"We Live Amongst the Dust" by author Matthew D. Jordan, a Weird West trilogy of books

Seattle-based author Matthew D. Jordan spent over ten years crafting a huge, remarkable saga called We Live Amongst the Dust. The three-book series is equally gunslinging-Western full of action and blood, mind-bending time travel with portals, alternate universes and multiples timelines, striking emotional drama with characters of great depth, and a unique take on the post-apocalyptic genre, exploring how humanity rebuilds when life as they knew it falls apart.

Previously released under the title Tincture, the story was only available as a dramatized audiobook read by the author, complete with sound effects, voice acting and a vibrant soundtrack. All three books of the trilogy are now newly available in beautiful Hardbound editions with new introductions by Josh Gaines (being me).

In the first volume, An Apocalyptic Proposition, I provided a fairly “traditional” Foreword that overviews the thematic elements and philosophical implications of the series overall. I analyze the relationship between the characters and the main villain as an archetype, and suggest how the perspective and approach Jordan takes in this series is utterly unique among apocalyptic literature. It’s basically a literary analysis about how badass I think this series is and kind of hyping the reader up to enjoy it, and perhaps point them to a few elements to pay close attention to.

In the second and third volumes, the “Preamble” of And the Devil Pulls Six-Guns and the “Prolusion” of And the Old King of New Nebraska before the main text provide short stories within the WLATD universe, giving further backstory for main characters or previously unseen glimpses into the events prior to the novels. These add some exciting and fun layers of complexity to the saga overall, fleshing out even further the curious nature of this fictional world.

The books are newly available in this edition as of February 2022, and can be ordered at the link:

The entire series is also available for free listening as a dramatized audiobook at these links:

• Spotify

• iTunes

• Audible

"THE FAMILIAR" Volume 4: Hades by Mark Z. Danielewski - Book Review

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Even with four installments, we’re already too far into this series for me to attempt to give a cursory overview of Volume 4 while trying to hide specifics. Those who are caught up in the series will know what I mean. That said, I’d like to touch on highlights of the book in order to spark intrigue while not completely spoiling the more important elements.

In The Familiar, Volume 4: Hades, one encounters (among other things): a teenage girl named Xanther who may very well exist in multiple (or all possible) timelines, knows the names of every animal she encounters (not their species or type, their personal name) and sees dark stones covering the eyes of every person around her which she must mentally “flip” away. Xanther also gets transported to a creepy-ass winter forest with thousands of floating, disembodied stone-eyes marching towards her every time she has a seizure. There are some downright nightmare-inducing page turns in these sections.

Additionally, Xanther found a cat (or is it the other way around?) which is not actually a cat (we aren’t sure exactly what it is yet), is thousands of years old or more, possesses definite (if uncertain, to us) power and for whom something very powerful and very bad is definitely coming.

Other elements of note, rapid fire: three A.I. beings called the Narcons who directly interact with the narrative and provide commentary/references/clues for the reader, glass orbs that are kinda-sorta-maybe computers but which can scan catalogued events throughout time, pink and blue balloons that hold some highly addictive substance (upon which one character named Jing Jing is hopelessly dependent), “The Great Tian Li,” an elderly witch (?) from Singapore who has flown to Los Angeles because she claims the aforementioned cat belongs to her, one very bad dude in Mexico City simply known as The Mayor who traffics endangered animals for the purpose of brutal sport, a Latino gangster named Luther who has lost his appetite and can’t get it up anymore because of (...), an alcoholic, depressive detective named Ozgur, a stubborn little taxi driver named Schnork who is suppressing some extreme grief and a handy new interactive service called HomePorn in which strangers come into your home and have sex in front of you (!!!).

Simply put, this series is insane, in all the best and most intriguing ways.

Something I very much appreciate about MZD’s approach with The Familiar books (and an aspect I’ve mentioned in previous reviews) is that he maintains a balance between difficulty and enjoyment for the reader. These books are challenging at times, no doubt. They’re mysterious, they’re abstract, they’re minimalist and some passages can be utterly inconceivable. However, they’re also heartfelt, dramatic, dark, terrifying and funnier than one might think. I’ve found myself getting emotionally invested in more than half of the nine characters and deeply curious about the remainder of them. To put it simply, The Familiar is a more accessible series and a more approachable read than its basest premise would suggest. To naysayers who might deem the series pretentious, all I can say is that you must pick one up and read it before letting your assessment land there. These aren’t just hard books for the sake of being hard. They’re fun, they pay off and there’s a community around them to help parse out the questions as you go.

With each subsequent volume, MZD is rewarding those who endure with more hints, more clues and (a few) answers, all the while the greater mystery deepens and grows more complex. Imagine if the television series LOST had all been planned out ahead of time and was leading somewhere that actually made sense. The nice part is that the books are each small segments of the larger treasure map being pieced together, (helpfully) referencing one another (with page numbers [even!]) to keep the reader on track and remind them of passages past (passed(?)). It’s all one big mind-bending, reality-defying, possibly simulated and probably multi-timelined puzzle. And the picture is getting clearer all the time, so keep scrying.

-J.G.

"THE FAMILIAR" Volume 3: Honeysuckle & Pain by Mark Z. Danielewski - Book Review

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In Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, I was introduced to a wild, scattered, multifaceted universe from the mind of Mark Z Danielewski, a story in which a girl finds a unique, powerful, mysterious (dangerous?) cat. Many other characters entered into the mix from across the globe and while I may not have known exactly what was going on, the experience was still interesting, exciting, colorful, and contained the necessary beats to keep me moving forward, anxious to know what came next. There was enough heart in certain characters to get me invested in them and their stories. Amazingly, for what at times was a difficult read, it ended with me thinking that, “Yes, I’d read another one of these.”

    With Volume 2: Into the Forest, things got more trippy, more spooky, more uncertain, more untethered, and yet also more tied together. Things were starting to make more sense. I was already familiar with the format, the main characters, and the fact that to understand the book better, the best plan was not to get too hung up on the mysteries and just keep moving forward, trusting that Danielewski would reveal things when the time was right. I learned more about the dangers (and powers) of curious electronic(?) Orbs that could search time and space and were inherently unpredictable. I saw dark and frightening stones cover people’s eyes, and disembodied eyes floating out of the page towards me from out of a cold and sinister forest. I realized that this story was going to be a lot of things, but safe was not one of them. And when it ended, I felt like I was awakening from a very exhilarating (and terrifying) nightmare… yet I was hungry for more.

    In Volume 3: Honeysuckle & Pain, on one hand, the pace smoothened out a bit. Where Volumes 1 and 2 were rip-roaring with frequent chaotic and puzzling events, Volume 3 slowed down. It took its time giving me more depth and history into the characters with whom I was now very familiar. Knowing well the tone and voice of each person, I was able to roll through the narrative relatively easily and enjoy seeing the plot unfold without the literary-acrobatics of figuring out the format, because I was already comfortable with it.

On the other hand, Volume 3 got stranger than ever, and scarier than ever, pulling the curtain back slightly further to give the reader a glimpse into Xanther’s potential, importance, and power (although none of these have yet been fully realized in her or divulged to us). Whatever is going on, she is in a precarious, volatile, highly dangerous situation (and nope, I don’t even fully understand what that situation is). Along with that, I’m not sure if even the ancient cat will be able to protect her from it (or if he himself is in fact a part of the danger, despite their apparent bond). The spookiness of Volume 2 got ripped open wider and, man, was it exhilarating. The complexity of the story's vastness also spun out further, but links are beginning to be made.

What I must stress about this series is that while it is a challenge, it is also perhaps one of the most rewarding reading experiences I’ve ever had. It is worth the effort. It is worth the digging into the text and looking for clues and patterns between the three Volumes and discussing theories with other readers online. And Danielewski knows this with complete clarity. The series is not just difficult for the sake of difficulty, or complex for the sake of highbrow artsy overindulgence. Instead, it is an experience built with great intention and needs to be given careful attention. But also, it's, uh, fun to read. It goes against the fast-paced information overload of our current media culture and forces the reader to slow down, to take in the prose, to make notes and underline passages and refer back to the previous volumes, to pay close heed, to study. And for those who take the time and do the work, Danielewski is handing out literary parcels of gold with each new book.

Volume 3 only confirmed this fact. Things are coming together. Characters are crossing paths. Something enormous is being built, and yes, it’s still full of mystery, but there are more clues all the time, and they’re fantastically exciting. There were several chill-inducing revelations. Never have I had a reading experience that was so well balanced between poetic, philosophic beauty and tripping-balls bizarre.

These books are works of art, and they’re only getting better. Join the community surrounding this series, and scratch your head with the rest of us while slapping yourself for not picking it up sooner. You have not had a reading experience like this before. Sure, it’s daunting, but do you know what the most daunting part of it is? The fact that Volume 4: Hades  isn’t coming out sooner.

-D.G.

"THE FIREMAN" by Joe Hill - Book Review

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Joe Hill’s The Fireman bears similarities to Lord of the Flies and Fahrenheit 451 (both comparisons that were made very early on in the book’s publicity run), but also, in my mind, to Stephen King’s 2009 modern epic Under the Dome. Like Golding’s book, it has the "my clan/your clan" adversity that builds throughout the novel and ultimately swells out of control with deadly results. It functions as a study in the irrationality of groupthink and the idiosyncrasies of people’s behavior who have been manipulated by an autocratic leader in whom they have blind faith, as the people of Chester's Mill with Big Jim Rennie in Under the Dome. And, like Fahrenheit 451, it has a lot of fire in it.

All three of Joe Hill’s previous novels (NOS4A2, Horns, Heart-Shaped Box) have been, more or less, “intimate” books with relatively few main characters at their centers. The Fireman is new territory for him in that regard, as it features a wide assortment of characters with vastly differing backgrounds and sensibilities. This contributed both to the book’s strength and, in my opinion, its weakness. While a number of the characters were written with utter clarity and easily discernible personalities (Harper, The Fireman, Jakob, Renėe, Allie, Nick, Ben, Carol, Tom Storey, The Marlboro Man, Harold Cross), other members of Camp Wyndham became muddled and lost in my mental inventory only because of the largeness of the book and the size of its cast of characters. I found this to be only occasionally distracting and, admittedly, the blame may lie more with my poor reading skills than with the author’s ability.

To touch briefly on one other negative quality, I felt that the pace of the book took an enormous two hundred page dip in its middle third. The beginning section was riveting, and the ending was fantastically exciting—a true heart-racing page-turner—but the meandering interpersonal drama of Camp Wyndham in the middle of the book was somewhat slow and frankly not all that interesting.

Those things aside, Joe Hill does an exceptional job of introducing the reader very swiftly into the nature of the world as it stands when we enter the story. An epidemic infection called Dragonscale, carried by a rare spore and transmitted to humans in an unknown way, is causing people all over the world to spontaneously combust. Evidence of the disease can be seen on the skin of its victims (before the point where they burn up) in the form of swirling black tattoo-like formations, flecked with gold. In the opening chapters, the Space Needle in Seattle tips over, engulfed in flames, ignited people flying out its windows before it crashes to the ground on live television. And the blazing mayhem only increases from there.

Speaking of blazing, Hill should be given credit just for his use of such a diverse collection of fire-, smoke-, and ash-related words. You can only say something is “hot” or “burning” so many times before you have to dig out the old thesaurus and start finding new ways to describe flames. Joe does, and well.

I have to admit that the last two hundred pages made up for the narrative lull that preceded it. In a way, there was not one climax, but three, as the novel wraps up several facets of its storyline at different times, each more satisfying than the last. Not only was the conclusion exciting, but clever in such a way that will inspire one to say of Hill, “That sly son of a bitch.” Having read everything he has published up to this point, I can personally attest to Joe Hill’s talent for dropping seemingly insignificant little nuggets throughout his stories and imperceptibly bringing them back around at the perfect moment. These small payoffs, along with his ability to be heartfelt without being corny, make the conclusions of his books often very satisfying.

While some of his books may be substantially stronger than others, I haven’t read a “bad” story by Joe Hill yet. He has a unique voice and is an undeniable talent, which makes me think he’s gonna be churning out good ones for many years to come.

-D.G.

"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" by Michael Chabon - Book Review

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This book struck me in an odd way in that I could recognize in a disconnected, impartial observer sort of way that it was clever, heartbreaking, artful, extensively detailed, well researched, and deeply funny, except that all of these qualities added up to me not caring one bit about the novel or the characters.  If this says anything, I recognized in a purely analytical sense that, Yes, indeed, this is technically a "good book," but I would never pick up another of Chabon's works again. There was nothing within it that struck a meaningful chord in me (though, clearly, it has struck a chord with a great many other people).

Something that bothered me was that Chabon's sentences could be so over-puffed (that's the primary word that kept coming to mind) that they almost became a study in how lengthy and convoluted with highfalutin vocabulary a sentence can be. I'm all for lengthy sentences, and I'm all for coming across new words in my reading (in fact, I hope for that quality in a book), but I got the sense at times that Chabon was simply showing off in order to prop his novel up as high art, real capital-L Literature, crafted for the express purpose of earning the praise of the New York City and NPR crowd. Or, perhaps Chabon is just really smart and it comes naturally to him to write in this way. That doesn't mean it is terribly enjoyable to read.

I'm not saying the book is shit--not in the least. It is one of those grand epics that encompasses the entirety of its characters' lives and explores a wide assortment of facets (magic tricks, isolated life in the arctic, World War II, lock-picking, writing stories, drawing superheroes, a Jewish Golem). Its sensibility is big, bold, and unabashedly American, but in a colorful, fun way that mirrors the comic books at its center. The drama that unfolds between its three main characters, while not particularly engaging to me, was well told.

It was interesting to read this not long after having finished The Goldfinch (both novels were Pulitzer Prize winners) because, although I enjoyed that book far more, I noticed some parallels. that made the two seem noticeably similar. Both books are big in scope, even though they pivot around a small group of characters. Both span the length of someone's life and therefore are widely varied in the areas of human experience that they consider. Perhaps that isn't much and sounds generic, like it could fit the description of many novels, but in reading Kavalier & Clay I kept being reminded of Donna Tartt's book.

In all, this book wasn't my ideal reading scenario, but I can see how a different type of person would find it unutterably adventurous and pleasurable. Still, at nearly 700 pages, I didn't quit as I might have with a lesser book. I stuck with it because it was admittedly engaging 85% of the time, I just can't put my finger on why it didn't connect with me more on an emotional level.

Recommended if you're into: Stories that take place in New York City, 1920's to 1950's America, the Golden Age of comics, Harry Houdini, World War II, McSweeney's Quarterly (because it's got the same literary tone as much of what Dave Eggers puts out), classic superheroes, vintage TV and radio.

-D.G.

"The Water Knife" by Paolo Bacigalupi - Book Review

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This was a decently entertaining read, but there were enough thematic and structural issues to also make it a distracting and confusing one. Something about the story felt amateurish and incomplete, and the ending itself was abrupt and seemed not completely thought out. It was not terrible, it simply felt like an idea that never got fully developed, thus the book never felt “solid” or came into its own.

It could be said that this is a “mid-apocalyptic” book (if such a thing exists—it does now, I guess) in that the story takes place not before or after a great calamity, but in the middle of the world falling apart, and the reason is much simpler than zombies or a viral outbreak: it’s water.

The premise is initially intriguing, if odd. The extent of the novel’s world takes a few chapters to get your head around if you come into the book cold, as I did. It takes place in a near future version of America where it no longer rains and the drier states such as Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas have become dangerous and desolate territories where water is scarce and what little is available is controlled by corrupt powers with their own self interests in mind. California, on the other hand, has become more or less its own country with plentiful water and resources. It is viewed as a sort of paradise that the rest of the US aspires to, however their borders are strictly monitored and getting inside the state is nearly impossible without a great deal of money or social stature.

Much of the book takes place in Phoenix, a city that has been largely abandoned and left to die by the rest of the country. Gangs and savages have sprung up who preside over the weak and helpless. They run prostitution rings, take cuts of cash and water from small business owners within their territory, and watch over the borders so that inhabitants cannot simply leave the state. It’s a dire situation.

The plot centers around three characters in vastly different situations whose stories eventually intertwine: Lucy, a journalist who covers primarily grisly murders often related to water rights conflicts; Angel, a highly trained hitman/undercover investigator/Jason Bourne type (the slang term for his occupation being water knife) who works for a powerful figure named Catherine Case based in Las Vegas who controls most of the water in the Southwestern states; and Maria, an impoverished young woman who makes her living by buying up water at low rates and reselling it in convenient locations for a profit.

I did come to care about all three of these characters, Lucy in particular, and Bacigalupi’s ability to write dialogue and small human moments was notable. The book plays out as sort of a medium-speed thriller (I would consider something by Lee Child or Michael Crichton to be “full-speed,” comparatively) mixed with more intimate moments between the main characters in their struggle to survive.  

One of my issues with the book is its smallness of scope. If there is literally no more rain anywhere and this water epidemic is supposedly affecting the entire world, why does the author only give us a pocket of the whole story? What’s going on in other countries? Why is the American government so standoffish to its own states that are suffering? Some of these details are alluded to—loosely—and I recognize that some of this approach may be commentary on a future government that is even more apathetic to its own people than it is now, but this aspect still bothered me. Only so much could be done about the scope, I realize, and the author prioritized the characters in their geographic situation, but I feel that these details could have at least been fleshed out more to give a larger idea of what was happening in the world at large.

There were some extremely graphic descriptions of torture and one sex scene that got pornographic. These things don’t generally bother me in a novel per se, but in both instances they felt like X-rated scenes shoved into what was otherwise a PG-13 novel, which is to say they felt highly out of place. They were jolting enough to take me out of the flow of the story and say, out loud, “Wait, what?” These contributed to the book’s overall inconsistency in tone.

In all, The Water Knife was not a bad read and it held my attention for the most part, but I kept waiting for it to break wide open and become truly great—except it never did. The author’s writing was decent and his concept was interesting, and there was undoubtedly a lot of research that went into making the concept believable and realistic. However, based upon this work alone, I would probably not bother to pick up another novel by Bacigalupi. It’s not crap, it just isn’t my thing.

-D.G.

"The Outlaw Album" by Daniel Woodrell - Book Review - Short Story Collection

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I picked up this short volume at a library used book sale for one dollar, and am now so very grateful that I did not spend anywhere near the $24.99 retail price (highway robbery for a book that has a large font and is not even 200 pages long). After reading through it, I got the sense that this collection was hurriedly assembled and released as little more than a cash-grab in the wake of the success of the Oscar-nominated film Winter’s Bone, based upon Daniel Woodrell’s novel. I myself read Winter’s Bone and found it to be decently enjoyable. It was not anything mind-blowing, but was entertaining and had compelling characters and an engaging plot, and was the reason I decided to go a little further down the road with Woodrell’s work.

The Outlaw Album, on the other hand, read like a series of college-level in-class writing exercises, and unfinished ones at that. The majority of these stories felt incomplete, like ideas jotted down but never fleshed out. Very few of them had character, and the characters themselves were not memorable. On certain stories, it seems that Woodrell tried to employ a minimal, jump-cut sort of storytelling that often left me bewildered because the scene changes and implied action made very little sense, as if he was attempting to be dark or ironic by leaving the reader to read between the lines and not quite succeeding.

On a more positive note, I will say that a few of the stories were pretty good and had plot arcs that actually made sense and were interesting. Woodrell also occasionally lucked out with a very strong sentence here and there; vivid, eloquent one-liners full of stark detail or metaphors that landed just right. But those two compliments are about as kind as I can be towards this collection, a book that, believe it or not, I had set out with the expectation to enjoy. Very rarely do I feel the need to rip a book up and down, but this volume came across as an amalgam of largely undeveloped stories that whoever edited them must have barely glanced at before giving them the stamp of approval.

Woodrell’s writing is, in this case, like a second rate Donald Ray Pollock, or a third rate Cormac McCarthy. He has neither the devastating punch nor the literary touch that those men do. If you want some quality Southern fiction with grit as well as heart, read those authors instead.

-D.G.

"Child of God" by Cormac McCarthy - Book Review

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My personal history with the work of Cormac McCarthy is limited and rather unbalanced. I have friends who praise his name up one way and down the other, though I had, until recently, never really understood the hype surrounding him. I read The Road several years back and did not care for it. I felt it was fairly straightforward as stories go and altogether less than fantastic. I watched the 2013 film The Counselor which he penned specifically for the screen and thought that while the movie was executed well from a filmmaking standpoint, it was a pointlessly bleak story and not a film worth revisiting.

On the other hand, I do very much enjoy the Coen’s adaptation of No Country for Old Men, though that is hardly the same thing as reading the novel so I can’t speak much to the story in its original form. More recently, I read McCarthy’s short novel Child of God, published in 1973, and finally caught a glimpse of that greatness of which my friends so fervently speak.

Child of God is a brutal novel, appealing to my love for gritty Southern literature, but it is also beautiful and eloquent with many rich descriptive passages and profound lines of dialogue. McCarthy’s tone in this book is like a pitch-perfect blending of Faulkner’s observant, human-centric prose and the depraved sinful conduct and bloodshed performed by the characters of Donald Ray Pollock or Daniel Woodrell.

There were numerous moments that were exceptionally hard to stomach while reading, though not because the violence was described gratuitously or at length, but simply for the nature of the violence (or sexual act) itself. The central character is utterly despicable, deranged beyond measure, and wholly impossible to admire in any fashion, yet somehow he is completely fascinating in a way that fills the reader with a sort of dumbstruck terror and holds their attention for almost 200 pages (at least, it held mine). Reading Child of God is like glimpsing a horrifying slice of reality we had never dreamt was possible but one that could very well exist in a not-so-distant corner of our own country.

McCarthy makes the minimalist approach work to his advantage (a style that is challenging to do well), both in the forming of his characters and in the building of the novel’s environment. The lack of specific detail about a character’s appearance or mannerisms allows the reader to formulate a sense of the person that comes almost exclusively from the way they speak or the actions they carry out (Steinbeck had a similar way of forming characters through dialogue). That said, McCarthy is able to be very descriptive when he wants to be and when the moment suits it, crafting lengthy and carefully-worded sentences that have to be read more than once to be fully appreciated for their scope (for example, the sentence that opens the novel).

The argument could be made as to “what’s the point?” of a novel like this in which a deplorable person does monstrous things to others and more or less gets away with it, enduring only meager repercussions to the end of his life. This is the sort of book that will rub certain people the wrong way, or which others will simply not “get.” I can’t say that I understand the point of the novel perfectly either (and am not suggesting that it needs to have one), but that, like so many things, it was quite an experience to walk through and I was ultimately glad to have read it, though “glad” is probably not quite the correct word. I came out the other end having had something small and subtle confirmed in my mind regarding the nature of man and his tendency towards wickedness.

-D.G.

"The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt - Book Review

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Best to get the nasty stuff out of the way early: the first and most glaring issue with this book is that it could have been utterly fantastic if it were 30,000 - 50,000 words shorter. I’m not exaggerating.

Long books are fine; I’m fond of a number of literary tomes. Books that take their time to develop and unfold can be wonderful. But in the case of The Goldfinch, there are passages that needlessly go on for far too long once the reader has already gotten the picture (heh heh). One particular exchange of dialogue towards the end of the book is drawn out so long in an (ineffective) effort to build tension that it literally had me cursing out loud to just get on with the reveal already. Other sections were flamboyantly self-indulgent, and while they were well written, they were also wholly necessary and trying too hard to come across as reverential. There were some particular similes used that were so eye-rollingly corny and out of place that an editor with any sense would have promptly zapped them out of the text.

Now, all of that sounds rather harsh for a book that I actually think it is a triumph and one that I ultimately enjoyed quite a lot. This book is wonderful, it just could have benefited from some hearty editing, and it took about 150 pages to get interesting.

As to the author’s strengths, there is no question that Donna Tartt’s prose is capable of being uncannily eloquent at times. She writes these swirling, dreamy passages so full of heart and carefully detailed familiarity that one tends to be carried away on her words and forget that they are reading altogether. Also, her ability to write dialogue is impeccable; to say that her characters speak like real, living, breathing souls doesn’t aptly describe it. Her descriptions are lush with details and are such that she must be drawing from a deep well of personal experience, so diverse are the areas of life the novel touches upon.

The Goldfinch has a curious flow about it, since the plot goes through a series of patterns that circle back around on each other, blooming and changing each time they recur like a massive kaleidoscope of events. And while the book only spans a period of somewhere around eighteen years and the narrator is still a young man by the end, there is this inherent sense of a great deal of time passing, as if the reader is watching someone’s life unfold from beginning to end with all the vivid, minute characteristics of everyday life. Believe it or not, that isn’t another jab to the length of the book—I’m saying it’s one of the novel’s strengths.

Boris, the main character’s unpredictable but endlessly loyal best friend, has earned a place in my favorite characters of literature. He was hilarious with an exuberant personality, a lover of life, not entirely safe and yet dumbfoundingly lucky. He enters the story roughly one-third of the way in, and it was at this point that I thought the book really came into its own. Boris contributed substantially to my sticking with the novel.

The main character himself, Theodore Decker, begins as a less than confident young man for whom the reader quickly feels some degree of sympathy because of the unavoidable tragedy that befalls him. The simplest way to describe the situation in which he finds himself in is crude: it just… absolutely sucks, and you can’t help but feel troubled for him. As the novel unfolds, the reader observes as Theo grows and becomes a man, changing all the while, though in many ways not for the better.

There is a great deal of alcohol and substance use (and abuse) throughout the book, though I found this to be more interesting than tragic; the odd, wide-eyed fascination of watching someone else continue to harm themselves and make poor decisions with horrific consequences. The drugs and booze are certainly presented in a negative, destructive light.

The Goldfinch concludes with a lengthy, larger-than-life speech from the narrator that attempts to somehow sum up the varied and complicated events that took place before it, though it rang a bit heavy-handed to my ears. As a writer, I can relate to the desire to want to give your readers some epic, all-encompassing, cosmic monologue that takes into account space, time, God, love, life, death, and every created thing (which is what I felt this speech was trying to do), but it did not quite work for me for two reasons: 1. the book was strong enough already without it, and 2. this book really cannot be summed up in a few pages. That said, I suppose I do not have any real room to criticize because I have no damn idea how a novel of this scope and length could have been ended in any way that would be perceived as “just right.”

The Goldfinch is a one of those reads that only comes around every decade or so. Unfortunately, it is also the sort of novel that attracts the booky-snobs, but who pays attention to them anyway? This book is lovely and powerful, but it is also an undertaking. Read it if you’re okay with stories being slow and taking their time. Read it if you’re okay with your main characters drinking a lot of alcohol and doing a lot of coke and heroin. Read it if you enjoy Russian culture. Read it if you’re really into art or antique furniture. And read it if you’re a writer; you’ll come out the other end with your mind expanded and a few new tricks in your bag.

-D.G.

2015: A REVIEW IN BOOKS

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1. Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn - 10/10 (To me, this book was a flawless thriller. It blew me away numerous times, and the conclusion was crushing. Even though it's become a pop-lit sensation, it has more depth than one might expect)

2. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand - 8/10 (Howard Roark is a character like none other I've ever encountered in literature. What a book. Would have called it a perfect "10" if it hadn't dragged so much in the last third)

3. Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis - 7/10 (second time reading this. Wonderful, inspiring, uplifting)

4. Broken Monsters, Lauren Beukes  - 7/10 (Great premise with some incredibly creative moments, but a very misguided and meandering book that lacked fluidity in its blending of genres)

5. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson - 8/10 (Unbelievably strong writing. Matheson's ideas were ages ahead of his time)

6. Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming - 7/10 (My first Bond book. A quick, entertaining little read)

7. Revival, Stephen King - 6/10 (Not one of his best. Strangely paced and with an ending that felt a bit out of left field, but it had some good moments, primarily the music-related passages)

8. Gateways to Abomination, Matthew M. Bartlett - 8/10 (the face of new horror. This man is trailblazing into insane territory, and it's brain-melting)

9. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner - 8/10 (Challenging, but excellent)

10. Duma Key, Stephen King - 9/10 (Possibly my favorite King novel since Lisey's Story. Diverse, character-rich, artful, bizarre)

11. Flight of the Blue Falcon, Jonathan Raab - 7/10

12. The Martian, Andy Weir - 6/10 (A rare case where the movie was better than the book. Weir's writing is primarily a series of technical [but interesting] expositions, while the movie has a fleshed-out cast of diverse and developed characters)

13. Finders Keepers, Stephen King - 9/10 (Second book in the Bill Hodges trilogy. Leans a bit too heavily on coincidence, but I still really had fun with this one)

14. The JAWS Log, Carl Gottlieb - 7/10 (The backstory to the production of one of the greatest films of our time. Fascinating)

15. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner - 9/10 (Overall more accessible than The Sound and the Fury. A strong and heartbreaking gem)

16. In the Woods, Tana French - 10/10 (A masterful mystery with incredible depth and realistic characters. French was my favorite new author [new to me, that is] discovery this year)

17. The Likeness, Tana French - 8/10 (A premise that is intriguing but a bit of a stretch riding on the heels of In the Woods. Still, her voice is strong enough that the story was solid)

18. The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer - 10/10

19. Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis - 8/10 (This has become my favorite B.E.E. work. A meticulously crafted piece of curious meta-horror)

20. Rose Madder, Stephen King - 5/10 (I almost couldn't finish this one. His weakest book, save The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon)

21. The Pleasure Merchant, Molly Tanzer - 3/10 (Well written, but not my cup of tea)

22. Donnybrook, Frank Bill - 6/10 (Had its moments, but mostly a series of gruesome actions being done by characters who are too similar to each other to be told apart)

23. Twelve Ordinary Men, John MacArthur - 4/10

24. The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May, Mark Z. Danielewski - 8/10 (I almost didn't begin this 27-volume series because it sounded too daunting/pretentious, but holy shit... am I glad I did. Like nothing else I've ever read; endlessly creative, full of mystery but with just enough clues and breadcrumbs to keep the reader going. Like LOST in some ways, but better)

25. The Familiar, Volume 2: Into the Forest, Mark Z. Danielewski - 8/10 (Vol. 1 was the introduction; Vol. 2 kicks it into high gear. Cannot wait for Vols. 3 and 4 this year)

26. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien - 9/10 (HOW/WHY did I wait so long to read this series?!? What an experience it must have been for those who read them before the films... Should have done that)

UNFINISHED or IN PROGRESS:

• Firestarter, Stephen King - Lost interest, or perhaps it just wasn't the right time. This is the first time I've started a King novel and not finished it. Will probably pick it up again at some point.

• Catch-22, Joseph Heller - Stopped after 120 pages because it was stupid, pointless, and I have no clue as to how or why it became a bestseller. I'm not the target audience, apparently.

• Mystery & Manners: Occasional Prose, Flannery O'Connor - This is a wonderful collection of lectures and essays that I don't so much read straight through as pick up from time to time throughout the year and read an individual piece or two. I would highly recommend to authors or creatives in general, I've found it hugely inspiring and insightful.

• The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt - Began the audiobook for this one late in the year and am still making my way through it. Enjoying it, it's just 900 hours long.

• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien - Currently reading. Where Fellowship took a while to get moving, this one starts with a bang and has been thrilling from the start.

• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky - Currently reading as part of a newly-joined book club. Several years back I wasn't able to make it through Crime and Punishment so we'll see how this goes...

• Stories NOT for the Nervous, Alfred Hitchcock (editor, [except he wasn't]), Various Authors - This is a pocket paperback from 1965 of macabre stories from various authors, supposedly compiled or selected by Alfred Hitchcock. The "editor" title on the book is misleading, however, because I found out that Hitchcock himself was not an editor and had nothing whatsoever to do with the choosing of the stories in the collection, he merely cashed a check for allowing the publisher to put his name on a series of books containing spooky stories because they'd sell (A LOT) more copies that way. Though the collection was enjoyable, this piece of information somewhat killed it for me. Well played, Alfie--not.

"The Familiar" Volume 2: Into the Forest by Mark Z. Danielewski - Book Review

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It is difficult to know just how to properly review this second volume in Danielewski’s massive series-in-progress. It is so inseparably tied to the first book that to describe the plot that is forming would take far too long and, more importantly, would give too much away. Plus, there are parts of the story that have thus far been presented in such a minimalistic and abstract fashion that I’m not exactly sure what is going on yet, though I have confidence these things will be revealed over time. I’ve learned from experience that Danielewski may set up a lot of mysteries for his readers, but he also always pays them off eventually.

    I can say that after finishing Into the Forest, I am more excited than ever for this series to keep going. As other reviewers have said, stepping into Volume 2 is much easier because the reader has already tackled the hurdle of understanding the structure and flow of the books by reading Volume 1. With that obstacle out of the way, it frees up the reader to move through the story more quickly and naturally, keeping out a keen eye for clues and hints that the author may be leaving for us.

    If Volume 1 introduced us to the gigantic mythos Danielewski is building, Volume 2 cracked it open that much wider and revealed that things are only going to get more trippy from here. We’ve also been shown a little more of the pure enormity of scale that this series is going to encompass (paranormal or multi-dimensional creatures? Possible computer-simulated lives?? A young girl who is coming untethered from our world and crossing over into another one??? These aren't spoilers because they're only my best guesses and may be wholly incorrect). I confess, my limited brain could imagine perhaps another seven or eight volumes finishing out this story (judging by the arc it has taken so far), but to think that the author has another twenty-five volumes in store for us is mind-blowing, and I cannot wait to see what he’s come up with.

    But Volume 2 is not just better because it’s weirder, more violent, and goes into new territory with the creative formatting. It also delved deeper into the hearts of the characters, which I think is key with a story of this size. It would be one thing for the author to make a massive series that had crazy formatting with strange convoluted text and images just to be pretentious or “for the sake of art,” but Danielewski has shown us yet again that he is also a good writer who can tell a good story and craft lifelike characters. The Familiar would not get very far if we didn’t care about at least some of the people at the heart of the tale. And I do.

    I guess that’s about all I can say. If you liked Volume 1, you pretty much cannot go wrong with Volume 2. I think it will solidify your faith in the series that much more, and you’ll be patiently waiting with the rest of us to get your hands on Volume 3. If you are somehow reading this without even having read Volume 1 of The Familiar, get it into your life right now. It will undoubtedly be one of the most unique reading experiences you are likely to have.

-D.G.

"The Familiar" Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May by Mark Z. Danielewski - Book Review

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As you may already know, The Familiar is not a book/series that lends itself easily to review. Instead of trying to summarize the complicated and many-faceted plot, I will rather share a few thoughts on the experience of getting through Volume 1.

To be honest, when I first read the announcement about this series something like five years ago, my initial thought was, “That sounds pretentious and exhausting.” I had already read Danielewski’s House of Leaves at the time and enjoyed it quite a lot (challenging though it was), but a story that was projected to be 27-volumes long about a girl and her cat(??) sounded like too much.

However, after having recently heard Mark Z. Danielewski interviewed on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast in promotion of Volume 2 of The Familiar, my interest was piqued. Danielewski was completely down to earth in the interview and his personality seemed the farthest thing from pretentious. His fervor and passion in talking about the project was too intriguing to ignore.

How wrong I was in my initial assessment!

This past week, I flew through Volume 1; I could not put it down. And yes, it was challenging at times and required an extra layer of careful attention that many books do not demand, but there was enough intrigue and mystery happening to keep me wanting more and moving forward. And I discovered quickly that that was the key: moving forward. Similar to the works of William Faulkner or James Joyce, it is best not to get too caught up in the moments that are unclear or confusing and push onward, because eventually those threads will begin to come together and your questions will be answered. If you try to read into every little clue and image or theorize about where the plot is headed in the middle of the book, you’ll drive yourself insane. Keep going, the story does pay off. Also, this being only the first of many volumes, the author isn’t going to reveal all of his tricks at once.

There was something enticing even in the physical act of turning pages at a fairly rapid pace, as many of the fonts are large or some pages have nothing more than a single sentence or word. Although the page count is 880, the word count adds up to something closer to a 250- or 300- page novel, and a quick-moving one at that. There was a wonderful balance of uncertainty and payoff, as well as weirdness and warmth. There are some enormous head-scratchers and curious elements throughout the book that may not be explained until many volumes down the line, but Danielewski isn’t just trolling us with a series that is bizarre and difficult for the sake of bizarre and difficult. There is a very clear story going on here with vivid, beautiful, and heart-engaging characters, particularly the family unit of Xanther (the teenage girl who rescues the cat), her mother Astair and her stepfather Anwar. Certain other characters only drop in very briefly and their passages are abstract and difficult to discern, but then again, we’ve only just met them, and surely their roles in this overarching tale will be revealed in time.

While reading the book I got a frequent sense of its bigness, and I don’t just mean page length or knowing how many more books there are to come. The story itself is something like a small peek into a vast universe; there is a strong sensation of much, much more lying just “beyond the curtain” of this world. The Familiar blends and transcends space, time, countries, races, species, technology, humanity, spirituality, and is meta and self-referential even in its structure as a novel. From front to back cover, not a single page is wasted, for even the pre- and post-story content is artful and intentional, offering more clues into the universe Danielewski is unveiling for us. The book is more to be experienced than read, and it is so visual and presentational in nature that it could be likened in many ways to a feature film. Lucky for us, this is only the first act.

-D.G.

SOMETHING BROKE IN ME: Thoughts & Experiences Surrounding Derek Cianfrance's "THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES"

Let’s get something out of the way first: I am not much of a crier.

It is not that I have some male chauvinist tough guy complex about not ever letting myself cry, but rather that things in life--be it movies, books, music, experiences, things that are supposed to be sad or emotionally compelling, etc.--simply do not bring me to tears very often. I have a dead, stone-like heart, perhaps, or a broken part of my brain that simply does not activate that inherent human emotion that says: It is time to cry now.

That said, let’s begin.

*

“The Place Beyond the Pines is a movie about fathers and sons,” a friend had told me one morning over coffee at a small Denver roastery on South Broadway Street near my home, “and you should watch it. I don’t want to say much more than that, but… just watch it. It gives you a lot to think about.”

This was March 2014. We had spent a bright weekend morning discussing movies and various other things. Among them, Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel which had just come out, and The Conjuring (both of which my friend recommended, for I had not seen either at the time), as well as Akira and The Shining (which I urged him to see). We talked about books, got refills of coffee, talked some more, then said our goodbyes and went our separate ways to get on with the rest of the weekend.

Jump to two weeks later. It was a rainy, overcast Saturday afternoon. I was settled comfortably onto my purple IKEA couch--which, damn it all, looked undeniably grey, not purple, when my wife and I picked it out in the IKEA showroom some weeks earlier--with a Sierra Nevada IPA in hand and a copy of The Place Beyond the Pines in the BluRay player. I had put a copy on hold at the library, as had a number of other folks, apparently, because there was a two week wait on availability. My wife, eight months pregnant at the time, was out--it’s true--photographing a wedding, even with a sizable baby-belly swelling out from her middle. I specifically waited until I could watch Pines on my own because I knew from reading a short synopsis that it would probably be too much of a “downer” for her to enjoy.

The film began and I was struck by the quiet intensity of the opening scene. Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), shirtless, covered in black and green tattoos, skin shining with sweat, breathing heavily and pacing back and forth in a small room while flipping a butterfly knife open and closed, hyping himself up. Cut to a lengthy one-shot that remains fixed on the back of Luke’s head as he, now clad in a red leather jacket, weaves through the colorful pandemonium of a carnival surrounding him. He arrives at a red and white big top tent where inside an announcer is shouting his name to wild cheers from a crowd as he approaches a dirtbike, already running and chugging with anticipatory life. From the first moment I was intrigued by this character but also got the immediate sense that something about him was very unsafe.

The film progressed and I was fully enveloped in its first act; a quickly-paced back and forth narrative of aggressive heist scenes blended with the mellow, somewhat tragic personal life of Luke Glanton, his illegitimate infant son, and the woman Romina (Eva Mendes) with whom he has a complicated bond.

Aside from this first third of the movie being wonderful all its own (if painful to watch), I enjoyed the added luxury of knowing absolutely nothing about the film prior to seeing it, save for the ambiguous recommendation of my friend. Thus, I was jarred (and delighted) upon discovering, slowly and subtly, that this movie was something wholly other than what I had been expecting. The way in which the plot unfolds has an amorphous and deceptive quality (in a good way), leaving the viewer walking away from a film that feels very different from the one that they stepped into, even though the story itself remains fluid and intact.

To describe this any further would be to ruin the pleasures lying hidden within Pines that the person seeing it for the first time ought to have the privilege of discovering for themselves. While it does not contain the hard-hitting, jolt-to-the-system twists like that of Gone Girl or The Usual Suspects, that is not to say it is a film without surprises.

Derek Cianfrance is a master of quietness and subtlety who seems to have a fondness for exploring characters with regular, less-than-fantastic lives. In regards to the quietness: there are long segments in Pines without a soundtrack, or with music mixed so softly it serves only as a delicate undertone to the action on the screen, providing the performers enough vulnerable space in which to glow. As to the subtlety: Cianfrance’s characters often tend to be melancholy in such a way that even they do not realize they are melancholy, however to the viewer it is abundantly clear. They are not pathetic per se, and yet there are parts of their lives that make us cringe. Perhaps they are not openly depressed, and yet there is an undeniable sadness intertwined in their person. These are people whose lives appear to be just a little bit worse than our own; utterly, exhaustingly regular.

*

It was during one of these “regular” moments in The Place Beyond the Pines that I experienced one of the most jarring emotional incidents of my adult life.

The second act of the film began and I was being introduced to Officer Avery Cross, Bradley Cooper’s character, who had just been injured in a shootout with Luke Glanton. He was being legally coached at the hospital by his superiors into changing his story regarding the altercation, saying Glanton had shot first, even though Avery knew that was not the truth. What begins as Avery being in possible legal trouble flips instead to him becoming a hero among the local police force; one of “the good guys” injured in the line of duty. Avery’s discomfort with being heralded is visible on his face in the scenes following. He is sorely aware of his dishonesty, yet he never discourages the praise being poured out on him, nor pipes up to confess the truth about what happened. I could not help but feel a sort of misguided sympathy towards him for the tricky situation in which he had been placed, and found myself wondering what choices I would have made given the same scenario.

Back at home, Avery’s wife had recently given birth to their first child, a son. A scene opens in which nothing special is happening. Avery and his wife settle down on the couch with their newborn in a small, cozy-looking home to watch television (a news program singing more praises to Avery Cross’ heroism). It is not a crucial scene in the film, and its inclusion serves only two basic purposes: to give us a small peek into Avery’s new life as a father, and to remind us via the TV program that he is still a local celebrity.

And yet something caught in my throat.

That will be my life soon passed through my head in a whisper.

The inconsequential elements on-screen added up to something strange and overwhelming: that humble disheveled look of the Cross family’s living room, in need of picking up but neglected because that’s what new parents do. That warm simplicity of a family’s quiet evening at home together. That delicate infant boy in his clean onesie, pure white.

Suddenly I’m weeping. It started small, a few streams down the cheeks that took me completely by surprise. I had a fleeting thought that I was being ridiculous because this was hardly the sort of scene to be crying at, but the tears kept coming. And growing.

Remember that my wife was eight months pregnant at this time, so the looming certainty of having a child (and becoming a father) was hovering over my thoughts constantly, whether up front or in my deep subconscious. Knowing that there would be a baby in my home in roughly a month’s time was a bizarre and emotionally-loaded sensation. Fear, joy, excitement, uncertainty, feelings of inadequacy, questions as to whether making the decision to have a child was a mistake, and a million other things all rolled into one. Sitting there crying on the couch, I realized more fully than ever that there was going to be a little person whom I had never met before living with my wife and I very soon; an actual human with a heart and a personality and a face; a tangible thing of flesh and blood to hold and nurture. Seeing that quiet little family at home together on the couch opened something up inside me that I had never known was there.

This may sound made up, but my weeping got to the point that I had to pause the movie and go into the bathroom for tissues. I remember thinking in some distant part of my brain What in the world am I doing? and Where is this coming from? even though I knew the answer to that. I stood in my bathroom and continued to cry until I was hunched over, wet tissues bunched in my hand and my arms crossed over my stomach. My shoulders trembled as the waves of emotion washed over me, and I just let them keep coming until they were finished. I was not sad, nor was I necessarily happy, but I can say that what was happening felt cathartic and wonderful, like a great release after being closed up and under pressure for far too long. It felt like something secret and beautiful and true had blindsided me from the most unexpected of places. And while to this day I don’t understand exactly what happened that rainy afternoon, I do believe it was necessary and, in a way, a gift.

The tears finally stopped and I splashed some water on my face, then went back to the living room to finish the movie. I was in something like a euphoric state for the rest of the film, and damn if that Sierra Nevada wasn’t the best thing I had ever tasted.

*

My friend was right, The Place Beyond the Pines is a movie about fathers and sons, but it is also a movie about parents and children. I watched it a second time a few months ago (with my wife this time, and she liked it just fine) and my perspective was wholly different after having had a child. The scene I described earlier did not bring me to tears during this second viewing--that was a moment of inexplicable magic which I would be foolish to expect twice--however it did conjure a sweet memory of that strange tumultuous experience I had enjoyed (yes, enjoyed) a year and a half earlier.

I said at the start that I was not a crier, but that is not quite an accurate statement anymore. It would be more honest to say that I did not used be a crier. Since our child was born in April of 2014, a girl, I’ve cried plenty, and it’s wonderful. Sometimes those tears are out of sheer exhaustion, yes, but mostly they have been borne of laughter and joy that goes far beyond myself.

The Place Beyond the Pines is not my favorite film, but it is one with which I will always share a unique bond, for something unutterable and lovely broke open in me the first time I watched it. If that rainy afternoon served as a foreshadowing to something beautiful, the birth of my daughter was undoubtedly that beauty brought to fruition.

-D.G.

"Rose Madder" Book Review - Stephen King

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I have read thirty-seven of Stephen King's books at this point in my life, and never have I struggled so much with not wanting to finish one, nor has finishing one taken me such a long period of time as with Rose Madder. I cannot place my finger on exactly why I felt this book dragged on and on, taking almost two months for me to get through it, as I would set it down for weeks at a time and have almost no interest in picking it back up save for a desire to see if it got better and to know what happened in the end. King has had a few duds over the years (I didn't care much for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and Blaze probably would have been just as well left unpublished. Roadwork was simply not that interesting) as would any author with a catalog as large as his, but there is at least some redeeming quality in all of his works—that inexplicable King-ness—that keeps myself and millions of other readers coming back to him time and again.

That King-ness was present in Rose Madder as well, and to be clear, I'm not calling this novel a dud, per se. The opening chapter is heart-wrenching and immediately engaging on an emotional level. We are introduced with striking clarity to the victimized Rose Daniels and her psychotic husband Norman (whose craziness and violence rivals only Beverly Marsh's husband Tom Rogan in IT). In the book's opening scene, Rose is beaten so badly that she loses the child with which she was pregnant, yet stays with her husband for a number of torturous years. She finally decides to leave him (not a spoiler) and free herself from his abuse and manipulation to find a new life on her own.

What follows is a tedious recounting of Rose moving to a new city, finding a place to stay as well as an unexpected job, making some new friends, discovering a love interest, etc. And while we care about Rose's well-being through all of this, there was a dawning realization as the book went on that, for lack of a better phrase, nothing else was going to happen. What I mean is, until about halfway through the book when some bizarre things finally start coming into play, I thought King had written a “straight” melodramatic novel about a troubled wife leaving her monstrous husband. It would have been completely fine if that is what the book ended up being, I'm just saying it gave the whole story an imbalanced feeling when it took so many pages to get to “the point.” I thought many times over that this could have been a great novella, a nice tight hundred page story as opposed to a three hundred plus page hardback with heaps of filler material.

While some of the weird stuff later on was cool and fun to read (a maze with a Centaur, a magical image-shifting painting, a woman in a blood red robe who is very far from safe or sane), it ultimately didn't make a lot of sense or tie together in the way that most of King's stories do. It frankly felt like strangeness thrown in for the sake of strange instead of a story that melded well with and allowed for certain oddities.

Despite my critical tone here, once I finished the book I was ultimately glad that I stuck with it. It does have a few minor ties to The Dark Tower universe which I enjoyed picking up on, and Norman Daniels was a terrifying antagonist. He was the sort of villain that one could imagine being a real person, and dwelling on that is scarier than any monster.

So, all this to say, Rose Madder was just all right. It had some good moments and was worth a read for any King completist, but could have been a whole lot shorter and probably stronger for it.

-D.G.

"Donnybrook" Book Review - Frank Bill

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I came upon Frank Bill's work by way of reading Donald Ray Pollock (who, in turn, I was directed to because Chuck Palahniuk referenced the strength of his work in an interview), and Frank rightfully belongs in such honorable company as those bold and brutal authors. Having read his first book, a collection of short stories titled Crimes in Southern Indiana (which I loved), I bought his debut novel soon after and only recently got around to reading it.

The premise begins as a simple one: there is an annual three-day event called the Donnybrook that takes place in backwoods Indiana where men pay a $1,000 registration fee to fight each other inside a wire fence ring, bare-knuckled, in groups of twenty at once until only one is left standing to go on to the next round. The grand prize? $100k. Onlookers camp all around the thousand acre grounds, betting on the fights, grilling up meat, snorting meth and other narcotics, and drinking copious amounts of hard liquor and cheap beer. The whole event is put on (and the prize money fronted by) an independently wealthy fatcat with a lust for bloodshed named Belmont McGill.

Given the title, the premise, and my familiarity with Frank's first book, I knew I would be in for a gruesome ride with Donnybrook. I wasn't wrong; this book is brutal. There was one particular torture scene involving tiny blades being inserted at pressure points in the body that I found genuinely difficult to continue reading. I was squirming in my seat, literally. Now that's powerful literature.

That said, Frank isn't just writing a slasher book here; he's building a world that is characterized by grittiness and terror, a version of which exists in the backyard of our own country. His writing is a cornucopia of textures and pitch-perfect descriptions. The man is a master of details, laying out scenes, environments, and the physical features of his characters with vivid (often cringe-worthy) accuracy. For the reader, there is no question of the scent of a meth-cooking house, the sound of a sawed-off shotgun being fired indoors, or the taste of blood mixed with gravel.

My only criticism is that the wide cast of characters in Donnybrook are, at times, almost indiscernible from one another. There are several storylines taking place between a few main “protagonists,” carrying along on their own paths until everything culminates at the Donnybrook. While the stories are technically clear and unique in purpose, I found myself getting mixed up with just who was who and why each was doing what because nearly all of them (particularly the men) are equally despicable. The two possibly redeemable figures are a tough but moral sheriff named Whalen and a young man, Jarhead, who is admittedly misled but has pure motives. Other than that, everyone is a wretch, and while this can be fun in the beginning it was at hard times to stick with a novel where everyone is a horrific human being.

That said, this book is still a spectacle to behold and, I must confess, a pretty fun ride front to back. I found myself grinning during numerous passages because, doggone it, there's just nothin' like some good ass-kickin' in the old American backcountry.

-D.G.

"Lunar Park" Book Review - Bret Easton Ellis

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Bret Easton Ellis ventures into horror, weird and supernatural territory; who knew he had it in him?

The story is that of Bret Ellis, an author whose work made him famous from a very young age, and who has enjoyed a life of extravagance, wealth and relative ease apart from the drama in his private life. The book begins with an exposition of Bret's history (which contains both fact and fiction), beginning with his college days and the hugely successful publishing of Less Than Zero that made him a celebrity almost overnight. The opening chapter goes on to expound Bret's various troubled relationships with men and women, his drug use and partying, his gallivanting around New York and Los Angeles through expensive hotels and restaurants with his author friend Jay McInerney, his book tours for which he was scarcely sober (or coherent) and the repercussions of the terrible relationship he had with his late father.

Fathers and sons is a strong them in the novel. One of the most curious elements (when held up against Bret's actual life) is that he marries a fictional actress (in real life Ellis is gay) of substantial renown who has two children; a girl of seven or eight and a boy of eleven. His relationship with the boy, Robby, is strained from the start. At first, Bret seems disinterested in pursuing either of his step-children but becomes increasingly obsessed with making right with Robby in particular as the story goes on. Meanwhile, he wrestles with anger towards his dead father and the lack of closure they had when he passed.

Much of the weirdness of the book (which builds slowly and is expertly subtle—until it isn't) revolves around Ellis' previous books, as well as his father. For example, a young man named Clay (same name as the main character of Less Than Zero) shows up to Bret's Halloween party dressed as Patrick Bateman (the psychopathic killer from American Psycho). Bret keeps receiving blank emails at exactly 2:40 a.m. from the bank where his father's ashes are kept in a safe deposit box. He keeps seeing a cream colored Mercedes Benz 450 SL—the same car that his father owned and he himself drove as a teenager—parked outside his house or at the college where he teaches. To top it all off, preteen boys have been mysteriously disappearing all around the city... All that only scratches the surface; there's plenty of other weirdness that happens, as well as sections that are downright creepy and wrought with suspense.

What comes as such a surprise (though perhaps it shouldn't) is just how damn good Bret Easton Ellis is at combining a genuinely engaging story of a broken man and his troubled relationships with elements that are absolutely bizarre. Somehow, he makes this combination work. I suppose it is surprising because, apart from one short story that involves a vampire in his collection The Informers, Ellis' work always remains in the realm of the “real.” So to read material of his that would be perfectly suited inside a Stephen King novel is a unique pleasure. 

There is a careful amalgamation going on in this book of factual Bret mixed with fictional Bret melding into an altogether strange central character whose reliability is questionable (not for his narrative dishonesty, but for his paranoia and abuse of drugs and alcohol). Additionally, I loved the meta quality of the novel—a literary gamble, and not an easy technique to pull off well—how it was written to be self-aware, self-referencing, branching outside the norms of a typical narrative and inclusive of Ellis' other works.

Having read all of his other works prior to this one (with the exception of The Rules of Attraction), Lunar Park became my new favorite before I was even halfway through it. I'm a sucker for strange fiction and already enjoyed Ellis' work so I may be biased, but I consider this book a triumph. Not many people can so expertly blend the dramatic with the weird.

-D.G.

"The Likeness" Book Review - Tana French - Dublin Murder Squad Book #2

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I have mixed feelings about this book. I began reading it immediately after finishing French's stellar debut novel, the award-winning In the Woods (which I raved about here), and while in The Likeness the initial premise is intriguing and a little out of left-field for the genre, it quickly devolved into something tedious and slow.

While In the Woods did take its time and was a “slow-burn” story (for lack of a better term), it was still well told, interesting from start to finish, and read like a detective story with some literary flair. The Likeness reads more like a tense family drama or—sad, but true—something a step or two up from a soap opera. I don't know if this says anything of the book's quality, but I read In the Woods in a week; The Likeness took me nearly a month. I knew I wanted to finish it, but the prospect was not an exciting one. It was hard to want to pick it back up and keep going.

It begins with Cassie Maddox (co-star of In the Woods and one of my favorite characters from that novel) being called to a crime scene even though she had transferred out of Murder six months prior and was working in Domestic Violence at the time. She quickly realizes the reason for the call because the dead body lying on the cold floor of an abandoned cottage is hers—or at least, it looks exactly like her (thus the title). What ensues next is Cassie taking on the identity of the dead young woman in an attempt to track down her killer. This involves Cassie moving in with four college students in Whitethorn House, a dilapidated mansion in Glenskehy and the former home of the dead woman.

Cassie's period living with these students—Daniel, Justin, Rafe, and Abby—takes up the rest of the novel, and it is here where my comparison to a soap opera comes in. While this part of the book is still technically well written with strong characters and decent dialogue, very little of it feels like an investigation, which left me as the reader somewhat bewildered. To go from one book that is very much a detective story into its direct sequel and get a drama with a circumstantial mystery thrown in felt off-kilter somehow.

It probably sounds as if I'm bashing the book so far. Well, I said at the start that I had mixed feelings about this one, and here's why: I cannot say that, overall, it was a bad book, just a weird one. I can say that, even though it took some extra effort, I am glad I finished it, and by the end felt that the experience had actually been a pretty good one. It was just so wholly different than its predecessor that it almost felt like the two did not belong together at all—even though The Likeness intimately intertwines with people and events from In the Woods. The whole doppelganger thing was a bit of a stretch, and even though seeing it play out was somewhat fun, it felt like the author was throwing in a dash of fantasy or sci-fi in an otherwise straight-faced series.

But here's the thing: wacky as the concept was, French made me believe it. At no point did her commitment to the premise falter, and even though this sort of thing probably would not ever happen in real life, she executed every aspect with as much reality as possible, and it held up pretty well.

I see that other reviewers have complained about the book's length and I can't disagree. I mentioned it took me a while to get through this one and that is at least partly why. There is an enormous chunk of the book where Cassie is just hanging out with her college roommates—drinking and smoking a lot, playing games, having picnics, listening to records, fixing up their house—and while this section solidifies the reader's idea of who each of these people are as characters, it simply isn't very interesting to sit through. Breakthroughs in the case come few and far between, and isn't that the main reason we read books like this one?

So, like I said: mixed feelings. The Likeness is not great, but it's also not terrible. It's a strange little book that feels like a distant cousin to In the Woods as opposed to a sister or brother. For folks who liked In the Woods as much as I did, I'd say this one is a toss-up. You might love it, or you might be totally thrown off by it. I'm somewhere in between those two. If you're willing to give the author a little leeway, then there's probably a nugget of enjoyment to be found.

-D.G.

"As I Lay Dying" Book Review - William Faulkner

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As I Lay Dying is one of those titles that I had heard thrown around by friends or fellow readers—both in praise and in distaste—for years before ever picking it up for myself. It was required reading for my highschool girlfriend in AP English (which is ironic, because she hated reading, whereas I loved to read, yet I was in “regular” English). I would hear classmates talking about the book and the fact that it was hard to understand and that each chapter was told from a different character's perspective, which intrigued me. At some point James Franco went and made that low-budget adaptation of the novel that, according to the unreliable opinion of the internet, is godawful.

Having been blown away by what is arguably Faulkner's most famous and beloved work, The Sound and the Fury, earlier this year, I took a brief repose into other authors' books before deciding it was time to dive into some Faulkner once again. One has to be in the right mindset to read Faulkner, or at least I do, as his books can be challenging and require utmost attention, thus reading him takes a bit of mental steeling and careful intention. A simple beach-read type of author, he was not, and yet in the case of these two novels, the payoff was well worth the effort put forth. And when things got tough to follow or all the necessary pieces of the puzzle had not yet been given? I learned to just keep going. Faulkner's breadcrumb trails always led to somewhere.

As I Lay Dying has its challenging moments, but overall it is a more straightforward story than Fury. The tale centers around Addie Bundren, a self-righteous and stubborn woman who is oft found wallowing in her own troubles and is on her deathbed at the beginning of the novel. It is her dying wish that her body be transported to Jefferson, Mississippi to be buried with her ancestors. She lies in bed while watching her oldest son work outside the window all day, Cash, who is building by hand the wooden coffin in which Addie will be buried. Addie's teenage daughter, Dewey Dell, stands by her side, fanning her in the heat. The middle son, Jewel, is a cynical bastard, cruel and impatient with the rest of his family, and his only pride in life is in caring for his horse, Snopes. Darl is the most “normal” and articulate of the sons, and narrates more chapters in the book than any other character. Vardaman is the youngest son, an imaginative and curious little boy who observes his older brothers with a sort of quiet fascination. Lastly is Anse, or “Pa,” Bundren, a slack-jawed man who spends his days sitting on the porch and staring into the fields, and who has not lifted a finger to work in twenty years or more due to some ambiguous injury in his younger days. He, like Addie, has his own sense of self-righteousness and stubbornness, although he is completely un-intimidating and the children mostly view him as a bother and a chore.

The main plot consists of Addie's death near the start of the book and the family's troublesome journey to Jefferson to bury her, during which time each character expresses their thoughts on the trip, opinions of their fellow family members and their motives for going along.

Two similarities between Dying and Fury struck me: First is that both tell stories of large families in the South that may have at one time been stable in terms of income, had a level of respect in their communities and perhaps once resembled something like a healthy family unit, but at the time we are introduced to them in the novels they are crumbling into broken, pathetic messes, barely holding on to life and dignity. Irony and tragedy are all over these books, as well as dark humor, and Faulkner's keen sense of the fleetingness of life is on full display. I find it interesting that he explored the dissolution of Southern families in particular (understanding, of course, that he did grow up there, so there were the sort of people with which he was familiar). His books also seem to paint the Christian faith in a mocking, satirical light and expose the errors of greed and pride. Secondly, both books include a character who is mentally unwell. The more obvious of the two is Benjamin Compson in Fury, although Cash's mental instability becomes more and more apparent throughout Dying until the culmination at the end of the book when he literally goes crazy. It is a tragic scene, as is much of the novel, and serves to further express the madness of the whole premise.

The final scene left me shaking my head and muttering phrases of disbelief out loud for several minutes, though that is not to say the ending wasn't quite “good,” at least in terms of being a fitting close to the book. This is quite a novel, and I can see why it is heralded alongside Fury as being one of Faulkner's best. It is also very dark and at times demented, especially considering the time and social climate in which it was written. For some reason, I am glad for having read The Sound and the Fury first, although I am not sure why. Perhaps it gave me a better perspective with which to approach more of his work.

Long story short, Faulkner was a genius, and a master of minimalism and ironic symbolism. Any serious lover of literature is doing themselves a disservice if they have overlooked his work.

-D.G.

"In The Woods" Book Review - Tana French - Dublin Murder Squad Book #1

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Every once in awhile you come across a book of such genius that, once you finish the final page and close the volume, leaves you thinking, “Now just how the hell did they come up with that?” In the Woods was that way for me, although I did not recognize that the book was brilliant from the beginning; it snuck up on me.

It was given to me as a wedding gift (in 2010, when it was already three years old) and had always intrigued me, yet sat untouched on my bookshelf for five years. Every time I picked it up, ready for a new book and perusing my shelves for the next thing to read, I would always internally cite that it was “not the right time of life” for that particular book.

As a side note, I have an odd, almost autistic-level obsessive compulsion about choosing what book to read next, insistent that I need to find just the right book that will hit me just the right way and match my mood for that particular period in life. Being between books—existing in that tiny window of savory time, having finished the previous thing and getting to choose the next thing—is too sweet and exciting to approach lightly, at least for me. That, and the fact that I own more than 300 volumes between two eight foot high shelves and have only read perhaps one third of them creates a certain self-inflicted pressure to make some progress through my miniature library (which only grows as life goes on). Too many books, too little time.

I say that the genius of this book snuck up on me because from the beginning I did not necessarily find it riveting or demanding in the hook of its initial premise, and yet it had a soft, quiet, un-put-down-able quality that kept me coming back to take in large portions at a time.

It begins as a “normal” enough murder mystery—horrific though the murder is—with a twelve year old girl found dead on an ancient sacrificial stone in the middle of an archaeological dig in Knocknaree, Ireland. What is revealed very early on is that this story encircles not one mystery but two, the second having happened thirty-some years earlier and directly involving one of the lead investigators on the dead girl's case, Detective Robert Ryan. The story is told from Rob's perspective, and like any good character he is complex, likable yet broken, and at times, unreliable as a narrator. From the very start, he confesses his own unreliability to the reader with the simple line: “I lie.”

The strength of this novel lies in the depth of its characters, and particularly in the relationship between the two protagonists, Det. Ryan and his partner Det. Cassie Maddox. Their partnership and friendship is a unique one, and some of the book's best moments are passages of their dialogue together. While the story is dark and heavy in an overall sense, it is not lacking for humor, diversity, and welcome breaks from the main plot. There are a number of offshoots and explored leads in the investigation that help spice up the narrative and keep the reader guessing—along with the detectives—which paths will be fruitful and which are dead ends. And while this has been clunkily grouped into the “Mystery” genre (which, admittedly, it is), it is also much more than your simple beach-read thriller, and literary to the core in all the best ways. The aspect of Det. Ryan's background and the demons that haunt him into adulthood is a piece of the novel that is expertly explored, as is the thread of his relationship with Cassie and how it evolves throughout the story. No wonder the book won a number of awards.

Tana French has an incredible sensibility for how humans think, act, and speak. Her dialogue is spot on (nothing is better than reading a book where characters talk the way real people talk), her characters diverse and vibrant, and her ability to craft a complex story impeccable. There were several moments that had me gasping (or moaning) out loud, as I was so invested in these characters and ached at the trials they had to endure. Cassie Maddox quickly became one of my favorite characters I have ever encountered in literature, and I don't use that superlative lightly. Thank goodness she appears in at least one more of French's subsequent novels. It is rare for me to finish a book and be left wanting to spend more time with the characters, but that was absolutely the case here.

I read a lot of books, though not many mysteries, and this one simply blew me away. For all intents and purposes, it is in my mind a “perfect” story; the sort of thing you walk away from thrilled about and perturbed at the same time that you didn't think of it first. This is the sort of writing to which I aspire.

If it isn't already clear: I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

-D.G.

"The Jaws Log" Book Review - Carl Gottlieb - The Making of JAWS (1975), a diary from the set of the hit movie

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For the hardcore Jaws fan, this is fun and certainly worth a read. However, after finishing this I watched the two hour documentary featured on the Jaws BluRay and essentially most of the same stories surrounding the production are told there as well, and more colorfully.

Gottlieb is an okay writer, but he tends to go off on small tangents throughout the book that are not directly relevant to the making of Jaws. Granted, he wasn't shooting for some grand literary feat with this small volume, and basically the book consists of nothing more than collected stories and interviews from before, during, and after production. The whole book has a somewhat cutesy, lighthearted quality, full of all the fish, bite, and water puns one might expect. Part of this, I suppose, is a product of it being a book from 1975; there is a playful tongue-in-cheek vibe about it, reminiscent of “simpler” times.

Reading this gave me a whole new appreciation for Jaws as a film (even with it already being one of my favorites) because the making of it was truly a disaster. One key reason for this is that filming a giant mechanical shark that was painstakingly made to look real had simply never been done before. Pair that with Spielberg's perfectionist approach and the fact that they filmed 12 miles from shore in order to appear being far out into the sea, and you've got a perfect storm of things that can go wrong—and they did. Admittedly, a book could probably be written about the making of nearly any major budget movie and the slew of obstacles that come up during production of a film, but what makes the story of Jaws remarkable is that somehow Spielberg and his editor, an industry veteran named Verna Fields, were able to scrounge together reels and reels of footage from a disastrous shoot and turn it into one of the most beloved films of all time.

There were a few things mentioned that would certainly not fly by today's standards. For example, the crew members were actively killing sharks for sport in between shots while out on the water. The author mentions this with an air that communicates he actually found it humorous, and says that it was the crew's way of taking revenge on the fact that they were miserable, homesick, and far over schedule. Not cool. Additionally, there were passing comments about crew members drinking beer throughout the shooting days. I'm fairly certain that alcohol is strictly off-limits on set these days, at least for crew (the talent may be another story).

Anyhow, I came away from this with a greater fondness for Spielberg and the passion with which he approaches his work (plus the fact that he was twenty-seven when he finished this film; my current age, by the way). On the contrary, my perception of a few of the film's stars was tarnished, but not greatly. They're actors, they live in their own world and sometimes they're divas, and there is nothing we lowly common folk can do about it.

Film buffs or avid fans of the movie will probably enjoy this. It was a quick and entertaining read with some interesting behind the scenes stories.

-D.G.