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 The Gutter and the Grave (1958)
by Ed McBain
217 pages - Hard Case Crime
This pulp mystery novel was originally published under the pen name Curt Cannon and titled I'm Cannon - for Hire. The current title was the one preferred by the author. The story follows the adventures of Matt Cordell, who used to be a successful private investigator, but after a series of tragedies he's just another wino hanging about in New York City's Bowery. An old acquaintance tracks him down and pretty soon he is caught in a web of murders and affairs and corrupt cops.
Probably the best thing to do with this novel is to go in with lowered expectations. The main character is supposed to be a homeless alcoholic, but still every attractive woman he runs into comes on to him, and he's able to fight back against toughs, as well as of course solve the convoluted mystery. It's basically full of cliches, but not in a way that I found very entertaining.
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 The Confession (2004)
by Domenic Stansberry
218 pages - Hard Case Crime
The narrator of this novel treats everything in it as his 'confession', which he is writing out, but how much he is actually confessing is, in the end, left up to the reader to determine. Jake Danser is a forensic psychologist living and working in the suburbs of San Francisco, married to a wealthy slightly older woman, and with the personality of a real jerk, complete with ponytail (I think it's a rule that any male urban professional sporting a ponytail is a grade-A ass). He acts as a witness for the defense in the case of a man accused of strangling his girlfriend, but soon the events move much closer to home when he is accused in the similar strangling death of his own mistress. The plot thickens when his estranged wife re-ignites her relationship with the prosecuting attorney in the case.
This novel is a lot different than many of the Hard Case Crime books, as much of the action is internal, dealing with the various thoughts and emotions and possible evasions in the narrator's account. Some people may find that indulgent, but I enjoyed it very much, and even with the occasional references to psychological theory or metaphysical and religious philosophy, I never thought it got too pretentious. Quite a good read, and I liked the writing style enough that I'll keep my eyes open for more of the author's work.
This was the winner of the 2005 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.
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 Fade to Blonde (2004)
by Max Phillips
220 pages - Hard Case Crime
 Ray Corson moved out to Los Angeles following his dream of being a writer, but ended up just getting one or two roles as an extra in films, and then working some odd jobs, including being a bodyguard, before settling in on being a sort of handyman. But his life changes when an odd-looking blonde, Rebecca LaFontaine, seeks him out and hires him to deal with a gangster who's been bothering her - deal with him by killing him, if necessary. But Corson wants to investigate more first, and ends up moving through dope parties and gangster-run clubs and other fixtures of 1950s California. This book won the 2005 Shamus Award for best paperback original.
The author Phillips is apparently more of a 'literary' author who wrote this novel for reasons I'm not sure of, but are probably easy to guess. And there's signficant skill displayed in the prose; in sharp, well-drawn descriptions of people and places, and the noir-style wisecracks that are peppered throughout ("Her hair was done Kim Novak-style and blonde enough to hurt. You could have sterilized a cut by running your fingers through that hair." pg.151). But unfortunately it's all in the service of a plot that's not just ludicrous, but entirely incomprehensible in the way it plays out. I have no idea why any of the things happen, or why the characters act the way they do. Someone hires you to 'stop/kill' another person, and so you start investigating every scrap of paper you come across, join a mob and start into the drug trade, get all Dirty Harry on brothels, etc? Maybe I just missed something, but the motivations didn't make any sense to me at all. Which ruined the enjoyment of what could have been a good read.
There was also a definite air of mean-spiritedness that didn't sit right with me, and wasn't necessary merely to be faithful to the characters and their world.
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 The Vengeful Virgin (1958)
by Gil Brewer
220 pages - Hard Case Crime
Jack Ruxton never accomplished much in his life, and now runs a small home electronics sales and repair shop in Florida. One day he's called over to install some televisions and an intercom system in the home of an old sick man whose only caretaker is his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, the smouldering Shirley Angela. Pretty soon the house-bound teen and the dim-witted repairman have a plan in place to knock off the old man and keep the contents of his bank account.
There's some promise in the early set-up of the story, and Brewer certainly knows how to use his powers of description to make a woman an object of lust. But the biggest flaw is that Jack the narrator is dumb as a post. The plot he devises is obviously full of many things that can go wrong, and then when things start to happen, he seems oblivious to even the most basic details (as in, not having a clue what would happen with the estate after death, not realizing that there would be a funeral - though the author seems to be aware of these faults in thinking). And then, what happens in the last 20 pages or so really doesn't mach with the way the characters have been built up in the novel.
I will say, though, that that is probably the most fetching book cover I have seen.
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Grifter's Game (originally published as 'Mona' - 1961)
by Lawrence Block
205 pages - Hard Case Crime
The narrator is a grifter, drifting from town to town, skipping out on hotel bills and women after availing himself of their services for a few weeks. When he arrives at Atlantic City he needs some luggage and so just takes someone else's, but finds a surprise when he opens it up. And then he falls in love with a girl on the beach, but she's married to a much older man, and they begin to think it might be to their advantage to get him out of the picture.
This isn't a book to read if you're looking for very sympathetic characters. At the beginning, the narrator is extremely cynical and materialistic; some of his better qualities are discovered partway through the book, but the ending is much darker than you might imagine. But I also think there's something very interesting happening under the surface events. Or it's possible that I'm reading more into the story than is there. But it does feel a bit like a low-rent Crime and Punishment or something by Graham Greene.
It's hard to believe that nobody has turned this into a movie. It's direct and to the point, full of tension, and has great potential in the scenery of places visited in the story such as Atlantic City, New York City, Miami Beach, Nevada, and points between. I kept thinking of this as either a black-and-white film noir or something in Technicolor. Anyway, for a pulp crime book, it's a great read.
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Enchanted Night: A Novella (1999)
by Steven Millhauser
109 pages - Crown Publishers
'Memory keeps turning into imagination.' (pg.33) This short little book takes place in the space of a single summer night in Connecticut, from just past midnight until the break of dawn, under an almost-full moon. It's divided into small pieces that start at the top of the page, and usually end on that same page as well. In this one night the town sees, among other things, several restless young girls leaving their houses, a failed 39-year-old writer's wanderings, an auto mechanic in love with a shop window mannequin, a beach that's home to both lovers and loners, and a group of teen girls that break into people's houses, snack in their living rooms, and leave a note saying "We are your daughters". This is a really fantastic piece of writing - lyrical, evocative, and full of heart. Millhauser has taken all the magic of summer nights and put it in between two covers. 'Because when you are known, then you lose yourself, but when you are hidden, then you are free.' (pg.105)
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Top of the Heap (1952)
by Erle Stanley Gardner (writing as A.A. Fair)
222 pages - Hard Case Crime
Erle Stanley Gardner is best known as the creator of Perry Mason. But among his other writings was the Cool & Lam series, written under the pen name A.A. Fair. This is a novel from the middle of the series, which focuses on the detective agency run by Bertha Cool (which she shortens for business to B. Cool...get it? ahahaha...erm) and Donald Lam.
In this novel a rich man comes to the agency asking them to track down a couple of women he spent an evening with in Los Angeles, and pays far over the going rate. The job is easily done, but Lam feels that it was almost too easy, and suspects that the agency is being set up to support a phony alibi. He goes up to San Francisco to investigate, and gets involved in web of crimes that involve, among other things, hit-and-run, an underground casino, mining scams, stock manipulation, and two murders.
The story is relatively entertaining, and probably good enough for a book to carry around when running various errands. Like a lot of these types of quickly-churned-out novels, I think it would benefit immensely if more effort was put into characterization and atmosphere. The book gets a little convoluted at the halfway point, then a lot convoluted near the end, where there's about twenty pages of straight exposition, and the names became a blur until I stopped trying to make sense of it. Actually, I'm still not sure what happened exactly.
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House of Leaves (2000)
by Mark Z. Danielewski
709 pages - Pantheon Books
I can't quite remember why I bought this book about four years ago, but I did. It looks very interesting physically, being very large and 700 pages thick, and when you flip through it it grabs your attention, with a lot of interesting stuff done with typography and different fonts. It consists of a document written by an old blind man, a sort of academic criticism of a film that apparently doesn't exist, a documentary about a family that moves into a house and suddenly finds new corridors appearing that go off seemingly into infinity. This whole document is framed by the words of Johnny Truant, a substance-abusing apprentice at a tattoo shop living in Los Angeles, who discovered the document and keeps interposing himself through footnotes.
The book was quite captivating for the first 100 pages or so, and I was really enjoying it as a sort of metaphor about all things that are bigger on the inside as compared to the outside: books, people, etc. But the author gets more and more self-indulgent and pretty soon you are reading very dry criticism of fictional material, and reading through page after page of lists of names or construction materials or whatever the author probably did an internet search on that day. I would say the three all-time dullest things to read are verbal descriptions of cinematography, academic criticism, and endless footnotes (which often are footnoted themselves) - and this book is basically full of all three. Luckily it's not really 700 pages long, as there are several hundred-page sections that you can flip through in about five minutes, as they mostly just contain a sentence or two and the only thing slowing you down is having to constantly turn the book to read the material that's upside-down or sideways. Which all sounds a lot more cool and fun than it really is.
It's too bad, because I thought that there was some real potential in several parts of the story, whether it be the spooky house with corridors that appear, or Johnny Truant's obviously made-up accounts of his increasingly wild sex and drug benders with women straight out of a wet dream; but none of these things were followed up on or developed. For the first little bit I could kind of suspend my disbelief at the way the family (seemingly quite well off financially too) just kept living in the house with their kids as crazy stuff happened, because I reasoned out that it was more metaphorical. But after a while the characters stop being real at all and end up just being plot devices. And I don't know what kind of person would see their already creepy house filled with several bloody, mutilated, dead and dying bodies, and then a few months later just move back in and decide that it's kind of a fixer-upper. One of the appendixes at the end has letters from Truant's mother who is in a mental institution, and though they're supposedly from an American in the 1980s, to show off Danielewski has her sound like some sort of Oxford professor in the 19th century. Bad characterization, bad writing - this whole book was just a bad idea.
A question I've found myself asking a lot lately, about things like books and movies, but regarding other stuff too, is, "What is the purpose of this thing's existence?" Is there anything here that needs to be said, any value or admirable quality? Books like this get labelled as 'pretentious' but I'm not sure that's the right word. Maybe 'conceited' or 'presumptuous'.
By the way, the author is actually the brother of the musician who goes by the name of Poe, and her second album Haunted supposedly has some ties to this book.
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The Keep (1981)
by F. Paul Wilson
406 pages - Berkley Books
In 1941, a detachment of German troops is sent to set up an outpost in a pass in the Transylvanian Alps, in a keep that is believed to have been built in the fifteenth century, and has since been kept up in perfect condition -- though its builders, owners, and current source of funds for upkeep are unknown. When the Germans arrive they find that the stone walls are covered in metal crosses. On the first night one soldier is viciously killed, and every night that they stay there one person dies, no matter what precautions they take. The strange events prompt an SS squad to join them, as well as an old Jewish scholar and his daughter.
That's a pretty interesting setup for a story, and that's the main reason I wanted to read this. And there is a small amount of atmosphere built up at the beginning, though that is quickly lost as things proceed along. What I realized as I was reading it was that, although there's not anything specifically wrong with the book, it's probably the most uninspired book I've read in years. There's no sign of any personality or depth, and I'd say it's written at about a grade five reading level. This is the way I imagine book #25 in a franchise would read like. 400+ pages of fluff. I was really determined to finish reading it anyway, but finally, having gotten to page 237, I was just too hungry to read something much better.
Michael Mann made a film version of the story, in what most people call an interesting failure. I caught a small bit of it on TV one time, including the score by Tangerine Dream, and I kind of wish I had seen the whole thing. Different versions pop up on TV now and again, or are played at festivals, but because of the displeasure of many people involved, it's never been released on DVD, or even had a definitive cut.
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The Colorado Kid (2005)
by Stephen King
184 pages - Hard Case Crime
On an island on the coast of Maine, two old men who work at the weekly paper tell their young female intern about a story from 25 years ago, about a man who was found dead on a beach without any identification. Eventually they find out he had disappeared from his job in Colorado in mid-morning of the previous day, without any apparent reason for disappearing, or travelling, or dying. It's also unknown if he was murdered, and if so, how.
I try to read as little Stephen King as possible. I find his writing incredibly plodding and ungraceful. King also seems to find it necessary to inject either a bunch of hokey down-home language and expressions (as he does here) or a lot of curse-words in order to try and somehow appear more like 'just folks' and not seem pretentious (though in my opinion purposely aiming your writing to a less-sophisticated level does precisely the opposite). I picked this up because it is part of the Hard Case Crime line; apparently when King was approached to write a forward, he instead offered the publishers an entire short novel, and they were understandably unwilling to turn down the world's best-selling living novelist.
But this book is really just a couple of old people chatting; though you'd find a more compelling story just dropping into any seniors home. There's really not much of anything to the story, and the two older characters are incredibly annoying, while the female intern is a blank slate. Seems to be a real 'love-it-or-hate-it' book, looking at the reviews of others.
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Amphigorey Again (2006)
by Edward Gorey
260 pages - Harcourt
I just recently learned of the existence of this fourth Amphigorey collection, put together after the death of Edward Gorey. As with the other three previous collections, this collects his various works, including some that were left uncompleted by his death. It's not exactly a surprise to find an 'odds & ends' collection to not quite blow your socks off, but I'd say that actually the first Amphigorey collection was by far the best, and contained the cream of the crop, and the ones that follow are more varied in quality.
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Money Shot (2008)
by Christa Faust
250 pages - Hard Case Crime
Angel Dare is a retired porn star who now runs an agency that handles female talent. An old friend asks her to come out of retirement to do a scene, but when she shows up she is beaten, raped, shot, and left for dead in the trunk of a car. She manages to survive, but her entire world changes as she tries to hunt down the people that did this to her and are now also targeting her friends, tries to track down the suitcase of money they are all after, and needs to dodge the law since she has been framed for various crimes.
Obviously, going by the cheeky title and the plot line, this isn't going to be an in-depth, introspective novel; it's a page-turner, and does pretty well at creating a mood and moving the action forward (almost every chapter ends with a teaser where I felt like I *had* to keep reading). The momentum of the story does slow a bit in the second half, but it's still a pretty satisfying light read. Needless to say, because of the world of the protagonist there's quite a bit of swearing and other risque content, though it's still very much a hardboiled crime book. None of the characters seem to have any second thoughts about revenge killing.
I think the main fault of the book that kept sticking out is that Malloy, the part-time security guy that helps out the protagonist, and becomes the second most prominent character in the story, is never fleshed out very much and seems like a blank slate with James Bond-like abilities -- both to outfight and outwit the enemy -- whenever they're needed. I also would have liked to have seen more exploration of the atmosphere and setting of Los Angeles, especially the seedier side of it. I know pulp novels place an economy on words, but more attention to the setting would have enriched the novel greatly.
This is the first time I've read anything from Hard Case Crime, a publisher devoted to both re-printing old hardboiled pulp classics and publishing new books with the same spirit. They're obviously not as challenging as the 'great works of literature', but I can see myself reading more of these.
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The Victim (1947)
by Saul Bellow
294 pages - The Vanguard Press
'In these cases, though, you get all kinds of rumors. Who knows? The truth is hard to get at. If your life depended on getting it, you'd probably hang. I don't have to tell you how it is. This one says this, and that one says that. Y says oats, and Z says hay, and chances are...it's buckwheat. Nobody can tell you except the fellow that harvested it. To the rest it's all theory.'(pg.87) Asa Leventhal lived through some difficult times in his young adulthood, but now has reasonably established himself in a respectable job, married and living in New York City. While his wife is away at her mother's during the summer, Leventhal runs into Allbee, a man who he's only met on a few occasions, but who has noticeably come down in the world. Allbee blames Leventhal for ruining his life, and doing it maliciously. Allbee keeps on harassing Leventhal, and though Leventhal is annoyed by this, he is also afraid that there may be some truth to what is being said. Adding to Leventhal's stress during the summer is the illness of a child in his brother's family. What this novel really does well is explore the inner chaos that can result when you are obsessed with what other people might be thinking of you, and the impossibility of getting a clear picture of what opinion people really have of you. There are some very good sections, but others are quite dull, especially in the group conversation scenes, and Bellow regarded his first two novels (of which this is the second) as the 'apprenticeship' before his real work. Just as the first, Dangling Man borrowed its structure from Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, many people see a parallel between this novel and two Dostoevsky stories, The Eternal Husband and The Double. Another possible symbolic level is a sort of transposition of the story of World War II, specifically the Holocaust, as Leventhal is Jewish while Allbee, who heaps blame for all his troubles on him, is a gentile; a possible interpretation that gains more validity in the last few pages of the novel with an attempted poisoning by gas. 'You couldn't find a place in your feelings for everything, or give at every touch like a swinging door, the same for everyone, with people going in and out as they pleased. On the other hand, if you shut yourself up, not wanting to be bothered, then you were like a bear in a winter hole, or like a mirror wrapped in a piece of flannel. And like such a mirror you were in less danger of being broken, but you didn't flash, either. But you had to flash. That was the peculiar thing. Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.' (pg.98)
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Lynch on Lynch (1997)
edited by Chris Rodley
269 pages - Faber and Faber
'I'd like to bite my paintings, but I can't because there's lead in the paint.' (pg.18) A book-length interview with film director David Lynch, which also touches upon his other art, such as painting, which is actually what he started out doing. This edition goes up to the film Lost Highway, though apparently there is a new edition out that interviews him further about more recent projects. I haven't seen all of Lynch's work, and I can't say that I like everything I've seen, but I found it really rewarding to read what he says about his work and his methods. One day I would love to meet him and we could go to a Big Boy diner and have a couple of milkshakes and have conversations like this: 'I happen to like electricity but I'm not really wild about the new plugs in America. I like forties and thirties electricity. And I like smokestack industry. I like fire, and I like smoke, and I like the noise. But sounds have become little.' (pg.73) It would be awesome. 'Well, film is really voyeurism. You sit there in the safety of the theatre, and seeing is such a powerful thing. And we want to see secret things, we really want to see them. New things. It drives you nuts you know! And the more new and secret they are, the more we want to see them.' (pg.145)
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Peace (1975)
by Gene Wolfe
264 pages - Orb
The narrator is Alden Dennis Weer, an old man wandering through the rooms of a large house which incorporates rooms from different times in his life. As he goes searching for his pocket-knife, various episodes of his life in the American Midwestern town of Cassionville come back to life, and, among other things, create a sort of personal history of the twentieth century. There are many memorable stories, but even more memorable are the stories-within-stories, such as the purchase of the chinese Easter egg, or the tale of St.Brendan and the cat and the dog, or the story of the apprentice pharmacist in a Florida town, the books of Gold, and the story of the young Chinese man who meets an old man in a hostel and gets to sleep on the old man's magic headrest.
The prose here is just wonderful, and is some of the best Wolfe has ever written. He is sort of channeling Proust and a bit of Joyce, as filtered through the Arabian Nights and the vast influence of middle America, with a guest appearance of some H.P. Lovecraft for good measure. I don't suppose there's any way of saying more about the plot without possibly including 'spoilers', but I don't think knowing any plot details can spoil a genuinely good book, though you should probably skip the rest if you don't want to know.
It was pretty clear to me even before I read much of the interesting speculation about this book on the internet, that Weer is actually dead, even though he seems as yet to be unaware of it. In fact, he isn't only dead, but he has awakened long after the human race has died out, and is in fact the last soul on earth. The large mansion which he wanders through, which he says he's built for himself to mimic many of the rooms he encountered in life (including the views out the windows) has a strong parallel to some of the memory devices people used before literacy was widespread, where they would create a house in their minds, and every object in it would be a reminder of something. So, my interpretation is that Weer is sort of circling and circling around in his memories as he tries to find peace about the things he's done in his life, as well as receiving clues about the reality of his situation.
This is at least the third time I've read this book, and it still really stands up. Perhaps a bit melancholy, but excellent. I also re-read a related short story:
"The Changeling" (1968) - collected in Castle of Days
A short story of about 10 pages about a man who went over to fight in the Korean war, got captured and then went over to the other side, and worked in China for a while before deciding to come back to the US. After getting out of jail, he returns to his hometown of Cassionville, even though he has no more family. He stays with a family he knew before, though he is shocked to find that one of their three children seems not to have aged a day, though nobody even hints at acknowledging it except the boy's father. The island on the river on which some of the story takes place is mentioned in Peace
( An excerpt of a section right near the end of Peace )
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Death is a Lonely Business (1985)
by Ray Bradbury
232 pages - Avon Books
It's the early 1950's in decaying Venice, California, and the narrator is a struggling writer based very much on Bradbury himself. While his girlfriend is away in Mexico and he is trying to make ends meet writing science fiction, a series of unfortunate events befalls his friends and neighbours, where they disappear or are found dead, and the narrator begins to suspect a single cause that is responsible, feeding on those who are filled with loneliness and/or despair.
This isn't considered one of Bradbury's classic works, but I wanted to re-read it because I had quite a positive impression of it. Having read it again, I can say that it's certainly a book of two halves. The first is very strong, and builds up an exquisite atmosphere of Venice, with fogs and rain and deserted carnivals and abandoned canals. However, in the second half the style really changes, and is more dialogue-based and 'zany', which is a characteristic of the last few decades of Bradbury's writing. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he'd taken an old uncompleted manuscript and finished it up, as he has done with other works.
So, I guess I loved the heavy atmosphere of the first part, but the flippant tone in the second half kind of soured me a bit on the book. There was a time when I considered Bradbury to be my favourite writer, but that's changed, even though I really treasure the memories of reading his material.
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Dangling Man (1944)
by Saul Bellow
143 pages - Penguin Classics
This is the diary of Joseph during the Second World War - a diary he keeps while idling around Chicago waiting to be called up for the military. He quit his job almost a year ago as he was about to be drafted, but as he was born in Canada (as was Bellow himself), various procedural red tape has been holding that up, and so he just lives in a rooming house along with his employed wife. The diary charts his thoughts, rants, and a few encounters in which he often embarrasses himself or quickly becomes angry.
This is Bellow's first published novel, and it does end up being a bit scattered and uneven in quality. There are some really excellent passages, but other parts seem to meander for pages and pages without coming to any particular point. It's not quite Notes from Underground, but it is a good illustration of an isolated and alienated individual who is mostly cut off from outside society, and the frustration he experiences when he tries to solely rely on his own individual faculties.
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Seize the Day (1956)
by Saul Bellow
135 pages - Penguin Books
This novella follows a day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, general failure. He is 44 years old and living in a hotel in New York City that is mostly populated by elderly residents such as his father. Wilhelm dropped out of college to pursue a movie acting career in Hollywood for the slimmest of reasons, and then went into sales for children's furniture, a job he also quit. He is married with two children but separated from his family. During the course of the day he will feel the pressures on him increase as he needs money, but the last of it has been entrusted to an investment made by Dr. Tamkin, another resident of the hotel.
This is a great, involving little book. You very effectively sense the despair and helplessness of Wilhelm - he has nowhere to turn, no one that will give him support, or useful advice, while he is stuck inside a society who only values you if you can steadily generate an income. Wilhelm is both damnable and sympathetic - you see how he has made bad choices, and keeps on making bad choices, but he in many ways is no worse than others who have been far more 'successful' in life. I find Tamkin a very interesting character - he seems like a charlatan, though he dispenses some pearls of wisdom along with his tall tales, and I wonder if even the negative influence that he has on Wilhelm's life doesn't end up helping Wilhelm in the end. If I could pick out a single theme from this work, I think Bellow is saying that sorrow is a part of life that we need to embrace, and when we try and run away from it it is only to our own detriment.
But the mistake couldn't be undone now, so why must his father continually remind him how he had sinned? It was too late. He would have to go back to the pathetic day when the sin was committed. And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father's. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then general forgiveness. Didn't he suffer from his mistakes far more than his father could?
"Oh, God." Wilhelm prayed. "Let me out of my trouble. let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy." (pg.27)
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Black Hole (2005)
by Charles Burns
352 pages - Pantheon
It's the seventies in a mid-sized town in the northwest United States, and many of the teens are spending their days drinking, doing drugs, and having sex. There is some kind of disease going around that is transmitted by the exchange of bodily fluids that causes strange deformations in whoever has it. This story, originally put out in a series of comic books now collected here in a single volume, follows some teens who catch the disease and drop out of society, and others who don't get it but still try to be friends with those who are suffering. This is set to be turned into a film scripted by Neil Gaiman and directed by David Fincher.
The 'high school horror' has so much potential, but this book pretty much misses out on all of it. You never learn is what 'baseline normality' is in this world, so it's kind of odd when someone develops little mouth-like lesions on their body that can talk, and others just shrug it off. Mutants seem to be a very secret thing, but then much later on in the book you see one in line in KFC, and everyone treats the situation like just an unpleasant aspect of the world. Also, the dialog is really wooden and all of these characters are pretty much just alcoholic, drug-taking zeroes without even the glimmer of potential for anything better. The artwork throughout is very impressive though, it's too bad it wasn't in the service of a better story (or, really, even a coherent story).
Trivia Footnote: Thanks to this book, I won't be totally lost should I ever find myself having sex with a girl with a tail.
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The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998)
by Joyce Carol Oates
323 pages - Plume
A collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates. Some of these are what you could think of as her standard kind of story, while others are more dream-like, or have more of an obvious element of fantasy or horror. Twenty-seven stories are included, grouped into five sections; which is a way Oates often arranges her short story collections, though it's up to the reader to guess at the common theme in each grouping.
Some of the highlights are: "██████" about the recall of a childhood experience that contains a lot of incomplete, confused, and missing memories; "Labor Day" about a missing child in a beachfront community; and "Unprintable" in which an abortion-rights activist attends a function on her birthday, and thinks about how her own parents had desired to abort her, while she is also haunted by her own aborted fetuses, and those of the women she has counseled.
But, I think the most remarkable story here is "The Affliction", which is a really powerful metaphorical story. On the surface it's about a person with a strange physical mutation that's extremely painful, but that he finds a way to turn into something else. What it's a metaphor for is pretty clear to me, but I think it's probably best discovered by each individual reading the story.
Not every story here is wonderful, but quite a few of them are; it's a very strong collection, and I have to marvel in admiration at how Oates can just kick out high quality story after story after story.
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