Books Read in 2020
2020. Wherever you are reading this from, your life was undoubtedly affected in ways not pleasant by this tire fire of a year. A global pandemic, for starters. In America, a year of social unrest and political turmoil. Everybody—and I mean everybody—I know experienced a major personal crisis or dramatic life event of some sort this year. Just seeing the number 2020 is enough to ratchet up our anxiety and leave us dependent on gallows humor memes to keep the screaming at bay.
So what effect did this year of acidic indigestion have on your [non-news consumption] reading habits? Did fiction seem trivial or was it a necessary escape? Did apocalyptic fiction suddenly seem a little too close to home or did it help deal with your anxiety? Did the pandemic give you more reading time or did it take it away? Light reading or heavy reading? Was reading pleasurable at all?
When I glance at the list of books below, the first thing I notice is that it is shorter than years past. I’m surprised as it didn’t feel like I was reading any less than normal. It’s not like the list is full of long or dense books either. I have a few guesses as to what happened: the first couple months of the pandemic caused my job to become extremely stressful and there were days I simply couldn’t pick up a book and read; I played a lot of video games with my youngest daughter, a wonderful bonding experience that nevertheless cut into my evening reading time; starting in June I began working through the full two volumes of Sylvia Plath’s letters (close to 2500 pages) thinking I would skim them and instead found myself reading intently at the pace of a handful of pages every night—time I otherwise would have spent on whatever novel I was reading (I finished the first volume at the end of November and promptly started the second.) Add these and a few other factors up and I can see how my completion volume shrank. Up until October I read fiction in spurts, knocking out several books in a short timeframe and then slowing down for a month or more. With the coming of autumn I settled back into a steady pace.
Other than the number of books read, my reading habits were not all that different in 2020. During the first few months of the pandemic, however, I did change my approach. I use Goodreads to keep a list of books I want to read. Over the years this list has grown to over 100 books and probably close to two-thirds of those have been on the list for three or more years. Starting in March I decided to focus on reading titles that had been on my list for way too long, some reaching as far back as 2012 when I first started using Goodreads. I also decided it was time to clean up the list and delete a number of titles I no longer had any interest in reading. The result? My list is all the way down to…about a hundred books. I didn’t say I stopped adding to it! By summer I’d shifted back into my normal approach, a mixture of what is on the list and whatever catches my eye at any given time. I did get a sense of accomplishment from reading some of those long-listed books (though the results were mixed; see my blurbs about the two oldest books below, Weathering and Wintering) and will probably do this again at some point in the future.
In the end, though, my reading year was little different from prior years. Some great books, a lot of good books, a handful of books that just didn’t click. If you’ve read my prior yearly overviews you know I simply love to read…and to blather on about what I read. I hope you enjoy the blatherings below and may this find you with your health intact and enough candles to light your way through the darkness. Here’s to a better 2021!
The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy, editor
Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith
The Cold Six Thousand, James Ellroy
The Deep, Nick Cutter
I Am The River: A Novel, T.E. Grau
Violet, Scott Thomas
Lanark: A Life in Four Books, Alasdair Gray
A Nest of Nightmares, Lisa Tuttle
Cosmos: Possible Worlds, Ann Druyan
The End of Everything, Megan Abbott
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, Kate Moses
Enchanted Night, Steven Millhauser
Song for the Unraveling of the World, Brian Evenson
She Said Destroy, Nadia Bulkin
If It Bleeds, Stephen King
Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir, Mark Lanegan
Cold Moon Over Babylon, Michael McDowell
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe, Brain Greene
The Chalk Man, C.J. Tudor
The Dead Girls Club, Damien Angelica Walters
Exhalation: Stories, Ted Chiang
Weathering, Lucy Wood
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah
American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell
The Wise Friend, Ramsey Campbell
German Metal Machine: Scorpions in the '70s, Greg Prato
The Art of Junji Ito: Twisted Visions, Junji Ito
Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, Max Brooks
Velocities, Kathe Koja
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, Michelle McNamara
Uzumaki: Deluxe Edition, Junji Ito
The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones
Observatory Mansions: A Novel, Edward Carey
The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature, Christopher Slatsky
The Reddening, Adam Nevill
Survivor Song, Paul Tremblay
The Ghost Tree, Christina Henry
Sumikowa: The Haunting of Higanbana Heights, Tara A. Devlin
Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes
I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Iain Reid
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940-1956, Sylvia Plath
Beowulf, Unknown, translated by Seamus Heaney
USBM: A Revolution of Identity in American Black Metal, Daniel Lake
Negative Space, B.R. Yeager
I finished reading Lanark: A Life in Four Books in early March, just as the pandemic was lighting up. It feels like a lifetime ago—like a different person read that book. Ever since I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Alasdair Gray’s novel, certainly the most unique and challenging book I read this year. (No beach read this.) What is Lanark? I’ve seen it referred to as a novel of magic realism, but I don't think that term quite applies. I tend to think of magic realism as a subtle and seamless blend of real-world story with magical elements. In Lanark, there are long stretches of realism and long stretches of surrealism and while these elements ultimately intertwine somewhat towards the end of the novel, they never really blend. And they sure as hell aren't subtle. Lest this sound like a criticism, I found the book deeply immersive--for all its challenges, I had a hard time putting it down (though I often felt exhausted when I did.) Started in 1954 and finished sometime in the early 70s, Lanark isn’t cohesive--yet, strangely, that plays to its strengths. The reader, like the protagonist, is supposed to feel discombobulated most of the time. At times highly neurotic (I would argue the portrayal of neuroticism is the most dated element of the book), Gray's tale wraps layers of social commentary and satire around a metaphysical dystopian core. It should be a muddled mess, yet somehow--alchemy, perhaps?--it is not. That the book bites off more than it can chew is true, and the emotional reactions of our often unlikable protagonist are frequently unjustified, but in the end I find myself in awe of what Alasdair Gray accomplished. His artwork is fantastic too! A truly singular artistic statement. I fear books this ambitious and strange are on the verge of extinction--no one could turn Lanark into a Netflix series and do it justice, nor should they try. I could go on a rant about how we need more writers and fewer content creators but this is neither the time nor place. If you are fortunate enough to come across a work as challenging and unique as Lanark, embrace it, treasure it and share it with other adventurous souls!
Ramsey Campbell. Hugely prolific but he’s never had a story become the basis for a movie or TV show that would pique the curiosity of those who don’t read deeply in the field of horror. This is both sad and understandable; his work is not the most approachable—atmospheric more than plot-heavy and often dense, populated by strange characters who seem to lack the full dimensions of humanity. His writing style is an acquired taste that can be difficult to follow upon first approach. I’ve found Campbell’s work in the aughts to be somewhat lacking compared to his 80s and 90s work, a trend partially reversed with his latest, The Wise Friend. This tale is chock-full of Campbellisms: domestic unpleasantness, weird trips into locales both urban and rural, a creeping sense of paranoia and completely unsympathetic main and supporting characters keeping any emotional involvement with the reader at arm’s length. The latter ultimately causes the tale’s ending to be anticlimactic. It’s a fine book but doesn’t reach the heights of his best (The Hungry Moon, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight.) I’d put it square in the middle of his oeuvre. While the above might sound negative, the challenges that Campbell presents in his work engage in a way that little else in the genre ever does; he is a legend and I appreciate that his work takes effort to fully experience. I do about one Campbell book a year, allowing plenty of time for consideration and reflection. His work demands it and for this reader, at least, rewards it more often than not. There is something in even the lesser of his works that elevates him above his peers and makes the sheer longevity of his career all the more impressive.
“In the coming days, conditions will continue to deteriorate. Emergency services and other public safety nets will be stretched to their breaking points, exacerbated by the wily antagonists of fear, panic, misinformation; a myopic, sluggish federal bureaucracy further hamstrung by a president unwilling and woefully unequipped to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary; and exacerbated, of course by plain old individual everyday evil.”
This is not a quote from someone writing about the pandemic we are currently living through. It’s from Paul Tremblay’s excellent Survivor Song, written in 2019 before all the shit hit the fan (though not published until July 2020.) A huge Tremblay fan, I admit I put off reading this book for a while because…well…I feared it might hit too close to home. And look, it does. Swap COVID for rabies as the novel’s culprit and you could damn well be reading a report from the early stages of the pandemic. It’s completely understandable why one might not want to read this book right now, and that makes me sad because this is the tightest, most propulsive Tremblay novel yet. The tension throughout the story is well-neigh unbearable because (as is Tremblay’s strength) he gives you two protagonists that you deeply care about, that are so recognizably human that you live and die with their every word, wishing for the best while knowing that there is no way the best can happen. While I’m not sure Survivor Song will end up my favorite Tremblay book (it might!) I think it might be his best. My lone complaint is that the epilogue felt unnecessary and completely took me out of the world he’d so brilliantly created (and it didn’t help that the secondary characters in said epilogue were clearly named after a number of current well-known horror writers; I confess that meta tricks like that bug the hell out of me.) Epilogue aside, I sincerely hope our current circumstances don’t keep this book from finding its audience because Tremblay is one the best storytellers we currently have.
It’s hard to know what to think of a book when you are mystified as to what it is trying to do. Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath—which covers the last few months of her life, when Plath wrote the bulk of her Ariel poems—clearly knows its subject matter. It’s obvious considerable effort was put into creating the poetic voice used to deliver the story, one clearly intended to be Plath’s herself though the book is told in the third person. It’s not a poorly written book, though the approach is likely to come across as almost unbearably pretentious to those who like their stories straight and to the point. I just don’t know why this book exists. It inhabits a strange twilight world between fact and fiction but says nothing new about Plath and the myths that have grown around her. It neither humanizes nor further mythologizes her. The fictional aspects of the book—some imagined sequences, details that couldn’t be known outside of the participants—are just, well, there. They offer no illumination or new perspectives. The book is clearly intended for those who already have a deep knowledge of Plath and her life as it fails to establish any kind of background, either personal or cultural, for the reader. It’s not like there is a dearth of Plath material available. There are dozens of biographies. She left behind her amazing journals (available in one 700+ page volume) and two volumes containing nearly all the letters she wrote have been published (totaling well over 2000 pages.) While it’s true that the final few months of Plath's life are the least documented and thus forever doomed to conjecture, much of it depressingly lurid, any of these books will better serve a reader wishing to gain an understanding of Plath—as a poet, as a human, as a symbol of the constraints women face in society and as a (controversial) feminist icon—than Wintering’s imaginative approach… While on the subject of Plath, I'm not sure how one properly assesses a lifetime of letters. All I know is that I started The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940-1956 fully expecting to, if not skim, at least skip over some of the letters. And yet I read every single one and promptly started Volume 2 as soon as I completed Volume 1. It became my practice to read a handful of these letters every night before bed and I’ve found it a strangely comforting routine in these unstable times. Sometimes the best thing one can do is accidentally invent a ritual and let it grow unforced…
I have been a gushing fan of Damien Angelica Walters’s work since first coming across her collection Sing Me Your Scars several years back. Her latest (published late in 2019) is the novel The Dead Girls Club and I’m so excited to say that it is her strongest work to date. You know that feeling when an author you already admire hits it out of the park? That was my experience of reading The Dead Girls Club. I hate limiting the discussion of books like this to genre; I guess it’s primarily a mystery but it should appeal to many different readers. Suspenseful, unnerving and told in firm, solid prose that never dips into pretension, the novel is a marvel of pacing and voice. I don’t want to give anything away but it’s in your best interests to let The Red Lady into your reading life. Trust me, she’s not one you want to cross…
The dictionary informs me that a vignette is “a brief evocative description, account, or episode.” Velocities is a collection of “short fiction” or “thirteen short stories.” I put this in quotes because I’m not sure that one can call many of the pieces in this long-awaited (by this reader, anyway) collection stories. Fiction they are, but a good share of this book reads like a series of vignettes. The fully-fleshed out stories, such as “At Eventide,” “Pas de Deux” and “Velocity” are inevitably the strongest material here. I am a fan of Kathe Koja’s work (particularly her early novels Kink and The Cipher) but I struggled with this collection. The stories that have a solid framework work beautifully but the less structured material meanders, sometimes coming off as affected. Velocities frustrated this reader, a first for any Koja I’ve read. Worth it for the aforementioned stories, but approach with caution…
King of the mountain: Some of Stephen King’s very best work can be found in his novellas: "Apt Pupil," "The Body," "The Mist," "Secret Window, Secret Garden" (a personal favorite, everything The Dark Half tries to be but never quite pulls off), “Big Driver” (a highlight of King’s aughts work.) If It Bleeds is an uneven addition to a proud (Different Seasons, Four Past Midnight) tradition. Three of the four stories exist in the grey area between “long short story” and “novella,” with only the title story falling firmly into the novella category. Unfortunately, the title story is also the most tedious of the four, yet another tale featuring his Finders Keepers cast. I simply don’t share King’s love of the Finders Keepers crew; they are one bland bunch and as the Bill Hodges trilogy proved, detective fiction isn’t King’s forte. “If It Bleeds” is more of a thriller with supernatural overtones and better plays to King’s strengths, but it should have been a third shorter and is frankly pretty forgettable. Elsewhere, “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” overcomes its utterly absurd Luddite plot with superb characterization; the latter is King at his best and made for a thoroughly enjoyable read even if I was rolling my eyes half the time. “The Life of Chuck” is more of a sketch than a story, really, but it’s a pretty fine one—once more the characterization is great and the surrealistic touches mixed with King’s down-to-earth prose make for a tale that no one else could write. The final tale in the book, “Rat” is a story King has already told approximately four billion times, that of a struggling writer who just wants to write a great (or financially successful) book. The whole writer protagonist thing is my one ongoing issue with King—while he’s most certainly had great successes with the approach, he’s relied on it so heavily through the years it now comes across as a dearth of ideas/inspiration and it’s pretty damn hard to imagine anyone identifying with these protagonists. The chief sin of “Rat” is that it reads like a tale anyone could have written, and not a very good one at that. So in the end we have two pretty great stories, one (overlong) meh and one dud. I’d rather dwell on the positive and consider that batting around .300. That’s pretty damn high and there will always be room in my life for new King stories…
Folk horror has seen a resurgence in film over the last few years and that resurgence is now spilling over into horror fiction as well. Adam Nevill’s The Reddening is a fine addition to the small but growing pool of folk horror novels. Nevill (who seems to be a truly nice guy, in his interviews he speaks of his responsibility to and thankfulness for his readers in an open and honest way that seems to come from a place of genuine gratitude) seems to get better with each book of his I read. While I’ve yet to read anything of that reaches the heights of the first half of Ritual, The Reddening is his most solid novel yet, adding thriller elements into a classic cult/fear of the outsider framework. Nevill avoids over-explaining, keeping his tale focused on a small set of characters and circumstance while hinting at something much older and possibly even cosmic. Scenes of brutality are intense but never exploitative or overused; Nevill exercises a disciplined restraint through the entire book. A quality read…
When there is a book you’ve wanted to read for decades, especially if it is out of print or hard to find, especially if it is whispered about in revered tones among fans of the genre, and then it is finally, finally reprinted and you read it…well, there can be an issue with the expectations you bring in being a tad unreasonable. That happened to me with A Nest of Nightmares, Lisa Tuttle’s 1986 collection of eerie tales. Kudos to Valancourt Books for bringing Nest to the U.S. for the first time, complete with an introduction by Will Errickson, who runs the magnificent Too Much Horror Fiction blog, an absolute must for anyone interested in 70s and 80s horror fiction. I’ve periodically come across Lisa Tuttle stories in anthologies over the years and been impressed; I’ve wanted to read this book for at least 25 years. And it’s good, even very good at times, but I’d built it up in my mind to be something transcendent, an unfair expectation for any book and one Nest can’t meet. These are quiet horror stories that are very much of their time; they clearly take place in a world that is long gone. For this reader, two stories rose above the rest: “Treading the Maze” with its overwhelming sadness, an ingredient far too rare in horror but used to great emotional impact here and “The Nest,” a surreal tale of two sisters with incompatible needs. Tuttle is a fine if understated writer and if your taste runs to quiet 80s horror, this will be right up your alley…
If one had to sum up 2020 with a book title, Song for the Unraveling of the World would lap the competition even though it was published in 2019. This collection served as my introduction to Brian Evenson and a fine writer he is. Like most collections, not every story lands, but the ones that do will get under your skin deep enough to make you feel queasy. Not because they are violent or visceral—they are neither—but because they take place in a world where there is no longer a dividing line between what is “real” and what is not. This is some of the most fertile ground for writers of the weird, but it’s remarkably hard to till effectively. Evenson does so with ease. The title story and “Leaking Out” were this reader’s highlights, the latter a fun and disturbing riff on the idea of storytelling that avoids being obnoxiously meta. My one minor criticism—and it is minor—is that three of these stories center around filmmaking and I’ve just read too many weird tales involving filmmaking and films the last five years or so. It’s a hard angle to do anything distinctive with and for this reader it has become a tired trope. Evenson acquits himself better than most but the other stories better showcase his original voice and deep talent…
The Ghost Tree by Christina Henry takes place in 1985 and reads exactly like a mid-list 1980s paperback original. Seriously, it’s impossible to tell this book was written in recent years, so perfectly does it capture the feel and language of 80s paperback horror. You’ve got your small town, you’ve got your weird things lurking in the woods, you’ve got your crooked mayor, you’ve got your carnival coming to town, you’ve got your xenophobia and your fear of them big city folk, you’ve got your spunky and preternaturally aware kids, you’ve got your nosy reporter, you’ve got your video games, malls and fast food—it’s all there. What does it add up to? A damn fine book, one of the more enjoyable I read this year. For the most part Henry nails the storytelling mechanics and if some of her secondary characters slip into unintentional caricature, her protagonist Lauren is a perfectly realized tween girl who more than ably carries the tale. You couldn’t set a story like this in the modern world—technology has made isolated, insular small towns like the one in The Ghost Tree a thing of the past, if indeed they ever existed in the first place. That makes The Ghost Tree a purely nostalgic exercise and given this dumpster fire of a year, reading it provided a nice mental break and reminded me of how I fell in love with paperback horror in the first place…
Stephen Graham Jones. One of the most distinctive—and fierce—writers of this young century, he elevates the horror genre every time he publishes a new tale. I think it’s safe to say that The Only Good Indians was the most anticipated book in the genre this year. Is it a game-changer? History will be the judge there, but it is a very, very good book. While I’ve enjoyed Jones’s novels to date (and find that they have a pleasant ability to linger in the memory long after completion) they have felt a little tentative and unsure next to the searing brilliance of his short work. The Only Good Indians changes that. A complex, deeply felt novel that seamlessly blends social commentary into the horror framework, it never once reads like a diatribe or an awkward mashup. These are the most fully realized characters Jones has written and empathy you feel for them makes every gut punch Jones swings—and he swings more than a few—land with force and precision. While reading The Only Good Indians I was in its world, feeling everything the characters felt, a vital linkage that only the best books achieve. I think it’s fair to say we fans long believed he had this book in him but that doesn’t make its accomplishments any less impressive. Look, if you have even the slightest interest in modern fiction you need to read this book. I don’t mean just horror fiction—this is a book that deserves a wide audience. Yeah it’s dark, but have you looked out the window lately? Confronting darkness via art can create a window for hope to enter. It did for this reader. Simply outstanding…
I’ve had the pleasure of following T.E. Grau’s career since his excellent debut collection, 2015’s The Nameless Dark. I fell behind the curve a little, only getting to his 2018 debut novel I Am The River earlier this year. The novel was nominated for the 2018 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, and it is not hard to see why. This intensely psychological Vietnam novel is a hallucinatory tour-de-force about the consequences of warfare and violence on the soul. There have been other works of fiction exploring these themes, but none I’ve read have gotten beneath my skin like this. Stealing from my Goodreads review: “Ace characterization and sinewy prose drive a feverish, strange war novel unlike any other.” Reading the book is a jarring affair that can leave you feeling disjointed if you’re not willing to immerse yourself in its world—this is not a book that’s meant to be read at a distance. Grau is simply becoming a better writer with each work he publishes—and he started from a pretty high place. I Am The River is proof that he has the talent to become one of the greats. I’m excited to be along for the ride…
I remember picking up Max Brooks’s World War Z somewhat reluctantly many moons ago, expecting a silly comedic take on the zombie apocalypse, a horror trope I was already quite weary of at that point. Instead I found an intelligent, political, devastating work about the collapse of society that turned out to be one of my favorite books of the aughts. After World War Z Brooks largely fell silent. So when I heard early this year that Brooks was finally coming out with a second book and it would be taking on the Sasquatch myth I…didn’t know what to feel, honestly. It was pretty hard to see how it could be done in a way that wasn’t totally hokey or that didn’t send the subject up for laughs, but as a native Washingtonian there was simply no way I wasn’t going to read it. In the end, I’d call Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre a draw. On the positive side of the ledger, it’s not hokey or comedic (but the sly satire of privileged tech new agers is the highlight of the book) and the characters are strongly drawn. On the negative side, the book’s approach of utilizing a found journal and a handful of ancillary interviews limits Brooks’s ability to flesh out the story—while this approach undoubtedly contributes to the strong characterization, it is too restrictive so far as viewpoint is concerned and inflects a painful wound in a story that is obviously going to stretch suspension of disbelief to the max in the first place. I really think it would have been better served as a third person narrative. If the subject matter interests you, it’s worth a read, otherwise it’s skippable…
I discovered Megan Abbott several years ago and reader, if you love well-paced suspense novels with honest-to-god characterization and not a single wasted word then get thee to the bookstore of your choice (go indie!) and stock up. The End of Everything is, I think, the fourth book of hers I’ve read and I love her work more with each read. Like most of Abbott's works, Everything pivots on strong teenage characters--no pandering here--dealing with dark secrets and discovering their own power. Even when they briefly move into center stage, the adults are still peripheral, broken figures who repeatedly fail their children. Sounds trite, but in Abbott's terse prose it is anything but. Abbott takes the no-nonsense approach of great noir crime fiction and applies it to stories of tweens and teens coming to grips with the fallibility of the adults around them. This approach keeps the subject matter from being lurid and allows the reader to empathize with the characters. I love, love, love how every young character in an Abbott tale is a lively, contradictory mess of immaturity and wisdom both; she never patronizes or judges. Her work belongs to the only genre that matters: great storytelling…
There’s not much I can say about Nadia Bulkin's 2017 debut collection She Said Destroy that hasn’t been said in laudatory reviews elsewhere. These socio-political weird tales tower over most of the short stories I read this year (genre be damned.) Fellow weird fiction readers: this is the future. This is what our beloved genre does at its best. Fellow readers who seldom or never dip their toes into weird or horror fiction: read this book anyway. All that is required to approach this book is a love of the possibilities of short fiction. She Said Destroy is so, so damn good. I sincerely hope Nadia’s audience grows and grows, hers is a voice that deserves to be heard far and wide. Mad props to one of my absolute favorite publishers, Word Horde, for bringing this out. Their entire catalog is quality, please support if you can!
Short takes: Lucy Wood’s Weathering didn’t connect for me. The characters had potential but the plot felt like it was constantly undergoing an identity crisis…Also missing the mark was American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell. I was expecting/hoping for stories portraying the complexity of those the American Dream has passed by, struggling to scratch out a living in rural backwaters, but the characterization was thin and too often fell back into cliche. A couple of the stories almost took flight, but the book overall was a big disappointment…Nick Cutter writes fun horror beach reads in the tradition of 80s titans like King, Koontz and McCammon. The Deep is a highly enjoyable yarn of terror, claustrophobia and apocalypse that you’ll be tempted to blow through in one sitting…I don’t read a lot of straight science fiction but the critical hosannas for Ted Chiang’s Exhalation: Stories caught my attention—it seemed like the book was raved about everywhere. I admit I struggled to understand what the hype was about. It was by no means a bad book, but I was expecting at least one story to blow me away and instead got a solid collection of sci-fi musings. Like much hard science fiction, character is an afterthought (if it’s present at all) but the stories do feature some intriguing premises. Better approached as a series of thought exercises than a collection of stories…Part crime, part supernatural and all thriller, Lauren Beukes’s Broken Monsters is an exceptionally paced tale set in the urban decay of Detroit. Beukes never settles for simple good/bad scenarios and paints even her secondary characters with depth and complexity. Every last character in this superb book is broken and Beukes’s empathy for all of them makes it a story that is easy to invest in…
Short takes, continued: I had such great fun with C.J. Tudor’s suspenseful page-turner The Chalk Man that I immediately put the rest of her novels on my to-read list. The Chalk Man is the kind of book you can read in a couple of sittings and despite its heavy subject matter I never found it plodding. Looking forward to reading more of Tudor’s work…Seamus Heaney’s critically acclaimed translation of Beowulf is both approachable and full of poetic depth. The root tale is a bit thin so far as classic yarns go—I wanted more Grendel, dammit!—but it’s a rewarding experience to simply flow with the rhythm of the language… Enchanted Night is a series of writing exercises in search of a story. Some of the language is beautiful, some of the imagery truly enchanting (and some unsettling) but there’s nothing to connect to. It’s extremely difficult to pull off a novel-length vignette approach and Enchanted Night doesn’t manage it. I could see the material making an interesting short/experimental film, though…I’m fond of telling anyone who will listen that Michael McDowell was one the great horror novelists of the eighties and it’s delightful to see his work finally getting rediscovered. Cold Moon Over Babylon is not one of his strongest works (I mean, nothing will ever touch the Blackwater novels) but it is still an enjoyable eighties horror paperback yarn…The staccato sentences and clipped rhythms of James Ellroy reach their fever pitch in The Cold Six Thousand, the second book in the Underworld USA trilogy. Like its predecessor, the similarly styled American Tabloid, I couldn’t put it down. Can’t wait to finish the trilogy, but as much as I love his work, I can only read Ellroy once every couple of years—he can be a tough hang, like living in someone’s fever dream. But so damn brilliant…Violet by Scott Thomas is a solid horror novel. The protagonists are well-realized (some of the supporting characters less so) and the plot moves along nicely. Thomas is a screenwriter and the story demonstrates visual flair but occasionally reads more like a screenplay than a novel. Overall I was intrigued enough to add his debut novel, Kill Creek, to my to-read list…Negative Space by B.R. Yeager is a dark little nugget of tale. Morbid and at times bracingly abstract, Negative Space is more concerned with atmosphere than the mechanics of plotting and this approach serves it well. Though rough around the edges, the book balances the grotesque and nihilism with just enough humanity to achieve a haunting effect. I appreciate it every time I discover a book like this, so far from the current center/mainstream of weird horror. It's not a perfect book but it's far more interesting than a lot of what I've read in the genre the last few years…
And with that, dear readers, I think it best I wrap this up for 2020. Whatever 2021 might bring otherwise, I look forward to new discoveries and new stories. See ya next December!