Summary: Last week there were three books: The Damned Don't Die, by Jim Nisbet, Dark Companions, by Ramsey Campbell, and Leviathan, by Paul Auster. Short reviews of those and future reading plans...
BLOT: (07 Nov 2011 - 07:43:48 PM)
My Week in Books [October 31 through November 6, 2011]. The Damned Don't Die, Dark Companions, and Leviathan...
The Damned Don't Die. Jim Nisbet.
Unexpected read of the week: Jim Nisbet's The Damned Don't Die. Saw it in an Overlook Press blog entry pimping out some of their darker stuff. Blurbed as being a brutal crime that disrupts surburban tranquility, which is false: it is much more a BDSM-laced maybe murder mystery set in a backdrop of the bored rich and scarred detectives. Purposefully mocks rules of the game—and sometimes hangs a lampshade on its joyous mockery—by cutting out important moments (what's up with the stitches?) and expanding the wrong ones, and more often than not does it in an interesting way, though fails hard, in particular, at one scene with the main character breaking into a house. Likewise, slogs down at a few vital junctions with its tone unsure between utterly hardboiled and at the point of cracking to, well, cracking a few jokes or focusing on some marginalized sort—gay man, person into cross dress or kink, prostitute, horror writer—with a mix of both humanity and something like loathing. Overlook edition had some typos in obvious spots—including one where they whoopsed and seem to have mixed up "guiltless" and "guilty", which is a big one in detective fiction—and so a few other broken sentences could be Nisbet pushing a quirk or another slip of the movable type. No clue. Feels like book three or four in a multi-book series (according to Overlook, this is Nisbet's first book though some mild Googling suggests there are others with the same main character) and often makes you want to dig deeper. To those liking a very fast read with a bit of sex and death and bravado, worth reading and pretty cheap since new copies are going for a penny on Amazon's Marketplace.
BUY, BORROW, or SKIP? Probably a borrow, possibly a skip.
Dark Companions. Ramsey Campbell.
Ramsey Campbell has, if you squeezed them into the broadest categories, three basic modes of stories to his name: the cosmic/Lovecraftian horror, the slow-and-creeping horror (aka The Horror from Beneath), and the darkly comic generally serial-killer themed horror. While a lot of his most purely uncomfortable stories fit into the last of those three, my favorite tends to be the middle. Dark Companions, a short story collection that showed up in the early 80s and collected what he identifies as his "anti-Lovecraft stories"—instead picking up something of an Aickmanesque story blended with drippy, wet, organic but not gory horror—this is probably the key collection of the middle style (at least the key collection out of those I've read so far). If you read and liked the more recent The Overnight and Creatures of the Pool—with Midnight Sun being related and often treated as one of the best of them—then this one is full of shorter, and generally punchier, stories in the same vein. If you disliked them, try the variation on the theme found here, because the long drift with indefinite conclusion (ending in a fog) there has yet to fully develop.
Most of the main characters are slightly broken, fairly stressed office drones or teachers or artist types who start experiencing glimpses out the corner of their sight, hear sounds they dismiss, and generally deal with a failure of interpersonal relations as slimy, bulbous things drip on rain soaked windows. Lot of the horrors are tangential and not fully described, though Campbell does generally give a clear if not always fully-wrapped ending ("Napier's Court" being an example of an ending in the fog and plus some). Includes some short stories in a "EC Comcis" style that are fun to read, alongside those like "The Pattern", "The Chimney", and "The Companion", which tend to be regarded as some of his best. "The Companion" was highlighted by Stephen King as being one of the best short stories in the horror field, and I guarantee if you read it, you will find this a laughable claim up until the final paragraph, which is one of the best I have ever read.
BUY, BORROW, or SKIP? Buy. The best way to read this one is a bit at a time. Several of the stories are worth a second read even once you know where it is going.
Leviathan. Paul Auster.
Started "reading" Paul Auster's Leviathan via an Audible Audiobook, but once I realized, about four hours in, that it was a nearly 10 hour audio for a 250 page book I decided that I'd rather hit the codex. It took me less than a couple of more hours to finish it out that way. I liked it, but also didn't. I got where it was going. I liked the use of conflicting narrations, many passed off as truthful to a degree, to explore the idea that real humans are complex and irreducible. Unfortunately, the joyous creation and technique is kind of wasted on a middling tale which is mostly about meeting someone, finding them confusing, and then having sex with them. Interesting opening concept with hints of mystery that will not be answered until about 1/2-2/3s the way through, so beware. With some uneven dialogue and questionable pacing in sections [likely on purpose], felt ultimately like a failure of its own ideal.
BUY, BORROW, or SKIP? Could be worth a reread once you have the whole picture, but right now feeling its a borrow. Its best tricks are already in the New York Trilogy, and Auster has managed to grasp characters better elsewhere.
Next Week's Planned Reads
Planning to change focus slightly so that I finish one book at a time instead of thumbing through about four at once. In this light, I am going to first work on Robert Aickman's Powers of Darkness (four stories to go), and then Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (about 1/3 done). After this, I have a couple of shorter novels in mind to get through. I've made this claim before but I'm going to make it again, after doing Dark Companions and then Powers of Darkness, on top of the many, many other short stories I have read this year: I think I'm going to hold off on reading short story collections for a few months. It takes a different sort of focus and I've done that so much that in general my wider reading focus has been disjointed. Of course, I'll probably break it sooner than later but there you go.
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: November 2011
