Read 'em and weep

As far as fiction goes I tend to fall on either end of the spectrum: utter butter pop novels or insanely ungainly tomes. Neither side tends to trigger my blues. I'm either turning the pages too fast or too busy looking up the word enfilade to get sucker punched by some subtextual dark cloud. But the following works linger somewhere in the middle, accessible enough to pull you in, dark enough to push you back.

5. The Information by Martin Amis – A superbly funny and smart story about a bleak and unhappy protagonist who loses at life. The night after I finished this, I leapt out of my bed, convinced that a gigantic black spider had dropped from the ceiling onto my stomach.

4. The Raw Shark Texts by Stephen Hall – Crammed with wordplay, including a shark built out of letters that floats through the pages, this book is like Memento starring Will Shortz. Just thinking about it makes me dizzy. What a wonderful construct. But somehow, some way, it pushed me into a deep little hole of alienation.

3. And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris – An entertaining read. A familiar setting. A moving experience. But the final sentence, which has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with how one has internalized the book, hit me in the gut with a sledgehammer.

2. The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno – A very quick read, thank God, as the entire time I felt like killing myself.

1. Oblivion by David Foster Wallace – An absolutely brilliant collection, stuffed with so much sadness above and below the text that I felt genuinely depressed for about a month after putting it down. To this day, I still refuse to read the final story, The Suffering Channel, about a man who shits out works of art, as I’m worried it will complete some horrible circuit in my brain.

The Seance

The closest I have ever come to passing out was as a teenager, riding the Shockwave at the Six Flags in Gurnee. I remember my peripheral vision going dark, and then the rest of my field of vision clouding over, until all I could see was a pinhole of the sun. I was holding onto consciousness by a thread, terrified that if I passed out all the way, the Shockwave would break my damn neck.

People don’t pass out much these days, except from heat or Obama’s awesomeness. That’s why I was glad to read The Séance, a moody little novel that takes place back in the day when fainting was de rigueur. Why did women used to faint so much? If I were a woman in the 18th century, I’d probably wear a fake moustache filled with smelling salts. Of course, if I did that, I’d probably already be declared a witch, or a freak, or a mustachioed hussy. Oh, and did you know women could be scared to death back then? It’s true. I read it somewhere.

Anyway, this book reads like A.S. Byatt had a threesome with Poe and Stoker: the delicate mannerisms, the nested narratives, the creepy, mysterious house in the middle of nowhere.  It’s a short book that’s long on atmosphere, not particularly creepy or horrific, but a worthy read nonetheless. Plus, it’s mostly told from the perspective of a couple of heroines, which is useful, because it allows the reader to experience fainting firsthand.

Ordinary Horror

This book is teeth grindingly slow. And not much happens. Like, at all.

But it scared me. Or made me feel dread. Or disquiet. Or unease. I can't really put my finger on it because the author put "it" so far out on the periphery that it's just a blur.

I still don't know if this book is about the devastating natural degradation of the human mind (as suggested by the title), or about wicked, carnivorous, hallucinogenic flora and the apocalypse.

Either way, I recommend it for those of you who appreciate your horror with a literary twist. Or your lit with horrific undertones.

The Strain

I'm not sure how much of this enjoyable little vampire novel was actually written by Guillermo Del Toro, but I'm also not sure I care. He may have just been hanging over Chuck Hogan's shoulder, saying, "ooh, ooh, try 'desiccated'" and "have the one guy's eyes be, like crimson, and swimming with flagellating virus-worms." I mean, even if that was his only contribution, it would still be a worthy one.

The book is basically a medical thriller set in Salem's Lot, New York, and the vampires are the same seriously evil, hungry and shark-eyed cabal from King's classic. There's no Lestat here, no tortured soul. Just pure eating machines. In fact, in a way, it's a lot more like a zombie story.

My only complaint is that it's pretty clear, almost immediately, that this book is the first of a trilogy. Not that it's that unsatisfying of an ending. It just all feels like one big setup. An entertaining, bloody, violent, decently paced setup. No biggie. Also, I caught a couple of typos. Seriously? Del Toro, why I oughta...

Anyway, that's my valuable opinion.