needs more demons? no.

I looked at Iowa. Moss-covered, windowless pickup trucks were marooned on the highway running alongside the river. A skinned, headless deer hung from a tree in a flooded backyard, next to a swing set. A trio of hide tents were set up on the flat roof of a strip mall’s bait shop. A small, skinny dog, smothered in mud, foraged along the banks.

and

. . .then there’d be that laugh of my mother’s, clear and clumsy, like a woman tripping over a bell that someone left on a cathedral floor by accident,

Total Oblivion, More or Less is divided into two major sections, and while I liked the book as a whole, I loved the first, and thought it was more successful than the second. The first half is (more or less, mostly) picaresque. Its catalog of weirdness and episodic encounters wraps up just as it’s beginning to feel a touch repetitive. Huck Finn’s shadow is so long it’s virtually impossible for a satiric book with a river boat not to call Twain to mind at least a bit; DeNiro’s ordinary folk confronted with the extraordinary also reminded me of George Saunders, and a smidge (despite a world of stylistic and thematic differences) of Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire.

In the second half, Macy and her family become increasingly embroiled in emerging political conflicts, and one of the characters is gradually revealed to be a sort of archetype. The novel also begins to suggest disappointingly straightforward metaphorical interpretations for the plague and the invaders. There are elements that evoke — deliberately, I’m inclined to think — Swift, Kafka, and Mervyn Peake; I thought at least one of these bordered on the gimmicky.

I also suspect it was a difficult book to decide how to end. DeNiro opts for small “r” naturalistic resolution over big “R” epic fantasy-style resolution — the right choice, but since DeNiro still has a lot of balls in play when the curtain comes down, it feels a bit abrupt. Overall, though, it’s a strong debut and certainly leaves me eager for more from DeNiro.

needs more demons? Let’s go with “no.”

A sextet of short stories by D. Harlan Wilson opens the collection. Wilson is big on present tense, and characters with attributes instead of names: “the man in the silver handlebar mustache”, “the little boy”, “a bodybuilder in a purple spandex G-string.” He favors dream-like illogic over anything resembling coherent plot. His prose is often very concrete and mechanical: “[He] sniggered, then began moving his tongue around the insides of his mouth so that his cheeks poked out.” Wilson claims Kafka as in influence to the extent that he titled a short story collection The Kafka Effect, but nothing drives these stories the way Kafka’s paranoia and the tension between the individual and society/The State drove his. None of them really grabbed me.

Bizarro first came to my attention via the impressively lurid titles of Carlton Mellick III’s novellas, here represented by The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. It’s probably not a bad litmus test: the titular object is not a molded toy-in-the-shape-of, it’s an actual clone of the Savior, and if this seems simply too offensive or too mechanically improbable, then Mellick is probably not for you. The shock-for-its-own-sake aspect leaves me cold, but beyond that the obvious metaphor of (ahem) internalizing belief systems and its consequences on a couple whose beliefs become disparate is explored with something approaching emotional resonance. Meanwhile the nightmarish milieu doesn’t make sense to me, but it seems to make sense to Mellick’s narrator; there’s something approaching internal consistency. I might cautiously experiment further with Mellick.

I didn’t enjoy Jeremy Robert Johnson’s Extinction Journals while I was reading it, but its grotesque imagery has stayed with me more than anything else in the book. And I have to admit that while marrying the hoary last-man-and-woman-in-post-apocalyptic-wasteland cliché with the popular notion that cockroaches are the critters most likely to survive a nuclear holocaust struck me as a tad obvious (not to mention really gross), I had never read anything quite like it.

Kevin L. Donihe’s The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports was for me the anthology’s first clear win. It has some weak spots — the back and forth between a pair of news commentators seemed trite, but on the whole it was surprising and held my interest. I may have a soft spot for it in part because the “sport” is cycling (and not, as the title might have led you to expect, copulation).

Gina Rinalli’s Suicide Girls in the Afterlife seemed a bit too familiar — a bit of Neil Gaiman, a dash of Kelly Link, a dollop of Beetlejuice — but if it’s maybe too indebted to obvious sources, I like those sources. Promising.

Andre Duza’s Don’t F(beep) with the Coloureds goes in quite a different direction than its inflammatory title might suggest. It reminded me a lot of a 1988 film, only (naturally) darker, and grosser. I liked the story-in-story structure (although I would have liked to see it pushed a little further) and thought some of the expository chunks could have been more smoothly integrated, but give it a qualified thumbs up overall.

Vincent Sakowski offers up one two short-shorts, one of which feels a bit like a Robyn Hitchcock song rendered in prose, and one which is tired and vile, and the pretty nifty long short story “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Ragnarok.” Its embittered modern couple, Vogue and GQ, have just enough depth to be more than tropes, and the intrusion of mythic elements offered a few interesting twists. The mood reminded me a bit of Leslie What’s “The Goddess is Alive, And, Well, Living in New York City,” only (naturally) darker and grosser. I may seek out more from Sakowski, although the story I really disliked leaves me somewhat distrustful.

I was a little annoyed by a persistent tic of Steve Beard’s Survivor’s Dream: it uses a boatload of definitive articles, maybe to evoke a childlike narrative voice: “She was hiding in this ship”, “It had a domed roof held up by these thick white pillars,” et cetera. It seemed excessive, but afterward it occurred to me that plenty of writers from the lit’ry side of the street play with not dissimilar tactics, e.g., Kathy Acker or even Vonnegut’s “So it goes.” (Of course I’m sometimes annoyed by those, too). Other than that, Beard manages a kind of impressive balancing act between multiple, contradictory narrative threads tied together by a pervasive mood and Beard’s flat, unmusical prose. I would have liked it better if it had been shorter.

John Edward Lawson’s Truth in Ruins is one of the most hyperbolic entries in the entire anthology. In Lawson’s grim future humanity is divided into serial killers and profilers, with genetically engineered “Humanzees” poised to take over after humanity’s failure. It’s self-consciously, cartoonishly, uber-violent, and narrative chunks are jammed together in ways that emphasize their incongruities, like a movie made of nothing but jump cuts. I sort of liked it, although I had to skim over some stomach-turning bits.

Three of Bruce Taylor’s short stories, “The Breath Amidst the Stones” and “A Little Spider Shop Talk,” and “Of Tunafish and Galaxies” are perhaps the most conventional entries in the collection: weird, for sure, but coherent, reminiscent of Leiber and Lafferty. I liked them. I thought the last, “City Streets” was less successful.

needs more demons? maybe kinda sorta

The Surf Guru’s range is impressive, encompassing an impressionistic* portrait of Van Gogh’s physician (and portrait subject) Paul Gauchet; a tale set against the backdrop of an unspecified conflict with dreamy, almost Garcia Marquez-like, overtones of magical realism; a slipstream story; a satire of an academic history; and a brief piece possibly inspired by John McCain’s campaign.

The stories I liked best were contemporary, predominantly naturalistic stories of people whose lives are not quite staying on the rails, but everything more than held my interest. Dorst has a particularly strong line in first sentences, like “The candidate is so tense he cannot walk without crutches,” and “I drove Trace to the hospital the day they tried to fix his eye.”

The Surf Guru easily lived up to the (high) expectations set by Dorst’s debut novel Alive in Necropolis, and leaves me similarly impatient for his next book.

needs more demons? negatory, good buddy.

* Sorry. Just not sorry enough.

Two thematic thrusts vie with each other for prominence. On one hand, Doyle twists the familiar trope of adolescents with fantastic abilities. Usually there’s a strong component of wish-fulfillment in identifying with the protagonist of these stories: you are special and unique; you do carry the weight of the world; you’re not related to the intensely embarrassing creatures that raised you. Instead, Doyle pushes his characters’ natural anxieties about what the adolescent hormonal storm is doing to their bodies to absurd, even nightmarish extremes. Doyle is not particularly subtle about serving this up; one of his characters is revealed at one point to literally not have a penis; another suffers a malady in which secondary sexual characteristics assume unbalanced prominence.

The other major thematic aspect is more generalized socio-politcal satire. The actual monster/sci-fi flicks of the 50’s were clearly informed by the twin fears of nuclear annihilation and the Red Peril; in Doyle’s version the saucer folk literally replace these fears, with Joe McCarthy ranting against Hollywood’s secret aliens. Doyle’s PLEX, a sort of Internet with Orwellian and Tesla-esque attributes, arises, representing the loss of faith in the benevolence of our government with which often we endow the idealized retrospective view of the fifties.

Both of these angles seem well capable of supporting a novel on its their own, so it didn’t surprise me that Doyle, among other credits, has written for The Simpsons, a show which often managed to cram what on almost any other show would be an hour-long plot into a half hour. And also like The Simpsons, Go, Mutants! is ridiculously dense with explicit allusions to other creative works. The Day the Earth Stood Still is probably the most important touchpoint for Go, Mutants!, but there are sly nods to literally dozens of other sci-fi/horror movies — everything from classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers to schlocky, sub-B-grade fare like Robot Monster. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone with a Mystery Science Theater 3000-flavored appreciation of cinema not having fun playing “spot-the-reference.” (I suspect nods to juvenile delinquent cinema are nearly as thick on the ground in Go, Mutants! as the sci-fi, but I’m not nearly as well versed in the arcana of that.)

I can’t write about this book without mentioning how gorgeous a physical object it is, and just how note-perfect the design choices are. The cover is a wonderful pastiche of one of the sleazier paperback houses (Beacon, for instance), right down to the relative position and size of “A novel by” and “Larry Doyle.” And the left-side drop-shadow. The opening page of each chapter is printed in white-on-black, with titles like “Science Gone Wild!” and “Charged with Million-Volt Excitement!” in the same screamingly dramatic typefaces as the posters and movie title frames they evoke –sometimes the crazy typefaces even creep into the main body of the text. (The book’s website, gomutants.com ably embodies its aesthetic, but might spoil some of the surprises.)

Doyle’s language is frequently colorful and dramatic. I clogged up the book with strips of paper identifying especially noteworthy passages, from the opening “Enter right, SCREAMING: THE GIRL, in high distress and heels,” to

The story on [her] was that she had been engaged to a soldier before the unpleasantness, and when her fiancé was devoured by a tree that ate women but was bi-curean, she went to work for the CIA, using the nom de guerre Ida Day, where she seduced and tortured hundreds of alien combatants, often at the same time, which led to her career in higher education.

and

Like most of Manhattan’s matrons, [she] had been a great beauty in her youth, but time and decapitation had taken their toll. Years of meanness were gouged into her face, which no amount of cosmetic troweling could ameliorate.

or just lovely coinages like the, “Rattarachirotacacean, a rat-spider-bat-crab from Mars.”

I loved a lot of things about this book, but still found it less than completely satisfying. I’m sure that’s partly because the opening handful of chapters set my expectations stratospherically high, but I think the book also has some pacing/structural issues. It would be stronger if it was shorter and punchier, or alternatively if the plot delivered more actual surprises, or perhaps even if Doyle didn’t hold his characters at such an emotional remove — the narrative voice is arch and omniscient, which seems appropriate, but is more than a little distancing.

needs more demons? Demons are the wrong genre, but I still felt like a tiny something was missing.

It mixes critical discussion of the albums music and lyrics with an exploration of “dangerous” music as a tool for coping with adolescence.

I’d never actually listened to Master of Reality before — the only song I knew from it was “Sweet Leaf,” not my favorite Sabbath tune by a long shot. Turns out it’s a pretty fantastically weird record. It delivers a lot of what you might expect from Black Sabbath — some of this record is so proto-Metallica it’s almost spooky. But it also contains some positively pastoral moments (flute? flute!) and, the opening love song to Mary Jane aside, you could more-or-less label it Christian Rock.

Darnielle is a perfectly suited writer to delve into these seeming contradictions, and he’s found a wonderfully authentic voice to use. Very, very, cool.

(I’m hardly the first person to draw a line between Master of Reality and “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” but John Darnielle says I’m wrong, in a very nice, but spoileriffic, piece at Nerve.)

needs more demons? nuh uh.

I also found it less insulting to the reader’s intelligence than many paranormal romance books. Davidson doesn’t really explain why Betsy’s corpse wasn’t embalmed, for instance, but at least the issue is raised within the novel.

Toward the end, the Undead and Unwed takes a turn in the power struggle between rival vampire clans direction, a theme I find tiresome. But, on the bright side, Betsy finds it tiresome too, so maybe, just maybe, it won’t dominate future entries in the franchise.

needs more demons? nah.

It opens with a rather laborious description of personal combat ending with a gag death. The humor relies on the reader’s visualization, and I think it would have worked much better as a handful of pages in the other medium David writes in (comics).

After the fight scene, there’s 200-plus pages of flashback, with Apropos narrating his family/life history to date (he starts his story even before his conception). This is sadly pedestrian and predictable stuff — it’s only real hallmark is Apropos’ refusal to conform to the expectations of the fantasy hero — but I waded through enough of Stephen Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever” to know that’s really not so genre-defying after all. If I had been the editor, I would have suggested lopping out this third of the book entirely, and replacing it with a few dialogue asides to fill in the gaps: “Funny, my mother saw that omen the day I was born,” “Now I remember where I’ve seen you before!” and such.

Once the reader makes it back to the present day, there’s some mildly diverting Apropos-has-to-escort-the-princess-through-dangerous-lands-and-they-think-they-hate-each-other-but-are-inevitably-falling-in-love stuff. The mood is a bit like when the Dread Pirate Roberts has kidnapped Buttercup in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (or, really, about a zillion other books of all genres). But David is much bawdier than Goldman (often in a nasty, not fun way, as when Apropos recounts his mother’s gang rape in excessive detail) and perpetrates a few puns that even Piers Anthony might have passed up.

Why did I bother to finish reading it? For a while I was on an airplane, and my other books were wedged deep under the seat in front of me. Then I kinda sorta wanted to see how David resolved his conflicting plot threads (answer: with a little more ick than I bargained on). The worst thing? Because I expected (based, as it turns out, on false information) to enjoy this novel, I already bought a copy of the sequel. Oops.

needs more demons? mostly just needs abridgment.

I’m no literary critic; I’m read The Three Musketeers primarily because I recently saw Slumdog Millionare, and I’ve been making a conscious effort to read books a little farther afield from my usual choices.

But for whatever it’s worth, here are my impressions.

Initially I found The Three Musketeers an uphill climb, mostly because I didn’t pay enough attention during European History class. Pevears’s copious notes are very helpful, but he assumes more knowledge of 17th-century French (and even English) politics than I brought to bear. In particular, the balance of power between King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, and Queen Anne (of France, but who is not French) was a little hard to puzzle out.

After I more-or-less internalized the dramatis personae I enjoyed the novel quite a bit — for a while. Dumas weaves his genre-defining derring-do skillfully through the threads of actual history. It reminded me a bit of how fantasist Tim Powers spins tales of high and improbable action around real events and people (only without the fantastic elements). A good portion of my pleasure in the book derived from flipping to an end-note and experiencing the jaw-drop of “that part really happened!” And, thanks in no small part to Pevear’s lucid translation, some of my pleasure derived from moments of genuine laugh-out-loud humor.

As the novel goes on, however, its tone darkens considerably and I found it increasingly unpleasant. I know it’s unfair to chastise a 19-century novel for sexism, but the portrayal of the novel’s femme fatale, Lady de Winter, seems to go beyond that and into misogyny. (Richelieu is guileful, a figure to be feared, but ultimately not ignoble; Lady de Winter, whose ambitions, cunning, and vengefulness roughly equal those of the male protagonists, is unsupportable.) It might be interesting to see a modern recasting of Lady de Winter as the novel’s heroine.

needs more demons? (too a silly yardstick to apply to a literary classic)

needs more demons? no, but Dorst needs to write more books.

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