A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Most of what I knew about A Separate Peace before reading it was that it was one of those 20th century curriculum books like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies that schools like to assign, and that Lisa and Grandma Simpson hate it. I also struggled to see how it fit in with Knowles’ other work until I realized I was mixing him up with John Fowles. That’s what they get for having names that rhyme.

The story takes place at a New England boarding school called Devon during the middle years of World War II. The narrator, Gene Forrester, is a top student who is enamoured with his roommate Phineas, a preternaturally gifted athlete whose breezy way of life and effortless charm make him Gene’s perfect foil. Despite their difference, the two are close friends, though Gene harbours a one-sided resentment of Phineas that festers into a paranoid assumption that his pranks and amusements are intended to undercut Gene’s academic success.

Gene eventually realizes his mistake, but rather than clean the infection, understanding merely drives it deeper, ultimately causing him to knock Phineas out of a tree and cause him a life-altering injury. The rest of the book deal with the consequences of this action. Like the bone in his leg, Phineas’ friendship with Gene reforms in the following, lumpy and misshapen yet in some ways stronger than before. Much is left ambiguous regarding why Gene did what he did, how conscious of an act it was, and to what extent Phineas realizes what happened. He rebuffs Gene’s initial confession and the whole things gets papered over, though later revelations make you question how Phineas really feels.

The book is interesting and well-told, convincingly narrated by an educated man looking back on his life. Perhaps not truly the ninth-grade level for a precocious student, but hardly pre-school.

Elevation - Stephen King

He may be the preeminent horror author of the 20th century, but Stephen King’s greatest skill as an author isn’t blood, gore, or terror, but his depictions of community. It’s easy to forget that The Stand includes an extended sequence about rebuilding Boulder from the ruins of the superflu-fueled apocalypse, and that these scenes are among the strongest in the book. I was reminded of this while rereading Hearts in Atlantis, in which the first two stories contain long passages of the characters simply existing, passages that in the hands of lesser authors would feel like padding or wheel-spinning. There is a coziness to King’s writing that you might not expect, but is essential to his stories’ power. He writes people you care about, and seeing their lives in such intimate detail is key to making you care about them.

I thought about this a lot while reading Elevation, which is essentially nothing but coziness. There’s some interpersonal conflict and a supernatural phenomenon affecting the main character, but none of it feels primed to draw blood. Even the character’s mysterious condition that renders him constantly lighter without appearing to lose weight feels to him more like a curiosity than an impending doom. If anything, it inspires him to be a better man, and to conjure better angels from the small circle of friends his condition draws around him.

Elevation is a warm cup of tea of a book, a momentary pause to be enjoyed in one reflective sitting. Some of the political elements flirted with the corny, but King has enough skill and experience to flesh out his characters beyond caricature, and to temper didacticism with honest depictions of human behaviour. The ending retains the courage of its convictions, and reminded me of the Baron in the Trees.

Le pont de la rivière Kwaï - Pierre Boulle

I had no idea that The Bridge Over the River Kwai was a novel before it got made into a movie, let alone a French novel. I don’t recall where I stumbled upon this information, but it encouraged me to get a copy from the library.

It’s a quick read (though in my case it would’ve been quicker in English), brief in focus, without a lot of narrative expansion. The story begins with a group of English POWs led by Lt. Colonel Nicholson, a man of profound resolve and and unbending yet warped sense of duty. He and his men are made to build a bridge over the eponymous River Kwai, and his resolve is tested early when his overseer, Colonel Saito, tries to force the officers to conduct manual labour. He refuses, and the resulting battle of wills ends when he is allowed supervisory duty. It is a duty he takes seriously, and the construction of the bridge becomes a symbol of his pride and sense of superiority over his captors.

The narrative shifts halfway through to a group of three English special operatives, who are tasked to destroy the very bridge Colonel Nicholson is building. The story climaxes with a scene where Nicholson must choose his allegiance between his country and his bridge.

The pacing was tight, with interesting descriptions of the process of construction and sabotage that provide a clear view without getting bogged down in detail. I find it difficult to gauge the quality of French prose, but the style seemed good, with moments of introspection offered in between the more clinical description of the action. A good book overall.

Shogun - James Clavell

I was slow to warm up to Shogun, owing mostly to having read Lonesome Dove immediately before. It suffered a bit by comparison, especially given their parallels as sweeping historical epics with broad ensemble casts. This isn’t a slight on Shogun, but rather a testament to Lonesome Dove’s singular narrative power. Shogun felt like commercial fiction; Lonesome Dove felt like literature.

This is not to denigrate commercial fiction (I’d describe my own work the same way), and as I got deeper into Shogun I became absorbed in the rich world it created, full of evocative period details and exploration of feudal Japanese culture. The book’s hero, pilot John Blackthorne, is an accomplished sailor seeking to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. He becomes shipwrecked on the insular island of Japan, and is quickly pulled into their politics, where an uneasy peace following the death of the Taiko has left the feuding kingdoms teetering on the brink of war. He becomes a vassal to Lord Toranaga, one of the five regents ruling the fractious empire and the man the others see as the greatest threat. Toranaga is a shrewd strategist, and much of the story concerns his machinations to become shogun, or undisputed military ruler of Japan.

It reminded me a bit of the works of Ken Follett, only without the clear dichotomy between heroes and villains. This might be because the characters were largely based on real historical figures, or simply because Clavell felt that the difference in cultures made clear moral judgement difficult. Even a detestable character like Yabu can be at times admirable, and demonstrates honour in line with his values as a samurai.

Clavell’s style is clear and unadorned, and his characters are engaging, though the broad cast can make it easy to confuse people, and I often forgot who people were or mistook one character for another until context proved me wrong (this is a challenge for me with any story where the characters have non-European names; even Russian novels give me no end of trouble). Though I was slow to warm to it, I enjoyed the book and by the end was open to picking up the next in the series.

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

I picked up Lonesome Dove after learning that Holly Flax had read it three times, and I can see why she did. What a wonderful, gorgeous, melancholic book. Historical in scope but without the rigid exposition common to historical fiction. Effortlessly paced. Crackling with characters hewn from archetypes and imbued with a richness of spirit that makes them feel real. Told with unshowy lyricism, flitting between perspectives without feeling disjointed. Easily the best novel I’ve read in a long time.

The story follows two retired Texas Rangers, Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae, who together run the Hat Creek cattle company, an outfit that wrangles cows and horses from Mexico and sells them to ranchers.

While joint venture on paper, the ranch is truly run by Captain Call alone, a man of such unbending, unsmiling industrious that he’d likely keep working several days after he was dead. Gus, by contrast, lolls on his porch all day drinking whiskey and chatting to anyone in earshot, speaking with sly humor and a sarcasm that betrays a certain sensitivity about his education, which, while robust by the standards of the range, falls short when held against big city standards. The odd couple pairing feels unforced, as both men are highly intelligent, competent Rangers honed by the frontier to deadly precision. You believe these two men respect and care deeply for one another, however fractious their relationship on a surface level.

A panoply of characters fill out the cast, all of whom feel well-realized and whole, even if they appear for only a few pages. The biggest among these are Lorie, a prostitute with a tough past who longs for a softer life in colder climes; Deets, a long-time partner of the Captains and a tracker of unparalleled skill; Newt, a young cattle hand adopted by the outfit on the death of his mother, raised with cold confidence by Call and avuncular warmth by Gus; and Jake Spoon, a former comrade whose sudden arrival spurs the story onward, and whose weakness provides an element of Greek tragedy.

Jake tells Call and Gus about the pristine fields of Montana, as of yet unpeople by ranchers and sure to make rich men of whoever first drives a herd of cattle there. The promise spurs Call to pack up shop and head north, a move made not from greed but for an unspoken desire that is never fully articulated. The plot keeps a loose hold on the story, which flows at a languid pace punctuated with moments of high tension, which are told in a detached and understated way that increases their effectiveness. The scene where Gus rescues another character from a band of Indians is particularly well-wrought, the action evoked without excessive details of staging or melodrama.

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’d hate to spoil anything for a new reader. I adored this book.

The Tin Drum - Günter Grass

I feel a little defeated that I didn’t read The Tin Drum in the original German, but I think that would have been a pretty painful experience. The book is dense enough in translation, rife with euphemisms, call-backs, extended metaphors, and narrative cul-de-sacs.

The story is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, a man born in Danzig between the World Wars whose growth was stunted (by his own telling, deliberately) at the age of three and whose abiding love for his tin drum is such that attempts to take it from him evoked the power to destroy glass with his screams. The story bounces between Oskar’s present, where he resides in an insane asylum, and his past--or indeed that of his family; he goes back several generations to give familial context.

As one might surmise from the summary, it’s a weird book. A bent and hyper-sexed One Hundred Years of Solitude, complete with the extended family history and magic realism. It’s also quite funny at times. Oskar’s detached and ribald commentary makes for good reading, and I genuinely enjoyed his company, even as I struggled to place names for characters that reemerged after a hundred and fifty pages.

This is not a book where plot is paramount, and there is a whiff of a shaggy dog tale about it, as instances that seem like they may explain his current predicament fizzle into nothing. When you do finally figure out why he’s in the insane asylum, it feels a bit anticlimactic. Still, I enjoyed reading it.

The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain

For some reason, I always assumed The Postman Always Rings Twice was a spy novel. I don’t know why that is. It’s one of those titles I heard about through pop culture at a very young age without any additional information, and my brain made a bunch of assumptions that I assumed to be true.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is not a spy novel. It doesn’t even have a postman in it. I’m not clear why it’s called that (nor is anyone else, apparently) but it’s got a nice ring to it, and I suppose when it comes to titles, that’s the most important thing.

The story is narrated by a drifter named Frank Chambers, who comes across a Greek diner owner named Nick and his beautiful young wife Cora. Frank and Cora share an attraction galvanized, in part, by their profound lack of moral character. Quickly, almost casually, they conspire to kill Nick so that they can be together. The novel follows their attempts and the legal aftermath. I’ll refrain from spoiling the story with more detail, but in the end it becomes clear why and where Frank is telling this story, which is something I appreciate in first-person novels. Too often the perspective seems to be used simply because it feels more literary, without any logic behind the narrator’s decision to speak.

Frank is a nasty but compelling character, his casual, detached description of heinous acts revealing ugly depths beneath a blandly charming surface. This is a strong novel, daring for its time.

The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve been a Le Guin fan for a long time, but hadn’t previously read much beyond her greatest hits (the Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Earthsea series) and some short stories. The Lathe of Heaven isn’t a book I’d heard mentioned previously. I believe I came across the title referenced in a Guardian comments section. I’ve gotten some good recommendations that way.

The Lathe of Heaven follows George Orr, a draftsman on the edge of poverty with the bizarre ability to alter reality through his dreams. He regularly wakes to find the world fundamentally different than it had been when he went to sleep the night before, with no one but him recognizing the change. His desire to stave off these “effective” dreams leads him to illegally acquire drugs from a state-run Pharmacy, a crime for which he is caught and forced into therapy. (The world, or worlds, in the book are different from—and worse than—our own in ways that are referenced obliquely through dialogue, lending the metatextual possibility that our original world was the first to be obliterated by one of Orr’s dreams)

His court-appointed psychologist is Dr. Haber, whose research into an innovative device called an Augmentor allows him to control dream states. He uses it to trigger an effective dream and, as he is present for the moment of transformation, learns that Orr’s powers are not simply a delusion but real and immense. This sets off the principal conflict of the book. Orr believes the act of reimagining the world is fundamentally immoral, regardless of whether things are superficially improved, while Haber claims it is their duty to dream away the ills of society and create a more utopian world (though it’s notable that his own station in life improves with every dream, bringing him from an obscure psychologist to head of an esteemed dream institute, while Orr remains a lowly draftsman throughout).

Hoping to extract himself from Haber’s grasp, Orr enlists the help of a human rights lawyer named Lelache, who becomes the third person to learn of his strange power. A subtle but effective love story grows between this pair, giving extra dimension ot the main story’s twists and turns. The dynamic is a good one, with Haber more self-interested and idealistic than outright villainous, and Orr and Lelache’s attempts to control his dreams doing more harm than good.

The tone of the story aligns with the major theme of dream life. It also reminds me of the works of Philip K. Dick (a classmate of Le Guin’s incidentally; funny how one high school graduating class produced wo of the most distinct and influential science fiction writers of the 20th century), with its preoccupation with the uncertain nature of reality. Her prose, as always, is excellent. Though her penchant for wordplay sometimes goes a littler overboard for me, I can’t deny her skill. Definitely a book from her canon worth reading.

Cancer Ward - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

It had been a long time since I last read Cancer Ward, and my memory of it was impressionistic, a few images and vignettes to brief to be properly called scenes. It is the sort of book where the plot is difficult to hold in your memory because there’s so little of it. There isn’t much of a narrative arc and no overt conflict. The story, such as it is, merely follows the lives of several patients undergoing treatment for cancer at a clinic in Soviet Uzbekistan.

While an ensemble piece, Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov sticks out as the main character. A former soldier undergoing permanent exile as part of the Stalinist purge, Kostoglotov is a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself. His reckoning with his disease, his status in life, and his feelings for two nurses form the closest thing to a narrative thread the novel offers. There are other characters as well, the most notable in my opinion being Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a mid-tier Communist official who adheres rigidly to the party line, and denounced a roommate in order to acquire his half of a shared apartment. Rusanov serves as a foil to Kostoglotov, as the two have diametrically opposed views on the Soviet Union. Rusanov demonstrates the mental contortions the good Soviet citizen must undertake to thrive in that culture without succumbing to guilt or despair, while Kostloglotov’s honesty makes it impossible to function under communism’s yoke.

While light on action, cancer Ward demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s gift for observing fine details of human behaviour, and characterizing people through small gestures. His work is an indictment of communism that showcases power through its plainspokenness. There is no climax or denouement, merely a continuation of existence. Like the cancer the characters suffer, there is remission but no cure.

VALIS - Philip K Dick

I waited way too long to write this, so my memory isn’t as clear as it could be.

I recently read The Man in the High Castle, which could by some metrics be considered Philip K Dick’s least Dickian work. By those same metrics, VALIS might be the most Dickian of his novels, at least among those I’ve read. To make this statement less meaningless, I should probably define what I mean by Dickian, which is the use of science fiction tropes to evince distinct veneer of unreality. Blurring of this sense of truth is universal in Dick’s fiction, be it the phony police station and paranoid hunt for replicants in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the uncertainty of which characters are truly dead in Ubik, or the personality-splitting Substance D in A Scanner Darkly. VALIS dials this up further by making Dick himself the narrator and protagonist of the book, despite the narrator and the protagonist being two different people(though also not).

The book ostensibly stars Horselover Fat, a recovering drug addict and amateur theologist who becomes convinced of having received information from a sentient pink light beamed into him by a satellite called VALIS. The book functions as a kind of first person pedestal story, with Dick discussing (ang tagging along on) Horselover’s quest for deeper truth and embroilment in strange conspiracies pertaining to early Christianity and time dilation. Only Horselover Fat is also Philip K Dick—his first and last name, in fact, being crude translations of Philip (from the Greek) and Dick (from the German). This is something Dick himself admits in the first few pages but then glosses over for most of the book in an elegant display of gaslighting.

The plot is light and hard for me to remember in great detail, but it is almost besides the point. Dick is somewhat like Raymond Chandler in that his fiction is more about mood than story, and that is particularly true in VALIS (perhaps that also makes it his most Dickian?). There is some stuff involving a rock star whose child is a reincarnation of Christ and subliminal messages through an arthouse film, but mostly the drive is the interaction between the characters, who (another Dickian touch) are erudite deadbeats, intelligent and eloquent but too damage to function in society.

I wouldn’t recommend VALIS as an introduction to Philip K. Dick’s work, but for those who have read several of his books and enjoy his style, it’s worth reading.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

I first read The Man in the High Castle in grad school. It wasn’t my first encounter’s with his fiction (that was, bizarrely, the largely forgotten We Can Build You) but I hadn’t read much of him at the time, and while I liked it, it didn’t grab me the way his other seminal works did (especially Ubik). That’s a bit surprising, as I’m a sucker for alternative history, and on rereading I found it displayed many of Dick’s usual strengths: nuanced characters understated but eloquent description, heady concepts. There is always an iceberg quality to Dick’s fiction, in that you sense you’re seeing only the small portion of the story peeking above the surface, while a mountain of detail lurks below, unexposed but supporting the visible tip.

The premise of High Castle is pretty well known: the Japanese and the Nazis won World War 2 and now fight for hegemony in a conquered America. Interestingly, the characters are all fairly unremarkable people: a Japanese bureaucrat, a store owner specializing in Americana fetishized by the Japanese, a fired metalworker, a judo instructor. As always with Dick’s work, tiny, fascinating details lurk in the corners: in this case, it’s society’s fascination with the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination that guides the behavior of many of the main characters.

The titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, only appears at the very end, though he looms throughout as the author of a book called the Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which posits an alternative alternative history in which the Us and Britain (but not Russia) won WW2. The Nazis are as expected not fans (they never did like books much), and attempt to assassinate him. Such attempts originally drove him to retreat to the eponymous High Castle, but one of the characters (Juliana Frink, Judo instructor) finds him living in a regular house, having resigned himself to whatever fate may bring him.

It is here that Dick’s universal fascination with the nature of reality—a cornerstone of essentially all his fiction—peeks through, just a little. Despite being a book about an alternate reality, the nature of what is true doesn’t feature in High Castle the way it does in, say, Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or A Scanner Darkly. That is, we presume throughout the novel that what we are reading is, in the context of the story, true. It is only at the very end, when Abendsen reveals to Juliana that he used the I Ching to compose every bit of the Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This leads Juliana to suggest that the I Ching actually used him, and through his words told a fundamental truth deeper than reality: that Germany and Japan actually lost the war. This is such a Dickian idea—that there exists a reality more true than the factual universe the characters are experiencing, and that such a truth mirrors (but is distinct from) the universe of the reader—and I’m embarrassed to say I missed it the first time around.

Dick truly is one of the great American writers of the Twentieth century. I’ve always bristled at the notion of some genres as more inherently “literary” than others, but if that term means anything, it is the idea of words and stories being able to convey a deeper understanding of humanity and the world. And Philip K Dick’s novels do that as well as anybody’s.

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I read this over a month ago and I think I’ve missed a book or two in between. In any case, The Age of Innocence is one of the many 100 Great 20th Century Novels about unhappy rich people, and I can’t say that is one of my favourite genres (another big one among those books I don’t much care for is Male Writer Suffers Ennui in New England). I got through this one and didn’t mind reading it, so I would consider it a strong book on that fact alone.

The story concerns Newland Archer, a wealthy New York socialite who practices law more as a hobby than a career. He is betrothed to the equally wealthy May Welland, but before the wedding date is set her cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe. Separated from her husband—a Count—and unfamiliar with the mores of 19th century New York, Ellen fascinated Newland, and next to her his fiancé seems hopelessly dull. He asks her to push forward the wedding, hoping that being finally married will put paid to his conflicted emotions, but she resists.

Most of the story concerns the shadow courtship between Newland and Ellen, both of whom struggle with attraction and guilt. The writing is coy in typical fashion for the era, and I’m not sure if they are ever intimate beyond holding hands (though maybe I missed something, being a typically unsubtle 21st century reader).

The writing is strong, and the characters are rich and well-drawn. Apparently the story draws on Wharton’s own childhood in terms of setting, and the details feel true to life. I doubt I’ll read it again, but that’s more a question of my interests than the book’s quality. Those into Jane Austen and the like will enjoy it.

Holly - Stephen King

It pains me to say this, but I didn’t really like this one. Holly is the first Stephen King book I struggled to finish.

The problem wasn’t the main story, which was an engaging mystery using the Columbo formula of giving away the villains and the outset and making the cat and mouse discovery the source of tension. King knows how to spin a yarn, and he does this well, teasing out revelations and using our knowledge to build dramatic irony.

The villains, likewise, were well-drawn and satisfyingly nasty (spoilers ahead, though you learn this within the first twenty pages). Emily and Rodney Harris are retired professors of English and Biology, respectively, who have descended into cannibalism under the belief that human flesh—livers and brains especially—hold restorative properties. They make for interesting villains with believable (if deplorable) motivations, though the focus on Emily’s racism and homophobia felt more like easy tags for her vileness rather than natural extension of her character. A person like her could certainly be prejudiced, but would she really be that preoccupied with her own prejudice?

The Harris’s insatiable hunger leads to a string of kidnappings, the latest of which Holly Gibney is hired to investigate. Through her sleuthing, she begins to connect the latest disappearance to previous ones. It’s clear King loves Holly, and she is indeed a good and interesting character. But I think one of the problems with this book is that he loves his characters too much. One of King’s great strengths as a writer has been his moral ambiguity. The line between good and evil is clear, but the good aren’t angelically so. They have flaws. They disappoint and hurt people. They are human. I don’t get that sense so much with Holly, and especially side characters Jerome and Barbara Robinson, who feel Mary Sue-ish in their fundamental goodness.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of sour grapes, as well, because not one but both Robinsons fart out lucrative literary careers without any effort whatsoever. Jerome receives $100,000 advance for a book about his grandpa, and Barbara is basically the Poetry Messiah, bequeathed by a character who is the greatest living poet of the 20th century and serves exclusively to beatify her. She also somehow makes $25,000, which is not something poets generally do. As someone who has written novels and sweated the requisite five pints of blood to get them published, the sheer ease of their success is galling, and makes King seem more than a little out of touch.

The late pandemic setting is an interesting touch, but this too proves distracting. I don’t think it’s by any means necessary to ignore COVID in fiction, but the constant references to it (though justifiable; it was all encompassing at that time) tended to take me out of the book, as did the repeated mentions of Trump. I know King’s politics, and while I share many of them, it still felt a bit cheap, as Trump supporter or COVID denier read like shorthands for “don’t like this person.”

To end on a positive note (and this really is a spoiler), I thought it was a clever choice to make the Harris’s cannibalism entirely a product of madness, and that the regenerative properties they feel are simply placebos. King doesn’t cheat with this, showing us impossible recovery that he then goes back on, but he does provide enough hints that, in the context of the Gibneyverse, where supernatural events have already occurred, such occult powers could conceivably exist.

Christine - Stephen King

I read Christine for the first time in high school and hadn’t picked it up since then. I’ve reread most of King’s books at least once since that time, and I’m not sure why Christine was one of the few I didn’t get around to. It’s a good book, classic King, full of quotidian details and bullies with switchblades and supernatural evil lurking at the fringes, operating at a level never fully explained but sufficiently realized to function within the universe of the story.

The book is constructed in an unusual way, opening and closing in first person with an extended stretch of third-person in the middle. Our narrator for the bookends is Dennis, friend of the bright, bespectacled, and perennially unpopular Arnie Cunningham, who is both the tragic hero and villain of the story. Arnie spots an aging Plymouth Fury up on blocks and is instantly smitten—or perhaps ensnared is a better word. He buys it from a crusty old coot named Roland LeBay, who dies shortly thereafter, and sets to fixing it up. As he works on the car—making impressive if desultory strides in the repair—his personality begins to change, aping the mannerisms of the late LeBay. Dennis is distrustful of the car and feels his relationship with Arnie start to slip.

Meanwhile, Arnie gets a girlfriend, who hates the car as much as Dennis does. The inevitable dirtbag bully crosses him and meets a violent end. A police officer grows suspicious and eventually dies as well. Dennis and Leigh both struggle to believe what is right in front of them, against the frantic struggle of their rational minds: Christine is alive, or possessed of LeBay’s malign spirit, or both (I was never entirely clear), and must be destroyed before it’s jealousy turns on them.

Christine is a good pulpy story elevated by King’s knack for dialogue and character, and his ability to nest outlandish tales in worlds made believable by small details. There is always room to breathe in a King story, and these moments of minutia, which a lesser writer might cut to torque up the action, have always been his greatest strength.

Pet Sematary - Stephen King

The 1980s was a dark time for Stephen King. By accounts, his alcoholism was at its worst during this period, and he also struggled wit ha cocaine addiction. I always felt this bled through into his fiction, as Kings novels written during this period are among his darkest, most vicious works (and also, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, some of his best).

People associate horror fiction with bleak plots and unhappy endings, but King is, despite his reputation, an extremely optimistic writer. Throughout his fiction, one sees a recurring motif of a benevolent force, often unnamed or unspoken, tat seeks to counterbalance the darkness faced by his characters. He has referred to this “the coming of the White” (probably not a term he uses anymore, given contemporary context), and it takes many forms: the hand that strikes the cleansing A bomb in The Stand, Maturin the turtle in the Dark Tower series and It (I assume it’s the same turtle, though I don’t think he gets a name), Father Callahan’s glowing cross in Salem’s Lot. Even if the main character dies (as he sometimes does) or tragedy strikes (as it almost always does), most King books conclude with a sense, at some level, of balance restored. The White sometimes comes late, but it comes.

Well, the White never shows up in Pet Sematary. I would consider it King’s darkest book, and appropriately so, for it deals with the horror that looms above all others in the heart of every parent: the death of a child. King is at his usual best setting up the town of Ludlow and building a friendship between Louis Creed, a doctor who moved his family to this sleepy town from Chicago, and Jud Crandall, one of King’s stalwart Maine lifers, who ayuhs his way into Louis’ heart. When the family cat dies while Louis’ wife and kids are away, Jud shows Louis a way to bring it back by burying it in an old Mi’kmaq burial ground. The cat comes back, just like the song says, but it comes back wrong. This proof of concept, however troubling, is enough to goad Louis into repeating the experiment with his own son, after the boy is killed by a truck.

The result is King’s most potent morality play, a profound metaphor on the destructive power of grief, and how if improperly channeled, it rips apart those it flows through.

Or at least, it should be.

If the book has a weakness, it is King’s repeated suggestions that the burial ground itself is manipulating things, and that the characters are only one step up from puppets in the malevolent land’s pantomime. I assume King did this to help explain some of the characters’ more irrational choices, but I think it is a mistake. The characters do indeed act irrationally, but grief is irrational. Knowing everything Louis knew at the time—that the ground had the power of resurrection, but the creatures that come from it don’t feel quite right, and secondhand accounts of human resurrections were disastrous—and faced with the death of one of my own children, would I make a different choice? I like to think I would, but any parent who says so with certainly is lying to themselves and to you.

I think Pet Sematary would be a stronger book with the references to the Sematary’s manipulations cut out. But even with them in, it’s a hell of a book. One of King’s best.

Up In Honey's Room - Elmore Leonard

This was a weird one. Most of the Elmore Leonard I’ve read has been contemporary crime fiction, so if it took place in the 70s it’s because it was written in the 70s. Up In Honey’s Room is set during World War II, and is a follow up to another historical crime thriller, the Hot Kid, which I haven’t read. The setting might not seem that different, but Elmore Leonard’s dialogue is so distinct that it felt weird coming out of the mouths of these characters. Maybe people talked like that in 1944, but I found it jarring.

Leonard’s novels are never particularly plot heavy, and the principal plan or focus tends to shift midway through. I like that about them, as it feels more realistic, but it can also muddy the action. In this case ,the story is ostensibly about Carl “the Hot Kid” Webster chasing down a pair of escaped German POWs. His pursuit brings him to Detroit, where he encounters Honey Deal, a young woman previously married to a pro-Nazi German immigrant named Walter.

Carl suspects Walter might be involved in hiding the POWs, and enlists Honey to help interrogate him, under the reasoning that her presence will throw him off balance. There are some other characters, including a spy named Vera and an officer named Kevin, but their roles aren’t always that clear, and Walter’s plan to murder president Roosevelt is mentioned suddenly and comes to nothing when the man dies of natural causes. Walter’s lame attempts to make people think he was responsible were funny, but they leant to the overall sense of narrative drift.

I wouldn’t want Leonard to write tight, plotted novels like Frederick Forsythe, as the meandering stories and bumbling criminals are part of the charm, but for whatever reason this one didn’t feel like it came together as nicely as his previous work.

Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

I came across this book after reading about the Collyer brothers on Wikipedia and seeing it mentioned in the popular culture section. I’d read and enjoyed Ragtime and found the brothers fascinating subject matter, so checked it out from the library. The story is told in elegant prose form the perspective of Homer Collyer, a blind pianist who lives in a Harlem brownstone with his brother Langley, an obsessive hoarder. Through his eyes (or ears, rather) the reader passes through the early years of the 20th century into the 1980s, encountering bootlegging gangsters and roving hippies, observing two world wars, and generally chronicling the century as it matures, ragged and cynical, into its twilight years.

The book takes significant liberties with its facts and chronology—the actual Collyers died in 1947, and Langley was the musician, not Homer—but sticks close to key events (the gradual recession from society, the begrudging paying off of their mortgage in one fell swoop, their untimely end) proposing a thesis on the brothers recalcitrant hermitism, speculating on the impulse that made these bizarre introverted men effectively immure themselves in rubbish collected from the streets over decades.

The plot is episodic, structured only in the natural progression of the brothers’ lives from youth to old age. Having the narrator be a blind man was an interesting choice and one Doctorow handles effectively. His limited description of images was handled deftly, and I don’t recall spotting him describing something he couldn’t have known. The fact he’d had sight as a young man allowed him some context, at least; I expect it would be a greater challenge to write a novel with a narrator blind from birth.

Homer & Langley didn’t pack quite the punch that Ragtime did, but it was still worth reading, and encouraged me to grab another Doctorow book at some point.

Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut was one of my four go-to authors through high school, and by the time I left home for university I’d read all of the books of his my parents had, except for one: Deadeye Dick. The (fairly stupid) reason for this was that their copy was either poorly bound or mistreated (or both), and as a result most of the pages would come free as soon as you turned them. I was never comfortable takin it out of the house, and because I did most of my reading on the school bus, I kept giving it a miss.

I’ve picked up a few Vonnegut books since high school (mostly re-reads), but that dumb prejudice kept me from picking it up until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally decided to read the thing, and if it fell apart in my hands, who the hell cares?

It would be a neat irony if it turned out Deadeye Dick was far and away my favourite Vonnegut book, but reality isn’t so tidy. It’s a good book—I’ve never read a Vonnegut that wasn’t—and very much in his milieu, but I don’t think it is quite the equal of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, or Breakfast of Champions (which most people don’t consider one of his best, but remains a favourite of mine).

The story follows Vonnegut’s familiar obsession with bizarre characters caroming off each other in peculiar coincidences. The narrator, a pharmacist and self-professed “neuter” named Rudy Waltz, recounts his life and that of his helpless bohemian parents. At twelve years old, Rudy fired a gun off his roof at nothing in particular and accidentally murdered a pregnant woman. The resulting arrest and lawsuit ruins his family socially and financially, and he becomes their caregiver, a role he doesn’t seem to particularly resent.

Like most Vonnegut novels, Deadeye Dick bounces between points in time, talking one moment about his venture opening a hotel in Haiti, the next about his short-lived career as a published playwrite. Rudy’s defining trait is his apathy/ Nothing in life excites him, and he recounts everything with muted emotion.

This isn’t the book I’d give someone as an introduction to Vonnegut, but for a fan it’s certainly worth a read.

52 Pick-up - Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has long been a standby author of mine—someone whose work I would pick up at random whenever I wasn’t reading anything in particular. For whatever reason, I hadn’t read a book by him in several years, so when I found a copy of 52 Pick-Up in a Little Free Library I grabbed it eagerly.

52 Pick-Up is classic Elmore Leonard, full of skeezy characters, excellent naturalistic dialogue, and crisp, effortless prose. Leonard never feels like he’s trying to impress, and thus always impresses. As far as the plot goes, I wouldn’t rank this among his best, but it’s certainly engaging. Harry Mitchell, a former soldier and autoworker who studied engineering and opened a successful auto plant, is captured by masked assailants and shown a porn film starring him and his mistress. They demand he pay up or they’ll leak the footage. Stubborn Harry refuses, and the ante is steadily upped, resulting in murder, kidnapping, and other Leonardy mayhem.

The characters are archetypal but distinct, filled with life through Leonard’s keen eye for detail and even keener ear for capturing spoken language. He has mastered the art of dropping words form sentences in a way that mirrors speech, something I see surprisingly rarely in other books (perhaps because it sounds hackneyed if done wrong)

I wouldn’t call 52 Pick-Up my favourite of Leonard’s novels (that’s Freaky Deaky, incidentally), and the title is incredibly arbitrary (referring, I assume, to the $52,000 in bribe money the perps settle on, a number I’m guessing he chose after he thought of the title), but it’s solid and worth reading.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying was the first William Faulkner book I ever read. I was about 18, and while a lot of it went over my head (some of it still does, to be honest), there was something deeply intriguing and evocative about it. I was used to more popular literature, with clearly delineated stories and key plot points spelled out or at most lightly obscured. As I Lay Dying offers no such roadmap. The story, itself quite minimal, is buried under conflicting perspectives, stream of conscience narration, and a language both florid and deeply colloquial.

The central premise concerns Anse Bundren and his five children, who travel with the recently deceased Addie Bundren (Anse’s wife and the children’s mother) in order to fulfill her dying wish to be married in the town Jefferson. Sudden rainfall floods the river and washes out the bridges, making the journey a challenge, but the real conflict is between and within the family members themselves. Cas, the oldest, is stoic to the point of self-destruction, refusing to admit to any discomfort from his broken leg. Darl, the second child, is slowly going mad. Jewel, the middle child and product (we infer) of an affair, bucks at the contraints imposed by his headstrong father. Dewey Dell, the only daughter, is pregnant out of wedlock and desperately seeking an abortion. Vardaman, the youngest, struggles to process his mother’s death, likening her to a fish he caught shortly before she died.

Each chapter is in first person, told by a revolving cast of characters. Most often it’s the Bundrens themselves, but smaller characters are given narrator duty as well. The prose, as you might expect, is superb, and even where actions are unclear, the strength of the language pulls you along. Rereading this some near twenty years later, I’m still struck by its narrative force. It feels like a much bigger book than it is, not because it drags ,but because of the weight of psychological and literary detail Faulkner provides. An excellent book.