Review: "The Border" by Don Winslow

I don’t much go in for book series’, with my reading habits making it hard to latch onto arcs over multiple books (I do not read more than one book by a certain author during a calendar year), but a few have made their way into my heart. Two come immediately to mind: one is Justin Cronin’s The Passage Trilogy and the other is Don Winslow’s drug epic, which I like to call the Art Keller Saga, beginning with The Power of the Dog, continuing with The Cartel and ending with this year’s The Border. I was entertained, horrified and deeply moved following the story of this flawed man who was there at the beginning of America’s misguided drug war and stuck with it as it evolved and morphed into a more ravenous and merciless monster with Adan Barrera as its head. If you have followed it too, you will enjoy this final part of it, the longest at a massive 716 pages, pulling from the headlines, narco hearsay and Winslow’s vivid and rhythmic imagination as Art Keller, exhausted, spent and pieces of his soul picked away like rotted flesh, still having hope that all of it will be worth it. It begins, like the other three with a prologue of things to come before stepping back to the end of the first novel where (SPOILERS) Keller walks out of the Guatemalan jungle, the Zetas finally defeated and Keller finally ridding the world of Barrera. After this, one of those who financed the covert mission to destroy the Zetas invites Keller to head up the DEA. He takes the job, knowing that even though Barrera is dead (despite the signs that crop up claiming he is alive) the vacuum left in the Sinaloa Cartel will be quickly filled, this time by the sons of those who started the whole bloody empire. And much like The Cartel, the book is not only focused on the story of Art Keller battling the cartels but stories completely separate from this blood feud, featuring a junkie undone by opioid addiction, an immigrant trying to avoid gang life as he makes his way from Guatemala to New York City and of course John Dennison, the pale horse candidate of the 2016 election, vowing to make America Great Again and build that wall, even though it is his own party who find themselves in the pocket of the cartels. Like all of Winslow’s books, it has a propulsive pace, with action scenes that feel authentic and over the top at the same time, under laid with a great passion for the subject ta hand; it’s ecstatic highs and horrid faults. If the Power of the Dog was about regret and The Cartel was about forgiveness, I’d surmise The Border is a book about hope, a hope that stems from the worst circumstances, a hope that stays a live and well lit when everything else seems to be falling apart. Winslow believes in this deeply, I think, and so do I. If this is the last book I will surely miss Art Keller and hope he has found some peace. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "You Know You Want This" by Kristen Roupenian

A book like Kristen Roupenian’s debut book of short stories, You Know You Want This, was published this year to great anticipation, with the story “Cat Person” being published in the right place (The New Yorker) and the right time (in the midst of the MeToo movement). I tend to steer clear of books with a clear political message, so when a friend bought me this book as a birthday present, I was both interested and a little hesitant as to whether it would live up to the hype or simply be an artifact of our current moment. Thankfully, I do not feel that is the case and found this book to be a little bit more complex than your average feminist screed. These are some of the creepiest stories I have come across in a while, reminding me of the work of Ottessa Moshfegh and Marina Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire but instead of Mexican history Roupenian is more preoccupied with how modern people fail to connect with one another, how things like paranoia, selfishness, our need to be loved and our overriding fear that we do not deserve such a thing take us down dark roads that we only realize lead to ruin and horror long when it is far too late. There is not a weak story here, although some I like more than others. The first story, “Bad Boy” about a couple who find that they get off watching their male friend drift in and out of a toxic relationship and can only have sex in the process of humiliating him is a good primer for what is too follow, the banal horror of the situation Roupenian deviously crafts only showing its ugly face when we are too far to go back. The stories take a welcome strange turn with “Sardines”, about a lonely divorced woman, her daughter and the results of her daughter’s birthday wish has echoes of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities” in its grotesque ending. I also feel I have a differing view on a handful of stories than other readers might, such as “The Good Guy” about the inner thoughts of a man whose sexual shame, pitiful submissive nature and failure to be honest with himself turns him into a callous monster, “Biter” about a woman’s obsession with biting one of her male co-workers which has the book’s best ending and the aforementioned “Cat Person”. Far from casting women as victims or men as villains or worse, foils, Roupenian uses the aberrant relationships in these and the rest stories to interrogate modern romance, its focus on selfish need and instant gratification and frames it as the kind of horror story Shirley Jackson would right which makes you question every misinterpreted sexual encounter, every awkward first date, every affectionate gesture from the opposite sex as something sinister, masking one’s darker desires that they have talked themselves into justifying. This is the kind of incendiary, thought provoking and original short story collection that reinvigorates my love for this lost art form. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" by Marlon James

With the exception of one other title released earlier this year, no other book this year got me more excited than Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, his follow up to A Brief History of Seven Killings, and by the end of the year, it is near impossible to think of something that will disappoint me more. In all fairness, that is partially my fault. I have never been one for high fantasy, still remaining unimpressed by both The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, (so much so that I have not read the two subsequent novels of the trilogy) and that is really the main inspiration for this book, placing that kind of high fantasy in an ancient and uniquely unfamiliar Africa, a very admirable quality this book maintains even as it wholly lost me multiple times through its 620 pages. The plot, which concerns a character named Tracker who is tasked to find a missing boy with a varied group of discontents, but really, it feels like a halfhearted reason for James to craft a world that is creative and original but also dense, obtuse and rarely if ever wanting to meet the reader halfway (at least it felt that way to this reader). What kept me going is James’ rich use of language and descriptions, which allows the reader to hear smell and even taste abstract ideas that seemingly float forth through thin air. Whether he is describing a knife cutting through flesh, a gory ritual involving humanoid creatures or an ancient delicacy that might or might not be a real thing, it is this book’s strongest point, especially if you are liable to get lost amongst the mountains of world building James seems a bit too eager to drop at the feet of his fans. 

Rating: 2/5