This slate of reviews is going to be uneven in length and scope – I have two extremely long reviews that probably should have been off on their own, but I’m putting them here now because I don’t want to put them on their own.

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t terribly thrilled by this one – longtime readers may have caught on to the fact that I’m a big Murakami fan, and while I’m not the biggest fan of books about craft, I decided to give this one a shot. However, this is much more of a memoir than anything else. It seems to me that Murakami is something of a unique talent – through my exploration of Japanese fiction, while he’s definitely had an impact, and changed things, he is much more aligned with American and Russian writers than he is with those from his homeland – and I was interested to see an analysis of his process.

Of course, this doesn’t make up much of the book: he describes his life before being a writer, and how the feeling that he should write a novel came upon him, but I get the sense that asking Murakami to describe how to write a book is sort of like asking a squid how to swim. He might have a lot of thoughts about it, but they’re so grounded in his own experience that the insights aren’t necessarily of much use to someone with different experience – which is, frankly, something he admits to early on.

As a tool for understanding Murakami, though, I think that it’s an interesting counterpoint to Matthew Stretcher’s The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami, which is much more of an academic exploration. I wish that I had read the two closer together to get a sense for the space that opens up between them, because getting the analytic side and the intuitive side next to one another would have made them both pop out more and make more sense – not that I found Stretcher’s work particularly difficult.

Still, if you’re a completionist or are seeking to position yourself as a true fan of Murakami’s work, this will definitely offer more insight than some other works – including works by Murakami.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

A long, involved work that serves as sort of the archetypal “dark academia” novel. It follows a student at a small liberal arts college in New England, Richard Papen, as he falls in with a coterie of the absolute worst people to be stuck at a dinner party with, who all happen to be the entirety of the school’s insular, strange Classics program, which Papen joins.

Of course, Papen isn’t really a character in the novel. You’re so immersed in his point of view that he kind of melts away. He’s the Ishmael for the Ahab that is this unstable polycule of a classics department, this melding of personalities that’s something like one of those incredibly dense and volatile transuranic elements that only exists for miliseconds under absolute perfect conditions.

The back copy for the novel makes quite a bit of the one Classics professor, Julian Morrow, who is the one professor most of these students have – their sole teacher, who speaks endlessly about the virtues of the classical mind. Of course, he’s a ghost on the page, appearing quite a bit early on and a little at the end, but absent for much of the important action in the middle.

The plot is somewhat convoluted, as one would expect from a 500+ page book where you’re shown a murder at the very beginning and then the murder doesn’t happen until the halfway point (well, that murder.) It’s quite pacy, though: I would argue that most people don’t really read it for the plot – they read it to watch the characters do psychological violence to one another, and they do so quite often and in great detail.

This, really, is the point of the book, not the “reverse detective story” that it’s sometimes claimed to be – putting six precocious intellects in the same room and then raising the thermostat slowly until one of them leans over and takes a bite out of the one sitting next to him. Not a one of them makes good decisions, and not a one of them deserves to emerge unscathed – but there’s no slasher here, no Jason Voorhees, no Freddy Kruger, there’s just these people who hold themselves to be better than those around them and are given enough evidence by the sole authority figure in their life to believe that this is the case.

Frankly, it’s not a mystery, though it may be a thriller. I, instead, read it as a horror novel, though my profession might lead me to that. Here is what could happen if you don’t take responsibility. Here is what might play out if you don’t offer guidance.

The book is quite entertaining, and Tartt is an excellent writer. I greatly enjoyed it, and my recommendation is that – in this case – the book’s popularity is well-earned.

The Inverted World by Christopher Priest.

A strange book. Technically science fictional, but with a vibe closer to fantasy novels – and featuring a protagonist with an extremely on-the-nose name.

This review will spoil the first half of the book.

Helward Mann is a young man who lives in the City of Earth, which is a moving city on the surface of an alien planet in a universe that obeys radically different laws than the one in which we live. He becomes what is known as a “Future Surveyor”, and is trained to scout the city’s path forward across the surface of the world on which they find themselves.

The strangeness of this is first presaged by Helward’s first sight of the sun: it is not a sphere, but an incredible spindle, its poles stretched incredibly far and its middle a disk. Eventually, it comes to light that this is the shape of the world upon which Helward lives: the far north is stretched vertically, and time there passes slowly; the far south is stretched horizontally – so much so that a mountain range can become a hand-hold – and time passes so quickly that the days blur together. This is because the surface of the world acts as a kind of conveyor belt, carrying everything southward, toward the rim of a disk spinning so fast that relativistic effects become visible.

The City of Earth passes through this landscape, always moving north, and always trying to stay close to “Optimum”, the point where time and dimensions are best for continued human life. To do this, they have to lay tracks: to do this, they hire natives, and thus begins a relationship of colonial exploitation that runs through the whole book.

It’s a fascinating read, and the only Priest novel I’ve finished. It was worth it, though like many high concept novels it struggles to fully commit to the idea.

Last Exit by Max Gladstone.

Perhaps not my most effusive review (Moderan, the next one, is a bit of a headtrip) but my favorite out of the lot presented here.

This is largely because Gladstone (author of This is How You Lose the Time War, reviewed by me here and Edgar here) has constructed a kind of contemporary fantasy story that I have not encountered in print – and it’s something that I’ve been both looking for and been having difficulty articulating. It’s a non-secondary world story that sits at the intersection of fantasy and horror, and hides the magical elements so that most people are unaware of them – and it does so without taking recourse to the standard figures of the werewolf or vampire or the tired exercises of Lovecraftian fiction.

Let’s talk plot: ten years ago, Zelda and her friends were outsiders at a small, well-regarded college in the north east. They were math and science prodigies, but they were not as disconnected from the world as that status normally makes one, stereotypically. There were five of them – with Zelda were Sal (her girlfriend), Sarah (Sal’s roommate), the mechanically-inclined Ramon, and Ramon’s friend Ish, who was both clever and tough. They tried to save the world – not from some threat they discovered, but from the ending that we all see when we look at the news. They discovered a sort of magic that allowed them to shift from one world to another, and they sought to find what they called “the crossroads” – the fulcrum point that would allow them to shift the world from its present course, away from “the rot” that they perceive.

They tried, they gave it their all, they failed.

Sal was taken by the rot.

Now, ten years later, Sal is coming back, and Zelda is working with Sal’s young cousin, June, to put things right.

First of all, this book is straight afterfiction – which I’m a sucker for – but doesn’t seem to be “after” any kind of story that one can easily find in the science fiction, fantasy, or horror sections of the library or bookstore. At least, not one I’ve found (the closest I’ve seen is Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books, but this is decidedly different). This is a universe in which magic is real, wonder is real, but everything is slightly off – as Ish, who has used his abilities to become a tech CEO, notes, it’s like “there’s a serpent gnawing at the roots of the world.”

In addition, though: outside of these people and their quest, the real world is just chugging along, as poorly as it always has. And those brushes with normality that they have – the fact of the characters reuniting in the parking lot of a Best Western in the great plains – is wonderful. The fact that these are people who wrestle with supernatural horrors, but also live in a world where you have to take time off from work, have to make time to go to the laundromat, have to get stuck in traffic to do it, makes the whole thing just sing for me.

Second, the supernatural horrors that they’re interacting with are not – as mentioned – things that have been previously featured in fiction, though there are obviously antecedents. The enemy – what they call “the rot” is not the legions of hell, extras from a Hammer Horror movie, or some bit of Lovecraftiana. They brought to mind more the entities from Jason Pargin’s John Dies at the End (reviewed by me here), or possibly the Mugwumps from William S. Burroughs’s work. It’s a force unleashed, apparently, when worlds begin to go bad, when they begin to go to seed and slide into an incomprehensible cosmic chaos.

Given the emphasis on the politics of vampires and the behavior of werewolf packs and the rules of engagement for wizard cops that a lot of speculative fiction had tended towards, I was drawn to this as an intrusion of something that at least felt new, that seemed fascinating. More on that later.

Finally, no one is ordering them to do this. The characters all have complex, and occasionally contradictory motivations for doing this, which is possibly the most rare thing about this. Part of what made Last Exit stand out for me is that there is no overarching agency that is determining what the central characters of this story should do. They simply are doing it. Given the (to me, lazy-seeming) tendency of speculative fiction to make the central characters agents of some other power, I loved watching the big personalities of the characters unfold and lead them one way or another. It really worked for me.

Now, it isn’t perfect. This is a road novel, and – frankly – the least interesting part of any road trip is often the arrival at the other end. I found the conclusion to not be quite as interesting as the journey there, though – frankly – my favorite era of science fiction was the New Wave, and none of them could write an ending to save their lives, so I think Gladstone did okay on that, and perhaps it was just

While hard to read, and not the best made physical object, the cover is certainly *striking*.

Moderan by David R. Bunch.

I first learned about this book in reviews of Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima (which I reviewed here), as a pre-existing point of comparison. This is an incredibly weird book – technically not a novel, but a collection of short stories.

There’s a book by Norman Spinrad – which I have admittedly never read, though I very much like Spinrad – called The Iron Dream, which is meant as a kind of alternate history joke, imagining a sword-and-sorcery novel that would have been written had failed painter, methamphetamine addict, and genocidal dictator Adolf Hitler moved to New York and started writing instead of going into politics.

Moderan, I feel, is unintentionally the same sort of thing. Imagine, for a second, if the failed casino owner, speed addict, and right wing ghoul who is our most recent ex-president had decided to write a cycle of science fiction stories. Read in conjunction with the piece “Theses on a President” from Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk, I think a rather amazing Tlönist reading of Moderan would be possible – right down to the way that sentences are constructed and the diction in play.

Just read the first two paragraphs of the introduction, and tell me they don’t have an eerie resemblance to the tweets of the former president:

Quaint they were, these records, strange and ancient, washed to shore when the Moderan seas finally unthawed. Played in the old-fashioned machine way we, the beam people, the Essenceland Dream people, easily divined, they told of a very different world, a transition world, if you will, between what we are now and the death and defeat these people hoped to overcome. New metal man! It does have a ring. MODERAN! It did seem pretty great in concept, I'm sure, and, who knows, perhaps it had a reasonable
chance for success. But all societies, all civilizations, all aspirations it seems must fail the unremitting tugs of shroudy time, finally, leaving only little bones, fossils, a shoe turned to stone maybe, a bone button in the sea perhaps, a jeweled memento of an old old love. In this case, tapes were left, wherein a great "King" had set down his story of hopes, fears, wars - yes, WARS! Perhaps this "King" was a writer of some skill, a kind of doomed King James. His prose does have a flair, although sometimes it turns tedious, I'm afraid; sometimes he belabors the obvious and becomes vague when he needs to elucidate; sometimes he's fat when he should be lean, lean when fat would be better. Or at least it seems to me these things are true. But then, I am the true machine efficiency, here as essence man, my perfections against his human flaws - quite unfair!
Yes, we are the essence people, a long way up the world from the world that these tapes told of. We truly have gained the immortality that these knaves could only dream of. CRUDE! Oh, yes, crude they were, and yet they had a certain verve and élan, surely, as evinced by these things a "King" set down, a kind of clown "King" certainly, but oh, so serious all the same. He was self-centered - who could doubt it? He was running scared most of the time, scared of himself, scared of time, scared of his Enemies, all other men; scared of the White Witch - scared scared. And yet there is, we have to say, the matter of the very human redeeming grace in this shell of a man who could, so terribly encumbered, screw braggadocio to the sticking point and go windily through the world, crowing, "I am greatest I Am Greatest I AM GREATEST - and I'll prove it!" And "hearing" these tapes and setting these stories down for you, I have become more than doubly convinced that this man, this "King," if you please, this Stronghold #10, had somehow a concept of his own worth that at least equaled his arsenal of fears and overcame them. And that would have to be quite a concept of worth, and quite an overcoming, for his fears were truly great.

Here is a window into an alternate universe, where the former president, instead of scamming large portions of the country into supporting his clownish bid for power, had decided to forsake his wealth – it would have grown faster if he had simply done nothing the whole time – and instead pursue a literary career. If he had been raised on a diet of Rocky Mountain Oysters, Forbidden Planet, and time-displaced John Brunner books, this would have been the result.

But this isn’t a single-layered joke. Bunch didn’t have this vaudeville act to base his voice off of: he isn’t satirizing, he’s doing a bit, which means that there’s a whole other layer. Moderan is a work so soaked in camp hypermasculinity, in a way that really understands it as an unconscious performance.

All of the greatest men of Moderan, the “Stronghold Masters” (who are, themselves, subject to a hidden power that is not explored, but exercises its control over them and is acknowledged) are marvels of machinery wrapped around a fragile core that they do their best to ignore: their “new metal” bodies are held together by the remnants of their organic forms, their “flesh strips,” which are so denatured that they are interchangeable (there is discussion of giving robotic servants “flesh strips” to elevate them to a higher status, but this does not make them the person from whom the flesh strips were taken). These fleshy remnants are so pared down that they cannot survive independently, they’re dependent on a steady diet of “introven” (intravenously-delivered nutrients) to keep them functioning.

When you get down to it, Moderan is a nation built upon projecting a particular camp masculine image of strength: the Stronghold Masters only speak to outsiders when those outsiders are surrounded by armies of drones, and only when the Stronghold Masters are, themselves, encased in unbreachable steel boxes. Women in this world are either reduced to consumable luxuries, able to be switched off at will, or are dangerous outsiders – nomad-terrorists who seek to breach the walls and do something to the stronghold masters that is ambiguously romantic, sexual, and violent.

It’s a bleak, dystopian vision that Bunch explored in great depth. The stories are quite short and quite readable, though the latest printing has some problems on the physical level (the cover of the paperback I own peeled as if it suffered from water damage, though none of the pages inside indicate any kind of moisture had ever touched them). If you can get past that, though, I highly recommend reading it – if, of course, only in small quantities (which is quite easy, as most of the stories are only 3-4 pages.)

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.

So, after all that, I decided to return to the first Murakami I ever read – I got my copy in the summer of 2006 at a used book shop in San Francisco, down the street from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury where my mother and sister found a Gap location to shop at (that store closed in early 2007, which is what helped me solidify the timeline.) I remember my brother was a fan of his, and I was a very awkward, unhappy college student who just wanted to sit in the motel room and read the copy of Viriconium that I’d packed for this three-day-ish expedition to a family friend’s wedding.

I eventually found myself unable to match M. John Harrison and decided to try Murakami. It was an interesting introduction: everything in the novel felt drifting and dreamlike, though it wasn’t necessarily the best introduction to Murakami’s work; while it came out much earlier, it is in the same mold as Pattern Recognition, which is a self-consciously-Pynchonesque story. I’m sure Murakami is familiar with Pynchon, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he made his plotting decisions with Pynchon as a reference point.

The narrator (a nameless young man previously featured in Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973; reviewed here) is now divorced, dating a woman with supernaturally beautiful ears, and thinking about leaving his job. He is collared by the personal assistant of a right-wing power broker, who wants our nameless protagonist to search for a particular sheep that was featured in a photograph that his company used as the backdrop to some ad copy: the sheep is a supernatural entity, brought over from mainland Asia, and was the supernatural patron of the power broker before it abandoned him for unknown, and principally supernatural/ovine, reasons.

Of course, finding one sheep in Hokkaido is something like finding a particular needle in a haystack made principally out of other needles, but – given the ultimatums and rewards being offered to him – he gives it a game attempt. A big part of this is that the image with the sheep was taken from a photograph that was sent to the narrator early on in the story: a photo taken by the titular Rat of the Rat trilogy (the aforementioned Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, as well as the subsequent – and much later – Dance Dance Dance.)

It was probably the introduction to Murakami that I needed; no prior knowledge of the other two books is necessary to enjoy it, as each of them can stand on their own. In addition, it takes a fairly standard plot format and layers the unique style that many people read Murakami for over it. It’s far less of a commitment than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or 1Q84, and not quite as many-layered as Kafka on the Shore or Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It is, if anything, that Straight Story (as in, the David Lynch movie) of Murakami’s career.

The Fires of Vengeance by Evan Winter.

(previously reviewed by Edgar here, and I cosign that review; the follow-up to Rage of Dragons, reviewed by me here.)

When I was much younger, I read quite a bit of what I now term “airport fantasy” – though “supermarket” might be a better term. The paint-by-numbers books that seemed to be heavy slabs of text, meant as novels to be sold by the pound. I read through so many Wheel of Time books, and can’t really bring myself to finish them; I have developed an active loathing of the Sword of Truth books since putting them aside in sixth or seventh grade; I made a serious effort to get into the works of Raymond E. Feist, but stalled out after investing too much time; I bounced right off The Sword of Shannara, and I only encountered The Dragon Bone Chair much later in life (I’m not...completely sure what to make of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant books – they’re competently written enough, but I wish the author made different choices with his story.)

All of this is, admittedly, to build up a pedigree, because the Burning series by Evan Winter seems to me to be the A24 take on this, the elevated form of the genre, performed artfully and executed with panache not normally found there. Of course, there are certain differences – in most of those stories that I mentioned above, if the protagonist spends any time in the army, it’s a short stretch, while Tau remains in the military the whole time (of course, military fantasy is a thing, and given the popularity of the show Game of Thrones, I can see how a writer might calculate taking a more of an institutional bent to their story. Still, Tau and his friends are enacting a kind of vicious, settler-colonial violence that – even if they do not necessarily acknowledge it as such consistently – the narrative is certainly aware of.

There are certain points, especially in The Fires of Vengeance where the perspective will flip, and you’re given the point of view of Tau’s opponent, and what was being portrayed as a triumphant approach is more of the slasher movie villain slinking out of the darkness to show the teenager slated to die that there was no real escape. There is a real feeling of not just inevitability in these moments, but of injustice, and the spicing of these otherwise fairly prosaic story beats with a feeling of moreal ambiguity really makes the narrative sing.

The cover of the audiobook, which I read.

The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman.

(reviewed by Edgar here.)

And here we have our ending (I technically finished Notes from Underground last night, but I’m saving that for my next slate.)

I like Lev Grossman’s Magicians series just fine, but I have a strange relationship to it: I came to Harry Potter late in life, and was cold to it from the beginning (I manufactured some small amount of enthusiasm for the films to fit in with friends, but frankly it took effort) and never really read any of the Narnia books. So I often approached the Magicians and related phenomena as more of their own thing – complicated, since the earlier portion of the first novel is just a non-murderous version of Secret History merged with Harry Potter, and then everyone goes off to a Narnia analogue and becomes royalty, though our protagonist is exiled twice in the second book.

So we find him in the third book, just gone thirty and returned to his alma mater to teach classes in using magic to fix small, broken objects.

These parts are very well-observed. As someone who became an adjunct after doing other things with my life, Grossman does an excellent job of describing the experience of being told you’re a teacher and being thrown up in front of a classroom of students with few guardrails. Here’s the thing about college that they never tell you: unless you’re in the school of education, very few of us have extensive training in how to teach. We might have one – perhaps two – classes in teaching, if we’re very lucky. Some of us figure it out, some of us don’t, and some of us think we may have figured it out, but perhaps we’re just a hack and a fraud.

I get the sense that Quentin’s in that third camp.

Admittedly, it would be a very different story if he remained in that position throughout; he does still go on a bit of a journey, but it’s a very different sort of journey and it’s one that feels somewhat familiar to those of us on the wrong side of 30: as we get older, things break, mistakes happen, we get embarrassed and set things aside; once you reach a certain point, though, you don’t care any more, and you begin to synthesize the person you were when you were a teenager and who you are at the tail end of your twenties. To the best of your abilities, you mend what’s been broken; and perhaps some of the broken, unfixable things are kept around to add a bit of wabi-sabi to the proceedings. All of the mistakes that you made, you come to terms with – perhaps you fix them, perhaps you acknowledge them as unfixable and live with them. All of the things that embarrassed you earlier, you reassess, and you bring them back into rotation, because embarrassment is a game for young people (it’s not “you’re not in high school anymore, don’t wear the band t-shirt”, it’s “you’re not in college anymore, wear the band t-shirt if you want to.”)

This latter stage of maturation is, honestly, not something that I’ve seen depicted too often in fiction. It’s often relegated to outside the narrative, and I felt immensely gratified that Grossman depicted it.

An excellent finish to the trilogy, highly recommended.

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Cameron's Book Round-Up: 2023, second part.