What I Read Last Month: September 2018
This is the first post in a new series I’m trying out where I’ll recap what I read last month. I’m going to give a mini-review and talk a bit about what I thought of each book. I’ll avoid spoilers as much as possible; I’d hate to ruin stories for anyone. Pretty straightforward. Hopefully you’ll find at least one new book to add to your reading list too! This month has great science fiction books and more. Look forward to next month, as I’ve got a selection of horror books for October.
Bonfire by Krysten Ritter
I picked up Bonfire out of sheer curiosity. I love Ritter’s work on Breaking Bad and Jessica Jones (yes, that’s why the name is so familiar). The book also featured a blurb from Gillian Flynn on the cover. Normally I don’t take cover praise into much consideration when I’m considering a book. However, I read Flynn’s Sharp Objects this spring, before I realized HBO’s adaption would be airing this summer. As an aside, please read Sharp Objects and watch the show. Both are excellent for different reasons. Maybe I’ll write about that soon.
Ritter makes Flynn’s influence no secret. Flynn is included in her acknowledgements, and both Sharp Objects and Bonfire follow a very similar premise. A career-focused woman who likes to drink returns to her rural hometown from Chicago for work reasons. There’s a central mystery propelling events forward, but the narrative unfolds very differently.
Our protagonist here is determined to mine her personal history, convinced that there has been a cover-up of some sort. She’s compelled to figure out what happened to her former childhood friend that went missing not long after faking an illness. She believes this is potentially tied to pollution in the town’s reservoir, and that maybe her old friend wasn’t actually faking that illness.
And where Sharp Objects deals with themes of familial trauma, motherhood, body image, and misogyny, Bonfire is more about friendship and the stark differences between relationships formed in childhood and those in adulthood, as well as the idea of trust, and of attempting to shed your past. And maybe reckoning with its futility. I’m talking about themes here in a very, very broad sense, and these two books operate at a much deeper level than my talking points will allow.
It also isn’t fair to compare the two books, especially as Bonfire is a first novel, and Sharp Objects comes from a veteran author. But Bonfire is a heck of a debut, and Ritter does enough to make the novel stand on its own, all influences aside. Ritter’s writing is solid, deftly tying the setting to her characters. There’s beauty to be found in this backwater town. Ritter highlights the contradiction between that beauty and the seedy workings of small-town high school cliques that turn into the seedy workings of local politics after graduation.
The plot turns are engaging, and her characters (while some secondary players edge towards tropes, but don’t completely cross that line) are rounded out and compelling. I’ll be pretty eagerly awaiting Krysten Ritter’s next work.
The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer
Annihilation
I was hesitant to read Annihilation, the first book in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy because Alex Garland’s film adaptation early this year was phenomenal. Not enough people saw it. I had heard the source material was drastically different, so I put off reading the novel, but much like the pull of Area X, my curiosity got the best of me.
The trilogy, especially Annihilation, is about Area X, a biological anomaly that has taken over a large area known as the “Forgotten Coast.” The Coast was affected by some event, or something, and its ecology was changed. The rest of the world has been told there was an environmental disaster. Despite the passing of 30-plus years, almost nothing is known about Area X. The Southern Reach, some form of a government agency sends “expeditions” into Area X to investigate.
In Annihilation, our narrator’s husband was part of the last expedition. He returned home unexpectedly after being considered missing, was changed somehow, and soon died. The narrator, known almost exclusively as “the biologist” is part of the next expedition. That’s about all the plot details I should give, and in fact it might be too much. It’s best to approach the book knowing very little. You’ll come out of it not knowing much more, but still.
Annihilation is a short book, about 200. I was anticipating a shorter read with that page count, but it’s dense. Incredibly dense. The novel might be difficult to read, especially at first, due to the descriptions of Area X, which makes up most of the first person narration. These descriptions can be hard to parse, not only because of the biologist’s sometimes technical terminology, or the strange, mostly uncanny nature of Area X, but mostly because of the way the biologist frames Area X. She is not narrating for you, she doesn’t care if anyone reads her words. They are there for her.
This means that all of her descriptions are written from the lens of her personal experiences and understanding. Her perception is not what your perception might be if you were witnessing the same object, location, or scene. It’s somewhat difficult to explain. It’s almost like a form of stream of consciousness prose, in the vein of Virginia Wolfe. For me, this was the most fascinating part of reading the novel: delving into the prose, trying to map out the biologist’s consciousness through her mapping, perception, and understanding of Area X.
Authority
I was talking to a friend who also loved the movie adaptation of Annihilation. I told him about the differences between the book and the film, mostly granular plot details that weren’t aligned, also attempting to explain my thoughts on the novel’s structure and narration. When discussing the ending, he asked if the book ended in a place that would propel me to read the sequels. At the time I said no, not really, and I meant it. But that same curiosity lingered, festered, tugged and pulled somewhere in the back of my mind. I was ready for another expedition.
It’s difficult to talk about the Southern Reach sequels without spoiling the events and revelations that precede them. I will say that the second book, Authority, is the weakest of the trilogy. Focusing on one character and the surreal bureaucracy of the Southern Reach, the novel feels more like a writer biding their time, padding out a series that didn’t necessarily need to be a trilogy. Authority is like a bottle episode in a TV show. Or an episode following a cliffhanger that doesn’t address the cliffhanger. Annihilation doesn’t even end in a cliffhanger, and yet Authority still gives me that feeling.
It’s unfulfilling, despite some mind-bending twists, a healthy dose of mystery, and even some terrific moments of horror that I really enjoyed.
Acceptance
Acceptance feels like a true, proper culmination of The Southern Reach Trilogy. Again, I have to be incredibly vague so I won’t ruin the previous two entries. Here Vandermeer follows the threads of a rotation of different characters. Some we’re familiar with already, some previously only by name. The timeline is different in some cases, and this becomes critical as the narrative shifts and unfolds, attempting to explain this delicate balance of cause and effect. Or maybe causation and correlation.
Vandermeer separates these arcs by character, focusing on one in each chapter. Think George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Yet Vandermeer takes that structure a step further and uses different perspectives and tenses: one character’s chapters are written in the second person, present tense. This greatly changes the effect on the reader. Suddenly you are that character, experiencing their increasing anxiety and paranoia in intimate, disorienting prose. Often second person is used to show a break in a character. While an “I” voice might be closer to a character’s true self (if they are reliable), a second person narration forces a depersonalization, a disassociation with the self. This may be used to convey guilt, or psychological trauma.
Meanwhile other chapters are in a close third person perspective. This becomes fascinating when the characters aligned to chapters interact. In one chapter the reader is behind the shoulder of that character, tuned in to some of their thoughts, and in the next the reader is behind that other character in the interaction. This becomes a mess without using character names, huh? It’s funny, because one of the biggest motifs in the trilogy is the importance of names and identifies, and their lack as well.
All told, Acceptance is satisfying. I’m glad my cat-like curiosity took hold, and that I stuck with The Southern Reach until the end. A truly intriguing series.
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
I hate to say it, but Universal Harvester is a disappointment. Going in, I thought this was a novel tailor-made for me. A horror novel set in the 90s centered around found footage in a video rental store? Hell yeah, that’s my aesthetic, as the kids from five years ago would say.
But the novel is actually very light on the horror. Super light. After reading, some quotes I’ve seen about the book are downright laughable. One said it’s as suspenseful as House of Leaves. Sorry, no. Not even slightly. That’s fine, it’s not really a horror book despite what the publisher and some strange reviewers claim. There’s still the central mystery of strange, snuff film-esque clips that were edited into VHS cassettes and made their way into the store, right? Not really. It doesn’t go anywhere. There’s an “answer” but it’s neither satisfying nor even really relevant to the rest of the narrative.
The book would have been better suited to stick to the lives and culture of the characters, and their relationship to Iowa, exploring themes of family and community, and finding one’s place in the world when all they’ve known is home. So much time is spent on flashbacks and family histories, and even discussing the discussions on family histories. But the histories don’t really matter that much. They don’t connect. And barely any of that is tied to the horror trappings and central mystery. It honestly seems like Darnielle couldn’t come up with a reason why someone was stitching clips into movies, so he just kind of didn’t include a reason. Or that whole concept was added in a late draft.
To make it worse, Darnielle uses a faux-unreliable narrator at certain points, slightly breaking the fourth wall, to intentionally withhold information from the reader purely to add to the mysterious atmosphere because otherwise, the plot doesn’t have anything engaging or worthwhile. The most tense moment of the book is basically a one-off. In the scheme of the rest of the narrative it doesn’t matter, reveals no new information about the story or characters, and exists only to create suspense. There’s maybe a draft of this story where this is all working towards a parody of horror/mystery novels, but if it exists, it didn’t make it to print.
That last sentence was inspired by a succinct Goodreads review I completely agree with. It’s also brilliant because it plays with a refrain from Universal Harvester‘s narrator: “There is a version of this story where it actually gets told. But this isn’t that version.” Also John Darnielle is the main member of the band The Mountain Goats. I did not know this until after I had written this review. Now you do not know it until the end of this review. Look at me, being withholding.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
There’s a reason Neuromancer is a classic. Actually, there’s a lot of reasons. I talked briefly about the book on a recent episode of It Doesn’t Add Up, as Gibson’s poem/art piece Agrippa came up. I was still reading the cyberpunk novel at the time of recording, and I already knew it was special.
Gibson coined the now-ubiquitous term “cyberspace.” Not only that, he explored the concept of cyberspace in Neuromancer, where it is an alternate (or augmented) reality of structures and constructs comprised of code. Hackers that explore cyberspace are cowboys wandering a lawless land. The descriptions of cyberspace are trippy, hard to parse, but Gibson’s vision of global networks dominated by corporations was prescient. Not to mention the social, political, and economic ramifications Gibson realized technology like the Internet would cause.
To say that he “predicted” anything does him a disservice. It’s clear he analyzed and theorized potential avenues the world was, and is, heading towards. Neuromancer‘s relevance continues to shine. Oh yeah, he also totally captured artificial intelligence. In 1984. Where AI is currently headed looks a hell of a lot like his “AI constructs.”
At it’s core, Neuromancer is a noir heist story, filled with characters with their own motives and vises. Gibson’s world is sprawling, juxtaposing superfast world-spanning bullet trains and space colonization with gritty, neon-drenched cities, burnouts, and holographic burlesque performances. The main crux of the narrative, the heist of a labyrinth mansion called Villa Straylight not only provided me with the answer to where the old emo band Straylight Run got their name, but also a dizzying, intense set of chapters. The reader is thrown between the “meatspace” of the physical heist with main character Case’s view of mercenary girlfriend Molly, Case’s cyberspace hacking, and obscured, dream-like mind palaces.
Cryo-clones, razorgirls, and Rastafarian space pilots are all here. Gibson uses a distinct lingo and slang that isn’t overbearing, but feels completely natural. And the noir cadence and syntax of the prose and dialogue is so well-done. I can’t wait to read the rest of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, along with the connected short stories. Read this book, especially if the upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 interests you like it interests me.
