sunn_bleach's Reviews (249)

This'll be one of those books that I like more for the ideas than the content itself. "Roadside Picnic" is easily one of the most influential books of contemporary science fiction through the two pieces of media shouted-out on the cover. The Zone is fascinating, and I find myself dining on and thinking about the various horrific conceits in the novel. Many of the more insidious aspects are mentioned off-hand, as if the "traps" (how else to think of them from a human perspective?) have become mundane.

However, the book itself is... kind of boring. Perhaps this is because it's so short, at less than 200 pages for most modern editions. You have an initial foray into the Zone, but it's bookended by lots of talking and drinking with what felt like cursory examination of the weirdness that comes from the Zone. And I'm not convinced that banality is its own point; "Roadside Picnic" isn't a character study, as bolstered by Boris Strugatsky's own afterword. Dialogue feels mismatched, and chapters stop right as events start t move. For a book about the Zone and people's relationship to it, there's an awful lot of puttering about.

The high point is the conversation between Pillman and Noonan. The former's theory about aliens having the eponymous roadside picnic and leaving their trash for smaller creatures to obsess over is an absolutely fascinating postmodern outlook on man's purpose in the universe. The Strugatskys knocked those 10 or 15 pages out of the Zone's garage.

I'm glad I read this for the influence on some media that I adore, but it would be a hard sell to someone who isn't deeply invested in the history of Russian science fiction or just wants to get more out of the "Stalker" media.

It's the classic for a reason. Buy this book if you think you'll ever be in avalanche territory - it's the best thing out there that isn't "The Avalanche Handbook".

"Subdivision" would have struck me harder if I hadn't seen this trick pulled in lots of other media. I got that this was a

dying dream

before the halfway point; not a flex on my behalf, simply that the puzzle pieces (hehehe) were all there early on. It's one of those books that simultaneously is a little obvious and a little cryptic, and the cryptic parts (such as the birthday party and the tennis ball) become more annoying than poignant as they seem to be there to confuse our narrator and just be weird. I love surreality, but if you go to great strides to make things have a symbol, they could be more symbolic, especially with how obvious things like the puzzle piece are. It felt disjointed in how "challenging" it wanted to be - and overly precious when it tried to be heartfelt.

Yet I wanted to keep reading because I wanted to see if Lennon stuck the landing - and he did. Parts like

the unnamed narrator being pregnant, the probability well at the house being what the family *could* have had in a happier life, her forgetting her own name due to the head trauma of the accident, and Cylvia being her unborn child who *does* survive the accident

were nice little "aha!" moments toward the end, as well as figuring out who the unnamed boy was supposed to be. The final section is unsubtle, but it works as the narrator comes closer and closer to the City.

The stilted prose was a little frustrating at the start - but I think that's best seen as yet another manifestation of our narrator's peculiar problem. And it makes her interactions with the bakemono all the better.

No surprises why this became as big as it is - "House of Leaves" captures the zeitgeist of late-90s existential dread and the earliest Internet "mysteries" pre-creepypasta. I read this in 2015 in Alaska and recall feeling like Danielewski didn't really know how to end it. I still stand by that: while I like the overall story of the tapes, Johnny's story feels so aimless as to belabor the point of its own aimlessness. The final chapter (added after the book's initial publishing) is unnecessary; the story works better when Johnny isn't ruminating and self-aware of his being overwhelmed by the book. Some of his terms of phrase are hilarious; the opening page's statement of Johnny being covered in blood "but it's not mine" is such transparent in-media-res spookums. I did find Pelafina's story much more heartrending this time around.

Glad to revisit, probably won't do so again. There's stuff I just prefer more, though "House of Leaves" certainly sparked a flame that burns for good reason.

Fantastic exploration(!) of semiotics, meaning, and combinatorics through literature. Over 55 short prose vignettes, Marco Polo speaks with Kublai Khan about fantastic cities with a focus on a particular quirk or interpretation of that city. Each city is categorized in one of several themes (Thin Cities, Cities & Desire, Cities & The Sky, etc.), some of which are more steeped in the semiotic discussion, others are allegorical, and still others are simply surreal.

My copy is less than 170 pages, but I easily read 300+ over two weeks given I was so enchanted by each of Calvino's stories. I would read one of the nine sections, pause, and then go back two sections to reread and rethink. Fantastic little book that's utterly inspiring not only for fantastic places but as a way to simply view your city (whatever that might mean) in new contexts.

Only caveat is that Calvino uses a similar theme of "two cities existing at once" for probably ten of the passages. The book is so strongly organized by patterns and combinations that I found this to be almost a frustrating red-herring in it not really amounting to anything other than a conceit that Calvino must have liked. Kinda wish he just had a category called "Twin Cities".

As I read, I kept thinking about my time in the Sierra Nevada and similar interpretations or conceits with mountains. Like, one of Calvino's stories is about how the archetype you have of a profession in a city makes you collapse any memories of people doing that skill into the single person (i.e. I saw ten stonemasons but I only remember one), kind of like a twisted platonic ideal. It made me think of seeing quaking aspen in the northern Sierra; I can't tell you about one particular aspen, but instead all the ones I've walked past coalesce in my mind as the memory of aspen.

I picked this up because it was recommended to me as horror literature that involves climbing. Four acquaintances uncover a mysterious, brand-new climbing crag in the southeast Kentucky wilderness, and they go to climb the new routes while also study its geology. The area turns out to be an eldritch, evil land that shifts and contorts itself to keep people trapped there while luring them with visions of past victims and deep desires. The concept is a little similar to "Uzumaki" in that sense, albeit without a singular obsession.

Kiefer owns a horror bookstore in Kentucky, and the book *definitely* reflects her understanding/experience within climbing culture at the Red River Gorge, where I've spent a lot of time. Unfortunately, I felt that the book was a good example of something written by an enthusiast but not so much a writer. The beginning is strong in uncovering the mysterious crag, but the characters just kind of... ruminate within the crag. There are flashbacks to other deaths and persons lured there, but there's little to be shown except "land evil!" with inconsistent descriptions of *how* that evil occurs. People who die there also become evil ghosts (not a spoiler; it happens pretty early on), and it just doesn't really make sense how or why.

Not that I need everything explained for me, it just felt like "hey what if this land wanted to literally eat people" and only developed about sixty percent of the way.  I ended up just being kind of bored, as if each new horror were just "ooo spooky ghost!" rather than something that sank into me. And there are a *lot* of descriptions of vomit and its various consistencies.

That being said, it'd make a great stylized indie horror B-movie.

A perfect example of what I like to call "totalism" in literature: books that explore the absolute fullness of a particular moment or occurrence in time. It's the totality of experience.

This book was overwhelming for obvious reasons, not the least of which is the idiosyncratic prose that is filled with parentheticals and asides. I didn't expect that; much of Krasznahorkai's prose focuses on the tiny interesting choices made by each character and why. It's absolutely fascinating, and I need to read more Eastern European literature.

The book that made me realize Chuck Palahniuk is actually full of shit, and this is nothing more than edgy Gen X distilled into Rotten.com internet culture.

 I'll exalt the literary merits of Max Porter and Ling Ma: both are fairly young authors with a small list of works, but I'll easily buy everything they put out if it's anywhere near the quality of what I've read so far. 

Porter a British bookstore-owner who writes short novels and novellas (Lanny is his longest) with highly idiosyncratic writing. Have you heard the term "prose-poetry"? Porter writes "prose-poetry-stage directions". Passages are announced with the name of characters in bold, and you read their thoughts or conversations with others rather than "normal" dialogue or descriptions. No surprises his debut Grief Is the Thing with Feathers was indeed adapted for stage, starring Cillian Murphy. 

Lanny follows a family who recently moved to a small town outside of London. Their capricious son has a gift for art, cavorts around the town, and has the fine-edged chaos that so many single-digit ages have before they "grow up" or something. The town also embodies the presence of Old Papa Toothwort, a Green Man-esque figure who... inhabits? haunts? is? the town as a sort of genius loci. Toothwort is waking up after a long rest, and the town has changed since last time. 

It’s not a spoiler to say that Lanny goes missing. Porter is incredible at describing the creeping fear of searching for a missing child and the irreparable harm it does to a family and community. At one point, POVs switch with every little break as the slow dread sinks in, with characters no longer being introduced but nonetheless distinct, just providing occasional snippets of thoughts or conversation as it turns from "Lanny isn’t home yet in the afternoon" to "have you seen Lanny?" to "I always knew that woman was a bad mum". It is tense. 

Spoiler for parents interested in the book but don't want to go in wondering about the missing child plotline:

Lanny survives, and the ending is actually kind of sweet in the implied relationship between Lanny, nature, and creativity even after the trauma of his disappearance.

Recommended if you're curious not so much what a unicorn is, but why a unicorn might have been part of diverse cultures throughout time. Yet, I will caveat this recommendation by saying Borges isn't as interested in directly stating what the creatures are as much as exploring the epistemology about what makes imaginary creatures interesting to us. It's classic Borgesian metafiction in that way!

The bestiary describes beasts as much as it describes their philosophical and moral progeny with the economy of phrase that typifies Borges' short fiction. Most entries are just a couple paragraphs long, and any entry longer than 2 pages is a surprise. Some might find it confusing that he has a single paragraph on elves or his dismissal of the chimera, but it's about the "why" more than the "what" for Borges' take on the fantastic.