The Factual Opinion

Top Five

 

Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy

I read five books by Cormac in 2022, some for the first time, some for the third, all in vacant, unplanned preparation for the two new ones he put out this winter, which were disappointing in their own particular ways. Suttree, on the other hand, was an immense pleasure. A book tortured by sadness, regret, perserevence, postively haunted by people who cannot resist the temptation to fall in love with one another endlessly. Nearly every character in this book would be better off (none more than Suttree) if they just assumed the worst of everyone who crossed their paths, but try as they might, they can't help but extend a hand in hope. If those arms are crafted of shattered bone and flaccid muscle, stinking in unwashed clothes, reeking of poverty, all the better. Every death in this book comes as a surprise, even more so if those deaths are never with the kind of machinery of cruelty and colonial design that touches the rest of McCarthy's work, even more than that, that so many of their are without sneering violence. If it's not his best work, that might only be because I haven't grown out of my adoration for the volume and storm of Blood Meridian. I think I would have liked 2022's The Passenger more if that book's best parts (which feature the lead character repetitively lining up in empty Southern bars like a Samuel Beckett character, wallowing through elliptical, conflict-free conversations with people who care about him but can't help him) hadn't read like a faint, Suttree-tinged echo.

The Bad Lands, by Oakley Hall

The story of Teddy Roosevelt's sojourn amongst the hard boys, and how he became a hard boy himself--possibly, maybe, maybe even truer to reality then Warlock, to which Bad Lands serves as the thematic sequel. (There's a third, The Apaches, which I have yet to read.) But where it shines brightest is the moments it leaves behind the truth it proposes and in the fear it nakedly endorses. It's cheap to treat post traumatic stress disorder as a blurb, an explanatory sticker--it takes real concern to instead just lay it out with this much of a gentle touch. Watching a man eviscerate himself of his own nature so that he can survive is one thing, but to see him do it out of a yearn towards friendship is far more tragic. Also: funny. It's never not funny to watch a guy who lives his life like its a giant pirate ship that he is the captain of decide to piss all over all a banker at a party when the subject of unpaid debts arises. 

Atlanta Hawks At Oklahoma City Thunder, January 25th, 2023

Imagine it: you're the franchise player who has (supposedly) helped implement an alternate ending to Succession's 3rd season finale in the real world, and your 27 year old zero-experience buddy is now running the NBA team that has gone all in on you. The team just blew a five game win streak (that you can't seriously take credit for) and lost two games to teams you should've won easily. Okay? Now picture yourself playing in the arena your parents took you to when they couldn't really afford it, because they knew how good you would become. Your parents are there, right next to the opposing team's bench. You're a divisive guy, and you've already gotten a technical for running your mouth. But the game is starting to turn around, and after multiple games where the three pointer you're famous for has seemingly abandoned you for a rookie everybody has fallen in love with, you're starting to get your shot together. The game is going your way. The team is looking to you. You fire one off from the logo, it's perfect--the arc, the touch. The camera passes by your family at that moment, a moment too far from the end of the game to be called a victory, but a type of victorious moment that hasn't been part of your story for months. And your mom?

She was looking down at her phone the whole time. 

King Buffalo, Regenerator

Sounds like if the band Keane made prog-psych-metal: the songs are still long, but you can understand all the lyrics and it's hard to imagine any of this band having facial hair that isn't regularly groomed. I listen to this only when I'm running in the cold--the one time I played it outside of that singular experience, a nine-year-old girl who was playing "spies" with my daughter said "this is good music for stealing". The way assholes talk about ambient music: that's how I should sound right now. 

Villette, by Charlotte Bronte

I read Jane Eyre years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit, but unlike Jane Austen or Edith Wharton or my beautiful Chuck Dickens, I don't believe I even gave a passing thought to looking for more from Charlotte. I doubt I was even aware of Villette's existence. I'm glad I waited. If I'd read this back in the day before I knew what it felt like to live alone, or to have a professional failure, or to experience genuine heartbreak...I might have drank in the language she uses and seen it for its beauty, but the truth of it would have been something I could only imagine. I would have bought it, but I wouldn't know how rare it is to see it laid this bare. I can't count how many moments I loved in this book, but I can say that the moment when Lucy refuses to budge, the minutes early on when she knows if she walks out the door that this one opportunity will never come back around--that broke something inside me that'll never heal. I thought this book was an astonishment.

The Michael Mann Book Club

It's time for another episode of Travis Bickle on the Riviera, with Sara McHenry, Matt Seneca and Tucker Stone!

The Best Books Of 2021, Which Is When I Read Them, But Not When They Came Out

 

Sense & Sensibility
By Jane Austen, 1811

I reread this one because I find Jane Austen to be about as effective as Call Of Duty or the much-missed co-op feature on Resistance 2: Fall Of Man when what is required is absolute brain immobilization. Is the world outside ping-ponging back and forth between disease-ridden nightmare and tedious, dipshit-bred annoyance? Jane's when-will-these-people-get-it-on romantic comedies never fail to save the day. I quite nearly fucked myself out of enjoying this one somewhere near the 2/3 mark when I thought "gee, I wonder what people on Goodreads who gave this a negative review have to say for themselves": I almost immediately wanted them all to die, humans, to be clear, all of us, the entire race. You think these books would be better if they were updated enough so that all the characters said things like "like" all the time? You don't recognize Captain Brandon as one of the straight up original master-killers, you piece of human shit? I hope your entire bloodline gets wiped off the face of the planet. (This time around I did think that it would have made more sense for Captain Brandon to get with Elinor Dashwood, but I'm allowed to have that opinion.)

Wolfstongue
By Sam Thompson
Published by Little Island, 2021

I read a lot of children's books, and it's rare to read one that assumes such a traditional, classical point of view--I believe the comparisons to something like Watership Down are initially made due to a commonality with the way animals have an intricate, engrossing world built around them, but those comparisons are actually more justified by the serious, thoughtful and "timeless" tone that the story is told with. The subtlety of the one human characters social anxieties--which are never clearly defined or diagnosed, but seem to be some type of autism--is never a focus, never a magic trick or superpower, but merely another tone and color to the narrative. The finality of the book's rare violence--one twist near the end was so abrupt and perfect that I was legitimately startled by how much it affected me--showed far more courage than I expect out of most contemporary works aimed at this audience, an audience it well knows is heavily populated with adults, adults who will then go on to control the narrative surrounding the book because 8 to 12 year olds have better things to do than hyperbolize the shit they're hyperconsuming for an audience of same-brain lunatics referred to as "their community". Real magic stings, and the conclusion to this book may set up a sequel, but it doesn't require one. 

When We Cease To Understand The World
By Benjamin Labatut, Translated by Adrian Nathan West
Published by NYRB, 2021

I hated the end of this book, which is a rambling verse thing that meant about as much to me as any rambling verse thing that isn't about arrows piercing ballsacks: which breaks my heart, because I loved, loved, loved the first 4/5 of this messy, messy, MESSY thing about contradictions, insanity, math, poison, craziness. The guy who changes the way the world using nitrogen, giving life to billions while also coming up with the gas in the Nazi showers, his wife shooting herself at his birthday party to show him how bad a call it was to start up a chemical warfare programs in WW1. Then, after all that messy stuff, some of which probably isn't even true, we get into the Holy Grail of a certain kinda cool boy writer: "math shit". Remember Gleick's Chaos? (That new Chaos book can suck my ass). Remember when DFW wrote about infinity, and they were going to make more books, books where Franzen or Lethem were going to explain quantum mechanics? I love it. I love them all, in all their unreadable glory, in all their pretentiousness, in all their "why is this writing thing my job, why couldn't I have danced amongst the spheres". Remember Proof? Remember Copenhagen?! Before he sold out and took the money, remember Tom Stoppard? He wrote Hapgood! This one though--I think old Benjamin might have fucked them all into oblivion. I think he actually gets this stuff, and in a fun, smarter-than-your-average-bear way, not in the way that the guy who wrote The Martian with his reddit friends gets it, in a fantastic broken brain kinda way. What a read. You can't blame him entirely for trying to make poetry work at the end. Michael Jordan probably would've gone for the Heisman if he'd won a World Series. Ego is a hell of a drug!

I Was Dora Suarez
By Derek Raymond, 1990

An editor puked on his desk when he read the manuscript, that's the legend. He walked away from our best criminal-turned-writer instead of publishing the thing. (Jean Genet is for grad students, sorry!) It's the fourth in a series about a cop who everyone hates, a guy who is fearsomely, awesomely mean to everyone around him to an aspirational degree, a cop who is never named, a cop who can never really win. It's enthralling, the agreed-upon masterpiece of the series. I loved this book as much as you can love something that will legitimately have you moving your thighs back and forth over and over again because the entire lower half of your body is convulsing with panic at the prospect of, deep breath, attaching the tip of your penis to a bike tire/chain that you then pedal as part of your "training". I read it! Now you can't unread it!

Fat City
By Leonard Gardner, 1969

Halfway through this book, I told my wife I hated it. I didn't hate it. I hated how accurately it describes the pain of feeling like a failure, and how that feeling, when it lands on you in the right way and at the right time is indistinguishable from being a failure. I think this is one of the strongest books I've read about a certain kind of struggle, a certain hellish bottom, and I came away with a huge amount of admiration for it. But it was not an easy road.

A Bridge Of Children's Books: The Inspiring Autobiography of a Remarkable Woman
By Jella Lepman, 1969

I took over as the President of the US chapter of the organization founded by this book's author this week, so I'm biased about its contents, because the level of expectation that the book presents is so staggeringly disproportionate to anything I could realistically (or fantastically) accomplish during my upcoming two year tenure. I don't mean that in a self-deprecating way. I am factually unqualified to follow anywhere near this woman's footsteps, and even if I were to stop the things I am doing for work, for pleasure, and abandon my family, I would fall short of her achievements. Jella Lepman was a German woman who returned to Germany after World War II and decided to make the world a better place by focusing on the children of Germany, on children's literature. She faced off against the same Nazis who she had left behind (and her brief description of Nazi mothers who had zero regrets whatsoever is more chilling than anything I've ever read about post war Germany), she faced off against the bureaucracy of the American military machine, and she succeeded. While this book seemed to me to run completely out of steam by the end, the gravity of the work she was doing at the time of writing it gives her a pass. It is easy to believe people like this do not exist, because they operate at a level that embarrasses those of us who are then permitted to rest upon the treasures of their achievements.

In The Distance
By Hernan Diaz
Published by Coffee House Press, 2017

This was recommended me too highly for it to ever achieve what its recommenders were hoping for--it's not long enough to be the epic that I would have liked its lead to be the star of, and survival-by-hiding is an extremely difficult subject to maintain excitement for, especially when you use it twice--and yet I think that after I stopped resenting the book for not being what it had been sold to me as, I came away with a lot of affection for it. It's a good contemporary Western thing that could've used a smarter ending instead of a loop-back-around thing. Big guys gotta do more big shit though. That's why you make them big!

Kiss Or Kill
By Mark Twight, 2001

These are Mark Twight's pre-Gym Jones essays about climbing, being an asshole, I read it before going out to train with him at his new gym in Salt Lake City. I had read some of these before--"Twitching" isn't as important to me as Henry's "The Iron", but it would have been if I had read it when I was 20 years old. I can't imagine coming away from these essays without feeling challenged to go and do something, anything, to push it a little bit. I also wonder what somebody like Twight would have gotten to do if there were other people in the fitness/training/masochism space who could actually think, or write. There remains a mountain of valuable and intelligent writing on how out there, and almost nothing of value on why.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
By John Valliant, 2010

Matt Seneca sent me some quotes about this book's main (human) character, off the strength of those, I bought the first copy I could find. A phenomenal piece of survival non-fiction, animal & human relations history, and brutally upsetting portrayal of yet another way that we have failed this planet by our addiction to money. Nearly every piece of human and animal suffering that goes down in this book, nearly every injustice, can be traced back to the failings of the modern system of leaving our poor to figure out not starving to death when that is cheaper than helping them. I loved this book, and I think if I'd read it when I was younger and believed that we were heading towards a better world, I would've loved it without any hedged bets. The lengths to which some people will go just to make the world a little more right, a little more safe, a little less scared--this one inspires awe.

Hard Rain Falling
By Don Carpenter, 1966

Can't even. I read this with a book club I'm in, it was my recommendation, some great points were made about the racism in it, all those points were right, I'm ashamed to say that some of them eluded me until they were raised. The sections in here about solitary confinement and prison life and human failure--those are like pure, painful diamonds. This book hurt my feelings.

Your Money Or Your Life
By Joseph Dominguez & Vicki Robin, 1992

Nina got me the new version of this, it's got a foreword by Mister Money Mustache, who I have a lot of fondness for. I think this is a book they should make you read as soon as you can understand it, if only so that people can have some tangible language to fight against the way capitalism and the presentation of money will pour its way into your mind while you aren't looking. I have never taken the time to use the somewhat complicated system in this book to dismantle my own finances, and I don't actually know anyone who has. But the simple, constant philosophical battle it presents--the way it crystalizes mortality against monetary--has never left me. It's impossible to completely detoxify oneself from this language, it didn't land for me until the pandemic how much of my own psychological structure had been colonized by it. 

Father Of Lies
By Brian Evenson, 1998

At least in Dora Suarez, you're on the side of the guy going after the other guy, and you see enough genre trappings around you to know which guy is going to win. But in this--an occasionally POV style experience of a child molesting serial killing provost--you're in for about as tough sledding as it is possible to find. It's well written, sure, it's scary, yes, it's upsetting, okay. There's something--I don't want to say respectable, that's not the right word--but this book restores depravity to its place as depravity. Everything in this book has been depicted in movies and television shows and books, but unless you read something like Father of Lies from time to time, I think one can very easily forget the soul-blackening world-destroying apocalypse that is any single one of the acts it describes, because in those other versions, it's part and parcel of an entertainment product, it's a genre, it's a category of story, and its victims do not feel real, they feel like paint, panels, things. (Even in the case of mega popular true crime podcasts, where the victims are, actually, real). What Evenson does here is a work of fiction--I don't think he'd say to entertain, if he would, he fails at that--that is like a work of magic in its extremity. It's a terrifying, uncomfortable suffocation, engagingly written. 

American Tabloid
By James Ellroy, 1995

I found a mass market edition of this for next to nothing, bought it so that no one else could have it, read it again. I think i'll read it again tomorrow and the day after that too. Why not? Tiger Kab today, Tiger Kab forever.

-Tucker Stone, 2022

No Pictures: Boys In Heat

Dirty White Boys
By Stephen Hunter
PRH, 1994

This is the second book in the Bob Lee Swagger franchise, set at an unclear time and only touching upon the Swagger character by way of his dad, who was such a great man of violence in Hot Springs (the first book in this franchise that I have read, which I discovered because it was recommended via an algorithm after I started watching the Shooter television show, which was based on the character of Bob "The Nailer" Lee Swagger and was previously made as a film starring Mark Wahlberg by the same name. Dirty White Boys mentions Earl Swagger once--he's the cop who killed one of this book's main characters father--but even if it didn't, you'd know whose world you're in. Stephen Hunter is super into guns, way more than he is into things like characters that have long term goals, and he's super into men, in this very broad strokes heavy boy way. This book follows a sociopathic murderer who breaks out of prison with his giant mentally handicapped (and indestructible) cousin and a young failed vaguely femme artiste in need of a father figure. The trio proceeds to kill their way across a couple of states. In pursuit is another real man type, and in keeping with the demands of morons, he's a "flawed" hero, an aging State Trooper who is wearily cheating on his wife with his cowardly partner's hot young wife. The book circles around gunfights and destruction, multiple moments where tough guys tell weak men how to be tough guys in this fashion that sounds sometimes like the author is talking to himself, which is something I can understand while not feeling very sympathetic towards in the slightest. It's a book where the action is cruel, sloppy and still extremely engaging--people get their faces torn off upwards by gunfire, but continue on via the power of insanity, extensive boring explanations (which are probably technically accurate) for how birdshot functions explain how a character can survive point blank damage...it's a white trash thriller, and it reads like one. The first sentence is a racist line about how big the character's penis is, a sentence that got reproduced in a Deadline article about the movie adaption that is apparently in production, and the book is one of those cases that probably leans on a contempt-for-your-feelings argument about realism for the never-ending stream of racial slurs that populates the book. I liked the (two) farmhouse shoot-outs, would have had higher tolerance for the rest of the book if I'd read it twenty years ago.

The Vintage Mencken
By HL Mencken, Edited by Alistair Cooke
PRH, 1955

I read this on a cruise ship, which is a pretty solid environment for reading about Mencken's disgusting descriptions of crowded, sweaty political conventions. He's got a lot of that-didn't-age-well comments about black people in here, even when he's talking about how awful some actual blood-on-their-hands racists are, and all of that is--hard to get through implies something I don't like, it's still just reading--it's tiresome and stupid and it makes it hard to take him seriously when you're reading the parts that aren't like that. The stuff where he talks shit about moralistic Puritan types holds up though, less so hs fantasy of an aristocracy to rule us all though--i'm unclear about how that embrace of a master race of high culture fits with his general worldview that it is up to people to engage with the world beyond their own comfort, to embrace the inexplicable. How does that fit with asking for a better boss? Aren't you still just climbing back into a cage? Based off the writing in this book, he's a terrible literary critic, it's functionally impossible to know what he's talking about in the Dreiser section.

Billy Bathgate
By E.L. Doctorow
PRH, 1998

All of these books were originally published by other companies that are now owned by PRH. I could credit their original houses, but I want to remember them as coming from one monolithic company for the sake of upset. Billy Bathgate is a category of book that is so massive that it really deserves a pungent name: books where old men write books where young boys lose their virginity while learning to become men at the feet of violent dudes. I guess you could boil everything down to its essence for the purpose of dismissing it--in a way, the above sentence covers Henry IV? And there's something in the sauce, I guess: there's a reason I've chosen to read enough of these books that i've gotten tired of these books (as well as their older cousin, books about old writers who fuck their grad students). Write about what you know, they like to say, and old guys spend enough time remembering a time period when they had multiple erections in a day that memory can be a Masterclass. This book is bad, except when it's not. The stuff about crime and the city is a dream, and it reads well, but the part where the kid fucks a lady in a swampy forest and she doesn't get grossed out by all the mud and sludge that is going inside of her is just--ah. I'll forget about the parts of this I liked--the parts where they explain a long game of jury tampering--will fade from memory, but I'll always remember the part where the girl didn't say "hey, clean all the mud off of your penis before you stick it inside me".

Agent In Place 
By Mark Greaney
PRH, 2018

Here's an interesting fact about the PRH imprint "Berkley Books" that should tell you something about this (not good) book:

Following its publication of Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October, Berkley Books became increasingly interested in publishing military fiction and technothrillers. The publicity campaigns at military bases were part of the success of Dale Brown's Flight of the Old Dog.

Makes sense! You can still make a lot of money off of Tom Clancy, I do believe--they've gone back to that well a million times. After all, you're not just monetizing a type of writing and a particular narrative, you're weaponizing a personality that already exists: Tom Clancy type-a-guys, both true believers like Clancy look-a-likes with the scrambled egg hats and guys like me, with a distaste for the military only exceeded by our distaste with ourselves and our feelings, who like to read books about hard lines and the hard men who straddle those lines. That's a lot of people who are willing to buy books, and they tend to be the kind of people who will read as indiscriminately as is possible--we read a category, and while we'd prefer it be as charming as Day of The Jackal or as cool as Jack Reacher, we'll still give quite a few of them a chance off of the most basic of recommendations.

Case in point: Agent In Place, the seventh in Mark Greaney's Gray Man series--there is no connection to the Gray Man that appears in the Spencer novels by Robert Parker, nor the character who used to show up in the Giffen/DeMattheis Justice League comics. Oh that it was! The idea of a depressed soul-collector with megalomaniacal goals and God-level powers on loan from the Lords of Order who followed up a successful career assassinating people in Boston with an even more bloodthirsty career as a rogue spy/mercenary/justice doer certainly sounds appealing. Alas: this is just the last part of that equation, the part where an unkillable guy wanders around being unkillable, gets referred to consistently as "The Violater" in a fashion that has me convinced that Greaney thinks that sounds cool and will broke no disagreement, despite it being clearly obvious that it isn't, like, ever, going to be. I haven't read the first six of these books. Based off the recap moments that pop up in Agent In Place, the character of The Gray Man/The Violator who also goes by the name, sweet jesus, kill me now, "Court Gentry", he used to be a badass for the US government, got annoyed with them for sending something his way that violated his moral code, went rogue and is thought of/talked about as some kind of dark Satan of assassination but is in all likelihood extremely moral and never accidentally does anything bad to anyone (his nickname is The Violater! There should be rules for having that as a nickname! The first rule should be that you don't have a moral code!), and eventually started doing random jobs for the US government again, who i'm convinced in this book is always on the side of justice excepting a few bad apples that the Gray Man gets to kill, which leads us (again, i'm guessing) up to this book, where he's recuperating from meeting a woman who knocked him for an emotional tumble. Agent In Place is about him being better at everything than everyone who ever lived, invading Syria all by himself, showing off what scumbags "military contractors" are, and playing moral shrill to a bunch of weak-kneed academic and Deep State types, none of whom survive the book, all of whom die with "The Violator's" smug told-you-so attitude hanging over them. The action in this book is few and far between, and just when it starts to get cool and interesting, Greaney finds someway to say "The Gray Man wasn't scared, like, at all. Not even a little bit. So cool, this Gray Man was." This would wear on any reader, regardless of their tolerance, but when it's coupled with the way every secondary character reacts when the Gray Man calls them on the phone--which is that they usually spill their drink, have an icy chill go down their spine and galvanize their sphincter, or basically do any manner of monocle squirting idiocy. It's a stupid, bad book. No big deal: lots of books are stupid and bad. But they can still be fun, and at no point does this manage to clear that bar. Would not bang: 1 out of 10.

^{Ed vs. Yummy Fur}

 

Where The Mailmen Know Your Name

On this week's episode of the only movie podcast in the world, Tucker is joined by Tim Hodler. Check it out after the break!

Carson & Elena

My Brilliant Friend
By Elena Ferrante

The first book in the incredibly popular tetralogy about two Italian women and their decades of friendship? That’s probably correct. I’ve avoided reading much about this book beyond the fervor with which the book has been received, because I’m one of those guys who most enjoys the drama of these kinds of narratives knowing as little as possible. That being said, it’s only said fervor that will keep me moving past this one, which read like a mix of the marriage scene in Deer Hunter and Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret. It’s no surprise that a book about women has to start by being a book about young girls, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it had to stick so incredibly close to all the adolescence cliches. Struggling for a teacher’s attention, figuring out which boy is most likable, the vagaries with which periods and puberty come on—even when these things are handled well (and Ferrante handles them with a lot of style), they’re still boxes to be ticked. There’s not a lot of beats here that haven’t been hit before, and while I’m certain that the remainder of the series has its charm—too many people who know what they’re talking about have said as much—the main reaction I had coming out of My Brilliant Friend is that, like Mr. Robot, Game of Thrones and Halt and Catch Fire before , this is gonna be another one of those critically acclaimed things that just isn’t worth the time.

 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
By Carson McCullers

An extremely well told and extremely painful book deeply indebted to that Southern Gothic tradition that seems nowadays to be little more than window dressing and costuming for generic narratives, this book was written when its author was only 23 years old—and if after reading it, that doesn’t hit you right between the eyes, then you’re too stupid to breathe—and I’d put it up there, and against, just about every single one of the American classics that are required reading. This should be a Gatsby, a Knowles. 

It’s torturous at times, mysterious in a way that feels cruel, a book that steadfastly focuses on five characters and their perspectives, forcing you to learn about their families, friends and foes by studying the shadows and the spaces between. A young girl on the verge of being a young woman, mired in poverty. A tortured, barely sane drunk packed into the body of a young radical on the run. An aging black physician racked with tuberculosis whose obsession with equality has decimated his own family. A hard luck fat boy, stapled to his youthful choices, incapable of winning over the love of others. At all their social center: an aging deaf-mute, either a repressed homosexual or a homosexual McCullers didn’t feel comfortable getting specific about due to the time period, whom all four of the others have independently placed as the living embodiment of morality and hope, none of them realizing that the man’s only real motivation is for the desperate, unrequited (and hopeless, and pathetic) love he has for a mentally handicapped deaf-mute locked up in a hospital on the other side of the state. It’s a book about these people and how they’re doomed for collapse, but are able to buy some time when they discover someone who can’t help but listen. If Being There is the funnier version of how we impugn our highest morals on those who can’t argue back, this is the more brutalist version: that we may do this, but it will not help.

-Tucker Stone, 2017

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Night School
By Lee Child

As good as an Army Reacher story can be (which is a pretty reliable “good”, but rarely a “great”, because most of Reacher’s greatest charms stem from the way he handles himself when he’s out there on his own, hunting guns, money and breakfast via the dusty highways of a dumbfuck America), Night School is Lee Child’s extended riff on The Day of the Jackal, with enough of the pieces rearranged that what’s left feels more inspired than most traditional homages. There’s still a fat local cop who knows his shit, but unlike Forsythe’s tale, our beefy friend lives as all men do: in the service of The Reach.

A worthy comparison to Night School might also be the 90’s era Jackal film starring Richard Gere as a guy who uses a bad accent to hunt down Bruce “Sexual Predator” Willis in hopes of saving Jack Black’s life. (He fails, but what ensues is the finest performance of Mr. Black’s storied career.) In that rightfully maligned—but still oddly delightful—film, the well regarded classic is mined for remnants that can be grafted onto a story where a character in need of redemption chased down a merciless super killing robot. Here, Child’s choice is more ingenious, with the primary characters of the original Jackal story rearranged to complement the outsized Reacher, and what gets ignored becomes unnecessary more than it is missed. The original story’s villain’s mastery over planning and preparation becomes Night’ School’s backstory, slowly unpacked over the course of the book. A secret cabal of evil fuckers, once cast as a secretive military junta unwilling to accept their obsolesce becomes a group of German nationalists (yes, but without their famous name or clothing). It’s an excellent choice, and if some of it the characters come across as a bit leaden (get ready to meet the dullest of Reacher’s sexual partners yet), their loss in character development is made up for in page time for Frances Neagley, who continues to be one of the most entertaining of Jack’s old running crew of beastkilllers. Come for the pastiche, stay for Lee Child’s version of “should we have killed Hitler as a baby”: I read this one twice, motherfucker.

American Assassin
By Vince Flynn

This was my first Vince Flynn book as well as my first time blindly trusting a recommendation created by the Goodreads algorithm (I had to join the site so that I use it for work purposes, I got curious), and it will probably be the last time I do either of those things. Flynn’s style could roughly be described as “non-existent”, unless blanket racism or total tone-deafness are now considered a kind of style. The book features a character creatively named “Mitch Rapp” who is the star, I later discovered, of every single one of Flynn’s published works, barring the first one, which was called Term Limits and is assumedly about the sort of political corruption that ensues when politicians aren’t tough enough to Get The Job Done or Stand Up For What Is Right. One guesses that after immersing himself in the sludge of his fictional DC for his first book spurned Flynn to create Rapp, a character who never met a generic 80’s right wing cliche he didn’t fully embody. (It is neither a surprise nor a condemnation that Flynn went on to work on later seasons of 24, a show which was consistently able to get away with its toxic political stances by contradicting it immediately or by stopping for a minute to show the horrific, unrepairable damage that had been done to its lead character and all those who surrounded him. Also because the action was pretty good.)

Flynn’s Rapp isn’t bothered by such issues, or at least he isn’t here, in a prequel book that introduces the characters initial training and first mission as a sort of Jason Bourne-via prehistoric caveman snob. The book’s basic plot is this: Mitch is a guy who is the greatest dude ever, one of the best lacrosse players of all amateur college time, he’s got a dad who died when he was young, and a girlfriend—youthful sweetheart, natch—who dies in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which, if you are my age, is the flight that the GZA is talking about on that one song from Liquid Swords. In this book, we see Mitch turn his sorrow at the loss of the girl (who has a name, but I have my doubts if even the characters in the book remember it) into rage, rage which leads him to take six months of brazilian jujutsu classes and then join the training program for some black ops CIA kill squad that, up until that point, had only taken on Navy Seal and Green Beret types. And while the characters in the book do acknowledge how absurd it is that there is a college lacrosse player who studied brazilian jujutsu in a suburban training center for six months who is easily 100% better than the American military’s cream of the crop, that particular plot dynamic never becomes any less ridiculous. (Although it is helped a bit by the even more ridiculous part where Rapp learns how to shoot at the level of a Navy Seal in the same amount of time it took to get tired of people talking about Stranger Things.)

As it is, this is one of those classic kinds of shit—a book that spends all its time telling you how smart and awesome a guy is, spices it up with some odd bit of tradecraft that the writer picked up somewhere (in this, it’s Rapp’s trusty rubber doorstop), and strings you along while you wait for violence to happen, or for the character to become smart, or awesome. The thinking seems to be that the violence will be shocking and/or exciting enough to propel you through the mechanics of the story, all of which are boring. And while spy books are often boring in parts—that’s sort of the point of a lot of Le Carre, is that it’s a boring job 98% of the time, and sometimes it’s not, but the only people who are really good at it are the people who can handle being bored—the problem here is that Rapp is a boring idiot, and spending time with him as he pompously judges people because they aren’t patriotic, or sexy, or tough…it isn’t fun the first time. Even the book’s boneheaded racism and right-wing agitprop is so tired and cliched as to be quite nearly inoffensive. (Nearly, said the white guy, about the white guy.) But hey: it is a prequel, after all. It’s always a surprise when those are bad.

Mr. Mercedes
By Stephen King

An unusual entry in King’s catalog in that it is a crime thriller devoid of supernatural elements, Mr. Mercedes is the first of a trilogy starring a retired detective named Bill Hodges. In this one, Bill is haunted by the one that got away: the titular Mr. Mercedes, who drove a car into a group of people while wearing a mask and was never caught. The book hits a lot of familiar beats, both in the genre (Hodges is a divorcee who spends his retirement fantasizing about killing himself, his closest relationship is with a super-smart black kid who he can rely on both so that the book has some contemporary relevance and also so an old white character can say “bro” a lot) as well as familiar beats in King’s career (the murderer has a fucked up sexual relationship with his drunk mom, none of the slang has ever been said in real life, by actual people). King’s saving grace in this one (if there is one, as the book is very much Not Good) is probably to be found in his belligerent commitment to getting this shit done—this book reads at times like an outline of expository action, which keeps it moving along. Beyond that, there’s no real pacing or structure to the book beyond a heavy reliance on coincidence—characters just endlessly move through scenes like they’ve been waiting in the wings for their cue. With the exception of the victims in the prologue, every character is seen multiple times, each time with more exposition to deliver to the two leads, and all of these side characters exhibit whatever skills are necessary to the scene. (in the book’s most glaring offense to its own credibility, a woman with crippling social anxiety magically transforms into a Lisbeth Salendar rip-off with one-punch fighting skills in the span of 36 hours. Mr. Mercedes is neither thrilling nor a mystery—it’s a book about a guy who wants to taunt an ex-cop and kill some people, and it’s a book about an ex-cop who wants to catch a guy who is taunting him before that guy kills some people. That these two people are in the same book occasionally results in the two stories coming together, but never in a way that anyone would describe as particularly graceful. 

That being said, there is a preview at the end for the second book in the trilogy, and in this preview, a group of guys invade the home of a writer who is clearly supposed to be John Updike, and after some pretty routine intimidation and slap-him-around stuff, one of the guys kills the writer, who is, again, clearly supposed to be John Updike. Your mileage may vary, but that shit sounds funny AF.

The City of Mirrors
By Justin Cronin

The promise of The Passage trilogy (of which this is the conclusion) was always a bit absurd—the implication that the literary world’s answer to the cultural takeover performed by genre and geek culture had arrived; here, finally, was the post-apocalyptic vampire series that Alan HOLLINGHURST fans would enjoy. On the face of it, it was unnecessary—Ridley Scott’s ambitious purchase of the series prior to its actual written existence had immediately assured the interest of curiosity seekers, and Cronin’s generally acknowledged skill level and his aw-shucks, I made this one with my little girl marketing hook brought the rest. It also ignored one of the core tenets of geek and genre culture obsessives, one of the basic reasons that all forms of culture (they’re even shaving time off opera, son) have given way to nerrrrrrds: they’re insatiable, and they’ll read anything. Capitalism is the word of the day, and while you do have to “market” a vampire trilogy, you certainly don’t need it to be any good at all. The audience for these things—the primary, foundational financial base—will buy and read a good one and a bad one interchangeably, you just have to make sure you’ve advertised well enough to be next in the pile. If you’ve covered enough of your Barnes & Noble co-op to ensure whatever overly serious cover design your failed artist cum designer created is prominently featured on endcaps, you’re golden. Get it out there, make some noise, the hyper consumers will do the rest. Plugging yourselves to the people who are still reading Harold Bloom—well, how many people is that, anyway? How many of them are “influencers”? Blogs are dead, baby boy! Middle aged critics don’t have interesting Instagram pages!

The first book, The Passage, remains the strongest of the series, tied as it is to the most interesting part of these sorts of stories: when the collapse of society begins and we see the immediacy of what comes after. Mixing bits of what made The Stand and World War Z memorable along with Cronin’s smartly written realist middle-aged frustrations and delivering one of the most satisfying (infuriating, book-throwing kind of satisfying) cliffhanger endings these sorts of books ever see—a cliffhanger so good that there’s no possible way the eventual movie will have the balls to replicate it—the Passage was a prime example of effective, smart genre work. You never really got to know anybody that well, but you cared about them nonetheless, and as the book tore its way through a century, one found themselves respecting Cronin in spite of the manipulation he was so blatantly trafficking in. You were being played, but in the same way that you forgive a truly great con, you couldn’t stay mad at that guy. (I can’t tell you how many times I found myself looking at that author photo, that half-lidded placidity, those still waters, judging me, finding me wanting. Can’t I be smart enough for you, Justin?)

The second book couldn’t have been more disappointing, of course. A bewildering misfire of lazy superhero pastiches fighting a confused battle against a foe that was never more than a list of names, it’s no surprise that the first thing that City of Mirrors does is recap that terrible book’s conclusion: it has no choice. Even if you had remembered what happened, what you remembered doesn’t make sense at all—a bunch of people ran out into a field? There was a dumpster and a basketball hoop? The immortal girl saw her dad again because the gardener loves flowers, and then all the bad guys screamed and laid down and died? (That’s the actual ending!) In honor of America’s other new religion—the cultural forgiveness of a financially demanded retcon—The City of Mirrors effectively turns The Passage from trilogy to a two parter, and while you’ll never be able to convince people to just skip the second book entirely, they certainly should.

Of course, recapping Book Two brings one right up to the issue that these books were never supposed to have, due to their specific “a girl who saves the world” origin: man, that’s a lot of rape. Is it supposed to be progress when rape isn’t used to make men tougher? When the “revenge” part of a rape/revenge story is just a woman becoming stronger and better at using a bow and arrow, or it makes her a really good mom? That doesn’t seem like progress. That seems like the same kind of laziness, in a form that’s just being dumb in a different neighborhood. What would be really smart would be to have a lot less characters, so that rape becomes all but narratively impossible, since there’s no working penises attached to non-heroic male characters. After all, you can’t have a bunch of rape happen if there aren’t any bad guys to do it!

Which is, of course, what Book Three happens to do.

Book Three has to be the conclusion, and it’s with no small amount of trepidation that one approaches the conclusion of these kind of stories: because it’s always terrible. In the short form—like Dawn of the Dead, for instance—you can get away with not concluding, with closing out on people fleeing immediate danger for the promise of more, imagined danger.. But in the long form, the form that Stephen King and Robert Kirkman traffic in, you’re fucked: nobody gets it right. The ending of the Stand is dumb as shit, the ending of It is dumb as shit, the ending of The Walking Dead is gonna be dumb as shit—none of it works, because having an answer in a serialized narrative is never as satisfying as the promise of postponement. And for what it’s worth, Cronin gets as close to good as he can, even if it means he has to resort to an epilogue featuring a goofy, Judge Dredd without any cool shit future, where new characters you couldn’t possibly care about tell you what happened after the Final Battle. As with the first book, there’s stuff here to play with—the origin of evil may be a cliched nerd who didn’t get his best friend’s girl, but Cronin acquits himself well with how he depicts that particular story, and as with any good post-apocalyptic story, it’s always fun to go to New York—and all the climactic battle power chords get played. As page turners go, this one has its charms. 

Go ahead and take a second and pretend that still makes a difference.

-Tucker Stone, 2016

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Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
By Gilbert Sorrentino, 1971

One of the more accomplished of a certain style of post-modern writing whose influence is still felt, even if those who share its tricks are unaware of Sorrentino’s existence, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things starts in a stronger place than where it ends, but the ride to that end is so delightful in its bitchiness that its hard to hold what feels like a tossed off conclusion against it. It doesn’t hurt that the author never stops reminding you of how artificial the construct of fiction can be, stopping in the middle of the narrative to address that the characters he’s created aren’t real or interesting, so he’s going to blind one of them, and isn’t that kind of overdoing it, anyway?

It’s that bitchiness that keeps the pages turning, really. Sorrentino has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of contemptuous remarks to deliver about the people that surrounded “him” in the late 50’s, and they’re never repetitive and rarely unfunny. He’s mean to people who probably deserve it, both because they’re ridiculous and because they’re probably doing the same to him. Hungrily sexual—this is a book with a lot of ass eating—Sorrentino’s “friends” can’t keep their hands off each other, and their drunk fucking makes for plenty of over-the-top drama. It takes a good couple of pages to catch up with what Sorrentino is doing with his writing—lists and rejoinders, author as narrator as author speaking directly to reader, and it’ll certainly help to have your Joyce references up to date—but the work is worth it in the end, if only so that you can wash off some more of the stink that comes from believing in the intellectual salons of the past.

Last Days
By Brian Evenson

"I’ve beat the system, he thought. and then thought, no. This was simply a sign that he’d already stopped being human and wasn’t planning on coming back."

A gory detective novel where the protagonist spends the whole book trying as hard as he can not to take the case (and ends up solving it purely on accident before the halfway point), Last Days is the book that cemented my affection for the writer to such a degree that I plan to parcel out what else of his work remains slowly, so that hopes of new Evenson always dance forever in the horizon. There’s a delightful pointlessness to Last Days—its a book that is almost surly in its rejection of easy acceptance being far too violent for the literary fiction crowd and way too weird for the murder mystery club. Its reminiscence of things is a mirage, something that fades when you actually try to shelve it alongside Ben Wheatley’s Kill List or the works of Raymond Chandler. It’s vague acknowledgement of the nastier, dustier, bloodier splinters of the Bible are where its furious pace most often lets up; it’s those sentences, Christian sentences, when Evenson is most willing to allow a pregnancy of attention. What you see is invariably unpleasant, but hey: so is the Bible, right?

The Literary Conference
By César Aira, Translated by Katherine Silver, 2006

A ninety page piece of perfection, The Literary Conference reads less like a novella and more like the transcript of a really great joke that just happens to be a bit longer than most jokes. While there’s definite similarities in terms of tone to other pieces of writing—seasonal moments in Camus, the way Thomas Mann describes clothes—Aira is the real deal, a singular, demanding voice. Translating the work must be pure alchemy, Aira’s sentences feel so dependent on another. (I thought about pulling one in for quotation, but it’s impossible to find one that could feel comfortable removing from those that surround it—it would just be cruel.) A newly rich mad scientist goes to a literary conference: enjoy!

-Tucker Stone, 2016

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