2023 Movie Diary: Part 2

June 12, 2023June 12, 2023clydeumney Leave a comment

It would be easy to spend my entire review of Lady Snowblood talking about how much it served as inspiration and/or fodder for Kill Bill Vol. 1, but doing that would turn this review into a discussion of Tarantino’s film, so let’s stipulate that as a given and move on to talking about fantastic Lady Snowblood is. The premise is simple enough: a beautiful young woman works to kill the four people behind the death of her parents. But none of that conveys the style and execution (pun not intended) of the film, which unfolds in chapters, mixes in animation, unfolds non-chronologically, and takes its time in doling out its information. Oh, and when it lets the action fly, the blood is copious, with literal fountains spraying everywhere. There’s some familiar tropes here, even if I’ll admit that there are a couple of slick reveals and surprises in the final act, but none of that really matters when the film is as expertly paced and told as this one is, delivering thrilling combat and a fascinating heroine. That latter has to fall at the feet of Meiko Kaji, who has to convey so much about our heroine entirely through looks, physical demeanor and actions, and especially her eyes, and more than delivers on that front, turning Lady Snowblood into a veritable Terminator while occasionally hinting at the loss of soul and humanity that the process has taken on her. It’s not hard at all to understand why Lady Snowblood has the cult following that it does; it’s stylish, beautifully crafted, moves like a rocket, and just delivers the good pretty much any way you could ask. Loved it. Rating: **** ½

I don’t think I’ve seen a more alienating, defiantly non-commercial, intensely “this is the movie I wanted, and screw the average viewer” movie than Beau is Afraid get a mainstream release since Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, and honestly, that alone raises the film a little bit in my estimation; there’s no way to argue that this isn’t the movie that Ari Aster set out to make in every way, and even if it doesn’t all work, by god, it’s personal, intense, memorable, imaginative, and not like anything else you’ve seen, ever. In its broadest sense, Beau is about its title character (brilliantly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix) and his journey to get home to his mother, with whom he has a…complicated relationship. But let me be honest and tell you that that in no way reflects the movie you’re going to get, which opens with a sort of surreal urban hellscape in which Beau has to scurry for his life before segueing into a bizarre situation where he’s been adopted by a pair of overly doting parents, and before that gives way into yet another genre involving a series of actors in the woods, and that…you get the gist. Beau is Afraid cycles through genres as it feels fit, using some of Aster’s horror chops but never in a conventional way whatsoever; instead, what he creates is a waking nightmare that lasts for three hours without a break or relief. That’s probably the biggest issue with Beau; in the best of these sort of things, there’s at least a moment of normality against which we can measure the rest of the film, but Beau starts off roughly at the level of the final act of Repulsion and never lets up. That’s intentional, to be sure, but it makes for a film that’s all but impossible to get your bearings in, as well as one without a single moment of clarity or sanity in the entire time. When you’ve made a movie whose comparison points are Eraserhead, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and the like, you’ve made something that’s not for all tastes – this is a movie about a broken man who’s been destroyed by the world and his mother, but there’s little sense that Beau will ever improve or get better. But for all of that, it’s hard to convey the blackly comic tone of Beau – it’s legitimately laugh out loud funny, frequently (although based off of my audience, that humor will work for you or it won’t, and let me tell you, I wasn’t in the majority in finding it hilarious), and it finds moments of transcendent beauty when you least expect them (there is a stretch in the late film that I found myself moved deeply by involving a life that could have been). Look, I don’t know that I’ve done any sort of good job describing the film, but maybe that’s not that surprising, given the wildness on display here; this is a movie that’s defiantly not for all tastes, that’s an intensely personal exploration of a toxic mother-son relationship, that’s both bleakly devastating and darkly hilarious, that swings for the fences over and over and over again and refuses to compromise. You know if that’s for you or not; the more I think I about it, the more I think I loved it, but it’s a film that won’t leave your head and demands to be seen. It gives you a cinematic experience that’s like little else, and that alone makes it worth seeing for the adventurous among you. Rating: **** (maybe 4.5? maybe 5? I haven’t settled yet)

I truly cannot figure out how The Ninth Configuration became associated with the horror genre; my guess would be that it’s the product of a studio who wanted to capitalize on writer/director William Peter Blatty’s connections to The Exorcist and make people think that they were getting something more traditional, more mainstream than what they got – especially because what they got was destined to be a cult film at best. Like some strange fusion of Catch-22 and Shutter Island, The Ninth Configuration takes place at a military asylum full of truly eccentric and broken men – men adapting Shakespeare for dogs, men who think that they’re classical painters, men who think they can adjust their atoms and walk through walls, and especially one astronaut who had a breakdown at the moment of launch. Into all of this comes a new psychiatrist in charge who finds a possible new treatment for the men, but the consequences here are a little unexpected. The Ninth Configuration is undeniably from the same mind behind The Exorcist, but not in terms of demonic possession; instead, this is a film about faith and the presence of any goodness in a world marked by the Vietnam War, by atomic bombs, by animal cruelty – and what might happen if there was nothing out there beyond our own evil and horror. If that sounds like an uneasy mix, it certainly is; the veering between surreal comic madness and complex theological debates certainly doesn’t always work, even if the juxtaposition both helps and hurts the film as it goes. It’s also not helped by Stacy Keach’s somnambulistic lead performance; while there’s some explanation of this as the film goes along, it doesn’t really make his scenes any more effective, and there’s definitely a sense where a better actor could have brought more to the table here. I don’t think The Ninth Configuration entirely works, but it’s compellingly strange and idiosyncratic, and I’m glad I finally saw it after a long time of being curious. Films about the complexity of faith are something I’m always intrigued by, and the weird mix of tones here only makes it all the more interesting. It’s far from flawless, but it’s an intriguing experiment regardless. Besides, you know me: an interesting failure is always better than a boring success, and this is roundly in the former category. Rating: *** ½

The issue I’ve come to have with anthology films is that they can so often struggle to hang together. That’s not always the worst thing; indeed, much as with short story collections, short pieces can give directors the chance to cut loose on ideas and techniques that might not work in a longer format. But more often, you get works like Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which brings to the table a lot of what I love and Anderson, but ultimately just doesn’t come together in a cohesive whole. With the conceit being that we’re reading the final issue of the titular newspaper (itself a New Yorker homage), Anderson gives us short and long segments about Paris, ranging from a youth revolution to a police chef caught up in a hostage situation to an imprisoned artist, all created with his usual style, wry sensibility, and astonishing casts. More of The French Dispatch works than not, honestly; Owen Wilson’s brief travelogue of the city delivers some great comic beats to kick things off, and I genuinely got caught up in the story of Benicio del Toro’s criminally insane artist and his relationship with a prison guard that blossoms into an art career; I’ll concede that the story feels like it’s missing a little something by the end, but it’s anchored by del Toro’s complex, layered performance and how much he brings to that character. And enough good can’t be said about the final stretch of the film, in which Jeffery Wright (channeling James Baldwin) narrates the story of the city’s amazing police chef, only to bring out a soulfulness and melancholy that’s been bubbling underneath the film’s surface when you least expect it. (Indeed, the brief flashback scene involving Wright’s getting the job at the Dispatch might be the single best moment in the film.) That melancholy is really the soul of the film, and it’s what anchors Anderson’s best work – the deep humanity, sadness, and isolation that’s so often masked by his controlled, precise style – and I can’t help but wish that the film tapped into it more, because when it does, you get a sense of the film that could be here – the one that’s about a time gone by and a world that’s passing us through. That could work best when it comes to the film’s longest segment, about a youth revolution and starring Frances McDormand and Timothée Chalomet, but sadly, that segment never comes together; it’s missing a core that the rest have, and ultimately bogs down the film as a whole, to say nothing of squandering that thematic richness that could have been. I still really enjoyed The French Dispatch overall, mind you – I think even Anderson’s weakest works (which might be this or Darjeeling, though I haven’t revisited that one) are worth seeing for his skill, his surprisingly deep humanity, and the soulfulness he brings underneath his fussy compositions – and I laughed a lot here and throughout, to say nothing of loving so many of the performances. It may be among his weaker works, but even his weakest bring me joy and remind me why I love watching his work. Rating: ****

A strange little impressionistic psychological horror/noir, Dementia unfolds across the space of about an hour, following a nameless woman as she drifts through a night full of sexual menace and threat. It’s clear even from the outset that our heroine isn’t quite stable, but as she goes out for a night with a man who looks distractingly like off-brand Orson Welles, we know things won’t go well. All of which is interesting enough, and you can’t argue that Dementia isn’t at least a unique little experiment. To make essentially a silent film in the mid 1950s, to say nothing of one that attempts to immerse us into the broken mind of its protagonist through stylized flashbacks and surreal costuming, is a good idea, and you can see the influence of Dementia on later – and better – films like Carnival of Souls. The problem here is that the reach far exceeds the grasp with Dementia; those flashbacks are clunky and full of leaden symbolism, the film drags and meanders even at less than an hour, and the payoff to it all just doesn’t work the way it needs to. But that doesn’t stop some memorable moments along the way, and director John Parker (helped, by all accounts, by co-writer Bruno VeSota) brings in a surprising amount of blatantly sexual and violent material into the film, making it really no wonder that it never passed approval. Dementia is more of an object of interest for film buffs and the curious than it is truly successful movie, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t some promise here; it just doesn’t ever quite live up to it. (Also, can’t let this review end without saying that it opens with truly one of the strangest opening crawls that I’ve ever seen, in which Preston Sturges raves about the movie, calls it one to “purge your libido,” and tells the audience that horror is subjective and you shouldn’t let anyone decide for you. Truly weird.) Rating: ***

I don’t love watching movies on my laptop, but I’m truly glad I made an exception for Host, director Rob Savage’s 2020 film that unfolds entirely through a Zoom call, a framing device that made it play like gangbusters on my laptop screen. Filmed during the quarantine, Host is simple enough: friends get together online and participate in a seance; the seance goes badly; something is unleashed. With a runtime of less than an hour (and the reason for that made me laugh), Host moves well, making the most of its medium in clever ways without overstaying its welcome, and letting its cast bring the characters to life smoothly and organically. Host doesn’t quite embrace the form the way that Unfriended did, and the final act works best when it’s showing less than it otherwise does, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it kept me pretty on edge as it builds, or that a lot of Savage’s choices didn’t absolutely play for me. (The use of an animated Zoom background is a brilliant touch here that works on multiple levels, all of them effective.) Sure, you can nitpick things here and there, but Host works incredibly well for what it is, and especially for the limitations that everyone was operating under. Horror is a genre that always reflects our fears and anxieties, so it makes sense that we would get a slew of quarantine horror films; while I haven’t seen a ton (though I’ve started to read more of them), it’s nice to have at least one that works as a horror film first and a cultural moment second. (Also, kudos for how the film handles the credits, which is a genuinely nice touch.) From a story perspective, you’ve seen all this before, but as a moment in time and a conceit taken to an extreme, Host is solid, entertaining, creepy fare. Rating: ****

It’s been a while since I was as excited for a sequel as I was for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The first film in the series was a triumph – easily the best superhero movie ever made, but also just a tour de force in terms of animation. Any sequel was going to have to deal with being less revelatory/out of nowhere, but also, it would just have the impact of its predecessor to measure up to. Did we need just a rehashing of the story? Thankfully, Across the Spider-Verse is less of a rehashing and more of a continuation/evolution of the original, one which finds the film grappling with what it means to have multiple Spider-Men wandering the world – and what it takes to be a Spider-Man, in the end. Along the way, that turns the film into an exploration of the canon and what we “expect” in our superhero tales, and what happens when we push beyond the expectations. That’s all subtext, though, for another stylish, energetic, funny, dazzling story, one whose beats are best kept for you to discover; what I’ll say is that we start the film with Gwen Stacy for a while, turning her into a dual protagonist all her own, before explaining how all of this ties into some remaining problems with the multiverse, a ridiculously inept new villain called The Spot (played by a perfectly cast Jason Schwartzman), and “Spider-Man 2099,” aka Miguel O’Hara (an intimidatingly intense Oscar Isaac), who’s trying to solve the problems. Let me warn you: Across the Spider-Verse is undeniably part 1 of a 2-part story; this is a film that ends on a pretty abrupt and cliffhangery “To Be Continued” point, and as such, it can be hard to judge it entirely on its own merits; how it sticks the landing will determine how well some of this worked, to say nothing of how it may clarify some of the themes of the film. But what I can say is that I had a complete blast here; Across the Spider-Verse picks up where its predecessor left off not only in terms of its story but in terms of its style, and they push it even further here, giving us more worlds, more animation styles (my favorite involves the way the film incorporates the original punk aesthetic into its animation and world), more astonishing sequences, and the same genuinely funny characters anchored by true emotional stakes that actually work and have heft to them. (It’s notable how much of the film revolves not around Spider-Man, but around Miles Morales.) More than that, it brings even more ambition and thoughtfulness than the first film did – and that’s saying a lot. I’m inclined to say that Into the Spider-Verse is still the superior film, but that may change over time (and with me seeing the endgame); what I can say regardless is that Across the Spider-Verse is every bit the sequel I was hoping for, and that it lives up to any expectations I could have set – and those were not low expectations. In short, I loved it; I’m just ready for next year already. Rating: *****

IMDb: Lady Snowblood | Beau is Afraid | The Ninth Configuration | The French Dispatch | Dementia | Host | Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

2023 Movie Diary: Part 1

June 3, 2023June 3, 2023clydeumney 1 Comment

For a lot of reasons, I watch a lot fewer movies than I used to these days, and a lot of what I watch I don’t always feel like reviewing, especially when it comes to rewatches of movies I’ve seen lots of times (for instance, this year, I’m still a fan of Harold and Maude, but I don’t have anything really new to say about it). Still, it’s June, and I’ve seen a handful of things worth talking about, and so some quick capsule reviews felt like an easy enough way of handling things.

It’s been a few months now since I saw Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, so you’ll have to forgive me for being a little hazy on some of the plot details, but what hasn’t faded is just how strange, dark, and surprisingly grim the movie is – and how much del Toro brings to the table. I’m a big fan of del Toro’s work in general, and I was a bit unsure how I felt about him taking on Pinocchio, even if it was in an intriguing stop-motion style. But what I didn’t expect is just how much it would fit into del Toro’s usual themes and fixations, with the story unfolding against the backdrop of the rise of fascism, a setting which makes puppetry all the more effective as a storytelling device and obvious metaphor. There’s more to the world here, though, with more time spent with Geppetto as the story thinks about fathers and sons (and grief), and a surprisingly strange sense of our place in the cosmos, with the Blue Fairy feeling very much in line with del Toro’s usual designs, to say nothing of a complex relationship with death. It’s a deeply strange movie; there are aspects that never quite seem to fit with the overall tone (I’m thinking here mainly of Ewan McGregor’s cricket; while McGregor does well with the role, it never seems tonally to gel with the rest of the movie), and the songs are eminently forgettable and bland. But it’s undeniably a del Toro film, as he takes this story and turns it into something that honestly feels more him than the (still very good) Nightmare Alley. Not for all tastes, and definitely a bit dark for younger kids, but I quite enjoyed it – it’s wholly idiosyncratic and personal, and that always makes for a more interesting movie for me. Rating: ****

I have yet to be let down by a John Wick film, but I’ll admit that the running time of John Wick Chapter 4 – almost three hours – gave me a bit of a bad premonition about the film. (In general, this trend of excessively long films is frustrating to me; it feels as though we have forgotten the benefits of restrictions and boundaries on film. But I digress.) And to be sure, there are a couple of stretches of Chapter 4 that could be trimmed down – I’m not sure we need the opening revisiting of a character from the last film, for instance, and I’m sure we could lose at least one sequence along the way…except that so much of the joy of Chapter 4 comes from delivering some of the best pure action of the entire series, and that’s a high bar to clear. As usual with Wick films, the plot is both labyrinthine and simple; very long story short, John needs to settle accounts to get any chance to just return to his normal life at this point, all while the new Marquis (a gloriously villainous Bill Skarsgård) is doing what it takes to bring Wick in and consolidate his power. Into the mix we bring in the usual array of supporting players, with almost every scene stolen by Donnie Yen, playing Wick’s former comrade Caine, whose blind martial arts never get less enjoyable, and equal supporting power brought by Shamier Anderson as a man only known as Tracker. All complicated fare, sure, but it barely matters once Chapter 4 stomps on the gas and lets loose, delivering a series of setpieces for the ages, even before we get into the closing forty five minutes of pure, relentless action that keeps topping itself. A jaw-dropping drone sequence; a chaotic brawl in the midst of a Paris roundabo½ut; and my god, that stair sequence. And all along the way, director Chad Stahelski peppers the film with wonderful homages, from The Warriors to Sergio Leone to wuxia films. I had a blast with Chapter 4, which does everything I’ve come to love about the series – giving me a murderer’s row of character actors, delivering astonishing action, soaking the film in style, and just in general being a joy to watch in a time of bland films that are only concerned with plot. That it all feels like a logical end point feels like a tease – there are already rumors of a Chapter 5, which seems pointless – but that’s okay, really; when you get something this imaginative and stylish and gleeful, I’m hesitant to say that I wouldn’t take more. Rating: **** ½

I’m going to confess that I actually have an affection for the found-footage genre when it’s done well; it’s a gimmick, sure, but when it’s executed well (see: The Blair Witch Project), it can bring an immediacy and an intensity to the proceedings. That’s incredibly well illustrated by [REC], a Spanish-language thriller that unfolds through the lens of a local news crew accompanying a team of firemen into a building where an elderly woman needs help. I’d heard that [REC} was intense and scary, but that undersells the film, which uses the claustrophobia of its setting (a small apartment building that feels like we’re in a building not designed for a camera crew instead of a spacious film set) and a constantly escalating sense of dread about what’s happening outside the eye of the camera to build tension and fear. (There’s an early moment that does this perfectly, delivering a jump scare for the ages but also a moment that feels like the first time we really get the sense that all hell is going to break loose here.) Once [REC] hits its final act, it becomes unbelievably tense and relentless, moving faster and faster without ever giving us a chance to catch our breath. The one misstep comes in the final stretch of the film, which hints at an explanation of what’s going on that doesn’t really add much; that being said, its use of that location is perfect, and I was fairly well out of my chair with tension through that point, so I can’t complain too much. [REC] does what the best found footage films do, which is turn its “gimmick” into part of the text of the film – as a news crew, they need to expose the truth, but more than that, if you’re reporting on the news, you can’t be part of it…right? Right? Rating: **** ½

Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To is so bracing, uncomfortable, and unsettling that it’s a disappointment when the film collapses under its own weight by the end of the story, but that doesn’t really detract from the great atmosphere and tension of the early going. One of those great grindhouse-feeling New York films where you can feel the grime on the street, God Told Me To boasts an intriguing hook that sadly doesn’t feel any less relevant today than it did back then: a series of pointless shootings and murders, all arising out of nowhere and linked only by the murderers’ claims that “God” told them to do it. One detective keeps digging at the crimes, wrestling with the implications that would arise from the existence of a God who would want His followers to commit these crimes, and that’s all so rich and compelling and uncomfortable and thoughtful…and then you find out what’s really going on, and it’s all just kind of a big mess. I was pretty disappointed by the final act of God Told Me To, obviously; even as I’ll concede that what we get is about as bonkers and committed to the insanity as we could get, it feels like a disappointing ending to a film that seemed to be touching on so much more interesting material. (It’s here that I’ll drop in that all of the setup and first half of God Told Me To reminded me of nothing so much as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, a film that I really need to revisit, and I suspect would scratch the itch this one left behind.) Still, I’m a sucker for that grimy New York feel, and Cohen brings it across beautifully, grounding the film more than you would expect in the beats of a failing relationship and the doubts of a believer. The destination is nonsensical and disappointing, but that doesn’t make the world or the execution any less engaging, and the deep strangeness is an appeal all its own. Rating: *** ½

In theory, George Romero’s Martin is a vampire movie, but anyone expecting anything remotely typical about the vampirism here should abandon that quickly; if anything, the comparison that came to mind for me repeatedly was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which is not the comparison I would have expected. But it’s the obvious analog here, as Romero introduces us to Martin, who certainly believes that he’s a vampire (a reality the film never confirms or denies) who preys on women, killing them and staging their deaths to look like suicides as he drinks their blood. But Martin has been sent to Pittsburgh to live with his older (and very religious) cousin, who hopes to save the boy’s soul. There’s no missing the serial killer parallels to Martin, down to the way that he clearly operates in a cycle that seems to be collapsing, but Romero dodges the usual assumptions of that genre as much as he’s avoiding vampire tropes. Instead, Martin is inextricably linked to its time and place – Pittsburgh in the 1970s, as it slowly dies out – and Romero does nothing to avoid the signs of the time. Indeed, there’s a bit of Taxi Driver here, as Martin feels as shaped by the drug abuse, dying factories, lack of opportunities, and more, as much as by his upbringing – whatever that was. Apparently Martin first existed in a much longer cut, and it shows; the film as it stands feels abruptly paced, with sequences elided out and time jumps that can be hard to follow and erratic. But even with those issues, it crawls under your skin, delivering murder and home invasion sequences that stand the test of time and giving us a protagonist who’s completely and utterly sui generis. It’s a more subtle examination of the world and its issues than Romero would come to be known for, but it’s all there in its own unique way, anchored by a great performance by John Amplas as the disturbed teenager at the core of it all. Strange, unsettling, uncomfortable, and wholly unique – it’s not hard to see why this has the cult following that it does, and you can count me in for it. Rating: ****

Thanks to the reactions and praise for Saint Maud, I assumed that what I was getting into was pure religious horror, but it became clear very quickly that Saint Maud was instead an entry in a genre that I have a lot of love for – that of a lonely, isolated person (often a woman, if I think of movies like Repulsion and books like Audrey’s Door) whose reality and/or sanity is breaking down around them, all while we’re thrust into their heads. In this case, we’re in the world of the titular Maud, an at-home caregiver who has retreated into religion after an incident from her time as a nurse left her fractured and broken. Maud becomes more and more fixated on saving the soul of her client, but it’s also clear that she’s looking for purpose and meaning in the world, and that only God can provide that for her. It’s also clear, though, that the reason Maud is relying on God is because she has no one else at all, and that isolation only causes her mania to build and escalate in dangerous ways. As entries in the “unreliable and slightly mad narrator” genre go, Saint Maud is solidly good, even if it’s not doing anything particularly new or incredibly; the film is anchored by a great performance by Morfydd Clark, who has to convey all of Maud’s past and trauma without much dialogue, and she’s helped by director Rose Glass, who effortlessly segues between reality and religious visions without ever missing a beat. I’m inclined to raise the movie’s score simply based off of the final seconds of the film, which felt like a brutal and brilliant touch by Glass; while others could complain that it removes the ambiguity from the film, I’m fine with that, as it turns the story from a horror/psychological thriller into more of a tragedy. I thought Saint Maud was very good but never great, but it’s a remarkable, strong debut, and I’m definitely curious to see what Rose Glass does from here. Rating: ****

I’ll start off my review of RRR by stipulating that I have essentially no exposure to Tollywood (or Bollywood, for that matter) films, and even though RRR is apparently only incredibly loosely based on real characters, I have no real sense of the history of the film beyond “hey, colonialism? Not great for India!” That stipulated, RRR is everything I’d heard and then some, delivering style, excess, operatic storytelling, and just a sheer energy that’s all but impossible to resist. Even now, I’m just thinking of the series of setpieces that make up this film – dance numbers, silent rescues of a child, tiger fights, motorcycles used in a variety of ways, male friendship montages – and I’m just delighted all over again. The story is functional enough – we’re very much in John Woo Hong Kong-opera territory here – with our two male leads in a bit of a Departed scenario as one tried to rescue a kidnapped village girl while the other searches for the hunter coming to rescue that same girl. But the film lives and dies through the chemistry between our leads, who work perfectly as rivals but even better as friends. Again, I know next to nothing about Tollywood films, but it’s not hard to see why both N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan are stars, particularly the latter; by the time Charan cracks his first smile, you basically realize, “Oh, this is a movie star.” RRR is excess in every way, with a disregard for physics and a love of the “rule of cool,” and by God, it works. That’s one of the fastest three hour movies I’ve seen in a long time (overall, anyway; I won’t deny that there are a couple of slow stretches along the way, and a couple of sequences that feel like nothing except buildup for the next big thing), and look, if it’s all a little dumb and broad, I refer you to Ebert’s idea that movies are about how they go about things, and I rest it there. What a blast. Rating: **** ½

IMDb: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio | John Wick Chapter 4 | [REC] | God Told Me To | Martin | Saint Maud | RRR

April 2023 Reading Round-Up

May 1, 2023April 29, 2023clydeumney 1 Comment

In his afterword, John Scalzi says of The Kaiju Preservation Society that “it is not…a brooding symphony of a novel. It’s a pop song. It’s meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you’re done and you go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face.” That’s a pretty accurate description of KPS, which is an enormously entertaining, if slight, book about a government agency that oversees, studies, and yes, preserves a planet full of kaiju – massive monsters a la Godzilla, Mothra, and the like. (Kaiju is the Japanese name for the giant monster genre.) Told in Scalzi’s usual jokey, quippy style, KPS moves rapidly, delivers some amazing wonder, gives enough plot to get the job done, and moves on – much like the pop song he concedes the book to be. That’s both to its credit – the book is hugely fun, harbors no illusions about what it is, and delivers the entertainment is wants to do – and its detriment, as the villain is a bit heavy-handed, the plot a little obvious and unsurprising, and the world ultimately less explored than I wish it was. But as Scalzi says, “we all need a pop song from time to time,” and he’s not wrong – KPS was exactly what I needed after a few heavier books and some general stress in life. I maybe wish there was a little more heft to it, but as a fun bit of imaginative storytelling, it hit the spot nicely. Rating: ****

I quite enjoyed Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built, a remarkably kind, warm, and humane little story about the importance of kindness and small gestures in the face of a world that can make us feel powerless or insignificant. And while I wasn’t really sure how much I needed a series of this, I’m happy to report that I equally enjoyed A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, the follow-up, which picks up right after the end of the first novella. In Psalm, we met Sibling Dex, a traveling tea monk (she provides tea and a listening ear for anyone who needs it) who was starting to have a crisis of faith in herself and her purpose; during her travels, she meets Mosscap, a sentient robot who wants to learn what humans want, in the first contact between robots and humans in generations. Prayer picks up immediately after Psalm ends, as Dex and Mosscap start making their way into human settlements, Mosscap meets more of humanity, and Dex continues to wrestle with their own purpose going forward. Once again, Chambers gives us an idyllic world where people are kind, purpose is found, and people genuinely care for each others (and attempt to do so for themselves), but somehow, it’s never cloying or sticky-sweet. Dex feels despair over their confusion about their life. Mosscap feels overwhelmed and nervous about its own inadequacies. Even minor characters have their pains and sorrows. But Chambers finds beauty and kindness in all of it, giving us a world where personal crises are given weight and serious thought, without piling on easy answers. Instead, Chambers gives us a reminder of why friendship matters, about the importance of self-care, about the need for connection, about the values of alone time and quiet. Never lecturing, never patronizing, never twee, but always warm and humane and decent and kind, Prayer moved me just as much as Psalm did, giving me a quietly beautiful story that really meant a lot to me. Rating: *****

A few years back, I read John Scalzi’s Lock In, a murder mystery set in a world where a large percent of the population got a disease that left them locked in their body but able to place their consciousness into robotic bodies. Lock In gave me a neat world to explore, but mainly used it for a sleek, engaging mystery – not the worst thing, mind you, but it felt like a world with more to tell. What I didn’t know was that Scalzi also wrote Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, which told the backstory of this world – how the disease spread, the realization of its symptoms, and how we ended up with the robotic bodies. Taking the form of an oral history, Unlocked ends up fulfilling some of the ambition of Lock In, giving me a better sense of the world, but also filling itself with different voices and perspectives, building up stakes both personal and societal, and illustrating the breadth and depth of Scalzi’s imagination. It wasn’t just the disease he pictured – it was the outbreak, the reactions, the political battles, and more. Unlocked probably isn’t entirely satisfying on its own terms – it very much feels like an addendum to Lock In – but that’s not the worst thing, not when it shows what Scalzi can do and reminds us that behind the often quippy, snarky banter (pretty much entirely absent here), there’s an imaginative, interesting writer whose ideas are more compelling than his jokey attitude might lead us to sometimes remember. Rating: **** ½

What’s great about novellas is their economy – the way they force authors to be tight and compressed in their word choice and world-building, the way that they can strip a story down to its bare components, suggesting more than telling, and telling a story that maybe doesn’t have the weight to carry a full novel. But what can also hurt a novella is a disconnect between the needed length of the story and the economy of a novella, and such is the case with Erin K. Wagner’s An Unnatural Life, the story of a robot that committed murder and the trial that emerges from that crime. Wagner builds a compelling world here, with thoughtful complexity building around the ramifications for the justice system of a situation like this – are robots sentient? What would a jury of a robot’s peers look like? If a robot was following orders, is it a person or a tool? All of these are interesting questions, and when combined with some of the ways that Wagner uses all of this to parallel modern day issues, Unnatural Life is intriguing to start off with. Sadly, though, the story ends up feeling too compressed and snug, with not enough time spent following our main character’s development (it happens in bursts along the way), maybe too much social commentary cast aside, the robotic character not given as much time to breathe as we might like, and especially a rushed ending that discards most of what was interesting about the book. I’d love to see this revised and turned into a novel, honestly – there’s a lot good here, but when compressed like this, it feels like Wagner left so much on the table in favor of cutting her page count short, and the results are pretty unfulfilling, especially when compared to the promise of the early going. Rating: ** ½

Sometimes taking a chance on an interesting-sounding advance copy of a book pays off, and man, is that ever the case with Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir, a hard-boiled detective tale in just enough science fiction to help him make sure that his contemporary parallels don’t distract you from the gripping tale he’s unfolding. What’ll grab you quickly about Titanium Noir is the prose; Harkaway’s police-adjacent detective is a jaded, cynical man, and his clipped narration and snarky banter illustrates that cleanly for us long before Harkaway gives us glimpses – never full explanations – of how he got this way. Indeed, one of the great things about the book is how Harkaway gives us a complex world full of undercurrents – the presence of figures known at Titans, whose power both physical and political is unmissable; the currents of a rich underworld, with a mythic figure at its head; new forms of bars and speakeasies with a very different aim – but never holds our hand through it, letting us infer as much as he can and instead just forcing us to experience it and lose ourself in the world. And lose yourself you will – this is a sharply drawn tale, with a great mystery at its core, but better still, a knockout array of characters – an iron-willed bartender, a slew of underworld connections, and my favorite, that mythic crime boss whose predilection for florid language and talking can’t help but bring to mind Casper Gutman from The Maltese Falcon. I couldn’t put down Titanium Noir once I started – from the fascinating sci-fi-infused noir world to the compelling characters, from the gripping mystery to the tight prose, all the way to a nicely pyrrhic ending that leaves the door open to more, or perhaps just leaves our hero changed forever. In short, it’s a knockout read, and the fact that I now have Harkaway’s other books to go through? Even better. Rating: *****

Sometimes I wish that it was possible to erase your knowledge about a piece of media before you experienced it – that you could go in divorced from the hype or the praise or whatever else you were already aware of. Such is the case with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that’s held up as one of the great books of the 21st century, because after all, what book could possibly live up to those expectations? And indeed, I can’t help but feel like my reaction to Goon Squad was shaped by those expectations, because while I enjoyed the book greatly, I never found myself bowled over it, and finished it with a sense that I was still waiting for something to click into place that turned it from a very good book to a great book. A series of short stories all orbiting around a music producer and his assistant, Goon Squad follows various characters backward and forward through time, seeing how small connections ripple out over time, watching how human relationships are shaped at different ages and in different eras, and helping us see how people evolve during their lives. (If you’re going to say “hey, Josh, maybe you were harsh on this because it sounds like it’s in David Mitchell territory and you love David Mitchell so much,” you’re probably not wrong, especially since my beloved Cloud Atlas came first (and did some of this better, in my opinion).) Egan writes wonderfully, and the range of stories here is great – there’s a blackly comic story about war criminals and public relations, a quietly heartbreaking about a closeted gay man at the end of his rope, and yes, the famous one that’s told entirely through PowerPoint slides (which works really well, even if I’m never quite sure that the gimmick fits the story). I liked Goon Squad a lot, don’t get me wrong; I think it’s a really good book, and one that I think is sharp, clever, well-crafted, and imaginative. (To say nothing of how eerily on track her predictions of the future turned out to be.) It just can’t help but pale in comparison to its reputation and praise – but what could, really? Rating: **** ½

Chester Himes was praised to me as one of the great voices of noir – someone who should have been held up alongside Hammett, Chandler, and others, even if he came a little later – but an author whose race (and attendant subject matter, since he largely focused on the Black community in Harlem) pretty much left him overlooked. A Rage in Harlem, Himes’s first introduction to the figures of not-to-be-trifled with policemen Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, bears out that promise pretty well, plunging us into a Harlem underworld full of con artists, hapless marks, dangerous criminals, and policemen who don’t tolerate fools willingly. Starting from an obvious con that leaves a desperate rube holding the bag, Rage spirals out to become a glorious cavalcade of betrayals, unreliable characters, and vicious paybacks. But what none of that conveys to you is the surprisingly fun, often funny tone of it all. More Elmore Leonard than Dashiell Hammett, Rage is populated with misfits and talkers, and Himes delights in their banter and their braggadocio, even as we see them tightening the nooses around their own necks. This has some undeniable marks of a first book – some slackness to the structure, a little bit of a whimper of an ending – but the result is still a really fun read, and it’s left me curious to see what comes next. Rating: ****

Based off of the structure of the previous two entries in the series, I somewhat assumed that The Kingdom of Gods, the final book of N.K. Jamison’s Inheritance trilogy, would follow Nahadoth, the god of Night. After all (spoiler alert for the first two books in the trilogy), the first book followed a young woman who evolved into the god Yeine, while book two followed the Bright Lord Itempas, cast down to live amongst mortals until he properly atoned for his sins. Instead, though, Kingdom follows young Sieh, the godling of children, whose presence has been constant throughout the series, and whose bond with a pair of human children turns out to be the beginning of the end for this saga. Sieh’s efforts to find companionship (set many, many years after the end of book two) ends up spiraling out of control, with Sieh’s divine nature crumbling and the old social order – the high caste of Arameri – feeling their reign coming to an end. All of that sounds like gibberish if you haven’t read the books, I’m sure, but Kingdom is the strongest entry in the series, thanks in no small part to Sieh’s grounded, direct narration (he opens the book rolling his eyes at the narration games of the previous two entries), centering the book on a character who has suffered at the hands of the heroes and villains of the other books, and who now finds his own past actions returning to haunt him. That choice ties in thematically to the larger ideas of Kingdom, which is so much a book about revolutions just and unjust and about what happens when people are subjugated for too long, even as it’s about big ideas about gods and godlings and more. Kingdom is ambitious (it’s almost the length of the previous two books combined), and at times it strains to hold together, but hold together it does, delivering a genuinely effective conclusion to the saga that works on both a character level and a larger story level. In the end, I think the Inheritance books are more of a series than a trilogy, if that makes sense; while these stories connect, this feels more like three separate tales than a single cohesive arc. But that doesn’t make the ending of Kingdom less effective or satisfying, nor does it make this ambitious, fascinating tale of gods, love and lust, revenge and power, subjugation and domination – none of it is any less interesting or gripping for that sprawl. Rating: **** ½

After all of the seriousness and massive stakes of the Inheritance trilogy, it’s hard to overstate the delightfully anarchic, energetic, and just plain fun experience that is The Awakened Kingdom, a novella that takes place after the rest of the series (and is contained in the omnibus edition of the trilogy). Narrated by a hyperactive newborn godling, Awakened Kingdom follows our nameless ball of energy and chaos as they work to find their own nature, wander among humans, and cause no small amount of trouble along the way – all while telling their story in absurd ways. Even from the opening lines, in which she overly summarizes things a little too quickly (“I am born! Hello! Many things happen! The end!”) to some missteps as she crashes into planets, Awakened Kingdom feels like a welcome refresher after the massive stakes of Kingdom of Gods. That’s not to say that Jemisin doesn’t still deal with her usual big ideas – here, playing with gender repression through a simple but generally effective (if a little obvious) role reversal, and tying that into the nature of our young godling – but it’s all anchored by Jemisin’s fourth narrative voice in as many books, showing off her talents and virtuosity, as well as giving readers yet another way to approach the ideas of this series. It’s a delightful capper to the book, and really just a lot of fun on its own – probably my favorite of the series, even if it’s technically a little extra novella. Rating: **** ½

I get accused of being a snob about certain things – books and movies, primarily – and I guess that’s fair, to a degree; my argument about that has always been that it’s less that I’m snobby and more that I’ve read/seen so many great things that I know how good the mediums can be, so why settle for mediocrity? So when I read something like Gregg Olsen’s The Girl in the Woods, I can’t help but compare it to, well, anything else and find it lacking. Good characters? Oh, lord, every character here is a flat caricature defined by a single characteristic (if they’re lucky) and absolute no personality. (The absolute gall to turn this into a series, anchored by two blank voids that happened to be named.) Good dialogue? Everything here is clunky, full of unabbreviated contractions, absurdly dramatic wording, and just generally sounds that human beings don’t make. Well, you ask, is it plotted well? Hell, it isn’t even written well – characters lurch from motivation to motivation nonsensically (my favorite is a scene where a character asks a policewoman to vouch for her, and when she does, the character yells at her for giving away her secrets), the plotting doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny, and I have to hope that the jarring scene changes are a Kindle formatting problem and not just more bad writing – but the fact that I can’t tell doesn’t help things. But, no, the plot is ludicrous, with the most gloriously bad segment stopping one already bad scene cold to insert a second bad scene that also doesn’t make sense. I normally can find at least something good to say about any book I read, but what I mainly thought of this one is “wait, this is a bestseller…and a series? REALLY?” It’s the crime thriller version of Patton Oswalt’s famous Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People bit, down to my own sadness that I think I’d never write anything good enough that anyone would want to read it, but here’s a man who committed to his own mediocrity and made a killing; meanwhile, I get stressed about these dumb reviews that no one reads and teach writing to high schoolers, a skill that clearly has nothing to do with success, apparently. Rating: *

PS: All of this also goes for The Bone Box, a short story featuring one of the two “characters” from the book that only manages to be better because it’s shorter. Otherwise, read everything above and copy and paste.

I didn’t know that Dan Simmons’s Hyperion was essentially the first half of a story that was split into two sections for publishing purposes (per the author, anyway) up until close to the end, and I wish I’d been aware of that going in – it would have helped me perhaps get a better sense of the structure of this strange, ambitious tale. Inspired by the storytelling pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales, Hyperion is the story of seven people chosen to go on a pilgrimage to the ruined, haunted world of Hyperion, to see the Shrike – a mythical, deadly figure which is said to grant a wish under certain circumstances, though no one seems to come back alive from this pilgrimage. As our pilgrims make their way, each tells their own tale of how they came to be on this journey, and in doing so, Simmons gets to let his imagination roam freely, giving us one found narrative of an explorer who finds a doomed tribe, another a hard-boiled detective tale, a third an action-packed military story, and so forth. During our seven narratives, Simmons carefully gives us clues and ideas about the nature of the Shrike, how this world came to be, and a sense of the larger galactic picture – all of which comes together by the end of the book, as lots of small details snap into place and we get a sense of maybe how the Shrike came to be, the role this pilgrimage is playing, and what the larger stakes are. Hyperion ends at a climactic point, one that works as a nicely ambiguous ending even as it’s clear that there’s a second part to come; thankfully, the second book is long since published, so I can see where the story goes from here, because I was completely fascinated by this dense, rich narrative. The characterization provided through each story, the rich range of imagination across the sprawling saga, the careful and thoughtful worldbuilding – Hyperion sucked me in pretty early on and never let go (even though the first couple of pages are a pretty bad example of XKCD’s Fiction Rule of Thumb). I have no idea where this tale goes from here, but that’s okay – with something this fascinating, I’m glad for the unpredictability. Rating: *****

Small Mercies, the first book by Dennis Lehane in six years, is set during Boston’s 1974 fight over bussing – a fight that found the city’s working class Irish neighborhoods engaged in outspoken, racist, hateful actions to push back against the forced integration of the schools. That’s a tense background for a book, and Lehane doesn’t flinch from it; indeed for much of the early going, Small Mercies can be a rough read, immersing us in a world full of racial slurs, white supremacy, and general hatefulness that’s hard to take. But as the plot kicks in – a story that involves the death of a Black man overnight and the disappearance of a Southie woman’s teenage daughter – it becomes clear that this material is integral to the ideas of the book, which is intent on grappling not only with the nature of racism in these areas, but in its effects – and not just the most obvious ones. I kept dreading that Lehane would turn this into an easy story of redemption for our protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, a tough Southie woman who can more than hold her own and knows exactly what she thinks of these efforts to integrate her town. Indeed, every so often, Lehane will let us see Mary Pat’s better nature and intellect trying to grapple with the contradictions and inadequacy of her beliefs, or the obvious connections between herself and these people she hates…but just as nimbly, Lehane avoids cheap redemption, most notably in a late book confrontation that spits on Mary Pat’s come-to-Jesus moments. All of this sounds heavy – and let me tell you, those who can’t handle a pretty blunt portrayal of virulent, toxic racism should look elsewhere – but it’s essential to the story that Lehane is telling, both for plot reasons and for larger ones – for ideas about parents and children, about the legacies we leave behind, about what our community is, about what happens when people are pushed and pushed without relief. It’s also a heck of a crime story, mind you, one that dives into Southie mob connections and more, capturing that same sense of unease about the community pillars that films like Goodfellas did, all while vividly bringing Southie culture to life. The result is more than the sum of its parts; while the crime story is gripping and sucks you along, it’s the rich characterization and the complex, nuanced, thoughtful takes on human nature that make the book soar, as Lehane gives as much time to letting his characters – even supporting ones like the police detective investigating the case – breathe and develop as he does intense, violent confrontations and plot revelations. Small Mercies is lean and short, but that doesn’t mean a thing here; it’s every bit as rich and well-developed as anything else Lehane has written – and just as trenchant, insightful, and painful as ever, all while giving us a flawed heroine for the ages. Rating: *****

Amazon: The Kaiju Preservation Society | A Prayer for the Crown-Shy | Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome | An Unnatural Life | Titanium Noir | A Visit from the Goon Squad | A Rage in Harlem | The Kingdom of Gods | The Awakened Kingdom | The Bone Box | The Girl in the Woods | Hyperion | Small Mercies

Halloween Horror #5: Last Days, by Brian Evenson / *****

October 12, 2022October 12, 2022clydeumney 1 Comment

Anyone who’s kept up with my reviews for any length of time will know my love for unclassifiable fare – works that confidently obliterate genre distinctions without fear, unconcerned with being comfortably labeled or marketed and instead following their muse wherever it leads. Well, that label undeniably applies to Brian Evenson’s Last Days, which has lost none of its impact and power in the decade-plus since I last read it. Then again, is there any world in which a detective novel about a cult whose religion focuses on amputation could ever be considered “classifiable,” even before I tell you how funny a lot of it is – and how gruesome?

I’ve read a lot of Evenson in the years since I was turned onto Last Days, but even now, I struggle to give you a sense of his prose. There’s a stripped-down feeling to all of it, a sense that Evenson is careful with what he includes, rarely giving you any more details than he needs to, and allowing the reader to fill in the details around them – and given how off-kilter and unbalanced the worlds he’s creating are, that approach works mightily, leaving us uncertain about just how nightmarish the story we’re in might be. Indeed, Evenson’s prose is never confusing, but neither is it artless; he carefully builds character through dialogue and sparse actions, hinting at a world where everything is off-kilter – a world here where cutting off a hand is the way to God and where holiness is measured in limbs and joints (or, more accurately, the lack thereof).

In its broadest possible terms, Last Days is a detective novel in the classic neo-noir sense. It’s the story of Kline, a detective who walked away from a recent incident minus his own hand, which he cut off and cauterized in order to survive. This brings him to the attention of the Brotherhood of Mutilation, a cult whose members measure their holiness by the number of amputations they’ve engaged in, and whose hierarchy is entirely shaped by what you’re willing to give up. (It all starts with the book of Matthew: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee… And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee.” ) Here, Kline is accepted and respected, but also drawn into a murder investigation – well, probably, except maybe the murder didn’t happen? And that doesn’t even get into the complications that arise when Paul shows up as the story gets wilder.

As its title suggests, Last Days is an apocalyptic tale, with emphasis on the lower-case “a” here. It’s a tale about religious fanaticism and violence, and how far people will go in the name of God. (It’s hard not to think of Evenson’s own conflict with the Mormon faith as you read the book.) And let me tell you, this is a tale in which blood is shed – and a lot of it. Is Last Days a “traditional” horror novel? No, it’s not – but given the body count, bloodshed, and sheer focus on body horror here, there’s not really another easy fit…

…except for the fact that it’s also surprisingly, darkly, wickedly funny, too. Evenson fills the novel with dry observations and oblique religious disputes, with theological discussions about whether fingers or toes should be more valuable and others that sound like so many of the nitpicking discussions I hear in the theology classes in my school. More than that, though, there’s a black absurdity to it all, lurking just below the surface, but never explicitly emphasized. I mean, listen to this Abbott and Costello-esque dialogue:

“Aline is dead,” Kline said.
“Aline is dead?” said Ramse, his voice rising.
“Is that possible?” said Gous. “How is that possible?”
“Or not,” said Kline. “Maybe not.”
“Well,” said Gous. “Which is it?”
“What did you say about Aline?” asked the bartender.
“Nothing,” said Kline.
“Oh, God,” said Ramse, shaking his head. “Dear God.”
“Aline is either alive or dead,” said Gous to the bartender.
“Be quiet, Gous,” said Kline.
“Well, which is he?” asked the bartender. “There’s a big difference, you know.”

It’s that sort of absurdist, bizarre feel that really makes Last Days stand out so much. I’ve read horror noir; I’ve read blackly comic horror; I’ve read body horror; I’ve read religious satire. But somehow, Last Days ends up feeling like all of it thrown together, like David Cronenberg had the Coens write a script combining classic noir and The Ruling Class and somehow emerging with the nightmare journey of a man into cults of religious fanatics, a lot of cleavers, a deep appreciation for self-cauterization, and oh so many dead bodies. A lot of them.

By this point, you know if you’re the type of person who should read Last Days or not. Those who aren’t up for the blackest of black comedy, or a lot of amputation, or a huge helping of pain, or a lot of gore, or a vicious look at fanaticism – they should stay far away. Last Days does what it does and it does it well, but to hell with making anything for a mainstream audience – this stands on its own and leaves you stunned with how well it does something you never thought could be done. An essential Kafkaesque noir nightmare, with a heaping topping of severed limbs for decor.

Postscript: If you do end up picking up Last Days, I strongly recommend leaving Peter Straub’s excellent introduction for after you finish the book. It’s a truly great discussion of the book’s themes and ideas, but it spells out everything that happens in the book, up to and including the ending. It’s more of an appreciation and discussion of the book, and honestly, it’s a superb one – it really engages with the text richly, turning over its ideas and thinking about them…but it’s far better to go in as cold as possible and then enjoy the plunge into hell, and then head back to hear what Straub has to say about it.

Amazon

Halloween Horror #4: Childgrave, by Ken Greenhall / ****

October 11, 2022October 11, 2022clydeumney Leave a comment

Over the past couple of years, I’ve discovered the joys of Valancourt Books, a company who, to quote their Wikipedia page, “specializes in ‘the rediscovery of rare, neglected, and out-of-print fiction,’ in particular gay titles and Gothic and horror novels from the 18th century to the 1980s.” As someone with a love for oddball and pulpy horror, that’s catnip to me, but what’s made me move from curious to an avid fan is my realization that many books I’ve gotten from Valancourt have turned out to be wholly sui generis, not really feeling like anything I’ve read before – and probably not like much else I’ll read again. (I can almost assure you that you’ve never read anything even resembling The Woodwitch before, for instance, nor ever found a book that straddles as many genres as well as Blackwater does.)

So it shouldn’t really surprise me that Childgrave is such a strange, unclassifiable book. It’s undeniably a horror novel, but it’s also a horror novel in which things burn so slowly that they basically smolder, and if you’re waiting for an explosion of horrors, it’s not coming. Instead, Childgrave is more of a slow building of unease – it’s the classic metaphor of “frog in a slowly boiling pot,” where the book moves so gradually through the steps of insanity and surreal notions that, by the time our narrator finds himself making an unthinkable choice, it feels both shocking and somehow inevitable.

Let me back up and give some context. Childgrave is narrated by Jonathan Brewster, a photographer and single father whose wry, artistic narration gives the book an insouciant feel that belies what’s going on under the surface. Jonathan doesn’t quite fit in with things; he’s a good photographer, his only real friends are his agent and his housekeeper/nanny, and he’s not a bad father to his daughter Joanne (who, as seems to have been a trend in odd horror, feels far too old for her age often). But when he meets professional harpist Sara Coleridge, he finds himself fascinated, despite her clear efforts to warn him away.

Think this is an odd romance novel? Well, that’s before the book shifts into spirit photography. And before it becomes a ghost story. And before it hints at being a vampire novel. And before it becomes a Town That Time Forgot. And before it starts diving into a Horrifying Secret. Again and again, Childgrave defies easy categorization and classification. It’s a horror tale, yes, but what are we even scared of? Where’s the other shoe coming from? Are we scared of Joanne, or Sara, or Jonathan, or that town, or…

You get the idea. Childgrave feels anchored by its offbeat, artsy, droll narration, but Jonathan feels like a man in search of something – Sara, yes, but also a man whose life feels empty and adrift. And as Childgrave unfolds, that search snaps into focus as we see the full shape of Greenhall’s plotting. All of these strange pieces never quite fit together, but they don’t fit in a way that enhances the mystery, not detracts from it. Much of Childgrave feels as though we are easing our way into a nightmare, bit by bit having revealed what we need, but never quite seeing how it all connects other than on an instinctive level.

That same looseness is also the biggest knock on the book, which, for all of its rising tension and unease, can often feel like a series of odd elements that don’t quite fit, driven by a narrator who’s unlikeable (intentionally, I think) and in a story that feels incomplete. That’s exacerbated by the weak epilogue to the book, which undermines the stark, uncomfortable ending with what feels like the equivalent of a Hayes Code-mandated final sequence, undoing a lot of the character work that the book had established.

Nonetheless, Childgrave got under my skin and stuck there, slowly ratcheting up its unease until I was as accepting of what I read as its characters, giving me a horror that was less explicit and more subtle and lasting. It’s not a perfect book, no, but it’s a fascinating one – a portrait of a lost man in a world he doesn’t quite fit into, and of the deeper waters in which we can all get lost. It’s not for all tastes, but those on it’s quiet wavelength will find it sticking with them quite nicely indeed.

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The Book of the Ancestor (trilogy), by Mark Lawrence / **** ½

October 6, 2022October 2, 2022clydeumney Leave a comment

“It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.”

So begins Red Sister, the first book in Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestor trilogy, and what a beginning it is. Within two sentences, you know the fundamental hook of the series – martial arts-wielding nuns who are a force to be reckoned with – and while Lawrence knows how to pace the ride to the fireworks factory, rest assured that when you get there, the ride was well worth the wait. Oh, the fighting here is more The Raid than The Karate Kid – there are bones to crunch and blood aplenty – but Lawrence more than delivers on the promise of the books, with some action scenes both here and in the succeeding volumes that absolutely work like gangbusters.

But let’s back up a bit to the premise of Red Sister, which follows a young orphan named Nona who’s adopted by the Sweet Mercy convent for reasons that are, to her, unclear at best and bewildering at worst. Oh, it’s evident that she’s wanted at the convent by the Abbess, but to what end? That end will take three volumes to gradually unroll – suffice to say, the Abbess would be easily at home playing the Great Game among the politicking nobles of the Wheel of Time – but in the end, it’s a backdrop to Nona’s story, as she taps into her own potential and makes peace with herself – and the violence within her.

Red Sister does so much well that it’s hard to know what to focus on first, but probably my favorite small touch is the way so much of the world building is elliptical and only hinted at, rather than being dropped in massive lore exposition dumps. Indeed, by the end of the first book I was starting to realize some of the implications of the history of this world, but it’s to the book’s credit that such information is flavor and depth, but not part of the story; instead, this is Nona’s tale, and that information only matters inasmuch as it matters to Nona – which, for this first tale, is little. Instead, she is learning her abilities. what it means to have friends, who to trust, and more. There are occasional moments of familiar tropes (there is a brief period where the book seems like it is aping the story of the first Harry Potter book beat for beat; luckily, that quickly fades out), but in the end, Nona and her friends more than turn this into their own story…helped by the fact that this most definitely isn’t a Chosen One story. Indeed, within the first few chapters, it’s revealed that the Chosen One prophecy of this world is hokum designed to distract people – and it’s that sort of decision that makes Red Sister such a good start to the world.

But things hit a new speed in Grey Sister, which finds a lot of complexity, a lot more depth, and a whole host of new problems, including an angry demon living in Nona’s skin, a new rival that has ties to the noble houses that already hate her, and a hunt for heresy that starts helping us see the scope of the Abbess’s plan for Nona. And against all odds, that culminates in an action sequence that takes up, oh, the last half of the book, giving me one of the most relentless stretches of writing I’ve read in a long time (this was one of the worst cases of “just one more chapter” I can remember in a while, resulting in far too many late nights).

I initially struggled a bit with Grey Sister, which felt like it was throwing a lot of new things at us while not entirely settling some of the old business; I suspect now that some of that disconnect comes from me reading the books back to back, whereas I’m sure a year between volumes would have made it less bumpy. But I’d recommend you stick with any initial discomfort, because Lawrence knows entirely what he’s doing here, as the hints at the larger world established in Red Sister start coming to fruition just enough to make things radically more complicated and giving us a sense of what the stakes of this series really are. It may not be a traditional Chosen One series in any way, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious threats to this world, and that our young heroines aren’t going to be forced to fight – and fight hard, often to the death – to save what’s left of the civilization on this rapidly narrowing world.

Luckily, the stakes are always personal here; without Nona, the Book of the Ancestor would be a fun series, but not a great one. Instead, we have Nona, who’s too violent, too brash, too snippy, too blunt, and far from a perfect hero. With so many stories like this, our lead is always right, always the noble one, always trustworthy – but Nona is none of these things. She is urged towards violence by her very nature, and that’s only exacerbated by this dark voice urging her on in this book. She wants revenge for the betrayals she’s suffered; she is willing to do anything to protect those she cares about; and she’s also very aware that she’s not always the heroine of this story. (Indeed, by the end of Grey Sister, it’s kind of evident who this world’s closest version of a “Chosen One” might be, and it’s to Lawrence’s credit that that character isn’t anyone we have a good handle on.) But with the flashforwards that started in Red Sister continuing, we can see what the stakes are, until the final line of the book sets up the stakes of what’s to come.

Which, of course, leads up to Holy Sister, the final book in the trilogy, and a satisfying end to Nona’s tale. (There is apparently another series set in this world, but from what I can tell, it is a prequel set hundreds and hundreds of years before, to the point where it’s basically an entirely separate story other than the setting.) Endings are notoriously hard for anything, and a series doubly so – stakes are higher, our involvement stronger, and the number of threads to resolve far more. So it speaks to the quality of the series that Holy Sister sticks the landing overall; while bits of it feel a little less developed than I wish they did, the overall impact is solid and well-constructed, and Lawrence does the series justice thematically, plot-wish, and in character terms – and doing all three of those is no small feat.

Holy Sister is the most structurally ambitious of any of the books, unfolding across two timelines simultaneously. One is the immediate (and I do mean immediate) aftermath of Grey Sister‘s cliffhanger ending, following Nona and her friends in the aftermath of the seismic battle that ended that book and their fight to stay alive afterward. The second thread, though, jumps forward in time, and does so far enough that there are some jarring changes to the abbey and our characters. Lawrence doles out his surprises here carefully, but with a purpose; by skipping some key events, he structures the story in such a way that some major developments have happened “off screen,” allowing for some genuinely surprising reveals and moments as the threads come together in a jaw-dropping climax.

And those beats aren’t just with regard to plotting. It’s always a bit hard to review a trilogy all at once, for fear of spoiling the first book, so let me just say that there is a casual reveal in the middle of the first book that finally clicks into place here in such a satisfying way, one that ends up explaining Nona’s arc and completing the plot in an unexpected but honest way that truly works for the series. And the fact that he does it all while also delivering on the battle sequences that have been building since the prologue of the first book (to say nothing of the escalating threads of danger throughout the series)? That’s impressive.

But even then, Holy Sister works because it keeps the focus on characters until the end. Every death matters. Every interaction has a part to play. Even seemingly tangential characters get their moments of payoff (there is a line that comes in the final book that feels like Lawrence has been so excited to get to it since book one, and let me tell you, it was worth the buildup), giving us a finale that feels like it mixes high stakes, character development, lore, and storytelling nicely, all while never neglecting spectacle. (And there is at least one scene that is spectacle for the ages – I am increasingly someone who never cares if books I enjoyed become movies, but the climax here would be genuinely incredible to see play out.)

I’m not sure Book of the Ancestor quite becomes as good as, say, Fonda Lee’s Green Bone Saga; it’s incredibly fun, it’s imaginative, it’s rich, but it ultimately feels like it’s anchored firmly in “really, really good” and not “amazing.” But to focus too much on that is to neglect just how much I enjoyed this series, and how rare getting something that’s really, really good is. If you’re a fantasy fan, or just love the idea of warrior nuns beating down beefy male warriors, or great world building, or strong almost entirely all-female casts…you get the idea. I had a blast with it, and I bet almost anyone who enjoys fantasy would too.

Amazon: Red Sister | Grey Sister | Holy Sister

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov / **** ½

July 9, 2022July 9, 2022clydeumney Leave a comment

Sometimes I end up reading a book that I can’t remember how I got turned onto, and it’s a bewildering experience. I’ll read something, and while I might like it, I can’t help but try to remember – who was it that told me to read this? What did they think of it? Because man, would I love to remember who told me to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a truly off-the-wall piece of Stalin-era Russian satire that’s wholly unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and honestly, probably unlike much I’ll ever read. Did I enjoy it? Oh, yes – but that doesn’t mean I feel like I got it at all, and this is a book that all but demands to be talked about with people.

How on earth do you describe this book? I mean, this is a novel where a talking tom cat who serves as the devil’s familiar gets into a shootout with the police, and it’s not even the strangest part of the book. In the broadest terms, The Master and Margarita is a story in which the devil comes to Moscow, and absolute chaos unfolds from there; it’s also the story of the titular couple, in love despite their own marriages, and separated by madness and obsession; and finally, it’s the story of Pontius Pilate on the day of the crucifixion. And if you’re thinking, “well, that seems like a lot to contain,” well, you’re not really wrong…and yet, somehow, it all more or less works, even if it’s all chaotic and held together in bizarre ways.

Because, rest assured, The Master and Margarita is undeniably a comedy and a piece of satire; it’s one with a deeply dark sense of humor (at least one sequence involves the Rube Goldberg-esque series of events that leads to a man being decapitated), and a sense of laughing in the face of a world that might be ultimately the nonsensical element of life. Indeed, much of the commentary I found on Master after I finished the book leans into this interpretation of the book – that it’s a look at the insanity of life under Stalin, where violence and death are just arbitrary and absurd, where corruption is both open and yet a horrible offense, and where religion can’t be discussed even though everyone knows it’s there. And so, by the time the Devil shows up in Moscow, well, he fits right in – and pretty much no one is prepared to know what to do.

But there’s more to Master – indeed, probably a lot that I haven’t even yet begun to think about. This is a book interested in the concept of evil, but also realizes that evil is a necessary part of the world – as the Devil says in the book, “what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?” And yet, for all of that, the evils of the book come less from the devil and his compatriots (yes, including a very grouchy talking cat) and more from the citizens themselves, as their own fallibility leads them into danger and death. And if that’s not enough complexity for you, Bulgakov explores thoughts about love, the validity of art, courage, purpose in life, and more – all while telling a story that involves a celebratory ball for figures of great evil, a magic show that leads to mass chaos, naked witches flying on brooms, literary societies controlling apartment rentals, and more. In other words, it’s a deliriously and deliciously weird ride, but one that’s got a lot more on its mind than its chaos might suggest.

Look, I’ll admit that I feel a bit unprepared to review The Master and Margarita after a single read; it feels like a book that benefits from multiple reads, and that’s not enough getting into any possible issues with the translation I read*. But I can say that what I read was a weird, bitterly funny, off the wall book – a defiant laugh at a truly bizarre society that didn’t seem to have much use for Bulgakov. It feels like the epitome of that slightly bleak, slightly defiant Russian sense of humor – and done with weirdness to spare. I may not have gotten it all, but I more than enjoyed the experience, and I think that that second read may be inevitable.

*Translation note: I read the pictured edition, which is the translation by Mirra Ginsburg. I’ve read both that this is an ideal read and the worst possible translation (would you expect anything less from the internet?). I can’t speak to the faithfulness of it all; I’ll say that the prose felt a little clunky at times and the flow a little odd, but that may well be inherent to the original text. I don’t feel like I have enough expertise to comment further; in short, I didn’t have major issues with it, but a different translation might have been a wholly different experience.

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Catching Up: Capsule Book Reviews (and One Movie Review, Too)

March 13, 2022December 15, 2023clydeumney 2 Comments

It’s been a pretty hectic couple of months lately; admittedly, it’s been for good reasons (a promotion at work), but it’s meant that free time has been pretty minimal. I’ve had limited time to read, and when I have, sitting down and writing reviews has been a bit of a back burner priority. But with spring break upon me and a decent chance that I’ll be doing a lot of reading in the next week, I figured it was time to take a quick recap of some recent reads, even if they’re just capsule reviews; it’ll get me caught up and keep me from stressing (pointlessly, I know!) every time I read another book.

P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout fits nicely alongside novels like Lovecraft Country and The Ballad of Black Tom, finding a way to turn racial prejudice and hatred into horror fare. In this case, the horror revolves around the Ku Klux Klan, which in Ring Shout often take the form of true monsters, ripping loose from their seeming human form into nightmarish beasts. Ring Shout packs in a lot of ideas into its novella length, and its sheer righteous fury and intensity goes a long way towards making up for the fact that it feels like it’s still almost too long – that it either needed a lot more lore or a bit more plot. Still, it’s a pretty great little read, and if it’s not quite on the level of those novels I mentioned, you’ll still love the two-fisted middle finger energy of any book that finds Stone Mountain being used as a nexus for racist energy. Rating: ****

Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hex was a blindsidingly brilliant horror novel, one that took me utterly by surprise and felt like almost nothing else I’ve read. So of course I was excited for his long awaited followup, Echo. And within the first chapter, I knew I wasn’t wrong. The actual nature of Echo’s plot is wild and utterly unique, to the point where I hate to say too much about it; suffice to say, after a young man’s partner comes back from a disastrous mountain expedition, things are not the way they should be – and that’s putting it mildly. Echo’s mood is an utterly unsettling dread that never quite goes away, building to a few set pieces – that opening chapter, a horrific death in a hospital, a trip through a street full of birds – that give me chills weeks later. And if the ending doesn’t quite stick together well enough, it’s at least out of an ambition to do something unexpected and different – yes, it feels like an anticlimax in many ways, but it’s done with an eye towards something richer than the typical horror ending. And even so, it doesn’t detract from the relentless horror and dread of the rest of the book. Rating: **** ½

Blake Crouch is on a hot streak right now, delivering the one-two punch of Dark Matter and Recursion, each of which rank among the best thrillers of the decade so far. So it’s pretty fair that he might deliver a book not quite on that level, and such is the case with Upgrade, a perfectly fine book that never really becomes as interesting as I wish it did. A high tech variation on Flowers from Algernon, Upgrade revolves around augmented intelligence and its effect on human life, and while that’s not a bad idea for a book, Upgrade never finds a second gear to move into, ultimately delivering the story you could kind of predict after the first few chapters. (Compare this to the way that Dark Matter and Recursion went in wild directions you couldn’t guess.) I didn’t dislike Upgrade, per se; it’s entertaining enough, and it moves fast. But there’s never a moment where it becomes interesting or novel in a satisfying way, turning into more than the pretty okay beach read it seems okay with being. Rating: ***

A friend of mine was horrified when he found out I’d had yet to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven; as he put it, “why have you not read a post-apocalyptic novel where Shakespeare might be the key to saving humanity?” And he’s not wrong, because I really, really loved Station Eleven, a remarkably humane and quietly hopeful post-apocalyptic novel (it would make a nice companion piece to Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars). Taking place in the wake of a deadly pandemic (ugh), Station Eleven largely follows a traveling theater troupe as they perform for the settlements they find; along the way, though, Mandel’s kaleidoscopic structure finds her flashing back and forth in time, tracing the link between a famed actor and various figures of the apocalypse, and ultimately meditating on the power of art and its role in our lives. The book’s one effort as suspense, involving a cult leader, never quite works as well as it needs to, and ultimately feels a little grafted into the book, but it’s not a major enough flaw to detract from the quiet grace and dignity of the rest of the story. It’s the rare book to look at the end of the world and think that maybe there’s a chance we can keep going after all. Rating: **** ½

Not only was Ryu Mitsuse’s Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights voted the greatest Japanese science fiction novel of all time, but it also features a cybernetic shootout between Jesus and the Buddha. How can that not sound interesting to you? But trust me, Ten Billion Days… is far, far stranger than you might expect even from that description. That title is fairly literal, for one thing, as the book spans almost the entire life of the universe, spending multiple chapters charting the growth of intelligent life on earth before diving into the life of famed religious figures in Earth’s history…and then things get bizarre. Trying to describe Ten Billion Days is a challenge, to put it mildly; suffice to say that it’s a weird mix of gleeful pulp, bizarre moments like that shootout, and meditations about the purpose of human life and why horrible things have happened in our histories. I’ve never really read anything quite like it, and even a couple of weeks later, I can’t really stop thinking about its confrontation with a kind of God, or its haunting final chapter. It’s ambitious to a wild degree, full of big swings, weirdly at odds with itself, and just generally completely fascinating and mind-melting. Rating: **** ½

Cassandra Khaw’s Persons Non Grata series (currently consisting of two novellas) follows detective John Persons, an almost cartoonishly hard-boiled detective whose Chandler-esque patter makes it a bit surprising when the novellas turns out not to take place in the 20s. Instead, Hammers on Bone find Persons hired by a young boy who wants his abusive parent killed, while A Song for Quiet follows a blues player dealing with the constant barrage of racism as he travels the roads. Oh, but I forgot to mention the cults, and the eldritch horrors, and the nightmarish visions of the beyond, and the fact that Persons definitely isn’t human…you know, small things like that. It speaks to the quality of the writing here that I wish both of these stories were longer, but that goes double for Song; Hammers delivers some great horror but feels like it’s trying too hard to keep its secrets to itself, while Song embraces its story entirely, giving you a wrenching tale of justice, vengeance, power, and horrors. Both are great, but if you’re only going to read one – and you should – make it A Song for Quiet, which absolutely delivers on all the promise of Hammers and then some.

Rating:

Hammers on Bone: ****
A Song for Quiet: **** ½

What was it in the air before 2020 that led to so, so, so many pandemic novels? Whatever it was, add Lauren Beukes’s Afterland into the mix, giving us a world where almost the entire male population has been wiped out, and a widowed mother is on the run, trying to protect her son from those who would use him to make a killing. There’s neat ideas here, including the gradual ways that masculine jobs shift their definition, or how reproduction evolves in a world where it’s all but impossible. Frustratingly, though, Afterland uses almost all of that as little more than a backdrop for a somewhat generic thriller, giving us glimpses of interesting ideas but setting them aside for a surprisingly uninteresting villain and a cult that never really comes to life in a satisfying way. I’ve really enjoyed every other Beukes novel I’ve read, so consider this a fluke; while Afterland is too well-paced and crafted to ever be bad, there’s a sense of wasted potential here that never really went away for me. Rating: ***

And hey, why don’t we sneak in a movie review while we’re here?

It’s incredibly weird to say that a German expressionist-infused, black and white, Academy ratio adaptation of Macbeth is one of the safer and less ambitious mountings I’ve seen, but such is the case with Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, an impeccably filmed but somewhat disappointing version of the play. You can’t fault the astonishing visual style of the film, and the cast is generally solid, if unremarkable (with one key exception I’ll bring up in a moment), but, to steal a phrase from critic Scott Tobias, there’s never a sense of why Coen was so interested in making this film. There are moments of brilliance here – Kathryn Hunter’s role as the witches is every bit as good as you’ve heard, and it doesn’t hurt that every witch scene is weirder and more ambitious than the rest of the film put together. I never disliked the film at all – it’s a great play, and it does lots of things well enough. But it was sad to have one half of my favorite directorial team helm my favorite Shakespeare and have it come out as middling as this did. Rating: *** ½

Amazon: Ring Shout | Echo | Upgrade | Station Eleven | Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights | Hammers on Bone | A Song for Quiet | Afterland

IMDb: The Tragedy of Macbeth

Embargo on Hope, by Justin Doyle / ***

August 18, 2021August 18, 2021clydeumney Leave a comment

No reviews are harder for me than books which are completely fine but also never really good. Such is the case with Embargo on Hope, the first volume in a new series by author Justin Doyle, and one that sets up a lot of ideas but struggles to ever come to any kind of life.

Embargo on Hope takes place on a planet suffering under the weight of a galactic embargo thanks to the planet’s treatment of its lowest caste citizens, who are left to suffer and die without assistance or sympathy by the rest of society. As the book opens, we meet our hero, a young man named Darynn who fell into that caste after the shocking actions of his father, once a beloved hero, lead to him being posthumously declared a traitor and his family to bear the shame. All of this is an interesting enough start, and if it’s a bit dark, that tracked, as it seemed like the book was going in some interesting directions about social class and who suffers in situations like that.

But Embargo on Hope turns out to be a little more conventional than that; yes, it has some material about the embargo, and in theory, that social class mistreatment is at the heart of the book, but the reality is that the book soon revolves around a quest to discover the truth behind Darynn’s father’s actions. From there, things get…complicated, and maybe overly so. At any given point, there were about a half dozen emotional threads going on in the book – a struggle with faith, worries about his father, guilt over some past actions, budding interest in a girl – and while they all worked fine individually, as a whole, they clashed with each other, leaving the book feeling like it was trying to throw a half dozen ideas together but couldn’t decide which to focus on.

The result is a character who never really comes to life in any way. Darynn seems wildly inconsistent at times, with outbursts that seem off, reactions that don’t quite track with who we think he is, and just generally a flatness that makes it hard to care for him. What Embargo on Hope often reminded me of is a screenplay in book form; there’s a sense that with some acting and performance behind the dialogue, a solid character might emerge, but on the page, none of our heroes ever felt alive enough to care about – and honestly, the same is true for the world, which leans pretty far to the right on the XKCD Fiction Rule of Thumb chart.

I never really hated Embargo on Hope, but I never was excited to get back to it, either; I finished it, and I thought that there were some interesting ideas in it, but the book feels disappointingly flat and uninvolving, for all of its ambition and clever ideas about religion and social class. But, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, a book isn’t about what it’s about, but how it goes about it. And that part of Embargo on Hope left me really, really flat, I’m sorry to say.

Amazon

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

May 12, 2021May 10, 2021clydeumney Leave a comment

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

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: *****

Umney's Alley

In which Josh Mauthe reviews books and movies for his own pleasure, and maybe other people's, too…

Tag Religion

2023 Movie Diary: Part 2

IMDb: Lady Snowblood | Beau is Afraid | The Ninth Configuration | The French Dispatch | Dementia | Host | Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

2023 Movie Diary: Part 1

IMDb: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio | John Wick Chapter 4 | [REC] | God Told Me To | Martin | Saint Maud | RRR

April 2023 Reading Round-Up

Halloween Horror #5: Last Days, by Brian Evenson / *****

Amazon

Halloween Horror #4: Childgrave, by Ken Greenhall / ****

Amazon

The Book of the Ancestor (trilogy), by Mark Lawrence / **** ½

Amazon: Red Sister | Grey Sister | Holy Sister

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov / **** ½

Amazon

Catching Up: Capsule Book Reviews (and One Movie Review, Too)

Amazon: Ring Shout | Echo | Upgrade | Station Eleven | Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights | Hammers on Bone | A Song for Quiet | Afterland

IMDb: The Tragedy of Macbeth

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

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