Cameron's Book Round-Up: End of 2023 - Start of 2024
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind — I’ve started a new semester and I’m putting the button on an old job. That hasn’t left a ton of time for reading, but I’ve still managed to finish a few. I’ve bookmarked the next month or so as a “re-read-a-palooza” for myself, revisiting older books that I may need to give more attention to. Given that my commute has increased a bit, this is leading to a fairly different rhythm for a bit.
In the meantime, enjoy these reviews — and maybe pick up a few if you’ve already given to relief for the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
Asura Girl by Otaro Majio, trans. Stephen Snyder (Link goes to bookfinder.org — no bookshop entry.)
In translation, there’s a problem of how to convert things from one language to another: do you translate currency? Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore famously — to me — puts its prices in dollars, which always bugged me. If you extend this line of thinking too much, you get to the point of claiming that the best translations of Dostoevsky were completed avant la lettre by Charles Dickens.
If you were to do a similar thing with Orange Eats Creeps (my review and Edgar’s) into Japanese, you’d end up with Asura Girl. It has a similar degree of stylistic experimentation, but is far more concerned with pop cultural references — the main character, at one point, hallucinates Tony Soprano as being present — to the point where it ends up being very of its time.
At the same time, there is a certain amount of very Japanese Millenarianism present — it was published (as far as I can tell) in 2004, though it wasn’t translated into English for another ten years — It feels very much like something written after the Tokyo Gas Attack, looking westward to see America and Europe anticipating the millennium. Perhaps it was written after the millennium had turned looking back.
In any case, while it’s a well-written enough book, it’s more interesting as a case study in Japanese writing than anything else. Another data point in my ongoing project of understanding Japanese genre fiction beyond the standard bounds of anime and manga.
Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror by Jordan Peele.
This book has a number of authors on its table of contents who we’ve loved in the past: N.K. Jemisin, Tananarive Due (who continues to be the best writer of Stephen King stories, arguably including Stephen King), P. Djèlí Clark, and Nnedi Okorafor — I’m definitely going to be checking out the other authors in there, too, if only through association. I could sing the praises of the writers I’m familiar with already — but you know I loved their work, just read our past reviews of their offerings. Some highlights from the new authors:
“Eye & Tooth” by Rebecca Roanhorse is a pulp adventure story about a pair of monster hunters hired to come and look in to a haunting and leaving with more than they bargained for. It might scratch the same kind of itch as a Dresden Files or similar story, but has the added benefit of the monster hunters being struck by the stinginess of their employer — a touch I found extremely amusing.
Lesley Nneka Arimah wrote a story called “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers”, which dealt with an interdimensional invasion of horrors who have a fascination with pregnant women, and the agency tasked with stopping them. Far from being a traditional invasion story, it deals with institutional failures exacerbating the problem.
“Flicker” by L.D. Lewis deals with the real cosmic horror of the simulation hypothesis. A chilling, ruthless little story that makes me glad that I don’t believe a single word of that nonsense — now, out of a kind of Pascalian hope instead of simple logic.
Nicole D. Soniers’s “A Bird Sings by the Etching tree” is a great exploration of the phantom hitchhiker motif — something that was the subject of one of our earliest pieces on this website — and was materially important to my decision to read Sparrow Hill Road later on. A meditation on the feeling of being passed by in a world that won’t stop moving, it hit something key for me.
I could go through each of the stories in here and give them a similar treatment, but I’ll just say this: I don’t feel like a single one of these stories missed, and I feel as if they had a great social awareness that contextualized their strangeness in relation to larger, material issues.
The Wavering Knife by Brian Evenson.
On the back cover of this book, there’s a quote from Samuel R. Delaney — nice — and another from Gilles Deleuze. That was a Venn Diagram that I wasn’t expecting. It contains a number of strange little stories, some of which were interesting, some of which were intriguing, a few of which knocked my socks off, and all of which featured just the worst people you could possibly imagine.
There was a certain amount of unevenness to the collection, as almost all collections tend to be — the best portion, in my estimation, is the third quarter of the book, where the level of strangeness was just about perfectly calculated, in my opinion.
My favorite, I believe, was “Moran’s Mexico: A Refutation” — an unhinged work of fictitious literary criticism from the grandson of a German travel writer, detailing his feud with the novelist who used the translation as the groundwork for a strange novel.
On the whole, quite good. I need to track down more of Evenson’s work and study it: he’s a fascinating writer, and seems to still be active. I’m given to understand that a notable portion of his work is tie-in fiction for the Alien and Dead Space franchise, or collaborations with other people such as Rob Zombie. Perhaps that isn’t terribly notable — I know Jeff Vandermeer did a Predator novel, after all — but it seems interesting that skilled genre and genre-adjacent writers have taken up that work.
The Cipher by Kathe Koja
You know, I didn’t think there would be a “Detroit Style” of horror writing, but between Kathe Koja and Thomas Ligotti, I’ve got two data points and I think that’s enough to say that there’s a particular vibe — maybe not insofar as the city itself has a style. The two writers share something of a genetic similarity, but they don’t overlap at all: instead, they’re two cousins born of the same city. There’s the expected emphasis on urban decay, and a cheap cigarettes and a kind of…gastric realism? A visceral quality of sickness to it that resembles, in a vague way, dopesickness as described in pop culture.
Perhaps this betrays my ignorance — are there other horror writers out of Detroit? I know of a fantasist — Alexander C. Irvine — but I wouldn’t characterize him as a horror writer.
Nicholas, a failed poet, works in a video store by day and at night gets dragged around their nameless city (which is probably Detroit) by his on-again-off-again fling Nakota. They are both quite awful people — Nick is a melancholic drunk in a pure Gen X mold, and Nakota is a even more temperamental and manipulative. Most of the story is, admittedly, the two of them happening to each other.
Except for the “Fun Hole” — which was originally going to be the novel’s title — a hole of unknown provenance in a storage room in Nicholas’s building. The hole is about a foot and a half wide and seems to go on forever (despite not going through the apartment beneath it.) Living — and once-living — things placed in the hole mutate rapidly. A jar of bugs become chitinous chimerae before turning into a sloshjng bug soup. A mouse bought from a pet store becomes twisted. A dead hand comes alive.
The two of them — and other characters that enter the picture later on — investigate the phenomenon in something approximating a science experiment and something that approximates an art scene, eventually turning into a somewhat cultic story, with Nicholas and Nakota and their toxic relationship in the middle.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t think that Koja would be able to pull a full novel out of the premise: a weird hole does not a novel make. And it doesn’t here: the motor of the plot is the human relationships at the center of it, these awful Michiganders ruining one another’s life and scrabbling for importance in a corner of the world that doesn’t have much importance to go around (the apartment building, not the city itself.)
The Atrocity Archives (The Laundry Files #1) by Charles Stross
I’ve read almost all of the Laundry Files books, but I have yet to really reread the first one during a time when I was writing reviews. It follows the first meeting of Bob Howard and Mo O’Brien, who are major characters through the remaining stories (Bob narrates most of them, though Mo has a stint as a narrator for one later work.) It’s a fairly basic, but extremely competently written adventure story featuring a group of Nazis summoning a Lovecraftian horror. It’s engaging enough — though it’s the attached novella, Concrete Jungle that sees Stross really shine: while Atrocity Archives is great adventure writing, the fact that Stross can turn around and use that same framework to grapple with colonialism and bureaucratic horror is a major testament to his abilities.
Honestly, while there are many contenders, I think that Stross might be in the running for best living science fiction writer: he’s clearly comfortable enough with the snark and sleaze that characterize the more libertarian-minded end of science fiction in the 1980s and 1990s, but shows a real ability to not only understand his characters as people but to understand them as people embedded in a social structure — while also giving you brain eating horrors from beyond the stars and a truckload of dead nazis. There are some elements of this in Atrocity Archives, I will admit — he doesn’t reduce his (dead) fascist villains to caricatures, but he also doesn’t make any of them less awful. It takes real talent to make an extremely detailed picture of people who are completely bad: full of a kind of nuance, full of condemnation.
Edgar bought these alongside some online purchases, but given the fact that they haven’t yet started them, I can only assume that it is a sort of perverse experiment to see how unhinged I’ll get in reading them. The answer is: very.
11 is the conclusion of the first major arc of the comic, while 12 is the beginning of the second one. I can say nothing about the end of the first one that will not spoil anything — and I know people get worked up about spoilers. I will say that it felt as if Fujimoto was about to hit the climax of the whole narrative, then took a left turn into a completely new space, doing a bit of a reset on his narrative. Volume 12 introduces a new deuteragonist, Asa Mikata, which complicates the narrative quite a bit: part of what made the first arc work is that it took a fairly traditional setup (the three central protagonists, two male [one serious, the other — the hero, — an idiot] and one female [in an innovative turn, here, also an idiot]) working for a larger organization that has a secret purpose — compare, Naruto, Jujutsu Kaisen, Attack on Titan, Ghost in the Shell, Fullmetal Alchemist, and (without the organization), Cowboy Bebop, and Samurai Champloo. It’s an established trope of the anime/manga medium (a database component as Hiroki Azuma might put it.)
With the new part, it seems like it might be taking more of a page from shoujo than shonen anime. Perhaps, much as part 1 is a Seinen recuperation and reworking into a strange form of Post-Shonen anime (using the tropes of stories aimed at young boys), this arc will attempt to do the same with Shoujo, exploding the tropes of stories aimed at teenage girls and making it into something strange and new.
Or, perhaps, I’m overthinking it.
Gideon the Ninth (Locked Tomb #1) by Tamsyn Muir.
I’m going to be rereading the whole Locked Tomb — probably over an extended period, not just as part of my rereading. As such, I’m going to skip talking about this one. However, I’ll point out that we’ve both reviewed this one several times, but there’s always new things that come up from revisiting it.
Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire.
I found this book because it’s mentioned as a touchstone in the rulebook for Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd edition.
This book has two things I have a soft spot for: ghosts and a braided structure. The Ghost thing I’ve mentioned previously, so let me get into the second one.
A braided novel is something I didn’t really learn much about until late in my academic career (one of my classmates in grad school wrote one for his thesis.) The components of a braided novel can be read as a collection of short stories, but come together to show a larger, more cohesive structure. Sometimes this can be a bit of a surprise (think “The Other Man” from Jesus’ Son [sic] by Denis Johnson, which reveals most of the way into the book that all of the stories have been from the perspective of one very unfortunate man, instead of a cavalcade of vaguely similar burnouts.)
Sparrow Hill Road is a braided novel about a hitchhiking ghost who died in the 50s at the age of 16, and has spent the past 60 years in the “twilight” in-between state, popping back up to travel the highways and try to save motorists from accidents and violence, and shepherding those she couldn’t save through to the Last Dance Diner, where they can decide what to do with their eternity while drinking milkshakes and talking to the banshee that runs things.
It’s a fairly basic premise, but McGuire builds it out in an iterative fashion, each story adding new elements gradually until there’s this well-drawn world that would be much less interesting to me if it were oriented around another type of supernatural creature.
The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek.
I’ll be honest: audio was the wrong format to read this in. It would have been a lot better to get this in text and dissect it like a proper scholarly book, but I had the chance and I took it.
I need to spend more time with both Žižek and Lacanian theory more generally — it seems fascinating, and I’ll be tracking more down. As it stands, I don’t feel comfortable doing more but reporting that I read it. I will admit, however, that this book did whet my appetite. If I had a greater degree of context, it would probably have been very fascinating.
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