jdcorley's Reviews (191)

It's facile to say this is Le Guin's book about speculative fiction itself.  It runs deeper - about how our desires for comfort, riches, power, or even simple security have endless implications, how the desires themselves are both the danger and the promise.  Lathe is truly one of the few books that truly address themselves to the eternal questions of the individual human and their relationship to the world.  We all feel, after all, entitled to dream, but are we all then held hostage to each other's dreams?  A work that will stay with you your whole life, that you will remember your whole life. It asks a question that you can only answer by living.

Pronzini's by-the-numbers detective story is elevated by a passion that shines through every line.  The reason to love the Nameless Detective is that Pronzini loves him, and identifies with him, and can vividly see the world through his eyes.  The Nameless Detective, like Pronzini, loves the early detective pulps. Pronzini has certainly heard the critique of Nameless delivered by the woman Nameless loves - that it's all fake, that loving those old detective stories, like the one Nameless is in, is just a way of maintaining adolescence, the same way that Nameless' inability or refusal to quit smoking is stupid in the face of old age and infirmity.  

Even in the street-perfect descriptions of San Francisco, Pronzini shows us he loves this world and loves this guy, and so we fall in love with him too, and we want him to succeed at this, a lavish, lush, classic "rich family hires a down in the dumps private eye" pulp mystery.  Yet this is more than pastiche. Pronzini reaches for the sadness and shabbiness at the heart of those old stories.  Nameless doesn't get the girl, and the killer is pathetic, even though the ending is pitch perfect - a revelation you could slowly work out if you had time to think it through.  It's empathy that makes Nameless work here, and Pronzini excites it expertly.  

Fans sometimes don't make good writers (I know from personal attempts!)  We are too close to what we love to really put our arms around it. Pronzini is one of the rare exceptions.

Better than a bad Christie, but struggles to maintain its inertia over its length. Poirot novels - and some of the most beloved Poirot stories - are short, or, alternately, if they aren't, Poirot enters when it's a tangled mess, and isn't present from the beginning.  The new point of view character is engaging enough (and emphasizes some of the blind spots of the characters in the historical world of Christie), but you never quite feel the murderer is breathing down our neck, or that we race with them to the finish.  

Some day I'll write 50,000 words about the tapestry of this novel, how terrible (in the ancient sense) and wonderful (same) it is. it's that kind of experience: noir and crime and mystery and historical character drama all wrapped and intertwined and all, in the end, the same, the same, the same.

 

Even a below average Christie is a solid outing.  While the opening of this book is all that you could want from the opening of a Christie book - mysterious, funny, tangled - as it progresses and the characters circle around and around each other, going from one explanation to another for the crimes, waiting on Miss Marple to sort things out, it becomes a bit of a grind.  Much of the humor and even tension comes from the mysterious and wholly improper dead body in contrast to the staid owners of the library, yet they disappear from the story almost immediately and don't return until the ending. This leaves us pinballing across the English countryside when we'd rather be having tea with Marple.

 

A real pleasure - Ahlborn's mastery of sensual (and sexual) description melds with a very simple story.  A young man, struggling, moves in with another young man, struggling, next door to the hottest, most perfect MILF of all time, who is, as it turns out,

a deranged serial killer, surrounding herself with such broken, subservient people so that she can fulfill her dark urges.

By keeping it simple, Ahlborn brings us fully within the psychology of the two characters and we end up rooting for our hero, and aghast at our antagonist, as the best thrillers do.  Not a horror novel, per se, but instead a thriller in the classic mold, when we were horrified by a simple murder.  Don't go in looking for a twist or for a dastardly mystery - instead, just enjoy the unfolding of character and thought.

The book attempts to meld several different kinds of horror into one - the "friend group who comes across an evil occult thing that draws their flaws into sharp relief", a la Stephen King, the "evil authorities working beyond human ken", a la every 1990s horror novel with a scared lady on the cover, and the "cosmic phenomenon horrifically imposes itself on earth" a la Lovecraft.  While I give it points (literally) for ambition, the melding doesn't quite make sense - there's only a nod towards the actual friendship of the group, hidden behind sarcasm and trauma (you have to let us in somehow!); the authorities are neither fully helpless (as they must be in cosmic horror) nor completely deranged (as they must be in corporate horror); the cosmic force is way too personal in its expression to be cold-hearted enough to excite fear.  Ultimately it's an ambitious muddle; but it's better than a plodding recapitulation of the tropes of the genre(s)!

The single-author horror short story anthology is more difficult to handle than it seems.  If you make the stories completely independent it's hard to get across a horror scenario quickly enough to bring the reader into it.  If they're not independent you feel like you'd spend your time better on a novel. Bartlett hangs his hat on a tone - both narrative and stylistic - and tries to tell you about what amounts of extrusions in that tone into more grounded situations (a kid going over to your weird friends' house, going to the dentist after waiting too long, etc.)  It works, essentially, but by the time you're halfway through, you "get it". The mythology is suggestive and interesting, so you're drawn along in order to learn more about it, but in the end there really isn't a single story that is sharp enough to be truly memorable.  I credit this collection for attempting a new approach to this type of anthology, and for the inventiveness of the horror mythology, but it doesn't quite add up. A "normal" anthology with a couple of hot stories might have more merit overall.

In his day, Hitt was known as a writer of "sleaze" and "sex novels", though everything seems rather tame here, more or less on the level of a teenaged boy sneaking a peek at a site he knows he shouldn't be on.  There are three men and three women "on stage" in this short novel.  The women all talk the same way and the men all talk the same way.  The book follows Butch, a heel who disregards Lucy, the girl in love with him to pursue Candy, the niece of Billings, the harsh farmer that Butch comes to work for. As he and Candy fall more in love, and Billings abuses Candy physically and mentally, Candy suggests that they might murder Billings so that she can inherit the farm and marry Butch. The question of the book is whether Butch will do it.  By the time the crucial moment rolls around, we want Butch to do it and be ruined - instead, he doesn't do it and returns to "good" Lucy, who turns out to have been pining for him all this time. The last chapter of the book feels like a fanfiction writer wrote it. 

Maybe it would have been too much for Butch to fall fully prey to the charms of a femme fatale and kill a guy, but ultimately if that doesn't happen there's no reason to read this book, unless you like imagining breasts. Who doesn't, I guess? 

Shorn of the pretense of fictionality, Ellroy's fetishization of the LAPD - including its racism and capacity for violence - emerges into the light.  In the world of noir we appreciate these traits at ironic arms length, in socially realistic literature we can explore them and disapprove, but here Ellroy wants to have it both ways. Crime, in this view, is an endless ocean of pain, highly racialized, and no one but a brutal, racist cop can even stand against the waves. "You might hate him but there's no other way" is the relentless attitude of Ellroy's prose. And without the fictional curtain it just doesn't work. 

The curation of the photos is truly excellent, though. It has just enough sleaze and violence, and just enough coldness and everydayness to feel real.