I think I let this get too long. Blame the summer heat for making me lazy and stupid. Links go to bookshop, as usual.

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The King In Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers.

A classic of weird fiction, though definitely showing its age. The King in Yellow is not a novel, but a collection of short fiction pieces, only the first few of which really qualify as “weird fiction” – the back half is arguably connected, though is generally much more realistic in timbre.

I generally like Chambers? He precedes Lovecraft, and is far less racist, though there is a bit of a trade-off: this is sort of a transitional form between the French Decadents and American Weird Fiction, and so some of the horror doesn’t quite hit right. While more readable and lacking the vitriol, the imagination on display has much less raw material to work from than later weird fiction writers. As a result, it’s simultaneously less derivative and less fleshed out – the “you have to believe me, this play was evil” element doesn’t work to quite the same degree.

That being said, the back half drags, and honestly I’m beginning to think that Chambers was a fairly ordinary writer that had a couple flashes of genius, instead of a real master.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo, by P. Djèlí Clark.

Reviewed alongside “The Haunting of Tram Car 015” later.

The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files #3), by Charles Stross.

I read a lot of these books. See the final entry of this round-up.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djèlí Clark.

Clark’s Djinn series of novellas are quite good – I honestly think that he’s one of the better fantasists working these days, and he has a slight advantage over other great fantasists in that his oeuvre is dominated by novellas, which are eminently readable and exceptionally quick. It allows him to rapidly work through ideas and build them up for potential exploration in longer novels, like The Master of Djinn, which I reviewed previously.

The downside of this, though, is that you want longer works: you want to see the world he’s describing really flex and breathe and stretch, and it’s just not quite as available. Frankly, I feel that the plot of A Dead Djinn in Cairo could have been expanded out to the same extent as A Master of Djinn, and it suffered under the constraints that it was given. That being said The Haunting of Tram Car 015 was a much more contained plot: it felt like an episode in an exceptionally imaginative police procedural, and while I’m somewhat tired of every skillful piece of fiction (seemingly) being about cops and bureaucrats to one extent or another, Clark handles it very well, and his other works – especially Ring Shout and Black God’s Drums – convince me he’s able to do other work, which means that I can deal with a bit of police procedural.

The End of Policing, by Alex S. Vitale.

A police-abolitionist text written in 2017, and which I read over the Fourth of July weekend. The End of Policing is a solid text that examines the problems of policing from a variety of angles, and makes a case for alternatives that could be implemented. In addition to being a compelling read, it’s a solid reference with a very extensive notes section that should be referenced often during discussions of policing.

The best description of the author’s position is put on the cover of the book, saying quite simply and clearly that:

The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself.

Highly recommended.

After Dark, by Haruki Murakami.

One of Murakami’s lesser novels, though one that has some interesting qualities. The critic Matthew Carl Stretcher, whose book on Murakami will be the first entry in my next book round up, noted that it came after Murakami’s turn from an individualist perspective to a more socially-minded one, and I can certainly see that.

The action of the novel takes place between midnight and dawn in a single district of Tokyo – the trains have stopped running, and everyone in the district is there for the night, due to the difficulty of traveling long distances in a city that’s big enough that it could stretch from Britain’s east coast into Wales. It starts with college student Mari Asai smoking and reading novels in a Denny’s, wanting to spend time away from her family home where her older sister, Eri – whom Mari notes is the “pretty one” between the two of them, – has been sleeping for months, and who the narrative makes clear is being victimized by some kind of supernatural force.

Over the course of the night, she runs into a trombone player who dated her sister once, Takahashi Tetsuya, and she periodically re-encounters him throughout the night – the two of them strike up a friendship that borders on flirtation through the course of the novel – but most of the novel is taken up by vignettes of one kind or another, with Mari serving as occasional viewpoint character and her conversations with Takahashi being a sort of repeating motif, meditating on the importance or unimportance of fitting in – nonconformity being a strongly discouraged trait in traditional Japanese culture – and responsibility to others.

Throughout the novel, we encounter Kaoru, a retired female wrestler who manages a love hotel named after the Jean-Luc Goddard movie Alphaville; Guo Dongh, a Chinese prostitute brought over illegally by an organized crime syndicate; Shirakawa, an office worker who viciously attacks Guo Dongh in the course of buying her services, and who is suggested to be an avatar of the supernatural force victimizing Mari’s sister.

It doesn’t reach the same heights as the Rat trilogy (actually four volumes: Hear the Wind Sing; Pinball, 1973; A Wild Sheep Chase; and Dance Dance Dance), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, or 1Q84, which seem to be considered the “canonical” Murakami works. It’s more similar to books like Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and South of the Border, West of the Sun that occupy a somewhat lesser – deuterocanonical? – status. All this being said, the book is an interesting exercise in ethics-focused fiction that doesn’t sink to the level of being didactic. The book doesn’t have a “moral,” but it does invite contemplation, which is much more valuable.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin.

(Reviewed by Edgar here)

There wasn’t much here that I didn’t know from listening to It Could Happen Here, or Robert Evans’s work on fascists, or the podcast I Don’t Speak German, or from the book Dark Star Rising by Gary Lachman. I will say that Lavin brings with her a Jewish woman’s perspective, which is absent from the other sources I’ve mentioned. Her hatred of the subjects of her book make complete sense, and I want to stress that before I get into my next point: her handling made me feel, paradoxically, sympathy for one or two of the people that she profiles.

Put down the torches and pitchforks, I’m not saying that we should be nice to fascists or that Jewish people should be kinder to antisemites – I strongly believe that we should not. No, I’m bringing this up because it feels to me to be a flaw in Lavin’s handling of the people that she profiles, and that it might serve as a point against recommending it. It’s not even a point against Lavin as a writer: I’ve generally enjoyed her other works that I’ve encountered.

However, it does seem to me that glorifying in the suffering of those that want to do you harm is a dodgy proposition when writing for a potentially neutral audience. You have to really detail the fact that they want to do you harm, even if you and your reader know this is the case, because if it slips out of focus then things become less clear cut. This isn’t a failure of research, or a failure of objectivity, but something I might describe as a hiccup in the rhetoric of the book, a difficulty triangulating its intended audience.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

A difficult book that’s easy to read, and the first Butler I read. I should have cracked her catalog open much earlier, I freely admit. There isn’t much praise I can heap on it that would be undeserved or new, so I will simply add this: I agree with the consensus. This is a very good book, and a very quick read that you will not regret picking up.

It concerns a young woman, living in a walled community in the mid-2020s (please note, this was written in 1993), in southern California. Though they are walled off, this community is not rich: they live on the edge of starvation and depredation every day, but they have a wall and they can grow some of their own food. This is what passes for Middle Class in the world of Parable of the Sower. The viewpoint character, Lauren Olamina, suffers from a strange disability caused by her mother having taken experimental medicine before she was born: she suffers from debilitating levels of empathy. This does not mean she is a nice person, it means that she can be disabled by seeing someone else in pain, which paradoxically leads her to be quite vicious at times: after all, a dead person feels no pain.

Olamina is an unlikely messiah, but one neatly tailored to the world she finds herself in – a world that looks distressingly like our own.

Appleseed, by Matt Bell.

(Previously reviewed by Edgar here.)

Appleseed is a difficult book, and one I read at Edgar’s insistence, because they wanted a second opinion on it. So let me be frank: I really liked this book, though that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This seems to me the equivalent of what happens when an indie auteur attempts to make a blockbuster movie – a hopeful monster that can’t quite be said to have failed, but the thing it’s trying to do is a little unclear.

So the book concerns three strings of events: the far future, the near future, and the colonial past. Except there’s also the deep, mythic past that all of the events reference back to, and which is only really revealed at the halfway point (I was almost tempted to turn back the clock and restart at that point, though I decided against it eventually). All of the other narratives – the story of Johnny Appleseed (who was a historical person, but who Bell recasts as a faun), the story of John, the ecoterrorist, and the story of C-433, the icewrecked survivor of an attempt to restart life on Earth.

I think that my read on this book was heavily influenced by approaching it right after finishing The Parable of the Sower, as Eury – the villain of the second part and the central character’s estranged wife – is the central character of Butler’s book – Lauren Olamina – played as a capitalist villain. Both have a similar ideological flexibility and willingness to take drastic steps to do what must be done (shades of the Broken Earth Trilogy here, whose civilization codified this as part of its equivalent to the ten commandments: “Necessity is the Only Law”).

The book is technically quite good, the characters who get the spotlight are well-drawn, and the plot is excellent and engaging up until about the 80% mark. At that point, John, in the near-future plot line, takes an action that doesn’t make any sense to me, that runs counter to his stated goals, and dooms the world, producing the icy death-ball that his far-future clone, C-433, lives on.

It reads as if Bell painted himself into a corner and decided to just finish anyway instead of planning a different way out. Perhaps the book bears rereading, but that seemed to be the major problem with the book.

The Quantum Thief (Jean le Flambeur #1), by Hannu Rajaniemi.

This book and its immediate sequel, The Fractal Prince, will be reviewed once I have completed the third book in the trilogy, The Causal Angel.

The author fed his copy to mushrooms and then ate them.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake.

Things must have been weird in the Sheldrake Household, because I first learned about Merlin Sheldrake’s brother the jazz musician, who is named Cosmo from an album made up principally of bird sounds, and I’ve not been surprised about anything to do with this family since then. This includes their father’s fascination with and advocacy of panpsychism or their family friendship with Terence McKenna.

Entangled Life is not just a book about mushrooms, it is about a particular mindset inspired by mycology, examining world through the lens of a type of life we often ignore. However, Sheldrake makes a convincing argument that they have shaped much of our world – indeed, large scale plant cultivation is impossible without fungi, and their use in fermentation is one of the first discoveries that we made as a species – and that they can shape much more of it – certain species of fungus can happily pull heavy metals from the soil and break down plastics.

But again, the book isn’t just about these practical innovations, it’s about adopting a different mindset – not purely through the exercise of psychotropic drugs, though a bit of attention is given to that – that is characterized by taking a position of empathy towards living things we often ignore, thinking through the world from their often blind and deaf perspective, and understanding that we live in a stranger and richer universe than we originally imagined.

Highly recommended.

The Fractal Prince (Jean le Flambeur #2), by Hannu Rajaniemi.

This book and its immediate predecessor, The Quantum Thief, will be reviewed once I have completed the third book in the trilogy, The Causal Angel.

Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

Peter Watts is an interesting guy, and not just because Customs and Border Protection bar him from entering the country and he has a long series on his blog documenting the course of his now (as far as I’m aware) treated case of flesh eating bacteria.

He’s also the one person to pull off what might be called “Hard Cosmic Horror” – a hybrid of Hard Science Fiction, which attempts to remain as faithful to the science of its day as possible, and Cosmic Horror, the genre popularized by H.P. Lovecraft and progressively made more readable and less racist as time goes on. He does so in Blindsight, which is a first contact novel that describes a contact that goes as poorly as possible, and also manages to suggest some disturbing and believable things about human nature.

It is, when you get down to it, a horror novel about empathy.

I will say no more. It’s available for free online through a creative commons license, but you can also get a hard copy past the link above.

Dreams of Shreds and Tatters, by Amanda Downum.

I guess summer was just the season of Carcosa for me. I consumed a bunch of media relating to it (and, as of writing this, I’m finishing up the book that’s one of the last entries on this list, which is another Carcosa book). This one began very strongly, being about a young woman going with her boyfriend to investigate the conditions by which one of her best friends fell into a coma and his own partner died.

However, there’s a fine line between horror and urban fantasy, marked by the point where the monsters or adepts of secret knowledge become so numerous that politics begins to be a factor. Downum slipped over that line in the character of the gallery owner and his partner/assistant, who are plugged into the occult underground of Vancouver.

Later on in the book, multiple supernatural agencies are present, and they are all jostling for power and control over one another, and some are helpful and some are not. I feel that this lessens the horror present to the text and, frankly, it pushed me out of it – on a line by line level, the book is good, but the plot goes someplace I couldn’t follow.

John Dies at the End, by Jason Pargin (formerly AKA David Wong)

A story I read on the internet a long time ago, under the author’s original pseudonym, David Wong, which he used when he wrote on Cracked.com, back when it was good. This novel began as a series of Halloween pieces, and Pargin has a good handle on how horror works, though he is a humorist before anything else.

The story concerns two losers in a dying rural community, John and David (Todd does not exist), who are caught up in an apocalyptic series of events involving a fake Jamaican, an undying Golden Retriever, a hallucinogen that wrenches your mind out of the normal flow of time, and demons in the form of a flying swarm of worms that burrow into people’s skin.

I enjoy the book, though I imagine that Pargin’s more recent works are potentially more sophisticated – that being said, Pargin has long had a gift for a turn of phrase, and I remember one in particular:

“I am an old Catholic and I do believe in Hell. I believe it ain’t just rapists and murderers down there, I believe its demons and worms and vile things that wouldn’t make no sense to you if you saw them. It’s the grease trap of the universe. And the more I think of it, the more I think it’s not some place ‘down there’ at all, that it’s here, all around us. We just don’t perceive it. Just like how the country music radio station is out there, in the air, even if you ain’t tuned to it.”

There is a film version by Don Coscarelli, which cut out the middle third of the novel for expediency’s sake, which I think was the wrong move: if it had cut out the final third, instead, it would have been more complete. Read the book, instead of watching the film, and watch Bubba Ho-Tep to get the true joy of a Coscarelli film. He also did Phantasm, but I’ve got my favorites. If you have yours, feel free to post your own review.

The Apocalypse Codex, (Laundry Files #4) by Charles Stross

See the final entry of this round-up.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, by Franklin Foer

The Accelerationist position is, fundamentally, that democratic modernity and industrial (and specifically informational) capitalism are incompatible. Right Accelerationism rejects the former, Left Accelerationism rejects the latter. Foer isn’t properly an accelerationist, but he does articulate fairly well that they have collided and that the results are not good for society.

He does a good job of bringing in information, detailing the California Ideology and the various players in the general drama he describes – not just Zuckerberg and Bezos, but also looking at people like Edward Bernays and Steward Brand, background characters that set the table before the oligarchs ate the world.

It’s a very personal book – Foer’s tenure at The New Republic was cut short by a cofounder of Facebook, who bought the magazine and ran it as a tech company – and that’s actually its weakness: it spends more time on Foer’s own experience than on attempting to address the question of what we can do, or examining the systemic underpinnings of the things that actually generated Foer’s experience. As a result, it feels a bit constrained.

As a result, I’d recommend it as background reading to someone who had really enjoyed How to Do Nothing or Work Won’t Love You Back, but on its own it doesn’t quite pull its weight.

The Fellowship of the Ring, (Lord of the Rings #1) by J.R.R. Tolkien

I’m going to be reading the other two. Look at my next book round up to see my thoughts on Lord of the Rings.

The Heroes (First Law #5) by Joe Abercrombie

Oh, it’s been a while since I read a Joe Abercrombie, and frankly I shouldn’t have spent so long away. You don’t necessarily need to read the preceding books – The First Law trilogy or Best Served Cold – to get The Heroes, but it might help.

This book details one battle, taking place over the course of three days, in a war between two armies. On the one side is the “civilized” Union, and on the other the “barbaric” Northerners. Neither side is “good” and neither side is “evil,” but there are individual – often flawed – people that the story follows, some of whom have appeared previously, but mostly new characters.

The book is an extended meditation on the ethics of violence, what constitutes a hero, and whether warfare makes any amount of sense to begin with (Abercrombie doesn’t come out and say “no,” but he does make it clear that he views it as an awful business and we’d all be better just keeping our heads down and staying out of the violent bits).

This is all well-served by the fact that no one can do a motif like Abercrombie. He’s not subtle, but nor is it wedged in or heavy handed. Everything feels perfectly natural and sensible and tied together – which feels like a skill on par with Tolkien (un-reviewed, immediately above), but with the added bonus that Abercrombie can write scenes of violence in a way that Tolkien can’t.

It may seem strange to have a book with well-written scenes of violence that says the violence is bad (“do not do this cool thing!” is a real problem), but Abercrombie gets around this with how he writes the scenes of violence – he’ll pick a new viewpoint character to start the battle, and will rapidly shift perspective, jumping from one viewpoint character to another as the old viewpoint character is unceremoniously killed off. This gives a kinetic and holistic view of the violence without glorifying it: you stay with each character, generally on different sides, just long enough to develop a measure of sympathy for them, and then they’re killed off out from under you – and by that point, the sympathy isn’t so great that you feel cheated by their death (also, by the third time it happens, you know it’s going to happen).

The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files #5) by Charles Stross.

See the next entry.

The cover design has gotten better over the years, I have to admit.

The Annihilation Score (Laundry Files #6) by Charles Stross.

The Laundry Files novels are apparently popcorn for me – popular adventure novels with an aesthetic that marries espionage and cosmic horror (not, it is important to note, of as grim a sort as Blindsight up above). Over this period, I read four of them via the Libby app (The Fuller Memorandum, The Apocalypse Codex, The Rhesus Chart, and The Annihilation Score). I still have several more to go through in the catalog that’s available to me, but I thought I’d take an aside and talk about them briefly. So this is an in-progress review, because the majority of what I read is Laundry Novels.

I liked the first two on this list better than the last two on it, and the first two in the series were quite good. I do not think this represents a trend, just difficulty that Stross might have had bridging the concept and the execution (#5 concerned vampires, and he made an about-face in the middle, deciding not to kill off the vampiric characters; #6 was from the perspective of the previous narrator’s wife, and I’m not sure he had her character fully sketched out). They’re all quite fun, and there’s some interesting things in them.

What I find interesting about these books is not really the supernatural elements – Stross handles them very well in the early portion of the series, but it seems to me that with these series there is a tendency to draw more and more from pop culture as they go on, and it’s why I tend to avoid them – but actually the handling of bureaucracy. I can’t think of any creator, other than Hideaki Anno, that equals Stross in their fascination with the functioning and foibles of bureaucracy. The difference between Stross and Anno is that Stross is equal parts fascinated with and hateful of bureaucracy. This doesn’t mean he wishes it would go away – for him, bureaucracy is a necessary evil, a life-saving annoyance that you decide is better than the alternative.

It is this frustrated fascination that makes the Laundry Files books feel unique and interesting, and I feel like there are a half-dozen moments in the books as a whole that really knuckle down and explain why organizations function as they do within the matrix of the bureaucracy. Moreover, while the plotlines are always fantastical, the stories that he produces serve as illustrations for the bureaucratic principles that he describes – how he views the goal of bureaucracy as producing consistent results regardless of personal competence, why organizations tend toward protecting their remit instead of achieving their stated goals, that sort of thing.

The books are solid fun, though I think I’ve done more series-based reading this summer than I’m generally inclined. Still going to finish them.

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Cameron's Book Round-Up, Closing Out the Summer