Cameron's Book Reviews: 2022, thus far
(the sequel to Vurt, reviewed here.)
A sprawling, hallucinatory novel about a half-ghost police officer searching for her amnesiac daughter who is a runaway cabbie investigating the murder of her half-dog paramour, who was also a cabbie, albeit an unlicensed criminal who would risk picking up zombies outside Manchester. If that sentence made any amount of sense to you, then congratulations, you’re more well-prepared to deal with this book than I was.
It’s honestly a wild ride, less coherent and more mythic than Vurt, and putting on display all of Noon’s various techniques of “Dub Fiction”. Highly recommended — though one should be forewarned: this is a deeply, uncomfortably horny book, and while I’m generally in favor of that, Noon goes a bit far and tends to bring in elements that are designed to be uncomfortable and boundary-pushing. If you have a weak stomach or a vivid imagination, maybe think through whether this is the book for you or not.
Rabbits by Terry Miles
I wanted to like this one. I’m a big fan of Miles’s podcast work, and it saddens me that he’s finding literary success now instead of earlier, when he was less attached to the podcast Rabbits and more to the podcast TANIS. As a concept, Rabbits doesn’t interest me quite as much – it’s been described as “Stranger Things meets Ready Player One” and this is a Ready Player One disrespecting zone.
The book itself is fairly competently written – Miles has a gift for a surreal conspiracy – but it leans too heavily on the all-concealing “I”: the protagonist is meant to be a woman, as all the narrators of the Rabbits podcast have been, but it’s never really remarked upon and the voice felt distinctly masculine to me. Please note: this isn’t a male reviewer saying that a male writer should have described a female protagonist more, this is me saying that it felt too much like Miles’s own voice.
Still I’ve read worse books, and I want Miles to do more, simply outside of Rabbits: as such, I see no contradiction in recommending it.
Ararat by Christopher Golden
This is the worse book. They find Noah’s ark but it’s got a demon inside it. Sort of a low-rent BPRD. Not recommended. Read Mike Mignola comics instead.
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
(Reviewed by Edgar here.)
I needed a palette cleanser after that last one: Edgar and I managed to find a copy of T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones shortly before we had to quarantine for Covid exposure and we both read it. It’s a fix-up of “The White People” by Arthur Machen, concerning a young woman going to North Carolina to clean out her grandmother’s old house. In the process, she encounters a strange, ancient phenomenon – entities that have lived in the Appalachians since before North America and Europe split.
There’s a great deal of the cosmic and strange to go around in here, but what I love more than anything is the matter-of-fact treatment of everyday life for an adrift millennial adult. Kingfisher’s protagonists are allowed to not have their shit together in a way that feels almost taboo: they work freelance jobs, they struggle to get funds together, they suffer injuries that younger people simply don’t. Some reviewers complain about the adolescent quality of the viewpoint characters here and in her not-actually-related-but-similarly-written The Hollow Places, but this stunted, unable to grow up quality and precarious existence is what makes them feel relatable to me.
I haven’t read any of Kingfisher’s other books (she primarily writes under the name Ursula Vernon) but I’m going to pick each and every one of these weird-fiction-fix-ups she releases up and, read it with intense enjoyment.
The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class by Cynthia Cruz
The Melancholia of Class is a book that I saw a number of people talking about near the end of last summer. I read a portion of it as an ebook around then, but decided that I would prefer to have it as a physical book, and so put a pin in it. I managed to get a copy of it near the end of last year in the Repeater Books sale. It’s an interesting read, made up of, roughly, one part theory, two parts memoir, three parts media criticism. At points it is incisive and original, at others it is fairly orthodox in its read of things.
I must say, though, that I do not feel – in the terms of the book – that I’m really qualified to comment upon the central concept of the book, which is about the nature of working class identities and how they express themselves. The author details her background in the introduction, and her journey from a working class origin to academic achievement and her life now as a writer and an (adjunct, like myself) academic. In my recollection, (and I read this back in January: my memory might not be as good as I was hoping) the way that she expresses class positions takes on a somewhat essentialist tone at points: working class origins aren’t escapable – she looks at a number of artists who made the attempt and mutilated themselves in the process – and working class identities aren’t understandable to those outside of them.
By the logic of the book, I cannot understand its subject: I was born middle class, and I work in higher education. By the essentialist read of things, even when I was delivering pizzas and struggling to make rent I was middle class, because that was my socialization. I would argue this point, personally: it seems to me that class position, while not something that is always easily changed in one direction and which leads to a sense of dislocation when one moves in that way, the nature of our society means that people are constantly being shuffled downward on the class hierarchy, and while there may be a difference of childhood socialization that doesn’t make one individual or the other more or less one class or the other. Perhaps this is one of those situations where we habitually use one word to mean two or more things.
A number of the things that Cruz discusses – the cultural invisibility of the working class, the relative sterility of the middle class, and so on – are important topics to discuss, and the art of working class creatives needs to be celebrated, but what I read as essentialization left me somewhat cold.
No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull
Reviewed previously by Edgar here.
A contemporary fantasy novel largely informed by the Black Lives Matter protests and the spread of “neo-anarchist” tactics through the whole of various protest movements. Turnbull marries radical politics and cosmological strangeness in a satisfying and mutually-reinforcing way. It’s supposedly the first of a series of books, but the latter ones haven’t come out yet. I may or may not follow them (I wasn’t really feeling series at the moment, and that’s kind of sticking with me,) but I did enjoy it quite a bit.
There’s a bit of humor — and a predictive quality of the text — insofar as, once the existence of “monsters” is revealed, the vast majority of people begin to immediately doubt their existence. It feels almost prescient at this stage in the coronavirus. As such, I must — at the very least — acknowledge Turnbull as a fantastic observer of human behavior. However, I think that, for the most part, I’ll let Edgar’s review do the talking.
The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya
A collection of somewhat surreal short stories from a Japanese author. I’ve been a big fan of Haruki Murakami for a while, and also enjoy anime every now and then, but I wanted to get a feel for Japanese literature – at least, the slice of it parallel to the anglophone literature I enjoy.
Motoya’s short story collection was free on audible, and I haven’t made myself stop paying for that yet, so I picked it up. While her longer stories are quite good, I found myself really drawn to the short stories featured in it: I feel that she has a real gift for tightly constrained narratives. My favorite of the lot was “Paprika Jiro” – told from the perspective of a background character in an action movie, for whom the events of such films come as regularly as bad weather, and are just as unwelcome – and “How to Burden the Girl” – which packs a number of anime tropes into a short fiction story that takes a decidedly gritty and un-spectacular turn later on.
The longer stories – such as “An Exotic Marriage” – left me a bit colder, but none of them struck me as bad near the end of the individual story.
I would say that it is worth reading, though there are other books – including at least one other Japanese book – in this list that are perhaps more worth one’s attention.
The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune
Reviewed previously by Edgar here.
A book that is describable as fundamentally cute and sweet. It’s far from insightful theory or heavy narratives about weighty matters, but occasionally you need that. Given what I read this time around and what I talked about in my prior reviews, it was a nice break.
That being said, it’s not pure cotton candy reading — there are certain things in it that are quite well-handled and done in a very measured, well-thought-out way: for example, there’s a slow-burn gay romance that I feel is not simply well-done, but also age appropriate for the intended readers. Likewise, I thought that the discussion of trauma in the story — it is about an orphanage for magical children, there is going to be trauma involved — was also well-handled and managed not to overshadow the other portions of the narrative.
I would say that I second Edgar’s review, and think that if you can find a copy it’s a nice bit of relaxation.
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
A joyous, pulpy read (those of you who have listened to our podcast will understand why this appealed to me) about a group of insurgents fighting against demon-possessed klansmen. I haven’t read any of Clark’s work (Edgar has, reviewed last year here), but I’m definitely going to be looking for more. In all honesty, I wish it were longer than novella length: I would be more than happy to read about Maryse and her comrades fighting against demons for a lot longer.
The way that Clark incorporates both novel interpretations of things (the demonic shape of the Ku Kluxes, the various monsters in their hierarchy) as well as older folkloric entities (the Night Doctors, the Gullah Ring Shout itself) is fascinating, and it’s quite interesting to watch Clark work with his source material and weave it into his own invention. I think that this is an example of masterful talent and that other fantasists should pay close attention to his work.
The work is extremely strong, and manages to be pulpy and earnest at the same time – in my opinion, a lot of things that aim for pulp tend to forget that they can do that without a thick veneer of irony. While it’s been optioned by Skydance Media for a television series, I’m honestly more interested in seeing more of it in print and audiobook (I mean, sure I’ll watch an adaptation, but I want more of it, rather than more of the same).
Death Sentences by Kawamata Chiaki (name placed here in the Japanese Order. Not available from Bookshop.)
A Japanese novel in translation (the translators are Thomas Lamarre and Kazuko Y. Behrens) that reads something like a lost Phillip K. Dick novel. Traces the history of a cycle of psychoactive poems from their origin as the work of a Franco-Vietnamese writer named Who May (a play on “fumei”, pronounced with a breathy “f”, the Japanese word for “anonymous”) through the deaths of several prominent surrealists – André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud – caused by the mysterious effect of the final poem, “The Gold of Time.” After that, they are translated into Japanese, and become the subject of a prohibition like dangerous narcotics, and eventually become a plague upon humanity.
I took this book slowly, reading a chapter of two every night, and it held my attention throughout. Apparently, Kawamata’s prose in Japanese is explosive and swift, making heavy use of free indirect speech to blur the line between first and third person. While the latter is definitely true, it was enjoyable read at a slow pace, and I strongly recommend this book.
A Book of Surrealist Games by Mel Gooding
After the last book – as well as reading The Last Days of New Paris in 2020 – I thought I would study up a bit more on Surrealism. This book was a wedding gift Edgar and I received in late 2017, and I finally got around to it. I should have done so much sooner, as it took me barely an hour to get through. It’s largely a book of techniques used by the surrealists to generate new and interesting perspectives.
Alongside the descriptions of how the games are played are textual examples of the results from rounds played by Breton et al., showing the results (and also the perversions and preoccupations of the earlier surrealists. Clocks and breasts are mentioned and discussed quite often.
Due to the ongoing public health crisis, I haven’t had a chance to use any of them, but as soon as it’s over I intend to become absolutely insufferable at parties.
Libidinal Economy by Jean-Francois Lyotard
Edgar and I read the evil book aloud: as I cooked meals for several months, they sat on a stool in the door of the kitchen reading it aloud, front to back. This method most likely gave us both a different perspective, but the two of us would break at the end of each section and talk through what we thought it meant. Most likely we should have kept notes, but the discussions themselves were productive and enlightening.
As for Lyotard’s book, itself, I feel that it had the unusual quality of being absolutely opaque as a whole, while each individual part felt reasonably clear. How is sex like speech like commerce? How are all three derived from the actions of the pulsions – the death drive and pleasure principle? What sorts of labyrinths do we build up around ourselves as traps?
One thing is clear to me from all of this, though: those who read Lyotard as turning away from Marxism may be correct – but if they read him as turning towards capitalism, I think they may have read a different book than we did. In my read, Lyotard was not describing what ought to be, but rather what is. The issue of what one ought do, tackled in the final section, is very much a leftist project: insert yourself into the system and destroy it from within:
What would be interesting would be to stay put, but quietly seize every chance to function as good intensity-conducting bodies. No need for declarations, manifestos, organizations, provocations, no need for exemplary actions. Set dissimulation to work on behalf of intensities. Invulnerable conspiracy, headless, homeless, with neither programme nor project, deploying a thousand cancerous tensors in the bodies of signs. We invent nothing, that's it, yes, yes, yes, yes.
This is not acquiescence. This is a call for leaderless resistance.
The fact that it is found in a text that many think of as calling for us to be “reasonable” and “adult” and to take part in capital means either (a) those people didn’t actually read it, or (b) capital is subject to a death drive and wishes for its own destruction.
This seems like the most appropriate way to follow up Lyotard, honestly.
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