Best Books of 2016ish: (2 of 3)

Following on from part one.

Europe in Winter, by Dave Hutchinson (2016)

 The third in a series, and what a series: some of the finest, cleverest, politically-minded SF of recent years. The ideas of nationhood and nationalism, citizenship, topology and topography, parallel worlds and information all get an intriguing examination, and it's very witty and thoroughly enjoyable. Hutchinson has a great fondness for Alan Furst, another extraordinarily underrated writer, and if you like one of them I can't see how you couldn't like the other. Get the first in the series, Europe in Autumn, and binge from there.

The Last Wolf, by László Krasznahorkai (2016)

In recent years I have become obsessed with Hungarian literature, for the simple reason that pretty much everything from that country which has made it into English has been excellent (an awful book by Peter Nadas aside). And every discussion of modern Hungarian literature comes around to
László Krasznahorka, who is astonishing. The Last Wolf, a novella published back-to-back with the related short story Herman, is a perfect introduction to his work: a bleakly funny story unspooling in a long single sentence about a washed-up academic involved, possibly through mistaken identity, in a search for the site of the death of the last wolf in Europe. 

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, by Kathleen Collins (2016)

 

A slim gathering of what seems to be the entire fictional output of an accomplished filmmaker who died young in 1988, whose work doesn't seem to have been collected before (the introduction doesn't really explain much, telling you more about the introducer than Collins). Extremely perceptive, occasionally harrowing, sometimes funny and very, very clear-eyed about American race relations, it makes depressingly clear how little things have really changed in recent decades.

Small Acts of Disappearance, by Fiona Wright (2015)

An Australian poet's memoir in essays about her experiences with severe eating disorder, from its beginnings to her hospitalisation, entwined with reflections on books and travel and much else. A genuinely fascinating analysis from the inside of a condition that words usually struggle to contend with.

Gypsy, by Carter Scholz (2015)

I'd never read Carter Scholz before I read Gypsy, a pretty much perfect SF novella about a group of people attempting to flee a dying Earth to colonise an exoplanet. Afterwards I quickly got hold of and read everything of his that is available, which sadly consists of only a novel (excellent) and one-and-a-half collections of stories (also excellent). He is an extraordinary writer, and Gypsy is a wonderful example of why epic literature can still work with only 100 pages.

Eleven Hours, by Pamela Erens (2016)

A novel that takes entirely during the eleven hours that a woman is in painful labour, spooling out to encompass her life story and that of her midwife. How did nobody think of this idea for a novel before? It's so simple, and done so well, and manages the feat of turning something that happens all the time to all sorts of women into a story with thriller-like levels of suspense.

Moonstone (The Boy Who Never Was), by Sjón (2016)

Do you want to read about a Reykjavik rentboy obsessed with the dawning world of cinema, and beautifully written depictions of his life as a body removal worker during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak? You do, trust me. Another example of a whole, wonderfully visualised world being brought to life in a bare minimum of pages.


More to come...

Best Books of 2016ish (1 of 3)

In the spirit of 'everyone else is doing it', here's the first of three posts on the best books I read in the last 12 months (so it includes December last year). Many of these were not actually published in the last 12 months, but that doesn't matter because they're fucking great and should be praised anyway. Overall there'll be 30-odd books, drawn from the around 300 books I managed in that time.

(NB: There were going to be four, but lack of time meant I crammed more books into the last post and made it three.)

The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories, edited by Joost Zwagerman (2016)

Zwagerman put this collection together and then killed himself not long afterwards, which is incredibly sad. His anthology, however, is full of stories of astonishing quality. It includes a number of well-known Dutch writers (Harry Mulish, Louis Couperus, Cees Nooteboom), a number recently revived in English (Nescio's great 'Young Titans', Arnon grunberg) and a welter of little- or not-at-all-known in English, like the wonderful 'Castle Muider' by Maarten t' Hart, the Patricia Highsmith nastiness of 'Sand' by Mensje van Keulen, or 'The Kid with the Knife' by Remco Campert. If you don't come away from this book with a long list of new writers to further explore, I don't know what medical attention could help you.

Viper Wine, by Hermione Eyre (2014)

This book could so easily have failed, but it succeeds beautifully. Real-life historical beauty Venetia Stanley, an adored celebrity and muse to Van Dyck and Ben Jonson, is terrified of losing her looks. Sir Kenelm Digby, her philosopher-alchemist husband, just wants her to let herself age naturally. From this simple conflict and obsession, Eyre wrote an amazing, timeslipping (see the iPhone in Venetia's hand on the cover), perceptive and funny book.

This Should Be Written in the Present Tense, by Helle Helle (2014)

You could just read the Danish women being translated into English at the moment and you'd get great book after great book (see Dorthe Nors below, plus various recent Open Letter books, and more). Helle Helle's novel about a woman failing to go to uni or move on from a failed relationship is strange and sweet and very engaging.

Karate Chop & Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, by Dorthe Nors (2015)

Two short books, published back-to-back in one volume, both wonderful. Karate Chop is a story collection full of uncomfortable and perfectly observed human relations. Even better is Minna, a novella in the form of an obsessive list, about an artist who just needs some space to get on with her art. In the US, Minna has been published together with a different Nors book, So Much for That Winter, so people in postapocalyptic Trumpland have no excuse for not reading it before the lights go out forever.

The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts (2015)

If you don't think you need to read a novel that incorporates Immanuel Kant, the Fermi Paradox, a novel but retrospectively obvious problem with teleportation (think the conservation of angular momentum) and God, and which opens with a homage to John Carpenter's 'The Thing' before jumping backwards and forwards through different times and narrators, and which manages it all with elegance, rigor and great intelligence, then what are you reading books for?

Unbecoming, by Rebecca Scherm (2015)

Coming-of-age tale, art heist suspense novel, revenge narrative. Get all three combined in beautiful prose with Scherm's first book.

Is That Kafka? 99 Finds, by Reiner Stach (2016)

Having written a huge 3-volume biography of Franz Kafka, Stach still wasn't finished. Frankly, if you have at least the vaguest idea of Kafka's life, I suspect this is the only book you need to get. Through 99 anecdotes, extracts and mini-essays, he brings Kafka more vividly to life than most biographers would do with 1000 stolid pages.

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, by Janna Levin (2016)

Levin's A Madman dreams of Turing Machines was a great novel from a few years ago, and her non-fiction account of the search for gravity waves--which succeeded after decades of attempts just as she was completing her book--is a pretty much perfect piece of reportage, full of intriguing people, weird conflicts, and frankly beautiful prose. Levin is both an wonderful writer and a practising scientist, and there aren't enough people who straddle both worlds.


More to come...

Best Books of the Year Part 4 [Not About Covers]

 (Continuing from here and here and here...)

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Roberto Bolaño: 2666
FSG, 2008

I went on and on about the design of this book here. It was the look of the thing, and a heartfelt recommendation from book designer Michael Kellner, which eventually persuaded me to read 2666, six months after everybody else had already read it and raved about it. You probably already know whether you intend to read it or not, based on the hype, so I'm not sure what I can say that will sway you if you are in the NO camp, but I'll try.

Bolaño's posthumously published, 900-page doorstopper is an intimidating but thoroughly rewarding book. In fact, in some ways, it's five books. Though all are interlinked, and the whole tells one big, complex story, it actually consists of three short and two long novels. The first is an academic satire about a group of literature professors seeking an obscure German writer in Mexico. The second book is about a Spaniard and his daughter moving to Mexico, and getting mixed up in things they don't really understand. The third book follows an American sports writer to Mexico on an assignment to cover a boxing match. The fourth, and longest (and sometimes hard to endure) part takes a look at a series of hundreds of horrific murders of poor Mexican women, and the fruitless police investigation (all, horribly, based on reality), told with the clinical distance and alarming detail of a forensic report. And the final part, which brings all the others together, is the life story of the mysterious German writer from the first section, from his birth, through the front lines of WWII, to his Mexican fate. All five books stand on their own, but read together are like nothing else I've come across.



Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes
Virago Modern Classics, 2000 (and NYRB, 1998)

The Virago Modern Classics are one of the Lost Great Things of modern literature (see also the Harvill/Panther paperbacks of the 1990s). From 1978 until some time in the 1990s, Virago put back into print some 400 books, mostly by women, which had been undeservedly forgotten or neglected. With their characteristic apple-green spines, these books were a wonderful collection of great novels, short stories and autobiographies. But then Virago was sold to Time Warner, and the list was savagely cut back. Now it's a shadow of its former self, but a few great books have survived: Antonia White, Elizabeth Taylor (the fantastic writer, not the appalling actress) and Rebecca West still have a few titles in print, though not all. Another amazing author who had a couple of books survive the purge was Sylvia Townsend Warner, who is also ably supported in the US by NYRB.  

Warner's short stories are brilliant, but good luck in finding them. Luckily, her novels are brilliant too, and Lolly Willowes might be the best of them. It starts as what might seem a straightforward repressed-woman-in-the-1900s narrative, but opens out to become someothing much odder and richer. It even seems to be parodying (though with more depth than any parody normally manages) books and films that hadn't even been written back in 1927, when it was first published--everything from the Elizabeth Gilbert-style middle-aged-woman-finds-herself memoirs that have boomed in bookshops over the last decade, to The Wicker Man. To say much more would be to spoil it, so I'll stop here.


Ron Currie, Jr: Everything Matters!
Viking, 2009

Before he is even born, Junior Thibodeax is hearing voices in his head, telling him that the world will end in 36 years. What's worse is that he's not mad, and the voices are telling the truth. They tell him other things, too--things he could never know otherwise--but they don't often tell him what he wants to know, and he can't really share his gift/curse with anyone in a way that they'll understand and believe him. Growing up with the indisputable fact of global destruction hanging over him, Junior's life goes understandably awry. He's unable to share his gift.

Taking in the end of everything, parallel universes and time loops, teenage sex, powerless gods and domestic terrorism, this could have been an appalling mess. Instead, it's a funny, clever and deeply touching novel: the sort of energetic, all-encompassing book that seems as though it could only have been wrtten by a young writer, but which seems much wiser than such youth should allow.


Hans Fallada: Alone in Berlin
Penguin Classics, 2009 (also Melville House, 2009, as Every Man Dies Alone)

I collect a lot of books about great forgotten books (often themselves out of print), listing reams of wonderful novels that never got the attention they deserved, or which vanished into oblivion despite one-time popularity. One writer who keeps popping up in these lists is German novelist Hans Fallada, who died in 1947. After years of neglect in the English-speaking world, Fallada is suddenly back in 2009, with more to come.

Alone in Berlin, Fallada's last book, is a story of the Germin resistance to the Nazis, based on a true story. Given his own troubled relationship to Hitler's regime, Fallada could well have chosen to write an uplifting tale of moral, upright citizens, defiant in the face of horror, working together to fight fascism--the sort of book Germans might have wanted to read in 1947. Instead, he produced this gripping, bleak thriller of hopelessness and petty revenge. The husband and wife at the centre of the story leave subversive postacrds all over Berlin, trying to change the minds of their fellow Germans, turning them against their Nazi masters. Most books would have pushed the light-in-the-darkness angle, but Fallada seems to view hope as something of a dirty trick, and the postacrds go astray, are ignored, or handed over to the authorities--and so the hunt is on for the subversive couple. To mention that this book is translated by Michael Hofmannis is to mention that it's translated masterfully.

Melville House also republished two other great novels by Fallada--Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker, both excellent--and are bringing out another, Wolf Among Wolves, in 2010.



Dash Shaw: Bottomless Belly Button
Fantagraphics, 2008

I can't add much more to what I already said here, but Bottomless Belly Button really is that good. And Shaw is only 26, which means he started writing and drawing this graphic novel when he was 22. It's depressing when other people are so talented and so young, and all you have to show for yourself is a blog and a series of foolish self-inflicted injuries.


 

Best Books of the Year Part 3 [Not About Covers]

(Continuing from here and here...)

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Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver
NYRB, 2009 (also Sort Of Books, 2009)

I’m gratified by the way my favourite writer as a child has also ended up becoming one of my favourite writers as an adult, for a different set of books. Tove Jansson, for it is she, wrote the wonderful Moomin books. In her later years she turned to novels and short stories for adults, and they are great. Back in the mid-1990s, when I first had a credit card and internet access, one of the first books I tracked down was Jansson’s The Summer Book, then long out-of-print in English, but now available from both NYRB in the US, and Sort Of Books in the UK. If you haven’t read it, I demand that you do. It’s a perfect evocation of childhood and old age, and the strange relationship between the two.

The True Deceiver (first published in Swedish in 1982, and now translated by Thomas Teal) is another small masterpiece. In less than 200 pages, Jansson tells the story of two odd women in a remote Swedish village. Katri is something of an outsider, yellow-eyed, brutally honest, no observer of social niceties, and always accompanied by an enormous, nameless dog. Anna, much older, lives alone in ‘the rabbit house’, where she paints illustrations for a wildly successful series of children’s books. Katri sets about moving into Anna’s life and home, motivated by both selfishness and altruism, trying to scrape together enough money to buy a special gift for her “simple” brother, Mats.

It is a brilliant, beautiful book. And for another side of Tove Jansson, 2009 also saw the publication of the fourth (and probably final) volume of her collected Moomin newspaper comic strips. Light-hearted, anarchic, humane and satirical, they’re also highly recommended: see more here.






Muriel Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington
Virago, 2008

A 20th-anniversary republication, this is probably the best of Muriel Spark’s later novels. Given the incredibly high standards Spark set in her fiction, that’s saying something. Like Tove Jansson, Spark worked almost exclusively at short novel or novella length, with no wasted words and beautifully clear, tight prose. Kensington is the story of Agnes Hawkins, a war widow in the 1950s, living in a boarding house (a frequent Spark setting), and working at a publisher’s. A mixture of bad temper and pride see her sabotaging her career, and becoming involved in a long-running feud with a hack journalist and womaniser called Bartlett. Black humour, death and diabolism ensue. (Weirdly, both this book, the Tove Jansson and two other bloody good books I read this year all have introductions by Ali Smith, who I don't even like much, and yet she obviously has excellent taste.)

I go on about Spark and some of her other great books here.


Miriam Toews: The Flying Troutmans
Faber & Faber, 2009

The set-up for Toews’ third novel is simple: Hattie, a woman fleeing a bad relationship in Paris returns to Canada to see her suicidal, institutionalised sister. The sister has two children, and desperate, to offer them hope, Hattie takes them on a road trip to find their estranged father.

That simple description gives no idea of how deeply funny and moving—as well as frequently alarming—this book is. It’s told mostly through the dialogue between the three characters in the car as they cross the border and roam the US, and it’s mostly in the dialogue that the humour of this book is found.

No a fifteen year old cannot live on his own, I said.
Pippi Longstocking wasn't even fifteen, said Thebes, and she -
Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.
And she was Swedish said Logan.
So there would have been a solid safety net of social programmes to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn't work here.

(Quoted text stolen from Dovegreyreader’s excellent blog, as my own copy of this book was loaned to a friend several months ago, and is yet to return (Are you reading, Trish?).)




Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
Library of America, 2008

Porter is one of those writers I was vaguely aware of, but had read nothing by. To be honest, I’m not sure why I suddenly decided to buy this 1100-page volume, except that it was on sale and I have no self-control. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad I did—it was a revelation. I have a particular fondness for short stories and novellas, and Porter must be up there with William Trevor and Alice Munro as one of the great English-language short story writers. This book (half of which is short fiction, half of which short non-fiction) is superb. Hell—the final story, ‘The Leaning Tower’, a 75-page story of pre-WWII Berlin, is reason enough alone to get this.





Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories
Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

Somehow, despite hugely enjoying those novels of Jackson’s which I have read, I’d never got this famous short story collection. Like the Porter book, though, this was a serious treat. First published in the 1950s, this collection demonstrates a range of mood and subject I really hadn’t expected: I knew Jackson could do creepy and mad and supernatural, but I had no idea she could do so much more. Having said that, though, the creepy and famous title story is one of the highlights.

Best Books of the Year Part 2 [Not About Covers]

(Following on from part one here)

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Ismail Kadare: Broken April
Vintage Classics, 2009

This book blew my mind. It's very well written, which helps, but the underlying idea is even more fascinating. The setting is Kadare’s native Albania, where the hill-dwelling people have this mad system of honour and code of behaviour called the 'Kanun'. The main character's family was visited 70 years ago by a stranger, who stayed the night. The next morning, as he's leaving the village, the stranger is shot dead. Because of the direction in which he fell, it's up to the host family to avenge his murder by killing the killer. Then it's up to that killer’s family to avenge his murder by killing someone from the host family. And then back and forth, until 70 years later some 44 people have been killed, and the main character, Georg, has just had to shoot someone dead. On top of that there's this system of 1-day and 30-day truces, and safe zones, and special rules, and taxes you have to pay when you kill someone. And it's all true.

And then a writer with romantic ideas about the Kanun stumbles into the midst of all this with his new wife while on their honeymoon. You can see where this might all go wrong for them.

(Originally written in 1978, this uncredited translation is actually from the Albanian, whereas several of Kadare’s other books in English are translations from French translations of the Albanian, the accuracy of which I’m a bit suspicious about, but which I have genuinely enjoyed.)

For a while afterwards, I was trying to work out which other writer Broken April reminded me of, and then I realised: it's like one of Ursula LeGuin's sociological-science-fiction novels, only with Albanians rather than aliens.



Bob Fingerman: From the Ashes
IDW, 2009 (as 6 comics, with collected book to come in 2010)

It’s no secret round these parts that I like a good fictional apocalypse. Artist and writer Fingerman is no different, and his comic in the form of a speculative memoir (along the lines of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America) sees a massive, world-shattering holocaust visited upon the world (and especially New York) in the last days of the Bush presidency.

The main characters are Fingerman and his wife, semi-everyman survivors who now have to contend with the collapse of society, radioactive mutants, demented self-appointed tyrants, religious fundamentalists and all of the other integral parts of the typical end-of-the-world story. You have to really know a genre to satirise it this thoroughly, and Fingerman really knows his stuff (as well as firing shots at a number of other well-deserved targets like Fox News demagogues and the like). It’s also, rather surprisingly, a rather sweet love letter to his wife.

Here are a couple of pages from the comic—click for bigger, readable versions.

 

Max Page: The City’s End
Yale University Press, 2008

Speaking of the destruction of New York, I was recommended this book by a commenter, and it’s great. In books, movies, comics, video games, artwork and even real life, New York has been visited with massive destruction again and again and again. Page takes a detailed, entertaining and thoughtful look at why New York is such a magnet for armageddon, and at the works of art (and pulp) which have rendered it in ruins. Tonnes of illustrations provide lots of nightmare fuel, too.








Hugo Wilcken: Colony
Harper Perennial, 2007

Way back in 2001, I read the debut novel by a young Australian writer, Hugo Wilcken. It was called The Execution, and it was wonderful: a sort of Graham Greene-ish literary thriller set in the world of Third World aid and human rights monitors. I had no idea, until I read John Self’s fine review, that Wilcken had produced a second book. And it’s a corker.

Camus-ish, Conrad-ish, and just plain excellent, Colony is set in a French South American penal colony in the 1920s, with the main characters being a war veteran-turned-criminal and a well-intentioned but too trusting official and his troubled wife.

Wilcken himself now lives in France, and it's interesting to look at the idea of prison colonies reflected here. After all, Wilcken is from Australia, a weird example of a dumping ground for criminals and political undesirables turning into a working, successful nation. Compare that to the prison in Colony, which is always on the knife-edge of vanishing back into the jungle.

Atmospheric, exciting and mysterious, Colony was well worth the six-year wait.





Carl Wilson: Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
Continuum, 2008

I’ve briefly mentioned Continuum’s 33 1/3 series before: each book is a short but in-depth analysis of a particular album. Most (including Hugo Wilcken’s look at Bowie’s Low) are reasonably straightforward narratives, well-researched and well-written, about the musicians and their experiences in making the recording, as well as the reaction to the music. But occasionally a writer goes out on a tangent, writing a novel or short stories inspired by the music. And then there’s this.

Wilson, like all right-thinking people, had nothing but disdain and contempt for Celine Dion, her albums, and her Titanic theme song. But he set out to immerse himself in the world of Celine Dion and her fans for a year, using this as a launching pad for a funny, thoughtful and perceptive analysis of taste, aesthetics, culture and mass popularity. It even manages to make Dion (though not her music) seem rather appealing, which is something I find it quite hard to admit.

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More to come next week…

Best Books of the Year Part 1 [Not About Covers]

I'm going to continue to talk about covers and book design here, but over the month of December I'm also going to do a series of extra posts about the books I most enjoyed this year. There's no particular reason why anyone should care about these besides me, so feel free to skip them, but my hope is that some lesser-known but frankly excellent things will become a little better known if I bang on about them here. I should also note that many of these weren't even published in 2009--I just happened to read them this year--so this is going to be a bit of an eclectic mishmash. Anyway, here we go...

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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: Memories of the Future
NYRB, 2009

The seven strange, surreal and fantastic stories collected here were written in the 1920s, but given that Krzhizhanovsky was living in the Soviet Union, and given to a darkly satirical view of life, he wisely kept them hidden. Not published until decades after his death in 1950, they’re now available in English in Joanne Turnbull’s fine translation.

And they are some seriously peculiar and wonderful stories: the Eiffel Tower achieves self-awareness after having radio transmitters installed in its summit, goes on a rampage, and then commits suicide; humanity’s collective subconscious plots a revolution against the waking world; an apartment grows bigger and bigger, though apparently unchanged on the outside, dwarfing the increasingly paranoid occupant.

The highlight is the nearly 100-page title story, in which a man with a unique view of time and human perception tries to build a working time machine, while the forces of Russian history work to frustrate him. And then he succeeds, and visits the Soviet future, which is not represented in a way Stalin would have appreciated.



Martine McDonagh: I Have Waited, and You Have Come
Myriad Editions, 2006

Science fiction is often the characters who turn out to be the most important people in the story’s imagined world: they create the world-shattering invention, or lead the fight against some strange oppressor, or discover the truth behind the warped reality, or encounter the weird other, or are the rare survivors of some cataclysm who must build the world anew. But some science-fiction books (usually the ones frantically marketed as not being SF by their publishers) create a world, but then look at some ordinary lives being lived there (see Ken Kesey’s vastly underrated Sailor Song, or Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!).

McDonagh’s first novel is set in the middle of this century, in a global-warming-devastated Britain. Her heroine lives alone on the fringes of a small community in the Midlands, with much of the land around her flooded out and depopulated. But it’s not a John Wyndham-style tale of being a survivor, or at least not most significantly. Instead, it’s a story of sexual obsession and broken trust, with the sodden (and wonderfully rendered) landscape a constant, literally atmospheric presence.



Gyula Krúdy: Adventures of Sindbad
Central European University Press, 1998

In the unlikely event that somebody puts a gun to my head and tells me that I can only read the work of writers who flourished under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I could probably live with that. There are so many who are so great, and they produced an extraordinary collection of brilliant novels and plays and stories and poems, birthed in the massively complex multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual humanistic pan-European society that was destroyed by the First World War.

One of Hungary’s greatest writers, Krúdy published this novel of short stories in 1911, shortly before everything went to hell, and it was translated into English by George Szirtes in 1998. It’s a strange and beautiful book about an aristocratic Hungarian going by the name of Sindbad, who’s either unmoored in time or else hundreds of years old, pursuing both women and Woman, all rendered in some deeply lush, dreamy prose.





William Hazlitt: Liber Amoris (The Book of Love)
The Hogarth Press, 1985 / Bookkake, 2008

Hazlitt was one of the great essayists of two centuries ago, and his reviews and articles are vivid and powerful today. This odd little book, published pseudonymously in 1823 (and available free here) , was an attempt to record, explain and exorcise a romantic/erotic obsession that almost destroyed him. In the midst of getting divorce, Hazlitt fell disastrously in love with his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Walker, on the basis of a little flirting, and was unable to accept that she wasn’t interested in him.

He collected together his letters to her, and to other friends, some of her notes to him, records of their conversations and arguments, and notes about his own feelings and behaviour. The result is a vivid and compelling portrayal of a ridiculous but unstoppable infatuation, presented with a weird mix of clarity and monomania. It also almost ruined his reputation.



Justin Evans: A Good and Happy Child
Three Rivers, 2008

I first mentioned this back here, as a book I was drawn to because of the cover. I’m glad I was, because it’s excellent: a deeply creepy look at madness, loneliness and demonic possession. A troubled man in a troubled marriage looks back at his unhappy childhood, when he made a special Friend. To say much more risks ruining the plot, but it’s very well done, and wears a lot of esoteric and fascinating research very lightly.

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More to come...