Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance – 4/5 Stars
This is Richard Powers’s first novel, and like a lot of first novels (he was 26 when he published it) it’s both good and precocious in various ways. The novel itself follows a few different threads, and ends up being similarly structured to a few other Powers novels. One thread involves a narrator with the last name P who is researching a photograph and learning about stories from Europe right up to and during WWI and then how those stories continued through after the war. This narrator, a first person narrator, clearly seems to be some version of Powers explaining his donee in the novel, as well as serving up treatises on the nature of truth, photography, and storytelling. If you’ve read Susan Sontag, you’ve mostly already got it — with a heavy emphasis on Walter Benjamin and other 20th century philosophers and thinkers.
Another thread involves a character LIKE P, who is also researching a specific photograph, the one mentioned in the title of the book and reproduced (a carefully chosen word here for its specific meaning for photography and in this novel especially) on the cover to see if his familiarity with the faces and thinking one of the farmers in it might be an ancestor, begins to try to trace its history and its photographer. And finally, using the license of fiction, the last thread involves a fictional retelling of the three farmers in the photograph and their roles as Germans in the soon-to-come war.
Over the book is a scattered, messy, and ultimately brilliant (with some fading returns) novel that lived and breathed in Richard Powers’s consciousness before coming to life here, and we see both happening on the page.
This book is the now-finished, but previously un-finished final novel by Michael McDowell, who is well know for several of his horror novels, but probably most well-known for writing Beetlejuice. This novel was completed by Tabitha King several years after Michael McDowell’s death in the late 1990s. The strength here is that it’s not clear where McDowell left off and where King picks up, or the exact nature of the posthumous collaboration.
What I didn’t like about the novel, was the novel. So the novel is narrated by Calley Dakin, who tells us upfront that her father was murdered in a gruesome fashion when she was young. We get some setup, setting, context etc, and then right onto the murder. The structure of the novel however is more Southern gothic than horror or mystery, so the bulk of the novel (and it’s not short) is about the lives being lived and the people living them, more so than just the novel. It’s not really all that much about a murder when it comes down to it, and so it shares a lot of parallels to Michael McDowell’s Blackwater series where there is A thing happening at the center of the story, but the story itself matters most. This is different from his other novels, which a little more traditional mystery/thrillers in the horror genre. And because I liked Blackwater and how rich and layered it ended up being, I don’t think I liked this one, but it felt like it was trying to recapture some of the magic of that, without it being nearly as interesting. I have to imagine it being left unfinished mostly tarnished or limited how much it could shine through.
Dead Men Can’t Complain – Peter Clines – 3/5 Stars
So when a book is VERY SERIOUS in its tone about sex, it either makes me feel squeamish or laugh. This is the book that the Hellraiser movies is based on and since Clive Barker made both the super serious tone of both is present here as well. Would I ever open a box that portends to hold the most tempting allure and desire? Probably not, I have the internet for that, and like with the Cenobites’ secret box, the internet also imprisons me with eternal suffering. I am not the right audience for this kind of stuff, but I feel like we all knew one person in high school who most definitely was. I will tell you that when I was like 14 we convinced my mom to put the three tape edition of these movies on layaway at Kmart and she never asked any follow up questions, which was nice for us.