Review: "Revival" by Stephen King

It has been about three years since I actually read a Stephen King novel. I listened to a few of his short stories and novels and audiobooks, some I had read before and some I had not, but I did not read them. And I think I made the right choice in reading his 2014 novel Revival, because while I don’t think it is his best work and it falls prey to some of his classic missteps, but it is surely his most original book since 11/22/63 and surely his darkest since Pet Semetary. I was told by one of my friends that this book was very Lovecraftian in nature, but I don’t really see that in execution. Tone for sure, but like all of his books it has a beating heart that was surely lacking from the cold and distant stories of H. P. Lovecraft. The book follows the life of Jamie Morton, born in 1955 or 1956, and his fateful connection with Reverend Charles Jacobs, a young and attractive pastor in Jamie’s small town. A few events entwine these two. The first is when he cures Jamie’s brother Conrad of his muteness using electricity. Soon after, Jacobs’ wife and son are killed in a freak car accident, and after a blasphemous sermon, he is banished from the town. The next time these two meet, Jamie is a travelling musician with a bad heroin habit. He finds the pastor on the carnival circuit. Jamie is cured of his addiction, but the black outs he is having force him to look into whatever door Jacobs has opened, and what dark path he is being drawn toward. What I found grating here was the more scientific stuff, which King never gets the hang of, at least for me, and when it takes the place of his more interesting human narrative, it acts as a rather impolite interruption. But this is still good stuff worth seeking out, with an ending a million times better than you’d expect. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Dodgers" by Bill Beverly

Dodgers, the debut novel of author Bill Beverly introduces an exciting new talent into the world of literary crime thrillers.  His effortless style and narrative capabilities are reminiscent of the greats that came before him like Richard Price, George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, but beyond that, bolstered by directions this story takes, I also found hints of writers like Daniel Woodrell, Frank Bill and even Larry Brown. These are two different classes of genre writers: they’re themes of failed redemption and inherited violence are the same, but the places said qualities come out of very different. It is a testament to someone like Beverly, especially with his first novel, to bridge these two classes of books in such a simple and direct way it is amazing something like this has not been done before. It flips a trope, the heroes journey into the darkness of the world and their own heart, on its own head, telling the story of four black youths, all under the age of 25, forced by their drug running boss, to journey out of their South Central Los Angles ghetto and travel halfway across the country to kill a potential witness. We witness this forceful and murky change of scenery through the yes of East; barely fifteen yet still harden by a life on the streets and under the tutelage of his uncle Fin, a successful drug dealer. In the book’s opening, he is watching over one of his uncle’s houses when he fails to alert those in charge of police raid. Because of this, a little girl on vacation is shot in the crossfire and dies in front of East. It is an incident that haunts him throughout the book in both metaphorical and possibly literal ways. This leads into the mission Fin sends East and three others on. Fin knows he is about to be arrested and his only chance of escaping the charge is if a judge can be killed. The only catch is that he is hiding out in Wisconsin. Fin wants East, as well as three other boys who work under him to drive there and kill him. What follows is a journey of discovery, both scary and transformative for the four involved. Beverly, much like his counterparts, recognizes the high tragedy in low people. These four, East, his trigger happy and psychopathic younger brother Ty, Michael Wilson, the oldest and least mature and Walter, overweight, ineffectual yet providing a much-needed balance to the proceedings, are overwhelmed more by the new world of trees, woods, open space and rural poverty, more so than they are of the dreaded task they must complete. The world they find themselves in is a world of possibility, of newness, of escape from their fatalistic vision of what life is like. Yet the deed they are there to follow through on will all but rob them of any kind of viable future. They can see how big the world is, but they are doomed to sheltered existence. A few twists and turns come about, which I won’t reveal, and the ending is one that is inevitable, but satisfying.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Sport of Kings" by C. E. Morgan

Well, this was a total surprise. To say that C. E. Morgan’s debut novel All the Living did not wow me would be an understatement. It was a competently written novel that was a bit too flighty and over meditative, and almost five years after reading it in 2011, I don’t remember much about it. That is why her new novel, The Sport of Kings is such a refreshing surprise for me. This is a complex work that shattered my expectations, and I am happier for it. Through this microcosm of horseracing and horse breeding, Morgan deals with a number of relevant issues such as race, progress and our inherited sense of duty in a way that rarely gets old (I will talk about those few and far between times this book does get to be a little bit of a hassle) and builds upon the intricate structure the book lays out. It is a long book and as a reader I felt every bit of its 545 pages, but it was an enriching experience to go through. One of the things that make the book so long is how it is divided up. There are only six chapter breaks, five interludes and one epilogue, and while sometimes that can leave me breathless, which this book did at points, the story really warrants such leaps in skill and scope. The novel begins with Henry Forge, one of the book’s main characters. He is running from his hard-lined and racist father after destroying the property of one of his neighbors. The punishment is cruelly drawn out by John Henry to teach Henry a lesson. As this section moves forward we see the two obsessions that give Henry the will to live and will eventually destroy him: white supremacy and breeding horses, one of which is taught to him in eloquent and disturbing passages by his father and one that his father despises and forbids him to pursue. He does so, an act which symbolically kills his father. The next section concerns his daughter, Henrietta, who follows in her father’s footsteps all the while sleeping with as many men as possible in loveless, tawdry trysts. This leads to her sleeping with Allmon, the half-black, half-white employee whose sad life story takes up the third and best section of the book. Struck with case after case of bad luck, with dead relatives and prison sentences, Allmon comes to the Forge farm looking to start over, but is caught up in a series of events that are grand, otherworldly and deeply symbolic, all qualities this book exemplifies with style and grace. Sometimes this book is a bit too flighty, as I said before, with its interludes (not its haunting epilogue) being superfluous and more often than not stultify this book’s smooth hypnotic rhythm. They could have been excessed and the book would not suffer. But that is a minor issue for a book this rich in subtext and acute symbolism that carries the reader away on its back with heart stopping metaphors. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist" by Sunil Yapa

If you are still reeling from last night’s election, this boring book sure won’t help. The debut novel of Sunil Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, is easily the worst novel I have read this year, although not the worst book (that dishonor goes to David Searcy’s book of navel-gazing essays Shame and Wonder). Not once did I find myself entranced or even passively interested in the goings on of a seven rather dull people who find themselves in a protest at the turn of last century that has gone completely array. I never once found any hint of greatness (although, to be fair, that doesn’t mean it is not there. I can never be that mean) or found myself swept away by the story’s urgency. The father I went on the more I wanted it to end. It begins in 1999 in Seattle during the WTO protests and focuses on seven people caught up in the events. At the center of the novel is Victor, young and full of vigor and wanderlust, whose plan to sell as much weed as possible to the protesters is trampled once his police chief father, Bishop, lets loose a few canisters of tear gas. Along with this father and son dichotomy, you have a few police officers whose loyalties shift, radicals who must come to terms with their amorality and a Sri Lankan delegate who is desperate to meet with President Clinton. None of it is very fun, and besides a few lines of dialogue (such as a description of hot dogs in a distant second to how Roman Craig put it) and the fascinating possibility of the female character King, I was happy when this book was over. The good news is that it only lasted a few days and not four years. 

Rating: 1/5

Review: "The City of Mirrors" by Justin Cronin

The biggest hurdle The City of Mirrors has to jump over is the passage (no pun intended) of time. It has been four years since Justin Cronin’s second book in his proposed Passage trilogy, The Twelve came out, and now, with the third one here so long after the last installment, a lot of the grandeur that kept me enthralled over books one and two has sadly faded away (I guess I know now how Game of Thrones fans feel). If you are picking this up after having just read the first two books, you’ll be fine and the story will be able to work as a grand, complex whole. If like me, it has been awhile since you visited these characters, you’d be obliged to read up on them in someway, whether rereading the books, which I rarely do, listening to the audio versions, which I did for the first one back in 2013, but even that and a prologue at the beginning of this book, didn’t help bring this series of novels to a satisfying close for me. I won’t get into the heavier details, since a lot of what this book is about hinges on what happens in the first two books. Let’s just say that thing seem normal at the beginning, with a few people and loyalties scattered across the southern tip of what used to be the United States. Of course they aren’t and that is mainly due to the rise of Patient Zero of the viral epidemic, Fanning, whose sad story is the best part of this novel: a fresh tale of woe among characters and settings I could barely recall at times, let alone bask in their importance. It might be an unfair assessment of this book, which is well written and more sophisticated than other books like it, but this final installment of a series that fascinated me has left me more than a bit underwhelmed.

Rating: 4/5