Reviews and Comments

At this point I know what I'm getting into every time I open up a T. Kingfisher book, whether it's horror, fantasy or romance - and most of her books have all three, mixed at different distillations. The writing will be breezy, the plot will both be interesting and turn in directions that you wouldn't expect, the characterizations will be unique and not standard cardboard cutouts (well, her male love interests tend to be big noble depressed guys, but they're all well written). "Nettle & Bone" hits all of these - a fun read that conceals depth and absolutely wrenching moments. My only complaint is that I wish it didn't move so fast - that there was a bit more room to breathe. But across the board I'm always so excited to read new stuff from her. Every book so far has been great, and I feel like she's closing in on masterpieces.

Vernon Subutex is a charmer - handsome despite being on the wrong side of 40, easy to get along with, and surprisingly attractive to women. He has also, at the start of "Vernon Subutext 1," spent the past two years unemployed and a virtual shut-in, licking his wounds after the demise of his legendary record store and the deaths of several close friends. The situation quickly changes when his old friend Alex Bleach, a past-it rock star who has been intermittently paying off Vernon's back rent, dies, and Vernon is almost immediately kicked out of his home. This begins a sort of Odyssey through Paris, into the lives and the points of view of the people who interact with Vernon - musicians-turned-middle-managers, retired pornstars, obsessive producers, erstwhile rock journalists, coked-up day traders, violent French nationalists. There is a MacGuffin of sorts - the tapes that Alex left with Vernon, which may reveal long-simmering secrets or jealousies or might just contain him talking about ambient music for hours - but the book isn't as concerned with that as you might think. The real subject of "Vernon Subutext" is Paris, with Vernon our sort of unwitting, louche, misogynist Virgil, who slips in and out of the narrative as the point of view switches between him and the people whose paths he crosses. These points of view - and Vernon's own - are incredible, well-observed and tender even when writing from the point of view of a domestic abuser or a racist screenwriter. I'm looking forward to starting the next volume - after, I think, a little break to read something a bit more calming.

This is a collection of four novellas by Rachel Ingalls, whose "Mrs. Caliban" I had already read. These range from the opening "Friends in the Country," a kind of Roald Dahl (adult stories of Dahl, that is)-tinged visit to what may be a coven, to the doom-laden "The End of Tragedy." Ingalls' work, to me, specializes in stories about unhappy marriages that intersect with fantastical events and creatures, with elements we expect from B-movies and melodramas. I once read a piece about David Lynch that posited that we all think that Lynch's big thesis is that our idealized small-town Americana notions hide horrifying underbellies, but that his ACTUAL thesis is that nothing's hiding anything - the idealized small-town Americana and the seedy horror are not opposite sides of the same coin, they're the same side and they flow into one another. To my mind Ingalls is doing the same thing - many of her stories are about marriages that are terrible in a pedestrian way, and when the couple is confronted with something out of a b-movie or melodrama - a coven or a sex robot or a murder plot - the real horror is not the dramatic element, nor what the situation draws out of the couple, it's the marriage itself. One novella in the collection is not about that, not really - The Life of an Artist is about a pair of bohemian Finns who meet in Paris, their domestic lives and their struggles towards artistic success. It's very different from the other work of hers that I have read, and the most arresting novella in the volume.

I have no idea who suggested this book to me - I must have recommended that my library buy it in ebook format, because they did, and I got an email that it was ready for me to read, without any memory of requesting it. This seems of a piece with the book itself - on the surface, the chronicle of the life of a failed poet and very depressed Romanian teacher in Bucharest, who endlessly reviews his old dreams, his personal failures and his childhood memories, the book opens like a flower full of teeth, from which emerges secret societies, rural testing facilities, mysterious subterranean machines, a hallucinatory museum of titanic dust mites, a fully-realized Klein bottle. At one point there are seven pages of just the word "help!" repeated over and over again. It's an EXPERIENCE, moments of breathtaking prose and philosophy come by the page, and for a book that is laden with despair the ending - which is truly a surprise - is very... sweet? Charming?

I do have to give a warning - the text is written in the sort of chauvinistic style that you get a lot of the time, there's a lot of writing about human bodies in terms of disgust, and there's two passages of fatphobia that I found fairly rough and couldn't recommend the book without reckoning with. The narrator isn't reliable, etc. etc., and in the midst of the conspiracies and secret societies he imagines one of fat women, who are described in a dehumanizing way. It's two paragraphs, in the late-middle of the book, but still - a bummer.

A young man inherits an estate from an uncle he has never met - a wild man and a wanderer, who ended his life in seclusion - on the condition that he spends three months on an island in the middle of a river in the Camargue region of France. This he does, without books or contact with the outside world, assisted only by his uncle's - friend? hired hand? acolyte? The synopsis sounds simple - or like a ghost story, which this might be, if our ancestors are ghosts that haunt our souls - but how the book actually plays out is incredible. There are intrigues, fevers, nocturnal visitations, a kidnapping and a daring rescue, a possible betrayal, a malevolent and possibly diabolical notary. But this all pales in comparison to the writing itself - an internal narrative granular to a hallucinatory degree, following the narrator as his heart - or as the book puts it, his blood - twists and turns. An incredible, beautiful book - I wish I could read it in French.