“How do you feel?” “Terrible. I must have gone to bed sober.” Few runs can compare with it: five novels in five years, lean and mean books that exited the ring with victory assured: no one afterward could say that hard-boiled novels couldn’t be great art, at least nobody worth taking seriously. Then, just forty years old and for reasons still speculated about and still unknown, he stopped writing. The Thin Man was final book. The protagonist is Nick Charles, a private detective remarkably perceptive […]
She Prefers To
At eighteen, Keiko Furukura, a strange, adrift young woman, landed a part-time job at a convenience store. It gave her a uniform, and an identity; more, it gave her a purpose: the dead-end job as moral calling. As others have noted, she’s a reverse Bartleby. Where Melville’s character preferred not to fulfill his duties, Furukura lives for hers. As she grows older (the bulk of the novel takes place when she’s thirty-six), her family and friends hector her: when will she get married, or get […]
She Just Hasn’t Met You Yet
Picture Death. What do you see? If it’s a pale, thin girl with big hair, dark clothing, and a silver ankh, Neil Gaiman’s to blame. In a moment of inspiration that will long outlive him, he chose to make his personification of death not terrifying or beautiful but cute. Over the course of Absolute Death (which collects two miniseries, three one-off stories, and various ephemera), she quotes Mary Poppins, jokes about pigeons, and ushers the newly dead into the afterlife. Her first appearance was in “The Sound of Her […]
You Got Me Readin’ Hell’s Bells
Dave Eggers has written that his mother read a horror novel every night. “I couldn’t look at her books,” he wrote. “[I] would turn them over so their covers wouldn’t show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood–especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.” If that was ever true of Grady Hendrix, great enthusiast of and advocate for grim books, it’s not now. The author of Horrorstor has put out a celebration of the kind […]
All The Hard Times Are Coming
“Looking out at the ice-cold water all around me I can’t feel any traces of that other place” –Vampire Weekend, “Diplomat’s Son” Less than a year ago, The New Yorker published Ronan Farrow’s article “From Aggressive Overtures To Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories.” It propelled the young journalist, son of Mia Farrow, into the spotlight, which wasn’t the point; Farrow insisted that the stage belonged to the brave women who had been willing to risk their careers, and more, to tell their stories. […]
The Way Out Is Through
An under-remarked facet of Stephen King’s genius is his eye. Like John Updike or Joseph Conrad, he sees more than we do, then carefully sets down what he sees, until a bright yellow bra strap or red lips moving in a black goatee become sharp, silvery hooks. Try and free yourself. The Outsider, in which that eye sees quite a bit, is at least two novels, imperfectly grafted. The first–and best–centers on a Little League baseball coach arrested for a terrible violation: the rape and murder […]