Things have Gotten Worse since We Last Spoke
“I was going to begin this with some absurd comment about the irony of posting about an apple peeler in a queer discussion forum when most of us are probably upset by the mere mention of the word “fruit.”
The most of this novella takes place on line in various communications between two people in a kind of fledgling and then growing, and then increasingly obsessive relationship. The tone and genre implications here really sell the horror in this story as the relationship grows and grows in intensity. What this best captures for me is the intensity of the early 2000s (and late 1990s as well to a lesser extent) of life online and the way that these growing intense feelings made between two people who might possibly never meet. Sure there are things like OKCupid and other dating sites, but the specific ways in which a budding between two people not ostensibly looking for a relationship or not on a site that is designed for this really changes things. I once ended up dating someone for six months who messaged me on MySpace, and the weird, growing intensity (combined with the specific life situation I was in at the time) really did blow quickly in both good and bad ways.
We can Never Leave this Place
“There are times when I look back on moments from my life as if my recollections were living things, little organisms confined to glass vases I’m meant to nurture and care for.”
This is a kind of fantasy horror novella, that also feel post-apocalyptic in its own way as well. Our narrator is a girl whose father is missing or who has disappeared, and her mother seems to be fracturing at the seams as well. One day a man shows up at the door, apparently some kind of circus performer who also seems to be a spider? and offers the two women some kind of relief from their trauma. As the mother becomes increasingly under the charms of this mysterious figure, the girl finds her own feelings becoming wrapped up in a different mysterious figure.
The novella is nightmarish and dreamlike in almost equal measures, and the story, as much as there is one, is increasingly fraught and intense.
Fletch
“‘What’s your name?’
‘Fletch.’
‘What’s your full name?’
‘Fletcher.’
I read this book when I was a kid (and I have no idea why) having seen the movie several times (and I have no idea why). Tonally they’re close, but distinct, with the book being a little darker and grittier, more ironic than sarcastic, and less laugh out loud funny. At the time I would have guessed it was the novelization of the movie, and had the cover from the movie, but the series has 11 books, and it won several Edgar awards among others.
The novel begins with Alan Stanwyck asking Fletch to follow him back to his house where he tells him that he wants Fletch to pretend to break into this house in about a week, and to for real murder him. For this Fletch will need a pair of gloves to avoid fingerprints and a passport. Fletch had been on the beach for a story he was writing for a local newspaper, and presumably, because he was undercover, Stanwyck did not know he wasn’t a drifter or junkie, but actually a reporter. This means that Fletch now has two mysteries to resolve here in this novel: who is the source for drugs on the beach and what’s up with Alan Stanwyck? And of course, the reader is left wondering, will these two stories be connected?
Fletch is also twice-married and twice-divorced, and I have to tell you that when the second novel in the series has adequately dealt with this narratively, we are better off because Fletch’s hatred for divorce, alimony, and one of his ex-wife’s attorney wears thin pretty quickly here. This adds some additional narrative tension, but it just feels tonally kind of grating.
The book is also very much an early 1970s book in a lot of ways, with a tone of a 1980s book. It’s about drug crime, it’s about insurance fraud, it’s about demimonde, and it’s about sorting out the nation’s malaise in the era of Watergate, even if it’s never named.
Confess, Fletch
“Fletch snapped on the light and looked into the den.”
The first book feels very much of the 1970s, but oddly this second book feels much more like the 1950s, especially because of the way Fletch has become a Tom Ripley like character, or at least a character from a Patricia Highsmith novel here. For reasons that happen at the end of Fletch, Fletch has been living in Italy and writing about art. Now’s he’s in Boston in order to track down some missing artwork, and when he shows up at the apartment he’s borrowing on a ex-pat exchange, he finds a dead, naked woman on the floor. He calls the police, has a drink, and waits. Soon after the Boston police inspector, Flynn (who will get his own series of novels later) questions him as if he’s guilty, but doesn’t arrest him as if he’s innocent. Fletch’s nonchalance seems to indicate innocence, but circumstances, which grow throughout the novel, seem to indicate he’s very guilty. Regardless, the novel progresses.
This one feels a lot more confident and settled from the first one. There’s a lot less set-dressing and world-building, and the mystery has a lot more time to meander and cook. Flynn is a ridiculous character in a lot of ways, but compelling, and Fletch’s misogyny and homophobia also recede here (though not entirely).
This is also the one that the new movie is based on, even though I’ve not seen it personally.
Billy and the Mini-Monsters: Monsters in the Dark
I randomly had this book included in my Thriftbooks order, and since it was extra and not an accidental replacement of the book I ordered I read it. The book is presented as a kind of chapter book with some elements of graphic novels as well. This means that there are tons of illustrations in addition to narration paragraphs and dialog bubbles. The story takes place around bedtime as Billy is trying to go to sleep but only thinking about monsters. This is ironic because there are monsters in Billy’s bedroom, and they’re about to make an appearance. Luckily for Billy, they are small, not dangerous, and cute. So you can more or less guess the story from here. Main takeaway is that there is a fart monster.
One thing that stands out to me here is that the book is also an advertisement for other books in the series, which is no problem, but that also this means selling on the specific merits of the book itself as a reading tool. I get it, but I also kind of hate it. As an English teacher, I already hate reading materials that are designed purely as reading materials, and it’s not to say that this book is only that, but that’s part of how it presents itself. I would feel a little cheated as a kid knowing that.
Thinner
“‘Thinner'”
This is the one of the Richard Bachman books that Stephen King wrote, the first four, Roadwork, The Long Walk, The Running Man, and Rage, all being collected as “The Bachman Books.” It also feels like the one that Stephen King even feels like he’s pushing it — having a character directly say something like ‘What do you think this is a Stephen King book?” — it just feels like you’re trying to get caught there.
And what exactly is a Stephen King book and why is this not one? I think the main difference as far as this book is concerned is that this is a relatively slim book, and the premise, once it gets going, is taken for accepted without trying to spend too much time investigating the backstory and history of it. It’s not entirely true, but certainly more so than a lot of Stephen King books.
The premise is that a lawyer from a small town in Connecticut gets cursed walking out of a court proceeding in which manslaughter charges against him have been dropped. The man who curses him is a Roma man who was the father of the woman that the lawyer killed with his car weeks before. The man tells the lawyer “Thinner” and that’s it. A few days later he starts noticing that he’s lost weight. Stephen King has always had a thing about weight in his books (although he himself has fluctuated throughout his career) and one of the weirder things here is that the guy keeps getting talked about like he’s the fattest guy in town, but he only weighs 250 pounds. It’s a good round number though so as he starts to lose more and more weight from the curse, it’s easy to keep that one in mind. At first the weightloss feels good to Billy, but his wife is worried about cancer. But his health comes back clear. But he keeps losing weight, and fast. Eventually he talks to the judge, a friend, and it turns out that the judge was also cursed (with a kind of scleroderma type disorder, and the local police chief with horrible acne). So Billy starts hunting after the old man to reverse the curse. Leading of course, to a big showdown.
I loved this book as a kid mainly because as a fat kid, I would have loved a curse for a bit. That’s part of the horribleness of American culture at play here. Stephen King sees obesity in some bad ways, but also clearly taps into diet culture and especially the hatred America has for fatness. He also clearly views it through the lens of addiction here, as a lot of the book also spends some time thinking about smoking.
Fatherland
This is one of those books I first learned about when I was a kid, and had that “whoooooooaaaaa” moment you get with alternate histories. I probably felt the same way about Hitler’s Germany in general. But I had also seen them in Indiana Jones and other movies long before I knew they were real and what they seemed to mean about humanity. The novel takes place in an alternate 1960s in Nazi Germany, twenty years after the end of WWII, a war it seems Germany did not lose. They also didn’t entirely win, as we find out later, what more or less happen. The US never entered the war. Robert Harris does a mostly solid and successful job at keeping the details to the world at large close the chest so that we don’t just get an information dump. The novel at times struggles with some narration issues. For example, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have the narrative voice live within the confines of Nazi Germany, but then to explain the Nazi military ranks by way of English and American military ranks. But for the most part he keeps the reveals as organic as possible. Sometimes though he revels in his cleverness — like revealing exactly which Kennedy happens to be president.
The novel focuses on a local police inspector, who because of a law must be a member of the SS, who responds to the report of a body floating in a lake. He arrives, finds the body, and questions the witness. Noticing some inconsistencies with the witness report he presses, and the result is a suspicion, not about guilt, but about the nature exactly what did happen. The body presents an issue too as the older man is immediately recognizable and does not have any ID.
From there, it becomes increasingly clear that March is not an active or vociferous Nazi official, and his waning enthusiasm (dead, actually) will cost him in this novel. In a way, it’s like the ways in which you see characters in dystopian novels become disillusioned with the regime and try to fake a feeling that is long gone. We see it primarily in his inability to fake enjoying time with his estranged son on a trip associated with the Hitler Youth.
As the body is eventually identified, the mystery starts taking shape. I think this is a pretty compelling book and a knockout debut really, and worth checking out if alternate history is of interest.
Enigma
“Cambridge in the fourth winter of the war: a ghost town.”
Another early Robert Harris novel, this time taking place in and around Bletchley Park in the middle of the war. Robert Harris has invented some codebreakers for us and put them in pursuit of a real problem, and created some both real and fabricated stakes in this novel. A huge convoy, the first of many, will be shipping from the United States soon, and the codebreakers need to break the dead period in their codebreakers or else risk the supplies and lives on the convoy. We know as readers that this convoy is meant to set up the eventually invasion of France, but the codebreakers don’t. Their breaking has dried up as the predictable procedure of the German navy allowed them to exploit the commands for several months, but changes to that and the possibility of a more complex machine being used has turned this into an even deadlier set of stakes. In addition, the real possibility of a mole has further tightened things up as the novel moves forward.
I have only read the WWII Robert Harris books, and for now that’s all I am interested in, but he does a pretty good job of nestling a procedural mystery into a historical novel for a compelling, if dreadfully serious book.
