Review: "Koko" by Peter Straub

It is cool that while I was reading Koko by Peter Straub, I was in Bangor, Maine, where I took a tour of the places that inspired some of the events in Stephen King’s novel. What isn’t cool is how boring the book was. I recall liking the first Peter Straub book I read, A Dark Matter, although in retrospect, I don’t think the book has aged well in my mind as a reader. But this book, I have no question about my feelings towards it. It would be good if it wasn’t over 500 pages long, not great or anything, but it would be over quicker and I wouldn’t have to spend so much time with it. And I want to like Peter Straub, the same way I want to like Ramsey Campbell and Daniel Woodrell. But while I will read whatever those authors publish, I will always approach it with trepidation. This novel focuses on a group of Vietnam veterans, years after the war, which must band together to stop a series of murders committed by the titular character, whom they think is writer Tim Underhill, since a lot of the murders have details that would be found in one of his horror novels. This leads them on trail that goes from the Far East in Thailand to the grimy streets of New York, looking for a killer who seems to have never left the jungles of Vietnam. A big problem I had with this book is the characters are never fleshed out well enough for me to care when they are in danger. They have sex and curse, but the seem interchangeable, with differences between them never being clear, even with a big death in the middle of the book. I’m curious about the other two books in The Blue Rose Trilogy, but this is not a good start.

Rating: 2/5

Review: "A Fraction of the Whole" by Steve Toltz

It is always nice to be surprised by a book, especially when that surprise is out just good but great, and I am glad to say that Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole is a great book, one that soars past your expectations, and can, with ease, get tangled in your heart strings. It’s 561 pages are never dull, and the narrator, who opens the book writing his memoirs on loose pieces of paper he finds in a foreign prison, will have you on his side the whole entire time, because his plight is so astounding and moving, but one, deep down, we can relate to. If I had to compare it to any other books, I find that it shares a lot in common with two distinct types of books (I’m cheating, because I will lump two authors together. Firstly, this book acts like an Australian version of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. It has the same cast of un-ironic quirky characters, although the ones here are a bit more violent, and similar themes of fate and sadness about one’s path in life. I can safely say that this book is as good as Irving’s. I also was reminded of two other books, Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, in that the nefarious nature of the narrative is hidden behind a narrator that you can’t help but follow. But this book is a different, grander beast than those two books. As I stated before, the book opens in a foreign prison, as Jasper Dean tells the story of his father Martin and his uncle Terry, both criminals who deserve scorn, but while his uncle gets praised as a folk hero, everyone in the country wants his father’s head. We learn the reasons behind such feelings as the story progresses through many different time periods. We learn of Martin’s early years, his mother a refugee of the Holocaust, her marriage to prison architect, and the birth of his half-brother Terry, who excels at sports while Martin is crippled by a years long coma in his adolescents. But when Terry is injured in a way that keeps him out of sports, his ant-social behavior shines through, and he grows up to be a killer of sports players who bet on games, and becomes a folk hero, while Martin is put on a path of nihilistic behavior that will ruin his life. All this ties into
Jasper, who is battling his own demons of unrequited love that have put him on the path to where he is in the beginning. I can’t say much more. This book is full of surprises that will put a smile on your face, or at least keep reading into the morning hours. And while this book could be seen as misanthropic, it has a heartfelt message about doing things your way, even when everyone wants you dead. This is a great book, long but very much worth your time.

Review: "Lush Life" by Richard Price

It took me awhile to warm up to Richard Price, and I finally saw his talent when I read Clockers last year. It was a simple, yet epic tale of inner city life viewed as if it were a hell filled with demons and lost souls. It had moments of crushing defeat and vague hope, but it was always interesting and I was always eager to find out the mystery at the heart of the book. In his most recent, if you can call the year 2008 recent, deals with a similar situation as that novel. But it really is a melding of the themes of Price’s two most famous novels, the aforementioned Clockers and 1998’s Freedomland. It takes the hearts of those two books, the way crime affects the victims and perpetrators after the fact as shown in Clockers, and the way the media can skew a murder story, making villains and heroes where there are none. The crime is simple and has been seen many times before: a white, bohemian man is shot and killed by a black gang member after failed stick-up during a night of drinking. The details of the crime become convoluted in the interrogation room, where a witness refuses to give information, accidently implicating himself in the crime, at least in the public’s eye. Where Price shines is in the little moments, where Matty, the lead detective, comforts the father of murdered victim after a harrowing scene in the county morgue. What Price has trouble with is making characters real. Despite how cool they talk, they never seem like any thing more than one-dimensional, leaving the emotional resonance of the book a bit ambiguous. But this is still a solid crime novel that touches on deep, troubling issues of modern life, and proof that Price has his eye on something special.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Free" by Willy Vlautin

As I’ve grown older, I found that a lot of the novels, mainly the famous ones, of American author John Steinbeck have not aged very well. They are good stories, and on the surface they are simple tales of good and evil and trying, and most of the time, failing to make a name for yourself. While those ideas are always going to be timeless, it is the political aspect of those books that I feel has lost some of its luster, mainly his tendency to over-romanticize the idea of the workingman and his fight against a faceless society that is hell bent on destroying them. The idea of the workingman has changed quite a bit since the great depression to include office workers and people in the retail industry, and not rugged men working in fields struggling to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. While that person still exists, it is lot less common now, with middle class working stiffs a bit better off, with that kind of desperation replaced with the concept of “making ends meet”. But for that person Steinbeck loved, we have an author like Willy Vlautin, whose novel, The Free, is a little more intimate than something like The Grapes of Wrath, and feels more like an elongated version of a Raymond Carver story. And for all it’s focus on an idealized version of the working outdated, I still think this novel is a great and memorable read. The novel focuses on three different characters, each trying to make a life out of petty and pathetic circumstances while trying to do so with dignity. The story opens as Leroy, a young man who enlisted in the National Guard, thinking it was not going to require him to fight, is living in a Veteran’s home, severely wounded in Iraq, struggling to make any sense of the life he now leads. He once had a girlfriend who loved him and a bright future. Now he can’t remember things that happened a day ago. In a desperate move, he tries to kill himself, but he survives, and lives in a world in his head based around the Science fiction novels he reads. Freddie, the night watchman at the home, works two jobs, gets little sleep and is slowly losing everything that he has left, including his home. Pauline, a nurse at the hospital where Leroy is in a coma, is drifting through life with little to care about, when a young runaway sparks a need in her to do right. I like how Vlautin creates suspense without blood and guts, making what happens real without piling up the bodies, with the emotion found in certain harrowing scenes of sadness, such as Leroy’s mother reading to hid body, Freddie’s lazy and unprofessional boss, and one of the saddest sexual encounters I’ve read in fiction involving Pauline, a guy named Ford and a Red Roof Inn. Despite the book’s flaws, like the alternate reality Leroy creates taking away from the human drama in the real world, this book has a lot of heart and passion in its pages, and you should definitely check it out.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Bottoms" by Joe R. Lansdale

It is no surprise to the few people who read my reviews that Joe R. Lansdale is one of my favorite writers, and someone I champion every chance that I get. He is the most underrated writer working in America, in both genre and mainstream fiction, and wish he had more recognition than he had. Hopefully that will change with the adaption of his novel Cold in July coming out soon, which stars big names such as Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. He is a storyteller in the classical since, with hi best work echoing writers as eclectic as renowned as Mark Twain and Flannery O’Conner to pulp authors like Jim Thompson and horror authors like Shirley Jackson. But while he has been compared to those authors in the past, there is something in the heart of Lansdale’s fiction that is all his own and cannot be compared to anything else. His use of language, ancient country slang and mixing of the gothic and grotesque with the humorous and screwball antics makes for a reading experience that is unlike other. And the novel of his that I just recently finished, The Bottoms, is the perfect example of Lansdale’s unique talents. It tells the bloody, yet deeply moral tale that takes place in small Texas town in the years of the Great Depression. At the start of the novel we meet young Harry and his sister, Tom, as they are told, by their father Jacob, to go out into the woods to put down their dog Toby, who has had his back broken. While out there, lost because they were surprised Toby could still track squirrels with a broken back and being moved in a wheelbarrow, they discover the horribly mutilated body of a young black women. They immediately think that it is the work of an old legend in the area known as “the Goat Man”, who is said to live near the swinging bridge that crosses a nearby river. They think they see the creature out there, but quickly go back to their house and tell their father. Jacob, who is also the town’s constable, begins to investigate the crime quite voraciously, due to the fact that, since the person killed was black, no one in town will care if it is solved. From there, it becomes quite ride that Lansdale is known for. It plays out a lot like To Kill a Mockingbird, but this is much bloodier and better story that I wish I could have read in middle school. There is a brutal lynching that is among the most painful things Lansdale has written, which leads to Jacob’s backstory as to why he is so adamant about investigating the murder that is even sadder, and it all culminates in a twist ending that I really didn’t see coming that I’m sure will surprise every reader of this book. It is a brilliant use of misdirect on Lansdale’s part. And the epilogue is both bitter and hopeful, which is hard to believe given its circumstances. Do yourself a favor this summer, and pick up this or any other of Lansdale’s books (especially find a copy of “Night They Missed the Horror Show”, my favorite short story of all time). He deserves more serious attention.

Rating: 5/5