so far…which makes it all the more disappointing when the book unravels in its final stretch. A compelling supporting character is checkmated out of the book in the most anticlimactic way possible, only to have their fate dragged out unnecessarily for multiple chapters. The book’s climax is perfectly okay, but I genuinely assumed there was more to come, as it felt really of a piece with the other set pieces, but no – that’s the end of the book, complete with a coup de grâce that feels so brief as to almost be an afterthought (and not worth the buildup that we’ve been given, especially since the reveal is shot a few pages earlier). And none of that even touches on the final chapter, which is an idea that could work on paper, but here feels less like an ending and more like an abrupt “well, I ran out of ideas” here, with a character choice that feels wholly out of place, and jars even worse against the epilogue that draws it all to a close.

It’s all so frustrating, because I was genuinely drawn into Moreno-Garcia’s rich, dark world, and found myself compelled by its characters (especially Bernardino, a reclusive, cat-loving vampire whose solitary existence is all but necessitated by his tribe). But ultimately, the end of the book is such a fizzle that I felt more frustrated and disappointed than anything else. Can you recommend a book if you know the ending is such a whimper? In this case, I just can’t.

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Work Reads: Their Eyes Were Watching God / Of Mice and Men

One of the fringe benefits of being a high school English teacher – at least, for a bibliophile like me – is the chance to catch up on or revisit classics of literature, forcing me to read things that I’ve somehow never gotten around to or giving me an obligation to read books over again that I didn’t necessarily appreciate enough the first time around. Such is the case with this break, which has already found me revisiting Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and now has led me to finally read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and take a fresh look at John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Let’s start off with the Hurston, a long-standing blindspot that I’ve been meaning to read for an embarrassingly long time now. The tale of an African-American woman named Janie and her three marriages, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a remarkably low-key work, one that surprised me with its relatively low plot stakes but rich emotional depth. It’s no surprise to find it rediscovered and heralded as a work of Black feminism; indeed, much of what makes the book effective is the way that it’s so evidently about a woman finding her own role in the world and struggling to define herself, all without ever becoming a Book About Important Things. Instead, Their Eyes is a life story, one that finds a woman cycling through roles demanded of her by others. (In many ways, it’s disheartening to find that Ralph Ellison was among those who didn’t appreciate the book when it first arrived, as it works as a female counterpart to his Invisible Man incredibly well – both are about African-American protagonists who struggle to be seen as a person instead of as a symbol or an archetype, and both grapple openly with the way they are treated both because of their race and their gender, as well as the places where the two collide.)

I’ll admit that I struggled a bit with Hurston’s writing, however; parts are overwritten and flowery to a fault, while her dedication to capturing dialect and accent work ultimately feels distracting and a little unneeded at times (even though I understand how differently it would have been received at the time). But even with that being said, the story here is a quietly moving one, with each of the marriages showing us something wholly different about the world – about the roles forced onto women, about the types of love we all experience, about the way our dreams can so easily curdle on us. Whatever my issues with some of the craft of the novel, there’s no denying the way its story and its ideas hit home, even all these years later; this is a novel less concerned with the time or the issues of the day, and more concerned with what life is like for Black women throughout time – and that means it all still works, all these years later.

Onto Of Mice and Men, which I’d read once (maybe twice), but it’s definitely been at least two decades since I last picked up Steinbeck’s classic novella; moreover, it’s the first time I’ve read it since teaching The Grapes of Wrath and coming to understand more of Steinbeck as a writer – his passions, his goals, his style, and the like. And with that in mind, Of Mice and Men is fascinating as a companion piece to that epic, touching on some of that novel’s big ideas and themes, all while telling its own quietly heartbreaking tale of male friendship and the death of anything like the American Dream.

Of Mice and Men is one of those stories that’s so familiar that everyone basically knows the tale of Lennie and George; even if you haven’t read it, you know the gist of it all. What’s notable, though, is just how tight and lean the novella really is; it’s impressive, really, how Steinbeck brings these men to life so quickly and neatly, taking so little time to do so, and yet creating characters that have long outlived what the book’s short page count might suggest. Indeed, the book almost works better because of its brevity, most notably with regard to Lennie; if the book needed to be longer, Lennie’s archetypal nature would strain and need to be filled in, but as it stands, Steinbeck can work within sketches and familiar tropes, writing enough specificity to make the character work without having to flesh out every detail.

That same leanness works for the book as a whole, but it also leaves enough room for Steinbeck to surprise you, as he takes what looks to be a regrettable racial stereotype and brings the character to heartbreaking life instead, or diving into Lennie’s head in an odd sequence that stands out all the more for being so different from anything else Steinbeck normally does. It all works together to create a story that feels like more than just a small novella; it feels bigger than its 100 pages somehow, dipping its toes into a world where men want to work and provide for themselves and have a place of their own, only to have their dreams taken away from them in the cruelest ways possible – all of which are ideas that Steinbeck would explore in more depth in Grapes a few years later. But even so, that later masterwork doesn’t detract from the simplicity of Of Mice and Men in the least, and neither does its familiarity; you may know what’s to come, but it doesn’t make the ending any less heartbreaking at all.

Amazon: Their Eyes Were Watching God | Of Mice and Men

The Violence, by Delilah S. Dawson / ***

Don’t take the trigger warnings about abuse that open Delilah S. Dawson’s The Violence lightly. This is a novel about abuse and abusive families in no small way; indeed, one can’t help but feel like the writing of this book had to be therapeutic for Dawson to write, finding a way to marry an examination of abuse and its effects with a high-concept premise – in this case, the emergence of an epidemic of horrific violence, as people explode into horrific spells of brutal assault, only to “awaken” moments later without any memory of anything that happened.

The connections there are obvious, and in the back half of the book, Dawson finds ways to thread all of it together in rich, compelling ways, exploring her three characters – a wife escaping her abusive husband; her daughter, on her own as the pandemic spread; and their mother/grandmother, a woman whose efforts to escape her lower class lifestyle have left her unapproachable and distant – and the various ways that violence has affected their lives. Indeed, as the book develops and evolves, Dawson finds way to explore their trauma in interesting ways, eschewing direct parallels in favor of letting the genre trappings handle some of it, whether via empowerment fantasies writ large, reminders of what matters in life, or finding people that can be trusted after being mistreated for so long. Really, the bigger the pandemic gets, and the more spread out her characters get, the better Dawson does at drawing you into her world and playing with her ideas, pulling it all together in a satisfying ending that gives you closure for the characters and helps you see them finding the same.

All of which makes it all the more frustrating how unpleasant, preachy, strident, and just plain unlikable the first quarter of The Violence is, giving you a book that’s going to drive off a lot of people, and honestly had me questioning whether I wanted this to be the third book I’ve ever bailed on in my life. It’s hard to know where to begin here, but it should probably be with the absolutely unlikable characters on every single page; while the mother and daughter get our sympathy by virtue of their abusive life, the grandmother/mother figure is hilariously, painfully awful, essentially being Jessica Walter’s Lucille Bluth except more so and not played for laughs. Her character is implausible and exaggerated into extremes, becoming a cartoonishly “evil” figure that makes it hard to take the more grounded and horrific abuse situation as seriously. Also not helping: the slew of male figures in this first section of the book, who often come across not as believable predators or misogynists, but as figures from a bad Lifetime movie, reducing the serious and real issues under discussion here to cartoonish one-dimensional figures. (The high school principal here is the one that broke the camel’s back for me; there’s a way to handle that material that doesn’t veer into mustache-twirling, but this ain’t it.) And none of this even gets into the lack of subtlety of the book in this early going; even as someone who agrees with the book’s points, I was rolling my eyes at the stridency of it all.

The beginning of The Violence is just a chore, plain and simple, with badly drawn archetypes, no characters to latch onto, a preachy and thudding tone that left me irritated, and more. The book gets so much better from there as it goes, with some genuinely interesting ideas…but they’re not good enough to bother muscling through that opening. I wish I could say otherwise; there’s a good book in here (indeed, I wonder if you could start after that opening stretch, and let the book handle its backstory through alluded statements and implication), but it’s not good enough to make it worth the frustration of the early sections.

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