Review: "The Weight of this World" by David Joy

It is nit rare that a second novel is just as good as the first one. I can think of countless occurrences of this happening, so many of which that I will refrain from naming them. But what is rare is that a second novel is better than the first one, and with his second novel, The Weight of this World, David Joy has crafted a novel that is not only better than the first one, but miles ahead in terms of narrative drive and overall thematic richness. His first novel, Where All Light Tends to Go, rarely felt like another country noir retread that was following in the footsteps writers like Larry Brown and Daniel Woodrell. It was not bad by any means, but in a somewhat bloated genre, it failed to rise out of its trappings and felt doomed to be lost in the shuffle. That is thankfully not the case with this book with its similarly dramatic title, but this time, those comparison to past greats are well earned through buckets of grit, rich descriptions of the book’s surrounding world and a trio of tragic characters stuck in past lives filled with equal parts sorrow and fleeting happiness whose lives are about to change dramatically and not always for the better. While the comparison to Woodrell in Joy’s first book seemed trite and undeserved, here it seems rather appropriate, because this might be the saddest book of this particular genre since The Death of Sweet Mister. It begins with a brutal prologue where Aiden McCall witnesses the murder suicide of his mother and father. It is through this tragedy that he meets Thad Broom and his aging beauty of a mother April. It establishes Aiden’s need for a family and how this need is never really met. Fast forward to their twenties, and the two boys are barley living after the housing crash and make a living robbing foreclosed houses of their copper wiring. It is not until a stash of drug fall into their lap in a scene of slapstick violence do they go down the dark path the book takes the reader. This is a very atypical book in this genre, and every step of the way Joy subverts expectations every step of the way, especially in the book’s final earth shattering 100 pages, where in a moment of depravity the two boys part ways. But to me the true hero of this book is April, who’s lived a hard life and just wants a little bit of happiness. Joy digs deep into her backstory despite getting only a few chapters, but it paints a sad picture of her underlying animosity toward Thad and casts a grim light on the penultimate scene of the book, which is rendered with profound sadness. And when it ends, with Joy having once again subverted my expectations, it ends on a sad note as a character fails to learn a lesson and resigns himself to a living damnation. This is powerful stuff, and Joy never shies away from the humanity of his characters, and while this is a sad story, it is a memorable and engaging one.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Dark Dark" by Samantha Hunt

I feel like I am going to be repeating myself throughout this review of author Samantha Hunt’s debut short story collection The Dark Dark because a lot of the book’s myriad of problems were ones I saw in previous books that I have read recently, those problems being with the “literary horror” genre that it seems to fall into, with a few exceptions of course. I is a well-written book with a few sections within some of the stories being expertly executed and had a strong hold on my attention. But besides a few slim bright spots (which I will get to), I was overwhelmed by how boring and dull this book could be and how few times the strange amalgamations of off beat scenes actually added up to something brilliant or even cohesive. This would work for flash fiction, but with stories being 20 or even 30 pages long, they quickly wear out their welcome. I will pick out a few short stories that drew my attention, but it was, I am sad to say, slim pickings and none of them were homeruns. The first story “The Story of” about a woman named Norma whose struggle concerning whether or not to have a baby coincides with her husband finding out about his father’s secret life and the vagrant sister that comes with it, who is also named Norma. I knew reading this story that I was not in for a treat. Like I said, I loved bits of this book, but as whole it is a bland soup I struggled to choke down. Standouts include “Beast” about a woman who, when she falls asleep wakes up as a deer, “Yellow” about a shiftless young man who runs over the dog of a polite witch, and “Love Story” a rather entertaining pastiche of a failing marriage. Even these tend to be sloppily put together and when they are bad they are dreadful. Not an entirely offensive collection, but one I can’t say impresses me very much.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "Kung Fu High School" by Ryan Gattis

It is quite appropriate that near the tail end of Kung Fu High School,  Ryan Gattis’s blood soaked ode to the horrors of high school  that a group of thespians are rehearsing a scene from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Despite the busted noses, broken ones and torn muscles, this dystopian look at adolescence run amok shares some thematic elements with such a tragedy, from it’s doomed hero, his even ore doomed love affair and all of the characters seemingly unaware of the grim road they have taken and where that leads. I would have thought I had grown out of reading and enjoying books like this that take a matter of fact and overly hip smart look at human depravity, but for some reason (I think this might have to do with my copy being re-released and updated by the author if I were to take a guess), but Gattis, who really impressed me with his last two novel, All Involved and Safe, has a grasp for the consequences of violence. It can be an exclamation point or a tool for shock and awe, but never does he shy away from its results, both physically (all of which in this book is, supposedly, accurate) and the deeper psychological effects it has on its victims and perpetrators. This won’t be a book for everyone and I can easily envision people reading this book and not seeing what I do, and more power to them. But looking past the brutality, as eloquently and symphonic it may be, this was a much deeper story with much bigger themes. After a prologue where Jimmy Chang, teen Kung-Fu master and the arguable hero of this book, puts a group of men in the hospital, his cousin Jen introduces us to Martin Luther King Jr. High School a. k. a. “Kung-Fu” High School, where almost all of the students know one form of martial arts and kids have to worry about getting out alive as well as passing tests. It is explained in rich detail early on about the school’s gang systems and what you can and cannot do within them. Above it all is Ridley, a man in his early 20’s, held back a countless number of years so he can strengthen his in-school drug empire and, by proxy, his hold over the student body.But once Jimmy transfers in, along with his well earned reputation as a badass, it sets off a series of events that threaten to destroy Jen’s life and uproot the brutal hierarchy at the school. This is a book filled with energy, from its many scenes describing what Jen, her brother Cue or Jimmy is doing to an unlucky fellow student, but also when the violence stops and the characters emotions and wants propel the narrative. And it is in this that I found this book’s tragic heart. In a few key scenes that I won’t spoil, Gattis gives you glimpses at a humanity that has been beaten out of the students for very little reason, a humanity embodied by the good hearted doctor Remo, and the ill fated Mr. Wilkes. These people are scene as naïve but by the book’s not quite unhappy but very non-heroic ending, you see the wisdom of their actions, even though it is clear by the end key characters never will. This engaging and well-crafted tale of mayhem and the fear we feel as teenagers is a spectacle to watch from a writer who has never failed to disappoint.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Job of the Wasp" by Colin Winnette

When I look back on it now, my experience reading Iain Reid’s game changing debut novel I Thinking of Ending Things might not have been a good idea. I still like it and with its mixture of horror and sadness give it a timeless quality. But the more books I read in the “literary” horror genre, I view Reid’s novel as an anomaly and less as a sign of things to come. That is sadly the case with Colin Winnette’s fifth book and third novel (don’t quote me on that) The Job of the Wasp. It styles itself a horror novel and has some familiar trappings regularly associated with the genre: a creepy location, characters with murky motivations and an unreliable narrator that ends up being a lot more than just the person telling the story. But besides those surface level attributes, this is, at times a painfully boring book, with large sections of its slim 191 page length being painful in their density. It begins with our unnamed narrator being shipped off to a remote boarding school for orphans. He is fat and it is hard for him to fit in, especially since the school year is already in swing. He is confronted by a few creepy encounters with students and the Headmaster, whose interrogation is both equally comforting and nefarious as his intentions are nebulous. It is only when a body is found in the garden and another student dies do the school’s true nature reveal itself. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jac Jemc’s novel The Grip of It while reading this: both are genre books that try to scare you, but instead make a few too many attempts to be clever and never really rise above tired tropes to give us something new. Despite that, this book is filled with a startling number of creepy scenes, from one taking place in a gazebo, another in the mess hall where a seemingly dead character returns and becomes the book’s true villain, and finally the one at the end, which is annoyingly confusing but still managed to creep me out. This is a very impressive book to look at even though it’s not nearly as substantive as it may think it is.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Tuff" by Paul Beatty

Even with a book like his second novel Tuff that, along with another novel is sandwiched between his debut The White Boy Shuffle and his momentous breakthrough The Sellout, American writer Paul Beatty produces nothing but the highest quality of work, with every hilarious sentence, every oddball character and every off the wall plot device not only serving a purpose, but is intricately and masterfully executed with staggering and enviable skill. I can’t think of a writer who has as good as Beatty who makes me laugh harder, and once the laughter dies down, you can’t help but read into the undercurrent of tragedy that seems to follow these characters around. Comedy and tragedy are inexorably linked, and Beatty never forgets that and his books depend on it. These stories about black men caught up in a whirlwind of agendas, politics and things beyond their control are never simply about their oppression by the system they live under. Beatty takes a very interesting and satirical (although in interviews he has stated that he does not like to be called a satirist) look at our current tumultuous racial divide that lampoons both sides and shows the somewhat not so innocent victims that become it’s casualties. Much like the narrator of The Sellout and Gunnar Kaufmann in The White Boy Shuffle, Winston “Tuffy” Foshay (or Tuff to his friends) is a young black man with little direction in life and nothing to lose. We first meet him after a botched drug robbery where he is the only survivor (thanks to a well-timed fainting spell). Seeing this as a sign to turn his life around, Tuff brainstorms ideas with his motley crew of characters, such as the crippled Fariq, his wife Yolanda and Charles, a white man of Irish descent and essentially a relic of the old New York. It is not until he connects with Inez, his Asian/black power surrogate mother and a Spencer, a black Jewish convert Tuff hilariously meets through a Big Brother program and whose adult circumcision scene is one of the book’s many highlight, that he gets the idea to run for city council. Tuff is a hard character to like. Infinitely less sympathetic than Beatty’s other creation, Tuff is a at times little more than a violent thug, with one scene where he shoots a police dog (to protect his baby boy Jordy) being one of the book’s more gut-wrenching scenes. But to see him in over his head, to see his family’s tragedies, his wastrel of a poet dad, his absent mother and his dead sister, whose apparition hangs over even the book’s funnier scenes, it is hard not to feel bad for this mercurial man whose being unwillingly used for something greater. Another apparition that founds its way into the book’s pages was the unexpected ghost of David Foster Wallace, with scenes taking place on a stoop and in a classroom matching the scenes at the halfway house and tennis academy for hilarity and pathos. This is another great book from a writer I suspect will be well regarded and appreciated in years to come.
Rating: 5/5