The Sandman, by Neil Gaiman / *****

It’s been a little bit more than a decade since I read Neil Gaiman’s epic comic book series The Sandman, which tells the story of Morpheus, the embodiment of Dream. At its core, as Neil Gaiman once said, the plot can be summarized as “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.” But to reduce The Sandman to its plot is to elide over all of the things that make it great – that make it not just an astonishing work of art in the comic book world, but a masterpiece of storytelling of any format imaginable.

In Gaiman’s rich cosmology, Dream is the king of dreams, yes, but also the lord of stories – and in making that choice, The Sandman becomes a celebration of storytelling and its import upon our lives as much as it is a study of a being so far beyond human conception and yet somehow human despite it all. To read Sandman is to watch Gaiman constantly defy easy categorization and labeling, giving you tale after tale that should never go together, and yet become part of a rich tapestry. What else could contain both the first performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, held in front of a faerie audience, but also the horrifying and nightmarish “24 Hours,” in which a man takes absolute control of the inhabitants of a diner for a day and uses them for his own pleasures? What else could contain both a traveling cat storyteller, carrying the story of a world that once was, but also contains the haunting beauty of The Dream Hunters and its tale of a fox in love with a man?

And my god, those are just the stories. What of the world and its inhabitants? What of Dream’s astonishing siblings, from the androgynous power of Desire to the manic, shattered mind of Delirium? What of the ominous presence of Destiny, or the genuine pain of Despair (exploring in mind-bending fashion in the series’ addendum Endless Nights)? And then there’s Death, hanging above all of it and perhaps Gaiman’s most indelible creation – a trope that should be laughable (Death as cheery Goth) but somehow works, becoming beautiful in its conception and details.

Tired of the Endless? What about acerbic raven Matthew, or nearly immortal Hob Gadling (my favorite character in the series)? You could go with snarky handyman Merv Pumpkinhead, dedicated librarian Lucien, or the constantly battling Cain and Abel. You could latch onto poor, haunted Rose Walker, or deeply broken John Dee, or the unsettling Ladies, or witch Thessaly, or the nightmarish Corinthian – wait, I’ve only covered a few!

I’m struggling in this review a bit, I think, and that’s because I decided to talk about the whole series, and not just a single volume, and in doing so, I find myself just staggered. Here is a ten volume epic (plus a secondary story, a short glimpse into the lives of the Endless, and an epilogue that’s also a prologue), one that literally travels through time and space, dives into dreams, unfolds over centuries, defies any logical space or conception – and yet also, at its core, is a tragedy of the classic form: one in which a man’s choices come back to him, and, to go back to Gaiman, he can change or die. Or maybe, there is a third option. It all depends how you take it all.

Over the course of The Sandman, you will see things you’ve never seen before – it’s hard to think of a story more suited for a medium where time and space can be so flexible, as malleable, as they are here. (I truly don’t know how some of these scenes could work as a live action TV series – and that goes triply when it comes to Sandman: Overture, maybe one of the most astonishing visual experiences I’ve ever had.) Panels crack and give way in the force of dreams. Styles shift as we embrace different minds. Realism and fantasy crash into each other, and the comics only emphasize the differences all the more. To live in Sandman is to live in a reality where anything is real if you will it, and the comic form allows Gaiman and his varied contributors to embrace that idea, telling a story whose scope truly is unimaginable.

All of which is what makes it great…but without that emotional core that Gaiman brings, it wouldn’t hold together. But there it is: an unimaginable epic, a daunting scope, but all in the service of a man coming to terms with his choices, and deciding what he must do. That all of this happens without Gaiman ever spelling out Dream’s thoughts – leaving an audience interpreting a main character only through his actions (or lack thereof)…all the more remarkable.

I love Gaiman a lot, and I think he’s written a number of all-timer books. But the more I think about Sandman, the more I think it may be the best thing he’ll ever do – the most ambitious, the most daunting, the most beautiful, the funniest, the weirdest, the richest, and simply put, the most Gaiman-ish thing. To read it is to see a writer finding his own voice and passions, but also seeing a form that can match him and make those ideas come to life, giving you an experience unlike anything else, and giving you a world whose beauty and darkness live long after you’ve turned the final pages.

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A Few Novellas: Sailing to Byzantium / The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men

I’ve known of Robert Silverberg’s work through reputation, but never actually checked him out, despite his status as one of the greats of classic science-fiction. Luckily, Sailing to Byzantium, a collection of six of his novellas, more than holds up that status, giving me a sense of the giant imagination Silverberg could bring to bear, but also seeing how he could take these ideas and turn them into something richer and more complex, using his conceits and ideas as a jumping off point for a meditation on humanity, our relationship with death, our grapplings with organized religion, the importance of community, and so much more.

But for all of their musings about larger matters, what will first strike you about Silverberg’s stories are their exceptional, stunning scope of imagination. Take the title story, which sees a 20th century man adrift in the 50th century, as citizens drift from one artificially reconstructed historic city to another, giving us tourism that spans space and time, all while also demonstrating what it would be like to see your society reconstructed with guesses and best evidence. Similar stories about death and our place in the world are echoed in “Born with the Dead,” a tale in which human beings an be “rekindled” into a living body, but come back as someone wholly new and different.

Other times, Silverberg finds himself thinking about the role of religion, such as “Thomas the Proclaimer,” in which God grants proof of his existence by freezing the rotation of the earth, or “We Are for the Dark,” as humanity tries to find the divine with the presence of science and FTL travel. Or there’s the idea of shared consciousness, which we see in “Homecoming,” in which a scientific experiment to see into the future results in a man’s consciousness combining with a far, far-distant lobster race, seeing the world through the eyes of something wholly inhuman and yet clearly conscious and thinking. But the idea is followed up on in “The Secret Sharer,” which pays tribute to Conrad’s tale by featuring a stowaway who’s little more than a digital burst of thoughts.

All of these are great hooks for stories, but what makes them work is Silverberg’s grasp of humanity and his strong prose, which can capture both the scope of his imagination and the complexity of his emotional palette. He can nail the beauty of “Byzantium’s” recreated cities, but also find the pain of seeing someone you love “rekindled” only to come back as someone wholly other. He can describe the alien perceptions of a lobster race, but he can also convey the wonder experienced as we dive into the darkness that allows us to explore the universe. At times, those emotions and descriptions become the point of the tales more than the plotting – indeed, Silverberg is of that school of writers for whom plot is a secondary concern, one used to anchor his ideas and his imagination – but when the stories are this rich and compelling, that’s only rarely an issue, and even then, only a small one. No, you may feel occasionally frustrated by odd endings here and there, but mainly, you’ll come away having been transported to six wholly new worlds, and that’s what we read fiction for. Rating: **** ½

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I got Gabriel Blackwell’s The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men as part of a “Weird Fiction” bundle – a collection of horror that defies the usual rules and norms of the genre, plunging you into unknown worlds and horror that pushes against what you normally see. Even by those standards, Dissolution (the title is a mouthful, so forgive me) is a truly bizarre, surreal experience, one that takes the form of H.P. Lovecraft’s final letter, only to push the reader into reality-bending darkness that bleeds into the book itself.

In its simplest form, Blackwell’s novella is a re-creation of a final letter by Lovecraft in the days before his death. As Blackwell explains, he found it in some old hospital files, realizing due to the date what he had. What we have is his attempted transcription of the letter exactly as it was, down to the fact that it is a single, very extended, very lengthy paragraph. Mind you, there’s far more to the story than that, as Blackwell’s footnotes gradually start turning into their own secondary story, one that makes us realize that our narrator isn’t quite as stable or as reliable as we might expect him to be, and telling a tale that doubles up with the Lovecraft letter to create something more than the sum of the parts.

As you can see, trying to convey this is a little difficult; I keep wanting to cite House of Leaves for the way the framing story becomes its own secondary tale, puncturing the text of the book with metatext, but Dissolution doesn’t have any of Danielewski’s weird playful side or unusual text formatting games. No, what you have here is a relentless plunge into madness, one in which we keep feeling like the reality around us is being peeled back, but one that also nicely sidesteps all of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos in favor of something less defined and yet equally alien and threatening.

Looking back over this, I realize I’ve been focusing so much on the form of Dissolution that I haven’t even touched on how effective it his – how well Blackwell mimics Lovecraft’s hysterical prose, or how he perfectly paces the footnotes to provide a structure to the tale that the single-paragraph format would seem to disallow; I haven’t touched on the genuinely disturbing imagery at play here, or how carefully and relentlessly Blackwell turns the screws until we are far beyond the normal realm of the world. Dissolution is undeniably deep within the boundaries of weird fiction, asking a lot of readers and refusing to deliver anything like a conventional tale. But for those who are intrigued by its challenges and conceits, you are in for something wild and unforgettably horrifying. Rating: *****

Amazon: Sailing to Byzantium | The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men

The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi / ****

John Scalzi’s The Dispatcher is undeniably a light, pulpy little story, and its weight is appropriate enough, given the novella’s origins as a 2-hour audiobook before being released in print. Essentially a quick little detective story with an unusual sci-fi conceit, The Dispatcher is a fast read, and one that’s pretty plot-heavy (again, appropriately so, given the genre). Nonetheless, the conceit here is so interesting, and Scalzi’s spitballing of ideas and moral questions so engaging, that it’ll give you more to chew on than you might expect – it just won’t stick with you that long.

That hook, though, is a great one. In Scalzi’s near-future, people have almost entirely stopped being murdered. Oh, people still die – there are suicides, disasters, and natural causes – but for some reason, murdering someone causes them to vanish and reappear back in their home, just as if they never died. And thus arises the job of a “dispatcher” – a person whose job it is to work alongside medical professionals and kill patients who are about to die of a botched surgery, or a bad treatment, or of untreated wounds – and give everyone involved a second chance.

That’s a neat idea, and Scalzi plays with it in wonderful ways, giving you a story that, at its best, can remind you of the way that Philip K. Dick would take simple ideas and run with them in interesting, strange ways. Scalzi follows the idea through crime empires and into rich college students, from insurance companies to police investigations, and takes even more time to let his characters bat around the complex questions that might arise from such an idea – the nature of god, the shifting nature of morality, and so forth. Even better, the story’s short length means that Scalzi never feels the need to dive into why it’s all happening, which makes the whole thing work all the more – does it even matter why it happens, or just that it does?

That all being said, at its core, The Dispatcher is intentionally light genre fare – it’s a detective story, but one with a loose enough framework that Scalzi can play around in the margins of his world, all while still telling the tale of a missing dispatcher. And by the end of it all, you may definitely come away with the sense that this is just the author batting around ideas without much substance underneath – the equivalent of two a.m. college philosophy sessions while passing around a joint. And while that’s not entirely unfair, it definitely sells short the pleasures of Scalzi’s writing, or his ability to build this world in such a brief time. No, The Dispatcher doesn’t do anything revolutionary; it just takes a single idea and looks at how it might change the world around it. But sometimes, that’s what satisfying sci-fi is made of.

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Noirvember 2019 #9-10: Noir Isn’t Just a Boys’ Club

After having a lot of fun reading nothing but horror for October, I decided to make November another themed month, stealing the popular film blogging idea of Noirvember for my month’s reads. So this month, it’s all hard-boiled gangsters, con artists, mysteries, and grizzled police detectives, with a publication range that spans 90 years. 

Admittedly, both entries today aren’t quite true noir, but they fit with the crime and mystery theme I’d been going with, and I wasn’t sure until I read them whether they’d be true noir or not. I still think they fit comfortably in the month’s reading, though.

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It’s hard to know exactly how to categorize Laura Lippman’s remarkable, effective, haunting mystery novel What the Dead Know. On one level, this is undeniably a mystery novel, one in which a woman walking away from an accident admits to being one of two young girls who disappeared from a shopping mall nearly thirty years before. Is she lying? Is she crazy? Or could she be telling the truth – in which case, what exactly happened thirty years ago, and why has she been missing for so long – and where is her sister?

That’s a good hook for a mystery novel, and Lippman lets the novel reveal its cards slowly and with perfect pacing, giving us windows into the disappearance and hints about the girls while never offering real answers – only clues and misdirections – until she’s ready for the big reveal – which comes along with a pretty genuine surprise that I didn’t see coming, as well as an explanation that’s satisfying and makes sense of the actions we’ve seen so far.

But if all the novel was was this mystery, it would be fascinating, but not as rich as it is. No, what makes What the Dead Know so powerful is the way it becomes a faceted, complex exploration of grief and loss, one that finds new takes on the topic through all of the book’s many characters, through the slow passage of time that the book covers, and maybe most effectively, in the way we wash the marriage of the girls’ parents slowly come apart over years and years together. Lippman alternates between the present-day mysteries and periodic check-ins on the family in the past, but each flashback jumps a large swath of time, allowing us to feel the slow, inexorable way that the mysterious loss becomes just another thing to live with. It’s a complex way to handle the mystery, but one that lets Lippman not only look at the disappearance itself, but on the effects such a thing would have on those left behind, and the toll it would take.

With a solid mystery and this thematic richness, What the Dead Know is a fast read you’re going to struggle to put down; it moves beautifully along, sweeping you up in its characters’ lives while also egging you on to unravel the bizarre mystery at its core. And if some of the modern characters never quite fit into the book – I’m thinking especially of the womanizing police detective – they’re still well-realized and well-written, helping to bring the book to life even if they don’t quite feel like they fit thematically. It’s a great read, and one that might linger with you in ways you don’t expect – ways more powerful and human than a typical mystery novel.

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I was about halfway through Amy Stewart’s Girl Waits With Gun when I found out that its tale of a young woman in the 1910’s who starts fighting back against violent factory owners and investigating crimes wasn’t just a fun idea for a novel – it was the true story of Constance Kopp, America’s first female sheriff. Stewart, a nonfiction author, stumbled across the story while doing some research, realized what a fascinating tale it was, and turned it into her first work of fiction, mixing a lot of research and background with just a bit of invention, and creating something wonderfully entertaining and enjoyable as a result.

It all started – both Stewart’s research and this story – when a car driven by a man named Henry Kaufman runs into a buggy carrying Constance and her sisters. But when Henry refused to pay for the damages, Constance decided to take matters into her own hands, unaware that the man she was going after was unwilling to suffer insults of any kind, much less from a woman, leading to a series of verbal threats, bricks through windows, and more. Kopp, however, refused to back down, and ultimately fought back against Kaufman, arming herself and defending her house overnight on multiple occasions (one of which led to the actual headline that gave the book its title).

Girl Waits With Gun is a lot of things – family drama, historical fiction, character study, crime story, biographical fiction, just to name some – all of which can make it a hard book to know exactly who would love it. It’s not hard enough for some crime aficionados, I’m sure, but Constance is a little darker and tougher at times than your typical proto-feminist heroine. What’s more, the book definitely feels a little sprawling at times, as though Stewart had so much research she’d done and couldn’t decide what all to cut, so she kept most of it – all of which helps build out this 1910’s America we’re in, but some of which feels like the book loses its way at times.

Even so, Girl Waits with Gun works because of how great of a character Constance and her sisters are. Sure, the story doesn’t fit your typical crime beat patterns, but such is the case when you’re stuck using true life, which doesn’t always fit your typical tropes. Instead, you get this hard-headed, tough, self-determined young woman who’s not so much interested as being a “new woman” so much as she’s protecting her family and tired of being dismissed or expected to wait for her older brother to save her. Constance’s fight against Kaufman is satisfying not just as a “woman standing up for herself” kind of story, but just as a story of this woman being tired of being bullied and refusing to take it, no matter what he throws at her. No, it’s not quite crime, but it is a window into a great historical story I knew nothing about and am glad people are being told about, especially when it’s done with such a nice sense of fun and a great voice.

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Ratings

• What the Dead Know: **** ½
• Girl Waits with Gun: ****

Amazon: What the Dead Know | Girl Waits With Gun

Halloween 2018 Reads #8: Elevation, by Stephen King / *** ½

October’s over, which is always a sad thing, but it was a great month for reading horror novels. Since I read a good number of them, I’m going to cluster them into reviews over the next few days, keeping the spirit of Halloween alive a bit into the month of November.

This will be the last of my Halloween reads for the year; next up, though? Noir-vember, where I take on crime thrillers old and new, and plunge into the shadows of human nature.

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About once a decade, Stephen King breaks from his usual mix of novels and short story collections to release a quartet of novellas, and the results are often some of his most interesting work. There’s the break from horror that was Different Seasons, the brutal darkness of Full Dark, No Stars, the Vietnam trauma of Hearts in Atlantis – all of these collections give us a glimpse of King doing something different from his usual fare, and the results are often fascinating. (There’s also Four Past Midnight, but that’s one of King’s less interesting collections by a long shot.)

I say all of this because you can’t help but wonder if Elevation, the new novella from King, would work better as part of an anthology than it does on its own. Elevation is, as you’d expect from King, engaging, well-told, richly characterized, and compulsively readable. But it’s also incredibly slight, and feels like a missed opportunity that might have been saved by setting up in conjunction with other pieces or shortening it down to the short story length the concept seems able to sustain.

I say all of this with the caveat that I still generally enjoyed Elevation; it’s all but impossible for King to write something uninteresting, and Elevation has a great setup, as Castle Rock resident Scott Carey goes to see a doctor friend with a most unusual complaint. See, Scott is losing weight…sort of. Oh, he undeniably weighs less – that’s not in question – but what is odd is that Scott’s clothes don’t affect his weight. Nor do the handbells he shoves in his pockets. Or the actual weight of his body. No, Scott’s weight is going down steadily, no matter what the actual mass of that body might be. And at the rate it’s going, Scott might not have more than a few months left before that weight hits zero – and whatever happens then can’t be good, right?

All of this leads to Scott taking stock of his life and realizing that he may not have made much of a difference on this planet in his short time here, and coming to understand that maybe it’s time to do something. So Scott starts trying to make peace with his neighbors, a relatively newly arrived (by small-town Maine standards, that is) lesbian couple with whom he’s had some disagreements. But as Scott reaches out, he starts to see how the couple’s been treated by the town around them, and how prejudice is still so much a factor in a town he thought was better than that.

In lesser hands, Elevation could turn into either an after-school special about the importance of tolerance or a sappy story of acceptance. But King avoids that by letting all of his characters come to life, not as easy archetypes or symbols of their orientation, but as human beings who become friends. Yes, the plotting feels a little slight – more on that later – but as ever, King makes it work by turning this into a story about these people, not a story about all people.

The problem is, though, that that’s about all there really is to Elevation. At King’s best, he mixes those themes with the supernatural elements, letting them play off of each other in interesting ways. Here, Scott’s “ailment” feels almost arbitrary, an element that wouldn’t be much different than giving Scott any terminal disease and a short time left. (There’s a single plot element, involving a race, that wouldn’t work without it, but it’s something that the story could easily move around.) And while King’s intentions are good ones here, giving us a reminder of the importance of human connections and making the world a better place than we found it, King’s done this message in other books, and done it better, and with more impact. Elevation feels slight because there’s just not that much to it; it’s a story that King would have used as part of a character’s development in the background of something stronger, but he’s released it on its own and expects it to satisfy. Is it a bad read? Not in the least, but like Scott Carey, it’s even lighter than it looks, and that page count looks pretty light to begin with.

Amazon

Hereditary / ****

I’ve been thinking now for several days about Ari Aster’s astonishing, terrifying Hereditary, mainly about one simple question: does it work, as a whole?

Now, let’s be clear: that question isn’t about the technical merits of the film. Hereditary is a masterwork of craft on almost every level, and the fact that it marks Aster’s feature debut is jaw-dropping. From the way he uses the miniaturized models that populate the house to the jarring transitions between day and night, from his phenomenal use of long takes to bring out the tension and emotion of a moment to his ability to build mood, Hereditary blew me away even before things go very, very, very bad. And when they do, Hereditary more than earns its reputation as a truly horrifying experience, delivering some of the most terrifying and intense scares I’ve ever had in a film, all without ever using jump scares. (Indeed, one of the most effective moments of the film is not always even noticed by some of the audience, given how Aster leaves it lurking in the shadows and background of a shot.) The final act of Hereditary is one for the ages, and even days later, the images it held don’t let go.

But that shift to absolute terror jars the film greatly, because for much of its running time, Hereditary is an admittedly tense portrait of familial grief, parental failings, and fears of hereditary mental illness. In fact, it’s worth noting that even without its horror-filled final act, Hereditary absolutely works as a study in grief and emotional pain, looking at the experiences of the characters and letting the cast absolutely own the raw anguish they’re feeling. The obvious standout is Toni Collette, who opens the film by providing a eulogy for her mother – a woman whose impact on her life was admittedly mixed, we feel – and has to mix her pain with her life as an artist and mother. Meanwhile, her children and husband are all dealing with their own dramas, and the fact that Aster gives their emotional struggles and connections as much time – if not more – than his horrors is much of what makes Hereditary so powerful.

And for a while, it feels like Hereditary is taking a page from The Babadook and using its horror as a metaphor for grief, the sins of our parents, and more. There’s much to support this – look, for instance, at how Collette’s inability to accept death is both figuratively and quite literally tearing her family apart, or how her efforts to move on, at one point, are literally causing her pain. That’s rich fare, and for a while, Hereditary handles that balance better than The Babadook does, managing to hold both horror and metaphor solidly.

But while The Babadook eventually let the metaphor take over the film and lost the thread of the horror, Hereditary does the opposite, letting go of its exploration of grief and parent-child relationships in favor of all-out terror (and in doing so, almost gives us the easy way out, because the grief we were watching was impossible to explain – this, by contrast, at least is something that almost makes sense). I don’t think the film entirely loses its way here – I think there’s something to be said about how much the film’s horrors still revolve around the relationship between parents and children, and how parents sometimes force their own lives onto their children, or how trauma can echo through generations. But as Hereditary goes weirder and weirder, there’s little denying that the horror overshadows the emotional complexity of the film, no matter how absolutely incredibly effective it is. (Seriously, that third act alone justifies Hereditary as one of the essential horror films of the 21st century automatically.)

Every component of Hereditary works, from the technical craft to the acting, from the nuanced writing to the dread-infused score. As a drama, it’s riveting and gut-wrenching; as a horror film, it’s terrifying and intense. Does the end work with the rest of the film? In some ways, yes; in other ways, not quite. But none of it keeps the film from being absolutely essential viewing; even if the whole isn’t quite the sum of the parts, those parts are truly incredible, and mark Aster as a talent who we’ll hopefully be watching for years to come.

IMDb

Ubik, by Philip K. Dick / *****

It’s hard to write about Philip K. Dick in general – what new can be said about a writer who was so influential and who’s inspired so much writing? And that goes doubly for Ubik, one of Dick’s most acclaimed novels. And yet, here I am, trying to describe one of the best novels written by one of the most fascinating and interesting science-fiction writers who ever lived.

Those of us who love Philip K. Dick usually concede that it’s not the craft and the prose that draws us to his work; it’s the complicated, mind-blowing plotting (usually more evident in his short stories) or the rich, thoughtful philosophical musings (a staple of his novels). Ubik is the best of both worlds, though – a head-scratching, dizzying display of plot twists, confusion, and surreal touches that all come together perfectly, all while anchoring itself in musings about the afterlife, causation, time travel, and the nature of consciousness.

Trying to describe the plotting of Ubik is a fool’s errand, but more than that, it would remove the pleasure of unraveling the book’s mysteries for yourself. Suffice to say that the book gives us a future in which company’s provide anti-psychic services in an effort to protect corporate secrets, which has led to what amounts to underground warfare between the psychics and those trying to thwart them. Into this comes a whole new talent that could change the game – but first, a most unusual contract comes across the desk of the leading anti-psychic agency, one that’s going to make the next few days exceedingly strange.

If that sounds vague, well, good – as I said, much of the pleasure of Ubik comes from unraveling all of its disparate pieces and seeing how Dick toys with his audience. But more importantly, for all of its rich plotting, Ubik is packed with fascinating world details, from a society where everything is automated and linked to your credit report to mortuaries where people are kept in a half-life state so you can speak with them for years after their death. And it’s those aspects that make the book so fascinating, as Dick plays with our ideas of the afterlife (here, he’s drawing in no small way on Tibetan beliefs) and how it will play out, but also our own self-awareness. Few authors were as fascinated by the malleable nature of reality as Dick was, and Ubik brings that in spades, as characters unravel, fall apart, and see the world devolving in front of them. The very question of “what is real?” becomes central not only to the plot, but to the lives of our heroes, as they attempt to figure out any sort of purpose or meaning to their existence.

There are better written Dick books out there (A Scanner Darkly); there are richer novels (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is my favorite); but few marry Dick’s playful side with his thoughtful as well as Ubik does. In many ways, it’s the platonic ideal of a Philip K. Dick novel, and maybe an ideal gateway into his work for those who’ve never experienced it. More than that, it’s just a blast of a read, with enough substance to satisfy those wanting a bit more than pure pulp.

Amazon

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman / *****

Most children’s books probably don’t begin with the slaying of the protagonist’s family at the hand of a blade-wielding murderer. Then again, most children’s books aren’t written by Neil Gaiman, an author who’s always moved in and out of the darkest aspects of the world with ease, even in his children’s literature. And while the result can definitely be scarier than what, say, the youngest children could handle, re-reading The Graveyard Book with my son only underlined for me all the ways that Gaiman’s respect for what children can handle pays off – the way it never talks down to its audience, but instead, spins a story that’s engrossing to all ages and while never feeling condescending, simplistic, or “safe”.

Yes, The Graveyard Book – Gaiman’s homage to Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book – is nominally for children, but don’t let that deter you from reading it. With every bit of the imagination, wonder, magic, and beautiful prose that Gaiman has brought to everything else he’s written, The Graveyard Book is a delight – part coming of age tale, part adventure story, part thriller, and part magical realism, but all wonderful, charming, and imaginative.

The Graveyard Book takes the form of, essentially, a series of connected short stories, all telling of episodes and incidents in the life of Bod Owens, a young boy being raised by the inhabitants of a graveyard. There’s a trip into the land of the Ghouls, an encounter with the ghost of a witch, a trip to the darkest grave in the yard, and more. And through it all, there’s the threat of the man Jack, trying to find his way back to Bod. Gaiman juggles the micro and macro expertly, turning each individual chapter into a satisfying, complete story while also putting them all together to create an arc for Bod – a young boy who’s beginning to grow up and figure out the person he’s going to become.

It’s that arc that truly makes The Graveyard Book so special. Yes, Gaiman’s imagination is on full display, giving you wonders and horrors, magic and terror, fantastical visions and other worlds. And yes, there’s his dry British humor, his love of his characters, his fleshed-out world. But what makes The Graveyard Book so truly rich is the emotion that comes along with Bod growing up. After all, much of a parent’s job is preparing your child to be self-sufficient and to be able to thrive on their own – and Gaiman doesn’t ever forget how painful that can be, no matter how proud you may feel of your child.

Of course, he does this while spinning a tale as deftly as ever, filling his world with memorable characters and fleshing it out with rules, shadows, hints, and details to dwell in for days. But maybe the most important thing of all was what my son said after I finished the last chapter: “Are there more books after this?” And that love of the book – one that I shared – is the thing that speaks best to the wonder and success of Gaiman’s creation.

Amazon

Reincarnation Blues, by Michael Poore / *****

A good portion of the books I read are review copies, and while I’ve come to enjoy the chaos and unpredictability of reading books where I have zero expectations, there are definitely times where I’ve considered giving it up. (Why, yes, these times often correspond with long streaks of bad books – how did you know?) All of which goes to say, the joy of reviewing is that sometimes you get a book like Reincarnation Blues that can completely blindside you, coming out of nowhere and blowing you away with its imagination, humor, style, and richness.

Trying to describe Reincarnation Blues is a bit of a rough task; the best I can do is to say that it combines the millennia-spanning reincarnated souls of Cloud Atlas with the untraditional but rich love story of The Time Traveler’s Wife, with a rich sprinkling of humor that’s oh so welcome. But even that description doesn’t really do the book justice – it doesn’t convey the richness of the storytelling, the quiet silliness, and most of all, the pure warmth of the whole experience.

Reincarnation Blues is the story of a soul named Milo, who’s among the oldest souls in the universe – he’s been reincarnated nearly 10,000 times. That’s given Milo an incredible amount of experience and learning, with lives lived in the ancient past, the distant future, and everywhere in between. But Milo’s favorite parts of existence are the parts in between his lives, where he gets the chance to reunite with the love of his “life”: Suzie…also known as Death. And once you add to that the impending threat of oblivion – because any soul that hasn’t achieved enlightenment by incarnation #10,000 doesn’t get another chance – and there’s a lot of pressure on Milo to figure some things out.

And yet, Reincarnation Blues never feels like a high pressure book. Yes, there’s this deadline looming, and yes, there’s this complicated idea of having a romance with the incarnation of Death, but Reincarnation Blues remains focused, both in plot and thematic terms, on the nature of the human experience – on learning to be kind, on listening to other people, on trying to accept the universe for what it is. It’s a book that’s never really about all of Milo’s lives, despite the way it weaves in and out all of them, giving us scenes of combat, of peace, of future science, of primitive tribes, and every possible combination of all of those. It’s about what Milo did and learned in those lives, and the experiences that shaped him into the person he is.

And yet, there’s no denying that Poore’s incredible imagination gives the book a life that’s undeniable, and maybe all the more effective for how he backgrounds it throughout. More than that, the way he weaves all of Milo’s lives into one complex history – with actions in one life being referenced in another – give the sense of a complex mythology behind the book, a carefully planned out reality that we only get glimpses of. Add to that his quietly funny, sometimes silly writing style, and you have a book that succeeds in no small part to the authorial craft on display in every page.

But more than the imagination, more than the humor, what really made Reincarnation Blues work for me was the warmth of the whole novel. This is a book where the stakes revolve around finding a successful relationship and achieving some sort of internal peace and calm with the universe. And to that end, for all of the drama, for all of the stakes in each individual life that Milo leads, the book is more about connecting to other people, about learning the importance of how we relate to each other and the legacies we leave behind. That’s a great message to receive, but also a rich one, one that’s so welcome in days where we feel constantly pushed against each other. And it’s the thing that really sold me on this book – that, and the great writing, and the rich imagination, and the wonderful characters, and the great humor…well, maybe I just loved all of it, and loved it so much.

Amazon

The Leftovers (Season 3) / *****

I’ve been a fan of The Leftovers since the beginning – yes, even that infamous first season, which I think is phenomenal television and gets an unfairly bad rap. (That’s not to say it’s not a bleak and draining experience, but I think people complain far too much about it.) Then came the second season, which managed to be even better – keeping all the themes and ideas of the first season, but turning into something more darkly funny and slightly more accessible, all while never compromising in the least.

And now, the show has ended with its best season yet, which went even further than the second, delivering some of the wildest, strangest, most ambitious hours of television I’ve seen in years, all while never leaving behind its basic themes: an exploration of grief, faith, doubt, and purpose in a hostile – or even worse, indifferent – universe. That’s heady, astonishing fare even for prestige television, but The Leftovers never flinches from its mission, exploring how faith can both give us purpose and blind us to reality, how suffering and pain are an essential part of the human experience but no less devastating for their necessity, how death leaves us walking wounded.

In lesser hands, The Leftovers would be overwhelmingly crushing (see that first season, which came close). But in the hands of Damon Lindelof, it’s one of the most remarkable, inventive, surreal, and powerful shows I’ve ever seen. What other show could take a throwaway joke about a beloved 80’s sitcom from season one, then twist it until it became a powerful scene about finding yourself rejected by the world and even the universe as a whole? What other show could take a character’s struggle with faith and have it culminate with an episode involving God, a sex cruise, and a lion? What other show could kick things off with a series of increasingly ludicrous bio-scanners (and one of the all-time funniest sound effects on a tv series), but end by forcing us to carry through an infamous and horrific nuclear deterrent? And honestly, I’m only scratching the surface of a season that delved into Australian Aboriginal culture, apocalyptic fears, damaged relationships, suicidal tendencies, but also a slow-motion trampoline sequence set to the Wu-Tang Clan, pratfalls, and a surprising number of penis jokes. The Leftovers has always been its own unique show, but never more than this season, when it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen on television – and I’m watching Twin Peaks right now. It’s unpredictable but always consistent, surreal but always comprehensible, surprising but logical – in other words, it was a constant joy to tune in, simply because I never knew what to expect, but it was always going to be great.

In other words, as The Leftovers hit its final season, its confidence grew, and the show was willing to go for broke, making its characters’ struggles literal, tangible, and even operatic in their stakes. These are big questions – questions about God, about why we suffer, why people die, how we can find happiness, what happens to us after we die, and the importance (or lack thereof) of faith. And rather than giving glib, simplistic takes or easy answers, Lindelof embraces the complexity and difficulty of these issues, exploring them and refusing to ever give us – or the characters – easy answers. The Leftovers has always been a show about uncertainty, a feat it managed to the end, somehow finding the absolute perfect way to handle the question of “What exactly happened in the Departure?” in a way that perfectly matches the show’s themes.

It doesn’t hurt that the show is anchored by such great performances. Christopher Eccleston’s religious figure Matt is all the more compelling and rich this year, as his faith leads him in some bizarre – and maybe delusional – places. Scott Glenn finally gets some showcases after far too long, carrying an episode on his back largely with his weathered, questioning face. Justin Theroux is as great as ever, mixing despair, anger, doubt, and public confidence in a way that’s instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever struggled with the moodiness that comes with depression. And best of all, there’s Carrie Coon’s wounded, bristly Nora Durst, perhaps the single person most affected by the Departure, whose pain can’t be covered up, no matter how tough her exterior can be. There’s any number of other great actors here, including a few I don’t want to spoil (but will be welcome appearances for fans), but the show’s main cast truly does remarkable work, investing us in these wounded, hurt people and following them as they grapple with issues that every single one of us grapple with as well.

Look, I know that so much of what I’m saying makes The Leftovers sound like work, or like seriously heavy fare. And make no mistake – the questions, the struggles, the themes of this series are huge ones, universal ones that are going to hit home for many of us, and evoke painful personal moments. But in the end, the reason The Leftovers works is that, for all of its questions, for all of its doubts, for all of its fears, it finds optimism and a reason to keep on, even in the midst of it all. Whether that be faith or family, relationships or purpose, The Leftovers ends up being far more reaffirming than you might expect for a show that’s so much about death, grief, and loss. And that optimism and hope is something very much worth remembering, maybe now more than ever.

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